Meet Your New Deputy Secretary of State

AP:

National Intelligence Director John Negroponte will resign to become deputy secretary of state, a government official said Wednesday night.

Wikipedia:

John Dimitri Negroponte (born July 21, 1939 in the United Kingdom) (IPA [ˌnɛgroʊˈpɑnti]) is a career diplomat currently serving as the United States Director of National Intelligence. President Bush named Ambassador Negroponte as the first Director of National Intelligence in 2005. On January 3, 2007, he announced he was resigning his position to become Deputy Secretary of State.

Prior to this appointment, Negroponte served as the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. He also served in the United States Foreign Service, from 1960 to 1997. He has various tours of duty as a United States ambassador, including a three-year ambassadorship to the Philippines, from 1993 to 1996. He subsequently served as U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations from 2001 to 2004, and was ambassador to Iraq from June 2004 to April 2005.

He has been criticized because of his involvement in the covert funding of the Contras, and there are allegations that he was in involved in a coverup of human rights abuses carried out by CIA-trained operatives in Honduras, where he was the U.S. chief of mission in the 1980s. It was in Honduras that Negroponte first worked with the former executive director of the CIA, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo. According to The New York Times, Negroponte carried out "the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinistas government in Nicaragua."