RFE/RL Broadcasting and West German Society: Caught Between Nature Protection Activism and Anti-Americanism

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RFE/RL Broadcasting and West German Society: Caught between Nature Protection Activism and Anti-Americanism

✣ Yuliya Komska

Introduction

“Invisible but audible.” Since radio’s coming of age in the 1920s, descriptions of the medium have often used these two adjectives.1 For decades, the two attributes reinforced the impression of the medium’s ethereal workings. That impression was illusory, however. Radio came with a most substantial technological entourage. Transmission towers stood tall; wires crisscrossed the air in plain sight; equipment-filled recording studios claimed vast space. In this light, “intangible, yet solid as granite,” the words of the U.S. radio pioneer Lee de Forest, is a more fitting contrast.2 In some cases—cue corporate icons, such as the wave-haloed transmission tower logo of RKO Radio Pictures—the technological trappings embodied and promoted radio’s vigor. On other, less readily recognizable occasions, they turned out to be a liability. The history of Radio Free Europe (RFE until 1976, when it changed to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, or RFE/RL), arguably the most influential Cold War broadcaster, with services into five East-bloc countries (Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania) in six languages, throws into sharp relief the fine line between the advantages of radio technologies and their pitfalls.3

1. Andreas Fickers, “Visibly Audible: The Radio Dial as Mediating Interface,” in Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 411–439. 2. Father of Radio: The Autobiography of Lee de Forest (Chicago: Wilcox & Follett, 1950), p. 4. 3. RFE’s sixth service, Albanian, was active only from 1951 to 1953. In this article, RFE refers to the station prior to 1976, whereas RFE/RL is reserved for the period following 1976. References to the station over the whole period are rendered as just RFE.

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Only in the last twenty years have scholars begun to address the long- overlooked materiality of sound media.4 Even more recent is their effort to study the media’s environmental impact and their attendant concern with “greening.”5 “Can we have a sound media that is ecologically sound?,” Jacob Smith asks in a plea to make his object of study “eco-sonic”; that is, capable of propagating environmental consciousness.6 Andyet,outsidetheacademy this awareness established itself much earlier, during the Cold War years. To historicize the present-day scholars’ quest for the eco-sonic, this article re- counts a standoff between two forces that played important roles in shap- ing the final decade of the Cold War: international radio broadcasting and environmentalism. The confrontation, which ultimately pitted Bavarian bird protection activists against RFE/RL, played out in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from 1983 to 1993. The conflict started regionally, with a broad allegation that large broadcasting installations in the south were harming feathered crea- tures. Little by little, the standoff gained national notoriety, with none other than RFE/RL’s technologies and their purveyors branded as deliberate bird slaughterers. My account of the protracted incident contributes to the eco- history of Cold War broadcasting, unwritten as yet. It captures the station’s delayed recognition of the impact that its deceptively immaterial dissemina- tion of information via the airwaves had on nature and human beings. At the same time, the article adds a chapter, if only a brief one, to the history of U.S. relations with the FRG and, in this case, to the history of anti-Americanism, which RFE often reflected during its Cold War–era existence. In the following, I introduce the antagonists. First, I describe RFE and its extensive array of technologies—a feature that the station’s published histories

4. Examples include Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); David L. Morton, Jr., Sound Recording: The Life Story of a Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward and Archeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); and Elodie A. Roy, Media, Materiality and Memory: Grounding the Groove (London: Ashgate, 2015). The ﬁeld of media archaeology, propelled by such scholars as Jussi Parikka and Erkki Huhtamo, provides a backdrop for many ongoing reevaluations. See the programmatic chapter “Media Theory and New Materialism,” in Jussi Parikka, What Is Media Archeology? (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), pp. 63–89. 5. See, among others, Karin Bejsterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture and the Public Problem of Noise in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, Greening the Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Jacob Smith, Eco-Sonic Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). I thank Daniel C. Hallin for directing me to the book by Maxwell and Miller. 6. Smith, Eco-Sonic Media, pp. 1, 6; emphasis in original.

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rarely treat at length.7 Then, I provide a brief note on the position of Bavarian bird protection activists. In the early 1980s, they had begun to forge links with West Germany’s burgeoning environmental movement, from which they had previously separated themselves. Subsequently, I recount the incident that pitted RFE/RL’s transmission towers, the engineers servicing them, Bavarian raptors, and nature protection volunteers in a standoff that lasted ten long years. The story pivots on these central questions: Were the preservationists concerned exclusively with the rescue of Bavaria’s avian population? Or was their intention also to compromise RFE/RL by discrediting the sine qua non of the station’s existence? Can the two motives even be separated? The article suggests that, in an age newly concerned with technology “not as an end in itself but as an aid,” ecological goals became inextricable from Cold War–era political demands.8 The coda sketches the long view that frames this linkage in the specific case of RFE/RL by fleshing out how the controversy over the station’s alleged avicide fits within the extended Cold War chronology of U.S.- FRG tensions prompted by the broadcaster’s operations.

RFE and Its Technologies

First set up in 1949, RFE epitomized international Cold War radio broadcasting in the minds of many. Analysts in the West, among them Timo- thy Garton Ash, recall it as a radio station “second to none” or even as the

7. These histories, written predominantly by former staffers, focus on personnel relations, surveillance by East-bloc secret police, fundraising practices, and the station’s relations with U.S. federal agencies. See Sig Mickelson, America’s Other Voice: The Story of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (New York: Praeger, 1983); Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 2003); A. Ross Johnson, Radio Free Eu- rope and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Richard H. Cummings, Cold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950–1989 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009); and Radio Free Europe’s “Crusade for Freedom”: Rallying Americans behind Cold War Broadcasting, 1950–1960 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010); and Paweł Machcewicz, Poland’s War on Radio Free Europe, 1950–1989 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). The exceptions to this rule are Robert T. Holt’s early study, Radio Free Europe (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), and accounts of jamming, such as George W. Woodard, “Cold War Radio Jamming,” in A. Ross Johnson and R. Eugene Parta, eds., Cold War Broadcast- ing: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: A Collection of Studies and Documents (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2010), pp. 51–63. Woodard’s essay does not focus on RFE/RL exclusively. 8. Hans-Peter Lühr, Umwelt und Technologie—Chance für die Zukunft (Hamburg: McGraw-Hill, 1987), p. 22. See also Josef Huber, Die verlorene Unschuld der Ökologie: Neue Technologien und su- perindustrielle Entwicklung (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1986), p. 12. Both Lühr and Huber draw on American sources.

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politically “most influential [station] in history.”9 Its Communist adversaries, writing in the 1980s, denounced it as “the most classic example of the Ameri- can propagandistic aggression and intervention into [other countries’] domestic affairs, pursued by the U.S. for 30 years without a pause and with great consistency.”10 Former listeners, such as the Romanian film director Alexan- dru Solomon and his interviewees for the documentary Cold Waves (Romania, 2007), reminisce about the broadcaster’s omnipresent and far-reaching sound in their native towns and villages.11 Their testimonies suggest that RFE’s predominantly exile staffers may well have fulfilled their ambition to provide a “surrogate home radio” service despite being hundreds of kilometers removed from the destinations of the station’s short and medium waves.12 Listener numbers, which reportedly surpassed those of the Voice of America (VOA) and the BBC World Service, contributed to RFE’s stature.13 However, they were not the only source of the station’s perceived uniqueness. Unlike VOA (set up in 1942) or West Berlin’s Radio in the American Sector (RIAS, founded in 1946), RFE started out as the only ostensibly private station of its caliber. In the first 17 years of operation, it claimed to exist off donations from ordinary U.S. citizens and private entities such as the Ford Motor Company, the National Biscuit Company, and Pabst Brewing. Collected by

