Deputy Chief of Mission

Mr. Jonathan S. Benton Deputy Chief of Mission

Mr. Benton arrived in Ireland on August 16, 2004 to take up his duties as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Dublin. He came directly from a one-year assignment at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.

Prior to that he served for four years in Washington as an Office Director and Deputy Director, in two separate offices, dealing with the Balkans and the former Soviet Union. His last overseas assignment was at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Russia, where he was responsible for arms control and European security issues.

A 25-year veteran of the Foreign Service, Mr. Benton has also served in Romania, Norway and Finland, and worked on Balkan affairs, NATO affairs, Soviet Union affairs, arms control, international labor, conflict resolution, post-conflict reconstruction, and counterterrorism. He was Executive Secretary of the 1992 U.S. delegation to the CSCE (OSCE) in Helsinki and a member of the U.S. delegation to the Rambouillet Peace talks (on Kosovo) in 1999.

Mr. Benton has supported over a dozen meetings and overseas visits by U.S. Presidents, from 1982 to the present, and has served as an assistant to Assistant Secretary of State Richard Burt (1983-1984), Secretary of State George Shultz (1984-1986) and U.S. Senator Jim Jeffords (1994-1995). He is the recipient of the American Foreign Service Association’s Rifkin award, and numerous individual and group awards from the State Department. He has varying degrees of fluency in Russian, Romanian, Norwegian and German.

Prior to joining the Foreign Service, Mr. Benton worked briefly in the retail and telecommunications fields, as well as for author Herman Wouk.

Mr. Benton was born in Buffalo, New York and holds a BS degree from Georgetown University and an MS degree form the National Defense University. He is married to Anne Simmons-Benton of Dallas, Texas. They live in Ireland with their daughter and have two other children in the United States.