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EPISODE 317 · DROPPED 13 HR AGO

Cold War 317: The John Wayne Complex

The CIA's original plan for Cuba was a slow, subtle guerrilla operation…. then someone started adding things. A combined air and sea assault. A march on Havana. Possibly US troops. By October 1960,

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Show Notes ↗

Sep · 30 · 2026

Cold War 317: The John…

317/—

01 WHAT YOU’RE GETTING INTO

History told the way it actually happened — messy, dumb, and frequently profane.

We’ve been doing history podcasting for twenty years. We literally invented the genre. We don’t do hot takes, we don’t do 10-minute summaries, we don’t do “and that’s why he was complicated.” We take a story — NATO, THE KOREAN WAR, THE RED SCARE — and we sit with it until we understand it.

That usually takes four to whatever hours. Sometimes more. We’re aware this is unhinged. You’ll come for the geopolitics and stay for the swearing.

— Ray & Cam

★ FILE 1947–1991 ★

▌ DOSSIER · STATS

317

Episodes

One Gajillion

Hours of audio

Years on air

Countries covered

Mini series

Sponsors we like

▌ TOPICS WE OBSESS OVER

CIA KGB Vietnam Stalin Cuba NATO Korea Iran The Military Industrial Complex Spy Tradecraft Nuclear Weapons Communism The Marshall Plan

02 THE VAULT

Latest dispatches from the front

EP 317 ★ PREMIUM

SEP 30

Cold War 317: The John Wayne Complex

The CIA's original plan for Cuba was a slow, subtle guerrilla operation…. then someone started adding things. A combined air and sea assault. A march on Havana. Possibly…

— LISTEN →

EP 316 ★ PREMIUM

SEP 16

03 THE PERPETRATORS

Two guys. Twenty years. A frankly unreasonable number of footnotes.

▌ HOST FILE

RAY

EDITOR

History MA. Used to teach. Now reads CIA memoirs in his garage and yells at them. Specialises in Latin America, intelligence ops, and the bit where everyone's lying.

“If your podcast doesn't make you slightly worse at parties, you're doing it wrong.”

▌ HOST FILE

CAM

MASTERMIND

Wrote a thesis on Soviet propaganda nobody has read. Owns more declassified PDFs than is probably legal. Handles the jokes, most of the swearing, and the editing nobody else wants to do.

“Every Cold War story is a love story between two intelligence agencies who hate each other.”

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