Freedom on the airwaves

On February 21st 1981, a winter Saturday evening, a van pulled up outside the Radio Free Europe building in Munich. A man carrying a large parcel exited the vehicle. The suspicious parcel was left next to the building. Moments later, a massive explosion set off by a 20-kilogram bomb rocked the area around the Englischer Garten park. The material damage was considerable, yet by a stroke of luck few people were in the radio building at the time and, most importantly, no one was killed. The most seriously injured was the Czechoslovak journalist Maria Puhr. The doctors who fought to save her life, fortunately succeeded.

Who was behind the attack on Radio Free Europe? One of the leads only came to light after 1989, following the end of East Germany and the release of the Stasi files. It then emerged that the attack on the broadcaster’s headquarters had been carried out on the orders of the Romanian political police, the Securitate, and that the operation was to be carried out by a group led by the most notorious assassin in the terrorist world of the 1970s and 1980s – Carlos, the “Jackal”. His real name was Carlos Ramirez Sanchez, a Venezuelan by birth and the son of a self-declared communist. Wanted by many western countries, the Jackal hid from law enforcement in Syria, Algeria and various countries of the Soviet bloc. He collaborated with the Eastern Bloc countries and was a guest under the protection of the ruling communists in both East Berlin and Warsaw. Working for their intelligence services, he carried out contract killings. Today, he is serving a life sentence in France for his numerous murders and attacks.

Constant threat

From the very beginning, Radio Free Europe was repeatedly targeted by the communist secret services. The staff of all the national sections based in the Munich offices lived under a continuous threat to their safety. The most widely documented cases of attacks on the station’s staff include: September 1954 – the body of the Belarusian journalist Leonid Karas was found in the Isar river, which flows through Munich; two months later, unknown assailants murdered the Azerbaijani editor Abdulrachmann Fatalibey; and in March 1975, the Romanian journalist Cornel Chiriac was killed by 12 stab wounds to the chest. The bomb attack on the radio station 40 years ago was the culmination of the campaign against it, but it did not put an end to the attacks. Less than half a year later, the Romanian editor Emil Georgescu was seriously injured outside his home in Haar.

Radio Free Europe (RFE) was launched in 1950 and initially broadcast programmes to Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania. Three years later, Radio Liberty (RL) began broadcasting programmes to the Soviet Union – not only in Russian, but also in 17 other national languages (for the non-Russian-speaking Soviet republics). In the early years of their operation, RFE and RL were funded primarily by the United States Congress via the CIA. Radio Free Europe also benefitted from private donations collected as part of the “Crusade for Freedom” campaign. In 1971, the CIA withdrew its funding for RFE and RL. From that point onwards, both stations were supported by public funds allocated by the US Congress. Initially, this was channelled through the International Broadcasting Board, and after 1995 through the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which later adopted the name USAGM.

Both stations served as an alternative to state-operated media in the countries behind the Iron Curtain. They often covered domestic news stories that were censored and ignored by the regime’s media, with most programmes produced at the broadcaster’s Munich headquarters. From there they were transmitted to the rest of the world via shortwave and medium-wave transmitters located in Germany, Spain, Portugal and, until the early 1970s, also in Taiwan.

By the end of the 1960s, RFE/RL had become an integral part of the media landscape in the Eastern Bloc. Their programmes did not focus on high-level international politics but rather addressed the day-to-day affairs of the target countries. Furthermore, the stations’ European mission was to maintain links between listeners behind the Iron Curtain and the West, to strengthen hopes for the restoration of freedom, and to support the slow but inevitable changes which, after 1989, came to be known as the path to a
“united and free Europe”.

In 1976, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty merged to form a single organization (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty – RFE/RL), which continues to operate under that name to this day. After 1989, RFE/RL began establishing offices in all the European countries that had regained their independence following the Autumn of Nations. The broadcaster’s journalists also helped to nurture a new generation of reporters and editors in these countries, passing on to them not only practical skills but also a professional ethos based on integrity, independence, and respect for facts and the credibility of the spoken word.

The importance of these experiences became apparent sooner than anticipated. During the failed coup in the Soviet Union in 1991, RFE/RL’s Russian editorial team was one of the few sources of reliable and independent information. Shortly afterwards, the broadcaster had a clear path to official accreditation in Russia. In August of the same year, President Boris Yeltsin signed a decree authorizing the opening of an RFE/RL office in Moscow. This event carried extraordinary symbolic significance.

Mission accomplished?

