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.

Cold war history

How the KGB Bugged American Typewriters During the Cold War

The Cold War spy drama that played out between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was the source of much ingenious spy technology. One of the most ingenious devices fielded by both sides was a typewriter designed to spy on the user, quietly transmitting its keystrokes to KGB listeners. The technology was an early form of keylogging but done entirely through hardware—not PC software

Charles Gandy, an electrical engineer with the National Security Agency, was charged with figuring out if the U.S. embassy in Moscow had been compromised. Counterintelligence had reason to believe that somehow, information was getting out that compromised American intelligence agents. Officials suspected a transmitter planted inside the agency, perhaps in the form of a listening device. Still, they had no concrete proof it existed, and sweeps of the embassy from top to bottom revealed no definitive transmitter.

But there was almost certainly something—a secret antenna was discovered behind a false wall. What transmitter was the antenna listening to? It had to be something inside the embassy.

Cold war history

The Soviets fired this secret heavy cannon while in orbit

Most important to the USSR was the idea of American spacecraft being able to literally get their hands on Soviet satellites. Anti-satellite operations were something both powers prepared for, but the idea that the satellite itself would need protection up there all alone prompted the Soviets to arm one of theirs, just to see how that would go.

The Soviets built a station code-named "Almaz," a space station that held spy equipment, radar, and the R-23M, a 37-pound 14.5mm automatic cannon that could fire up to 5,000 rounds per minute that was accurate up to a mile away. There was just one problem: aiming the cannon. The cosmonauts in the station would have to rotate the entire space station to point the weapon.

It was supposed to be the first manned space station in orbit, but the Russians were more concerned with developing the weapon than they were other aspects of the capsule, like sensors and life support. So instead of building their grand space station, they slapped together what they had with the R-23M and a Soyuz capsule, called it the Salyut before launching it into space in 1971.

Cold war history

New York’s Morbid KGB Museum Is for Spy Nerds

New York’s new KGB Museum is, suffice it to say, a very strange place. The cinderblock-walled space occupies the ground floor of a pricy condo complex, and it recently underwent its “ribbon-cutting” ceremony, with a metallic rope serving as ribbon, which was cut through with a power saw. Inside the museum sit dozens of glass cases featuring a massive (and occasionally baffling) panoply of Soviet and Russian spy gear, flanked by propaganda posters and uniformed mannequins.

The overall theme sits in an awkward position between its Spy v. Spy-style camp and brief reflections on the actual horrors inflicted by the Soviet bloc’s secret police and formal intelligence services.

With Russian intelligence agencies and the possibility of a new Cold War at the forefront of some American minds, it’s hardly a surprise that someone would choose to open a museum dedicated to the Eastern Bloc’s legacy of spycraft. The collection spans from the pre-World War II period to the end of the Cold War and beyond. And the KGB Museum, a project of Lithuanian father-daughter collector team Julius Urbaitis and Agne Urbaityte, sits at the junction of the U.S. public’s Russia-related anxieties in 2019.

Cold war history

The secret on the ocean floor

In the summer of 1974, a large and highly unusual ship set sail from Long Beach in California.

It was heading for the middle of the Pacific where its owners boasted it would herald a revolutionary new industry beneath the waves.

Equipped with a towering rig and the latest in drilling gear, the vessel was designed to reach down through the deep, dark waters to a source of incredible wealth lying on the ocean floor.

It was billed as the boldest step so far in a long-held dream of opening a new frontier in mining, one that would see valuable metals extracted from the rocks of the seabed.

But amid all the excited public relations, there was one small hitch - the whole expedition was a lie.

This was a Cold War deception on a staggering scale, but one which also left a legacy that has profound implications nearly half a century later.

Cold war history

Fidel Castro’s Armageddon Letter to Nikita Khrushchev[*]

ALEKSANDER ALEKSEEV: Fidel, do you mean to say [to Khrushchev] that we should be the first to strike a nuclear blow against the enemy?

FIDEL CASTRO: Under certain circumstances, we should forestall them without waiting for the first nuclear blow from their side. If they attack Cuba, we should wipe them off the face of the earth.

—Conversation between Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Soviet Ambassador to Cuba, Aleksander Alekseev, in a bunker beneath the Soviet embassy, Havana, Cuba, sometime between 2:00 AM and 7:00 AM, October 27, 1962 EDT[1]

The truth can be really powerful stuff. You’re not expecting it.

—Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country (2005)[2]

Cold war history

Son of Nikita Khrushchev Provides Unique Perspectives on US and Russian History

As all intelligence officers know, the thirst for knowledge is the key to excelling in their jobs and maintaining a daily situational awareness. The same is true for most Americans. We have a need to understand our history, so that we can avoid future mistakes.

One of the best ways to understand our history is to listen to those who have lived through previous eras. On October 28, the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, in association with the Smithsonian Institution, hosted a talk by Dr. Sergei Khrushchev as part of its Distinguished Lecture Series.

