Radio Free Europe: The Voice from Behind the Iron Curtain

For nearly half a century, millions of Poles turned the dial on their radios in the evenings, searching through the noise and the howling of jammers for the familiar signal and the words "This is Radio Free Europe speaking." The Polish Station in Munich reported on what the newspapers and television in the PRL were silent about: the behind-the-scenes of power, strikes and protests in the country, and what was happening in the world. For some, it was the only source of truth; for the PRL authorities, it was the number one enemy, fought against with propaganda, agents, and a network of jamming transmitters.

In this guide, we explain how and why Radio Free Europe was created, who financed it, how the Polish Station operated under the leadership of Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, and which broadcasts changed the course of events. We clarify how and on what people listened to Free Europe, how jamming worked and how much it cost, whether there were penalties for listening, and what else the authorities did to silence the radio. Finally, we discuss the fate of the station after 1989 and Radio Free Europe today. Where sources differ or something could not be confirmed, we state this directly.

How and Why Radio Free Europe Was Created

The history of Radio Free Europe begins not in Munich, but in New York. On June 1, 1949, the National Committee for a Free Europe was established there. According to the Hoover Institution, which today houses the station's archives, the idea originated from the State Department: George Kennan asked former ambassador Joseph C. Grew to gather a group of prominent citizens willing to endorse an anti-communist organization. Founding members included Allen Dulles, later head of the CIA, and diplomat DeWitt Clinton Poole. Among the members were General Dwight Eisenhower, General Lucius D. Clay, publisher Henry Luce, director Cecil B. DeMille, and DeWitt Wallace.

Officially, it was a private citizen initiative. In practice, as Rafał Opulski from the IPN writes, the committee was supervised by the U.S. State Department and the CIA. The idea was simple: thousands of refugees from countries where communists had seized power lived in America and Western Europe – politicians, journalists, writers, radio people. Jan Nowak-Jeziorański recalled that one of the goals was to give "prominent emigrants a field of action and provide them with work corresponding to their aspirations." The main tool of the committee was to be radio, which would speak in the languages of the nations behind the Iron Curtain about what the censored press and state radio could not say.

Money from the CIA – a Documented Fact

For the first two decades, Radio Free Europe was financed by the U.S. Congress through the CIA, although it publicly presented itself as a private corporation. Oversight was provided by Frank Wisner, head of the Office of Policy Coordination in the CIA, among others. This is not a conspiracy theory, but a fact described in declassified documents and in the works of historians, primarily A. Ross Johnson, author of the book "Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond." Professor Jakub Tyszkiewicz emphasized in an interview with PAP that the station was a tool of U.S. policy during the Cold War, and that "the Polish section was under constant control of the American government."

The secret began to unravel in 1967. The March issue of the magazine "Ramparts" revealed that the CIA was financing civilian organizations. The station was not mentioned in it, but the article triggered journalistic investigations, and a series of articles in the "New York Times," followed by a CBS television documentary, revealed the connections between RWE and the CIA. In 1971, Senator Clifford Case introduced a bill that aimed to transfer the station's funding from the CIA's secret budget to public funds. An influential critic of the station was Senator J. William Fulbright, but ultimately the Senate passed the International Broadcasting Act by a vote of 76 to 10, which became law on October 19, 1973. From then on, the money came openly from a budget approved by Congress, and the board allocated it to the station's management. When exactly the funding from the CIA ended is reported differently by sources: the station itself on its historical page and historian A. Ross Johnson mention 1971, while the Hoover Institution states 1972. This may stem from whether one counts the political decision or the last budget year, but we could not resolve this.

“Crusade for Freedom” and the Bell for Berlin

To cover the true source of funding and build support for the station in America itself, the Crusade for Freedom campaign was launched in 1950. It was inaugurated by General Eisenhower with a radio address on Labor Day, September 4, 1950. He announced that it was necessary to "fight the great lie with the great truth." The chairman was General Lucius D. Clay, the hero of the Berlin Airlift, and from 1952, Henry Ford II. Americans were encouraged to make small donations called "dollars of truth." One of the main spokesmen for the campaign was actor Ronald Reagan, who appeared in the propaganda film "The Big Truth" in 1951.

The symbol of the crusade became the Freedom Bell. It was designed by Walter Dorwin Teague, cast by the British foundry Gillett and Johnston, and weighed about 10 tons. It bears an English inscription modeled on Lincoln's words, which translates to: "That this world, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom." The bell toured the United States on a truck, and over 16 million Americans signed the "Scrolls of Freedom," which are kept with it. On October 24, 1950, General Clay ceremoniously presented it to West Berlin, and according to available reports, over 400,000 Berliners attended the ceremony. The bell still hangs in the tower of the Schöneberg Town Hall. However, the money from the crusade never maintained the radio: in the first year, about 1.3 million dollars were raised, and in the 1950s, according to later estimates, between 2.25 and 3.3 million annually, which constituted only a small part of the committee's expenses. Interestingly, according to studies of the campaign's history, the CIA spent about 5 million dollars on the crusade itself over five years.

The First Broadcasts and the Polish “Voice of Free Poland”

In January 1950, the committee secured a broadcasting base in Lampertheim in West Germany. On July 4, 1950, on American Independence Day, it broadcast its first program – to Czechoslovakia. This shortwave transmitter was called "Barbara," and for the first six months, it operated completely alone. According to the official history of the station, from the beginning it directed programs to Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and Hungary.

The Polish broadcasts began with a modest program called "Voice of Free Poland," prepared in New York. It initially lasted half an hour, later an hour. Recordings were sent by airmail to Germany and broadcast from an antenna near Frankfurt. The team was initially led by former diplomat Lesław Bodeński, who was later replaced by pre-war journalist Stanisław Strzetelski, editor of "Wieczór Warszawski." The date of the first broadcast is uncertain: dzieje.pl states August 4, 1950, while the text on the IPN Przystanek Historia portal generally refers to the spring of 1950.

The true beginning of the Polish Station was on May 3, 1952. At 11:00 AM, after the first notes of the melody, which dzieje.pl calls "May Mazurka," the announcer said: "This is Radio Free Europe, the Voice of Free Poland." Harold Miller, the committee chairman, and the new director Jan Nowak-Jeziorański spoke. "Know that no curtain of falsehood and lies will ever obscure your face – the true face of Poland," said Nowak. The listeners were welcomed by Zbigniew Błażyński. According to Rafał Opulski from the IPN, in this first broadcast, Nowak also said: "Poland lives, Poland fights, Poland will win!" The name "Polish Station of Radio Free Europe" was adopted only in March 1958. According to the IPN, this was to emphasize the informative character of the station and to dispel accusations that the radio spoke on behalf of the emigration or any political group.

Munich, Portugal, and Transmitters

The headquarters was located in Munich, at Oettingenstraße 67, on the edge of the Englischer Garten park. On May 1, 1951, RWE broadcast its first program from the still unfinished studio complex, and a ceremony inaugurating the new transmitter took place at the Bayerischer Hof hotel. Today, the building houses institutes of Ludwig Maximilian University.

However, the most important were the transmitters. On the same May 1, 1951, a medium-wave transmitter was launched in Holzkirchen near Munich, at the former Luftwaffe airfield. Known as "Carola," it had a power of 135,000 watts and broadcast to Czechoslovakia, and later transmitted programs to Portugal. Shortwave transmitters in Biblis in Hesse took over the role of "Barbara." The most surprising element was Portugal. The government of António Salazar agreed in 1951 to build a center in Glória do Ribatejo, but stipulated that no independent program would be broadcast from Portuguese soil. Formally, it was an independent Portuguese company, RARET, that broadcast. "Barbara" was transported there from Lampertheim and was back on the air on July 4, 1951. The signal from Glória reached its target by bouncing off the ionosphere, which, according to the station itself, made Soviet jamming more difficult. By 1954, there were already twelve transmitters in Glória, and by 1971, eighteen. The center broadcast until 1996. From 1959, a station in Pals, Spain, also operated.

Radio Liberty and the Merger into RFE/RL

A separate radio broadcast to the Soviet Union. The American Committee for the Liberation of the Nations of Russia launched it on March 1, 1953, also from Lampertheim, under the name Radio Liberation from Bolshevism. In 1956, it was shortened to Radio Liberation, and later renamed Radio Liberty, in Polish Radio Swoboda. By the end of 1954, it was broadcasting in 17 languages. The two stations merged in 1976 into Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. In 1982, the International Broadcasting Board took full control of the merged corporation. In 1995, the headquarters moved from Munich to Prague, to the former building of the Czechoslovak parliament, which was proposed by President Václav Havel.

The Polish Station in Munich

Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, actually Zdzisław Antoni Jeziorański, was a man of legend in 1952: a courier of the Home Army, an emissary of the Supreme Commander, a participant in the Warsaw Uprising. In December 1951, after consultations with representatives of the emigration National Council of the Republic of Poland, he was entrusted with building the Polish section in Munich. For several months, he assembled a team, largely from pre-war Polish Radio personnel and correspondents from the Polish Press Agency. He led the station continuously until December 31, 1975. It is often noted as "1952–1976" because his successor formally took office in 1976. He described his years in Munich in two volumes of memoirs: "War in the Ether" (1985) and "Poland from Afar" (1988). After leaving the radio, he settled in Washington, advising the State Department on Eastern European matters from 1977 to 1989, and from 1979 to 1996, he was the national director of the Polish American Congress.

