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| -Great Cultural Revolution | |
| 'Brainwash like Hitler.' How American 'Freedom' Began | |
| 2025-03-25 | |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Oleg Shevchenko [REGNUM] "We knew what we were doing. It was a dirty deal. We'd use any bastard as long as he was an anti-communist."
This statement by former CIA operative Harry Rositzke is cited by Christopher Simpson, a researcher of Nazi crimes at the Washington American University, in his 1988 book, " Blow Back : America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Devastating Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy." Intelligence officer Harry Rositzke, who worked in West Germany under CIA co-founder Frank Gardiner Wisner, had a very specific operation in mind when he spoke of recruiting “bastards.” It was the opening, 72 years ago, in March 1953, of Radio Liberation, better known by its other brand name, Radio Liberty (recognized in Russia as a foreign agent), in Munich. Now this station, along with another “honored” foreign agent media outlet, the Voice of America, is being closed by decision of the Donald Trump administration. In the age of social networks, radio as such is no longer an effective instrument of soft power and a weapon in a proxy battle. But at the beginning of the last Cold War, under another Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower (to whom Trump is often compared), it was a powerful tool that could be put into the hands of ex-Nazis. Let us add that the second information warfare machine, the Voice of America, was launched in Washington even before the start of the Cold War, at the height of the fight against Hitler and our alliance with the Americans. "THE VOICE" CHANGES INTONATION The Voice of America (VoA) first went on the air on February 24, 1942, at a time when the Third Reich and its allies were enjoying their greatest successes. Europe from Scandinavia to the Balkans was occupied, the Germans were advancing in North Africa, the Japanese had taken Singapore, and the Battle of Moscow—which marked the collapse of Hitler’s blitzkrieg in the East—was not yet over. The Franklin Roosevelt administration's decision to begin broadcasting the Voice of America had a noble goal: it was necessary to interrupt the flow of Goebbels' propaganda, which was benefiting from the situation at the front. "We will talk about America and the war, the news can be good or bad - we will tell you the truth" - this was the first phrase with which VoA went on air. And the fact that, in addition to news broadcasts, jazz and pop melodies and stories about the American way of life were heard on the airwaves - was perceived as an integral part of the "truth". Immediately after the war, propaganda and counter-propaganda work acquired a new target: no longer Europe, but a recent ally – the USSR. The Russian-language broadcast of the Voice of America was launched on the initiative of a man from Roosevelt’s team who specialized in our country. It was the industrialist and diplomat William Averell Harriman, who represented the United States at the Moscow Conference of 1941, was Roosevelt's special representative to the Soviet Union and the United States ambassador to Moscow in 1943–1946, was responsible for contacts on Lend-Lease issues, met with Joseph Stalin on several occasions, and witnessed decisions in Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and American diplomat Averell Harriman (left to right) at a meeting in Moscow At the same time, the master of Soviet diplomacy Oleg Troyanovsky noted: it was Harriman who was largely responsible for the deterioration of relations between the USSR and the USA after Roosevelt’s death in 1945. In early 1946, he conveyed to the Harry Truman administration his thoughts on the ineffectiveness of distributing American printed materials in the USSR and pointed out that radio was the most effective means of directly reaching the Soviet audience. On February 17, 1947, the first Voice of America broadcast in Russian was broadcast. And a year later, in 1948, the Voice officially ceased broadcasting... on the territory of the United States itself. Congress then passed the Information and Educational Exchange Act, better known as the Smith-Mundt Act. It created a foreign policy propaganda agency within the State Department, the United States Information Agency (USIA), and simultaneously restricted propaganda broadcasts to the United States. The authors of the published collection “U.S. Foreign Affairs in the New Information Age: Charting a Course for the 21st Century,” edited by senior USIA veteran Alvin Snyder, noted that in passing the Smith-Mundt Act, “Congress wanted to make sure that a government agency (USIA) could not brainwash citizens, as Hitler did in Germany.” "THE BEGINNING OF AN ORGANIZED POLITICAL WAR" But “brainwashing” the inhabitants of Europe and the peoples behind the Iron Curtain seemed not only acceptable, but also necessary. At the same time, the Voice of America and other “voices” distanced themselves more and more from the White House administration. In full accordance with the memorandum that diplomat George Frost Kennan, the author of the doctrine of containing the Soviet Union, presented to the US National Security Council in 1948. Kennan's memo spoke of "The Inauguration of organized political warfare" and mentioned "carefully concealed official control so that it would be impossible to connect the operations with the state." "General direction and funding come from the government; guidance and funding are provided to private American organizations... private