“Jako były słuchacz programów sekcji polskiej Radia Wolna Europa w PRL-u uzyskałem dostęp do informacji, których reżimowa cenzura chciała nas pozbawić. RWE odmieniła bieg mojego życia i życia milionów ludzi. Dlatego czuję się zaszczycony, że powierzono mi zadanie kierowania tą legendarną instytucją w dalszym przełamywaniu cenzury i udzielaniu głosu niesłyszanym” – powiedział PAP Lipien.
“When I was a teenager in Communist Poland, I would listen to Radio Free Europe to find out what the government was not telling me,” said Mr. Lipien. “It had an enormous impact on my life, and on the lives of millions of others. I’m honored, and humbled, to be entrusted with helping this storied organization continue to break the hold of…
As I prepare to start my new job as President and CEO of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/FL), an organization which contributed greatly to the peaceful fall of communism in East Central Europe and in the former Soviet Union and continues today to counter censorship, propaganda and disinformation with outstanding journalism, I’m re-reading books on U.S. international broadcasting history published…
Cold War, Glos Ameryki, History, OWI, Poland, RFE, VOA
Soft Propaganda by Former Voice of America Editor Targeted Americans in Support of Communist Regime
Mira Złotowska, later known as Mira Michałowska, who during the Cold War published books and articles in English in the United States and in Great Britain as Mira Michal and used several other pen names, was one of many radically left-wing journalists who had worked in New York on Voice of America (VOA) U.S. government anti-Nazi radio broadcasts in the…
Comrade Absolonova is a tall, blond, sexy-looking girl and a devout Communist who seduced young men and blackmailed them to become informers. “Radio Free Europe calls the citizens of Bratislava! … We are warning you…” Newsweek reported that after RFE called her “a prostitute, an immoral woman, and a tramp … Comrade Absolonova doesn’t work in Bratislava any more.” The…
Cold War, Glos Ameryki, History, Poland, RFE, VOA
Communist secret police in Poland spied on Voice of America's Willis Conover to shut down Radio Free Europe
By Ted Lipien for Cold War Radio Museum Polish communist intelligence service and secret police spied on Voice of America’s (VOA) jazz expert Willis Conover during his visit to Poland in 1959 and tried to exploit it to influence U.S. diplomats into silencing Polish broadcasts of Radio Free Europe (RFE). As reported by Polish media, the spying on Conover is…
Toward the end of the Cold War in the 1980s, the Republican administration of conservative President Ronald Reagan greatly increased spending on U.S. international broadcasting to the Soviet Union and to other communist-ruled nations. Broadcasts to nations behind the Iron Curtain were carried out by the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL). President Reagan…
History, Poland, RFE, RL, VOA
The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II by Victor Suvorov
By Ted Lipien I would like to thank Bill Coe for bringing Victor Suvorov’s book to my attention. Journalists reporting on Vladimir Putin’s latest attempt to re-write history with his propaganda and disinformation blaming the start of World War II on Poland–the first victim of the war and the first country to resist militarily Hitler’s Nazi Germany–should read The Chief…
Children, Cold War, Featured, Glos Ameryki, History, International Broadcasting, Media, Poland, Radio, RFE, VOA, Women
Radio was a ‘childhood companion’ of Polish Nobel Prize author Olga Tokarczuk
I learned something today by reading on the Internet the Nobel Prize in Literature Lecture delivered on December 7, 2019 at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk. As a young girl growing up in Poland in the 1960s and the 1970s, a country at that time still under communist rule until 1989, she was often listening…
RFE, VOA
1953 CIA Source: People Died in Czechoslovakia Because of Pro-Communist Propaganda from Voice of America
OPINION AND ANALYSIS Cold War Radio Museum By Ted Lipien Note: The article has been updated to include information that Heda Margolius Kovály had worked in the 1970s as a freelance reporter for the Voice of America Czechoslovak Service under a radio name Kaca Kralova. A declassified CIA report from 1953 featured a claim by a still unidentified Slovak source…