She Calls Me in the Wind s Soft Song and With the Fl wrs She Comes Again
W ith its haunting, whistled refrain and lyrics inspired by Russia slowly thawing under glasnost, Scorpions' 1990 power ballad Wind of Modify became a potent presence in the dying days of the cold war. A creative volte-face up for the German grouping, previously best-known for their Spinal Tap-esque album covers and threat to "rock you like a hurricane", the song'south rallying call of rapprochement was embraced by eastern Europeans equally the iron curtain rusted abroad. But what if this unlikely twist in the group's career masked an even stranger truth: that the song was in fact penned past the CIA to destabilise a teetering Soviet Union?
That is the conspiracy theory explored by the Orwell prize-winning US journalist Patrick Radden Keefe in his new podcast, named afterward the vocal. Keefe kickoff heard the rumour from one of his contacts in the intelligence community a decade ago, and has been intrigued by information technology e'er since. Looking for a gear-change following the gruelling research for a contempo book nearly Northern Ireland'southward Troubles, he decided to make a series almost it. "I imagined information technology being similar some big international spy thriller, if it had been directed by the Coen brothers," he laughs. Indeed, Wind of Change quickly develops a gripping – if faintly cool – narrative, equally Keefe chases clues from the U.s.a. to Russia, parties with fans at a Scorpions concert in Kiev, and tries to become veteran CIA operatives to pause protocol and confirm whether or non America's elite espionage force had a budding songwriter among its ranks.
While he concedes that this particular alleged operation seems small fry "when you set information technology alongside CIA-assisted coups or targeted assassinations or torture", at the time the stakes were loftier. "In 2020, we look dorsum and are like: 'Of course the Berlin Wall was going to autumn, of course the Soviet Union was going to collapse,'" he says. "But people in the CIA at the time didn't take that for granted at all. There was a sense that the Soviet Spousal relationship was going to last for ever, and the CIA needed to exercise everything they could to undermine that."
This meant using every weapon within its armory – including that most American of cultural exports: heavy stone. "Soviet officials had long been nervous over the free expression that rock stood for, and how it might bear on the Soviet youth," Keefe says. "The CIA saw rock music as a cultural weapon in the cold war. Current of air of Change was released a yr after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and became this anthem for the end of communism and reunification of Frg. It had this soft-ability message that the intelligence service wanted to promote."
Rock'southward alluring glamour ensured there was an audience in the eastern bloc hungry to consume this message. "You couldn't purchase western music in record stores, only via the black market, and you could get into a lot of trouble for listening to a ring similar Scorpions," Keefe explains. "I interviewed people in Moscow and St Petersburg who'd risked abort. That song meant a lot to them."
But would their connectedness to Wind of Change be cheapened if information technology turned out to take been cynically cooked up by the other side? "That's one of the questions we investigate: what does it mean for the listener, to larn that a song might not have been a pure expression of the artist's feelings simply a slice of political propaganda?" says Keefe. "Merely I don't think the CIA confected the sentiments in Wind of Change; there was a sense of exhaustion within the Soviet bloc, which helped bring about the alter. The vocal reflected that, and too intensified that emotion, which is what the CIA would have wanted."
Along his quest for the truth, Keefe uncovers a hole-and-corner history of artists, moving picture-makers and musicians collaborating with America's espionage services, with characters as unlikely every bit Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone and hippy-era folk-rockers the Nitty Gritty Clay Band "intersecting with the worlds of politics and espionage in ways that were totally mind-blowing to me".
Inveigling himself inside this disorientating globe of propaganda designed to seem like anything other than propaganda, Keefe began to feel what he dubs "the 'hall of mirrors' effect. I'd uncover a new slice of information that fabricated me re-evaluate things I idea I knew. I was asking myself: 'Am I paranoid? Am I seeing shadows where at that place's nothing?' Hopefully, in the podcast, the listener is having similar experiences, hearing interviewees reveal these weird things and asking: 'Are they lying? Can I trust them?'"
It is clear that Keefe relishes keeping his audience lost within the mystery for as long as possible, reluctant to reveal any spoilers over what his investigation has uncovered, and even refusing to ostend whether he got the risk to interrogate any Scorpions along the manner. He would probably make a adept CIA agent.
The sense that aught is what it seems chimes with our times. "The whole time we were working on the series, the news was full of reports well-nigh Russian influence operations during the 2016 U.s.a. ballot," agrees Keefe. "These themes of propaganda, conspiracy theories and what is the truth find some interesting echoes." Whether our current historic period of conspiracy turns up a tale equally unlikely as the hair metallers who scored a hitting from a slice of CIA propaganda remains to be seen.
Current of air of Alter is available in full on Spotify, with episodes available weekly on other podcast platforms
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/may/15/wind-of-change-did-the-cia-write-the-cold-wars-biggest-anthem
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