Woman in 2008 Affair Is Said to Have Accused I.M.F. Director of Coercing Her

One briefing was on the fund’s activities in Ghana. The fund’s operations in the small west African country were minimal. But Mr. Strauss-Kahn took a keen interest in the woman making the presentation — Piroska M. Nagy, a blond Hungarian-born economist who was 50 at the time and who had worked at the I.M.F. since 1986.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s subsequent brief affair with Ms. Nagy, who is married, soon became public — spurring an internal investigation at the fund that would ultimately clear him of having abused the power of his office.

Now, in the aftermath of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s arrest on charges that include attempted rape, his past conduct is undergoing fresh scrutiny. A person with direct knowledge of Ms. Nagy’s version of what happened and her view of the I.M.F. investigation said that the affair — which was conducted at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland — was consensual, but that she had felt coerced because Mr. Strauss-Kahn was so forceful and so senior to her, making it hard for her to, in effect, say no.

This person, who declined to be identified because the matter was a sensitive one, said Ms. Nagy had felt that her claim about abuse of power was not taken into account by the board.

The I.M.F., whose investigation at the time concluded that Mr. Strauss-Kahn had shown poor judgment, declined comment. Ms. Nagy, who now works for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London, also declined comment.

Robert J. Smith, a partner at Morgan Lewis & Bockius who led the investigation, said it did take Ms. Nagy’s claims into account. “There was no evidence of coercion or abuse of his power,” he said.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s interest in Ms. Nagy materialized soon after her presentation, according to the person with knowledge of the matter. He began to call Ms. Nagy in an insistent fashion, asking many questions about Ghana’s economy, this person said.

It soon became clear to Ms. Nagy that Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s interest was more than professional, and he began asking her out and even using increasingly sexual language in his communications, this person said.

William Taylor, a lawyer for Mr. Strauss-Kahn, said Ms. Nagy responded in kind to this form of e-mail communication.

On one occasion, this person recalled, Mr. Strauss-Kahn even sent his secretary to summon Ms. Nagy from the bathroom with a message that the managing director wanted to see her. Ms. Nagy found herself in an increasingly awkward relationship with her ultimate boss, but for a while she put off his advances, the person said. In January 2008, however, she met up with Mr. Strauss-Kahn in Davos and had a very brief affair with him, a version of events that has been publicly accepted by both sides.

Ms. Nagy put an end to the affair after her husband became aware of it. In the spring of 2008, she left the fund, taking advantage of an attractive severance package when the organization cut staff, but also feeling uncomfortable in light of the affair.

After the I.M.F. board heard of the affair, it hired a law firm to investigate it, focusing on whether Ms. Nagy had received any advantages in promotion or pay as a result of her relationship.

The board concluded that Ms. Nagy had received no undue benefit from her relationship, and while it deemed Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s behavior inappropriate — and he apologized — it concluded that he had not abused his power.

In a letter to the board, Ms. Nagy disagreed, saying Mr. Strauss-Kahn had used his power as managing director to become intimate with her.

“I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t,” she wrote in a letter to the investigators. In the letter, she went on to say that Mr. Strauss-Kahn was “a man with a problem that may make him ill-equipped to lead an institution where women work under his command.”

Graham Bowley contributed reporting.

 

In Search for F.B.I. Director, Administration Seeks a Shared Philosophy

Robert S. Mueller III, who became the F.B.I. director just a week before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, will complete his 10-year term on Sept. 4, having led the in-progress effort to transform the bureau into a domestic intelligence agency.

A small team led by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has been evaluating potential successors and, according to officials familiar with the deliberations, has reached certain views about the ideal candidate.

In particular, officials said, the administration wants someone who shares the philosophy and has the management abilities to press forward with changing the bureau’s culture, so that agents focus less on solving already-completed crimes and more on uncovering potential threats — even at the expense of accumulating arrests and convictions.

Possible contenders include James B. Comey, a former deputy attorney general; Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago; Raymond W. Kelly, the New York City police commissioner; Ronald K. Noble, a former enforcement head at the Treasury Department who now leads Interpol; and Kenneth L. Wainstein, a former assistant attorney general for national security.

Officials say the administration is also looking for someone who will be easily confirmed and who will be respected both inside the bureau and elsewhere in the intelligence community.

Finally, they say, they want someone with the character to be a strong leader during a crisis and to maintain an appropriate level of independence, but who would keep a low political profile and focus on operational matters while deferring to the White House and the Justice Department on policy issues.

