Authors Electric

  Vera Rich was one of those extraordinary people who was a total one-off. Clever, funny, infuriating, multi-lingual and fiercely in favour of an independent Ukraine, she was a part of my life for fourteen years. She was revered in Ukraine and Belarus for her poetry translations, and I travelled to Ukraine with her on two occasions. Vera never needed to embellish stories – her life had been quite exciting enough. She edited the unique Manifold Magazine, and I remember her saying, oh yes, people who’d had a week’s holiday in Prague would send me poems about their extensive knowledge of the place. I spent a week in Prague hiding from the Secret Police in a circus… And then there was the time, after Poland was once again a free country, when they saw a police car broken down by the side of the road and stopped to help. The driver kept staring at Vera, until she asked him if he knew her. He stood up very straight, clicked his heels and said, “I had the honour to interrogate you in 1...

I have only known one, for-sure, Russian spy in my life. I keep wondering what he would have had to say on the spreading oil slick of revelations about contacts between Trump minions and Kremlin agents meddling with the 2016 election. He'd very likely have deja vu, given his experiences with the Soviet (now Russian Federation) oligarchy and the KGB (now FSB). It's all in our book, High Treason : Revelations of a Double Agent . I met Vladimir Sakharov in the spring of 1979. His Russian accent - rich as Stroganoff - didn't fit with the name he was using then, Bill Stiller, an alias given him by the CIA, I was to learn. He was supposed to be from West Germany according to his fake dossier. When I got around to asking him how he felt about that, he shrugged stoically. "I keep it to myself. You learn to live with paradox," he said. Barbara Lowenstein , my then New York agent, had given me a phone number and very little else except that it would connect me with a ...