Aline Mosby: Interview #2

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community. I would just say not an intense interest, what I'd call an average interest, I guess. My parents always voted, of course. I remember that.

My father wasn't very interested in religion. He was too absorbed with what he was doing, until he was divorced and married a second time to a woman who was a Christian Scientist. I think he went to her church with her just because he wanted to be with her, not necessarily because he believed in it. But she did, and refused all medical treatment (according to Christian Science practice). Everybody in her family was that way.

My mother was very firm about religious education for my sister and myself. I remember going to Sunday school when I was little, going to the Episcopal Church that my mother was attached to, which is normal for Irish families from Northern Ireland. That is, she wasn't from Catholic Ireland. Yes, I remember going to Sunday school, where you do drawings, in the basement of the Episcopal Church, I think it was. Then I was confirmed in the church and sang in the choir. I gave up on religion when I was about thirteen or fourteen, I think.

Currie: What made you give up on it?

Mosby: I remember announcing to my parents at the dinner table that I was atheist, and they were very shocked. [Laughter.] Well, after learning about human reproduction, I announced, "I don't see how Christ could have been born of a virgin." I thought the whole thing was just made up. So I announced that I just didn't believe it.

Then when my parents got divorced, I was very sad and I started going back to church because I really felt very lonely. By then my sister had married and moved away, so I felt quite alone. I just clung to going to church, because I just felt very alone in the world. I think that happens to a lot of people—millions—that they just need something to hang on to.

But then when I left university, after I worked for UPI in Seattle and I was in Los Angeles, I met some artist from New York, who got me very interested in the art world. I owe them a lot. We got to talking about religion once, and I remember coming to the conclusion that it's fine for people who need it, and it's very understandable, but to believe all those things that they teach you in Sunday school, I just don't think they're true. I don't believe them. And also, when I got in the outside world, out of my little town in Montana, and discovered that there are other religions, I became very upset with the anti-Semitism of Christians. I think that would be maybe the major thing that turned me off to Christianity.

Currie: How were you first exposed to the anti-Semitism?

Mosby: Just meeting Jewish people in Los Angeles, of course, where there's a very large population of them, and realizing how many there were. I just hadn't realized it, being closeted in Montana. I thought there were just a few left wandering around the world. Then I got interested in exploring, from an outsider's point of view, all religions. I remember reading things about them, and I have several books on anti-Semitism. That was when I was in my early twenties. So I am very interested in religion, still today, but strictly from an outsider's point of view. A great many of my close friends in Los Angeles were Jewish.

When I realized all of that and began to read about other religions, I look at it, I think, from a more objective point of view now, of all religions. But I still think there are many bad things about religion, to put it mildly. I mean, look at the Gulf war, you know. To Moslems, the religion is too important to them. This business of praying five times a day, they would get

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In Spain, I read an article recently, since Franco died and the economy of Spain has gone up and they're really now just charging ahead and part of Europe, the church attendance in Spain has plummeted downward. It's interesting. But in the United States, probably the most religious country, there are so many sects and so many of them are rip-offs, criminals! You know what I mean, those people. I listen to them in Montana. They're on a small town radio station that I tune in on to get the news. They have these programs where these men talk in great religious fervor and say, "You send me $30 and I'll help you with your problems," or something like that. And some people up there are very simple. They send these people money. They've been doing it for years, even before all the rip-off people got started.

All right. Okay. [Laughter.] You ask a question.

Currie: We can talk about it later, too. Just to follow up, how do you think your family's political stance or beliefs affected you?

Mosby: Since I was determined to be independent, I tried to think for myself. I also may have been influenced by many of my friends whom I knew socially. They were Democrats. So when I started to vote—let's see. Where was I when I was twenty-one? I was in New York. I don't think I was a registered voter there. I don't remember the first time I voted. But anyway, I voted Democrat. In fact, I usually did until the last election. I didn't like either one of them, but I voted for [George] Bush. I didn't really like either one of them. But I've never been interested in any of the smaller parties, probably because I was born in a small community where there weren't any. I suppose there are a lot of small parties in big cities, and I can understand how voters thought at first that the Communist party was a great idea or the Socialist party.

Currie: How would you describe your journalist colleagues' political views?

Mosby: You mean down the years in various cities?

Currie: Yes.

Mosby: I would say that the majority of the journalists whom I've known were voting Democrat, maybe because they were salaried workers and weren't owning the enterprise.

Currie: One study I read said that publishers and owners tended to be Republicans, and the reporters and editorial staff tended to be Democrats.

Mosby: Yes. Whether that holds true today, I don't know. I'm trying to think of journalist friends in Paris. I think that may still be largely true. Of course, for the next election, I don't know what I'll do. I'm so disappointed in the Democratic party, it's just as if they've thrown in the towel. They're just sitting around reading a book or something. They don't seem to be doing anything.

Currie: They can't seem to figure out what they need to do.

Mosby: Yes. They can't get their act together. It's really unfortunate. Actually, they have a lot of material to draw upon. I mean, they certainly would have. But then you're closer to it than I am, because you're living in the city where you're surrounded by politics. Of course, I read the Washington Post and the New York Times, what's published in the Herald Tribune. You know that's owned by the Times and Post. I just mention that because Fern and Jay [Ingersoll] didn't

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to how one could have a career and children and be married. I knew one thing, I wanted to be independent and not rely on some man to give me household expense money to pay for my clothes and my metro fare and so forth. That whole idea just never appealed to me. The situation, I think, is much more clear now. In the first place, men accept women having careers now, don't you think, much more easily?

Currie: Because it's the norm.

Mosby: Yes. A lot of men, I think, probably enjoy it because it makes their life easier, in a way, because there are two paychecks coming into the house.

Currie: I only have one friend who's a full-time homemaker. You said yesterday that you were thirty-seven when you went to Moscow, and you said there had been several romances, but nothing worked out.

Mosby: I think a lot of men aren't interested in a woman who wants to work all the time and is busy running around, at least in my generation. It's different now. Men accept it. I think they want it. I'm thinking of young journalist couples, American and otherwise, they still work and their husbands don't just accept it, I think they want it that way.

Currie: I think you're right. First of all, you need the money. Secondly, it's actually much better when you are two independent people.

Mosby: Absolutely. I'm thinking of a farewell party I went to just before I left, at the home of a Canadian with whom I worked in United Press for years. She was married to a Canadian. I think they have to trade off deciding where to live, because the husband in Canada was with the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which links all of the highly developed countries, the West, plus Japan and so forth, and the headquarters is in Paris. They guide the economies of all the member countries. It's very important. Anyway, he was transferred from the Canadian government, which was connected with OECD, to the OECD in Paris. His wife had been with UPI in Canada, so it was easy for her to get a transfer. It worked out fine.

Well, anyway, after she left UPI, she had a baby and she got a job at OECD. His term of duty is up there, but he is doing freelance work, the same kind of thing, advising companies, etc., on their economic matters, and he travels all over, the Middle East and all over Europe, always going off to Turkey or something. She works at the OECD and brings up their baby. It works out great. They've managed to adjust.

Another couple—her name has gone out of my mind—she was transferred to someplace in Europe. Where was it? So he gave up his job in the States and still doesn't exactly know what he's going to do, but he's trying to find something. It depends on maybe which job is the most important.

