The Secret Life and Mysterious Death of Radio Liberation’s Leonid Karas ©

Leonid Karas

The post–World War II Byelorussian emigration in Western Europe was split into two organizations: 

•       BZR/BCR (Beloruska Zentralna Radaor Byelorussian Central Council)

•       BNR (Beloruska Nationalna Rada, Byelorussian National Council or Council of the Byelorussian Peoples Republic) based in Paris, France. 

From 1951 to 1962, CIA financially supported and used the BNR émigré/exile group in the United States and Europe. 

CIA operations against the BSSR began in the summer of 1951 when CIA initiated a joint Office of Special Operations (OSO)-Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) Foreign Intelligence project (cryptonym AEQUOR). The project included agent infiltration operations in Byelorussia to establish contact with partisan groups and set up support bases for future operations. CIA’s Munich Combined Soviet Operations Base was the responsible field unit. OSO and OPC shared equally in all expenses related to recruitment, training, compensation, equipment, dispatch, and exfiltration of agents into and out of Byelorussia. 

CIA’s Principal Agent for spotting and recruiting agents for the Byelorussian operations was Boris Ragula (cryptonym CAMBISTA 2), a medical doctor in Belgium.

The first penetration agent was Yanka Filistovich (CAMPOSANTO 1), dispatched on September 21, 1951. He was captured almost immediately, interrogated, later imprisoned, and executed.

A four-man team (AEQUOR II) was dispatched on the night of 26/27 August 1952. One was killed, three captured. All three cooperated and participated in radio games with CIA for three years. It was then decided to send another team, AEQUOR III, in 1954.

Leonid Karas (Лявон Леанід Карась) was born on 20 November 1923. He had been a teacher during World War II and reportedly was one of the leaders of the “Union of Belarussian Youth” (based on the German Hitler Youth). In 1944, he left Belarus with about 3,000 persons with the retreating German army. 

Registration Card

Karas registered in the Displaced Persons (DP) Camp in Michelsdorf on August 16, 1945. On his Registration Card, it was written: “I am a White Ruthenian of Polish citizenship, and I don’t wish to become a Soviet citizen.”

Karas worked as a camp guard in the Belarusian camp in Michelsdorf and studied at a Belarusian school. By 1948, Karas was a member of the Belarus youth organization "Twelve," along with other friends. In that year, he left the DP Camp for the United Kingdom, where he worked in coal mines in Scotland. 

The BNR needed more suitable agent candidate material for CIA operations. Because there was no 1953 dispatch under Project AEQUOR, it became necessary for a third AEQUOR team to be prepared for dispatch in 1954, to be utilized in support of Team II, or undertake an independent mission to ensure CIA coverage of the Belorussian SSR.

 

One of the agents associated with Ragula in 1954 was Leonid Karas, whom friends nicknamed Fish (Riba). He was given CIA cryptonym AECAMPOSANTO 11 and invited to Munich. The cover devised for him was that of attending university either in Heidelberg or Karlsruhe. The Leuven term had already begun, and he had to leave Belgium soon or the interest of his friends there would be unduly aroused. 

 

In December 1953, an assessment of Karas was completed, and medical and lie detector examinations were given. At the beginning of the training, Karas showed excessive knowledge of the BNR Council's cooperation with the CIA. For example, Karas knew detailed information about previous landings, landing sites, and more. Because of this, CIA dropped him as a potential agent.

 

On March 14, 1954, CIA’s Principal Agent Boris Ragula wrote:

 

“You said that Fish knows the whereabouts of the four. There is no basis for this statement; it is doubtful because even the President does not know this, and neither do his colleagues. Fish allegedly knows where the poison is hidden. However, I don't know anything about this. I have to come to the only possible conclusion that all of these arguments have been invented for the purpose of asking about an actual danger which probably does not threaten from our side.”

 

Karas returned to Munich on December 6, 1953, to complete his assessment, and physical and lie detector examinations. Karas lived in a local pension and paid per diem rather than placed in a CIA safe-house requiring considerable logistic support. Because of his favorable lie detector examination and medical, Karas was permitted to return to Louvain for the Christmas holidays. He established his cover story as a student and cut ties with the group then. 

