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this stratagem would have the advantages of creating the impression of voluntary humanitarianism among American citizens and, at the same time, helping educate the U.S. public in the moral issues of the Cold War.
In April 1949, Kennan wrote Secretary of State Dean Acheson asking for the go-ahead to launch “one of the principal instrumentalities for accomplishing a number of our most important policy objectives.”4 Acheson in turn contacted diplomatic elder and veteran anti-Bolshevik Joseph Grew, who agreed to chair the new organization. Meanwhile, corporate lawyer Allen Dulles, still without a government position yet exerting a growing behind-the-scenes influence over the emergent U.S. intelligence apparatus, attended to the legal practicalities, filing a certificate of incorporation with the State of New York in May. On June 1, 1949, Grew held a press conference, announcing the formation of the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE) (a name later shortened to the Free Europe Committee) and introducing a group of sponsors that, in the words of Frances Stonor Saunders, “read like Who’s Who in America, ”
including Dwight Eisenhower, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Cecil B.
DeMille.5 Shortly afterward, Dulles accepted the post of executive secretary, leaving the more visible job of NCFE president to DeWitt C. Poole, a State Department expert on anticommunist propaganda who, as a young official in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, had witnessed the Bolshevik revolution and, during World War II, managed émigré relations for the OSS.
In 1951, Poole was succeeded by Time, Inc., senior executive C. D. Jackson, previously Eisenhower’s head of psychological warfare operations during the war.
According to outward appearances, the NCFE was an independent organization spontaneously formed by private American citizens, “one of those innumerable voluntary associations which make up democratic society,” as Grew put it.6 In fact, the New York–based corporation was a proprietary of Frank Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), which provided it, as per Kennan’s 1948 memo, with both secret guidance and funding, the former arriving in the shape of verbal or written directives from Washington, the latter a weekly check fetched from the Wall Street offices of investment bank Henry Sears & Co.7 Details of these arrangements were divulged to employees on a strictly “need-to-know” basis and only after a careful security vetting. There was, however, no shortage of clues as to the committee’s real nature. When questions of policy or the
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organization’s budget came up, “witting” officers would refer mysteriously to “our friends in the South” or the “Sponsor” (the committee itself was the “Fund”).8 Government classification codes appeared on internal committee memoranda, as did handwritten annotations with the initials
“F. W.”9 The whole operation had an oddly sleek feel to it for “a struggling young organization of European refugees.” Visitors to the NCFE’s headquarters expecting to find themselves in a “barren loft” discovered instead a plush suite of offices on the third floor of the Empire State Building.10 This high standard of accommodation reflected the generosity of the OPC’s patronage. “Contributions” received by the committee during the financial year 1951–52 alone amounted to $18,017,864.11
The obvious wealth of the NCFE created an urgent need for a cover story. This was provided by the “Crusade for Freedom,” a public fund-raising drive devised by Abbott Washburn, an ex-OSS officer and public relations expert who was seconded from food conglomerate General Mills for the purpose.12 Earlier in the century, the PR genius Edward L. Bernays had adapted such covert techniques as the front organization for commercial purposes, creating, for example, the Tobacco Society for Voice Culture, an apparently independent group dedicated to promoting the message that smoking improved people’s singing, on behalf of one of his clients, Ches-terfield cigarettes.13 During World War II, the U.S. public relations industry was pressed into the cause of strengthening civilian morale through the War Advertising Council (later renamed the Advertising Council), which encouraged the public to buy war bonds and conserve war materials.14 Now, Washburn was being invited to draw on this tradition of secret salesmanship and government service in order to “sell” the Cold War to the American public—and, in doing so, provide a plausible explanation for the large sums of cash sitting in the coffers of the National Committee for a Free Europe.15
Launched by General Eisenhower on Labor Day, 1950, the Crusade for Freedom employed a number of ingenious devices to stimulate the support of ordinary Americans. A “Freedom Bell,” cast (like the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall) in an English foundry, was transported around the nation on the “Freedom Train” before being shipped to Europe and, during an emotional ceremony watched by a crowd of 400,000, installed in the tower of the Schöneberg Rathaus in Berlin.16 Echoing the
