# Americans were asked to chip in for a private radio. Their government was already paying for it.

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  Americans were asked to chip in for a private radio. Their government was already paying for it.
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From Labor Day 1950, a citizens' drive led by Eisenhower and Lucius Clay collected signatures and small donations for Radio Free Europe. Most of the money

WhenSeptember 4, 1950ActorNational Committee for a Free Europe and its Crusade for Freedom, funded mainly by the U.S.…Full record at propagandaarchive.org

## What it said

The drive opened on Labor Day, 4 September 1950, with a radio address by General Dwight D. Eisenhower carried on all the major networks.

The Crusade for Freedom will provide for the expansion of Radio Free Europe into a network of stations. They will be given the simplest, clearest charter in the world: 'Tell the truth.'

Dwight D. Eisenhower, radio address opening the Crusade for Freedom, 4 September 1950, as recorded on the FRAME case study.

Two years later donors were handed a card to sign and mail. The 1952 Freedom-Gram, addressed to a listener behind the Iron Curtain, put the funding claim in the donor's own voice:

DO YOU LISTEN TO RADIO FREE EUROPE? I HOPE YOU DO, FOR I AM ONE OF MILLIONS OF AMERICAN CITIZENS WHO HAS VOLUNTARILY CONTRIBUTED TO BUILD THESE STATIONS, WHICH BRING TRUTH TO YOU WHO ARE DEPRIVED OF IT.

Freedom-Gram: Help Truth Fight Communism, Crusade for Freedom, 1952, transcription in the FRAME collection.

A 1951 television appeal recorded by Ronald Reagan opened: My name is Ronald Reagan. Last year the contributions of 16 million Americans to the Crusade for Freedom made possible the World Freedom Bell. A 1954 advertisement asked readers to invest a "Truth Dollar" in Radio Free Europe, with George Washington framed like the face of a banknote.

## Who made it and why

The front office was the National Committee for a Free Europe, set up in New York on 1 and 2 June 1949 with former ambassador Joseph C. Grew in the chair and Allen Dulles among its organizers. Grew said it would put the voices of these exiled leaders on the air. The committee described itself as a private corporation of American citizens. Its money came mainly from the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination.

Radio Free Europe went on the air to Czechoslovakia on 4 July 1950. The Crusade for Freedom, chaired by General Lucius D. Clay, who had been military governor of occupied Germany during the Berlin airlift, was the domestic campaign wrapped around it. Its centerpiece was a ten-ton bell cast in England by Gillett and Johnston and shaped to recall the Liberty Bell. It reached New York to a ticker-tape parade and toured American cities (the sources disagree between 21 and 26). Americans signed Freedom Scrolls affirming the dignity of the individual and a God-given right to freedom; the campaign reported about 16 million signatures. The bell bore a line adapted from Lincoln: That this world under God shall have a new birth of freedom. On 24 October 1950 it rang for the first time at Schöneberg town hall in West Berlin, before a crowd reported at more than 400,000. It still hangs there.

The same structure carried balloons. From 13 to 17 August 1951 the "Winds of Freedom" launches sent leaflets from West Germany into Czechoslovakia, with Crusade chairman Harold Stassen releasing balloons for Time's cameras. Later operations followed (Prospero in July 1953, Veto in 1954, Focus over Hungary from 1 October 1954) until the program stopped in November 1956. Some leaflets claimed to speak for domestic "national resistance movements" that did not exist as organizations. A second CIA-funded committee, Amcomlib, put Radio Liberation, later Radio Liberty, on the air to the Soviet Union on 1 March 1953.

## What it got right or wrong

The broadcasts themselves have serious defenders. A. Ross Johnson and Arch Puddington, both former RFE/RL officials, argue from declassified files that the CIA acted mainly as funder and broad policy sponsor, and that émigré staff produced professional surrogate journalism for audiences whose own press was controlled by their governments. Giving people news their rulers banned is a cause Americans can be proud of.

The domestic campaign is another matter. The record is plain: Americans were invited to think of themselves as the stations' backers, and they were not. The Freedom-Gram had them sign a sentence saying they had built the stations. The Truth Dollar asked for trust in a word. Eisenhower's charter was accurate about the stated mission and silent about who paid. FRAME's gallery entry cites about $50 million raised from 1951 to 1976; Senator Case put the government's share at "several hundred million dollars" over twenty years. A drive that covers a small share of the cost while a hidden budget covers the rest is not a citizens' station. It is a government station with a citizens' storefront.

Nothing in the sources shows that ordinary donors, endorsers such as Reagan, or most volunteers knew about the CIA money. They should not be blamed for a concealment that was done to them.

