The Curious Case of Columbo's Message to Romania Part 1

A couple of months ago, I found myself watching an old interview from the late show with David Letterman.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is his first time with us.

Please welcome Peter Falk.

Peter!

As the actor Peter Falk loped onto the stage, his gray hair standing out against his black leather jacket, the audience greeted him with a roar.

They love you.

That must make you feel very, very nice.

Very, very nice.

By this point in his career, Falk had played almost 100 different roles, but he was beloved for one in particular.

I'm just another cop.

My name's Columbo.

I'm a lieutenant.

Lieutenant Columbo, who has no first name, was the star of the Smash detective series Columbo, which aired on and off for 30 years, beginning in the 1970s.

In every episode, the brilliant yet unassuming Colombo doggedly pursued high-class murderers while wearing a scruffy brown raincoat, chomping on a cigar, and absentmindedly mentioning his wife.

I'm the worst cook in the world,

but there's one thing I do terrific, and that's an omelet.

Even my wife admits it.

And just when his investigation seemed to have hit a dead end, he'd circle back to ask, Oh, listen, just one more thing.

Um, one more thing, sir.

Listen, one more thing.

It'll just take a second.

The show also had a very particular structure.

Well, in a matter of speaking, this isn't really a who've done it.

It's more of a how we did it.

Each episode begins with the murder.

The audience sees the crime, sees who the killer is and how they kill before Columbo even appears on screen.

Then the audience gets to watch Columbo 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-wracking suspense.

It's the satisfaction of watching Colombo unravel the mystery.

A satisfaction that has helped make the show a hit all over the world.

It's very, very popular in Romania.

In Romania?

This is Falk 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.

As a matter of fact, about 10 years ago, I got a call from the State Department and a guy called me up and he says, we got a problem in Romania.

Maybe you can help us.

Falk was chatting with Letterman in March of 1995.

10 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.

Okay, so what's the problem?

He said, the problem is...

That the people don't believe the government.

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.

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

They were arming themselves over this.

My God.

It was that severe.

Yes, I guess so.

Why would the Romanian ambassador come here?

No, of course.

Falcon Letterman bantered a bit more until Letterman seemed ready to move on.

That's good.

We want to show you.

It's an excellent story.

And it is an excellent story.

But listening to it, I couldn't help wondering:

is it true?

This is Dakota Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

When I first saw Peter Falk's 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 Falk actually recorded this message?

And if so, why and how?

Or 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, Falk's 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 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 Decodering, the first half of a very cold case: Did Peter Falk's appearance on Romanian television actually happen?

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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.

Maybe it's the way you come slouching in here with your shophorn bag of tricks.

Me?

Tricks?

Peter Falk was born in 1927 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.

The key to it is when you realize you can get a laugh with it.

This is Falk later in life, talking to the hosts of The View.

By the time I was in high school, that's a true story.

I was playing baseball.

The umpire called me out.

It was a bad call.

Everybody saw it.

And I whipped out the eye, and

I handed it to the umpire.

I said, try this one.

Falk broke out in 1960 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 moseys through his sentences and comes back around when you least expect it.

You know, exactly the comic timing of Columbo.

He has many of the same idiosyncratic characteristics of the cop.

He's rather sloppy.

He's forgetful.

William Link was the co-creator of Columbo, and he's heard here giving an oral history to the Television Academy.

But in his acting, he's obsessed.

I mean, he's really dead onto it in a very humble, self-effacing kind of way.

It's Falk.

So he had that to draw on, that whole well of personality quirks to bring to that cop.

When Falk was cast as Columbo, 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.

Columbo's signature brown raincoat even came from Falk's own closet.

Falk and the raincoat debuted as Columbo in the 1968 NBC TV movie Prescription Murder about a psychiatrist trying to get away with killing his wife.

Columbo, you are magnificent.

You really are.

What makes you say that, Doc?

You're the most persistent creature I've ever met.

An 11-year-old named Mark Dewitziak was watching.

I was just getting into mysteries, and my idea of mystery was that, well, you follow the detective, you follow Sherlock Holmes, you follow the clues, and eventually you reach the point where the detective says, and the murderer is, and this starts with you knowing who the murderer is.

Mark is talking about Colombo's structure again.

Unlike most mysteries, Colombo 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.

So to an 11-year-old, that just took the top of my head off.

