This is a book about jamming that never uses the word about itself. Aggressive Broadcasting: Evidence, Facts, Documents — in the Russian, Radioagressiya (radio aggression) — was published in English by Progress in 1985 under the names G. Alov and V. Viktorov, two authors who do not otherwise exist in the record and are almost certainly pen-names of the kind these exposés carried by convention. It is a survey of Western international broadcasting into the socialist bloc: Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the Voice of America, the BBC External Services, Deutsche Welle, and a supporting cast of smaller stations, all treated as a single apparatus of "psychological warfare" directed by Washington. The subtitle is the genre. Evidence, facts, documents: the book means to be a dossier, and much of the time it is a good one.
The date on the spine is the date of the text. Nothing here lags. The book argues from the sharpest year of the second Cold War and knows it: Reagan's June 1982 address to the British Parliament, with its promise to leave "Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history," is the hinge of the whole argument; the shooting-down of Korean Air Lines flight 007 in September 1983 gets a full chapter; Reagan's secret Directive 75 of early 1983, instructing his administration to "exert a steady influence on the internal political life in the USSR," is quoted and named. The budget figures run through the 1985 fiscal year, and the newest event the authors can cite is the August 1985 congressional appropriation of 250 million dollars to RFE/RL. This is a real-time book, closed in the middle of 1985. It shows no awareness of what was already beginning: Gorbachev had been General Secretary since March, but glasnost is nowhere in these pages, and neither is any hint that the jamming war the book defends had less than three years left to run. In outlook it belongs to the Andropov–Chernenko winter that produced it, not to the year of its printing.
Who wrote it, and for whom? The apparatus answers part of the question. The authors thank TASS and the Novosti Press Agency — the state wire service and the state feature agency — for their material, along with "Soviet experts on the problems of Western radio broadcasting" and unnamed journalists who were "so kind as to make their documents and dossiers available." This is not a scholar's monograph assembled from open archives; it is a semi-official compilation drawing on the files of the organs whose job was to monitor exactly these stations. Its intended reader is double: the Western sympathiser who might be persuaded that RFE/RL is a CIA front (which it had been), and the domestic and bloc reader who needs the jamming of those stations explained as lawful self-defence rather than censorship. The book performs both tasks, and the tension between them is where it comes apart.
Begin, as this series always does, with what is true — because a good deal here is true, and the criticism that follows is worthless if this part is fudged.
The central factual case is sound and was sound. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were created, funded and run by the Central Intelligence Agency, and the book documents this properly, from the American record rather than by assertion. It quotes Senator J. William Fulbright, who spent years trying to defund the stations, in his own words: "Each radio presented itself as a spontaneous creation, run by freedom-loving refugees financed by dimes from free-world schoolchildren. Secretly, each was the organizational and financial instrument of the CIA, staffed by expatriates who sought the overthrow of Soviet rule." It quotes Joseph Whelan of the Library of Congress's own research service conceding that Radio Liberty "is clearly a United States Government operation and an integral part of this Nation's foreign policy apparatus." It reconstructs the "white," "grey" and "black" propaganda structure accurately, and it is right that the National Committee for a Free Europe was fronted by the CIA's Allen Dulles, that the fiction of donations "from schoolchildren" was cover for state money, and that the émigré staffs included men who had collaborated with the Nazi occupation. The Fulbright campaign, the CIA funding exposed in 1967, the reorganisation that moved the stations under the Board for International Broadcasting in the 1970s — all of this is real history, and the book gets it right.
It is right, too, about intent, and this is the part a Western reader is likeliest to want to wave away. The men running American broadcasting in the early 1980s did talk about it as warfare, on the record, and the book has caught them at it. Congressman Robert Michel's judgment that "the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty are worth three divisions of troops — at least" is a real quotation from the Congressional Record, not a Soviet invention. So is the newspaper column, cited approvingly on the House floor, calling short-wave radio "our only means to erode the Soviet System." So is the VOA commentary chief Philip Nicolaides urging in an internal memo that the station work "to 'destabilize' the Soviet Union and its satellites by promoting disaffection between peoples and rulers." The book's flat report of the VOA's operating creed — that "it is more important to be credible than truthful" — is a fair paraphrase of what American propaganda professionals actually wrote about their own trade. On the question of what these stations were for, the dossier holds. A reader who comes away believing that Western international broadcasting in the Reagan years was a disinterested public service has not reckoned with the evidence this book assembles.
