The KGB Radio Hour

...It turns otxt that the Russians had something else in mind...

...Thanks to the Wall Street Journal and a handful of other papers, a window has been opened on this fascinating and crucial aspect of the current phase of our predicament...

...Calling itself the "Voice of the Egyptian People," it stridently attacked Sadat for his "treasonous" cooperation with Israel and his support for Morocco's King Hassan in the war against the Algerian-backed Polisario Front in the Sahara...

...Since 1959 the Soviet Union has been operating a clandestine and unofficial radio station in Baku known as the "National Voice of Iran" (it is also called "Our Radio...

...Perhaps we should...

...The only surprise in the story is that the United States does not take the ideological conflict to heart...

...it is the clandestine stations that carry the hard line, playing Mr...

...In short, the clandestine Soviet broadcasts--purporting to come from within Iran itself--have encouraged that sequence of events that has now become our major national preoccupation...

...and what Nature will he Honour who honours not the Human...

...Here and there, we are beginning to piece together the jigsaw puzzle that is Soviet foreign policy, and those relatively complete segments are admirable in their simplicity and coherence...

...For the most part, our national leaders seem to have taken them to mean that Russians would speak out on those aspects of American policy that were disagreeable to them...

...Its content has been for the most part entirely predictable: unrestrained attacks on the Shah and on "American imperialism," calls for revolution and freedom from Western influence, appeals for better relations with the Soviet Union...

...CHINA: THE GENERATION IN THE WINGS Fourteen years ago China's young people appeared on the political scene as Red Guards...

...Second, RFE/RL used to be run by the CIA, and this administration has labored mightily to emasculate the Agency...

...It is the third, divergent revolution that Ying Tzu calls a catalytic "agent o f awakening" for Chinese youth and that, in the words of another writer, Mu Huo, in Cheng Mi'ng, produced "irreversible" change with a potentially "greater impact on the future course of the nation, in the long run, than any political or economic change...

...and Norman Mailer is the leader of the pack...

...Last of all, it might be bad for SALT...

...A faded Western truism has become a "new-born thing" in China--if we may salvage this now discredited Maoist phrase, which once applied to radical Left innovations like the Model Plays, the sham universities, supposedly begotten by the Cultural Revolution...

...Their work lacks genuine meaning because they themselves lack purpose: They don't write about anything, simply because they can't , s o they just write, on and on into the night, coughing up pools of directionless, readable prose for a quasi-literate audience...

...They took the "ideological struggle ~' to mean the waging of Michael Ledeen is Executive Editor of the Washington Quarterly...

...In part, the answer lies in the curious ideology of the administration's top policymakers...

...The use of clandestine radio stations is not new for the Soviets, but in recent years it has taken on a more subtle role in the context of d*tente...

...After all, as Cyrus Vance has observed, Leonid Brezhnev and Jimmy Carter share common aspirations, and it is only understandable that each might find it necessary to bemoan the sometimes unpleasant aspects of the other's society and national behavior...

...In fact, VOA is hardly worth jamming anymore...

...In the last 30 years two Chinas have coexisted--not Mao's mainland and Chiang's island--but a magnificen t abstraction created in the universities of the West and a massive land creating its own divergent reality in the East...

...Since 1966, besides, there have been three Cultural Revolutions...

...What do you mean by truth...

...And it has continued to call for the participation of all parties--including the Communists--in a governmental coalition...

...Truth," he replied, "is objective fact, never to be twisted at human will...

...Is anyone in the West taking note...

...And when the Embassy was overrun for a second time, the National Voice praised the event as an act of righteous indignation by young Iranians intent on defending their country from foreign subversion...

...it was funny as hell...

...If the Russians do it, that is considered unfortunate, but after all two wrongs do not make a right...

...Gary Gilmore killed two very young men, both of whom were married, one of whom had a small child...

...It is hack work, and dangerous hack work, and we condone it at our risk...

...Two recent developments give the picture: 11 new transmitters have been budgeted, in order to reach 75 percent of the area of the Soviet Union (still not enough to reach Mongolia and most of the Asian population), but the proposed budget for fiscal year 1981 does not provide enough money for the electrical power necessary to operate the transmitters...

...Lawyers like Cyrus Vance do not care for what they call "propaganda...

...But they reTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 21...

...The game becomes risky when the grownups begin to pay attention: A hack who pretends to be an honest artist--and who is welcomed as such--can be as unhealthy, and as dangerous, as his own obsessions...

...Why should that officer out of the blue have supposed that one of the small boys before him was weeping "for the end of innocence" and "the darkness of man'~ heart" ? Miriam London is a researcher in Soviet and Chinese studies...

...Third, most of our current leaders have adopted a thoroughly masochistic view of the world, according to which ffny exercise of American will inevitably provokes hostiiTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 ity...

...The Russians have toned down the content of their official broadcasts, bringing them in line with the official pronunciamenti from the Kremlin...

...The Russians obviously take the ideological struggle seriously, as well they might...

...The empire whose symbol is t h e gulag does not welcome the free flow of information to its inhabitants, and even Jimmy Carter's relatively mild humanrights campaign at the outset of his administration was interpreted by the Kremlin as a serious threat to its internal control...

