Frank J. Wesker II, a veteran American diplomat, Washington from the inside and an foreign affairs specialist who enjoyed the ambassador’s position of life as much as the back channel died and the arms less than the general influence declined on Monday at his home in Millen Nick, New York, in Long Island. It was 86.
His son, David, said that the reason was the complications of lung cancer.
For decades as a member of the political elite, Mr. Wesnar headed the embassies in Zambia, Egypt, the Philippines and India, which included high -ranking positions.
He ascended to the lead while the Cold War competing with the Soviet Union has turned a world emerging from newly independent countries to a plate of competition between Washington and Moscow and its various alternatives.
Grueus is often his own style of the task of enhancing America’s vision. In Cairo, for example, where he was an ambassador from 1986 to 1991, he invited a correspondent to join him to spend an evening of diplomacy and social communication, and he intersects the city in Mercedes -Benz armored vehicle, followed Official reception.
The list of guests was shown at his elite dinner. Since the actor of the ally of the superpower is the most influential in Egypt, his interlocutors sometimes treated him like the deputy king.
Once, Mr. Wesnar borrowed a friend of a friend in Cairo for non -collective talks with members of the exile from the Soviet armed wing at the African National Congress in Nelson Mandela, at a time when the official contact with these numbers was unusual.
Mr. Wesnar was the American ambassador to Egypt when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, which led to a huge Iraq-led Iraq-an event that sent removal from fears across the Western diplomatic legion throughout the Arab world. “While some tasks have been postponed or closed their facilities,” we have adhered to. “I was confident in the direction of our diplomacy and in the Egyptian relationship with us.”
“We read the right Egyptians,” he added. “They have read us correctly. We and we were on the same wavelength.”
During his time in Manila, where he was deployed as an ambassador to assist in the stability of the administration exposed to the coup in Korazon Akino, his office was part of the Old American Governor’s wing.
The New York Times reported that “the cigarette is within reach, he liked to get visitors to the giant balcony overlooking the Gulf, describing the sweeping of American interactions with the Philippines, and returning to the days of the Spanish -American war,” the New York Times reported.
But after a long period of retirement from public service in 1997 and began a profitable profession as a great advisor to private companies, the General Diplomacy of Mr. in Wesnner during the alleged Arab Spring in 2011 became sour when he found himself at odds with the Obama administration and isolated from the main current to manufacture policies American.
At that time, with the massive crowds gathering in Tahrir Square in Cairo in Cairo to demand the overthrow of the supporter of the Americans, Hosni Mubarak, President Barack Obama sent the master to present a message to his Egyptian counterpart, whom Wesnner had to come to know well during his ambassador there.
President Obama wanted Mr. Mubarak to start to start abandoning power immediately. But after only one meeting with Mr. Wesner, Mr. Mubarak stumbled, saying only that he would not defend his re -election in a scheduled vote after months, but he wanted to stay in office until then. Mr. Wesner, who also met Vice President Omar Suleiman from Egypt during his mission, ordered the return to the United States.
A few days later, Mr. Wesner spoke by speaking by video to a major security conference in Munich, that it is very important for Mr. Mubarak to keep his transfer from his position.
These observations were immediately coordinated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the White House, whose representatives said that Mr. Wesnar was speaking personally and that his opinions did not reflect the official policy.
It was a rare and embarrassing public reprimand.
According to news reports at the time, Mr. Obama was angry at the unexpected intervention of Mr. Weissler, who seemed to reflect cautious respect for regional stability between the Foreign Policy Foundation, which was keen to protect Egypt’s peace agreement with Israel in 1979 – the cornerstone of the American vision of the region – Instead of supporting the revolutionary demands of the crowds calling for the expulsion of Mr. Mubarak.
In this event, Mr. Mubarak, Who died in 2020 In 91, he was forced to step down within days to confront the trial as the protests multiplied against him.
After years, In an online discussion Under the auspices of the Council of Foreign Relations, Mr. Wesner seemed not Nebes.
“During the Obama administration, I was asked to take a speech to Mubarak about his departure position,” he said. “I did as I was instructed.” But he continued, “The policy has changed, and that was disappointing for me.” He said he believed the United States should be seen as helping to solve problems, “” Don’t go at the top of the protest. “
He added: “He undermines our position in the region. There was no way at all to decide the future of the Egyptian revolution, as we learned later.”
