[RADIOLAB INTRO]

MATT KIELTY: From the top. Hey, this is Radiolab.

KATIE: Hey, here's Matt.

MATT: I'm senior producer Matt Kielty.

KATIE: Hi!

MATT: And today we're starting in Minnesota.

MATT: It's great to see you, too.

MATT: With freelance journalist Katie Thornton, in Katie's home.

MATT: Minneapolis!

KATIE: Minneapolis! You're here!

MATT: In Minneapolis.

KATIE: It's so nice to see you!

MATT: So last winter, Katie came to New York, was my roommate for a month as she was finishing up season two of this project she's created, the show called The Divided Dial.

MATT: Season one was about—you should say it.

KATIE: Well, season one is about ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, The Divided Dial: This has been the biggest global dry run to prepare the world to receive the mark of the beast.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, The Divided Dial: The vast majority at this point in gender confusion is being driven by societal mania.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, The Divided Dial: Racial profiling is good for your health.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, The Divided Dial: Drill, build the Keystone pipeline, deport illegals, defy the federal government!]

KATIE: ... how the right came to dominate talk radio in America.

MATT: Peabody Award-winning season one.

KATIE: Indeed.

MATT: So that was season one. Then Katie came out to finish season two, which is ...

KATIE: Let's see what we got.

MATT: ... all about ...

MATT: Wait, is this—this is AM.

KATIE: Okay, so let's go to shortwave now.

MATT: ... shortwave radio.

KATIE: We are gonna go to shortwave one.

MATT: So maybe you've heard of shortwave. I kind of like knew it as a phrase, as a thing, but didn't know really anything about it or its significance.

MATT: Turning the dial.

KATIE: Turning the dial.

MATT: So Katie was just gonna show me what this is by tuning into a shortwave radio station on this radio she has.

KATIE: Oh! Okay, so nothing there.

MATT: Which she tried to do ...

KATIE: Let's try 7570.

MATT: Back up we go.

MATT: ... for a while.

KATIE: Up we go.

MATT: A long while.

KATIE: Ugh. Nothing! Let's see if we can try 5850.

MATT: Like, for 20 minutes ...

KATIE: Five ...

MATT: ... this is what we did.

KATIE: Mm-mm.

MATT: Nothing.

KATIE: Nothing.

MATT: Well, this is almost the perfect segue into Katie, why did you do this series?

KATIE: Great question. Should I turn this down so we don't have to worry about it?

MATT: Just turn—yeah, you can turn it off.

KATIE: Great. Boom. Yeah. Well, shortwave radio completely altered the course of, you know, geopolitics globally in the 20th century.

MATT: Oh!

KATIE: It also played a really big role in sort of shaping the modern right in the US, and giving rise to the anti-government militia movement, which we've, of course, seen make its way into the mainstream. And then I also found out that there's a very strange battle taking place on the shortwaves today where on these sort of often-ignored, minimally-known frequencies, Wall Street is trying to get access to the shortwaves.

MATT: [gasps]

KATIE: For a very unexpected reason that maybe I won't give away because it's the final episode of the series.

MATT: I haven't heard it yet. I don't even know.

KATIE: Oh! You want me to tell you?

MATT: Yeah, just tell me.

KATIE: Okay, I'm gonna tell you.

MATT: But you listening will not be told. You're gonna have to listen to the series. And so today what we're doing is we're playing the first episode in season two of The Divided Dial, which was created by Katie, produced by On the Media, our friends, colleagues, literally just down the hall at WNYC. And I swear episode one, it'll grab you, it will eventually lead you down a path to revelation of what Wall Street is doing with shortwave radio. And it's—it's great. It's basically like episode one is kind of about the promise, the hope, the dream of shortwave radio, which you actually would not expect feels very present to today. So with that, we present to you, On the Media, Katie Thornton, Divided Dial season two, episode one. Enjoy!

DAVID GOREN: Zenith Trans-Oceanics.

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

KATIE: Last summer, I met up with a journalist and radio fan named David Goren.

DAVID GOREN: These were, like, beautiful radios for a ...

KATIE: 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: 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.

KATIE: 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, you know, the economic plan.

KATIE: Today he's part of the Library of Congress's Radio Preservation Task Force, and 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 Marti.

