Voice of America History

This Cold War recording brings together actors, journalists, and musicians in a coordinated appeal for Radio Free Europe—part of a broader effort to shape public understanding during the early Cold War.

Radio Free Europe Transcription Disc Insights This Cold War recording brings together actors, journalists, and musicians in a coordinated appeal for Radio Free Europe—part of a broader effort to shape public understanding during the early Cold War.https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/broadcasters-for-radio-free-europe-transcription-disc-from-th...

In April 1989, just months before the end of communist rule in Poland, Stefan Korboński was laid to rest in Washington, D.C.

This short archival recording captures not only a farewell, but a continuity—from the Polish Underground State during World War II to the work of exile and Voice of America (VOA) broadcasting in the Cold War.

Read and listen to the full story:

Farewell to Stefan Korboński in Washington (1989) — Recording and Memory - Cold War Radio Museum Archival audio from the 1989 Washington funeral of Stefan Korboński, Polish Underground leader, with historical context on Zofia Korbońska and the Voice of America Polish Service.

April 22 is not a date usually remembered in the history of the Voice of America—but perhaps it should be.
On this day in 1954, in New York, a former VOA chief news writer, Howard Fast, publicly accepted the Stalin Peace Prize—an award created by the Soviet regime to honor those who helped advance its vision of “peace.”

This post looks at that moment through original documents from the Cold War Radio Museum.

🔗

April 22, 1954: Howard Fast Accepts the Stalin Peace Prize in New York - Cold War Radio Museum Archival documents from April 22, 1954 show Howard Fast accepting the Stalin Peace Prize in New York, with remarks by William Howard Melish and Paul Robeson.

The early history of the Voice of America is usually told as a story of truth confronting propaganda. The historical record is more complicated.

This article looks in particular at the Polish-language desks of the Office of War Information and Voice of America. Many of the better-known Polish journalists working there—often with prior visibility in prewar political and cultural life—held strongly left-leaning views, and a number later supported or joined the Soviet-backed communist regime established in Poland after the war.

Their stories, set within the broader context of wartime alliance with Stalin’s Soviet Union, raise important questions about journalism, ideology, and responsibility.

👉

Voice of America and Soviet “Democracy”: How VOA Journalists Helped Establish Communist Regimes - Cold War Radio Museum A historical analysis of Voice of America and OWI during WWII, showing how Polish-language broadcasters supported Soviet narratives and later served communist-ruled Poland.

W latach 80. wielu redaktorów anglojęzycznej redakcji Głosu Ameryki w Waszyngtonie uważało Ronalda Reagana za „podżegacza wojennego”, niezdolnego do prowadzenia skutecznej polityki informacyjnej.

Myli­li się.

To właśnie dzięki jego nominatom i dziennikarzom–uchodźcom z Europy Wschodniej — szczególnie z Polskiej Sekcji VOA — amerykańskie radio odzyskało wolność redakcyjną i misję. Ich audycje docierały do milionów słuchaczy za Żelazną Kurtyną i pomogły w pokojowym upadku komunizmu.

🎙️ Ten program z 23 kwietnia 1986 roku to fragment tej historii, zachowany w archiwum Muzeum Radia Zimnej Wojny:
👉 https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/voice-of-america-polish-service-broadcast-april-23-1986/

VOA Polish Service Broadcast — April 23, 1986 (Digitally Restored) Hear a 30-minute Cold War–era VOA Polish Service segment, recorded for NSA language training. Full transcript, context, and restored tape-box images—featuring Renata Lipińska and Janusz Hewell.

From Maristella Feustle:

"I love it when Conover is holding an album that helps date the photo! That one is from 1960, which fits with an extensive tour of Yugoslavia that Conover did in early June of 1960, including Belgrade, Zagreb, Novi Sad, and Ljubljana. He met with a large number of radio and jazz (or "light music") people as well as giving lectures. This is just a quick photo (there are a lot from this tour!) that shows one of the lectures, with the obligatory portrait of Tito on the wall."

Ted Lipien:

This photo of Voice of America jazz programs host Willis Conover is one of my most recent acquisitions for the Cold War Radio Museum. It came from a collector in Serbia.

