From 1947 to 1991, two superpowers competed around the world without fighting a direct war against each other, and the true stories are often stranger than the spy novels. Here are the leaders and the close calls, the codebreakers and the hidden bunkers, and the songs, games and symbols of an anxious age, checked against archives, museums and declassified histories.
Every tile in a The Cold War game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Leaders
nine stories
1The British exit that launched the Truman Doctrine
On the tile: Truman1947
The Truman Doctrine began with an announcement from London. Britain said that after March 31, 1947, it would stop providing military and economic aid to the government of Greece, which was fighting a civil war against communists. Turkey had also depended on British support. On March 12, 1947, President Harry Truman went before a joint session of Congress and asked for $400 million in aid for both countries. It marked a turn in American policy, from staying out of faraway conflicts toward possibly stepping into them.
On June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced a plan for the economic recovery of Europe, and it came to carry his name. In 1953 he received the Nobel Peace Prize for it, the first professional soldier to be so honored. Not everyone approved. At the ceremony in Oslo, three young men began heckling the general and accusing him of war crimes. Marshall looked up calmly. The King and his party rose to their feet, the whole audience followed, and Marshall received a thunderous ovation.
On September 19, 1959, during his tour of the United States, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev arrived in Los Angeles and asked to visit Disneyland. Authorities said they could not guarantee his security there. Khrushchev was not amused. He asked whether there was an epidemic of cholera at the park, or whether gangsters had taken hold of the place. At Twentieth Century-Fox studios during the same Los Angeles visit, he complained about the canceled trip, met Marilyn Monroe and watched the filming of a scene from Can-Can.
On July 24, 1959, U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev argued about their rival systems in an unlikely setting: a model kitchen. It was part of the American National Exhibition in Moscow's Sokolniki Park, which also showed off cars, television sets and fashions. Nixon pointed to a dishwasher and said, "In America, we like to make life easier for women." Khrushchev shot back that such a capitalist attitude toward women did not occur under communism. An estimated 2.7 million Soviet citizens visited the exhibition over six weeks.
On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a televised farewell address from the Oval Office that lasted less than ten minutes. In three days, he said, he would lay down the responsibilities of office. The military leader and hero of World War II used the moment for a warning. An immense military establishment joined to a large arms industry, he said, was new in the American experience, and the government must guard against unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex.
6No, Kennedy did not call himself a jelly doughnut
On the tile: JFK in Berlin1963Myth busted
A popular story says that when President John F. Kennedy told a crowd in Berlin "Ich bin ein Berliner" on June 26, 1963, he accidentally announced that he was a jelly doughnut. It never happened. The sentence was correct German for what he meant, and his interpreter, a native German speaker, had given him the line. Berliner can mean a jelly doughnut, but people around Berlin called that pastry a Pfannkuchen. The myth spread after a 1988 New York Times essay titled I Am a Jelly-Filled Doughnut.
In June 1973, during Leonid Brezhnev's visit to the United States, President Richard Nixon gave the Soviet leader a gift at Camp David: a dark blue Lincoln Continental with black velour upholstery. Brezhnev, who already owned a Rolls-Royce and a Mercedes, took the wheel with Nixon beside him. Nixon later recalled that Brezhnev was going more than 50 miles an hour as they approached a steep slope marked as a dangerous curve, then braked with a squeal of rubber. Nixon told him he was an excellent driver.
8Thatcher's famous nickname came from a Soviet newspaper
On the tile: Iron Lady1976
On January 19, 1976, Margaret Thatcher, leader of Britain's Conservative Party, gave a speech at Kensington Town Hall in London that was sharply critical of the Soviet Union. On January 24 the Soviet Army newspaper Red Star answered with a nickname meant as an insult: the Iron Lady. Thatcher decided to wear it. Speaking to Conservatives in her Finchley constituency a week later, she pictured herself in a Red Star chiffon evening gown, softly made up, as the Iron Lady of the Western world.
On June 12, 1987, at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, President Ronald Reagan said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." The idea reached speechwriter Peter Robinson at a dinner in Berlin, where his host, Ingeborg Elz, said that if Gorbachev was serious about glasnost and perestroika, he could get rid of the wall. The State Department and National Security Council sent no fewer than seven alternate drafts without the demand. Reagan kept it, telling an aide that the boys at State were going to kill him, but it was the right thing to do.