DAVID GOREN: The US broadcasting news and information to Cuba.

KATIE: Voice of Islamic Republic of Iran.

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

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio: The Voice of Italy broadcast in Italian.]

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

DAVID GOREN: They have very strident, you know, military stuff.

KATIE: And news from Cuba.

DAVID GOREN: This is Radio Rebelde—Radio Rebel. And it goes back to the revolution.

KATIE: On the shortwaves, the global tussle for influence plays out 24/7. But we didn't just hear news and propaganda.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio: Well, let's just get up to dance. Let's hear some Morse code.]

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

DAVID GOREN: Let's see what else we have.

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

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio: Strong in the Lord, and the power of his might against the wiles of the devil.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio: It was hidden just to hide the meaning and the power of the divine name. It is inherent in the name of Yah.]

KATIE: 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, you know? But details, details.

KATIE: 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. And 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.

KATIE: 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. 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.

KATIE: 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 gonna 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 ever did. But like the internet, shortwave also took a turn for the chaotic.

KATIE: 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.

KATIE: 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio: Daniel Larson? This is Lester Larson. Happy birthday.]

KATIE: Signals reached up to 50, maybe 75 miles.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio: By the way, down Texas way, your home state. And take a bow, will you now?"]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio: I will.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio: Good old Ma Taylor up there in Lake Geneva says happy birthday to us. You know, it's her birthday, too.]

KATIE: But 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 ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio: Edison Studios, WAAM, located at 1 Bond.]

KATIE: ... would hear stations from Chicago.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio: WCFL, Chicago.]

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

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio: Let us follow through the steps and the processes in transmitting or sending radio messages.]

KATIE: 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio: The radio messages leave the antenna as electromagnetic waves, and travel with the speed of light.]

KATIE: 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 by-product.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio: Radio waves are sent off in all directions.]

KATIE: It's called a "skywave." And the skywave 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: 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.

SUSAN DOUGLAS: 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 skywaves.

KATIE: At night, these skywaves, the sort of 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio: When these waves strike the antenna of a receiving zip, this entire process is reversed. We hear sound originating at that very moment, hundreds or even thousands of miles away.]

KATIE: 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: 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." 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.

KATIE: 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.

SUSAN DOUGLAS: They were kicked down to the waves that were thought utterly worthless—shortwaves.

KATIE: 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: And 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: 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: 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. 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.

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

KATIE: 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: 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.

MICHELE HILMES: 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.

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

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

KATIE: Giessen, 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.

MICHELE HILMES: You had people like Axis Sally.

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

KATIE: She was an American living in Berlin. She became the first American woman to be convicted of treason after the war, but she was broadcasting into the United States on shortwave.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Axis Sally: The women of America, waiting for the one you love, thinking of a husband who is being sacrificed by Franklin D. Roosevelt.]

MICHELE HILMES: You might have heard of a person called Lord Haw-Haw.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lord Haw-Haw: The great exodus from Britain is well underway.]

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

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lord Haw-Haw: The rich and affluent are removing themselves and their valuables as fast as they can.]

KATIE: 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charlie and His Orchestra: [singing] All the Jewish families have a brand new heir. He's their joy, heaven-sent, and they proudly present Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones. Yes, there is Yes, there is]

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

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charlie and His Orchestra: [singing] Non intervention, how he shows it, his decision to send troops along.]

KATIE: 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 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: Susan Douglas again.

SUSAN DOUGLAS: And they had people who were fluent in foreign languages monitoring international shortwave broadcasts.

KATIE: 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."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, 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: Every week, radio sleuth Stout debunked enemy shortwave propaganda.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rex Stout: First, a broadcast of the official German News Agency on August 2.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The meeting between Churchill and Stalin was very excited and hysterical. It assumed a dramatic ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rex Stout: On August 8, aimed at England.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: This morning, Churchill shook hands with Stalin at the Kremlin.]

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

KATIE: 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, BBC Radio: This is London calling in the overseas service of the British Broadcasting Corporation.]

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

[ARCHIVE CLIP. BBC Radio: 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: 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Voice of America: This is a voice speaking from America. Our voices are coming to you from New York, across the Atlantic Ocean to London, from where there are ...]

