Ted Lipien with his mentor, anti-Nazi underground Home Army radio coder in German-occupied Poland, journalist Zofia Korbońska, at the Voice of America Polish Service in Washington, DC, circa 1974.
Faulty research by three British academics distorts the history of the Cold War.
This postcard was sent from Poland to the Voice of America Polish Service in the early 1990s. The Polish stamp shows former Solidarity leader, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and Poland’s President Lech Wałęsa, whom I had interviewed in Gdańsk for VOA’s Polish Service in 1987 when he was still under surveillance by the communist regime’s secret police. I was the head of the VOA Polish Service for most of the time Lech Wałęsa was the leader of the independent Solidarity labor union in Poland.
“It is difficult to imagine what would have happened if it were not for the Voice of America and other sources with the help of which the true information squeezed through, which showed a different point of view, which said that we are not alone and that something is happening in the country—because our mass media did not do that.” – Lech Wałęsa in an interview for the Voice of America Polish Service in 2002
In their recently published book, Capturing News Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America, Oxford University Press, 2024), three young British academics—Kate Wright, Martin Scott, and Mel Bunce—managed to rewrite the history of the Cold War, the history of Voice of America’s (VOA) broadcasting to countries behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, my biography, and the account of what happened at VOA during Donald Trump’s first term. They based their conclusions on interviews with U.S. government officials and U.S. government-employed journalists. They even submitted their manuscript for review by the legal department of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which oversees the Voice of America. They decided not to interview me and other journalists and eyewitnesses to history who had worked at VOA during the Cold War. Some of us are still engaged in independent investigative journalism. Professors Wright, Scott, and Bunce declined my request for an interview and never responded to my e-mails correcting some of the false information quoted in their book.
By relying on biased sources and not checking facts, the history of the Polish services of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe during the Cold War that emerges from their book is, in fact, the exact opposite of what happened when I was in charge of VOA Polish broadcasts in the 1980s and the legendary Polish anti-Nazi fighter and journalist Jan Nowak Jeziorański was in charge of RFE broadcasts to communist-ruled, Soviet-dominated Poland from 1952 to 1976. Contrary to what Professors Wright, Scott, and Bunce heard from their anonymous sources, I and most of my colleagues at VOA and RFE were anti-totalitarian and liberal—not anti-communist in a sense of being anti-liberal.
We were committed to preventing violence of any kind—not promoting “aggressive” opposition to Communism and Soviet rule. The only Communists in the 1980s were in Western Europe and in the United States—not in Poland. By that time, the failure of Communism in the Soviet Bloc was so evident that there was no need to attack local “Communists” or Communism, which became, for them, an ideology to justify their unchecked power and privileges as members of the Red aristocracy.
History has confirmed the need to select non-ideologues and non-propagandists to run U.S. government-funded foreign language radio broadcasting services. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1956 Polish protests, RFE Polish Service director Jan Nowak Jeziorański showed restraint and helped to avoid a Soviet military intervention in Poland, whereas the RFE Hungarian Service may have convinced the Hungarians that they could count on military assistance from the United States and NATO. Jan Nowak Jeziorański, whom I considered a mentor and consulted when I was in charge of the VOA Polish Service, knew that no Western help for anti-communist workers and intellectuals in Poland or Hungary would be forthcoming and adjusted his programming policy accordingly. He was committed to avoiding violence and loss of lives in the 1950s and 1970s, as was I in the 1980s at VOA.
Former Radio Free Europe Polish Service Director Jan Nowak Jeziorański with me when I served as the VOA Polish Service chief in the 1980s at the VOA building in Washington, DC. He and I shared the same programming philosophy of supporting non-violent opposition to totalitarianism, Soviet colonialism, and repressive policies of communist regimes.
We do not know who their sources were among current and former VOA officials and journalists, whom Professors Wright, Scott, and Bunce vouch for and praise, but perhaps some of them, and definitely some of their colleagues who later received promotions from the VOA and USAGM management, produced in 2016 a VOA-subtitled news video, in which Donald Trump was called without any balance or counterarguments: “punk,” “dog,” “pig,” “con,” “buls— artist,” “mutt,” “idiot,” “fool,” “bozo,” and “blatantly stupid.” For the first time in Voice of America’s history, both foreign audiences and domestic audiences in the United States could see a one-sided electoral campaign attack video shown under the VOA logo and with VOA-provided subtitles. Also for the first time ever, a VOA-produced news video condoned physical violence against an American politician.
The VOA colleagues of the authors’ sources also posted memes on their personal social media accounts insulting Trump and his supporters: “f— cheeto with hair,” “three cheers for f—ing Trumpy and his neo-Nazi crew,” and “F—face Von Clownstick.” One Facebook post by a VOA reporter depicted Trump as a male sex organ. Another showed him with a Nazi swastika over his head.
