When Lyon was occupied by German troops during the Second World War, Klaus Barbie was appointed head of the Gestapo secret police in the city. He would become feared for his brutality, responsible for the murder of hundreds of people in France – torturing many himself, and sending countless others to concentration camps. After the war Barbie returned to Germany and lived under an assumed name. Three years later – amidst growing tensions between the western Allies and the Soviet Union – he was recruited by the USA’s Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). When France demanded his extradition, however, the Americans could no longer afford to retain Barbie’s services as an agent. But instead of handing him over, they gave him a new identity and allowed him to move to South America, where he could start a new life in anonymity. Barbie went to Bolivia, and subsequently built up a network of contacts to influential politicians and military leaders. He provided assistance for a series of bloody coups, and was also involved in numerous violent suppressions of trade unions and left-wing groups. West German intelligence then recruited him as an informant and an organizer of illegal arms exports. It was not until the early 1970s that Klaus Barbie was exposed as a war criminal by Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld. Even then it would take over another decade for the "Butcher of Lyon" to be extradited to France and put on trial.

After 1945 the former allies of the Second World War, the western powers and the Soviet Union, fought to impose their political systems and ideologies on Germany. In a divided Berlin, thousands of agents and spies from East and West fought the information war as closely and intensely as nowhere else. Former CIA agent Peter Sichel reports on the role of the intelligence agencies during the Soviet blockade of West Berlin and the airlift by the western Allies. Sichel was also involved in planning the spectacular tunnel built by the CIA to spy on the Soviet administration in East Berlin. A Russian intelligence expert reveals how the newly founded KGB tricked the Americans with the help of British double agent George Blake. The KGB also benefited from the cooperation provided by the powerful spy network of the East German state security, the Stasi. As a "man without a face", the head of Stasi foreign intelligence became a legendary figure. It took western intelligence decades to find out his name and identity: Markus Wolf. He helped the most famous East German spy, Günter Guillaume, to work his way up to the echelons of the West German government. Because the CIA was less efficient in classic espionage, the largest US intelligence agency, the NSA, installed a gigantic surveillance facility on West Berlin's Teufelsberg hill, in the process possibly gaining a decisive advantage in the Cold War, which came to an end with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Starting in the mid-1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union, both world powers at the head of their own blocs, were locked into an unprecedented arms race that culminated in the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. American aerial reconnaissance photographs showed that the Soviet Union was deploying medium-range missiles in Cuba. The very short flight time between the island and the mainland meant Moscow would easily be able to launch a nuclear strike on the USA. This led to a fraught confrontation: To prevent the deployment of further missiles, the US Navy set up a naval blockade around Cuba, and Strategic Air Command was put on high alert as the stand-off threatened to escalate into a full-blown nuclear war. Feverish negotiations between Moscow and Washington finally succeeded in defusing the conflict. But the crisis had a little-known backstory. Two years earlier, the USA had stationed its own medium-range missiles in the Mediterranean region, threatening Moscow, Leningrad and other targets in the Soviet Union. One place they were deployed was in Murgia, a sleepy region in southern Italy.

In late December 1979 thousands of Soviet troops crossed the border into neighboring Afghanistan. Paratroopers and special forces landed in Kabul, stormed the presidential palace and killed President Hafizullah Amin. It was a drastic violation of international law that was condemned by the majority of the UN’s member nations – including the non-aligned Muslim countries that had traditionally almost always sided with Russia. US President Jimmy Carter froze the ratification of outstanding treaties with Moscow. The US and 65 other nations boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. The progress that had been laboriously secured over the past 15 years on a detente between the eastern and western blocs appeared to have been suddenly nullified – reactions that were foreseeable in the Cold War logic of the time. What had prompted the leadership in Mosow to make this extremely risky move? Why were Soviet soldiers ordered to murder Hafizullah Amin, who was after all a communist leader? How did the now emerging war in Afghanistan affect the balance of power in the region? One thing is clear: the war brought completely new players into the arena of global politics, with consequences that continue to reverberate to this today – and not only in south-central Asia.

After taking office in 1981, US president Ronald Reagan redefined America’s Cold War strategy to one of attack instead of defense. Alongside rearmament, one of the most important instruments in the US conflict with the Soviet Union was the informal group known as the ‘Deception Committee.’ Defective computer chips and Trojan viruses were smuggled in to sabotage the Soviet economy. Provocative air and sea maneuvers near the important Soviet base in Murmansk were carried out to unnerve and humiliate Moscow and demonstrate America’s own strength and technological superiority. In 1983 these operations took the world to the brink of a nuclear war. But the US deception strategies also targeted friendly countries. In order to sabotage the détente politics and neutrality endeavors of the influential Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, bogus Soviet submarines appeared off the Swedish coast in the 1980s, unsettling not only the Swedish public. Statements by experts, military leaders, and politicians show that under Ronald Reagan the US was deterred by nothing, not even the sovereignty of democratic states, in order to promote its own interests.

The Vietnam War raged for decades. Fearing the spread of communism, the United States initially joined the conflict in secret, later openly and with increasing ferocity in the fight against North Vietnam and its Chinese and Soviet sponsors. After US public opinion turned against the war in response to heavy losses and reports of frontline brutality, peace talks began in Paris in 1968. A breakthrough was achieved in separate, secret talks between US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and Lê Duc Tho, a member of North Vietnam's politburo. This resulted in the 1973 Paris Peace Accords and the withdrawal of US forces.