The Power of Shortwave Radio. And, What Gets Lost with Voice of America?

We are going to be slimming this agency down, way down.

It's going on an Ozempic diet.

The Trump administration has been gutting the broadcasting service Voice of America.

From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Micah Loewinger.

But Republicans once wanted VOA to be as big as possible.

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.

Radio Free Europe also risks losing funding.

A journalist who spent time in a Russian prison for her work with it grapples with the fallout.

I'll be talking to the families of our imprisoned journalists these days.

What am I gonna tell them that their loved ones are imprisoned for nothing?

It's all coming up after this.

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From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

I'm Michael Loewinger.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

The voice of America is still alive, but just barely.

This month, Michael Abramowicz, the director of the VOA, was fired after refusing to accept what he called an illegal reassignment to a lower position.

Abramowicz has been an outspoken critic of the Trump administration's moves to dismantle the government broadcasting service.

Leading those efforts has been Carrie Lake, the former TV host, now a special advisor to the United States Agency for Global Media, which oversees the service.

We are going to be slimming this agency down, way down.

It's going on an Ozempic diet.

The rot is so bad, it's like having a rotten fish and trying to find a little portion you can eat.

It's unsalvageable right now.

It's not the first time the VOA has been explicitly politicized.

Ronald Reagan did it back in the 80s.

But in fact, over the past century, radio has played a vital role in much of the nation's engagements in soft power.

That story about the role AM radio played throughout the last century is how we launched the second season of The Divided Dial, our award-winning series hosted by reporter Katie Thornton.

With the VOA back in the news, we thought it was definitely worth a revisit.

Here's Katie.

Z with Transoceanics.

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

Last summer, I met met up with a journalist and radio fan named David Gorin.

These are like beautiful radio tough for a few years.

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.

And I turned it on, and it's like the radio leapt out of my hand with the North American service of Radio Moscow.

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

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

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,

the U.S.

broadcasting news and information to Cuba.

Reserve Islamic Republic of Iran, China Radio International, broadcasting in Spanish.

Let's see, anything else strong?

No, worth of Italy, broadcast in Italian.

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

And they have very strident, you know, military stuff.

And news from Cuba.

This is Radio Rebelde, Radio Rebel.

And it goes back to the revolution.

On the short waves, the global tussle for influence plays out 24-7.

But we didn't just hear news and propaganda.

Well, let's just go at the dance.

We'll talk about some worse good.

There were beeps and bloops.

Here we go.

Coded messages sent between amateur radio operators or between government officials who used the shortwaves to send military data or secret instructions.

Let's see what else we have.

And some of what we heard just sounded like normal radio with lots of music

and preaching.

Strong in the Lord and the power of his might against the wiles of the devil.

It was hidden just to hide the meaning and the power of the divine name.

That's an end times ministry that also preaches that the earth is flat.

Which is very interesting because

shortwave radio wouldn't propagate in a flat earth, you know, but

details, details.

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.

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.

In season one, I investigated how right-wing talk took over AMN FM radio.

But in all my years of radio research, I'd never really learned about shortwave radio before.

And listen, I'm not going to tell you that shortwave radio is as influential today as the AMN 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.

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.

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.

Signals reached up to 50, maybe 75 miles.

By the way, downtakes way, your home state can take a bow, you know.

I will.

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 Edison studio

located at one one would hear stations from Chicago

a listener in Kansas might hear an opera or a boxing match from the East Coast

after dark it was like the world cracked open and distant stations faded in and out on ghostly mysterious winds

Most people had never heard a faraway voice, period.

Long-distance telephone calls were the costly domain of dignitaries and government officials, and even those were fed across long, scratchy copper lines.

A disembodied voice, without a wire, without a fee, from hundreds of miles away, that awed and baffled people.

Even scientists, some of whom believed that radio, perhaps, could be used to communicate with the dead.

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

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

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.

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

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 byproduct.

Radio waves are set up in all directions.

It's called a sky wave, and the sky wave goes up into the atmosphere.

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.

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.

But at night, when the sun sets, these layers disappear, and the ones above them combine to form a dense layer, and it acts like a mirror to sky waves.

