The Man Who Stole East Germany's Death Machines
On the night of 30 April 1976, Michael Gartenschläger walked back alone to the East German border fence at marker 231, near Büchen.
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The Friend Who Cooked Dinner: A Stasi Murder Plot on the Sinai, 1981
On the twenty-first of July 1981, on a beach in the Israeli-held Sinai a few miles south of Eilat, a West German on holiday with his wife and their seven-year-old daughter sat down to a bowl of meatballs cooked by his best friend.
Poland Sent a Spy to Los Angeles. He Recruited the Man Next Door
In February 1977 a young Polish machine-tool salesman took an apartment in a tennis complex between the beach and the Los Angeles airport, and made a friend on the court: a Hughes Aircraft radar engineer of fifty-seven who was broke.
Czechoslovakia Sent a Spy to London. A Dutch Mother Thought He Was Her Son
On the morning of Saturday 2 April 1988, Special Branch officers broke down the door of a flat in Friern Barnet, north London, and found an art dealer in his pyjamas with headphones on, listening to a woman's voice reading numbers in Czech.
The Masaryk File
Before dawn on 10 March 1948, two stokers crossing the courtyard of the Czernin Palace in Prague found the foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, barefoot and in pyjamas on the paving under his own bathroom window.
Yugoslavia Sent a Hitman to Scotland. A Neighbour's Envelope Beat Him
On a quiet street in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, on an October morning in 1988, a man walking his Alsatian home from the woods bent down to help a driver who seemed to want directions.
4 Men Who Never Arrived: The Strangest Disappearances of Eastern Europe
Four doors, four decades, four countries.
Unsolved for 90 Years: The Girl in Two Suitcases
Otýlie Vranská was twenty-two, six months into a new life in Prague, when she walked out into the small hours of Friday, the first of September 1933, and did not come back.
The Real Story of the Black Widow: Vera Renczi and the 35 Zinc Coffins
The story says that in a town near the edge of Yugoslavia, police broke down three iron doors and raised their torches over thirty-five zinc coffins, arranged around a cellar, each labeled with a man's name, his age, and how long he had been hers.
The City That Stopped Opening Its Doors: The Mosgaz Panic of 1963
In December 1963, a young man in a fur hat began knocking on Moscow doors and saying one word: Mosgaz, the gas service.
The Culianu Case
On May 21, 1991, in the middle of a crowded book sale, a professor of religion was executed with a single small-caliber shot inside the Divinity School of the University of Chicago.
He Was in a Cell When the Shots Were Fired: The Babice Case
On a July night in 1951, armed men walked into the village school of Babice, Czechoslovakia, and shot the three communist officials meeting inside.
The Friend Held the Key: The Cold War Murder Germany Took 33 Years to Solve
In July 1983, Stjepan Đureković, marketing director of Yugoslavia's oil giant INA, was shot and struck down with a blade inside a Bavarian garage where his banned books were printed.
The Man With the Red Armband: 36 Murders the Soviet Union Refused to See
For fourteen years, women vanished along the roads of the Vitebsk region of Soviet Belarus, and the state kept solving the murders: fourteen innocent people were convicted, one was shot, one went blind in the camps, one was broken in a psychiatric ward.
The Man With the Hammer: The Serial Killer Communism Couldn't Punish
Cluj, Romania, winter 1972.
He Never Confessed: The Vampire Trial That Hanged Two Brothers
For six years a killer stalked the coal towns of southern Poland, striking women from behind at dawn and dusk.
Tortured Into Confessing: The Murder That Communist Romania Refused to Solve
In July 1977, an eighteen-year-old student named Anca Broscoțean traveled to Bucharest for a university entrance exam and never came home.
The Sealed Death of the Dictator's Daughter
In 1981, Lyudmila Zhivkova, the daughter of Bulgaria's communist dictator, his minister of culture and presumed heir, was found dead in her bath at 38.
Murder at the Golden Stag
In March 1971, communist Romania threw open its doors to the West for the Golden Stag, Cerbul de Aur, its glittering international song festival.
The Communist Bank Robbery That May Never Have Happened
In 1959, six former insiders of Romania's Communist regime were accused of the impossible: robbing the National Bank of Romania, in a state that insisted crime was a disease of the capitalist West.
The Vampire of Bucharest and the Murders His Father Got Away With
In 1970, a killer began hunting the streets of Bucharest, and he came only on the worst nights, in the storms and the freezing rain.
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