Constantly in motion, flitting from one highly-charged press briefing to another, Mr Jamie Shea, NATO's chief spokesman, never allows the cool control expected of a NATO spokesman drop to reveal the stress of the office. As journalists from around the world shout his name during the daily press briefings from inside the "cushy billet" of its headquarters in Brussels, he sweeps in the door, does the job, and sweeps out again to take yet another telephone call from a journalist insisting he must talk to him "now".
Mr Shea (45), who hails from Well Street, Hackney, in east London, has become a familiar figure on television screens during the war in the Balkans. This week, however, has surely been his most difficult yet as he admitted NATO's deep regret over the air attack on a convoy of Kosovan refugees on a road near Djakovica.
Yet even as he faced a barrage of journalists on Thursday demanding details of the air attack, he skilfully expressed NATO's "regrets" over the loss of civilian life, and in the same breath charged Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic with ultimate responsibility for the suffering of Kosovan people. "I don't feel any moral qualms about what NATO is doing," he told a journalist this week.
"NATO is not easy to anger, but once the decision is taken I see no other solution. Without NATO action, these refugees would be refugees all their lives." It is no more than can be expected from the public face of NATO and a man who does not apologise for using "colourful language" in bringing home the message that, in his words, President Milosevic is "like the school bully saying, `If you hit me, I will hit this other kid harder'. Do you do nothing, and let him go ahead?"
In the propaganda war being fought by NATO against the Serbs, Mr Shea has come up with powerful imagery to describe President Milosevic. The Serbian leader is Pol Pot or Stalin and he has spoken of the "Orwellian nightmare" of Kosovan refugees stripped of their identity papers as they fled their homes. His daily briefings are a "catalogue of soundbites and powerful quotes", according to one of the journalists attending his Brussels "court".
While he is described as "more Ford Dagenham than Bentley" his Cockney boy-made-good persona - he was the target of an official complaint by a NATO general's wife offended by his accent - belies considerable experience in several private and public roles before he began his NATO career as a minute-taker 18 years ago. Much has been made of Mr Shea's roots - as if the British press have been taken by surprise that someone who drops his aitches can at the same time deliver the gravitas required in times of war. Fluent in French, German, Dutch and Italian and with a doctorate from Oxford, he is described by his colleagues as a modest man: "He is not a performer. He is uncomfortable when he has to accompany Solana [the NATO Secretary General] to London and they stay at Claridge's. "He'd rather go to the pub."
Others suggest that he has been embarrassed by NATO's admission that it bombed residential districts in Pristina and criticism in the French press, blaming him for "propagating rumours".