When Newcomb Mott flew into the small airport in Kirkenes, Norway, in 1965, nothing had ever truly gone wrong in his life.
He was 27 and tall (over six feet), with notably red hair (though it was starting to recede from his high forehead). He was an American man from a well-off family. He had gone to college at Antioch, in Ohio. During his college years, he tried his hand at being a forest ranger in the Berkshires, a copy boy for the Toledo Blade, an assistant in the press gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives, and an elementary school teacher. At the time he landed in Kirkenes, he was working as a college textbook salesman. He’d lived for a time in Mexico, and visited close to 20 other countries. He dreamed of becoming an editor.
Mott was, as one U.S. ambassador would later describe him, “a kind of innocent abroad,” who had come to this isolated place, north of the Arctic Circle, on a whim. He had a confidence characteristic of young, educated, American white men in the 1960s—a feeling that everything would probably work out, because, the great majority of the time, everything did. But when Newcomb Mott illegally crossed the border into the USSR in 1965, aiming to collect a new stamp on his passport, everything did not go right for him.