CIAO DATE: 05/02

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs

Volume 1, Number 1, Winter/Spring 2000

 

The C.I.A. and Radio Free Europe
by Cord Meyer

 

In September 1954, I became Chief of the International Organizations Division of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and with it inherited the responsibility for the Agency’s relationship with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. At that time, both radio stations formed part of the operations covertly funded by the CIA. Although much has been written about the radio stations’ unique effort to communicate across the Iron Curtain, the nature of the twenty–year relationship between the CIA and the stations rarely has been described accurately.

In retrospect, the approval to fund Radio Free Europe broadcasts to occupied Eastern Europe and subsequently Radio Liberty broadcasts to Russia was one of CIA Director Allen Dulles’s most critical decisions in the struggle against communism. As a private citizen, Dulles had been an original founding member of the Free Europe Committee. He had many personal acquaintances on the boards of trustees of both that committee and the Radio Liberty Committee, which was formed in 1951 with confidential CIA funds by a group of American citizens at the government’s instigation.

It was not until 1971 that the widely held belief that these two organizations received most of their funds from the CIA was officially confirmed by Republican Senator Clifford Chase of New Jersey. As a result, Congress terminated all CIA funding for the radio stations and arranged for their continued existence by open appropriations. The stations survived the transition. Throughout the following two decades, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty proved effective in keeping their mass audiences in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe informed of the dissident activity that swept these countries in the wake of the Helsinki Declaration of 1975.

Dulles’s confidence that the radio stations could spark dissent in the Soviet bloc played a decisive role over the years in ensuring their survival and expansion. For instance, in the early 1950s I first proposed to build a transmitter site in Spain for Radio Liberty broadcasts to the Soviet Union (at the heavy cost of $5 million). Dulles answered that there was little evidence of any substantial dissident opinion behind the monolithic facade of the regime’s control. However, he had recently finished reading an Agency study which demonstrated that the Soviets had made great strides in eliminating illiteracy and in improving technical training available to Soviet citizens. Dulles regarded this as the very basis upon which the radios could succeed. I remember Dulles stating that the Soviet people were no longer an “uneducated peasantry.” Despite the narrowness of the Soviet education system, he believed that it was bound to stimulate the imagination and curiosity of millions of citizens. Dulles concluded that they would inevitably begin to ask questions and then listen to foreign broadcasts when the dusty answers of the regime left them unsatisfied. In the end, Dulles’s determination and faith in the radios convinced Congressional committees to fund the broadcasts.

By the end of the 1940s I regarded the triumphant extension of Soviet–directed communist rule into other countries as a development that would only strengthen the Soviet system at home and lead to the gradual isolation of the United States. In my opinion, the United States needed to demonstrate with patient firmness that Stalin’s police state was not exportable and that a communist–dominated world was not a historical inevitability. American–sponsored broadcasts would provide the best avenue toward that end.

During the Cold War, both sides recognized that information played a huge psychological role. I had become increasingly mindful of the danger posed by the Soviet regime’s determination to completely control access to information. Strict travel restrictions, censorship of all incoming mail, and total control of all internal media gave communist regimes a monopoly on what their citizens were told about events both in the bloc and the outside world. Breaking through this curtain of censorship was an essential step toward reducing the threat of a managed, monolithic public opinion.

Securing the United States’ vital national interests required the emergence of civil societies in authoritarian regimes around the globe. By broadcasting short–wave programs in foreign languages prepared by highly competent exiles, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty played a critical role that eventually broke the communist grip on both Eastern Europe and Russia. Crucial to this success was the early decision to make the news reports as objective and accurate as possible and to concentrate coverage on internal developments within the bloc not covered by the Voice of America or the BBC. I believe that the journalistic accuracy of the stations was relatively well known behind the bloc, and the communist governments tried to counteract this through a variety of efforts.

Psychological warfare was rampant. Contrary to persistent Soviet allegations that exiles working for the radios were being used as CIA agents, this was simply not the case. At the Agency, we recognized that it would have been foolishly shortsighted to expose the radios to the type of attacks made possible by the apprehension of a single spy behind the curtain. Nonetheless, the Soviets routinely infiltrated the staffs and controlled double agents, who would pretend to defect with loud accusations that they had been hired as CIA spies while working for the stations. Although the Radio staff did not engage in covert intelligence work, they openly collected vast amounts of information about their target countries.

