The story of Radio Free Europe.

IT IS HARD to imagine what life would be like without Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty or other free-world broadcasters--such as Voice of America and the BBC--for the 380 million people residing east of the Iron Curtain (Churchill's metaphor was his dramatic recognition in 1946 of a revolutionary political life introduced by Lenin) is due to these broadcasters and the governments that support them. Without these stations, the Eastern European and Soviet peoples would be as hermetically sealed off from the rest of humanity as if they had been teleported to Uranus, to become the silent and invisible target of a SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) project, which in a figurative sense they have been for a long time.

RFE/RL, as well as VOA, the BBC, Deutsche Welle, Kol Isreal, are the electronic lifeline between our world and theirs, as can be shown by the remarkable audience research findings ingeniously compiled from the rawest of data by members of their staffs. Of which more later.

RFE/RL, the two U.S.-financed radio stations, broadcast round-the-clock seven days a week in the 21 different languages spoken behind the Iron Curtain. In fact, RFE/RL have become the domestic radio service for tens of millions of people who would otherwise be totally dependent upon the "disinformation" policies of their Communist-controlled media. For it should be emphasized that the first target of Soviet disinformation is the home front. RFE/RL transmit not only in Russian and the Eastern European languages but also in the languages of one-half the Soviet people, many of whom either don't know Russian, refuse to learn it, or refuse to listen to Russian anything. The BBC and Deutsche Welle broadcast in English and German respectively, as well as in Russian. Kol Israel broadcasts in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian. These other broadcasters, including Voice of America, are not as strongly focused on domestic issues nor are they on an 18-hour-a-day schedule, which is necessary to span the many USSR time Zones.

A measure of how effectively RFE/RL, headquarterd in a former German military hospital in Munich, are performing their job, is that in a year of straitened congressional budget-cutting, RFE/RL have been voted increased funds for their broadcasting activities. Appropriations to upgrade the 46 transmitters located in Spain, Portugal, and West Germany are being considered. Moreover, new transmitter sites closer to the USSR, especially to Soviet Central Asia, are being sought to break through the jamming.

The most dramatic measure of RFE/RL effectiveness is the costly jamming of the broadcasts by the USSR and its satellites in order to maintain their information monopoly. At a cost of $300 to $500 million a year (three to five times the annual RFE/RL budget of $100 million), the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria attempt to smother the broadcasts with persistent ear-piercing whines, whistles, and groans. Fortunately for the people who live in the Soviet sphere, for about three hours at sundown ionospheric conditions over Europe mysteriously change, creating a "twilight" immunity from jamming. And there is always one frequency kept unjammed for taping purposes, otherwise how would the Soviets know what RFE/RL were broadcasting? So the trick for a would-be listener in Moscow or Tbilisi is to twirl the dials of his shortwave receiver, a sort of electronic Russian roulette, looking for the clear channel, which the jammers shift from frequency to frequency. The jamming, however, seems to create a need to know what you are not supposed to know. RFE/RL try to meet that need by repeating their news and commentary broadcasts three and four times during a day over different frequencies to break through the Electronic Curtain. (For whatever reason, Hungary and Rumania do not interfere with the broadcasts.)

Recently Robert Gillette, the Los Angeles Times Moscow correspondent, described how a Muslim peasant woman, who had traveled by train a thousand miles from her town in Dagestan, on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, approached him in the parking lot of Moscow's International Press Center. She asked him to save her son from a ten-year prison sentence, which he was serving in a camp near Archangel, in the Arctic. (She knew Gillette was a foreign journalist by his auto license plate. Foreign correspondents are assigned bright yellow plates, an administrative stratagen to make KGB surveillance easier.) "You are our last hope," she told Gillette. "My neighbors say that I must speak to an American, and he can see to it that justice is done for my son."

"Encounters like this," wrote Gillette, "are a common occurrence in Moscow, particularly for foreign journalists, whose names become known across the country through Voice of America and Radio Liberty. Both U.S.-run stations translate Western news reports from Moscow into half a dozen Soviet languages and broadcast them back by shortwave to million of listeners, some of whom seek out reporters to relate their own stories."

RFE/RL are especially proud of a photograph smuggled out of Poland in 1983 that showed Lech Walesa listening to his wife in Stockholm reading his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. The speech was, of course, broadcast over RFE/RL facilities.

