One morning in the spring of 1984 a French former tax clerk called Jacky Challot drove his van off the Copenhagen ferry on to the dock at Swinoujscie, a port city in northwestern Poland. The temperature in the Cold War was close to freezing, but Challot had made the journey many times before and had come prepared.
As he handed out coffee, chocolate and Marlboro cigarettes to the Polish customs officials, they all seemed in good spirits. They glanced through his documents, as usual, and asked him to unload the van. He was struggling with one of the larger items, a dentist’s chair, when a senior official told him to stop. The inside of the van, the customs man said suddenly, wasn’t as long as
