Page 199 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 199 of 237

Radio Cairo exulted in the bloodshed in Baghdad and urged the people of Jordan to rise up and butcher King
Hussein. But now, as the CIA transmitters got busy, new voices were heard on the airwaves.

This obscure dispatch appeared in American newspapers on July 23, 1958, for example:

BEIRUT, July 23 (UPI) -- A second mysterious Arab radio station went on the air yesterday calling
itself the "Voice of Justice" and claiming to be broadcasting from Syria.

Its program heard here consisted of bitter criticism against Soviet Russia and Soviet Premier
Khrushchev. Earlier the "Voice of Iraq" went on the air with attacks against the Iraqi revolutionary
government.

The "Voice of Justice" called Khrushchev the "hangman of Hungary" and warned the people of the
Middle East they would suffer the same fate as the Hungarians if the Russians get a foothold in the
Middle East." [8]

On August 14 Egyptian officials charged that seven secret radio stations were operating in the Middle East,
attacking the UAR and Nasser personally. Cairo said two stations were transmitting from the French Riviera, and
said others were in British Aden, Jordan, Lebanon, Cyprus and Kenya. Before the revolt in Iraq, there had been
another in Baghdad, the statement said. The carefully worded announcement stopped barely short of mentioning
the CIA.

The Egyptian spokesman said the Voice of America was heard regularly in Egypt also, but added: "The Voice of
America is not in the same category with clandestine stations." Asked if there was any evidence of who was
behind these secret stations, the official replied laconically: "There is no way to be certain. Certainly they are too
expensive for any small nations or groups to maintain without help." [4]

The Egyptian official had put his finger on one of the soft spots in black-radio operations. These operations are
indeed expensive, and one of the most nagging problems for such radio stations is to explain the source of funds.

One short-wave radio station in the United States with an interesting history is WRUL, with offices in Manhattan
as the World Wide Broadcasting System, Inc. In his fascinating book about Sir William Stephenson, the head of
British Intelligence in the United States during World War II, H. Montgomery Hyde maintains that WRUL was
penetrated by British Intelligence in the war years and subsidized by it through intermediaries.

In more recent times, WRUL has taken a more overt part in Cold War operations. As will be described, it joined
with Radio Swan in broadcasting the programs of "Havana Rose."

In 1954 WRUL received a letter of commendation from the Castillo-Armas government of Guatemala, thanking
the station for its services during the revolt against Arbenz. The letter was from Jose Toron, who had operated a
clandestine "Free Guatemala" radio station before the Communist government was overthrown.

Thus, WRUL has been linked with at least two CIA operations -- the Bay of Pigs (through Radio Swan) and the
Guatemala coup in 1954.

Not long after Cairo complained about clandestine transmitters in the Middle East, Konstantin Zinchenko, the
head of the press department of the Soviet State Committee for Foreign Cultural Relations, told a news
conference in Moscow that the United States had set up a whole series of secret radios aimed at making trouble
for the Soviet Union. Among those he mentioned was Radio Liberation.