On the eve of what would be a most traumatic and momentous year for both the British government and the Corporation, the BBC Governors hosted a dinner on 8 December 1955 for the Foreign Secretary, Harold Macmillan, at Broadcasting House. With the Director-General, Sir Ian Jacob, and senior overseas staff also in attendance, conversation focused on the challenges facing the External Services.1 It was suggested that the recent Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in Geneva heralded a ‘revived hardening of the cold war’ and that the Russian refusal to agree to closer cultural relations increased more than ever ‘the value of broadcasting as a means of communication which, despite the jamming, remains almost the only one open to the West’.2 It was clear, however, that what really exercised the minds of BBC management were the domestic challenges facing overseas broadcasting and the future of relations with the British government.
The shadow of the Drogheda Committee continued to hang over any consideration of the strategic purpose and scope of the External Services. Although the BBC claimed that its continued non-implementation should mean that its Report be considered ‘obsolete in detail’, the Corporation could not escape from the threat it represented to remake the External Services as an organization predisposed to servicing the foreign policy and trade requirements of the British government. Anxieties were compounded by the fact, pointed out to Macmillan, that in the last eight years ‘overall costs have risen in this country by about 50%, whereas the grants for revenue expenditure on the External Services have risen by only about 20%’. As a consequence British overseas broadcasting had become an impoverished enterprise when compared to its American and Russian counterparts: ‘our Services have been curtailed or eliminated in order to make ends meet, during the very period when the Cold War has been raging’.3 However, while the BBC was seeking a fiscal stimulus to enhance its remit, the Foreign Office (FO) was beginning to argue for a more selective assessment of the value of broadcasts.
On 20 February 1956, Paul Grey of the FO’s IPD attended a meeting chaired by Anthony Nutting at which the Minister of State emphasized, in light of the government’s commitment to reduce public spending by £100 million, ‘the need for fresh thinking and for concentrating our resources on essentials’. Grey was asked whether he was ‘satisfied that no reallocation could be made in our own overseas information vote to meet the special threat of Soviet propaganda’?4 Was there, Nutting wondered, ‘any rearrangement which could be made in the information services . . . in particular, the BBC transmissions to Europe’?5 This was just the opportunity that many Foreign Office officials had been waiting for to reopen, under ministerial cover, the debate on overseas broadcasting that had been stuck in a state of inertia since the Drogheda Committee reported in 1954.
While protective of the overall information services budget – ‘I am sure that we cannot make further significant savings in our general information and cultural effort without destroying our basic propaganda machine’ – Grey offered to look again at ‘the question of the BBC’. It was not just the ‘value for cost of our broadcasts to Russia’ that Grey felt needed review. He argued that a wholesale study should be employed to ‘show how much would be saved by cutting out broadcasts to various countries or groups of countries’. Grey had seized the initiative and with the support of his colleagues began sweeping aside official nervousness at addressing the perceived inadequacies of BBC services abroad.6 From now on, they would be considered essential only where it was possible for a positive contribution to be made to government publicity objectives and anti-communist work in particular. As in 1948, the broadcast environment was changing. The Corporation, Grey argued, was ‘holding on to what is largely a fetish’ by believing it had an unassailable right to a global broadcast remit.7
Cultural rapprochement
The decision to embark on a cost-benefit analysis of the BBC External Services was as much a response to the inconclusive outcome of the Drogheda Committee as it was a reaction to the perceived requirements of overseas broadcasting in the current political and diplomatic climate. The added impetus in the spring of 1956 was the determination of officials to reinforce the BBC’s programmes to Russia and by extension to maximize the dividend realized from broadcasting to Central and Eastern Europe.