Subsequent Directors

After Nowak, the station was led by:

• Zygmunt Michałowski (1976–1982) – during his time, the station read in installments the entire three-volume "The Gulag Archipelago" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In a letter to the writer, Michałowski explained that he wanted to show Poles the "community of suffering."
• Zdzisław Najder (1982–1987) – a literary scholar and initiator of the Polish Independence Agreement. He was in Oxford when martial law was declared and decided not to return to the country. On May 28, 1983, the Warsaw Military District Court sentenced him in absentia to death for alleged espionage on behalf of the U.S. Historian from the IPN Witold Wasilewski believes that the real reason was his opposition activity, especially taking over the leadership of the station. The sentence was overturned in 1989. It is fair to add that the IPN also describes his earlier episode: in 1958, he began cooperating with the SB under the pseudonym "Lighter," but broke it off in the early 1960s (other studies mention the years 1958–1963). Najder himself claimed that the talks with the SB were intended to mislead it.
• Marek Łatyński (1987–1989).
• Piotr Mroczyk (1989–1994).

Voices and Programs

Listeners knew the schedule by heart. The most important was the news and public affairs service "Facts, Events, Opinions" and "Day Panorama," broadcast since 1959, and "Week Panorama." There was "Road through the Village" for farmers, "Review of Western Press," religious broadcasts with Father Tadeusz Kirschke, the series by Tadeusz Żenczykowski "From the History of the PRL," "Contemporary History of Poland," and "At Our Neighbors." Andrzej Chomiński read banned books on air in the program "On the Red Index."

Tadeusz Nowakowski, a writer, was the editor of the station from 1952, and moved to Munich in 1953. Under the pseudonym Tadeusz Olsztyński, he hosted "Day Panorama" and weekly stories "At the Café Table." As a reporter for the station, he covered the pilgrimages of John Paul II and earned the nickname "the Pope's reporter." Wiktor Trościanko, at the station since 1952, hosted the program "The Other Side of the Coin," in which he dissected communist propaganda. Marian Hemar, living in London, hosted a one-man "Hemara Theater" on the Polish Station, a weekly radio cabaret with satirical commentary in verse.

In the 1980s, from 1984, Jacek Kaczmarski worked at the station. He hosted his own "Quarter Hour of Jacek Kaczmarski" and wrote commentaries for "Facts, Events, Opinions." He remained in Munich until the station's closure. The list of employees and collaborators also includes Zbigniew Błażyński, Maria Badowicz, Tadeusz Chciuk-Celt, and Bronisław Wildstein, and among the authors outside the staff were Stanisław Barańczak, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Leopold Tyrmand, and Józef Wittlin.

Where the News Came From

The station had, in various years, its own correspondents in Bonn, Hamburg, Berlin, Rome, Stockholm, Paris, Vienna, Washington, and New York. The second pillar was monitoring. The station followed Polish Radio, as well as regional stations and national media. From West Berlin, where a sub-studio of RWE operated, Radio Szczecin was well heard. Paradoxically, as historian Paweł Szulc notes, it is thanks to preserved RWE broadcasts that today one can reconstruct what the Szczecin station said in December 1970, whose own archives were decimated.

The third source was people: defectors like Józef Światło, foreign journalists returning from Poland, acquaintances of editors who heard or saw something. Poles traveling in the West and defectors were also questioned by the American research department, which tried to determine how many people listened to the radio. The fourth source was independent literature. After 1976, the station publicized texts from independent press. The sister station Radio Liberty collected samizdat so thoroughly that a separate Samizdat Archive was established in Munich. Transmitting information to Munich was risky in the PRL: as Paweł Szulc writes, the security apparatus pursued not only listeners but also those who tried to deliver news from the country to the station. In December 1981, RWE Vice President William Buell told the "Christian Science Monitor" that the station does not broadcast news unless it comes from at least two independent sources.

Program Line and Its Critics

From the beginning, Nowak announced that the station would not call for armed resistance, conspiracy, or uprising. Its main task was to defend Polish identity against Sovietization, and the tool was truth. The Hoover Institution describes the line that RWE adhered to in 1956 as "liberalization instead of liberation." Such restraint did not please everyone, including in Munich itself. Wiktor Trościanko was opposed to the political and editorial line of Nowak and Jadwiga Mieczkowska. What historians later established about him is described in the section on the PRL's war with Free Europe. On the other hand, the PRL authorities presented the station as a CIA agency and a tool of American imperialism. We describe the relations with the emigration government in London in the guide about the government in exile.

How Many People, How Much Money, How Many Listeners

We could not find a reliable number for the budget of the Polish Station itself, and American documents usually provide costs for the entire corporation. It is known that in December 1981, the "Christian Science Monitor" estimated the Polish RWE team at about 70 people, compared to 17 in the Polish section of Voice of America. The same newspaper reported that the budget for the entire corporation for the current budget year was nearly 90 million dollars.

Listener numbers are a topic where sources differ the most, and it is worth knowing why. The government’s Public Opinion Research Center asked people in the country, who were afraid to admit to listening to the "hostile" station, and the results went to the party leadership. The American research department East European Audience and Opinion Research spoke with Poles traveling in the West and defectors, and such results could not be extrapolated to the entire society. According to data collected by Paweł Szulc, OBOP reported 20 percent in 1969, and 7.6 percent in 1973, while American studies for the same years indicated 59 and 57 percent. The discrepancies reached 50 percentage points. The Security Service estimated in the mid-1960s that about 30 percent of Poles listened to Western stations, mainly RWE. Szulc considers this result to be probably the closest to the truth, although it may also be inflated. Professor Andrzej Friszke, based on the work of Jolanta Hajdasz, spoke of even 20 percent of the population in calm times and 50 percent of receiver owners in times of tension, and among clergy, journalists, writers, and lawyers, about 70–80 percent. All these numbers are estimates, and none can be considered definitive. More about listenership studies is discussed in the section on how Free Europe was listened to.

Broadcasts That Changed History

Światło: The Secret Police from the Kitchen

On December 5, 1953, in Berlin, Colonel Józef Światło, the deputy director of the notorious X Department of the Ministry of Public Security, which surveilled the party itself, surrendered to the Americans. He was familiar with the files, wiretaps, and the background of arrests. The Americans only revealed him at a press conference on September 28, 1954. A correspondent for the "New York Times" described him as "short, resembling an owl in his thick glasses."

The first interviews with him were broadcast by RWE on September 28 and 29, 1954. They concerned the Field brothers, Herman and Noel, Americans imprisoned in Poland and Hungary. On October 20, a regular series titled "Behind the Scenes of the Secret Police and the Party" began. According to PAP, around 140 broadcasts were aired over approximately six months. Listeners learned who was spying on whom, how accusations were fabricated, and how party dignitaries lived. Zbigniew Błażyński compiled a 40-page brochure with the same title based on this material. Starting February 12, 1955, the "Spotlight" campaign sent it to Poland via balloons – according to PAP, 232,000 copies were sent in the first two months.

The effects were real. Nowak-Jeziorański recalled that Światło's revelations and their consequences – the reorganization and dismemberment of the secret police, a purge at its top, and the release of some political prisoners – broke the barrier of fear, and the broadcasts became the second event, after Stalin's death and Beria's arrest, that enabled the thaw. Prof. Andrzej Paczkowski told PAP that the broadcasts had a fundamental impact on the situation in Poland: "It meant the end of Stalinist repression, although there were still several thousand people in prison."

1956: The Secret Speech and Two October Events

In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev delivered a secret speech about Stalin's crimes at the 20th Congress of the CPSU. In Poland, the text circulated more widely than anywhere else in the bloc. According to Marek Kramer from the Davis Center at Harvard University, the new head of the PZPR, Edward Ochab, disseminated it more broadly than leaders of other communist countries. In Warsaw, about 3,000 additional copies were officially printed, and at the initiative of Stefan Staszewski, another 15,000 to 20,000 unofficial copies circulated. From mid-March 1956, Poles could listen to increasingly detailed summaries of the speech on Western stations, including RWE. Kramer writes that the broader availability of the speech aimed to weaken the influence of these broadcasts. The full text was published by the "New York Times" on June 5, 1956.

In June 1956, RWE reported on the brutally suppressed protest in Poznań, while Nowak called for restraint and caution. We discuss how crowds in Poznań and Bydgoszcz were destroying jamming devices in the section on jamming. In October, the station provided limited support to Władysław Gomułka, in line with the aforementioned approach.

