Timothy M. Carney

His father served in the United States Army in the early 1940s before being assigned to the Judge Advocate Generals Corps in 1948.

His mother, daughter of a surgeon in St. Joseph, raised Carney and his two siblings as the family moved from one military posting to another.

Timothy Michael Carney (born July 12, 1944) is a retired American diplomat and consultant.

Carney served as a career Foreign Service Officer for 32 years, with assignments that included Vietnam and Cambodia as well as Lesotho and South Africa before being appointed as ambassador to Sudan and later in Haiti.

Carney served with a number of U.N. Peacekeeping Missions, and until recently led the Haiti Democracy Project, an initiative launched under the presidency of George W. Bush to build stronger institutional foundations for the country's long-term relationship with the United States.

He received his Bachelor of Science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1966 and the U.S. Foreign Service sent him on a brief sabbatical to study at Cornell University from 1975 until 1976, focusing on Southeast Asian studies as part of his career.

Carney was a member of the board of the American Academy of Diplomacy and speaks Khmer, Thai and French fluently.

Carney is married to a free-lance journalist, Victoria Butler.

He has a daughter from a previous marriage.

He and his wife, both writers, have published, with a British photographer, a photographic essay on the Sudan.

Carney began his Foreign Service Officer career in Vietnam in 1967 as a rotation officer based in Saigon for biographic and youth affairs and for commercial matters.

He was then stationed in Lesotho as second of two officers in charge of consular, political and economic affairs until 1971.

In 1972, he was appointed Second Secretary at the U.S. Mission in Phnom Penh, before returning to the United States to study at Cornell University in 1975.

After spending a few years at the State Department's Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia desk, Carney was appointed as U.S. consul in Udorn, Thailand and later as political officer in Bangkok during the Third Indochina War from 1979 until 1983.

After serving three year stints as the political counselor to U.S. Missions in Jakarta, Indonesia and Pretoria, South Africa (before Apartheid ended), Carney joined the U.S. Mission to the UN as political adviser for the 1989 UN General Assembly.

On return to Washington he joined the White House National Security Council staff under President George H. W. Bush.

He focused on Southeast Asian and Pacific Island affairs.

Carney cycled through several United Nations positions during the 1990s, serving from 1992 to 1993 as the Director of Information and Education of the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia, in 1993 as the Special Political Adviser to the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General in Somalia, and in 1994 in the UN Observer Mission in South Africa as it prepared for the historic post-Apartheid transition to democracy in 1994.

In late 1993, Petterson was asked by officials in the Clinton administration to deliver a "non-paper" ultimatum to Sudan's Islamist leader, Hasan al-Turabi, and the country's president, Omar al-Bashir.

The document contained a brief list of talking points that were designed to warn Sudan's top government officials about any involvement in alleged plots to kill U.S. diplomats working in Sudan.

The alleged threats were based on evidence gathered by a foreign agent retained by the C.I.A., data which would be used to justify Petterson's reduction of American embassy personnel in Khartoum.

The agent's information would later be found to have been fabricated, and would force the C.I.A. to redact or delete up to 100 reports on Sudan.

Petterson would later state that he did not believe the intelligence findings warranted a draw down in embassy staff.

Petterson's compulsory delivery of the talking points based on faulty U.S. intelligence would set the stage for strained relations between Washington and Khartoum that lasted well into Carney's early tenure as ambassador.

In 1994, Carney was appointed as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs.

A year later, he would receive his first ambassadorial posting.

Carney was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Sudan on 27 June 1995 during a period of turmoil in U.S.-Sudan relations.

Osama bin Laden had fled Saudi Arabia for the safe confines of Khartoum a few years earlier, and Sudan's alleged harboring and abetting of Muslim extremists on its soil was attracting attention of counterterrorism experts in the United States and abroad.

Carney's tenure as ambassador followed a tumultuous period during which his predecessor, Donald K. Petterson, had been forced to draw down embassy staff by half and send their families back to America when terrorist threats were made against U.S. diplomats stationed in Khartoum.

In late 1995, Carney was also asked to deliver a similar non-paper message based on what he would later recount as having been poorly sourced U.S. intelligence.

In early 1996, a few months after his credentials had been accepted, Carney met with senior Sudanese foreign ministry officials prior to vacating the U.S. embassy in Khartoum for the safer environs of Nairobi.

He proposed tangible steps to recover the rapidly deteriorating relationship between Washington and Khartoum.

In March 1996, El Fatih Erwa, then minister of state for defense, was authorized by President Omar al-Bashir to make several secret trips to the United States to hold talks with U.S. officials, including Carney and senior C.I.A. Africa experts, about U.S. sanctions policy against Sudan and what measures might be taken by the Bashir regime to lift them.

During a series of meetings in northern Virginia, Erwa was presented with a list of U.S. requirements, including demands for information about bin Laden and other radical Islamic groups encamped in Sudan.

In 2003, Carney was appointed to oversee America's reconstruction efforts in Iraq after the war that deposed Saddam Hussein.

His strong views on Iraq's reconstruction efforts after the war in 2003 were in part responsible for a wholesale change in the Bush administration's strategy to stabilize the war-torn nation.

He also advocated engagement with Sudan at a time when White House officials and the C.I.A. wanted the U.S. Embassy closed in Khartoum.

Carney was born in St. Joseph, Missouri and was raised and educated at military posts in the U.S. as well as abroad where his parents were stationed, including in Bad Tölz, Germany, Fort Bliss, Texas and Taipei, Taiwan.

After a long diplomatic career, Carney served as Executive Vice President of the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, a non-profit organization whose principal purpose was to assist Haiti's redevelopment in the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake until the Fund rolled over operations in December 2012 to a domestic Haitian non-profit organization.

Carney's appointment to diplomatic postings in countries that had often difficult relations with the United States earned him both praise and criticism from observers for his hands-on diplomatic style.