The Inconvenient Journalist: A Memoir 9781501759109

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The Inconvenient Journalist

The Inconvenient Journalist

A Memoir

Dusko Doder with Louise Branson

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2021 by Dusko Doder and Louise Branson All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2021 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Doder, Dusko, author. | Branson, Louise, author. Title: The inconvenient journalist : a memoir / Dusko Doder with Louise Branson. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020051007 (print) | LCCN 2020051008 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501759093 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501759109 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501759116 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Doder, Dusko. | Foreign correspondents—United States— Biography. | Cold War—Personal narratives. | Foreign correspondents— Soviet Union. | LCGFT: Autobiographies. Classification: LCC PN4874.D635 A3 2021 (print) | LCC PN4874.D635 (ebook) | DDC 070.4/332092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051007 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051008

To the memory of Clyde A. Farnsworth

Contents

Prologue: The Assassination

1

1. The Story That Died

5

2. A Moscow Education

22

3. Evading the KGB to Make Contacts

33

4. Hired by the Washington Post

44

5. Perils Covering My Native Yugoslavia

63

6. Back at a Paper Changed by Watergate

75

7. Post Moscow Correspondent at Last

91

8. Covering Russia’s KGB Tsar

112

9. The Price for Breaking a Rule of Journalism

134

10. Love Changes Everything

151

11. Reluctant Intelligence Reporter

169

12. Casey’s Revenge

176

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13. Seeking a New Life in China

199

14. A Reckoning in Yugoslavia

212

15. Assassination by Time Magazine

233

Epilogue: Dogs Bark

245

Acknowledgments

249

Index

251

The Inconvenient Journalist

Prologue The Assassination

Assassinations come in different guises. Mine was in the form of a phone call, its unfamiliar British ring echoing through the rented house on London’s outskirts. My second wife, our two sons, and I were pre-Christmas snowbound. I remember picking it up, wondering who could possibly be calling us. Who even knew this number? The agent who had rented us the house? “Yes,” I said, looking through the gap in the chintz curtains at snow blanketing the neighboring houses ranged along the narrow Barnet streets. “Daddy, look at me,” little Tommy said. He was firing a cap gun. “Bang, bang,” he said, pointing it at me, laughing as his baby brother looked on, a little bewildered. After two years of reporting and writing about the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia, it was paradise to be on vacation in this warm and quiet house; I thought there was nothing better in the world than to sit with Louise and watch our two boys play. “Dusko? Have I tracked you down?” The voice on the phone startled me. Bob Kaiser, the new managing editor of the Washington Post, didn’t

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fit into this time, this place. His next sentence divided my life in two. Time magazine, he said, was preparing a story for the 1992 Christmas issue suggesting I had become a Soviet agent while serving as the Post’s bureau chief in Moscow. “What?” This did not make sense. “That’s total bullshit!” I shouted into the telephone receiver. A lump rose in my throat; I could barely breathe. Kaiser interrupted me. “I know. I think we can still stop the story, but you’ve got to talk to Time. They’re insisting.” “I have nothing to talk to them about,” I said. “What’s going on?” Louise was trying to calm Nicholas as I hung up the phone. He seemed to react to my bewilderment and rage. His wail grew louder, louder, as if he were screaming at the world, at his impotence as more powerful beings took control of his life. The phone rang again. Ben Bradlee, the former Post editor, was offering encouragement. “You sure got some friends at Langley, pal,” he said. His hunch was that the CIA was behind this. “Retribution,” he said, before breaking the trans-Atlantic connection, “is not carried out unconsciously or unknowingly, and they sure know how to do it.” His words affirmed what my gut was already telling me. This was about the scoop that had embarrassed the top CIA brass, the story I had filed from Moscow on February 10, 1984, indicating that Soviet leader Yuri Andropov might have died. I had chosen my words carefully at the time, listing sudden TV programming changes, a switch to funereal classical music, lights blazing at midnight at KGB headquarters and other strategic buildings. Bradlee, excited but jittery in his Washington office, had asked top US officials for more information and then scheduled the story for page 1. Instead of validating it, the CIA checked with its operatives in Moscow, who said, “Doder must be smoking pot.” It was late at night by the time this was relayed to a Post editor, and Bradlee had already gone home. Without consulting Bradlee, the editor removed the story from the front page but kept it deep inside the paper for its later editions. After the story proved correct, the Post and other newspapers ran stories praising my reporting and questioning the competence of US intelligence. I spent much of that evening in December 1992 on the phone. Kaiser called several times. He was trying to persuade Time executives that their

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reporter had been set up, played. “You have to talk to them,” Kaiser said during our last conversation. “I still hope we can stop them.” “OK,” I said, grasping at the straw Kaiser held out. Journalism was about the truth. I just had to refute everything, point by point. But Kaiser’s I think had now become I hope. I had an awful foreboding that nothing was going to work out, that Time merely wanted to create the appearance of fairness by entertaining my account of events in 1984. A million silent arguments rattled around in my head. Why now? Who? I could think of no more grievous blow to myself, to any journalist, than impugning his or her patriotism and integrity. The attack was especially painful for an immigrant like myself who had worked long and hard to achieve the American dream I had fantasized about, and that had motivated my escape from Communist Yugoslavia. As I played out scenarios in the now ominous quiet of the London rental, I resolved to sue Time for libel. The truth would be told, if not in the magazine then in court. But Louise, I thought, didn’t deserve to be dragged into a long legal fight against Time Warner, with its vast legal and financial resources. That night I told her that she must take the two boys and separate from me. She was young, successful in her career with the London Sunday Times. If I live to be a hundred years old, I’ll never forget her quiet grace, the way she looked at me and shook her head. “What are you talking about? I’m your wife. We fight this together.” She, like me, understood that all we had, as reporters and people, were our reputations. In the morning I did what I had to do. I phoned my attorney in Washington, Mitchell Rogovin, and instructed him to immediately serve notice on Time that I would sue them for libel if they printed this false story. The next few days were a blur. Bradlee called a few more times. I had long talks with Rogovin. Post colleagues, scandalized because they knew my work, started collecting money for my legal defense fund. When I heard this my heart leapt, momentarily. Yet I felt oddly restless and dislocated. My self-doubt, my lack of faith in my own capacities, had grown quickly, like a tumor. I was beginning to fear I’d be unable to cope. I realized that I was at severe risk of losing my good name. Days before Christmas, Kaiser faxed an advance copy of the Time story. I was shocked. A photo of me, smug and arrogant, had been selected to make a clear editorial point. I knew a hatchet job when I saw one. I felt myself being killed, not by an assassin’s single bullet, but slowly, the

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poison of the falsehood starting to spread throughout my body. I anticipated the weeks and months of predictable awfulness that would follow. I’d cease to exist for my friends and colleagues. We celebrated Christmas with Louise’s parents at their home in her family’s ancestral village in the Buckinghamshire countryside. In turmoil inside, I went through the motions: pulling British Christmas crackers, nodding as my father-in-law, a conservative local politician, lamented Princess Diana’s divorce from Prince Charles that year. “Daddy, don’t be sad,” three-year-old Tommy said as he climbed onto my lap. He was a lovely boy; I was touched. I’d be able to tell him my story one day, I thought—how I had dedicated myself to journalism, believing that telling the truth, no matter where it led or who it exposed, was my calling. I would share with Tommy and his brother Nicholas that I had always held in my head and my heart what Thomas Jefferson wrote: that if he had to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, he would choose the latter. I had reported the truth in service of that mission, and out of a belief in American values and the First Amendment that protects the freedom of the press and free speech. Always I had been certain I was both special and protected. How wrong I had been.

1

The Story That Died

Twenty-four years earlier, long before I could imagine working for the Washington Post, let alone being the target of a reputational hit job, I stepped into the bar of the Sheraton Carpenter Hotel in Manchester, New Hampshire. At the time I was a young reporter still married to my first wife. Warmth enveloped me. I felt grateful to be out of the swirling February New England snow. I scanned the room for my friend Bill Dunfey. His family owned this hotel. The bar was where I usually found him. The barroom still felt familiar, with its sleek, modern, recessed lighting, scattered tables, the smell of whiskey and cigarette smoke. I was passing through Manchester now, but I had worked here, months earlier, as a reporter for the Associated Press wire service. As I sought out Dunfey, the way I held myself, with an incongruous mix of hesitancy and cockiness, no doubt conveyed who I was: a journalist who was chafing at being in a junior role. Though I had moved up a notch from New Hampshire to the bigger AP bureau in Albany, I was impatient to fulfill my outsized ambition of becoming a famous journalist.

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I picked out Dunfey’s tall, gaunt figure through swirls of cigarette smoke seconds before he saw me. It was time enough for me to register that he was in a heated argument. Dunfey was gesticulating, his finger jabbing at the air. That was so unlike him, I thought. It must be something serious. I recognized the distinguished-looking man with receding iron-gray hair who was the subject of his anger: Senator Tom McIntyre, Dunfey’s fellow Democratic Party grandee and fellow Irish American. “Dusko!” Dunfey beckoned me over. He bear-hugged me, and his face lit up. “You know Senator McIntyre, of course.” “Of course.” We shook hands. Their tension remained. I sat down, ordered a Scotch. Their argument picked right back up. Dunfey resumed pressing McIntyre. He insisted to him that the Vietnam War was lost, a mistake, just look at the Tet disaster. McIntyre, who was President Lyndon Johnson’s campaign manager in New Hampshire at the time, sounded more and more defensive, his voice growing louder. At that time, Johnson was claiming Vietnam was all but won. The country disagreed. Protesters were chanting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Campus radicals were blowing up ROTC buildings. Polls showed Johnson’s antiwar challenger, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, making an extraordinarily strong showing against him. And the presidential election was just ten months away. MacIntyre did not have the political space to accommodate Dunfey’s opinions. I looked at Dunfey, his lean face growing redder beneath his thinning blond hair as his passion mounted. Dunfey had once been the New Hampshire campaign manager for President John F. Kennedy in his 1960 campaign. Unlike McIntyre, I knew what lay behind Dunfey’s passion. Weeks earlier, he had shared a secret with me. He had told me that he was turning against the Vietnam War, and—something that would be deeply shocking to McIntyre—that he was poised to openly back a far more serious potential challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination: Robert F. Kennedy. Dunfey’s Vietnam War doubts, shared over a Scotch at this same bar late one night, had matched my own. I had confided back that I, too, was turning against the war. I had escaped from Communist Yugoslavia and was still convinced we had to fight Communists everywhere. But Vietnam, I had concluded—and Dunfey had enthusiastically agreed—was different

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7

and did not fit the Cold War mold. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who had become one of my heroes, had said something in his recent Riverside Church speech in New York that had resonated with me: it was morally indefensible to send African American troops to “guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.” The Tet Offensive of early 1968, too, had shaken my sense of the United States’ military superiority. The months and years of distressing pictures—the self-immolating Buddhist monks, the napalmed children, the defoliated forests—had made it more difficult to say something positive about the war or the president. All this was on my mind as I sipped my Scotch, feeling a little excluded as Dunfey and McIntyre squared off in the Carpenter Hotel. McIntyre then shrugged, a defeated look creeping over his patrician face as he looked at Dunfey. His next words made my hair stand on end. What could he do, the senator said, now that General Westmoreland had asked the president for an extra 206,000 US troops? I could scarcely believe what I had heard. Johnson already had 550,000 troops in Vietnam, and he was insisting the war was nearly won. Asking for 206,000 more was all but admitting that the US was defeated. The senator, seeming to remember I was there, turned to me, his face slightly shiny from drink, and said, “This is completely off the record, you understand. Do I have your word?” I nodded. “Of course.” “So what are you going to do?” Dunfey asked McIntyre, shaking his head as mild shock registered on his lean face. “I can tell you for sure he’ll not get more than forty thousand,” McIntyre said in a resigned manner that led me to think that he thought the whole business was a lost cause. “That’s what most members of the Armed Services Committee think.” I was no longer following the conversation. How could I take back my commitment to McIntyre? Both men were now sunk in gloomy silence, cradling their drinks. I cleared my throat to get their attention. I said that I felt this was an important story and that I would like to write it without mentioning the source, provided the senator agreed. “It’s going to come out anyway,” Dunfey said, philosophically, turning to me. “As long as he’s not mentioned,” he added, pointing at the senator.

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“In fact there should be no mention of the state of New Hampshire in any way, shape, or form. Write it under an Albany dateline. He’s now based in Albany, New York,” Dunfey told McIntyre, pointing at me. “No,” McIntyre said. “I can’t risk it.” My heart sank. But after some back and forth the senator agreed. Excitement gripped me. I could already see this sensational story, with my byline on it, being transmitted to news outlets around the country and the world over the AP wire. It would draw attention to me. I allowed myself to imagine the faces of the senior New York Times executives who had interviewed me two weeks earlier and rejected me. I still felt humiliated just thinking about it. This would show them just who they had turned down. I headed to the pay phone in the hotel to alert Earl Aronson, my boss in Albany. No matter that it was a Saturday evening, no matter that he had decreed that he never be bothered at home, this was big, a national— no, an international—scoop. He would be as proud as I was. His bureau would earn kudos. As I prepared to dial Aronson’s number, with plenty of quarters and dimes in my hand ready to push in and pay for the call, I could not help reliving that New York Times humiliation from a month earlier. I was again, in my mind, driving to New York in my battered Volkswagen Bug through late January sleet for a day of interviews. It had gone so well at first. Shaking with nerves, I had entered the stucco New York Times building on FortySecond Street and taken the elevator to the third floor. A no-nonsense secretary, who wore a black pencil skirt, a pink blouse, and low-heeled black pumps, showed me into my first interview with Seymour Topping, the foreign editor, who greeted me warmly. He was a handsome man in late middle age, dressed in an expensive navy-blue jacket and a blue polka-dot bow tie. I mentioned that I had followed his dispatches from Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis and that seemed to please him. We discussed the issues of the day—Vietnam, the beginnings of the Prague Spring, Communism in general, and Soviet leadership in particular. He and my mentor, Clyde Farnsworth, had been colleagues. It was Clyde who had arranged the interview. Clyde had introduced me to Topping, by letter, as having just the kind of background and profile the Times needed to report from Moscow, the heart of the United States’ Cold War opponent. I was, he had

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told Topping, a hardworking young journalist with a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, plus two other degrees. I had been cutting my journalistic teeth with the AP. I spoke fluent Russian. I understood Communism in a way few Americans could. As the interview with Topping continued, he seemed to agree with Clyde’s assessment of me. Before we adjourned for lunch, he instructed his secretary to prepare the paperwork for me to complete after the afternoon “formalities,” which meant separate interviews with three senior executives. Too excited to eat lunch and already picturing myself in the Times newsroom, I weaved around shoppers and sightseers in Times Square. That afternoon, I met separately with three elderly assistant managing editors. The first was Emmanuel Freedman, Topping’s predecessor as foreign editor. Dressed like a banker in a pinstriped suit, he was pleasant and inquisitive, asking about my academic credentials and knowledge of Communism. I no longer remember the name of the second interviewer. The third one-on-one meeting was with the legendary Times journalist Harrison Salisbury, who was famous for his Moscow reporting. I had read his books, followed his reporting, and watched him on television. He was a handsome man with a trim mustache and sleek salt-and-pepper hair. We exchanged pleasantries. Feeling intimidated, and eager to impress him, I switched to Russian, which I assumed he spoke after so many years in Moscow. “Let’s continue in English,” he said, cutting me off. He smiled and stubbed out his cigarette. The atmosphere suddenly seemed less casual. I knew at that moment that I had made a mistake. But what was it? I tried to recover, saying, “I just wanted to say that the way you wrote about Moscow in diary form was quite revealing.” “Thank you,” he replied, a little curtly. “We can talk about it on another occasion.” We chatted briefly about Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and the Politburo, and then he abruptly ended our meeting. He was exceedingly polite and wished me good luck, but I knew I had somehow failed. I waited for Topping in his office. And I waited. I ran the conversation with Salisbury over and over in my mind, still hoping I was wrong. It must have been an hour later when Topping’s secretary walked in. Apologizing profusely, she said Topping had been detained in a meeting and would

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be in touch with me in the next couple of days. She did not mention the paperwork. Only years later did I find out that Salisbury, the famous Moscow correspondent, did not speak Russian. With the New York Times humiliation still preying on my mind, I dialed my boss’s home number from the pay phone in the New Hampshire hotel. My fingers trembled with excitement. I was writing the story in my head. Coming after the Tet Offensive, the request for such a huge number of additional troops amounted to General Westmoreland’s acknowledgment that we were losing the war. This was so obvious that it didn’t need to be emphasized. But how to pitch the story to Aronson? Aronson picked up. Clumsily, my fingers still trembling, I slotted dimes into the pay phone. “Hello? Who is it?” The line was bad, crackly. “It’s Dusko. I’ve got a big story. A scoop. Westmoreland’s asking . . .” I knew that I needed to calmly lay out the particulars of fact and make clear the reliability of my source. But the magnitude of the story made me excitable and almost inarticulate. “What? Speak up, man.” Aronson sounded annoyed to be disturbed. I continued to make my pitch, keenly aware that I was not doing it properly, and that made me even more flustered. He cut me off. “I’ll check on it, call you back. What’s your number there?” I stood by the phone for twenty minutes, perhaps longer, fear and excitement mounting in equal measure. Then the phone rang, echoing into the corridor by the bar. “Dusko?” “Yes.” “My source in Washington says it’s a crock of shit.” His words paralyzed me. How could he say that? I had an impeccable source. Yet my boss was telling me he did not believe me. I had to convey to him that my source, McIntyre, was not only Johnson’s campaign manager but also a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and, above all, a decent person. But the more I talked the more incoherent I seemed to become. “My source says it’s a crock of shit,” Aronson repeated. I should have fought harder for the story. I should have gone over his head and contacted someone higher up in the AP. But I wasn’t resourceful

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or confident enough. I let my scoop die on the crackling telephone line between Manchester and Albany. Two weeks later, on Sunday, March 10, 1968, the New York Times carried the front-page headline “Westmoreland Requests 206,000 More Men, Stirring Debate in Administration,” splashed over three columns. The appearance of the story ignited self-righteous anger in me. My good work had not been recognized. The AP, my boss, had not believed in me. The paper that also had not believed in me, the New York Times, had gotten my scoop. I resolved to do the only thing in my power: quit. I handed in my notice. I did not say why; I would not publicly humiliate myself further. I was the one with journalistic standards, not them, I thought to myself as feelings of humiliation churned inside me. “Do you realize how petulant you are? Foolish? Childish?” my wife at the time, Karin, chided me, flicking her blond hair back in the way she did when she was upset. We had become engaged in haste months earlier when she thought she was pregnant. The idea of marriage, and commitment, had scared me, but the code of honor drilled into me by my father dictated that you marry a girl if you got her pregnant. When it turned out to be a false alarm, I felt it would be dishonorable not to follow through. Karin was Danish, and I was beguiled by her Scandinavian beauty. Though she was my opposite in every way—sensible, modest, without grand ambitions, uninterested in pursuing higher education— I reasoned that she would be a grounding force in my life. She saw in me someone adventurous, knowledgeable, driven to pursue an exciting future that would open up new horizons. But her common sense right then could not shake me out of the selfrighteous state she had correctly diagnosed. I lay on our bed, feeling hopeless, playing Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and telling Karin she could not possibly understand. The walls of our one-bedroom apartment that Karin had painted ochre, telling me she wanted our first home together to be special, seemed to close in on me. I had dreamed of working for the New York Times for years. I had secretly hoped, before Earl Aronson betrayed me, that its editors would see my scoop and reconsider. But now they had the story and I didn’t even have a job. I wasn’t any kind of journalist anymore. I was thirty years old. David Halberstam had won a Pulitzer at that age, and Max Frankel had been three years younger when he became the

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New York Times’ Moscow correspondent. But I didn’t envy anyone so much as the person I had been before the disastrous job interview and this fresh blow. I now saw myself twenty years hence, sitting on the copy desk of the Nashua Telegraph or some similar provincial newspaper, wearing shabby clothes and thick glasses, and sporting a pot belly from too much beer. Whenever I now found a job opening in Editor & Publisher, I’d sit behind the typewriter unable to complete a simple application letter. “At least they considered you seriously, which is amazing, given your background,” Karin said about the Times interview, not giving up on her mission to shake me out of my self-pity. “Yes,” I grumbled. “And I failed.” She persisted. “It’s all in your head,” she said, again flicking back her hair. “The New York Times is not the be-all and end-all of journalism. There are other newspapers.” The more she talked, the more I resented her. My new wife didn’t understand me. She wanted me to be content with a smaller life than the one I had aimed for, that I felt I was born for. And she was signaling that she would be perfectly happy with that. Was this the moment to abandon my dreams altogether and pursue a kind of psychological reconstruction now that my life, my dreams, my short journalistic career, were over? For weeks I wallowed in self-pity. And then, in early April of 1968, a blue airmail letter with postage stamps from Vienna, Austria, arrived. It was from my mentor, Clyde Farnsworth. The veteran US foreign correspondent had taught me the fundamentals of journalism ten years earlier, and then, in 1959, had helped me escape to the United States. He was coming to New York, he wrote, and he proposed that we meet up. And so, later in April, Clyde, his wife Dolly, and I rendezvoused in one of the many pastry-and-coffee shops on Madison Avenue. “Dusko, my God, don’t look so glum,” Dolly exclaimed as she and Clyde arrived and caught my nervousness and shame as I braced myself to tell Clyde I had let him, and myself, down. We found a corner table with a red-and-white checkered tablecloth next to a window through which fingers of April sunshine played. Looking at our reflection in the window, I fantasized, not for the first time, that this gray-haired, distinguishedlooking American in a green and brown tailored tweed jacket and I were father and son, and that the glamorous Dolly was my mother.

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We ordered coffee and spinach-and-cheese pastries. I launched into the tale of my failure with the Times and my reasons for quitting the AP. “Yes, of course,” Clyde said. “It looked so promising.” He thumbed some of his favorite Dunhill tobacco into his pipe and tamped it down. “It’s not the end of the world. I’m sure something else will turn up. You were merely unlucky. That happens from time to time. We’ll work something out.” I was flooded with gratitude. Around us, everything seemed to signal a fresh hope: the hubbub of conversation, the clatter of forks and knives, the scent of fresh pastries and strong coffee. Unlike my real father back in Yugoslavia, Clyde had not criticized me or made moral judgments. Dad had died two years earlier, of a heart attack, at age fifty-three. Until six months before his death, he had angrily kept me excommunicated from my family for becoming a journalist, a profession he despised, and for escaping to the United States without his blessing. Then, in a series of letters to me, he had ended our seven-year estrangement but continued to condemn me. “Newspapering is nothing,” he wrote. “Journalists are merely traveling gypsies.” He told me I should give it up, “get a teaching job at a small college and live comfortably with your family.” He still felt justified in his anger at me. “According to God’s laws,” he wrote, “children have the right to choose their life’s path but only by heeding the advice of, and in agreement with, their parents. You made your choices alone, and if anyone has the right to be angry, that certainly can’t be you.” Now, in the coffee shop on Madison Avenue, I listened, gratefully, as Clyde laid out some options. I felt my belief in myself, in journalism, start to revive. There’s a new editor at the Washington Post, he said. “Ben Bradlee. They’re talking about him at the Times as an exceedingly ambitious new broom.” Clyde had no contacts at the Post, but he would cast around. He did know a few editors at the Los Angeles Times. We could try there too. “Don’t look so worried, for God’s sake. It will be all right.” Dolly looked up at me through her mane of jet-black hair, a wry smile on her scarlet-painted lips. We had now finished our pastries and Dolly called over a waiter to order Sachertorte. Yes, I thought. Yes, it will. With Clyde and Dolly in my corner, things would work out. What happened next was extraordinary. As Clyde, Dolly, and I left the coffee shop to take a leisurely walk, it started to rain. Dolly and I took

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shelter in a shop doorway and watched Clyde shouting and waving at the passing cabs, then chasing one up the street in vain. He rejoined us, soaking wet. “Oh, let’s have a drink,” Dolly said. She pointed to a green shamrock sign indicating an Irish bar two doors down. Just as we settled into a booth with red faux-leather seats, a man in a khaki trench coat approached us. Handsome, with curly black hair and a Mediterranean complexion, he was shaking his head in disbelief, a wide smile on his face. He exclaimed, “Dolly! Clyde! My God!” “Roger!” the Farnsworths responded in unison. It took a while to establish when the last time was that they had seen one another. Sometime in the aftermath of World War II. But had it been in Rome? London? Or Hong Kong? As they sorted out memories and reviewed geopolitical developments, I was introduced to Roger Tatarian of United Press International. Tatarian was friendly and clearly accomplished. Left unsaid was the fact that he had since become editor in chief and vice president of UPI, the competitor wire service to the AP. By the time we had ordered a third round of drinks, Clyde had begun telling the story of how I’d quit my job with the AP. This caught Tatarian’s attention and he turned to me and said, quite seriously, “You should have called us.” He took out a cigar and offered me one. I accepted. “That could have never happened at UPI. At least I hope not.” Before I could say anything, Clyde asked, “Any job openings in your shop?” “As a matter of fact,” Tatarian said, “we have a vacancy in Moscow.” “Moscow!” Clyde exclaimed. “I got a candidate right here.” He pointed at me and launched into a recitation of my qualifications for the job, including advanced Russian-language proficiency. Tatarian seemed impressed. He asked me a few questions about my studies at Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford University, and Columbia University’s schools of journalism and international affairs. After a while he said that I should phone the foreign editor, Jack Fallon, on Monday morning. By Wednesday of that same week in April 1968, I had a new job. Karin was excited at the thought of living together in a new country. “But I’m sad to quit my job,” she said ruefully. Her clerical job in Albany, filing and answering the phone at a solicitor’s office, had given her a sense of purpose, helped dispel the gloomy moods she frequently sank into, and suited her sense of order and organization. She liked the idea of me taking her on

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this adventure, but still turned to Better Homes and Gardens magazine in her free time rather than reading books on the Soviet Union or trying to learn Russian. “That’s your job,” she said. We drove into New York City in our blue Volkswagen Bug overloaded with all our belongings, some in battered suitcases, some in cardboard boxes. As I drove, and as Karin kept boxes from falling over and blocking the rearview mirror, Clyde and my luck at meeting him ten years earlier were on my mind. If not for Clyde I would not be in the US, let alone a journalist. We had met in the summer of 1958, when I had just turned twenty-one, at the press club in Vienna. I was playing the piano, a parttime job I had taken in order to meet real journalists and perhaps, somehow, join their ranks. I wore the sideburns in fashion at the time, and a brown suit that branded me as the Yugoslav that I was, but that did not stand out in postwar Austria, with its proliferation of Eastern European refugees fleeing Communism. My hands flew across the piano keys, I took requests and accepted drinks. A glamorous woman in a red dress, her dark hair piled high on her head, sauntered over and asked me to play “The Man I Love.” It was Dolly. She mouthed the words of the song to a distinguished-looking older man—Clyde—sitting a few tables away. Dolly and Clyde invited me to join them for a drink. They told me they had just arrived in Vienna, that Clyde had reported for the AP during the Second World War, and then from Mao’s China, India, Iran, Europe, and Latin America. In Vienna, he was a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and a stringer for other papers. I could not believe my luck at meeting a real American correspondent. He and Dolly all but adopted me then and there. As we talked during the next weeks and months, I gradually told them how I had fallen in love with journalism four years earlier, when I was still in high school in my native Sarajevo. I told them I had written some stories for the city’s Oslobodjenje (Liberation) newspaper, beginning when its principal sportswriter asked if I could phone in the results of a high school table tennis tournament I was participating in, because he was short staffed. Flattered that such a well-known reporter—I was a regular reader of his soccer reports—was asking me for a favor, I cobbled together a story of four or five paragraphs and tacked on the results. Seeing my

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work in print the next day gave me a thrill. I began to offer my services to the sports section and started studying stories by senior reporters, trying to imitate their style. Soon the sports editor agreed to use me as a freelancer on “marginal” sports. Other staffers didn’t seem to mind. They all wanted to write about soccer, which accounted for almost 90 percent of the sports section. My parents thought of it as a passing hobby. But I was hooked, I told Clyde and Dolly. I began visiting the Oslobodjenje offices on a dead-end side street near the city center. It had no newsroom; editors and reporters were dispersed in a warren of small, separate rooms. The place didn’t look anything like newsrooms did in American movies: no people dashing around or shouting. But I was in awe of the reporters. They seemed cooler and wittier than most people. I would see them at a café on Sarajevo’s main street, gossiping and exchanging jokes. I desperately wanted to join their circle, but the gulf between them and a novice like me was deep, particularly since, to join the staff, it was necessary to be a loyal Communist—something my Dad abhorred, as did I. Joining the Communist Party, Dad would say, was akin to selling your soul. Then I got to know a young man on the city desk named Sveto Maslesa. I’d pitch him stories, mostly sports related. If he said go ahead, I’d stay up late at night doing rewrites. In the morning, I’d dictate my short pieces to a stenographer. It gave me a thrilling sense of importance knowing people were reading my observations. I began to think of a career in journalism as a real way to right wrongs. An idea—preposterous given who and where I was, a young man in Communist Yugoslavia—began to take shape in my head. I would go to America and become a great journalist! Dad, I was sure, would support me. I was so certain because, seven years earlier, in 1949, when I was twelve, Dad had taken me for a serious “man-to-man” talk, a big change from his default approach of stern lectures. This talk came at a low point for our once-rich family. We had been stripped of our wealth by Marshal Tito’s Communist regime and branded enemies of the people. We had no hope of leaving and joining my father’s mother and two older siblings in St. Louis. Our family, like most other Yugoslavs, was also suffering from near starvation because of Stalin’s blockade of the country after Tito broke with the Soviet dictator. As Dad and I walked by the river, I experienced enormous pleasure that he was treating me as an equal. My pleasure

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grew when he said he had a secret that only he and I would share. He had made a mistake staying in Yugoslavia and not joining his relatives in St. Louis when he still could, he said. When the time came, he would help me escape to St. Louis and live a better life. But conditions in Yugoslavia had improved by the time I had what I saw as my own man-to-man talk with Dad, telling him that I wanted to go to America and become a journalist in a country where journalists could tell the truth. And since Dad always insisted that we Doders aim for the best, I would, of course, work for the New York Times. But Dad seemed to have forgotten our secret. Not only was America out of the question, he said, his face looking like thunder, but no son of his would be a journalist. “Journalists are parasites,” he told me. They draw nourishment from the misfortunes of people and nations. Journalism was akin to shoplifting, a swiping of other people’s stories for monetary gain and practiced only by pretentious, fly-by-night adventurers. “No,” he said, “you will stay here with your mother, brother, and me. You will become a doctor; that’s a safe profession.” Since Dad was not a man who brooked disobedience, I did not challenge him. But I fumed inside. What happened to that Shakespeare quote he was always throwing at me: “To thine own self be true”? The only way I could pursue my ambition, I finally decided, would be through deception—something I was already well practiced at. Deception was a way of life in Yugoslavia as I grew up. We learned to keep our mouths shut or spout what was necessary to survive, first under fascism, then under changing brands of Communism. I persuaded Dad, with the same enthusiasm with which I professed Communist beliefs in school (a condition of graduating), that my new passion was to become a neurologist and that the University of Vienna was the best place to study for this career. Dad was delighted. “This is the profession for you,” he said, cracking a rare smile. Education in Europe was free at the time. Somehow Dad got permission for me to travel to Vienna. He arranged a monthly stipend from his brother Peter in St Louis of around one hundred dollars, about the salary of an Austrian bank clerk. Before I left, I persuaded Oslobodjenje to let me write for them from Vienna on a piece-by-piece basis. By the time I met Clyde and Dolly, I had penned a few tabloid stories, which I submitted by mail, about theater scandals, pastry wars between major Viennese bakers, and the bones

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of Hapsburgs turning up in excavations for new buildings. But I already knew, with a sinking heart, that this was hardly going to get me into real journalism, let alone to America. I also had not attended a single class at the University of Vienna. It was only a matter of time before Dad uncovered my deception, called me home, and unleashed his wrath on me. But Clyde took me under his wing, introducing me to journalism basics, shaping my belief in journalism as a noble profession, and supporting my conviction that the United States was the country that stood for all that was right. Who else would speak truth to power? he would say. Give voice to the voiceless? Journalists, he said, had a special obligation under the First Amendment to defend the Constitution and the nation’s civic virtues. “We’re democracy’s last line of defense,” he told me. “However bad the American press may be, whatever remains of our civic morality rests on it.” I hung on his every word. Journalists were not impartial, though they had to try to be, Clyde would add, a shine in his eyes as he packed Dunhill tobacco into his pipe, lit it, and drew on it. “You select what to put in and what to leave out, you shape the narrative,” he said. “The most important thing is an implicit trust from the readers that you’ll deliver a reasonable facsimile of events and people as they appeared to you. Whatever you do you must honor this trust.” This, I knew, was not something that was possible in Communist Yugoslavia. Clyde then helped me get a student visa to the US. He bought my ticket by ship to New York City in December 1959. From there I made my way to my relatives in St. Louis, hopeful that they would take me in, help me smooth things over with my father, and help me immigrate to America. “They’ll know their congressman,” Clyde said, “and they can help you get the ball rolling to immigrate. If they aren’t able to—well, you’ll find a way. I can’t see them not helping you.” But Clyde knew neither my Dad nor the power and rules of Balkan clan ties. I got a frosty welcome from Uncle Peter, my father’s older brother, and my other relatives. “Your dad is very angry,” Uncle Peter said, handing me a letter on thin airmail paper written in blue ink in my father’s small, neat handwriting. Blood rushed to my face as I read it. Dad cursed me in Old Testament–style language. I’d broken the most sacred family trust and placed a hideous stigma on the family’s honor. He didn’t know how I’d managed to get a US visa, but however I had done it, it had to

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have been through some act of moral depravity. I had sold my soul for “thirty pieces of silver,” he wrote. “May God exact a retribution for your deception!” A curse, at least in Serbian folklore, supposedly foreshadows bad luck—and a father’s curse in particular was said to be the most potent of all. I wrote a contrite letter back, begging to be forgiven and to be allowed to stay in the United States. Dad never replied—and cut off all contact with me for almost seven years. When I told my St. Louis relatives of my intention of becoming a journalist, they said I had no hope of succeeding. “Goddamn craziest idea I ever heard,” my cousin Charlie said. “Uncle Pete’s daughter couldn’t break into journalism—and she was born here and has a journalism degree from the University of Missouri.” They all urged me to return to Yugoslavia. All except for Aunt Lepa, Uncle Peter’s wife. “For God’s sake, Pete, the arrow has already left the bow,” she said to him. She offered to pay my tuition for the spring semester at Washington University “while things are sorted out.” I had a series of interviews with the dean, Aaron Hack, and faculty members. I cited a quote by James Joyce’s character Stephen Dedalus as I talked of why I wanted to study at Washington U: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” I was admitted as a sophomore. In the next five years I attended first Washington University, then Stanford, then Columbia University. I lived off scholarships, jobs waiting tables, working the overnight shift at a bottling plant, even selling my blood. At times I subsisted on five-cent White Castle burgers or ate peanut butter sandwiches for days. I acquired American friends, played in a jazz band, and hitchhiked across the country. I went to a whites-only diner with a black friend to protest segregation, proudly bought a cheap car, admired President John F. Kennedy, and began using the pronoun our with regard to the United States. I believed ever more fervently in America’s exceptionalism and invincible virtues. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” gave me goose bumps, as did “America the Beautiful.” I found mentors along the way. Columbia professor Melvin Mencher, for example, deepened my belief in the mission of journalism and taught me the craft. I still remember, with some embarrassment, the day Mencher handed out a fact sheet that reproduced a real phone conversation from the night of March 4, 1960, between Sanche de Gramont, a night deskman at the New York Herald Tribune, and his wife. De Gramont was at

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work that night while his wife attended a performance of La forza del destino at the Metropolitan Opera. Renata Tebaldi and Leonard Warren were playing the lead roles. Warren, the most prominent American opera singer at the time, had just completed his Act III aria—which began with the words “To die, a momentous thing”—when he suddenly collapsed and expired on the stage. In the pandemonium that ensued, Mrs. de Gramont rushed out to grab the first public phone she could find to call her husband. De Gramont had twenty minutes to write a story before the deadline for the final edition, Mencher informed us. He let us read the fact sheet for a few minutes and then announced that he’d collect our stories in twenty minutes. After we finished our stories, Mencher distributed de Gramont’s gracefully written story that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1961. Comparing it to my own, I remember groaning inside. What I had written read something like this: “The famous American singer Leonard Warren died on the Met stage last night, struck by the force of destiny after finishing his aria ‘To die, a momentous thing.’” What followed was a string of more clichés that seemed a parody of de Gramont’s piece. Like most of my other classmates, I had hyped an already dramatic tale. Mencher’s object lesson was to properly size up raw material. If the material is inherently dramatic, the best way to handle it is to tell it in a simple, straightforward fashion. If the material lacks drama, however, a skillful reporter can enrich the story and make it interesting. There was another lesson here, Mencher elaborated after class to a small group. Journalists spend most of their time waiting for things to happen. “You have to be prepared and patient,” he said. “That’s the game of newspapering—waiting patiently for a chance and then nailing it.” I obsessively studied the stories of such top reporters as Max Frankel, Hedrick Smith, Tom Wicker, and Anthony Lewis, and followed with particular interest Paul Underwood in Eastern Europe and Theodore Shabad in Moscow. I tried to imitate them. It took me quite a while to realize that it was impossible to imitate a reporter’s approach because you cannot possibly know what insights and emotion are shaping the words. You try to imitate someone and everything you do sounds derivative, just as Clyde had said. For a year, awarded a Ford Fellowship, I then took a full load of classes in Soviet politics, Russian and Eastern European history, and international

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politics. I attended seminars taught by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. I took classes with Alexander Dallin, Henry Robert, and Peter Brock. Alexander Kerensky, head of the provisional government in Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution, came to one of our seminars to speak and answer questions. Adolph Berle and a few of Roosevelt’s other “brain trusters” were still on the campus. In May of 1965, just before I turned twenty-eight, I got my lucky break: I was hired by the AP. I bought my own Olivetti portable typewriter and started at 50 Rockefeller Plaza, in the heart of Manhattan. My first job was preparing five-minute world news roundups for the broadcast wire. Four weeks later, I was transferred to the graveyard shift. This meant that my boss, Mr. Aspinwall—he was always “Mr. Aspinwall” to me and other young staffers—had concluded that I no longer needed supervision. Mr. Aspinwall broadly sketched out my future with the AP. After six months in New York I’d be moved to a line bureau somewhere in the United States. After a while, I’d be brought back to New York to work on the foreign desk before being sent overseas. “Have you ever thought about changing your first name?” he asked while playing with a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “What do you think about the byline ‘Donald Doder’?” The AP in those days didn’t have names like Dusko in its bylines. I had privately toyed with the idea quite often, cursing my parents for saddling me with an odd-sounding name. I was aware that many artists had changed their names to sound more American—Tony Curtis, for example, and Bob Dylan. But I could see my father, who believed that names were welded into our souls: No, we have no Donalds in our family, thank God! I looked at kindly Mr. Aspinwall and said, “I’m simply not there yet.” “That’s OK,” he said, patting my shoulder.

2

A Moscow Education

“What a bizarre place,” Karin said. It was our first night in Moscow. We collapsed, exhausted, into bed. Around us, our new home on Kutuzovsky Prospect looked like a comfortable American apartment, all modern appliances and upmarket Scandinavian furniture of blond wood and muted shades of gray and blue. Outside, though, this place could not be further from prosperous, capitalist America. It had been raining as we drove into the complex past one of the towering skyscrapers known as “Stalin wedding cakes.” Drably dressed people, heads down, hurried past the Beryozka foreign currency store that none of them could enter. One of the grim-looking, gray-uniformed militiamen in booths at the entrance, whom foreigners dubbed “mili men,” ostentatiously recorded our arrival in a logbook. Ted Shields, my new UPI colleague, and his wife Elaine, along with the UPI photographer John Mantle and his wife, held a welcome dinner in the Shieldses’ similar apartment.

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They gave us an earful about the strange new life we would be living. The job of the mili men was to record our movements and keep most Russians out, they explained. We should be careful about what we said indoors because the KGB tapped our phones and bugged our apartments. And forget using rubles as currency. We foreigners instead used ruble coupons for shopping in local hard-currency shops and fancy hotels from which Russians were barred. The Soviet state, they explained, operated several hardcurrency shops that sold tax-free food, wine and liquor, cigarettes, and other desirable goods. Whatever we couldn’t get in those stores—fresh lettuce, say, or a new leather couch, or a decent iron—we could import from Stockmann’s department store in Helsinki, which would put goods and fresh produce on an overnight train to Moscow. As Karin fell asleep, I lay awake. I could not shake the old sense of fear and vulnerability that had gripped me as soon as we had entered the Soviet Union. We had flown to Copenhagen, bought a blue Volkswagen Bug, and driven it through Sweden and Finland to the Soviet border. Finland’s tame landscape had been reassuring, resembling a geometry class, everything in straight lines, precise and perfect, smooth tarmac highways, frequent gas stations, and colorful places to stop to eat and take a break. Entering the Soviet Union, by contrast, felt as if I were taking a nightmare trip back into my Communist Yugoslavia childhood. For more than three hours, slovenly-looking soldiers opened and inspected every suitcase and box in the trunk and on the back seat. They checked and rechecked our passports and visas, retreating to booths to hold lengthy telephone conversations. When we drove off into the Soviet Union, it was on badly marked roads full of potholes, the shoulders chewed up by tanks and heavy trucks. Crooked lines delineated fields. Hedges were overgrown. The paint on most houses and grim apartment blocks was peeling, the sills rotting, windows without curtains gaped blank. Huge posters on buildings and billboards depicted women with wrenches and sinewy men with hammers. Villages showed little sign of life. We searched in vain for places to eat or rest. The few people we passed stood or sat around listlessly, dressed similarly in grieving black, faces fixed, as though going into battle knowing it would be another futile charge. Some looked at us with curiosity; foreign cars were even scarcer than Soviet-made Ladas or Zhigulis. In the Leningrad suburbs,

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we passed a gang of women shoveling crushed rock into trucks, singing patriotic songs. Watching them, I could not help, in my mind’s eye, seeing my mother twenty-two years earlier when I was just nine years old. I had followed Mom as she was forced to march into a field with other neighborhood women to construct a road, her black kerchief tied under her chin, carrying a shovel. Women around her also carried picks or shovels and pushed wheelbarrows. I had felt deep humiliation: how could this happen to us? How could my parents have turned from carefree, upper-class people and friends of the royal family into haunted, worried ghosts? As Karin and I drove deeper into the Soviet Union, old memories of Yugoslavia kept being triggered, memories I thought I had buried as I became an American in love with all America stood for. I felt as if I were a young boy again, glimpsing the “traitors” hanging from lampposts all along our Sarajevo street. I heard again the hectoring voices from my childhood declaring us “enemies of the people!” I again felt the fear of the day my father, a chemist, failed to return from work, only reappearing months later, gaunt and wearing the baggy, mustard-colored uniform of the Yugoslav People’s Army. “This,” Karin had said, reaching for my hand from the front passenger seat of the blue Volkswagen as we drove deeper into the Soviet Union, “is what you wanted to forget.” As I lay awake now, Karin sleeping peacefully beside me in our new apartment, I tried to tell myself that the past was the past. But it continued to rear up in my mind. In my half-awake state, I thought about the day the partisan army lieutenant arrived at our door, a young, puffy-cheeked man with floppy hair and a smirk, accompanied by two civilians in leather topcoats. They said we occupied too much living space and therefore must share our apartment with another family—the lieutenant’s. “The committee’s decision,” said one of them. Tito’s lieutenants at that time screamed from every newspaper stand, from the radio, from loudspeakers in public squares: the new state belongs to the proletarian classes, to workers and peasants; we would have hydroelectric dams, irrigation systems, collective farms, and future achievements once the centuries-old crust of backwardness was broken. At our kitchen table, my family’s fearful whispers were about informers and agent provocateurs. In the sleepless hours of that first night in Moscow, I remembered, too, how freezing we were in our Sarajevo apartment in those days. For fuel,

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we used everything, including the remnants of my grandfather’s library, with its many nineteenth-century editions of German authors printed in Gothic script. My toddler brother, Mladen, who was six years younger than I was, and I slept fully dressed, our stomachs rumbling from hunger as my parents risked arrest by listening to the Voice of America and the BBC World Service. “But I’m not back there, they have no power over me, I’m an American journalist,” I told myself over and over as I tried, and failed, to sleep. It was a relief to walk across the courtyard the next morning for my first day of work at the UPI Moscow bureau in the same complex as our apartment. As I weaved around cars parked with little sense of order, the hawkeyed mili men watched me from their booths and wrote in their logbooks. I’m an American, I said in my head. Beyond the mili men’s booths, I saw drab Russians and a handful of Soviet cars, kept out of our foreigners’ complex, making their way along Kutuzovsky Prospect in May rain and melting slush. “Welcome,” Henry Shapiro said, greeting me. My new bureau chief was a balding, stocky man around five and a half feet tall, with a salt-andpepper mustache. “Let’s get you set up. I hear your Russian’s good,” he said. Behind him, the clattering telex kept springing to life with messages from the UPI foreign desk in New York. I felt my American identity being shored up. The Communist system had no power over me. I instead now had some power as an American correspondent to tell the truth about it. Shapiro, known as the wise man of the Moscow press corps, had a heartbreaking Cold War story that reinforced my anger at Communism. After finishing Harvard Law thirty-five years earlier, in 1933, Shapiro had traveled to Moscow to study what passed as the Soviet legal system under the brutal Communist dictator Joseph Stalin. He became a reporter instead; five years later he married the daughter of a Moscow University professor. The marriage was, he would say, with a resigned look on his lean, lined face, his “life sentence,” because the Soviet Union would not grant his wife, Ludmilla, an exit visa. Shapiro had a wealth of personal experiences and insights that gave UPI’s coverage depth and wisdom. A consummate cynic, he would often go against the conventional wisdom, something I admired, thinking of Clyde’s admonishments

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to see and think for myself, not follow the herd—in this case the US embassy and other journalists. The big story that summer of 1968 was that the Soviet Union was making threatening noises against fraternal Communist Czechoslovakia. Its leader, Alexander Dubcek, was introducing liberalizing reforms. Would the Soviet Union invade or not was the question of July and August. No one was buying the official line regarding socialist brotherhood. “I think they’ll go in,” Shapiro said as we sat in his office, which was filled with teetering piles of Soviet newspapers and torn-off telex messages from headquarters. “I don’t think the Soviet Union is bluffing.” That, of course, was a hunch, he added quickly, seeing my face, “and you can’t do an analytical story based on hunches.” He pointed out that the US ambassador, Llewellyn Thompson, saw things differently. He had not changed his vacation plans. I told Shapiro that I agreed with him that an invasion was likely. I wanted to impress him and so I quoted Karl Marx’s analysis of Russian policy. Writing in the New York Tribune on July 14, 1853, Marx argued that “the Russian bear is certainly capable of anything, so long as he knows the other animals he has to deal with to be capable of nothing.” “Hmm,” he said, his expression seeming to convey that for all my reading on Russia, and my ability to pull out fancy, pertinent quotes, I had yet to gain experience on the ground. Getting anywhere near Shapiro’s expertise, I told myself, meant working as hard as I could. In the next few days I stayed late at my desk, familiarizing myself with Soviet press commentaries about the situation in Czechoslovakia and the Russian military maneuvers near its borders. But the more I worked, the more I realized I had to learn. Though I spoke Russian, I did not understand the language of Soviet politics. I had to repeatedly consult two office translators on the meanings of words the official Soviet TASS news agency used. TASS did have an English-language service available in New York and London, but I did not want to be lazy and read only that. Comparing them, I saw that sometimes its English translations were misleading or inaccurate. I felt Clyde watching over my shoulder. “Go to the source,” he’d say. Shapiro began teaching me how to decipher the Soviet Union. A few weeks after I arrived, he called me back into his office and pointed to the

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front-page editorial in the official newspaper, Pravda. “I’m going to teach you the right way to read this,” he said. “Now, scan the initial generalities. What does that tell you?” I began to paraphrase. He stopped me. “It’s virtually meaningless,” he said. “Now, go halfway down the column to the paragraph that begins with the word odnako [however] and read to the end. The punch line, the whole point of the editorial and what they want you to take away, is in the last paragraph.” A foreign correspondent in Moscow had to use his wits to analyze what was available in the public domain, he told me. Analysis was everything. I had been in the Soviet Union just three months when, shortly before five o’clock in the morning on August 21, 1968, the phone by my bed rang. I fumbled for it, not yet awake. It was Shapiro. “Get into the office right away,” he said. “Pronto. It’s the big one.” As he had predicted, the Soviet Union and four other Warsaw Pact countries had invaded Czechoslovakia. I was thrilled. Finally I was covering one of the biggest stories in the world. For the next few weeks, the stories I helped churn out appeared in newspapers around the world. I hoped Clyde would see at least one. I wished my father were still alive. With this, he would have had to be proud of me, to finally see that I was following that beloved Shakespeare quote of his, “To thine own self be true.” Wasn’t I being true to myself, to my ambition, and, in some small way, redressing the horror the Communists inflicted on our family? Wouldn’t he have had to withdraw his curse on me? After the invasion, I continued to stay late at the office on most days, writing about the repercussions of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Karin at first did not object, saying she understood that I had to work extra hard at the beginning. Even though she was finding Moscow’s drabness hard to bear, particularly as she no longer had the clerical job that gave her life structure, she, like me, was amazed by how much the Moscow posting had improved our financial situation. Until Moscow, we had struggled to make ends meet. We now marveled that UPI paid our rent, as well as the phone bill and other utilities. It also paid for a full-time housekeeper who shopped, laundered, cleaned, and cooked five days a week. Twice a year, because this was considered a hardship post, we could take

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ten-day R&R trips to warmer climes, paid for by the company, to places like Majorca, Greece, the Canary Islands, or Sicily. In addition to my salary, I received a weekly, and tax-free, hardship allowance. We no longer had to add up each grocery item in our shopping cart to make sure we had enough money to pay for them. Moscow even had a magical quality for both of us at first as we explored the city together. Special license plates on our blue Volkswagen Bug signaled that I was an American correspondent, allowing us to park virtually anywhere. Not that there was much traffic in those days. Our favorite place to park was just outside St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square. We could also get prime seats at the Bolshoi as often as we wanted. The city had virtually no restaurants or coffee shops, but we could eat out in big hotels for foreigners, such as the Ukraine Hotel in one of Moscow’s seven “Stalin’s wedding cake” skyscrapers dotted around the city, or the vast Metropol Hotel off Red Square. Their menus were limited, and the whole process took about two hours. But we didn’t mind. We ordered items that were readily available for foreigners: blini, Beluga caviar, a bottle of dry Soviet champagne, and ice cream for dessert. “I never imagined I’d have as much black caviar as I wanted,” Karin would say. Karin and I soon became part of the social life within the foreigners’ ghettos and on the diplomatic party circuit. Inhabiting this world felt akin to living on a luxury liner, cut off from the Soviet world, particularly after Czechoslovakia when the Kremlin put all social contacts into the deep freeze as domestic repression intensified. Thick, cream-colored cards embossed with various impressive seals invited us to embassy bashes and dinner dances at which women dressed in slinky long gowns and men in well-tailored tuxedos. I had to buy a tuxedo and Karin elegant evening wear on our first R&R to the West. We also attended intimate foreigners’ dinner parties. But I soon grew impatient with these gatherings. A good deal of the talk at the dinners focused on the day-to-day difficulties of our lives, such as dealing with the Soviet-state-supplied maids and drivers who reported on us. Karin joined in the complaining; she liked knowing that others were chafing, as she did, at Moscow life in the foreigners’ ghettos. A journalist, Clyde had drummed into me, needed to go out, feel, see, and observe for himself. This seemed impossible in the privileged, enclosed, and isolated foreigners’ world.

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I began to absent myself from social engagements that I saw as professionally nonproductive. Despite appearing rude, I’d even leave embassy dinners and return to work whenever I gleaned tidbits of information that I felt had to be reported. Karin, naturally, resented this. Since the spouses of American correspondents were not allowed to work in Moscow, she began complaining that she hardly knew what to do with herself. She felt a prisoner in the foreigners’ ghetto as I was working more and more, even on my days off. Even the Bolshoi did not hold much appeal after a while. What do you do after you’ve seen all the operas and ballets in the current repertoire? “Do I even have a husband?” she was complaining by the fall of 1968. She had given up everything back in the States, she said, and for what? How, Karin asked me, could she keep a job, and so her independence, her reason to get up in the morning, with all this moving around? My UPI colleague Ted Shields did his shift and went home to Elaine, she kept saying. Shapiro went home to his wife, Ludmilla. “Only you do your shift and then work another shift for free.” “Just give me this time,” I pleaded, resenting that she did not understand how important this was to me. This assignment could make my career, our lives. If she could just stick it out for a couple of years, I would find a way to make it up to her. “Look,” I’d say, putting on a face of false bonhomie, “it’s just nine weeks until our next R&R—we’ll be in Tenerife. Ten whole days of beach and good food. The hotel we’ve booked is five star.” But our arguments escalated. “I hate it here,” Karin said one night in the deep, dark chill of early January. “You like it, which is lucky for you.” Not wanting to hear her complaints, I retreated further from her and worked harder. My father had said in a letter that it was impossible to pursue a successful career as a journalist and have the happy, balanced family life that he considered the most important goal in life. But Clyde, my surrogate father, had told me to “follow your star.” Clyde was right, I thought, not Dad and his old-fashioned Balkan ideas. I worked late into the night, and early in the morning. I was sometimes envious of newspaper correspondents. They had to meet a deadline only once a day. A wire service correspondent was perpetually on deadline and faced with time-consuming obstacles. It was difficult to keep a focus on facts and truth in the face of mendacious Kremlin propaganda barrages. Also, we transmitted our reports by telex. Any phone calls had to be

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booked through Soviet operators and could take hours. That would entail more hours away from home. I was constantly nervous, not wanting to be caught wrong-footed. The work, in part because of the creaky and secretive Soviet system, was all-consuming. But the rhythm of wire services had its own rewards. There was a special, indescribable thrill in breaking big stories first. They were often completely unexpected. Such was the case in January of 1969, when an assassination attempt was made on Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev as he rode in an open limousine in Moscow with three cosmonauts just back from a space mission. Tens of thousands of Muscovites cheered the triumphal motorcade as it crept along Kutuzovsky Prospect toward the Kremlin. Millions were watching the televised welcome when the broadcast was suddenly interrupted the moment Brezhnev and the cosmonauts passed through the Kremlin’s Borovitsky Gate. After a brief delay, the broadcast was restored. But the camera had shifted attention to the Palace of Congresses, where the Soviet elite had assembled to greet the new heroes with flowers and speeches. The limousine with Brezhnev was not to be seen, and the general secretary did not join the others at the Palace of Congresses. Two hours after filing stories on the basis of TV coverage, I was alone in the office when a breathless colleague, Jay Axelbank, rushed in. He had been told by a known Kremlin propagandist that the TV broadcast was interrupted when a gunman hiding inside the Borovitsky Gate fired shots at the cosmonauts. Jay gave me this tantalizing piece of information as a professional favor because he worked for a weekly and could not use it himself. If ever there was a time for a clear head, this was it. I knew I had a great story and was pumped up with adrenaline but also terrified. Was there a shooting at all? I wondered. How do you confirm that? To say that the gunman tried to kill Brezhnev would get me expelled from Russia. I had no doubts about that. On the other hand, to repeat what the leakers said, that it was an assassination attempt on the cosmonauts, was ludicrous. It made no sense. It was my first big solo story, and I desperately wanted to beat my rivals. So I ran out of the office to seek another source. As luck would have it—and luck is invariably one of the key elements in the news business— I soon crossed paths with a neighbor with whom I had gotten royally

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drunk a couple of times. He was the Mongolian telegraph agency’s Moscow correspondent. He had been in the vicinity of the Borovitsky Gate, he said, and had heard the shots. But he had not seen the incident, nor could he offer additional information. At least that was something: somebody had fired shots and most likely at the motorcade, I thought, as I ran back to the office. Why not say exactly what happened and to hell with it? I carefully constructed a lead that said everything I could safely say. I still remember the phrasing that solved my problem: “A gunman fired shots at the motorcade carrying Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and three cosmonauts just back from their space mission.” In the world of wire services, a minute was an eternity. Since wire service stories always went out with the journalist’s byline, this story, which I broke first, propelled me out of the herd. I had covered myself in glory. That was what the “play cable”—the daily communication from UPI’s New York headquarters tallying newspapers that carried UPI stories and those that carried AP copy—told me the next day. Later it was disclosed that a shooting did take place and that one of the cosmonauts, Georgy Beregovoy, was slightly wounded. After a few days, rumors identified the would-be assassin as an army lieutenant named Ilyin, who was positioned inside the gate and was wearing a police officer’s uniform. Two months later, in early March, I had another accidental scoop. I was alone in the office late at night waiting for something to happen. Journalism is often like that. We wait for a conference to end, or a government communiqué to be issued, or a cease-fire to take hold, putting in long hours of waiting that are sometimes followed by electrifying bursts of energy. On that particular night vigil, I was reading the Russian TASS wire instead of the English-language TASS. The Russian version often carried stories that would not appear on the English TASS service until minutes or hours later, if at all. Just as I walked into the wire room, the Russian TASS wire began tap-tapping a government communiqué about armed clashes between Soviet and Chinese border troops. The site of the conflict was, as usual, reported as “in the Far East.” Excited, my hands trembling, I began hand-pecking a bulletin directly into the telex machine: TASS reports armed clashes between Soviet and Chinese troops along their border in the Far East. I knew the story would have the US State Department by the throat within minutes and that

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senior reporters would be rehashing it for weeks if not months. Nothing can compare with the thrill of being alone in the bureau as such an important story develops late at night. I proceeded to add details: the incident took place along the disputed border on Damansky Island in the Ussuri River; Moscow blamed China for staging the “provocation” and reported an unspecified number of dead and wounded. It was a story of huge magnitude, exposing the depth of a Sino-Soviet feud that had been percolating for several years. I was busy through the night. Suddenly there was a lot on my plate, what with having to locate the Ussuri River on the map and flesh out some details. New York’s play cable the next morning said we again covered ourselves in glory. Despite these successes, I was frustrated. How could I break through the barriers the Soviet state erected to stop foreigners from making friends with Russians, from getting to know the realities of Soviet life—official and unofficial—behind the propaganda wall?

