[music]

Kari Lake: We are going to be slimming this agency down, way down. It's going on an Ozempic diet.

Brooke Gladstone: The Trump administration has been gutting the broadcasting service Voice of America. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Republicans once wanted VOA to be as big as possible.

Ronald Reagan: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Radio Free Europe also risks losing funding. A journalist who spent time in a Russian prison for her work with it grapples with the fallout.

Alsu Kurmasheva: I'll be talking to the families of our imprisoned journalists these days. What am I going to tell them? That their loved ones are imprisoned for nothing.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. The Voice of America is still alive, but just barely. This month, Michael Abramowitz, the director of the VOA, was fired after refusing to accept what he called an illegal reassignment to a lower position. Abramowitz has been an outspoken critic of the Trump administration's moves to dismantle the government broadcasting service. Leading those efforts has been Kari Lake, the former TV host, now a special advisor to the United States Agency for Global Media, which oversees the service.

Kari Lake: We are going to be slimming this agency down, way down. It's going on an Ozempic diet. The rot is so bad, it's like having a rotten fish and trying to find a little portion you can eat. It's unsalvageable right now.

Brooke Gladstone: It's not the first time the VOA has been explicitly politicized. Ronald Reagan did it back in the '80s. In fact, over the past century, radio has played a vital role in much of the nation's engagements in soft power. That story about the role AM radio played throughout the last century is how we launched the second season of The Divided Dial, our award-winning series hosted by reporter Katie Thornton. With the VOA back in the news, we thought it was definitely worth a revisit. Here's Katie.

David Goren: The Zenith Trans-Oceanics.

Katie Thornton: Oh, this is such a cool radio with the little-- Last summer, I met up with a journalist and radio fan named David Goren.

David Goren: These are like beautiful radios for--

Katie Thornton: 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.

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

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

David Goren: In the seventh grade, I became the expert on the next five-year plan in the Soviet Union, the economic plan.

Katie Thornton: Today, he's part of the Library of Congress's Radio Preservation Task Force. Together, on a sweaty Thursday afternoon last July, we sat down to hear what we could find on the shortwave dial today. Just like when David was a kid, we heard lots of government-run stations like Radio Martí.

David Goren: The US broadcasting news and information to Cuba.

Katie Thornton: Voice of Islamic Republic of Iran.

David Goren: China Radio International, broadcasting in Spanish. Let's see, anything else strong?

Broadcaster: The Voice of Italy, broadcasting in Italian.

Katie Thornton: On other days, David has picked up English language shows from North Korea.

David Goren: They have very strident military stuff.

Katie Thornton: And news from Cuba.

David Goren: This is Radio Rebelde, Radio Rebel. It goes back to the revolution.

Katie Thornton: On the shortwaves, the global tussle for influence plays out 24/7. We didn't just hear news and propaganda.

David Goren: Well, let's just go up the decks. The topic is in Morse code.

Katie Thornton: There were beeps and bloops, coded messages sent between amateur radio operators or between government officials who used the shortwaves to send military data or secret instructions.

David Goren: Let's see what else we have.

Katie Thornton: Some of what we heard just sounded like normal radio with lots of music and preaching.

Preacher 1: Be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might against the wiles of the devil.

Preacher 2: It was hidden just to hide the meaning and the power of the divine name that is inherent in the name of Yah.

Katie Thornton: That's an End Times ministry that also preaches that the earth is flat.

David Goren: Which is very interesting because shortwave radio wouldn't propagate in a flat earth, but details, details.

Katie Thornton: In just about an hour of surfing the shortwaves, we heard prayer and propaganda, news and conspiracy theories, so many languages and some really decent jams from all over the globe. I felt like I had been welcomed into a club that was somehow secret and yet right there for anyone to join. I know it's cliché, but there was something magical about tuning into the world, training my ear to listen through the crackle, hearing the distance.

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. What broadcasters did with that information completely altered the trajectory of the 20th century.

