00:00:16
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey everyone, it's been this week. We're excited to share a new show with you from our friends at Dakota Ring, Slate's podcast about cracking cultural mysteries, hosted by Willa Paskin. This year, they're back, and I say this as a member of a team making a different narrative, historical podcast. They are back on an impressively regular schedule. They're now going to be putting out new episodes over at Slate every two weeks all year long. And today we're bringing you an episode of THEIRS that we love. It's called The Curious Case of Columbo's Message to Romania, Part one, and in it you can follow Willa as she investigates an old clip that resurfaced and went viral last year of Peter falk On David Letterman, in which he told an intriguing tale about recording a special Cold War message for Romanian state television. In this episode, you'll find out if the tale was actually try true and if a fictional American detective really did help quell a communist revolt. It's an honest to goodness Cold War caper about American soft power behind the Iron Curtain. They go so deep that in the process of listening to this episode, I heard Paskin tell a story that exactly intersects with the story my grandma always tells about the time she was living in Romania and the band Blood, Sweat and Tears came to town. It's involved so involved that it takes two episodes to solve. So if you enjoyed this episode, you're gonna want to head over to the Dakota Ring Feed to download part two of this show and subscribe. Now here's the episode and host Willa Paskin.
00:01:56
Speaker 2: A couple of months ago, I found myself watching an old interview from The Late Show with David Letterman.
00:02:01
Speaker 3: Ladies and gentlemen, this is his first time with us.
00:02:03
Speaker 4: Please welcome Peter falk Peter.
00:02:08
Speaker 2: As the actor Peter Faulk loped onto the stage, his gray hair standing out against his black leather jacket. The audience greeted him with a roar.
00:02:19
Speaker 3: They love you. How must make you feel very, very nice nice.
00:02:27
Speaker 2: By this point in his career, Fok had played almost one hundred different roles, but he was beloved for one in particular.
00:02:34
Speaker 5: Oh I'm just another cop.
00:02:35
Speaker 6: My name is Colombo.
00:02:36
Speaker 2: I'm a lieutenant Lieutenant Colombo, who has no first name, was the star of the smashed detective series Colombo, which aired on and off for thirty years beginning in the nineteen seventies. In every episode, the brilliant yet unassuming Colombo doggedly pursued high class murderers while wearing a scruffy brown raincoat, chomping on a cigar, and absent mindedly mentioning his wife.
00:03:00
Speaker 7: I'm the worst cook in the world, but there's one thing I do terrific, and that's an omlet.
00:03:06
Speaker 2: Even my wife admits it. And just when his investigations seem to have hit a dead end, he'd circle back to ask.
00:03:13
Speaker 7: Oh, listen, just one more thing, one more thing, sir.
00:03:18
Speaker 4: I'll listen one more thing.
00:03:19
Speaker 3: It just take a second.
00:03:21
Speaker 2: The show also had a very particular structure.
00:03:25
Speaker 7: Well, in a matter of speaking, this isn't really a who've done it?
00:03:28
Speaker 4: It's more of a how we did it.
00:03:32
Speaker 2: Each episode begins with the murder. The audience sees the crime, sees who the killer is and how they kill before Colombo even appears on screen. Then the audience gets to watch Colombo engage in a battle of wits with the murderer who underestimates the schlumpy lieutenant until it's too late. You're very lucky, lieutenant. No congratulations, you're very smart. The pleasure of the show isn't nerve racking suspense. It's the satisfaction of watching Colombo unraveled the mystery, a satisfaction that has helped make the show a hit all over the world.
00:04:18
Speaker 7: It's very, very popular in Romania.
00:04:21
Speaker 2: In Romania, this is fulk on Letterman again. He's sitting in one of those big late night armchairs and he takes a sip from a coffee mug and launches into a story.
00:04:31
Speaker 7: As a matter of fact, about ten years ago, I got a call from the State Deplotment and a guy called me up and he says, we've got a problem in Romania. Maybe you can help us.
00:04:40
Speaker 2: Falk was chatting with Letterman in March of nineteen ninety five. Ten years prior was during the Cold War, when Romania was under the control of a particularly cruel and autocratic communist dictator. Falk tells Letterman he was asked to meet two men from the State Department and one from the Romanian embassy, maybe even the ambassador himself, at a hotel room in Los Angeles. There they explained that the Romanian government had aired every episode of Colombo available.
00:05:09
Speaker 7: Okay, so what's the problem, he said, the problem is that the people don't believe the government.
00:05:16
Speaker 2: They told Falk that the Romanian people were clamoring for more Colombo and they believed the communist government had it, that they were sitting on a pile of fresh episodes, keeping those episodes from them, the way it withheld so many other things. And they were mad. And Romanian officials were worried.
00:05:38
Speaker 7: So what do you want me to do? He said, We got a camera here, would you talk to the people? We got phonetic Romanian here, And I gotta tell the people. I gotta tell the people put down your guns.
00:05:54
Speaker 3: They were arming themselves over this.
00:05:58
Speaker 6: God was that severe?
00:05:59
Speaker 8: Yes, I guess, So why would they Romania?
00:06:04
Speaker 2: Fucking letterman bantered a bit more, and the letterman seemed ready to move on.
00:06:08
Speaker 7: That's good.
00:06:10
Speaker 9: We want to get a story.
00:06:11
Speaker 8: It's an excellent story.
00:06:14
Speaker 2: And it is an excellent story, But listening to it, I couldn't help wondering, is it true? This is decodering. I'm Willie Paskin. When I first saw Peter Fox interview with David Letterman after it went viral not so long ago. I had to know more. Did Colombo and Romania really have a special relationship? Could a fictional American detective really have helped calm a communist revolt? Had fuck actually recorded this message? And if so, why and how? Was this whole story too good to be true? I couldn't find the recording in any of the usual easy places, so I donned the proverbial raincoat and started sleuthing, at which point Fox Late Night anecdote cracked open into an intricate geopolitical saga that stretches from DC to Bucharest, from a Los Angeles hotel room to the palatial estate of a despot. It's a story that involves dueling ideologies, dozens of diplomats, and millions of viewers. It's an honest to goodness cold war caper about American soft power behind the Iron Curtain, and it's so involved it's going to take us two episodes to solve. So today on Decoder Ring, the first half of a very cold case. Did Peter fox appearance on Romanian television actually happen? So let's go with this whole I'm a detective thing for a minute. I wanted to start with the basics. What was the deal with Colombo? Anyway? You know Colombo, You're almost likable in a shabby sort of way.
00:08:29
Speaker 3: Maybe it's the way it.
00:08:30
Speaker 10: Comes, slouching in here with your shop onorn bag of tricks.
00:08:35
Speaker 9: Me tricks.
00:08:39
Speaker 2: Peter Falk was born in nineteen twenty seven to Jewish parents who were themselves the children of Eastern European immigrants. At just three, he had his cancerous right eye removed, and he wore a prosthetic from then on, one that gave him a perpetual squint.
00:08:53
Speaker 7: The key to it is when you realize you can get a laugh with it.
00:08:56
Speaker 2: This is fulk leader in life talking to the hosts of the view.
00:09:00
Speaker 7: By the time I was in high school, that's a true story. I was playing baseball.
00:09:05
Speaker 4: The umpire called me out. Was a bad call.
00:09:07
Speaker 7: Everybody saw it, and I whipped out the eye and I handed it to the upput I said, try this one.
00:09:19
Speaker 2: Falk broke out in nineteen sixty in an Academy Award nominated dramatic role as a bloodthirsty gangster. But he could always do comedy. He has that unique lackadaisical comic timing, the way he can't be rushed, the way he moses through his sentences and comes back around when you least expect it. You know, exactly the comic timing of Colombo.
00:09:42
Speaker 10: He has many of the same idiosyncratic characteristics of the cop. He's rather sloppy, he's forgetful.
00:09:50
Speaker 2: William Link was the co creator of Colombo, and he's heard here giving an oral history to the Television Academy.
00:09:56
Speaker 10: But in his acting he's obsessed. I mean, he's really dead onto it in a very humble, self effacing kind of way. Falk, so he had that to draw on, that whole well of personality quirks to bring.
00:10:15
Speaker 1: To that cop.
00:10:17
Speaker 2: When Falk was cast as Colombo, the character had actually been kicking around for a while, appearing in a stage play and a TV movie, but as soon as Falk got the role, he made it his own. Colombo's signature brown raincoat even came from Falk's own closet. Falk and the Raincoat debuted as Colombo in the nineteen sixty eight NBC TV movie Prescription Murder, about a psychiatrist trying to get away with killing his wife columbu.
