Kim Shin-jo, the only captured member of a team of 31 North Korean commandos who came within striking distance of the South Korean presidential palace in central Seoul before they were repelled in 1968, died on Wednesday. He was 82. Mr. Kim’s death at a nursing hospital was confirmed on Thursday by his Sungrak Church…
Oleg Gordievsky, who was the top K.G.B. agent in London until he defected to the West in 1985 and revealed himself as a longtime double agent for British intelligence — making him one of the most highly placed Western spies during the Cold War — was found dead at his home in Godalming, southwest of…
Journalists from Radio Martí, the U.S. federally-funded news outlet aimed at communist Cuba, were in the middle of interviewing a Cuban activist in Miami on a recent Saturday when bleak looks suddenly came over their faces. The 40-year-old news agency, designed to send uncensored news in Spanish into Cuba, had just been ordered closed by…
For decades a core objective of the Soviet Union was to “decouple” the United States from Europe. Decoupling, as it was called, would break the Western alliance that kept Soviet tanks from rolling across the Prussian plains. Now, in weeks, President Trump has handed Moscow the gift that eluded it during the Cold War and…
My grandfather’s idea of an Easter egg hunt involved hiding money in colorful plastic eggs sprinkled around his house in Long Island. Most held coins, but there was always one with a crisp, new $100 bill. My cousin, Billy-O, and I were the only players. We were usually playful partners in mayhem but as competitors,…
Boris Spassky, the world chess champion whose career was overshadowed by his loss to Bobby Fischer in the “Match of the Century” in 1972, died on Thursday in Moscow. He was 88. His death was announced by the International Chess Federation, the game’s governing body, which did not cite a cause. He had been sick…
Three and a half decades after reunification, a line runs through Germany where the Iron Curtain once stood. Instead of barbed wires and dogs, that line now divides Germans by measures like income and unemployment — and increasingly by the willingness to vote for extremist parties. If East Germany were still its own country, the…