Edward Alexander

At the height of the Cold War and before the Berlin Wall, a reception in West Berlin finds the author in dialogue with an official from the Soviet Embassy in East Berlin who, upon learning of the author’s ethnic Armenian heritage, writes down his name and promises contact with a member of the Soviet Embassy. This happens months later (signifying to the CIA that he was not from the Embassy but sent from KGB headquarters in Moscow). After 13 months of periodic contacts, including a family get-together in a KGB safe house in East Berlin, culminating later in a crude attempt to recruit him in an ill disguised ‘picnic’ in East Germany, beyond the border of East Berlin, the author leaves West Berlin for language training in Washington and then Hungary. For the next two decades the KGB pursues him through many subterfuges, primarily journalistic and diplomatic, in Washington and even during visits to Moscow and Armenia, eventually culminating in one final ‘reunion’ in East Berlin where the agent, implicitly conceding defeat and confessing to having been a pawn in the hands of others, displays photos of his family, now grown, in a pathetic display of being all too human.


“In my twenty years of working on Soviet nationality questions, I have never come across so detailed and interested a description of Soviet approaches to Armenian-Americans. It should be required reading for all scholars.”



“I stayed up all night reading this book from beginning to end. It is a candid and fascinating account of the recruitment efforts of the KGB…”

“…offers a fascinating international jaunt with eye-opening revelations by an eminently qualified expert…a mass of authentic information not available elsewhere which will exhilarate and enlighten.”

“…an unforgettable chronicle…a fascinating memoir that reads like a thriller.”