Trust, but verify Trust, but verify Trust, but verify (; "Doveryat, no proverit") is a Russian proverb. The phrase became well known in English when used by President Ronald Reagan on multiple occasions in the context of nuclear disarmament. Suzanne Massie, an American writer, met with President Ronald Reagan many times between 1984 and 1987. She taught him the Russian proverb "Doveryai, no proveryai" (; "Trust, but verify"), advising him that "The Russians like to talk in proverbs. It would be nice of you to know a few. You are an actor – you can learn them very quickly." The proverb was adopted
US signals intelligence in the Cold War package would fly aboard a photoreconnaissance satellite, Discoverer-13, in August 1960. Translated from the Russian, it was equipped with "Scotop equipment was intended to record the signals of Soviet radars which were tracking the flight of American space objects." NSA in the post-World War II period had broken messages used by the Soviet armed forces, police and industry, and was building a remarkably complete picture of the Soviet national security posture. It was a situation that compared favorably to the successes of World War II. Then, during 1948, in rapid succession, every one of these cipher systems went dark, as