At night, these sky waves, the sort of byproduct 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.

When these waves strike the antenna of a receiving set, this entire process is reversed.

We hear sound originating at that very moment, hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

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.

They had a map on the wall with map tacks, and every time they reeled in a station, they would put a map tag on where that broadcast emanated from.

Was it Kansas City?

Was it Washington, D.C., wherever?

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.

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 U.S.

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.

They were kicked down to the waves that were thought utterly worthless, short waves.

Back then, people thought the short waves 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.

They began experimenting with them.

And as it turned out, the short waves weren't the short end of the stick.

They were getting really far.

They were getting stations in Australia, New Zealand, or stations in England and France.

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

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.

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.

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

Michelle Hilms is a retired professor of media studies who has written a lot about radio.

It would, you know, solve all kinds of problems.

Just a huge enthusiasm over the possibilities of shortwave as a medium.

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.

Coming up, the shortwaves go to war.

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I

am

con

this is on the media.

I'm Michael Loewinger.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone, and we're back with the second part of this episode of the Divided Dial that we first aired in May.

We pick up at the moment that the shortwaves went from utopian dreamscape to weapon of war.

Here's Katie Thornton.

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

This is Germany Coin who are going to convene tonight a radio play entitled Visions of Invasion.

Zeesen, Germany's state-run shortwave service, had spent years building a large following in America and around the world, playing things like orchestral music.

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 U.S.

was a key target.

You had people like Axis Sally.

This is the moon colour.

And I just have to say that when the women call, it pays to look for you.

She was an American living in Berlin.

She became the first American woman to be convicted of treason.

After the war, that she was broadcasting into the United States on shortwave.

Women of America waiting for the one you love,

thinking of a husband who had been sacrificed by Franklin D.

Roosevelt.

You might have heard of a person called Lord Haw Hall.

The great atheist from Britain is well underway.

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

The rich and affluent are removing themselves and their valuables as fast as they can.

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.

The Jewish family has a brand new heir.

He's their joy, heaven sent, and they proudly present Mr.

Franklin D.

Roosevelt Jones yesterday.

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

Non-intervention, how he shows it.

His decision to send troops along.

The U.S.

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 counter-offensives.

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

Susan Douglas again.

And they had people who were fluent in foreign languages, monitoring international shortwave broadcasts.

And then they turned their findings into entertainment, like the hits CBS radio series hosted by a popular detective novelist named Rex Stout.

It was called Our Secret Weapon.

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.

Every week, Radio Sleuth Stout debunked enemy shortwave propaganda.

First, a broadcast of the official German news agency on August 2nd.

The meeting between Churchill and Stalin was very excited and hysterical.

It assumed a dramatic.

On August 8th, beamed at England.

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

As we now know, Churchill actually arrived in Moscow on August 12th.

You can't beat that for a scoop.

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.

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

They broadcast news to the world with just a bit of pro-Ally spin.

The Danes have already had a taste of what German protection means.

A better word word for it would be plunder, for the Germans are seizing goods and property at will.

And in early 1942, the U.S.

followed suit.

The federal government debuted its shortwave radio service, The Voice of America, with an in-language broadcast to Germany.

This is a voice speaking from America.

Our voices are coming to you from New York, across the Atlantic Ocean to London.

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 U.S.

government did something unprecedented.

They nationalized all the roughly one dozen shortwave stations broadcasting from U.S.

soil, filling the international airwaves with approved broadcasts.

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.

And for the most part, they did that, if a bit selectively.

Michelle Hilms.

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

As the U.S.

sent more troops into battle, it used shortwave to boost morale.

They began to transmit entertainment programming via short wave to the troops.

Susan Douglas again.

And this was so important during holidays like Christmas and New Year's when there you are freezing and alone and scared.

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.

Dear mother, tonight I'm very lonely.

I've never written that before, and maybe it's a shock to you.

And then again, maybe you've read between the lines lines and have known it all along there was a very popular program called GI Jive with Jill

here's Jill and the GI Jive hi you fellas this is GI Jill with GI Jive you know the World Series 1942 World Series broadcast you gotta have the World Series

Yankees riding from five to nothing the voice of America was very highly respected and many people think that it you know did a great deal to help us win the war by the end of the second world war the Voice of America blanketed much of the world.