The triumvirate post-Stalin leadership of Nikolai Bulganin, Nikita Khrushchev and Georgy Malenkov suggested a new direction in the management of Soviet affairs.8 The continuing process of de-Stalinization implied a marginal loosening of central control over life in the Soviet Union while the rapprochement in May 1955 with Yugoslavia had given currency to the idea of ‘national roads to socialism’ within the Soviet orbit. In the same month the signing of the Austrian State Treaty, the Geneva Conference in July and, later in 1955, trips to Afghanistan and India were evidence of a re-engagement by the Soviet leadership with the world beyond the Iron Curtain.9 There remained, however, continuing trends that pointed towards a more orthodox interpretation of Soviet objectives and methods and generated a deep scepticism in British official circles towards these events at the beginning of 1956. Not the least of these was the emergence of a Soviet thermo-nuclear capability, increased Russian penetration of the Middle East and North Africa, the signing of the Warsaw Pact and the continued propaganda attack on the West in general and British ‘imperialism’ in particular.10 In the face of this evidence, and underlined by the brusque and uncooperative manner in which Molotov had brought the second Geneva conference to a close, the FO considered that even greater effort should be put into meeting the ‘special threat of Soviet propaganda’.11
Naturally, the BBC was intended to be a central player in this renewed counteroffensive, but there existed at the heart of the relationship between Whitehall and Bush House a long-term difficulty in the handling of Russian output. The accommodation reached between the two in the years following the 1948 Cabinet decision on foreign publicity policy had, by the mid-1950s, begun to splinter and significant divergences of opinion on the tone used in broadcasts to Russia contributed to an increasingly dysfunctional relationship between officials and broadcasters in this respect. Indeed, the BBC’s Russian programmes had been ‘the subject of discussion between the department and the BBC for the past three years in an attempt to improve them’, but without, from the Foreign Office’s perspective, success.12 In particular, it was felt that ‘in their anxiety to appeal to the Soviet intelligentsia and to create a mental and emotional bridge across the Iron Curtain, the Russian Service have tended to blur their presentation of the British case by trying to be too conciliatory’.13
Several years’ worth of experience of transmitting over the Iron Curtain had produced two distinct doctrines of how best to maximize the effectiveness of broadcasts in Russian. For the Foreign Office, the BBC’s programmes were excessively ‘dry and dull’ and therefore lacked the necessary edge to be an effective form of propaganda, opening the ears of listeners to the world outside and exposing the inequities and hypocrisies of Soviet communist rule as seen from the West.14 For example, there was concern that recent ‘talks on the Rembrandt exhibition in Amsterdam, one on the Schumann centenary and another on the merits of the Tunisian Prime Minister would seem, given our relatively short broadcasting hours, to be only justifiable if there were a drastic dearth of interesting material’.15 The BBC, as Ian Jacob pointed out, had developed a rather different approach. ‘The art of broadcasting successfully to foreign audiences’, he explained in a paper for the FO, ‘lies in estimating how best to secure their friendly interest.’16 This echoed the personal style of the Russian Service Programme Organiser (head of the service), Anatol Goldberg, and although Russian output did not eschew critical commentary – indeed it had become a fact of Cold War broadcasting life – the BBC sought to couch it within an empathetic framework rather than a more aggressive and potentially alienating one.
What made this difference of emphasis particularly difficult was that it centred on an issue of editorial tone – a textural dispute. This fact was, of course, well understood by both sides and helps explain why, after three years of debate, the FO felt that it had failed to realize the desired changes in output. Actual editorial control, as opposed to instructions concerning where and when to broadcast, was the emblem of the External Services’ independence from the British government. It was also, the BBC maintained, the preserve of the broadcast specialist, not the realm of the policy analyst, and a strict interpretation of the BBC’s Charter would confirm this constitutional and practical position. And yet, it was also understood that the BBC, under the rubric of the national interest, had a duty to protect and present Britain’s interests overseas. To do this successfully required negotiation with the FO over the strategic direction of broadcasts abroad. This had been the case in 1948 in terms of the external threat that communism posed Britain, and now in 1956 another such reorientation was on the cards.
Rather than continuing to push for a gradual editorial overhaul, by the spring of 1956 the FO was planning a radical shake-up of the External Services. What remained to be seen was whether common ground could be found between Whitehall and the BBC on the direction to be taken. However, before this process had a chance to gain purchase it was overtaken by a hugely significant development: the cessation of the jamming of BBC programmes in Russian. The trigger for this was the arrival in Britain of Khrushchev and Bulganin. On 18 April 1956, the first day of their visit, the BBC noticed ‘that a very substantial proportion of the jammers located in the USSR were no longer attacking these particular broadcasts’. Among the western radios transmitting in Russian – America, Canada, Italy, Turkey, Spain, France, Israel and the Vatican – only the BBC was given this reprieve.17 There was an obvious and immediate political and diplomatic dividend for the Soviet leaders in having the jamming suspended both at home and overseas. On the one hand, it demonstrated an intention for cultural co-operation with the United Kingdom at the start of an historic visit, while on the other, it allowed the BBC’s Russian audience to glimpse their leaders on the international stage as reported independently and freely by the world’s press through the BBC. It is also important to recognize that there were other, more rooted, reasons for the cessation.
