Aid workers began whispering among themselves that Cuny might have a more than informal connection to the American intelligence community. There was almost certainly no such connection. Nevertheless, Cuny seemed to enjoy the talk, and not infrequently fueled it. Even those closest to him wondered at times what deals he made, and with whom. When asked how Cuny had managed to get the transport trucks past the Bosnian Serbs at the Sarajevo airport -- it was the Bosnian Serbs, after all, who were trying to strangle the city in every way -- Rick Hill of Intertect grinned and replied, "I never did figure out exactly how Fred did that."

Questions of how things get done can take on a life-and-death importance in war zones, for they can very quickly lead to the essential question: Which side are you on? Relief specialists and aid workers have traditionally gone about their work in ways to insure that the question never comes up. But in recent years, in Bosnia and Somalia and elsewhere, the role of nongovernmental organizations has become both larger and less strictly neutral, and this has not gone unnoticed among the warriors.

Ambassador Pickering acknowledged that this new role carries considerable dangers. "I think there's been a growing sense in the past few years of the need to intervene preemptively to forestall crises, and governments have found that nongovernmental institutions can be useful in these situations," he said. "What you are starting to see is [humanitarian] assistance deliverers playing a mediatory role in resolving problems in a way that governments often can't. The downside for these people is that it puts them at risk at a time when military types are becoming increasingly paranoid. And the smaller the conflict, the greater the paranoia."

At the time he was planning his return to Chechnya late last winter, perhaps no one in the field was more at risk than Fred Cuny. And yet he did nothing to cool things down -- no avowing neutrality, no keeping a low profile. Quite the opposite, in fact: for Cuny, Chechnya had became something of a crusade. In a much-discussed article published in The New York Review of Books last spring he described the Russian military in Chechnya as "bogged down in a fruitless combat for an objective that is ultimately meaningless." A few days after his dinner in Dallas with Damir Lulo, Cuny flew to Washington, where he met with people on the Hill and excoriated the Russian military's brutal tactics in Chechnya.

The following afternoon he was ushered into a conference room at the State Department to expound on the topic. Among the dozen or so in attendance were most of the department's top officials responsible for Russian policy. "I've never sat in on a briefing quite like it," an official who attended the meeting said. "Cuny must have talked for over an hour. I don't think any of us up until that time had really grasped just how bad the situation was, the absolute depravity of the Russian [military] operation. And I don't think you can overestimate the impact that Cuny's talk had on those of us in that room. In fact, I think if you go back and chart this thing, you'll see that it was when guys like Fred Cuny started coming in and talking to us that American policy on Chechnya changed."

Whether or not Cuny's lobbying was behind the Clinton Administration's stepped-up criticism of Russia's campaign in Chechnya, he was seen as someone with a role in shaping American foreign policy. It was a perception that began to set off alarm bells in a number of places. Particularly anxious was the Soros Foundation, which, at the behest of its founder, the billionaire-financier George Soros, had begun financing several of Cuny's projects after his success in Kurdistan.

Not long after setting up operations in Russia in 1987, the Foundation became the target of a persistent whisper campaign there charging it with being a C.I.A. front. Those whispers grew louder through early 1995; it was precisely the kind of Soros projects that Cuny was planning in Chechnya and neighboring Ingushetia -- refugee assistance, medical relief to Chechen war victims -- that seemed most suspicious. Then on the morning of March 21, three aid workers under contract to Soros who were based in Ingushetia -- Galina Oleinik, Andrei Sereda and Sergei Makarov -- were among a group of travelers stopped at a particularly notorious Russian Army checkpoint near Assinovskaya, a village in western Chechnya. After being interrogated for several hours and threatened with execution if they didn't "confess" to carrying supplies to the Chechen guerrillas, the three women detained, Oleinik among them, were hustled aboard an army helicopter and taken away for further interrogation by the Russian Federal Security Service (F.S.B.). According to Oleinik, the women were inexplicably left at an airport without any guards. Rather than wait for their F.S.B. interrogators to show up, they hitched a ride back to Nazran, the capital of Ingushetia. There, Oleinik was able to win the release of the three men still held in Chechnya, quite possibly saving them from execution.