Cold War Conversations - "vivid & compelling" The NY Times

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 II and in the early stages of the Cold War. The woman who introduced Philby to Deutsch was Edith Tudo...

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 infamous James Hall, a United States Army warrant officer and signals intelligence analyst who sold eavesdropping...

Liz Kohn has been researching Alice Glasnerová, who was imprisoned as part of the early Cold War Czechoslovak show trials known as the Slansky trials.  These were among the most notorious show trials of the 20th century, with the prosecution and sentencing to death of Rudolf Slánský, general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist party, and 10 other defendants, who had been arrested in a brutal p...

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. However, he was an employee of the KGB and a member of the Communist Party. During her trip to the US, Ieva’s father informed her that he and his wife Rasma were abou...

The British Nuclear Test Veterans Association (BNTVA) is the Charity for UK Nuclear Veterans and last year they very kindly invited me to the annual conference. I met many veterans including Peter Lambourne and this is his story. Peter joined the Royal Navy aged 15. He describes those early days including serving on HMS Wizard during the Cod War with Iceland in 1961. In 1962 Peter was then posted...

In 1982 the East German Ministry for State Security is hunting for creative new weapons in the war against the class enemy – and their solution is stranger than fiction. Rather than guns, tanks, or bombs, the Stasi develop a programme to fight capitalism through rhyme and verse, winning the culture war through poetry – and the result is the most bizarre book club in history. I speak with Philip Ol...

The phrase “history is human” was coined by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian David McCullough. He says “History is about life. It isn't just about dates and quotations from obscure treaties and the like; it's about people", which is exactly what Cold War Conversations is about. I discovered this phrase listening to the History Daily podcast presented and narrated by Lindsay Gra...

Frank Baldwin was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1979 and served for ten years, rising to the rank of Major. The first battlefield study he planned was in 1989 for HQ 4th Armoured Division. Since then, he has been a guide or historian for over 200 realities of war tours, battlefield studies and staff rides.  Frank reels off lots of great anecdotes as he takes us through the initial years...

When the Cold War split Berlin in half, between East and West, one neighbourhood was trapped in the middle and became a symbol of Cold War tensions.  For more than twenty years, the hamlet of Steinstücken was caught in a tug-of-war between the Americans, the Soviets and the East Germans.  Steinstücken officially belonged to the U.S. Occupation Sector of Berlin. But, it was located outside the city...

You will remember Karl-Heinz from our episode 218 where he talked about being a signaller on the West German destroyer "Hamburg" in the late 70s.  Today we follow his post navy life as a travelling supporter of football club HSV Hamburg where he followed them all over the Soviet bloc talks about watching them play Dynamo Berlin the Stasi side and drinking with Liverpool, Newcastle and Hamburg lege...

Karl-Heinz served in the Bundesmarine as a Signalman on the West German destroyer "Hamburg" in the late 70s.  He talks of his training, his role and shares details of manoeuvres in the North Sea and Baltics involving East German and Soviet ships. He also speaks about a cruise to West Africa where the sailors were briefed to stay away from any East German merchant marine sailors and not to engage w...

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 1995 Bob became deputy director of the Office of Technical Service and in 1998 was appointed its direc...

Bob Wallace joined the US Army in 1968 as a reluctant conscript. He describes the draft process, and his attempts to avoid conscription.  After basic training, Bob is assigned to a long range reconnaissance unit and ambush unit in five or six man teams in the Mekong delta. We hear of the reconnaissance and ambush tactics as well as some poignant memories of those that didn’t make it back. This pod...

Refusenik was an unofficial term for individuals—typically, but not exclusively, Soviet Jews—who were denied permission to emigrate, primarily to Israel, by the authorities of the Soviet Union and other countries of the Eastern bloc. The term refusenik is derived from the "refusal" handed down to a prospective emigrant from the Soviet authorities. Eric Hochstein was a staff member for Senator Carl...

Today’s episode is different. Brett Elliott died earlier this year and I was contacted by his ex-wife Polly who offered me a cassette tape.  Polly and Brett had met in college and got to know each other in Russian Club at Oklahoma State. In the summer of 1991, they went to Moscow to pursue Polly’s goal of being a reporter in Russia and Brett’s goal of further studying Russia.  They both worked tog...

John Andrews joined the Royal Navy in 1981 and went on to serve aboard the HMS Repulse, one of the UK’s Polaris nuclear missile submarines from 1982. His role was Missile Compartment Control Patrol which included security of the nuclear missile compartment as well as assisting in the maintenance of the missile tubes and the nuclear missiles themselves.  John shares details of life aboard the ship...

I speak with Colin Ferguson a veteran from the British Army‘s covert Special Observation Post Troop which was founded in 1982. The "stay behind" Special OP Troop consisted of selected soldiers in 6 man patrols whose task was to dig in large underground hides known as "mexe" shelters along the inner German border. They would then allow the main Soviet forces to pass over them before deploying to tw...

Lea Ypi grew up in one of the most isolated countries on earth, a place where communist ideals had officially replaced religion. Albania, the last Stalinist outpost in Europe, was almost impossible to visit, almost impossible to leave. It was a place of queuing and scarcity, of political executions and secret police. To Lea, it was home. People were equal, neighbours helped each other, and childre...

On 17 July 1975 the first manned international space mission, carried out jointly by the United States and the Soviet Union. Millions of people around the world watched on television as a United States Apollo module docked with a Soviet Union Soyuz capsule.  The project, and its memorable handshake in the heavens, was a symbol of détente between the two superpowers during the Cold War, and it is g...

Now, what do you think of when you hear the name Leonid Brezhnev who ruled the Soviet Union for 18 years from the 1960s to the 1980s?  An old guy waving weakly from the Lenin mausoleum? Well, think again! We speak with Susanne Schattenberg, the author of a new biography that systematically dismantles the stereotypical and one-dimensional view of Brezhnev as the stagnating Stalinist by drawing on a...

Fred Weir was a third-generation red diaper baby from Toronto and a long-time member of the Communist 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 up to the graduate level, but never wanted to live there until Gorbachev came t...

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 of Spies: Intelligence agencies in Berlin during the Cold War recently published...

In 1985, an eighteen-year-old named Riho Terras arrived at the Soviet armed forces’ large conscript assessment facility in Tallinn obeying his conscription orders. Little did he know that 26 years later he would be a NATO General. Riho shares his experiences in the Soviet Navy with us in some detail. We hear about his service on the Soviet frigate Zadornyy including trips to the Mediterranean and...

I talk with the writers and editors of Terrorism in the Cold War a new two volume book that uses a wide range of case studies including Polish Military Intelligence and Its Secret Relationship with the Abu Nidal Organization and Gladio – Myth and Reality: The Origins and Function of Stay Behind in the Case of Post-war Austria.  The book sheds new light on the relations between state and terrorist...

Emanuela Grama was born in the mid-1970s’ in a small provincial town in Eastern Romania. She provides us with a great insight into life in the Romanian provinces during the 1980s.  Emanuela lived in a small two-bedroom flat and tells of her parents working in a factory while her grandparents looked after her. Her father listened secretly to Radio Free Europe and collected stamps so he could legiti...