WALKER AND THE FREE EUROPE PRESS
One day in April 1956, on the fifth floor of the Normandy Building at 110 West 57th Street in Manhattan, a group of young Americans and East European exiles were meeting in their boss's smoke-filled office, chewing over a project they had been discussing for months. When the last person in the room had had his say, Sam Walker, who had called the meeting, took a pull on his pipe, blew out a long shaft of smoke and then, in a lisp his colleagues no longer noticed, said "O.K., Let'th do it!"
Neither Walker nor anyone else in that room had any inkling of what they were starting. The Cold War was still young. While Soviet leader Nikita S. Khruschev had recently delivered his secret speech denouncing Josef Stalin, the text had yet to reach the West. The summer and fall upheavals in Eastern Europe, resulting from that speech, had still to come. Nonetheless, it was an exhilarating time, with change and ferment in the air. One half of Europe had been unnaturally sealed off from the other half for the past eight years, and people sensed that this could not last much longer. But when it did, Americans grew so used to the division that Europe, whether referred to by diplomats or travel agents, meant only the western half. For the vast majority of Americans, the other half was now off the map.
Samuel S. Walker, Jr. was then in his late 20s. A former chairman of The Yale Daily News, he had been snatched upon graduation by Time magazine for a special training program designed to ensure the continuance of its top editorial management. But for a gap between his front teeth, he was as handsome as a movie actor, with a touch of Orson Welles's furrowed brow and poppy eyes. He laughed frequently, giving the impression that he found life as enjoyable as he found it interesting. He had tired of Time and been lured in early 1952 to the more exciting position of Director of Free Europe Press (FEP), a newly created sister organization of Radio Free Europe (RFE).
The East European employees of the Press were somewhat younger than their radio counterparts. And, thanks to Walker, the Americans, taken as a group, were not only young, but definitely left of center politically. This latter trait made for good rapport with their overseers in the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington -- Cord Meyer and Emmons Brown -- whom Walker and company, to shield their identity, referred to as "our friends down south." Only a handful of people on the Free Europe Committee and the leadership of RFE and FEP knew that the general direction and real funding for the organizations came from the Central Intelligence Agency, not the private funds noisily raised by the Crusade for Freedom. Most of the money was funneled though dummy, and possibly a few legitimate, foundations.
At its inception, Free Europe Press had established a monthly magazine with the prosaic title News from Behind the Iron Curtain. But the Press was better known for its for more dramatic program of dropping leaflets in Czech, Slovak, Polish, and Hungarian behind the Iron Curtain. Taking advantage of the prevailing west to east winds, they were dropped from high altitude by hydrogen-filled polyethylene balloons launched at night from three sites in Bavaria.
While the authors of these leaflets, and those handling the vast logistical side of this operation, were fully engaged, Walker and many of those in the New York office -- specifically those meeting that April day -- were somewhat underutilized. They spent no small amount of time scheming and speculating.
The "it" to which Walker referred when he said "Let'th do it" stood for "mailing project," something that had occurred to nearly all the East European exiles who had experimented with posting parcels to relatives back in their homelands. Free Europe mailings to individual people would be the reverse of the leaflet program. The leaflets, which were picked up randomly in fields and woods, were meant for the vast anti-Communist majority of the population. The mailings Walker and his colleagues had in mind would be special literature targeted for Communists or regime- friendly individuals for specific reasons.
Walker's decision ran counter to advice from one of the Free Europe Committee's chief consultants, Professor Hugh Seton-Watson of the University of London's School of Slavonic Studies. He said it simply wouldn't work; the Communist censorship would stop it cold. Walker's East European colleagues thought differently. Massive mailings would be more than the censors could handle.
The project envisaged postings from a few U.S., but mostly West European cities, and always to specific individuals, not from purloined East European telephone books. The messages -- according to the "Plan" published some months later by FEP's Plans and Analysis Department -- would be designed "to reduce the efficiency of the communist administration by weakening loyalty of the Party and state cadres."2
The principles which would govern selection were:
All materials must appear under "sponsorship" of a cover organization. There should be no total attacks on communism. Mailings should favor "revisionist" trends among the new elites. Practical alternatives to doctrinaire Marxist principles should receive high priority. Crossreporting (i.e., reports of what is going on in the other East European countries) should be used to demonstrate what might be possible in their country. Negative developments to weaken confidence in the bonafides of their government may be used. ...Our primary aim should be to demonstrate the superior achievements of the West.
American staff members thought there was no shortage of suitable material, in the form of articles and pamphlets, to fit within these guidelines, but the Hungarian editor, Robert Gabor, had his doubts. He preferred to stress the positive and begin with an original document of unchallengeable quality. Gabor was a close friend of Adolph Berle, then a vice president of the Free Europe Committee. He persuaded Berle to write an essay, "The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution." Gabor then had his fellow editor, Imre Kovacs, a left-wing Peasant Party writer of considerable renown in Hungary, translate it into good Hungarian.