 

Faced with the issue of not being able to prepare a team for support purposes or otherwise, CIA decided to use a two-person team, providing both candidates were equally qualified to undertake either a support or independent type mission. Discussions with and assessment of Karas indicated, qualifications-wise, that he would be able to undertake either mission equally well but only as a team member. 

 

After the assessment concluded, Karas lacked the desirable leadership qualities to permit the launching of an independent two-man team into the Byelorussian SSR. Furthermore, because of his partial knowledge of Team II operations and team members, CIA decided that Karas would be a security risk even if sent in as a team member of an independent type mission.

 

After receipt of the Headquarters decision that the preparation of Team III be postponed, CIA’s case office told Karas that certain security issues precluded his utilization at that time and “Particular exigencies necessitated the postponement of any mission at this time. 

 

Although Ragula admitted that Karas and two others were almost wholly witting in all aspects of CIA collaboration, it was felt that a lot of loose conversation inconsistent with the best security interests was extant in the student home in Belgium. The use of the student home for routing candidates in conjunction with the above loose talk has undoubtedly blown the home completely.

 

Karas was then completely unoccupied and unemployed:

 

We have not been so fortunate in disposing of Karas. There was some indication that he could obtain a job with Radio Liberation, but apparently, there are no openings for him. He has very little qualifications for a job here in Germany. He could have obtained employment as a chauffeur if he knew how to drive. Lacking this ability, the door was closed even for a menial task such as this. Since Karas’s visa expires in April, we have no alternative but to return him, with a payoff, to Louvain. It is doubtful whether security will suffer significantly because of his seemingly premature return to his friends in Louvain. Nobody believed him when he said he was coming to Munich to attend the university. The collapse of CIA-BNR relations in Europe is undoubtedly reasonably common knowledge amongst his friends in Louvain. 

Karas was given 10,000 Belgian Francs as a disposal allowance and permitted to return to Louvain. He planned to study typing and eventually return to Munich to work as a temporary translator for Radio Liberation. He was successful. On May 20, 1954, Belarusian programs aired for the first time. The main "speaker" was Leonid Karas.  

On or about September 1, 1954, Leonid Karas did not appear for work, and Radio Liberty notified the Munich police that Karas was missing. On September 7, 1954, his body and Belgian passport were found on the banks of the Isar River in Munich. Leonid Karas was buried in Munich’s North Cemetery. The crime remains unsolved, but his friends and colleagues had no doubt it was murder.

 

 

 

Jozef Swiatlo, Radio Free Europe, Leaflets, and Balloons ©

In West Berlin, on Saturday, 5 December 1953, Jozef Swiatlo, a lieutenant colonel in the Polish secret police, "defected" to the West. Whether or not he was a double agent already under the control of the CIA or was a genuine defector is a matter of historical debate. For example, in his book Operation Splinter Factor, British journalist Stewart Stevens claims that Swiatlo was first an agent of British Intelligence and turned over to the CIA in 1949 for various reasons. Another version has it that Swiatlo reportedly defected after being sent to the West to intimidate or kill Mrs. Wanda Bronksa, a former Communist Party member and influential RFE Polish Service broadcaster since 1952.

American Journalist Flora Lewis has written in her book The Red Pawn: The Story of Noel Field:

 

         He was a man with the ineradicable spot of blood on his hands; he personally had been a torture master. His nickname was the ‘Butcher’. When the United States agreed to give him asylum it was in the knowledge that he would have to be protected for the rest of his life because the number of his victims and relatives of victims sworn to exact retribution was so great

 

Who was Jozef Swiatlo?

 

According to one biography, Jozef Swiatlo was born as Izak (Isaac) Fleischfarb to a “poor Jewish family” in the village Medina, Ukraine (now Poland), on 1 January 1915 and attended public school for only seven years. He was a member of a Zionist organization “Gordonia” and joined the Communist Youth Union in 1933. For "political reasons and his youthful inexperience," he was twice arrested for his political activities. In 1938, he was drafted into the Polish army.

 

After the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, he was captured by the German army, escaped, and fled to the Eastern Section of Poland, then under Soviet army control. He joined a Soviet-backed force and marched westward with the army as a political officer in the Kosciuszko Division that remained in a Warsaw suburb during the Uprising in 1944. 