[music]

Katie Thornton: This is Season 2 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 1, I investigated how right-wing talk took over AM and FM radio. In all my years of radio research, I'd never really learned about shortwave radio before. 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 1. It's not, but I, and I think you, love the medium of radio.

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 ever did. 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. 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. Let's get back to the story.

[music]

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

Broadcaster: Dana Larson and Mrs. Lester Larson, happy birthday.

Katie Thornton: Signals reached up to 50, maybe 75 miles.

Speaker 9: By the way, down Texas way, your home statement. Think about it, will you now?

Speaker 10: I will.

Speaker 11: Ma Taylor up there in Lake Geneva says happy birthday to us. It's her birthday, too.

Katie Thornton: At night, those listening at home noticed something strange. 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-

Speaker 12: Edison Studios, WAAM, located at 1 Bond--

Katie Thornton: -would hear stations from Chicago. A listener in Kansas might hear an opera or a boxing match from the East Coast. After dark, it was like the world cracked open and distant stations faded in and out on ghostly, mysterious winds. 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. Of course, there was an explanation for these voices in the night.

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

Katie Thornton: 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.

Scientist: The radio messages leave the antenna as electromagnetic waves and travel with the speed of light.

Katie Thornton: 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. When you shoot out an AM signal, there's another thing that happens, almost a by-product.

Scientist: Radio waves are sent out in all directions.

Katie Thornton: It's called a sky wave. The sky wave goes up into the atmosphere.

Susan Douglas: 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.

Katie Thornton: 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. In the daylight, those layers are where radio waves go to die.

Susan Douglas: 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.

Katie Thornton: At night, these sky waves, the by-product 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.

Scientist: 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.

Katie Thornton: 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.

Susan Douglas: 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--

Katie Thornton: 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. 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.

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. 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.

Susan Douglas: They were kicked down to the waves that were thought utterly worthless: shortwaves.

Katie Thornton: Back then, people thought the shortwaves 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.

Susan Douglas: They began experimenting with them.

Katie Thornton: As it turned out, the shortwaves weren't the short end of the stick.

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

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

Susan Douglas: 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.

Katie Thornton: 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. 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. With the scars of World War I still fresh, this burgeoning international medium was a source of hope.

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

Katie Thornton: Michele Hilmes is a retired professor of Media Studies who has written a lot about radio.

Michele Hilmes: It would solve all kinds of problems. Just a huge enthusiasm over the possibilities of shortwave as a medium.

Katie Thornton: 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, but the peacenik aspirations for shortwave didn't last.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, the shortwaves go to war.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. We're back with the second part of this episode of The Divided Dial that we first aired in May. We pick up at the moment that the shortwaves went from utopian dreamscape to weapon of war. Here's Katie Thornton.

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

Axis Sally: This is Germany calling. We are going to present tonight a radio play entitled Vision of Invasion.

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

Katie Thornton: You had people like Axis Sally.

Axis Sally: This is Berlin calling. I'd just like to say that when Berlin calls, it pays to listen.

Katie Thornton: 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 shortwave.

Axis Sally: Women of America, waiting for the one you love, thinking of a husband who is being sacrificed by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Katie Thornton: You might have heard of a person called Lord Haw-Haw.

Lord Haw-Haw: The great exodus from Britain is well underway.

Katie Thornton: He was a British man named William Joyce who was working in Germany, broadcasting on their shortwave service.

Lord Haw-Haw: The rich and affluent are removing themselves from their valuables as fast as they can.

Katie Thornton: 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.

[MUSIC - Charlie and his Orchestra: FDR Jones]

Katie Thornton: They were trying to persuade Americans that the Germans had the right side in the war and that it was crazy for them to fight.

[MUSIC - Charlie and his Orchestra: FDR Jones]

Katie Thornton: 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. The feds didn't have any control over shortwave 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 counteroffensives.

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

Katie Thornton: Susan Douglas again.

Susan Douglas: They had people who were fluent in foreign languages monitoring international shortwave broadcasts.

Katie Thornton: 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.

Rex Stout: 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.

Katie Thornton: Every week, radio sleuth Stout debunked enemy shortwave propaganda.

Rex Stout: First, a broadcast of the official German News Agency on August 2nd.

Reporter: The meeting between Churchill and Stalin was very excited and hysterical. It assumed a dramatic--

Rex Stout: On August 8th, beams of England.

Reporter: This morning, Churchill shook hands with Stalin at the Kremlin.

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

Katie Thornton: 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.

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

Katie Thornton: They broadcast news to the world with just a bit of pro-Allies' spin.

Rex Stout: 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.

Katie Thornton: 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.

Broadcaster: This is a voice speaking from America. Our voices are coming to you from New York, across the Atlantic Ocean to London, from where they are--

Katie Thornton: 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. 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.

Broadcaster: 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.

Katie Thornton: For the most part, they did that, if a bit selectively. Michele Hilmes.

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

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

Susan Douglas: They began to transmit entertainment programming via shortwave to the troops.

Katie Thornton: Susan Douglas again.

Susan Douglas: This was so important during holidays like Christmas and New Year's, when there you are, freezing and alone and scared.

Michele Hilmes: They had programs that would allow troops to speak to people back at home. "Oh, here's mailbag, and we have letters from soldiers." They would read them aloud.

Letter Reader: Dear Mother, tonight I'm very lonely. I've never written that before, and maybe it's a shock to you. Then again, maybe you've read between the lines and have known it all along.

Michele Hilmes: There was a very popular program called GI Jive with Jill.

[music]

Gi Jill: Hi, you fellas. This is GI Jill with GI Jive.

Susan Douglas: The World Series. [laughs]

Broadcaster: The 1942 World Series broadcast.

Susan Douglas: You got to have the World Series.

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

Katie Thornton: By the end of the Second World War, the Voice of America blanketed much of the world. It ran in about 40 languages. During the Cold War, shortwave would become so much more.

Speaker 20: Radio PK.

Speaker 21: This is Tehran, Radio Iran.

Speaker 22: The Australian Force, Australia.

Speaker 23: [foreign language]

Speaker 24: You are tuned to the North American Service of Radio Moscow.

Katie Thornton: The VOA, the BBC, the Soviet Union, China, Egypt, Iran, Argentina, and so many others were on shortwave, 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 shortwaves as a way to promote their independence and to fuel an international anti-colonial movement.

The global superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, were two of the most dominant voices on shortwave. Shortwave became one of the most ferocious battlegrounds of the Cold War. At bat 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.

Speaker 25: 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.

Katie Thornton: The BBC and the VOA were expanding, too, sending more and more coverage over the Iron Curtain. 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.

Speaker 26: Radio Free Europe gets through with the truth every day.

Katie Thornton: Debuting in 1950, Radio Free Europe was a flame-throwing anti-communist shortwave network.

Speaker 26: 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 onto the will and the drive--

Katie Thornton: 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.

Speaker 27: [German language]

Katie Thornton: 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.

Speaker 28: Radio Free Europe calling Czechoslovakia.

Katie Thornton: 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. Sometimes the battle went beyond the airwaves, like when a Czechoslovakian double agent poisoned the salt shakers 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. These US-run shortwave stations weren't just beaming out journalism.

Willis Conover: Willis Conover speaking. This is the Voice of America Jazz Hour. The music of jazz parallels the freedom that we have in America, something that not every country has.

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

Louis Armstrong: This is the Voice of America.

Katie Thornton: 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.

Speaker 31: The revolutionary people of Cuba sympathize with all people who struggle for social justice.

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

Speaker 31: 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.

Katie Thornton: 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. He broadcast a perspective that couldn't be found in the mainstream US media.

Robert F. Williams: 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 folk's toilet. It should be more than clear to us that if we are ever going to be free, we must liberate ourselves.

Katie Thornton: Outlets like Radio Moscow and Radio Havana want 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. 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 station, they broadcast groups like Metallica and Mötley Crüe to listeners around the world.

[MUSIC - Mötley Crüe: Kickstart My Heart]

Katie Thornton: 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.

Ronald Reagan: 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.

Katie Thornton: 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, Season 1 of The Divided Dial. 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.

