When, in 1997, the International Atomic Energy Agency unanimously elected Mohamed ElBaradei as its next Director General, few observers could have forecast the dramatic role he would play over the next 12 years. Certainly, the stage onto which Dr. ElBaradei stepped - featuring Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Kim Jong-I's North Korea, Muammar al-Gaddaf's Libya, and the Islamic Republic of Iraq - gave ample opportunity for high-stakes and high-profile decision-making. But no one could have predicted that ElBaradei would be 'the man in the middle' of so many nuclear conflicts over so sustained a period of time. And after he and the IAEA were jointly awarded the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize, his role as middle-man only gained intensity. In The Age of Deception, Dr. ElBaradei gives us his account from the centre of the nuclear fray. Sit at the dinner table with Iraqi officials in Baghdad, and listen as they bleakly predict the coming war. Eavesdrop on exchanges between UN inspectors and U.S. officials and observe the behind-the-scenes formulation of the foreign policy and diplomacy that would come to characterise the Bush administration. This book expresses the difficulty of the IAEA inspector's struggle to maintain objectivity when trust is broken, and when the press - or governments - are playing fast and loose with the facts. The Age of Deception is a story of human imperfection, of modern society struggling to come to grips with the multiple dimensions of human insecurity. Engaging and fascinating, this is the story of a central player on the world stage, who even now is shaping the future of the Middle East.
