'The Spirit Of Freedom:' 75 Years Of Radio Free Europe

A Hungarian presenter in a Radio Free Europe (RFE) office in Munich, Germany, in 1955.

The American radio had begun broadcasting five years earlier, on July 4, 1950.

RFE workers in the Munich headquarters sort through mail received from broadcast countries.

RFE was set up with the stated aim of “keeping alive the spirit of freedom in the hearts and minds of captive people” living under communism in Eastern Europe.

RFE was headquartered inside this complex alongside Munich’s English Garden park.

With RFE targeting communist European states, Radio Liberty (RL), a sister entity, was founded to transmit into the Soviet Union in 1953.

A brochure calling for donations to support the operation of RFE.

A portion of RFE’s funding came from donations but the bulk of the operation was secretly funded by the CIA. This subterfuge allowed for RFE to be ‘bare-fisted and hard-hitting,” unhindered by awkward diplomatic considerations of openly state-funded broadcasters.

Radio Free Europe’s main transmitting station at Gloria, near Lisbon, Portugal.

RFE and Radio Liberty used powerful short-wave transmitters in Germany, Spain, and Portugal that could “bounce” signals off the atmosphere to reach target countries in Eastern Europe and the USSR. Radio Liberty operated a transmission facility in Taiwan that directed broadcasts into deepest Siberia.

An armed guard patrols a medium-wave radio transmitter truck in West Germany, near the border with Czechoslovakia, in 1955.

As communist states moved to jam RFE and Radio Liberty’s broadcasts, Radio Free Europe deployed dozens of mobile transmitter stations, such as the one seen above, which could operate close to the Iron Curtain.

Hungarians surround a toppled statue of Josef Stalin amid the 1956 revolution.

In 1956, RFE came under fire for broadcasts that many perceived as encouraging Hungary’s anti-communist uprising. The revolution was crushed by the Soviet military, killing thousands. In a look-back on RFE’s 1956 broadcasts to Hungary, which included some technical advice on keeping revolutionary momentum rolling, one former RFE director concluded “it is never [the radio’s] function to tell people what they should do -- and least of all under conditions of violent upheaval.”

Radio Free Europe's Berlin correspondent Tom Bodin talks with a US soldier during a joint Anglo-American training exercise in West Berlin's Grunewald forest in 1964.

Radio was seen as an ideal medium for reaching populations living under repressive regimes, in part because it left no incriminating trace. Listeners could tune into a broadcast then simply twist the dial to another frequency.

A Polish girl records a message to her countrymen and women living under communism.

As well as reporting the news, RFE and RL kept audiences entertained with the latest music and cultural programs in the languages of the target audiences.

Editors at work in RFE's newsroom in Munich in 1967.

In 1967, the CIA’s funding of RFE was revealed and the radio later began receiving its budget directly from the US Congress. The radio was seen as vital tool for fighting a war of ideas between communist regimes and Western democracies.

The monitoring station in Munich, where broadcasts from communist countries were recorded and reviewed by radio staff.

RFE and RL merged to become RFE/RL in 1976.

The scene of a bomb blast at RFE/RL's offices in Munich in February 1981.

The effectiveness of RFE/RL was evidenced by multiple attacks on its staff and facilities. In 1981, a bombing reportedly paid for by Romania’s communist ruler, Nicolae Ceausescu, and arranged by Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the notorious Venezuelan Marxist militant known as “Carlos the Jackal,” shattered a corner of RFE/RL’s Munich headquarters, injuring several staff inside.

The aftermath of the 1981 blast at RFE/RL’s Munich headquarters.

Patrick Moore was a senior analyst at RFE/RL and arrived at the scene of the blast soon after it took place. “The smell of destruction was everywhere,” he recalled in an email. He says many RFE/RL staff had suspected such an attack on the then loosely guarded building was likely. “This was the Cold War, and we were on the front line,” he says.

Security at the Munich headquarters in 1982.

Individual journalists and contributors were also targets of communist spooks that haunted Western Europe. Bulgarian Georgi Markov, who had presented a biting series of reports about life under communism for Radio Free Europe was killed by a pellet of ricin poison in London in 1978.

Young East Berliners celebrate as they enter the West through an opening in the Berlin Wall in December 1989.

After the Berlin Wall fell and one after another of Europe’s communist regimes collapsed, RFE/RL had its budget slashed by nearly two thirds amid debate over the radio's future.

The building in central Prague that served as the headquarters for RFE/RL.

In 1995, RFE/RL relocated to Prague where Czech President Vaclav Havel offered the broadcaster the former Czechoslovak communist parliament building in the city center for a nominal rent. In 2009 the operation moved to a purpose-built facility outside the center.

RFE/RL's Armenian Service correspondent Ruzanna Stepanian covers a standoff between police and demonstrators in Yerevan.

Since the collapse of communism in Europe, RFE/RL has closed several language services, including those broadcasting to Poland, the former Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic States, while opening others, including in the Balkans and Iran.

RFE/RL visual journalist Maryan Kushnir filming near Kyiv during the first week of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Amid Russia's war on Ukraine, RFE/RL has provided intensive on-the-ground reporting of the invasion. Today, RFE/RL is a major international media organization, reporting in countries where "a free press is either banned by authoritarian governments or not fully established."

RFE/RL staff in the current Prague headquarters campaign for the release of their colleague Alsu Kurmasheva from a Russian prison in 2023.

Seventy-five years on from its founding, RFE/RL is currently fighting White House efforts to shut down the organization.