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.

Al-Quds Palestinian Arab Radio — the intifada station

The new station attracted international attention

What was it?

Al-Quds Radio was a semi-clandestine station that broadcast to Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, and neighbouring states for more than 20 years from 1988. 

It never overtly announced its precise location, though the fact that it transmitted from Syria became widely known. 

Al-Quds Radio was best known for its association with the first Palestinian intifada (uprising) of 1987-1993. 

Al-Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem.

White, grey or black?

In the jargon of clandestine broadcasting and psychological warfare, Al-Quds Radio was "light grey". It was not transparent about behind-the-scenes details of its operations – location, backing, funding, management and editorial control – but listeners could correctly deduce some of those things. 

As the station's political affiliation and location became more widely known, so its position on the greyscale moved further to the lighter side.

However, the radio never became fully "white" and so its output could be disavowed by the Syrian government, which allowed it to operate.

Success or failure?

Al-Quds Radio can be seen as a tactical success for its important role in the intifada.

But it was a strategic failure. The objective of its operator (the Palestinian militant group PFLP-GC) – the end of the Israeli state – was not achieved..

Affiliation, funding, management and political stance

Affiliation: The station was established and operated by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command. 

The PFLP-GC, led by Ahmed Jibril, was a rejectionist Palestinian faction which opposed recognising or negotiating with Israel. Its main backer was Syria. 

Funding: At the time of Al-Quds Radio's launch the PFLP-GC also had close ties with Libya. The radio's long-serving director, Fadl Shururu, said in 1997 – when looking back to events 10 years earlier – that the funds for setting up the station were "almost entirely" provided by Libya. He also confirmed that this funding had allowed Al-Quds Radio to buy its own equipment (i.e. rather than rely on equipment provided by its Syrian hosts). [1]

Management: Fadl Shururu was a senior official in the PFLP-GC. For many years he was secretary of its Political Bureau and served as the group's chief spokesman (in his capacity as head of the PFLP-GC's Information and Central Guidance Department). 

The first mention in BBC Monitoring's records of Shururu as Al-Quds Radio's director was in March 1993. However, he may have been in charge of the station from its inception.

He regularly broadcast commentaries over the radio. For example, a schedule from 2002 showed two daily 10-minute slots for a political commentary called "Fadl Shururu's Opinion". 

In 1994, Shururu said: "The fact that the radio was launched by the PFLP-GC does not mean that it belongs to the PFLP-GC. Al-Quds Radio is the radio of the Palestinian masses inside and outside the occupied territories... It is not affiliated with any Palestinian resistance faction." [2]

Shururu died in 2009.

The PFLP-GC's logo 

Political stance: Throughout its existence, Al-Quds Radio was consistently opposed to peace negotiations with Israel. 

At times, therefore, the station's output contrasted with that of the rival Voice of Palestine radio, which spoke on behalf of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

In its early days, however, Al-Quds Radio stressed the importance of Palestinian unity. "It avoids partisan politics and concentrates on the need to close ranks and face the enemy," a report from Jerusalem in Britain's Guardian newspaper said in late January 1988. [3]

Nevertheless, in a foretaste of what would become a battle of the Palestinian airwaves, on 25 January 1988 Voice of Palestine denounced its rival as a "suspect" station that sought to "don Palestinian cloth". Voice of Palestine said Al-Quds Radio had "begun transmitting a campaign of disinformation and distortion of facts, placing the names of our strugglers on lists it claims as being those of enemy agents in the heroic Gaza Strip".

Name and slogans

Full name: "Al-Quds Radio, the Palestinian Arab radio on the road to liberating the land and man"

Name in the original Arabic: Al-Quds, al-Idha'at al-Arabiyat al-Filistiniyat ala tariq tahrir al-ard wa al-insan — القدس، الإذاعة العربية الفلسطينية على طريق تحرير الأرض والإنسان

The full name can be heard being announced in the recording at this site. 

