“Buonasera, qui Radio Londra”

In this way, the mythical “Colonnello Buonasera” started his transmissions –entirely in the Italian language – from the BBC London. The voice of “Good evening, this is Radio London” was, in fact, that of Colonel Harold Stevens, former military attaché at the British Embassy in Rome, and was even able to trace Italian ancestry (Neapolitan it seems) in his genealogical tree.
In the years preceding the entrance of the Italians into the war, Europe experienced moments of unmitigated tension mixed with a popular ferment of rare intensity: from the enthusiasm in Italy for the colonial expansion achieved, to the astonishment of the apparent unrelenting supremacy of the European dictatorships, and to the bewilderment determined by the violent transformation of the state borders in central Europe ascribable to the expansionist aims of Germany and the Soviet Union.
The military industries produced, at full throttle, always more modern and perfected armaments, experimented chiefly during the Spanish civil war, which were the absolute protagonists in the German and Italian military march pasts. For England and France, especially, the fear of a new world war was by then transformed into an absolute certainly, and the awareness of an imminent future of tragedy and horror drove the two powers towards the individuation of broad spectrum defence systems. However, weapons and armies could not be the only means of countering the arrogance of the totalitarian powers. It was also indispensable to strike at what fuelled that extraordinary aura of power and invincibility that surrounded the armies of the Axis. In function of which, alongside the allied war machine the persuasive propaganda machine was added, thanks, above all, to the greatest innovative product achieved in the communications sector: the radio.
In the June of 1940, the State radio transmitted the declaration of the Duce regarding the entrance of the Nation into war. In those same days, a small local radio station (Radio Bari) transmits press releases and news, in Arabic, addressed, mainly, to the residents of the Middle-East zones occupied by the English. This small station, set up ‘on the quiet’, obtained such a success to the point of being noticed by the most famous radio station in Europe, the British Broadcasting Corporation.
At this point, the British have formidable intuition, which will result in a remarkable success and which will produce real consequences (at times, unimaginable even to the English) on the events of the armed conflict. With regard to the Italian scenario, the BBC decide to create a radio programme in the Italian language, entrusting its management to Colonel Stevens who, apart from having an undisputed mastery of the language, possesses a very good knowledge of the usage and customs of the Italian people, having lived for many years in the “Bel Paese”.
Actually, the transmissions of Radio Londra in Italian were begun much earlier than 1940.
The first radio passage was celebrated the evening of the 27th September 1938, precisely while the crisis determined by the Monaco Conference was being brought to completion. The transmission was almost improvised and finished within a few minutes with the communiqué of Prime Minister Chamberlain, first in German, then in Italian and French.
With the entrance of Italy into the world conflict, the duration of the BBC transmissions is substantially increased: from the original 15 minutes per transmission, they reach 90 minutes and the programmes are repeated up to twenty times throughout the day.
Naturally, the news is all centered on the tragedy of the actions conducted by the Countries of the Axis, but the two peculiarities which distinguish the English programmes and which create the gradual development of the trust of the Italian people regarding the reliability and, therefore the veracity of the transmitted information, are the punctuality and the fidelity of the broadcasted news.
