Madeleine Albright

The bug pin, worn to meet Russia's foreign minister in December 1999 That month a Russian embassy employee was arrested on a bench outside the State Department, caught collecting signals from a listening device planted in a conference room inside the building. A few days later Albright met Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov in Berlin for a G-8 foreign ministers' meeting with an enormous insect pinned to her dress. The two greeted each other as friends and relations were not disrupted, but Ivanov could not fail to notice it. It shows her method at its sharpest: a reproach delivered without a word, leaving the other side to decide whether to mention it.