Buckle up because we are going in a different direction today.

Wind of Change is...hard to describe. It’s a podcast about a song, a moment in time, and a very real mystery: whether the CIA was involved in creating the whole thing. It's farcical, satirical, and true crime all rolled into one. It also kinda feels like it would make a great Christopher Guest movie except for the fact that it is real.

Or real adjacent.

The band that put the song out is so very not what you would ever consider as either a place where a covert CIA operation would occur or, really, anything of substance.

To take you back, dear reader, a band by the name of Scorpions existed at the height of the hair metal craze (which you can best experience quickly and enjoyably via the seminal documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years). Suffice it to say, independent of their own intellect, said intellect was not necessarily on display in their music or stage performances (I feel like I’m going to get some pushback on this and I welcome the challenge). That doesn't mean there weren't some bangers or some just unique songs. "Wind of Change" was one of those songs, a metal band doing a ballad with a LOT of whistling. Perhaps the most whistling in any song from that genre.

Were there nights spent back in the day at karaoke whistling this song? Yes, yes, there were. And there were beautiful nights, and I regret none of it.

Which was why, when I saw the podcast Wind of Change, I was immediately intrigued, because the concept just seems so absolutely untethered from the reality I thought I knew.

The song played over the end of the Cold War, and around 2011 Patrick Radden Keefe, who writes for The New Yorker, heard from a source he trusted that the CIA wrote it.

What keeps it from being a joke is how hard Keefe works to talk himself out of believing it. He writes to the CIA and asks them directly, and reads their answer on air. He tracks down retired officers, some of whom will talk to him but not on tape. He goes to a Scorpions show in Kyiv, a G.I. Joe convention in Dayton, and a boat on the Moskva River, where he starts to wonder whether the podcast itself is somebody's propaganda. Snakes eating their own tail and all that.

The real history he turns up along the way is just as strange. Nina Simone was flown to a festival in Lagos in 1961 on the CIA's dime and never knew it, and a whole episode covers the 1989 Moscow Music Peace Festival, where Bon Jovi and Ozzy Osbourne played a Soviet stadium with fireworks, fist fights and the KGB in the mix.

The podcast is eight episodes, about six hours, won three Ambie Awards, and is free everywhere. There’s strong language throughout, a graphic account of a political assassination in Episode 3, and drug smuggling and a shooting in Episode 6. Because again, hair metal band in the 80s and 90s.

Keep reading after the jump for retired spies, a rock manager with a smuggling past, and the interview Keefe was most nervous about.

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