9. Timothy Garton Ash, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 287; and Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom, p. ix. Echoing Puddington, A. Ross Johnson and R. Eugene Parta call RFE “one of the most important Western instruments” in the conflict. See A. Ross Johnson and R. Eugene Parta, “Preface,” in Johnson and Parta, eds., Cold War Broadcasting, p. xii; and Paul B. Henze, “RFE’s Early Years: Evolution of Broadcast Policy and Evidence of Broadcast Impact,” in Johnson and Parta, eds., Cold War Broadcasting, pp. 3–16. Further examples appear in Johnson, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, p. 185. For a more guarded view, see Linda Risso, “Radio Wars: Broadcasting in the Cold War,” in Linda Risso, ed., Radio Wars: Broadcasting during the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 1–8. 10. Radio Freies Europa: Instrument der propagandistischen Aggression (Warsaw: n.pub., 1983), p. 5. 11. Information about the documentary is available at Doc Alliance Films, http://dafilms.com/film /7634-cold-waves/. 12. On RFE as a surrogate medium, see Friederike Kind-Kovács, “Voices, Letters, and Literature through the Iron Curtain,” Cold War History, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2013), pp. 207–211. The article also provides a thorough outline of the exiles’ participation in RFE’s operations. 13. The decade-by-decade breakdown of listener numbers, derived from the surveys of RFE’s East European Audience and Opinion Research Department, appears in “Appendix C: Weekly Listening Rates for Major Western Broadcasters to Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and the USSR during the Cold War,” in Johnson and Parta, eds., Cold War Broadcasting, pp. 142–144. Country-specific studies of RFE fall in line with these statistics. For example, RFE was the most listened-to radio station in Poland, with the VOA second and the BBC third. See Machcewicz, Poland’s War on Radio Free Europe, p. 4. Melissa Feinberg provides an eloquent analysis of what the listeners actually wanted to hear in “Fantastic Truths, Compelling Lies: Radio Free Europe and the Slánský Trial,” Contemporary European History, Vol. 22, No. 1 (2013), pp. 107–125.

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RFE’s fundraising arm, the Crusade for Freedom, the donations served as a front for covert support from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). With time, the initial semblance of private existence translated into RFE’s unrivaled visibility in East and West, literal and figurative—an important context for understanding the incident at stake. In the United States, the broadcaster was conspicuous on posters, roadside billboards, magazine advertise- ments, and even television.14 By contrast, none of the other publicly funded U.S. Cold War stations had promotional campaigns, much less ones run by leading advertising agencies (e.g., Benton & Bowles, Ted Bates & Co, Doyle Dane Bernbach, and Foote, Cone & Belding).15 In East-bloc countries, RFE’s visibility took the form of propaganda leaflet–filled balloons, launched from the western side of the Iron Curtain, and the still more widespread distribution networks for underground literature—also off-limits for the others.16 Finally, in West Germany, which hosted RFE’s operations under the provi- sions of the renewable U.S.-FRG broadcast licensing agreement first signed in 1952, RFE’s numerous facilities were difficult to overlook.17 They were a source of pride for some and an eyesore for others. These broadcasting spaces thrived in the station’s “private” years. Follow- ing the exposure of CIA involvement (1967) and the resulting congressional hearings (1971–1973), which called into question the future of RFE and its Russian-language counterpart, Radio Liberty (RL, founded in 1953 as Ra- dio Liberation), the facilities weathered a storm of events. Among them were the placement of RFE under the oversight of the newly formed Board for

14. See Cummings, Radio Free Europe’s “Crusade for Freedom”; and Yuliya Komska, “Sight Radio: Radio Free Europe on Screen, 1951–1965,” in Anna Bischof and Zuzanna Jürgens, eds., Voices of Freedom— Western Interference? 60 Years of Radio Free Europe in Munich and Prague (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), pp. 55–75. 15. The campaigns were orchestrated by the Advertising Council, a non-proﬁt association of the nation’s top agencies formed in 1942. The history of the association is documented in Daniel L. Lykins, From Total War to Total Diplomacy: The Advertising Council and the Construction of the Cold War Con- sensus (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). 16. On the balloon launches, see Cummings, Radio Free Europe’s “Crusade for Freedom,” pp. 111– 112, 130–131. On the distribution of illegal literature, see Friederike Kind-Kovács, Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014); and Alfred A. Reisch, Hot Books in the Cold War: The CIA-Funded Secret West- ern Book Distribution Program behind the Iron Curtain (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2013). 17. “Lizenz,” n.d., in German Federal Archives Koblenz (BArch), B136/3458. Until 1961, RFE’s American management and part of the newsroom were located in New York. See also Johnson, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, pp. 67–68; and Christian Heinrich-Franke, “In the Juridical Loophole: Radio Free Europe and the International Legality of Broadcast Transmission across the Iron Curtain,” in Bischof and Jürgens, eds., Voices of Freedom, pp. 93–107.

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International Broadcasting (1973), the attendant transition to public financ- ing (1972), and the merger to form RFE/RL in 1976.18 Still, the technological expansion endured—albeit not unquestioned—into the 1980s, the last full decade of RFE’s broadcasts into Eastern Europe. The growth in sophistica- tion and geography of this physical apparatus set the context for the incident of 1983 and therefore merits an overview. When an influential New York Times media critic, Jack Gould, described RFE as an “outfit of formidable proportions” in 1950, he was hardly exag- gerating.19 As early as 1951, its second year of service, RFE committed nearly $1.15 million (roughly twice its budget for salaries and personnel) to develop- ing its web of technologies. But even this sizeable fraction of its overall budget of $6.4 million was a grain of sand in the scheme of its yet unapproved plans. That year, the estimated technology spending increase amounted to more than $2 million.20 Single transmitter costs ranged from $184,600 to $401,998, not including receivers, antennas, power bills, communications fees, and studio equipment. In Europe, RFE’s Munich headquarters was being completed and would join the already functioning transmission (subsequently relay) station in Upper Bavarian Holzkirchen, another transmission station in Biblis near Mannheim in southern Hesse, the receiving and monitoring station in nearby Schleißheim, and a mobile 50 kilowatt, 854 kilohertz AM broadcast station temporarily installed on the Czechoslovak border near Cham in 1953.21 Starting in 1953, RFE cast its net over western Portugal and furnished sites in Glória do Ribatejo and Maxoqueira, equidistant from the capital, Lisbon. Speaking to the Munich staff in April 1952, RFE’s Director of Engi- neering William A. Holmin said the station would be “devising all sorts of new methods of operating, . . . really new methods.” The new equipment would have to cope not only “with unintentional interference of other stations in the crowded shortwave bands” but also with “intentional interference

18. An outline of these events is sketched in Johnson, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, pp. 203– 209. 19. Jack Gould, “Radio Free Europe: A Unique Private Enterprise Is Set Up to Pierce Russia’s Iron Curtain,” The New York Times, 9 July 1950, p. X9. 20. “Radio Free Europe Capital Expenditures,” 31 December 1950, in Hoover Institution Archives (HIA), RFE/RL Corporate Records, Alphabetical File, Box 267, Folder 8. 21. “Radio Free Europe Munich, Germany—50 KW Mobile AM Transmitter Installed on Czech Bor- der,” Jack Quinn, Santa Rosa, CA, 2 May 2001, ed. Bob Hartman, 1 May 2001, in HIA, Jack R. Quinn Papers, 2001C85–16.351.

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from the opposition.”22 The 135,000-watt transmitter in Holzkirchen—the future site of alleged avicide—occupied a special place in Holmin’s address, which emphasized the full potential of the outfit even when preaching to the choir of RFE’s own employees. Holmin’s team devised means of increasing the wattage of the site’s equipment fivefold to reach such proximate targets as Czechoslovakia: [The transmitter] has a system of towers that provide a reflector much as a reflector back of a light tends to beam the light in one direction, giving a much brighter light in the desired direction. . . . 675000 watts of power may not mean too much to some of you, so to give you an idea of what a tremendous amount of power that really is, I’d like to transfer that much energy into mechanical energy...,about900horsepower,andthatactuallymeansthatitwouldtake 900 horses to develop the energy that is radiated from our antenna towers.23 Holmin was not alone in attempting to convey the outsized scale of the operation. By 1954, the broadcaster’s staff was receiving a three-page “calendar” of the facilities’ multistep technical expansion schedule.24 The plans were not restricted to internal consumption. In 1958, the managing director of trade publications for the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) put out a 22-page overview of RFE’s cutting-edge equipment, characterizing it as a “king-size radio system.” The article featured high-quality images of RFE’s antennas and monitoring consoles.25 In the United States, RFE’s image-makers created publicity films for RFE, such as Crusade Report (1951), Lifeline to Freedom (1957), and The Most In- credible Challenge (1965), which featured extended shots of masts, cables, and radio valves. Two of these films, Antennas and Wires (n.d., early 1950s) and Towers of Truth (1957), zoomed in on towers, antennas, and wires, offering sparse narrative, if any, and letting the pictures speak for themselves.The close- ups of humming devices were accompanied by real-life public displays of the facilities’ physical models. One of them, a 73-foot replica of an RFE transmission tower, materialized on New York’s Times Square in 1954. A distant cousin of an earlier Gotham radio extravaganza—RCA’s transmission tower on the Manhattan set of the movie King Kong (1933)—RFE’s model served

22. “Talk Given by Mr. William A. Holmin, Director of Engineering, at Employee Staff Meeting on 23 April 1952,” in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Ofﬁce File, Box 22, Folder 2. 23. Ibid. 24. “Calendar Technical Highlights RFE,” n.d., in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Ofﬁce File, Box 22, Folder 2. 25. Paul A. Greenmeyer, “Radio Free Europe’s Broadcast Operation,” Broadcast News, Vol. 94 (April 1957), p. 58.

