Wordplay

Red faces in the control room

Listeners to Radio Moscow's English-language service last Monday could hardly believe what they were hearing. "The population of Afghanistan plays an increasing role in defending the country's territory against Soviet occupants," Announcer Vladimir Danchev declared in his hourly news roundup. He went on to quote Afghan tribal elders as saying that Soviet activities endangered "the security of the population of Afghanistan." An hour later Danchev repeated the same bulletin. During the next hourly summary, he reported that the Afghan population was playing a greater role in defending the country "against bands infiltrated from the Soviet Union." He then intoned: "Reports in Kabul say that tribes living in the eastern provinces of Nangarhar and Paktia have joined in the struggle against the Soviet invaders."

A Radio Moscow spokesman ambiguously described the startling deviations from the official Soviet line as a "personal mistake." An executive for the service, however, said privately that "anything like that has to be an act of sabotage." The question was, By whom? Radio Moscow news programs are prerecorded, so Danchev's broadcast could have been edited, mistakenly or mischievously, without his knowledge. The doctored tape could have slipped through once, and perhaps even twice. But that would not explain the third suspicious broadcast, which differed markedly from the first two. Because staffers at Radio Moscow's English service are held to high standards of proficiency, it seemed unlikely that Danchev, an experienced announcer in his 30s, was merely having problems with the language.

At the British Broadcasting Corp., which picked up the revealing reports in its routine monitoring of foreign radio transmissions, experts said that Danchev had made a similar mistake a week earlier. That broadcast also concerned Afghanistan. One Western diplomat was convinced that the mistakes were deliberate. Said he: "It represents the first time that the Soviet media have rebelled against the Kremlin's policy in Afghanistan."

Perhaps ironically, the Radio Moscow incident comes at a time when Soviet officials have been hinting loudly that they are anxious to find a way out of the costly 2 1/2-year occupation of Afghanistan. In a lengthy article in the Communist Party daily Pravda, the Kremlin last week accused the U.S. of stepping up aid to the Afghan rebels in order to scuttle United Nations-sponsored talks to obtain an agreement on the withdrawal of Soviet troops.

As for Danchev, he was promptly taken off the air after the gaffes were discovered. Late last week he was reportedly dismissed by Radio Moscow, and the broadcast agency was said to be planning stricter controls over its announcers. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.