3

Evading the KGB to Make Contacts

Dissidents provided one entrée into the Soviet world beyond what officials wanted foreigners to experience. But, as I learned on a snow-swirling Moscow day, contact with foreign correspondents could put them in great danger. On that day, Henry Kamm of the New York Times and I drove to an apartment complex in a central Moscow district not far from the US embassy. The former World War II troop commander Piotr Grigorenko, a leading dissident, had gotten word to us that he wanted to meet with us. “Come in, come in,” Grigorenko, a gaunt, tall, balding, and slightly stooped figure said, greeting us, when we arrived. He had taught at the Frunze Military Academy before being forced into retirement. He led us into the bright kitchen and poured us tea from a silver samovar. His face registered more passionate determination than fear. Henry and I listened to Grigorenko and took notes. Despite the pressure and the certainty of surveillance, Grigorenko wanted to talk. Dissent for him, as for others, and as he now emphasized to us, was directly linked to the suppression of the liberal Czech regime. The Soviet intervention

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had been followed by massive repression within the Soviet Union. Underground leaflets and typewritten protest letters (known as samizdat) had sprung up. Political trials had followed. I had long admired dissidents’ courage from afar. In college, I had read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in English—it had been smuggled out, translated, and published—and he had become a hero of mine. His very name had an aura for me. In the Soviet system, Solzhenitsyn was an outlaw, a priestlike, almost mythical figure made more powerful by the remoteness and silence forced on him by authorities. Now I was to witness the courage of a dissident up close. As Henry and I left Grigorenko’s apartment and entered the dimly lit stairwell, several plainclothes KGB men pushed us roughly aside. Within minutes they were manhandling Grigorenko past us, his head pushed down so that he could make no contact. We yelled, tried to stand in their way, but it was futile. The episode underscored an uncomfortable truth: every time dissidents reached out to me and other foreign journalists, they risked everything, and we, by contrast, risked almost nothing. Soviet authorities knew that if they revoked an American journalist’s visa, the US would almost certainly retaliate with the expulsion of a Soviet journalist. Grigorenko was incarcerated in a psychiatric institution for being “mentally ill,” even though a resident psychiatrist, Semyon Gluzman, found him to be sane. Gluzman, in turn, was tried and sentenced to seven years in a labor camp and three years of Siberian exile. I never saw Grigorenko again. Besides dissidents, another group that provided us with unauthorized access was Soviet Jews. I would stand across from the Central Synagogue on Archipov Street on Friday evenings and watch them gather in numbers that grew from week to week. It was an astonishing sight: groups of people emerging from side streets, buildings, standing and walking in near-silent protest. Though thoroughly secular, many of the protesters had come to believe that Israel might have a meaning for them as a Jewish homeland. This Jewish reawakening was, as far as I could determine, a direct result of Israel’s military triumph in the Six-Day War. Up to that point, Russian Jews had shown little interest in the existence of the new state on the Mediterranean Sea. But in 1967 the Israeli victory over the Soviet-backed-and-armed Arab states appeared as the embodiment of intrepid Jewish strength.

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In a deeper sense, Israel became a psychological avenger for the centuries of pogroms; it certainly stiffened the spine of Russian Jews who for generations had been pitilessly marginalized, caricatured, and worse. Many began dreaming about going to Israel. Some of them asked the authorities to be allowed to immigrate there—and became known as refuseniks after they were turned down, becoming instant outcasts, stripped of jobs and more. As the crowds grew in size, the authorities responded with repressive measures, deploying more police agents and dispersing the quiet but committed protesters. The crowds around the synagogue became still larger. The regime countered by deploying fierce-looking mounted police. I admired Soviet Jews’ courage and determination, echoing that of Grigorenko and other dissidents, and I empathized with their predicament. Like other Western journalists, I visited their homes to hear their stories. But I was always conscious of that uncomfortable side of journalism: that the more horrific and heartrending a story, the more news outlets would pick it up and the more attention and praise I would get. Sometimes I thought, with shame, what a rotten business this was: using everybody, moving in and out of people’s lives as easily as one slips on a fresh shirt each morning and takes it off at night. It was hard not to take liberties to get a story and pursue professional glory. But I felt better when I told myself that I felt an affinity for the refuseniks and the dissidents. I believed that the United States’ mission was to help the weak and oppose the oppressors. We American journalists were the good guys because we were going after the truth. Yet, even as I told myself this, I often felt that I was little more than a mercenary with a good eye, constantly collecting details and color for possible stories. Perhaps my father’s warning about drawing “nourishment from the misfortunes of people and nations” was playing more on my mind than I cared to admit. On a fall day in 1968, I made a first effort to develop meaningful contact with a wider circle of Russians besides dissidents and Soviet Jews, with people who would be taking a risk to talk to me but who were not already under surveillance. I headed to the section of Gorky Park where Russian men passed hours playing chess. Shafts of light filtered through trees onto the makeshift tables where chess aficionados had gathered, seeking out partners for games.

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At first I hung back. It was likely, I knew, that I had been followed. The KGB considered all Americans as potential spies. They had started following all foreigners at least as early as six years previously, in the fall of 1962, when the wife of a British visa officer in Moscow, while walking with their three small children, was observed by Soviet agents receiving a small packet from a Russian passerby. The woman was Janet Chisholm, herself an MI6 operative running Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, one of the great Western spies in Moscow. I saw no obvious tail, so perhaps I had some room to maneuver. I was wearing shabby clothes, a well-worn jacket and scuffed shoes, and so I did not stand out as a foreigner. I was acutely aware of how important clothes were to fitting in. When I had first arrived in the United States at the end of 1959, my bulky European winter clothes and thick, long hair had acutely embarrassed me. My aunt Lepa, seeing my distress, had driven me to the Famous-Barr department store in Clayton and bought me a pair of khaki pants, several shirts and T-shirts, a pair of sneakers, a turtleneck sweater, white socks, and a windbreaker. Getting rid of my old wardrobe had felt deliciously exciting. Finally I didn’t stand out as foreign! For a while, after I came into contact with New York Times journalists who were adjunct professors at Columbia Journalism School, I tried to dress nattily like them. Even the sports reporter, Joseph Durso, dressed like a prosperous business executive. But after my rejection by the Times I had reverted to what Karin, in disgust, called my “thrift-shop style of clothing.” I had first dressed like that to fit in with the American friends I had gravitated toward at Washington University from 1960 to 1962. They were would-be campus jazz musicians who, though middle class, favored shoddy, stained clothing. In Gorky Park, in my shabby clothes, I approached a man in late middle age looking for a partner. “Let’s play,” I said in Russian. He studied me with faded blue eyes, taking a drag on his filterless papirosi cigarette before blowing out smoke to add to the swirl around the chess tables. Nearly all the chess players smoked. If he knew I was a foreigner, he did not give this away. He said his name was Vladimir. We began playing. We chatted a little as we became engrossed in the game. General things. I had started to follow Soviet soccer games and players on TV. That was one topic of conversation: “Did you see that goal last week?” We had an interesting

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conversation. I learned that he had a dacha where he spent as much of his time as possible and that the mushroom season that year was one of the best. I was not looking for secrets. I just wanted to get a sense of people, Soviet life, up close. I could not do that when I sat in the bubble of a Soviet-guarded complex a couple of miles from the Kremlin rewriting official handouts—which was what TASS statements amounted to—which I could just as well do in New York. I had to be in places like Gorky Park. After a couple of hours, I won the game. We made a date for a rematch three days later. I showed up, as arranged. He didn’t. The same infuriating pattern repeated itself. The initial contact over a chess game in Gorky Park was not difficult, though chess players’ and bystanders’ reactions varied. Because of my Russian-looking clothes and because I spoke Russian with almost no accent, many did not immediately know I was a foreigner, let alone an American. Those who did tended to either pepper me with questions or eye me silently, no doubt scared. After most games, my partner would agree to meet up for a rematch. But I’d never see him again in the park or elsewhere. In time I learned from Russians I did befriend that the KGB always stepped in when interlocutors left me. They would give my new acquaintances a choice: become my “friend” and be a KGB informer, or not keep the appointment. Not keeping the appointment was what honorable people tended to do. As the winter of 1968 was taking hold, just as I was despairing of making meaningful connections with Russians outside the dissident and refusenik circles, I bumped into Sveto Maslesa, the man to whom I had pitched stories when he worked on the city desk of the Sarajevo newspaper Oslobodjenje back in 1955 and 1956. Maslesa remembered me, and my rookie eagerness back then. “Dusko, so you became a journalist—and an American one, too!” he exclaimed. He was now working as a Moscow correspondent for the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug, one of five or six Yugoslav journalists in Moscow, all skilled professionals and veteran Communist Party members who knew the Soviet system. He was clearly impressed by my position with a major world wire service and just as keen to establish a relationship. Soon we began to socialize and exchange information. To formalize our cooperation, I introduced his bureau chief to Henry Shapiro.

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Maslesa and his colleagues began getting me into the Moscow press club, a place to which they had access as journalists from an Eastern European Communist country. Second-tier Russian journalists, writers, and artists could be found there from early evening until late at night, eating, drinking, and exchanging gossip. Some would come to our table and talk for hours. No state secrets were ever revealed in these alcoholic conversations, but the press club was, finally, an entrée into a world beyond the dissident and refusenik circles. At a point when my new friends would start to sputter and sway, I’d discreetly stop drinking and grow sober and all the more fascinated by what I saw and heard. I often stayed at the club deep into the night. Karin would be asleep when I pulled into the Kutuzovsky Prospect foreigners’ ghetto in the blue Volkswagen in the early hours of the morning, the mili men recording my arrival. I sometimes suspected that she was feigning sleep but would feel guiltily relieved at avoiding another argument about how selfish I was, about how little I did to relieve her boredom. I did try persuading her to come with me to the press club. “Russia and Russian people don’t interest me, and I don’t speak Russian,” she’d say. “That’s your thing, not mine. I just want to go back to the US and have a normal life and a job. I’m suffocating here.” I tried to entice her by describing the dozens of interesting people at the press club, who in turn led me into Moscow’s cultural life. But the more I pressed, the more she resisted. And so I went alone, my circle, and my world, widening. Mikhail Zhvanyetsky, the great humorist, was a regular. One evening I was seated next to Tamara Milashkina, the young Bolshoi soprano whom I admired for her performance of the haunting Kaddish-like aria in Borodin’s opera Prince Igor. On another occasion, I met the nationalist painter Ilya Glazunov, who was reputed to have close links with several top politicians. The journalist Alexander Bovin was another habitué of the club and the heaviest drinker I’d ever met. He worked for the Central Committee and was rumored to have openly opposed the invasion of Czechoslovakia. How he did so and remained at seeming liberty in Moscow I would never know. In conversations at the press club, I emphasized my Serb heritage instead of making Soviet-American comparisons, reasoning that I should use whatever I could to establish relationships. The Serb comparisons

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threw Russians off. They were unprepared for feisty arguments and negative comparisons with Yugoslavia, rather than with the United States. “My ancestors were reading books when your ancestors were living in the trees,” I joked to Bovin. I pointed out that the first Serbian book was printed in 1494 by a printing press in Cetinje, Montenegro, while the first Russian printer, Ivan Fyodorov, was born thirty years later. Bovin, disarmed, roared with laughter. I regularly pretended, too, that I held my liquor badly. The display of a tendency to alcoholism, I figured, would diminish the secret police’s interest in me. I learned nearly all the Russian profanities—no easy feat—and became known for using them. As my circle of Russian contacts grew, one contact leading to another, an uncomfortable question sat at the heart of each of those relationships. Logically, a friendship between a foreign journalist and a Soviet citizen was not possible in a totalitarian state. If everybody who worked for the state was paid by it, then, as Upton Sinclair put it, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” I was always on my guard, particularly with Russians who seemed too eager to be friendly, and who could be KGB plants. But I decided that if someone was willing to have contact with me, I’d cut him a lot of slack, and consider him a friend. That was simply the way things worked in a totalitarian state. As a journalist, after all, wasn’t I looking to them for insights that would inform my journalism? Even though I took care not to expose anything that could endanger them? It was friendship with caveats on both sides. Always, Clyde’s words about journalism were in my head: was I not going out and touching, feeling, seeing for myself? I had figured out how to circumvent some of the barriers of being an American correspondent reporting from the heart of America’s Communist adversary by using my wits and my heritage. Was this not what great journalists did—figure out how to win trust? Were we not all human beings, even people living in the Soviet Union? Was I really using them if I took great pains to protect them? Some of my new acquaintances volunteered that they made a show of cooperating with the KGB without saying anything of consequence. The actor Mikhail Kozakov, for example, described how “they came, a couple of fellows, very civilized and polite and said they really needed my help. They wanted me to help them, from time to time, nothing very

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much, just so they could round out the profile of this or that person. And it was difficult to refuse them.” The Russian friends-with-caveats led me to a deeper knowledge of the realities of the Soviet Union. One such friend, Joseph Goldin, a teddy bear of a man with unkempt hair and beard, held no regular job. His shabby communal apartment was just off Pushkin Square in the very center of the city, and I often wondered how fourteen people could share a single bathroom. Once inside I could smell the odor of poverty, that sour reek of unwashed clothes. From time to time I tried to help Joseph with gifts of clothes and food, but I had to be careful not to hurt his pride. Hearty, expansive, energetic, fearless, and passionate about the life of the mind, Goldin wrote science articles for several newspapers, but always under a pseudonym. He was well connected and knew personally many influential figures in the city’s cultural and scientific elite. He was also exceptionally well read and had excellent English. We once discussed at length the book The Icon and the Axe with its author, the Princeton historian James Billington, over dinner in my apartment. As Joseph took me around Moscow, I began to see the city through his eyes. “Pushkin got married in there,” he would remark while we were driving past a dilapidated church that now served as a storage depot. Or he would point at a two-story house painted yellow near the Garden Ring and say, “Chekhov lived on the first floor.” Whenever I felt stumped in my research or reporting, I’d get Joseph to walk the streets with me, and I got to know the wider city, from the elegant Patriarch’s Pond neighborhood to the poor and decrepit parts that nobody I knew ever visited. We used to sit by Patriarch’s Pond in the spring, when the daffodils were blooming and white swans were traversing the still water, and we’d speculate about what the place must have looked like when they stocked fish there for the table of the Russian Orthodox patriarch. In winter, the pond became the largest skating rink in the heart of Moscow; on those winter evenings I had the illusion of being a vital part of the living city, and I imagined Tolstoy and Chekhov skating on the frozen pond. It was Joseph who told me who lived in the posh apartment buildings on the banks of the Moscow River opposite the Kremlin. With that knowledge, I’d sometimes go and wait in the car to catch a glimpse of Red Army marshals who lived in the House of Lions, a luxurious neoclassical

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stone building with two gilded lions at the entrance to the compound. The house, Joseph pointed out, did not exist when Mikhail Bulgakov wrote about the neighborhood in The Master and Margarita. One day, Joseph managed to get me into a party at the home of Air Marshal Nikolai Golovanov. Hosted by the air marshal’s daughter, it was attended by actors, producers, directors, journalists, and would-be stars. I got into conversation there with the playwright Nikolai Erdman, who, in the 1920s, had won the Stalin Prize for the screenplay of the musical comedy Volga-Volga, which I had seen as an adolescent in Sarajevo. It was Erdman’s satirical play The Mandate, directed by the legendary Vsevolod Meyerhold in 1924, that had vaulted him into national prominence. Maxim Gorky called him “our new Gogol.” But his second play, The Suicide, was banned by Stalin after Erdman refused to change such lines as one character’s lament that “only the dead can say what the living are thinking” in Stalin’s Moscow. Stalin shut him out of literary and theatrical life in 1932 by sending him into Siberian exile for ten years because his allegorical stories made fun of an authoritarian character who behaved very much like the general secretary. At the party in the air marshal’s apartment, Erdman invited me to visit him and continue our discussion. With a cultivated look of indifference, he suggested I park my car away from his building. He lived in a massive block of houses almost directly opposite the old US embassy on Tchaikovsky Street. “Anonymity is a valuable asset around here,” he said wryly. I always brought a bottle of French cognac along when I called on Erdman, always on Tuesdays and unannounced by prearrangement. I appreciated Erdman’s restless, opinionated mind, always ready for some sharp observation as though everything was potential grist for his brainpower. He kept me abreast of literary happenings in Moscow; he gave me a bootlegged copy of Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, which I had to read in one week. When I declared it a masterpiece, Erdman winced, as he always did when he didn’t agree with something I said. “Good piece of work, I’d say,” he commented, “but everybody needs a good editor.” Though Erdman decided to risk regularly seeing me—no doubt given his advanced age and his history of braving Stalin’s punishment—that was not the case with many of the visitors I ran into at his home. They included the actor and singer Vladimir Vysotsky, the screenwriter Mikhail

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Yesenin-Volpin, and other theater people. Most behaved in such a way as to indicate that my presence made them uncomfortable, and I’d quickly make myself scarce. Like Erdman, the avant-garde sculptor Vadim Sidur—whose statues graced public squares in Germany and Switzerland but who was largely unknown at home—decided to risk being my friend. Yugoslav correspondents took me to his studio in the basement of a decrepit building on Komsomol Street, not far from the Cuban cigar shop. What I found the oddest thing of all was that, in this enslaved country, Sidur talked and acted like a free man. Like Goldin and Erdman, he lived on the fringes of society, but his wife, Julia, held a regular job. I also got to know a man from out of town named Joseph Rappa. He lived with his family in Murmansk, in the North, and worked for a company that sent him frequently to the capital. He was thin, with an elongated face like a Christian ascetic in Russian icons, and had a long, black beard. We met at the press club a couple of months after my arrival in Moscow, and he surreptitiously handed me a pamphlet protesting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, written by General Grigorenko—the same dissident Henry Kamm and I would witness being dragged away from his apartment by KGB thugs. We ended up having a meal together. He had never met an American before and was full of questions; I was curious about life in Murmansk. When I suggested over dinner that he give me a call the next time he was in town, a strange look of fear came briefly into his eyes. But he phoned me some weeks later, and we had dinner again. I saw him from time to time over the next two years. At one point he confided to me that he had been questioned by the KGB and indicated he had pretended to go along in order to continue seeing me. As my circle of Russian friends and contacts—both official and unofficial—grew, I recognized more and more parallels with how people had behaved in the Communist Yugoslavia of my youth, a place where words spoken out of turn could get you into deep trouble. I thought of what Clark Gable, playing a Moscow correspondent, said in the 1940 movie Comrade X: “Face the facts, baby. There ain’t no news in Russia.” But he wasn’t quite right. What news there was was not out in the open. It was passed on by word of mouth and rumors.

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Because of this I slowly had to unlearn many of the basic lessons from my Columbia journalism classes. In the US, almost anyone would take my call when I identified myself as a reporter for the Associated Press or UPI. Spokespeople or people in authority would attempt to influence a story. Others would provide information. In Russia, the direct American approach led nowhere. “Only police ask direct questions,” Joseph explained, shaking his head. “It’s a matter of historic experience.” One November day in 1968, I drove home through a snowstorm after spending the afternoon at the sculptor Sidur’s cramped apartment. Karin had big news: she was pregnant. As we hugged, as I took in the news that I was going to be a father, feeling some trepidation, I felt sure a child would be the answer to Karin’s unhappiness. Wasn’t this what couples did? Wouldn’t a child give Karin a focus to her life, make her happier? I had tried for months to persuade Karin that this would alleviate the gloom and depression that gripped her, but she had resisted, saying she was unsure she wanted to be a mother. Perhaps she was already questioning our marriage. But she was happy that she would escape from Moscow to wait out the last trimester of her pregnancy with her parents in Denmark. Karin departed for Copenhagen in March of 1969; our baby was due in July. Alone in Moscow, I felt guiltily freed to work even longer on stories without having to worry about Karin. I copied and recopied them from longhand to sharpen and improve the flow. I went to different theaters three or four times a week, accompanied by acquaintances, and spread my wings as far as possible. I smoked cigars all the time. Boxes of fine Upmanns were available at the Cuban store on Komsomolskaya Street. I drank a great deal and went to bed hours after midnight, and when I finally closed my eyes, I was not so much falling asleep as succumbing to sheer exhaustion, my body shutting down for repair. If journalism is for driven people, for overachievers willing to sacrifice their personal lives for professional satisfaction, I was happily in it for keeps. Our son, Peter Alexander, was born on July 11, 1969. Karin and I rejoiced in the Copenhagen hospital room, gazing at our perfect little boy, and at each other, elated that we were now a family of three, once again optimistic about our future.

4

Hired by the Washington Post

In July of 1970, I received a letter from Washington Post foreign editor John Anderson inviting me to Washington for interviews and a tryout at the newspaper’s expense. A month later, I flew to Washington and checked into the Statler Hilton—since renamed the Capital Hilton—at 1001 Sixteenth Street NW, close to the Washington Post building on Fifteenth and L Streets NW. Remembering my failed New York Times interview two and a half years earlier, I tried not to be too optimistic. Phil Foisie, who oversaw the paper’s foreign service, met me for breakfast the next morning in the hotel’s fancy, cavernous restaurant. From the start, it felt nothing like that 1968 Times interview. The balding, stocky Foisie asked me barely any questions about the Soviet Union or Moscow. Instead he outlined Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee’s “big plans” for expanding the paper’s international coverage, which I might become a part of. Since being appointed by publisher and owner Katharine Graham two years earlier, he said, Bradlee had been transforming the Post from a second-tier newspaper into a rival to the

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Times. Bradlee had been attracting “great talent”—such journalists as David Broder and Bud Nossiter—by paying them good salaries and giving them a lot of editorial freedom. I would be happy to hear, he added, that unlike the Times, the Post was a writer’s newspaper. He told me that Henry Kamm, the Times Moscow correspondent with whom I had interviewed the dissident Grigorenko and others, was one of his best friends. “It was he who recommended you when I asked him,” he said. “I checked out your work. I was impressed.” We finished breakfast and headed on foot to the nearby Washington Post. “A few months from now,” Foisie said as he led me to the newsroom, treating me like an honored guest, “we’ll have expanded into the modern building next door, and into the computer age.” Foisie guided me to the desk where, for the next three and a half days, I would try out to join the Washington Post. I felt as if I had stepped into one of the American movies that had helped spark my boyhood ambition to become a journalist. I was captivated. Reporters and editors sat at rows of battered wooden desks that groaned under the weight of stacks of paper and clunky old typewriters and were littered with cigarette butts in used Styrofoam cups. Telephones rang, loud voices cried “Copy to foreign,” “Copy to news desk,” “Copy to photo.” A layer of acrid-smelling cigarette smoke hovered below ceiling lights, since almost everyone smoked. For three days I worked from early morning until late at night at my tryout tasks, mostly shaping wire service and other copy from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. I worked on a clunky manual typewriter with six-ply carbon paper. The stories had to be triple spaced so that various editors would have room to write in changes—always in lead pencil. I was enthralled as the atmosphere in the newsroom reached a frenzy through the early evening until the first deadline at 7:00 p.m., when everything stopped. The whole process, I thought, was like an orchestra playing a symphony that reached its crescendo with the deafening din of the composing room in the basement, when the presses would start warming up. The work I had been given was straightforward and I sensed from Foisie’s reaction that he thought I had done a competent job. The Washington Post, with the long shadow it cast over the US government, carried far greater weight than a wire service, I thought. At noon on the fourth day, a Friday, Foisie took me down a dimly lit corridor and knocked on a door at the end. “Come,” Ben Bradlee’s voice

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boomed. Distinguished looking, with his gray hair slicked back, he stood up and shook my hand. I had seen him around the newsroom and he had struck me as a man full of energy and commanding great respect as he talked to reporters and editors. My eye was drawn to the top bookshelf behind him, lined with books written by Washington Post reporters. “Let’s have lunch,” Bradlee said, flashing me his rakish smile. I had a hard time keeping up with him as he strode down the corridor and out of the building into the sweltering August heat. We were, he told me, speaking fast, going to his favorite French restaurant, Chez Camille. Besides what Foisie had told me about Bradlee’s plans to transform the Post, I knew plenty about him. He was from an upper-class New England family and had attended St. Mark’s preparatory school and Harvard before doing navy service in World War II. He had then worked for Newsweek as a correspondent and Washington bureau chief. The most intriguing fact about Bradlee, for me, was that he had been friends with the late President John F. Kennedy. I was dying to ask him about my hero. Kennedy’s had been the first political voice I actively listened to when I arrived in the US just as the 1960 presidential campaign was cranking up. I had devoured his speeches. He was young, charming, glamorous, and articulate, with a heroic military record and a beautiful wife. It had been impossible for me to see his smile and not like him. He held out hope of a new era—a time of progressivism and forward movement after the Eisenhower years of tranquility. It was an exciting time to be alive in America, I had thought, the kind of time I had dreamed about. The air was crackling with energy and I felt as if Kennedy were talking to me directly and personally, urging me to get involved, to aspire to something beyond myself. He gave a sophisticated meaning to the new secular religion Clyde had introduced me to, which demanded from its faithful a fervent belief in the United States’ mission to remake the world. I pretended to be confident as we sat down at Chez Camille. I was far from it and I knew I would not dare ask him about Kennedy. I declined a drink, and Camille, the French proprietor, brought Bradlee a glass of his favorite white burgundy. Bradlee first asked me a few questions about myself and the Soviet Union. It felt like being in a firing line; he barely let me finish the answer to one question before proceeding to the next. Then he began recounting, with gusto and dropping some profanities, the drama surrounding his coverage of Nikita Khrushchev in Belgrade when he was

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a Newsweek correspondent. Growing more expansive, he began outlining plans to do great things at the paper after getting rid of “the deadwood in the newsroom.” He talked as if he were giving dictation, point by point. I had a feeling he knew exactly where he was going. I told a few Russian jokes, but mostly listened and said yes or no in the right places, hoping to survive the ordeal. “So, when can you start?” he asked as we returned to the Post building and he left me in the main lobby. I said something about wrapping up my affairs in Moscow. Before I returned to the hotel to prepare for my flight back to Moscow, Foisie told me to expect to hear from them “very soon.” As I left, I convinced myself that I could not yet count on getting the job. The signs were good, but I was most intent on escaping the misery and disillusionment of my unsuccessful interview at the Times. Just as at the end of my Times interview, there had been no talk of paperwork. Still, this time felt different. The Post had approached me. Bradlee had asked when I could start, as if it was a done deal. Most importantly, I told myself as my cab sped along the highway to Washington’s Dulles Airport, I had done this on my own, without Clyde or anyone else intervening on my behalf. This was a real chance and I was in Washington on the merits of my work with UPI and the recommendation of Henry Kamm. My ability to speak Russian threatened no one. By now I was sure that was why Harrison Salisbury had nixed my hiring. One night over drinks in Moscow, Henry Shapiro had reminisced about people he had worked with over the years. He had mentioned casually that the most famous of them all— Walter Cronkite and Harrison Salisbury—didn’t know how to speak Russian. I arrived back in Moscow in a restless mood. Karin and baby Peter met me at Sheremetyevo Airport, and she peppered me with questions. How did the interviews go? Did I think I had gotten the job, that we could leave Moscow? Taking care of Peter now occupied her and she had become less unhappy in the thirteen months since he was born, but she was still desperate to leave Moscow. “You need to stop working all the time and pay attention to your family,” she said repeatedly. “I thought the interviews went well,” I told her as we loaded my battered blue Samsonite suitcase into the VW Bug and drove off on the potholed airport road. “But we can’t count on it.” Then I added, “At least there’s no committee this time. Ben Bradlee runs the paper. The decision is his.”

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“God, let him hire you. I can’t stand another winter here,” she said. The job offer arrived in late September of 1970. It specified that the paper would also pay our moving expenses. I was over the moon; after all, I thought, the world was still right side up. My first thoughts went to Clyde. I thought he would be pleased, and would even see it as a vindication of his faith in me. This is all I want, I thought, all I need to be happy. I wrote a long letter to Clyde, describing my trip to Washington in August, my joy at the job offer. I also spelled out what I felt were my shortcomings. “As you used to say,” I wrote, “a correspondent’s job is to look on and not interfere—be a witness. I’m afraid I didn’t measure up.” I partly blamed KGB surveillance and harassment. But I blamed myself more for following the pack too much, for being too self-righteous and prosecutorial in my articles, and for my zeal to condemn Communism and remake the world along American lines. My features had focused too much, I said in my letter, on gloating about the backwardness of Russian society and what a reporter had to do to overcome mindless Soviet restrictions. There had been no need for that. In my articles the facts should have spoken for themselves. Clyde’s congratulatory message came on a postcard: “Congrats! Next time around, your abilities will catch up to your ambition. You’ll know where to go and what to do. Just hang in there.” In my first few days at the Washington Post in November 1970, I wandered around in pleasure and disbelief. Never before, I thought, had I seen assembled a group of journalists approaching such talent and expertise. Behind the battered wooden desks in the newsroom sat some of the greats of the journalistic world: Bernard Nossiter, Chalmers Roberts, William Greider, Don Oberdorfer, Ward Just, George Lardner, David Broder, Morton Mintz, Murray Marder, Herbert Block. I thought of what my father used to say as a warning to me about the company I kept when I was a boy: “If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.” Well, I was certainly in the right room. I’m in the big leagues, I thought—though I still felt like an interloper. I was assigned to the foreign desk and given responsibility for the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and other parts of the Communist world. The smell of ink was in the air since the paper was printed in the building, the massive presses rumbling nightly. I did the same work as at my tryout,

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feeding the six-ply carbon paper into my clunky typewriter and getting ink all over my fingers like everyone else. I also learned how to use scissors to cut the text and white paste to glue parts together when the copy was readied for production. It was a messy business. Bradlee seemed to be everywhere and involved at every stage of the paper’s production— running the news conference with editors, changing the page 1 headlines in the composing room, putting the first edition to bed around 7:30 p.m. Steve Rosenfeld, a tall, dark-haired, and earnest-looking man who was to become my best friend at the paper, invited me to lunch at the end of my first week. Steve had been the Post’s first Moscow correspondent, appointed in 1964. He was expelled a year later in retaliation for the Post’s serialization of the Penkovsky Papers, the purported memoirs of Soviet scientist Oleg Penkovsky, who was convicted of spying for the United States and Britain and executed in 1963. The Penkovsky Papers were later revealed to have been the work of the CIA. Steve was now an editorial writer. We headed out of the stucco-front building on Fifteenth and L Streets into a drizzling early afternoon and made our way to the nearby Post Pub favored by people who worked at the newspaper. I grabbed my khaki Burberry raincoat, which I had bought along with suits, shirts, ties, and pairs of shoes to conform to the Post’s formal dress code that I already secretly resented. I was still getting my Washington bearings. Taking a walk the previous day I had had a lesson in the reality that Washington is two cities. Just a couple of blocks north I had encountered burned-out facades of buildings, a reminder of the 1968 riots that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination, as well as unemployed men sitting in doorways and junkies panhandling. Poor neighborhoods stretched north and east, while the west and northwest were the precincts of luxury hotels, lawyers and lobbyists, trade associations and national federations, foreign embassies and international unions, and the fancy Italian and French restaurants. Over beer and hamburgers, Steve and I first discussed the Soviet Union, and then he outlined for me the Post’s personalities, realities, and power struggles. It had taken Bradlee only three months to push out his main rival, former managing editor Al Friendly, Steve recounted, but it had been much harder for Bradlee to get rid of Friendly’s protégés. He quoted I. F. Stone’s acerbic remark that Friendly’s newsroom had been putting out an exciting daily for years—exciting because “you never knew on

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what page you’d find a page-one story.” I had already decided to avoid office politics. I wanted to succeed with outstanding work. That, I thought, would be true success, as opposed to gaining position through political maneuvering. I had a deep-seated distrust of alliances, particularly political alliances, that dated back to my experiences growing up in Yugoslavia. Alliances that were strong one day could destroy you the next. My dictatorial, mustachioed uncle Uros, who was the head of the family, and who loomed large over my early boyhood, had links to the wartime’s initial fascist regime, for example. I had helped him burn his private papers in a zinc bathtub to destroy any evidence of that as the Communists swept into power. But that had not stopped him from being arrested as a collaborator. “Politics is a whore, my boy,” Uncle Uros had told me bitterly, with a conspiratorial flick of the eyebrows, as he waited stoically for what was to come. My cousin Ranko had bought into Tito’s initial Stalinism, strutting around with Stalin’s little history of the Bolshevik Party under his arm, proselytizing to us and spouting Marxist clichés. But when Tito broke with Stalin, Ranko was among the first to be arrested by the secret police in the early morning hours. My father fought for the partisan Communist army, but it was against his will. He refused to join the Communist Party, even though joining could have brought him privileges, saying privately that he would not sell himself to what he regarded as a corrupt mafia. A lesson also passed down by my dictatorial father, and that I took to heart, was that success through outstanding work was the only success that held its value, that education and hard work mattered above all else. He would use dinnertime talk as a pedagogical tool, quizzing me incessantly, challenging everything I said, and always demanding I be at my best. We never discussed current affairs in Communist Yugoslavia; that was an area of danger. But he’d ask me about this or that book, sometimes pulling a volume from the bookshelves to inquire about the motives of a fictional character. Or he’d make surprise spot checks, expecting me to meet high standards. He would say, “Give me a plot summary of . . .” and he’d name a play. I would have to respond in the same polite, overenunciated tone used for police officers and school administrators. Being a fan of Greek and Latin classics, Dad had a nasty habit of asking me about the plots of the plays of Sophocles. To this day I remember the names of the Roman politicians who brought down Julius Caesar

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in the most brutal manner on the Ides of March—Decimus Brutus, Servilius Casca, Cassius Longinus, Minucius, and Marcus Brutus. I secretly preferred the Greeks and their sensual gods, their dissoluteness and perversity. Whenever my answers were fuzzy, my father would groan theatrically, work his knife through his dish with more force than was necessary, then order me to look up the relevant passages after dinner. Dad also had a pet conviction that teenagers should be kept busy at all times. One of his idiosyncrasies was the belief that classical music had a beneficial effect on the central nervous system. He insisted I learn the piano to a high standard. I preferred jazz, and when my parents were out I played Gershwin. I could sit for hours improvising new melodies built on chord changes and extending them into syncopated, intricate patterns. The moment they returned home, though, I’d thunder up and down my scales and arpeggios and practice Mozart sonatas. I thought—wrongly, it would turn out—that by focusing on work and staying away from office politics I would be noble and safe. Steve was far wiser. He always, from that point on, kept me informed about office politics he thought I needed to be aware of. In our first five months in Washington I would return most evenings to the apartment Karin and I had rented in Albemarle House on Upper Connecticut Avenue NW. Usually, Karin would hand me a stack of real estate brochures as soon as I arrived. Peter, now a toddler, would sit on my knee as I looked through them, picking out what houses we would visit on my days off. Washington, Karin kept saying, was where we would put down roots and raise Peter. I kept silent as she said this, knowing that our visions of our future were starkly different. I had been hired by the Post with the understanding that I would eventually go to Moscow, a posting I badly wanted. In Moscow, working for Ben Bradlee’s Washington Post, I knew I could propel myself into the top tier of journalists. But why bring it up now and spoil things? I thought. Things had a way of working themselves out and it could be years until we went to Moscow. In the meantime, I had to work as hard as I could to prove myself at the Post. My competitive nature and workaholism quickly fit with the tone of the Post newsroom. The place was full of brilliant people—oversized egos wall to wall—each slightly strained, almost to bursting, with pent-up ambition. Like almost everybody else, I worked hard and stayed late at the office, as Bradlee seemed to expect. Single-minded devotion to one’s career

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was considered a cardinal virtue. Karin didn’t seem to mind at this point. She continued to pursue real estate agents and the leads they provided. On my days off, besides looking at prospective houses, we’d go to the Kennedy Center. Its opening in 1971 was the moment when Washington began its transformation from a sleepy southern town into an imperial capital. I still remember seeing a memorable performance of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, with Claire Bloom as Nora, in the Eisenhower Theater late that year. In the spring of 1971, the new Washington Post building on L Street and facing Fifteenth Street, adjacent to the old one, was finally finished. Leaving the grubby old newsroom for the plush new one—with its dark gray carpeting, off-white acoustic ceiling tiles, and walls covered with beige fabric, all faithfully recreated in the 1976 movie All the President’s Men and the 2017 movie The Post—felt, to me, as if I had completed some kind of apprenticeship. I had been working hard on the foreign desk, rewriting material sent by stringers, piecing together big stories quickly, and sharpening the leads on page 1 stories. By now I was completely at ease and totally identified with the paper. Like everyone else, my focus was to get noticed by Bradlee. My new desk was about ten feet from his glass-walled office that faced the newsroom, and so I had a full view of his constant meetings and discussions, of the demanding way he challenged editors and reporters. He was Mr. Washington Post. Nothing was done without his approval. The newsroom, in turn, seemed to share Bradlee’s gospel of excellence in putting out a firstrate product: respectable, authoritative, and profitable. The newspaper was hitting its stride, setting the next day’s agenda for the country. Symbolic of the Post’s growing influence was that the wire services’ photo of the Post’s first-edition front page began to be distributed nationally in the early evening hours. Previously that had been done only with the front page of the Times. Now editors throughout the country wanted to know what information would be featured on the front pages of the two main newspapers. In May of 1971, within a month of the Post’s move to its modern new building, Karin and I bought a brick colonial house on Thirty-Sixth Place NW, in the small triangle set off by Massachusetts and Wisconsin Avenues

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and Observatory Circle. It was located a block and a half from a little park opposite St. Albans School, where I had rested for ten minutes in the noon sun a decade earlier when I was a student at Washington University in St. Louis. I had been in Washington to take part in a nationally organized student protest against atmospheric nuclear tests. The only thing I remember about the peaceful march is that President Kennedy or someone close to him instructed the White House kitchen staff to provide a couple of tubs of warm tea for the protesters outside the gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Sitting in the park, I had thought that one day I’d like to live in a neighborhood like this. Now I did. Now Karin and I looked like any normal couple—we had a kid and debt. The mortgage was the only debt I ever incurred, and Karin and I were in agreement not to plow ourselves under with car payments, credit card bills, and other debts, then struggle to repay them. But a mortgage on a house was different. Not having the temperament for a sedentary job, I moved into reporting after six months at the newspaper, and, as in the past, I contrived to constantly probe. My Moscow experiences had offered an adrenaline stimulation that had become an addiction. I covered the regular menu of diplomatic stories on subjects ranging from Korea and the Middle East to Russia and Eastern Europe. I sought to lift these stories out of banality, into interest or even significance. I also continued to write about the repression of Solzhenitsyn and other dissidents and about the Jewish exodus from Russia and various Soviet maneuvers to block it. One of my first assignments was to cover the visit to Canada of Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin in October of 1971. What was expected to be a routine event turned into a big story when, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, a Hungarian refugee jumped the Soviet leader from behind. Mounties looked on, stunned, before coming to Kosygin’s aid. A sequence of four photographs published on the Post’s front page dramatized the story, and the incident sparked tumultuous anti-Soviet demonstrations by Canadians. The press traveled with Kosygin across the country to Vancouver, the final destination on the tour. Protesters appeared at every stage. It was on this tour that I got my real breakthrough as a foreign correspondent for the Post. In Ottawa, it was announced that Kosygin would

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next visit Cuba, and my editor, Phil Foisie, urged me to apply for a visa at the Cuban embassy. US passports in those days explicitly stated that they were not valid for travel to Cuba, but Foisie said he’d handle that problem. The next morning I visited the embassy, located in Ottawa, and felt quite depressed when refused entry by the Cuban guards. I decided to try what I assumed always worked with dictators: I sent a long personal telegram to His Excellency Fidel Castro, Havana, Cuba. I worked on the text for a couple of hours and laid it on thick about the importance of Kosygin’s visit to Havana. Four days later, in Vancouver, I received a message to pick up my visa in Mexico City. The message also said that a seat on the Cubana Airlines weekly flight from Mexico City to Havana was reserved in my name. Arriving in a woolen suit in the hot and humid air of Havana was something of a shock. The Soviet and Cuban flags hung side by side all over town. Giant portraits of Castro and Kosygin towered over the main squares. The US embassy was boarded up, a Swiss flag flying over it. Havana, though tropical, reminded me of a midsize Soviet city bracing for a May Day parade. The heat was unbearable and I cursed myself for failing to buy a light summer suit in Canada. I walked around the downtown area, vainly looking for a clothing shop. Due to rationing, food stores had almost no food in them; scarcity was prevalent for most Cuban citizens. I was at my wits’ end until I ran into my foreign-ministry minder—what a coincidence, he said—who suggested I try a hard-currency shop on the ground floor of my hotel. This was where I bought an illfitting East German light jacket. A jacket and tie were required at the reception for the visiting Soviet leader. Later that evening when I returned to my room, I found my belongings slightly rearranged. Somebody had searched the room. I stuck closely by Kosygin’s interpreter during Castro’s guided tour of the island. Fidel was the charismatic leader, an exciting figure with his familiar black beard, his flashing eyes, his inexhaustible flow of philosophical rhetoric. The monotheistic cult he had permitted to be built around himself also extended to an adoring following among left-wing intellectuals and journalists in the Americas and Europe. Two dozen of them made up the press corps covering the visit—among them the young Christopher Hitchens. They were openly partial to Castro and seemed to see in him hope for achieving a truly just and prosperous society in the Caribbean.

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The press corps, led by Castro, visited the Moncada Barracks in the hills above Santiago de Cuba, the official birthplace of Castro’s revolution. Castro got very emotional in a peasant hut transformed into a shrine to the revolution, where he and his comrades had plotted the attack on the barracks. Kosygin, looking bemused, listened patiently to the translator’s rendition of Castro’s narrative. His Excellency related a myriad of minutiae of the events and he gestured to a display of bloodstained uniforms, which he handled like sacred relics. There was something wholly proprietary about his narrative. Fidel was the revolution. He owned the island. I wrote several stories, transmitting them from the central post office, where I was given access to a telex machine. Once Kosygin and his party departed for Moscow, my presence in Cuba became a nuisance to the authorities. I was told I asked too many questions about everything from the economy to the military to dissent. But I had to stay in Havana for another three weeks before I could secure a seat on a flight to Mexico City. In the meantime I interviewed many Cubans, among them Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, an economist and an old-line Communist, who was now minister of economics. I also took obligatory trips to collective farms and hospitals in various parts of the island. The basic fact was that Communism didn’t work, but I already knew that. The Cuban trip put me on the map professionally. It also raised my profile at the Post. Soon I was included in a small group of senior editors who attended weekly lunches in Mrs. Graham’s eighth-floor dining room with foreign potentates and leading domestic political figures. Also, little by little, it was accepted by the rest of the newsroom that I was the person to be consulted on Soviet affairs. Even our chief diplomatic correspondent, Murray Marder, would ask me to read and comment on his stories. Karin only occasionally complained as I stayed extra hours in the office at night. She took care of toddler Peter and worked on settling into our home on Thirty-Sixth Place in northwest Washington. The red-brick colonial with its fenced yard gave her a feeling of being rooted, she said, and she never wanted to move again. She still wanted to find an administrative job like the one she had had in the lawyer’s office before we left for Moscow, but she decided to wait a year or two until Peter was in school. At the end of 1972, after a year at the Post, I was promoted to covering the State Department. I was a diplomatic correspondent. I was Murray

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Marder’s number three, the low man on the totem pole (Marilyn Berger was number two), but definitely on the pole and, I thought, on the ascent. In practice, this meant that, in the mornings, I’d go directly to the State Department building at 2201 C Street NW, where we had a small cubicle in the press room on the ground floor. William P. Rogers was secretary of state, but everybody knew that foreign policy was run from the White House by President Nixon and his then national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. State Department briefings were conducted by a spokesman, Charles Bray, who had a tendency to mix personal views and often misleading flowery interpretations with the policy statements he received from Rogers. The briefings were largely a waste of time, and Marder refused to cover them. From time to time Bray was given important policy announcements, but in those cases Bernard Gwertzman of the New York Times and I would corner the garrulous Bray after a briefing to verify the exact language he’d gotten from upstairs. Marder was partly correct about the morning briefings, but I had to be there to get the official take from Bray once he stepped from behind the podium. When nothing was going on at State, I’d roam around the building and visit acquaintances and friends in their offices. Looking back, I have to marvel at how accessible officials were to newspapermen in those days. My Moscow service and Russian fluency gave me instant entrée into the small world of Soviet experts in Washington. It was an exclusive fraternity defined by Moscow experiences, in the same way people are defined by having attended some great university. We all enjoyed the same anti-Soviet jokes and had read the same books about the Soviet Union, such as those by Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Seweryn Bialer. This made contacts easier, more natural. I produced a steady stream of good stories for my part at the State Department. They were not brilliant, I thought, and I wondered how widely they were read. But people consistently saw my name on the front page. I was no longer invisible. My appetite for the front page was like an addiction, requiring ever larger doses. It made me work harder. The visibility I had achieved at the Post led people to assume that I had that commodity so highly prized in Washington: access. This in turn produced invitations to lunches at the Metropolitan and Cosmos Clubs, and to dinner at fancy homes in

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Georgetown and McLean with antique furniture, heavy drapes that hung to the floor, gilt-edged mirrors in the bathrooms, and Picassos and Mirós on the walls. I was getting a crash course in the Washington reporting trade. One lesson was that journalism not only makes you social but also makes you depend on sociability if you want to succeed. This was a period when the Post skyrocketed in the public’s estimation, first with how it handled the Pentagon Papers in June of 1971, and then, after June of 1972, with its coverage of the Watergate scandal. The Post was at first stung when the New York Times published an article about the Pentagon Papers on its front page on Sunday, June 13, 1971. The Pentagon Papers were a seven-thousand-page history of the Vietnam War that detailed decisions that were made, including lies the Johnson administration had told about it. Daniel Ellsberg, one of the authors, gave the papers to the Times. The scoop in the Times put Bradlee in “the humiliating position of having to rewrite the competition,” as he later described it. At Bradlee’s insistence, the Post story the next day began with the words, “The New York Times reported . . .” The Pentagon Papers scoop must have been a huge blow to Bradlee, who considered his competition with the Times as a personal test. As the most junior State Department correspondent I was not involved, but watched from the sidelines, and the newsroom, as reporters, editors, and the newspaper’s lawyers held constant, intensive meetings in Bradlee’s fishbowl office. I was truly pleased, though, with that bit of honesty in the lead sentence and it increased my admiration for Bradlee. He was, I thought, so unlike the Times editors, who, when scooped, reluctantly acknowledged the original source somewhere deep inside the paper. But the Nixon administration went to court and got an injunction restraining the Times from continuing to publish the series starting on June 15, 1971. The Times was silenced. Having by now obtained a copy of the secret papers, Bradlee and Katharine Graham decided to continue what the Times had started. The Post began publishing more of the revelations from the Pentagon Papers that Friday, June 18, refusing a Nixon administration order to stop. Like the Times, it was drawn into a legal battle. Two weeks later, on June 30, the Supreme Court sided with the Times and the Post. This was the moment, Bradlee said later, that crystallized for everyone how independent and confident of its purpose the new Washington Post

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had become. It reflected his personality—his ability to be bold in the face of fear, his instinct for believing in himself. Though I was not involved in covering the Pentagon Papers or Watergate, my reporting sometimes took me to sensitive areas that required Bradlee’s approval. In early 1973, I was working on a piece about a CIA survey of Soviet Jews who had recently arrived in Israel. The CIA’s work was dressed up as an educational study and involved in-depth interviews with the recent arrivals, which the agency hoped would give it a deeper understanding of how the Soviet Union operated. About thirty thousand Jews had immigrated to Israel in the previous two years, and the agency was eager to establish a scientific sample of two thousand persons for the interviews. The project, financed by the US Information Agency, was to be run by Massachusetts Institute of Technology experts and Israeli researchers. But the Israeli government was divided. Prime Minister Golda Meir was reluctant to endorse it out of fear that Moscow would stop the exodus of Jews; the hard-liners in her cabinet, especially the intelligence and military folks, sided with the CIA. A source at the State Department leaked the story to me. I checked and gathered information and wrote a brief memo summarizing what I had. I have to admit that I considered backing off because my reporting came with the possibility of limiting or even stopping the exodus of Jews from Russia. Meir’s fears were legitimate and made me uncomfortable. I had gotten to know so many Soviet Jews in Moscow and to admire their courage and determination. Part of me felt it would be a betrayal of them. But then I remembered Columbia journalism professor Mel Mencher’s adage that we should not play God and decided to let my editors sort out the moral issues. Phil Foisie immediately took me to see Bradlee. “Anyone else got this?” Bradlee said, holding up the memo. It was exactly the kind of story that would be broken by the New York Times. (The Post didn’t even have a bureau in Israel at the time.) “We need to get Howard on this.” “If we publish this,” Howard Simons, the foreign editor, said, “the CIA project is dead.” Moreover, he added, recognizing the complexity of the story, “publicity could endanger the exodus of Soviet Jews to Israel.” Being Jewish, he said, he’d recuse himself. “Jesus, how many times have we heard the world would end if we publish,” Bradlee said. “If your reporting is right, they can go fuck themselves.”

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Bradlee was given neither to self-doubt nor to self-restraint. “We do it and nothing happens.” Foisie offered a compromise. “Instead of a hard-hitting front-page story, why not do a mellow op-ed? Like there’s a debate about something everybody already knows. People are funny; nobody is going to say, ‘Hey, I never heard of this before.’” “Okay. Let’s do it that way,” Bradlee said. All he wanted was to have the story in the paper and to have it before the Times. I wrote an op-ed in which I said that such research was appropriate and should go ahead. A front-page news story would have provoked debate, but there was little reaction to the op-ed. Meir did cancel the project and part of me was relieved that Soviet Jews continued to immigrate to Israel. During lunch in the State Department cafeteria one day, I got another potential scoop that required Bradlee’s attention. As an old acquaintance and I carried our lunch trays to our table, he unexpectedly volunteered a fascinating bit of information: Soviet premier Kosygin had been involved in a car accident on Rublyovskoe Highway in the western suburbs of Moscow. Ambulances had been summoned. “Was he dead?” I asked. “Hurt seriously?” My informant didn’t know much more than the date and time the incident occurred. An incapacitated Kosygin would be a big story, I thought. There would be a power shift at the top of the Soviet pyramid; Kosygin and Brezhnev were seen as equal partners in power. I didn’t want my interlocutor to suddenly realize that he was talking out of school and declare everything he had said to me to be off the record, so I raised another issue and the conversation shifted to a different track. How devious can we reporters be? I talked on a different topic while playing his words over in my mind so that I could write them down in the bathroom. I could already see the scoop on top of page 1. I rushed back to the office to relay the story to the editors. Foisie immediately took me to see Bradlee. Now we needed the Post’s lawyer, Joseph Califano, on the intercom to check whether this raised legal problems. I repeated the story, never revealing the name of my source. “Was the guy drunk? Or mentally unbalanced?” Califano asked. “No,” I said, “we were just gossiping in the cafeteria.” “Why was he telling you all this?”

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“I guess to show off a bit.” Califano said that the person at State who leaked the information could be hit with a $10,000 fine and five years in jail. “That’s irrelevant, Joe,” Bradlee interrupted. “If we think it’s a story, we’ll run it.” After switching off the intercom, Bradlee turned to me. “Do more reporting, kid. If you feel it’s a story, we’ll keep space for it on page one.” I had half expected his standard definitive ruling: “Run it!” Instead he put the responsibility on my shoulders. This made me proceed more carefully. I went back to the State Department to look for the original source, but the man had left for the day. I sat in my cubbyhole in the press room staring blankly at the partition, wondering what to do. I decided to prowl around the building in hopes of meeting somebody, then returned and called several people to ask them vague questions about Kosygin. Completely frustrated, I finally decided to level with a friend in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research named Paul K. Cooke. We had become more than acquaintances in Moscow, where he served in the embassy’s political section. A former marine, he smoked a pipe, liked to play chess, was passionate about understanding Russian society, and was generally looser and more self-confident than the usual diplomat. We called him Uncle Paul. Uncle Paul didn’t fib. I trusted him and I believed he trusted me. We had both been in the business of gathering information—teasing it out of people, trading for it—and we were both used to evaluating what information we gleaned. Paul was quite surprised when I told him about the incident, but his demeanor was a confirmation. He didn’t deny it, and that was all I could think about at that moment. “You aren’t writing about it,” he said, jokingly wagging his finger at me. “Depends,” I said. “Even if it is only a fender bender?” he asked slowly. “Well, if it affects the Kremlin power balance . . .” I said, my statement trailing off almost to a question. Now I had an explicit confirmation of the accident. Paul fiddled with his pipe, a kind giant with blond hair turning white, close-cropped and disappearing on top. “You should do what you think is right,” he said after a while. “But you should know that we have been

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reviewing this very point in great detail. I can truthfully say there’s nothing to it. So far.” He said there were no signs that Kosygin was hurt, as “we’d have heard rumors by now.” In fact, he suggested, I could do some harm by publishing a brief story about the accident. The mere fact that we can intercept car phone communications between Soviet leaders was a very big secret in itself. Which, he added, raised the question of whether I wanted to tell the Russians about this capability. The way he looked at me made me feel bad for even thinking about running the story. I looked Paul in the face and thought of the debates I’d had at Columbia Journalism School. We often talked about how far one was prepared to compromise his or her basic principles to get a good story. On one occasion I remember someone saying, “It depends how good it is.” Virtually anything was possible if the story was high quality. Mel Lavine, who was sitting next to me in class, said under his breath, “Shit, you know in your bones what you shouldn’t do!” Right then, I knew in my bones that I had no story. I returned to the office and said so to Bradlee. Though I was not part of it, the long-running Watergate story infused the newsroom with self-confidence; even the copy boys were animated by the consciousness that their drudgery was part of the epic struggle with the White House. Watergate marked the final stage of the induction of journalists into the establishment. We were no longer seen as the raffish types that populated Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s play The Front Page, but rather as sophisticated, well-informed, and well-paid members of the political elite. This must have been the reason for an unexpected lunch invitation I received from the number three man in the Soviet embassy. The counselor for press and cultural affairs, Alexander Yevstafiev, contacted me in the spring of 1973. It meant he was paying, something unheard of. I had maintained relations with low-level diplomats at the embassy and frequently lunched with them, but it was always I who paid the bill. Yevstafiev took me to the fancy and expensive Madison Hotel across Fifteenth Street NW from the Post. After some chitchat as we sat at a table with a starched linen tablecloth and glasses of Czech crystal and perused the fancy menu, he came to the point: how did I think the Watergate affair would end? I said I had no information beyond what I read in the paper. But one thing I knew for sure, I went on, stressing that it was my personal

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opinion: all the top White House people with the exception of Nixon would end up in jail. He laughed and pretended huge astonishment—hand on forehead, leaning back in his chair. That will never happen, he said. He was willing to bet me a dinner. After we shook hands, he went on to explain to me the realities of political power. Soon afterward I was sent overseas. A decade later, in Moscow, while looking over the composition of a new Soviet cabinet, I spotted the name of Alexander Yevstafiev as minister in charge of radio. I phoned his office to remind him that he owed me a dinner. I left word with the secretary. He never returned my call.

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Perils Covering My Native Yugoslavia

The chasm between domestic reporter and foreign correspondent was wide, and to make the leap, you had to demonstrate that the paper could trust your judgment. I knew I had impressed Bradlee, Simons, and Foisie. The office grapevine had picked up the rumor that I would soon be going to Moscow, and everybody was nice to me. In the spring of 1973, however, it was announced that instead of Moscow correspondent I’d been appointed the paper’s East European bureau chief. The beat included all of Eastern Europe. But the bureau itself was located in Belgrade and that was the part I didn’t like. I had escaped from Yugoslavia and I truly didn’t relish the prospect of living there again. Karin was reluctant to leave our home on Thirty-Sixth Place NW, and she worried that Yugoslavia would be too much like the Soviet Union. I called Clyde in Sherman Oaks, California, and told him about my concerns. What now? He never said what I should do, but in between the lines I realized what he was trying to say: I had an offer to become a foreign correspondent, and if I turned it down I might never get another chance. I accepted.

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When Karin, our rambunctious, blond, four-year-old son Peter, and I landed in the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade on a hot July afternoon in 1973, I encountered a very different country from the one I had left a decade and a half earlier. The last time I had been in Belgrade, on a trip there from Sarajevo in 1952, it had been a shabby city cut off from the rest of the world and still marked by the ravages of World War II. Red bunting and Communist slogans had plastered buildings, along with gigantic pictures of Tito, Marx, and Engels. Now, twenty-one years later, our German Volkswagen sedan taxi drove along a four-lane highway edged with billboards advertising Coca-Cola, Avis, Pan Am, Siemens, cars, washing machines, and soap powder. We cut through new suburbs of high-rise buildings where fields had once been. We arrived at the stately, turn-of-the-century, newly renovated Moskva Hotel on Terazije Square in the heart of Old Belgrade, where we would be staying until we found a house to rent. People bustled around us, well dressed, confident, enjoying themselves—a far cry from the numbed, shabbily dressed people I remembered. Later that afternoon, Karin and I took a walk along Prince Michael Street in the city center, pushing Peter in a stroller. All down the street, people were enthusiastically shopping for just about everything you could see in Paris or London. I remembered that when I had last been here as a teenager, there was a shop on the corner that was called Nama, an acronym for “People’s Shops,” whose display window had featured dead flies and a picture of Tito. Now it was the bustling, modern Belgrade Department Store, with a display window showing off German vacuum cleaners and foreign and domestic TV sets. The next day I took another walk into backstreets; peering through windows I saw families eating in front of televisions. Everything looked so unexpectedly middle class. That weekend we ventured into the countryside north of Belgrade in a rented Volkswagen sedan. This was not the impoverished countryside I remembered. It looked as if chunks of American suburbia had been embedded in the landscape, complete with swimming pools, wooden decks, and colorful awnings. Small Fiats and Volkswagens were everywhere. How could this be? Communism didn’t work; that was my deeply held belief, reinforced by my experiences in Russia. Yet the Yugoslavia of 1973 seemed to challenge this. My 1950s teenage memories came back like drab, black-and-white television. That regime was committed to the abolition of private property and the creation of a classless society. Now

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that same regime was promoting a free market and Western middle-class values. Life in Belgrade—and presumably in Sarajevo—in some ways resembled what I knew from St. Louis. Karin was relieved that we would be living in a city that seemed more like a Western European city than Moscow. Within two weeks we had moved from the Moskva Hotel into the neoclassical villa vacated by my predecessor, Dan Morgan, in the posh Dedinje district in the hills above the city, where the political elite lived. Four-year-old Peter, as delighted as Karin, ran around the large living room and out onto its marble terrace. It had two wrought-iron lampposts at each end of a twenty-foot-wide stairway leading into a formal garden with evergreen hedges, flower beds, and a small, wooden pavilion set in the deep shadow of fir and peach trees. We were three minutes from Tito’s residence, and in even closer proximity to the residences of several Western ambassadors. But surface appearances did not tell the whole story. On our first evening there, we drove into the city down a deserted boulevard. A burly policeman waved at us to turn into a narrow side street. I pulled into the street, stopped the car, and leaned out the window to ask what the problem was. “Move on!” the policeman yelled, indicating that I should continue down the side street. I started to tell him that I was not familiar with the neighborhood, but before I finished, I saw his nightstick swinging toward my head. I jerked my head away and the stick landed with full force on my shoulder and upper arm. “I said move on,” he hissed. Enraged, I opened the door, intending to get out and ask for an explanation. “He’ll kill you!” Karin screamed. “Please drive on. Please.” The policeman had pulled out his gun. I drove off, my feet trembling from rage and fear so much that I had to stop the car after a bend and recover my composure. The next day, I protested at the Ministry of Information. The Yugoslav officials were apologetic. I showed my bruises, which had now turned dark blue and rusty red, to US ambassador Malcolm Toon. “You haven’t lived here long enough,” he said. “Nothing moves in this city when Tito goes somewhere.” A few days later, I had lunch with the deputy information minister, Enver Humo, and learned that an investigation was conducted. “You see,” Humo explained, “he [the policeman] thought you were a Yugoslav.” In the first week after arriving, I made my first contact with my extended family. I was hoping for a joyful Balkan reunion, a healing of the rift that

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I had felt with such pain on holidays, birthdays, and my graduations after my father had excommunicated me. I phoned my aunt Zora, who lived in Belgrade. Apart from an uncle in Los Angeles, she was my late father’s only surviving sibling. She had lived with us during World War II when her husband, my uncle Bozidar, was imprisoned in Germany, and I had grown up with her two daughters. When Aunt Zora answered the phone, she seemed a little tentative but invited us to come over at four the next afternoon. I felt excited. Her two daughters, my former playmates, were sure to be there. Perhaps, too, I thought, Aunt Zora would invite members of our extended Doder clan. Driving over, I enthused to Karin about Aunt Zora’s belief that any problem could be overcome with something good to eat, about how she would manage to produce a spread of cheese or spinach pie, beans, roasted lamb, or chicken even in desperate times. “She’ll ask us to stay to dinner,” I predicted. We arrived at her apartment in central Belgrade and knocked on the door. Aunt Zora opened it. Her eyes filled with tears as she hugged me and used the nickname she had given me three decades earlier and that nobody else used. Once slim and radiant, she was now gray-haired and a little bent with age and thrombosis, her face deeply lined. A welter of feelings, and hope, rose up inside me as I hugged her back. I struggled to control my emotions. Uncle Bozidar— tall, well built, and more vigorous—materialized behind her. His face was grim as he ushered us into the living room. I felt a stab of disappointment: they were alone. Aunt Zora fussed over Peter, smiled and greeted Karin, then fetched Pepsi for Peter and coffee for us. “You must be doing something else besides writing for newspapers, eh?” Uncle Bozidar said with pursed lips. “You know what I mean.” I said no and that my beat included several other countries in Eastern Europe besides Yugoslavia, so it would keep me very busy. “They are all spies,” Uncle Bozidar said, looking at Aunt Zora. “Please, stop that,” she said. He ignored her and pressed on with an insinuation that, as my father had stated in his curse, I had entered some corrupt bargain. “Information is a weapon, often a more powerful weapon than any rifle or machine gun,” he said. “Why do you think they’ve sent him here? And to Moscow?” He looked at Aunt Zora and raised an interrogatory eyebrow. “Think about it: two hundred million Americans, and they sent him.”

