Quiet contemplative place. With a public event is where doing this evening. You can read about in the program she wrote her own book stranger is drowning grappling witwith impossible idealism, drastic choices and the overpowering urge to help deliver a center for scholars and writers. Strangers traveling which also explores puzzling fascinating questions of Human Behavior was a finalist for the librarian 2016 award for excellence in journalism. I hope that youll all agree there could be no better moderator for tonights program than larissa and no more appropriate place to hold it than right here at the new york public library. Now please join me in welcoming melissa. [applause] good evening ladies and gentlemen and thank you, larissa. Such an honor to be interviewed by one of my favorite authors and i have to tell you one reason the producer of great literature is that there is terrible perception there so we have to keep our noses down. [laughter] the book about the cold war and about the attraction and repulsion to it but its essentially about this one man that very few people have heard of before you introduce him to us so can you just sit the scene and tell us who he is so we know what we are talking about . His career as a spy went unnoticed. In the 30s he was recruited while he was a rising young officer in the Foreign Service and the state department. A. His career ended not by the people that he betrayed in the United States but the people that he served. Stalin and the kgb. Stalins demonstrating work again is no less ruthless towards his own polymer. Its sort of like edward snowden. One step up the fbi subpoena. There he was kidnapped. Not only was he picked up his a, his brother and his adopted daughter who all naively went looking for him. To set the broader scene a devoted stalinist at this point. At this point in the late 20s and early 30s immediate why there would be an attraction to the soviet union, and if you could talk us through that. They havent come as xavier and they had an enormous impact and Many American intellectuals were attracted to at that point. Can you tell us more of that . There are parallels between that age and present euro into disenchantment he had a whole generation that was disenchanted with capitalism with 11 Million People out of work and he was raised as a quaker and i would say an exceptionally sensitive man and he is a complicated. It sounds very odd to call him sensitive, but he was at the outset. The injustices abounded and in the 30s racism, antiimmigrant sentiments which were at play in the execution which was a watershed moment. What is extraordinary is he never let go of the state and itits a type of personality tht its something to lift him out of himself and to kind of explain everything in life and make sense out of it. I compare it in the process to the power today. So the power to capture minds becomes very addictive. Lets tal lets talk about that for a minute. You talk about the recruitment of volunteers now. Is it too early to know if they have created those who cling to their faith for their whole lives regardless of what happens. But what are some of the differences to some extent it relies on the internet outreach and its a very different mode of recruitment. Many people come to them. Draw some of the differences between this. The power of the leader and the only thing that they knew was his own propaganda and they kind of invented spam to be to spinning. It was also the point was that . It was in the 30s and early 40s. So, we cant judge the era where these people and i think that i am pretty clear eyed in my judgment of the very troubling soul in so many ways and guilty of multiple betrayals. He basically betrayed everybody for the cause, faith and religion. Okay, so isis if these early communists and it was the allknowing little father of the people as he was called and america was really on its knees. We have to keep remembering the four roosevelts lifting spirits, the United States parallels with today. Capitalism seemed to be failing and witnessed thousands of veterans marching down pennsylvania avenue claiming the bonuses that they had been promised with their service and president hoover walked the white house gates. But they started off as a good guy and marched with these veterans and his best friends in washington were not fellow up and coming diplomats. They were africanamericans. So there was a lot to like about this guy and told there wasnt. This is one of the deeply fascinating things about this book is that its not even as comprehensible a story as a good guy turned bad, or an idealist. He was always both. This is the hardest thing to understand. Many people saying that even at the end of his life when he had the violence and brutality of the regime was very obvious and yet they still described him as a person of goodness. He didnt change his mind. After a certain point, his allegiance to this obviously misleading faith was irreversible. They made so many sacrifices. He gave up a brilliant career and his country because unlike some, he had some scruples about the documents from the state department and about writing than those of his colleagues or the kgb. When the opportunity to leave the country and this uncomfortable situation that he was in at the state department, he took that opportunity, he went to europe, worked for the league of nations if diminished the spanish civil war. It was the first time that there was an opportunity to do something other than talk about fascism. And again their faith was flagging by now because of what they were hearing that was going on in the course of stalin. They rejoined the cause because the u. S. Was so