Finally a man wearing a sharp pinstriped suit walked to the podium. Everyone grew silent. The Secretary General's Spokesman announced that Annan would be a little late. As soon as he left the podium everyone started speaking again. One journalist commented, "It feels funny looking at him standing up there apart from the noon briefing."

He's the man United Nations journalists look to when they need to figure out how to write a story. He's the man who supplies the interesting stories every day at the noon briefing. He's the mouthpiece for the Secretary General himself. Impeccably dressed, soft spoken and affable, Frederic Eckhard, Spokesman for the Secretary General is simply -- the man.

They all know him. He doesn't take two steps on the third floor of the Secretariat building without someone saying hello or some journalist asking him a question. His phone rings continuously and he's always returning phone calls to journalists so that they'll make their deadlines.

"He's a good guy," said one journalist.

From his office, Eckhard faces First Avenue. Normally, he could see the M15 bus roll by the waving flags on its way uptown. Now there is nothing on First Avenue but some police cars and some sanitation trucks filled to the brim with sand. From where he sits, he can see the staff walking toward the entrance as the tourists go to the visitor's entrance, which he cannot see from his huge office. Things may seem to be getting back to normal, but everyone knows they are not.

"I think the 11th of September has sobered all of us," Eckhard, 58, said while renovations continue outside his office. "We're looking at security both national and international from a fresh perspective. I think as individuals we feel much less safe, certainty in New York and possibly in other big urban centers around the world."

Eckhard is in his 16th year at the UN Secretariat. He served in Nambia in 1989, Sarajevo in 1992; he's used to stressful situations, if that's possible.

"The search for [Osama] bin Laden has now turned into a military action," he said, repeating the news in his patented monotone style. "Of course, that too generates tension. People don't know how others will react to this military action. It's not a classical war."

Eckhard said he feels everyone is becoming "reflective" and "a bit uneasy." The UN, he said, has defined the legal framework by which to judge the actions of terrorists. Not too long after the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC, the UN issued Resolution 1373 which condemned acts of terrorism.

"We hope that this General Assembly will succeed in defining terrorism," he said, "because there has been a political debate over what it is. One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. The Secretary General has called for moral clarity and the hope is that the Assembly can come up with an over-arching convention that would make the whole thing much clearer."

The UN has urged the Taliban to turn over suspected terrorist bin Laden and has pressured the Taliban to that end through economic sanctions. "They didn't respond to it, so now we're in the enforcement stage," he said, "which is unsettling."

Eckhard said that if the Taliban is overthrown, then he'd like to see the UN help establish a broad-based government in which all Afghans could feel that they have a stake.

"And then I would like to see the UN gradually work to help the Afghans rebuild their economy so that the number of people living under the poverty line could be reduced dramatically and that social services could once again be restored."

Eckhard said he doesn't believe that poverty and despair alone are enough to serve as breeding grounds for terrorism. But he said that a healthy prosperous society is perhaps less likely to breed terrorists. "What we need to do is raise the level of discourse here," he said, "so that people don't feel that to make a political point they need to blow up a building."

Eckhard said he's not sure he understands what turns a small group of people into "homicidal maniacs" and he's not sure anyone does. When asked if World War III is imminent, Eckhard said, "I don't think so. I've never seen the level of cooperation of consensus on what's right and what's wrong as what we have right now in the Security Council and in the General Assembly."

This consensus, he said, builds on a decade of communication following the end of the cold war around the importance of democratic principles and human rights.

"So gradually the base on which contemporary societies and political structures are built is really very broad and increasingly harmonious," he said. "I don't think you have the elements of a world war but there is a deep underlying frustration over the inability to find a political solution between the Israelis and the Palestinians. And there is also an angry minority, but substantial, minority that can easily be seduced by this violent way of reacting to political frustration."

Unlike others, Eckhard doesn't think an active International Criminal Court could have prevented the September 11th attacks. So now, with the threat of anthrax now a possibly, Eckhard said his staff has had one practice evacuation. They have also received security instruction concerning anthrax.

"I think our security people are doing everything they can to prepare for the worst case scenario," he said. "Whether or not there will ever be a serious attempt against this building, I don't know. I would hope that people would see this building as representing everyone's best interests."

He said the office renovations have nothing to do with speeding up evacuation proceedings. "That predated any security threat," he said. "The idea was just to make space more functional for journalists so that you don't come down a narrow corridor, off a second long corridor and then look up and down for someone to help you. The idea is you would walk through a big double door, into a nice spacious room where six people would have desks all looking in your direction and if three people are on the phone, there would still be three people on the phone ready to respond to your question."

Eckhard said he was always an editor, never a journalist. He "did a bit of writing on Africa" that but tended more towards editing of news summaries for the African magazine where he worked after he spending two years in Africa as a student.

"So I went in on the editorial side and I was there for 15 or so years before I came to the UN and the first job I applied for at the UN was an editorial job, which I didn't get," he said. "When I didn't get that, they threw me in to the political side, sending me to Washington to try to convince Congress to pay UN dues."

Laughing he said, it was considered a big joke when he went down there in 1985, asking for the US to pay their dues. "They thought I was on a quixotic mission," he said. "But I'm happy to say that the money is in the mail now from Washington."

Eckhard said his day starts at 7:00 AM, when he looks at the wires and reads the newspapers. His staff comes in an hour later. By that time, Eckhard is there too and they divide up the newspapers. They start producing what they call, "the morning headlines" two to three line items, concerning the major news overnight along with any noteworthy articles, editorials, or opinion pieces.

"By 9:30 we have a pretty good snapshot of what's happening in the world at that time," he said. "We then fan out to the different departments and gather information that's come in from our field missions via cables.

"At 10:30, we get together again and we share everything that we've learned," he said. "And then we decide what the most newsworthy stories of the day are and then my people write those stories between 11 and 12 and what they write is what I read at the briefing."

He said his staff writes the story with footnotes, "if you're asked this, the answer is" and that sort of thing. Rarely, does the staff or he make a mistake but when it happens, they quickly correct themselves. Mistakes are okay a few times, Eckhard said, but not when they happen too frequently.

"One of the hardest things to do is keep your mouth shut," he said, smiling. "But when you're a spokesman because your professional pride makes you want to have the answer to every question. And if you have to say, 'I don't know I have to look that one up for you' some people just can't do that. Some people think they have to fabricate an answer or say what they think the answer is and I always have to discipline my staff who say, 'That Head of State's name is spelled ABCDE' and I have to say 'Show it to me from an authoritative source in writing.'

"And the same with facts," he said. "I might be a little sleepy, a little lazy or a little over-confident and I might do the equivalent in answering a question. 'Oh the answer to that I think is the following' and that isn't the answer. And then I've got to squawk a correction. But I think that if you keep those to a minimum so that they become human error and not an indication of sloppy work and you correct yourself as quickly as possible I think the journalists will forgive you."