Fishing In The Night

Shortwave radio opened a portal to the world—then became a weapon in a high-stakes war of propaganda and power.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:05Roman Mars?

  This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

• 1:11Roman Mars?

  I love podcasts, but like many people who work in this industry, my first love was the radio. I got my start working at my college radio station, W O B C 91.5 at Oberlin College. My musical taste and sense of humor were shaped by the DJs at W F M U in New Jersey, and my professional radio career and this very show began at my favorite public radio station, K A L W 91.7 here in the Bay Area. But there's a whole other radio universe that I have a lot less experience with. Shortwave radio is the less-used but further-reaching cousin of AM and FM. It requires a completely different radio set.

• 1:54Roman Mars?

  Long before the internet, shortwave connected people all across the globe instantaneously, and it became an information battleground and powerful propaganda tool.

• 2:05Roman Mars?

  This week, we are bringing you the first episode in the second season of The Divided Dial. It's a series from On The Media and longtime 99PI contributor Katie Thornton. In season one, Katie explored the history of political talk radio and how the radical right came to dominate the airwaves in the US. But her new four-part season is all about shortwave. I'll let Katie take it from here.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Zenith Transoceanics.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  This is such a cool radio with the little...

• 2:37Speaker 03

  Last summer, I met up with a journalist and radio fan named David Gorin.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  These are like beautiful radios.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  I went to his house in Brooklyn, New York, so that we could listen to the radio together. Not any old radio, not AM or FM, nothing you can pick up in your car, but shortwave radio, the little-known cousin of AM and FM with fuzzy stations that can reach insanely far distances. David's been listening to shortwave since he was a kid in the 70s, when his uncle gave him a radio.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  And I turn it on, and it's like the radio like leapt out of my hand with the North American service of Radio Moscow.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  Suddenly, the world was all within reach, available to him right there in this box.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  In the 7th grade, I became the expert on the next five-year plan in the Soviet Union, the economic plan.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Today, he's part of the Library of Congress's Radio Preservation Task Force. And together, on a sweaty Thursday afternoon last July,

• 3:40Speaker 03

  we sat down to hear what we could find on the shortwave dial today.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  Just like when David was a kid, we heard lots of government-run stations, like Radio Marti.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  The US broadcasting news and information to Cuba.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  The Islamic Republic of Iran.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  China radio, and also broadcasting in Spanish. Let's see, anything else strong?

• 4:08Speaker 03

  On other days, David has picked up English-language shows from North Korea.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  They have very strident, you know, military stuff.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  And news from Cuba.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  This is Radio Rebelde, Radio Rebel, and it goes back to the revolution.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  On the short waves, the global tussle for influence plays out 24/7.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  But we didn't just hear news and propaganda.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Well, let's just go up the dents. I thought we heard some more scat.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  There were beeps and bloops.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Here we go.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  Coded messages sent between amateur radio operators or between government officials who used the short waves to send military data or secret instructions.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Let's see what else we have.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  And some of what we heard just sounded like normal radio, with lots of music and preaching.

• 4:57Speaker 04

  Strong in the Lord and in the power of his might against the wiles of the devil. It was hidden just to hide the meaning and the power of the divine name that is inherent in the name of Yah.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  That's an end times ministry that also preaches that the earth is flat.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Which is very interesting because sure, we radio wouldn't propagate in a flat earth, you know? But details, details.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  In just about an hour of surfing the short waves, we heard prayer and propaganda, news and conspiracy theories, so many languages, and some really decent jams from all over the globe.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  I felt like I had been welcomed into a club that was somehow secret and yet right there for anyone to join. And I know it's cliche, but there was something magical about tuning into the world, training my ear to listen through the crackle, hearing the distance.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  As it turns out, this practice of scanning the dial, finding out what you can hear and from how far away, is a century-old art. It was popular among radio's early adopters. These early "distance fiends," as they were known, uncovered something very strange about how radio waves traveled through space. And what broadcasters did with that information? Completely altered the trajectory of the 20th century.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  This is season two of The Divided Dial. I'm your host, Katie Thornton. I've worked in radio since I was a teenager, sometimes behind the scenes, sometimes behind the mic. In season one, I investigated how right-wing talk took over AM and FM radio. But in all my years of radio research, I'd never really learned about shortwave radio before. And listen, I'm not going to tell you that shortwave radio is as influential today as the AM and FM talk radio we covered in season one. It's not. But I, and I think you, love the medium of radio. So this season, we're diving into the often failed promise of a medium that was once ubiquitous, connecting people around the world long before the internet

