Radio Free Europe

An innocusous looking office building? Maybe so, but it is home to Radio Free Europe which played a critical role in Cold War era Eastern Europe. Broadcasts were often banned in Eastern Europe and Communist authorities used sophisticated jamming techniques in an attempt to prevent citizens from listening to them. Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa and Russian reformer Grigory Yavlinsky would later recall secretly listening to the broadcasts despite the heavy jamming.

Radio Free Europe was developed out of a belief that the Cold War would eventually be fought by political rather than military means. RFE was created through the efforts of the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE), an organization that was formed in New York City in 1949 as a response to the growing number of refugees, many of them intellectuals, fleeing Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. The committee was composed of powerful US citizens including a former ambassador, then CIA director Allen Dulles, Reader's Digest owner Dewitt Wallace and a prominent New York investment banker. Its mission was to support refugees and provide them with a useful outlet for their opinions and creativity whereupon Radio Free Europe (RFE) became the NCFE's greatest legacy.

Today, RFE is an independent international broadcast organization that provides news, information, and analysis to countries where non-state media are often limited or banned. RFE reaches 25 million listeners and readers in 20 countries including Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Belarus, and Iraq.