Abstract
On 8 June 1967, Cairo’s Voice of the Arabs declared that Arab forces had “hobbled the Israelis” and liberated Palestine. Ahmed Said’s confident broadcast promised victory, unity, and defiance against imperialism. Yet, as Margaret Peacock recounts, it was all a lie. Egypt’s air force had been destroyed days earlier; Arab armies were retreating in defeat. Across the Middle East, listeners who had gathered around radios to celebrate triumph instead confronted betrayal and the collapse of an entire information world. For Peacock, this moment marked the death of the audiosphere: the vast web of Western, Soviet, and Arab propaganda stations that for two decades had promised peace, liberation, and modernization but delivered competing myths instead.
Frequencies of Deceit argues that the Cold War in the Middle East was waged less through armies than airwaves. Across 10 chapters, Peacock shows how Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Egypt used radio propaganda to compete for legitimacy, shape national identities, and mobilize popular sentiment from the 1940s to the 1967 defeat. At its core, the book claims propaganda was not just a tool of statecraft but a force shaping how politics, revolution, and even peace itself were imagined in the modern Middle East.
Peacock moves chronologically, beginning with Britain and the Soviet Union’s battle over Palestine in the 1940s when, as she writes, they “battled over the airwaves of the Middle East, with Palestine in the center” (p.12). Radio Moscow promised anti-colonial solidarity and socialist modernization, while the BBC portrayed Arab well-being as dependent on British “benevolence.” Both assumed Arab development required outside tutelage—an assumption Arab broadcasters would soon reject.
The 1950s brought Nasser’s Voice of the Arabs, whose director Ahmed Said created what Peacock calls “a non-Western vocabulary and voice for the Arab world” (p.57). His phrase “Imagine, O Arabs” forged a sense of unity against Western imperialism and rival Arab leaders. After Suez in 1956, Peacock observes, Voice of the Arabs seemed to hold “a claim to the truth [. . .] not because it had spoken the truth, but because it had not been exposed” (p.164). Meanwhile, the United States entered the propaganda war belatedly through the Voice of America and the US Information Agency, promising capitalist modernity and religious freedom. But its rhetoric clashed with reality: even as Washington claimed to support freedom, the CIA orchestrated the 1953 coup in Iran. The book subjects Soviet propaganda to the same critical lens, showing how its grand narratives of liberation and solidarity were riddled with contradictions and ultimately unraveled under the weight of unmet promises.
By the 1960s, all sides faced growing skepticism. Words like “peace,” Peacock notes, had become “degraded,” even “bereft of meaning,” as every invasion or coup was justified as a step toward peace. When Voice of the Arabs promised victory in 1967 as Arab armies collapsed, the entire propaganda edifice cracked, leaving what Peacock calls “the betrayal of the audiosphere” (p.194), and the disillusionment of millions who no longer trusted the voices claiming to speak for them.
Frequencies of Deceit succeeds in showing that Cold War propaganda in the Middle East was not peripheral noise but a central arena where legitimacy and ideology were contested. Peacock’s archival research is formidable: intelligence reports, radio transcripts, and diplomatic memos reveal how stations created a “resonance machine” of mutually reinforcing messages as each responded to and fed off the others.
Her concept of the audiosphere is especially compelling. By analyzing metaphors, repetitions, and silences, she shows how language itself became a weapon. Promises of peace and liberation were repeated so insistently that, as she puts it, “being at peace often looked a lot like war” (p.80), while freedom was invoked to justify coups and invasions. The book’s close reading of rhetoric—Ahmed Said’s appeals to Arab unity, Soviet portrayals of American “warmongering,” US celebrations of consumer capitalism— reveals how propaganda created a shared but fractured political imagination. Yet the book’s ambition creates some problems. At times, it overstates propaganda’s power while underplaying its limits. Listeners often doubted what they heard, and by the late 1950s, Peacock herself admits, key terms had become hollow. Did propaganda really shape political reality, or did it increasingly expose the gap between official narratives and lived experience? The 1967 war, when the Voice of the Arabs promised victory as Arab armies collapsed, suggests the latter.
Methodologically, Peacock focuses on rhetorical form—repetition, metaphor, irony, the “economy of the gift.” This yields brilliant insights, as when she shows how both Soviet and American broadcasts linked “peace” to tractors, consumer goods, or electrification projects, promising modernity as the reward for loyalty. But the focus on language sometimes sidelines listeners themselves. How did ordinary people interpret, resist, or mock these broadcasts? The book hints at skepticism but rarely explores alternative networks of meaning beyond the state-controlled audiosphere. Moreover, the argument occasionally conflates propaganda’s intentions with its effects. British stations, for instance, hoped to portray communism and Arab nationalism as twin threats, yet one listener told the BBC bluntly that “the Arabs are not so much interested in that as in saving their Palestinian brothers” (p.125). Similarly, US broadcasts insisted on America’s support for freedom even as coups revealed imperial ambitions. These contradictions emerge vividly but raise questions about whether propaganda persuaded audiences or merely exposed hypocrisy.
Still, the book makes a major contribution by situating Middle Eastern broadcasting within global Cold War history while showing how local actors like Nasser used the audiosphere to project power and forge transnational identities. The claim that “only Voice of the Arabs seemed to hold a claim to the truth” after the Suez crisis captures both the potency and fragility of this project. The Six-Day War’s aftermath, when “pan-Arabism died with the 1967 defeat” (p.215), powerfully illustrates how the medium that built Nasser’s charisma also broadcast its collapse in real time.
Frequencies of Deceit opens several paths for future research. Its focus on state broadcasting invites studies of unofficial or dissident media—pamphlets, underground stations, and later cassette sermons—that challenged both Western and Arab nationalist narratives. Peacock’s concept of the audiosphere could be extended beyond 1967 to examine how Islamists, Palestinians, and postcolonial regimes learned from the failures of Nasserist and Western propaganda. Comparative work might ask whether similar “collapses of the audiosphere” occurred in Africa, Latin America, or South Asia when Cold War rhetoric met local aspirations and disillusionments.
For scholars of media, Middle Eastern history, and the Cold War, Peacock’s work will be indispensable. Its interdisciplinary approach—political history, rhetorical analysis, cultural studies—ensures its relevance across fields. But its most lasting insight is cautionary: when every power claims to speak for peace or freedom while demanding loyalty and suppressing dissent, the result is not consensus but cynicism. By 1967, as Peacock shows, “the audiosphere had collapsed, and with it [. . .] the trust of millions who had believed that Palestinian liberation was just around the corner” (p.214). That collapse still echoes today, shaping how we think about media, war, and political possibility in the modern Middle East.
