Twisted History
Twisted History

Twisted History

2.7 Jan 2013
Ended

Overview

History doesn’t travel in straight lines. The truth is far weirder and more fascinating than anything you learned at school. The most iconic events of the modern era – the Moon Landing, the Roswell Incident, the death of Martin Luther King Jr. - are all the product of small things - chance meetings, friendships, collisions of ideas and crazy stories. These are the connections that make history. When an unknown German army general met Abraham Lincoln to discuss observing the Battlefields of the American Civil War, nobody could have known this meeting would set in motion a chain of events that culminated in man landing on the moon, but that’s exactly what happened. When allied pilots began reporting UFO sightings in the final days of World War 2, who could have guessed that what they were seeing could influence the development of the modern home computer and the internet? How could nuclear weapons possibly connect Nazis and UFO’s to IBM? The darkly fascinating stories of the Mafia and the Klu Klux Klan have been well told, but few people are aware of the secret war between these two sinister organisations that spanned decades, a battle for the soul of modern America, with a legacy that persists to this day.

English
E4

Hollywood vs Commies

The amazing story of how Hollywood took on Communism and played a key role in winning the Cold War. The story begins in the middle of WW2 when Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, joins British Naval Intelligence. He is so successful that he is sent across the Atlantic to help America set up the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA. This extraordinary organization, headed by ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, recruits top Hollywood director John Ford and rising star Sterling Hayden for its undercover campaigns in occupied Europe and the Far East. When the war ends, Ford and Hayden return to Hollywood only to find a new conflict has broken out: the Cold War. It’s a different kind of war, but the stakes are just as high. As America is gripped by the ‘Red Scare’, Hollywood stars are asked to stand up and declare their opposition to Communist ideology. One prominent actor in the anticommunist campaign is Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors’ Guild. He works as an informer for the FBI and becomes the public face of Radio Free Europe, a CIA funded radio station, which broadcasts to Eastern Europe. In 1961 a Soviet officer, Oleg Penkowsky, contacts the US embassy in Moscow and offers to spy for America. He passes on hundreds of secret documents, including design drawings of Soviet missile launch sites. When in 1963 Penkovsky’s documents are crosschecked with photographs from a U2 spy plane, the world is thrown into crisis. Russia has been secretly sending nuclear missiles to Cuba, just 90 miles off the Florida coast. Fidel Castro, Cuba’s communist leader, has been the target of many secret CIA assassination plots, but now the United States prepares for all out war. After several tense weeks, the Soviets finally back down and agree to remove the missiles, but they continue to manufacture huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

Jan 22, 2013 45m

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