shamefully absent from the antifascist battle. And again, another parallel today. We were in a time of day maximum need to take in refugees principally those fleeing fascism but this is already starting in the 30s. The u. S. Tightened its quote us against the refugees, and this was appalling for an idealist. And again, it fueled his faith. He wasnt observing bees in the newspapers. He went to spain and helped out with the fighters. Tell us a bit about what he was doing during the war. In his internal regret he got to know many of the future leaders of the soviet empire, the future communist leaders were in spain and he was helping and then fastforwarfastforward to the py of them have paid with their lives. So that became like a curse. Just to take the trajectory, he worked for the state department at which point he was recruited. Then he was working in spain during the civil war and then, tell us about what worked during world war ii. Another piece of the supreme irony and a bunch of the boston dogooders unitarians rushed in to fill the awful void left by the failures to engage in the refuge of the refugees by setting up shop which was kind of a sanctuary for the refugees for the German Occupation of france. So from here he is hire hes hin the thing. What he does with the solid unitarian funds is set up the aid. That is to rescue the hardcore communists from camp and help them find their way back to their home countries and begin the work of setting up the future soviet states. All on unitarians time, which is and what they had in mind. And for a long time, it worked. Ive got all these descriptions as this holds some allamerican guy and by the way, they had a soft spot for that type. Its because their experience was a good shield against detection. How could such a well brought up harvard educated young man be a traitor . He was. As you describe the scene, he was involved with as im sure you know, trying to bring refugees from europe to the u. S. And constantly lobbying the government against the policy of clamping down. He was suspicious. He had his own people in the field and in the air of humanitarianism it was pretty hardcore in selecting only not only the columnists, but has fallen. We all know this is shameful part of the history clamping down on refugees in world war ii and again facing the refugee crisis. It was just wondering. I think that its another blocblot on americas image in e world. We have a number on our face at the moment. We dont want to get into that. But, this is one we cant blame on donald trump. This is i think a sorry lack of compassion towards refugees and how they somehow a bout of the war against terror to be completed with those fleeing the brutality. I dont want to get off too far on what we should be doing. Doing. Taking 10,000 refugees when germany has taken 1. 5 million is pretty prophetic. Im not inclined to sign up with any radical movements as a result. But i can see how somebody with this inclination towards wanting to do good in the world, and an enormous need as well, i mean he was a needy man. Stick one of the things that is unusual is that he met his future wife when they were nine and effectively you dont date when you are nine i hope, that they were each others closest companions. As you know theyve written about the marriages have thought about what that means constructing a political wife. What difference do you think its made to this unshakably devoted companion who was 100 with him ideologically, emotionally in every way. Did that enable him to take the road he did in some way . It is hard to imagine as a loner and a stranger everywhere he went. He spent his early years in switzerland, son of a loving father who died much too soon filling him with an image of america that was a fantasy america so that when he arrived to harvard after his fathers death having been his wish, he was shocked suddenly not in this utopia his father described above privilege, and again the alienation grows apace. The alienation was deepened. I quoted the recruiter essentially recruited both of them and it is impossible to views into a single human but they did i would say and i quoted her as saying they would have become a buddhist monk. But funny enough, we havent talked about the connection but it is relevant at this moment to mention my mother and father who were jailed as spies but they were convicted of being cia agents working for the americans in the soviet occupied hungary. And they were the only journalists ever to have conducted an interview, because one of the conditions and again im jumping forward, sorry. One of the conditions of the release from the soviet captivity after five years was that they never spoke to the western journalists because of how banning it would be for the west to discover what this man had been through and again we will talk about what he went through. So, my parents were determined to interview this couple and tried for years. When my father was being led to his cell in january, 1955 and he had just been released we will talk about why that happened, but the jailer said it to my father congratulations, youve got the vip so recently vacated by an american asian and two years later my father is freed and we ask is that the really cool place with a nice view and he said no, there was more sophisticated bugging them in the average person. But anyway, so when my mother and father meet in their hideaway in the past theyve asked for political asylum after they are freed with the alger hiss hearings im sure many of you recall that episode shattered his double life because he was revealed to be an agent. But anyway, the first question she asked my mother is what happened