Broadcasting Freedom
Puddington, Arch
Freedom's Radio Stations Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty Arch Puddington University Press of Kentucky 390 pages / $27.50 REVIEWED BY Joseph...
...Freedom's Radio Stations Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty Arch Puddington University Press of Kentucky 390 pages / $27.50 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan D uring the Cold War, America's two "freedom radios"--Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty-were beacons of hope to the oppressed peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union...
...But the way the United States implemented the Kennan-Dulles plan was unprecedented...
...The balloons," writes Puddington, "provoked a degree of official Communist fury never elicited by RFE broadcasts...
...The radios a aged their propaganda war on bch'alf ofa jtlst cause--the defeat dan evil e~>pirc...
...In a 1951 Voice of Free Hungary broadcast, for example, Vilmos Vizi, a factory manager, was exposed as a sexual predator...
...Only after being deluged by listeners who knew, thanks to RFE, that Penny Lane was a street in the Liverpool business district did Radio Budapest feel conrpelled to apologize...
...They also led to major personnel and policy changes at RFE: Along with the balloons, the broadcasts fingering Communist spies and informers, and urging peasants to sabotage their harvests, were out...
...tn 073, RFE and RL were taken away from the CIA and placed under the control of a new entity, the Board for International Broadcasting...
...Indeed, perhaps the most interesting chapter in Broadcasting Freedom describes RFE's involvement in the discjockey business...
...But not only political broadcasts helped bring down the Iron Curtain...
...Yet, although one party publication suggested that it had been introduced at President Johnson's behest in order "to gain the confidence of politically immature strata," eventually the regime felt compelled to produce its own version of Teenager Party...
...Radio Free Europe was the brainchild of such eminent Cold Warriors as George Kennan, Allen Dulles, and Frank Wisher...
...Broadcasting Freedom should help rescue the radios from the "memory-hole" to which their detractors are attempting to consign them...
...Leading the charge against the freedom radios was the powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright of Arkansas...
...Yet none of these changes would save RFE and RL from the firestorm of controversy that erupted once it became known, in 1971, that the radios were being funded by the CIA and not-as had been generally believed-by private donors...
...And, in fact, RFE programming grew much more restrained after 1956-so much so, in fact, that during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981, RFE coverage was generally more cautious (and accurate) than that ofmostWestern newspapers and press services...
...By today's standards, RFE's early broadcasts were extraordinarily hard-hitting, denouncing local Communists by name and warning of the reckoning to come...
...regime leaders were reduced to profanity when the subject of the balloons came up, and the balloon campaign ultimately wound up as an issue before the United Nations...
...has bee~ solved...
...Aren't you ashamed, Vilmos Vizi," the broadcaster thundered, "of using the advantage originating in your party position not only to exploit physically the working women and to torture their minds, but to lay claim to their bodies in order to satisfy" your filthy urges...
...The success of Teenager Party upset Communist authorities almost as much as RFE's balloon campaign had...
...If the document were broadcast on a Western radio station, however, it could reach millions...
...Besides broadcasts, between 195, and 1956 RFE used balloons to drop millions of anti-Communist leaflets into Eastern Europe...
...As a subsequent RFE investigation concluded, during the uprising, "many of the rules of effective broadcasting technique were violated...
...When it was not, they believed the United States had betrayed them...
...In particular, Radio Liberty--founded in t953 to broadcast to the peoples of the Soviet Union--distinguished itself by airing dissident Soviet literature ("samizdat") that would otherwise have gone largely unnoticed...
...One Voice of Free Hungary program, for example, "gave detailed instructions as to how partisan and Hungarian armed forces should fight" the Soviet invaders...
...ously believed that their new creation would replace the Communisbcontrolted media as the primary information source for people trapped behind the Iron Curtain...
...To placate Fulbright, Puddington contends, RFE officials "went out of their way to emphasize the non-controversial nature of their programming and to reassure America that the RFE mission was compatible with d6tente...
...cool objectivity and sober professionalism were in...
...You are worse than a beast, Vilmos Vizi...
...He did not succeed in shutting the radios down, but he did force them to pull their antiCommunist punches...
