The Cold War: everything you wanted to know

What can we learn from history's most powerful people? Join me, Mike Souter, author of Next Gen CEO in History Extras New Podcast series, History's greatest leaders to find out. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to the History Extras Podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm Ellie Corporn. Just how close did the Cold War get to becoming hot? And has it ever really ended? In the latest episode of our Everything You Want to To Know series, Professor Michael Goodman of King's College London, tackles questions on the conflict that divided East and West from the evolution of espionage on either side of the Iron Curtain to the global impact of the conflict. Putting the questions to Michael was our acting digital editor, Eleanor Evans. Our topic for today's Everything You Wanted to Know podcast episode is the Cold War. Our expert is Professor Michael Goodman, Professor of Intelligence and International Affairs and Head of the Department of War Studies at King's College London. Thanks so much for joining us, Mike. Absolutely. Great. So as with previous episodes, the format will be looking at popular search queries around the subject and also some listener questions as well. And we've had some great listener questions. So thanks so much for all of your submissions ahead of this episode. And to start us off, Mike, perhaps we could start by covering off a couple of the most broad search queries that are most often put to Google about the subject, which are when was the Cold War and who was it between? The Cold War was the battle that really broke out in the aftermath of World War II and landed it lasted up until 1991. The two main protagonists with the United States on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other. But of course, like everything, it's much more complex than that. Of course, yes. So you mentioned the aftermath of World War II there. So can we perhaps dig into those tensions that kind of were bubbling away underneath that conflict and kind of came to the fore then in the years that followed? Yeah. Well, World War II, of course, began at different times for different countries. For Britain, it was 1939 for the United States and the Soviet Union. It was 1941 in different ways. And the bit that brought together Britain and America and the Soviet Union and France as the four main allies was, of course, a dislike of Nazism, a fear of what the Germans were up to and the other Axis powers, as well as Italy and Japan, most prominently. For many, it was described as a marriage of convenience. In other words, it wasn't that Britain, France, the Soviet Union, America were joined by any great love for one another. It was more out of a fear of what the Germans were up to. So the idea of a marriage of convenience really underpinned a lot of what went on and as the Germans began to lose and as the war began to go in the Allies favor, those cracks began to appear more and more. So, yeah, so we've already started covering it really. So one of the other key questions about this conflict on Google is why and how did it start. So perhaps we can talk about how those ideological fractures started to appear in this aftermath. Yeah, I think most people would date the start of the Cold War to the period after World War II. In theory, at least, the Cold War was a political, ideological battle between communism on the one hand and capitalism on the other. So some people have argued that it goes with the way back to 1917, the Bolshevik revolution, the rise of the communist state, the idea of worldwide communist revolution. But really, it was only with World War II and the aftermath that it began to take on the form that we sort of associated with, I think. You mentioned broadly the two sides, I guess, that most people will be familiar with the USA and the US as well. Can we just lay out for our listeners who might be coming to the subject completely new? What the ideology and the split between these two kind of blocks was? Yeah, one level it was political. America, Britain, as the two leaning protagonists on the one hand were capitalist countries, democracies, the sort of systems that we know and would understand today. The Soviet Union on the other hand was a communist country and it was the first very significant large communist country that came out of World War I. Had, as its ideal, was both a system internally for making life more equitable and level, I suppose. But more broadly, one of the ideas it had was, if communism was to succeed in the Soviet Union, it had to export that mentality, that ideology, to other countries. And so from the 20s and 30s, particularly onwards, when Stalin took over, this idea of worldwide communist revolution, took favor and the idea was that you had to export that. You had to build on grievances and workers, unhappiness, the working class, distress in other countries and export that. And in the aftermath of World War II, that took on a renewed vigor. It had been evident in the 1920s and 1930s, but really it was with 1945 onwards that began to become much more obvious. And it began to be much more obvious, not just in a political, ideological way, but increasingly in a military way and increasingly in a conflict for ideas, for people, for land, for territory. And so it became characterized more and more by the threat of nuclear war as the '40s and '50s war on. OK, yeah, perhaps we can talk about that escalation and that armament aspect of it in a moment. But we've got a couple of listener questions here that lead quite nicely into what you just said. So two listener questions about the inevitability of the conflict. We've got a question here from the Brut's, Brawds and Bastards podcast on Twitter. Thank you for that question. With the defeat of their mutual enemy, Flag of Germany in '45, was a cold war inevitable between these two superpowers and what were the fundamental causes. Now you've already