The first mailings to Eastern Europe, begun in July 1956, were a hodgepodge of articles and cross-reporting, some translated, others simple reproductions of the originals in English, French, or German. They were sent from New York and a half-dozen West European cities in batches of anywhere from 200 to 2,000 per item. Almost all were from bogus "cover" organizations. In reality, the addresses were those of the persons mailing them. The volume nearly doubled in August, with mailings from Athens, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, London, New York, Paris, Rome, Vienna, and West Berlin.3
The first responses took several months to trickle back to the senders or, in some cases, the legitimate organizations that had allowed their names and addresses to be used. But, with one exception, they were disappointing. That exception was Poland. After four months of mailings, the third "Summary of Responses to Mailing Operations," dated 13 November 1956, reported no responses whatsoever from Bulgaria, a mere 13 from Czechoslovakia, 7 from Hungary, 1 from Romania, and 69 from Poland.
The Hungarian Revolution of October 1956, though a major setback for U.S. foreign policy, was disastrous for Free Europe, completely disrupting Free Europe Press operations. All balloon-leaflet flights were suspended -- forever, as it turned out -- and all mailings to Hungary were suspended for eight months. As it became clear that the balloons would never fly again, Free Europe Press's Munich office gradually became the headquarters for printing operations all over Western Europe.
Both the contents of the mailing campaign and the easily discernible bogus "cover" organizations soon alerted the Eastern European Communist authorities to the true origin of the mailings. Professor Seton-Watson's prediction that the Communist censors would defeat any mailing project began to look accurate. But, a surprising number of items did reach their targets, as the Hungarian newspaper Esti Hirlap (Evening Journal) indicated on 5 September 1957:
The Budapest telephone directory was the source of names and addresses of people who were accorded the great honor of receiving various products of the so-called Free Europe Committee. Week after week orange and blue colored envelopes came to Budapest, containing roughly translated, mimeographed newspaper articles and lectures mostly addressed to intellectuals.
But books--and there had been a few, such as George Orwell's 1984 and Albert Camus's The Rebel, particularly when mailed from the actual publisher--were a different matter. If they were not too political, they sometimes received acknowledgements and occasionally even a letter of thanks asking for more of the same.
MINDEN'S ASCENT
An internal reorganization which took place at the Free Europe Press after the Hungarian Revolution was the decision to put the mailing project under one man. The person selected was not an American, but a Romanian exile, George Minden, who had entered the country in March 1955 only weeks before being appointed head of Free Europe Press's Romanian section. Then in his early 30s, Minden's handsome, longish Latin face featured dark, sad eyes every bit as arresting as those in a Byzantine mosaic.
He actually had left Romania with his wife and two children in 1946, a year after graduating in the top one percent of his class at the University of Bucharest's School of Law. After two months in Paris, he moved his family to London, where the following year his Romanian law degree was validated. He used the intervening time to earn a Teaching Diploma from Cambridge University. But, the collapse of his marriage led him to seek work outside of England. He served as Director of the Cartagena School of Foreign Languages in Spain from the fall of 1948 to June 1950. In 1952 he was made director of two language schools in Madrid. Then, in 1954, he moved to Mexico City, where he became Director of Studies for the Central School in the Paseo de la Reforma district. By the time he entered the U.S. the following year, he spoke flawless British English, Parisian French and Castilian Spanish, and was also well-versed in the literature of these three cultures.
Minden needed time to get full control. For most of 1957 the selection of articles, pamphlets, and occasional books continued to follow the heavily political "plan" and the whims of the editors of the country departments. The monthly report for May 1957, for instance, lists ninety-nine items mailed in April, fifty-five of which are clearly political, and others, such as the magazines Preuves, Der Monat and the Economist, could certainly be considered political by Communist censors. But, in the following month, when a total of 105 different items were dispatched, only 44 could be considered blatantly political.
WORKING WITH OTHERS
A new type of mailing introduced at this time consisted of a publisher's catalogue and the offer, on the publisher's stationary, of one or two books of the recipient's choice to be sent him free of charge. The note usually suggested that the recipient might send some books in return to make it appear a legitimate exchange, when in fact, the Western publisher had no use for books published in East European languages. This greatly increased the number of responses, as well as varying the type of books now being mailed in, albeit the volume of these requested books was much smaller.
Gradually, more and more books, such as Maurois's La France Change de Visage, and subscription offers to women's magazines like Marie Claire (French) and Madame (German) crept into the program. Though they could not have been justified under the original "plan," these diversions from the basic intent were nonetheless justified in the "Summary of Activities" with which Minden began each monthly report.
All policy direction came from the New York office. The Munich office of Free Europe Press, led by Howard S. Weaver, a somewhat older Yale friend of Sam Walker, had had the balloon-leaflet operation as its raison d'être. Nonetheless, it supplied many suggestions for the mailings, was instrumental in setting up the mailers around Western Europe, and recruited the agents who were to deal with publishers.
