Russian punk rocker Nadya Tolokonnikova on how she spends her time in jail:

Prison is a good place to learn to really listen to your own mind and your own body. I've learned to read much more deeply, for instance. For four months, I had nothing to read but the Bible, so I read it for all four months -- diligently, picking everything apart. Prison is like a monastery -- it's a place for ascetic practices. After a month here, I became a vegetarian. Walking in circles for an hour in that tiny dusty yard gets you into a pretty meditative state as well. We don't get much in the way of the news. But enough to get inspired. "

Later in the interview, she comments, in an aside, "unlike Putin, we're not chickenshit."

By Rebecca Frankel
Best Defense Chief Canine Correspondent

It seems that Prime Minister Vladmir Putin isn't the only one using dogs to get the upper hand in Russia. And the United States isn't the only country catching on to the how valuable bomb-sniffing dogs are in the field. After the bombing at Moscow's Domodedovo airport last January, President Dmitry Medvedev has made a big push to get more sniffer dogs on patrol -- and more dogs there will be.

The Russian military is banking on what they're calling "high-tech" bomb-sniffing dogs -- an overstatement perhaps given its rudimentary function. As the BBC reports from a military base outside of Moscow, this elevated technology is really just a remote-controlled dog, consisting of little more than a walkie-talkie and small video camera strapped to the dog's collar.

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Why doesn't anyone ever tell me these things?

I'd avoided reading Col. Robert S. Allen's book Lucky Forward, a history of Patton's Third Army, because it has the reputation of being a gushing bio by a former aide. Allen was assistant G-2 -- that is, the no. 2 guy in the intelligence section --for Patton's Third Army during World War II.

I finally picked up the book yesterday, and in doing some preliminary research, was surprised to learn that a few years ago, Allen, who shot himself in 1981, has been revealed to have worked briefly with the KGB in the 1930s. The KGB code-named him source "Sh/147," according to Spies: the rise and fall of the KGB in America, a 2009 book by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, who dug through the KGB's archives.

This is complex but interesting. In 1931, Allen, then the Washington bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor, along with Drew Pearson, then of the Baltimore Sun, anonymously wrote a gossipy book titled Washington Merry Go-Round. After being identified and fired from their newspaper jobs, in 1933, Allen and Pearson started a syndicated column of the same name. The same year, the KGB's New York station reported to Moscow Center that Allen looked to be a good source because he was plugged into the Roosevelt Administration, just then taking office, and put him on a $100-a-month stipend, according to Spies, which Yale University Press published in paperback earlier this year. That wasn't great pay, but remember that this was during the Depression. "Given the lack of any reference to him after the first two months of 1933, it is likely the relationship did not last more than a few months," the book says. "There is no indication of whether he or the KGB ended their association."

Allen, an Army reservist who went on active duty in 1942, also was "one of the few people cleared for the ULTRA secrets" in Europe during World War II, according to the website of the George Patton Museum. Sadly enough, he lost an arm during the war, was briefly taken prisoner, and then when back home was elbowed out of the column by Pearson, who replaced him with Jack Anderson. Lucky Forward, by the way, is as gushy as I expected. Patton can do no wrong, and Allen describes his immediate superior, Col. Oscar Koch, as "the greatest G-2 in the U.S. Army" (46, Manor Books paperback edition). It also is written in a kind of Winchellesque staccato. "There was one force, however, Montgomery could not keep from Falaise. The Air." (89)) It does have some minor tidbits. But no, it would not make my list of the top 500 books to read about World War II.

If I were the KGB, I would have been mighty tempted during World War II to blackmail Allen into sharing Ultra knowledge. Learning all this also makes me wonder just how Drew Pearson came to be the one who broke the hot news about General Patton slapping two hospitalized soldiers in Sicily in the summer of 1943. That happened before Patton took over the Third Army, but Allen might well have been hearing things.

That's all, men.

Policy Review has a rambling essay on military memoirs that I found especially interesting for its discussion, at the end, of a recent memoir of serving in the Russian army. I hadn't heard of One Soldier's War in Chechnya, by Arkady Babchenko, but was struck by some of it quoted in the essay:

'This is not an army, but a herd drawn from the dregs of the criminal classes, lawless apart from the dictates of the jackals that run it.' In this 'army living by prison camp rules,' the end product is a soldier without a conscience and 'with a coldness inside [him] and a hatred of the whole world, with no past and no future.'"

Meanwhile, here is a roundup of recent U.S. military memoirs. (How can I not like an essay that says in an aside, "Ricks is even more right about that than he realizes?" Of course, he goes on to say that, "Ricks is wrong to think we can rely on ROTC instead of, rather than along with, the academies" -- but alas he misses the point that in advocating closing the military academies and war colleges, I advocated moving to a Sandhurst-like approach, rather than just relying on ROTC. And send colonels to civilian institutions to learn how to think strategically.)

Speaking of military memoirs, Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for literature yesterday. He isn't generally known for military writing, but his novel Captain Pantoja and the Special Service is a good farce about an officer assigned to set up a roving brothel for troops isolated in the Amazonian jungle.

A few months ago historian Geoffrey Wawro and I did a panel discussion together for a group of documentarians specializing in military history. He mentioned then that he had a new history of the American experience in the Middle East being published soon, and now it is out. It is called Quicksand.

Yesterday I interviewed him by e-mail.   

