Cold war history

‘Rockers and spies’ – how the CIA used culture to shred the iron curtain

Two memories: one, from November 1989, of a crowded bar at 3am in Berlin, not far from the wall breached just 36 hours beforehand. My brother and I are in town for the craic and biggest street party of all time. An awful band called Eurocheque strikes up a cover of the Scorpions’ Big City Nights and, inebriated, the crowd joins in. An elderly couple from the eastern sector two-steps to the beat. It’s very moving. A few months earlier, the Scorpions had played a music festival in Moscow, and were already working on their most famous song: Wind of Change.

Second memory: the less epic surroundings of Mote Park, Kent, three decades later. The Scorpions, this time for real, with bedazzling lightshow and backdrop of peace signs on a holograph of the Berlin Wall; Klaus Meine – born 1948, year of the Berlin blockade – singing Wind of Change through a chilly night. “The world is closing in/ Did you ever think/That we could be so close, like brothers … ?”

Now, it turns out, that sparkler-swaying anthem may have been contrived by US intelligence as cultural subversion of communism. An upcoming podcast series, Wind of Change, by the New Yorker’s Pat Radden Keefe, investigates whether it was – as the journalist was told a decade ago – actually a CIA-crafted confection.