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The Berlin Wall had just fallen and the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse when German band The Scorpions released their 1990 song Wind of Change.
The power ballad became the soundtrack to a revolution and one of the best selling songs of all time.
Decades later, investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe heard a rumour that the song wasn't written by the Scorpions but by the CIA as a cultural weapon in the Cold War.
He's made a 10-episode podcast investigating this most intriguing of ideas. You can access it on Apple podcasts and Spotify.
Radden Keefe is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of three books: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream, and Chatter: Uncovering the Echelon Surveillance Network and the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping.
The conspiracy theory isn’t that far fetched as the CIA has a documented history of engaging in cultural wars with its political rivals and other nations deemed a threat to its interests. It has weaponised culture as a means of undermining governments, Radden Keefe tells Kim Hill.
The last leader of the USSR Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev asked the lead singer of the group Klaus Meine to a meeting as his Glaznost reform policies took shape. He invited him to sing the song in Red Square and a fortnight later on Christmas Day 1989 the flag of the Soviet Union was lowered from the Kremlin for the final time.
“The more I looked into it the more plausible it became. I hadn’t reaIised, but there’s this whole secret history of during the Cold War the CIA trying to weaponise pop culture and various forms of culture, but particularly music.”
The most striking example involved African-American soul singer and one-time icon of the civil rights movement, Nina Simone. He says she was used without her knowing it, as a way to sway Africans towards US cultural hegemony and away from Soviet influence.
“She was politically radical in the 1960s… and not a great fan of the United States in terms of posture at home or the types of things we doing abroad. In the early 1960s she had the opportunity to go on tour to Nigeria and take part in a festival and perform.
“What I discovered while working on this project was she was sent by a non-profit group based in Washington DC and this group was actually a front for the CIA. There was a scholar who went into the archives of this non-profit and discovered evidence of many things that they had been doing and that this concert tour had been facilitated by the CIA.
"So, this was a huge shock to me, the notion that an artist who wouldn’t have seen herself as a chest-thumping, flag-waving pro-American – and in fact in later life going into exile – was unwittingly used as an instrument of propaganda at a time when a lot of African countries were decolonising and there were questions as to whether they would align with the Soviet Union or the West.
“There was Soviet propaganda at that time which, quite rightly, pointed out that it was one thing for the United States to talk about liberty, but what about race relations in the United States, what about Jim Crow. So, you can see how having an African-American performer go to Africa would have actually been in the interests of the CIA.”
Friends of Simone, who went on tour with her, including poet Nikki Giovanni, told him she had no idea of the scheme and that it had been an inadvertent asset to the CIA.
“She died not knowing, that’s what really gets me,” he says.
As outlandish and colourful characters appeared as Radden Keefe investigated the Wind of Change rumours, the idea that the story lent itself more to a podcast than a magazine story got stronger, he says.
The immersive journey of discovery, listening to the intriguing takes from people, which may or may not be true, suited the format.
“If you sit with a long piece of writing – and if you sit with a magazine article that would take you 45 minutes to read – and it’s a mystery story, and at the end of it the author throws up his hands and says ‘we’ll never know, you’ll tend to get a little cranky. You’d be like, ‘I want my hour back’.”
Another strand of intrigue within the story is the Moscow Music Peace Festival that took place in 1989, ironically billed as pro-sobriety and anti-drugs, as it was organised by controversial American music manager Doc McGhee. The Scorpions' song was reported to have been penned after the concert, which was its inspiration.
“It’s the first time there’s been a big rock festival In Moscow and Doc Magee arranges for Ozzy Osborne, Bon Jovi, Motley Crew and Skid Row and all these bands to get on a plane and fly to Moscow.
“The Scorpions were one of bands. The really intriguing thing with Doc McGee is somewhere the hand of the US government arranged for this man not to go the jail for a long time.”