...As in Iran, one station speaks on behalf of the Turkish Communist Party, while the other calls itself "Our Radio...

...But there are some pretty good guesses...

...As we now know, Soviet clandestine radio stations have aided and abetted the anti-American hysteria in Iran...

...Clearly, some alert group in Peking and its bolder "friends" in Hong Kong have analyzed and assigned primary importance to changes in "thinking" inside China, especially among the young up to the age of 30, who constitute more than half the population...

...In the eyes of our national spokesmen, nothing is more understandable than that disagreements be aired, the better to resolve them in lawyer-like fashion...

...Nor is its sponsor...

...Thus, the Kremlin attacks the American government and those of countries (such as Spain, Portugal, and West Germany) that permit the stations to operate on their soil...

...Hyde to the Kremlin's official Dr...

...The "model of society" that most appeals throughout the world today is ours, and for those who care the United States is the symbol and guarantor of freedom...

...These are the hollow artists, these are the practitioners of high hack...

...Apparently concerned about any action that might provoke American military intervention against Khomeini, the National Voice has recently urged moderation in the treatment of American prisoners in Teheran, calling instead for more intense attacks against the dollar...

...And recent events suggest that the effect of RFE/RL will be even slighter in the future, what with budget cuts, personnel reductions, and constant fiscal problems...

...To give new life to RFE/RL might be considered a vindication of some of the old CIA types, and hence must be avoided on internal political grounds...

...In the meantime, the Soviet clandestine radio war continues...

...How is one to contemplate the emergence of democratic thought behind 'communism's iron curtain' ?" The "bewilderment" of the West is itself bewildering...

...It is a statement of personal discovery, made at cruel mental and physical cost...

...And ever since the Shah's fall appeared likely, the National Voice has doubled its broadcasting time...

...The West now confronts the severely tried youth of China very much as the uncomprehending naval officer in Lord of the Flies looked upon the battered schoolboy survivors standing on the beach of their nightmare island--with "wary astonishment" and a somewhat embarrassed sympathy...

...for in addition to the imagined revolution that has gained a pseudoexistence in dozens of Western textbooks (now obsolete), there was the revolution that Mao planned and the revolution he did not plan...

...This is not the textual parroting of a naive schoolboy...

...war by other means, and have acted accordingly...

...Since they wish to avoid the hostility of other countries, our leaders have elevated stasis to the level of master strategy...

...It is also "Rabelaisian humor," according to Mr...

...On the day of the first seizure of the American Embassy in Teheran, for example, the National Voice announced that the archives of SAVAK--the Shah's hated secret police --had been transferred to the Amexican Embassy...

...Why is it that in a century of revolutionized communication--when the atmosphere crackles with news transmission and even space has eyes--China is still charted somewhere between fact and fantasy...

...The contemporary hack can be just as boring as his predecessor (Mailer's chief concerns are boxing, sex, and Henry Miller), but he is not content to stay in the literary cellar: He wants to bring his enormous books into the front room, and read them aloud to the grownups...

...They are opposed to ideological warfare because it generates resentment...

...How is one to explain this change...

...The Turkish-language broadcasts have been running for over 20 years, but there are some newcomers to the clandestine network: Libya and Cuba...

...Prose that glorifies such men is anti-human in itself, and is therefore not literature, and not art...

...Where are they now...

...The censorship is done largely by the staff of the organization, and this permits the Russians to concentrate their enormously expensive jamming operations on Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty...

...now they are reappearing before Democracy Wall as fighters for democracy...

...And on occasion the correspondence between the words of the National Voice-and the actions in the streets of Iran has been impressive indeed...

...Every act of pro-Western individuals is condemned, every theme likely to inflame hatred of the United States is stressed...

...Within the last year several remarkable articles on Chinese youth have appeared in the Communist journals Tung Hsiang and Ctseng Ming, the newest Pekingconnected monthlies published in Hong Kong, which convey fact and .opinion too candid for the internal press, but circulate with permission inside China...

...since the return of Khomeini it has been more ethnic-oriented, urging separatism on the Kurds, the Azerbaijanis, and others...

...This has yielded excellent results, for the Soviets have apparently negotiated an unwritten agreement with the United States, by which they have ceased jamming Voice of America broadcasts to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself in exchange for corresponding moderation in our own broadcasts...

...The Russians used to offer themselves as the harbingers of a new order, but today this theme has all but disappeared from their propaganda...

...This smacks to them of the Cold War, Vietnam, and other bugaboos of the past...

...What did the United States make of such proclamations...

...I f the other [OPEC] countries should follow suit [in abandoning the use of dollars to pay for oil], a transformation will take place in the world's currency system, and the world will be free from the domination of the American dollar...

...For years the Russians told anyone willing to listen that while d6tente required a certain degree of East-West cooperation, the "ideological struggle" would continue unabated...

...And broadcast~ have never ceased to claim that the "satanic" Americans have inundated Iran with espionage THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 19 agents, Zionist saboteurs, and the like...

...it is a grave error.Yor the appeal of Communism has never been weaker than it is today...

