In 1972 the Summer Olympics were being held in Munich, West Germany, from August 26 to September 10. West Germany wanted the event to feel bright, modern, and the opposite of the Games that Hitler held in 1936. Instead, on September 5, 1972, 8 members of the Palestinian militant group Black September broke into the Olympic Village and the Games became the site of a tragic terrorist attack when 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were murdered.

This incident is included in my memoir because I was living in Munich at the time and it impacted my life. In fact, during my research about the massacre, I found there was more information than I could include in my book. As I found more interesting information about the Cold War, espionage, and terrorism that wouldn’t fit into my memoir, but that I wanted people to be aware of, I decided to start my Substack about these topics, as well as about writing about growing up the daughter of a Cold War spy.

Because tomorrow is the 54th anniversary of the Munich Massacre I looked at information I’ve collected that wouldn’t fit into my book. Upon realizing that it had been so long since the attack, I looked for survivors and there are a few from the 1972 Israeli Olympic delegation and alternate athletes who managed to avoid capture or were in adjacent rooms during the siege who are still alive, but they mostly maintain private lives.

Shaul Ladany, a 90-year-old world-record holding speed-walker, however, continues to give interviews and discusses his life as a survivor of a bombing and a camp during the Holocaust and the Munich massacre.

Born on April 2, 1936, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia); his father was a chemical engineer and patent attorney and his mother studied law. His sister and grandparents also lived with them in a spacious villa. Ladany spoke three languages before he turned five: Hungarian with his parents, German with the nanny, and Serbian outside of the home.

Days after his fifth birthday, the Axis armies of Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria invaded Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941, and his family took shelter in the laundry room of their home during a German air raid. “A bomb entered the house diagonally, hitting on the rear side, the second floor, the ground floor and entered the adjacent basement. Several people were killed. The laundry room saved our lives,” Ladany said in an interview with The Independent. Yugoslavia surrendered 11 days later.

Despite that near-miss, and the persecution of Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe, he says he never sensed anxiety from his parents and added: “Maybe we inherited it from our forefathers, this kind of behavior of never panicking, always trying to find a way out of very bad situations. This type of behavior followed me in all my life.” This trait would hold him good stead throughout this life.

Ladany’s family fled to his parents’ hometown of Novi Sad, 70 miles north of Belgrade, but his father was arrested soon after their arrival. Once he was released, the family fled to Budapest, Hungary, where his father used fake documents to obtain a job with Hungary’s largest pharmaceutical firm. In early 1942, the family learned that his aunt and uncle had been killed in a massacre in Novi Sad where, over 3 days, the Hungarian military killed 3,000 people, primarily Serbs and Jews. “My mother started to cry, almost nonstop,” he recalled.

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This weekend our son and his fiancée flew in to help celebrate my husband’s retirement. We had a small gathering to celebrate both milestones as well as two other friends’ retirement and I was asked to give a speech. I should have been prepared, but it had been a whirlwind few weeks and I hadn’t processed all the life changes in our family, much less thought about what to say.

A large part of writing your memoir is processing the events you’re writing about and what you’ve learned from them. To do that you need to make the time, which can take longer than writing.

I spoke about my husband’s accomplishments and how we looked forward to traveling, then about our friends’ retirement, and then I looked across the room at my son and his fiancée. I suddenly remembered all the feelings I had when Ben and I were starting out.

The time in front of us seemed endless, as well as the options. Thankfully, I was able to mention that in my speech, as well as the fact that I hope they feel the same way about their bright future. She’s halfway through her doctorate and he recently started a job in a field he loves. Thinking about it now, they’re ahead of where we were financially at the same age, which is how parents want it to be.

I also thought about how it seems like both a short and a long time ago that my parents were the age we are now. If I wasn’t already in the practice of processing my childhood and early adulthood for my memoir, this experience would’ve made me start.

My dad and husband were both in counterintelligence (talk about marrying your father!) and I entered the field, myself, for six years, which allowed me to understand their work more thoroughly than I would’ve otherwise.

As an example, out of the three of us, I had the hardest time with polygraphs. I feel guilty too easily; I give back extra change if I’m given too much, return pens to tellers, and do any other number of things to make sure I’m doing “the right thing.”

So when I “failed” a polygraph (which is not reliable enough to be used in trials) I was told I had to come back in two weeks, but they waited six months to bring me back, when I was at the busiest time of my work year. They also told me before Christmas that I’d need to come back after New Year’s to take it. A great tactic to get me stressed, which worked, my nerves made me nauseous. My husband suggested I call my dad to get advice.

Dad had spent three days “on the box” once during the Iran Contra era and was the perfect person to talk help make me feel less nervous. He knew about polys and he knew me and what makes me tick. I was raised “Catholic when grandma was in town” and was predisposed to feeling guilty when I hadn’t done anything wrong.

He told me to remember that no matter how they might try to seem like my friend, they were not. If they could say they “saw deception” and the person had to come back, they could meet their goals for number of people who were brought to the next step of an additional polygraphs or interviews with investigators.

After the new year, when I finally took it, the polygrapher tried to act friendly initially, but soon was aggressively asking me if my husband had told me something he shouldn’t have because he also had a Top Secret clearance at the time. His tactics got increasingly hostile and I finally told him I needed to get back to work and he replied this was my work for now.

Eventually, I was more irritated and frustrated than nervous and soon after I reached this level of annoyance he let me leave. About a year later I was talking to another editor who had worked with the investigators previously and I told her about the incident and how this polygrapher had he treated me. When I mentioned his name, she told me he’d been fired because he was using unethical methods and enough people had complained about him. I wondered how many good people had left intelligence because of him.

Polygraphs were one of the reason I left, but also because my job was busiest during the summer and at the holidays, so I didn’t get to spend them with my husband and son who was reaching his teen years. I applied to government jobs that were closer to home and that didn’t require a security clearance, and most importantly, a polygraph.

Now that I’ve experienced polygraphs, I can understand why dad didn’t ask to get together with us for a meal after his three-day experience of “being on the box.” He’d flown in from Europe and returned once the polygrapher was done. That’s just one of the ways my job helps me relate to my dad and husband’s lives in counterintelligence.

Understanding their work and all that goes with it, from the inside, has helped me immeasurably as I write about growing up as the daughter of a Cold War spy.

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The Red Purse of Justice is written by Amy Benavides, the daughter of a Cold War spy who writes articles related to her life, terrorism, espionage, history, and culture that she discovers as she writes her memoir.

Subscribe to make sure you receive her articles on Tuesdays (free subscribers) and Thursdays (paid subscribers). After a bit of a hiccup medically this week, I’ve decided to put the Friday columns on pause. This way I can continue to work on my memoir as I provide you with informative and interesting articles about the Cold War, espionage, terrorism, and memoir. I appreciate all of your comments about the Friday column during the past months.

As tributes for Dolly Parton have occurred throughout the world since her death Tuesday, new examples of the humanitarian acts she quietly performed have been being shared. The country music icon whose career spanned more than six decades of songwriting, acting, and philanthropy represented what America should be. She embodied what America should be and encouraged others to do the same, including speaking out about LGBTQ issues, Black Lives Matter, and literacy. Parton once described her patriotism simply, “I’ve got an all-American heart,” she told Vanity Fair in a 1991 profile.

Parton’s iconic blonde image appeared on U.S. military aircraft inspiring traditional pin-up style nose art and special tributes, she performed for troops and military families, recorded patriotic music, funded literacy efforts serving military children, and took the Grand Ole Opry stage as American service members watched from Iraq. Her connection to the military was also personal since Carl Dean, Parton’s husband of nearly six decades, enlisted in the Army shortly after they began dating and served for two years.

Dolly’s Message to Saddam Hussein

In June 1991, Parton visited Army Base Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, to boost military morale shortly after Operation Desert Storm. Chronicled in a famous Vanity Fair profile, the visit featured Parton posing on M-1 tanks and an A-10 Thunderbolt II; meeting returning servicemembers, including soldiers who had returned from the Persian Gulf only weeks earlier; and famously climbing onto an Army major’s shoulders.

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The Brink of War dramatizes the extraordinary meeting between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavík, Iceland. The summit lasted just two days, but in those 30 hours the two leaders came remarkably close to an agreement that could have transformed the nuclear balance—and potentially put the world on a path toward eliminating nuclear weapons altogether.

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Proven Actors Give Great Performances

All three primary actors’ performances are incredibly strong with Jeff Daniels as Ronald Reagan, J.K. Simmons as George Shultz (to whom the movie is dedicated), and Jared Harris (son of actor Richard Harris) as Mikhail Gorbachev. Jeff Daniels, alone, was enough to get me to the theater; after all I had taken a day trip to NYC from DC to see him on Broadway in To Kill a Mockingbird before it closed. I’ve followed J.K. Simmons since he starred in Oz and I also got to meet Secretary Shultz in Vienna the month the summit took place.

Most of the film consists of people sitting in rooms, arguing over missile defenses, nuclear arsenals, verification, and the extraordinary possibility of eliminating entire classes of weapons. The film succeeds, however, in making negotiations dramatic, which is not an easy task. There are no battlefield scenes with explosions and gunfire. The stakes, instead, are what happens if negotiators get it wrong.

