May 23, 2013
The Voice of America's board of governors is calling on the U.S. to lodge a formal protest with Cuba for apparently jamming satellite signals to Iran.
The board's chairman says an interference signal has been traced to a facility near Havana. Kenneth Tomlinson says Cuba has a history of jamming U.S. government programming to its own country, but blocking transmissions to a third country in a distant hemisphere would be unprecedented.
U.S. officials think Iran contracted with Cuba to do the job this month in advance of a four-year anniversary of large-scale student protests in Iran. Tomlinson says, "They obviously thought they were going to lose control of their own people."
Because the satellites are over the Atlantic, Iran couldn't block them on its own.