to the little girls. Because my sister and i have han part of the coverage of our pair of interest pigments arrest particularly the act of cruelty to take a mother and father when there are little kids involved. So she was aware of that because they had a frontpage picture of us and my fathers impression of both after the brutality of prison, she was stronger than and knew that he was the one keeping them together. And of course the records from the files even when they were in the hospital they were bugged. They were whispering to each other at night and day are never alone. He is saying he just wants to die and shes saying no. That is just what our enemies want you to do. You cannot give them that victory. We have to rebuild. So they did. It seems as if you say it does seem she was devoted to h him. Its hard to imagine this double life. Then after they are reunited occasionally he thought he heard that she was three cells away from him but the first question he asks her after not seeing each other for five years is have you remained true not to me but to the cause. [inaudible] then they asked how stalin was doing. We need to backtrack a little bit. You explained how he was captured and imprisoned for five years. They were both in prisons for five years when they crossed over and their adopted daughter after some time goes looking for then it also is captured. She is the extraordinary heroine. This is a complicated, strange, fascinating figure shes just sort of thing unambiguous here. She was truly a child of the 20th century who grew up in germany with a jewish backgrou background. Again, idealistic parents, doctors, lost to spain, volunteer. The parents are unable to look after her so they offered to take care of her. [inaudible] one of their better decisio decisions. So shes team when they adopt her and they have high hopes in the future. She invigorates. She sees they are the only ones who are doing anything to. But she doesnt swallow that facespace the way that he does n he meets and falls in love with an american g. I. Indices his dream shattering and when dole is taken prisoner and hes now married to the gia and has two little kids. A six monthold and a year and a half old. Because she is a fundamentally good person and feels she owes them, she goes looking. They are now catching a big show trial as he had in the 30s to get rid of the perceived enemi enemies. In the 30s it was the trotskyites were the enemies. Now its the hero of yugoslavia who has bolted from the fold. Now they have all the soviet satellite and who better than the chief witness against all these people because hes an american so we are now posted by Stalin Roosevelt brief alliance. He noticed him from his refugee rescue work. The book starts off with his hotel kidnapping and then flashes back from that. But erica has friends in the communist german party so she goes to berlin and is believed that there is a trap set for her and she is tortured into confessing that she was working for the cia. She has an entirely different experience, so she humanizes prison if thats possible. Key difference when hes in solitary confinement which i think is one of the most brutal forms of punishment. For five years virtually no contact except for the hungarian guards. Erica is sent to the northernmost outpost of the gulags and is laying out Railroad Tracks in the freezing weather that has companions and has about as full a life as you can have in confinement. When the entire family is suddenly free its not because there is an ounce of kindness and humanity in the kremlin but their interrogators turns up in the big cia news conference. I was very heartened that they found a great deal of material in the book. Anyway, he steps up and says that they have been given for dead. I know because i interrogated which is a euphemism for torture and at that moment the state department starts bombarding moscow and warsaw and prague with demands for the release of this american family. The family are released but they do not want to come home because they are afraid of the mccarthyist america. But this is one of the amazing twists in the story. When the ambassador contacted them after they requested asylum saying they fear returning to the u. S. , he says quite reasonably this is not consistent with american citizenship. This came as a total shock to him and believe that he explained it, his loyalty is to the american people, not the contemporary government said he considered himself a loyal dissenter but this would come as a shock, one of many little moments where your jaw drops. I am quoting myself, he had the gift of seeing only what each was to see if. I just want to ask you about this before we go to questions. Its a combination of the villains and the repression of the uprising many people then saw the soviet regime for what it was and they stayed loyal but in 68 before he died spring was repressed and that seemed to have affected him. He didnt renounce communism but he stopped paying his party dues. Why do you think after everything that happened why he spent a lifetime lighting as spies do and must. The only candor ever to come out is contained in this book because i was very fortunate getting a hold of correspondence and the fact is that by 68, the country where he was living the pair were very few people left who still believed he was working in a literary magazine and i interviewed people who were his colleagues and they all said we were dreaming of our first car into passport to the west and nobody was thinking about revolution anymore so in that kind of environment, i think some of the juice kind of went out of im mixing metaphors here out of his revolutionary