The only time in my life I got a job I didn’t apply for it was midnight and I was in my nightgown.
It’s not what you’re thinking.
In 1989 my family and I were living in Moscow when it was still the USSR. My husband, the first Voice of America correspondent to be sent to the Soviet Union, was on the phone with a friend from ABC News discussing a story they both were on deadline to file. Our friend told André that he and the other correspondent in the bureau were so slammed by the tsunami of news they needed to cover that they were looking for a radio correspondent so the two of them could focus on television reporting.
“Do you think Ellen would be interested?” he asked. “She’s already got a work permit.”
“Ask her,” my husband said. “I’ll get her.”
And so at midnight I got out of bed and padded into the kitchen for a telephone job interview, of sorts. It didn’t matter that my only experience in radio journalism was being married to a radio journalist: the bureau chief in Moscow persuaded the bosses in New York to hire me anyway and suddenly I was the resident stringer—freelancer—for ABC Radio News, the largest radio network in the US.
The hours were crazy, the work was non-stop, but it was fascinating, and I loved it. Still, I had never wanted to move to Russia. It was André’s dream assignment, VOA had always wanted him in Moscow, and those things worried me. In fact, they terrified me because my husband spoke perfect Russian thanks to a Ukrainian grandmother and a Russian grandfather who barely managed to flee to France as the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917. André’s grandfather, a naval officer, had been a captain of the yacht belonging to Tsar Nicholas II who, along with his family, would later be brutally executed.
But my real gnawing worry was this: three years earlier, Nicholas Daniloff, an American journalist with U.S. News & World Report who spoke fluent Russian like my husband did and had family ties to pre-revolutionary Russia, also like my husband, had been arrested by the KGB, accused of espionage, and held in Lefortovo Prison for fifteen days. Daniloff claimed the papers found on him had been planted, but the incident escalated into an international crisis at the highest level involving multiple tit-for-tat expulsions by the US and USSR that went on for years.
And here we were moving to Moscow.
Could André be accused of spying if he, say, reported on a story that the Soviets didn’t like and they wanted to retaliate? You bet. Being a journalist was already considered a dead easy cover for a spy. Not only that, our arrival hadn’t gone unnoticed: a reporter from one of the Moscow newspapers interviewed André and a photographer took a photo of us with our three young children in front of our hotel a few days after we arrived. The story and photo landed on the front page.
Our time in Moscow came to a screeching halt in December 1990 when André contracted a rare but reversible—and potentially fatal—paralysis called Guillain-Barré Syndrome after returning home from a trip to Kyiv. (Some people still believe the Sovs had a role in what happened to him, but we’ll never know, and we let it go years ago). Back home in the US as he was recuperating at Walter Reed Army Hospital and we were trying to put our life back together, I knew I wanted to write about our time in Russia. The place had gotten under my skin and I wondered if anyone would believe the fever dream that had been our life there: the appalling poverty and repression, the creepiness of constantly being spied on, how we grew to accept things that would seem utterly bizarre in the West as normal life in Moscow. A New York agent scribbled a note at the bottom of her form rejection letter: Make it up. You’ll have better luck with fiction.
I eventually wrote Moscow Nights while we were in London, our next overseas post; it was published in 2000 in Britain. Although I made up the story of an American journalist who arrives in Moscow to discover her colleague and ex-lover was murdered after stumbling on a plot to steal a priceless and supposedly lost Old Master painting plundered by the Soviets during World War II, everything else in that book is true because it was taken directly from my diary. A few years ago the book was reprinted in the US; twenty-two years later, it almost seems like a historical mystery about a place that no longer exists.
Today as the world is horrified and riveted by the news of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the evil perpetrated by one man who has the potential of unleashing World War III, I am wondering when—not if—writers are going to do what we’ve always done: write about it. There is already a deep, rich trove of spy novels written and set during the Cold War as well as a growing number of books with more recent settings since Russia and the US are still playing the cat-and-mouse spy game, just as we’ve always done. Plus I don’t think we’ll ever stop being fascinated by the country Winston Churchill famously called “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” as well as “an inscrutable and menacing land that plays by its own rules.”