The farewell party was for an Australian journalist who worked for UPI and then Reuters in Paris. I knew her very well. She married a French journalist with AFP, Agence France Press. They just had a baby. He was bored being in Paris and had actually asked to go to Moscow, but they didn't send him there. They sent him to South Africa. In this case, she was with Reuters and couldn't get a transfer with Reuters to South Africa. They didn't need anybody in the bureau down there. But this is understandable. In this case it would be better if they go to where his job is, so they have. Before she went, she just got on the phone and lined up freelance stringer deals

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Currie: Yes, they're similar fields.

Mosby: Or maybe because I'm just interested in art and in music.

Currie: Were there any other serious relationships over the years?

Mosby: Oh, yes. Oh, yes, in Paris and Moscow. Yes. Next question? [Laughter.]

Currie: You don't want to talk about it?

Mosby: I just don't think it's very interesting. I don't know, they just didn't work out. The last man I knew was an American diplomat and he was obviously looking for a woman who would be extremely feminine in the old sense—he's a little bit older than I am now—who would cook and take care of him and keep house and entertain and do all that sort of thing. That didn't interest me. I just couldn't live with somebody like that.

Currie: I'm afraid you missed the generation of men who—

Mosby: Yes, that's true. I have one friend, one of my very close friends, her husband is someone who was interested in a woman like that, and I was attracted to him first, but I just didn't think I could live with him. When I was in New York, I introduced him to a woman friend because he was just dying to get married, and she was, too. She was just really dying to get married. So they got married, and every time I see them, they're always thanking me profusely for having introduced them. And the marriage worked out beautifully. That was many years ago. It worked because she writes features sometimes for the paper that he's with, so that satisfies her yearnings to express herself.

Now he's covering Eastern Europe and the Gulf, and he's hardly ever in Paris, and she works as his secretary and assistant. He calls up and will dictate stories to her, and she'll dictate to his paper in the States. She has to be in their office all alone, watching the fax machine to see if he's sending something or if he's phoning in. He phones in, and she reads what's on the Reuters wire in the office to him so he keeps up with the news. Takes care of all those things, takes care of all their business relationships and the whole household accounts and their financial dealings and everything. She works very hard at that. She's really working for their paper, too, and they should pay her.

[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Currie: When you said they were both desperate to get married, it doesn't sound like you ever really were.

Mosby: No, no. No, possibly that's correct.

Currie: Only you could say.

Mosby: Yes. When I came back from New York to Montana, I was very homesick. I felt very lonely and alone then. I probably would have married the first person who came along if there had been a man around at the time. [Laughter.] But then when I went to work for UP, I gained back my self-confidence and my ability to work and be single.

Currie: And be self-sufficient.

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Then through my friends, the goddaughters' parents, I have an old farm house on Menorca Island. I have now started to go there more often. I decided I was working too hard as a freelancer, and this is ridiculous. I was only going there for a month in the summer. Last year I was there for more than two months, and this year I'll be there more than two months, too, but I will be writing a magazine article there. I have close friends there, a couple from London and other Americans who have homes there, and my really very close friends, two South African artists who became Canadian citizens. Alas, they've left. They've gone up to Canada now.

Currie: Then you have a place in the Dordogne.

Mosby: Yes. That I share with another journalist, a friend from Paris, because it's too expensive now to buy a country home and remodel it yourself. I bought the one in Spain for $1,800 twenty-six years ago; it was just nothing. L'Express magazine asked me in Paris to do a story on Lee Harvey Oswald, because I had interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald, and they paid me really a good hunk of money—$5,000. That's a good hunk of money for a quick story twenty-eight years ago.

Currie: That was twenty-eight years ago?

Mosby: Yes. It was whenever [John F.] Kennedy was killed. When was that?

Currie: 1963.

Mosby: Yes. So with that money, I bought the house on the island and fixed it up, and one of the goddaughters has an old stable right across the pasture, and she's made that into a home. So I have close friends and my goddaughters are there. It's like family to me.

Currie: It's like a big extended family.

Mosby: The one in the Dordogne, I've been trying to get down there about a week every six weeks. That's rented out to friends during the summer while I'm down in Spain, because there are just too many tourists there for me. It's in a village and there's a chateau in the village, a lot of tourists around. My friend, Nan Robertson, has rented it for June. She's going there. Then I'll see her down there for the first week in July, before I go down off to Spain.

Currie: You own it with Flora Lewis.

Mosby: Yes. Oh, yes, you know that because you talked to Flora.

Currie: When you first got your jobs at UPI in Seattle and Los Angeles, was there anyone who helped you out, who showed you what to do, or sort of took you in hand as a raw recruit, so to speak?

Mosby: Oh, yes. The bureau managers explain everything. I guess some of the more experienced staffers who were there probably helped me and gave me tips and so forth. With beginners, UPI is very helpful. Even when I changed departments, after I'd been with UPI many years, in the New York bureau, when I went there in between Moscow and Paris [staffers were helpful]. They wanted to put me in the department that writes Sunday features. I remember they sent me all over America to write something about television.

Then the foreign editor needed somebody a year or so later on the foreign desk, and he ran out of people, so he came in and asked me if I'd work on the foreign desk. I said, "I've never

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So we got along fine. We both learned a lot from him, because neither one of us had been Soviet experts or knew that much about it. Now the journalists who are sent there, there's room for more journalists and now there are more Americans who really study Soviet affairs, like Nicholas Daniloff, who replaced me when I left the first time. He came from a Russian family. He was a little more acquainted with the language than either Bud Korengold and I were.

Anyway, we got along fine with Henry. As I told you, he didn't live in the diplomatic ghetto, as we called it; he lived by himself with his Russian wife, and he worked at home. It was easier for him that way. He wasn't exactly young or the type of person who runs around. Some days he would send the chauffeur, who was usually attached to him. We used to battle over that now and then. When we desperately needed him, we would call Henry's house and say, "We just have to have Victor (who was the chauffeur) to come over quickly." In those days, you just had to have somebody take copy to the central telegraph. It had to go past the censor. You just had to have a car and a driver. I notice that the journalists there still do. It's very difficult to work in Moscow without a car and a driver.

Currie: Why is that?

Mosby: In the censorship days, we had to. You needed somebody to take your copy to the telegraph office, because there was censorship then and we could not use our phones to file material on. Our phones were tapped. There weren't any direct wires then between the Soviet Union and the outside world. You had to either telegraph or phone your copy. We weren't allowed to phone the copy from the office because they would instantly cut you off. You had to go to the central telegraph office and type out your copy, and you didn't even have to write it with very great style, because you were sending telegrams. So to save money, you did it sort of briefly, and then UPI in London would rewrite it and get it into newspaper style. If you were going to phone it, it was the same way. You still had to type it out. You gave it to the censor.

Years before that, when Henry was first there, you could talk to the censor. It was somebody sitting at a little desk, and you could go and yell at him and argue. But then by the time I got there, there were a couple dozen journalists from various countries, and it was just too much. The censors got tired of being yelled at. You had a long counter, where you sent telegrams, and then the censor was in the door behind that counter with a green curtain. So you couldn't see them. There were several censors in there. By then they had to have censors in Japanese. There were Japanese correspondents then. The censors could read Japanese. One day a big story broke, the Japanese correspondents went rushing down with their stories, and the Japanese reading censor was sick, so they couldn't send anything. [Laughter.] You just sat there and waited for your copy to be cleared. Sometimes you could wait a couple of days, literally! There was a couch in the entry way, and sometimes you'd spend the night on that, sleeping on the couch.

Currie: So you'd have the driver take you down to the central telegraph office.