While Daniels gives a charismatic performance of Reagan without being a caricature, he also portrays the president as heroic, energetic, focused, intellectually nimble, and seemingly in complete command of the negotiations. While some of these aspects may have been partly true at this point in his presidency, the movie shows no ambiguity in Reagan’s abilities. Instead, it presents him as a man who understood the stakes, saw the possibility of nuclear eradication, and had the resolve to pursue it, which would give him too much credit.

Despite these issues, Reagan was deeply invested in eliminating nuclear weapons and did, indeed, bring the topic up in Reykjavík. According to declassified records, he contended with resistance from within his own administration and national security establishment.

The Actual Summit

Reykjavík was the result of years of preparation and negotiation. It was also important that Gorbachev was willing to contemplate extraordinary changes. The U.S. State Department’s historical record describes the summit as extraordinary precisely because of the breadth and depth of the negotiations.

The real Reykjavík summit was remarkable for how quickly the conversation moved beyond conventional arms control. Reagan and Gorbachev discussed deep reductions in strategic nuclear weapons, the elimination of intermediate-range missiles, and ultimately the possibility of eliminating all nuclear weapons. Despite the honest attempt, the two leaders didn’t reach an agreement, but the negotiations improved communication between the superpowers and helped lay the groundwork for the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and subsequent arms-control agreements that both men signed. The summit came remarkably close to a deal that would have eliminated ballistic missiles and potentially put the United States and Soviet Union on a path toward eliminating their nuclear arsenals.

The movie demonstrates how two leaders, supported by teams of diplomats and advisers, were willing to imagine that the assumptions underpinning the nuclear arms race could be changed. There are few films about nuclear disarmament, negotiations, and arms control; negotiation is itself a form of power, as this movie demonstrates.

The Shooting

The film also alludes to how Reagan’s shooting continued to affect him privately. At one point he examines the scar left by the attack and he has nightmares twice about reliving the shooting. experiences lingering trauma associated with it, while regarding his survival as reinforcing his sense that he has a purpose to fulfil. One of the barbs that Gorbachev retorts back to Reagan in one tense section is that none of his people have shot him.

Dueling First Ladies

Outside the negotiations, Raisa Gorbacheva (played by Serbian actress Branka Katić) attracts considerable press attention during public appearances, including a visit to the Blue Lagoon. Back in the Soviet Union Raisa had received a lot of negative press on her last trip because she wore a suit twice for which she was ridiculed by the press. Wanting to show that Russians are sophisticated, she dressed up in Iceland and was attacked for that, as well. While I refer to her as a First Lady in the subtitle, she makes the point to a member of press that everyone is equal in the Soviet Union and she should just be called by her name.

Meanwhile, Nancy Reagan (played by Hope Davis), remains in the United States because she didn’t know that Mrs. Gorbachev would be in Iceland. She regrets her decision not to accompany her husband, and scenes allude to the fact that she’d take it out on her Chief of Staff and Press Secretary.

Why Negotiations Fell Through

Reagan and Gorbachev eventually move close to an agreement involving unprecedented reductions in nuclear weapons. Gorbachev agrees to the wider arms-reduction proposals only if American Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) work remains confined to the laboratory for 10 years. Reagan refuses, arguing that he cannot abandon research into a system intended to defend the United States from nuclear attack. Neither leader is willing to compromise.

Before leaving, Reagan returns to the humanitarian request with which he began the summit and again asks Gorbachev to allow Rostropovich’s sister to visit her brother in the United States. Gorbachev agrees. The two leaders shake hands, and the final spoken word of the film is “deal”.

Conclusion

Now that we are living during a time when diplomacy is too often treated as an afterthought, Reykjavík demonstrated that sometimes negotiations can move the boundaries of what governments believe is politically and strategically possible.

We need more stories about the people who negotiate arms-control agreements, verify them, defend them, and work to prevent nuclear crises. We need stories about the risks of nuclear weapons, but also about the people trying to reduce those risks.

Most of all, we need stories that remind us that the future is not predetermined by the weapons we have built.

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The Red Purse of Justice is written by Amy Benavides, the daughter of a Cold War spy who writes articles related to her life, terrorism, espionage, history, and culture that she discovers as she writes her memoir.

Subscribe to make sure you receive her articles on Tuesdays (free subscribers) and Thursdays (paid subscribers). After a bit of a hiccup medically this week, I’ve decided to put the Friday columns on pause. This way I can continue to work on my memoir as I provide you with informative and interesting articles about the Cold War, espionage, terrorism, and memoir. I appreciate all of your comments about the Friday column during the past months.

Old Bay Seasoning

Summers in Maryland involve picking crabs and Old Bay; using Old Bay is the easier of the two, as you might guess. The exact spice blend of Old Bay has been kept under proverbial lock and key ever since the German-Jewish immigrant Gustav Brunn founded the Baltimore Spice Company in the late 1930s. All that is known is that it is specific recipe containing 18 ingredients including celery salt, red pepper, black pepper, and paprika. McCormick acquired the company more than 30 years ago and since then Old Bay is available much more broadly in the mid-Atlantic (although we Marylanders still think of it as ours).

Drinks and Cocktails

Yesterday I had an Old Bay Caramel Latte at an indie coffee shop in Baltimore. I asked for less caramel and Old Bay, because I don’t like sweet coffee, but I had to give it a try. It was good, but I think I’ll stick with my straight up iced coffee or unsweetened latte. You can also add Old Bay to hot chocolate to get a Mexican hot chocolate. I might try that when it’s cold again.

You’re more likely to find Old Bay in cocktails, however. Most often, Old Bay is used in Bloody Mary rims (and in the Bloody Marys). But you can get creative and try it in other drinks, such as in gimlets, because of the celery’s fresh, earthy aroma. To make these cocktails that taste like summertime anytime, infuse the gin with Old Bay and strain into a chilled glass with a bit of lime juice, green chartreuse, and a dash or two of celery bitters.

Summer-Perfect Dishes

Old Bay’s note of paprika makes it perfect for deviled eggs (or regular eggs). Blend Old Bay into a tangy, brick-red romesco sauce to slather onto sandwiches, pair with crudites, or drizzle over steak. It’s also a great addition to mayo; on corn of the cob; on chicken, especially with lime; on popcorn; pasta; in pumpkin pie; on French fries; in caramel to make a sauce you can use on vanilla ice cream, brownies, pies, or even cakes for a pop of flavor.

What People are Watching

Ted Lasso, Season 4 (Apple TV)

As you likely know, the previous three seasons of Ted Lasso were about an American football coach who’s hired to manage a British soccer team. In season 4 Ted takes on a new challenge coaching a second-division women’s soccer team that team owner Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham) has started.

Rebecca, Keeley (Juno Temple), and Higgins (Jeremy Swift) travel to Kansas City, to ask Ted to return to England. Phil Dunster (Jamie) doesn’t return to the series due to scheduling conflicts with other projects like the HBO series Rooster and also because the plot has moved to focus on Richmond’s women’s soccer team.

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As I work on my memoir about growing up as the daughter of a Cold War spy, I spend a lot of reading memoirs because I love them and learn from them. The one I read this past week was especially helpful to learn and inspiring: Gisèle Pelicot’s A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides.

She wrote the book with Judith Perrignon, which was translated into English by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver. In her memoir, Gisèle is ruthlessly honest as she describes her life prior to and during the decades she spend married to her husband, Dominique, which is intertwined with the abrupt, very public unraveling of their life after he was caught taking upskirt photos in a supermarket.

Gisèle and Dominique met when they were only 19, and perhaps it was foreshadowing that she writes, “I’d been stung between the eyes by a wasp that day, the venom was circulating, my eyelids were so swollen I could barely see.” The reader wishes she’d believed in “signs.” Their marriage was happy for decades, however, despite financially precarious and subject to Dominique’s increasingly excessive sexual demands that Gisèle turned down.

Dominique Pelicot, a retired, and not very successful, electrician and real estate agent, had for a decade been routinely drugging his wife and then videotaping degenerates from the dark web (and at least one neighbor) as they brutally raped her. The drug cocktail he used included lorazepam to sedate her into prolonged spells of unconsciousness that led her to seeing doctors for her “memory lapses” and “sleepiness”. She was even in a car accident that she now believes that he’d drugged her prior to her suddenly needing to drive.

Gisèle Receives Support from Females

Large groups of female supporters greeted Gisèle at the Palais de Justice each morning of the trial, many holding signs of support. Many women wrote to her about abuse they’d suffered and expressed how her strength and dignity had helped them. She read these letters from her supporters every night instead of watching the news. It was during this period that she recognized that shame needed to change sides from sex-crime victims to their perpetrators and the perpetrators’ enablers.

When she addressed the court midway through the trial, she stated, “‘Every day people thank me for my courage. I want to tell them this is not courage, but a deep urge and determination to change our patriarchal, sexist society.’” She continued in, “These were words I would never have uttered before.”

