Radio Vltava — East Germany's failed covert information operation in 1968

This article looks at a clandestine radio station operated by East Germany in support of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. [1]

Although named after the same river, the Radio Vltava of 1968 and 1969 should not be confused with the eponymous station currently operated by the public broadcaster ČRo (Český rozhlas – Czech Radio). 

Some ČRo veterans have said the name of the current station was deliberately chosen at its launch in 1972 as an attempt to erase the memory of the earlier operation.

I also look at some other pro-Soviet radio activity targeting Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Acknowledgements

Along with the published sources listed at the end of this article, I must thank my BBC Monitoring colleague Simona Kralova, whose knowledge of both Czech and German helped me to understand the problems that Radio Vltava faced. 

Thanks also to my fellow radio hobbyists Kai Ludwig and Wolfgang Büschel, who confirmed several points about what happened in 1968 from their informed perspectives either side of the inner German border.

Most of the detailed published accounts of Radio Vltava's operations are in Czech or German and I wanted to tell its story in an English-language article. 

RADIO VLTAVA

Summary: Radio Vltava was run by, and from, East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, GDR), targeting audiences in Czechoslovakia following the Soviet-led invasion and occupation of the country in August 1968. Posing – entirely unconvincingly – as an authentic Czechoslovak station, it broadcast hardline pro-Kremlin material supporting the invasion and criticising the reforms of the Prague Spring that had prompted it.

Radio Vltava's technical operations were competent. It aired a substantial volume of daily output, produced in a professional broadcasting environment and carried by a powerful transmitter. But its programmes were poorly conceived and executed. The station's operators gave no sign that they understood the target audience. The broadcasts failed to win over listeners to accept the invasion. In the face of criticism, including from Czechoslovakia's communist government (which had no control over the station and opposed its existence), Radio Vltava closed in February 1969.

Background: The invasion of Czechoslovakia

Late in the evening of 20 August 1968, Soviet forces began their invasion of Czechoslovakia, intending to put an end to the reforms of the Prague Spring spearheaded by Alexander Dubček.

While retaining communist rule, these reforms were liberalising politics and society to an extent that alarmed the Kremlin, which feared they threatened Soviet control throughout Eastern Europe. Some of the Soviet Union’s allies, notably the rulers of East Germany, shared these worries.

The armed forces of three other Warsaw Pact countries – Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria – took part in the invasion (codenamed Operation Danube). [2] 

The role of East Germany

The GDR had also been earmarked to take part in the invasion. But, at the last minute, it was realised that the sight of troops wearing the German feldgrau uniform invading Czechoslovakia only 23 years after the last lot had surrendered there would not look good. GDR forces were therefore held back from crossing the border (except, reportedly, for a few specialists and liaison officers).

Although the GDR's military played no role on the ground during the invasion and subsequent military occupation of Czechoslovakia, it had already been assigned another role – conducting information warfare against its people.

It had been decided that the GDR would run a radio station, broadcasting in Czech and Slovak, and intended to be heard throughout Czechoslovakia, but based in East Germany.

The station's objective would be to induce support for the invasion and undermine resistance to it.

A pro-invasion newspaper, Zprávy ("News"), would also be produced in the GDR and distributed in Czechoslovakia.

Preparations in the month before the invasion

The decision to go ahead with such propaganda work appears to have been triggered by a meeting in Warsaw on 14 and 15 July 1968 at which the leaders of the USSR, the GDR, Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland discussed the problems created for them by the Prague Spring and the option of mounting an invasion.

One immediate result of the meeting in Warsaw was that the GDR's external broadcasting service, Radio Berlin International (RBI), began broadcasting in Czech on 22 July (one source says 21 July) and in Slovak on 31 July (30 minutes in each language at 0500-0600 and 1800-1900 local times). Until then, RBI had not broadcast to Eastern Europe, its services to Europe only being in Danish, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish.

Other preparations were made. In late July, a team of GDR radio specialists drove around Czechoslovakia in private cars, checking the reception of various East German radio stations. These included Deutschlandsender on the longwave frequency of 185 kHz; another longwave station, Radio Volga, which broadcast in Russian to Soviet troops in Germany on 263 kHz; and RBI on the mediumwave frequencies of 1430 and 1511 kHz. [3]

Based on their findings, it was decided to use to 1430 kHz (210 metres) to reach audiences in Czechoslovakia, and that the signal should come from an existing mediumwave transmitting station at Wilsdruff, just outside Dresden, close to the Czech border.

(RBI's existing mediumwave broadcasts on both 1430 and 1511 kHz came from a transmitting station in the Berlin suburb of Köpenick.)

The transmitter at Wilsdruff was a powerful one, 250 kilowatts (kW). Until August 1968, it had operated on a different frequency (1043 kHz), carrying the domestic service Radio DDR 1.

East German officials visited the Wilsdruff station at the end of July and told the staff there that they would be receiving new orders, which should remain secret. Restrictions were placed on the staff's movements and armed guards were posted at the station.

Test transmissions on 1430 kHz from Wilsdruff began, consisting of Czech brass band music, and what would become the new station's musical motif.

The tests were heard by West German radio hobbyist Wolfgang Büschel. In later years, Büschel recalled first hearing the test transmissions on 1430 kHz on his car radio while driving near Frankfurt around a week before the invasion. He later used a directional aerial to confirm that the tests were coming from the Dresden area, not from the usual Radio Berlin International transmitter site at Berlin-Köpenick.

While Wilsdruff would be the transmitting station, the broadcasts to Czechoslovakia would originate from studios at the HQ of GDR radio, the well-known Funkhaus building on Nalepastrasse in East Berlin.

Thanks to inside information now available, we know even the exact studio in the Funkhaus that was used. It was studio K4.

"Radio Vltava" starts its broadcasts

The name chosen for the station was Radio Vltava, after the river flowing through Prague.

As a tuning signal it used a theme from the well-known tone poem Vltava by the 19th century Czech composer Bedřich Smetana.

In this recording, the musical theme is followed by the announcement: "This is Radio Vltava. This is Radio Vltava. We are broadcasting on two hundred and ten metres, 1430 kHz, in the Czech and Slovak languages."

Broadcasts began early on 21 August, just hours after the start of the invasion, using 1430 kHz mediumwave from the Wilsdruff transmitter. Many people first heard about the new station's existence when, at 0525 local time, Czechoslovak Radio (then still in the hands of the legal government) warned listeners that it was operated by the invading forces. [4]

Among the very first items broadcast by Radio Vltava was what would become the famous (and false) claim by the Soviet news agency TASS that Czechoslovakia's leaders had requested "urgent assistance" from the USSR and its allies, "including assistance by their armed forces", to counter the threat from "counter-revolutionary forces which have entered into collusion with foreign forces hostile to socialism".

