The C.I.A. dismantles threats overseas; the F.B.I. works inside the U.S. That rough division of labor places the responsibility for keeping the 19 hijackers from boarding planes on Sept. 11 squarely in the F.B.I.'s hands.

So far, the reorganization of intelligence procedures has been the focus-most recently, at a Saturday evening Senate session this past weekend that lasted well into the night. The F.B.I. and C.I.A. didn't share intelligence, the conventional wisdom in the capital goes, and therefore the clues to the planned attack went unnoticed. The public has the impression that even if the F.B.I. had dug up the names of the hijackers in the summer of 2001, the bureau couldn't have found or detained them in time.

In fact, recently revealed documents, and a close study of small details made public in the course of the 9/11 commission's study, show that the F.B.I. may have been several phone calls away from burrowing into the plot in late August 2001.

In a little-noticed exchange at the commission's hearings this spring between commission member John Lehman and former F.B.I. official Thomas Pickard, the bureau's acting director in the summer before the attacks, Mr. Lehman asked Mr. Pickard (according to the official transcript): "As you know, very shortly after the September 11th attack, some of the commercial databases like Axion, ICSO (ph), ChoicePoint, so forth were queried and nearly all of the 19 hijackers were very prominently covered, with addresses, credit cards, locations et cetera. Why did not the F.B.I. make use of those commercial databases before 9/11?"

"We were prohibited from utilizing a lot of those commercial databases by statutes and things like that," Mr. Pickard replied. "That was one of the benefits of the Patriot Act, as I understand it."

In this exchange, Mr. Pickard maintained that an F.B.I. agent capable of querying the databases for the names of the hijackers prior to 9/11 would have found them-their addresses and credit cards, at any rate-because the hijackers had lived openly in the U.S. and had used their real names to accumulate a string of ID's like drivers' licenses. But by law, Mr. Pickard maintained, this trove of information was off-limits to the F.B.I.

But the F.B.I., then as now, is a client of the largest U.S. database containing public records about individuals: ChoicePoint, the bête noir of civil libertarians, and a company that made $796 million in 2003. Sources there and at the F.B.I. confirmed that the agency regularly taps this service for key information on people it seeks for criminal and intelligence investigations. In a mouse click, the database retrieves information like current phone numbers, for instance, through the F.B.I.'s secure ChoicePoint access. And in late August 2001, the F.B.I. had an investigation underway into two of the men who turned up on 9/11 as hijackers-Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi. The F.B.I. wanted to question them about the U.S.S. Cole bombing; the task of finding them was given to a counterterrorism agent in New York.

Both were on the State Department's TIPOFF terrorist watch list.

"Searches of readily available databases," the 9/11 commission report notes, "could have unearthed" al Mihdhar's and al Hazmi's California drivers' licenses, car registrations and telephone listings. A search on al Hazmi's car registration "would have unearthed a license check" by the police in South Hackensack, N.J., that "would have led to information placing Hazmi in the area and placing Mihdhar at a local hotel for a week in early July, 2001." ChoicePoint also had up-to-date telephone listings for both men.

From there, it might have been possible to turn up al Hazmi and al Mihdhar in Paterson, where they'd been living with a group of the other hijackers. Al Hazmi was spending some time flying cross-country on the type of plane he would later hijack on 9/11.

"There was information about the people who turned out to be hijackers in the ChoicePoint databases prior to 9/11, that's a true statement," ChoicePoint chairman and chief executive Derek Smith confirmed.

How does he know? The F.B.I. got a court subpoena for ChoicePoint to go through its records and pull out what it had on al Hazmi and al Mihdhar after the Twin Towers fell. Why the F.B.I. didn't do this before 9/11, Mr. Smith can't say, but he confirmed that the F.B.I. didn't seek this information before 9/11. With 20 days left before the attacks, would questioning these two men have been enough to prevent them? And why would Mr. Pickard tell the commission that he wasn't allowed to do before Sept. 11 what his agency did do immediately after-but before the signing of the Patriot Act?