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Former Marine Robert Gilman, 32, was released by Russian authorities on August 11, 2026, after being imprisoned for four years and six months. Polish-born, US citizen Gilman was arrested outside of Moscow on January 17, 2022, after a fight with a police officer. Gilman travelled to a U.S. military hospital in Texas, where he’s being medically and psychologically assessed and treated, said Eric Lebson, chief strategy officer of Global Reach, a group that’s been working to free him and other American detainees abroad. Gilman’s family has flown to Texas to be with him, including his mother, Nina Gilman, who was in Russia attempting to see him at a hospital.

Gilman had an established teaching business in Poland and was traveling to a new job teaching English in Moldova when he became ill and spent time recuperating with his aunt outside of Moscow. While recovering, he realized his luggage and passport had been tampered with, and that he’d need to replace missing passport pages before he could continue to travel.

On his way to Moscow to have his passport repaired at the US Embassy, he became violently ill again. When his train stopped at Voronezh station, fellow passengers called the transport police claiming that the American had been drinking and was creating a disturbance.

The former Marine, who has a degree in cybersecurity from Western Governor’s University, was arrested for “petty hooliganism” and taken to the local police station in what appeared to be a state of advanced inebriation. (He suggested in court that the vodka he drank had been poisoned and he claimed that he didn’t recall the incident.)

Police struck Gilman with a baton and took him to the police station. He was vomiting and falling, his supporters say likely due to a concussion. Russian police tried to restrain him, and his leg accidentally hit one of the police officers’ shins. The Russian police took him into custody, where prosecutors charged him with a series of vague charges that continued to escalate.

Gilman was imprisoned in Voronezh and was put on trial for unjustified additional charges. A police officer who was present when Gilman was brought into the station stated in court that shortly after his arrest, Gilman “was sitting in handcuffs on the bench for detainees but was constantly throwing up. He then fell off the bench and while lying on his back he kicked out twice at the patrol officer standing next to him.”

In October 2024 he was sentenced to 7 additional years in a maximum-security prison for assaulting employees of a local penal colony, where he was serving time, which was later extended to 10 years. Gilman dealt with court delays, witnesses not showing up, and torture and provocations in custody, including being force-fed drugs, and deprived of food and sleep. It appeared he was being sentenced in such a way that his only way out would be a future prisoner exchange between the United States and Russia.

Gilman’s family asked the State Department in 2023 to designate him as a wrongful detainee, which would allow the U.S. government to negotiate for his release, his sister, Lexie Hudson, said. It was not granted.

At an April hearing in Voronezh, Gilman told a judge that he wanted to fight for Russia in the war in Ukraine, according to a Russian news agency. But Senators Edward Markey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, in a letter to the department shortly after, said that Russian officials had told Gilman that his government had forgotten about him and that the only way to earn his freedom was to serve in the Russian Army in Ukraine.

Since June, Gilman had been in a “dissociative stupor,” in which a patient is unresponsive without an apparent physical cause. A Russian news agency reported in July that Gilman had been moved to a hospital because of his “deteriorating health.”

“I am more afraid for my brother than I have been since this horrible nightmare started,” Gilman’s sister said in a statement prior to his release. “I’m worried that I ⁠may never see him again if the Russians don’t release him. I’m worried that he could die.”

Gilman’s release is unusual in that it was made for humanitarian issues and not as a swap, which is how people were usually released throughout the Cold War (and often are today).

February 1962 Swap on “Bridge of Spies”

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union routinely exchanged prisoners, who were typically spies, military officers, or other government agents. In the first major prisoner exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States, Rudolf Abel, a convicted Soviet spy, was swapped for Francis Gary Powers, an American pilot.

Abel, a British-born Soviet intelligence officer, had worked for the KGB in New York. He served 4 years of a 30-year sentence before being exchanged. Powers was piloting a U-2 spy plane when his aircraft was shot down in 1960 over present-day Yekaterinburg in Russia’s Urals region. Powers parachuted to safety only to be captured by the Soviets and later convicted of espionage.

On February 10, 1962, Powers was exchanged for Abel on the Glienicke Bridge, which marked the border between the Eastern bloc and West Berlin. The bridge was commonly known as the “Bridge of Spies” and would be used for several high-profile swaps during the Cold War.

A Large Swap in June 1985

In the biggest trade of government agents in history, Marian Zacharski, a Polish former intelligence officer convicted of espionage against the United States, was swapped alongside 3 other Eastern Bloc agents for 23 Westerners jailed for espionage in Warsaw Pact countries. The swap, which also took place on the Glienicke Bridge, came after 3 years of negotiations.

February 1986 Release of Anatoly Shcharansky

The Glienicke Bridge was also the location for the exchange of Soviet Jewish dissident Anatoly Shcharansky, known also as Natan Sharansky, and Czechoslovak nationals Karl and Hana Koecher.

The first political prisoner released by then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Sharansky had spent nine years in prison on charges of spying on behalf of the United States. He was swapped alongside three low-level Western spies for the Koechers, who had moved to the United States and infiltrated the CIA, as well as several other Soviet bloc spies imprisoned in West Germany.

U.S. Journalist Freed in September 1986

In a case reminiscent of Evan Gershkovich, Nicholas Daniloff, a correspondent for U.S. News & World Report in the Soviet Union, was arrested and accused of espionage by the KGB. Daniloff, who said he had been framed, was jailed for less than a month before he was allowed to fly out of the Soviet Union without standing trial.

The Reagan administration believed Daniloff had been arrested in retaliation for the detention three days earlier in New York of Gennadi Zakharov, an employee of the Soviet mission to the United Nations. The two men were swapped after weeks of negotiations alongside Soviet dissident Yuri Orlov, a founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group who subsequently moved to the United States.

July 2010 Spy Swap

This mass prisoner swap between Moscow and Washington involved 10 Russian sleeper agents detained in the United States as part of the so-called “Illegals Program” exchanged for four prisoners who were held in Russia.

The swap, which took place on the tarmac of Vienna International Airport, came after the FBI said a multi-year investigation had broken open a sleeper agent network of Russian spies planted in the United States by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service.

One of the swapped individuals was Sergei Skripal, a colonel in Russia’s Military Intelligence Service who was convicted of high treason for working as a double agent for Britain. Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were later the subjects of a botched assassination attempt by poisoning in Salisbury, England, in 2018.

Unequal Exchanges?

Trevor Reed, a U.S. Marine veteran arrested in Russia in 2019 allegedly for attacking a police officer, was released in April 2022 for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot and aviation transport expert imprisoned in the U.S. for drug smuggling.

Less than a year after Reed’s release, American basketball player Brittney Griner, who had been arrested in February 2022 for drug smuggling, was exchanged the following December for convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms trafficker known as the “Merchant of Death” whose exploits inspired the movie Lord of War. Several analysts and U.S. officials expressed concern that Russia used Reed and Griner as leverage in response to the international sanctions imposed upon it after their invasion of Ukraine.

Several other Americans held by Russia, including former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan and schoolteacher Marc Fogel, had been contemplated as part of the exchange deal for Griner; the negotiations leading to her release reportedly paved the way for the exchange of 26 individuals between both countries and their respective allies.

Most Extensive Exchange since the Cold War

During a February 2024 trip by German chancellor Olaf Scholz to Washington, D.C., the German and United States governments began working on how to negotiate an agreement that would include the freeing of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Vice President Kamala Harris met with Scholz and Slovenian prime minister Robert Golob separately during the Munich Security Conference in that month to privately discuss the negotiations. After Navalny’s death on the first day of the conference—explained by his allies as a killing to prevent the exchange—the proposal turned to focus on other prisoners.

Prior to June 2024, Sergey Beseda headed the Russian side of the negotiations that later led to the 2024 Ankara prisoner exchange; however, in June 2024, Vladimir Putin replaced Beseda with Aleksey Komkov. The Vice President of Germany’s BND Philipp Wolff also joined the negotiations.

On 21 July, U.S. President Joe Biden called Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golob to secure the necessary pardons for two Russian spies held in the country that were to be exchanged as part of the swap. In the days leading up to the exchange, three Russians were transferred from facilities operated by the United States Bureau of Prisons to the United States Marshals Service.

On August 1, 2024, the most extensive prisoner exchange since the end of the Cold War took place, involving the release of 26 people at Ankara Esenboğa Airport in Turkey. Following at least 6 months of secret multilateral negotiations where Turkey served as a mediator, Russia and Belarus released 13 prisoners to Germany and 3 to the United States. Meanwhile the United States, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, and Norway collectively released 8 detainees and 2 minors to Russia.

Among those released by the Soviet Union were 3 American citizens: Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal; Alsu Kurmasheva, a journalist for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; and Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine. Gershkovich and Whelan had each received 16-year sentences for espionage, becoming cause célèbres in the United States.

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The Red Purse of Justice is written by Amy Benavides, the daughter of a Cold War spy who writes articles related to her life, terrorism, espionage, history, and culture that she discovers as she writes her memoir.

Subscribe to make sure you receive her articles on Tuesdays (free subscribers) and Thursdays (paid subscribers). On Fridays I post a column for paid subscribers about topics that would help recruiters build a rapport with their targets.

Sherry Spritz

Recipe by Henri Schock of Bottlehouse

I know I wrote about spritzes at the beginning of the summer, but I had this spritz today and it was so refreshing that I had to share it. It’s been even more hot than unusual this summer so anything that’ll make you feel cooler is welcome. Cheers!

