Post Office Box 408 London

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Mike Barraclough for permission to quote from his 1982 correspondence with the MoD.

Address

Post Office Box 408 – or "Casilla de correos cuatro cero ocho, GPO, Londres, Inglaterra" as it was given out over the air – was the address to which Radio Atlantico del Sur invited its listeners to write.

I received this card  –  eventually. Note the address.

Motivation

Why did the station announce an address, given that its target audience – members of the Argentine forces on the islands – would be unlikely to be able to write in?

The answer is that everything aired by RAdS had one of two purposes:

1. Furthering its primary objectives of persuading Argentine troops to "hesitate before firing on British troops" and "consider positively the benefits of surrendering".

2. Establishing the station's credibility with the target audience so that the latter would be receptive to the messages in Point 1.

Announcing an address served the second purpose: winning and reinforcing credibility. It did this in three ways:

Authenticity: Even if they don't wish to do so, listeners expect a radio station to provide a means of contacting it.

Cover: The address helped to explain the bogus dedications that were read out to named members of the Argentine forces on the islands.

Transparency: A London address refuted any suggestion that the station was an unavowed black operation.

As a bonus, it might provide feedback. Which radio station doesn't want to hear from its listeners?

Win a candle-lit dinner with Mariana

Soliciting mail from listeners was neatly combined with the psychological tactics of RAdS's sole female presenter, Mariana Flores, whose work I have already discussed.

In an article on the station, the Times reported (5 June 1982):

There is currently a competition, offering a candle-lit dinner with Mariana to the sender of the letter that comes from furthest away from Ascension Island, though quite how the letters will reach her is not clear.

Mariana, the Times explained, was the station's "star" presenter, "the Tokyo Rose of the 1980s":

"I have not yet met the man of my dreams," she told the troops enticingly recently.

I write to the station

I heard Radio Atlantico del Sur give out its address on 20 May 1982 (its second day on the air). I wrote to it, describing what I had heard (a so-called reception report), explaining my interest as a shortwave radio enthusiast, wishing the staff success in their work and asking if they could send me their card. [1]

I addressed the letter to PO Box 408 - and back it came to me about 10 days later.

The address was correct  –  but it was returned to me

The envelope had been stamped INCOMPLETE ADDRESS with a penciled addition: "Not a Box No". I was amused to see that someone else had written "Try Bush House" (the HQ at the time of the BBC External Services). [2]

What had gone wrong? Perhaps the PO Box address was so new that not all sorting offices knew about it.

I heard that other radio enthusiasts had received replies from the Ministry of Defence's Main Building in Whitehall, and so the week after the end of the conflict I wrote again, using that address rather than the PO Box number. This time (and I still have a copy of my letter) I was able to congratulate the staff on a job well done and note that their work might have saved lives on both sides. 

About 10 days later I received the card shown at the top of this page. 

Who else wrote to them?

An MoD report written soon after the war said:

Listener response started slowly after about a week’s broadcasting, quickly rose to a steady stream and is still being received. More than 100 letters have been received from all over the world. Of most interest are those from Latin America which currently total 26. The vast majority speak in favourable terms of RAdS broadcasts which are generally described as informative and interesting. What emerged clearly is the dislike of most Latin Americans for Argentina and hence their approval of RAdS. Not surprisingly the five responses from Argentina are not favourable although they have confirmed the ineffectiveness of the attempts to jam and a keen awareness of RAdS in Argentina.

Three quarters of the letters, therefore, came from outside Latin America. It's likely that most of them were from shortwave radio enthusiasts (the jargon term is DXers) such as me. 

That's not to say that some of the enthusiasts were not also interested in the political and military aspects of the station's operations.

When my friend and fellow DXer Mike Barraclough sent in his reception report he added that he felt press criticism of the station was unfair and that psychological warfare was justified if it was effective. In reply, he received the following note:

Thank you for your letter and helpful comments. If you feel sufficiently strongly it would help our cause if you conveyed the same sentiments to the press. The Times and Observer have written articles which appear very prejudiced to us. You will appreciate that we cannot reply directly ourselves as MOD employees. Thank you again for writing.

