“Meet the diplomat who might have the most dangerous job in the world”

Formerly the United States ambassador to Kuwait, Matthew Tueller is currently our representative to Yemen, where the government has just fallen, a Shi‘i insurgency has taken over the capital, and “Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” (AQAP; تنظيم القاعدة في جزيرة العرب‎) is extremely active (having recently sponsored the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris).

He’s a Latter-day Saint, and a graduate of BYU — as are Deborah Jones (also a former ambassador to Kuwait, now assigned to Libya) and Stephen Beecroft (formerly American envoy to Jordan, and then to Iraq, and now the U.S. ambassador to Egypt).

Here’s a new article from Politico about Ambassador Tueller:

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/yemen-ambassador-matthew-tueller-114544.html#ixzz3PhkBVOrS

I came to know Matt Tueller when we were both students at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad in Cairo in 1981-1982.  Our wives went through pregnancies together there in Egypt; their first child, a daughter, was born about a month before ours, a son.  We had a running joke that year about whether quality counted more than quantity: I contracted a fairly serious case of hepatitis, but he managed to come down with mild cases of both malaria and amoebic dysentery.

I can attest to his almost surreal calm.  We saw it already back then.