Arms control specialist is new security adviser

Stephen Hadley, a mild-mannered career foreign and arms control specialist, has been one of the backstage foreign policymakers of the Bush administration. But as he steps up to the post of National Security Adviser, he will also be stepping into the limelight.

Stephen Hadley, a mild-mannered career foreign and arms control specialist, has been one of the backstage foreign policymakers of the Bush administration. But as he steps up to the post of National Security Adviser, he will also be stepping into the limelight.

As deputy to Condoleezza Rice, the 57-year-old Mr Hadley was known as a skilled manager. But he did not escape controversy - most notably when he was forced to take responsibility for not keeping the now notorious reference to Iraq's alleged search for uranium in Africa out of Mr Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.

He also came in for criticism over his insistence that Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers, had met an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague five months before the attacks - an encounter now accepted as not having happened.

Mr Hadley's experience goes back to the Nixon days. Under President Ronald Reagan, he was counsel to the commission that probed the Iran/ Contra affair, before moving to the Pentagon under the first President Bush.

In 2000, he advised the Bush/Cheney campaign before joining the White House. There his hawkish views have sometimes surfaced publicly - in a 2002 speech he advocated extending nuclear weapons' role to deterrence against biological and chemical weapons held by rogue states and terrorists.