>> watch more history of holidays online, c-span.org/history. >> tonight's program inside the cold war, why it matters. i am james brundage and i will be your host for this evening's program which is offered by the international spy museum. i'm joined by colonel chris costa and doctor andrew hammond. chris costa is director of the international spy museum and 34 year veteran of the department of defense. previously he served 25 years in the united states army working in counterintelligence, human intelligence and with special operations forces in central america, europe and throughout the middle east. he ran a wide range of intelligence, special operations in panama, the first and second iraq wars and afghanistan. he won two goldstar for intelligence work in afghanistan and was assigned to the warfare develop and where he served as squadron deputy director. in 2013 he was inducted into the united states special operations command hall of honor for lifetime service for us special operations. most recently he served as special assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the national security council. doctor andrew hammond is historian and curator at the international spy museum his interest in intelligence came from the period of service in the royal air force, with documents to the royal navy. he specializes in military and intelligence history and author of the forthcoming book entitled struggles for freedom, afghanistan, us foreign policy, and the story of 9/11, with military and intelligence study. has helped fellowship at the british libraries, library of congress, new york university and he was formerly a public humanities fellow at the 9/11 memorial museum and public policy 0, and the museum's podcast. gentlemen, thank you for being here. i'm looking forward to our discussion. doctor hammond, would you mind telling us a little about the spy museum before we begin? >> absolutely. i think it would be better if you don't mind me changing the running order as we discussed that. >> i can do that. it is my favorite topic to talk about. i will say we opened in 2002, our founder milton lost who swerved in the national security agency in the 1950s. the spy museum in 2002, we existed in dc, it is too far from the national mall. in may of 2019, moved to the other side of the mall, an amazing 140,000 square-foot building and that is where we have an opportunity to tell how and why the techniques and procedures that we are going to talk about, and the nation's spy, the heart of the cold war story, the only public museum in the united states to tackle espionage and intelligence from an international standpoint and we are proud of that with the largest collection of espionage placed on public display. that the great segue, talking about the artifacts it is crucial role in the spy museum. >> this is just off the mall on the plaza. one of the ways i think about the spy museum, it is four walls, the collection that is truly magnificent. what you want to think about, there is amazing stories connected to an amazing artifact. for two minutes i will walk through a few that relate to what we are talking about. this is one of my favorites. a silver cigar box. you see the bottom of your screen, the gentleman at the top right of your screen. this is probably the only physical piece of evidence connecting these two gentlemen want to overthrow the bolshevik regime. think of this as the history of the cold war. imagine more bolshevik regime and some historian said the cold war started in 1917 during the russian revolution. others of the more conventional starting point. we can go from there up to 1940. this, i thought was a specific fact, the cold war was a number of things but one thing it definitely was was an ideological conflict. within con you knew some the previous artifact, lenin dies, trotsky and stalin have a struggle and to cut a long story short stalin doesn't want trotsky to stick around so he gets killed. the next one, you can jump to the 60s in 70s. there are different artifacts. this is the heart that was used by what some called the spy of the century. the famous british officer secretly working for the soviet union. john walker, silver bar that we have that was given to him for his espionage activities. he set up aspiring and one reason, if you've been following in the past week a couple that are connected to the navy charged with espionage, john walker with the silver bar, they were paid with the crypto currency so we begin to think about the changes and espionage in the cold war up to now and the present day, these are the artifacts we have, the cold war into the present in so many ways, some of which we are going to discuss but you see the top left the connections to 9/11, the top rate you see joe biden, the premier of australia and the uk, all about what is happening in the south china sea, you see the bottom left here, what we see now is almost a succession struggle among great powers but grows out of the cold war by direct connection to what the cold war left behind. on the bottom right the brave new world, the wild west of saigon. over the course of the collection it goes from way back to the present day. each of those artifacts you can enter a portal, into a specific place in the cold war, a rough overview of our collection. >> thanks for the introduction to the museum and the collections here. i'm going to briefly highlight a few of the pieces from the library. we have an exhibit drawn to comments, the art of war which you see behind me on your screen. the museum is home to the largest collection of his work anywhere in the country all of which is digitized on our website. i encourage you to take a look at some point but i will share a few pieces and highlight the collection here. for anybody who doesn't know he was an editorial cartoonist at the st. louis dispatch 1958 through 1991 so he covered so many topics we may be talking about tonight and a lot of foreign policy issues surrounding the cold war and a veteran of world war ii as well. what he talks about. he did pieces, this was done in the early 1970s. and the nuclear arms race, some very general topics, those caught in the middle does define cold war he saw through the decades. a couple more pointed things as well. these are a few of the many cartoons we have in the collection moulton did on the cold war. this reflects his opinion what was happening and a lot of public perceptions how the country saw what was happening from the standpoint of us soviet relations. on to our discussion. i will start with a general question that we haven't talked about. can we