Radio Free Europe and the Pursuit of Democracy: My War Within the Cold War.

• Author: Coleman, Peter
• Position: Review

George R. Urban, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 322 pp, $35.

When the Venezuelan terrorist "Carlos" (Ilich Ramirez Sanchez) was run to earth in Khartoum four years ago and flown to Paris for trial, the charges against him included the blowing up of the Czechoslovak service of Radio Free Europe (RFE) in Munich in February 1981. Four people were seriously injured. A few months after the bombing, one of RFE's Romanian broadcasters was stabbed twenty-two times in his Munich home. He survived, but earlier in London a Bulgarian broadcaster for RFE had been killed when a "poison umbrella" injected a ricin pellet into his thigh.

Other weapons for intimidating RFE broadcasters and staff included parcel bombs, cancer-inducing radioactive material, and anonymous letters along the lines of: "Oh, Deformed One, if you don't shut your Jewish trap, you will be gripping clay underground. Be careful, viper, we will be cutting out your venomous tongue."

These attacks and threats were one measure of RFE's success in eroding communist legitimacy by providing a surrogate free press in the Eastern bloc. With Radio Liberty (RL), which broadcast to the Soviet Union, it reached twenty-five million listeners and played a major role in the peaceful ending of the Cold War. Launched in 1951, it took a few years to strike form. Beginning as a CIA "black radio" whose mission included disinformation and counter-revolution, the turning point was the Hungarian bloodbath in 1956. RFE was accused of having incited and maintained the Hungarian uprising by broadcasting promises of Western arms. Fifteen thousand Hungarians were killed. Relying on archives located in Budapest, George Urban concluded that the RFE'S Hungarian service had not incited revolution or promised arms, although its maudlin and pugnacious rhetoric, drawn from the pre-war Horthy regime, had encouraged false hopes.

After this tragic fiasco, RFE was reorganized to become a basically non-government voice of national traditions within the Soviet bloc, pursuing policies of reform and liberalization while never accepting the permanence of Soviet rule. No one symbolized this new direction - and the problems it faced - better than George Urban, whose last book (he died in October 1997) is this memoir of RFE and, to some extent, RL.

Urban's is not a happy memoir. The subtitle, My War Within the Cold War, sums up his theme. The new policy involved years of often bitter struggle with both grotesque reactionaries and Western appeasers. Born in Hungary in 1921 to a family of some wealth and Magyar pride, Urban early in life absorbed a conservative aversion to...