In the United Kingdom, the BBC had been a monopoly broadcaster from the 1920s up to the mid-1950s, responsible to the British people through a Royal Charter and the payment of a Licence Fee. Since December 1932, its overseas operation, first in English only and then in over 40 languages, had to survive in a far more dynamic and competitive environment in which broadcasters, governments and publics, at home and abroad, made a range of political, diplomatic, military and cultural demands of its output. Since the introduction of foreign-language services from 1938, itself a response to the activities of Italian and German broadcasters in North Africa, the Middle East and Europe, the BBC has to varying degrees always been engaged in an international radio war. The apogee of this was reached during the Second World War, when programmes were explicitly committed to the defeat of Germany and the Axis powers. By way of contrast, BBC services in the Cold War, as has been noted, relied on an implicit adherence to the demise of Soviet communism. Broadcasting to Europe and the rest of the world in the late 1940s and 1950s nevertheless continued to be a battle for the hearts and minds of listeners in a world of competing ideological and geopolitical interests. The ability of radio to transcend the internal controls of the state consequently made it a key weapon in a vicarious conflict increasingly being fought on the cultural battlefield. This was reflected in the major scaling-up of overseas output by the Soviet Union and America to a level that by the turn of the decade surpassed the BBC’s, until then the world’s largest foreign broadcasting operation.1 It also revealed the emergence of a Cold War radio arms race where competing states expended considerable energy and resources in getting their broadcast messages heard in the face of determined opposition.
From Monday, 25 April 1949, BBC services to Russia were jammed for the first time on all short-wave frequencies.2 The Corporation’s receiving station at Tatsfield initially identified over 60 separate Russian transmitters jamming BBC broadcasts from the United Kingdom in addition to VOA programmes to Russia from New York and Munich, which were also being jammed. This figure soon rose to between 200 and 300 and reports from Moscow and Turkey indicated that ‘broadcasts in Russian were completely obliterated’.3 The BBC had previous experience of being jammed during the Second World War, but it was immediately realized on both sides of the Atlantic that the sophistication, scale and potential longevity of this new attack required a co-ordinated response from Britain and America. This was despite the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, just a year earlier arguing against ‘any system of collaboration which would commit us to following a common Anglo-American policy in anti-Communist propaganda’.4 As the Russia Committee noted at the time, following a meeting between Warner and his new opposite number at the US State Department, George Allen, it had been agreed that in British and American foreign publicity ‘there would be advantage in aiming at the same targets from somewhat different angles’.5 However, the imposition of an editorial veto did not preclude technical collaboration or the sharing of resources in pursuit of a common aim and jamming provided just such a focus.
The immediate response by the State Department was to suggest that the BBC and VOA should broadcast continuously for 24 hours a day on two transmitters carrying repeats of their Russian language programmes. The BBC, with a close eye on the expense of these counter-jamming measures, thought differently. Already fighting to stave off cuts in the External Services budget, the Deputy Director of External Services, John Beresford (J.B.) Clark informed Jacob that a cheaper alternative was an ‘increase in the frequencies employed for any of the existing UK or USA bulletins’.6 This was subsequently translated by Jacob for consumption by the Board of Governors: ‘Experience has taught us that the only way to defeat jamming is to increase the number of frequencies on our transmissions in the hope that there will not be enough jamming transmitters at work to blot them all out everywhere.’ It was also important, Clark thought, ‘not to take panic measures without careful thought’, as ‘any change which did not affect the Jamming and which was, therefore, abandoned would constitute a minor Russian victory’.7 Accordingly, on 7 May 1949, in addition to the regular half hour BBC broadcasts in Russian at 04.30, 16.45 and 19.45 GMT, two new simultaneous BBC and VOA transmissions were introduced at 03.15 and 14.15 GMT (06.15 and 17.15 Moscow time) for an experimental period of one month.8 At these times, the maximum number of transmitters were available to the BBC and VOA, with additional stations in Honolulu and Manila used by the United States and Singapore by the BBC. On average, over the first two weeks of this experimental period it was estimated that between 12 and 25 per cent of BBC and VOA broadcasts got through the jamming, between 17 and 32 per cent were partially jammed and between 50 and 60 per cent were completely jammed.9
Collaboration was quickly seen to be the key to any possible success in breaching an aerial Iron Curtain. In a telegram from the US Embassy in Moscow to the State Department it was proposed that ‘long-range research’ into counter measures should be given due priority as ‘our relative superiority over Sovs is greater’. In a compelling reference to the most spectacular US/UK joint research project of the Second World War, it also suggested that ‘time on our side if best US and Brit brains resources pooled as in development of A-bomb’.10 The Foreign Office (FO) agreed that particular stress should be laid on planning ahead and close co-operation, though they remained somewhat sceptical of the assertion by their US colleagues that the ‘drive for air mastery is a vital part of drive for world mastery’.11 Nevertheless, in coming to terms and engaging with the Cold War ‘radio race’ that was emerging, it was important
to realise that we are up against a determined attempt, planned well in advance and likely, so far as can be foreseen, to continue for years, to stop up a channel through which Western ideas were reaching the Soviet public. Indeed, the jamming is likely not only to continue but, if necessary, to be intensified.12
And just as in other vital collaborative spheres of the post-war special relationship between Britain and America, the broadcast effort, if only in terms of resources, would have to be highly integrated.
In the years after the Second World War, the BBC had considered a number of proposals for the use of its transmitters for relaying broadcasts of the VOA.13 The BBC took the position, albeit contingent on the views of the FO and the rulings of the General Post Office, that although airtime could be provided when the Corporation itself was not broadcasting, no frequencies used by the BBC should be made exclusively available.14 In addition, the Americans should not be allowed to run, using their own personnel, a radio station in the United Kingdom. It was, nonetheless, suggested at the beginning of 1948 that they might like to use, at their expense, the Woofferton broadcasting station near Ludlow on the Shropshire and Herefordshire border, which had been scheduled for closure in April 1948.15 Accordingly, on 18 July the first of two regular daily transmissions of VOA were broadcast from Woofferton.16
In the time between the invitation to use this transmitter and the offer being taken up, American broadcasts to the Soviet Union were jammed first in the Far East and then from April in Europe. Three months later, jamming of Vatican Radio broadcasts to the Soviet Union also started, as well as of the VOA transmissions relayed by the BBC.17 The occasional interference of BBC Russian Service programmes led Ernest Bevin in May 1948 to declare that if BBC broadcasts were being jammed ‘it would be to their credit’.18 It was not until nearly a year later, however, that the BBC received the full attention of the Russian jammers. That it happened – a response to the increasing tension between East and West and the desire of the Soviet authorities to eradicate external voices that sought to undermine internal support for the state – was perhaps easier to understand than why, after three years of the BBC broadcasting to the Soviet Union, it had taken so long.
