THE SPY WHO BECAME DISENCHANTED

LISA Warden spent two years in India with her (now ex) husband, devoting her time and energy to street dogs. She tried to implement animal birth control in Visakhapatnam and Ahmedabad, but ended up fighting the municipality of Ahmedabad-where they lived for their use of cruel tongs to catch dogs. With criminal charges levelled against her, she left before things could get ugly. The use of tongs has since been made illegal in India.

- NANDITHA KRISHNA

But that was not Lisa's first sojourn in India. She was here earlier as the daughter of Canadian ambassador Bill Warden, who has written the book, Diplomat, Dissident, Spook, about his fascinating life as a Canadian diplomat and spy in some of the spookiest and politically thrilling places-Soviet Union during perestroika, Cuba under Fidel Castro, Hong Kong during Deng's Beijing Spring, Pakistan during the Afghan insurgency, and India during the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the anti-Sikh riots, where he ended his career after the Air India aircraft disaster.

The late Bill Warden started out as a student with a conservative political ideology in Berlin in the late 1950s, where espionage was the order of the day and the world often stood at the brink of nuclear war. The infamous Berlin Wall came up three days after he left. In this memoir, Warden chronicles his career as a diplomat. Soon after he joined the Canadian foreign service came the Cuban missile crisis, of which Warden writes, "It was as if the world had stopped... I felt myself to be a spectator watching a surreal drama as the world edged to the brink of nuclear war." His life confirms the popular belief that diplomats often work as spies for their governments in their various postings.

The British and the Canadians have been the eyes and ears of the English-speaking West, especially the US. His first foreign posting was Moscow in the 1960s, where his dodging of KGB operatives reads like something out of a James Bond story.