Central among these was the desire within the Soviet leadership to promote their vision of peaceful coexistence as the future for Cold War relations. And a high profile way of demonstrating this was to shut down some of the jamming operation. In this context, it was ironic that the persistent thread of British government criticism of BBC broadcasts to the USSR – that output was too mild – may have been a compelling facilitating reason on the Soviet side in support of cessation. The fact that the Russian Service was not overly denunciatory in character, that it was in essence a news service, would certainly have made it far less offensive on political, ideological and theological grounds to Soviet Communist Party sensibilities than certain other western broadcasters. Not surprisingly, however, BBC broadcasts to the satellites, which maintained a much sharper attack on Soviet domination and with which the FO were much more satisfied, continued to be jammed.18 There were also significant logistical reasons for a curtailment of jamming activity. The BBC and the FO were very aware of the cost they (along with the Americans and others) were placing on the Soviet Union in terms of financial expenditure and material resources (including personnel), in maintaining such a major jamming enterprise. And as the dimensions of the radio race between East and West expanded, the reduction of this burden may have been a consideration for the Russians in deciding if and when a reduction in the jamming operation could be made.
A perhaps less well-known contributing factor to this break in jamming was the continued development of co-operative relations between BBC and Soviet broadcasters and a series of discussions that took place between their representatives in 1955 and 1956. In October 1955 a Russian delegation of broadcasters had visited the United Kingdom to discuss mutual areas of interest – technical, engineering, management and output – and the scope for future co-operative development with the BBC. High on the agenda, from the British perspective, was the continued jamming of BBC broadcasts. During this visit the leader of the delegation, Topuriya, the Deputy Minister of Communications (the Soviet department responsible for the technical execution of the directive to jam BBC broadcasts), implied there was room for manoeuvre on the topic. The UK response was not to accept this informal invitation so as to avoid giving the impression of a ‘concessionary attitude’.19 Nevertheless, it was clear that, whatever the Soviet motivation, a shift was occurring in its attitude towards jamming. The visit to London in February 1956 of Mikhailov, the Soviet Minister of Culture (responsible for Soviet Radio), may also have provided another opportunity for official discussion of the culture of jamming and its future direction.20 As it was, the cessation of jamming was not the complete surprise it might otherwise have appeared. The Director of External Broadcasting, J. B. Clark, when explaining the circumstances to the BBC Governors clearly felt that the reduction in jamming was a consequence of the combined effect of ‘Russian détente’ and negotiations conducted by himself with the Soviet authorities ‘in London and Moscow’.21 It was, nonetheless, a hugely significant development and marks the beginning of what might be described as a unique period of ‘radio détente’ between the BBC and Soviet Radio.
In the spring of 1956 the course of radio diplomacy between BBC and Soviet broadcasters in many respects mirrored that of relations between Britain and the USSR. Under the leadership of Khrushchev and Bulganin it was apparent that a significant change in the style of Soviet engagement with the rest of the world was taking place. But there were major doubts, highlighted by the ‘imperialist’ criticisms levelled at Britain during the Soviet leaders’ Asian tour, about whether this represented a change of substance. Nonetheless, the possibility of lessening Cold War tensions provided a compelling reason to explore with an open, though sceptical, mind the parameters and dynamics of the emerging détente. It was in this spirit that the FO had agreed to a return visit to the Soviet Union by a BBC delegation that would be ‘prepared to insist on answers to awkward questions’, particularly on issues related to jamming.22 Accordingly, eleven days after the Soviet leaders arrived in Britain a BBC party of seven, led by the Director of External Broadcasting J. B. Clark with the Russian Programme Organiser Anatol Goldberg acting as interpreter, arrived in Moscow.23 Top of the visitors’ agenda on their twelve-day tour (which included visits to Leningrad and Kiev) was the question of programme exchanges between the BBC and Soviet Radio. These had been taking place for some time albeit on a rather uneven basis but there was now a desire, also strongly supported by the FO, to develop the potential for television programme exchanges in addition to extending the trade in radio exchanges. During negotiations the BBC delegation were at pains to stress at every available opportunity ‘the fact that the continuance of jamming which was so directly in conflict with the purposes and potentialities of broadcasting bedevilled the whole prospect of cooperation’.24