Mark liked what he saw so much that when he grew up, he became a TV critic and the author of the Colombo file, spelled P-H-I-L-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.

Falk had a movie career to think about.

So, what do we do?

That's where they had come up with the whole idea of the mystery movie.

It's not going to air every week, it's going to air every four weeks.

It'll rotate with three other detective characters.

We don't have to do 22 episodes, we can do seven or eight episodes a year.

Colombo premiered in September of 1971 on a Wednesday night.

I kind of knew it right from the start.

There's nothing definite.

There's a lot of little things.

Little things.

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.

Well,

it's terrific to win.

It won Emmys.

I'm trying to figure out some way to appear humble.

Falk became the highest-paid TV actor in Hollywood.

Celebrities lined up to play murderers.

Faye 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 1973.

Your show is in Japan and a lot of the foreign countries.

You ever seen it in Japanese or anything?

I've never seen it in another tongue, Johnny.

I have the series would ultimately air in over 40 countries, and Falk would come to revel in stories of its global success.

There was one about the Italian director, Federico Fellini, leaving dinner parties early to watch Colombo.

One about the Emperor of Japan asking if Colombo can 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 Dewitziak heard all of these anecdotes from Falk firsthand when he was writing his book.

Peter loved telling stories and Peter loved telling his favorite stories.

He got so tickled.

His favorite story was Romania.

Romania sits on the eastern edge of Europe, bordered by five different countries and the Black Sea.

It has a population of around 19 million, most of whom speak Romanian, a romance language similar to Italian.

The most famous Romanians outside of Romania are the absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco, the gold medal-winning gymnast Nadia Komenici, and Dracula.

Transylvania is now a part of Romania.

Mark DeWitziak says Falk told him his Romania story during their very first sit-down around 1986.

I did the interview in his art studio, which is actually his garage at his Beverly Hills house.

He had converted it into 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 a meeting.

It's similar to the version Falk told on Letterman.

So I end up in a hotel room at one in the morning.

Though not identical.

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 Peter's stories were truthful, but were they embellished?

Was it one in the morning?

I don't know.

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 2006 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 Falk writes that after some initial hesitation, but with U.S.

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.

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I mentioned earlier that Peter Falk's interview with David Letterman went viral.

It did that back in June of 2021, thanks to Radu Tiginash.

Like many other Romanians, I did grow up watching a lot of Colombo and I was a big Colombo fan.

Radu grew up watching the show in Romania during the 1990s, 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 he started poking around online.

There's basically three or four videos about Colombo on YouTube as far as I could see.

Radu is a freelance writer and video editor, so he 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.

Let's do a quick five-minute video on this weird story about Peter Falk apparently stopping the revolution 15 years before it actually happened or some weird stuff like that.

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, let alone seen.

But it was nowhere online until Radu emailed a letterman fan an unofficial archivist who sent it to him for over 20 years our first guest has starred as the beloved lieutenant columbo he now has radu found something else too an article about falk's story with a wikileaks link in it wikileaks is the giant cache of various government documents that went online in 2007 and this particular link was to an american cable itself unclassified And then I had the idea of like, hey, maybe there's more.

Let's give a quick search.

And then I searched for Peter Falk, I searched for Colombo, I searched for these CERNs individually.

And lo and behold.

American Embassy, Bucharest to USIA, Washington, D.C.

Between April and June of 1974, eight official diplomatic cables were sent between the American Embassy in Bucharest and Washington, D.C.

about Peter Falk.

Romanian TV requests a short two to three minute optical 16 millimeter sound film clip of star Peter Falk.

The back and forth corroborates a number of things about Falk's story.

For one, the U.S.

government really did reach out to him.

Falk willing to make Colombo closing.

For another, Romania really had run out of Colombo episodes.

Romanian TV says it aware that Colombo is still in production, but notes that it has run all episodes received thus far and must fill space on weekly basis.

But the cables do not substantiate many of Falk'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.

Text Falk interview is as follows.

Oh, excuse me.

Do you have a minute?

I'm Lieutenant Colombo.

Sometimes I'm known as Peter Falk.

In fact, the transcript included in the cables, relaying what Falk apparently said, is tame.

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.

But according to the cables, even this generic greeting was a big deal.

Judging from comments of embassy, foreign service locals, and other Romanians, Falk's greetings and his use of Romanian language tagline created minor sensation here.