Jacob thought previous reports of interference could be ascribed to the Russians ‘preparing an organisation for jamming and . . . trying out parts of it, rather as a battery of artillery registers on the target before opening fire for effect’. He speculated that soon after the BBC started broadcasting in Russian, ‘the Soviet authorities must have come to the conclusion that the only hole in the Iron Curtain would become dangerous and must be stopped up’, suggesting ‘it had probably taken them a year or two to perfect their system and organisation for jamming’.19 In a cold conflict dependent on vicarious displays of strength, it perhaps took this period of time before a comprehensive jamming campaign against UK and US radio could be mounted. The considerable success of that offensive, regardless of its timing, now required a co-ordinated and well-considered response. This came on 9 July 1949 after further consultation between the State Department, the BBC and the FO. The result was the abandonment of the experimental transmission schedule and the institution, despite the US desire for consecutive broadcasting periods, of three half-hour BBC broadcasts a day to Russia, synchronized with transmissions of VOA at 03.15, 14.15 and 21.15 GMT.20 In addition, a new scheme was introduced to make it ‘more difficult for Russian jamming stations to operate with complete efficiency’. For example, the 21.15 broadcast was carried on 23 transmitters, but from a larger pool of frequencies. Accordingly, the BBC was ‘able to vary each time to a small extent the actual frequencies used’, which meant any jamming operation had to anticipate that all of the available frequencies would be used, thereby dissipating their grouped coverage of the ones that were in use.21 Initial reports from Moscow indicated that the new schedule was relatively successful with 95 per cent audibility of BBC broadcasts being claimed soon after the change.22 Hard evidence was difficult to come by, but reports from cities around the Soviet Union such as Helsinki, Warsaw, Istanbul, Tokyo and Tehran suggested ‘that the present large scale effort provides possibilities of listening over large areas of the USSR’.23 There were, however, other reports in July which pointed towards heavy local jamming of broadcasts in the large centres of population, with reception there increasingly problematic.24
In the autumn of 1949, as the BBC was dealing with the consequences of sterling devaluation and facing the prospect of a massive cut in the government’s overseas information services budget, the US Congress granted a non-recurrent appropriation of $11,000,000 for use in improving facilities for international broadcasting.25 This was very nearly the entirety of the External Services budget for 1949/50 and puts into sharp contrast the relative means at the disposal of these two broadcasting operations and their outlook when it came to new collaborative projects.26 The disparity was reflected in discussions between Jacob and, first, Charles Thayler, and then his successor in the State Department in charge of VOA, Foy David Kohler, which looked at ‘the possibilities in various parts of the world for the establishment of new broadcasting facilities’ either by the United States alone or jointly with the United Kingdom.27 The American proposals included improvements to existing facilities, extensions to their short-wave operations, and the erection of two powerful medium-wave transmitters in the Western Pacific and the Middle East to broadcast primarily to the Soviet Union and the countries bordering it as well as to China and Japan. In pursuit of this they asked for assistance and expertise and even suggested that the BBC install and run the Middle East station.28 Financial constraints alone meant that the Corporation was unable to commit to anything more than assisting with technical surveys, but there were also other concerns with these plans for expansion. It was felt that America should be discouraged from establishing any more broadcasting stations in Europe.29 In addition, as Jacob pointed out to senior colleagues, the BBC should not
take part in the erection or operation of broadcasting stations in order to save the Americans the trouble of doing the job themselves. Any new stations that were brought into operation would be carrying American programmes only because we should not have the money to make use of any time on the air which might be available.30
Meanwhile, there was no objection to the extension to the type of scheme that had been employed at Woofferton, although there were potential difficulties over origin, ownership and operation of transmitting equipment in these circumstances.31 Consequently, while a high degree of technical co-operation and sharing of information was maintained between the BBC, the US State Department and VOA, another great collaborative leap forward at that time was to prove too costly for the BBC.
While Britain was examining the parameters of the broadcasting special relationship in 1949, the United States Information Service (USIS) of the State Department was also eager to explore ideas of co-operation with as many partners as it could find. Following the advent of blanket jamming in April it was the view of the American Embassy in Moscow that a counteroffensive should be worked out not just with Britain, but with ‘other like-minded countries’ as an essential part of any plans.32 Tapping into the opportunities offered by new post-war international organizations, Jacob was informed in October of their ‘idea of approaching the other Atlantic Treaty [NATO] powers with a request that they should help strengthen our Russian broadcasts’ either by broadcasting simultaneous Russian programmes of their own or by relaying VOA and BBC programmes. The FO saw no diplomatic objection to this and agreed to joint US/UK approaches to a number of countries as well as the Brussels Treaty Powers.33 A year later, however, these parallel advances had achieved relatively little, with only Italy responding positively to the suggestions.34 Indeed, when the question was raised at The Hague and at the Permanent Commission of the Brussels Treaty in London ‘considerable resistance was shown on all sides to the idea that countries should relay Voice of America’.35 While the FO informed the BBC of this reaction, it conveyed to the Americans the more diplomatically framed suggestion that more support might be raised through NATO.36 This route, though, proved equally unsuccessful as many of those approached declined to assist, either through a lack of broadcasting capability, disinclination to transmit another country’s programmes, or fear of inviting the attention of Soviet jammers and the opprobrium of the Soviet Union – a particular concern for Scandinavian broadcasters.
