Scorpions – Wind of Change: CIA Propaganda Deluxe

The whistling… this fucking whistling.
Only a few seconds into the song, and you’re already in some twisted Land of Oz- finished, fucked up and destroyed.

Throwback to my first introduction into torture: early 90s in gray Germany- the Berlin Wall has fallen and the Scorpions’ “Wind of Change” is all over the place, and for years. All of my friends burst out in annoyed laughter whenever the obnoxious whistling would be heard, but they also took great joy in my predictable personal meltdown the further the song played along. No song triggered stronger reactions from me: giving my eyes a hysterical and insane glance, making me want to smash my head at walls or put a drill on my temples. I was a walking soft cell. It was a predictable show, and so people played this song or started whistling its intro whenever they thought of annoying me. Or they’d buy me the CD single or “Rock Power Ballad” compilations with the song on it as a birthday present until I was around 17- I threw them all away except for one to remember this shitty tradition.

There are two ways to break a man: in a clear, unconflicted, and precise way involving your fists as practiced by Ivan Drago (God bless him), or in most crude, vicious and deceptive ways as practiced by the world’s biggest terror organization, the CIA. Unlike Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady” or Queens “We Are The Champions“, the Scorpions’ mega hit and soundtrack to the Fall of the Iron Curtain was not included to the CIA’s list of songs to torture Muslims in Guantanamo, although one can’t think of a better song to torture a human being. But are you sure that we weren’t rocked like a hurricane here?

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Wind of Change became one of the most successful singles in rock history as the 13th biggest selling single of the pre-digital era, selling even more physical copies than “Bohemian Rhapsody“. The single got released with a Russian and Spanish version so that there were no doubts and risks about the global reception of the song and its message. The cheesy song topped the charts in the USA and all over Europe, paired with a video that showed images arching from the rise of the Berlin Wall in 1961 to cheering East Germans as it comes down, and dancing Soviet Soldiers. 24/7 sentimental but persistent brainwash on all channels, 7 days a week, for months and years- the predictive programming of the ‘soft-power-coup’ hymn couldn’t have been more obvious.

A mediocre and up until then unpolitical German hard rock band penning the hymn to a most historical event- was it all a lucky coincidence? In his podcast ‘Wind of Change- Soviet. Secrets. Spies. And tight leather pants‘, journalist Patrick Radden Keefe follows these questions in an 8-part investigation, and suggests that it was not. The New Yorker writer shares his journey to find the truth and unravels a history about secret spies, propaganda collaborators in pop music and culture in general, and the maze of government secrets and ruthless CIA methods. It is a highly recommendable listen.

One striking hard fact Keefe presents is about the Scorpions’ manager Harold ‘Doc’ McGhee, who also managed other hard rock bands like Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi and Skid Row, who altogether played the ‘Moscow Music Festival‘ that went down as initiation for the Wind of Change folklore. But before dedicating himself to music completely, Doc McGhee had another life that is not being mentioned on Wikipedia: he was involved in the biggest drug-bust of US history, along with CIA-asset Manuel Antonio Noriega, the dictator general of Panama. Doc Mc Ghee was identified as the link between the smuggler and a Colombian drug supplier, but other than the other suspects, he never served a day in prison. Apparently, a sweet deal was made, one that involved having him put up the ‘Make a Wish Foundation’ in the finest NGO-manner. And so his foundation organized the legendary festival in Moscow, and now fasten your seatbelts: the Moscow Music Peace Festival was carried out under the motto “Say no to drugs and alcohol” – by a bunch of drug-addicted Western rock stars of low intelligence. It is the typical degenerate CIA humor, not a long way from there to the musical torture in Guantanamo if you ask me.

„Listen to a song, go to see a movie, turn on the TV- we’re not aware that we’re on the receiving end of messaging, carefully devised and calibrated messaging, “ is how Patrick Radden Keefe puts it. The CIA’s propagandist influence operations don’t start and end with Rocky 4, but are being organized and produced in a dimension that you can’t- and possibly don’t want to- imagine.

Film.

Maybe you already knew that the CIA funded both the 1955 animated film of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and the 1956 film of his 1984 and altered the endings to make them more explicitly anti-communist. But have you ever heard of Lookout Mountain?
Lookout Mountain, Hollywoods’s top secret and most prolific film studio, got established in Laurel Canyon, California in 1947 – by The United States Air Force, which means military budget. Lookout Mountain was a full-service, complete facility that was leading in inventing the technologies that are getting used in most Hollywood films. The secret studio you have never heard of produced over 6500 films- vs. the lousy number of 420 films produced by the officially No.1 studio, Disney. Lookout Mountain was not a secret to the industry though, and it was common that directors like Kubrick used NASA equipment to film 2001, for example.

But the CIA influence and propaganda doesn’t stop with Hollywood, which hopefully a growing number of people consider a lie-factory anyway.