More recently, a few Voice of America reporters posted “death to Israel” memes shortly after the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on defenseless Jews in Israel and tried to excuse the murders and kidnappings of civilian men, women, and children as a response to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
Professors Wright, Scott, and Bunce do not mention in their book aggressive, hateful, and violent language by some of the current VOA Newsroom journalists. During the Cold War, I or anyone in the VOA Polish Service would have never even for a moment considered using such language to describe Communists in VOA broadcasts, and yet the British academics quote sources calling us right-wing, aggressive anti-communists.
Frankly, as a journalist of 50 years, I am shocked that a University of Edinburgh professor and the co-authors of the book would work very closely with the legal department of a U.S. government agency while conducting what they claim was an independent study designed to produce unbiased results. They admit to spending hours interviewing government officials and government-employed journalists who had every reason to be biased. They also admit providing their manuscript for review to government officials and prominently presented and supported accusations from U.S. government employees but decided not to contact or interview independent journalists who were being criticized and falsely accused. As a journalist, I can’t imagine that such an approach could result in an unbiased research product.
“The past is another country: they do things differently there.” William Palmer borrowed from another British writer, L. P. Hartley in his 1953 novel “The Go-Between,” the opening sentence in an essay 20 years ago for a multimedia magazine I edited at the U.S. government-funded and managed Voice of America to ask whose version of the Cold War history will survive. The political novelist observed that “it is harder for democracies to falsify their histories” but added a caveat that “most historians work in accord with the current orthodoxy.”
Readers of Capturing News Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America could easily assume that I was a political appointee in the 1980s, which I was not. I was also not a partisan appointee in 2020-2021. As National Public Radio’s (NPR) David Folkenflik reported in January 2021, I was “the only one without established partisan ties” as head of RFE/RL during the last days of the Trump Administration. I have been registered for many years as an independent voter in Oregon, where I now live.
I joined VOA in 1973 as a 20-year-old recent immigrant in the United States and had no initial impact on any decisions by the Reagan Administration officials. Only after VOA’s Polish audience increased nearly five-fold under my direction following more than a decade of no growth, I was consulted from time to time on programming issues by the then-VOA directors Kenneth Y. Tomlinson and Gene Pell, both of them well-regarded journalists in their previous careers with Reader’s Digest and NBC News. I interviewed Karol Wojtyła before he became Pope John Paul II, Vice President George H.W. Bush, Solidarity labor union leader Lech Wałęsa, and other Polish dissidents who later became top leaders in democratic Poland.
With Pope John Paul II at a general audience in the Vatican circa 1980s. The Pope expressed thanks for Voice of America broadcasts to Poland and said that he was a faithful listener.
Interviewing Vice President George H.W. Bush at his office shortly before his trip to Poland in 1987.
The authors of Capturing News Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America omitted information about my journalistic career and rewrote the history of successful Cold War-era broadcasting by RFE/RL and the Voice of America. On page 35 of their book they claim that the “approach” of RFE/RL was “overtly anti-communist, and they [RFE and RL] often deployed what [Mark] Pomar (2022) describes as manipulative strategies.”
I worked with Mark Pomar at VOA in the 1980s. I do not think for a moment that Pomar’s excellent book supports the argument that RFE/RL broadcasters, as a group, were manipulative. His book, Mark G. Pomar, Cold War Radio: The Russian Broadcasts of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (Lincoln: Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, 2022), is a tribute to Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty broadcasters, their independence, professionalism, and honesty.
Nobel Prize Russian writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn arrives in Vladivostok in 1994 ending his forced exile in the United States. Photo by Ted Lipien.
I invite the authors to contact Mark Pomar and ask him what he thinks. I am sure he would tell them that they have cherry-picked from his book to bolster their arguments when, in fact, it contradicts many of their conclusions. Mark Pomar helped to lift the USIA/VOA ban on interviewing Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and interviewed the author who was a target of KGB campaigns to defame him as a Russian nationalist and anti-Semite. Solzhenitsyn’s defenders included Jews and Gentiles who knew him well: Saul Bellow, David Remnick, and Mark Pomar.
The authors repeated the false claim that I played a “prominent” role in the Reagan-era reassignment of VOA managers. I was not even 30 years old then, and from 1980 to 1981, I worked as an editor for the Polish Service. I had no contact with the Reagan transition team or the early Reagan appointees. I had no partisan links. No one from the Reagan Administration had asked me in 1980-1981 for advice on any personnel changes. However, I was happy about these changes because they freed us from censorship and made our programming effective.
