Radio Hole In The Head/Radio Liberty: An Insider’s Story Of Cold War Broadcasting PDF
Preview Radio Hole In The Head/Radio Liberty: An Insider’s Story Of Cold War Broadcasting
Radio Hole-in-the-Head Radio Liberty Radio Hole-in-the-Head Radio Liberty An Insider’s Story of Cold War Broadcasting James Critchlow The American University Press Washington, DC Copyright © 1995 by The American University Press 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20016 Distributed by arrangement with University Publishing Associates 4720 Boston Way Lanham, Maryland 20706 3 Henrietta Street London, WC2E 8LU England All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America British Cataloging in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Critchlow, James. Radio hole-in-the-head/Radio Liberty : an insider’s story of Cold War broadcasting / James Critchlow p. cm. 1. Radio Liberty (Munich, Germany)—History. 2. RFE/RL, inc.— History. 3. International broadcasting. 4. Radio in propaganda— United States—History. 5. Cold War. I. Title. HE8697.4.C75 1995 95-32855 384.54’06’543364—dc20 CIP ISBN 1-879383-47-0 (cloth: alk: ppr.) ISBN 1-879383-48-9 (pbk: alk: ppr.) fc? The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48—1984 To those lively souls of many nationalities who came together, against odds, to form the improbable team that turned “Radio Hole-in-the-Head” into Radio Liberty Contents Acknowledgements Author’s Note viii Prologue ix 1. Stalin Dies, We Live 1 2. Forget the CIA! 15 3. Class Conflicts 31 4. Country Boy in Germany 49 5. Moscow Strikes Back 55 6. What Can I Tell You? 69 7. Munich, “Center of Subversion” 87 8. Who’s Listening? 99 9. A Brooklyn Window on the World 113 10. Moscow-on-the-Seine 127 11. Moscow-in-Manhattan 141 12. The Fulbright Flap 149 13. Merger Traumas 161 14. One for the Good Guys 171 Epilogue: End of the Cold War 179 Photographs follow page 96 Acknowledgements My thanks to those who helped by providing photographs for the illus trations, expeciallyJoan Balcar; Gerda Pylajew-Pawlowsky; Francis Ronalds; Jon Sawyer; Anatole Shub; Tanja Venzl; Solveig Baldauf, Kevin Klose and Jane Lester of RFE/RL, Inc. Richard T. Davies encouraged me at various stages of the writing and editorial process. Francis and Adair Ronalds read portions of the text and made helpful suggestions, as did McKinney and Lydie Russell. Richard Rowson and David Burke of The American University Press have been of great assistance throughout. Responsibility for the final content is solely my own. Author's Note Some of the dialogue reported in this book appears in quotation marks as direct quotations. People have asked me how it is possible, so many years after the events, to remember what was said verbatim. The answer: my use of quotations is limited to conversations that were unusually striking at the time, the kind of thing that you review over and over in your own mind and in reliving the past with others. In those cases I am certain that a written transcript, if there were one, would differ only in minor respects from what I have written. Prologue The end of the Cold War has turned the world upside down in more ways than one. In March 1993 Mikhail Gorbachev attended a reception held in Moscow to honor Radio Liberty’s fortieth anniversary, and said he now listens regularly to Radio Liberty broadcasts. He was talk ing about the station that is credited today as a major catalyst in the political softening that led to collapse of the Soviet Union he headed. One of the other guests at the Moscow party for Radio Liberty was a KGB general. Such people were once at the pinnacle of a sys tem that resorted to extraordinary measures, even murder, to try to destroy us at Radio Liberty in Munich. In the earliest Munich days we at Radio Liberty had other ene mies, too. Senator Joe McCarthy and his followers were looking for victims who could be branded “red” or “pink.” It made no difference that the real Reds in the Kremlin were out to do us in. Then there were those kibitzers who merely poked fun at our nondescript gang of unruly American intellectuals and threadbare refugees from the Soviet Union. They mocked us for abandoning po litical and bureaucratic orthodoxy to cobble together our offbeat station. They were the ones who called us “Radio Hole-in-the-Head.” Against all expectations we managed—beginning with our first feeble broadcasts in 1953—to lay the foundation of an effective com munication instrument with a personality of its own and an audience of millions inside the Soviet Union. We thought up program ideas that shaped the broadcasts for decades to come. And together with our band of Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Uzbeks, Armenians, Azerbaijanis—not to mention Balkars, Chechens, Karakalpaks, and others even more exotic to Americans—we experienced years of difficulties and occasional dangers, of frustration mixed with fun. ix X Radio Liberty Our job was to create an American-funded radio that would ad dress its listeners in the Soviet Union in the name of the former Soviet citizens, now in the West, who would be our broadcasters. Each na tionality would have its own language service. Russians would speak to Russians, or Tatars to Tatars, in terms of their common historical experience and shared cultural values. (At one point, there were more than twenty language services.) Programs would focus on events in the homeland that were suppressed or distorted by the censored offi cial media. It was reasoned that a radio of that kind would evoke a special response from its audiences. In this respect it would be differ ent from the governmental Voice of America: although the Voice also broadcast in Russian and some of our other languages, its basic mission could be summed up in the slogan “telling America’s story to the world,” making it to listeners a foreign medium, however great the popularity of some of its broadcasts (especially its programs of American jazz). Back in Washington, D.C., there was another consideration in the conception of our radio. It would be easier for the U.S. government to disclaim responsibility for the broadcasts of a “private” radio in case the Kremlin complained about them. The fiction of Radio Liberty’s nongovernmental sponsorship fooled hardly anyone, certainly not the Soviet government, but it helped the State Department and its diplo matic staff to relax. To us in Munich, whether our radio was public or private made little difference, as long as the broadcasts could speak for themselves, without official censorship. The model that our sponsors had in mind was Radio Free Eu rope, whose programs beamed to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Soviet “satellite” countries were already on the air when Radio Lib erty was conceived. But we soon found that the specifics of broad casting to Soviet audiences, and the kind of people available to do it, created a whole new set of problems. This book tells how we rose to that challenge. Did Radio Liberty do its job well? It gained millions of daily listen ers, despite the insistent grinding noise of hundreds of Soviet jamming stations trying to blot it out Some of its listeners even managed to tape the broadcasts and stealthily circulate transcripts to their friends. Soviet propaganda officials conducted an elaborately orchestrated campaign, through the controlled mass media and oral “agitation” lec tures, to discredit the station and those of us who worked for it. After the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a chorus of praise from people
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