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To make Norway as attractive a Pentagon partner as possible, Devold has spent heavily and cut radically; hence her insistence that our airborne taxi do double duty as a tactical training exercise to save fuel and pilot time. ''We have some of the best pilots,'' she shouts appreciatively over the roar of the chopper's turbocharged engines. It's an American-made Bell 412, a modern version of the venerable Huey popularized during the Vietnam War. I nod weakly, trying not to encourage any further demonstrations of the craft's maneuverability. As if on cue, the pilots oblige us with a series of harrowing missile-avoidance moves known as tail-ons, during which the chopper's airframe shudders violently and we find ourselves suddenly falling -- actually falling -- backward.

The civilian official next to me has turned green. Devold, meanwhile, gazes dreamily out the window, her paratrooper boots propped leisurely on the chopper's deck, a huge smile on her face.

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Who's Afraid of Norway?

And this woman sounds like heaven:

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With Mr. Kouchner came Nadia Younes, the French-speaking, American-educated, Puccini-loving Egyptian, whom Kofi Annan trusted to keep the emotional Mr. Kouchner on line and on course. A former chief of protocol for the United Nations, she was anything but prim.

In long conversations over neat whiskey, marked by scores of cigarettes, sometimes in a cold, blacked-out Kosovo, even in the United Nations headquarters that was once the seat of Belgrade's administration in Pristina, Nadia was, above all, honest about what was possible and what was not.

Blunt, refreshingly cynical, she spoke openly about the realities of Kosovo: the criminality of the Kosovo Liberation Army; the fraud of its "transformation" into a supposedly disarmed civilian conservation corps; the hapless optimism of the Clinton administration; the endless reluctance of the Security Council to finance its responsibilities in Kosovo; the wounded, malign nationalism of the local Serbs; the reverse ethnic cleansing of the province, with most Serbs and Roma and even Muslim, non-Albanian minorities, like the Gorani, pushed out by the ethnic Albanians; the lawlessness of the province, with 80-year-old women murdered in their apartments and no one arrested; the fecklessness of much of the United Nations' own initial efforts.

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'I Should Always Believe Journalists,' He Said, Adding: 'Please Pray for Me.'

[ 26 August 2003: Message edited by: clockwork ]