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exclusively the purpose of fundraising.26 Collectively, these examples rendered the station’s technologies not merely visible but iconic. However, the icons could not remain arrested in time, which is why per- fecting broadcast quality and ﬂexibility was among the station’s highest pri- orities. Transmitters, the RFE engineering team reported in 1968, had to be updated at least once every ten years.27 Otherwise, RFE would fail to meet West German and international standards for spurious emissions (i.e., unin- tentionally created frequencies) or could be “overshadowed by the 250 KW and 500 KW transmitters now being used by VOA, BBC, and a multitude of other international broadcasting services.” No strangers to interservice competition, the engineers added: “The alternative to improving the transmission facilities...canonlyresultinagradualbutcertaindegradationofthetech- nical services provided to our potential audiences. Our signal in our target areas will be more and more overshadowed . . . by the higher power and increasing numbers of other [western] broadcasters.” At stake was “the race for higher power amongst the world broadcasters,” the director of engineering and technical services announced in 1969.28 “Inafewyearsfromnow,”he prophesied, the 100 KW transmitters will be small fry and 200 KW or so will be the order of the day. When this stage is reached, we will be able to combine our 100 KW transmitters to run them in pairs as 200 KW units and so save them from obsolescence. The only way RFE’s mission can be accomplished is to put a loud enough and good enough signal into our target areas to be comfortably heard above the Babel of world competition in the short-wave bands; stated in simple words, it is a matter of the “survival of the ﬁttest.” The drive to expand the station’s facilities—as well as to lionize them— continued unabated in the following decades. An RFE pamphlet for the West German public in the 1960s listed the station’s transmitters’ strength, number, and locations; highlighted its programs’ simulcasts from several sites; and pointed out that the radio monitored its airings from Berlin, Vienna, and Istanbul to optimize broadcast strength and counter jamming.29 In 1968, a

26. “Tower Dramatizes Radio Fund Appeal,” The New York Times, 17 February 1954, p. 17. On RCA’s tower, see Mark McGurl, “Making It Big: Picturing the Radio Age in ‘King Kong,’” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Spring 1996), p. 420. 27. “Program Papers: March 1968,” in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Office File, Box 22, Folder 2. 28. “Engineering and Technical Services: General Engineering Program Paper, 1969,” in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Office File, Box 22, Folder 4. 29. “Warum Radio Freies Europa,” n.d., in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Office File, Box 22, Folder 14.

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series of full-page diagrams, produced for internal use, captured the massive scale of RFE’s engineering plant. One sheet recorded the station’s impressive West German facilities down to the smallest teleprinter. Another sketched the mind-bogglingly intricate procession of the wire circuits from RFE’s New York studios to the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, then on to the Deutsche Post, a Press Wireless transmitter in Brentwood, NY, Schleißheim, Munich, Holzkirchen, the sites in Portugal, as well as a generous smattering of locales between them. Thanks to the impetus that lasted through the 1980s, the station’s long- term trajectory constituted a radical refashioning of the original designs for RFE, which the National Committee for Free Europe (NCFE), the station’s parent organization, had committed to paper in October 1949. Formulated less than a year before RFE went live, NCFE’s proposal focused on rebroad- casts of U.S.-generated programs and found that the extent of capital expenses was a modest $196,400.30 The NCFE made no mention of broadcasting on site, let alone of the mesh of antennas and wires that would eventually con- nect two West European countries (one post-fascist and the other, in the case of Portugal, fascist until 1974) with listeners inhabiting the Communist world across the Iron Curtain. The station’s departure from its scripted destiny offers an important com- mentary on the place of technology in broadcast histories. Broadcasting gear, it transpires, is irreducible to a mere conduit for content—that is, to the implicit opposite of content. The effects of the technologies’ material pres- ence amount to more than its users and uses, as Heidi Tworek and Simone Müller point out.31 The historian Melvin Kranzberg postulated in 1986 that technological developments “have environmental, social, and human consequences that go far beyond the immediate purpose of the technical devices and practices themselves.”32 In RFE/RL’s example, technologies, too, relinquished their supporting roles. From functional scaffolds for the broadcaster’s political, ideological, or cultural messages, they advanced to centers of

30. “Memorandum,” 17 October 1949, in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Alphabetical File, Box 267, Folder 8. By 1958, only about 10 percent of RFE’s programs originated in New York. See Green- meyer, “Radio Free Europe’s Broadcast Operation,” p. 9. 31. Simone M. Müller and Heidi J. S. Tworek, “Imagined Use as a Category of Analysis: New Ap- proaches to the History of Technology,” History and Technology, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2016), pp. 105–119. 32. Paraphrased in Andreas Fickers, “‘Neither Good, nor Bad; nor Neutral’: The Historical Dispositif of Communication Technologies,” in Martin Schreiber and Clemens Zimmermann, eds., Journalism and Technological Change: Historical Perspectives, Contemporary Trends (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2014), pp. 30–52.

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controversies that touched but did not hinge on the broadcast programs or their presenters and announcers.

Bavarian Nature Protection in the Age of Environmental Activism

Starting the controversy examined here were German nature conservationists, whose ranks included bird protection activists. They were “hardy survivors” with historically parochial loyalties that not even the formation of the national League for Homeland Protection (Bund Heimatschutz, 1904) could unhinge. In the 1970s and 1980s they reemerged as nimble antagonists of the state, which was inevitably weighed down by domestic and international pressures and obligations, not to mention red tape.33 At this time, they broad- ened their historically narrow concerns with conservation by testing the wa- ters of civic engagement. With the new social movements in the background, the move emboldened these volunteers to venture beyond strictly domestic crises.34 They now dared to confront such non-native corporate behemoths as RFE/RL without giving too much thought to the consequences of their actions for the state’s foreign policy. In the 1980s, a period still underrepre- sented in East and West Germany’s environmental histories, conservationists appeared ready to infuse their aesthetic-, nature-, or broadly science-focused agendas with politics.35 And their concern for forest dieback—a privileged

33. I borrow the phrase “hardy survivors” from William T. Markham, Environmental Organizations in Modern Germany: Hardy Survivors in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), pp. 3, 55. See also Ute Hasenöhrl, Zivilgesellschaft und Protest: Eine Geschichte der Naturschutz- und Umweltbewegung in Bayern 1945–1980 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2011), pp. 494– 495. On the transatlantic context of (West) German environmentalism, see Carl Lankowski, “Social Movements in Germany and the United States,” in Detlef Junker et al., eds., The United States and GermanyintheEraoftheColdWar, Vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 430– 436. 34. On intersections between peace and environmental movements, see Lankowski, “Social Move- ments,” p. 430; Silke Mende and Birgit Metzger, “Ökopax: Die Umweltbewegung als Erfahrungsraum der Friedensbewegung,” in Christoph Becker-Schaum et al., eds., “Entrüstet Euch!” Nuklearkrise, NATO-Doppelbeschluss und Friedensbewegung (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012), pp. 118–134; and Philipp Gassert, “Die Entstehung eines neuen Umweltbewußtseins,” in Bernd Greiner, Tim B. Müller, and Klaas Voß, eds., Erbe des Kalten Krieges (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2013), pp. 360–361. My thanks to Martin Klimke for recommending Mende and Metzger’s piece. 35. On the conservationists’ withdrawal from civil society, see Hasenöhrl, Zivilgesellschaft und Protest, p. 494. On their reserve vis-à-vis the term “environment,” see Sandra Chaney, Nature in the Mira- cle Years: Conservation in West Germany, 1945–1975 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), pp. 4–6. Astrid Eckert’s recent work brings the 1980s into focus, especially her “Geteilt aber nicht unverbun- den: Grenzgewässer als deutsch-deutsches Umweltproblem,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte,Vol.1 (January 2014), pp. 69–99.

