The need for such a service became apparent in the 1930s. As fascist powers Germany and Italy broadcast violent anti­ British propaganda, both the Foreign Office and the BBC did some listening in, using shorthand typists wearing headphones. In the summer of 1939, with war approaching, the new Ministry of Information formally asked the BBC to undertake the task on a wider, more professional basis and agreed to cover the cost.

     Because it was feared that London might be heavily bombed, the service was at first based in the Midlands, in the town of Evesham in Worcestershire. In 1943 it was moved to Caversham Park, near Reading, west of London, where it remains.

     The first surviving report, dated 27 August 1939, said that the highlight of German news programs in German was "the new ration decree." News in English for Africa the same day "suggested that Poland was in a nervous, anxious and bellicose state and that the army chiefs were losing control over the lower army groups."

Monitoring in Wartime

  A few days later, the German army invaded Poland, and Britain and France declared war. The early wartime experiences of monitors were described later by retired members of staff. One of them said

  I was sent almost immediately ... to the hut which housed the engineers. There was a long table down the centre of the room and on it stood a row of big black boxes. They turned out to be radio sets, most delicate instruments, each with about half a dozen coils representing a range of frequencies (a term then still unknown to most of us). Housed in movable boxes, these were tuned by large calibrated dials. The engineers were rightly very proud of these sets and also protective of them; it was months before they allowed us to operate them ourselves.

  During the war, monitoring became a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week operation. Verbatim texts of speeches by Nazi leaders and lists of prisoners of war were provided. One notable coup was the "eavesdropping" on the weekly article written by the Nazi propaganda chief, Josef Goebbels, for the periodical Das Reich. The article was transmitted in advance to the German authorities in Norway on the Hellschreiber, the German tape machine. The Monitoring Service picked it up and transmitted it to the BBC German Service, which wrote a commentary on the article before it appeared-much to the amazement of the Nazis.

     In 1942, shortly after the United States had entered the war, its own monitoring service, the FBIS, began a collaboration with the BBC service, which was formalized in 1947 and lasts to this day. The two services divide the world between them, which allows them to operate more economically than if they both tried to cover everything. The BBC concentrates on Russia, Central Asia, Iran, parts of Europe and Africa, and a few other areas, and the FBIS concentrates on the rest of the world; there is some overlap. The arrangement has been described as a shining example of international cooperation.

Cold War

  After the war, the service began to look farther afield, particularly to the communist world. Because so many official pronouncements are first made on radio, it picked up many developments that it reported to the world either through the BBC World Service or one of the news agencies that subscribe to the Monitoring Service; these include the death of Stalin in 1953, the nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956, and the crushing of the Hungarian revolution by Soviet tanks the same year. In 1962 the Monitoring Service played a part in bringing the Cuban missile crisis to an end. At a dangerous stage in the crisis, it monitored a Moscow Radio broadcast in which the Soviet leader, Nikita Khruschev, replying to a message from President Kennedy, said, "The Soviet government has ordered the dismantling of the bases and the despatch of the equipment to the USSR. I appreciate your assurance that the United States will not invade Cuba."The message was flashed to Washington via the FBIS. Kennedy replied immediately, even though he had not received the official text, because, he said, "I attach tremendous significance to acting quickly with a view to solving the Cuban crisis."

     Sometimes the behavior of radio stations gave a hint that an important announcement was on its way. On the evening of 26 August 1968, for example, it seemed that momentous events were in the offing in Czechoslovakia. The Czech monitor on evening duty stayed on to listen to the first bulletin after midnight, which normally repeated old news. At 12:50 A.M. he heard this: "In a short while the Czechoslovak radio will be broadcasting an extremely important news item. Stay at your receivers, wake all your fellow citizens." This was followed by an interval of music, then an announcement that Warsaw Pact troops had invaded the country to put an end to the experiment of "communism with a human face," the so­-called Prague spring.

     The Monitoring Service received a foreshadowing of the overthrow of President Ceausescu of Romania in 1989. Listening to a live relay of a rally CeaU(;:escu was addressing, the monitor noticed what sounded like a scream. The relay went silent, to be resumed later. The recording was played over and over again for checking, and finally the BBC correspondent in Central Europe was alerted. The president was overthrown, but the scream was never identified.

     The attempted coup against Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 was heralded by radio. Just before three o'clock in the morning on 19 August, all the separate radio channels were merged into one, a break with the normal pattern. Ten minutes later, the Soviet news agency announced the formation of a state emergency committee to run the country because, according to the agency, of Mr. Gorbachev's state of health. Once the Monitoring Service heard this, the BBC broke the news.

     The Gulf War in the same year provided the Monitoring Service with a severe test. There was a proliferation of new radio stations, such as the "Mother of Battles," "The Voice of Free Iraq," "Holy Mecca," "Voice of Peace," and "Voice of the Gulf," as well as Baghdad Radio and other stations in the area. The Monitoring Service became the main source of news from within Iraq, and Caversham Park was visited by journalists and TV crews from many parts of the world, including Japan, Can­ ada, the United States, the Netherlands, and Britain itself.

