Radio Free Europe
Pro-Western radio program that, along with its sister program, Radio Liberty (RL), constituted the main anti-Communist radio propaganda effort of the United States in Eastern Europe during the cold war.
From the early 1950s to the mid- 1990s, Radio Free Europe (RFE) beamed the Western version of world and local news over the iron curtain in an attempt to counter pro-Communist Radio Moscow and to foster pro-Western sentiment in the Eastern European masses. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, RFE programming became less focused on anticommunism and in 2005 it continues to be the main source of radio news in the former Communist bloc nations.Radio Free Europe was created in the ashes of post—World War II Germany, when the U.S. government needed a strong radio propaganda program to counter the new threat of communism. Though the United States had relied on the Voice of America (VOA) radio program to counter first Nazism after 1942 and then communism after 1945, the VOA was deemed insufficient for blanketing Eastern Europe. Radio Free Europe was created in 1950, with headquarters in Munich, as part of the National Committee for a Free Europe and was secretly funded and controlled by the CIA. In 1971, after CIA funding was revealed to the public, RFE and RL were officially combined into the RFE/RL program and funded by open congressional appropriations.
During the cold war, RFE programming was a curious blend of attempted journalistic objectivity combined with heavy anti-Communist propaganda. Because CIA funding and control of RFE was secret, overt propaganda was downplayed in favor of news coverage that presented both Communist and capitalist views of political events. In this regard, RFE was designed to serve as the free press of the radio waves, and its programming soon became the most reliable source of news on both sides of the iron curtain.
In 1956, for example, RFE was lauded for its objective take on the labor strikes in Poland and its evenhanded coverage of the Hungarian Revolution. As testament to RFE news objectivity, both Communist leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin volunteered to continue RFE programming in Russia after 1989.In most cases, however, the RFE proWestern agenda was evident. Radio Free
912 Radio Inside the American Sector
Europe programs frequently included interviews with Communist refugees, and several stations even hired refugees as staff journalists. Radio discussions of culture, religion, economics, academic lectures, and politics were usually wrapped in Western ideology. Communist-banned books were read over the airwaves, as were the antiCommunist speeches of Czech dissident Vaclav Havel. Moreover, RFE transmissions were never aimed at Yugoslavia, because it was deemed that propaganda was not needed there in light of Josip Broz Tito’s pro-Western stance.
At its height RFE programming featured around-the-clock broadcasting, all in native languages, to Romania, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Albania. After RFE and RL were merged, it came under the new direction of the nonmilitary Board for International Broadcasters, a program that from 1985 to 1993 included Radio Free Afghanistan. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, RFE operations were relocated, by personal invitation of Czech president Havel, to Prague.
Jeff Stone
See also Berlin Wall; Radio Inside the American Sector
References and Further Reading
Snyder, Alvin A. Warriors of Disinformation: American Propaganda, Soviet Lies and the Winning of the Cold War. New York: Arcade, 1995.
Urban, George R. Radio Free Europe and the Pursuit of Democracy: My War within the Cold War. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University, 1997.
Washburn, Philo C. Broadcasting Propaganda: International Radio Broadcasting and the Construction of Political Reality. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992.