Mosby: If we were very busy at the office, we would just give him the copy to take down, or if it was just an ordinary story, you would. If it was a big story, we would go to the telegraph office and phone. It would depend. Sometimes we'd write it out and send it by telegraph, but then we'd also have a copy and try to get on the phone with that, maybe phone London first before the telegram would get there.

Currie: But if they didn't like what they were hearing on the phone, they'd cut you off?

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Mosby: Of course, the story that would have been sent, the London office would just try to figure out what we meant. If it was completely garbled, it wouldn't make any sense. If you were trying to phone it in—I'm trying to remember—I think we would just say to London, "We just can't give you the details," or something like that.

One of my predecessors was Whit Bassow. He was expelled, I think. I can't remember why. It was something ridiculous. Anyway, he's written a book recently called Moscow Correspondents. I should have brought it with me to show you. I have two copies back in Paris. Whit Bassow lives in New York now. I could maybe get a copy of it from somebody here.

Currie: I actually have a copy.

Mosby: Oh, you have it. If you look under "Shapiro," there are a lot of anecdotes in there about how he tried to get stories passed and so forth.

Currie: I was hoping to add to the record with your recollections.

Mosby: Yes. I just have to refresh my memory. There would be some hilarious things. They would cut out things that were just—the Russians have a big inferiority complex, you know, about their country. That's one of the problems of dealing with them now. That's an idea. I'm going to suggest that to somebody to write a column on it. I think the State Department realizes that. With people who have inferiority complexes, they're unsure of themselves. In personal relationships, you treat them a little differently, don't you?

Currie: Yes.

Mosby: A little differently.

Currie: How would you treat them?

Mosby: You understand that if they get bridling and bristly, they're trying to make up for the fact that they do feel inferior, and all that bluster is all part of it. You just have to be more understanding. I'm getting edgy now that the Bush administration—not Bush, I don't think; it's all those people around him—are snarling about the Soviet Union. And those columnists who are doing the same thing—[A.M.] Rosenthal in the New York Times and [William] Safire.

This is no time to start reviving Cold War attitudes toward the Soviet Union just because the army and the KGB are making a lot of noises. You just have to be very understanding that some in the army are getting very frightened and worried themselves that the United States is going to attack them. They don't understand that we desperately want to have a close relationship with them and that we do things together. Bush is trying to do that, like the Soviet Union and the United States being co-chairmen of the Middle Eastern negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis. But some of those people around Bush are too right-wing. I don't think they realize the situation. They should go to the Soviet Union and live there a while and see how bad it is, etc.

Currie: Did it surprise you? Was the Soviet Union different than what you expected?

Mosby: Oh, yes! I told you I expected to see everybody marching toward communism and being very strong, and then you see it isn't that way at all. They put an awful lot of money into military things. Of course, that's terrifying, but then society, as a whole, is just so backward, it's just incredible.

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Mosby: Because there was censorship and because he was a strict academician, he taught us to be really very, 100 percent sure of our facts. I mean, anything involving history, to get the quote exactly right, and to write things very carefully without editorializing in any way. I think that was a very important thing, because, as I said to you before, I can read stories now, written from various capitals of the world, that I think are not right down the middle of the line. Henry was very careful about that, because a lot of journalists come there with a patriotic idea of, "We're from the United States, and the Soviet Union is wrong and we're right," especially in those days when it was really the height of the Cold War, and that's not necessarily correct. I think journalists now realize that, but not all of them. There's still some stories from Washington that are still too much reflecting what the government wants you to say, I think, and not really objective. But I would say that Henry really hammered that home. Of course, because there was censorship, you had to be very careful, too, about not getting any editorializing words in there.

I would say that was very important, and also being very conscious of history when reporting from a foreign country. You really have to know their history, going back many centuries, and take all of that into account, which explains a lot of their attitudes and so forth. He just taught us to be very discreet and very careful. For example, I told you when I was in Brussels I had three Soviet friends there who were working in the Soviet Pavilion. One was a journalist and the other two were in the government hierarchy. Of course, they were very careful about being friends with me, and if I should come to Moscow, I must be very careful. I learned that from them. I also learned it from Henry. I told him, because I didn't want to have any secrets from him, I told him that I knew some Soviets that I had met in Brussels and that I was going to contact them and be friends with them. He never asked me their names. He knew perfectly well that I wouldn't say. I mean, I wouldn't even tell him. Who knows who could be overhearing? His apartment may have been tapped; probably was. Even asking me outside, I just wouldn't tell anybody, and I never did.

Currie: Is there anything else that Henry Shapiro taught you?

Mosby: He wanted us to tell him, which we always did, of anything that we would hear which would be a story for him. That was fine.

Currie: You mean a story that was more political in nature?

Mosby: Yes, yes. Which, of course, was the big thing—the politics. When UPI sent me there, they wanted me to write stories about the people, which I did. I don't think anybody had before. There weren't enough people there to start writing stories like that. That's one thing I was interested in, too. I think that nations understand each other better if you know what the people are like. They just aren't militant villains marching down the street; they are people with problems, like anybody else. A lot of the things that I wrote about were really very welcomed and very widely printed.

For example, the Soviet friend who was a journalist, I saw him one day. You sort of meet them privately for a walk or maybe even a lunch in a little out-of-the-way place, something like that. They were always afraid they were being followed or that I was being followed. He had talked to somebody in his company—see, I'm even afraid to say it to you—who had just come back from China, and all the Russian technicians were leaving China. Well, Russia and China were just like this. [Mosby holds fingers closely together.] I told this to Henry. I waited till I got him outside, not in the office or anyplace where we could be overheard or tapped, and I told him that. He didn't believe it. At first he said, "That's not true. That's just a rumor." I said, "I don't know. The source is very reliable." The source really was. As far as I was concerned, he would

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Currie: No.

Mosby: I don't remember that. I don't know whether he would have called him in. I don't know. Whit Bassow might know more about it than I. But they could have easily talked together at receptions. I used to talk to Khrushchev. He was very easy to get to in those days, before he was bounced out. You never knew which embassy reception he was going to show up at, and there were so many. The embassies had nothing else to do except give cocktail parties. [Laughter.] Between the three of us in the office, we may be invited to three different receptions, and we'd share them. So in addition to working all day long, you had to go to these receptions. I would have to at least quickly put on some clothing halfway acceptable and go to these receptions. There always would be some journalist at each one, wondering if Khrushchev was going to show up.

Currie: You could just walk up to him and talk to him?

Mosby: Oh, that's what he would come there for, I think. So when somebody would finally say, "My God, here comes Khrushchev," you know, we would all run and get around him and get out our notebooks. We would be politely hanging back while he talked to the diplomats and the hosts, and then we would wait for a time to sidle up close to him, and we would all get around him and try to do it in a polite and dignified way, and then he'd start talking to us. You never knew which embassy he was going to come to, so all of those receptions had to be covered. Later, as I recall, under [Leonid] Brezhnev, I don't think Brezhnev went to them. So that made that part of the work a bit easier. But Khrushchev was very easy to get to. I remember he used to put his arm around me sometimes.

Then I was sent to New York when he was there at the United Nations. I was sent to New York to help UPI's U.N. staff cover him. It was the same situation there. He would remember me and wave. He was very friendly and very open.

Currie: When he would come to these embassy parties, possibly even to give information, what kinds of information would he want to hand out?

Mosby: We would be asking him about the politics of the day, what was happening. There always was something going on. There would be some local things, too. Was the Soviet Union going to do this or that or the other? Is it true that he's going on a visit to Paris next week? Or whatever. You know, things that you never could get out of the press office.

