By Don Murtha
After a career of 28 years with the U.S. Foreign Service, Mary Rose Brandt of Silverton said she believes the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya was the work of outsiders.
“The host country is required to provide protection against such attacks, but in this case there is no one in charge in Libya and since there was no one in charge this must have been engineered by outsiders, like Al-Qaeda,” Brandt said.
International rule normally requires that countries agree to protect the interests and property of the guest country.
“In Libya, there is no one to protect foreign interests and so the outside influence can take charge,” she said. In September, U.S. Ambassador Chris Steven and three other Americans were killed in Benghazi.
She speculated that Libyans who were supposed to guard the U.S. Ambassador abandoned their post and told the attackers where to find the Americans.
Brandt, 70, said the Americans had recently helped Libya rid their country of Moammar Kadafi, a despotic and violent dictator.
“You would have thought they would be grateful to the Americans, but because there is no one in charge they are under mob rule,” she said. “I should think some one should have warned the Americans there was trouble.”
Brandt was involved in one case where an embassy was attacked.
In October of 1989, a mob of Yugoslav refugees attacked the American Embassy in East Berlin after the communists closed the border between Yugoslavia and East Germany.
The Yugoslavs were hoping to get to the West through the embassy.
Brandt was consul general at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin at the time.
“We had steel shutters on the embassy. We could hear the local police outside chasing the rioters away,” she said.
Brandt’s interest in the Foreign Service was peaked when she was a student at Mount Angel Academy when her sister, Pat, urged her to look into a career.
“I wrote to Dean Rusk (then Secretary of State) to ask about joining the Foreign Service. I got a reply telling me all about the service and how to apply,” she said.
Brandt was raised on a dairy farm on James Street with her three sisters and her brother.
“When the Foreign Service security man came to interview me. I was in the barn helping with the milking,” she said.
After graduating from Portland State University in 1964 Brandt joined the Foreign Service. She speaks Polish, German, French and Latin.
After a training period in Arlington, Va., her first post was as a junior officer trainee in the U.S. Embassy in Lagos, Nigeria.
In Nigeria, she was assigned to escort an American ship hauling an oil rig. Her job was to assure the American crew was paid.
Later back in Lagos, another officer was assigned to the same job and asked if he could bring his wife.
“I told him I had done that assignment and he said to me, ‘You couldn’t have. That’s much too dangerous for a woman.’”
Brandt had read much about Poland and was intrigued by the country. When an opening came for a position in Poland, she asked for it. She spent four months in Arlington at the U.S. State Department language center learning to speak Polish.
From 1968 to 1971 she was a consular officer in the American Embassy in Warsaw, Poland.
Subsequently, she was assigned to embassies in Yugoslavia and again in Poland, this time as U.S. Consulate in Poznan, Poland.
In Poznan, she was officer in charge of the consulate and her duties also included administration and visas.
“It seemed everyone who applied for a visa had a cousin in Chicago,” she said.
In between assignments overseas, Brandt had duties in Washington D.C. and Arlington. She was at times on the staff of the Soviet and Eastern European Exchanges, the bureau of cultural affairs staff for Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania, refugee officer for Vietnamese and a State Department visa officer.
In 1987, Brandt was assigned to the East Berlin Embassy in the Soviet Sector as Consul General with a staff that included a vice consul and two assistants.
“We also had two East Germans working for us and we had to watch them all the time. We had to keep everything locked up at all times. We couldn’t trust them,” she said.
The Soviets had built the Berlin Wall around their sector because East Germans seeking freedom were constantly trying to flee to the West. The East Germans continued to try to get through despite the wall by any means, including by way of the American Embassy, she explained.
Events at the embassy were sometimes bizarre, she added.
The consulate had a reading room open to the East German public and occasionally readers would refuse to leave at closing time.
“They would say ‘asylum’ and we would tell them we could not give them asylum,” Brandt said. “They would stay on and sometimes we would put them up over night and put them out in the morning.”
Sometimes the “readers” were obstinate like an East German poet who protested against the Chinese incident at Tiananmen Square.
“Then he protested that the East German press wouldn’t print his poetry and he protested against this and that. He stayed on for a week before we got rid of him,” Brandt said.
There were occasional romances between citizens of the East and West. In one case, an American woman fell in love with an East German. They were married and eventually survived the red tape and were settled in New York.
“I got a call from her asking if the husband’s papers could be revoked. He beat her and abused her and she wanted to be rid of him. All he wanted from her, the woman said, was to go to America,” Brandt recalled.
Everyone was thrilled when the Berlin wall came down and there was a rush to get out of East Germany.
“It was wonderful to see the wall come down,” she said. “It was only two blocks from the embassy and I could see everything.”
“I hated the communists myself,” she said. “They operated on envy and fear.”
Despite her attitude toward the communists, Brandt said she preferred the European assignments.
“You always knew where you stood. You were always being watched and you always had to be careful what you said on the telephone and who you talked to,” she said.
In 1992, Brandt retired from the Foreign Service. Her last station was in the visa support office in Washington, D.C.
She now lives on the Century Family Farm where she was raised. She likes to volunteer and plays the flute in the Marion County Citizen’s Band.
Asked if she has gone back to the places where she served she said, “After I left the service, I decided to just come home.”
