Stars Too Far – A Memoir of Diplomatic Confrontation in Yugoslavia: 578 (East European Monographs) - Hardcover

In 1975, Laszlo Toth, a U.S. citizen and then the director of technical research at the Great Western Sugar Company in Colorado, was visiting his native country of Yugoslavia to work on its continuing technical cooperation with other European nations. As part of this effort, he had agreed to provide photographs of a Yugoslav sugar plant. During this visit to his home town of Vrbas, Toth was shocked to find himself arrested by the Yugoslav State Security, charged with spying as a CIA agent, tried in a "kangaroo court," and sentenced to seven years in the notorious maximum-security prison Sremska Mitrovica."Stars Too Far" describes his harrowing experiences and how the ensuing struggle for his freedom, involving such key figures as President Gerald Ford and Foreign Secretary Henry Kissinger, led to one of the lowest points in relations between the American and Yugoslav governments since World War II. The story of his rescue and eventual release from behind the Iron Curtain provides new insight and unprecedented access into one of the fiercest diplomatic clashes between Tito's communist Yugoslavia and the Ford Administration. "Dear reader, in this book you will find all the requisites necessary for a spy adventure - car tailings, guns, merciless investigations, screams, teeth grindings, court actions, prison cells, etc. About deaths? Well there will be just one death...she used to be a powerful image, but - after long, painful agonies - she passed away. Her name was Justice. It all started on a warm July day in 1975..." - from "Stars Too Far".

Laszlo Toth was born in Yugoslavia and grew up in the Sugar Factory Vrbas workers' colony as the third generation in the family trade. He is a former Research and Technical Director of the Great Western Sugar Company and remains a consultant for the U.S. sugar industry.