The Picnic That Ripped Open The Iron Curtain (329)
In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists did the unthinkable: they entered the forbidden militarised zone of the Iron Curtain - and held a picnic. Word had spread of what was going to happen. On...
27 Jan 20241h 17min
US Army Anti-Aircraft Missile Battery Command in Cold War West Germany (228)
Dan served as a lieutenant and captain in a US Army air defence artillery battalion in West Germany from 1980 until 1985. He describes details of Soviet overflights deep into West Germany and we dis...
20 Jan 20241h 18min
Britain's first Cold War Nuclear Attack Warning Station at Jodrell Bank (327)
The Jodrell Bank observatory in Cheshire in the UK played a significant secret role during the Cold War. It was established in 1945 by Bernard Lovell, a radio astronomer at the university, to investig...
13 Jan 20241h 35min
The East German Tank Commander (326)
In the mid-1980s Dag was a T72 tank commander in the NVA, the East German Army and is now a volunteer at the Tank Museum at Bovington in the UK. He describes his initial tank commander training, the...
6 Jan 20241h 38min
Twilight of the Soviet Union – Memoirs of a British Journalist in Moscow (325)
Kate is sent to Moscow in 1985 to write articles for The Morning Star, a left-wing British daily newspaper founded in 1930 as the Daily Worker by the Communist Party of Great Britain. She lives in a b...
30 Dec 20231h 22min
Further Cold War Tank Tales from the Land Down Under (324)
Tim participates in Kangaroo 89, a huge military exercise with the entire Australian Army using an area the size of Western Europe and we hear about the Australian equivalent of Wolfgang the Bratty Ma...
23 Dec 20231h
How To Catch A Cold War Spy (323)
Since 1985, Ana Montes has been an asset of the Cuban intelligence service. In that time, she’s risen through the ranks to become one of the Pentagon’s most respected voices on Cuban affairs with easy...
16 Dec 20231h 12min
Cold War, Warm Hearts - Hitchhiking behind the 1960s Iron Curtain (322)
In 1966 most of Bridget’s friends, in their early twenties, were settling down with jobs and/or husbands… She, on the other hand, set off alone to travel across Poland relying on the kindness of stran...
9 Dec 202359min
