Here I am at the White House with Ronald Reagan and Yuri Orlov and his then-wife Ira, just after he was released from Soviet exile and exchanged for a Soviet spy and brought to the US.

I'm in the corner at 5:22 — I was Yuri's translator, although more of a bag-handler that day as the WH had their own official translator. I got to shake Reagan's hand afterwards and there's a picture of us hanging in my living room. It has a letter of thanks with it signed by none other than John Poindexter, literally two days before he was forced to step down in Iran-contra. Ah, those were the days.

I thanked the president for staying with the Helsinki Accords about which there were certain protests urging the US not to sign them. I said it was very important to keep the intrinsic linkage between peace, disarmament, human rights and justice.

But he looked at me blankly and I'm not sure he understood what he was saying. He was formally diagnosed with Alzheimer's much later in 1994 but showed signs in 1989, 3 years after this meeting.

The ideas of Helsinki — the connection between peace and human rights that many anti-nuclear activists wanted to jettison at the time — were actually in his speech at this meeting, which was a good one, right on the eve of a US-Soviet summit in Rejkavik. The arms deal wasn't signed there, nor were more prisoners released, but they did come later in the year and of course arms control became much easier once the USSR fell.

There was so much hatred of Reagan by the liberals and he was the personification of evil for many. Although I didn't vote for him, I certainly credit him as a main factor in ending Soviet tyranny. But it wasn't Star Wars, it was his willingness to link progress on disarmament with actual reforms which in fact were coming for this and other internal reasons. And this is the kind of toughness that is needed with the Kremlin and with Putin now. I was glad to be a part of that historic occasion.

In celebration of Orlov's 90th birthday, the National Security Archives released this video and some other photos and documents.