Other slogans were also used. For example in April 1993 it described itself as "the voice of the Palestinian people, the voice of the intifada, the voice of martyrs, the voice of deportees, the voice of those who have no voice".

The following month, Al-Quds Radio said it was "the radio of the Palestinian Arab people, the radio of the martyrs, the radio of the wounded, the radio of the detained, the radio of the universities, the radio of the workers, the radio of the mosque imams, and the radio of the uprooted".

Historical summary

Al-Quds Radio operated for more than two decades from 1988. 

The station's greatest influence came in its earliest years. It began broadcasting on 1 January 1988, less than a month after the start of the first Palestinian intifada, and quickly gained attention among its target Palestinian audience and elsewhere.

"Listening to the new radio station has become a must for Palestinians and others who want to know what is happening," the Guardian reported later that month. "Accuracy is a powerful weapon. Al-Quds has repeatedly broadcast the names, ages and occupations of Palestinians hurt or arrested in clashes with the security forces. It can be intimidating, too, revealing the names and addresses of Palestinians said to be collaborating with the Israelis, including Arab policemen and employees of the West Bank civil administration." [3]

The Independent (London) said in the same month about the station's involvement with the intifada: "Most significant are the real operational instructions given to the population: when to strike, and how and where to demonstrate. The instructions given often repeat the precise content of leaflets handed out throughout the occupied territories and East Jerusalem." [4]

The influence of Al-Quds Radio influence waned with the end of the intifada in the early 1990s and the signing by Israel and the PLO of the 1993 peace agreement, which was a strategic defeat for the PFLP-GC.

The launch a few years later of pan-Arab satellite TV channels such as Al Jazeera (1996) and the emergence of the internet transformed the region's media environment and further reduced Al-Quds Radio's importance.

Al-Quds Radio remained on the air well into the 21st century, although its impact on the second intidafa (2000-2005) did not match that during the first uprising.

Operational model

Al-Quds Radio's operating model was strikingly different from the rival radio broadcasts of the time by the PLO. 

The latter were made via the state networks of various sympathetic Arab countries. In the late 1980s these included Iraq (which hosted the PLO's central radio operations after the group was forced to abandon broadcasts from Lebanon following the Israeli invasion in 1982), Algeria, North Yemen and South Yemen. 

This arrangement left the PLO entirely reliant on the host broadcasters for airtime, which was generally made available on a limited basis.

For example, even the PLO's central radio only had three hours of airtime a day on Iraqi transmitters by 1988. Other host broadcasters were even less generous: Algerian state radio, for example, provided just one hour a day.

In contrast, Al-Quds Radio was a standalone operation with its own studios and transmitters, and was broadcasting for nine hours a day from the start, later increased to 11 hours daily. 

Location

Al-Quds Radio broadcast from Syria, which backed the PFLP-GC.

Its powerful mediumwave (AM) transmitter was thought to be at Daraa, in the far southwest of Syria, close to the Jordanian and Israeli borders. (Initially it was suggested, incorrectly, to be based in southern Lebanon - see footnote 5.)

In March 1994, the Jordanian weekly newspaper Assabeel published a feature on Al-Quds Radio by a sympathetic reporter who had visited its HQ in an unnamed residential district of Damascus. This would have been the station's editorial offices and studios, rather than the location of its transmitters. [1]

A variety of Post Office Box addresses were announced for listeners' letters, including in Damascus, Beirut, Aden, Tripoli (Libya) and Kuwait. The Damascus address (P.O. Box 5092) was used for many years. 

In 1998, the station also announced a physical address in Daraa (c/o Ra'id Talib al-Hariri, near the Women's Arts College, Nuwah Road, al-Shaykh Miskin, Daraa).

Programming

Broadcasting schedule: At its launch in January 1988 the station was on the air at 0900-1400 and 1600-2000 local times. Later, the gap at 1400-1600 was filled, providing continuous broadcasts between 0900 and 2000, a total of 11 hours a day.

