HUNGARY'S FALSE HOPE DETAILED : RADIO FREE EUROPE FOMENTED UPRISING.

Byline: Jane Perlez The New York Times

Newly released documents concerning Radio Free Europe broadcasts during the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the Soviets confirm what many Hungarians remembered and others suspected: that commentators encouraged the Hungarians to battle on in the false understanding that they would receive reinforcements from the West.

The documents were among those made public last week at a conference on historians' access to archives from the Cold War era.

The main item shedding new light on the broadcasts is an internal Radio Free Europe memorandum written by William Griffith, then a political adviser at the Munich-based station, a few weeks after the rebellion was crushed.

Griffith noted that a broadcast on Oct. 27, four days after the revolt began, ``fairly clearly implies that foreign aid will be forthcoming if the resistance forces succeed in establishing a `central military command.' ''

A program on the following day, Griffith said, stated that ``Hungarians must continue to fight vigorously because this will have a great effect on the handling of the Hungarian question by the Security Council.'' Without saying so directly, the author of the broadcast, a Hungarian emigre, implied that the United Nations would give active support to Hungarians if they kept on fighting, Griffith said.

At the time of the revolt, Radio Free Europe was covertly financed in part by the Central Intelligence Agency. Its support ended in the early 1970s when the station came under the supervision of an independent federal agency funded by Congress.

Many Hungarians still remember listening to the broadcasts, which many said gave tremendous hope - false hope, it turned out - that help was on the way.

On Nov. 4, for example, the day the Soviets suppressed the rebellion, a Radio Free Europe broadcaster, Zoltan Thury, told his listeners, ``In the Western capitals a practical manifestation of Western sympathy is expected at any hour.'' Griffith noted in his memo that Thury's broadcast constituted the ``most serious policy violation of all.''

The question of whether the broadcasts unduly incited the Hungarian fighters caused such a storm in Washington that congressional hearings were held in 1957. Radio Free Europe was then exonerated.

The Griffith memorandum was among documents recently unearthed in Washington, Budapest and Moscow concerning the rebellion whose 40th anniversary will be commemorated next month. The new material, which includes minutes of Hungarian Cabinet meetings with Prime Minister Imre Nagy, the Communist reform leader, as well as notes from Politburo meetings in the Soviet Union during the crisis, was unveiled here Friday at a conference of American, Hungarian and Russian historians.

The notes from the Politburo show that at one moment during the rebellion the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev considered recognizing the government of Imre Nagy, the reform Communist, but the notes also show that there was great indecision and opposing points of view in the meetings as well as distrust among the members.

Other documents also showed that the presence in Moscow of the Chinese Communist Party's vice chairmen, Liu Shaoqi, was vital in tipping the scales toward suppressing the revolt.

The conference organized by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, a group that focuses on encouraging governments around the world to open their archives, addressed the varying degrees of access that scholars now have to the gold mine of Cold War information that lies in the archives of the former Communist bloc.

Charles Gati, a political scientist who fled Hungary during the 1956 revolt and is now a fellow at Johns Hopkins University's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, said he had encouraged the current Hungarian government to be more forthcoming in releasing documents.

In that way, he said, the Hungarians could show the West that they were truly a democratic country and not just a ``post-Communist country.''

``I told them you need to break with the past more definitively and open up the archives in the Ministry of Interior,'' Gati said. ``I said, `Why don't you let the country confront its collective past.' ''

Gati said the Hungarian government had made some progress, but not enough. ``You can open up a controversial event and think you've done your job. But the daily activities of a police state don't emerge from a sensational event - a lot of Hungarians want to understand the sociology of a police state,'' he said.

Although he had been given considerable access to the archives for a book he is writing on the trial and execution in 1958 of Nagy, Gati said some material was still off-limits.