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At the age of sixteen Stanley enlisted in the Red Army for the Fatherland War, mistakenly called World War II by Western historians. Even then he knew it was no true world war--but one was coming. During the storming of Berlin, as the youngest lieutenant of engineers in Zhukov's armies, he performed deft and daring feats with explosives that won him two Red Stars, promotion, and marked him for the future.

When he was twenty-five, and a major attached to the Army intelligence service in Budapest, he was recalled for special schooling. For five years, in Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev, he attended agitprop, espionage, and counter-intelligence schools, and became proficient in such esoteric branches of military knowledge as silent killing and cryptography. He took language courses and studied English and American history. He crammed the fundamentals of nuclear physics, and the basics of biological warfare.

A major military operation is the most complex undertaking yet attempted by man. It may be recalled that the planning for Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy in June, 1944, was begun by a British staff four years earlier. Stanley was to participate in something infinitely more ambitious, the subjugation of a powerful nation with one massive blow. Just as a jet bomber must be on the drawing boards five to ten years before it can be launched against the enemy, so a human weapon must be prepared with equal thoroughness. This is particularly true if the human's mission is likely to be of critical importance. So Stanley's education was still not complete. He was sent to a place that its inhabitants and a few people on the General Staff called, jokingly, "Little Chicago."