 

Afterward, he joined the University of Public Security and became a Polish Security Service officer in 1945. He rose to the position of Deputy Chief of Department 10, responsible for protecting the Communist Party from non-Party subversive forces and "protect the purity of the Party from within the Party" by screening all appointments and conducting surveillance of Party and Government officials.

 

After this defection in West Berlin in 1953, the Americans sent him to a “Defector Reception Center “in Frankfurt, Germany. He was "debriefed" by CIA official Ted Shackley, who established his bona fides as a "defector" and sent his findings to CIA headquarters. In his memoirs, Spymaster: My Life in the CIA, Shackley wrote:

 

            The wealth of detail that Swiatlo was able to give me about the organization,

            functions, and misdeeds of UB, soon made it evident that Swiatlo was uniquely

            able to provide answers to questions that had long remained unanswered, and I

            was bombarded by cable demands from headquarters that I tackle Swiatlo on

            other subjects.

 

After a debriefing that lasted five hours a day, seven days a week for three months, Shackley and Swiatlo then flew to the United States in April 1954.

 

Swiatlo and Radio Free Europe

 

The CIA then gave Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America access to Swiatlo. RFE’s Voice of Free Poland started broadcasting his “revelations” on 28 September 1954, when Swiatlo “officially” surfaced in the United States at a press conference in Washington, D.C.

 

On 20 October 1954, RFE’ began a series of 78 programs entitled “Inside Story of Bezpieka and Party” that were broadcast until 31 January 1955. They were not verbatim interviews but were prepared scripts based on Swiatlo’s material. Swiatlo voiced the scripts. Other programs were broadcast throughout 1955 for a total of 141 Swiatlo programs.

 

Cord Meyer, one CIA officer responsible for RFE, has written: “He turned out to be a gold mine of detailed and accurate information on the corruption and personal rivalries that flourished among the leadership of the Polish Communist Party.” 

 

Swiatlo's name is translated as "light," and since listening to RFE was considered a crime, listeners referred to his programs by asking, "will there be any light at your house tonight?" For the following months, RFE's other language services and the RFE's sister station Radio Liberation used his "revelations."

 

Swiatlo's broadcast over Radio Free Europe reportedly caused a significant chain reaction in Poland with the dismissal, transfer, and worse, of thousands of Communist Party members and government officials. According to one estimate, as many as 150,000 party members were affected by RFE's programming.

 

RFE’s radio programs about Swiatlo were described as "a brilliant tactical decision that brought unforeseeable strategic gains" and "one of the most successful pieces of radio propaganda ever." The Polish regime responded with silence for a few weeks before it launched a heavy counter-propaganda campaign of radio commentaries, articles, poems, and cartoons.

 

Leaflet Balloons to Poland

 

Based on experiences in its previous balloon programs, on 12 February 1955, the Free Europe Press began sending copies of a forty-page summary of his testimony, "The Inside Story of the Bezpieka (Security Apparatus) and the Party," to Poland. This balloon campaign was called Operation SPOTLIGHT, which "was designed to bring to the Polish people the revelations of corruption and immorality in the hierarchy of the Polish Communist regime."

 

The purpose of the Free Europe Press balloon launching-leaflet program was "to weaken the Communist control apparatus, and through detailed exposure of Communist techniques, to enable the Polish people better to defend themselves against the Communists.” The FEP pamphlet’s forward was hard-hitting:

 

Swiatlo is a man who has drunk from many a filthy well. Does he regret it today? Has he resolved to improve his ways in the innermost recesses of his heart? Does he treat the story of his experiences as contrition, or does he regard it as an act of vengeance of his former Party comrades. We have no first-hand information on this matter. We only know that he is to be believed.

 

This booklet is like a hand grenade. It may become dangerous should you try to keep it in your possession. It may also be dangerous to repeat the text of this booklet to your neighbor. On the other hand, no harm will be caused to the public good should this pamphlet reach the hands of representatives of the regime.