The TASS statement was followed on Radio Vltava by one from the invading forces, saying they had answered the "invitation".

"We are coming to render you fraternal help… to defend the cause of socialism in Czechoslovakia," the statement by the invaders said.

Slogans and announcements used in the first days of broadcasts included: "Listen to Radio Vltava. For the homeland, socialism and peace" and "Only a socialist radio station gives you correct information."

The announcement in this recording says: "You are listening to Radio Vltava, the socialist voice of truth. You are listening to Radio Vltava, the socialist voice of truth. Only a radio station connected with socialism gives you correct information. You are listening to Radio Vltava."

Broadcasting schedule

In the days immediately after the start of the invasion, Radio Vltava was on the air around the clock.

By early September, it had introduced a broadcast schedule of 0500 to midnight local time (0400-2300 GMT), which remained in place for the remainder of the station’s existence.

Once the schedule had settled down, about a third of output was speech and two thirds music. A typical hour had a three- to five-minute news bulletin at the top and bottom of the hour, along with three or four commentaries, each between five and 10 minutes. The rest of the hour was filled with music.

Frequency usage

Along with its main frequency of 1430 kHz from the Wilsdruff (Dresden) transmitter, Radio Vltava was also heard in its first few days on 1322 kHz, from a transmitter at Wiederau, near Leipzig, which usually relayed external service broadcasts from Radio Moscow.

It's possible that was a mistake, and that it had been intended that the Leipzig-Wiederau transmitter would relay Radio Moscow in Czech and Slovak. The German operators responsible for the programme feed from Berlin to Wiederau may have been unable to distinguish the Czech/Slovak broadcasts of Radio Vltava from those of Radio Moscow.

A mistake would also be the most likely explanation for reports that Radio Vltava was heard, though perhaps only briefly, on 1043 kHz (Radio DDR 1's frequency) from Dresden-Wilsdruff. [5]

I've not found any evidence to support claims by Czech sources in the 21st century that Radio Vltava also broadcast from a mediumwave transmitter in Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz).

Problematic pronunciations and troublesome translations

While Radio Vltava's technical operations were professional (excepting the minor glitches with frequency usage noted above), its announcers were ridiculed by listeners for the poor quality of their spoken Czech and Slovak.

Many of the announcers appeared to be Germans, who faced the usual problems that native German speakers have when speaking Czech and Slovak, such as pronouncing "v" as "f", and struggling to distinguish between a soft "p" and a hard "b". Reportedly, they also sometimes had a characteristically German way of pronouncing the accented Czech consonants ž, š, č, ř, ň.

It was also suspected that some of the announcers were Russian, or were very familiar with the Russian language, as they pronounced Russian names as a Russian would, not as a Czech speaker would say them. The suspected Russian announcers would also place the emphasis on the wrong syllable in Czech words and give a harder pronunciation to some "e" sounds.

My BBC Monitoring colleague Simona Kralova says about the 0:34 clip on this page: The first presenter speaks in Slovak, the second in heavily accented Czech.

In this clip, Simona says the announcer at 1:04 is almost certainly a German posing as a Czech speaker, and clearly struggling with what he is reading out.

The announcers were therefore mocked by listeners.

In this cartoon, the Vltava duck is saying "It’s a pity I can’t speak Czech."

And this cartoon mocks the German announcers for pronouncing "v" as "f".

And it wasn’t just a problem of accents.

Fred Eidlin, the author of a Radio Free Europe research paper in November 1968 noted that Radio Vltava used expressions not found in modern Czech and "which sound artificial".

Eidlin added: "Ideological expressions often give the impression of having been taken directly from Russian manuals and translated badly."

Political problems too

Radio Vltava's broadcasts made no concessions to sceptical or hostile Czechoslovak listeners. There was no attempt at a soft sell.

Instead, the output was hardline and uncompromising. For anyone who remembers listening to Radio Berlin International, the output of Radio Vltava was in the same vein.

See the appendix below for transcripts of some of Radio Vltava's commentaries in the week after the invasion. 

Czechoslovak Radio warned its listeners against Radio Vltava. Here's a recording of the station at České Budějovice doing that on the first day of the invasion, when it was still in the hands of the legal authorities (third clip on this page).

Czechoslovakia's communist leaders complained to their East German counterparts that Radio Vltava's broadcasts were counter-productive. Listeners were mocking the announcers' accents, while the station's extreme commentaries generated irritation or hostility, rather than acceptance of the Soviet stance. People were either tuning in for a laugh, or turning off in disgust.

There was also hostility towards the newspaper Zprávy produced in East Germany, which took the same hardline position as Vltava.

Closedown

In the face of such criticism, and with little or no evidence that the broadcasts were having the desired effect – indeed, more likely the opposite – the East Germans abandoned Radio Vltava. The station made its last broadcasts on 12 February 1969, just under six months after it had begun.

The following day it was replaced on 1430 kHz by Radio Berlin International, including in Czech and Slovak.

In an indication of a lack of coordination on the part of the invasion forces, the newspaper Zprávy continued to be published. 

The Czechoslovak authorities were pleased with Vltava's closure. Radio Prague's English service commented two days later that the development was welcome, and said on 9 March 1969 that Vltava had closed "to the relief of the vast majority of our people".

Eventually, in April 1969, Dubček was forced by Moscow to resign, and Czechoslovakia entered a 20-year night of "normalisation".

Other pro-Soviet broadcasts at the time

Along with Radio Vltava, several other stations – both overt and clandestine – broadcast in support of the invasion.

Workers' Voice of the Republic (Dělnický hlas republiky) was first heard by BBC Monitoring from early on 26 August on mediumwave (1178 kHz) and shortwave (7125 and 7285 kHz). It also announced the use of 200 kHz longwave and said it was on the air around the clock. Radio Free Europe said it might have been on the air as early as 22 August. Its broadcasts denounced those by the legal Czechoslovak authorities as being from "revisionists, counter-revolutionaries and foreign agents". RFE said that it stopped broadcasting on 3 September after announcing that that it had fulfilled its "patriotic and partisan" task. It may have been broadcasting from Poland or Hungary. 

Radio Zare (Dawn) began broadcasting on 29 August on 1250 kHz mediumwave. It was a classic "black" (falsely attributed) operation, claiming to support the reformist Dubček leadership, while putting out disinformation. It was immediately denounced by the legal Czechoslovak authorities. RFE suggested that it broadcast from Poland but I note that 1250 kHz was usually a Hungarian frequency.