Willis Clark Conover, Jr. (December 18, 1920 – May 17, 1996) was a jazz producer and broadcaster on the Voice of America for over forty years. I knew him well and was responsible for launching a Polish-language version of his famous jazz program after the communist regime imposed martial law in December 1981 in an attempt to crush the Solidarity labor union and human rights movement. I was, at that time, the chief of VOA Polish Service.

Voice of America "Special English" Word List, June 1964

used in THE VOICE OF AMERICA'S World-Wide Radio Broadcasts in Special English
published by VOICE OF AMERICA, United States Information Agency (USIA), Washington, D.C. 20547

Cold War Radio Museum Library

The Cold War Radio Museum has acquired a Longines Symphonette Society record of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds," which he produced in 1938 together with John Houseman, who later would become known as the first Voice of America Director. However, the title of VOA Director may not accurately describe Houseman’s job at VOA since he was only responsible for producing broadcasts rather than determining their political content. The program directors were Robert E. Sherwood, who was a well-known playwright and President Roosevelt's speechwriter, and Joseph F. Barnes, a fellow traveler journalist and apologist for Stalin. "War of the World" was one of the first examples of fake radio news produced in the United States. Its desired purpose was to entertain and generate publicity, but it caused panic among some radio listeners when the show was broadcast on the CBS network on October 30, 1938. Houseman was hired to be in charge of radio production of VOA's propaganda against N**i Germany and Japan. Sherwood and Barnes determined the content of these broadcasts, which were written and edited by VOA's chief news writer and editor, future Stalin Peace Prize winner Howard Fast and author of bestselling historical novels. Houseman was hired in 1942. In April 1943, the U.S. State U.S. Department of State warned the Roosevelt White House that Houseman had hired many Communist Party members for VOA jobs. Houseman was forced to resign in mid-1943, but this information has been kept secret for several decades and even now is hidden from Voice of America journalists and American public by officials in charge of VOA and its parent federal agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media - USAGM . In recent years, VOA has hired some former Putin media Russian propagandists and also broadcast propaganda in favor of Iran, Hamas, and China. Some knowledge of VOA's history by VOA and USAGM senior executives might have helped avoid such recent hiring and programming decisions, which were reported by mainstream U.S. media and triggered a congressional investigation. READ MORE: https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/timeline/future-first-voice-of-america-director-introduces-america-to-fake-entertainment-radio-news-in-1938/

How the New York Times misread John Paul II’s first visit as pope to Poland in 1979

Forty-five years ago, Pope John Paul II made a historic visit to Poland. Probably the most significant of all of John Paul II’s travels abroad, the 1979 visit to Poland provided the impetus for establishing the 10-million-strong Solidarity trade union a year later, which became a crucial movement in the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe.

Some private news media in the United States underestimated the power of religion and did not foresee that Pope John Paul II could undermine the communist system in Poland or in the rest of the Soviet empire. When Karol Wojtyła visited his homeland for the first time as pope, the New York Times firmly expressed its view in its editorial on June 5, 1979 that Communism was not being threatened by the papal visit.

“The speeches of John Paul II call for greater freedom for the church, for greater opportunity to educate the Polish young and for greater church participation in determining Poland’s future. But these are far less than a summons to end Communist rule or to break with Moscow. As much as the visit of Pope John Paul II must reinvigorate and reinspire the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, it does not threaten the political order of the nation or of Eastern Europe.” (Quote from a New York Times editorial, “The Polish Pope in Poland,” June 05, 1979, page A20.)

The New York Times‘ editorial board did not say anything that, taken at face value, would have been false, but it could not have been more wrong. John Paul II’s speeches called for much more than what the New York Times thought he did. What should have been obvious to the newspaper’s journalists is that Poles listening to the pope interpreted his statements as a call for a peaceful resistance and revolution against Communism.

President Reagan and George Bush, on the other hand, understood the critical role of Pope John Paul II, a former Archbishop of Kraków, and the role of the Catholic Church in leading the nonviolent struggle for freedom and democracy in Poland. John Paul II and Polish bishops firmly believed that any political transformation must be nonviolent. The Polish pope admired Matin Luther King Jr. for his peaceful struggle for civil rights in the United States and Mahatma Gandhi for his advocacy of nonviolence in winning India’s independence from England. The only acts of serious violence in Poland during the Solidarity period were committed by the communist secret police, whose officers beat up and sometimes killed workers, students, intellectuals, and priests involved in pro-democracy activities.