• 7:18Speaker 03

  ever did. But like the internet, shortwave also took a turn for the chaotic. Over the next four episodes, I'm going to explain how shortwave radio became a propaganda tool for governments at war, and then a propaganda tool for American right-wing extremists and cults. And we'll explore what a little-known battle playing out on the shortwaves right now between radio fanatics and Wall Street can tell us about what happens when we cede control of our public airwaves. That's all coming up on this season of The Divided Dial. But let's get back to the story.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  Radio broadcasting, as in from one to many, it didn't start on shortwave. It started on AM, taking off around 1920. And AM was inherently local.

• 8:10Speaker 05

  Santa Larson, Mrs. Lester Larson. Happy birthday.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Signals reached up to 50, maybe 75 miles.

• 8:17Speaker 06

  By the way, down Texas way, your home state. Can you take a bow? I will.

• 8:22Speaker 05

  Girl, Ma Taylor up there at Lake Geneva says, "Happy birthday to us." You know, it's her birthday, too.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  But at night, those listening at home noticed something strange.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  As the sun set, more stations emerged from the static. And they weren't coming from down the street or the next town over. Sometimes, listeners in New York-

• 8:44Speaker 04

  Edison Studios, WAM, located at 1 Bond-

• 8:48Speaker 03

  -would hear stations from Chicago.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  WCFL in Chicago.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  A listener in Kansas might hear an opera or a boxing match from the East Coast.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  After dark, it was like the world cracked open, and distant stations faded in and out on ghostly, mysterious winds.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  Most people had never heard a faraway voice, period. Long-distance telephone calls were the costly domain of dignitaries and government officials, and even those were fed across long, scratchy copper lines. A disembodied voice, without a wire, without a fee, from hundreds of miles away? That awed and baffled people. Even scientists, some of whom believed that radio, perhaps, could be used to communicate with the dead.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  But, of course, there was an explanation for these voices in the night.

• 9:44Speaker 06

  Let us follow through the steps and the processes in transmitting or sending radio messages.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Here's what was happening. The way AM normally works is that radio waves get shot from the top of a tall tower, which is often on top of a tall hill.

• 9:58Speaker 06

  The radio messages leave the antenna as electromagnetic wave and travel with the speed of light.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  The waves travel over the ground, basically line of sight, from the tower to you. It's called a ground wave, and it's the thing that fades out a few dozen miles from the tower. But when you shoot out an AM signal, there's another thing that happens, almost a byproduct.

• 10:19Speaker 06

  Radio waves are set up in all directions.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  It's called a sky wave, and the sky wave goes up into the atmosphere.

• 10:28Speaker 07

  The lower layers of the ionosphere, which are about 45 to 75 miles above the Earth's surface, they're like a huge sponge during the day, and they absorb the signals that pass through them.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Susan Douglas is a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan. She says that these lower layers of the atmosphere are made up of ions that get all charged up by the sun, and in the daylight, those layers are where radio waves go to die.

• 10:56Speaker 07

  But at night, when the sun sets, these layers disappear, and the ones above them, they combine to form a dense layer, and it acts like a mirror to sky waves.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  At night, these sky waves, the sort of byproduct of AM transmission, they keep going until they bounce off this other layer of the ionosphere, and they come back down to Earth vast distances away.

• 11:23Speaker 06

  When these waves strike the antenna of a receiving set, this entire process is reversed. We hear sound originating at that very moment, hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  That's what these late-night AM radio listeners were hearing, a radio wave that had ricocheted off the ionosphere to get to them. And it rocked their world. Long-distance channel surfing became a fad called fishing in the night, with listeners casting out into the ether and seeing what they could catch.

• 11:56Speaker 07

  They had a map on the wall with map tacks, and every time they reeled in a station, they would put a map tack on where that broadcast emanated from. Was it Kansas City? Was it Washington DC? Wherever.

• 12:12Speaker 03

  Radio manufacturers ran ads with slogans like "concerts from 14 cities in one evening." In newspaper editorials, distressed housewives and sometimes husbands lamented that their significant other was spending every evening out in their "radio shack."

