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0:48

Previously on Decoder Ring. Please

0:50

welcome Peter Falk. Peter!

0:53

Peter Falk, the star of Columbo, went on

0:55

David Letterman and told a wild

0:57

story. Oh, I got a call from the State Department.

1:00

We got a problem in Romania. Maybe you can

1:02

help us. The

1:04

problem was Romania had run out

1:06

of episodes of Columbo, and Romanians

1:08

were mad. So the State

1:11

Department drafted Peter Falk into

1:13

recording a soothing message.

1:15

I got to tell the people, put down your guns.

1:19

They were arming themselves over this? My

1:22

God!

1:24

This all sounded a little far-fetched to

1:26

me, but it turns out Columbo was very

1:28

popular in Romania. It

1:30

was a national phenomenon. And

1:32

there are U.S. diplomatic cables from 1974

1:36

that back Falk up.

1:37

Total estimated audience was 10

1:40

million. There are even cables

1:42

that show the U.S. government asked Heli

1:44

Savalas, the star of Kojak, to

1:47

do the exact same thing a year

1:49

later. Look, pussycat,

1:53

never, ever, ever talk to me like that.

1:56

But when we started looking for

1:58

anyone who had seen Falk's... message,

2:01

we slammed into a dead end. I

2:04

have no memory whatsoever.

2:08

I don't remember

2:08

anything about that incident. You're

2:10

just hitting a blank with me. I'm sorry.

2:13

If 10 million people watched Peter

2:15

Falk's message, I mean, if even a fraction

2:18

of those 10 million people watch Peter Falk's

2:20

message, we should be able to find

2:23

some of those people. Right?

2:33

This is Dakota Ring. I'm Willa Paskin.

2:36

Last week I pulled on the proverbial raincoat

2:39

to make like Columbo and try and figure

2:41

out if, why, and how Peter Falk's

2:43

message had been made. This week

2:45

I'm back at it. And what started out as

2:47

a zany inquiry is going to get a little more

2:50

serious. Part two of this caper

2:52

involves dubbers, propagandists, a

2:54

couple of 90-year-olds, and a lot more

2:57

legwork, but also the legacy

2:59

of a brutal dictatorship. It's

3:01

a story about celebrity, diplomacy,

3:04

memory, and the limitations of all three,

3:06

and about the power of television, not

3:09

to get Romanians to put down their

3:11

guns as Peter Falk would have it, but

3:13

to pick them up. So

3:16

today on Dakota Ring, if a message

3:18

gets made for television and no

3:20

one remembers it, did it actually

3:23

happen?

3:46

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4:25

So I want to start with the elephant in the room. Or,

4:28

you know, the missing film reel in the

4:30

archive. Do you remember what I said last

4:32

week? A detective needs luck. Obviously,

4:36

I really wanted to find it, just

4:38

like Columbo did in season 10, episode

4:41

one. Well, this case is a classic

4:43

example. I was in

4:45

the dark, and suddenly,

4:49

lady luck showed up. Because

4:51

out of the blue, that

4:52

15-second video tape showed

4:55

up on a television news program. And

4:57

for me, that turned

4:59

the whole case around. I

5:02

can't tell you how many times I wish something

5:04

like this would happen to me.

5:06

Do you think, like, they're, like, trying to

5:08

see if this tape exists in the archive

5:10

is, like, a total dead end in Romania? So

5:13

if you get lucky, someone

5:15

might just say, here, take this flashlight,

5:17

go down to the basement.

5:19

I talked about the odds of finding the message

5:21

early on in my reporting with Radu Tighinash,

5:23

the Romanian writer and video producer,

5:26

who surfaced a Letterman interview.

5:27

Look wherever you want, in

5:30

boxes and boxes of Indiana Jones

5:32

style, like, you know, endless shelves of,

5:34

like, movie reels that are

5:36

not labeled in any way if

5:39

the film had not been destroyed or degraded.

5:41

Romanian archival material is, in general,

5:44

hard to access. Very little has been digitized

5:46

for the public, and the state TV network,

5:48

TBR, had no system for organizing

5:51

its archives, and film stock was intentionally

5:54

repurposed and reused in the 1980s. So

5:57

I asked around, hoping things would

5:59

go like this.

5:59

like this. Was it the tape that led

6:02

you to the murder of Lieutenant? Once

6:04

I saw that, then the

6:06

whole thing fell into place. But

6:08

I had to accept that for this whole thing

6:10

to fall into place, I was going to have

6:12

to get my answers elsewhere.