The last cable, sent back after the message aired, says that Romanian television reported 10 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?

Seems weird for one

Romania,

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 like give in to such a request without getting something in return.

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 II, 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.

It is necessary to remember that these are all separate countries, but the fact fact that each is communist and the fact of their physical proximity to each other enable us to consider them as a unit.

Romania was a part of this unit.

In 1944, the Soviets directly occupied the country and would remain for more than a decade.

I am old enough, you see, I was born in 1947, to have gone through some of these phases of the communist takeover.

Ioanna 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.

It was horrible in the 50s, political prisons were full and people disappeared from home.

In 1958, Soviet troops began to pull out of the country.

It remained communist, but by the early 1960s, things felt different.

This period is known as a thaw.

And as part of the warming, newsstands carried Western papers, Romanian rock and roll bands started to appear, and foreign films and series aired on television.

It's very simple.

I don't

The spy show 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 1960s, 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.

Nikolai Ceaușescu was a longtime member of the Communist Party who became general secretary in 1965 and then president in 67.

Around this time, a British student named Denis Deletante began studying at a Bucharest University, where he is housed with three Americans.

Every week, the Securitati, the Secret Police, would come to our rooms and rummage through our belongings and leave very clear evidence that they had been in our rooms.

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.

Romanians were not seeking to break away from Soviet influence, but they were seeking a certain amount of autonomy.

This was telegraphed to the world in 1968.

That year, the Soviet Union sent tanks into a liberalizing Czechoslovakia to clamp down on mass protests known as the Prague Spring.

But Romania refused to support the Soviet action.

Ceausescu even denounced the invasion in a famous speech.

This was an act of defiance the West did not forget.

Richard Nixon, in particular, took notice.

As president, he pursued a policy policy called differentiation, picking out the communist countries that seemed most susceptible to Western influence.

President Nixon and his advisors were aware of Ceausescu's desire to have closer contacts with the United States.

In 1969, Nixon visited Romania.

This is an historic occasion.

It was his second visit in as many years.

Both times, Ceausescu was savvy enough to welcome Nixon with much respect.

While 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 to this region of the continent of Europe.

Ceausescu 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 Ceausescu's reputation as a maverick communist leader.

That word maverick was used a lot in the press, and one that the U.S.

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 Ceausescu's domestic policies.

I think there is this great paradox with Ceausescu.

So the paradox of his, we might say, very inventive, ambitious foreign policy and the repression, the internal repression.

This paradox was already on display by the early 1970s.

Birth control and abortion had already been banned to boost the population.

The securitate acted with impunity.

And Ceausescu announced that all cultural output needed to be ideological and nationalistic, ultimately putting an end to the thaw.

But at the same time, Ceausescu'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.

Do you just want to tell me your name?

Alexandrina Tica.

Alexandrina was in high school in the 1970s living in the same apartment in bucharest from which she spoke with me a few months ago with the help of a translator so she said that in the 70s they were having uh streaming from 7 30 in the evening until around midnight a good life in this

good life in this uh 70s comparison with the previous years most of what was on tv was dull ideological and political long speeches and footage of Ceausescu 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.

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 were knowing what happened.

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 it was a national phenomenon streets were empty ioanna yeronim latham again everybody made the plan to be there and to see installment after installment it was enormously successful enormously Colombo was so popular it would air again on Sundays and it wasn't the only show that cleared the streets in Bucharest.

Love you baby.

You're beautiful.

Kojak, the cop drama starring Tally Savalis that premiered in America in 1973, was also a hit with Romanians in the mid-1970s.

The bald-headed Kojak was as debonair as Colombo was disheveled, and he sucked on a lollipop instead of a cigar.

Hey, what's with the lollipops?

I'm looking to close the generation gap.

Get out of here.

Kojak, because he was having this lollipop, they created created lollipops in Romania that they were selling in the seats vendors

with Kojak.

They call them Kojak.

Buy the Kojak.

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.

March 19, 75, U.S.

Berlin to Am Embassy Bucharest.

Subject, Telly Savalis film clip for Romanian TV.

A little less than a year after the Peter Falk incident, the U.S.

Diplomatic Corps had apparently asked Tele Savalis to do the exact same thing, though Savalis 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.

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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 U.S.

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 Falk's 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.

Please advise if film possible and if developed film can be here in time for May 15 program.