KATIE: 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. 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Voice of America: 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: And 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: 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: Susan Douglas again.

SUSAN DOUGLAS: And 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. You know, "Oh, here's mailbag, and we have letters from soldiers." And they would read them aloud.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Voice of America: "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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] Here's Jill and the GI Jive.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, GI Jill: Hiya, fellas. This is GI Jill with GI Jive.]

SUSAN DOUGLAS: You know, the World Series. [laughs]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Voice of America: 1942 World Series broadcast.]

SUSAN DOUGLAS: You gotta have the World Series.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Voice of America: The Yankees are out in front five to nothing.]

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: 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. That's coming up after the break.

MATT: Okay, the rest of On the Media's episode one of The Divided Dial, season two, when we come back.

MATT: Matt again. Radiolab. Back to Katie, Divided Dial, On the Media.

KATIE: 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 shortwaves at the end of World War II. But during the Cold War, shortwave would become so much more.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Radio Peking.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: This is Tehran, Radio Iran.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The Australian Forces Radio.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: You are tuned to the North American Service of Radio Moscow.]

KATIE: 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. But the global superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, were two of the most dominant voices on shortwave. And shortwave became one of the most ferocious battlegrounds of the Cold War.

KATIE: 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radio Moscow: 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: 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radio Free Europe: Radio Free Europe gets through with the truth every day.]

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

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radio Free Europe: 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: It was portrayed as grassroots, run by émigrés 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. 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radio Free Europe: Radio Free Europe calling Czechoslovakia.]

KATIE: 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. But these US-run shortwave stations weren't just beaming out journalism.

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

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Louis Armstrong: This is the Voice of America.]

KATIE: 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radio Havana: The revolutionary people of Cuba sympathize with all people who struggle for social justice.]

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

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Radio Havana: 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: 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, 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 folks' toilet. It should be more than clear to us that if we are ever going to be free, we must liberate ourselves.]

KATIE: 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 like Metallica and Mötley Crüe to listeners around the world.

KATIE: 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, 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: 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ronald Reagan: I'm pleased to call on Director Wick and Minister Filali to sign this agreement, an important step towards strengthening the signals of the Voice of America.]

KATIE: 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. 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.

KATIE: 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 hardline anti-communist messages.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, 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 Marti, for broadcasting to Cuba.]

KATIE: 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.

[NEWS CLIP: In Eastern Europe, which the Soviets had held by force since World War II, Mikhail Gorbachev said that Moscow would no longer interfere.]

[NEWS CLIP: Serious fighting begins in the early morning, a staccato of machine gun bursts punctuated by cannon fire.]

[NEWS CLIP: 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.]

KATIE: 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: You must form your militia unit. Pay no heed to the federal government, which is a counterfeit enemy, foreign government.]

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

[ARCHIVE CLIP: 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?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Clinton: I'm sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brad Hefner: These stations and the programs grew and they took over. They dominated.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, J.R. Lind: What is associated in the public's mind was shortwave. It's no longer the BBC World Service. Now it's the guys who helped Timothy McVeigh bomb a federal building.]

KATIE: 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. The Divided Dial is written and reported by me, Katie Thornton, and edited by OTM's executive producer, Katya Rogers. Music and sound design is by Jared Paul. Jennifer Munson is our technical director. Fact-checking by Graham Haysha. This series was made possible with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

MATT: Okay, that's it. Episode one, season two of On the Media's Divided Dial. You can listen to the rest of this series wherever you get podcasts. Just find On the Media. You'll see in the episodes list season two of The Divided Dial. Or you can go to OntheMedia.org. Up near the top is a little tab for The Divided Dial. You can listen there. It's great. The next episodes get into conspiracies, militias, cults—very much mirroring what you see on the internet today. And then, of course, the Wall Street thing. You'll hear about the Wall Street thing. So yeah, go listen. Again, I'm Matt Kielty. We'll be back soon with some new episodes for you, so until then, goodbye.

[LISTENER: Hi. I'm Eisha, and I'm from Plano, Texas. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Rebecca Laks, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Anisa Vietze, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster and Jessica Yung. With help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol-Mazini and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Michelle calling from Richardson, Texas. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

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