The visit also provided a first rate opportunity to look for evidence of jamming operations – ‘mysterious sausage type aerials are visible on a number of buildings’ – and to judge the reach and audibility of BBC broadcasts to Russia with the portable medium and shortwave receiver they had brought with them. Neither was easy and Clark noted that it was not possible ‘within the limits of tact, to take the receiver in a car some 20 or 30 kilometres out of Moscow to attempt reception of the Russian Service and to confirm that the jammers are only effective in the main centres of population’. Nevertheless, they were able to conclude that the western areas of the Soviet Union provided good shortwave reception from most parts of the world. The greatest surprise, though, and of quite some importance to the ongoing expansion of English by Radio output in broadcasts to the USSR was the discovery that the English-language General Overseas Service ‘was received excellently’ even when radiated from the Tebrau transmitter in Singapore which was not directed for reception in Moscow.25
Although discussions between the BBC and their Soviet counterparts produced no tangible concessions in the official Soviet argument in favour of jamming (that it was a necessary means of protecting Soviet citizens against hostile propaganda), there was detected in discussions with the Head of Soviet Radio, Puzin, ‘a mood in which negotiation might be possible’ and a ‘wish on the part of the Soviet Government to make a first step towards some abatement of this major irritant’.26 As Jacob pointed out to the Governors in the summer of 1956, ‘plans for future liaison are based on the assumption that the recent reduction in jamming will continue.’27 Clark, however, sounded a note of caution about the long-term implications of this apparent breakthrough in his report on the trip of the BBC delegation:
The elaborate and obviously carefully engineered jamming installations . . . and the importance clearly attached to the control of listening inherent in the act of jamming, yields no indication that the Soviet authorities are likely to dismantle or abandon the means of jamming, whatever bilateral or multilateral arrangements they may make. It would be wishful thinking to imagine that, in the context of their present more cooperative attitude in broadcasting as in other fields, they contemplate depriving themselves of the jamming weapon – at least for many years to come.28
This sober, though entirely accurate, assessment was a useful reminder of the geopolitical context within which these discussions were taking place.
It was, nonetheless, a very successful visit and the source of a real improvement in relations between the two broadcasters with an agreement, in principle, reached ‘on the basis of collaboration which will cover the exchange of programmes on an entirely satisfactory basis and liaison in other matters of mutual interest’.29 The trip had also been very useful in terms of gaining an assessment of the potential of the BBC’s audience in the Soviet Union – a field that had lacked illumination for some time. Out of a total of 35 million licensed receiving installations, 10 million wireless sets were produced by the Ministry of Radio Engineering Industry.30 Therefore, the need to maintain a domestic broadcasting service across the vast distances of the Soviet Union provided wireless receivers with a short-wave range capable of picking up BBC broadcasts in Russian. The Soviet authorities were, in effect, manufacturing wireless Trojan horses which gave the BBC access to an audience of millions deep behind the Iron Curtain which were otherwise untouchable from the outside. Both Bush House and the Foreign Office were quick to identify the ‘immediate and striking opportunities . . . now presented by the lessening of jamming of BBC broadcasts’ to penetrate Soviet minds as never before.31
The ‘unparalleled opportunity’, as IPD’s Paul Grey described it, to address Russian listeners unimpeded now gave greater impetus and direction to the FO’s editorial re-engagement with the BBC External Services’ output, and broadcasts in Russian in particular.32 It also provided the BBC with a chance, mindful of official views on King Charles Street and keen to retrieve the initiative, to re-engineer its programming over the Iron Curtain in line with the new listening conditions. In a very important memorandum for the FO in May 1956 the Director-General, Ian Jacob, evinced the latest BBC thinking on Russian-speaking audience requirements. The listener, he wrote, ‘will be in receptive mood, and avid for knowledge and stimulation. In place of the bare presentation of facts and argument which is all that has been possible in the face of the jamming, a more elaborate programme will be necessary in order to follow up and develop our advantage.’ New series of talks would be commissioned ‘to correct the distortions and gaps in knowledge’. The teaching of English by Radio would be increased and the ‘music, entertainment and the ordinary sounds of this country will need to be put across for the first time’.33 What Jacob was talking about amounted to an educational agenda to engage the people of Russia with a more composite programme, indicative of wider social trends within British society, than had been possible before.