6:16

So with the help of a Romanian journalist and

6:18

translator, we started reaching out to Romanians

6:21

of a certain age, expecting to find

6:23

someone who remembered the message. You

6:26

heard from some of them last week. I

6:28

also tried various archival institutions

6:30

and museums, the Romanian embassy

6:32

and the Romanian ambassador to America

6:34

at the time, or rather his children and his number

6:37

two. But the Romanian response

6:39

we got was similar to the American one. They

6:41

remembered Colombo. But no

6:44

one knew where the filmed message was, and

6:46

no

6:46

one recalled it.

6:49

I did learn something interesting when I started

6:51

looking for someone who worked at TVR,

6:53

the state TV network. It was

6:55

the story of how Colombo started airing

6:58

in Romania in the first place. I

7:01

read about it in an article from May of 1990, filed

7:04

on assignment from Bucharest, Romania's

7:06

capital. One of the people interviewed for the

7:08

piece was a longtime TVR employee

7:10

named Jan Ionell. According

7:13

to Ionell, in the early 1970s,

7:15

a police procedural called Mannix had

7:17

been airing on Saturday nights.

7:19

Mannix, Joe Mannix. Mannix

7:22

was a stylish drama about a Los Angeles

7:24

private eye created by the same duo

7:26

that made Colombo. But

7:28

then word came down from on high

7:30

that Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania's

7:33

leader, was personally sick and

7:35

tired of Mannix.

7:39

So Jan Ionell, the TVR employee,

7:41

was tasked with finding a replacement.

7:44

He described a trip to Munich, presumably

7:46

to a trade show for TV exports, where

7:48

he watched 11 shows over the course

7:50

of the week, including...

7:52

Lieutenant Colombo, police. Ionell

7:55

says his higher ups were skeptical about airing

7:57

Colombo because of all the murder. But

7:59

when Ceausescu...

7:59

Chasco reiterated that he wanted manics

8:02

off the air.

8:03

Columbo went on. And according to

8:05

EO now, Columbo didn't just become a

8:07

hit with the people.

8:09

He said Chasco himself liked

8:11

it so much that he had copies

8:13

of Columbo episodes made to take on

8:15

plane and train trips.

8:17

And you know what other show Chasco

8:19

did this with? What do you think you're talking

8:21

about? What do I think I'm talking about? Talk

8:25

about murder, dummy.

8:28

According to a number of close Chasco

8:30

observers, Kojak was also a

8:32

huge favorite of the dictator and

8:34

his wife Elena. After

8:37

reading all of this, I really wanted to speak

8:39

with Jan Iounel, the TDR employee

8:41

who'd selected Columbo if he was even

8:43

still alive. I added him to the

8:45

bottom of the long list of people I was trying

8:47

to get a hold of. And then I turned to the

8:49

top of my list. Up

8:52

there were a bunch of film producers I thought might've

8:54

had a hand in the FOC message, but

8:56

not ones who worked for Romania

8:58

or for a Hollywood studio.

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11:05

So at the end of the last episode, I hit a dead

11:07

end with the embassy in Bucharest, where the

11:09

cables about Peter Falk

11:11

originated. But what about

11:13

where the cables were sent? American

11:16

Embassy, Bucharest to USIA

11:18

Washington, DC.

11:20

USIA stands for the United States

11:23

Information Agency. It was created in 1953

11:26

during the Eisenhower administration, and

11:28

it was tasked with telling America's

11:30

story to the world. Today, the

11:32

United States is the leading power for

11:35

peace. USIA practiced

11:37

what it called public diplomacy,

11:39

out in the open communication with foreign

11:42

publics.

11:43

We must combat Soviet propaganda.

11:47

This is the job of the United

11:49

States Information Agency.

11:52

They had their own budget. They also had their own

11:54

director who had his own

11:57

relationship directly with the president.

11:59

is a professor at the University of Southern

12:02

California, where he teaches at the Annenberg

12:04

School, training diplomats. So, especially

12:06

in the early days, you would see USIA

12:09

directors sitting in on

12:12

cabinet meetings along with

12:14

the CIA, State

12:16

Department and the Defense Department.

12:19

Just about everyone I had spoken with at the embassy

12:21

in Bucharest had been USIA,

12:23

which was sometimes referred to as USIS.