On Aug. 23, 2001, a New York F.B.I. agent, Robert Fuller, new to the International Terrorism Squad, was told to find al Mihdhar and al Hazmi after the C.I.A. finally shared the information that both were in the U.S.

Another agent had labeled the lead "routine," meaning that Agent Fuller had 30 days to find his targets. He scanned local New York databases, checked the New York hotel listed on al Mihdhar's July 2001 J.F.K. airport entry form as his destination and, when that failed to turn him up, let the matter drop. This was a fumbling of standard procedure: Al Mihdhar was being sought in connection with the F.B.I.'s criminal investigation of the Cole bombing, so consulting commercial databases was fair game.

Basic procedure at the F.B.I. is to tap Lexis-Nexis and databases like ChoicePoint to locate the targets of criminal or intelligence investigations if initial efforts to find them fail.

"People leave a trail behind them, especially in this society," said former F.B.I. counterterrorism chief Steve Pomerantz. "Certainly, probably the easiest and the most effective way is publicly available material-utility records, business records. Think of things you do everyday that leave a trail."

An F.B.I. spokesman said that while it's not standard procedure to check commercial databases in every case, if "it would benefit the investigative effort, yes." Why it never happened in the 20 days between Aug. 23 and Sept. 11 isn't known: Until now, Agent Fuller hasn't been identified or interviewed by the press. He declined a request from The Observer to be interviewed for this article.

But the F.B.I. explains its failure this way: "On Aug. 23, we were given two names by the C.I.A.-al Hazmi and al Mihdhar," said an official who asked that his name be withheld. "With no specificity of a threat or a bombing or anything-just that they'd been at a meeting in Malaysia with an individual associated with the Cole bombing …. [The C.I.A.] had reason to believe they may possibly have gone to the U.S. We didn't put [a public] alert out then-we didn't have any information that these people were involved in a plot or were a threat to anybody."

Why no urgency? "We didn't have that type of information that says these particular two were bad people."

The C.I.A. had handed over al Hazmi's and al Mihdhar's names for questioning in the Cole bombing; al Mihdhar had attended a meeting in Malaysia with top Al Qaeda suspects and had other known jihadist connections; the F.B.I. had requested the State Department to add both men to its watch list; Washington was rife with warnings of an impending terrorist attack ("the system was blinking red" were the F.B.I. official's words)-and the urgency wasn't there?

"Everybody was saying, 'You should have done the query before'-but we didn't have a lot of names to do the query before, and the information we had on these two individuals was very scant," the official maintained. "We didn't identify them until post-9/11-and they were very compartmentalized. If we had found these two, they may not have been able to tell us anything."

Al Hazmi certainly could have told the F.B.I. quite a lot: He was Mohammed Atta's second-in-command for the 9/11 attacks. But the F.B.I.'s spokesman insists that the bureau did all it could. Don't forget, he said, the F.B.I. had no information that al Mihdhar or al Hazmi were about to attack the U.S. "The most we could have done was interview them. We didn't have any legal process to arrest them."

The 9/11 commission begs to differ. Its report says that the F.B.I.'s failure to locate and interview the only hijackers whose names it had beforehand was of terrible import: "Many F.B.I. witnesses have suggested that even if Mihdhar had been found, there was nothing the agents could have done except follow him onto the planes. We believe this is incorrect. Both Hazmi and Mihdhar could have been held for immigration violations or as material witnesses in the Cole bombing case. Investigation or interrogation of them, and investigation of their travel and financial activities, could have yielded evidence of connections to other participants in the 9/11 plot. The simple fact of their detention could have derailed the plan. In any case, the opportunity did not arise."

To date, no individuals have been held accountable at the F.B.I. for the failure of the bureau's 70-some investigations into Islamic extremism in the U.S. to turn up any clues to 9/11; or its ignoring of the July 2001 memo from an agent in the Phoenix office warning that Osama bin Laden had undertaken an effort to send foreign students to train at U.S. flight schools; or its failure to search Zacarias Moussaoui's computer after his mid-August 2001 arrest; or its overarching failure to conceive of a 9/11-like event happening in the U.S.