talk about how we define the cold war? >> i will give the version that is currently understood is a conflict that took place between the end of world war ii, 99 to 1, the dissolution of the soviet union involved two blocks antagonistic we opposed to one another. the north america and western europe, east, largely the soviet union and eastern europe, the former being democratic and the latter communist. why is it called a cold war? it was cold in the sense the general war never broke out between the two antagonistic we opposed power blocs, which meant to the between them a lot of the action took place in the realm of intelligence and espionage which is why there is a doozy of a story that connects. just a couple brief complicating events that take place globally. there was a global cold war. it was beyond east and west. from mozambique and angola to cuba, vietnam, took place around the world, even took place in the antarctic, the antarctic treaty that took place in the north pole because the shortest route for intercontinental ballistic missiles in the soviet union and america was over the north pole. the whole world was in meshed in the struggle. as i mentioned some say it begins earlier. some say it never went away. i gave the conventional understanding. the last thing to say in all those places, the cold comes from the united states and the soviet union not engaging in general war involving nuclear weapons which had happened, we wouldn't be here speaking. >> probably not. that is a great explanation. there were a lot of specifics. i will leave a little open for either of you. what are the more memorable aspects that go beyond the well-known touch points. >> i can join them. >> appreciate the opportunity to be here. i was remiss in saying that. we are very grateful to be connected to 2:00 pm m l. at the same time i learn something new, when i learn something from you that i really appreciate. andrew got to part of the question what the cold war wasn't how it was declined. i worked early on in my career on the periphery in places like central america. there was a war in el salvador, all bought as surrogates to a hot war. the nicaraguan regime. it is a fascinating dynamic that takes us as andrew indicated across the globe and we will get into specifics of counterintelligence. andrew did a great job as a seen setter. and a referral place across the globe. it truly was global in terms of the confrontation between east and west. >> the memorable aspects that are overlooked, i will give an interest in when to start. the longest war, in afghanistan. longest war in the history of the united states a couple months back, the longest war in the history of the united states, afghanistan in parallel. both of them feed into each other in ways that are more complicated. the second one is an interesting example. the ak-47 is invented in 1947, soviet weapon, one of the iconic symbols of the cold war, a symbol of the post 9/11 era, photographs of osama bin laden with the ak-47. what is interesting on the flag of four countries, mozambique, zimbabwe, just think about that. the mozambique one is interesting, there's an awesome bob dylan song called mozambique and it is meant to be ironic because mozambique was torn apart and the final one that is not discussed often is all of this takes place against the backdrop of decolonization. at the end of world war ii, you've got a lot of countries, but nowhere near the amount of countries that eventually become independent with the cold war. the best cold war, to decolonization and think about all of the european powers after world war ii, probably beaten up. almost the whole of the beginning of the cold war is under european, some form of european control. the literal states of the indian ocean all the way from oman and yemen all the way through to southeast asia and asia all controlled to some level by european powers. after the cold war that is no longer the case and you see the west and the east getting involved in various national issues because of a dog in vietnam or india or pakistan so that's another thing that is not often discussed but that was against the backdrop of decolonization which is quite wide-ranging and profound. >> host: something both of you hit on is this is the whole world that becomes affected by the cold war. it seems as if nothing is not impacted or you couldn't connect in some way to the cold war and what is happening during this time period. i will move to chris costa and talk about your personal experiences working in espionage and working for nato. how does what you did exemplify or relate to cold war espionage in general or more specifically? >> there is a story that takes us to belgium in 1992. that picture - this program was a vehicle for me to do in to my personal stuff and go into the storage unit and find some relics of my past. i did to share with everyone i was truly young ones in this takes us back to 1992. the story i will tell is a metaphor for the cold war and we will close the circle a little bit on the discussion of the cold war with some of the points that andrew made to include the possibility of nuclear confrontation. in 1992 i was assigned to belgium as a young counterintelligence agent. my mission was to detect terror and investigate the possibility of espionage directed against the supreme headquarters, and that was a few miles away from nato headquarters. i was responsible as an operations officer for my colleagues to discuss investigations and to ensure we didn't have spies operating against the military headquarters. we worked closely with 16 partners in those days. there were more nato partners working with ci services and the other 15 countries. it was as much about liaison officers and investigations as already mentioned. this is a post 1989 posts wall coming down environment. when did the cold war end, ended when the wall came down, when the soviet union broke up. in belgium in particular who are assigned there, peace is breaking out all over the place. it made our jobs in the counterintelligence realm so much more challenging because everyone wanted to do things like partnerships for peace, soviet schoolchildren to nato, we were going much more deliberately because we are counterintelligence people and suspicious by nature. all of the sudden much to our surprise, a story broke about a spy at the heart of nato headquarters. the spy was purportedly codenamed topaz, somewhat mysterious. and investigative leads to try to determine if the headquarters was penetrated. was there a spy reaching into the heart of military headquarters in the midst of all of that