In the summer of 1948, with West Berlin cut off by a Soviet blockade, American airlift pilot Gail Halvorsen met about 30 children at the fence of Tempelhof airport. He had two sticks of gum, so he broke them in half and passed four pieces through the wire. He promised to come back with more candy and to wiggle his plane's wings so they would know him. The next day he did, and candy floated down on handkerchief parachutes. The children named him Uncle Wiggly Wings. Other pilots joined in, and Operation Little Vittles dropped more than 20 tons of candy.
Budapest's bronze statue of Joseph Stalin was 8 meters tall, and it stood on a grandstand where communist leaders waved at parading crowds from beneath his feet. On October 23, 1956, the day the Hungarian Revolution broke out, protesters cut the statue off at the knees and pulled it down. Only the boots were left on the pedestal. Soviet forces crushed the revolution, but the boots became a symbol of the longing for freedom. A full-size replica of the grandstand now stands in Budapest's Memento Park, and visitors can climb it and wave.
3The weather flight that turned out to be a spy mission
On the tile: U-2 Incident1960
On May 1, 1960, a Soviet surface-to-air missile brought down an American U-2 spy plane over the Ural Mountains. Before they knew the pilot had survived, U.S. officials said it had been a routine weather flight whose pilot blacked out from an oxygen problem and drifted into Soviet airspace. On May 7, Nikita Khrushchev revealed that the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was alive and uninjured, and that the Soviets had recovered the plane mostly intact, camera included. President Eisenhower refused to apologize, and a planned summit in Paris fell apart.
The Berlin Wall began as an operation code-named Action Rose. In the night of August 12 to 13, 1961, East German police sealed off the border through the middle of Berlin, tearing up streets and stringing barbed wire. On August 15, a 19-year-old East German policeman named Conrad Schumann was posted at the corner of Bernauer Strasse and Ruppiner Strasse. He took a running start, jumped the barbed wire into West Berlin and threw away his submachine gun as he went. The leap was caught on camera.
On October 27, 1962, the most dangerous day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet submarine B-59 surfaced to charge its batteries amid American ships and planes. Like the other submarines in its brigade, it carried a nuclear torpedo. Captain Valentin Savitsky, blinded by searchlights and shaken by explosions, believed war had begun, and by later accounts he called for an emergency dive and readying of the nuclear torpedo. Vasily Arkhipov, the brigade's chief of staff, saw the Americans were signaling, not attacking, and calmed him. The order was never passed on.
In public, the Cuban Missile Crisis ended on October 28, 1962, when Nikita Khrushchev announced that the Soviet missiles would be dismantled and removed from Cuba. Part of the settlement stayed private. The day before, Khrushchev had demanded that American Jupiter missiles be removed from Turkey. Attorney General Robert Kennedy met secretly with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and indicated that the United States planned to remove the Jupiters anyway, and soon, but that this could not be part of any public resolution. The Jupiter missiles left Turkey in April 1963.
On April 30, 1975, as North Vietnamese troops entered Saigon, the U.S. Navy ships that had evacuated Americans steamed away from Vietnam, with one exception. That night the small destroyer escort USS Kirk was ordered back. The admiral in charge explained that they had forgotten the South Vietnamese navy. At sunrise on May 1, the Kirk reached Con Son Island and found 30 South Vietnamese navy ships and dozens of fishing boats and cargo ships, crammed with as many as 30,000 refugees. The Kirk led them to safety in the Philippines.
In the early hours of September 26, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was the duty officer at a Soviet early-warning command center when the system reported that the United States had launched five nuclear missiles. He was expected to pass the alarm up the chain of command. Petrov judged it a false alarm; the system was fairly new, and he did not completely trust it. He was right. His decision embarrassed his superiors, and the story stayed secret until the late 1990s. In 2007 he visited a former American missile site in South Dakota.
On November 9, 1989, East German party leader Egon Krenz handed spokesman Günter Schabowski a draft of new travel rules. At a press conference broadcast live that evening, a journalist asked when the rules took effect. Schabowski answered that they applied immediately. Just after 7 p.m. the news agency AP reported that East Germany had opened its border, and crowds began gathering at the crossings. By 11:30 p.m. thousands of people were pushing toward the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint, and the officers there gave up checking passports.