Jamming had certainly quickened the pace of US and UK co-operation in the field of broadcasting but, according to a BBC paper on jamming in May 1951, not quick enough. The Russians had ‘kept pace with, and possibly gained on, the combined and extended UK and USA broadcasts to the USSR and satellite countries’. Nevertheless, it was thought that ‘on average three or four or sometimes more frequencies are clear of interference out of the fifty or more frequencies’ by then being used. As has been seen, the relative success of jamming called into question the value of maintaining BBC broadcasts in Russian. The continuation of these programmes, almost irrespective of whether they could be heard, was a public statement of intent by the BBC and the British government of their ongoing engagement with (and status within) the radio race between the power blocs of East and West. It also implied the extent to which, in the face of Soviet jamming, the BBC had established an interdependent relationship with the American government in beaming its services over the Iron Curtain, something that only intensified with the introduction of a more widespread jamming campaign from the end of 1951. This was not, however, the only field in which these transatlantic partners pursued their own rather special relationship.
BBC Monitoring Service
While BBC and American co-operation on counter-jamming measures became an essential ingredient of the wider strategy of broadcasting over the Iron Curtain into the 1950s, such collaboration was not unique. Since the early 1940s a valuable relationship had been established between the United States government and the Corporation for the interception and analysis of broadcasts, transmissions, telephony and telegraphy by foreign countries or organizations. Such work, with its obvious connections to the world of intelligence gathering, does not at first seem to be the most likely task of an organization dedicated to the output of broadcast material and independent, by Charter, from government instruction. The story of the BBC Monitoring Service, however, has from its beginnings mapped a curious path between the duties of public and national service.
Monitoring of English news broadcasts by foreign stations began in the FO during the Italo-Abyssinian war of 1935.37 By the late summer of 1937 this enterprise was extended to cover Italian broadcasts in Arabic from Bari Broadcasting Station to the Near and Middle East and Sigmar Hillelson, an Arabic scholar from the Sudan Civil Service, was employed to monitor and report on these broadcasts.38 When transmissions in Arabic by the BBC began a few months later in January 1938, informed by material monitored from both Italy and Germany, Hillelson was relocated within the Corporation’s structure, bringing together in a loose arrangement the combined needs of the FO and the BBC.39 But it was not until over a year and a half later, on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War, by which time the BBC was broadcasting in the vernacular to the Middle East, Latin America and Europe, that a comprehensive Monitoring Service of a stand-alone and recognizable form was fully established.
