Page 197 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 197 of 237

THE INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT -- BLACK RADIO

THE EMERGENCE of the transistor radio in the 1950s has intensified one of the most shadowy, elusive and
least-known electronic aspects of the Cold War. This is the war of words, conducted on the airwaves by
combatants who are thousands of miles apart -- and who will never meet.

Daily, East and West beam hundreds of hours of propaganda broadcasts at each other in an unrelenting babble of
competition for the minds of their listeners. The low-price transistor has given this hidden war a new importance.
Millions of people in the Middle East, Latin America and Asia who cannot read, can nevertheless be reached by
the propaganda of both sides.

The Invisible Government is heavily engaged in "black radio" * operations of every conceivable type. So is the
Communist bloc.

United States radio activities have ranged all the way from overt, openly acknowledged and advertised programs
of the Voice of America to highly secret CIA transmitters in the Middle East and other areas of the world. In
between is a whole spectrum of black, gray, secret and semi secret radio operations. The CIA's Radio Swan,
because it became operationally involved at the Bay of Pigs, never enjoyed more than the thinnest of covers. But
Radio Swan was a relatively small black-radio operation. Other radio operations, financed and controlled in whole
or in part by the Invisible Government, are more skillfully concealed and much bigger.

Some are hybrids -- broadcasting organizations that solicit funds from business corporations and the general
public but also receive secret funds from the CIA. While allegedly "private" organizations, they receive daily
policy direction from the State Department and take orders from the CIA.

In some cases, it is possible, indeed probable, that lower-level employees of such an organization are unaware of
the true point of control of the particular activity. A secret CIA transmitter in Lebanon, to take a random example,
would be run directly by CIA officers. But in a larger, hybrid operation, knowledge of financing and control by
Washington might be limited to a handful of top executives.

For purposes of this book, it is sufficient to note that an inevitable by-product -- as in clandestine operations
generally -- is that the American public has been beguiled by some of this allegedly "private" broadcasting work.
It has contributed its gift dollars to such "private" activity, entirely unaware that it is already supporting the same
broadcasting operation with its tax dollars, through the CIA.

Black-radio operations fall into two categories -- transmitting and receiving. Besides broadcasting, both sides
carefully monitor each other's broadcasts to learn what the opposition is saying.

For the United States, the task of monitoring and recording foreign radio broadcasts, by friendly as well as
unfriendly countries, is performed by the CIA. The intelligence agency's listening posts all over the globe capture
every major broadcast of a foreign nation on tape. Daily, this extremely valuable foreign broadcast information is
edited, correlated, mimeographed and distributed to a wide list of consumers from a CIA office in downtown
Washington. * The consumers are asked not to mention the name or initials of the arm of the CIA which performs
this work. However, this broadcast monitoring service, which is more or less openly acknowledged by the CIA, is
about the most "overt" operation the agency conducts.

Some idea of the magnitude of the CIA's task, in monitoring Communist bloc broadcasts alone, can be gained
from a speech made on January 30, 1963, by John Richardson, Jr., the president of the Free Europe Committee,
which operates Radio Free Europe.