Agent Fuller continues to work in counterterrorism. He will probably testify in January at the trial of the Yemeni sheik Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad, who is accused of providing money, weapons, equipment and recruits to Al Qaeda and Hamas. The case will apparently go on despite the fact that the chief confidential informant involved, a Yemeni immigrant, set himself on fire in front of the White House to protest his treatment by F.B.I. agents. In the F.B.I. sting operation, Mr. al-Moayad was taped in Europe telling the confidential informant (who was posing as an Al Qaeda sympathizer) and another intelligence agent that he'd funneled millions of dollars to Mr. bin Laden and was his spiritual advisor.

One of the individuals connected to the defendants in this case was another Yemeni who owned a gas station in New Jersey, near where the two 9/11 hijackers lived before the attacks.

Too bad those calls to al Hazmi and al Mihdhar never got made.

That's not all. At the Port of New York/New Jersey, the third largest in the country, strange new structures are rising: the steel outlines of drive-through nuclear-bomb scanners for containerized cargo. All trucks carrying containers out of the shipping terminal will be examined in these "portal radiation detectors" starting in several months. Scores are being built at the Elizabeth, N.J., port and at major airports, seaports and border crossings.

Customs and Border Protection, charged with stopping terrorists and their weapons from entering the U.S., was formed from the merger of immigration, customs, border-patrol and agriculture-inspection operations 14 months ago under the new Homeland Security Department.

Already, the agriculture inspectors are complaining. Among the 2,000 bug and plant experts happier looking for beetles than bombs, many are uneasy with the changes at the border, and some complain bitterly that Homeland Security's counterterrorism mission hinders their enforcement of federal agriculture regulations.

By examining a small percentage of imports-ranging from dog chews to food, flowers and military equipment-and destroying diseased produce, fumigating or treating grains, plants and other produce (such as Mexican mangos) to kill pests, and enforcing the regulations aimed at barring foreign insects and animal and plant diseases, the inspectors have provided enough of a deterrent that the U.S. has been remarkably free of catastrophic outbreaks such as foot-and-mouth disease, which several years ago devastated Britain's livestock and harmed its economy. And when outbreaks do happen, the inspectors contain them.

Now, some inspectors say, that vital function is taking a back seat to looking for terrorists, suspicious packages, W.M.D. and "agroterrorism"-the deliberate sabotage of the food supply. Under the 2002 Bioterrorism Act, 23 animal diseases are now termed "agrothreats." No. 1 is foot-and-mouth disease.

"Because it spreads so rapidly, we're considering it the worst at this point," said C.B.P. spokeswoman Sue Challis. "And the economic implications are just so horrible."

Others, like avian influenza, can spread from animals to people. Plant diseases such as plum pox are now considered agroterrorist weapons.

Before 9/11, said RAND Corporation agroterrorist expert Peter Chalk, the possibility that anyone would want to spoil the food supply in America wasn't given much thought. Now, he says, there's a growing appreciation of the U.S.'s vulnerability.

But, several New York–region C.B.P. officers say, the ranks of agriculture inspectors are stretched too thin and are too underfunded to keep the food supply safe.

One, requesting anonymity for fear of dismissal, offered to give an affidavit at a Congressman's office so as to be covered by the federal Whistleblower Protection Act. "Homeland Security doesn't want us talking to the press outside the script," he said nervously.

"I don't know if the agriculture industry knows what's going on. Their first line of defense has melted away. We haven't got the people to do the inspections, and we're just waving cargo through," he continued. "We're courting an agriculture disaster."

Contraband

In a room out of public view at a terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport some months ago, a huge table was piled with a deli's worth of meats and sausage, canned hams from China, grape vines, raw eggs, wilted geraniums, shiny purple eggplants and a dozen bruised brown palm nuts from Nigeria-all seized from travelers' suitcases and destined for the shredder.