Still another measure of effectiveness is the amount of broadcasting time that the Soviet Union and the bloc countries devote to denunciations of RFE/RL transmissions. Obviously were the jamming effective, attacks on RFE/RL would be superfluous. For example, Izvestia published an article on July 10, 1984, by General Aleksei Epishev, chief of the Main Political Directorate of the Soviet army and navy, that disclosed Soviet concerns about the Western radios and what the called their "ideological aggression." He quotes President chernenko's June 1983 warning about "attempts to organize a real information and propaganda intervention against us and to turn radio and television channels into an instrument of interference in states' internal affairs and of the Execution of subversive acts."

Epishev listed what the scholarly Soviet Analyst called "Soviet area of vulnerability," such as campaigns in defense of human rights, publicity about Poland's travail, and support for national self-determination. His article singled out RFE/RL as especially dangerous to the USSR because of their "infammatory and hostile activity." Said Epishev:

Fanning nationalist sentiments, Western radio stations persistently stress the "uniqueness" of their culture and customs, the "purity" of their language, and so forth. Alongside the preaching of nationalism, attempts to sow the poisonous seeds of religious fanaticism and to play on the feelings of believers for subversive purposes are being stepped up.

RL has its problems, which are less pressing today than they were several years ago when charges of anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, or anti-democratic broadcsts were bandied about--and exaggerated out of all proportion to the easily available facts. Program content and interpretation of that content can lead to confrontations between staff members of different Soviet or Eastern European nationalities or between RFE/RL executives and certain staff members. Such troubles are not unexpected. A former State Department official once said that involvement in emigire politics is like walking through a minefield. Another official who knows the problems of Radio Liberty said, "Everybody in Munich has a monkey on his back--it's only a question of the size of the monkey." Munich, as one observer put it, is "like a ghetto because it is difficult here to get absorbed in the culture."

Emigres from a dozen or more Soviet satellites make up a large part of the RFE/RL staff. That means trouble in spades. As Joseph Conrad wrote, back in 1910, in one of the greatest of his novels, Under Western Eyes:

The shadow of autocracy . . . had already fallen upon the Boulevard des Philosophes, in the free, independent, and democratic city of Geneva, where there is a quarter called La Petite Russie. Wherever two Russians come together, the shadow of autocracy is with them, tinging their thoughts, their views, their most intimate feelings, their private life, their public utterances--haunting the secret of their silences.

Sometimes the press also can be difficult. For example, on August 30, 1984, the New York Times accused RFE/RL of having failed to report President Reagan's August 11 quip about the bombing beinning in five minutes. Half-true; the story was broadcast extensively over several days in news-related feature programs, but not in newcasts. Why not in newscasts? For two perfectly good reasons, according to RFE/RL executives: "First, a simple announcement of the President's quip . . . as a factual news item, heard and more probably misheard through the jamming, would have created panic in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Our mandate enjoins us to do no such thing. Second, a joke reported as a factual news item, even when combined with Mr. Mondale's criticism of the President's remarks, would have added to world tension by creating the impression that the President of the U.S. was inclined to play fast and loose with the lives of millions."

Despite internal and external criticisms, RFE/RL go right on doing one of the most essential jobs in the cold war, which most people know never stopped, detente or no. Even RFE/RL's severest critics in Congress agree that the stations should continue doing their job, albeit with much more care. The current RFE/RL debate, led by Senators Claiborne Pell (D., R.I.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the rebarbative Lowell Weicker (R., Conn.), is actually over unresolvable questions. When it comes to deciding what should be the subject matter of the programs and how that subject matter should be treated, there is no final, definitive answer.

What the station managers do know is that there is an enormous listening audience in the Soviet bloc for everything from news broadcasts to rock concerts. (There is a continuing Soviet campaign against rock and pop music that one Soviet music commentator said has been created by "American centers of sabotage.")

Radio Free Europe is directed by George Urban, an Anglo-Hungarian. The word "urbane" comes immediately to the lips after a few moments with this engaging scholar-journalist. For anyone who has read his probing and explosively revealing Encounter interviews with the great and the once-great, Urban has become the world's finest interviewer, not excluding Oriana Falacci.

RFE is a haven of peace compared to Radio Liberty. RL's director is big, burly, rumpled George Bailey, who reminded me of Heywood Broun, whom someone once described as looking like an unmade bed. Bailey is a brainy no-nonsense anti-Communist who thinks President Reagan's description of the Soviet Union as "the evil empire" is right on target. Bailey is multilingual, a longtime journalist who worked briefly with the Central Intelligence Agency. For some eight, years, until 1982, he was a "supervising" editor representing the Axel Springer publishing empire that has helped finance a controversial Paris-based Russian-language magazine, Kontinent, edited by a controversial Soviet emigre, Vladimir Maksimov.

