Only afterward, at the end of my meeting with Rice, did she address my reelection. The Americans’ view on my serving a third term had not been personal, she said, only a consistent application of the U.S. policy of two terms for heads of UN agencies. Looking at each other, we both knew this wasn’t true, but I also saw that Rice and Hadley were trying to distance themselves from some of John Bolton’s diplomatic blunders. I had heard that Rice, upon taking her new position, had refused to keep Bolton at the State Department. He was instead appointed directly by Bush as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, which was either the most outrageous mismatch of job qualifications in diplomatic history or the most coherent expression of the U.S. approach to multilateralism at the time.
We left it at that. I understood that the meeting with Rice constituted a shift and the United States would now join the rest of the Member States in their decision.
I smiled. “We should let bygones be bygones,” I said to Rice. “No need to talk about past history.” Just days later, on June 13, 2005, I was reelected to a third term by unanimous vote.
After a bruising season, the Agency received the most restorative of gifts. It was the morning of October 7, 2005, and I had stayed home from the office. By late morning, I was still in my pajamas. I had recently returned from a grueling trip, but that had never kept me at home before. The reason for my truancy was something quite different.
For the second year running, there were rampant rumors that the IAEA and I were front-runners for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2004 the rumors had been so persistent that our communications people had drawn up talking points in case we had to deal with the press. On the day of the announcement that year, I had been in Japan for talks with the minister of the economy. When I arrived at our meeting, there were roughly fifty cameramen waiting in anticipation of news from the Nobel committee. During the meeting, my assistant, Ian Biggs, slipped out. He came back a few minutes later and passed me a note with the name of the Peace Prize laureate: Wangari Maathai. When I left the meeting, there was one cameraman outside, who came up to me and said, very kindly, “Sorry.”
This year I avoided talking about it with anyone at the Agency. I was told later that no one wanted to jinx our chances. That Friday, I didn’t feel like sitting through a morning staff meeting with everyone looking at their watches, especially since the day before, bookmakers had suddenly upgraded our odds of winning.
The announcement was scheduled for 11:00 A.M. The Nobel committee customarily phones the winner half an hour in advance. By 10:45, my stomach had stopped churning and I was at peace with the fact that the committee had chosen someone else. When Aida went into the study to watch the announcement on TV, I tagged along, curious.
Even in Norwegian, I recognized the name: “Det Internasjonale Atom-energibyrået,” followed by “Mohamed ElBaradei.” I stood there dumb-founded, half-disbelieving; then, as the words were repeated in English, Aida and I embraced, tears streaming down our faces.[6]
In less than a minute, our phones began ringing off the hook. First, my brother Ali, calling from Cairo, glued to the TV. Then my secretary, Monika Pichler, ringing from the office to say that the Norwegian ambassador and his deputy had arrived with a huge bouquet of flowers.[7] The ambassador was the only one who had been informed in advance by the Nobel committee. I invited them to come over to the house. Between the multitude of calls coming in and my emotional state, it was all I could do to get dressed.
After a hastily arranged press conference at the IAEA, I gave an impromptu speech to the Agency staff, who had crowded en masse into the boardroom. The room was electric: there were tears, laughter, and recurring waves of applause. To say that we were all thrilled and proud would not begin to describe the enormity of the moment. I do not expect to experience again in my lifetime the joy of sharing such extraordinary affirmation: my colleagues, people from more than ninety countries, had striven together to make the world more secure. The prize was the culmination of our efforts as an institution and of my forty years working for the common good.
The deluge of support rapidly became an avalanche. Emails jammed my in-box. Letters began arriving in stacks: the IAEA mailroom resorted to circulating them in overstuffed grocery bags. The thrill of these messages was that they were coming in from people from all walks of life and of all ages, ethnicities, and religions, from heads of state to schoolchildren. A group of Italian nuns wrote to promise their prayers for our future. Three hundred Spanish children from Fuenlabrada, a suburb of Madrid, sent individual letters of congratulations.[8] Egyptian citizens of every description wrote to express their pride. This generous outpouring was at once immensely humbling and immensely uplifting.
I felt a great obligation to convey, through my Nobel lecture, my particular understanding of nuclear proliferation—as part of a much larger context of global inequality and the quest for human security. For some time, I had been trying, in speech after speech, to articulate the connections: the negative societal spiral began with poverty and inequality; which all too frequently coincided with poor governance, corruption, and human rights abuses; which in turn provided fertile breeding ground for extremism, violence, and civil wars, and, in some cases, in areas of unresolved conflict, the temptation to project power or achieve security parity by acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
Laban Coblentz, my communications assistant and speechwriter, and Melissa Fleming, the Agency spokesperson, had told me that the point was being lost on my audiences, even though they themselves understood my reasoning. The connections I saw were there, but I wasn’t driving the message home. I needed something more concrete: an image to capture the message.
I found my answer while thinking about how to use the money that accompanied the Nobel recognition. The prize had been awarded jointly to me, as Director General, and to the IAEA, as an organization. The award money totaled just over one million euros. The IAEA Board had determined that half the money would go to support cancer treatment and childhood nutrition in developing countries. My portion, I decided, would be put toward a cause I had known my whole life: the need to care for the orphans of Cairo. My sister-in-law was directly involved in the city’s orphanages; she could help me ensure that the funds were well spent.
Here was the image I wanted, the motif for my Nobel lecture: “My sister-in-law,” I wrote,
works for a group that supports orphanages in Cairo. She and her colleagues take care of children left behind by circumstances beyond their control. They feed these children, clothe them and teach them to read.
At the International Atomic Energy Agency, my colleagues and I work to keep nuclear materials out of the reach of extremist groups. We inspect nuclear facilities all over the world, to be sure that peaceful nuclear activities are not being used as a cloak for weapons programmes.
My sister-in-law and I are working towards the same goal, through different paths: the security of the human family.
The quest for security, I argued, was the motivation driving a multitude of human endeavors. But because our societal priorities were skewed, some nations of the world were spending more than a trillion dollars per year on armaments while two-fifths of the earth’s population were living on less than two dollars per day and nearly a billion were going to bed hungry every night. The world’s insecurities had gone absurdly awry. Nor was it possible to sustain such a model. “Today,” I wrote,
6
My son, Mostafa, was a studio director at the time, working in the London offices of CNN. The news broke in the middle of his shift. He sent us a three-word text message: “Oh my God!”—then took a ten-minute break outside to regain his composure. He later told us he had fifty British pounds in his pocket, which he gave to the first beggar he saw.
My daughter, Laila, who also lived in London, was in the Underground on the way to her law office. She came out of the station to see thirty messages on her cell phone and was sure that something was terribly wrong—until she was able to reach her brother.
7
The Nobel committee later said they were sure that if they called the IAEA the news would leak immediately. The ambassador told me he had bought a large bouquet the year before as well.
8
Two examples: