Turning Off the Radios

For more than two decades, the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies have tried to silence Radio Free Europe, which beams programs of news, music and political commentary to five Eastern European countries, and Radio Liberty, which broadcasts exclusively to the Soviet Union. Last week both stations were on the brink of being shut down--by U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright.

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is waging a singlehanded and (so far) highly effective battle against the two stations whose broadcasts from West Germany, he feels, jeopardize America's efforts to improve relations with Communist nations. "These radios," says Fulbright, "should take their rightful place in the graveyard of cold war relics."

Stop Payments. One basis of Fulbright's two-year-old campaign is that the stations, instead of being the private organizations that they claimed to be, were actually supported by the Central Intelligence Agency. Last spring the Nixon Administration ordered the CIA to stop its payments and proposed the creation of a public-private corporation similar to COMSAT that would run the two stations under congressional scrutiny. But Fulbright has created a deadlock between the House and Senate over bills that would keep the stations alive until this or some other new arrangement could be worked out. As a result, a temporary congressional appropriation expired last week, leaving RFE and Radio Liberty with only enough money for a few more weeks of operation.

As it happens, Fulbright's criticism of the stations is itself a cold war relic. To be sure, when they were founded in the early 1950s, both Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were indeed propaganda tools that sought to undermine the Communist governments. To its enduring discredit, Radio Free Europe, in the opening stage of the 1956 revolution, encouraged Hungarian freedom fighters to believe that the West would intervene militarily on their side. Since then, however, there have been massive personnel and policy changes at both stations.

Music Hours. Most of the old emigre right-wingers, who unrealistically ranted for an overthrow of the Communist regimes, were weeded out in favor of younger and more perceptive East Europeans and Soviet defectors. In general, these staffers have tried to encourage a process of liberalization within the Communist societies. No one can evaluate to what degree the stations have affected developments in the East bloc, but they both have won a reputation for veracity and reliability inside and outside the Communist countries.

Radio Free Europe employs 1,600 people, 960 of them at its headquarters in Munich. Operating on a $21 million budget, it broadcasts a total of 557 hours each week in native language to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary. About half of the programs is news and analysis of events in the various East bloc countries. Other programs range from music hours featuring the latest Western rock to special reports on living conditions of foreign workers in Western Europe.

Much of RFE's information comes from monitoring of East European news services and radio broadcasts, and interviews with travelers. The station's 100 political analysts, many of them natives of Eastern Europe, often are able to draw deductions that an official Eastern European commentator could never make. Example: the notion that the Polish government actually encourages alcoholism because it collects a big tax on vodka.

To protect its reputation for accuracy, RFE's broadcasts, if anything, err on the side of caution. When reports of Alexander Dubcek's ouster first came from Prague over a Western news ticker, RFE waited for Czechoslovakia's confirmation before airing the item. Despite the fact that for years RFE held up Yugoslavia as an example of how a Communist regime could peacefully develop toward liberalism, RFE has given extensive coverage to the Croatian crisis that has shaken Yugoslavia's progress toward greater governmental freedoms. Judging by the annual polls of East bloc tourists in Western Europe, RFE's audience is impressive: 78% of all radio-listening Poles, 81% of the Hungarians, 77% of Rumanians, 78% of Bulgarians and 60% of the Czechoslovaks. At present, all the East bloc countries except Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria have given up trying to jam RFE since the broadcasts tend to get through anyhow.

Samizdat Essay. Radio Liberty, which has a $14 million budget, employs 800 persons, including 250 Soviet defectors. It broadcasts 24 hours daily in 19 languages. A research staff of 40 gleans Russian publications for details about happenings in the country. Through private channels, Radio Liberty receives underground samizdat (literally, self-publishing) manuscripts that are clandestinely circulating in the Soviet Union and broadcasts them to listeners in Russia.

At Radio Liberty, a typical day's broadcasting, in addition to hourly news bulletins, might include a samizdat essay by a Soviet engineer on the need for economic reform in Russia and a synopsis of a Polish film that is not being shown in Russia. Radio Liberty tries to fill in gaps caused by Soviet censorship. For example, it carries criticism by Western psychiatrists about Soviet imprisonment in mental hospitals of political dissenters.

The Soviet and Eastern European regimes understandably want RFE and Radio Liberty closed down since they challenge the governments' complete control over the information reaching their people. Despite Fulbright's argument that the stations must be silenced as a U.S. contribution toward relaxing tensions in Europe, many Western Europeans maintain exactly the opposite. As one West German editorial put it: "In this era of detente, it is all the more important that the voice of free opinion is not silenced." Even though his Ostpolitik seeks better relations with the Communist countries, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt obviously agrees. He has consistently rejected Polish and Soviet suggestions that the stations' licenses to operate from West German territory be withdrawn.

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