10 Amazing Coincidences From History

During the Cold War, Soviet spies used to use hollow out coins to hide secret messages in. A delivery boy named Jimmy Bozart, who worked for the Brooklyn Eagle, was collecting payments on his round when something odd about one of the coins caught his attention. He examined it briefly and then threw it to the ground where it split in half and revealed a small piece of paper inside.

Jimmy showed his friend at school who then told his dad, an NYPD officer, who passed the coin up the chain of command until it ended up in the hands of the FBI.

The piece of paper found inside the coin turned out to be a tiny photograph that consisted of columns of numbers. It was a code. There was no key for the code and cryptologists and code-cracking machines were unable to decipher it.

Four years later a Russian KGB officer named Reino Hayhanen was called back to the USSR. Not wanting to return, he stopped on his way from in Paris and gave himself in. From there, he called the U.S. embassy and soon found himself back on US soil.

Someone involved remembered the coin from four years previous and asked Reino if he would be able to decode it. He could. It turned out the message was meant for him and was simply welcoming him to America from Moscow. Penny for his thoughts, eh?