Did Radio and TV Pioneer David Sarnoff Coin the Voice of America name?

Summary

David Sarnoff, the pioneer of the radio and television industry in the United States and the founder of the NBC network, was most likely the first American with access to the White House to present a comprehensive plan for U.S. government-funded international radio broadcasting and one of the first to suggest for it the “Voice of America” name. However, when the first programs with anti-Nazi and anti-Japanese propaganda went on air to Europe in 1942, the “Voice of America” name was not used.

The first U.S. government-funded radio broadcasts, beginning in early 1941, were to Latin America using six private American companies. The agency in charge of the initial U.S. government’s overseas broadcasting operations was the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), headed by Nelson A. Rockefeller. The name “Voice of America” was never used for international radio programs to Latin America before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

David Sarnoff of NBC suggested to Nelson Rockefeller in 1940 that all existing private U.S. stations broadcasting to Latin America be consolidated into one group. Eventually, NBC and CBS, program providers through government contracts, agreed on simultaneous broadcasts to Latin America to achieve greater coverage. Programs to Europe initiated separately in February 1942 by the Foreign Information Service (FIS) within the Office of the Coordinator of Information (CIO) started to use the “Voice of America” name but not until later in the war.

U.S. government-sponsored broadcasts to the rest of the world except to Latin America were absorbed in June 1942 by the Office of War Information (OWI), headed by Elmer Davis. In addition to anti-Nazi propaganda, they also included a heavy dose of disinformation to whitewash Stalin and his repressive Soviet communist regime to protect America’s military alliance with Russia (Hitler’s erstwhile ally).

The “Voice of America” name would not be officially adopted for the broadcasts until a few years after the end of World War II, although by March 1942, some OWI radio services started introducing their programs as VOA, and some officials started referring to them by using the name in official correspondence.

David Sarnoff was alarmed by both fascist and communist propaganda, but while serving as an advisor on communications to General Eisenhower during the war, he did not make his views about the Soviet Union public. As Stalin reneged on most of the unenforceable and unenforced promises made to Roosevelt and Churchill at the Tehran and Yalta wartime conferences, Sarnoff recommended countering Soviet propaganda in the early years of the Cold War. Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL) successfully implemented most of his ideas. He and General Eisenhower served on the board of the Free Europe Committee, a CIA front organization that helped to establish Radio Free Europe and generated public support for its broadcasts.

The Voice of America also used some of Sarnoff’s ideas for post-war broadcasting on a smaller scale during President Truman’s “Campaign of Truth” in the early 1950s. However, toward the end of the Eisenhower administration, some United States Information Agency (USIA) diplomats, American-born VOA officials, and VOA editors gave up on most of Sarnoff’s recommendations for confronting Soviet propaganda through Voice of America broadcasts. Most likely because of his strong anti-communism, which David Sarnoff was not afraid to express publicly before and after World War II, and because he was never a journalist, he is not mentioned in books and articles written about the Voice of America, even though he had a much greater influence on U.S. international broadcasting during the Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower administration than the CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow who became President Kennedy’s USIA director. Sarnoff tried unsuccessfully to recruit Murrow to work for NBC and defended him when Senator Joseph McCarthy falsely accused him of pro-Soviet sympathies.

Before Truman’s “Campaign of Truth” reforms, VOA still censored strong criticism of the Soviet regime until about 1951 and, after his presidency, to a limited degree in later years. Sarnoff was strongly opposed to the appeasement of the Soviet Union and its satellite states. Limited censorship of some of the most effective critics of communism—Americans and Russians like Nobel Prize-winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—did not entirely disappear at the Voice of America until the start of the Reagan administration in 1981.

Not all USIA Foreign Service officers serving in senior management positions at the Voice of America tried to interfere with VOA news for reasons of diplomacy. Not all American-born VOA managers and editors resisted hard-hitting journalism, but many did. Fortunately, RFE and RL were spared such interference and restrictions.

Reagan, who also strongly supported Radio Free Europe, was the second U.S. president after Truman who agreed with most of Sarnoff’s views about communism and the Soviet Union. Reagan’s appointees at USIA and VOA allowed anti-communist refugee broadcasters much greater freedom, providing them with resources to help peacefully defeat communism, beginning in Poland when I was in charge of the Polish Service.

Sarnoff died in 1971, but during the Solidarity trade union’s struggle for democracy, we used many of his concepts to increase the listenership to VOA’s Polish-language programs in Poland nearly fivefold to well over 50 percent of the adult population. We did it quietly against the fears and advice of longtime USIA and VOA officials and some American journalists who predicted that Reagan’s much harder line against communism and Russia would make the Voice of America ineffective and ruin its credibility.

Some pre-Reagan Voice of America officials and journalists, often highly partisan, admired the VOA’s founding fathers. At least some must have known that many of the early VOA officials and journalists had followed in the footsteps of the fellow traveler Anglo-American New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty. Some may also have known that pro-Stalin communists, including a future Stalin Peace Prize winner, were in charge of the Voice of America programs during World War II but hid that fact from the American public and their employees.

During World War II, the Voice of America employed many pro-Soviet propagandists. After the war, refugee journalists, who were former victims of Hitler’s and Stalin’s repressions and replaced some of those who later served the communist regime in Eastern Europe, knew more than enough about the Gulag slave labor camps not to be deceived by the official distortions of their own organization’s history. They practiced journalism in opposition to totalitarian ideologies and followed the example of other anti-communist journalists, American and foreign-born, including some former communists and Soviet sympathizers who became strongly opposed to communism—Bertram Wolfe, Julius Epstein, and Eugene Lyons.

Their ideas were not much different from Edward R. Murrow’s strategy to fight against communist propaganda, especially in Cuba, although, as the USIA director during the Kennedy and early Johnson administrations, he only expressed them in secret memos. Unlike almost all liberal mainstream American journalists, including those working for VOA in the 1940s, Murrow was not duped by the Soviet propaganda lie about the Katyn massacre of thousands of Polish military officers—the crime, which Stalin personally ordered but falsely blamed on the Germans.

Neither Sarnoff nor Murrow advised distorting the truth, mixing news with commentary, or using crude propaganda. Sarnoff’s contributions to U.S. international broadcasting, like those of later anti-communist refugee journalists, have been ignored or greatly diminished. Murrow is justly presented as a defender of truthful journalism, but his behind-the-scenes propaganda battle with the Soviets as the USIA chief is rarely mentioned.

The distortions and the ignorance of history, especially at the Voice of America and in the rest of the U.S. government, have damaged post-Cold War journalism and helped Vladimir Putin wage his war of aggression and imperial territorial expansion against Ukraine. The damage has extended well beyond the Voice of America and its current federal overseer, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM).

In November 2003, the Pulitzer Prize Board, whose then-membership read like the Who’s Who of the elite American media and academia establishment, voted not to revoke Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize despite his pro-Soviet propaganda and lies about the Stalin-engineered famine in Ukraine that took millions of lives in the 1930s. Because of the decades-long suppression of information about the Soviet propaganda influence, at least some of those Pulitzer Prize Board members who had voted in 2003 not to strip Walter Duranty of his Pulitzer Prize and later attained positions of leadership in the U.S. government’s international broadcasting may have been unaware of the entire history of Stalin’s Great Terror, the Ukraine famine, and the Duranty-led attack on Welsh reporter Gareth Jones, one of the few journalists who was telling the truth about the Holodomor extermination of peasants of Ukrainian, Russian, and other nationalities.

Joining Duranty in his attack on Jones were other elite American and British correspondents in Moscow. One of them, Eugene Lyons, revealed later in his 1937 book Assignment in Utopia that they had all deliberately lied about the imposition of Soviet rule, the Ukrainian famine, and Gareth Jones. Did members of the 2002-2003 Pulitzer Prize Board know about Eugene Lyons’s admission of guilt before making their decision? Have they heard of other courageous journalists like a Jewish refugee from Nazism and a former communist, Julius Epstein, former communist Bertram Wolfe, and Homer Smith, an African-American journalist in the Soviet Union who had exposed Soviet propaganda lies? Did they know about Konstanty Broel Plater, the only World War II-era Voice of America broadcaster known to have resigned in protest against VOA’s airing of Soviet propaganda lies?

The U.S. government officials deceived by Putin’s propaganda may not have paid sufficient attention to the memoirs of U.S. diplomats George Kennan, Charles Bohlen, and Foy Henderson, who noted the dishonesty of news reporting from the Soviet Union by left-leaning Western journalists during Stalin’s rule. They may have never heard of Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles’s successful effort to remove John Houseman from his VOA job. Houseman was later inaccurately proclaimed the first director of the Voice of America. Houseman was not in charge of program content but hired communists to fill VOA jobs.

The U.S. government officials also may not have known about David Sarnoff’s contributions to U.S. international broadcasting or Edward R. Murrow’s no longer secret Cold War USIA directives, in which he firmly advocated countering Soviet propaganda. The decades-long coverup of the Voice of America’s true history has implications for today’s American journalism, not just at VOA but also in private U.S. media.

What used to be largely the affliction of the American radical Left, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his propagandists managed to turn into an epidemic among radical right-wing Republicans and TV and social media pundits. Putin aims to do the same in spreading disinformation and influencing American leaders on the right and on the left as Stalin and other Soviet leaders had done. He has found that Tucker Carlson can spread the Kremlin’s message in the United States much more effectively than his own propagandists.

The same thing was done for Stalin by Walter Duranty at the New York Times, Voice of America’s Howard Fast, the Office of War Information director Elmer Davis, his deputy and VOA’s de facto director and FDR’s speechwriter and personal friend Robert E. Sherwood, former Moscow correspondent and VOA’s first program director Joseph Barnes, VOA’s chief radio producer John Houseman, OWI and VOA officials Wallace Carroll and Owen Lattimore, OWI’s liaison officer with Hollywood Nelson Poynter, and many World War II VOA broadcasters.

Apologists for these fellow travelers managed to hide that some of VOA’s early officials and journalists were fired or forced to resign even by the already highly pro-Soviet Roosevelt administration as General Eisenhower and FDR’s liberal friends and Russia experts in the State Department became alarmed by OWI’s and VOA’s excessive reliance on Soviet propaganda. These officials’ and journalists’ naive faith in Soviet communism made it easier for Stalin to mislead President Roosevelt, for FDR to mislead the American people about Stalin, and for the Soviet dictator to enslave East-Central Europe.

President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided the fate of seventy million East Europeans without the knowledge or agreement of America’s smaller allies in the coalition against Nazi Germany. It happened at the Tehran Big Three conference with Stalin at the end of 1943 and was confirmed at the Yalta conference in February 1944. Still, history might have taken a different turn if journalists like Duranty had not lied in the 1930s and the early 1940s and if the U.S. government’s World War II propagandists in the Office of War Information and the Voice of America had not covered up Stalin’s genocidal crimes. Perhaps millions of lives could have been saved in Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as the lives of American soldiers who died in Soviet-instigated wars in Korea, Vietnam, and other Cold War conflicts.

The 2003 Pulitzer Prize Board decision on Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize confirms that no lessons were drawn about the dangers of dishonest journalism. Right-wing media pundits like Tucker Carlson and some Trump administration officials have been deceived by the lies of Russia’s current ex-KGB ruler just as easily as many left-leaning Western journalists and the Roosevelt administration officials were deceived by Stalin and his propagandists during World War II.

Our best and surest way to prevent a Hot War is to win the Cold War.

David Sarnoff, Program For A Political Offensive Against World Communism, April 5, 1955

Ted Lipien for Cold War Radio Museum

Introduction

According to David Sarnoff‘s biographer and his first cousin Eugene Lyons (both Sarnoff and Lyons were born in the same town to Jewish families in the pre-Bolshevik Russian Empire and emigrated to the United States when they were children), the president of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and the founder of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), may have been the first person to use the words “Voice of America” in calling for U.S. government-funded and managed international radio broadcasts. The “generalissimo of the radio industry” and “father of television” in the United States had made his suggestion about the need for “Voice of America” radio before the start of World War II and before such U.S. government-produced radio programs were launched in 1942, although still at that time without the use of the Voice of America name. The name proposed by Sarnoff was not officially adopted until shortly after the end of World War II.

Eugene Lyons, important but because of his anti-communism forgotten figure in American journalism and political discourse, paid somewhat more attention to David Sarnoff’s interest in U.S. international broadcasting than his other biographer, businessman, and former RCA executive vice president Kenneth Bilby. Bilby attributed Sarnoff’s distaste for communism and Soviet Russia primarily to his cold-warrior mentality amplified by the prospect of lucrative government communications and military contracts for his company. Bilby saw Sarnoff as “a leader among the cold warriors, a wholehearted subscriber to the later brinkmanship of John Foster Dulles,” President Dwight D. Eisenhower‘s Secretary of State.¹

But contrary to Bilby’s assumptions, Sarnoff’s anti-communism had deeper roots in his life experience and was more nuanced. The Jewish immigrant from Russia often stressed that eventual “liberation” was to be achieved peacefully and that countering communist propaganda and strong U.S. defense posture were needed to avoid a “hot war.” While he and many others used the badly-chosen word “liberation,” he saw it as the “hope of liberation” and the ultimate result of consistent American policy to oppose Soviet Russia and communist China. In a 1960 article in Life magazine, titled “Turn Cold War Tide in America’s Favor,” also included in a book, The National Purpose, with articles from Adlai Stevenson, Archibald MacLeish, James Reston, Walter Lippmann, and others, Sarnoff explained:

…in the conflict with Communism we must become the dynamic challenger rather than remain the inert target of challenge. Only then can freedom regain the initiative.²

He pointed out that few democratic leaders dared to speak of the coming collapse of the communist empire and instead used “such solacing and temporizing words as accommodation, modus vivendi, relaxing tensions and coexistence,” while Soviet and Chinese leaders constantly predicted the doom of capitalism and the Western world.³ The first U.S. president who adopted a new communications strategy vis-a-vis Soviet Russia according to some of Sarnoff’s recommendations, was Ronald Reagan, who took office ten years after Sarnoff’s death.

Lyons understood his cousin’s pro-freedom perspective based on their shared experience of being born in imperial Russia more than Bilby and shared a heightened sense of injustice, prejudices, and repression with his cousin. Lacking the same immigrant experience, Bilby was somewhat dismissive of Sarnoff’s anti-communism and did not cover as much of Sarnoff’s involvement with U.S. government-funded broadcasters as in Lyons’s book. But Bilby noted in 1986, fifteen years after Sarnoff died in 1971:

… his concept of penetrating the Iron Curtain with broadcast messages won broad support. Out of it later emerged the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, to both of which services Sarnoff felt a parental tie.⁴

Bilby was likely referring to the Voice of America as it developed several years after the end of World War II rather than the U.S. government radio broadcasts of the earlier period aired under various other names. Sarnoff’s idea had a role in their launch, but they did not follow his recommendations for opposing the communist and Soviet totalitarian ideology. They supported it by presenting it as progressive and democratic.

Sarnoff’s strong opposition to communism and the Soviet Union may have also resulted in his contributions to U.S. international broadcasting being largely ignored by those writing about the Voice of America from left-leaning perspectives. The same writers, who have a near monopoly on interpreting VOA’s history, have also been silent on the role of many pro-Soviet American propagandists and journalists in the World War II U.S. government radio broadcasts and the years immediately after the war. At the same time, they downplayed the critical role of refugee and immigrant VOA broadcasters in helping to bring down communism in Eastern Europe. They also vastly overstated the impact of VOA English language news and music broadcasts.

In addition to his technical genius that helped to transform the electronics industry in the twentieth century, Sarnoff, the primary figure behind the development of color television, also had a remarkable understanding of political issues and their impact on business. Even though his formal education was interrupted at a very young age by the need to support his mother and younger siblings (in his younger years, he only completed the eighth grade of elementary school), his immigrant family background, strong religious Jewish faith, intelligence, self-learning, and devotion to science—all contributed to making David Sarnoff a visionary and pioneer in the field of electronics and communications like no other person in America during his lifetime.⁵ In addition to making correct product development and business decisions, he also acquired an exceptionally prophetic view of international politics. His immigrant experience and, later in life, easy access to influential business and political leaders worldwide helped him to achieve success and fame.

In 1958, Sarnoff was perhaps the only well-known American willing to risk a public prediction that “Within the next 20 years Soviet Communism will collapse under the weight of its economic policies, its political follies, and the pressures of a restive, discontented population.”⁶ The collapse happened only slightly more than ten years later than Sarnoff had predicted, but even in the 1970s and the early 1980s, almost no one in America believed it would happen soon or in the foreseeable future. He believed new technologies would help pierce the Iron Curtain and “bring home to the Russian people the facts and the truth.”⁷ He also predicted in 1958 with remarkable foresight that “The Soviet Empire will fall apart as one satellite after another attains its own liberation.”⁸

It was no coincidence that of all the satellite countries, communism fell first in Poland, the main victim of President Roosevelt’s Yalta policy and his betrayal of the 1941 Atlantic Charter principles, and that it happened during the presidency of Ronald Reagan who, like Sarnoff, also believed in the inevitable and quick dissolution of the Soviet “Evil Empire.” In the 1980s, many left-leaning partisan American-born officials and journalists working for the U.S. Information Agency and the Voice of America viewed Reagan and his “evil empire” speech with contempt. In contrast, many foreign language VOA broadcasters, especially those from communist-ruled nations, were encouraged by his words.⁹

The betrayed Atlantic Charter guarantees, first agreed to by President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on August 14, 1941, included free elections and “freedom from fear and want.” They were part of the Four Freedoms announced by President Roosevelt in his State of the Union address to Congress on January 6, 1941: “freedom of speech,” “freedom of worship,” “freedom from want,” and “freedom from fear.” According to Eugene Lyons, it was Sarnoff who had suggested to Roosevelt two of the Four Freedom phrases: “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear.”¹⁰

While not alone as a critic of communism among American elites of his time, Sarnoff was in the minority in the media and entertainment industry, whose leading figures and many authors and intellectuals were seduced by Soviet propaganda long before World War II. Before the United States entered the war, Sarnoff tried to interest President Roosevelt and key members of his administration in starting government-funded shortwave radio broadcasts for international audiences in cooperation with private industry. His technical plans for U.S. international broadcasting were implemented in 1942. Still, he was likely discouraged when pro-Soviet American fellow travelers and American and foreign communist sympathizers gained the dominant role in management, program development, and journalism in Roosevelt’s newly-created Office of War Information (OWI).

After the war, Sarnoff advocated for a much stronger countering of Soviet propaganda by the Voice of America and was again at least partially disappointed. However, many of his ideas were used in Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty broadcasts, which he strongly supported. He was an advocate for a free press and freedom of speech. He lobbied to convince the United Nations to establish “Freedom to Listen” as a human right as important as freedom of speech and freedom of the press.¹¹

It is not clear whether his efforts were decisive in this case, but the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights stated, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference, and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.” This would become later the slogan of Radio Free Europe.

Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who, in her 1949 autobiography, This I Remember, wrote that her late husband “enjoyed his first contact with Stalin” at the “Big Three” Teheran conference in late 1943 and thought that Joseph Stalin’s “control over the people of his country was unquestionably due to their trust in him and their confidence that he had their good at heart,” is usually given credit for being the chair of the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.¹² She also wrote that her late husband trusted Stalin when the Soviet leader had told him that the Russians would find themselves “growing nearer to some of your concepts and you may be finding yourselves accepting some of ours” and that he “had a real liking for Marshal Stalin.”¹³ While representing the United States at the United Nations at the request of President Harry S. Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt indeed had a role in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Still, the concept of defending the right “to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers” may have been first proposed to the U.S. government by David Sarnoff.

It is of paramount importance that the principle of “Freedom to Listen” be established. It should be inalienable right of people to listen anywhere and at any time to the voices on the wavelengths that come to them from home and abroad. They have the right to know the truth in the news, and it is the duty of international broadcasting to provide them with the truth.

From David Sarnoff’s address before the United States National Commission for UNESCO, Chicago, Illinois, September 12, 1947

Jewish Family’s Journey from Tsarist Russia to New York

David Sarnoff (1891-1971), the son of Abraham Sarnoff and Leah Privin, was born in  Uzlyany (as was Eugene Lyons), a small town near Minsk, then part of the Russian Empire (today part of Belarus). His father was a house painter who left for America in 1896, hoping to find a better life for his family. While he could send some money to his wife, he was having a hard time in New York due to his poor health, and the family’s departure to join him was delayed.