The FO, too, was focused on re-educating a Soviet audience that had been ‘cut off from information about the West for so long’. However, their educational zeal was punctuated by more pressing political concerns than that of the BBC. Increasing the range of output to give a genuine picture of life in Britain, they argued, ‘did not mean to imply that we should abjure all criticism of Soviet policy. . . . Indeed projection of Britain and criticism of Soviet behaviour must often go hand in hand; the one will not be effective without the other.’34 As such, while BBC plans for the broadening of Russian Service programme content were considered by the FO to be ‘plainly on the right lines’, there was a strong belief that the Corporation was simply not making the most of the opportunity the cessation of jamming presented. As Cosmo Stewart, the head of IPD, put it in an internal briefing note, there was an ‘intellectual softness’ at the heart of the BBC’s operation that prevented the British point of view from being presented more forcefully. Broadcasts were characterized by ‘too much hedging, ambiguity and oversubtlety’.35
A good, if rather curious, case in point had been the arrest in the summer of 1956 of the Russian discus-thrower, Nina Ponomareva, for stealing hats from C & A Modes in Oxford Street while in London with the Soviet athletics team for the White City Games. The ensuing crisis – the Soviet team’s withdrawal from Games, Ms Ponomareva’s initial failure to attend her bail hearing and six week confinement at the Soviet Embassy until she was finally permitted to go to court – was fully reported, often through eyewitness accounts, as was her conviction and non-custodial sentence of a payment of three guineas. The Director of External Services, J. B. Clark, noted at the time that
comment in the BBC’s Russian broadcasts confined itself to a calm exposition of the facts, explaining the independence from political interference of the legal processes that had been set in motion, coupled with regret that political prejudice had again been injected into a field which had been pleasantly free from it in recent months.36
This treatment of the case exemplified the nature of the FO’s criticism of the present balance in Russian output. On the one hand, the opportunity taken to explain the principles and operations of the British legal system, particularly when contrasted with the Soviet judiciary, was well realized. On the other, the FO believed there had been a failure to ‘firmly condemn Russian nonsense’: ‘We fully recognise that there is scope for subtlety in penetrating Russian minds, but the prime purpose must surely be to state our views unambiguously, and this means that if the Russians behave badly at our expense we should not shrink from telling them so plainly.’37 Where the BBC had shown regret over the course of Soviet actions the FO wanted condemnation.
The debate over broadcasts in Russian stood in contrast to that concerning services to the Soviet satellite states which the FO considered far more satisfactory. The reason for this was the convergence of respective appreciations of the interests, needs and tolerances of the listening audience. Since 1948/49 when the editorial policy towards the satellites was first fixed in its Cold War mode, Soviet domination over the internal affairs of these territories had provided a central and rich theme which the BBC, after careful negotiation with Whitehall, was willing to exploit. As Jacob noted of overseas listeners in the summer of 1956, ‘It may in some instances be best to enlist their support against the regime in which they live, as in Germany during the war, or in the Russian satellites.’ This was a strategy that made sense in broadcasting terms because there already existed a cleavage between the people of Central and Eastern Europe and their Moscow-sponsored communist leaderships. Consequently, programmes that highlighted, in their coverage of current events and world affairs, the nature of Soviet oppression had a ready audience and a chance of gaining purchase. Although not liberationist, these broadcasts did seek to extend the emotional and political distance between the people and their leaders. As a result, the theme of Soviet imperialism, in contrast to national or regional self-determination, was seen in Bush House as a fruitful and worthwhile target in a way that just did not translate to the Soviet context where history and culture were against it. For Jacob nothing was to be gained by ‘alienating the listener or his nation as a whole’.38 The fear at the BBC was that to follow a highly critical and denunciatory policy in its broadcasts to Russia would run the risk of doing just that.
Aggressive broadcasting which challenged the listeners’ loyalty to their homeland weakened the broadcast authority of the BBC, it was argued, whereas attacks on the Soviet system in the satellites where there was growing hostility towards Russian domination made the central control exercised by Moscow a weakness that could be legitimately targeted. This convergence of purpose on Central and Eastern Europe reflected a consensus, in this sphere at least, of what it meant to broadcast in the national interest. It was based on a calculation that took into account UK attitudes, government opinion, as well as the cultural, political and emotional needs of audiences whose national identity was made subservient to Soviet regional aims and who lacked an independent media.
