The Foreign Service Journal, September 2004

A PPRECIATION Hume Alexander Horan 1934 – 2004 68 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 4 ume Alexander Horan, 69, retired Foreign Service officer and ambassador to five Middle Eastern and African countries, died of prostate cancer at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Va., on July 22. A man whose conscientiousness and compassion were as deep as his prodigious intellect, Hume Horan was a fluent speaker of Arabic and spent most of his career in the Middle East during some of the region’s most turbulent times. He spent six months in 2003 as a senior counselor with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, dealing with religious and tribal affairs — an experience he wrote about in the March 2004 Foreign Service Journal (“Restoring a Shattered Mosaic”). Wide-ranging as Amb. Horan’s career was, he is probably best known to the general pub- lic for the circumstances of his 1988 departure from his ambassadorial post in Riyadh, just nine months after arriving. In the spring of that year, the United States discovered that Saudi Arabia had bought and accepted delivery of medium-range bal- listic missiles from China. Amb. Horan was instructed to make a strong demarche to King Fahd about the unac- ceptability of the missiles. Ever since his previous tour as DCM in Riyadh (1972- 1977), Amb. Horan had cultivated his own contacts throughout Saudi society. Knowing that this had already annoyed the ruling family, he called Washington to be sure officials understood how offended the king would be by the verbal rebuke, and was again ordered to deliver the message. Soon after he did so, he received a telegram from the department informing him that “a message dif- ferent in tone and substance” had also been communicat- ed to the Saudi Embassy in Washington. “My goose was cooked,” he told The Washington Post in 2002. Adding insult to injury, State then directed Amb. Horan to per- sonally present the U.S. request for approval of his suc- cessor, after which he was recalled to Washington. Despite that experience, Amb. Horan retained an opti- mism and idealism about the diplomatic corps. In a 1992 article for The Washington Post, he wrote that Foreign Service officers “are the infantry of American diplomacy. We’ll never be able to dis- pense with them. Consistently to work at our national purposes, someone has to be on the scene, speak the language, meet with the leaders, make the argument and report back — saying what he or she thinks we should do.” Amb. Horan was a native Washingtonian whose mother, Margaret Robinson Hume, came from a prominent family and whose father was Abdollah Entezam, an Iranian diplomat who served as foreign minister long before the 1979 downfall of the shah. They divorced when he was 3, and his moth- er remarried Harold Horan, a newspaperman. He served in the Army from 1954 to 1956, graduated from Harvard College in 1960 and joined the Foreign Service. He received a master’s degree from Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies in 1963. Mr. Horan requested a first assignment in Baghdad, a choice unusual enough that the under secretary for man- H