Kaplan schmoozed Hamid Karzai’s security detail for his autograph and smooth-talked his way into then-president of Nigeria General Olusegun Obasanjo’s hotel room. He even mastered phonetic Russian well enough to convince Gorbachev’s bodyguards the baseball in his hand wasn’t a bomb…

For PRI’s The World [a co-production of the BBC]

 

[For a complete archive of my stories for PRI’s The World, click here.]