David was an exceptionally bright child and quickly learned to read. On the advice of his maternal grandmother, he was sent at the age of five to his granduncle, a rabbi in a distant town, under whose guidance he memorized Jewish religious texts in Hebrew and Aramaic, sometimes for twelve or fourteen hours a day.¹⁴ Finally, after four years, there was enough money for the rest of the Sarnoff family—Leah, David, and his two younger brothers—to journey to America. They arrived in New York on July 2, 1900.¹⁵ David was enrolled in a public school and mastered English within a year.¹⁶ 

Young David Sarnoff

Two more children were born to Abraham and Leah in America, but the father’s health continued to deteriorate, and he died soon after David’s sixteenth birthday.¹⁷ His father’s illness cut short David’s childhood and made him the family’s main breadwinner at ten and eleven. He started selling Yiddish newspapers, running errands, and doing other chores to help his mother buy food and pay bills.¹⁸ He also sang for $1.50 a week in a synagogue choir to contribute to the family budget.¹⁹ Still, in his hunger for learning, he found time to attend evening classes at the Educational Alliance, a social institution serving mainly Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.²⁰ 

From Office Boy to President of RCA

Young Sarnoff’s first choice in looking for a job at age fifteen was to become a journalist. He went to the New York Herald, looking for any newspaper-related work, but, by chance, the first person he spoke to was a representative of the Commercial Cable Company who offered to hire him as a messenger. Soon, he became more interested in electronic communications, which he realized could also allow him to prosper and improve the lives of people around him and those living abroad. The Commercial Cable Company fired him within a few months when he dared to request leave without pay for the Jewish holidays of Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah so he could sing in the synagogue choir. He quickly found an even better job.²¹

In 1906, young David Sarnoff started working as an office boy in the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America, running errands for Guglielmo Marconi and discussing radio electronics with the famous Italian inventor.²² In 1909, he advanced to manager at the Marconi station at Sea Gate, Brooklin, and worked as a wireless operator.²³ A messenger who later finished an evening electrical engineering course at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, became commercial manager for Radio Corporation of America when the Marconi company was taken over by RCA, general manager and vice-president in 1922, and RCA president in 1930. In 1926, he founded the NBC network, the first national radio network in the United States. Among his many accomplishments, he is credited with developing the television industry in the United States. 

Proposes “Voice of America” to Roosevelt

Throughout his business career, various U.S. presidents consulted David Sarnoff on electronic communications issues, and he took such occasions to urge greater U.S. government involvement in international broadcasting. The launch of government radio broadcasts would benefit his company through contracts for equipment purchases. Still, he was also deeply convinced of their urgent need in the world threatened by aggressive propaganda from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Eugene Lyons noted in Sarnoff’s biography that in the late 1930s and the early 1940s, the president of RCA repeatedly suggested directing broadcasts to foreign countries from the United States. He used the “Voice of America” name in a document in 1943 when U.S. government-produced radio programs were not yet known under that name. At various times, he had talks about international radio broadcasting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs Nelson Rockefeller, and FDR’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull.²⁴  

In the fall of 1938, Sarnoff discussed the growing importance of international radio with Sumner Welles at President Roosevelt’s suggestion. Sarnoff had talked to Roosevelt earlier about establishing U.S. government shortwave radio broadcasts for foreign audiences, prompting FDR to ask his friend and foreign policy advisor at the State Department to consult with the U.S. radio industry pioneer. Lyons did not confidently claim that Sarnoff had coined the Voice of America name but concluded that “he took the initiative in planting the seed that eventually sprouted as the Voice of America.” ²⁵ 

In his 1938 memorandum for Sumner Welles, Sarnoff wrote that “mental preparedness” for national defense may prove as vital as military preparedness. He concluded, “Radio, especially in the international field, is the instrumentality by which this can be best accomplished.” ²⁶ At that time, he had no way of knowing that President Roosevelt and the United States government would soon have to embrace Joseph Stalin, a dictator and mass murderer, as an indispensable ally to fight the other dictator and mass murderer, Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler.

Comparing “Red Russia” with “Brown Germany”

Even before the start of World War II in September 1939, when Nazi Germany and communist Russia invaded and divided Poland under the secret terms of the Hitler-Stalin Pact (also known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact or the Nazi-Soviet Alliance), Sarnoff had been concerned about the growing threat of both Nazi and Soviet communist propaganda. He knew about the pogroms of Jews in Tsarist Russia and was exposed to anti-Semitism and racism in the United States. He developed a distrust of Russia even before the Bolshevik coup after witnessing Cossacks charging on horses against Russians, demonstrating for more freedoms under the Tsar. He recalled that the trampling of women and children “also trampled out of me any lingering feeling I might have had for Russia as my homeland.”²⁷ According to his biographer, Sarnoff would flinch when he later read that someone had described him as Russian-born.²⁸ In Sarnoff’s view, the takeover of the government in 1917 by the Bolsheviks made communist Russia even worse and more threatening to the rest of the world than Tsarist Russia. His 1938 memorandum to Sumner Welles referred to “Red Russia with Brown Germany” in denouncing both totalitarian ideologies.²⁹

Lyons wrote that this comparison of communism with fascism did not endear Sarnoff to those American “intellectuals who were then as ardently pro-Soviet as anti-Nazi.” ³⁰ Some of them would be later in charge of the wartime “Voice of America” broadcasts and would fill them with pro-Stalin propaganda and the whitewashing of Stalin’s genocidal crimes. Besides lionizing Stalin, the Office of War Information also produced propaganda films supporting the internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry. While not resulting in brutalities and countless deaths, as during the Soviet deportations, this anti-constitutional decision of the FDR administration was modeled after the displacement of entire nationalities and other groups suspected by Stalin of disloyalty toward the communist regime.  

Contrary to Sarnoff’s recommendations, Stalin would be presented to Americans by FDR’s propagandists and in Voice of America broadcasts to audiences abroad as a supporter of democracy and liberty and a guarantor of post-war peace and security. FDR based America’s post-war plans on these assumptions about Stalin and Soviet Russia. In line with the President’s wishes and out of their own convictions, Voice of America officials and journalists supported the establishment of communist governments in East-Central Europe. Shortly after the war, a few VOA broadcasters left their jobs in New York and started working as anti-U.S. propagandists or diplomats for Soviet-controlled regimes in Poland and Czechoslovakia. 

However, despite FDR’s faith in Stalin, Sarnoff never changed his views about communism. When his biography was published in 1966, Lyons shared Sarnoff’s abhorrence of the Stalinist regime, but his biographer and cousin had not always been a critic of the Soviet Union. Working as a United Press (UP) correspondent in Moscow from 1928 to 1934, Lyons, like many American and British journalists and intellectuals of that period, was initially a fellow traveler of communism and may have been the first Western reporter to be invited for a press interview with Stalin in November 1930. However, Sarnoff’s biography was written long after Lyons lost his enthusiasm for the communist cause and became a critic of Soviet propaganda influence within the U.S. government, including the Voice of America.

David Sarnoff’s WWII Service and Assistance to American Journalists and Radio France

As an immigrant in the United States and someone born in imperial Russia who was aware that Jews were still living in the Soviet Union, prevented from leaving, and arrested on false charges, David Sarnoff knew enough not to be deceived by pro-Soviet propaganda. Still, Eugene Lyons did not find that the president of RCA spoke openly to protect American radio audiences from it during the war with Japan and Nazi Germany when the Soviet Union was America’s military ally. After the United States entered the war, Sarnoff, an Army Signal Corps reserve officer, immediately offered his and his company’s help to the United States armed forces and served as special assistant on communications to General Eisenhower in Europe. Before the June 6, 1944 (D-Day) Normandy landings and the opening of the second front in Europe, Sarnoff proposed the establishment of a mobile Army Signal Center behind the front lines to be made available to journalists covering the invasion.³¹ Following D-Day, correspondents of American radio networks, including Edward R. Murrow of CBS, expressed their gratitude for Sarnoff’s work in a message to Eisenhower’s headquarters.³² 

After the liberation of Paris, Sarnoff helped to get Radio France on the air in barely two weeks, including its international short-wave broadcasts.³³ Captain Harry C. Butcher, a radio broadcaster who served as the naval aide to General Eisenhower, noted in his memoirs that in October 1944, he saw Colonel Sarnoff smoking a cigar in the lobby of a Paris hotel as he was getting ready to return home having purchased a large selection of lingerie for his family and wearing a U.S. Army Legion of Merit awarded him that day.³⁴ Sarnoff’s wife, Lizette Hermant, was a beautiful French-born Jewish immigrant girl he had met in New York—an “accidental” meeting arranged by their mothers. They fell in love and got married in 1917 after a short engagement. According to his biographer, David Sarnoff explained, “I could speak no French, and Lizette could speak no English, so what else could we do?”³⁵ They were happily married for 54 years.

For his service to France during the war, the French government promoted David Sarnoff to Commander of the Legion of Honor. He had already been a French Legion of Honor officer for several years.³⁶ After President Roosevelt made Sarnoff brigadier general for his U.S. Army war service, his friends, associates, and others often called him “the General.”³⁷ In 1947, President Truman presented him with the Medal of Merit at a White House ceremony.³⁸ Sarnoff maintained good relations with President Truman and supported his policies of containing Soviet aggression in Korea.³⁹

Sarnoff’s relationship with General Eisenhower, whom he greatly admired, was closer than with any other U.S. president, and he became Ike’s friend and advisor. Several years before Eisenhower’s successful run for the White House in 1952, Sarnoff, having heard of the retired general’s financial difficulties, offered him a largely public relations job as RCA president. After considering the offer, Eisenhower politely declined despite a six-figure salary and accepted a less controversial position as president of Columbia University.⁴⁰ President Eisenhower was weary of the influence of the “military-industrial complex” on U.S. defense and foreign policy and warned about it in his January 1961 farewell address to the nation, but it did not seem to affect his relationship with Sarnoff.

Eisenhower Accuses Voice of America Commentators of “Insubordination”

Sarnoff had likely learned from Eisehower of his profound displeasure with the Office of War Information’s “Voice of America” commentators, whose 1943 broadcast about King Victor Emmanuel of Italy threatened the safety of American soldiers under Ike’s command.

When VOA officials and journalists took their pro-Moscow zeal too far and, in their broadcasts abroad, tried to undermine a critical American diplomatic and military initiative in Italy because communists voiced their objections, President Roosevelt made a rare public statement designed to bring a measure of control over OWI activities and limit foreign propaganda interference in U.S. foreign and information policy. On July 28, 1943, the New York Times published a front-page report by its Washington correspondent and bureau chief Arthur Krock under the headline: “President Rebukes OWI for Broadcast on Regime in Italy.” The President denounced a short-wave “American public opinion” broadcast to Europe by the Office of War Information for calling King Victor Emmanuel of Italy “the moronic little King” and “the Fascist King” and Marshal Badoglio as a “high-ranking Fascist,” Krock reported.⁴¹ The New York Times correspondent also noted the OWI’s preference for Soviet propaganda:

The selections of opinions made by the OWI were drawn heavily from purely personal journalistic sources—otherwise undistinguished—which have opposed the President’s Vichy and North African policies and usually produce an “ideology” that conforms much more closely to the Moscow than to the Washington–London line.⁴²

After leaving the White House in 1961, former President Eisenhower briefly alluded in his memoirs Waging Peace (1965) to the Voice of America’s wartime record of collusion with Soviet Russia. As a military leader during World War II, he must have been still upset to have mentioned the incident years later during the Cold War with the Soviet Union when VOA was already playing a useful, although still less than fully adequate, role in countering communist disinformation. 

During World War II the Office of War Information had, on two occasions in foreign broadcasts, opposed actions of President Roosevelt; it ridiculed the temporary arrangement with Admiral Darlan in North Africa and that with Marshal Badoglio in Italy. President Roosevelt took prompt action to stop such insubordination.⁴³

Eisenhower also expressed his concerns with what he saw as Voice of America’s unethical journalism supporting partisan political advocacy in one foreign policy incident during his administration.

In Washington I had been told that a representative of the Voice of America (our governmental radio overseas) had tried to obtain from a senator a statement opposing our landing of troops in Lebanon. In a state of some pique I informed Secretary Dulles that this was carrying the policy of “free broadcasting” too far. The Voice of America should, I said, employ truth as a weapon in support of Free World, but it had no mandate or license to seek evidence of lack of domestic support of America’s foreign policies and actions.⁴⁴

If General Eisenhower had not told Sarnoff in Paris in 1944 about the Voice of America’s “moronic little King” broadcast when he served as his communications advisor and provided assistance to American journalists, he likely read about it in the New York Times or in the former president’s book.

Soviet and Communist Influence at the Office of War Information

Not surprisingly, communists who had turned against Stalin and communism were often the first to expose Soviet influence in the Office of War Information, the wartime parent U.S. government agency of the Voice of America. One of them was Oliver Carlson, a writer, journalist, founder of the Young Communist League of America, and lecturer at the University of Chicago. Carlson, who had never worked for VOA and only observed the organization as an outsider, published a pamphlet, Radio in the Red,” in 1947, describing how pro-Soviet U.S. government propaganda developed with the help of OWI officials and journalists.

During the war years—and largely with government blessing—the Communists moved en masse on the radio, as they did on the movies and the press to help “sell” the American people on the virtues of our Soviet ally. The idea officially projected through such organizations as the O.W.I., was to cure “misunderstanding” of Soviet Russia, which was suddenly discovered to be a “democracy” and a noble social experiment.⁴⁵

Carlson knew that the Office of War Information produced such propaganda for overseas audiences through the Voice of America and domestic audiences in the United States until Congress eliminated most of OWI’s domestic propaganda budget in 1943. Carlson wrote about domestic OWI propaganda programs, essentially the same as VOA programs. 

Tens of millions of radio listeners were deluged with streamlined and dramatic presentations to prove that any talk of Russia as a ruthless dictatorship was a “reactionary” plot. The Bolshevik regime, it turned out, was just a Russian version of our own War for Independence, Lenin a Russian replica of George Washington, Stalin a compendium of Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln.⁴⁶ Carlson noted, however, in his 1947 pamphlet, Radio in the Red, published by the Catholic Information Society, that “such crude propaganda, now that the war is over, has declined.” ⁴⁷

Carlson was not alone in making these observations about the American media’s enthusiasm for the Soviet Union during World War II. Ambassador Charles “Chip” E. Bohlen, who became one of many innocent victims of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s post-war anti-communist witchhunt, which helped Stalin and communists more than anybody else by discrediting all legitimate concerns about their propaganda influence, observed in his memoirs Witness to History 1929-1969, published in 1973, that “The influence of Soviet propaganda on America during the war should not be underestimated.”⁴⁸ Bohlen was hardly a Soviet sympathizer, as McCarthy alleged, but neither a wild-eye critic of Russia. He acknowledged that some of the American wartime supporters of the Soviet Union “perhaps knew what they were doing and were genuine Party-line boys, eager to capitalize on the situation to promote communism; others were doing it out of general enthusiasm for the war effort and gratitude for the exploits of the Red Army.⁴⁹ Both of these categories of pro-Soviet officials and journalists, both American and foreign-born, were present in the Office of War Information and the early Voice of America. The number of naive and unwitting Stalin helpers was much larger.

Considering Sarnoff’s earlier recommendations to oppose the totalitarian nature of communism, he could not have been pleased with the pro-Soviet and pro-communist propaganda and disinformation in the wartime VOA broadcasts. Still, Lyons noted that as an Army officer during the war, Sarnoff “necessarily avoided frontal attacks on communism, with which we were then in history’s strangest alliance.”⁵⁰ 

Lyons, who at the beginning of his journalistic career had been a Soviet news agency TASS correspondent in the United States, recognized the totalitarian nature of communism much earlier than most fellow travelers and made his break with pro-communist journalists several years before the start of World War II. He was later senior editor of Reader’s Digest and a founding member and the second president of the Overseas Press Club established in New York City in 1939. In the early 1950s, he helped found and was the first president of the American Committee of Liberation (later called the Radio Liberty Committee), which supported Radio Liberty broadcasts from Munich, West Germany to the USSRS, initially, as in the case of Radio Free Europe, with secret U.S. government funding and general oversight by the CIA. David Sarnoff was well aware of his cousin’s pro-Radio Liberty activities, as he himself supported the work of Radio Free Europe.

In his 1937 Assignment in Utopia book, updated and republished in 1967, which described how Lyons and other Western correspondents in Soviet Russia became spokespersons for the Stalinist regime, Lyons noted that American communists and supporters of Stalin were not proletarians, having failed to win the support of American workers, but rather “petty bourgeois and intellectual elements,” for whom “caviar and vodka took the place of the hammer and sickle as emblems of the proletarian revolution” as they attended official Soviet diplomatic functions and “mutual admiration parties thrown by well-to-do Left intellectuals.”⁵¹ Some of these Communist Party members and supporters ended up working for the Office of War Information and its “Voice of America” English operation and recruited foreign communists for VOA’s broadcasts in other languages. According to Lyons, Soviet Russia became, for them, a mythical state which had:

“already entered the stage of true socialism,” a Russia of “the world’s most democratic constitution,” the “happy life” and “classless society” that was being entrenched in the American mind. So many weary or bored or panicky Americans had made their spiritual homes in its wonder-chambers that anyone who threatened to undermine its foundations was treated as a shameless vandal. Perhaps he was.⁵²

In another book, Our Secret Allies: The Peoples of Russia, published in 1953, Eugene Lyons wrote about “revivified Stalin worship in the war years when the Kremlin magically became a freedom-loving ally.”⁵³

… the revised legend fashioned by the comrades of the OWI, the BBC, and other Allied agencies celebrated a regime not too different from our own—democratic and liberal in its own inscrutable way. Under the earlier concept the Kremlin was changing the world. In the OWI fairy tales the world was changing the Kremlin. The USSR was now presumably moving closer to our way of life. A hundred experts explained that Soviet Russia was moving closer to capitalism, the capitalist world was moving closer to socialism—and soon the twain would meet and embrace midway.⁵⁴

It is more than likely that Sarnoff read his cousin’s books about Soviet Russia. After Lyons’s break with communism, their views were remarkably similar. According to Sarnoff’s other biographer, Kenneth Bilby, Lyons, an editor at Reader’s Digest, was also on the RCA payroll as a public relations consultant and drafted Sarnoff’s speeches on the Cold War since the 1950s.⁵⁵ Bilby wrote that despite their kingship and friendship, after reading the draft, Sarnoff was displeased with Lyons for disclosing some of his personal faults, and their relationship suffered. Sarnoff suggested many revisions, which, according to Bilby, were made, even though the original manuscript was “almost more hagiography than biography.”⁵⁶

Communist Sympathizers at Early Voice of America

VOA’s chief radio producer, John Houseman, the co-inventor with Orson Welles (no family relation to Sumner Welles) of fake news radio entertainment and the future Hollywood actor, only later declared the first Voice of America director, recruited several Communist Party members and many more Soviet sympathizers for VOA jobs.⁵⁷ Houseman, who at the time of his appointment in 1942 was not yet a U.S. citizen (he had a British passport) had obtained U.S. citizenship in early 1943 through the special intervention of the OWI deputy director, famous playwright and FDR’s speechwriter and personal friend Robert E. Sherwood.⁵⁸ However, the State Department still refused to allow Houseman to travel abroad on U.S. government business because of his suspected Soviet and communist links. This information does not appear in Voice of America’s official presentations about its “first director.”

One of Houseman’s protégés, who also does not appear in any of Voice of America’s official presentations of his U.S. government employer’s history or many books and articles about it, was the first chief news writer and editor, Howard Fast, who had worked in his VOA news director position for the Office of War Information until 1944. A best-selling author of historical novels, including Spartacus, which was made into a Hollywood movie, Fast was later a Communist Party USA activist and member of the party’s Daily Worker newspaper editorial staff. In 1953, he received the Stalin Peace Prize, which he accepted with its substantial monetary award and never returned. During the McCarthy period, he was blacklisted and served several months in federal prison, having been convicted of contempt of Congress.

The Roosevelt administration quietly forced Houseman and Fast to resign during the war. However, many pro-Kremlin propagandists among VOA officials and journalists kept their jobs, some of them for several more years. 