From Poland: By 24 August, Polish state radio was using its longwave frequency (227 kHz), which usually carried its domestic service, to air programmes in Czech at certain times of the day. By 5 September, Polish radio was broadcasting in Czech for 20 hours a day, with shortwave, mediumwave (1502 kHz) and longwave (227 kHz) being used at various times of the day and night.

It was also reported that a station on 7280 kHz shortwave operated by the Polish army was on the air for audiences in Czechoslovakia, in Polish and Czech/Slovak, at times in the morning and evening.

From Russia: From the evening of 21 August, Radio Moscow expanded its output in Czech/Slovak to round-the-clock broadcasting. At the start of 1968, it had been on the air for just 30 minutes a day in each language.

Transcripts of some commentaries on Radio Vltava

A recording of Radio Vltava from 26 August 1968 contains the following commentaries: 

Female announcer at 00:00: "…They are using wild emotions to exacerbate the situation so that a group of pro-Western anti-communist adventurers can come to power. Do not allow a handful of adventurers – who are alien to the interests of the people, peace, socialism and the security of the country – to trample on the good name of the Czechoslovak people and to play with their fate. Expose their political diversions! Delete provocations! In the name of the bright future of the socialist homeland, in the name of the nation, people, be prudent."

Male announcer at 00:45: "Dear friends, dear listeners. We received exciting news today. A Nazi nest was discovered near the National Theatre. In the building opposite the footbridge to Slavonic Island, not only a warehouse of foreign weapons was found, not only radio and encryption equipment, not only a special set of gloves designed not to leave fingerprints, but also documents of obvious Nazi origin. Among the fascist pamphlets and posters was a picture of Adolf Hitler. Inexperienced boys are waging an offensive campaign against the Russians. The fascists have acted. We repeat: The fascists from the NDP have begun their activities. It is no coincidence that the counter-revolution is accompanied by the threat of fascism coming from the West. Dear friends. Be vigilant! Draw attention to suspicious gatherings and buildings where mysterious activities are taking place. Tell our authorities or any authorised person about it. Today, a picture of Hitler was found near the footbridge to Slavonic Island. And tomorrow our entire homeland may be covered in swastikas. Czechs and Slovaks, don't let it happen."

Female announcer at 02:25: "People! Listen and judge for yourself. Is it in the name of humanism? On 21 August, a group of criminals calling themselves adherents of socialist humanism pushed a group of children into the path of a Soviet tank 40 km from Prague. Children of the local boarding school. The tank crew, in order not to crush our children, drove their tank off a high cliff and died. Three Soviet boys sacrificed their lives for the lives of our children without hesitation. They could not have acted otherwise. Illegal radio stations, provocateurs on the streets, constantly brandishing humanism and democracy. Think about the case of the tank crew and you will understand the value of the humanism of the instigators and appreciate real humanism. The imperialist agency and the local counter-revolution misuse the word humanism, which is dear to everyone, only to deceive the gullible and incite them to dangerous acts. Think! Nation, freedom, democracy, humanism - these bright words are now being abused by reaction and counter-revolution for their black betrayal. Those who recently tried to throw Czechoslovak children under a Soviet tank would like to provoke an even worse tragedy today. A fratricidal war! The enemy longs for victims. Look around and see how many victims it wants. Citizens of Czechoslovakia, remember this. Be vigilant! Meet the call of President Ludvík Svoboda. Actively defend order and peace! Protect yourself from provocateurs! Protect yourself from provocations by counter-revolutionaries! It's in our interest."

NOTES AND SOURCES

[1] The Warsaw Pact was the shorthand term for the Soviet-dominated military alliance formed after the signing in 1955 in Warsaw of what was formally the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance. The alliance, intended as a counterweight to NATO, was also known as the Warsaw Treaty Organisation (WTO).

[2] The other two members of the Warsaw Pact, Albania and Romania, refused to take part in the invasion, and Albania left the WTO altogether shortly afterwards.

[3] This field survey is described in a German article which focuses on the technical aspects of Radio Vltava, and which I have used as the source of some other information in this article.

[4] In August 1968, neither Czechoslovakia nor the GDR were using DST (summer time), and so local time there was one hour ahead of GMT.

[5] Radio Vltava on 1430 kHz was using the 250kW transmitter normally used for Radio DDR 1 on 1043 kHz. To allow for that, Radio DDR 1 on 1043 kHz was switched to a less powerful standby transmitter at Wilsdruff. 

Sources for this article

Radio Vltava's broadcasts were widely reported at the time by the Western and Czechoslovak press, and were documented by the US government’s monitoring agency (the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, FBIS, via its outstation in Vienna), FBIS’s partner BBC Monitoring, and the monitoring service of Radio Free Europe (RFE, based in Munich, where the station could be heard easily).

Behind-the-scenes details of the station’s operations were not confirmed until after the end of the Cold War when official archives were opened and some of those in the GDR involved in the project were able to speak. 

Observations of Radio Vltava's broadcasts by radio hobbyists are also a valuable source of information about the frequencies and transmitter sites used.

My sources for this article include the articles listed below, the archives of BBC Monitoring, memories of fellow radio hobbyists and the 1968 edition of the annual World Radio TV Handbook.

Articles and documentaries in Czech

A 2017 text and audio feature on Czech Radio’s website, including recordings of Radio Vltava: “Špatná čeština a anonymní hlasatelé. Vysílačka Vltava šířila v srpnu 1968 bludy” (Bad Czech and anonymous announcers. Radio Vltava spread delusions in August 1968)

A 2021 text and audio feature on Czech Radio’s website, including recordings of Radio Vltava: “Když ztichl socialistický hlas pravdy aneb Stanice Vltava plnila po srpnu 1968 éter propagandou” (When the socialist voice of truth fell silent, or Radio Vltava filled the airwaves with propaganda after August 1968) 

A 40-minute Czech Radio documentary from 2022: Jak šuměla Vltava? Aneb co vysílala východoněmecká prookupační stanice, která v roce 1968 otravovala rozhlasový éter? (How did the Vltava River murmur? Or what was broadcast by the East German pro-occupation station that was polluting the radio airwaves in 1968?)

Articles in German

A 2014 article by Radio Prague’s German service: “Propagandafunk aus der DDR in die ČSSR: Sender Vltava 1968/69” (Propaganda radio from the GDR to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic: Radio Vltava 1968/69)

A 1999 article in Berliner Zeitung giving an overview of the story: "Der mysteriöse Sender ‘Vltava’ und sein Ende vor 30 Jahren: DDR-Schützenhilfe gegen den 'Prager Frühling'" (The mysterious Radio Vltava and its end 30 years ago; GDR support against the "Prague Spring")

A 2018 article on the radiomuseum.org site focusing on technical aspects of the station, including the Wilsdruff transmitter: "Radio Vltava, Radio Moldau Geheimsender aus der DDR" (Radio Vltava, secret transmitter from the GDR) 

The radiomuseum.org site also has photographs of the Wilsdruff transmitter.