Frank George Wesner II was born on July 2, 1938, in Manhattan Frank Garderner Wesnner And Mary Nolls Weesner. His father was an intelligence worker in World War II went to join the CIA, as he was attributed to the coup of the mastermind in Guatemala and Iran. He died due to suicide in 1965.
Mr. Wesnar the youngest had two brothers, Graham, Eleless Weesner, and sister, Elizabeth Garderner Wesnner, who died in 2020. Graham died in January.
In his youth, Mr. Wesner spent a year at the Rajabi High School in England before going to Princeton. He joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1961 and had early tasks for new independent Algeria, southern Vietnam, Tunisia and Bangladesh.
In 1969, he got married to GeneVieVie de Virel, a descendant of a famous French family. she He died in 1974. They had a daughter, Sabrina.
In 1976, he married Christine de Ganai, who was also from a French aristocratic family. She was the former wife of Pal Sarkozy, the father of former President Nicholas Sarkozy from France. David Wesner is their son. She had two children from her previous marriage, Olivier and Caroline Sarkozy. The couple later released. Mr. Wesner married Judy C. Cormer, internal designer, in 2015.
In interviews after his retirement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Wesnner pointed to a frequent indication of his role during the Nixon administration to Henry’s employees. Kissinger while the White House was following a diplomacy to end the guerrilla warfare in Zimbabwe, then called Rodisia, in the 1970s.
At that time, Moscow and Washington stumbled to influence a group of comfortable African lands, including Mozambique, Angola, Namibia and South Africa in the end. In Angola, the competition was tied in the Cuban and South Africa forces fighting to support the opposition liberation movements.
When Mr. Wesner was an ambassador to Zambia, from 1979 to 1982, part of his mission was to rebuild a close relationship with President Kenneth Dr. Erotic disclosure He appeared in 1981 about the activities of the Secret CIA there.
At that time, Lusaka, the quiet Zambian capital, was filled with representatives of the liberation movements supported by the Soviet Union and China differently, along with the Western spies who sought to follow and sabotage them. Zambia was also a pioneering player in the so -called confrontational states, which long provided background bases and decisive diplomatic support for liberation movements throughout the region.
“There were some hairy moments,” Mr. Wesner said in an interview with the Congress Library in 1998.
In fact, Mr. Wesner himself was an influential player in the Reagan administration policy known as “constructive participation”, led by Chester Crocker, former Assistant Foreign Minister for African Affairs. The essence of politics was the belief that the white minority regime in the apartheid in South Africa could be persuaded to reduce its grip on its absolute authority instead of fighting destructive conflicts against the black opponents who demand the rule of the majority.
In the “High Dhuhr in South Africa”, he narrated the American regional diplomacy published in 1992, Mr. Crocker referred to Mr. Wesner as “the dean of South Africa specialists”, who “possess a wide range of unparalleled background of foreign affairs in our government.” Those who were offered “in a low -key key and personal warmth”.
Throughout his career, Mr. Wesnner alternated between foreign tasks and senior positions in Washington, including tasks in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Pentagon.
Even after his retirement from the Diplomatic Corps in 1997, he continued to combine the advisory roles of the private sector with official missions. In 2005, George W. Bush Administration His eye as his own actor In the conversations that led to the disputed independence of Kosovo in 2008.
From 1997 up, he built a second profession in the field of private business, where he held the position of Vice Chairman of the AIG Insurance Company and an international affairs advisor for Squire Patton Boggs, a legal group and pressure headquarters in Washington.
In his recent years, Mr. Wesner expressed his concern about the way the United States practiced its global strength, from the Vietnam War in the 1960s to the struggle decades in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“It seems that we are not trapped to learn from our mistakes, and therefore we have ended in tragic transgressions in Iraq and now in Afghanistan,” Mr. Wesner told the Council of Foreign Relations in June 2021, months before the American chaotic withdrawal from Kabul. .
“I hope that this period of American history, from the late sixties to the present time, will somehow in the American mind, and we will be careful about how we use the American authority,” he said.