In many ways the administration appears to be looking for a clone of Mr. Mueller, who worked relatively smoothly with four attorneys general of widely divergent personalities and political views, under both a Republican and a Democratic president.

“Bob is a hard person to replace,” Mr. Holder told reporters last week. “He has done a really excellent job in transforming the F.B.I. He is a person who has the confidence of the people in the F.B.I. and people in the intelligence community. He’s a person I’ve worked with for a number of years — he’s a friend. He has the president’s confidence as well. So we want to make sure the person picked to be his successor will be able to fill those really large shoes that he leaves.”

Mr. Holder said the administration wanted to have the next director in place by the time Mr. Mueller is required to step down. He hinted that a nomination could come as early as May, though other officials said that later was more likely. The Senate has been slow to vote on Justice Department nominees lately; by contrast, in 2001, the Senate confirmed Mr. Mueller less than a month after his nomination.

It is not clear whether there is a front-runner for the job.

Most of the high-profile potential nominees come with advantages and disadvantages.

Mr. Comey, a career prosecutor who was the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York before his elevation to deputy attorney general, earned a reputation for independence by leading — with Mr. Mueller at his side — an internal Bush administration revolt in March 2004 over the legality of the program of surveillance without warrants, forcing the White House to modify the program.

Mr. Comey is now identified as a Republican political appointee, which could make it easier for him to win confirmation, but the Obama administration might also be reluctant to signal that it could not find a Democrat for the job. Mr. Comey also now has a well-paying job at Lockheed Martin and may be reluctant to leave it.

Mr. Fitzgerald, a longtime prosecutor and a holdover United States attorney from the Bush administration, also has a strong reputation for independence, as leader of the investigation into the leak of the name of a Central Intelligence Agency operative, Valerie Plame Wilson.

Like Mr. Comey, Mr. Fitzgerald now has the public identity of a Republican political appointee. Moreover, his demonstrated willingness to challenge the Bush White House could give its current occupants pause, though they would never say so in public.

Mr. Kelly, by contrast, is a Democrat with a strong law enforcement résumé. Before becoming commissioner of the New York Police Department, he was a Treasury Department official during the Clinton administration and supervised the United States Customs Service, the Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, has endorsed him for the F.B.I. position.

But Mr. Kelly would be 70 at the start of his 10-year term. In addition, his efforts to expand the Police Department’s counterterrorism intelligence-gathering capabilities have led to turf-war friction with F.B.I. officials. He also helped scuttle Mr. Holder’s signature plan to prosecute the Sept. 11 defendants in Manhattan.

Mr. Noble, too, is a Democrat who oversaw the Treasury Department’s enforcement arm for a period during the Clinton administration. He has global stature as the first American to be elected to lead Interpol, developing ties that would resonate with the F.B.I.’s increasing presence overseas. But he has less operational experience than other candidates and is somewhat less well-known in Washington.

Mr. Wainstein is the candidate most closely associated with Mr. Mueller, whom he worked with first as the F.B.I. general counsel and then as his chief of staff. Later, Mr. Wainstein became the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, then led the Justice Department’s national security division. Since leaving the department, he has frequently testified before Congress about national security legal policy issues. Like Mr. Comey and Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Wainstein is now identified as a Republican appointee — though he, too, was a longtime federal prosecutor and is generally respected on both sides of the aisle.

At least two prominent figures are said to have made it clear that they do not want to be considered for the job, including Merrick B. Garland, a federal appeals court judge, and Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general and a member of the Sept. 11 commission.

 

M.I.T. Media Lab Names a New Director

That makes the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s decision to name a 44-year old Japanese venture capitalist who attended, but did not graduate, from two American colleges as the director of one of the world’s top computing science laboratories an unusual choice.

On Tuesday, the university plans to announce that Joichi Ito, known as Joi, will become the fourth director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, which was originally founded by the architect Nicholas Negroponte in 1985 and has since become recognized for its willingness to take risks in developing technologies that are at the edge of the computing frontier.

The Media Laboratory gained a global reputation during the 1990s as an avant-garde research center known for stunning high-technology demonstrations that pointed toward a future digital society.

Indeed, the Media Lab has on occasion been criticized for overemphasizing flashy demos. During the 1990s, under Dr. Negroponte, the lab evolved a research culture of “demo or die,” rather than the standard academic “publish or perish” model.

