I may have underestimated the extent to which they would look me up and get in touch and lay out those theories in elaborate detail. I think I intuited that probably people would listen and pick up different parts of the story that they were interested in and develop theories of their own.

It asks: did the CIA write ‘Wind of Change’, the cheesy Eighties power ballad by German hair band The Scorpions, as propaganda to help bring about the end of the Cold War? A delicious notion, but arguably not the most outlandish story uncovered over eight riveting episodes, a project that variously draws in the Kremlin, Mötley Crüe, George H W Bush, Nina Simone, an action figure convention, several ex-spies and the CIA today.Ĭongratulations on the success of the podcast. Wind of Change tells a rather different story, one its author had been unable to get out of his head since he heard it from a creditable source ten years ago. His next, due out next year, concerns America’s opioid crisis, and the role the Sackler family and their company Purdue Pharma played in it. Originally from Boston, he lives with his family in New York.The big difference, however, is that Wind of Change is written and presented by Patrick Radden Keefe, long-serving New Yorker staff writer, investigative journalist and award-winning author, whose most recent book Say Nothing: The True Story of Murder And Memory in Northern Ireland, won the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, among others. He is also the creator and host of the 2020 podcast “Wind of Change,” about the strange convergence of Cold War espionage and nineteen-eighties heavy metal. Many of his New Yorker pieces are collected in “ Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks,” which will be published in June, 2022. Keefe’s story “A Loaded Gun,” about the troubled history of the mass shooter Amy Bishop, received the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 2014 he was also a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 20. His two previous books are “The Snakehead,” which was a finalist for the J. He is the author of “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty,” which received the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, and “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland,” which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Orwell Prize for political writing, and the Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council on Foreign Relations. Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2006.

Rogue patrick radden keefe