Currie: Did they actually have press conferences?

Mosby: Yes, they had press conferences, but they would be about technical things that they wanted known. I'm not giving you a very good example, but maybe something connected with science or something that they wanted, some publicity on the minister in charge of something or other, something that they wanted publicized.

Currie: Were you doing your interviewing in Russian at this point?

Mosby: Yes. I interviewed people in Russian, but if it was something very technical, I would take along one of the translators. My Russian wasn't that good. Henry could, of course. Interviewing people on the street or talking to people on the street, something where the Russian would have been easier, I could do that.

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it's almost impossible to find a real box made in Palekh, which is the name of a town. They're now just reproductions. And the same way with the enameled vodka cups that I bought. They only cost about $15 or $20 for one at the time; now they're about $80. Again, they're just cheap reproductions that aren't the real fine handwork. I never use them anymore because if you're serving a Russian meal, you put one at each place and put vodka in it, and you're serving caviar or smoked salmon. But who do you know now who drinks vodka? My American friends don't drink hard liquor anymore, you know. Neither do I. [Laughter.] But I would drink a shot of vodka with real caviar if somebody brought me some from Moscow. I have a lot of antique vodka cups that I bought there, and they're never going to be used, so I gave them as wedding presents to the daughter of a French friend who was getting married.

Currie: What a great present!

Mosby: Yes. I still have about three left, and I think I'll give those away, because it's a shame not to.

Currie: How important was it that you be able to do interviews in Russian?

Mosby: Of course, it's much better if you can. By the time I left, I was doing fairly well. I could go to press conferences when somebody would be button-holed, you know, and could understand what they were saying and ask questions in Russian and get a reply and so forth. I could do that. That is very important, because you don't have to waste time going through a translator. A lot of translators make mistakes. Some of them might even be hiding things, but I don't think ours were. They would just make mistakes under pressure.

Currie: It's understandable.

Mosby: Yes.

Currie: Did you know much about Russian history or culture before you arrived?

Mosby: I had studied it in university, but I hadn't specialized in it. But then before I went, I got books on Russian history. Not Russian culture, I don't think, but Russian history, and read those. When I was there, I collected some. In Paris I have, in my bookcase, quite a collection of books on Russian art and Russian history and so forth that I collected when I was there. But, of course, we had a great expert in the office in Henry. If we were writing a story and couldn't remember what happened on a certain day in 1920 or something, and even the translators would scratch their heads, I'd call up Henry. He knew. [Laughter.] His wife, of course, was also a great source because she came from a very highly educated family and she would help us on lots of things. That was one great advantage we had over the other Western correspondents there, because they didn't have anybody like that in their office. We were really number one over the AP.

Currie: In Moscow?

Mosby: Yes. When Harrison Salisbury was there during the period of time I was there, he became a very good friend. I still talk to him now and then. He had been there in the early days with Henry, too, and then gone back to the States. He was very knowledgeable about history and everything. He's an incredible man. He's written so many books.

Currie: When you knew him, he was there with the New York Times?

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Currie: What year was that?

Mosby: That would have been '64, I think. I remember that year Bud Korengold, by then, had left UPI in Moscow and gone to Newsweek. I remember we were together covering a story in Tashkent, the summit between Brezhnev and the president of India, [Lal Bahadur] Shastri. He [Shastri] died there. He died in the middle of the conference. It was a summit conference between Shastri and Brezhnev, and Shastri died. If it was '64, then that's when I was there the second time. [Shastri died on January 6, 1966.]

But all the American dissidents were—but you weren't talking about American dissidents.

Currie: Is there something interesting about the American dissidents?

Mosby: Yes. What did that person say?

Currie: She said basically that there was some controversy about Shapiro when she was in Moscow in the late seventies, that he had tried to circumvent coverage of the dissidents, and that that caused some consternation on the part of younger journalists. They felt that maybe he was either co-opted or had lost some of his objectivity.

Mosby: Yes, that's so. That's very possible, because I had met some dissidents while I was there, and, of course, Henry didn't approve of that, the first time I was there. Dissident artists. I bought a painting from one of them, Oskar Rabin, and he became quite well known. He's now in Paris. I bought another painting from him there. The second time I went to his home near Moscow to buy something, the police followed me and told me I couldn't do that. Of course, the foreign ministry found out about the dissident paintings and gently scolded me for it. They didn't get too upset.

Currie: What about Henry?

Mosby: I can't remember. Henry didn't tell me I shouldn't have bought it. He didn't say anything. In fact, did I write something about that? I can't remember.

Currie: You wrote about it in your book.

Mosby: Yes, but if I wrote something for UPI, I don't remember, about the dissident artist. That great thing about the really big movement of dissident artists, that was after I left.

Currie: Do you think Henry Shapiro had lost some of his objectivity from being there so long?

Mosby: I don't know. I'll have to think about that for a while.

When we were talking about dissidents, I was confusing it in my mind, because American dissidents started showing up, and that was really quite interesting. I think it's just because when Russia opened up to the outside world a little bit more in the sixties and the seventies, it got to be a fad, so to speak. Americans are like that. One went—that was Lee Harvey Oswald. The next thing you know, a couple of others came after that. They thought they were going to find the promised land there, and they sure didn't.

Currie: You covered some of these American dissidents?

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Mosby: I incorrectly thought that it would be a disadvantage if I went to Vietnam or to the war in the Pacific. Looking back on it now, I see that I was wrong. I should have gone. Because there were several women correspondents in Vietnam, Americans.

Currie: I talked to Roger Tatarian.*

Mosby: Oh, I must call him. Thank you for reminding me, because he's not in the best of health.

Currie: He isn't?

Mosby: No.

Currie: He sounded pretty spunky.

Mosby: That's good. He's had a heart problem for many years. That's why he quit UPI and went to teach in a small, quiet community [Fresno, California] and got out of New York. He was just a hero. He's an example of the way a lot of UPI people were. I don't know whether they are now. You could just tell by talking to him, I'm sure, that he is someone who's kind and warm.

Currie: He was the editor-in-chief of UPI at one point, wasn't he?

Mosby: Yes. When he quit, he was editor-in-chief, but he had a heart attack or some sort of a heart problem. The doctor told him he'd just have to get out of the news business and out of New York. He was right to have done so, because this was many years ago. He's still alive and okay. I must call him.

Currie: One of the things he said to me was that no women he'd ever assigned to Vietnam ever asked to be relieved, but some of the men did.

Mosby: Oh, really? That's interesting. Well, the women would have been trying to prove something. I never asked to be relieved from either China or Moscow. Anyway, I should have gone to Vietnam. I'm sorry I didn't.

Currie: It's interesting that you said the women were probably trying to prove something. Did you feel, as a woman, you had to prove something?

Mosby: Yes. As I told you yesterday, it's like Avis rental cars. If you're number two, you try harder.

Currie: You said that about UPI.

Mosby: Yes. I feel that about myself, too. I would think that most women journalists whom I knew at the time were the same. I think that's true probably in a great number of fields.

Currie: Do you think you were ever denied an assignment because you were a woman? Not one that you refused, but one that was denied you because you were a woman?

______________________ * Former editor-in-chief of UPI.

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Currie: We still have you in Moscow. I was wondering if we would talk a little bit about some of the stories you covered when you were in Moscow.

