Giandomenico Picco, Diplomat Who Freed Hostages in Lebanon, Dies at 75

Giandomenico Picco, an Italian diplomat who as a lead negotiator for the United Nations helped resolve conflicts across the globe — most notably spending nearly a year in the early 1990s shuttling around the Middle East to secure the release of 11 hostages held by terrorist groups in Lebanon — died on Sunday in Wilton, Conn., north of Norwalk. He was 75.

His son Giacomo said the cause of his death, at an assisted living home, was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.

Mr. Picco spent 20 years with the U.N., mostly in a series of loosely defined roles that placed him at the center of some of the world’s most dangerous hot spots.

Early in his career he helped manage the conflict between Greece and Turkey over the island of Cyprus; in 1986 he mediated between New Zealand and France after French secret agents sank the Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace ship, in the Auckland harbor; and in 1988 he helped arrange the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Tall, sharply dressed and always discreet, Mr. Picco was something of a mystery within the U.N. bureaucracy. He would disappear without notice from the headquarters in Manhattan, only to surface a few days later in Lebanon, Iran or Afghanistan, often without having passed through border controls along the way.

Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, who met Mr. Picco when they both worked in Cyprus and who, after becoming secretary general in 1981, brought him on as his personal assistant, often called Mr. Picco his “chief troubleshooter” and an “unarmed soldier of diplomacy.”