Georgia’s current President Salome Zourabichvili, who yesterday vetoed the legislation to expose foreign control of operations inside Georgia, forcing NGOs with more than 20% foreign funding to register as foreign agents, has quite a profile. Her grandfather was the head of the Security Service in Georgia prior to the family’s emigration in 1921. Her parents were Georgian political refugees. She was born in Paris and served in France’s diplomatic service for three decades, including her last official posting, in 2003-2004, as France’s ambassador to Georgia. She moved from that position in 2004 to then becoming the Foreign Minister of Georgia. Her time in Georgia overlapped the early color revolution, the 2003/4 “Rose Revolution.”
Her Wikipedia page reports that she was trained at Columbia University in 1972/3 by none other than Zbigniew Brzezinski, specifically in the areas of Soviet politics and Cold War diplomacy. She’s had two marriages, first to a World Bank economist and then to a Georgian political refugee.
She rose to become Second Adviser to the French Embassy in Chad in 1989-92, the time when France supported the coup d’état run by Idriss Deby. Then in 1992, she was appointed First Secretary to the Permanent Mission of France to NATO. In 2001 she became director of International and Strategic Affairs at the General Secretariat of National Defense and worked at NATO’s Bureau of Strategic Affairs. (And, sometime around 2003, she was also the Coordinator of the Panel of Experts assisting the UN Security Council’s Iran Sanctions Committee.)
