Book review: ‘The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times’

When tens of thousands of antigovernment protesters filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square for 18 tense days and toppled Egypt’s brutal dictator early this year, Mohamed ElBaradei visited the street revolutionaries exactly once — briefly — and never went back.

Since then, ElBaradei has made repeated appearances on American TV talk shows to portray himself as the leader of Egypt’s opposition movement and to argue that he now should become the country’s first freely elected president.

Revisionism is a recurrent theme in ElBaradei’s memoir, “The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times.” Written before the “Arab Spring” gave him a political platform, it is a compelling, if incomplete, account of his years at the helm of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the obscure United Nations agency charged with preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.

Given his unique perch, ElBaradei provides behind-the-scenes details of how the Vienna-based agency navigated — and sometimes blundered — through headline-grabbing nuclear standoffs and crises over the last two decades with Iraq, Iran, Libya, Pakistan and North Korea.

And for a diplomat, he dishes dirt with an acid pen. He settles scores with fellow arms control experts, with the CIA and other spy services, and especially with President George W. Bush and his aides for what he calls the “grotesque distortion” of intelligence during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

ElBaradei recounts sitting down with Bush in late 2002 in the Oval Office, for example. “‘I’m not a trigger-happy Texas cowboy, with six-guns,’ [Bush] quipped, sliding forward on his armchair, hands on his hips, to show us how a cowboy would pull out his pistols… It was an odd interaction: Bush kept repeating that it was an ‘honor’ for him to meet with us, but he was not the least bit interested in anything we might have had to say.”

If the Bush administration is to blame for a human and foreign policy fiasco in Iraq, it’s equally true that ElBaradei didn’t raise nearly the fuss he now claims. Most important, he never told the U.N. Security Council that Saddam Hussein had abandoned plans to build nuclear weapons. The reason: The IAEA wasn’t yet convinced.

Still, ElBaradei’s confrontations with the Bush White House over Iraq and other issues helped him and the IAEA win the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize. It also helped him win a third term as IAEA director general, a position he now claims he sought because he wanted to stand up “against U.S. bullying.”

It’s strong stuff, and ElBaradei clearly doubts U.S. motives and actions on the world stage. Indeed, he sometimes seems to show more sympathy for renegade dictators and their ambitions than for Western powers and their security.

He documents the myriad ways that North Korea, Iran and other despotic regimes have flouted international nuclear arms accords, for example. But in almost every case, he faults the United States for scaring their leaders into seeking nuclear weapons for protection from Western aggression.

In his telling, the IAEA doesn’t get the respect it deserves or the cooperation it needs, and it’s not his fault if nuclear arms and technology spread widely during his tenure. He seems genuinely shocked when repressive regimes lie to him or his inspectors about their nuclear programs.

He thus was furious when the United States and Britain moved to unilaterally disarm Moammar Kadafi’s regime of a nascent nuclear weapons program in 2003 without first informing the IAEA.

“The very existence of Libyan WMD development was news to me,” ElBaradei admits. Rather than fault the Libyans, he lashes out at the U.S. and British officials who briefed him: “I was angry, and I let my indignation show.” He disparages their success as minor.

He similarly complains that the West didn’t share intelligence on A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb and the head of a global nuclear smuggling network that ElBaradei rightly calls “a virtual Nuclear Wal-Mart.”

It’s now clear that the CIA and its allies made a monstrous miscalculation by letting Khan’s black market network flourish for years before they tried to shut it down in 2004. Their decision “to watch and wait was a royal blunder,” ElBaradei declares.

Yet where was the IAEA? This was their job too. ElBaradei never says how Washington and its allies should respond when U.N. agencies are ineffective and the future of the planet is at stake.

bob.drogin@latimes.com