Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

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RFE/RL is a news station founded by the National Committee for a Free Europe, an anti-communist CIA front organization. It has spread anti-socialist propaganda since the Korean War. Radio Free Asia, another US government-funded news station that spreads anti-socialist propaganda, is based on RFE/RL, and both are supervised by the U.S. Agency for Global Media — as is Voice of America, yet another US government propaganda outlet. Despite having a pretext of correcting the falsehoods of communist media, it was rather as Victor Marchetti, former senior official of the Agency, wrote: "To many in the CIA the primary value of the radios was to sow discontent in Eastern Europe and, in the process, to weaken the communist governments". From the CIA website on the origin of RFE/RL:

On June 1, 1949, a group of prominent American businessmen, lawyers, and philanthropists – including Allen Dulles, who would become Director of Central Intelligence in 1953 – launched the National Committee for Free Europe (NCFE) at a press release in New York. Only a handful of people knew that NCFE was actually the public face of an innovative "psychological warfare" project undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). That operation – which soon gave rise to Radio Free Europe – would become one of the longest running and successful covert action campaigns ever mounted by the United States.[1]

Many of the Russians who worked for RFE/RL and other such stations, which broadcast at length about freedom, democracy and other humanitarian concerns, were later identified by the US Justice Department as members of Hitler's notorious Einsatzgruppen, which rounded up and killed numerous Jews in the Soviet Union. Among these was Stanislaw Stankievich, under whose command a mass murder of Jews in Byelorussia was carried out in which babies were buried alive with the dead, presumably to save ammunition. Besides Russian collaborators several German war criminals were employed by the CIA for similar anti-Soviet operations and others.[2]

A paragraph from Socialism Betrayed describes the functioning of this organization towards the end of the Soviet Union:

Part of Reagan’s destabilization effort involved an escalation of the ideological warfare waged by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Between 1982 and 1986, both stations increased the number and sophistication of their foreign-language broadcasts, as well as the number of their listeners. As glasnost reduced and then eliminated jamming in 1988, Radio Liberty reached 22 million Soviet listeners a month. Both stations fomented nationalism, stirred up outrage over the Chernobyl disaster, encouraged opposition to the Soviet war in Afghanistan, provided a platform for pro-market advocates like Yeltsin, and aired unsubstantiated corruption charges against the Party leader, Yegor Ligachev, after he opposed Gorbachev.

— Chapter 4, [3]

RFE's commentaries about various European Communists were described by Blanche Wiesen Cook in her study of the period, The Declassified Eisenhower. She wrote that the broadcasts:

involved a wide range of personal criticism, tawdry and slanderous attacks ranging from rumors of brutality and torture, to corruption, and to madness, perversion, and vice. Everything was used that could be imagined in order to make communists, whether in England or in Poland, look silly, undignified, and insignificant.[4]

Other known lies and manipulations by RFE/RL

  • In January 1952, after RFE learned that Czechoslovakia was planning to devalue its currency, it warned the population, thus stimulating a nation-wide buying panic.[4]

References

  1. A Look Back … The National Committee for Free Europe, 1949. Central Intelligence Agency.
  2. Washington Post, 17 and 20 May 1982; 4 November 1982.
    For fuller discussions of the use of Nazis and their collaborators by the US Government in the anti-communist crusade, see:
    • Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America's Recruitmentof Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (New York, 1988), passim.
    • John Loftus, The Belarus Secret (New York, 1982), passim.
  3. Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union.
  4. 4.0 4.1 Blanche W. Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower (New York, 1981) p. 129.