"Readers will discover the failures of Kissinger s policy of detente in the early 1970s, the mistaken departure from Carter s balanced policy toward China and the USSR, and the near-collapse of the embassy due to intelligence failures"-Foreign Service Journal. "Ober s book recounts it all, along with the personalities and events of the time now mostly forgotten: dissidents and refuseniks, Victor and Jennifer Louis, Nina and Ed Stevens, U.S.-Soviet summits, microwaves, bugged buildings and typewriters, fires, spy dust and spy mania . . . It s all there, the pageant of U.S. Embassy Moscow 1970-90, a place so unlike today s walled air-conditioned, high-rise embassy fortress a block away as to beggar the imagination."-Richard Gilbert, AmericanDiplomacy.org "You have wonderfully captured the way things were in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 80s. I don t know anyone who has done it better."-Donald Connery, former Time-Life correspondent, Moscow. "Together with much wisdom about American diplomacy, this rich memoir provides keen insight into Russian thinking and behavior"-George Feifer, "The Girl from Petrovka".