• 12:30Speaker 03

  But while AM broadcast listeners burned the midnight oil to marvel at all the faraway stations, there was one group of people who weren't so surprised by radio's ability to go long. They were the amateur radio operators, what you might know as ham radio. Basically, guys who weren't broadcasting but were tinkering with radio equipment just to chat, one-to-one, like long-distance walkie-talkies.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  Back in the days before broadcasting, almost all radio transmission was one-to-one. The radio waves were mostly used by ship captains or the military and the hams, who were just having fun. But in World War I, the US government got worried about interference on those AM airwaves, so they eventually assigned specific frequencies for ships, for the military, and for those meddling amateurs.

• 13:20Speaker 07

  They were kicked down to the waves that were thought utterly worthless, short waves.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  Back then, people thought the short waves with short wavelengths—picture a really tight, squiggly line—just wouldn't go very far. Even Guglielmo Marconi, the father of radio, thought that longer wavelengths would mean longer distances. But the amateurs weren't put off.

• 13:43Speaker 07

  They began experimenting with them.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  And as it turned out, the short waves weren't the short end of the stick.

• 13:50Speaker 07

  They were getting really far. They were getting stations in Australia and New Zealand, or stations in England and France.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  For the most part, reception was clearer at night, but it didn't have to be dark to go the distance.

• 14:03Speaker 07

  Amateurs reported spanning distances as great as 10,000 miles, which was unthinkable. Australia and New Zealand were described in the fall of 1923 as a bedlam of Yankee signals.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  The amateurs proved something huge. Shortwave could do round-the-clock what AM could only do at night. It could use the ionosphere as a springboard.

• 14:30Speaker 03

  And this changed the game for AM broadcasters who wanted their station to reach more people. In 1923, Pittsburgh's KDKA, the country's first commercial radio station, they got their station on shortwave and reached as far as South Africa. New shortwave stations started up in Switzerland and Japan and Venezuela. And with the scars of World War I still fresh, this burgeoning international medium was a source of hope.

• 14:58Speaker 08

  There was a lot of utopian discourse around radio that, you know, having allowed people to communicate across all these borders, you know, would there be no more wars?

• 15:08Speaker 03

  Michelle Helms is a retired professor of media studies who has written a lot about radio.

• 15:13Speaker 08

  It would, you know, solve all kinds of problems. Just a huge enthusiasm over the possibilities of shortwave as a medium.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  Entire magazines were devoted to helping people discover new shows on international radio. Listeners would write to far-flung stations, and the stations would reply with these beautifully decorated cards branded with the station name and maybe some imagery that evoked the national culture of wherever they were broadcasting from. They're called QSL cards. It's international code for "I confirm receipt of your transmission." Shortwave listeners around the world amassed collections of these ornate cards, tangible evidence of their part in an ethereal global community. By the late 1930s, almost all home radio sets had AM and shortwave settings.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  But the piecenic aspirations for shortwave didn't last.

• 16:07Speaker 08

  It was the first time that human beings had had it in their power to be heard around the world, and a lot of governments figured out that this could be a really powerful tool for the common good, but also, of course, for the waging of wars.

• 16:22Speaker 03

  Lots of the world's governments had taken to the shortwaves by the 1930s, but no nation used them quite like Germany.

• 16:30Speaker 04

  This is Germany calling. We are going to present tonight a vocal play entitled "Visions of Invasion."

• 16:38Speaker 03

  Ziesn, Germany's state-run shortwave service, had spent years building a large following in America and around the world, playing things like orchestral music. But in time, they started pushing out Nazi propaganda, tailored for specific countries in 12 different languages. And with its own festering Nazi movement, the US was a key target.

• 17:00Speaker 08

  You had people like Axis Sally.

• 17:02Speaker 04

  This is Berlin calling. And I'd just like to say that from Berlin call, it pays to listen.

• 17:09Speaker 08

  She was an American, living in Berlin. She became the first American woman to be convicted of treason. After the war, that she was broadcasting into the United States on short wave.

• 17:20Speaker 04

  Women of America, waiting for the one who laughs. Thinking of a husband who is being sacrificed by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

• 17:30Speaker 08

  You might have heard of a person called Lord Ha Ha.

• 17:33Speaker 09

  The great exodus from Britain is well underway.

• 17:36Speaker 08

  He was a British man named William Joyce, who was working in Germany, broadcasting on their short wave service.

• 17:43Speaker 09

  The rich and affluent are removing themselves and their valuables as fast as they can.