Supervisor Fred Skolnick pulled on rubber gloves and picked up a snail. "Many types of snails and slugs carry nematodes that can attack the brain or the digestive system. If you contract these, you're probably better off dead, because there's no cure." He chucked the snails into a grinder.

"Mostly we focus on viruses, because they aren't always killed in food processing. This meat-which yesterday happened to come in from Europe-we intercepted for animal diseases like foot-and-mouth, which exists in some countries on the continent and also in Africa and Asia. Beef products from Europe can't come in because of mad cow. And if you want to bring in grape vines or apples, pears and peaches, we're not going to let you, because there's about 20 latent viruses in those species-not to mention insect, bacterial and fungal pathogens as well. Our pest risk-assessment teams at the Department of Agriculture make the regs, and they change periodically relative to information about disease outbreaks world-wide."

Outside, travelers from Asia milling around a baggage carousel hardly noticed a beagle in a "Protecting American Agriculture" vest trotting from bag to bag, sniffing. The beagle, one of several in canine teams at Kennedy, is trained to sniff out smuggled food. (Other dogs sniff out explosives and currency.) The dog gently pawed a young woman's backpack and sat down. He'd found an orange. The woman's customs declaration ticket was marked and the orange confiscated to prevent citrus canker entering the country.

In another terminal, Mr. Gomez, a heavyset Guianese in a T-shirt draped with a gold chain, protested as inspectors unzipped all 12 of his duffel bags, extracting enormous quantities of fresh thyme, basil and round red peppers, leaving the dried shrimp and wine. "He's a courier," explained inspector Tim Carroll.

Last time, Gomez brought 100 gutted iguanas. Bush meat is barred in case it carries Ebola, for example.

"Can't I keep one little bag of herbs?" Gomez begged. Mr. Carroll said no. "We shake it and insects will fall out. When we walk into Waldbaum's," he said to a reporter, "the food is always there and the general public has no idea what it takes to keep it there. They think it falls out of heaven cellophane-wrapped. Want to terrorize this country? Take away its food."

Underfunded and Overwhelmed

That is a risk now that passenger baggage inspections have been cut back by C.B.P., said Mike Randall, president of the small independent union National Association of Agriculture Employees, which represents all of the agriculture inspectors who were moved to Homeland Security.

"It's terrible. They are not being permitted to do their jobs. There are places where there were five or six inspectors before, now they have one ag inspector as of the last few months," and a dog to find smuggled goods. "What an inspector will tell you is that some agriculturally risky flights are 'walking out the door.' One of the ways we deter them is by applying fines. Now, customs-attendant paperwork may take 45 minutes to an hour to fill out, so no one-surprise-is issuing fines anymore."

At Kennedy Airport, the largest airport gateway in the country for international arrivals, only one or two agriculture officials have been peering into passenger luggage on weekends and holidays.

Inspectors at Kennedy instead have been shifted to cargo inspections partly for counter-terrorism: The C.I.A. is believed to have decided that a nuclear bomb is more likely to come in the country concealed in a shipping container than in a missile strike, according to The New York Times . While moving around terminals checking cargo manifests and ripping open 1 or 2 percent of shipments to look for exotic insects and diseases, officials wear radiation pagers on their belts to scan cargo for radioactivity.

Even so, they are overwhelmed. About 300 C.B.P. agriculture inspector jobs are vacant nationwide; 33 of them at Kennedy reportedly. Airlines at Kennedy have complained that food imports and perishables are going to waste because there are too few agriculture inspectors to clear cargo. So, to keep up, some inspectors say they sign cargo out without proper examination.

Meanwhile, dangerous foreign insects and diseases are walking into the U.S. inside unchecked passenger bags, others say. "The last foot-and-mouth disease here was started by some jerk who slopped his hogs with pork sausage from Europe," said an official. "Bottom line: The American taxpayer is getting screwed because formerly they were protected agriculturally and ecologically and that is not happening anymore. Homeland Security is significantly diminishing our coverage in baggage to save money at the larger airports. Customs is just not trained to do our job. Five years from now, maybe."

