The first woman to graduate from French Commando school (227)
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 i...
19 Mar 20221h 18min
Betrayed by comrades (226)
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 ...
12 Mar 20221h 6min
My father, the KGB spy (225)
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 translat...
5 Mar 20221h 23min
"Three, Two, one, detonation..." a Royal Navy nuclear test veteran remembers (224)
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 Lam...
26 Feb 202247min
The Stasi Poetry Circle (223)
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 bo...
19 Feb 20221h 7min
The start of the Cuban revolution & the launch of Apollo 8 (222)
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...
16 Feb 202235min
Cold War British Army fighting tactics in West Germany (221)
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. ...
12 Feb 20221h 5min
The West Berlin village surrounded by the Berlin Wall (220)
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 Steinstü...
5 Feb 20221h 11min
