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  • Cold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950-1989
  • James Critchlow
Richard H. Cummings , Cold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950-1989. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co.

This book is a valuable contribution to Cold War history, written from the unique perspective of the security officer who was responsible for protecting Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL) from Soviet-bloc countermeasures. These countermeasures spanned the gamut from assassination and attempted assassination through the planting of bombs and kidnapping and harassment of employees to less violent methods such as infiltration of the staffs by agents. Richard Cummings was director of security for the two radios for fifteen years beginning in 1980. During his tenure he was witness to numerous depredations, including a bomb at RFE/RL headquarters in Munich that caused much material damage and serious injury to employees. In addition to recounting his own experiences, Cummings goes back in time to document actions carried out against RFE and RL in the more than 30 years before his affiliation with them began.

Let me offer a disclosure: To the best of my knowledge, I have never met Cummings, but that did not keep the two of us from being linked in an unsavory way. In 1985 the prestigious Soviet journal Zhurnalist published a novel in six installments claiming that the 1981 bombing of the building in Munich was clandestinely instigated by the U.S. government as a cynical ploy to win sympathy and support for RFE/RL. At the time I was on the staff of the Board for International Broadcasting, the federal oversight agency for RFE/RL. In a couple of scenes, the novel has me clandestinely meeting with Cummings in the Cafe Annast in Munich over beers laced with vodka to pass alongWashington's instructions on how to organize the bombing. I still hope to meet Cummings some day.

The broader context, much of which is beyond the scope of Cummings's book, is the place of RFE and RL in the politics of the ColdWar. If the Soviet-bloc attitude toward the radios was one of unalloyed hostility (with some wavering by the East European regimes toward the end), the attitude toward them in the West was ambiguous. Despite broad popular support (especially for RFE, which had Polish and other ethnic constituencies in the United States) in the early "hot" period of the Cold War, some officials, legislators, and commentators questioned whether the radios were effective or should exist at all. Part of the problem was their funding through the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which became an open secret (and ended years before Cummings arrived on the scene). U.S. news media tended to dismiss the radios as "propaganda outlets." At one point, United Press refused to sell them its wire service, evidently for fear of contaminating its independent reputation. Some newsmen expressed the feeling that even the overtly funded Voice of America (VOA) was an improper intrusion by government into the private media sphere.

The effectiveness of the radios, particularly RL, was in dispute. At one point a cable from the U.S. embassy in Moscow suggested closing down RL on the assumption [End Page 175] that Soviet citizens could not hear it through the jamming. This appraisal changed when one intrepid embassy officer voyaged out of Moscow and reported successful reception at a number of locations. Further experiments showed that although short-range "ground-wave" jamming in the center of cities was almost totally effective, reception was better in outlying districts such as the dacha belts around Moscow, Leningrad, and other cities. Beginning in the 1970s, a computer simulation methodology to estimate the number of listeners devised by Ithiel de Sola Pool, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Frederick Mosteller, a mathematician at Harvard University, suggested that the audience for Western radios was in the millions, though skeptics existed. Even if the effectiveness of the radios was conceded, some U.S. ambassadors objected to the broadcasts on the ground that they complicated diplomatic relations with the host governments.

Other political problems also arose. As Cummings notes in...

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