J. Christopher Stevens was the American ambassador to Libya when he was killed on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, when an armed mob attacked and burned the American Consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi.
Three of his staff members were also killed.
The violence appeared to be part of riots that had broken out in Benghazi and Cairo that day over a short American-made video mocking Islam’s founding prophet.
But the next day, American officials said they suspected the Benghazi attack may have been planned rather than a spontaneous mob getting out of control.
Mr. Stevens, a career diplomat, previously served in Iraq, Canada and the Netherlands. A veteran of American diplomatic missions in Libya, he had served in Benghazi during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi, and he was widely admired by the Libyan rebels for his support of their struggle.
Mr. Stevens, a fluent Arabic speaker, knew better than most diplomats in the American Foreign Service the opportunities and travails facing Libya after the fall of Colonel Qaddafi.
Having served as the deputy ambassador during Colonel Qaddafi’s rule, he acted as the Obama administration’s main interlocutor to the rebels based in Benghazi who ultimately overthrew him while NATO conducted airstrike missions. Mr. Obama rewarded him with the nomination to become the first ambassador in a post-Qaddafi Libya, and he arrived in May with indefatigable enthusiasm for the country’s prospects as a free, Western-friendly democracy.
For those who knew him, Mr. Stevens was an easygoing, accessible, candid and at times irreverent diplomat, with a deep understanding of Arab culture and politics that began when he was a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.
Mr. Stevens, a native of California and graduate of Berkeley, joined the Foreign Service in 1991 after working as a trade lawyer. He spent much of his career in the Middle East, serving in Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel, where he focused on the Palestinian territories, and in State Department offices overseeing policy in the region. He served as the deputy chief of mission in the capital, Tripoli, from 2007 to 2009 during the relatively brief easing of tensions with Colonel Qaddafi’s government.
After the Arab Spring uprisings spread, first to Benghazi, then across Libya, he came back to the country in circumstances that would challenge any diplomat. Then, as he prepared to return this year as ambassador, he appeared in an introductory video, subtitled in Arabic, earnestly recalling the United States’ own Civil War as an example of overcoming internal strife.
“We know that Libya is still recovering from an intense period of conflict,” he said. “And there are many courageous Libyans who bear the scars of that battle.”
He developed a reputation as a keen observer of Libya’s politics, and, as Ms. Kwiram noted, a patient listener who eagerly sought out Libyan activists, diplomats and journalists to meet in his offices in a hotel and later in a rented villa on the edge of Tripoli. He also kept up his routine of daily runs through goat farms, olive groves and vineyards nearby. In his e-mail to family in friends, he joked about the Embassy’s Fourth of July party.
“Somehow our clever staff located a Libyan band that specializes in 1980s soft rock,” he wrote, “so I felt very much at home.”
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