Ingredients

· 1 oz Oloroso Sherry

· 2 oz Rose Vermouth

· 2 oz Prosecco

· Orange Twist

Tools

· Spritz Glasses

· Champagne Saber

· Jigger

· Barspoon

Instructions

Fill a large wine glass with 5–6 medium ice cubes. Combine sherry and bitters. Stir until chilled (about 15 seconds). Top with prosecco and garnish with an orange twist.

The restaurant I had it at included a thyme garnish.

What People are Watching

How to Get to Heaven from Belfast (Netflix)

Having enjoyed Derry Girls, I was looking forward to seeing How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, which was also created by Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee, but was about a group of adult women instead of high schoolers. The show didn’t disappoint.

How to Get to Heaven from Belfast follows three close friends from Belfast who reunite for the funeral of a long-estranged high school classmate. In their late 30s, Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher), a popular TV writer; Robyn (Sinead Keenan), a stressed-out mother of three; and Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne), a caretaker for her mother travel to the home of their classmate to pay their respects to Greta (Natasha O’Keefe).

They’ve grown up, moved apart, and lead very different lives, but they receive a peculiar email saying Greta has passed away. Before long, old secrets begin to resurface, and they learn that Greta’s death may not be all that it seems to be.

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In September 1976, Sánchez was arrested in Yugoslavia, flown to Baghdad, and released there. He chose to return to Aden. When the leader of the PFLP died suddenly in March 1978, Sánchez recruited the best agents from within the leaderless group, as well as other nationals, to form his own group of terrorist mercenaries, named the Organization of Arab Armed Struggle. The agents included German divorcee Magdalena Kopp, who went on to become Sánchez’ wife in January 1979.

The group established relations with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Cuba’s Fidel Castro and East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi. Records that became available after German reunification showed that the Stasi provided him with an office and safe houses in East Berlin, a support staff of 75, a service car, and allowed him to carry a pistol while in public. From here, Sánchez is believed to have planned his attacks on several European targets, including the bombing of the Radio Free Europe offices in Munich in February 1981.

The records also showed that he was connected to the KGB via the Stasi. When Leonid Brezhnev visited West Germany in 1981, Western intelligence expected terrorist activity, but the KGB asked Sánchez to refrain from performing any attacks. Sánchez also had a relationship with the leadership of Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, which the Stasi asked him to use to tone down the Armenian group’s anti-Soviet activity.

The documents also revealed that Sánchez was not the master terrorist who worked in lockstep with ruthlessly efficient regimes to launch attacks in the west as he was depicted in the media such as the epic, multi-part film and TV miniseries Carlos was released in 2010 and traces the terrorist’s life from the 1970s through the 1980s. Instead, he was an arrogant, demanding, and unreliable terrorist entrepreneur who manipulated the anxieties of insecure decisionmakers and the ignorance of security officials from the Baltic to the Black Sea until they finally ran out of patience.

The Organization of Arab Armed Struggle’s first attack may have been a failed rocket attack on the Superphénix French nuclear power station on January 18, 1982. The next month French police arrested Kopp and a Swiss associate carrying weapons and explosives in a car. Prosecutors stated they were planning an attack on the Kuwaiti embassy.

Sánchez demanded her release and, when the French failed to comply, he arranged for France to be struck by a wave of terrorist attacks, including: the bombing of the Paris-Toulouse TGV ‘Le Capitole’ train on March 29, 1982, that was supposed to have been carrying former French President Jacques Chirac (5 dead, 77 injured); the car-bombing of the newspaper Al-Watan al-Arabi in Paris on April 22, 1982 (1 dead, 63 injured); the bombing of the Gare Saint-Charles in Marseille on December 31, 1983 (2 dead, 33 injured), and the bombing of the Marseille-Paris TGV train (3 dead, 12 injured) on the same day. The French continued to refuse to release Kopp, who was given a four-year sentence for her part in the failed reactor attack.

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Sánchez attended high school in Caracas and joined the youth movement of the Venezuelan Communist Party in 1959. After attending the Third Tricontinental Conference in January 1966 with his father, Sánchez reportedly spent the summer at Camp Matanzas, a guerrilla warfare school run by the Cuban state intelligence agency near Havana. Later that year, his parents divorced.

His mother took the children to London, where she studied at Stafford House College in Kensington and the London School of Economics. In 1968, his father tried to enroll Sánchez and his brother, Lenin, at the Sorbonne in Paris but eventually opted for the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. Here, Sánchez met Palestinians for the first time and slowly became radicalized. Sánchez was expelled from the university in 1970 for poor grades and behavior, including socializing, partying, womanizing, and breaking the strict university rules.

Sánchez then travelled to Beirut, Lebanon, where he volunteered with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in July 1970. He was sent to a training camp for foreign volunteers of the PFLP on the outskirts of Amman, Jordan. After graduating, he studied at a finishing school, code-named H4 and staffed by Iraqi military, near the Syria-Iraq border.

When Sánchez joined the PFLP, recruiting officer Bassam Abu Sharif gave him the code name “Carlos” because of his South American roots. Sánchez was later dubbed “The Jackal” by The Guardian after one of its correspondents reportedly spotted Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal on the bookshelf of a friend’s apartment in which Sánchez had stashed some weapons. The book belonged to a resident in the apartment, not Sánchez, who probably never read it. In an interview, however, Sánchez was proud of the nickname and seemed to enjoy the attention it brought him.

After completing training in Jordan, Sánchez played an active role in the PFLP in northern Jordan during the Black September conflict of 1970, gaining a reputation as a fighter. After PFLP was pushed out of Jordan, he returned to Beirut. He was then sent to be trained by Wadie Haddad.

Haddad, Sánchez’s mentor, recognized that he was a potential star. Sánchez was an expert marksman, and spoke French, Russian, and English in addition to Spanish. He was light skinned and resembled a man of the world—he could fit in where most Middle Eastern terrorists could not.

He eventually left the Middle East to attend courses at the Polytechnic of Central London (now known as the University of Westminster) where he reportedly took chemistry courses and apparently continued to work for the PFLP.

On December 30, 1973, Sánchez conducted his first solo mission, which was a failed PFLP assassination attempt on Joseph Sieff, a Jewish businessman and vice president of the British Zionist Federation, which raised money for Israeli charities. Having gained access to Sieff’s London home he ordered the maid to take him to Sieff, who was in his bath. Sánchez shot Sieff with a Tokarev 7.62mm pistol but failed to kill him. Sánchez’s gun jammed after the first shot and he fled unharmed. The attack was announced as retaliation for Mossad’s assassination in Paris of Mohamed Boudia, a PFLP leader.

Sánchez accepted responsibility for a failed bomb attack on the Bank Hapoalim in London and car bomb attacks on three French newspapers accused of pro-Israeli leanings. He claimed to be the grenade thrower at a Parisian restaurant in an attack that killed 2 and injured 30 as part of the 1974 French Embassy attack in The Hague. He later participated in 2 failed rocket-propelled grenade attacks on El Al airplanes at Orly Airport near Paris on January 13 and 17, 1975.

The second attack resulted in gunfighting with police at the airport and a 17-hour hostage situation involving hundreds of riot police and the French Interior Minister Michel Poniatowski. Sánchez fled during the gunfight while the 3 other PFLP terrorists were allowed passage to Baghdad, Iraq.

On June 27, 1975, Sánchez’ PFLP contact, Lebanon-born Michel Moukharbal, was captured and interrogated by the French domestic intelligence agency, the DST. When two unarmed agents of the DST interrogated Sánchez at a Parisian house party, Moukharbal revealed Sánchez’ identity. Sánchez then shot and killed the two agents and Moukharbal, fled the scene, and managed to escape via Brussels to Beirut, where the PFLP welcomed him as a conquering hero. In June 1992, Sánchez was tried in absentia for these murders and was convicted.

From Beirut, Sánchez participated in the planning for an attack on the headquarters of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in Vienna. On December 21,1975, he led a 6-person team that attacked the meeting of OPEC leaders. The team took 60 to 70 hostages (including 11 oil ministers) and killed 3: an Austrian policeman, an Iraqi OPEC employee, and a member of the Libyan delegation. Sánchez demanded that they be provided a bus to take all the terrorists and hostages to the nearest airport, where an aircraft would be on standby to fly the group wherever they demanded. They also demanded that Austrian authorities read a communiqué about the Palestinian cause on Austrian radio and television networks every 2 hours. To avoid the threatened execution of a hostage every 15 minutes, the Austrian government agreed and the communiqué was broadcast as demanded.

On December 22, the government provided the PFLP with an Austrian DC-9 and flew them to Algiers. Ex-Royal Navy pilot Neville Atkinson, at that time the personal pilot for Libya’s leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, flew the DC-9 to Algiers, where Sánchez agreed to free 30 non-Arab hostages in exchange for a refueling of the jet, which then flew on to Tripoli.

The reception in Tripoli was hostile, and the Libyans refused to provide Sánchez with a larger plane with a greater range capacity. Eventually, in exchange for the release of the Libyan hostages and five other delegates, the plane was again refueled and returned to Algiers, where Sánchez agreed to release the rest of the hostages in exchange for political asylum and a large undisclosed sum of money that is rumored to be between $25 and $50 million, which was provided either by the Saudis or the Iranians. The terrorists made it to safety with the ransom.

