After the publication of the first article about one of the most mysterious murder cases in post-war history, we received numerous letters. Many thanks for all advises and comments.

 

Please read the first part.

 

Who was the beautiful stranger?

 

Of course, the question is allowed, why nobody misses the Isdal woman. This circumstance is extraordinary.

 

Were there people, one reader asked, who did not officially exist, but who rushed like a shadow army through the Cold War of Europe?

 

That well, maybe. In our research, we have found no evidence to deny or affirm this fact.

 

Of course, the trail also points to the former Yugoslavia. To the machinations of the days of Tito. This would be following what witnesses said, that the Isdal woman had met with two men of southern appearance. It must have been just before she died.

 

Yes, and Norway has done everything it can to cover its tracks and, as a deterrent to more Soviet spies, has invented one story after another to avoid the real reason. From the point of view at the time, this was quite understandable. This includes the history of the two check fraudsters who were arrested in 1972 using false identities in their crimes. The public never believed this story, which sounded like a legend of a former police officer who retired in 1976.

 

Nobody could or would believe in the suicide of the Isdal woman. According to the autopsy report, the Isdal woman was standing when the fire broke out. However, she could not stand any longer according to human judgement, because she had taken a lethal dose of Fenemal and alcohol, voluntarily or involuntarily, this could not be reconstructed. She choked to death on her combustion—carbon monoxide poisoning. Later, during the autopsy, a haematoma was found in the neck area, which could have been caused by a punch or a fall against a tree.

 

The probable time of death was Monday, 23 November 1970, at about 10 o'clock.

 

Surely the Isdal woman was not alone in her last hours. In the Hotel Hordaheimen in Bergen, where she was last seen alive, there was a meeting with an unknown man to whom she said she wanted to come straight away.

 

Since the death of the Isdal woman almost half a century ago, the world has changed—even the faces of the countries. The Isdal woman was a product of her time; that fact is often forgotten.

 

Her death cannot be atoned for, even if the perpetrator were to turn himself in. The murder is time-barred in Norway after 25 years, in 1995.

 

Based on a list of the objects that were recovered from the unidentified woman's suitcases and the site in Isdal, Norway, many facts can be reconstructed. Conclusions can also be drawn today from their almost hectic travel activities. At first, the trail of the Isdal woman leads across Europe, then to the German-French border between Pirmasens and Baden-Baden.

 

This was the result of the enamel analysis in 2016. There, in the vicinity, she must have stayed and also the train tickets found later in the suitcases at least point the way to Basel.

 

Twice it used the Hamburg - Basel railway line.

 

The discovery of the map of southern Scandinavia by the Reise- und Verkehrsverlag, Stuttgart, from 1970 speaks for this, according to the evidence list of the Norwegian police. Her handwriting was French; perhaps she was from Belgium or Luxembourg.

 

The intersection, however, can only be located in the Baden-Baden area.

 

This circumstance can be assumed if the tickets found in the suitcases of the NSB locker system in Bergen are not forged. Or were preliminary placed there later? There is a testimony from a witness, who is not mentioned in the documents, who claims to have seen several people with the suitcases before they were found by the Norwegian Criminal Police, two days after the Isdal woman was found.

 

In this connection, nine "passport identities" were found. It is not clear from the investigations at the time whether these passports were forged or were duplicates. So, issued by the state whether the passport forms had been stolen somewhere.

 

 

 

What she was doing in Isdal could, of course, be explained with the top-secret Norwegian Sea Penguin. Experiments with the novel rocket were carried out in all places where she was at the time. In November 1970 the paths crossed with two Soviet agents, named Rubanov and Popov, as the security police in Trondheim dutifully noted. Whether the persons met can no longer be determined from the files.

 

According to another point of view, based on the travel activities of the woman, described as more than elegant, it was a possibility that she was a high-class prostitute who travelled to a specific circle of clients throughout Europe. Perhaps also a drug courier who was killed because of a business in Isdal?

 

Only the names that the Isdal woman, as she was later called in the absence of a real identity, indicate an activity that had to do with intelligence services at the height of the Cold War.

 

Genevieve Lancier, Claudia Tielt, Vera Schlosseneck, Claudia Nielsen, Alexia Zarna-Merchez, Vera Jarle, Finella Lorck and Elisabeth Leenhouwer, in addition to other names during the first test phase of the Penguin Rocket: The unknown woman used the wrong names E. Velding and L. on this trip.