Mosby: Yes. I remember when the U-2 spy plane was shot down and the pilot was captured and brought to Moscow, and his family was there.* I still have a photograph that I took of the mother standing there with her son. That was quite a touching thing. I've forgotten what happened to him.

Currie: He was sentenced and then released.

Mosby: Yes. Then there were trips of various American officials who would come there, and I would be assigned by Henry to chase them around. I remember Richard Nixon's trip. We went way out to Siberia with him on that. It was a good way to see the Soviet Union. Correspondents didn't travel then as much as they do now, because especially under Khrushchev, there was so much happening in Moscow, you just couldn't leave the agency, couldn't leave the Tass machine unwatched and the papers unwatched. Somebody always had to be there.

Currie: Would the Soviets allow you to travel?

Mosby: They didn't allow us to travel nearly as much as the correspondents can do now. I went to Leningrad a couple of times.

Currie: But these visits of American officials were good excuses to get out into the country?

Mosby: Yes, get to see things. Siberia was really quite fascinating.

Currie: Were you restricted in what you could cover, even of their trips? How did you handle filing and coverage when you would go outside of Moscow?

Mosby: As I recall, I would phone into the Moscow bureau and dictate it, and they would handle it from there. We may have sent some things on teletype. The second time I was in Moscow, that was when Shastri died, the Brezhnev-Shastri summit meeting in Tashkent, I believe it was.

On those junket things, you had to keep an eye on what was going on. I had my nightgown on, but a dressing gown over it, and I had the door to my room open, so that if anything happened or somebody ran down the hallway, I would hear it. I just happened to be peering out the door when my old friend Bob Korengold went striding by. He was then with Newsweek, as I told you. He said, "Shastri has died." So I went running to find somebody from either Shastri's delegation or the Soviet press people to confirm it. This was after midnight. Most people had gone to bed. I finally found somebody to confirm it, so then I went running down to the telex office. The hotel had a big telex, and I sent it by telex to London. I called the London office on the telex and sent a flash that Shastri had died. So I really beat the AP on that. [Laughter.]

______________________ * On May 5, 1960, Francis Gary Powers, an American on a spy mission for the U.S. in a U-2 plane, was shot down over the USSR. He was put on trial, convicted, and in 1962 exchanged for a Soviet spy.

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Currie: Did you ever write any stories about that?

Mosby: No, no. To write something like that, I don't know, you're just so busy covering news stories, you don't think of it. It wouldn't be a news story; it would be more or less a commentary. It's something that I don't think I could have written inside the Soviet Union. It would have had to be written outside for somebody else. UPI didn't have any sort of a thing that allowed for—you could do it in certain ways, but not really. It would have taken a lot of research. I never did it.

Currie: Maybe this is the time to talk about your experience with the KGB.

Mosby: Oh, yes. That was on the first visit. In Whitman Bassow's book, we're old pals, and he came to Paris and interviewed me, and I don't know why he didn't get it a little more straight.

Currie: This is your chance to tell the whole story from beginning to end, put it on the record, so it's exactly right.

Mosby: Yes. I was covering the British fair in Moscow, I believe it was, and I had been out there a couple of days. I think about the second time I was there, two young men were following me around, attractive young men, late twenties, something like that. I didn't pay much attention to them. Finally, after a while they were still there. I decided it would be safe to talk to them, because it was very hard to talk to Russians who would talk back to you, and find out anything. So I just turned to talk to them, I can't remember what about, and then they said, "Well, we would like to take you out to lunch some day." So I said, "Well, all right." I thought, "Well! Russia must be changing, you know. This sounds a little like a pick-up." Anyway, I gave them my name and the office telephone number, and I said, "Well, call me sometime."

A few days later, they telephoned and they said, "Could you have lunch with us?" It was in a restaurant next door to the Metropole Hotel. I've forgotten the name of it. It was reasonably popular then. So they said, "Meet us there at twelve o'clock."

Well, the more I thought about it, the more nervous I got. I thought, "Maybe they're the KGB. I don't know what it could be, but it sounds very dangerous," and I really was afraid to go, so I didn't go.

Then the next day, he called me. The fellow called me and he said, "Where were you? We waited hours for you." He said, "We brought you a big bouquet of flowers and you weren't there." I thought, "Oh, that sounds really suspicious and very strange. Why would they be so anxious to see me?" I thought, "Well, he's never seen an American before." I thought if they were hoodlums trying to rob me or something, it would be safe in a restaurant, because I could run, and I wouldn't go anyplace with them after the restaurant.

So I told Korengold about it, and I told Henry about it, too. We debated. Finally, I had said to the man, "Well, okay. Let's meet tomorrow," or something. Then I debated whether to show up or not. I discussed it with Korengold. I told him about it before, and I'm almost sure I told Henry. He finally said, "We don't have much of a chance to talk to Russians, and you might go find out some things about the young generation. It might be a good story." I said, "Okay, I'll go, but if I'm not back here by—" I was supposed to meet them at one thirty or something like that. "If I'm not back here by six o'clock, you'd better call the cops." He said, "Okay."

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I thought, "My God, they poisoned me." I looked up and the room began to swim. They were sitting there watching me, you know, and I grabbed my handbag and got up. I thought, "I've got to get away from them." I staggered out of the restaurant, just weaving between the tables.

I managed to get outside and sort of collapsed, sitting on a windowsill. There was a photographer waiting, taking pictures of me. The next thing I knew, the two fellows were out there, they came out and stood there laughing at me, sort of chuckling, you know, and they said, "Come on. We're going to take you this way." They kept trying to drag me off in the other direction, and I was yelling, "Help!" and so forth.

A policeman came up and he said, "You're drunk." In Russian he said, "You must be drunk," and he called a car. I was taken to a drunk tank. The only thing I remember about the drunk tank is sort of opening my eyes and seeing that they had written an identification number on my knee, like they put on convicts, you know. Then I don't remember anything else.

The next thing I knew, I woke up the next day about noon, and Bud and Henry and the doctor from the American Embassy were waiting outside the door. I got up, opened the door, and I said, "What am I doing in bed with my clothes on?" They were just so relieved to see me alive, and they told me that the drunk tank had called the embassy, the police did, and that the embassy came and got me and took me home. I instantly said, "They slipped me a mickey." It was just very obvious, you know. That was it. Horrible.

Currie: That's horrible.

Mosby: It was a horrible experience. I remember a German journalist came over a couple of days later when the story got around, and he said one thing he had learned when he came to the Soviet Union, he said, to never eat or drink with anybody unless it's at a big reception where you're sure that it would be all right. Don't ever eat or drink with any of the Russians, because you never know.

Currie: What do you think they were trying to accomplish?

Mosby: The story wound up on the front page of Izvestia. I think they were trying to make me look like a drunken idiot and discredit me in the eyes of the Russian people.

Currie: Why would they single you out?

Mosby: Probably because I was a woman and they thought I would be a little too innocent, which I was, and also the editor of Izvestia, Alexei Azhubei, I think he had it in for me. He didn't like me, anyway. He disapproved of me. At one reception I was wearing makeup, no more than I was last night. I don't have anything on today, but I don't wear a great deal. He came up with his handkerchief and wiped off my lipstick and wiped off my eye shadow like that. [Mosby demonstrates.] I just think he had it in for me. I think he probably organized it. A couple of other people do, too, in Moscow. In fact, one Russian journalist on Izvestia said he thought probably Azhubei had something to do with it. He was the son-in-law of Khrushchev, and he knew everybody. He got together with the KGB and thought this would be a good propaganda story. I don't know. That's just my feeling. Of course, when Khrushchev was bounced out, so was he.