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For once I was happy that Karin did not speak Serbo-Croatian, but I saw she had sensed the chill in the air. It was the time of the Senate Watergate hearings, and I tried to explain the role of the American press, but my arguments seemed to infuriate Uncle Bozidar even more. He began talking about Yugoslavia, describing Tito as the greatest thing that had ever happened to the country. When did he become a Tito booster? I wondered. What was the purpose of his monologue? An oil painting of Uncle Bozidar as the Yugoslav Royal Cavalry major he had once been dominated the living room. I recognized it and remembered that the portrait had once hung in our Sarajevo apartment. It had been painted by his uncle in Rome, before World War II, when Uncle Bozidar was imprisoned in Germany. Then the Communists came and took away all that our extended Doder family had. Aunt Zora tried to make sunny talk. One of my cousins had become an architect, she said, the other a professor of political economy at the University of Zagreb. The atmosphere changed when my cousin Mira appeared, though she said little. Uncle Bozidar dropped political topics to complain about Peter’s hair—“the first blond one in the family”—as though it were a serious character deficiency. The silences lengthened. Peter was hungry and Aunt Zora began giving him chocolate but did not offer us dinner as Balkan tradition dictated. Eventually we left. I felt humiliated because, except for the first few moments, not a single word had passed that was from the heart. A year later I heard my cousin’s name read out among the newly elected members of the party’s Central Committee. If she had political ambitions, I reasoned, perhaps they were protecting themselves. My brother Mladen, now a doctor in Sarajevo—he had bowed to our father’s career wishes—phoned from Sarajevo and said he wanted to come to Belgrade to see me. The extended Doder family knew I was here; after the fiasco with Aunt Zora and Uncle Bozidar, I decided to leave it to them to contact me if they wished to. Mladen and I had had little contact over the years. The last time I had seen him, in 1957 as I left for Vienna, he had been a gawky fourteen-year-old. Now he was a young physician with a family of his own, still living in the apartment in which we both grew up. On the phone we set a mid-August date, but he declined an offer to stay at our house and said he could see me only for a few hours.

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I expected him to show up at our house. I had given him the address. But he phoned from Belgrade’s Dva Ribara restaurant and told me to meet him there. “Don’t be crazy, come over to our house,” I said. “Why meet in a restaurant?” “No,” he replied cryptically. “That’s not possible.” I had often imagined him coming to the United States to work and study in one of the great hospitals. I had even asked my mother to tell him that I’d help him financially if he decided to come for a year. Selfishly, I had imagined him deciding to remain in the US. The restaurant was obviously expensive, and, perhaps as a result, it was half empty. I saw my brother getting up from a corner table and approaching me, looking eager and slightly panicky. Sitting at his table was a man I immediately recognized as Bobo Cagalj, who’d gone to high school with me. My brother and I embraced. He immediately said, “I asked Bobo to come with me. We thought it better that way.” At first I did not understand. Why did we need a chaperone? I shook hands with Bobo and exchanged pleasantries. Bobo was a physician, too, and worked with my brother at the Clinic for Internal Medicine in Sarajevo. “I’m secretary of the hospital’s [Communist] party unit, you know,” Bobo said, flapping out his napkin. He and Mladen exchanged glances, and I understood that Bobo’s presence was designed as some kind of protection for my brother. Still, the news—that Mladen was a Communist Party member!— stunned me. Couldn’t he have just told me that himself? I felt uneasy, taking in his tailored suit and air of self-satisfaction. It was he, not I, who had entered a corrupt bargain. Why? Out of the blue, feeling a surge of anger, I remembered how as a kid he would throw huge tantrums to get his way. Yes, I thought resentfully, he’d always behaved as an entitled brat, anything to get his way, to get what he wanted. Of course he would join the Communist Party. We all stared at our menus. Fortunately the waiter came over to explain the fish dishes the restaurant was known for. We ordered. I kept hearing inside my head my father’s voice saying—he had been full of such sayings—that we see only what we want to see. That was the source of our mistakes, he would add: all the false starts, the self-delusions. Was I being unfair?

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I began jabbering about Watergate and the world situation. I’d wait for Bobo to go to the restroom, I told myself, to get a chance to have Mladen explain. The Communist Party was a mafia with privileges. Our father had refused to join it. “I want to keep my dignity and our family’s honor. You boys should too,” he had said. How could Mladen disobey him? But then, hadn’t I disobeyed him? Bobo never went to the restroom. I poured myself another glass of wine. Yes, who was I to judge my brother? Or condemn him? Perhaps he had a good reason to bring along his party supervisor. When we were served ice cream, I ventured to suggest that Mladen— and Bobo himself—would benefit professionally from spending a year in the United States and that I could help. This is a safe thing to say, I thought. Thousands of Yugoslav specialists were studying in the US on Fulbright grants. There have been some remarkable advances in medicine recently, new machines and new technologies, I said, and I had some connections at Barnes Hospital, which was associated with Washington University in St. Louis. The other possibilities included Johns Hopkins and Harvard. Mladen and Bobo looked acutely embarrassed. “We have all the latest equipment right here,” my brother said emphatically. “We follow the latest literature.” “Of course, of course,” Bobo added, aiming a pitying smile at me. I feebly suggested that the new technology required huge investments, but I was promptly cut off by Bobo: “Americans always talk about money!” I itched with residual shame. Although I had emptied a whole bottle of wine by myself, I was sober enough to know that I shouldn’t enter this argument on their terms. So I said nothing and instead called the waiter for the check. Yes, I said to myself, I will stay away from my family in Yugoslavia as long as my assignment lasts. Yes, we are linked by blood, but in the real world, we have become separated. For more than two months, from mid-July until late September of 1973, Karin and I worked on getting ourselves and Peter settled in Belgrade. I spent tedious hours on the bureaucratic formalities needed to live and work in the country, such as registering and getting passes. On the weekends, Karin and I would drive into the countryside with Peter to visit folk artists and painters of primitive art. Their work, which Karin was

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interested in, was becoming renowned in Europe. I worked from the Post bureau in a central Belgrade office building below the Voice of America bureau. At first it seemed that I would travel intermittently to Eastern European capitals and that we could spend time together as a family. I worked on getting to know Yugoslavia as if it were a country that was foreign to me—and in many ways it now was. As in the Soviet Union, I thought, people were the key. Initially I sought out Yugoslav diplomats and journalists I had known in Washington, Moscow, or elsewhere, confident that they were my entrée. When I knew them abroad, they always appeared dynamic, open, charming, and talkative. But now most were cautious, diffident, silent. Some of those who eagerly sought my company in Washington would not even return my phone calls in Belgrade. It took time to find some willing to risk more sustained contact with me. One of them was Milan Bekic, whom I had known in Moscow and who had become editor in chief of the evening newspaper in Zagreb, Yugoslavia’s secondlargest city. “It’s great you’ve been assigned here,” he said over a dinner of roasted lamb and white Grasevina wine at an outdoor restaurant. “Of course, there will be people who will be suspicious of an American of Yugoslav stock. But what do you care? You do what you think is right. Our spooks may give you some trouble—you know what I mean. The hell with that. It cannot really affect you one way or the other.” I also sought out the dissident Milovan Djilas, Tito’s former right-hand man. Djilas had been living under police surveillance, the target of hatred in the official press since his fall from power in 1954. He had broken with Tito and written The New Class, a book criticizing party-state officials as a new class that “uses, enjoys, and disposes of nationalized property.” Our talks in Serbo-Croatian covered topics from Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn to Stalin to Princeton historians. We both knew we were under electronic surveillance in his apartment, so he and I would go for walks through the maze of old streets in the old city. Like Joseph Goldin in Moscow, Djilas would give me an insider’s sense of the buildings, their history, and any role they had in the decisions of Tito and his lieutenants after they took power. I was drunk on the import of being on the staff of the Washington Post. Watergate had propelled it into the very top echelon of the world’s newspapers. I found that almost everybody I talked to wanted to discuss

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Watergate. Djilas, for example, was fascinated by it. “It shows the tremendous vitality of America,” he would say. “There are Watergates all over Europe, but only in America can you have such an open and sustained challenge to the presidency.” Bekic, the Zagreb editor, also included Watergate in his advice to me. “We have no Watergates here,” he said. “Only in America can you have Watergates.” I closely followed the Watergate scoops and coverage by the Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during 1973 and 1974, until President Nixon was forced to resign in August of 1974. Yugoslavia, though, was something of a backwater for Americans and the Post. I began to tour Soviet bloc capitals to meet political figures, dissidents, and others. But I soon discovered that Nixon’s easing of hostilities with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union had rendered Prague, Warsaw, and other capitals, at least temporarily, quiet and uninteresting. The opportunities to get a story on the front page and be noticed, particularly by Ben Bradlee, were limited. Much to Karin’s dismay, instead of spending time with her and Peter in Yugoslavia, interspersed with trips to Eastern Europe as we had expected, I became a newspaper “fireman,” sent to cover stories and crises as far afield as Somalia, Italy, Helsinki, Beirut, and Israel, where the newspaper had no bureaus, often with just a few hours’ notice. I had to get quickly up to speed on stories, and was sometimes in physical danger, a far cry from being a foreign correspondent in Cold War Moscow, or even Yugoslavia, and attempting to dig under the surface with different skills. In 1974, I even found myself living for months in hotels in Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey as tensions between Greece and Turkey escalated. On July 19 of that year, I was in Cyprus after pro-Greek junta officers staged a coup against the president, Archbishop Makarios III. For nearly a week, there were intercommunal massacres throughout the island, and the ethnic Turks on the island were publicly clamoring for Turkey to protect them. I had left the huge, elegant Ledra Palace Hotel, which was right on the Green Line dividing the Greek and Turkish parts of Nicosia, and went into the Turkish sector to meet with Rauf Denktash, the Turkish leader. Though I had met Denktash several times before, he had never been so tense, reticent, and circumspect. After the obligatory cups of mint tea and conversation, he told me why he was so edgy. He said he had asked

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Turkey to intervene militarily to protect the Turkish minority on the island. Thousands of people, on both sides, had been slaughtered during the past week. It took some time to persuade Denktash to go on the record, but he finally agreed. I sneaked back across the Green Line—literally demarcated by a green line painted on the road—into the Ledra Palace on the Greek side to telex my exclusive, which ran counter to what Greek officials had told my colleague Jim Hoagland. Right then, I was just thrilled to have a scoop that might be noticed—something rare when so much attention was focused on Watergate. It did not survive the first edition. The story I then got—and hoped Bradlee would notice—was far bigger. Just before sunrise the next morning, a crashing noise woke me. Four bullets had shattered the windows of my room and pierced the wall above my headboard. Five inches lower, I realized, and I’d have been killed. Thousands of orange-parachuted Turkish paratroopers were descending from the sky. Heavy artillery sounded from the Trodos Mountains. A Sovietbuilt T-32 tank positioned outside the hotel was firing into the Turkish sector. Cyprus, despite being inhabited by ethnic Greeks and ethnic Turks, was not a NATO country and had developed relations with the Soviet Union and Third World countries. The larger Cold War concern was that two NATO countries, Greece and Turkey, were about to start a war with each other. As I crouched down, gathering up my things to get out of the line of fire, the phone rang. It was the Washington Post foreign desk. I dictated an improvised new top to the story I had filed hours earlier, emphasizing in the third paragraph the real possibility of an all-out war between Greece and Turkey, the two NATO neighbors. As I was finishing my dictation, the line went dead. All communications with the outside world were stopped. Even with the Watergate scandal in its final stage and Nixon facing impeachment, I felt certain Bradlee would be pleased that the Post alone had a firsthand report from Cyprus. By midmorning, the hotel came under Turkish fire, and I was among dozens of reporters gathered in the stairwell, waiting for the UN contingent in Cyprus to get us away from the front line. After a lot of confusion, I decided to evacuate to the British military base in Dhekelia, in the southern part of the island, where I expected to have access to communications. I had earlier rented a Morris Minor, a tiny British car. The UN organized a convoy and I drove in it, taking with me Steve Roberts

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of the New York Times, Jeff Price of the Baltimore Sun, and a Swiss colleague. All we could bring were our passports, money, typewriters, and toothbrushes. Getting out of Nicosia was dicey. Greek Cypriot T-32 tanks rumbled around each intersection, furiously lobbing shells into the Turkish quarters. Once on the road south, we had to deal with terrible heat. Quite apart from the hundred-degree-plus weather, the road cut through burning fields and forests. Turkish warplanes kept dropping more deadly napalm as we crawled south. The whole island seemed to be in flames. At Dhekelia, the British military authorities let us into the British base, but they had no sleeping accommodations, so we slept under the stars. I filed my stories by telex from the base to the Post bureau in London, which relayed it to the foreign desk in Washington. Two days later, the military dictatorship in Athens collapsed from the pressure of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. I hopped on a Royal Air Force flight to England and then quickly transferred to a commercial flight to Athens. As battles raged in Cyprus, Greeks took to the streets in Athens and other major Greek cities, calling for a national unity government before the Cyprus war spread all over the Aegean. Politicians and military chiefs met and decided that only Constantine Karamanlis, the former conservative prime minister living in self-imposed exile in Paris, could lead a successful transition government. He was asked to return and lead the country. Crowds gathered in Greece’s streets chanting, “He is coming! He is coming!” After years of dictatorship, Karamanlis was welcomed as a savior. The first weeks after his arrival were rife with rumors that the supporters of the deposed regime were preparing a coup and that Karamanlis would be assassinated. The threat was credible enough that he slept aboard a yacht watched over by a destroyer. Karamanlis moved quickly amid the political turmoil and the military standoff in Cyprus. He legalized the Communist Party, purged the government of numerous junta sympathizers and appointees, set a November date for new elections, and attempted to defuse the tensions over Cyprus. After several weeks he moved into an apartment in a modern building facing the park, near the old Olympic stadium. I visited him there one Sunday morning for breakfast, a few months after he’d won a resounding victory in the elections. After breakfast, we rode in his limousine to Cape Sounion, the southernmost tip of the Attica peninsula. I had a long interview with him in the car, interrupted only when we stopped for coffee at

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a taverna and Karamanlis engaged in retail politics. Once again I hoped Bradlee would notice the lengthy interview. Back in Belgrade, though, Karin felt lonely, as she would tell me each time I arrived home by taxi from the airport—she had given up on picking me up. She liked Belgrade better than Moscow, but she may as well be a single parent, she said. She was particularly exasperated each of the many times I left to cover stories on short notice. “You could at least say no sometimes,” she said when the Post foreign desk phoned in the spring of 1975 and asked me to go and cover the nascent civil war in Beirut for two weeks—even though we had been planning a family trip to Dubrovnik. How could I say no? My ambition was to get noticed as much as I could and to become the paper’s Moscow correspondent in the future, not get a reputation for refusing assignments. Karin and Peter flew to stay with her parents in Copenhagen for weeks at a time, but she chafed there too. She longed to be back in Washington at our house on Thirty-Sixth Place NW. Now that Peter was a little older—he would be seven by the time we left Belgrade in 1976—she wanted to start working again and feel more independent. If I were based back in Washington again, she said, that would be possible. “It’s a three-year assignment—we can count the time down,” I said. But even as I said it, I knew I still wanted to do as Clyde advised and follow my star—the star that led to the Washington Post bureau in Moscow, not to our home in Washington. I was more than ready to leave Belgrade in 1976. Eastern Europe was politically dead. The paper had decided to move the bureau to Jerusalem. Karin was delighted that we were going back. Before leaving, I phoned my brother Mladen. “It’s good you’re leaving Yugoslavia,” he said, and he was right. I asked him to send his young son to spend a summer with us in Washington next year, and he said he’d consider it.

6

Back at a Paper Changed by Watergate

“Now we’re a family,” Karin said, sitting down next to me on our new green velvet couch. Seven-year-old Peter wriggled around from my lap to tell his mother to shush. We were watching his favorite TV show, Sesame Street, and Cookie Monster was up to some cookie-stealing antics. I felt a wave of contentment wash over me. Was there anything that could compare to this happiness? Half an hour earlier we had finished eating dinner together, as we had done every night for the past few weeks since we had returned from Yugoslavia and settled back into our red-brick colonial in northwest Washington in the shadow of the National Cathedral. Yards of blue velvet spooled from Karin’s sewing table in the corner of the living room—she was making curtains for our bedroom. Through the windows that looked out over the backyard, the sun’s fading light played across the leaves of tall oak trees. The Post had granted me a year’s sabbatical from the summer of 1976 to write a book about Yugoslavia. Random House had given me a book advance. I also had a fellowship from the Wilson Center that came with

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an office in the Smithsonian Castle on the National Mall and a parking space on Independence Avenue—one of the most extravagant perks I have ever had. To great acclaim, Hedrick Smith of the New York Times and the Post’s Bob Kaiser had both just written books about the Soviet Union after their tours in Moscow, focused on the realities and absurdities of life in that Communist country. Smith’s was titled The Russians, Kaiser’s Russia: The People and the Power. I thought I could do something similar about Yugoslavia with the added dimension that it would also be about the return of a native son. I thought it would help me get a perspective on my experience and also solidify my personal and professional identity. My only obligation to the Wilson Center was to attend a noon sherry hour once a week in the magnificent Smithsonian Castle library, which I did. The rest of the time I mostly wrote in my basement office, looking out through its glass wall to the patio and backyard. Karin would bring me strong black coffee as I worked and would frequently emphasize to me that book writing was something worthwhile, in contrast to journalism. “Journalism is obsessed with the unexpected and dramatic,” she’d say in the Danish-accented English I once more found endearing. “Isn’t this better?” She had a point, I thought. I had been ricocheting from one story to the next for almost a decade, covering a lot of water but only skimming the surface. Writing a book was more satisfying and rewarding. I had time to think, to dig deep. Finally we had a chance to live the sort of life Karin and I had never known. We developed a simple, easy rhythm. I would drive Peter to school every day and go early to meet him. Karin and I played tennis and bought season tickets to the Kennedy Center. On weekends, we’d revel together in Peter’s delight as he galloped around the Air and Space Museum, or the Natural History Museum. My goal with my book, The Yugoslavs, was to make sense of the country where I was born. I wanted to disprove my father’s prophecy that Yugoslavia would never escape recurring bouts of unreason and violence. I chose to write in a hopeful spirit, to attribute Yugoslavia’s ills to the Communist dictatorship that had ruined my family’s life. If the country would only rid itself of dictatorship, I argued, it would eventually find a way to survive as a modern European state. I wove together the personal and the political, filling The Yugoslavs with anecdotes, sketches of people and day-to-day realities. My notebooks from my three years based in Yugoslavia were a first draft. They brought back all the talk, all the people

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I had encountered. I wrote with passion and took great pleasure in the growing stack of paper. When I was stumped in my writing, I roamed the neighborhood, letting my mind wander. In the evening, Karin and I read to Peter and put him to bed. We’d sit out on the covered deck, share a bottle of chilled Chardonnay, and marvel at how lucky we were to have landed in this neighborhood. As the late spring of 1977 turned to summer and the end of my sabbatical year, I thought about my father’s urging me, in letters just before his untimely death, to settle down and become a university professor. Karin began suggesting I write books for a living. I was tempted. But I’d have to write a book per year to make a go of it. Random House had given me a book contract and the Wilson Center a fellowship because I was a Washington Post foreign correspondent writing about what I had experienced. What else would I write about? “Well,” Karin said, shrugging, as we sat on our deck sipping Chardonnay when I asked her this. “don’t expect me to move from here ever again.” I didn’t reply because I was a coward. I hadn’t told her that Bradlee had promised me I would succeed Kevin Klose as the Washington Post Moscow correspondent when his tour was up three years later, in 1980. I still badly wanted the Moscow job, seeing it as my path to fulfilling my ambition to succeed in the biggest way in American journalism. Surely, I told myself, I owed myself that much. Besides, three years was a long time—why risk upsetting Karin now? But as I returned to the Post in the summer of 1977, a part of me knew that by not telling her any of this, I was effectively cheating on her. When you are overseas, you don’t quite grasp the changes at headquarters even though you hear about them. That much was brought home to me days after my return to the Washington Post that summer of 1977. I was sitting one night at my same old desk in the newsroom, the one within sight of Bradlee’s glass-walled office. My new job, again on the foreign desk, was to edit copy from overseas and to write stories and analyses from Washington, particularly on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Karin had just phoned. Where was I? she had asked. It was almost midnight— hadn’t we agreed I would make an effort to get home at a reasonable time? I had just told her I had to stay to get up to speed after so much time away. I heard loud voices and was startled to see Bradlee stride across

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the near-deserted newsroom in a tuxedo, his bow tie undone. With him, in a shimmering cream dress, was the actress Lauren Bacall. Expansive, gesturing, Bradlee ushered Bacall into his office. I was astonished. Before I left for Yugoslavia four years earlier, Bradlee used to insist that journalists and newsmakers keep a civil distance from one another. He would deride the annual White House correspondents’ dinner—at which journalists and newsmakers, usually including the president, socialized—as a “god-awful spectacle” reminiscent of the court at Versailles. But now the Post, and Bradlee, had embraced post-Watergate success and celebrity, so recently enhanced by the 1976 hit movie All The President’s Men. In the movie, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman played Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose dogged investigating, with support from Bradlee and Post owner Katherine Graham, led to President Nixon’s 1974 resignation. Jason Robards played Bradlee. It would be the first of many times I would see Bradlee appear in the newsroom late at night, a celebrity in tow, after attending one of Washington’s social gatherings. Bradlee was also romantically involved with Sally Quinn, a glamorous Style section journalist twenty years his junior who reported on the Washington party scene and who became his third wife in 1978. “Ben and Sally” were one of the most sought-after couples on the social circuit. Bradlee had also become fabulously wealthy; his Washington Post stock had made him a multimillionaire. Clearly, I thought, Bradlee’s old rules were now out the window. I had the impression, too, that my colleagues were using the words “I” and “my” more frequently than before. Katherine Graham had also changed. Before I left for Yugoslavia in 1973, she was a shy and retiring figure who rarely came down to the newsroom. Now recognized as one of the most powerful persons in town, she received a stream of distinguished visitors. Everybody wanted to tour the Post and meet with its top people—foreign and domestic luminaries alike. To my surprise, I once again became a regular at the lunches Mrs. Graham hosted weekly on the eighth floor, just as I had been before I left for Yugoslavia. The guests were newsworthy figures, former and current heads of state, cabinet ministers, and congressional luminaries. Celebrity was clearly good for business. Advertising revenues were up, and so was circulation. The stock was going up and up.

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I quickly found myself chafing, though, at being back at headquarters, at having to wait three whole years for the Moscow post, and at having to dress well. I missed the freedom of being a foreign correspondent and of having a defined beat. In my new job I felt spread thin. I wrote about the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—particularly about the economic difficulties in Poland and the rise of the Solidarity trade union movement that put pressure on Moscow. I wrote a great deal about the Middle East as Jimmy Carter, sworn in that year as the thirty-ninth US president, turned his attention toward engineering a peace accord between Egypt and Israel. My responsibilities would expand in late 1977 when I was also given responsibility for covering Canada, based in Washington with occasional trips to the United States’ northern neighbor, since the Post did not have a bureau in Canada. Had I been interested in moving up the editorial ladder, I could, at this point, have exploited my proximity to Mrs. Graham. But moving up the corporate structure, as Clyde Farnsworth would say, was like moving from the sidelines of a football game into the rarefied atmosphere of a skybox. No journalist worth his salt wants to be cut off from the world. There were two ways to achieve the glory I craved, I thought. I could try to achieve positions of power and authority through self-promotion and skillful maneuvering in office politics. But I wanted to earn glory and the respect of my colleagues through my work, not through alliances that, as my Yugoslav experiences had taught me, could blow up in my face. In Moscow, I felt, I could build on my UPI experience, my contacts, and have my best shot at doing outstanding work. Careful, consistent, outstanding work could never, I thought, be questioned. I had complete faith in the religion of American journalism as Clyde had preached it. I did not consider that such work might arouse the jealousies of people who could undermine me, just as Harrison Salisbury had done. The Yugoslavs, published in 1978, garnered positive reviews, including a front-page review in the New York Review of Books. Bradlee placed it on his bookshelf alongside books by other Washington Post reporters, even though, like most of the books on his shelf, it did not appear to have been opened, much less read. It was yet another indication that Bradlee, like most others I interacted with in Washington, was not deeply interested in the details of my experiences working for the Post abroad. He was more focused on Washington political maneuvering and on his

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competition with the New York Times. The one story about Yugoslavia that did fascinate him, that he wanted to know more about, was Tito’s marriage to his wife, Jovanka, thirty-two years his junior. What made a woman interested in a man so much older than she was, Bradlee wanted to know, clearly thinking about Sally Quinn. Could it really be love? I had no satisfactory answer. The one other topic Bradlee talked to me at length about was the house he had bought just off Florida Avenue near R Street in northwest Washington, not far from mine, which needed a lot of work. Since we used the same carpenter, Bradlee often discussed kitchen remodeling problems and “our” carpenter, Kaare Berg. He had Berg hire his teenage son Dino during summers, “to teach him stuff about life.” As a carpenter’s apprentice, Dino Bradlee helped build the deck off my kitchen that summer. I continued to admire Bradlee’s courage as an editor, to be dazzled by his news judgment and pugnacious style, by the way he was clearly enjoying the brand of power and celebrity that was the business of being Ben Bradlee. Like other ambitious reporters at the Post, I still wanted to please and impress him with my reporting and to work as hard as necessary to do so. In the summer of 1978, the Post sent me to Moscow for a month to relieve Kevin Klose. Karin refused to go. “I never, ever want to go back there,” she said, glowering at me, her face telling me I was out of line to even ask. Besides, she said, Peter, who had just turned nine, had summer camp to attend. I still had not told her of the Post’s plans to make me its next Moscow correspondent two years later. I was not unhappy that Karin and Peter would stay in Washington: I would be freed to work more and be noticed. The Post’s driver picked me up from Sheremetyevo Airport in the newspaper’s green Volvo and drove me into the city. It seemed less drab than eight years earlier, the people better dressed. A gaggle of women in bright, stylish summer dresses caught my attention; they would not, I thought, surprised, have been out of place in London or Paris. Traffic was hardly heavy, but there were definitely more small Soviet cars—boxy, nofrills Ladas, Zhigulis—on the road. The Kutuzovsky Prospect foreigners’ ghetto, though, felt as if I had never been away. The same stern-looking mili men manned booths at the entrance recording foreigners’ comings

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and goings, challenging Russians who tried to enter. As I entered the Post’s apartment across the courtyard from my old UPI apartment, the same stomach-turning carbolic acid smell infused the hallway. And yet Moscow had changed. Ten years after the Czech invasion that I had covered for UPI, the Soviet government seemed to have heeded demands for improvements in living standards. In the narrow circle of my Russian friends and acquaintances—such people as Joseph Goldin, the unkempt teddy bear of a man who, a decade earlier, had been my guide to the city beyond its facades, and the irreverent journalist Alexander Bovin—I found something new, or at least more pronounced: the quest for the comfort of a middle-class life, a car, a place in the country, a tiled bathroom, a Japanese stereo set, a chance to travel abroad, at least to Bulgaria. Dissident samizdat had largely disappeared. Most people seemed less afraid, even though they were careful of what they said to me. Joseph in particular was irrepressibly optimistic. Although Jewish, he did not want to emigrate, and although a free spirit, he was not anti-Soviet. His intellectual curiosity had increased since I had last seen him. His playful azure-blue eyes twinkling above the large beard that framed his pink face, he told me the latest of his many ideas: “building space bridges” between the peoples of the US and Russia through direct communication via gigantic TV screens. He had great faith in new technologies as the answer to international problems, he told me, assuring me that direct communications between the people of, say, San Francisco and Novosibirsk would end political strains. In that summer of 1978, he was convinced, as he put it, that the question was no longer whether systemic changes would take place, but how they would shape the future. We went swimming that summer and, under the spell of the warm sun and the kindness and good cheer of other friends, agreed that things were moving in the right direction. The authorities were confronting a wave of rising expectations and pressures for a better life, and that seemed a natural progression. During those summer weeks of 1978, I spent several pleasant evenings at the home of Vadim Sidur, the sculptor, and his effervescent wife, Julia. We drank tea and vodka in their sculpture-stuffed apartment as they regaled me with details of the period of openness and success that he, too, was enjoying. Several of his statues had been erected in Bonn, Berlin, and

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Frankfurt. “They didn’t get official permission,” Vadim said, a look of wicked pleasure on his bearded, hobbit-like face, explaining that German admirers (among them the novelist Heinrich Böll) had smuggled the small models out. There was another piece of good news: Sidur’s first monument had been built in Moscow itself. The thirty-by-ten-foot concrete abstraction was set outside the Academy of Medical Sciences building and was visible from the street. Erected on ground belonging to the academy, the sculpture had required the approval of the Ministry of Culture. Clearly, the country’s most prominent doctors had sufficient clout to defy the central authority, albeit by finding a loophole in the law. The talk of Moscow that summer was the wedding of Christina Onassis to a recently divorced Russian shipping clerk. I covered this somewhat absurd event: the heiress to one of the world’s great private fortunes and stepdaughter of Jacqueline Kennedy marrying a one-eyed Communist Party member whose take-home pay was seventy dollars a week. Yet there was something symbolic about it, for even the whim of a very rich twentyseven-year-old woman spoke volumes, I thought, about changing times in the Soviet Union. Just a decade earlier, the Kremlin would never have given its blessing. The ceremony took place in the Palace of Weddings. Women in red-and-white scarves working at a nearby construction site dropped their tools to join the crowd of journalists and photographers. The bride, in a purple gown, arrived in a beat-up Chevrolet Nova belonging to a Greek diplomat. Adding to the absurdity, Onassis talked about a honeymoon in Siberia and a happy future sharing her new mother-in-law’s one-bedroom apartment in Moscow. After the perfunctory ceremony, we watched Onassis and her new husband, thirty-seven-year-old Sergei Kauzov, leave the eighteenth-century building and drive off in Kauzov’s Volga sedan, which he had trouble starting. The Onassis wedding prompted Yura, an acquaintance I had known in the 1960s, to talk about his life when we reconnected. When I had last known him, Yura had been passionately in love with an English girl. He was working at an important institution and his superior gave him a choice: you can either keep your job or marry a foreigner. He left his job. They endured long periods of separation as he waited for permission to marry her. She would travel to Leningrad on short Intourist tours and they would meet. After nearly three years, he recalled, both of them were desperate. They decided they had no choice but to end the relationship.

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Now, he told me wistfully, if he had been able to hold out for a few more years, it would have worked out. You see, he said, “things are changing, slowly.” As the weeks went by, I gathered more and more signs of a loosening of authoritarian power. I even began to think that Soviet power might be waning as a result of the Helsinki Accords that were signed by thirtyfive countries, including the United States and the Soviet Union, in 1975. The accords were widely regarded as a Soviet diplomatic success because of provisions de facto guaranteeing the inviolability of Soviet Union and Eastern European borders, something the Soviets cared deeply about. But other provisions addressed Western human rights concerns and it was these, I thought, that might instead have made the accords a Soviet diplomatic failure—because, as I saw that summer, they had made political dissent and Jewish emigration semi-legitimate. I had a sumptuous lunch of caviar, blini, roasted chicken, and cucumbers with dill at the home of Veniamin Levich, the most prominent Jewish scientist to apply for permission to immigrate to Israel, and his wife. As we sat around their kitchen table, their mood was sour. Like other refuseniks, they complained bitterly about the long wait and bureaucratic harassment. But though their frustration was justified, I still found it astonishing that tens of thousands of Russian Jews had been allowed to go to Israel; emigration had not been an option in the past. Several months after our lunch, the Leviches, making use of their freedom once allowed to go to Israel, immigrated to the United States. I spent many hours, too, with my old Egyptian friend, Abdel Malek Khalil. Skinny and short, with a shock of black hair and an animated lean face, and almost always dressed in blue jeans, Malek had arrived in 1969 to cover Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s visit to Moscow and had remained ever since as a correspondent for Al-Ahram. Married to a vivacious Russian woman, Tanya, he spoke the language and had a keen analytical mind. He shared my impression that authoritarian power was waning. Communism under Brezhnev had, he said, “reached a dead end.” I had gained a perspective, I thought, as I ran the gauntlet of dour-faced officials before boarding the plane back to Washington, as I reflected on what I had seen and heard in Moscow. I could see changes and view them unfolding over a decade—hardly a vast canvas of history but a substantial

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perspective, especially when you compare it to that of a correspondent or diplomat arriving in Russia for the first time. Over the next two years, 1979 and 1980, Canada became politically busy. I found myself living for weeks at a time at the Four Seasons Hotel in Ottawa. I covered two elections within nine months, in June 1979 and March 1980. They were dominated by a planned 1980 referendum on Quebec sovereignty that threatened to break up the country. I was happy to be reporting and to be away from headquarters. I loved covering Canada and its civilized, polite political culture. I crisscrossed the country with key political figures as they campaigned from Quebec in the East to the Northwest Territories and British Columbia in the West. Longtime prime minister Pierre Trudeau and his Liberal Party were defeated in the 1979 elections, and the conservative leader, Joe Clark, formed a shortlived minority government. The March 1980 elections returned Trudeau’s Liberals to power weeks ahead of the planned Quebec referendum. But I was away from home, from Karin and Peter, more than I was with them. I made occasional weekend visits to Washington to spend time with them, but Karin again felt like an abandoned single mother. What was the point of being married? she asked me. My profession had once seemed to promise her an exciting life; it had delivered the opposite. She had stayed home while I was always leaving for some exotic destination. I was always too long away from home, doing stories she didn’t care to hear about. “I’m so unhappy,” she complained, exuding wearied disappointment. “We no longer do anything together.” “What are we doing to each other?” she’d ask as we disagreed about ways to raise our son or when to have sex. My self-deprecating comments had become less charming, my fierce competitiveness less understandable, my ambition less shiny. Instead of looking like a romantic partner, I appeared to her like an overambitious workaholic given to excesses. She used the German word to describe me: the boring Fach Idiot. She was just going through a crisis, I told myself, refusing to blame my ambition or to think of my father’s condemnation of journalism as incompatible with family life. We just saw the world differently. What other couples were happier? Not many as far as I could see or wanted to see. I also did not want to contemplate life without the sensible, orderly world she created, and that I returned to after each trip: her Scandinavian pottery, her books

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and antique carpets, her glossy magazines neatly displayed on teak coffee tables. Peter was growing up, attending the private school The Heights, busy with friends and after-school activities, supervised by Karin. I spent time with him when I was home; he was always delighted to see me and I him. Deep down, in the rare times I would be honest enough to admit it, I was aware that both Karin and Peter were being sacrificed to my ambition. But I clung to the belief that, in time, my family life would work itself out. Besides, what other choice was there? “In our family, marriage is forever,” my father would say. When I returned from the Canadian elections of March 1980, Bradlee called me into his office. He told me Kevin Klose had asked to extend his tour by one year: “It’s yours in 1981,” he said. His patrician face breaking into a broad smile beneath his slicked-back graying hair, he clapped me on the back and said I was doing a good job in Canada. Part of me was relieved. I had another year to tell Karin we were going back to Moscow and to bring her around. As if suspecting my plans, she never missed the opportunity to be explicit about not wanting to move house ever again. But I figured that in the end Karin could be reasoned into accepting my arguments. In the meantime, I thought, I had better double down, work longer and harder, prepare for Moscow like an actor learning his lines for a new play. Almost immediately after the March elections in Canada, I was sent to Yugoslavia because the eighty-five-year-old Tito was gravely ill and the paper wanted me to cover his death. Soon after I arrived, I sought out the rotund, short American ambassador in Belgrade, Larry Eagleburger. He had served in the Belgrade embassy in the 1960s and was a genuine expert. I liked him immensely because he was great fun and because I sensed he never lied to me, even though he often steered clear of matters he didn’t want to discuss with me. We had met in Washington, where we would get together regularly for dinner at the Café Rondo on Dupont Circle. Besides discussing Soviet and Eastern European issues, Eagleburger, a chain smoker, would lecture me on the psychological benefits of nicotine. In Belgrade that March of 1980, Eagleburger and I dined together several times in the kitchen of the US ambassador’s residence on Uzicka Street, a block away from Tito’s home. We talked about old times and

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what might happen to Yugoslavia after Tito’s death. Eagleburger was worried the country might fall apart. One night, after brandies and coffee, as we walked across the lawn to the pool house, he offered criticism of the main conclusion of my book on Yugoslavia. “There’s no reason to believe, as you argue in your book,” he said, grimacing, “that the eventual restoration of political freedoms will lead to a happy ending. Quite the opposite, I would say.” I was taken aback. As we lowered ourselves into the white lawn chairs by the pool, I told him about what Dad had said to me back in 1949, when we had had our man-to-man talk about me escaping to the United States when the time was right. “History has always been bloody and will be again,” Dad had said, adding that “the past is never really past.” Was that what Eagleburger was telling me? I asked. “That all this modernity and development could be flushed down the toilet—just like that?” “I’m afraid so.” Eagleburger lit up a Dunhill and frowned. “Your people, especially the Serbs and Croats, seem to be barely out of the Bronze Age in here”—he put his right hand on his heart—“and their martyrology is easily ignited. I like the people here, you know that. But in conflict situations their nature is to operate at gut level, very far from the brain. Besides, they don’t have a common vision.” His voice trailed off and he deeply inhaled on his cigarette and stared silently into space. He added, as an afterthought, “The Book of Proverbs says where there’s no vision, the people perish.” I also spent time with Mark Palmer, Eagleburger’s political counselor at the embassy. I had been an admirer of Palmer’s analytical skills ever since we first met in Moscow in 1969. His analysis of post-Tito Yugoslavia was much closer to mine and reflected the prevailing opinion in the State Department, which came under the general rubric of “Somehow they’ll muddle through.” After several weeks in Belgrade, and with medical bulletins suggesting Tito’s condition was improving, I headed back to Canada in late April for the May 20 Quebec referendum. I was in Quebec when Tito died on May 4, 1980. I had prepared a long obituary on him that ran on the Post’s front page the next day. In Canada, the proindependence Parti Québécoise was soundly defeated by a no vote of almost 60 percent on May 20. At the end of August 1980, I again went to Moscow to relieve Kevin Klose for a month. Again I went alone. “Perhaps this will get Moscow out

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of your system,” Karin commented. But the third time there only got my blood going. I was immediately conscious of rather dramatic changes in the two years since I had previously filled in for Klose. Superficially, Moscow looked even more cheerful than in 1978. It had been spruced up for the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in the second half of July: miles of roads had been repaved and instantly lined with mature trees, thousands of peeling facades had been repainted, stores had been stocked with goods. Long-neglected and abandoned churches had been hastily restored to a semblance of their former glory, including the magnificent eighteenth-century church of Metropolitan Philip near a new Olympic stadium, and the Holy Trinity Church on the Garden Ring, adding beauty and a sense of history to previously drab neighborhoods. But the spirit of the place had changed. US-Soviet tensions were high. Moscow had been chosen as the site for the 1980 Summer Olympics at the height of détente, but the United States, under President Carter, boycotted the Moscow Olympics to protest the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Carter also imposed a grain embargo on the Soviet Union. The Russians put on a brave face and the games were a brilliant, if curiously joyless, spectacle. In a televised speech after the Olympics, Brezhnev was contemptuous about the US boycott. “So what that the Americans did not come!” he said, adding that the Soviet Union could buy wheat elsewhere. He also underscored his commitment to Afghan Communist leader Babrak Kamal, saying that “no one should have any doubts about it.” The Soviet media, from national newspapers to provincial publications to TV and radio shows, blasted out propaganda echoing his speech, belittling the impact of the US grain embargo, and boasting about grain purchases in Argentina and other places. But I contrasted the gush of official optimism with grim reality, describing widespread food shortages. Poland was a big worry to Moscow that summer. The creation of an independent trade union, Solidarity, was a direct challenge that seemed to shake the foundation of Communism; the authority of Poland’s Communists seemed to be fast disintegrating. Reports from Afghanistan also suggested things were going badly. Brezhnev was old and sick. The Kremlin was in a panic: food shortages were approaching critical levels. I had the sense that the Soviet empire was beginning to unravel. A few days after the end of the Olympics, I got a call from the sculptor Vadim Sidur. He informed me that the jamming of Western radio

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broadcasts had been resumed that very morning—something that had been stopped in the heyday of détente in 1973. Sidur, like countless other Russians, was an avid listener. He knew there were wiretaps on my phone, and I was surprised that he was not afraid to tell me about the jamming. That in itself reflected far less fear than a decade earlier, when he would insist I phone him from a public phone because, as he would say in a conspiratorial voice, “the phones are bugged, you know.” The decision to again jam Western broadcasts suggested that Moscow saw what was happening in Poland as a challenge to the Soviet bloc similar to the 1968 crisis in Czechoslovakia that was “resolved” when Warsaw Pact armies marched into the Czech capital of Prague. That had been my first major story in Moscow as a rookie UPI reporter. As I boarded the plane in Moscow to return to Washington that late summer of 1980, I again had the sense that my experience gave me an ability to see the changes with a perspective that would be impossible for correspondents arriving for the first time. I was itching to take up my assignment the next year to replace Kevin Klose. After I returned, I finally told Karin about the Moscow posting the following year. It took me the better part of two weeks to persuade her to accompany me. Evening after evening, sitting out on our deck, I bargained with her. “I’ll fall apart,” she pleaded. “Don’t you remember what it was like before? Peter is settled at school here. There’s nothing for me in Moscow. Go alone. Please. We’ll stay here and you can fly over every few months. How different will that be anyway—you’re always gone.” “Things have a way of sorting themselves out,” I would repeat. “This will be my last posting, I promise. I need you, my family, with me.” She finally relented after I assured her—nay, promised her, as she would remind me later—that she would be able to find a job with the US embassy, or at least with the contractors building the new embassy, that we would stay for only three years, and that we would return home to Washington and live happily ever after in our house on Thirty-Sixth Place. One evening in April 1981, two months before I was to leave the Washington Post foreign desk and return to Moscow as the Post’s correspondent, I received a call from Clyde Farnsworth. He had left Sherman Oaks,

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California, where he and Dolly had lived for the past decade, and moved in with his son, Clyde, now in the Washington bureau of the Times. Could we join them for a Chinese dinner over the weekend in DC? he asked. “Where’s Dolly? Is she here?” “No.” He didn’t elaborate. Instantly I knew that they had split up, and I was too stunned to speak. He clearly didn’t want to talk about it either. Our mutual affection was such that after months—even years—of neglect, it would flourish immediately after renewed contact. But there was a strange note in Clyde’s voice and I intuited that the wound was new, still bleeding. Clyde’s tone frightened me: marriages end when love and hope are gone. There was something disturbing, something soul destroying, about a broken marriage. From the moment I met them in Vienna, Clyde and Dolly had inspired in me hope and confidence. Now they made me think about the fragility of life. Dolly and Clyde were my family—they were there for me when I most needed love and support. Their kindness to me had always been a part of their affection for each other. How could this happen to two people so obviously devoted to each other? I repressed comparisons to my own marriage and family life, refusing to contemplate the shaky ground it, too, was on. After hanging up, I phoned Dolly in California. The line had been disconnected. Clyde and I went for a Chinese dinner that weekend. He and his son lived in a large apartment opposite the Islamic Center on Massachusetts Avenue. He seemed delighted to see me. In two months, I told him, I was due to take over the Moscow bureau. I wanted to know what had happened between him and Dolly, but he said he did not want to talk about it. There were other journalists present and we talked shop. I kept looking at Clyde, searching in vain for some sign of how he was feeling, of what might have happened, but his face betrayed nothing. I took Clyde Jr. aside to get some information about the breakup, but his own marriage had recently broken up, too, and he seemed to be in the dark about the details of his father’s problems. I had lunch with Clyde the next week, and though I pressed him, he again said he did not want to talk about what had happened between him and Dolly. We talked about my forthcoming assignment, which, he said,

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was not going to be about great coups and spectacular conflicts. “It’s going to be about consistency,” he said, “about sticking it out, about sensible judgment.” His sole warning was to resist the most corrupting desire to afflict a foreign correspondent: “the urge to give readers what they want.” Before we parted, he said, “Your dad would have been proud of you.” I took that to mean that he was proud of me, too, but would not claim any credit for it.

7

POST Moscow Correspondent at Last

Karin gave me a perfunctory kiss when I met her and Peter in the arrivals hall of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport in mid-August of 1981. “I missed you,” I said, truthfully. I was disappointed that she had cropped off the long hair I liked but said nothing. Peter, who had just turned twelve and was tanned from a summer outdoors, hugged me tight. “I can’t imagine you had time to miss me.” Karin rebuffed my attempt to put my arm around her. She had stayed in Washington for the summer to organize the rental of our house and as Peter attended summer camp. “You’ll like the apartment,” I said to Karin and Peter as we piled into the Post’s green Volvo station wagon. Driving into the city, I pointed landmarks out to Peter. I gave him a brief history lesson as I took a detour past the red-walled Kremlin and the iconic St. Basil’s Cathedral. “You’re going to learn so much, Peter,” I said. Karin was studiously uninterested. “I’ve seen it all already,” she said. My spirits sank. Alone in Moscow for the past two and a half months, I had felt elated at finally having the posting I had coveted for so long. If I were to succeed

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as badly as I wanted to, I knew I would have to work harder and longer than anyone else. To get a sense of what was happening in the Soviet Union, of what stories might be important, I had walked Moscow’s streets, hung out with the chess players in Gorky Park, and spent countless hours at the press club with such acquaintances and contacts as Izvestia’s Falstaffian political commentator Alexander Bovin. I had made contact with the Yugoslav correspondents. I had called on such official figures as Central Committee member Georgy Arbatov, head of a think tank called the US and Canada Institute, who advised Brezhnev on US affairs, and Central Committee member Nikolai Inozemtsev, a former senior aide to Khrushchev who headed the prestigious Institute of International Economic Relations. I had spent time with the irrepressible Joseph Goldin, the sculptor Vadim Sidur and his wife, and others. My overwhelming sense was that the mood in Moscow had changed even since the year before. It felt to me as if all energy and sense of direction had been lost, as if the Kremlin had run out of steam and ideas. The seventy-four-year-old Brezhnev, in power for seventeen years, was surrounded by an aging leadership that valued stability and its privileged way of life. Though the Kremlin was still spouting the same rhetoric about Communism marching toward a bright future, all over Moscow I had come across longer lines and shortages and an air of disillusion and resignation. The song “Bluebird of Hope,” by the popular rock group Mashina Vremeni, that I heard that summer seemed to capture the attitude of the younger generation. “We do not believe in promises now or in the future,” the lyrics went, because “there is no sense” in it. Abroad, too, the Soviet Union seemed to be at a loss as to how to respond to a growing mujahideen insurgency in Afghanistan backed by the CIA, to intensifying Polish labor unrest, and to a new, combative US president, Ronald Reagan, who seemed bent on ending the policy of détente and arms control that Brezhnev saw as his legacy. The Kremlin was behaving as if détente were still strong and Jimmy Carter still president. I had gone to the staging of Moscow’s first-ever full-scale rock opera, Juno and Perchance, with lyrics by the poet Andrei Voznesensky. It involved a love story between a dashing Russian naval officer and a beautiful San Francisco woman, essentially a paean to détente and cooperation between the two superpowers.

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My Egyptian friend Malek, the Al-Ahram correspondent, a night owl like myself, would join me in the Washington Post office on Kutuzovsky Prospect most nights just after midnight when I returned to check whether TASS was reporting anything significant after its 2 a.m. shift change. Since Moscow was seven hours ahead of Washington, I could still get a story into the Post at that hour. I valued Malek’s speculative mind and his deep knowledge of the Soviet Union after so many years in the country. We would engage in freewheeling discussions. We made an odd couple: Malek, short, skinny, with curly hair and wearing jeans, I slightly overweight and rumpled, released from the Washington Post newsroom dress code. We sat on the battered sofa in the Post office that, much like the nearby UPI office I had worked in more than a decade earlier in the same courtyard, had stacks of Soviet newspapers everywhere, TASS wires tapping out stories, and the telex occasionally springing to life with messages from the news desk back in Washington. A week before Karin and Peter arrived, Malek showed up as usual and laid out a plate of feta cheese and peppers—his wife Tanya’s specialty— and opened a bottle of vodka. I lit one of the Cuban cigars I was now chain smoking—I was able to buy them in a store on Komsomolskaya Street that had few other customers since Russians preferred to smoke cigarettes. As we chatted, a phone call I had placed to Karin in Washington came through. Making overseas calls was a cumbersome process requiring going through the Soviet operator and waiting, sometimes for hours, to get connected. Karin was all business, focusing on practical details involving the rental contract. Malek looked studiously at his feet and nursed his vodka as the phone call descended into an argument because Karin had made a change in the contract over the amount of notice each side needed to give to terminate it. Karin hung up on me. She didn’t want to live in Moscow again and that made things difficult, I told Malek by way of explanation. He shook his head and said nothing. Tanya and their young daughter, Mona, enjoyed living in the foreigners’ ghetto on Kutuzovsky Prospect, with its far better standard of living than that of most Russians. “Being a family requires work,” Malek finally said. “Sure,” I said, then changed the subject, asking him how Mona was doing in school. I had enrolled Peter in the same Soviet school across the street, rather than the Anglo American school, feeling it could broaden

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his horizons and that he would learn Russian. I had not told Karin, and, knowing her hatred of all things Soviet, I was anticipating more arguments over that. As dawn was breaking, I walked across the quiet Kutuzovsky Prospect courtyard, past the mili man in his booth, to the apartment that Karin, Peter, and I were to call home. Piled up in the main entrance were dozens of boxes the Post had shipped over for us, filled with books, linens, Karin’s sewing machine, and other possessions that she would unpack after she arrived. Malek’s words echoed in my mind, reminding me once again of what my father always said about journalism and family life being incompatible. I vowed to try my best, even as I knew, deep down, that my job, and ambition, would come first. In the next few weeks, I carved out time to spend with Peter as Karin, with the help of the Post’s driver and translator, set about creating a life as hermetically sealed from Soviet life as she could. She unpacked the boxes. She set out her magazines on the teak coffee table, and her sewing machine in the corner of the living room, just as it had been in Washington. She arranged for food items that were hard to obtain in Moscow—lettuce, the Heinz ketchup that Peter loved—to be shipped in weekly by train from Stockmann’s department store in Helsinki. And, within two weeks, she found a part-time job as a receptionist at the US Department of Commerce’s storefront office a block away from the US embassy compound. Its main mission was to help American businessmen make appointments with Soviet officials. It wasn’t busy and it paid peanuts, around two dollars an hour. “Not exactly a job I can be married to,” she said, “but at least I won’t go completely bonkers.” She made friends with a group of women in the Nordic community—mainly wives of diplomats and correspondents, some of whom spoke her native Danish—who shared her dislike of life in the Soviet Union. She also began taking daily tennis lessons at the Diplomatic Club and played singles tennis most days. Tennis energized her, taking the edge off her bouts of depression that always grew worse in Moscow. I was glad that she was finding a focus on tennis and a social life that filled her days even as we mostly moved in different spheres. Perhaps, I thought, we could make it work. Temperatures began to plummet and fall took hold after the brief summer. We settled into a routine. I continued to work hard but, mindful of Malek’s words, made sure to join Karin and Peter for dinner most

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evenings. Since I never got up before 10 a.m. after working late, dinner was usually the first time I had seen them that day. The dinners, though, quickly became fraught. Not only was Karin furious that Peter was going to the Soviet school, but he was having a hard time there. I hired tutors to help him, took him for drives and pep talks about persisting. I worked on his homework with him. All to no avail. “I hate it, Dad.” Peter’s eyes would brim with tears at dinner every evening as he pushed aside the meatballs, chicken, or ice cream that Karin or our Soviet maid had prepared. He said he understood nothing, and he missed his friends at The Heights. “I know it’s tough, but give it a chance,” I’d say. “For God’s sake,” Karin would chime in, “send him to the Anglo American school with everyone else’s kids.” When Peter began complaining that his main sixth-grade teacher was picking on him for being American, I walked across Kutuzovsky Prospect to talk to her. Natalya Ivanovna was a plump, middle-aged woman with a kindly manner, her hair pulled back in a severe bun. We met in her classroom filled with rows of solid wooden desks, as portraits of Lenin and Brezhnev gazed down on us. At the time, Reagan was proposing to station intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Western Europe. The Kremlin, in response, had begun a fierce propaganda barrage against the United States. Natalya Ivanovna, like other Soviet teachers, was required to present the Kremlin line on issues of the day to her class from a prepared text. She would look directly at Peter, the only American in the class, as she castigated the United States for contemplating the creation of immoral weapons to fight immoral wars. My sense was that she looked at him more out of embarrassment than patriotic fervor. But Peter felt he was being picked on for something he did not understand. I gave up on what I had hoped would be an enriching experience for Peter. By January, he was studying at the Anglo American school. I continued to make it home most evenings for dinner or to accompany Karin to dinners at the homes of her Nordic friends or to other diplomatic dinners. Unlike a decade earlier when I worked for UPI with its rolling deadlines, I no longer felt I had to rush away when I heard a tip or information. Though dinners became less fraught at our Kutuzovsky Prospect apartment, I had a habit of being mentally absent, distracted by stories I was working on that Karin did not want to hear about. I often felt as if we

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were actors pretending to be a family for Peter’s sake. I would quiz Peter on his homework. The three of us would discuss where we would go on our next R&R, which the Washington Post paid for every six months, as UPI had. Tenerife? Perhaps Greece? I would have Peter look at a globe, spinning it to find and pinpoint the countries. After dinner, I would return to the office, or go to the press club looking for gossip or information, or check out the latest play at the Taganka Theater if I had tickets—all too often with a mix of guilt and relief at being back doing what I loved. Both Karin and Peter were usually long asleep by the time I returned in the early hours of the morning. From my first weeks back in Moscow, I decided that if I was going to make my mark, I needed to do so in a different way from most correspondents and my own former reporting. In the United States and other Western countries, I thought, political journalists cultivated sources in the elite to help them report on power politics. Why not do this in the secretive Soviet Union? Soviet officials and members of the elite were, after all, human beings. I had already won a certain amount of trust from some, such as Bovin and Arbatov, and developed ways to put them at their ease. I had fluent Russian, I used Russian swear words just as most officials did among themselves, I shot the breeze about Soviet soccer and hockey players, I emphasized my Serbian background, and I assured them I would not betray their trust. I did this in an effort to pull back some of the veil of secrecy that shrouded power politics in the Kremlin. It did not occur to me that if I uncovered truths and scooped other Westerners in Moscow and Washington—the US embassy, the CIA, other excellent Russia experts in Moscow and elsewhere—I might stir up trouble for myself. The fate of my uncle Uros and cousin Ranko, I thought, belonged in another time, another country. This approach, however, did not at first seem promising. As the severe Moscow winter of 1981–82 took hold, with leaden skies, frigid winds, endless days with little sun, and snow piling up higher and higher, the weather matched a deepening chill in US-Soviet relations. The Kremlin lambasted Reagan for “a campaign of hatred” against the Soviet Union and for wanting to “hurl the world back to the dark ages of the Cold War.” Soviet officials, particularly those at a senior level with whom I had little or no previous contact, would not see me. I faced a wall of “nyets”

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even when Howard Simons, the managing editor of the Post, paid a visit in November. A visit by such a senior newspaper executive was usually a good way for a Moscow correspondent to gain access to high-level figures. My formal request for Simons to meet with Izvestia editor in chief Pyotr Alexeyev, however, was turned down. Furious, I drove through heavy snow to the press club to seek out Alexander Bovin, the Izvestia correspondent and Central Committee member. After several glasses of vodka, I wangled Alexeyev’s closely guarded direct phone number out of him. “You didn’t get it from me,” Bovin said, wagging his finger at me. When I reached Alexeyev on the direct number, I reminded him that he had been Simons’s guest at two Post luncheons in Washington. “I know, I know,” he said irritably, “but I am really busy that whole week.” “Now look, Pyotr Fyodorovich,” I said, knowing exactly how I could shame him, “even Russian peasants would be more decent than you are. When they accept someone’s hospitality they know how to return it!” After a long silence, he barked, “Okay, okay, I will see him.” Alexeyev greeted us in his office, flanked by two deputies. We did not need a translator since I spoke fluent Russian. From previous contact with him, I knew that he was not among such sophisticated representatives of the Soviet establishment as US and Canada Institute head Arbatov or Yevgeney Primakov, the head of the Institute for Oriental Studies. Like most members of the Central Committee, in fact, he seemed suspicious of foreigners and surprisingly ignorant of foreign countries. From long practice at ways to get Soviet officials to drop the stern mask they invariably wore in meetings with Americans and other Westerners, I sprinkled my initial remarks with the kind of profanities many Russians used among themselves, usually involving doing unspeakable things to the other person’s mother. My profanities, as intended, caught him off guard. His rigid body language became more relaxed. After a few moments, Alexeyev launched into a description of hostilities Russians were facing in Afghanistan. His two deputies rolled their eyes and coughed to warn him that this was not a subject to discuss with foreigners. Alexeyev ignored them. “It’s terrible there,” he said, leaning back and throwing up his hands. “Imagine, the other day crazy Muslim women marched to the house of our correspondent in Kabul and almost killed him.” I knew not to write a story and quote him—that would

