A Life Amid Spies: The KGB

In part three of her series, former State Department official and human rights advocate Roberta Cohen recalls her run-ins with Soviet agents

My first run in with Soviet intelligence was when I was in my 20s and went looking for my relatives in the Soviet Union. I had joined a citizen’s exchange group in 1969 that participated in dialogues with Russian citizens in different cities. One of those cities, Kharkiv, now in Ukraine, was of special interest because my grandmother Sarah’s relatives lived there after migrating from Lithuania in 1905.