The intended victim, then-Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, escaped injury.

Fresh details about the 1969 assassination attempt appeared in an October 1989 issue of The Baltic Light, an 18,000-circulation newspaper that served the district of Petrodvorets in the former Soviet Union.

Zaharov Evgeny, then 26, broke the story -- 20 years after the fact.

I met the thin, bearded newspaperman 20 years ago this month along the Gulf of Finland. We were covering a delegation of California police officers visiting a group of Soviet militiamen in a first-of-its-kind police exchange program.

Evgeny spotted me first.

"Journalist?" he asked, smiling.

"Yes," I said.

"Me, too."

Evgeny quickly handed me an issue of a tabloid-sized paper, opened to page 12, where his Brezhnev story appeared. He translated the story, and he asked me to share it with the West.

Evgeny said the gunman received a sentence of 20 years in a mental institution and was scheduled to be released by the end of 1989.

He said he first heard rumors about the assassination attempt in 1986, at a time when writing such a story in the Soviet Union may have been considered seditious, with a reporter risking possible imprisonment.

Three years later, Evgeny's story published during a period of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's political and social reforms.

Evgeny said his sources included people who had worked in the Kremlin. Others had witnessed the shooting. He listed all their names in the story, along with the gunman's name and those of the cosmonauts. In all, he said he interviewed 20 people for the story.

The story was Evgeny's first big scoop after graduating from the University of Leningrad, where he studied journalism.

I asked him about his next big story. He grinned. He said he heard rumors about corruption among ranking military officials during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Evgeny said he had interviews lined up with soldiers.

I thought of Evgeny last week after I addressed a group of Arabic-speaking journalists visiting the United States as part of the Edward R. Murrow Program.

The program is operated by the State Department and brings journalists to the U.S. to learn, among other things, about the rights and responsibilities of a free press in a democracy.

The 12 journalists came from Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Oman, Palestinian Territories, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

According to a survey by freedomhouse.org, only one of those countries, Egypt, holds partial press freedom.

They visited the University of Maryland in College Park, where I caught up with them. I talked about open government and transparency, and a State Department interpreter provided simultaneous translation.

I discussed freedom of information laws, those tools that reporters at The Frederick News-Post use every day to dislodge information.

I showed them examples from the Watchdog section of fredericknewspost.com. We looked at The News-Post's collection of online, searchable databases: salaries of public employees, Camp David airspace violations, restaurant inspections and use-of-force reports involving Tasers, to name a few.

Repeatedly, they asked me if the government turned over the information.

"Yes."

They asked other questions, too. For example, what did I mean by "Sunshine Week"? It struck me I took those words for granted.

In 2005, the America Society of Newspaper Editors Freedom of Information committee launched Sunshine Week. Each March, newspapers join forces to test open record laws and publish stories about open records and government. The News-Post participates in Sunshine Week.

Steve Crane, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, said past Murrow Fellows have been beaten or jailed for what they wrote about their governments. Crane worked with the journalists during their visit.

The hope is their governments open up, so these journalists can cast sunshine on deeply held secrets the same way a young, skinny Russian did two decades ago.