Broadcasting Freedom

The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty

Arch Puddington

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813182650
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Among America's most unusual and successful weapons during the Cold War were Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. RFE-RL had its origins in a post-war America brimming with confidence and secure in its power. Unlike the Voice of America, which conveyed a distinctly American perspective on global events, RFE-RL served as surrogate home radio services and a vital alternative to the controlled, party-dominated domestic press in Eastern Europe. Over twenty stations featured programming tailored to individual countries. They reached millions of listeners ranging from industrial workers to dissident leaders such as Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel.

Broadcasting Freedom draws on rare archival material and offers a penetrating insider history of the radios that helped change the face of Europe. Arch Puddington reveals new information about the connections between RFE-RL and the CIA, which provided covert funding for the stations during the critical start-up years in the early 1950s. He relates in detail the efforts of Soviet and Eastern Bloc officials to thwart the stations; their tactics ranged from jamming attempts, assassinations of radio journalists, the infiltration of spies onto the radios' staffs, and the bombing of the radios' headquarters.

Puddington addresses the controversies that engulfed the stations throughout the Cold War, most notably RFE broadcasts during the Hungarian Revolution that were described as inflammatory and irresponsible. He shows how RFE prevented the Communist authorities from establishing a monopoly on the dissemination of information in Poland and describes the crucial roles played by the stations as the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union broke apart.

Broadcasting Freedom is also a portrait of the Cold War in America. Puddington offers insights into the strategic thinking of the RFE-RL leadership and those in the highest circles of American government, including CIA directors, secretaries of state, and even presidents.

1

“It Will Be Seen Who Is Right”

It was, fittingly, on May Day, the most revered holiday of the international working-class movement, that Radio Free Europe inaugurated its full broadcast service to the peoples of Eastern Europe. Once regarded as an inspirational commemoration of the democratic Socialist vision, May Day had been expropriated by the forces of world communism, which is to say by Stalin and his devoted acolytes in what were then known as the satellite countries. In Eastern Europe, May Day in 1951 was celebrated with the emblems of Soviet militarism and the wooden slogans promoting “peace” and the anti-imperialist cause instead of the traditional symbols of trade unionism and social democracy.

Technically, RFE had been beaming its message to Eastern Europe for the better part of a year; the initial broadcast was made on July 4, 1950, and a regular schedule of daily programs was introduced shortly thereafter. Those early programs, however, were produced by a neophyte staff in New York and then relayed to the audience through a cumbersome process that involved shipping the tapes to Europe and broadcasting the programs over outmoded and weak transmission equipment in Germany. No matter how skillfully crafted the message, the weak signal alone guaranteed that listenership would be limited.

By May 1, 1951, many of the early problems had been resolved. Several transmitters, the most up-to-date and powerful available at the time, had been acquired and strategically located at several sites in West Germany. A European broadcasting headquarters had been opened in Munich, a city chosen for its proximity to the RFE audience countries as well as its sizable East European exile community. The staff of journalists had been enlarged and strengthened by the addition of a number of highly regarded exiled writers and editors.

The management of the American “freedom radio” treated the May Day broadcast as something of a media event, particularly for the European press. C.D. Jackson, president of the National Committee for a Free Europe, the organization that sponsored RFE, had stirred up a minor furor when he declared at a press conference that RFE broadcasts would encourage defections from Communist-controlled countries. The reaction of the assembled reporters was not to question whether such a policy might endanger the lives and freedom of potential defectors, but to suggest that invitations to defect were unwise, given West European hostility to the rising numbers of East European exiles in their midst.

