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The Cable goes inside the foreign policy machine, from Foggy Bottom to Turtle Bay, the White House to Embassy Row.

Dibble to replace Limbert as State Department Iran official

Philo L. Dibble, a former longtime State Department official, will return to Foggy Bottom this fall to take over the Iran portfolio following the departure of John Limbert. A State Department spokesman confirmed that Dibble is expected to start in September as the deputy assistant secretary of state (DAS) covering Iran in the Bureau of ...

By Josh Rogin

July 29, 2010, 12:51 PM

Philo L. Dibble, a former longtime State Department official, will return to Foggy Bottom this fall to take over the Iran portfolio following the departure of John Limbert.

Philo L. Dibble, a former longtime State Department official, will return to Foggy Bottom this fall to take over the Iran portfolio following the departure of John Limbert.

A State Department spokesman confirmed that Dibble is expected to start in September as the deputy assistant secretary of state (DAS) covering Iran in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (NEA). According to his State Department bio, he was previously a DAS in NEA from 2003 to 2005, although he didn’t deal with Iran specifically. In March 2005, he moved to the Bureau of International Organization Affairs to be the principal DAS until he left government for personal reasons.

A career Foreign Service officer, Dibble has also served as director of the Office of Northern Gulf Affairs, deputy director of the Office of Egyptian and North African Affairs, special assistant in the office of the under secretary of state for economic, business, and agricultural affairs, financial economist in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, and Lebanon desk officer.

Meanwhile, Limbert’s last day, after nine months in the job, is tomorrow. He told Barbara Slavin for an article in Foreign Policy that he had promised to return to his teaching post at the U.S. Naval Academy for the fall semester. But he did suggest that he wasn’t happy with the current state of U.S.-Iran diplomacy.

“Here’s the problem,” Limbert said. “For 30 years, careers were made both here and in Tehran by how nasty you could be to the other side and how creative you could be in being nasty to the other side. So if you’re going to change that, what happens if it doesn’t get some immediate result? It’s very easy to slip back into what you always have been doing.”

Josh Rogin covers national security and foreign policy and writes the daily Web column The Cable. His column appears bi-weekly in the print edition of The Washington Post. He can be reached for comments or tips at josh.rogin@foreignpolicy.com.

Previously, Josh covered defense and foreign policy as a staff writer for Congressional Quarterly, writing extensively on Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, U.S.-Asia relations, defense budgeting and appropriations, and the defense lobbying and contracting industries. Prior to that, he covered military modernization, cyber warfare, space, and missile defense for Federal Computer Week Magazine. He has also served as Pentagon Staff Reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading daily newspaper, in its Washington, D.C., bureau, where he reported on U.S.-Japan relations, Chinese military modernization, the North Korean nuclear crisis, and more.

A graduate of George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, Josh lived in Yokohama, Japan, and studied at Tokyo's Sophia University. He speaks conversational Japanese and has reported from the region. He has also worked at the House International Relations Committee, the Embassy of Japan, and the Brookings Institution.

Josh's reporting has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, CBS, ABC, NPR, WTOP, and several other outlets. He was a 2008-2009 National Press Foundation's Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellow, 2009 military reporting fellow with the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and the 2011 recipient of the InterAction Award for Excellence in International Reporting. He hails from Philadelphia and lives in Washington, D.C. Twitter: @joshrogin