2023 issue of Journal for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies (JIPSS) : "In Focus: Radio Propaganda in the Cold War"

 

The 2023 issue of JIPSS has just been published: "In Focus: Radio Propaganda in the Cold War" contains my article "CIA Early Cold War Clandestine Radio Broadcasts to Ukraine from Greece and Spain." Below are some editorial comments:

You will find numerous insights thoroughly relevant to the present: Numerous basic propaganda techniques have changed little or nothing since the early Cold War and are still used effectively today. And they are not limited to the medium of radio. Original Cold War radio propaganda, such as disinformation in the form of gray propaganda, can be found in online videos and social media campaigns. The use of dissidents and the politically persecuted can also be observed to this day. Moving images and dissemination through the Internet may have been added to pure sound – but one discovers many parallels in the techniques and principles used.

Moser, Mehring, Summers, Bardet, and Jäggi provide new insights into the weighty cultural and diplomatic role of radio within the Western bloc. Michael Kuhlmann, Richard Cummings, and Adrian Hänni examine hitherto unnoticed aspects of radio use in the ideological conflict between East and West.

Kuhlmann makes clear the incredible political impact radio coverage could have. For example, radio in the American Sector of Berlin (RIAS) played a significant role in the people's uprising in the GDR on June 17, 1953. Editors openly showed sympathy for the opposition movement, but their coverage swung to de-escalation when East Berlin imposed a state of emergency.

CIA Early Cold War Clandestine Radio Broadcasts to Ukraine from Greece and Spain

Cummingsʼ article on CIA clandestine radio propaganda explains how Spanish and Greek stations were used to offer anti-Soviet radio broadcasts to a Ukrainian target audience. Cummingsʼ approach focuses less on the content and impact of the broadcasts than on the operational and technical levels of the operation. In the former, preparation on the part of Western intelligence and information services, especially the CIA, plays an important role. Cummings shows how such an operation was planned, prepared, and executed, and thus how the basis for such a propaganda project could be created.

Hänniʼs contribution shows that not only state actors such as the CIA used clandestine radio stations as a weapon in the Cold War. Using Radio Omega, the Roman Catholic Church also tried to support the ideological struggle against “atheistic communism” clandestinely. Hänniʼs case study of Radio Omega, which broadcast Russian-language programs to the USSR in the 1960s, offers insights into aspects of radio propaganda that have received little attention in research to date, such as the importance of religion or the collaborations between propaganda stations and certain sociopolitical groups in the production of programs.

Kristina Wittkamp analyzes Soviet broadcasting policy during the Cold War, which ranged from station jamming to counter-propaganda to surveying the programming preferences of listeners. With the format station Radio Mayak, a counteroffer to the Western stations in content and politics was even deliberately created. Wittkamp, therefore, offers new insights into the radio politics of the Soviet Union, but she also improves our understanding of the interactions between Western and Eastern radio propaganda.

Here is the Table of Contents: