Foreign Broadcast Information Service Research Articles

Trends in Communist Propaganda. A CIA Investigation from 1970

Our study analyses a detailed report, issued on November 18th, 1970, by The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), which was subordinated to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Cold War. The role of the FBIS was to collect, translate into English, and make extensive summaries of information in foreign media, especially those within the Communist Bloc, summaries which would later be made available to U.S. decision-makers. The FBIS was an important branch of the CIA, seeing that the United States sought to identify any vulnerability to the adversary, and that the communist media did not enjoy freedom of expression, but instead precisely reflected the official position of the regime. The late 1970s are all the more interesting as the Communist Bloc`s monolithic unity breaks down and distinct positions emerge (e.g., the Soviet Union versus China, or Romania versus the Soviet Union), while the United States find themselves in a difficult situation in Indochina, the Middle East, or Latin America.

US Intelligence Estimates on the Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean Propaganda Campaigns during the Korean War

During the Korean War of 1950–1953, one of the dimensions of confrontation between the communist countries and the UN camp was information confrontation. The USSR, the PRC, and the DPRK were active in this sphere. Their propaganda exposed real and imaginary war crimes and “atrocities” by the American imperialists. The myth about the use of bacteriological weapons by the United States in Korea was widespread. Also, propaganda supported the legend of Chinese people’s volunteers. At the same time, materials from the propaganda campaigns of the USSR, the People’s Republic of China, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea were used by the American special services as a source of information about the enemy’s plans. This function was performed by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). This agency’s analytical conclusions constituted a significant part of the intelligence information flow received by the country’s highest authorities. The article discusses the content and direction of information flows of the socialist states’ mass media. Additionally, it considers the main directions of the propaganda activity of the USSR, the PRC, and the DPRK, the “special place” Soviet propaganda occupied in the information war, and the content of radio broadcasts and other media of the socialist countries. The source base of the research includes declassified FBIS documents, mass media materials, documents of the US State Department, and various narrative sources. The authors conclude that although FBIS specialists identified differences between the strategic approaches used by Moscow, Pyongyang, and Beijing, the country’s leadership often ignored this information and preferred to follow its own “homework”.

Amerikan Jokes: The Transnational Politics of Unlaughter in Turkey

How did ideas about humor shape US allies’ perceptions of America and Americans during the Cold War? This essay offers a small part of the puzzle by examining a category of unfunny jokes that midcentury Turks came to call “Amerikan.” The structure of these jokes shifted between the late 1940s and 1990s, offering clues as to how disparate cultures can merge and transform across uneven power divides. The label itself and the connection to “unlaughter,” however, also operated as a political index. Turkish opinion leaders and journalists used Amerikan jokes to comment on US actions, including Cold War aid policy and the war in Vietnam, and to code local perceptions of American political leaders, including President Harry Truman, then senator Joseph Biden, and President Ronald Reagan. Using Turkish newspaper archives and Foreign Broadcast Information Service Daily Reports, this essay demonstrates how ideas about American national character coded through humor could influence local perceptions at a time when the United States was both seeking to differentiate itself from Europe as a “benevolent” world power and driving economic and cultural change in newly independent nations.

Analysis of Radio Propaganda in the 1953 Iran Coup

In 1953, the United States assisted in a coup that removed Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq from office. Analysis of radio broadcasts during and after the coup provides a window for scrutinizing the event and understanding the motivations of all sides. The United States monitoring agency, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), snatched these ephemeral broadcasts from the ether for posterity. This study expands the coup narrative based on these broadcasts. An analysis of the transcripts suggests that assertions that the Central Intelligence Agency's covert propaganda program resulted in the coup's success are an oversimplification. On the contrary, the effect of both Mosaddeq's and the Tudeh party's actions unwittingly legitimized the coup-plotters' propaganda in the weeks prior to the coup and contributed more to the success of the coup.

Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1941‐1974

Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1941‐1974

Problem Representation and Conflict Dynamics in the Middle East and Northern Ireland

In an effort to explain conflictual and cooperative actions in the Middle East and Northern Ireland at a time (1995–1999) when international structural factors were relatively constant, this article focuses on cognitive factors. Specifically, statements of leaders representing multiple actors in the Israeli–Palestinian and Northern Ireland relationship are examined. Texts from these leaders serve as data for the independent variable, problem representation. Hypotheses argue that the existence and centrality of actor problem representations can help explain behavior, in a manner that adds to more widely used scholarly explanations. More specifically, the article explores the relationship among leaders' “problem representations” and conflict between the entities they lead. Problem representation is measured in three dimensions using Foreign Broadcast Information Service (World News Connection) texts: (1) centrality of enemy image, (2) how inclusive/exclusive the leader is in describing the in-group and principal outgroup, and (3) the key definition of the problem (coded in terms of three strategies: justice, governance, or threat). Conflict, the dependent variable, is measured in terms of KEDS-TABARI event data on deeds (not words) in the Israeli–Palestinian and Northern Ireland conflicts. Strikingly, the analysis finds that Israeli actions are strongly related to prior and current Palestinian leaders' problem representations, much more than they are to Israeli leaders' problem representations. Similarly, Palestinian actions are found to have a clear relationship with prior and current Israeli leaders' problem representations, much more than they are with Palestinian leaders' problem representations. These results are particularly strong when the problem representation is one of the overall political leadership on the “other” side. Additionally, in-group and out-group inclusivity are the most significant predictors of actions. For Northern Ireland, the same two themes prevail, although not as strongly: there is a clear statistical relationship between each side's problem representations and the other side's actions, stronger in fact than the relationship between their own side's representations and actions. Also, in-group and out-group inclusivity produce a strong statistical relationship with conflict and cooperation. Finally, results are compared with a “tit-for-tat” hypothesis, and found to embellish that hypothesis.

Military Confidence-Building Measures:

Much attention has been paid in recent years to escalating tensions across the Taiwan Strait. Especially in the aftermath of the reelection of Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian in March 2004, politic...

B. PALESTINIAN COUNCIL SPECIAL COMMITTEE, REPORT ON THE POLITICAL AND SECURITY SITUATION IN THE PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES, RAMALLAH, 24 JULY 2004 (EXCERPTS).

In late spring and early summer 2004, Sharon's disengagement plan moved forward as the security situation particularly in Gaza steadily declined and Arafat ignored Palestinian and international calls to consolidate the Palestinian security services and reassert control over the territories. In light of the deterioration and growing uncertainty, the Palestinian Council (PC) formed on 7 July a special committee (comprising Arafat loyalists and ““reformers””) to study the political and security situation in the occupied territories and draft a report assessing current conditions, how they got that way, and how they could be improved. Between 12 and 18 July, the committee interviewed dozens of Palestinian officials and citizens in the West Bank and Gaza, including Prime Minister Ahmad Qurai‘‘. The committee issued its eighteen-page report around 19 July, during a sharp upswing in intra-Palestinian violence that prompted Qurai‘‘'s resignation on 17 July. The PC endorsed the report's recommendations after a heated debate on 21 July. The report, which was not made public, was leaked to the U.S. Department of Commerce's Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which translated and published it through its online service, World News Connection, on 27 July.Reproduced below are the committee's observations and recommendations and selections from the long appendix summarizing the committee's hearings with Palestinian figures. The excerpts were selected to reflect the opinions of the main groups interviewed: citizens and key public figures, representatives of the national and Islamist factions, members of NGOs and the press, officials in the security forces, and PM Qurai‘‘ as an official voice of the PA.

China's Kashmir Policies

This article analyzes the policies of the People's Republic of China (PRC) toward the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan. “Policies” is a plural noun. There are at least six distinct Chines...

HIGH‐DIMENSIONAL LEARNING FRAMEWORK FOR ADAPTIVE DOCUMENT FILTERING*

We investigate the unique requirements of the adaptive textual document filtering problem and propose a new high‐dimensional on‐line learning framework, known as the REPGER (relevant feature pool with good training example retrieval rule) algorithm to tackle this problem. Our algorithm possesses three characteristics. First, it maintains a pool of selective features with potentially high predictive power to predict document relevance. Second, besides retrieving documents according to their predicted relevance, it also retrieves incoming documents that are considered good training examples. Third, it can dynamically adjust the dissemination threshold throughout the filtering process so as to maintain a good filtering performance in a fully interactive environment. We have conducted experiments on three document corpora, namely, Associated Press, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, and Wall Street Journal to compare the performance of our REPGER algorithm with two existing on‐line learning algorithms. The results demonstrate that our REPGER algorithm gives better performance most of the time. Comparison with the TREC (Text Retrieval Conference) adaptive text filtering track participants was also made. The result shows that our REPGER algorithm is comparable to them.