00:10:44
Speaker 5: You are a magnificent you really are. Well, what makes you say that, don You're the most persistent creature I've ever met.
00:10:52
Speaker 2: An eleven year old named Mark Dewiziak was watching.
00:10:56
Speaker 4: I was just getting into mysteries, and my idea of mystery was that, well, you follow the detective, you follow Sheerla Holmes, you follow the clues, and eventually you reach the point where the detective says and the murderer is starts with you knowing who the murderer is.
00:11:12
Speaker 2: Mark is talking about Columbo's structure. Again. Unlike most mysteries, Columbo unfolds in chronological order. The details of the murder are right there at the beginning of the story instead of being saved for the climactic end.
00:11:27
Speaker 4: So to an eleven year old, that just took the top of my head off.
00:11:31
Speaker 2: Mark liked what he saw so much that when he grew up he became a TV critic and the author of the Columbo File Spelled Phil e a book about the series. But as a kid, he'd have to wait to see more of it. Prescription Murder was just a one off a TV movie. It wasn't until three years later that NBC decided to turn Colombo into a regular event, and even then they couldn't make it weekly. Fall had a movie career to think about, So what do we do.
00:12:00
Speaker 4: That's where they had come up with the whole idea of the mystery movie. It's not gonna wear every week. It's gonna air every four weeks. It'll rotate with three other detective characters. We don't have to do twenty two episodes. We can do seven or eight episodes a year.
00:12:15
Speaker 2: Columbo premiered in September of nineteen seventy one on a Wednesday night.
00:12:20
Speaker 7: I kind of know it right from the start. There's nothing definite. There's a lot of little things, little things.
00:12:28
Speaker 2: The episode was directed by a very young Steven Spielberg. Immediately it was a smash, a water cooler show that people were talking about. Audiences watched in droves.
00:12:40
Speaker 7: Well it it's terrific to waymen.
00:12:44
Speaker 2: It won Emmys.
00:12:45
Speaker 7: I'm trying to figure out some way to work here.
00:12:47
Speaker 2: Mumblem Falk became the highest paid TV actor in Hollywood. Celebrities lined up to play murderers. Bade Dunaway, Dick Van Dyke, and Johnny Cash all played killers on the show. William Shatner did it twice simultaneously. Universal, the entertainment company that owned and distributed Colombo, began to license the show around the world. As Johnny Carson noted to Peter Falk in nineteen seventy three.
00:13:15
Speaker 4: And your show is in Japan and a lot of the foreign countries. Have you ever seen it in the Japanese or anything?
00:13:19
Speaker 2: I've never seen it?
00:13:20
Speaker 7: In another song.
00:13:21
Speaker 2: The series would ultimately air in over forty countries, and Falk would come to revel in stories of its global success. There was one about the Italian director Federico Felini leaving dinner parties early to watch Colombo. One about the Emperor of Japan asking if Colombo could meet him at the White House. One about Falk being recognized while filming movies high up in the Andes Mountains and on the bombed out streets of West Berlin. Mark Dewoodziak heard all of these anecdotes from Falk firsthand when he was writing his book.
00:13:53
Speaker 4: Peter loved telling stories, and Peter loved telling his favorite stories. He got so tickled. His favorite story was Romania.
00:14:01
Speaker 2: Romania sits on the eastern edge of Europe, bordered by five different countries and the Black Sea. It is a population of around nineteen million, most of whom speak Romanian, a Romance language similar to Italian. The most famous Romanians outside of Romania are the absurdist playwright Eugenie and Esco, the gold medal winning gymnast Nadia Comanici, and Dracula. Transylvania is now a part of Romania. Mark dewidziax has Falk told him his Romania story during their very first sit down around nineteen eighty six.
00:14:35
Speaker 4: I did the interview in his art studio, which is actually his garage at his Beverly Hills house he had converted into a sort of an art studio man cave. This is what was said to me that night. He said, the Romanian government called the American ambassador and they had.
00:14:50
Speaker 2: It's similar to the vision Falk told on Letterman.
00:14:54
Speaker 4: So I end up in a hotel room at one in.
00:14:56
Speaker 2: The morning, though not identical.
00:14:58
Speaker 4: They've got a camera set up and I'm speaking Romanian phonetically, and I say put down your guns, be patient. Your government is not responsible if your stories were truthful, But were they embellished? Was it one in the morning?
00:15:14
Speaker 3: Is I don't know.
00:15:17
Speaker 2: What stands out as embellished to me. Isn't the time of night it happened, though it changes. Where it happened though, the hotel changes, or who was there when it happened, though, that changes too. That's how dramatic the whole thing was. It's hard to believe Romanians were really up in arms about Colombo. But let's imagine for a minute they were. Why would Peter Falk be telling them to stand down? Wasn't this the Cold War? In his two thousand and six memoir Just One More Thing, Falk tells an even more detailed version of the story. In it, he says the Romanian ambassador himself asked Falk to say on film about the Romanian communist regime, I'm here to tell you that you should trust your government. It tells you the truth. Believe me when I say that. And then, though writes that after some initial hesitation, but with US State Department officials in the room, he did. It's all so preposterous and far fetched, it's hard to believe. If not for the next clue, We'll be right back. I mentioned earlier that Peter Fox interview with David Letterman went viral. It did that back in June of twenty twenty one thanks to Radu Tikinash.
00:16:51
Speaker 11: Like many other Romanians, I did grow up watching a lot of Colombo when why was a big Colombo fan?
00:16:57
Speaker 2: Radu grew up watching the show in Romania during the nineteen nineties, but during the pandemic at home in Bucharest, Romania's capital, he found himself watching the show again. He wasn't alone in this lockdown turned the cozy, well crafted Colombo into a sleeper hit. He wanted to learn more about the show, and so we started poking around online.
00:17:17
Speaker 11: There's basically three or four videos about Colombo on YouTube as far as I could see.
00:17:22
Speaker 2: Radu is a freelance writer and video editor, so we decided to make a Colombo video of his own. He wanted to explore an unsourced anecdote he'd read years earlier about how Peter Falk had once taped a PSA to quell riots in Romania.
00:17:38
Speaker 11: Let's do a quick five minute video on this weird story about Peter Falk apparently stopping the revolution fifteen years before it actually happened, or some weird stuff like that.
00:17:51
Speaker 2: So Radu started to look into the story. In earnest he came across a mention of Peter Falk's David Letterman interview, which Radu to that point had never heard about litt alone scene, but it was nowhere online until Radu emailed a Letterman fan, an unofficial archivist, who sent it to him.
00:18:08
Speaker 3: For over twenty years, our first guest has starred as the beloved Lieutenant Columbo. He now has.
00:18:13
Speaker 2: Rado found something else too, an article about Fox story with a WikiLeaks link in it. WikiLeaks is the giant cash of various government documents that went online in two thousand and seven, and this particular link was to an American cable itself unclassified.
00:18:29
Speaker 11: And then I had the idea of like, hey, maybe there's more. Let's give a quick search. And then I searched for piece Falk, I searched for Colombo. I searched forty threns individually.
00:18:41
Speaker 2: And low and behold.
00:18:44
Speaker 3: American Embassy Bucharest to Usia Washington.
00:18:47
Speaker 6: D C.
00:18:48
Speaker 2: Between April and June of nineteen seventy four, eight official diplomatic cables were sent between the American Embassy in Bucharest and Washington, d C.
00:18:58
Speaker 3: About Peter Falk Romanian TV requests a short two to three minute optical sixteen millimeters sound film clip of star Peter Falk.
00:19:08
Speaker 2: The back and forth corroborates a number of things about Falk's story. For one, the US government really did reach out to him.
00:19:17
Speaker 3: FUK willing to make Colombo closing.
00:19:19
Speaker 2: For another, Romania really had run out of Colombo episodes.
00:19:25
Speaker 3: Romanian TV says it aware that Colombo's still in production, but notes that it has run all episodes received thus far and must fill space on weekly basis.
00:19:36
Speaker 2: But the cables do not substantiate many of Fox's details. There's no mention of armed or incensed Romanians, no midnight meetings, no Romanian ambassadors present, and no communists insisting Falk tell people to trust them.
00:19:53
Speaker 3: Text falk interview is as followers, Oh, excuse me, do you have a minute? I'm Lieutenant Colombo. Sometimes I'm known as Peter Fawk.
00:20:04
Speaker 2: In fact, the transcript included in the cables relaying what Falk apparently said is tame.
00:20:11
Speaker 3: We would like to thank Romanian Television for having put us on the air on Saturdays and Sundays, but most of all, all of us, myself and the crew and the other actors we want to thank the Romanian people for their great response to our show.
00:20:25
Speaker 2: But according to the cables, even this generic greeting was a big deal.
