U.S. Government Propaganda Photo (1943) By Ted Lipien U.S. government propaganda pictures taken in 1943 by the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) photographer in Iran showed Polish children and women several months after they had come out of Soviet Russia in a mass exodus of former Gulag prisoners and their families. The OWI photographs were carefully staged and their…
U.S. Government Propaganda Photo By Ted Lipien Almost no one knows today that one of the targets of misleading Soviet and American propaganda during World War II were Polish refugees fleeing from Russia. Before they were refugees, they were Stalin’s prisoners. The Red Army and the NKVD Soviet secret police occupied their cities, towns and villages in pre-war eastern Poland…
Polish refugee children with a priest, Santa Rosa Colony, Mexico. Julian Plowy Family Album. Before being transported to Mexico from India in 1943 on a U.S. Navy ship, these Polish children were for close to two years prisoners in Soviet Russia along with their parents and families. Some of them lost their mothers and fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents and other…
In 1943 nearly 1,500 Polish refugees, many of them children, including orphans, stopped briefly in the United States on their way to their refugee camp in Mexico, called Santa Rosa. Most Americans, however, never learned the true story of these homeless people who had been earlier Stalin’s prisoners while their parents and even some of the older children worked as…
By Ted Lipien Support Silenced Refugees America had its own shameful episode of war crimes, not nearly as brutal as Soviet deportations to the Gulag forced labor camps of many groups and nationalities, but still inexcusable detention of American citizens of Japanese origin and forcing them into internment camps during the Second World War. It is entirely possible that Roosevelt…
U.S. Government Propaganda Photo (1943) By Ted Lipien Support Silenced Refugees The extent of the damage the initial propaganda from the Roosevelt administration had on the handling of the Polish World War II refugees story is not always easy to document, but some of the false information has kept reappearing in new forms for many years. After the arrival of…
U.S. Government Propaganda Photo By Ted Lipien Time Magazine Story In addition to misleading foreign audiences through Voice of America (VOA) shortwave radio broadcasts and domestic “news” outreach by the wartime Office of War Information (OWI), U.S. government propagandists had a definite impact on independent U.S. media. A short Time magazine entry on November 15, 1943 described a group of…
RFE, VOA
1953 CIA Source: People Died in Czechoslovakia Because of Pro-Communist Propaganda from Voice of America
OPINION AND ANALYSIS Cold War Radio Museum By Ted Lipien Note: The article has been updated to include information that Heda Margolius Kovály had worked in the 1970s as a freelance reporter for the Voice of America Czechoslovak Service under a radio name Kaca Kralova. A declassified CIA report from 1953 featured a claim by a still unidentified Slovak source…
Cold War Radio Museum The recent death of Russian human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva brings into focus not only her contributions to improving the lives of millions of people but also the historic role played by the American-supported Radio Liberty (RL), which together with its sister station, Radio Free Europe, contributed to breaking up the monopoly of communist…