Khrushchev spoke on the topic, “The USA and Russia in the Past and Future.” He provided stories from the “other” side of the Cold War.

Cold war history

Ex-Pentagon Advisor Reveals How CIA Killed Western Politicians During Cold War

German investigative journalist Patrik Baab and former Pentagon adviser Robert Harkavy have released a bombshell book, revealing the links between the murders of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, West German politician Uwe Barschel and former CIA director William Colby. Baab told Sputnik what their groundbreaking research has uncovered.

Baab and Harkavy's book, 'In the Spider Web of the Secret Services: Why Were Olaf Palme, Uwe Barschel and William Colby Murdered?', takes aim at the CIA's suspected involvement in the officials' deaths. Based on secret documents from seven different intelligence agencies, conversations with former agents, toxicology reports, and consultations with experts, the book seeks answers to long-standing questions about who was responsible for what have become among the most high profile political death and suspected suicide cases of the 20th century.

Cold war history

Anatoly S. Chernyaev Diary, 1977 

Inside the Central Committee during Brezhnev’s stagnation

New details on the historic Tula speech, Vance mission, Carter and dissidents, challenges of Eurocommunism

The National Security Archive marks what would have been Anatoly Sergeyevich Chernyaev’s 96th birthday today with the publication for the first time in English of his extraordinary diary for 1977, written from inside the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, where he was then a Deputy Director of the International Department.

The Archive’s dear friend and partner in opening historical records passed away this past March, but his voice is with us and remains irreplaceable for anybody who wants to understand not only the end of the Cold War in the 1980s, but also what was going on at the very top of thepolitical hierarchy in Moscow in the darkest years before the dawn of the new thinking that would put Chernyaev at the right hand of Mikhail Gorbachev. 

The diary of 1977 continues the themes seen in the earlier 1970s chapters, previously published on this web site, chronicling the decline and atrophy of the Soviet political system, starting with its top leadership.  The first entry of the year vividly describes Chernyaev’s conversation with his close friend and confidant at the time in the International Department—Karen Brutents.  They share their feeling of “despair” about the Soviet Union’s “dead end,” their pessimism about where the country is going, their embarrassment at the party’s empty ideological words and the constant flattery with new medals and awards that the leadership demands. 

Cold war history

The CIA's Secret Plan to Crush Russia During the Cold War: Super Psychic Powers

What if someone sitting in a darkened room could close his eyes and visualize the exact location of a nuclear submarine hidden in the ocean depths five thousand miles away?

If the U.S. government’s paranormal research had proved fruitful instead of a flop, that’s the world we would live in today. A world where psychics hunt subs, and American soldiers kill enemies with the power of their mind, like an army of Darth Vaders in camouflage uniforms.

When the CIA made twelve million documents available online in January, the records that drew the most media attention were those concerning the agency’s Cold War paranormal research. Beginning in the 1970s, and spurred by reports that the Soviet Union had invested heavily in psychic research, the CIA’s Scanate and the U.S. Army’s Stargate projects explored the possibility of using psychic powers as battlefield tools.

Cold war history

Mikhail Gorbachev: The man who lost an empire

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has accused the West of "provoking Russia" and said the USSR collapsed in 1991 because of "treachery".

The BBC's Steve Rosenberg in Moscow was given a rare interview with him, 25 years after the USSR's demise.

Mikhail Gorbachev, 85, has been having health problems. But his sense of humour is indestructible.

When we meet he points to his walking stick. "Look", he says, "now I need three legs to get around!"

Mr Gorbachev agreed to talk to me about the moment the world changed: the day the Soviet superpower fell apart.

"What happened to the USSR was my drama," he tells me. "And a drama for everyone who lived in the Soviet Union."

Cold war history

Russia's 'plan to drop nuclear bomb on London' in attack that could kill millions exposed

A plot from Russia to drop nuclear bombs on London in a bid to wipe out the capital city has been exposed.

William Penney, a British atomic expert who helped develop the UK's first atom bomb, warned the Atomic Energy Authority chairman Edwin Plowden in 1954 that the eastern European giant was prepared to drop several "very powerful" bombs.

He added in the top-secret letter that the bombs would fall all across London during the Cold War, with Croydon in south London, Uxbridge in the west, and Romford in the east all suffering from a catastrophic nuclear fallout.

Cold war history

NATO's Master Plan to Crush the Soviet Union in Battle

Even before the guns fell silent in Europe in 1945, it became apparent to American and British planners that the Soviet Union would hold a massive advantage in land power along the Central front. In the early post-war years, Western planners hoped that nuclear weapons would keep the Soviets at bay. As the USSR’s own missile and nuclear programs accelerated, however, it became apparent that NATO (which came into existence in 1949) would need to come to some understanding of how to fight Warsaw Pact forces.