00:20:30
Speaker 3: Judging from comments of embassy, Foreign service locals and other Romanians. Fox greetings and his use of Romanian language tagline created minor sensation here.
00:20:43
Speaker 2: The last cable sent back after the message aired says that Romanian television reported ten million people watched it. That was about half the population at the time. Why would Romania have wanted an American star like Peter Falk reaching half of its population?
00:21:03
Speaker 11: Seems weird for one Romania than the Communist Party to do such a thing without any ulterior motive, And it would also seem weird for Peter Falk or the American State Department to give in to such a request without getting something in return.
00:21:23
Speaker 2: Weird, is right. What was the nature of Romania and America's relationship that they would be working together on something like this. I had to know more about Romania, so as a detective, sometimes you need to learn some history. At the end of World War Two, Europe was carved up by the victorious Allied Powers into spheres of influence. The Soviet Union's authority extended to eight nations that would become satellite states known as the Eastern Bloc.
00:21:59
Speaker 5: It is necessary to remember that these are all separate countries, but the fact that each is Communist and the fact of their physical proximity to each other enable us to consider them as a unit.
00:22:14
Speaker 2: Romania was a part of this unit. In nineteen forty four, the Soviets directly occupied the country and would remain for more than a decade.
00:22:22
Speaker 12: I am old enough Fiucia I was born in forty seven to have gone through some of these phases of the communist takeover.
00:22:31
Speaker 2: Yoanna Ieronim Latham is a Romanian poet, playwright, and author. At the time she was born, Romania was in the midst of massive social and political upheaval as Communism was enforced on the country. The mostly agrarian nation was collectivized. A secret police called the Securitate was established, and purges and mass arrests were common.
00:22:53
Speaker 12: It was horrible in the fifties. Political prisons were full, people disappeared from home.
00:22:58
Speaker 2: In nineteen fifty eight, Soviet troops began to pull out of the country. It remained communist, but by the early nineteen sixties things felt different.
00:23:06
Speaker 12: I was still a school girl, and I remember you could almost feel it in the air that it was a change. It was exactly twenty years after our having been taken over, and it became more relaxed.
00:23:20
Speaker 2: This period is known as a saw and as part of the warming news dance carried Western papers, Romanian rock and roll bands started to appear, and foreign films and series aired on television.
00:23:33
Speaker 5: It's very simple. I don't like being a cog in the machine.
00:23:36
Speaker 7: Being one of the millions of ants that deva the Dragon is all very noble.
00:23:40
Speaker 2: The spy show of the Saint, starring the future James Bond Roger Moore, became Appointment TV on Saturday nights, airing thanks to an agreement between Romanian state Television TVR and the BBC to license shows cheaply. Also during the nineteen sixties, programming increased to about eight and a half hours a day, the number of people with televisions rose tenfold, A second channel was added and Romania got a new leader, Chipitri de.
00:24:10
Speaker 7: Base Alim Bunetesei.
00:24:14
Speaker 2: Nikolai Chauchescu was a longtime member of the Communist Party who became General secretary in nineteen sixty five, and then president in sixty seven. Around this time, a British student named Dennis Deletante began studying at a Bucharest university where he is housed with three Americans.
00:24:30
Speaker 9: Every week, the security Tante, the secret police would come to our rooms and rummaged through our belongings and leave very clear evidence that they had been in our rooms.
00:24:42
Speaker 2: Dennis went on to become a scholar of Romania at University College London and the author of dozens of books about the country, and he's now a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Institute. He says that this was a time of great change.
00:24:55
Speaker 9: Romanians were not seeking to break away from Soviet influence, but they were seeking a certain amount of autonomy.
00:25:02
Speaker 2: This was telegraphed to the world in nineteen sixty eight. That year, the Soviet Union sent tanks into a liberalizing chechioslov Vaka to clamp down on mass protests known as the Prague Spring, but Romania refused to support the Soviet action. Choichescu even denounced the invasion in a famous speech.
00:25:24
Speaker 9: This was an act of defiance. The West did not forget.
00:25:30
Speaker 2: Richard Nixon in particular, took notice as president, he pursued a policy called differentiation, picking out the communist countries that seemed most susceptible to Western influence.
00:25:43
Speaker 9: President Nixon and his advisors were aware of Chocescu's desire to have closer contacts within the United States.
00:25:51
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty nine, Nixon visited Romania.
00:25:55
Speaker 13: This is an historic occasion.
00:25:57
Speaker 2: It was his second visit in as many years. Both times, Cheuchescu was savvy enough to welcome Nixon with much respect.
00:26:05
Speaker 13: Wow, this is not my first visit to your country. It is the first visit of a president of the United States to Romania, the first state visit by an American president to a socialist country or of this region of the continent of Europe.
00:26:23
Speaker 2: Chochesca would in turn visit America three times. He'd be knighted by the Queen of England and appear on the cover of Time magazine as the face of a relaxed communism. Romania would join the IMF, open a Pepsi Cola factory, and be granted Most Favored Nation trading status by the United States. All of this solidified Chouchescu's reputation as a maverick communist leader that word Maverick was used a lot in the press, and one that the US wanted to pull closer with trade and with culture. The State Department arranged visits by the Astronauts and a concert tour by the rock band Blood, Sweat and Tears, all while turning something of a blind eye to chaw Chesscu's domestic policies.
00:27:06
Speaker 9: I think there is this great paradox with Josh so the paradox of his we might say, very inventive, ambitious foreign policy and the repression, the internal repression.
00:27:21
Speaker 2: This paradox was already on display by the early nineteen seventies. Birth control and abortion had already been banned to boost the population. The Securitate acted with impunity, and Chaouchescu announced that all cultural output needed to be ideological and nationalistic, ultimately putting an end to the thaw. But at the same time, Chauchescu's foreign policy, with its focus on international trade, was boosting material living conditions for regular Romanians and still allowing for some cultural exchange, including of television shows.
00:27:59
Speaker 1: You Just Want to.
00:28:00
Speaker 3: Tell Me Your Name?
00:28:02
Speaker 2: Alexandri Nakica Alexandrina was in high school in the nineteen seventies living in the same apartment in Bucharest from which she spoke with me a few months ago with the help of a translator.
00:28:13
Speaker 4: So she said that.
00:28:14
Speaker 14: In the seventies they were having streaming from seven point thirty in the evening until around midnight.
00:28:23
Speaker 2: In this.
00:28:25
Speaker 14: Good Life. In this seventies, comparison with the previous years.
00:28:30
Speaker 2: Most of what was on TV was dull, ideological and political long speeches and footage of Chaouchescu and his wife Elena visiting farms and opening factories. But this only made the foreign shows, which included Bewitched, The Untouchables and Lost in Space stand out more. Alexandrina particularly remembers Tom and Jerry, Popeye, Charlie Chaplin movies, and especially the oil gushing soap opera Dallas. But of course I'd called her to talk about one show in particular, and do you remember Columbo. Alexandrina remembers Columbo's slouchy posture, which she imitated as we spoke. She remembers his cigar and his clothes, which she wondered why he never changed. She remembers his French roadster and his love of dogs, and that all the murderers were wealthy.
00:29:20
Speaker 14: She remembers also like that the mystery and the best part of the action was actually happening in the first minutes, because after that you are knowing what happened.
00:29:31
Speaker 2: She also remembers when the show aired Saturday nights, she recalled that it was an event, the thing to do, and she wasn't the only one who told me so.
00:29:41
Speaker 12: It was a national phenomenon. She t were empty.
00:29:45
Speaker 2: You want to hear a Nym Latham again.
00:29:47
Speaker 12: Everybody made the plan to be there and to see installment after installment. It was enormously successful.
00:29:54
Speaker 2: Enormously Colombo was so popular it would air again on Sundays, and it wasn't the only show that cleared the streets in Bucharest.
00:30:03
Speaker 8: Loves Your Baby, You're Beautiful.
00:30:07
Speaker 2: Kojak, the cop drama starring Tali Savala, the premiered in America in nineteen seventy three, was also a hit with Romanians in the mid nineteen seventies. The bald headed Kojak with as debonair as Colombo was disheveled and he sucked on a lollipop instead of a cigar.
00:30:23
Speaker 8: Wait, what's with the lollipops? I'm looking to close the generation gap get.
00:30:28
Speaker 12: Out of here or Jack because he was having this lollipop. They created lollipops in Romania that they were selling in the seas vendors with Kojak. They call them Kojack by the Kojack.
00:30:44
Speaker 2: Kojak also kicked off a craze for American style coffee mugs and thin cigarettes. It was a sensation, such a sensation that there are American diplomatic cables about it too.