• 17:50Speaker 03

  There was also a big band called Charlie and his Orchestra, run by the German Ministry of Propaganda. They'd take popular big band and swing songs and add or change lyrics to berate Roosevelt or denigrate Jewish people.

• 18:02Speaker 06

  All the Jewish family has the brain new heir. He's their joy heaven sent. And they proudly present Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones.

• 18:15Speaker 08

  Yes, sir. They were trying to persuade Americans that, you know, that the Germans had the right side in the war and that it was crazy for them to fight.

• 18:24Speaker 06

  Non-intervention, how he shows it. His decision to send troops along.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  The US government had banned all editorializing on domestic radio stations during the war, making it illegal for Americans to promote the Nazi cause on the AM airwaves. But the feds didn't have any control over short wave broadcasts beaming in from Germany. So the content was still there for the many Americans who wanted to listen. Journalists at CBS and NBC launched counter-offensives.

• 18:57Speaker 07

  The networks had what were called shortwave listening posts in New York.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  Susan Douglas again.

• 19:03Speaker 07

  And they had people who were fluent in foreign languages, monitoring international shortwave broadcasts.

• 19:11Speaker 03

  And then they turned their findings into entertainment, like the hit CBS radio series hosted by a popular detective novelist named Rex Stout. It was called "Our Secret Weapon."

• 19:23Speaker 10

  The truth is a weapon that isn't secret in our country, but it's a big secret to the people who live in Germany, Japan, and Italy. Our enemies don't have this weapon. They don't dare let their people know the truth.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  Every week, radio sleuth Stout debunked enemy shortwave propaganda.

• 19:39Speaker 11

  First, a broadcast of the official German news agency on August 2nd.

• 19:43Speaker 12

  The meeting between Churchill and Stalin was very excited and hysterical. It assumed that to man-

• 19:48Speaker 11

  On August 8th, being of England.

• 19:50Speaker 12

  This morning Churchill shook hands with Stalin at the Kremlin.

• 19:53Speaker 11

  As we now know, Churchill actually arrived in Moscow on August 12th. You can't beat that for a scoop.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  The rest of the Allies were also busy fighting Germany's shortwave radio propaganda. It was during World War II that the BBC ramped up what would come to be known as the World Service on shortwave.

• 20:12Speaker 13

  This is London calling in the overseas service of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  They broadcast news to the world with just a bit of pro-ally spin.

• 20:22Speaker 13

  And the Danes have already had a taste of what German protection means. A better word for it would be plunder, for the Germans are seizing goods and property at will.

• 20:32Speaker 03

  And in early 1942, the US followed suit. The federal government debuted its shortwave radio service, The Voice of America, with an in-language broadcast to Germany.

• 20:42Speaker 14

  Hier spricht eine Stimme aus- This is a voice speaking from America. Our voices are coming to you from New York, across the Atlantic Ocean to London.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  The Voice of America started as a government-run radio show, and they partnered with networks like NBC and CBS to get it out worldwide. NBC and CBS were already broadcasting overseas via shortwave.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  But shortwave quickly proved so central to the war effort that the US government did something unprecedented. They nationalized all the roughly one dozen shortwave stations broadcasting from US soil, filling the international airwaves with approved broadcasts.

• 21:25Speaker 14

  Daily at this time, we shall speak to you about America and the war. The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  And for the most part, they did that. If a bit selectively. Michelle Helms.

• 21:41Speaker 08

  They were walking a fine line between willful propaganda and sort of putting a good spin on things.

• 21:48Speaker 03

  As the US sent more troops into battle, it used shortwave to boost morale.

• 21:53Speaker 07

  They began to transmit entertainment programming via shortwave to the troops.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  Susan Douglas again.

• 22:01Speaker 07

  And this was so important during holidays like Christmas and New Year's, when there you are, freezing and alone and scared.

• 22:09Speaker 08

  They had programs that would allow troops to speak to people back at home, you know? Oh, here's Mailbag, and we have letters from soldiers, and they would read them aloud.

• 22:18Speaker 07

  Dear Mother, tonight I'm very lonely. I've never written that before, and maybe it's a shock to you. And then again, maybe you've read between the lines and have done it all along.

• 22:28Speaker 08

  There was a very popular program called G.I. Jive with Jill.

• 22:33Speaker 04

  Here's Jill and the G.I. Jive. Hi, you fellas. This is G.I. Jill with G.I. Jive.