The leader of the PFLP regarded the OPEC operation as a failure, however, because Sánchez had released, rather than killed, two senior OPEC hostages—the finance minister of Iran, Jamshid Amuzgar, and the oil minister of Saudi Arabia, Ahmed Zaki Yamani—the primary targets in the raid. His trainer and PFLP-EO leader Haddad expelled Sánchez for not shooting hostages when PFLP demands were not met, thus failing his mission. It was discovered that he had also appropriated some of the ransom funds for his own use, although this was not publicized by the PFLP at the time.

In the years following the OPEC raid, Bassam Abu Sharif and Hans-Joachim Klein, a West German left-wing militant tied to the Revolutionary Cells who’d participated in the raid on OPEC headquarters, publicly claimed that Sánchez had received a large sum of money for the safe release of the Arab hostages and had kept it for his personal use. Sánchez later told his lawyers that the money was paid by the Saudis on behalf of the Iranians and was “diverted en route and lost by the Revolution”.

Sánchez settled in Aden, South Yemen, courtesy of Gaddafi, who was rumored to have funded the OPEC attack, where he trained terrorists in guerrilla warfare techniques for several years.

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The Red Purse of Justice is written by Amy Benavides, the daughter of a Cold War spy who writes articles related to her life, terrorism, espionage, history, and culture that she discovers as she writes her memoir.

Subscribe to make sure you receive her articles on Tuesdays (free subscribers) and Thursdays (paid subscribers). On Fridays I post a column for paid subscribers about topics that would help recruiters build a rapport with their targets.

Intelligentsia Coffee

When I’d just started working for the Federal Reserve Board in 2014, I was sent to work with the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago. I was excited to see the city and one recommendation I got was to try Intelligentsia Coffee; luckily there’s a location a few blocks from the Bank.

The first morning, I was up early so I could get to the café before heading to the Bank. I took in the busy café: baristas dressed in Trotsky-esque clothing (one man even had a period mustache) greeted people who were clearly regulars, merch was available along the line for me to ogle, the marketing reminded me of Cold War Soviet style, fresh flower arrangements were strategically arranged, and I immediately felt at home. I hated to leave and arrived earlier the rest of the week so I could stay in this unique environment longer than the first morning.

Not only did the Cold War, communal vibe win me over, the coffee was delicious and I was disappointed to find out that there were no Intelligentsia locations in the D.C. area. I bought some bags of coffee (and some merch) to bring home and then started ordering Intelligentsia online.

I’ve also been happily surprised when I find a restaurant, hotel, or café that uses Intelligentsia as their house coffee. Last year when I was working as a freelance florist for a wedding at the Washington, D.C., Waldorf Astoria a few of us went to get coffee during a break. The only location in the hotel where you could get coffee to go was at the bar.

When I opened the drink menu, I smiled broadly, excitedly telling the others that the coffee was Intelligentsia. It turns out not everyone is as choosy about their coffee and they didn’t know the brand.

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Shortly after 7 p.m. on December 21, 1988, peace in the idyllic town of Lockerbie, Scotland, was shattered, for many irrevocably. Pan Am Flight 103, a Boeing 747-121 wide-body jet liner named the Clipper Maid of the Seas, was flying from London to New York City. The flight was usually routed across the Irish Sea, but due to severe winds it was rerouted north and then left across Scotland.

The gross takeoff weight of the aircraft was 713,002 lbs carrying about 200,000 lbs of jet fuel. As it approached Lockerbie, which is located between Dumfries and Galloway in south-western Scotland, the plane was flying at 500 miles per hour and ascended to 31,000 feet, which activated an electronic timer for an explosive device hidden inside a Toshiba radio in the luggage hold, detonating a lump of Semtex, and shearing open the fuselage. The plane broke apart in midair, almost six miles above the earth.

Bodies all landed near Lockerbie. Wreckage fell on homes, farms, and the countryside, scattered over 845 square miles, making it the largest crime scene in history.

The town’s 4,000 residents normally have 4 police officers on duty. By the morning of December 22, however, about 1,100 police officers were involved in the massive recovery operation and investigation, along with 1,000 personnel from the military, emergency services, local authorities, and voluntary groups.

In the weeks that followed, a painstaking search recovered wreckage as far away as the coast of Northumberland on the other side of the country due to the severe winds. Some pieces were found as long as 2 years later.

The Victims

That night 270 people were killed: 259 passengers and crew—the oldest 82, the youngest a two-month-old baby—and 11 people on the ground. In total, citizens from 21 countries died, including 44 UK citizens and 190 Americans. It was the worst terror attack on the United States until 9/11 and remains the worst act of mass murder in British legal history.

Among the passengers was Matthew Gannon, the Central Intelligence Agency’s deputy station chief in Beirut, Lebanon, in seat 14J, which was in the business class (branded as “Clipper Class”) cabin. In addition, Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) Special Agents Daniel Emmett O’Connor and Ronald Albert Lariviere and a group of U.S. intelligence specialists were on board. The presence of these passengers gave rise to speculations and conspiracy theories that one or more of them had been targeted.

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Therefore, I want to give you a gift for my birthday. A gift that will continue.

From today through Friday, August 7th,you can subscribe to my Substack for 25% off (forever!) here.

As a paid subscriber you will receive:

• my free Tuesday articles;

• my paid Thursday articles;

• and my paid Friday columns about topics that recruiters would use to build a rapport with their targets.

You’ll also have my endless gratitude, because there are so many talented writers on Substack who deserve support. I appreciate my free subscribers, as always, and also want to take a moment to thank all of my readers for any amount of time you spend reading my work.

As the numbers of Cold War warriors continues to fall, it’s important to take down and share this information while we can. As is now clear, history repeats itself, so we must learn what we can from the past while also paying homage to those who have risked or given their lives to keep their countrymen safe.

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Mumbo Sauce

We were out to dinner at St. Anselm’s this weekend with friends from out of town when Mumbo Sauce came up. It was served with their Bobo Chicken. For many DC natives, like us, the sauce that captures the flavor of home is Mumbo Sauce. There are many stories about where it originated, mostly people say it started in Chicago.

DC Mumbo Sauce is different from wherever you go ranging in color from orange to red, it is thinner than the typical red barbecue sauce, and it usually tastes closer to Chinese sweet and sour sauce. Some people think it is simply sweet and sour sauce with a little ketchup added. Both red barbecue sauce and sweet-sour sauce are typically made with the same base: Tomato concentrate, distilled white vinegar, and sugar.

In DC Mumbo Sauce the tomato base plays bass in the background with the vinegar and sugar playing the lead. DC Mumbo Sauce is most popular on chicken wings, French fries, fried jumbo shrimp, and fried rice, but it works on just about anything deep fried. Long-time residents argue about where DC Mumbo Sauce originated, making claims that it first appeared sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s at either Wings ‘N Things, U Street, or Johnny Boy’s among others.

The Chicago Connection

The original Mumbo Sauce was probably a ketchupy barbecue sauce created in Chicago in 1957 by Argia B. Collins, Sr. A Black man from Indianola, Mississippi, Collins was part of the great post-WWII migration to the industrial north from the agricultural south, especially from the Delta area of Northwest Mississippi.

Collins opened his first barbecue joint, Argia B’s Bar-B-Q, in the early 1950s in a storefront on the South Side, and in 1957 he created his signature Argia B.’s Mumbo Bar-B-Que Sauce. Locals called it “mild sauce” as opposed to hot sauce. His sauce’s popularity helped him and his brothers open about 10 other storefronts.

Mild sauce became popular at other BBQ and fried chicken joints in Chicago and can still be found at a dozen or so, mostly in the Black neighborhoods of the South Side. It has evolved to something akin to DC Mumbo sauce.

How Did Argia B’s Bar-B-Q Come to DC?

People still wonder about how Chicago Mumbo Sauce made its way into Chinese restaurants and fried chicken joints in DC and become something altogether different. The South Side of Chicago has vast concentrations of Black people, but it is also the home of Chinatown, which, in the 1950s, bumped right up against the area known as Bronzeville to the East. Just north of Chinatown was the Maxwell Street open air market, originally a Jewish enclave that after WWII morphed into a center of Black commerce.

It’s not hard to imagine a Black person bought a bottle of Argia B’s Mumbo Bar-B-Q Sauce and used it on carryout eggrolls from Chinatown. It is not much of a stretch to think that they moved to DC and brought the sauce along. Perhaps it got there in the suitcase of one of the great South Side Chicago bluesmen. Perhaps a cook from a Chinese restaurant brought it south. However it journeyed from Chicago to DC, within a decade after Argia B. introduced his condiment, something bearing the same name began appearing in DC.

Mumbo Sauce in DC

Many DC area restaurants, especially Chinese restaurants, Korean restaurants, and fried chicken carryouts serve DC Mumbo Sauce, which is sometimes also called Mambo Sauce, Mombo Sauce, Mumba Sauce, Mumble Sauce, and even Mummbah Sauce. Throughout the Petworth neighborhood there are scores of restaurants that offer Chinese carryout, fried chicken, and pizza all in one storefront, and they all have DC Mumbo Sauce. You’ll also find it in Chinatown.