00:30:59
Speaker 3: March nineteen seventy five, US Berlin to AM Embassy Bucharest subject Telly Sabalis film clip for Romanian TV.
00:31:10
Speaker 2: A little less than a year after the Peter Falk incident, the US Diplomatic Corps had apparently asked Telly Savalas to do the exact same thing. The Savalas filmed in West Berlin, not Los Angeles. Someone at the embassy in Bucharest at the time must have looked at the popularity of both of these shows and seen an opportunity to do their job to bring the countries closer together. But who exactly? I thought I had an idea, So at this point I was pretty confident the incident I was investigating had taken place. I also had a solid handle on motive on why the message had been made and what the US and Romania both stood to gain. But I still didn't know the method. The cables didn't get into the nitty gritty of how the message was filmed, and FALKS version seemed a little over the top. I wanted to find someone who could tell me what had gone down, not give me the dramatic late night TV version, but the real thing. The cables offered up an obvious place to begin. At the bottom of the ones coming out of Bucharest, there was the same name over and over again.
00:32:32
Speaker 3: Please advise if film possible and if developed, film can be here in time for May fifteen program. Post strongly concurs TV request.
00:32:42
Speaker 2: Barnes Barnes was the sign off of Harry Barnes, the American ambassador to Romania from nineteen seventy three to seventy seven. He'd done a previous three year stint in the country and spoke Romanian so fluently he acted as Nixon's translator, rare for an ambassador. In an interview, he recalled of this time, I got the sense in Washington that we ought to keep looking for opportunities to suggest collaborative activities with the Romanians. Maybe he looked at Colombo and Kojak and thought they could be one of those activities. Harry Barnes died in twenty twelve, though, so I got in touch with his son, Doug. I asked him about an infamous incident in which Romania Securitate bugged the soul of his father's shoe.
00:33:26
Speaker 8: My sister just went did a trip to DC and went to the Spy Museum and sent us all pictures of the shoe, which is on display there.
00:33:34
Speaker 2: Doug had never heard anything about the Peter Fox segment or the Teleisavalis one either, but he'd become a Foreign Service officer himself, and in this capacity he told me something important. An ambassador's name is on every single cable that leaves an embassy, as a matter of course, every.
00:33:51
Speaker 1: Single telegram as long as he's in the country.
00:33:54
Speaker 2: So though Barnes could have written these cables, they also could have been authored by nearly anyone at the embassy. I asked Doug if you could think of anyone else who might remember anything about this, and a couple of calls later I reached a man named Richard Gilbert.
00:34:08
Speaker 8: I was posted the US Embassy in Bucharest as the cultural Adashe Richard.
00:34:15
Speaker 2: Was there from nineteen seventy two to seventy six. When I first spoke with him on the phone, he told me he remembered Colombo's popularity, and we arranged a zoom call where it turned out he remembered more.
00:34:26
Speaker 8: I do remember him giving his little spiel I would call it.
00:34:30
Speaker 2: Like other members of the foreign service. Richard lived in an apartment in Bucharest furnished by the State Department but provided by the Romanians, and one Sunday night in nineteen seventy four he and his family turned on the TV to watch Colombo.
00:34:45
Speaker 8: Quite a coup for the Romanians because they got Peter Falk to say all these positive things about what essentially it was rather despotic communist government in Eastern Europe.
00:34:58
Speaker 2: Richard doesn't remember much more about it besides part of it being delivered and stilted Romanian.
00:35:04
Speaker 8: We didn't usually tune in, but we watched this one, certainly because it was so unusual. Do you think you.
00:35:10
Speaker 2: Knew it was coming and that's why you had tuned in?
00:35:12
Speaker 8: I suspect I must have. That's why I happened to be watching it. I'm not sure how we knew what we did.
00:35:18
Speaker 2: Know in your experience or just acknowledge this is this like kind of thing common.
00:35:26
Speaker 8: I mean, my guest would be definitely not common. I can't imagine such a thing. I just find a little head scratching how they made contact with Peter fall in the first place.
00:35:39
Speaker 2: I got off this call feeling optimistic. I still didn't know the method, but I was making progress. Sure it had taken some legwork to find Richard, but I could do more legwork. I was a detective. I honed in on the embassy in Bucharest in nineteen seventy four, tracking down any name mentioned in the cables and scouring old Foreign Service telephone directories. I got the American Foreign Service Association to ask it's sixteen thousand members if anyone recalled anything about it. On a lark, I emailed the press officer of Henry Kissinger, who was Secretary of State at the time, to see if Kissinger remembered anything himself. He did not, but I was confident someone would know something if I just kept making phone calls.
00:36:26
Speaker 6: My name is Willa Paskin.
00:36:27
Speaker 2: I'm I make a podcast for the website slate. This is going to be very convoluted, and I'm just gonna babble it a couple messages, So I'm sorry to keep calling just about everyone I reached suggested someone else. I'm in the middle of sort of obsessively reporting out this story. And as I said, it's a little bit sanyou who suggested someone else to basically film Oh oh hi, sorry, this is Willa again. I'll keep it much shorter. All told, I communicated directly with over twenty people who'd been at the embassy in Bucharest around nineteen seventy four, but my optimism had been premature.
00:37:12
Speaker 6: Listen, I don't want you to waste your time with me because because I have no memory whatsoever of either of those things.
00:37:24
Speaker 3: I don't remember anything about that incident.
00:37:27
Speaker 10: I'd love to read more about it, but you're just heaving a blank with me.
00:37:31
Speaker 6: I'm sorry.
00:37:31
Speaker 2: No luck, No one recalled it like no one. It didn't even ring a bell.
00:37:39
Speaker 12: No one thinks it's real. Not one person who was at the embassy at the time remembers it.
00:37:44
Speaker 6: It just seems so unlikely.
00:37:47
Speaker 2: I'd begun all of this thinking that Peter Fox story sounded a little exaggerated and wanting to figure out what had really happened and why and how and what Peter Fox had really said. I'd read diplomatic cables and gotten a crash course in Romanian history, I learned Romanian slang for a lollipop, and yamred into more voicemail boxes than I could count. And from all of this I had gotten the sense that these messages would have been a big deal. Peter Falkshore said so, but so did the cables. They described Falk's message as a minor sensation seen by ten million Romanians. Twelve million had watched the message with Telly Savalis. Moreover, all, the people I'd spoken with to this point had told me this would have been an unusual and creative undertaking for any diplomat involved. So why couldn't I find anyone who remembered it? I mean, besides Richard Gilbert.
00:38:48
Speaker 8: I do remember when Peter Falk gave this introduction, But as.
00:38:54
Speaker 2: It would turn out months later, when I finally figured out what really happened with Peter Falk's message, Richard Gilbert would still be the one and only person whoever recalled seeing it. If a message gets made for television and no no one remembers seeing it. Did it actually happen? I was back where I started. Next week Ondacodering. We get some answers, but not before a whole lot more questions. There's a couple of loose ends I'd like to tie up.
00:39:28
Speaker 7: Nothing important, you understand, but I would.
00:39:31
Speaker 8: Like to get him tied up.
00:39:39
Speaker 2: This is decoder Ring. I'm willib Haskin. You can find me on Twitter at willib Haskin. And you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decoder Ring at slate dot com. This podcast was written by me Willip Haskin. I produced a coder Ring with Katie Shepherd. This episode was edited by Joel Meyer. Derek John is Slate's executive producer of Narrative Podcasts. Merrick Jacob is Senior technical director. I want to give in a special thank you to Andrada loud Tauru, who translated in worked with me from Romania. I'd also like to thank Carol and Joel Levy, Jonathan Ricker, Alan and Rii Fernandez, Katie Koob, Felix Renschler, Richard Viatz, Jock Shirley Gabriel Roth, Cameron Gorman, Tory Bosch, Delia Marinescu, David Koenig, Don Giller, Boris Backnerkrina Popa, David Langbart, William Burr, Asger Sigwitzen, John Frankensteiner, Tom Hobin, and everyone else who helped with this episode. For my research into Romanian television, I relied heavily on the scholarly work of Dana Mustada, Alexandre Mattai and Maurice Aresco Marinkovich, and the Screening Socialism Project from the University of Lofbrow. I also relied on the work of Dennis Deletante and Timothy w Ryeback's Rock Around the Block, a history of rock music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. You also heard a song in this episode from the Romanian rock band Phoenix. If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feet on Spot, to fid, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Even better, tell your friends. If you're a fan of the show, I'd love for you to sign up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get to listen to Decodering without any ads. Their support is also crucial to our work, so please Go to slate dot com slash Decoder Plus to join Slate Plus today. We'll see you next week.