...The most popular RFE program in Hungary, for example, was called Teenager Party, and was devoted exclusively to Western rock music...
...Another program urged Hungarians "to fight vigorously because this will have a great effect on the handling of the Hungarian question by the Security Council and the United Nations...
...It says even more about the skill and dedication of RFE's staff--especially such remarkable figures as the Polish service's Jan Nowak and the Hungarian service's Gfza Ekecs-that that's precisely how things worked out...
...Fortunately...
...rFo the captive ~ations behind the Iron Curtain, this meant that, for all its fickleness and obtuseness, the United States was still on their side...
...But perhaps more important than the actual content of specific RFE-RL broadcasts was the mere fact that, despite Fulbright, despite anti-anti-Communist appeasers like West Germany's Willy Brandt and Hchnut Schmidt, and despite attempts by Communist authorities to assassinate specific editors and even (with the help of tire infamous international terrorist, Carlos) bomb RFE-RL's Mtmich headquarters, the radios continued to stay on the air...
...for the euphemistically inclined) is to encourage your friends and demoralize your enemies, then RFE-RL a ~s on bata~ce a resounding success...
...In typed editions," writes Puddington, % samizdat document might reach an audience of a few hundred or several thousand at best...
...Hungarian disc jockeys introduced the Beatles' hit song, "Penny Lane," as "Penny Lane: Street of the Poor...
...The new orientation came about as a result of RFE's flawed coverage of the tragic Hungarian Revolution of 1956...
...In fact, Puddington argues that oversight of the radios by the CIA had been relatively relaxed, and that the change of management made RFERL more, rather than less, vulnerable to political meddling...
...Arch Puddington-a distinguished journalist who served as deputy director of the Radios' New York Bureau from 1985 to 1993 and is currently a scholar at Freedom House--has written a ground-breaking history of RFE-RL that is both erudite and a delight to read...
...Eventually, however, it was a changeof-heart on the part of RFE itself, rather than Communist protests, that ended the balloon campaign...
...If fl~c purpose of propaganda (or "public diplomacy...
...Many countries have used international broadcasts to spread their views, but only Radio Free Europe (and later Radio Libeily) sought to become a "surrogate" radio station, airing news not about the United States, but about a nucleus of five Communist countries: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania...
...rock 'n' roll helped too...
...Now, it was confidently predicted, the radios would cease being tools of America's notorious intelligence agency, and become respectable journalistic instiThe American Spectator - June zoo o 75 tutions in their own right...
...76 ju~e 2ooo _9 The American Spectator...
...Soon, a major goal of samizdat authors was to arrange for the document to be smuggled to the West and given to Radio Liberty...
...Noxx, t]~azaks to Arch PuddiJqgton's diligent and determined efforts, tImt problen...
...Although no RIVE broadcast explicitly promised direct American assistance to the freedom-fighters, Hungarians might be pardoned for gaining the distinct impression that such assistance would be forthcoming...
...still fighting the good fight...
...Their idea was to stir up as cnuch unrest as possible in Stalin's backyard, to deter him from invading Western Europe...
...Americaus I~a\-e even reason to be proud ofttleir frecdouq radios: the problem ha~ alxx a} s been fuding a h iston of RFE-N, ttaat doesut undermine that pride with spurious scholarship...
...Fulbright came to regard antiCommunism as America's original sin," writes Puddington, and for two years he conducted a single-minded campaign to end what he called the "ideological mischief" perpetrated by RFE and RE...
...It says something about the remarkable self-confidence of RFE's founders that they seriJosEPH SHATrAN is the author of Architects of Victory: Six Heroes of the Cold War, published by the Heritage Foundation...
...Yet throughout much of their existence they were widely reviled in the United States, and today most Cold War historians either ignore them altogether or dismiss them as "CIA fronts...
...The question of how and why these broadcasts were authorized remains bitterly contested to this day, but there is no denying that they constituted a propaganda debacle for the United States...
...Still, the radios continued to make important contributions to the anti-Communist struggle...
...But the Communists could never quite get it...
Vol. 33 • June 2000 • No. 5