12:26

USIS was sometimes called useless

12:30

by State Department people who were

12:32

very dismissive of it. I think secretly

12:34

the mainstream State people

12:36

were a little jealous because USIA

12:39

knew all the celebrities and

12:41

knew the artists in any one country.

12:44

USIA staffers knew celebrities

12:46

because they worked on cultural exchanges and

12:48

visits like the famous Jazz Ambassador

12:50

Program, which sent American musicians

12:52

on Goodwill tours around the globe.

12:54

One of the people who were

12:57

planning to use my friend Dizzy Gillespie,

12:59

who's the father of modern

13:02

jazz. What do you think about that, Dizzy? I

13:04

think it's a little nice. This is what

13:06

I might call a cool war. I

13:09

mean, a cool war.

13:10

USIA was also in charge of Voice of America,

13:12

the radio network broadcasting in multiple

13:15

languages all over the world that was

13:17

particularly important in Eastern Europe

13:19

during

13:19

the Cold War. Kelly Sabalis

13:21

actually did work for VOA before becoming

13:23

an actor.

13:25

Anyway, USIA also ran libraries

13:27

overseas and student exchange programs.

13:30

But most relevantly, they had a staff

13:33

back home that made and

13:35

shipped thousands of documentary

13:38

films, shorts, and newsreels around

13:41

the world.

13:43

So I started reaching out to retired USIA

13:46

producers at the agency's motion picture

13:48

and television service, doing the whole

13:50

rigmarole again, the calls, the voicemails,

13:53

the scouring of telephone directories.

13:56

Same

13:56

as before, no one knew anything

13:58

about the Falk or Sivalis messages. But

14:01

unlike before, they had lots of experience

14:03

making short film projects with famous people

14:06

like Karen Carpenter, Dionne Warwick,

14:08

The Righteous Brothers, and Olivia Newton-John.

14:11

One man even had a whole theory of the case.

14:13

I'm going to guess that

14:16

it was somebody, a Romanian,

14:19

who worked at the embassy, who watched

14:21

this series

14:23

and brought it up.

14:24

Ken Sale was a longtime producer

14:27

at USIA, but I think he might have

14:29

missed his calling as an investigator.

14:31

And then some smart

14:33

American officers said, gee, because

14:36

they could see the possibilities.

14:38

The request would have been sent to Washington

14:40

and wound its way to the relevant department, where

14:43

Ken posited they would have considered a lot

14:45

of things, including

14:46

what's this going to cost? That

14:49

would have depended on Fox availability, schedule

14:51

and fee. So the next step would have been reaching out

14:54

to Fox representatives. Ken

14:56

thought the person who would have reached out was named Pat

14:58

Woodward, a woman who had come to USIA

15:01

from Hollywood.

15:01

She knew a number of

15:03

the studio people and she could get things

15:06

done in Hollywood if need be. So

15:09

they probably asked her.

15:11

I'm sorry, she died. With

15:14

Falk and the producers on board, Ken

15:16

thought the film and television service would have assigned

15:18

the project to an in-house producer, hired

15:21

a crew, written a script with a closing

15:23

line in Romanian supplied

15:25

as suggested in the cables by a voice

15:27

of America

15:28

correspondent. Would you talk to

15:30

the people we got phonetic Romanian

15:32

here? You know, he would have done

15:34

his thing in English and then done his

15:36

closing line in Romanian.

15:38

And so if he

15:41

had a question about it, the USIA

15:43

producers of trust, you know, because they've done

15:45

similar types of things like

15:47

this in the past. Despite

15:50

what Falk said to Letterman. So the

15:52

guy says, can you meet us in a hotel,

15:54

Century Plaza, six o'clock? This

15:57

wouldn't have been a last minute arrangement. And

16:00

also despite what Falk said, Why

16:02

would the Romanian ambassador come here?

16:06

Ken thought it would have been surprising for the Romanian

16:08

ambassador or any other emissary

16:11

from the Romanian government to have been involved

16:13

in this part of the process. Ken's

16:16

version of events sounded much more plausible

16:18

to me than what Falk had relayed to Letterman.

16:21

Not that you'd ever relay Ken's version

16:24

on late night TV.

16:29

Shortly after I spoke with Ken, his theory

16:31

of the case got some corroboration.

16:40

That was a voicemail from a man named Joseph

16:42

Reuster. Joseph is a 92-year-old

16:45

who worked at USIA for 35 years

16:47

as a producer and then the director of Languages

16:49

and News. I returned his call

16:52

and gave him the whole spiel.

