Chapter 2
“If America had a consul at Urga … it would be a most helpful factor in the development of a wonderful country.”
The establishment of formal diplomatic ties between Mongolia and the United States on January 27, 1987, introduced a new chapter in the US-Mongolian encounter, one that was given further impetus with Mongolia’s “decision for democracy” during the tumultuous and historic events of 1990 and afterwards. Over the past quarter century, these diplomatic ties have also become the foundation and springboard for a growing network of relationships in at least five other main areas—democratic exchanges; development assistance; commercial opportunity; security cooperation; and people-to-people engagement.
Initial diplomatic contacts between the United States and Mongolia were first launched during the early 1900s. However, it would take many decades for formal diplomatic ties to be officially established. Political developments within the United States played a partial role in preventing this from happening. Additionally, there were times when efforts by the United States to open relations with Mongolia were not reciprocated on the Mongolian side, usually because of pressure from the Soviet Union. In retrospect, synchronizing diplomatic overtures between the two countries proved to be an unexpectedly difficult task.
Mongolia marks 1911 as the date of its official proclamation of independence. According to documents maintained in the Mongolian National Archives, by November 1912 the new government headed by the Bogd Khan sent letters to several countries, including France, Germany, Belgium, Japan, Denmark, the Netherlands, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Among other things, the letters announced Mongolian independence to the leading nations of the world while also requesting “friendly cooperation.”
Records from that time further suggest that in 1914 the Bogd Khan’s government wrote to the United States legation in Peking, requesting that a consulate be opened in Urga, as Ulaanbaatar was then known. Four years later, A. W. Ferrin—the US trade envoy in China—recommended to Washington that the United States do exactly that, further suggesting in his memorable turn of phrase that “if America had a consul at Urga … it would be a most helpful factor in the development of a wonderful country.”
In 1919, Commercial Attaché Julean Arnold made a similar recommendation. Highlighting economic opportunities in particular, Arnold placed Mongolia’s annual exports at around $15 million and argued, “It is the psychological moment for the inauguration of American activity in Mongolia.” When Washington finally replied on the question of a US consulate in Urga, it resorted to the classic language of bureaucratic obfuscation everywhere, rejecting any immediate steps while not necessarily closing the door permanently: “It is not deemed practicable to establish an office at the present time.”
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Although formal recognition of an independent Mongolia was still more than half a century away, during the early 1920s the United States did open a consulate in the Inner Mongolian city of Kalgan, known today in China as Zhangjiakou. The purpose was to track political developments in Outer Mongolia, promote trade, and protect the interests of the handful of American citizens then living in both Inner and Outer Mongolia.
Located 135 miles northwest of Beijing and 600 miles southeast of Urga, Kalgan was a trading center with a population of 30,000, including many ethnic Mongols. The completion of a rail line from Peking to Kalgan in October 1909 had given the city added importance. Several companies with American connections—including Standard Oil, the British-American Tobacco Company, and the Mongolian Trade Company—all had American staff working out of Kalgan who often visited Mongolia to advance their business interests. Enterprising American business executives also pioneered an early automobile route connecting Kalgan with Urga. At one point, as many as 15 American cars—a combination of rugged Fords and dependable Dodges—plied the Kalgan-Urga route, providing a useful taxi service for both goods and passengers across the Gobi Desert.
Samuel Sokobin (1893–1986) was the first US consular official assigned to Kalgan, serving initially as interim consul and then as consul. Occasionally, he also visited Urga, providing the State Department in Washington with a firsthand perspective on people and events in a rapidly changing Outer Mongolia, one that for a brief time was emerging as an unlikely “battleground” for both White Russians and Bolsheviks fighting for supremacy across the vastness of the Russian Empire.
During this period of violence and instability, Mongolia witnessed a number of dramatic events outside the scope of any discussion on US-Mongolian relations. Among the most notable were the final expulsion of the remaining Chinese troops garrisoned in Mongolia and the brief but devastating rule of a savage and enigmatic character known as the “Mad Baron,” who for a time provided White Russians with the illusory hope that they might yet defeat the Bolsheviks.
The Mad Baron’s full name was Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg, and he was born to Baltic German parents in Austria in 1895. He later attended military school in St. Petersburg, served in a Cossack regiment in eastern Siberia, and first visited Mongolia when he was briefly assigned to help guard the Russian Consulate in the important city of Hovd in western Mongolia prior to the onset of World War I. Later, amidst the chaos of the Bolshevik Revolution, he simultaneously dreamed of restoring both the Romanov dynasty and the Mongol Empire. Increasingly viewed as unstable if not demented, the “Mad Baron” succeeded in expelling the Chinese from Urga, making the city his base during the early weeks of 1921. However, his ruthless reign was short-lived. In August 1921 he was captured by the Bolsheviks in north-central Mongolia; and in September 1921 he was tried and executed across the border in Siberia.