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forever burn bridges with him. But it was useful information to inform my reporting about the Soviet quagmire in Afghanistan. Simons was also an avid bird watcher, and when he asked if I could arrange a trip for him into the woods around Moscow with local bird watchers, I spent countless hours on the phone explaining to various officials that bird watching really was what he wanted to do. “A bird watcher, eh?” would be the response. “In the woods around Moscow? And he is using binoculars?” Finally I told one official, in colloquial Russian sprinkled with profanities, that Simons was my superior and my position would be so much better if he could go. No doubt imagining his own dictatorial boss, he said, “Okay, we’ll arrange it.” Simons set off in the Post’s green Volvo with our office driver, a local bird watcher, and his binoculars. In those first months, I had a good relationship with the US embassy. The embassy’s cafeteria-style snack bar on Tchaikovsky Street was, for me and for other US correspondents stationed in Moscow during the Cold War, a haven. I would stop by two or three times a week to have lunch there. I would drive over, park the car, and enter, walking past the Soviet guards hanging out in the street ready to challenge anyone who appeared to be Russian. It was possible to order a taste of home: hamburgers, ketchup, Coca-Cola, sometimes a green salad. The cafeteria was where US diplomats and other correspondents could exchange stories, gossip, and analysis. Bill Eaton from the Los Angeles Times might be there, or the New York Times’ Serge Schmemann, correspondents from the AP and UPI wire services, perhaps the embassy press attaché, Frank Tonini. The major geopolitical Cold War issues were a regular topic of conversation in those first months: deteriorating relations with Reagan’s United States, the impact of the labor unrest in Poland, Soviet military operations bogging down in Afghanistan, or Soviet economic decline. When General Wojtiech Jaruzelski imposed martial law in Poland on December 13, 1981, for example, part of the embassy snack bar table talk was about how it took the pressure off the Kremlin to repeat its 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. On one January day in 1982, the story that dominated the conversation at the snack bar involved the beat I now wanted to excel at: interpreting signs from the Kremlin and elsewhere. “Hey Dusko, hearing anything new about Tsvigun?” The question, about a puzzling sign all diplomats and journalists had picked up on, was

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thrown at me as I walked into the snack bar, shed my fur shapka and thick sheepskin coat, stamped the January snow off my boots, and extinguished my Cuban cigar. The people who looked up saw a gruff, rumpled, slightly overweight middle-aged man—I was now forty-four—with a growing reputation for having good contacts, solid stories, and some minor scoops. I had, for example, written a story about an internal Soviet Academy of Sciences study that detailed the disastrous deterioration in agriculture over the previous decade. I had obtained it through a contact of the Yugoslav Tanjug correspondent Slavko Stanic, whom I met when I went by the Tanjug office on Prospect Mira, something I regularly did to encounter a broader range of Russians, among them officials whose duties included keeping contact with Yugoslavs but not Americans and Westerners. The “Tsvigun” of the question was Semyon Tsvigun, a senior KGB official married to Brezhnev’s sister. The previous week, TASS had reported that he had died in Moscow after a long illness, but his obituary, in all the newspapers, was not signed by Brezhnev. But why? Kremlin watchers were at a loss to know what was going on. Brezhnev, after all, had moved Tsvigun to the KGB when Yuri Andropov took over as KGB chief, presumably to be his eyes and ears there. Tsvigun was also a member of the Central Committee and a four-star general. Brezhnev was all but obligated to sign it. But he hadn’t. Even more intriguing was the fact that the obituary was signed by all the top officers of the KGB. Their names had never before been made public. As we discussed it at the snack bar table, we wondered if this could be linked in any way to the very public crackdown on corruption over the past two months. It had been astonishing, involving daily exposés in the press of such things as embezzlement by top local officials in Georgia or workers at a packing plant in Minsk stealing large quantities of meat. Such stories would never be allowed without direction from on high. But from whom? Getting a hamburger and a Coke and joining the conversation, I threw out that I had heard a rumor that Tsvigun had committed suicide. Joseph Goldin had first tipped me off about this, but I could get no solid confirmation. Rumors in Moscow were tricky. They were often where the real information was, and they tended to spread very quickly, but their original sources often garbled them to protect themselves. Rumors, I also knew, could be put out to prepare the public for things to come. I had had no

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luck pinning down this rumor’s source or who stood to gain from it. I had tracked down an actor in a film based on a novel written by Tsvigun. He told me Tsvigun had indeed been ill and recently undergone lung surgery, but he insisted the sixty-four-year-old Tsvigun was in good shape and not the kind of person to take his own life. All this was too little on which to write a story saying that such a prominent person might have committed suicide. Leonid Zamyatin, the chief of the Central Committee Information Department, could make a journalist’s life miserable, or have him or her expelled, if he found their work irreverent or insulting, particularly when it came to Brezhnev or other prominent personalities. Nobody else at the table had heard the rumor. I wrote nothing. In the next few weeks, though, different rumors were so widespread that every diplomat and journalist seemed to have heard them and we all reported them. I felt sure they were being spread to prepare the public for the removal of Brezhnev. The salacious rumors involved Brezhnev’s family. They centered, at first, on the arrest of the circus performer Boris Buryatia, better known as “Boris the Gypsy,” the longtime lover of Brezhnev’s daughter Galina, and the confiscation from him of tsaristera jewels. Senior officials in charge of circuses and others were widely rumored to have been arrested, with foreign currency and diamonds supposedly confiscated from them. Fresh rumors then had Galina hospitalized to avoid being interrogated, and her brother Yuri, a deputy foreign trade minister, hospitalized for a drinking problem. Another rumor held that Boris the Gypsy had died in prison under mysterious circumstances. Then, on February 22, Pravda published an article supposedly summarizing readers’ letters about private morals. The newspaper’s editor in chief, Viktor Afanasiyev, allowed the following sentence to appear: “Children reveal, as if in a mirror, the psychological conditions and convictions that prevail in their families.” Though I still did not have enough to write about Tsvigun, I thought the rumors of his suicide might well be true, and that he might have taken his own life when he caught wind of the moves against Brezhnev’s family within the KGB, where he was supposed to be Brezhnev’s loyal watchdog, and could not stop them. But within weeks, the rumors began to fizzle. As I roamed the city to talk to contacts in the Soviet elite, I found that the country’s history weighed too heavily on members of the establishment, particularly within the leadership of the KGB and the military, for them to act to remove

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Brezhnev from power. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev denounced him and turned him into a nonperson. Brezhnev did the same when he ousted Khrushchev in 1964. History books were often rewritten to gloss over the forty-year span between Lenin and Brezhnev. References to Stalin and Khrushchev were eliminated and their images cut from films and photographs. I read Peter’s history book when he was still in the Soviet school, and the period between 1924 and 1964 had few heroes and no leaders, presenting Soviet history in terms of gigantic building projects, factories, and dams. Brezhnev, if the fizzling rumors were anything to go by, would be in power for as long as he lived. One night around this time, I remember feeling discouraged as I trekked from the office to the darkened apartment where Karin and Peter were asleep. “It’s a dead place filled with deadened people,” Malek had said, referring to the Soviet Union, as, just before dawn in the Washington Post office, we bet a bottle of vodka on how long Brezhnev’s rule would go on. Five years? Ten? March was still freezing, the snow piled high. I was doing a solid job, following Clyde’s advice to go out and feel, see, the story, even in a country that does its best to make that impossible. But a journalist also makes a reputation by being where the story is, and Brezhnev’s Soviet Union seemed as frozen as the weather. But in late March, rumors began to fly that Brezhnev had been hospitalized after a recent trip to Tashkent, the capital of Soviet Uzbekistan in Central Asia near the border with China. The rumors gained more credence when TASS announced, without explanation, the postponement of a March 29 visit by South Yemen president Ali Nasser Mohammed, who was to have met with Brezhnev. Then it was reported in the British media that Brezhnev’s personal doctor, Evgeny Chazov, had postponed a visit to an antiwar conference in England. I had been watching Brezhnev closely for signs of ill health when he appeared in public, but he had always given the impression of being vigorous. Weeks earlier, for example, on his seventy-fifth birthday on December 19, he had welcomed Eastern European leaders in the Kremlin’s St. George’s Hall, and I detected something of a spring in his step as, yet again, he received his country’s highest honor, an Order of Lenin with the gold star of a Hero of the Soviet Union. Banner headlines in Soviet newspapers that day lauded him as “the planet’s most widely read author” for books on his career and

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Communism’s achievements, though it was an open secret that the books were ghostwritten. I thought hard about how I would get more solid information. There was none to be had in the embassy snack bar. None of my Soviet contacts who were in a position to know anything wanted to see me, rebuffing me with such excuses as being out of town or in conference. The state of Brezhnev’s health was a state secret. I thought about going to see Dzuna, an Assyrian woman said to treat Brezhnev and other officials with her purportedly miraculous healing powers. The previous summer, Joseph Goldin had taken me to meet her, a striking woman with olive skin, long dark hair, and piercing, near-black eyes, wearing a flowing dress and jangling gold and silver jewelry. As we entered her apartment, a luxurious place in central Moscow with Oriental carpets everywhere and caviar and smoked salmon laid out on a table, Joseph pointed to one of some dozen people surrounding her, a nondescript man in jeans, and told me he was the son of former Soviet prime minister Georgi Malenkov, who had been deposed by Khrushchev. I had made a point of stopping by Dzuna’s apartment often after this—even once taking the writer Norman Mailer with me when he visited Moscow. She was always welcoming, never alone, and did not seem to fear contact with an American journalist, though I never asked her directly about Brezhnev’s health. With rumors about his health so widespread now, it did not seem the time to approach her. I had recently been to her apartment and she had given no sign that he was ill. The illness, I thought, must have been sudden—particularly as Brezhnev had not seemed ill when I had recently watched him on Soviet television in Tashkent as he made an appeal for a modest rapprochement with Communist rival China and suggested political talks “without any preconditions.” The speech, as I had written in the Post, seemed aimed at countering Reagan’s challenge and allaying rising dismay, particularly within the military and the younger generation, about his policies. After two days of getting nowhere, I went to the studio of the nationalist painter Ilya Glazunov, to keep a longstanding appointment. I had first met Glazunov, then a struggling unknown, when I had worked in Moscow for UPI. He had since become known for his portraits of prominent people, including Politburo members. I wanted to reconnect with him, figuring I might meet interesting people at his studio. It had been hard to get the appointment, as he no longer was keen for Western journalists

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to write stories about him. I pushed on the creaky door into Glazunov’s building and ran into Bovin, the larger-than-life Izvestia correspondent. I had not thought he would have information and so had not tried to contact him. But as we chatted, Bovin told me that Brezhnev had been taken on a stretcher from his plane to a hospital on his return from Tashkent. It seemed, Bovin said, that Brezhnev had suffered a mild stroke and would stay in the hospital for several weeks. Because of that, a Central Committee meeting scheduled for March had been postponed to May 24. “They” thought, Bovin added, that Brezhnev would recover. That, he said, was all he knew. As our conversation turned to talk about our wives and children, my mind furiously ran through why he might be telling me this. Could he have an ulterior motive? Did the KGB or some element in the elite want to float information or misinformation through me? I could not know. I decided I just had to do my job, which was to gather information as best I could. What he had told me could be priceless in gathering more information. Whenever I asked Soviet officials general questions, they tended to answer reflexively that they knew nothing. But if I already had some information and convinced them I would not betray them, they could be forthcoming. And so, as casually as I could, as Bovin left, I asked him, “Is that stuff about Brezhnev right?” Bovin closed his eyes slowly, opened them, smiled, and said, “You’ve not heard it from me. Understood?” I forgot about the meeting with Glazunov. I drove to the US and Canada Institute and cajoled my way into a meeting with its head, Georgi Arbatov, the Central Committee member and foreign affairs adviser to Brezhnev. I was surprised, I told him, as casually as I could, that the Central Committee plenum had been postponed until May 24. Arbatov winced. “But what really interests me,” I went on, “is the condition of the general secretary. How serious is it?” “Who told you about it?” Arbatov asked. I said I could not tell him, just as I would not tell others about my conversation with him. “Well,” he said, looking displeased and putting down his glasses, “you are correct. The plenum is set for May 24. But I can tell you that the doctors say that the general secretary will be in good shape in a few weeks.” I asked him what had happened in Tashkent, but he said he knew only that Brezhnev had had to be hospitalized. “But it’s a minor matter, I’m told,” he said.

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Back in the Washington Post office that evening, I wrote a story giving prominence to the image of Brezhnev being carried away on a stretcher. I felt that image conveyed Brezhnev’s enfeebled health and the regime’s political paralysis as well as the shadow of death over the Kremlin and the beginning of a succession process. But as I sat in front of the telex machine looking at a printed copy of it, I felt paralyzed. What if Brezhnev had not been carried away on a stretcher when he arrived in Moscow? Bovin had not, after all, witnessed it himself. I stared at the rickety East German telex machine. I just had to dial the number in Washington, press a button, and let the tape run through it. But I still felt paralyzed. I badly wanted an exclusive story that would hit the world’s front pages. I figured I had nothing to fear from the Soviet regime if my information was correct and my analysis reasonable. But what if I was wrong? I then did something I would never do again. I called Serge Schmemann of the New York Times and offered to share the story. My motive was hardly one of generosity; I was looking for someone to share the blame should there be blame the next day. “I can’t do it,” Serge said. “I do not have the sources for it myself.” My hands shaking, I dialed Washington and transmitted the story. Hours later, I woke up in a cold sweat, realizing I had made a mistake. Why had I written the exact date of the postponed Central Committee plenum, May 24, that Bovin and Arbatov had given me? No matter how good the sources, a good deal could happen in two months to shift the date. I should have played it safer and simply said the plenum would be held in “late May.” The next morning, a political officer from the US embassy called me at home as I was drinking coffee around ten o’clock. I was barely awake. What happened next would be a first salvo in the antagonism between me and the embassy—not that I saw it as that at the time. In a way that I imagined a Soviet official might summon an underling, he demanded I come to his office. I told him that normally he should come by my office if he wanted to see me, but since I was going to attend the ambassador’s briefing that afternoon, I would stop by his office afterward. Frank Tonini, the press attaché, escorted me to the office of the political officer that afternoon. It was not possible, the officer said as I walked in, to know the correct date for the Central Committee plenum so far in advance, and I needed to tell him who my sources were and convince him they were right. Incensed, I said he should pay twenty-five cents for the Washington Post,

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its price at the time. If he had a problem with my story, he should write a letter to the editor. I stormed out of the office, needlessly self-righteous, seeing myself as imitating Bradlee’s pugnacious self-confidence. I would only later see this as an early sign of the trouble to come as my reporting began to dig up exclusive information that would appear in the Post and be read by officials in Washington who would compare my reporting with embassy cables. For the next two months, I was in a state of agitation about the Central Committee plenum. Brezhnev’s illness had by now been confirmed, and for several weeks, until he appeared on April 22—frail, thinner, and shuffling into the vast hall of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses for the Lenin anniversary fete—there were rumors he was either dead or about to die. American colleagues said they would buy me a box of my trademark Cuban cigars if the date proved correct, as did the press attaché, Tonini. When the date did prove correct, only Tonini kept his word. My relationship with the embassy only deteriorated further as my analysis began often to diverge from that of the embassy and the CIA. That summer, for example, President Reagan’s unrelenting pressure on the Soviets switched from harsh anti-Communist rhetoric to punitive economic measures. The Reagan administration banned sales of US technology for the construction of a Siberian gas pipeline that was to carry Soviet natural gas to Western Europe, and that also affected Western European firms using US technology. There was confidence in Washington that this would prevent the pipeline from being completed. My editors asked me to write an analysis. Knowing Soviet psychology, I wrote that Soviet leaders would see this as an affront, develop the technology themselves, and complete the pipeline, perhaps even ahead of schedule. The smart, intelligent CIA station chief in Moscow, Carl Gebhardt, who had a deep grasp of Soviet affairs, stopped me in the Kutuzovsky Prospect courtyard after my story appeared. “I have never,” he admonished me, “seen a more despicable story under your byline.” But it proved correct. Soon after the oil pipeline story appeared, I was in Washington on a brief trip to confer with editors. My State Department friend Paul K. Cooke took me to lunch and warned me that my name was appearing in a “negative context” in dispatches from the Moscow embassy. “Be less abrasive and more cooperative, share with them when you get exclusive information. You’ll avoid a lot of trouble,” he advised.

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Karin, Peter, and I went on vacation to Sicily in August. I was looking forward to relaxing and spending time with Peter, who had just turned thirteen. We checked into our hotel, then drove in our rented car to a beachside restaurant and ordered olive-oil-drenched salads, pasta, fresh fish, gelato, and wine. For the next two weeks, I thought, as I basked in the sea breeze that was kicking up as the sun dipped below the horizon, I could unwind from the grind of reporting from Moscow, from throwing myself into the story in the only way I knew how. We drove back to the hotel, saying little. The receptionist handed me a message to urgently call managing editor Howard Simons at the Post. When I reached him, he told me that an editorial in Izvestia titled “Lying, Lying” lambasted me for “blackening” Moscow’s peace policy. I should have seen this coming, I thought. The editorial was a response to a story in which I had not been able to resist playing with a linguistic ambiguity in the word mir. In Russian, it has two meanings: “peace” and “world.” The story was about Moscow allowing a group of Scandinavian women to stage a peace march across the Soviet Union. Though the Kremlin had felt impelled to allow the march since the Kremlin was waging a campaign to encourage a Western European movement against the planned deployment of US nuclear missiles, it had arrested two Russian citizens and placed eleven others under surveillance to keep them from making contact with the Scandinavian peace marchers. In my story, I had glibly questioned the real meaning of the Kremlin’s repeated battle cry of “the fight for peace” (borba za mir), which could also be translated as “the fight for the world.” For several days, as Karin went shopping and Peter and I swam and played chess and as I gave him mini-lectures on the history he would be learning in school the next year, I fretted that I would be expelled. But then came news that the Kremlin had ordered the expulsion of the Newsweek correspondent Andrew Nagorski. I decided to stop worrying, figuring the Soviets would not expel another American journalist so soon. When I returned to Moscow from our Sicily vacation, refreshed, Peter about to start a new school year, I quickly began to pick up on signs that Brezhnev’s days might be numbered. On the surface, all was normal. I went outside our Kutuzovsky Prospect compound to watch the happenings on the important opening of Moscow’s political season. Throughout

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August, as usual, workers had resurfaced Kutuzovsky Prospect, one of the main avenues used by the political leadership. Just after 8 a.m. on September 1, I watched police officers wave motorists away from the central lanes reserved for the nomenklatura (members of the elite) as a succession of Zil limousines sped down the seven-lane highway to the Kremlin. The new political year was starting as usual. Brezhnev initially, in public appearances, seemed to have regained his physical health. When I visited Dzuna, the woman who was said to treat Brezhnev, in her central Moscow apartment, she gave no sign that his health might have deteriorated. But then I watched Brezhnev give a speech on television from Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. After being presented with an Islamic dagger of gold with encrusted diamonds, a symbol of Muslim hospitality, he started reading the wrong speech. His national security adviser, Andrei Alexandrov-Agentov, rushed to the podium and handed him the correct one as, on a cue from the Azerbaijani leader Gaidar Aliyev, the audience applauded. Brezhnev, looking baffled, said, “It seems we have to start all over again,” adding, “It wasn’t my fault, comrades.” A week later, Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi held talks in Moscow with Brezhnev. A diplomat at the Indian embassy told me privately that his grasp of issues was shaky. As I visited Soviet officials and other contacts, I picked up rumors of a power struggle on the thirteen-man Politburo between the oldguard Brezhnev ally Konstantin Chernenko; another old-timer, Andrei Kirilenko; and former KGB chief Yuri Andropov. Rumors were also flying that Kirilenko was in trouble. One held that Kirilenko’s diplomat son had been seized by KGB agents in Switzerland as he was about to defect, another that Kirilenko had committed suicide. Malek and I, in our latenight sessions as I waited for the 2 a.m. TASS shift change, speculated endlessly about what the rumors about Kirilenko meant. Chernenko and Andropov, the two main contenders to succeed Brezhnev, we decided, shared an interest in discrediting him. He probably didn’t stand a chance. I sensed from all these signs that a transition was approaching and proposed to the Washington Post a series of three long articles that would sum up Brezhnev’s eighteen years in office, examine the crises facing the Soviet Union toward the end of his rule, and discuss the thorny issue of succession in a country whose previous leaders had either died in office or been deposed. My editors agreed and we scheduled the series to begin

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running on the November 7 holiday commemorating the sixty-fifth anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. I could not have known this would be Brezhnev’s last appearance and that he would die three days later. As I was finishing the series, my editors in Washington asked me by telex if I would object to the articles appearing under the headline “The Final Days.” I did object, I said, because I thought I had good information that Brezhnev’s health was holding up. President Spiros Kyprianou of Cyprus had held talks with Brezhnev in Moscow the previous week, and a senior Cyprus diplomat, a friend from my days covering Cyprus, and who spoke fluent Russian, had accompanied him. I sought him out to ask him for his impressions of the Soviet leader. He told me Brezhnev was in good form and had cracked jokes. Months later, the diplomat apologized to me for deliberately misinforming me. The authorities knew we were friends, he said, and he did not want to be the source of a report on the true state of Brezhnev’s health—the interests of his country had to come first. In fact, he said, Brezhnev was slumped in his seat doodling on a piece of paper as Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko conducted the talks. At one point, when Kyprianou mentioned the United Nations, Brezhnev looked up, turned to Gromyko, and said, “Is he again talking about Waldheim?” Kurt Waldheim, the former UN secretary general, had been out of office for almost a year. Rumors about Kirilenko grew in late October and early November. Several sources told me he had been absent from a meeting Brezhnev had held with military chiefs to discuss countermeasures to Reagan’s rearmament program. One source said Kirilenko had entered the Kremlin in his Zil limousine only to leave in a modest Volga sedan. Three days before the November 7 holiday, my Japanese colleague Hiroshi Imai and I drove in freezing rain to a building on Prospect Mira where the portraits of leaders were usually displayed first before festive occasions. It was past midnight and the building was not lit, but there were clearly only twelve Politburo portraits instead of thirteen. Kirilenko’s portrait was missing. We counted several times to make sure we were not mistaken. The next day, November 5, I joined other foreigners, journalists, and diplomats at a rally in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses marking the anniversary of Soviet power and witnessed what appeared to be a demonstration by Chernenko that he was in charge. I had already noted that

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Chernenko was often seen on television at Brezhnev’s side, looking cocky. Three times at the festivities, aides came to the burly, white-haired Chernenko with papers. He read them and passed them in front of Brezhnev to Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov, who read them and handed them to Andropov. Andropov looked at them briefly and handed them back to Chernenko, who signed them and indicated to aides to take them back. I could not imagine anything important enough to interrupt this important celebration even once, let alone three times. I took this as a sign that Chernenko would be the next leader. On November 7, Brezhnev was atop the Lenin Mausoleum reviewing the traditional Red Square military parade. Kirilenko, as the missing portrait foretold, was missing from the lineup. The first of my series of three articles began running in the Post. On November 10, the day after my series ended, I and other Kremlin watchers began picking up signs that something was amiss. Radio and TV began broadcasting classical music. A popular annual concert honoring the uniformed police was canceled. By the next morning, radio and TV presenters were announcing that Brezhnev had died. This was the big story I had been waiting for. I walked out of the Kutuzovsky Prospect compound to find that Moscow had been turned into an armed camp, with roadblocks set up by the KGB and military at intervals down the avenue. Back in the office I heard Moscow Radio reporting that the city would be closed to traffic for four days. I set out in the Volvo. Because I had press credentials and special foreigners’ plates, I was able to get through. At every avenue leading to the Kremlin, I encountered roadblocks, with soldiers in brown uniforms lined up two deep and behind them police, also two deep. People exiting the subway had to produce passports and prove they lived or worked in the area. Anyone entering buildings closer to the Kremlin were challenged by KGB agents to prove they belonged there. I headed to places where I might bump into Soviet journalists, including the press club, but with little success. I managed to talk to just a few contacts and pick up on a story widely circulating that Andropov was part Jewish and that, because of that, the Central Committee might not go along with the choice of him when it met the next morning. By late evening, it had been announced that Andropov would head the funeral commission. The next morning, Moscow looked even more like an armed camp as the Central Committee of about three hundred top officials met in Sverdlov

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Hall. I saw black limousines barreling fast down Kutuzovsky Prospect just after 1 p.m. An hour later, Moscow Radio announced that Andropov had been elected as the next general secretary. As was customary, in a show of unity it was announced that the defeated candidate, Chernenko, had nominated the new leader. Only months later, when contacts felt more comfortable talking to me, would I find out that the vote had been close and that Ustinov, the military chief, as well as younger Politburo members and Foreign Minister Gromyko, had supported Andropov. I picked up that the bureaucratic establishment felt that Andropov had been imposed on them by the KGB and the military and would challenge their way of life. The story about Andropov being part Jewish had likely been a desperate last-minute gambit by Chernenko’s backers to block Andropov. Foreign journalists had access to Red Square for Brezhnev’s funeral. On November 15, Brezhnev was given a state funeral and then buried in the Kremlin Wall. The northern wind blew in stinging gusts as Andropov faced Brezhnev’s coffin, took off his fur hat, and gave an oration, followed by Ustinov. Chernenko, visibly shaken, was not called on. A 1,500-man military band played Chopin’s “Funeral March” as the senior Politburo members accompanied Brezhnev’s coffin, descending the red granite steps of the Lenin Mausoleum. A gun carriage bore the coffin, and red-andblack flags fluttered as the procession moved up the cobblestone slope past the Historical Museum. At 12:45, bells, sirens, and artillery salutes sounded from Vladivostok on the Pacific Coast to Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea. Brezhnev’s body was lowered into the ground near Stalin’s grave. Andropov threw the first shovel of earth into the grave, followed by other Politburo members. Later, journalists were admitted into Saint George’s Hall in the Kremlin to watch Andropov receive foreign dignitaries, including all Soviet bloc leaders, US vice president George Bush and secretary of state George Shultz, as well as Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, and scores of others. As he greeted leaders, the other Politburo members were not with him. Late that night, when Bush and Shultz returned from the Kremlin to the US embassy compound, they looked grim and would not talk to reporters. All we had was a press release saying the talks had been “frank, cordial and substantive.” I caught up with Arthur Hartman, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, in the courtyard, but his expression indicated he was under orders to say

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nothing. A few days later, he was a bit more forthcoming, telling a group of us that Andropov, the former KGB chairman, “does not look like a guy who has to turn around and take a vote in the Politburo.” I was on fire, covering the biggest story in the world. I was as excited as I’d been when I had my first big story at UPI, covering the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia almost a decade and a half earlier. But now I felt I was professionally poised to have a shot at achieving my ambition of becoming an outstanding foreign correspondent.

8

Covering Russia’s KGB Tsar

This was the story I had been waiting, and hoping, for: covering Russia’s new tsar after the first handover of power in the Soviet Union since 1964. As the sole correspondent for the Washington Post in Moscow—the New York Times had two—I felt under even more pressure, but pressure was what I thrived on. There was so much to cover. Each day I eagerly anticipated what the next day would bring. The gaunt, sixty-eight-year-old Andropov had swept into the Kremlin like a whirlwind. I would sometimes watch his limousine speed down Kutuzovsky Prospect at precisely 8:35 a.m. and return between 7 and 8 in the evening. Brezhnev, by contrast, would be taken to work at 10 a.m. and return around 5 in the afternoon. In contrast to Brezhnev’s rambling assurances about all being well, Andropov gave startlingly frank, short, and direct speeches focused largely on the economy. He admitted that the Soviet economy had failed to meet its targets for the past two years, blamed “inertia” and “adherence to old ways,” and characterized many Communist Party objectives as containing “elements of separation from reality.” He oversaw a limited

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debate on economic reforms and talked about greater discipline and material incentives for better performance. He launched daytime police raids to crack down on absenteeism in factories and offices. I could now find officials in their offices in the mornings—under Brezhnev they frequently would not appear until after noon. My stories detailed how Andropov set about replacing Brezhnev’s bloated secretariat with aides from the KGB, moved KGB personnel into political jobs, and sent many of the old guard into retirement. After fifteen years as the head of the KGB, I wrote, he apparently had sufficient information about old-guard corruption to thwart their moves against him. The main obstacle was that although Andropov appeared to have consolidated his personal authority with the support of the military and the KGB, he had yet to gain control over the party bureaucracy and the approximately eighteen million Communist Party members accustomed to privileges that they did not want to lose. I wrote about the new limited openness—such things as Pravda running stories from citizens about not being able to buy basic necessities. But there were limits. The KGB was not letting up on repression of unwanted political criticism. Nikolai Erdman’s play The Suicide was dropped from the Taganka Theater’s lineup. The historian Roy Medvedev was told he would be prosecuted if he continued to write about Soviet politics. Jewish emigration slowed to a trickle. That winter, the United States, and the West, distrusting Andropov’s KGB background, remained skeptical that Andropov could, or really wanted to, change the Soviet system. Several Western countries expelled KGB agents, and Italy stepped up its investigation into a Bulgarian connection with the failed assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. Larry Eagleburger, then the third-ranking official in the State Department, summed up official thinking. He did not believe, he said, that the change in Soviet leadership meant “a great opportunity” for dramatic changes in US-Soviet relations, and that “because a man wears a Western suit with cuffs on the pants does not make him a Western liberal.” As when I had worked for UPI, I kept in close contact with Yugoslav journalists. And that was how I came upon a scoop from one of them that would land me in considerable trouble with the KGB. It was a chilly April evening when I stopped by the office of Tanjug, the Yugoslav news agency,

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on Prospect Mira. As I entered, Branko Stosic, small, balding, stood up to greet me, rubbing the back of his head and peering at me over his glasses. Piles of papers and newspapers were everywhere, a boxy Soviet TV balanced on the top of a battered metal filing cabinet. The office was in one room of the apartment of the Tanjug bureau chief, Slavko Stanic, but he was not there. Stosic’s passion was economics. He, and other Yugoslav journalists, often debated with me whether Andropov’s economic reforms could succeed, as they watched Andropov, and the changes he might make, through the prism of their own country’s more relaxed approach to Communism. Though Stosic admired Andropov’s approach, he was skeptical that it could work. When I asked him what he had been working on, a light came into his eye. “I have a very interesting story,” he said. “You should take a look at it.” He motioned me to go outside. We descended in the rickety elevator to the courtyard. He had obtained, he said, a confidential economic study prepared for a closed-door debate among the top leadership about what to do about the ailing economy. It was, Stosic said, extraordinary because it went further than anything Andropov had been saying publicly to date, to the point of questioning whether the Stalinist system of central planning was right for the Soviet Union. The study had been distributed in just seventy numbered copies. He had gotten it from a source on Chernenko’s staff—that was the reason he had taken me outside, out of the range of possible KGB microphones. His source was taking a big risk in giving it to him. I asked if I could see it. Back in the Tanjug office, Stosic unlocked his metal desk drawer and retrieved the thirty-page document. Its limited circulation number was at the top, and there were markings and comments in the margins. I stuffed it and a copy of Stosic’s story into the deep pocket of my dark brown sheepskin coat, promised I would return them the next day, and set back out. A gust of wind blew snow into my face in the courtyard. I blinked and stopped, feeling a fresh burst of exhilaration. With yet another fascinating, potentially exclusive story in my coat pocket, I again felt how alive I was, how on fire, as in the days when I had worked for UPI. Back at the Washington Post office I read the document Stosic had given me. The study was written by Tatyana Zaslavskaya, an associate of the well-known economist Abel Aganbegian at a Novosibirsk economic

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institute. Backing its conclusions with detailed data, it blamed the Stalinist system for declining economic performance and questioned the system of central planning. It said that Stalin’s half-century-old economic system was compromised and outdated and was no longer suitable for the Soviet Union. I also read Stosic’s story. It had, I thought, as journalists put it, “buried the lead.” Rather than highlighting that the study was a limited-circulation document being discussed by the leadership, his story was more of a dense economic analysis. Stosic had been miffed that it had had little response. I knew that the document would get attention if it ran in the Washington Post with the proper lead. I made a copy with the Post Xerox machine and then hid it at the back of a volume of a Stalin-era Soviet encyclopedia high on my bookshelf. The next day, I asked Stosic if I could meet his source so that I could get a better sense of the closed-door discussions. Knowing the source would be reluctant, we came up with a plan: Stosic would invite him for a drink the following week in the bar of the Ukraine Hotel, one of the seven GothicBaroque-style skyscrapers around Moscow known as Stalin’s “wedding cakes,” and I would “happen” to be there. As Stosic and I drank coffee in the gloomy bar of the Ukraine Hotel, a short, balding man, who could almost have been Stosic’s twin, approached. Stosic introduced me and a look of apprehension came over the man’s face. Stosic waved his hand. “Don’t worry,” he said. “He may be an American, but he is one of ours, a Serb.” I began talking knowledgeably, in fluent Russian, about the previous night’s hockey. I peppered my commentary with colorful expletives. We ordered more coffee. The source seemed to relax. After a good fifteen minutes, I asked him about the Zaslavskaya report. I said I would like to write a story, but I promised I would do so in a way that would not compromise him or Stosic. After much hesitation, he agreed and began describing to me, in detail, other documents that had been prepared for the closed-door meeting. As we parted, he again became nervous. “I won’t betray your confidence,” I promised. I made my way back home on foot—the Ukraine Hotel was within walking distance of the foreigners’ ghetto on Kutuzovsky Prospect. How, I worried, could I protect Stosic and his source? I decided that the best way would be to let weeks elapse before I wrote about the study—time in which I would have met with such a wide range of people that the KGB

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would have a hard time figuring out where I had gotten it from. And so I hid my notes of what the source had told me, along with the Zaslavskaya paper, in the Stalin-era encyclopedia. In early August, after four months, I decided enough time had gone by for me to write the story. I thought about Paul K. Cooke’s advice to be more cooperative with the US embassy and gave a copy of the report to Burt Gerber, the CIA station chief, making sure to first cut off the identifying number and white out the notes and markings in the margins. In order to protect Zaslavskaya and the Novosibirsk institute, I did not identify them in the story. I described the document only as one of a series being considered at the top levels of government. I did my best not to sensationalize it. In the all-important lead, or first paragraph, I wrote, A confidential study prepared for the Kremlin leadership has called for a fundamental reform of the Soviet economy and asserted that its centralized management system can no longer ensure the “full and effective use of the society’s intellectual and labor resources.” The document, printed in 70 numbered copies and made available here, provides an unusual insight into internal Kremlin debates over how to rescue the economy from the stagnation that has afflicted it during the past few years. In contrast to published accounts that focus on various impediments to economic growth—ranging from a lack of incentives to shortages of skilled personnel—the 30-page study’s main argument is that the existing system itself is now acting as a “brake” to further development. The study was presented in April at one of a series of closed-door seminars organized by the Soviet Academy of Sciences, economic sections of the Communist Party Central Committee and Gosplan, or the state planning commission. It is not known what other points of view were articulated at these conferences. The fact that the system itself was being questioned, however, suggests the scope of the discussions and the concern over the economy.

The story went on to say that the study identified the huge state bureaucracy as the main opponent of any reforms and noted that there were an estimated five million Communist Party members employed at various levels of the bureaucracy. Some officials, I noted the study as saying, feared reforms because of their lack of education. Others were afraid that they would lose their lucrative jobs and said that opponents were “putting forward unfounded arguments that would weaken the system.”

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Despite my efforts to downplay the story, it created a minor stir. Major newspapers around the world and in the United States subsequently reproduced the full text of Zaslavskaya’s study after I gave copies, without the identifying markings, to several other correspondents. US pundits speculated that the KGB wanted it to be circulated and so had leaked it to me. In fact, the opposite was true. Not only had the KGB not leaked it to me, but it wanted to figure out where I had gotten it. As I left my Kutuzovsky Prospect office the day after my story appeared, the mili man rushed to his booth and picked up his phone, watching me the whole time. As I then drove out of the Kutuzovsky Prospect compound, I noticed that a white Zhiguli with three men inside seemed to be following me. I deliberately took a wrong turn to the right outside TASS headquarters. The Zhiguli was in the left lane and had to continue straight. I watched it stop at the intersection and two men jump out. The next night, I set out to meet a person who lived on the outskirts of the city and who did not have a phone. I again noticed a white Zhiguli following at a discreet distance. I turned into a one-way street in the wrong direction. The Zhiguli followed. I decided not to keep the appointment and to lie low for a while, fearing that every person I was in touch with would be interrogated. The KGB goons were not the only ones putting pressure on me. At the press club, a towering Georgian named Aftandil Ruhadze, who worked for the Novosti news agency, approached me. He always seemed to work excessively hard to be in my circle and I had long suspected he worked for the KGB and had been detailed to keep an eye on me. He sat down and told me as a “friend” that I was suspected of having espionage connections in connection with my recent scoop. I gave my typical response: “Well, whoever thinks that can go fuck themselves.” But later I wondered if I had inadvertently brought suspicion on myself. When my Zaslavskaya story had appeared, no American diplomats had been among the several people who called to ask for additional details. Had the KGB concluded from that that the embassy already had the document and that I had given it to the embassy, or the embassy had given it to me to embarrass the Soviet Union? The next week, Ruhadze again approached me and told me that a KGB investigative team had gone to Novosibirsk to question Zaslavskaya and others at the institute. “Well, they’re looking in the wrong fucking place,”

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I said, “the idiots.” I felt sad, impotent, because there was no way I could prove that neither Zaslavskaya nor the institute had had anything to do with the leak. That night I woke up in a cold sweat. When I had given the embassy and others who asked for it copies of the Zaslavskaya paper, I had made sure to eliminate identifying markings. But I had not destroyed the original. At first I had forgotten where I had hidden it and began a frantic search for it. But then I remembered, retrieved it, and burned it in the office sink. Late at night the following week, a friend of Joseph Goldin phoned me. His voice was panicked. The police, he said, had taken Joseph to the Kashchenko psychiatric hospital. Horror gripped me. I immediately thought that this must have to do with me, with the Zaslavskaya paper. I jumped into the green Volvo and drove to the massive, prison-like hospital. I stared up at the dark, barred windows and tried to picture Joseph inside. Was he being restrained? Force-fed drugs that would make him ill? I had last seen him three weeks earlier, in late July. Joseph had come to a dinner party Karin and I had given for Tim Wirth, a visiting Colorado congressman, and his wife, Wren. Washington’s Wilson Center director, James Billington, and the poet Andrei Voznesensky and his wife, Zoya, were also there. Joseph had read Billington’s book about Russian cultural history and wanted to meet him. I thought about how, as I had driven Joseph from the compound—the only way Russians could come in and out and avoid being questioned by the mili men—he had told me he was in hiding from the police because, under Andropov, they were cracking down on anyone who did not hold a steady job, which was against the law. Those who did not have a job were condemned as “parasites.” No, I decided, my troubles and Joseph’s were not linked. He was in trouble with the uniformed police; I was in trouble with the KGB. I sat down and, in a white fury, wrote an article about Joseph’s plight, equating his imprisonment in a psychiatric hospital with punishments Tsar Nicholas I used to mete out. Before I could send it, Malek argued me out of it. A foreigner’s involvement, he pointed out, could make it a state case. I knew he was right. I descended into a frustrated rage, ill tempered toward everyone around me. A group of Joseph’s friends, including several Soviet journalists and two film directors, became involved and enlisted Academy of Sciences vice president Yevgeny Velikhov to petition for Joseph’s release—which happened, finally, in late August.

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I was overjoyed at Joseph’s release. The KGB surveillance of me, though, became increasingly blatant. I had to use the phones and telexes in the offices of my Japanese neighbors, as mine had all but stopped working. Finally I decided I had to act. I complained to Foreign Ministry acquaintances and some political figures, including one close to Andropov. The KGB, I said, were using Gestapo methods—I used that term deliberately—and I would describe them as such in an open letter to Andropov that would be published on the Post’s op-ed page. “But this is not directed against you,” one said. “They have to find out who leaked the document. They do the same in Washington.” My tactic worked. A few days later, the harassment ended. Some days after that, a Russian I had known for a long time said he could obtain unpublished memoirs written by Stalin’s deputy, Vyacheslav Molotov— would I be interested? He could, he said, get a copy of the manuscript from the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. He put forward a plan that would involve me obtaining it through Molotov’s daughter Svetlana, whose husband I knew. It seemed suspiciously easy and I declined. I felt I was being set up. The extra work, and pressure, put yet more strain on my marriage and family life. One night in August, Karin appeared in the doorway of the Washington Post office just after midnight. I was frowning at the telex machine, taking a drag on my Cuban cigar as I did a final check on a story and wondered whether my telex would cut out in the middle of transmission. Malek was sitting on the sofa. Karin had phoned me twice that evening and I had told her I was too busy to talk and that I would call her back when I had filed my story. She rarely ventured across the courtyard to the office, preferring to phone me there if, as was frequently the case, there was some issue with Peter, who was struggling in school, or something I had failed to do. I was startled to see her. I motioned to her to sit down, but she remained standing and looked pointedly at Malek. “I’ll be back,” Malek said, getting up. “I need to check on something.” Ever since Andropov had taken power, I had abandoned my vow to eat dinner with Karin and Peter most nights. Often when I did see her, Karin would complain about always being the parent dealing with teachers. I had hired tutors, including a refusenik physicist, Semyon Katz, who had been out of work since applying to immigrate to

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Israel, to help Peter with math and other homework. Shortly after Andropov came to power, as I understood I would have to give the story my all, I had tried to explain to Karin once again that I felt I owed myself this push. “Save your breath,” she said. “I’ve heard it all before.” “Dusko, listen to me for once,” Karin said. Peter would have to go to boarding school, and she would take trips to the States for his half terms and vacations. Karin said she had talked to Peter, and he wanted to go. “I agree,” I said, painfully aware that I was failing them both, yet without the time that would be needed to fix this now. Karin looked hard at me, nodded, and left. I told myself, once again, that our relationship could be fixed after my tour was over. Weren’t we like so many other couples I knew, unhappy but together? We did, after all, look, in public, like any other couple. And Karin was right. Peter would be happier at boarding school for a year until we returned to Washington in the summer of 1984. Karin, Peter, and I checked into Montreal’s Dorval Hilton on a luminous September afternoon in 1983 for our latest R&R, which would be combined with taking Peter to boarding school. I felt drained from the KGB pressure, from the worry about Joseph, and from the relentless work. Andropov had left Moscow for a vacation, so I believed it would be safe to leave. We went down to the dining room to have supper after our long flight. Peter was looking forward to attending his new boarding school in Connecticut. We chatted about this over a dinner of steak and wine. I felt some tension draining away. I had less than a year left in Moscow. Karin had been right to send Peter to a school where he could flourish and escape the tensions of our home, even though I would miss him. When we went up to our room and turned the TV on, every channel was reporting that a Soviet air force plane had shot down Korean Airlines flight KAL007 with 269 passengers on board, including fifty Americans. I phoned the Post’s foreign desk. The deputy foreign editor, Rick Weintraub, read me the TASS statement, which ended by saying that the plane was last seen heading “in the direction of the Sea of Japan.” I understood how to interpret what TASS said. “That means they have shot it down,” I said. “The phrase literally means it went into the Sea of Japan.” I was relieved I was not sent back to Moscow. My colleague Michael Dobbs flew in from Paris as Karin and I took Peter to school, then she and I went first for a vacation in New Hampshire and then to spend two weeks in

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Washington, DC, before returning to Moscow. Karin was already making plans for some renovations of our house in Washington when we returned the following summer. A week after we arrived in Washington, Bradlee took me to lunch at the Madison Hotel, a place of deep-pile carpet, rosewood paneling, and Czech crystal chandeliers that symbolized European elegance in a world of franchise hotels. Bradlee told me how pleased he was because I had been consistently ahead of the New York Times. My head was already swimming from compliments and invitations. Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger had asked Katherine Graham to arrange a meeting with me, and she had us over for an intimate lunch at her home. Mrs. Graham also asked me to accompany her to meetings with administration officials and Soviet experts to prepare for an interview with Andropov that the Soviet ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, was setting up for her. I sensed it would not take place. After the KAL flight downing, US-Soviet relations, already in trouble, were heading back to the deepest of deep freezes. But we went ahead anyway. At the lunch with Bradlee, I had hoped to talk about my next assignment when I finished in Moscow the next summer. Just as I was about to broach the subject, Bradlee suddenly switched the topic. “We’d like you to extend your tour for one year,” he said. He’d always hungered to be judged against the Times, he told me. “Our Moscow bureau is now better than theirs, and I want to keep it that way.” To make my life easier, he promised to send a second permanent correspondent to help. Overwhelmed by his praise, I said yes. I was rejoicing inside. I had done what I had set out to do! I had won Bradlee’s approval; my reporting stood out. Wasn’t this exactly what I had worked for? I was so intoxicated with this thought that I failed to think of Karin. “He can’t do that to us,” Karin said, shocked, when I later told her. “You turned it down, of course?” “Well, he said I could have anything I want after that,” I said. Buy time, I thought. You’ll bring her around, you always have. I fantasized for a moment that she would share in my joy, my sense of achievement, the proof that my hard work was paying off. In Washington, even star reporters get only a piece of a big story to nibble on, I wanted to say to her, and here I was in Moscow, at the top of my game, living the thrill of watching

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and reporting on what I now was sure was the collapse of a great empire. This was what my life had been leading up to. But Karin had never been interested in my work. I had shown too little compassion for her dislike of Moscow and her anger at my workaholism. The words I so wanted to shout out loud, in joy, formed a traffic jam in my mouth. I had promised her she would have to endure the Soviet Union for only three years. And now, indecently, I was reneging on that promise. I had not even thought to tell Bradlee I had to check with Karin. She discreetly began to sob. “Your faith in the Washington Post will be the end of you.” We were sitting in the Madison Hotel coffee shop, and I feared a scene in front of a lot of Post people. She knew exactly what I was thinking. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to throw a fit,” she said, taking her napkin and dabbing at her face. I tried to put my arm around her, but she pushed it away. When we returned to the paper’s corporate apartment later that night, she was in a bleak mood. She said, “I feel sorry for you. They own your soul, don’t they?” We had a busy schedule and didn’t speak much to each other. I watched her talk in an animated way during a Georgetown dinner party on our last full day in Washington. Late that evening my new foreign editor, Jim Hoagland, asked to have breakfast with me before we flew to Moscow. I was surprised. He had been at the dinner; could he not have talked to me the previous evening? When we met, he came straight to the point. He had been seated next to Karin at the dinner party, he said, and was shocked— shocked—to learn that she worked for the US embassy. “She must quit immediately,” he said, emphatically. “What are the Russians going to think?” I said the Russians regarded all correspondents as extensions of the US embassy anyway. Besides, I added, she worked for the US Commercial Service as a receptionist, was a local hire, and made two bucks an hour. Technically speaking, she wasn’t working for the embassy but for the US Department of Commerce. “Why wasn’t I informed about this intolerable conflict of interest?” he asked. I said something to the effect that I did not think that was something he’d be interested in. Looking back, it seems almost unbelievable that any American executive in the 1980s would make such a preposterous demand. But it was my

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fault. I was reluctant to have a full-blown argument. I proposed that we ask Bradlee to settle the issue. Hadn’t he promised to do anything to make my life easier? I phoned his office. It turned out that he was going to be out of town that day. “What did Hoagland want?” Karin asked. “Nothing much, just the routine stuff,” was my cowardly reply. I was absolutely certain that Bradlee would side with me and I didn’t want to upset her even more. Three days later, in Moscow, I received a short message from Hoagland saying, “Ben fully agrees. Karin must quit her job.” (When I saw Bradlee in Washington six months later, he promptly reversed Hoagland’s decision. But by then, it was too late.) I was rattled. I tried to reason with Hoagland, but the phone lines wouldn’t cooperate. We spoke across, or rather under, the Atlantic, and there was a lot of hissing and interference on the line. Whenever I got through, I had to shout as he kept saying, “Can you repeat that? I can’t hear you.” Finally we argued over the dedicated telex lines for a few days, but he wouldn’t budge. Talking on telex was cumbersome: sixty-six words per minute. On the plus side, you have a record of the conversation. In the end I told Hoagland that his request had been met. It wasn’t true. I procrastinated, hoping the problem would go away. When I eventually summoned the courage four months later to tell her that she had to quit, she was stunned. “How could you let them do this to me?” she asked. “Bear with me just for a while,” I said, showing her the exchanges of telex messages. She began to cry. “You’re married to your job, not to me,” she said. “And you know what’s funny? You being so loyal. You can’t see that in the end they’ll dump you.” I promised to travel to Washington and have Bradlee straighten things out. “Please don’t.” Her face was now full of contempt. She wouldn’t hear me out. She resigned a few days later. After that, our conversations became even more civil and cool. Like two Trappist monks, we no longer talked to each other. We were beyond arguments. We kept up the pretense of an ongoing relationship, but her grim silence kept reminding me that I was a failure in my personal life just as I was doing my best work as a journalist. As Karin and I arrived back in Moscow in September of 1983, after agreeing to extend my tour to the summer of 1985, the acrimony between the

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Soviet Union and the United States matched that in my marriage. The Soviet Union blamed Washington for the KAL downing, saying the US had engineered it to make sure US missiles were deployed in Europe. The whole world condemned the KAL shooting. Soviet efforts to stop the US missile deployments in Europe failed; Reagan called the Soviet Union “an evil empire.” Top Soviet and Warsaw Pact defense officials warned of a drastic response to the US missile deployment. Andropov denounced Brezhnev’s policy of détente. In this poisonous atmosphere, Kremlin leaders believed the United States was preparing a sneak attack on Russia under the guise of preparations for a NATO military exercise code-named Able Archer. The Kremlin appeared to have detailed intelligence about Able Archer, which was designed to simulate preparation for a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. President Reagan and other NATO political leaders were scheduled to take part in the exercise. The Kremlin saw this as a prelude to a preemptive nuclear strike. The Soviets walked out of Geneva arms control talks and Marshal Dmitri Ustinov, the defense minister, placed Soviet nuclear forces on the highest alert in late October. Fortunately, Reagan quietly defused the issue by scaling down the scope of Able Archer and canceling his participation. But a big new story was underway. Andropov was sick. He failed to appear for Kremlin celebrations of the November 7, 1983, anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Rumors abounded that he had more than the “cold” that was the official explanation and would be asked to retire. From contacts and the media, I picked up that the party elite was stirring and his opponents regrouping. On November 11, for example, the armed forces issued a ringing endorsement of Andropov’s hard-line policy toward the United States and sent greetings to him from the Central Committee—but none from the Politburo. Soviet television, controlled by the Chernenko ally Sergei Lapin, failed to report the endorsement even as the armed forces newspaper carried it in full on its front page. Andropov’s supporters I talked to insisted he was recovering and would attend the December plenum of the Central Committee. A series of pronouncements by him about arms control and East-West relations gave the illusion he was working and in control. But he failed to appear at the December plenum or at a Supreme Soviet opening session on December 28. On January 21, 1984, I read in Pravda an article by Lev Tolkhunov,

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the editor in chief of Izvestia and an Andropov friend. Titled “Parting,” it described the final days of the semiparalyzed Lenin, who continued to plan and think about the future and prepare a speech for a congress even though he was “not destined to accomplish this.” I took this as a sign that Andropov’s days were numbered, though I did not have the information to write this. In contrast to the leaky bureaucracy under Brezhnev, Andropov had been able to keep his illness a secret from all but his closest advisers. In January, a new edition of the official History of the Soviet Communist Party appeared in bookstores. I read it twice, then compared it with similar chapters in other party history books. What leapt out to me was that it mentioned Chernenko as the architect of the party’s strategic course, along with Andropov. Picking up on the clues regarding Andropov’s health, but frustrated that information was so hard to come by, I wrote a story that appeared in the February 9, 1984, edition of the Washington Post summing up what could be said about the leader and his health—little more than that he had not been seen in public for 173 days, that unconfirmed reports circulating within the Communist Party bureaucracy suggested that he had an “ailment that affects his appearance and ability to talk,” and that despite the reports, “it seems that only a small number of top officials knows the real state of affairs.” I had little inkling that the story would be superseded the very next day in a way that would have reverberations for me and my career for years to come. Just after six o’clock in the evening on Thursday, February 9, 1984, I drove home to the Kutuzovsky Prospect compound from a visit to Vadim and Julia Sidur. Over tea and vodka, I had listened to their worries about Andropov’s continuing cultural crackdown, though Vadim had escaped intense scrutiny so far. The snow-swept streets were emptying out as people hurried out of the frigid weather and anticipated watching the Sarajevo Winter Olympic Games on television at nine o’clock. The whole country was focused on the Olympics. Soviet skaters had already won a host of medals and the national ice hockey team was playing that evening and fast moving toward the gold medal. I checked in at the office. My article on Andropov’s health was in that day’s Washington Post and I was not anticipating filing a story that

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day. I decided to go home to have dinner with Karin and watch the first nationally televised speech being made by Yegor Ligachev, the newest member of the Soviet leadership, from Tomsk in Siberia. Andropov had brought this provincial official from Siberia and appointed him to a key power position in the Kremlin, in charge of party personnel, just six weeks earlier. I wanted to get a sense of him, presuming he was yet another of Andropov’s younger, purposeful protégés, like Mikhail Gorbachev. I stamped the snow off my boots in the apartment entrance and went into the kitchen, where Karin was putting boxes in the refrigerator in preparation for a sit-down dinner we were giving for fifty people the next night, as we did once a year to repay social obligations. We were hosting it with Mary Dau, the Danish minister counselor, in her much larger apartment on the floor above ours. We had sent out invitations a week earlier and had hired two Gypsy musicians along with waiters and a cook. The guests included Soviet figures and senior diplomats. “Everything under control?” I asked. She half nodded. I went into the living room, poured a glass of wine, and settled in to watch the Ligachev speech. Karin came in and joined me. “I hope this dinner goes well,” she said. Soviet television was to broadcast a show by the Swedish pop group ABBA at eight o’clock, after the Ligachev speech and before the Olympics show began. Karin was looking forward to watching it. “Finally something decent on TV,” she said. The Ligachev speech began. I was immediately struck that he did not convey Andropov’s greetings to the people of Tomsk, a phrase that was all but obligatory in Soviet speeches. “Maybe Andropov is dead,” I remarked to Karin, though I immediately dismissed the idea, which, based on so little, seemed far-fetched. Still, my gut told me the omission was significant. Was it possible the phrase had been inadvertently cut by a technician? Or by a censor? But why? Then, at eight o’clock, instead of the ABBA concert, and to Karin’s dismay, Soviet television began broadcasting musicians in tails playing classical music—exactly as had happened the night before Brezhnev’s death was announced. I felt a flutter of excitement. I turned on both radios in the apartment but there was no classical music. At nine o’clock, just before the Olympics coverage, the main evening news program, Vremya (Time), came on. The newscaster read a few brief items, then the programming shifted to the excitement, gaiety, colors, and sounds of the Olympic Games.

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I walked back to the Washington Post office across the courtyard. The Olympics coverage had not changed—did this not indicate normalcy? But ice hockey was the preeminent Soviet sport and the stakes could not be higher. Four years earlier, the Soviet team of professional players had been defeated at the Lake Placid Winter Olympics by the US team of amateurs, who had taken the gold medal. The defeat had been regarded as a national humiliation. The Soviet ice hockey players had pledged to come back from Sarajevo with gold. To cancel the live transmission that night without an explanation would cause nationwide panic—like interrupting the transmission of a Super Bowl game without explanation. I decided to ignore that and focus on looking for evidence and assessing it. But it was already ten at night and I had so little to go on. I decided to call Alexander Bovin. He had discouraged me from meeting him alone, but we had agreed on a phone signal for emergencies that I would send from a public phone. I would get a prearranged signal from him at my office exactly twenty minutes later. I drove through an eerily quiet snowcovered city to the Lenin Library metro station, where I usually made calls from the public phones. As I passed the Armed Forces General Staff building, I noticed that it was fully lit. Outside the Lenin Library station, I noted a military patrol of two soldiers and an officer. I made the call to Bovin and rushed back to the office to await his return call. It never came—either he was not at home or he chose to ignore my signal. I checked the TASS wire, hoping it would be carrying the full text of Ligachev’s speech, but it ran only a summary. The Reuters wire was running a story about an exchange of fire near Beirut involving US naval forces. Masai Egawa, the correspondent for the Japanese daily Mainichi, came in to collect his copy of the TASS—Mainichi and the Washington Post shared the wires. He told me that Agence France Presse had earlier reported that Andropov’s son Igor had suddenly left Stockholm, where he was a member of the Soviet delegation to a disarmament conference. I called the Agence France Presse Moscow bureau, but they said they had no further information. It was now past 11 p.m. Moscow radio and television were still carrying reports from the Sarajevo Olympics. Soviet television was scheduled to stop broadcasting after the games were over, and so I reasoned that Moscow Radio would be my only source of information. I checked the newspapers for the lineup of radio programs. A jazz program was scheduled

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for 11:35 on one of the main frequencies. I figured that if it was changed to classical music, that would be decisive. With nothing else to check on, I phoned Slavko Stanic and told him I would stop by the Tanjug office after midnight. I then drove out of the Kutuzovsky Prospect compound and headed toward the Kremlin. The white marble General Staff building was still fully lit. I turned right toward the river and the Ministry of Defense buildings. The Ferris wheel in Gorky Park loomed high over the frozen river, snowflakes illuminated in my headlights. When I reached the Ministry of Defense buildings I saw that hundreds of its windows were lit. Clearly something extraordinary was happening. If not the leader’s death, then what? I got out of the car, crossed the street, and began to count the lit windows, but soon gave up. I thought about the Reuters reports on the Middle East fighting and wondered if that was the cause of so much activity in the building. I got back in the car and drove along the river toward the city center. The car radio played the end of the Olympics broadcast, then a brief news summary. It was now 11:35, time for the scheduled jazz program. I held my breath. The sounds of classical music filled the car. There could be only one explanation. For the first time that evening, I felt really excited. The city all around me was mostly asleep, unaware of the big story I had stumbled on in this obsessively secretive country. As I approached the redwalled Kremlin, a fairy-tale sight on a snowy night, I felt disturbed that I could be so elated over the death of a man, and had to chase away my exaggerated sense of accomplishment. I parked the car by Red Square and walked toward the Central Committee building complex. The red stars shone like jewels above the Kremlin towers. The golden hands of the Spassky Tower clock moved to midnight and chimed the hour, the Kremlin honor guard changed in front of the Lenin Mausoleum, lights glowed on the onion domes of St. Basil’s Church. The wind whipped the snow on Kuybishev Street as I approached. I saw two young men wearing woolen overcoats and fur hats and knew they were security guards, the same kind as had been here when I made the same tour of the city after Brezhnev’s death. From this vantage point I could see the granite left wing of the KGB next to the Lubyanka prison and main KGB office building. The lights were on. I hurried back to the car, feeling certain Andropov was dead, but uncertain that I had enough to write a story.