To persuade the OWI leadership to get rid of Houseman, Sumner Welles, and other State Department officials, with the concurrence of the U.S. military intelligence, refused to give him a U.S. passport for official government travel abroad. The then-secret State Department memorandum with warnings about Houseman and other OWI officials sent to the White House in April 1943 contained a few inaccurate accusations, including the claim that a book by African American writer Richard Wright, who later condemned communism, was subversive or that Houseman was a communist (there is no proof that Houseman had joined the Communist Party). Still, most of the information Under Secretary Welles sent to the White House was true. He is best known for the Welles Declaration, which was named after him as its principal author. Issued on July 23, 1940, when he served as the acting Secretary of State, the U.S. government’s statement condemned the June 1940 occupation by the Soviet army of the three Baltic countries—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—and confirmed the United States’ refusal to recognize their annexation into the Soviet Union.

Soviet Disinformation in OWI and VOA Wartime Propaganda

During World War II, the OWI director, former CBS broadcaster Elmer Davis, and OWI and VOA official, journalist Wallace Carroll, spread one of the greatest of Stalin’s propaganda lies to American and foreign audiences. The Soviet dictator falsely claimed he was innocent of the brutal executions of thousands of Polish POW military officers and intellectual, business, and government leaders, collectively known as the Katyn massacre. The Soviets blamed the carnage on the Germans.

Another journalist supporting the Katyn lie was an OWI freelance volunteer in London and Moscow, Kathleen Harriman, the daughter of the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. She said after the war that Soviet officials had misled her. When she and her father, Ambassador W. Averell Harriman, were leaving Russia in 1946, Stalin, in his gratitude, presented them with two gift horses.⁵⁹

Kathleen Harriman’s (Kathleen Mortimer after her marriage) OWI boss in London, Wallace Carroll, who later was a news editor in the Washington bureau of the New York Times (1955-1963) and subsequently editor and publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel, still defended Stalin’s Katyn lie in his 1948 book, Persuade or Perish, designed to teach Americans how to recognize and fight propaganda.⁶⁰ Yet this spectacular failure to recognize a Soviet deception is strangely omitted from his biography by Mary Llewellyn McNeil, Century’s Witness: The Extraordinary Life of Journalist Wallace Carroll, published in 2022, even though she devotes several pages to discussing his Persuade or Perish book. Century’s Witness jacket includes a quote from Donald Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post, saying, “Only after reading this wonderful book did I understand how great Carroll was. ⁶¹ Carroll, like many other progressives of his era, was right about the scourge of racism in America and defended civil rights for all Americans. Still, it does not change the fact he and some others were easily duped by Soviet propaganda and promoted the cult of Stalin with disastrous consequences for millions outside of North America and Western Europe and for Americans who died in the Korean and Vietnam wars, which Stalin and later Soviet leaders had instigated to draw the United States into these conflicts and weaken America’s military and moral power. The Cold War was not only cold. The U.S. government OWI and Voice of America propagandists helped President Roosevelt appease Stalin in ways that could have been avoided, thus making Russia stronger and the United States weaker.

Mission to Moscow Propaganda Film

Many OWI officials besides Carroll and early VOA journalists were engaged in whitewashing Stalin. Media publisher Nelson Poynter, who recommended John Houseman for his VOA position, worked closely in his OWI job with Hollywood’s Warner Brothers on the 1943 Mission to Moscow propaganda film, which presented Stalin as a great statesman who identified and eliminated Fascists and spies trying to kill him and enslave Russia. Directed by Michael Curtiz, the film, based on the highly pro-Kremlin 1941 book by the former ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph E. Davies, justified Stalin’s purges and show trials to an even greater extent than Davies—a corporate lawyer, Democratic Party politician, and Roosevelt’s friend—did in a naive analysis in his book. Davies wrote that the show trials and executions were “quite clearly a part of a vigorous and determined effort of the Stalin government to protect itself from not only revolution from within but from attack from without.”⁶² According to Davies, Stalin got rid of the “Fifth Columnists” engaged in “subversive activities in Russia under a conspiracy agreement with the German and Japanese governments.”⁶³ “The purge,” Davies concluded, “had cleansed the country and rid it of treason.”⁶⁴ The Mission to Moscow movie took this fantasy conspiracy theory narrative of President Roosevelt’s former ambassador to Russia even further. While Davies served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1938, American career diplomats in Moscow, George F. Kennan and Charles E. Bohlen, seriously considered resigning as Foreign Service officers but were dissuaded by their senior colleague, Loy W. Henderson, even though he was also a strong critic of President Roosevelt’s appeasement of Stalin.⁶⁵

Bohlen did not write in his memoirs that he had thought of resigning but described Davies as “Sublimely ignorant of even the most elementary realities of the Soviet system and of its ideology.” ⁶⁶ He also observed that in his reporting to the State Department from Moscow, “Davies had relied much more on the opinion of the American press than the judgment of his staff and had spent a lot of time ingratiating himself with American newsmen in Moscow.”⁶⁷ According to Bohlen, because of his incurable optimism, Davies misled the U.S. government in his reports to Washington.⁶⁸

George Kennan wrote, “Mr. Davies’s constituents in Moscow—those who received his confidence, and whose opinions he consulted—were not the members of his official staff, they were the American journalists stationed there.⁶⁹ Two most distinguished American diplomats agreed that many American journalists in the Soviet Union during that period were fellow travelers. One of them was Joseph F. Barnes, the future Voice of America program director in the Office of War Information.

Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles warned the FDR White House about Soviet influence within the U.S. government. His 1943 memorandum had an attachment listing several OWI officials, including Barnes and Houseman:

It is reliably stated that there has been no crucial point in Russian development, since 1934, when Barnes has not followed the Party line and has not been much more successful than the official spokesman in giving it a form congenial to the American way of expression.⁷⁰

The note about John Houseman attached to Sumner Welles’s memorandum said in part:

Said to have been responsible for placing Communists in key position in foreign radio sections of OWI. Is reliably reported to be known in newspaper and theatrical circles in New York as a Communist. Military authorities consider should remain United States for the duration.⁷¹

As one of Roosevelt’s liberal friends, Welles could hardly be accused of being a precursor of Senator Joseph McCarthy, an entire decade before the Republican Senator from Wisconsin started his anti-communist witchhunt, making accusations against some who were Communist Party members and in a few cases Soviet agents, but mostly hurling false accusations against those who were never disloyal to the United States and even those who opposed communism.

Welles’s warnings were not baseless, and, unlike McCarthy in the early 1950s, he was not crusading against liberals and their ideas. He observed in his 1943 memorandum:

If it is desired to give a distinctly liberal cast to these organisations, it would seem possible to find men who are liberal in the light of their own conviction, and of the American ideal, rather than men who have, for one reason or another, elected to give expression to their liberalism primarily by joining Communist front organizations, and apparently sacrificing their independence of thought and action to the direction of a distinctly European movement.^⁠72

We know that Welles discussed U.S. international broadcasting issues with David Sarnoff but not whether they talked about Soviet influence within the Office of War Information and its impact on domestic U.S. news media and the film industry. In 1942 and 1943, Houseman was producing “Voice of America” radio programs under the supervision of his boss, Joseph Barnes, and in line with propaganda directives from the OWI deputy director and the head of all OWI overseas operations, Robert E. Sherwood, whose additional job was to coordinate U.S. propaganda with Soviet propaganda and issue program directives to VOA editors. At about the same time, the OWI’s Nelson Poynter reviewed the final script for Mission to Moscow. The U.S. government propaganda agency declared the film “one of the most remarkable pictures of this war” and “a most convincing means of helping Americans understand their Russian allies.”⁷³

Charles Bohlen called the Mission to Moscow movie “one of the most blatantly propagandistic pictures ever screened.”⁷⁴ According to Bohlen, when Davies showed the film in the Kremlin in 1943, it embarrassed even the Soviet leaders.⁷⁵

Eugene Lyons described the film, produced with guidance from Nelson Poynter and other OWI officials, as “grotesque” in taking “Stalin-Worship” to new depths.⁷⁶ More than a decade later, Lyons concluded in a Reader’s Digest article in June 1954 that “Ardent anti-Communists on the inside are now convinced that no known Communists or Communist sympathizers remain.” ⁷⁷ He also wrote, “Without doubt some ‘subversive’ individuals formerly found their way into VOA, as into other agencies in Government,” but “Fortunately the Voice has cleared house.” ⁷⁸

Agents of Influence or Spies?

Based on unconfirmed information from others and his own assessment, Lyons strongly suspected some high-ranking OWI officials of being Soviet spies. Still, there was no proof that they were. They were, however, witting or unwitting agents of influence, doing what the Kremlin hoped they would do to protect Stalin’s reputation and advance Soviet interests.

Several actual Soviet intelligence agents in the Office of War Information, including some VOA personnel, were, however, mentioned in cables deciphered under the secret U.S. counterintelligence Venona project. Only one, a young Russian-American communist Flora Don Wovschin (codename “Zora”), a Barnard College graduate whose parents were Communist Party activists, was positively identified by name. Still, the Venona project cables prove there were also others in lower-ranking positions.

Wovschin, who had opposed American aid to Britain during the Hitler-Stalin alliance, transferred from the OWI, where she worked as a research analyst, to the State Department and helped recruit other agents to spy for Moscow. Fearing arrest by the FBI, she defected to the Soviet Union after the war and was reported to have died working as a nurse in North Korea.⁷⁹

Still, some Voice of America journalists, including at least one former VOA director, are convinced there were never any Soviet spies at the Voice of America and are not reluctant to state it with confidence in public discussions and print.⁸⁰

Bipartisan Congressional Condemnation of OWI and VOA

On April 13, 1943, Radio Berlin (Reichssender Berlin) broadcast official news of the German Nazi government that German military forces in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, in the then German-occupied region of the Soviet Union, had uncovered a ditch that was “28 meters long and 16 meters wide [92 ft by 52 ft], in which the bodies of 3,000 Polish officers were piled up in 12 layers”. The Germans blamed the murders on the Soviets. The Soviet government blamed it on the Germans— in this case, a blatantly false Soviet accusation designed to cover up the mass murders committed by the secret Soviet police NKVD on the orders of Stalin and the Politburo in April and May 1940.

The Soviet propaganda version of the Katyn Forest massacre was, however, accepted and promoted by the Roosevelt administration, including the Voice of America, despite evidence available to President Roosevelt and the Office of War Information officials who were in charge of overseas VOA broadcasting and domestic U.S. government propaganda that the Soviets were the likely perpetrators of the mass murders. OWI officials, including its director Elmer Davis, repeated Soviet propaganda on Katyn overseas and in domestic broadcasts in the United States. OWI officials, including future U.S. Senator from California Alan Cranston (D), tried to intimidate and censor some American media outlets, most of them Polish American radio stations and newspapers, which attempted to report truthfully to Americans on the Soviet crime.

During April-May 1940, thousands of Polish prisoners of war in Soviet captivity were moved from their internment camps and taken to three execution sites, including the Katyn Forest. The total number of Polish POWs executed by the Soviets in the spring of 1940 is now estimated to be over 20,000. Those who died at Katyn included an admiral, two generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 3,420 NCOs, seven chaplains, three landowners, a prince, 43 officials, 85 privates, and 131 refugees. Also among the dead were 20 university professors, 300 physicians, several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers, and more than 100 writers and journalists, as well as about 200 pilots.⁸¹

September 17, 1939, is the date of the invasion of eastern Poland by the Soviet Union under the secret provisions of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which launched World War II on September 1, 1939. After Hitler betrayed Stalin and Soviet Russia eventually became a major military ally of the United States in the war with Nazi Germany, the Roosevelt administration used the Office of War Information, where radio programs of what would become known later as the Voice of America originated, to hide the origins of the German-Soviet attack on Poland in September 1939 and to help cover up Stalin’s crimes. Many members of the U.S. Congress, however, both during and immediately after World War II, kept warning about the secret collusion between the Roosevelt administration and the Soviet Union.

Close cooperation between Soviet and American government propagandists and employment of Soviet agents of influence at the wartime Voice of America helped to obscure the betrayal of U.S. allies and democratic values at the February 1945 Yalta Conference between President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The appeasement of Stalin was accompanied by the U.S. government’s pro-Russian propaganda and censorship of information to prevent Americans and foreign audiences from learning about the true nature of Soviet communism and Stalin’s intentions to subjugate Central and Eastern Europe. While protecting Stalin and Russia from criticism was excused by some during the war as dictated by military necessity, it was harder to excuse the continuing coverup of Stalinist crimes in the immediate post-war Voice of America broadcasts until President Truman took action to remove pro-Soviet officials and broadcasters and his Democratic administration hired anti-communist refugee journalists from Eastern Europe. But for some Democrats, it became, for many decades, a partisan coverup to protect the reputation of President Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. For some, it was also an ideological refusal to abandon their attachment to radical socialist ideas, the coverup to hide their mistakes, and the embarrassment of being duped by Soviet propaganda. Ironically, the reluctance to expose and admit FDR’s and the Office of War Information’s and Voice of America’s mistakes was much lesser among members of Congress of both parties, including Democrats, than among left-leaning intellectuals, academics, and journalists. Some of the strongest critics of the pro-Soviet line in Voice of America broadcasts during and shortly after the war were non-racist, progressive northern Democrats supported by labor unions and various ethnic communities.

After the war, one of many members of the U.S. Congress who raised the alarm about Soviet influence and censorship at the Voice of America was a U.S. Representative from Illinois (1951 to 1959), Timothy P. Sheehan. He was a moderate Republican member of the bipartisan Select Committee of the House of Representatives investigating the 1940 Soviet mass murder of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia. In a supplementary statement to the committee’s Final Report, Congressman Sheehan included a segment on “Propaganda Agencies.” The congressional investigation put a stop to most of VOA’s censorship of the Soviet responsibility for executions in Katyn and in other locations, in which the NKVD secret police shot more than 20,000 Polish military officers and government leaders.

The Select Committee of the House of Representatives, which investigated the Katyn Massacre, is also known as the Madden Committee after its chairman, Rep. Ray Madden (D-Indiana).

Rep. Timothy P. Sheehan observed in his separate statement in the bipartisan Madden Committee’s Final Report:

Admittedly, during the Katyn investigation, we but scratched the surface on the part that the Office of War Information and the Voice of America took in following the administration line in suppressing the facts about the Katyn massacre. During the war there may have been a reasonable excuse for not broadcasting facts which were available in our State Department and Army Intelligence about the Katyn massacre and other facts which proved Russia’s failure to live up to her agreements. After the war there certainly was no excuse for not using in our propaganda war the truths which were in the files of our various Government departments.

One of the witnesses from the Department of State, which controls the policy of the Voice of America, stated that they did not broadcast the fact of Katyn behind the iron curtain was because they did not have sufficient facts on it. Yet the preponderance of evidence presented to our committee about the cover-up came from the files of the State Department itself.

The Voice of America, in its limited broadcasts about the Katyn massacre, followed a wishy-washy, spineless policy. From other information revealed about the policies followed by the Voice of America, a committee of the Congress ought to make a thorough investigation and see to it that the Voice pursues a firm and workable propaganda program and does not serve to cover up the mistakes of the State Department or the incumbent administration.⁸²

In the “Misjudgment of Russia” section, Congressman Sheehan also mentioned the Voice of America’s role in misleading foreign and American public opinion. During World War II, many of the Office of War Information news and broadcasts were widely distributed to media in the United States. The U.S. Congress put a legal stop to the domestic distribution of VOA programs by passing the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act. However, the primary purpose of the Smith-Mundt Act was to authorize the U.S. government’s information programs abroad.

The Final Report of the Madden Committee was issued on December 22, 1952. Democratic and Republican committee members concluded that Office of War Information officials in the Roosevelt administration engaged in illegal censorship of U.S. domestic media during the war, targeting Polish American radio stations that broadcast accurate information about the Katyn massacre and other Soviet atrocities.

OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION, FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION

When the Nazis, on April 13, 1943, announced to the world the finding of the mass graves of the Polish officers at Katyn and accused the Soviets, the Allies were stunned by this action and called it propaganda. Mr. Elmer Davis, news commentator, then head of the Office of War Information, an agency established by Executive order, told this committee he reported direct to the President. Under questioning he admitted frequent conferences with the State Department and other Government agencies. However, testifying before this committee, when faced with his own broadcast of May 3, 1943, in which he accused the Nazis of using the Katyn massacre as propaganda, he admitted under questioning that this broadcast was made on his own initiative.

This is another example of the failure to coordinate between Government agencies. A State Department memorandum dated April 22, 1943, which was read into the record (see vol. VII of the published hearings), stated:

and on the basis of the various conflicting contentions [concerning Katyn] of all parties concerned, it would appear to be advisable to refrain from taking any definite stand in regard to this question.

Mr. Davis, therefore, bears the responsibility for accepting the Soviet propaganda version of the Katyn massacre without full in­vestigation. A very simple check with either Army Intelligence (G- 2) or the State Department would have revealed that the Katyn massacre issue was extremely controversial.

Furthermore, members of the staff of both OWI and FCC did engage in activities beyond the scope of their responsibilities. This unusual activity of silencing radio commentators first came to light in August 1943 when the House committee investigating the Na­tional Communications Commission discovered the procedure.

The technique utilized by staff members of OWI and FCC to si­lence was as follows: Polish radio commentators in Detroit and Buf­falo broadcasting in foreign languages after the announcement of the discovery of the mass graves of Polish officers at Katyn reported facts indicating that the Soviets might be guilty of this massacre.

In May 1943 a member of the FCC staff suggested to a member of the OWI staff that the only way to prevent these comments was to contact the Wartime Foreign Language Radio Control Committee. This committee was made up of station owners and managers who were endeavoring to cooperate with the OWI and FCC during the war years. Accordingly a meeting was arranged in New York with two of the members of this industry committee. They were specifically requested by the OWI staff member to arrange to have a Polish radio commentator in Detroit restrict his comments to straight news items concerning Katyn, and only those by the standard wire services. The fact that a member of the FCC staff attended this meeting is significant because the FCC in such a case had no jurisdiction. In fact, the FCC member was in New York to discuss the renewal of the radio license of one of these industry members. The owner of the radio station in Detroit was contacted and requested to restrict the comments of the Polish commentator on his station, and this was done.

By applying indirect pressure on the station owner, these staff members accomplished their purpose, namely, keeping the full facts of the Katyn massacre story from the American people. (See vol. VII of the published hearings.)

Office of Censorship officials testified and supported the conclusion of this committee that the OWI and FCC officials acted beyond the scope of their official Government responsibilities on this matter of Katyn. Testimony before this committee likewise proves that the Voice of America—successor to the Office of War Information—had failed to fully utilize available information concerning the Katyn massacre until the creation of this committee in 1951. The committee was not impressed with statements that publication of facts concerning this crime, prior to 1951, would lead to an ill-fated uprising in Poland. Neither was it convinced by the statements of OWI officials that for the Polish-Americans to hear or read about the Katyn massacre in 1943 would have resulted in a lessening of their cooperation in the Allied war effort.⁸³

1932 Pulitzer Prize for Walter Duranty Defended in 2003

Many elite White American and British journalists supported the Soviet experiment with communism and whitewashed Stalin’s acts of genocide. Sarnoff’s cousin, Eugene Lyons, was initially one of them until the publication in 1937 of his best-selling book, Assignment in Utopia, in which he described Soviet Russia as it truly was and admitted his part in spreading pro-Stalin disinformation.

Once he gave up his allegiance to communist dogma and was outside of the Soviet Union, Lyons wrote about thousands of homeless children roaming through the Russian countryside in search of food. Their “kulak” peasants, he pointed out, had died from starvation or allowed them to escape before being herded in cattle trains, taking them into exile to slave labor camps, where they were discarded without adequate food and shelter. He wrote about the peasants from liquidated Ukrainian villages who were hardly prosperous “kulaks,” as presented in Soviet propaganda posters. “I saw batches of the victims at provincial railroad points under G.P.U. guards, like bewildered animals, staring vacantly into space,” the journalist told American readers.⁸⁴ He then described in Assignment in Utopia how most Western journalists in Moscow, including himself, had reported on “the liquidation of the kulaks as a class”:

For a few correspondents it provided a useful opportunity to demonstrate their “friendship” and “loyalty” for the Soviet regime by explaining away ugly facts, wrapping them in the cellophane of Marxist verbiage, slurring over them with cynical allusions to broken eggs for Soviet omeletts. Others were curbed by the censorship, and grateful enough on occasion for this convenient alibi for silence.⁸⁵

“Broken eggs for Soviet omelets” referred to the expression used by Walter Duranty, the Anglo-American New York Times reporter in the Soviet Union in the 1930s who worked for the Times until 1941.⁸⁶ In his report from Moscow in March of 1933 titled, “Russians Hungry But Not Starving,” Duranty described the “mess” of collectivization. “But – to put it brutally – you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”⁸⁷

Duranty received the Pulitzer Prize for his earlier reporting from Soviet Russia. The New York Times eventually published a weak admission that “Times correspondents and others have since largely discredited his coverage.” It noted that “Since the 1980s, the paper has been publicly acknowledging his failures.”⁸⁸ However, the Pulitzer Prize Board has declined to withdraw the award for Duranty, stating in November 2003 that there was “no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception” in his earlier 1931 reporting, for which he had won the prize.⁸⁹ The 2002-2003 Pulitzer Prize Board membership reads like a Who’s Who of the American media, academia, and intellectual establishment.⁹⁰ These men and women of the Pulitzer Prize Board would have most likely never thought twice about revoking the journalism prize if it were discovered that the winner had supported fascism and Hitler.

