Abraham Accords

RETIRED TWO-STAR U.S. ARMY GENERAL MIGUEL CORREA

How a two-star U.S. general from Puerto Rico earned the trust of the Emiratis to later help broker the Abraham Accords — and name it too.

It was in the UAE, where he was stationed for two years as a defense attaché, that Correa made the connections that would prove so fruitful to the negotiations between Israel, the UAE and the United States.

But the seeds for his involvement in the backchannel talks were planted decades earlier, during a childhood that took him from a city near San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he was called a “saltwater Mexican” when he hung out with other Spanish-speaking kids; from the arid desert heat of Kuwait, where Correa first learned Arabic and got to know people from across the Arab world, to the sticky humidity of South Florida, where, as a high school student, he met a Jewish person for the first time.