President Donald Trump on March 14 formally declared that the storied U.S. broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, among other U.S. government broadcasters like Voice of America, was “unnecessary” and ordered it “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” He gave no basis for finding it “unnecessary,” although Kari Lake, a former local television news anchor, political candidate, and 2020 election denier and now a senior advisor to RFE/RL’s umbrella organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, derided USAGM in a post on Elon Musk’s X “the most corrupt agency in Washington D.C.” and “a giant rot and burden to the America taxpayer –- a national security risk for this nation.” She provided no detail.
RFE/RL, in fact, was one of the most effective instruments the United States ever devised to combat Soviet communism and its oppressive empire in Europe. It demonstrated over time the effectiveness of “soft power,” much scoffed at then and again now, to advance U.S. interests by demonstrating its values.
At the start of the Cold War, the United States, inexperienced in its new role as leader of the free world, grasped at ways to undermine Kremlin power. The newly established CIA tried various forms of “hard power,” mainly paramilitary covert actions, seeking to support anti-communist insurgent groups in Soviet-dominated Europe. These initiatives generally ended badly. One of the worst, described in the Evan Thomas book “The Very Best Men,” was an effort to arm and supply Polish anti-communist fighters that ended up sending arms to a false front group controlled by the Polish communist security services.
One of the best CIA initiatives, though, was a congressionally funded, covert operation to assemble political refugees from Soviet-dominated Europe and give them means to broadcast into their home countries. This was the origin of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which launched its first broadcast (in Czech) on July 4, 1950. Its mission was not to be a U.S. broadcaster, a la the Voice of America that had been established in 1942, but rather a surrogate free press for countries who no longer had one, led by people from those countries with U.S. citizen staff in management and reporting on events and issues in their own countries with an independent, not government-controlled take.
‘Profoundly Impactful’
The structure led to occasional cultural, editorial, and political clashes between the U.S. management of “the radios,” as they were called and the State Department and emigree staff. I recall these from the mid-1970s when I was a very junior office at the State Department working on what was then called “Eastern Europe”: the U.S. staff at the Munich headquarters and State Department thought the emigrees sometimes too radical and too skeptical of the then-policy of “détente” with the Soviet Union, a policy that included better relations with some of the less crudely repressive Eastern European communist governments. The European journalists sometimes chafed at restrictions and editorial guidance from the Americans whom they sometimes considered naïve about the Kremlin’s character and objectives. RFE/RL’s CIA origin, when publicly revealed by the early-1970s (CIA support ended in 1971), exacerbated that tension and meant that part of the U.S. political left distanced itself from RFE/RL.
What neither I nor the other U.S. State Department officials understood was how profoundly impactful RFE/RL was becoming on the ground. Take RFE’s Polish Service, one of the most effective. It had been headed for 25 years by Jan Nowak. A graduate student in economics who was called up in 1939 as a reserve officer in the Polish army, Nowak had been a courier in World War II between the Polish government in exile in London and the Polish underground Home Army. He parachuted to Poland just in time to run English-language radio broadcasting from Warsaw during the two-month long Warsaw Uprising in the late-summer of 1944. At RFE/RL, Nowak set a standard of intellectual rigor and political sophistication that won the Polish Service a wide and influential audience in Poland.
How influential? Shortly after the Cardinal of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla, was elected Pope John Paul II in 1978, Nowak was invited to the Vatican to meet the first Polish Pope in history. As Nowak relayed the story to me later, upon meeting the Holy Father, Nowak started to explain who he was. John Paul explained that there was no need because “I listened to you every morning while shaving.”
RFE/RL was not the only source of outside information to reach the large Polish audience hungry for uncensored thought, but it was one of the major ones, in addition to others such as BBC World Service and Kultura, which was run by Poles in Paris. RFE/RL fed into Poland’s large dissident movements that coalesced into the mass Solidarity movement in 1980 which, in 1989, negotiated a peaceful end to communist rule and took over the government after winning an election.
RFE/RL did more than broadcast from its Cold War headquarters in Munich. Its research and analysis arm produced some of the best assessments of politics and economics of the communist Eastern Bloc in Europe, forecasting the terminal decay of Soviet power and the rise of Central and Eastern Europe’s democratic and patriotic oppositions in ways that put much of the mainstream U.S. government analysis at the time to shame. One of those RFE/RL U.S. analysts, Tom Ilves of New Jersey, returned after 1991 to his family’s country of origin, Estonia, and eventually became president of Estonia.
U.S. government initiatives don’t get better than this.
Fit for Purpose?
Still, that was then. What about now? Is RFE/RL still fit for purpose?
At a strategic level, RFE/RL’s past success demonstrates proof of concept: that the model of a surrogate free press can be effective as a substitute for people in countries without independent media. That is why RFE/RL inspired parallel initiatives for Cuba (Radio and TV Marti, launched during the Reagan administration) and China and South East Asia, (Radio Free Asia, launched during the Clinton administration).
RFE/RL’s history suggests that the effectiveness of such broadcasting does not take place in linear fashion: it doesn’t bring about change…until it does. RFE/RL had a budget in 2024 of $142 million and an audience of 47.6 million. That suggests that something other than summary termination based on unsupported fragments of accusations ought to be in order.
Are RFE/RL and the parallel initiatives of Radio TV Marti and Radio Free Asia using the best techniques for current, mid-21st century conditions? That is surely a fair subject for debate (in December 2020, Alina Polyakova and I offered a number of recommendations for improvement). It is also reasonable for the current administration, or any new administration, to lay down broad editorial guidance. The resultant tugging would be nothing new, given the history of RFE/RL from its early years, and need not be damaging. Perhaps the technological talent of DOGE could find means to strengthen the effectiveness of these proven programs.
Terminating the whole set of “surrogate free press” initiatives, however, without reasonable cause and based on what so far amounts to invective, neither makes government efficient nor advances any identifiable American interest. It’s a poor standard to set against decades of success.