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey everyone, it's been this week. We're excited to share a new show with you from our friends at Dakota Ring, Slate's podcast about cracking cultural mysteries, hosted by Willa Paskin. This year, they're back, and I say this as a member of a team making a different narrative, historical podcast. They are back on an impressively regular schedule. They're now going to be putting out new episodes over at Slate every two weeks all year long. And today we're bringing you an episode of THEIRS that we love. It's called The Curious Case of Columbo's Message to Romania, Part one, and in it you can follow Willa as she investigates an old clip that resurfaced and went viral last year of Peter falk On David Letterman, in which he told an intriguing tale about recording a special Cold War message for Romanian state television. In this episode, you'll find out if the tale was actually try true and if a fictional American detective really did help quell a communist revolt. It's an honest to goodness Cold War caper about American soft power behind the Iron Curtain. They go so deep that in the process of listening to this episode, I heard Paskin tell a story that exactly intersects with the story my grandma always tells about the time she was living in Romania and the band Blood, Sweat and Tears came to town. It's involved so involved that it takes two episodes to solve. So if you enjoyed this episode, you're gonna want to head over to the Dakota Ring Feed to download part two of this show and subscribe. Now here's the episode and host Willa Paskin.
00:01:56
Speaker 2: A couple of months ago, I found myself watching an old interview from The Late Show with David Letterman.
00:02:01
Speaker 3: Ladies and gentlemen, this is his first time with us.
00:02:03
Speaker 4: Please welcome Peter falk Peter.
00:02:08
Speaker 2: As the actor Peter Faulk loped onto the stage, his gray hair standing out against his black leather jacket. The audience greeted him with a roar.
00:02:19
Speaker 3: They love you. How must make you feel very, very nice nice.
00:02:27
Speaker 2: By this point in his career, Fok had played almost one hundred different roles, but he was beloved for one in particular.
00:02:34
Speaker 5: Oh I'm just another cop.
00:02:35
Speaker 6: My name is Colombo.
00:02:36
Speaker 2: I'm a lieutenant Lieutenant Colombo, who has no first name, was the star of the smashed detective series Colombo, which aired on and off for thirty years beginning in the nineteen seventies. In every episode, the brilliant yet unassuming Colombo doggedly pursued high class murderers while wearing a scruffy brown raincoat, chomping on a cigar, and absent mindedly mentioning his wife.
00:03:00
Speaker 7: I'm the worst cook in the world, but there's one thing I do terrific, and that's an omlet.
00:03:06
Speaker 2: Even my wife admits it. And just when his investigations seem to have hit a dead end, he'd circle back to ask.
00:03:13
Speaker 7: Oh, listen, just one more thing, one more thing, sir.
00:03:18
Speaker 4: I'll listen one more thing.
00:03:19
Speaker 3: It just take a second.
00:03:21
Speaker 2: The show also had a very particular structure.
00:03:25
Speaker 7: Well, in a matter of speaking, this isn't really a who've done it?
00:03:28
Speaker 4: It's more of a how we did it.
00:03:32
Speaker 2: Each episode begins with the murder. The audience sees the crime, sees who the killer is and how they kill before Colombo even appears on screen. Then the audience gets to watch Colombo engage in a battle of wits with the murderer who underestimates the schlumpy lieutenant until it's too late. You're very lucky, lieutenant. No congratulations, you're very smart. The pleasure of the show isn't nerve racking suspense. It's the satisfaction of watching Colombo unraveled the mystery, a satisfaction that has helped make the show a hit all over the world.
00:04:18
Speaker 7: It's very, very popular in Romania.
00:04:21
Speaker 2: In Romania, this is fulk on Letterman again. He's sitting in one of those big late night armchairs and he takes a sip from a coffee mug and launches into a story.
00:04:31
Speaker 7: As a matter of fact, about ten years ago, I got a call from the State Deplotment and a guy called me up and he says, we've got a problem in Romania. Maybe you can help us.
00:04:40
Speaker 2: Falk was chatting with Letterman in March of nineteen ninety five. Ten years prior was during the Cold War, when Romania was under the control of a particularly cruel and autocratic communist dictator. Falk tells Letterman he was asked to meet two men from the State Department and one from the Romanian embassy, maybe even the ambassador himself, at a hotel room in Los Angeles. There they explained that the Romanian government had aired every episode of Colombo available.
00:05:09
Speaker 7: Okay, so what's the problem, he said, the problem is that the people don't believe the government.
00:05:16
Speaker 2: They told Falk that the Romanian people were clamoring for more Colombo and they believed the communist government had it, that they were sitting on a pile of fresh episodes, keeping those episodes from them, the way it withheld so many other things. And they were mad. And Romanian officials were worried.
00:05:38
Speaker 7: So what do you want me to do? He said, We got a camera here, would you talk to the people? We got phonetic Romanian here, And I gotta tell the people. I gotta tell the people put down your guns.
00:05:54
Speaker 3: They were arming themselves over this.
00:05:58
Speaker 6: God was that severe?
00:05:59
Speaker 8: Yes, I guess, So why would they Romania?
00:06:04
Speaker 2: Fucking letterman bantered a bit more, and the letterman seemed ready to move on.
00:06:08
Speaker 7: That's good.
00:06:10
Speaker 9: We want to get a story.
00:06:11
Speaker 8: It's an excellent story.
00:06:14
Speaker 2: And it is an excellent story, But listening to it, I couldn't help wondering, is it true? This is decodering. I'm Willie Paskin. When I first saw Peter Fox interview with David Letterman after it went viral not so long ago. I had to know more. Did Colombo and Romania really have a special relationship? Could a fictional American detective really have helped calm a communist revolt? Had fuck actually recorded this message? And if so, why and how? Was this whole story too good to be true? I couldn't find the recording in any of the usual easy places, so I donned the proverbial raincoat and started sleuthing, at which point Fox Late Night anecdote cracked open into an intricate geopolitical saga that stretches from DC to Bucharest, from a Los Angeles hotel room to the palatial estate of a despot. It's a story that involves dueling ideologies, dozens of diplomats, and millions of viewers. It's an honest to goodness cold war caper about American soft power behind the Iron Curtain, and it's so involved it's going to take us two episodes to solve. So today on Decoder Ring, the first half of a very cold case. Did Peter fox appearance on Romanian television actually happen? So let's go with this whole I'm a detective thing for a minute. I wanted to start with the basics. What was the deal with Colombo? Anyway? You know Colombo, You're almost likable in a shabby sort of way.
00:08:29
Speaker 3: Maybe it's the way it.
00:08:30
Speaker 10: Comes, slouching in here with your shop onorn bag of tricks.
00:08:35
Speaker 9: Me tricks.
00:08:39
Speaker 2: Peter Falk was born in nineteen twenty seven to Jewish parents who were themselves the children of Eastern European immigrants. At just three, he had his cancerous right eye removed, and he wore a prosthetic from then on, one that gave him a perpetual squint.
00:08:53
Speaker 7: The key to it is when you realize you can get a laugh with it.
00:08:56
Speaker 2: This is fulk leader in life talking to the hosts of the view.
00:09:00
Speaker 7: By the time I was in high school, that's a true story. I was playing baseball.
00:09:05
Speaker 4: The umpire called me out. Was a bad call.
00:09:07
Speaker 7: Everybody saw it, and I whipped out the eye and I handed it to the upput I said, try this one.
00:09:19
Speaker 2: Falk broke out in nineteen sixty in an Academy Award nominated dramatic role as a bloodthirsty gangster. But he could always do comedy. He has that unique lackadaisical comic timing, the way he can't be rushed, the way he moses through his sentences and comes back around when you least expect it. You know, exactly the comic timing of Colombo.
00:09:42
Speaker 10: He has many of the same idiosyncratic characteristics of the cop. He's rather sloppy, he's forgetful.
00:09:50
Speaker 2: William Link was the co creator of Colombo, and he's heard here giving an oral history to the Television Academy.
00:09:56
Speaker 10: But in his acting he's obsessed. I mean, he's really dead onto it in a very humble, self effacing kind of way. Falk, so he had that to draw on, that whole well of personality quirks to bring.
00:10:15
Speaker 1: To that cop.
00:10:17
Speaker 2: When Falk was cast as Colombo, the character had actually been kicking around for a while, appearing in a stage play and a TV movie, but as soon as Falk got the role, he made it his own. Colombo's signature brown raincoat even came from Falk's own closet. Falk and the Raincoat debuted as Colombo in the nineteen sixty eight NBC TV movie Prescription Murder, about a psychiatrist trying to get away with killing his wife columbu.