Articles in English

Radio Free Europe (RFE) research paper (11 November 1968): This assessment by Fred Eidlin of RFE’s research department, written while Radio Vltava was still active, gives an excellent overview of the station’s operations and output as they were known by that time, and reports some of the Czechoslovak reaction.

Article by Don Moore on radio and the 1968 events in Czechoslovakia in the August 1993 edition of Monitoring Times

IF YOU ENJOYED READING THIS ARTICLE…

… you may be interested in others that I’ve written about radio stations that were run as exercises in political or military influence in the last four decades of the 20th century:

Voice of the Coast: This soft-sell British station targeted Arabic listeners in the 1960s, wooing them away from listening to the anti-Western broadcasts of Voice of the Arabs from Nasser's Egypt.

Radio Spark: A fully "black" (meaning: falsely attributed) CIA-run station that sought to exploit the turmoil in China during the Cultural Revolution of the second half of the 1960s.

First August Radio: Another pure "black" station, this one was part of Soviet "active measures" targeting the Chinese army between 1979 and 1986.

Radio Atlantico del Sur: Britain’s Spanish-language station for Argentine troops during the 1982 Falklands War, known within the MOD as Project Moonshine. It had as many enemies in Whitehall as in Argentina. 

Radio Truth: A look at this and other covert stations – such as Voice of the Resistance of the Black Cockerel – run by apartheid South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s to undermine neighbouring countries.

Al-Quds Palestinian Arab Radio: The "intifada station" – funded by Libya and broadcasting from southern Syria between 1988 and the early 21st century. 

BBC Monitoring — how it started

I wrote this article in August 2019 to mark BBC Monitoring's 80th anniversary. I revised and expanded it in 2022, with further minor amendments in 2023. [1]

The Golden Gates at the entrance to Wood Norton on the cover of Assigned to Listen

What is monitoring?

Today, media monitoring is a well-used term to describe the observation of the output and behaviour of public-facing media in order to collect news and information, to learn the messages and narratives being pushed by governments and other players, and to understand the audience's reaction to the material it is receiving.

"Public-facing media" covers the press and other printed material, television and radio broadcasts, and a huge variety of online content, including that on social media.

Monitoring before the age of broadcasting

The word monitoring has only been used in this sense since the 1930s, when it referred to the systematic listening to radio broadcasts. But the activity, as applied to earlier forms of media, dates back much earlier. As Tsar Nicholas I reportedly said of the London press during the Crimean War (1853-1856): "We have no need for spies. We have The Times." 

During the First World War, the British intelligence agency MI7 read foreign newspapers as part of its work to coordinate the UK's own propaganda efforts.

Alongside foreign newspapers, by the time of WWI governments had another means of acquiring such material - wireless telegraphy (WT). During the war, the Marconi company's "Wireless Press" subsidiary monitored the WT transmissions of Germany's Transoceanic news agency, which were mainly intended for the American press, and supplied the information to the British government.  

1920s: The BBC's first receiving stations

The BBC was formed in 1922 and the earliest documented reception of a foreign broadcast for use in BBC programmes was in December of the following year when KDKA radio in Pittsburgh was picked up by a BBC engineer at Biggin Hill aerodrome, south of London, and relayed to the BBC's own listeners.

From 1925, the BBC operated a signals-receiving station, first at Keston in Kent (a few miles north of Biggin Hill and now in the London Borough of Bromley) and then, from 1929, at Tatsfield on the North Downs immediately south of Biggin Hill. 

The Keston and Tatsfield stations measured the technical characteristics of BBC and foreign transmitters, and picked up foreign broadcasts, such as concerts, to be relayed in BBC programmes. 

They were not, however, tasked in those early days with monitoring foreign radio stations to gather news or report on their political output.

1930s: First British monitoring efforts

The first official British efforts at monitoring foreign broadcasts for news or intelligence purposes are obscure. It is known however that, at the request of the Foreign Office, the Post Office undertook some listening to Soviet broadcasts in English as early as 1930. [2] 

The BBC also listened to Moscow at that time, but only experimentally, and soon dropped the work in the absence of any financial support from the government. 

The BBC's official historian Asa Briggs made no mention of that 1930 activity in his volume covering the period. Instead, he identified the BBC's first monitoring of foreign broadcasts as being that of English bulletins from Italy after the outbreak of the Italo-Abyssinian war in October 1935. Briggs said: 

The Foreign Office gave little sustained support to this venture, which went through a further phase of development at the time of the abdication crisis [in 1936], when Whitehall was especially interested in knowing what American stations were saying about the King and Mrs Simpson. [3]

Briggs noted that in the late summer of 1937 the Foreign Office turned to a target in which they were "genuinely interested", namely broadcasts in Arabic from Italy and Germany, and undertook that work themselves. The FO recruited Sigmar Hillelson, a former Director of Intelligence in the Sudan Civil Service, for this work. He was known as an "Arabic broadcast listener" rather than a monitor. [4]

Another historian of the BBC, Gerard Mansell, described the FO's monitoring efforts in 1937 as "desultory".

The BBC sees the value of monitoring

That same summer the Foreign Office began its monitoring in Arabic, two BBC officials wrote critical reports on the Corporation's overseas activities, calling for them to be improved in both quantity and quality. 

One of them, Felix Greene [5], used his July 1937 report to urge the creation of a monitoring service: 

To know immediately and precisely what is being said by Rome and Germany to our empire and colonial listeners will become of immediate importance. 

The BBC starts small-scale monitoring in 1938

In January 1938, the BBC began broadcasting in Arabic, its first service in a foreign language. (The Empire Service had started in 1932 but it was only in English.) 

Staff of the new service took over from the Foreign Office the monitoring of Arabic broadcasts from other stations. 

Similarly, when the BBC's Latin America service (in Spanish and Portuguese) began in March 1938 its staff also monitored relevant foreign broadcasts. 

BBC staff had to do this monitoring when time could be spared from their broadcasting duties. This was the birth of monitoring as a consistent BBC activity, albeit on a limited scale. It would be well over a year before monitoring became a separate BBC department. 

Alongside Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese, by June 1938 the BBC was also monitoring English broadcasts from Paris, Berlin, Rome, Prague, New York, Pittsburgh and Tokyo. In all cases, signals were picked up at the Tatsfield receiving station and fed to an office on the third floor of Broadcasting House in London to be listened to by shorthand typists. 