talked about a bit about the causes. But I really like this aspect of inevitability, which Mirav Kullinsky has also asked on Facebook. Was it a direct result of World War II, or perhaps might it have occurred anyway as the inevitable clash between communism and capitalism? They're both good questions. And I think the answer is more complex than a yes or no response. I think at one level, you could say, why did this break out in 1945 when it hadn't broken out in 1917 or in 1921 or whatever, when the Bolsheviks won the Civil War in the Soviet Union? And I think the simple answer is on a number of levels. One is in the aftermath of World War II, there were a number of countries that had been defeated. There were a number of countries whereas the aftermath of the war was split in half effectively. So we can look at Germany as a classic example. Germany was split into four between the four great powers that one World War II. Very quickly, the three capitalist powers, Britain, America and France, combined their zones into what would become West Germany, the Soviets took over East Germany. And so you had, at one level in one country, a division between ideology, between politics, between economy, between political allegiances. And the idea that those two could live perfectly harmoniously, perhaps was a bit naive. So I think at one level, there were substantial differences in the aftermath of World War II that didn't exist at any previous time. At another level, one of the things that pervades the Cold War is the problem of trying to understand what's going on, the perception versus reality. And one of the great difficulties, I think, for the West after World War II was, what are the Russians up to? Stalin in power in the Kremlin has this great fear of a German invasion. The Russians have been invaded in the First World War and the Second World War back into the 19th century. And so for Stalin and people in the West looking at this, and there was some very famous diplomats who looked at this from both Britain and America in the mid-1940s, the question was, what Stalin up to? Is he trying to expand his revolution outwards by creating? If you think of a map, the states to the west of the Soviet Union, trying to make those communists, because he wants to expand and fulfill this idea of World War II communist revolution, or what his intention as others believe to create a buffer zone between Germany and the center of Europe and the mass of the Soviet Union, and you could almost interpret the same activity in two almost completely different ways. It all began to, and so there was a period of two years or so between 45 and 47, where there was this question, are the Russians expansionist? Are they defensive, what are their plans? And it was really only with a number of subsequent events that the Russian hand, as it were, became revealed. And that's when the Cold War became much more crystallized, much more serious as an event. And by then it was very difficult to roll it back effectively. Right, so yeah, a plenty going on there. Another popular question, we've been referring to the Cold War. Why is it called the Cold War? When did this term originate for this conflict? It's a very good question, and I confess, I don't quite know the exact answer. It became Cold War because a hot war is a sort of physical conflict. Cold War because it was a war of ideology, and of course, in various instances, it did become into a physical war, but fundamentally it remains peaceful even though there were lots of wars by proxy and we can explain what those mean in a moment. But fundamentally it remained peaceful arguably and certainly not the conflict that World War 2 had been or World War 1 or other big battles. So you've already mentioned the armament and a new phase of warfare really. So right at the beginning of the period we're beginning to talk about in the 40s there's obviously a major change in the way wars are fought. How does this change come about and how does it affect the beginnings of this conflict and then the increasing armament on both sides? I mean I think to understand that we need to step back slightly into World War 2 and we need to look at the nature of the conflict. World War 2 was innovative for a whole variety of ways in a purely military sense. One of them was the innovation of science and the use of technology in warfare. And you can see that in a whole variety of ways from simple weapons through to the V missiles that the Germans used, the V1 and the V2. You can look at the innovations in jet technology and all the rest of it. But fundamentally one of the big areas that World War 2 is remembered for is of course it's termination, it's the dropping of the atomic bomb. And the construction of the atomic bomb when the Allies created it, it was based in the United States, it was fundamentally an American program but with some important contributions from the Commonwealth countries. But fundamentally it was born out of a fear that the Germans would first develop that at the start of World War 2. And as the West built those sorts of weapons as America constructed those, increasingly towards the end of World War 2 the question was well if we're building it what will other countries do. And towards the tail end of the war there was a lot of effort on the Germans obviously. But there were questions raised within the intelligence community about what the Russians were up to. And the atomic bomb was one of the biggest secrets of World War 2. The science behind it, the fact it was being constructed on such an enormous scale. And the dropping of the bombs on Japan in August of 1945 was this great watershed moment. All of a sudden for Warfare you have a device that's the size of a small car dropped out of an aeroplane that has such devastating impact. And it fundamentally changed Warfare. And so when it moved into the post-war period one of the antagonism between sort of Eastern West grew, one of the key questions for the