Authors Electric

I had just read Death and the Penguin , a surreal mystery novel by Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov , when Russian despot Vladimir Putin stepped up his Big Lie that Ukraine doesn't exist as a country or culture outside of Mother Russia.  He might as well have said that Ireland doesn't exist because the Emerald Isle spent so much of its history under British rule. No surprise here: Lies are the mother's milk of tyrants, actual and would-be. This long-of-tooth American, for example, has oft lowered a Quixotic lance at waves self-serving, authoritarian lies washing over so-called land of the free incessantly as polluted tides. Meanwhile, inconvenient truths are gagged and spirited away. The Russian bombing of Mariupol differs little in its mass-murdering savagery from those of  Guernica, Rotterdam, London, Rotterdam, Dresden, Hiorshima, or more recently, Aleppo.  George Orwell's rule holds true: "The most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate how ...

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 ...