William Eagelton

His Excellency William Eagleton (b. 1926) is the Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations for Western Sahara, and was appointed to that role by Kofi Annan, UN Secretary-General), in 1999. He is also the main advisor to the US Department of Justice in northern Iraq, and was formerly United States Ambassador to Syria from 1984-1988. He is one of the State Department's foremost experts on the Middle East.

Ambassador Eagleton graduated from Yale University in 1948 with a bachelor's degree in political science. He then attended the Paris Institute of Political Studies (best known as Sciences Po), and received a Master of Public Policy in 1966 from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.

He entered the Foreign Service in 1949, after serving two years in the U.S. Navy. His overseas postings include Damascus (1951-53), Beirut (1953-54), Kirkuk (1954-55), and Tabriz (1959-61). He was in Mauritania in 1962, chargé d'affaires in Aden, South Yemen (1967-1969), and chief U.S. diplomat in Algeria (1969-74), Libya (1978-80), and Iraq (1980-84). Following a stint as ambassador to Syria (1984-88), he served six years as the deputy commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). He subsequently served in senior U.N. capacities in Bosnia and the western Sahara before returning to northern Iraq in 2003 as an advisor to the U.S. Department of Defense.