The British press

The articles in the Times and Observer mentioned in that MoD reply to Mike were probably those published on 5 June and 30 May respectively. Both portrayed RAdS's broadcasts as amateurish.

The piece in the Times was particularly harsh. Headlined "The ultimate weapon – Radio station could be last straw for invaders", its opening sentence set the tone:

If the British artillery does not blast the Argentinians out of Port Stanley, or the RAF's leaflets cow them into surrender, it is just possible that the 8,000 Argentine troops in the islands will still give up just to get away from Radio Atlantico del Sur, the Ministry of Defence's propaganda service to the beleaguered troops.

The Times would not have known that the RAF leaflets to which it referred were prepared by the same MoD unit, the Special Projects Group (SPG), that ran Radio Atlantico del Sur.

The Observer's article – headlined "What Britain tells the enemy" – was more measured, reporting that RAdS's broadcasts were exploiting differences within the Argentine junta, in particular criticisms by the air force of the inaction of the Argentine army and navy.

But the Observer also spoke of RAdS's "crude and occasionally comic attempts at demoralisation".

A helpful civil servant?

My reply from Radio Atlantico del Sur came in a standard OHMS franked buff envelope stamped with a return address in the MoD's Main Building.

But fellow DXers John Campbell and Gordon Darling reported that their replies came in envelopes postmarked, respectively, Hemel Hempstead and Chesham & Amersham (all three are commuter towns to the north of London), suggesting that an interested member of the MoD's staff who lived in that area took it upon themselves to handle mail from hobbyists in a private capacity, rather than as part of office business.

Notes

[1] At the time, most shortwave radio stations solicited reception reports from listeners. The stations would generally reply with a "verification card", also known as a QSL card, confirming the listener's reception, and often other promotional items (pennants, stickers, leaflets).

[2] What is now known as the BBC World Service (operating in English and many other languages) was in 1982 still referred to as the BBC External Services – and in internal BBC bureaucracy as External Broadcasting (XB). At that time, the "World Service" name was reserved solely for the service in English. This distinction was abandoned in 1988 when the "External Services" name was dropped and all international broadcasting by the BBC came under the World Service brand.

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

Did the MoD broadcast military secrets to Argentina?

The raid on Pebble Island

A prominent news story covered by Radio Atlantico del Sur during its first night on the air (19-20 May 1982) was the British raid a few days earlier on Pebble Island, off the north coast of West Falkland. The Argentines had stationed ground-attack aircraft at the island's air strip. Members of the British Army's Special Air Service (SAS) were landed by helicopter on Pebble Island in the early hours of 15 May and attacked the aircraft. A British warship offshore shelled the air base. 

The raid was a success. All the aircraft were damaged, an ammunition dump and fuel stores were hit and an Argentine officer who led a counter-attack was killed (he was the only fatality on either side; the aim of the raid had been to destroy the aircraft rather than kill enemy troops).

A summary of RAdS's story on the raid is in the declassified MoD files on the station:

The attack on Pebble Island was carried out by the SAS, using 12 teams of 4 men each; 11 aircraft were destroyed, as well as a munitions dump. The SAS is an elite force drawn from the British Army, specialising in clandestine military operations. Recruitment is by a rigorous selection process - only 1 in 50 volunteers being selected.

The Guardian gave an account of RAdS's reporting of the SAS. In a 22 May article headlined "MoD beams in terror tactics, pop and propaganda", it said:

The next item appeared to be designed to instil a fear of the SAS in the Argentine garrison. It was described as an elite corps within the British Army that was hand-picked and specialised in clandestine military operations, with the clear implication that SAS units were already on the islands.

"Potentially embarrassing" 

As any British journalist who reports defence and security affairs will have spotted, RAdS's coverage of the SAS had a problem: it contravened D Notice guidelines.

The D (Defence) Notice procedure – now known as the Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) system – is widely misunderstood, but it certainly covers, to use the current wording, "the inadvertent disclosure of classified information about Special Forces... including their methods, techniques and activities". This would have included reporting the deployment of the SAS in the Falklands in such a specific manner.

