As assistant director of the Russian Service of Radio Liberty (RL), Mark Pomar was deeply immersed in the work of that organization. He went on to become director of the USSR Division at the Voice of America (VOA); his personal knowledge and experience in these roles underpin the arguments and conclusions of the book he has written. At the same time, Pomar draws on memoirs of participants and witnesses, secondary literature, and documents from the Hoover Institution Archives and the U.S. National Archives as well as items released by various U.S. government agencies in response to Freedom of Information Act requests and mandatory declassification reviews. Many of these were digitized for the Woodrow Wilson Center's Cold War International History Project website.
Pomar's prose is clear and precise. He gets to the point immediately, stating that the aim of his book is “taking the reader inside Voice of America and Radio...