A Diplomat Who Loves The Really Tough Jobs

Iraq will be his fifth embassy as ambassador -- sixth if you count reopening the embassy in Afghanistan after the United States ousted the Taliban in 2001. He also was the top U.S. envoy in Lebanon (again), Syria, Pakistan and Kuwait. Each has involved personal danger or crisis.

In 1998, during a U.S. bombing campaign on Iraq, Syrian mobs attacked the U.S. ambassador's residence in Damascus. Christine Crocker fled into a vaulted safe-room in the residence as rioters ransacked the building. Jones remembers talking to Christine on a line that connected directly to Washington from the residence and on a separate phone to Ryan, who had raced home to help his wife but was stuck outside. The place was so badly trashed that they had to move out.

Though President Bush gave him the State Department's most prestigious title of "career ambassador" in 2004, Crocker is little known outside diplomatic circles and intensely private -- a stark contrast to the flamboyant and media-ready current ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad. Crocker is also an unassuming diplomat in a profession known for its dapper suits and fancy dress.

He drove a pickup truck in Washington, and Crocker coined the term "no socks required" to describe attire at parties he and his wife host.

David Mack, a retired diplomat who served with Crocker in Iraq and Lebanon, still remembers dinners of "cold Spam and peas eaten with crackers" when he stayed at the Crockers' Beirut apartment.

A Red Sox fanatic, Crocker favors heavy metal and hard-rock jam groups, including Iron Maiden and Black Crowes, colleagues say.

Crocker gets through most of his tough assignments by running. The day before the embassy blew up in Beirut in 1983, he ran in the first -- and some say only -- marathon held in Lebanon. Mack, now vice president of the Middle East Institute, recalls how Crocker took him out running along Beirut's seafront Corniche, during the middle of the civil war.

Crocker has now run in marathons on four continents, including a 50-kilometer race in Jordan. He also ran a 10-kilometer uphill race to the top of Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights that was particularly painful, he told colleagues. As a young foreign service officer learning Arabic, he had to take a field trip to use the language, and he chose to live with a Bedouin tribe of sheepherders in Jordan. He made that choice so he could run, according to Frederic C. Hof, who still remembers Crocker's field report.

In his current post in Pakistan, Crocker still regularly runs, often exhorting members of the embassy staff to join him. "His idea of unwinding is running 10 miles with security guys behind him in a four-wheel drive trying to keep up," says retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who has known Crocker for years and recently visited him in Pakistan. Crocker's favorite run is from outside Islamabad to the border of the Northwest Frontier Province.

During the few times he lived in Washington, Crocker ran most days from Alexandria to the State Department, his clothes in a backpack.

Friends say they can always tell when he's worried about something because he runs longer and harder, getting rail thin in the process.

Crocker is the first career foreign service officer and Arabist to take the Baghdad job, which may put him at a disadvantage in persuading the administration on policy. The three previous U.S. envoys -- Khalilzad, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and Coalition Provisional Authority chief L. Paul Bremer -- had all been political appointees who had a direct line into the White House.

"It's going to be a terrible job," says former ambassador to Lebanon Robert Dillon, who was also in the embassy when it blew up. "As a career guy, he's going to be under a lot of pressure and I'm not sure how much support he'll get in Washington."

But diplomats and military officers who have served with him say Crocker, who knows Iraq's tribes as well as its Arabic dialect, was the only realistic choice to deal with the country's labyrinthine politics.

Says Abington, "To the extent anyone can make a difference there, Ryan will."