 

From February through May 1955, over 260,000 pamphlets were launched into Poland, with only 30 per balloon, because of the pamphlet's weight. The number of launchings would have been greater, but for the weather: in April, for example, no launches took place because the winds blew from East to West. Additional brochures were sent via postal mail to members of the Polish Communist Party bureaucracy and distributed in Paris and elsewhere in the West

 

RFE also put out details of Swiatlo in the March 1955 issue of News Behind the Iron Curtain, a monthly subscription journal published by the Free Europe Press. The short introduction explained the importance of the Swiatlo revelations:

 

Here is the mirror of what it means to "build a Socialist state," and "what Socialist morality" is truly like. It is a tale of the evils done by the police, Party and Government to their adherents, and horrible as it is, it is far less horrible than what all of these combined have done to the Polish people.

 

Controversy at Radio Free Europe

 

The Swiatlo programs also affected Radio Free Europe as the Polish broadcasting service in Munich and management in New York were divided on the programs. Robert Lang, the Director of Radio Free Europe, stationed in New York, wrote an eight-page resignation letter in which he complained to the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of the Free Europe Committee that the Deputy Director of RFE in New York had turned down the balloon program and was not consulted before the Free Europe Press in Munich started Operation SPOTLIGHT. He explained in the letter how the Polish émigrés in the United States were unhappy with the RFE's use of Swiatlo and "the Polish press in this country broke out in a rash of angry editorial comment, and, in brief—poof--there went our carefully built up validity."

 

Lang also reveals in his letter that Swiatlo had once sued RFE for “uncoordinated publishing on his material in News From Behind the Iron Curtain” and received $2,000. He threatened to sue again, this time for $10 000 because he was "infuriated—particularly by the introduction that was flown in with his materials in which, among other things, he was labeled a man,  "Who has drunk of every shame."  Also, Swiatlo had first learned about SPOTLIGHT two weeks after it had started.

 

The controversy came to a head in a meeting of CIA, VOA, and RFE officials on 7 October 1954, during which CIA set ground rules for further interviews with Swiatlo.

 

In December 1956, Poland expelled Life magazine photographer Lisa Larsen when her visa expired. According to her, the Polish Foreign Department explained that her visa was not extended due to Life magazine's 26 November 1956 article published under Swiatlo's name. The Polish press department complained that “This article by one of Poland’s worst criminals was sensational and untrue and its publication was an unfriendly act. Polish newspapers accused Swiatlo of “robbing prisoners, using illegal methods of interrogation and ordering the liquidation of at least one political prisoner while he was a police officer.”

 

Crusade for Freedom

 

In the February 1956 Crusade for Freedom campaign, Swiatlo's story was used in the United States with this nationwide newspaper appeal prepared by the Advertising Council:

 

                   SHAKE-UP

 

                   Broadcasts cause removal of Polish Police officials

 

MUNICH--A series of broadcasts by Radio Free Europe have caused great upheaval and embarrassment in Poland.

 

They were based on highly inflammatory information about corrupt Polish police operations obtained from Josef Swiatlo, a Polish Security Ministry official who had defected to the West. As a result of the broadcasts, the Reds were forced to dismiss four of Swiatlo's former chiefs and reorganize the ministry.

 

This is just a single example of the influence of Radio Free Europe's words of truth. Up to 20 hours of truth daily are broadcast to five key satellite countries—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Moreover, the truth is getting through, despite costly Red jamming attempts.

 

Millions take the risk daily to listen. Millions more hear the truth from Radio Free Europe as it is passed cautiously from mouth to mouth.

 

Truth builds hope and continued resistance. Each dollar sponsors a minute of truth. Send your truth dollars to CRUSADE FOR FREEDOM, c.o. Local Postmaster 

 

Post RFE?

 

The CIA prepared part 7 of a National Security Council report dated 2 March, 1955, in which it was written: "the Polish Security Official, Josef Swiatlo, although defecting early in 1954, made outstanding contributions to U.S. intelligence and psychological warfare programs during this period.“

 

By the 1960s, Jozef Swiatlo, once called "the most successful Western agent in the Cold War," had effectively become a nonperson. Former CIA Director Allen Dulles' book, The Craft of Intelligence, published in 1963, contained only a two-sentence and incorrect reference to Jozef Swiatlo saying that he had defected in Berlin in 1954, not 1953.