In April 1996, the broadcasting hours were cut to nine hours a day, at 0800-1700 local time, with the main news bulletins at 1230 and 1630.

Later in the 1990s and into the following decade there was evening programming, but only on the FM frequencies.

Languages: Most output was in Arabic, but from the start there was also material in Hebrew and English. Later, programmes in French, Italian, Romanian, Russian and Spanish were added. 

All non-Arabic programming was dropped in the mid-1990s.

Transmission arrangements

The main frequency was 702 kHz AM (mediumwave), which had been heard with test transmissions of music since September 1987 (more than three months before regular programming began on 1 January 1988). A powerful transmitter was used on this frequency.

In a bid to escape Israeli jamming of its signals, the AM frequency was sometimes varied. This included moving the frequency to interfere with Israel Radio's Arabic service on 738 AM. Al-Quds Radio explained this behaviour in May 1994 by saying that it chose a frequency "close to that of the enemy's radio so that [their] jamming will also affect the enemy's radio".

Note reference to Al-Quds's wavelength being close to that of Israel Radio
The Guardian, 30 January 1988

Also from the start, two FM channels were announced (96.7 and 105.4). These would have been heard by an audience limited to southern Syria and Lebanon, and perhaps northern Israel.

From April 1988 a second AM transmitter was brought into use on what was called the "reserve" channel of 630 kHz.

Tests on shortwave were conducted later in 1988, on 4320 and 7460 kHz, and in 1990 on 15050 kHz. When the use of shortwave became regular the frequencies were 5990 and 5910 kHz. The latter was referred to as the "reserve" shortwave channel. 

Note that 5910 was close to the shortwave frequency (5900 kHz) used by Israel Radio's Arabic service. 

The use of shortwave was suspended in April 1996, though it may have resumed at some point. In August 2001, the station noted that financial problems had forced it to stop shortwave transmissions "over a year ago". 

Jamming

Israel jammed Al-Quds Radio's signals from soon after it began transmissions in January 1988 and in subsequent years, though there were gaps in the interference, for example between February and July 1989 and between March 1991 and October 1992. 

Jamming then continued into 1993 and 1994.

In July 1994, the new radio station in the West Bank of the Palestinian Authority (which the PFLP-GC opposed) briefly used one of Al-Quds Radio's frequencies (702 AM) before shifting to a nearby channel (675 AM). 

Later years and end of the story

By the end of the 1990s the station's best days were well behind it. In a sign that its influence had waned, Israel no longer bothered to jam it.

Broadcasts in languages other than Arabic had ceased, as had shortwave transmissions.

In early 1996, station director Fadl Shururu was forced to deny reports that it would be closed, along with other Syria-based Palestinian groups, following progress in peace talks between Damascus and Israel. [6]

The station's financial position worsened and it appealed to listeners to provide financial support to keep the station on the air.

"Regrettably, all we received were emotional letters and telephone calls. We thank them for their sympathy, but this could not provide us with spare parts," the station complained in August 2001. 

That month, Al-Quds Radio started taking commercials as a means of raising revenue, and announced that it would close both its AM transmitters and continue on FM only. It said the move was for "purely financial reasons" though there had been rumours that the Syrian government was putting pressure on the PFLP-GC to close down the station or reduce its output. 

In September 2002, the 702 AM transmitter resumed its previous schedule (daily at 0800-1700 local time). The 630 AM channel remained silent.

I can't find a definitive date for when Al-Quds Radio ceased operations. It appears to have been one of the victims of the Syrian civil war in which the PFLP-GC backed the government side. Daraa, the presumed location of the AM transmitter, was one of the birthplaces of the Syrian uprising in March 2011.

The PFLP-GC is now a very marginal group on the Palestinian political scene.

Notes and sources

Quotes from broadcasts by Al-Quds Radio and Voice of Palestine, and details of transmission schedules and jamming, have been taken from BBC Monitoring's archives. 