It ran in about 40 languages.

But during the Cold War, shortwave would become so much more.

This is Tehran Radio Iran.

The Australian Forces Radio.

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 U.S.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Radio Free Europe gets through with the truth every day.

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

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 on to the will and the drive.

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.

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 U.S.-run shortwave stations weren't just beaming out journalism.

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.

In the 1950s and 60s, music, especially jazz, was a key component in the U.S.

government's shortwave campaign.

This is the vice

of America.

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.

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

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

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.

Radio Free Dixie was hosted by U.S.

black power activist Robert F.

Williams.

He was on the lamb in Cuba fleeing drummed up charges that were later dropped.

And he broadcast a perspective that couldn't be found in the mainstream U.S.

media.

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.

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 U.S.

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 U.S.'s government-run, taxpayer-funded shortwave stations, they broadcast groups like Metallica and Motley Crew to listeners around the world.

By the early 1980s, the U.S.

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.

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.

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 into the VOA and Radio Free Europe.

I'm pleased to call on Director Wick and Minister Filelli to sign this agreement, an important step towards strengthening the signal of the voice of America.

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 shake-up by sidestepping one of the Voice of America's long-held tenets, the idea that a free press is the U.S.'s best advertisement.

Sure, that idea hadn't always been perfectly executed, but Reagan opted instead for more heavy-handed anti-communist propaganda.

Reagan's VOA ran explicit editorials on behalf of the administration.

Many longtime leaders resigned, replaced by more amenable colleagues, including Richard W.

Carlson, father of right-wing bloviator Tucker Carlson.

And it was Reagan who launched a costly new shortwave service targeting Cuba with hardline anti-communist messages.

Today, I'm appealing to the Congress, help us get the truth through.

Support our proposal for a new radio station, Radio Marti, for broadcasting to Cuba.

While public broadcasting floundered at home, government-subsidized propaganda and bad hair metal reverberated on Shortwave from the U.S.

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.

In the last weeks and months, we've seen one Communist Party after the other released in Europe knocked off its perch by the people.

The Cold War was over.

On this medium that seemed almost tailor-made for propaganda, there was vacancy, airtime for rent.

And in the U.S., a particular group of people was ready to snatch it up.

You must form your militia unit.

Pay no heed to the federal government, which is a counterfeit enemy, foreign government.

Are you a white woman such as myself who is sick of being harassed and tormented?

Call Aryan Nation for a whiter, brighter America.

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?

The airways became a haven for right-wing hate speech, and in the early 90s, Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City put the spotlight on the growing militia movement on shortwave radio.

For that story and for the rest of season two and indeed season one, search for the divided dial in your podcast app of choice.

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I

am

This is on the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Micah Loewinger.

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

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

Bae Fong, president of Radio Free Asia, or RFA.

A few months later, the organization cut nearly 300 jobs.

RFA had been producing boots on the ground reporting for 30 years in countries where few, if any, independent media outlets remain.

In 2017, reporters for the RFA Uyghur service, the world's only independent Uyghur language outlet, were the first to uncover clues of the now infamous detention camps in Xinjiang in northwest China.

One of our reporters found this out because he was calling around and just amazed at how many people were saying their relatives had been rounded up.

He broke the story and then that was picked up by all sorts of different media.

And by members of Congress.

And it goes on talking about ethnic Uyghurs held in political re-education camps.

I'm going to put quotes around that because they're not re-education camps.

They're concentration camps.

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

I received a call from our neighbor's daughter, Golchera Hoja, a Uyghur American reporter at RFA.

told me

all my relatives arrested because of me, my work.

Four other Uyghur service reporters have had close family members arrested and possibly sent to detention camps.

And in 2021, in nearby Myanmar, after a violent military coup sparked a long, bloody civil war, several journalists from RFA's Burmese service were forced to leave, but a few stayed behind.

They report without using their names.

Be Fong.

And they are able to get such stories as a villager found a cell phone that belonged to a junta soldier.

And on the cell phone were selfies and videos that he had taken of him and his comrades committing war crimes.

Using that cell phone footage, RFA reported in 2022 that 29 Burmese citizens were murdered by military junta soldiers in a small village.

Meanwhile, Russian state television is celebrating cuts to Radio Free Europe/slash Radio Liberty.

But for now, the service is still running.

In July, a judge ordered Trump officials to restore funding to Radio Free Europe, although a new budget has yet to be finalized.

In recent years, the Putin regime has targeted Radio Free Europe journalists, including Al Su Kermasheva, who spent nine months last year in a Russian detention center.

Today, she's she's a press freedom advocate, but for more than 20 years, she worked for Radio Free Europe/slash Radio Liberty's Tatar Bashkir service as a reporter, editor, and radio host covering the stories of ethnic minorities in Russia and broadcasting in her native language of Tatar.

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

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

This is how RFE operates.

We have a history of shutting down the services whenever the press is self-sustaining in the country where we broadcast, we report the service, the department shuts down.

So there were beautiful times 20 plus years ago.

This is how it started.

And then what was the turn?

When did it become such an essential service?

When Putin came to power, he started putting more pressure on journalists, on independent media.

We slowly lost

frequencies, FM frequencies, then they shut down the radio.

The Russian authorities later designated RFE as a foreign agent in Russia.

And later, the recent development, this happened when I was in prison, the Russian authorities designated RFE as an undesirable organization, which makes working for us a criminal offense in Russia.

I want to talk about

what happened in May of 2023 when you were detained by Russian authorities.

You were on a trip back to Kazan to care for your elderly mother.

The investigation was launched on the charges I hadn't registered my American passport.

The investigation took five months.

You were on house arrest for five months?

Yes.

And I paid my fine, which was not more than $100.

And I was about to pick up my passports from the investigator and leave when they arrested me.

And this time, it was a real arrest, and they sent me to the detention center.

What was going through your mind?

October 18th, I was cooking lunch at home, texting with my husband about school break later in October, which I was planning to be at home in Prague with my children already.

Suddenly, I heard noise at the door, and I saw from the little eye in the door that they were showing me some paper that they they need to take me away for investigation.

Then I was taken to the investigative committee and charged with not registering as a foreign agent.

That was absolutely a fake accusation.

It didn't have any evidence against me, but this is how it works: that they still put me to prison.

Later, that accusation was dropped, and they built up new charges against me,

which was based on the

book that I co-edited at RFERL.

The book is called Saying No to War, and it's a collection of 40 stories of 40 people in Russia who oppose the war.

The final charge I was charged with was that I was spreading fake information about Russian military.

And so you spent nine months in detention before the trial?

Yes, nine and a half months, 288 days, 40 Fridays.

I love Fridays and I calculated my life in prison by Fridays.

What was life like during that time?

In prison, you can't control anything.

You can't control your sleep.

You can't control your food intake.

You can't control...

basically nothing, but at least your breath or your thought.

That was very important.

I set set the routine to read.

And, you know, as there was a lack of books, I didn't have enough books.

I was reading ingredients on the food packages.

I was learning the amount of sugar in each product.

I know it sounds insane right now, but this is how I made my brain work.

And this is how I try to control my thoughts so I don't be depressed.

Actually, nobody is depressed in prison.

It's something beyond depression.

It's everything

around you deprives you of dignity.

So I set my routine of exercise, reading, trying to maintain a healthy diet.

You received a press freedom award from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

And in your speech, you alluded to this image that stuck with me where

There was snow and you were in a courtyard and you started to build a little house out of the snow?

It was the first snow, and there was a very small courtyard, and we couldn't walk.

I don't remember how many of us were several prisoners.

And I suddenly, without even thinking, I started building a lighthouse.

Accidentally, I found in my pocket a candy wrapper, which was yellow and red, which I put on top.

And I was looking at that lighthouse for a very long time,

thinking that, oh my gosh, this is the light I feel from my friends and family from the free world.

There was this big campaign around the world to write to political prisoners in Russia.

The best letters I got were from

people I didn't know.