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At the Tanjug office on Prospect Mira, Stanic was sitting gravely by his radio. “Probably the boss,” he said. He figured something was up, but he was not aware of the TV programming changes or the lights blazing at the strategic buildings in the city. We analyzed each indication together, looking for alternative explanations to each. In half an hour, I said, the radio would begin its broadcast for young people building the Baikal-Amur railroad in Siberia several time zones away. If the customary five minutes of humor was dropped and classical music played, we decided, we could be certain that Andropov was dead. The time to the Washington Post deadline was ticking down. I needed to let my editors know about the story. I swung back past the strategic buildings as I drove back to the office. The lights were still burning in the KGB headquarters, the Defense Ministry, and the General Staff building. No uniformed police could be seen, though. I reasoned they must have been called in to receive instructions. Back at the office, I sat at my desk, with its usual piled mess of files, papers, cigar ends in an ashtray. I turned on the radio and waited for the program for young people in Siberia. As soon as I heard the sounds of classical guitar, I dialed the Washington Post in Washington on the telex, my direct line to the Post newsroom since phone calls had to go through an international operator. Rick Weintraub, the deputy foreign editor, came to the telex and I told him, cryptically, that I would be filing a story that would be almost identical to the one I had filed on November 10, 1982, the day of Brezhnev’s death. My fingers fumbled nervously on the telex keys. I knew the telex exchange would be read in some KGB office and feared my editors would ask questions about sources or for explanations I did not want to be explicit about. But Weintraub immediately grasped the situation. I had been working on an Andropov obituary, I wrote, but I had been overtaken by events and suggested it be done in Washington as I had other work to do. “Don’t worry,” Weintraub telexed back, “just go to it.” It was two hours to the first deadline. As I drove back to Stanic’s office I noticed that the uniformed police were out again on several streets. As I waited at a traffic light on Kutuzovsky Prospect, a black limousine roared through the red light at around eighty miles an hour; two Volgas sped in the opposite direction. When I reached the Tanjug office, Stanic had decided he would write a story focusing on the TV and radio changes and not mentioning Andropov’s name

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because his readers would draw the obvious conclusion. He colored, evidently embarrassed, as he said, “I have to call my ambassador and inform him about it,” since Tanjug was a government news agency. It was past two in the morning. I listened to Stanic outline the story to a presumably sleepy ambassador, and gathered from his reaction that the ambassador was skeptical. “Comrade ambassador, I work for Tanjug and it is my judgment that Tanjug should have this story,” he said. “I just thought I should inform you.” He hung up and told me that the ambassador said his deputy had been with Soviet officials that evening and reported that everything was normal. As Stanic and I were discussing this, the ambassador called back. Stanic listened, his lips pursed, and then hung up and turned to me. “He has checked around and said flat out that I am wrong, and that Andropov is alive.” I drove back to the office. I was perturbed by what the ambassador had said, but it was not enough for me to change my mind. The radio music was shifting from classical to funereal. I was certain my editors would have contacted the CIA, the State Department, and other agencies in Washington that monitor Soviet radio transmissions and that they would have confirmed my reporting. The vast machinery of the US government would, like me, have picked up on the signs. Or so I thought. I sat down and wrote a story that laid out, in a factual way, everything I had observed, making sure everything was accurate so that I could not be accused of fabrication, which would be reason to expel me. I wrote selfconsciously, carefully. Because of the time difference, it was only around six in the evening in Washington. I listed all the signs I had noticed without embellishments, and, as I had done back in Professor Davidson’s class at Columbia, I examined each line for its truth. I wrote that Soviet television had changed its scheduled program to classical music shortly after eight o’clock and that state radio followed with similar changes. I noted that this came against the background of Andropov’s long illness and suggested the Soviet Union had been placed on an emergency footing in a way that was identical to the night of November 9 of the previous year, before Brezhnev’s death was formally announced. I detailed all the signs I had noticed and evidence to support the conclusion that Andropov had died. I reread the story one more time to make sure that not a single fact could be challenged. Once satisfied, I began transmitting it via the clacking telex machine. Momentarily I forgot everything—the crisis in my

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marriage, all my worries. I was happy. I thought of Clyde and his instruction to “be there, see things for yourself, feel them, smell them.” But after I finished transmitting the story, I felt anxious. I hoped that Tanjug had run Stanic’s story, because if we were both wrong then we could at least share the embarrassment. Back home in the predawn hours, as I tried to sleep, mournful music emanating from the radio, I suddenly remembered the dinner we were giving that evening. Karin would be getting up in a couple of hours. I wrote her a note that Andropov was dead and we might have to cancel the dinner. As I slept, another story was unfolding in Washington. When my story reached the foreign desk around seven o’clock on Thursday evening, Bradlee decided to put it on page 1. He asked Post reporters to call the White House, the State Department, the CIA, and other elements of the US intelligence community to inform them about the contents of the story and to ask whether more details had been reported officially to Washington. All of the officials replied in the negative. After checking further, the officials called the paper back to say that they had no information about any program changes or other telltale signs. Later that evening, though, several Post editors and reporters attended a State Department dinner at which Secretary of State George Shultz, Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, and Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin were present. One of the editors told Dobrynin about the story. He laughed and said, “Come, come, he’ll drop dead with these rumors.” Eagleburger said he would check the story. By the end of the dinner, he told a Post executive that the story was “bullshit” and that US diplomats in Moscow, when told, had joked that “Doder must be smoking pot.” Jim Hoagland, the same editor who had forced Karin to quit her job, decided to move the story from the front page to page 28 and to soften the language. Warren Zimmermann, the deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Moscow, would later tell me that he had received a tip that night that Andropov had died—from the well-known journalist Edmund Stevens, who had been in the Soviet Union since the 1930s and who was frequently used as a conduit. Zimmerman had filed it to the State Department. But Shultz and Eagleburger had checked with the CIA, not their own State Department whose building they were in.

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I woke up midmorning feeling jubilant. Karin was not home, but the Soviet maid told me about an impending announcement. I phoned Stanic. Tanjug had not run his story. “You are all alone,” he said, congratulating me. Back at the office, I was incredulous when I received, by telex, the “play cable” that showed my Andropov story on page 28. How could my editors, my foreign desk, not have recognized what I had given them? How could they not have put it on page 1? I had never filed anything that was more certain front-page material. Still, the story had run, albeit deep inside the paper. I remembered Clyde’s words: once a story is gone, it’s gone. On to the next one. I had a busy day ahead of me. I was back on the street once it was officially announced at 1 p.m. that Andropov had died at 5:25 p.m. the previous day. I drove down to the city center to walk among the crowds of people bundled up against the bitter February cold. Throughout the city, people were putting up black rosettes and black-bordered Soviet flags. Workers were already putting up black and red bunting and a giant portrait of Andropov at the Hall of Columns where his body would lie. When I got back to the Kutuzovsky Prospect compound, as I was entering the office building, I bumped into the CIA station chief. “Why didn’t you call me and tell me?” he said angrily. “But I don’t work for you,” I said, with arrogant dismissiveness. “If I had run into you then I would have told you.” Today, if I could turn back time, I would have called him to check what he might be reporting. It would have saved me a lot of future grief. But it did not enter my head that the embassy, and the CIA, did not pick up the signs I had. I could not know how fateful that would prove. Our dinner party was still taking place. I took a cold shower before the dinner, dressed, and stood near the door to greet the guests. I had assumed that most people, particularly diplomats, would not come on such a busy day. But word had spread about my exclusive story. Apart from four important Soviet officials, everybody turned up. I had already decided that after mingling over cocktails I would leave Karin and Mary Dau, the dinner’s cohost, to continue, and I would quietly slip out. I had finally managed to contact Bovin that afternoon and I learned from him that Chernenko had been named chairman of the funeral commission, a sign he had an edge over Andropov’s groomed successor, Gorbachev. Chatting with one of the guests, Indonesian ambassador Mohamed

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Choesin, he agreed with me that Chernenko would be the next leader. US ambassador Arthur Hartman disagreed, saying it would be Gorbachev or Romanov and that “they will never turn to Chernenko.” I assumed that was the embassy’s analysis, once more at odds with my own. I slipped out of the party into the frigid night and back to the office. Several congratulatory cables were on the telex. As I read them, I was thrilled. They included notes from Kay Graham (“Congratulations on your spectacular world beat”), from Ben Bradlee (“We’re all basking in the glory you earned”), and from Clyde Farnsworth (who said something to the effect that he had always had faith in me). I was usually good at keeping souvenirs, but I sure wish I had Clyde’s message. The next day, papers around the world, and the Post, ran stories that were highly embarrassing to the CIA. How, they asked, could the world’s most powerful espionage service be scooped by one vigilant journalist? Among many rewards in the newspaper business, one of the finest is reading the competitors quoting your paper. All my life—since the days when I first wrote sports stories in Sarajevo—I had wanted my name to be known because of my journalism. But a journalist, I also knew, should never become the story. As Clyde would put it, journalists belong in the audience, not on the stage. I knew that I had broken that rule and crossed a line. At the time, though, I did not dwell on it. After all, it was not I who had written the stories about me. Though I was not prescient enough to see that any repercussions could be lasting, Malek was worried. He stopped by to congratulate me, his brow furrowed. “You’ll have a lot of trouble with the CIA,” he said, shaking his head. I admired Malek’s political sense and deep knowledge of the Soviet Union, but I thought he was off base because his point of reference was Egypt. “Malek,” I scoffed, “the CIA is not the Mukhabarat. What are you talking about?” “They are all the same once you challenge their competence,” Malek said. Still on a high from all the praise, I did not take him as seriously as I should have.

9

The Price for Breaking a Rule of Journalism

There was too much work to do to spend time reflecting on my scoop or the accolades, let alone Malek’s warning. When Andropov’s successor was announced the next day, it was the elderly, old-guard Chernenko, not the younger, more vigorous Gorbachev. I stood in the Red Square stands reserved for journalists and other foreigners and officials on a frigid Valentine’s Day in 1984, watching as Chernenko presided over the funeral of his predecessor. Despite my sheepskin coat and fur shapka, I shivered as flurries of snowflakes fell, as the Spassky Tower bells struck noon, and as Chernenko, looking feeble and exhausted, gave his address, stumbling over some of the words. His frailty was emphasized by the more forceful speeches then given by Foreign Minister Gromyko and Defense Minister Ustinov, even though both were four years older than he was. Trying to penetrate the secretive process of how Chernenko had been chosen, at a Foreign Ministry reception I sought out Valeri Pork, a Foreign Ministry press official whose father headed the KGB in Estonia. I reasoned that he would know details of how Andropov’s chosen heir, Gorbachev,

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had been bested by Chernenko. KGB men like Pork’s father, I assumed, would be dismayed at the choice. I was right. I learned from Pork— confirming the information with Alexander Bovin and Georgy Arbatov— that Chernenko had won out because the armed forces had backed him, a signal that the old guard was not yet ready to hand power to a new generation or continue Andropov’s assault on their privileged way of life. But, I learned, there had been a compromise engineered by Gromyko in which Gorbachev was appointed second secretary, and therefore was the next in line. Meanwhile the accolades continued to pour in. On February 16, 1984, the Wall Street Journal carried a column written by Hodding Carter III, a well-known journalist and former assistant secretary of state. It began with the following sentence: “If Dusko Doder of the Washington Post is not the best American correspondent in the Soviet Union today, it’s hard to name one who is better.” But as I worked hard to cover the next chapter of the Soviet Union’s history, my stories usually hitting the front page, something strange and inexplicable was starting to grip me. My burning ambition to be a famous journalist was deserting me. I now was the famous journalist I had set out to be. Was this not the success I had craved, worked for for so long? Why did I feel so let down, as if I had nothing else to aspire to? A week after Andropov’s funeral, I got home at around four in the morning, inebriated after sharing half a bottle of vodka with Malek. Karin’s light was on in the separate room she now slept in. My first thought was to avoid her hearing me and coming out. With no work now to go to because of my betrayal of her, she had sunk deeper into depression. I thought of the curse Dad had pronounced on me: “May God exact a retribution for your deception!” Had the curse left a more profound wound than I realized and made me measure everything in terms of professional success? What had I done to my wife, our marriage, in the pursuit of the success that, now achieved, felt like a letdown? Looking at Karin’s closed door, I thought back to when we were first married. When things went wrong then—after the disastrous New York Times interview, then when I had quit my job with the AP after it would not run my scoop about General Westmoreland requesting more troops in Vietnam—she tried to cheer me up. But now, because I had singlemindedly put my career over her, because I had betrayed her and failed to

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support her needs, all because of my ambition, I had destroyed her happiness and, probably, our marriage. I stood by the window looking out at the parked cars, the mili men in their boxes, the grim-looking apartment buildings, the streetlights starting to flicker off. What, I asked myself, what I was doing here seeking truth in a land of half truths? A plan began to form: I would set a different course when this tour in Moscow was over in the summer of the following year. Hadn’t Bradlee said I could have any job I wanted? I would tell him I wanted to write book reviews for the Book World section of the Post. Perhaps, over time, Karin and I could still patch up the rift in our marriage, if only for Peter’s sake. I refused to acknowledge, to myself, that because of my selfishness there was nothing left to salvage. “Don’t even try,” Karin said each time I made an effort to apologize or to promise that this extension in Moscow would be the last time I would agree to anything with the Post without consulting her. I felt like a heel and I was a heel. All I knew, all I could grasp hold of, was that I had to get through the final year of my job as the Post’s Moscow correspondent with the quality of my work as high as it had been. In the days and weeks after Andropov’s death, as these inexplicable feelings churned inside me, I doubled down on work. I sought out as many contacts as I could, picking up information about ways in which Chernenko and his loyalists were fighting the Chernenko-Gorbachev compromise. I learned from several sources, for example, that Gorbachev had delivered the concluding remarks at the Central Committee session that elected Chernenko, even though this was not mentioned in the media. I found Bovin in a maudlin mood at the press club. Chernenko, his old nemesis, he told me, was moving against Andropov loyalists—and that included him. His weekly foreign affairs TV show had been canceled and his name removed from the list of candidates for the upcoming elections. One of Chernenko’s top aides, Alexei Alexandrov-Agentov, months later, told me Chernenko wanted Bovin out “because he’s got a tongue a mile long.” Chernenko chose, for his first public meeting, to address the Central Committee apparat with a reassuring speech in which he quoted, approvingly, the old saying “Look before you leap!” and, in another dig at his predecessor, promised that future changes would be gradual. But no matter how hard I worked, my heart was no longer in the stories I was writing. Work was no longer the single thing that fueled me, that gave

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me such satisfaction that nothing else mattered. I began drinking heavily to keep going. The half bottle of vodka with Malek at night became a full bottle, most of it drunk by me. The course of the Soviet Union seemed to match my own. The country was now on autopilot as Chernenko and his men did all they could to return Soviet society to the Brezhnev era. Andropov’s domestic reforms were abandoned; the Chernenko Kremlin focused on trying to revive Brezhnev-era détente and arms control and made every effort to engage the hawkish Reagan in arms control talks. This was understandable given that Chernenko’s years as Brezhnev’s closest aide had been his personal and professional golden era, years when the Soviet Union was on a forward march. Third World countries—Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Nicaragua—had embraced socialism, and the Soviet Union also had achieved détente with the West, toeholds around the world, and rough strategic parity with the United States. Now, in 1984, that was no longer the case. Poland and Afghanistan were burdens, ethnic republics on the periphery were restive, economic figures were deteriorating, and Moscow’s hard-currency earnings had become depleted because the price of oil, gold, diamonds, and other metals had plummeted since the 1970s. Andropov had failed to stop the deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe, and Reagan was proposing a “Star Wars” space-based antimissile shield to destroy incoming missiles, which would put more of a financial strain on the Soviet Union if it tried to keep up or counter it. Chernenko first boycotted the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics—citing security reasons but essentially to retaliate for the US boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980. Then he went on a major offensive to reengage the United States. He first proposed to start talks on space weapons in Geneva that coming September. Reagan replied in late July that he was willing to do that, but only if the Russians resumed the talks on strategic and intermediate-range missiles that Andropov had broken off. The Kremlin began to push arms control, making public details that until then had been kept secret from all but select officials. I watched in astonishment as Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov held a press conference live on TV using multicolor charts as he discussed various Soviet and American nuclear missiles and their numbers. Alla Pugacheva, the most popular singer in the Soviet Union, even recorded the first antinuclear song I had heard in Russia,

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depicting Earth as an easily smashed crystal ball. The Soviet Union laid the blame squarely at the feet of the “imperialists,” mainly the United States. Life did not get easier for Jewish refuseniks and dissidents under Chernenko, though. I reported on the arrest of several Hebrew teachers, and I went to visit the dissident historian Roy Medvedev and found police guards outside his apartment to prevent foreigners from contacting him. The Soviet media also continued to attack Western journalists. I was denounced in the monthly Journalist magazine that spring, along with Serge Schmemann and John Burns of the New York Times, Bob Gillette of the Los Angeles Times, and Howard Tyner of the Chicago Tribune, for various alleged abuses of our “power,” for allegedly hanging around with the dregs of Soviet society, and for deliberately misrepresenting Soviet realities. Peter arrived in Moscow to spend two weeks with Karin and me before we departed for our summer vacation in August. Seeing him arrive at Sheremetyevo Airport, just fifteen, an awkward adolescent, I felt a stab of regret. We had several meals of forced bonhomie at the apartment. Karin moved back into our bedroom, but she refused to sleep with me. Peter said he was unhappy at school, that he did not like being surrounded by teenagers from privileged backgrounds with whom he felt he had little in common. I assured him that after the next year he could go to St. Albans or another school in Washington, DC. As I pressed him to buckle down and lectured him about the importance of good grades, I knew I sounded like my father, but I felt at a loss over what else to say. And work was relentless. I was picking up on rumors about Chernenko’s poor health, and, giving in to the pressure of reporting it rather than spending time with Peter, I told myself we would have a chance to have quality time on the vacation we were about to take in Canada. The rumors held that Chernenko had gone to Kislovodsk on vacation on July 15, 1984, but that his emphysema had been aggravated when the weather turned rainy and humid. Though he was then taken to Crimea, his health had supposedly not improved. I felt uneasy as we prepared to leave, wondering if I was going to cover another state funeral. I would not have to return to Moscow if it happened over the next month, because Celestine Bohlen, the daughter of a former US ambassador to Moscow, Charles Bohlen, had just arrived as the second correspondent Bradlee had

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promised and was settling in. She was fast learning the ropes and I could already see that my life would be easier. Bob Kaiser, who had been a correspondent in Moscow in the 1970s and written the excellent book Russia: The People and the Power, also arrived to fill in while I was away, bringing his wife, Hannah, and their two daughters to stay with him in the Post apartment. Still, I left with a sense of foreboding that it would be only a short time before another elderly Soviet leader died. In Canada, Karin, Peter, and I stayed in a cottage belonging to the New York Times’ Serge Schmemann and his wife on the shores of Lake Labelle, north of Montreal. The three of us drove along a country road on starlit evenings to a small French-Canadian restaurant. It felt like a glorious release from the strain and grayness of Moscow. Peter and I did not have that talk; I could find no way to reach him and ended up, once again, giving him lectures and sounding like my father. I was exhausted and told myself that it was just one year, that after we returned to the United States I could address everything and reset my course. I just had to make it through that year. After taking Peter back to his school, Karin and I spent two weeks in Washington, DC. We drove past our house several times to check on the birch tree we had planted before going to Moscow. It had shot up high, its bark white like the birches in Russia. A part of me wished we had come back now, as planned before Bradlee asked me to stay an extra year. But I also realized after the relaxing break in Canada that my ambition was not completely dead. With Chernenko ill, probably dying, a part of me wanted to see this transition through. Karin and I returned to Moscow in mid-September, driving silently through the rain along a gloomy and almost featureless road from Sheremetyevo Airport into the city. I felt myself mentally square my shoulders to get through this final ten months in Moscow. I did my rounds of Soviet officials and I found that rumors about Chernenko’s health were rife. I watched him on TV as he addressed a convention of the Writers’ Union and he appeared thinner, his slurred speech hard to decipher. A writer contact who had been at the address told me Chernenko had been able to read only part of it, though the media printed the full text of the speech the next day. On September 22, the eve of his seventy-third birthday, when Ustinov presented him with the Order of Lenin, he seemed unsteady. Still, he was working and making every effort to engage the Reagan administration in

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a dialogue, his foreign policy pronouncements increasingly conciliatory. Reagan, with the US presidential election looming, no longer all but ignored them. In mid-September, Foreign Minister Gromyko flew to the UN and had talks with Secretary of State George Shultz and the president. And then, in early October, my competitive instincts were aroused. Abe Rosenthal, the executive editor of the New York Times, arrived in Moscow to visit his son Andrew, a correspondent in the Associated Press bureau. Rosenthal had reported from India and earned a Pulitzer for his Poland coverage. I felt sure he would have discussed the possibility of a Chernenko interview with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington. He would, I knew, be meeting senior officials at a lavish reception the Times had scheduled for him at the National Hotel. Perhaps he would also press them for an interview. I thought about how I had snagged an interview with Fidel Castro years earlier by writing a letter directly to him. If Rosenthal had asked for an interview without submitting questions, I figured, he could bring up issues the Soviets would not want to answer, on Jewish emigration and politics. I could limit the questions to the issues Moscow was most interested in—Soviet-American relations and arms control. I sent a message to Karen DeYoung, my foreign editor at that time, telling her about Rosenthal’s visit and proposing we send three questions to Chernenko. Since the Soviet leader traditionally would receive only top news executives like Rosenthal, or publishers, it had never before occurred to me to ask for an interview, though I had previously asked for interviews with Gromyko and other senior officials. Only Khrushchev had received a resident correspondent, the veteran UPI correspondent Henry Shapiro, my former UPI bureau chief who had spent nearly four decades in Moscow. DeYoung concurred with the plan, I translated our agreed-on questions into Russian, and, using all the high-level contacts I could reach, I got them to Chernenko’s two key personal assistants, Vadim Pechenev and Viktor Pribitkov. When Rosenthal departed in mid-October with no interview, I was relieved. I had covered my bases and not been scooped. I did not expect what came next. Just after ten in the morning on October 18, days after Rosenthal had departed, the phone rang by my bed. I was still asleep, having worked, as usual, into the early hours of the morning and having drunk a good deal of vodka. I fumbled for the phone by the bed and heard the voice of the

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Foreign Ministry press official Alexander Sazonov. Unable to keep the excitement out of his voice, he told me that Chernenko would receive me in his office in an hour, at eleven, and give me answers to my questions. Sazonov said he would collect me in half an hour—would I be ready? I was not sure I understood him correctly and asked him to repeat what he had just said. I took a cold shower as Karin got my suit and clothes together. I tried to remember what questions we had submitted and formulate new ones, but my mind was paralyzed. I found a fresh spiral-bound reporter’s notebook and pen and made sure the batteries were working in my tiny voiceactivated tape recorder. At ten thirty, as I watched through the apartment window, a black government sedan drew up. Sazonov got out, looked up, and motioned for me to come down. As the sedan pulled away slowly, I noticed the first snow flurries of winter. Sazonov said, “We have time.” Balding, with an air of seriousness, he, too, was excited and said he had never been in the Kremlin’s inner sanctum before. I apologized for not wanting to talk as we drove down Kalinin Prospect toward the Kremlin’s Borovitsky Gate, where a security man, a tall, muscular man in his late thirties wearing a gray business suit under a thick wool coat, halted us at the checkpoint and took the front seat. We drove through the public part of the Kremlin, past foreign tourists taking photographs of the tsar’s bell and tsar’s cannon, through a huge iron gate, and into the Kremlin’s closed section, where all the buildings were guarded by uniformed KGB soldiers. We entered the Senate building and checked our coats, nobody asking for IDs, then took an elevator to the third floor. As we began walking down a long corridor, I asked our escort, “Where does the Politburo hold its meetings?” He did not acknowledge the question, but as we reached the end of the corridor and turned a corner, he pointed at impressive doors and said, “Here.” We walked farther, turned right, and came to another impressive door guarded by a middleaged man in a KGB colonel’s uniform. He opened the door and we found ourselves in the vast antechamber of Chernenko’s office. There were no typewriters or other office equipment in the room. Chernenko’s top assistants, Pechenev and Pribitkov, and about ten other secretaries, all male, were either sitting at desks or moving about very quietly, as if in a church. Some were answering phones but speaking so softly I could not hear what they were saying. Three other people

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whom I recognized were also in the room: foreign policy adviser Andrei Alexandrov-Agentov, spokesman Leonid Zamyatin, and veteran Kremlin translator Viktor Sukhodrev. Pechenev disappeared into Chernenko’s office, then reemerged to call in Alexandrov. At 10:55, Pechenev opened the doors and led us all in. Chernenko stood at his desk behind a long conference table and waited for me to approach him. He was about five feet eight, stocky, and barrel chested, with a ruddy complexion, a broad face, and thick white hair. He wore a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a blue tie with light blue stripes. He squeezed my hand like a steelworker. “A visitor coming with the first snow is a good omen,” he said, pointing at the snow flurries outside the window. “According to an old Russian proverb, it means good luck.” Behind him, the walls were covered with pale yellow silk, the trims painted with gold leaf, and four huge windows, some twelve feet high, were partly covered with white silk curtains. An official photographer began taking photographs. Chernenko then took my arm and led me toward a picture of Lenin, guiding me beneath it to his right. According to a doctor’s opinion I had read, a man with the emphysema Chernenko reportedly had would have a blue tinge around his lips, but I saw none. Despite shallow breathing, he seemed physically strong. Wanting to feel him out, I said, “Konstantin Ustinovich, I am not a head of state, I am a journalist, I should be to your left.” He seemed pleased as I stepped behind him and moved him to the right by his shoulders. His body felt strong and muscular, that of the Siberian farmer he had once been. As the photographer snapped more pictures, Chernenko told me that he wanted to resume arms talks with the United States but that Reagan only talked about it without doing anything meaningful, and that although the Reagan administration said it was focused on defensive weapons, the US budget showed a massive buildup of offensive nuclear systems, and he cited several new US strategic weapons systems. He said he wondered why two great countries were not able to do something to secure peace, that it was what kept him up at night. “Only when you reach this office do you begin to understand certain things,” he said, pointing at his desk, on which official papers were lined up neatly on the left side, along with a fountain pen and a cut-glass container filled with sharpened yellow pencils.

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He invited me to sit at the long, green-baize-covered table on which, in front of him, was a sheet of paper with “Doder” in large letters. I placed my tiny tape recorder on the table and turned it on. Suddenly, Chernenko’s face assumed a stony, formal expression and his breathing became heavy. He told me that he wanted to see me personally to present his answers to my questions, and also “at the behest of my comrades.” When he turned to Sukhodrev, the official translator, Alexandrov said I spoke fluent Russian and no translation was needed. “I’ve noticed that,” Chernenko said. “How come?” I told him I had worked in Moscow for several years and was a Serb by background. “A Serb . . . a Serb. That means you are a Slav?” he asked, playing with his pen and seeming unsure. That was correct, I said, and he seemed pleased, telling me, with emphasis, that that was “good,” and saying, with a laugh, that Sukhodrev was now “without a job.” As Chernenko handed me the text of his written replies, Zamyatin reminded him that an English translation was also provided, prompting Chernenko to laugh and say, “You see, full service.” I took the text, which was typed on very fine paper with his signature at the end. Rather than take time to read it, I decided to ask him questions based on what he had said as we were being photographed. As Chernenko outlined his arguments, he spoke more clearly, with breathing less labored than when he gave public speeches, and he used common Russian phrases. He spoke without consulting notes or aides. He offered to resume arms control talks at the first sign of a “genuine” US interest to sit down at the negotiating table, singling out several issues that would demonstrate this, including US ratification of already-signed test ban treaties. He said he was concerned that Reagan’s change in his pronouncements on nuclear arms was a “tactical” move to curry favor before the upcoming US presidential elections. And he stated that the Kremlin was not awaiting the outcome of the elections and would deal with any US president who wanted to join him as a “partner in this sacred human task—for peace.” After exactly twenty minutes, I was told the interview was over. Chernenko stood up and Alexandrov said he assumed that “we can count on the Washington Post to print the full text of the general secretary’s remarks.” I had not been able to get in touch with my editors because of the short notice, time difference, and absence of direct dialing, so I said I was fairly sure that would happen but I could not guarantee it. I told Chernenko,

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who was looking puzzled, that I could guarantee all his points would be part of the long story I would write. “The longer the better,” he said, laughing, and then he asked, as he escorted me out of the office, “Is the Washington Post an influential newspaper?” In the antechamber, I ran through my notes to make sure I had understood the essence of Chernenko’s message. He clearly wanted to dramatize his message weeks before the presidential election and achieve the greatest impact in the United States. The same security man escorted me, along with Sazonov, back to the cloakroom. I tried to take the stairs down instead of the elevator so that I could look the place over, and told the security man, “We can find our own way out of here. You do not need to walk down with us.” He laughingly, and firmly, refused, saying that “it is pretty hard to get into this building but sometimes it is even harder to get out of it.” The black sedan was waiting as we left the classical green-domed Senate building and drove out through the Borovitsky Gate, the security man jumping out at the checkpoint and waving goodbye. There was already half an inch of snow on the streets. I was elated. I had an interview with the Kremlin tsar, news I knew would go around the world. My ambition was not that dead. Back in the Post office that afternoon, I played the tape for Malek and for Stanic, my Tanjug friend, and then Celestine Bohlen and I worked to translate it. Malek urged me to write down my personal impressions of Chernenko and recall the details of the Kremlin’s inner sanctum right away, which I did for a sidebar “color” story to go along with the news story. Stanic suggested that I phone the US ambassador, Arthur Hartman, something neither Bohlen nor I had thought about doing. Since my story on Andropov’s death, my relations with the US embassy had been strained, with fewer smiles and friendly gestures. The embassy, I was told, had produced a report suggesting that I had been tipped off by an important Soviet figure about the leader’s death and subsequently went out to look for signs of an emergency. This reaction, though understandable, particularly after the Post wrote its story about me scooping the CIA, was painful for me. I felt I had lost access to what had been an oasis of understanding and friendliness. I had obstinately chosen to ignore it. But Stanic’s suggestion felt like a chance to at least keep the door open by showing courtesy toward the ambassador by giving him an advance summary of the Chernenko interview.

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But when I phoned Hartman’s residence and told his personal aide that I had something of importance to tell the ambassador, the aide said Hartman was taking a walk and was not available. When I called again an hour later, the aide again said Hartman was not available. I told him that I still had something important to tell him, and that Bohlen would give him details later as the Hartmans had invited her to dinner that night. After I hung up, though, I felt this was not right and that Hartman could interpret my not telling him personally as a slight. I again called the ambassador’s residence, but this time asked to speak to the Italian majordomo, Clemente, whom I knew well. Within a minute, after I told Clemente I had something important to tell the ambassador, Hartman was on the phone. I told him about the interview and gave him Chernenko’s main points. Bohlen went to the dinner and, returning just after ten, worked with me until the early hours of the morning to transmit the text of the interview along with my stories. The Post planned to carry the full translation of Chernenko’s remarks in a front-page spread along with my story about the interview and a story describing the Kremlin’s inner sanctum and my impressions of Chernenko. Exhausted, we then made a mistake: we failed to make a final check of the text. The next morning around eight thirty, the phone began ringing in the apartment. Karin answered and I found myself sleepily talking to TASS editors as they asked me why a portion of one of Chernenko’s sentences had been omitted. Baffled, I scrambled to get dressed. Just after nine, Sazonov appeared at my apartment with the same question. The missed part of a sentence was one in which Chernenko assertively stated that an improvement in US-Soviet relations was possible. I had included the remark in my main story. The Russians, furious, assumed the omission was made in Washington by “anti-détente” forces in our newsroom. I tried to assure Sazonov that was not the case. At the office, I checked and discovered, with great embarrassment, that it was indeed our mistake. “There will be an official protest,” Sazonov said. “The key sentence!” he kept repeating. I tried to reach the editors in Washington but they had left for the day. The way out, I figured, would be to write a story about the omission that would repeat the whole paragraph, including the “key” sentence. We would, I told Sazonov, be making the point again, so Chernenko would be getting his message across twice. I asked him to sell this idea to Zamyatin and Alexandrov. He left and phoned me shortly afterward saying the compromise had been accepted.

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Several news organizations wanted to talk with me about the interview, which had made a considerable impact. But this time I wanted to follow Clyde’s admonition to not be the story. And so I declined, displeasing my editors in Washington. Despite Chernenko’s gambit, Reagan did not give a positive response that October. After Reagan’s November reelection, Chernenko agreed to his proposals from the previous summer, even though the Soviet Union had roundly rejected them back then, since it meant agreeing to resume talks about more than space weapons; it meant also resuming the nuclear weapons talks the Russians had walked out of. On November 22, both sides announced that Foreign Minister Gromyko and Secretary Shultz would meet in Geneva to negotiate the resumption of talks the following January. As the clock ticked down to my leaving Moscow in the summer of 1985, I was also following the drama of Chernenko’s men and former Andropov supporters vying for power. Since I was now an experienced old hand with a wide network of contacts, I was able to dig deeper for information. When Pravda and other newspapers carried portions of a speech by Gorbachev at a December 10 ideological conference that suggested he was in complete agreement with Chernenko, for example, I obtained Gorbachev’s full speech from sources. It had been published in a pamphlet with limited circulation. I discovered that Gorbachev actually argued, sounding like Andropov, that the economic slowdown in the 1970s and early 1980s showed there was a “need for change in some aspects of production relationships.” Gorbachev had also decried efforts by proponents of Communist orthodoxy “to squeeze new phenomena into the Procrustean bed of moribund conceptions,” and said the country needed “deep changes in the economy and the entire society.” In December, when Gorbachev went on a wildly successful official visit to Britain, he was seen, and treated, as the Kremlin crown prince. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, a strong Reagan supporter, famously told a BBC interviewer after meeting him, “I like Mr. Gorbachev. He is a man we can do business with.” But when Defense Minister Ustinov died suddenly, Gorbachev cut the visit short to return and take part in the deliberations on Ustinov’s successor. He could not afford to stay away from the factional politicking. Chernenko chose another Brezhnev protégé of

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his own generation, the colorless Marshal Sergei Sokolov. But the sense of a generational change was still palpable and underscored by Chernenko’s frailty. At Ustinov’s funeral, I watched Chernenko stand guard in the Hall of Columns behind the coffin, looking shaken—and then he did not appear atop the Lenin Mausoleum for the funeral. The frigid weather of minus twenty-four degrees centigrade at noon, with the wind chill making it closer to minus thirty-five, was far too dangerous for a man with lung problems. Gromyko presided instead, standing still as a statue as other top officials in the lineup stamped their feet against the cold. It seemed a matter of time before Chernenko died, but, as with his two predecessors, I was again playing a waiting game. The big question was whether the old guard could make another stand and block Gorbachev from acceding to the Kremlin leadership and returning the country to Andropov’s path. My marriage finally collapsed in October. Karin told me she was leaving. “You have chosen what is more important—the Post, not me,” she said, sounding defeated over a gloomy meal. “I’m going home. It’s over here for me. It’s over between me and you. I can’t take it anymore.” “Don’t go,” I said. “Don’t.” From Karin’s face I knew there would be no turning back for her. “I’m sorry,” I tried. But I knew I no longer had the right to ask her to stay. I had betrayed her too many times. Karin nodded and smiled in a helpless way. She felt totally superfluous, she said, and was certain she would not be missed. I drove her to Sheremetyevo Airport a week later. The night before she left we discussed our future, vowing that we would be civil toward one another for Peter’s sake. I felt an enormous weight of sadness, and guilt, as she disappeared toward immigration. It took a week for the reaction to set in. Without Karin, I began to fall apart. I’d wake up in the middle of the night in a state of lucid alertness, thinking, Where did I go wrong? I had missed holidays, birthdays, entire seasons, and from the obsessive work had come great achievements, journalistic prizes, personal gain. It was what I had wanted. But I had denied Karin the happiness she wanted, always insisting she do what I wanted. Karin had wanted to settle down, and that had felt like a death to me, to who I was. I had been happiest when I was alone and had plenty of elbow room. But who was I? I had experienced satisfaction in my work, in a well-constructed story that offered new insights. I had passionately followed the mission of journalism as I saw it. It was my religion. The truth,

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I always told myself, clichéd though it sounded, would set me, and the world, free. But had pursuing it at all costs instead imprisoned me? Was my soul, in fact, possessed, as my father had said? What had I been thinking in denying Karin her happiness, to chase what I thought was mine? What had I been running from? I indulged in fits of grief, guilt, and self-dramatization, ranting profanely to Malek in our late-night meetings about mistakes I had made and mistakes that had been thrust upon me. I kept thinking of Professor Davidson’s story about Bertrand Russell, who was said to have once told his wife that she’d better “face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible,” and that only then, only after accepting this terrible fact, could she “start being happy again.” Long ago I had dismissed this as stupid; now I found it profound. I also missed Clyde. Seven months earlier, he had died of cancer, with little warning, at seventy-six. In our last telephone conversation he had told me he felt lousy and might go to the hospital for a checkup. He never complained about his health. I had felt the loss more intimately than the passing of my own father, and now my grief doubled. Whenever there had been an obstacle to overcome or whenever I had felt unable to cope with a personal or professional problem, Clyde would run interference on my behalf, write a letter of reference or point out what I had to do. Even when he was not there, I would remember stories I had heard from him on how to deal with this or that problem. Clyde would now have given me heart through the breakup of my marriage. But Clyde was gone. I felt as if the earth itself had been taken from under my feet and slivers of black despair were slowly inserting themselves into my spirit. I could still see Clyde in the moments before I left Vienna imparting last-minute advice: “You already know everything there’s to know, my dear boy. Just work hard and follow your star.” But I no longer had a star. I no longer had a family. Was it possible I could lose more than this? Was the dream I had pursued, the ambition I had chased, crumbling to dust, a chimera fueled by my outsize ambition and desire to reach a mountaintop that my father would have to acknowledge? Now I had to have a drink in the morning to get going and several drinks to get through the day. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to work if I stopped drinking. Time seemed to have stretched and

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become meaningless, its passage blurred by endless drinks and meandering conversations at diplomatic receptions and dinners, where booze flowed freely. Nobody seemed to notice—certainly not the foreign desk in Washington. Bohlen, if she noticed, said nothing as she worked hard to share the load. I no longer had to be constantly on alert and could leave her manning the office. Somehow, given the desperate state I was in, I got things done. I even had some pretty good stories, considering how drunk I was. But I felt as if I were outside of myself watching myself reporting and writing. The crisp phrases I wrote seemed to me to have been written by someone else. This lasted for weeks. It could have very well lasted longer had it not been for Malek. He realized I needed help, that I wasn’t going to pull out of this self-destructive downward spiral on my own. He suggested we both might benefit from the calming effects of Stolichnaya vodka before getting sobered up in an overheated sauna at the old tsarist bathhouse on Neglinaya Street. We sat side by side in the sauna and between us, over the space of an hour, emptied the bottle of vodka, passing it back and forth and swigging from the neck. Malek talked while I was sunk in silence, listening with half an ear. We repeated this for five afternoons in a row, adding caviar and crab sandwiches to the vodka. “You only get one life,” he said. “This is no way to live it.” He argued that our jobs were not worth the squandering of marriages and good health, to say nothing of sound finances. I braced myself because he was at his most persuasive when he focused with his huge brown eyes, always slightly feverish. He would not be budged. I can still see him, sliding down the hot marble wall onto his haunches to keep his back warm and to talk reason to me, condemning my comparisons of my drinking to that of Hemingway and Fitzgerald as “sheer bullshit,” looking at me as if I had gone mental on him. “It’s better to learn how to live with the wound than pretend it doesn’t exist,” he went on. Besides, I couldn’t afford to indulge my emotions for very long, he said, because I had deadlines and a reputation to keep. Malek’s talk slowly ignited some survival instinct. I began to concentrate on my routine, my job, clinging to it as all I had. I began collecting material and putting notebooks in order. I had an idea for a book and I began planning it. I saw it in vivid scenes depicting the power transitions and upheavals as

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the country moved from Brezhnev to Andropov to Chernenko, and with still more transition to come. For long hours I sat at my desk planning Shadows and Whispers. That, in turn, helped me refocus on my job. I lived in the office most of the time. Bohlen shared the daily reporting. The Soviet maid and driver did the shopping and chores. I lunched most days at the embassy’s snack bar.

10

Love Changes Everything

Louise Branson first caught my attention in November of 1984 as she was entering the elevator of the US embassy on Tchaikovsky Street. We rode with several journalist colleagues to the eighth floor, where the ambassador’s office was located. She seemed hardly more than a girl, all blond curls, sparkling green eyes, and radiant smile. Her red sweater and black pants accentuated her trim build. I discovered that she was going, like me and other colleagues, to the ambassador’s briefing. When I introduced myself to her, she said, in a British accent, that she worked for UPI, and that we had met before at a party. I felt embarrassed, knowing the reason I did not remember her must be that I had been drunk. I called late the next evening at the ninth-floor UPI office where I had worked a decade and a half earlier. Malek lived on the fifth floor in the same Kutuzovsky Prospect building and had found out that Louise was working the night shift, which ended at midnight. We timed it so that we would get to the UPI office around eleven thirty, ostensibly to read the latest news on the UPI wire. Louise sat at the desk where I had once

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sat, surrounded by telex machines clacking out messages, piles of Soviet newspapers, Radio Free Europe bulletins, and gray metal filing cabinets. Malek and I made a show of reading the stories on the wire. Louise was busy finishing a story on deadline and said little to us. I came around the next day at the same time, this time alone. She was less busy, and we chatted. She seemed surprised and flattered that I showed an interest in a feature she had written about “polar bear” Russians who cut holes in the ice and swam in the dead of winter. With infectious enthusiasm, she told me she loved journalism and loved being in Russia. She seemed to want most to talk to me about the Soviet Union, politics, and how long I thought Chernenko would live. In answer to my questions, she told me she had degrees in Russian and French from Britain’s Lancaster University, and a master’s degree from the University of Paris. She also, she said, felt something of a gypsy, having grown up in Uganda with adventurous British colonial parents, her family eventually escaping the murderous dictator Idi Amin. She had attended boarding schools in Kenya and England, and lived in France, Spain, and Switzerland. Four years earlier, before she joined UPI in London, she had taught for a year at the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys under a British Council exchange program, living in a student hostel on the outskirts of the city. She talked about the Soviet Union with a fascination for how Russians coped with the absurdities of their daily lives. She said she had started an English club at the Steel and Alloys Institute with the subversive plan of playing Pink Floyd’s The Wall to her engineer students who wanted to listen to forbidden Western music. When the session was almost canceled because it was scheduled for Lenin’s birthday, she reached a last-minute compromise with the institute’s authorities: the students were allowed to listen to the album on the condition that they critique the songs in English from a Marxist-Leninist point of view as showing the evils of life under capitalism. Her students had also sneaked her into the 1980 May Day parade; she had marched past Brezhnev through Red Square, waving pink flowers under a red banner. I was smitten. I tried, and failed, to maneuver my way into her life. Romance with a badly dressed older man clearly did not enter her head. I seemed to be of interest to her only because of my experience and reputation. I then got Malek to ask her to join us for drinks in my office one night after her shift ended at midnight. The three of us talked about a

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Chernenko speech for a while, and then Malek said he needed to attend to something. Louise and I continued to talk. I detailed some signs of the Chernenko-Gorbachev divide that I had picked up on, and she peppered me with questions in a journalistic way. As she got up to go, I asked her if she had ever been to the press club. She hadn’t, and I suggested we go the following week because she could meet interesting people. This idea delighted her. I began taking her to the press club, and also introducing her to such people as the Sidurs and Joseph Goldin. Slowly, I worked my way into her life, determinedly wearing down her defenses. Weeks later we became lovers, but not openly. I was separated from Karin, but still married, and this made Louise uncomfortable. We became conspirators, sneaking after work to her apartment at one end of our compound or to mine at the other end. We would lie for hours in bed, discussing Soviet life, politics, and literature, analyzing developments and stories, gossiping and laughing. When she was around, full of joy and humor, I was on good terms with the world. I had never before felt so intimate with anyone, both physically and mentally. But because our affair was secret, Louise was hesitant and formal in public with me and at official functions. I felt an obscure sense of guilt and suspected she was embarrassed by her affair with an older, unprepossessing, still-married man. At parties, I always had a strong desire to run my hand along her calf, but whenever I tried to touch her, she would recoil. It was as though she had built a moat around herself, as if she sensed that once it was breached there would be no turning back. I began to feel intensely jealous. It seemed to me that she was always surrounded by men. I could not bear the thought of any of them touching her or gaining too much of her attention. Just as I was wearily retreating from my career in the Soviet Union, I thought, she was enthusiastically beginning hers. We would eat at the press club, talk to Alexander Bovin and others, debate whether a new generation of leaders could arrest the country’s decline. I learned how to serve tea the English way, with milk. I began preparing dinners for Louise when she worked the evening shift. Our foreigners’ ghetto was like a gilded cage, though, and nothing could stay private for very long. Soon we were the subject of gossip. A UPI rival put out the word that Louise was so ambitious that she was sleeping with me only for my sources. “But it’s not true,” Louise

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said, deeply hurt as the gossip reached her. My common sense refused to consider the possibility that this might develop into something more permanent. She was seventeen years younger than I was. I tried several times—lamely, I concede—to end the relationship, but each time she said the age difference was her problem, not mine. She, too, though, seemed to be considering alternatives, as if she had not decided where to cast her lot. “Sometimes I wonder where all this is leading,” she said one night after we drank white wine and made love in my apartment. She always insisted on returning to her own apartment in the early hours of the morning. I would stand at the window and watch her walk around badly parked cars, past the mili man and across the courtyard, each time fearing she was walking out of my life. I began to find the idea of living without her unbearable, full of loneliness and pain. All I wanted was to please her and be with her. Her cheerful chatter, sense of excitement, humor, and instinctive belief that life must be enjoyed kindled in me a zest for life. I felt I was just then beginning to live. Could it be that such happiness had existed in the world all along and I had never understood this? Never looked for it? I retrospectively reconfigured virtually everything I had thought about myself and my life. I’d done everything in my life, I thought, except live. I wasn’t aware of having been fully relaxed before at any time in my entire life: not in the fraught circumstances I had grown up in, not in the pursuit of an unlikely dream, and not in the competitive world of journalism. I had always had to be taut as a wire, on the ball, conscious of dangers around me, never feeling secure. Had this insecurity been inevitable given the ways that my family’s life back in Yugoslavia had been turned upside down again and again? In my childhood and adolescence, regimes, people, relationships, and life had always changed, become their opposite, been rife with betrayal. I had learned to trust nobody, to hide, disguise my emotions, my true self. The maelstrom of war, Nazism, Stalinism, and Tito’s Communism had destroyed certainties, beliefs, relationships. I had been born into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, lived under Nazi and Italian occupations in the “Independent State of Croatia,” and ended up in Tito’s Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. I thought about the times when all that had seemed solid and secure collapsed. I thought of the relatives who had

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seemed a close, stable part of my world until they weren’t. I thought of Uncle Uros, who ruled our extended family until he was arrested by the Stalinists for links to Croatian wartime fascists and returned from imprisonment years later, his self-confidence destroyed. I thought of my exuberant Stalinist cousin Ranko, who disappeared in the dead of night, arrested by Tito’s post-Stalinist Communists. My elegant mother, too, had turned into a timid woman after my parents were stripped of their wealth and she was forced to do manual labor. Most hurtful was my father’s excommunication of me, denying me contact with our family because I escaped to the United States, something he had once urged me to do, and became a journalist. And then there was his curse on me, which still haunted me. Given all these betrayals, was it any surprise that the goals of journalistic glory and becoming an American had seemed more solid than relationships with people? But in the process I had ignored what Karin wanted. Was Louise now changing all this? Or was our unlikely relationship just one more thing that could not be relied on, a fleeting passion forged in a strange place at a strange time? In January 1985, Louise and I were both assigned, along with most other US Moscow correspondents, to cover the meeting between Secretary of State George Shultz and Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, in Geneva. As we boarded the plane, my focus was as much on Louise and the luxury of spending time with her in the West, in the city where she had worked for UPI for two years before Moscow, as on the story we would cover. Before we departed, Nicholas Daniloff of U.S. News & World Report gave me a Soviet study, prepared by top Russian scientists, of Reagan’s so-called Star Wars defense system, which involved constructing a system of space-based devices to shoot down any incoming Soviet missiles, and which Chernenko was desperately trying to stop. Daniloff had proposed a story about the study to U.S. News & World Report for two successive weeks, but the magazine, with its limited space, had declined to run it. Daniloff thought the study important and thought that the Washington Post might report about it as Shultz and Gromyko met to discuss arms, including Star Wars. I read the study on the plane. Its fundamental conclusion was that the US project was flawed and would not work. In short, the best Soviet

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scientific minds seemed to be saying that the Americans were bluffing. But I was all too aware that this could be yet another mendacious Kremlin propaganda salvo and that it would serve Soviet purposes for it to be made public in the Western press. Still, it struck me as important to write about it and point this out. Shortly after checking into the Intercontinental Hotel, where the talks would be held, I passed the Soviet study on to Bud McFarland, Reagan’s national security adviser, because I didn’t want to do a story without giving US experts a chance to look at the study and comment on it. Within a couple of hours, I was told not to expect any comments from the US delegation. And so I filed a story about the study, with caveats about the possibility that it was Kremlin propaganda. The Washington Post ran the story on the front page. It was seen as yet another of my scoops, even though it was Daniloff, not I, who had obtained the study. The ShultzGromyko talks were successful, producing an agreement to resume nuclear talks and other bilateral contacts. Louise and I stayed in Geneva for an extra two days and rented a car. We drove to a restaurant overlooking Lake Geneva for cheese fondue, visited the house where Louise had lived when she worked for UPI from 1981 to 1983, and window shopped, delighting in the plentiful goods in shop windows, a stark contrast to Moscow’s drab fare. The first thing I picked up on when we returned from Geneva on January 10 were whispers that Chernenko, who had last been seen in public on December 27, was ill. I was back to reporting on the leader’s health and the oblique signals of a power struggle. This time the struggle was between Gorbachev and his supporters and the Brezhnevite old guard. Though TASS had announced two weeks earlier that there would be a Warsaw Pact summit in Bulgaria on January 15, East European journalists told me the summit had been called off, and Bovin confirmed this to me at the press club a few days later. Then, at a diplomatic reception, Georgy Arbatov told me in confidence that Chernenko had been hospitalized because of a respiratory ailment—perhaps not surprising since throughout January and February, smog hung over the bitterly cold city, which was not conducive to the health of a man with emphysema. As Chernenko remained in the hospital, I was soon seeing signs of intensified politicking. When Senator Gary Hart of Colorado arrived in

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Moscow in January, Gorbachev declined to meet him. Bovin told me at the press club that the reason was that Gorbachev had had “too much exposure” when he visited Britain and did not need any more at that moment. In late January, rumors began to circulate that Chernenko was dying and that his designated successor was either Viktor Grishin or Grigory Romanov, not Gorbachev. The garrulous Bovin, an ardent Gorbachev supporter, said he was certain that the rumors were part of a strategy by the seventy-one-year-old Grishin, the old-guard boss of Moscow known for his Italian shoes and corruption, to be chosen as another transitional leader by old-guard members who were afraid Gorbachev would continue Andropov’s reforms, which threatened their positions and lifestyle. Several Kremlin insiders I spoke to had a similar analysis. Romanov, sixty-one, was a controversial figure. He wore elevator shoes to make him appear taller than his five feet six inches and maintained an open liaison with Lyudmila Syenchina, a pop singer thirty years his junior. Stories about his boorish behavior also abounded—when he was the boss of Leningrad for thirteen years, until 1983, for example, he reportedly requisitioned priceless china from the time of Catherine the Great for his daughter’s wedding and some of it was broken in the drunken revelry. Because of all this, I judged, he probably would not get enough support, and Grishin was positioning himself as the compromise. Still, I found it hard to get a clear fix on signals in the second half of January and early February. My new foreign editor, Michael Getler, visited Moscow, and Foreign Ministry spokesman Vladimir Lomeiko assured him that Chernenko was just on a “winter vacation” outside Moscow. The day before, though, Pravda editor in chief Viktor Afanasiyev, in an interview with Italian state television, had said Chernenko was ill. Chernenko partisans put out the word that Chernenko had recovered and would meet with visiting Greek prime minister Andreas Papandreou. The meeting was canceled at the last minute, and more rumors flourished. I decided that February 22 would be important to get a better idea of Chernenko’s health: he was scheduled to give a speech at a rally that day for the pro forma elections. But February 22 came and Chernenko failed to appear; Grishin stepped in in his place, saying on television that Chernenko had stayed home “on the doctor’s recommendation” but had asked Grishin to convey his greetings to the voters

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in his district and the people of Moscow. This was a clear signal—not just to me, but also to diplomats and other journalists, as well as to Russians—that another transition was underway. On Election Day in late February, when Russians were obligated by law to vote, the Foreign Ministry alerted Western journalists that they could observe Gorbachev casting his ballot inside the ancient House of Architects. This was highly unusual, as normally such information was given to us only when the leader would appear. Dozens of Western journalists, including myself, turned out on that brilliantly sunny winter day to watch Gorbachev cast his ballot, accompanied by his wife, Raisa; their doctor daughter, Irina; and their granddaughter, Oksana. Gorbachev seemed supremely self-confident as Oksana dropped her grandfather’s ballot into the box. Delighted photographers wanted a repeat, but Gorbachev, smiling, said, “Even I have only one vote.” Even though the Foreign Ministry had alerted the foreign media, Soviet television showed only Chernenko voting, accompanied by Grishin, apparently to indicate that Grishin was Chernenko’s heir. The TV images showed Chernenko looking unsteady, his eyes unfocused, his face blank. All of the Western correspondents and diplomats were now on high alert for signs that Chernenko might have died. One day I drove out, with Louise, on the government road toward the Uspenskoe suburb, the road on which most top officials traveled into the city from the dacha enclaves. We were looking for signs of unusual activity. The frozen vapor veil had dispersed, and the sun hung low in the southern skies. We were in the green Volvo, which was preferable to Louise’s cramped and temperamental blue Zhiguli. We passed by the high brick wall surrounding Stalin’s dacha, known as Dalynaya, glimpsing the forest of birch and pine behind it that surrounded the empty, but maintained, country home. We had been pondering how long this tense death watch would last, but instinctively fell silent as we passed Stalin’s dacha, as if sensing the dictator’s ghost still casting his spell on the Soviet Union. Celestine Bohlen and I rarely left the office unmanned, because the news of Chernenko’s death might break at any time. Louise and her three UPI colleagues, too, were working long hours and watching for signs of Chernenko’s death. Though the ambition of my earlier years in Moscow had left me, I wanted to see the series of transitions through: Brezhnev to Andropov, Andropov to Chernenko, and now a new question mark. Louise’s fascination with the story, and my

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loving being with her, also revived my spirits. I no longer needed so much alcohol to keep myself going. “I can’t stand this waiting,” Louise said as Stalin’s dacha disappeared in the rearview mirror. A visit from Louise’s mother in early February reinforced my fear that our relationship could not survive. Her mother was coming to Moscow to make the Trans-Siberian train journey to Khabarovsk, on the Pacific coast. Louise wanted me to meet her, describing her as an adventurer who often traveled alone to exotic places. “That’s just who she is,” Louise said, by way of explanation. What did that mean? Did she, like her mother, see the world as a place for adventure, and people as fellow travelers on the way to the next challenge? We went to the airport to pick up my future mother-in-law, a trim, handsome woman, only ten years older than I was, with short blond hair and wearing a long, black sheepskin coat cut in Cossack style, which was in vogue then, and stylish boots. She was also very English—watchful, formal, somewhat hesitant. As I drove the green Volvo, saying nothing, Louise and her mother sat in the back seat, chatting about various relatives. I helped with the luggage when we reached Louise’s entrance, then left them alone. The next day Louise gave a lunch for her mother and invited several people, including me. At one point, I caught her mother looking at me, frowning slightly, as if I were an exotic and potentially fascinating creature. After I met her gaze, she switched her attention to someone else. The next day I again played chauffeur, taking Louise to accompany her mother to the railway station. Twelve days later, the Trans-Siberian adventure over, Louise’s mother flew from Khabarovsk back to Moscow. Again we picked her up at the airport, and Louise, thinking her mother remembered me from twelve days earlier, introduced me, with what to her was humor, as “the Soviet driver.” She did not realize that her mother did not recognize me, perhaps because of the thick fur hat I was wearing, and took Louise literally. When Louise, who was sitting in the front seat beside me, asked her mother if the food on the trip had been “awful,” her mother looked embarrassed and, clearly not wanting to offend me, the Soviet driver who spoke English, said, “It was all right,” nodding pointedly at me. Louise’s plan had been for me to join her and her mother for dinner so that Louise could get her

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used to the idea that I was her boyfriend without quite spelling it out. But, sensing her mother’s frostiness, still not realizing that she thought I was the Soviet driver, I went to my apartment and phoned Louise to tell her I thought that was not a good idea. Louise laughed, explained, and told me to “come on over.” When I did join them, though, I felt like an interloper. I thought her mother was grasping the situation and probably thinking what a nightmare it was to see her thirty-year-old daughter with a man who was not only married—I was not divorced at the time—but a foreigner with an odd-sounding name. Long silences led me to jump in with my observations about Siberia. As I drove them to the airport the next day, there was a palpable strain between them, though Louise did not want to discuss it. As February 1985 turned to March, it brought several welcome mild spring days. We continued to watch and wait for signs about Chernenko’s health. Chernenko received some electoral officials at a Kremlin ceremony, again accompanied by Grishin. But on March 7, the eve of International Women’s Day, he failed to appear at the traditional Women’s Day gala at the Bolshoi Theater. Arbatov, Bovin, and other official figures whispered to me that Chernenko was dying; Tanjug’s Stanic said he had also heard this. Bohlen and I began working even longer, more watchful hours. On March 10, likely due to the change in the weather from bitter cold to springlike warmth, I came down with a high temperature and went to bed early. At around three in the morning on Monday, March 11, the ringing phone awoke me. Colleagues on the foreign desk at the Post, Ginny Hammill and Al Horne, said a member of the Soviet delegation led by the Ukrainian leader had told a State Department escort in San Francisco that Chernenko had died—something a senior US diplomat in Geneva, where Vice President George H. W. Bush was visiting, had confirmed. Shaking with fever, I rushed to the office and turned on the radio. Moscow Radio was playing classical music, Glinka and Rachmaninov. I phoned Bohlen, whose apartment was a fifteen-minute drive away. She said, as she reached the office, that she felt for the first time that she was being followed by the KGB. I phoned Tanjug and asked Stanic about Vorotnikov, a Politburo member who was visiting Yugoslavia, and he said Vorotnikov had cut short his visit and returned to Moscow during the night. After Bohlen and I filed a story, I returned, still gripped by fever, to bed. Chernenko’s death was announced later that morning, after twelve hours of funeral dirges on state TV and radio. Hours later, Moscow Radio

