Contributions by Coloradans in the Foreign Service

People born, raised, or educated in Colorado have made important contributions to America’s prosperity and security as members of the Foreign Service community. Here are some examples from ADST’s oral history collection:

• After growing up in southwest Colorado, Robert C. F. Gordon joined the State Department in 1950.  As a political officer in Baghdad in 1958, he helped evacuate Americans during Iraq’s 14 July Revolution. Gordon negotiated the list of U.S. citizens to be granted safe passage with Iraq’s Foreign Office, where key contacts revealed that they had secretly been part of the coup. Despite the anti-American nature of the revolution, Gordon got Americans home safely. He went on to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Mauritius. Find the rest of his story in ADST’s collection. 

• Born and raised in Fort Collins, Kathryn Clark-Bourne attended Colorado State University and joined the State Department’s Civil Service in 1952, becoming a Foreign Service Officer in 1956. She fought the Department to allow women to work in Muslim countries and became the only woman in the entire Diplomatic Corps as a political officer in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, shrewdly gaining access to the Foreign Ministry that her male colleagues didn’t have. Later in the Netherlands, she aided American travelers who were lost or stranded abroad. Clark-Bourne’s full oral history is in ADST’s collection. 

• Born and raised in Dever, Philip C. Wilcox joined the Foreign Service in 1966. During the 1980s, he represented U.S. interests in the UN and the Middle East, working towards an Arab-Israeli peace process. In 1994 he was appointed as the State Department’s Ambassador-at-Large for Counterterrorism, coordinating with allies to protect the U.S. homeland and apprehend international terrorists. Read more about his career in his ADST oral history. 

• Born and raised in Denver, Georgia A. Rogers joined the State Department in 1966. She adjudicated difficult U.S. citizenship cases and later assisted American families with relatives in crisis overseas, including hostage situations and plane hijackings. Rogers’ story is in ADST’s collection.

• Robert M. Perito was born in Denver and attended the University of Denver, which inspired him to join the Foreign Service in 1967. He helped establish commercial trade with China after President Nixon re-established diplomatic relations and was among the first Americans to enter China after Mao’s rise to power. Learn more details in his full oral history. 

• Gilbert L. Corey grew up on a farm in western Colorado. Working with his alma mater Colorado State University and the U.S. Agency for International Development, Dr. Corey improved irrigation systems for independent farmers in Pakistan in the 1970s, making them more efficient and equitable. His project revolutionized the lives of local farmers and advanced American values of progress and equality. Read more of his story in ADST’s collection. 

ADST also remembers those Coloradans in the Foreign Affairs community who made the ultimate sacrifice in service to America. Here are some recorded on the American Foreign Service Association’s Memorial Plaque:

• George Atcheson, Jr. was born in Denver and served as a State Department  Foreign Service Officer assigned to General Douglas McArthur’s staff in occupied Japan. He was traveling from Japan to Washington, D.C. in August 1947 to review U.S.-Japan peace treaty drafts when his U.S. Army Air Corps B-17 crashed in the Pacific 110 miles west of Hawaii.

• Raised in Denver, Barbara Annette Robbins attended Colorado State University and volunteered for service in Vietnam with the Central Intelligence Agency under State Department diplomatic cover. On March 30, 1965, Robbins was killed when insurgents detonated a car bomb outside the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. She was the first American woman to die in the Vietnam conflict, the CIA’s first woman killed in action and, at age 21, remains the youngest CIA employee ever killed in the line of duty.  

• Born in Denver, Deborah M. Hixon graduated from the University of Colorado – Boulder and served with the CIA under diplomatic cover at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. On April 18, 1983, she was one of 17 Americans and 46 others killed when a car carrying a bomb crashed through the embassy gates.

• Rudolph Kaiser of Colorado Springs served as a USAID senior advisor in Go Cong Province in Vietnam. He died in a Viet Cong ambush on July 27, 1972, while accompanying South Vietnamese militia forces in the Mekong Delta.