“What if the person spreading CIA propaganda is me?” the journalist Patrick Radden Keefe contemplates in the penultimate episode of Wind of Change, a sprawling 8-part narrative podcast about American soft power. He quickly turns the statement on its head; what if, Keefe wonders, he’s actually spreading Kremlin propaganda about the CIA? What if his suspicions about a CIA psyop are part of an effort to undermine faith in the liberal democratic order? What if the propaganda is working, and the 8-part documentary series, co-produced by Spotify, plays right into the hands of Russian geopolitical meddling?

Wind of Change investigates a rumour that the CIA had written a 1990 ballad by German hair metal band The Scorpions, using it as an entry point to explore Cold War culture politics. The song – with its solemn whistling melody and melodramatic vocal delivery – recounts, in English, a festival that the West German band played behind the Iron Curtain. It was released just a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall; kitsch as it was, for a time it served as the anthem for the Fall of Communism.

Keefe, a New Yorker staff writer and the author of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, acknowledges early in the series that a rumour about the CIA’s hand in a rousing pro-democracy anthem is good PR for the agency. “It’s a story of a win,” he explains, “this isn’t a blight on the nation’s history; this would be an example of incredible creativity advancing the US interests.” 

The “incredible creativity” of The Scorpions’ work aside, the rumour is part of how the CIA tells the story of its own cultural triumph during the Cold War. The veracity of the rumour is, to a certain extent, beside the point. In the first episode of Wind of Change, we’re introduced to Keefe’s friend Michael, a long-time source with connections in the American intelligence community who had originally told Keefe about the CIA involvement in “Wind of Change” more than a decade ago, relaying a piece of agency trivia which had been allegedly divulged by a veteran CIA agent. 

Keefe’s examination of the CIA’s internal history, its long, mutually-beneficial relationship with Hollywood, and the trail of clues leading to the mysterious festival that inspired The Scorpions’ lyrics is both self-aware and politically astute. But Wind of Change is wrought with a tension that has become a preoccupation of the narrative podcast as a form. Like Serial and S-Town, Wind of Change is set to become a benchmark of longform audio, and like those series, Wind of Change doesn’t leave us with any definitive answers.

As an audience, podcast listeners are ever-eager for the cliff-hangers, false leads, and in-depth character studies because, as an audience, we buy into the idea that story can reveal difficult political truths. Serial told us that Adnan Sayid’s story could tell us something about the criminal justice system. S-Town told us that the story of a hedge maze could tell us something about the white working class. What narrative podcasting offers is a remedy against cynicism – allowing an audience to become emotionally invested in the complications and messy details of the institutions and system that often feel too big to bear.

In Wind of Change, Keefe grapples with the tension that comes with that commitment to the power of story. One of the series’ best episodes focuses on the history of the CIA’s involvement in jazz music, including Nina Simone’s relationship to the US soft power apparatus, with a tragic discovery that Simone’s trip to play a festival in Lagos, Nigeria was funded by a CIA front organisation, “The American Society of African Culture” without her knowledge. Louis Armstrong is confronted with his own sense of complicity during pro-American voyages abroad during the most repressive period of the civil rights movement.

At its most poignant moments, the story that Wind of Change recounts is less a salve against cynicism than it is an appeal to distrust and discount American soft power. Why become emotionally invested in an agency that manipulated a civil rights icon to gain power and influence abroad? Of course, nowhere is this tension going to be more manifest than in an investigation of the American intelligence agencies. While This American Life and Radiolab have both spent the past half decade lamenting the turn towards “post-truth” politics, Keefe’s hard-nosed look at the Cold War speaks to the neurosis and hangups of the podcast, making it a refreshing advance for the form. 

The closest that Keefe gets to uncovering answers about The Scorpions song comes in the form of an unlikely story arc: the plight of The Scorpions manager Doc McGhee. A legendary music manager who’s represented Bon Jovi, Kiss, and a number of other hard rock bands, McGhee had been arrested for participation in what was, at the time, the largest drug running operation in American history – an operation that relied on the support of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. McGhee had been let off with a surprisingly easy punishment, and organised a massive anti-drug music festival in Moscow.

The story of the festival makes for good listening: McGhee hadn’t finalised negotiations with the Kremlin by the time the plane took off for Moscow with Ozzy Osbourne, Mötley Crüe, Cinderella and The Scorpions, and he was half expecting the bands to be arrested on arrival. But the festival went off without a hitch, bar some pyrotechnic drama, with the band’s having an opportunity to meet adoring Soviet fans eager for American rock music. The Scorpions frontman Klaus Meine may deny any connection with the CIA, but McGhee’s relationship with the American government remains unclear.

As narrative audio becomes more ambitious, more novelistic, and more digressive, it has hit up against the limits of the liberal imaginary. Where the “End of History” may have produced a feeling of political apathy and disengagement in the West, an earlier generation of bright-eyed podcasters set out to reveal intimate stories behind the news of the day. Wind of Change signals a new set of problems around political cynicism – whether that be the question of how to confront the violence of hegemonic American power, or the excesses of information and engagement that come with conspiratorial thinking. CIA propaganda or Kremlin misinformation, the best way to address these problems may be to adopt a new politics of storytelling that can challenge the liberal order, instead of scrambling to save it.