Other sources:

[1] Interview with Shururu in the London-based monthly Filastin al-Muslimah, October 1997

[2] Article by Abir Fuad in the Jordanian weekly newspaper Assabeel, 29 March 1994

[3] Report by Ian Black, "West Bank tunes into voice of uprising", The Guardian, 30 January 1988

[4] Report by Charles Richards, "Clandestine radio keeps Israeli forces guessing", The Independent, 22 January 1988

[5] Location: Al-Quds Radio was initially assumed by observers to have been based in southern Lebanon, possibly because a much less powerful PLO station had been operating from the Ayn al-Hulwah refugee camp near Sidon in southern Syria since 1987. Furthermore, during its test phase in late 1987 Al-Quds Radio had aired songs praising Lebanese Shia leader Nabih Berri. 

Mickey Gurdus, Israel Radio's legendary one-man monitoring service, was reported on 1 January 1988, the first day of Al-Quds Radio's regular broadcasts, as saying that the station was transmitting from the Sidon area.

Even though the Israeli authorities must have known within days, if not sooner, that the transmission site was in fact in Syria, the Israeli newspaper Hadashot was still reporting on 12 January that it was "probably broadcasting from southern Lebanon".

It was only on 17 January that Israel Radio reported Gurdus as confirming the location as southern Syria.

[6] Report by Jordanian newspaper Al-Ra'y, 2 February 1996

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

"Who is this smug fellow Ingham?"

Like most posts on this blog, this one is about Radio Atlantico del Sur, the Spanish-language station operated by the British Ministry of Defence during the 1982 Falklands War.

If you are unfamiliar with Radio Atlantico del Sur you may find it useful to read an earlier post which summarises the story of what was known within the MoD as Project MOONSHINE.

Introducing Mr Bernard Ingham

Very few of those intimately involved with Radio Atlantico del Sur were public figures. One exception was Sir Frank Cooper, the top civil servant (permanent under-secretary) at the Ministry of Defence, who – despite the other pressures of an exceedingly busy time – gave time and energy to the project. 

Initially sceptical of the wisdom of such a radio station, he was won round and then championed the venture against opposition from elsewhere in Whitehall, mainly the Foreign Office.

Another public figure moved across the stage, albeit only briefly, in the RAdS drama. This was Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher's chief press secretary throughout her prime ministership.

Ingham – a familiar face on British TV in the 1980s – sometimes appeared more Thatcherite than his boss, but on the issue of Radio Atlantico del Sur he took the opposite side to the prime minister.

Mr Ingham (he was not knighted until after Thatcher left office in 1990) cultivated the persona of a blunt-speaking and clear-thinking Yorkshireman whose job was to knock common sense into the fanciful heads of London journalists.

There was no good reason for Ingham to have been concerned with the planning of Radio Atlantico del Sur. It was a purely military project and, until its launch, not disclosed to the public. At most, it might have been appropriate for him to have become involved when the MoD issued a press statement on the station's launch.

But Ingham chose to intervene during early May 1982 when the MoD and FCO were arguing over whether Project MOONSHINE should go ahead.

This culminated, on 10 May, when he wrote to several senior civil servants expressing his strong opposition to MOONSHINE.

Ingham's letter

Ingham's letter in declassified Ministry of Defence file DEFE 25/502

Image credit: Lee Richards

Transcript of the letter

10 DOWNING STREET

From the Press Secretary                            10 May 1982

Dear Nick [possibly Nicholas Fenn, head of the FCO's News Department],

OPERATION MOONSHINE

You mentioned the above and, while I suspect – and very much hope – that it is dead, I should perhaps set out my views for the record. 

As I understand it, the project is intended to play downmarket propaganda tricks through a "requisitioned" transmitter with the objective of sapping the morale of the Argentines.

