In August 1986, Nicholas Daniloff, the Moscow bureau chief for U.S. News and World Report was arrested by the KGB on bogus spy charges. In his book Of Spies and Spokesmen: My Life as a Cold War Correspondent, he described the experience, which included daily six-hour interrogations and isolation from the outside world, as creating a kind of mental torture and duress that left him unable to reason with himself. His captivity ended after two weeks when the Soviets agreed to release him in exchange for the United States’ release of a Soviet agent who had been arrested shortly before Daniloff’s arrest. He returned to the U.S., thus ending an impressive career reporting on the Soviet Union that began as a reporter for the UPI in 1961 ? a year before the Cuban Missile crisis.

I was honored when Nicholas Daniloff agreed to read an advanced copy of my book and am thrilled by his endorsement:

[In Moscow], Lisa fell in with a group of Soviet dissidents, among them two remarkable intellectuals Inna and Naum Meiman. Suddenly she was learning why it was essential in Soviet Russia to lie in public, to tell the truth only around the kitchen table, to bribe and barter to get things done. By the time she left two years later, she had concluded the authoritarian Soviet system was “inhumane, oppressive, and paranoid” and that the United States, whatever its faults, offered real freedom “to think, write, be, go”. In this beautifully written recollection about the Meimans’ travails, Lisa Paul records with compassion the upside-down life of young and old in the last days of Communist Russia. A “must read” for those who want to know what that life was like.

Nicholas Daniloff, US reporter after his release from being detained in Russia.

(Photo by Cynthia Johnson/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)