We Are Witnesses of This Great Revolution! Wind of Change Is Blowing Again!
W ith its haunting, whistled refrain and lyrics inspired by Russian federation slowly thawing under glasnost, Scorpions' 1990 power ballad Current of air of Change became a potent presence in the dying days of the cold war. A artistic volte-face for the German grouping, previously best-known for their Spinal Tap-esque anthology covers and threat to "rock you similar a hurricane", the song's rallying phone call of rapprochement was embraced by eastern Europeans as the atomic number 26 curtain rusted away. 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 United states of america announcer Patrick Radden Keefe in his new podcast, named later on the vocal. Keefe outset heard the rumour from one of his contacts in the intelligence community a decade agone, and has been intrigued by it ever since. Looking for a gear-modify following the gruelling research for a contempo volume about Northern Ireland's Troubles, he decided to make a series well-nigh it. "I imagined it being like 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, every bit Keefe chases clues from the United states of america to Russia, parties with fans at a Scorpions concert in Kiev, and tries to become veteran CIA operatives to intermission protocol and ostend whether or not 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 it alongside CIA-assisted coups or targeted assassinations or torture", at the fourth dimension the stakes were high. "In 2020, we look back and are like: 'Of class the Berlin Wall was going to fall, 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 Union was going to final for ever, and the CIA needed to do everything they could to undermine that."
This meant using every weapon inside its arsenal – including that most American of cultural exports: heavy rock. "Soviet officials had long been nervous over the costless expression that rock stood for, and how it might bear upon the Soviet youth," Keefe says. "The CIA saw rock music as a cultural weapon in the cold war. Air current of Alter was released a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and became this anthem for the end of communism and reunification of Germany. It had this soft-ability message that the intelligence service wanted to promote."
Rock's alluring glamour ensured in that location was an audience in the eastern bloc hungry to consume this bulletin. "You couldn't buy western music in record stores, only via the black marketplace, and you could get into a lot of trouble for listening to a band like Scorpions," Keefe explains. "I interviewed people in Moscow and St Petersburg who'd risked arrest. That vocal meant a lot to them."
Just would their connectedness to Wind of Change be cheapened if it turned out to have been cynically cooked up by the other side? "That's 1 of the questions nosotros investigate: what does it mean for the listener, to acquire that a vocal might non have been a pure expression of the artist'south feelings but a piece of political propaganda?" says Keefe. "But I don't think the CIA confected the sentiments in Wind of Modify; there was a sense of exhaustion inside the Soviet bloc, which helped bring nearly the change. The song reflected that, and also intensified that emotion, which is what the CIA would have wanted."
Along his quest for the truth, Keefe uncovers a hugger-mugger history of artists, film-makers and musicians collaborating with America'southward espionage services, with characters every bit unlikely as Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone and hippy-era folk-rockers the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band "intersecting with the worlds of politics and espionage in ways that were totally mind-blowing to me".
Inveigling himself within this disorientating world of propaganda designed to seem similar anything other than propaganda, Keefe began to feel what he dubs "the 'hall of mirrors' result. I'd uncover a new piece of information that made me re-evaluate things I thought I knew. I was asking myself: 'Am I paranoid? Am I seeing shadows where there'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 forth the way. He would probably brand a good CIA agent.
The sense that naught is what information technology seems chimes with our times. "The whole time we were working on the series, the news was full of reports most Russian influence operations during the 2016 Usa ballot," agrees Keefe. "These themes of propaganda, conspiracy theories and what is the truth find some interesting echoes." Whether our current age of conspiracy turns upwardly a tale as unlikely as the pilus metallers who scored a hit from a piece of CIA propaganda remains to be seen.
Air current of Change is available in full on Spotify, with episodes available weekly on other podcast platforms
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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