• 22:40Speaker 07

  You know, the World Series. 1942 World Series broadcast. You gotta have the World Series.

• 22:48Speaker 08

  The Voice of America was very highly respected, and many people think that it, you know, did a great deal to help us win the war.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  By the end of the Second World War, the Voice of America blanketed much of the world. It ran in about 40 languages. But they were about to get lots of company on the airwaves. Because in the Cold War, the shortwaves exploded.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  That's coming up after the break.

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• 26:15Speaker 03

  This is On The Media. I'm Katie Thornton, host of OTM's Divided Dial series. We're right in the middle of episode one of our second season. Before the break, we heard about how groups like the VOA dominated the short waves at the end of World War II. But during the Cold War, short wave would become so much more.

• 26:35Speaker 09

  This is Tehran, Radio Iran.

• 26:37Speaker 13

  The Australian Forces Radio.

• 26:39Speaker 04

  The heart of Namdakht in Libya. You are tuned to the North American service of Radio Moscow.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  The VOA, the BBC, the Soviet Union, China, Egypt, Iran, Argentina, and so many others were on short wave, broadcasting their national identity to the world in stories and song. They were joined by newly decolonized nations like Libya and Ghana, whose leaders saw the short waves as a way to promote their independence and to fuel an international anti-colonial movement. But the global superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, were two of the most dominant voices on short wave. And short wave became one of the most ferocious battlegrounds of the Cold War.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  At that for the Soviet Union was Radio Moscow. Founded in 1929, the USSR's government-run network broadcast in over 70 languages. With news, propaganda, and human interest stories, it offered a Soviet alternative to the BBC and the VOA.

• 27:39Speaker 15

  America hit a new high in crime, and according to FBI reports to the president, nearly half of the criminals were young people. The causes of this menacing situation are well-known. The pornographic pictures distributed among adolescents and the exhibitions of abstract paintings and statues that say nothing to either the heart or the mind.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  The BBC and the VOA were expanding too, sending more and more coverage over the Iron Curtain. But the United States government wanted to reach people in Eastern Europe with messages that weren't so obviously propaganda as the literal "Voice of America." So, they lied.

• 28:19Speaker 16

  Radio Free Europe gets through with the truth every day.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Debuting in 1950, Radio Free Europe was a flamethrowing anti-communist shortwave network.

• 28:29Speaker 16

  Into the closed communist countries of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania go the facts the people are not allowed to hear. The truth. The truth that helps them hold on to the will and the drive.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  It was portrayed as grassroots, run by emigres and exiles. And it did employ those folks. But secretly, it was funded by the CIA, which was busy meddling in global politics and supporting pro-capitalist coups during these Cold War years.

• 29:03Speaker 03

  Staff at Radio Free Europe launched weather balloons into the Eastern Bloc and airdropped over 300 million leaflets, instructing listeners on how to tune in.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  The Soviet Union did not like any of this. They spent tons of money trying to drown out Western broadcasts. They'd flood the shortwaves with ear-splitting noises that listeners recalled sounding like a buzzsaw or a machine gun.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  Sometimes the battle went beyond the airwaves, like when a Czechoslovakian double agent poisoned the saltshakers at Radio Free Europe's Munich office. That plot was foiled before any of the 1,200-plus employees sat down for lunch. Years later, a Radio Free Europe journalist died after allegedly being stabbed with a poison-tipped umbrella. But these US-run shortwave stations weren't just beaming out journalism.

• 29:58Speaker 17

  Willis Conover speaking. This is the Voice of America Jazz Hour.

• 30:06Speaker 17

  The music of jazz parallels the freedom that we have in America. Something that not every country has.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  In the 1950s and 60s, music, especially jazz, was a key component in the US government's shortwave campaign.

• 30:26Speaker 18

  This is the voice of America.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  The federal government ran a jazz ambassador program that sent musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington on tours around the world. They focused on countries that the Soviet Union was also hoping to win over. All the while, though, many of these very same musicians faced racism and segregation at home. And on the shortwaves, Radio Moscow and others were ready to exploit this contradiction.

• 30:56Speaker 19

  The revolutionary people of Cuba sympathize with all people who struggle for social justice.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  In the early 1960s, Cuba's government-run service, Radio Havana, regularly beamed this show, "Radio Free Dixie," up to the United States.