Aside from the controversy over defections, the inaugural events went smoothly. Although RFE was eventually to form its program around a nucleus of five Communist countries—Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania—the May Day broadcast focused on a single country: Czechoslovakia. Considered the satellite nation with the closest links to the West and the most enduring democratic tradition, Czechoslovakia was also the last East European country to succumb to total Communist domination. Indeed, the 1948 Communist coup in Prague reinforced the mounting anti-Soviet mood in Washington and played an important role in convincing policy makers that institutions of ideological persuasion like RFE should be added to America’s Cold War arsenal. Although the men responsible for the creation of RFE were experienced veterans of international affairs and realistic about America’s ability to influence events in Eastern Europe, they were convinced that communism was especially vulnerable in Western-oriented countries such as Czechoslovakia and Poland. C.D. Jackson had helped implement America’s psychological warfare program during World War II, and his experience in the struggle against Nazi Germany persuaded him that hard-hitting propaganda could be a potent weapon against a totalitarian power.

Yet Jackson’s opening message to the people of Czechoslovakia reflected the thinking of a liberal internationalist more than an ardent anti-Communist. He reassured his audience that Radio Free Europe had no intention of promoting any particular economic system, a policy RFE would adhere to throughout the Cold War. While he made passing reference to America’s historic friendship with Czechoslovakia, he stressed pan-European federation as the solution to the sicknesses that had caused two world wars and now seemed to be threatening to trigger a third. His phrases about the eventual liberation of Czechoslovakia were carefully chosen, emphasizing the thoroughly nonpolemical idea that world peace required self-determination for Eastern Europe. And he demonstrated his awareness of the May Day symbolism by inserting a passage about the “creative spirit and the growing strength and prosperity of the free labor movement” of the Western world.

Jackson was followed at the microphone by Ferdinand Peroutka, chief editor of the Voice of Free Czechoslovakia (VFC), as the language service was to be known in its early, combative days. (All RFE language divisions were identified as the Voice of Free Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, and so forth throughout most of the 1950s.) Peroutka was a legendary figure in the intellectual life of Czechoslovakia. He had been a close associate of T.G. Masaryk, the father of democratic Czechoslovakia, and a foremost editor and historian who had been imprisoned by the Nazis and then pushed into exile by the Communists. Peroutka would become famous for his Sunday commentaries on RFE, and for this, the first day of broadcast, he composed a small jewel of an antitotalitarian essay. “Many things can be said in favor of ancient tyrants as compared with present day tyrants,” he declared:

Ancient tyrants were, at least, more sincere. They did not care about their victims after they had crushed them. . . . The present day tyrant does two things at the same time: he tortures the nation and orders it to smile . . . just like a photographer. Meanwhile, a terrible and wretched weapon was invented—the propaganda of the totalitarian states. The present day tyrant always sends out two kinds of emissaries: armed men and forgers of ideas; robust individuals and thin men with glasses and sunken chests; rowdies who beat the nation and other rowdies who give thanks for the beatings in the name of the nation. The policeman is followed—and sometimes also preceded—by the liar.

Peroutka also included a passage on the fate of Czechoslovak journalism—an institution he personally had influenced and shaped over the previous two decades—under Communist rule: “Three years ago they sent after us, into our editors’ offices, armed crowds from the street, guarded by police so that nothing could happen to them. Those dark crowds occupied our printers’ and editors’ offices. . . . When facing us—always a hundred armed individuals facing one unarmed person—they told us: now we have proved to you that you are not right. When this radio station will smash the Communist monopoly on speaking to the Czech nation, it will be seen who is right.” And in his ruminations on May Day in People’s Czechoslovakia, Peroutka gave evidence of his ability to convey a political message through a personal, almost intimate, vocabulary, a talent that enabled him to remain a presence in Czechoslovak affairs even in exile. “You are walking among pictures of Stalin and Gottwald [Klement Gottwald, Czechoslovakia’s first Communist leader] without paying attention to them,’ he intoned, “while you are carrying Masaryk’s picture in your heart.”

If Peroutka’s hopeful remarks represented one part of the RFE message, another, equally important aspect was reflected by the opening commentary of the next speaker, Pavel Tigrid. Tigrid had worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) during the war and was thus a member of the small group of RFE exiled journalists who could boast of actual radio experience. Tigrid would remain at RFE for a few years, after which he became a writer and publisher of exile literature and a guiding force among the Czechoslovak intellectual diaspora; after communism’s demise, he would return in triumph to serve for a time as minister of culture under the government of Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus.