After more than six months of study and deliberation, the Pulitzer Prize Board has decided it will not revoke the foreign reporting prize awarded in 1932 to Walter Duranty of The New York Times.⁹¹

The Pulitzer Prize Board concluded that Duranty’s work fell “seriously short” of today’s standards of foreign reporting, but “there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case.”⁹² Yet, Eugene Lyons admitted already in 1937 that both he and Duranty, as well as other Western journalists in Moscow in the 1930s, had lied about the Holodomor—the mass starvation of Ukrainian and Russian peasants by Stalin that took millions of lives.

Unable to agree to condemn their organization’s laureate supporter of a genocidal and totalitarian ruler, the Pulitzer Prize Board extended an olive branch to the Ukrainians:

The famine of 1932-1933 was horrific and has not received the international attention it deserves. By its decision, the board in no way wishes to diminish the gravity of that loss. The Board extends its sympathy to Ukrainians and others in the United States and throughout the world who still mourn the suffering and deaths brought on by Josef Stalin.⁹³

The Pulitzer Prize Board’s statement was not truly an apology to the Ukrainians. Likewise, no VOA management in its 83-year history bothered to extend sympathy to Stalin’s victims for the deceptive pro-Soviet regime journalism of the early Voice of America’s imitators of Walter Duranty’s reporting.

Tamara Gallo Olexy, the then-director of the national office in New York for the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, called the 2003 Pulitzer Prize Board’s decision “outrageous” and promised that members of her national umbrella organization uniting over 20 national Ukrainian American groups in advocating for over 1,000,000 Americans of Ukrainian descent will not stop their campaign to strip Walter Duranty of the Pulitzer Prize. ”This is not the end,” she said. ”We are not going to stop.”⁹⁴

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The Times, said in November 2003, after the Pulitzer Prize Board made its announcement, ”We respect and commend the Pulitzer Board for its decision on this complex and sensitive issue. He added that The Times “regret[s] his [Walter Duranty’s] lapses, and we join the Pulitzer board in extending sympathy to those who suffered as a result of the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine.”⁹⁵

Walter Duranty not only deceived New York Times readers but also publicly criticized Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who had accurately reported that the forced starving of the Ukrainians ordered by Stalin took millions of lives. Eugene Lyons joined Duranty in undermining Jones’s reporting on the Ukrainian famine at that time. However, in 1937, he admitted that his criticism of a fellow journalist who, unlike most of his colleagues, had shown the courage to report the truth was wrong. In his book Assignment in Utopia, in a chapter titled “The Press Corps Conceals A Famine,” Lyons quoted from Duranty’s March 30, 1933 report in the New York Times, “There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.” He concluded that this “classic example of journalistic understatement” characterized “the whole shabby episode of our failure to report honestly the gruesome Russian famine of 1932-33.”Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1937), p. 572.[/efn_note] The 2002-2003 Pulitzer Prize Board’s excuse for its vote not to deprive him of his Pulitzer Prize was that, in the board’s view, he did not deliberately lie, but Eugene Lyons was one of the unique individuals among journalists who was unafraid to admit and left no doubt that he himself lied and that Duranty and other correspondents all lied.

However, the board concluded that there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case. Revoking a prize 71 years after it was awarded under different circumstances, when all principals are dead and unable to respond, would be a momentous step and therefore would have to rise to that threshold.⁹⁶

“And every correspondent, each in his own measure, was guilty of collaborating in this monstrous hoax on the world,” Lyons observed.⁹⁷ Had they not lied, the international community might have taken measures to save lives. Duranty did not start to lie in his reporting from the Soviet Union during the famine. He also lied about the Soviet regime’s actions that had led to the famine in his reports for the New York Times, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. Lyons pointed out that he, Duranty, and other correspondents also lied in accusing one honest journalist, Gareth Jones, of having lied.

Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes—but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of equivocation. Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials.⁹⁸

Howard Fast – VOA’s First Chief News Writer and Editor – Future Winner of Stalin Peace Prize

Office of War Information and wartime Voice of America editors in New York were no better than Walter Duranty or Eugene Lyons before the latter’s break with communism. They could not be compared to Gareth Jones, Eugene Lyons in his later journalistic career, or Edward R. Murrow. Contrary to countless official assertions that in the Voice of America programs, “the news may be good or bad, but we shall tell you the truth,” Howard Fast, VOA’s first chief news writer and editor and ten years later Stalin Prize winner, wrote in his 1990 autobiography, Being Red, that he had sought information from the Soviet Embassy and eliminated criticism of the Soviet Union from the VOA broadcasts.

As for myself, during all my tenure there [VOA] I refused to go into anti-Soviet or anti-Communist propaganda.⁹⁹

Howard Fast belonged to a large group of pro-Soviet American enthusiasts, whom Eugene Lyons called “New York radicals,” although not specifically about Fast.¹⁰⁰ The Voice of America was based in New York from 1942 until 1954. Also, without a direct reference to VOA radicals but commenting in general on American Soviet sympathizers on the Left, Charles Bohlen, President Eisenhower’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, confirmed by the Senate after the President firmly rejected Senator McCarthy’s false accusations against the seasoned diplomat and Russia expert, wrote in his memoirs that during the war, their pro-Soviet “feelings were so strong that you could hardly say it was cold in Russia without being accused of being anti-Soviet.”¹⁰¹ Lyons noted that they restrained their natural idealism to accept “a flow of arbitrary ‘directives’ from Moscow headquarters” and pointed out that journalists were among them as members of fake organizations:¹⁰²

Endless fake organizations were hatched, each dressed up with a respectable false front of complacent or innocent clergymen, social workers, befogged millionaires, journalists living a dual capitalist and communist life under different names.¹⁰³

Howard Fast was more than an idealistic enthusiast duped into joining a fake organization serving as a front for the Communist Party and the Soviet state. He was a Communist Party supporter and later a dues-paying party member. He explained in his memoirs that what he considered “anti-Soviet or anti-Communist propaganda” included news items from the governments in exile based in London.¹⁰⁴ These governments, representing countries under German occupation, had their ambassadors in Washington. Poland’s democratic and multiparty government was one of them. Leaders of these allied nations were invited to the White House for meetings with President Roosevelt, and their ambassadors met with top State Department officials. They complained to them about Soviet propaganda influence in Voice of America broadcasts. Still, their protests did not moderate Soviet propaganda in Voice of America broadcasts.

Polish Government in Exile Ambassador in Washington

Poland’s wartime ambassador to the United States, Jan Ciechanowski, reported to his government in exile in London in July 1943 that “Similar interventions by Ambassadors from Greece, Holland, and Yugoslavia—countries whose O.W.I. desks are staffed by communists and army and navy deserters, etc.—also met the same fate” and noted that the State Department is powerless to produce change.¹⁰⁵

In his memoirs, Defeat in Victory, published in 1947, he described his unsuccessful efforts to eliminate Soviet propaganda from American radio broadcasts:

I protested repeatedly against the pro-Soviet character of such propaganda. I explained to those responsible for it in the OWI that the Polish nation, suffering untold oppression from Hitler’s hordes, was thirsting for plain news about America and especially about her war effort, her postwar plans, and her moral leadership, that Soviet propaganda was being continuously broadcast anyway to Poland directly from Moscow, and there seemed no reason additionally to broadcast it from the United States.

When I finally appealed to the Secretary of State and to divisional heads of the State Department, protesting against the character of the OWI broadcasts to Poland, I was told that the State Department was aware of these facts but could not control this agency, which boasted that it received its directives straight from the White House.¹⁰⁶

In his posthumously published memoirs,  Loy W. Henderson, a U.S. diplomat who was one of the prominent early experts on Soviet Russia and later served as ambassador to Iran and India and occupied senior positions in the State Department, devoted a long section to his dealings with Ambassador Ciechanowski in wartime Washington and his book Defeat in Victory. Henderson’s remembrance of the Polish diplomat was warm and overall highly favorable. He described Ambassador Ciechanowski as being more to the left than other members of the Polish government and “acceptable to the more moderate New Dealers” but still unable to persuade those with influence in the White House and President Roosevelt to side with his government and refugee Poles who wanted to see independent Poland. The more radical New Dealers and the President supported Stalin’s territorial expansion ambitions.¹⁰⁷

His book has been read by relatively few Americans. Professors in our universities rarely place it on the prescribed reading lists of their students. In general, we Americans prefer to forget what happened to Poland, the country for the independence of which Great Britain and France allegedly went to war with Germany to defend. The book does not make pleasant reading for those who believe in the rights of peoples, which President Roosevelt and Churchill eloquently proclaimed during the early years of the war, or who subscribe to the principles set forth in the charter of the United Nations.¹⁰⁸

Henderson confirmed that the FDR White House made the decisions on the appeasement of Stalin. The Office of War Information used Soviet propaganda in Voice of America broadcasts according to President Roosevelt’s wishes. Moreover, individual officials and broadcasters often went beyond what even Roosevelt would tolerate.

My main criticism of the [Ciechanowski’s] book is the tendency of the author to place too much of the blame on the members of the Department of State for the decisions that contributed to the failure of Poland to regain independence. The members of the department of whom he was critical were not responsible for these decisions. They merely had the unpleasant duty of putting them into effect.¹⁰⁹

According to Howard Fast, information put out by the Allied governments in exile in London was mostly anti-Soviet.¹¹⁰ He wrote in his autobiography that his bosses—Elmer Davis, Joseph Barnes, and John Houseman—agreed with his decisions to reject their news reports.¹¹¹ These statements generally did not contain anti-Soviet propaganda and did not criticize Stalin, but, at the same time, they did not support his demands for the expansion of Russian territory at Poland’s expense and Soviet domination over East-Central Europe.

The famous Polish anti-Nazi underground resistance courier Jan Karski faulted the Polish government in exile in London for not challenging Soviet propaganda before the German discovery of the Katyn Forest graves. Karski, who was later a professor of international relations at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, pointed out that the Polish government should have officially raised the issue of the missing officers with the Allied Western governments long before April 1943 and made public its failed diplomatic efforts to get a satisfactory explanation from Stalin about what had happened to the thousands of Polish POWs in Russia and hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens deported from their homes in eastern Poland occupied by the Red Army in 1939.¹¹² On July 28, 1943, Ambassador Ciechanowski accompanied Jan Karski when he delivered to President Roosevelt at the White House, on July 28, 1943, his eyewitness account of the Nazi extermination of Jews in Poland.¹¹³

The London government of Polish Prime Minister General Władysław Sikorski wanted at all costs to avoid offending the Soviet dictator after the two governments had reestablished relations following Hitler’s betrayal of Stalin and his attack on Russia in 1941. Stalin lied to Prime Minister Sikorski when asked at their meeting in the Kremlin about the fate of the Polish POWs later found murdered in Katyn. In late April 1943, Hitler’s former ally broke diplomatic relations with Poland and lied again in identical cables to Roosevelt and Churchill, denying the Soviet responsibility for the Katyn murders and accusing the Sikorski government of being pro-Nazi. Stalin’s charges against the Sikorski government were patently false. A moderate and cautious statesman who went out of his way to maintain good relations with Soviet Russia, Sikorski was the leader of Poland—the country that had been at war with Nazi Germany since September 1, 1939, was the first one to fight against Hitler, and its armed forces in the West fought alongside the Western Allies to defeat the German army.

Robert Sherwood, Voice of America’s de facto director and President Roosevelt’s speechwriter, issued a secret propaganda directive to OWI and VOA officials on May 1, 1943, urging them to shape the news about Katyn in line with Stalin’s accusation that the Polish government turned pro-Nazi. “Some Poles are consciously or unconsciously cooperating with Hitler in his campaign to spiritually divide the United Nations,” Sherwood wrote, and instructed Voice of America editors:

Use the retribution theme to make the loss of 10,000 Polish officers recede into the background. Of course,the 10,000 officers [executed on Stalin’s orders] must not be mentioned.¹¹⁴

Had 10,000 American military officers in foreign captivity gone missing and were later found murdered, FDR’s speech writer and chief Voice of America propagandist would almost certainly not object to an impartial investigation. What Stalin, Howard Fast, and Robert Sherwood, one of Fast’s top bosses at the Office of War Information, saw as anti-Soviet and pro-Nazi propaganda was a request from the Polish government in London to the International Red Cross in April 1943 to investigate the Katyn massacre. The State Department had advised VOA not to accept the official Soviet explanation for Katyn at face value to avoid embarrassment later, but OWI officials ignored the advice.

Still, in reflecting President Roosevelt’s view, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles told Ambassador Ciechanowski that the Polish government had made a mistake by appealing to the International Red Cross to investigate an accusation made “by the German propaganda machine.” Ambassador Ciechowski responded that it was not Poland that had broken its relations with Moscow and pointed to Under Secretary Welles that Prime Minister Sikorski had no choice but to ask for an impartial Red Cross investigation.

Did the American Government think that any self-respecing government could possibly pretend to ignore such an outrage on its fighting men? How, of all people, could Sikorski, who had so patiently and unsweringly pursued a policy at friendly relations with the Soviets, hope to remain in office and to continue this policy, without at least making an attempt to clarify the unprecedented situation with which he was now faced?¹¹⁵

Ciechanowski added that he “drew Mr. Welles’s special attention to the necessity of curbing the exaggerated pro-Soviet tendency of OWI propaganda at this delicate moment,” and “Welles promised he would try to do so.”¹¹⁶

However, senior American diplomats in the State Department had no power to change the pro-Soviet content of Voice of America broadcasts on Katyn and other Soviet-related matters. Still, they could deny issuing U.S. passports for government travel to John Houseman and Howard Fast. They also warned the White House about Joseph Barnes and several other OWI employees whom they considered unreliable because of their excessive pro-Soviet and pro-communist sympathies.

VOA’s Early Pro-Soviet Leadership

According to the 1953 Stalin Peace Prize laureate, Howard Fast, writing in his 1990 Being Red autobiography, his second boss at the Voice of America, Louis G. Cowan, had tried to dissuade him from resigning in January 1944. However, Fast had already formally joined the Communist Party in 1943 while working for VOA and had other plans.¹¹⁷His former immediate boss, John Houseman, was forced to resign a few months earlier after the State Department had refused to give him a U.S. passport for government travel abroad.¹¹⁸ Cowan gave Fast a glowing recommendation letter with effusive words of gratitude from himself, Office of War Information director Elmer Davis, Joseph Barnes, and John Houseman.¹¹⁹ Cowan, Fast recalled, was “acutely miserable” that the State Department refused to give Fast, the chief news writer and editor, his U.S. passport to work for VOA in North Africa.¹²⁰ Fast also wrote in 1990 that in January 1944, he had assured Cowan that he was not a communist, apparently forgetting that in his 1957 book, he had admitted to joining the Communist Party in 1943.

Fast claimed in Being Red that a group in the short-wave section of the Voice of America driven by “virulent anti-Communism” tried from time to time to pass on to him a news item from one of the governments in exile in London.¹²¹ However, his sweeping claim about anti-communists at the wartime Voice of America seems dubious since pro-Soviet journalists, some of them his friends, were in charge at that time of the VOA Polish Service and other foreign language services. Only one VOA Polish broadcaster, Konstanty Broel Platter, refused to read on air Soviet propaganda lies and resigned in protest in 1944.¹²² Other VOA Polish broadcasters were in touch with University of Chicago professor Oskar Lange, who was identified later in the U.S. Venona project intercepts as a Soviet agent of influence and who became the ambassador to the United States for the communist regime in Poland after renouncing his American citizenship.¹²³

Working with a Soviet NKVD agent, Bolesław “Bill” Gebert (later the Polish communist regime’s ambassador to Turkey), who was in contact with VOA Polish journalist Stefan Arski, Lange succeeded in convincing President Roosevelt, after meeting with Stalin in Moscow, that the Soviet leader would allow democratic elections in Poland and was no longer the enemy of religion. When at their meeting at the White House in June 1944, President Roosevelt tried to convince Polish Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk, who became the head of government after the previous Polish Prime Minister General Władysław Sikorski had been killed in a suspicious plane crash near Gibraltar, that Stalin would support religious freedom in Poland, Ambassador of the Polish government in exile, Jan Ciechanowski, reported that Mikołajczyk responded he would be ready to believe in Stalin’s sincerity about freedom of religion “only after Stalin freed the many Catholic priests whom he still held in Soviet prisons.” According to Ciechanowski, Roosevelt acknowledged the logic of this view and changed the subject.¹²⁴

Comparing Howard Fast with Edward R. Murrow

While the future Stalin Peace Prize winner Howard Fast, with encouragement from Office of War Information leaders—Robert E. Sherwood, Joseph Barnes, and “Voice of America’s first director” John Houseman—rejected information from the Polish government in exile in London and used instead in VOA 1943 broadcasts propaganda lies about the Katyn massacre fed to him by Soviet diplomats, who were most likely spies working under diplomatic cover, Edward R. Murrow in his job as a CBS wartime reporter in London maintained contacts with the refugee Poles and accurately reported that the Soviets had been responsible for the Katyn murders of thousands of Polish POW military officers and intellectual leaders. When, in the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) had falsely accused Murrow of being a communist sympathizer, the famed American broadcaster pointed to his accurate early reporting on Stalin’s duplicity and the Katyn massacre. Murrow also spoke highly of his contacts with exiled East European friends, whom Howard Fast regarded as fascist sympathizers, if not worse.

I require no lectures from the junior Senator from Wisconsin as to the dangers or terrors of Communism. Having watched the aggressive forces at work in Western Europe, having had friends in Eastern Europe butchered and driven into exile, having broadcast from London in 1943 that the Russians were responsible for the Katyn massacre, having told the story of the Russian refusal to allow allied aircraft to land on Russian fields after dropping supplies to those who rose in Warsaw—and then were betrayed by the Russians—and having been denounced by the Russian radio for these reports, I cannot feel that I require instruction from the Senator on the evils of Communism.¹²⁵

Historian Gerald Sorin’s biography of Fast, Howard Fast: Life and Literature in the Left Lane, leaves no doubt that Fast played a key role in writing news for the Voice of America’s early broadcasters, many of whom were, like him, communists or communist sympathizers. They were some of John Houseman’s hires.

Fast wrote concise, dramatic pieces for broadcast, which were read by actors transmitting via BBC into Nazi-dominated Europe. … Eighteen of the twenty-three actors available for narration were Communists.¹²⁶ Fast was not just “impressed” by them, he said, but “overwhelmed” by his associates “knowledge” and “sensitivity.”¹²⁷

Professor Sorin, the National Jewish Book Awards winner, concluded that journalists like Howard Fast:

…failed to acknowledge the human inclination to abuse power, ignored horrific consequences, and often rationalized Soviet barbarities as historically necessary. One of the benefits of examining the life of Howard Fast is that it enables us to make yet one more exploration into the hoary question of how this could have happened.¹²⁸

Émigré “Voice of America” friends of John Houseman’s protégé Howard Fast went back to Eastern Europe after the war to support Soviet-imposed communist regimes with propaganda based on Soviet lies about the Katyn massacre. Former VOA Polish Service editor Stefan Arski (his real name was Artur Salman) was especially active in denying Stalin’s responsibility for the Katyn murders. He launched tirades against members of the U.S. Congress for investigating the Katyn massacre. He attacked the new teams of Polish refugee journalists at VOA and Radio Free Europe, accusing them of being fascists despite their record of fighting to defeat Hitler’s Germany.

