When the Radio Lied: Cold War Propaganda and the Shaping of the Middle East

In the summer of 1967, millions across the Arab world tuned into the radio and heard what sounded like victory. Egypt’s Voice of the Arabs announced sweeping military successes over Israel, claimed the liberation of Palestine was underway, and reported that American and British forces were being defeated. None of it was true. The Egyptian air force had already been destroyed. Arab armies were in retreat. Palestine was not being liberated. People across the Middle East woke up to the realization that they had been fed a lie.

That moment of rupture—when millions realized that what they were hearing on the airwaves bore no resemblance to what was happening on the ground—did not mark the beginning of disillusionment. It was its culmination. The Cold War in the Middle East had been built on a dense latticework of misinformation, aspirational propaganda, and ideological noise since the 1940s. The radio was the medium through which much of this unfolded, and the battleground on which trust was won and lost.

My book, Frequencies of Deceit: How Global Propaganda Wars Shaped the Middle East, tells the story of that battleground. It’s a book about sound—about what people heard, and what they were meant to believe. From the end of World War II to the aftermath of the 1967 war, international radio stations like Egypt’s Voice of the Arabs, the BBC Arabic Service, the Voice of America, and Radio Moscow flooded the Middle Eastern airwaves with carefully crafted messaging. Each station promised a better world—one shaped by Arab nationalism, British wisdom, Soviet peace, or American development.

Radio, once a medium of intimacy and connection, became an engine of state power. As Cold War rivalries deepened, broadcasters stopped trying to describe reality. Instead, they described what their governments needed reality to be. In the name of modernization, development, or liberation, they pushed mantras that sounded revolutionary but increasingly failed to match people’s lived experiences. They offered simple solutions for complex crises. Over time, words like “freedom” and “peace” became so hollowed out by repetition that they lost all meaning.

What’s most striking about this period is not just that states lied. It’s how they lied—and how coordinated the echo chamber became. One message from Radio Moscow would appear a day later on the BBC, then be mocked or repurposed by Voice of the Arabs. Even their critiques of each other began to echo. They listened to each other as much as they spoke, in what I call a dialogic audiosphere: a swirling chorus of competing voices, each shaping and reshaping the language of the other.

The result? By the late 1960s, many listeners across the Middle East and North Africa had stopped believing—not just in the radio, but in the idea that official language could describe truth at all. That collapse of legitimacy reverberated across the region. For many, it marked the end of faith in secular nationalism, in socialist revolution, or in liberal modernization. And it helped set the stage for a turn toward new, often religious, forms of political and moral authority—ones that promised clarity where the radio had delivered only noise.

Frequencies of Deceit is not simply a history of radio. It is a history of how states tried to speak entire worlds into being—and of what happened when those words failed. It brings together archival research from Egypt, the U.S., the U.K., Russia, and beyond to reconstruct a multilingual, multi-sited conversation that unfolded across airwaves and decades. It foregrounds not just what broadcasters said, but how they listened to each other, borrowed from each other, and ultimately built the discursive conditions for their own undoing.

This book also reminds us of something essential: language is powerful, but fragile. It can shape public belief, stir revolutions, and reinforce ideologies. But it cannot survive indefinitely without connection to the material realities and lived experiences of those who hear it. The history of Cold War broadcasting in the Middle East offers a sobering mirror. It shows us not only how propaganda systems rise, but how they falter—and how, in the echoes of their collapse, new forms of political imagination begin to take shape.

This originally appeared on the UC Press blog and is reprinted with permission.

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