Mumbo Sauce briefly gained nationwide fame on October 9, 2023, popular fast-food chain McDonald’s released their own version of the sauce as a limited time offering in their US locations. Alongside the dipping sauce’s release, they hosted a media campaign pairing with multiple content creators to promote the product, as well as developing a short YouTube documentary covering the sauce’s history.

What People are Watching

Ride or Die (Prime Video)

My favorite part of Ted Lasso was discovering the goddess that is Hannah Waddingham (and then learning that she’d played the nun who cries “Shame” while ringing a large bell, walking behind Cersei). As soon as I learned she was going to be playing an assassin I knew I had to see the show as soon as possible. This instinct was good, because the show, with costar, Octavia Spencer, is one of the best female-lead shows I’ve seen in a long time.

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Not only was Ask E. Jean an excellent documentary, but the Rosenberg trial and executions were such an important part of the Cold War that I knew I had to watch Meeropol’s Heir to an Execution. Once I watched Heir, I had to see the Cohn documentary immediately afterward. The two documentaries were interconnected because 23-year-old Cohn was the brutal federal prosecutor in the 1951–1953 espionage trials that helped secure the controversial conspiracy and death sentences that sent her grandparents, the Rosenbergs, to the electric chair.

Heir to an Execution

Heir to an Execution explores her family’s conflicted views of the Rosenbergs’ trial and subsequent execution. On June 19th, 1953, the US government executed the Rosenbergs for “conspiracy to commit espionage” leaving behind two sons and an extended family of siblings, one of whom, David Greenglass, had testified against his sister and brother-in-law. Greenglass’ testimony was the evidence the government had to convict them. Now, 50 years later, the Rosenbergs’ granddaughter, Meeropol, embarks on a quest to understand who her grandparents were and the choices they made. Along the way, she discovers startling new information about the case and what happened to her family. After their parents were executed, Meeropol’s father, Michael, and his younger brother, Robert, were adopted by New York songwriter Abel Meeropol and his wife Anne.

The Rosenbergs’ Comrades

To understand her grandparents as people rather than symbols, Meeropol seeks out the comrades of their youth. Luckily for us, many of them are still with us, (including the remarkable Harry Steingart, 103 years old when Meeropol interviews him). Like Steingart, most of the Rosenbergs’ friends were trade unionists and/or members of the American Communist Party and every one of them, Miriam Moskowitz, Abe Osheroff, Morty Sobell, was Jewish.

These elderly activists, looking back now at events that occurred two generations ago, may or may not be remembering all the details with pinpoint accuracy. After all, many of the stories they tell have probably been told dozens of times and, therefore, have an almost mythical quality.

In conjunction with the film clips and still photos Meeropol has found to illustrate these narratives, her interviews remind us of a time when thousands of young Jewish-Americans proudly dedicated their lives to the cause of universal social justice. Coming of age during the Great Depression of the 1930s, they were determined to end the poverty and oppression that surrounded them. They organized, marched, and fought for better working conditions and social services.

We’ll likely never be 100 percent certain of the facts of the case, but it appears likely that Julius Rosenberg provided our wartime allies in the Soviet Union with non-atomic military intelligence during World War II, and that Ethel knew about this even though she was not personally involved in his activities. What they were charged with, in 1950, was “conspiracy to commit espionage,” with the apparent goal of forcing them to name other people. In the court of public opinion, however, they were damned for “stealing the secret of the atom bomb,” thereby endangering the survival of the United States during the Cold War.

The Rosenbergs’ Family Members

While the Rosenbergs’ friends are outgoing, their family members are almost invisible, even in film clips. History books tell us that Ethel Greenglass had three brothers and Julius Rosenberg was one of five children, but neither family wants anything to do with the boys. Meeropol does her best to track her cousins down and solicit their participation, with no success. She shows herself on the phone working from two hand-drawn family trees, but she never shows us any of the names or tells us exactly who she is talking to at any one time.

Finally, a cousin her age agrees to see her. She identifies him as “Baron Roberts,” son of Julius’s brother, David. Meeropol flies to an unnamed city to meet with him in his comfortable suburban home. When she tells him that none of the other cousins will speak with her, even off camera, he cries and she comforts him. Although the events happened long before any of them were born, Ivy and Baron share a moment of sorrow for all the relatives who still live with their conflicted feelings.

Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn.

In 2019, Meeropol revisited the story of her grandparents to look into the man who prosecuted them, Roy Cohn. She directed and produced Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn.

Meeropol never met Roy Cohn, but he played an important role in her life. Cohn became famous as a tenacious—and often unscrupulous—23-year-old federal prosecutor of the Rosenbergs. He cemented his reputation the following year as chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy during the U.S. senator’s infamous hearings to identify and investigate suspected communists.

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Life didn’t follow my plan, as often happens, and in 2019 I was working in a high-stress, government position in Washington, DC, when E. Jean Carroll published What Do We Need Men For? Carroll, now 82, journalist, author, and advice columnist, alleged that Donald Trump raped her in a dressing room at a department store in Manhattan in the mid-90s, leading to two blockbuster court cases.

Ask E. Jean Must be Seen as Widely as Possible

Now, 7 years later, the documentary Ask E. Jean by director Ivy Meeropol has been released in theaters and is playing in film festivals. The documentary examines the question of why Carroll waited decades to come forward, making a convincing case that she belongs to the “silent generation”—a cohort of women who were conditioned to endure the predatory behavior of men with a shrug and a smile.

“I was born in 1943,” she explains in the film. “We are the chin-up, move-it-on, grin-and-bear-it generation. We didn’t complain. It would never occur to me. We actually smiled about it and moved on. That’s how we handled things.”

Carroll is a former Miss Indiana University and Miss Cheerleader USA who became the first female contributing editor at Playboy and wrote the feisty “Ask E Jean” column for Elle from 1993 to 2019. She hosted her own cable TV show, wrote for one season of Saturday Night Live, and penned an unauthorized biography of fellow gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson.

Even though she said, “My writing wasn’t that good,” she sensed that there was something about her personality that belonged on the page. From writing the column, she landed a TV show where guests brought her their problems and she helped solve them. She considered it another form of being a cheerleader.

The Attack

It’s when she’s riding high and enjoying life, that E. Jean runs into Donald Trump in the revolving door of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York City as she’s leaving taping her cable show. Trump recognizes her as the “girl who gives advice” and she recognized him as “the real estate guy.”

Here, her recorded deposition takes over as narrator in the film: Come help me choose a gift, Trump urges, and Carroll, ever open to adventure, agreed. They start with handbags then move on to hats, but Trump is already heading up the escalator to lingerie. There is some back and forth over a bodysuit. Trump tells her to try it on. She tells him to try it on. And then she finds herself in the store’s fitting room, a place she doesn’t want to be, but keeps telling herself this is “hilarious.” Carroll’s delivery in the deposition is appropriately direct, but you can feel the emotion layered into it as she relives every decision and every detail that led her to this awful moment. The questions they ask make it that much worse. (Was she wearing a bra? Underwear? List all the men you’ve slept with.)

What the documentary captures so achingly, is how outwardly confident E. Jean masks the inner wounded E. Jean. It’s clear this wasn’t any old incident in a dressing room—it was sexual abuse, and it changed her forever. “I never had sex again after the incident,” E. Jean explains in the documentary.

The dichotomy is staggering between the woman who talked about sex but could no longer have it; the woman who told other women to stand up for themselves but couldn’t stand up for herself. Heart wrenchingly, the documentary includes earlier footage from a talk show during which Carroll insisted that Anita Hill and Paula Jones should have been able to stand up to Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton, respectively. Of course, she said this before she was attacked.

Carroll didn’t set out to end up in the courtroom. She initially wrote a list of “hideous men” (including mafia bosses, media titans, boyfriends, husbands, a serial killer, and a president) that she had encountered, because the #MeToo movement had deeply affected her, and her readers were pleading for guidance on whether to come forward with their own stories of abuse.

The details of her encounter with Trump are still vivid in her memory, including the clothing she wore and her feeling of shock, “It’s welded into my brain.” she said. In fact, she wore the same clothes on the cover of the New York magazine in June 2019 with the main cover line: “This is what I was wearing 23 years ago when Donald Trump attacked me in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.” The magazine also included an excerpt that includes her account of the attack.

After the assault, however, Carroll did what countless women of her era did, confiding in trusted friends—the author Lisa Birnbach and television journalist Carol Martin—and then buried the memory deep down. Birnbach suggested she report the attack and said she would go with her to do so, while Martin said she should never tell anyone else about it. Her initial reaction, attempting to laugh it off, has frequently been weaponized against her.

Trump, who had been accused of sexual misconduct by an estimated 27 women by 2019, stood on the White House lawn and told reporters that he’d never met Carroll and would not have assaulted her because “she’s not my type.” Carroll, who had spent decades building a career as an author, journalist, and advice columnist based on her credibility, said the relentless defamation was intolerable.

During Carroll’s private deposition from 2022, Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba asks her, “If you were concerned about being dragged through the mud, why would you choose to sue Donald Trump?”

