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The Soviet counterpart is Leonid Zamyatin, chief of the Central Committee's International Information Department. He is a former director of TASS who operates under the guidance of the party's longtime chief ideologist, Mikhail Suslov. TASS serves as the backbone of Soviet propaganda. The bluntness of TASS's bias often works against it. For example, the Soviets in 1963 provided, free of charge, equipment for receiving TASS bulletins to the fledgling Kenyan news agency. The Kenyans, however, soon started using the equipment to receive Britain's Reuters wire service as well. A former Kenyan journalist says he was supposed to give equal play to both news services, but that the TASS material arrived days later than Reuters, and was too late to be usable. The CIA claims that the Soviets" often try to plant loyalists in local broadcasting stations so that TASS reports will get better play.
TASS provides most of the material for Radio Moscow, the Soviet version of the Voice of America. In the past two years the broadcasts have been enlivened by sprinkling Soviet-made jazz and rock music recordings among the turgid recitations of editorials. Radio Moscow propaganda is much less vitriolic than the printed press; a Soviet delegation returning from a visit to the U.S. might be quoted by Radio Moscow as saying that the Americans they met share with them an aim of world peace. The broadcasts in English are now particularly subtle, using announcers who try to sound indistinguishable from those on the VOA or England's BBC World service. This new sophistication, however, does not exclude an unfounded allegation here and there. Soviet media actively spread the word, for example, that the U.S. was responsible for the 1978 kidnaping and murder of former Italian Premier Aldo Moro. In addition, events often have to be filtered through an ideological bureaucracy before they are reported. For example, news of the death of former Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin was withheld for 36 hours by TASS and Radio Moscow. Even Soviet citizens heard the news first on Western broadcasts.
The Soviets also make use of "clandestine" radio broadcasts, transmissions that purport to originate from within a particular recipient country but actually come from the Soviet Union or an East bloc ally. The "National Voice of Iran," a source of inflammatory anti-U.S. propaganda, is actually located in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, other Moscow-aligned Communist countries deliver more than 5,000 additional hours a week of pro-Soviet (and anti-American) broadcasting, more than twice the output of Radio Moscow. Radio Havana broadcasts to Africa and Europe through transmitters in the U.S.S.R. In parts of the U.S., Radio Havana can be heard at 600 kHz on AM radio.