West was when would the Russians get the atomic bomb and how would that change Warfare. And it was assumed from the outset that any future war between Eastern West would be a nuclear war. This question then, the Cold War, there's a key question asked to Google a lot and we've got to listen to a question from it as well. How close did it come then to becoming a hot war, a war of action like you just mentioned, how close was this nuclear threat? Yeah, it's a question which is often asked and it's most frequently referred to the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. And the Cuban missile crisis was a reasonably short-lived episode where the Russians very secretly without anyone sort of knowing from the outset transported armaments to Cuba. Cuba was is an island, something like 90 miles off the coast of Florida. So within very easy reach of the mainland United States, it was a communist country led by Fidel Castro, a great friend of the Soviet Union at that time. And the Russians transported by ship lots and lots of missiles to Cuba. American intelligence spotted these missiles on route. There were some of them had got to Cuba, some of them were stopped on the way. And there was a sort of tense standoff for a short period of time about what was going to happen. The Americans had various meetings very famously, the head of their strategic air command, which was the nuclear bit of the Air Force, which was one of these great characteristic cigar-chomping, big butch Air Force men who just said, "Let's bomb them." Unfortunately, Sainar heads prevailed. The President Kennedy had a very good system of how they had discussions about all of this. And they eventually had a blockade of Cuba which stopped more ships getting in. Also they had an agreement where the Russians would dismantle and remove these missiles. The reason why people think it came very close to the nuclear war was for a number of reasons. Some obvious at the time, some much clearer now with the benefit of hindsight. So the ones that were obvious at the time was this was a very great standoff between President Kennedy on the one hand and the Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev on the other. And Khrushchev was another one of these great characters, you know, from a sort of farming, prehistory. He had famously, at one meeting of the UN, I think was taking his shoe off the table, taking his shoe off and wanted to be heard, had banged it on the table. And he was notorious about for using bluff as his main way of dealing with people. He did not want to back down. The Americans were clearly not happy to have these missiles so close to mainland United States. And there was a very great sense that this would lead to an escalation of conflict. And something reasonably small, but still serious could lead to conflict. It was all diffused as we now know. And the Americans did at the time by a very well placed Soviet spy, a colonel in the Soviet military intelligence organization called Oleg Pankowski, who had passed lots of very significant information to the Americans. And so they knew what the missiles were. They had a good sense that Christchurch's policy was based on bluff and that the best way of dealing with someone like that with the bullies to stand up to them and Christchurch back down. As always, these things are much more complex than they would seem. The Americans had previously put missiles into Turkey, which is partly what had prompted the Russian retaliation. It was seen as sort of quid pro quo. The British looking at this were very interested because they, and there's a sort of classic quote between the British prime minister and someone else in the service saying, "Now the Americans know what we feel like. We've had these missiles on the continent with an easy reach for decades and now the Americans know." I think one of the more interesting bits which came out much more recently, I think not until the 1990s, was that the missiles that the Americans had known about these missiles and had trapped them and had watched them being dismantled. What was not known at the time was that the Russians had managed to get some tactical nuclear weapons onto Cuba and these have never been spotted. Which is a very long winded way of answering your question. But to come back to the actual question, how close was it? Arguably less close than people I think appreciated at the time, but nonetheless one of the fundamental concerns in all of this was the misperception. If one side had misperceived what the other one was up to, could it have led to a miscalculation of some sort that would have led to war? That was the closest arguably that both sides came, but there were rather episodes. There was an episode a year before in Berlin, which was in eastern Germany, but like Germany itself had been split in half. So there was a tiny little capitalist island in the sea of communism. And in 1961, just after the direction of the Berlin Wall in August that year, Soviet tanks and American tanks across checkpoint Charlie, which was the divide between eastern West, you know, fading each other, muzzle was off their guns, the engines revving all of the rest of it. So there were certainly other hot points. I think the Cuban Missile Crisis is often held up as the closest it came because there was the more likely threat of nuclear war as opposed to direct sort of conventional confrontation. On the question of people knowing about it, more generally public knowledge, you've just mentioned that lots of what we know about the conflict has come out relatively recently. And at the time, we've got a listener question here from Stratton 279 on Instagram, who's asked, did the public know the true severity of the Cold War or were they protected by propaganda? And how long after the cold war started? And I know the start date is obviously not an exact one. How long after the cold war started did the public know about it? I think, well, let's say that second