Profile: John Negroponte: Ringmaster for the big US spy showdown

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Sunday Times



It has been dubbed ¡Èthe posting from hell¡É, but if anyone can bring a semblance of unity to America¡Çs bewildering network of competing spy agencies, it is John Negroponte, the British-born career diplomat who was appointed director of national intelligence by George W Bush last week.

Tall, patrician and with an English wife from a landed family, the 65- year-old ¡Èdiplomat¡Çs diplomat¡É confounds most stereotypes of American envoys. Fluent in five languages, including Vietnamese, he has adopted five Honduran children.

These attributes are also reminders of his contentious past. In the 1960s he was a political officer in Vietnam and, as such, would have been familiar with such dirty tricks as the CIA-run Phoenix Program that assassinated thousands of Vietcong. Later he played a part in the peace talks that ended the war.

It was as US ambassador to Honduras during the 1980s that he came under intense scrutiny, accused of turning a blind eye to human rights abuses as the Reagan administration assisted the contra rebels to overthrow the leftist Sandinista regime in neighbouring Nicaragua.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1491501,00.html

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1. Negroponte's History and Black Ops' Future

Regretably, I haven't the money to subscribe and read the rest of this bio.
I've been familiar with Mr. Negroponte's checkered career in Honduras since it came to light in the 1980s. I hadn't, however, known that he worked in Saigon under Nixon in a position that would have made him familiar with the details of Operation Phoenix. According to one bio I found, after his time in Honduras, "In 1987, during the administration of George Bush the elder, Negroponte returned to the NSC to work under Colin Powell as deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs. Within two years, he was back in Latin America; Bush appointed Negroponte ambassador to Mexico, where he served from July 1989 to September 1993. There, he officiated at the block-long, fortified embassy and directed, among other things, U.S. intelligence services to assist the war against the Zapatista rebels of Chiapas,"(www.fpif.org/republicanrule/officials_body.html#negroponte). After he was appointed as ambassador to Iraq, reports (which I don't have the time to track down) of death squad activities in that country began appearing.
Apparently, he has a long history of 'association' with counter-insurgency "dirty wars." At the least, his appointment seems to be a harbinger of what we can expect from this administration's "counter-terrorism" policy. By economic logic, execution is the expectable extension of a policy of disappearances brought on by kidnapping and extrajudicial incarceration: it is more cost efective to kill "unreliable elements" than it is to pay to hold them.