radio appeals exhorted audiences to donate “truth dollars” to the cause, with celebrities such as actor Rock Hudson assuring listeners that the NCFE was “supported entirely by contributions by American citizens.”17
Civil air patrols “bombed” suburban neighborhoods with preprinted
“Freedom-grams” to be signed and sent to NCFE headquarters for distribution in eastern Europe.18 Although Washburn’s campaign raised only $2.25 to $3.3 million a year during the 1950s, a fraction of the NCFE’s total expenditure, it did manage to divert attention from the organization’s main source of funding and succeeded in imaginatively involving the American public in the plight of the captive nations. Its ubiquitous images and slogans became as familiar to 1950s Americans “as Ivory soap or Ford automobiles.”19
Given such a wealth of covert patronage and public support, one may ask, just what did the NCFE do? Much of its early activity consisted of efforts to relieve and rally the eastern-bloc refugees who were drifting into the United States. Attempts were made to form effective working groups, or “National Councils,” representing all the democratic political elements—socialist, Catholic, and peasant—in each of the Iron Curtain countries, with the OPC trying to control council membership.20 Individual émigrés undertaking research projects on aspects of the communist system were supported by regular grants from the NCFE. Brutus Coste, for example, an eminent Rumanian diplomat and scholar who was working on a project entitled “Democracy in Russia,” received a monthly stipend of $300.21 This interest in subsidizing academic endeavor with a possible intelligence dividend was evident also in several more ambitious initiatives undertaken in the NCFE’s first years. The organization established its own publishing house, Free Europe Press; a “Mid-European Studies Center” for newly arrived refugee scholars in New York; and a “Free Europe University in Exile” to educate eastern European émigré youth, housed in a chateau near Strasbourg, France.22
Such activities remained an important part of the NCFE’s program, but by 1950, as U.S.-Soviet relations plumbed new depths and the Cold War turned hot in Korea, the emphasis shifted to more aggressive forms of psychological warfare, which involved piercing the Iron Curtain itself. One method employed extensively by the NCFE had been tried and tested against the Nazis in World War II but now looks surprisingly low-tech.
Staff would travel to sites on the borders of the Soviet Union’s “satellite”
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nations and release balloons. Carried eastward on the prevailing winds, the balloons would explode once they had reached a height of 30,000 or 40,000 feet, showering propaganda materials—leaflets denouncing communist leaders, fake currency, and anticommunist “newspapers”—on the captive populations below. (One tongue-in-cheek proposal—to advertise the sexual prowess of American men by scattering extra-large, U.S.-manufactured condoms stamped “medium”—was abandoned at the planning stage.)23 The first such operation was launched from an open field near Regensburg, West Germany, in August 1951. The balloons floated toward the border with Czechoslovakia as planned, but then, to the consternation of the watching crowd, began drifting back. Fortunately for the NCFE officers present, the wind changed direction again, and the balloons eventually reached their target.24 Similar launches were carried out throughout the early 1950s; protests from eastern European officials were met with the claim that the U.S. government had no control over the actions of a private group of freedom-loving American citizens. Some 300
million pieces of propaganda were dropped over the “denied areas” before the practice was discontinued in the wake of the failed Hungarian uprising of 1956.25