Former Office of War Information writer Mira Złotowska (later Michałowska) supported the communist regime in Warsaw with soft propaganda by deceiving American readers of Harper’s magazine in 1946 that Polish communists were committed to the rule of law.¹²⁹ It is hard to imagine that, as a journalist, she did not know that, in 1945 alone, the Soviet NKVD and the Polish communist secret police had sent 50,000 Poles to Soviet prison camps in Russia, with many dying before they reached their final destination.¹³⁰

According to Polish journalist Zbigniew Błażyński—a pre-war diplomat, RFE broadcaster, and longtime head of the BBC Polish Service and deputy director of BBC’s Central-European services—in one post-war transport of 1,400 Polish citizens to Russia, more than 300 had died during a month-long train journey to a Soviet prison camp in the Urals.¹³¹ This information was based on a series of interviews Błażyński had recorded for Radio Free Europe in Washington in 1954 with Józef Światło, a high-raking Polish communist security service official who had defected in West Berlin. His last mission before his defection was to discuss with the East German communist secret services how to silence Wanda Brońska, a former Polish communist who had described in RFE’s Polish broadcasts from Munich the tragic fate of Polish children in Russia.¹³² Some of them were children of Polish communists whom the NKVD had executed on orders from Stalin.

Michałowska’s reporting from Poland for American readers was not dissimilar to dispatches and commentaries by many of the pro-Soviet Western journalists. In an article titled “Russia’s Postwar Aims” in the September 4, 1944 issue of the New Republic, Moscow-based American reporter for the Toronto Star newspaper, Jerome Davis, who earlier had accepted and promoted the Soviet version of the Katyn massacre, wrote about the Soviet Union that “In the postwar world she doesn’t want to foist communism off on other nations by force, revolution or propaganda.”¹³³ Davis informed his American readers that he had recently toured Romania under the Red Army’s occupation and reported that “the Russians are leaning over backwards not to interfere,” and that “Rumanians are carrying on their own government and business in their own way.”¹³⁴ He chastised the Polish government in exile for “demanding investigation of the charges” that the Soviet Union “had murdered in cold blood 10,000 Polish officers.¹³⁵ He assured Americans that in Eastern Europe, Russia “definitely wants governments which are democratic and friendly.”¹³⁶

When Mira Michałowska wrote for American readers about Polish communists defending the rule of law, she had to know that in Poland, they had passed laws creating concentration camps, established a Soviet-like special commission that could condemn anyone to perform forced labor for an undetermined time without the right to defense for “activities contrary to social interests of the state,” and passed laws about summary trials before communist judges, appointed after a three-month Communist Party-arranged training course. These communist judges had the power to impose death sentences.¹³⁷

Michałowska, Howard Fast’s friend from their VOA days and translator of his books, also had to know about countless unpunished rapes by Red Army soldiers against Polish and Jewish women, some of them survivors of Nazi concentration camps. Had she and Stefan Arski continued their work with the Voice of America, they would have been second-class immigrant employees looked down upon by their American bosses. All they could have hoped for would have been most likely a middle-class life in the United States. By returning to Poland and declaring their loyalty to the communist regime, they immediately joined the ranks of the Red aristocracy with access to privileges, including foreign travel, that were denied to the vast majority of Polish citizens but gave Arski and Michałowska an elite status within the ruling elite.

In contrast to Howard Fast’s associates at the Voice of America, Murrow’s East European friends could not and did not want to return to their home countries after the war. Had they accepted as true VOA propaganda about the Soviet Union and communist governments and decided to return to their homelands under communist rule, they would have risked being imprisoned, tortured, accused of spying, and in many cases, executed.

Edward R. Murrow Declined Offer to Be the First “Voice of America” Director

Would Edward R. Murrow have allowed the spreading of the Soviet Katyn lie in Voice of America broadcasts in 1943 had he been the VOA director instead of John Houseman, a theatre producer, a specialist in fake radio news entertainment, and later an Oscar-winning Hollywood actor? Would Murrow have put Howard Fast, a communist ideologue with no reporting experience and later the Stalin Peace Prize (1953) winner, in charge of writing VOA news in 1942 and 1943?

Edward R. Murrow could have become the first Voice of America director had he accepted a job offer from Robert E. Sherwood in 1942. He did not and had nothing to do with the wartime Office of War Information international radio broadcasts later developed by Sherwood, Barnes, Houseman, Fast, and other Soviet sympathizers, including journalist Wallace Carroll and Asia scholar Owen Lattimore. Carroll was one of many Western journalists who were deniers of Stalin’s responsibility for the Katyn massacre. Professor Lattimore tried to convince readers of the National Geographic magazine in 1944 after his visit to the infamous Kolyma goldmines with U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace that the Kolyma miners were Soviet volunteer workers, heroes of socialist labor fed a special diet supplemented with tomatoes and other vegetables grown in hothouses, rather than Stalin’s Gulag prisoners who were dying by thousands from brutal treatment and malnutrition.¹³⁸

As revealed by Murrow’s biographer Ann M. Sperber in Murrow: His Life and Times, Sherwood, President Roosevelt’s speechwriter and personal friend, had wanted Murrow to be in charge of the international radio side of the Office of War Information—the job that was later divided between Joseph Barnes and John Houseman—but Murrow said no.¹³⁹ Having been rebuffed by Murrow, Sherwood appealed in January 1942 to FDR’s trusted advisor and liaison to Soviet leaders, Harry Hopkins. Sherwood informed Hopkins that there was a large audience for English-language broadcasts to Europe, which was not true except for Great Britain. Still, he correctly stated that the BBC had a firm hold on that particular audience.

While pointing out that the new operation would produce programs in many languages, Sherwood wrote to Hopkins that for the English language broadcasts—”the voice of America”—he was “most anxious to get” Ed Murrow.¹⁴⁰ But since Murrow wanted to return to London to continue his radio reports for CBS, Sherwood asked Hopkins to try to persuade the CBS star reporter to accept the government job offer. It would mean a significant cut in salary for Murrow, and Sherwood suggested that a word from President Roosevelt might also be helpful. Hopkins did what he had asked and sent Murrow a telegram from the White House, urging him to take the job. But more than a week later, Murrow replied: “AFTER MUCH SOUL SEARCHING AM CONVINCED MY DUTY IS TO GO BACK TO LONDON.”¹⁴¹

Murrow did not become the first director of the U.S. government’s international radio operation, had no input in selecting its name or content, and did not participate in the hiring of Joseph Barnes, John Houseman, and Howard Fast for key management positions—all of them fellow travelers for Stalin’s communist Russia to various degrees. President Roosevelt chose Murrow’s CBS colleague, less astute than Murrow but still highly popular domestic broadcaster Elmer Davis, as director of the Office of War Information. Houseman had no journalistic experience, except for producing dramatic fake radio news for entertainment purposes, and proudly claimed to be an expert in propaganda and psychological warfare. Fast, the future recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize, also had no prior news reporting experience but was a talented bestselling author of historical novels admired by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who reviewed one of his books, and a passionate believer in communism. Barnes, according to a March 1943 State Department memorandum, has followed the Soviet Communist Party line since 1934, giving it “a form congenial to the American way of expression.”¹⁴²

Had Edward R. Murrow agreed to become the “Voice of America” director in 1942, would he have followed the same path as his CBS colleague Elmer Davis, who, in response to a request from President Roosevelt, had started broadcasting commentaries for listeners to domestic U.S. radio networks despite his government position as a political appointee? Would Edward R. Murrow repeat the Soviet propaganda lie about the Katyn massacre, as Davis had done, knowing that this was what President Roosevelt would have wanted him to do? The bipartisan Madden Committee of the House of Representatives, named after its Democratic chairman, Rep. Ray Madden of Indiana, condemned Davis in 1952 for failing to adhere to high journalistic standards and criticized Voice of America’s coverage of the Katyn massacre story.

While one cannot be sure what Murrow would have done in a government job under pressure from the Roosevelt White House, it seems doubtful that he would have behaved the same way as Elmer Davis and some of the other Voice of America’s “founding fathers,” including Wallace Carroll, the future news editor of the Washington bureau of the New York Times, who, in his 1948 book Persuade or Perish, still defended Stalin’s Katyn lie. It’s unlikely that Murrow would have chosen John Houseman or Howard Fast for any positions within the Voice of America.

It is true that after President Kennedy had appointed him USIA director in 1961, Murrow secretly tried to persuade the BBC not to use his 1960 CBS documentary Harvest of Shame about the plight of American migrant agricultural workers because he feared that foreign audiences might get a wrong impression from it about the United States. But Murrow immediately acknowledged his mistake and apologized after the BBC revealed and rejected his secret request to stop the airing of his documentary.

Jewish Refugees and American Blacks Who Questioned “Love for Stalin”

The Voice of America federal government management has never come to grips with its early pro-Stalin propaganda and never apologized for the decisions and actions of those many VOA officials and journalists who followed in the footsteps of Walter Duranty. When Julius Epstein, a former OWI German desk editor and Jewish-Austrian refugee and international journalist, exposed after the war the OWI’s whitewashing of Stalin, including the false VOA reporting about the Katyn massacre, the Voice of America director and State Department diplomat Foy D. Kohler called Epstein “not … best type of new American citizen” and suggested in a later declassified memorandum that the journalist should be investigated.¹⁴³ Kohler’s ire was over Epstein’s newspaper articles and congressional testimony about VOA.

Kohler may have tried to get Epstein investigated over his brief membership in the Communist Party during his student years in Germany. However, Epstein, like Eugene Lyons, who had never joined the Communist Party, quickly renounced communism—something VOA’s Howard Fast never did. Fast criticized Stalin only after Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalinist crimes.

Epstein wrote in August 1950 about the Office of War Information with its “Voice of America” international radio broadcasting operation and the Voice of America in the early post-war years:

There are still too many of the old OWI [Office of War Information] employees working for the Voice, both in this country and overseas. I mean those writers, translators and broadcasters who so wholeheartedly and enthusiastically tried for many years to create ‘love for Stalin,’ when this was the official policy of our ill-advised wartime Government and of our military government in Germany. There is no doubt that all those employees were at that time deeply convinced of the absolute correctness of that pro-Stalinist propaganda. How can we expect them to do the exact opposite now?¹⁴⁴

Even five years after the end of World War II, the Voice of America management censored a refugee from communism and one of the former prisoners of Soviet camps, Polish writer and artist Józef Czapski, when he tried to describe his search in the Soviet Union for thousands of missing Polish military officers whom the NKVD murdered in Katyn and in other locations in Russia. Julius Epstein came to Czapski’s defense and exposed to members of Congress of both parties the VOA management’s mistreatment of the Polish witness of Stalin’s crimes.¹⁴⁵

In The Gulag Archipelago, Soviet dissident writer and Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whom the Voice of America management censored in the 1970s to prevent complications in the U.S. policy of detente with the Soviet Union, praised Julius Epstein’s investigative reporting—not directly in connection with VOA, but in Epstein’s book Operation Keelhaul (1973).¹⁴⁶ In his book, Epstein revealed a shameful U.S. government secret—the forcible handing over to Stalin of hundreds of thousands of Soviet refugees, many of whom were innocent of collaborating with the Germans and did not want to return to Russia.

“‘Operation Keelhaul’ was the code designation the U.S. Army gave to its own—Top Secret—documentary record of the forced repatriation of at least two million prisoners of war and displaced persons to Stalin’s hangmen and slave labor camps,” Epstein wrote in the preface to Operation Keelhaul.¹⁴⁷ He explained that keelhauling—dragging sailors under the ship’s keel, often resulting in death, was a form of punishment used by the Dutch and British Navies and pirates. Bertram D. Wolfe, who, during the Truman administration, had used his knowledge as a former communist to write broadcasts for the Voice of America exposing Soviet propaganda lies and persecution of religion, wrote the introduction to Epstein’s book.

It is worth noting that many American-born establishment figures, including leading politicians and journalists, were easily deceived by Soviet propaganda. Those who had experienced prejudice and repression, members of persecuted minorities, Jewish immigrants like Sarnoff and Lyons, refugees like Epstein, and some former communists like Bertram Wolfe, understood the true nature of Stalin’s totalitarianism and tried to warn Americans in books and articles. It is not surprising that among more than a dozen American, Canadian, and British journalists who went on an NKVD-organized trip to Katyn in 1944 with the OWI representative, Kathleen Harriman from the U.S. Embassy, and accepted Soviet propaganda lies at face value, one journalist who chose not to report anything rather than lie was an African-American journalist, Homer Smith Jr.¹⁴⁸ By then, Smith was already disillusioned by communism and knew that during Stalin’s purges, the NKVD had arrested thousands of American, German, and other foreign communists, including his African-American friend  Lovett Fort-Whiteman who died of starvation in a Soviet prison camp in 1939. Fort-Whiteman was denounced as a “counterrevolutionary” by a Black American lawyer who was a member of the Communist Party USA. The denunciation led to Fort-Whiteman’s arrest by the NKVD and his death.¹⁴⁹

In his memoirs, Black Man in Red Russia, published in the United States in 1964, Smith wrote that he had tried to be honest in his reporting from Russia and was impressed by what he described as non-discrimination and non-segregation. He noted that “the harshness of the regime…did not affect me or other Negroes directly.”¹⁵⁰ It was directed against other minorities and classes of people in the Soviet Union. Smith pointed out that the reporting of his colleagues among American correspondents in Moscow was not different from his.

Most of the distinguished correspondents for large American newspapers in Moscow—Walter Duranty, Eugene Lyons, Louis Fischer, and others— also wrote favorably about the “new experiment” in Russia.¹⁵¹

In answering his question about why he and the others had not reported on the mass arrests and hundreds of thousands of Russians being sent to “the vast network of concentration camps in Siberia,” Smith wrote that the American journalists had no choice but to accept strict Soviet censorship.¹⁵² American readers of their dispatches from the Soviet Union were usually not alerted that they had to pass through Soviet government censorship and were self-censored by the correspondents.

Another African-American ex-communist in the Soviet Union who later wrote about Stalin’s arrests of foreign and Russian communists was Robert Robinson.¹⁵³ Robinson was a Ford Motor Company toolmaker, who in 1930 was recruited by a Soviet government agency to work in Russia and train Soviet workers. He wanted to escape racism, which prevented him from becoming an engineer in the United States, and was enticed by a promise of a higher salary.

Eventually, Robinson became disillusioned and frightened by secret police repressions and Soviet racism against Blacks and other ethnic minorities, but, having accepted Soviet citizenship, he was banned by the communist regime from leaving the USSR for more than four decades.¹⁵⁴ In his autobiography, he thanked American journalists—William Worthy, Daniel Schorr, and Clifton Daniel—for supporting him in his efforts to leave Russia, which he finally did in 1974 by going first to Uganda.¹⁵⁵ He also thanked William B. Davis, an African-American Foreign Service officer in the United States Infomation Agency, whom he met in Moscow in 1959 and who helped him return to America and regain his American citizenship.¹⁵⁶ His view of Western attitudes toward Soviet communism was very pessimistic. “I wondered,” he wrote, “how it was possible that educated people in the Western world could be duped so easily by Soviet officials, could be so ignorant of the reality of the Soviet system.¹⁵⁷

Konstanty Broel Plater – VOA Broadcaster Who Resigned in Protest Against Soviet Propaganda

Immigrants, refugees, racial and ethnic minorities, former Gulag prisoners, and former communists were likelier to expose Soviet propaganda than American officials and journalists responsible for the Voice of America wartime broadcasts. We know of only one Voice of America journalist, Konstanty Broel Plater, who resigned from his job at the U.S. government radio station during World War II in protest against the orders from the VOA management and the editors in the Office of War Information in New York and Washington to broadcast Soviet propaganda lies.

At the time of his resignation in 1944, Broel Plater was a Polish aristocrat with a law degree from the prestigious Warsaw University and a former young Polish diplomat in the United States. He was also an experienced radio broadcaster who wrote and voiced Polish-American programs for radio stations owned by Columbia Broadcasting System and General Electric before his employment at the Voice of America.¹⁵⁸

Broel Plater told a Polish-American journalist, who interviewed him at his home in Pennsylvania, that while he worked as a Voice of America announcer in New York, a representative of the Washington office had come to see him to discourage him from criticizing VOA broadcasts supporting Soviet propaganda. In a short conversation, the Office of War Information manager asked him after inviting him to lunch whether he intended to fight with the President of the United States and the Voice of America director. Shortly after this conversation, Broel Plater resigned from the Office of War Information and, for a period of time, worked as a night laborer in a paper mill in Pennsylvania to support his young American family.¹⁵⁹

First U.S. Government Broadcasts Without Voice of America Name

If Sarnoff had indeed been the first person to suggest that American broadcasts for audiences abroad be named the Voice of America, the name was not adopted when the U.S. government-produced radio program in German went on air in February 1942, although the German phrase “voices from America” was used in the opening segment. However, some of Sarnoff’s early suggestions on countering Nazi propaganda were employed by the Office of War Information producers preparing these broadcasts.

The first U.S. government-funded radio broadcasts, beginning in early 1941, were to Latin America using six private American companies operating short-wave stations.¹⁶⁰ One of them, NBC, was headed by Sarnoff. CBS also provided programs to Latin America and transmitters under contract with the U.S. government. The agency in charge of the initial overseas broadcasting operations was the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), headed by Nelson A. Rockefeller. In addition to shortwave transmissions from the United States, NBC and CBS had local affiliate stations in Latin America that carried CIAA-purchased programs.¹⁶¹ The name “Voice of America” was never used for U.S. government-acquired broadcasts to Latin America in English, Spanish, or Portuguese.¹⁶² Sarnoff suggested to Nelson Rockefeller in 1940 that all existing private U.S. stations broadcasting to Latin America be consolidated into one group. Eventually, NBC and CBS, program providers through government contracts, agreed on simultaneous broadcasts to Latin America to achieve greater coverage. Programs to Europe initiated separately in February 1942 by the Foreign Information Service (FIS) within the Office of the Coordinator of Information (CIO) started using the “Voice of America” name later in the year. Broadcasts to the rest of the world except to Latin America were absorbed in June 1942 by the newly-established Office of War Information, headed by Elmer Davis. The “Voice of America” name would not be officially adopted until a few years after the end of World War II, although by March 1942, some OWI radio services introduced their programs as VOA, and some officials used the name in correspondence.¹⁶³

Did Communist OWI Propagandists Invent Voice of America’s Name?

The first use of the Voice of America name in print in English may have been by a group of OWI and VOA journalists who, in 1943, published an anti-Nazi pamphlet advocating for radical socialism in Poland and friendly relations with Russia after the war. Its OWI authors—Stefan Arski (aka Artur Salman), Mira Złotowska, and Adolf Hoffmeister—later supported communist regimes in Warsaw and Prague. After marrying a communist diplomat, Złotowska was known as Mira Michałowska. Initially as Mira Złotowska and later under her Western pen name Mira Michal, she published soft pro-regime propaganda in U.S. magazines. In an article in Harper’s magazine in November 1946, she argued that communists in Poland were following the rule of law at the time when Polish supporters of democracy were murdered, and the Soviet NKVD secret police squads were arresting Poles and sending them to Gulag camps in Siberia.¹⁶⁴ Arski, who stayed with the Voice of America within the U.S. State Department until 1947, became one of the chief promoters in Poland of Stalin’s Katyn lie and published virulent anti-American propaganda, including attacks on Radio Free Europe and post-war VOA refugee journalists. Hoffmeister, who resigned in 1945 as the chief of the VOA Czechoslovak Service, became the Czechoslovak ambassador to France. However, later, he had a falling out with the communist regime in Prague. 

Early Names for U.S. Government Broadcasts

Knowing that others could have claimed credit for naming the future Voice of America, Lyons was cautious in his observation that Sarnoff had been the first to suggest the name of the Voice of America. Still, he was sure that Sarnoff’s advocacy had led to the establishment of U.S. international broadcasting. Dr. Walter R. Roberts, who had started his government career with the Voice of America in the World War II-era Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI), conducted extensive research on the origins of VOA radio programs and their names but also did not present any definite conclusions who coined the name for the station and when it was first officially adopted. The Office of the Coordinator of Information and its international radio broadcasting unit, later named the Voice of America, were incorporated in June 1942 into the newly-established Office of War Information. Roberts concluded that Robert E. Sherwood, the planner of these radio broadcasts who was also a playwright, FDR’s speechwriter, and OWI deputy director—as well as their chief producer, John Houseman—wanted them to be referred to as “Voice of America.” However, the name, although sometimes used by foreign language services as they were being set up, was not officially and consistently adopted until a few years later. It is unclear why the name would not have been immediately used if Sherwood, close to President Roosevelt, wanted to use it. The only person who could have overruled him was the President or OWI director, Elmer Davis.  