This breach of guidelines did not go unnoticed. At the very next day's (20 May) morning meeting between the Permanent Undersecretary at the Ministry of Defence, Sir Frank Cooper, and his senior staff, alarm was expressed that the previous night's RAdS broadcast had referred to the SAS. 

The meeting triggered a small flurry of memos which are now in a declassified MoD file. Sir Frank's private secretary, S. Webb, wrote to B. Miller, head of the MoD's DS6 (Defence Secretariat 6), to ask:

Whether the station should make public information that we are not prepared to release to the press... the reference to the SAS on last night's broadcast was quoted [at the meeting] as an example, though it was not clear whether this was just a report of UK press stories.

Webb added that there was also concern about how to answer questions that might be asked in Parliament and:

The detailed arrangements within MoD for settling questions of editorial policy and giving directions to the [civilian] station manager.

Miller replied the same day:

We are attempting to obtain a translation of what was actually said but we understand that the reference was one of a number of items culled from "various sources" and was clearly identified as such. Nevertheless the reference to the SAS by an MoD organ is unfortunately and potentially embarrassing for us in our dealings with the Press. I have therefore written to SPC/CDS to make it clear that the Station must in future observe the guidelines that we urge upon the Press when dealing with Special Forces. [1]

(SPC/CDS was the colonel who led the Special Projects Group (SPG), the MoD unit which had set up Radio Atlantico del Sur.)

Guidelines tightened

It appears that the incident resulted in the tightening up of the written editorial guidelines issued to the Media Assessment Team (MAT), the cover name for the group of journalists, editors and presenters who produced RAdS's programmes.

On the question of sources, the "Initial Guidelines" issued to MAT staff merely said:

[RAdS's] sources of information will be British and foreign [news] agencies. Argentine sources will only be quoted if compatible with our aim. No lies are to be told.

(The full text of the "Initial Guidelines" can be read in my post "No Lies are to be told" – see Annex A to "MEDIA ASSESSMENT TEAM DIRECTIVE").

This was later amended to:

The presentation of news must not conflict with the MOD press line for the day. MAT is to maintain close contact with PR to achieve this. News is to be attributed clearly to some overt source, preferably a media source. Under no circumstances is RAdS to lay itself open to accusations that it has scored a “scoop” over the UK media. Thus, if the editorial staff is keen to use a particular news theme which has not been announced through PR, OC [officer commanding] MAT is to attempt to influence the MOD news release staff to take steps which will permit use on RAdS.

"Secret the MOD told Argentina"

There seems to have been at least one further breach of the guidelines.

Under the headline "British radio told foe of the QE2's arrival", the New York Times of 14 June 1982 reported:

The Argentine garrison on the Falkland Islands heard about the arrival of the reinforcements aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 four days before it was announced here [London], over the British Ministry of Defense's own radio station.

The daily summary of the output from Radio Atlantico del Sur, broadcast from Ascension Island, said that on June 1 and 2, ''arrival of reinforcements from the QE2'' was disclosed. [2]

Yet it was not until 6 P.M. on June 6 that the ministry announced in London that the Fifth Infantry Brigade had disembarked for the Falklands. Until then, the ministry had removed any mention of the troops arrival from the dispatches of correspondents in the field.

According to Valerie Adams, in her book The Media and the Falklands Campaign, the same claim was also reported in the 14 June edition of London's Evening Standard. In an article headlined "Secret the MOD told Argentina", the paper said that RAdS broadcast news of the "arrival of reinforcements from the QE2" on the night of 1-2 June. 

Adams noted: 

This was when the landings [of 5th Infantry Brigade at San Carlos] were still taking place, and was despite MoD's request to the press to keep silent on the subject. According to Sir Frank Cooper, Radio Atlantico del Sur only broadcast information already carried in the British media. But even if this was simply a report of speculation, specifically drawing the latter to Argentina's attention seems to have been at variance with MoD's policy.

Notes

[1] The memos written on 20 May 1982 by MoD officials Webb and Miller can be found in the National Archives in MoD file DEFE 25/502.

[2] Radio Atlantico del Sur's studios were in London but its signal was beamed to the Falklands from a transmitter on Ascension Island.

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.

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

Argentine Annie and Radio Atlantico del Sur — A Comparative Study

The post was originally written in September 2017. It was revised in November 2017 and in October 2018.

