In this 36th installment of the series, Skeen is the unfazed victim of an insidious plan to drive him crazy, but in this case he learns it is a policy of the Soviets, although it is an idea handed to the East German Communists by the Soviets later in the century. The Stasi was the GDR's secret police, which devised a policy to destroy a man's life. It was refined in Soviet Russia, and spied on thousands of Germans. The Stasi's methods were based, not so ironically, on an idea developed by two German academics, whose purpose was to expose the methodologies of totalitarians.