Yet, even in the uncertainty that marked so much of the early 1920s, there were opportunities for American commercial activity (as reflected in the entrepreneurship of the Swedish-American businessman and former missionary Frans Larson); scientific enquiry (as Roy Chapman Andrews demonstrated in his various expeditions to the Gobi); and tourism (as suggested by the travel writing of Harry Franck). For their part, Mongolians consciously reached out to the wider world, typically welcoming ties with foreigners of any type and especially those from Europe and North America, who were perceived to provide important “balance” at a time when Mongolia, while ending its ties with China, was increasingly falling within the Soviet orbit.
Lacking any formal presence in Mongolia, the United States largely watched events unfold from a distance. Officially, the doors of the new American Consulate in Kalgan, housed in a building leased from Frans Larson, first opened on April 1, 1921. As the first American consul in Kalgan, Sokobin sent periodic reports to his superiors in Peking that on occasion touched on both political developments and commercial opportunities in Outer Mongolia.
In addition, Sokobin’s tenure at Kalgan as well as that of his two successors—Edwin Stanton and Lewis Clark—provided important opportunities for occasional contact with senior Mongolian officials, contact that was maintained even in the absence of formal diplomatic ties or an exchange of ambassadors. In August 1921, the same month in which the Bolsheviks finally captured the “Mad Baron,” Sokobin drove across the Gobi Desert in his initial foray to Urga and got lost for two days before eventually finding his way to Mongolia’s capital city. He stayed in Urga for a month, sufficient time to provide useful reporting on political and economic developments as early Mongolian nationalists sought to strengthen and develop diplomatic and trade relations with the rest of the world beyond Russia and China.
On various occasions, Sokobin met with Prime Minister Dogsomyn Bodoo and several Mongolian cabinet ministers, including modern Mongolia’s “founding father,” Sukhbaatar, then serving as minister of war. At times, Frans Larson accompanied him as a translator. According to contemporary accounts, Bodoo expressed hope that “the American government would be the first to recognize the new, independent state of Mongolia.” Subsequently, Bodoo sent a note “proposing the establishment of friendly relations between the two countries, especially trade relations.” The prime minister also requested a “treaty,” “a resident ambassador,” and “commercial relations,” all meant to “increase benefits to both countries.” In November 1921, in an article Bodoo wrote for The Nation entitled “Mongolia Speaks to the World,” he expounded on similar themes, including the case for establishing friendly ties between the United States and Mongolia.
In the end, Bodoo’s term as prime minister proved to be brief. Born in 1885, he spoke Mongolian, Tibetan, Manchu, and Chinese and had once served as a lama, an occupation the Soviets deemed reprehensible. Later he worked as a translator at the Russian consulate in Urga before embarking on a revolutionary path that eventually led him to help found the Mongolian People’s Party and, in 1920, travel to the Soviet Union to discuss future plans for the country under Soviet guardianship. He served as prime minister of Mongolia from April 1921 until January 1922, when he asked to be relieved of his responsibilities, ostensibly for health reasons. Several months after that, he was arrested and then executed.
Sokobin visited Urga at least four times during his tenure as head of the American consulate in Kalgan during the early 1920s, developing a useful network of contacts, both Mongolian and foreign. However, the Soviets were highly suspicious of his efforts, and the hoped-for rapid expansion in commercial opportunities involving American companies never materialized.
The fate of Soliin Danzan, a key early player in the Mongolian Revolution who briefly served as minister of finance, illustrates the formidable hurdles that prevented even commercial ties from developing. At one point, Danzan had represented the American-Mongolian automobile company in Urga. Reportedly, he owned private houses and cars—and a Harley Davidson motorcycle given to him by the American businessman W. Holman. An early advocate of capitalism in the Mongolian context, he was executed in 1924 as the revolution turned once more on one of its early proponents and claimed yet another victim. As with Prime Minister Bodoo, the lesson was obvious enough: working with Americans or, for that matter, any other foreigners, might easily prove fatal.
The complete consolidation of the Soviet hold in Mongolia effectively ended any hope of expanded trade relations, at least for American business. On September 30, 1927, the small US consulate in Kalgan finally closed down, having been in place for little more than six years. With the closure of the consulate, the US “window” on Outer Mongolia was also shut tight, ushering in a period of long diplomatic silence in which the United States lacked not only an official presence in Mongolia but also the insights provided by even the occasional diplomatic visitor.