Hungary in 1956 is the hardest test, and it is honestly contested. After the Soviet crushing of the uprising, RFE political adviser William Griffith reviewed the Hungarian service's output and finished his report on 5 December 1956.

(with one exception) made no direct promise or commitment of Western or UN military support or intervention

may well, however, have encouraged Hungarians to have false hopes in this respect; they certainly did little or nothing to contradict them.

William Griffith, "Policy Review of Voice for Free Hungary Programming, October 23-November 23, 1956," 5 December 1956; National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book 76, doc. 10.

The exception was a 27 October broadcast that, in Griffith's words, fairly clearly implies that foreign aid will be forthcoming. West German and Council of Europe inquiries found no broadcast promising armed intervention, though the West German report criticized tone and "gratuitous advice." A 1996 newspaper headline said documents confirmed that RFE promised aid. None of these reviews shows whether the broadcasts changed what the insurgents did. This page leaves it there.

## Congress was never asked to approve the money

Senator Clifford Case framed the objection the right way. On 25 January 1971 he introduced S. 18 and told the Senate that "several hundred million dollars" from "secret CIA budgets" had paid "almost totally" for the two stations over twenty years, more than $30 million in the last fiscal year alone, and that Congress had never been asked to approve it. That is a power-of-the-purse complaint, not a complaint about anticommunism. Whatever one thinks of the stations, spending on that scale without a vote by the people's representatives is the kind of executive habit the Constitution's design is meant to prevent.

The second injury is to the donor. A gift is voluntary only if the giver knows what the gift is for and who else is paying. Asking citizens to sign a statement that they built a station their government secretly funded turns their own names into part of the cover. After press disclosures in 1967, a committee under Nicholas Katzenbach barred covert funding of private voluntary organizations; in February 1969 the 303 Committee decided that RFE and RL did not count as such organizations, and the money kept flowing. The executive branch, in other words, ruled on its own exemption.

The fix, when it came, was the right one. CIA involvement ended in 1971, and the International Broadcasting Act of 19 October 1973 created the Board for International Broadcasting to fund the radios openly. Once Congress paid in public, the stations had an honest funding line to match the honest name they already broadcast under. The mission did not have to change. Only the concealment did.

## Its legacy

The radios outlived the deception. RFE/RL's own published history says the stations were funded principally by Congress through the CIA until 1971. That is the station's phrasing; Case's complaint was that Congress had never been asked to approve the money. The Crusade's artifacts survive too: the 1951 donor stamp with its skyline of spires, domes, and a minaret over a scene of soldiers attacking civilians, and the Freedom-Gram quoted above. The Soviet side ran its own civic front: Radio Peace and Progress, from 1964, called itself "the voice of Soviet public opinion" while using Radio Moscow's studios. The difference is that the Crusade's civic face was aimed at the sponsor's own citizens, as donors.

For contrast, the wartime Office of War Information signed its posters with an agency name and a number, and Congress could and did cut its budget; see the Writers' War Board and the OWI and the OWI hub. The Crusade used the same vocabulary of liberty and the same founding-era symbols, but without the label. The lesson for a reader is to ask who covers the running costs, not who is being invited to give. The same years saw a parallel arrangement for intellectuals, covered in our study of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

## Sources

- FRAME case study, The Crusade for Freedom, for the chronology, quotations, balloon operations, Case's statement, and the $50 million figure.

- FRAME collection: Freedom-Gram (1952), Crusade for Freedom donor stamp (1951), Truth Dollar (1954), with transcriptions.

- Richard H. Cummings, Radio Free Europe's "Crusade for Freedom": Rallying Americans Behind Cold War Broadcasting, 1950-1960 (McFarland, 2010); Cold War Radio (McFarland, 2009).

- A. Ross Johnson, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond (Wilson Center Press / Stanford University Press, 2010). Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom (University Press of Kentucky, 2000).

- RFE/RL, "Our History."

- William Griffith, "Policy Review of Voice for Free Hungary Programming," 5 December 1956, National Security Archive EBB 76, doc. 10. Wilson Center occasional paper on RFE and the Hungarian Revolution. The Spokesman-Review (AP), 28 September 1996.

- Time, "Propaganda: Winds of Freedom" (1951). "Burn after reading: Operation Focus," Cold War History 23:2 (2023).

- Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, vol. XXIX, doc. 28 (303 Committee), with S. 18 (25 January 1971). Katzenbach Committee Report (1967).

- Bezirksamt Tempelhof-Schöneberg, "75 Years Freedom Bell in Berlin."

- UK National Archives, background brief on Radio Peace and Progress.

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/case-studies/crusade-for-freedom-radio-free-europe/