Contributions by South Dakotans in the Foreign Service

Dayton S. Mak was born in Sioux Falls and served in the U.S. Army in North Africa and Italy in World War II, including in the battles of Anzio and Monte Cassino. He entered the foreign service in 1946. As chief of the political section in Beirut, he tracked the growing presence of Fatah fighters in southern Lebanon and led his team through anti-American protests and a partial evacuation during the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and a coalition of Arab states. Read Mak’s full oral history in ADST’s collection.

Born and raised in Howard, Rita Wysong served in the WAVES in World War II and entered the foreign affairs community through marriage when her husband Bob joined the Foreign Service in 1947. She helped represent the United States in tours across South America and the Middle East and embraced the challenges of raising a family overseas, including evacuating from Beirut with the four Wysong children while pregnant with their fifth as bombings rocked the Lebanese capital. Wysong recorded her family’s experiences in the book Packing Up and Moving On and in her ADST oral history.

Born and raised in South Dakota, Clinton L. Olson served as a U.S. Army ordnance officer in World War II, coordinating a joint U.S.-UK program in Moscow supplying the Soviet Union with artillery shells for their fight against the Nazis. After spending two years collecting economic intelligence in Iran with the Office of Strategic Services, Olson entered the Foreign Service in 1948. In a complete role reversal, he was assigned to Austria as an economic officer in what was known as East-West Trade Control, secretly restricting the shipment of sensitive items to the now belligerent Soviets. Olson went on to serve as Ambassador to Sierra Leone. Find the rest of his story in ADST’s collection.

Charles William Maynes was born and raised in Huron and entered the Foreign Service in 1962. In his first assignment with the State Department’s Bureau for International Organizations, he proposed a new “assurances” provision for negotiations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, removing a key impediment to U.S. ratification and allowing this centerpiece of international efforts to curb the spread of nuclear weapons to come into force. He went on to serve as Assistant Secretary in the same bureau fifteen years later and worked to pursue a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Read more about his career in his full oral history.

Born and raised in Huron, J.D. Bindenagel studied at the University of South Dakota and, after serving in the U.S. Army, he joined the Foreign Service in 1975. As Deputy Chief of Mission in East Germany, he helped negotiate the reunification of Germany in what became known as the “Two plus Four process.” As Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues, he helped secure nearly $9 billion in payments from Germany to Holocaust survivors. Read his account of the fall of the Berlin Wall and his full oral history in ADST’s collection.

Born in South Dakota, Barbara Annette Robbins was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency as a secretary in 1963 and volunteered for service in Vietnam 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. Robbins was the first American woman to die in the Vietnam conflict, the first female CIA employee to be killed in action and, at age 21, the youngest CIA employee to ever die in action.