Frank G. Wisner, Diplomat With Impact on Foreign Policy, Dies at 86
Frank G. Wisner, a veteran American diplomat, Washington insider and foreign affairs specialist who relished the prestige of ambassadorial life as much as the back-channel cajoling and arm-twisting of less public influence, died on Monday at his home in Mill Neck, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 86.
His son, David, said the cause was complications of lung cancer.
Over decades as a member of the policy elite, Mr. Wisner headed embassies in Zambia, Egypt, the Philippines and India, held high office under both Republican and Democratic administrations and was linked to initiatives that wrought change in regions as disparate as southern Africa and the Balkans.
He rose to prominence at a time when the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union turned an emergent world of newly-independent states into a checkerboard of competition between Washington and Moscow and their various surrogates.
Gregarious and often expansive, Mr. Wisner brought his own style to the task of promoting America's vision. In Cairo, for instance, where he was ambassador from 1986 to 1991, he once invited a reporter along to join him for an evening of diplomacy and socializing, crisscrossing the city in an armored Mercedes-Benz followed by a chase car of bodyguards as he was feted in a series of formal receptions.
The guest list at his dinner parties offered a Who's Who of the elite. And as the representative of Egypt's most influential superpower ally, his interlocutors sometimes treated him like an affable viceroy.
Once, Mr. Wisner borrowed a friend's apartment in Cairo to conduct unpublicized talks with exiled members of the Soviet-backed armed wing of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, at a time when official contact with such figures was unusual.
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