John Negroponte

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John Negroponte
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John Negroponte

John Dimitri Negroponte (born July 21, 1939) (IPA [ˌnɛgroʊˈpɑnti]) is a career diplomat currently serving as the United States Director of National Intelligence. President Bush named Ambassador Negroponte as the first Director of National Intelligence in 2005. Prior to this appointment, Negroponte served as the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. He also served in the United States Foreign Service, from 1960 to 1997. He has various tours of duty as a United States ambassador, including a three-year ambassadorship to the Philippines, from 1993 to 1996. He subsequently served as U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations from 2001 to 2004, and was ambassador to Iraq from June 2004 to April 2005.

He has been criticized because of his involvement in the covert funding of the Contras, and there are allegations that he was in involved in a coverup of human rights abuses carried out by CIA-trained operatives in Honduras, where he was the U.S. chief of mission in the 1980s. It was in Honduras that Negroponte first worked with the former executive director of the CIA, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo. According to The New York Times, Negroponte carried out "the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinistas government in Nicaragua."

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[edit] Background

Negroponte was born in London; his father, Dimitri John, was a Greek shipping magnate and his mother is Catherine Coumantaros. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, in 1956, and Yale University in 1960. He was a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity, alongside William H.T. Bush, the uncle of President George W. Bush, and Porter Goss, who served as Director of Central Intelligence and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Negroponte from 2005 to 2006.[1]

He later served at eight different Foreign Service posts in Asia, Europe and Latin America; and he also held important positions at the State Department and the White House. In 1981, he became the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. From 1985 to 1987, Negroponte held the position of Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs. Subsequently, he served as Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, from 1987 to 1989; Ambassador to Mexico, from 1989 to 1993; and Ambassador to the Philippines from 1993 to 1996. As Deputy National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan, he was involved in the campaign to remove from power General Manuel Noriega in Panama. From 1997 until his appointment as ambassador to the UN, Negroponte was an executive with McGraw-Hill.

Negroponte speaks five languages (Greek, Spanish, French, English, Vietnamese). He is the elder brother of Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab and the One Laptop per Child project. His other brother, Michel Negroponte, is an Emmy award-winning filmmaker. Negroponte and his wife, Diana Mary Villiers Negroponte, have adopted five children, Marina, Alejandra, John, George and Sophia. They were married on December 14, 1976.

[edit] Ambassador to Honduras (1981 - 1985)

From 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras, and was given the title, "proconsul". During this time, military aid to Honduras grew from $4 million to $77.4 million a year, and the US began to maintain a significant military presence there, with the goal of providing a bulwark against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, which was then a state with close ties to both Cuba and the Soviet Union.

The previous U.S. ambassador to Honduras, Jack Binns (who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter) made numerous complaints about human rights abuses by the Honduran military. Following the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, Binns was replaced by Negroponte, who has denied having knowledge of any wrongdoing by Honduran military forces.

In 1995, The Baltimore Sun published an extensive investigation of U.S. activities in Honduras. Speaking of Negroponte and other senior U.S. officials, an ex-Honduran congressman, Efraín Díaz, was quoted as saying:

Their attitude was one of tolerance and silence. They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed.

Substantial evidence subsequently emerged to support the contention that Negroponte was aware that serious violations of human rights were carried out by the Honduran government, but despite this did not recommend ending U.S. military aid to the country. Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, on September 14, 2001, as reported in the Congressional Record, aired his suspicions on the occasion of Negroponte's nomination to the position of UN ambassador:

Based upon the Committee's review of State Department and CIA documents, it would seem that Ambassador Negroponte knew far more about government perpetrated human rights abuses than he chose to share with the committee in 1989 or in Embassy contributions at the time to annual State Department Human Rights reports.[2]

Among other evidence, Dodd cited a cable sent by Negroponte, in 1985, that made it clear that Negroponte was aware of the threat of "future human rights abuses" by "secret operating cells" left over by General Alvarez after his deposition in 1984.