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theme in discussions of that decade’s ecology—was far from exclusive.36 Their resistance to RFE/RL’s technologies, documented from 1983 to 1993, illus- trates the extended reach of these developments.

Avicide Perpetrators

The first complaint from the Bavarian Federation for Bird Protection (Landes- bund für Vogelschutz in Bayern, LVB) arrived at RFE/RL on 26 January 1983. Ludwig Sothmann, the president of the federation from 1978 to 2014, and Ernst Deutsch, a member and trained biologist, attributed “the relatively high loss of bird life” to the “high frequency feeder lines of various transmitters.”37 Raptors, the men noted, were especially hard hit. The species used the area of RFE/RL’s newly upgraded Holzkirchen transmitter as a hunting ground, perching on horizontal aboveground high-voltage wires to spy mice and other prey. The wires scorched the birds’ feet and exposed them to torturously slow deaths, the activists alleged. Apparently, Sothmann and Deutsch had visited just such transmitters. The rate of bird casualties there, they summed up, was “considerably high” even without the uncounted cases. The numbers averaged 50 per year, they estimated, pushing for such prompt countermeasures as wooden feeder line encasements and ultrasound devices. In light of the political ramifications that the issue could have, the two activists argued that the willingness of the station to protect the birds was essential. What they failed to specify was whether they considered the problem endemic to RFE/RL alone. Nowhere—except in the address—did the letter name the station explicitly. Consequently, to quote from a memorandum later filed at RFE/RL, “it [was] not known if these groups approached other transmitter sites on the same subject.”38 Confusion was largely unavoidable. After all, Bavaria housed other large domestic and international stations. Especially prominent were RIAS and VOA in Erching and subsequently Ismaning, both near Munich. In the 1980s,

36. Birgit Metzger, “Erst stirbt der Wald, dann Du!” Das Waldsterben als westdeutsches Politikum 1978– 1986 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2015). 37. Ludwig Sothmann and Ernst Deutsch to RFE/RL, with undated Bild clipping, 26 January 1983, in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Ofﬁce File, Box 22, Folder 8. In an e-mail communication with the author from 9 July 2015, Sothmann did not recall the correspondence: “We had no contact with Radio Free Europe.” 38. “Birds Force RFE/RL to Put Cats on Payroll,” n.d. (ca. 1985), in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Ofﬁce File, Box 22, Folder 8.

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VOA’s facilities worldwide underwent vast modernization, and this development did not leave Ismaning untouched.39 Besides, broad concerns about the relationship between electromagnetic waves and forest dieback, to which all wildlife would fall victim, were being raised widely in and outside Germany.40 The groundswell of efforts to protect raptors locally, nationally, and worldwide peaked in the late 1980s, with considerable input from Sothmann.41 For multiple reasons, including superstition-induced shootings and exploita- tive falconry, sheltering raptors from extinction, biologists and conservationists urged, was a challenge distinct from wildlife protection in more general terms.42 Hawks, owls, and other raptors, one local conservancy association elaborated, did not adapt to environmental changes as easily as other animals.43 These worries were gaining traction far and wide. But in 1983, when Sothmann and Deutsch refrained from naming the culpable broadcasters, it fed a conflict that would take ten years to resolve. The delay may have had more to do with human beings than with birds and, as RFE/RL officials eventually came to suspect, at least as much to do with U.S.-West German tensions as with nature protection. The letter from Sothmann and Deutsch did not disclose anything about the extent of RFE/RL’s awareness of its opponents’ clout, although the extent to which the station purported to heed their demands year in, year out makes some such knowledge on their part probable. In the FRG, bird protection was both the oldest umbrella for nature conservation and the first environmental cause to garner a national following as early as 1875.44 Furthermore, RFE/RL’s physical home, Bavaria, had its own long-standing nature conservancy tradition, predating the term “environment” by many decades. The tradition went back to the Bavarian League for Nature Protection (Bund Naturschutz in Bay- ern, 1913) and this organization’s keystone role in forming Germany’s most

39. Alan L. Heil, Voice of America: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 117– 118. 40. Radio- und Mikrowellen als mögliche Ursache für Waldschäden (Bern: Bundesamt für Umweltschutz, 1985). 41. Ludwig Sothmann, ed., Greifvogelschutz (Laufen: ANL, 1989). For this collection, Sothmann edited the proceedings of the 1988 annual meeting of the Bavarian Academy for Nature Protec- tion and Landscape Care (Akademie für Naturschutz und Landschaftspﬂege). See also Silvia Seitz and Peter Havelka, Schützen wir unsere Greifvögel (Karlsruhe: Landesamt für Umweltschutz Baden- Württemberg, 1991). 42. Goetz Rheinwald, “Inwieweit unterscheidet sich Greifvogelschutz vom allgemeinen Artenschutz?” in Sothmann, ed., Greifvogelschutz, pp. 110–112. 43. “10 Jahre Aktionsgemeinschaft Greifvögel- und Eulenschutz e. V.,” n.d., in HIA, RFE/RL Corpo- rate Records, Public Affairs Ofﬁce File, Box 22, Folder 7. 44. Markham, Environmental Organizations in Modern Germany,p.55.

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vital environmental advocacy groups—the German League for Environment and Nature Protection (Deutscher Naturschutzring, DNR, 1950) and the German Union of Environment and Nature Conservation (Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland, BUND, 1975).45 In addition, Holzkirchen was located on staunchly Catholic territory, and it was at the German Catholic Bishops’ conference in 1980 that species protection was declared to be one of the church’s (as well as humanity’s) central mandates.46 An exacerbated dispute could have had far-reaching consequences for the broadcaster, which had not enjoyed a hearty welcome in West Germany—particularly not at the grassroots level. It is therefore understandable that station manager Oskar Mild proceeded with care, even if his precautions were somewhat belated. By 3 February the news had already seeped into the Bavarian issue of the tabloid Bild,andMild filed the pertinent clipping with the letter from Sothmann and Deutsch. The article headline, “Radio Free Europe: Death Trap for Raptors,” left few doubts about the tone of the piece and hinted at the story’s explosive potential. Sim- ilarly certain was the conviction of the unnamed reporter that the problem was specifically RFE/RL’s: a dense forest of the broadcaster’s transmitter masts graced the captioned illustration. A year earlier, the article disclosed, the station had introduced significant technological innovations that resulted in as many as sixteen bird deaths. The local nature conservationist Anton Beil, pic- tured with a sparrow hawk—ostensibly a casualty—had already marked every incident site. Helmut Rippenberger, Mild’s assistant, was who insisted that the issue plagued all large stations. Rippenberger was also the man who convinced RFE/RL’s Engineering Department Deputy Director Varick Steele that LVB’s original mailing had been a form letter sent out to “all Broadcasting Corporations in the F. R. of Germany, not only [RFE/RL].”47 Initially widespread among the employees, this misconception slowly dissipated. The process of its gradual waning, captured in the surviving correspondence, reveals the extent of RFE/RL’s everyday diplomacy; its employees’ exasperation with the less-than-cordial

45. Ibid., p. 63. 46. Zukunft der Schöpfung—Zukunft der Menschheit: Erklärung der Deutschen Bischofskonferenz zu Fra- gen der Umwelt und der Energieversorgung (Bonn: Sekretariat der Deutschen Bischofskonferenz, 1980), http://www.nachhaltigkeit.info/media/1294745787phpxOOD7y.pdf. 47. Varick Steele to Oskar Mild, 4 February 1983, in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Ofﬁce File, Box 22, Folder 8. Files of the Bavarian Ministry of Development and the Environment at the Bavarian Main State Archive (Munich) currently contain no documents concerning broadcast technologies and species protection, according to an e-mail communication from archivist Laura Scherr (7 November 2014).

