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In early February 1961, two Italian radio operators, the Judica-Cordiglia brothers, reportedly received an extraordinary transmission. The brothers had spent the previous year holed up in a makeshift listening station in an old German bunker with their equipment pointed towards the stars, hoping to listen in on the early space expeditions being mounted by both the United States and Soviet Union at the time. The incoming broadcasts of February 1961 were unusual, though, and featured muffled gasping noises and what sounded like a human being struggling to breathe. Another signal, a faint pulse, was also heard shortly after. The brothers played the recordings for their father, a cardiologist, who believed that the soft pulse was a failing human heartbeat. If that were true, it would mean that someone, the Soviets or the Americans, had successfully launched a man into space for the first time and that the brave pioneer likely never returned alive...

Georgi Markov, a dissident of the Soviet Union and enemy of the state in his native Bulgaria, had been poisoned. It was one of the most devious acts of spycraft ever documented, and the "umbrella incident" stood out as an important clue. What happened during that fateful encounter on the street? Could an umbrella really have been turned into a secret weapon? And who was the mystery umbrella man who seemingly disappeared, never to be seen again?

Pictured: Not the Cuban Missile Crisis you thought you knew. Nuclear-armed FKR (frontovaya krylataya raketa/front-line winged rocket) cruise missiles, whose deployments in Cuba were so secret that the U.S. Air Force failed to detect them. This particular group had the mission of destroying the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo.

It was entirely unknown to the US at the time, but the infamous Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war did not actually end with the agreement between the US and Soviet Union in October 1962. Another second secret crisis instead brewed as at least 100 other tactical nuclear weapons remained in Cuban hands, entirely under the radar of US intelligence. Springing such a surprise would be the ultimate US deterrent, and Cuban leader Fidel Castro was not going to give up his firepower easily...