“policy advisor” held daily briefings with the desk chiefs, at which he laid down editorial guidelines formulated in Washington. He also read through transcripts of programs on each of the different language services (but only after they had been aired). Every month intelligence officers in the United States would review tapes of a day’s output, chosen at random, to double-check that the policy advisor’s guidance was being followed.40
Taken together, these measures persuaded the Americans that, despite the sense of autonomy felt by the émigré staff, in fact it was the Americans who were in charge. Some congratulated themselves on the ingenuity of these arrangements. In 1952, William E. Griffith, the American policy advisor in Munich during the early 1950s and later a major academic expert on communism based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies (another institution with connections to the CIA), told a colleague, using words reminiscent of Willi Münzenberg’s contemptuous attitude toward his “Innocents’ Clubs,” “This feeling of freedom is indispensable. That it is in fact an illusion, albeit a convincing one, is even more so.”41 Not everyone was reassured, however. In 1955, Frank Altschul, former head of the NCFE’s radio committee, informed Allen Dulles (then Director of Central Intelligence) that the “audit of scripts is not comprehensive enough . . . to insure the early detection of deviations from the line laid down.”42
As well as giving the Americans a false sense of security, attempts to impose control on the émigrés could produce unexpected and unwonted results. In 1951 Dulles was overheard at a Washington dinner party telling fellow guests that “these refugees had never lived so well in all their lives, . . . that they [were] getting too big for their britches, [and] that they would have to do what our people . . . told them to do or else.”43 The following year the NCFE issued a directive to all émigré organizations based in the nation’s capital to relocate to New York—a move presumably intended to bring them more firmly under NCFE supervision and make it less easy for them to hobnob with conservative congressmen. Disgusted by this “unwarranted” and “overbearing” behavior, the exiles complained to officials in the Truman administration that the NCFE’s diktat threatened
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to “reduce them to the status of paid American agents” and, furthermore, invited “a major propaganda attack on American exploitation and abuse of émigrés and displaced persons” (the last comment sounding suspiciously like a veiled threat to leak the plan to the press).44 Meanwhile, in Munich, refugee broadcasters balked at what many regarded as heavy-handed American management techniques. When the NCFE overruled RFE advice and launched a balloon operation designed to complement the Swiatlo broadcasts by scattering written accounts of his revelations over Poland, relations with the Polish desk broke down altogether. “Poles are now asking Poles,” one sympathetic American reported to the NCFE,
“who is the worse master, the Russian or the American?” The fallout from this incident was extensive. Polish-American congressmen wrote furious letters to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles; communist propagandists pointed to evidence that a hidden hand was manipulating the RFE; and Swiatlo himself, incensed by negative references to him in the balloon materials, threatened to sue the NCFE for $10,000.45 The incident culminated with Robert E. Lang, the RFE’s American director, resigning his post in protest.
As Lang’s resignation showed, the OPC could not even count on the passive obedience of the private American citizens acting as its front men.
Such NCFE officers as DeWitt Poole had, after all, been in the anti-Bolshevik game much longer than a sophomore like Frank Wisner. They were also backed up by the clout of the prestigious names that had lent themselves to the NCFE board, and they were sufficiently well connected in government circles to appeal decisions they did not like directly to the White House. “It has to be borne in mind that the Fund is directed by individuals not only of some public stature but possessing specific experience in the fields of diplomacy and psychological warfare,” an anonymous memorandum from a NCFE officer (probably Poole himself) warned the OPC in 1950. “If an ostensibly private instrumentality is desired which will do no more than carry out automatically directions from Washington, a different type of personnel will have to be found for the Fund.” The memo concluded, “A long step would be accomplished simply by recognizing the Fund to be a partner on an equal footing, subject only to the final authority of the Government on points of public policy.”46
From the first, the NCFE appears to have felt that its “friends in the South” were paying it insufficient attention and failing to come up with
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