JAMIE RUBIN AND CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR ON A DELICATE BILATERAL RELATIONSHIP -

"I wish you had any idea of what it's like to have a total stranger walk into your office and talk about something like this," says Jamie Rubin, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs.

"I'm very uncomfortable talking about my personal life," says Christiane Amanpour, the chief international correspondent for CNN and a regular on CBS's "60 Minutes." "I've always shied away from doing that -- and for good reason. I don't buy into the celebrity culture. I don't consider myself a celebrity."

Amanpour, 40, is one of the planet's most famous women -- known from here to Sarajevo for her courageous dispatches from the world's worst hellholes, her groundbreaking interviews with heads of state and her uncompromising reporting on the carnage in Bosnia. Rubin, 37, is one of America's most influential men -- the chief spokesman for, and a key figure in, the U.S. foreign policy establishment, and a confidant of the secretary of state.

Neither is known for being shy and retiring. Neither is used to being at a loss for words. Rubin's reputation is for being forceful and occasionally arrogant, and Amanpour is famously tough-minded and swashbuckling. And yet when it comes to the sensitive subject at hand -- the fact that they're just crazy about each other and planning to be married this summer -- both are unusually tight-lipped.

But they sat down in separate interviews this week -- with extreme reluctance, both insisted -- to discuss their mutual attraction and the implications thereof.

"I don't want to turn the best thing that's ever happened to me into the subject of somebody else's amusement," Rubin says in his State Department office, with its panoramic vistas of the Potomac and beyond. "I don't want people to get the impression that if they just call me up, I'm going to tell them stuff about her and me. Because it will ruin our lives."

"You know what?" Amanpour says over coffee and cigarettes in the antiques-appointed living room of Rubin's high-ceilinged bachelor pad in Adams-Morgan. "I think that this is going to be a two-day wonder and that this is going to die down. Really. Seriously."

But since the news of their engagement broke last week and made international headlines -- it led the foreign section, for instance, of Corriere Della Serra, Italy's newspaper of record, with bold black type announcing a "wedding scoop' for the queen of CNN" -- the story has shown little sign of losing steam.

Quite the contrary. The world's capitals, Washington especially, have been buzzing over every aspect of the extraordinary liaison between the star foreign correspondent and the top foreign policy flack. Last week -- when Amanpour snagged a newsmaking television interview with the president of Iran and Rubin, in his daily State Department briefing, gave the official U.S. reaction to the CNN broadcast -- tongues wagged, eyes rolled and self-styled ethicists cogitated.

Are the Amanpour-Rubin nuptials a potential perception of a conflict of interest -- or are they a synergy? Should an independent counsel be appointed? And, given their workaholic, peripatetic lifestyles, what wedding gifts are appropriate and where should they be sent?

Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott granted a rare audience in his magisterial office to enunciate U.S. policy on these fascinating developments: "Let a thousand stories bloom. . . . Jamie is the spokesman for a secretary of state {Madeleine Albright} who is herself quite properly receiving a great deal of publicity all around the world. And Christiane is a particularly high-visibility and well-respected journalist. So no one should be surprised at the fact that the two of them would be getting married is a story."

The two lovebirds -- she an exotically alluring British citizen of Persian and English parentage, he a handsome and sophisticated New Yorker from the gilded suburbs of Westchester County -- kept their whirlwind, seven-month romance out of public view until late last year, when they began showing up together at social events in Washington and New York, inspiring numerous accounts of how besotted they are. In November, at a book party for Washington author Sally Quinn, "you couldn't have inserted a dollar bill between them," said one gimlet-eyed partygoer who asked not to be named. "It was grope, grope, grope. I haven't seen such a public display of affection since Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche."

Rubin's friend John Rich -- a fellow staffer for Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the early 1990s and now an ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna -- said the couple was equally demonstrative during a recent dinner with Rich's family at a Paris restaurant. They were so gooey together, Rich said, that "they were at the point of what my two daughters refer to as maximum fromage.' "

"I'm not at all surprised by Jamie and Christiane getting together," said Biden, who hired Rubin from the Arms Control Association, a Washington think tank where he was a resident expert in the arcana of nuclear weaponry. "If you had told me he was getting married to his high-school sweetheart, or that he was getting married to the homecoming queen, that would have surprised me. . . . If you lined up whoever were the smartest, most interesting women of the day and asked who's Jamie gonna be with, it would be Christiane. Jamie has a little bit of flair and adventure. So to me, it fits."

Rubin was lured away from the Foreign Relations Committee by Albright, 60, then U.N. ambassador and already a close friend from the policy wars. Their relationship is often likened to that of mother and son, and at the United Nations, by most accounts, Rubin single-mindedly worked to position his boss for higher office.

"Obviously he was her campaign manager for secretary of state, and he was quite ruthless in advancing her case," said a close observer of U.S. policymaking, echoing the comments of others interviewed for this article. "Sometimes his promotion of Albright, sometimes at the expense of others, has really ticked off some of the most powerful people in the foreign policy establishment. He is devoted to Albright, and he's very shrewd, incredibly ambitious, and knows how to trade favors among journalists.

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"The big change now," with the publicity about Rubin's engagement, "is that he not only has Madeleine, he has himself for a client," this observer said. "And some of the attributes which you want in a gunslinger when the client is someone else create problems when the gunslinger and the client are one and the same."

In a job where his every public statement is microscopically deconstructed by the international press and foreign governments, Rubin has made his share of missteps. On a trip to the Middle East last September, his characterization to traveling State Department reporters of Israeli President Ezer Weizman's comments in a private meeting with Albright provoked embarrassing headlines in Israeli newspapers after they ended up in a pool report. He wrote a letter of apology to Weizman.