Anyway, it was a horrible experience. One person at the American Embassy said, "You're sure you weren't really drunk?" I got very upset at that. In the first place, I would never be

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Mosby: The only other one was a woman, an American, named Priscilla Johnson, who also interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald after I did, a couple of days after I did. She was the only other one who got him, because he was sent off to Minsk. She was a freelancer there just temporarily. Let me think. At that time, no, there weren't any others. Oh, for a while there was a French woman there, someone older than I was, from France Soir in Paris. She wound up marrying Preston Grover, who was the AP bureau chief upstairs from where we were.

Currie: There weren't many women correspondents there.

Mosby: No.

Currie: That made you more vulnerable as a target?

Mosby: Oh, yes, and made me stick out more, particularly because I was American. I don't think they paid much attention to the older French woman as a target.

Now, getting back to other stories, there was the U-2 plane and Nixon's trip. I'm trying to remember what else happened.

Currie: Maybe we could talk a little bit about how you actually did your job.

Mosby: I told you about getting up in the morning and running in to ask the translator what was in the papers and so forth. If there was anything big, I'd get on the phone to Henry and call him in his apartment. Then you'd have to sit there and keep busy and keep awake while the translator would go through all the press. [Laughter.] While he was doing that, I'd be doing other odds and ends, working on a story or a feature story or something while he was reading the papers. By the time he got them read, then he'd tell me everything that was in the papers. Not everything, but the things he felt were newsworthy. By the time you struggle through the papers, it's noon.

Currie: Did you get a lot of your stories directly from the Russian press?

Mosby: Oh, yes. Some days that would be the only source you would have. Before they started having a lot of news conferences and letting the press see a little bit more, there wasn't any other source. I remember Harrison Salisbury told me, when he was there for UPI many years before that, that it got so that Pravda wouldn't even print anything, hardly anything, about anything, and all the other papers were nothing, too. If you even tried to pass a little story about the weather, that the spring sunshine had arrived in Moscow and that there were people getting married, and that the countryside was in bloom or something, they would kill it. I remember I asked Harrison why, and he said, "Well, the weather is really a military thing." So they wouldn't even let you write about the weather. He had a dacha there that he shared with another correspondent, I forget who, outside of Moscow, and he said they'd just go out there for the weekend and there was nothing to write about. Listen to the radio in case there was something, but there was hardly anything to cover. Then there were just three or four correspondents there. There wasn't much to do. [Laughter.]

Then by the time I got there, there were a few more things to do. Depending on what would be happening, if there was anything to write, I'd have to write and, if it was important, go off to the telegraph. If it wasn't, I'd give it to the driver. Henry might be working on—he did write commentaries and various things. Then there might be an embassy luncheon he'd be invited to or something going on to cover, like if there were any Americans doing anything, or anything that the Russians had invited us to, various news conferences. I don't know. The time would go by.

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Mosby: I think they did on things that were not too harmful, and they also were good about explaining to me a lot about how the people lived and so forth. One of them was Georgian and one of them was Russian. Of course, the Georgian wouldn't say anything, but it was very obvious that he felt ethnically quite different from the Russians. I just learned from them a lot about how people lived.

There was one man from the foreign ministry who was friendlier than others, and I remember one night when I was with these young men from the foreign ministry, we wound up in his apartment. We were only there about half an hour, sitting around a table with a lace tablecloth. They were all drinking vodka. Then all of a sudden he said, "Oh, what are we doing here? It's late." He shooed us all out. But I was there about twenty minutes or so.

Currie: So it wasn't normal for you to visit them in their homes?

Mosby: Oh, no. They weren't supposed to invite any foreigners. I was there about twenty minutes, I guess. I think that was the only Russian home that I ever got into until I went back last fall.

Currie: Did you ever invite Russians into yours?

Mosby: Yes. I remember having a cocktail party at one time, and that must have been why they were there. Some were journalists and some were foreign ministry people who were our contacts and so forth. Henry's contacts came from people whom he had known before there was the terrible crack-down. He was there. I can't remember; it's in that book.

Currie: The twenties.

Mosby: 1926 or something, when it was much easier to see people. He knew academicians and people in science. We would have had no chance of knowing anybody like that. Now I think the correspondents do have sources, because now the Russians want the news out and they want everybody to know what's happening. So it's much easier. When we were there, it was very closed.

Currie: When you'd write a story, you'd have to use existing Russian newspaper stories?

Mosby: You'd have to quote Pravda or whatever it was, or the foreign ministry or whatever ministry you got the story from.

Currie: So it must have been hard to use enterprise in that situation.

Mosby: If you felt something was coming up, you could really hound the foreign ministry until you got something, and maybe before they announced it to everybody. You still could. It was very difficult, certainly.

Currie: You were sent to do pieces on the people and how they lived?

Mosby: I was sent to do the news, but they also wanted pieces on the people and how they lived, because that was the thing that obviously wasn't Henry's academic style. So Bud Korengold and I both would write features about various things that were safe to write about—shopping or what there is to buy.

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Mosby: Oh, of course. Oh, indeed. Everything goes through the foreign ministry. Now, of course, it's different. I assume it's different. It depends on who it is.

Currie: So how was that done?

Mosby: You'd contact the foreign ministry and say, "I want to interview Dmitri Shostakovich. Can you organize it?" Two weeks later, you don't hear anything, so you call up again. "We're working on it." You know. Then they call you, "You have an appointment next Tuesday (or Wednesday) at the Academy of Music," or wherever it was. It was some official building. You go there with the translator, and there was somebody from the Academy of Music. Somebody else was there.

Currie: So it wasn't conducive to a very good interview.

Mosby: No.

Currie: He was being watched.

Mosby: Yes, yes.

Currie: Difficult circumstances.

Mosby: Yes. I went to Leningrad a couple of times, but I don't remember what I wrote about there. Maybe I wrote about the museum and the palaces. I'd have to look at my book and see if that would remind me of something. We went in a boat once. I don't know what the boat was for. Of course, as more and more Westerners were allowed in, often we'd get requests to follow the senator or that governor around. You'd have to be with them all day.

Currie: Would you report then on their meetings?

Mosby: Yes. You'd talk to them and they'd tell you what they learned and what they thought of the Soviet Union, etc., etc.

Then from there I went to Paris for the first time, from Moscow.

Currie: Let me ask you about Russia, though. What do you think you learned from your experience, reporting in the Soviet Union?

Mosby: Do you mean learned about the Soviet Union or learned about reporting?

Currie: About reporting.

Mosby: You really have to be very sharp-eyed, you know, and very alert at all times. In a place like that, you never know when you're going to hear something that's really important. You have to face the fact that you've got this bureaucracy facing you, but still to be on good terms with them so that they can help you when necessary, and especially, as I said before, to write objectively and without sounding like you've waving the star-spangled banner every five minutes and assuming that everything they do is wrong. You just have to keep a sharp eye out, because often there are interesting things to see. I think I wrote about the Leningrad flea market or something like that.

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in France, too; they put them in little surgical gowns, as if they were a person, with arms and leggings and everything, and tie them up that way. She got over that.

Then she began vomiting worms, the poor thing. I took her to the vet and they said, "Oh, why don't you just have her put to sleep." I said, "No, no, no. You've got to cure her." I wrote a story on the vet. That was a story. I wrote a story of what it was like. I was surprised they even had any. But I don't think they knew much what they were doing. So they kept giving her things, purges. I don't know how that cat ever survived, but I finally got her back, covered with oil. I guess he'd been giving her oil to purge the things out of her intestines. But she survived that.

