'Cold War Radio' by Mark G. Pomar
During the Cold War, a pair of separate U.S. broadcasting services breached the Iron Curtain with a daily stream of news and culture in various languages. Mark G. Pomar offers an insider’s view in Cold War Radio. He had been assistant director of the Russian Service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and director of the Voice of America’s USSR Division during the Reagan years.
There was a distinction between VOA, a government agency, and RFE/RL, a corporation initially funded by the CIA and then by Congressional appropriations. VOA trod diplomatically around controversy while RFE/RL was more eager to poke a stick into the eyes of the Communist regimes. Although the Soviets tried to jam the broadcasts and denounced them as propaganda, those broadcasts were avidly followed. Pomar tells stories of receiving a hero’s welcome when he traveled through the former Eastern Bloc after the Soviet Union dissolved.
VOA and RFE/RL were part of a public relations war against the Soviets, a conflict for hearts and minds across the world. Soviet propaganda had negligible effect in the U.S. while American propaganda—not Pomar’s word choice—inspired dissidents and presented a vision of a freer, more affluent society. Cold War Radio details the history of the American broadcasters, the push and pull of opinions within those organizations and assesses their role in undermining support for the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe and Soviet Central Asia.