question first. I mean, I think if we date the start of the Cold War to the end of World War II, which is the sort of perceived wisdom really, I think people knew fairly quickly that there was there was a knees going on. I mean, I think there was a peer, as I said earlier, there was a period of a couple of years where not very much happened effectively. Most countries were preoccupied with their own economic and other forms of rebuilding. The big change came in 1947, two years after the end of the World War, effectively. And it came with a couple of events. There was a threat to Greece and Turkey, which led to the US President Harry Truman launching something called the Truman Doctrine. And I can't do it in his sort of fantastic Midwest US accent. He was from Missouri. But Truman announced through the Truman Doctrine essentially a promised that the United States would come to the rescue of any country who was fighting sort of political oppression as it were. And it didn't label the Soviet Union, but it was very clearly identified as, you know, anyone standing up to the Russians, we the US will support you. And that was followed a few months later by the Marshall Plan, named after the then US Secretary of State George Marshall, which promised, you know, enormous amounts of economic aid to countries. And so what you had in both of those was essentially a an economic commitment and a political commitment to defend Europe particularly, but more broadly, countries against the Soviets. And that was followed two years later really with the creation of NATO. So I think, you know, sending by the late 1940s, people knew that there was this growing antagonism, whether they knew there's a conflict or such, it was certainly growing. And on the first question, the severity of the Cold War, I think varied from time to time, you know, lots of this was done in secret, a lot of it, you know, my interests, particularly around the intelligence side of this. And that was very much done in secret. And people didn't really know what was going on. I think the broader events were known about, like most things, there's always a level that lurks below the surface that people don't quite know the detail on. The second half of that first question about propaganda, I think is, is a different question actually. I don't think it's necessarily linked. Propaganda was very significant in a number of ways, you know, one was to try and persuade. So when I mentioned earlier about being very little direct confrontation between Eastern West, what there were lots of wars by proxy. In other words, you had lots of conflict in other countries, which were on the face of it between two sides, but which in reality, one side was propped up by the United States, one side was propped up by the Soviet Union. And you see that all around the globe, you know, not just in Europe, but in the Middle East, in the Far East, in Africa and elsewhere. In those sorts of conflicts, propaganda was fundamentally important, you know, whether it was the dropping of leaflets, whether it was radio broadcasts or other things. And huge efforts went into that. The CIA funded radio free Europe, which, you know, the name was suggestive as a designer, inspire people to rise up against the Russians and do other things. Similarly, the Russians, particularly internally within the Soviet Union, you know, the propaganda efforts there were hugely significant and trying to persuade people, not just that the Russian cause was the only cause, but actually there was no alternative that could be stomach, I suppose. Right. So you've already said in so many of your answers has become clear. It's obviously such a global thing, you know, it's happening all over. And we've talked about Cuba, but there's a question here from Amber Lincoln on Instagram, a quite broad one. What are the most significant or important events in the Cold War? And perhaps we could use that question talk about some of these proxy conflicts and whereabouts they were happening kind of more of the significant turning points. Gosh, I could spend a very long time answering this. Yes. I mean, I think at one level, of course, you know, this political divergence is one of the most significant events. And the way in which countries almost take, you know, tax their colors onto one side or another, you know, there were some neutral countries in Europe, for instance, in the Cold War, but majority of countries were either Western aligned or Eastern aligned. And increasingly, as you went through the 1950s and onwards, you know, that spread to the Middle East and the Far East and elsewhere. So I think those were very significant because in a sense, what you ended up with, I mean, it would be over the top to say a world divided into two camps, but certainly Europe was divided into two camps, increasingly, as I say, other regions as well. I think there were great differences between the military technologies of these kinds, you know, so the division in camps was not just ideological, it was economic and also it was military. And so you could look at, you could quite nicely map NATO countries onto the Western oriented ones politically and all the rest. And then of course, you can look at the specific events themselves. You know, we've spoken about the Cuban Missile Crisis and how significant that was. And you can see other events, I think, that go through time. Another way to think about it, I guess, is to say, you know, the world, the Cold War ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the falling of the Berlin Wall, with the rise of independence in formerly Soviet states. You know, that's 30 years ago, it's probably longer than the age of many of the listeners. Certainly, I don't remember the end of the Cold War, which, you know, might date me. But, but if you then look at to say, well, there were very significant events in the Cold War itself, which of those still has a hangover or is still felt today arguably. And perhaps