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

On 1 July 1960, a United States RB-47H reconnaissance plane was shot down by the Soviet Air Defence Forces while performing signals intelligence in the Barents Sea, near the Kola Peninsula, off the Arctic coast of the Soviet Union. Four of the six crew members died. The shootdown occurred exactly two months after the far better-known U-2 shootdown involving Francis Gary Powers and added to the ten...

Honecker emerged as an ambitious political player and became the shadowy mastermind behind the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, a crucial moment in twentieth-century history. Author Nathan Morley brings to life the story of the longtime leader of the German Democratic Republic. Drawing from a wealth of untapped archival sources – and firsthand interviews with Honecker’s lawyers, journalist...

Tom Sullivan was a tank platoon commander in Korea in the early 1980s responsible for six tanks and their crew We hear why he joined the US Army, his training, and his first impressions of Korea in the Winter of 1982. He is assigned to Second Platoon, C Company, 1-72 Armor under the toughest Company Commander in the Brigade who had very high standards, no humour, and was a rigid disciplinarian wit...

In February 1983 US soldier Manuel Alzager was sent to a mysterious posting to the British Zone in the north of West Germany a long way from the main US forces in southern Germany. After a lengthy journey, he is picked up by a West German private and eventually arrives at the 81st USAFAD (US Army Field Artillery Detachment), where his mission is to guard, assemble, and deliver low-yield nuclear ar...

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, she reported from Hungary during the 1956 Uprising and was held in the infamous Fő...

I speak with author Ethan Scheiner whose book “Freedom to Win” describes the gripping story of a group of small-town young men who would lead their underdog hockey team from Czechoslovakia against the Soviet Union, the juggernaut in their sport. In 1968 Czechoslovakia experienced the Prague Spring, an attempt to moderate and soften communism. However, a sudden invasion by 500,000 Warsaw Pact soldi...

The BBC Wartime Broadcasting Service (WTBS) is a little-known piece of Cold War history that would have been for many the last human voice they heard after a nuclear attack on the UK. Iain started work for the BBC in 1988 and due to the pressure on training space, was trained in the nuclear bunker at BBC Wood Norton. After training he went to Broadcasting House in London where he first encountered...

Jonny Whitlam has been a Berlin tour guide since 2010, and since then he’s been showing travellers from across the world the fascinating history of Berlin. We met via social media after I noticed his great videos describing well-known and lesser know 20th-century historical locations in Berlin. We discussed doing an episode to help you see Cold War Berlin sites without needing a tour guide and thi...

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 the echelons of the racist government in her work as a journalist, whilst concealing her espionage and military training in the Soviet Union,...

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 known for its opposition to apartheid In the 1980s she built a legend, a fake persona where she pretends to conform, moving easily through the echelons of the raci...

In November of 1982, at the height of the Cold War, Samantha Smith, a 10-year-old girl from Manchester, Maine, wrote to the Soviet leader Yuri Andropov and asked him if he was going to wage a nuclear war against the U.S. When an unprecedented response from Andropov arrived, and Samantha received an invitation to visit the USSR, she and her family embarked on a journey that brought the two warring...

Communist Poland had universal conscription and the armed forces were huge by contemporary standards. The Polish People’s Army, Navy, and Airforce had just over 400,000 troops for most of the 1980s in a country of 36 million. Tom was a conscript in Polish People's Army from 1987-89. He served as a radio operator in Legnica for the rocket artillery.  His service was at an interesting time when the...

It’s 1966 in Berlin and the city has now been divided for 5 years by an almost impenetrable wall erected by the communist German Democratic Republic. Together with his friends, West German student Volker Heinz joins a group looking for ways to help would-be fugitives escape from East to West. Their search ends at Checkpoint Charlie, the most heavily secured border crossing of the Berlin Wall. By h...

Colonel Terry Chester’s flying career spanned some 42 years, and 10,000 flying hours. He joined the RCAF in Sept 1964 and in 1968 was awarded Navigator Wings. Terry flew for 3,000 hrs on the Argus Maritime patrol aircraft where he spent a good portion of his RCAF career hunting for Soviet Submarines in both the Pacific and Atlantic areas of operation.  He was instrumental in the design criteria fo...

The second part of Svetlana’s story starts shortly after her arrival in West Germany with her husband Oleg who is the Chief Editor of the Russian Service of Radio Liberty a CIA-financed station beaming Western propaganda into the Soviet Union. Listen to the previous episode here https://coldwarconversations.com/episode288/ To Svetlana’s horror, Oleg reveals that he has been working for the KGB for...

Svetlana came from a dissident Jewish family opposed to Soviet rule in Latvia. Her parents survived World War 2, but during the Stalin era two members of her family were held in the Gulags. The family never resigned themselves to Latvia's occupation by the Soviet Union in 1940. It was almost impossible to legally leave the Soviet Union, however, in 1971 the first opportunities for "Jewish" emigrat...

We continue Steffen’s story where he tells of serving in three armies – firstly, the NVA, secondly the East German Army between the first free elections and unification, and finally the unified Bundeswehr.  We start the episode in the Autumn of 1989 where demonstrations are growing against the government in nearby Leipzig and Steffen’s unit is on high alert and confined to barracks. It is clear Ea...

Steffen was born in Karl Marx Stadt and was conscripted into the NVA (East German Army) in 1988. When he left school he started an apprenticeship in electronics learning how to build radio receivers at REMA, a then-famous producer of HiFi equipment. Steffen is called up at 18 for his 18 months of service and he talks of the conscription process and incentives offered to him to serve for a longer p...

During the Cold War, the awesome power of nuclear weapons and its deadly fallout meant that every town, village and home in Britain fell under the nuclear shadow, and the threat of annihilation coloured every aspect of ordinary life. I chat with author and fellow Cold War podcaster Julie McDowall about her new book  Attack Warning Red!: How Britain Prepared for Nuclear War. We discuss how families...

In 1990, a country disappeared. When the Iron Curtain fell, East Germany simply ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the GDR presented a radically different German identity to anything that had come before, and anything that exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire: this was a Germany forg...

Richard was 6 years old when he was uprooted from a school in the United States to a Soviet school 700 miles East of Moscow.  In 1988 the Soviet Union was opening up following Michael Gorbachev’s policy of Perestroika and American firms began looking at the possibility of trading with the Soviet Union. It was politically and economically sensitive and his family was chosen to be sent to the USSR t...

Brian Regal entered the US Army in 1977 and served on the M60A1 tank initially as a driver. The M60A1 was America's primary main battle tank during the Cold War, with initial deployment in 1960 and combat service through to 1991. After tank school, Brian was sent to West Germany where he was assigned to the 3/35 Armor in the Bamberg Garrison as part of the 1st Armored Division US Army, where the 3...

In 1987 Martin received a letter informing him of his conscription into the Dutch Army. A number of European NATO countries had conscription during the Cold War. Holland’s applied to men over the age of 18 and included service for about a year, after which you were placed on the reserve.   Martin objected to military service as a conscientious objector on religious grounds. Conscientious objectors...

Mark Baker was featured in episode 9 where he told us about working in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s as a journalist for a small publishing company called Business International (BI). He was the company’s Czechoslovakia expert and with his Czech minder Arnold he travelled to Prague and other cities to report on significant economic and political developments. In 2021, he published “Čas Proměn” (“Tim...

We return to Dirk’s story from episode 278 with a move to East Berlin following his mother’s divorce from his father. Dirk finds school life more relaxed where pupils are allowed to wear Western clothing and to speak more openly, even questioning their teachers about the existence of the Berlin Wall. After leaving school, Dirk starts work in a factory from which he can see into West Berlin and he...