Profile : Pole Learns Capitalism as U.S. ‘Envoy’ in Iraq : The onetime Communist diplomat typifies the topsy-turvy diplomacy of Hussein’s isolated country.

Not so long ago, Jan Piekarski was a member in good standing of Poland’s pro-Soviet ruling party; an official in a Communist government that maintained the best of relations with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

How times have changed.

Now Jan Piekarski spends his days at the desk of the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, a photograph of President Bush behind him. In the evening, he goes home to the two-story villa that once housed the U.S. Marine guards in Baghdad. And he commutes behind the wheel of the gray, armor-plated Chevrolet that the Americans left behind when they sealed the U.S. Embassy and pulled out just days before Baghdad became a war zone last year.

The veteran diplomat still keeps a Polish flag beside his desk, but today his main job is as America’s man in Baghdad.

As head of the U.S. Interests Section in the nation that ranks No. 1 on the U.S. diplomatic blacklist, Piekarski is living proof of the magnitude of change that has swept through international diplomacy.

A protocol signed by Washington and Warsaw in May, 1991, designates the Poles as America’s emissaries in Baghdad “because of the excellent state of U.S.-Polish bilateral relations.” So today the onetime Communist diplomat finds himself on the opposite side of the table from his old Iraqi allies doing things like negotiating the release of American ordnance specialist Chad Hall, taken prisoner by the Iraqi army earlier this fall while clearing the Iraq-Kuwait border of land mines.

After a career in the employ of a Communist state, Piekarski also finds himself delving deeply into the complexities of American capitalism--sorting out Social Security benefits for retired U.S. Embassy employees in Baghdad and poring over property regulations for dozens of leases, cars and a huge warehouse filled with the personal possessions that U.S. State Department employees left behind.

The job has its good and bad points.

Unlike his previous assignments, Piekarski does not enjoy the official title of ambassador in Baghdad. He conducts no official diplomatic exchanges on America’s behalf--those are all handled at an Iraqi Interest Section in Washington operating under the Algerian flag. And the job is hardly as prestigious as his last position: deputy director of Poland’s department for Africa, Asia and Australia.

“And it’s not that comfortable, either,” Piekarski said during a recent interview. “It’s not so prestigious at home. And, of course, my family isn’t here with me.

“But it’s a lot like the experience of a young doctor, who has the choice of either being one of 20 assistants to a famous professor where he’s nobody, or in a small hospital in a small village on his own,” Piekarski added. “Here, you’re a decision-maker. You work on your own.”

Indeed, living history has been Piekarski’s stock in trade. He was Poland’s ambassador to Pakistan when Islamabad’s authoritarian President Zia ul-Haq was killed in the midair explosion of a Pakistani air force plane. And he was No. 2 in the Polish Embassy in Tehran when Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was overthrown by Islamic revolutionaries.

The next question was inevitable: Does he think he might also witness the fall of a dictatorship in Iraq?

Piekarski waved his hand and laughed. The job, he stressed, does not involve political analysis, least of all regarding the strength of President Saddam Hussein’s regime.

What it does involve is survival on a daily basis--maintaining sanity and health in a capital city that is now among the most diplomatically isolated on the globe. That isolation is the cornerstone of the U.N. effort to force Iraq to comply with cease-fire resolutions that ended last year’s war to drive Hussein’s army out of Kuwait.

There is the odd diplomatic cocktail party. While Iraq formally severed diplomatic ties with the United States, Britain and France, and many other nations maintain “diplomatic relations without diplomatic representation,” about 40 embassies remain open.

The Iraqis treat most of the remaining diplomats like local celebrities. One of Iraq’s main strategies to break out of the international embargo is on the diplomatic front, constantly searching for weaknesses in the allied coalition.

When the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar returned its ambassador to Baghdad last month, for example, he became an instant national hero, featured on the front pages of the regime’s daily newspapers for several days.

But there are few such gestures of Iraqi gratitude for Piekarski, who is well aware of the adversarial aspects of the job he assumed in June, 1991.

Communications, for example, is a constant problem. Stripped of the direct telephone links the embassy staff removed when they left, Piekarski has to book his calls to Washington through the Iraqi government operators. He is limited to two calls per day, each no longer than five minutes.

The Polish diplomat said he has received excellent cooperation from the Iraqi government in most of his day-to-day affairs. But, he conceded, just beneath the surface there is on both sides the constant awareness that he is after all representing a government that the Iraqis consider their No. 1 enemy.

It’s hard to forget the basic situation.

The U.S. Interests Section is in the same building that served as the U.S. Embassy during the tense months before the Gulf crisis became the Gulf War--the months when acting Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV had almost daily shouting matches with his Iraqi counterparts.

And the building still contains haunting images of the confrontational role the embassy staff played after Hussein invaded Kuwait and held thousands of Westerners as “special guests”--hostages. Among them: a wall map with dozens of tiny colored pins and the names of U.S. “guestages.”

But the imagery in the more public spaces of the interests section reminds visitors of the strange new era of diplomacy that Piekarski represents.

In the waiting room of what was once the embassy’s consular section, for instance, there was a copy of Sports Illustrated, dated just a few weeks before the United States launched air strikes on Baghdad. And beside it, there was an edition of Poland Today.

Biography

Name: Jan Piekarski

Title: Head, U.S. Interests Section, Baghdad.

Personal: Career diplomat in Polish Foreign Service. Former ambassador to Pakistan, No. 2 in Polish embassy in Tehran. Served most recently as deputy director of Poland’s department for Africa, Asia and Australia. Married with two children who remain with their mother in Poland.

Quote: “It’s a lot like the experience of a young doctor, who has the choice of either being one of 20 assistants to a famous professor where he’s nobody, or in a small hospital in a small village on his own.”