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West German setting; the natives’ creative approaches to framing their own well-founded and pent-up frustrations with the broadcaster; and the long- simmering tensions between German “rootedness in place” (Heimat)andthe foreign corporation (i.e., RFE/RL) that eroded it.48 The backdrop of a tiny rural community at the foothills of the German Alps only accentuated the contrast between the bucolic West German landscape and the uninvited interloper busy transforming Holzkirchen into its technological foothold. As Jack Quinn, RFE’s manager of technical operations from 1952 to 1956, recalled, Holzkirchen was “famous for two things: the large RFE transmitting station, and . . . beer.”49 From the vantage point of people like Sothmann and Deutsch, the transmitting station was quickly gaining the upper hand. One did not have to be a fervent nature protection activist to see that RFE’s leases and incessant restructuring projects had changed the fenced-off outskirts of the village. Within a few years, the originally peaceful backdrop housed a sizeable communications knot between the U.S.-approved broadcast content, the station’s predominantly German engineers, and transmitters at RARET (RFE/RL’s most powerful station in Glória do Ribatejo) that were used by the Holzkirchen staff to beam RFE/RL’s programs for their ultimate impact.50 Meanwhile, inside the Holzkirchen facilities, the sense of not being sin- gled out as the sole culprit proved motivating, if short-lived. The mistaken assumption that LVB had approached all large stations—and that all of them supposedly lagged behind equally when it came to bird protection—was on the mind of RFE/RL’s information services ofﬁcer when he sent a request for help to the National Audubon Society on 4 February 1983. He wrote that the broadcaster, “along with other large radio stations in Germany, ha[s] been seeking ways to eliminate or reduce the threat that transmitter sites pose to bird species.”51 Omitting the details of RFE/RL’s involuntary and lone search

48. An extensive discussion of West Germany’s changing official position on RFE appears in A. Ross Johnson, “The Uninvited Guest—Radio Free Europe in the Federal Republic of Germany,” in Bischof and Jürgens, eds., Voices of Freedom, pp. 77–92. Additional press reports on official and unofficial attitudes are collated in the Bavarian State Archives Munich (BayHSta), Stk Bd. 9 (1949/50–1963) and the Munich City Archive (Stadtarchiv München), Zeitungs-Ausschnitts-Sammlung Monacensia (1956–1972). 49. Jack Quinn, “RFE Holzkirchen Transmitting Station in Bavaria,” 4 May 2001, in HIA, Overview of the Jack R. Quinn Papers, 2001C85-16.351. 50. “Engineering and Technical Services: Station Operations: Holzkirchen Program Paper,” n.d. (late 1960s), in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Office File, Box 22, Folder 4. See also Holt, Radio Free Europe, pp. 113–119. 51. William G. Mahoney to the National Audubon Society, 4 February 1983, in HIA, RFE/RL Cor- porate Records, Public Affairs Office File, Box 22, Folder 8.

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mission, he asked whether the society had any information on the effect of ultrasound on birds or, for that matter, mice. Could it advise about the available devices, their cost, and manufacturers? His addressee was unable to help. But in these relatively early days of concerted bird protection against technology, RFE/RL could at least acknowledge the problem and look for solutions. Inevitably, however, these efforts failed to impress the RFE’s opponents or mitigate their outrage, despite the station’s assurances of its interest in resolv- ing the issue and its repeated apologies for the ostensibly unforeseen circum- stances created by the new technologies. Could bird protection be a ploy for undercutting the broadcaster, some employees began to wonder? In subsequent months, Steele and his engineering team got swept up in a whirl of recommendations and initiatives, each more quixotic than the last. First, they let LVB know that RFE/RL’s transmitters were as culpable “as any other.”52 Then, they immediately ruled out encasing the wires as detrimental to the already compromised broadcast quality and rejected the use of optical signals (such as glass spheres) as habit-forming in birds and therefore ineffec- tive, according to the experience of other unnamed stations. Instead, Steele explained to LVB, his workers devised an illuminated do-it-yourself “ultra-sonic scarecrow,” expressed their readiness to build two other such contraptions, and erected numerous wooden T-pole perches over several thousand square meters. Willi Rüther, an engineer at the time, drew up lists of expenditures, which amounted to 1,088 Deutschmarks by March 1983. Rüther’s colleagues checked whether ultrasound would inﬂuence guard dogs or the sheep that were allowed to graze on the grounds to keep the grass cover at bay, exper- imented with numerous ultrasonic frequencies, and anticipated a reciprocal gesture of compromise from the conservationists.53 Their hopes were rash. West German conservationists, although historically attuned to reconciling “pro-nature and pro-technology” perspectives, balked at this possibility in RFE/RL’s case.54 In fact, they proceeded to dismiss RFE/RL’s every idea, including those originating with Sothmann and Deutsch

52. Steele to LVB, 7 February 1983, in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Ofﬁce File, Box 22, Folder 8; and Steele, memorandum to William Mahoney, 9 March 1983, in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Ofﬁce File, Box 22, Folder 8. The following references are from the latter source. 53. In an unpublished memoir recorded on 21 April 2016, the Holzkirchen RFE/RL engineer Luke Springer (subsequently director of technology at RFE/RL in Prague) reminisces about the early use of loudspeakers to scare away the birds. Unmentioned in the corporate correspondence, this device apparently proved too habit-forming to have sustained effects. I thank A. Ross Johnson for sharing the interview. 54. Chaney, Nature in the Miracle Years,p.4.

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themselves, as unsatisfactory.55 Thus, on 22 March Deutsch discounted his own first suggestion—ultrasound—as futile and insisted on using plastic wire encasements, an option that had already been rejected. To support the ar- gument, Deutsch cited the findings of the Frankfurt branch of the Battelle Institute, where bird repellence around airports was a matter of systematic investigation. Not only did the electro-scarecrow have no effect on birds, he argued, but the very thought of creating a vertebrate-free space was alien to species protection as such.56 On the other end, station manager Mild was losing patience, especially because Deutsch, he suspected, did not follow RFE/RL’s experiments closely enough, let alone appreciate the enthusiasm that was fueling them. Transmit- ters covered only three percent of the area, Mild noted; thus, the talk of a vertebrate-free space was an exaggeration. Besides, he had never heard of the “exploding” birds mentioned by Deutsch—certainly not in the environs of Holzkirchen.57 Instead, he finally inquired which other stations had been receiving LVB’s mailings and suggested that a neutral party, such as the Bavarian Ministry of Development and the Environment (Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Landesentwicklung und Umweltfragen), should helm an unbiased investigation. The story’s newspaper coverage, Mild interjected with an acerbic nod to Bild, had given him the impression that bird protection activists enjoyed seeing their names and pictures in print more than bringing facts to light.58 The previous year’s casualties, Mild followed up in his letter to the ministry, had not exceeded six birds.59 Mild’s appeal to the Bavarian state was not ignored, but state officials held little sway over the conservationists. Although the ministry responded with an onsite visit on 2 November 1983, the intervention had limited consequences and unfolded at a glacial pace. Anton Beil, contracted to provide field notes, had died, and a replacement (his son Josef) was not designated until 1985. As late as that year, the matter was also forwarded to the government of Up- per Bavaria for further action. In June 1985, Upper Bavarian officials finally

55. According to an e-mail communication from Ulrich Lanz (LVB Wildlife Conservation Depart- ment deputy chief; 8 August 2014), LVB records from the period have not survived. 56. Deutsch to Oskar Mild, 22 March 1983, in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Office File, Box 22, Folder 8. 57. Springer in his memoir (see note 52 supra) describes how “smaller birds that landed on the lines simply went ‘PUFF.’ They disappeared in a cloud of feathers.” 58. Mild to Deutsch, 21 April 1983, in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Office File, Box 22, Folder 8. 59. Mild to the Bavarian Ministry of Development and the Ecology, 22 April 1983, in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Office File, Box 22, Folder 8.