one of the most prominent is you can say, well, where are there still communist states in the world? You know, and the number one fundamentally important communist state is, of course, China. China, you know, became a communist power in 1949. There was a civil war in the aftermath of World War II. It was one of these sort of proxy battles in the sense where the civil war was half propped up by a US side, half propped up to some extent by Russian communist side. And of course, that still exists today. And that's a very significant one. You could also argue in some half that we are now in a second Cold War with the Russians today. And that's a very different kind of Cold War. It's not in the same sort of ideological or economic way. But it's still a conflict where you don't have physical fighting as the main ingredient, I suppose, of that conflict. Yeah, really interesting answers there. And I mean, I hope we can dig into that little more there is some questions about the legacy and the end that you just mentioned there. I'm going to ask another listener question now. And I imagine, again, this might be one that varies, or, you know, both geographically and within the timeframe we're talking about. But your icon on Twitter has asked the longer the Cold War is over, the more I read about how people cross seamlessly without any problems, the borders between East and West. So what's fact and fiction about the so-called Iron Curtain and the confinement of people in the East? Yeah, it's a good question. I mentioned earlier the Berlin Wall, which was erected in August 1961. And that's a, to give you a sort of microcosm of an answer, that's a good example of all of this. Texte back, Germany, as I said, was divided after World War II between an East and half and a West and half. Increasingly through the 1950s, people were allowed to cross. There were borders, but it was a reasonably free permeable border, I suppose, that people could move across. Increasingly through the late 50s, and then into the very early 1960s, the Russians got more and more concerned because there was a growing disparity between the sort of economic wealth of East and West. And so increasingly, more and more, East Germans were crossing into West Germany, not for political reasons or anything else, but it's just West Germans were richer. The way of life was richer and more affluent. And so in August '61, literally overnight, Barb Dwyer was rolled around in circle Berlin, the zone of Berlin. And that was replaced with a three meter, I think, was high wall that was constructed in Montfau save afters. There was a border, people could cross. People lived in one and a certain number worked in the other, but it became a much more difficult border to cross. And I think you could see this all the way through other countries, really, where that border zone was, and it became difficult. People did cross, but the difficulty was not so much the physical crossing of the border, as it were, it was getting to the border itself. So to give you another brief example, one of the West's best spies in the Cold War was a Soviet KGB officer called Oleg Gordievsky. He'd been working for British intelligence from the 1970s, like many very significant spies he had had an ex-filtration plan worked out. So if he felt he was under observational scrutiny, I suppose, he could escape. He'd been living overseas for a number of years. He was then back in Moscow working as the KGB headquarters. And he activated this ex-filtration plan, which was very elaborately done where he was smuggled into a car by British officials into a special constructors car driven to the border in Finland and taken across the border. And the journey, which is in a number of books, which you could read, the journey from getting from Moscow to the Finnish border was tremendously difficult. And the ways in which it was worked out where cars could speed up and slow down to try and escape the Russian monitoring. So I think, again, it's very long with the dance, I do apologise, but I think the fact is the border itself was problematic, but for many it was getting to the border itself that was very, very difficult. (upbeat music) Still to come on the History Extra Podcast. - The retreat from empire, and in many of these countries there began, there were lots of local skirmishes. Britain tended to see these at the time as being cold war. So anyone that opposed the British regime must therefore be Soviet inspired and communist. (upbeat music) - And I'm gonna ask another broad one, I'm afraid. - How about espionage? You've mentioned it so many times. It seems to underline, and underpin so many of the events that we've already talked about. But Tracy A on Instagram has asked how much of an impact did spies have on how the conflict played out? - Oh gosh, now here's one I can really could talk about until the cows come home. How significant was this espionage? So I think we can, we can look at this in two ways. One is we can look at very specific episodes and we can say that episode fundamentally was reacted to as a result of espionage and the information that was had. And you can see that in whole hopes of ways. The technical intelligence which led the Russians to build their atomic bomb in the way they built it was very, very significant. They had blueprints from World War II passed by a variety of different scientists. You know, that led them to choose to follow that particular scientific pattern. The Cuban missile crisis we've spoken about, you know, there are other episodes where either technical information obtained via satellites or photographs from airplanes, whatever was very significant. There are other episodes where human espionage was very, very significant. If you then take them out of the isolation, I suppose, of a single event. And you say, what was the overall contribution of intelligence in the Cold War? And that's much more difficult to answer. Because you're then coming up with, you