The situation unfolded differently in Hungary. The Hungarian section of RWE is still accused of raising the hopes of the insurgents for Western assistance. A. Ross Johnson, former director of RWE and a historian, analyzed the texts of the broadcasts and documents in the Hoover Archive. His conclusions are measured. The accusations that the radio incited the revolution, promised Western military assistance, or provoked Soviet intervention are not substantiated. However, it turned out that the broadcasts were excessively emotional, violently attacked Prime Minister Imre Nagy, and diverged from U.S. policy. One broadcast provided instructions for making a Molotov cocktail. Among about 500 broadcasts from that month, only one press review from November 4 suggested that a "practical manifestation of Western sympathy" was expected "at any moment." In a survey among a thousand refugees in Austria, nearly 40 percent believed that Western broadcasts indicated the U.S. readiness to fight for Hungary. An internal analysis by RWE primarily blamed the leadership of the Hungarian section, but according to Johnson, the ultimate responsibility lay with the American superiors in Munich, who hired them and did not monitor their broadcasts. After 1956, RWE established a broadcast analysis department to prevent a recurrence.

March 1968 and December 1970

In 1968, the station commented on factional struggles within the PZPR, the growing influence of Mieczysław Moczar, and the anti-Semitic campaign that forced thousands of Polish Jews to leave. The authorities responded with an intensified campaign against RWE: according to the IPN, the number of attacks on RWE in the press rose from 267 in 1967 to 750 in 1968.

December 1970 shows what the station's work truly looked like. According to Nowak's recollections, on the evening of December 15, editor Barbara Nawratowicz learned from a Danish acquaintance about "disturbances" in Gdańsk. Nowak did not want to broadcast unverified information and ordered monitoring. The RWE monthly "Na Antenie" described it as follows: the equipment was tuned to Szczecin, which was broadcasting on the same frequency as Gdańsk, and suddenly, through the music, the voice of the Gdańsk announcer broke through, announcing the curfew. The message was recorded, and just before midnight, RWE broadcast it to the world. Polish Radio, as the first nationwide editorial office, reported the PAP message about "serious street incidents" in Gdańsk only in the early afternoon of December 16.

This same story has a second, less commendable side, described by historian Paweł Szulc. On December 18, RWE aired a report by Swedish journalist Anders Thunberg, who was in Szczecin on December 17. It spoke of tanks attacking the crowd and a mother with a child being hit by a tank. As Szulc writes, however, the tanks in Szczecin did not attack people, and no one heard of such a victim. Szulc obtained the original recording from Swedish radio and established that Thunberg indeed spoke of a woman with a child, although about "armored vehicles," not tanks. According to Szulc, RWE journalists did not commit an abuse but handled the report rather loosely and relied on it uncritically, and in subsequent versions, especially the printed one, dramatic details increased.

1976, KOR, and the "Protective Umbrella"

After the workers' protests in Radom and Ursus in June 1976 and the establishment of the Workers' Defense Committee, the station began to widely publicize the activities of the democratic opposition: reports from trials, information about repressions, texts from independent press. Prof. Andrzej Friszke points out that reporting on arrests and repressions created a kind of "protective umbrella" over the oppositionists. He also emphasizes that the radio was not to call for rebellion but to disseminate knowledge about what KOR or the Society of Scientific Courses were doing. Ryszard Blajerski, a co-founder of the strike committee at the Lublin car repair plants, recalled: "Since '78, we listened to RWE as if it were a drug."

The pilgrimages of John Paul II were reported for the station by Tadeusz Nowakowski. We discuss the pilgrimages in more detail in the guide about John Paul II.

August 1980

The strike at the Gdańsk Shipyard broke out on August 14, 1980. Information about the protests spread across the country, as dzieje.pl writes, "thanks to broadcasts from Radio Free Europe and leaflets printed by the striking workers." According to Friszke, RWE reported on strikes in Mielec, Ursus, Świdnik, and Gdańsk, and since the press did not cover them, it was the radio that built the awareness that not just one plant was protesting, but the entire country. We discuss "Solidarity" in a separate guide.

Martial Law

After martial law was imposed on December 13, 1981, Western stations, including primarily RWE, became one of the few sources of independent news for many Poles. According to the "Christian Science Monitor," the station increased its programming for Poland from 19 hours and 10 minutes to a full day, although this peak lasted only a few days. The Soviet Union jammed RWE on a record scale at that time, which we discuss in the section on jamming. The archives of Polish Radio preserved cycles titled "Documents of Martial Law" and "Comments on Martial Law in Poland" from this period.

On February 21, 1981, just before martial law, a bomb exploded at the Munich headquarters. According to the Hoover Institution, the Polish section reported the news of the attack within 10 minutes, and we discuss the attack and its perpetrators in the section on the PRL's war with Radio Free Europe.

In December 1983, as stated in the caption under a photo in a publication by the Hoover Institution, Lech Wałęsa listened to RWE's broadcast from Oslo, where he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Later he wrote: "Without Western stations, totalitarian regimes would have survived much longer."

1989 and the End of the Mission

In 1988, jamming ceased, and the Polish Station finally began to come through clearly. For Poland, Polish sources give the date of January 1, 1988, while the Soviet Union turned off its jammers at the end of November 1988, which we describe in the section on jamming. In 1989, after the Round Table talks and the elections on June 4, the government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki was formed. Zdzisław Najder, whose death sentence was commuted, returned to the country. From 1990, the Polish Station conducted official activities in Warsaw. At the same time, the radio, whose task was to replace free media, faced the question of what purpose it served in a country that already had such media.

How Radio Free Europe Was Listened To

Radio Free Europe could not do what any ordinary station does: ask its listeners directly. In the People's Republic of Poland, it was impossible to conduct surveys on behalf of the Munich "barking dog," and letters sent to Munich were read along the way by the secret police. Therefore, everything we know about the number of listeners is based on estimates – sometimes very different ones. It is worth knowing them, as they themselves say a lot about those times.

How Many Listeners There Were and How We Know

Within the structure of RFE, there was a separate Audience Research Department (later under different names), which reported directly to the station's European management, not to the national sections. Its method was simple yet ingenious: conversations were held with citizens of the bloc countries who were temporarily in the West. Interviews were commissioned to research firms, such as the Austrian Oesterreichisches Gallup-Institut, and interviewers approached people at train stations and airports. Between 1961 and 1963, 10,000 interviews were conducted this way, of which as much as 46 percent were conversations with Poles – Poland was surveyed more often than any other country in the bloc.

However, this method had serious weaknesses, and researchers in Munich were well aware of them. In the second half of the 1950s, the focus was mainly on refugees and emigrants, that is, people who were naturally critical of the authorities. By the 1960s, Poles who were temporarily in the West predominated, but among them, there was a clear overrepresentation of men, better-educated individuals, and those in better economic situations. Historian Kamila Kamińska-Chełminiak, who analyzed studies from 1958 to 1961, points out that in one group, as much as 98 percent of respondents declared listening to RFE – and she considers this result to be clearly inflated. She also recalls what the technical reality looked like at that time: by the end of 1959, there were 4,931,000 radio receivers registered in Poland, which means one for about every six residents. Since entire families listened to the radio, about 12 million people, or 42 percent of the population, could have access to it.

According to data from RFE itself, cited in the same article, in the early 1960s, the station's listenership was around 50 percent, rising to nearly 70 percent in 1968, and exceeding 80 percent in 1970, fluctuating between 45 and 70 percent in the following years. Jan Nowak-Jeziorański reported a range of 40 to 80 percent for the years 1954–1976, with peaks in the autumn of 1956, in March 1968, and in December 1970.

Completely different, much more cautious numbers come from the other side of the Iron Curtain. Since the late 1960s, confidential surveys of listenership of Western stations were conducted for the authorities by the state-run Public Opinion Research Center. Prof. Paweł Machcewicz cites a series from these studies: in January 1979, 30 percent of respondents admitted to listening to RFE, in 1980–48 percent, in 1981–53 percent, in 1982–49 percent, and in November 1984, only 18 percent. These data show a pattern visible in all sources: listenership grew during times of crisis and political tension, and fell when the situation calmed down. For February 1989, sources provide different values – 22 percent according to Machcewicz's compilation cited by Kamińska-Chełminiak and 34 percent according to a joint study by the BBC and OBOP from February-March 1989, referenced by Konrad W. Tatarowski. It should also be remembered that in the survey conducted by the state center, not everyone wanted to admit to listening to a "hostile station." The authors of the OBOP reports noted this themselves, and Kamińska-Chełminiak concludes that the results may have been underestimated due to respondents' fear of reprisals.

An interesting estimate "from letters" was proposed by historian and later president of the IPN, Łukasz Kamiński. In the 1970s, the Security Service intercepted about 20,000 letters annually from Poland to Munich, and about the same number reached the recipient. If we assume that one in a hundred listeners wrote, it turns out that RFE was regularly listened to by 10 to 15 percent of adult Poles.