Say one Russian woman from one of the European cities.

sent me a postcard saying, Aulsu, it's Christmas time.

It's beautiful here.

My friends are celebrating, but I took this time and I'm sitting in the next room where it's quiet to write to you while everybody is eating.

Those words will stay with me forever.

They meant so much to me in that dark prison cell.

Last July, you were brought to a courtroom for a secret trial in Kazan.

On that same day, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was tried in another Russian city.

He was sentenced to 16 years.

You received six and a half years for, as you said, spreading false information.

What happened after the sentence?

I was taken and brought to a prison in Moscow.

That's the notorious prison called Lefortova, former KGB prison.

I was kept there from Monday until Thursday, and on Thursday, the actual exchange happened.

Evan Gershkovich, Alsru Kermasheva, and Paul Whelan landed in Maryland late last night.

It was a moment I was dreaming of for many, many months.

I couldn't cry in prison.

I'm a person who

holds emotions when it's hard.

But since I was released, I think I've cried all my tears.

What were your initial feelings when you got the news that President Donald Trump had signed an executive order cutting off all funding to the U.S.

Agency for Global Media, which is the entity that funds Radio for Europe/slash Radio Liberty.

Well, I thought about two things.

First,

millions of people

will stop reading and watching our reporting.

Russian and Chinese propaganda will fill in that empty space very quickly, very efficiently, because those countries are spending more money on soft power and on propaganda media than the United States.

And the second thing, I'll be talking to the families of our imprisoned journalists these days.

What am I going to tell them that their loved ones are imprisoned for nothing?

This were my thoughts immediately when I heard the news.

You said you don't know what to tell the family members of Radio Free Europe journalists who are in prison for their reporting.

But I mean, for you,

you spent nine nine months for reporting that you did on behalf of this U.S.-funded news organization, and then an American president is accusing it of spreading, quote, radical propaganda, which was essentially the same charge that you got from that Russian secret court.

How are you feeling about the work that you paid a sacrifice for?

Thank you for your words.

You just took them out of my mouth, and you said that exactly how I would put it.

Because

if we talk about cost to taxpayers, we are the most efficient example of soft power that America can have.

Our effectiveness is proven by America's enemies to silence us.

These days, propaganda media organizations in Russia and Iran are celebrating.

And we are not out of business yet.

They're celebrating the rumors.

I mean, they've been trying to end our operations for years, for decades, and now suddenly our government is giving them this gift.

It's like an own goal, you know.

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

today is a celebration for my colleagues at rt sputnik

and other outlets because trump suddenly announced he's closing rfe slash rl and voice of america

they are closed now this is an awesome decision by

trump to which the host of the show vladimir salovyov responded

i'm addressing independent journalists die animals you are lying vile disgusting traitors to the motherland Die in a ditch.

Do you want to respond to that?

No, I don't want to respond to that.

I don't respond to things like that.

I saw that statement, too.

I mean,

yeah.

It was interesting to hear you use the term American soft power as part of the mission of Radio for Europe.

How important to you was it that the work, in addition to being journalism, was about advancing American soft power.

When I was doing that job, I didn't think about it.

I wasn't thinking about promoting anything.

I wasn't thinking about being a soft power for somebody.

This is what I was doing.

I was giving a voice to my people so they could take informed decisions for themselves.

Journalism, open objective journalism, doesn't exist in certain countries with autocracies.

People don't know that a media organization can be just reporting for the sake of reporting.

Those regimes are sure that every media organization should work for somebody's purpose, the ideology or politics or political parties or something.

But we were bringing those values of freedom of speech to our audiences.

Really, not much will change immediately if Radio Free Europe stops, But in a long-term effect, it will be such a disaster and it will be so difficult to start that over again, that experience that have been built for years, for 75 years.

Alsu Kermasheva is a journalist and press freedom advocate for Radio Free Europe slash Radio Liberty.

Alsu, thank you very much.

Thank you, Monka, for having me.

That's it for this week's show.

On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, and Candice Wong.

Our technical director is Jennifer Munson.

Eloise Blondio is our senior producer.

On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Micah Loewinger.