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sent a letter to Mild’s successor, Fritz von Pilgrim, striking a conciliatory tone and offering recommendations. These included stretching plastic cord just over the feeder lines to prevent the birds from perching; experimenting with fluorescent bird-of-prey silhouettes; planting trees to alter the “steppe-like” character of the plot; and trying out landscape care alternatives in order to stem the growth of the mouse population.60 The feebleness of the suggestions suggested that the bird protection activists were more organized than the state officials.61 By prodding the station’s Munich executives and its engineering plant, they waged a grassroots campaign, much like their predecessors had done in other instances in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. This time, however, the campaign was not strictly domestic. Gradually, it acquired an international edge, insofar as its target would be not just any large broadcaster but a large U.S. broadcaster that had not always met a friendly reception in the FRG. RFE/RL’s attempts to remedy a technological problem with still more technology brought little relief. Both the ominous-sounding and costly “earth- quake machine,” designed specially to scare off mice, and the plastic casings for individual transmitter wires proved to be less adequate than the most low- tech solution imaginable. Putting five cats and a vaccinated fox family on the payroll produced unbeatable results. This discovery cost the station little money but a good deal of credibility and opened RFE/RL’s engineering endeavors to ridicule, implying that the station was trying to get away with a trick familiar to every Holzkirchen toddler. Even the typically restrained voices at the ministry opined that to regulate the rodent population the station had to rely on more than just a petting zoo. To make matters worse, the measure initially provoked a drastic rise in the feline population, prompting the station to add dogs to its bloated menagerie.62 A resolution of the matter proved difficult. As late as 1985, RFE/RL continued its struggle to come up with alternatives beyond those that struck its critics as cosmetic. Officials tried landscape care, replacing the sheep with electric mowers to deter mice and planting fast-growing trees to provide alternative perches for the birds.63 Von Pilgrim unsure what else his department could try. After consulting with the notetaker Josef Beil, he set the following targets: to increase the number of cats by two, add 30 T-poles and other

60. Dr. Richarz/Bavarian Government to Fritz von Pilgrim, 14 June 1985, in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Ofﬁce File, Box 22, Folder 8. 61. Markham, Environmental Organizations in Modern Germany,p.3. 62. Springer memoir (see note 52 supra). 63. Richarz/Bavarian Government to von Pilgrim, 14 June 1985, in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Ofﬁce File, Box 22, Folder 8.

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perching arrangements, provide a winter bird-feeding ground, and plant still more trees in the antenna field. Most important, he announced in a memorandum to the Holzkirchen staff that “in order to show the Government that RFE/RL is doing everything within reason to protect birds it is suggested to set up a charge number like ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION to show the authorities . . . the money spent to protect birds.”64 At this point, concerns about the culpability of other radio or television broadcasters were off the ta- ble. No accusations were lodged against other stations. The verdict was clear enough: RFE/RL was the main target, and it would have to fend for itself. In subsequent years, the broadcaster’s interactions with conservationists who possessed environmentalist crossover appeal proved that the latter could stand their ground. Ursula Rode, a resident of Ulm, turned out to be particularly implacable. She also had an advantage over traditional conservationists such as Sothmann and Deutsch. In contrast to them, Rode was affiliated with a renegade environmentalist organization that operated across all of the FRG: the Federal Society for Animal Protection (Bundesverband Tierschutz), which had emerged in 1962 in response to the alleged inertia of the venerable Ger- man Animal Welfare Federation (Deutscher Tierschutzbund, founded in 1881). The influence of the new group extended beyond Bavaria, not least thanks to its periodical Der Tierschutz. In the spirit of her organization, Rode had no intention of keeping the matter either quiet or local.65 It was at this point that the case gained greater notoriety. As late as 1988, Rode began single-handedly adding fuel to the controversy’s smoldering fire when she attached the already current label “avicide” (Vogelmord) to the incidents at RFE/RL. In her letter to station manager Frank Valcarcel, she declared: “We are looking for professionals to come together and deliberate how we can stop the avicide over at the transmitter, . . . Something effective needs to done there now. I really don’t understand how one intends to fix the situation with cats, not to mention how a family of foxes has come into play.”66 In the postscript she listed her extensive contacts—the leading organizations of West German nature protection—and signed off on an em- phatic note:

64. Von Pilgrim, memorandum to Holzkirchen staff, 28 June 1985, in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Ofﬁce File, Box 22, Folder 8. 65. Karl-Werner Brand, “Umweltbewegung,” in Roland Roth and Dieter Rucht, eds., Die sozialen Bewegungen in Deutschland seit 1945: Ein Handbuch (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2008), p. 223. 66. Ursula Rode to Frank Valcarcel, 3 February 1988, in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Ofﬁce File, Box 22, Folder 8.

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I have written to [the Bavarian] Prime Minister [Franz Josef Strauss] and [the Bavarian] Minister [of Ecology Alfred] Dick. We have involved the President of the German Animal Welfare Federation, Dr. [Andreas] Grasmüller, the Bird Protection Society in Munich (Vogelschutzbund München) and the League against the Mistreatment of Animals (Bund gegen den Mißbrauch der Tiere) in Munich, as well as the Committee against Avicide (Komittee gegen den Vogelmord)inHam- burg. We hope that something finally gets done! Can you help????67 To this, Valcarcel responded apologetically, recapitulating, in essence, the work of the past five years. He assured Rode that RFE/RL had “not sat idle but undertook all possible efforts” to address the problem. He said they had “so- licited advice from reputed professionals” and followed the recommendations of LVB and the Bavarian Ministry of Development and the Environment.68 Protecting raptors was a priority, he emphasized. He then cited expert opinion indicating that the task depended on providing alternative perches throughout the transmitter area or ridding the grounds of mice. The latter, he noted pointedly, can be achieved either by the extensive poisoning of mice—which, however, threatens the birds who eat these poisoned mice . . .—or by keeping a few cats. We have opted for the ecological solution, which is certainly what you have in mind. The [cats] are provided for by animal-loving co-workers and have warm quarters.69 As for the foxes, Valcarcel explained that they had settled on the grounds long before the need for them was evident. All in all, he summed up, the station had done a great deal to enhance bird protection, “not solely under pressure from animal protection organizations” but also because RFE/RL’s own workers supported the cause. In the past year, no more birds had died at the station “than on the neighboring highway.”70 Valcarcel closed with a look into the future: Certainly, every killed bird is one too many, and we are happy to let you know that by the end of this year we will replace the hazardous transmitter lines with a different type. The construction of these lines has been developed in accordance with the recommendations of the Bavarian Ministry of Development and the Environment. At a great cost, more than two kilometers of fiberglass cable have

67. Ibid. 68. Valcarcel to Rode, 15 February 1988, in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Ofﬁce File, Box 22, Folder 8. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid.

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been strung above the electric wire. Moreover, the field strength of the wires, dangerous for the birds, has been reduced by more than 50%. We hope that these measures contribute to the future prevention of bird loss at our station.71 Appended at the end was a list of the letter’s co-recipients, a list that roughly one-third of the page and included not only the parties mentioned in Rode’s postscript but also the government of Upper Bavaria, BUND, and the Bavar- ian Federation for Bird Protection. Despite Valcarcel’s efforts, his letter arrived too late as far as Rode was concerned. In March 1988, Der Tierschutz adopted Rode’s indictment and named RFE/RL as an unrepentant avicide perpetrator (Vogelmörder). The publication accused the station of refusing to swap the “murderous” aboveground copper wires for the buried coaxial cables (à la the German Federal Post) and blamed Bavaria’s government for condoning animal cruelty. Because the “American station” was not subordinate to the U.S. military, the article underscored, the time had come for the FRG government to confront RFE/RL. The broadcaster’s employees, in the view of the periodical, were criminals. Luckily for them, the impending denouement of the Cold War—and, last but not least, the station’s relocation from Munich to Prague in 1995—precluded any effort at a trial. Until then, RFE/RL remained on the defensive, and the number of the personae agentis in the plot multiplied in its now reunified host country. The last documented interaction was with the district administration in Miesbach, under whose jurisdiction Holzkirchen fell. In 1992, together with the Ac- tion Group for the Protection of Raptors and Owls (Aktionsgemeinschaft für Greifvögel- und Eulenschutz, AGES), the Miesbach officials insisted on visiting RFE/RL’s facilities to check on “the damage to the native raptor population.”72 They made this visit after a new tower had recently appeared on Holzkirchen’s horizon. RFE/RL’s West German interlocutors suspected that the station had not learned from the earlier controversy. In 1992, such a failure would have been much more consequential than in 1983. Within the decade, bird protection evolved from a niche interest to a cause célèbre. Only a year earlier, a 10-page report in the West German weekly Der Spiegel reported on the attrition of bird species. The report cited the “wiring of the landscape” as among the main causes, mentioned a rate

71. Ibid. 72. Wager/District Administration, Miesbach, to RFE/RL, in 4 February 1992, in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Ofﬁce File, Box 22, Folder 7.