16:53

He was, I'm a little embarrassed to say,

16:55

the 33rd person

16:58

I asked directly about the

17:00

real.

17:01

But this time, something surprising

17:03

happened. He knew what I

17:05

was talking about. But it's fuzzy.

17:07

It's fuzzy as all get out. Oh

17:09

my God. And it wouldn't be worth anything. No, the littlest

17:12

fuzz. I'm very, very interested. It's

17:16

just been so

17:18

long ago that I

17:20

was doing that and I was involved in

17:22

that.

17:23

Joseph struck me as very upstanding.

17:26

Like, the problem wasn't just that he was fuzzy

17:28

on this. It was that relaying fuzz would

17:30

have been a dereliction of duty.

17:32

All of us who were involved

17:35

in stuff back then, we

17:38

stood by our word. Anything that I

17:40

would tell you would be too risky. He

17:42

did give me a little bit of fuzz, though.

17:44

He told me all the retired producers I'd

17:46

spoken with, 60 and 70-year-olds,

17:48

were just too young, too junior

17:50

then to have known about this. And almost

17:53

everyone who did was dead, though he

17:55

did mention someone by name.

17:59

work with us at the same time, Pat Woodward,

18:02

it's gone.

18:03

Pat Woodward again, the same Hollywood hand

18:05

Ken Sale had mentioned. It's gratifying

18:07

to even speak with someone who sort of vaguely remembers

18:09

it because I was starting to be like,

18:12

maybe it didn't happen. It

18:16

did happen. I can vouch for that. That's

18:22

something. That's something.

18:23

And I meant it. I finally

18:26

found someone with firsthand knowledge of

18:28

the method, of the making of the message.

18:30

Sure, it had taken a frankly ludicrous

18:33

and possibly misguided amount of effort

18:35

to do so, but at least this part

18:37

of the mystery was put to bed.

18:41

But that bed was about to get

18:43

unmade in a hurry.

18:48

It happened when I returned to the list of people

18:51

I wanted to speak with. I was winnowing

18:53

it down, but I was still trying to talk to someone

18:55

who'd been at Romanian state television.

18:58

Towards that end, I was put in touch with the Romanian

19:01

translator and film critic, Irina Margarita

19:04

Nistor.

19:05

Irina

19:09

is famous in Romania for reasons chronicled

19:11

in the short documentary Chuck Norris

19:13

vs. Communism, which you just heard. As

19:16

explained in that film, Irina personally

19:18

dubbed thousands of American movies,

19:21

many of them action films that were smuggled into

19:23

the country in the 1980s. While

19:25

she was dubbing all those movies, she also

19:27

worked as a translator at TVR.

19:30

It would have been after the Falk message aired,

19:33

but when we were arranging a time to speak, she

19:35

mentioned someone she thought might know something.

19:38

It was actually the man who hired her at TVR,

19:41

a man named Jan Yonell.

19:44

That's right, the man I had been trying

19:46

to find. Jan Yonell

19:49

was the TVR employee who had selected Colombo

19:51

to replace Manix back in the 1970s.

19:54

And now, coincidentally, Irina

19:56

was about to call him. It

19:58

was his 93rd birthday. the next

20:00

day. A few mornings later, afternoon

20:03

in Romania, Irina and I got on a video

20:05

call with a spotty connection to talk

20:07

about her chat with Ionell. This morning,

20:10

I

20:10

got you on your name on the phone.

20:14

He said that he's too old to talk to

20:16

you, but he said, OK, please

20:19

be my voice.

20:21

So Irina relayed Ionell's recollections

20:23

to me. He meandered a bit. He had

20:25

told her things like, TBR would move the

20:28

Saturday afternoon start time of Bewitched,

20:31

Elena Ceausescu's favorite show, so

20:33

she could have luncheons around it. Ionell

20:35

had also selected the soap opera Dallas

20:38

to air on TBR and was

20:40

a deputy chief of programming, intimately

20:42

involved in the screening, translation,

20:44

subtitling and airing of all

20:47

foreign movies and TV shows.

20:49

Eventually, we got around to the matter

20:51

at hand. He never arrived

20:54

into Romanian television. What you

20:56

said, he doesn't think that

20:59

either the Telly Savalas clip

21:01

or the Peter Falk clip actually

21:03

aired on television. Now

21:07

it wasn't for sure. It wasn't aired

21:09

on television. How

21:11

does he know for sure? It was

21:14

the book. Yeah, the film department.

