For Veteran Envoy, Return to Libya Was Full of Hope - New York Times

For Veteran Envoy, Return to Libya Was Full of Hope - New York Times

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

Published: September 12, 2012

WASHINGTON â€" J. Christopher Stevens arrived in Benghazi, Libya, in April 2011 aboard a Greek cargo ship carrying a dozen American diplomats and guards and enough vehicles and equipment to set up a diplomatic beachhead in the middle of an armed rebellion.

Even then, the fraught, divided view of the NATO-led intervention was on display, as were the dangers of diplomacy in a turbulent nation. The rebels fighting Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi had hoisted American, British and French flags in the plaza in Benghazi they renamed Freedom Square, Mr. Stevens often recalled, but a car bomb later exploded in the parking lot of the hotel where he and his team had settled, forcing them to move.

Mr. Stevens, 52, died in Benghazi on Tuesday, along with Sean Smith, an information management officer who joined the Foreign Service 10 years ago, and two other employees of the State Department whose names have not been released. Armed militants began firing on the American Consulate during a violent protest over the release of an American-made anti-Islam video.

Mr. Stevens is the first American ambassador killed on duty since Adolph Dubs was kidnapped and killed in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1979. The circumstances of the attack â€" including the motives and any security lapses that contributed to their deaths â€" are under investigation.

“It’s especially tragic that Chris Stevens died in Benghazi,” President Obama said in the White House’s Rose Garden on Wednesday, “because it is a city that he helped to save.”

Mr. Stevens, a fluent Arabic speaker, knew better than most diplomats in the American Foreign Service the opportunities and travails facing Libya after the fall of Colonel Qaddafi.

Having served as the deputy ambassador during Colonel Qaddafi’s rule, he acted as the Obama administration’s main interlocutor to the rebels based in Benghazi who ultimately overthrew him while NATO conducted airstrike missions. Mr. Obama rewarded him with the nomination to become the first ambassador in a post-Qaddafi Libya, and he arrived in May with indefatigable enthusiasm for the country’s prospects as a free, Western-friendly democracy.

“The whole atmosphere has changed for the better,” he wrote in an e-mail to friends and family in July. “People smile more and are much more open with foreigners. Americans, French and British are enjoying usual popularity. Let’s hope it lasts.”

For those who knew him, Mr. Stevens was an easygoing, accessible, candid and at times irreverent diplomat, with a deep understanding of Arab culture and politics that began when he was a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.

“The thing that struck me was that he had a level of candor that was unusual for a diplomat,” said Sidney Kwiram, who conducted research for Human Rights Watch in Libya during the revolution and afterward and often met with him. “He had no pretensions.”

She last spoke with him two weeks ago after her own visit to Benghazi, spending two hours on the telephone discussing the intricacies of Libya’s new political forces. “There was no formality to his rank,” she said. “He didn’t take himself too seriously, but he took his job very seriously.”

Mr. Stevens, a native of California and graduate of Berkeley, joined the Foreign Service in 1991 after working as a trade lawyer. He spent much of his career in the Middle East, serving in Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel, where he focused on the Palestinian territories, and in State Department offices overseeing policy in the region. He served as the deputy chief of mission in the capital, Tripoli, from 2007 to 2009 during the relatively brief easing of tensions with Colonel Qaddafi’s government.

After the Arab Spring uprisings spread, first to Benghazi, then across Libya, he came back to the country in circumstances that would challenge any diplomat. Then, as he prepared to return this year as ambassador, he appeared in an introductory video, subtitled in Arabic, earnestly recalling the United States’ own Civil War as an example of overcoming internal strife.

“We know that Libya is still recovering from an intense period of conflict,” he said. “And there are many courageous Libyans who bear the scars of that battle.”

He developed a reputation as a keen observer of Libya’s politics, and, as Ms. Kwiram noted, a patient listener who eagerly sought out Libyan activists, diplomats and journalists to meet in his offices in a hotel and later in a rented villa on the edge of Tripoli. He also kept up his routine of daily runs through goat farms, olive groves and vineyards nearby. In his e-mail to family in friends, he joked about the Embassy’s Fourth of July party.

“Somehow our clever staff located a Libyan band that specializes in 1980s soft rock,” he wrote, “so I felt very much at home.”

Harvey Morris contributed reporting from London, and Kareem Fahim from Beirut, Lebanon.

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