One, one of the Stalinist purge trials of the late 1930s. He was convinced of the guilt of the accused. According to Davies, "the Kremlin's fears [regarding treason in the Army and Party] were well justified". His opinions were at odds with much of the Western press of the day, as well as those of his own staff, many of whom had been in the country far longer than Davies. The career diplomat Charles Bohlen, who served under Davies in Moscow, later wrote: Davies even claimed that communism was "protecting the Christian world of free men", and he urged all Christians "by the faith you have found at your mother's knee, in the name of the faith you have found in temples of worship" to embrace the Soviet Union. After Moscow, Davies was assigned to the post of Ambassador in Belgium (1938–1939) and Minister to Luxembourg concurrently before being recalled to the United States following the declaration of war in 1939. Davies served as a special assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Mission to Moscow Davies' work in the Soviet Union resulted in his popular book, Mission to Moscow. The book—published by Simon & Schuster in 1941 which sold close to 700,000 copies worldwide in many languages—consists of letters, diary entries, and Davies' State Department reports between 1936 and 1938, which Roosevelt agreed for Davies to use. In 1943, the book was adapted as a Warner Brothers movie starring Walter Huston as Davies and Ann Harding as his wife Marjorie Post Davies. As part of his book contract, Davies retained absolute control of the script, and his rejection of the original script caused Warner Brothers to hire a new screenwriter, Howard Koch, to rewrite the script in order to gain Davies' approval. The movie, made during World War II, showed the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin in a positive light. Completed in late April 1943, the film was, in the words of Robert Buckner, the film's producer, "an expedient lie for political purposes, glossily covering up important facts with full or partial knowledge of their false presentation. I did not fully respect Mr. Davies' integrity, both before, during and after the film. I knew that FDR had brainwashed him ... The movie gave a one-sided view of the Moscow trials, rationalized Moscow's participation in the Nazi-Soviet Pact and its unprovoked invasion of Finland, and portrayed the Soviet Union as