Here are some all-but-forgotten footnotes from one of history’s most unusual political conflicts–the decades-long struggle between Moscow and Washington that became known as the Cold War:
– England, 1952: British Intelligence officer Kim Philby holds a press conference to deny he was the “third man,” even as he slips information about British efforts to infiltrate the Soviet Union to Yuri Modin, his KGB controller.
– Soviet Union, 1960s: Oleg Penkovsky becomes a spy for the CIA, feeding the U.S. vital information about the lack of Soviet nuclear warheads and the type of missiles being used to arm Cuba in 1962. His information helps President Kennedy make the decisions in the missile crisis that avert war, but he is caught by the KGB and interrogated dozens of times before being executed.
– Chile, 1974: A CIA agent walks around with money stuffed in his boots, money that will be used to incite the overthrow of the Allende government.
– East Germany, 1962: Gunned down while trying to escape East Berlin, Peter Fechter gasps out his life as people on both sides watch.
“A cloud hides the sky — a nuclear shadow falls across the human future.” Episode 1, “Cold War”
With those words spoken by narrator Kenneth Branagh, a new, epic documentary begins a journey through the second half of the 20th Century, a trek through the events that shaped our lives even when we did not know they were taking place.
Starting Sunday at 7 p.m. and nearly every week for the next six months, CNN’s “Cold War” will unfold chapter by chapter, full of insights from eyewitnesses and color footage of events that seemed to occur only in black and white.
The Cold War is a period that spanned virtually the entire youth and early middle age of the Baby Boomer generation.
Nearly half a century after the nuclear shadow fell, the sky reappeared when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the dominoes of Eastern Europe began to topple.
A few years later, in August 1994, CNN founder Ted Turner was in Russia for the first post-Cold War Goodwill Games, the world-class athletic event he founded to promote better relations between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union.
Pat Mitchell, co-executive producer of the series and president of Time Inc. Television-CNN Productions, well remembers the moment her Cold War odyssey began. In Russia for the closing ceremonies, she met with Turner for breakfast.
“The first thing he said to me was, `Cold War. I want to do a documentary series on the Cold War,’ ” Mitchell recalls. “I think he’d been in Russia for about a month and he was struck by the differences that were so obvious to him between the Russia then and the former Soviet Union he had been in so many times before, realizing how open everyone was, how open the files were, how willing everybody was to talk about the truth rather than the propaganda.
“He said to me, `Look, somebody needs to do this. We need to document what really was a 45-year war, the longest one in this century and one that took millions of lives and yet nobody has ever really looked at it and told the whole story.’ “
Turner also knew who he wanted as executive producer: Jeremy Isaacs, who had produced “The World at War,” the even more epic 1970s landmark documentary series about World War II.
Isaacs — who became Sir Jeremy midway through the project — took several months to prepare a proposal for the series. It took Turner only 10 days to give the green light.
“He was prepared to say, `If I say go it will happen,’ ” Isaacs said in a telephone interview while in the U.S. to promote the series. “That is Ted’s great ability. Other media owners only take very occasional interest in programming and when they do it’s usually to try to stop something, naming no names. But Ted is always trying to get things made.”
Isaacs called together members of the “World at War” production crew, including Martin Smith, who became series producer. One of the first goals: produce a list of people to be interviewed as soon as possible rather than risk losing access because of death or illness. They learned quickly that former President Ronald Reagan would not be available, although they did not know why until his family announced that he had Alzheimer’s Disease.
Others were captured on film just in time. British diplomat Sir Frank Roberts, who met with Josef Stalin in 1941 in Moscow, was the first to be interviewed; he died earlier this year. McGeorge Bundy, who had to be persuaded by Fred Friendly to participate, died several weeks after he was interviewed. Vaclav Havel, who was very ill, agreed to be interviewed then, and twice again after he recovered.
The passage of time was both enemy and ally. It made capturing the oral histories pressingly important but it also provided access to information that was not available when the actual events occurred. Former diplomats could talk about secret meetings that were no longer classified. KGB and CIA controllers could discuss the operations they managed. Spies could explain their rationale.
Researchers turned up ordinary eyewitnesses who were part of history but never in its spotlight. Efforts were made to track down people seen in rare film footage, some of it never meant to be seen outside government channels.
“No one has ever seen KGB footage of arrests before,” says Mitchell, adding that CNN paid for the rights to use the film just as it paid American archival houses. A British film crew discovered a can of 8 mm color film taken of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech, footage never before publicly screened. Meanwhile, John F. Kennedy’s `Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech is also seen in color for the first time.
Historian John Lewis Gaddis was one of those consultants whose work you see but whose voice you won’t hear. The core group influenced the project from the beginning. One day, after a meeting spent discussing the things that would have to be left out, a fellow historian sharing a New York cab ride with Turner even persuaded Turner to add four episodes to the series to make room for more information.
When Gaddis looks out over his lecture hall at Yale this fall he sees a room full of students whose earliest memory of a world event is the moment that marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. And yet so many students signed up for his Cold War course — more than 400 compared with last year’s 140 — that all 50 freshmen had to be exiled to avoid straining resources such as teaching assistants.
“What’s come out of this is a visual record of the impact of the Cold War on ordinary people that simply is not reflected in any of the existing scholarly literature,” said Gaddis. “I learned a lot about that and found myself incorporating it increasingly into my thinking about the Cold War.”
But Gaddis and the others involved with “Cold War” also know that no matter how much they learn there is still much more information out there waiting to be uncovered.
