good-quality anticommunist intelligence for use by RFE. “We receive with some regularity a daily selection of what is purported to be significant news items,” complained Frank Altschul in 1950. “Only the fewest of these items are of any use at all.” At the same time, NCFE and RFE managers resented excessive meddling in their business by OPC officers. Lang was particularly sensitive on this score, fulminating about “intrusion in each and every element of our affairs by characters on the operating side of our friends’ organization.”47 Most controversial of all were attempts by the OPC to use the RFE’s airwaves to broadcast code messages to resistance fighters behind the Iron Curtain. Although senior CIA officials have denied that the station was ever used for this purpose, there is evidence that the Polish section, at least, was directed to air “several special messages.”48
The balance of power in this relationship appears to have shifted periodically. On one occasion a showdown between NCFE/RFE staff and their OPC case officers was won by the former, with the spies either resigning or being reassigned to other projects.49 Shortly afterward, however, Dulles used a “full dress RFE meeting” in his office as an opportunity to slap down Lang. “Are you telling me, Mr. Dulles, that this is ‘it’?” the station director demanded, after hearing the DCI expound the official line on broadcast policy. “I don’t know if we will ever see anything ‘itter’,” responded Dulles.50
Given his experiences with the NCFE, it is small wonder that, when he turned his attention from satellite nation refugees to émigrés from the Soviet Union, Frank Wisner would have taken a rather different approach.
The American Committee for Liberation for the Peoples of the USSR
(the last words of the name changed several times during the early 1950s, but the first half remained constant, often abbreviated to “AMCOMLIB”) was incorporated in Delaware in January 1951, after Frank Lindsay, deputy chief of OPC, had dealt with the necessary paperwork. (With its relatively lenient corporation laws, Delaware became the spies’ favorite state for reg-istering front organizations.)51 There was little of the fanfare that had accompanied the establishment of the NCFE, and few of the new organization’s officers were household names. Rather than enlisting “old boys” like Dulles and Wild Bill Donovan, Lindsay turned to low-profile academics
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and journalists with expert knowledge of Soviet affairs. AMCOMLIB’s first president was Eugene Lyons, a senior editor at
Grover told AMCOMLIB’s first board meeting that there would be no public fund-raising activities along the lines of the Crusade for Freedom.
Instead, money would come from “personal friends of committee members.”53 Generally speaking, the new organization departed from the example set by the NCFE in that AMCOMLIB adopted a more secretive and, so Wisner and Lindsay must have hoped, manageable structure. Its basic aims, however, were much the same as those of the older group: organizing the émigrés into an effective political warfare force and equipping them with a radio station capable of reaching listeners behind the Iron Curtain—in this case, within the Soviet Union itself.
The trouble was that the Soviet émigrés proved no less conflict-ridden than the exiles from the satellite countries. To begin with, the “minority”
nationalities, especially the Ukrainians, were just as opposed to Russian domination as they were to Bolshevism and were determined to use the anticommunist cause as a vehicle to assert their national independence.