 

 

Selling, according to the Norwegian secret service. Probably, to cover any possible tracks.

 

According to the language, as witnesses assure who saw her at the end, in November 1970, shortly before her death, she was German. However, she also pretended to be a South African antique dealer to an Italian gala, the photographer Giovanni Trimboli, who had invited her to dinner and took her in his car. That was a few days before her even more mysterious demise in the lonely gorge.

 

Indeed, she was a child from the time before the war, born around 1926-1930, knew the profession "Verziererin" in the porcelain industry, which is located in Franconia, near the then Czechoslovakian

border, in Selb and its surroundings, had a great tradition. At least she had to know about it. Perhaps through a direct relative or in the context of the so-called Kinderlandverschickung at the end of the Second World War.

 

She had, for whatever reason, made strange statements on registration forms.

 

This issue is also indicated by the analysis that was initiated decades later. After an almost creepy exhumation years ago. They got everything from the woman, fingerprints, DNA, the dentures, which raises more questions than it answers. Some sources indicate that the dentition in Latin America was processed in this way. There is no sure indication of this, except the time of the unknown in Spain, probably in the Burgos area, in the north. In December 1970 news came that the dental work had been done in Italy or Spain.

 

The question is, does anyone recognize this work?

 

The teeth must have been worked on about three years before her death.

 

 

 The lower jaw of Isdal woman, Kripos Norge, 2019

 

 

 The upper jaw of Isdal woman, Kripos Norge, 2019

 

The work could also have been done in former Czechoslovakia or the GDR. The gold, however, points to work in the Western world at that time. Probably in Germany.

 

Who can remember this specific set of teeth?

 

Next part: 

 

Does the trail lead to Ljubljana in former Yugoslavia?

 

Infiltrated and exfiltrated the beautiful unknown over Yugoslavia or optionally the

 

Czechoslovakia? The whole case refers to the KoKo and its international art trade.

 

(br/mcvth/Bergen/ Norway)

 

Death in the Isdal in Norway

 

Anyone who deals with what is by far the most mysterious criminal case in post-war European history must start on November 29,1970, in the Ulriken Bergen, in Isdalen. 

 

A father and his two daughters found the body of a woman on this Sunday afternoon, the first Advent of this year.

 

This case had all the ingredients of an espionage thriller, which could only have happened in the Cold War era. It made sense that Taxi nach Leipzig, the first crime scene in the ARD programme in Germany, was running that evening for the first time.

 

The Norwegian public prosecutor Carl Halvor Aas, then 30 years old, was on duty that day and found his own, quite real crime thriller with the case in a small valley, in a poorly accessible rocky gorge, in the area of Bergen in Norway.

 

The former prosecutor in charge recalled in an interview with NOK and the BBC, which was conducted many years later, that the smell of the charred body had particularly entered his nose before he even saw the body.

 

The area was picturesque. Between dense tree cover and mossy stones, at a safe distance from one of the paths, lay the half-carbonized body of the approximately 30-year-old and, as reconstructed later, quite a pretty woman. She had also already attracted attention during her short lifetime, as the rather slowed down police investigations revealed shortly afterwards. Braked by whomever, it was not clear and was not clarified.

 

It remained one of the many secrets in this case.

 

Even the place of discovery offered a criminally very confused picture. Burned rubber boots, which would later become a substantial lead in the case. A tube of phenobarbital sleeping pills, a packed lunch and an empty bottle of alcohol. Besides, two white plastic bottles, whose smell indicated gasoline, and a burnt passport. A purse? Wrong!

 

Allegedly the dead woman had succumbed to an overdose of sleeping pills and carbon monoxide poisoning associated with the fire. Soot was found in her lungs, although, according to instructions from above, suicide was indicated, it was almost impossible that the Jane Doe had committed suicide. A box of matches from the German sex shop operator Beate Uhse was found at the crime scene as a spicy detail. Later the matches were allegedly also found in one of the suitcases from the station.

 

Everything, in this case, was contradictory.

