Meanwhile, back in the United States, attempts to organize the émigré population into distinct National Councils ran up against even greater obstacles. An NCFE progress report compiled in January 1950 noted the apparent inability of both Yugoslav and Polish exiles to form single councils, concluding that “it is in this department of our work that the most harassing problems have arisen.”34 By 1952, the Poles still lacked an organization that could qualify for NCFE recognition, the Rumanians were in a similar state of disarray, and both the Czechoslovakian and Hungarian councils were badly split.35 A high-level government committee formed to review all U.S. psy-war programs reported in 1953 that “efforts to form national councils . . . have largely been frustrated by the bickerings and jealousies common to émigré politicians.”36
It is certainly arguable that the NCFE’s problems with the National Councils were related to a historic tendency among exiled political leaders to internal factionalism and ideological extremism. Macaulay’s description of English refugees in seventeenth-century Holland might have applied equally well to the eastern European émigrés of the Cold War era:
“A politician driven into banishment by a hostile faction generally sees the society which he has quitted through a false medium. Every object is distorted and discoloured by his regrets, his longings, and his resentments.
Every little discontent appears to him to portend a revolution. Every riot is a rebellion.”37 Certain characteristics unique to this particular exile community, however, made it especially fractious and ungovernable. First were the obvious rivalries between certain nationalities, such as the ani-
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mosity between Poles and Ukrainians. There were also ethnic conflicts within particular exile communities—for example, the tension that existed between Czechs and Slovaks. Finally, often overlapping with these other divisions were profound political differences between and within groups. Émigrés from socialist or social democratic backgrounds accused exiles with right-wing beliefs of harboring fascist sympathies (sometimes with good reason), while the latter denounced the former for alleged communist leanings. Some political conflicts were even more obscure. According to one internal Office of Policy Coordination memorandum, Polish social democrats were among those calling for their compatriot, the famous anti-Stalinist writer Czeslaw Milosz, to be denied a visa to enter the United States because they objected to his continuing to call Poland’s economy “socialist”—they interpreted this as a slander on socialism.38
The problems caused by exile factionalism potentially extended far beyond the National Councils. There was always the danger that outsiders would get dragged into intramural disputes, opening the NCFE up to unwelcome external scrutiny. Security was a problem anyway, given the ease with which refugee populations could be infiltrated by communist agents.
Émigrés also had the inconvenient habit of boasting to one another about successful bids for U.S. government patronage, and a number of them had guessed correctly at the real source of the NCFE’s funds. Most worrying for the OPC was exile leaders’ readiness to complain to elected politicians if they did not get what they wanted from the NCFE. Many U.S. congressmen represented districts dominated by eastern European immigrants and therefore took more than a passing interest in the official conduct of the Cold War. During the 1950s, with domestic anticommunism reaching a fever pitch, several widely reported attacks were made on the RFE by right-wing Republicans, who were goaded on by disgruntled émigré constituents. And as if all this was not enough, exile conflicts often spilled over into the day-to-day operation of RFE. The Czech service, for example, faced repeated attacks by ethnic Germans who had been expelled from the Sudetenland and perceived RFE as an obstacle to “German-West Slav understanding.”39
This is not to say that the OPC simply stood back and let the émigrés do whatever they wanted. Granted, the desk chiefs at RFE were selected by the National Councils, and the NCFE made much of the editorial freedom enjoyed by the émigré programmers, but the station’s administrative
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structure included a number of circuit breaks designed to give the Americans some control over what was broadcast. As with staff at the NCFE’s headquarters in New York, any employee in Munich made witting of the OPC’s patronage was required to swear a secrecy pledge. An American