Lone Ranger of Relief Aid Feared Slain in Chechnya : Disappearance: Hip-shooting humanitarian worker Fred Cuny may have run out of luck in a lawless land.

In times of disaster, few humanitarian relief workers have stood taller than Frederick C. Cuny, even without his Size 12 cowboy boots on.

For three decades, he has traversed the most troubled corners of the globe, dodging bullets, risking disease and bluffing dictators to aid the victims of floods, famines, earthquakes and civil wars. Whether in Bosnia or Guatemala, Beirut or Somalia, he has succeeded with equal doses of pragmatism and audacity, sort of a Texas-style melding of Jimmy Carter and Indiana Jones.

But the man who would save the world may have fallen victim to the very destruction he sought to avert.

On Thursday, four months after Cuny disappeared in the hellfire of Chechnya, his family said that all evidence points to a coldblooded execution. In a chilling twist worthy of a spy novel, they alleged that both Russian authorities and Chechen rebels may have had a hand in the 50-year-old maverick’s demise.

Last seen with a translator and two doctors in a Red Cross ambulance packed with medicine, Cuny had become the focus of an international search unusual for a private citizen. President Clinton vowed to investigate Cuny’s disappearance, while Boris N. Yeltsin and breakaway Chechen leader Dzhokar M. Dudayev pledged to help.

But speaking in Moscow, where they have been conducting a search of their own, Cuny’s brother and son accused Russian intelligence agents of spreading false rumors that Cuny was anti-Islamic and a spy--presumably in retaliation for his sharp criticism of the crackdown in Chechnya. They further charged that Chechen rebels, swayed by the disinformation, took Cuny and his companions hostage, killed all four, then hid the remains.

*

“I would feel better with a bone in my hand, but I think the information we have is sufficient to call off the search,” said Cuny’s 28-year-old son, Craig, declining to reveal any evidence to support his allegations. Russian authorities denied the charge, and U.S. officials conceded they simply do not know.

It was a grim denouement to months of fretful speculation about Cuny, who is often described as the Red Adair of disaster relief, referring to the globe-trotting oil-blaze fighter.

The MacArthur Foundation recently awarded Cuny a $305,000 “genius grant” in absentia, citing his ability to “heroically bring order out of crisis and chaos.” But even that news was bittersweet: The money can be collected only by Cuny, not his family or friends, who need the funds if they are to continue hunting for his body.

“I knew Fred was taking risks,” said his brother, Christopher, shortly before heading off to Russia last week. “But I always felt he was savvy and experienced enough to negotiate his way out of any trouble.”

Without him, there is a huge void at Cuny’s Dallas-based firm, Intertect, which stands for international architects--a name inspired by his dream of literally redesigning a better world. The for-profit company averages about $500,000 in annual revenues, most of it from government agencies and charitable organizations seeking Cuny’s shrewd on-site recommendations. But his calendar, usually punctuated by at least 10 months of overseas travel, now hangs eerily vacant on an Intertect wall.

*

“One would have to say that he saved the lives of many, many thousands of people in many, many places,” said Aryeh Neier, president of the New York-based Soros Foundation, which had hired Cuny to help develop several relief projects in Chechnya. “There’s other quite wonderful people out there who do superb work, but I can’t imagine anyone who can fill his shoes.”

They were big shoes--and not just because Cuny relished his larger-than-life image. Complex and sometimes misunderstood, he combined softhearted compassion with hard-nosed analysis, risk-taking flash with nuts-and-bolts expertise.

On the surface, he could be a swashbuckling self-promoter and fanciful raconteur. There was the time in India when he butted heads with Mother Teresa, telling the Nobel Peace Prize laureate that her plan to build concrete housing was wrong for Calcutta’s muddy soil. Or the time in Zagreb when he tried to disarm Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic by poking fun at the accused war criminal’s showy, perpendicular cap.

With an imposing 6-foot-3, 250-pound frame, Cuny would often play the role of the “stride-in, take-charge, fearless Texan . . . sort of a ‘Fred Cuny’s in town’ kind of thing,” said his colleague Rick Hill, now the acting director of Intertect. In Sri Lanka, Cuny once bluffed rebel troops out of commandeering his car by threatening retaliation from U.S. armed forces. In another country, left nameless, he once hastily drafted an official-looking manual, full of supposed international regulations, that convinced local leaders not to recklessly move a refugee camp.

“It’s no place for virgins,” Cuny said of his work in a 1985 Texas Monthly profile. A gag business card, still pinned above his desk, trumpets his versatility: “Fate tempted. Bars emptied. Tigers tamed.”