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Few Americans visited Mongolia during most of the 1930s and for much of the early 1940s, a period that included almost complete disengagement by China combined with an ever-stronger Soviet presence. These were dark days for Mongolia, as Stalin exerted an increasingly harsh hand and the Soviet impact became more and more evident, even in remote areas of the countryside.
On the American side, there was little knowledge of what was happening domestically within Mongolia or about the pogroms launched by Stalin that decimated Mongolia’s traditional Buddhist community, destroyed hundreds of monasteries, and resulted in the deaths of many thousands of Mongolian lamas, intellectuals, military officials, and party cadres, some of whom were accused of being “spies” for various foreign powers, most notably Japan.
Even the battle of Khalkin Gol, which took place in the summer of 1939 along Mongolia’s eastern border with Manchuria, remained largely unnoticed in the United States, despite the potentially far-reaching and even historic implications that it set in motion. The battle pitted a combined Mongolian-Soviet force led by General (later Marshal) Zhukov against a large Japanese army seeking to expand Japan’s own empire into Mongolia and perhaps Siberia. The battle itself began with an initial skirmish in May 1939 and lasted until August 1939, eventually involving airplanes and tanks as well as cavalry on horseback.
By some accounts, the overwhelming Japanese defeat at this desolate and remote site led Japan to reorient its strategic perspective away from Northeast Asia and toward Southeast Asia, in turn contributing to its decision to invade Burma, Malaya, Singapore, French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines—and, ultimately, to protect its far eastern flank and keep the United States at bay, even contributing to Japan’s decision to attack Pearl Harbor. Though such possibilities have been ignored in most history books for years, Antony Beevor’s popular one-volume Second World War, published in 2012, does in fact recognize this connection. Beevor departs from the more usual opening references to Germany’s invasion of Poland in August 1939 and instead starts his narrative by describing the devastating Japanese defeat at the hands of the Soviets and Mongolians at Khalkin Gol, using the battle as a platform to help shed light on the geopolitics of Europe as well as Asia.
More than 70 years later, the battle site at Kalkhin Gol on Mongolia’s eastern border with China remains an isolated and rarely visited place, marked only by the occasional memorial or small cemetery stretching across the landscape. Even now, it is possible to explore the site and see the remnants of war, including rusting helmets, decaying hand grenades, corroding ration tins, crumbling shoes, and even the whitened bones of the fallen. The shallow remains of trenches and shell holes on the steppe are also visible, serving as reminders of the ferocity of the conflict. As one contemporary Mongolian marker—placed next to the remains of a bomb crater—poignantly notes, “Even now, the wounds of war have not completely healed.”
While most of the more than 57,000 troops that Zhukov commanded at Khalkin Gol were Soviet, some 3,000 Mongolian soldiers also participated, drawing special praise for their horsemanship. Colonel (later General) Lkhagvasuren, aged 27 at the time, became the heroic face of battle for Mongolia, reminding Mongolians in subsequent generations of the honorable part that their ancestors played in the victory. During a trip to Arkhanghai in central Mongolia in February 2012 to celebrate Tsagaan Sar (the traditional Mongolian New Year), I met a 102-year-old veteran of Khalkin Gol being looked after by his family, blind but otherwise in good health, one of the few soldiers from that era who still survive. A statue of a youthful Lkhagvasuren, in uniform with a sword at his side, has also been erected in Ulaanbaatar, near the Selbe River at the end of Denver Street, a few hundred yards from where the US Embassy now stands.
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World War II and the period that followed offered a potential new opportunity for the United States and Mongolia to engage on the diplomatic front. Remarkably, it was Mike Mansfield (1903–2001), then a young congressman and later a revered senior statesman, who was one of the first to raise the issue of US recognition.
Mansfield, though born in New York, was raised, educated, and taught for a decade in Montana, the US state said to most resemble Mongolia in terms of its small population and vast, impressive landscapes. Mansfield himself never visited Mongolia, but from a distance he became a firm champion of it. Years later, as US ambassador to Japan, he once again had an opportunity to promote his goal of recognizing Mongolia as an independent state and establishing diplomatic relations between Mongolia and the United States.
Mansfield publicly endorsed US recognition of Mongolia as an independent state in the Congress on at least two occasions, first in the early 1940s as a member of the House of Representatives and again, some two decades later, as a senator. On the latter occasion, he referred to Harrison Salisbury’s reporting in the New York Times and emphasized that Mongolia was neither a province of the Soviet Union nor a part of China.
