Radio Free Europe once sent 350,000 balloons of leaflets across the Iron Curtain
Between 1951 and 1956, Central European skies filled with weather balloons carrying more than 300 million leaflets, posters and books. They came from Radio Free Europe, a station secretly paid for by the CIA, which treated the Cold War as a battle of ideas and broadcast to people whose own media were censored.
Radio Free Europe grew out of the National Committee for a Free Europe, an anti-communist front organisation set up by Allen Dulles in New York in 1949. Its model was RIAS, an American-sponsored station in Berlin run almost entirely by Germans. American strategists such as George Kennan saw the conflict with Moscow as a war of ideas, and surrogate radio was one weapon. Covert CIA funding continued until 1972. Publicly, Eisenhower's Crusade for Freedom drew over 16 million signatures in 1950 and raised $1,317,000.
Its first broadcast, aimed at Czechoslovakia, went out on 4 July 1950 from Lampertheim in West Germany. Rather than recycle exile opinion, it hired journalists for each language and gathered news from émigrés, travellers and defectors while combing communist newspapers and radio. A sister station aimed at the Soviet Union itself, first called Radio Liberation from Bolshevism, began on 1 March 1953 and won a large audience four days later by reporting Stalin's death. By December 1954 it broadcast in 17 languages, from Ukrainian to Uzbek.
Its influence cut both ways. During the 1956 Hungarian uprising, broadcasts urged rebels on and hinted Western help was coming, contrary to Eisenhower's decision not to intervene, and the scandal led to stricter editorial checks. After the Chernobyl disaster, when Soviet media stayed silent for days, listeners turned to it for precautions about fallout. Communist states jammed its signals and planted agents on its staff; one Czechoslovak operative in 1959 reportedly tried to poison the cafeteria salt shakers.
In 1981 a bomb caused $2 million in damage at its Munich headquarters, an attack later tied to Carlos the Jackal and Romania's Ceaușescu, and by a former KGB general to Soviet planning. The two stations merged in 1976 and moved to Prague in 1995.
Source: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
