p From its very first days, Radio Liberty, under CIA guidance, began planned spying operations. Soviet citizen Y. Marin who for several years had worked with Radio Liberty as Konstantin Neastrov, had investigated this aspect of RL activities in detail and submitted to competent Soviet authorities documentary proof that duplicated similar evidence about Radio Free Europe supplied by its former employees—intelligence officers Andrzej Czechowicz of Poland, P. Minafik of Czechoslovakia, and Kh. Khristov of Bulgaria.^^7^^

p Radio Liberty performs a wide range of intelligencegatliering functions. By using open Soviet sources, above all the press, Radio Liberty employees compile, specially tor the CIA, surveys and forecasts of the state and development of the Soviet armed forces, the defense industry, the overall economic potential, and various sociological and domestic political development trends in Soviet society. Banking on their status of self-appointed ’natural experts on the Russian soul and Russian thinking’, incomprehensible to Western intelligence agencies (including their CIA masters), the traitors employed by Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe often draw self-righteous conclusions and recommendations. Of course, one should not overestimate their influence on the shaping of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. Still, those U.S. politicians who oppose detente gladly use the results of such Radio Liberty ‘research’ as additional arguments to further their cause.

p A special RL department is in charge of another intelligence operation: monitoring both radio communications within the Soviet Union and radio communications between Soviet centers and civilian and naval vessels on the high seas and aircraft in flight. Radio and telephone communications of Soviet and foreign embassies and missions in third countries are also monitored. When in the 1970s Radio Liberty was officially recognized as a CIA subsidiary, its radio monitoring service was simply moved to the quarters of U.S. troops stationed in Iho FRG.

p Radio Liberty is equally active (although less successful) in spying on the U.S.S.R. by contacting Soviet citizens abroad, a task made easier by the fact that RL has offices and agents virtually in all Western countries.

p The symbiosis of Radio Liberty’s propaganda-cum- subvcrsion-cum-spying is clear: its mission was defined by the CIA’s OPC^^8^^ and has since remained unchanged. That is typical of psychological warfare. According to Ray Cline, subversive radio stations used subtle psychological pressure in their broadcasts. The CIA set up this operation upon request of government officials: the broadcasts were supposed to be more effective if 4hoy could not be traced lo the U.S. government.^^9^^ That was the concept of propaganda as part of subversion in action, and it fitted the formula once suggested by Donovan:

p ’Foreign propaganda must be employed as an instrument of war—a judicious mixture of rumor and deception, with truth as a bait, to foster disunity and confusion ... In point of fact, propaganda is the arrow of initial penetration in preparing the people of a territory where invasion may be contemplated. It is the first step; then fifth column work; then militarized raiders or “commandos”; then finally the invading divisions.’^^10^^

p From the CIA viewpoint, that World War II formula has never lost its relevance. Its implementation beyond the initial stage is impossible not because the CIA is reluctant to go whole hog but because of circumstances it cannot control. The 1956 counterrevolutionary putsch in Hungary was a good example. The origins of the bloody clashes in that country can be traced to the subversion of Western intelligence services. Firebrand radio broadcasts to Hungary were merely one of its external aspects. At any rale, these broadcasts fostered the insurgents’ confidence: they need only begin, and the West will launch a massive invasion to support them. Without such assurances, the counterrevolutionaries would never have dared take up arms.

p As soon as the putsch started, Richard Nixon, then Vice-President of the United States, hurried to the Austrian areas bordering on Hungary where he met a group of rebels. ’Do you feel that the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe played a part in encouraging the revolution?’ he asked. ’Looks of surprise came over their faces as my deliberately undiplomatic question was translated. One of them blurted out the answer—“Yes”.’^^11^^ Even those who were with the rebels and later tried to picture the putsch as a ‘spontaneous’ uprising recalled that wherever a gang assembled, there was always a radio set tuned in to Radio Free Europe. Inflammatory broadcasts, addressed above all to that audience, assured the bandits that they were on the right track.

p Exactly 20 years after the counterrevolutionary putsch, The New York Times featured an article entitled ’56 East Europe Plan of CIA Is Described. It was an interview with J. Angleton, the man in charge of CIA counter-intelligence and subversion in 1956. Apparently, this former CIA executive wanted to mark the inglorious anniversary and gripe about some details in the book Ray Cline had just 121 published. Here is the newspaper account of the interview with Angleton:

p ‘ “Having the document gave us enormous advantage to organize and update those operational groups which were authorized in 1950,” he (Mr. Angleton) continued, referring to a directive that established the agency’s covert political-action arm, the Office of Policy Coordination, with an authorization for paramilitary operational groups to be used “with a view of never accepting the status quo of Soviet hegemony.” Mr. Wisner, who had been recommended by Gen. George C. Marshall (then Secretary of Defense— N.Y.) to head the covert action program, and Mr. Angleton promoted “vast preparations for refurbishing operational groups" . . . The Eastern Europeans, in part former members of prewar peasant parties and largely from Hungary, Poland and Rumania, with some from Czechoslovakia, were trained at a secret installation in West Germany by CIA paramilitary specialists, he said. He added that the units were headed by a man he described as “a born leader, a Yugoslav, whose schooling was in the Hapsburg military academy" ...’ ’Nationalist risings in Poland, Hungary and Rumania’ were provoked ’too soon for the covert operational groups to respond.’^^12^^