Then when I left—am I getting my years mixed up? It must have been this first time I left. Oh, it couldn't be. I'm getting mixed up. I went to Paris. I was posted in the Paris bureau, but then Natasha, the cat, was shipped to me in New York when I was working there. That doesn't make any sense, because I was in Paris two years.

Currie: Maybe you picked up Natasha on the second trip.

Mosby: No. That really is a mess. I don't understand how that happened. Well, I must have gone to New York on a vacation or something before I started to work in the Paris bureau, because I remember that I had left behind Natasha, the cat, with a foreign diplomat friend in our building. When I was in New York, this diplomat sent word that they were leaving, so they were going to ship the cat to me. I remember that she arrived in a cage, and the people had very nicely tied food to the bars. She changed planes at Helsinki—I don't know how she lived through it—and Copenhagen and got to New York. I remember going out to the airport there and trying to find her, and finally found the cage. Poor Natasha. Or was this in Paris? Now, wait a minute. Oh, this is ridiculous. Yes, she was sent to me in Paris. Then after two years she went with me to New York.

Anyway, after I was next posted in the Paris bureau.

Currie: That would have been 1962?

Mosby: Yes.

Currie: In the meantime, you wrote a book about your experiences.

Mosby: I wrote the book in Moscow. A publisher, Random House, had asked me to do it. When I was in New York covering Khrushchev, a Random House editor asked me to write a book about what it was like to live there. Not a political book, just what it was like to live there. It was published when I was in Paris, I guess.

Currie: I'm pretty sure it was published in 1962.

Mosby: I was in Paris in '62 and '63 and '64, I think. Then I went to New York and did that nine months of studying Chinese.

Currie: You got the Ford Foundation [scholarship].

Mosby: Yes, the Ford Foundation [scholarship], for studying Chinese and Chinese history at Columbia. In the middle of the year, as I told you, in January or February, the State Department

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Before, when I covered Khrushchev in New York, while I was posted in Moscow, I remember being at the U.N. when he banged his shoe on the table. But at the U.N. in 1968 I just covered the general run-of-the-mill news that was going on and studied my Chinese and got to know New York. I lived near Lincoln Center, and I liked that because I could go to concerts there. I had rented an apartment in the townhouse of a brother of a friend of mine, so it was very pleasant. I was there for a while, and then I lived in another apartment on the West Side and was robbed there. I lost so many things.

Currie: You must have found the social life in New York a little more active than the Soviet Union.

Mosby: I don't know. I remember I liked going to the jazz clubs, because I'm interested in jazz. You could hear cool jazz in various little nightclubs. I'd go to the theater. My friends who had homes in Connecticut, I'd go out there for the weekend. But I wouldn't call it one of the most fun experiences of my life.

I also had an operation in the hospital. Or did I have two? I think I had two operations in the hospital. That kept me busy, laid up for a while.

And I always went to Menorca every summer from there. I would go back to Paris. As an excuse, they would ask me to cover the fashion shows, because after I had left, they were back to no women in the bureau again. So that was fun, because it would get me to Menorca. That was in the same area, so I didn't mind going back to do that. I still kept in touch with Europe that way.

Then in 1968, when I was on the foreign desk, I told you I had been in the features department and worked at the U.N. Then the foreign editor asked me to work on the foreign desk, and I learned editing that way. So I left for Europe. The European division editor wanted me there right away, and he wouldn't even let me wait for the movers to come. I asked a friend to come and sit there while the movers were there, and she sat there for a while and got bored and went home. My things were shipped to Vienna when I was summoned back to Vienna in '68, when the Russians went in.

Currie: Was that your idea to go?

Mosby: This is when I was on the foreign desk and the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia. They had to get people there in a hurry, so they wanted me to go. I was given only something like a week to get organized and get there, and I had told this close friend, who lived nearby on the West Side of New York, that I was leaving, and could she come over and sit there when the movers came. The head of the whole European division was just screaming, "You've got to get here as fast as you can!" So I had asked her to come over and sit, and she got bored and went home. Maybe it happened then or when the container that my things were in got to Hamburg. Allegedly the container broke, according to customs in Vienna.

My belongings finally got to Vienna, and I knew that they were in customs, but to take them out of customs, I didn't have an apartment yet. Besides, I was sent to Prague and I was sent to Bucharest and I was in Budapest. When I finally got to Vienna and had time to look for an apartment, I had a furnished pied à terre, and I had taken my cat with me.

Now, what happened to Natasha? During my three years in New York, Natasha was with me. Then my mother died and my Burmese cat, which I had left with my mother, still remembered me, and I just couldn't bear to part with her. I took her back to New York, and the

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I went off to the university, and I spoke Russian to some of the students and some of the people, and they wouldn't speak Russian back. So then I spoke French and always found somebody who would understand French.

I made some contacts with some Czech journalists. I remember I was in the office of one of them when somebody came running in to say that [Alexander] Dubcek had fallen out of power and was out, so I rushed back and filed that. That was a good thing. I was just lucky I happened to be there.

Then I went to Bratislava with this Swedish journalist, and we were just about to leave when we stopped at where there was some ceremony going on in a little square, sort of an official ceremony, but there was hardly anybody there. We got out to see what was happening. We might have been there for some anniversary or something; I can't remember what. We talked to a passer-by, and he said, "Oh, this is nothing. You should see what's happening up on the square," their main square.

So we went up there and, my God, there were thousands of people all around the square, and they were all putting down flowers on this spot where there used to be a statue of a non-Communist Czechoslovak hero of some sort. This was a day that they would have commemorated in their own hearts, but it wasn't an official holiday. It was either his birthday or something. There were thousands of people standing around this square, silent, and the police were all there. Now and then, people would put flowers down and they would put photographs of this person. He was a big hero. I'll think of who it is, a big hero in their country. They obviously were anti-Russian, and this was an incredible gesture that was following the big upheavals that had taken place in Prague. Then finally some of the young people got a little restive, were sort of running about, and the police arrived with fire hoses, those strong fire hoses, and broke up the thing, and everybody was running and so forth.

There was a public phone up the street, and I went running up there. The Swedish correspondent was running up there, too. He was phoning his office and I was phoning mine, and, of course, we weren't going through the Czech authorities. I thought, "This is probably going to be my undoing, but to hell with it. It's a story and I have to report it." The AP wasn't there, so we did have a scoop on that, because it really was a big riot.

When things quieted down and we finally drove back to Prague, when we got there, there was word waiting that the foreign ministry wanted to see both of us, and we were informed we had to leave. [Laughter.] But I was expelled just for one year. That was all. That wasn't too bad. But I put the cat in the Volkswagen. I was afraid something else would happen, and I was getting a little nervous, so I picked up my cat. I had brought her with me, because there was no one I could leave her with in Vienna. And my suitcase and so forth and drove my Volkswagen back to the frontier. When I got there, they were waiting for me there, too, and sort of gave me a bad time, searching the car for foreign currency and all sorts of silly things they didn't have to do, held me up there for some hours. So I went back to Vienna.

From there I was sent to Bucharest.

Currie: Let me ask about Czechoslovakia. You had to file through the foreign ministry there, too?

