Beaming in Afghanistan

Small wonder. Conniff is acting director of the International Broadcasting Bureau, which commands such broadcasters as the internationally known Voice of America, whose clients include Afghanistan and Pakistan. So Conniff had a quandary: Get his employees out of the building but continue to get the U.S. government's message out.

"We're at the foot of the Capitol," he says calmly from his office in Southwest Washington, D.C., "about 200 yards from them. If a plane hit them it would take us out, too." (He kept the "essential" people there and sent the rest home.)

It's a far cry from Conniff's days in bucolic, hilly Harrisonburg. Conniff enrolled in Madison College in 1968. For most of his college years, he lived in an apartment on Market Street near the courthouse and not far from a head shop. "Hippie paraphernalia," he says diplomatically. "I think it's a tattoo parlor now." The house was painted purple, so if you ever wanted to find him, "you just looked for the purple house."

Now Conniff can be found in the center of the action -- and he likes it. The Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees all civilian US government international broadcast services, appointed him acting director of the IBB in April 1999.

Aside from the Voice of America, the IBB oversees WORLDNET Television and Film Service, and Radio and TV Marti. "It's a small enough agency where you know everyone by name or by face," Conniff, seated in his office on Independence Ave., says of the IBB. "But at the same time, it's a worldwide operation. It's small in size but large in scope."

The Voice of America broadcasts internationally to more than 1,200 radio and television stations in English and 52 other languages. More than 86 million people listen to its 700 hours of programming each week. He notes that most rebellions come from ideas from within, and the VOA helps provide those in repressed areas with evidence that there is another kind of life out there.

"We always make the argument that we are the most cost-effective component of foreign policy," says Conniff, noting that the bureau's $400 million budget is a fraction of the foreign affairs budget. "There are a lot of ways to deal with international problems. The military is very expensive. There's providing financial aid -- millions and billions of dollars to these countries."

The Sept. 11 attack and subsequent war in Afghanistan have brought more attention to the IBB and VOA. The Today Show, the NewsHour and other news magazine shows as well as newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post have profiled the bureau. Yet press coverage is not the proper measure of an organization, especially after an attack; it's what it does in the face of such a crisis that counts.

"Immediately after the attack," says Marc B. Nathanson, chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a bipartisan group that monitors the IBB, to the House Committee on International Relations on Oct. 10, "we increased our broadcast hours in critical languages, including Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Pashto and Urdu. "Most of our broadcast services, which include many of the languages of the world, have switched to an all-news format. The International Broadcasting Bureau's transmitter network is at maximum power. Our international Web sites are taking thousands of hits."

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the VOA indeed continued to broadcast with only essential personnel. Though the agency has about 20 various-sized broadcast booths in the main Wilbur J. Cohen Building, it also has several off-site booths as well. Conniff says they have also worked out arrangements with broadcasters such as National Public Radio to borrow space should the need arise.

This "contingency planning," as Conniff calls it, became especially important in October when anthrax spores were found in the VOA's mailroom. "We brought in the public health service to the mailroom, and people were tested," says Conniff. No one tested positive, but mailroom employees were given 10-day supplies of antibiotics.

Before the Sept. 11 crisis, the VOA was broadcasting two and a half hours a day in Afghanistan. The agency has beefed that up to six hours a day. Amid congressional and others' -- including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's -- fears that US arguments about the war weren't getting out fast enough, the bureau was awarded a $12 million increase in supplemental funding.

Conniff says 80 percent of males in Afghanistan listen to the VOA on short wave. "That is unprecedented. Normally it would be single digits, but there is no independent news for people to listen to. People who listen have to go into their closet to hear us," he says.

Most of what's being beamed to Afghanistan has been everything from explaining American actions ("We want to make people understand this is not a war against religion.") to letting folks know where the Department of Defense has dropped food.

A graduate of McLean High School in Northern Virginia, Conniff earned his bachelor's degree from Madison in political science. He fondly remembers Paul Cline, a legendary law and political science professor, who "took me under his wing," he says. Conniff earned his master's in public administration from Virginia Tech in 1974.

His father, the late Thomas Conniff, was a foreign service officer, so Conniff traveled overseas while growing up. It seemed foreign service would have been a shoo-in for him. "My initial interest was in state and local government," he says, and he even toyed with law school. "But I hungered for the pizzazz of the international arena."

Conniff's wife, Jan Barnett Conniff ('73), had something to do with it, too. After getting his master's, Conniff spent 11 years at the US General Accounting Office, which included a four-year stint in the European Branch Office in Frankfurt, Germany.

"That was the first time my wife had been overseas, and she thought it was terrific," Conniff says with a laugh. Yet it was the call of the Cold War, "fending off communism," he says, that fueled his desire for public service in the international arena. One of his most vivid memories was the Berlin Wall. "You had this sense of foreboding," he says of the atmosphere around the wall, remembering the silent border guards in their tower. "Dark, grim, this physical, imposing structure that says without words, 'That's them, and this is us.' It just made a stark comparison to freedom -- the barbed wire and concrete that separated them from us."

When the wall came down, the mission of the VOA's Radio Free Europe shifted from providing basic information about democracy to helping Eastern Europeans adjust to freedom and rebuild their society. "We would have programs on how banks work in America, very simple concepts that they didn't know about," Conniff says. "It was kind of exciting because we thought almost overnight it was all over. Then we realized we had a big job ahead of us. It was just a different job."

Besides, he says, Russia is still struggling economically; it possesses nuclear weapons, and in Conniff's eyes, "Their press is uneven and can't always be relied upon. So we feel we still have a role to play in informing them about America and also about their own country."

As the IBB scales back its effort in Eastern Europe and ratchets up its efforts to address the US war on terrorism, it must also continue to address emerging political promises and threats. "We want to shift the resources to places like China," Conniff says, later adding Iraq, Iran and the entire continent of Africa.