Word: diplomat
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After more than 40 years, serving under every President since Kennedy in such trouble spots as Vietnam, Honduras and Iraq, U.S. ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte, 65, is the consummate diplomat--discreet, deliberate and always careful choosing his words, whether in English, French, Greek, Spanish or Vietnamese. So a day after President Bush nominated him to be the nation's first Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Negroponte's brief exchange at a breakfast with the ambassadors representing the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council was telling. Asked by a diplomat whether he should "congratulate you or offer condolences...
Though Negroponte has no formal intel background, he's an experienced consumer of intelligence, having headed five U.S. diplomatic missions. His well-tested skills as a diplomat may be particularly valuable. "He understands the power centers in Washington," Bush said of Negroponte. "That was code to the intelligence agencies that John is not going to rock the boat," says Leslie Gelb, a former Defense and State Department official and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. "He's not going to try to pound the table and create a revolution. The agencies would blow up anybody who would...
...pulling Negroponte out of Baghdad at such a critical moment. With Iraq's freshly elected National Assembly about to start writing a new Constitution, and the American exit strategy waiting to be negotiated, "this is the worst possible time to be sending in a newcomer," says a Western diplomat in the country. "This is a time when the U.S. would want an ambassador here who already has built up close contacts with Iraqi leaders." Negroponte has won plaudits for having a light touch with local officials, always offering advice rather than giving orders...
Fitzgerald's probe was launched after syndicated columnist Robert Novak revealed the identity of Valerie Plame, a covert CIA officer who is the wife of Joseph Wilson, a retired U.S. diplomat and an early postwar critic of the President's prewar justification for the Iraq invasion. Wilson figures in the story because he made a secret trip to Niger in 2002 at the CIA's request to determine if that country had sold a uranium ore known as yellowcake to Iraq, a key piece of evidence for the Administration's claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Wilson...
...Zhao] has traveled abroad relatively little and speaks no English. Yet he is at ease with foreigners and has a reputation as a deft, and occasionally witty, diplomat. After he became a member of the Politburo in 1979, he surprised many Chinese, long bored by tight restrictions on dress, by appearing in public in a Western tie and jacket, the first high official to do so since the Cultural Revolution. LIKE MOST OF CHINA'S PRESENT LEADERS, ZHAO WAS BRUTALIZED BY THE RED GUARDS. In 1967 he was paraded through the streets of Canton in a dunce...