"The ag inspection is a regulatory compliance inspection. It's easygoing. We like you but maybe we don't like the mango in your luggage." Ag inspectors don't want to be anti-terrorist, so teaming up with customs and immigration is hard, he maintained. About 500 inspectors and technicians have quit, retired or returned to the Agriculture Department since D.H.S. took over their teams.

The goal of "one face at the border," given the culture clash and tensions in some ports between agriculture and customs, has been scaled back for now to a combined customs-immigration check and a second one by agriculture.

Cross-training is occurring, but in a minor way. More is promised, meanwhile all inspectors are required to know counterterrorism procedures.

"What's going to be pounded into the work force is that their primary mission is anti-terrorism," said Kennedy Airport agriculture-cargo supervisor Robert Redes, adding enforcing agricultural regulations is now secondary. The training is inadequate, according to others. "The spin is that we are bioterrorist," one inspector scoffed. "We were given an hour course on a CD-ROM on chemical and biological weapons. And we are slated for about five to six mini courses having to do with immigration and customs inspections."

"I'm looking out for terrorists and weapons of mass destruction that I haven't a clue about," said another. "Please! I don't know anything about pink powders."

"I don't see how I can help with this new problem," said Edwin Concepcion, a third inspector whose background is plant science. "I don't know anything about W.M.D. and maybe I can't run so well."

More agroterrorism training is coming this year, said Sue Challis, a C.B.P. spokesperson in Washington.

Facilities like the New York/New Jersey port report fewer problems in changing to Homeland Security management. "This is probably the only port in the country where we have one face at the border," said deputy chief inspector for customs James Frawley. The port and area directors are "very receptive to agriculture's concerns," added C.B.P. supervisor Basil Liakakos, and that's the difference. "I'm not going to tell you that this is case across the country."

The supervisors touted C.B.P.'s automated targeting systems (A.T.S.) as an example of the "force multiplier" security advantages gained by the merger of customs, immigration and agriculture border watchers.

A.T.S. scrubs electronic shipping manifests for anomalies with algorithms and intel to pick which of the millions of cargo shipments every year warrant further inspection. Agriculture officials will use A.T.S. to check agriculture imports if they pass background security checks.

"If one is looking at the general push to upgrade border inspections, certain moves are being undertaken," said RAND analyst Peter Chalk. "But when one looks at the volume coming in, to rely on integrated inspections is not particularly useful. You can't deal with this problem with border defenses. You need the ability for in-country response. Animal- and plant-inspection officials are deployed with customs officials to check produce coming into the country, but the extent to which customs officials know much about what is going on is debatable and there is a lack of personnel from agriculture to A) inspect all the entry points and B) to inspect the imports. My point is to rely on extensive border security at the expense of upgrading response and preparedness measures within the country is a misallocation of resources."

The rub constantly debated, said Kennedy airport agriculture-cargo supervisor Redes, is, do agriculture inspections fit in Homeland Security? No, said Mr. Randall, the union president. They should be returned to agriculture. "There's a general unhappiness among agriculture inspectors everywhere," he went on. "They have a top-down management style, there is very little ag infrastructure at C.P.B., and there's new directives everyday.

"We didn't hire on for this militaristic job. I believe we had convinced the House Agriculture Committee that it was a bad idea to split the agriculture inspection service apart [sending border inspectors to Homeland Security], but at the last minute there were orders from the top of the administration that D.O.A. must be split in order for Customs and Border Protection to stay one face at the border."

A solution won't be debated, he concluded, "until there is an agriculture disaster as a result of some action or inaction of C.B.P."

There has been "a lot of whining and sobbing," acknowledged C.B.P. spokesperson Sue Challis, "because change is scary. At some ports, it was very segmented before. Ag didn't talk to customs and customs didn't talk to immigration. Some people will never smile about it. This is where we are and we have to concentrate on it."

