The problem with mystery podcasts like Wind of Change

Did the US secretly write a power ballad in order to bring down the Soviet Union? That’s the question behind Wind of Change, a serial documentary that has topped the podcast charts. It’s the work of an investigative journalist called Patrick Radden Keefe who claims to have once received a tip-off, from an intelligence contact, that the song ‘Wind of Change’ — recorded by the hair metallers Scorpions — was actually a CIA campaign to encourage anti-Soviet uprisings. Now he wants to prove it.

This week’s episode, the fourth of eight, takes Keefe to a collectors’ convention in Ohio in pursuit of an internet user called ‘Lance Sputnik’ who creates customised versions of GI Joe action figures. ‘I think he knows something about this,’ ponders Keefe in the introduction. That’ll be a solid lead then, you think, given that our host is an award-winning muckraker. But it turns out that the suspicion is based purely on the fact that Sputnik once made Scorpions action figures from reharvested GI Joes and wrote a story that they’d been secret Cold War operatives.