Europe’s Biggest Thief

Advocating for better mental health care is a top priority to me, but it’s not my only interest. I took time last week to have lunch with a friend of mine who works for a U.S. intelligence agency and our conversation quickly turned to Russia.

   I have been fascinated with the Kremlin and Moscow much of my life.  Perhaps, it started when I was a youngster living in Pueblo, Colorado when my mother began storing food items in the bathroom closet in 1962. The bathroom was the only room in our small house that didn’t have windows, which was why it was chosen as our family’s emergency bomb shelter if the Soviet Union attacked.

For those too young to remember, 1962 was when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened and at the elementary school that I attended, we did drills where we either hurried into hallways or ducked under our desks. That was supposed to help us if  bombs fell.

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Putin says “Traitors always end badly” But “illegals” can end up in Playboy

“Traitors always end badly. They finish up as drunks, addicts, on the street…”
This is what Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said recently during a visit in the Ukraine. He also told reporters that he had met earlier in Moscow with the ten Russian “illegals” who had been expelled from the U.S. for being agents of the Russian government.
While Putin said the illegals would “have interesting, bright lives,” he explained that traitors never are happy after they betrayed their homelands.

Sergei Tretyakov, Russian Spy ‘Comrade J,’ Dead at 53

I am sorry to announce that my good friend, Sergei Tretyakov, the subject of my book, Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War, died unexpectedly on June 13th in his home with his wife, Helen.
Sergei was 53.
Helen asked those of us who were his friends to not immediately reveal his death until an autopsy could be performed under the supervision of the FBI. She was concerned that Sergei’s former colleagues in Russia’s SVR, which replaced the KGB as Russia’s foreign intelligence service, might attempt to use his unexpected death for propaganda purposes.