RFE - Radio Free Europe

1950-7-4 Radio Free Europe broadcasts for first time behind the Iron Curtain - HiPo > .

On 4 July 1950 Radio Free Europe, which was founded the previous year to transmit uncensored information to audiences behind the Iron Curtain, completed its first broadcast.

Although the station was uncensored in the sense that it shared information that was suppressed within the Communist Bloc, it was still a propaganda tool founded and funded by the US government.

The task facing the journalists who worked for RFE was daunting. Since they broadcast to states that suppressed a range of information and news, the gathering of intelligence to provide broadcast material was an enormous challenge. They were forced to rely on contact with émigrés and people who had travelled behind the Iron Curtain for eye-witness accounts, and closely monitored print and electronic media from the communist governments. Despite the challenge of sourcing information it has been suggested that the quality and quantity of RFE news was so comprehensive that the communist governments themselves used Radio Free Europe to gain information about what was happening within their own countries.

However, RFE was still fundamentally a broadcaster that promoted anti-communist ideas and was therefore a significant threat in the countries it targeted. The USSR tasked the KGB with establishing expensive radio jamming facilities to try to block broadcasts, while in 1981 a terrorist group funded by the Romanian regime of Nicolae Ceausescu detonated a bomb at RFE’s Munich headquarters.

Despite these challenges Radio Free Europe and its partner station Radio Liberty survived, and even after the end of the Cold War has continued to broadcast to countries where a free press is not established.