In March 1938 the BBC began broadcasting in Spanish and Portuguese to Latin America and staff undertook occasional monitoring of other country’s broadcasts in these languages via a line feed from the Tatsfield receiving station through the Control Room at Broadcasting House.40 Used for internal editorial purposes, the transcripts they produced were also distributed to interested Government departments.41 This ad hoc arrangement regarding monitoring in the BBC’s increasing number of language services (broadcasting in French, German and Italian began on 27 September 1938) and the interchange of material between the Corporation and Whitehall characterized the early stages of the monitoring effort. On the eve of war, preparations were made for ‘an enlarged scheme of monitoring’ on a 24-hour basis outside of London.42 On Friday, 25 August 1939, the day before a state of emergency was declared in Britain and a week before the declaration of war with Germany, the decision was taken to mobilize and move the BBC’s unit to Wood Norton near Evesham in Worcestershire, which the BBC had just acquired as part of its evacuation and dispersal plans in the event of war.43
Once at Wood Norton, as Asa Briggs notes, ‘the basic principles of professional monitoring’ were very quickly established.44 Composed of three main operational departments – Reception, Information and Editorial – the organization quickly grew in size and stature.45 The work of the Reception Unit soon became a task of immense proportions and by August 1944 monitors roved across wavebands, ‘patrolling the ether’ and listening to around 1½ million words a day in 32 languages.46 The Information Bureau, also working on a 24 hour basis, ‘received the monitors’ reports and determined the distribution of the material’.47 In addition to the Corporation’s own use, by May 1940 a teleprinter service had been established to the Admiralty, Air Ministry, the War Office, the FO, the MOI, Electra House and the Home Office.48 The number of government departments directly connected to Wood Norton, in addition to the BBC’s Home, Overseas and European News Departments, was to increase further and by the end of the war teleprinter links were also in use to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), Ministry of Home Security, 10 Downing Street, Political Intelligence Department (Foreign Office), Ministry of Economic Warfare, Federal Communications Department (USA) and the Office of War Information (USA).49 At its wartime peak in July 1942, 30,000 words in ‘flash messages’ were being sent daily to government departments.50 Meanwhile, by April 1940 the Editorial Unit was producing a Daily Digest of World Broadcasts, the forerunner of the standard post-war Summary of World Broadcasts, of between 100,000 and 150,000 words and a more concise Daily Monitoring Report of around 4,000 words.51 These reports were then distributed to between 600 and 650 departmental and other recipients.52 The Unit also separately published an Index to the Daily Digest and a special ‘one-page document . . . prepared daily for the War Cabinet’.53 From this vast reservoir of information the Editorial Unit also produced ‘a daily statement on trends in enemy propaganda’.54 This analytical capacity was to have continued significance after the war when utilized by the Foreign Office’s Russia Committee as the foundation for its ‘Trends in Communist Propaganda’ publication, which informed the government’s anti-communism strategy and was presented on a regular basis to the CIPC.55 The scale of the task undertaken by the Monitoring Service during the war and the speed with which it functionally and organizationally addressed the technological, editorial and logistical challenges it faced were remarkable.
This explosion in activities led to growing concern that Wood Norton, designated as the BBC’s transmission centre in the event of evacuation from London, had become overcommitted, in terms of people and machinery, to the monitoring effort.56 In April 1943 the Service moved operations to a new site, formerly the old Oratory School, in Caversham in Berkshire, with reception facilities cabled in by land lines from nearby Crowsley.57 It was from this new home that staff contemplated the task of monitoring after the war. Immediately after the cessation of hostilities in Europe, the Treasury was keen to make reductions in the size and cost of the Monitoring Service which, in common with the BBC’s other overseas services, was paid for out of a Grant-in-Aid. This approach fitted with Haley’s opinion of February 1945 that ‘a smaller and less elaborate organisation’ was anticipated.58 However, and in keeping with the trajectory of post-war planning experienced across the External Services, it soon became apparent, as the Board of Governors noted, that ‘After the liberation of a large part of Europe the amount of material to be covered actually increased, owing to the removal of the former central direction of propaganda from Berlin and the consequent diversification of broadcasting in Europe.’59 By the beginning of 1947, Monitoring output was organized on the basis of extensive summaries arranged in three parts each week with the Monitoring Report, including ‘all important comments on world affairs and events’, still published each week day.60 Part I, covering Russia and Eastern Europe, came out three times a week while Part II, Germany and Austria, was published once a week as was Part III, covering the remaining countries of the world whose broadcasts were monitored by the BBC.61 As a result, despite major reductions in staff numbers and a consequent increase in the volume of material to be monitored, the Monitoring Service was maintained as a large-scale operation.62
Monitoring Service output continued to be circulated ‘throughout the BBC and in various departments of His Majesty’s Government’, but questions were raised about whether passing these documents ‘to foreign Governments, various public bodies, and the Press’,63 as had been done for allied countries during the war, should be stopped. There was particular concern that such a wide distribution would reveal Whitehall’s internal thought processes: ‘. . . it is inevitable that selection of material will be made in light of the special interests of Government departments and it might be embarrassing if these special interests were detected by foreign governments’.64 This was not entirely the case, however, in regard to the United States monitoring effort, which has maintained an intimate relationship with the BBC Monitoring Service, involving the sharing of open-source intelligence, up to the present day. A week after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the BBC’s Frank Benton, Senior Supervisor of the Information Bureau, had noted in his logbook for 15 December 1941: ‘Four Americans, members of the American Monitoring service, are coming to Wood Norton some time this week to start a sort of European outpost for their service. They propose to send home by transatlantic telephone, three times every 24 hours, a précis of material put out by European stations which are normally inaudible in the United States.’65 Staff of the Federal Communications Commission’s Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service were soon joined by personnel from the US Office of War Information (OWI) and collectively they heralded the start of a still-active co-operative monitoring endeavour between the BBC and the US intelligence services.