The CIA maintained control over content by formulating general policy guidelines, which were supplemented by daily meetings to determine the handling of specific news items. This compromise agreement led to a productive partnership between exile talent and American policy advisers, which made the radio broadcasts widely popular on the other side of the Iron Curtain. At the same time, great care was taken to assure objectivity and to avoid any attempted news manipulation for propaganda purposes. I can remember that even in the case of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, we avoided exaggerating the significance of the revolt. The Radio staff consistently met the challenge of upholding its standard of objective reporting in the face of the most complex emergencies.

Finally, the stations had to deal with continued attempts by Soviet and Eastern European secret police to intimidate exile staffs, sabotage the installations, and exacerbate friction between the stations and the host governments. This campaign of harassment ranged from the ludicrous to the deadly. In West Germany, two Radio Liberty exiles were murdered under mysterious circumstances, and suspicion fell on two Soviet agents who disappeared behind the Iron Curtain during the mid–1950s. A Russian colonel confessed that part of his assignment had been to “silence” Wanda Bronska, a former communist working for Radio Free Europe. The KGB and the satellite secret services infiltrated the Radio staffs in order to identify exile personnel and take reprisal actions against members of their families who remained behind the Curtain. Ridiculous and botched attacks included attempts to poison the salt in the Radio Free Europe cafeteria and to blow up transmission balloon sites. The Russians also tried to smuggle a doctored tape into the West German Radio Free Europe library in order to convince the West German government that an anti–German policy was being pursued. None of these heavy–handed actions succeeded.

There is no doubt that over time the continuous exposure to accurate news broadcasts had an enormous effect on Russian and Eastern European opinion. The communist line was much more difficult to sell when confronted with an increasingly well–informed and skeptical public. In many Russian and Eastern European homes, it became an evening ritual to listen to Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty broadcasts, and ultimately Moscow was powerless to prevent it. Despite the traditional manipulation of opinion practiced by communists in the past, they now had to confront a more informed public that was knowledgeable enough to be able to question the gross simplifications of Russian propaganda. During subsequent travels as a journalist through Eastern Europe, I continuously encountered people who remembered their nightly ritual of listening to the Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty news broadcasts.

In his Nobel Prize speech in 1970, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn described the danger of public disinformation in dramatic terms: “Suppression of information renders international signatures and agreements illusory; within a muffled zone it costs nothing to reinterpret any agreement; even simpler, to forget it as though it had never really existed. A muffled zone is, as it were, populated not by inhabitants of the Earth, but an expedition corps from Mars; the people know nothing intelligent about the rest of the Earth and are prepared to go and trample it down in the holy conviction that they come as liberators.” Two years later, Solzhenitsyn spoke of the irreplaceable role that the broadcasts had played in bringing the powerful voice of democracy to people behind the Iron Curtain. When asked what he thought of Radio Liberty, he replied: “If we learn anything about events in our own country, it’s from there.”

A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe continue to play an important role. Their broadcasts support the emergence of civil societies in formerly authoritarian countries. Many democratic leaders in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union rely on Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty to support the development of political pluralism, market economies, and an independent media. According to Czech President Vaclav Havel, “These radio stations are significant even after the end of the Cold War . . . not only because human rights are not fully respected [and] democracy has not fully matured, but also because they set a goal for the new independent media, creating a healthy competitive environment.”

Dulles’s strategic decision in favor of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, combined with the efforts of those associated with the stations, has left us with a uniquely democratic legacy that continues to serve America’s national interests. Few of the people involved at the Radios’ inception had any idea of the substantial role these stations would come to play in world affairs. Based on the hugely successful and influential broadcasts of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty to Eastern Europe and Russia, Radio Free Asia began its first broadcast on September 29, 1996. Similarly, the Voice of America now provides eighty–three million listeners in almost every corner of the globe with broadcasts in fifty–three languages. As we begin the new millennium, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Asia, and the Voice of America continue to play a unique and vital role in America’s ongoing struggle to bring freedom to the world.