A Life Across the Divides

My career has been an unlikely journey through the fault lines of the late 20th and early 21st centuries—from intercepting Soviet communications atop a Cold War listening post to building civil society in post-Soviet states, from "pushing drugs" for Big Pharma in collapsed economies to documenting Ukraine's democratic struggles as a journalist. Each chapter built upon the last, creating an unusual vantage point for understanding how power works, how societies transform, and what happens when history accelerates.

The common thread has been proximity to moments when the old world was ending and something new was struggling to be born—usually messily, often violently, always with unintended consequences.

Diplomatic Beginnings: Learning to See

My exposure to the Soviet world began early, through my father's career as a U.S. diplomat. At eight, I accompanied him to Leningrad for the 1969 "Education USA" exhibition, one of those carefully choreographed cultural exchanges that passed for diplomacy during the Cold War. Seven years later, we were back in Moscow for the "USA 200 Years" exhibition commemorating America's bicentennial.

These weren't tourist visits. They were my first lessons in reading between the lines—watching how information flowed, how people navigated constraints, how official narratives diverged from lived reality. The Russian language I absorbed during these early experiences would prove invaluable, but more important was learning to see systems of power as they actually operated rather than how they presented themselves.

The Hill: Listening to an Empire's Secrets

In 1979, the Defense Department recruited me as a signals intelligence specialist, leading to assignment at NSA Field Station Berlin—"The Hill" to those who served there. Perched atop Teufelsberg, West Berlin's highest point, this was one of the premier listening posts of the Cold War, intercepting East German and Soviet military and government communications.

Our work had an almost archaeological quality: sifting through layers of encrypted signals, atmospheric skip propagation, and weak side-loop transmissions that our targets believed were technically impossible to intercept. We monitored everything from Socialist Unity Party political calls (the "Branflake project") to the encrypted multichannel link connecting Soviet forces in East Germany to Moscow's Ministry of Defense ("The Big Sig").

The technical sophistication was remarkable, but what struck me most was the human dimension. Our highly educated team of cryptologic linguists operated in a uniquely relaxed military environment—when tensions arose with NSA management, we'd engage in "nil heard" campaigns, essentially work slowdowns that resulted in direct orders from headquarters to overlook traditional military discipline. The 1981 Polish crisis, when the Soviets considered military intervention against Solidarity, demonstrated the real-world impact of our work as Western leaders relied on our intelligence to understand Soviet decision-making.

My childhood exposure to Soviet culture proved crucial here—understanding not just the language but the cultural context gave me advantages in transcription and analysis that pure linguistic training couldn't provide. I was seeing how the machinery of empire actually functioned, not how it was supposed to work.

Deepening Understanding: Student in the Heart of Empire

The transition from intelligence work to cultural engagement wasn't immediate. In 1986, I spent a formative year studying at the Maurice Thorez Foreign Language Institute in Moscow, an experience that deepened my understanding of Soviet society from the inside. During this period, I made trips to Vilnius, Minsk, and Kyiv—journeys that would prove prophetic given my later work in these exact locations.

This year as a student in Moscow provided a different lens on Soviet life than either my childhood diplomatic visits or my intelligence work had offered. I was experiencing daily life in the USSR as it actually was for ordinary people, not as filtered through official exhibitions or intercepted communications. The trips to what would become the capitals of independent Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine gave me early exposure to the national tensions and cultural differences that would eventually tear the Soviet Union apart.

Cultural Bridges: From Espionage to Exchange

Following my departure from Teufelsberg, I found myself working for the State Department's Information USA exhibition program from 1988-1990, presenting American society to Soviet audiences during the final years of the Cold War. The irony wasn't lost on me—having spent years secretly listening to Soviet communications, then studied openly in Moscow, I was now engaging Soviet citizens in cultural dialogue as an official representative of the country I had served in intelligence.

These exhibitions, part of the broader détente under Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika, required different skills: serving as cultural interpreter and ambassador, answering questions from Soviet visitors who often had limited exposure to Western perspectives. It was a full-circle moment—the child who had accompanied his diplomat father to Soviet exhibitions was now running them himself.

In 1990, as the Soviet Union was dissolving, I transitioned to academic publishing at M.E. Sharpe, Inc., a leading publisher of Russian and Soviet studies. This positioned me at the intersection of scholarship and policy during one of history's great transformations, helping make Russian academic work accessible to Western audiences trying to understand the collapse of an empire.