American wartime monitoring had been split between the OWI and the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, but at the end of hostilities the monitoring work of OWI was absorbed by the latter.66 This was not a lasting settlement and the ‘functions, equipment and personnel of the monitoring service operated by the Federal Communications Commission were ultimately transferred to a new post-war body, the Central Intelligence Agency’.67 In this new structure a Foreign Broadcasts Information Service (FBIS) was established to conduct the US monitoring effort within that part of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ‘responsible for the collection of material from overt sources’,68 maintaining ‘a large editorial staff’ at Caversham and supplying ‘up to 20,000 words of BBC material by telegraph to Washington every day’.69
The sharing of monitored material between the BBC and the United States had been expedited by the needs of war, but in 1947 further steps were taken to enhance this relationship when a reciprocal arrangement was made with the FBIS whereby the Corporation would receive ‘a service of about 20,000 words a day from the Far East and Latin America’.70 At the same time, the British Government gave permission to the Americans for the erection of a monitoring station on the island of Cyprus, then under British administration: ‘an unsinkable aircraft carrier’ in the eastern Mediterranean, as Richard Aldrich has described it, ‘of growing importance to both Britain and the United States’.71 The increasing interdependency of the UK and US monitoring effort was underlined the following year with the signing in the spring of 1948 of an agreement ‘for the dove-tailing of the monitoring operations of the two countries so as to avoid duplication as far as possible, and for the complete pooling of the intercepted material’.72 The negotiations, led by the Head of FBIS, Colonel Whyte, and the Head of the Monitoring Service, Malcolm Frost, took place during a particularly interesting period of time in the wider story of US-UK post-war co-operation. Just two years earlier British and American intelligence services had divided the world between them in terms of signals intelligence (Sigint). The UKUSA Security Agreement of 5 March 1946 – only recently avowed – linked the British Government’s Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) with its American counterparts in a global network of listening stations which forms one of the unseen, yet founding, building blocks of the transatlantic intelligence relationship.73 The 1948 agreement, formalizing relations between the BBC and the CIA in the field of Communications Intelligence (Comint), considered synonymous with Sigint under the terms of the UKUSA agreement, established the monitoring of foreign broadcast transmissions as well as intercepting telephony and telegraphy as an embedded part of the Cold War special relationship between Britain and America.