Monitoring Today

     The tasks of the Monitoring Service and its working arrangements altered considerably over the first 60 years of its existence. Caversham Park itself remains a pleasant environment, with extensive grounds and graceful vistas over the Thames valley. The building dates from the 19th century but has been enlarged since then. The receiving aerials are in an old deer park a few miles away (Crowsley Park), an electrically quiet area in which the local electricity company has agreed not to station any overhead power cables. Here there are aerials suited to the whole range of radio frequencies and a number of satellite receiving dishes. There are more dishes in Caversham Park itself. The first dish went into operation in 1981, covering one of the Soviet television channels. Since then, there has been a huge increase in the number of satellite TV and radio channels, and they now account for over 70 percent of the services received.

     The monitors themselves are foreign nationals living in Britain or at Monitoring's overseas units or British graduates with a good grasp of languages. They listen on headphones, but transmissions are recorded, and it is from the recordings that translations are made, which can be checked for accuracy and archived. The monitors have been described as sedentary correspondents, gathering news by sitting and listening.

     In a booklet written in 1979, a former member of the service made the point that, in addition to good hearing, a monitor needs "a wide knowledge of current affairs, politics, economics, history, world geography, a knowledge in depth of the language or languages being monitored, and a fluent and idiomatic command of English." Accuracy and speed, he said, were the keynotes; he continues: "The monitor wages a constant struggle against the unreliability of sound. In that struggle background knowledge and an intuitive gift for mental association are major allies."

     The use of satellites has made transmissions easier to hear since those days, but there are still problems. Mishearing can lead to a mistranslation, and even if the words are clear, their meaning may be obscure. Television presents its own problems: pictures can be open to subjective interpretations.

     In 1994 the Foreign Office undertook a review of the whole operation, which changed its direction and the arrangements for funding. The service now has "stakeholders," customers who specify their requirements and who are serviced in various ways. Stakeholders are major government departments concerned with foreign policy and international security and the BBC itself. British diplomatic missions abroad that are on-line can receive the service direct. Material is also available to the public by commercial subscription to hard-copy publications and tailored on-line services. Customers include the media, major corporations and investment houses, consultants, charities, academic institutions, and freelance researchers. The stakeholders require that the service receive as much commercial income as possible.

     The Monitoring Service and the FBIS between them select about 150,000 words a day from the millions they receive. The selection process still depends on the knowledge, skills, and judgment of the individual men and women who make up the service, but it is conveyed to the customers in radically differ­ ent ways from the past. At one time, information was conveyed by teleprinters or the printed word.

     Printed information from the Monitoring Service continues in several forms. There is the Summary of World Broadcasts, a regular publication that developed from the wartime Digest. The Summary is divided geographically-the former Soviet Union and Baltic states; Central Europe and the Balkans; Asia and the Pacific; the Middle East and North Africa; and Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. A weekly publication called World Media gives a complete picture of developments in radio, television, satellite communications, and news agencies. Another weekly publication, Inside Central Asia, is in the form of a briefing document covering the various states in the region. However, the trend is for an increasing amount of material to be supplied in soft-copy form. It can be accessed either by searching the worldwide web database (with a password, or "pull" service) or by means of a profiled email service from the database (a "push" service). This service enables customers to extract only information relevant to them, meaning that material can be passed much more quickly.

     The Monitoring Service has always been able to provide up­ to-the-minute news, and this continues with the Newsfile. This is a 24-hour-a-day service that now provides a concise headline for each story, a summary of the main points, acknowledgment of the source, and relevant quotes. Audio and video material from a wide range of countries is available for actuality inserts-a useful service for broadcasters, in particular the BBC World Service, one of Monitoring's main customers.

     There is constant consultation with customers to ascertain their requirements. There is still high interest in a number of geographical areas, such as the former Soviet Union, but there is also increasing interest in specific subjects, including developments in the foreign media, reaction to British policies, energy, human rights, crime, telecommunications, and terror­ism. Some services are targeted for customers according to criteria they provide and are sent by fax or email. Some are packaged to meet particular requirements on an ad hoc basis. The service also provides reference material, such as cabinet lists and biographies, consultations and radio and TV interviews with in-house specialists, and monitoring of the use made of radio frequencies.

     There has been a major retraining program to raise standards of English among the monitors in order to improve their understanding of customer needs and their basic skills, including use of the internet. This is to enable them to release material directly to the newsroom or to external customers instead of having to pass it through a process of editing.

     The end of communism in Europe and technical developments have meant that instead of dealing with state-controlled media with a single voice, the Monitoring Service now deals with a huge proliferation of media. The challenge now is to select the most authoritative, authentic, and representative of these many different voices. Caversham Park remains the headquarters, but the Monitoring Service has set up a number of regional sites to gain access to the increasing range of local sources. This began in 1961, when a unit was established in Nairobi to cover East and Central Africa. Much later came others-Moscow and Tashkent in 1994, Baku in 1997, Kiev in 1998, and Rabat in 2000.