21:16

So it couldn't be shown without him knowing

21:19

that because it was supposed to be subtitled

21:22

because you couldn't show something directly

21:24

in English with no subtitling. So

21:26

everything would pass through him. Yeah.

21:29

So it wasn't possible. Probably it

21:31

was shown directly to Tseuscu.

21:34

Probably somebody tried to

21:37

show off saying, you know, I can

21:40

talk to your favorite actors

21:42

and they will send you a message or something like that.

21:45

But it was never aired

21:46

on the Romanian television. You

21:49

know, there are these there's like diplomatic

21:52

cables about it. There's one

21:55

that is like from the embassy in Bucharest

21:57

saying that it was aired

21:59

and that

23:58

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wow, look at that. No, I'm going to Hawaii now. Ooh,

24:26

Cancun looks nice. You know what? Belize

24:29

looks pretty

24:29

nice this time of year. Or, mmm,

24:32

Palm Springs.

24:33

Go to your happy place

24:35

for a happy price. Go

24:39

to your happy price, Priceline.

24:43

So after I got off my call with Arena, I was

24:45

disoriented.

24:45

I get confused

24:47

sometimes, you know? I mean, just trying to keep

24:50

all the facts straight in my head.

24:51

Did this derail the story?

24:54

Did it make the story? Did

24:57

it make sense?

24:59

I started to turn the possibilities over

25:01

in my head.

25:02

And as I did, things began to click

25:04

into place. This

25:06

would explain why so

25:08

few people remembered the message.

25:11

I was also not immune

25:13

to just how good a twist this was.

25:15

The U.S. had been making all this effort to

25:18

reach out to Romania and its people, and

25:20

all they'd done was what? Send

25:22

a personal message to a dictator?

25:25

Had one of Ceausescu's lackeys gone out

25:27

and procured the 1970s version

25:29

of a cameo for their boss?

25:32

Screenwriters could hardly have done better.

25:35

I could feel myself getting excited

25:37

about the possibility that this was the

25:39

key to the case. But

25:41

I didn't want to lose my cool.

25:43

I knew there was still evidence against

25:45

it.

25:46

Namely, the diplomatic cables.

25:48

Focke film clip

25:50

ran at end of final Colombo episode, Saturday

25:53

June 1 at 2230 on Nationwide TV, and

25:56

was repeated Sunday June 2 on Booperrest

25:58

Channel.

26:00

U.S. diplomatic cables are legit,

26:03

as I confirmed with Nick Kull, the USIA

26:05

expert. My experience has been that

26:07

if it's reported by the embassy, the

26:10

thing actually happened, and that

26:12

they're not in the business of making stuff

26:14

up.

26:15

It would never occur to me that they would have lied.

26:19

It's... If

26:21

they were lied to. Oh,

26:24

were they lied to?

26:26

Well, that would be interesting. It

26:29

sure would be. But was it possible

26:31

the Romanian government had lied to the

26:34

American embassy about the message airing?

26:37

I read back over the final cable for the

26:39

umpteenth time with this in mind. The

26:42

assurance that 10 million people had watched

26:44

the show came directly from Romanian

26:46

TV and so easily could have been

26:48

exaggerated or even made up. The

26:51

cables also referred to an initial

26:53

screening.

26:54

After initial screening, the

26:56

Romanian director of programming told embassy

26:59

officer, a wonderful job. It

27:01

couldn't have been better if I had written and produced

27:03

it myself.

27:04

It sounded like there had been a pre-screening

27:07

for officials. Maybe embassy officers

27:09

saw it there too and not on television.

27:12

In fact, the final cable only reports

27:14

what Romanians and Romanian employees

27:16

thought of the message, not what any

27:18

American staffers made of it.

27:20

But of course, there was Richard Gilbert,

27:23

the cultural attaché at the embassy, who

27:25

remembered seeing Peter Falk give his spiel

27:27

one Sunday night while he was sitting in his living

27:29

room. So I called Richard back to

27:32

see what he made of the new

27:33

theory. If I were a jury, I'd

27:35

obviously come up,

27:37

go with the vast majority. Perhaps

27:40

I recall it incorrectly. Obviously

27:43

other people recall it differently.

27:45

So you can't go with me.

27:47

Who could I go with,

27:49

though? It's hard to prove something didn't

27:52

happen, that a message didn't air.

27:55

I wish this part of the investigation was sleek

27:57

and sensible, but really, I just started

27:59

trying.

