The shooting down of KAL007, the Able Archer exercise and the nuclear war scare of 1983 (229)
The year 1983 was one of the most dangerous in human history. While the Cuban crisis was exceptionally dangerous and both the United States and the Soviet Union had significant nuclear arsenals in 196...
1 Apr 20221h 24min
Charlotte Philby talks about her grandfather Soviet spy Kim Philby & her book "Edith & Kim" (228)
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 o...
26 Mar 20221h 10min
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
