Book Review Extracts
Those who wish to appreciate the totality of the East-West conflict from the end of World War II to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, must also include a study of the Cold War’s hidden dimension, to wit, intelligence. This book provides a great opportunity to do so.
Cummings’s book introduces many of the major American players involved in the broadcasting endeavor during the Cold War—for instance, Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, DeWitt Poole, William E. Griffith, and others. It is gratifying that it does not omit several lesser-known personalities, such as Ferdinand Peroutka and Pavel Tigrid. Readers will appreciate learning about Operation WINDS OF FREEDOM during which from 1951 to 1956 some 500,000 balloons carried about 300 million leaflets from West Germany across the Iron Curtain to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.
The book brings up the devilish Operation KAMEN, a stratagem whereby the Czech secret police (StB) lured victims into a trap involving false border markers and the misuse of U.S. Army uniforms and insignia. Cummings also writes about the role of RFE broadcasts during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Much of this has been known. But many readers are unlikely to have heard of other topics the book brings up, including, for instance, Russian-language broadcasts from Taiwan that targeted Siberia. Starting in 1950, they continued for almost twenty years. Cummings brings even the well-informed reader onto a new territory with his chapters on clandestine broadcasts from Greece to Bulgaria and Romania, the Voice of Free Albania, and “black” stations broadcasting to the Baltic States and to Ukraine, Belarus, and Slovakia. Regarding Slovakia, the focus is on the White Legion and the kidnapping of Josef Vincen, one of its founders.
Igor Lukes, University Professor, Professor of History & International Relations, Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University. The Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies Volume 27 • Number 1 • Winter-Spring 2022.
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