 

 

A disturbing puzzle of possible entanglements resulted from the objects and later in the two suitcases from the lockers at the station with the luggage of the unknown woman. These traces did not lead to the identity of the unknown person, nor a motive, nor the perpetrator. The circumstances are also more than strange and therefore also lead to the most adventurous speculations, which entwine themselves like a spider's web around the more than 48-year-old case. The find is still one of the most sensational criminal cases in Norway today and has been riding journalists worldwide for decades.

 

Nothing is defined in this case.

 

Hours later witnesses came forward who were treated very unconventionally for a murder investigation. It was not until the beginning of the millennium that further testimonies on this subject were given, which took the attention. Witnesses who saw the dead woman with two southerners were just didn't taken down as a note by the Police. The witnesses were forbidden to talk at all about their observation. Who or what the southerners were, who the person who died a few days later knew, with whom she had a lively conversation, remained in the dark. The unknown woman stayed at the Hordaheimen Hotel in Bergen days before her death, from November 19 to 23. This stay under a false name, an alias or one of the many identities that a person had. Was one of the strangers, with whom the later deceased in a summer dress was talking, the Soviet military attaché in Norway, who was in Bergen at the same time?

 

Who was that woman?

 

If anyone recognizes the woman or thinks he or she knows her, can give any clues as to her identity, can say anything about the so-called Isdal woman, please contact the local police.

 

There's a memo with Interpol.

 

It became mysterious when several suitcases were found in an expired locker, and the contents could be connected to the dead woman. In the suitcases, props were found that could have come from a spy movie or just a crazy person. So fingerprints of the deceased were preserved on fake glasses. These matched the body found on November 29, 1970. 

 

 

Another curiosity in the whole behaviour of the dead was the constant changing of identities, the creation of tables with seemingly coded groups of numbers that made up a systematic code. Not every woman of about 30 years of age was able to create codes in this form at that time and why would she, when she was travelling through Europe, create such codes at all?

 

The labels had been removed from the clothes.

 

Why did the unknown travel through Europe for several months during her lifetime, giving different names?

 

Later, one of the investigators involved in the case credibly claimed that the Military Intelligence had searched the two suitcases found in the locker before the police. Whether this was the case, no one can say how everything in the case was and is "a maybe" or "possible". 

 

For quite some time it had been suspected that the Norwegian Military Intelligence Service was trying to suppress the proceedings. There were several reasons for this. During the Cold War, Norway was the country on whose coasts Soviet submarines operated. Besides, spies from the Eastern Bloc infiltrated the West via Norway.

 

But why would Counterintelligence protect a foreign agent? According to several parties involved in the proceedings, the police investigation was considerably obstructed.

 

Part 2 Does the trail lead to the HVA in East Berlin?

Lourenço Marques (Maputo)/ Cape Town )

 

1979 Treacherous brother kiss between Samora Machel and Erich Honecker

 

It is the year 1984.

The prehistory to the attack on the GDR development helpers of the socialist state farm Unango was long and owed to the crisis in southern Africa since the independence of numerous states from colonial rule in the 1960s and 1970s, which also resulted from the block thinking of the African states and the Cold War.

 

Ultimately, this lack of transparency by the new masters in African governments led to the devastating terrorist attack at Unango. The endless civil war, Apartheid and the slow collapse of the Comecon economic system also created a situation in which the attack on the GDR   development workers was never resolved.

Maybe the involved countries didn't want to solve the crime either.

Such a starting point was the calculation of the former Minister for State Security, Erich Mielke, in Berlin.

An admission of the socialist state, which was in chaos, into the then economic union of the Eastern Bloc Comecon was rejected by its members, Mozambique turned away from its alleged brother states already in the mid-1980s.

 

From Federal Archives, Picture 183-R0522-177 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, Link

A very bad guy: Erich Mielke, Minister for State Security in East Berlin

Even at that time, secret negotiations were underway with South Africa, which was interested in removing Mozambique from the list of front states against the Apartheid State of Pretoria. Thus, as early as March 1984, a real politic treaty was signed between Mozambique and South Africa at Nkomati Bridge.

From Federal Archives, Picture 183-1983-0303-423 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, Link

 

  

Samora Moises Machel with friends when they were still friends Margot Honecker, then wife of the dictator Erich Honecker

Mielke could not like that: The corrupt Samora Machel moved behind the front line and cashed in on both sides. Thus, Mielke conducted foreign policy with his Stasi apparatus. And yes, actually Honecker was no longer the first man in the state, but Erich Mielke.

