A Life Across the Divides

The encrypted Soviet transmission crackled through my headphones at 3 AM on a frozen December night in 1981. From our perch atop Teufelsberg—West Berlin's highest point and one of the Cold War's premier listening posts—my team and I were monitoring communications between Moscow and Soviet forces in East Germany. The intercepted conversations revealed something extraordinary: the Soviets were not seriously considering military intervention in Poland to crush the Solidarity movement. Within hours, this intelligence would reach Western leaders, potentially influencing decisions that could reshape Europe.

I was 22 years old, a signals intelligence specialist for the NSA, and I was listening to history unfold in real time. It was a moment that crystallized what would become the defining pattern of my life: finding myself at the crossroads of power during moments when the old world was ending and something new was struggling to be born.

Early Exposure: Learning to Read Between the Lines

My education in seeing how power actually operates began through my father's career as a U.S. diplomat. At eight, I accompanied him to Leningrad for the 1969 "Education USA" exhibition—one of those carefully choreographed cultural exchanges that passed for diplomacy during the Cold War. Seven years later, we were back in Moscow for the "USA 200 Years" exhibition commemorating America's bicentennial.

These weren't tourist visits. They were my first lessons in understanding how information flows, how people navigate political constraints, and how official narratives diverge from lived reality. The Russian language I absorbed during these early experiences would prove invaluable throughout my career, but more important was learning to see systems of power as they actually operated rather than how they presented themselves.

The Hill: Intercepting an Empire's Secrets

In 1979, the Defense Department recruited me as a signals intelligence specialist, leading to my assignment at NSA Field Station Berlin—"The Hill" to those who served there. Our work involved intercepting East German and Soviet military and government communications using sophisticated equipment that could capture what our targets believed were technically impossible to intercept.

We called it "atmospheric skip propagation"—bouncing radio signals off the ionosphere to reach beyond the horizon. We monitored everything from Socialist Unity Party political calls (internally dubbed the "Branflake project") to the heavily encrypted multichannel link connecting Soviet forces in East Germany directly to Moscow's Ministry of Defense (known to us as "The Big Sig").

The technical sophistication was remarkable, but what struck me most was how this work revealed the human dimension of geopolitics. When tensions arose with NSA management, our highly educated team of cryptologic linguists would engage in "nil heard" campaigns—essentially work slowdowns that forced headquarters to overlook traditional military discipline to keep the intelligence flowing.

My childhood exposure to Soviet culture proved crucial—understanding not just the language but the cultural context gave me advantages in analysis that pure technical training couldn't provide. I was witnessing how the machinery of empire actually functioned, not how it was supposed to work according to official doctrine.

Student in the Heart of Empire

The transition from intelligence work to cultural engagement deepened my understanding in unexpected ways. In 1986, I spent a formative year studying at the Maurice Thorez Foreign Language Institute in Moscow, experiencing daily life in the USSR as ordinary people actually lived it—not as filtered through official exhibitions or intercepted communications.

During this period, I made trips to Vilnius, Minsk, and Kyiv—journeys that would prove prophetic given my later work in these exact locations. These visits exposed me to the national tensions and cultural differences that would eventually tear the Soviet Union apart. The experience taught me that to understand a system, you had to live within it, not just observe it from the outside.

Cultural Bridges: From Espionage to Exchange

Following my departure from intelligence work, I found myself working for the State Department's Information USA exhibition program from 1988-1990, presenting American society to Soviet audiences during the final years of the Cold War. The irony wasn't lost on me—having spent years secretly listening to Soviet communications, I was now engaging Soviet citizens in open cultural dialogue as an official representative of the country I had served in intelligence.

These exhibitions, part of the broader détente under Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika policies, required different skills: serving as cultural interpreter and ambassador, answering questions from Soviet visitors who often had limited exposure to Western perspectives. It was a full-circle moment—the child who had accompanied his diplomat father to Soviet exhibitions was now running them himself.

In 1991, as the Soviet Union dissolved, I transitioned to academic publishing at M.E. Sharpe, Inc., a leading publisher specializing in Russian and Soviet studies. This positioned me at the intersection of scholarship and policy during one of history's great transformations, helping make Russian academic work accessible to Western audiences trying to understand the collapse of an empire.

