The Needle

Communist officials in the satellite nations of Eastern Europe suddenly found themselves undergoing a sharp, persistent needling. From somewhere in Western Germany a mobile radio transmitter kept punctuating its first-rate entertainment programs to jab at Red stooges with a disquieting array of names, addresses and facts about the rigors of Communist rule. The station identified itself by four peals of the Freedom Bell. Its call letters: RFE, for Radio Free Europe.

The brain behind RFE's voice is the privately organized, privately financed National Committee for a Free Europe, Inc., which for the past 19 months has been organizing a mounting psychological war against the Soviet Union from third-floor offices in Manhattan's Empire State Building. Basing its information on reports from exiled satellite leaders and its own intelligence pipelines through the Iron Curtain, the committee drafts, records, and ships off some 100 scripts a week for airing from RFE's transmitter.

The Doctor. Last week CFE was ready to start stepping up its operations to a full-scale effort. To boss the show, it picked as its new president C. D. (for Charles Douglas) Jackson, 48, publisher of FORTUNE, a vice president of TIME Inc., and one of World War II's top civilian experts in psychological warfare.

As deputy chief to Ike Eisenhower's P.W. branch in 1944, Jackson worked his staff around the clock in London's Inver-esk House on the touchiest campaign of the war: rousing the conquered peoples of Europe, by radio and leaflet, to active support for Dday. As D-day grew closer, they warned of bombings to come, urged the French into effective disobedience of German orders. Finally they sent the organized French underground after important specific targets like bridges and railroad switches.

The Hope. This time Jackson was aiming at no known Dday, but the scope of his operations was broader, the stakes higher. By spring, RFE's voice would be amplified by a second transmitter in Munich, its production department shifted to Europe to capitalize swiftly on fast-moving intelligence. Beyond that, the committee already was godfather to a group of National Councils, one for each conquered nation, composed of exiled intellectuals, artists and political leaders. These kept'a close watch on their respective homelands, stood ready, in a pinch, to act as governments-in-exile.

"We've damn few tricks left in our bags to keep us out of World War III," said Jackson last week. "I think this is one of them. If we can keep the Russians busy with the people they have already conquered by holding out a genuine hope of freedom, we can, perhaps, prevent the march across Western Europe."

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