I had been mulling over getting a shortwave radio for some time, but could never quite bring myself to take the plunge. As parts of northern India came under Pakistani aerial attack last month, I reckoned if there was ever a good case for one, it was then.
My receiver is yet to see any action. The air raids stopped abruptly, by the time the radio was unboxed. As a ceasefire takes tentative hold, I am left fidgeting with buttons, knobs, and antennas, disappointingly surfing noise for scarce signals. Shortwave is not what it used to be, evidently.
Nevertheless, its story is worth retelling. Especially at a time when US President Donald Trump seems determined to uproot American international broadcasting for opaque reasons, and emerging great powers like India scramble to mould international opinion.
Empire and airwaves
For much of the 20th century, geopolitics and long-distance radio broadcasting were conjoined twins. Narrative control defined their common heart.
On 1st October 1939, exactly a month after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, the British Raj’s All India Radio (AIR) flagged off its external service, with broadcasts in Pashto. They targeted what was then the North-West Frontier Province of British India (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in Pakistan) and bordering Pashtun Afghanistan. Afghanistan was something of an idée fixe for the Raj; the British government too found itself worrying about Kabul. The Great Game instinct intact, Delhi fretted over what the Soviets had in mind, while London was more attuned to German inroads amid domestic unrest.
Either way, the physics of radio waves was brought to bear on frontier management.
As we move from light to dark, fidelity to facts can take a back seat.
Independent India would eagerly continue this practice, radio broadcasts aiding the transmutation of a truncated empire into a coherent nation-state. Also known as Akashvani since 1956, AIR, one of the world’s largest broadcasting networks, would go on to have dedicated programs for soldiers deployed along India’s contested borders and territories. Amid serious debate within the Indian government about the utility of shortwave broadcasting, Akashvani announced doubling the duration of its transmissions in Pashto and Balochi, to three hours a day, in January 2022.
Given the strategic significance of these languages for Pakistan, Islamabad had undoubtedly taken note. After all, during the upheaval leading to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, Akashvani Calcutta had played a crucial psyops function, by relaying speeches of Bengali nationalist leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Parenthetically, Radio Australia played a small but noticeable role in spreading the word, by picking up Rahman’s declaration of independence through a clandestine broadcast 26th March that year.
Meanwhile, Voice of America (VOA) focused on Islamabad’s version of events, “often absurdly so” as historian Gary Bass put it, in face of genocide committed by the Pakistani army. On full display in May, the Indian public’s worst suspicions about American coverage of subcontinental crises are not entirely unfounded.
War of words
As portents of a second world war became clear, American shortwave broadcasting – albeit with borrowed facilities, including transmitters – took off, with dispatches from European capitals led by CBS’s Edward Murrow and his team of young reporters, the fabled Murrow Boys.
An inversion of function followed as the Cold War set in.
Instead of informing Americans about the goings-on in Europe, American international broadcasting increasingly focused on talking to the world, about itself and its audiences. Alongside roping in émigrés and dissidents, Washington rolled out a carefully tailored suite of broadcast networks, made palatable by the growing draw of American popular culture. This was an important “psychological” component of Cold War grand strategy, as George Kennan put it in a 1946 lecture.
Established in the 1940s and 1950s, VOA (global in scope), Radio Free Europe (RFE, targeting Eastern Europe) and Radio Liberty (RL, directed at the Soviet Union) were joined by Radio Free Asia in the 1990s as Washington’s concerns about China mounted. While VOA government funding was transparent, RFE and RL (merged in 1976) continued to be covertly supported by the CIA until the early 1970s. The latter were, naturally enough, pulled into Cold War intrigue, enough to inspire an excellent Netflix show.
Efforts of VOA, RFE/RL and Radio Free Asia were buttressed by those of American allies such as Britain’s BBC. They sat on top of various clandestine and makeshift operations, targeting specific countries and political circumstances including in West Asia and South America. (A 1953 CIA document, declassified in March, provides a fascinating big-picture account.)
The shortwave game was played in earnest by the other side as well. As but one example, Soviet Union’s Radio Moscow had expanded to include the Indian subcontinent around the late 1940s and early 1950s. Smaller Soviet broadcasters were able to transmit as far as Ontario. Nevertheless, Moscow could never quite match the potency of Western efforts. As the legendary Stasi spymaster Markus Wolf put it, RFE was the “most effective” of all Western influence operations directed at the East.
The enduring value of credibility
With the end of the Cold War, the decline of Western shortwave broadcasting was inevitable. After all, it made little sense to continue to wage an ideological war amid – in hindsight, reckless – triumphalism and diluting geostrategic goals. The internet contributed its share. Blogs and “new media” opened up and heterogenised global opinion-shaping, at least before the inevitable enshittification of the internet which not only facilitated disinformation ops at a scale that would astonish Stasi’s Wolf if he were still alive, but also memeify geopolitics and amplify propaganda on a dime at a nickel’s cost.
That said, there are two vital lessons from Cold War radio.
First, an effective influence operation needs to solely rely on influential indigenous voices from target regions. The operator must be at a remove, neither seen nor heard, faithfully appearing to play second fiddle. This was how India’s Research and Analysis Wing and its storied founder RN Kao manoeuvred the 1971 Bangladesh crisis.
Second, psychological operations form a spectrum. For political effect, they must be deployed in tandem. To wit, VOA was a “white” effort; RFE and RL were “grey”; and numerous clandestine radio stations “black”. As we move from light to dark, fidelity to facts can take a back seat; the intent of the operator shifts from defence to offense, in a manner of speaking. A cautionary obverse: white efforts must be scrupulous in order to be credible.
As another 1953 CIA document, on the effects of VOA broadcasting in Czechoslovakia, warned, “[u]ntruths breed distrust”.
