Laurence Pope, diplomat and top envoy after Benghazi, dies

He was considered a stabilizing force following attack

Laurence Pope, a veteran diplomat and counterterrorism expert who came out of retirement to serve as the top U.S. envoy to Libya, weeks after the 2012 attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, died Oct. 31 at his home in Portland, Maine. He was 75.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Elizabeth Pope.

In his 31 years as a diplomat, Pope helped shape Iran and Iraq policy at the State Department, was appointed ambassador to Chad by President Bill Clinton and served as political adviser to Gen. Anthony Zinni, head of Central Command, which manages U.S. forces in the Middle East.

He had been retired for more than a decade when Islamist militants launched an assault on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. The attack marked the first time a U. S. ambassador was killed in the line of duty since 1979 and ignited a fierce political debate over the security of American personnel overseas.

It also inspired Pope to return to the Foreign Service, which he had joined in 1969 partly to avoid fighting in Vietnam. While his father had served in the Marines during World War II and received the Medal of Honor, the military’s highest award for valor, Pope often championed diplomacy above military action and lamented what he described as “the marginalization of the State Department.”

“I remember I heard the news that Stevens was killed and ran into the living room to tell him,” his wife, known as Betsy, recalled in a phone interview. “He sort of thought, ‘How could I help?’ and I spent about 20 minutes thinking about it. His parents were dead, our daughters were grown, and I came back in and told him, ‘You should volunteer to go. They’re not going to think of you, Larry, up here in Portland, Maine.’”

Pope was fluent in Arabic and had served as a political officer in Libya in the 1970s, early in dictator Moammar Gaddafi’s four- decade rule. After sending an email to Deputy Secretary of State William Burns to volunteer, he was named chargé d’affaires to Libya in October 2012, charged with maintaining diplomatic links to the country as it moved toward democratic governance.

Pope remained in Libya for only three months — he was succeeded by William Roebuck, another career diplomat — but by many accounts was a stabilizing force in the country, at a time when the State Department had few senior Arabists in its ranks.

“He was part of the cavalry,” said David McFarland, a deputy assistant secretary of state who was then deputy chief of mission in Tripoli. In an email, he added that Pope “reassured staff that their work served a higher purpose for United States interests . . . then spent the next several months delivering on his pledges, with compassion and a dry sense of humor peppered throughout.”

Pope’s time in Libya served as an unexpected coda to a diplomatic career that had ended abruptly in 2000, when he retired months after Clinton nominated him to be ambassador to Kuwait. As he told it, his appointment was short-circuited by congressional conservatives angered by his connection to Zinni, who had opposed efforts to finance Iraqi opposition groups in an attempt to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Laurence Everett Pope II was born in New Haven on Sept. 24, 1945. His mother was a homemaker, and his father became a bank president in the Boston area, leading the family to settle in Braintree, Mass.

Pope studied philosophy at Bowdoin College in Maine, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1967 and then served in the Peace Corps, part of a semi-successful effort to avoid being sent to Vietnam. To his dismay, his first posting in the Foreign Service was as a vice consul in Saigon.

Pope could be outspoken at times, notably while serving as ambassador to Chad. In a State Department cable, he wrote that some U.S.-backed aid programs in the country had gestation periods that were “longer than that of an African elephant” — comments that were later cited by Helms’s Senate staff in an effort to curtail foreign aid.

In 1976, he married Elizabeth Harris, a journalist. In addition to his wife, of Portland, survivors include two daughters, Eleanor Pope of Queens and Elizabeth Pope of Portland; a brother; and four grandchildren.