Robert B Oakley

Ambassadorships in difficult places like Zaire and Pakistan, as well as in Somalia a decade before the hostage episode, helped prepare Mr. Oakley for his biggest challenge: securing, as a special presidential envoy, the pilot’s release after Somalis shot down two Black Hawk helicopters in a raid by Army Rangers seeking to seize lieutenants of a Somali warlord in Mogadishu, the capital. American forces were in Somalia to protect a United Nations famine-relief mission amid a vicious civil war. In the fighting, 18 Americans were killed and 75 wounded, and video images of Somalis dragging American bodies through the streets of Mogadishu outraged the American public. President Bill Clinton ordered Mr. Oakley to make no concessions in negotiating for the pilot’s release with Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid, the leader of a dominant Somali faction. Mr. Oakley was accordingly unequivocal in threatening military retaliation if Mr. Durant was not freed. After two days of negotiations, General Aidid agreed to release the pilot, as well as a captured Nigerian soldier, and to return the American bodies. Robert Bigger Oakley was born in Dallas on March 12, 1931, and he grew up in Shreveport, La., where his father was an electrical engineer for a utility. He graduated from South Kent School, a boarding school in Connecticut, and then from Princeton with a degree in philosophy and history. He became a Navy intelligence officer in Japan, a job that kindled his passion for international affairs, his wife said. Mr. Oakley met her, as Phyllis Elliott, in Khartoum, Sudan, where he had been assigned to the United States Embassy and where she was a Foreign Service officer. They married in 1958. She resigned from the Foreign Service because marriage between officers was forbidden then. She returned to the service in 1974, when the rules changed. In addition to his wife, Mr. Oakley is survived by his daughter, Mary Kress; his son, Thomas; and five grandchildren.