Beware gifts from Soviet spies
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What historical context sets the stage for the Cold War rivalry?
ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. How reliable is your memory of a crime scene? And can those memories be manipulated? Connected to wrongful convictions?
How a memory works can be damaging for a justice system and for the integrity of a justice system.
This is Sana Khadar from All In The Mind. If you are a fan of true crime, you should check out our new series, Forensic. It's about the quirks and curiosities of our weird human brains. Search for All In The Mind on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. Here is a news flash. The German radio has just announced that Hitler is dead. Germany, the enemy who drove all Europe into war, has been finally overcome. During the first few moments of this bulletin, the war in Europe is coming to its official end.
World War II has ended. Nazi Germany has been defeated. The US, Britain and the Soviet Union banded together to win a war. But now the relationship between them all is, well, it's tense. We've shifted into Cold War territory and they're watching each other with intense side eye. And it turns out, listening to each other as well. The year is 1951, and a British spy radio operator in Moscow is monitoring a Soviet frequency. He's been listening for hours, and frankly, he's starting to nod off. Until he hears something that makes him sit up and clutch his headphones in disbelief.
Suddenly he hears voices speaking English in American accents. And this is not supposed to be on the radio. Something very strange is going on. So he's certainly very confused.
And it wasn't just any American voice he was listening to. The US ambassador to Russia was the voice that they eventually managed to identify. So the Americans swing into action. They're searching the ambassador's study to see if they can find this listening bug.
They walk around the US ambassador's residence, scanning every single bit of the residence, and they cannot find any bugs. They can't find any source of these voices.
But it turns out the bug was right in front of them, in plain sight, being looked at every single day. But where? I'm Mark Finnell, and this is just the tip of the mystery. That bug would somehow spark a technology that you and I use every day to get into a gym, to travel on the train, to buy groceries. Let's just say there's a whole bunch of consequences coming from that bug, and no one saw it coming.
So we are in 1945 and I think it's fair to say that the US and the Soviets are, well, they're frenemies.
The most frenemy that anyone has ever been, possibly.
This is the voice of Matthew Bevan, the host of the ABC podcast If You're Listening.
They were technically allies. They had, of course, been allies throughout the Second World War in fighting primarily in Europe against the Nazis, but also in the final stages of the Pacific War, the Soviets joined that war and contributed to the Japanese surrender.
Scientists, British and American, have made the atomic bomb at last. The first one was dropped on a Japanese city this morning. It was 9.15 and a half a.m., August 6th, 1945. Where Hiroshima had been, we could see nothing but an immense brown-gray cloud which completely covered the city, and rising from its center was a tremendous white column of smoke. Not until the following day were photographs obtained showing that 60% of the city had been completely destroyed. The official announcement of the event was made by President Truman. We won the race of discovery against the Germans. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war. We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan's power to make war.
The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the first atomic weapons ever used in war. Almost 200,000 people were killed. Japan surrendered soon after, bringing World War II to an end. But while those bombs may have forced the conclusion of one conflict, they also supercharged the next, the Cold War. You see, before those bombs in Hiroshima exploded... The Soviets still don't know about the bomb.
So they're still in a state of more friend than enemy...
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