Robert Jackman

The problem with mystery podcasts like Wind of Change

Plus: the real story behind the explosive allegations in The Missionary podcast

The Scorpions on tour in 1984. Photo: Ross Marino / Getty Images

Did the US secretly write a power ballad in order to bring down the Soviet Union? That’s the question behind Wind of Change, a serial documentary that has topped the podcast charts. It’s the work of an investigative journalist called Patrick Radden Keefe who claims to have once received a tip-off, from an intelligence contact, that the song ‘Wind of Change’ — recorded by the hair metallers Scorpions — was actually a CIA campaign to encourage anti-Soviet uprisings. Now he wants to prove it.

This week’s episode, the fourth of eight, takes Keefe to a collectors’ convention in Ohio in pursuit of an internet user called ‘Lance Sputnik’ who creates customised versions of GI Joe action figures. ‘I think he knows something about this,’ ponders Keefe in the introduction. That’ll be a solid lead then, you think, given that our host is an award-winning muckraker. But it turns out that the suspicion is based purely on the fact that Sputnik once made Scorpions action figures from reharvested GI Joes and wrote a story that they’d been secret Cold War operatives.

‘It’s completely fictional,’ says Sputnik when Keefe tracks him down, probably surprised to find himself justifying his profoundly unfashionable hobby to an investigative reporter. But Keefe can’t let it go. The coincidence (that a middle-aged man might enjoy 1970s patriotic cartoons and camp-as-Christmas rock bands) is apparently too much. ‘I’ve got to ask: were you in the CIA?’ asks Keefe. ‘God, no,’ laughs the potential operative, giving a decent impression of someone who’s never been asked that question before.

Was a hit power ballad by hair metal band Scorpions written by the CIA to hasten the collapse of the USSR?

These mystery podcasts (a less grisly evolution of the true-crime serials before them) are everywhere, but they’re awfully drawn out. Producers demand that what would otherwise be a solid one-off documentary is instead stretched out into several 45-minute episodes to be drip-fed each week.

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