This background make Bailey a subject of dispute in emigre circles even before coming to the radios, but he now has strong support in the organization, in part because has has loosened the reins over editors and programmers. This change of policy has meant taking risks with content--hence some of his troubles--but he maintains it has improved the product. Impartial observers agree. Some staff members, according to the Times story mentioned earlier, "say a preachy anti-Communist trend is particularly pronounced at Radio Liberty. . . ." Urban, as well as Bailey, is accused of instituting "a tougher anti-Communist and pro-Administration line . . . in the last two years."

What this infighting means in practice is a serious difference of approach to events behind the Iron Curtain. For example, there is no question that the Hungarians have carved out for themselves a bit of independence, especially in the economy. There cheers. What Urban, however, presses for in the Hungarian broadcasts is an emphasis that for these reforms to be meaningful they must be institutionalized, otherwise here today, gone tomorrow. Hardly what I would call "preachy" anti-Communism.

RL employs as translators, broadcasters, editors, and executives Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, Jews, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Tatars and Bakshiris, Kazaks, Kirghizis, Tadjiks, Turkmeni, and Uzbeks. Most of these nationalities have a history, a land, a culture, religion, traditions, customs, conventions, holy places, feelings of irridentism, generationally transmitted identities, and, often, tragic memories.

Such attributes are all the more sacred to these nationalities because their land is no longer theirs but rather the victim, for almost seven decades, of a hated imperial system, What unites them, the Eastern Europeans, and the Baltic peoples forcibly incorporated into a modern Slav federation is a loathing of their Soviet oppressors and the hope that someday the Soviet empire will become an Ozymandian rubble. What disunite these emigres are their clashing views of the future based on different interpretations of past and present, all of which gets reflected in the RFE/RL offices and corridors.

Will the end of Soviet imperialism, if it should ever come, mean a non-Soviet Union of "socialist republics" no longer under the domination of the "Great Russian" Moscow center? Will it mean the right to secede, as Lenin once promised, from the totalitarain union sacree? What will this unquenchable and unappeasable Soviet superpower look like when it is no longer Soviet, when it will, in President Reagan's words, be "remembered only for [its] role in a sad and rather bizarre chapter in human history"?

Among these non-Russian nationality groups there are divisions, incomprehensible occasionally to the outsider, seemingly as unbridgeable as the differences between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, or Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. These divisions and factionalisms are unavoidably reflected within RFE/RL and, inevitably, in Washington officialdom. In Munich you will be told that there are RFE/RL staffers who are said to be more nationalist than demoncratic, although there's no reason why one couldn't be both. There are Czechoslovaks who are said to be more Czech than Slovak and vice versa; White Russians who dislike former Bolsheviks. There are historic quarrels among different nationalities in Soviet Central Asia, some of them with irridentist claims against neighboring Soviet republics from which they are exiled. And there is always the fear of chauvinist. Panslavism. Emigre Eastern Europeans and ex-Soviet citizens have longer memories than most people.

There are Jews with long memories about Cossack pogroms in the Ukraine under the czars, and Bolshevik discrimination against them under their successors. Some staffers argue that there are anti-Semites to be found in RL and that the anti-Semitism shows in the output. In examining a random selection of the scripts, I found nothing that I could call anti-Semitic, although I have no doubt that there are anti-Semites on the Staff. Some Jewish RFE/RL staffers I interviewed said the anti-Semitism was highly exaggerated. Other Jewish staffers who had brought me the accusations, when told this, said that their compatriots had sold out for career ambitions.

Few people can speak with utter certainly about how RL should handle reports and discussions of Russian nationalism or the Russian Orthodox Church, let alone whether either of these subjects should even be mentioned.

The Russian-nationalism issue became such an overwhelming question that former Senator James L. Buckley, RFE/RL president, convened a meeting last August of four renowned scholars, specializing in Russian history and politics, to study and evaluate RL scripts dealing with Russian nationalism or, in the preferred phrase, "Russian national consciousness." The four were Professors John Dunlop, of the Hoover Institution; Peter Reddaway, of the London School of Economics; Nicholas Riasanovsky, of Berkeley; and Adam Ulam, of Harvard.

Overall, their report supported the RL position, although there was a critical undercurrent:

1. It is important to broadcast programs on Russian and Soviet history, because "having been fed the lies and distortions of official Soviet history, Russians--indeed all citizens of the Soviet Union--are starving for an accurate version of their past."