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reported that Gorbachev, at fifty-four the Politburo’s youngest member, had been elected the new general secretary. Still fighting my fever, I handed the coverage to Bohlen, thankful she was there. On March 12, Gorbachev’s photo was on the front pages of Soviet newspapers, with Chernenko’s photo and obituary relegated to page 2—even though, in the past, the dead leader’s photo and obituary had always appeared on the newspapers’ front pages, surrounded by a thick black border. On March 13, my fever subsiding, I went out, just as I had thirteen months earlier, to sense the public’s mood as yet another Red Square funeral was prepared. Police that morning had sealed off the center of Moscow and some troops were deployed, but I found people out on that sunny day congratulating one another over the appointment of a younger leader. A joke was already making the rounds: Who supports Gorbachev in the Politburo? Nobody: he can walk by himself. Gorbachev, five feet nine inches tall, stocky, and with a wine-colored birthmark on the front of his bald pate, cut a very different figure from his predecessors. He broke with tradition at the Red Square funeral and had army officers, not himself and other Politburo members, carry the coffin. I was able to watch him in St. George’s Hall afterward as he welcomed foreign dignitaries. He was accompanied by Gromyko, seventy-six; Nikolai Tikhonov, eighty; Vasily Kuznetsov, eighty-three; and Boris Ponamarev, eighty. After all other foreign visitors had left, I stayed and watched the leaders leave the hall—all but Gorbachev had difficulty walking. When I subsequently questioned foreign diplomats, they described Gorbachev’s private sessions later that day with France’s leader, Francois Mitterrand; Britain’s Margaret Thatcher; and West Germany’s Helmut Kohl. They said he rarely glanced at documents in front of him as he criticized them for following the United States’ lead, though he emphasized the importance of bilateral relations. My next task, as it had been for the previous successions, was to seek information about the process of the new general secretary’s election. I learned from Bovin that Gromyko had proposed Gorbachev’s candidacy at an extraordinary session of the Central Committee, and that his speech had been tailored to reassuring the old guard. “Comrades,” Bovin quoted Gromyko as saying—and it was confirmed to me by Arbatov and others— “this man has a nice smile but he has got iron teeth.” I reported this remark in the Post and it was immediately picked up in the West, though it was removed from the official text of Gromyko’s remarks, published a

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week later in pamphlet form. Gromyko also praised Gorbachev as an exceptionally gifted man and said that he was in a position “to see it better than some comrades.” During Chernenko’s illness, Gromyko said, Gorbachev was running the Politburo and doing so “spectacularly.” My feeling about Gorbachev, at first, was that he could only be a true believer, having made the journey from being a provincial official to the Politburo in the Kremlin in record time. His language to this point was much like that of the rest of Soviet officialdom, and he had, after all, been shaped by the Komsomol, the party organization in his native Stavropol, and finally in the Secretariat in Moscow. But, to my surprise, Gorbachev immediately abandoned the stilted language of his predecessors, making an effort to connect with ordinary Russians in the way he spoke and what he did. In April, for example, he spent two days in a Moscow neighborhood visiting housing blocks, the apartment of a younger worker, supermarkets, a school, a factory, and a hospital. He gave a televised speech in which he echoed regular Russians’ complaints, in plain language, about food shortages, shoddy consumer goods, and poor services. I began hearing from Bovin, Arbatov, and other sources about how he was dealing with officials and others in positions of power. Sources in the Soviet media described how Gorbachev called in the top newspaper editors and told them not to quote him as a fount of wisdom as they had done for his predecessors. He told them that he disliked empty phrases and patriotic exhortations and that “you can quote Marx and Lenin if you have to have a quotation.” He reportedly told the Central Committee’s propaganda department that he did not want them to invent a heroic story about him from the time of the Nazis’ wartime occupation of his native Stavropol, as they had done for Brezhnev. I learned, and reported, that Gorbachev had ordered medical checkups for all senior officials—unsettling for the scores of top figures in their sixties, seventies, and eighties—and for their associates and subordinates throughout the vast web of patronage. Even after Andropov’s housecleaning, the average age of Politburo members was sixty-seven, of top cabinet officials sixty-eight, and of the entire Central Committee sixty-six. On May 17, when Gorbachev gave a televised speech from the Smolny Institute in Leningrad, Lenin’s headquarters during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, households throughout the Soviet Union tuned in to what, to them,

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was an astonishing address. Rather than speaking in opaque Communist phrases, he described, in a down-to-earth way, real issues and economic truths. The computer industry was making “unsatisfactory computers,” he said, and the country was wasting resources on a vast scale—a quarter of all drinking water was lost because of faulty faucets. “What happens when you try to fix your apartment?” he asked. “You need to go to a shabashnik,” a semilegal private contractor. He described the Soviet Union as a house that has a solid foundation but needs extensive repairs. In this and subsequent speeches, he set a goal for the Soviet Union to bring its economy up to Western levels of efficiency and quality, and that meant a complete change in “the very psychology of economic activity.” Living standards, not slogans and propaganda, would be the image the country presented to the world. Those “who do not intend to adjust and who are an obstacle” must “simply get out of the way,” he said. “Get out of the way. Don’t be a hindrance.” In these speeches, and in his actions, he took up Andropov’s approach. He began using two words that were quickly picked up in the West. The first was perestroika, which means rebuilding or reconstruction, but Gorbachev gave it the broader sense of a “profound transformation” of the economy and the “entire system of social relations.” The other was glasnost, or openness, which meant a new honesty. Soon I was hearing, and reporting, stories from my sources that Gorbachev did not suffer old-style bureaucrats gladly. He reportedly, for example, asked Sergei Burenkov, the health minister, into his office to ask about how to deal with the problem of alcoholism. When Burenkov launched into a long-winded summary of the problem, Gorbachev interrupted him and said, “Comrade Burenkov, we did not ask you to come here and tell us alcoholism is bad. We know that. You’d better come back later and tell us what we can do about it.” The people I knew well outside officialdom—the Sidurs, Joseph, various cultural figures—were upbeat. Louise and I went for tea to the Sidurs’ apartment and to admire Vadim’s new miniature sculptures. While sounding a note of caution about the chances of any Soviet leader to effect change, because of the entrenched bureaucracy and system of patronage and corruption, they nevertheless marveled at the way Gorbachev spoke and the solutions he wanted. “Thank God at least he won’t die in a few months—that is already an achievement,” Julia Sidur said as we all left their apartment and drove in my Volvo to stroll together

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in Gorky Park on a glorious day in late April. I had never seen them, or other Russian friends, so hopeful. Bovin, his nemesis Chernenko now gone, was back in favor and a Gorbachev confidant. Gorbachev was not afraid of his intellect and often nonconformist comments. (Bovin went on to become the first ambassador to Israel when full diplomatic relations were established in 1991.) He told me that Gorbachev had “that rare ability to be absolutely himself.” Pravda editor Viktor Afanasiyev described Gorbachev to me as energetic, with an ability to summarize divergent views and put his finger on the heart of an issue. Afanasiyev said he had worked with Gorbachev on drafting a revised party program, including at a dacha in the country, and that as they worked Gorbachev was outgoing, that he was “extremely social and loves jokes.” Foreigners, too, were full of praise. A Swiss socialist politician told me, “I found myself talking to an absolutely modern man whom I could understand.” Republican congressman Silvio Conte of Massachusetts saw Gorbachev with a group of US lawmakers and told me that his impression was that the Kremlin had a different, and even Westernized, leader. Gorbachev quickly imposed antialcoholism laws, shutting down some distilleries, restricting sales outlets, and curtailing hours for selling alcohol in public places. That spring and summer of 1985, he forced the retirement of more than a dozen senior military officers, giving him more say over the military defense budget that took up 11 to 13 percent of GDP, and made such shrewd political maneuvers as elevating three allies to full Politburo membership and ousting his political rival Romanov. The Soviet press became more freewheeling and critical, eventually describing an “entrenched, inert, immovable bureaucratic party.” Tatyana Zaslavskaya, the author of the controversial Novosibirsk report that I wrote about in 1983, and that caused trouble for her and her colleagues, now argued on the front pages of major newspapers for a radical economic overhaul and discussed the once-heretical notion of interest groups and inevitable clashes of interests in socialist countries. It felt as if the greater openness in the Soviet Union was again paralleling my personal life. As I had reported on Chernenko’s Soviet Union I had felt I was going through the motions, my heart no longer in my work. I was counting the weeks to leaving. Now I was suddenly alive again, interested

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in the story, in the changes Gorbachev was making, and delighting in being with Louise. With the younger, healthy Gorbachev in the Kremlin, and with Bohlen as an additional Washington Post correspondent, I also no longer felt constantly watchful, manacled to the office, fearful of missing some development. And so Louise and I took a trip to Central Asia, to Tajikistan, Kirgizia, and Uzbekistan, to sense the mood of the country far from the capital. After living in the artificial bubble of Moscow, I found joy in a parallel world, a world anchored to a distant past. We walked through old cities, all small dilapidated homes and winding alleys, drove to places we wanted to see, ignoring the ubiquitous white Lada carrying local KGB agents following us at a discreet distance. We traipsed around the bazaars, stopping at the stalls to examine the brassware, the antique samovars, the leather goods, the woven bags, and the urns adorned with the old scripts of curlicues and doodles. We talked to vendors. Louise walked fast and had a hopeless sense of direction. We watched people praying in mosques and sat cross-legged in grubby little restaurants where the food was better than anything on offer in Moscow. I again sensed Russia’s vast spaces, the variety of provinces and nationalities, the contradictions implicit in the endurance of old civilizations, barely covered by the new Communist veneer. Time together with Louise, walking, talking, reporting on the mood and realities in the Soviet Union outside Moscow, was pure joy. There was something almost childlike about her, a wide-eyed eagerness that she had held on to from her girlhood and that made her a delightful companion. After only two weeks in Central Asia I felt as though I had known Louise all my life. At the risk of sounding sentimental, I felt that she had helped me relax and enjoy life, that she had stopped the spinning of my psychological compass and fixed it at a certain azimuth. I had lost the taste for my career, but I had found an appetite for the world and what was going on in it. That spring, the Sunday Times of London was looking for a Moscow correspondent and Louise became a stringer for the prestigious paper, writing under a pseudonym as she still worked for UPI. She had the real prospect of becoming a full-time correspondent. “I’d rather come with you to Washington,” she told me. It was late one evening after her shift at UPI. I had made dinner. We were sipping wine. “I could try for a job with Reuters,” she said. “I have some contacts.”

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My heart leapt. I wanted her to come with me more than anything in the world. But I was sober enough to be apprehensive. She was so much younger than I, and this strange life in the Moscow foreigners’ bubble was not real life. Perhaps in a month or two, the sober side of me said, she would come to think of our affair as one of those crazy interludes that happen far away from home. Whenever I considered this, I felt a weariness of spirit descend. Is that where love begins? I thought. Not in a sudden passion but in the acceptance of another person’s right to happiness? I saw myself in her and it did not occur to me that our relationship could be more important to her than a career, that unlike me she was not driven by ambition to the exclusion of all else. “No,” I said, “we need to be sure.” A separation would reveal how real—or not—our relationship was, I insisted. The only way we could be sure of a future, I told myself, and her, would be if, six months down the road, she still felt the same way. Being deeply in love, I now knew, was akin to a mental illness, but I was still sane enough to be apprehensive about what came next. I thought that if for my sake she sacrificed this chance to move into major-league British journalism, sooner or later she would come to regret it and would inevitably blame me for having mangled her life and career. I wanted to give her a chance to reconsider. Was I really prepared to give Louise up? Or was I protecting myself against the jealous anxieties that had begun to infiltrate me like a poison? Whatever the answer, I felt I was taking the biggest risk in my entire life. Every time Karin had wanted to stay behind, I had insisted she come with me; now I was doing the opposite, but yet again imposing my will on the relationship. As the end of my tour approached, we avoided discussing our parting. What was to become of us? I wondered, instinctively skirting around topics that called to mind the fragility of our ties. I was now reading my old notes to extract a three-part valedictory series that summarized, in effect, Kremlin politics over the past four years. I had chosen to do it through the key players. I realized only then how much I had written down, not always reporting what I learned in the Post for fear of retribution while I was still an accredited correspondent. I was surprised by how much detail I had about things that Communist Party grandees, even in this new age of Gorbachev’s glasnost, would not want to be revealed, even if

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I protected my sources by disguising them in my book—as, for example, I did Bovin. I had enough details, I thought, to make me some serious enemies in the KGB. Soviet propaganda had always portrayed the lives of the tsars and party leaders like the lives of saints—idealized, prettified, distant—and the secret police had to keep them that way. Perhaps already sensing that the book I was going to write might be damaging in this way, unknown enemies, likely within the KGB, set a trap for me in my last week in Moscow. I walked right into it. Arriving one evening at the press club, I encountered a group of Soviet journalists gathered around a political commentator for Izvestia whose name I no longer recall. They called me over, and the commentator told me that Nikolai Ogarkov, who had been ousted by Chernenko the previous September as chief of the general staff and first deputy defense minister, had been made commander in chief of the Warsaw Pact forces and restored to the first deputy defense minister position. I called later that day at the US and Canada Institute and met with Radomir Bogdanov, Arbatov’s deputy. Stocky, completely bald, he could have passed for a double of the actor David Suchet playing Agatha Christie’s detective Inspector Poirot. An expert on arms control, he had the kind of sophisticated intelligence that was a hallmark of KGB operatives who interacted with foreigners. Bogdanov was not a Central Committee member like his boss Arbatov, and so he rarely had Arbatov’s privileged inside information, but I often sought him out, particularly when I wanted to get a grasp of Soviet spin and thinking on arms control and to see what political and other gossip had reached him on the rumor mill of the elite. When I told him that I had information about Ogarkov making a comeback, he sat back, looked seriously at me, and told me he did not think it was true, and that I should not write it. I walked out of the institute and onto the street and told myself that Bogdanov either was not informed or had an agenda of his own. I went back to the office and wrote the story. It ran on the front page. In the next few days, Bohlen and journalists at other newspapers wrote analyses of what Ogarkov’s return meant. But my last scoop turned out to be a planted false story. I had been played and, with my last big story, my reputation had been dented. When I left Moscow in late July, days after my forty-eighth birthday, I was certain that I loved Louise more than I’d ever loved anyone in my life, and I felt flutters of resentment at her continued excitement at reporting

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from Moscow. On my last day, Malek, my Egyptian friend, gave me a gift. It was a copy of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder, and Malek pointed out the lines he had underlined: “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

11

Reluctant Intelligence Reporter

Back in Washington, DC, I was once again on book leave in the Smithsonian Castle on the Mall, with a Wilson Center fellowship and a book advance, but at first the words would not come. I was a man obsessed. Louise was in my thoughts all day. I feared a warm letter from her citing some unforeseen event that would force her to remain in Moscow, something in connection with her new job at the Sunday Times. That would be her style, letting me down gently. In the one-bedroom apartment I had moved to in a new building near the Alexandria Metro station south of Washington. I would stay awake at night, my whole being aching for Louise, tormenting myself with thoughts that she might have met someone else. I would listen over and over to Etta James singing “I’d Rather Go Blind,” about her fear that her lover would leave her. In the early morning hours, evening in Moscow, I’d dial Louise—direct-dial was now possible thanks to Gorbachev’s reforms—and her laughter on the other end of the line would partly reassure me. I was able to start writing only when

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I set myself a goal to have the first draft of Shadows and Whispers finished by the time Louise came to Washington in December. If she came. I began writing steadily. Peter was now living with Karin in the house on Thirty-Sixth Place and attending St. Albans School. I tried to connect with him, taking him to dinners, movies, encouraging him to work harder to improve his middling grades, but he was not inclined to listen to me. Karin, now working at an administrative job, hired a divorce lawyer. I agreed to all that she asked for: the house on Thirty-Sixth Place and everything in it, most of our investments, and a rental apartment we had bought that would give her an extra income. She also took over the management of Peter’s education fund. She graciously helped me choose a few paintings and carpets from Thirty-Sixth Place to make my Alexandria apartment more pleasant. One day I was leafing through albums Karin had given me from which to choose photos I would like to keep. I came across photos of the three of us, smiling, together, looking happy when Peter was a toddler, on holiday in Tenerife. I remembered vivid details of that break from Moscow; it had been a time of sun, swimming, and doting on Peter, holding hands with Karin on the beach, feeling happy. But now it was just a half-erased memory, superseded by sadness and guilt at all that Karin had sacrificed for me and for our marriage. When I went to the Post that fall to discuss my future with Bradlee, he was effusive and congratulatory about my having made the Post look good. But as we sat in his office, as I watched him later in the newsroom, I sensed that he, and the paper, had become more cautious and bureaucratic. Decisions were now made by a committee of editors. I thought this must be the fallout from the humiliating episode four years earlier in 1981, when the Post journalist Janet Cooke won a Pulitzer Prize for an article written by Cooke and approved by Bradlee but that Cooke, it proved, had fabricated. Bradlee survived a scandal on that scale because he was Ben Bradlee and because he ordered an immediate investigation, admitted guilt, and returned the Pulitzer. But its impact, I now thought, had been long lasting. Over lunch, Bradlee asked me what I’d like to do next. Louise and I had discussed foreign postings we might try to get together in the future, and Louise had come up with the idea of China, thinking it would be fascinating to report from there and compare it with the Soviet Union.

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I asked Bradlee to send me to China, but he told me the Beijing bureau had just been filled, though I could have it when it became vacant three years later. Bonn would open up in a year or so—did I want that? No, I said, what I’d really like would be to write book reviews for the Book World section and wait for China. If Louise came to Washington, I thought, it would be the perfect job, one without the urgent deadlines, anxiety, and competition I had lived with for so long. “You’d be bored to death in Book World,” Bradlee said, shaking his head. “No, let’s put you on the intelligence beat.” I protested. I pointed out that it would be hard to cultivate sources within an intelligence community that had been embarrassed by my Andropov scoop and by my reporting from the Soviet Union, which had been prominently displayed week after week on the desks of officials in Washington, and which had often been at odds with the assessments of US intelligence. “Exactly why you should be on the intelligence beat,” Bradlee replied. I objected several more times, and then, as always with Bradlee, I agreed. In the meantime, I still had eight more months on book leave. At the time, the five most recent years of my taxes were being audited. The thought did occur to me that it might be some kind of retribution for my reporting. But the US government did not work that way, I told myself. In early November, the PBS program The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour called me in my office in the Smithsonian Castle. Would I take part in a segment on the perestroika and glasnost reforms being implemented by Mikhail Gorbachev? I was one of only a handful of people openly arguing that Gorbachev’s changes were for real. A broad official Washington consensus, particularly within the intelligence community, was that Gorbachev was—in the words of Vice President George H. W. Bush at the time —“a slick idea salesman,” and that all the talk of changes had been concocted by the KGB to lull US public opinion. Robert Gates, who headed the analytical section of the CIA, fervently believed this. Before I was to be picked up by the station’s car late in the afternoon, a NewsHour producer called me to say that the topic had been changed because a Soviet defector named Vitaly Yurchenko had unexpectedly slipped from US custody and redefected to the Soviet Union. He would be holding a press conference at the Soviet embassy in Washington. Could I come earlier to watch it before the show went on the air, and then comment? I watched only the first ten to twelve minutes of the news conference he

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gave at the Soviet mission before we were asked to go on the set. The other guest on the show was George Carver, the former deputy director of the CIA. Yurchenko was a tall man with a ready smirk and a handlebar mustache. From his bragging and bold behavior it was apparent to me that he had fooled his CIA handlers. I certainly didn’t believe a word of his story about being drugged and abducted by the CIA. It was a joke he made about Burt Gerber, one of his CIA handlers, who had been a CIA station chief in Moscow, that convinced me that Yurchenko was not someone who would face a firing squad back in Russia, the standard punishment for traitors. Gerber, he joked, pointing at the journalist crowd in front of him, had repeatedly urged him to meet with American journalists, and he now was following Gerber’s advice. I felt pretty sure from his performance that he was a man on a mission for the Soviet Union, and I said so on air. I had no idea what his mission was, I said, apart from embarrassing the United States. I disagreed with Carver, who presented the argument that Yurchenko had changed his mind after the Russians threatened his family. Louise later attended Yurchenko’s triumphal press conference upon his return to Moscow. When we spoke on the phone, she relayed that Yurchenko had bragged about having three meals with CIA director Casey in his private dining room, and how on one occasion Casey came in with his zipper down. What I said on the TV show did not earn me more friends in the intelligence community I would soon be covering. But I saw my job as giving my best judgment, not currying favor with officials who might hold a different view or want to put a good spin on an embarrassment. I was as blunt and outspoken on the NewsHour as I always was. I was also in demand because of my reputation. I gave a convocation speech at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. I had several job offers. David Newsom, former undersecretary of state turned Georgetown University professor, suggested I run a journalism program at the university. I met David Gergen, former communications director in Reagan’s White House, who had recently become chief editor of U.S. News & World Report, at a dinner party in one of those megamansions in Virginia horse country, and he asked me to join his magazine. I dismissed the idea, saying I was happy at the Washington Post. Why would I want to leave? Gergen persisted: “Let me put it another way. What would you like to do?” I told him I’d like to go to China. “We don’t have a bureau in China,” he said.

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“Call me when you do,” I said jokingly, not imagining I would ever give it another thought. Louise arrived during the third week of December 1985. She had not wavered in wanting to be with me, she had not met someone else, my age had not deterred her. I was so happy I felt like shouting. I was going to spend my life with her. That week, the Sunday Times, which had by now hired her, featured her photo on its front page along with a story about her appointment and the headline “Branson, Back in Moscow.” We went out to buy a copy of the newspaper and celebrated. It was going to be agony to be apart but we were now going to be planning a future together. I began to look for ways to spend time with her in between her visits. The Washington Post, and my reputation, helped. In February of 1986, while still on book leave, I asked the Post to send me to Moscow to be part of the coverage of the Communist Party Congress. I lived in Louise’s Sunday Times Moscow apartment on Oktyabrskaya Square. Though I followed the Congress, I could not summon the passion, the zest for Kremlin politics, I once had. As I watched Gorbachev’s long speech on TV with Louise, I was struck by his referring to Afghanistan as a “bleeding wound.” I took this, as did most Russians I talked to, as a signal that Gorbachev intended to end the war and withdraw Soviet troops. But when I submitted a lengthy analysis saying this, my editors at the Post did not agree and asked me to rewrite it. At first I fought back, but they insisted, and I gave up and rewrote it as they wanted, acutely feeling the discrepancy between what I now felt I had to do at the paper to be professionally successful and what had originally attracted me to journalism, and to the Post in particular. The overriding reason I had come to Moscow, I had to remind myself, was to be with Louise. (Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan two years later.) In July of 1986, the book now finished and with me scheduled to return to the Post, I proposed another story that would help me see more of Louise and delay my start on the intelligence beat. It involved Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations secretary general who was then president of Austria. Rumor had it that he had served with Nazi forces in Yugoslavia during World War II and had been accused of war crimes by Tito’s government. The 1947 indictment was rumored to be stored in the basement of the UN building in Manhattan. No one had seen it. Waldheim publicly denied everything.

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I told Bradlee I still had a few contacts in Yugoslavia and was pretty certain I could get my hands on a copy of the indictment. Bradlee approved the assignment without setting a time limit, and so Louise and I spent a glorious two August weeks in the town of Orebic on the Croatian coast. We swam and sunbathed and drank a lot of fine Dalmatian wine. I took a photo of Louise on that holiday that I still keep on my bedside table, of her looking over the blue Adriatic Sea from our balcony, her hair golden in the waning sun, and the island of Korcula across the bay turning rust red. In mid-August, Louise returned to Moscow and I moved to Belgrade and began working in earnest on the story, following all leads I could. Every Saturday, Louise would fly in from Moscow and stay with me at the Intercontinental Hotel, and then return to Moscow on Monday mornings. It was extravagantly expensive, an expense we both readily shared. In September, I finally obtained a copy of the Waldheim indictment from the historian Vladimir Dedijer. I went to see him at his home near Pula, in northern Yugoslavia, where he had lived since the falling out with Tito in 1955. At first he assured me quite categorically that he did not have the document. Later that evening, after we emptied several bottles of wine, he suddenly volunteered that he did have a copy. We took our drinks to his office, where he made a copy on his Xerox machine. “Payback time,” he joked as he handed it to me. “You know, in 1878, the Austrians burned down my grandfather’s house in Trebinje.” I glanced at the document in my hand and was suddenly stone-cold sober. I had a story. A big story. I also realized that the retribution to which Dedijer referred was far larger than a destroyed house in Trebinje. The next day in Belgrade, I called on Dessa Trevisan, the veteran Times of London correspondent and an old friend. She pointed me to a retired Yugoslav general, Anton Kolendic, who lived on her street in the next block. Kolendic, she said, had been chief of the Yugoslav military mission in Vienna in 1947–48. Kolendic was slim and dapper, and he filled in the details over coffee and brandy. He had personally received the Waldheim file during his tenure as mission chief, he said, along with the instructions to “recruit the subject.” Kolendic had carefully studied the materials and had a phone conversation with Waldheim, who was at that time the secretary to Austria’s foreign minister, Karl Gruber. On his own initiative,

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Kolendic said, he had shared the contents of the Waldheim indictment with his Soviet counterpart. “But then came June 28, St. Vitus Day, the day on which Stalin expelled Yugoslavia from the Soviet bloc,” Kolendic said, digressing. St. Vitus Day is the day on which the Serbs were defeated by the Ottoman armies in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, the day on which Gavrilo Princip shot Ferdinand in 1914, a day that rarely passed without some incident in Yugoslavia. Kolendic was recalled to Belgrade. “Of course, the Russians must have used the material,” he told me, and pointed out that Waldheim was Moscow’s candidate for UN secretary general. A thought flashed through my mind: Washington and London had favored Max Jakobson, a Finnish diplomat, for the UN job. The Soviet choice, Waldheim, had won. It took me several weeks and long hours on the phone to get Waldheim— through his spokesman—to acknowledge that he had served with Nazi troops in Yugoslavia during the war. The day after my two Waldheim stories appeared on the Post’s front page, the US Justice Department announced that the sitting Austrian president was banned from visiting the United States.

12

Casey’s Revenge

Not only did my first story on the intelligence beat put me in the middle of a vicious turf war between the two most powerful figures in the Reagan administration for control over US foreign policy, but it unleashed the intelligence community’s retribution on me for reporting that embarrassed them. It was a story that inadvertently signaled that even though I had left Russia, I would still be an irritant. Secretary of State George Shultz, believing the United States should deal with the new Soviet leader, was pushing for a summit meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev. CIA director William Casey, who had managed Reagan’s reelection campaign and who, like Reagan, was deeply anti-Communist, was doing all he could to derail any meeting. In early August of 1986, just as Shultz was about to announce that a Reagan-Gorbachev summit would be held in Reykjavik on October 11–12, a Russian diplomat was arrested in a sting operation in New York. The Russians immediately retaliated with a sting of their own and arrested the U.S. News & World Report Moscow correspondent Nick Daniloff on espionage charges. With Daniloff in a KGB prison, Casey

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sought to create a national groundswell against the Kremlin and have the Reykjavik meeting canceled. A mutual expulsion of diplomats followed. In a personal letter (which he made sure was leaked to the press), Casey asked the president to fire Shultz, and he revoked the security clearances of people working in Shultz’s office, thus preventing them from doing their work. The summit seemed doomed. But Reagan then sided with Shultz. The diplomatic and strategic crisis was averted after an exchange of prisoners was arranged, and Daniloff flew back to a hero’s welcome. I stood with a gaggle of reporters at Dulles Airport waiting to cover Daniloff’s press conference. I had known him for years and considered him a friend and a solid reporter. It was Nick who had given me the Soviet scientists’ assessment of Reagan’s Star Wars program before the US-Soviet arms control meeting in Geneva in January of 1985. At the news conference, a tired, relieved-looking Daniloff confirmed what had been the official story: He had been compromised by a Soviet agent provocateur masquerading as an Orthodox priest. The phony priest had asked him to deliver a letter to the US embassy. When US officials opened the letter, there was another envelope inside addressed to the CIA director personally. It contained an offer to divulge Soviet military secrets to the agency. I felt that something in the official story didn’t pass the smell test. For one thing, why did Daniloff cooperate with the KGB? I could not imagine he was a spy. If this had happened to me, I reasoned, I’d tell the interrogators to go fuck themselves and refuse to say a word without a US consul in attendance, as a bilateral treaty provided for. Why had he not done that? This was exactly what I asked Daniloff after his press conference at Dulles Airport as he chatted with me and a few colleagues. “Why did you cooperate, Nick?” “Because I’d been betrayed by the CIA,” Daniloff replied. “What do you mean?” The KGB, he explained, had presented him immediately with two pieces of evidence. One was a letter to “Father Roman” from the CIA station chief, in which Daniloff was mentioned as a “mutual friend.” The other was a phone intercept in which the CIA man again used Daniloff’s name to facilitate contact with the bogus priest. After he had passed the letter to the embassy, Daniloff went on, the career diplomats had immediately smelled a rat. Father Roman, they were

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sure, was an agent provocateur and the letter should be ignored. But the CIA station chief—and his superiors at Langley—concluded the letter was genuine. They vigorously sought to establish contact with the bogus priest, unwisely using Daniloff’s name in subsequent communications. But, as the career diplomats had argued, the “priest” was not genuine. It had been a Soviet sting. “I was compromised by the CIA using my name in their correspondence,” he repeated. “There was nothing I could do.” Other reporters failed to pick up on these fascinating details. The next day, only the official version of the story appeared in the media. I had not been assigned to write the spot story, but I thought these details were important. I proposed an analysis piece in the Outlook section in which I would give the full story and point out that, for a foreign correspondent, passing information to the CIA could be fraught with peril. I’d add a few experiences of my own to buttress the argument. I first checked with a senior State Department official about whether Daniloff’s account was correct. It was. With my usual unvarnished style, with the same call-it-as-I-see-it way in which I had given my opinion on TV about Yurchenko, the purported defector, I did not mince my words. The piece was headlined “Daniloff Forgot a Reporter Can’t Do His Country a Favor.” I started by saying that “the Nicholas Daniloff case contains an important but little-noted lesson for the press: in a place like Moscow, doing a favor for the US Embassy can get you in big trouble.” I said that “like many other American correspondents,” Nick felt he was being helpful “by delivering a letter from Father Roman addressed to the US Embassy and subsequently giving CIA operatives Father Roman’s telephone number.” What Daniloff considered a mistake, I went on to write, “was compounded by the CIA’s clumsy handling of the case.” Later in the piece I called the CIA “sloppy” for mentioning his name in communications with the bogus priest, communications that Nick was confronted with in Lefortovo Prison. “In a place like Moscow,” I opined, “an American reporter must carry a white flag, making it abundantly clear that he has nothing to do with any government, including his own.” This, I added, was “for their own protection and the protection of their Soviet friends and contacts,” and was necessary “to uphold the professional standards that make the American press so different from the Kremlin’s

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government-controlled media.” I said that I knew several colleagues who had made such mistakes, as had I. I described giving the US embassy a copy of the Zaslavskaya paper in the summer of 1983, well before I wrote about it, as I kept it hidden for four months to throw off the KGB. I wrote that the story had caused a minor stir in the West, trouble for the paper’s author in Novosibirsk, and KGB harassment for me. I described how the US embassy did not join the deluge of requests for more information, likely signaling to the KGB that it already had the document and may even have been its source. David Ignatius, the Outlook editor at the time, said I should brace myself for retribution from Langley. Indeed, I could have been less outspoken and moderated my words. “Clumsy” and “sloppy” were hardly diplomatic. But that was not my style. What I could not have known was that there was an additional reason why this good reporting would be so inflammatory to the intelligence community. Nor could I have known about the potent weapon the CIA had to use against me. The reason the piece so enraged the intelligence community, I would learn later, was that they had done their utmost to keep the details I wrote about from getting into the press. “Casey was terribly pissed off by that story,” Edward Bennett Williams, the Post’s lawyer and a friend of Casey’s, would tell me later. The potent weapon they had to use against me—and promptly did—was something that Yurchenko, the double defector, had said. As I would learn only much later, Yurchenko, who had defected at the US embassy in Rome on August 1, 1985, had told his CIA handlers that he had heard KGB gossip about me—namely, that I had accepted a $1,000 bribe from a KGB operative. Colin R. Thompson, one of the CIA officers who handled Yurchenko, would later testify that Yurchenko said he “was told in late 1984 or early 1985 by a senior officer, whose name he could not remember, that in a Second Directorate operation the Washington Post bureau chief had accepted payment of US $1,000 in cash.” Yurchenko, Thompson went on to testify, “said that he believed that the senior officer had told him of this because it was a very recent and unusual event of which the senior officer was proud and pleased. Yurchenko also told us that he understood from the senior officer that Doder had accepted the money somewhere to the south of Moscow during a trip with a Russian girlfriend.” Yurchenko had heard

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about this one payment only, Thompson added; he had no further or direct information, and he “did not know if Doder had done or agreed to do anything for the money.” “Information about Doder was considered so important and sensitive,” Thompson went on to say, that it was forwarded “directly to” Casey, “who then relayed it to President Reagan’s office.” The previous year, the FBI had thoroughly investigated the tip, including by auditing the past five years of my taxes. The FBI had also tried to plant information with me to see if I would pass it on to the KGB. The investigation had cleared me and concluded that there was nothing to the purported KGB gossip. But after reading my Outlook piece, Casey, incensed, called FBI director William Webster and demanded the FBI reopen its investigation of me. And so, late in the afternoon on Friday, October 17, 1986, five days after my Outlook piece appeared, Webster called Bradlee. He had something urgent to talk about. Right away. Could he loop by the Post and pick Bradlee up in his car? Bradlee regarded phone calls from the directors of the CIA and the FBI as calls to “General Quarters”—a Navy expression for highest shipboard alert. During his destroyer duty in the Pacific in World War II, it meant that strange blips were appearing on the radar screen, and until they were identified, God only knew what was going to happen. Something about the call bothered Bradlee. It was conspiratorial, ominous. Straight out of Le Carré. What did Webster want? Dusk was coming on as Bradlee walked out of the building. He did not have to wait long before the FBI director’s midnight-blue limo came to a halt at the curb in front of him. He quickly jumped in and sat next to Webster on the back seat. As the limo glided back into heavy traffic, Webster ordered the chauffeur to take a left and park on narrow, secluded N Street. He told the chauffeur to wait outside until he was called. The driver took a position across the street, the bulge in his jacket by his left armpit indicating he was doubling as a security guard. Webster, in a tuxedo on his way to a diplomatic dinner, quickly came to the point. “The FBI had received information from a source it considered reliable . . . that a Washington Post reporter had accepted $1,000 in cash from a KGB official in Moscow,” Bradlee later recounted in his memoir. Webster then offered details from Yurchenko’s debriefings. He said the

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FBI had decided to raise the whole issue now because I had been assigned to cover the intelligence community. “My heart stopped,” Bradlee wrote. “I could think of no more grievous blow. Absolutely nothing could be more harmful to the paper that was my life.” Was this an effort, Bradlee asked, to discredit Doder, whose reporting had been head and shoulders over the embassy and the CIA reporting from Moscow? “Webster, to his everlasting credit,” wrote Bradlee, “said his experts had in fact gone over every Doder dispatch, and found nothing more than the obvious: Doder had better contacts.” The conversation ended with Bradlee saying that he would not pull me off the beat and Webster saying that “the intelligence community had decreed that no one should talk to Doder.” But Bradlee, I also learned later, first acquiesced to Webster’s request for cooperation as the FBI prepared an ambush. The investigation was being reopened and I was about to be confronted. “He promised to sit tight and not breathe a word about it to anyone” except the publisher Don Graham and the paper’s lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, Williams told me later. Especially me. They couldn’t, Williams explained, deprive the FBI of the moment of maximum danger, the moment when each word and gesture could lead me into the swamp. “They needed the advantage of surprise,” he added. “Mr. Doder?” “This is he.” The voice on the other end of the phone line was unfamiliar. I was in the Post newsroom, getting up to speed on the intelligence beat. “My name is West; I’m an agent of the FBI’s Washington field office. I’d like to meet with you and get your advice on a matter. We need some help, but it is not a matter to be discussed over the phone.” He invited me for drinks at the Madison Hotel at four o’clock that afternoon. Perfect, I thought. An opportunity to establish a personal contact with someone inside the office that handled espionage cases in the Washington area. That was part of my new assignment. What a strange coincidence, I joked, that he should call on the same late October day when I had lunch scheduled with the assistant FBI director, William M. Baker. It was an appointment I had set up to get to know key people on my new beat. West sounded genuinely surprised. “Well, big shots don’t tell me what they’re doing,” he said. We both laughed.

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Forty minutes after I hung up, Baker’s secretary called. Baker was tied up in a meeting that could last quite a while, she said, and he apologized profusely for not being able to keep the lunch date. She’d call again to reschedule it for another day. I was secretly pleased. I could have lunch with Louise, who was in town for three weeks. She had just covered the Reykjavik summit between Reagan and Gorbachev. The Sunday Times had her temporarily exchange jobs with the Washington correspondent Jon Connell for a story about reporting from the other superpower. It was a glorious October day, sunny and agreeably warm. I silently thanked Baker for the cancellation. We strolled up New Hampshire Avenue to Dupont Circle, then to Kalorama, descending to Rock Creek Park, where joggers glided past. We held hands, laughed, and had lunch at a sidewalk café on Connecticut Avenue. Louise read our horoscopes in the morning Post—she is an Aries, I am a Cancer—and they both predicted future happiness. At just after three thirty, Louise hailed a cab to head to an interview and I took another cab, arriving in the lobby of the swank Madison Hotel just in time for my four o’clock appointment with West. I was feeling on the best of terms with the world. West was a compact man, in the prime of life, with a winning, open smile that could belong to a car salesman. Counterintelligence agents, like journalists, cultivate the ability to make themselves agreeable. “You don’t mind if a colleague joins us,” he said, referring to John McGirl, a somewhat dour middle-aged man who joined us after parking their car. I joked about Baker’s lunch cancellation. They laughed in unison. “We got nothing to do with it.” We lowered ourselves into the comfortable leather chairs and talked for a while— about Russia and about the recent massive expulsion of suspected KGB agents from Washington. I teased them about their work—chasing Communist agents. The worst thing that happened to Communism, I said, was the automobile tour of Italy a younger Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife had taken decades earlier that had allowed them to see how the rest of the world lived. “Now he’s decided to destroy the system in order to save it.” Their grunts and comments suggested to me that I was dealing with highly intelligent men whose specific knowledge of Russia, however, came from old FBI manuals. As always in such situations, I treated them as knowledgeable and serious and took their comments as well intentioned. But after a while I had had enough. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

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“Yes,” McGirl said. “You know Yurchenko, of course. Well, Yurchenko in the course of his debriefings mentioned your name.” “That’s interesting,” I said. It was still unclear whether or not he was a genuine turncoat. “I always believed he was on a mission,” I said. “What do you think?” McGirl squinted and glanced around the room. “We’re not going to discuss that with you,” he said in a sharp and cold tone. The change was abrupt. “This is an official conversation.” “You said you wanted advice, didn’t you?” I said, turning to West. “Yurchenko said you’re a KGB asset,” McGirl said, giving me what was supposed to be a piercing look. “Great,” I said mockingly. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? Are you saying I’m a spy?” McGirl sidestepped the question. “You’ve been an outstanding correspondent because you had a corrupt relationship with the KGB. Since the KGB controls everything, they were feeding you information to make you look good. That’s why you had good stories.” “Are you telling me that I fooled a town full of Soviet experts? That for years they were bamboozled by a clever KGB agent?” They didn’t respond. Instead West chimed in. “Have you known any KGB people?” Of course. Many. In the ministries, in journalism, and in academia; some were full time, some part time, but I had never come across one who said he was KGB. I tried to explain to them the nature of Soviet society and the fact that many people worked for the KGB (especially people who dealt with foreigners). McGirl pulled four passport photos from his breast pocket. He carefully spread them on the table in front of me. “Recognize any of them?” “Yup,” I said, pointing at Radomir Bogdanov, who was formally the deputy director of the US and Canada Institute. “Never seen the others.” Poor quality made Bogdanov look quite sinister. On the back was written “Vladimir Bogdanov.” I said, “This man’s name is Radomir Georgievich Bogdanov.” The two agents looked at each other. “What do you mean?” said West. “Exactly what I said. The man’s name is Radomir. Look him up in John Barron’s book about the KGB.” “So you met him, you know him,” said McGirl.

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“Yes indeed, many times. I like him.” I proceeded with a thumbnail sketch of the man: very intelligent, consummate cynic with a good sense of humor and full grasp of arms control issues, which had been the principal topic of our discussions. Only a handful of people in Moscow were licensed to talk openly about this sensitive matter. In fact, all US politicians, presidential candidates, administration officials, and academics called on the US and Canada Institute and met either Bogdanov or Georgy Arbatov, his boss, or both. McGirl coughed as if announcing he was shifting gears. “Were you ever approached with a recruitment proposal?” “No,” I said. “Or given money?” He hit the m at the beginning of “money” as if with a hammer. “No.” I was astounded. It was the first time in my life that somebody had suggested that I might have done something dishonest or even treasonous for money. They didn’t say it directly, but the meaning was clear. “What’s this bullshit?” I was becoming angry. “Is there anything in my reporting that suggests I was pushing the Soviet propaganda line?” “We can’t say there is,” McGirl said. “So what’s your problem?” I asked. “Our concern,” he replied, “is what you could do in the future. Yurchenko said they regarded you as a potential future asset.” The KGB, I thought, must be trying to discredit me and my forthcoming book, Shadows and Whispers. I pointed out that Yurchenko, in my view, had been on a mission to snooker the CIA and was given a hero’s welcome back in Moscow. Besides, I said, the FBI had had a whole year to check the veracity of his statements, adding, “You know, of course, that they shoot traitors in Russia.” My mind was working feverishly. The utter viciousness of these charges was what David Ignatius had meant by retribution from Langley. But this is America, I thought, where such exercise of absolute power is not acceptable. I must have been under investigation for the past year. My mind went back to the audit of my taxes. I stood up, preparing to leave. “Thanks for the drink,” I said. “I’m not prepared to listen to insults! I’ve had enough!” I looked at West. “You mind telling me what this shit is all about?” West sounded conciliatory. “We’re only trying to get your views.” “Don’t take it personally,” McGirl added.

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I stood there for a while, then sat down. Perhaps because the agents backed down so quickly, or because I wanted to believe them. The conversation resumed in a friendlier tone. Not knowing what Yurchenko had said, I couldn’t speculate about Russian motives. Of course I must have made enemies in Moscow, I told the agents, but frankly I didn’t give a damn. I wasn’t planning to live there. I was more concerned about enemies I made here, among them masters of the black arts of the smear and innuendo. My problem was that the people in Washington read the Post with their morning coffee, and then went to their offices to read secret cables. I said, “This is a bullshit investigation and I’m going back to my office to inform my bosses.” I stood up. “I’m not prepared to listen to insults,” I said, letting some steel into my voice. They looked startled. “No, no, no,” they said in unison. West suddenly came to life. “Nobody is accusing you of anything,” he said. “It’s just that Yurchenko made these allegations, and we are simply trying to get your views. C’mon, it’s just a friendly conversation.” As I left them seated in the lobby, we did not shake hands. Of course, it was not a friendly chat. It was an ambush. What made it more distasteful was that I was put on the defensive. I went straight into Bradlee’s office and gave him a quick summary of my conversation with the two FBI agents. He listened attentively, interrupting a few times with pointed questions, never letting on that he already knew about it from Webster. Then he summoned Len Downie and Robert Kaiser, the two men he was grooming as his successors. I repeated my account in slightly greater detail. “Did they really say ‘Vladimir Bogdanov’?” Kaiser said, shaking his head. As a former Moscow correspondent, he knew Bogdanov. “These guys don’t know their asses from third base,” Bradlee said. He stared at the ceiling, then turned to me. “Write a detailed memo, collect all relevant material. The stories, the message. Go see Eddie first thing in the morning,” he said, referring to Edward Bennett Williams. He’ll be waiting for you.” Then he made a circle with his finger pointing at all three of us. “You mustn’t breathe a word about this to anyone.” After Downie and Kaiser departed, Bradlee clasped my upper arm and led me out of his office toward the back of the building, where the Style section was located. The newsroom was almost empty; the presses were about to start rolling. We were now alone.

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“My office is not as private as we may think,” Bradlee said. “I think they’re bugging us.” He told me that as soon as I completed my memo, I should “make a printout and wipe it from the system because they have a way of tapping into the computer system.” He seemed rattled as we walked around the building. “I think they want you off the beat,” he said, again grasping my upper arm. “Dealing with the bastards is dicey. Whenever they say something threatens national security, in most cases it is smokescreen to cover their own asses.” Suddenly I saw that for all his apparent strength, Bradlee could be weak and unsure, and even fearful. A compassion for him welled up in me. There was another jarring note in our conversation. “You’ve got to get Eddie interested in the case,” he repeated several times. “This is very important.” Williams, a lawyer whose high-profile clients had included such people as Frank Sinatra and US senator Joseph McCarthy as well as the Washington Post, had been battling cancer for a number of years; doctors had removed a part of his lung, and two-thirds of his liver. “Seems he’s finally out of the woods,” Bradlee said, as a result of a new experimental chemotherapy, developed at Harvard. “The tumor in his liver is gone.” We had now reached a service elevator on the eastern side of the building. We went up to the garden court on the eighth floor, outside Mrs. Graham’s office, because, he said, “they” had no way of monitoring conversations there. “We go way back, Eddie and I,” Bradlee went on, staring into the middle distance. “He is my closest friend. Get Eddie interested. It’s crucial. He’s terrific, the best. He’s got the instincts of an intrusive animal, or a Gypsy fortune teller. He hates boring cases. You mustn’t breathe a word about this to anyone.” My mind was being pulled in several directions. My instinct was to scream, “What case? Why do I need a lawyer?” Getting a lawyer suggested that I was guilty of something. But I just listened. I admired Bradlee, and I trusted his judgment. In my mind this was a man with a backbone of steel that supported his dazzling self-confidence. But I again thought of the impact on him of the Janet Cooke scandal. I had put Bradlee on a pedestal throughout my professional life, but now I saw him as human after all. We began walking back toward his office. “We should do nothing to spread this rumor. That’s what they want us to do. Screw them! We’ll be here long after they’re gone.”

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Back at my desk, I phoned Louise to tell her we’d have a late dinner. When I hung up, I was seized by the terrifying prospect of losing her over this. On my way over to the restaurant, that fear grew. I suddenly had so little faith in myself. I had a sense that everything solid in my life was disintegrating. I felt radioactive. Would these attacks on me turn Louise away, cause her to rethink our relationship once she was back in Moscow? Earlier that day we had planned our future; now I saw it unraveling in my mind’s eye. There were only a handful of guests at the restaurant when I joined Louise. She looked impossibly glamorous in a red silk blouse and white trousers. I felt I was now looking at someone who had become unreachable over the course of an afternoon. We kissed and I gave her the memo to read. “Before dinner?” she protested in her joking style. “Yes,” I insisted. I sat brooding, sipping wine. When she finished, she set the memo aside. “Let’s order, I’m famished,” she said cheerfully, looking around for a waiter. “Well,” I said glumly, “what do you think?” She put her hand on mine. “The bullies are just trying to frighten you. They won’t get anywhere. You were the best Moscow correspondent, you embarrassed them, and they want to get back at you. They won’t succeed. Not while the truth is on your side. Isn’t that what you are always telling me? Let’s get the waiter over here.” We ordered. She kept her hand on mine while talking to the waiter, sensing how worried and confused I was. “This may be the time for us to part ways,” I said. “I love you, you idiot,” she said. “Anyone who knows your work knows those claims are rubbish. A thousand dollars? So cheap a spy? No, you’ve pissed off the intelligence community. If there was anything wrong with you, they would not have waited until now to bring it up. Bradlee’s right. They want to frighten you off the intelligence beat. Bradlee and the Post will protect you. Now, let’s eat, I’m starving.” My mind went involuntarily to the time Karin had told me that the Post would abandon me. I pushed the thought aside. I kept searching for clues—something, anything, a shadow of reproof in Louise’s voice—that would reveal other thoughts running on a parallel

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track in her mind. Why did she abruptly remove her hand from mine and pick up her cognac glass with both hands? By the end of the evening, I was reassured by her sunny optimism and common sense. She believed in me, and I felt that was all that mattered. In the midst of my present chaos and uncertainty, Louise offered me one sure thing, and that was happiness with her. It was nearly one in the morning when I caught the waiter’s eye and wrote a check in the air to summon the bill. The law offices of Williams & Connolly were located at the southern edge of Farragut Square, on the eighth floor of the Hill Building, two blocks away from the White House. In the elevator that day, I felt the trepidation of someone anticipating the whirring burr of the dentist’s drill. Williams wore an expensive-looking shirt of finely spun cotton with a designer logo on it. He was surprisingly energetic and immensely genial, and he certainly didn’t look like someone dying from cancer. There was a certain expensive odor about him, the smell of money. He was tall, muscular, with piercing eyes and wavy reddish-gray hair that was flicked into little horns above the ears. He resembled the actor Jack Warden. He immediately offered me coffee and shared some off-color jokes and tidbits of delicious gossip, such as how Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago worried whether he had committed a sin by stealing votes from Richard Nixon in the 1960 elections. “Do you think God is going to forgive me for doing in that son of a bitch?” he quoted Daley as wondering during a lunch. Then he showed me a photo of himself and Reagan sitting in the owner’s box at Camden Park. “What’s important in this town,” he said, “is that all those top officials and Alfalfa Club members, they all know that the man in the White House is my friend. Reagan and I may be talking bullshit, but nobody knows what we are talking about.” As the co-owner of the Washington Redskins and later the Baltimore Orioles, Williams had an easy reach to everyone who had to be persuaded: presidents, Supreme Court justices, senators, cabinet members, other grandees. He used Redskins and Orioles tickets as a currency, passing them around on Capitol Hill. Williams was a superb raconteur and he almost made me forget why I was in his office. Here was a spectacular self-promoter and name dropper who was explaining his unique position in a city where the real work is done in the shadows and where he was known as “the man to see.”

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Why was he establishing his bona fides with me? Soon I realized that this was the opening gambit, the lawyer’s spiel, which was part of his technique. I had no experience with lawyers. I knew several, lawyers being everywhere within the great cobweb of Washington society, but I dealt with them as a reporter, not a client. “What sort of a name is Dusko?” Williams asked before remarking, “What a great name for a ballplayer.” From this observation we moved into my background, until Williams suddenly faced me and said, “Webster told Bradlee that you are a KGB agent.” My face became hot. “That’s not true. That’s insane.” “Webster said you have received a thousand dollars from someone in the KGB. That’s what Yurchenko told them.” I had to laugh at the absurdity of it. “The figure is insulting,” I said bitterly. “No serious person could possibly believe this.” How do you retain dignity in such a situation? How do you prove a negative? But something was setting off my internal alarm bells. This was the first time I had heard about the $1,000 bribe, and I wondered why Bradlee had not mentioned it the previous evening. “Ben said nothing about a thousand dollars last night,” I noted, my voice rising almost to a question. Williams said, with an evasive smile, “He was sworn to secrecy. Besides, had he warned you in advance, you’d have had time to prepare yourself.” But I had talked to Bradlee after talking to the FBI agents, I realized, and this made a small bruise in my memory. Another question raced through my mind: why didn’t Bradlee immediately tell the FBI director to piss off? Why did he play along with Webster? Nothing made sense. A haunting silence ensued. I got up and stared out at the heavy traffic on K Street. What else are Bradlee and Williams holding back? I wondered. The whole business seemed suspect. Was Williams my lawyer? Our whole conversation, the sudden shift of gears, could only be the fruit of a carefully prepared strategy. This was, I thought, a different kind of ambush: Williams (and therefore Bradlee, perhaps) was prepared to entertain the possibility that I was an enemy infiltrator disguised as a simple scribe. In the real world, Bradlee’s behavior was perfectly rational. All this was no more than a sensible precaution. He had to be sure. Yet I felt betrayed. “The Post will abandon you in the end,” Karin had said. Bradlee had been my hero for embodying the journalism ideals I believed in, for

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speaking truth to power. What I understood later was that Williams gave Bradlee the protective umbrella of lawyer-client privilege. Eddie Williams had done this for years, in one form or another. Each time there was a call to General Quarters—the Pentagon Papers, Watergate—Williams was there to give advice, which in turn stiffened Bradlee’s courage to press on when other editors were turning the other way. A conservative and deeply religious Roman Catholic, Williams was offered the job of CIA director by President Ford in 1975. He declined but asked Ford to appoint him to the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, thus becoming privy to the deepest secrets of the nation. He became close friends with another board member, William Casey, and this friendship deepened when both men became cancer patients. Both were fiercely anti-Communist. Despite his reputation as a great civil libertarian, Williams was at the forefront of a drive to give the intelligence community a freer hand to counter the Soviet threat, even endorsing illegal wiretapping of US citizens. He was also a board member of the right-wing Committee on Present Danger, which relentlessly argued for more defense spending. But, ensconced in his professional digs that autumn day, I didn’t immediately grasp that I was being interrogated by Williams. As he told me, I had been under surveillance for many months. “They have checked everything there is to check,” he said. “You can bet your sweet ass they did. The boys know what they’re doing. I bet you you never noticed anything.” Few lives are lived without a trace of sin, and fewer still can stand up to the electronic scrutiny of US intelligence agencies and a full complement of FBI watchers. So Williams was telling me that they had thoroughly investigated me. Why, then, more than a year after Yurchenko defected, were they doing this? As I tried to justify my actions to Williams, I grew flustered. I found myself telling him things in the wrong order, or too quickly, or without a coherent flow to their logical conclusion. But what was there for me to justify? I was certain in my own mind, absolutely certain, that this was a case of CIA vendetta, with Casey and Gates behind it. Over the next seven or so hours, Williams encouraged me to talk and lost himself in the listening. I drew on information that was fresh in my mind, having just finished writing Shadows and Whispers. Occasionally he questioned a detail and its ramifications. And then later he would pose the same question I had already answered. Or he would ignore my

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answers and then, as if by uncontrollable reflex, return to them. He was probing, probing, though for what I knew not. When I told him how Carl Gebhardt, the CIA station chief in Moscow in 1984, had stopped me in the courtyard of our ghetto to tell me I should have warned him about all the telltale signs on the evening of Andropov’s death, Williams interrupted. “Why didn’t you? You could have.” “The thought never crossed my mind,” I said. “I told Gebhardt that had I run into him the previous evening I would’ve told him. And I would’ve asked him for more details. I always thought the agency was far better informed than I.” We did not break for lunch. Instead we had pastrami sandwiches and beer in his office and continued talking. Williams had two beers, which seemed to lower his inhibition. He told me that he had interrogated all the people who had handled Yurchenko. “Well, Burt Gerber’s got his cock caught in the wringer,” he said, laughing. “He won’t remain chief of the Soviet Russia division.” “Gerber has a first-class brain,” I said. “But intelligence is a service industry and he has to satisfy the needs of his main consumers. His principal consumers needed a strong Soviet Union getting ever stronger each day, to justify escalating US military expenditures.” “Are you trying to say that Bobby Gates is cooking the books?” he said sharply. “I know you’re reading agency reports about Russia being allpowerful, confident, determined, led by the Communist Party, whose powers are untouched and untouchable,” I said. “This is the stuff they send up to Congress to raise more money for defense. But Jesus, the Soviet Union is Upper Volta with missiles.” Williams frowned. “How I hate journalists! You guys think you know it all. All you do is sit on the sidelines and whine. Bobby Gates has got a PhD in Soviet studies. He’s got first-rate people—you know, people with PhDs, serious analysts. Why the fuck should I believe you?” I realized the conversation was degenerating, and I didn’t want that. Bradlee had said I had to get Eddie interested, not mad at me. So I cited some statistical evidence to show a catastrophic decline of the Soviet economy, but he interrupted me. “All Russian statistics are phony, aren’t they?” “Yes,” I agreed, “but your PhDs use the same figures.”

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“They do, but always with proper caveats.” “Okay. Just to show you that they have trouble feeding themselves, we’ll use our figures. No caveats. As you know we began selling grain to Russia in 1970. That year they bought seven hundred million dollars’ worth. In each subsequent year they bought more and more. In 1980 the total was more than seven billion. Keep in mind that during this ten-year period one-third of all of their capital investments had gone into agriculture. What the hell does that tell you?” “Well, yeah, shit.” He seemed to give ground with a grudging half grin. “But their military industry is strong, isn’t it?” “I suppose so,” I said. “But why is everything secret? The military must function better than the civilian sector, but that’s only a matter of degree. In the end, the same kind of people make tanks and tractors.” Bradlee phoned at 3:20 in the afternoon. It was the only time that Williams was buzzed by his secretary. “Benjy!” Williams said. The name was uttered lovingly, as though he were addressing a favorite child. A long silence followed. I looked out the window onto the glowing neon lights of Farragut Square. Williams tapped his fingers and grunted, his face impassive. “That’s good news, Benjy. Good news!” he suddenly exclaimed, pointing his pistol finger at me. After a long pause, Williams said, “That’s bullshit, Benjy. No way, José! No lie detectors. Remember the Indian polygraph, Benjy: buffalo shit and saliva.” He laughed. After another pause, he said, “Okay,” and hung up. Then he turned to me. “Webster called Bradlee and said the two FBI agents had a very good conversation with you and would like to meet one more time to wrap this whole thing up. They’re backing down now. They would like you to take a lie detector test. I’ll never allow that.” “I’d like to take it,” I said. I had suggested to Bradlee the previous evening that I’d take the test. I knew nothing about the polygraph, but I knew I had nothing to hide. “It’s a very bad idea,” Williams said. “You know, recently we had a guy who killed several people and who passed the polygraph with flying colors, but Bud McFarland flunked when he offered to prove he was not the source of a leak. They had to plead with the New York Times publisher Punch Sulzberger to tell the security people just how the Times obtained the story. Because the polygraph is a piece of shit.”

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After Bradlee’s call, Williams was in a better mood. He invited me to stretch my legs. We walked into a small study behind his desk, where he had a sofa for quick naps, and then into a conference room whose walls were covered with mementos. Famous faces, any of which would prompt a story, were staring from the walls. Presidents. Joe DiMaggio. Joe McCarthy. Presidential candidates, senators, movie stars. Vince Lombardi. John Riggins. “We were trailing Miami seventeen to thirteen, with ten minutes to go, trying to make the first down on a fourth and one,” Williams said. “Mind you, fourth and one. Then John got the ball, broke a tackle, and ran forty-three yards for the touchdown. Boy, it was one of the happiest moments of my life.” Inside I was seething with mute fury as I struggled to come to grips with all that had just happened. That Bradlee, whom I admired as a model and father figure, whose foul-language audaciousness in challenging authority was something I had wanted to emulate, had been prepared to believe I was a KGB agent. Warnings I had once dismissed in my arrogance played through my mind. Malek telling me that the CIA would seek retribution after my Andropov scoop and me dismissing his words, telling him that the CIA was not the Mukhabarat. David Ignatius warning me to brace myself for retribution after my recent piece about Nick Daniloff. And, yes, Karin saying the Post would abandon me. Hadn’t my father cursed me too, calling for God’s retribution on me? The next day, Webster told Williams that “there may have been a leak at Justice,” because he thought one newspaper was already onto the story. I felt impotent and defenseless; I could imagine the headlines. Williams calmed me down. “It’s an old trick, keeps everybody off-balance.” I asked Williams to get a copy of the transcript of Yurchenko’s allegations. Williams summoned me to join him Friday at the opulent Jefferson Hotel at eleven at night. It was a hotel he had bought and renovated ten years earlier. Wearing a tuxedo, his face flushed with energy, Williams arrived directly from a White House dinner. “Very good news,” he said. “I had a long talk with Casey. He said he had no interest in this matter anymore. He doesn’t want you to cover the intelligence community. That’s all. The word is out: no one can talk to you. Casey would not give us the transcript. As far as he is concerned, he said, the case is closed. He told me in confidence that when he saw the figure of one thousand dollars he knew it was bullshit.”

