He took on the very dangerous secret assignment of traveling to a hostile country in the Middle East to rescue eleven hostages and 91 other prisoners.

He tracked down the terrorist captors, who blindfolded him and drove off with him at gunpoint to an unknown destination.

He knew that the last man who had attempted to rescue them was himself abducted and had already been incarcerated for five years.

The ninth time that he was snatched from the streets of Beirut he offered himself as a hostage in exchange for the release of the others.

This may sound like the plot of some fictional thriller, but it is actually a true story. And it happened to Giandomenico Picco, Gianni to his friends and neighbors on Roosevelt Island. Gianni was the hostage negotiator for the United Nations who traveled to Beirut and Teheran over several years between 1984-1992 and succeeded in obtaining the release of the hostages from four different countries, in the face of extreme danger to himself.

He tells this suspenseful story in his book Man Without a Gun, just published by Random House. It reads much like a cloak-and-dagger thriller, yet it is much more. It is the real life account of one UN diplomat's attempts to add peacemaking to the peacekeeping efforts of the United Nations.

"It's a terrifying feeling to be blindfolded and at the mercy of abductors who you are not even sure are the right people with whom to negotiate the release of the hostages. During one scary night I asked myself whether I had the right, as the father of a son, to put my life at risk in the pursuit of my professional life. I came to the conclusion that my private life, like my professional life, is committed to the search for justice, stopping violent conflicts, and to saving human lives. There is no higher commitment one can make than to put one's life on the line for that. We in the West are taught to defend our own life above all and we tend to have the perception that the Islamic world has less respect for individual lives. But isn't value added to one's life when one is prepared to sacrifice one's life for the benefit of neighbors and children?"

Picco was born in 1948 in a small village in the Italian Alps. He speaks Italian, French, German, Spanish, English, and Romansh, the dialect commonly spoken in that region of Northeastern Italy. "It's an area where we used to have four to five months of snow," he recalled. "I love snow and try to ski in Canada or the Western Rockies as often as I can." He joined the United Nations in 1973 after completing his education at universities in Padua (Italy), Santa Barbara (California), Amsterdam (Holland), andPrague (then in Czechoslovakia).

His first job was in the United Nation's Department of Political and Security Council Affairs. He went to Cyprus in 1976 as a political-affairs officer with the UN Peacekeeping Force. It was there that his son was born and, when the family returned to New York in 1978, they decided to move to Roosevelt Island. "It seemed like a nice place for a one-year-old to grow up - all the large trees and open green spaces, a quiet, mixed community of friendly neighbors." This year his son graduated from college, where he majored in History and Economics. He will begin working at a major New York investment bank this month. Picco says, "I wrote this book mostly for my son and other young people, to demonstrate that individuals do make a difference in major world events; to encourage them to follow their dreams and never surrender their highest aspirations, no matter what the odds."

From 1979 to 1982, Picco served in the UN's Office of the Under-Secretaries-General for Special Political Affairs, where he became the assistant to Javier Perez de Cuellar, who remains his mentor and friend. When Perez de Cuellar became Secretary-General of the United Nations in 1982, Picco was appointed First Officer in the Executive Office of Secretary-General de Cuellar. Boutros-Boutros-Ghali, who succeeded de Cuellar as UN Secretary-General, does not come off very well in the final chapters of Picco's book. "A brilliant intellectual, but a very arrogant man," says Picco. Without consultation Mr. Ghali appointed him as chief negotiator for Iraq to exchange oil for food, a modification of the Gulf War sanctions. This was a post earlier held by Kofi Annan, who is today the UN Secretary-General. Finally, when he was able to secure the release of the last two remaining German hostages in July 1992, Picco, who then held the title of Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs, resigned from the United Nations.

He then established GDP Associates, an international consulting firm that conducts private diplomacy with countries and corporations in the Middle East. He also continues his work in conflict resolution through the non-governmental Peace Strategy Project which he founded as a non-profit organization in Geneva, Switzerland. He writes many articles on political affairs for journals and magazines in Europe, Japan, and the Middle East.

The man without a gun is, however, no pacifist. "The use of force is sometimes justified, especially when the enemy is intolerance," Picco said. He agrees with John Hume, the Irish Nobel Laureate, that "the mindset of war is to believe that difference is a threat." War-mongers, he insists, have to be defeated. Picco maintains that the common enemy of all peoples is not a state, not a religion, not a race, not culture, not ethnicity, but intolerance. Can the fight against intolerance be the element that unites the peoples of the world in the 21st Century? Picco is one person dedicated to that fight.

Signed copies of his book, Man Without a Gun, are available at the Roosevelt Island Card and Gift Shop for $27.50.