Anne Gruner
Author, McLean, VA
Anne Gruner
Anne Gruner is a former CIA analyst and family law attorney. Over the years, she wrote Presidential Daily Briefs and advised on nuclear disarmament treaties. She then became a lawyer writing legal briefs and negotiating property settlement agreements.
Along the way, she picked up a pen and wrote for fun, most recently, A Diplomatic Dog in Paris, which appears in Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Magic of Dogs. Royalties from this publication go to the American Humane Society. See, https://www.amazon.com › Chicken-Soup-Soul-Family-Friendship-ebook
Anne lives in McLean, Virginia with her husband, Jay Gruner, and their two golden retrievers.
More About Anne
As a career CIA analyst, Anne specialized in the former Soviet Union, arms control and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
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She helped negotiate the US-Russian Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in Geneva, Switzerland in the 1980s and the 2002 Strategic Offensive Arms Reduction Treaty.
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Her INF experience is memorialized in A Quiet Victory in a Cold War Skirmish, published in The Intelligencer, a Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies. Years later, in War-on-the-Rocks, she warned that Russia was violating the Treaty in Back to the Future with INF.
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Her CIA career is portrayed in A Cold War Analyst Remembers, published in Stories from Langley: A Glimpse Inside the CIA, an anthology published by Potomac Books, December 2014.
During a three-year assignment to the American Embassy in Paris, Anne reported on European political-military affairs as the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the reunification of East and West Germany.
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Her whimsical memoir of Paris through the eyes of her golden retriever, A Diplomat Dog in Paris is found in Chicken Soup for the Soul: the Magic of Dogs.
Our Last Thanksgiving
An excerpt from The Avalon Literary Review
Fall 2019
by Anne Gruner
We lie in the family room, Ryder on the faded oriental,
I on the worn corduroy sofa. I've dragged her fuzzy
brown bed down the stairs, knowing my beautiful
Golden Retriever will never climb them again.
It seems more than odd that Ryder and I are on the
same meds: Gabapentin and Prednisone, for nerve
pain and inflammation, respectively. She for a benign
brain tumor on her pituitary gland and I for a herniated
disc in my back. After being zapped by radiation for 18
days, Ryder's tumor has proven reluctant to shrink. It
is stubbornly sucking the life out of her. My herniated
disc that came out of nowhere, has been similarly
resistant to the corticosteroid epidural that was supposed to relieve the pain. The Gabapentin we
take only dulls our pain, hers from an intracranial
pressure headache, mine from disc material pressing on a spinal nerve.
Ryder can still walk if I pull her upright. She slowly
follows me outside to the deck and down the sloping
path to the lawn. I go alongside her, gently touching
her shoulder, reassuring her when she hesitates. I limp, she wobbles. She gets slower an slower. Yesterday she could not get down to the lawn. She pooped an peed on the deck, but only when i was not
looking. She was embarrassed, even though I told her it was okay. I stay at my post on the sofa, waiting for a sign--when she lifts her head--to tell me it is time to go out. I am her service dog.
I turn away, my face contorting in tears as I hold an ice pack around my thigh to stop the sciatica throbbing down the leg. But I can do nothing for the ache in my heart. My beloved Ryder is leaving way too soon, only six years old. Why do golden retrievers die so young" Because the good die young.
And she is so good. Ryder, the nanny at homeowners' meetings, gentler than a mother, licks the babies' tears. They stop wailing and giggle, dog and baby eyes locked in unspoken communication. Running their fingers through her silky strands, the kids bury their faces in her clean sweet fur. Three years in a row, a first-place winner in the Rein Dog Parade, Ryder prances down the street in her red and green Christmas sweater, beautiful against her pale golden coat. Her elf-eared Santa's hat and brown felt rein deer antlers perch perfectly on her head. The reviewer's voice booms from the stand, "Ryder the Rein Dog!" Head held high, she poses to the whir of cell phone clicks. She smiles as children cry out, "Look at the dog!" She doesn't need to wave. Her photos in the local paper are carelessly jammed into a folder, a plan to frame them never realized.
