Nobel Laureate Mohamed ElBaradei
Faleh Kheiber / Reuters / Corbis
Compliance
One of ElBaradei's first acts as Director was to withdraw the agency's nuclear inspection teams from Iraq, where they had been dispatched to enforce a UN-mandated destruction of all Iraqi chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The IAEA did not return to Iraq until after 9/11, when international pressure forced Saddam Hussein to allow them to set foot on Iraqi soil. In November 2002, ElBaradei, accompanied by UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, above, arrived in Baghdad.