MOROCCO COUNRY READER TABLE OF CONTENTS A ... - ADST

It was important that we did for it had become a crazy scene. Shootings, fighting, double
murders. You name it, we had it, including, but that was not related to the bases, a case of piracy
on the high seas. Some Americans had become involved with the Italian mafia. Attacking from
high speed boats, they hijacked a ship on the high seas and took off hundreds of cases of
cigarettes to peddle in Sicily. Somehow, they were arrested and tried in the Tangier court. It was
completely an 18th century happening in the 20th century. But it was interesting.
ROBERT F. FRANKLIN
Radio Engineer, USIS
Tangier (1951-1954)
Robert F. Franklin was born in San Francisco, California. He served as a United
States Information Agency officer in Vietnam, Germany, Washington, DC, the
Philippines, the Congo, Rwanda, Tunisia, and Kenya. Mr. Franklin was
interviewed by Earl Wilson in 1988.
FRANKLIN: At Tangier I was involved in the initial setting up and operating of the Tangier
Relay Base for the Voice of America.
Q: What type of title was that then?
FRANKLIN: Engineer; staff engineer. Well, I guess they called us Shift Supervisors, actually,
because we had locals under us doing the slog work, so to speak, and we supervised them.
Q: Where was the facility located?
FRANKLIN: We had two plants. The office was in town, in Tangier. Our receiving plant was
nine kilometers south of the town and our transmitting plant was 21 kilometers south of the
town. We had to separate them because of potential interference from the transmitters, of course.
The equipment was very good, and for the most part it worked well.
Q: New equipment?
FRANKLIN: Oh, yes. Brand new. It was a new installation. It had actually started on the air just
a short time before I got there. But not all of the transmitters were on when I arrived. We had
banks of receivers, picked up transmissions from the States and relayed them to the Middle East,
Europe, the Soviet Union. I think that was about all at the time. India, perhaps; I'm not sure. My
memory fails me on that point.
Q: I don't think we had discovered Africa, sub-Saharan Africa.
FRANKLIN: No. At that point we didn't pay much attention to sub-Saharan Africa. That's true.