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“Then why did he demand a new FBI investigation?” I asked. “What investigation? There is no investigation!” Williams said almost angrily. “They had an investigation, they burrowed through your phone records, bank statements, credit cards, everything. They found nothing. Casey was very much up front. He wants Bradlee to move you to another beat. That’s all.” He beckoned the waiter for another round of drinks. “The problem’s that Benjy wants you to stay on the intelligence beat.” He repeated his mantra: patience and silence. On Friday, October 31, Williams phoned to tell me he had had a “very good” conversation with Webster. “He told me that they think you’re clean,” Williams said. “I think you should send him a signed copy of Shadows and Whispers.” The official publication date was November 1. “Where do we go from here?” I asked. “Be patient,” he said. “I talk to Webster every day and I’m sure this will be over soon.” During the weekend I phoned Larry Silberman, asking to meet him for lunch because I needed advice in addition to the vague but reassuring guidance I was getting from Williams. I had gotten to know Silberman while he served as ambassador to Yugoslavia when I was based there as the Post’s correspondent for Eastern Europe. I was initially skeptical of him. We disagreed politically on most issues, but I admired his brilliant intellect and outspoken honesty, and appreciated his vast political experience, and we became friends after he returned to Washington. He had held several high positions in the government, including undersecretary of labor in the first Nixon administration and acting US attorney general during the Watergate scandal. He had been chairman of Reagan’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and after the 1980 elections became head of Reagan’s transition team at the CIA. Now he was a judge on the US Court of Appeals in Washington. Over lunch at Colleen’s restaurant, a bustling place largely frequented by journalists, I told him the whole story. His immediate reaction was that Webster’s behavior was “outrageous.” He added, “If I were the attorney general, I would fire him on the spot.” He said he believed Yurchenko had been a plant, but that the CIA now had an interest in proving he was not and that Yurchenko had changed his mind at the last minute. Silberman said Yurchenko’s overall effect was causing confusion in the CIA. “You

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should keep in mind,” he told me, “that your interests and the interests of the Post do not coincide, and that Williams was the Post’s lawyer—not yours. That’s why you should air this whole business right away. Go public, take a lie detector test, and go after Casey and Webster.” As a judge, he said, he could not offer any specific advice, but he thought I needed independent legal counsel and suggested his friend and neighbor Mitch Rogovin. By the time I returned to my office, while computing in my head all the preceding developments, I had decided to follow Silberman’s advice. When I told Bradlee, the expression on his face changed from one of gruff benevolence to cold displeasure. This was unusual. He was never offhand. “You’ll have to talk to Eddie about it,” he said. In the same breath he immediately dismissed as “a terrible idea” any lie detector test, because “it would set a very bad precedent for American journalism.” “Talk to Eddie,” he said again. “Let’s see what he says.” Later that day, I walked over to Rogovin’s office at Donovan, Leisure, Rogovin & Schiller, which was on M Street three blocks from the Post, taking my diary and various memos. Rogovin was a liberal labor lawyer who later worked as counsel for the IRS and subsequently, in the 1970s, became the CIA’s top legal officer. I told him the whole story in detail. I also told him about Silberman’s advice. Rogovin immediately dismissed the lie detector as nonsense and said that taking on Casey and Webster publicly was unwise. “If you do, you’ll never work again in this town,” he told me. One of his current clients, he continued, was a young CIA officer who for the past two years had been attached to the State Department and worked for Shultz. “Shultz liked the guy and Casey pulled his security clearances. The man’s out of a job.” The CIA director by law had unconditional authority to hire and fire without giving any reason, to protect the security of the agency. Rogovin said he would study the material and then talk to Bradlee and Williams. In the early evening I walked over to Farragut Square to talk to Williams. I told him the substance of my conversations with Silberman and Rogovin. “It’s a mistake to talk to anyone,” Williams said, clearly displeased. He and Silberman were both members of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. “I’ve always thought Silberman a fool,” he continued. “Look, there’s no investigation, there’s no case against you. Webster is on your side. He’s looking for a way to wrap up this whole

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thing. Let them do it quietly. I know these guys, they are good guys.” All I had to do was be patient and quiet, he said. In the midst of all these developments, Rogovin wanted to see me. I went to his office. His discussions with Williams were “unsatisfactory,” he said. “In plain English, he simply refused to work with me.” Rogovin asked me to talk to Bradlee to figure out a way that he and Williams could exchange information and confer. I broached the subject with Bradlee but I knew from his demeanor that he sided with Williams and regarded my insistence on engaging Rogovin as an act of disloyalty. I had no choice, I told Rogovin; I couldn’t continue with him. It was not possible for me to go against Bradlee’s and Williams’s wishes. I learned later that sometime during that fall of 1986, the FBI staged a sting operation of which I was blissfully unaware, apparently passing some classified stuff to me. Webster later told Time, “If he’d really been recruited as an agent of influence and he happened to get some classified information, don’t you think he would sell it to them? Even if he wasn’t fully recruited? The conclusion reached by the FBI is that he wasn’t their agent.” Webster conveyed that conclusion to Williams and Bradlee, though I do not know exactly when. On December 2, I received a call from Williams. The FBI wanted to have another interview with me to “wrap up the whole business.” He asked if I could meet with West and McGirl at the Madison Hotel on Friday, and added, “By the way, West expressed his admiration for you, and I thought he was genuine.” Then he added knowingly, “Just wait until the shit hits the fan.” That last comment struck me as odd. I did not at first connect it to snippets of news appearing in the papers that fall about the so-called IranContra affair. But Williams, as a member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, must have been briefed in detail on what was happening, and his comment likely meant that he knew that Casey himself was in deep trouble and unlikely to keep up this retribution against me. The first newspaper stories involved an American C-123 transport plane being shot down over Nicaragua; these were followed by rumors that the plane had been air-dropping arms to antigovernment rebels. The only survivor, Eugene Hasenfus, was quoted by his captors as saying that he was employed by the CIA. It seemed apparent that Casey was up to his old tricks, running a covert operation in Nicaragua without a presidential finding and

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disregarding a congressional ban on supplying weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras. With congressional elections a few weeks away, the Democrats began hammering the administration over this issue. I picked up dark rumors about illegalities committed by the administration with regard to Iran. Then the roof fell in on Bill Casey. In the November 3 elections, the Republicans lost control of the Senate. On that same day, a Lebanese newspaper ran a story about US arms sales to Iran, specifically revealing an arms-for-hostages deal between the White House and the ayatollahs. The administration denied any wrongdoing, but Iran’s speaker of parliament confirmed the report. Shultz inflamed the situation by saying he did not approve any arms deliveries. A number of top CIA officers were hauled before congressional investigators, while FBI agents swarmed all over CIA headquarters, taking depositions. Since Bradlee had refused to take me off the intelligence beat, I was now in the uncomfortable situation of covering the intelligence community that had had me in their sights. Quite apart from my Andropov scoop, I had long been a thorn in their side, as my reporting from the Soviet Union had been at odds with that of the CIA and contradicted the views of Casey and his deputy, Robert Gates. Now I was covering a fullblown political scandal with Casey and Gates at its center. Reporting on it meant spending most of my time on Capitol Hill, often sitting on the marble floors outside hearing room S-219. Casey testified (not under oath) on November 21 and was roundly criticized for answering questions in the narrowest context possible. He appeared three times in December but again managed to avoid testifying under oath. Even so, the investigators were closing in on him and his coconspirator, Colonel Oliver North, a National Security Council staff member, who had funneled money from Iran arms sales to the Contras. On December 16, Casey was scheduled to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee, this time under oath. On Monday, December 15, he collapsed in his office and was taken to Georgetown University Hospital. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor and underwent surgery. He resigned a few weeks later. “What did I tell you?” Williams said when I ran into him. “We made it go away. If you’d listened to your friend Silberman you’d be in deep doodoo now.” The story of Yurchenko’s allegation and the FBI investigation into me had not circulated beyond the Washington Post’s inner

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circle, but this felt like cold comfort. I still wished I had gone public. I had nothing to hide, and wasn’t journalism about exposing truths? Wasn’t this the bedrock of all that Clyde had taught me? Secrets needed to be aired. But Bradlee and the Post employed and protected me. What would have happened, I wondered, if I’d been a reporter for the Santa Fe Daily Eagle? I would probably have been relegated to obscurity within a few weeks— such is the implacable power of the national security establishment. My reputation, the fact that successive administrations had been reading my articles for nearly two decades in the Post, and the reputation of Bradlee and his newspaper made the difference. But why had the newspaper kept silent? That question sat uncomfortably with me. My faith that Bradlee and the Post would be on my side so long as I did a good job was dented.

13

Seeking a New Life in China

Louise arrived in Washington five days before Christmas, and we spent a wonderful two weeks driving through several southern states. We talked about a possible joint project we could undertake while she was in Moscow and I in Washington. We settled on a biography of Mikhail Gorbachev. In New York, we successfully pitched the idea to Viking Penguin. I relished the idea of us working together, of long phone conversations conferring and planning. We talked about Louise leaving the Sunday Times and coming to Washington. She decided that she would look for a job in Washington, and we put down a deposit on a condo in a conversion of the old Chinese embassy. The moment she left for Moscow I felt incomplete. Days later I received, out of the blue, a call from David Gergen as I sat in the Post newsroom. He asked whether I remembered our conversation in Virginia horse country the previous summer, and then said, “Would you like to go to China for us?” U.S. News & World Report had decided to reopen its Beijing bureau. Though I had long disliked the group journalism

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of newsmagazines, this was not my first thought. Still bruised from the Yurchenko episode that I had not been allowed to air publicly, I immediately saw it as a possible way to be with Louise in China much sooner. “And what time frame do you have in mind?” I asked. “In two, three weeks, or whenever you can wind up your affairs at the Post.” “I couldn’t do that,” I said. I’d never go to a country as a permanent correspondent without first trying to learn its language. Gergen promptly suggested a year of language training. I thought about taking time off to learn Chinese with Louise as we also wrote the Gorbachev book. “You don’t have to give me an answer right away. Think about it,” Gergen said. But his offer was tempting. In the past, I had done everything to further my journalistic ambition. Now, as if on a seesaw, I felt myself tilting away from ambition and toward a life where all that mattered was to be happy with Louise. It did not occur to me, not yet, to see this as similar in any way to the time I had quit the AP after it allowed my Westmoreland scoop to die. Though I knew I loved the Washington Post and, until this offer, could not imagine quitting, my lack of enthusiasm for covering intelligence, the FBI investigation, and the Post’s reaction had exhausted me and left me dispirited. I told myself I no longer had the stomach for such struggles. Why not? I found myself thinking. Was this my chance at happiness? It was in this frame of mind that I went to lunch with my best friend at the Post, Steve Rosenfeld, the paper’s deputy editorial page editor, to talk it over. As we walked out of the Post building, I thought of how valuable Steve had been as a sounding board for me. It was Steve who had invited me to lunch during my first week at the Post and outlined for me the paper’s internal power struggles. Though I had avoided office politics myself, pursuing what I saw as my higher goal of proving myself by my work alone, he had always kept me abreast of what office politics he thought I should be aware of. I told Steve about the FBI’s investigation into me, how Williams had “made it go away,” and my deep unease over not going public and taking Silberman’s advice. Steve listened carefully, shaking his head at points. When he spoke, it was with a grave look on his face. It would be a big risk, he said, to take the U.S. News job offer. I was a star at the Post, and Bradlee had promised

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me China in three years’ time. I did not have to be on the intelligence beat forever, and staying on it, in his opinion, would be the best way of fighting back. I confided to him that I simply had lost the ambition that once fired me up. I was deeply in love with Louise and wanted to go on this adventure with her. Why not? I also wanted to avoid the inevitable complications that would come with both Karin and Louise living in the same city, with Peter spending time with both of us. That, I thought, was another reason to move away, to start a new life. Love is not a reason to take this risk, Steve’s sober look seemed to say. He put down his knife and fork, looked me in the eye, and said that what he did know was that the intelligence community did not forget, that while I was still at the Post I was protected from CIA retribution. “The moment you leave, you’re an open target,” he cautioned. “But when and how would Louise and I get the chance to be adventurous again?” I asked. He at first said nothing, then said, “That’s my best advice.” Later I would wish I had taken it. I asked Louise to fly back to Washington so that we could discuss it, though, in truth, my mind was already made up. A huge snowstorm blanketed much of the East Coast just after she arrived. Over dinner at a Greek restaurant on Dupont Circle, I outlined to her the reasons why I felt I should take the job, the main one being that we would be far away and on an adventure as we started our life together. She was skeptical. “I can’t see you working for a newsmagazine, and you love the Post,” she said, shaking her head. I said I was sure that it was what I wanted—for me, and for us. U.S. News would pay for us both to study Chinese in Taiwan for a year, then we would proceed to Beijing. I told her about Steve’s caution over CIA retribution, but said I felt that was overblown. Once I was far away in Asia and my name was no longer on the front page of the Post, retribution was unlikely. What form could it even take? She was still reluctant, saying she would love to go to China with me but thought I was making a mistake and that we should wait. After two days, just as I had with Karin, I won her over. When I told Bradlee of my decision, he thought I wanted more money and said he was ready to accommodate me. When he realized I had made up my mind, he was at his most gracious. Just before my departure at the end of March, Bradlee hosted a newsroom party that included a huge

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cake with the Chinese characters for “good luck.” He made a speech. My response was incoherently maudlin. Louise and I arrived in Taipei, the bustling, traffic-clogged, Americanized capital of Taiwan, in the late summer of 1987. We lived in an efficiency apartment rented for us by U.S. News and became students, attending Chinese-language classes at the university in the morning and practicing with Chinese tutors in the early afternoon. We also explored the island, sampled Taipei’s restaurants, toured the outdoor markets at night, and spent time in teahouses working on our Gorbachev biography, discussing and alternating writing chapters. I quickly gave up on learning thousands of Chinese characters and concentrated on speaking—and even that made me feel I was constantly negotiating a minefield, as Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language. Being in this faraway place with Louise felt like an extended honeymoon, even though we were not married. I was still awaiting the finalization of my divorce from Karin. Buoyed by Louise’s happy disposition and curiosity about life, I forced myself to live in the present and not worry about the future. Far from the center of intelligence reporting, removed from Soviet affairs, warnings about CIA retribution receded further. Nine months later, in the late spring of 1988, we moved to Beijing, into U.S. News’s spacious, rather worn three-bedroom apartment in the foreigners’ compound at Jianguomenwai, within sight of the main Chang An Avenue. It felt like an even further world away from my former life— removed, even, from modern Taiwan. There were almost no cars. I had the sense of starting over, being reborn, as we went through the bureaucratic processes of acquiring Chinese drivers’ licenses and press cards, buying a jeep, and hiring a translator and a maid through the Chinese government’s bureau for foreigners. I would drive with Louise down to Tiananmen Square in our jeep, crawling slowly along to avoid hitting any of the swarming bicycles. I would park on a side street and stand below the giant portrait of Chairman Mao dominating the square from the red wall of the Forbidden City, wondering about this mixture of ancient land and Maoist repression. Professionally, though, I floundered. For all of my professional life I had been either a wire service reporter or a daily newspaper journalist. In my arrogance, I had frequently in the past disdained newsmagazine

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writing, which puts an emphasis on packaged stories, successive drafts honed by editors. My lifelong approach to journalism, shaped by Clyde’s tutoring and the lessons at Columbia Journalism School, put the greatest emphasis on facts and getting to the truth. I had also focused on politics and official personalities. But not only did the politics in China, in which I had no background, elude me; I also no longer had the discipline of daily deadlines. I missed the Washington Post, which had been my life, in many ways my family, and which had pushed me to write my best. I felt adrift, unable to adapt to this new kind of journalism. I was drinking too much. Louise did her best to help me. She had negotiated a contract with the Sunday Times and was writing articles and features about China and Chinese society with the kind of vitality and humor I did not have. I sometimes caught her looking at me in a way that made me suspect she thought I had made a monumental mistake in leaving the Post. I tried not to think she was right, but a piece of who I was was missing and I had not expected this. I felt this even more keenly when I bumped into Wang Chongjie, the longtime Moscow correspondent of the official Xinhua news agency, three months after arriving. We had first met in 1969, shortly after the SinoSoviet border clashes on the Ussuri River, and become friends. Wang, like many older Chinese officials, had been educated at a Russian university— he had gone to Leningrad University—and spoke fluent Russian. Many times, when I had wanted a thoughtful discussion in Moscow, I would seek out Wang. In Beijing, now, he would come to dinner in our apartment, round-faced, earnest. His glasses were designed to go dark in sunshine, but also darkened as we turned on the lights in the apartment, making him look like a Chinese mafioso. It was in Russian, our common language, that he sketched out for us in broad outlines the factional struggles over reforms that were raging in the lead-up to Gorbachev’s planned visit to Beijing in May of 1989, for the first Sino-Soviet summit in three decades. I felt grateful to him for lifting for me some of the opacity of what was happening in China but, at the same time, saw how little I understood. In the Soviet Union, Wang and I had had two-sided discussions, sharing information and insights. Now I had little but questions. For hours, Wang thoughtfully explained that the Chinese Communists, especially the intellectuals and workers and students, were immensely interested in the liberal political and economic reforms Gorbachev was pushing through.

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But Deng Xiaoping, China’s de facto ruler, thought Gorbachev’s reforms were dangerous and premature. The new Communist Party leader, Zhao Ziyang, was among those who favored policies similar to Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. With Deng and other party elders insisting that political reforms must wait until China gained a sound economic footing, conflict was in the air. But even with Wang helping me understand the nuances and factions in Chinese politics in ways I would have investigated and detailed for the Post, a weekly newsmagazine focused on occasional big-picture stories, not the kind of daily news stories that the Post and its editors would have run. One result of my feeling journalistically adrift was that, when our son Thomas was born in Hong Kong on February 4, 1989, I became the kind of family man Karin had wanted me to be. I helped with diaper-changing and night-feeding duties. Louise and I spent many afternoons and weekends on outings with Thomas in a sling on my back. I would sometimes slip out of the apartment if Thomas woke up in the early hours of the morning, to let Louise sleep, and watch Chinese practicing tai chi in Beijing’s parks. We would visit the Beijing zoo, and enjoy taco night with other foreigners at the Jianguo Hotel. One weekend, we took a bus trip to the Great Wall with friends, including my Columbia classmate Lew Simons, who had moved to Beijing to report for Knight Ridder, and McKinney Russell, a friend from my Moscow days who headed the cultural section of the US embassy. As in Moscow, foreign journalists and diplomats and their wives and husbands often invited one another for dinner parties, given the dearth of places to eat out. We regularly gave or went to dinner parties with such friends as the Indian ambassador, Rangy Ranganathan, whom both Louise and I had known when he was ambassador to Moscow; the Thai ambassador, Tej Bunnag, and his wife, Phensri; and such journalists as the New York Times’ Nick Kristof and his journalist wife, Sheryl WuDunn, and Daniel Southerland, who reported for the Washington Post. I was happy to be an involved parent because I was in love with Louise and her infectious joy at being a mother, a role she put first over being a journalist. I wondered whether I would have been neglectful of her and Thomas if they had been at home as I single-mindedly pursued my career. It was an impossible question to answer. Louise shared my interests and had the kind of curiosity that Karin lacked. And I had met her at a

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different stage of my life. Being in love was intoxicating, but a part of me was missing: the part of me that was a journalist for a great newspaper. This became even more painfully clear to me as the events leading up to the Tiananmen Square uprising and massacre began. It all started on April 15, 1989, two months after our return to Beijing with baby Thomas, when the Chinese Politburo member Hu Yaobang died at age seventythree. Three and a half years earlier, in December 1986, Hu had been the Communist Party’s general secretary when student protests broke out across China. Hu’s political opponents had successfully blamed the protests on his political and economic reforms, his “bourgeois liberalization,” and his advocacy of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. He had been removed as general secretary, though allowed to remain on the Politburo. With his death, Hu became a symbol of a yearning for Gorbachev-style reforms in China. Louise and I attended his Tiananmen Square memorial service a week later and witnessed thousands of students marching in protest at the way Hu had been treated. It was clear they had been emboldened by the reforms that Gorbachev was promoting in the Soviet Union and that were sweeping across Eastern Europe, and by the fact that Gorbachev was due in Beijing a month later. As April turned to May, pro-democracy demonstrations swelled in Beijing and broke out in more than four hundred cities. I stood on our balcony filming demonstrators clogging the streets, marching on foot, riding bicycles, and packed into honking vans and cars. They waved red or white banners displaying such slogans as “The Soviet Union today, China tomorrow.” Student demonstrators began camping out in central Tiananmen Square in the thousands, in makeshift tents and sleeping bags. Student leaders in the square then announced a hunger strike. By the time Gorbachev arrived in Beijing on May 15, the government had lost control. Two to three million people filled Tiananmen Square and choked city roads. The Chinese government had to move the welcoming ceremonies from Tiananmen Square to the airport, then route Gorbachev’s motorcade through back roads to a government guest house in the suburbs. Louise and I were unable to drive our jeep out of our compound through the crowded streets to reach Tiananmen Square and the Great Hall of the People, where Gorbachev was supposed to give a press conference. We instead battled on foot through a series of narrow alleys known

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as hutongs, then took the subway to reach the Great Hall. But once we got there, a harassed-looking official told us that Gorbachev would instead meet the press at the government guest house. I spotted Imai, my former Moscow neighbor who worked for the Mainichi newspaper in Tokyo, in the crowd of journalists, many of whom had flown in for the Gorbachev visit. He had somehow managed to get a car and driver to the Great Hall and gave us a ride to the government guest house. Gorbachev was brought in and looked uncomfortable. Only about half of the journalists who had been at the Great Hall had made it. I asked him a question in Russian. He had been insisting that the Communist system just had to be reformed, I said, that his so-called perestroika and glasnost changes were part of the “growing pains of socialism.” Did the crowds in Tiananmen Square represent these “growing pains of socialism”? With a curt nod of his head, he refused to give a meaningful answer. Throughout Gorbachev’s visit, the demonstrations swelled and the Chinese government seemed paralyzed. By May 16, there were more than three thousand hunger strikers in Tiananmen Square. Louise and I, like other journalists, reported on the rising numbers, depicting in our stories the ambulance sirens blaring as they transported fainting students, many of whom professed they were ready to die if need be, to medical tents to be treated and rehydrated. Chinese from many walks of life, including workers, increasingly joined the protesters. I grieved for my old job at the Post, for what now felt like the luxury of writing a story with the latest developments or analysis for the next day’s paper. I wanted to cover events day by day, relaying what I was seeing, rather than being subjected to the newsmagazine story process, with endless rewriting and condensing by editors. Had I been writing for the Post, I knew I would have worked as if I were on fire, sleeping little, driven by the demands of daily deadlines. I would not have excelled as I had in Moscow, but I would have been engaged and digging as Clyde had taught me. I could never quite give the U.S. News editors the overview stories they wanted; try as I might, I simply did not know how to craft that kind of article. I kept telling myself that I was with Louise and that that was all that mattered. The big story, the momentum of the protests, began to fizzle after Gorbachev left. It appeared to be over, and editors around the world thought so too. On May 19, Louise and I went with Thomas to Tiananmen Square: litter was everywhere, the numbers dwindling, the atmosphere more like

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a mixture of summer camp and traveling circus. On May 20, the government imposed martial law on the city and mobilized three hundred thousand young men from the Beijing area. The number of demonstrators declined further. By the end of May, many foreign journalists—both those who had come for the four-day Sino-Soviet summit between Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping from May 15 to 18, and resident journalists—made plans to leave, either to return to their home bases or take a vacation after so many weeks of reporting the story that had held the world’s attention. Louise and I had tickets to leave with Thomas for Hong Kong on Friday, June 2, then travel onward for a beach vacation in Malaysia. Louise’s editors in London, like those at my magazine and other media outlets, had no interest in yet another dispatch about the failed, fizzling Tiananmen protests. But that Thursday, June 1, Louise’s internal alarm bells went off when she witnessed, on the street outside our compound, a standoff between regular people and trucks filled with soldiers sent in from the provinces. People had let the air out of the truck tires and were haranguing the soldiers, many of them barely out of boyhood and looking uncomfortable. “Let’s postpone for a few days. Things just don’t feel right,” Louise said. On Saturdays, the Sunday Times was like a daily paper and she wanted to be cautious. Louise had written a feature story for that week’s newspaper about taking care of baby Thomas in China. A Reuters photographer went with her and Thomas to take a photo of them in Tiananmen Square on Friday to accompany the story. We had guests for dinner the next evening, Saturday, June 3. Just after ten o’clock that night, as we were serving coffee and brandy, the night outside our compound lit up. We rushed to our window in time to witness an army personnel carrier on the main avenue being firebombed and bursting into flames, likely killing the soldiers inside. The dinner party was instantly over. Adrenaline flowing, we went to work. It was one of the most frustrating nights of my life, crystallizing how much I missed daily journalism for the Post and how much I regretted leaving. One of the most important stories of the late twentieth century was unfolding—the Chinese government had ordered military forces to clear the square—and I was without an outlet to report for in real time.

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Louise, unlike me, was on deadline throughout the night, since London was eight hours behind Beijing, and her reporting and updates covered much of the Sunday Times front page. I helped her throughout the night as I also gathered material for the next edition of U.S. News & World Report. I kept in phone contact with my Columbia Journalism School classmate Lew Simons, who was in a hotel a few blocks down Chang An Avenue with a view from his window of many of the atrocities. Shortly after midnight, he was able to provide an eyewitness account of armored personnel carriers entering the square and, at one o’clock, of paratroopers sealing off the area and army troops pouring out of the Great Hall of the People. There was a lot of shooting throughout the brutal military assault. The air was thick with smoke. Hundreds, if not thousands, were killed. By six in the morning, the square had been cleared. The last group of students was removed from the Monument to the People’s Heroes, in the middle of the square, as they were singing the “Internationale.” As Louise returned from Tiananmen Square and fell into a brief, exhausted sleep at around seven, I lay awake, painfully aware of how deeply I missed the rigor of reporting for the Post and how detached I felt from China professionally, without the rhythm of daily deadlines and the discipline it had imposed on me. The next day, Louise and I were again working together, going out to try and establish the full scope of the massacre. Thomas’s nanny, Wang Jinxia, was agitated as she arrived at our apartment midmorning, coming in even though it was Sunday, her day off. “But if I didn’t come,” she said, “there would be nobody to look after Thomas, and you would not be able to tell the world what happened.” We left the apartment shortly after ten o’clock and found a war scene, with burning buses, wrecked military vehicles, twisted metal barriers everywhere. We witnessed students driving through the streets displaying the corpses of their dead friends. “Animals, animals,” we heard one woman say. We were able to get in touch with our translator, who came with us to Fuxingmen Hospital. We were barred by military personnel from going in, but a nurse told us that, treating the dozens of injured, she and other medical staff were “shocked at the cruelty. Most of us cried.” That night, shooting continued sporadically. Wang Jinxia came to work again the next morning. We traveled with a U.S. News photographer and translator north to the Sino-Japanese Friendship Hospital, where

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a twenty-three-year-old man with blood-caked trousers told us that he and his friend, both clerks at a factory near Tiananmen, had heard the commotion in the square and gone to see what was happening. As they turned a corner, a tank had blasted a hole through his friend’s head. “Are you a Chinese man? The world should know about this!” he screamed at the hospital guard, tears streaming down his face, as the guard at first refused to let us see his friend’s body, then finally relented. That afternoon, back outside our compound, we saw two army trucks ablaze after being attacked by people with gasoline bombs. Tanks had been moved onto the nearby Jianguomen Bridge. After one of the tanks strafed the compound, Louise, Thomas, and I, along with other residents, were evacuated in a convoy from the compound, arranged by Western embassies. We went to stay with our friend Arne Belling, the Danish ambassador, and his family. In the months that followed the Tiananmen massacre, China became as quiet as a graveyard. Our book, Gorbachev: Heretic in the Kremlin, came out in early May of 1990 to coincide with Gorbachev’s visit to the United States. A friend noticed the book in a Beijing bookstore, translated into Chinese, though nobody had asked for permission to translate or publish it. I phoned Xinhua asking for at least the ten free copies normally given to the author, but they refused. In the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe, I could have found a way to get them by shaming officials in fluent, profanity-laced Russian. But here, I did not have the same deep understanding of the language, people, and culture. It was just one more episode that emphasized how professionally unmoored I felt. With Beijing so quiet, we decided to explore and write about more of China. We traveled from Manchuria in the North to Hainan Island in the South, to Tibet and Szechuan in the West. We roamed through ancient Chinese towns where shops were full of strange wonders, like snake wine and jars of pickled lizards and medicinal deer antlers. In Mao’s native village in Hunan Province we rented his summer home for two days; it had been built for him after he took power. Though I loved the traveling and being with Louise and Thomas, I knew I could no longer stay in China or with U.S. News. I began to wonder what to do next, how to live a life with both the professional and personal in balance, the kind of life my father had prescribed. I had closed the door on the driven journalism I had once

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pursued. I had made my name, achieved my ambition, and I was proud of that. But what next? I began to think about writing books for a living. That, I thought, could make me happy. But what would I write about? In the past I had ended assignments overseas for the Post by writing books—The Yugoslavs after Yugoslavia, Shadows and Whispers after Moscow. But that was when I had a career with a prestigious newspaper, could command paid fellowships and generous advances based on that. I felt I had been a failure with U.S. News, and knew that editors there were less than thrilled with my reporting from China. I felt I did not have the understanding of China for anything more than a mediocre book. And what would I do if I returned now to the United States? I had no clear idea, and I felt I was not yet ready to return to the city where Karin and Peter still lived. If I stepped into a public role there—say, with a position at a think tank commenting on Soviet and Eastern European affairs—I might again draw unwanted CIA attention. On CNN, available to us in China in our foreigners’ compound, we watched events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and constantly wished we were there to report on it. Poland got its first non-Communist government, the Soviet Union had its first semi-free elections, the Berlin Wall came down, and even the South African apartheid system came to an end. The familiar world beyond China, places I understood, was changing with dizzying speed. An idea began to take shape. I could, I thought, be like Clyde and put together a freelance operation in Yugoslavia while I gathered material for a solid book that I could write when I did go back to the United States. I was, after all, an expert on that part of the world; I would not be as at sea as I had been in China. A part of me also wanted to make peace with my father’s ghost and felt it might be possible. Tito was dead and Yugoslavia seemed poised to be part of the democratization sweeping Eastern Europe. That Balkan homecoming I had dreamed of more than a decade and a half earlier might now be possible. Louise was enthusiastic about covering Eastern Europe and getting to know Yugoslavia and my relatives. Robert Maxwell, owner of the London Daily Mirror and scores of other companies, had just started an English-language weekly broadsheet, the European. The deputy editor, Peter Millar, a friend who used to work in the Reuters bureau in Moscow, offered me a generous contract to be the paper’s Balkan correspondent, which would leave me free to write for US daily newspapers.

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I made arrangements to also file for the Baltimore Sun, the Fort Worth StarTelegram, and the Boston Globe. The Sunday Times gave Louise a contract to be its Balkans correspondent based in Belgrade; she would also be a stringer for several other publications in Australia, Canada, the United States, and Singapore. Louise, eighteen-month-old Thomas, and I packed up our household and moved to Belgrade in August of 1990.

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A Reckoning in Yugoslavia

Louise and I sat in a restaurant in the lively bohemian quarter known as Skadarlija in Belgrade’s Old Town soon after arriving. As we listened to Gypsy music and ate cevapcici, a dish of grilled minced meat, and drank wine, I could not help comparing Belgrade and Yugoslavia with the place I had left fourteen years earlier. Back then, I had been a significant figure, a Washington Post reporter at the time of Watergate, an American correspondent of Yugoslav heritage in Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia at the height of the Cold War. Now the world and I were changing. I had achieved my ambition in journalism and was a freelance journalist like Clyde, seeking a new raison d’être as I gathered material for one or more books. My mind also wandered to the awkward encounter with my brother Mladen and Bobo Cagalj, his Communist Party minder, in the Dva Ribara restaurant that was not far from where Louise and I were now. Back then, I was sure that in leaving Yugoslavia, becoming American, and believing in all that the United States stood for, I had crossed a bridge over which there could be no return. But a new hope now flickered.

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Could I finally mend the aching hole at the center of my being, created by the rift with my family and my father’s curse? Louise was as optimistic as I was. She had fretted in Beijing over my inability to embrace newsmagazine journalism. Now she expressed hope that I would again find my feet. With so much time off the radar of the intelligence community, too, I was sure they would have forgotten me by the time I returned to the US. Our optimism on that August night seemed justified. We had just moved into our new home, a stone and brick house in the Diplomatic Colony, in the same picturesque upmarket neighborhood where Karin, Peter, and I had lived. The house, built for the head of the first US military mission to Tito’s Yugoslavia in the 1950s, had three bedrooms, a lovely red stone patio and garden, and a downstairs bedroom for our Chinese nanny, Wang Jinxia, who, to our surprise, the Chinese government had granted permission to join us. She was due to arrive soon in Belgrade after the paperwork, including getting a passport, was sorted out. Under that starry August sky, we made plans to reconnect with Mladen and his family, who still lived in the Sarajevo house where I had grown up, and with my mother, who had retired to a house on the Croatian coast that I had bought her. The dinar was convertible and strong, and after our dinner in Skadarlija, Louise and I strolled past stores with an abundance of goods, including imports, that seemed to promise us a comfortable, stable base. But as I read local newspapers and listened to the local radio stations, I quickly began to feel alarmed. Yugoslavia’s six ethnic republics had just elected non-Communist, nationalist governments. Serbia’s leader, Slobodan Milosevic, was whipping up Serb nationalism to roaring crowds, talking about restoring to Serbia parts of Croatia and Bosnia that Tito had taken away in an effort to dilute the former dominance of the Serbs. The previous summer, he had gone to Kosovo on June 28, 1989, the six hundredth anniversary of a day holy in Serbian lore: in 1389, the Serbian Tsar Lazar was defeated there by the Ottoman Empire on the so-called Field of Blackbirds. As Serb legend has it, it was actually a victory because Tsar Lazar chose to die, to enter a heavenly kingdom, rather than accept defeat on earth. For Serbs, Kosovo was the cradle of their civilization, home to ancient Serb monasteries, even though it was now predominantly Albanian and Tito had made it an autonomous province. Before we left China, the

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Serbian correspondent for the Belgrade-based newspaper Politika had enthused to us about Milosevic restoring Serbs’ honor. I had not taken him too seriously. Now I began to. Since Yugoslavia was not yet a focus of editors’ or world attention, though, Louise and I went on reporting trips in the region as planned, including to Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, even Greece. But I became even more alarmed as the reviving nationalism in Yugoslavia grew, with calls for violence and retribution. I listened to radio talk shows spewing nationalist drivel, turning other ethnic groups into monsters and caricatures. In June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence from Yugoslavia. Louise and I drove on an eerily deserted highway from Belgrade to Slovenia to cover the relatively bloodless ten-day secession of that small, largely homogeneous republic. But ethnically mixed Croatia was not going to break away so easily. We found ourselves covering clashes as forces loyal to the government of Croatia were pitted against both the Serb-controlled Yugoslav People’s Army and local Croatian Serb forces. The escalating war that we were now covering included sieges of the cities of Vukovar and Dubrovnik. We began getting into physical danger. In November of that year, when Louise was seven months pregnant, she and I were held at Serb gunpoint trying to get into Dubrovnik as it was besieged by Serb forces. The next month, we headed to England, and Louise’s parents’ village, to await the birth of our second child, Nicholas, on January 21, 1992. Though the European Union recognized Croatia’s independence, fighting continued in Serb enclaves back in Yugoslavia. The job in Yugoslavia was increasingly turning into war reporting. Back in England, with our new baby, Louise and I began to discuss our future. Louise was now more interested in motherhood than in war reporting. She wanted the boys to grow up in one place, something she felt she had missed out on by growing up in Uganda and being sent to boarding schools. Though I liked Britain, I could not imagine living there long-term. We decided we would go to the United States and settle there and that we would start looking for opportunities to do so. First, though, I felt a family duty stirring in me. I was closely following local Bosnian news reports that depicted conflict brewing, and occasional violent incidents, between Bosnia’s Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. I began to think Dad and Lawrence Eagleburger were right to warn that

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Yugoslavia would never be able to escape its bouts of violent ethnic hatreds. I felt that war was coming to Bosnia and I had to first help Mladen and his family leave. And so, two weeks after returning to Belgrade with Thomas, now three, and baby Nicholas, Louise and I set off for Sarajevo from our home in Belgrade in the white Mercedes we had bought from the departing Danish ambassador, leaving the children with Wang Jinxia. It was a safe journey still, along highways and serviceable roads. We checked into the Holiday Inn, a rather soulless establishment painted lurid brown and yellow and built for the 1984 Winter Olympics. We had arranged to meet Mladen there for dinner that evening. I wanted to discuss with him ways I could help him and his family—his wife, Sonja; his son, Zoran; and his daughter, Andrea—to leave, probably for the United States. I was sure that he would be attuned to the impending war in Bosnia and know that there was no time to lose. “I hope this time we can meet without your party secretary,” I said on the phone. My brother laughed. He was no longer a Communist, he said. Besides, Bobo Cagalj had moved, “gone to Croatia, he’s a Croat.” Something about the crazed nationalist agitation in bustling cafés and restaurants that afternoon put me off. People in small groups acted conspiratorially. As I eavesdropped, hearing snatches of conversation, I sensed the place was brimming with vague racial and religious fears. What, I thought, was I doing here? Wasn’t this what I had wanted to escape? I thought about the talk I’d had with Eagleburger by the US embassy pool more than a decade earlier, about him quoting the Book of Proverbs: “Where there’s no vision, the people perish.” Fear of the Soviet Union had temporarily united the South Slav tribes, he had said. But now that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist, they no longer had a common vision. That afternoon, my foreboding deepened when I phoned a few former Yugoslav colleagues from the Holiday Inn. I heard the shocking news that Sveto Maslesa, the former Oslobodjenej editor with whom I had reconnected in Moscow and who had been my entrée into Soviet society at the press club and elsewhere, had committed suicide the previous week. Maslesa, a Serb, had been married to a Muslim. According to a mutual friend, he took his life “apparently because he couldn’t take this new nationalism.” I discovered that my old table tennis partners from when I was in high school no longer lived in the city. I came across a high school

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acquaintance, Vojo Babic, at Hotel Europe, around the corner from the spot where Franz Ferdinand was shot, sparking World War I. “Everybody is getting armed. Bosnia is the bomb of Yugoslavia and it’s about to go off,” he said in hushed tones, looking over his shoulder. But when Mladen showed up at the Holiday Inn, looking fit and in good health, he was brimming with optimism about his, and Bosnia’s, future. Sonja had a previous engagement and could not join us, he explained. He and a colleague had started a lucrative private medical practice. Life was good, he said. This startled me. Hadn’t he watched the television news? I asked. Mladen said no, he was no longer interested in politics. “Besides, the political tensions will sort themselves out.” We were sitting at a table by the window and my mind went back forty-seven years to when my mother had been wielding a shovel in a field not far from here during one of those “voluntary labor actions.” I could see her in my mind’s eye, wearing a flower-patterned cotton dress and a kerchief tied at her forehead. I wanted to mention that long-forgotten incident to Mladen, but then realized that he had been a toddler at the time and would not remember. So I started talking about Dad and what seemed his prescient concern about what might happen to his children and grandchildren. I told Mladen about what Dad had said when I was twelve, that he had told me, “You have to get away from here—promise me you won’t spend the rest of your life stuck here.” As I relayed this to Mladen, I could recall Dad’s tone of voice exactly—no indignation, just a calm, logical judgment. Dad must have been a psychic, I said. Bitter experience of repetitive cataclysms had taught him that our people go crazy from time to time, that they engage in bouts of violence and unreason. This was one of those times, I said, a time of chaos filled with ugly rhetoric. I was about to raise the specter of the frightful religious war I could see coming, but the shock on his face made me stop. I quickly terminated my little speech by urging him to take his family out of Bosnia “as soon as possible.” I was prepared to help him settle down in the United States, I added. Mladen shook his head, his eyebrows raised as if I had said something of surprising stupidity. Looking at Louise, he said, “He’s been away too long.” Now suddenly confident, even jolly, he told us, “You must realize that war here’s impossible. Look, my best friends are Muslim. Do you realize that one-third of all marriages in Bosnia are mixed?”

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What was I missing? I wondered. We went back and forth on the subject, but he wouldn’t budge from his optimism. Instead he summoned a couple of his colleagues who were dining at the Holiday Inn, and they backed up his assessment. We returned to Belgrade. The war started six weeks later, on April 6, 1992. Now nobody was allowed in or out of Sarajevo as Bosnian Serb leaders shelled the city. The countryside, in particular, erupted in a collective dementia of looting, arson, and destruction. Telephone links with Belgrade were not interrupted and I talked almost daily with Mladen and Sonja. They became my most reliable source of information about the appalling situation in the besieged city. I began to empathize with Mladen. We spent more time talking to each other in those few weeks than we had in our entire lives. Their lives, I soon learned, had become a nightmare. Mladen and his son, Zoran, also a physician, worked at the Kosevo hospital. Each day, he told me, they had to sprint across the open spaces outside the Radnik movie house to dodge bullets fired by Serbian snipers from the village of Osmice, in the hills just above the Jewish cemetery. The hospital itself, he said, had become a vast emergency room. The injured were triaged, and the worst cases waited for surgery on a series of stretchers lined up in a corridor. But after a few days of shelling, the wards were filled, and patients were lying on the floor between the beds. Medical order soon broke down. The doctors were dressing wounds and performing surgeries around the clock. “We resemble butchers after a long day,” Mladen said, referring to the doctors’ and nurses’ blood-spattered surgical gowns. “I have never seen so many dead and injured.” The morgue was filled and new corpses were stacked on the pavement outside. “We’re running out of anesthetics and antiseptics,” he complained. For the first time in his life he was forced to operate on a patient without anesthesia. But if he didn’t amputate the girl’s arm, he said, he knew she would die of her wounds. He managed to operate because the girl fainted the moment he started. The days and hours for him, Mladen said, were an exhausted blur. He had become numb to the capricious deaths of children, the suffering of mothers. As the months went by, NATO countries withdrew their ambassadors to protest the war in Bosnia. Our Diplomatic Colony also changed. Foreign embassies shut their doors or drastically cut their staff. Warren Zimmermann, the last US ambassador, left for Washington in May. Warlords,

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arms dealers, and an assortment of shady characters took over the empty embassy residences around us in the Diplomatic Colony. The most notorious warlord, Arkan, moved into the residence of the Thai ambassador. Our new next-door neighbor was a businessman in a perma-press suit with blue and white stripes, a pale blue shirt, and a yellow tie. He wore rimless spectacles that made him look like a college professor. He was doing export-import, he said when I first met him, and with a wink he added, “The kind of stuff that discharges seven hundred rounds a minute. Ha ha ha.” I lay awake night after night mulling the same question over and over: why did I break my vow never to return to Yugoslavia? My brother’s stories about the appalling suffering of Sarajevo residents were beginning to affect me. I thought about possible ways of saving Mladen and his family. I did not want to leave until they were safe. I continued to write for my collection of newspapers, but my main goal that summer of 1992 was to get Mladen and his family out of Sarajevo—no longer to the US but simply out of the city. At that point, there was speculation in the diplomatic community that the United States was preparing to bomb Belgrade in an effort to stop Slobodan Milosevic from financing and arming the Bosnian Serb Army. Diplomats regarded Milosevic as a shrewd and manipulative leader, but I suspected he was badly educated and mildly insane. What he said made no sense. But Washington procrastinated. Like many other foreigners, Louise and I airlifted what we thought of as our valuable possessions to England. Shortly afterward I made my first trip to Sarajevo under siege, without Louise. We had decided to travel separately now when reporting—so that one parent would survive. The European and other papers I was writing for were eager for stories from besieged Sarajevo. But my main goal in going there was as much personal as professional: I wanted to see things for myself and perhaps find a way to extricate Mladen and his family. As I drove to Sarajevo, I felt the lessons about keeping an emotional distance that I had learned from Clyde, from my Columbia University training, and from my own reporting experience vanish. I no longer felt I could be an objective journalist. This was too personal. This was the history and the family I had tried to disentangle myself from as I had

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fallen in love with America, American journalism, and all they stood for. Now I was being sucked back into my past. As I drove alone in the white Mercedes, I listened to threatening nationalist raving on the car radio. I stopped up in the hills above Sarajevo, at the headquarters of the leadership of the Bosnian Serbs who were overseeing the random shelling of the city in a bid to beat the city’s Muslims into submission. My aim was to cross over to the Muslim side by going through a United Nations outpost at the airport. It was a full moon, a sniper’s moon, as the Bosnian Serbs called it. It was long past midnight when I was stopped by Serb paramilitaries on a stretch of winding road directly above the Jewish cemetery. Mostly in their twenties, they reeked of alcohol, sweat, and unwashed clothes. Their voices were cigarette harsh. One perused my documents, kept looking up and down to match face and photograph, then again, and once more. “Nase gore list” (One of our kind), one said approvingly, reading my documents by the fire and observing that I, too, was a Serb. This reduced the level of hostility, though he immediately started to criticize Western press coverage of the siege of Sarajevo, to approving grunts and profanities from his men. I offered Marlboros—I always carried a carton of two hundred cigarettes for use as a diplomatic present when on the road. They asked me to join them for a drink. Someone passed a bottle of high-octane slivovitz. All around, we heard the firecracker pops of rifles and machine guns. Muslim troops were huddled in foxholes some three hundred feet away down the mountain. Much of the infamous Sniper Alley—as the dangerous stretch leading into Sarajevo was known—lay before me. Just then one of the soldiers crouching behind a stone hedge stood up, pointed his Kalashnikov toward the houses below, and emptied the magazine, the spent cartridges clattering on the ground. “Get the fuck down!” a man screamed at me as he raced toward us. Suddenly the air was full of the fat popping noise of small arms and everyone started swearing and grabbed their weapons. “This is a fucking war zone!” he said, leading me back to the fire. “Get him a drink,” he told the man holding the bottle. I asked that same young soldier if I could look down through his telescopic sight. I had seen people running along Vojvode Putnika Boulevard on TV, and my

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brother often talked about it. But what did it feel like to see a human being in a sight and pull the trigger? He grinned and handed me the wooden stock of his rifle. “I’ll show you a safe place,” he said, leading me back to the stone hedge. Through the scope I looked at a speckled green world of surprising clarity, in which tracer bullets left comet-like tails. Not a soul was in sight as I slowly viewed Vojvode Putnika Boulevard. I pulled the sight closer to my eye when I located the Olympic skating arena. The Radnik movie house was behind it and I couldn’t help imagining that my brother had to run that gauntlet each day. In the role of predator I kept looking at it until a small dark blob appeared, the shape of a man running for cover. I focused on the faceless human figure, vulnerable and, with the scope and powerful rifle, so near. I had the feeling I could touch him; I was suddenly aware that I could kill him. I took the scope down from my eye and handed it back to the young soldier with as much an air of martial confidence as I could muster. I could hear soldiers around me bragging about the targets they’d “eliminated” the previous day. There was something awful and indecent about their laughter. It made me think that there was something about the power of having a gun that allowed these boys to become killers. I had a feeling that everything inside me was slowly shriveling. I was clearheaded enough not to voice my disgust. I drove down to the city, my nerves ragged. Reaching the suburb of Lukavica, I was stopped outside a Serbian military compound and led to an office to meet a heavy-lidded man named Colonel Zarkovic, who had pouches beneath his eyes and the face of a melancholy hound. Sitting bolt upright in a chair and resting closed fists on the desk in front of him, he offered me a cup of coffee. To put the colonel at ease, I told him that my father had been a colonel in the Yugoslav army but had died nearly three decades earlier. To my surprise, I found myself imagining Dad was alive and standing beside me, and I wondered what he would say. I was absolutely certain he would have been repelled by the Serbian siege and could almost hear his admonishing authority rising up to condemn it. “Since you’re one of us, as we say, you surely must understand what’s going on here,” Colonel Zarkovic said, with the suspicion of a clannish highlander.

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“Not really,” I replied, trying to save what was left of my self-control, “I don’t understand your strategy. You’ve surrounded Sarajevo with heavy guns and you keep pounding it. Do you realize that the siege is condemned by the entire world as a crime against civilians?” “We have no choice but to continue,” the colonel said, his thick chest sticking out aggressively. I had a premonition that our talk was about to turn nasty, but I couldn’t contain myself. “You’re terrorizing civilians,” I said. “You realize that there are journalists in the city and that this whole business is broadcast across the globe like a deadly reality show. Most people think that’s barbaric.” The colonel’s mood changed. He mentioned that the Muslims had positioned guns at the Kosevo hospital—which was where my brother and nephew worked—and were firing at Serb positions. “That’s what I call barbaric.” He continued: “If we lift the siege we lose the war. It’s as simple as that. The siege will be maintained until they surrender.” He looked at his watch and added, somewhat pompously, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have things to do.” I wanted to say, Then you must know you’ve already lost. But I kept silent. At dawn, artillery shells began to explode in fields around Dobrinja, a front-line suburb at the edge of the airport, sending brown smoke billowing into the air. The mortar tubes flickered on the ridgeline. I had to fight the urge to scream as I crossed over into the Muslim-controlled part of the city. The physical devastation was appalling. The only hope I clung to was that Sarajevo was full of American and European journalists whose stories would, I believed, eventually force the outside world to intervene and lift the siege. I phoned my brother from the Holiday Inn, its southern face damaged by Serb shelling but still safe enough to stay in. We talked for a while. I proposed to come to the hospital to see him. He declined. “I’m very busy,” he said. “Besides, they might think I’m planning to escape.” As I drove back to Belgrade two days later, I was no closer to a plan to get Mladen and his family out of Sarajevo. I yearned to be back with Louise and the boys in the Diplomatic Colony, to use that vantage point to write stories about the war and to look more earnestly for ways to leave. I wanted to take Louise and our sons and put an ocean between me and my past. Why had I come here?

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After I returned to Belgrade and the relative safety of the Diplomatic Colony, scenes from besieged Sarajevo began to haunt my dreams. In my nightmares I was back in the city, marooned, terrified that something bad was about to happen. Then, in late June, I received an urgent phone call from my distraught sister-in-law. My brother had been arrested by the Bosnian Muslims. She was afraid, she said, that Mladen could simply vanish in the general chaos. Some detained persons had never been heard from. As she put it, “They were swallowed by the night.” “What was the charge?” I asked. I thought of the arrests of Uncle Uros and my cousin Ranko. “Good Lord!” She gave a brief, high laugh, tinged with hysteria. “There are no charges or arrest warrants here. They just took him away.” I didn’t know what to do. My immediate instinct was to phone Eagleburger, now acting secretary of state, and ask for help. But my brother wasn’t a US citizen. I consulted a friend in the US embassy, Thomas Hutson, former consul general in Moscow. He suggested I appeal directly to the Bosnian Muslim president, Alija Izetbegovic, and gave me the phone number the embassy was using. Hutson also disclosed that Izetbegovic’s daughter, Sabina, was acting as his personal secretary and would probably answer the phone. When I reached her, Sabina Izetbegovic sounded efficient and organized. Her father, she said, was extremely busy and could not take any phone calls. “We are at war here,” she said with finality. I attempted to explain why I wanted to speak to her father, but she cut me off. “We can’t deal with individual cases,” she said, and hung up. I passed a message on to Eagleburger. There is something about the authority and power of the US government that gives any request from the secretary of state an entirely different status. It’s hard to turn it down. I felt sure Eagleburger would understand that I had to plead to save my brother. The next morning I waited by the phone for a call from somewhere, as if gods could let me know how things with my brother were going to pan out. The phone rang shortly after noon. It was Mladen. He had been released that morning. A few weeks later, he and his family received exit permits. Louise had written a cover article for Newsday’s Sunday magazine in the summer of 1991 about the revival of religion in post-Communist Eastern Europe. She

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had kept in touch with Aryeh Cooperstock, a senior figure at the Jewish Joint Committee, whom she had interviewed at a synagogue in Budapest. He told her his organization was arranging a convoy to evacuate members of Sarajevo’s tiny Jewish community and that Mladen and his family were welcome to join it. Sonja had Jewish ancestry. Mladen, Sonja, Zoran, and Andrea made a harrowing road journey by bus through war-torn Yugoslavia. They were offered the chance to settle in Haifa, Israel. I tried to persuade Mladen to move to the United States, but he declined. At least he was safe. The retribution that Malek, Steve Rosenfeld, and David Ignatius had warned me of, and that had never quite disappeared from the back of my mind, began one hot September afternoon in 1992. Louise and I met Jay Peterzell of Time magazine in the lounge area of the Hyatt Regency. The five-star establishment of red marble and glass was all but deserted. It had been completed the previous year, just before the wars broke out. Louise, who had taken Peterzell’s initial call, and I were under the impression that he was working on the Bosnian war, and that he had been put in touch with us by Nancy Traver, Louise’s friend in the Washington bureau of Time. He indirectly confirmed this and presented me with the latest issue of the magazine, in which there was an article about Kosovo under his byline. It was a typical way of establishing bona fides. He furthered this impression by conveying greetings from Strobe Talbott, the Time diplomatic correspondent, and Stan Cloud, the bureau chief. I regarded both as friends. I had first met Talbott in December 1969 in Moscow. He was then still a student at Oxford, and he brought along his roommate, Bill Clinton. Cloud was then the second man in the bureau. Jerry Schecter, the bureau chief, was a close friend of mine. I remember Talbott having to leave Schecter’s holiday dinner early to join Clinton at another party. I retain this memory because Cloud was taken ill immediately after the dinner and had an appendectomy in a Soviet hospital the next day. It was only several years after our meeting with Peterzell that I learned that the fancy attaché case he had brought along with him was fitted with a recording system. In the deserted Hyatt Regency that afternoon, we expected to pick up gossip about the American political scene and whether

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Strobe Talbott would get a big job if his old roommate Bill Clinton was elected president. Louise wanted to know how Nancy Traver was faring following her divorce. Peterzell said suddenly that he had something unpleasant to ask and suggested I might not want Louise there. Surprised, I told him Louise and I had no secrets. He proceeded to talk about Yurchenko’s allegations. I told him I thought he, Peterzell, was being set up by the CIA, that the very idea of a $1,000 bribe was ludicrous, and that if he thought otherwise we had nothing to talk about. He agreed, but said that reporters could not get good stories without a relationship with the KGB and that I had had a lot of scoops. I thought I had only three or four scoops, I said. “What about the interior minister’s incognito visit to a police station?” he asked. I had no idea what he was talking about, and I saw I was dealing with someone who had no clue about the Soviet Union. I thought there was no point in continuing. I had tried to identify major trends—and had done so correctly, as it turned out—and Peterzell was talking to me about a minister’s visit to a police station? The man was not qualified to judge such matters. I told him to put away his notebook or we would be leaving right away. “You are being set up and I’m not going to take part in it,” I said. But as a courtesy to a colleague, I told him, I’d explain to him on an off-the-record basis how we worked in Moscow and I hoped he would faithfully relay our conversation to Talbott and Cloud. He agreed, reaching into the attaché case, ostensibly to put away his notebook, but also likely to turn on or check the recording equipment. I proceeded to do that, with Louise frequently offering her observations. I tried to explain why some people in the CIA wanted to crush me. I suggested he interview Per Egil Hegge, of Oslo’s Afternposten, who had told me that another Norwegian colleague, a former Moscow correspondent for the Scandinavian news agency, had admitted that the CIA had paid him to write, under a pseudonym, an exceptionally hostile review of Shadows and Whispers when it was translated into Norwegian. As we were walking out, I asked Peterzell again to tell Talbott and Cloud that I rejected in the strongest possible terms everything Yurchenko had said as completely untrue, and told him that the leak was a delayed CIA vendetta now that Robert Gates, whose interpretations of the Soviet Union had been at odds with mine, was CIA director, and that all

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Peterzell had been fed was unadulterated bullshit. Before we parted, I said I wouldn’t ask him to identify the source, but was I right to think it was the agency? Peterzell nodded his assent. I thought I should get on the phone and talk to Strobe Talbott. But as Louise and I discussed the whole thing, it seemed so preposterous that there was no need for such intervention. Talbott was a Soviet expert and Cloud a former Moscow correspondent. There was no way they would endorse a sting that fell apart under any serious examination by people who knew their stuff, as both of them did. We were also distracted by what was fast becoming an untenable situation in Yugoslavia. Not only was I psychologically imploding, but we were not sure we could continue financially. The previous November, Robert Maxwell’s body had been found floating in the Atlantic Ocean near the Canary Islands. At first it was judged an accidental drowning after he had fallen overboard from his yacht. But as banks called in loans, the truth was emerging: that Maxwell had been a con man. His empire of more than three hundred companies, including the European, had been run as a Ponzi scheme. Maxwell had also embezzled more than $600 million from his own companies’ pension funds. My generous retainer had just been terminated. There was talk of bankruptcy. True, I still received good money for each piece, but the loss of the retainer left a big hole in our budget. Louise and I sat down and went over the numbers. We decided that although we had a solid “go to hell” fund, we would be financially better off by leaving Belgrade, and we should look more earnestly for ways to leave. Louise thought of asking for a staff assignment at the Sunday Times back in London; she felt there had to be something I could do in England that I would find rewarding. I still wanted to return to Washington. She agreed. Unexpectedly, though, giving us a financial reprieve, Serbia suddenly experienced Weimar-like inflation. With the Bosnian war underway, the financially starved Belgrade regime turned to the printing presses. There was a run on the banks, followed by the collapse of the financial system. Encouraged by the regime, money changers flooded the streets to soak up any hard currency people had kept in reserve. Set by the market, the exchange rate quickly soared to stratospheric heights. Almost overnight, foreigners paid in hard currency found themselves well off in a very

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inexpensive country even as the inflation inflicted debilitating hardship, tragically driving many retirees to suicide. With ever-higher denominations being put into circulation, I began to collect these worthless pieces of paper. My collection includes several 500 million dinar notes. At one point, 50 million dinars bought six eggs at the farmers’ market. But at night, memories of my trip to Sarajevo still haunted me. I felt emotionally ill equipped to handle this war. In the darkness, I would relive being in the besieged city, still imagining that I was marooned with something bad about to happen. I’d force myself awake and think about my brother and his family, now safe in Israel, and I was slowly reassured by that thought and by Louise’s quiet breathing beside me. But I descended into depression—I was constantly asking myself why we had come here, berating myself for what I saw as a stupid mistake. I could see that my distress, moods, and renewed heavy drinking were affecting Louise, but even her good humor could not bring me out of my depressed state. We would spend time at the American Club in the US embassy and at the Hyatt Regency. It was usually all but deserted. National Geographic had commissioned me to write an article about Albania, which was cracking open after being one of the most closed, secretive Communist countries for half a century. Louise and I decided that once it was finished we would leave for the United States, even if it meant living off our “go to hell” fund and looking for jobs once we were there. I worked on the Albania piece with determination, feeling some echo of my past self, absorbed in reporting that partly involved tracing longlost relatives of my Albanian mother. It was just an echo, though, not the twenty-four-hour alertness, the feeling of always being on edge, always looking for a story (preferably on page 1 of the Post), being read by all of Washington as well as readers around the US, never wanting to be scooped by the competition. That is what had defined me, given me my identity as Dusko Doder. And now, who was I? I had given up being a star Washington Post correspondent for an array of reasons. Partly it was out of the disillusionment that came with the Yurchenko allegation and having to bow to the interests of the Post, to not follow Silberman’s advice to go public. There was, too, not wanting to be on the intelligence beat covering agencies I had embarrassed and that wanted revenge. I had also wanted to spare Karin and Louise the tensions of living in the same city. And I had thought I needed a course correction, to live a more

