Soft power

Could the CIA Have Planted Hair-Metal Propaganda During the Cold War?

In 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, West German band the Scorpions released their prescient ballad “Wind of Change.” With earnest lyrics about togetherness and the “children of tomorrow,” the song sounds like an anthem to the end of the Cold War. But, according to The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe, there’s reason to believe the hit ballad could have been a CIA concoction created to aid in the West’s fight against communism.

In the eight-part podcast Wind of Change, produced by Spotify, Pineapple Street Studios, and Crooked Media, Keefe takes listeners along on his reporting journey, through interviews with musicians and their fans, ex-CIA spooks and historians, as he tries to piece together the true story of the song.

Part spy caper, part Cold War-era music lesson, Wind of Change discusses the U.S. government’s history of exerting cultural influence overseas, especially through music, like in the 1950s and early 1960s, when President Eisenhower sent jazz performers Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong to introduce the American art form to listeners in the Middle East and Africa, respectively.