00:10:44
Speaker 5: You are a magnificent you really are. Well, what makes you say that, don You're the most persistent creature I've ever met.
00:10:52
Speaker 2: An eleven year old named Mark Dewiziak was watching.
00:10:56
Speaker 4: I was just getting into mysteries, and my idea of mystery was that, well, you follow the detective, you follow Sheerla Holmes, you follow the clues, and eventually you reach the point where the detective says and the murderer is starts with you knowing who the murderer is.
00:11:12
Speaker 2: Mark is talking about Columbo's structure. Again. Unlike most mysteries, Columbo unfolds in chronological order. The details of the murder are right there at the beginning of the story instead of being saved for the climactic end.
00:11:27
Speaker 4: So to an eleven year old, that just took the top of my head off.
00:11:31
Speaker 2: Mark liked what he saw so much that when he grew up he became a TV critic and the author of the Columbo File Spelled Phil e a book about the series. But as a kid, he'd have to wait to see more of it. Prescription Murder was just a one off a TV movie. It wasn't until three years later that NBC decided to turn Colombo into a regular event, and even then they couldn't make it weekly. Fall had a movie career to think about, So what do we do.
00:12:00
Speaker 4: That's where they had come up with the whole idea of the mystery movie. It's not gonna wear every week. It's gonna air every four weeks. It'll rotate with three other detective characters. We don't have to do twenty two episodes. We can do seven or eight episodes a year.
00:12:15
Speaker 2: Columbo premiered in September of nineteen seventy one on a Wednesday night.
00:12:20
Speaker 7: I kind of know it right from the start. There's nothing definite. There's a lot of little things, little things.
00:12:28
Speaker 2: The episode was directed by a very young Steven Spielberg. Immediately it was a smash, a water cooler show that people were talking about. Audiences watched in droves.
00:12:40
Speaker 7: Well it it's terrific to waymen.
00:12:44
Speaker 2: It won Emmys.
00:12:45
Speaker 7: I'm trying to figure out some way to work here.
00:12:47
Speaker 2: Mumblem Falk became the highest paid TV actor in Hollywood. Celebrities lined up to play murderers. Bade Dunaway, Dick Van Dyke, and Johnny Cash all played killers on the show. William Shatner did it twice simultaneously. Universal, the entertainment company that owned and distributed Colombo, began to license the show around the world. As Johnny Carson noted to Peter Falk in nineteen seventy three.
00:13:15
Speaker 4: And your show is in Japan and a lot of the foreign countries. Have you ever seen it in the Japanese or anything?
00:13:19
Speaker 2: I've never seen it?
00:13:20
Speaker 7: In another song.
00:13:21
Speaker 2: The series would ultimately air in over forty countries, and Falk would come to revel in stories of its global success. There was one about the Italian director Federico Felini leaving dinner parties early to watch Colombo. One about the Emperor of Japan asking if Colombo could meet him at the White House. One about Falk being recognized while filming movies high up in the Andes Mountains and on the bombed out streets of West Berlin. Mark Dewoodziak heard all of these anecdotes from Falk firsthand when he was writing his book.
00:13:53
Speaker 4: Peter loved telling stories, and Peter loved telling his favorite stories. He got so tickled. His favorite story was Romania.
00:14:01
Speaker 2: Romania sits on the eastern edge of Europe, bordered by five different countries and the Black Sea. It is a population of around nineteen million, most of whom speak Romanian, a Romance language similar to Italian. The most famous Romanians outside of Romania are the absurdist playwright Eugenie and Esco, the gold medal winning gymnast Nadia Comanici, and Dracula. Transylvania is now a part of Romania. Mark dewidziax has Falk told him his Romania story during their very first sit down around nineteen eighty six.
00:14:35
Speaker 4: I did the interview in his art studio, which is actually his garage at his Beverly Hills house he had converted into a sort of an art studio man cave. This is what was said to me that night. He said, the Romanian government called the American ambassador and they had.
00:14:50
Speaker 2: It's similar to the vision Falk told on Letterman.
00:14:54
Speaker 4: So I end up in a hotel room at one in.
00:14:56
Speaker 2: The morning, though not identical.
00:14:58
Speaker 4: They've got a camera set up and I'm speaking Romanian phonetically, and I say put down your guns, be patient. Your government is not responsible if your stories were truthful, But were they embellished? Was it one in the morning?
00:15:14
Speaker 3: Is I don't know.
00:15:17
Speaker 2: What stands out as embellished to me. Isn't the time of night it happened, though it changes. Where it happened though, the hotel changes, or who was there when it happened, though, that changes too. That's how dramatic the whole thing was. It's hard to believe Romanians were really up in arms about Colombo. But let's imagine for a minute they were. Why would Peter Falk be telling them to stand down? Wasn't this the Cold War? In his two thousand and six memoir Just One More Thing, Falk tells an even more detailed version of the story. In it, he says the Romanian ambassador himself asked Falk to say on film about the Romanian communist regime, I'm here to tell you that you should trust your government. It tells you the truth. Believe me when I say that. And then, though writes that after some initial hesitation, but with US State Department officials in the room, he did. It's all so preposterous and far fetched, it's hard to believe. If not for the next clue, We'll be right back. I mentioned earlier that Peter Fox interview with David Letterman went viral. It did that back in June of twenty twenty one thanks to Radu Tikinash.
00:16:51
Speaker 11: Like many other Romanians, I did grow up watching a lot of Colombo when why was a big Colombo fan?
00:16:57
Speaker 2: Radu grew up watching the show in Romania during the nineteen nineties, but during the pandemic at home in Bucharest, Romania's capital, he found himself watching the show again. He wasn't alone in this lockdown turned the cozy, well crafted Colombo into a sleeper hit. He wanted to learn more about the show, and so we started poking around online.
00:17:17
Speaker 11: There's basically three or four videos about Colombo on YouTube as far as I could see.
00:17:22
Speaker 2: Radu is a freelance writer and video editor, so we decided to make a Colombo video of his own. He wanted to explore an unsourced anecdote he'd read years earlier about how Peter Falk had once taped a PSA to quell riots in Romania.
00:17:38
Speaker 11: Let's do a quick five minute video on this weird story about Peter Falk apparently stopping the revolution fifteen years before it actually happened, or some weird stuff like that.
00:17:51
Speaker 2: So Radu started to look into the story. In earnest he came across a mention of Peter Falk's David Letterman interview, which Radu to that point had never heard about litt alone scene, but it was nowhere online until Radu emailed a Letterman fan, an unofficial archivist, who sent it to him.
00:18:08
Speaker 3: For over twenty years, our first guest has starred as the beloved Lieutenant Columbo. He now has.
00:18:13
Speaker 2: Rado found something else too, an article about Fox story with a WikiLeaks link in it. WikiLeaks is the giant cash of various government documents that went online in two thousand and seven, and this particular link was to an American cable itself unclassified.
00:18:29
Speaker 11: And then I had the idea of like, hey, maybe there's more. Let's give a quick search. And then I searched for piece Falk, I searched for Colombo. I searched forty threns individually.
00:18:41
Speaker 2: And low and behold.
00:18:44
Speaker 3: American Embassy Bucharest to Usia Washington.
00:18:47
Speaker 6: D C.
00:18:48
Speaker 2: Between April and June of nineteen seventy four, eight official diplomatic cables were sent between the American Embassy in Bucharest and Washington, d C.
00:18:58
Speaker 3: About Peter Falk Romanian TV requests a short two to three minute optical sixteen millimeters sound film clip of star Peter Falk.
00:19:08
Speaker 2: The back and forth corroborates a number of things about Falk's story. For one, the US government really did reach out to him.
00:19:17
Speaker 3: FUK willing to make Colombo closing.
00:19:19
Speaker 2: For another, Romania really had run out of Colombo episodes.
00:19:25
Speaker 3: Romanian TV says it aware that Colombo's still in production, but notes that it has run all episodes received thus far and must fill space on weekly basis.
00:19:36
Speaker 2: But the cables do not substantiate many of Fox's details. There's no mention of armed or incensed Romanians, no midnight meetings, no Romanian ambassadors present, and no communists insisting Falk tell people to trust them.
00:19:53
Speaker 3: Text falk interview is as followers, Oh, excuse me, do you have a minute? I'm Lieutenant Colombo. Sometimes I'm known as Peter Fawk.
00:20:04
Speaker 2: In fact, the transcript included in the cables relaying what Falk apparently said is tame.
00:20:11
Speaker 3: We would like to thank Romanian Television for having put us on the air on Saturdays and Sundays, but most of all, all of us, myself and the crew and the other actors we want to thank the Romanian people for their great response to our show.
00:20:25
Speaker 2: But according to the cables, even this generic greeting was a big deal.