There are also numbers for the entire region. In a CIA document from the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, published in the official series of U.S. diplomatic documents (FRUS), it is stated that RFE programs were listened to by over 30 million people in Eastern Europe, and this number "rose sharply during crises." On the other hand, Ted Lipien, an American journalist who led the Polish section of Voice of America in the early 1980s, cites on his website the results of studies conducted by Western firms among travelers from Poland. According to them, in 1982, RFE reached nearly 70 percent of adult Poles weekly. Lipien also cites a secret survey by "Solidarity" from 1986, in which Voice of America (77 percent) clearly outperformed the BBC (52), RFE (43), and Radio France Internationale (21). These are unverified estimates from a single source: we could not verify the original reports, and the number 70 percent clearly deviates from the OBOP result for the same year (49 percent). In summary: millions of Poles listened to RFE, during breakthroughs according to OBOP surveys even every second respondent, but each specific number is an estimate.

What Was Used to Listen

The authorities quickly understood that the radio's frequency bands were a political issue. On June 6, 1953, the Presidium of the Council of Ministers adopted a strictly confidential resolution No. 418/53 "on radio receivers," signed by Bolesław Bierut. It obligated the Minister of Machine Industry to change the design of receivers so that short waves could be received "only in the band from 31 to 51 m." The resolution specifically mentioned the models produced at that time, Aga, Pionier, and Pionier B, and also applied to all new types. According to available studies, the goal was to make it difficult to receive Polish-language broadcasts from abroad, which were well heard on the 16 and 25 m bands. The resolution was repealed in November 1956, in the atmosphere of the October thaw. The phrase "let's listen to something on short waves" had a clear subtext in the People's Republic of Poland.

Between 1956 and 1957, the Marcin Kasprzak Radio Factory in Warsaw began producing the "Szarotka" – the first mass-produced portable radio in post-war Poland. According to the Museum of Engineering and Technology in Krakow, the first models had only medium and long waves, and the shortwave section was added later. According to the museum, this allowed listening to Radio Luxembourg, which the museum describes as illegal in Poland, and Western popular music. The museum's description does not mention Radio Free Europe.

However, Polish radios had one flaw, which Mieczysław Oktaw Pietruski writes about in a Polish Radio study on jamming: they often lacked the 13 and 75-meter bands, which were precisely those that were jammed the least or not at all. Soviet receivers of the Riga and VEF brands (produced in Riga) had them, which, according to this study, observant listeners quickly noticed. This is one of the paradoxes of the era: equipment from the USSR helped listen to the station that the USSR was jamming.

Meters, Kilohertz, and Good Hours

On the scale of an old radio, short waves were described in meters – this is the wavelength, and the shorter the wave, the higher the frequency. The Polish RFE station broadcasted on all shortwave broadcasting bands: 75, 49, 41, 31, 25, 19, 16, and 13 meters. Frequencies were changed depending on the time of year and day, as short waves reflect off the ionosphere, and its state changes from hour to hour. In addition, there were medium waves: 719 kHz, and from December 1978, 720 kHz, from a transmitter in Holzkirchen near Munich. This transmitter was shared with the Czechoslovak section – the Polish program aired on it from 7 PM.

This resulted in "good hours." According to a Polish Radio study in Warsaw, the main route to RFE was the evening signal of 720 kHz from Holzkirchen and the 16-meter band, while the least jammed were usually the 16 and 19-meter bands. English-language studies describing jamming throughout the bloc add two technical curiosities: jamming was less effective above 15 MHz, and at dusk, there was a phenomenon known as "twilight resistance" – signal fading affected the jammers more than the station itself.

The program was long. Przystanek Historia states that the Polish Station broadcasted even 18 hours a day, and according to the American newspaper "Christian Science Monitor," in December 1981, it was 19 hours and 10 minutes. After the introduction of martial law, RFE switched to 24-hour broadcasting, although only for a few days. The day began early: Kazimierz Siczek, who worked at the Polish jamming station in the 1950s, recalled in Maciej Drygas's film "Voice of Hope" (2002) that "at five o'clock they started with the song 'When the Morning Dawns.'"

A Signal Remembered by Generations

According to two publications from Polish Radio, the station's signal became the mazurka "Witaj majowa jutrzenko" – a song about the Constitution of May 3, which matched the date of the opening of the Polish station in Munich on May 3, 1952. What exactly opened that first broadcast is reported differently by sources: according to the IPN, after the sounds of the anthem, director Jan Nowak-Jeziorański spoke, while according to dzieje.pl, the first notes of the "May Mazurka" sounded. Maciej Drygas, the author of a film based on listeners' accounts, wrote that the sound signal of the Polish Station "imprinted itself in the memory of several generations of Poles." A popular joke in the People's Republic of Poland, cited by Łukasz Kamiński, told of a drunkard who repeated, "This is Radio Free Europe speaking..." – patrolling militiamen lay down next to him and began to "jam" him, humming: bzzz.

Lower the Volume, the Neighbors Are Listening

What did home listening really look like? The often-repeated images – a radio covered with a blanket, tightly closed windows – are difficult to confirm in the reliable publications we accessed, so we do not present them as fact. However, daily caution is well documented. Stanisław Królak, later an employee of the Warsaw-Raszyn Radio Broadcasting Center and the Ministry of Communications, recalled in the RadioPolska service that in the 1950s, his father listened to RFE "almost every day," and he himself, as a child, was surprised that "there were some whistles." It was precisely the jamming that pushed him into radio technology: he read in magazines about good grounding and antennas, starting with indoor antennas, then looking for an undisturbed signal outside, among farm buildings. He admitted that he had "a certain psychosis" that "one could not listen too loudly" so that no one would know what he was listening to.

Łukasz Kamiński describes even more interesting phenomena in an essay for "Tygodnik Powszechny." In the countryside, radios were listened to in small groups, which then discussed the news together. In March and April 1953 alone, there were seven recorded cases of someone broadcasting RFE programs over public address systems. During crises, when official media were silent or lying, according to him, "practically all Poles" listened to RFE, and party members referred to it in meetings. News spread from mouth to mouth – the authorities called it "whispered propaganda" – which, according to Kamiński, also generated the most fantastic rumors.

Listeners also wrote to Munich, to contact addresses in Western Europe. The secret police hunted for these letters. Tatarowski states that between January 1 and March 1, 1955, the IX Department of the Security Office confiscated 391 letters sent to 35 such addresses, including 11 concerning the revelations of Józef Światło. After the introduction of martial law, from December 16, 1981, the program "Bridge to Poland" was broadcast, conveying messages from people in the West to families in the country. It was based on a telephone line launched in Munich as early as December 13.

However, the most surprising thing is that RFE was also listened to by those who were supposed to silence it. The aforementioned Kazimierz Siczek recounted in Drygas's film: "I know it sounds incredible, but I listened to Radio Free Europe all the time."

Were People Imprisoned for Listening?

This is one of the most frequently oversimplified questions. Many texts, including Polish Radio, simply state that listening to Radio Free Europe was "forbidden." However, the legal situation was more complex. Melissa Feinberg from Rutgers University, summarizing in a 2016 review the findings of Paweł Machcewicz's book "Poland’s War on Radio Free Europe, 1950–1989," writes that private listening to foreign stations was never formally prohibited; however, listening in groups and publicly discussing broadcasts was illegal. In the case described below from the Warsaw district of Włochy, the basis for the accusation was Article 22 of the so-called small penal code, that is, the decree of June 13, 1946, punishing the dissemination of false news that could cause significant harm to the interests of the state. As the Attorney General pointed out in 2020, in this case, simply calling the station "imperialist" did not prove that the information it provided was false.

Repressions during the Stalinist years were real and well documented. Machcewicz wrote in "Tygodnik Powszechny" about "draconian reprisals against listeners": for listening in groups, which was common due to the small number of receivers, and for passing on heard news, one could end up in a labor camp for many months. Specific examples are known from later rehabilitation trials. Two employees of the measurement apparatus factory in Warsaw's Włochy listened to Voice of America, the BBC, and RFE between 1951 and 1952, and repeated the news they heard – including about food exports to the USSR, Poland's sovereignty, and Katyn – to colleagues in the dormitory. In February 1953, the Warsaw District Court sentenced them to one and a half years in prison, reduced to nine months due to amnesty (one of them later to eight). In 2020, the Attorney General filed a cassation in their case, indicating that simply repeating news did not exhaust the elements of the crime. We could not determine the outcome of this cassation. A resident of Białystok, Józef M., listened to RFE with friends, and in 1952, the Special Commission for Combating Abuse and Economic Sabotage sent him to a labor camp for 16 months. He served half of it. The Supreme Court acquitted him only after 54 years.

As for the scale of repression, sources vary greatly. According to the aforementioned review, between 1950 and 1954, over 40,000 people were sentenced to a year or more of hard labor "for such crimes" – although it is not clear from the review whether this number pertains solely to cases related to Western radio stations or more broadly to "whispered propaganda." Łukasz Kamiński writes about "hundreds" of people who ended up in labor camps or prisons for simply listening to RFE. We could not verify the number 40,000 in the book itself. We could not resolve this discrepancy. What is certain, however, is that after October 1956, the pressure clearly eased, and listening to RFE became a mass phenomenon that the authorities no longer tried to prosecute criminally on the previous scale. Instead, they focused on jamming, propaganda, and fighting the station itself.