Acknowledgement: Many thanks to Mike Barraclough, whose archives were particularly valuable when researching this post.

Note: I prefer to use the name Liberty rather than Argentine Annie, and you'll only see one further mention of the latter in this post (and that's in a footnote). In the remainder of this post I refer to the name of the Argentine radio station as Liberty and to its sole presenter (Silvia Fernández Barrio) as "Liberty".

Liberty v. Radio Atlantico del Sur

If you read a randomly-found article on the internet about Radio Atlantico del Sur there's a good chance that it will at some point mention Liberty/"Liberty" and say that it/she was Argentina's "version" of RAdS.

As the two stations are so often mentioned in the same breath, it's worth comparing them.

It's ironic that for many years more facts were known about some aspects of Liberty, which operated under a military dictatorship, than about Radio Atlantico del Sur, from democratic Britain.

Things we once knew about Liberty, but not about RAdS, included:

• the real name(s) of its presenter(s)
• the precise location of its studio
• exactly how its programmes got from the studio to its transmitting station

The questions about RAdS's studio location and studio-transmitter link have now been addressed in posts on this blog.

But one thing we still don't know for sure about Liberty is its precise transmitter site, a question that is explored below. 

Liberty – Profile of a psychological operation

Summary: An English-language shortwave radio station broadcasting from Argentina during the April-June 1982 Falklands War.

Target audience: There were at least three targets: members of the British Task Force, civilian opinion in Britain and wider English-speaking audiences (including in the USA).

This multiplicity (and therefore confusion) of audiences was a major weakness, not least when it came to the technical targeting of Liberty's signal. The official Argentine news agency Telam on 6 June 1982 quoted a "reliable source" as saying that Liberty could not be heard in the Buenos Aires area because the beaming of its signal "ensured it reached the northern hemisphere with maximum strength".

But by that date, the Task Force had been in the southern hemisphere for many weeks.

This beaming of its signal to the north had the effect in Europe and North America of making Liberty often easier to hear than Radio Atlantico del Sur, which was beamed southwest from Ascension Island. And for British listeners, Liberty's evening broadcasts were more conveniently timed than those of RAdS, which did not come on the air until midnight UK time.

As a result, the content of Liberty's broadcasts is better documented than those of RAdS in English-language websites. 

Comparison: Radio Atlantico del Sur had a single target audience: Argentine forces in the Falklands.

Objectives: Again, Liberty had too many: to undermine morale in the Task Force, to influence British public opinion and to promote Argentina's cause in the wider world. 

Comparison: Radio Atlantico del Sur had just two simple objectives: to persuade Argentine troops to "hesitate before firing on British troops" and to "consider positively the benefits of surrendering". (These objectives were discussed in an earlier post.)

Operator: Argentine army intelligence. (Source: Interview with Fernández Barrio published in the Argentine newspaper La Nacion in April 2002, in which she added that army intelligence was in conflict with naval intelligence over her work. One is reminded of Radio Atlantico del Sur's own problems with squabbling between rival parts of the British government over its very existence.)

Outline of broadcasting operations: All broadcasts consisted of monologues by a single female presenter, interspersed with music. Fernández Barrio's La Nacion interview said the daily programmes (nominally 45 minutes long) were pre-recorded "very early" each morning in the studios of Radio Ciudad de Buenos Aires (owned by the city authorities and also known as Radio Municipal; it was, and still is, based at 1551 Sarmiento Avenue in central Buenos Aires). 

The tape was then taken by a police motorcyclist to the transmitting station to be put on the air. Each day's pre-recorded programme was given four airings in the afternoon/evening, Argentine time.

Comparison: All of Radio Atlantico del Sur's broadcasts went out live.

On-air identification and location: The female presenter never announced a formal station identification. She also never gave her name on air, only describing herself as "Liberty". [1]

Similarly, no specific place of origin was given. "Liberty" often said that she was "speaking to you from the heart of our Malvinas, Georgias and South Sandwich Islands", though this was probably not intended to be taken as literally as it has been by some radio historians. The latter have sometimes reported that "Liberty" claimed to be broadcasting from the Falklands themselves.

