BBC MONITOR SERVICE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 83, 24 January 1941, Page 3

BBC MONITOR SERVICE

Britain's Secret Radio Spotters

N the outskirts of a little village in the English countryside stands a small group of huts. Beyond, towers of steel rear into the air as if they would catch every whisper borne by the laden wind. And that, in fact, is just what they do, for those masts are the aerials which receive news, talks, and messages from every known corner of the globe. The engineers of the British Monitoring Service sit in the huts below, earphones on head, listening-in to the world. They receive two hundred foreign broadcasts a day, in twenty-five different languages, from Japan to South America, from Moscow to Buenos Aires. This Monitoring Service is the latest addition to British war intelligence, and plays an important part in British broad-_ casts to foreign countries. It was started before the war, mainly to test and improve reception in foreign countries and to record any outstanding speech or interesting programme for future use. In this way, Britain has a permanent record of all of Hitler’s speeches, broken promises, and betrayals, and is using the Nazi leader’s own words for many propaganda broadcasts to Germany and German-controlled Europe. Lies Noted The task of these monitors is highly important. Their job is to note every news bulletin issued by enemy countries, to record shipping movements, weather, and crop conditions in Europe and elsewhere. Reports of concentrations of troops, ships or other war material are all taken down by the expert linguists and sent

out to a central department, which in turn sends out a digest of this information twice a day to various Government departments and officials, Every lie spoken by Goebbels or Germany’s radio announcers is instantly noted and refuted in the British foreign programmes that same day. Even the German and Italian cookery programmes are listened to intently, for here are often hints as to the shortage of a particular food, or the rationing of yet another item. 500,000 Words The daily reports are issued in two parts, the early report at eleven in the morning being devoted exclusively to German broadcasts, and the later one at 2 p.m., dealing with transmissions other than German. Extracts from German bulletins to their own people and to foreign countries, Italian programmes for home and abroad, transmissions from the United States, Spain, Portugal, Japan, South America, are all included in the reports. Even the Free German station is not left out of these comprehensive information digests. At the end of a non-stop 24 hours of listening, the monitors will have taken down, translated into English, and edited some 500,000 words, enough to fill six good-sized novels. So Britain listens-in to the world, and on what the monitors hear is based largely the British a wireless programmes. BBC Foreign Broadcasts In the past three years Britain has developed a foreign broadcasting service second-to-none in the world. Over 20 different languages are spoken every day. Czech, Greek, French, Magyar, Polish, Serbo-Croat, Arabian and Turkish, are among the languages broadcast. The Monitoring Service is very essential in this work, for no false enemy statement has time to do real damage before the British monitors have heard it, passed it on to the Government, and had a denial issued in the next British foreign broadcast to the particular countries concerned.