Spying in Berlin
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 10 November 2021
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At the height of the Cold War the German city of Berlin was known as the spy capital of the world. Spies were operating on both sides of the Berlin Wall as tensions between democratic West Germany and communist East Germany meant governments on both sides of the ideological divide were desperate to find out what the other side was planning. In the early 1980s Nina Willner became the first female US army officer to lead intelligence missions into East Germany. For her there was an added poignancy to her work, as her mother’s family were living in East Germany while Nina was operating in East Berlin. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the divided family was reunited and Nina wrote a memoir, ‘Forty Autumns’ about their very different lives. Caroline Bayley spoke to Nina Willner for Witness History about her experiences of the Cold War in Berlin.
Photo by Régis BOSSU/Sygma via Getty Images - The frontier between West and East Berlin.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. |
| 0:30.9 | This This is the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Caroline Bailey. |
| 0:40.0 | In the 1980s, the border between West and East Germany |
| 0:44.0 | and the wall dividing the city of Berlin |
| 0:46.0 | marked the frontier between Western Europe |
| 0:49.0 | and the communist states of Eastern Europe. |
| 0:51.0 | It was a political and military border and West Berlin was |
| 0:55.2 | known as the spy capital of the world. When I came into West Berlin as a young |
| 1:01.0 | lieutenant, the tensions were absolutely heightened at that time. It was the height of the Cold War, really at that time. This was the nuclear arms race, the space race. It was a time when you had these two starkly |
| 1:15.9 | different ideologies of democracy and communism, democracy in the West, |
| 1:20.2 | communism in the East, pitted against one another in conflicts around the world. |
| 1:25.0 | Nina Wilner, then an officer in the US Army, arrived in West Berlin in the autumn of |
| 1:30.8 | 1983. A lot of eyes around the world were focused on the sort of demarcation line between the East and West. |
| 1:39.0 | It was very heavily patrolled by the U.S. and the Brits and the French on the one side, the |
| 1:44.8 | Western side and the East Germans and Soviets on the East side. |
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