In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

183 20 BOMBED IN MOSCOW it was a delightful christmas. our sons were at ages, three and a half and two and a half, when Christmas is magical, Santa Claus very real, his presents wondrous, and life freshly exciting every morning—an excitement in which parents revel. The pleasant day ended with a warmly friendly dinner across town with another family with small children. Then the bomb went off. We had just returned from dinner after 9 p.m. in the light green Volkswagen Beetle in which Monica ran around Moscow with Keith and Neal looking over her shoulder from seats attached in the back. Someone up the one staircase of our large building where apartments were occupied by Western diplomats and journalists (Russians lived up the other staircases) seemed to be having a late Christmas party. As a result, all of the parking spaces carved out of snowbanks were occupied in the illuminated area watched over by the KGB man there to keep check on what foreigners did and block access to them by ordinary Soviet citizens. So I pulled on through the parking area and parked on packed snow just behind the building, out of the illumination and the militiaman’s sight. We had been in our apartment about twenty-five minutes when the bomb exploded under the front right corner of the Volkswagen, five floors below the AP bureau that occupied an apartment across the hall from where we lived. Windows were shattered for several floors up, but none of the Russians in those apartments below the office was hurt. In the seven-decade history of the Soviet Union, this was the only reported case of a foreigner’s car being bombed in Moscow. The U.S. government concluded that the Soviet political police, the KGB, were trying to intimidate me. It was easy to figure out why. I was an inconvenient person to have in charge of the Moscow bureau of the world’s largest news agency. I often did not adhere to the polite caution expected of foreign correspondents in the U.S.S.R.—a 184 The Dalai Lama’s Secret and Other Reporting Adventures politeness that, for some, ran through self-censorship to obsequiousness until it fringed on peddling Soviet propaganda. Instead, for almost four years I had been calling things as I saw them. As a result, the Soviet government had six weeks earlier started trying to make life even more difficult for me than its normal treatment of Western correspondents. It sought to isolate and so far as possible ignore me. Now the KGB seemed to be adding intimidation to that pressure. Western journalists were already pretty isolated. Josef V. Stalin had begun in the late 1920s inculcating the populace with the idea that all foreigners were spies, and any involvement with them would mean serious trouble, even banishment to the Gulag of concentration camps. The only Soviet citizens authorized to maintain contact with resident foreigners were members of a few small, special categories. These included a limited number of government officials and journalists, some artists and writers, and office and household employees hired through a KGB-controlled government agency. The press department of the Soviet Foreign Ministry was the official point of contact for non-Communist correspondents. It authorized visas for resident journalists, usually on the basis of strict reciprocity. The journalists’ home countries had to provide an equal number of residence visas for Soviet correspondents , a significant percentage of whom were actually officers of the KGB or Soviet military intelligence, the GRU. Requests for interviews with Soviet officials had to be made to the press department, which might—or, usually, might not—do anything about them. From time to time, the press department arranged what purported to be news conferences by government officials but usually ended up being boring lectures on subjects of minor significance, with reporters’ followup questions filibustered or completely ignored. Questions about governmental announcements were supposed to be directed to the press department, rather than the part of the government where the announcement originated. Any travel outside a twenty-five-mile radius from the Kremlin had to get the press department’s advance approval. Only after it was given could transportation and hotel arrangements be made. As was repeatedly obvious, the KGB then made its arrangements to keep an eye on the traveler. By Christmas 1967 the press department had a lengthy file on me, stu...

Share