Timothy Carney, a diplomat who relished difficult assignments in war-torn countries and pushed against bureaucratic restrictions, died on Aug. 10 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 82.
His death, from cancer, was confirmed by his wife, Victoria Butler.
In a State Department career that took him from Saigon and Phnom Penh during the Vietnam War, to South Africa during the final years of apartheid, to ambassadorships in Sudan and Haiti as those countries disintegrated, to Iraq after the U.S. invasion, Mr. Carney proved willing to challenge conventional thinking and to go places other diplomats avoided.
He foresaw the looming menace of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship in Cambodia in the mid-1970s, and engaged with Afrikaners in the mid-1980s, convinced they were opening up to the idea of majority rule in South Africa. He opposed closing the U.S. embassy in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, in 1996 while Osama Bin Laden established himself there — the closure deprived America of a valuable listening post. He was skeptical of the former Haiti president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, seen by many in Washington as a valuable ally, as Mr. Aristide prepared to retake power. In Iraq, Mr. Carney was publicly disgusted with the absence of American planning.
Colleagues said he didn’t hesitate to engage with U.S. foes, believing that to be the diplomats’ best role. “He wasn’t afraid of anybody,” the former U.S. ambassador Robin Raphel, who knew Mr. Carney for decades, said in an interview.
“You don’t make deals with your friends, you make deals with your enemies,” Ms. Raphel said, describing Mr. Carney as “pro-engagement in a way that makes perfect sense.” She added: “Serious people paid attention to him.”
Unusually for a diplomat, Mr. Carney insisted on seeing things for himself, even at the cost of incurring the wrath of his superiors.
As Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, was being rocketed by rebels in 1972, Mr. Carney — then a junior official in the U.S. embassy — jumped into a car with a Cambodian journalist and soon found “a little kid” who “had been chopped up by a chunk of casing from this 122 mm rocket, and was dead,” Mr. Carney told an interviewer in 2002 for a State Department oral history project.
Undeterred, “we heard a lot of automatic weapons fire from further south,” he said, “and we drove down there to see what was going on.”
The next day, he reported all of it to his bosses at the embassy. They were horrified.
“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 do foreign affairs reporting in a war. You have to get out, meet people, and be out of the embassy as much as you possibly could.”
