Radio Free Europe's Tangled History

THE STORY OF RADIO FREE EUROPE (RFE; since 1976, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, or RFE/RL), the West's key Cold War–era broadcaster into five Eastern European countries in six languages, is laced with tales of mystery, murder, and espionage. Founded in 1950 and covertly financed by the CIA until 1967, based in divided Germany's western half, amplified along fascist Portugal's coast, and jammed east of the Iron Curtain, the station remained for decades in the spotlight of more than one country's secret police. In addition to the CIA and its Western European counterparts, “[a]ll of the intelligence services of the Warsaw Pact,” RFE's chronicler and former security director Richard H. Cummings observes, took a keen interest in the station's operations. In Czechoslovakia alone, the former Ministry of National Security's RFE dossier, started as early as April 1953, exceeded forty thousand pages.

To a greater extent than other Western broadcasters into the Eastern bloc—including the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the Voice of America (VOA), and Rundfunk im Amerikanischen Sektor (RIAS)— RFE and its Munich headquarters set the stage for suspense worthy of a John le Carre novel. The allegedly unrivaled “visibility of Munich's invisible [spy] community,” to quote le Carre himself, amounted to increasing infiltration of RFE by undercover Soviet-bloc agents disguised as RFE's Eastern European employees. This entailed poisonings and suspected irradiation conspiracies against the station's exile staffers (in the 1980s, three directors of the Romanian service fell victim to cancer within seven years) as well as a 1981 bombing of RFE's Munich headquarters, coordinated by the infamous international terrorist Carlos the Jackal.

In return, RFE kept a close watch on Soviet-bloc secret police forces, all the while being watched by them. The CIA, as far as we know, kept in the background. It did not directly stipulate the content of the station's programs and thus remained, in the words of its historian and former director A. Ross Johnson, “a consumer rather than the source” of the information collected for broadcast. However, the agency did supervise RFE to ensure that the station's exile employees, hired to simulate home radio broadcasts, did not stray too far from US foreign policy guidelines.