WHAT REALLY HAPPENED AT 2 A.M. IN GENEVA

Yevgeni Primakov was in high spirits as he pulled a chair up to a horseshoe-shaped table in Geneva's Palace of Nations. Seven years earlier, the Russian Foreign Minister had been hunkered down in a Baghdad bunker with American bombs falling around him after he failed to broker a deal to head off the Gulf War. Now, with two U.S. carrier battle groups and 300 warplanes poised in the Persian Gulf for another major strike against Iraq, the pressure was on Primakov once more. But this time he was sure he could keep the guns silent. "I think it's going to work...

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