Socialist History

You may have heard that the US government recruited Nazi scientists to work for NASA, but did you know they also recruited them to experiment on US soldiers? Their recruitment was part of Operation Paperclip, and the scientists were only a fraction of this program. It also recruited Nazi SS spies and unleashed them into the Cold War, installed Nazi generals into top positions in West Germany and N...

Socialist History is an in-depth, immersive podcast that uncovers the real story of US imperialism through a socialist lens, told from the perspective of the people who fought back.  Hosted by Layan Sima Fuleihan and Brian Becker, each episode reopens a hidden chapter of US imperialism and shows how it still shapes the world today.  Don't let the empire whitewash its history. Get the Socialist His...

In 1959 the US Army began building a base beneath the Greenland ice sheet, presented to the press, to Congress, and to the Danish government as a scientific research station. This was a cover story. The real plan, code-named Project Iceworm, was to bury a network of tunnels housing up to 600 nuclear missiles under the ice, invisible to Soviet satellites, on land taken from Indigenous people who we...

Most empires never write their plans down, but the American empire did. In 1950 a top-secret government document called NSC-68 laid out the blueprint for permanent war: a militarized economy, a nuclear buildup without limit, and a posture of global confrontation that would outlast the men who wrote it. It is the founding doctrine beneath every operation in this series. In this episode we take a de...

In 1961 the United States launched the largest covert operation of the Cold War against a single country, a campaign of sabotage, terror, and assassination aimed at destroying the Cuban Revolution ninety miles from Florida. It was code-named Operation Mongoose. Alongside it, the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up Operation Northwoods, a plan to stage terrorist attacks on American citizens and blame the...

In 1953 the CIA secretly organized a coup to overthrow the democratically elected leader of Iran. This was the CIA's first regime change operation — code-named 'Operation Ajax' — becoming the playbook for later CIA operations. Its consequences are still reverberating around the world. In this episode we take a deep dive into how Operation Ajax was planned and executed, its motivations, the politic...