The Text REtrieval Conferences (TRECs): Providing a Test‐Bed for Information Retrieval Systems

Les congres de la TREC (Text REtrieval Conferences) ont pour sujet d'etude les methodes de recherche d'information ainsi que l'evaluation de ces methodes. La TREC fournit des collection-test

Measuring worldwide connectivity: Expansion of the internet

The media have focused a great deal of attention on the Internet in the United States, but what is the status of connectivity outside the United States? The Human Development Index (HDI) created by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) ranks 174 countries by human development status, e.g., average life expectancy, GDP per capita, and adult literacy. Since 1991, Larry Landweber, a member of the Internet Society (ISO), has tracked the growth of Internet connectivity worldwide and made this information available via the Internet. Landweber's list is converted into high, medium, and low HDI rankings in order to note the growth of Internet connectivity for 174 countries during the past five years. Additionally, international media reports translated by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) are examined to track discussion of telecommunications or Internet expansion. FBIS citations show substantial coverage of telecommunications development and satellite projects in Asia and the Pacific, and Oceania. It is only within the last two years that the Internet has surfaced in international news reports. FBIS reports also reveal that foreign government officials are confronted with their inability to regulate the Internet. One example involves dissident groups circumventing traditional information channels to broadcast opposing views.

Instant History: Understanding the Wars of Yugoslav Succession

Nothing concentrates the attention like war. This is true not only of the actual participants but of the vicarious participants as well. While the peoples of the former Yugoslavia have suffered and died, a horrified but nevertheless fascinated world has wondered how it was possible that a seemingly prosperous and stable country could collapse into such a brutal internecine war. Was this a case of ancient ethnic hatreds breaking loose? Who was at fault, the Yugoslav communists or ethnic nationalists, western financial pressures or indecisive western policy? Could the wars have been prevented? What to do now? In 1992 two British journalists, Mark Thompson and Misha Glenny, provided the best initial accounts of Yugoslavia's collapse into warfare.' Since then, our shelves have filled with an unprecedented outpouring of books offering descriptions and analyses of Europe's worst bloodletting since World War II. Sifting through this contextual logjan has become a daunting task, both in emotional and in scholarly terms. In this review article we dip into the flood of new books to investigate how, and how well, these studies have dealt with the Yugoslav crisis. Understanding the wars of Yugoslav succession poses a problem that is common to most contemporary issues. Few archival sources of the sort that historians are now using to inform their understanding of the collapse of the first Yugoslavia in World War II and the creation of the second Yugoslavia in that war's aftermath are yet available to scholars. The Foreign Broadcast Information Service has translated major articles, broadcasts and public speeches from the Yugoslav media and from the successor states, but in the main scholars have had to rely on a mountain of secondary work, much of it in English. Western academic specialists have joined native scholars in sampling public opinion, assembling statistical data, reading the press and interviewing participants to fill in the archival gaps, while the still larger number of journalists who report on the wars rely primarily on interviews with participants and on their own experiences on the ground. These contrasting styles of investigation-scholars seeking written texts; journal-

Vietnam since 1975: Winning a war and losing the peace

BBC BBC Summary of World Broadcasts: Far East FBIS Daily Report of the U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information Service: East Asia FER Far Eastern Economic Review. Articles by Murray Hiebert unless indic...

Is the shining path the “New Khmer rouge”?