Carroll removes her glasses calmly and replies firmly: “Because he called me a liar. He called me a liar. And I couldn’t let it stand.”

She said in the lawsuit that readers no longer wanted to write to a woman the president had branded a liar and that her column had received 50 percent fewer letters from readers. In fact, once the lawsuit was filed in 2020, Elle didn’t renew her contract. “A women’s magazine fires a woman for standing up to a powerful man? As we say in the fashion world,” Carroll says in the film, “Not a good look.”

The Photograph

During his deposition, Trump was shown a photograph from 1987 of himself with his first wife, Ivana Trump, talking with and Carroll and her then-husband, John Johnson, at a public event in New York. Trump misidentified Carroll as his ex-wife, Marla Maples, undermining his “not my type” defense.

Carroll was represented by Roberta Kaplan, a civil litigator described by peers as a “street fighter” and a “force of nature”. In 2023 a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation but did not determine that he raped her, awarding Carroll $5 million.

The Second Trial

Trump continued social media attacks on Carroll, who also received death threats and had to put in cameras and use other security measures at her home. Therefore, in a second civil suit in 2024 the jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million for defamation as a punitive measure to deter him and others from further defamation.

The effect of the terrible messages and Trump’s attacks on Carroll after the first trial is clear. While the depositions are less than a year apart, she looks ten years older.

Carroll explains, with her signature candor, one of the big challenges she faced heading into the second trial. “Who on a jury is going to believe an 80-year-old woman is fuckable? Nobody.” Whether Carroll was sufficiently attractive then or now shouldn’t matter, but she and her lawyers know very well that it does. She hires the same hair and makeup stylist she worked with in the ’90s, Lisa Corelli, to make her look as much as possible like she did back then.

While Trump’s lawyers are seeking to overturn the rulings, in July 2026 Carroll received $5,625,005.48, which included the original $5 million plus three years of accrued post-judgment interest.The second amount is still under appeal.

Getting Carroll on Board with the Documentary

In the post-screening Q&A that I attended, Meeropol, 57, said that, initially, Carroll wanted nothing to do with a documentary. “I was lucky because she basically told everybody, ‘I’d rather eat my shoe.’ I find it very funny because it’s classic her.”

Eventually, a mutual friend persuaded Carroll to watch Meeropol’s acclaimed HBO documentary Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn, about the notorious lawyer who mentored the young Trump and prosecuted Meeropol’s grandparents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. A Zoom meeting followed, the connection was immediate, and Carroll declared: “All right Ivy, let’s do it.”

Meeropol found Carroll to still be energetic, eccentric, funny, generous in her support, and, despite her status as a public figure who belonged to New York’s media elite, protective of her solitude. “She needs her time alone; she’s a writer; that’s what she loves to do. She likes to be in her cabin with her dogs, drinking her tea and writing or reporting. A lot of what she had to endure with the trials and all the publicity was very hard for her.”

Securing funding for the project proved even more difficult. Financiers and studios repeatedly turned the film down, blaming Trump fatigue, too many #MeToo films, or Carroll not being famous enough. “I was surprised and disappointed,” says Meeropol. “I thought we’ve got the most incredible character in documentary history, possibly.”

Rescuing Tapes, aka Time Capsules

The film eventually secured independent equity investment in 2023, with a budget of less than $2 million. Meanwhile, Meeropol and her team had been digging through Carroll’s packed storage unit and the basement of her home, rescuing boxes of dusty VHS tapes.

They completed that task just in time. “The very next day she called me and said, ‘You’re not going to believe this. The basement flooded.’” The rescued tapes, along with 25 further episodes unearthed by NBCUniversal, yielded footage of Carroll’s 1990s television show, broadcast on the America’s Talking cable network, run by Roger Ailes.

Watching the footage, Meeropol was struck by how radically progressive Carroll’s advice was for the era. “She is giving incredible advice at a time when women were not hearing that. Like, ‘You don’t have to be married at 30. Who told you that? Don’t beat yourself up because you’re not married at 30. If you’re bored at home because your husband goes off to work and you drop your kid off at school, go to college.’

She advises one guest to “always press charges,” and another to let go of her guilt around being raped—advice that Carroll herself will struggle to follow. Where a much less charitable filmmaker might frame the contradiction as a “gotcha,” Meeropol frames it as an evolution in thinking. Carroll, in her typically clear-eyed, clear-voiced manner, does not mince words when asked why she didn’t report Trump then: “Didn’t have the guts.”

“It’s so interesting to see because it’s such a time capsule moment in the mid-90s. As E. Jean says, women were finally talking about their careers and what they want to do with their lives, which was not something she’d experienced except that she was this outlier who had paved her own way when she got to New York City and launched her career in the male-dominated magazine world.”

Shame has Got to Switch Sides

Meeropol was determined not to frame Carroll as a victim. “She rejects those terms herself —even ‘survivor’. I’m at a loss sometimes what language to use because it’s so current but she embodies the opposite of that. That’s what Gisèle Pelicot [a Frenchwoman who waived her right to anonymity as the victim in a multiple rape case] has been talking about and the Epstein survivors coming out: shame has got to switch sides.

“I thought about that a lot with E Jean. She herself embodies the flip side of shame because she will sit there and say, yeah, I was flirting with Donald Trump, I did try to laugh it off and I do love men. It’s refreshing. The worst thing for her would have been she says it in her show when she’s talking to a young woman who is talking about being raped—is to make yourself the victim.”

During a phone interview Carroll said she was doing this for “every woman who has come forward and was dragged through the mud, ridiculed, and called a liar.” In addition, the purpose of the lawsuit is “to demonstrate that even a man as powerful as Trump can be held accountable under the rule of law,” the filing states.

Later, in a deposition, she says that her memories of her own experience bring her shame because she feels as if it was her fault. Even the deposition is harrowing: “If women could see what kind of questions their fellow woman is asked when she brings charges of rape against a powerful man, it would stop a racehorse,” she tells the filmmakers.

The most illuminating part of Ask E. Jean is not really Carroll’s story, as interesting as she is and as important as her court cases have been. The film’s strength is in how it illustrates a cultural shift in attitudes toward women who make accusations against powerful men. As Carroll points out, progress is slow, and women still stay silent for many reasons. But her decision to come forward, she believes, has inspired others to do the same, and that can help turn shame into triumph.

Carroll also wrote a book in 2025 with the cheeky title Not My Type: One Woman vs. A President, which is a hilarious, hopeful, revelatory behind the scenes account of the trials that riveted the nation.

Behind the Scenes and Supporters

Although some backers asked to have their names removed from the project, due to the political environment, Graydon Carter and Sheila Nevins are among the executive producers. Additionally, it was reported recently that the U.S. Department of Justice had opened a criminal inquiry into people involved in the lawsuits. Democratic billionaire donor Reid Hoffman has publicly said that a U.S. Department of Justice criminal investigation of donations he made in support of Carroll’s sexual abuse and defamation lawsuits against Trump is designed to “silence” critics of the president.

Nonetheless, Hoffman wrote in an X post on Friday that Trump “is investigating me because I supported E. Jean’s lawsuit”. The LinkedIn co-founder added on Substack that “Trump cannot be allowed to use the full weight and power of the U.S. government to come after women who speak up, or anyone who supports them in doing so”.

Conclusion

In recent years, Carroll reignited public discourse by standing up to power—becoming the only woman to beat Trump twice in court, and sparking a national conversation about truth, accountability, and resilience. This film is a portrait of an indomitable woman who proved it’s never too late to reclaim your voice, rewrite your story, and change the world.

As E. Jean said on her show, “Never let them steal your joy!” and “Fate loves the fearless!” Two very good pieces of advice.

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The Red Purse of Justice is written by Amy Benavides, the daughter of a Cold War spy who writes articles related to her life, terrorism, espionage, history, and culture that she discovers as she writes her memoir.

Subscribe to make sure you receive her articles on Tuesdays (free subscribers) and Thursdays (paid subscribers). On Fridays I post a column for paid subscribers about topics that would help recruiters build a rapport with their targets.

Taharka Brothers Ice Cream

It was finally cool enough to take a walk around the Inner Harbor tonight after writing all day. Walking away from Federal Hill towards the Power Plant, I passed a small building and noticed they were selling Taharka Brothers Ice Cream. Tapping into my self-discipline, I kept walking.

I then saw people in line at the Rita’s Italian Ice that I’d walked to repeatedly last summer only for it to be closed every time. My discipline was flagging. As I walked up to the window the couple in front of me left without anything. I soon found out why; only lemon and cotton candy ice and vanilla custard were available. Part of me was grateful, I kept walking.

When I reached the Power Plant I saw Lucky’s Ice Cream Shop at the corner. Looking at the list of available ice cream, three were marked as from Taharka Brothers. My interest piqued, I started back. Towards the end of the walk, I stopped to look at the small ice cream stand I’d initially passed.

The ice cream shop was part of The Choice Program at UMBC, which “provides engaging programming, connection to resources and holistic case management to youth in Maryland’s communities.” Additionally, the shop provides job training and career development to help youth start on their way to employment success.

Standing near the line of people, I looked up the ice cream. I saw there’s a permanent stall down the street in Cross Street Market (and in Lexington Market), as well as other locations and is available for local and national delivery.