• 31:10Speaker 19

  It is in this spirit that we proudly allocate the following hour in an act of solidarity, peace, and friendship with our oppressed North American brothers. Radio Free Dixie invites you to listen to the free voice of the South.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  "Radio Free Dixie" was hosted by US black power activist Robert F. Williams. He was on the lam in Cuba, fleeing drummed-up charges that were later dropped. And he broadcast a perspective that couldn't be found in the mainstream US media.

• 31:40Speaker 20

  One Negro goes to the White House as a member of the president's cabinet, while another is gunned down like a wild dog for using a white folks toilet. It should be more than clear to us that if we are ever going to be free, we must liberate ourselves.

• 32:03Speaker 03

  Outlets like Radio Moscow and Radio Havana won followers around the world with their mix of propaganda and just factual reporting on civil rights abuses in the US. Governments saw winning people over on shortwave as a key path to winning the Cold War. So even after the CIA's secretive role at Radio Free Europe was revealed in the early 70s, not much changed. In fact, Congress increased its budget, and they kept pumping out news and tunes. Increasingly, they played the defiant and oh-so-American sound of rock music, which was heavily censored in the USSR and Eastern Bloc. On the US's government-run, taxpayer-funded shortwave stations, they broadcast groups

• 32:47Speaker 03

  like Metallica and Motley Crue to listeners around the world. By the early 1980s, the US government's shortwave stations reached an estimated 80 million people each week. It took tons of manpower, and it was a huge infrastructure project, too. The government had miles upon miles of fields filled with antennas. But one man didn't think that was enough.

• 33:20Speaker 21

  We're as far behind the Soviets and their allies in international broadcasting today as we were in space when they launched Sputnik in 1957.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  On the home front, Ronald Reagan had vetoed public broadcasting budgets and overseen a massive deregulation of the airwaves that allowed for big businesses and conservative and religious broadcasters to dominate AM and FM radio. You know, season one of The Divided Dial. But on international radio, on shortwave, the great deregulator had no qualms about spending taxpayer dollars. He poured public money into the VOA and Radio Free Europe.

• 33:56Speaker 21

  I'm pleased to call on Director Wick and Minister Filali to sign this agreement, an important step towards strengthening the signal of the voice of America.

• 34:07Speaker 03

  Reagan's administrators wrung their hands over what to do about rock music. Lots of them didn't believe it represented the best of Western culture. But after long internal debates, they decided to keep the rebellious racket going on the shortwaves.

• 34:24Speaker 03

  Meanwhile, on the journalism side, Reagan led a shakeup by sidestepping one of the Voice of America's long-held tenets: the idea that a free press is the US's best advertisement. Sure, that idea hadn't always been perfectly executed, but Reagan opted instead for more heavy-handed anti-communist propaganda. Reagan's VOA ran explicit editorials on behalf of the administration. Many longtime leaders resigned, replaced by more amenable colleagues, including Richard W. Carlson, father of right-wing bloviator Tucker Carlson. And it was Reagan who launched a costly new shortwave service targeting Cuba with hard-line anti-communist messages.

• 35:06Speaker 21

  "Today, I'm appealing to the Congress: Help us get the truth through. Support our proposal for a new radio station, Radio Marti, for broadcasting to Cuba."

• 35:17Speaker 03

  While public broadcasting floundered at home, government-subsidized propaganda and bad-hair metal reverberated on shortwave, from the US to the world. In its first seven decades of life, shortwave transformed from an idealistic experiment in global cooperation into a hardened government tool of information warfare. And then, in the late 1980s, much of the medium's reason for being crumbled.

• 35:50Speaker 22

  "In Eastern Europe, which the Soviets had held by force since World War II, Mikhail Gorbachev said that Moscow would no longer interfere." "Serious fighting begins in the early morning, a staccato of machine-gun bursts punctuated by cannon fire." "In the last weeks and months, we've seen one Communist Party after the other in Eastern Europe knocked off its perch by the people."

• 36:12Speaker 03

  The Cold War was over. On this medium that seemed almost tailor-made for propaganda, there was vacancy, airtime for rent. And in the US, a particular group of people was ready to snatch it up.

• 36:32Speaker 04

  You must form your militia unit. No heed to the federal government, which is a counterfeit enemy foreign government.

• 36:40Speaker 23

  Are you a white woman such as myself who is sick of being harassed and tormented? Call Aryan Nation for a wider, brighter America.

• 36:48Speaker 24

  We don't want to have to kill you. We hope to not have to kill you, but we can kill you. And if need be, we will kill you. Well, what are a few lives in the grand scheme of liberty?

