The award-winning podcast preserving the stories of the Cold War before they are lost…subscribe for free. Produced by Ian Sanders FRHistS
Listen on Apple PodcastsListen on SpotifyListen on Google PodcastsBecome a Patron! Maura McCormick was posted to Berlin as a Signals Intelligence voice interceptor (Russian). Her workplace was the Teufelsberg U.S. listening station, aka Field Station Berlin. Maura shares her early impressions of Berlin and working at the Tberg. She talks about her impressions of the … Read more
In June 1934, Kim Philby met his Soviet handler, the spy Arnold Deutsch. Kim Philby was a British intelligence officer and a double agent for the Soviet Union. In 1963 he was revealed to be a member of the Cambridge Five, a spy ring that had divulged British secrets to the Soviets during World War … Read more
You might remember listening to short wave radio during the Cold War and coming across weird transmissions of metallic voices reciting random groups of numbers through the ether. These are number stations, shortwave radio stations characterised by broadcasts of formatted numbers, which were being sent to spies operating in foreign countries. Number stations were used … Read more
After service in the US Army during the Vietnam War Bob Wallace was recruited into the CIA. In the CIA his initial assignments were as a field case officer. He rose through the ranks at the agency and was Chief of Station in three locations where he directed the full range of CIA activities. In … Read more
Listen on Apple PodcastsListen on SpotifyListen on Google PodcastsBecome a Patron! In 1978, Ieva Lesinska was a university student in Soviet Latvia with dreams of becoming a writer. She had just spent a heady month in New York visiting her father, Imants Lesinskis, a Soviet translator working at the United Nations. He was an employee … Read more
For almost half a century, the hottest front in the Cold War was right across Berlin. From summer 1945 until 1990, spying was part of everyday life in both East and West Berlin. I speak with historian Bernd von Kostka of the Allied Museum in Berlin-Dahlem who has co-authored with Sven Felix Kellerhoff the book Capital … Read more
Pete Curran served with BRIXMIS, the British Military Liaison Mission in East Germany. Their operation was established by a post-WWII Allied occupation forces’ agreement, where British, US and French missions had relative freedom to travel and collect intelligence throughout East Germany from 1947 until 1990. Pete’s story starts with details of his vetting interview, driver … Read more
Frank Olson was an American bacteriologist, biological warfare scientist, and employee of the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories. In 1953 at a meeting in rural Maryland, he was covertly dosed with LSD by his boss Sidney Gottlieb, who was the head of the CIA’s MKUltra mind control program. Nine days later, Olson plunged … Read more
I speak with Aden Magee who operated as the commander of a highly specialized Counterintelligence (CI) unit in West Germany during the last decade of the Cold War. We talk about his book The Cold War Wilderness of Mirrors – Counterintelligence and the U.S. and Soviet Military Liaison Missions 1947–1990. This is a rare book … Read more
Igor Gouzenko exposed Soviet intelligence’s efforts to steal nuclear secrets as well as the technique of planting sleeper agents. The “Gouzenko Affair” is often credited as a triggering event of the Cold War, with historian Jack Granatstein stating it was “the beginning of the Cold War for public opinion” and journalist Robert Fulford writing he … Read more