“Are you a spy?” Martin Grossheim, a student from Western Germany was asked on the streets of Hanoi in 1987. Why was this a legitimate question in Vietnam and how does it all come back to the Cold War struggle for dominance?
In Episode 6 we talk about the biggest armed conflict of the Cold war era, the Vietnam war. How did the socialist states help North Vietnam? What was the chain of assistance and how come the Soviet, East German and Vietnamese secret services operated identically? Dr. Martin Grossheim from Seoul National University explains how Vietnam went from nothing to a spy-manic country, why everyone who spoke a foreign language was suspicious and why the country kept their distance even from the brotherly Soviet bloc.