Jamming

For several generations of Poles, Radio Free Europe had its own, unique sound: the voice of the announcer cutting through the buzzing, the "saw", the noise reminiscent of a crowd, and crackles. These were not atmospheric disturbances, but the result of the work of hundreds of transmitters and people.

How the jammer worked

The principle was simple: on the same frequency that the Western station was broadcasting, a stronger signal had to be transmitted to jam it. According to a rule cited in a Polish Radio study, the jamming transmitter needed about twice the power of the transmitter it was meant to jam. Two methods were used. Ground wave jamming involved setting up a small transmitter close to the receivers, most often in a city. It was effective, but only over a small area. Ionospheric wave jamming was conducted from distant, powerful stations – it covered a vast area, but was much less effective and easier to bypass.

In Poland in the first half of the 1950s, the basis was small shortwave transmitters with a power of 1 to 5 kW, called "schmitówki" after their designer, engineer Schmidt (also written as Szmidt or Szmit in some sources). According to a Polish Radio study, they operated in many cities, installed in state buildings, such as post offices. Polish-designed jammers were mass-produced at the T-12 plant in Warsaw's Żerań district.

Technician Jan Panek, who worked at the station in Bogucice, recalled in Drygas's film: "At each transmitter, there was a hand-crank telephone connected to a control point in the Security Office." The duty officer tuned the transmitter's generator to "jam" the frequency of the Western station to zero. There was a standard that the transmitter could not have a downtime longer than 20 minutes in a month. Employees signed a commitment to maintain state secrecy, and the facility was guarded by a unit of the Internal Security Corps. Kazimierz Siczek from the station on Góra Chełm, connected by cable to the UB in Wałbrzych, mentioned three types of jamming: crowd noise, low buzzing, and the "saw", which they "always played on Sundays and holidays".

The repertoire changed over time. From December 1970, music was played on the RWE frequency from tapes – according to a Polish Radio study, among them were "Flight of the Bumblebee", tangos, the Beatles, polkas, jazz, and Cuban orchestras. On August 20, 1980, in the midst of strikes on the Coast, jamming was switched to a "speech-like signal" that could not be filtered out, and it also covered the previously unjammed 13-meter band. According to the same source, the direct reason for the change was a protest by Warsaw technicians who turned off the tape recorders with music.

The network in Poland: 1951–1956

Jamming came to Poland from Moscow. In July 1950, Soviet stations began jamming Voice of America in Poland. On October 24, 1951, the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a secret resolution "On creating obstacles for anti-Polish radio propaganda on the territory of Poland", which, according to Przystanek Historia, instructed the Soviet Ministry of Communications to organize jamming in Poland starting December 1, 1951. The Polish Minister of Public Security issued an executive order on December 24, 1951. On the Polish side, jamming was directed by the security apparatus. In December 1951, the "BO" service was established in the Ministry of Public Security, which was transformed in January 1955 into the Special Communications Division, and three months later into the Special Radio Communications Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. According to accounts from employees in Drygas's film, part of the stations was built and staffed by the civilian Central Office of Radio Stations, but it was UB officers who indicated by phone which broadcasts and on which frequencies to jam.

The network was large. According to data from 1955 cited by Waldemar Bałda, there were 249 jamming devices of various types operating in Poland, and according to Przystanek Historia, 374 officers were then engaged in combating foreign broadcasts. The "BO" service network was deployed in so-called "K" points in Bydgoszcz, Wrocław, Szczecin, Łódź, Kraków, Katowice, and Poznań. In Warsaw, jammers were located, among others, on Chałubińskiego Street and in Fort Mokotowski, and in Raszyn, a medium-wave transmitter with a power of 50 kW was operational. Stations were also built outside cities, for example in Winów near Opole, where, according to Stanisław Siczek's account in Drygas's film, construction began in the autumn of 1952 and ten Polish-designed transmitters with a power of 10 kW were installed, or in Boguchwała near Rzeszów, the seventeenth such station in the country. In Boguchwała, four operators worked each shift, and the facility was guarded by ten armed guards with a commander. According to data cited by Zdzisław Zblewski, jamming from 1950 to 1956 cost 83 million złoty.

1956: the burning jammer

Jammers provoked such anger that in 1956 they became targets for crowds. On June 28, 1956, during the Poznań June events, demonstrators destroyed one of the jamming transmitters – according to available studies, the action lasted only 20 minutes. However, the most famous event took place in Bydgoszcz. On November 18, 1956, nearly 3,000 people participated in a demonstration, according to the IPN. Several hundred of them headed for the jamming station on Wzgórze Dąbrowskiego in the Szwederowo district, which was for them, as the IPN writes, a "symbol of enslavement and communist censorship", and set fire to its equipment and mast. Władysław Gomułka reportedly ordered that the participants be "exemplarily punished". The number of those convicted varies in sources. According to the IPN and PAP, in the 1957 trial, sentences ranging from suspended sentences to six years in prison were handed down to 12 people, with PAP stating that they were convicted for "hooligan acts". However, the IPN's introductory statement mentions 16 convicted individuals, and the rehabilitation case concerned five people – these discrepancies are not explained by the sources. In 2016, the IPN applied for the resumption of proceedings, and in February 2017, the District Court in Bydgoszcz, at the request of the IPN investigative division, declared the verdict against those five convicted individuals invalid.

A few days after the events in Bydgoszcz, the government announced the cessation of jamming. Sources differ by one day: Polish Radio states that Polish jamming lasted until November 24, 1956, while other studies date the government announcement to November 25. In December 1956, the Special Radio Communications Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was dissolved, and in January 1957, it was reported that 52 jammers were transferred for radio communication needs.

Silence that was not silence: 1957–1971

For listeners, the difference turned out to be smaller than the announcement promised. Jamming was not conducted from Polish territory, but RWE programs for Poland were still jammed by stations in other countries of the bloc. According to Lithuanian expert and former Minister of Communications Rimantas Pleikys, cited by Polish Radio, Bulgaria did this until April 1962, Hungary until March 1963, Romania until September 1963, and Czechoslovakia until May 1964. Jamming from the territory of the USSR continued. According to Zdzisław Zblewski, jamming conducted from the territory of the USSR and Czechoslovakia from 1957 to 1970 turned out to be ineffective. Studies explain that since November 1956, programs for Poland were jammed using reflected waves from transmitters abroad, and this method was less effective and easier to bypass.

Return: 1971–1988

After December 1970, jamming returned on a large scale, first in the form of the music described above from tapes. Then a joint Soviet-Polish jamming network was launched – according to Pleikys on March 18, 1971, while other sources state March 17, and the portal Nowy Napis indicates that jamming from Polish territory was discontinued between November 25, 1956, and March 17, 1971.

The new system was based on the exchange of services. Programs for Poland were jammed by Soviet stations, including those in Leningrad, Kyiv, Moscow, and Kaliningrad. In return, Polish transmitters jammed Radio Liberty programs for the USSR: from June 1970 to January 1988, six Czechoslovak TESLA transmitters of 50 kW were operational for this purpose in Lidzbark Warmiński, as well as stations in Radiówka near Wiązowna and in Tychowo near Szczecin. Since Polish transmitters were weaker than Soviet ones, the "services" did not balance out, and according to Pleikys, Warsaw could thus be accumulating debt in Moscow. According to him, similar debts of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland were paid off with goods, such as Polish clothing. After the protests in Radom in 1976, the authorities also began jamming RWE on medium waves, using dedicated transmitters of Program II of Polish Radio in Wola Rasztowska near Radzymin, in Katowice, Wrocław, and Szczecin. They did this until January 1988. Jan Nowak-Jeziorański mentioned, according to Zblewski, places of jammers from 1971 to 1988, including the areas around Kamień Pomorski, Żagań, Nowa Ruda, Strzelin, Niemodlin, and several locations in central Poland.

The scale was enormous. According to Pleikys, the network jammed RWE for 19 hours a day on 5–8 frequencies simultaneously, which amounted to about 180 hours of transmitter operation daily. The cost of one hour of operation of a 200 kW transmitter was 43 rubles, with the annual cost reaching 2.8 million rubles, and over 17 years, about 50 million rubles were spent on this. Despite this, the effect was limited. In May 1971, the audibility of RWE decreased compared to September 1970, but at most by half. According to the assessment of the International Telecommunication Union, the effectiveness of jamming did not exceed 54 percent, and about 46 percent of reception was of good quality.

The peak occurred after December 13, 1981. RFE Vice President William Buell stated at that time to the "Christian Science Monitor" that programs for Poland were being jammed more than any programs for any Eastern European country had ever been jammed.

How much it cost compared to the radio itself

This is one of the most surprising threads in this story: jamming was significantly more expensive than broadcasting. In a CIA document attached to Henry Kissinger's memorandum for President Nixon, published by the State Department, it is stated that according to a Voice of America study, the Soviets used 2000–2500 jammers at a cost of about 150 million dollars annually. The annual cost of operating RFE at that time was 21.7 million dollars, and Radio Liberty 12.8 million. Kissinger summarized that both radios cost less than 35 million dollars, while jamming, for which the Russians spent 150 million, was "only marginally effective".