The BBC began to broadcast limited services in French, German and Italian at the time of the Munich Crisis in September 1938, and monitoring in those languages would also have started at some point. One of the German service's editors, Leonard Miall, who joined it in early 1939, is known to have done his own monitoring at Broadcasting House of Germany’s shortwave station at Zeesen. [6] 

The results of this monitoring activity were passed to both BBC programme makers and government departments. A.P. (Pat) Ryan served as the BBC's liaison officer with the Foreign Office for this work. Ryan went on to have an interesting wartime career, moving back and forth between jobs in the BBC and government, and being the BBC's "leading figure" (as Briggs put it) in liaising with the Ministry of Information and the armed forces. 

Two monitoring pioneers

David Bowman joined the BBC Latin America service in March 1938 and, like his colleagues, combined both broadcasting and monitoring work. After a year, he was taken off other duties and assigned to work full-time on monitoring. He therefore has the distinction of being the first BBC "monitor".

Bowman also advised the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) on their own monitoring project, which began in May 1939 at the request of the Foreign Office, and involved conducting a comparative survey and analysis of broadcasts from Britain, France, Germany and Italy.

Both a talented linguist (Spanish, Portuguese and French) and a shortwave radio enthusiast, Bowman would remain with BBC Monitoring for over 40 years, including tours of duty at its listening posts in central and east Africa. One of his last assignments was using his Spanish skills to cover the 1982 Falklands War. He continued to show a lively interest in the service during his retirement. 

The Chatham House project had been due to last for six months, but it ended abruptly on 25 August and the members of the small project team joined the new BBC Monitoring Service which was launched the following day. This included the project's leader, David Hallett, who played a leading role in establishing the new service's editorial principles and standards. Hallett would be remembered more than 40 years later by Ernst Gombrich as BBC Monitoring's "scholarly spiritus rector". 

Clouds of war

By early 1939, with the international situation deteriorating, there was an appetite in government for the BBC's limited monitoring efforts to be expanded and various schemes were considered for how that could be done. 

One idea was for the establishment of a number of separate "monitoring centres", along the lines of the station at Tatsfield.

Another suggestion was that equipment be installed in the homes of BBC staff so that they could listen there.

A more ambitious proposal was put forward by the BBC in April 1939, the month that Italy invaded Albania (the previous month, Germany had invaded the rump of Czechoslovakia). 

Rather than piecemeal operations, the BBC recommended that the work be consolidated into a single, dedicated "monitoring unit" with its own staff, working 24 hours a day. A formal proposal was put to the government for an establishment of 34 monitors (covering German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Arabic) plus managerial and clerical staff, with the latter also covering English broadcasts. 

The government (in the form of the embryonic Ministry of Information) agreed in principle with the BBC's proposal. But the ministry queried the size and scope of the suggested unit, its cost and who should pay for it – the BBC or the government. 

Matters were not helped by the Ministry of Information (MoI) being itself still only in a planning stage. It would not be launched formally until September 1939.

The Man from the Ministry

The MoI's discussions with the BBC were led by its Deputy Director-General, A.P. Waterfield, who is remembered by history, if at all, as the civil servant behind the Keep Calm and Carry On poster (which was never displayed during the war). Unfortunately, as Asa Briggs described, Waterfield knew nothing about broadcasting, and was ignorant as to what the BBC would need to do in wartime. 

For example, in June 1939 Waterfield queried whether it was really necessary, as the BBC insisted, that monitoring operations take place around the clock. 

As one BBC official put it:

We ourselves are planning [in case of war] what is virtually a 24 hour programme for both Home and Overseas. Should we not presume that other countries will take similar action?

The BBC buys Wood Norton

While these difficult negotiations with the government continued, the BBC had already found a home for the new Monitoring Service. 

Starting in November 1938, the BBC's Director of Office Accommodation, Ralph Wade, toured districts to the north and west of London in search of suitable properties. It seems unlikely to have been a coincidence that Wade began this search within weeks of the Munich Agreement. 

He was looking for "somewhere in the country" that could accommodate not just Monitoring, but the many other BBC departments that would be evacuated from London in the event of war. 

Wade and two colleagues, later rumoured to have posed as a trio of Midlands industrialists, eventually decided upon Wood Norton Hall, near Evesham in Worcestershire, which had once been the home of the Duke of Orléans, pretender to the French throne. 

Evesham is about 100 miles west-northwest of London.

The estate agent described the property as follows:

Wood Norton, Worcestershire. Evesham 2 miles. A magnificently appointed mansion, reconstructed by the Duc d’Orléans about 40 years ago at cost of £40,000. 40 acres. 9 reception rooms. 30 bedrooms. 7 bathrooms. Swimming pool. The construction is of red brick with stone dressings in the French style, and contains vast quantities of oak panelling, parquet flooring and other fittings. There are two drives – the principal one entered through a pair of magnificent wrought iron gates from the Palace of Versailles. 

The estate agent was wrong about the gates. They came in fact from York House in Twickenham, where Louis Philippe Robert d’Orléans had been born in 1869.

The BBC signed a contract in March 1939 to buy Wood Norton for £10,000 and took possession shortly afterwards, with an Engineer-in Charge (W. Bruce Purslow) taking up his duties there on 10 April to begin equipping the new site for both broadcasting and monitoring operations. 

For monitoring, the BBC initially spent £810 on a wooden hut, six receivers and some simple aerials. The Ministry of Information declined to assist with the cost. 

Several wooden huts were eventually built in the grounds of Wood Norton

Preparations accelerate

After weeks of discussions in the spring and early summer of 1939, the Ministry of Information (which was still operating in "shadow" mode) formally requested the BBC to make arrangements to run a dedicated Monitoring Service in case of war. 

But there was still disagreement over funding. The MoI agreed to pay for the new service, but rejected the proposed budget. The BBC had estimated that it would cost £100,000 to run the service in its first year. 

The MoI initially provided just £24,0000, plus £4,000 for capital expenditure. Arguments over money continued for months after the start of the war, with the MoI making piecemeal additional grants from time to time. By February 1940 these had totalled £90,000, not far short of the BBC's original estimate. 

Meanwhile, the government was pressing the BBC to provide more information from foreign broadcasts. To bridge the gap before Wood Norton became operational, the head of the BBC's Overseas Intelligence Department (OID), Malcolm Frost, arranged for receivers to be installed at the home of a member of OID's Spanish section, R.J. Baker, at Flackwell Heath, between High Wycombe and Beaconsfield. [7]

German-speaking members of OID's staff joined Baker at his home while others were sent to Tatsfield to monitor English broadcasts from the US and the USSR. 

