A podcast about the CIA, the Cold War, rock ‘n’ roll

Patrick Radden Keefe, New Yorker writer, investigative journalist, bestselling author and newly minted audio star, has a dirty secret.

His eight-part podcast hit, “Wind of Change” released on Spotify May 11 and concluding on all platforms next week, is a deep dive into a wild hair metal conspiracy theory involving the CIA, Motley Crue’s manager, and the end of the Cold War.

But despite spending a decade on the mystery and full year reporting it out full time, Keefe — a man now synonymous with the power ballad — doesn’t know jack about heavy metal.

The story that became “Wind of Change” started for Keefe with a tip from his best source, a hyper-connected American insider he calls Michael. About 10 years ago, Michael told Keefe that a former spy had told him something incredible. In the waning days of the Cold War, the ex-spook claimed, the CIA, as part of the cultural war against communism, wrote a heavy-metal ballad that became a hit on both sides of the Berlin Wall.

The song proved so popular in Eastern Europe some believe to this day it helped speed the end of the Soviet Union.

That song was Wind of Change, by the German rock band Scorpions.

On first blush the idea sounded, well, nuts. But the more Keefe dug in, the more plausible it seemed. The CIA had a long history of using pop culture to spread American influence. With the help of a Canadian diplomat, the agency once faked an entire film production to help smuggle a group of Americans out of Iran. (That incident was fictionalized in the movie Argo.) Plus, Michael’s source was close to rock solid. If he was saying it, Keefe’s reporting suggested, there was a good chance it was true.

For Keefe, “Wind of Change” turned out to be both a passion project and a mental break. He had spent years trying to find the right way to tell the story. It never seemed like a magazine piece to him, or a book. Whatever he produced was inevitably going to be as much about the investigation as it would be about any answer he might find, and in print, he felt, the might “start feeling a little navel gazey.”

But podcasting, that’s a different story. There’s just something about the medium that’s “more generous,” he felt. “For some reason, with audio, I just think that there’s more interest in going along for the ride.”

So after he finished his last book, “Say Nothing,” a work of history and true crime in which Keefe ended up solving a decades-old murder linked to the IRA, and before he started his next one, on the Sackler pharmaceutical family and the opioid crisis, he pitched a podcast about rock and roll. It was “just this kind of candy-coated dream opportunity to do something where, it’s investigative, but it’s fun,” he said.

There was only one problem. Keefe is an educated man. He has degrees from Columbia, Cambridge, the London School of Economics and Yale. He’s a deeply experienced reporter who works for the most prominent magazine in the world. He has sources in multiple governments and even the CIA.

But seriously, he does not know anything about 80s rock.

Keefe recently took a hair metal quiz written with the help of veteran Toronto rock journalist Ian Gormely. To put it kindly, he did not do well.

Thankfully, in addition to his many talents in journalism, and his many, many degrees, Keefe is also a good sport. After 10 minutes of mostly blank stares and ‘I don’t knows’ (he did get three questions right) he settled in to talk about the podcast.

The conversation below has been edited for clarity, grammar and length.

NP: Have you heard from the band since the podcast came out?

Keefe: I haven’t heard directly from them. It’s been funny because Klaus Meine (Scorpions lead singer and the credited songwriter on Wind of Change) has done a couple of interviews and he’s denied it, but in his kind of wonderful enigmatic way. In one interview he said it’s ‘fake news.’ But he was very gracious. So, the headlines are like ‘Klaus Meine denies CIA connection to Wind of Change’ which is perfectly cryptic, because that’s exactly what he would do if it wasn’t true and exactly what he would say if it was.

NP: What was it like to have something this big, that took this much time to put together, come out in this moment of incredible change and uncertainty?

Keefe: It’s funny, when we first conceived of this project, my pitch was I want this to feel big and sweeping and beautifully produced. I want it to feel like a big spy caper if it was directed by the Coen brothers. And what’s been interesting is that I think a lot of people have responded to the escapism of it. I mean, in some ways there are themes that actually resonate quite strongly with this moment. But it’s also a period piece about ridiculous people in the 1980s. And so that’s been interesting because I think for a lot of people it’s been it’s been a kind of respite.

But it’s also strange, right. Because each time a new episode posts on all platforms — they all posted right away on Spotify — I had been going on Twitter and promoting it and I didn’t do it this week (the week of June 11th) not so much because of COVID, but because there are people on the streets, there’s really serious stuff happening. So far be it for me to be out here banging the drum, insisting that people take their eyes off of these major national events and listen.

NP: Have you heard from anyone or learned anything since the podcast came out that swayed you one way or the other toward a definitive conclusion?

Keefe: It’s been fascinating. People have theories and every day I get these often extremely elaborate messages parsing through the evidence, which is fun and super gratifying, but tough to keep up with. We’ve gotten some tantalizing leads, which I’m still pursuing. But look, the nature of this project is, I’ll get a message that makes me skeptical about the story and then three hours later, I’ll get another one that makes me believe it.

“I’ll get a message that makes me skeptical about the story and then three hours later, I’ll get another one that makes me believe it.” Patrick Patrick Radden Radden Keefe Keefe