![]() “But 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 change. Photograph: Crookedīut would their connection to Wind of Change be cheapened if it turned out to have been cynically cooked up by the other side? “That’s one of the questions we investigate: what does it mean for the listener, to learn that a song might not have been a pure expression of the artist’s feelings but a piece of political propaganda?” says Keefe. “I interviewed people in Moscow and St Petersburg who’d risked arrest. “You couldn’t buy western music in record stores, only via the black market, and you could get into a lot of trouble for listening to a band like Scorpions,” Keefe explains. Rock’s alluring glamour ensured there was an audience in the eastern bloc hungry to consume this message. ![]() It had this soft-power message that the intelligence service wanted to promote.” Wind of Change was released a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and became this anthem for the end of communism and reunification of Germany. “The CIA saw rock music as a cultural weapon in the cold war. “Soviet officials had long been nervous over the free expression that rock stood for, and how it might affect the Soviet youth,” Keefe says. This meant using every weapon within its arsenal – including that most American of cultural exports: heavy rock. There was a sense that the Soviet Union was going to last for ever, and the CIA needed to do everything they could to undermine that.” “But people in the CIA at the time didn’t take that for granted at all. ![]() ![]() “In 2020, we look back and are like: ‘Of course the Berlin Wall was going to fall, of course the Soviet Union was going to collapse,’” he says. 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 time the stakes were high. Indeed, Wind of Change quickly develops a gripping – if faintly absurd – narrative, as Keefe chases clues from the US to Russia, parties with fans at a Scorpions concert in Kiev, and tries to get veteran CIA operatives to break protocol and confirm whether or not America’s elite espionage force had a budding songwriter among its ranks. “I imagined it being like some big international spy thriller, if it had been directed by the Coen brothers,” he laughs. Looking for a gear-change following the gruelling research for a recent book about Northern Ireland’s Troubles, he decided to make a series about it. Keefe first heard the rumour from one of his contacts in the intelligence community a decade ago, and has been intrigued by it ever since. That is the conspiracy theory explored by the Orwell prize-winning US journalist Patrick Radden Keefe in his new podcast, named after the song. But what if this unlikely twist in the group’s career masked an even stranger truth: that the song was in fact penned by the CIA to destabilise a teetering Soviet Union? A creative volte-face for the German group, previously best-known for their Spinal Tap-esque album covers and threat to “rock you like a hurricane”, the song’s rallying call of rapprochement was embraced by eastern Europeans as the iron curtain rusted away. With its haunting, whistled refrain and lyrics inspired by Russia slowly thawing under glasnost, Scorpions’ 1990 power ballad Wind of Change became a potent presence in the dying days of the cold war.
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