27:59

anything and everything.

28:03

I got in touch with Jan Jonell, the Romanian

28:05

state TV staffer, and despite talking

28:07

on a janky transatlantic call, he

28:10

did confirm that he did not remember

28:12

the message. I ran the new theory

28:14

by people I'd spoken with before. Most

28:17

of them found it plausible. And then I ran

28:19

it by new people who'd never heard it before,

28:21

too. And that's when

28:24

it finally happened. And

28:27

suddenly,

28:27

lady luck showed up.

28:30

In this case, her name was Alexandra

28:33

Bardan. Alexandra is a journalism

28:35

and communication professor at the University

28:37

of Bucharest, who does archival media research

28:39

in Romania. After I was put in touch

28:42

with her, I explained the whole project via

28:44

email. She said it sounded fascinating

28:46

and that she'd look into it. So

28:48

one Saturday morning, I woke up to an email

28:50

from her with a number of PDFs attached.

28:53

I could see that none of them were the Falk message.

28:56

So it wasn't until I actually clicked into

28:58

the documents that I realized

29:00

what she had sent me was the proof I'd

29:03

spent months looking for. They

29:05

were issues from four different Romanian

29:07

publications published in May, June,

29:10

and July of 1974. Alexandra

29:13

had gone into the PDFs and boxed

29:15

the relevant text out in red.

29:17

And in those boxes, as clear

29:20

as a blurb in TV Guide, which

29:22

is pretty much what they were, were

29:25

announcements like this. After

29:28

so many Sunday evenings of captivated participation

29:31

in the investigations of the insightful Lieutenant

29:33

Colombo, this week we say goodbye

29:35

to him. But before he leaves our small

29:37

screens, the Los Angeles lieutenant will

29:39

return for a minute and exclusively for our

29:42

viewers.

29:42

He will deliver a few words from Hollywood.

29:45

There was an additional

29:47

publication from 1975 that mentioned it too. In

29:51

other words, it was not just an announcement

29:53

ahead of time, but an acknowledgement after

29:56

the fact that the message really

29:58

aired.

29:59

The months after I started, I finally

30:02

had the proof I had set out to find. And

30:04

yet if I had never looked into any

30:06

of this at all, I might have had a consistently

30:09

more accurate sense of what really happened

30:12

than the roller coaster ride I'd been on. It

30:15

turned out I'd been in an episode of Columbo all

30:17

along. Peter Falk had said what

30:19

happened right at the very beginning. He'd

30:22

taped a message for Romania and

30:24

it had aired.

30:26

The details had been exaggerated for sure.

30:29

But the gist of the truth was there.

30:32

I kind of knew it right from the start. There's

30:35

nothing definite. There's a lot of little things.

30:39

Little things.

30:41

Of course, if this

30:43

whole investigation is like an episode

30:45

of Columbo, it makes sense that

30:48

when it comes to why almost no one remembers

30:50

Peter Falk's message, there

30:53

is just one

30:55

more

30:56

thing.

31:00

I can pinpoint the mistake I made. The

31:03

red herring that led me astray. It

31:05

was the assumption that Falk's message

31:08

would have been a big deal and therefore

31:10

something Romanians would have remembered.

31:13

I took it so much for granted that

31:15

I hypothesized the Romanian government

31:17

had successfully bamboozled the

31:20

United States State Department. Before

31:22

it occurred to me, the message might have just gone

31:24

over like a lead balloon. Even

31:26

though that seems to be

31:28

exactly what happened, it

31:30

was a mistake to believe the message

31:33

would have been unforgettable.

31:35

But it wasn't just my mistake.

31:37

It would have reverberated to a society

31:40

that didn't have much excitement in terms of

31:42

entertainment. Something like that would

31:45

make a huge tsunami.

31:48

Oh, everybody is going to talk

31:50

about that.

31:50

It wasn't only Romania

31:53

watching Columbo. It's Columbo watching

31:55

Romania. That's

31:58

a special thing. You could chalk this

32:01

up to the vagaries of collective memory,

32:03

its quirks, flaws, fickleness, but

32:05

I don't think so. I think there's a reason

32:08

people think the message would have resonated.

32:11

As you know, in the early 1970s,

32:13

when Fox message aired, life in Romania

32:15

was significantly better than it had been under

32:17

direct Soviet occupation. Less

32:20

isolated, restricted, and impoverished,

32:23

the country had become a player on the world

32:25

stage. And one of the signs of all

32:27

of this was on Romanian TV,

32:29

on how much there was, how many different shows,

32:32

how many foreign shows. It

32:34

was in this period, with a thaw

32:36

underway, that Peter Fox message was

32:38

broadcast.

