In 1948, an association of American intellectuals and literary personalities was formed New York under the name Friends of Russian Freedom (FRF) as an organization "entirely independent of the United States government and policy." However, beyond some organizational meetings and public statements, the group otherwise was not actively engaged.
Another group consisting of prominent Americans was formed in New York on February 18, 1951, under the name Friends of Fighters for Russian Freedom (FFRF), with Mrs. Henry Hadley as Chairwoman of the Organizing Committee and Mrs. Ivan Tolstoy as Secretary and Treasurer.
The New York Times reported on forming the FFRF with this headline, "To Aid 'Russian Freedom’; New Anti-Red Unit to Stress Amity for the People.” Local newspapers in the U.S. also covered the formation of FFRF by quoting from the press announcement: "There can be no lasting peace and no source of freedom for any people until the Russian people have regained their freedom and returned as free and equal partners to the community of nations. It revealed that it already had begun to send financial aid and guidance to runaway Soviet citizens now in central Europe.”
A Washington Post newspaper editorial of April 5, 1951, “Friendship for Russians”, listed two objectives of FFRF: “To mobilize American support for anti-Communist elements inside Russia and to provide material aid for refugees from that land and for Red Army deserters.”
The group's name was changed or superseded by the American Friends of Russian Freedom (AFRF) in late 1951. The president was retired Foreign Service Officer Felix Cole, the American Consul in Archangel, Russia, during the Russian Revolution. Other members included Mrs. Ivan Tolstoy, Eugene Lyons, Albert (Bert) Jolis, and William (Bill Casey).
Eugene Lyons was editor of Reader’s Digest magazine and the first president of the American Committee for the Liberation from Bolshevism, responsible for Radio Liberty. Bill Casey was a former member of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and a future CIA Director in President Ronald Reagan’s administration.
According to a biography of Bill Casey, he recruited Frank R. Barnett as director of the New York AFRF office in 1951. Barnett had been a Russian interpreter for the U.S. Army in World War II. He later described AFRF: “The idea was to get Red Army personnel in Berlin and Vienna to desert, to get them papers, find them jobs, resettle them in the West and make propaganda hay out of their defections.”
Barnett later wrote about the opening of a new AFRF “Friendship House” in Munich in November 1951 as: “[T] he first reception center in West Germany exclusively for the use of escapees from the Soviet Union. Activities in a new and larger hostel include: language classes in German, English, and Portuguese; chess, ping pong, motion pictures, and a library of Russian, English, and German books; legal counseling and, of course, hot meals, not only for residents but transients en route to some technical training center or to the AFRF center at Kaiserlautern for job placement with U. S. Army installations in that area.”
Mckinney Russel was the first director for the AFRF center in Kaiserslautern from 1953-1955. He later described his experiences in an oral interview:
[A]t that time, there was a significant NATO build-up, and consequently, there were lots of jobs for drivers, plumbers, electricians, security guards, and so on. As Center Director, I was in charge of finding jobs for the escapees and running the Center, a rather challenging job because I was still younger than most of the people I was responsible for. They would arrive speaking barely any German, and it was my job, through the German Labor Office, to persuade the Germans to give them a reference to the American office that was hiring for the U.S. Forces build-up. It turned out to be a very tough job. There were some rowdies and drunks among the Russians who were very hard to manage.
McKinney Russell left AFRF after two years and first took a job as a manager at Radio Liberation in Munich in 1962 and then became a career State Department Foreign Service Officer.
For more information, see Chapter 3 in
