Cold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950-1989

As a Professor of Russian at Arizona State University I was particularly sensitive to the important Cold War work done at RFE/RL to counteract Soviet propaganda with the world's facts as WE knew them through their broadcasts into a country that had only one radio station...The Soviet government's station...and the people called the device by which they listened to it a "receiver" as opposed to a multi-station "radio" of our European and American conception. This receiver could be reduced in volume in most Russian households of the time but could not be completely shut off...so the sound of the propaganda was subtly still penetrating the country's millions of ears and half that many brains... In those years I had colleagues of many backgrounds who all had a common desire to refute the Soviet lines and to effect finally the sea change in world politics that was the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Many of the people working in important roles at RFE/RL were themselves former citizens of the Soviet empire...dissident emigres and defectors. Managing the content they produced and set about to broadcast was a difficult task for the stations' administrators who were accustomed to western journalistic standards and ethics. And one of the major problems they faced was the fact that the Soviet intelligence organs (KGB and GRU) were ordered to do what they could to silence these broadcasts. This effort represents what Richard Cummings was working there to prevent...assassinations, bombings, poisoning, bribery, threats, and sabotage of all kinds... He was the long-time Director of Security. He has only become a writer and memoirist in his retirement, so he might be excused from the strictly editorial criticisms of some of the other reviewers...at least in this, his first book. Only is his dilemma to report to his readership on incidents that he and his security colleagues were unable to prevent, as those incidents are more conventionally "newsworthy" than the myriad tales of all their work to stop these incidents from happening. The fact that Russian KGB agent Oleg Tumanov worked at Radio Liberty for more than twenty years undetected by the security cadre is exemplary of this dilemma. I once met Oleg Tumanov when he came to Arizona State University for reasons obscure in 1984...two years before his redirection back to Moscow. During that short visit...unmentioned in his own biography... his siip in reporting to us a botched attempt to assassinate dissident emigre buddhology scholar Aleksandr Piatigorsky (1929-2009) convinced us that he was a spy...but despite reporting this to RL Director George Bailey and to more than one CIA investigator, Tumanov was able to keep working there another two years under a still oblivious security staff. Still, RFE/RL did triumph in the Cold War information battles, and Cummings tells us the details of many of the skirmishes in that battle. That is why I recommend it. Lee B. Croft

As a security director for Radio Free Europe during critical years of the "cold war", with a broad background in all phases of "security", Rich Cummings writes a fascinating report on the intrigue, behind-the-scenes planning and violent incidents of the epoch. Those of us who lived in Europe at the time did not know what was happening around us, but Rich's book reveals the full scope of the not-so-cold war in which we participated. Excellent reading for anyone interested in US history from the 50's to the 90's, and indispensable for persons making foreign relations decisions today - lest we forget the lessons of history!

While the stories told are fascinating and the research done to support them was thorough, the author's writing style made this a difficult read. This really could have benefited from a co-author.

It seems that Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty managed to annoy at one time or another people of virtually all political persuasions, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, from Senator Fulbright to Nicolae Ceausescu. That alone was probably sufficient evidence of their utility. But the sustained efforts of Communist regimes and their agents to denigrate, slander, and violently attack - including bombing and poisonings - RFE/RL and its staff serve to remind us that the institution was a powerful champion of liberty in its target areas. I knew Vlad Georgescu, the eminently civilized and cultured head of Romanian broadcasting, and saw him succumb to a brain tumour that owed to criminal poisoning. Thus there were victims of communism even in the Free World. Richard Cummings ably relates these campaigns to silence the voice of freedom. He deserves great credit for telling the story.

Both my wife and I enjoyed this book as we were aquinted with the time and I was stationed in England and listened to Radio free Europe.

An interesting Cold War account, but already the Product Description about Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty allegedly broadcasting "uncensored" news and commentary gives a false impression. Censorship has a number of definitions, depending on the viewpoint of its interpreter. First, it is certainly true that the US radio station during the Cold War broke through heavy-handed Communist media censorship and corrected gross distortions in the domestic media of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but censorship in its own ranks was not foreign to RFERL. It once had censors known euphemistically as "policy officers" whose legitimate efforts to stop violations of its own policy code in programming also resulted many times in censorship, pure and simple. Egregious censorship in later years became rare, and the mechanisms of implementing it were subtler. Second, the backgrounds of employees from Communist countries without a strong history of a free press predestined them to accept censorship with ease if they believed it benefited the US Cold War cause, which they ardently supported. Many an international comment they felt put the US in a bad light was regularly watered down when they put it into their languages for broadcast. Their censorship worked overtime during the Vietnam War when leading democratically elected politicians in Europe and elsewhere blasted the US and American aggression in Southeast Asia. The book also too easily brushes aside Communist criticism of the fact that there were a number of World War Two war criminals working for RFERL. The culprits may have got hired undetected, but their slips of tongue over the years revealed their backgrounds to their coworkers and ultimately to their American employers. However, they kept their jobs. Moreover, the book omits the problem of rabid anti-Semitism in the ranks of RFERL and also ignores the dilemma of Islamic fundamentalism embraced by the Muslim bloc at the station who let it get into their programs to the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union. The Americans did not know then that Muslim fundamentalism was going to come back to haunt them.

Ein ausgezeichnetes Buch, Mit historischer Charakter und Bedeutung. Auch sehr spannend.An excellent book with historical importance. Also very exciting.

The first chapter is fine, but progresses into obscure stories of intrigue only peripherally related to cold war radio. Full of detail, and of a certain interest, but without purpose or direction. Much seems to be filler; reads like a random collection of bureaucratic circular s.