In Richard Butler's office on the 32nd floor of United Nations headquarters, a visitor's eyes are drawn irresistibly to a dome-shaped, olive-coloured metal canister, bristling with wires and circuit boards and covered in cyrillic characters.
This object, the chairman of UNSCOM, the UN Special Commission, explains with glee, is the Russian-made guidance system of a Scud missile, the rocket that rained down on Israel and Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War and which his inspectors have been hunting down since it ended in 1991.
Mr Butler, an Australian diplomat and arms control expert, took over one of the hottest jobs on the international scene 18 months ago, and triggered this latest violent chapter in the Iraq crisis on Tuesday when he reported to the UN Security Council that Saddam Hussein had again failed to live up to his obligations to allow unfettered access to the UN inspection teams.
He is no stranger to controversy, having set the alarm bells ringing in November when he acceded to an American request to withdraw his personnel from Iraq and was immediately attacked by Russia and France, always quick to see him as a tool of Washington and London.
UNSCOM is a strange creature: set up to catalogue and destroy Iraq's once formidable arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, it runs the most intrusive arms control regime in history. But when it was founded it was seen as a temporary measure.
Rolf Ekeus, one of those understated Swedes who make the UN system run, and who oversaw UNSCOM's first years, was occasionally lambasted. But his more abrasive successor has been repeatedly vilified by the Iraqis as a "mad dog". And rarely has a UN official been subjected to such withering fire in the security council, though Mr Butler seemed thick-skinned on Wednesday, chewing gum as the Russian and Chinese ambassadors set aside diplomatic niceties to savage him.
Russia's Sergei Lavrov charged that the crisis had been "created artificially by the irresponsible acts of Richard Butler". Qin Huasun of China was even harsher, saying that he had played a "dishonourable role" in the present confrontation.
Part of the reason for such venom is his effectiveness. Mr Butler abandoned Ekeus's more cautious approach for aggressive inspections, adopting the "shake the tree" approach espoused by Scott Ritter, an inspector who resigned this summer complaining that UNSCOM had gone soft at the behest of Washington and London because they were not ready for a new crisis.
"Baghdad pumps out propaganda against Mr Butler all the time," Robin Cook, the British Foreign Secretary, said yesterday. "In truth the only real criticism they have is that he tried to do his job only too well."
Mr Butler's position was badly undermined in February, when Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, induced Iraq to promise compliance at the price of accepting its demands for wider UN involvement in inspection of so-called sensitive or presidential sites. UNSCOM was also forced to accept French and Russian political advisers.
"We are all human when we are under tension," Mr Annan said this week. "We say or do things that we normally would not do. I have discussed this with Richard Butler. I think it is possible to be firm and correct."
Mr Butler has had had mixed reviews from fellow professionals. "Part of Butler's problem is that he has blown hot and cold, telling the Americans that he is going to get tough with the Iraqis but then backing down when he hits resistance," said one former colleague. "But the problem isn't Richard. The problem is Iraq."
After the launch of Desert Fox, UNSCOM seems resigned to the fact that its return to Iraq may be impossible. US officials say the inspectors could not function effectively in any case because of Iraqi obstructionism. Mr Butler came to the same conclusion in his report, in effect writing himself out of a job.