“Campaign of Truth” launched earlier in the year by President Truman,
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radio appeals exhorted audiences to donate “truth dollars” to the cause, with celebrities such as actor Rock Hudson assuring listeners that the NCFE was “supported entirely by contributions by American citizens.”17
Civil air patrols “bombed” suburban neighborhoods with preprinted
“Freedom-grams” to be signed and sent to NCFE headquarters for distribution in eastern Europe.18 Although Washburn’s campaign raised only $2.25 to $3.3 million a year during the 1950s, a fraction of the NCFE’s total expenditure, it did manage to divert attention from the organization’s main source of funding and succeeded in imaginatively involving the American public in the plight of the captive nations. Its ubiquitous images and slogans became as familiar to 1950s Americans “as Ivory soap or Ford automobiles.”19
Given such a wealth of covert patronage and public support, one may ask, just what did the NCFE do? Much of its early activity consisted of efforts to relieve and rally the eastern-bloc refugees who were drifting into the United States. Attempts were made to form effective working groups, or “National Councils,” representing all the democratic political elements—socialist, Catholic, and peasant—in each of the Iron Curtain countries, with the OPC trying to control council membership.20 Individual émigrés undertaking research projects on aspects of the communist system were supported by regular grants from the NCFE. Brutus Coste, for example, an eminent Rumanian diplomat and scholar who was working on a project entitled “Democracy in Russia,” received a monthly stipend of $300.21 This interest in subsidizing academic endeavor with a possible intelligence dividend was evident also in several more ambitious initiatives undertaken in the NCFE’s first years. The organization established its own publishing house, Free Europe Press; a “Mid-European Studies Center” for newly arrived refugee scholars in New York; and a “Free Europe University in Exile” to educate eastern European émigré youth, housed in a chateau near Strasbourg, France.22
Such activities remained an important part of the NCFE’s program, but by 1950, as U.S.-Soviet relations plumbed new depths and the Cold War turned hot in Korea, the emphasis shifted to more aggressive forms of psychological warfare, which involved piercing the Iron Curtain itself. One method employed extensively by the NCFE had been tried and tested against the Nazis in World War II but now looks surprisingly low-tech.
Staff would travel to sites on the borders of the Soviet Union’s “satellite”
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nations and release balloons. Carried eastward on the prevailing winds, the balloons would explode once they had reached a height of 30,000 or 40,000 feet, showering propaganda materials—leaflets denouncing communist leaders, fake currency, and anticommunist “newspapers”—on the captive populations below. (One tongue-in-cheek proposal—to advertise the sexual prowess of American men by scattering extra-large, U.S.-manufactured condoms stamped “medium”—was abandoned at the planning stage.)23 The first such operation was launched from an open field near Regensburg, West Germany, in August 1951. The balloons floated toward the border with Czechoslovakia as planned, but then, to the consternation of the watching crowd, began drifting back. Fortunately for the NCFE officers present, the wind changed direction again, and the balloons eventually reached their target.24 Similar launches were carried out throughout the early 1950s; protests from eastern European officials were met with the claim that the U.S. government had no control over the actions of a private group of freedom-loving American citizens. Some 300
million pieces of propaganda were dropped over the “denied areas” before the practice was discontinued in the wake of the failed Hungarian uprising of 1956.25
By the mid-1950s the balloons were functioning merely as adjuncts to a technologically more sophisticated form of psychological warfare. Like so many “psy-war” tactics employed by the United States in the Cold War, the use of radio to propagandize eastern European populations had been pioneered by the Bolsheviks. On November 7, 1917, a message from Lenin to the Russian people was transmitted from the cruiser Aurora, an-chored at Petrograd, in Morse code. Later, during World War II, the people of Finland were “softened up” for Soviet annexation by intimidatory radio broadcasts.26 Now it was the anti-Bolsheviks’ turn to take to the airwaves. During the NCFE’s press launch in June 1949, Joseph Grew described a plan to “put the voices of . . . exiled leaders on the air, addressed to their own peoples back in Europe, in their own languages.”27 The State Department already had a foreign broadcast arm, the Voice of America, but it was designed to inform foreign audiences about the United States and was constrained from carrying out explicit propaganda by its overtly official ownership. The NCFE’s aim was to set up a station to act as a sort of surrogate home service for the Iron Curtain countries, an alternative to the communist-controlled media, with separate national desks enabling