Operation Smiling Buddha was the assigned code name for India’s first nuclear weapons explosion on May 18th, 1974. India declared…
Normalizing Ties with Franco: “I don’t have to like the son of a bitch, do I?”
For many people, Spain in the 1930s and 40s was a country of despair, where the dreams of democracy and…
Get Your Cameras Ready: Celebrities in the Embassies
While the work at embassies can often put Foreign Service officers in harm’s way, on occasion they have the chance…
The Nazi Invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece
Axis military efforts in the Balkans, compared with the rest of Europe, had not gone well. Italy had invaded Greece…
Cracking the Glass Ceiling: A Conversation with Foreign Service Women
Despite their education and background, women Foreign Service Officers in the 1950s and 60s faced discrimination and were often treated…
Books, Defectors, and Song — The Cuban Missile Crisis, as Seen from Moscow
The Soviet Union, in Churchill’s famous words, was a “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”; as such it made…
Poison as a Weapon in Putin’s Russia
Russia’s tumultuous history is replete with backstabbing — sometimes literal — where the powerful would seek their vengeance with a…
Returning the Crown of Saint Stephen to post-Cold War Hungary
For centuries, it was the national symbol of a nation. For decades, it was kept in Fort Knox for safekeeping.…
The Afghan Invasion as Seen from U.S. Embassy Moscow
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was, among other things, a horrible political miscalculation, lasting nine bloody years and resulting in the…
Not-So Full Disclosure
So you have been entrusted with a very important mission — in this case, trying to convince several countries in…