moved in 1948 to the Soviet sector of Berlin, where Pozner senior was offered a position with SovExportFilm, an international distributor of Soviet films. At one time Pozner junior claimed to have stayed behind in New York, attending Columbia College between 1950 and December 1953; however, there appears to be no record of him at Columbia. Currently he tells of attending a Russian military-style high school in Berlin run by the Soviet Military Administration during that time. In 1952, the Pozner family moved to Moscow. In 1953 the younger Pozner enrolled at Moscow State University, Faculty of Biology and Soil Science, majoring in human physiology. He graduated in 1958. Career Pozner began his career as "quote, unquote a journalist" – unwittingly, by his own account – in a disinformation department of the KGB. In 1961 he was offered the position of senior editor with the English-language Soviet Life magazine. In 1967 he transferred to a sister publication, Sputnik, leaving it in February 1970 to take up a post with the State Television and Radio Committee, where he became a chief commentator and host of the propaganda radio program the Voice of Moscow on the North American service of Radio Moscow. Beginning in the early 1970s, and until the early 1990s, Pozner was a regular guest on Ray Briem's talk show on KABC in Los Angeles. During the 1980s, he was a favourite guest on Ted Koppel's Nightline. Pozner was the host of Moscow Meridian, an English-language current affairs program focusing on the Soviet Union; the show was produced by Gosteleradio, the Soviet State Committee for Television and Radio and broadcast on the Satellite Program Network. He also often appeared on The Phil Donahue Show. In his Western media appearances Pozner was a charismatic and articulate apologist for some of the Soviet Union's most controversial foreign and domestic policy decisions. He would frequently draw parallels and point out similarities between Soviet and Western policies as well as candidly admitting the existence of certain problems in the USSR. However, while stopping short of unequivocal endorsement and support, he nevertheless rationalized, among other events, the arrest and exiling of Andrei Sakharov, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, in his 1990 autobiography Parting with Illusions. Later, he wrote that some of the positions he had taken were wrong and immoral. In a 2005 interview with NPR's