tomato. This revolutionary tomato. [laughter] it became a very dry fruit by then. But there are many things that are unforgivable and one is that he never acknowledged the faith for which hed sacrificed everything was in fact as toxic as the fundamentalism that captures young people today. She never acknowledged he hadnt participated in that movement that had played a role in the assassination. This was a targeted assassination so when you realize this is a young man that started with the great dream he promised his father he would do good things and prevent another world war and he gave his life for one of the most violent of all systems and became its pond but the book is also the story of a tragic family because his siblings who were quite helpful because the fields for life into the kgb archives were not yet open and they never got the story but now i dont think that this is easy reading for the family but now they know and they never stopped trying from here they never stopped hoping and trying. But the story is triumphant. She restarts her life here and has a spectacularly successful american life. We should go to questions at this point. He was able to get to the soviet union, was any of it really valuable and did they use it in any way . The reason the soviets were so interested is because in the 30s, with fascism rising, stalin wanted to have a sense of what if anything washington was preparing to do to fight and he was well placed in the office of the western european wing of the state department to help along with that. He gave them enough so that the kremlin had the sense that the u. S. Wasnt going to be active in the antifascist movement and he also gave a lot of information from the u. S. At the naval conference in 1934 i believe, and from there he did a lot of spying. But its not determined by the quality of the material gets determined by your willingness to betray your country, and in fact, he was very guilty as when you read the book you will see as the counter hits not a shred of doubt. Not for the same branch as he was in the political kgb precursor. Thank you very much for the introduction to this madness. It gives you an idea in the kind of toxic mixture and youve already answered some of the questions but what really impacts people to do these things like the oxford cambrid cambridge. The cambridge spies were a somewhat different species. He wasnt a cynic as they were. They were disenchanted with the British Society and i dont think they gave a damn frankly as i could make out about the little guy for the job creation. He actually did come of the tragedy is that he really did start out with the high ideals and slowly this ideology purely soaked into him so that he was ready to pretty much do anything for the faith in the personality type that is susceptible to the seduction and he was such a personality even without the internet, people like that they are talents spouted by those looking for recruits. Yes . You did a lot of research, you understand. But even in the late 30s and early 40s, the soviet union wasnt that close. In the civil war it was work. Everybody that wanted to understand what the soviet union was all about. Nobody really knew how it worked. I think thats the book that really ripped the veil off the cruelty of stalin. But that was already in the 40s. In the 30s, this was before the technological revolution where that was a very long way off it was a smart use of propaganda. The things that we talked about some of the really shabby performance with the fascism and stalin taking a seemingly active role and there was a difference between stalin and lenin. He was a favorite of the maximum execution. And i compared the show trials that have nothing to do with justice to the beheadings as a propaganda tool meant to spread ever. The image of these absolutely reduced former heroes of the revolution, quaking in their boots confessing to every crime under the sun was pretty repellent and people couldnt believe that these people were innocent because they needed its like crying when a little father died in the biblical father of the people even though people knew he was as dominant a figure for the soviet people as fdr was for americans but only knew one president , fdr. A more general question. Thank you for asking that and reading my other books as well. This will sound a little bit grandiose but i like to portray through one character and it was in the book about my parents, enemy of the people. It was life under soviet rule. We dont really understand the era until we feel it otherwise it is dry academics, its factual and i think through a human story through portraying a character that we can somehow identify with we are more able to understand. Its a remarkable fact of my parents having been the only journalists to have met him and of course i did hear my parents talk about this strange guy. Then i started thinking weve been talking about the parallels between the two areas if they played such a huge role in the chapter in that he wasnt at all known but we did in know in some ways theyve probably more damage than he will be appalled at how he basically destroyed his own family of a band never said sorry. Do we have time for one more . Was the adopted daughter ever bitter about the past her parents took her down . Eric wasnt a bitter person. She considered herself a very fortunate person and even considered president had given her a tremendous perspective on life. She adored her biological parents and the father unfortunately died during the war but she and her mother were very close. She was a remarkable character of the sort that you income per in fiction. Thank you all. [applause]