This chapter examines the author's arrival in Moscow and his meeting with his new United Press International colleague, Ted Shields, and the UPI photographer John Mantle. They explained that the militiamen, whom foreigners dubbed “mili men,” was to record their movements and keep most Russians out. They also warned that they should be careful about what they said indoors because the KGB tapped their phones and bugged their apartments. The author then compares the experience of entering the Soviet Union to his Communist Yugoslavia childhood. 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. On August 21, 1968, as predicted, the Soviet Union and four other Warsaw Pact countries had invaded Czechoslovakia. The chapter also looks at the other important stories that the author covered while he was in Moscow.

This chapter recounts the author's return to Yugoslavia as the Sunday Times gave Louise Branson a contract to be its Balkans correspondent based in Belgrade. However, 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. The author became alarmed as the reviving nationalism in Yugoslavia grew, with calls for violence and retribution. In June of 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence from Yugoslavia. But ethnically mixed Croatia was not going to break away so easily. Branson and the author found themselves 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 they were now covering included sieges of the cities of Vukovar and Dubrovnik. They then headed to England; the job in Yugoslavia was increasingly turning into war reporting.

This chapter details how the author met and fell in love with journalist Louise Branson. Branson loved journalism and talking about the Soviet Union. She talked about the Soviet Union with a fascination for how Russians coped with the absurdities of their daily lives. Just as the author was retreating from his career in the Soviet Union, Branson was enthusiastically beginning hers. In January of 1985, they 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. The chapter then looks at how Mikhail Gorbachev became elected as the new general secretary of the Communist Party. With the younger, healthy Gorbachev in the Kremlin, and with Celestine Bohlen as an additional Washington Post correspondent, the author no longer felt constantly watchful, manacled to the office, fearful of missing some development.

This chapter focuses on how the author was appointed the paper's East European bureau chief. However, the bureau itself was located in Belgrade in Yugoslavia, from which the author had escaped. Since he feared that he may never get another offer to become a foreign correspondent, he accepted the position. The chapter then looks at the author's meeting with Turkish leader Rauf Denktash. The author 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. Denktash told the author that he had asked Turkey to intervene militarily to protect the Turkish minority on the island. Later, the author got caught in a Turkish fire during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus.

This chapter evaluates the challenge and danger of making contact with foreign correspondents. One day, Henry Kamm of the New York Times and the author met with the former World War II troop commander Piotr Grigorenko. Despite the pressure and the certainty of surveillance, Grigorenko wanted to talk. Dissent for him, as for others, was directly linked to the suppression of the liberal Czech regime. The Soviet intervention had been followed by massive repression within the Soviet Union. As the two journalists left Grigorenko's apartment, several plainclothes KGB men pushed them roughly aside. Within minutes, they were manhandling Grigorenko past the two, his head pushed down so that he could make no contact. The episode underscored an uncomfortable truth: every time dissidents reached out to foreign journalists, they risked everything, and foreign journalists, 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. Besides dissidents, another group that provided unauthorized access into the Soviet was Soviet Jews.

This chapter highlights the author's return to Moscow as the Washington Post's correspondent. The mood in Moscow had changed; the seventy-four-year-old Leonid 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, there was an air of disillusion and resignation all over Moscow. As the severe Moscow winter of 1981–82 took hold, the weather matched a deepening chill in US–Soviet relations. The Kremlin lambasted Ronald 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.” The chapter then considers how the author's relationship with the US embassy in Moscow deteriorated as his analysis began often to diverge from that of the embassy and the CIA.

This chapter describes how the Washington Post granted the author a year's sabbatical from the summer of 1976 to write a book about Yugoslavia. He also had a fellowship from the Wilson Center. The author's goal with his book, The Yugoslavs, was to make sense of the country where he was born. He chose to write in a hopeful spirit, to attribute Yugoslavia's ills to the Communist dictatorship that had ruined his family's life. The author then returned to the Post in the summer of 1977, going back to his job at the foreign desk, writing stories and analysis from Washington, particularly on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. During this time, the Post had embraced post-Watergate success and celebrity. The Yugoslavs, published in 1978, garnered positive reviews, including a front-page review in the New York Review of Books.

This chapter describes how the author's first story on the intelligence beat not only put him 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 him for reporting that embarrassed them. 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.

This chapter begins by discussing a story that the author got from Senator Tom McIntyre, who was President Lyndon Johnson's campaign manager in New Hampshire and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He found out that General Westmoreland had asked the president for an extra 206,000 US troops in Vietnam. 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 author decided to pitch the story to his boss in Albany, Earl Aronson. However, Aronson did not greenlight the story and it ended up being picked up by the New York Times. Soon after, the author handed his notice and later took a job at United Press International in Moscow. The chapter then recounts how the author had fallen in love with journalism when he was still in high school in his native Sarajevo; he had written some stories for the city's Oslobodjenje (Liberation) newspaper.

