Russian Intrigue

I don’t have any proof this was the case, but I have an amusing story about the time I believed I was being spied on. <br><br>I was a young woman in my early twenties, living in the United States. I was friends with the then-head of the computer department at the local university. <br><br>In 1991, he had an unusual offer: a computer company in Moscow had an opening for an English translator, and wanted him to apply. He had another job lined up, and could not take the position. <br><br>In 1992, Russia had broken with the Soviet Union, and the times they were a changin’. He received a phone call about the translator job, while I was visiting his home. He gave me the phone and said, “Talk to them. You’re an English speaker. You’re here.” <br><br>I could not believe it when they offered me the job. <br><br>Now, this was an odd time in Russia. The old Soviet Union had collapsed in a heap, and the new Russian government did not know what it was going to look like. There were a few different groups scrapping for power, and while the days of the gulags were pretty much over, the country was hardly stable. And I was moving there. <br><br>I arrived in early January 1993, after a grueling flight from Seattle to Amsterdam to Moscow. The woman who was meeting me at the airport was running late, and I spent the first two hours in Russia alone, with little grasp of the language. <br><br>I had been told the first couple of nights would be in a hotel, and then I would move in to a dacha outside of Moscow. And on the third night, I was sitting in the hotel room, drinking vodka and watching Russian TV when I noticed something odd. <br><br>The TV would go dark, and then come back on again. It went dark four or five times, and came back on again each time. <br><br>Now I was an American, alone in Russia, and I had been watching a lot of spy movies to prepare myself for life overseas. And I did not think that TV could just go dark and come back on four or five times without some sort of cause. <br><br>In the early 90s, hotel room TVs were not like our modern smart TVs. They were really little more than a box with a couple of knobs and maybe two or three pre-set channels. There was no way it was glitching repeatedly. <br><br>I crawled over to the TV, and when it went dark a sixth time, I reached behind to feel if the plug was being yanked. It was. <br><br>There was a mirror behind the TV, and after I felt the plug being removed, I looked in the mirror to see a man in a black coat pulling the plug and then reaching into his own coat to pull out something I could not see. <br><br>He returned the item and pulled the plug again. The TV flickered on, I returned to my seat, and drank two more vodka shots. <br><br>I went to bed, and the next morning, I told my employer what had happened. I don’t know to this day what they thought of my story. There was no hidden space behind the TV, so there was nowhere to hide a camera where all someone would have to do was glance in a mirror to see the spy. <br><br>In any case, they changed my hotel room, and gave me instructions on how to find listening devices. But I never saw the man in black ever again while I was in Russia.