• 36:56Speaker 25

  I'm sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  These stations and the programs grew and they took over. They dominated.

• 37:08Speaker 26

  What is associated in the public's mind with shortwave? It's no longer the BBC World Service. Now it's the guys who helped Timothy McVeigh bomb a federal building.

• 37:20Speaker 03

  Next time on The Divided Dial, it's the shortwave story you've never heard. The private citizens who took over a fringe medium with a fringe message and used it to build a movement that fundamentally changed mainstream US politics.

• 37:41Roman Mars?

  Katie Thornton, it's so nice to have you back on the show. I love that episode.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, Roman. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me back.

• 37:48Roman Mars?

  I'm so excited to hear the rest of this series. So what made you want to do a series on shortwave radio at this moment? Which is not the peak of shortwave radio usage, but it's something that is so fascinating and so cool.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, it's definitely not the peak of of shortwave radio usage. The internet really sort of took a bite out of it. But I was really interested in shortwave radio in part because I love radio and I had never really heard much about shortwave. I started volunteering at FM radio stations when I was in my teens. I worked at them throughout my teens and twenties. I obviously still make radio today. Like, I love radio. I love what it can do. I love that it moves through the air at the speed of light and it magically shows up in a box in your kitchen or your car or wherever. I think it's just sort of this magical thing. And yet I had never really heard about shortwave. And a friend of mine, after the first season of The Divided Dial came out, a friend of mine was like, hey, do you know about this station?

• 38:45Speaker 02

  It's like... Really powerful, it reaches every continent. It's like a shortwave radio station. And I remember thinking like, shortwave, like, is that still a thing? That's like that Cold War medium, right? Like, that's the only context I had for it. And so I really wanted to find out what the history was, what it's like today, and some weird stuff that's gonna be coming up in the future on the shortwaves.

• 39:05Roman Mars?

  So one of the things you mentioned very briefly in the episode we just heard is something I'm completely fascinated by, and that is QSL cards. So first of all, can you describe what a QSL card is again for people who are unfamiliar?

• 39:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. A QSL card is almost like a combination thank you card and postcard that broadcasters send out. So they really started sort of in the late teens and early twenties when amateur radio operators were first starting to send their signals, you know, across the country, across national borders, across the world. And they wanted to know like how far they were reaching. Natural curiosity, you've got this new technology, you're like bouncing it off the ionosphere, you're like, where can you hear me? And so these people who were out there on the shortwaves, they would basically say, hey, if you're hearing this, please write me a letter, please tell me where you are, please tell me what you're listening on, and like, what did you think of the program?

• 40:01Speaker 02

  Did it come through pretty clear? Things like that. So the listeners would send these letters, and the people who were putting the transmissions out there would send them these beautifully decorated cards as sort of thank you notes back. The broadcaster got information about just how far their signal was reaching, and the listener got to sort of amass this collection that really showed off, like, here's how good I am at listening to the radio. I have all these cards from all over the world, and they're all incredible.

• 40:30Roman Mars?

  So before we talk about the sort of design of the physical cards themselves, what does QSL actually stand for?

• 40:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, great question, one that I had as well, and was slightly disappointed by the answer. It's not an abbreviation, it's just part of this what's called Q code. It's an international code that's basically an assortment of three letters, Q followed by two other letters, and then they mean something. Like if you're transmitting in Morse code, QSL, and on shortwave, QSL means, I confirm receipt of your transmission. And so it's sort of like a shorthand for the same way you would hear like on CB radio, truckers communicating with one another like 10-4, things like that. Yeah, it's like a little language.

• 41:13Roman Mars?

  So I've seen collections of these QSL cards and they're really beautiful. So could you describe to the audience what they look like?