Market Realities: Capitalism in the Ruins

The shift to private sector work brought me face-to-face with the human costs of systemic collapse. As Vice President of NYC-based Project Development International, I managed joint ventures in metals and mining with the former Soviet Union, interpreting for American executives at meetings in Moscow, including at the USSR Ministry of Metallurgy and in the Kremlin itself.

In 1992, Merck Sharp and Dohme recruited me as director of their Scientific Network in Russia and Central Asia. When the USSR collapsed, the centralized distribution of medication simply stopped—no drug registry existed, no regulatory framework remained. I was essentially pioneering pharmaceutical sales in markets where basic systems were still being invented, covering Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

The work was revealing in ways I hadn't expected. Healthcare access, which had been a fundamental guarantee under the Soviet system despite its limitations, became increasingly problematic as state funding collapsed and market mechanisms hadn't yet developed to replace it. I was witnessing firsthand how ordinary people experienced the transition from socialism to capitalism—often as a series of promises that didn't materialize and services that simply disappeared.

During this period, I maintained my physical and mental equilibrium through long-distance running—a practice that would sustain me through 25 years of high-stress work in volatile regions. There's something about the rhythm of running that allows you to process experiences that would otherwise be overwhelming.

Civil Society: Building Democracy in the Wreckage

The most consequential chapter came when I stopped "pushing drugs" to become Executive Director of the Belarusian Soros Foundation in the mid-1990s. Here was a chance to support actual democratic development rather than just analyze or profit from post-Soviet transitions.

Under my leadership, we grew the foundation substantially, administering 23 regional programs and providing financial support to writers, poets, scientists, and civil society activists operating under Alexander Lukashenko's increasingly authoritarian regime. We were, as I put it, "perfecting fertilizers that supported real people with actual money"—and it worked, for a while.

The foundation supported freedom of speech, human rights, rule of law, education, and economic reform. There were gracious and welcoming intellectuals, and the genuine pleasure of being constructively subversive while working with exceptionally talented people. But as I learned, "free money, when it travels at a certain trajectory and speed, can turn anyone into a target."

The end came in March 1997 when the Belarusian government expelled me, accusing me of "meddling in the affairs of a sovereign state." State television ran inflammatory programs targeting me and other civil society leaders while the government seized our bank accounts for alleged "tax and currency violations." The U.S. State Department condemned the action, but we were forced to close operations.

The experience was both professionally devastating and personally enlightening. What became clear was that no one in the collective West really cared enough to sustain the long-term work of building democratic institutions. The moment of clarity came with the realization that we were essentially creating victims of the regime rather than changing fundamental power structures.

Ukrainian Immersion: Journalism in the Chaos

Following my expulsion from Belarus, I relocated to Ukraine and began what would become a 25-year career in journalism. This transition represented both continuity and transformation—I was still engaging with post-Soviet political developments, but now from the perspective of documenting rather than trying to directly influence them.

My most significant work involved extensive coverage of the disappearance and murder of Ukrainian journalist Heorhiy Gongadze, founder of the independent news website Ukrainska Pravda. When secret recordings surfaced appearing to implicate President Leonid Kuchma in ordering Gongadze's murder, Ukraine faced its worst political crisis until the Orange Revolution. I wrote numerous investigative articles and was contracted to help produce the BBC's full-length documentary "Killing the Story," bringing international attention to this watershed moment in Ukrainian journalism and politics.

The 2004 Orange Revolution represented both hope and the beginning of what I described as "hard labor"—dealing with seemingly insurmountable problems while maintaining journalistic practice under increasingly difficult circumstances. The emotional toll was significant. There were periods of consuming cubic kilometers of cheap Georgian red wine, crushing out one cigarette after another, while trying to make sense of cyclical political crises that seemed to defy resolution.

My daily runs through Kyiv became essential during this period—they provided the mental clarity needed to process the chaos and maintain perspective on events that often felt overwhelming when experienced up close.

