Since the end of the American–Soviet conflict scholars have been preoccupied with the controversial question: who won the Cold War? Yet few have asked at what cost the battle was fought. Richard H. Cummings, the former director of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty during the 1980s and 1990s, addresses this issue in his recent history of the radio stations.
No doubt the traditional accounts of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty are familiar to the readers of this journal. You are probably aware, for example, that both stations were funded by the Central Intelligence Agency until 1972. And that the American public first learned of the CIA's sponsorship in 1967 when Ramparts magazine ran its famous exposé of the agency's connection to a number of domestic organizations including student and women's groups. However, these stories pale in comparison to Cummings's account of the bombing of RFE/RL headquarters in Munich, in 1981, by Ilych Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal. Or the murder of Georgi Markov by Bulgarian intelligence, a murder in which the head of the KGB at the time, Yuri Andropov, was directly involved. This is of course the same Yuri Andropov who later became the General Secretary of the Soviet Union and who served as one of Mikhail Gorbachev's most ardent supporters as he rose toward his assumption of power in 1985. Today Markov's murder – he died of septicaemia, a form of blood poisoning caused by bacterial toxins, which entered his system through a poison pellet shot from an umbrella – remains one of the great unsolved murders of the Cold War.
These stories are part of a larger narrative that revolves around the trials and tribulations faced by those who worked on the front lines of the propaganda war. Throughout his work Cummings maintains, and correctly so, that the battle was fought at a great cost to those émigrés who were recruited for the job. His is a blood-and-guts history, the kind we often forget about in the less emotional accounts of the past that we seem to privilege. Indeed the emotive nature of Cummings's work should not be dismissed despite his attempts to absent himself from the story he is uniquely tied to.
Notwithstanding his claim that his goal was to detach himself from the events and remain “objective,” there is a palatable and persistent emotional undertone to his work. While this helps bring his stories to life it also has a downside because Cummings appears unable to distance himself from the traditional narrative of the Cold War. As a result he refuses to see the radio stations for what they really were: propaganda. This is problematic because the critical reader is left wondering why the stations were targeted so frequently by East European intelligence. Certainly it was not simply that the Soviets and their East European counterparts were antagonized by the release of “truthful information.” For despite Cummings's protestations to the contrary, the information was not always “truthful,” nor was it always American in origin. Indeed, many of the émigrés who worked for the stations were able to write their own scripts because successive governments failed to provide the necessary policy guidance to keep the programs in line with US policy.
But this is not the story that interests him. Instead he wants to focus our attention on what he terms questions of “security and intelligence.” Compelling topics certainly, but are they, in and of themselves, enough to hold the reader's attention? In my view, no. Unfortunately, I found much of his discussion difficult to follow. Aside from his claim that the histories of the radio stations needed to be updated there was no central argument that holds the various sections of the book together. The chapters rarely include introductions or conclusions and there is no discussion about why the stories he chooses to outline are important or what they tell us about the larger issues that surround the Cold War. In this sense Cummings's work raises more questions than it answers.
There are also sections of the book that should have provided a more in-depth discussion. For example, I would like to have seen a more detailed examination of the origins of the radio stations and how they fit into a general history of American propaganda. There is also no mention of the importance of the Voice of America or how the three radio stations differed from each other. The standard interpretation is that Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were more hard-hitting than VOA. Although Cummings is not interested in questions of policy, I was left wondering, was this the reason why RFE was targeted by terrorists and not the Voice? I also wished he had provided his take on the role RFE played in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. This is still a controversial subject and one that I think should have been explored in his history.
Clearly the stories Cummings tells need to be told, but given the problems I outlined above I have to wonder whether a book was the best format. I think that many of these tales would have been better suited to a series of articles. In that format they would have garnered much more attention from the general public, which seems to be what Cummings was most interested in. It is highly unlikely that this book will achieve the same ends. Nor, I believe, will it meet the expectations of scholars who tend to prefer a little analysis along with their narratives, no matter how dramatic and tragic those narratives are.
