THE EMERGENCE of the transistor radio in the 1950s has intensified one of the most shadowy, elusive and least-known electronic aspects of the Cold War. This is the war of words, conducted on the airwaves by combatants who are thousands of miles apart -- and who will never meet.
Daily, East and West beam hundreds of hours of propaganda broadcasts at each other in an unrelenting babble of competition for the minds of their listeners. The low-price transistor has given this hidden war a new importance. Millions of people in the Middle East, Latin America and Asia who cannot read, can nevertheless be reached by the propaganda of both sides.
The Invisible Government is heavily engaged in "black radio" [i] operations of every conceivable type. So is the Communist bloc.
United States radio activities have ranged all the way from overt, openly acknowledged and advertised programs of the Voice of America to highly secret CIA transmitters in the Middle East and other areas of the world. In between is a whole spectrum of black, gray, secret and semi secret radio operations. The CIA's Radio Swan, because it became operationally involved at the Bay of Pigs, never enjoyed more than the thinnest of covers. But Radio Swan was a relatively small black-radio operation. Other radio operations, financed and controlled in whole or in part by the Invisible Government, are more skillfully concealed and much bigger.
Some are hybrids -- broadcasting organizations that solicit funds from business corporations and the general public but also receive secret funds from the CIA. While allegedly "private" organizations, they receive daily policy direction from the State Department and take orders from the CIA.
In some cases, it is possible, indeed probable, that lower-level employees of such an organization are unaware of the true point of control of the particular activity. A secret CIA transmitter in Lebanon, to take a random example, would be run directly by CIA officers. But in a larger, hybrid operation, knowledge of financing and control by Washington might be limited to a handful of top executives.
For purposes of this book, it is sufficient to note that an inevitable by-product -- as in clandestine operations generally -- is that the American public has been beguiled by some of this allegedly "private" broadcasting work. It has contributed its gift dollars to such "private" activity, entirely unaware that it is already supporting the same broadcasting operation with its tax dollars, through the CIA.
Black-radio operations fall into two categories -- transmitting and receiving. Besides broadcasting, both sides carefully monitor each other's broadcasts to learn what the opposition is saying.
For the United States, the task of monitoring and recording foreign radio broadcasts, by friendly as well as unfriendly countries, is performed by the CIA. The intelligence agency's listening posts all over the globe capture every major broadcast of a foreign nation on tape. Daily, this extremely valuable foreign broadcast information is edited, correlated, mimeographed and distributed to a wide list of consumers from a CIA office in downtown Washington. [ii] The consumers are asked not to mention the name or initials of the arm of the CIA which performs this work. However, this broadcast monitoring service, which is more or less openly acknowledged by the CIA, is about the most "overt" operation the agency conducts.
Some idea of the magnitude of the CIA's task, in monitoring Communist bloc broadcasts alone, can be gained from a speech made on January 30, 1963, by John Richardson, Jr., the president of the Free Europe Committee, which operates Radio Free Europe.
Radio stations of thirteen Communist countries, he said, "transmit more than four thousand hours of radio programming abroad every week in sixty-three languages. Leaving nothing to chance, the broadcast languages include even Esperanto ... The Soviet Union leads this radio propaganda parade with some thirteen hundred weekly hours of radio propaganda directed abroad. Red China comes second, with almost seven hundred hours weekly, followed by East Germany ... with little Cuba in fourth place." [1]
Surprisingly, the fact that black-radio operations are conducted by the United States was indirectly admitted by President Eisenhower in his Middle East speech to the UN General Assembly on August 13, 1958:
"The United Nations Assembly has on three occasions, in 1947, 1949 and 1950, passed resolutions designed to stop the projecting of irresponsible broadcasts from one nation into the homes of citizens of other nations ... we all know that these resolutions have been violated in many directions in the Near East. If we, the United States, have been at fault, we stand ready to be corrected."
For the background to this unusual passage in the President's speech, one must look to 1956 and Suez. In the aftermath of the abortive Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt, Nasser increased his efforts to bring the entire Arab world under his domination. A major weapon in this campaign was Radio Cairo.
Up until 1956, the British-controlled Near East Broadcasting Station at Zyghi, on the south coast of Cyprus, was the most powerful propaganda voice in the Middle East. NEBS was a British black-radio operation, ostensibly under private ownership.
