The Foreign Service Journal, November 2020

52 NOVEMBER 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL when her husband was posted to Geneva. She has now published 10 books in the Virginia wine country mystery series, featuring winemaker Lucie Montgomery, as well as Moscow Nights , a standalone memoir based loosely on her time as Moscow correspondent for ABC Radio News in the late 1980s. You can visit her website at www.ellencrosby.com . Believers: Love and Death in Tehran: A Novel Marc Grossman and John Limbert, Mazda Pub, 2020, $35/paperback, e-book available, 378 pages. Ambassadors (ret.) Marc Grossman and John Limbert pool their extensive Foreign Service knowledge to cre- ate this page-turner about a fictional junior American diplomat, Nilufar Hartman, who arrives in Tehran in November 1979. She ends up spending nine years in Tehran as an American spy, reporting on the new Islamic Republic as it collapses into extremism and war. She flees Iran, pregnant and betrayed, carrying secrets of love and tragedy. Returning to the United States, she chooses a quiet life teaching at a university and swears never to work for Washington again. Hartman’s life is upended when Alan Porter, the man who had sent her to Iran in 1979, asks for her help once more. Porter describes a plot by American and Iranian extremists working together to provoke a war between the two countries. Porter says only she can stop it. Marc Grossman is the vice chair of The Cohen Group in Washington, D.C. Amb. Grossman was a career Foreign Service officer from 1976 to 2005, serving as under secretary of State for political affairs, Director General, assistant secretary of State for European affairs and U.S. ambassador to Turkey. John Limbert served for 34 years in the Foreign Service and was ambassador to Mauritania and deputy assistant secretary of State for Iran. He earned the State Department’s Award for Valor after spending 14 months as a hostage in Iran. After retiring from State, he was professor of Middle Eastern studies at the U.S. Naval Academy until 2018. (See p. 81 for a story on their AFSA Book Notes discussions.) A Question of Time James Stejskal, Casemate, 2020, $24.95/hardcover, 304 pages. In Berlin, 1979, the CIA realizes its most valuable spy is compromised, but cannot safely extract him. Chaos and cascad- ing consequences will ensue across the agency’s operations worldwide if he cannot escape the savvy East German security service. Master Sergeant KimBecker survived the hell of the VietnamWar while serving with the elite Studies and Operations Group. But after losing one of his best men in a controversial operation, he began to harbor doubts. He is now serving with an evenmore clandestine special forces unit operating out of Berlin, and to get their man out the CIA turns to Becker’s team. As Becker’s men devise a plan to extract the CIA spy by any means necessary, the agent must play for time. But one question remains: Is the man worth the risk? This book, the first in the Snake Eater Chronicles, is the author’s fiction debut. Says Publisher’s Weekly : “Fans of realistic espionage fiction will look forward to the sequel.” James Stejskal, a military historian and conflict archaeologist who specializes in the research and investigation of irregular warfare, spent 35 years with the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. Army Special Forces. He is the author of numerous articles and several previous books, including: Masters of Mayhem: Lawrence of Arabia and the British Military Mission to the Hejaz (2018) and Special Forces Berlin: Clandestine Cold War Operations of the U.S. Army’s Elite, 1956-1960 (2016). He is the husband of Ambassador Wanda Nesbitt, who served as dean of the Foreign Service Institute’s School of Language Studies (2016-2019) and retired from the Foreign Service with the rank of Career Minister. Attack on a Principal George Kennedy, SETAF Publishing, 2019, $20/paperback, e-book available, 342 pages. The second book in the author’s Crosshairs series, Attack on a Princi- pal takes us into the White House of President Annetta Nielsen, formerly vice president to the recently mur- dered President Reginald Branson— the first Black president. Branson’s