 

Former CIA officer Ted Shackley wrote:

 

Once he had fulfilled his obligations to the U.S. government, he sank quietly into private life as a legal resident of the United States. According to what little I have heard about him, he moved to New York—whether City or State I don't know—and opened a small business. The absence of any news to the contrary gives me confidence that his resettlement was a success.

 

Another CIA officer who had the chance to interview Swiatlo, after his arrival in the United States, was Tennent H. Bagley, who wrote in his book Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games:

 

            Gave important and high-level insights into Soviet operations and techniques....

            This information, sent to Poland by leaflet and radio, shook the regime and

            led to reforms that, developed in later years, made Poland a factor in the eventual

            collapse of Soviet Communism.

 

On 24 November 1982, the Polish Intelligence Service decided to "close" the examination of his case because of "the lack of information where he lived, where he is, and what he did."  

 

In January 2009 the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) asked the U.S. Justice Department for current information about Jozef Swiatlo. A year later, the response was one sentence advising only that Jozef Swiatlo died on 2 September 1994 in the United States.

 

#

 

Recommended Reading

 

A. Ross Johnson, The Inside Story of the Secret Police and the Party; Origins of the Swiatlo Broadcasts on RFE, http://wolnaeuropa.org/history%20forum/content/view/17/29/

 

L. W. Gluchowski, The Defection of Jozef Swialto and the Search for Jewish Scapegoats in the Polish United Workers' Party, 1953-1954, Intermarium, Columbia University electronic journal of modern East Central European postwar history. 

http://www.sipa.columbia.edu/ece/research/intermarium/vol3no2/gluchowski.pdf  (Last accessed September 2010)

 

Operation SPOTLIGHT: Regime, Press and Radio, Western Press and Radio and Internal Reactions, 12 February - 13 March, 1955, Free Europe Committee, New York, March 1955, Free Europe Press. RFE/RL Collection, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, California

 

The Inside Story of the Bezpieka and the Party: Jozef Swiatlo Reveals the Secrets of the Party, the Regime, and the Security Apparatus, English translation,  RFE/RL Collection,

 

CIA Infiltration Agents into Bulgaria in the early Cold War ©

Bulgaria

CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) Operational Project QKSTAIR was approved on April 18, 1950, with final authorization on April 24, 1950. The original objectives of QKSTAIR included

 

• Develop underground networks within Bulgaria.
• Provide financial support to George M. Dimitrov to enable him to develop an underground along the lines outlined in his paper “Organization of the Anti-Communist Resistance Movement in Bulgaria,” and 
• Develop additional networks entirely separate from Dimitrov`s organization.

Georgi M. Dimitrov was Chairman of the Bulgarian National Committee (Bulgarski Nacionalen Komitet, BNC)

Below are excerpts from a review of early CIA training in West Germany of the Bulgarian infiltration agents:

The German training installation has its headquarters in Frankfurt, which is under the cover of the Documents Disposal Division. This office administers and controls the training areas, such as supply, finance, personnel, documentation, and transportation. There is a training plans staff located in Frankfurt that prepares the training schedules and lesson plans for the various training areas. This staff is now re-writing and standardizing all lesson plans to include all subjects used in training. The training areas will request these lesson plans as needed. Commo training is handled by a separate communications staff. 

The main training areas are Gernsheim, Murnau, and the U.S. Army Grafenwohr military sub-post. Since Grafenwohr is the largest and most active of the sites visited, this report will primarily concern the training of Bulgarians now undergoing training at this area. 

The Grafenwohr training site is located on the base of the Grafenwohr military sub-post. The trainees, consisting of Bulgarians, Poles, and Czechs, are quartered in three barrack-type houses. The houses are located approximately one city block apart. 

All members of the training staff are under military cover. The instructors who are not actually military personnel are documented at Frankfurt previous to entering the Grafenwohr sub-post. Personnel assigned to Germany for training, particularly those going to Grafenwohr, should acquire Army uniforms prior to their departure. However, articles of uniform can be purchased in Germany at certain Army Quartermaster stores. It is particularly desirable for alien contract agents and persons who are not familiar with the army uniform and army procedure to obtain their uniforms before going overseas.

