https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1999/09/06/the-disaster-expert-who-met-his-match/990c0006-0edc-4342-8495-6819a9699992/?utm_term=.600478207160

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THE MAN WHO TRIED TO SAVE THE WORLD

The Dangerous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Fred Cuny By Scott Anderson

Cuny was a larger-than-life Texan whose specialty was striding into scenes of disaster and bringing order out of chaos. In scores of trouble spots, clad in jeans and cowboy boots, he organized refugee camps, unsnarled supply lines, browbeat military commanders into truces, and in the process was credited with saving many thousands of lives. He was a visionary and an American original, and by the time he disappeared his family and friends had the support of the highest levels of the U.S. government, starting with President Clinton, as they struggled to solve the mystery of his final days.

Drawn to overseas adventures, he wangled a job with a British relief agency, Oxfam, when floods and civil war devastated East Pakistan in 1970, and he soon concluded that international relief programs were grossly mismanaged and in urgent need of his assistance. Back in Texas he founded his own consulting firm, grandly called International Technical Consultants, and waited for the next disaster to strike.

Business was scarce at first, but in 1972 Oxfam hired him to help after an earthquake in Nicaragua, where he gained attention by insisting that traditional "grid"-style refugee camps should be replaced by more user-friendly "cluster" camps. Cuny proceeded to write his Relief Operations Guidebook, a virtual encyclopedia of disaster relief, and in 1976 he was back in Central America to help survivors of an earthquake in Guatemala.

By then his legend was growing. In a world of massive relief organizations, he was the lone cowboy, striding in at high noon to set things right. Despite his criticisms, he began to win contracts from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and United Nations relief agencies. Increasingly he was drawn not to natural disasters but to the even more dangerous challenge of man-made disasters such as civil wars. In 1991, working with a USAID Disaster Assistance Response Team, Cuny helped save the lives of thousands of Kurdish refugees by persuading U.S. military officials to establish a security zone for them in northern Iraq.

Cuny hoped the incoming Clinton administration would make him its disaster-relief czar. That didn't happen; instead he was soon in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, where he added to his legend by strolling unconcerned through sniper fire and by bringing a new water system to the besieged city in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

By 1995 Cuny was 50, too old to be rushing off to war zones, but some fatal attraction led him to the hell of Chechnya. ("To imagine this war and the way it was fought," Anderson writes, "it might be easiest first to forget what you know about war.") Cuny went to Chechnya on the payroll of billionaire George Soros, saw just how ugly the conflict was, and then, over the protests of friends, went back.

And then he never came back, "Fred Cuny vanished in Chechnya in 1995."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Cuny

Cuny went to Chechnya at the behest of the New York-based Soros Foundation. Soros President Aryeh Neier says Cuny was asked to recommend a course of action but he tended to set his own agenda once he was on the ground.

http://archive.is/jPLfG

Soon after, Cuny ventured into Chechnya in a Russian Red Cross ambulance with his translator and two Russian doctors who were working for Soros. Some fear that Cuny put himself at risk by traveling into Chechnya with a group of Russians. Some say there were rumors that his interpreter, 35-year-old Galina Oleynik, was a KGB agent. Some say those rumors were planted by the Russians to set Cuny up. But none of Cuny's friends believes he was a man to take a naive risk. "The ego is one thing, but when it came time to make a decision as to where he was going to go and how he was going to do it, he was very smart and very cautious," his brother says.

Map of Cuny's World https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cuny/world/

"He knows 100 times more than I do about how one goes about doing this sort of thing," Neier says. "I was necessarily somewhat humbled." On March 31, Cuny phoned Neier from the neighboring Russian region of Ingushetia with three recommendations: Establish a lab to cope with an anticipated outbreak of cholera; offer repair kits for residents returning to damaged apartments; start an emergency radio station in the region to help trace missing persons. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1995/06/19/where-is-fred-cuny/53789ae5-f71a-4686-9afb-5a0a745b4d84/?utm_term=.78a5745479a9 At the time, Neier says, he had no idea that Cuny was about to become one of them.

Other observations on Cuny:

As long as he was independent, Cuny could take sides, and increasingly he did. In Bosnia, where he installed a system that supplies 95 percent of the water available in Sarajevo, he became an outspoken critic of the United Nations, says Thomas Weiss, director of the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. "I remember him saying to me, If the U.N. had been around in 1939, we'd all be speaking German.'

International Crisis Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Crisis_Group

The International Crisis Group was founded after a chance meeting in January 1993 between former US diplomat and then-President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Morton I. Abramowitz and then future World Bank Vice-President Mark Malloch Brown on a flight to Sarajevo.[2]

The international community's difficulty in responding to the Bosnian War provided the catalyst for

"an independent organisation that would serve as the world’s eyes and ears on the ground in countries in conflict while pressing for immediate action."[2] George Soros was involved in discussions early on and provided seed money.[2]

Disaster relief specialist Fred Cuny made significant contributions to disaster relief in Bosnia, and was brought on board later that year, though participation was cut short by his death in 1995.[2]

In November 1994, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace announced plans for Crisis Group, while former Congressman Stephen J. Solarz toured foreign capitals to promote the new organisation and raise funds, gaining early support from Martti Ahtisaari (President of Finland), Gareth Evans (Foreign Minister of Australia) and Bernard Kouchner (founder of Médecins Sans Frontières and future French Foreign Minister).[2]

A January 1995 meeting in London brought many international figures together, and approved a proposal for an annual budget of $8m and 75 full-time staff. In mid-1995 it was formally registered in the US as a tax-exempt non-profit organisation.[2] From 1996 to 1999, Crisis Group had an annual budget of around $2m and around 20 full-time staff; by 2008 its budget was $15m.[2]

Following the death of its first president, Nicholas Hinton, in January 1997 and his replacement by Alain Destexhe, Crisis Group moved its headquarters from London to Brussels.[2]