individuals... these organizations, through their branches in Europe and Asia, establish contacts..." the memorandum stated. One of the "guiding instructions" was the propaganda treatment of the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union "oppressed by Moscow." Usually, in this connection, the law PL 89-90 "On Captive Nations", adopted under Eisenhower in 1959, is recalled, but in fact the "instructions" came much earlier. On March 12, 1947, at a joint session of the Houses of Congress, Harry Truman declared: "The United States...must help to liberate peoples so that they can decide their own destiny." In 1949, the Ukrainian broadcast of the Voice of America began. The first editor was Nikifor Grigoriev, a full namesake of the famous ataman, who himself had distinguished himself during the Civil War as the head of the press bureau of the Symon Petliura army. It is not surprising that one of the main topics of the broadcast was the "national liberation struggle" against Russia. Since 1951, the Voice of America has been broadcast in the languages of the Baltics and Transcaucasia. At the same time, the Radio Free Europe began to broadcast from West Germany, initially targeting the countries of the socialist camp, from Poland to Romania, and then expanded to include Baltic editorial offices. And then the interesting personnel policy of the Voice of America - Free Europe showed itself. For example, Mikhail (Michel) Dadiani broadcast in the Georgian editorial office of VoA, about whom it is cautiously reported that during the war he became "a victim of fascist propaganda and fought in the German army." Another example: the first editor of the Estonian edition of VoA was Harald Parrest - in biographical sources he is called a "literary critic", but if you dig a little, it turns out that Parrest "was known under the pseudonym Partisan", from 1944 he also served in the Wehrmacht, and in 1949, that is, the year the American occupation regime in West Germany ended, the "literary critic" moved to the United States. THEATERGOERS AGAINST THE BOLSHEVIKS OR THE DEATH OF DUBROVSKY In 1953, the Russian Service of the Voice of America was headed by Alexander Barmin, also a very curious character. In the early 1930s, a repentant Trotskyist, later a resident of the Red Army Intelligence Directorate in France and the Balkans, since 1937 a defector, an employee of the first unified intelligence service of the USA – the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). At the same time that Barmin took over the reins of the Voice of America, Radio Liberation from Bolshevism debuted in Munich, also known as Radio Liberation/Radio Liberty. In full accordance with Kennan’s memorandum, this “office” was not quite state-owned – its founder was listed as the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism (ACLB). But the personnel policy was reminiscent of that adopted at the Voice of America: they recruited people who had collaborated with the Nazis. The first broadcast of “Radio Liberation from Bolshevism” was hosted by Boris Vinogradov, a man with a strange fate. Before the war, he was an actor at the Lensovet Theatre, was evacuated along the "Road of Life" to the Caucasus, found himself under German occupation in Pyatigorsk and "retreated" with the Wehrmacht. Another prominent theatre-goer, former actor and director of the Moscow Art Theatre Sergei Sverchkov, who ended up with the Germans immediately after the war began, worked in the editorial office. Unlike Vinogradov, he gave the impression of being ideological. In particular, Sverchkov worked productively in the "Vineta" - the Special (Eastern) Department of the Propaganda Ministry of the Third Reich. In 1945, Sverchkov managed to escape to the Allies, the Americans refused to hand him over to the NKVD, and in 1946, the successfully "denazified" former Goebbels employee arrived in New York, where he was already in circulation. At Radio Liberty, Sverchkov (hiding under the pseudonyms Ostrovsky, Orlovsky, and finally Dubrovsky) was considered a mentor. And in 1955, Vinogradov informed his boss Dubrovsky that he intended to... quit. Moreover, it became known that the first announcer had applied for repatriation to the USSR. Vinogradov gave a farewell dinner, after which Sverchkov-Dubrovsky suddenly fell ill. And in October of the same 1955, the "mentor" of the Svoboda members mysteriously died suddenly - with a diagnosis of "rapid cirrhosis of the liver." Vinogradov calmly moved from the FRG through East Berlin to his homeland, returned to work in the theater and cinema (for example, he played the role of a pastor in Mark Donskoy's 1962 film "Hello, Children!") and died a natural death. Let's just chalk it all up to luck. FROM SMERSH VIA NTS TO THE CIA Another person with an interesting fate in the first line-up of Radio Liberty was an actress from Rostov-on-Don, “the first female voice of Liberty” Victoria Semenova-Mondich. This employee of Sverchkov-Dubrovsky's troupe ruined her career with "Great Russian chauvinism": she believed that radio should fight Bolshevism only by broadcasting to Great Russians. And at that time, broadcasting to enslaved peoples was just being developed - from Adyghe and Armenian to Uzbek and Turkmen languages. Rostov resident Semenova apparently did not consider herself an “ethnic Cossack”. Of no less interest to the curators of Svoboda was her husband, the Transcarpathian writer Mykhailo Mondich (aka Mykola Synevyrsky), an activist in the émigré People's Labor Union (NTS). The well-known part of Mondich-Synevyrsky's biography is quite interesting: this Carpathian Rusyn, a citizen of Czechoslovakia, worked