The birth of BBC Monitoring

To mark the 83rd anniversary of the formation of the BBC Monitoring Service on 26 August 1939, I've revised and expanded my 2019 article on the events leading up that date.

Six covert radio stations of the past 60 years

Here are links to articles on this blog profiling six covert (in one way or another) radio stations of the past 60 years - two British, one American, one Russian, one South African, one Palestinian.

In historical order:

Voice of the Coast A modest, and apparently well managed and competently executed, British effort in the second half of the 1960s. It aimed at countering Egyptian and other hostile propaganda in the Gulf. Posing as a local Arabic-language station for Sharjah and the other Trucial States, Voice of the Coast used a softly-softly approach and various shades of "grey" attribution (not attributed, vaguely attributed) to avoid being seen as a British propaganda operation. >> Read more

Radio Spark Set up in 1966 to exploit turmoil in China during the Cultural Revolution, this was one of three CIA-run stations based in Taiwan. They were so pure "black" (falsely attributed) that they ended up confusing other parts of the US intelligence community who assumed they were genuine dissident operations inside China. The stations were closed after Nixon's 1972 visit to China, but Taiwan appears to have revived them and they were running well into the 1980s. >> Read more

First August Radio Named after China's Army Day, this was a Soviet "active measures" and pure "black" operation to encourage dissent in the People's Liberation Army after China invaded Moscow's ally Vietnam in 1979. It is impossible to say whether it achieved this objective to any extent, but it did have nuisance value. It closed in 1986. >> Read more

Radio Atlantico del Sur Known to its operators as Project MOONSHINE, this was a short-lived British station targeting Argentine forces in the 1982 Falklands War. It had purely tactical objectives regarding enemy troops, rather than being an attempt at strategic communications targeting Argentina or Latin America. The FCO seemed to have been unable to grasp this, and rows between the FCO and MOD delayed the start of broadcasts and undermined the station's work and reputation. Pale "grey"/"off-white". >> Read more

Radio Truth One of several covert radio stations run by apartheid South Africa from the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s to undermine neighbouring countries, in this case Zimbabwe. Its presenters had British accents and gave an address in UK, but the station was in Johannesburg. Its operation was a long-running irritation to the Mugabe government. "Grey/black". >> Read more

Al-Quds Palestinian Arab Radio Funded by Libya and run by the PFLP-GC Palestinian faction from southern Syria. It was launched in 1988, shortly after the start of the first Palestinian intifada, quickly gaining a mass audience. It was a tactical success, but closed as a strategic failure more than 20 years later. "Light grey" (vaguely attributed). >> Read more

© 2022. Material may be reproduced if attributed to Chris Greenway and any original source.

When Britain wooed Arab hearts and minds

Note! I've updated my 2018 article on Voice of the Coast (Sawt al-Sahil), the Arabic-language radio station operated by Britain in the 1960s to counteract Egyptian and other hostile propaganda in the Gulf.

Radio Atlantico del Sur - 40 years on

A strange thing has happened.

Once a barely known episode in the Falklands War, Radio Atlantico del Sur is now one of the best documented British information operations since the Second World War.

Even as recently as the 30th anniversary of the war, the few "facts" about the station that could be found in a Google search were generally wrong: all of the BBC's top management opposed it – nobody in the islands heard it – its presenters were civil servants – it used a "well known BBC frequency".  

There was a bizarre claim that it broadcast from a basement in the Foreign Office. Given what we now know the FCO was saying about the station in Whitehall, and in off-the-record briefings to the press, it would hardly have been more ridiculous to have said it was based in Buenos Aires.

The predominant impression was that it was, at best, a pointless exercise; and, at worst, counter-productive, even ludicrous. If described in a single word, it might have been "amateurish". 

The past 10 years have seen much more of the truth emerge about Radio Atlantico del Sur. I've tried to document as much of that as I can in this blog.

Latest disclosures

Now an excellent TV documentary by Stewart Purvis, broadcast in early April to mark the 40th anniversary of the war and available on YouTube, has added much more to our knowledge.

Purvis knew the station's manager, Neil ffrench-Blake, well, and had access to his large collection of secret papers. 

Some of the things revealed publicly for the first time in the documentary:  

- The station's military commentator, who was introduced on air as Jaime Montero, was in reality a serving major in the 14th/20th King's Hussars, Terence Scott (he's interviewed in the documentary).

- One of his cousins, Major Tony Valdes-Scott, who was in the same regiment, was the station's chief editor.

- Another cousin was the station's sole female announcer, who used the on-air Mariana Flores. I've described her work on my blog. 

- The station's chief engineer was Jim Warrack, a former RAF technician who in 1982 was an engineer at Hereward Radio in Peterborough.

- Soon after the launch of the station, Warrack quickly switched the station's feed from London to the transmitter on Ascension from a radio link to a phone line. (Something I had looked at in 2017 in my blog post The Incident at Crowsley Park on the Night of 20-21 May 1982.) 

- One of the news editors was David Addis, who in 2018 wrote an anonymous guest article on my blog.