History proved, especially in Poland, that President Reagan, his vice president, and their appointees selected to run the U.S. Information Agency and the Voice of America were right about what represented the greatest threat to communist regimes in the Soviet Block and the most significant opportunity for their defeat.

On the other hand, some longtime Voice of America managers and the VOA English newsroom editors and reporters before Reagan’s presidency were generally critical of these changes and his policy toward the Soviet Union and other communist-ruled countries. For many of them, programs focused on U.S. and international news reporting without being too critical of Communism or trying to counter Soviet propaganda represented a purer form of objective journalism. They also wanted to protect their jobs by insisting that VOA’s foreign language services translate centrally-produced programs written by them in English. Many thought that American jazz, and other cultural and public diplomacy outreach initiatives abroad were more effective in dealing with the Soviet Russia and her communist allies. While not being opposed to all reporting on religious matters, many VOA managers before Reagan did not think that radio audiences in Eastern Europe necessarily needed more religious programs from the Voice of America.

The Catholic Church’s support for the Solidarity pro-human rights movement ensured that the revolution from Communism to democracy in Poland was free from violence. The courage and determination of Poles to resist Communism was informed by the history of resistance against N**i Germany and Soviet Russia and, to a large degree, by religion and strong ties to the Church. Partially free parliamentary elections in Poland in June 1989 led to the peaceful restoration of democracy, including fully free elections, free press, and complete independence from Soviet Russia. The victory of the people over the communist regime in Poland made the fall of the Berlin Wall possible a few months later. George H. W. Bush, who came to Poland in September 1987 as Reagan’ vice president, visited Poland again in July 1989, this time as president of the United States after winning the presidential elections in November 1988. In a few more years, Poland became a member of NATO and the European Union.The image in this post shows L**h Wałęsa’s slogan MUSIMY WYGRAĆ! (WE MUST WIN) for the partially free parliamentary elections in Poland 35 years ago, in June 1989, won by candidates supported by Solidarity. For MORE see https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/vice-president-george-h-w-bushs-1987-visit-to-poland-religion-in-voice-of-america-broadcasts/

On December 13, 1981, the government of the Polish People’s Republic introduced martial law and formed a military junta in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to crush the Solidarity (Solidarność) independent trade union movement. December 13, 2023 marks the 42nd anniversary of the mass arrests and further restrictions of human rights in Poland under communism. Western radio stations broadcasting to Poland played a crucial role in providing uncensored news and commentary, which enabled Solidarity to force the communist regime to give up power peacefully and to bring about the fall of communism before the end of the 1980s decade.

The Polish communist regime’s attempts to win support for it among Western publics through external radio broadcasts is less known. Such broadcasts were on the air both before and during the martial law. Their impact, however, was minimal.

The use by Polish Radio of Pablo Picasso’s “Dove of Peace” on their 1975-1976 promotional brochure may seem well-chosen for targeting Western communist sympathizers and left-leaning peace movement activists. But such propaganda was largely ineffective due to minimal listenership to Polish Radio’s external broadcasts in the West.

‘Tu Mówi Warszawa’ – Polish Radio Propaganda Abroad Before 1981 Martial Law – Cold War Radio Museum On December 13, 1981, the government of the Polish People’s Republic introduced martial law and formed a military junta in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to crush the Solidarity (Solidarność) independent trade union movement. December 13, 2023 marks the 42nd anniversary of the mass arrest...

Why are US-funded Voice of America journalists defending , over the massacre of in ?

My new op-ed in The Hill includes comments on the latest barbaric attacks by Hamas terrorists on Israeli civilians—defenseless Jewish women, children, and the elderly. I discuss the hard-to-understand and explain defense of propaganda and disinformation from Iran and Russia by U.S. government-managed and funded U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) journalists, including federal employees working for the Voice of America (VOA). They went as far as to contradict interview answers from Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), without offering any evidence to support their exoneration of the main supporters of Hamas terrorists: Iran and Putin’s Russia. Rep. McCaul is currently investigating allegations of corruption at USAGM, including charges of bias in favor of Iran’s regime in VOA programs, VOA’s alleged hiring of former Putin propagandists, and dismally low employee morale.