Mansfield’s speech on the floor of the Senate in 1960 became a catalyst for subsequent discussion of recognition in the early days of the Kennedy administration. Pushback came from other politicians and some sections of the media, which expressed skepticism and argued against it. As a result, efforts to extend US recognition of Mongolia as an independent state once again foundered and petered out.
The United States did ultimately acquiesce to Mongolia’s successful effort, under Soviet patronage, to join the United Nations in October 1961, abstaining on the matter rather than voting against it. Shortly thereafter, a German-born Jewish realtor named Walter Sheldon assisted Mongolia in obtaining property in which to house its Mission to the United Nations. Having worked as a businessman in Inner Mongolia during the 1920s, he was especially sensitive as well as sympathetic to Mongolian requirements and was ultimately successful in arranging not only the purchase of a building in New York City but also a summer property on Long Island.
For the early Mongolian diplomats assigned to the United Nations, life in New York provided a firsthand look at a country that for them had been mostly a mystery. Recalling a conversation with one of those early diplomats, Erdenechuluun, former US ambassador to Mongolia Al La Porta notes that many Mongolians had been “propagandized” into believing that the United States was an “armed camp” that was “dedicated to make war on the USSR.”
As a USAID officer in Mongolia during the early 2000s, I recall meeting Mongolians whose parents had worked at the Mongolian Mission to the United Nations and who had spent part of their childhoods in New York, attending Russian schools and spending vacations on the Mongolian-owned summer facility on Long Island. According to their accounts, they lived physically in the United States but remained very much apart from it, mostly viewing New York and its surrounding areas as “outsiders.” They remembered being intrigued by the United States as children, while remaining largely insulated from it.
Personal experience ultimately did result in changed perspectives on the part of at least some Mongolians, despite limited travel opportunities. For example, reciprocal travel restrictions similar to those imposed on the Soviet Union meant that Mongolian diplomats assigned to the United Nations were limited to New York City and their Long Island compound. Despite these restrictions, some Mongolian diplomats began to question the heavy-handed guidance from Moscow and to develop a different and more independent perspective on what the United States had to offer, both as an example and as a diplomatic player within the wider international community.
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In January 1963, the United Kingdom became the first Western European country to officially recognize Mongolia and open an embassy in Ulaanbaatar. Anticipating that US recognition as well as the formal establishment of diplomatic relations might follow within the next few years, the Department of State at about the same time sent two young Foreign Service officers—Curtis Kamman (later US ambassador to Chile, Bolivia, and Colombia) and J. Stapleton Roy (later US ambassador to Singapore, China, and Indonesia)—to study Mongolian at the University of Washington in Seattle. Not long afterwards, Kamman traveled to Ulaanbaatar to participate in a United Nations meeting concerned with women’s issues.
France was the next Western country to establish ties with Mongolia when it extended recognition and opened diplomatic relations in April 1965, followed thereafter by a concerted effort on the part of other Western countries to do likewise. However, despite occasional overtures from both Mongolia and the United States throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, the time did not yet appear ripe to recognize Mongolia as an independent state, formalize a diplomatic relationship, and exchange ambassadors.
Partly, this was because the United States continued to maintain strong ties with the Nationalist Chinese in Taipei, which claimed Mongolia as part of their territory, in contrast to the Communist Chinese in Beijing, who had recognized Mongolian independence in 1946. As Richard Solomon, a former US assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, recalled years later, President Kennedy in 1962 had “floated the idea of recognizing Mongolia.” However, “Chiang Kai-shek shot the idea down because he considered Outer Mongolia as Chinese turf.”
For their part, outreach by Mongolian authorities to the United States occasionally included pro forma contact with the American Communist Party. For example, a document in the Mongolian National Archives dated September 9, 1966, extends an invitation from the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP) to Gus Hall, head of the United States Communist Party, to visit Mongolia. Seven years later, in 1973, James Jackson, a member of the US Communist Party did in fact travel to Ulaanbaatar, where he met with Prime Minister Tsedenbal.
Media interest was also part of the mix. Among other things, this included interviews by United Press International (UPI) correspondent Albert Axelbank with Tsedenbal and Deputy Foreign Minister Dugersuren in spring 1968; an interview by New York Times correspondent C. L. Sulzberger in March 1971 with Prime Minister Tsedenbal; and an interview by Time reporter David Aikman with Foreign Minister Rinchin in October 1971. These media contacts, in particular, helped renew awareness about Mongolia among American officials while also giving the American public important, if brief, glimpses into Mongolia, which still seemed a distant place.