By the time of the 1948 agreement the FBIS liaison section at Caversham was well established and formed an analytical and production cell that selected ‘from the raw material provided by the BBC monitors items of likely interest to the American Government, which are transmitted by high-speed radio-telegraphy circuits direct to Washington’.74 The pooling of intercepted material was augmented by the planning of coverage in order to make the best use of resources between the two monitoring organizations.75 The BBC monitoring station at Caversham focused primarily on European broadcasts, the Moscow domestic service and foreign-language broadcasts from the Russian capital. The FBIS station in Cairo, a UK MOI monitoring operation transferred to the FBIS in 1946, had special responsibility for the Middle East with its output having been ‘the major interest of the BBC’ beyond the Corporation’s own operations. An American monitoring station in California listened to Latin America while one in Maryland near Washington received shortwave transmissions from around the world. There were also stations in Hawaii and Tokyo that tuned into Russian regional stations in the Far East as well as other Far Eastern broadcasters.76 The output of these US stations fell into three categories. The first were summaries of all transmissions intercepted and these were distributed to American government departments, members of the press in Washington, including radio representatives, and the Library of Congress. The second type of document produced were those classified as ‘Restricted’ and available to government departments only, such as summaries of transmissions in Morse code or by mechanical systems of transmission, including the world press services. The third, classified as ‘Secret’ and only available within the US government on a very limited distribution, were ‘special reports prepared to the demand of the State Department or US intelligence departments’. Out of these, the BBC received reports from the first two categories as part of its collaborative agreement with the Americans.77
The division of responsibilities and flow of monitored information across the Atlantic by direct teletype circuits between FBIS headquarters in Washington and the BBC in Caversham was further enhanced, on the American side, by a considerable investment in capacity. However, the construction of new monitoring facilities at Okinawa, to supersede Hawaii and Tokyo, and in Cyprus, to replace the Cairo station, in addition to the new stations already built in California and Maryland stood in stark contrast with the development of UK monitoring in a period of austerity.78 The desire to amalgamate on one site the receiving, listening and production parts of the Monitoring Service had been evident even before the move to Caversham and the perennial problems with reception and accommodation that came with it. At the beginning of 1948 Jacob had recommended the purchase of Crowsley Park, the receiving station at that time being leased, in preparation for an eventual move of the whole operation.79 By the end of the year ‘the modernisation of our Monitoring installation’ was considered the ‘main task’ facing the service with Jacob acknowledging that the ‘equipment at Caversham Park is obsolete and uneconomical both in quantity and arrangement’.80 These problems, he thought, ‘will be remedied when we concentrate the Service at Crowsley in a new properly designed building with modern equipment’.81 This view was echoed by Malcolm Frost who suggested that the contrast between the new generation of US monitoring stations and operations at Caversham ‘provides much food for thought when planning our new station at Crowsley’.82 It soon became apparent, in the light of the climate of austerity in Britain and the economic challenges facing the government (not least with the country still reeling from the shock of devaluation the previous year), that any move to Crowsley was unlikely ‘in a period of less than three years’.83 As the fiscal screw was further turned at the end of the decade, with the government taking much tighter control of capital investment programmes such as these, alongside Treasury pressure for cuts in the External Services’ budget, plans for Crowsley never got beyond the drawing board and the process of piecemeal modernization at what is still the home to the BBC Monitoring Service at Caversham, began.
The significant investment made by America in its global network of listening stations was a vital part of what J.B. Clark characterized as the ‘harmonious interests’ of US and BBC monitoring operations. Likewise, the vast experience of BBC monitors, in what was still a relatively young intelligence discipline, had a valuable role to play in guiding and assisting the professional development of their American counterparts. A very special monitoring relationship consequently ran alongside close co-operation in the field of counter-jamming. The value of this to the BBC and, by extension, the British government who paid for both its broadcasting and monitoring activities, was considerable. The global nature and significance of BBC overseas services was both emblematic of Britain’s stature and influence on the international stage, and a serious concern for the Exchequer at a time of extreme financial uncertainty. The challenge posed by Soviet jamming, first to Russian broadcasts and then to other services across the Iron Curtain, intensified the dilemma between managing limited resources and projecting the voice of Britain abroad. The opportunity to share some of this burden with America was consequently welcomed, reflecting a complimentary communications strategy, as long as it did not interfere with the editorial independence of either party. In the case of the Monitoring Service this is a continuing co-operative endeavour. That these initiatives were undertaken at all after the Second World War was a response to the ideological, diplomatic, technological and economic demands of a radio arms race which placed the BBC firmly on the frontline of the Cold War.