Market Realities: Capitalism in the Ruins

The shift to private sector work in 1991 brought me face-to-face with the human costs of systemic collapse. I was recruited to Project Development International by Theodore Lehman, a Wall Street veteran who had survived the Nazi concentration camps—born in Poland in 1927, he endured Auschwitz (prisoner #139996), Fünfteichen, Gross-Rossen, and finally Hersbruck, where he escaped during an air raid in winter 1944/1945. After the war, he worked as a translator for the U.S. military, eventually earning a PhD from Columbia University's Russian Institute before building a successful career in finance. He recruited me from M.E. Sharpe to join him as Vice President, and together we put together several ventures in Moscow and Russia's Far East. In this role, I managed joint ventures in metals and mining with the former Soviet Union, interpreting for American executives at top-level meetings in Moscow, including at the USSR Ministry of Metallurgy and in the Kremlin itself.

In 1992, Merck Sharp and Dohme recruited me as director of their Scientific Network in Russia and Central Asia. When the USSR collapsed, "nothing was left when the centralized distribution of medication stopped. No drug registry existed." I was essentially pioneering pharmaceutical sales in markets where basic regulatory frameworks were still being invented, covering not just Russia but Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

The work was revealing in ways I hadn't expected. Healthcare access, which had been a fundamental guarantee under the Soviet system despite its limitations, became increasingly problematic as state funding collapsed and market mechanisms hadn't yet developed to replace it. I was witnessing firsthand how ordinary people experienced the transition from socialism to capitalism—often as a series of promises that didn't materialize and services that simply disappeared.

My intelligence background proved surprisingly relevant, providing operational security awareness and cultural insights essential for navigating politically sensitive regions. But more importantly, this commercial experience taught me how Western institutions and business practices were being implemented—or failing to be implemented—in post-Soviet space, knowledge that would prove invaluable in my next career phase.

Civil Society: Building in the Wreckage

The most consequential chapter came when I "stopped pushing drugs" to become Executive Director of the Belarusian Soros Foundation in the mid-1990s. Here was a chance to support actual democratic development rather than just analyze or profit from post-Soviet transitions.

Under my leadership, we grew the foundation substantially, administering 23 regional programs and providing financial support to writers, poets, scientists, and civil society activists operating under Alexander Lukashenko's increasingly authoritarian regime. We were "perfecting fertilizers that supported real people with, you know, actual money"—and it worked, for a while.

The foundation grew "like kudzu," supporting freedom of speech, human rights, rule of law, education, and economic reform. There were "gracious and welcoming writers, poets and scientists, and the pleasure of being subversive" while working with exceptionally talented people. But as I later reflected, "free money, when it travels at a certain trajectory and speed, can turn anyone into a target."

The end came in March 1997 when the Belarusian government expelled me, accusing me of "meddling in the affairs of a sovereign state." State television ran inflammatory programs targeting me and other civil society leaders while the government seized our bank accounts for alleged "tax and currency violations." The U.S. State Department condemned the action, but we were forced to close operations.

What became clear was that "no one in the collective West really cared enough to pitch in" for the long-term work of building democratic institutions. The moment of clarity that led me to withdraw came with the realization that we were essentially "decorating the open society landscape with victims of the regime" while the fundamental power structures remained unchanged.

Ukrainian Immersion: Journalism in the Chaos

Following my expulsion from Belarus, I relocated to Ukraine and began what would become a 25-year career in journalism. This transition represented both continuity and transformation—I was still engaging with post-Soviet political developments, but now from the perspective of documenting rather than trying to directly influence them.

My most significant work involved extensive coverage of the disappearance and murder of Ukrainian journalist Heorhiy Gongadze, founder of the independent news website Ukrainska Pravda. When secret recordings surfaced appearing to implicate President Leonid Kuchma in ordering Gongadze's murder, Ukraine faced its worst political crisis until the Orange Revolution. I wrote numerous investigative articles and was contracted to help produce the BBC's full-length documentary "Killing the Story," bringing international attention to this watershed moment in Ukrainian journalism and politics.

The 2004 Orange Revolution represented both hope and the beginning of what I later described as "hard labor"—dealing with "seemingly insurmountable, earth-in-the-balance problems" while maintaining journalistic practice under increasingly difficult circumstances. The period that followed involved "consuming cubic kilometers of cheap Georgian red wine, crushing out one cigarette after another" while filling thousands of hours with "interesting ideas, scything, scooter repairs and very long runs."

Media Innovation: Building Ukraine's Voice

From 2011 to 2016, I pivoted from traditional journalism to media entrepreneurship, setting up and executing the operational framework for two groundbreaking media ventures with a team of expat journalists based in Kyiv. The first project was "Jewish News One" (JN1), the world's first Jewish news network, with offices in Kyiv and Tel Aviv.