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of 400 bird casualties per kilometer of electric cables, and quoted Sothmann along with nine other German bird protection experts.73 Thus, in anticipation of another tense encounter, Rüther, now station manager, sought to preempt a backlash. He “called the [local] newspaper before and asked to publish a note, that this tower will have nothing to do with RFE-RL (to prevent ru- mors, that we will increase the power!!).”74 As Holzkirchner Merkur explained at Rüther’s behest, the FRG communications monopoly Deutsche Bunde- spost Telekom had rented some land from RFE/RL to add a 2.5-million- Deutschmark antenna to its brand new mobile communications network.75 In the long run, the locals were the ultimate beneficiaries of the innova- tion. The publicity stunt, Rüther smugly admitted, “worked out well” and defused any potential outbursts of anger.76 The readers could rest assured that RFE/RL was not the recalcitrant avicide perpetrator that Rode had imagined it to be. The visitors from Miesbach, Rüther noted in a memorandum for RFE/RL’s special “Bird Protection” file, were impressed by the station’s efforts. The latter included the most recent cable changes, which now featured bird- compatible fiberglass connecting two copper pipes.77 They stipulated another meeting in May 1993. In the meantime, RFE/RL was obligated to register all injured or dead birds with AGES. The hunter leasing the grounds around the stationwasorderedtodothesame.“Theproblemseemstobesolvedtoan extend [sic], which can be tolerated,” Rüther noted in his German-inflected English.78 Local authorities concurred enthusiastically. The meeting in May 1993 went so well that a member of the Miesbach administration volunteered

73. Editorial, “‘Sterbesüß dunkelklarer Blues’: Spiegel-Report über Ursachen und Folgen des Arten- sterbens bei Vögeln,” Der Spiegel, No. 1 (1991), pp. 118–128. 74. Memorandum from Rüther to P. Schroeder, 10 February 1992, in HIA, RFE/RL Corpo- rate Records, Public Affairs Office File, Box 22, Folder 7. Rüther’s original English is quoted throughout. 75. “Kommunikation verbessert,” Holzkirchner Merkur, 8 February 1992, n.p., in HIA, RFE/RL Cor- porate Records, Public Affairs Office File, Box 22, Folder 7. 76. Memorandum from Rüther to P. Schroeder, 10 February 1992. 77. Memorandum, from Rüther to File (Vogelschutz), 16 April 1992, in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Office File, Box 22, Folder 7; Wager/District Administration, Miesbach, to Rüther, 21 April 1992, in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Office File, Box 22, Folder 7; and Springer, unpublished memoir, 21 April 2016. 78. Memorandum from Rüther to P. Schroeder, 12 May 1993, in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Office File, Box 22, Folder 7. Springer in his memoir (see note 52 supra) also cred- its RFE/RL’s innovative multistep start-up procedure, unmentioned in the corporate records, with improving the situation. In the early 1990s, the process of the transmitters’ automation involved re- programming them to turn on at lower power. As a result, the gradual warming of the lines served as a signal to the birds, which flew away at the first sign of tingling in their feet.

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to nominate the station for the district ecology prize.79 The 10-year-long dispute had come to a close at last, as had RFE/RL’s more than 40-year-long stay in West Germany.

Coda

At first blush, the confrontation between bird protection activists and RFE/RL appears to be an isolated episode. The pertinent correspondence from the broadcaster’s corporate files contains no references to other concurrent events, domestic or international. In particular, there is no mention of a contempo- raneous catastrophe tied to RFE’s technologies and air traffic, a case that like- wise took several years to investigate. On 6 July 1984 a West German Tornado fighter jet crashed in the immediate environs of the Holzkirchen transmitter, first careening and then hitting the ground during an exercise. Both the pi- lot and the navigator were killed on impact, and images of the Holzkirchen antennas and wires appeared in the mainstream West German press.80 Al- though the story could have easily become another indictment of RFE/RL’s technologies—the station’s powerful electromagnetic field interfered with the bomber’s sensitive electronics—the government-sponsored investigation as- signed the blame differently. In the end, Minister of Defense Manfred Wörner was held responsible for ignoring his British partners’ warnings about the dan- gers of flying over RFE/RL’s grounds.81 RFE/RL, by extension, was deemed to be the incident’s backdrop and not its culprit. In downplaying RFE/RL’s technologies, the Tornado incident differed starkly from the controversy over bird protection. Distinct were not only the losses at stake (another piece of Cold War technology, albeit steered by human beings, vis-à-vis nature) or the provenance of the concerns (multinational vis- à-vis regional; military vis-à-vis civilian). Above all, the German actors were different: federal government officials as opposed to grassroots activists. Not until several years later did environmentalists link the loss of human life in the Tornado crash to the greater hazards of electrosmog. This list of discrepancies

79. Rüther, “Greifvogelschutz in Holzkirchen,” 12 May 1993, in HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Public Affairs Ofﬁce File, Box 22, Folder 7. 80. The most systematic coverage of the story appears in “Absolut sicher,” Der Spiegel, No. 30 (1984), p. 26; and “An die Nieren,” Der Spiegel, No. 33 (1986), pp. 70–71. At this time, West Germany conducted Tornado training in partnership with Great Britain and Italy. 81. “Wörner belastet,” Der Spiegel, No. 32 (1987), p. 17.

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suggests that the story of RFE/RL’s bird protection issues may not have been as self-contained as it first appears. The story belongs within the bigger picture of RFE/RL’s existence in West Germany, defined by the grassroots—rather than just official, as A. Ross Johnson documents—questioning of its operations.82 The geography and fo- cal points of anti-RFE and anti-RFE/RL sentiments in the FRG varied from one decade to another. The “German context” was hardly monolithic.83 But, the sentiments lingered throughout the Cold War, reflecting the ebbs and flows of anti-Americanism. They were not limited to just certain political and academic elites, who by the 1980s “considered [RFE/RL] as a relic of the Cold War.” 84 In Bonn, government officials tended to condone the station’s existence on West German soil as a tradeoff for its convenient anti-Communism, among other reasons.85 Outside the capital, however, farmers, pressure group activists, journalists, academics, security experts and, finally, nature conservationists voiced opposition. In the 1950s, for example, the political lobby of German expellees from the former eastern territories and the Sudetenland sounded the alarm about RFE’s provocative campaigns at the site of the Iron Curtain.86 They ven- tured that the “Munich barker” (Kläffer), as RFE was regularly described, favored foreign amateurs over West Germany’s own experts on Eastern Eu- rope and anti-Communism.87 A particularly radical expellee voice went so far as to consider the station a Zionist plot to create Intermaria, a Jewish-ruled “Balkanic Middle Kingdom” that would engulf everything between Greece

82. Johnson, “The Uninvited Guest,” pp. 77–92. 83. See Johnson, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, pp. 67–75. 84. Ibid., p. 90. 85. Evidence of the willingness of the Bonn government to tolerate or even concertedly rely on RFE/RL can be found in the records of the Federal Press and Information Service, BArch B 145/479, B 145/2073, B 145/6340, and B 257/115975; and in Hans Schirmer, memorandum to the Federal Press and Information Service, 6 March 1952, in BArch B 145/479, 204-1 II 2951/52. See also Johnson, “The Uninvited Guest,” pp. 78, 80–82, 84, 86. Criticism of RFE’s “extraterritorial existence” is evident in Ottmar Katz, “Miteinander reden: Deutsche Politik und Radio Freies Europa,” Südost-Kurier, 24 July 1953, in BayHSta StK Bd. 9, 20473, Presseausschnittsammlung. 86. “Interpellation des Abg. Gaksch u. Gen. betr. Sender Freies Europa,” Bayerischer Landtag, 3. Legislaturperiode, 17. Sitzung, 10 May 1955, 416–417; full text at https://www.bayern.landtag.de /webangebot2/webangebot/protokolle;jsessionid=945D5F2944FA3722C33E2FEB1AF222D2?exec ution=e1s1. See also Johnson, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, pp. 69–72. 87. “Unklarheiten um ‘Freies Europa,’” Christ und die Welt, 19 June 1952, in BayHSta StK Bd. 9, 20326, PASL6, VN244; and Voita Musil, “‘Freies Europa’ verrät Flüchtlinge,” Volksbote,30May 1953, in BayHSta StK Bd. 9, 20473.

