Giandomenico Picco, Italian diplomat who freed hostages in Lebanon, 75
Giandomenico Picco, an Italian diplomat who as a lead negotiator for the United Nations helped resolve conflicts across the globe — most notably spending nearly a year in the early 1990s shuttling around the Middle East to secure the release of 11 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, at an assisted living home, was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
Mr. Picco spent 20 years with the UN, mostly in a series of loosely defined roles that placed him at the center of some of the world’s most dangerous spots.
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 the Auckland harbor; and in 1988, he helped arrange the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Tall, sharply dressed, and always discreet, Mr. Picco was something of a mystery within the UN bureaucracy. He would disappear without notice from the headquarters in New York City, only to surface a few days later in Lebanon, Iran, or Afghanistan, often without having passed through border controls.
Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, who met Mr. Picco when they worked in Cyprus and who, after becoming secretary-general in 1981, brought him on as his personal assistant, often called Mr. Picco his “chief troubleshooter” and an “unarmed soldier of diplomacy.”
Among the thorniest world crises in the late 1980s was the taking of scores of Western hostages by Hezbollah and other terrorist groups, including more than two dozen Americans, often for years at a time. Pérez de Cuéllar made it a personal mission to free them, and he sent Mr. Picco to make it happen.
Their leverage was Iran, the sponsor behind groups including Hezbollah, which by 1990 found itself at a crossroads. With the end of the Cold War and the death of the country’s hard-line leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the country seemed open to a rapprochement with the West. Freeing the final hostages seemed a real possibility.
Mr. Picco later joked that during the early 1990s, he spent more time in Tehran than in his native Italy. Over nearly a year of negotiations, he would meet first with Iranian officials, then travel to Syria. From there, he would be taken in a military car, with curtains across the back seat so no one could see him, over the Lebanese border to meet with hostage takers.
He knew the risks: One of the hostages, an Anglican official named Terry Waite, had been taken captive while on a similar mission in 1987. Nevertheless, he traveled without bodyguards and often went into meetings alone. He made nine trips to Lebanon to meet with the kidnappers, each time bringing back one or more hostages, including Waite and Terry Anderson, a reporter for the Associated Press who had been held by Hezbollah since 1985.
Giandomenico Picco was born Oct. 8, 1948, in Udine, in northeastern Italy. His father, Giacomo, was a pharmacist, and his mother, Ares, managed the home. He received a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Padua, in Italy, in 1971, and a master’s in international relations from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1972.
Mr. Picco applied to work at the United Nations on a whim and landed a job at the lowest professional pay grade. Two years later, he joined the Office of Special Political Affairs to focus on conflict resolution, a post that soon had him in Cyprus.
By the end of the 1970s, he had a reputation as a reliable and reliably low-profile fixer. After Cyprus he worked around the Middle East, including a multiyear engagement trying to end the Iran-Iraq War. It finally came to a close in 1988.
His mentor, Pérez de Cuéllar, left the secretary-general’s office in 1991, and Mr. Picco knew that his time at the UN would most likely end as well. Although he admired the new officeholder, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, he realized that Boutros-Ghali had his own priorities, and his own staff.
Mr. Picco had one more mission. There were two remaining hostages, Thomas Kemptner and Heinrich Struebig, both German aid workers.
He returned to Lebanon, despite being told by an Iranian official that several of the terrorists wanted him dead. In Beirut, he met with officials from Germany, Lebanon, and Syria; after several days of tense negotiations, the two men were released.