Obituary: Isaac Patch

WHEN he found out that his new employer was a front for the CIA, Isaac Patch was furious. He disliked the secret world, with its mixture of paranoia, incompetence and furtiveness. The agency was “unsavoury” and he hated having to lie about what he did.But he detested Communism even more. As a diplomat he had seen the Soviet system first hand. In 1949, after the coup in Czechoslovakia, he and his family had been expelled by the secret police, at a bruising 24 hours notice. At the American embassy in wartime Moscow, he’d come to love Russia and to deplore the damage that Communism was doing to it.He admired Russians—the humbler the better. Careless of hardship and risk, they would share their last bread with him, a strange foreigner wandering from village to village during his weekends. They even let him try to teach them his beloved baseball, enjoyably if unsuccessfully: “Russians ran the bases the wrong way, picked up the bases when we told them to steal, and swung the bat in the manner of a cricket player,” he recalled later. “The villagers crowded around the field and cheered every play, whether good or bad.”Organising Russians abroad was equally difficult, and...



from The Economist: Obituary http://ift.tt/1mxh7Fx