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balanced, still exciting life, the kind of life my father wanted for me, with the woman I loved. But what had happened since? Floundering in China without the discipline of the Washington Post, being in Yugoslavia, made me see that the real reckoning was now here. I needed to make peace with my past, with who I was, not run from it. After I completed the National Geographic piece, we left on an extended Christmas vacation in London, where we would, we decided, firm up our plans. I had forgotten about the distasteful meeting with Peterzell. But not for much longer. After all the dislocations and the uncertainties of the Yugoslav wars, it was paradise to be in a comfortable three-bedroom terraced house in Barnet, an upmarket neighborhood in North London. It was within an hour’s drive of the Buckinghamshire village where Louise’s ancestors had lived for centuries, and where we were due for Christmas. Almost immediately after we arrived in mid-December, there was a snowstorm and we were housebound. The city’s lights and decorations, its bells and baubles, were buried deep in piles of snow. I thought there was nothing better in the world than to sit with Louise and listen to eleven-month-old Nicholas and Thomas, about to turn four. As they played in the sitting room by the fire one day, the phone rang. I picked up. The voice on the other end was from another world, another time. It was Bob Kaiser, now the managing editor of the Washington Post. He sounded agitated. “Dusko? Have I tracked you down?” “Bob. How did you find me here? Why . . . ?” But somewhere in the pit of my stomach, I knew. Across the years I heard Malek’s warning, and the added warnings of Steve Rosenfeld and David Ignatius. Kaiser came straight to the point. Time magazine, he said, planned to run a story in its Christmas issue that strongly suggested I had been recruited by Soviet intelligence while serving as the Post’s bureau chief in Moscow. “The old Yurchenko stuff,” he said. “What? That’s total bullshit!” I shouted. “You know that Yurchenko snookered the agency. He was on a mission.” I thought about Peterzell in the Hyatt in Belgrade just over two months earlier. I had assumed Cloud and Talbott were professionals, that good reporting would expose the truth. How could my supposed journalistic brethren believe the narrative of whoever leaked it because it sounded like a good Cold War

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story now that the Soviet Union had disintegrated—the story of a star Post reporter secretly being a Soviet spy? It could not be, I thought. I had the sense of everything coming to an end, my entire professional career being threatened. “I know,” Kaiser said. “I think we can still stop the story, but you’ve got to talk to Time. They’re insisting.” He seemed confident he’d be able to talk sense to the Time editors. “I have nothing to talk to them about,” I said. I knew that journalists frequently sought to create the appearance of fairness by soliciting short comments from the accused. I also knew something about magazine journalism, how a storyline can start to take precedence over laying out facts. The phone kept ringing that evening. Jonathan Randal and several other Post colleagues called with words of encouragement. Ben Bradlee called too. Kaiser called several times and gave me the impression that he was getting nowhere in his talks with the Time people. “You have to talk to them,” Kaiser said. “I still hope we can stop them.” “OK,” I said. Perhaps there was a chance. But as soon as the words left my mouth I regretted them, realizing that Kaiser’s I think had become I hope. I tried to reach Strobe Talbott but without success; there were reports he would be given a high post in the State Department to guide US policy. I talked to Cloud eventually, at Kaiser’s insistence, and in the strongest language possible rejected the allegations. Cloud said they had not made a final decision, and he asked me to talk to Peterzell on the record. I agreed. But Peterzell wanted only a formal denial from me. I felt as if I’d walked into yet another ambush. By all logic and by any standards, there’s no more grievous blow to a journalist than impugning his or her professionalism or integrity. I saw my whole life being snatched away by lies. But how do you roll back all these lies? To whom do you complain? I had been immensely proud of my career in journalism. I knew the charges were completely false, but even if I demonstrated they were lies, once the charge is out there, it stays. Mud sticks. I could imagine weeks and months of predictable awfulness to come. Knowing all this was like dying—not from a single bullet in the head, but slowly, slowly, as a poison spreads throughout the body. And the poison was being administered by my journalistic brethren. I had to

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fight this, I thought. I had no choice. I recalled a line from Njegos, the nineteenth-century Serbian poet, that gave me heart: “Die gloriously / If you must die.” Yes, I said to myself, I’ll fight like hell. I was at an age at which my responses should have been tempered by caution, but the intensity of my rage demanded I take immediate action, no matter the risks. A courtroom was the place I most wanted to be, to face my accusers head-on. It was the only way I could go on living with dignity. But first I had to explain this to Louise. I did not want her to suffer, and since I had no way of knowing how long this legal battle would take or what it would involve, it seemed to me that we should lead separate lives until a settlement was reached. After the boys were bathed and put to bed, I poured two glasses of wine. Louise and I sat down in our living room to review the situation. I told her she should take our two boys and separate from me. She cut me off. “We’ll fight this together, baby,” she said. Being a journalist, of course, Louise knew that all we had were our reputations. What about the cost? We would sell our house in Alexandria, Virginia, and her London apartment, she said, embracing me as I fought back tears. My spine thus stiffened, I phoned my attorney in Washington, Mitchell Rogovin, the former CIA counsel who had deep knowledge of the events from eight years earlier, and told him about the conversations with Kaiser earlier in the day. The phone in the house was a pay phone and there were never enough coins to keep pumping in during the long consultations. I asked him to immediately serve notice on Time that I would sue them for libel if they printed this manufactured and wholly false story. It was now almost midnight in London, five hours ahead of Washington. I wondered if I should take a sleeping pill but decided not to, because they often left me tired and heavy lidded the next day. I needed my head clear. The next few days are a blur. The story had become big news at the Post. Jonathan Randal called and said that he and my other Post colleagues had started collecting money for a defense fund for me. Rogovin was my most frequent interlocutor. He was not encouraging. I was a “public figure,” he explained, and that meant I was stripped of the privacy that allows most people to sue for libel. As a public figure I would have to prove malice on Time’s part. “Time Warner lawyers,” he added, “will tie you into knots for years to come, given the company’s financial prowess and the CIA’s interest.” My future suddenly seemed so much darker and

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more complicated than I could ever have imagined. Bradlee called a few times. “You sure got some friends at Langley, pal,” he said. I knew all was lost when Randal told me that Katherine Graham, the Post publisher, had challenged Strobe Talbott at a party. “How could you do this, Strobe?” she asked. Talbott replied that he had been recently preoccupied with negotiating his financial settlement with Time before joining the Clinton administration as ambassador at large in charge of Russia (later deputy secretary of state). But then he added, “We believe it’s true.” I was in mild shock after Kaiser faxed over an advance copy of the Time story days before Christmas. Two full pages of smear and innuendo made me fight an urge to scream. In the story, events had been systematically distorted to imply that my scoop on Andropov’s death was handed to me by the Soviets. It was the end of the world as I knew it, I thought—to be insulted and robbed of my dignity and prestige. Time noted that my “journalistic record was impressive,” that the US government had concluded that my reporting was “too good,” that I “often had advance word on who was being investigated by the KGB—complete with rumors about their drinking and sexual habits,” that my stories “contained a depth of detail and a quality of analysis” that aroused suspicion that they were obtained by improper or unethical means. To support these allegations, Time quoted the top-ranking American in Moscow, Ambassador Arthur Hartman, as saying, “My impression at the time was that [Doder] had a very good source close to the Andropov group—probably KGB direct.” Hartman was the only person quoted in the article. I was familiar with Washington hardball, but now I felt the authors of the article were virtual hit men who had taken my life and thrown it away. If my reputation was destroyed, Bradlee said in one of his phone calls, Soviet experts I had disagreed with—Gates and others—would get a boost to their reputations. The Christmas lunch with my English relatives was a painful affair, despite the pops of Christmas crackers, the reading of the funny aphorisms, and a lively fire in the fireplace that warmed the Christmas tree to release a fragrance of pine. I put on my traditional English paper hat, a red crown,

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and tried not to sulk. The nicest thing my in-laws did was not to ask me any questions. I didn’t eat much because I couldn’t sleep the night before, and when I got up that morning I was still too agitated. But I enjoyed coffee and brandy afterward while we watched the queen’s speech on television. My father-in-law always insisted on it. Rogovin called two days after Christmas. It was my great fortune to have an attorney who knew all the CIA’s tricks and its blackest secrets. He had talked to Larry Silberman and a few other people, he said, and had come up with an idea for me to consider: why not file charges against the magazine in London? This, he said, would reduce CIA interference and speed things up. “And you know I know what I’m talking about,” he added pointedly. The downside, he explained, was that London would be more expensive and risky. The English legal system did not allow contingencies or defense funds of the kind my colleagues in Washington were setting up. The English had a rigid “loser pays” rule—the loser was responsible for all court costs, which normally ran into millions. I saw no problems. The possibility that I could lose never occurred to me. How could I lose if I was telling the truth? If there was justice in the world I was sure to prevail. Mitch said I should think about it, and he would confer with London lawyers who were allied with his firm. He said that Time executives had offered to debate me on television, and I was keen to vent my feelings. But Mitch said the best thing for me to do was to keep mum. “Silence is like darkness,” he told me. “Suspense makes them uncomfortable.” Sleeping badly that night, I began to wonder, after having popped awake in the dark for the fourth or fifth time, whether those phone calls from Washington had not occurred in dreams. The next day Mitch gave me the name and phone number of Peter Carter-Ruck. “He’s the best. He literally wrote the book on English libel law.” When I phoned Carter-Ruck, I was told that he had been on a retainer by Time magazine for years. The best libel lawyer would be my adversary. My spirits were fast sinking as we began to look for another lawyer. But then another event gave me heart. Twenty-eight top US journalists who had reported from the Communist world—ranging from David Halberstam and Flora Lewis to Craig Whitney and Jonathan Randal—had

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signed a letter to Time protesting the publication of its article. At least I knew that journalists were rallying behind me. I’d never met most of the signatories. We finally settled on the small firm of Schilling & Lom, on the strength of a recommendation by the counsel for the Sunday Times. It was a lastminute decision, because the next day we were scheduled to fly back to Belgrade at the end of our Christmas vacation. I presented my case in a long phone conversation with Keith Schilling, the senior partner. He agreed in principle to take me as a client but wanted me to fax him detailed answers to a list of questions he dictated to me over the phone. Once he had a chance to go over the material, I’d have to return to London for a conference.

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A month later, I returned to London and saw the Schilling & Lom partners at their Baker Street offices (a block away from Sherlock Holmes’s fictional house). In their tiny conference room I met, for the first time, Mark Thompson, who had been assigned to me by the firm’s senior lawyers. He had familiarized himself with my case and had consulted Mitch Rogovin. Thompson was about thirty, unmarried, thin, with bushy black hair and a winning smile. He looked, talked, and acted like a young Hugh Grant. I was uncertain of him. His hourly rate was a little over the British equivalent of $500, which was quite a bit less than Schilling’s. I was to be billed monthly, Thompson said, and delayed payments were charged 15 percent interest. I agreed. Louise and I put our house in Alexandria, Virginia, and her South Kensington apartment in London on the market. Real estate prices had plunged in 1991–92. Our renter in Alexandria had gone bankrupt. The house was empty and needed a new roof, and due to a new town ordinance, an access

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for disabled persons needed to be installed before it could be sold. It took about a year to sell both properties at a substantial loss. Back in Belgrade, where Louise and I were still covering the Yugoslav wars, I felt terrified that I did not have the strength to hold myself together. I was plagued by insomnia. When I did sleep, I had nightmares in which the twisted faces of Bill Casey and Robert Gates looked down in disapproval, mumbling warnings and shaking their heads. I now ventured outside the Diplomatic Colony only when required to do a story. When we did drive into the city of Belgrade, usually at Louise’s insistence as she tried to shake me out of my gloom, it seemed dreary, damp, and dark. Milosevic’s Serbia had been hit by sanctions for aiding and encouraging continued fighting in Bosnia and Croatia. Faces in the street were fearful. Hyperinflation had devastated the society. Shops everywhere were locked and closed. There were frequent blackouts and food shortages. My surroundings echoed the blackness in my soul. I was unable to concentrate. I raged inwardly, and to Louise, against life and its injustice. I avoided talking to friends; nothing depressed me so suddenly or made me doubt myself so rapidly as the question, “How’s your case going?” Louise, who was continuing to report for the Sunday Times and for other newspapers and radio stations, wrote several stories for me under my byline as she encouraged me to keep reporting with her. But I felt paralyzed, kept busy only with answering Mark Thompson’s questions, which he faxed to me. I traveled to London for short consultations. I talked to Thompson and Rogovin on the phone. The spring of 1993 came. I was stuck in Belgrade feeling like a wounded prisoner, sick with guilt at how miserable I was to live with. Louise remained cheerful and kept my spirits up, but that only made me feel more guilty. I thought back to when I had quit my job at the Post to join U.S. News & World Report, how she had urged me not to. Ben Bradlee kept in touch, offering words of encouragement. He relayed the news that the author of the Time article no longer worked for the magazine and that his boss, Stan Cloud, had been forced to retire at the end of the year. Bradlee told me he had also discovered that a former CIA operative had leaked the story to Time, but he would not give me his name. In his book A Good Life, which he was writing at the time, Bradlee described the agency’s revenge in the following way: “Doder wrote something that embarrassed the CIA, and when the agency thought they saw a chance to get even, they took their shot. It’s rare to catch them in the act.”

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Throughout 1993, I was frustrated by delay after delay as it became clear to me, and to Thompson, that Time’s strategy was to defer proceedings indefinitely, to wear me down and drain not only my resources but my spirit. I failed to understand how it was possible for the magazine’s lawyers to repeatedly swear false affidavits without incurring punishment. First Time argued that British courts had no jurisdiction, claiming that Time International was “printed and put into circulation in the Netherlands.” Eventually Thompson discovered the name and address of the English printer that produced all 114,000 weekly copies sold in Britain. In November of 1993, Time agreed to provide further particulars of their defense, as English law requires. But they delayed matters for six months and finally produced the particulars only under court order. Over the next eighteen months, to keep the case from coming to trial, Peter Carter-Ruck came up with thousands of new questions and demands for me to produce my notes, stories, and various other documents. Time also selected twentyfive of my Moscow dispatches as evidence of my unique (KGB-facilitated) access to information. The first on the list was a story about food shortages— which I had done on a callback (the story had appeared a day earlier in the New York Times and could be checked on LexisNexis under John F. Burns’s byline). Another legal gimmick employed by Time was to demand that I deposit almost $150,000 to pay Carter-Ruck’s legal fees if I lost the case. I could not put up that amount of cash. I appealed to the US Committee to Protect Journalists, but they were a body interested in protecting Third World journalists from dictators. Fortunately the court saw through Time’s maneuver and ruled against them each time. Another obstacle I encountered was the Post itself. Bob Kaiser, the managing editor, had told me that the Post would not help me financially if I proceeded to sue Time, as I had said I would. I said that the Time article libeled the Post as much as it did me. I asked whether I could monetize my Post pension to help pay for my legal expenses, but that was impossible as well. When I decided to sue in London, Kaiser said the paper opposed it as a matter of principle because the paper did not agree with British libel laws; it was also fighting a case there brought by a Russian oligarch. I was alone. Because of this, Washington Post staff were barred from getting involved, which meant that no one could testify on my behalf. This became rather painful when Carter-Ruck and the defense team started bombarding me with requests for explanations for thousands of alleged instances of the KGB feeding me with information.

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The simple fact is that virtually all stories that end up on page 1 of the Post are a refined product that bear the stamp of several people. In some exceptional cases, the correspondent had no knowledge at all as to what was published under his or her byline. For example, I had written the story on Marshal Tito’s death under Michael Dobbs’s byline because Michael, our correspondent in Belgrade, was some three hundred miles away from the city driving home that night. Or sometimes a correspondent was temporarily incapacitated and unable to file a story, as was the case with the wounded Chuck Krause, whose eyewitness account of the Jonestown massacre I wrote after listening to his rather incoherent tale for about fifteen minutes. In the case of more sensitive stories, especially those from Moscow, editors were more reluctant to tinker with the copy without consulting with and getting approval from the author. My stories were never changed, but bits and pieces of information available in Washington were woven into them from time to time. As one example of supposedly clear KGB fingerprints, Time cited a story from February 7, 1984, that described the rumored medical condition of Andropov. The foreign desk had managed to get a call through to Moscow that day and wanted me to talk to our medical writer, Vic Cohn. I repeated to Vic what I had heard, and he wrote a couple of paragraphs suggesting that the Soviet leader was afflicted by, among other things, Lou Gehrig’s disease, an illness I’d never really heard of. But when I got in touch with Vic to try to have him confirm this, he told me he couldn’t remember it. Another story involved my interview with Chernenko, which I had suggested to Karen DeYoung, my foreign editor at the time. But when I wrote to her asking her to confirm this, and our exchanges over the telex regarding what to ask the Soviet leader, she wrote me a letter saying she didn’t remember, but she was certain that I was right. Fortunately, John Darnton, at the New York Times London bureau, helped me by giving me access to the LexisNexis database so that I could retrieve and print out the stories I had written. Even though I was not guilty, I felt so much shame over the Time story that I wanted to disappear. But as the case wore on and my lawyers and I began to collect witness depositions, I was overwhelmed with gratitude and began to feel it was only a matter of time before the case was won. Among the scores of diplomats, journalists, and experts who signed

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witness statements on my behalf were Larry Eagleburger; former assistant secretary of state Jack Scanlan; Warren Zimmermann, the former US deputy ambassador in Moscow and former US ambassador to Yugoslavia; and Richard Stolz, former CIA deputy director for operations, as well as former Yugoslav foreign minister Ilija Djukic and Reino Paasaalina, a member of the Finnish parliament. Also offering testimony were numerous American and British colleagues, including many former Moscow correspondents of the New York Times. Craig Whitney, the Times foreign editor and probably the most critical reader of my copy on a daily basis, said he saw “no evidence whatsoever” that I “uncritically passed on information fabricated by the KGB.” Warren Zimmermann said that Time had asked him whether he had any reason to believe that I had been working for the Soviets. “I said absolutely no,” he stated in his deposition, “and the idea was absurd.” On the night of February 9, 1984, Zimmermann also said he told Time, he was tipped off by a source with known KGB connections that Andropov had died, and that he personally relayed the tip to the State Department. This was not included in the Time story. The New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, whom I did not know, wrote a column on the case in March 1995, also giving me heart. It read in part: “Those of us who live by freedom of the press must recognize that sometimes the freedom can be perverted into arrogance. A media giant does cruel injustice to an individual—and then uses its power to try to keep the victim from repairing the damage.” He characterized the article as “a classic smear, a concoction of innuendo and sensationalism. The wonder is that Time wants to go on defending it. . . . The editors of Time and the executives of Time Warner should rethink their evident decision to deal with the libel suit by crushing Dusko Doder. It is in their real interest—the interest of their standing in the profession—to apologize and settle this case.” On Thompson’s advice, I faxed a letter to Yevgeny Primakov, the new head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, and to William Webster, now retired CIA director. I knew Primakov. I’d first interviewed him in 1969, when he was director of the Institute on Middle Eastern studies. After summarizing Time’s allegations, I told him, “I’d be most grateful to you if you could designate someone to look into these and any other files of the former KGB and provide me with a written response as to whether

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there is anything there to support the story Yurchenko told or its implication of me having been a paid agent of the KGB.” I asked Webster to confirm the following quote in the Washington Post: “Webster told the Post that the FBI had concluded that there was no evidence that Doder had done anything improper or had any connection with the KGB.” I had no response from Webster. Primakov’s reply, saying there was nothing in KGB files to support the story, came a couple of weeks later in the form of a two-paragraph letter signed by Yuri Kobaladze, the spokesman for the security agency. Bradlee continued to phone from time to time to tell me about his conversations with various top Time executives. He urged them, he said, to stop delaying tactics, but they never responded. And despite all the evidence, as the weeks and months passed, Mark Thompson did not know what sort of defense Time was putting together. In May of 1994, isolated in Belgrade’s Diplomatic Colony, obsessed with fighting my case, I received word that Karin had passed away from leukemia. She was fifty-one. I stayed up all night drinking and berating myself for failing her as a husband and friend—all in search of the glory that I now knew to be fleeting. Yes, I had achieved my ambition, but, to do so, I had denied her so much that she wanted. She had been prescient; now it was being snatched away. Even when I won my case—as I had no doubt I would—some of the mud flung at me would stick. I, and my reputation, would be forever damaged. I went out into the Belgrade neighborhood in the early hours of the morning. Darkness still shrouded the houses, stray dogs barked. One followed me and bared its teeth, then slunk away. I tried to reach Peter by phone but he refused to take my call. One day in the fall of 1994, I received a phone call from Bo Jones, the new publisher of the Washington Post. I knew him to be a close friend of Don Graham, the owner of the company. Bo had been editor of the Harvard Law Review. When I’d first met him a decade earlier he had been the Post’s lawyer. Bo said he had been reviewing my case—my lawyer had kept the Post’s legal department informed about all the twists and turns—and he thought I should transfer it to a US court. “I have discussed the matter with my former law partners in Boston,” he said. “They are prepared to take you on a contingency basis.” Jones suggested that I instruct my lawyers to

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forward copies of all legal documents to his former senior partner, John Gilmore, at Hill & Barlow. I told Jones that I’d have to think about it and consult my wife, and that I’d get back to him. I was seriously tempted. I wanted to fight in a US court. I was frustrated by endless delays in London. Moreover, I suspected that Jones would not have proposed this without Don Graham’s approval. I reached out to Mark Thompson and Mitch Rogovin. They gave me contradictory advice. Thompson said I should turn Bo’s offer down, while Rogovin advised me to accept it. For a few moments it felt like one piece of advice was turning madly within the other. After talking things over with Louise, I gingerly explained my reasoning to a clearly distraught Mark, who reluctantly sent copies of all documents to Gilmore in Boston. A few weeks later, Gilmore called. He said I had a “stupendous” case and that he had no doubt that I’d prevail in a Massachusetts court— despite Time Warner’s enormous resources and possible CIA interference. “They have no case,” he said. “They would be laughed out of court. But they have the resources to drag it out for years.” “How many years?” I asked. “Four or five years. And here’s the question only you can answer. Are you and your family prepared for another four to five years of litigation?” The moment we filed charges in Boston, he explained, Time would demand a stay of proceedings in London. “That means everything stops in London and we start all over again in Boston.” I said I’d have to think about it. “You’re close to trial now,” Gilmore said. “By the way, I don’t think they’ll ever go to trial because, as I said, they don’t have a case. So they’ll just keep delaying, but they can’t delay for very long in London. Now, do you want to abandon that?” I talked things over with Louise and called Gilmore back. I asked him, “What would you do if you were in my shoes?” “I think you’d be better off finishing what you’re doing in London,” he said. I was beginning to falter. I no longer had the energy to endure the public abuse that was certain to come from Time, as Gilmore predicted. “Their strategy’s to break you psychologically,” he told me. I agreed. Gilmore was right. A few months later, Louise and I decided to move to Washington, irrespective of the London proceedings. Balkan travels had become more

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complex and hazardous. Our children were growing up; Tom was one of only three pupils in the first grade at the International School. Both Louise and I were tired of living in the midst of chaos and war. I could no longer wait. Steve Rosenfeld, my closest friend at the Post, suggested that I apply for a fellowship at the US Institute of Peace, a US government think tank. I did. Louise had plans to put together a freelance operation like mine in the United States while the children were young, so that she could work from home. She lined up accreditation from the Scotsman and other newspapers. Mitch Rogovin urged me to keep silent about my plans, lest CarterRuck come up with another legal maneuver to delay or stay the proceedings. I also told Mark Thompson about my plans and asked him to keep them a secret. In early February 1996, Louise and I flew to Washington. I wanted to consult Rogovin and she wanted to look around for housing now that our Alexandria house was sold. We were met by sad news the day we landed: Mitch had suffered a fatal heart attack the previous day. I was happy at least that I could attend the funeral and pay my last respects. His wife, Sheila, wrote me a note later saying that Mitch had never wavered in his belief that I would be exonerated. Thompson’s main worry was Arthur Hartman’s quote in the Time article. I’d had a difficult relationship with Hartman. My arrogant streak was again coming back to bite me. Quite apart from the string of tensions with the embassy over my reporting, I had hardly been complimentary about Hartman in my book Shadows and Whispers. I had put him and the embassy unnecessarily in a bad light by highlighting his—and therefore the embassy’s—wrong assessment that Gorbachev, not Chernenko, would succeed Andropov. He did not care for me and did not talk at all kindly about me. But Hartman was an honest diplomat with a distinguished career. In early 1995 I received a letter from my old Post colleague Murray Marder, who had had lunch with Kempton Jenkins, former assistant secretary of state and now Hartman’s colleague in a Washington public relations firm. “Jenkins was high in his praise of your work,” Marder wrote, “and he said he’d be prepared to produce a statement on your behalf. He was also not surprisingly defensive about his colleague Arthur Hartman.”

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Referring to Hartman’s quote in Time, Marder went on: “Kempton could only say, rather lamely, that he couldn’t believe Hartman meant to do you harm.” Marder countered by saying, “Hartman may well not have foreseen the full implications of what he said, but it was unquestionably said with malice.” I don’t know what Jenkins said to Hartman, but soon Marder phoned me and said I should call Hartman directly and ask him to speak with my lawyer. I called Hartman. After a brief conversation he agreed to talk to Mark Thompson. Talking to Mark, who taped the conversation, Hartman suggested he had not been aware of what his quote was going to be used for. He was, he said, “expressing my feeling that Doder had a very good source in the KGB and they might have been using him as they tried to use everyone, but I did not believe there was a corrupt relationship.” When Peterzell interviewed him, he had added, “I had a source from the KGB too. I had several. They used to come around to me peddling one line or another. Some of them I believed and some of them I didn’t.” That second part of the quote, just like Zimmermann’s statement that he, too, had reported signs of Andropov’s death on the night he died, was not included in the Time article. Thompson was happy, but he quickly pointed out that a phone transcript was not of great value. He wanted Hartman to say those things in a deposition, which Hartman refused on the grounds that he had already been deposed by Time’s lawyers. Besides, he said, he was opposed to bringing such action in Britain. It was a mystery to me why Mark wanted Hartman’s statement so badly. I said we had several top US diplomats (including Secretary of State Eagleburger) and leading experts on the Soviet Union testifying on my behalf, so why did we need Hartman? Mark was convinced that Carter-Ruck would maneuver and keep things delayed as long as Hartman stuck to this position. Then Hartman changed his mind. I don’t know the reason, but I assumed it had to do with Kempton Jenkins. Mark Thompson flew to Washington, and, on March 18, Hartman signed a statement that included the following two paragraphs: As a favor to Jay Peterzell I agreed to file a statement saying that the two direct quotes from me in the story were accurate. Neither of those was

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particularly prejudicial to Dusko and in fact I could have said it about all the reporters covering Moscow in that peculiar period when it was hard to verify a single-source story. Any fair-minded person would see in what I said to Peterzell that I in no way thought Dusko an agent and in fact explicitly said the idea of a responsible journalist taking money was “cuckoo.” Needless to say, I was unaware of all aspects of the story in which my two rather innocent quotes were to become a part of the slant that asserted Dusko was a paid agent and including “information” from a phony defector thrown in for verisimilitude.

Thompson was jubilant. The way to trial was now clear. Thompson asked the judge to set the date, a request granted almost immediately. That same week, Carter-Ruck broached the idea of an out-of-court settlement. I told Thompson that I was not interested. I wanted to expose Time’s brand of journalism. I also had a thrilling sensation being on the attack. I had gone to great lengths to be here, and my persistence was my own logic for living. If that was my shortcoming, so be it. Thompson said that refusal to settle would be dismissed by the judge if Time offered a proper apology and adequate compensation. I countered by insisting we turn down any settlement, irrespective of the amount of money they offered. By now, I said, I had evidence to prove malice and that they had used information they knew was false to prove their thesis. At this stage in the proceedings, the court required discovery, an exchange of information and documents that had been subpoenaed. From this we learned that the only outside witnesses to support Time were two former employees of the CIA: Robert Gates and Colin R. Thompson, a junior operative who was also the son of a Time-Life executive. Gates’s deposition was confined to his assessment of Yurchenko: Gates said he didn’t know Yurchenko to have given any bad information. I wonder if Gates would have said that after the treason of Aldrich Ames came to light. Discovery also allowed me to view in detail the way in which my attempted destruction was prepared and carried out. Among the subpoenaed Time materials, perhaps most extraordinary was the series of eight versions of the Time story (with notations and comments by top executives), which could be a case study of how the instrument of assassination was refined over a period of eight weeks. The first version attempted to

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give some balance, even though a handful of notes in the margin read, “guilty,” “but guilty nevertheless,” “guilty.” There were no margin notes on the second version, but the authors gradually hardened the tale by massaging the subsequent rewrites to eliminate everything that could weaken the judgment of guilt. For example, in place of Zimmermann’s quote about having been tipped off about Andropov’s death, Time wrote that the Kremlin “traditionally leaked word of the death or ouster of a national leader to a favored American reporter.” One margin note said that a statement in the text attributed to a US official should be attributed to Yurchenko, “otherwise the reader will be led into believing we have triangulated this accusation with independent third parties.” Another comment said, “Strike the first ‘Webster told Bradlee’—Webster didn’t put it quite this way, so let’s attribute it to the FBI.” All of this made for awfully depressing reading. In May of 1996 I was informed that I had been awarded a Randolph Jennings fellowship at the US Institute of Peace. We left Belgrade in early June, taking along our Chinese nanny and Macedonian sheepdog. I took up my position at the institute at the end of June. The institute in those days was on M Street near Sixteenth Street, in more modest accommodations than its palatial building on the Mall today. Sometime later I ran into Max Kampelman, the US diplomat who negotiated many arms control treaties with the Soviet Union for both Republican and Democratic presidents, who was the vice chairman of the institute board. “We really wanted you to come to the institute,” he told me tactfully, without mentioning my libel suit. “Nobody believed all that Time stuff, you know.” By early July, Time proposed a settlement that included an apology, $262,000 in damages, all lawyers’ fees and court costs, and about $30,000 for my travel and related expenses. The magazine promised to give prominent display to the apology. I emphatically turned down the offer. I was hell bent on going to trial, on exposing Time’s shoddy journalism, on having my day in court. Mark Thompson and I had several long-distance shouting matches over this. He insisted that the matter was up to the judge to decide, and vehemently argued that a reasonable offer couldn’t be turned down. What is reasonable? Just the recollection of those exchanges makes my heart beat faster.

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Thompson was right. When told about my refusal, Carter-Ruck appealed to the judge, who ruled that Time’s offer of an apology and compensation was reasonable and should be the basis for a settlement. I had to accept this, Thompson said. The court date was set for August 1, 1996. As the date approached, Thompson called me to say that Time was offering an additional $75,000 if the apology was not read in court. I turned it down with the comment, “They can stuff the money up theirs.” August 1 in London was a cool, sunny day, a day suggesting that the canopy of autumn would soon settle over the city. My mother-in-law had laid out a full English breakfast, one that would have done Claridge’s proud, before we turned up at the High Court on Fleet Street. For some reason I always associated the ornate building with Charles Laughton playing a barrister in an old movie also featuring Marlene Dietrich. As in the movie, the judges, lawyers, and other officials wore wigs. Carter-Ruck, a reptilian-looking man in his late seventies, read the statement of Time’s “sincere regret and apologies” for any distress caused. Time also said it withdrew “without reservations” all statements assailing my reputation and professional integrity. It was over. I read my statement to the reporters assembled on Fleet Street. It felt unreal, as if I had been involved in some dramatic production and was a character in a movie. The New York Times put the story on its front page. Shortly afterward, Jay Peterzell wrote and congratulated me on my win. I stared at the letter in disbelief. My best guess is that Peterzell was targeted by the CIA as its perfect instrument, an ambitious journalist who was then egged on by superiors who knew better. When he had signed off on an article that fell short on every journalistic measure, he had effectively signed his own journalistic death warrant, as the true assassins slipped into the shadows. What his true story is, or why he wrote the letter, I do not care to know.

Epilogue Dogs Bark

It was some years later that I went to a reception at the British ambassador’s residence in Washington, DC. Louise was now an editorial writer at USA Today, a job she had taken after freelancing from home while the boys were younger. I was there as her spouse. As she chatted with various diplomats and US officials, I headed out onto the lawn. It was a balmy summer evening. I walked toward a table laden with canapés. If I were still at the Post, I would have worked the gathering as a journalist, looking for information. Now I meandered, thinking about the task I had the next day to drive Thomas, a teenager, and Nicholas to basketball games in the Virginia suburbs where we now lived. I was also thinking about the main character in a novel I had turned to writing after finishing a biography of Milosevic with Louise in 1999. The novel was in part an effort to banish the depression that ebbed and flowed but never quite left me. The protagonist was a former Moscow correspondent, a tortured soul who had once been a star at his newspaper, who now was a lowly chess columnist because of some unfortunate turns in his life.

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He was now being lured back to Russia with the promise that he would find out how his wife had died there. “Dusko?” I looked up. Ben Bradlee was holding a glass of wine. He still had his slicked-back silver hair and that roguish look to him, but the lines on his face were deep and his manner distracted, no doubt a sign of the Alzheimer’s disease that would eventually claim him. Seeing him, my mind flashed back through scenes of when Bradlee, my one-time hero, had dominated my every waking moment. I thought of him taking me to Chez Camille when I had tried out for the Post. I could almost hear him calling me “kid” and sending me to do more reporting on the story of the Soviet prime minister’s fender bender. I thought of him suddenly seeming more human, cautious, wounded after the Janet Cooke affair. I tasted my bitter disappointment when he would not go public with Yurchenko’s allegations against me. I thought, gratefully, too, of his constant phone calls as Time carried out its assassination, of the way he had kept in touch by phone with news and words of encouragement as the London court case unfolded. Yes, we had a lot of history, he and I. And we were both so very human. “Good to see you, Dusko. How are you?” he asked. “Fine, Ben, you?” I was then transported further back, to my life before I knew the name Ben Bradlee, before I could imagine I would work for the Washington Post. I saw myself arriving in the United States by ship, with a ticket paid for by Clyde, my hopes and dreams focused on becoming part of the excitement of America and, improbably, achieving journalistic greatness in a country where that was possible. Would I have done things differently in hindsight? That was, I thought, an impossible question. Life, as Soren Kierkegaard once said, has to be lived forward and understood backward. I had already long known my biggest regret: that I sacrificed Karin and Peter to my ambition. Her unhappiness followed by her untimely death and my estrangement from my son are deep wounds I will carry to my grave. I regret, too, subjecting Louise to decades of standing by me as I insisted on quitting the Post, as I lost my way as a journalist, fought the Time allegations and risked our financial ruin, and descended into lengthy bouts of depression. I once thought my outstanding work would speak for itself and be all that I needed. I had been wrong. I only understood that backward.

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Still, for all the human mistakes I made, and paid so dearly for, I consider myself one of the luckiest men in the world to have reported for a great newspaper with a self-confident editor who embodied everything I felt journalism meant: being bold, speaking truth to power, telling it like it is. Today, with the plethora of media outlets and with social media liberally spewing out rumors, opinions, and propaganda that are not edited or fact checked, I am reminded of the distortions of the Soviet propaganda machine or the wild ravings in the Yugoslav media before that country’s collapse. Many news outlets, including the Post and the New York Times, continue to adhere to good journalistic principles, but with so much less influence in our fractured society. The founders of the United States wrote the Constitution in part because they understood what I learned to my cost: that institutions are made up of human beings who do not always play fair, adhere to the principles they are supposed to uphold, or see good work as what it is rather than as a threat. Clyde never tired of repeating, and I have never stopped believing, what Thomas Jefferson wrote: that if he had to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, he would choose the latter. My father used to say that “dogs bark and the caravan moves on.” Standing on the British ambassador’s lawn with Ben Bradlee, I now thought of this and chose to give it a different meaning from the one Dad intended. The Washington Post had done a lot of barking, but it had not been without effect. With Bradlee’s guidance, the Post had barked loud enough to make an impact on the caravan. I had been part of that. Yes, the caravan, and we, had moved on. But I was proud of being part of that history, and grateful to Bradlee, whom I now understood to be another flawed human being, like myself. “Dusko?” I looked up. The pleasantries over, Bradlee and I had run out of things to say to one another. I must have been quiet for a long time, lost in my, and his, past. “I have to go.” I nodded, turning and walking back toward the residence as the sun retreated in the sky. I would find Louise and tell her I needed to go home.

Acknowledgments

The biggest thanks for this book go to Michael J. McGandy, editor at Cornell University Press, who saw the potential in an early manuscript and worked to shape it. After Dusko suffered illnesses that prevented him from completing this memoir, his wife and journalistic partner, Louise Branson, took over. Special thanks go to literary agent Rita Rosenkranz, Cornell University Press production editor Karen Hwa, eagle-eyed copyeditor Eric Levy, and other members of the production team. George Hager is owed a particular debt of gratitude for reading and offering incisive suggestions on the manuscript at every stage. Thanks, also, to the many friends who read and commented on the book, or helped with information, advice, or encouragement. They include Nancy Lieber, Professor Robert Lieber, Sushma Palmer, Marion Clarke, Margaret Meyers, Mellissa Fung, Richard Branson, Ian Branson, Lisa Branson, Saundra Torry, Jack Torry, Pat Humphlett, and Diane Garfield. Two of the book’s most helpful critics were sons Nicholas Doder and Thomas Doder. Diane O’Connell was a valued early editor. The events described in the book are as remembered by Dusko and Louise. Any errors are theirs alone.

Index

Able Archer, 124 Afanasiyev, Viktor, 164 Afghanistan, 87, 92, 97–98, 173 Albania, National Geographic piece on, 226–27 alcoholism, 39, 137, 148–49, 163, 164, 203, 226 Alexandrov-Agentov, Andrei, 107, 136, 142, 143 Alexeyev, Pyotr, 97–98 Aliyev, Gaidar, 107 alliances, author’s distrust of, 50 All the President’s Men, 78 Anderson, John, 44 Andropov, Yuri contrasted with Brezhnev, 112–13 and death of Brezhnev, 107, 109, 110, 111

illness and death of, 2, 124–33, 134–35, 230, 236, 237, 243 Arbatov, Georgy, 92, 103, 156, 167 arms race, 137–38, 142, 155–56 Aronson, Earl, 8, 10–11 Aspinwall, Mr., 21 Associated Press author hired by, 21 author leaves, 11, 13, 14 Axelbank, Jay, 30 Babic, Vojo, 215–16 Bacall, Lauren, 78 Baker, William M., 181–82 Bekic, Milan, 70 Beregovoy, Georgy, 31 Berg, Kaare, 80 Bernstein, Carl, 78

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I n de x

Billington, James, 118 Bogdanov, Radomir, 167, 183–84, 185 Bohlen, Celestine, 138–39, 144, 145, 149, 150, 160 Boris the Gypsy, 100 Bosnia, 214–23, 226 Bovin, Alexander Alexeyev’s phone number provided by, 97 as author’s friend, 81 on Brezhnev’s medical condition, 103, 104 Chernenko moves against, 136 and death of Andropov, 127, 132–33 and Gorbachev, 157, 161, 164 as habitué of press club, 38, 39, 92 Bozidar (uncle), 66–67 Bradlee, Ben and author’s departure from Post, 201–2 author’s future at Post discussed with, 170–71 author’s history with, 246 on author’s Moscow assignment, 85 and backlash against Outlook piece, 180–81, 185–86, 189–90, 192, 193, 195, 196, 198 and coverage of Andropov’s death, 131, 133 and coverage of CIA survey of Soviet Jews, 58–59 and cultural changes at Washington Post, 77–78 as editor of Washington Post, 13, 52 extends author’s stay in Moscow, 121 interest of, in details, 79–80 job interview with, 44–47, 49 on Karin’s employment in Moscow, 123 and Kosygin story, 60 and Pentagon Papers coverage, 57–58 and Times lawsuit, 2, 3, 234, 238 Bradlee, Dino, 80

Branson, Louise author begins relationship with, 151–55 author meets mother of, 159–60 and author’s departure from Moscow, 165–68, 169–70 author’s regret regarding, 246 author’s relationship with, 204–5 and author’s U.S. News & World Report job offer, 201 background of, 152 and CIA retribution, 187–88, 223–24 covers Chernenko’s illness and death, 158–59 life in China, 204 moves to China, 202 moves to London, 227 moves to Washington, 239–40 moves to Yugoslavia, 210, 212–13 supports author, 3, 233–34 and Tiananmen Square uprising, 206–7 travels through China, 209 and unrest in Yugoslavia, 214, 218, 222–23, 225–26 vacations in Central Asia, 165 vacations in Yugoslavia, 174 visits Washington, 173, 199 and Yurchenko’s accusations against author, 229 Bray, Charles, 56 Brezhnev, Leonid, 30–31, 87, 92, 99, 100–113 Burenkov, Sergei, 163 Buryatia, Boris, 100 Bush, George, 110, 171 Cagalj, Bobo, 68–69, 215 Califano, Joseph, 59–60 Canada, 84, 85, 86, 138–39 Carter, Hodding III, 135 Carter-Ruck, Peter, 231, 235, 240–42, 244 Casey, William, 172, 176–77, 179–81, 190, 193–94, 195, 196–97

I n d ex Castro, Fidel, 54–55 Central Committee plenum, 104–5 Chazov, Evgeny, 101 Chernenko, Konstantin, 107–10, 132–33, 134–35, 136–47, 156–61, 236 China author accepts job offer in, 201–3 author contemplates life after, 209–10 author requests post in, 170–71 author’s life in, 204 author’s understanding of politics of, 203–4 author travels through, 209 clash between Soviet Union and, 31–32 Tiananmen Square uprising, 205–9 U.S. News & World Report’s job offer in, 199–202 Chisholm, Janet, 36 Choesin, Mohamed, 132–33 CIA, 2, 58–59, 131–33, 144, 172, 177–78, 191, 193, 194–95, 201, 223–25. See also Time magazine Clinton, Bill, 223–24 clothing, and fitting in, 36 Cloud, Stan, 223, 224, 227, 228, 234 Cohn, Vic, 236 Communist Party, 50, 68–69, 125 Communist Party Congress (1986), 173 Conte, Silvio, 164 Cooke, Janet, 170 Cooke, Paul K., 60–61, 105, 116 Cooperstock, Aryeh, 223 Croatia, 214 Cuba, 53–55 curses, 18–19, 135, 155 Cyprus, 71–74 Czechoslovakia, 26, 27 Daley, Richard, 188 Daniloff, Nicholas, 155, 176–79, 193 Darnton, John, 236 Dau, Mary, 126, 132 Dedijer, Vladimir, 174 de Gramont, Sanche, 19–20

253

Deng Xiaoping, 204 Denktash, Rauf, 71–72 DeYoung, Karen, 140, 236 Djilas, Milovan, 70–71 Djukic, Ilija, 237 Dobbs, Michael, 120, 236 Dobrynin, Anatoly, 131 Doder, Andrea, 223 Doder, Lepa, 19 Doder, Mladen, 67–69, 74, 213, 215, 216–18, 221, 222–23 Doder, Nicholas, 214, 227 Doder, Peter Alexander (son) arrives in Moscow, 91 arrives in Yugoslavia, 64, 65 author’s estrangement from, 238, 246 birth of, 43 education of, 119–20, 138 life in Moscow, 93–96 life in Washington, 51, 75, 80, 85, 170 life in Yugoslavia, 74 vacations in Sicily, 106 visits author’s family in Yugoslavia, 66 Doder, Peter (uncle), 18, 19 Doder, Sonja, 217, 222, 223 Doder, Thomas, 1, 4, 204, 207, 209, 227 Doder, Zoran, 217, 223 Downie, Len, 185 Dubcek, Alexander, 26 Dunfey, Bill, 5–8 Durso, Joseph, 36 Dzuna (contact), 102, 107 Eagleburger, Larry, 85–86, 113, 131, 215, 222, 237 economic study, 114–19, 179 Egawa, Masai, 127 Ellsberg, Daniel, 57 Erdman, Nikolai, 41–42, 113 European, 210, 225 Farnsworth, Clyde, 8–9, 12–15, 18, 29, 48, 63, 79, 88–90, 131–33, 148 Farnsworth, Clyde, Jr., 89

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I n de x

Farnsworth, Dolly, 12–14, 15, 89 father of author on career in journalism, 29, 35 on Communist Party, 69 curse of, 18–19, 135, 155 disapproves of journalism, 13, 16–17, 18–19 encourages author to leave Yugoslavia, 216 lessons learned from, 48, 50–51 on past, 86 refuses to join Communist Party, 50 FBI, 180–98, 200, 238, 243 Foisie, Phil, 44–47, 54, 58, 59 Frankel, Max, 11–12 Freedman, Emmanuel, 9 Friendly, Al, 49

Grigorenko, Piotr, 33–34, 42 Grishin, Viktor, 157–58 Gromyko, Andrei, 108, 110, 135, 140, 146, 155–56, 161–62

Gandhi, Indira, 107 Gates, Robert, 171, 191, 197, 224, 242 Gebhardt, Carl, 105, 191 Geneva, Gromyko-Shultz talks in, 155–56 Georgetown University, 172 Gerber, Burt, 116, 172, 191 Gergen, David, 172–73, 199–200 Getler, Michael, 157 Gilmore, John, 239 glasnost, 163, 171 Glazunov, Ilya, 38, 102–3 Gluzman, Semyon, 34 Goldin, Joseph, 40–41, 81, 99, 102, 118–19 Golovanov, Nikolai, 41 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 135, 146, 157, 158, 161–64, 171, 173, 203–6 Gorbachev: Heretic in the Kremlin (Doder and Branson), 199, 209 Gorky Park, 34–37 Graham, Don, 181 Graham, Katharine, 57, 78, 121, 133, 230 Greece, 71–74

Ignatius, David, 179, 193, 223 Imai, Hiroshi, 108 Inozemtsev, Nikolai, 92 intelligence beat author’s distaste for, 200–201 backlash against author on, 176–77, 179–98 Daniloff story on, 176–79 Waldheim story on, 173–75 Iran-Contra affair, 196–97 Israel, 34–35, 58–59 Ivanovna, Natalya, 95 Izetbegovic, Alija, 222 Izetbegovic, Sabina, 222

Hack, Aaron, 19 Hart, Gary, 156 Hartman, Arthur, 110–11, 133, 144–45, 230, 240–42 Hegge, Per Egil, 224 Helsinki Accords (1975), 83 History of the Soviet Communist Party, 125 Hoagland, Jim, 122–23, 131 House of Lions, 40–41 Humo, Enver, 65 Hutson, Thomas, 222 Hu Yaobang, 205

Jaruzelski, Wojtiech, 98 Jefferson, Thomas, 4, 247 Jenkins, Kempton, 240–41 Jews under Chernenko, 138 CIA survey of Soviet, 58–59 dissidents, 138 emigration of, 83 as sources, 34–35 Johnson, Lyndon, 6, 7 Jones, Bo, 238–39

I n d ex journalism author’s aspirations in, 16–17 author’s beginnings in, 15–16, 17–21 author’s father’s disapproval of, 13, 16–17, 18–19 author’s renewed interest in, 164–65 versus book writing, 76 Clyde Farnsworth’s teachings on, 18 importance of, 247 in Moscow, 42–43 Kaiser, Robert, 1–3, 76, 139, 185, 227–28, 230 KAL007, 120, 124 Kamm, Henry, 33–34, 45 Kampelman, Max, 243 Karamanlis, Constantine, 73–74 Karin (ex-wife) agrees to return to Moscow, 88 arrives in Moscow, 22, 24, 91 arrives in Yugoslavia, 64–65 and author’s New York Times interview, 11, 12 on author’s post in Moscow, 14–15, 86–87 author’s regret regarding, 246 background of, 11 death of, 238 divorce of, 170 employment of, in Moscow, 122–23 enrolls Peter in boarding school, 119–20 leaves author, 147–48 life in Moscow, 27, 28–29, 38, 47–48, 94–96 life in Washington, 51–53, 55, 75, 76, 77, 121 life in Yugoslavia, 63, 69–70, 74 marital problems with, 84–85, 93, 120, 121–22, 123, 135–36 pregnancy of, 43 prepares for party, 126 refuses to return to Moscow, 80

255

vacations in Sicily, 106 visits author’s family in Yugoslavia, 66–67 Kauzov, Sergei, 82 Kennedy, John F., 46 Kennedy, Robert F., 6 KGB under Andropov, 113 arrests Grigorenko, 34 author accused of being asset of, 183–84, 189, 193, 194–95, 201, 223–25, 227–31, 234–44 author’s trouble with, 113–19, 179 cooperation with, 39–40 follows foreigners, 36 threatens author’s potential sources, 37 See also Time magazine Khalil, Abdel Malek advice of, 118, 144, 149 and author’s departure from Moscow, 168 author’s friendship with, 93–94 and author’s relationship with Louise, 151–53 background of, 83 and death of Brezhnev, 107 warns of CIA retribution, 133, 193, 223 Khrushchev, Nikita, 101 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 7 Kirilenko, Andrei, 107, 108 Kissinger, Henry, 121 Klose, Kevin, 77, 80, 85, 86 Kolendic, Anton, 174–75 Kosygin, Alexei, 53–55, 59–61 Kozakov, Mikhail, 39–40 Krause, Chuck, 236 Kyprianou, Spiros, 108 Lavine, Mel, 61 Lazar, Tsar, 213 Lenin, Vladimir, 125 Levich, Veniamin, 83 Lewis, Anthony, 237 Ligachev, Yegor, 126

256

I n de x

Lomeiko, Vladimir, 157 Los Angeles Olympics (1984), 136 MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, The, 171–72 Mantle, John, 22–23 Marder, Murray, 55–56, 240–41 Marx, Karl, 26 Maslesa, Sveto, 16, 37–38, 215 Maxwell, Robert, 210, 225 McCarthy, Eugene, 6 McFarland, Bud, 156, 192 McGirl, John, 182–85, 196 McIntyre, Tom, 6–8, 10 Medvedev, Roy, 113, 138 Meir, Golda, 58 Mencher, Melvin, 19–20, 58 Milashkina, Tamara, 38 Millar, Peter, 210 Milosevic, Slobodan, 213–14, 218, 234 Mira (cousin), 67 Mohammed, Ali Nasser, 101 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 119 Moscow accidental scoops in, 30–32 accolades for author’s work in, 133, 135 author arrives in, 22–25 author assigned to, 91–92 author begins UPI work in, 25–27 author covers Communist Party Congress in, 173 author investigates Brezhnev in, 99, 100–105, 106–11 author leaves, 165–68 author loses satisfaction in, 135–36 author returns to, 80–83, 86–88 author’s coverage on Andropov in, 112–13, 124–33, 134–35 author’s coverage on Chernenko in, 139–47, 156–59, 160–61 author’s coverage on Gorbachev in, 162–64 author’s self-destruction in, 148–50

author’s trouble with KGB in, 113–19, 179 author’s work in, 29–30, 48, 93, 96–101 benefits of working in, 27–28 challenges of living in, 28–29 changes in, 92 Clyde Farnsworth’s advice concerning post in, 89–90 extension of author’s assignment in, 121–22 family strife in, 94–96 friends and contacts in, 33–42 journalism in, 42–43 Karin agrees to return to, 88 Karin’s employment in, 122–23 US embassy in, 98–99 Washington Post’s plan to station author in, 77 Moscow press club, 38–39, 153 National Geographic, 226–27 Newsom, David, 172 New York Times, 8–10, 11, 12, 13, 47, 57, 121, 140 Ogarkov, Nikolai, 136, 167 Olympic Games (1980), 87 Olympic Games (1984), 125, 126, 127, 136 Oslobodjenje (Liberation) newspaper, 15–16, 17–18 Paasaalina, Reino, 237 Palmer, Mark, 86 Pechenev, Vadim, 140, 141 Penkovsky, Oleg, 36, 49 Penkovsky Papers, 49 Pentagon Papers, 57–58 perestroika, 163, 171 Peterzell, Jay, 223–25, 227, 228, 241–42, 244 Poland, 87–88, 98 Pork, Valeri, 134–35

I n d ex press club, 38–39, 153 Pribitkov, Viktor, 140, 141 Price, Jeff, 73 Primakov, Yevgeny, 237–38 Pugacheva, Alla, 137–38 Quinn, Sally, 78, 80 radio jamming, 87–88 Ranko (cousin), 50, 155 Rappa, Joseph, 42, 43 Reagan, Ronald, 92, 95, 96, 105, 124, 136, 140, 142, 146, 176–77, 188 Roberts, Steve, 72–73 Rodriguez, Carlos Rafael, 55 Rogers, William P., 56 Rogovin, Mitchell, 3, 195, 196, 229, 231, 239, 240 Rogovin, Sheila, 240 Romanov, Grigory, 157 Rosenfeld, Steve, 49–50, 51, 200–201, 223, 240 Rosenthal, Abe, 140 Ruhadze, Aftandil, 117 Russell, Bertrand, 148 Russell, McKinney, 204 Salisbury, Harrison, 9–10, 47 Sarajevo, 15–16, 24–25, 215, 217–22, 226 Sarajevo Olympic Games (1984), 125, 126, 127 Sazonov, Alexander, 140–41, 145 Scanlan, Jack, 237 Schecter, Jerry, 223 Schilling, Keith, 232 Schilling & Lom, 232 Schmemann, Serge, 98, 104, 139 Serbia, 225–26, 234 Shadows and Whispers (Doder), 149–50, 169–70, 184, 224, 240 Shapiro, Henry, 25–27, 47 Shapiro, Ludmilla, 25 Shields, Elaine, 22–23, 29

257

Shields, Ted, 22–23, 29 Shultz, George, 110, 131, 140, 146, 155–56, 176–77, 195, 197 Siberian gas pipeline, 105 Sicily, 106 Sidur, Julia, 81, 125, 163–64 Sidur, Vadim, 42, 81–82, 87–88, 125 Silberman, Larry, 194–95, 231 Simons, Howard, 58, 97, 98, 106, 208 Simons, Lew, 204 Sinclair, Upton, 39 Sino-Soviet feud, 31–32 Slovenia, 214 Smith, Hedrick, 76 Sokolov, Sergei, 146–47 Solidarity, 87 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 34 Soviet Union animosity between US and, 123–24, 137–38, 142, 145, 146, 176–78 author’s study of, 26–27 breaking through barriers erected by, 32, 33–35 challenges facing, 92 changes in, 82–84 clash between China and, 31–32 conditions in, 23 economy of, 112–13, 114–19, 146, 163, 191–92 Gorbachev on problems in, 163 grain embargo imposed on, 87 invades Czechoslovakia, 27 Reagan’s pressure on, 105 threatens Czechoslovakia, 26 See also Moscow Stalin, Joseph, 41, 50, 101, 115 Stanic, Slavko, 128, 129–30, 131, 144, 160 Star Wars defense system, 155–56 State Department, 55–57, 59–61 Stevens, Edmund, 131 Stolz, Richard, 237 Stone, I. F., 49–50 Stosic, Branko, 114, 115

258

I n de x

St. Vitus Day, 175 success, 50–51 Sukhodrev, Viktor, 142, 143 Summer Olympic Games (1980), 87 Summer Olympic Games (1984), 136 Talbott, Strobe, 223–24, 225, 227, 228, 230 Tanjug, 113–14, 130, 131 Tatarian, Roger, 14 Thatcher, Margaret, 146 Thompson, Colin R., 179–80, 242 Thompson, Llewellyn, 26 Thompson, Mark, 233, 235, 238, 239, 241–42, 243–44 Tiananmen Square uprising, 205–9 Time magazine, 2–4, 227–32, 234–44 Tito, Marshal, 4, 16, 50, 65, 67, 80, 85, 86, 236 Tolkhunov, Lev, 124–25 Tonini, Frank, 104, 105 Toon, Malcolm, 65 Topping, Seymour, 8–10 Traver, Nancy, 223, 224 Trevisan, Dess, 174 Trudeau, Pierre, 84 Tsvigun, Semyon, 98–100 Turkey, 71–74 United Press International accidental scoops while working for, 30–32 author begins work at, 25–27 author hired by, 14–15 author’s work for, 29–30 benefits of working for, 27–28 Uros (uncle), 50, 155 US embassy, 98–99, 104–5, 116, 117, 122–23, 179 US Institute of Peace, 240, 243 U.S. News & World Report, 172–73, 199–203, 210 Ustinov, Dmitry, 109, 110, 124, 146–47 Vietnam War, 6–8, 10–11, 57–58

Waldheim, Kurt, 108, 173–75 Wall Street Journal, 135 Wang Chongjie, 203 Wang Jinxia, 208, 213, 243 Warren, Leonard, 20 Washington author buys home in, 52–53 author returns to, 75–77, 169, 239–40 Louise visits, 173, 199 Washington Post assigns author to Moscow, 91–92 assigns author to Yugoslavia, 63 author begins work at, 48–50, 51–52 author covers State Department for, 55–57, 59–61 author discusses future with, 170–71 author interviews with, 44–48 author investigates Brezhnev for, 99, 100–105, 106–11 author leaves, 200–201 author loses satisfaction in Moscow post for, 135–36 author regrets leaving, 206, 207, 208 author returns to Moscow for, 80–83, 86–88 author’s assignments to sensitive areas for, 58–61 author’s breakthrough as foreign correspondent for, 53–55 author’s Canadian assignment for, 84, 85, 86 author’s coverage on Andropov for, 112–13, 124–33, 134–35 author’s coverage on Chernenko for, 139–47, 156–59, 160–61 author’s coverage on Gorbachev for, 162–64 author’s trouble with KGB working for, 113–19, 179 author’s work in Moscow for, 93, 96–101 author’s work in Yugoslavia for, 70–74, 85–86 and backlash against Outlook piece, 179–98

I n d ex Book World section of, 171 changes at, 77–79 extends author’s stay in Moscow, 121–22 impact of, 247 moves to new building, 52 and Pentagon Papers coverage, 57–58 plans to station author in Moscow, 77 and Times lawsuit, 235–36 and Watergate coverage, 61–62, 70–71 Watergate, 61–62, 70–71, 78 Webster, William, 180–81, 189, 192, 193, 194, 195–96, 237–38 Weintraub, Rick, 120, 129 West (FBI agent), 181–85, 196 Westmoreland, General, 7, 10–11 Whitney, Craig, 237 Williams, Edward Bennett, 179, 181, 185, 186, 188–96 Wilson Center, 75–76 Winter Olympic Games (1984), 125, 126, 127 Woodward, Bob, 78 work, success through, 50–51 Yevstafiev, Alexander, 61–62 Yugoslavia author arrives in, 64–65 author assigned to, 63

259

author freelances in, 209–10 author moves to, 212–13 author researches Waldheim story in, 173–75 author returns to, 233–34 author’s family’s experiences in, 50 author’s life in, 69–70 author’s memories of, 24–25 author’s work in, 70–74, 85–86 author visits family in, 65–69 impact of, on author, 154–55 unrest in, 213–23, 225–27 Yugoslav journalists, 113–14 Yugoslavs, The (Doder), 76–77, 79, 86 Yura (friend in Moscow), 82–83 Yurchenko, Vitaly, 171–72, 178, 179–98, 223–25, 227–31, 237–38, 242, 243, See also Time magazine Zamyatin, Leonid, 100, 142, 143 Zarkovic, Colonel, 220–21 Zaslavskaya, Tatyana, 114–15, 116, 117–18, 164, 179 Zhao Ziyang, 204 Zhvanyetsky, Mikhail, 38 Zimmermann, Warren, 131, 217, 237 Zora (aunt), 66–67