Other estimates are even higher. In December 1981, William Buell estimated the USSR's spending on jamming at least 200, and possibly 300 million dollars annually, with the entire RFE budget at that time being nearly 90 million dollars. Studies cite a BBC estimate of over 900 million dollars annually in the USSR alone, where jamming was directed by the Second Department of the USSR Ministry of Communications. Jan Nowak-Jeziorański wrote in his memoirs that the costs of jamming were about three times higher than the costs of broadcasting. These are estimates with a large spread, but all indicate that the Eastern bloc spent multiple times more on silencing the radio than the Americans spent on running it.

How jammers were outsmarted

The battle was fought on both sides of the receiver. RWE increased power, broadcast the same program simultaneously on many frequencies and from different locations – from transmitters in Germany and from distant Portugal, where RWE had a broadcasting center in Glória do Ribatejo – so that at least one of them could break through the noise.

Listeners had their own methods. The simplest involved turning the dial across the scale – from band to band, in search of the clearest signal, preferably on 16 and 19 meters or on 13 and 75 meters, if the radio had them. The second utilized physics: local jammers operating on ground waves covered only a small area, mainly large cities and their surroundings, so further away from them, there was weaker jamming from reflected waves. The third was an antenna. Kazimierz Siczek built a directional rhombic antenna, which, as he said, "somewhat eliminated jamming signals", while Stanisław Królak looked for a place where an external antenna and proper grounding provided the clearest sound. It is also often claimed that RWE was best heard in the border area – however, in the sources we accessed, we did not find confirmation of this.

The end of the noise

Polish sources state that the end of jamming RWE programs for Poland was on January 1, 1988. Polish Radio speaks more generally about January 1988, while Konrad W. Tatarowski mentions the beginning of 1988.

The Soviet Union turned off its jammers less than a year later. The "Christian Science Monitor" on December 1, 1988, reported, citing RFE/RL, that the change was detected on Tuesday, November 29, and confirmed the next day. The December 2 edition specified that technicians in Munich noticed it on Tuesday at 21:00. Therefore, two dates appear in studies: November 29 (for example, in some Polish studies) and November 30 (for example, in Ted Lipien's work). Some English-language studies also cite November 21, 1988, but this date does not match the press reports from those days – November 21, 1988, was a Monday. RFE/RL President Gene Pell stated at that time: "For the first time, we will not have to conduct our dialogue through a wall of interference." The same newspaper noted that Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia were still jamming Radio Free Europe at that time. The Czechoslovak authorities ceased jamming Western stations on December 9, 1988, according to the Slovak Institute of National Memory (Ústav pamäti národa). As for Bulgaria, the sources we accessed provide different dates, and we could not resolve this. According to available studies, over 1600 transmitters in 120 jamming centers were turned off in the USSR, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia combined.

The PRL's War Against Radio Free Europe

For the authorities of the PRL, the Polish Broadcasting Station in Munich was not just an enemy station. It was a competitor that deprived the party of its monopoly on information, and that in its own country. Historian Paweł Machcewicz, author of an extensive monograph on this topic (“Monachijska menażeria. Walka z Radiem Wolna Europa 1950–1989”, published by IPN and ISP PAN in 2007, and in 2014 in English as “Poland’s War on Radio Free Europe”), describes this struggle as a long-term operation conducted simultaneously by propaganda, intelligence, the Security Service, and diplomacy. Jamming, described in the earlier part, was just one of its fronts.

Words as Weapons: Press, Books, Television

According to an article by Karolina Trzeskowska-Kubasik published by IPN on the Przystanek Historia portal, the authorities were interested in the station from the first weeks of its operation. Propaganda portrayed RWE as a "CIA agency" and "a tool of American imperialism." Rafał Opulski, also in an IPN text, adds that official media referred to the radio as a "spy center," and its journalists as "pavans from Munich" who spat on everything in their "barking box." In the 1960s, a brochure titled “Monachijska menażeria” circulated in the West – years later, Machcewicz ironically used this term as the title of his book. In drawings and posters, employees of the station wore SS insignia. “Szpilki” published a caricature in which Jan Nowak reads “Mein Kampf,” and when asked about an April Fool's surprise for listeners, suggests broadcasting “some real news.”

The attacks came in waves and depended on the situation in the country. Trzeskowska-Kubasik states that in 1967, 267 texts attacking RWE were counted, and in 1968, during the power struggle in the PZPR, already 750. Some individual texts have gone down in history, such as Daniel Passent's article “Wolna Europa a emigracja polska” in “Polityka” from October 17, 1959, which contained moral insinuations against Nowak-Jeziorański. Books were published, including “Uwaga! Radiodywersja” by Stefan Arski and “Czy Stanisław Talarek musiał umrzeć?” by Mirosław Azembski and Lucjan Wolanowski. A selection of such texts, drawings, and caricatures was compiled years later by Alina Grabowska in the volume “PRL atakuje Radio »Wolna Europa«” (2002).

The derogatory term “barking box,” which, as can be seen, was used by official propaganda, survived in the title of Jolanta Hajdasz's book “Szczekaczka, czyli Rozgłośnia Polska Radia Wolna Europa” (2006). We were unable to determine who first used this word.

Television played an important role. In the IPN archives, three episodes of the program “Publicystyka TV” titled “Nazywają ich pawianami” have been preserved, with materials dated in the inventory to the years 1981–1985. According to the archival description, this is a conversation with “a former personnel employee of the ‘diversionary’ station” Mieczysław Lach, identified in the IPN inventory as a PRL intelligence agent. The program presented Zdzisław Najder as a man “maintained and supported by the CIA,” Jerzy Giedroyć as a CIA agent (as proof, a film shot secretly in a Paris restaurant was shown), and RWE employees as people earning from 3 to 10 thousand marks and receiving furnished apartments for free.

“Captain Czechowicz Completed the Mission”

The loudest propaganda action aimed at RWE was the return to the country of Andrzej Czechowicz. Born in 1937 in Święciany, a history graduate from the University of Warsaw (1962), he emigrated to West Germany and received asylum as a political refugee. According to available studies, he likely made contact with the Polish Military Mission in West Berlin in the fall of 1964, and in January 1965, he agreed to cooperate with Polish intelligence. In April 1965, he applied for a job at RWE and after a conversation with Nowak-Jeziorański, was accepted into the Department of Studies and Analysis. He was not a journalist: he prepared, among other things, press clippings. Sources differ in their assessment of how the recruitment occurred. Machcewicz's reviewer Melissa Feinberg writes that the cooperation was the price for the possibility of returning to the country, while Czech historian Prokop Tomek, discussing the same book, states that Czechowicz left as an authentic refugee and only became an agent at RWE. The act of Czechowicz as an intelligence collaborator, as Tomek notes, has not been preserved.

In March 1971, his return to Poland was announced by all media. The scenario was, as Tomek writes, typical for such actions: first, the announcement that an “unknown by name” agent had returned, then a press conference, followed by interviews and books. Still in 1971, the MON Publishing House published “Kapitan Czechowicz wykonał zadanie,” and in 1973 “Siedem trudnych lat.” The books were translated into Bulgarian, Czech, Slovak, Latvian, Russian, Ukrainian, and German. Feinberg writes that the latter was written by people from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and portrayed RWE employees as American agents, cynical careerists, and “Zionists.” Czechowicz referred to Nowak-Jeziorański as “a Podolian cavalryman, a speculator, and a fraud.”

The effect was different from what was intended. The publicity surrounding the “successes” of the captain quickly became a subject of mockery and jokes in Poland. Nowak-Jeziorański himself said in 2002 that Czechowicz “was the least harmful of all,” because “he harmed the security service more than us with his appearances.” Czechowicz sued PAP and Nowak-Jeziorański for these words, and in February 2005, the Warsaw District Court dismissed his lawsuit against the agency. Later, Czechowicz worked, among other places, at a post in Mongolia, and in 2018 published his memoirs “Straceniec” on his own.

Other Agents and Their “Returns”

Czechowicz was not the only one, but the scale of infiltration was smaller than propaganda suggested. From the review of Machcewicz's book by Prokop Tomek (IPN, “Pamięć i Sprawiedliwość,” 2009), it appears that in the 1950s, Polish security managed to place only one person in RWE – later a re-emigrant and propagandist Zbigniew Brydak. In 1974, two RWE employees, Mieczysław Lach and Andrzej Smoliński, returned to the country. Tomek notes that such loud “returns” provided the regime with a propaganda success, but in practice closed off the services' previous access to the station. Lach was used propagandistically long after his return: the program “Nazywają ich pawianami” describes events from 1982, which occurred at least eight years after his arrival in the country.

The most serious case, according to Machcewicz, was Wiktor Trościanko, a broadcaster at the station who was in conflict with Nowak-Jeziorański. Machcewicz identified him as an informant for PRL intelligence and as a source of accusations that Nowak managed Jewish property during the war (PAP report from 2011). Tomek writes that Trościanko was recruited and handled by Polish military intelligence, while other studies mention his conversations with officers of the Military Internal Service in Munich. Descriptions therefore differ as to which service was handling him. Trościanko died in 1983 in Spain.