p That was hardly the reason. William Colby’s book is probably closer to the truth in its description of CIA subversion experts converging like vultures on the Hungarian border at the very first reports of the putsch:

p ’Ever since the creation of the OPC under Frank Wisner’s direction, the Agency had had—or at least believed that it had—a mission to assist military, in the OSS tradition, resistance groups—call them freedom fighters in the Hungarian case—seeking to overthrow Communist totalitarian regimes ... But once the uprising was underway, there can be no doubt that Wisner and other top officials of his Directorate of Plans (since 1952 the new name of the OPC which merged with other CIA departments—N.Y.), especially those on the covert action side, were fully prepared with arms, communications stocks and air resupply, to come to the aid of the freedom fighters. This was exactly the end for which the Agency’s paramilitary 122 capability was designed. And a case can be made that they could have done so without involving the United States in a world war with the Soviet Union. ’But President Eisenhower overruled them. Whatever doubts may have existed in the Agency about Washington’s policy in matters like this vanished. It was established, once and for all, that the United States, while firmly committed to the containment of the Soviets within their existing sphere of influence, was not going to attempt to liberate any of the areas within that sphere ... the price might have been World War III.

p ’Wisner went to Vienna at the end of the uprising and traveled to the Hungarian border to watch . . . Shortly after, he resigned from the Agency for health reasons, and Richard Bissell succeeded him ... Wisner never fully recovered, and his eventual suicide was as much a casualty of the realities of the Gold War as was that of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal.’^^13^^

p While Wisner’s terrorists were straining at the leash in late 1956, the White House was much more realistic about a possible war between the United States and the Soviet Union. About that time Washington was coming to realize that the United States was vulnerable to a return strike. The lessons of the counterrevolutionary putsch in Hungary were not lost on the administration: while the armed outbreak stemmed from the subversion by US intelligence services, President Eisenhower could not allow the events in Hungary to trigger a world nuclear war. But they were not learned properly enough: psychological warfare has its own inertia and logic. According to Colby, what happened in Hungary ’provided a wonderful propaganda opportunity . . . The CIA and its allies did everything they could to reinforce the impact in Italy.’^^14^^

p In 1959 Congress approved the so-called Captive Nations Resolution urging Americans to mourn the destiny of those nations annually and call for their ‘liberation’. The resolution stunned even George Kennan, an old hand. Apparently, he was genuinely shocked when he wrote, in the second volume of his memoirs published in 1972, about the maze into which psychological warfare had led the United States:

p ’It was the existence in our country of one vocal and not uninfluential element that not only wanted a war with Russia but had a very clear idea of the purposes for which, in its own view, such a war should be fought. I have in mind the escapees and immigrants, mostly recent ones, from the non-Russian portions of the postwar Soviet Union, as well as from some of the Eastern European satellite states. Their idea, to which they were passionately and sometimes ruthlessly attached, was simply that the United States should, for their benefit, fight a war against the Russian people to achieve the final break-up of the traditional Russian state and the establishment of themselves as the regimes of various “liberated” territories ... They appealed successfully at times to religious feeling (in the U.S.A.—N.Y.), and even more importantly, to the prevailing anti-Communist hysteria. An idea of the political power they possessed can be had from the fact that some years later (1959) they were able to recommend to Congress, through their friends there, the text of a resolution—the so-called Captive Nations Resolution—every word of which was written (on his own published admission) by their spokesman, Dr. Lev E. Dobriansky, then associate professor at Georgetown University, and to get this document solemnly adopted by Congress as a statement of American policy. This resolution committed the United States, insofar as Congress had the power to do so, to the “liberation” of twenty-two “nations”, two of which had never had any real existence, and the name of one of which appears to have been invented in the Nazi propaganda ministry during the recent war. . . I could think of nothing worse than what these people wanted us to do. To commit ourselves politically and militarily not only against the Soviet regime but also against the strongest and most numerous ethnic element in the traditional Russian land... This would have been a folly of such stupendous dimensions that even the later venture in Vietnam now pales to insignificance beside the thought of it.

p ’I also had some awareness of the limits of our own power, and I knew that what was being asked and expected of us here far exceeded these limits,’^^15^^

p That is all very well, but could it be that Kennan did not know who fed and supported those people? He must have known that the CIA stood behind them.

Washington increasingly recognized the power of the Soviet Union, which explains why declarations of intent were not followed by acts that could precipitate a big war.