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As the end of the Vietnam War approached, the opportunity for the United States and Mongolia to recognize Mongolia, establish diplomatic relations, and exchange ambassadors seemed to gain new momentum. Reflecting renewed optimism on the part of the United States, another two young Foreign Service officers—William A. Brown (later US ambassador to Thailand and Israel) and Alynn Nathanson—were sent to study Mongolian, this time with Owen Lattimore at Leeds University in England. As former senior US diplomat Walter L. Cutler later recalled, “We produced a Mongolian-speaking Foreign Service officer but with no place to go.”
In spring 1973, American and Mongolian diplomats met several times in New York to discuss possibilities, hoping to prepare the groundwork for eventual recognition. However, just when it seemed that progress was being made, the Soviet Union made it clear that it would not approve such a step, causing yet another initiative to founder. Despite a concrete expression of interest on the part of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to visit Mongolia and rumors that President Nixon himself was contemplating such a trip, the effort lost traction, leading to several more years of frustrating inaction.
US attempts during the Carter administration to renew the discussion on recognition and the establishment of diplomatic relations also appeared to make little or no headway, despite the fact that President Carter told then Foreign Minister Dugersuren pointblank at a dinner for the heads of Asian delegations in New York, “We are ready to establish full diplomatic relations with Mongolia.” Just as the United States had been reluctant to establish relations during the 1950s and early 1960s for its own reasons, now it was Mongolia—with guidance from the Soviet Union—that seemed determined to slow things down and postpone the inevitable.
By the mid-1980s, nearly 100 countries had recognized Mongolian independence and established diplomatic relations—but the United States was still not listed among them. Nonetheless, American journalists such as Seymour Topping from the New York Times occasionally visited Mongolia, prompting further discussion as to why normal relations had not yet been established.
Lack of a US presence also did not stand in the way of visits by the occasional tourist or big-game hunter, not to mention scholars and even diplomats. For example, in September 1984 Donald Johnson—then first secretary at the US embassy in Beijing and several years later the third US ambassador to Mongolia—visited Ulaanbaatar, meeting with Mongolian academics and officials at the Foreign Ministry.
While American journalists occasionally made forays into Mongolia, a handful of American scholars found opportunities to conduct research and offer perspectives of their own. Robert Rupen, for one, first at Stanford and later at the University of North Carolina, produced two books, Mongols of the Twentieth Century and The Mongolian People’s Republic. While condemned by communist authorities in Ulaanbaatar during the Soviet era, in retrospect both books represent a useful contribution to scholarship on Mongolia in English, a commendable achievement given the difficult circumstances in which the required research had to be carried out.
In October 1985, Robert Scalapino of Berkeley—one of his generation’s most prominent American scholars on Asia—led a study trip to Mongolia along with other American academics. Meeting with Chairman Batmonkh in Ulaanbaatar, Scalapino took the opportunity to highlight the importance of formal diplomatic ties between the United States and Mongolia.
The rapid changes stemming from glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union provided a new opportunity for dialogue as well as new grounds for hope on the diplomatic front, despite the deep frustrations of the past. About this time US Foreign Service officer Curtis Kamman—by now head of the US interests section in Cuba—attended an exhibition sponsored by the Mongolian embassy in Havana. Apparently, some elements of the discussion that ensued were later reported back to Foreign Ministry authorities in Ulaanbaatar. At about the same time, discussions were also beginning to take place in Tokyo that would eventually help realize the long-standing goal of finalizing formal diplomatic ties between Mongolia and the United States.
Former Senator Mike Mansfield was by then US ambassador to Japan and a senior US statesman perceived in Ulaanbaatar as a sympathetic “friend” of Mongolia. Mansfield played a role in the unfolding diplomatic drama, which also involved Ravdan Bold, then a second secretary at the Mongolian embassy in Tokyo and later Mongolian ambassador to the United States.
Alicia Campi, at that time a young American diplomat who spoke some Mongolian and was working in the visa section of the US embassy in Tokyo, took a personal interest in the process, as viewed from her vantage point in Japan. Years later, she co-authored with R. Baasan a book about US-Mongolian relations during the twentieth century, published in 2009 under the title The Impact of China and Russia on United States Mongolian Political Relations in the Twentieth Century, that gave a detailed and indispensable account of the Mongolian quest for recognition, based on archival research conducted in both the United States and Mongolia.
According to Campi, starting in the fall of 1985 and continuing for at least a year, she and Bold occasionally met at downtown restaurants, coffee shops, and even Campi’s own apartment on the US embassy compound in Tokyo. Reports from these meetings were shared with colleagues in Washington and with the US embassy in Beijing. For his part, Donald Johnson on his own initiative embarked on another long train trip from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar to explore the situation in Mongolia for a second time.
