Timothy Carney, a dedicated diplomat known for embracing perilous postings in conflict zones and challenging institutional constraints, passed away on August 10 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 82.
His wife, Victoria Butler, confirmed that he died of cancer.
Throughout his distinguished career in the State Department, Mr. Carney served in some of the world’s most volatile regions, including Saigon and Phnom Penh during the Vietnam War, South Africa during the twilight of apartheid, and as ambassador to Sudan and Haiti amidst their respective collapses. He also served in Iraq following the U.S. invasion. Unwilling to conform to conventional thinking, he consistently ventured into territories that other diplomats shunned.
In the mid-1970s, he anticipated the impending threat of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship in Cambodia, and later engaged with Afrikaners in the mid-1980s, convinced they were genuinely moving toward majority rule in South Africa. He vehemently opposed the closure of the U.S. embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, in 1996, even as Osama Bin Laden established a foothold there; the closure subsequently deprived the United States of a crucial intelligence outpost. He also harbored deep skepticism toward Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom many in Washington viewed as a valuable ally, as Aristide prepared to reclaim power. Furthermore, during his time in Iraq, Mr. Carney publicly expressed outrage over the lack of American planning.
Colleagues noted that he never hesitated to engage with adversaries, viewing it as the core duty of a diplomat. “He wasn’t afraid of anybody,” said former U.S. Ambassador Robin Raphel, who had known Mr. Carney for decades, in a recent interview.
“You don’t make deals with your friends, you make deals with your enemies,” Ms. Raphel remarked, characterizing Mr. Carney as “pro-engagement in a way that makes perfect sense.” She added, “Serious people paid attention to him.”
Unusual among his peers, Mr. Carney insisted on observing situations firsthand, even if it meant risking the ire of his superiors.
In 1972, while Phnom Penh was under rebel rocket fire, Mr. Carney—a junior official at the U.S. embassy at the time—climbed into a car with a Cambodian journalist. He soon discovered a “little kid” who “had been chopped up by a chunk of casing from this 122 mm rocket, and was dead,” he recalled in a 2002 interview for an oral history produced by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.
Undeterred, he recounted, “we heard a lot of automatic weapons fire from further south,” and “we drove down there to see what was going on.”
The following day, he reported all his findings to his superiors at the embassy, who were horrified by his recklessness.
“One didn’t do that,” Mr. Carney told the interviewer in 2002. “You weren’t supposed to put yourself at risk, which struck me as a very bizarre way to conduct foreign affairs reporting during a war. You have to get out, meet people, and spend as much time outside the embassy as possible.”
This approach—leaving the embassy—was, and remains, atypical for State Department officials. In an era of heightened security, American diplomats typically remain behind the Marine-guarded embassy walls, venturing out only for official functions.
“He was where no other foreign service officer would be,” said Elizabeth Becker, a journalist with extensive reporting experience in Cambodia. “He treated Cambodians with a dignity I did not see from others.”
In April 1975, as the murderous Khmer Rouge closed in, he drove to the prime minister’s residence to urge government ministers to evacuate by helicopter. “Nope,” he recalled. “Only one went with us.”
A decade later, he followed a similar trajectory in South Africa. Serving as a political counselor at the U.S. embassy in Pretoria, he attended parties with Afrikaners—some of whom defended apartheid—while simultaneously engaging with others who, despite being “serious, engaging, ruthless,” possessed a genuine interest in ending the regime, unlike the outwardly liberal South Africans who, in his view, merely paid lip service to change.
“No matter how unstable the political environment and how tense relations could be, Tim always maintained the highest level of professionalism and tenacity,” former President Bill Clinton wrote on Facebook after Mr. Carney’s death. Mr. Clinton, who had appointed him ambassador to Sudan and Haiti, added that Mr. Carney “always believed that diplomacy was the essential key to reducing instability and promoting peace and prosperity.”
When Mr. Clinton dispatched Mr. Carney to Sudan in 1995, the nation was a safe haven for Islamist terrorists and rife with insurgency, having become a refuge for Osama Bin Laden after his departure from Saudi Arabia in 1991. For Mr. Carney, it was the ideal vantage point from which to assess the impending terrorist threat.
However, officials in Washington, led by Susan Rice—then the National Security Council’s senior director for African Affairs—were concerned about the safety of diplomats in Khartoum and relocated them to Nairobi in early 1996.
Mr. Carney considered this a grave mistake. Having kept tabs on Mr. Bin Laden, he could no longer do so. “We took our eye off the ball,” he later told Roger Cohen of The New York Times. “We did not know what was happening in Khartoum, a center of extremist Islam.”
That same bluntness defined his response to the chaos in Haiti, where he arrived as ambassador in January 1998—describing the landscape as having “no trees except at the embassy residence” in a State Department oral history interview. He quickly assessed Mr. Aristide, who was viewed with leniency on Capitol Hill.
“He was more of the same,” Mr. Carney told the State Department interviewer. “He himself certainly tolerates corruption as a way of manipulating people. Interesting.”
Timothy Michael Carney was born on July 12, 1944, in St. Joseph, Missouri. He was one of three children of Col. Clement Carney, a career army officer and Judge Advocate General Corps judge, and Jane (Byrne) Carney, an English teacher. The family relocated frequently during his childhood, spending two of those years in Taipei.
He graduated from Christian Brothers High School in St. Joseph in 1962, and earned a Bachelor of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1966.
His first foreign service assignment came the following year as a junior officer at the embassy in Vietnam, and from 1969 to 1971, he was posted to the embassy in Lesotho.
After his tour in Cambodia ended in 1975, Mr. Carney studied at Cornell University, served in Washington on the State Department’s Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia desk, and was appointed to the U.S. mission in Thailand from 1979 to 1983.
During the 1990s, Mr. Carney undertook several missions for the United Nations, including serving as an adviser to the U.N. representative in Somalia in 1993.
Mr. Carney retired from the State Department in December 1999. He returned to government service in 2003 for several months as a member of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, an agency established under the Department of Defense to aid in the reconstruction of Iraq.
He departed Baghdad after two months, frustrated by what the writer David Rieff termed a “dialogue of the deaf between ORHA officials and the U.S. military on the ground in Iraq.” He returned to Iraq for several months in 2007 and assisted the State Department in Kabul in 2009.
In addition to his wife, a journalist and writer whom he married in 1983, Mr. Carney is survived by his sister, Sheri Carney; his daughter, Anne Carney, from his previous marriage to Demaz Tep Baker; and two grandchildren.
“Tim was very deeply committed everywhere he served,” Ms. Butler said in an interview. “Everywhere we went, he got to know the people where we lived. He believed very strongly in soft power over hard power. He was an old-school kind of diplomat.”