The OID had been formed in December 1937. Although its name suggests a focus on political intelligence-gathering, its main purpose was what we would now call audience research in the countries to which the BBC was starting to broadcast. [8] 

OID appears to have been the main sponsor within the BBC of the corporation's monitoring activity at that time, and the face of the results of such work to those in government who used it. Thus the first editions of Monitoring's Daily Digest in August and September 1939 were produced by the OID and distributed to recipients under the OID's name.

The men in charge 

In June 1939, a BBC foreign liaison officer, Richard D'Arcy Marriott – described as "one of our ablest young men" – was assigned to take charge of the "monitoring unit" at Wood Norton in the event of war. He would be assisted by Oliver Whitley as Chief Monitoring Supervisor. 

Marriott would report to OID head Frost, who was given the title Director of the Monitoring Service and would have overall supervision of the new department. 

Marriott, Frost and Whitley all went on to have eventful BBC careers. [9]

Recruitment of other staff

With at least some funding guaranteed for the new Monitoring Service, and its new managers appointed, in July and August 1939 the BBC began recruiting linguistic staff. By 24 August, 32 monitors had been formally engaged. 

The new recruits were told that they would be based in "the West of England", but that their work would only start if war broke out or a national emergency was declared. 

The records differ on exactly which languages they covered. By then the BBC was broadcasting in Afrikaans, Arabic, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, and it was policy that if the BBC broadcast in a language then it should also monitor the output of other stations in that language. But one source does not mention Italian or Afrikaans as among the "core" languages monitored at the outbreak of war, while it adds Polish as one that was covered. By the end of 1940, coverage was taking place in more than 20 languages. [10]

It's striking that Russian was not one of the languages covered from the very start, given the importance it would soon have, though some of the first monitors were Russian speakers who had been recruited to work in other languages. They included Anatol Goldberg, who had passed the recruitment test in Spanish (by no means his strongest language - he also spoke Chinese and Japanese), a member of the Russian nobility, Prince Andrey Belosselsky (who was initially recruited to monitor French), and Vladimir (Vova) Rubinstein (taken on for his German - he also spoke Russian, French and Hebrew). 

Goldberg thought the offer of an annual salary of £300, plus free accommodation and two meals a day, "absolutely magnificent". [11] 

The last week of peace

Just as the recruitment of the first monitors was being completed, there came the news on 22 August that German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop would visit Moscow the next day. It seemed that the BBC's preparations were only just in time. 

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed in the Kremlin during the night of 23-24 August. War was now certain, and the BBC moved to implement its plans. 

Events moved rapidly. On 24 August, the British parliament passed the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act. The same day, Ralph Wade – the BBC manager who earlier in the year had found Wood Norton for the corporation – drove there with his secretary, a typist and £100 in cash for emergencies (the equivalent of around £6,000 in 2019). 

One of the tasks of Wade and other BBC administrators who arrived from London was to arrange the billeting in private homes of the many BBC staff (both broadcasting and monitoring) who were about to descend on Evesham. 

Evesham was a largely agricultural community at the heart of one of England's main fruit-growing districts. When Wade arrived, the main concern of the town’s residents was preparing for its annual Gala in aid of the local hospital. 

Back in London, on 25 August the BBC sent telegrams and made phone calls to the newly recruited monitors telling them to report to Broadcasting House the following day to be taken to Evesham, or to make their own way to Worcestershire. 

Amid the preparations to start work at Wood Norton, the limited monitoring operations in London, Tatsfield and Flackwell Heath continued.

26 August 1939

On the morning of Saturday 26 August, a bus carrying staff of the newly formed BBC Monitoring Service set out from London for Evesham.

Those on the bus included Dr Gustaaf Renier, a Dutch historian recruited from the Royal Institute of International Affairs and author of several books, including The English, Are They Human? [12]

They arrived to find Evesham under drizzle and en fête, enjoying its annual Gala. It was not the best day to sort everyone out with a billet in a local home. Locals received one guinea a week for hosting a billetee, who became known as "guinea pigs". 

The billeting fee was soon raised to two guineas a week (£2.10, equivalent to around £120 pounds in 2020). Problems with billeting feature prominently in the reminiscences of wartime monitors. 

Transition to Wood Norton

Although 26 August 1939 is the official birthday of the BBC Monitoring Service, it's unlikely that much serious monitoring took place at Wood Norton that day. The operations in London, Tatsfield and Flackwell Heath continued while WN became established. It was at Broadcasting House in London, which was keeping a constant watch on the main German station, Deutschlandsender, that a transcript was made of Hitler's speech to the Reichstag on the morning of 1 September announcing the invasion of Poland. 

All the monitoring in those very early days was of public radio broadcasts on shortwave, mediumwave and longwave. The reception of news agencies by Morse, Hellschreiber and radioteletype came later. 

The first "Digest of Foreign Broadcasts", a nine-page document circulated to BBC and government departments, was dated 27-28 August 1939. [13]

In the early months of Monitoring's life, during the so-called Phoney War, Pathé newsreel cameras visited Wood Norton – described only as being "somewhere in England" – and made a lovely two-minute feature. The press was not invited back to Monitoring until after VE Day. 

It's tempting to continue this article to describe Monitoring's work during the war, with the organisation growing to 1,000 staff. But that deserves a separate article, and this story of how the service came to be launched must end here. Further information is in the sections below. 

One of the huts of Monitoring's "M Unit" at Wood Norton in February 1941
The separate "Y Unit" focused on specific intelligence targets

 

Russian monitor Vladimir Rubinstein (top) and German monitor Max Brehm
in one of the Wood Norton huts

 

Notes

[1] Originally known as the BBC Monitoring Service, the name was shortened in the mid-1980s.

[2] Brian Bridges (1985): A note on the British monitoring of Soviet radio, 1930 

[3] Asa Briggs (1965): The Golden Age of Wireless (page 373 of the 1995 edition)

 

[4] Hillelson was later taken on by the BBC to do Arabic monitoring. In 1940 he became Director of the BBC’s Near East Service.

 

[5] Felix Greene was a cousin of Hugh Carleton Greene, who would run the BBC German service during the war and serve as BBC's Director-General in the 1960s, and the novelist Graham Greene.

[6] Miall was one of several Monitoring pioneers who went on to have notable careers elsewhere in the BBC or outside it. He left the BBC German service in 1942 to work for the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), including in the US, returning to the BBC in 1945 to become its Washington correspondent and then holding BBC various managerial posts until 1974.

