Under Fire: A Journalist’s Story of the 1989 Romanian Revolution

Today we are transported back to a pivotal moment in history that occurred 35 years ago this month – the Romanian Revolution of 1989. Listen on Apple PodcastsListen on SpotifyListen on YouTubeListen on Amazon MusicListen on Podcast AddictBecome a Patron! This episode is from our archive and features, Mark Brayne, a former Reuters and BBC … Read more

Dickey Chapelle – trailblazing female Cold War journalist

  Now have you ever heard of Dickey Chapelle? No, I hadn’t either, but I’m delighted to bring you the unknown story of this trailblazing female war correspondent. Dickey’s career started in World War 2 where she reported from some of the Pacific wars’ toughest battlefields of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. During the Cold War, … Read more

A KGB trained spy’s desperate escape from Cold War South Africa

  Listen on Apple PodcastsListen on SpotifyListen on Google PodcastsBecome a Patron! South Africa in the 1980s is a brutal, racist Apartheid regime. Those who oppose it risk their lives. Apartheid was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s Sue Dobson is moving easily through … Read more

A KGB trained spy in Cold War South Africa

  Listen on Apple PodcastsListen on SpotifyListen on Google PodcastsBecome a Patron! South Africa in the 1980s is a brutal, racist regime. Those who oppose it risk their lives. Sue Dobson, was a young white South African woman who was also a spy for the banned African National Congress. The ANC was a liberation movement … Read more

A photojournalist in Cold War Eastern Europe

During the 1970s and 1980s, Arthur Grace travelled extensively behind the Iron Curtain, working primarily for news magazines. One of only a small corps of Western photographers with ongoing access, he was able to delve into the most ordinary corners of people’s daily lives, while also covering significant events. His remarkable book Communism(s) A Cold … Read more

Born into a family of Canadian Communists

Fred Weir was a third-generation red diaper baby from Toronto and a long-time member of the party. His uncle, trained at the Lenin School in Moscow in the 1920s as an agent of the Communist International, the Comintern and spent many years in the USSR. Fred had visited a few times, had studied Russian history … Read more

A South African journalist in apartheid South Africa

  John Matisonn is a South African journalist who  grew up in the suburbs in Johannesburg. In 1979 he was sentenced to jail for refusing to reveal his news sources. Matisonn describes life as a journalist in apartheid South Africa as well as his meetings with some of the key South African personalities of that … Read more