1The schoolteacher who started reading Soviet cables
On the tile: Venona1943-1980
On February 1, 1943, the U.S. Army quietly began studying encrypted Soviet telegrams. The first person on the job was Gene Grabeel, a Virginia schoolteacher who had recently arrived at the codebreaking center at Arlington Hall. She stayed with the project for 36 years. Soviet one-time pads should have been unbreakable, but some pages had been duplicated. Late in 1946, linguist Meredith Gardner began reading KGB messages, and in 1949 the decrypts led the FBI to Klaus Fuchs, a physicist who had spied inside the Manhattan Project. The program, later called Venona, closed in 1980, and its translations began to be made public in 1995.
In 1945, a group of Soviet youngsters presented the American ambassador in Moscow, W. Averell Harriman, with a hand-carved wooden Great Seal of the United States. It hung in the ambassador's residence, Spaso House. Hidden inside was a listening device with no battery and no electronics, which worked only when a radio signal was beamed at it from nearby. It went undetected for seven years, until 1952. Its inventor was Leon Theremin, creator of the electronic instrument that bears his name. In 1960, U.S. officials showed the seal at the United Nations.
On June 22, 1953, a Brooklyn newspaper boy named Jimmy noticed that one coin in his change felt lighter than a normal nickel. He dropped it, and it fell apart. Inside was a tiny photograph of typewritten numbers. The FBI could not crack the code for four years. Then, in May 1957, Soviet intelligence officer Reino Hayhanen defected in Paris and explained his ciphers. He also led agents to his boss, a Brooklyn photographer who turned out to be Colonel Rudolf Abel. In 1962 Abel was traded for American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers.
For decades, Area 51, a remote site beside a dry lake bed called Groom Lake in Nevada, attracted rumors about aliens. In 2013 a newly declassified CIA history of the U-2 spy plane program officially acknowledged the site. It was chosen in 1955, and President Eisenhower personally signed off on the acquisition. The history also offered an earthly explanation for UFO stories. U-2 test flights, much higher than airliners then flew, caused a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects, because no one expected to see anything that high in the sky.
5The secret jets that set off a hangar's sprinklers
On the tile: A-12 OXCART1964
On February 29, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson revealed a secret jet called the A-11 that had flown at more than 2,000 miles per hour, and said several were being tested at Edwards Air Force Base in California. There were none at Edwards, and there never had been. Its sibling, the CIA's A-12, code-named OXCART, stayed secret elsewhere. Caught by surprise, project officials rushed two Air Force YF-12A jets to Edwards. The hot planes were pushed into hangars so quickly that they set off the sprinkler system, drenching the welcoming team.
In the 1960s the CIA tried to turn a cat into a listening device. Surgeons implanted a microphone in its ear and a transmitter under its skin, and ran a fine wire antenna through its fur. The story goes that on its first test the cat wandered into the street and was hit by a taxi. Robert Wallace, who later headed the agency's technical service, disputed that, saying the acoustic kitty was not killed by a taxicab. A declassified memo gives the official verdict: trained cats would not be practical.
Many people picture the Washington-Moscow hotline as a red telephone on the president's desk. It was never a phone. After the Cuban Missile Crisis showed how slowly messages could travel, the two sides signed an agreement in Geneva on June 20, 1963, for a direct link with teletype equipment at each end. It ran over a wire circuit through London, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki, with a radio circuit as backup. The first American test message was a typing exercise about a quick brown fox and a lazy dog. Fax machines came in the 1980s.
In 1958, workers broke ground at the Greenbrier, a famous resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Hotel staff and guests were told the big hole would house a new conference facility, and part of it did. The rest was Project Greek Island, a bunker meant to shelter every member of Congress after a nuclear attack, with 1,100 beds behind concrete walls three feet thick. For 30 years a crew posing as TV technicians from a company called Forsyth Associates kept it ready. The Washington Post exposed the secret in 1992.
In 1968 the Soviet submarine K-129 sank about 1,560 miles northwest of Hawaii. The CIA decided to raise it. Its cover story was that billionaire Howard Hughes was building a ship to mine manganese nodules from the ocean floor. On August 8, 1974, the Hughes Glomar Explorer secured part of the submarine inside its hold. When a journalist later asked for records, the CIA said it could neither confirm nor deny its connection to the ship, and a court upheld that answer. Such a reply is still called a Glomar response.