32:39

We would like to thank Romanian television

32:41

for having put us on the air on Saturdays

32:44

and Sundays. And I think it's actually pretty

32:46

straightforward why Romanians didn't remember

32:48

it. But most of all, all of us, myself

32:51

and the crew and the other actors. It was

32:53

really boring. I mean, listen to

32:55

this. We want to thank the Romanian people

32:58

for their great response to our show. It

33:00

was forgettable. I hope someday

33:02

I can come to your country and enjoy

33:04

the traditional culture and hospitality

33:07

of the Romanian people.

33:09

There are no guns, no civil unrest.

33:12

It was a generic, polite, boilerplate,

33:14

one-minute thank you that ran after the episode

33:17

was over. And so Romanians,

33:19

though they were behind the iron

33:22

curtain, reacted just like

33:24

we would have.

33:25

It didn't stay with them.

33:28

They moved on. They watched other

33:30

TV. They watched a show called Madigan

33:33

that aired in that time slot the very

33:35

next week.

33:36

They lived their lives. But

33:39

in the coming years, something would happen. To

33:41

make their previous forgetfulness

33:43

and disregard

33:45

seem impossible.

33:47

Showing signs of growing egomaniac,

33:50

Ceausescu told one of his ministers, a

33:52

man like me comes along only once

33:55

every 500 years.

33:57

When oil prices crashed in the late

33:59

1970s.

33:59

Ceausescu, a darling of

34:02

the West, revealed himself to be

34:04

a tyrant. He became fixated

34:06

on paying down Romania's foreign debt

34:08

and began squeezing Romanians as hard

34:11

as he could.

34:12

That was a world which was closing

34:14

in ever more, ever more. Ioana

34:17

Yeronim Latham. You saw a lot

34:19

of gray around. It was

34:21

cold. There was a shortage

34:24

of food severe. Over

34:27

the course of the 1980s, it wasn't just

34:29

food that became scarce. Energy

34:31

was rationed. Homes were permitted

34:34

one light bulb and the streets were barely lit. Heat

34:36

was rare and sporadic. People froze

34:39

in their homes. The country's forced

34:41

birth policy led to untold maternal

34:43

deaths and brutal orphanages teeming

34:46

with mistreated children. And the

34:48

Securitaté, Romania's secret police,

34:50

swelled to half a million informants.

34:53

In the sense that

34:54

any and everything that happened

34:56

was to please Ceausescu, was

34:59

basically accurate. And

35:01

as part of the larger effort to cut costs

35:03

and energy use, television changed

35:06

too.

35:06

Its hours dried up and so did its programming.

35:10

The oil drenched soap opera Dallas, the

35:12

most popular foreign show ever

35:14

broadcast in Romania, was abruptly

35:16

taken off television in 1981, mid-run. By

35:20

the late 1980s, Ceausescu was the most

35:22

dictatorial and controlling leader in the

35:24

Eastern Bloc, overseeing its most repressed

35:27

and isolated country, and television

35:29

was only broadcast for two hours a day.

35:33

In the scheme of all this hardship, the

35:35

disappearance of TV might sound trivial.

35:38

But imagine if TV all but vanished,

35:40

and what you could watch to escape from

35:43

the brutal dictatorship you were living

35:45

through was the propaganda and

35:47

speeches of that very dictator.

35:50

In this context, in this decade, missives

35:53

from the outside, however dull,

35:56

were a big deal. All those dubbed

35:58

American action movies, smuggle.

35:59

in the 1980s found huge audiences,

36:02

and the shows that had aired in the 70s lingered

36:05

in the cultural memory.

36:07

These were precious moments when

36:09

you could see some other life, some other color,

36:12

some something else. And I think

36:14

this is where the confusion about Peter

36:16

Falk's message comes from. The memory

36:19

of the horrors of the 1980s have been laid

36:21

retroactively over something that happened

36:23

in the 1970s and then resurfaced in the 2020s.

36:28

In Colombo, events may happen in order.

36:30

The beginning may be at the beginning. But

36:33

we remember a thing is out of order. We

36:35

project our subsequent understanding backward,

36:38

and it can lead us to misunderstand

36:40

the past.

36:42

Eventually, in December of 1989,

36:45

communism would fall in Romania.

