The Foreign Service Journal, June 2007

prehensible to her listeners. Toward the end of her tour in VO, Ms. Harper became a member of a departmental task force on the status of women in the Foreign Service. She helped establish, and was a strong advocate for, the con- cept of tandem assignments for Foreign Service couples. In 1972, Ms. Harper attended the Senior Seminar. Subsequently, she was assigned as consul general to Montreal, where she served until 1979. She then returned to Wash- ington, D.C., as deputy assistant sec- retary for visa services in the newly reorganized CA front office, where then-Assistant Secretary Watson continued to rely on her. In July 1980, when she turned 60, then the mandatory retirement age, Ms. Harper was forced to retire, but she went directly into a When Actually Employed contract as an adviser without missing a day. As a WAE, Ms. Harper played a key role in the work of the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy established in 1979. As the staff representative for the Secretary of State, who was one of the commissioners, she went to all the commission meetings and wrote the briefing and position papers for the Secretary. In early 1980, in the wake of the seizure of Embassy Tehran, Ms. Harper helped draft the executive order that President Carter issued imposing additional restric- tions on the entry of Iranians. She handled its implementation at the department, and remained the key the U.S. government contact on Iranian immigration cases until 1985. From then until her health de- clined in 2002, Ms. Harper served as a consultant to VO, drafting regula- tions, analyzing pending immigration legislation and rewriting portions of the Visa Manual. An only child who never married, Ms. Harper leaves an elderly first cousin in the Chicago area. Edna Gutierrez Jones , 83, a retired FSO with USAID, died under hospice care on March 3 in Rio Rancho, N.M. She had had a long J U N E 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 69 I N M E M O R Y