The confusion extends in some cases to confusing Liberty with LRA60 Radio Nacional Islas Malvinas, the name given by the invading forces to the island's radio service (the Falkland Islands Broadcasting Station) after they seized it on 2 April 1982. 

Means of transmission: The broadcasts were aired on shortwave. The most commonly heard frequency was 17740 kilohertz in the 16-metre shortwave band. This channel (high up the shortwave band) is much more suitable for the lengthy path from Argentina to Europe and North America than the much shorter distance to the Falklands. [2]

The transmissions came from an unconfirmed location, though it was without doubt in the Buenos Aires area. See the section below, "Where was the transmitter site?"

Staffing: Although under military direction, the all-civilian production team was managed by Enrique Alejandro Mancini (1931-2008), a prominent broadcaster and journalist.

After the war, the voice that had called itself "Liberty" was identified as being that of TV presenter Silvia Fernández Barrio (born 1952). 

A Google search will easily find photos of Fernández Barrio and her story continues to be told in the Argentine media – see for example this feature in April 2017. 

Still active in public life, as of October 2018 she had 122,000 followers on Twitter – @silviafbarrio. She is also subject to criticism by some other Twitter users for collaborating with the military dictatorship.

Both Fernández Barrio and Mancini were happy later to acknowledge their work on Liberty.

Hours of transmission: Each pre-recorded programme was given four airings: at 1800, 2000, 2200 and midnight GMT (1500, 1700, 1900 and 2100 Argentine local time; 1900, 2100, 2300 and 0100 British local time). The duration of the programmes varied between 35 and 50 minutes.

First broadcast: In contrast to Radio Atlantico del Sur, no announcement was made by Liberty's operators either before or after its launch. The first known documented reception was on 21 April, by British radio enthusiast John Hurn, but the station could have been on the air for a day or perhaps even two before then. [3] 

Liberty's daily broadcasts were covered by BBC Monitoring from 22 April. The first mention of Liberty in the Argentine media also came on 22 April, when the official news agency Telam carried a Madrid-datelined dispatch, reporting that the broadcasts were being heard in Spain. My guess is that this Telam report was a "plant" by Liberty's operators to publicise news of its existence.

Last broadcast: Liberty stayed on the air for more than a week after the Argentine surrender (14 June), though the broadcasts on 19 and 20 June were repeats of the 18 June programme.

A farewell programme went out on 21 June, with repeat airings on the following three days. A farewell programme in Spanish also went out on those days; they were the only occasions on which Liberty was heard to broadcast in Spanish.

Total number of broadcasts: Assuming that the first transmission was on 21 April, and allowing for the repeats in June, a total of 60 unique English broadcasts were made, and aired over the course of 65 days. 

Comparison: Radio Atlantico del Sur made 47 broadcasts, over the course of 28 days.

British counter-measures: Beyond mocking comments by officials in response to questions from the press, there were no specific British counter-measures. Contrary to some Argentine claims, Britain did not attempt to jam the station. 

There is no documentary evidence for the suggestion that Liberty's appearance was the trigger for the UK government to set up Radio Atlantico del Sur. 

Where was the transmitter site?

There are two obvious candidates:

The first is the Buenos Aires facilities of Transradio Internacional. This enterprise, established in the 1920s, was what we would now call a transmission services company. Its work was mainly carrying commercial radio traffic. 

In the above-mentioned 2002 interview with Fernández Barrio, she specifically named Transradio Internacional as the transmitting station used by Liberty.

However, an excellent Spanish-language article by Horacio A. Nigro Geolkiewsky, while noting the suggestion that Transradio Internacional aired the broadcasts, also cites a claim by Argentine radio historian Daniel Camporini that by 1982 this site had closed and was "a ruined field". 

So, two good sources giving contradictory versions!

The second candidate is the state broadcaster's main shortwave transmitting station in the Buenos Aires suburb of General Pacheco. 

The problem here is that is not clear that there were any free transmitters available at this site during the 1982 war. Another excellent reference source, the Transmitter Documentation Project, says there were only a maximum of three shortwave transmitters at the General Pacheco station. The same figure of three transmitters is given by the 1983 edition of the World Radio TV Handbook.