Ronald Reagan: 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.

Katie Thornton: 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. After long internal debates, they decided to keep the rebellious racket going on the shortwaves. 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. It was Reagan who launched a costly new shortwave service targeting Cuba with hardline anti-communist messages.

Ronald Reagan: Today, I'm appealing to the Congress, help us get the truth through, to support our proposal for a new radio station, Radio Martí, for broadcasting to Cuba.

Katie Thornton: While public broadcasting floundered at home, government-subsidized propaganda and bad hair metal reverberated on shortwaves 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. Then, in the late 1980s, much of the medium's reason for being crumbled.

Speaker 33: In the last weeks and months, we've seen one Communist party, FDR, released in Europe, knocked off its perch by the people.

Katie Thornton: 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.

Speaker 34: You must form your militia unit. Pay no heed to the federal government, which is a counterfeit enemy foreign government.

Speaker 35: Are you a white woman, such as myself, who is sick of being harassed and tormented? Call Aryan Nations for a whiter, brighter America.

Speaker 36: We don't want to have to kill you, we hope to not have to kill you, but we can kill you. If need be, we will kill you. Well, what are a few lives in the grand scheme of liberty?

Brooke Gladstone: The airways became a haven for right-wing hate speech. In the early '90s, Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City put the spotlight on the growing militia movement on shortwave radio. For that story and for the rest of Season 2, and indeed Season 1, search for The Divided Dial in your podcast app of choice. This is On the Media.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. In March, on a day dubbed Bloody Saturday, journalists at Radio Free Asia learned their work may soon be coming to an end.

Bay Fang: We were sent a grant termination letter, effectively cutting off all of our funding.

Micah Loewinger: Bay Fang, President of Radio Free Asia, or RFA. A few months later, the organization cut nearly 300 jobs. RFA had been producing boots-on-the-ground reporting for 30 years in countries where few, if any, independent media outlets remain. In 2017, reporters for the RFA Uyghur Service, the world's only independent Uyghur language outlet, were the first to uncover clues of the now-infamous detention camps in Xinjiang in northwest China.

Bay Fang: One of our reporters found this out because he was calling around and just amazed at how many people were saying their relatives had been rounded up. He broke the story, and then that was picked up by all sorts of different media.

Micah Loewinger: And by members of Congress.

Speaker 38: It goes on talking about ethnic Uyghurs held in political reeducation camps. I'm going to put quotes around that, because they're not re-education camps. They're concentration camps.

Micah Loewinger: For their trenchant work, some RFA journalists have paid a steep price.

Gulchehra Hoja: I received call from our neighbor's daughter.

Micah Loewinger: Gulchehra Hoja, a Uyghur American reporter at RFA.

Gulchehra Hoja: She told me all my relatives arrested because of me, my work.

Micah Loewinger: Four other Uyghur service reporters have had close family members arrested and possibly sent to detention camps. In 2021, in nearby Myanmar, after a violent military coup sparked a long, bloody civil war, several journalists from RFA's Burmese Service were forced to leave, but a few stayed behind.

Bay Fang: They report without using their names.

Micah Loewinger: Bay Fang.

Bay Fang: They are able to get such stories as a villager found a cell phone that belonged to a junta soldier. On the cell phone were selfies and videos that he had taken of him and his comrades committing war crimes.

Micah Loewinger: Using that cell phone footage, RFA reported in 2022 that 29 Burmese citizens were murdered by military junta soldiers in a small village. Meanwhile, Russian state television is celebrating cuts to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. For now, the service is still running. In July, a judge ordered Trump officials to restore funding to Radio Free Europe, although a new budget has yet to be finalized.

In recent years, the Putin regime has targeted Radio Free Europe journalists, including Alsu Kurmasheva, who spent nine months last year in a Russian detention center. Today, she's a press freedom advocate. For more than 20 years, she worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Tatar-Bashkir Service as a reporter, editor, and radio host, covering the stories of ethnic minorities in Russia and broadcasting in her native language of Tatar.