2. "No historical figure or subject should be regarded as taboo . . . Radio Liberty's historical programs should not rush to judgment about a particular historical figure, urging the listener to be either for or against him."

3. RL's historical programming is, "in general, factual, reliable, and interesting." But--

4. More effort should be made to take into account the most up-to-date scholarship about Soviet affairs.

5. RL should consider scheduling more historical programs, some of which should be in the form of round-table discussions.

In the meantime, internal conflicts among the staff members, especially between different generations of immigrants, go on. Unavoidable as these debates may be, they distract attention from RFE/RL's function as the trusted day-to-day source of news and features about life in the Soviet empire.

Has there been any KGB penetration of the RFE/RL staff or pressure brought to bear on staffers with family members still living behind the Iron Curtain? Possibly, but RFE/RL executives operate by the Bedell Smith probability theorem. When asked at his Senate confirmation hearing in 1950 whether he though the CIA was penetrated by Soviet intelligence, General Walter Bedell Smith, CIA director-designate, replied that he worked on the assumption that it was. Everything at RFE/RL is public knowledge and is beamed eastward. There are no state secrets or classified documents around.

For some of the more than one thousand Munich-based employees (there are about 1,700 employees including correspondents in Washington, New York, Paris, and elsewhere), RFE/RL are the most important part of their lives because, as they write, research, or speak their scripts to a real audience of their own countrymen, they are endowed with an identity that neither exile nor expulsion can diminish.

But what not all staffers are conscious of is that there is an American foreign policy and public opinion which cannot be trifled with. If in the judgment of Frank Shakespeare and Ben J. Wattenberg, chairman and vice chairman respectively of the Board for International Broadcasting, which supervises RFE/RL--or the handful of American executives in Munich, headed by former Senator Buckley--there is such trifling with the content of broadcasts, then steps will be taken. And since it is almost impossible to fire angbody at RFE/RL (the German unions to which many staffers belong are extremely powerful) a lot of negotiation and hand-holding is necessary. As one official put it, "You couldn't fire Himmler if he were working here. You've got a few nuts here with tenure." A staff-writer emigre put it frankly, "Let's face it, whatever Radio Liberty does, whatever line it might pursue, there is no way it could satisfy all Radio Liberty employees."

As a result, arguments between staff and executives over a perceived ideological tilt in what is regarded as a wrong direction can become bitter, quasi-theological. Accusations about "crypto-anti-Semites" on the Ukrainain desk, conspiracy masquerading as innocene, leaks to the press, congressional investigations, or government accounting audits--such phenomena demand a sophisticated appreciation by the station managers that they must not be seduced into taking sides except as their decisions are congruent with American foreign policy and public opinion. Always there must be the realization that RFE/RL are the domestic news service for some 380 million people curtained off from the rest of the world.

It's not that these debates are unimportant. They cannot easily be trivialized, considering the intellectual qualifications of so many of the RFE/RL disputants. Nor is it a case of the Americans against "them," the emigres, if only because there are understandable differences over ideological or policy interpretation among the American executives themselves, and sometimes among the vocal RFE/RL constituencies in Paris, New York, and Washington. For example, how should RFE/RL deal with religion behind the Iron Curtain, specifically the Russian Orthodox Church within the USSR and outside it? The number of Russian Orthodox believers is estimated at forty to fifty million. Or how to deal with Ukrainain nationalism, something that frightens Jews for existential reasons, especially those who've tasted Ukrainain naitonalism?

It takes a determined insouciance to stay on course and fulfill RFE/RL's raison d'etre--to act as the daily news service for the people who live in the Soviet empire.

It would be stultifying to tell the Poles, for example, that Communism is bad for their health. It is, however, the fulfilling of their mandate for RFE/RL to tell a Polish or a Russian audience about the receipt of a samizdat and to read it over the air. Or, on some Sunday afternoon to put on a top-ten program of U.S., German, and British music for Hungarian teenagers emceed by a Hungarian disc jockey in Munich. Reach out and touch someone--a lot of RFE/RL programming is just that.

During a recent visit to RFE/RL headquarters in Munich and to the Paris bureau, I met and interviewed a large number of executives from the different language desks. They impressed me as excellently educated, steeped in the history and culture of the motherlands they had left behind. Some of them have taught at American universities and are well known to scholars in the field of Soviet and Eastern European studies. Others are pursuing original research into events behind the Iron Curtain to be turned into broadcast scripts. Some have been away from their native lands since the end of the Second World War and have become U.S. citizens. Understandably, they mourn the loss of the motherland. "Exile is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home," Professor Edward Said, of Columbia University, has written.