Beginning in 1956, Nasser's radio supplanted NEBS. Cairo spread the most violent sort of propaganda against its Arab neighbors and the United States. Its "Voice of the Arabs" was on the air from 6:30 A.M. to 1:15 A.M. the next morning, broadcasting throughout the Middle East and as far south as the Belgian Congo from two seventy-kilowatt transmitters on the Mokattam Hills overlooking Cairo, and from two other transmitters on the Nile Delta.
By 1958 Radio Cairo was openly urging bloody revolution in Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. In February of that year Nasser had seized power in Syria and proclaimed the United Arab Republic. Iraq's King Feisal II countered by joining with his Hashemite cousin King Hussein of Jordan to form the Arab Union.
On May 2, 1958, as an example, Radio Cairo broadcast to Baghdad: "Arise, my brethren on the police force and in its army in Iraq. Stand side by side with your brothers and your people against your enemies! The freedom of Iraq is in your hands."
Since Iraq was the world's sixth largest oil producer and the only Arab member of the pro Western Baghdad pact, the CIA felt this kind of talk from Radio Cairo could not go unanswered. As a result, by 1958 the CIA had set up a series of clandestine radio stations in the Middle East and along its fringes to counteract the influence of Radio Cairo.
Meanwhile, a crisis was brewing in Lebanon over the selection of a successor to President Camille Chamoun, whose term was expiring. The CIA had helped elect Chamoun, then turned against him.
On July 14 Brigadier General Abdul Karim el-Kassem took over Iraq in a pre-dawn coup which had not been "clearly predicted" [2] by the CIA, according to Allen Dulles. In the coup, twenty-three-year-old King Feisal and his uncle, the crown prince, were murdered. Premier Nuri as-Said, captured while trying to escape dressed as a woman, was also killed.
The next day Eisenhower, in Operation Blue Bat, sent the Marines into Lebanon to shore up the Chamoun government. Two days later the British airlifted 1,000 troops into Jordan.
Radio Cairo exulted in the bloodshed in Baghdad and urged the people of Jordan to rise up and butcher King Hussein. But now, as the CIA transmitters got busy, new voices were heard on the airwaves.
This obscure dispatch appeared in American newspapers on July 23, 1958, for example:
BEIRUT, July 23 (UPI) -- A second mysterious Arab radio station went on the air yesterday calling itself the "Voice of Justice" and claiming to be broadcasting from Syria.
Its program heard here consisted of bitter criticism against Soviet Russia and Soviet Premier Khrushchev. Earlier the "Voice of Iraq" went on the air with attacks against the Iraqi revolutionary government.
The "Voice of Justice" called Khrushchev the "hangman of Hungary" and warned the people of the Middle East they would suffer the same fate as the Hungarians if the Russians get a foothold in the Middle East." [8]
On August 14 Egyptian officials charged that seven secret radio stations were operating in the Middle East, attacking the UAR and Nasser personally. Cairo said two stations were transmitting from the French Riviera, and said others were in British Aden, Jordan, Lebanon, Cyprus and Kenya. Before the revolt in Iraq, there had been another in Baghdad, the statement said. The carefully worded announcement stopped barely short of mentioning the CIA.
The Egyptian spokesman said the Voice of America was heard regularly in Egypt also, but added: "The Voice of America is not in the same category with clandestine stations." Asked if there was any evidence of who was behind these secret stations, the official replied laconically: "There is no way to be certain. Certainly they are too expensive for any small nations or groups to maintain without help." [4]
The Egyptian official had put his finger on one of the soft spots in black-radio operations. These operations are indeed expensive, and one of the most nagging problems for such radio stations is to explain the source of funds.
One short-wave radio station in the United States with an interesting history is WRUL, with offices in Manhattan as the World Wide Broadcasting System, Inc. In his fascinating book about Sir William Stephenson, the head of British Intelligence in the United States during World War II, H. Montgomery Hyde maintains that WRUL was penetrated by British Intelligence in the war years and subsidized by it through intermediaries.
In more recent times, WRUL has taken a more overt part in Cold War operations. As will be described, it joined with Radio Swan in broadcasting the programs of "Havana Rose."
In 1954 WRUL received a letter of commendation from the Castillo-Armas government of Guatemala, thanking the station for its services during the revolt against Arbenz. The letter was from Jose Toron, who had operated a clandestine "Free Guatemala" radio station before the Communist government was overthrown.
Thus, WRUL has been linked with at least two CIA operations -- the Bay of Pigs (through Radio Swan) and the Guatemala coup in 1954.
