Someone comes up to you at a party and says,

The CIA are trying to suppress my research.

You probably start backing away slowly.

But if that person was my guest this week, they'd be telling the truth.

I'm talking today to a living legend, Alfred McCoy, who in the early 1970s conducted research

in Southeast Asia that exposed the French and American intelligence services complicity in the

global heroin trade during the Vietnam War.

The CIA demanded to have a look at his research, but they couldn't find a single mistake he'd made.

It was all true.

For 50 years, he's maintained his steadfast commitment to uncovering the violence of empire,

and now he's back with a new book

called The Cold War on Five Contents, the whole story of the Cold War that takes in the Iran

coup in 1953, all the way up to the US to support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

And it couldn't be a more timely topic, because it really seems like we're heading back

into a second Cold War.

And the parallels are quite eerie.

One of the major events of the first Cold War was the Suez Crisis.

In that crisis, waning global powers invaded a Middle Eastern country,

failed to depose its leader, and didn't secure control of a vital global shipping lane,

because the middle power blocked it off. Those countries were chastened, and their ability

to project global power was tarnished forever. In that case, it was Britain,

France and Israel attacking Egypt, but it might one day be telling the same story about the effects

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