It is an astute move that draws its origin from certain concepts based on the psychology of persuasion and which finds fertile ground in a tried and exhausted society, like the Italian one, which is daily increasingly shaken by the war and by the loss of credibility in the Duce and the Fascist regime. The news transmitted by the State radio appears progressively impregnated with visibly false propaganda, biased and implausible. The enthusiastic tones on the results achieved in the multiple battlefields do not match the accounts of the veterans returning from the Front and, in particular, with the first bombings that the allies begin to make on the national territory. When it is abundantly clear that the tide is changing to the advantage of the allies, the credibility of Radio Londra increases in exponential terms and all the news transmitted is considered authentic and not constructed for propaganda purposes.
At this point, the British Government, perfectly aware of the potential of this innovative media instrument, decides to exploit it more effectively, putting together a team of “experts” able to create programmes aimed at a variety of purposes.
The figure who personifies the English radio is without doubt, “Colonnello Buonasera”, but all the texts, the news and all information is designed, constructed, assembled and refined by the group of experts in communication; persons of the caliber of Aldo Cassato (a Trieste journalist of the newspaper “Il Piccolo”), Cecil Sfrigge, able English journalist, and the Italian socialist fugitive, Paolo Treves, persecuted, for a long time, during the first years of the Fascist regime. Each transmission was planned and followed to the smallest detail. The dialectic, the pauses, the comments and even the calm and reassuring tone of Colonel Stevens were the fruit of careful and reasoned considerations which had the same objective in common: the psychological conditioning.
As far as the methodology of persuasion is concerned, the communication of the English radio adopts methods and styles different from those of the Nazi-fascists. It present itself in sharp contrast to them, characterized by their violent and aggressive manner, and makes use of the commentators of the worst species, e.g. the racist, Alfred Rosenberg, the fanatic minister of the German propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, or the less refined, and for this defined “savage” by his own party companions, Robert Farinacci, Secretary of the Fascist Party.
Accompanying the English news, instead, are authentic transmissions which will produce considerable psychological effects and are the result of refined elaborations of projects put into play by extremely qualified experts.
One of these is that conducted by the same Treves and two of his collaborators, which is based on the conversation of three Italian subjects, respectively: an anti-fascist, a moderate and a naïve citizen tormented by disbelieve of the tragedy into which the Country is being plunged, result of the nefarious policy of the Fascist regime.
Other examples of elegant persuasive methodology were “The conversations of the Axis”, centered on the discourses between a German industrialist of proven Nazi faith and the “Allied” Italian ‘Commendatore’ (grade in the Order of Knighthood) Mancini (interpreted by Umberto Limentani, Italian scholar who, in 1939, following the political persecutions in Italy, established himself in England, collaborating with the BBC and later becoming a Professor of Italian at the University of Cambridge, from 1945 to 1981). The interpretations of another protagonist are of particular significance, one Candidus, better known as John Marus, also of Italian origin and gifted with a special interpretive ability which was particularly cutting and sarcastic, but at the same time, never vulgar in denouncing the conduct of the Nazi-fascist regimes. He became so popular as to rival that of Colonel Stevens. Other analogous transmissions were experimented, such as “L’Osteria del buon umore” (The Inn of good humour”) and “Livio Zencovich, the London observer”, both particularly good in the construction of content, but never equaling the success of the “Radio Londra” transmission.
Colonel Stevens became so famous with the Italian people and the allied soldiers that during the landing in Sicily, slogans of the type “Viva Colonel Stevens” were written on the walls. Not even the initial phase of the transmission was left to chance: it was accompanied by the notes of Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony which, almost ironically, corresponded to the letter “V” in the Morse Code, symbol of victory made famous by Winston Churchill, who loved to repeat the gesture with two index fingers.l