“During World War II, the term ‘Voice of America’ was not well known outside our office,” Walter Roberts recalled in 2011. He wrote, “If someone had asked me then where I worked, I would have answered, ‘in the Office of War Information,’ rather than in the Voice of America.” Roberts may not have known why the newly created U.S. government radio station had not been officially named the Voice of America from the start. It could not be confirmed whether Elmer Davis, Robert E. Sherwood, John Houseman, and Joseph F. Barnes, another official among VOA’s “founding fathers, knew about Sarnoff’s recommended name for these broadcasts.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Sarnoff discussed the need for U.S. international radio broadcasting with Nelson Rockefeller, then Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, and again with President Roosevelt, who suggested a meeting with Secretary of State Cordell Hull. In a memorandum handed to Hull on January 9, 1943, Sarnoff used the “Voice of America” name to describe a government and private industry broadcasting initiative.¹⁶⁵ Lyons observed that this was probably the first use of the name of the future U.S. government broadcaster in a formal document.¹⁶⁶ Lyons was quite sure that Sarnoff “had not seen or heard the name elsewhere.” ¹⁶⁷ Lyons may have been right since Sarnoff knew of the existence of the Office of War Information’s shortwave radio broadcasts but did not associate them with the Voice of America name. In any case, the name was not officially used in 1943. Lyons concluded that “At least part of the credit for the establishment of the Voice of America—how large a part seems open to dispute—accrues to Sarnoff.”¹⁶⁸

However, the name “Voice of America” about the United States Office of War Information’s radio broadcasts appeared in print later in 1943 in a socialist propaganda pamphlet written by pro-Soviet Polish OWI broadcasters who, after the war, returned to Poland and supported the communist regime in Warsaw. The illustrations in the socialist pamphlet were by the chief of the VOA Czechoslovak Service, Adolf Hoffmeister, who later became the Czechoslovak communist regime’s ambassador to France.

The Congressional Record for the wartime period has many mentions and entries about the Office of War Information, including references to shortwave radio programs, but the “Voice of America” name was not used by members of Congress or by American newspapers and radio reporters quoted by the legislators. The “Voice of America” name only starts to appear in the Congressional Record shortly after the end of World War II.

Sarnoff had already used the name in a memorandum to the U.S. government in 1943. “Such a corporation might derive its legal authority from Congress through enactment of a bill that would define specifically the purpose and scope of such an organization, representing, as it would, to the rest of the world the ‘Voice of America’,” Sarnoff wrote to Secretary Hull.¹⁶⁹

While the government should have the ultimate control, the organization should be removed as far as possible from political influence and domination. Its board of directors might be composed of representatives of the radio industry, of the public, and of governmental departments most directly concerned with out foreign policy and with other phases of our relations with other countries.¹⁷⁰

Sarnoff added that the State Department “should occupy the place of paramount authority in general supervision of the policies and activities of the corporation.”¹⁷¹

In a few saved recordings of some initial broadcasts, they are introduced as “The United States of America Calling the People of Europe,” or calling the people of specific countries.  No definite official name was attached to these U.S. government radio broadcasts between 1942 and 1945.  A post-war observation by a Polish refugee journalist Czesław Straszewicz, who worked in Great Britain during the war and later joined Radio Free Europe in Munich, is illustrative of the confusion over the name of the early Voice of America broadcasts, their pro-Kremlin line during World War II and Stalin’s cynical refusal to help the anti-Nazi Warsaw Uprising in the hope that those Poles who would be likely to oppose his takeover of Poland would be killed fighting the superior German forces. Straszewicz also pointed out what he and others saw as the simplistic nature of VOA’s anti-German propaganda and were discouraged by the U.S. government broadcaster’s pro-Kremlin position.

With genuine horror we listened to the Polish language programs of the Voice of America (or whatever name they had then), in which in line with what [the Soviet news agency] TASS was communicating, the Warsaw Uprising was being completely ignored.
I remember as if it were today when the (Warsaw) Old Town fell [to the Nazis] and our spirits sank, the Voice of America was broadcasting to the allied nations describing for listeners in Poland in a happy tone how a woman named Magda from the village Ptysie made a fool of a Gestapo man named Mueller.¹⁷²

The first VOA Russian-language broadcast in February 1947 was not introduced as the “Voice of America” but as the “Voice of the United States of America,” yet another name used before the Voice of America name was finally universally adopted.

First VOA Russian Broadcast

Like many immigrants and refugees from Russia, David Sarnoff would have been disappointed with the Voice of America’s first Russian-language programs. U.S. government radio broadcasts in Russian were not started until 1947, presumably because pro-Soviet U.S. officials had been afraid of offending Stalin, even though during the war, Robert E. Sherwood had secretly coordinated U.S. propaganda with Soviet propaganda. Even after VOA had launched its programs in Russian in 1947, for several years, State Department officials did not allow direct criticism of the Soviet government. As one of the early VOA Russian broadcasters, Helen Yakobson, recalled, in the first broadcasts to Russia, “No direct criticism or attacks on the Soviet system were permitted.” She further noted, “After all, they had only recently been our allies.”¹⁷³

Russian-American composer and liberal intellectual Nicolas Nabokov, a cousin of writer Vladimir Nabokov of Lolita‘s fame and friend of diplomats and Russia experts Charles Bohlen and George Kennan, was deeply frustrated with his engagement for a few months in 1947 to work on the initial VOA broadcasts to the USSR. He wrote that in 1943-1944, “America was in a state of Sovietophilic euphoria” that Bohlen, Kennan, and a few other American diplomats among his close friends did not share. They “had few if any illusions about ‘Uncle Joe,’ about Russian Communism and the future shape of the Socialist Motherland.”¹⁷⁴

In the unpublished section of his memoirs, Nabokov wrote that his brief association with the Voice of America after the war:

…remains in my memory as something hilariously funny, earnest in its aims, and as disappointing as sweet-sour pork in a third-class Chinese restaurant.¹⁷⁵

Nicolas Nabokov quit government service after six months, “vowing never to return.”¹⁷⁶ After leaving his VOA job, he became Secretary General of the CIA-supported Congress for Cultural Freedom, which helped many anti-Soviet writers and artists, refugees from Eastern Europe, and many left-leaning Western intellectuals who became disenchanted with communism.  He was initially unaware that the CIA was paying his CCF salary and created and funded the entire organization.¹⁷⁷

When, during the Cold War, Sarnoff started to support Radio Free Europe and submitted to the U.S. government his proposals on opposing Soviet and other communist propaganda, he may have realized that putting the State Department and later the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) in control of the Voice of America was not the best idea. He would not have known that some board members of the future Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), later renamed the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), who were recruited from the private media industry, would be doing corporate business in Russia and China while overseeing U.S. government-funded broadcasts to these countries.

Our American concept of radio is that it is of the people and for the people. Its essence is freedom—liberty of thought and speech. Our purpose in fostering international broadcasting is to help make the spectrum of radio truly a spectrum of peace.

David Sarnoff’s address before the United States National Commission for UNESCO, Chicago, Illinois, September 12, 1947

Russian Service Chief Names Possible OWI and VOA Soviet Spies

Before writing Sarnoff’s biography, Eugene Lyons knew the Voice of America Russian Service chief, former Soviet general, and ex-Communist Party member Alexander Barmine. The Soviet general had defected to the West before the war and, in 1948, was hired by VOA. It was Barmine who had identified to the FBI and, in later congressional testimonies, two former OWI officials, Joseph F. Barnes and Dr. Owen Lattimore, both responsible for VOA’s wartime broadcasts, as Soviet agents of influence and possible Soviet spies. However, he did not have definite proof that either engaged in spying for Russia. They both vehemently denied the spying charges. Barmine was later angry with Lyons for informing one of Senator McCarthy’s staffers about what he had confidentially told the FBI about Barnes and Lattimore.¹⁷⁸ 

While it seems doubtful that the Soviet military intelligence had indeed recruited Barnes and Lattimore as spies, there was abundant evidence, which Barmine and Lyons knew, that Barnes and Lattimore had repeated Soviet propaganda and disinformation for many years. In December 1944, Dr. Latimore published a lengthy article in the National Geographic magazine. He claimed, after visiting the Soviet gold mines in Kolyma, that the miners were all volunteers for whom the Soviet authorities had built hothouses to grow vegetables to improve their diet.¹⁷⁹ In reality, the gold was mined by slave laborers of the Soviet Gulag prison system who were being worked to death under inhuman conditions.

Once again, it took an ex-communist, Elinor Lipper, a German-Jewish prisoner in the Soviet Gulag, to expose and criticize Owen Lattimore’s role as a propagandist for Stalin in the Office of War Information.¹⁸⁰ Professor Lattimore was in charge of VOA broadcasts to Asia, including China, until the end of 1944.

Elinor Lipper was lucky to have survived and, in 1950, published her memoirs Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps. She won her freedom thanks to the decisive intervention on her behalf by the Swiss government because of her Swiss citizenship by marriage.¹⁸¹ The U.S. government, specifically the Roosevelt administration, did nearly nothing to win the freedom of Communists imprisoned in the Soviet Union who were American citizens.¹⁸² Some were offered and accepted Soviet citizenship, unaware it would lead to losing their U.S. citizenship. The Soviet authorities often confiscated U.S. passports of American citizens in Russia.

American journalists in Moscow did not report on the plight of these “captured Americans,” as they privately called them.¹⁸³ And neither did the Voice of America English Service when Greek-born, Oxford-educated British writer and documentary filmmaker Tim Tzouliadis published in 2014 his book, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia.

Anti-Communist Refugee Journalists Replace VOA’s Pro-Soviet Staff

After the war, President Truman promptly abolished the Office of War Information and reformed the Voice of America by the end of his second term. VOA proceeded to hire anti-communist refugee journalists to replace the original pro-Soviet staff, including the Polish anti-Nazi underground resistance radio coder and refugee journalist Zofia Korbońska.¹⁸⁴ Still, congressional and media criticism of VOA programs continued in the post-war years.

In the spring of 1955, Sarnoff had one of his meetings with President Eisenhower, in which they discussed the need for the United States to take a much more vigorous approach to countering Soviet propaganda. Sarnoff urged increasing spending on the non-military struggle to defeat communism worldwide and thus avoid a “hot war.” He believed that the U.S. policy should emphasize liberation from communism rather than merely its containment. Eisenhower arranged a meeting for Sarnoff by telephone on the same day with CIA director Allen Dulles, White House aide Nelson Rockefeller, and officials from the State and Defense Departments. 

“Program For A Political Offensive Against World Communism”

The result of that meeting was a memorandum submitted by Sarnoff to President Eisenhower on April 5, 1955, titled “Program for a Political Offensive Against World Communism.” The White House press secretary James Hagerty released it to the media on May 9, indicating that it had Eisenhower’s approval. Recommendations in Sarnoff’s memorandum were cited widely in U.S. media reports. Senator Lyndon B. Johnson placed the text of the memorandum in the Congressional Record, praised Sarnoff’s ideas, and called for “the greatest political offensive in history…to win the Cold War.” ¹⁸⁵

According to Lyons, Sarnoff eventually became disillusioned by the Eisenhower administration’s steps to seek an accommodation with the Soviet Union. His biographer concluded that the 1955 Sarnoff memorandum did not have “any real effect on the course of national policy.”¹⁸⁶ Lyons was right that Sarnoff’s memorandum did not change Voice of America programs. However, it had an impact on Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and other CIA front operations, such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which continued to implement some of the ideas Sarnoff had proposed.

In September 1959, as the Eisenhower administration tried to improve relations with Moscow, Sarnoff was one of the guests at a reception for Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at the New York home of Governor W. Averell Harriman, FDR’s former ambassador to the Soviet Union. Sarnoff got an angry reaction from the Soviet leader when he proposed a “free exchange of information” by allowing U.S. broadcasts to be heard without restrictions in Russia. Khrushchev reportedly accused him of wanting to propagandize to Soviet citizens and interfere with the education of Soviet youth. According to Lyons, the guests thought Khrushchev was dogmatic and incapable of engaging in a rational debate.¹⁸⁷ 

Lyons wrote that by 1961, Sarnoff had stopped making public statements about communism—an acknowledgment, in Lyon’s view, that his attempts to counter Soviet propaganda had failed. However, he received praise for his past efforts from President John F. Kennedy, who, in a letter dated June 22, 1962, wrote, “I have been aware of your activities in regard to the Cold War situation, including your speeches and magazine articles, and I commend you for your efforts in this area.”¹⁸⁸

Sarnoff’s 1955 memorandum had a proposal to expand the Voice of America’s name to “Voice of America — for Freedom and Peace.” ¹⁸⁹  He believed that the added slogan would help clarify VOA’s mission and help counter Soviet propaganda. 

Adding such a slogan was not one of Sarnoff’s best ideas. The East Europeans would likely see it as a lame copy of communist propaganda. Still, his proposals for more effectively exposing Soviet disinformation, if skillfully implemented, could have made VOA radio broadcasts more effective. However, restrictions on criticizing the Soviet regime and its human rights violations were not completely lifted at VOA until the beginning of the Reagan administration in 1981.

To wrest from the Communists the advantages they gain through constant use in their propaganda of the appealing word “peace” – while casting us in the role of “war-mongers”– it is recommended that the present name of the “Voice of America” be extended to the “Voice of America – for Freedom and Peace.” ¹⁹⁰  

This slogan added to the name will, through constant repetition, impress the truth upon receptive ears. 

Besides the official voice, we have other voices, such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation. There are other popular democratic voices that should make themselves heard: those of our free labor movement, American war veterans, the churches, youth and women’s organizations.¹⁹¹ 

Labor Unions and U.S. International Broadcasting

During World War II, the American labor federations AFL and CIO broke their cooperation with the Voice of America’s labor programming unit after they had discovered that it was staffed by communists. American labor leaders later strongly supported Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.

In the 1970s, the AFL-CIO helped to organize events to honor exiled Soviet dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn when the Voice of America management banned the VOA Russian Service from interviewing the Nobel Prize author, as the Nixon and Ford administrations bowed to Soviet pressures and did not want to complicate their relations and negotiations with the Kremlin.¹⁹² Unlike VOA, RFE and RL never censored Solzhenitsyn. In the 1980s, the American labor movement supported the independent Solidarity trade union, struggling peacefully for democracy in Poland. AFL-CIO representatives were frequently interviewed by VOA’s Polish Service when I was in charge of it during the Reagan administration. 

Problematic VOA-Private Media Partnership

While Sarnoff also called for the American private media’s involvement with U.S. international broadcasting, the VOA-U.S. private media partnership sometimes proved problematic. An early experiment in using NBC-produced programs by VOA caused a minor disaster when U.S. Senators from both parties described them in 1948 as “baloney,” “lies,” “insults,” “drivel,” “nonsense,” “falsehoods,” and “downright tragedy.” ¹⁹³  VOA editors failed to review these NBC programs about various American states before they aired. The commissioned NBC programs employed sarcasm that was not likely to be fully understood by some foreign audiences. U.S. lawmakers were not amused with NBC-VOA’s humor at the expense of the citizens of their states.  

While generally suspicious of the role of U.S. government journalists, NBC and other private media outlets occasionally supported Radio Free Europe journalists broadcasting to countries behind the Iron Curtain by publicizing the activities of their backers in the ostensibly private organization called the Crusade for Freedom.

RFE’s connection to the CIA was not yet widely known in the 1950s. Possibly because of David Sarnoff’s strong support for Radio Free Europe’s mission, Crusade for Freedom spot announcements appeared on popular NBC programs such as Milton Berle and Eddie Fisher Show.¹⁹⁴

On September 8, 1951, the NBC network carried an address on behalf of the Crusade for Freedom by its National Chairman, General Lucius D. Clay.¹⁹⁵

Government, through the Voice of America, important as it is, cannot do this job alone. The people of the satellite countries must be reached by their own exiled countrymen whom they know. To bring this about, one year ago we launched the Crusade for Freedom. Its purpose is to show that the American people will support the exiles from the satellite countries in their effort to carry the truth to their homelands.¹⁹⁶

General Clay’s address was somewhat misleading in implying that Radio Free Europe was financed entirely by donations from private U.S. citizens. The U.S. government’s involvement in providing all the funding and the CIA’s role were purposely hidden to provide deniability and allow RFE to be much more hard-hitting and journalistically independent than the Voice of America. A Fact Sheet printed in 1951 by the Crusade for Freedom Illinois Regional Office under the honorary chairmanship of Governor Adlai E. Stevenson,  the unsuccessful Democratic Party nominee for president of the United States in 1952 and 1956, had this explanation on the difference between the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe:

Q. Doesn’t our government broadcast to these people, too?

Yes, but because RFE is a private operation, maintained by the citizens of the United States, it can be bare-fisted and hard-hitting in its programs. RFE is not restricted by the ethics of diplomacy which effect (sic) Voice of America.¹⁹⁷ 

Contrary to General Sarnoff’s and General Clay’s hopes for helping to bring freedom and democracy to Eastern Europe, there would be no quick liberation of the Soviet Bloc countries. The Eisenhower administration would not risk a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union in 1956 to help the anti-communist Hungarian insurgents. Radio Liberation, which had broadcasts in Russian and other languages spoken in the USSR, would soon change its name to Radio Liberty. RFE’s Hungarian Service came under criticism for encouraging the Hungarians to resist the Soviet invasion. At the same time, RFE’s Polish Service, under the leadership of Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, urged the Poles to be cautious to avoid a Soviet military intervention in Poland. 

It was clear, however, from Sarnoff’s memorandum that while he called for liberation from communism, he was not advocating armed resistance. He urged caution to avoid risking a “hot war.” During the 1952 presidential campaign, Sarnoff told General Eisenhower in a confidential assessment of the Cold War that the United States “cannot in good conscience exhort [the captive nations in the Soviet Bloc] to seek freedom without spelling it out in terms of ultimate liberation.”¹⁹⁸ According to Lyons, Sarnoff would have been equally willing to give the same assessment to the Democratic Party presidential candidate had he been asked.¹⁹⁹

Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty

Sarnoff was most likely aware of the CIA’s behind-the-scenes role at Radio Free Europe while it was still the official secret. In 1958, the Crusade for Freedom released a letter stating that CBS President Frank Stanton and David Sarnoff, Chairman of the Board of RCA, were greatly impressed by Radio Free Europe’s performance.²⁰⁰ Despite the oversight by the CIA, there was much more journalistic independence at RFE during the Cold War than at VOA. 

David Sarnoff’s son, Robert Sarnoff, promoted to the president of NBC in 1956, was also active in supporting Radio Free Europe. In a closed circuit television program “They Speak for Freedom,” on March 29, 1960, which was recorded to be seen by representatives of the radio and television industry in the United States, Robert Sarnoff said about Radio Free Europe’s mission, “let’s show what kind of a job broadcasting can do in this country to raise funds that make this extraordinary service possible.” ²⁰¹ Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty had the freedom to criticize communist regimes that the Voice of America, as the official broadcasting arm of the U.S. government, did not have, even though they were also funded by American taxpayers and managed by the CIA. However, their connection to the U.S. government was not officially acknowledged for the time being, thus giving them greater freedom of action.

Radio should make a prisoner of no man, and it should make no man its slave. No one should be forced to listen, and no one compelled to refrain from listening.

David Sarnoff’s address before the United States National Commission for UNESCO, Chicago, Illinois, September 12, 1947

Journalist Walter Lippmann Calls Voice of America’s Name “Impertinence”

The Voice of America’s name itself had somewhat official overtones. However, it was still gladly accepted by many listeners in communist countries who wanted to believe that VOA fully reflected the U.S. government’s views. Still, the somewhat presumptuous claim of being the voice of America had its critics. Walter Lippmann, a founding editor of the New Republic and Pulitzer Prize winner, questioned the usefulness of the Voice of America, especially the U.S. government’s involvement in such broadcasts. 

For ANY Government agency to call itself the Voice of America is an impertinence.^⁠202

Sarnoff Proposes “Voice of America For Freedom and Peace”

Sarnoff’s proposed slogan, “For Freedom and Peace,” was wisely not adopted by VOA in addition to its already official-sounding name. Still, some of his programming concepts outlined in the 1955 memorandum were already used to a good effect by VOA and, to a much greater degree, by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Sarnoff served for many years on the board of the Free Europe Committee, which provided a convenient private sector cover for the U.S. government’s secret funding for RFE and RL and the CIA’s secret management role at the two radio stations.²⁰³ The CIA’s engagement with the stations ended in 1971.