The architecture the book lays out is genuinely useful as a record of the moment, and the numbers are largely right. It traces the 1980s reorganisation in detail — Frank Shakespeare installed at the Board for International Broadcasting, the CIA veteran George Bailey given Radio Liberty, Charles Wick's transformation of the USIA into what a serving officer inside it called a return to "all the cold-war rhetoric." It reconstructs "Project Truth," the counter-propaganda programme the National Security Council authorised in 1981, and the "total ideological war" the administration built around it; it catches Wick telling a Washington audience in 1981, "We are at war /with the Soviets/, whether de facto or declared." It quotes, at length and accurately, the CIA operations chief Frank Wisner's description of his own propaganda machine as a "mighty Wurlitzer" he could play "just about any tune he liked." These are real documents, mostly from American and West German sources, and the book's willingness to quote the adversary in the adversary's own words is a genuine strength — the same strength this series has noted in its more careful siblings. The dossier is not the problem. What the book does with it is.
And now the thing that is wrong with it, which is one structural thing, and which this book displays more purely than almost any other in the series, because its entire subject is who may speak, who may listen, and who may be silenced.
The category the book is built on — "information aggression" — is wired to point in only one direction. Broadcasting a signal across a frontier is aggression when the West does it. Blocking that signal is self-defence when the East does it. The book does not arrive at this asymmetry shyly or by omission; it states it as law. Its long chapter on international law argues that the free flow of information guaranteed by Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights "applies only to individuals and not to states" — and then, having confined the right to individuals, spends no further sentence on whether the individual Soviet listener possesses it. It concludes instead that a target country may lawfully "organize a system of interference against the broadcasts of these radio stations, e.g. by jamming these and other radio stations." Jamming, in other words, is not something the book must explain away. It is the book's positive recommendation, argued as a right under international law.
This is worth dwelling on, because it is the reflexive test this series applies to every volume: can the category the author prosecutes ever be turned back on the author's own state? Here the answer is written out in full, and it is no. The Soviet Union in 1985 ran the largest international-broadcasting operation on earth. Radio Moscow beamed more hours, in more languages, to more of the world than the Voice of America and the BBC combined. In this book it appears exactly once — in the opening pages, as a benign "visiting card on the air," alongside Radio Beijing, a station by which "a citizen of one or another country" keeps "in touch with his people." Everything the book indicts when Washington does it — the transmitter aimed across a border, the broadcast in the target population's own language, the intent to shape opinion inside another state — the book's own state did on a larger scale, and the category simply does not reach it. The authors were not unaware of the symmetry; they were untroubled by it, because for them aggression is defined by the politics of the broadcaster, not by the act.
The listener never appears as a bearer of rights at all. This is the absence that decides the case. The book can write, and does, that "there is a need for an open and honest dialogue on a global scale" and that "there is no room for a war of words." It can allow that "the battle of ideas presupposes recognition of the equal right of the various ideologies." But the right that would follow from any of this — the right of a Soviet citizen to tune a radio and hear what a foreign station is saying, and decide for himself — is never stated, never defended, never so much as raised to be dismissed. The whole apparatus of the argument is about the rights of states: the sovereign right not to be interfered with, the state's right to "form their own information policy," the state's right to jam. The individual on the receiving end, in whose name a free flow of information would have to be claimed if it were a value at all, is present only as a target to be protected from misinformation — which is to say, as someone whose access to information the state is entitled to control.
Nor does the book acknowledge what its own reader in Moscow or Warsaw knew perfectly well: that in 1985 the jamming it recommends in the abstract was in fact total and ongoing. The USSR had resumed jamming all the major Western stations in August 1980, over Poland, and had not stopped; the racket of it filled the Soviet short-wave band as the manuscript was written. The book mentions Soviet jamming only in the past tense and only defensively — noting, of the late-1970s détente, that "the USSR had long since stopped jamming" the Voice of America, as though that condition still held. The vast, expensive, continuous jamming campaign that was the largest single fact about Soviet reception of foreign radio in the year of publication is present in this book only as a legal entitlement, never as a practice. A state confident of its own account of the world does not spend a fortune to prevent its citizens from hearing another. That it did so is the confession the book cannot make and cannot quite suppress.