 

Terror simply swept under the table

It sounds like a grotesque reference to the international community.

One of the most serious terrorist attacks against Germans remained completely without consequences for the perpetrators, who were not to be found in Mozambique but in the former GDR, due to the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The once so good relationship between the respective leaders of their states Erich Honecker and Samora Machel had been clouded for months. 

Since 1979, many ships had left the legendary Delagoa Bay. Mielke wanted to sell weapons through the KoKo and no longer import coffee from Mozambique. He preferred to take it from West-Germany.

Mozambique, on the other hand, was once again approaching South Africa after years of the bush war. A consensus was needed and the socialist leadership in Maputo sought a balance with Pretoria. Mielke could not like that.

Eight Germans were murdered just like that.

But who murdered Wolfgang Smardz, Uwe Wriedt, Günter Skibbe, Manfred Lindner, Klaus Einecke, Helmut Liepe, Hans-Dieter Wagner, Jürgen Michel, the Yugoslavian development aid worker Branko Vujovic and who injured Klaus Pohl so badly in the long stretched curve in the bushland?

It was December 6, 1984, on a dusty African dirt road leading to the fields of the state farm. About 45 men, partly armed with bazookas and MPs, sneaked to the track under the protection of the surrounding bushes.

Another 10 kilometres to Unango, the convoy came to a standstill. Shortly afterwards, the assailants approached the Multicar from behind and executed the victims with targeted shots to the head. Three are found in front of the truck, four in the truck. One of the development workers was seriously injured, he died shortly afterwards. The Yugoslavian is also dead. One of the development helpers survives, but even he could not contribute much to the enlightenment.

 

The perpetrators escaped unrecognised within minutes, the guard fled to the other side of the slope, Mielke in East Berlin raged.

Whilst the decades passed by this history was completely forgotten, the attack faded out.

After the reunification of Germany, the case was again taken up by the public prosecutor's office in Gera and finally handed over to the visibly uninterested authority in Maputo in 2009.

Smokescreens in the bush

The "truth" rewritten by the Ministry for State Security and the alleged mastermind of the attack, Erich Mielke, was used to describe gangs that at that time were caught between the lines of the Mozambique civil war, who were identified as the perpetrators. None of the alleged gang members could ever be located. There were arms dealers, mercenaries and desperados who sought their fortune between the lines.

The incompetent regime of Samora Machel was a great help to them, endless strikes kept the socialist version of Mozambique in suspense. Nothing worked anymore. Also, several hundred trucks from the GDR, which had already been delivered and were intended for the deal between the GDR and Mozambique, rusted in the ports.

The reflection within the socialist brother states of the Cold War was one of the greatest disasters.

To cultivate agricultural land outside of the GDR to harvest tropical fruits and coffee and to provide development aid to the Mozambicans, who were plagued by civil war, through about 100 reconstruction workers was within the framework of the possibilities of the former GDR.

This socialist fraternal support for the FRELIMO regime by the then ruler Samora Machel ended in death for one Yugoslavian and eight German reconstruction workers.

Simple, they were murdered.

While the GDR still existed, no reconnaissance activities were developed.

Samora Machel hamba khale (Walk safely)

Mozambique also got into considerable, further difficulties after the death of the "revolutionary leader" Samora Machel.

The already curious crash of the Tupolev Tu-134A-3 over Lebombobergen, South Africa, near Komatipoort, in October 1986, exposed even the international investigation commission to countless puzzles arising from the facts of the crash.

Margo Commission 

During his lifetime Machel had maintained a corrupt and perfidious regime that turned to either side if it only served to maintain the diminish power. The RENAMO supported by South Africa was no better.

Machel's death left a political vacuum in that it was also very difficult for the South African judge Cecil Margo to determine what had happened when the crash occurred. In this environment, the clarification of the death of the GDR citizens was quickly forgotten.

The state GDR, a militarily active band of robbers

As early as July 1984 there were rumours that the GDR had entered into a political and military engagement in Angola to obtain important foreign exchange through the international diamond trade. Mielke also sensed a profitable arms business in Mozambique, even if the desired development boost did not come from Mozambique, as the GDR leadership expressed itself after the attack. Mielke spoke of "capitulatory behaviour of the Mozambican forces" 

2.Part Traces to the Oranje Vrystaat