not finding evidence to substantiate spy activity, there was an arrest made and it was reported a spy couple was arrested for espionage at nato headquarters. let me tell you the rest of the story. it is fascinating if you bear with me for a moment. topaz, a former top spy recruited in the 1960s. he was west german, he had a left-wing ideological bend. nobody caught on to that. by 1977 he was able to get hired at nato headquarters. he was an intelligent individual by all accounts. by 1977 he had recruited his wife is a british citizen to spy along with them. he continued to take home secrets, photographs or secrets in his basement, in his office with a camera. i will show our guests in a moment. when the wall came down, his spying stopped but was not revealed until as i indicated he was arrested in 1993. nato would not have known they had a spy were it not for any sturm and defector that said there was a spy at nato headquarters. i watched this play. a fascinating dynamic for me as a counterintelligence officer to be involved intentionally with the investigation and do the follow-up assessment. here is the bigger surprise and it has to do with christian robe. when we went to nato headquarters to coordinate our counterintelligence activities with the nato office, she was a deck of contact. she actually worked in the nato office of security. she took our most sensitive intelligence secrets, in some cases the top-secret level and secure them extensively for her boss who was the head of nato office of security. we were very concerned but we discovered she stopped spying years before. when it was revealed the topaz was her husband, she was stunned. because she thought her husband had stopped spying against nato years before because he committed to her once the children were born to stop his dangerous spying activity. he continued it nonetheless in both of them served time in prison. the last point is crucial to make and ties into excellent points andrew made. the postscript for this story is activities may have by some judgments of verdict a nuclear war. how? at the time, in the 1980s, to set conditions for our audience and guests, in the 1980s, president reagan's rhetoric and activities scared the soviets. we had a series of exercises, you can google, the soviets actually believed the united states was getting ready for a first nuclear strike. topaz's intelligence that was provided to the warsaw pact called the nerves of the soviet union. ultimately they saw this intelligence. usually clandestine tradecraft like you see in the movies to communicate with his handlers, he was able to calm the lawyers. in some quarters people believed, as egregious as it was, from our perspective, in a western perspective, as egregious as it was, it calms the soviets down and they were convinced the united states, and nato, was not going to conduct an attack. the last thing i want to do, i went on a little long but it is worth it for our audience, they can see this. i to let everyone know that i had an opportunity because of this program to go to our archivists and historians and staff and they provided me with a camera which is right here in my gloved hand. this small camera, you can't see the components of it but there is a little switch i'm scared to play with that would have controlled the shutter speed. what we used to do with this - not this specific camera, but this model, he used the rest it on his 4 head and lean over and change one document at a time while he photographed the most sensitive intelligence the west had so that is just a sliver of the cold war story that i wanted to share. .. from your perspective you're writing a book or you have two books in the works, for you why is it important to study and discuss the cold war? >> i mean, many reasons. came up a couple of times as nuclear weapons. the vocabulary, the grammar of nuclear weapons, that was all developed during the cold war and during the cold war for the first time in human history the stakes were everything -- you know, we don't know nuclear weapons because we only have two examples to go on and what happened to hiroshima and nagasaki of what's available now. there was a general war between the west and east with nuclear weapons, the stakes would have been the biosphere and years ago when they were facing but wouldn't affect the western hemisphere but the legacy of nuclear weapons as all fell on the lane, the stakes are everything that is just there. i've just done a brief research and one of the nuclear war simulators and one mega ton. one megaton nuclear weapon in downtown chicago where you are, you would be gone, 100% casualties, great low occasion but you would be gone unfortunately and the the follow would reach places like detroit and flint, michigan. that's one megaton nuclear weapon. within the first four minutes casualties where they are now after 18 months of covid. so we are talking about really big stakes. so we are still learning how to deal with that and learning how to deal within the confines of the cold war mainly the united states and some of its allies in the soviet union, nuclear weapons, horizontal proliferation where more countries are getting nuclear weapons and international relations are struggling to try to deal with some of the developments. i think that that would be one of the big ones. i'm sure chris has got a few. i spoke about ideology earlier and you can see a lot of the 20th century was about a conflict between communism, fascism and liberalism fascism, by in large at the general level and that isn't something that's gone away, that's struggle for idealology for how to arrange governments for levels of individual freedom. that's something that's still continuing. communism has not went away. it wept away in the soviet, it's not went away in china and we see lots of interesting developments taking place in the south china sea and that's a growth, we have seen the international system change and china assessing itself and that's a post-war context. >> chris, do you have anything to add? i think that was great comment? >> no that was comprehensive. andrew does a great job of capturing. >> i thought that was fantastic and kind of takes us to our last question here which in a sense one of the questions that we have gotten from our audience. you know, what implications does the cold war have for today's military for global affairs and i think it goes along with this idea that you just mentioned with so many nations still communist governments and did the cold war really ever end or has it become less prominent. did it just shift in ideology, you know