Allan Phillip Mustard is a retired American agricultural economist and career diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Turkmenistan from 2015 to 2019.
[2] Mustard was raised on a dairy farm in Brady,[2] in Grays Harbor County, Washington, where he attended Montesano High School.
[3] Mustard's early positions included work as a guide-interpreter for the U.S. International Communication Agency in Kishinev, Moscow[3] and at Rostov-na-Donu, in the then USSR, and a year as a social worker with the Jewish Family Service in Seattle.
[2][3] During that period, the Soviets withdrew all local staff from the embassy, so Mustard's ability to touch-type in Russian saw him doubling up in a clerical support role.
[2][3] From 1996 to 2000 he served as agricultural counselor at the U.S. embassy in Vienna, where he had responsibility not only for Austria, but also Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia.
[3] In October 2015 he was joined at a groundbreaking ceremony for a new embassy building in Turkmenistan's capital, Ashgabat, by the city's mayor.
[7][8] At the North American Cartographic Information Society's annual banquet in 2019, he gave a keynote address on his mapping in Turkmenistan.