Tigrid pulled no punches in spelling out Radio Free Europe’s methods for dealing with the Communist enemy. “Our station has, above all, a fighting and political mission,” he explained. “Our offensive is directed against Communism and Sovietism, against the representatives of the terrorist regime. . . . It is our task to unmask Communist plans. . . . Today, a terrible enemy rises against all Communist informers, agents provocateurs, and stool pigeons, all inhuman guards of prisons and work camps, all judges and officials of Communist jurisprudence, all propagandists of communist ideology: Radio Free Europe, which will reveal their names, one by one; all of them will be blacklisted by the democratic world and will be dumped on the rubbish heap of contempt by the Czech and Slovak people.” Tigrid added that RFE would also speak to Communist Party members and petty functionaries—“to advise them what they should do and how they should behave, so that, when the day comes, their fate will not be that of the Communist big-shots.”¹

Within a few years, the brass-knuckles approach reflected in Tigrid’s remarks would be abandoned, as Radio Free Europe evolved into a more normal, if still intensely political, international broadcasting service. Likewise, the semitriumphalist themes struck by Peroutka would be replaced by a more humble approach, as events demonstrated that the overthrow of communism would be a matter of slow, incremental change over decades rather than the quick and total collapse that had been anticipated, by some at least, in 1951.

But if the expectation of early liberation was not to be realized, Radio Free Europe would, in fact, be proved right, as Peroutka predicted. Its strategy, language, and short-term objectives would change during the course of the Cold War, just as American policy toward the Communist world would change. Yet no matter what doctrine predominated in Washington—liberation, gradualism, détente—RFE continued to fulfill its original mission as an instrument of anti-Communist diplomacy. Radio Free Europe, along with its sister organization, Radio Liberty, stood as the most visible institutions of official American anticommunism, and were arguably the most successful Cold War vehicles established by the American government.

Radio Free Europe was not, of course, the only foreign radio station to which the people of Eastern Europe listened. But while the BBC was appreciated for its professionalism and the Voice of America (VOA) valued for its programs on American culture, only RFE was given the status of honorary member of the democratic opposition. This treatment attests to RFE’s unusual character. The Radio Free Europe—Radio Liberty model is unique not simply to the Cold War, but to the history of diplomacy. Many countries have established international broadcasting entities, ranging from respected journalistic services such as the BBC to the crudely propagandistic global networks sponsored by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Only with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, however, did a country establish broadcast services whose purpose was to change the form of government in foreign nations by airing news not about the country from which the broadcasts originated but about the countries that were the broadcast targets.

Initiation of this unprecedented project in peacetime propaganda—for RFE was publicly described as a propaganda instrument at its creation—represented a radical departure from U.S. political tradition. Until World War II got underway, the United States had shown no inclination to participate in the global war of the airwaves. Historically, it had been the totalitarian powers that had made the most ambitious use of international radio. The Bolsheviks were the first to recognize radio’s political potential; while the Soviet Union did not use its international broadcasts to foment revolution abroad during the period between the Revolution and World War II, it did make carefully targeted broadcasts to countries in which there were border disputes or in which leftist forces seemed on the verge of major gain. During the thirties, the USSR was the only country to beam anti-Nazi broadcasts into Germany; later, after the Hitler-Stalin pact had been signed, Stalin used radio broadcasts to intimidate Finland, threatening the Finns that unless they agreed to certain concessions, they would suffer the fate of Poland.²

Hitler also made effective use of radio propaganda. The pattern was set with a slanderous propaganda offensive against the League of Nations occupation regime during the campaign to prepare the way for the reintegration of the Saar region into the Third Reich. Subsequently, Austrian Nazis were put on the air to pave the way for the Anschluss by, among other things, advocating the assassination of Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. A similar approach was used in the campaign to dismember Czechoslovakia. Konrad Henlein, the leading Nazi among the Sudeten Germans, was placed before a microphone to make patently fraudulent charges of anti-Sudeten atrocities against the Czechoslovak government. Eventually, Hitler established a worldwide propaganda network aimed at expatriate Germans as well as non-Germans. The broadcasts were not as shrill as those directed at Germany’s neighbors, and there seems to have been an effort to give a human face to Hitler, the Nazis, and the Third Reich.³