Post strongly concurs TV request, Barnes.

Barnes was the sign-off of Harry Barnes, the American ambassador to Romania from 1973 to 77.

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 2012, though, so I got in touch with his son, Doug.

I asked him about an infamous incident in which Romania's securitate bugged the sole of his father's shoe.

My sister just went and did a trip to DC and went to a spy museum and sent us all pictures of the shoe, which is on display there.

Doug had never heard anything about the Peter Fox segment or the Tele Savalis 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 single telegram as long as he's in the country.

So though Barnes could have written these cables, they also could have been authored by nearly anyone at the embassy.

I asked Doug if he could think of anyone else who might remember anything about this.

And a couple of calls later, I reached a man named Richard Gilbert.

I was posted at the U.S.

Embassy in Bucharest as the cultural attache.

Richard was there from 1972 to 76.

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.

I do remember him giving his little spiel, I would call it.

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 1974, he and his family turned on the TV to watch Colombo.

Quite a coup for the Romanians because they got Peter Falk to say all these positive things about what essentially was a rather despotic

communist government in Eastern Europe.

Richard doesn't remember much more about it, besides part of it being delivered in stilted Romanian.

We didn't usually tune in but we watched this one uh certainly because it was so unusual do you think you knew it was coming and that's why you had tuned in i suspect i must have that's why i happened to be watching it i'm not sure how we knew but we did know in your experience or just like knowledge is this like

kind of thing

common

I mean, my guess would be definitely not common.

I can't imagine such a thing.

I just find it a little hedge scratching how they made contact with Peter Falk in the first place.

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 1974, tracking down any name mentioned in the cables and scouring old Foreign Service telephone directories.

I got the American Foreign Service Association to ask its 16,000 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.

My name is Willa Paskin.

I'm um...

I make a podcast for the website Slate.

This is going to be very convoluted and I'm just going to babble it.

I've left you a 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 zany about

to basically film um oh uh oh

hi sorry this is Willa again.

I'll keep it much shorter.

All told I communicated directly with over 20 people who'd been at the embassy in Bucharest around 1974.

But my optimism had been premature.

Listen, I don't want you to waste your time with me because

I have no memory whatsoever

of either of those things.

I don't remember anything about that incident.

I'd love to read more about it, but you're just hitting a blank with me.

I'm sorry.

No, no, no.

Anyway, good luck.

No one recalled it.

Like, no one.

It didn't even ring a bell.

No one thinks it's real.

Not one person who was at the embassy at the time remembers it.

It just seems so unlikely.

I'd begun all of this thinking that Peter Falk's story sounded a little exaggerated and wanting to figure out what had really happened and why and how and what Peter Falk had really said.

I'd read diplomatic cables and gotten a crash course in Romanian history.

I learned Romanian slang for lollipop and yammered 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 Falk sure said so, but so did the cables.

They described Falk's message as a minor sensation seen by 10 million Romanians.

12 million had watched the message with Tally 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.

I do remember when Peter Falk gave this introduction.

But as 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 who ever recalled seeing it.

If a message gets made for television and no one remembers seeing it, did it actually happen?

I was back where I started.

Next week on Decodering, 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.

Nothing important, you understand, but I wouldn't like to get them tied up.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willip Haskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willip Haskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

This podcast was written by me, Willipaskin.

I produced Decodering with Katie Shepard.

This episode was edited by Joel Meyer.

Derek John is Slate's executive producer of Narrative Podcasts.

Merritt Jacob is senior technical Director.

I want to give an especial thank you to Andrada Lautauru, who translated and worked with me from Romania.

I'd also like to thank Carol and Joel Levy, Jonathan Rickert, Alan and Ori Fernandez, Katie Koob, Felix Renschler, Richard Beetz, Jock Shirley, Gabriel Roth, Cameron Gorman, Torrey Bosch, Delia Maronescu, David Koenig, Don Giller, Forrest Backner, Karina Popa, David Langbart, William Burr, Asghar Siegvitsen, John Frankensteiner, Tom Hoban, and everyone else who helped with this episode.

For my research into Romanian television, I relied heavily on the scholarly work of Dana Mustada, Alexandru Matai, and Marie Suresko-Marenkovic, and the screening socialism project from the University of Loughborough.

I also relied on the work of Dennis Deletante and Timothy W.

Ryback'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 feed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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We'll see you next week.