know, the what if questions. If there had been no espionage, how would the Cold War have been different? And we just, it's very hard to say. I often would answer this by saying the simple reality is that policymakers in both East and West, you know, continuously supported, financed their intelligence community and had they not thought they were useful, they would have cut funding and not supported them. The intelligence communities in, you know, Britain, America, the Soviet Union, elsewhere, were very, very significant in terms of people and in terms of resourcing and all the rest of it. So clearly it was felt there was some need for all of that information. What does this tell us more broadly? I think it's still difficult, you know, back in the 1980s, there was a book looking at intelligence which talked about it as being the missing dimension, you know, we know what politicians were doing. We know how they dealt with scenarios. We don't know what led them to think the way they thought about things and what was a role of intelligence. So I think, you know, this is still, to some extent, an evolving story. We know lots about the Western half of what went on. And we know that Western intelligence was very well organized that it had a good process for, you know, gathering information and using it. We know a bit less, apart from episodes about Soviet intelligence. What we do know is that Soviet intelligence was fundamentally different. You know, it was about gathering secrets, secrets like it had been in the West. But in the East it was just about as much as internal surveillance, which was never a Western concern. So it was about trying to find out what the Americans and the Brits were up to as much as it was watching Soviet citizens and making sure they didn't have thoughts that were, you know, ideologically wrong or went against the Soviet system. So in that sense, the internal surveillance of the Soviet system was fundamental and comprehensive. And, you know, some writers in the Soviet Union said it was only in their thoughts that they had complete independence. You know, they couldn't speak out loud or write things down because who knows who was watching and listening. So the short answer is, yes, very significant. Sure. And can we dig into that a little bit more for listeners in terms of perhaps the evolution of the organisations on both sides? How did it affect the KGB or Americans? I know that there's the CIA that kind of evolves early on. Yeah. Well, the Russians had created going all the way back to the. The Bolsheviks had taken power in 1917. There was then a period of three years or so of civil war whether and the Bolsheviks, you know, one power. As part of the efforts in the civil war, you know, way back in the 1917-1918, they created the checker which evolved into various organisations that would become the KGB. So, but really from the outset, internal surveillance was a fundamentally, you know, innate part of the Soviet status it were. And that grew. And the idea that you could recruit people and put them into important places was very, very significant. You know, some of the best Soviet spies, the best gang of them, I suppose, are the Cambridge Five. You know, the five affluent four, you know, four-wing reference. But anyway, the affluent Cambridge educated spies recruited in the 1930s by the Soviet Union that went on to cause absolute havoc in what they passed across to the Russians in various different ways. And the Russian and the Soviet and the Soviet Union, but the they are, was often quite different. You know, they would take a punt on someone as a university student saying, "We don't know what you're doing your life, but we think you might. " So, there might be that chance of, you know, we'll recruit you, we'll run you, we'll let you off the hook as it were for 10 years and see where you end up, but we'll keep in touch. And the Russians also relied much more on black male and other forms of, you know, less friendly ways of inciting someone to spy for them. And there are lots of examples of where they blackmailed someone into working for them and passing information. Broadly speaking, I think the Russians, the Soviets, you know, they were often thought to collect, the assessment is they collected vast amounts of information, but they were much less good at using it. It was much more a collection state, you know, having knowledge, having power. The Western sides, Britain and America, Britain had intelligence communities going back to the, you know, pre-World War I. So by the Cold War, we had a very developed, I think, system of intelligence, looking in different ways, whether it was foreign, domestic, technical versus human, sort of more elaborate systems of analyzing intelligence and feeding them into decision-making. The Americans were much slower, you know, Pearl Harbor was the sort of wake-up call to them for intelligence. They had a variety of organizations between 1941 and the end of the war, and they sort of, many of them closed down at the end of the war. It was only in 1947 with the National Security Act that the CIA was created. And all of a sudden, you know, the evolution of the Cold Wars we've already discussed at that precise point, the ramping up of the military conflict and the requirement to have intelligence led to the CIA. All of a sudden becoming this enormous organization that we would recognise today. We've already spoken about how global the conflict was. LK Whitehead on Instagram has us, how did it play out in Africa? Yeah, so, broad rather, I mean, Europe was the fundamental Cold War battleground, and yeah, and that's where it began in the 1940s, and that's where it continued all the way up. To the end, it began to spread more and more through other regions, really from the 1950s. And it did that, I think, in a number of ways. One of them was post-World War II Britain was committed to decolonising, and so a number of commonwealth countries, colonial countries, were