From psychological communication
to operative communications

Notwithstanding the public success, the English psychologists and sociologists, by then convinced of the effectiveness and, above all, of the potentiality of their instrument of persuasive communication, imagined a new scenario of action in which to experiment the efficacy of Radio Londra: to construct coded messages to issue orders and guidelines to the Resistance organizations.
Within a few weeks, flash messages were engineered which contained data and secret information, many times in reference to military operations to be conducted in enemy territory or aimed at the request of support for actions of counter espionage, provision of arms and specific equipment. The preparation of the messages was provided for by the War Office, or in a more covert manner, by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret structure constituted by Winston Churchill himself, with the task of encouraging, facilitating and conducting actions of espionage and sabotage inside the enemy lines.
Precisely in function of its secrecy, the SOE found itself operating in collaboration with the French Resistance and then the Italian one and many of its operations remained, also during the course of the subsequent decades, completely enveloped in mystery. Also for this reason this little arm of secret agents was known by the name of “Churchill’s Secret Army”.
The reading of the messages was the culminating moment of the Radio Londra transmissions, and the tension induced by the desire to decipher the contents was celebrated by various films and documentaries which recounted that sad period of world history.
The reading phase of the messages was the most critical moment of the transmission. It was absolutely crucial to read the messages in the right order, without committing a single error. Any pause, error of pronunciation or incorrect sequence of the words, could have had disastrous consequences. Certain phrases like “Felix is not happy. – The rain has stopped. – My beard is blond. – The cow doesn’t give any milk. – Big Giacomo kisses Mohammed. – The shoes are tight. – The parrot is red. – The eagle flies”, maddened the German and Italian encryption experts, but at the same time, apart from allowing the success of military operations, these incomprehensible phrases gave a gift to the entire population which was something more than a simple text devoid of sense: it gave a message of hope, that of the growing certainty of the end of the horrors of the war.
All of the major personalities of the epoch, such as Churchill, Eisenhower, De Gaulle, as well as Ministers of allied Countries and figures from the world of culture and entertainment made their voices heard through the microphones of the BBC, formalizing the transformation of the radio from a simple instrument of communication into a mediatic device able to condition the masses.
It should be remembered that in Italy it was absolutely forbidden to listen to the Radio Londra transmissions, and the sanctions for those caught in flagrante delicto were very harsh: two months of prison, a fine of one thousand Lire (an amount almost astronomical for the times), as well as the confiscation of the radio. However, notwithstanding this, the Italians who awaited that crucial hour were always numerous and over the course of the years, the listening public increased vertiginously.
The precautions to avoid being discovered were simple and, at the same time, rather effective: the blinds and the doors were closed, darkening the rooms, and the children were sent to bed. You placed yourself as close to the radio as possible with the volume at the very minimum, in the hope of understanding as much information as one could on the course of the war.
The BBC continued tirelessly to transmit “L’Ora di Londra” “The London hour” until the evening of the 31^st December 1981 when the programme was closed notwithstanding the innumerable protests raised by an impressive (and perhaps never exactly verified) number of listeners.
Certainly, the radio, over the subsequent years, progressively lost that role of social centrality, which it had held for many long years, in favour of the television which assumed the function of management of domestic and cultural entertainment of the Italian family and, consequently, of that new society which came to be created in the years of the economic boom after the war.
The television, symbol of the renewed nation of democracy and economic well being, obtained growing consensus also in function of the increasing accessibility to the purchase costs. On the contrary, the radio was never an instrument of easy access for the Italian family for obvious reasons of census.
The television, unlike the radio, through a multiplicity of programmes of culture, entertainment shows and even scholastic formation has been able to merit the title of “national-popular” device, assuming that strategic importance in the communication which, today, is often subject of discussion, especially at the political level.


Buonasera, qui Wikileaks!

Without doubt, the image of entire families thirsty for information and entangled in absolute silence around a radio set could elicit smiles from many young people who have grown up in the era of Internet and handheld omni-functional devices. In a globalized society, not only in the economy and finance, but above all, in information, the simple hypothesis of the impossibility of access to information and data sources is considered simply unimaginable.
The entire planet depends on access and possession of information. Economy, politics, religion and, therefore, the same social fabric that surrounds the life of every single individual is fed and governed by a uninterrupted flow of information which governs, also often in an unconscious way, the existence of the human being. An adverse weather forecast is enough to postpone the departure for a programmed journey; we modify our eating habits when a certain food that will improve our health is announced, and we do not hesitate to grab the latest technological gadget if it is presented with the right methods of persuasion.
The communication technologies, and with them, the techniques of information, have disrupted our way of living and of conceiving life itself within a society that engulfs and absorbs wide-ranging knowledge in the hope of maintaining “cultural updating” at the highest levels. However, something much deeper has changed. I refer to the cruciality that the information has assumed in the world society, always more globalized in its desires and needs and always less “social” in its intensions.
The media and, in particular, the Internet, with all its multiple applications, are no longer simply instruments of communication, but have assumed a role of absolute importance in the life of the modern individual, who, not by chance, is becoming more and more identified as the “digital individual”. Google, Face book, Twitter, MySpace, blog, chat room, are terms which are actually part of the common language and which show, without a shadow of doubt, the level of the presence of cyberspace in our lives. And it precisely this cyberspace which allows us to go much further than the simple information, through the use of instruments which are able to exercise refined techniques of persuasion (and, therefore, of conditioning) of our thought. An example for everyone: Wikileaks.
Many of the events which have characterized the birth and development of this anomalous web portal of information are still enshrouded in mystery. Even more is the story of its inventor, the polyhedral Daniel Assange. Nevertheless, without entering into the merit of the goodness or veracity of the information spread by Wikileaks, it clearly resulted that the sole announcements on the imminent publication of highly sensitive documents were enough to greatly disturb world public opinion and the same governments, which were made involuntary protagonists of the contents of the diffused information.