as a translator for SMERSH with the arrival of the Red Army, supported the annexation of Transcarpathia to the USSR, then fled to the West, joined the NTS and got a job at Radio Free Europe. Mondich-Synevyrsky was subsequently a full-time employee of the CIA and, according to him, survived several assassination attempts by MGB agents. But what is interesting is that it was precisely at the time of the formation of the staff of Radio Liberty that Mondich was not accepted into the editorial board - precisely as a person from NTS, at that time this organization was under suspicion of being “infiltrated by Soviet agents.” FROM VLASOV'S BARRACKS TO "FREEDOM" If you continue to study the biographies of Svoboda employees, you will see less and less “spy passions” and more and more stories of dirty deals between American propagandists and Nazi collaborators. For example, the Ukrainian editorial office of Radio Liberty employed career CIA employees Ivan Maistrenko and Alexander Voznyak. Not only Soviet, but also American intelligence services were well aware of their past: as militants of the OUN (an organization whose activities are banned in the Russian Federation), Maistrenko and Voznyak participated in mass shootings in Stanislav (Ivano-Frankivsk) in 1941. One of the founders of the Tatar-Bashkir editorial board of Svoboda, the predecessor of Idel. Realii (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia), was Garif Sultan, who had recently been a fighter in the SS legion Idel-Ural. According to historians, it was Sultan who gave Musa Jalil's anti-fascist underground group, which operated in the legion, to the Gestapo. Jalil's case could theoretically have fallen into the hands of the Slovak Gestapo functionary Imrich Kruzlyak, who rose to the post of editor of the European service of Radio Liberty under his new bosses. Even more well-known is the case of Konstantin Kromiadi (Sanin), the head of the personnel department of Radio Liberty and a devout Christian who was a member of the Holy Prince Vladimir Brotherhood. At the same time, Kromiadi rose to the rank of chief of the CIA's Munich base for relations with the second wave of emigration. His superiors knew his track record very well. In particular, this included participation in the creation of the 1st Russian National SS Brigade "Druzhina" and the so-called Russian National People's Army (better known as the "Gray Head" Special Purpose Unit as part of the sabotage Abwehrkommando-25). Kromiadi-Sanin also "showed up" in the most famous collaborationist project - he was the head of Andrei Vlasov's personal chancery. Before moving to work for Svoboda, he was known for successfully hiding "officials of the Russian Liberation Army" from being extradited to the USSR, where the traitors would face a well-deserved sentence. BRAINWASHING ON AN INDUSTRIAL SCALE Having been staffed with Vlasovites, Banderites, “forest brothers”, defectors and other “ideological fighters against Bolshevism”, the conglomerate “Voice of America” – “Radio Liberty” – “Free Europe” reached a serious technical level. As the Voice of America staff liked to tell, already in the early 1950s their broadcasts could theoretically be received by about 1.5 million listeners in the Soviet Union. By the 1960s, the supposedly not quite state radio station was already broadcasting 850 hours a week in 38 languages of the peoples of the USSR, creating materials for TV centers in 90 countries around the world. American music has always been one of the elements of "soft power". Jazz producer and radio host Willis Conover worked for VoA for more than 40 years The transmissions were transmitted using state-of-the-art, top-secret military radio transmitters at American bases in Lampertheim, Germany, and Taiwan. The network was reinforced by the resources of over a hundred powerful radio stations in the United States, as well as a network of radio centers in London, Munich, Athens, Tangier, Thessaloniki, Manila, Delhi, Bangkok, and on the islands of Okinawa and Rhodes. An exotic project was also carried out to transmit news using Morse code (to break through our jamming system). At the disposal of "Svoboda" were 28 powerful radio transmitters, 2 thousand employees (among whom were 700 successfully denazified West Germans and 470 post-war emigrants). Fruitful cooperation with the same "white émigré" NTS, which no longer raised questions from the CIA, also made its contribution. The Munich Institute for the Study of History and Culture of the USSR, affiliated with "Svoboda - Free Europe", worked closely with the diasporas of "enslaved peoples" - Ukrainian, Belarusian, North- and Transcaucasian organizations. The history of counteraction to this intelligence and propaganda factory (which counteraction is not limited to "jammers") is worthy of separate consideration. Let us just note that the counter-efforts were nullified in 1989-1991 with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the USSR. Let us recall that Voice of America, Liberty and Free Europe were added to the register of foreign agents only in 2017. | |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #1 Christmas 1942 was, by ten thousand times, the most interesting part of WW2. Fight me. I know, the Americans weren't in the war so it didn't count. A lot of Americans only like to pay attention to the part of the war when the Axis was already broken and it was one one-sided ass-kicking after another. Like a video game player playing alone on a server destroying bot after bot and thinking he's the best player in mom's basement. |
| Posted by: Jairong+Scourge+of+the+Gepids2435 2025-03-25 11:03 |