The Foreign Service Journal, December 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2018 91 Over the span of more than 40 years, including his time in the U.S. Navy, Mr. Koehring served in Côte d’Ivoire, the Republic of the Congo and as USAID representative to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Develop- ment in Paris. He also served as USAID mission director in Cameroon, deputy assistant administrator for Africa, Regional Eco- nomic Development Services Office mis- sion director in Kenya, mission director in Sudan and director of the management control staff in Washington, D.C. In 1985 Mr. Koehring was awarded the Presidential Meritorious Service Award. He retired as a Career Minister and enjoyed a more tranquil life of fishing and bonfires in the Adirondacks and surf fishing on the Outer Banks. Mr. Koehring is survived by his wife, Elizabeth Bready Koehring, and three sons: Joseph P. Koehring, John Fritz Koehring and Ralph Vincent Koehring, himself a Foreign Service officer. He is also survived by his sister, Gretchen Strong of Southwest Harbor, Maine, and six grandchildren: Caleb, Jacob, Kazimir, Josephine, Louisa and Gideon. Memorial contributions may be made to Heifer Project International. n George W. Landau , 98, a retired State Department Foreign Service officer and former ambassador, died of renal failure on Oct. 9 at his home in Bethesda, Md. Mr. Landau was born in Vienna, Austria, on March 4, 1920, and graduated from high school in 1938, shortly after the annexation of his native country by Nazi Germany. He left Austria immediately thereafter and made his way by train to Amsterdam and then by steamship to Colombia, South America, where he had a distant relative. Although he spoke no Spanish at the time, it was the beginning of a relationship with Latin America that was to mark the rest of his life. He remained in Colombia for three years, working a series of odd jobs, including teaching English, which was not his native language. During this period, he successfully helped his parents emigrate from Austria to Colombia, where they lived for the remainder of their lives. Eventually, he obtained a job in Colombia with Otis Elevator Company, which sponsored him for a visa to the United States. He arrived in New York City on July 1, 1941. Mr. Landau was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942, completed officer candi- date training, and became both a U.S. citizen and a military intelligence officer in 1943. As the war drew to a close, he was assigned to interrogate captured pris- oners of war in Austria. At the American base in Gmunden, he met his future wife, Maria, who was working there as a bilingual secretary. They were engaged and, after she came to the United States on a plane of war brides, married in New York City in 1947. After the war, Mr. Landau remained in the Army Reserve, retiring with the rank of colonel in 1975. In 1957, after several years in the import-export business in New York and in Colombia, Mr. Landau began his diplo- matic career through an Eisenhower-era program designed to recruit people with business experience into the Commercial Service. He first served as a commercial attaché at Embassy Montevideo, later transitioning from the Commercial Ser- vice to the Foreign Service. During his posting in Uruguay, Mr. Landau was part of the U.S. delegation that created the Alliance for Progress dur- ing the Kennedy administration. From 1962 to 1965, he was first secretary and political officer at Embassy Madrid. In 1965, he was designated for the Senior Foreign Service and spent a year at the National Defense College in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. From 1966 to 1972, he served as direc- tor for Spanish and Portuguese affairs in the State Department, where he helped negotiate agreements allowing the United States to maintain military bases in both countries. Mr. Landau served as ambassador to Paraguay from 1972 to 1977, Chile from 1977 to 1982 and Venezuela from 1983 to 1985. During his tenure in Chile, he was instrumental in helping to resolve the mystery over the 1976 assassination in Washington, D.C., of Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean foreign minister and ambassador to the United States, and his American aide. The FBI ultimately tracked down the assassins, who confessed that they had acted on instructions of the Chilean secret police. After a protracted legal battle, two top Chilean intelligence officers during the Pinochet regime were convicted and served jail terms in the United States. After retiring from the Foreign Service, Ambassador Landau served as president of the Americas Society and the Council of the Americas in New York, the premier institutions devoted to strengthening business and cultural ties within the hemisphere. He retired from that position in 1993. Amb. Landau received numerous hon- ors from the United States government and other governments, as well as the American Foreign Service Association’s 2013 Award for Lifetime Contributions to American Diplomacy. He was a long- time member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of