Not long after Cairo complained about clandestine transmitters in the Middle East, Konstantin Zinchenko, the head of the press department of the Soviet State Committee for Foreign Cultural Relations, told a news conference in Moscow that the United States had set up a whole series of secret radios aimed at making trouble for the Soviet Union. Among those he mentioned was Radio Liberation.
Radio Liberation, which changed its name to Radio Liberty in 1959, is an avowedly private organization with offices at 30 East 42d Street in New York. It broadcasts exclusively to the Soviet Union, twenty-four hours a day, from seventeen transmitters in three locations -- Lampertheim, West Germany; Pals, near Barcelona; and Taipeh, Formosa.
Its programming center is a rebuilt former airport building near Munich at Oberwiesenfeld, which was once Hitler's airfield. An official of Radio Liberty said the majority of its 1,200 employees are in Munich, but that the organization also has offices in Paris and Rome, as well as New York, Formosa and Spain.
Radio Liberty does not go to the public for funds. It says it is supported by foundations but does not list them anywhere. It insists that it receives no government funds, directly or indirectly, but says its budget is "classified."
"We do not advocate revolution," the official said, in explaining why Radio Liberty had changed its name from the more controversial Radio Liberation. "When the revolution comes, it will have to come from within. In the meantime, we can feed them ammunition."
According to its official booklet, "Radio Liberty is supported by the American Committee for Liberation, founded in 1951 by a group of private Americans who formed a working partnership with the free emigration from the USSR." It first went on the air on March 1, 1953. The American Committee for Liberation also supports the Institute for the Study of the USSR, Mannhardtstrasse, 6, Munich, which describes itself as a scholarly organization that puts out a number of publications on Russia, including Who's Who in the USSR.
Radio Liberty broadcasts a heavy diet of news to its Soviet audience. In 1956 it broadcast the text of Khrushchev's secret speech to the 20th Communist Party Congress. In 1961 it broadcast the fact that the Russians had resumed nuclear tests. Neither event, of course, had been disclosed to the Russian people by the Soviet government. The Russians, in turn, have tried hard to jam Radio Liberty.
Possibly, they have taken other steps as well. In 1954 two Radio Liberty employees died under mysterious circumstances in Munich. In September, Leonid Karas, a writer on the radio's Byelorussia desk was found drowned. In November, Abo Fatalibey, head of the Azerbaijan desk, was murdered and stuffed under the sofa in the apartment of a Russian named Mikhail Ismailov.
Police assumed the body was that of Ismailov, a fellow emigre. At the last moment the coffin -- which someone noticed was too short for the six-foot Ismailov -- was opened. The body was definitely identified as that of Fatalibey, the Radio Liberty official. Ismailov had vanished. Radio Liberty does not discount the possibility that the drowning and the murder were the work of the KGB.
Another interesting case was that of Anatoli Skachkov -- a Russian emigre who joined Radio Liberty on January 1, 1957. Skachkov died on July 22, 1959. On November 5, 1962, Izvestia carried an article which accused Radio Liberty of being staffed by CIA men. It listed eight alleged agents by name. In the course of the article, Izvestia said Skachkov had fallen from favor with American intelligence:
"He was seized at his place of employment and sent to a mental hospital. The next day two Americans, Valerio and Sanker, bearing flowers and a bottle of cognac, visited Skachkov. After their visit, he died. The physicians attributed his death to poisoning."
The tale of poisoned cognac is colorful, but Radio Liberty tells a different story. According to the radio station, Skachkov was an alcoholic who developed a persecution complex. As a result, he was committed to the State Institute for the Mentally Disturbed. He died, said Radio Liberty, of "a heart attack." Radio Liberty employed a Joseph Valerio and a Paul Sanker in its news department, but "neither Valerio or Sanker ever visited Skachkov, so the whole premise is a fabrication."
But the continuing Soviet attacks on Radio Liberty and its present and former employees provide some indication that this radio station "supported by a group of private American citizens" is reaching the Russian people in sufficient numbers to be irritating to the Soviet leadership.
By far the biggest, and from time to time the most controversial, of these radio operations is Radio Free Europe, which says it is a "private non-profit, non-government network broadcasting through the Iron Curtain to eighty million captive people in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria."
One distinction between Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty is that RFE broadcasts exclusively to the five satellite nations, while Radio Liberty broadcasts exclusively to the Soviet Union.
Radio Free Europe was born in 1949, with the formation of the National Committee for a Free Europe. In 1950 the committee's Crusade for Freedom fund drive was launched by General Eisenhower and General Lucius D. Clay, the hero of the 1948-49 Berlin airlift. The purpose of the fund drive was to raise money for RFE.