00:20:30
Speaker 3: Judging from comments of embassy, Foreign service locals and other Romanians. Fox greetings and his use of Romanian language tagline created minor sensation here.
00:20:43
Speaker 2: The last cable sent back after the message aired says that Romanian television reported ten million people watched it. That was about half the population at the time. Why would Romania have wanted an American star like Peter Falk reaching half of its population?
00:21:03
Speaker 11: Seems weird for one Romania than the Communist Party to do such a thing without any ulterior motive, And it would also seem weird for Peter Falk or the American State Department to give in to such a request without getting something in return.
00:21:23
Speaker 2: Weird, is right. What was the nature of Romania and America's relationship that they would be working together on something like this. I had to know more about Romania, so as a detective, sometimes you need to learn some history. At the end of World War Two, Europe was carved up by the victorious Allied Powers into spheres of influence. The Soviet Union's authority extended to eight nations that would become satellite states known as the Eastern Bloc.
00:21:59
Speaker 5: It is necessary to remember that these are all separate countries, but the fact that each is Communist and the fact of their physical proximity to each other enable us to consider them as a unit.
00:22:14
Speaker 2: Romania was a part of this unit. In nineteen forty four, the Soviets directly occupied the country and would remain for more than a decade.
00:22:22
Speaker 12: I am old enough Fiucia I was born in forty seven to have gone through some of these phases of the communist takeover.
00:22:31
Speaker 2: Yoanna Ieronim Latham is a Romanian poet, playwright, and author. At the time she was born, Romania was in the midst of massive social and political upheaval as Communism was enforced on the country. The mostly agrarian nation was collectivized. A secret police called the Securitate was established, and purges and mass arrests were common.
00:22:53
Speaker 12: It was horrible in the fifties. Political prisons were full, people disappeared from home.
00:22:58
Speaker 2: In nineteen fifty eight, Soviet troops began to pull out of the country. It remained communist, but by the early nineteen sixties things felt different.
00:23:06
Speaker 12: I was still a school girl, and I remember you could almost feel it in the air that it was a change. It was exactly twenty years after our having been taken over, and it became more relaxed.
00:23:20
Speaker 2: This period is known as a saw and as part of the warming news dance carried Western papers, Romanian rock and roll bands started to appear, and foreign films and series aired on television.
00:23:33
Speaker 5: It's very simple. I don't like being a cog in the machine.
00:23:36
Speaker 7: Being one of the millions of ants that deva the Dragon is all very noble.
00:23:40
Speaker 2: The spy show of the Saint, starring the future James Bond Roger Moore, became Appointment TV on Saturday nights, airing thanks to an agreement between Romanian state Television TVR and the BBC to license shows cheaply. Also during the nineteen sixties, programming increased to about eight and a half hours a day, the number of people with televisions rose tenfold, A second channel was added and Romania got a new leader, Chipitri de.
00:24:10
Speaker 7: Base Alim Bunetesei.
00:24:14
Speaker 2: Nikolai Chauchescu was a longtime member of the Communist Party who became General secretary in nineteen sixty five, and then president in sixty seven. Around this time, a British student named Dennis Deletante began studying at a Bucharest university where he is housed with three Americans.
00:24:30
Speaker 9: Every week, the security Tante, the secret police would come to our rooms and rummaged through our belongings and leave very clear evidence that they had been in our rooms.
00:24:42
Speaker 2: Dennis went on to become a scholar of Romania at University College London and the author of dozens of books about the country, and he's now a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Institute. He says that this was a time of great change.
00:24:55
Speaker 9: Romanians were not seeking to break away from Soviet influence, but they were seeking a certain amount of autonomy.
00:25:02
Speaker 2: This was telegraphed to the world in nineteen sixty eight. That year, the Soviet Union sent tanks into a liberalizing chechioslov Vaka to clamp down on mass protests known as the Prague Spring, but Romania refused to support the Soviet action. Choichescu even denounced the invasion in a famous speech.
00:25:24
Speaker 9: This was an act of defiance. The West did not forget.
00:25:30
Speaker 2: Richard Nixon in particular, took notice as president, he pursued a policy called differentiation, picking out the communist countries that seemed most susceptible to Western influence.
00:25:43
Speaker 9: President Nixon and his advisors were aware of Chocescu's desire to have closer contacts within the United States.
00:25:51
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty nine, Nixon visited Romania.
00:25:55
Speaker 13: This is an historic occasion.
00:25:57
Speaker 2: It was his second visit in as many years. Both times, Cheuchescu was savvy enough to welcome Nixon with much respect.
00:26:05
Speaker 13: Wow, this is not my first visit to your country. It is the first visit of a president of the United States to Romania, the first state visit by an American president to a socialist country or of this region of the continent of Europe.
00:26:23
Speaker 2: Chochesca would in turn visit America three times. He'd be knighted by the Queen of England and appear on the cover of Time magazine as the face of a relaxed communism. Romania would join the IMF, open a Pepsi Cola factory, and be granted Most Favored Nation trading status by the United States. All of this solidified Chouchescu's reputation as a maverick communist leader that word Maverick was used a lot in the press, and one that the US wanted to pull closer with trade and with culture. The State Department arranged visits by the Astronauts and a concert tour by the rock band Blood, Sweat and Tears, all while turning something of a blind eye to chaw Chesscu's domestic policies.
00:27:06
Speaker 9: I think there is this great paradox with Josh so the paradox of his we might say, very inventive, ambitious foreign policy and the repression, the internal repression.
00:27:21
Speaker 2: This paradox was already on display by the early nineteen seventies. Birth control and abortion had already been banned to boost the population. The Securitate acted with impunity, and Chaouchescu announced that all cultural output needed to be ideological and nationalistic, ultimately putting an end to the thaw. But at the same time, Chauchescu's foreign policy, with its focus on international trade, was boosting material living conditions for regular Romanians and still allowing for some cultural exchange, including of television shows.
00:27:59
Speaker 1: You Just Want to.
00:28:00
Speaker 3: Tell Me Your Name?
00:28:02
Speaker 2: Alexandri Nakica Alexandrina was in high school in the nineteen seventies living in the same apartment in Bucharest from which she spoke with me a few months ago with the help of a translator.
00:28:13
Speaker 4: So she said that.
00:28:14
Speaker 14: In the seventies they were having streaming from seven point thirty in the evening until around midnight.
00:28:23
Speaker 2: In this.
00:28:25
Speaker 14: Good Life. In this seventies, comparison with the previous years.
00:28:30
Speaker 2: Most of what was on TV was dull, ideological and political long speeches and footage of Chaouchescu and his wife Elena visiting farms and opening factories. But this only made the foreign shows, which included Bewitched, The Untouchables and Lost in Space stand out more. Alexandrina particularly remembers Tom and Jerry, Popeye, Charlie Chaplin movies, and especially the oil gushing soap opera Dallas. But of course I'd called her to talk about one show in particular, and do you remember Columbo. Alexandrina remembers Columbo's slouchy posture, which she imitated as we spoke. She remembers his cigar and his clothes, which she wondered why he never changed. She remembers his French roadster and his love of dogs, and that all the murderers were wealthy.
00:29:20
Speaker 14: She remembers also like that the mystery and the best part of the action was actually happening in the first minutes, because after that you are knowing what happened.
00:29:31
Speaker 2: She also remembers when the show aired Saturday nights, she recalled that it was an event, the thing to do, and she wasn't the only one who told me so.
00:29:41
Speaker 12: It was a national phenomenon. She t were empty.
00:29:45
Speaker 2: You want to hear a Nym Latham again.
00:29:47
Speaker 12: Everybody made the plan to be there and to see installment after installment. It was enormously successful.
00:29:54
Speaker 2: Enormously Colombo was so popular it would air again on Sundays, and it wasn't the only show that cleared the streets in Bucharest.
00:30:03
Speaker 8: Loves Your Baby, You're Beautiful.
00:30:07
Speaker 2: Kojak, the cop drama starring Tali Savala, the premiered in America in nineteen seventy three, was also a hit with Romanians in the mid nineteen seventies. The bald headed Kojak with as debonair as Colombo was disheveled and he sucked on a lollipop instead of a cigar.
00:30:23
Speaker 8: Wait, what's with the lollipops? I'm looking to close the generation gap get.
00:30:28
Speaker 12: Out of here or Jack because he was having this lollipop. They created lollipops in Romania that they were selling in the seas vendors with Kojak. They call them Kojack by the Kojack.
00:30:44
Speaker 2: Kojak also kicked off a craze for American style coffee mugs and thin cigarettes. It was a sensation, such a sensation that there are American diplomatic cables about it too.