Army rank is designated by the Frankfurt office to those persons who are to be directly connected with the training program or to anyone who may at various times be required to enter a military installation under military cover. Military rank is assigned to the individual on the basis of his pay grade. Therefore, a contract agent drawing the equivalent of a Major's pay will be assigned the rank of Major. This practice has a tendency to give too high a rank to some individuals. As an example, one of our alien contract agents, under the cover of an Army Major, will work under army personnel of lesser rank. 

Bulgarians.

The Bulgarians are being trained in a variety of subjects, primarily weapons, demolitions, parachutes, map reading, base selection, guerrilla warfare, survival, and some agent training. 

Recreation and entertainment for the Bulgarians have consisted primarily of American movies. There has been no recreational activity as far as outdoor sports are concerned, however, the training staff had arranged to use the facilities of the post-gymnasium two nights a week. The Bulgarians are occasionally allowed liberty outside of their quarters. They are never allowed liberty on the military post and are escorted wherever they go on the post. Liberty was granted to the Bulgarians once in December and once in January, in the cities of Nurnberg and Beyreuth. The Bulgarians were required to check in every two hours with two staff instructors who accompanied them on liberty. 

Between May 16, 1951, and May 28, 1951, 17 agents were infiltrated into Bulgaria. This number included the 15 agents trained in Germany during March and April, plus two others recruited in Greece for specific one-shot missions. The total number was broken down into six teams. According to reports received by the end of June 1951, the status of the 17 agents infiltrated during May was:

• Three agents remained in Bulgaria,
• Eleven returned to Greece and were being prepared for re-infiltration
• One of the eleven had been captured by the Bulgarians and forced to establish Motorola contact with the OPC covert aircraft but was permitted to escape for reasons now being investigated.
• One of the 17 agents was killed in an ambush by Bulgarian soldiers while returning to Greece with one of his teammates and four recruits, two of whom were also killed.
• Two agents defected to the Communists.
• Another two are being treated as rejects because of a demonstrated lack of operational ability.  

In September 1951, six CIA infiltration agents were tried in Sofia. Three were sentenced to death and three to long-term imprisonment. Apparently, the men were caught as a result of: 

•  information furnished to the militia by a defector,
•  faulty operational judgment on the part of some of the agents, 
•  militia ambushes. 

CIA believed that the trial did not cause severe damage to future operations because “The information available to the Bulgarian authorities from the defendants must have been known to them already through agents who had defected or been captured.

2023 issue of Journal for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies (JIPSS) : "In Focus: Radio Propaganda in the Cold War"

 

The 2023 issue of JIPSS has just been published: "In Focus: Radio Propaganda in the Cold War" contains my article "CIA Early Cold War Clandestine Radio Broadcasts to Ukraine from Greece and Spain." Below are some editorial comments:

You will find numerous insights thoroughly relevant to the present: Numerous basic propaganda techniques have changed little or nothing since the early Cold War and are still used effectively today. And they are not limited to the medium of radio. Original Cold War radio propaganda, such as disinformation in the form of gray propaganda, can be found in online videos and social media campaigns. The use of dissidents and the politically persecuted can also be observed to this day. Moving images and dissemination through the Internet may have been added to pure sound – but one discovers many parallels in the techniques and principles used.

Moser, Mehring, Summers, Bardet, and Jäggi provide new insights into the weighty cultural and diplomatic role of radio within the Western bloc. Michael Kuhlmann, Richard Cummings, and Adrian Hänni examine hitherto unnoticed aspects of radio use in the ideological conflict between East and West.

Kuhlmann makes clear the incredible political impact radio coverage could have. For example, radio in the American Sector of Berlin (RIAS) played a significant role in the people's uprising in the GDR on June 17, 1953. Editors openly showed sympathy for the opposition movement, but their coverage swung to de-escalation when East Berlin imposed a state of emergency.

CIA Early Cold War Clandestine Radio Broadcasts to Ukraine from Greece and Spain

Cummingsʼ article on CIA clandestine radio propaganda explains how Spanish and Greek stations were used to offer anti-Soviet radio broadcasts to a Ukrainian target audience. Cummingsʼ approach focuses less on the content and impact of the broadcasts than on the operational and technical levels of the operation. In the former, preparation on the part of Western intelligence and information services, especially the CIA, plays an important role. Cummings shows how such an operation was planned, prepared, and executed, and thus how the basis for such a propaganda project could be created.

