Chapter Eleven: Radio Free Europe
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CHAPTER ELEVEN RADIO FREE EUROPE, 1949-1951 In April 1949, Frank Altschul’s irrepressible and occasionally disreputable long-time friend, the lawyer Arthur Ballantine, told him that he was under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and promptly asked him “what crime I had committed or what assignment I was being considered for.” Altschul, who had already learned of these inquiries from at least two other sources, one of the Morgan partners, most probably Russell Leffingwell or R. Gordon Wasson, plus an unidentified “member of a brokerage firm,” prevaricated.1 For fifty years, Altschul sought political power and influence, but usually did so while eschewing formal government office. In the early Cold War years, however, he was more willing to take a public stand than at any other time in his life, an index of the degree to which the burgeoning conflict engaged him both emotionally and intellectually. From mid-1949 to January 1952, he served as a key director of Radio Free Europe, an organization established by the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE), using funding from the Office of Policy Coordination, an offshoot of the newly created Central Intelligence Agency, in the hope that it would weaken the Soviet hold upon its satellites in Eastern Europe. Altschul remained the foremost NCFE director dealing with the radio project until December 1951, a few months after its operations moved to Munich.2 For several years, the affairs of Radio Free Europe apparently absorbed most of Altschul’s 1 Altschul to Brien McMahon, April 7, 1949, File Brien McMahon, Political Series, Altschul Papers. 2 See Committee for Free Europe-Radio Free Europe Files, Organization Files, Altschul Papers; also Altschul to Harold E. Rider, October 21, 1969, File Rh-Ri, General Correspondence, Altschul Papers; on Radio Free Europe, see also Sig Mickelson, America’s Other Voice: The Story of Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Liberty (New York: Praeger, 1982); A. Ross Johnson, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond (Washington, DC, and Stanford, CA: Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2010), 8-10; Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947-1956 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 21-23, 105-109; Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The American Crusade Against the Soviet Union (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 100-104, 150-154, 188-190, 229-230, 251-260; Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000); Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), ch. 2; Michael Nelson, War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997); Richard H. Cummings, Cold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950-1989 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009); Richard H. Cummings, Radio Free Europe’s “Crusade for Freedom”: Rallying Americans Behind Cold War Broadcasting, 1950-1960 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010); A. Ross Johnson and R. Eugene Parta, eds., Cold War Broadcasting Impact: Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press, 2010); Cord Meyer, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 110-138; Shawn J. Parry-Giles, The Rhetorical Presidency, Propaganda, and the Cold War, 1945-1955 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 52-53; Allan A. Michie, Voices Through the Iron Curtain (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1963); Robert T. Holt, Radio Free Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958); Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA (New York: Scribners, 1992), 256-260; and Wilson D. Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947-1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 203-205. 1 considerable energies. In March 1950 he was, he told his wife’s sister-in-law, Cecily Goodhart, “working from morning till night at Radio Free Europe, which is supposed to be a propagandist weapon in the Cold War, supplementing the Voice of America in a field in which the Voice must be restrained because it is an agency of the Government.”3 A few months later, a communication to Altschul regarding an “investment advisory service” was “temporarily buried in the rush of affairs at Radio Free Europe.”4 Many years later, Altschul told a friend that, as “one of [the] original organizers” of Radio Free Europe, he had “spent full time directing its operations for several years and only retired when a great deal of our activities were moved to Munich.”5 Radio Free Europe and its parent, the National Committee for a Free Europe, were among the most prominent major psychological warfare initiatives launched by the American establishment in response to the tightening of the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe in the late 1940s. They were, in many ways, emblematic of the cognitive contradictions besetting even those Americans who believed, at an intellectual level, that for the indefinite future there was little alternative to accepting Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe, and containment of further Soviet advances was the most to which American strategy could aspire. However logical this stance, there was a strong ideological component to American policy, which viewed Soviet communism not simply as a strategic rival, but also as a morally reprehensible political system. Interestingly, in the early stages of these initiatives, one of their strongest proponents was George F. Kennan, the silver-tongued diplomat whose analysis of the forces driving Soviet behavior and articulation of the policy of “containment” became the new orthodoxies of American foreign policy. Somewhat ironically, during World War II Kennan had, it seems, been prepared to write off Eastern Europe and abandon the entire area to Soviet rule.6 In the late 1940s, however, as director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, he became the father of what would become known as the “rollback” policy, an American campaign to destabilize the Soviet position in Eastern Europe through a wide variety of initiatives, including the propaganda broadcasts transmitted by Radio Free Europe. Inspired in part, it seems, by fears that the Marshall Plan would prompt East European leaders to look to the United States and the West for assistance, and also by apprehensions that West German economic revival would ultimately pose a renewed military threat to Russian interests, in late 1947 and 1948 Soviet officials moved to ensure Communist dominance of the Eastern 3Altschul to Cecily Goodhart, March 31, 1950, File Arthur and Cecily Goodhart, General Correspondence, Altschul Papers. 4 Altschul to Wasson, February 9, 1951, File Committee for the Promotion of Advanced Slavic Cultural Studies, Organizations File, Altschul Papers. 5Altschul to Harold E. Rider, October 21, 1969, File Rh-Ri, General Correspondence, Altschul Papers. 6 Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 227-228, 238-239; Anders Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 31-33, 37-42; Walter L. Hixson, George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 21-23; David Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 91-97; Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 22-23. 2 satellites. Political pluralism came to an end in Hungary, where non-Communist leaders were forced out of office and the country was declared a Socialist People’s Republic. In Czechoslovakia, a brutal coup d’état in 1948 was accompanied by the mysterious death, either suicide or murder, of the non-communist Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk. Soviet control over East Germany and East Berlin also intensified, culminating in spring 1949 in efforts by Soviet occupying forces to bar Western access to West Berlin and assume control of the entire former German capital. Rather than backing down and abandoning this symbolic Western-held enclave deep in East German territory, for more than a year the United States and Britain resupplied West Berlin by air, an expensive but effective operation that demonstrated more effectively than any rhetorical declaration the determination of the Western powers to maintain their position in the city. In Yugoslavia, however, the fact that the communist leader Josip Broz Tito successfully broke with Stalin in mid-1948 and successfully maintained his hold on power gave some aid and comfort to those Americans who hoped to be able to encourage separatist forces in other Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe. As the Soviet Union tightened its hold on the East European satellites, officials in the proliferating American national security bureaucracy were reluctant to abandon Eastern Europe completely to communist domination. Ideally, they hoped that it might be possible to destabilize the region’s Communist governments, and ultimately to break Soviet control of the area. Containment of Soviet communism would thus evolve into the rollback of communism. Rather than risking war to bring this about, the United States government would rely upon covert operations and psychological warfare. As director of the Policy Planning Staff, Kennan felt that containment alone had become an inadequate response to Soviet assertiveness. He strongly supported the creation of the new Central Intelligence Agency, established in 1947, and served as a consultant to the director of its predecessor, the Central Intelligence Group.7 As early as October 1947, Kennan drew attention to the presence in the United States of numerous East European and Russian refugees, whom he hoped might be made an asset of some kind to United States foreign policy, perhaps by training them for some kind of psychological warfare operations.