Feb 21, 2010
This is Part One of one of the most popular documentaries broadcast in the Radio Netherlands Media Network programme in 1993, looking at UK black propaganda during the Second World War. In 2019 we might call it deliberate "fake news".
This programme features an interview with the late Harold Robin, the Foreign & Commonwealth broadcast engineer who put a number of "fake" resistance stations on the air from a transmitter site not far from Bletchley Park. I was glad to see that they haven't forgotten the role of these broadcasts - it's mentioned in the exhibition at Bletchley.
The second part of this 30 minute documentary can be found here (see March 22nd 2010). The second part deals more with the Aspidistra transmitter built very near Crowborough, Sussex and still used by Sussex Police as a training ground. Little known fact is that it was also used a location in 1981 for an episode of BBC's Dr Who.
The only remaining parts of the Aspi 1 transmitter were hanging in the entrance hall of the Babcock transmitter site at Ordfordness, Suffolk. That site was used until March 27th 2011 for transmission of BBC programmes on 648 kHz towards Western Europe.