A Bittersweet Remembrance: A US Navy Dad
An excerpt from Hippocampus Magazine,
June 1, 2015
by Anne Campbell Gruner
June 1, 2015
. . . As an adult I learned he flew a P-3 Orion patrol aircraft with four turboprop engines that during the Cold War could fly for hours hunting Soviet submarines hidden beneath the sea. The aircraft was named for the mighty hunter Orion of Greek myth who bragged he could rid the world of wild animals.
One of his missions was to patrol the famous Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom, or GIUK, “Gap,”
a naval choke point through which stealthy Soviet submarines could enter into the Atlantic Ocean and potentially threaten the U.S. homeland. Daddy also flew hurricane hunters into giant storms, which I thought was very scary, even though he brought home nifty photographs from inside the eye of the storms. He must have been a good pilot and leader since he became a “skipper,” which meant he was the squadron’s commanding officer.
T
To read more of Anne's article about her father, please go to A Bittersweet Remembrance: A US Navy Dad
https://www.hippocampusmagazine.com › tag › anne-campbell-gruner
A Diplomatic Dog in Paris
An excerpt from Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Magic of Dogs.
July 14, 2020
by Anne Gruner
I cannot think of Bucky without remembering Paris, and I cannot think of Paris without remembering Bucky. Many years ago, when my husband and I were assigned as diplomats to the American Embassy in Paris, we worried whether our shy, seventy-pound Golden Retriever Bucky could transition from his quiet suburban backyard to the hubbub of a big city. Bucky did fine, however. More than fine. Back then, dogs were considered royalty in Paris.
Bucky easily ensconced himself in our home in Neuilly, a tree-lined hamlet of the western edge of Paris. The Embassy provided the house, which came with Asuncion, a housekeeper from Barcelona who spoke French with a Spanish accent, and her mature female cat Mignon. Bucky had no French and zero experience with cats.
To read more of Anne's article about her dog Bucky, please go to https://www.amazon.com › Chicken-Soup-Soul-Family-Friendship-ebook
Our HO
OurLasHeading 1
Essays
A Quiet Victory in a Cold War Skirmish
An excerpt from The Intelligencer Journal of US Intelligence Studies, Spring/Summer 2013, page 51.
by Anne Gruner
It was 1982 and the height of the Cold War, when as a junior missile analyst at the CIA, I affected the course of world events. . . .
. . . .To my great fortune, I was selected to be an advisor on the INF delegation headed at the time by the brilliant Paul H. Nitze, former secretary of the Navy, Assistant Secretary of State, and advisor to presidents. In my twenties and just a few years out of graduate school, it didn’t get much better than this: personally advising Paul Nitze and debating the range of the SS-20 with Major General Yuriy Lebedev, then deputy chief of the Soviet General Staff. The Soviet colonels could barely disguise their pique that a young American woman knew so much about their most deadly weapons systems and on occasion even bested their commanding general in debate.
Anne Gruner with Ambassador Paul Nitze
A Cold War CIA Analyst Remembers
An excerpt from Stories from Langley: A Glimpse inside the CIA , p, 96 by Edward Mickolus
It was 1978, the height of the Cold War, post-Vietnam, a time of the OPEC oil crisis and stagflation. Having attended the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown and passed the oral and written Foreign Service exams, I intended to enter the State Department as a Foreign Service officer after graduating with my Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts. That was not to be. President Jimmy Carter had cancelled two Foreign Service Officer classes due to budget cutbacks and it was unclear when there would be another class. Having been an intern in the CIA’s Office of Strategic Research (OSR) the summer before, I had applied to the agency’s Career Trainee (CT) Program as a backup to the Foreign Service. Thanks to Jimmy Carter, my backup plan became my primary plan. Read more HERE
Contact Anne Gruner at
gruneranne@gmail.com