The real question one asks about this multi-million-dollar effort is: Who listens? Henry Hart supervises audience research on Eastern Europe from Munich, and Gene Parta does similar research on the Soviet Union from Paris. While they and their organizations are part of RFE/RL, they operate independently of RFE/RL, and in fact make their headquarters in separate buildings. Their independence and reliability are attested to in that both do audience research for VOA, the BBC, Deutsche Welle, and Radio Sweden, which also broadcasts to the East.

The Hart-Parta researchers face an enormous problem: How do you make audience estimates from unreliable samplings, given that there is no way to correct samping deficiencies through field checkups, as could be done if the research were pursued in an open society? The research program they have adopted is called "the method of comparative and continual sampling." The method seems sound, because where survey findings by Soviet sociologists have been reported, they agreed with RFE/RL findings.

Soviet and Eastern European research is conducted among visitors temporarily in the West, i.e., official tourists, not defectors, emigres, or refugees. To include any but tourists would distort the sample. In short, the population sampling based on tourists is believed to be representative of the stay-at-home population, and about as close as one can get to the known demographic profile of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc.

Interviewing is handled on a contract basis by independent research institutes in Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, and Sweden. Results are regarded as reliable only if the findings reported by all the institutes concur. Thus, instead of the customary single sample, a number of samples are taken for every nationality. These are combined into a single national sample only when the results based on the separate and independent samples drawn by the different institutes agree to a significant extent. Final processing and computerized weighting of the aggregate national samples are carried out by Gallup International in England.

Elaborate statistical methods, computer simulation, and quota sampling techniques have been worked out with leading comunications specialists, among them Professor Frederick Mosteller, the Harvard statistician, and the late Ithiel de Sola Pool of MIT, to ensure that the raw data is correctly interpreted.

Interviewers are tested for their knowledge of Russian or the Eastern European languages in which they will conduct the interviews. Most importatnly, the interviewers must have excellent memories since they must memorize the questionnaire, although the questions, when asked, are more in the nature of a conversation. To fill out a questionnaire in the presence of the tourist or make entries in a notebook would be distracting. And to be sure that there is no phony reporting, random interviewers are under surveillance as they appraoch and engage a Soviet visitor to Paris, Rome, Vienna, or some other European city in a structured conversation.

There is plenty of business for interviewers, says Hart, since there are, according to Eastern European governement statistics, anywhere between two and three million tourists annually in the West from the five Soviet satellites. About seven thousand a year are interviewed. close to half of them come through Vienna. Soviet tourists, however, are not as numerous. The last reliable figures, of about 600,000 a year, date back to 1976. Between 15 and 20 per cent of the prospective interviewees refuse to cooperate. Since 1970, more than twenty thousand interviews with Soviet citizens have been conducted.

The most immediate questions to which answers are sought by the Hart-Parta interviewers are: extent of listenerhship, motivation for listening, and how can listenership be increased. Then come the sensitive questions: What is your attitude to the government, to the local Communist Party, to the West? The anwers to the last, in order: negative, negative, positive.

The 1984 report estimated that in Eastern Europe, RFE's regular audeince (meaning individuals who listen once a week or more) was approximately 40.3 milllion listeners out of an adult population of 70.5 million. The total audience, which includes those who listen at least once a month, is in excess of 42 million.

In the Soviet Union, the RL listening audience is proportionately smaller, no doubt because of the constant jamming. Regular listeners (once a week or more) number between 4.7 and 8.3 million people on an average day, between 11.2 and 18.7 million in an average week, and between 13.8 and 24.4 million in an average month, out of an adult population of 192.1 million. OVA attracts the largest audience of any Western broadcaster into the USSR. In Eastern Europe, RFE has the largest following of all the Western broadcasters.

If there is any question about the value of RFE/RL and the other Western radios, let me quote from an interview with the Polish governemnt spokesman, Jerzy Ubran, published in the Wall Street Journal on August 14, 1984. The official conceded that the political opposition today is more influential than it was before Solidarity. However, if the Solidarity underground lost its access to Western ratio channels, he said, the government's problems would be minimized. And here is the clincher. "The amount of discontent is still great, and trust in leaders is only growing very slowly. But extremist poliltical tendencies have a small and shrinking role. If you would close your Radio Free Europe, the underground would completely cease to exist."

Thanks for the tip, Jerzy.