The overall balance is modest for the services. According to Feinberg and Tomek, the security service recruited employees, their relatives, acquaintances, and emigrants who could get jobs at RWE, but never obtained an informant in a high position. On the other hand, American historians of the station point out that the headquarters forbade their agents from interfering in programming to avoid being compromised. The agents' task was to gather information, not to change what was broadcast.

Striking at People: Nowak-Jeziorański, Najder, Bartoszewski

The most effort went into destroying the reputation of Jan Nowak-Jeziorański. In “Siedmiu trudnych latach,” Czechowicz published an authentic document signed on April 22, 1970, by Johann Kassner, which indicated that Nowak was employed as a manager of property, that is, Jewish property taken over by the Germans from 1940 to 1942. What was omitted was the most important part: according to biographers and witnesses, Nowak performed this work with the knowledge and consent of the underground. In 1972, Tadeusz Żenczykowski, a wartime employee of the BIP KG AK, confirmed that Nowak “was appointed in 1941 as the administrator of two tenement houses with the approval of the underground authorities.” According to Feinberg, the security service believed that its campaign led to Nowak's departure from RWE in 1975. Machcewicz does not fully share this assessment but admits that the campaign intensified conflicts within the team.

This old forgery resurfaced years later in America. Edward Moskal, president of the Polish American Congress, accused Nowak of having worked for the Nazis as a “trusted and loyal manager of the seized Jewish property” (PAP dates these words either to 2000 or April 2001). The statement was condemned in Poland and the USA. In 2001, Nowak-Jeziorański himself asked the president of IPN to prosecute officials who fabricated documents about him. In 2004, the head of the investigative department of IPN, Witold Kulesza, stated that the collaboration thread was closed because “there is not even a shadow of evidence for such cooperation.” In 2011, IPN discontinued the investigation into the forgeries themselves due to the statute of limitations. In 2010, historian Sławomir Cenckiewicz revealed that Moskal had been registered by PRL intelligence as an informational contact under the codename “Edwos,” although he himself noted that he found no record of any meeting that would describe the nature of these contacts.

At the other end of the scale was the death sentence, issued in absentia on May 28, 1983, against the then-director of the Polish Broadcasting Station Zdzisław Najder, which we discuss in the section on the station's directors.

The security service also hunted those who passed information to Munich from the country. Machcewicz described operation “Olcha,” one of the largest SB actions of the 1960s. Its target was Władysław Bartoszewski, who had been secretly providing RWE with news from Poland since 1963. The SB caught wind of it in 1966, using wiretaps and the help of the Stasi and KGB, and in 1970 arrested three people from his circle: Stanisław Salmonowicz, Danuta Bańkowska, and Ewa Dreżepolska. Bartoszewski himself, according to the summary of Machcewicz's article, was interrogated multiple times and attempts were made to recruit him. Reviewer Melissa Feinberg writes that he was also arrested, but Machcewicz's summary lists only the three mentioned as arrested. The planned trial was abandoned after December 1970 and the change of the ruling team, and the arrested were released, although they were still monitored and harassed. Bartoszewski continued to cooperate with the station. According to a PAP report from a conference in 2012, he had been cooperating with the station since 1963, and until 1989, no one in Poland, except for his wife, knew about it.

Intimidation, Families, Letters

Some methods were simply brutal. According to Trzeskowska-Kubasik, employees received anonymous threats, Nowak-Jeziorański received death threats several times a day, and on the day of the operation, his wife received an anonymous letter with a form from the municipal funeral home. Studies mention among the methods the fabrication of prepared denunciations by the SB, citing as an example the correspondent of the station in France, Maciej Morawski. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs even prepared a plan to revoke citizenship from Nowak-Jeziorański, Trościanko, Żenczykowski, Giedroyć, and Mieroszewski, which was ultimately not implemented.

The most painful tool was family in the country. Tomek's review states outright that employees of RWE were routinely attempted to be recruited by blackmailing their relatives and exploiting ties to their homeland. In a broadcast from November 29, 1969, Żenczykowski (on air with Tadeusz Zawadzki) told listeners about recruitment based on blackmail, in which the agent's wife and child remained in the country as a “guarantee collateral.”

A separate issue was the mail. After 1957, a separate “W” Department handled the censorship of correspondence in the SB. According to an IPN exhibition on the Krakow security service, its officers, at the request of operational departments, reviewed, photocopied, or intercepted letters and packages arriving at a specified address or sent by a specified person, and the “order” could cover, for example, all foreign correspondence coming to a given locality. Letters to and from Munich could therefore be subjected to control like any mail abroad. However, we were unable to find in open sources a study showing how many letters from listeners to RWE were intercepted and what consequences this had for them.

The Bomb in Munich, February 21, 1981

On Saturday, February 21, 1981, at 21:50, a bomb exploded at the RFE/RL headquarters in Munich. According to Richard Cummings, a longtime head of security at the station, the device weighed about 30 pounds (several kilograms) and consisted of Romanian nitropenta. The explosion destroyed part of the building and shattered windows in over 170 offices. Cummings lists four seriously injured employees: three from the Czechoslovak section (Maria Pulda, Rudolf Skukalek, Allan Antalis) and switchboard operator Ingeborg Eberl. No one died. The damage is estimated at over 2 million dollars. The official history of RFE/RL provides different numbers: six injured and about a million dollars in damages.

After the fall of communism, a picture emerged from the archives of the Stasi and other secret police, which RFE/RL presents today: the attack was commissioned by Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and organized by Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as “Carlos” or “The Jackal.” His associates included Johannes Weinrich and Bruno Breguet. Carlos is serving a life sentence in France (in 2017 he received his third such sentence), Weinrich is reportedly serving life in Germany, and Breguet has disappeared and is believed to be dead. Some studies cite a version in which the Securitate promised Carlos a million dollars primarily for killing Ion Mihai Pacepa, the head of Romanian intelligence who fled to the West, and since Pacepa could not be found, the radio was targeted. This is an unconfirmed version: English-language studies only state that Carlos allegedly participated in plans to kill Pacepa, and we could not confirm any connection to the attack on the radio in any other source. There is also a competing thesis: former KGB general Oleg Kalugin claimed that the KGB counterintelligence had been planning the attack for two years with the help of its mole in the station, Oleg Tumanov. Sources differ here, and the KGB thread should not be treated as established.

An Umbrella on Waterloo Bridge and Other Attacks

The most famous assassination attempt on a person associated with Radio Free Europe concerned a Bulgarian. Georgi Markov, a writer who fled to the West in 1969, worked in London for BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle, and Radio Free Europe. From 1975 to 1978, RWE broadcast his “Zaoczne reportaże” about life in communist Bulgaria, mercilessly critical of Todor Zhivkov. On September 7, 1978, at a bus stop near Waterloo Bridge, Markov felt a prick in his thigh and saw a man raising an umbrella. He died on September 11. During the autopsy, a pellet with a diameter of 1.7 millimeters made of a platinum-iridium alloy was found in his leg, with drilled channels that likely contained ricin. Ten days earlier, another Bulgarian emigrant, Vladimir Kostov, was similarly targeted in the Paris metro. No one was charged. The main suspect was Italian Francesco Gullino, who died in Austria in August 2021. Kalugin claimed that the KGB assisted the Bulgarians.

Romania particularly fiercely fought against Radio Free Europe. According to English-language studies, Ceaușescu conducted a campaign against the station as part of the “Ether” program, and sources differ on when it was launched. English-language studies also mention the “controversial circumstances” surrounding the deaths of three directors of the Romanian section. Suspicions that they fell victim to the Securitate have circulated for years, but we have not found evidence that would confirm this.

After 1989

Year of Breakthrough

According to PAP, in 1989 the station, led from that year by Piotr Mroczek, significantly helped the Citizens' Committees of "Solidarity" in the campaign before the June elections. In August 1989, at the invitation of Lech Wałęsa, Jan Nowak-Jeziorański visited Poland for the first time since the war.

End of the Polish Station

On June 30, 1994, the Polish Station of Radio Free Europe broadcast its last program from Munich. This date is cited by the IPN and PAP. In one English-language summary, the end of the Polish section is noted as December 31, 1994. The calendar of Polish Radio adds that in 1996, the Warsaw branch of RFE ceased operations. The official history of RFE/RL states that the "Polish section" was closed in 1997, and the then-president Thomas Dine said in 2002 that RFE/RL stopped broadcasting to Poland precisely in 1997. Sources thus refer to different stages of winding down. The date of June 30, 1994, marks the end of 42 years of the Polish Station in its classic, Munich form. We were unable to determine exactly what the Polish broadcasts looked like between 1994 and 1997.

