By the mid-1950s the balloons were functioning merely as adjuncts to a technologically more sophisticated form of psychological warfare. Like so many “psy-war” tactics employed by the United States in the Cold War, the use of radio to propagandize eastern European populations had been pioneered by the Bolsheviks. On November 7, 1917, a message from Lenin to the Russian people was transmitted from the cruiser
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Polish émigrés to speak to Poles, Hungarians to Hungarians, and so on.
Radio Free Europe (RFE) first broadcast to Czechoslovakia on July 4, 1950, from a former Luftwaffe base in Lampertheim, near Frankfurt, using a transmitter loaned it by the U.S. Army. The following year, with more powerful machinery at its disposal and a new headquarters situated in the beautiful surroundings of Munich’s Englischer Garten (with rehabilitated German spy chief Reinhard Gehlen helping to provide the base security), RFE expanded its operations to Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania.28 By 1953, the station boasted 252 American and 1,526 foreign employees. It gathered broadcast materials from eight news bureaus; operated twenty-six transmitters, including cutting-edge facilities in Portugal; and provided “saturation broadcasting” to the captive nations.29
The tone of RFE’s early broadcasts was shrill and hectoring, reflecting both the ardent anti-Bolshevism of the National Committee for a Free Europe and the more aggressive Cold War stance adopted by the U.S. government after 1950. (NSC 68, signed by President Truman in September 1950, effectively militarized Kennan’s doctrine of containment by calling for a massive arms buildup to defeat communism.) In November 1950, DeWitt Poole instructed the station’s managers to attack communist leaders “and tear them apart, exposing their motivations, laying bare their private lives, pointing up their meannesses, pillorying their evil deeds, holding them up to ridicule and contumely.”30 Gradually this approach moderated, as programmers attempted to build RFE’s reputation as a legitimate news source and began introducing more lighthearted items intended to appeal to a wider audience. Nonetheless, the denunciatory impulse remained, as was demonstrated to startling effect in 1954, when the Voice of Free Poland broadcast a series of interviews with Josef Swiatlo, a colonel in the Polish security service who had defected during a shopping trip to West Berlin. As the former head of counterintelligence in Poland, Swiatlo had seen the private files of many of the country’s leading communists—indeed, he had compiled several of them himself. He now divulged their contents, including lurid details of financial corruption and personal scandals, to RFE’s presumably outraged Polish listeners. It was a propaganda coup for the new station, one made to appear all the more dramatic by subsequent political developments in Poland, which included a purge of senior intelligence officials, a spate of communist self-criticisms, and, in 1956, the ushering in of the more moderate Gomulka regime.31
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S E C R E T A R M Y
The National Committee for a Free Europe enjoyed several successes, not least in the realm of broadcasting. Years later, after the disintegration of the eastern bloc, such dissident luminaries as Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel testified to the importance of RFE in nurturing the flame of resistance in the captive nations.32 Reviewing the NCFE’s program in its en-tirety, however, one cannot help being struck by the organization’s operational problems, its many failures, and the unintended consequences of several of its actions. The NCFE’s scholarly projects, for example, were fraught with difficulties and disputes. In France, the University in Exile was subject both to harsh attacks by the left-wing press and attempts to penetrate it by French intelligence. Its American planners argued about its admissions criteria and the selection of staff, while its students fell prey to a creeping demoralization, some calling it the “tragic bordello.”33