More recently, in December, Rubin got into trouble when he used the phrase "a little carrot" to describe the United States' consideration of allowing heavily sanctioned Iraq to buy more food and medicine with oil money. That gaffe earned him a bawling-out from national security adviser Sandy Berger and, by several accounts, required Albright's intervention to protect him from more severe measures. "It was an ill-considered remark and I learned from it," Rubin said.

In some quarters of the media, his relationship with Amanpour provokes expressions of concern. One State Department press room veteran who spoke on condition of anonymity said Rubin should have recused himself from commenting on Amanpour's exclusive with the Iranian president. But Rubin replies, "I was responding to the answers, not the questions."

Sid Balman, senior diplomatic correspondent for United Press International, spoke for many. "Knowing both Jamie and Christiane, I think they are both professional enough to observe their ethics in a way that neither of them are compromised. I have seen no evidence in this brief period of their being romantically involved to indicate otherwise."

Arguably, Amanpour might have to worry that a government might conclude she is too close to U.S. foreign policymakers.

"I reject that categorically," Amanpour said. "I don't think they would. . . . I've already built up a reputation in most of the world -- and I don't say that in a self-serving manner, because CNN reaches the world -- and already people know who they're dealing with and what they're dealing with. Why should that change? I don't think it's going to change."

Rubin said: "She is an international personality of great renown, known for being fiercely independent, for being someone who has taken great risks to report the news from everywhere, from Afghanistan to Africa to Bosnia, and she is a force to be reckoned with all by herself. . . . There will be conspiracy theorists that always have something to say, but at the end of the day, personality trumps. I can't imagine any place in the world where people don't know who she is. They will probably think of me as just lucky to be married to her."

The two have known each other professionally since 1993, when Albright was U.N. ambassador and Rubin was her spin-meister. Amanpour, meanwhile, was the best-known journalist in the Balkans. She and Rubin talked a few times on the phone about Bosnia, but it was strictly business.

As one of the Clinton administration's more eligible bachelors -- second only to his Columbia University classmate George Stephanopoulos -- Rubin was continually being set up on blind dates by concerned friends. Albright, among others, has been a persistent and energetic participant in the effort to find him a suitable mate -- periodically floating the names of women with whom he might want to have bilateral relations.

"Neither the secretary nor I has ever been reluctant to give Jamie unsolicited advice on his professional or his personal life," said Elaine Shocas, Albright's chief of staff.

"On a couple of occasions, Madeleine Albright asked me if I knew of any excellent candidates for Jamie," said CNN Chairman and CEO Tom Johnson, with apparent pride in his role as a middleman. "And at one point Christiane asked me to run some due diligence on Jamie, and I did." Rubin declined to produce Albright for comment on these issues.

It was during Albright's trip to Bosnia last spring, her first visit to the troubled region as secretary of state, that the romance budded. Amanpour, naturally, was along for the ride. One night in Zagreb, Rubin asked her to drinks. When he showed up wearing bluejeans and a black leather jacket, Amanpour quipped: "Government official relaxing." They downed many margaritas.

"I did actually think it was going to be professional, and it was professional," said the petite Amanpour, who was staying with Rubin for a few days this week before flying off to cover the pope in Cuba. "I knew perfectly well it was off hours and he was relaxing and I was relaxing after a long day of work. Everybody and his brother does that. And Jamie -- whose job it is to interact with the press -- was doing that with me. Only after that, we got together -- several months after that."

"I said I wanted to ask her out for a proper dinner and if she were in New York would she let me know," the lanky Rubin said in his office on the seventh floor of the State Department, down a crimson-walled corridor from Albright. "A month or so later in New York, I took her for a proper dinner. That's the best dinner I ever had and the best result a dinner has ever had for me. It basically changed my life. . . . I knew immediately. I told my closest friends that this is the real thing. It was just a matter of time before I mustered the courage to ask her to marry me."

This he did after Christmas, getting down on one knee on a beach in Tobago. But the real moment of truth had come a few months before, when the two took their first extended vacation together. Late one night at the start of their week in Tuscany, both received phone calls from their home offices, according to authoritative accounts. Princess Diana had just died in a car crash, and the State Department wanted Rubin's help in fashioning a statement. Get somebody else, he said. I'm on vacation. Then the CNN assignment desk called for Amanpour. Will you fly back to cover the tragedy? If you insist, Amanpour replied, but I'd really like to stay here. This is more important to me. CNN didn't press her.

"Let me just say, when you fall in love with somebody and you get engaged, it's the most important thing of your life," said Amanpour, who wears a blue sapphire in a simple gold setting on her ring finger. "Certainly it's the most important thing of my life. I'm 40 years old today {Monday}. And I've worked very, very hard and I've built a career of independence and put my life at risk on many occasions for many years. I perhaps put my personal life on hold. "

"It's the most important thing in my life right now," Rubin said. "I never felt this way about anyone and I never thought I would feel this way -- and I'm going to make it work. . . . Settle down? I would never expect Christiane to settle down.' I would like to find a way that we can spend more time together. My quip is that she needs an airport more than she needs a permanent residence."

"He's brilliant. He's funny. He's loving. He's a friend -- all the things a woman like me looks for in a man," Amanpour said. "My philosophy has always been: I knew my soul mate was always out there. It was just a question of when I would run into him. And now I have." CAPTION: State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin and CNN foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour are meant for each other, friends say. But can they divorce their jobs from the marriage? CAPTION: Christiane Amanpour, interviewing Iranian President Mohammad Khatemi: "I don't consider myself a celebrity." CAPTION: Jamie Rubin: "They will probably think of me as just lucky to be married to her."

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