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and the Baltic.88 In Munich—a vile émigré wasp’s nest, in the eyes of many expellees and natives—a Bavarian member of parliament (MP) alleged that RFE’s headquarters would be the next nuclear bomb target and thus a liability.89 The mainstream press, for its part, lamented that “German listeners don’t get much” out of the station’s sprawl.90 Subsequent criticisms acquired a more pointedly anti-American tenor. With expellees taking the back seat, the 1960s ushered in a new and last- ing resentment against RFE as “an element of American foreign policy.”91 Annoyance with the United States ran the gamut of conditions. Some were routine, such as squabbles over salary disparities between RFE’s German and non-German employees.92 Others were dire, as when RFE and RL came under attack for their CIA ﬁnancing.93 The opposing voices, however, did not speak in unison with the federal government, which approved RFE’s technological expansion and declared the station “useful” even as the unease about it mounted in the spring of 1967.94 The 1970s gave rise to apprehension about RFE/RL as a peril for dé- tente and the increasingly independent West German Ostpolitik.95 In the Bavarian parliament, an MP from the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) drafted a bill that would have allowed a native propaganda station to occupy RFE’s frequencies and broadcast across the Iron Curtain in its stead.96 Across the country, fears mounted about the station as a hotbed of or, alternatively, a magnet for international terrorism. And at the close of the decade, especially after the terrorist Carlos the Jackal orchestrated the

88. Tellmann Binder, “So träumt man bei ‘Freies Europa’: Halb-Bolschewisten und Deutschen- Mörder erstreben Morgenthaus ‘Mittelreich,’” Die Deutsche Gemeinschaft, 20 August 1952, in BayH- Sta StK Bd. 9, 20326, PASL6, VN244. 89. R., “Geschrei um Freies Europa,” Deutsche Woche, 10 December 1952, in BayHSta StK Bd. 9, 20326, PASL6, VN244. 90. “Den Vorhang lüften,” Der Spiegel, 11 July 1951, p. 41. 91. Ottmar Katz, “Miteinander reden. Deutsche Politik und Radio Freies Europa,” Südost-Kurier,24 July 1953, in BayHSta StK Bd. 9, 20473, Presseausschnittsammlung. 92. Erwin Janik, “Hinaus mit Sender ‘Radio Freies Europa,” Passauer Neue Presse, 26 November 1960, in BayHSta StK Bd. 9, 21525, Presseausschnittsammlung. 93. “CIA funkt dazwischen,” Der Stern, 7 February 1973, in Stadtarchiv München, RFE 1956–1972, Zeitungs-Ausschnitts-Sammlung Monacensia. 94. “Sender von RFE und RLC in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” Federal Ministry of Post to the Federal Press and Information Service, n.d. (late spring 1967), in BArch B257/15975, II M3 5424-2. 95. “Dokumentation: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty unter Beschuß. Pressestimmen im Jahr 1971,” in Stadtarchiv München, RFE 1956–1972, Zeitungs-Ausschnitts-Sammlung Monacensia. See also Johnson, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, p. 214. 96. “Radio Freies Bayern,” Der Spiegel, No. 11 (1972), p. 17.

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bombing of RFE/RL’s headquarters in 1981, West German intelligence of- ﬁcers worried that RFE/RL attracted foreign agents and their guns-for-hire to one of West Germany’s wealthiest cities.97 Yet none of these concerns suc- ceeded in effecting substantial changes in the day-to-day functioning of the station. In this light, the allegations of bird protection activists against RFE/RL’s superior technologies—the station’s pride as well as its bread and butter— could be seen as the latest entry on the already long roster of diverse criticisms. Thus considered, the controversy appeared unprecedented, starring a novel cast of such fable-worthy protagonists as birds, cats, mice, and foxes. But the activists’ push for a most literal kind of media ecology could well have been a cumulative product of many previous dissatisfactions. It paired Germany’s long-established tradition of nature protection and the country’s relatively recently mobilized political environmentalism with the enduring critique of American materialism, disdain for nature, and unbridled “technopolitics”; that is, the “unpredictable power effects of technical assemblages.”98 Notably, in controversies over ecology that framed the end of the Cold War, RFE/RL was identiﬁed as a U.S. (rather than “Western” or “anti- Communist”) station. This was the case not only in the incident with the raptors but in the subsequent accusations of excessive electromagnetic emissions at Holzkirchen, leveled upon the station retroactively in yet another round of grassroots campaigns. From 1994 (RFE/RL’s last full year using the facility) to 2002 (the year following the facility’s closure by the International Broad- casting Bureau, IBB, which had operated the facility since 1995), residents of Holzkirchen and the neighboring valley initiated several rounds of health examinations and court hearings. These were intended to stockpile evidence that RFE/RL’s 51-year-long “acoustic liberation of the East” had produced enough electrosmog pollution for a dark legacy of nervous disorders, sensory hallucinations, fatigue, and cancer in the local population. IBB’s (and before that, RFE/RL’s) signals, Der Spiegel reported, had emanated from the most unforeseen sources, including kitchen sinks and electric church organs. An

97. David Clay Large, Munich 1972: Tragedy, Terror, and Triumph at the Olympic Games (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleﬁeld, 2012), p. 101. 98. On the long view of German nature protection, see, among others, Thomas M. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Jeffrey K. Wilson, The German Forest: Nature, Identity, and the Contestation of a National Symbol, 1871–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). On German voices against U.S. technocracy, see Dan Diner, America in the Eyes of the Germans (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1996), pp. 31–51. On interpretations of technopolitics, see Gabrielle Hecht, “Introduction,” in Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), p. 3.

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acoustic “ghost” haunted the locals, who “blamed the United States” ex- pressly.99 And yet, to suggest that the efforts of bird protection activists were more politicized than their correspondence with RFE/RL would suggest is not to downplay the conservationists’ very real concerns about the impact of the human-controlled ether on the avian population. Without a doubt, long- term developments in modern sound technologies have rendered ambigu- ous the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s description of birds as “the ether’s darlings”—the description with which Der Spiegel opened its alarming report in 1991.100 To some, the underpinnings of this metaphor remain profoundly innocent. Jacob Smith, for example, writes about the beneﬁts that the 18th- and 19th-century conversion of songbirds to “organismal [sonic entertain- ment] technologies” had for middle-class parlors and, in the long run, for the recording industry and radio. The positive outcomes included the “no- wattage” “minimal media,” which produced little waste and encouraged cross- species communication and interaction.101 But more than a century later, birds and sound technologies parted ways; the overcrowded ether turned against its onetime darlings. The innocence once attributable to intersections between the lives of birds, human beings, and recording technologies did not last. The new interspecies encounters came at a cost that was neither anticipated by the politics-focused champions of Cold War broadcasting nor measurable in dollars and cents. The “war in the black heavens,” to use Michael Nelson’s metaphor for propaganda on the airwaves, resulted in casualties that were not human alone.102 The nature protection activists’ persistent focus on them laid bare the extent to which America’s ambition to emerge victorious had not only shaped “culture, economy, and politics” across the Atlantic but also en- croached on something much more elemental: the natural environment.103

99. The campaign was a partial success. In 2002 the German parliament canceled the U.S. lease on the Holzkirchen grounds, but the causality between the emissions and the symptoms remained scien- tiﬁcally unproven. See Conny Neumann, “Dröhnen in der guten Stube,” Der Spiegel, No. 22 (2002), p. 54. I am especially grateful to the anonymous reviewers at The Journal of Cold War Studies for suggesting I incorporate this incident as well as the crash of the Tornado bomber. 100. Friedrich Hölderlin, “An den Aether,” in Gedichte 1784–1800 (Hamburg: J.G. Cottasche Buch- handlung Nachfolger, 1946), Vol. 1, p. 224; and “‘Sterbesüß dunkelklarer Blues,’” Der Spiegel No. 1 (1991), p. 118. 101. Smith, Eco-sonic Media, esp. pp. 50, 73, 78. Smith’s concern remains limited to the human- ecological perspective and does not consider the trend’s impact on birds. 102. Michael Nelson, War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997). 103. Risso, “Radio Wars,” p. 147.

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Acknowledgments

My thanks to Astrid Eckert, Heidi Tworek, and Frank Biess for commenting on the early drafts of this essay and to the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their helpful guidance and suggestions. Ngoc But offered important help with the retrieval of documents at the Hoover Institution Archives.

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