First a note... this story is from March 2020! However, I only came across it today and I think some might find it of interest.
Extract from the Deutsche Welle website... "Apparently the Soviet Union spied during the Cold War from the Hambach opencast mine near Cologne. During their excavations, the archaeologists from the Rhineland Regional Association not only found fossilized remains of a manatee that lived more than 20 million years ago, or spearheads from the Bronze Age, but also: a Soviet radio from the Cold War.
To find out more about the device, historians and the Bundeswehr's Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD) were called in, says Erich Claßen: "We are certain at the moment that it is a device made in Russia." It could have been used by either an employee of the Soviet military intelligence service GRU or the East German NVA or Stasi. The box was buried 60 to 80 cm below the surface of the earth and therefore frost-proof. This corresponded to the instructions of the time.
The device was produced in 1987. It is impossible to say exactly when it was buried. “Probably not after 1990,” says Claßen. "There were instructions to bury such emergency radios in the forest, protected from frost, in order to be able to report quickly in an emergency, i.e. in the event of troop movements." The device's range of up to 1,200 kilometres made it possible to radio and inform the Warsaw Pact states without any problems."
The full article is in German and can be found HERE