I had joined Free Europe Press as Editorial Advisor for the balloon-leaflet operations in April 1956 after two years in RFE's Central Newsroom. In June 1957, for instance, I noted that the Munich FEP office had suggested 40 of the 114 items mailed out that month. The Munich office also handled mailing from all West German cities, including West Berlin, and dealt directly with West German printers and publishers.
Warner Wolfe, an American of German extraction on the FEP Munich staff, was chiefly responsible for setting up the mailing network. In early 1957, he was also responsible for finding two highly intelligent, motivated young women to handle relations with publishers in France and England. His choices were brilliant. Martine Servot was a well-off, socially prominent young Parisian who worked full-time at the Louvre. Her small, deep-set blue eyes, high cheekbones and blond, bobbed hair made her look more Dutch or Danish than French. She had a university degree in library work and publishing. The fact that her husband, Jean, was a rising civil servant who would eventually become Director General of the French National Association of Employers, and that her uncle, Francois-Poncet, had been the French High Commissioner for French-occupied Germany, gave her entrée where she needed it.
Daisy Veszy, a young upper class émigré from Hungary, whose Oxbridge English, together with her soon-to-be acquired name, Finney, disguised her foreign origin, was a person whom Free Europe had earlier tried to recruit. She had luxuriant dark hair surrounding a pale and pretty face, from which flowed a mellifluent contralto voice. She married Jarlath Finney, a young English barrister, very shortly after she was hired. In the all-male bastion of British publishing, she found her femininity raising eyebrows, but the fact that she was charming, attractive and had a law degree of her own, invariably broke the ice. When a special connection was needed, her father-in-law was usually able to provide it.
And this was important. Both young women insisted on starting at the top. Both were also careful to deal with only one, or at the most two people in any one publishing firm. When Martine Servot first approached top publishing executives they assumed she was a society lady seeking free books for some charity benefit. They were "astonished" when they found she wanted to buy their books, and in considerable quantities. Mrs., Finney went first to the head of the Oxford University Press. In a letter to FEP's Warner Wolfe, dated 7 June 1957, she wrote:
I must say, it is a tremendous advantage to have Oxford University Press giving us a trade discount, because when dealing with any new publisher their name appears to be magic and they are immediately willing to give us a discount, e.g. Routledge.
As more publishers came aboard, and more catalogues were dispatched, an increasing number of responses was received, especially from Poland. By mid-summer 1957, the total had reached 1,489, with 1,377 of these from Poland. 4
Being so much closer to Eastern Europe than our colleagues in New York, we in Munich felt much more aware of the realities of life in the Communist sector. Western journalists almost always visited RFE immediately before taking up their assignments behind the Iron Curtain. And RFE was usually the first place they visited for debriefing when the reemerged. The FEP shared in the resulting reports, and we even commissioned some snooping of our own.
A report in my files from that time addressed to me came from Judith Friedberg ("J.F."), a freelance journalist who, because she visited Poland frequently, did not care to have her name appear on Free Europe stationary. Dated 9 October 1957, this report must have been passed immediately to Sam Walker, who passed it on to Minden.
Friedberg had just spent four months in Poland. With her nearly colloquial Polish she had talked to everybody who was anybody in Polish literary circles. She wrote:
The situation today is far different from what it was when overt propaganda was required ...What is required now is intelligent "ammunition handling," and by that I mean regular transmission of basic tools to the Poles who will use them and see to it that they are used ... "One O.E.D. [Oxford English Dictionary] is worth 10,000 pamphlets," said a friend of mine recently. "You have no idea how a really good reference work can be to you," ...
Most Polish reviewers today write their reviews from the book section of the London Times or the New York Times - when they can get them ...In the ultimate they dream of getting a few review copies.
Everywhere one goes in Poland one finds a tremendous hunger to catch up with the main literary and political trends abroad ... People want to be filled in on the last two decades. Remember the Nazi occupation left plenty of holes which the Reds have not bothered to plug.
I have handed out dozens of copies of "The God that Failed" and "Darkness at Noon," but the one that people most wanted was "The Portable Faulkner."
After five pages of this, Judy suggested six ways we might "cushion" Polish intellectuals, "either for greater democracy ... or for renewal of the Dark Ages,":
Arrange for key Polish reviewers to get review copies of a dozen books monthly from the U.S. and the U.K.; provide a reading shelf of the latest books for the Polish Writers' Union; forget the spatter technique of intermittent mailings to great numbers, it is ineffectual; instead provide a lifeline of periodicals; stop sending clippings and tearsheets which are not good in any language since they smack of organized activity; concentrate on intellectuals and professionals; send parcels the way CARE does, perhaps a "dictionary parcel" or a "war memoirs" parcel to be sent to libraries.
This scarcely fit the original FEP "plan." That document had even gone so far as to say "the purpose of the mailings is never mere spite."
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