36:48

There was a moment on television when Ceausescu

36:50

was booed in public during what was supposed

36:53

to be a major speech that is widely

36:55

considered to be the trigger point of

36:57

the Romanian Revolution,

36:59

much of which unfolded live on

37:01

TBR. On Christmas Day,

37:03

Ceausescu and his wife Elena were

37:05

put on trial.

37:06

Nikolai Ceausescu and his wife Elena

37:09

were executed after a trial. They said

37:11

they'd been found guilty of genocide,

37:14

and they were charged also with smuggling huge

37:16

amounts of money out of the country.

37:18

Their deaths were also shown on TBR, the

37:20

same state TV service that had once

37:22

aired Dallas, Bewitched, Kojak,

37:25

and of course, Colombo.

37:27

As the 1990s

37:30

dawned, Romania began to find its

37:32

footing as a democracy. And among all

37:34

the momentous things that happened, something

37:36

small happened, too.

37:38

Colombo returned to Romanian television.

37:41

It

37:41

would have been right around when Peter Falk appeared on David

37:43

Letterman in 1995.

37:45

They understand that Colombo was

37:47

a TV show, right? They did understand.

37:50

Knowing everything that I know now, I still

37:53

understand why Falk thought this was a

37:55

big deal. He was approached by

37:57

serious people from a major U.S. agency.

38:01

They were laboring under a misapprehension

38:03

about the benefits of aligning with Ceausescu,

38:06

but they surely talked in weighty terms

38:08

about how consequential a message like

38:11

this would be, how much it would help America

38:13

prosecute the Cold War.

38:16

And so Falk took this story and ran

38:18

with it, elaborated on it, exaggerated

38:20

it, made it seem

38:23

important, part of the myth of Colombo,

38:25

a TV show that has traversed the

38:28

globe. He didn't know, or even

38:30

want to know, that his message wasn't that

38:32

special, that it was just one of thousands

38:35

upon thousands of times during the Cold

38:37

War, when America's Foreign Service

38:39

tried something, deployed a visit,

38:42

a collaboration, a newsreel, a pamphlet,

38:45

a PSA,

38:46

most of which almost no

38:48

one remembers at all.

38:49

It's ironic that Peter Falk of

38:52

all people would make the truth seem

38:54

like some big swaggering thing,

38:56

when in this case it was more like an unassuming

38:59

little guy in a rumpled brown raincoat,

39:02

one that no one paid that much attention

39:04

to, but

39:04

that was a part of a

39:07

long, meandering and

39:09

dogged effort to set things

39:11

right. What

39:14

are you going to do with that shit you have? Right? It'd

39:16

be tight to go with the bay.

39:28

This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. You

39:30

can find me on Twitter at WillaPaskin. And if

39:32

you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode,

39:35

you can email us at decoderring at slate.com.

39:38

This podcast was written by me, Willa Paskin.

39:40

I produced Decoder Ring with Katie Shepard. This

39:43

episode was edited by Joel Meyer. Derek

39:45

John is Slate's executive producer of narrative podcasts.

39:48

Merrick Jacob is senior technical director. I

39:51

would like to give an special thank

39:53

you to Awana Kodanu Kenworthy, who

39:55

was totally instrumental

39:57

in figuring this all out.

40:00

I want to give another thank you to Andrada Lattaru,

40:03

who translated and worked with me from Romania again.

40:05

I'd also like to thank Andrei Khodrescu,

40:08

Ilinca Kalgorinu, Cameron Gorman,

40:10

Gabriel Roth, Harry Geisel, Elaine

40:12

McDevitt, Michael Messinger, Gerald Crell,

40:15

Ash Hawken, Tom Mullins, Jessica

40:17

Leporin, Jerry Gruener, and Marie

40:19

Weyland. There's a number of documentaries

40:22

that were instrumental to reporting this episode

40:24

and that I also highly recommend. Just

40:27

from a revolution, Chuck Norris vs. Communism,

40:29

the autobiography

40:30

of Nikolai Ceausescu, the

40:32

rise and fall of Ceausescu, and

40:35

whatever happened to blood, sweat, and tears.

40:38

If you can't get enough Columbo, please make

40:40

sure to listen to our previous episodes on McGruff

40:43

the Crime Dog, who was directly

40:45

inspired by The Lieutenant. It's

40:47

also a two-parter with some

40:48

wild music. You won't be disappointed. You

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next week. Till then.

41:29

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41:31

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