US Foreign Service dependent who has done the most to advance US interests. Her brother, Charles W. Thayer, was also a diplomat and worked closely with his brother-in-law, Charles, as US vice-consul in Moscow. Charles and Avis Bohlen had two daughters, Avis and Celestine, and a son, Charles Jr. The daughter Avis also became a distinguished diplomat and served as deputy chief of mission in Paris, US ambassador to Bulgaria, and US assistant secretary of state for arms control. The other daughter, Celestine, became a journalist and has been a Moscow-based reporter for The New York Times. Diplomatic career Bohlen joined the US Department of State in 1929. His first diplomatic post was in Prague. In 1931, he was transferred to Paris, where he studied Russian and became a Soviet specialist. In 1934, at 30, he joined the staff of the first US embassy to the Soviet Union in Moscow. On August 24, 1939, he received the full content of the secret Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, signed only a day earlier, from Hans von Herwarth. The secret protocol contained an understanding between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin to divide Central Europe, the Baltic States, and Finland between Germany and the Soviet Union. US President Franklin Roosevelt was urgently informed, but the US did not share the information with any of the governments concerned. A week later, the plan was realized by the German and Soviet invasions of Poland, and World War II started. In 1940 and 1941, he worked in the American embassy in Tokyo, where he was interned for six months before his release by the Japanese in mid-1942. In 1943, he became head of the East European Division, the first of the six specialists who started the Russian-language program in the late 1920s to become the head of a division of the State Department. He then worked on Soviet issues in the State Department during the war, accompanying Harry Hopkins on missions to Stalin in Moscow. He worked closely with Roosevelt and was his interpreter at the Tehran Conference in 1943 and the Yalta Conference in 1945. He also served as interpreter for US President Harry Truman at the Potsdam Conference in 1945. Bohlen later lamented that the Potsdam Conference was the beginning of the Cold War: "After Potsdam, there was little that could be done to induce the Soviet Union to become a reasonable and cooperative member of the