Hänniʼs contribution shows that not only state actors such as the CIA used clandestine radio stations as a weapon in the Cold War. Using Radio Omega, the Roman Catholic Church also tried to support the ideological struggle against “atheistic communism” clandestinely. Hänniʼs case study of Radio Omega, which broadcast Russian-language programs to the USSR in the 1960s, offers insights into aspects of radio propaganda that have received little attention in research to date, such as the importance of religion or the collaborations between propaganda stations and certain sociopolitical groups in the production of programs.

Kristina Wittkamp analyzes Soviet broadcasting policy during the Cold War, which ranged from station jamming to counter-propaganda to surveying the programming preferences of listeners. With the format station Radio Mayak, a counteroffer to the Western stations in content and politics was even deliberately created. Wittkamp, therefore, offers new insights into the radio politics of the Soviet Union, but she also improves our understanding of the interactions between Western and Eastern radio propaganda.

Here is the Table of Contents: 

 

 

Historical Overview of RFE/RL Cold War Baltic Broadcasts ©

1983 Advertisement

 CIA wanted to have Radio Free Europe broadcast to the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) in 1951. It was first approved by the U.S. State Department in May 1951 and again in August 1951. RFE started to plan for the broadcasts, including the selection of personnel for the broadcasts, but then the US Department of State vetoed the idea in November 1951: “There is nothing that needs to be said to the Baltics that cannot be said quite adequately by Voice of America.”

Also, Radio Free Europe broadcasting to the Baltic Republics was not considered to be cost-effective: “Compared to the Czechoslovakian broadcasts, which were estimated as costing $0.762 per radio set per year, broadcasts in Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian would cost on average $18.22 per radio set per year.” 

Radio Liberty began broadcasting to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 1975, before consolidation with Radio Free Europe as RFE-RL.

 

President Ronald Reagan Statement on the Establishment of the Baltic States Service of Radio Liberty on November 18, 1983:

Today, November 18, 1983, as Americans of Latvian heritage commemorate the 65th anniversary of the declaration of independence of the Baltic Republic of Latvia, the new Baltic States Service of Radio Liberty will begin its inaugural broadcast to the people of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The Baltic States Service unites the formerly separate Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian services of Radio Liberty.

Latvian Independence Day is a timely and fitting occasion to begin the operations of the new Baltic States Service division. Latvia, along with her neighbors Estonia and Lithuania, were invaded by Soviet forces in 1940 and still remain under the yoke of Soviet oppression. One of the most insidious forms of oppression continues to be the denial of freedom of speech and access to information.

The people of the three Baltic Republics look to the United States international broadcasting services as their informational lifeline. Radio Liberty, an integral part of the international broadcast network, serves as a surrogate press, providing current information on events which the Government of the Soviet Union has censored and prohibited for use by the media.

The establishment of the Baltic Radio division reaffirms United States policy of not recognizing the forcible and unlawful incorporation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into the Soviet Union. The new call signal, ``the Baltic States Service of Radio Liberty,'' will reinforce the distinct identities of the Baltic States and separate them from the rest of the Soviet Union.

By uniting the three Baltic services of Radio Liberty, we have enhanced their administrative operations and increased the political and psychological impact of the broadcasts on its listeners. We will continue seeking methods to improve our broadcasts to ensure that the right to know for the Baltic peoples is not blocked by Communist oppressors.

As we note Latvian Independence Day and the establishment of the Baltic States Service, this administration reaffirms its resolve to maintain our commitments to the people of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in their struggle to regain freedom and self-determination.

On the same day, the White House announced that Radio Liberty would broadcast the President's statement from Munich, the Federal Republic of Germany, to the Baltic States and the Soviet Union on November 18. 

The creation of the Baltic States Service did not happen because the three language services could not unite on various issues. They remained in the Radio Liberty Division until October 8, 1984, when the Baltic services were transferred to the Radio Free Europe Division. The rationale was: “To conform with the U.S. policy of non-recognition of the Soviet annexation of these countries during World War II.”

 

RFE/RL Language services broadcasting to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania ceased on December 31st, 2003,