Paul Ernest Freed was born in 1918 in Detroit, Michigan, into a Christian family and while he was still a child his family went to the Middle East as missionaries with the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church. While his parents (Ralph and Mildred Forsythe Freed) were based in Syria, Paul went to school in Jerusalem; when the family returned to Wheaton, Illinois, on furloughs, Paul attended Wheaton Academy. He graduated from Wheaton College in 1940; he had helped pay his way with a variety of entrepreneurial endeavors: selling souvenirs of the Middle East, working for Pontiac Motor Company and in steel mills in Gary, Indiana, and finally starting his own belt business, which employed other Wheaton College students.

Following his graduation from Wheaton, he obtained a Master's degree from Columbia University in 1956 and a Ph D in Mass Communication from New York University in 1960. Freed was ordained by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1949. He began working for Youth For Christ (YFC) in Nyack, New York, and later in Greensboro, North Carolina. While attending the YFC Beatenburg Conference in Switzerland in 1948, he received a request to begin YFC work in Spain. Though touched by the spiritual hunger in Spain, and the need for evangelistic efforts, he was also frustrated by the restrictions put on such work by the Spanish government.

Convinced that "closed" countries like Spain could be reached through radio, he resigned from YFC in order to begin working in radio evangelism. In 1952, he founded Trans World Radio (TWR), incorporating under the laws of the state of North Carolina. The station was based in Tangiers, Morocco, and the first broadcast took place in 1954. Later TWR moved to Monaco when the Moroccan government made it impossible for them to stay in Tangiers.

Other stations were added in the years following: in Cyprus, Swaziland, Sri Lanka, Guam, and the island of Bonaire, in the Caribbean. The headquarters for Trans World Radio are in Chatham, New Jersey. At the time of this interview, Freed was still active as the head of TWR. He died after a long illness on December 1, 1996.