The United States, by contrast, chose not to establish a national propaganda or information program until the Japanese attacked American territory at Pearl Harbor and the country entered World War II. To some degree, the lack of interest in propaganda reflected the influence of isolationist sentiments between the wars. Perhaps a more important factor was the absence of state-owned radio in the United States, a condition unique to this country, since in many countries radio was operated exclusively by the government. Furthermore, Americans, while comfortable with business advertising and the propaganda associated with domestic political campaigns, seemed ideologically averse to government-sponsored international propaganda, whose centralized state direction clashed with the American preference for individualistic enterprise.⁴

During the war, the United States created a propaganda agency, the Office of War Information (OWI), and an international radio network, the Voice of America. But while the American public supported international radio during wartime, there was considerable sentiment that, with the end of hostilities, the government should close down its propaganda and information projects; by 1947, the VOA’s budget had been slashed and influential members of Congress were advocating the elimination of what remained of American international radio.

The impulse toward a revived isolationism was checked by the onset of the Cold War. Having defeated, at a great cost in life and resources, one great European totalitarian power, the United States found itself confronted by another and in some respects more insidious totalitarian state, the Soviet Union. Communism seemed a more rational, even inspirational, creed than that of the Thousand Year Reich, and it could count as allies the local Communists who existed, in some cases in impressive numbers, throughout Europe. Furthermore, the Soviets approached the challenge of constructing a totalitarian social order with utmost seriousness. Within the satellite countries of Eastern Europe, the Soviets and local Communists moved expeditiously to silence opposition voices, eliminate an independent press, outlaw non-Communist political parties, neutralize religion, and seal off the borders from foreign influence. Countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, with centuries of ties to the West, were condemned to a regime of international isolation never contemplated by their old imperial masters in Vienna and prerevolutionary Moscow.⁵

Radio Free Europe was the brainchild of some of the most prominent architects of America’s early Cold War strategy, particularly those who believed that the Cold War would eventually be fought by political rather than military means. Here the most important figure was none other than George F. Kennan, author of the famous “X” article and father of the containment doctrine. Unlike some others involved in the creation of America’s “freedom radios”—as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty came to be known—Kennan was not a proponent of an American policy to liberate Eastern Europe from Soviet domination. But a program of aggressive ideological warfare did not clash with Kennan’s preferred strategy of preventing the spread of the Soviet empire beyond its East European boundaries. The logic of containment demanded a policy of creating complications for the Soviets within their own sphere of influence, since the more Moscow was preoccupied with keeping the restive peoples of Eastern Europe in check, the less likely it would be to cast a hungry eye on Western Europe.⁶

Although Kennan was never publicly identified with RFE or with the Free Europe Committee (FEC; originally called the National Committee for a Free Europe), he was clearly one of the key figures in planning this unprecedented propaganda venture. An internal RFE memo from 1949 refers to Kennan as the “father of our project,” and Kennan was personally acquainted with most of the men who were officially associated with the FEC and RFE.⁷ There was even a university connection tying Kennan to the early RFE leadership: Kennan, Allen W. Dulles, Frank Wisner, and De Witt C. Poole were all graduates of Princeton who went on to play important roles in shaping policy toward the Soviet Union and establishing RFE as an instrument of American diplomacy.

More important than the Princeton connection was the fact that many of the men who helped get RFE off the ground had firsthand experience with the brutal side of Soviet behavior. Kennan had grown to detest Soviet diplomatic tactics during his wartime service as counsel in the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Wisner had served in the American embassy in Bucharest and was sickened by postwar Soviet brutality toward the local populace, particularly the mass deportations of Romanian citizens to the Soviet Union. For Ar...