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I recently had the pleasure of staying at Bratislava’s upscale Hotel Devín while on a guidebook assignment for Fodor’s. It’s a very nice hotel, but the stay held special meaning for me for another reason. It was here, on the night of November 9, 1989, that the Czechoslovak secret police, the StB, tried to entrap me as part of an elaborate Cold War scheme to recruit or compromise me -- I never learned their ultimate goal. I had been looking forward to this return visit ever since receiving the guidebook assignment a few months ago. Walking once again through the Devín’s familiar wood-paneled lobby felt less like nostalgia than a chance to place that earlier trip in perspective and, in some small way, close a circle between memory, history, and the person who first stayed there some 37 years ago.