This article assesses the claim that Peru's Shining Path insurgency is the “new Khmer Rouge,” a reincarnation of the brutal communist movement responsible for the death of more than one million Cambodians during the 1975–1979 “Democratic Kampuchea” era. Although Shining Path is unlikely to seize power in Peru the analogy is still worth evaluating, given its prominence in public debates over the nature of the insurgency. On the basis of Foreign Broadcast Information Service reports, party statements, and other primary and secondary sources, two major characteristics of these organizations are compared: ideology and prerevolution behavior in their respective “liberated zones.” While acknowledging that the Shining Path and the Khmer Rouge share a number of important features, the article concludes that a Shining Path regime would be less extreme than Democratic Kampuchea, and that it is an overstatement to call the insurgency the new Khmer Rouge.

Political process and the 1989 Chinese student movement

Abstract This article analyzes the 1989 Chinese student movement in Beijing using the political process model that was used by Doug McAdam (1982) in his study of the U.S. civil rights movement. Discussing McAdam's three main variables—the structure of political opportunities, indigenous organizational strength, and cognitive liberation processes—as they relate to the 1989 Chinese context, the authors present a cross‐national application of the model. The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports from April, May, and early June of 1989 are used as the primary sources of data on the Chinese student movement. In applying McAdam's model crossnationally, the authors call for some modifications, but find its central elements to be essentially useful in explaining the emergence, development, and basic outcomes of this social movement.

THE 1989 CHINESE STUDENT MOVEMENT

The 1989 Chinese student movement holds many lessons regarding the use of nonviolent action as a mechanism for social change. Basic factors that contributed to the progression and outcomes of the movement were the structure of political opportunities, student organization, and protest tactics. Drawing primarily from Foreign Broadcast Information Service Daily Reports — China from April, May, and early June of 1989, the author has analyzed the events surrounding the student movement in order to gain insights into the dynamics of nonviolent social protest. Should the Chinese case be used as an example of the ineffectiveness of nonviolent action in the face of a regime willing to counter with military might? Might different actions on the part of student activists have led to a more favorable outcome? These questions are explored in attempting to understand better the factors that contribute to the effectiveness of nonviolent action for social change.

Latin America vs East Asia: A Comparative Development Perspective.

This handbook is designed to help researchers, journalists, students, and business people to locate the rich array of Washington institutions and organizations that focus on issues pertaining to Central Asia and the Caucasus region, particularly in the post-Soviet period. Washington's status as a major repository of documentation on every aspect of the region is strong and growing daily. Beyond the Library of Congress, which intensively collects newspapers and other published materials from the region, and the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which does the same for radio, there are hundreds of national and international public, non-profit, and private organizations and institutions in Washington with extensive links to Central Asia and the Caucasus, all of which maintain active archives and collections. The Guide includes more than 270 entries. It describes the structure and scholarly and technical resources of libraries, archives and manuscript repositories, museums and galleries, collections of sound and visual recordings, map and film collections, and the holdings of research centers and information agencies. Academic programs and departments of the metropolitan area's many institutions of higher learning are covered, along with international organizations, U.S. and foreign government agencies, association and advocacy groups, scientific organizations, educational and cultural organizations, corporations, technical assistance organizations, religious organizations, publications and media operations, bookstores and online resources. An index of organizations and institutions enhances the Guide's usefulness.

Population Redistribution in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam

Like a number of other developing countries the Socialist Republic of Vietnam has deemed its pattern of settlement to be in need of radical intervention. This article analyzes the post-1975 population redistribution program in Vietnam. After examining the goals and instruments of the program it evaluates its demographic and geographic efficiency and its social and economic costs. Information on interprovincial migration flows derived from the daily reports of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service is analyzed separately for the periods before and after the Sixth Party Plenum (1979). Results indicate that the decongestion of Southern cities took place mainly in the 1st period that labor population movements served mostly to alleviate excessive demographic pressures in a few Northern provinces and that the outmovement of Southern urbanites to New Economic Zones (NEZs) had been largely offset by an influx of Northerners into Southern cities and by substantial return migration from the NEZs. (authors)

The KAL 007 tragedy the use of FBIS in cross cultural research

In this paper the use of the daily report of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) for cross cultural research is described. The author was living in the Soviet Union during the period that the Soviets shot down a Korean Airliner. Shortly after the incident he collected interviews with Soviet citizens and contrasted these impressions with reports carried in the Soviet media in an effort to assess the impact of news reports on the development of belief systems.