In his new, eight-part podcast — duly titled “Wind of Change” — journalist Patrick Radden Keefe doggedly pursues a rumour he heard nearly a decade ago: that US intelligence officers wrote the power ballad as a tool to help end the Cold War.
“On the one hand, this is an investigative story about Cold War espionage, but on the other hand, it’s about these ’80s hair-metal guys who are inescapably absurd,” Keefe explained in an interview. “That’s the reason I hadn’t been able to cut this idea loose — the contrast between the serious aspect of it and the ridiculousness lurking at the edges.”
The podcast (produced jointly by Pineapple Street Studios, Crooked Media and Spotify) takes listeners from CIA headquarters in Virginia to a Scorpions concert last fall in Kyiv, Ukraine, and on to Berlin, St Petersburg and Los Angeles in between. Keefe — known for his work in The New Yorker and his book about the Troubles in Belfast, “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland,” which was published last year — makes references to George H.W. Bush, “Argo” and the Beach Boys alike. He’s an amiable host focused on telling an absorbing tale full of tightly edited twists and turns, and he is less concerned with connecting photos of suspects with red string.
All eight episodes of “Wind of Change” will be available Monday on Spotify.
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