Radden Keefe asks whether McGhee did a deal to avoid jail in the US for drug smuggling in return for his efforts in Moscow. He says the CIA at the time couldn't have been sure the USSR would collapse, so wanted to do everything it could to push Russian public opinion towards that end. McGhee has always denied the allegation.
Radden Keefe says it is striking that McGhee avoided jail at a time when US law enforcement was focused on a huge anti-narcotic effort after large drug shipments arrived into the country.
“Doc McGhee ends up waltzing away and it does seem clear to me that a deal was done.
“The really interesting question is what was the nature of the deal?"
Radden Keefe agrees he worries giving credence spreading conspiracies and becoming part of the information disorientation that now characterises the post-truth covid-19 era.
He also feared becoming a mouthpiece for the CIA or Russia intelligence, but sticking to journalistic principles and a transparency in his narrative allowed him to pursue the project, he says.
“The way I tend to deal with that is to show my work and hopefully show enough of my process that the reader or the listener will understand that I’m coming at this in good faith, and if I tell you it’s true it’s because there’s evidence there and if I have doubts it’s because there’s just that.”
Another interesting aspect to the investigation involves speculating over the authenticity of a story Scorpions' Klaus Meine told on German radio - of being in a hotel in Memphis, in 1994, where he says he “whistled for the CIA”, a reference to the haunting whistled retrain at the opening of Winds of Change.
It involved Meine being told there was a CIA operator in the hotel who wanted to see him. A woman came up to the hotel room and knocked on the door and asked him to whistle the tune for him.
Radden Keefe says the bizarre story could describe a congratulatory meeting between the singer and a familiar CIA operative years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“You could also see a scenario in which he doesn’t know that the CIA played some role and Klaus Meine doesn’t know, it was unwitting like Nina Simone in a way, which would kind of double the irony that this woman is asking him to whistle and he may not realise the significance of it.”
He admits the weirdness of the story casts doubt on the veracity of Meine’s account of it and it leaves it up to listeners to decide.
A CIA operative called ‘Oliver’ was central to the story, but wouldn’t talk on the podcast and instead an associate of his ‘Rose’ gave extensive interviews, telling the story third-hand.
Oliver was a source he had previous met years before and Radden Keefe says he came to trust he wasn’t a liar.
“You do come to trust your gut... I came to conclude Oliver was honest. The weirdness of it being a third-hand story is that the guy who told Oliver the story … he could have been lying he could have been making it up and exaggerating.”
Radden Keefe is now working on a book looking at the Sackler dynasty’s ruthless marketing of painkillers and the family's public personae as a funder of charity causes.
The family’s wealth is derived from its company Purdue Pharma, based in Stamford, Connecticut, which developed the prescription painkiller OxyContin. The drug became a blockbuster, generating billions of dollars in revenue for Purdue.
The drug’s active ingredient is oxycodone, a chemical cousin of heroin, which is up to twice as powerful as morphine. It is highly addictive and has been associated with America’s opioid crisis.
The family, one of the wealthiest in the US, is widely known for its philanthropic endeavours, funding universities and museums, among other institutions.
Radden Keefe is at pains to point out that he was not an activist but a journalist and his work is geared towards informing and starting a debate about the ethics of money and its use.
“These are very very fraught decisions. To me, if we created some kind of ethical litmus test for who we took money from there’d go half the art museums in the world,” he says.
“The most important thing is for decades the Sacklers were known as this great philanthropic dynasty who were chiefly known for their generosity and their name was everywhere.
“People didn’t have much of a sense of where the money came from and meanwhile there was this company Purdue Pharma that kept getting in trouble, pleaded guilty – we had a Federal case in 2007, had to pay a $640 million fine and to me there was a little bit of a shell game, whereby the family were not publicly associated with this company that was the engine of their wealth.
“So, for me the issue would be, not so much people would need to take a stand, or stop accepting future gifts. It’s more, do it with your eyes opened. Let to facts out and understand and provenance of this money.”