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When I read that former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, Jr., died Tuesday I tried to try to remember if he was a director dad had liked or had talked about one way or another. Nothing specific came to mind, so I googled both their names and found that on September 21, 1999, they both testified about Russian money laundering in front of the Committee on Banking and Financial Services at the U.S. House of Representatives.

I’d read dad’s testimony in the past, but yesterday I read Woolsey’s testimony and then dad’s testimony, again (Woolsey spoke earlier in the day than dad). I could hear dad’s voice as I read his testimony, which brought tears to my eyes, so I pushed that thought away. I concentrated, instead, on trying to discern how much Woolsey might have known about dad’s work from both their testimonies.

When Woolsey said he’d tried to get the administration to heed the CIA’s intelligence about Russian organized crime in 1993-1994, I instinctively (and rationally) knew that a good part the intel had to have come from dad since he was the Moscow Chief of Station from 1992 to 1994.

My heart filled with pride as I reread his testimony and thought about his devotion to his country, his intelligence, and his strength to continue to speak up even when no one wanted to hear what he had to say. I also realized that in three days he’d be gone for two years. There had been so many questions I wish I could’ve asked him in the past two years, especially since I started Red Purse of Justice and working on my memoir.

I’m lucky we knew it was the last conversation we’d have when dad called and we were both able to say the important things one last time (some things were the first and last time). Not everyone gets to have that.

I do wish he’d been more willing to talk about his work in the weeks leading up to the last call, but to learn more I’ll need to put in a FOIA request.

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As I said in one of the first Substack articles, James Bond has played a big role in my life. Not only did dad love to see James Bond movies, but we also had records of the James Bond soundtracks. I spent countless hours of my middle school years in Vienna listening to the Spy Who Loved Me soundtrack with Carly Simon singing “Nobody Does It Better.” I also excited awaited Sheena Easton’s Bond song “For Your Eyes Only” because I loved her song “Morning Train (Nine to Five).”

Now we’re waiting for the new James Bond to be announced and, then, the next Bond movie to be made. Therefore, those chasing a dose of 007 can be excused for impatiently tapping their Omega watches. In the meantime, you can get thrills from the iconic music of the 60+ year-old series, interviews with the star-studded musicians and singers who brought the music to life, and points of view of some of the latest James Bond actors.

In The Sound of 007 filmmaker Mat Whitecross brings together Shirley Bassey; Rita Coolidge; Simon LeBon; composer Marvin Hamlisch; James Bonds Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan, and Daniel Craig; producer Barbara Broccoli; and many others to discuss the music that became a signature of the British spy thrillers.

Whitecross’ film collects an intriguing set of interviews from James Bond singers and songwriters and it’s through their stories that some of The Sound of 007’s most memorable anecdotes appear. There are amusing moments, such as when Duran Duran and John Barry share secrets of their sometimes rocky relationship on “A View To A Kill”; moments of candor, such as Nancy Sinatra recalling how stepping into the studio to record “You Only Live Twice” was one of the most intimidating moments of her life, Tom Jones almost passing out from holding the final note of “Thunderball”, and Shirley Bassey ripping off her bra to hit the “Goldfinger” notes; and moments of poignancy, such as Amy Winehouse meeting with Barbara Broccoli about collaborating on a Bond song. Winehouse took notes about the emotional elements of the movie but left the paper behind where she had just written “Blake” repeatedly. Broccoli says Winehouse was too broken to work and died not long after.

Rock and pop stars have vied for the chance to sing a Bond song, and while the lucky make it, it doesn’t work out for others. The documentary gives Radiohead as an example of a band where the timing didn’t work out. Both director Sam Mendes and Daniel Craig were fans and hopeful that a collaboration would be possible. The band proposed two songs for “Spectre”, “Man of War” was recorded before they were requested to pitch a song, which, therefore, couldn’t be used, and “Spectre” was a more downbeat song that came in too late to be used. The producers had moved on to use Sam Smith’s “Writing’s on the Wall.”

One of “the most underrated” title songs was “Goldeneye,” which U-2 wrote and Bono insisted Tina Turner sing. Simon LeBon and John Taylor of Duran Duran discuss getting the call to make “A View to a Kill,” the best New Wave Bond theme. They were grateful they weren’t asked to do “Quantum of Solace” because LeBon jokes, “nothing rhymes with ‘Solace’…except for bollocks.”

Both Hamlisch and Paul McCartney discuss how quickly they wrote their instant classics because they were so motivated by the Bond movies they worked on. McCartney had written the song he recorded based on the book because the script wasn’t written, yet. Bond villain Rami Malek complains that Queen never got to do a Bond song, and a joke is made that his contract for Bohemian Rhapsody states that he must push for Queen songs if possible.

Legendary film and TV composer Hans Zimmer is shown in the recording studio working out ways to incorporate the Bond themes, including adding the hummed and sung melody of the title tune of No Time to Die by Billie Eilish into the score for that movie.

Whitecross says, “Each song is of its time but also must reflect Bond. There is this fusion of different elements that make it timeless. The songs and the scores are a snapshot of a moment in time and that is not true of any other film series in history.”

For all the focus on the songs, he’s even more fascinated by the majestic scores. “I love all the songs, but what really appeals to me is the classical side of things and the soundtracks, the history of John Barry going all the way to Hans Zimmer,” he says.

Whitecross talks about John Barry’s role in Bond films’ music, including saying, “I love On Her Majesty’s Secret Service with ‘We Have All the Time in the World’. That score is almost like a test case of why the music is so important to Bond.” Louis Armstrong recorded “We Have All the Time in the World” shorty before he died and everyone knew he was very ill. In addition, the documentary tells the story behind the phrase and when it was used so poignantly in other Bond films.

Monty Norman’s “James Bond Theme” is another vital component of The Sound of 007, and it features early in the film. “Again, it would have been so easy to focus so much time on that story,” Whitecross says. “It is, after all, the ‘James Bond Theme’ that provides the audience with such an important anchor, launching them immediately into the hero’s world.”

“You’d need a 10-part television series to go into every song and every score in detail,” says Whitecross, “but when we were watching No Time to Die, which worked as such a beautiful final curtain, we realized we could use that as the spine of our film. We had such wonderful access to Hans Zimmer, Johnny Marr, and Daniel Craig, as well as Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell. From here we could jump into the past.”

Whitecross was hard at work on The Sound of 007 when he saw No Time To Die, sifting through hours of archive material, shooting new interviews with key contributors from across the years, and figuring out the best way to present the story within the constraints of a 90-minute running time.

“The Bond films have a who’s who of so many of the best pop musicians in music history, from Shirley Bassey and Matt Monro in the early days, through to Billie Eilish now. No film series will ever be able to emulate that.” Proving his point, Shirley Bassey is shown in interviews and singing “Goldfinger,” the song that set the Bond title tune standard, as well as the slinky “Diamonds are Forever”.

Perhaps the most delightful anecdote, however, comes from Michael Caine who recalls how he had been kicked out out of his apartment with actor Terence Stamp because of the rotating parade of women entering and exiting their flat. He wound up sleeping on John Barry’s couch and was awoken by Barry’s playing the piano, which continued throughout the night. By the morning, the composer had written the title song to Goldfinger, and Caine was the first person to hear it.

Whitecross says that Caine’s story, “allows you to really step into the Swinging Sixties. John Barry was one of the most iconic figures in the Swinging Sixties. He was right there; he was married to Jane Birkin, and was mates with everyone, from The Beatles to Michael Caine and Terence Stamp, and there is something lovely about the snapshot of the ecosystem of the time of the first Bond films. It’s no coincidence that they emerged then; it was such a creatively fertile moment.”

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The Red Purse of Justice is written by Amy Benavides, the daughter of a Cold War spy who writes articles related to her life, terrorism, espionage, history, and culture that she discovers as she writes her memoir.

Subscribe to make sure you receive her articles on Tuesdays (free subscribers) and Thursdays (paid subscribers). On Fridays I post a column for paid subscribers about topics that would help recruiters build a rapport with their targets.

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Dirty Martini Toast by Julianna McIntosh (JoinJules.com)

This Dirty Martini Toast is salty, briny, crispy, creamy, and honestly tastes like the perfect martini hour snack turned into dinner. The toast gets pan-fried in beef tallow until deeply golden and crisp, then topped with whipped blue cheese ricotta and a smashed olive salad packed with citrus, herbs, vermouth, and olive brine. Finish it with fried shallots and a drizzle of olive oil, and suddenly your martini has a soulmate.

Ingredients

For the Toast

• 1-2 thick slices of sourdough bread

• 1 tbsp beef tallow

For the Smashed Olive Salad

• 1 cup green olives, smashed with the side of a knife or your muddler!

• 1 garlic clove, very thinly sliced

• Zest of 1 lemon

• Zest of 1 orange

• 1 tbsp fresh lemon juice

• 1 tbsp olive brine

• 1 tbsp dry vermouth

• Pinch chili flakes

• Sea salt, to taste

• Fresh cracked black pepper

• Fresh basil, chopped

• Olive oil, enough to coat

• Fried shallots from Trader Joe’s

• To Finish

• Extra olive oil

• Flaky sea salt

Instructions

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