Cuban Missile Crisis U2 Squadron Commander (80)

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 wh...

18 Dec 202147min

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 ma...

11 Dec 20211h 19min

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...

3 Dec 20211h 1min

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 State...

27 Nov 20211h 15min

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 a...

14 Nov 202159min

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 ...

13 Nov 20211h 5min

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...

6 Nov 202155min

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 lat...

29 Okt 20211h 1min