RFE/RL

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is a US government-funded international broadcaster established in 1949-1950 as a Cold War instrument to transmit news into Soviet-bloc and later authoritarian-governed countries. It operates across 27 languages and covers Russia, Iran, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and the South Caucasus. Headquartered in Prague, it is funded by the US Congress through the US Agency for Global Media. RFE/RL's Persian Service (Radio Farda) is one of the principal independent news sources accessible to Iranian audiences, and its Russian-language reporting is among the most widely cited sources on internal Russian affairs.

In the Iran conflict context, RFE/RL was the outlet that reported Russian Ilyushin Il-76 transports flying radar systems, electronic-warfare components, and aviation parts into Mehrabad and Bandar Abbas at high tempo from late April 2026 — the intelligence that the Pentagon described as the mechanism keeping Iran's military operational after the February Israeli strikes. The report was independently significant because RFE/RL's sourcing on Russian military logistics rests on access inside both Russia and Iran that commercial wire services do not have.

RFE/RL's dual Persian and Russian-language capabilities made it uniquely positioned to track the Russia-Iran military supply relationship in real time. Its reporting on the Il-76 flights was cited in the U#81 briefing alongside the Pentagon's own assessment, giving independent corroboration to what was otherwise a classified intelligence finding.