COMPLETELY COVERED IN ICE, the old train from Siberia, with its baggage of refugee passengers and frozen freight, struggled against the storm like a huge white serpent. Its large yellow eye peering out into the darkness, the train slowly twisted and wove its way past the endless snow-covered towns and villages on its 6,000-mile journey across Great Mother Russia.
Fierce arctic winds blew heavy snow out of the north as the first major storm of winter caught up with us outside the Russian city of Sverdlovsk. In some places the snow lay four and five feet deep across the tracks.
I was the only foreigner on board - an American intelligence agent desperate to get to an agency safe house several days away, somewhere in the middle of Russia. At this very moment, both the KGB and Russian mafia were trying to find me.

Safe - at least for now - on board the cold, overcrowded train, trying to rest my aching, wounded body, I sat at my seat mesmerized, staring through the ice-framed windows. As I watched the storm and the endless, frozen desolation of Siberia slowly pass by, I struggled to make sense of the improbable events of the last 72 hours, amazed at how fortunate I was to still be alive.

* * *

IT WAS THE EARLY 1990s. After 70 years of communist oppression, the Soviet Union was coming apart at the seams. Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms had loosened the government's stranglehold over the people, but the economy was in shambles. Overnight tens of millions of pensioners lost their life's savings. Worker strikes and political protests paralyzed the country. Food shortages, the norm since Lenin, had deteriorated into food crises. Crime ran rampant in the major cities. As the Soviet Union plunged deeper into chaos, civil war appeared imminent.

Anticipating the overthrow of Gorbachev, leaving who knows what sovereign in charge, the U.S. State Department decided to make a bold, last-ditch attempt to locate four ex-communist officials, take them into custody and smuggle them out of Russia. These men would then be tried by our government before an international tribunal at the Hague in the Netherlands for the crimes of espionage and embezzlement which they had committed against the United States.

These four corrupt officials, with the complicit knowledge of the Soviet government, had fraudulently siphoned tens of millions of dollars from the U.S. construction fund during the building of the new American embassy in Moscow. More serious than the pilfered millions, each of these political oligarchs, working with Soviet intelligence, had played a major role in the KGB's successful efforts to bug and render useless the $100-million crown jewel of the American embassy complex - the newly constructed U.S. Chancery Building. more