"We need powerful radio stations abroad," Eisenhower said in launching the crusade, "operated without government restrictions."
Clay struck the same theme. He praised the Voice of America but said: "There seemed to me to be needed another voice -- a voice less tempered perhaps by the very dignity of government; a tough, slugging voice, if you please."
In 1950-51, the directors of the National Committee for a Free Europe [iii] included Clay, Allen Dulles, C. D. Jackson, who became Eisenhower's psychological warfare adviser, and A. A. Berle, Jr., who participated in the Bay of Pigs operation a decade later.
RFE has twenty-eight transmitters at three sites. Two locations are in West Germany, at Biblis, near Frankfurt, and at Holzkirchen, near Munich. The third site is at Gloria, near Lisbon. RFE headquarters, like Radio Liberty, is at Munich. The organization employs about 1,500 persons.
"We're supported by contributions from the American people, mainly from the Radio Free Europe Fund," a spokesman said. He added that RFE is "privately managed and privately financed." However, he said "we work within the published policy of the United States Government."
Asked how it went about making sure that its broadcasts were consistent with United States foreign policy, he rep1ied: "We read the New York Times."
Are any government funds behind RFE? "No," was the reply, "but I prefer to put it positively -- we are supported by voluntary contributions." RFE's budget figures, however, are not published anywhere.
For a time, RFE dabbled in some intriguing balloon operations. In 1953 it set up something called the Free Europe Press, which began wafting rubber and plastic balloons filled with propaganda materials to Eastern Europe. For a time the balloon barrage went under the code name "Operation Prospero."
In February, 1956, the Czech Government charged that a balloon released by RFE had caused the crash of a Czech airliner on January 18 of that year in the Tatra Mountains of Slovakia. The crash killed twenty-two and injured four.
Moscow also protested the balloons, and Hungary chimed in that American balloons had caused three Hungarian air crashes. RFE replied that the balloons were not dangerous, that the "captive nations" had "attempted to shoot down balloons by aircraft and ground fire" and that Czech intelligence had tried twice "to blow up our balloon sites in Western Germany."
RFE called in its balloons during the Hungarian revolt. The program was not revived.
RFE figured in another cloak-and-dagger episode in December, 1959, when it charged that "a Communist diplomat" had put lethal amounts of atropine in the salt shakers of the radio station's cafeteria in Munich.
If taken in sufficient quantity, atropine can cause delirium, convulsions, coma or death. The U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps investigated and charged that Jaroslav Nemec, the vice-consul of the Czech consulate in Salzburg, Austria, had given the spiked salt shakers to a Communist agent "for placement in the Radio Free Europe cafeteria in Munich." The case was quietly dropped the next month, when the Munich public prosecutor said the amount of poison in the salt cellars had not been sufficient to cause serious harm.
At times, RFE has come under critical attack for the content of its broadcasts to Eastern Europe. On July 9, 1959, for example, there were news reports from Warsaw that the United States Ambassador to Poland, Jacob D. Beam, had protested RFE's broadcasts because he felt they contained misinformation and too blatant a propaganda line. At his press conference the same day, Secretary of State Christian A. Herter appeared to confirm the reports; he said any recommendations from Beam "will be very carefully studied."
But it was RFE's role in the Hungarian revolt of 1956 that brought the most criticism and controversy upon it. At the heart of the issue was the extremely touchy question of whether United States foreign policy should be aimed at the "liberation" of Eastern Europe.
"In thirteen years," an RFE executive explained, "Radio Free Europe has incurred a heavy moral responsibility. We must be extremely careful that what we say cannot lead to an ineffective uprising." Obviously, he had Hungary in mind.
Nevertheless, a recent RFE fund-appeal booklet, Your Money's Worth, illustrates that the radio station still speaks with a militant voice. 'The captive people," the appeal said, "desire freedom and do everything reasonable in their power to obtain it ... Radio Free Europe helps the East Europeans resist Communism ... helps them keep alive their faith in freedom ... Support Radio Free Europe ... it is one of the few ways you as a private citizen can take an active part in the fight against Communism ... bring the battle to the Kremlin's doorstep."
The Soviet role in Hungary was a sickening spectacle to civilized men everywhere. In the first phase, Moscow seemed willing to grant Hungary a measure of freedom. Then Russian tanks rolled into Budapest and brutally crushed the Hungarian patriots.