This short documentary, which won an Oscar this year, shows what happens years after a nuclear disaster: mutant children and unthinkable illnesses.

When Chernobyl Heart was aired in the U.N. General Assembly several months ago, a blond head of curls was barely visible above the podium. It belonged to filmmaker Maryann De Leo. A pretty, tough, intense former independent TV producer, Ms. De Leo told the 600 folks in attendance-mostly diplomats and cineastes-that the people affected by Chernobyl wanted Americans not to forget them. "After tonight, I think you never will," she said.

Coming from most people, that would have been preposterous self-promotion. But not from Ms. De Leo. She put herself in harm's way to take a camera into the radioactive no-go zone around Chernobyl and tell the world what the fallout from the accident is. She has struggled for years, winning awards for disturbing documentaries without compromising and doing commercial work. Now she's about to get some prime time.

Chernobyl Heart won an Oscar without ever being seen by the public. In early September, HBO will broadcast it along with Rory Kennedy's film about the Indian Point nuclear-power plant, located 40 miles from New York City. The broadcast will be a timely reminder that an explosion at Indian Point could well be another Chernobyl, but this time with New York in the wind shadow.

Ms. De Leo grew up in Bensonhurst and Pearl River, N.Y., in a big family headed by a city sanitation worker. She broke into film as an independent producer and reporter for The Today Show , and now is one of a wave of documentary filmmakers doing the kind of fresh, in-depth investigative reporting largely abandoned by mainstream print journalists.

Think Jonathan Demme's The Agronomist , about a murdered Haitian activist; Jehane Noujaim's Control Room , on the Arab news agency Al-Jazeera and the Iraq war; Hidden in Plain Sight , John Smihula's exposé of an Army training school linked to Latin American death squads and massacres; and Errol Morris' The Fog of War .

A major force behind the docu-renaissance is HBO/Cinemax's Sheila Nevins, the executive vice president for original programming (documentaries and family), whose uncanny sense of what will fly has brought documentaries back into theaters.

She urged Ms. De Leo to go to Chernobyl and find out what the aftermath of the disaster has been, long after the rest of the world had forgotten.

"Doctors and scientists there said it'll be 50 years before we find out what's really happening," Ms. De Leo said recently, referring to the effects of genetic damage on future generations. When one of the Chernobyl reactors caught fire and blew its top on April 26, 1986-thanks to a poorly designed test sequence meant to determine how the plant would operate in the event of a power failure-the resulting explosion spewed radiation over an area almost half the size of Italy, extending from Belarus and Russia to the Ukraine, exposing some people to the equivalent of a thousand chest X-rays. Seven million people in the region are estimated to suffer from the physical or psychological effects of radiation exposure, according to a U.N. report. Some 4,000 people who took part in the cleanup in the Ukraine have since died.

Ms. De Leo's Virgil guiding her through the devastation was Adi Roche, the founder of the Irish Chernobyl Children's Project. Ms. Roche has been bringing medical care for 12 years to children in Belarus, the country hardest hit because it was downwind from Chernobyl that day. The film opens with Ms. Roche and Ms. De Leo in HazMat suits, driving through the 18-mile-wide evacuation zone to the Dnieper River, near the shuttered plant. The dosimeter they lay on the ground clicks and clicks ominously.

Chernobyl is still leaking radiation. Yet the international community still hasn't fixed the leaks in the reactor's concrete sarcophagus, which could trigger another explosion.

"It was scary," Ms. De Leo remembered. "The closer you get, the less vegetation there is. It's quiet-there are few birds. The villages are abandoned. The Dnieper is the most polluted river in the world."

During the filming, Ms. De Leo got cesium poisoning. Maybe it was from the meal of potatoes grown in the poisoned soil that she ate at the home of a farmer in the exclusion zone. Cesium, a byproduct of fission, has a half-life of 30 years. It can cause cancer. In the film, a doctor from the Belarus Radiation Medicine Institute sits Belarussian students in a special chair to measure any cesium in their bodies. He also tested Ms. De Leo.

