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I wanted to choose somewhere public, because I was scared of the KGB.

I know not every mom is a secret KGB spy, but every mom has this whole other life. Every dad and every person has this whole other life.

We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon.

I went to Moscow and met some slightly powerful and scary people.

Over the past years, I have lectured many times on the Cuban missile crisis, most provocatively to 200 senior officers of the former Soviet army in Moscow in 1991, among them KGB generals. There, my knowledge of Penkovsky's role was thoroughly confirmed, and so was the Soviet military men's residual sense of humiliation at Khrushchev's 'blink'.

I was not extremely patriotic about Mother Russia. I played their game, pretending. You have to deal with, you know, party people, KGB. Horrifying.

I'm eternally grateful to fate and the citizens of Russia that they've trusted me to be the head of the Russian government.

To say that you now trust the Russian military command and control system because some Russian general told you from the bottom of his heart that's the case, strikes me as most unrealistic.