Michigan Man is new Ambassador to Bulgaria!

[mrsdragoness]

Area native confirmed as ambassador to Bulgaria
Saturday, July 02, 2005By Susan Harrison Wolffis
CHRONICLE STAFF WRITER
John R. Beyrle, whose fascination with languages at Mona Shores High School in the 1960s led to a career in foreign service, was named the U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria Thursday.

"I feel very lucky and privileged to serve," he said in a telephone interview earlier this week.

Beyrle, 51, was nominated for the post June 6 by President George Bush. On Wednesday, he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington, D.C., and received word Thursday that the Senate had officially confirmed his appointment.

Beyrle is expected to begin his three-year appointment in Sofia, Bulgaria, by late August. He currently serves as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. This will be his second tour of duty in Bulgaria. Beyrle and his wife, Jocelyn Greene, a fellow Foreign Service officer, served in the U.S. Embassy in Bulgaria from 1986 to 1987.

Beyrle, who grew up in Muskegon, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Bulgaria is "a force for stability and a model for Euro-Atlantic integration in a region that is marred tragically by violence, by ethnic tensions and by political stagnation."

In a telephone interview from Washington, D.C., Beyrle said Bulgaria, once the most loyal Soviet ally, "is beginning to make its way back into the mainstream of Europe" as a member of NATO. He said the country is in the midst of an "unprecedented time in history."

"They've thrown off one way of government (communism) and are re-embracing market democracy," he said. "As ambassador, I'll work to find ways to help make that transition work."

Beyrle will head a staff of 75 American and 300 Bulgarian employees at the embassy in Sofia. His job will include everything from political and economic responsibilities to managing the staff and the more familiar "consular end of things" -- helping people get visas or assisting American tourists who have lost their passports.

A talent for languages

Beyrle was drawn to the Foreign Service as early as high school when his talent for foreign languages emerged as a ninth-grade French student in 1968. He later studied German in high school, as well.

"I remember thinking: This was something I could do," Beyrle said in what has to be the understatement of the interview.

He is fluent in Russian, French, German, Bulgarian and Czech.

"He was very linguistically inclined," said Ed Anderson, who taught German, Spanish and English at Mona Shores High School for 22 years. "I didn't think ahead of time what (Beyrle) might do as an adult ... but he was very talented from the beginning."

His words of praise were echoed by Christine Rydel, Beyrle's first Russian literature and language professor at Grand Valley State University.

"John was just a remarkable kid; he had the knack," Rydel said. "What I couldn't get over was that he was a French major, and yet, he somehow managed to have the native accent in Russian."

Rydel visited Beyrle in Moscow in June on a trip she took with some of her current Russian language students from Grand Valley. Beyrle spent a couple hours, just talking with the kids.

"He's always been so generous with his time with students," she said.

That's because Beyrle was one of those students once upon a time.

In 1976, he studied for four months in Leningrad, a trip that "pushed" his interest away from Russian literature toward politics and government.

"I found a country so fascinating, a country so full of contradictions, a country so flawed," he said. "In many ways, the Soviet Union defined us as a country. ... It was fascinating."

That fascination led Beyrle to a specialized field of service in the Eastern European arena during his 22 years with the Foreign Service. His overseas assignments with the State Department include postings in Moscow, Sofia Vienna, Austria, and Prague, Czech Republic.

He has served as the senior advisor to the Office of the New Independent States at the U.S. Department of State. In the mid-1990s, he was the director of Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian Affairs for the National Security Council, for which he helped form U.S. policy toward the former Soviet Union.

He also served as a member of the U.S. delegation to the arms control negotiation on conventional armed forces in Europe. As a staff officer in the State Department, Beyrle traveled frequently to the former Soviet Union with former U.S. Secretaries of State George Shultz and James Baker, including the historic meeting between presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988.

"We don't often think of the Cold War as a war," Beyrle said, "but when Jocelyn and I were first assigned to Moscow in 1983, (the U.S.) was right in the thick of it. It was during the nadir of Soviet-American relations."

An eyewitness to history

As part of the U.S. Foreign Service and State Department, Beyrle was eyewitness to the dismantling of the Soviet Union just a few years later.

"That caught all of us by surprise ... the disintegration of the Soviet Union," he said.

Beyrle will spend the next three years as ambassador to what he calls "one of the fastest-changing and most dynamic countries of the former Warsaw Pact."

When people from his hometown ask him what his job will be, he answers, "I will represent the United States of America, and that stands for something good in this world."

It is a charge he learned early in life from his parents, JoAnne Beyrle and the late Joseph Beyrle. The ambassador's father is believed to be the only soldier to have fought during World War II for both the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. German soldiers captured Joe Beyrle, who was an Army paratrooper, in the first hours of the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944. He escaped from a prisoner of war camp in Poland in January 1945 and joined a Soviet tank unit headed for Berlin.

His service to the two countries won him medals from President Clinton and then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin on the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994.

"I think about my dad," John Beyrle said. "When he was 19 years old, he volunteered to go fight. ... That had to have inspired me to pubic service. I think my outlook on America came from those formative years growing up on Columbus Avenue."

Beyrle, Greene and their younger daughter, Caroline, who is in eighth grade, will move from Moscow to Sofia in August. The couple's older daughter, Alison, will start her freshman year at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio


2005 Muskegon Chronicle. Used with permission


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