Was it foolish to enter one of the most radioactive environments on earth? Ms. De Leo doesn't think so. "The cesium I got was small, he told me-but you shouldn't have any," she said.

The poisoned air, water, soil, crops and people led her into hospitals and mental asylums. There, she saw unimaginable deformities.

"Is this from the radiation?" she asked everywhere. "I found it hard to get information." She often spent nights crying in her hotel room.

On camera, Ms. Roche cradles children with tumors the size of turbans. One toddler's brain hangs off her head like a white cabbage. To hold this girl, named Juliya, she cups the brain in one hand and her body in the other.

Eighty-five percent of the children in Belarus are born unhealthy, Ms. De Leo discovered. The poorest nations on earth have healthier children.

"I had to make it short. You really couldn't watch more." At the end, an American surgeon saves the life of a 13-year-old girl with holes in her heart, a condition so common in Belarus it's called "Chernobyl heart."

"She likes to focus on what people deny," said Ms. De Leo's good friend, Ellen Hilberg.

The film's link between radiation and illness is controversial, since few studies are conclusive. Illnesses induced by radiation exposure have a long latency period. Of all the conditions shown in the film, only childhood thyroid cancer has been confirmed as increasing: In some areas of Belarus, it is 100 times greater than before the accident, according to the U.N. Its nickname is the "Belarusian necklace," after the scar the surgery leaves on the neck. Caught early, it isn't fatal.

Radiophobia is common, Ms. De Leo reports. "People live with an insecurity about everything. Everything is poisoned." In the film, a teenager learns that the jam he's cooked from berries in the forest contains cesium. The fear on his face when he is told that he is contaminated too is difficult to watch.

Ms. De Leo's other films-about Bellevue's psychiatric emergency ward (2001), four people who chose alternative medicine for their terminal illnesses (1996) and a rape-crisis center (1991)-share a compassion for the wounded.

"I was extremely shy. I used to hide under the table as a kid and listen to what the grownups were saying. In a way, I still do that-being a fly on the wall." But this crusader usually gets what she wants.

A month after the U.N. screening, however, she wasn't succeeding. People told her that all she had to do to get a free camera was call Sony and say she'd won the Oscar. Sony turned her down, as did Panasonic.

So there she was, in sandals and jeans at B&H Photo-Video on Ninth Avenue, hoisting a $22,000 Sony E.N.G. (electronic news gathering) camcorder on her shoulder-the sort of camera she used in war zones for NBC. (Always in harm's way, her mother complained.) She fiddled with the lens aperture and compared it to a Panasonic campro, a $3,500 video camera between a consumer and a professional model. "I like a warm picture-not video-y."

In several months she is starting a new film, The Boys of Baghdad , about young Iraqi children, and she'd promised herself to look at a new camera which would make footage more easily transferred to film for theatrical display.

Half an hour later, she left sans camera. Maybe she'd use her old one after all. In a Subaru Forester, she drove off to her rent-stabilized Lower East Side apartment, where the film-editing equipment crowds out all but her bed. Her private life is a little skimpy, she admits. The Spanish boyfriend who first challenged her to film Chernobyl is long gone. "Even my plants are gone," she said. "I'm away too much, working."

News keeps trickling in of which children in Chernobyl Heart have died.

"When I began editing, I saw how difficult it was to watch some of the children. I had to figure out how to make it a film people would not want to turn off. We'll see if I've succeeded. I also felt a responsibility to the kids. I wanted to make a film that would get help for them. I felt like I couldn't, on their behalf, let the film fail. There were many times I thought the film would not work.

"I had this guilt about leaving them behind. Walking away-it just didn't seem right."

Baghdad could be another shock. Ms. De Leo hasn't been back since the 1991 Gulf War. "I'm interested in survival there, and the victims of this war, like the war orphans. It's on boys, because they don't let the girls out of the homes."