Cold war. Vol. 5. Episodes 17-20: Third world wars

Volume five of the six volume television series “Cold War” features episodes 17 to 20 and covers the period from 1954 to 1990. The Soviet Union and their Cuban allies find themselves rivals with the United States and their allies in supporting wars in Africa and the Middle East during the 1960’s and 1970s, including the Six Day War between Israel and the Arab states led by Egypt in 1967, the invasion of, and civil war in Angola in 1975 and the deposing of emperor Haile Selassie by a Marxist regime in Ethiopia in 1977. Detente is fading as the Cold War takes a new turn. Central America, the Caribbean and South America become the new focus for control between the United States and the Soviet Union as a push towards nationalism begins to spread, particularly in the Central American region, right on the United States’ back door. Countries such as Guatemala and Cuba were experiencing revolutionary upheaval and it was in the late 1950s that Fidel Castro and Che Guevara established a Soviet-backed communist regime in Cuba, making for a very nervous United States. During the 1960s left-wing groups were fighting the authorities in Guatemala, Venezuela, Columbia and Peru, with Chile, Nicaragua and El Salvador facing their own revolutions during the 1970s and 1980s. In the midst of all this turmoil, Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev promised to reduce East-West tensions but for all their good intentions, this promise was doomed to fail. Meanwhile Afghanistan, vital to Moscow’s interests, was becoming a focus of superpower rivalry. CIA plots, KGB counter-plots and finally an invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in December 1979 - which was to become the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. In 1980, the US under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, covertly increased military aid to the Afghan rebels with money and arms being channeled through Pakistan - which controlled the way aid was distributed among the many Mujahedeen factions. Pakistan hoped to install a fundamentalist Islamic regime in Afghanistan. Finally, by 1989, after the killing of almost 15,000 Soviet soldiers, 1,000,000 Afghans, and a further 5,000,000 Afghans displaced or wounded, Moscow withdrew its troops. Narrated by Kenneth Branagh. (For more information see www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war)