This chapter addresses how the author was assigned to the intelligence beat. He protested, pointing out that it would be hard to cultivate sources within an intelligence community that had been embarrassed by his Andropov scoop and by his reporting from the Soviet Union. However, Ben Bradlee insisted on giving him the position. In July of 1986, with his book now finished and with him scheduled to return to the Washington Post, the author proposed another story that would help him see more of Louise Branson and delay his start on the intelligence beat. It involved Kurt Waldheim, the former UN 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.

This chapter discusses the author's experience 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 author felt under even more pressure. Yuri Andropov 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.” Andropov also oversaw a limited debate on economic reforms and talked about greater discipline and material incentives for better performance. The author's stories detailed how Andropov set about replacing Leonid Brezhnev's bloated secretariat with aides from the KGB, moved KGB personnel into political jobs, and sent many of the old guard into retirement. 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.

This chapter highlights the author's legal battle against Time magazine. Throughout 1993, he was frustrated by delay after delay as it became clear that Time's strategy was to defer proceedings indefinitely, to wear him down and drain not only his resources but his spirit. Another obstacle he encountered was the Washington Post itself. Bob Kaiser, the managing editor, had told the author that the Post would not help him financially if he proceeded to sue Time. When he 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. Because of this, Washington Post staff were barred from getting involved, which meant that no one could testify on the author's behalf. Nevertheless, the author began to collect witness depositions. Later, the court required discovery, an exchange of information and documents that had been subpoenaed. This revealed that the only outside witnesses to support Time were two former employees of the CIA: Robert Gates and Colin R. Thompson. Finally, Time proposed a settlement that included an apology; the author reluctantly accepted even though he wanted to expose Time's brand of journalism.

This chapter examines the author's experience covering Yuri Andropov's successor, Konstantin Chernenko. 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. The country was now on autopilot as Chernenko and his men did all they could to return Soviet society to the Brezhnev era. The chapter then looks at the author's interview with Chernenko. Chernenko told the author that he wanted to resume arms talks with the United States but that Ronald 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. During this time, the author's marriage had collapsed.

This book describes how one February night crystalized the values and personal risks that shaped the life of the author of this book. The frigid Moscow night in question was in 1984, and the author, a Washington Post correspondent, reported signs that Soviet leader Yuri Andropov had died. The CIA at first dismissed the reporting, saying that “Doder must be smoking pot.” When Soviet authorities confirmed Andropov's death, journalists and intelligence officials questioned how a lone reporter could scoop the multibillion-dollar US spy agency. The stage was set for Cold War-style revenge against the journalist. After emigrating to the United States from Yugoslavia in 1956, the author committed himself to the journalist's mission. He knew that reporting the truth could come at a price, something driven home by his years of covering Soviet dissidents and watching his Washington Post colleagues break the Watergate story. Still, he was not prepared for a cloaked act of reprisal from the CIA. Taking aim at the author, the CIA insinuated a story into Time magazine suggesting that he had been co-opted by the KGB. His professional world collapsed and his personal life was shaken as he fought Time in court. In this book, the author reflects on this attempt to destroy his reputation, his dedication to reporting the truth, and the vital but precarious role of the free press today.

This chapter details how, in July of 1970, the author received a letter from Washington Post foreign editor John Anderson inviting him to Washington for interviews and a tryout at the newspaper's expense. Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee had been transforming the Post from a second-tier newspaper into a rival to the New York Times, and had been attracting “great talent” by paying them good salaries and giving them a lot of editorial freedom. The author worked at his tryout tasks for three days, mostly shaping wire service and other copy from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The job offer arrived in late September of 1970. The chapter then looks at the author's first few days at the Washington Post, where he was assigned to the foreign desk and given responsibility for the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and other parts of the Communist world.

The Awakening of the Soviet Union by Geoffrey Hosking. Harvard University Press, 208 pp., $19.95. Gorbachev: Heretic in the Kremlin by Dusko Doder and Louise Branson. Viking, 450 pp., $24.95. Against the Grain by Boris Yeltsin, translated by Michael Glenny. Summit, 263 pp., $19.95. Memoirs by Andrei Sakharov, translated by Richard Lourie. Alfred A. Knopf, 740 pp., illus., $29.95. Moscow and Beyond, 1986 to 1989 by Andrei Sakharov, translated by Antonina Bouis. Alfred A. Knopf, 168 pp., $19.95. The New Russians by Hedrick Smith. Random House, 621 pp., $24.95. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations by Walter Laqueur. Charles Scribner's Sons, 382 pp., $24.95. The Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes. Alfred A. Knopf, 944 pp., illus., $40.00. Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War by W. Bruce Lincoln. Simon and Schuster, 637 pp., $24.95.