In April 2005, as the Senate confirmation hearings for the National Intelligence post took place, hundreds of documents were released by the State Department in response to a FOIA request by The Washington Post. The documents, cables that Negroponte sent to Washington while serving as ambassador to Honduras, indicated that he played a more active role than previously known in managing US efforts against the communist Sandinistas. According to the Post, the image of Negroponte that emerges from the cables is that of an

exceptionally energetic, action-oriented ambassador whose anti-communist convictions led him to play down human rights abuses in Honduras, the most reliable U.S. ally in the region. There is little in the documents the State Department has released so far to support his assertion that he used "quiet diplomacy" to persuade the Honduran authorities to investigate the most egregious violations, including the mysterious disappearance of dozens of government opponents.[3]

The New York Times wrote that the documents revealed

a tough cold warrior who enthusiastically carried out President Ronald Reagan's strategy. They show he sent admiring reports to Washington about the Honduran military chief, who was blamed for human rights violations, warned that peace talks with the Nicaraguan regime might be a dangerous "Trojan horse" and pleaded with officials in Washington to impose greater secrecy on the Honduran role in aiding the contras.
The cables show that Mr. Negroponte worked closely with William J. Casey, then director of central intelligence, on the Reagan administration's anti-Communist offensive in Central America. He helped word a secret 1983 presidential "finding" authorizing support for the Contras, as the Nicaraguan rebels were known, and met regularly with Honduran military officials to win and retain their backing for the covert action.[4]

Both papers based their stories on cables obtained by a Post FOIA request. George Washington University's National Security Archive writes of

dozens of cables in which the Ambassador sought to undermine regional peace efforts such as the Contadora initiative that ultimately won Costa Rican president Oscar Arias a Nobel Prize, as well as multiple reports of meetings and conversations with Honduran military officers who were instrumental in providing logistical support and infrastructure for CIA covert operations in support of the contras against Nicaragua -"our special project" as Negroponte refers to the contra war in the cable traffic.[5]

[edit] Ambassador to the UN (2001 - 2004)

President George W. Bush appointed Negroponte to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in February, 2001, and after substantial opposition from Senate Democrats the nomination was ratified by the Senate on September 15, 2001, four days after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. According to CBS News,

At the United Nations, Negroponte, 64, was instrumental in winning unanimous approval of a Security Council resolution that demanded Saddam Hussein comply with U.N. mandates to disarm.[6]

[edit] Ambassador to Iraq (2004 - 2005)

John D. Negroponte's remarks at swearing in ceremony as new U.S. Ambassador to Iraq
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John D. Negroponte's remarks at swearing in ceremony as new U.S. Ambassador to Iraq

On April 19, 2004, Negroponte was nominated by U.S. President George W. Bush to be the United States Ambassador to Iraq after the 30 June handover of sovereignty. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on May 6, 2004, by a vote of 95 to 3, and was officially sworn in on June 23, 2004 replacing L. Paul Bremer as the U.S.'s highest ranking American civilian in Iraq.

In the months Negroponte spent as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq he received plaudits, even from Bush administration critics such as Fred Kaplan, for his work tackling corruption in the U.S. administration in Iraq.[citation needed]

[edit] National Intelligence Director (2005 - present)

On February 17, 2005, President George W. Bush named Negroponte as the first Director of National Intelligence, a position created due to recommendations made by the 9/11 Commission completed late in 2004. On April 21, 2005, Negroponte was confirmed by a vote of 98 to 2 in the Senate, and subsequently sworn in.

A controversy exists around the status of 35,000 boxes of documents and tapes seized in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. According to the editors of The Weekly Standard, Negroponte continued the policy of delaying the translation and release of these documents and tapes. In one of the taped conversations, an aide to Saddam Hussein asked "Where was the nuclear material transported to?" He goes on: "A number of them were transported out of Iraq."[7] Although this has been widely claimed to be evidence that Iraq hid its weapons of mass destruction by moving them out of the country, the aide was speaking in the mid- to late 1990s and was referring to the IAEA's confiscation of fissionable material from Iraq in 1996, when, as Hans Blix said, "the large nuclear infrastructure was destroyed and the fissionable material was removed from Iraq by the IAEA."[1][2] House Intelligence Chairman Pete Hoekstra requested that all the documents be put on the Internet so Arabic translators around the world can help translate them. According to the editors of the Weekly Standard, President Bush has also expressed his desire to have the documents and tapes released, but has never ordered this action through official channels.[7]