00:30:59
Speaker 3: March nineteen seventy five, US Berlin to AM Embassy Bucharest subject Telly Sabalis film clip for Romanian TV.
00:31:10
Speaker 2: A little less than a year after the Peter Falk incident, the US Diplomatic Corps had apparently asked Telly Savalas to do the exact same thing. The Savalas filmed in West Berlin, not Los Angeles. Someone at the embassy in Bucharest at the time must have looked at the popularity of both of these shows and seen an opportunity to do their job to bring the countries closer together. But who exactly? I thought I had an idea, So at this point I was pretty confident the incident I was investigating had taken place. I also had a solid handle on motive on why the message had been made and what the US and Romania both stood to gain. But I still didn't know the method. The cables didn't get into the nitty gritty of how the message was filmed, and FALKS version seemed a little over the top. I wanted to find someone who could tell me what had gone down, not give me the dramatic late night TV version, but the real thing. The cables offered up an obvious place to begin. At the bottom of the ones coming out of Bucharest, there was the same name over and over again.
00:32:32
Speaker 3: Please advise if film possible and if developed, film can be here in time for May fifteen program. Post strongly concurs TV request.
00:32:42
Speaker 2: Barnes Barnes was the sign off of Harry Barnes, the American ambassador to Romania from nineteen seventy three to seventy seven. He'd done a previous three year stint in the country and spoke Romanian so fluently he acted as Nixon's translator, rare for an ambassador. In an interview, he recalled of this time, I got the sense in Washington that we ought to keep looking for opportunities to suggest collaborative activities with the Romanians. Maybe he looked at Colombo and Kojak and thought they could be one of those activities. Harry Barnes died in twenty twelve, though, so I got in touch with his son, Doug. I asked him about an infamous incident in which Romania Securitate bugged the soul of his father's shoe.
00:33:26
Speaker 8: My sister just went did a trip to DC and went to the Spy Museum and sent us all pictures of the shoe, which is on display there.
00:33:34
Speaker 2: Doug had never heard anything about the Peter Fox segment or the Teleisavalis one either, but he'd become a Foreign Service officer himself, and in this capacity he told me something important. An ambassador's name is on every single cable that leaves an embassy, as a matter of course, every.
00:33:51
Speaker 1: Single telegram as long as he's in the country.
00:33:54
Speaker 2: So though Barnes could have written these cables, they also could have been authored by nearly anyone at the embassy. I asked Doug if you could think of anyone else who might remember anything about this, and a couple of calls later I reached a man named Richard Gilbert.
00:34:08
Speaker 8: I was posted the US Embassy in Bucharest as the cultural Adashe Richard.
00:34:15
Speaker 2: Was there from nineteen seventy two to seventy six. When I first spoke with him on the phone, he told me he remembered Colombo's popularity, and we arranged a zoom call where it turned out he remembered more.
00:34:26
Speaker 8: I do remember him giving his little spiel I would call it.
00:34:30
Speaker 2: Like other members of the foreign service. Richard lived in an apartment in Bucharest furnished by the State Department but provided by the Romanians, and one Sunday night in nineteen seventy four he and his family turned on the TV to watch Colombo.
00:34:45
Speaker 8: Quite a coup for the Romanians because they got Peter Falk to say all these positive things about what essentially it was rather despotic communist government in Eastern Europe.
00:34:58
Speaker 2: Richard doesn't remember much more about it besides part of it being delivered and stilted Romanian.
00:35:04
Speaker 8: We didn't usually tune in, but we watched this one, certainly because it was so unusual. Do you think you.
00:35:10
Speaker 2: Knew it was coming and that's why you had tuned in?
00:35:12
Speaker 8: I suspect I must have. That's why I happened to be watching it. I'm not sure how we knew what we did.
00:35:18
Speaker 2: Know in your experience or just acknowledge this is this like kind of thing common.
00:35:26
Speaker 8: I mean, my guest would be definitely not common. I can't imagine such a thing. I just find a little head scratching how they made contact with Peter fall in the first place.
00:35:39
Speaker 2: I got off this call feeling optimistic. I still didn't know the method, but I was making progress. Sure it had taken some legwork to find Richard, but I could do more legwork. I was a detective. I honed in on the embassy in Bucharest in nineteen seventy four, tracking down any name mentioned in the cables and scouring old Foreign Service telephone directories. I got the American Foreign Service Association to ask it's sixteen thousand members if anyone recalled anything about it. On a lark, I emailed the press officer of Henry Kissinger, who was Secretary of State at the time, to see if Kissinger remembered anything himself. He did not, but I was confident someone would know something if I just kept making phone calls.
00:36:26
Speaker 6: My name is Willa Paskin.
00:36:27
Speaker 2: I'm I make a podcast for the website slate. This is going to be very convoluted, and I'm just gonna babble it a couple messages, So I'm sorry to keep calling just about everyone I reached suggested someone else. I'm in the middle of sort of obsessively reporting out this story. And as I said, it's a little bit sanyou who suggested someone else to basically film Oh oh hi, sorry, this is Willa again. I'll keep it much shorter. All told, I communicated directly with over twenty people who'd been at the embassy in Bucharest around nineteen seventy four, but my optimism had been premature.
00:37:12
Speaker 6: Listen, I don't want you to waste your time with me because because I have no memory whatsoever of either of those things.
00:37:24
Speaker 3: I don't remember anything about that incident.
00:37:27
Speaker 10: I'd love to read more about it, but you're just heaving a blank with me.
00:37:31
Speaker 6: I'm sorry.
00:37:31
Speaker 2: No luck, No one recalled it like no one. It didn't even ring a bell.
00:37:39
Speaker 12: No one thinks it's real. Not one person who was at the embassy at the time remembers it.
00:37:44
Speaker 6: It just seems so unlikely.
00:37:47
Speaker 2: I'd begun all of this thinking that Peter Fox story sounded a little exaggerated and wanting to figure out what had really happened and why and how and what Peter Fox had really said. I'd read diplomatic cables and gotten a crash course in Romanian history, I learned Romanian slang for a lollipop, and yamred into more voicemail boxes than I could count. And from all of this I had gotten the sense that these messages would have been a big deal. Peter Falkshore said so, but so did the cables. They described Falk's message as a minor sensation seen by ten million Romanians. Twelve million had watched the message with Telly Savalis. Moreover, all, the people I'd spoken with to this point had told me this would have been an unusual and creative undertaking for any diplomat involved. So why couldn't I find anyone who remembered it? I mean, besides Richard Gilbert.
00:38:48
Speaker 8: I do remember when Peter Falk gave this introduction, But as.
00:38:54
Speaker 2: It would turn out months later, when I finally figured out what really happened with Peter Falk's message, Richard Gilbert would still be the one and only person whoever recalled seeing it. If a message gets made for television and no no one remembers seeing it. Did it actually happen? I was back where I started. Next week Ondacodering. We get some answers, but not before a whole lot more questions. There's a couple of loose ends I'd like to tie up.
00:39:28
Speaker 7: Nothing important, you understand, but I would.
00:39:31
Speaker 8: Like to get him tied up.
00:39:39
Speaker 2: This is decoder Ring. I'm willib Haskin. You can find me on Twitter at willib Haskin. And you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decoder Ring at slate dot com. This podcast was written by me Willip Haskin. I produced a coder Ring with Katie Shepherd. This episode was edited by Joel Meyer. Derek John is Slate's executive producer of Narrative Podcasts. Merrick Jacob is Senior technical director. I want to give in a special thank you to Andrada loud Tauru, who translated in worked with me from Romania. I'd also like to thank Carol and Joel Levy, Jonathan Ricker, Alan and Rii Fernandez, Katie Koob, Felix Renschler, Richard Viatz, Jock Shirley Gabriel Roth, Cameron Gorman, Tory Bosch, Delia Marinescu, David Koenig, Don Giller, Boris Backnerkrina Popa, David Langbart, William Burr, Asger Sigwitzen, John Frankensteiner, Tom Hobin, and everyone else who helped with this episode. For my research into Romanian television, I relied heavily on the scholarly work of Dana Mustada, Alexandre Mattai and Maurice Aresco Marinkovich, and the Screening Socialism Project from the University of Lofbrow. I also relied on the work of Dennis Deletante and Timothy w Ryeback's Rock Around the Block, a history of rock music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. You also heard a song in this episode from the Romanian rock band Phoenix. If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feet on Spot, to fid, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Even better, tell your friends. If you're a fan of the show, I'd love for you to sign up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get to listen to Decodering without any ads. Their support is also crucial to our work, so please Go to slate dot com slash Decoder Plus to join Slate Plus today. We'll see you next week.