Media Innovation: Building Ukraine's Voice

From 2011 to 2016, I pivoted from traditional journalism to media entrepreneurship, setting up and executing the operational framework for two groundbreaking media ventures. The first was "Jewish News One" (JN1), the world's first Jewish news network, with offices in Kyiv and Tel Aviv.

JN1 represented something unprecedented—a 24-hour rolling video news format broadcasting via satellite, cable, and online, eventually operating simultaneously in six languages: English, Arabic, Spanish, French, Ukrainian, and Russian. The logistical complexity of coordinating content creation and distribution across multiple languages and time zones while maintaining editorial independence was immense.

The 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine transformed everything. JN1 was restructured into "Ukraine Today" under Kyiv-based 1+1 Media, becoming the world's first English-language news network dedicated to Ukraine. This pivot from Jewish diaspora news to Ukrainian international broadcasting reflected the broader geopolitical shift that was reshaping the region.

Running these operations required all the skills I'd developed across previous careers: cultural sensitivity from diplomatic experience, operational security awareness from intelligence work, project management capabilities from civil society development, and editorial judgment from journalism. The sustained exposure to Ukraine's ongoing crises took a personal toll—as I put it, "I quite literally stopped remembering to look both ways before crossing the street."

Artistic Collaboration: Finding Beauty in Breakdown

Perhaps my most fulfilling recent work has involved collaborations with renowned Ukrainian photographer Ruslan Lobanov on critically acclaimed photography books. Our partnership produced "The Wrong Door," set in 1960s Paris, and more significantly, "Wartime Sketches" in 2023, during the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

"Wartime Sketches," limited to 500 numbered and signed hardcover copies, was launched in Kyiv even as the war continued. The book became a sought-after collectors' item, demonstrating the continued vitality of Ukrainian artistic expression under the most challenging circumstances.

These collaborations represent an evolution from journalism to literary art, combining narrative skills with internationally recognized photography to create works that document both historical moments and human resilience. After years of analyzing and reporting on political breakdown, there was something deeply satisfying about creating beauty in the midst of chaos.

Legacy: Understanding Power from the Inside

Looking back, my career has provided a unique vantage point for understanding how power actually works, how societies transform, and what happens when the pace of change outstrips institutions' ability to adapt. Each phase built upon the previous one: intelligence work taught me to see through official narratives to underlying realities; civil society experience showed me both the possibilities and limitations of external efforts to support democratic development; commercial work revealed how economic transitions affect ordinary people's lives; journalism provided a platform for documenting these intersecting dynamics over time.

What strikes me most is how interconnected these apparently different careers have been. The cultural understanding developed in childhood diplomatic settings proved essential for intelligence work. The language skills and regional knowledge from intelligence work were invaluable in civil society development. The civil society experience provided insights that informed journalism. Each phase prepared me for the next in ways I couldn't have anticipated.

The common thread has been proximity to moments of systemic breakdown and attempted reconstruction—learning to read the signs, understanding the human costs, and documenting what survival looks like. From today's perspective, I've been fortunate to witness history from multiple angles, revealing how complex and contingent historical change actually is, how individual agency and structural forces interact, and how the stories we tell ourselves about progress and democracy often diverge from messier realities on the ground.

Through it all, the discipline of long-distance running has been my anchor—providing physical resilience and mental clarity needed to process experiences that might otherwise be overwhelming. There's something about the solitary rhythm of running that allows you to integrate complex experiences and maintain perspective on events that can feel all-consuming when you're in the middle of them.

As I recently noted, "I'm back doing the stuff I love: crazy projects, thermal optics, isometrics, hand-eye coordination exercises, conjecture and refutation." After decades of analyzing power from various angles, there's something to be said for simply creating and documenting what comes next, one project at a time.

The work continues. I currently live in Kyiv with my cat, Balush, who is easing into middle age with considerably more grace than his human companion.

A note on collaboration: This biography was developed through an iterative process with Claude AI, combining my experiences and voice with assistance in structuring and refining the narrative. I've found this human-AI collaboration particularly apt for someone who has spent decades at the intersection of technology, intelligence, and storytelling. The approach reflects my belief that the most interesting work happens at the boundaries between different systems and ways of knowing.