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Chapter 19 The Last Seventeen Years International Literary Centre, Ltd., East Europe, and the USSR There is evidence that the involvement of Free Europe’s Radio Liberty in the book mailings to the Soviet Union was preceded by a similar project undertaken by the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism (AMCOMLIB), an organization set up in January 1951 with financial support from the CIA to deal with Russian refugees and émigrés. Reader’s Digest editor Eugene Lyons was its first president . After undergoing a series of name changes, in January 1964 it became the Radio Liberty Committee, Inc. (RLC), with radio broadcasts to the Soviet Union.1 Between January 1, 1960 and April 30, 1961, AMCOMLIB also sent 2,000 books to the USSR through Ethel Schroeder, at a cost of $18,000.2 The following year, FEC suggested mailing through “well-dispersed assets” from various European cities, particularly in Italy, selected translated material from Albanian, East European, and Chinese sources to the USSR, in addition to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. For this special project, it submitted a list of roughly 1   For a good account of the origins of AMCOMLIB, see Ross Johnson, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. The CIA Years and Beyond, 26–9. Eventual financial support from U.S. Government funds for Radio Liberty would amount to $160 million. 2  EC memo to [FEC] President dated May 5, 1961. HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, Box 32. Richardson had become interested in AMCOMLIB’s book mailings to the USSR and was in favor of FEC taking the operation back, noting that it was already mailing books to the three Baltic republics and handing out books to visiting Russian scientists in New York. i5 Cold War.indb 505 2013.03.04. 13:37 506 Hot Books in the Cold War 1,400 potential targets—government, communist party, and economic and trade unions leaders—and asked the CIA to supply the names and addresses of relevant Soviet leaders. At the same time, FEC recognized that the inclusion of the USSR “raises a question of ‘jurisdiction’ which you will have to clear with other elements.”3 A year later, AMCOMLIB informed the FEC President that it had circulated 500 copies of a pamphlet entitled “ABC-Austria” in Russia, and wanted to know whether Radio Free Europe or FEC had knowledge of anyone else distributing similar pamphlets to other captive nations. FEC’s response was that it did not want to duplicate the activity of any other organization.4 RLC’s main aim was to promote a united organization of Russian and non-Russian émigrés to carry out radio broadcasting and other anti-communist activities. Isaac (Ike) Patch, a former U.S. diplomat in Moscow during World War II, became RLC’s director of émigré relations in Munich. While he failed in bringing Russians and nonRussians together in a single committee, he was able to recruit people for the various Radio Liberty desks. In 1956, Patch was transferred to RLC headquarters in New York as head of the Special Projects Division, which published a newspaper and a quarterly for the Russian émigré community. Radio Liberty’s aim was basically the same as that of Free Europe’s book program, namely to communicate Western ideas to Soviet citizens by providing them with books on politics, religion, philosophy, and art, denied to them by Soviet dictatorship 3  Letters from the President [FEC] to the Executive Committee dated July 9, 1962, July 23, 1962, and July 24, 1962, 1–2, plus a list of 13 selected Albanian and Soviet statements and articles. Ibid. Sam Walker, who maintained direct contact with both FEC and AMCOMLIB’s Ike Patch, also asked George Minden for Hungarian, Czechoslovak, Polish, and Soviet lists, which contained 800 names each. Letters from John Dunning to Sam Walker, August 2, 1962, and to John Page, dated August 21, 1961. Ibid. 4  Letter from John Richardson, Jr, to Mucio Delgado dated June 20, 1963. Delgado was the head of the London office of Free Europe Divisions, Inc. A December 1965 exchange of letters between the Executive Committee and the FEC President about the PSPD distribution program makes no mention of any mailings to the USSR. Sometime during the first three months of 1963, Minden’s PSPD sent 2,000 copies of an unspecified number of titles to the USSR, probably the last instance of such a mailing. PSPD Mailing Operations, Monthly Report No. 81, April 1963, 1. HIA, RFE/RL Corporate...

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