There are many arguments against this course but the clincher is that it would not work – except perhaps to the enhanced reputation of the BBC. It would not work for the following reasons:

  –  we live in a free democracy with a free media;

  –  any new "station" would therefore have to compete, among others, with the BBC's established reputation;

  –  to compete and to secure an audience it would presumably have to advertise itself and its "authority";

  –  it would therefore become known and the BBC, unless it was entirely cavalier with its own interests, would seek to destroy its rival at the first opportunity;

  –  the new station would thus become rapidly known as a propagandist exercise; it would soon be discredited along with the Government, some of whose Ministers would end up with a great deal of egg on their face and possibly without a job. Can you imagine the media/Parliamentary outcry if so much as a whisper of this ludicrous idea ever surfaced?

I know you feel that the idea could only damage the BBC. I think there is considerable risk of this if the idea were ever to go ahead. But the BBC could turn it to its advantage if the scenario I set out above were to prove reasonably accurate. The BBC could do much to enhance its independence if it chose to expose Operation Moonshine for what it would be.

In short, there is nothing but trouble in it for Britain. We would be a lot better off if MoD put as much effort into ensuring a prompt PR response to South Atlantic events as it apparently puts into dreaming up moonshine.

I am copying to Clive Whitmore [Thatcher's Principal Private Secretary], Sir Frank Cooper [Permanent Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Defence], John Groves [Director-General of the Central Office of Information], Ian McDonald [MoD chief spokesman] and Simon Fuller [South Atlantic Presentation Unit in the Cabinet Office].

Yours sincerely          

Bernard Ingham     

B. INGHAM     

SECRET

Analysis: what was Ingham worried about?

Ingham's letter betrayed a number of misunderstandings about what was being proposed. 

He foresaw the planned radio station competing with "the BBC's established reputation", and this leading the BBC to "seek to destroy its rival at the first opportunity".

But Radio Atlantico del Sur was never intended in any way to compete with the BBC. Its sole target audience was members of the Argentine forces in the Falklands – not, as Ingham seemed to have thought, the very much wider audience in Argentina which listened to the BBC's Latin America service.

Similarly, Ingham appeared utterly confused between the UK and global audience for the information provided by the MoD press office, which he worried was not providing a "prompt PR response to South Atlantic events", and the purely military target for RAdS's broadcasts. 

Finally, Ingham was convinced that the project was nothing but a "propagandist exercise" that "intended to play downmarket propaganda tricks".

In fact, the radio's staff were specifically instructed not to engage in "propaganda" – if that term meant, for example, trying to persuade listeners to accept the British case for sovereignty over the islands. The staff were also told to avoid anything that could be seen as undermining Argentine troops' loyalty to their flag.

As for what Ingham called "propaganda tricks", RAdS's civilian manager Neil ffrench-Blake instructed his staff, in writing, that "No lies are to be told."

What happened next?

Ingham's bid to scupper Project MOONSHINE came to naught. 

Within a few days of his letter, the final proposal to start broadcasts had been drafted for approval by the War Cabinet, and the station went on the air on 19 May. Nothing more seems to have been heard from the Number 10 press office on the subject.

In his memoirs, ffrench-Blake says that once the War Cabinet had given its approval:

To take the pressure off, we removed all opponents to the scheme, including Mr Ingham, from our circulation list, and changed our code name [from MOONSHINE] to "PINOCCIO" [sic]. 

The day after Ingham wrote his letter, it received this rebuke in a handwritten note on an MoD memo:

Does anyone recognise the handwriting?

Image credit: Lee Richards

The handwritten comments say:

Who is this smug fellow Ingham? 

I could write in similar vein about some of his ventures.

(Not that I am pro-Moonshine)

Along with those comments, note that paragraph 2.g says: 

No. 10 Press Sec wrote to the FCO an emotive, ill-informed opposition to the Project.

And, remembering Ingham's comments about RAdS competing with the BBC, see paragraph 3.c:

The BBC... do not see Moonshine as a threat to their own efforts. 

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. 

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