During his week at the Ulaanbaatar Hotel, conveniently located close to the Mongolian Foreign Ministry, Johnson eventually managed to meet with Davaagiiv, an English-speaking Mongolian official who later became his country’s second ambassador to the United States. Yet the meeting was not successful, and subsequent reporting from the US embassy in Beijing to both Washington and Tokyo questioned the sincerity of Mongolia’s commitment and its willingness to establish diplomatic ties with the United States anytime soon.
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Despite these disappointments, the long journey toward recognition, launched decades earlier when the first American officials began to write about Mongolia, to visit Urga, and to recommend that the State Department recognize the independent state of Mongolia and establish a diplomatic presence there, was finally gaining an irreversible momentum. Following interaction between Campi and Bold in Tokyo and Johnson’s two visits to Ulaanbaatar from Beijing, contact was established in New York between Ambassador Vernon Walters at the United States Mission to the UN and Ambassador Nyamdoo at the Mongolian Mission to the UN. Increasingly, there were also sympathetic go-ahead signals from President Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Shevardnadze in Moscow.
One important milestone was the meeting in New York on December 12, 1986, between Ambassador Nyamdoo and US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia J. Stapleton Roy—the same Foreign Service officer who, almost a quarter century earlier, had spent a year studying Mongolian at the University of Washington in Seattle and had once thought he might eventually be posted in Ulaanbaatar. On this occasion, the US side passed on to the Mongolians a draft document outlining a framework for moving quickly on recognition and the establishment of diplomatic relations. A few days later, the Mongolian side returned the document with comments of their own.
Negotiations between the two sides continued into the early days of January 1987, and any lingering issues were quickly resolved. By mutual agreement, a date was also selected to mark the declaration of US recognition of Mongolia and the formal establishment of diplomatic relations between Mongolia and the United States: January 27, 1987.
Depending on the source, the United States became either the 100th or 101st country to recognize Mongolia. Secretary of State George P. Shultz made the official announcement for the United States. He also signed the relevant documents for the American side, even as Ambassador Nyamdoo signed for Mongolia.
Diplomats from both countries attended the small State Department ceremony held in the Treaty Room in Washington D.C., along with two private citizens who had worked so hard to promote relations over the years—John Gombojab Hangin, president of the Mongolian Society, who had emigrated to the United States from Inner Mongolia during the late 1940s; and Walter Sheldon, the far-sighted realtor who had helped Mongolia to locate property for its initial diplomatic presence in New York as a member of the United Nations more than 25 years earlier.
By coincidence, Joseph Lake—later the first US resident ambassador in Ulaanbaatar—was one of a small number of Foreign Service officers who attended the brief State Department ceremony. “I went to the secretary’s office to work in the Operations Center in January 1987,” he later recalled, and noted:
Immediately after I arrived, the Mongolian ambassador to the UN and Secretary Shultz signed the agreement establishing diplomatic relations between the United States and Mongolia. I went out of historical curiosity as much as anything else, little realizing how relevant this would be in terms of my own personal future.
According to Lake, the next big challenge involved figuring out how to fund a new embassy in Ulaanbaatar at a time of severe budget constraints that were threatening the closure of consular posts in other countries. “The decision was made to fund it out of the hide of the existing East Asia Bureau on a real shoestring,” he says, and adds: “I believe that 90 percent of the people who worked on it thought that this was a fundamental mistake.”
Former US Ambassador to Mongolia Al La Porta—at the time serving in the Office of Management Planning with Under Secretary Ronald Spiers—amplified further on some of the bureaucratic in-fighting that made it difficult to contemplate opening a new embassy at a time when the State Department was dealing with its latest budget crisis. According to his account, it was Secretary of State Shultz who played an important role in “making the decision to cut through the bureaucratic and political fog on both sides.” In La Porta’s view, even at this late date there was opposition from some quarters, largely of a bureaucratic and administrative nature, that still required intervention by the secretary of state to overcome.
Back in Tokyo, Campi reports, when she and Bold heard that diplomatic relations had finally been established between the United States and Mongolia, they celebrated over “a steak dinner with champagne and cognac to toast the happy occasion.”
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Ambassador Nyamdoo moved from New York to Washington soon after, becoming Mongolia’s first ambassador to the United States. Initially working out of an apartment building, Mongolia eventually turned a conveniently located former bank building on M Street in Georgetown into its embassy, a highly visible site where it remains to this day. The Mongolian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also bought an impressive residence for its ambassador in Potomac, Maryland.
