Giandomenico Picco, diplomat who freed hostages in Lebanon, dies at age 75
Giandomenico Picco, an Italian diplomat who, as chief negotiator for the United Nations, helped resolve conflicts around the world – most notably shuttling around the Middle East for almost a year in the early 1990s to secure the release of eleven hostages held by terrorist groups in Lebanon – died Sunday in Wilton, Conn., north of Norwalk. He was 75.
His son Giacomo said the cause of his death, in an assisted living facility, was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
Mr Picco spent 20 years at the UN, mainly in a series of loosely defined roles that placed him at the center of some of the world’s most dangerous hotspots.
Early in his career he helped manage the conflict between Greece and Turkey over the island of Cyprus; in 1986 he mediated between New Zealand and France after French secret agents sank the Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace ship, in Auckland harbour; and in 1988 he helped arrange the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The tall, neatly dressed and always discreet Mr Picco was something of a mystery within the UN bureaucracy. He would disappear from headquarters in Manhattan without notice, only to resurface a few days later in Lebanon, Iran or Afghanistan, often without passing through border controls along the way.
Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, who met Mr. Picco when they were both working in Cyprus and who appointed him as his personal assistant after becoming Secretary-General in 1981, often called Mr. Picco his “chief problem solver” and an “unarmed soldier of diplomacy.”
One of the most thorny crises in the world in the late 1980s was the taking of dozens of Western hostages by Hezbollah and other terrorist groups, including more than twenty Americans, often for years at a time. M. Pérez de Cuéllar made it a personal mission to free them, and he sent Mr. Picco to make it happen.
Their influence was Iran, the sponsor of groups like Hezbollah, which found itself at a crossroads in 1990. With the end of the Cold War and the death of the country’s hardline supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the country seemed open to rapprochement with the West. Freeing the last hostages in Lebanon seemed a real possibility.
Mr. Picco later joked that he spent more time in Tehran than in his native Italy in the early 1990s. During nearly a year of negotiations, he would first meet with Iranian officials and then travel to Syria. From there he would be taken across the Lebanese border in a military car, with curtains over the back seat so no one could see him, to meet hostage takers.
He remembered waiting for them on an empty street in Beirut in the middle of the night.
“The car screeched to a halt, a bag was put over my head and then I was thrown into the boot of the car, something I don’t recommend to anyone, especially if you’re 6ft tall like me. he told the BBC in 2013.
He knew the risks: one of the hostages, an Anglican official named Terry Waite, had been captured during a similar mission in 1987. Nevertheless, he traveled without bodyguards and often attended meetings alone.
He made nine trips to Lebanon to meet with the kidnappers, each time bringing with him one or more hostages, including Mr. Waite and Terry Anderson, a reporter for The Associated Press who had been held by Hezbollah since 1985.
On December 12, 1991, eight days after Mr. Anderson’s release, President George H. W. Bush presented Mr. Picco with the Presidential Award for Exceptional Service.
“His skillful diplomacy with governments, officials and hostage representatives in the Middle East has resulted in the freedom of many individuals held in the region.” read the price quote. “His personal courage in the face of danger and his dedication to the mission represent the finest tradition of international civil service.”
Giandomenico Picco was born on October 8, 1948 in Udine, a city in northeastern Italy, not far from the border with what was then Yugoslavia. His father, Giacomo, was a pharmacist, and his mother, Ares, managed the house.
He received a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Padua, Italy, in 1971, and a master’s degree in international relations from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1972.
He married Elena Carretta in 1973. They later divorced. He married Kate Cooney in 2000; they also divorced later. Together with his son Giacomo, he is survived by another son, Liam, and a granddaughter.
Mr. Picco applied for a job at the United Nations on a whim and got a job in the lowest professional salary scale, at the Ministry of Political and Security Council Affairs. Two years later, he joined the Bureau of Special Political Affairs to focus on conflict resolution, a position that soon put him on the front lines in Cyprus.
By the late 1970s he had a reputation as a reliable and unobtrusive repairman. After Cyprus, he worked in the Middle East, including a multi-year assignment to end the war between Iran and Iraq. It finally came to an end in 1988.
His mentor, Mr. Pérez de Cuéllar, left the Secretary-General’s office in 1991, and Mr. Picco knew that his time at the United Nations would most likely end as well. Although he admired the new office holder, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, he realized that Mr. Boutros-Ghali had his own priorities, and his own staff.
Mr. Picco had one more mission. There were two more hostages, Thomas Kemptner and Heinrich Struebig, both German aid workers.
He returned to Lebanon despite being told by an Iranian official that several terrorists wanted him dead, a tense conversation he recounted in his 1999 memoir, Man Without a Gun: One Diplomat’s Secret Struggle to Free the Hostages, Fight Terrorism, and End a War.” In Beirut he met with officials from Germany, Lebanon and Syria; after several days of tense negotiations, the two men were released.
During the festivities that followed, Mr. Picco called his secretary in New York and asked her to deliver a letter he had left on his desk to Mr. Boutros-Ghali’s office. It included his resignation.
He flew with the Germans to Frankfurt, but turned down an offer to attend their press conference on the airport tarmac.
“As attention shifted to them, I slipped out of the plane unnoticed and walked under the plane and across the tarmac to a waiting car,” he wrote in his memoir. “Within seconds I was gone.”