In 1949, a CIA Front organization, a nonprofit surreptitiously founded and operated by the CIA called the National Committee for a Free Europe,

started a project called Radio Free Europe.

That front organization was ostensibly a grassroots anti-communist operation,

and the concept behind Radio Free Europe was a radio station that would

broadcast news reports, analysis, and other sorts of information from the outside world to

folks living behind what would become known as the Iron Curtain, citizens of the various

Soviet socialist republics and their satellites that made up the USSR,

who didn't otherwise have access to info not created by Soviet propaganda professionals.

Behind the scenes, that front organization was also building relationships with exiles and

escapees from behind the Iron Curtain.

So they had a sense of what folks living within these countries thought about the world

and where these ideas came from, the narrative being shared with them via their local

radio stations and newspapers, and they had a sense of what might nudge them away from the

dominant party line,

what people would be inclined to believe what they would consider to be nonsense,

despite it being true, and how they might communicate ideas that were broadly favorable

to what we might call the West and broadly unfavorable to the Soviet Union and its allies.

There was what amounted to a complex covert spy network,

providing up-to-the-minute intel for this station,

which started in Czechoslovakia,

but then expanded over the next few years into other neighboring countries in Eastern Europe.

These spies, these informants, allowed Radio Free Europe to provide, in addition, to news from around the world, news from the region as well, which served

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