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.