The first broadcast was via "Barbara," a small mobile short-wave transmitter complex on a former Luftwaffe Air Base in Lampertheim, West Germany. "Barbara" was not one vehicle, but a set of seven vehicles, which included a studio van, transmitter van, generators, fuel supply truck, and a flatbed truck for the antenna towers.
Beginning July 4, 1950, the first programs to Czechoslovakia only consisted of music and spot announcements advising the listener that full programming of news and commentary would begin on July 14, 1950. “Barbara” sent its first broadcast to Romania also on July 14, 1950. In August 1950, shortwave broadcasts began to Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria. It is doubtful that many behind the Iron Curtain actually heard the first programs due to the relatively low power of the mobile transmitter.
The first Radio Free Europe broadcasts were at first prepared in RFE’s New York studios in the Empire State Building and relayed to West Germany via a high-powered transoceanic transmitter and later program tape recordings were air transported. The administrative and editorial offices were located at Sieberstrasse 4, in Munich, where there were two studios, two newsrooms, a tape library, a recorded music library, a control room installed in the kitchen, offices for the staff, and the workers found space in the passageways of the building.
Time magazine reported on July 17, 1950, under the rubric “Urgent Whisper”:
This week Czech and Rumanian radio listeners could hear music, plays and satires forbidden by their Communist masters—as well as the voices of men long exiled. These forbidden broadcasts came from a Radio Free Europe transmitter deep in Western Germany.
RFE's lone 7½-kilowatt transmitter is only a whisper compared to the worldwide 58-station network of Voice of America. But RFE, a branch of the National Committee for a Free Europe founded last year by a group of private U.S. citizens, expects to make up in pungency for its lack of volume. Explains Banker Frank Altschul, chairman of RFE: "Unhampered by diplomatic restrictions, we can slant our programs in a more definitely anti-Soviet way than the Voice."
Welcomed by the State Department as a freewheeling, free-speaking ally in the propaganda war, RFE plans to boost its power with five transmitters now on order. It intends, eventually, to speak strongly to every Communist satellite from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
The New York Times reported, “New ‘Voice’ Talks to Europe Like Member of the Family.” Some grass-root newspapers in the United States printed this editorial about Radio Free Europe and its “secret-location” transmitter:
Many wise statesmen have been appealing insistently to the free world to exert greater effort to the grimy "struggle for men's mind." They have pounded repeatedly on the idea that it isn't enough to combat Russian Communism with economic and military measures: that freedom must be shown to be the great cause it really a way of life eminently superior to the slavery imposed by Moscow.
The first Imaginative stride in this direction has now been taken. From a secret radio transmitter in Europe, a new series of programs is being beamed to the countries behind the Iron Curtain…Radio Free Europe, as the new transmitter is called, is the product of the National Committee for Free Europe, which was organized about a year ago by outstanding American citizens.
We must make plain to decent people everywhere that the language of Communism is the language of falsehood, that Russia's words can never be believed because words to the Soviet Union are simply weapons in the psychological theater of war.
Cord Meyer, the CIA official, who later was directly responsible for Radio Free Europe policy and programming for most of his intelligence career in the International Organizations Division of the CIA, wrote in his autobiography Facing Reality:
At the start, the somewhat naïve notion existed that all that was necessary was to build some radio transmitters and to hand the microphones to exiles to say what they wished…. It quickly became evident that the exile leaders were so divided among themselves on ideological lines and the different political groups were so prone to infighting, that a tower of Babel would be erected if they were left to their own devices.
Paul B. Henze was one of the early American managers of Radio Free Europe in Munich. He would later join the US State Department and National Security Council. At a conference at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California in 2004 examining the role of international broadcasting, Henze succinctly summed up the radio station’s genesis:
Radio Free Europe was an experiment. It was jerrybuilt. Its success was far from foreordained. The early years of its operation were never trouble-free. It faced many difficulties, some inherent in the operation itself, some the result of bureaucratic factors, many caused by doubts about--even strong opposition to--the notion of radio broadcasts as a means of communicating with peoples who had been forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Empire and isolated from the outer world with no immediate prospect of improvement of their situation.
Almost all the planning that went into the creation of Radio Free Europe was an improvised response to the sense of urgency that prevailed in the early 1950s about the threat, which Stalinist aggressive expansionism represented for the United States and the Free World. The notion that Radio Free Europe resulted from a coherent concept of what needed to be done has become widespread in recent years, but it remains an illusion.
Frank Altschul wrote a long status report to Allen Dulles in August 1950, part of which included:
If Radio Free Europe is to be effective, its sincerity must be above suspicion. It would be self-defeating to attempt to expound the gospel of twentieth-century liberalism through the recognized voice of nineteenth-century reaction. This raises a question that goes directly to the very heart of our activity in the field of propaganda. The way in which it is answered may have an important bearing on the success or failure of our effort.
Whether ... the experiment will seem to continue to justify the very considerable capital and current expenditure involved is primarily a question for those to decide who have assumed the responsibility of defraying up to now our budgetary requirements.
According to an August 1954 State Department Top Secret report,
The Free Europe Committee (FEC) and Radio Free Europe (RFE) are powerful propaganda and psychological political instruments, which are controlled by the Agency and are supposed to operate under policy guidance from the Department. The FEC was created in 1949 as a private organization, financed partly by private donations and partly by funds from the Agency, the latter accounting for about two-thirds to three-fourths of the money.
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