A DNI spokesperson noted of the recordings: "Intelligence community analysts from the CIA and the DIA reviewed the translations and found that while fascinating from a historical perspective, the tapes do not reveal anything that changes their postwar analysis of Iraq's weapons programs, nor do they change the findings contained in the comprehensive Iraq Survey Group report. The tapes mostly date from the early to mid-1990s and cover such topics as relations with the United Nations, efforts to rebuild industries from Gulf War damage, and the pre-9/11 situation in Afghanistan."[8]

A recent Congressional Quarterly article suggests that the Ambassador does not find his new position particularly challenging. Jeff Stein writes:

On many a workday lunchtime, the nominal boss of U.S. intelligence, John D. Negroponte, can be found at a private club in downtown Washington, getting a massage, taking a swim, and having lunch, followed by a good cigar and a perusal of the daily papers in the club’s library.
“He spends three hours there [every] Monday through Friday,” gripes a senior counterterrorism official, noting that the former ambassador has a security detail sitting outside all that time in chase cars. Others say they’ve seen the Director of National Intelligence at the University Club, a 100-year-old mansion-like redoubt of dark oak panels and high ceilings a few blocks from the White House, only “several” times a week.[9]

[edit] Awards received

  • Lifetime Achievement Award, World Affairs Council of America
  • Jit Trainor Award for Distinction in the Conduct of Diplomacy, Georgetown University, Institute for the Study of Diplomacy

[edit] References

  1. ^ Marshall, Joshua Micah (2006-05-07). Big world, small world. Talking Points Memo blog. Retrieved on 2006-07-21.
  2. ^ Nomination of John Negroponte. Congressional Record: (Senate) S9431-S9433 (2001-09-14). Retrieved on 2006-07-21.
  3. ^ Dobbs, Michael. "Papers Illustrate Negroponte's Contra Role", The Washington Post, 2005-04-12, p. A04. Retrieved on [[2006-07-21]].
  4. ^ Shane, Scott. "Cables Show Central Negroponte Role in 80's Covert War Against Nicaragua", The New York Times, 2005-04-13, p. A14. Retrieved on 2006-07-21. (preview only)
  5. ^ Kornbluh, Peter. "The Negroponte File: Negroponte's Chron File From Tenure in Honduras Posted", National Security Archive, 2005-04-12.
  6. ^ "Bush Taps Negroponte For Iraq Post", CBS News, 2004-04-09. Retrieved on 2006-08-17.
  7. ^ a b (2006-02-27) "Need to Know". Weekly Standard 011 (23). Retrieved on 2006-07-21.
  8. ^ Lake, Eli. "Furor Erupts Over Recordings of Saddam", The New York Sun, 2006-02-16. Retrieved on 2006-07-21.
  9. ^ Stein, Jeff. "Negroponte Makes the Most of his Post as Minister without Portfolio", Congressional Quarterly, 2006-03-03. Retrieved on [[2006-09-27]].

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Favorable commentary

[edit] Criticism

Preceded by
Jack R. Binns		 US Ambassador to Honduras
1982–1985		 Succeeded by
John Arthur Ferch
Preceded by
Charles J. Pilliod, Jr.		 US Ambassador to Mexico
1989–1993		 Succeeded by
James Robert Jones
Preceded by
Richard H. Solomon		 US Ambassador to the Philippines
1993–1996		 Succeeded by
Thomas C. Hubbard
Preceded by
Richard Holbrooke		 US Ambassador to the United Nations
2001–2004		 Succeeded by
John Danforth
Preceded by
L. Paul Bremer
(as head of the CPA)		 US Ambassador to Iraq
2004–2005		 Succeeded by
Zalmay Khalilzad
Preceded by
Porter Goss
(as DCI)		 US Director of National Intelligence
2005-(a)		 Succeeded by
Incumbent
Preceded by
Susan Schwab		 United States order of precedence
as of 2006		 Succeeded by
John Bolton


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