Adel Al-Jubeir

Adel al-Jubeir built his diplomatic career around Washington and communicating Saudi policy to American audiences. Born in al-Majmaah in 1962, he earned degrees at the University of North Texas and Georgetown University. He joined the Saudi diplomatic service in 1987 and became a special assistant to Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan. During the Gulf War he worked with the joint information bureau in Dhahran, which handled foreign reporters, and he later accompanied Saudi forces to Somalia. ^{1, 2, 3}

He served on the Gulf Cooperation Council delegation to the 1991 Madrid peace conference, directed the embassy's information and congressional affairs office, and advised Crown Prince Abdullah and then the royal court. After the September 11 attacks, he became a prominent public defender of the kingdom. He returned as ambassador in 2007 and remained until his appointment as foreign minister in 2015. ^{1, 3}

His ambassadorship included a thwarted assassination plot. In 2012 Manssor Arbabsiar pleaded guilty in the United States to conspiring with Iranian military officials to kill the Saudi ambassador; he received a sentence of twenty-five years in 2013. The plan had involved hiring a supposed cartel associate who was actually a confidential source for American law enforcement. ⁴

Al-Jubeir also presented Saudi arguments for the 2015 intervention in Yemen. On NBC's Meet the Press that March, he described the air campaign as a defense of Yemen's recognized government and said no decision on ground troops had been made. He subsequently served as foreign minister until 2018, then became minister of state for foreign affairs, with an additional appointment as climate envoy in 2022. ^{5, 1}