In addition to the spy classics by John LeCarré, Len Deighton, Robert Ludlum, Ken Follett, and Jack Higgins—and yes, I know I’m leaving out a bunch of names—here are a few newer books and a couple of old favorites.
Red Widow by Alma Katsu
CIA insider Katsu’s unputdownable spy novel is the tale of two female CIA agents whose paths cross when one of them is given the assignment to find a mole inside the Agency’s Russia Division. Katsu also deftly explores the wrenching and heartbreaking choices that come with a life of secrets, lies, and, occasionally, betrayal. Already in pre-production for a tv series with Fox.
The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott
A terrific thriller that garnered an Edgar nomination for Best First Novel and was inspired by the true story of a CIA plot. Irina, a Russian-American secretary from the Agency’s typing pool, is assigned to smuggle the greatest love story of the twentieth century—Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago—into Soviet Russia where it had been banned. Mentored by a glamorous, experienced CIA agent, the two women become involved in unexpected ways, but also prove once again the powerful belief that there are books that can change the world.
Moscow Rules by Daniel Silva
When a pro-Western Russian journalist with information about a ruthless oligarch’s plans to sell Russia’s most sophisticated weapons to Al-Queda is assassinated, Israeli spy/assassin-cum-art-restorer Gabriel Allon travels to Moscow. Determined to stop the deal from going through, Allon’s fast-paced international search takes him to Europe and back to Russia seeking information on the time and place of the delivery in order to avert the deadliest terror attacks since 9/11.
The Red Sparrow Trilogy (Red Sparrow, Palace of Treason, The Kremlin’s Candidate) by Jason Matthews
Set in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Matthews—a 33-year CIA veteran years who passed away in 2021—weaves the story of Dominika Egorova, a Russian spy and trained seductress (a sparrow) who is assigned to operate against Nathaniel Nash, a CIA officer stationed in Moscow. The two begin a passionate affair and eventually Dominika begins a double life, working for the CIA and turning against her hated masters. Putin—who Matthews called a great character whose goals are the stuff of spy novels—is a recurring character. Red Sparrow won an Edgar for Best First Novel and was made into a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence. Matthews’ years of experience and extensive knowledge of spycraft have prompted comparisons to John LeCarré and Ian Fleming; The New York Times wrote that his books were “a primer in twenty-first century spying.”
The Russia House by John LeCarré
This book has special meaning for me because the movie starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer was filmed while we were living in Moscow (including a scene that took place at the hotel where we were living) and perfectly captures the drab, gray life of that era. Barley Blair becomes an unwilling spy for British intelligence when he attends the Moscow Book Fair and is pressured into finding out whether a manuscript handed to him by Katya, a beautiful woman with whom he eventually falls in love, contains the truth—that the author has nuclear secrets he is willing to share with the West.
The Charm School by Nelson DeMille
A few days after we arrived in Moscow, a journalist friend handed me this book and I—mistakenly—read it at night before going to sleep, scaring myself to death wondering how much was or could be true. In the woods outside Moscow there is a sinister place known as “The Charm School” where American POWs teach KGB agents how to be model US citizens in order to infiltrate our country as undetected spies. When three Americans—an Air Force Officer, a young female US embassy liaison, and a CIA chief—set out to uncover the truth about what’s going on in Borodino woods, they are caught by the Soviets who run the place. I’m not going to spoil the surprise ending. Just don’t read the book before bedtime.
The Inconvenient Journalist—A Memoir by Dusko Doder with Louise Branson
The only non-fiction book on this list and, full disclosure, Doder and Branson (husband and wife) are long-time friends. A harrowing account of a night in 1984 when Doder, an acclaimed Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post, pieced together signs from the Kremlin that Soviet Communist Party Chief Yuri Andropov had died. Doder was the first to report the story, which the CIA dismissed—but when it was later discovered to be true, there were questions how one reporter could manage to scoop the largest and most sophisticated spy agency in the world. Eventually a story insinuated by the CIA in Time magazine claimed that Doder, who had emigrated to the US from Yugoslavia, had been co-opted by the KGB. Although he fought Time in court, Doder’s professional life collapsed and he never worked anywhere again. Reviewers describe the book as a thriller, but it is also a well-written meditation on one man’s unshakable belief that the truth must be reported regardless of the cost and the sometimes-unbearable price that might be exacted.