Despite budget constraints that eventually resulted in the closure of several US consulates elsewhere, the US State Department moved forward with plans to establish an embassy in Ulaanbaatar. As Stapleton Roy noted in a conversation with a New York Times reporter at the time, Mongolia had “always been a place of fascination for Americans.”
In early February 1987—only days after the signing ceremony in Washington—Stephen Young, a junior officer designated as one of the “Asia watchers” at the American embassy in Moscow (and later US ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, director of the American Institute in Taiwan, and consul general in Hong Kong) was dispatched to explore the situation on the ground in Ulaanbaatar, accompanied by Tom Hanson, a fellow Foreign Service officer. The two of them held meetings at the British, Japanese, Chinese, and Soviet embassies. Perhaps not surprisingly, their final report highlighted some of the enormous challenges involved in opening a year-round embassy in “the world’s coldest capital” and expressed some skepticism as to whether the idea would even work.
In March 1987, Richard Williams, director of the State Department’s Office of Chinese and Mongolian Affairs, made the first visit by a senior US official to Mongolia following the establishment of diplomatic relations, meeting with Foreign Ministry officials and others in Ulaanbaatar. That summer a second US Foreign Service officer carried out further discussions, staying for several weeks at the Ulaanbaatar Hotel, the only housing then available. As Williams recalls:
Our first concern following 1987 diplomatic recognition was basic—where would we work and live? Housing was so tight in the Ulaanbaatar of that era that for a long time there was no clear answer. At last, in the spring of 1988, we were able to open our first embassy when the authorities found us four 400-square-foot apartments in a building ordinarily reserved for other embassy drivers and cooks.
We assigned two young Foreign Service officers, Steve Mann (later US ambassador to Turkmenistan) and Victoria Nuland (later US ambassador to NATO), to go out for the late spring and summer. They stayed in the upstairs flat, and the embassy office took up one of the two downstairs. That left the fourth little apartment as ‘The Residence’—not only of the ambassador but of anybody else who managed to visit. Its unique endearing feature, unmatched elsewhere in the world, was the cow in the grassy yard outside who regularly wandered up to the window to stare in, chewing its cud in bovine amazement at the weird-looking foreigners.
On April 17, 1988, Steve Mann and Victoria Nuland transmitted cable Ulaanbaatar Number One, announcing, “Embassy Ulaanbaatar is open.” Sent via Beijing at exactly 0503 hours “Zulu time,” the cable reads as follows:
1. Arrived Ulaanbaatar 1050L April 17, assumed charge. Embassy Ulaanbaatar is open.
2. Until leased quarters are ready, Political-Economic-Officer Victoria Nuland and I will operate from the Hotel Ulaanbatar.
3. Cable traffic for Ulaanbaatar should be routed to Embassy Beijing. Unclassified traffic of priority precedence or higher will be relayed to Ulaanbaatar via telex from Beijing.
In fact, in the early days telex served as the main communications “lifeline” for the United States embassy in Ulaanbaatar. In one especially amusing early incident, the “Embassy of the US” was briefly confused with the “Embassy of the USSR,” resulting in the following telex to Washington:
At approximately 11:00 AM … we rcvd a phone call at this office from the USSR Embassy in UB saying that they had rcvd a commercial cable delivered to them by the Post Office which they suspected was for us. On pickup from the USSR Embassy we discovered it was addressed to “US Embassy Ulaanbaatar” but apparently the Post Office made no distinction between “US” and “USSR” when sorting for delivery.
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Following Senate confirmation hearings and a July presidential appointment as the first nonresident American ambassador to Mongolia, Richard Williams presented his credentials to Chairman Batmonkh in September 1988.
Some days later, Williams hosted a visit by US ambassador to the United Nations Vernon Walters, who had worked with Mongolian diplomats in New York to help prepare the groundwork for recognition and the establishment of diplomatic relations. Shortly thereafter, Williams, Mann, and Nuland all returned to Washington. Not until 1989, when more commodious housing became available, was the embassy finally staffed year-round.
In June 1989, Chargé Michael Senko and Theodore Nist arrived in Ulaanbaatar with their families, marking the start of regular two-year assignments in Mongolia for US Foreign Service officers volunteering to serve in what seemed like a cold, remote, and isolated part of the world. They were briefly joined by another Foreign Service officer—Alicia Campi, previously posted in Tokyo—who arrived to study Mongolian, undertake various public affairs assignments, and explore initial possibilities for what eventually became a long-term Peace Corps presence in Mongolia.
Photograph albums that are still maintained at the US embassy in Ulaanbaatar record a number of landmark early events, including the presentation of credentials by Ambassador Richard Williams and the unveiling of the first embassy plaque, both of which occurred in 1988.