Other notable figures in post-war life who had been Monitoring pioneers included the publisher George (later Lord) Weidenfeld, the art historian Ernst (later Sir Ernst) Gombrich (author of "the most popular art book of all time"), the dramatist and critic Martin Esslin (credited with coining the term "theatre of the absurd"), the radio and TV personality Gilbert Harding (once described as "the rudest man in England"), the poets and critics Geoffrey Grigson and William (later Sir William) Empson, the radical Austrian author and journalist Ilse Barea-Kulcsa, the Czech poet and literary translator Ewald Osers, and the prominent Cold War broadcaster Anatol Goldberg (see note 11 below).

Ilse's husband, the exiled Spanish Republican leader Arturo Barea, was also taken on the staff.  

Also notable was the Austrian art historian Ernst Buschbeck, a walking encyclopedia. Anyone at Wood Norton looking for information on any topic was told to "look it up in Buschbeck". After the war he became director of the national art gallery in Vienna. 

One famous name who was turned down by Monitoring was the novelist Arthur Koestler. The author of Darkness at Noon passed the listening and translation tests given to all aspiring monitors, but the BBC recruiting staff felt they "couldn't imagine that particular brain straining to catch Moscow's endless repetitions". 

[7] The BBC Written Archives Centre has a letter from 1975 saying that monitoring also took place that summer at a private house at Seer Green, which like Flackwell Heath is near Beaconsfield. It's unclear whether there really were two separate operations near Beaconsfield or whether the writer of the letter had misremembered the details. 

[8] A BBC document from the time said the Overseas Intelligence Department had been formed "for the purpose of initiating and maintaining publicity and of studying and interpreting the reaction of the [BBC's] audience and the effects of the broadcasts".

[9] In June 1940, Frost handed over the job of Director of the Monitoring Service to Marriott and spent the rest of the war in both MI5 and various other BBC jobs. At the end of the war, Frost returned to the BBC to serve once again as Monitoring's Director, with orders from the BBC Director-General, William Haley, to "go down [to Caversham] and clean up" the service. BBC official historian David Hendy says Frost, with his MI5 background, took this as an instruction to clear out perceived security risks. 

Frost continued as HMS until 1952, including negotiating a formal partnership agreement on global monitoring in 1947 with the newly formed CIA. After leaving Monitoring he became head of the BBC Transcription Service.

Marriott and Whitley both resigned from the BBC (along with another senior Monitoring manager, John Shankland) in early 1942 after a prolonged dispute with the BBC Director-General, Frederick Ogilvie, over Monitoring's proposed move from Wood Norton to Caversham Park (which had been decided in the summer of 1941 but did not take place until April 1943). The dispute was among the factors that led to Ogilvie being asked to resign as DG by the BBC Governors, also in January 1942. 

Both Marriott and Whitley returned to the BBC after the war and went on to hold senior posts. Whitley eventually became Deputy Director-General, while Marriott's career included another job swap with Frost, serving again as head of the Monitoring Service in 1952-53 after Frost left Caversham. 

[10] See Laura Johnson, The operation of the BBC Monitoring Service during WWII. Johnson also cites Marriott as saying at the start of October 1939 that almost half of the monitors were working on covering Germany. 

[11] After the war, Goldberg became the BBC's chief commentator on Eastern Europe and a household name in the USSR through his broadcasts on the BBC Russian service, of which he was for a time also its head. He died in 1982.

[12] Renier's wife Olive was another Monitoring pioneer and one of the co-authors, with Vladimir Rubinstein, of Assigned to Listen. 

[13] The Digest was soon renamed as the Digest of News Bulletins from Foreign Stations (an inaccurate title, as it covered more than just news bulletins, such as notes on broadcasting behaviour and propaganda trends). In November 1939 it was given the simpler and better title of Daily Digest of Foreign Broadcasts. But the practice of giving Monitoring's products clumsy titles continued and in January 1940 an additional daily document was launched called Notes and Repeated & New Items on Daily Digest of Foreign Broadcasts. 

Further reading

No single comprehensive description of how the BBC Monitoring Service came to be formed (or, indeed, of its subsequent history) has been published, though as Brian Rotheray noted in a booklet to mark the service’s 70th anniversary, "more has been written about the Evesham period than any other".

Laura Johnson's 2013 PhD thesis Establishing Broadcast Monitoring as Open Source Intelligence: The BBC Monitoring Service during the Second World War comes closest to providing a detailed account of events leading up to 26 August 1939. We are grateful to Johnson for her careful and well-sourced narrative. For example, her thesis is invaluable in correcting other vague descriptions of the 1935 monitoring of Italy and confirming that it was the BBC, not the Foreign Office, that undertook that work. 

But only the very briefest accounts of, for example, the Foreign Office’s Arabic monitoring in 1937, and of the listening that took place at Flackwell Heath in the summer of 1939, have been published.

A good overview of the birth of Monitoring is provided in BBC Monitoring Service, August 1939 – August 1979 by Ramon Silva, which focuses on the service's early years. This 35-page unpublished history was written at the time of the 40th anniversary. Silva had been a member of the service between 1939 and 1972, including as head of the Reception Department.

The 1986 book Assigned to Listen by Olive Renier and Vladimir Rubinstein tells the story of Monitoring at Evesham between 1939 and 1943, when the service moved to Caversham Park. It is based on the recollections of Monitoring staff of the time and was inspired by a staff reunion in September 1979 to mark the 40th anniversary. Along with many interesting chapters – including an essay by Dr Lux Furtmüller on "Changing techniques of German home propaganda" and a vivid description by Rubinstein of the difficulties of monitoring Soviet broadcasts in the first months after the German invasion of June 1941 – it has personal accounts of events leading up to August 1939.

A third fruit of the 40th anniversary was Listening to War, an excellent hour-long Radio 4 documentary written by Norman Longmate, produced by Barbara Crowther, recorded in 1980 and broadcast in January 1981. It includes interviews with several of Monitoring’s pioneers, including David Bowman, Malcolm Frost, Richard D’Arcy Marriott, Anatol Goldberg, Vladimir Rubinstein, Lorna Swire, Ray Barker, Ivan Bilibin, Sir Ernst Gombrich, Lord Weidenfeld, Molly Warren-Evans, Stephen Szego, Martin Sullivan, Karl Lehmann and Susan Temple.

Preparations for the launch of the Monitoring Service are described in the two relevant volumes of the official history of the BBC by Asa Briggs, The Golden Age of Wireless (covering 1927-39) and The War of Words (looking at 1939-45), published in 1965 and 1970 respectively. These set the work to form the service in the broader context of the other preparations that the BBC was making for war.

Gerard Mansell’s excellent 1982 history of the first 50 years of BBC external broadcasting, Let Truth Be Told, has a particular emphasis on the 1930s and 1940s, including Monitoring. 