granted independence, you know, India in 1947, and many more afterwards. For Britain, they would often see the retreat from empire, and in many of these countries, they began, there were lots of sort of local skirmishes. Britain tended to see these at the time as being Cold War, so anyone that opposed the British regime must therefore be Soviet inspired and communist. And so what happened in lots of countries, and Africa was, you know, no exception to this, were arguably nationalist local conflicts being perceived as Cold War conflicts when they weren't necessarily the case. So that was one element. Another element, this which increasingly took place in the Middle East safaris and then spread to Africa from the 1950s, was the view that the President Eisenhower and his sort of administration through the middle and late 50s had, which was this idea of the domino theory, you know, like a pack of dominoes, you set them on their edges and you set up a nice chain of them, and if you flick over the first one the rest fall down. That was the case to some extent in the forest, and it was certainly the case in Africa. And in Africa, the Cold War arguably was more localised than I think it was elsewhere, but there were certainly communist regimes that, you know, grew up and lots of skirmishes that grew up. Egypt was a very, very significant one, I think, in the mid 1950s. which had broader connotations and which led to the very badly botched Suez war in October '56, but there were others. And I think to some extent you still see the hangover of that again today with the sort of broken fragile nature of a number of these states. I've got a question here about Amber Lincoln again from Instagram, another from her saying, "Who are the winners and losers if there are any?" And it sounds like there was so many different skirmishes and various fronts being happening at various times in this time. But I wonder is there any answer to that question? Well, I mean, I think you could ask this at a very simple level, which is the West one and the East lost. The Soviet system, the political, ideological system imploded and all of those countries that were allied with it to a great extent, particularly in a European context, also imploded and became independent and sort of shed that that Soviet allegiance. So arguably that's the very easy answer. Of course there's a much more complex answer than all of this and whether some of those countries, you know, wish they hadn't lost and preferred things back then to now is a totally separate question, I think. But I think at a basic level, you know, you could say as a ideological, political conflict, the Soviet system lost and it imploded. This is a question I perhaps could have included a bit earlier. I think I skipped us a head a bit, but we've had a question about Cold War leaders too and their various styles and impact on the conflict. Are you happy to give a bit of an overview there? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the Soviet system had a number of leaders, you know, Lenin was of course the first one which predated this Stalin took over in the 1920s effectively and lasted all the way up to his death in 1953 and he was replaced by Christchurch and was replaced by Brezhnev. Then there were a number of short lived leaders before Gorbachev took over. And from a Soviet perspective, I think they, you know, there were very significant differences. Stalin, out of World War II was increasingly paranoid. As I mentioned earlier, this question about whether he was expansionist and therefore that's why he wanted to take over the state to whether he was increasingly defensive and that's why he built these buffer states. But when he died, you know, the terror that he had instilled on the Soviet system and the propaganda that had come out about what he was all about began to erode. And there was a period of about three years or so after his death before Christchurch finally took over. And in 1956, Christchurch launched something called the secret speech, but of course, like all secret speeches, there was a spy in the audience and managed to get a copy of the document. And in that very important speech, both at the time and sort of afterwards, you know, he debunked all of this. He basically said, you know, Stalin had this terror and we're going to change how he did things. And so they're carried on for a little while being a period of sort of peaceful coexistence. I suppose the simple answer is you can, the different leaders had different approaches, you know, some of them were old and paranoid. Some of them had very different views. Gorbachev, of course, was in Soviet terms a young leader. He was in his 50s when he took over. And he had these dual policies of perestroika and glasnost, which you know, many people have said led to the end of the war. Perestroika was sort of more more free living, I suppose, and relaxing of economic thing. Glasnost was slightly more freedom of speech. The duality of those led to the relaxing of the economy and the way it was run, led to slightly more people beginning to make a bit of money and be a bit more sort of taken away from those constraints. But it also led to the rise of free speech in lots of the Soviet states. And so people, like all these things, they're debated, you know, some people say it's those policies which ended the Cold War. In other words, very long with dance again. The realities you see, if you look at the Cold War, you can see peaks and troughs of, you know, conflict and tension, friendlier things people were getting on a bit more. Arguably those were to do with the personality traits of the Soviet leaders. But equally, they were the personality traits of the American leaders. You know, we can look at some of these leaders and they were much more in their rhetoric and how they spoke about things, you know, Reagan who came to power in the 1980s spoke about the Russians being the evil empire, you know, and he sort of