...As of this writing, the locus of the transmitter is not known...

...One wonders whether our allies approve this decision...

...Two transmitters operate in East Germany for the benefit of Turkey...

...The crucial difference between the high hack and the oldfashioned drudge is that the latter never pretended to be anything other than what he was...

...Typically, when the revolution got underway in Iran, they dropped the Communist Party line in favor of Islamic fundamentalism...

...The Libyanbased station, "Radio of the Patriots," broadcasts to Iran and Arab countries, with the usual collection of anti-Western and anti-American themes...

...Jekyll...

...Because the story of Chinese youth since the Cultural Revolution is more than an episode in peculiarly Chinese history, just as Lord of the Flies is more than a tale of schoolboy adventure on a remote island...

...they may be under direct Soviet control...

...No sooner had Khomeini returned to the country than the National Voice was announcing a plot by the CIA to kill him...

...The "new things" really engendered by the Cultural Revolution were never foreseen and cannot be canceled...

...As in Iran, they attack the American presence, denounce proposed U-2 flights (while ignoring the linkage between such flights and the verification of the provisions of SALT II), and urge better relations with the Soviet Union...

...This is, as the French put it in their inimitable fashion, worse than a crime...

...It called for solidarity with the Soviet Union...

...I n light of this considerable activity, it may come as a surprise to advocates of d6tente that Moscow continues to denounce the broadcasts of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty as "intolerable interference in the internal affairs of other countries...

...In short, the Russians are ideologically weaker than at any time in human memory, and we possess an enormous advantage...

...we asked...

...Early in September a new radio station began transmitting to the Middle East...

...Westerners, take pause...

...It would not only enrage the Russians, but various Third World countries would also protest...

...In June 1978, when Prime Minister Ecevit travelled to Russia, Our Radio hailed the trip...

...as a symptom of a new era in Soviet-Turkish relations...

...I n his own attempt to trace the course of change, Ying Tzu turned first tO individual history, seeking out interviews with young people in Peking...

...I walked in on [one of the victims]," Gilmore told his cellmate later, "and I said to that fat son of a bitch, 'Your money, son, and your life '~ The prisoners "both cracked," writes Mailer-as-Cellmate...

...These young peopl6~" Ying Tzu notes, "first appeared on the political stage as Red Guards...

...Michael Ledeen THE KGB RADIO HOUR On the air from Baku...

...Our protests about Soviet broadcasts to Iran have been quiet and diplomatic, and our own efforts to tell our side of the story to the Iranians consist of a single hour of broadcasting a day (only just recently increased from half an hour...

...For some 17 years this station broadcast along with another station that was formally allied with the Iranian Communist Party (Tudeh...

...The Cuban stations are predictably similar, and some Western experts in the field suspect that...

...But then, that's the peculiar horror of the spiritual disease: It's contagious...

...So t h e United States, which gave the world the modern radio, virtually invented mass media, and has more broadcasting talent by far than any other country, has opted out of the ideological struggle...

...An intense young man who recently left Peking on a Student visa described Chinese dissidents like Wei Ching-sheng and Li Cheng-t'ien as "'truth-seekers, quite will, ing to lose their lives for truth...

...The printed excerpts of these interviews appear simple, even shallow, and may float past the Western reader, as words do that escape attachment to personal experience...

...There is nothing wrong with being a hack, of course: Indeed, the old-fashioned literary drudge was a rather comfortable fellow to have around, always ready with a cozy essay or a cute poem...

...One of these articles, by Tung Hsiang correspondent Ying Tzu, acknowledges at the outset that "the behavior of the younger generation in China has indeed bewildered the West...

...From an artistic point of view--indeed, from a social point of view--it doesn't matter how utterly hilarious Gilmore was about his murders, or how intelligent he was, or how psychologically corrupted: In the end, he failed as a man, because his purposes were anti-human...

...Ta-/ing Lee is professor of history at Southern Connecticut State College.4van D. London is professor of psychology at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York...

...Art is nothing but the highest sagacity and exertions of Human Nature," said the Swiss mystic Johann Lavater...

...Mailer's publishers...

...Until the fall of the Shah, the National Voice was at one with the mullahs in its pious embrace of fundamentalist Islamic doctrine...

...Yet we not only fail to challenge the Russians on this highly favorable terrain, but indeed we cut back on our efforts at the very moment that they are launching an unprecedented assault against us and our friends...

...and in the current fiscal year, RFE/RL was forced to borrow six million deutsche marks from the Deutsche Bank in order to meetcurrent expenses...

...but this latter station (located at first in East Germany, later in Bulgaria) stopped activity in the autumn of 1976, and since then the total clandestine broadcasting to Iran from the Soviet bloc has consisted of the National Voice...

...At a cost of some 300 million dollars a year, the Kremlin jams these two stations, which themselves have a total annual budget of slight20 ly more than 80 million dollars...

...The Libyan case is particularly interesting, in light of President Qaddafi's claim to desire better relations with the United States...

...They have especially affected two generations of Chinese youth...

...At a certain point listeners were urged to write in their questions and reactions to a Post Office Box in Stockholm, later identified as being rented to a KGB agent in Sweden...