Word: klement
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...first Czechoslovak party boss, Klement Gottwald, was a harsh ruler. He nationalized the country's entire industry, including even small artisans' shops, collectivized all farms, and subjected the people to a withering succession of arrests, show trials and executions of "Titoists" and "traitors." Fittingly, Gottwald caught a chill at Stalin's funeral in 1953 and died a few months later. An almost equally unbending Stalinist took his place: Antonin Novotny, who had been Communist boss of Prague. As the slight winds of liberalism blew throughout the East bloc following Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin, Novotny tried his best...
Thus ended the career of one of Communism's most guileful and skillful leaders. One of Novotny's first projects after he maneuvered to succeed the late Klement Gottwald in 1953 as party boss was to build a giant statue of Stalin overlooking the Vltava River in Prague. Though he eventually came around to recognizing the need for a reorganization of the country's decrepit economy and for granting wider freedom of expression to writers, he did so only reluctantly. He ran a severe police state, yoked the economy and foreign policy of Czechoslovakia to the needs...
...wine flowed freely, and the old Nazi cronies, safe in Buenos Aires, reminisced about the great days under the Führer. "I am no longer being pursued," boasted one Ricardo Klement...
...Klement was wrong, and fatally indiscreet. A tape recorder was taking it all down (the cronies wanted a record of their thoughts). A transcript fell into the hands of the Israeli secret service, and early in 1960 an Israeli agent arrived in Buenos Aires to look Klement over. Pretending to represent a British sewing-machine company that was seeking a factory site, the agent called on the Klements' neighbors. Yes, the lady there was interested in selling her property. The agent wondered if the people next door might also be interested. Unexpectedly, the woman jumped to the window...
...When Klement heard about this from his wife, he grew suspicious, for the neighborhood was remote; why should anyone choose it for a factory? In the end, he put aside his doubts. The Israeli agent secretly photographed him, and from these pictures came convincing identification. In April 1960, other Israeli agents carried off the celebrated kidnaping that delivered Adolf Eichmann to Jerusalem...