brought about a way of speaking about the Russians and the Soviets which hadn't been around for decades probably. So I think, you know, there's an element to this of both sides, but fundamentally in all history, what we tend to ignore the role of personalities. And I think certainly in the Cold War, the role of personalities are very, very significant. And so it's a good question and we should think about them much more. Absolutely fascinating stuff. And it is interesting that you say about Reagan and that rhetoric that he was using because obviously he's towards the end and took closer to that 1991 date you've already said as being closer to the end. So what was his kind of relationship with his counterpart and how did that end, how did the end begin? It's like an example. How did the end begin? How did the begin end? So I think, you know, again, I think we need to recognize the importance of espionage and intelligence. Reagan came to power, you know, he was his perfect counterpart was Margaret Thatcher, of course, and there are lots of great images you can see of the two of them they got they got on fabulously like a house on fire. At one level they were both very, very anti-Soviet and you know, very keen to bring an end to the Cold War. They had their advantage, the espionage of Oleg Gordievsky who we've previously mentioned. He was very, very good at passing information about the sort of mentality of the of the Kremlin. So for instance, in the early '99 Natives, Brezhnev who was by then a very, very old leader was in charge. Again, very paranoid, you know, heard these speeches about the evil empire and in his brain equated those with the West is going to launch a first nuclear strike on us. And in his last couple of years, Brezhnev was absolutely petrified that the Americans would launch a first strike nuclear war. And Gordievsky passed this sort of fear across to the West and actually, you know, here is a key example of where you can draw a line almost between the espionage information and a change in policy. So Gordievsky's intelligence led to a change in Thatcher's rhetoric and she used that to persuade Reagan to change his. So the evil empire speech, you know, after that, he was said this, this really, it might play out well domestically in political terms, but it plays out very, very badly in sort of international Cold War terms. And so he was asked to change those and you know, and he did. And so that sort of rhetoric changed things. I mean, there were other, I've already formed with your question was, but there are other reasons why the Cold War ended, you know, one of them was the Americans at that same time really ramped up the military side of things. And they created something called SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was known as Star Wars, because of course the Star Wars films were very good then, which was basically a space-based laser system that would shoot down incoming Soviet missiles. And that had the potential to fundamentally change the military conflict. And that led some believe to a massive increasing Russian defense expenditure, which was at the detriment of its economic expenditure, which then led to more unhappiness and hostility, which Gorbachev's reforms were then allowed to be exploited by, but like everything, there are so many different strands to this that were sort of intermingling, it becomes very, very complex. Mm-hmm, yes, that's everything. And if we are then to take this 1991 date and as the kind of official end, you've already alluded to it, it's a lot more complicated that. And we've got a question here, has it ever really ended? PJ Hire too on Twitter, wants to know, has it ever ended? Well, I think, I think had you asked someone in the 1990s, they'd have said, yes, had you asked someone in the early 2000s, as they'd have said, yes, if you asked someone in the last, I don't know, five years, people would say no. I mean, I think at the one end, at one scale, you know, we were talking about the political and ideological nature of the conflict. You know, Russia is not a communist system, they have no desires for communist expansion, but nonetheless, there are political differences between both countries, there are, you know, clearly military differences between both countries. And some of which very much annoys the Russians is the fact that many of the former Soviet states are now politically militarily aligned with the West. And you know, that creates fear, it creates concern, much like Stalin had concerns back in the 1940s. Arguably, you know, some would say we are in a Cold War again, we do not have direct military confrontation, but all of the cyber efforts that go on between East and West, all of the attempts to sway elections and to interfere domestically are technologically very different, but at a simplistic level, very similar to what was going on in the 1920s, for instance. So I think you could argue it both ways is the simple view. And I have very clearly not given my point of view on all of this, because I think it's much more complex than the sort of black or white answer. But clearly there is tension in a very different way. At the same time, there is also reasons why countries work, you know, Eastern West works together much more closely than it would have done in the Cold War. There are common enemies, as it were, and you know, over the last 20 years, terrorism has been a very common enemy. And so there have been reasons why countries would work together, but there are other fundamental differences that this is a when I say we go away. That was Michael Goodman. His latest book is the CIA and the pursuit of security, history, documents and context, which is co-authored with Hugh Dylan and David Guillo. That's published by Edinburgh University Press and is out now. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Benuit and Jack Bateman. Join us tomorrow for a discussion on women's history for International Women's Day. [Music]