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'.