Alsu Kurmasheva: Tatars were one of the ethnic groups which had never had an independent media or schools or any institutions to develop the language, to develop the statehood, to develop ethnic identity.

Micah Loewinger: When I spoke to Alsu in March, she told me that when she first joined the service, things were going so well that her boss in Prague, where she's based, told her that RFE was planning to pull out of the region.

Alsu Kurmasheva: This is how RFE operates. We have a history of shutting down the services. Whenever the press is self-sustaining in the country where we broadcast, we report, the service, the department shuts down. There were beautiful times 20-plus years ago. This is how it started.

Micah Loewinger: Then what was the turn? When did it become such an essential service?

Alsu Kurmasheva: When Putin came to power, he started putting more pressure on journalists, on independent media. We slowly lost frequencies, FM frequencies. Then they shut down the radio. The Russian authorities later designated RFE as a foreign agent in Russia. Later, the recent development, this happened when I was in prison, the Russian authorities designated RFE as an undesirable organization, which makes working for us a criminal offense in Russia.

Micah Loewinger: I want to talk about what happened in May of 2023 when you were detained by Russian authorities. You were on a trip back to Kazan to care for your elderly mother.

Alsu Kurmasheva: The investigation was launched on the charges I hadn't registered my American passport. The investigation took five months.

Micah Loewinger: You were on house arrest for five months?

Alsu Kurmasheva: Yes, and I paid my fine, which was not more than $100. I was about to pick up my passports from the investigator and leave when they arrested me. This time, it was a real arrest, and they sent me to the detention center.

Micah Loewinger: What was going through your mind?

Alsu Kurmasheva: October 18th, I was cooking lunch at home, texting with my husband about school break later in October, which I was planning to be at home in Prague with my children already. Suddenly, I heard noise at the door, and I saw from the little eye in the door that they were showing me some paper that they need to take me away for investigation. Then I was taken to the Investigative Committee and charged with not registering as a foreign agent. That was absolutely a fake accusation. It didn't have any evidence against me, but this is how it works that they still put me to prison.

Later, that accusation was dropped, and they built up new charges against me, which was based on the book that I co-edited at RFE/RL. The book is called Saying No to War, and it's a collection of 40 stories of 40 people in Russia who opposed the war. The final charge I was charged with was that I was spreading fake information about Russian military.

Micah Loewinger: You spent nine months in detention before the trial?

Alsu Kurmasheva: Yes, 9-and-a-half months, 288 days, 40 Fridays. I love Fridays, and I calculated my life in prison by Fridays.

Micah Loewinger: What was life like during that time?

Alsu Kurmasheva: In prison, you can't control anything. You can't control your sleep, you can't control your food intake. You can't control basically nothing, but at least your breath or your thought. That was very important. I set the routine to read. As there was lack of books, I didn't have enough books. I was reading ingredients on the food packages. I was learning the amount of sugar in each product. I know it sounds insane right now, but this is how I made my brain work, and this is how I try to control my thoughts so I don't be depressed.

Actually, nobody's depressed in prison. It's something beyond depression. It's everything around you deprives you of dignity. I set my routine of exercise, reading, trying to maintain a healthy diet.

Micah Loewinger: You received a Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists. In your speech, you alluded to this image that stuck with me, where there was snow and you were in a courtyard, and you started to build a little house out of the snow.

Alsu Kurmasheva: It was the first snow, and there was a very small courtyard, and we couldn't walk. I don't remember how many of us. There were several prisoners. I suddenly, without even thinking, I started building a lighthouse. Accidentally, I found in my pocket a candy wrapper which was yellow and red, which I put on top. I was looking at that lighthouse for a very long time, thinking that, "Oh my gosh, this is the light I feel from my friends and family from the free world."

There was this big campaign around the world to write to political prisoners in Russia. The best letters I got were from people I didn't know. Say, one Russian woman from one of the European cities sent me a postcard saying, "Alsu, it's Christmas time. It's beautiful here. My friends are celebrating, but I took this time, and I'm sitting in the next room, where it's quiet, to write to you while everybody is eating." Those words will stay with me forever. They meant so much to me in that dark prison cell.