From Munich to Prague

After the Cold War, Congress cut the budget, and in the 1990s, the closure of the station was seriously considered. The move to Prague in 1995 was made possible by the invitation of President Václav Havel and Prime Minister Václav Klaus. The building of the former Federal Assembly of Czechoslovakia, right next to Wenceslas Square, had been empty since the federation's dissolution in 1992. The station, which communist services had tried to silence for decades, took residence in the building of the communist parliament. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, American and Czech authorities deemed the central city location too vulnerable to attack. In 2009, the editorial offices moved to a new, heavily guarded headquarters in the Hagibor district.

Return of Nowak-Jeziorański

From Washington, Nowak-Jeziorański worked, among other things, for Poland's admission to NATO. In 1994, he began broadcasting commentaries titled "Polska z oddali" ("Poland from Afar") on Program I of Polish Radio. On July 21, 2002, he returned to Poland permanently and settled in Warsaw. He said at that time: "There comes a moment when one must not look at the country from afar." His next radio series was titled "Polska z bliska" ("Poland Up Close").

He died on January 20, 2005, in Warsaw, at the age of 90. His coffin was displayed in the courtyard of the Royal Castle, where on January 26 he was bid farewell by crowds and the most important people in the state. He was laid to rest in the family grave at Powązki.

Free Europe Today and the 2025 Crisis

RFE/RL still exists. According to its official website (as of November 2026), it reaches audiences in 18 countries and in 24 languages. Older summaries report more, for example, 27 languages and 23 countries, as several sections were closed in 2025–2026. The main headquarters is in Prague. The most important focus remains Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. In 2014, the station, together with Voice of America, launched a Russian-language news channel called Nastojaszczeje Wriemia ("Current Time"). Since 2017, Russia has demanded that RFE/RL register as a "foreign agent," and in 2021, it granted such status to its website and froze its accounts. In March 2022, following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it initiated bankruptcy proceedings that forced the radio to suspend operations in Moscow, and in February 2024, it declared it an "undesirable organization." The Belarusian service, after the repressions of 2020–2021, operates from Lithuania. Journalists from the station pay a high price for this: in June 2025, RFE/RL journalist Farid Mehralizade was sentenced to 9 years in prison in Azerbaijan.

In 2025, Radio Free Europe found itself on the brink of closure, this time due to a decision from the White House. On March 14, 2025, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14238, which mandated limiting the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which oversees RFE/RL and Voice of America, "to the maximum extent permitted by law." The next day, USAGM terminated its grant agreement with RFE/RL. On March 18, the station sued the agency and its leaders, including Kari Lake, in federal court in Washington. On March 25, Judge Royce Lamberth issued a temporary restraining order, finding that the agency acted "arbitrarily and capriciously." On March 26, USAGM withdrew its termination but reserved the right to terminate the agreement again. On April 29, the court ordered the payment of $12,178,590 for April, and on July 18, it partially granted the request for a restraining order, ordering the signing of a grant agreement for the 2025 fiscal year and restoring monthly payments until the case was resolved. The legal axis of the dispute was that the funds for RFE/RL are allocated annually by Congress.

Europe rushed to help. On March 22, 2025, the Czech government announced support for the station, and in May, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas announced that the EU would provide RFE/RL with $6.2 million (Sweden pledged $2 million). The band R.E.M., known for the hit "Radio Free Europe" from 1981, released a new version of the song, with proceeds going to the station.

This crisis did not end there. In November 2025, at the behest of USAGM, the Hungarian section ceased operations. On February 3, 2026, the president signed the budget law for 2026, which provides funds for RFE/RL and Voice of America. However, Reporters Without Borders estimates that this means a cut of about one-fourth compared to previous years. In March 2026, citing "ongoing budget pressure," RFE/RL closed its Bulgarian, Romanian, and North Macedonian sections, as well as the Pashto service Radio Mashaal for northwestern Pakistan. As of early November 2026, the station is broadcasting, but we were unable to find reliable sources regarding the final resolution of its legal dispute with USAGM. We also do not provide the amount allocated for 2026, as we have not confirmed it.

Archives: Stanford, Warsaw, Budapest

In December 1999, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University announced that RFE/RL had transferred its archive of broadcasts and corporate records from the early 1950s to June 1995, that is, until the move to Prague: about 61,000 reels of tape and approximately 7.5 million pages of typescripts. In May 2002, Hoover and the Polish State Archives signed an agreement for the joint cataloging of Polish broadcasts from 1952 to 1994. According to Hoover, this includes over 17,000 recordings and 1.5 million pages of texts, and RFE/RL agreed to allow the State Archives to make copies for themselves. Polish Radio also digitized recordings from the Polish Station and made them available online.

A separate collection is the archive of the RFE/RL Research Institute, which includes analyses, reports, and clippings used by journalists and diplomats worldwide. It did not go to Stanford but to the Open Society Archives at the Central European University in Budapest. The personal archive of Nowak-Jeziorański was taken over by the Ossolineum National Institute in Wrocław.

Memory in Poland

In 2002, Polish Radio awarded Nowak-Jeziorański the Diamond Microphone, and one of its studios, S-4, was named after Radio Free Europe. The day after his death, on January 21, 2005, his name was given to the main lecture hall of the Warsaw Uprising Museum. Since 2006, a bench dedicated to Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, sculpted by Wojciech Gryniewicz, has stood in Warsaw's Powiśle. His name is borne by schools, streets in Warsaw and Kielce, a roundabout in Poznań (since 2005), a square in Kraków (formerly Railway Square, since 2007), and an avenue in Gliwice and Bytom, along which national road No. 88 runs. The Senate declared 2014 the Year of Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, and the Polish Post issued a stamp with a denomination of 4.20 PLN in a print run of 300,000 copies. In 2016, a permanent exhibition titled "Mission: Poland" about Nowak-Jeziorański and Władysław Bartoszewski was opened at the "Pan Tadeusz" Museum Ossolineum.

In 2001, at the initiative of Nowak-Jeziorański, the College of Eastern Europe in Wrocław was established in his name, which publishes the bimonthly "Nowa Europa Wschodnia" and "New Eastern Europe" and is based in the castle in Wojnowice, which it has owned since 2014. Since 2004, the Jan Nowak-Jeziorański Award has been presented in Wrocław, with the first laureate being Tadeusz Mazowiecki. Former employees of the station are active in the Association of Employees, Collaborators, and Friends of the Polish Station RWE named after him. We were unable to confirm whether there is currently a plaque commemorating the former radio headquarters in Munich at Oettingenstraße 67.

Interesting Facts

• In December 1959, the Czechoslovak StB attempted to poison employees of the Czechoslovak section by substituting salt shakers in the RFE cafeteria with containers of atropine. Announcer Ivan Havlík, who was forced to cooperate after his father was kidnapped, informed the other side about the plot. According to Prokop Tomek, the failed operation destroyed the StB network in the station for the entire 1960s.
• In the spring of 1976, representatives of the Soviet intelligence proposed a show "tribunal" against Radio Free Europe. Ministers from East Germany, Hungary, and Bulgaria supported the idea and suggested Prague. KGB chief Yuri Andropov and Polish Minister of Internal Affairs Stanisław Kowalczyk "recommended reconsidering" the idea, which meant its end. Prokop Tomek speculates that Moscow did not want to complicate relations with the West during the Helsinki process.
• In June 1976, the Czechoslovak equivalent of Czechowicz, "Captain" Pavel Minařík, came to Poland at the invitation of the Polish intelligence. Both "heroes" met with listeners at the Feliks Dzierżyński Officer School in Warsaw.
• Minařík was only an announcer at RFE and, as Prokop Tomek writes, he himself made proposals to his superiors for a bombing attack on the station. He began making such proposals after 1972, when the political consequences of such an action were already unacceptable.
• A replica of the umbrella used to kill Georgi Markov, a collaborator of Radio Free Europe, can be seen at the International Spy Museum in Washington. The program "MythBusters" tested whether such an umbrella-gun could work and concluded that it could.
• In 1986, a court in the Polish People's Republic sentenced Józef Szaniawski for espionage, whose "crime" was passing information to Radio Free Europe.
• Across from the Munich headquarters of RFE, on the other side of Oettingenstraße, were tennis courts. Station employees met at the St. Anna Hof restaurant on Lerchenfeldstraße.
• Radio Free Europe repeatedly broadcast a letter from Ion Mihai Pacepa to his daughter Dana, published in 1980 in "Le Monde." The defector, former head of the Romanian intelligence, explained in it why he sided with the West. According to Pacepa, the reason was Ceaușescu's order to organize the assassination of Noël Bernard, the director of the Romanian section of RFE.
• Attacks on Radio Free Europe did not end with the Cold War. When Radio Free Europe began broadcasting to Iraq in 1998, Saddam Hussein ordered his intelligence to "brutally disrupt" their broadcasts. The plan involved shelling the Prague headquarters with an RPG-7 from a window of a building across the street. It was thwarted by the Czech counterintelligence BIS.
• Since June 2023, Jan Nowak-Jeziorański has been the patron of one of the Wrocław trams, Moderus Gamma No. 3325.
• Markov's "Remote Reports," broadcast by Radio Free Europe, were published in Bulgaria only in 1990, and in 2000 the author posthumously received the Order of Stara Planina, Bulgaria's highest honor.