Many of my colleagues in the VOA Polish Service likewise supported programming and management reforms because of the stagnant impact and audience reach in the 1970s, which was several times smaller than RFE’s audience in Poland. I was highly critical of the Nixon and Ford administrations’ policies and some of their managers at USIA and VOA but did not make my views public. I tried instead to bypass the bureaucratic restrictions on journalistic independence as much as possible without attracting the attention of the pre-Reagan management.
Thanks to reforms and personnel changes during the early years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, I and my colleagues were finally able to make the VOA Polish Service in the 1980s the most successful broadcasting operation in VOA’s history in terms of audience growth, impact, and the resulting peaceful fall of a repressive regime. To describe my position as demanding stronger “anti-communist” or arguing for “aggressive” anti-Soviet programming is highly misleading. What I argued for was more effective programming, not stronger anti-Soviet and anti-communist propaganda, which would have the opposite effect on the audience.
Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to President Carter, with me and my Voice of America Polish Service deputy Marek Walicki getting ready for an interview at the VOA building in Washington, DC circa 1980s.
Our focus was on interviewing Solidarity and other human rights activists and giving them the voice denied to them by the communist censorship in Poland. The vast majority of them would be now described as liberal. One of my interviewees who impressed me the most was the well-known Socialist leader Jan Józef Lipski. I conducted interviews with other liberal opposition figures, including Jacek Kuroń and Adam Michnik. But I also hosted a Worldnet-VOA TV discussion program with communist regime journalists who defended the regime even as it was collapsing. I invited Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former National Security Advisor to President Carter, to help me show that any talk of “reformed Communism” was no alternative to free elections and democracy in the Soviet Bloc. The Polish government TV rebroadcast the VOA-Worldnet program with Dr. Brzezinski shortly before the final fall of the communist regime.
The British authors may benefit by knowing that for the majority of VOA refugee journalists, being “anti-communist” during the Cold War did not mean being anti-liberal. I recruited Václav Havel, one of the most liberal opposition figures during the Cold War, to be an advisor for a multimedia, multilingual VOA magazine I edited in the early 2000s. We were against totalitarianism, totalitarian regimes, and Soviet colonialism. Being against highly repressive regimes did not make us “right-wing.” I launched the first VOA satellite TV news programs to Ukraine and Russia after warning the VOA management that sooner or later, Putin would ban us in Russia.
Journalists defaming other journalists is nothing new. Former VOA Polish Service editor, Stefan Arski (aka Artur Salman) went back to Poland in 1947 and published some of the most vicious attacks on the new VOA Polish refugee journalists and RFE journalists, calling them Fascists, right-wing reactionaries, etc. Many of the RFE and VOA journalists this former VOA editor vilified fought against Nazi Germany in WWII and were prisoners in the Soviet Gulag.
The book’s authors may or may not know that Anglo-American New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty and other fellow traveler Western journalists attacked Welsh journalist Gareth Jones who exposed their lies about Stalin’s murderous regime and disclosed the death by starvation of millions of Ukrainian peasants. But the 2002-2003 Pulitzer Prize Board refused to take away Duranty’s 1932 Pulitzer Prize, claiming that he did not deliberately lie. He most certainly did. The current USAGM CEO Amanda Bennett, the former VOA director during the Obama Administration and for most of the Trump Administration, was a 2002-2003 Pulitzer Prize Board member.
RFE Polish Service employed many liberal journalists and writers, some of whom (Józef Czapski) were censored by VOA because, in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, they exposed Stalin’s crimes, including the Gulag slave labor camps and the Katyn massacre of thousands of Polish POW military officers and intellectual leaders, including journalists. Indeed, the authors would probably be surprised to learn that the largest single group of journalists in the first Polish Service at RFE who declared their party affiliation were pro-democratic Socialists, according to Jan Nowak Jeziorański. Most of the 125 employees did not belong to any political party.
One of the critics of the early VOA officials, who were Soviet sympathizers (Owen Lattimore) and defended and repeated Soviet propaganda lies about the Katyn massacre and other Stalinist crimes, was former German Communist Elinor Lipper, who spent 11 years in the Soviet Gulag. Lattimore claimed in a 1944 National Geographic magazine that Gulag workers in the infamous Kolyma mines, where hundreds of thousands of Stalin’s prisoners died from starvation, were fed a diet rich in vegetables and vitamins.
Another early VOA official, journalist Wallace Carroll, defended the Soviet propaganda lie about the Katyn massacre as late as 1948. The early Voice of America employed many Soviet agents of influence (exposed in 1943 by The New York Times journalist and Washington bureau chief Arthur Krock) and Soviet spies or collaborators of Soviet agents identified in the Venona projectwhich enabled the U.S. government to read secret Soviet diplomatic and intelligence services cables.
