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Name: Pearce, David
Current Position: Previous Ambassador
A native of Portland, Maine, David D. Pearce serves as the US Ambassador to Algeria. He was appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the US Senate on May 27, 2008 and sworn in on August 11, 2008.
Born in Portland, Maine, on June 9, 1950, Pearce grew up in Falmouth and attended Cheverus High School. Pearce received his Bachelor of Arts in classics from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine in 1972 and a Master of Arts in journalism from Ohio State University a year later. Following his graduation, he worked as a reporter and foreign correspondent from 1973 to 1979. The publications he worked for include the Associated Press in Ohio, the Rome Daily American in Italy, the United Press International in Brussels, Lisbon and Beirut. He then moved to The Washington Post, where he worked as a copy editor on both the foreign and metro desks, and from 1980 to 1981 was a writer-editor in the book service of the National Geographic Society.
In January 1982, Peace entered the Foreign Service. His first position was vice consul and political officer in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He was a watch officer in the State Department Operations Center (1984-1985), and a country desk officer for Greece (1985-1987). In 1987, he studied Arabic at the Foreign Service Institute field school in Tunis. He became chief of the political section at the US Embassy in Kuwait and, during the Gulf War, he served as a liaison officer with the Kuwaiti government-in-exile. He returned to Washington in 1991 and worked as a special assistant to the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.
From 1992 to 1993, Pearce took a sabbatical leave to write a book on diplomacy and media entitled Wary Partners: Diplomats and the Media, published in 1994.
Upon his return to the foreign service, he served as the Consul General in Dubai (1994-1997), then as Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy in Damascus (1997-2001). He was the Director of the Department of State's Office of Northern Gulf Affairs with responsibility for Iraq and Iran (2001-2003), and he served with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad in 2003. He was Chief of Mission and Consul General at the US Consulate General in Jerusalem (2003-2005), and Minister Counselor for Political Affairs at the US Embassy in Rome (2005-2008), where he also made excursion tours to Iraq as a senior advisor to Ambassador Ryan Crocker.