On the Job Training: Berlin to Vladivostok

This is the first volume of a four-volume series documenting Billy Mays’ twenty years, 1983–2003, living in Central and Eastern Europe. A student turned unwitting spy through his work for Radio Free Europe, Billy’s adventures both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall are described in a career that spans two decades from Soviet-Bloc martial-law Poland through the Klondike-like era following the Soviet Union’s collapse. En route to becoming a European Director for several multinational firms—including FEDEX—the author befriends world leaders, becomes engaged in spy networks, is immersed in black market trading, and has numerous brushes with death along the way while handling sensitive affairs for U.S. Government agencies. This book, sometimes irreverent and shocking, reveals a great deal about how the East was really won and sheds light into the dark and dangerous world that was the former Soviet Bloc before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.