Cold War Conversations Podcast

This special episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the Imperial War Museum London, in October 2025. I speak with Colin Ferguson, a veteran from the British Army‘s covert Special Obser...

We hear the fascinating story of Miles, a British National Service conscript during his military service in the late 1950s. I’d like to give special thanks for the Norfolk Tank Museum for highlighti...

Author Tom Hapgood is a US military BRAT  aka the child of a parent or parents serving full-time in the United States Armed Forces. He talks about his 5 years in West Germany during the Cold War. He s...

Fraser McCallum is the author of a new book Cold War Britain: Fifty years in the shadow of the bomb which gives a fascinating insight into a period that shaped the fabric of British society. The Cold...

In this gripping episode, we hear a detailed account from an eyewitness right at the heart of the tense NATO and Russian confrontation in Kosovo in 1999 at Pristina Airport. NATO General Wesley Clark...

I speak with Jon Benjamin who recounts his meetings with Margot Honecker, the unrepentant architect of East Germany’s education system and widow of GDR leader Erich Honecker then living in exile in Ch...

Richard F Kaufman is the author of A One-Way Trip to Death A Survivor’s View of Cruise Missiles in the Cuban Missile Crisis In the 1950s he served in the Korean War, where he was shot down and provid...

Today we are transported back to a pivotal moment in history that occurred 35 years ago this month - the Romanian Revolution of 1989. This episode is from our archive and features, Mark Brayne, a f...

In the late 1970s, the United States found itself at the centre of a crisis where 52 US Embassy staff were held hostage in Iran. Our latest episode takes you on a journey through the tumultuous event...

On April 30, 1980, six heavily armed gunmen burst into the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate, overlooking Hyde Park in London. There they took 26 hostages, including embassy staff, visitors, and three B...

BRIXMIS and its operations behind enemy lines continue to fascinate the listeners of Cold War Conversations. In August 2024 I was honoured to be invited to the National Army Museum in London to interv...

Beginning with the death of Stalin in 1953, the “sixties” era in the Soviet Union was just as vibrant and transformative as in the West. The ideological romanticism of the revolutionary years was revi...

Denmark joined NATO as a founding member in 1949. However, it originally laid down limitations to NATO membership, effectively excluding the country from full military integration. The conditions were...

This is the second part of my chat with Thomas who worked in a secret East German radio monitoring base. He describes how a BRIXMIS or another Allied Military Liason Mission vehicle had once got into ...

Steffen was born in Karl Marx Stadt and was conscripted into the NVA (East German Army) in 1988. When he left school he started an apprenticeship in electronics learning how to build radio receivers a...

Ana Montes was the most damaging female spy in US history. For nearly 17 years, Montes was one of the government's top Cuba experts, with easy access to classified documents. By night, she was working...

Every weekday on the History Daily podcast, Lindsay Graham takes you back in time to explore a momentous moment that happened ‘on this day’ in history.  1989 was a pivotal year for the Cold War. The...

On 10 February 1962, Gary Powers, the American pilot whose U2 spy plane was shot down in Soviet airspace, was released on “The Bridge in Spies” in Berlin by his captors in exchange for one Colonel Rud...

Lt Col. Stephen Harrison, MBE served for two years as a full-time Touring Officer with BRIXMIS. These Tours were hazardous three man, vehicle-borne patrols collecting intelligence on the Warsaw Pact f...

In the early 1980s East Germany had just 5000 members of the Church of Latter-day Saints, many of which had been members since before World War 2.  In 1982 East German leader Erich Honecker historical...

Refusenik was an unofficial term for individuals—typically, but not exclusively, Soviet Jews—who were denied permission to emigrate, primarily to Israel, by the authorities of the Soviet Union and oth...

In 1985, an eighteen-year-old named Riho Terras arrived at the Soviet armed forces’ large conscript assessment facility in Tallinn obeying his conscription orders. Little did he know that 26 years lat...

Frank Olson was an American bacteriologist, biological warfare scientist, and employee of the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories. In 1953 at a meeting in rural Maryland, he was covertl...

Joanna is questioned by the KGB and the FBI, falls in love with Yuri and starts to smuggle the bands' music out of the Soviet Union to produce the album. Details of the book giveaway are here https:/...

This episode is sponsored by MUBI, a curated streaming service with an ever-changing collection of hand-picked cinema. From new directors to award-winners. From everywhere on earth. Beautiful, interes...

Germany has been at the heart of the British Army's story since 1945. After the Second World War, the Army helped rebuild a devastated and divided nation. It provided protection during the Cold War, a...

We continue the story of Bill, a US Army Intelligence Analyst with Combined Analysis Detachment-Berlin (CAD-B) from episode 127. Germany has now been re-unified and Russian troops have withdrawn from ...

Michael Zdanowski was born and raised in the UK, but his interest with the Cold War goes back generations. His grandfather having emigrated from Poland to the United Kingdom during the second world wa...

This is the first of two episodes we have following Don Snedeker’s experiences through the Cold War. In this episode, we hear about his time in Vietnam and the book he has written entitled "The Blackh...

Hans de Vreij is a Dutch journalist who has worked in Berlin , Brussels, Geneva and Prague. Whilst working at the United Nations in Geneva Hans was the subject of attempted recruitment by the KGB to d...

In Britain and the Bomb Bill Nuttall considers Britain's national journey from Empire to Europe and the transition of British nuclear weapons from the Royal Air Force to the Royal Navy. If you are enj...

The Cold War got colder in the early 1980s and the relationship between the two military superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union, each of whom had the capacity to annihilate the other, was tense. By...

In early 1989 attention being paid to Albania in England by the English media because the England football team had recently travelled to Tirana for a World Cup qualifying game.  Looking for somewhere...

Charlie Flowers was 18 in 1988. He travelled by train across a divided Eastern Europe that was starting to show signs of the changes that manifested themselves in 1989. He shares stories of the intere...

Harry served as a soldier in the Intelligence Corps in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. His role was that of an Intelligence and Security Operator, focused on the identification of foreign and other ma...

Manuel Alzaga returns to the podcast after his debut in episode 57 with his experiences as US Army 18-year-old assistant artillery gunner in West Germany. He tells of his first impressions of West Ger...

We return to Ramona Reed’s account of her father, Dean Reed who was an American actor, singer, songwriter, director, and Socialist who became a huge star in Latin America and the Eastern Bloc. Now if ...

Dr Peter Johnston is the Head of Collections Research and Academic Access at the National Army Museum in London and the author of a lavishly illustrated military and social history of the British forc...

We speak to 98 year old Gail Halvorsen aka "The Candy Bomber" who flew in the Berlin Airlift in 1948. The Soviets had started a 11-month land blockade against West Berlin. The blockade was broken by ...

In this episode we hear the third and final part of Torsten Belger’s story as he tells us about his first visit to West Berlin, leaving the East German Army and life after the GDR. Before we start a ...

In this episode we welcome back Gillian Cox who told us about her student trip to East Germany in 1989. In this episode the story continues with her trip further East into Poland. At this point Polan...

Today we talk with Samy who as a native West Berliner describes growing up in the city during the 1970s and 80s. He describes in detail the difference between West Berlin and West Germany, including ...

Jeremy Poynton was a 16 year old school boy in 1968 when he embarked on a memorable trip by road from Leningrad to Odessa. He vividly describes a Soviet Union still struggling with poverty and a diver...

Mark Baker is an independent journalist and travel writer who’s lived in Central Europe for more than two decades.   I heartily recommend his travel website www.markbakerprague.com which is an eclecti...