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| Secret
State |
| A
look at the secretive world of spies and state security systems
of the last century. |
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I
Kidnapped Adolf Eichmann
Listen
Hermann Arndt was a high-ranking agent
of Mossad, the Israeli secret service, and in 1960 was sent
to Argentina to track down the notorious Nazi war criminal Adolf
Eichmann. After weeks spent spying on Eichmann who was living
in a slum outside Buenos Aires, Hermann Arndt was sure he had
the right man. He kidnapped Eichmann, flew him to Israel in
disguise where he was tried and executed on 31st May 1962.
(Hermann Arndt has written his autobiography:
'On Life and Death, the Tale of a Lucky Man', published by the
Minerva Press in 1998 under his Israeli name of Zvi Aharoni)
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Hounded
By The FBI
Listen
Ruth Goldberg tells her story of small-town American
politics in the early fifties during the McCarthy anti-communist
era. Married to a Marxist and a labour lawyer, when Ruth stood
for election as president of her local parents teachers association
she was denounced as a left-wing activist. Her six year old
son was told by neighbours that his mother ought to be stood
against a wall and shot. Many years later Ruth was allowed
to see her FBI file - and says it was hoplessly inept, saying
she was a friend of 'dangerous communists' - people she had
never even met. She calls her experience a microcosm of the
Cold War.
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Operation
Condor
Listen
Juan Mendez is an Argentinian lawyer
who was arrested in 1975 tortured, and held in detention for
eighteen months. In prison he realised that he and many thousands
of others were the victim of Operation Condor, the covert cooperation
between Latin American countries to hand-over those considered
to be left-wing activists and dissidents. Set up by General
Pinochet, in one instance Operation Condor operatives rounded
up more than a hundred Chileans in Paraguay and Brazil, returned
them to Chile where they were summarily killed. Operation Condor
has been described as a 'common market of terror'.
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Spies
Of The Cold War
Listen
Chingiz
Abdullayev says his job during the Cold War was to provide security
for spies. He worked for the Ministry of Defence of the Soviet
Union, and as such participated in meetings between Soviet and
Western spies. He started writing novels when a friend was killed
by a shotgun blast in Angola in 1983. At the age of forty, Chingiz
Abdullayev now writes best-selling detective novels. He has
sold fifteen million books, and says he only writes about real
people. |
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The
Seductive Spy
Listen
Mata Hari was a spy for the Germans who became
a double agent for the French during the First World War.
She is famous for her seductions, and the incautious 'pillow
talk' she elicited from her different lovers. Mata Hari has
been blamed for the death of fifty thousand men and the prosecutor
at her trial in 1917 said 'The evil that this woman has done
is unbelievable. This is perhaps the greatest woman spy of
the century'. Her biographer, Julie Wheelwright, explores
the truth behind the myth of Mata Hari, and explains how this
great spy-seductress was more inept than dangerous, and her
life a tragi-comedy rather than high drama.
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