Upset by the group’s dire warnings, Mr. Condé publicly criticized Doctors Without Borders, despite its lonely efforts to blunt the disease on the front line. But as Mr. Condé played down the outbreak, Ebola was steadily entrenching itself in the Guinean forest villages where it surfaced nearly a year ago.

Now, after more than a thousand deaths in Guinea, Mr. Condé has reversed course. Disturbed by the threat to his country’s people and economy, he is grappling with Ebola nearly every waking moment. Having initially overlooked the crisis, he is now micromanaging it, some international officials say.

“While shaving I think of Ebola, while eating I think of Ebola, while sleeping I think of Ebola,” Mr. Condé, 76, said at the drab, concrete, Chinese-built presidential palace named for Ahmed Sékou Touré, the nation’s first president and strongman, who forced Mr. Condé into exile in 1970 and condemned him to death in absentia.

“When you are at war, how can you think of anything else?” Mr. Condé said, leaning forward, describing his battle with Ebola in the rapid staccato delivery for which he is known.

Much of Guinea’s political establishment has been compromised by association with the country’s past autocrats, reinforcing the go-it-alone tendencies honed by Mr. Condé’s decades in exile. The soldiers now guarding the presidential palace are aggressively loyal: Mr. Condé was the target of an assassination attempt at his home by restive army officers three years ago.

A new coup is never far from his thoughts. During a news conference on Ebola last month, he veered off to warn that “those who are dreaming of a coup d’état, they are kidding themselves.”