Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson, the

past brought to life by those who were there.

This week the 1980s Walker Espionage scandal in the US.

Two brothers and two generations of the same family

caught selling secrets to the Soviets.

One of the most devastating military spy rings

since the war has just been smashed in the United States. The damage is enormous.

Also from 1963, the moment when Africa might have been united. Plus two medical stories,

we meet the scientists behind the earliest diagnoses of autism

and from the 1980s the first surgery on an unborn baby in the womb.

The only way to save these babies is to do something before birth.

Well, the surgeon and everybody else just about fell over.

It thought it was such an outlandish thing.

That's all to come.

But we begin with the remarkable story of the fall and rise of King Simeon of Bulgaria.

In 2001, more than half a century after being driven into exile by communists,

Bulgaria's former monarch, Simian the second made a dramatic

comeback by winning the country's parliamentary election. There are some European regal dynasties

which have survived the upheavals of the 20th century, but none in those

parts of the continent which fell under communist rule, which is what makes the former King Simmians

political rise to power all the more astonishing.

Fahana-Heider has been speaking to Simian Saxe-Cober-Gota about his remarkable life.

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