Diplomats security

Is Vladimir Putin Poisoning U.S. Diplomats?

 Many a Western visitor and not a few expats living in St. Petersburg in the 1990s shared stories about poisoned libations in the city’s watering holes. That gorgeous metropolis, renowned for the elegance of its 18th century architecture, had become Russia’s Wild West. Local bandits shot each other dead in the streets. And local residents who worked as translators and assistants for Western businessmen and journalists, myself included, often got emergency calls at odd hours from their foreign friends pleading for help.

“Somebody drugged me!” the foreigner would scream in the receiver—somebody like a hooker or just a drinking companion, and the victim felt as if he, or occasionally she, was about to die.