The Media Lab pioneered a range of computing-based technologies like the Aspen Movie Map, a forerunner of Google Street View, the $100 Laptop, an educational tool intend for students in the developing world, and E Ink, the display technology that makes an Amazon Kindle book reader viewable in bright sunlight.

Perhaps its most important role, however, has been in helping to nurture a generation of innovative designers like John Underkoffler, a user-interface designer who is now a Hollywood consultant and who provided most of the futuristic interface ideas seen in the movie “Minority Report.”

In 1990, with American fears about Japan as a high-technology competitor running high, the Media Lab also briefly became a lightning rod for criticism after it struck a deal to transfer its research approach to Japanese industry and educational institutions.

Although that adds a touch of irony to the decision to choose Mr. Ito, he is neither a conventional Japanese technologist, nor your average college dropout.

Raised in both Tokyo and Silicon Valley, Mr. Ito was part of the first generation to grow up with the Internet. His career includes serving as a board member of Icann, the Internet’s governance organization; becoming a “guild master” in the World of Warcraft online fantasy game; and more than a dozen investments in start-ups like Flickr, Last.fm and Twitter. In 1994 he helped establish the first commercial Internet service provider in Japan.

He was also an early participant in the open-source software movement and is a board member of the Mozilla Foundation, which oversees the development of the Firefox Web browse, as well as being the co-founder and chairman of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that has sought to create a middle ground to promote the sharing of digital information.

“The choice is radical, but brilliant,” said Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, a University of California laboratory that pursues a similar research agenda to the Media Laboratory. “He can position the lab at the edge of change and propel it for a decade.”

Mr. Ito’s appointment comes at a time when the Media Lab, as well as other information technology research centers, have struggled to reclaim the financing levels that were characteristic of the era of the dot-com boom. Although the lab gets the bulk of its $35 million annual budget from corporate and government sponsors, that amount has declined measurably as a percentage of the overall budget during the last decade, Dr. Negroponte said.

“Funding got tight in 2002 and even tighter in the last economic downturn,” he said. That has made fund-raising the highest priority for the new director, he said. However, he added that Mr. Ito’s particular leadership qualities made him stand out among the 250 candidates who were considered for the position.

“Joi is very good at enabling others,” he said. “I’ve never met a 44-year-old who is able to enable others in this way. Most people who are at that age are into themselves and their career.”

L. Rafael Reif, the provost of M.I.T., called Mr. Ito “the right person to lead the Media Lab today,” describing him as “an innovative thinker who understands the tremendous potential of technology and, in particular, the Internet, to influence education, business, and society in general.”

Directing the Media Lab is an alluring challenge because of the potential of blending the longer term focus of university research and development efforts with the agility and risk-taking approach of Silicon Valley start-ups, Mr. Ito said.

“You embrace serendipity and you pivot as you go along this longer term arc. That’s the way I have lived my life. I’ve jumped around in terms of career and geography,” he said.

Mr. Ito, who maintains a home outside of Tokyo, became a resident of Dubai at the end of 2008 to gain a better understanding of the Middle East. He said that was part of his desire to understand intellectual property issues internationally and to become what he described as a “global citizen.”

Even among the Internet generation, Mr. Ito has been extraordinary in the degree to which he has lived his life publicly and online in blog posts and on a dizzying array of social media. Last year he traveled about 230 days, and it is possible to follow his adventures on a Web site he maintains in text, images and video including a diving trip this month that involved feeding sharks in the Caribbean.

Mr. Ito first attended Tufts where he briefly studied computer science but wrote that he found it drudge work. Later he attended the University of Chicago where he studied physics, but once again found it stultifying. He later wrote of his experience: “I once asked a professor to explain the solution to a problem so I could understand it more intuitively. He said, ‘You can’t understand it intuitively. Just learn the formula so you’ll get the right answer.’ That was it for me.”

Mr. Ito’s colleagues minimize the fact that he is without academic credentials. “He has credibility in an academic context,” said Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School who co-founded Creative Commons. Mr. Ito is currently chairman. “We’ve been collaborators, and I’ve stolen many ideas from him and turned them into my own.”

The Media Lab will benefit from a director who has Mr. Ito’s global connections, said John Seely Brown, former director of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. “What they really need right now is to have a two-way connection to the outside world. Who more to do that than Joi?”