In the aftermath of the blood bath, questions were widely raised about RFE's role. Had it incited the Hungarians to revolt? Had it held out false promises of Western aid, knowing that this aid would not come? Was RFE, to put it bluntly, partly responsible for the carnage in Budapest?
Various tribunals examined this question, but little was said publicly about some more subtle and basic under lying questions.
These questions began with the Voice of America, the official voice of the United States Government. It is an organ of the United States Information Agency, and it broadcasts around the globe in thirty-six languages.
The Voice spends $22,000,000 a year. Forty percent of its programming is aimed at Communist countries. (In West Berlin, a huge 300,000-watt station called RIAS -- Radio in the American Sector- -- broadcasts around the clock to East Berlin and East Germany. It is said to be under the USIA.) In 1963 work was completed on a gigantic transmitter complex at Greenville, North Carolina, giving the Voice the most powerful long-range broadcasting station in the world.
From all this, it should be obvious that news and propaganda broadcasts across national boundaries to other nations, particularly behind the Iron Curtain, are among the mechanisms of United States foreign policy. On the face of it, therefore, it would seem logical that the United States Government could scarcely allow a competing organization to broadcast, as it pleased, material that might affect relations between governments, incite to revolt, or even involve the United States in military action. It did not seem likely, in other words, that it could allow a "private" broadcasting organization to conduct the foreign policy of the United States.
Consequently, lying ominously just below the surface of the various inquiries into RFE's role in the Hungarian revolt was the larger question of whether the United States Government had erred in permitting RFE to broadcast any degree of encouragement to the Hungarians that could not be backed up by U.S. military assistance.
However, the post-Hungary inquiries were not conducted in these terms. To do so would have opened up the entire sensitive question of whether and/or to what extent RFE received policy guidance, funds and direction from the CIA and the State Department. [iv]
The charges against Radio Free Europe began in Moscow and soon spread to the free world, where they were picked up by Freies Wort, the organ of West Germany's Free Democratic Party. They were aired further when three revolutionary leaders who had escaped from Hungary said at a press conference in Bonn, on November 19, that RFE had broadcast "more than the troth." On November 29 Anna Kethly, the Hungarian Social Democratic leader who had escaped to the West, dealt RFE another blow when she said of its broadcasts: "The intentions were good but the results were not always happy."
In New York, RFE countered by calling Miss Kethly's statement "utterly without foundation and wholly incorrect." A spokesman said broadcasts promising Western military aid to Hungary were the work of a "Communist radio located in East Germany. These Communist programs were broadcast in the name of Radio Free Europe."
There were then three inquiries into RFE's role. The West German Government set up a commission to study the charges (since RFE was headquartered in Munich on West German soil) RFE turned over to it three miles of tape containing all its broadcasts to Hungary before, during and after the revolt.
On January 25, 1957, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer reported the results of this inquiry at a press conference. Charges that RFE had promised the Hungarians armed assistance by the West "do not correspond with the facts," he said. "Remarks, however, were made that were subject to misinterpretation. The matter has been discussed and personnel changes have resulted. I believe we can consider the matter closed for the time being."
Adenauer's report seemed internally contradictory. On the one hand, it found the charges to be incorrect. On the other hand, it said there had been a shake-up at Radio Free Europe.
A second inquiry was conducted by a special committee of the Council of Europe, an organization of Western governments formed in 1949 to deal mainly with social problems. In its report on April 27, 1957, the committee said the charge that RFE had promised "military aid from the West was proved to be without ground." But it said one RFE news broadcast "could easily have led to misunderstandings."
The report added it was "regrettable that Radio Free Europe is still entirely financed by the U.S.A. ... Radio Free Europe depends entirely on American funds and is consequently a purely American affair ... actual political leadership and the last word rest with the American management."
In June, 1957, a United Nations special committee on Hungary came in with its verdict on RFE:
"Listeners had the feeling that Radio Free Europe promised help ... the general tone of these broadcasts aroused an expectation of support ... In a tense atmosphere such as that prevailing in Hungary during these critical weeks ... the generally hopeful tone of such broadcasts may well have been overemphasized in the process of passing from mouth to mouth ...
"The attitude of the Hungarian people towards foreign broadcasting was perhaps best summed up by the student ...who said: 'It was our only hope, and we tried to console ourselves with it.' It would appear that certain broadcasts by Radio Free Europe helped to create an impression that support might be forthcoming for the Hungarians. The Committee feels that in such circumstances the greatest restraint and circumspection are called for in international broadcasting."
