In June 2011, President Barack Obama nominated diplomat Thomas C. Krajeski to be the U.S. ambassador to Bahrain. Krajeski has spent much of his career serving in the Middle East and Persian Gulf regions, including two stints in Iraq. He received his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on September 21.

 

The son of Chester and Helen Krajeski, Thomas Krajeski was born in Groveland, Massachusetts. He studied Russian language and literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, earning his BA, after seven years, in 1975. He continued his studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill until 1977.

 

He joined the Foreign Service in June 1979.

 

His early assignments included the U.S. embassy in Kathmandu, Nepal (1980-1982); as chief of the consular section in Madras, India (1982-1984); in the State Department Press Office (1985); and as the deputy chief of the consular section in Warsaw, Poland (1985-1988).

 

In 1988, Krajeski returned to Washington to be the political desk officer on the India Desk in the Bureau of Near Eastern and Asian Affairs. He followed this assignment with a stint as a senior watch officer in the Operations Center during the Gulf War in 1990.

 

After completing two years of Arabic language studies at the Foreign Service Institute, he served as a political officer at the U.S. embassy in Cairo, Egypt until 1997. During his Cairo tour, Krajeski was the embassy liaison to the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations that resulted in the Gaza-Jericho Agreement in 1995 and the Palestinian Administrative Agreement of 1996.

 

From 1997-2001, Krajeski was the principal officer and consul general at the U.S. Consulate General in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

 

From 2001 to 2004, he was the deputy director, and subsequently, the director of the Office of Northern Gulf Affairs (Iran and Iraq) in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. During this time, from July to October 2003, Krajeski served, at least in name, as a political advisor on Ambassador Paul Bremer’s staff at the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

 

His first opportunity to serve as ambassador came in July 2004, when he was posted to the Republic of Yemen, where he served until July 4, 2007.

 

From August 2007 through March 2008, he was the director of career development and assignments for the State Department in Washington, where he managed the assignment process for more than 12,000 Foreign Service officers and specialists.

 

Krajeski served from April 2008 to April 2009 at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad as the senior advisor to the ambassador on Northern Iraq Affairs, where he worked on the negotiations regarding the permanent boundary of Iraqi Kurdistan.

 

In August 2009, he began his assignment as the senior vice president of the National Defense University, which included overseeing the school’s international programs and providing foreign policy perspective. Krajeski also lectured on foreign policy, national security issues, the interagency process, and the role of the State Department.

 

Krajeski and his wife, Bonnie, who married in 1975, have two daughters and one son. Bonnie Krajeski served as a USAID project management advisor while her husband was ambassador to Yemen.

-Noel Brinkerhoff

 

Biography (National Defense University)

Krajeski on Forcing Diplomats to Serve in Iraq (AlJazeera English, YouTube)