THE ALBRIGHT TOUCH

By DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON

The five U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopters swooped down on the Croatian village of Prevrsac, and out of one climbed U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright with a gaggle of reporters and cameramen in tow. She had just given President Franjo Tudjman a public lecture in Zagreb for failing to live up to the peace accord that ended the Yugoslav civil war 18 months earlier. In Prevrsac, standing, with cameras rolling, in front of a burned-out Serb home, she dressed down one of Tudjman's ministers over Croatian attacks against returning refugees. "It's disgusting," Albright snapped. Secretaries of State usually make their protests to foreign leaders in private. Albright delivered hers with a two-by-four with the whole world watching.

It's been only four months since she was sworn in, but already American diplomacy is feeling the Albright touch. Her interpreters spend more time sitting silently; during a Paris visit, she conducted her meeting with Foreign Minister Herve de Charette in French, one of five languages she speaks. Her speechwriters, chained for four years by Warren Christopher's stilted delivery, are now free to insert colorful one-liners into the text of public statements. Harried bodyguards make her wear a bulletproof vest at times. Albright's public diplomacy in risky spots overseas often makes them nervous.

Foreign leaders are discovering that she's difficult to bully. Before meeting Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, her aides warned that the Serbian President would try to throw her off stride early in the session. As she began reciting a laundry list of Serbian violations of the peace accord, Milosevic did just that, interrupting with a patronizing smile: "Madame Secretary, you're not well informed." Albright, who had spent three years in Belgrade as a child, retorted, "Don't tell me I'm uninformed. I lived here." Milosevic's smile disappeared.

The country's first female Secretary of State, however, has been careful to cultivate other men whose help she needs. "It makes a big difference...if you can get on a first name basis with a foreign minister," Albright told TIME. She has exchanged a dozen letters and phone calls with usually dour Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeni Primakov, who now greets her with flowers when she flies to Moscow. The two even share private jokes. During one of their first meetings, Albright recounted that she learned that her Georgetown house was infested with termites. Now, whenever Primakov's aides try to quibble over a promise he has just made in negotiations, Albright will quip, "The termites are back," and the two laugh.

Back home Albright has made more than a dozen out-of-town trips to talk up foreign policy with Americans or to let influential Senators show her off with constituents. Her most ardent courtship has been of Senator Jesse Helms, the Foreign Relations Committee's curmudgeonly chairman whose home state of North Carolina Albright has visited twice. During her trip there last March, she spoke at Helms' alma mater and attended a birthday dinner for his wife. When Albright boarded the Air Force jet to return to Washington, she found on her seat a bag of barbecue he had had delivered.

It's too soon to tell how much difference the sound bites and charm campaigns are making. With the barbecue came a promise from Helms not to block the Senate from voting on a treaty banning chemical weapons. Albright persuaded Primakov to drop an objection on NATO-troops levels, which opened the way for Russia's signing an agreement with NATO last month on the alliance's expansion into Eastern Europe.

But Albright wasn't intimidating enough to force Tudjman or Milosevic to surrender war criminals or allow hundreds of thousands of refugees to return to their homes. Helms is still willing to make trouble for the Administration, announcing last week that he would block Massachusetts Governor William Weld's nomination to be ambassador to Mexico.

Albright has made little headway in other parts of the world. The Israeli-Palestinian talks have broken down, and China has ignored her calls to stop jailing dissidents. "She clearly has a sharper and more public style," says Richard Haass, director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. "But if this were a report card, at best you'd give her an incomplete." The final grade depends on results.