Entertaining Stories from the Past
Discover the covert operations, espionage, and tensions of the Cold War era.
4 articles in this category
From tunnels and hot air balloons to cars with hidden compartments, East Germans devised extraordinary methods to cross the Berlin Wall. Some made it. Many did not.
During the Cold War, the CIA spent five years and millions of dollars surgically implanting listening devices into a cat. Its first mission lasted about an hour.
In 1983, Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov received a warning that five American nuclear missiles were incoming. His decision to ignore the alarm may have prevented World War III.
During the height of the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force seriously considered detonating a nuclear bomb on the moon as a show of military might. A young Carl Sagan was part of the team.