Micah Loewinger: Last July, you were brought to a courtroom for a secret trial in Kazan. On that same day, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was tried in another Russian city. He was sentenced to 16 years. You received six and a half years for, as you said, spreading false information. What happened after the sentence?

Alsu Kurmasheva: I was taken and brought to a prison in Moscow. That's the notorious prison called Lefortovo, former KGB prison. I was kept there from Monday until Thursday, and on Thursday, the actual exchange happened.

Speaker 41: Evan Gerscovich, Alsu Kurmasheva, and Paul Whelan landed in Maryland late last night.

Alsu Kurmasheva: It was a moment I was dreaming of for many, many months. I couldn't cry in prison. I'm a person who holds emotions when it's hard, but since I was released, I think I've cried all my tears.

Micah Loewinger: What were your initial feelings when you got the news that President Donald Trump had signed an executive order cutting off all funding to the US Agency for Global Media, which is the entity that funds Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty?

Alsu Kurmasheva: Well, I thought about two things. First, millions of people will stop reading and watching our reporting. Russian and Chinese propaganda will fill in that empty space very quickly, very efficiently, because those countries are spending more money on soft power and on propaganda media than the United States. The second thing, I'll be talking to the families of our imprisoned journalists these days. What am I going to tell them? That their loved ones are imprisoned for nothing? These were my thoughts immediately when I heard the news.

Micah Loewinger: You said you don't know what to tell the family members of Radio Free Europe journalists who are in prison for their reporting. For you, you spent nine months for reporting that you did on behalf of this US-funded news organization, and then an American president is accusing it of spreading "radical propaganda," which was essentially the same charge that you got from that Russian secret court. How are you feeling about the work that you paid a sacrifice for?

Alsu Kurmasheva: Thank you for your words. You just took them out of my mouth, and you said that exactly how I would put it. Because if we talk about cost to taxpayers, we are the most efficient example of soft power that America can have. Our effectiveness is proven by America's enemies to silence us. These days, propaganda media organizations in Russia and Iran are celebrating, and we are not out of business yet. They're celebrating the rumors. I mean, they've been trying to end our operations for years, for decades. Now, suddenly, our government is giving them this gift. It's like an own goal.

Micah Loewinger: To your point, Margarita Simonyan, the head of Russia Today, was on one of Russia's state TV channels when she said.

Margarita Simonyan: Today is a celebration for my colleagues at RT, Sputnik, and other outlets, because Trump suddenly announced he's closing RFE/RL and Voice of America. They are closed now. This is an awesome decision by Trump.

Micah Loewinger: To which the host of the show, Vladimir Solovyov, responded.

Vladimir Solovyov: I'm addressing independent journalists. Die, animals. You are lying, vile, disgusting traitors to the motherland. Die in a ditch.

Micah Loewinger: Do you want to respond to that?

Alsu Kurmasheva: No, I don't want to respond to that. I don't respond to things like that. I saw that statement, too.

Micah Loewinger: It was interesting to hear you use the term American soft power as part of the mission of Radio Free Europe. How important to you was it that the work, in addition to being journalism, was about advancing American soft power?

Alsu Kurmasheva: When I was doing that job, I didn't think about it. I wasn't thinking about promoting anything. I wasn't thinking about being a soft power for somebody. This is what I was doing. I was giving a voice to my people so they could take informed decisions for themselves. Open, objective journalism doesn't exist in certain countries with autocracies. People don't know that a media organization can be just reporting for the sake of reporting. Those regimes are sure that every media organization should work for somebody's purpose. The ideology or politics, or political parties, or something.

We were bringing those values of freedom of speech to our audiences. Really, not much will change immediately if Radio Free Europe stops. In a long term effect, it will be such a disaster, and it will be so difficult to start that over again that experience that have been built for years, for 75 years.

Micah Loewinger: Alsu Kurmasheva is a journalist and press freedom advocate for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Alsu, thank you very much.

Alsu Kurmasheva: Thank you, Micah, for having me.

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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