Carey Cavanaugh

Carey Edward Cavanaugh (born January 1955) is a former U.S. Ambassador/peace mediator and chairman of International Alert, a London-based independent peacebuilding organization.

He is currently professor of diplomacy at the University of Kentucky.

Cavanaugh had a twenty-two year Foreign Service career focused on conflict resolution, arms control, and humanitarian issues.

This included diplomatic postings in Berlin, Moscow, Tbilisi, Rome, and Bern, as well as Washington assignments in the State Department, the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill.

Upon leaving government service, he took a full professorship at the University of Kentucky and became director of its Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce.

He remains active in conflict resolution and peacebuilding, working with several leading British and European non-governmental organizations on civil society initiatives and track-two diplomatic efforts.

Cavanaugh was born in Jacksonville and grew up in the Jacksonville Beaches (primarily Atlantic Beach).

His mother—Sylvia Cavanaugh Ponti—was an artist and a writer; his father was a U.S. Navy non-commissioned officer.

After his parents' divorce, he moved with his mother to Italy for two years before the family returned to Florida.

He began studying Russian in ninth grade at Duncan U. Fletcher High School in Neptune Beach and put his language skills to work helping HIAS assist Jewish refugee families from the USSR resettle in North Florida and Jacksonville's Sister City Association build a relationship with the Russian naval port of Murmansk.

After briefly starting with nuclear engineering, Cavanaugh majored in Russian at the University of Florida.

There he was a member of Delta Chi fraternity.

In 1975 he also studied briefly at Leningrad Polytechnical Institute.

He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in 1976.

He went on to graduate study in government and international affairs at the University of Notre Dame, receiving a Master of Arts degree in 1978.

He continued work toward a Ph.D., but left before completion in 1981 to accept a tenure-track position teaching international affairs and Soviet and East European studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio.

In the summer of 1982 he was a research intern and in 1983 a visiting researcher at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich.

Entering the Foreign Service in 1984, Cavanaugh rose to the diplomatic rank of Minister-Counselor (equivalent to the military rank of Major General).

His first tour of duty was at the U.S. Mission Berlin (West) where he worked primarily on consular affairs and political reporting on Iran.

This was followed by assignment to the Office of Soviet Affairs in Washington to handle bilateral relations and some arms control issues, including implementation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Afterwards, as a political officer at the American Embassy in Moscow, he was responsible for covering Soviet relations towards Europe (in particular the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Two Plus Four Agreement on German unification), arms control issues (the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe), and the new USSR Supreme Soviet Defense and State Security Committee.

He worked directly with Chairman Les Aspin (D-Wisconsin) and House Committee on Armed Services members to instruct their Supreme Soviet counterparts on how to perform legislative oversight.

Cavanaugh later attended the U.S. Army Russian Institute (today the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies) in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany in 1988–1989 and was a fellow at MIT's Seminar XXI in 1994–1995.

In 1991–92, he was an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, working with Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) on nuclear weapons issues.

When Eduard Shevardnadze became President of the Republic of Georgia in 1992, Cavanaugh was sent to Tbilisi as Chargé d'affaires, leading the team that established the U.S. embassy to that new independent state.

After Tbilisi, Cavanaugh was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Rome to cover the communist (PDS) and socialist parties (PSI), the Lega Nord, as well as European policy issues.

The State Department cut short this assignment to return him to Washington to help with the multibillion-dollar assistance program for the post-Soviet states and shortly thereafter to support U.S. and international efforts to advance peace in the Caucasus, working with Swedish diplomat Jan Eliasson and Finnish diplomat (and later European Union Special Representative) Heikki Talvitie.

Under the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Cavanaugh spearheaded or helped advance peace efforts involving Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cyprus, Georgia, Greece, Moldova, Tajikistan, and Turkey.

Selected by Richard Holbrooke to serve as Director of Southern European Affairs, he was part of the team that helped prevent – via telephone – a potential military confrontation between Greece and Turkey in the Aegean Sea over the disputed islets of Imia/Kardak.

Later, serving also as Acting Special Cyprus Coordinator, he received the State Department's James Clement Dunn Award for Excellence for defusing the crisis that arose when Cyprus purchased a Russian S-300 (missile) system capable of striking Turkey.

He later dealt with the issue of the handling by Swiss banks of Holocaust-era bank accounts which held deposits made by victims of Nazi persecution, while serving as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Switzerland.

In 2000, he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to be Ambassador/Special Negotiator responsible for conflicts in Eurasia and concurrently U.S. Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group.

This assignment culminated in OSCE peace talks on Nagorno-Karabakh with the President of Azerbaijan Heydar Aliev and the President of Armenia Robert Kocharyan at the Harry S Truman Little White House in Key West, Florida.

In 2001–2002, he was a member of the Department of State's 44th Senior Seminar.

At the Foreign Service Institute, he also studied German and Italian.

Cavanaugh was president of the Department of State's 44th Senior Seminar in 2001–2002.

Afterwards, he worked for three years as a senior inspector/team leader in State's Office of the Inspector General.

Cavanaugh's final official assignment was foreign policy/political advisor to Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Since leaving government service, he has also carried out special assignments for the State Department's Inspector General in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Brazil.

Cavanaugh was appointed tenured full professor at the University of Kentucky and director of its Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce in August 2006.