The asymmetry has a sharp factual cost, and it falls on the peoples of Eastern Europe. Because aggression is defined as something transmitters do, every popular movement inside the bloc has to be recast as the product of a foreign signal. The June 1953 rising of East German workers becomes, in this book, a thing RIAS manufactured: the station's programmes "gave a signal for the commencement of the disturbances," and its "instructions were the main factor in the organized nature of the disturbances." Hungary in 1956 is "the counter-revolutionary events," radio-instigated; the Prague Spring of 1968 is "brainwashing"; Solidarity — a workers' union of some ten million members — appears in the chapter headings as a matter of "foreign currency for 'Solidarity'" and diplomats "on spying missions." Western broadcasting certainly covered all of these, and RFE's conduct in 1956 in particular has a real case to answer. But a book written from the tradition of Marx cannot explain the largest workers' movements in the history of the socialist states as artefacts of Munich transmitters without emptying its own politics of content. It denies the East German building workers, the Hungarian workers' councils and the Polish shipyards any agency of their own, and treats the population the state claims to embody as a passive audience to be captured or protected — which is precisely the view of the listener the book elsewhere attributes, with contempt, to the psychological warriors of the USIA.
This is the same operation the sibling volumes in this series perform on adjacent ground, and the three are best read together. A New Information Order or Psychological War? (1984) prosecutes the West's dominance of the international news wires — accurately — while counting the word censor once in fifty-odd thousand words, and never once naming Glavlit, the Soviet censorship office that decided what could be printed while the book was being written. Political Consciousness in the USA and Nihilism Today manage the reader's picture of the adversary by the same means: the deforming pressures of the other system are anatomised with real skill, and the mirror is never turned. In each case the scholarship on the outward-facing side is genuine and the inward-facing silence is total. Aggressive Broadcasting is the purest of them because its subject is literally the control of information, so that the silence and the subject are the same thing.
The answer from within the Marxist tradition was written half a century before the book, by a man the book's own state had by then erased from its histories. Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936) is the standard against which every Soviet account of Soviet society should be read, and on the monopoly of information it is exact. The Soviet bureaucracy, he argued, ruled not only by the firing squad but by the lie, and the lie had become structural — built into the very texts the state held up as its achievements. Of the 1936 Constitution, the document Aggressive Broadcasting still cites in 1985 as the guarantee of Soviet freedoms, Trotsky wrote that it was imbued with "the lie with which, as a mirror of the ruling stratum, the new constitution is imbued." He saw precisely what a monopoly of information does to the people living under it: "Wide circles of communists as well as nonparty citizens," he wrote, "keep up two systems of thought, one official and one secret." That sentence describes the exact condition a foreign broadcast threatens — the private, unofficial system of thought that jamming exists to starve. And he named the reflex the book performs: "The bureaucracy unfailingly represents its enemies as the enemies of socialism." Aggressive Broadcasting does nothing else. Every broadcaster it indicts becomes, by the act of broadcasting, a subversive; the possibility that a listener might simply want to know something is never entertained.
Trotsky also supplied the answer to the deepest premise of the book — that hostile radio is a mortal danger against which the state must defend itself with jammers. "Repressions do not kill thought," he wrote; "they merely drive it underground." A state that must jam is a state that has conceded it cannot win the argument in the open, and has chosen instead to prevent the argument from being heard. The jamming towers that ringed Soviet cities in 1985 were not evidence of the West's strength; they were a monument to the bureaucracy's fear of its own population, which is the fear this whole book is written to disguise.
None of which cancels the dossier. The reader should hold both halves at once, because both are true. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were built and paid for by the CIA to destabilise the states they broadcast to; American politicians did describe their stations as weapons and their purpose as erosion; the book proves it, and the proof does not expire because the book that assembles it is a work of the Soviet propaganda apparatus. But a book that can see all of this in Washington and none of it in Moscow, that defines aggression by the flag on the transmitter, that argues the free flow of information belongs to individuals and then never lets an individual have it, is not an account of the radio war. It is one of its combatants, filing a dispatch — and, like the stations it exposes, more interested in being credible than in being true.