Collection of Assorted Newspaper and Magazine Clippings: Jfk Assassination, Conspiracy Theories, Etc

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

# Another switch-off for the truth?

A renewed campaign has been presented against Europe. Here Europe, the station (based in Federal Germany) which broadcasts to the Soviet Empire and to which millions of that empire's colonial subjects listen at the risk of their liberties or even lives. The station, which has long been a poisoned thorn in the flesh of the Soviet imperialists, not least because it does not waste its time on exhortation, tant or propaganda, offering instead the dissemination of news to nations deprived of it, lives a precarious existence; its funds are provided by the United States, but voted annually by Congress, and the spirit of appeasement now life in that body has resulted in a prolonged campaign to have the funds cut off and the station consequently shut down.

I wrote here almost exactly three years ago about the attempt being made at that time to destroy RFE, an attempt led by Senator Fulbright. It failed then, and failed again a year later, when Fulbright returned to the attack; he has, of course, disappeared from Congress since then, but I learn that another assault is to be made shortly. Such pressure has been fuelled in the past by massive campaigns of "disinformation" on the part of the authorities in those countries to which RFE beams its piercing ray of truth, and it can be safely assumed that the same thing is happening now. Since I think that a further word in RFE's support is in order, it will do no harm to present some details of previous campaigns of that kind, particularly since I have reason to believe that the Polish Embassy in this country is even now trying to get some of the same kind of material "planted" in the British press.

At the end of 1972 the offices of the editor of the principal Polish-language daily in the United States was broken into; a letter to its editor from Jan Nowak, director of the Polish section of REE, was stolen. Early in 1971, the letter was

published in New York, with other letters, purporting to be from Nowak, the man which were in fact forgives all have the documentary proof of this, including attests from those directly concerned.) The justification of the genuine with the false was designed to discredit Nowak and the RFE (the forgery, for instance, suggested that Fulbright was a Communist or Communist sympathizer), and the operation was timed to coincide with an "official" visit by Nowak to the United States and with hearings in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on RFE and its future. Fulbright, understandably, made great play with the letters, using them to attack RFE; he then, of course, believed them all to be genuine, but it is much to be regretted that; even when he was later supplied with proof of the forgery, he made no retraction.

The forgeries were typed on the headed writing paper of RFE; the same technique had been used in an earlier, similar campaign, when other forged letters were circulated, purporting to be from the head of the European staff—one to the president of the company through which RFE operates in the United States, and the other to the Turkish Foreign Ministry. (These referred to plans for moving RFE's headquarters to Turkey; no such plans existed, but the campaign served both to alarm RFE's staff, who feared that the station was about to be expelled from Germany, and to disturb United States-Turkish relations.)

A parallel campaign was launched recently in Czechoslovakia, using Erwin Marak, a spy whom the Czech intelligence services had managed to infiltrate into Federal Germany (he had presented himself as a victim of political persecution) in 1908; he got into contact with a number of genuine Czech exiles, including some who worked for KFE. Unknown to them, he, taped telephone conversations with

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inure I have been in the military test attem- tion of allied employees in the army by the use of the most advanced avi- sives that have been in the Norwegian Fighter out of an attempt that succeeded, res- ed in a Polish rela- tion who had been employed in St. Peters research department treating to War- saw and being used as the signa- tory to a pamphlet which attempted to coerce ELE and even incited allega- tions that Nowak had been a Dan- collaborator during the war. (He was a particularly courageous member of the Polish underground and was decorated for his services by both Poland and Russia.)

And now, as I say, it is due to begin again. In a sense, these campaigns against RFE are the highest tribute the organization could be paid; if it really were the crude propaganda machine that it has been called upon only by its enemies in the East but also, also, by too many in the West), the Secret Imperialists and their general governors would not use so fiercely to destroy it, nor need to. But RFE serves two vital purposes; its broadcasts get the truth across the frontiers of the subjugated nations of Eastern Europe, and they help to keep hope and faith alive among the people who take the risk of listening to them. In other words, they do exactly what the RFE broadcasts to occupied Europe during the Second World War did, and they rest on the same foundation which is the avoidance of mere propaganda (the peoples of Soviet Europe do not need to be told now grim their lot is, nor the criminals are their oppressors, and the use instead of programmes displaying material and accurate knowledge of those things in their own countries which are concealed from them. (It was this that made the RFE broadcasts so effective; when they came in the next

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It would be a serious loss to the world at the present point of recolonization that appears to be growing in the United States were to lead to America's abandonment of Radio Free Europe, and I hope Senator Jackson, and others in Congress who are disturbed by the new trend will stand firm against attempts to cut off RFE's funds. Above all, I hope that when, at some crucial moment, letters or other documents coincidentally appear which seem to discredit RFE or members of its staff, similar campaigns of the past will be remembered. For I say that the closure or restriction of RFE would be a serious loss to the world, and so it would. It would also, however, and much more seriously, be a catastrophic blow to the morale of the people who depend on it to keep alive within themselves the tiny sparks of hope, courage and patience which enable them to go on living in their communist darkness without succumbing to total despair. As few weeks ago, I received, by a circumnaut route, a letter from Crechoslovakia in which the writer was good enough to say that my words on the subject of his chartered country served for him and his friends just such a purpose. If that is so, if that can be done by my words, in English and in a newspaper which has to be smuggled into Crechoslovakia in single copies, of how much greater effect, and of what genuine and lasting worth, must be the words that such people can bear in their own language, from Radio Free Europe. I cannot believe that the United States, on whose generosity, and belief in freedom, RFE depends, would wish the spark to be extinguished.

Times Newspaper Ltd. 1975