In 1959, President of the Crusade for Freedom John Patterson wrote to David Sarnoff asking him to help obtain endorsements for RFE’s ad campaigns in the United States from Steve Allen and Perry Como.²⁰⁴ During the Cold War, U.S. presidents and members of Congress sought Sarnoff’s counsel on problems in international broadcasting. Senator Bourke Hickenlooper (R-Iowa) complained to the RCA president in December 1951 that VOA and RFE “are still dominated, in some departments at least, by left-wingers of a very pinkish hue.” ²⁰⁵ By then, most of the pro-Soviet VOA broadcasters of the earlier era had already been forced out quietly by the Truman administration. RFE sometimes hired ex-communists or former supporters of communism, but only if they made a clear public break with their past affiliations and could help appeal to others willing to change sides.  

Sarnoff and Wolfe on Religious Programs

Sarnoff was right about many technical, programming, and personnel aspects of U.S.-funded international broadcasting.  He correctly observed, for example, that audiences behind the Iron Curtain wanted religious programs, although this was not a novel idea. Religious sermons and programs about religion were already part of RFE and RL broadcasts when he recommended them in 1955 and, to a minor degree, in VOA programming since the later years of the Truman administration. They were introduced at the Voice of America by Alexander Barmine and other newly hired refugees from communism despite doubts among some U.S.-born officials and executives, possibly concerned about the separation of church and state issues. 

When he joined the Voice of America in 1950, Bertram David Wolfe, a leading American communist and later a leading anti-communist, discovered that VOA’s central English service journalists lacked the right background, education, and experience to report on the Soviet Union and the other Communist Bloc countries, especially on religion-related topics. He wrote about it in his autobiography, A Life in Two Centuries, published posthumously in 1981:

When I went to work for the Voice of America in the period from 1950 to 1954, religious leaders and believers were being framed, tortured, and sent to concentration camps in all the countries under Communist rule in Eastern Europe. After trying to get my script writers to write effective radio broadcasts to defend the religious freedom of the churchmen and devout believers who were being thus persecuted, I found that I had to write the scripts myself to get the requisite feeling into them. I did not believe what the persecuted believed, but I did believe in their right to freedom to harbor and practice their beliefs without interference. !” ²⁰⁶

The political director at the Voice of America thought Bertram Wolfe was “the most deeply religious man” at VOA, as did the director of VOA’s religious programming. Wolfe told them that “out of more than nineteen hundred people working for the Voice,” they “have picked on the one who is probably the least religious!” ²⁰⁷ He was not affiliated with any religion and wrote that he did not believe in the existence of a personal God or any religious dogma. Wolfe’s description of them suggests that they may have been too naive to help VOA respond appropriately to communist propaganda. Wolfe observed that what they “have mistaken for religious feeling must be my compassion for the persecuted, my readiness to understand their feeling for their religion, and quite simply my deep concern with freedom, their freedom to believe, to practice their creed, to worship openly, to teach their children their beliefs and moral code.” ²⁰⁸ 

In his advocacy of the usefulness of religious programming to countries in the Soviet Bloc, David Sarnoff may have been trying to neutralize potential criticism of religious programs in VOA broadcasts. 

A greater hunger for spiritual comfort, for religion, is reported from Soviet Russia and its satellites. Programs of a spiritual and religious character are indicated. They should preach faith in the Divine, abhorrence of Communist godlessness, resistance to atheism. But in addition they can offer practical advice to the spiritually stranded – for instance, how to observe religious occasions where there are no ordained ministers or priests to officiate. 

The enslaved peoples do not have to be sold the idea of freedom; they are already sold on it. The propaganda should wherever possible get down to specifics. It should expose the weaknesses, failures, follies, hypocrisies and internal tensions of the Red masters; provide proof of the existence of friends and allies both at home and abroad; offer guidance on types of resistance open even to the individual. It should appeal to universal emotions, to love of family, of country, of God, of humanity.²⁰⁹ 

Distribution of Shortwave Receivers

On the technical side, which was the area of his expertise, Sarnoff proposed in 1955 that the Soviet Bloc “be ringed with both fixed and mobile broadcasting facilities, of a massiveness to overcome jamming.”²¹⁰ He stated that the “Voice of America will acquire larger audiences and more concentrated impact under the new approach.” ²¹¹ 

Another of Sarnoff’s proposals in 1955 was the mass distribution of “cheap and lightweight receivers tuned to pick up American signals.”²¹² This was not a new idea. The U.S. Congress had allocated $3 million in 1950 to purchase radio sets for free distribution in critical areas. However, the VOA management in the State Department bungled the project by delaying the solicitation of bids. Instead of paying $15 per radio to a U.S. manufacturer, Voice of America paid $35 each to an English firm, which by February 1951 only delivered 500 out of the order of 2,750 sets. According to an insider account, “In view of contradictory testimony, confusion, and failure to utilize the emergency appropriation, the Budget committee denied a further request for $2,834,000 for the purchase of radio sets for free distribution.”²¹³

Yet another one of Sarnoff’s proposals, the distribution of “a simple, hand-operated phonograph device costing no more than a loaf of bread” and “records made of cardboard and costing less than a bottle of Coca-Cola” to be made available by the million in critical areas was impractical and never seriously considered by the U.S. government.

Broadcasting to Western and Second-World Countries

Overall, while some of his ideas were off the mark, Sarnoff, a poor Jewish immigrant from Russia who had an extraordinarily successful business career in the United States after a childhood of poverty and hard work, had a far better understanding of the Soviet Union and communism than many American-born U.S. government officials and American-born Voice of America journalists. 

However, Sarnoff was not a foreign policy expert and was not right about everything connected with Soviet propaganda and political warfare. He was mistaken in thinking that VOA could have had a significant impact on Western countries and some of the Second World nations that already had free media. Still, he understood better than most of VOA’s American managers that the station’s primary focus must be on the populations in “the unfree world.”

FREE-WORLD TARGETS: 

The fighting front is everywhere. The program of the U. S. Information Agency should be reappraised with a view to improvement and expansion. “The Voice of America – for Freedom and Peace” has tasks to perform in many nations of the free world second in importance only to those in the unfree world.²¹⁴

Merely to point up the inadequacy of our present effort, consider Finland – a country on the very edge of the Red empire and under the most concentrated Soviet propaganda barrage. Soviet broadcasts beamed to Finland total over 43 hours weekly. A television station is now being built in Soviet Estonia which will be directed to a million potential ·viewers in nearby Finland. To maintain their morale under this pressure, the Finnish people, still overwhelmingly pro-West and pro-American, have desperate need of our encouragement. Yet the Voice of America in 1953 was compelled to discontinue its daily half-hour broadcast to Finland to save $50,000 annually.²¹⁵ 

VOA could not attract a measurable audience in France, Germany, Italy, or even pre-Castro Cuba. Sarnoff was also wrong to assume that insufficient funding was responsible for the cessation of VOA broadcasts in Finnish to Finland in 1953. They could have continued if State Department officials had made cuts in bureaucratic positions and other information programs rather than closing down the VOA Finnish Service. While major Finnish media outlets could afford to have their own correspondents in the United States or use independent freelancers, VOA could have still provided a limited news feed service in Finnish.

But the Finns, whose country Stalin invaded in 1939, did not desperately need the Voice of America to remain strong opponents of communism and Soviet influence. VOA, and especially Radio Free Europe, were most successful and had the largest audience and impact in countries like Poland, with Soviet-imposed, highly-repressive communist regimes and no free media. RFE was listened to by the vast majority of the Polish people. Until the mid-1980s, when I became the chief of the Voice of America and could drastically change the programming policy thanks to the reforms carried out by the Reagan administration, RFE’s audience in Poland had been several times larger than VOA’s. In a few years following the Reagan administration reforms, the audience to VOA’s Polish-language broadcasts increased nearly fivefold.

“Freedom to Listen” and the Internet Predictions

In a plan for international broadcasting submitted to the United Nations on April 4, 1946, David Sarnoff proposed that “Freedom to Listen” be included among the UN’s stated goals for the rights of citizens of member nations.

If it is to be effective, the principle of “Freedom to Listen” must be established for all peoples of the world. This is as important as “Freedom of Speech” and “Freedom of the Press.” People everywhere must be able to listen without restriction or fear.²¹⁶

He already knew that listening to international radio without fear was never possible in the Soviet Union and was quickly becoming impossible in countries in East-Central Europe under Moscow’s control. In an address before the United States National Commission for UNESCO in Chicago, Illinois, on September 12, 1947, he added “Freedom to Look” to his list of media freedoms and acknowledged that “Forces of totalitarianism and aggression still are attempting to mislead the masses.²¹⁷

Therefore, “Freedom to Look” is as important as “Freedom to Listen,” for the combination of these will be the radio of the future. This is no idle dream, and no one needs doubt that we shall have international television.²¹⁸

Sarnoff was a visionary who anticipated international communications problems before they developed and tried to suggest solutions. In a speech to an international conference of legal experts in Washington, DC, in September 1965, he commented on what the satellite communications revolution might bring to the world if countries cannot agree on some basic rules:

…propaganda instruments used primarily for heating up the cold war, for stimulating subversion, for promoting conflict and confusion on a worldwide scale.²¹⁹

Sarnoff could have issued the same prophetic warning about the computer revolution. In a speech in 1964 on “The Social Impacts of Computers,” he predicted the establishment of the Internet and its impact on politics, stating that “the computer will make it possible to restore a direct dialogue between the people and their political leaders, in the tradition of the Athenian assembly or a New England town meeting.” ²²⁰ In another speech in 1964, he said that the computer “will affect man’s ways of thinking, his means of education, his relationships to his physical environment, and it will alter his ways of living.”²²¹

The man who may have coined the Voice of America name would probably not be surprised by how easily Russia’s new rulers, especially the ex-KGB spy Vladimir Putin, have been able to use new communications technologies for propaganda and disinformation. It is more difficult to say whether he would have been surprised by the failure of the American government’s current information coordinator, the nearly $1-billion U.S. Agency for Global Media, to save Afghanistan from the Taliban despite two decades of heavy investment and easy access to the airwaves within the country.

Hidden History and Reoccurring Problems

David Sarnoff would most likely be shocked to learn that the Voice of America has been duped in recent years into using a fake interview with a later-imprisoned and likely murdered Russian dissident politician Alexei Navalny.²²² In 2014, without seeking permission from the Ukrainian government, VOA’s U.S. government agency commissioned a public opinion survey in Crimea, which Putin’s military forces had recently occupied. Agency officials presented the survey’s results, obtained under the terror of foreign occupation and showing support for the Russian annexation, as perfectly valid and made no historical comparisons to Hitler’s or Stalin’s forced annexations of territories of sovereign foreign states.²²³ USAGM officials and VOA editors did not acknowledge that results of any poll conducted under foreign military occupation cannot be trusted.

A VOA English Service report presented the survey similarly as showing valid results. It also did not mention Crimea’s repressed Tatar population.²²⁴ At about the same time, the VOA English news website briefly showed a map of Crimea as being part of Russia.

More recently, the VOA English Service glorified Che Guevara, and the VOA Spanish Service mourned the death of Fidel Castro without mentioning the countless victims of these communist leaders and Cuban refugees in the United States.²²⁵

VOA also presented as a stalwart fighter for human rights, American communist and Lenin Prize winner Angela Davis, who, as noted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his speech to American labor leaders in New York City on July 9, 1975, had refused appeals to help East European dissidents imprisoned during the Cold War.²²⁶ Not disturbed by knowledge of history, VOA editors did not mention her Communist Party membership, her support for repressive communist regimes, and her prominent role in Soviet anti-American propaganda.²²⁷

In February 2023, the Washington Post reported that the government-funded broadcaster Voice of America had to put two journalists on leave after 15 coworkers in the VOA Russian Service accused them of producing Kremlin propaganda in their previous jobs for state-run media outlets in Russia. One of the journalists was subsequently returned to work at VOA.²²⁸

Mistakes like these could have been avoided, but the spectacle of the Office of War Information’s and the early Voice of America’s “Love for Stalin” and the lessons of its impact on VOA’s early programs have been largely forgotten due, in no small measure, to the many efforts of successive VOA leaders to erase embarrassing facts from historical memory in favor of self-serving and misleading narratives.

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Digitized from Box D14 of “The Ford Congressional Papers: Press Secretary and Speech File” at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library

Release: Tuesday, May 10, 1955

SARNOFF SUBMITS PROGRAM FOR POLITICAL OFFENSIVE AGAINST WORLD COMMUNISM TO WIN “COLD WAR”

A firm and open decision “to win the Cold War,” as the “surest way to prevent a Hot War,” was urged upon our Government by Brig. General David Sarnoff, Chairman of the Board of the Radio Corporation of America in a Memorandum presented to the White House on April 5, 1955, and made public today.

Pointing out that the Kremlin’s fixed goal is world dominion by means short of an all-out war – propaganda, fifth-column subversion, civil strife, terror and treacherous diplomacy General Sarnoff declared:

“Logically we have no alternative but to acknowledge the reality of the Cold War and proceed to turn Moscow’s favorite weapons against world Communism. Our political counter-strategy has to be as massive, as intensive, as flexible as the enemy’s.

“The question, in truth, is no longer whether we should engage in the Cold War. The Soviet drive is forcing us to take counter-measures in any case. The question, rather, is whether we

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should undertake it with a clear-headed determination to use all means deemed essential, by governments and by private groups, to win the contest.”

General Sarnoff’s Memorandum, entitled “Program for a Political Offensive Against World Communism,” grew out of his

discussion of the subject with President Eisenhower in Washington on the morning of March 15, and announced at the time by James Hagerty, White House Press Secretary.

The same afternoon, at the President’s request, General Sarnoff conferred with Nelson Rockefeller, Special Assistant to the President on psychological warfare, and officials from the U. S. Information Service and the Central Intelligence Agency. At the end of the meeting, he undertook submitting his views on the subject and a suggested program of action.

The result was this Memorandum, in which he emphasized that “we must go from defense to attack in meeting the political, ideological, subversive challenge.” The problem,” he said, “is one of attaining the requisite magnitude, financing, coordination and continuity of action. The expanded offensive with non-military means must be imbued with a new awareness of the great goal and a robust will to reach it.”

People everywhere, and especially behind the Iron Curtain, General Sarnoff recommended, should be told that “America has decided, irrevocably, to win the Cold War; that its ultimate aim is, in concert with all peoples, to cancel out the destructive power of Soviet-based Communism.”

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General Sarnoff declared that his proposals “should not be construed as a substitute for adequate military vitality,” both in the newest weapons and balanced conventional forces.

“But short of a blunder ·that ignites the Third World War which nobody wants,” he added, “the immediate danger is the debilitating, costly, tense war of nerves that is part of the Cold War. The primary threat today is political and psychological.”

If we allow ourselves to be defeated in the cold struggle, he warned, “we will have bypassed a nuclear war — but at the price of our freedom and independence. We can freeze to death as well as burn to death.”

Existing organization for fighting and winning the Cold War must be “adjusted and strengthened in line with the expanded scale and intensity of operations,” General Sarnoff said. He proposed a “Strategy Board for Political Defense, the Cold War equivalent or the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the military side,” functioning “directly under the President, with Cabinet status for its head.”

The conflict on the political front, he said, “is not a preliminary bout but the decisive contest, in which the loser may not have a second chance. It must therefore be carried on with the same focused effort, the same resolute spirit, the same willingness to accept costs and casualties, that a Hot War would involve.”

The specific activities cited as examples in the Memorandum would be carried out not only by official agencies but by private groups such as labor unions, veterans’ organizations,

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churches, youth and women’s groups. The Soviet-controlled countries, it showed, are extremely vulnerable to precisely the kind of psychological pressures the Communists are using against free nations.

In outlining a vastly enlarged propaganda effort, General Sarnoff drew attention to opportunities opened up by new technical developments in communications. For instance, “mobile big-screen television units in black-and-white and in color” would be effective in non-Communist regions where “their very novelty will guarantee large and attentive audiences.”

“Vast regions in Asia and elsewhere, where illiteracy bars the written word and lack of radios bars the spoken word,” General Sarnoff explained, “could thus be reached.”

His plan also included mass distribution of “cheap and lightweight receivers tuned to pick up American signals.” In addition, “a simple, hand-operated phonograph device costing no more than a loaf of bread” and “records made of cardboard and costing less than a bottle of Coca-Cola” could be made available by the million in critical areas.

“Propaganda, for maximum effect, must not be an end in itself — it is a preparation for action,” the Memorandum stated. “Words that are not backed up by deeds, that do not generate deeds, lose their impact.”

The arena of action is the whole globe, General Sarnoff believes. We must aim, he said, “to achieve dramatic victories as swiftly as possible, as token of the changed state of affairs.”

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He saw great possibilities for encouraging and guiding “passive resistance” by individuals, with a minimum of risk, in the Soviet empire.

At the same time he took note of the fact that “pockets of guerilla forces remain in Poland, Hungary, the Baltic states, China, Albania and other areas.” These “must be kept supplied with information, slogans and new leadership where needed and prudent.”

“We must seek out the weakest links in the Kremlin’s chain of power,” General Sarnoff declared. “The country adjudged ripe for a break-away should receive concentrated study and planning. A successful uprising in Albania, for instance, would be a body blow to Soviet prestige and a fateful stimulus to resistance elsewhere.”

Among the specific activities discussed in the Memorandum were intensive collaboration with emigres and escapees from communist countries and special schools to train personnel for political-psychological warfare.

(NOTE: The full text of the Memorandum is attached. See especially the Summary of Proposals on pages 40-42 and the 8 “Guidelines for Political Offensive” on pages 20-21).

