Book Review

On March 31, 1995, Fred Cuny, the so-called "Master of Disaster," clambered into a beat-up Yugoslavian-made ambulance, crossed the unmarked border into Chechnya, and disappeared off the face of the earth. 

In 1995, Chechnya was a patchwork of Russian and separatist-controlled territories, marbled with front-lines and terrorized by bandits and marauding Russian battle helicopters. Fred Cuny, a Texan maverick and self-made legend within the disaster relief community, drove straight
into the eye of a major Russian offensive. The ostensible 
mission of the one-time head of disaster relief efforts in Bosnia, Iraq and Somalia was to negotiate the evacuation of civilians from a besieged village high in the Caucasian Mountains.

The search for his body was abandoned three months later, 
after the efforts of dozens of U.S. embassy and human relief 
officials, and the personal involvement of presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, resulted only in rumors and increasingly wild conspiratorial whispers. Was he a CIA spy on a mission to uncover missing Russian nuclear weapons, as some suggested, a U.S. military operative, or could he even still be alive and well, on some new shady mission? Cuny, whose efforts probably saved thousands of lives over the course of a 30-year career, was too much larger-than-life for anyone to believe he died a simple, anonymous death.

Part biography, part war correspondence and part 
spy-thriller, Scott Anderson’s new book “The Man Who Tried to Save the World”  explores the mysterys of Cuny’s death and chronicles his rise to the pinnacle of the international disaster relief establishment. Cuny is revealed as an adventurer, womanizer, and a teller of tall tales who rose to international prominence by virtue of his unbounded ambition and a relentless ego.

Anderson pricks holes in the self-inflated legend of Fred 
Cuny, revealing the hyperbole in boasts of a U.S. Marine Corps career and tales of early professional victories. Anderson is an insightful storyteller, and has no qualms about admitting his admiration for his subject; Cuny’s eventual accomplishments become even more impressive
when built on a foundation of hot air. “The Man Who Tried 
to Save the World” takes the reader along to some of the most terrifying places on earth, as Cuny’s career in disaster relief unfolds as a life-long effort to conquer the world by other means.

--Stephen Siff 7/14/99  

Scott Anderson

Doubleday

384 pages