I also tried to provide some broader historical perspectives. The New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty made it respectable to lie in defense of a “progressive” ideology and received the Pulitzer Prize for his deliberately deceptive reporting, which later included lying about millions of Ukrainian peasants who had died from starvation (Holodomor) forced on them by Joseph Stalin and his Soviet communist secret police. Since Duranty received his journalistic award in 1932, which the 2002-2003 Pulitzer Prize Board—whose membership reads like Who’s Who in journalism, media industry, U.S. government service, NGOs, and academia—refused to revoke, many communist and post-communist regimes and terrorist groups could claim the mantle of human rights and anti-imperialism to excuse and/or hide their total contempt for human life and their genocidal crimes. This propaganda has duped many Western journalists. A major part of the problem seems to be that Soviet communist atrocities, unlike those of the N**is in Germany, were never put on trial or punished.

I was Voice of America’s Polish Service chief during Poland’s peaceful struggle for democracy in the 1980s during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and later VOA’s acting associate director. I also served briefly in 2020-2021 as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty president in a non-political and non-partisan role.

Great British-Polish writer Joseph Conrad, whose timeless novels are deeply humanistic, warned at the beginning of the previous century that “the Government of Holy Russia” has been “arrogating to itself the supreme power to torment and slaughter the bodies of its subjects like a God-sent scourge.” Before becoming a refugee in England, Conrad was one of Russia’s many non-Russian conquered subjects. Conrad also wrote about imperial Russia, “Western thought, when it crosses her frontier, falls under the spell of her autocracy and becomes a noxious parody of itself.”

A parody of the truth is what is delivered as Putin’s propaganda to naïve Western journalists. As for the conservatives who think that Putin is right about Ukraine, they ought to ask how a leader like Ronald Reagan, who called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire,” would have reacted to Russia’s current attempt to restore it.

As a political refugee, Joseph Conrad was understandably pessimistic about Russia, but there have always been Russians who risked everything to defend the truth. In one of his “Kolyma Tales,” Russian writer Varlam Shalamov (a Gulag survivor like his friend Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) described the slave labor camps there as “Auschwitz without the ovens.” Shalamov wrote about how the starving Kolyma prisoners stole and ate engine grease sent to the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease program and how American-made bulldozers were used to dig mass graves.

What can one say, faced with such evidence of inexplicable brutality and genocide, about Owen Lattimore, an American academic, journalist, and U.S. government official in charge of Voice of America broadcasts to China (soon to be ruled by communists), who, in his December 1944 National Geographic article informed millions of American readers that workers in the Kolyma Gulag gold mines were all volunteers and heroes of socialist labor served a special vitamin-rich diet of vegetables grown for them in hothouses?

There was no shortage of Walter Durantys in the early Voice of America, but almost all of them were removed or forced out by the end of the Democratic Truman administration. President Truman also supported the establishment of Radio Free Europe.

Several former VOA journalists later worked for communist regimes in Eastern Europe. The first VOA chief news writer and editor, novelist Howard Fast, was a Communist Party USA member who later worked for the Daily Worker party newspaper and in 1953 received the Stalin International Peace Prize. And even during the conservative Nixon and Ford Republican administrations in the 1970s, VOA banned Russian Service interviews with Solzhenitsyn, fearing that they could damage relations with the Kremlin.

Fortunately, at that time, the independent management of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty resisted such censorship. Conservative Republicans, including the late Senator James L. Buckley, criticized the Voice of America, President Ford, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for their snubbing of Solzhenitsyn. James Buckley served as President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich from 1982 to 1985. Sadly, RFE/RL is now under the management control of the USAGM’s federal bureaucracy.

READ MORE in The Hill

Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel are a handy gift to Russia’s autocrat Vladimir Putin. They distract the free world’s attention from his own atrocities in Ukraine. They may lead to higher energy prices that will benefit his regime. They also contribute to the Kremlin’s propaganda, which is influencing public opinion on the radical wings of both the Republican and Democratic parties.

Why are US-funded journalists defending Russia, Iran over the Hamas massacre?

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4252199-why-are-us-funded-journalists-defending-russia-iran-after-hamass-attacks/

Why are US-funded USAGM journalists defending Russia, Iran over the Hamas massacre? – Ted Lipien Op-Ed in The Hill - USAGMWatch.com Why are US-funded USAGM journalists defending Russia, Iran over the Hamas massacre of Jews? Ted Lipien asks in his op-ed in The Hill.