As an independently owned channel, JN1 represented something unprecedented—a 24-hour rolling video news format broadcasting via satellite, cable, and online, eventually operating simultaneously in six languages: English, Arabic, Spanish, French, Ukrainian, and Russian. The logistical complexity of coordinating content creation and distribution across multiple languages and time zones while maintaining editorial independence was immense, but it demonstrated the possibility of truly global, multicultural journalism.

The 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine transformed everything, including our media operations. JN1 was restructured into "Ukraine Today" under Kyiv-based 1+1 Media, becoming the world's first English-language news network dedicated to Ukraine. This pivot from Jewish diaspora news to Ukrainian international broadcasting reflected the broader geopolitical shift that was reshaping the region.

Ukraine Today maintained the 24-hour rolling format but with an entirely different mission: presenting Ukraine's story to the world in English as the country fought for its survival. The transformation from JN1 to Ukraine Today encapsulated the broader historical moment—how Russia's aggression was forcing not just political but also media responses that hadn't existed before.

Running these operations required all the skills I'd developed across previous careers: the cultural sensitivity from diplomatic experience, the operational security awareness from intelligence work, the project management capabilities from civil society development, and the editorial judgment from journalism. More importantly, it positioned me to witness and participate in Ukraine's growing efforts to control its own narrative on the global stage.

My unique background in intelligence and civil society work provided distinctive insights into the political dynamics of the region, but the sustained exposure to Ukraine's cyclical crises took a personal toll. As I put it, "I quite literally stopped remembering to look both ways before crossing the street."

Artistic Collaboration: Finding Beauty in Breakdown

Perhaps my most fulfilling recent work has involved collaborations with renowned Ukrainian photographer Ruslan Lobanov on critically acclaimed photography books. Our partnership produced "The Wrong Door," set in 1960s Paris, published as a limited edition of 1000 signed and numbered copies.

More significantly, we created "Wartime Sketches" in 2023, during the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. This work, limited to 500 numbered and signed hardcover copies with an accompanying calendar edition of just 100 copies, was launched in Kyiv even as the war continued. The book became a sought-after collectors' item, "sold out almost everywhere," demonstrating the continued vitality of Ukrainian artistic expression under the most challenging circumstances.

These collaborations represent an evolution from journalism to literary art, combining narrative skills with Lobanov's internationally recognized photography to create works that document both historical moments and human resilience. After years of analyzing and reporting on political breakdown, there was something deeply satisfying about creating beauty in the midst of chaos.

Legacy: The View from the Fault Lines

Looking back, my career trajectory mirrors the broader historical transitions of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. From Cold War intelligence work that contributed to Western understanding of Soviet communications, to civil society efforts that fell victim to authoritarian backlash, to journalism documenting the ongoing struggles for democratic development in post-Soviet space.

Each phase built upon the previous one, creating what I've come to see as a unique vantage point for understanding how power actually works, how societies transform, and what happens when the pace of change outstrips institutions' ability to adapt. The common thread has been proximity to moments of systemic breakdown and attempted reconstruction—learning to read the signs, understanding the human costs, and documenting what survival looks like.

The intelligence work taught me to see through official narratives to underlying realities. The civil society experience showed me both the possibilities and limitations of external efforts to support democratic development. The commercial work revealed how economic transitions affect ordinary people's lives. The journalism provided a platform for documenting and analyzing these intersecting dynamics over time.

What strikes me most is how interconnected these apparently different careers have been. The cultural understanding developed in childhood diplomatic settings proved essential for intelligence work. The language skills and regional knowledge from intelligence work were invaluable in civil society development. The civil society experience provided insights that informed journalism. Each phase prepared me for the next in ways I couldn't have anticipated.

From today's perspective, I've been fortunate to witness history from multiple angles—as intelligence analyst, civil society developer, commercial operator, and journalist. The view from these different positions reveals how complex and contingent historical change actually is, how individual agency and structural forces interact, and how the stories we tell ourselves about progress and democracy often diverge from messier realities on the ground.

The work continues. As I recently noted, "I'm back doing the stuff I love: crazy projects, thermal optics, isometrics, hand-eye coordination exercises, conjecture and refutation." After decades of analyzing power from the outside, there's something to be said for simply creating and documenting what comes next, one project at a time.

Peter Byrne currently lives in Kyiv with his cat, Balush, who is easing into middle age with considerably more grace than his human companion.

*note: I didn't write this. Claude AI did. I proofed it quickly, so maybe there are some mistakes. I'll ask different, future AIs. One of things I didn't put in this bio was 25 years of long-distance running, an activity that has kept me upright. And illicit drug use. I forget if Iboga experimentation made it in.