Linguist With a Sense of Humor Holds the Fort for U.S. in Kuwait : Diplomacy: Ambassador Howell--on the point of leaving when Iraq invaded--leads a small group of trapped American diplomats.

W. Nathaniel Howell, the U.S. ambassador to Kuwait, had completed his three-year assignment in the Persian Gulf sheikdom and was hoping to get back home to Virginia before the month was out.

The Senate already had confirmed his successor, Edward W. Gnehm, and Howell--who had spent most of his 25-year Foreign Service career in the Arab world--needed only make final preparations and say a last round of goodbys before leaving for vacation and a new posting.

Instead, Howell found himself Friday trapped in occupied Kuwait, at the head of a small group of besieged American diplomats who remained at the U.S. Embassy in defiance of orders issued by the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

According to friends and associates, it is a challenge that Howell will handle with calmness and courage.

Nat Howell, as his friends call him, is a portly, bearded man of 50 years whose hair is apt to head in 70 directions at once. He speaks Arabic and French and has an immense intellect, often angering both Arabists and Zionists who tend to argue issues in the Middle East from positions based on emotions. His has the ability, friends say, to see humor in every situation.

“I remember Nat as a very sound, steady kind of fellow who was able to work in a crisis situation without getting flustered,” said Hermann Eilts, former U.S. ambassador to Egypt. “In the generation of diplomats after my own, he was considered one of the bright young comers.”

Howell was named ambassador to Kuwait by President Ronald Reagan in 1987. He arrived in Kuwait city in August that year, at a time when tankers were sailing through the Persian Gulf under the protection of American warships. He impressed Kuwaiti journalists by speaking in both Arabic and English upon his arrival.

“I am sure there is great opportunity for the development of relations between the two countries on the basis of understanding and mutual interests,” he told the reporters in his arrival remarks.

Before serving in Kuwait, Howell was the political adviser to the commander of the U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., a unit that oversaw the creation of the anti-terrorism Rapid Deployment Force and developed contingency plans for Middle East events that would require a military response.

“I think of Nat as being an unflappable kind of person,” said Nicholas A. Veliotes, former U.S. ambassador to Egypt. “He wasn’t one who worried whether what he did or said would affect his career. He was very outspoken.”

In 1983, for instance, while the State Department was devoting all its energy to negotiating a withdrawal of foreign forces from Lebanon, Howell was telling his superiors that Secretary of State George P. Shultz was wasting his time. Howell was proven right.

A native of Portsmouth, Va., Howell graduated with honors from the University of Virginia in 1961. He received his doctorate from the university in 1965, writing his thesis on Kurdish nationalism and the Soviet Union. While studying there under Prof. R. K. Ramazani, an Iranian-American who headed the School of Government and Foreign Affairs, Howell’s interest in the Middle East grew.

“Many of my graduate students were unclear what they wanted to do career-wise,” Ramazani said, “but the remarkable thing about Nat was that the future was always clear to him. From the very beginning, he said he wanted to serve his country in the Foreign Service.”

Howell’s first assignment was in Cairo in 1965, where he served as an assistant to the ambassador. Subsequent assignments took him to France, Belgium, Lebanon, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Algeria. He was a political adviser to U.S. officials at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Brussels and attended the National War College.

“Nat’s an activist,” said David Long, a colleague at the State Department. “He’s not intellectually arrogant or domineering, but he’s a dominant kind of person. He threatens a lot of people, just by the power of his intellect.

“I used to tell him that he would either get kicked out of the Foreign Service or rise to the top. I’m glad it was the latter. He’s the type of person you feel comfortable with being in charge during a crisis situation.”

On Thursday, Howell accompanied a 30-car convoy of Americans leaving Kuwait for the Iraqi border. He watched them drive on toward Baghdad and presumed safety, then got back into his car and returned to the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait city, where it was uncertain what dangers Iraq’s demand to close the facility would bring.