Edward Pawley’s mammoth and comprehensive BBC Engineering 1922-1972 is my constant companion when researching anything about the BBC’s first 50 years. It deals with much more than pure engineering (for example, it is a good record of the many buildings owned and used by the BBC across the country) and is crammed full of precise facts, figures and dates.

© 2019, 2022, 2023. Material may be reproduced if attributed to Chris Greenway and any original source.

General Galtieri's mystery decree

Disclaimer: I was employed by the BBC at the time of the 1982 war, and continue to be so. However, this is an entirely personal blog post, reflecting only my views.

Although Argentina was under a military dictatorship in 1982, the country's media was not entirely directed from above. The regime was authoritarian, not totalitarian.

Whatever censorship was happening behind the scenes, explicit action by the government against the privately owned media was limited. In any case, the Argentine media, like the public, largely supported the invasion of the Falklands, and self-censorship may have been just as important as formal official controls in determining reporting.

However, in early June – as the war entered its final 10 days – President Leopoldo Galtieri signed a decree ordering the temporary closure of a national news agency and a provincial newspaper. 

No official explanation was provided as to what had prompted the move. 

Galtieri's decree merely said the two outlets had "violated the guideline on the dissemination of information on the development of military operations in the South Atlantic".

The British explanation for Galtieri's decree 

Radio Atlantico del Sur regularly broadcast lists of captured Argentine soldiers. It was an excellent way of attracting the attention of the target audience, and then encouraging the idea that allowing themselves to be taken prisoner by the British might be a good idea.

A Ministry of Defence document written shortly after the end of the war said, in a list of the "effects caused" by its radio station:

On 1 June 1982 Noticias Argentinas, the Argentine press agency, mentioned RAdS and in particular the list of Argentine wounded and captured given out nightly. At this time this was the only source of this information available to Argentinians. As a result Noticias Argentinas was closed down by the junta for 72 hours.

I believe that 1 June was the date this particular list of the captured was broadcast by RAdS, with Noticias Argentinas (NA) filing its report of the list the following day. (RAdS's evening broadcasts went out at 2000 to 2300 Argentine time.)

NA's naughty dispatch

The Argentine newspaper Córdoba, published in the provincial city of the same name, printed the Noticias Argentinas dispatch which – according to the MoD – got the news agency into trouble. 

The clipping below of the Córdoba story is reproduced by Alejo Miguel Díaz in his 2016 thesis on the South Atlantic conflict.

Credit: Alejo Miguel Díaz

The clipping is from the 3 June edition of Córdoba, suggesting that the NA dispatch was indeed filed too late to make it into the 2 June edition of the paper.

Córdoba's report is headlined "Presumed prisoners", datelined Bahía Blanca (on the coast south of Buenos Aires) and starts:

Bahía Blanca (NA) – Radio Atlantico del Sur, a station heard here which transmits from the Ascension Island base, announced last night the list of presumed Argentine soldiers who are prisoners of British troops after the attacks on Goose Green and Port Darwin in the Malvinas.

The station, which transmits on shortwave, said the following soldiers were prisoners and in good condition:

It then lists 34 names, in most cases with their military numbers.

Noticias Argentinas and El Patagónico closed temporarily

Three days after the probable date of the Noticias Argentinas dispatch, the agency was closed by Galtieri's decree for a 72-hour period, 5-7 June. 

Also closed for the same period was the newspaper El Patagónico, published in Comodoro Rivadavia, the site of a key air force base in southern Argentina.

Comodoro Rivadavia air base was used in Argentine operations
Credit: naval-history.net

Other explanations

Why were Noticias Argentinas and El Patagónico closed?

There is the British MoD's apparently straightforward explanation: NA had published Radio Atlantico del Sur's list of Argentine POWs.

But there are other suggestions.

At the time (6 June 1982), The New York Times reported an editor at El Patagónico as saying: "There are guesses. It might have been some photographs or maybe a cable from June 1 that we published on June 2 saying that the air shuttle and movement of war material between Comodoro Rivadavia and the Malvinas was functioning perfectly well.''

The NYT cited the English-language Buenos Aires Herald as reporting an editor at NA, Raul Garcia, as saying that the closure was a discriminatory move as ''other media carried the reports which seemed to have prompted this with even more details''.

Unfortunately, nothing more was said about what those reports might have been.

A 2015 study of the press in Comodoro Rivadavia during the war, by María Laura Olivares of the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, says El Patagónico and Noticias Argentinas were suspended over their reporting of the possibility that British Vulcan bombers had been stationed in Brazil. 

Such a report was just the type of story that the British – through the MoD's Special Projects Group (SPG) – might have spread as an unavowable rumour.

If such a rumour had gone on to be repeated by a media outlet, perhaps in Chile, Radio Atlantico del Sur might have aired it. (The Chilean media was a fruitful source for RAdS of negative reporting about Argentina's military position.)

Finally, the book The Falklands War, published by Britain's Sunday Times shortly after the war, says the temporary closure of Noticias Argentinas came after it "published a story alleging that supplies to the troops on the islands were less than adequate".

Noticias Argentinas recalls its closure

The news agency itself appears to be unable to resolve the mystery. 

An article – headlined "The day that Noticias Argentinas had to go underground" – written in 2010 by Fernando Aguinaga and still on NA's website, recalls the agency's "unjust and incomprehensible" closure by the Federal Police in June 1982. 

Aguinaga makes no mention of Radio Atlantico del Sur and says the reasons for the closure "remain hidden". 

He suggests theories about NA giving the weather forecast for the South Atlantic or filing a dispatch about British military equipment.

Aguinaga says that, during NA's temporary closure, it "went underground" and continued to distribute its output by hand from a secret location in the Buenos Aires district of Avellaneda.

Conclusions

Perhaps only the discovery of documentary evidence in Argentine archives would finally settle the question of exactly what prompted Galtieri to issue his decree.

The British MoD's explanation may yet prove to be correct. 

Another possibility is that it was not one single incident that triggered the move but a steady drip of reporting by Noticias Argentinas that was irritating the authorities.

Other Argentine news agencies

In 1982, Argentina's TV, radio and press were served by no fewer than four national news agencies: 

• Télam - government run
• Noticias Argentinas (NA) - run by a group of private news outlets
• Diarios y Noticias (DyN) - another privately owned service, which had only been launched the month before the invasion
• Saporiti (ANS) - originally a private firm, by 1982 it had fallen under the control of the state intelligence service SIDE

All transmitted their output via radiotelegraphy. One of my jobs at BBC Monitoring during the war was to intercept RT signals from all four of them.

One day I'll write a blog post about that particular work. I wrote about another aspect of my work during the war in my post The Incident at Crowsley Park on the Night of 20-21 May 1982.

© 2018. Material may be reproduced if attributed to Chris Greenway and any original source.