BBC Monitoring's records show that during much of the 1982 war all three transmitters were in use more or less around the clock carrying state radio's external service RAE and relays of various domestic stations. [4]

Is there a third possibility? An article by Don Jensen in the November 1983 edition of Popular Communications magazine reported that "Argentine broadcasting insiders" had confirmed that Liberty "broadcast from a secret transmitter at a military base in the northern part of that country".

I'm unconvinced. It seemed to listeners in Europe and North America that Liberty was aired by a reasonably powerful (50 or 100 kilowatts) transmitter operating in AM mode. Military communications facilities tend to have transmitters of lower power, and don't normally use the AM mode.

So, in the absence of other definitive evidence, the exact transmitting site used by Liberty must be considered unconfirmed.

Strengths and weaknesses

One of Liberty's strengths was that it came on the air relatively quickly – less than three weeks after the invasion. Meanwhile, Radio Atlantico del Sur wouldn't launch for a further four weeks. This was a major regret for RAdS's manager, Neil ffrench-Blake, who said in his memoirs that "we didn't have sufficient time to build up our credibility".

A serious weakness of Liberty was the technical quality of its transmissions. This was not their signal strength, which was often good. It was the quality of the audio.

Part of the problem was that "Liberty" consistently used a decidedly soft tone at the microphone, with her voice described as sultry, smooth and sexy. But such a technique is ill-suited to shortwave.

In contrast, Radio Atlantico del Sur's presenters spoke boldly and distinctly.

"Liberty" was also let down by her engineers. Whether it was a faulty microphone, tape recorder or transmitter, the signal put on the air sounded muffled and woolly. For those who remember the days of magnetic tape, it may have been something as simple as dirty or misaligned playback heads in the tape player at the transmitting station. 

Whatever the cause, on many occasions, although the signal was strong, and one got a clear sense of the tone of "Liberty's" messages, their precise content was impossible to make out. 

In the stock phrase of shortwave-era BBC Monitoring, there were an awful lot of "words indistinct".

Finally, as discussed above, there was the problem of Liberty's multiple target audiences. Attempting to target the British Task Force was far too ambitious as an objective, both in practical and psychological terms. Members of the British armed forces would have been immune to such Argentine influencing efforts. 

Notes

[1] "Liberty" also used a number of oft-repeated phrases about herself, notably (with minor variations): "I am a voice, a spirit, a country. I am now, as ever, a woman who is proud that the world listens when Argentina speaks."

[2] Throughout its life, Liberty used 17740 kHz in the 16-metre shortwave band (the frequency had drifted down slightly to 17738 by mid-June). Initially, perhaps for just a few days from 21 June, it was also using 25680 kHz (in the 11-metre band).

There appear to have been no confirmed reports of reception on 15110 kHz (in the 19-metre band), mentioned in BBC Monitoring's archives as a possible replacement for 25680 kHz.

[3] A number of press reports at the time (notably in newspapers published on 24 April 1982) cited Hurn as saying that he first heard the station on Thursday 22 April. However, a report in the 22 April edition of Hurn's local paper, the Nottingham Evening Post, quoted him as saying that he heard it the previous night, and it is certainly my own recollection that Hurn beat us at BBC Monitoring to this scoop.

The press reports of the time attribute Hurn with having named "Liberty" as Argentine Annie.

"Liberty" even sent greetings to Hurn ("dear John") in one of her early programmes. (Source: Mike Burden in the World DX Club's magazine Contact.) Hurn's story appeared in many newspapers around the world, so it's no surprise that "Liberty" had heard of him.

[4] Interestingly, this round-the-clock broadcasting started at more or less the same time as Liberty appeared. The Telam news agency reported on 23 April (i.e. perhaps only two days after Liberty started) that three shortwave frequencies would be used to relay Radio del Plata (on 11710 kHz), Radio Rivadavia (9690 kHz) and Radio Continental (6060 kHz) at certain times of the day, with RAE (Radiodifusion Argentina al Exterior) aired on all three channels during the rest of the day.

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.

© 2017-2018. Material may be reproduced if attributed to Chris Greenway and any original source.