The broadcaster’s victory also brought new challenges, as the fall of communism led some decision-makers to believe that RFE/RL had fulfilled its historic mission. Deep budget cuts made it impossible for the broadcaster to continue operating in Germany. It was then, at the invitation of Czech President Václav Havel, that RFE/RL moved its headquarters to Prague, where, in 1995, it began a new chapter in its history in the former seat of the Czechoslovak parliament.

As the countries of Central and Eastern Europe joined NATO and the European Union, RFE/RL’s management increasingly recognized that its mission was drawing to a close. The Hungarian office was closed in 1993, and four years later the Polish office ceased operations. In the years that followed, the broadcaster began to gradually wind down more of its operations. In 2002, Czech-language broadcasts ceased; two years later, the services aimed at Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Bulgaria were shut down; and in 2008, programmes for Romania were discontinued.

As democracy and media freedom came under renewed pressure, the broadcaster expanded opportunities for independent journalism. Following the violent break-up of Yugoslavia, RFE/RL launched services for the states that emerged from the former federation. It later adopted a similar approach in response to Russia’s military aggression and its growing use of disinformation as an instrument of political and military influence in the early 21st century. Following the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, the broadcaster launched the Russian-language project Ekho Kavkaza (Эхо Кавказа) aimed at audiences in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, RFE/RL’s Ukrainian team launched a trilingual project Krym.Realii and the Russian-language portal Donbas.Realii. In the same year, in collaboration with Voice of America, the Russian-language digital news network Nastoyashchee Vremya (Настоящее Время) was started.

In response to escalating Russian disinformation, RFE/RL expanded its scope of operations between 2016 and 2019, creating Russian-language websites for audiences in the North Caucasus, Siberia and north-western Russia. From December 2017, the Russian Ministry of Justice began to brand RFE/RL and nine of its Russian-language projects as “foreign media acting as foreign agents”. In the years that followed, dozens of journalists working with the broadcaster were subjected to this status. In March 2022, the Russian authorities initiated bankruptcy proceedings, forcing RFE/RL to suspend its operations in Moscow. For safety reasons, its Russia-based journalists fled the country and relocated to Latvia.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 became one of the defining moments in RFE/RL’s recent history. The broadcaster’s journalists and staff went out into the field to report on the fighting in eastern Ukraine, documenting Russian atrocities and alleged war crimes committed against the civilian population – including in Bucha and Izium. Their reporting also covered the environmental impact of the war and the plight of millions of Ukrainian refugees and internally displaced persons. In February 2024, the Russian authorities designated RFE/RL as an “undesirable organization”.

From 1998 RFE/RL expanded its coverage in the Middle East and South Asia, launching Arabic broadcasts to Iraq and Persian-language programming for Iran, later renamed Radio Farda. It also resumed Dari and Pashto services for Afghanistan and broadcasts in Avar, Chechen and Circassian for the Russian North Caucasus. In 2010, Radio Mashaal began serving north-western Pakistan and the Afghan-Pakistani border region. The Iraqi service merged with Radio Sawa in 2015. After the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021, RFE/RL closed its Kabul office and evacuated its journalists and their families. Budget cuts later led to the closure of the Hungarian service in November 2025 and the Bulgarian, Romanian, North Macedonian and Radio Mashaal teams in March 2026. RFE/RL currently broadcasts in 24 languages to audiences in 18 countries.

Balloon war

RFE/RL’s story begins immediately after the Second World War, in Berlin, which was divided into occupation zones. Founded in the German capital, within the American occupation zone, RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) enjoyed unexpected success. The programmes’ audience and popularity extended far beyond the American sector and the city itself. Thanks to the station’s powerful transmitters, the entire Soviet occupation zone was also able to listen. RIAS became a source of information for the eastern part of occupied Germany.

“What if”, thought soft power experts, “we were to extend RIAS’s success to the whole of Eastern Europe, which had been seized by Stalin?” Their idea quickly gained the support of the US authorities. After the end of the Second World War, the paths of the Allied nations in the fight against Nazism began to diverge. As a result of the war, Stalin’s Red Army had occupied the whole of Central and Eastern Europe and had no intention of leaving the territories it had seized. There was no question of democratic self-determination or pluralism in Hungary, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia or Bulgaria. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia became direct parts of the Soviet empire.

How could one reach the people behind the Iron Curtain, stretching from Szczecin to Trieste, which the former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had already announced in 1946? What was to be done about encroaching communism and the new alliance between the Soviet Union and communist China, which threatened the democratic world? And what was to be done about the ideological battle – the struggle for people’s minds? What hope could be offered to an abandoned and betrayed Eastern Europe? How could the spirits of the apathetic societies be lifted? Radio became one of the answers.

Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, the first head of RFE’s Polish section, wrote in his memoirs that the Czechoslovak team were the first to move into the sprawling building on the edge of the Englischer Garten in Munich, even before the building was officially handed over in May 1951. Next came the Hungarians, followed by the Poles, and after them the Bulgarians and Romanians. “Upon crossing the threshold of the building on the Englischer Garten for the first time”, Jeziorański wrote in his memoirs, “I was struck by such incredible commotion, as if someone had just thrust a stick into an anthill. Although the Czechoslovak Broadcasting Station had already been on air for five months, the building was not yet finished; wings were being hastily erected to soon house the Hungarians and Poles.”

The “balloon war” became the first of many unprecedented and legendary operations carried out by RFE. In the summer, a wave of weather balloons swept over Czechoslovakia. This time, however, the organizers were not interested in weather research. Leaflets and information to which citizens of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic had no access were placed inside the balloons sent over Prague and Plzeň. The materials, prepared by the Czech and Slovak sections, reported on events in the Eastern Bloc countries and bolstered national spirit. Operation “Prospero” – as the balloon campaign was codenamed – proved a success and sent the communists into a panic. Extraordinary measures were employed to shoot down the balloons (including the Soviet MiG-15 jet fighters). The balloons, which had become a symbol of freedom, flooded the Czech and Slovak skies in waves. The campaign was repeated in Hungary and subsequently in Poland. The communist authorities’ response to the promotion of RFE was an increase in the installation of “jammers” – devices designed to disrupt the reception of radio broadcasts from the free world.

Despite the success of the campaign, fears arose that it might become the spark for some kind of unprepared uprising. Seemingly, the concerned editors at RFE were right. Expectations behind the Iron Curtain were clear – a Third World War. Only a war would set us free and remove the Soviet yoke, thought the people in the Eastern Bloc. The leaders in Moscow would not relinquish their dominance over this part of the continent so easily.

 The first confrontation with the regime took place in Berlin in 1953. An uprising was suppressed by the Soviet army stationed there. The next outbreak of social unrest occurred in October and November 1956, during the Hungarian uprising for independence. Even whilst the uprising was underway, but particularly after it had been crushed, Andor Gellert, director of the Hungarian section of RFE, was accused, along with his team, of fuelling the Hungarians’ hopes and expectations of western aid.

The outcome of an in-depth debate was the conclusion that the content of programmes should be reviewed prior to broadcast and approved for publication, so as not to provide a pretext for attacks on the station. A programme monitoring mechanism was established to respond to potential problems. In 1968, during the Prague Spring, these mechanisms were already in operation. The Czechoslovak team remained calm and acted responsibly, without raising false hopes. A measured response also guided the Polish section of RFE during the events of 1970, as well as during the emergence of the Solidarity movement in 1981.

Why do we need RFE today?

It seems that today, in many parts of the world, we are seeing renewed attempts to muzzle freedom of speech and access to information through censorship. At the same time, the most important issue remains the preservation of a democratic state governed by the rule of law, as opposed to a democratic state without the rule of law. Political movements have emerged today that invoke democratic equality and the sovereignty of the people in order to weaken the institutional mechanisms for checking power. All this takes place within the framework of formal democracy. Charismatic populist leaders are gaining popularity and consolidating their power by undermining various political arrangements. In doing so, they are eroding the foundations of the constitutional order developed over the decades following 1945. They are supported in this subversion by a section of society. These are people who applaud attacks on legal and constitutional norms, and who would gladly welcome a democratic system that is at the same time illiberal or even anti-liberal. The appeal of illiberal democracy, as Viktor Orbán termed it years ago, is in fact nothing new. Meanwhile, the attempt at a global resurgence of authoritarian populism reflects the tensions within contemporary society.

During his second term, US President Donald Trump moved to reshape American institutions in line with his administration’s political and ideological priorities – changes that critics described as increasingly authoritarian. Several organizations that had long supported democracy and independent media were closed, scaled back or restructured. RFE/RL, however, could not simply be eliminated while Congress continued to fund it. The broadcaster challenged the administration’s attempt to withhold its funding, securing court orders requiring the release of money appropriated by Congress.

The challenges facing RFE/RL today are a reminder that independent journalism remains as important as ever. Autocrats seek to control not only political institutions but also the flow of information and the way citizens understand the world around them. The history of RFE/RL demonstrates that independent reporting can serve as an effective counterweight to such efforts, and that its mission remains as relevant today as it was when the broadcaster first went on air.

 

Piotr Leszczyński is an editor and publisher of Przegląd Polityczny, as well as a member of the Polish PEN Club.