Mosby: Everybody filed by telex from the hotels, and I'm sure that there was somebody from the government reading those telexes. Somebody must have been either monitoring that phone or else

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I remember the man from the foreign ministry came down to where we were, inside the cabin. He welcomed us out. He said he wanted us to see something. So we thought, "We'd better stand here and watch." So we watched as the boat went by. After about fifteen minutes, we got to the Soviet frontier and there on the frontier between the Soviet Union and Romania was a big guard house, several of them, with soldiers in there with machine guns. In other words, this is what the Soviet Union regards as friendship with its satellite countries, was to have soldiers there in these big, tall guard houses, with barbed wire all over the place. The man from the foreign ministry just looked at us and smiled. He didn't say anything. They're just very subtle.

Currie: But he was clearly tipping you off?

Mosby: Oh, yes. He did it in a very subtle way. He wanted to make sure that we saw that. That's why he beckoned us out and then looked at us and smiled as we passed the frontier.

Currie: How long did you stay in Bucharest?

Mosby: Just about six months.

Currie: So you were basically sent there just to check it out? You weren't going to be posted there permanently?

Mosby: No. At the end, we discussed it with the news editor in London. We decided it's really better to send somebody in from Vienna now and then to stay there for a few weeks and write something. Otherwise, Romania has been covered by the Vienna bureau. They get the news service wire from Romania, so if there are any official announcements over that, they're written under a Vienna date line. I don't know what it's like now. There's a revolution there now. I'm sure they all have bureaus there now. In those days, it was very quiet.

One thing I wanted to do a story on was Dracula.

Currie: Dracula the vampire?

Mosby: Yes. What's the name of the writer who wrote the book?

Currie: Bram Stoker.

Mosby: Yes. Thank you. So I went to find out where the site was that Stoker had written about, where the vampire allegedly lived and all of that. Of course, the foreign ministry was, again, nearly in hysterics over this, trying to figure out how was I going to write something anti-Soviet out of that. I remember that actually a friend of mine with the New York Times, who had been there shortly after me, had written something about this Dracula site. He was 100 percent wrong. I never told him that, but that wasn't right at all.

I had gotten a very good young woman who was a translator, who was very helpful, and she helped me track down exactly where the site was which Bram Stoker had written about. Because UPI was so rich there with all that money, I had a chauffeur-driven car, a very nice car, a Mercedes, so he drove me to this place. It's now an industrial city. They got the idea from the New York Times story, and from my writing about it, and I think somebody else did later, too, that if everybody's interested in Dracula, they'd better make a tourist spot out of a Dracula site. So they did, but they were taking one close to Bucharest, which is not the one. They did that for tourist business, because it's just easier to get the tourists there, and they said, "This was Dracula's

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The Romanian Secret Police were, of course, following me everyplace. I didn't care. A lot of correspondents get upset by that, and I don't. I never was upset in Russia or any of those Communist countries. What difference does it make? I have nothing to hide. Let them see what I do. They're perfectly welcome to. I have absolutely nothing to hide. The one following me usually wore a very cheap trench coat, which he must have seen in an American movie or something, you know, tied around here, and it was an ugly sort of a rust color, and a horrible hat jammed like this. You couldn't miss him! [Laughter.] When this artist would come in to talk to me, we'd sit in the lobby of the hotel, and the Secret Service man would get his chair over like this and then he'd lean back to listen to what we were saying. [Laughter.] It was so obvious, it was funny. I just loved that touch.

Currie: Yet you're right, though. A lot of people would be spooked by this.

Mosby: But why? I mean, who cares? [Laughter.] As I said, I have nothing to hide. It wasn't the case of my getting the artist in trouble; he proposed himself to come to the hotel and he said he didn't care if they saw him. He couldn't have cared less. So he came over. He tipped me off to some various art galleries and museums and so forth to go to, and I met some nice people in those museums. I remember there was one very attractive young couple and they took me to a church, watching a wedding, just standing in the back, watching the wedding. I said, "The church seems to be full." She said, "Well, it isn't that we're believers." They didn't use to be full. But she said, "The people come to them, as they probably do in Russia and Poland and the rest of them, just as a sign of protest."

Currie: Interesting.

Mosby: And I think that's probably true of churches in all the Communist countries. Otherwise, though, she said they wouldn't have been there, but they went as a sign of protest. That was interesting. I said, "We'd like to have you to dinner at the hotel. Are you sure you want to come?" They said, "Yes, we'll come. We don't care if they see us." I remember I had them for dinner at the hotel. I have addresses of people I knew in Romania and I really should write to them now. I wonder if they're still there and still alive and so forth. I had heard that this artist who was head of the Artists Federation, whatever it was called, had died, but the young couple might still be there. The people were very nice.

Currie: After six months in Bucharest, what did you do?

Mosby: Then I went back to Vienna, and I was only there about a month, because by that time things had quieted down in Prague, and UPI in London decided there were too many Americans there, and they wanted to just make one of the Viennese the bureau manager, because it was very quiet. Hardly anything happens in Austria; that was what their feeling was.

So then they transferred one of them to Frankfurt and one of them to London, and wanted me to go back to Paris, also because Paris needed somebody to do those damn fashion shows. [Laughter.] Back to those!

Currie: They come back to haunt you. [Laughter.]

Mosby: Yes.

Currie: What year were you in Romania?

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"I'm a freelance writer." Well, I thought about that over our glass of wine. Freelance writers don't make a great deal of money.

Currie: No, they don't.

Mosby: Particularly when you have a wife and child. Their child, I think, was with them. I'm not sure. This was the child they were allegedly doing the Christmas shopping for, in the first place. In the second place, why would they come into Austria? Italy would have been closer. I don't know. It seemed very strange. I came to the conclusion, after we had a couple of glasses of wine, that he undoubtedly was a CIA operative, because Vienna was just full of spies from all sorts of countries from the world, and I'm sure that he was up there. What could be more romantic than sitting with a CIA operative in this bar with the snowflakes and the violin? Oh, what fun. That was great. I'll never forget that.

In fact, in the UPI bureau, up the hall was a sign that said some sort of a British shipping company. There was usually hardly ever anybody in there, but now and then you'd hear somebody in there frantically typing. I looked in there once. There was a man sitting there typing, looked at me. Everybody in the office, including the Viennese, was sure that that was the British Secret Service. [Laughter.] Vienna was full of spies. I think it still is.

Currie: Isn't it sort of a jumping-off point between East and West?

Mosby: That's right. A lot of the spies that the Western countries plant in the Communist countries, then they can meet and exchange information, I guess. [Laughter.]

Anyway, so back I went to Switzerland, to Paris.

Currie: UPI wanted you transferred back to Paris?

Mosby: Yes. So back I went with the same cat to Paris.

Currie: That was 1970?

Mosby: Yes, toward the end of 1970, I think. After a two-month search, I finally found an apartment on the Rue de Bievre, right where President [François] Mitterand lives now. Then in 1979, I moved to the next street over, the one that you saw.

Currie: With a view of Notre Dame.

Mosby: Yes. I found something that I could sort of design the apartment myself and had it done myself, the work. The architect did the whole building, but my neighbor from Florida, the one I'm going to see now, I knew him before, and followed him around Paris, looking at the apartments he was redoing. Then he said he had bought this ruin and was going to restore it, so I was able to get in on the ground floor. We both told him what we wanted.

Currie: You bought that place?

Mosby: Yes. My friend bought three apartments. Real estate prices have soared, so it was a great investment. Of course, I don't want to sell anything; that's the problem. [Laughter.] I wouldn't want to sell that apartment or any of my summer homes. I just love them.