As Jacob pointed out in the summer of 1956, the value derived from this approach rested on the application of a consistent editorial strategy over a long period of time.39 Strong support for this view was evident in a contemporary Radio Free Europe (RFE) report on listening in Poland which had concluded that the BBC’s popularity, which exceeded that of RFE, Radio Madrid and VOA, was predicated on ‘its reliability and tradition dating back to the days of the German occupation, which accounts for the listeners’ attachment to the BBC’.40 Accordingly, when Jacob laid out for the FO the editorial strategy for broadcasting over the Iron Curtain he was able to point to six major themes that had formed the basis of critical attacks on the Soviet regime ‘during the past decade’:
In reflective mood, Jacob wondered whether it was ‘a coincidence that the work of a decade on these themes by the BBC has been followed by major admissions and modifications under each of these headings, with a resultant loosening of the whole regime’. Leaving his Whitehall readers to contemplate the consequences of this claim, his comments brought into focus a highly important conclusion being drawn in the West in the early summer of 1956: that the Soviet Union was experiencing highly significant problems in managing internal dissatisfaction within its satellite system. In this context, did the BBC have a role to play in amplifying the pressures being felt in Moscow? Jacob seemed to think so:
While the future will establish how much the cracks spreading across the Communist façade have been due to broadcasting from without. . . . The cracks which have appeared must now be prised further open and prevented from closing again. The Soviet domination of Eastern Europe must be further weakened and its recovery prevented.42
By 1956 the Soviet Union had been coming to terms with the political and doctrinal legacy of Stalin’s death for nearly three years. The competition for the Soviet leadership – involving, principally, Malenkov, Bulganin and Khrushchev – had mirrored the unsettled direction of the USSR’s ongoing ideological strategy and its practical application. By extension, the nature of Soviet control over the satellites became inherently bound up in the vicissitudes of the leadership race. At the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956 a vision of the future did emerge out of a dramatic critique of the past that was to have a seismic impact on relations between the Soviet Union and her satellites and provide an organizing theme around which broadcasts over the Iron Curtain were thereafter framed. In a closed session on the last day of the Congress, the ascendant Khrushchev delivered a long and wide-ranging speech that at its heart sought to cut the Soviet leadership free of the previous twenty years of Stalinist rule. Khrushchev’s purpose, in what was a carefully calculated, but none the less daring, speech was to effect a decapitation of the old order and revitalize the governing communist tradition, with himself at its head.43
In what must have been a shocking and unsettling break from normal practice for delegates, Khrushchev came to bury Stalin, not to praise him. And this he did with a penetrating piece of character assassination that, on the one hand, acknowledged officially for the first time what many had privately known or suspected about the terror of previous decades while, on the other, consigning this problematic past to the history books along with its chief architect in what was a calculated act of flagellation to effect political renewal. Stalin, he argued, had violated principles of collective decision-making and fostered the ‘cult of personality’ as an adjunct to power. What was now required was a return to ‘Leninist principles of Soviet socialist democracy’ which would be ‘characterised by the wide practice of criticism and self-criticism’ – something that had been conspicuous by its absence under Stalin.44
This was a step into the unknown for Khrushchev and other senior officials. The notion of criticizing the state, self-criticism indeed, had been absent from Soviet life for a generation and sat incongruously with the idea of an infallible and historically determined system which had become an inherent part of the projection of Soviet identity both at home and overseas. It was a message that needed careful dissemination if the Soviet leadership was to control the course and consequences of the debate it had started. Developments over the next few months, however, led the BBC to conclude that Khrushchev had opened the floodgates and could not now easily stem the liberalizing sentiment flowing through some of the satellite states. As the Hungarian Section Programme Organiser, Ferenc Rentoul, succinctly put it in a General News Talk for the European Services at the end of June: ‘Like the sorcerer’s apprentice who had released forces he could not later control, the Communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe are in difficulties.’45
Far from being passive observers of the dramatic changes taking place in the Soviet Union, the BBC and other broadcasters, in particular RFE and the VOA, put a great deal of effort into influencing the way in which these shifts were interpreted by satellite audiences. As Clark noted, ‘Khrushchev’s admission that the Stalin regime had been a tyrant-ridden nightmare was persistently underlined in comments in the days and weeks that followed.’46 This critique was considerably enhanced when the text of Khrushchev’s speech was leaked by the CIA (who had obtained a Polish copy in April from Israeli Intelligence) to the New York Times and published on 2 June.47 Now it was possible to broadcast ‘extensive extracts . . . to those countries without a free press’. Consequently, publication of the speech dominated output of the BBC, RFE and VOA. As Clark pointed out for the BBC Governors, despite the lack of publication within the Soviet Union, ‘there is no doubt that everyone who listened to the BBC broadcasts over this period was able to get a clear understanding of what is certainly one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of Communism’.48