1. Kenneth W. Bilby, The General: David Sarnoff and the Rise of the Communications Industry, 1st ed (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), p. 156-158.
2. John K. Jessup, Adlai Stevenson, Archibald MacLeish, David Sarnoff, Billy Graham, John W. Gardner, Clinton Rossiter, Albert Wohlstetter, James Reston, and Walter Lippmann, The National Purpose (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), p. 55.
3. Ibid., p. 53.
4. Bilby, p. 161.
5. Ibid., pp. 18-19.
6. Wisdom, “The Universe of David Sarnoff,” Twenty-Second Issue, p. 77.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. I base this view on my observations and conversations with Voice of America and U.S. Information Agency officials and staffers while working as a journalist and the VOA Polish Service chief during the Reagan administration in the 1980s.
10. Eugene Lyons, David Sarnoff: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 230-231.
11. David Sarnoff, Looking Ahead: The Papers of David Sarnoff (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 77.
12. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), p. 316.
13. Ibid., p. 253.
14. Lyons, David Sarnoff, p. 23.
15. Ibid., p. 25.
16. Ibid., p. 29.
17. Ibid., p. 47.
18. Ibid., p. 27.
19. Ibid., p. 35.
20. Ibid. p. 30.
21. Bilby, The General, pp. 18-19.
22. Lyons, David Sarnoff, p. 46.
23. John K. Jessup, Adlai Stevenson, Archibald MacLeish, David Sarnoff, Billy Graham, John W. Gardner, Clinton Rossiter, Albert Wohlstetter, James Reston, and Walter Lippmann, The National Purpose (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), p. 140.
24. Lyons, David Sarnoff, p. 177.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Bilby, The General, p. 14.
28. Ibid.
29. Lyons, David Sarnoff, p. 177.
30. Ibid.
31. Bilby, The General, p. 146.
32. Ibid., p. 147.
33. Lyons, David Sarnoff, pp. 261-262.
34. Harry C. Butcher, My Three Years with Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), p. 681.
35. Lyons, David Sarnoff pp. 76-77.
36. Ibid., p. 262.
37. Ibid., p. 265.
38. Ibid., p. 270.
39. Bilby, The General, p. 193.
40. Ibid., pp. 195-196.
41. Arthur Krock, President Rebukes OWI for Broadcast on Regime in Italy,” The New York Times, July 28, 1943, pp. 1 and 5.
42. Ibid.
43. Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years: Waging Peace 1956-1961 (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1965), p. 279.
44. Ibid.
45. Oliver Carlson, Radio in the Red (New York: Catholic Information Society, 1947), p. 7.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History 1929-1969 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973), p. 126.
49. Ibid., p. 126.
50. Lyons, David Sarnoff, p. 325.
51. Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (New York: Twin Circle Publishing, 1967), p. 256.
52. Ibid. p. 257.
53. Eugene Lyons, Our Secret Allies: The Peoples of Russia (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1953), p. 339.
54. Ibid.
55. Bilby, The General, p. 269.
56. Ibid., pp. 270-271.
57. Curator, “Future First Voice of America Director Introduces Americans To Entertainment Fake Radio News in 1938 – Cold War Radio Museum,” Cold War Radio Museum (blog), July 10, 2022, https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/timeline/future-first-voice-of-america-director-introduces-america-to-fake-entertainment-radio-news-in-1938/. In his book, Voice of America: A History (New York: Columbia University Press: 2003), Alan L. Heil, Jr. does not mention the secret 1943 State Department memorandum about Houseman. Heil identified Houseman as the first VOA director: “Hollywood and Broadway producer, author and director John Houseman, another VOA pioneer and its first director…” (p. 36). Allan M. Winkler, an assistant professor of history at Yale University who published The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information 1942-1945 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), accepted Houseman’s misleading account that he was denied a U.S. passport because Ruth Shipley, the head of the Passport Division in the State Department, “decided that his current alien status disqualified him for government travel at the time” (pp. 101-102). Ted Lipien, “First VOA Director Was a Pro-Soviet Communist Sympathizer, State Dept. Warned FDR White House,” Cold War Radio Museum (blog), May 5, 2018, https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/state-department-warned-fdr-white-house-first-voice-of-america-director-was-hiring-communists/.
58. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), p. 350. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in 1949 that her late husband’s “association with Bob Sherwood grew into friendship.
59. Geofrrey Roberts, “‘Do the Crows Still Roost in the Spasopeskovskaya Trees?’: The Wartime Correspondence of Kathleen Harriman,” Harriman Magazine, the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, Winter 2015. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/creative/epub/harriman/2015/winter/harriman_winter_2015.pdf. Also, Ted Lipien, “Voice of America Freelancer Who Promoted Stalin’s Propaganda Lie on Katyn Massacre,” Cold War Radio Museum, April 25, 2023, https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/voice-of-america-freelancer-who-promoted-stalins-propaganda-lie-on-katyn-massacre/.
60. Wallace Carroll, Persuade or Perish, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1948), pp. 150-152.
61. Mary L. McNeil, Century’s Witness: The Extraordinary Life of Journalist Wallace Carroll (Buena Vista, VA: Whaler Books, 2022). The quote appears on the front jacket above the title.
62. Joseph E. Davies, Mission to Moscow (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1941), p. 280.
63. Ibid., p. 276.
64. Ibid., p. 280.
65. George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950 (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), p. 82. George W. Baer, A Question of Trust–The Origins of U.S. Soviet Diplomatic Relations: The Memoirs of Loy W. Henderson (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), p. xxiv.
66. Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History 1929–1969 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973), p. 44-45.
67. Ibid., p. 56.
68. Ibid.
69. Kennan, p. 83.
70. Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles April 6, 1943 memorandum to Marvin H. McIntyre, Secretary to the President with enclosures, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum Website, Box 77, State – Welles, Sumner, 1943-1944; version date 2013; the National Archives State – Welles, Sumner, 1943-1944, From Collection: FDR-FDRPSF Departmental Correspondence, Series: Departmental Correspondence, 1933 – 1945 Collection: President’s Secretary’s File (Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration), 1933 – 1945, National Archives Identifier: 16619284.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid.
73.  M. Todd Bennett, One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II (Chapel Hill: University Of North Carolina Press, 2016), p. 176.
74. Bohlen, p. 123.
75. ibid.
76. Bennett, p. 197.
77.  Eugene Lyons, “How Good Is the Voice of America,” Reader’s Digest, June 1954, p. 91.
78. Ibid.
79. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale Nota Bene (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 197-199. Also, Ted Lipien, “A Stalin Peace Prize Laureate Still Waiting for Acknowledgement of His Soviet Agent of Influence Role at Voice of America,” Cold War Radio Museum, https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/a-stalin-peace-prize-laureate-still-waiting-for-acknowledgement-of-his-soviet-agent-of-influence-role-at-voice-of-america/.
80. Voice of America, “VOA 80th Anniversary Panel #1: Recognizing 80 Years of Independent Journalism (2022),” YouTube, February 3, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/live/CvzuuWuQo6Q?feature=share.
81. Nataliya Lebedeva, “The Tragedy of Katyn,” International Affairs (Moscow), June 1990 and “The Katyn Controversy: Stalin’s Killing Field,” Studies in Intelligence. CIA (Winter), https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/winter99-00/art6.html. Retrieved 13 April 2018.
82. United States Congress, The Katyn Forest Massacre: Final Report of the Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation and Study of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances on the Katyn Massacre (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1952), p. 15.
83. Ibid.
84. Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, p. 114.
85. Ibid., pp. 114-115.
86. Walter Duranty, “RUSSIANS HUNGRY, BUT NOT STARVING; Deaths From Diseases Due to Malnutrition High, Yet the Soviet Is Entrenched. LARGER CITIES HAVE FOOD Ukraine, North Caucasus and Lower Volga Regions Suffer From Shortages. KREMLIN’S ‘DOOM’ DENIED Russians and Foreign Observers In Country See No Ground for Predictions of Disaster,” The New York Times, March 31, 1933, p. 13, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1933/03/31/99218053.html?pageNumber=13.
87. “New York Times Statement About 1932 Pulitzer Prize Awarded to Walter Duranty,” https://www.nytco.com/company/prizes-awards/new-york-times-statement-about-1932-pulitzer-prize-awarded-to-walter-duranty/.
88. Ibid.
89. Pulitzer Prize Board, “Statement on Walter Duranty’s 1932 Prize,” November 20, 2003, https://www.pulitzer.org/news/statement-walter-duranty.
90. Pulitzer Prize Board 2002-2003, https://www.pulitzer.org/board/2003.
91. Pulitzer Prize Board, “Statement on Walter Duranty’s 1932 Prize.”
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid.
94. David D. Kirkpatrick, “Pulitzer Board Won’t Void ’32 Award to Times Writer, The New York Times, November 22, 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/22/us/pulitzer-board-won-t-void-32-award-to-times-writer.html.
95. Ibid.
96. The 2002-2003 Pulitzer Prize Board, “Statement on Walter Duranty’s 1932 Prize,” November 20, 2003, https://www.pulitzer.org/news/statement-walter-duranty.
97. Lyons, Assignment in Eutopia, p. 573.
98. Ibid., p. 575.
99. Howard Fast, Being Red (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990), p. 23.
100. Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, p. 67.
101. Bohlen, Witness to History 1929-1969, p. 126.
102. Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, p. 634.
103. Ibid.
104. Fast, Being Red, p. 24.
105. Jan Ciechanowski, Ambassador of the Polish Government in Exile, Secret Cable from the Polish Embassy in Washington to Minister of Foreign Affairs in London, July 13, 1943, in Ted Lipien, “Polish Diplomat Who Exposed Pro-Stalin U.S. Propagandists,” Cold War Radio Museum (blog), December 16, 2018, https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/the-polish-diplomat-who-fought-wwii-voice-of-america-pro-stalin-propaganda/.
106. Jan Ciechanowski, Defeat in Victory (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1947), pp. 130-131.
107. Loy W. Henderson, A Question of Trust: The Origins of U.S.-Soviet Diplomatic Relations: The Memoirs of Loy W. Henderson, ed. George W. Baer, Hoover Archival Documentaries 333 (Stanford, Calif: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 1986), p. 518.
108. Ibid., pp. 518-519.
109. Ibid.
110. Fast, Being Red, p. 23.
111. Ibid.
112. Jan Karski, The Great Powers and Poland 1919–1945 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985), p. 429.
113. Ciechanowski, Defeat in Victory, p. 180.
114. Robert E. Sherwood, Director, Overseas Branch, Office of War Information; RG208, Director of Oversees Operations, Record Set of Policy Directives for Overseas Programs-1942-1945 (Entry363); Regional Directives, January 1943-October 1943; Box820, National Archives.
115. Ciechanowski, Defeat in Victory, pp. 159-160.
116. Ibid., p. 161.
117. In his book, The Naked God, published in 1957 and announcing his break with the Communist Party but not with communism, Fast wrote, “I joined the Communist Party in 1943, but I came to it first as a part of my generation, in the 1930s.” Howard Fast, The Naked God (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1947), p. 7.
118. Ted Lipien, “First VOA Director Was a Pro-Soviet Communist Sympathizer, State Dept. Warned FDR White House,” Cold War Radio Museum (blog), May 5, 2018, https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/state-department-warned-fdr-white-house-first-voice-of-america-director-was-hiring-communists/.
119. Howard Fast, Being Red, pp. 24-26.
120. Ibid., pp. 22-23.
121. Ibid., p. 24.
122. Ted Lipien, “Broel Plater Resigns In Protest Against Soviet Propaganda On Voice Of America,” Cold War Radio Museum, accessed October 31, 2022, https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/timeline/broel-plater-resigns-in-protest-against-soviet-propaganda-on-voice-of-america/.
123. Ted Lipien, “Voice of America Polish Writer Listed As His Job Reference Stalin’s KGB Agent of Influence Who Duped President Roosevelt,” Cold War Radio Museum (blog), February 12, 2020, https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/voice-of-america-polish-editor-listed-stalins-kgb-agent-of-influence-as-job-reference/.
124. Ciechanowski, Defeat in Victory, pp. 308-309.
125. Edward R. Murrow, “Edward R. Murrow – Response to McCarthy on CBS’ See It Now,” April 13, 1954, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/edwardrmurrowtomccarthy.htm.
126. Fast, Campenni interview, April 16, 1968; Fast on CBS Nightwatch, December 7, 1990.
127. Gerald Sorin, Howard Fast: Life and Literature in the Left Lane (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).
128. Sorin, p. 19.
129. Mira Złotowska, “I came back from Poland, Harper’s, November 1946, https://harpers.org/author/mirazlotowska/.
130. Zbigniew Błażyński, Mówi Józef Światło: Za kulisami bezpieki i partii (London: Polska Fundacja Kulturalna, 1986), p. 116.
131. Ibid.
132. Ibid., p. 12.
133. Jerome Davis, “Russia’s Postwar Aims,” The New Republic, Vol. III, No. 10. Number 1553, p. 277.
134. Ibid., p. 276.
135. Ibid.
136. Ibid.
137. Błażyński, Mówi Józef Światło, pp. 116-117.
138. Owen Lattimore, “New Road to Asia,” National Geographic, December 1944, p. 567. Also, Ted Lipien, “1951 – New York Times Reviews Former Communist Elinor Lipper’s Book Debunking U.S. Office of War Information’s Soviet Propaganda,” Cold War Radio Museum, accessed August 12, 2023, https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/new-york-times-reviews-former-communist-elinor-lippers-book-debunking-u-s-office-of-war-informations-soviet-propaganda/.
139. Ann M. Sperber, Murrow: His Life and Times (New York: Freundlich Books, 1986), p. 211.
140. Ibid.
141. Ibid. Ann M. Sperber cites Robert E. Sherwood’s telegram to Harry L. Hopkins, January 9, 1942; Hopkins’s telegram to Murrow, January 10, 1942; Murrow’s telegram to Hopkins, January 19, 1942.
142. State – Welles, Sumner, 1943-1944, From Collection: FDR-FDRPSF Departmental Correspondence, Series: Departmental Correspondence, 1933 – 1945 Collection: President’s Secretary’s File (Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration), 1933 – 1945, National Archives Identifier: 16619284.
143. Curator, “Quote: ‘…the Time Has Arrived to Investigate Mr. Epstein…he Is Not…best Type of New American Citizen’ – VOA Director Foy D. Kohler,” Cold War Radio Museum, accessed October 31, 2022, https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/timeline/quote-the-time-has-arrived-to-investigate-mr-epstein-he-is-not-best-type-of-new-america-citizen-voa-director-foy-d-kohler/.
144. Journalist Julius Epstein quoted by Congressman George A. Dondero (R-MI) in Congressional Record, August 9, 1950. The quote was from the article published in the Evening Star Washington newspaper on August 7, 1950. Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 81st Congress, Second Session, Appendix, Part 17 ed. Vol. 96. August 4, 1950, to September 22, 1950. (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1950), pp. A5744-A5745.
145. Ted Lipien, “Pro-Stalin Voice of America Propaganda Revealed in 1984 VOA Interview with Józef Czapski,” Cold War Radio Museum (blog), September 4, 2018, https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/stalins-american-voice/.
146. Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenit︠s︡yn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, 1st ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 85.
147. Julius Epstein, Operation Keelhaul: The Story of Forced Repatriation from 1944 to the Present (Old Greenwich, Conn., 1973), p. 1.
148. Ted Lipien, “Black History Hero Homer Smith Fought Racism at Home and Soviet Propaganda Abroad,” Washington Examiner, February 28, 2022, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/patriotism-unity/black-history-hero-homer-smith-fought-racism-at-home-and-soviet-propaganda-abroad.
149. Robert Robinson with Jonathan Slevin, Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union – An Autobiography by Black American (Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1968), p. 361.
150. Homer Smith, Black Man in Red Russia (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 1964), p. 207.
151. Ibid.
152. Ibid.
153. Ted Lipien, “1951 – New York Times Reviews Former Communist Elinor Lipper’s Book Debunking U.S. Office of War Information’s Soviet Propaganda,” Cold War Radio Museum, accessed August 12, 2023, https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/new-york-times-reviews-former-communist-elinor-lippers-book-debunking-u-s-office-of-war-informations-soviet-propaganda/.
154. Robert Robinson with Jonathan Slevin, Black on Red, pp. 299-310.
155. Ibid., p. 7.
156. Ibid. p. 8.
157. Ibid., p. 262.
158. Ted Lipien, “Polish Radio Host Who Resigned from Voice of America to Avoid Broadcasting Soviet Propaganda Lies About Katyn Massacre,” Cold War Radio Museum, accessed April 18, 2023, https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/polish-radio-host-who-resigned-from-voice-of-america-to-avoid-broadcasting-soviet-propaganda-lies-about-katyn-massacre/.
159. Teofil Lachowicz, “Zapomniany dyplomata,” Przegląd Polski (New York), October 20, 2000.
160. Robert William Pirsein, The Voice of America: An History of the International Broadcasting Activities of the United States Government, 1940-1962, Dissertations in Broadcasting (New York: Arno Press, 1979), pp. 21-23.
161. Ibid., p. 30.
162. Ibid.
163. Ibid., p. 57.
164. Mira Złotowska, “I came back from Poland, Harper’s, November 1946, https://harpers.org/author/mirazlotowska/.
165. Lyons, David Sarnoff, p. 271.
166. Ibid.
167. Ibid.
168. Ibid., p. 272.
169. Looking Ahead: The Papers of David Sarnoff (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 77.
170. Ibid.
171. Ibid.
172. Czesław Straszewicz, “O Świcie,” Kultura, October, 1953, 61-62. I am indebted to the Polish historian of the Voice of America’s Polish Service, Jarosław Jędrzejczak, for finding this reference to VOA’s wartime role.
173.  Helen Yakobson, Crossing Borders: From Revolutionary Russia to China to America (Tenafly, N.J: Hermitage Publishers, 1994), p. 146.
174. Nicolas Nabokov, Bagázh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan, 1st ed (New York: Atheneum, 1975), pp. 211-212.
175. Vincent Giroud, Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015),p. 203.
176. Ibid., pp. 232-234.
177. Nicolas Nabokov, Bagázh (New York: Atheneum, 1975), pp. 243-244.
178. Ted Lipien, “Voice of America Russian Branch Chief Alexander Barmine Was An Ex-Soviet General and Ex-Spy Who Testified Before Senator McCarthy,” Cold War Radio Museum (blog), April 17, 2023, https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/voice-of-america-russian-branch-chief-alexander-barmine-was-an-ex-soviet-general-and-ex-spy-who-testified-before-senator-mccarthy/.
179.  Owen Lattimore, “New Road to Asia,” National Geographic, December 1944, p. 567.
180. Elinor Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps (London: The World Affairs Book Club, 1950), pp. 114-116.
181. Hannes Holmsteinn Gissurarson, Totalitarianism in Europe – Three Case Studies, “The Survivor – Elinor Lipper: A Brief Note on a Little-Known Episode of the Cold War,” (Reykjavik: ACRE, 2018), https://rafhladan.is/bitstream/handle/10802/23125/ACRE-Totalitarism-preview%28low-res%29.pdf?sequence=1.
182. Tim Tzouliadis, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), p. 64.
183. Ibid., p. 49.
184. Ted Lipien, “LIPIEN: Remembering a Polish-American Patriot,” The Washington Times, accessed May 13, 2023, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/sep/1/remembering-a-polish-american-patriot/.
185. Lyons, p. 328.
186. Ibid., p. 329.
187. Ibid., pp. 329-330.
188. Ibid., p. 330.
189. David Sarnoff, “Program For A Political Offensive Against World Communism,” April 5, 1955, p. 29.
190. Ibid., p. 42.
191. Ibid., p. 29.
192. The best descriptions of how the leadership of Voice of America had tried several times to censor the Nobel Prize-winning author Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in the 1970s can be found in the published memoirs of Victor Franzusoff, the late VOA broadcaster, writer, editor, commentator, and Chief of the Russian Service. See Victor Franzusoff, Talking to the Russians (Santa Barbara: Fithian Press, 1998).
193.  Senator Home E. Capehart of Indiana, Voice of America? (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1948), https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Sen-Capehart-on-VOA-1948.pdf.
194. Richard H. Cummings, Radio Free Europe’s “Crusade for Freedom”: Rallying Americans Behind Cold War Broadcasting, 1950-1960 (Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co, 2010), p.180.
195. Lucius D. Clay, “The American People Fight Communism.” A booklet in the online Cold War Radio Museum collection with the text of an address on behalf of the Crusade for Freedom delivered over the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) network on September 8, 1951.
196. Ibid.
197. Crusade for Freedom, “Fact Sheet,” 1951, in the Cold War Radio Museum collection.
198. Lyons, David Sarnoff, p. 325.
199. Ibid., p. 326.
200. Cummings, p. 178.
201. Ibid., pp. 197-198.
202. Walter Lippmann, “Why the Voice of America Should Be Abolished,” Reader’s Digest, August 1953. Condensed from New York Herald Tribune.
203. Lyons, David Sarnoff, p. 336.
204. Cummings, p. 181.
205.  Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), p. 82.
206. Bertram D. Wolfe, A Life in Two Centuries: An Autobiography (New York: Stein and Day, 1981), p. 81.
207. Ibid.
208. Ibid.
209. Sarnoff, “Program For A Political Offensive Against World Communism,” pp. 29-30.
210. Ibid., p. 29.
211. Ibid.
212. Ibid., p. 31.
213. Edward Carleton Helwick, Jr., “Policy Problems of the Voice of America 1945-1953.” A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Department of Political Science, University of Southern California, June 1954, p.70. The manuscript is in the Cold War Radio Museum’s collection.
214. Sarnoff, p. 30.
215. Ibid.
216. David Sarnoff, Looking Ahead, p. 77.
217. Ibid., pp. 78-79. Also, Lyons, David Sarnoff, p. 271.
218. Sarnoff, Looking Ahead, p. 80.
219. Lyons, David Sarnoff, p. 341.
220. ibid. p. 338.
221. Ibid., p. 339.
222. Michele Kelemen, “Russian Accuses Voice Of America Of Fake Interview,” NPR, February 20, 2012, http://www.npr.org/2012/02/20/147064987/russian-accuses-voice-of-america-of-fake-interview.
223. U.S. Agency for Global Media, “Ukraine political attitudes split, Crimeans turning to Russian sources for news,” June 3, 2014, https://www.usagm.gov/2014/06/03/ukraine-political-attitudes-split-crimeans-turning-to-russian-sources-for-news/.
224. Ken Bredemeier, “Gallup Poll Shows Wide Political Split in Ukraine,” Voice of America, June 6, 2014, https://www.voanews.com/a/gallup-poll-shows-wide-political-split-in-ukraine/1930867.html.
225. Reuters (VOA did not initially give attribution to Reuters), “Che Guevara Poster Artist Looks Back on 50 Revolutionary Years,” Voice of America, September 18, 2018, https://www.voanews.com/a/che-guevara-poster-artist-looks-back-on-50-revolutionary-years/4577789.html.
226. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, Solzhenitsyn: The Voice of Freedom (Washington, DC: American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1975), p. 32, https://archive.org/details/SolzhenitsynTheVoiceOfFreedom/page/n31/mode/2up.
227. Voice of America, “Activist Angela Davis Representing the Powerful Forces of Change Women’s March,” January 21, 2017, https://www.voanews.com/a/angela-davis-representing-the-powerful-forces-of-change-womens-march/3686331.html.
228. Paul Farhi, “Voice of America journalists put on leave after ‘Russian propaganda’ accusations,” The Washington Post, February 24, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/02/24/voice-of-america-russian-propaganda/.