At about the same time that Senko and Nist arrived in the summer of 1989, Luvsanjav was hired as the first US embassy employee from Mongolia. Another early Mongolian employee, Duinkerjav, with prior experience at the Mongolian UN Mission in New York, also made important contributions during those early years, when logistic and administrative challenges were especially formidable.
Embassy officials celebrated the Fourth of July with due fervor in Ulaanbaatar in 1989. Among other things, the festivities featured a round of fermented mare’s milk known as airag, shared by Mike Senko with senior local officials, including Secretary of the Presidium of the Great People’s Hural Gotov, Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers Peljee, and Foreign Minister Gombosuren.
The pioneering early embassy officers and their families arranged field trips and participated in a variety of local events, including the Mongolian Tennis Open held in September. A fading photograph from November 1989 shows the entire American staff and their families gathered around a Thanksgiving table—Chargé Mike Senko with his wife Dita and their children Sharon and Fe, aged 2 and 16 at the time, and Ted Nist and his wife Sally. Remarkably, Shannon, the Nist family dog, was subsequently used as a model by the Mongolian Post Office, her face forever preserved on a Mongolian postage stamp. The Senkos and the Nists were also the first American embassy families brave enough to spend an entire winter in Ulaanbaatar.
The following summer saw other landmark events, including the arrival of Joseph Lake as the first resident ambassador, followed almost immediately by a short visit by Secretary of State James A. Baker in early August 1990. Ambassador Lake traveled with his wife by train from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar to take up his new post, along with a group of Chinese workers headed to Romania and a shipment of watermelons rolling around the floor of the train compartment. Two weeks later, Secretary Baker arrived at Ulaanbaatar International Airport aboard Air Force Two. Although cows still grazed in front of the US Embassy, a newly paved road, informally dubbed “Baker Street,” had also been built, just before the secretary’s arrival.
In those early days, the US embassy offices in Ulaanbaatar were located in two places—first, in rooms 206 and 207 of the Ulaanbaatar Hotel, the same place where many other embassies, including the British and French, had initially established their offices on arrival some two decades earlier; and, second, in an apartment in a foreign residential complex controlled by the Mongolian Foreign Ministry. Ambassador Lake’s first office was equipped with a discarded desk and table that had been turned over to the United States by the Japanese embassy. Space was at such a premium that the photocopy machine was placed on a board sitting atop a bathtub. Finally, in spring 1991, the American embassy moved to new and much larger quarters near the Selbe River, which remains the embassy location to this day.
Secretary Baker and his wife Susan visited Mongolia a second time in late July 1991. On this occasion, he accompanied Foreign Minister Gombosuren on a trip to the Gobi to see camels, eat mutton, and admire the desert landscape. Returning to Ulaanbaatar, Secretary Baker joined Ambassador Lake in officially opening the newly refurbished US Embassy on the Selbe River. Photographs from the period also show him greeting the first group of Peace Corps volunteers in Mongolia and meeting with Chuck Howell, the first Peace Corps country director in Mongolia.
During the intervening years, the present Embassy complex has been improved and expanded. The building is leased from the Mongolian Foreign Ministry and, according to some reports, was initially designed to house the French and German embassies together, an interesting experiment in European harmony that never came to fruition. Regardless of its origin, the complex has been fully Americanized over the last two decades. It also continues to expand, marked most recently by the launch in summer 2011 of a new $25 million renovation program, providing suitable embassy facilities for at least the next generation.
Housing for American embassy staff has also improved markedly, despite many challenges. “We were prepared for spartan living,” recalled Ambassador Al La Porta, who served in Ulaanbaatar during the late 1990s. “Our American staff in the beginning lived in a ramshackle ten-story apartment building called ‘Faulty Towers,’ located about 300 yards from the main Chancery building.” Ambassador La Porta also recalled that Ulaanbaatar’s first French restaurant, run by two Corsicans, opened soon after his arrival in Mongolia in 1997. At the time, the few restaurants in Ulaanbaatar were mostly located in Soviet-style hotels, providing poor food and appalling service.
It was only in 2001 under Ambassador John Dinger that embassy staff finally moved from Faulty Towers to the Star townhouse complex, built according to Czech standards near the railway line, on the road toward Zaisan and not far from Sukhbaatar Square. By spring 2004, some 17 career Americans were working at the US embassy in Ulaanbaatar. The size of the US embassy staff in Ulaanbaatar increased still further in subsequent years. By early 2012, a quarter century after that tiny first group of pioneering American diplomats arrived to locate apartments, there were more than 40 American officers working at the US embassy in Ulaanbaatar, assisted and supported by more than 160 Mongolian staff.