But behind that bravado, Cuny possessed the kind of unglamorous, brass-tacks engineering skill that translates good intentions into real, lifesaving aid. A “technocrat with social conscience,” as he described himself, Cuny helped revolutionize the field of relief work by viewing disasters not as short-term emergencies but as opportunities to rectify the conditions that fueled the calamity.

He believed that most humanitarian assistance is, at best, misguided--lots of tents and blankets that do nothing to address the ethnic strife or substandard housing that underlies much of the destruction. At worst, he argued, such sudden infusions of donated material often disrupt local economies and breed dependency among the recipients. Construction techniques, sewage treatment, political negotiations--now that, Cuny maintained, is what disaster relief should be all about.

*

“He had enormous disdain for unprofessional, inefficient, bleeding-heart do-gooders,” said Tex Harris, president of the American Foreign Service Assn., who befriended Cuny during the Ethiopia famine of the 1980s. “Fred never masked his feelings about suffering and injustice, but he was able to combine them with modern management and engineering skills. That was his genius.”

In recent years, Cuny had begun carving out an even more ambitious role for himself, moving beyond humanitarian aid into the far touchier realm of foreign policy.

During the Persian Gulf War, he took on extraordinary responsibilities as a U.S. military adviser, ultimately overseeing the successful return of 500,000 Kurdish refugees to northern Iraq. In Sarajevo, where he stealthily restored an underground water system after it had been cut by Serbian bombardments, he chastised the United Nations for its halfhearted presence. And after his first visit to Chechnya earlier this year, he assailed Russian atrocities, revealing an insider’s understanding of the armed struggle in a detailed New York Review of Books essay.

Cuny’s unusual access, coupled with his frequent briefings in Washington with State Department and Pentagon officials, have long fueled speculation about his agenda. Earlier this week, an unidentified Russian security official told a Moscow news agency that he believed Cuny was still alive--and working as an undercover agent with Chechen rebels.

*

U.S. officials dismissed the allegation as groundless. If anything, Cuny was contemptuous of the CIA, say friends and co-workers, who describe him as a liberal Democrat whose projects often had radical implications.

After the devastating 1976 earthquake in Guatemala, for instance, Cuny began training villagers to rebuild their homes. When some of his proteges emerged as community activists, they were reportedly beaten and killed by the military regime.

“We went too far, we were very naive, and we provoked the government,” Cuny told the Wall Street Journal. “It backfired.”

As a middle-class teen-ager during the early stages of the Vietnam War, Fred did dream of becoming a Marine aviator, said Cuny’s father, Gene, a retired Dallas television executive. Armed with a pilot’s license, he enrolled in the military cadet program at Texas A&M; University.

But after failing Spanish, he transfered to Texas A&I;, a campus whose proximity to Mexico opened his eyes to the plight of migrant farm workers and he became a labor organizer. A later injury kept him out of military service.

He ran unsuccessfully for the state Legislature before finding a job helping design the Dallas/Ft. Worth International Airport.

Cuny finally found his calling during a 1969 visit as a tourist to Biafra, where he was as shocked by the mismanagement of disaster aid as by the starving refugees.

Families were reduced to living with dead relatives inside their huts, he discovered, because they feared that reporting the death would cause the loss of a daily ration.

“When you heard from Fred, you got no flailing, just a first-class appraisal of the scene and the alternatives,” said Morton Abramowitz, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and now president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Sometimes they were good, sometimes they were bad, but he just had much more interesting perspectives than most of the people in this field.”

It was that expertise that led the Soros Foundation to send Cuny back to Chechnya, even though some friends feared that his public condemnation of the Russian military had put him at risk.

*

On April 4, according to Cuny’s family, he and his companions--all Russians--were detained by masked gunmen as their ambulance headed toward the foothills controlled by secessionist rebels. Ten days later, after allegedly being passed up the chain of command to Chechen intelligence chief Abu Masayev, they were killed.

Frustrated by the sluggish pace of the official investigation, Cuny’s family soon journeyed to nearby Ingushetia, where they have spent more than $50,000 a month retracing his last, quixotic steps.

Russian troops shot at them, the family contended, while Chechen soldiers and Ingush officials extorted them.

Last week, according to family members, their communications equipment was stolen at gunpoint in what appeared to be “a planned and deliberate attempt to tell us we were getting too close.”

As they head back to Texas this weekend, it is with the realization that the full truth may forever be out of reach.

Times staff writer Sonni Efron in Moscow contributed to this story.