JERROLD L. SCHECTER
Jerrold L. Schecter is a historian and journalist with extensive first-hand experience in Russia,
Ukraine, Japan, China and Southeast Asia.
He began his career with the Wall Street Journal and then spent 18 years with Time Magazine. He was
a foreign correspondent covering Indo-China based in the Hong Kong bureau (1960-1963); a Nieman
Fellow at Harvard (1963-1964); bureau chief in Tokyo (1964-1968) and Moscow (1968-1970); White House
correspondent (1971-1973) and diplomatic editor (1973-1977). While based in Moscow he was instrumental
in the acquisition of Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs and their preparation for publication.
Mr. Schecter served on President Jimmy Carter's White House staff as associate White House press
secretary and Spokesman for the National Security Council (1977-1980). From 1980 to 1982 he was
vice president for public affairs of Occidental Petroleum Corporation reporting directly to Chairman
Armand Hammer. In 1987 he organized the production of a documentary for Frontline titled Back in the
USSR, the return of his family to Moscow after 17 years to report on the changes under Gorbachev's
peristroika.
From 1990 to 1994, Mr. Schecter was a founding editor of We/Mbl, an independent Russian-American
newspaper, started by the Hearst Corporation and Izvestia. In 1992 he was a producer and director
of research for the Hearst Entertainment's mini series, The Kremlin Conspiracy, about the attempted
coup d'etat against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991.
From 1994 to 2006, Mr. Schecter was Senior International Consultant for Cassidy & Associates, the
Washington, DC, based public affairs company. He continues in the role of chairman of Schecter
Communications Corporation, which he founded with his wife, Leona, in 1982.
Mr. Schecter's books include
Khrushchev Remembers, The Glasnost Tapes, co-edited and translated
with V.V. Lyuchkov (Little, Brown,1991); an award winning biography of Soviet colonel Oleg Penkovsky,
The Spy Who Saved the World with Peter Deriabin (Scribners,1992); and a co-author of
Special Tasks
(Little, Brown, 1994) written in collaboration with the late Soviet spymaster Pavel Sudoplatov. He
is co-author with his family of
An American Family in Moscow (Little, Brown, 1975) and
Back in the
USSR (Scribners, 1988.)
In 1987-88, Mr. Schecter organized the making of a Frontline documentary,
Back in the USSR, returning
with his family after 17 years to examine Gorbachev's peristroika. He is also the author of
The New
Face of Buddha (Coward, McCann 1967) and
The Palace File with Nguyen Tien Hung ( Harper and Row, 1986)
a New York Times Best Books of the Year selection, and
Russian Negotiating Behavior: Continuity and
Transition (US Institute of Peace, 1998). His most recent book, co-authored with his wife, Leona P.
Schecter, is
Sacred Secrets, How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History (Brassey's 2002).