The appearance of progress, however, was deceptive. Shortly after the Wiesbaden conference, the conservative NTS, which had access to sources of covert patronage other than the CIA, including British intelligence, led a breakaway movement of Russian nationalists unhappy with the concessions that had been made to the minority nationalities. Relations between the Russians and non-Russians left behind do not seem to have improved as a result; indeed, by the summer of 1953, they had broken down altogether. AMCOMLIB decided that enough was enough and withdrew its support for the Coordinating Center, announcing, “It is regrettable that the political forces of the emigration have not had the fore-sight and statesmanship to lay aside their internal differences and unite in presenting a common front to the Kremlin.”61 From that point on, the radio project would be developed independently of the émigré leadership.
Still, AMCOMLIB did not completely give up its hopes of forging a unified exile movement, which one Russian onlooker reckoned had already cost it about $8 million.62 In 1954 C. D. Jackson, who had moved on from the presidency of the NCFE to become President Eisenhower’s Special Assistant for International Affairs (which meant, in effect, chief planner of U.S. Cold War psychological warfare), grew so exasperated with AMCOMLIB’s continuing “exilitis” that he called a series of meetings with senior CIA managers, telling them “to pull [themselves] together and evolve some practical policy.” “Forget about trying to unite political ex-
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iles,” he instructed one intelligence officer. “Get the political exiles out of the way, preferably Peru . . . and just go to work.”63
Meanwhile, in March 1953, AMCOMLIB’s new radio station began broadcasting to the Soviet Union from the former operations building of Oberweisenfeld airport in north Munich.64 Radio Liberation (after 1964, Radio Liberty, or RL) experienced many of the same problems as its Munich neighbor, Radio Free Europe, although there was little sense of camaraderie between the two: the eastern Europeans who worked at RFE
looked down on the “slouching tatterdemalion staff” of RL, which soon acquired the nickname “Radio Hole-in-the-Head.”65 Its clandestine patrons in Washington tried to exert influence by posting undercover staff to RL’s Lilienthalstrasse offices. The pretense fooled no one. “I doubt that there was a single stoker or sweeper,” wrote one American employee,
“who did not have some inkling of the true state of affairs.”66 Protecting the base against Soviet penetration was also a daily challenge. The deaths of two émigré employees in 1954—one a Belorussian writer whose body was fished out of the Isar River, the other the chief of the Azerbaijani desk found garrotted in his apartment—both smacked of the KGB.67 Nevertheless, internecine strife carried on unabated, with Great Russians pitted against the nationalities, and Mensheviks versus the NTS. The latter were eventually banned from the station by its director of broadcasting, Howland Sargeant, a former assistant secretary of state and head of the Voice of America. Under Sargeant’s management, Radio Liberty also moved away from the highly aggressive tone it had adopted in its first broadcasts, becoming a trusted news source for such dissident Russian intellectuals as Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.68 It was thanks in no small part to this approach that the station avoided the sort of disaster that befell Radio Free Europe in 1956 and drove one top CIA officer to the edge of insanity.
For Frank Wisner, the man charged by George Kennan with the task of breaking up the Soviet empire, the intractability of the émigrés connected with the NCFE and AMCOMLIB was only one in a long and growing list of problems. To begin with, the paramilitary side of the liberation campaign was faring no better than the psychological. In 1949, the Office of Policy Coordination had become involved in the first U.S. attempt of the
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Cold War era to overthrow a foreign government, the communist regime of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. British spies had come up with the idea of using the island of Malta—still a UK colony at the time—as a base for infiltrating specially trained émigré agents loyal to the exiled King Zog into the small Balkan country. “Whenever we want to subvert any place, we find that the British own an island within easy reach,”
remarked Wisner, whose OPC put up the funds for the operation, code-named BGFIEND.69 This first test of rollback ended in dismal failure.
Hoxha’s counterintelligence service rounded up the Anglo-American agents with an efficiency that suggested advance knowledge of their arrival. The source of the tip-off was later identified as H. A. R. “Kim”