The Cold War got its popular name at a portrait unveiling. On April 16, 1947, financier Bernard Baruch was honored in the South Carolina House of Representatives, and in a fiery speech about labor troubles he warned that "we are today in the midst of a cold war." His speechwriter, Herbert Bayard Swope, supplied the phrase, and columnist Walter Lippmann spread it that fall with a series of columns titled Cold War. George Orwell, though, had already written of a state of cold war in a 1945 essay about the atomic bomb.
The Doomsday Clock started as cover art. In June 1947 the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published its first issue as a magazine rather than a newsletter, and co-editor Hyman Goldsmith asked the landscape painter Martyl Langsdorf to design the cover. Her husband was a physicist on the Manhattan Project. She drew a clock, its hands at seven minutes to midnight. In 1949, after the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, editor Eugene Rabinowitch moved them to three minutes. In 1953, after hydrogen bomb tests, the clock reached two minutes.
Bert the Turtle wore a tin helmet and pulled into his shell whenever danger threatened. In the nine-minute civil defense film Duck and Cover, shot with schoolchildren in Queens, New York, and released in January 1952, students copied him by crouching under their desks. It was promoted as the first children's film about atomic attack, though an earlier one, Atomic Alert, had come out months before. By 1957 the government had declared Duck and Cover obsolete, but the turtle stayed in the memory of a generation.
On April 14, 1958, a lanky 23-year-old from Texas who had never before left the United States won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. Van Cliburn's victory came at the height of the Cold War. The judges reportedly asked Nikita Khrushchev whether they could really give first place to an American, and he told them to give it to the best player. Cliburn came home to a ticker-tape parade in New York, and his recording of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 became the first classical recording to sell more than a million copies.
The peace sign was designed in 1958 by Gerald Holtom, a British designer who had been a conscientious objector in World War II. It was made for the first Aldermaston march over Easter weekend that year, a four-day walk from London to Britain's nuclear weapons factory. Holtom combined the flag semaphore letters N and D, for nuclear disarmament, inside a circle. He also described a more personal source: a drawing of himself in despair, arms stretched outward and downward like the peasant in a Goya painting. It was deliberately never copyrighted.
In the Soviet Union of the 1950s, Western jazz and rock and roll were off limits, so banned records, Rock Around the Clock among them, were cut into discarded hospital X-rays. Chest films were plentiful, and the grooves ran across strangers' rib cages, which gave the discs their nickname: ribs, or bone music. One bootlegger, Rudolf Fuks, gave blood again and again to pay for a record-cutting machine of his own. The sound was poor, a faint tune in the middle of the noise, and the discs wore out fast.
7The table tennis trip that opened the door to China
On the tile: Ping-Pong1971
In April 1971, the American table tennis team was at the World Championships in Nagoya, Japan, when the Chinese team surprised them with an invitation to come and play in China. The youngest American, Judy Hoarfrost, was 15. In Beijing the players met Premier Zhou Enlai, and their far stronger Chinese hosts intentionally lost a few games in the name of friendship. This Ping Pong Diplomacy gave a public face to more serious negotiations, and in February 1972 Richard Nixon became the first U.S. president to visit mainland China while in office.
On October 10, 1983, President Ronald Reagan watched a tape at Camp David of The Day After, a TV movie ABC planned to air on November 20. It showed Lawrence, Kansas, wiped out in a nuclear war. In his diary he wrote that it was powerfully done and very effective, and that it left him greatly depressed. He noted that ABC had not sold any of the 25 commercial spots, and he could see why. His own reaction, he wrote, was that America must keep a deterrent and see there is never a nuclear war.
9Tetris began as punctuation marks on a Soviet computer
On the tile: Tetris1984
Tetris was created in the Soviet Union by Alexey Pajitnov, inspired by his favorite puzzle, Pentominoes. His Electronika 60 computer could only show symbols, so the first falling pieces were made of punctuation marks. Copies spread from friend to friend on floppy disks. Personal rights to such work barely existed there, so Pajitnov let the Computer Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences control the game for ten years. In 1989 publisher Henk Rogers went to Moscow to secure the handheld rights, and Nintendo of America packed Tetris in with its Game Boy.