Neutrality makes for unexciting diplomacy, and until a few months ago one of the sleepier diplomatic missions in Washington was the Swiss Embassy.
But now, Ambassador Carlo Jagmetti's outpost has become a command center for handling the most explosive diplomatic problem in the country's postwar history: the stream of newly declassified documents describing Switzerland's role as banker to the Nazis.
Just as Mr. Jagmetti was preparing to retire after 35 years as a diplomat, he suddenly finds his days filled explaining what a leading Swiss official meant when he said that American Jewish groups were trying to ''blackmail'' Switzerland's banks and that Washington and London were intent on ''demolishing the Swiss financial system.''
The official, Jean-Pascal Delamuraz, who served as Switzerland's President until his term ended last month, issued a carefully worded apology last week for his comment about blackmail but did not retract his other accusations.
And just as Mr. Jagmetti makes the rounds here in Washington, assuring American officials that Switzerland is carrying through on its commitments to investigate thoroughly the origins of assets it held for Germany during the war, the newspapers are filled with accounts of World War II era documents being fed through the shredder at the Union Bank of Switzerland in Zurich.
''I think it is fair to say that this incident certaintly didn't help,'' Mr. Jagmetti said, resting his head in one hand. ''The documents were probably much ado about nothing. But the psychological effect was certainly not needed.''
Mr. Jagmetti has been assuring American officials that his Government, which has hired a lobbying firm, seems about to reverse its longtime opposition to creating an interim compensation fund to make payments to elderly Holocaust survivors with some evidence that their families deposited assets in Swiss accounts before or during the war.
The United States has been quietly pressing Switzerland to set up the fund quickly, arguing that many of the survivors may not be alive by the time historians finish combing financial records and tracing old bank records.
Some of the money would come from unclaimed accounts that the banks have acknowledged finding, accounts that the Swiss Bankers Association says total about $30 million.
But it is unclear whether those accounts originally had much to do with the Holocaust. Some may include assets from Poland and other countries where wealthy individuals feared that they would lose everything to Communist governments.
Paul A. Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, is head of a committee searching for other dormant accounts, but his first report will not be ready for months.
A member of the Volcker commission, Hans Baer, said in Geneva on Friday that the commission was unlikely to find much more money in unclaimed accounts, The Associated Press reported. Another $40 million may come from the Swiss Government in the form of restitution to Jewish groups that paid the costs of keeping Jewish refugees in Switzerland during the war.
But American officials have made clear that the creation of the fund is only a first step. Next month, the Administration plans to release a report detailing the preliminary findings of historians who have been examining the archives of the State Department, the Treasury, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon for evidence of where the Nazis placed gold and other assets looted from across Europe.
If those studies show that Switzerland greatly understated the size of those assets in 1946, when it came to an agreement with the Allies over the disposal of some of Germany's assets, there could be pressure to reopen 50-year-old accords.
No one in the Administration is willing to speculate about whether the United States will follow that path, which would certainly lead to greater tension with Switzerland.
Stuart Eizenstat, the Under Secretary of Commerce, who is leading the American effort to dig up the documents, said in an interview last week, ''We totally reject the charge that any part of the U.S. Government is trying to destablize the Swiss banking system or blackmailing anyone.''
Mr. Eizenstat is trying to calm the diplomatic waters, declaring in a speech recently that he was ''heartened'' by the actions of the Swiss Government to lift bank secrecy laws so researchers could examine documents. In the interview, he said Switzerland had agreed to share documents it finds that bear on the financial accounts.
But the incident at Union Bank of Switzerland has left some researchers doubting whether the banks, which control most of the documents and have so much to lose if evidence of concealed assets is uncovered, will be equally forthcoming.
Some Swiss officials are openly hostile to Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato, the New York Republican, who has selectively released individual declassified documents -- some containing new facts, some rehashing old accusations -- that refer to trucks of gold sent over the border to Portugal or to banks that may have misled misled American officials trying to find Nazi assets in 1946.
Many of the documents contain information that cannot be checked, but they are also full of tantalizing clues that have sent historians digging further.
''What D'Amato is doing is considered rather aggressive in Switzerland,'' Ambassador Jagmetti said.