Best Defense: What are the essential facts that Americans don't understand about the Middle East?

Geoffrey Wawro: Americans look at the Middle East through the lens of terrorism. This is analogous to the Cold War tendency to view the Middle East as a place under perpetual threat from Communism. In fact, most Middle Eastern peoples detest terrorism, and their security services are committed to its destruction. Unfortunately, states like Iran, Syria, Libya and Iraq under Saddam play a double game. Although frightened by terrorist extremism, they succor groups that they can wield tactically against their enemies, chiefly Israel. In the event of a U.S. war with Iran, those groups -- like Hezbollah -- would be unleashed against Americans and U.S. interests as well. What this means for Americans, is that we must proceed delicately. It is foolhardy to imagine we can "rid the world of terrorism," if only because terror attacks are an asymmetric weapon wielded by weaker states against stronger ones. Syria is certainly a "terrorist state" in the sense that it gives cover to anti-Israeli terrorist groups -- which Damascus regards as no more objectionable than Israeli F-16s -- but it is also a country that we can do business with, solidifying gains in Iraq, managing Lebanon and the Kurds, and fighting al-Qaeda. This complexity, with its strong odor of amorality, exasperates Americans, but is an ineradicable piece of the Middle Eastern landscape, of the "quicksand" I describe in my new book.

BD: What do you think of the Obama Administration's handling of the Iran situation?

GW: This is a tough one. Iran may well be on track to have a nuclear weapon before the end of Obama's first term. We've known about this program for seven years, yet both Bush 43 and Obama have failed to strangle it with hard sanctions, owing to the reluctance of Russia and China to get tough. On the one hand, Obama is trying to distance himself from the "axis of evil" rhetoric, and make a good faith effort to understand Iran better. On the other hand, he deplores the bloodthirsty irresponsible chatter coming out of Iran: the holocaust denials and the bluster about actually using nukes. But the recently leaked Robert Gates (January) memo about the absence of military options for Iran gets to the heart of the problem. How does the U.S. fight a war, or even an air campaign, against Iran today? Can we afford it? Can we afford the disruption in oil flows? Can we afford the inevitable explosion of Iranian wrath in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf? Can Israel deal with concurrent explosions from Iranian clients in Gaza and Lebanon? The question that recurs to me is why are the Russians and Chinese -- who have their own problems with Islamist extremism and proliferation -- not taking this threat seriously? Neither one of them wants to credit an American right to interfere in the internal affairs of another nation, but at some point THEY need to take this threat seriously. Obama should have traded the anti-missile sites in East Central Europe for Russian sanctions on Iran.

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Speaking of Colorado, Defense Secretary Gates apparently wants to re-name the Iraq mess Operation New Dawn. I hate these Orwellian names.

Speaking of the Russians, I see where the Putin regime is expressing alarm over Iran's nuclear plans. Germany too. Maybe the Obama strategy is working...

If you want to understand what is going on, read this -- by far the best thing I've read on the Obama administration's decision to change course on missile defenses facing Russia and Iran.

Kaplan's bottom line:

What will the Russians do now? They've cited the missile-defense plan as the main source of suspicion, the main obstacle to improved relations. Now that Obama has wiped it off the board, will Putin and Medvedev come around -- or will they bring up some other reason, some other excuse, for remaining distant and occasionally hostile? It's in the Kremlin's court.

The only thing I'd add is the lineup that made the decision. President Obama remains a novice in foreign affairs, but he is backed by people who know this subject intimately from a variety of angles -- James Jones (national security advisor, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe),  Gen. Cartwright (vice chairman of Joint Chiefs, former head of U.S. Strategic Command) and Robert Gates (defense secretary, and lifetime Russia expert).

I have no idea where Hilary Clinton is on all this. Am I wrong or is she floundering in her job?

Tambako the Jaguar/flickr 

The Obama people are throwing the Russians a bone and cancelling the Bush Administration move to put missle defense systems in Poland the Czech Republic. I hope this is part  of a deal or understanding that the Russians will help us out more on containing Iran.

This is, by the way, good news for the U.S. Navy, which now will have to plan on deploying anti-missile ships to the Black Sea, where they could try to intercept rockets the Iranians might be stupid enough to shoot northwestward toward Europe. Ah, "the Black Sea fleet" -- that has a nice ring to it. Turkey is also a nice place for liberty ports. There are lots of interesting and relatively inexpensive towns in Turkey, especially on its Mediterranean coast, which Americans never seem to have discovered. And the larger message for political leaders is a reminder that sea-based systems are less subject to political pressures than are land-based systems -- another plus for the Navy. 

Tambako the Jaguar/flickr

They ran about less than two hours apart:

• NATO resumes ties with Russia, Moscow welcomes move (21 minutes ago)

BRUSSELS (Reuters) -- NATO foreign ministers agreed Thursday to resume high-level formal ties with Russia, suspended last year after Moscow's military thrust into Georgia.

• Putin threatens to cut Ukraine gas supplies (2 hours, 10 minutes ago)

KIEV/MOSCOW (Reuters) -- Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warned that Moscow would halt gas deliveries to Ukraine if payment were not received by Saturday, and this could also affect supplies to Europe.

DMITRY ASTAKHOV/AFP/Getty Images

The Russians are testing a new submarine-launched ICBM. It failed, for the fifth time.