The three cautiously phrased reports, in other words, found in varying degree that RFE's broadcasts, while they did not promise aid in so many words, "helped to create an impression," as the UN put it, that assistance might be on the way.
One RFE broadcast that might have contributed to this was a news report of Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge's words in the UN. Lodge said the Hungarian resistance had given the UN "a brief moment in which to mobilize the conscience of the world on your behalf. We are seizing that moment and we will not fail you."
Another RFE broadcast during the revolt gave instructions on how to blow up attacking Soviet tanks.
While none of the inquiries produced any evidence that RFE actually promised military aid, there is no doubt that it encouraged the revolutionary fighters. For example, one script broadcast to Hungary by RFE on November 3, as Soviet tanks ringed Budapest, said:
"The Soviet monster stands at our gates ... the eight days' victorious revolution have turned Hungary into a free land ... Neither Khrushchev nor the whole of the Soviet army have the power to oppress this new liberty ... What can you do against Hungary, you Soviet legions? It is in vain to pierce Hungarian souls with your bayonets. You can destroy and shoot and kill: our freedom will now forevermore defy you ..." [5]
In his book The Bridge at Andau, James A. Michener said that RFE did not incite the uprising "but this radio did broadcast messages of freedom and is presumably still doing so. Are we now prepared to assume direct responsibility for these messages? How long can we broadcast such messages without assuming direct responsibility for our words?" [6]
Michener's question is well worth pondering. The effect of RFE's words is nowhere more heartbreakingly recorded than in the broadcasts from inside Hungary in the dying hours of the revolt. Better than any UN or other investigation, they reflect how the men and women inside Hungary, whether rightly or wrongly, regarded the role of RFE.
On the afternoon of November 5, Radio Free Rakoczi broadcast this message from inside Hungary at 13:48 hours: [7]
"Attention, Radio Free Europe, hello attention. This is Roka speaking. The radio of revolutionary youth ... continual bombing ... Help, help, help ... Radio Free Europe ... forward our request. Forward our news. Help! Help!"
November 6, 13:52 hours:
"We appeal to the conscience of the world. ...Why cannot you hear the call for help of our murdered women and children? Peoples of the world! Hear the call for help of a small nation! ... This is Radio Rakoczi, Hungary ... Radio Free Europe, Munich! Radio Free Europe, Munich! Answer! Have you received our transmission?"
15:05 hours:
"... Attention, attention, Munich! Munich! Take immediate action. In the Dunapentele area we urgently need medicine, bandages, arms, food and ammunition! Drop them for us by parachute."
And, finally, on November 7 at 09:35 hours:
"Must we appeal once again?
"Do you love liberty? ... So do we.
"Do you have wives and children? ... So have we.
"We have wounded ... who have given their blood for the sacred cause of liberty, but we have no bandages ... no medicine ... And what shall we give to our children who are asking for bread? The last piece of bread has been eaten.
"In the name of all that is dear to you ... we ask you to help ... Those who have died for liberty ... accuse you who are able to help and who have not helped ... We have read an appeal to the UN and every honest man ...
"Radio Free Europe, Munich! Free Europe, Munich!"
_______________
Notes:
i. To intelligence officers, the term "black radio" can have a specialized meaning, to describe a radio that is captured and then operated as if all were normal in order to deceive the opposition. The Germans successfully undermined the British Operation Northpole during World War II by using this technique. Parachutists dropped by British Intelligence were lured into traps by Dutch underground radios that had been captured by the Nazis. In this chapter, however, the term is used in its broader sense, to describe radio operations in general where they are controlled directly or indirectly by an intelligence apparatus.
ii. Less well known are the CIA's mimeographed summaries of the foreign press.
iii. The committee is now known as the Free Europe Committee, Inc., 2 Park Avenue, New York. The Crusade for Freedom is now the Radio Free Europe Fund. The Committee engages in a multitude of other activities. It publishes East Europe magazine (22.,000 copies a month) and works with Eastern European exile groups "engaged in the struggle for eventual freedom of their countries." The Committee has five operating divisions: RFE, Communist Bloc Operations, Exile Political Organizations, Free World Operations and West European Operations.
iv. About the furthest anyone went was Edwin A. Lahey, a veteran Washington correspondent, who said in a December 15, 1956. dispatch from Munich in the Chicago Daily News: "The United States Government probably supports RFE with 'unvouchered funds' but this has never been officially established."