Mustard, Allan Phillip, 1955-

Allan Phillip Mustard (born 1955) is a retired American diplomat. He most notably served as U.S. Ambassador to Turkmenistan from 2015 until 2019.

Growing up on a dairy farm in rural Brady, Washington, Mustard graduated from nearby Montesano High School in 1973 and attended community college at Grays Harbor College, earning an associate’s degree in 1975. He then transferred to the University of Washington, where he earned a B.A. in political science and Slavic languages and literature in 1978.

His first professional job was as a guide and interpreter for the U.S. International Communications Agency at an American exhibit in the Soviet Union. While there, he met the agricultural attaché from the U.S. Embassy, who encouraged him to get an agricultural degree and join the Foreign Service as an agricultural expert. Mustard took his advice and earned an M.S. in agricultural economics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1982. After a year working with Jewish Family Service in Seattle helping to resettle Soviet émigrés, Mustard joined the Foreign Agriculture Service (FAS).

Mustard's first few years were spent in Washington at the USDA. In 1986, he returned to Moscow, first as assistant agricultural attaché, and later as agricultural attaché at the U.S. Embassy, analyzing Soviet agricultural policy. That was a difficult period for the U.S. Embassy. The Soviets had forbidden locals to work at the mission, so diplomats there had to do the manual labor involved in running such a large installation. In addition, the embassy had no heat during one winter because the Soviets wouldn’t allow anyone to repair the embassy’s boiler. Because he could touch-type in Russian, Mustard was put to work as a clerk in addition to his agricultural duties.

Mustard was sent to Turkey in 1988 to the U.S. Agricultural Trade Office in Istanbul, promoting the sale of American farm products. He returned to Washington in 1990 as deputy director of the Emerging Markets Office of the FAS. In 1996, Mustard was sent to Vienna to be the agricultural counselor at the embassy there, responsible for Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia. Much of his focus was on getting food aid to Bosnia in the wake of its civil war.

Mustard came home in 2000 as assistant deputy administrator for International Services for FAS in Washington.

He was sent back to Moscow in 2003 as minister-counselor for agricultural affairs. He used his Russian language skills to talk to farmers and local officials outside the capital and using the information gained, predicted a huge Russian wheat harvest. His colleagues were skeptical, but his predictions were eventually borne out. In an article for the University of Washington, Mustard said: “One tactic I used to get past suspicious and sometimes apprehensive Russians was to quote liberally from the works of Ilf and Petrov, particularly The Golden Calf. They sensed my love of Russian literature and in particular of Russian satire, and that often helped build a mutual trust.”

In 2007 he worked to get the Russians to allow beef imports from the United States to resume after having been halted in 2003 because of fears of mad cow disease.

In 2008, Mustard moved to a similar job at the embassy in Mexico City and in 2011 at the embassy in New Delhi, India. There he operated market research, market development, market access and technical assistance programs in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, as well as food aid programs in Bangladesh.

Mustard was sworn in as U.S. Ambassador to Turkmenistan on November 25, 2014. Presenting his credentials on January 20, 2015, he served until June 22, 2019. Retired from the Foreign Service, Mustard currently serves as a member of the advisory board for the Caspian Policy Center and as Chairperson for the OpenStreetMap foundation.

Mustard’s wife, Ann Anderson Mustard, is a former correspondent for CBS Radio News. In addition to English, Mustard speaks Russian and German fluently as well as basic Spanish.