News and the media.

CIA agents massively infiltrating newspapers and all other media outlets are neither a new, and more importantly, not an old phenomenon- it has always been a common propaganda method that it still at work, and during the digital age with its increasing media possibilities and control mechanisms more so than ever. In a CIA-classified document, Fred Landis gives us one hint on how to spot such newspapers in Latin America: “The point is that if you look at the front page of a conservative newspaper, at such time that the CIA has taken it over, the newspaper looks like a psychological warfare leaflet. It looks like a cartoon. It does not look like a conservative newspaper. “ Foreign countries could sing endless elegies about this, but hey, now these self-grown methods have finally come back to openly haunt the USA through Breitbart & Co. Karma is such a fair lady.

Literature.

The CIA infiltrated the world’s literature by having agents as chief editors in literature magazines like the Partisan Review and Paris Review, the London-based Encounter, French Preuves, German Der Monat, Italian Tempo Presente, Austrian Forum, Australian Quadrant, Japanese Jiyu, and Latin American Cuadernos and Mundo Nuevo. The Agency was using the academia and “left but anti-communist” authors for their propaganda, or simply had writer-agents pen literature for the CIA agenda. It’s not just the obvious high-propaganda pieces like Betty Mahmoody’s horrible bestseller Not Without My Daughter which plays into the genre of what the German Professor for Political Science Jürgen Becker calls the „imperialistic-feministic discourse, the murderous alliance between NATO and Western feminism“ in order to wage war on Islam. No, it’s also through Nobel price winning authors like John Steinbeck and Gabriel José García Márquez, authors like Hemingway and Orwell, and a high number of foreign authors which the CIA won and instrumentalized for their agendas. You should actually be cautious of every next hyped foreign ‘dissident darling’ in literature, film, activism and art. Frances Stonor Saunders’ book “The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters” carries together the facts and is a comprehensive read on the matter.

Art.

Remember that The US Empire and its CIA are not only waging modern colonial wars over resources but also always and inevitably cultural wars. An empire cannot exist without an ongoing narrative. Held up as proof of creativity and intellectual freedom, Modern Art is an invention admittedly used by the CIA for its purposes, to weaken other cultures and put New York on top of the world’s cultural scene. With collaborators such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, it manifested Modern Art as the peak of all civilization- with a scene and market that strongly echoes the insanity of the stock markets. The next time you stare at three moody lines on canvas selling for 100 million dollars, ask yourself how you were conditioned to value and accept such a ridiculous, turbo-capitalist canon. Talk about degenerate art.

***

You’re still one of those believing that the CIA is a harmless “intelligence” agency with gray bureaucrats working in gray offices, receiving and transmitting ‘messages’? Well, they do that too. The WikiLeaks lists 50 pages of US cables containing the words “Wind of Change“.

One of the cables that were leaked in 2011 came from the US Embassy in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. In 2006 it informed Washington about that a „Crowd of thousands in central square demand ‘change’,“ . It was a cable initially reporting on demonstrations, but then taking an astonishing turn by mentioning the Scorpions concert that had taken place in Ulan Bator on just that evening and penning out the lyrics to the song:

„ /…/ Just after midnight, the crowd began to shout for “change” — “the Winds of Change” that is. Klause Meine, the lead singer of the Scorpions, soon complied in the encore to the band’s 90-minute set. From the statue of General Sukhbaatar (the hero of the 1921 independence revolution) to Government House to the stock exchange, the lyrics began to echo:

“I follow the Moskva / Down to Gorky Park / Listening to the wind of change / An August summer night / Soldiers passing by / Listening to the winds of change /…/ ” “

God, help us please. And if you won’t, send Ivan Drago at least.

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If your head is not in a major twist yet, let’s go back to Radden Keefe’s podcast briefly. He talks to Doc McGhee and he even talks to the Scorpions singer Klaus Meine, but the best part of the series is episode 7, titled “Rorschach“, where he refers to the CIA’s own image control. The CIA has a large spy museum and is funding Hollywood films that are excellent propaganda on how the agency wants to be perceived. It’s propaganda films like Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, which are justifying CIA actions like foreign invasions and the use of torture.

By its massive infiltration and domination of all modern art sectors, the terror agency is by now a part of pop culture itself and letting out (or: ‘declassifying’) bits of stories which are shedding a good light on them- just like the Wind of Change– story. Glamorous drug deals and rock stars- what’s not to love? It makes them look pretty cool, just a bunch of loveable and adventurous Yankees with their Ray Ban Aviator glasses on. It’s certainly not evoking images of the CIA reality of torture, drug-trafficking, bloody takeovers, executions, and all kinds of tyranny.

So… what if the person spreading CIA propaganda is me here?

by Saliha Enzenauer

Frances Stonor Saunders: "Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War" (2000) and "The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters" (2013)
Edward Said: "Culture & Imperialism" (1994)