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, they really are so beautiful. I mean, some of them are quite simple. They have like your handle for the amateur radio operators in particular. They'll have like, you know, you have a series of letters and numbers that you go by on the radio. It's like your licensed name. And so some of them are just sort of that, just that plain text. But some people would decorate their cards super beautifully, you know, something personal to them or personal from where they were broadcasting from. But the people who like really went wild with the decorations were the broadcast stations. So on radio, you have like one to one transmission. That would be a lot of amateur operators. They're just trying to make contact like from one person to another person across a vast distance.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  But in the, starting in the twenties, you started to have broadcasting on short wave. So that's like from one to many. It's actually like a term that early broadcasters borrowed from agriculture, like when you broadcast seeds, you basically like scatter seeds all over the place. So you're just trying to hit like as many people in the case of radio broadcasting as possible. And so after, there were some early AM stations that ended up transmitting their signal on short wave and getting into different countries. And a lot of these stations, especially by the thirties and the forties, were owned by governments. And so a lot of the broadcast stations, a lot of which were run by governments, they like went wild with the decorations on the QSLs.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  But yeah, I mean, these stations would really, would really sort of use the QSL cards as an opportunity to paint a picture of how they wanted their, their home country to be perceived and understood sort of on the global stage.

• 42:59Roman Mars?

  Yeah. And they're like, they're kind of like tourist picture postcards. I mean, they have like maps and they have, you know, highlight, highlighted features of the landscape and things like that. They're really beautiful.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  Absolutely. They're so beautiful. They are like, like postcards. Like imagine if the, the official government tourism bureau was like, we will make a postcard to represent everything about our country in one, in one image. That's sort of what they were trying to do with the QSLs was almost sort of like an element of this broader soft power campaign. Like, how do we want to broadcast ourself not just in sound, but in imagery to the rest of the world? So there's like beautiful maps, there's food items, there's like clothing that is specific to regions. There was a lot of like architectural feats would maybe be depicted sometimes in an artistic style that was specific to that country. Like they're colorful, they're beautiful, the fonts are amazing to watch change over time. One of the things

• 43:55Speaker 02

  that I love about these QSLs is how many of them like have radio imagery. Like they're all so excited about the fact that they're using radio, especially the ones from like the 30s, 40s and 50s. They all have that sort of early radiographic of the lightning bolts, which to me is so cool because it was like, how do you, how do you demonstrate the power and the like excitement of this invisible thing? It's like, obviously it's got to be lightning bolts.

• 44:19Roman Mars?

  And so what is the status of QSL cards today? Like, is this still something people do? I imagine they're collector's items because the world of shortwave is a very, I don't know, it's a very like active subculture of very dedicated people.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely it is. Absolutely it is. And it is still active. Like certainly they're collector's items. These are like beautiful historic objects, really. But there are still QSL cards that are going out today. Like I talked to a ton of people, a ton of broadcasters, a ton of listeners. And I was at a station where I was going through the QSL letters, you know, the initial letter where somebody's asking for a card. I was going through them with the station owner. And they had gotten letters from all over the place, you know, from the US and far beyond. And so, you know, I was going through the stack of letters where it's like, here's what I heard, here's how the reception was. And then in turn, he would mail back the station's QSL. You know, it's down from its

• 45:19Speaker 02

  heyday, just like a lot of things in, in the shortwave world are, but it's still very much happening today, which is really neat.

• 45:26Roman Mars?

  So before we wrap up, could you tell me a little bit more about the whole series and where it's headed from here?

• 45:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the second episode is dropping in May 14th. This next episode is really going to dive into the pretty little-known role that shortwave radio played in the rise of the American right, especially sort of in the 90s and into the 2000s. We're also going to go visit a very particular, kind of peculiar, station operating out of the US, one of the most powerful broadcasting facilities on the planet that I did not know existed until quite recently, and play some very interesting material. And then we sort of end the series, the fourth episode, by talking about what's going on in the shortwaves today and what's happening in the future on the shortwaves. Because as I talk to people, I learned that there is a battle going on on the shortwaves

• 46:16Speaker 02

  right now that is really representative, I think says a lot about how we value or don't value our public airwaves.

• 46:23Roman Mars?

  Well, I'm so glad that the series is back. The first series of The Divided Dial was amazing. It won a Peabody Award. And now I'm so excited to hear the second season. And it's all going to be released on On The Media's podcast feed and on the airwaves. So thank you so much for being back with us.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me. It was great to talk with you about this.

• 46:47Roman Mars?

  The Divided Dial was created by Katie Thornton and WNYC's On The Media, edited by OTM's executive producer, Katja Rogers, with music and sound design by Jared Paul. The series is also supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. 99PI's executive producer is Kathy Too, Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director, Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Joe Rosenberg, Martin Gonzalez, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, LaShma Dawn, Swan Riel, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the

• 47:28Roman Mars?

  Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California. We are all over Blue Sky and our Discord server is thriving. We'll have links to those, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

• 47:59Speaker 27

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