The first VOA chief news editor and writer, Howard Fast, received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953. The first VOA director, John Houseman, was denied a U.S. passport by President Roosevelt’s liberal friend, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, and forced to resign. FDR himself got rid of a few other early VOA officials after General Eisenhower complained that VOA broadcasts with elements of Soviet propaganda put the lives of American soldiers at risk. Yet, the book written by Professors Wright, Scott, and Bunce says nothing about this capture of VOA by a foreign power.
The American labor unions, which could hardly be described as “right-wing,” were the first to expose the Soviet and communist influence at the Voice of America. In 1943, the AFL and the CIO broke their cooperation with the Office of War Information because Communist Party members and Stalin supporters captured the OWI’s labor desk.
Some of the most credible critics of Soviet influence at the early Voice of America were, in fact, former Communists or Soviet sympathizers who broke with Communism: Bertram Wolfe, Julius Epstein, and Eugene Lyons. Bertram Wolfe worked briefly for VOA in the early 1950s. He wrote in his autobiography that he, an atheist, had to write programs on religious freedom and repression of religion behind the Iron Curtain because he could not find a single VOA employee [English Service] who could write on religious topics.
It was President Truman’s administration that fired pro-Soviet sympathizers at VOA, replaced them with refugee broadcasters from Eastern Europe, and made drastic changes in programming. Senator McCarthy, God’s gift to Stalin, could not find any Communists at VOA because, by that time, they were all gone.
Truman’s reforms were slowly reversed and by the time I joined VOA in 1973, we at the foreign language services were reduced to translating centrally-produced English-language news reports and programs. VOA managers, newsroom reporters, and USIA diplomats were quite pleased to have VOA language services translating English-language programs because their misguided and self-interested approach to journalism protected their jobs and allowed them to dictate the content of our broadcasts. The Reagan administration changed this and our audience and influence in Poland was vastly increased in the 1980s.
Yet, many predicted that these changes would destroy VOA. They did not. We helped to win the Cold War only to see our legacy tarnished by a new generation of highly partisan and activist journalists now employed by the U.S. government-funded Voice of America.
OPINION
How USAGM officials misused taxpayer resources to attack their critics | Ted Lipien | THE HILL
BY TED LIPIEN, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR – 09/20/24
A group of highly paid officials in the perennially scandal-ridden U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), and a handful of federal employees of its Voice of America news operation, have found a new way to discredit media critics. They started using some of the $944 million of taxpayers’ money they control to feed disinformation and selectively provide legal and logistical assistance to outside individuals to smear those shining a light on their behavior.
Congress must stop them, as more American watchdog journalists could become targets of this rogue agency’s interference with their First Amendment rights.
USAGM bureaucrats found a new opportunity to go after perceived media enemies when three British academics asked them to help write a book about the short tenure of President Trump’s USAGM CEO, Michael Pack.
Sadly, at the cost to U.S. taxpayers of thousands of dollars in staff time, a genuinely frightening cooperation agreement between the academics and USAGM resulted in linking Cold War journalists with “aggressive anti-Communism” and “right-wing” causes. Never mind that I have been a supporter of gay marriage, environmental protection and racial equality and critical in my op-eds in The Hill of ultra-conservative Republicans, including Tucker Carlson, for being easily duped by Vladimir Putin’s propaganda.
I disagreed with some of Pack’s decisions but never doubted his honesty as a public servant. He approved my choice of a Democrat for a senior Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty position. He was proven correct that USAGM’s lax employee vetting led to the hiring of former Putin state media propagandists, apologists for Hamas and at least one alleged Russian spy as a Voice of America freelance news reporter — stories first brought to light by USAGM Watch, the watchdog website I co-founded.
USAGM officials have a long history of hindering the volunteer work of USAGM Watch (known as BBG Watch before 2018). They registered the domain name USAGMWatch.com to prevent us from using it. (We got it back after a two-year battle.) One of VOA’s star reporters banned our volunteers from following his VOA Twitter account, to stop us reporting on his violations of the VOA Charter.
USAGM did not merely answer a media inquiry from these British professors. Eleven government-employed senior managers and eight VOA reporters spent hours being interviewed with unprecedented official approval to remain anonymous. It is a sad reminder of my young life in communist-ruled Poland that, as an immigrant and American citizen, my political views are under scrutiny by U.S. government executives enjoying official guarantees of anonymity.
Incredibly, USAGM also provided the British academics with legal advice and reviewed their manuscript, in which officials slandered me and other former VOA and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcasters. The researchers decided not to interview Michael Pack or any current or former VOA journalists who could question their information or conclusions. I don’t know how a reputable British publisher and three academic institutions could have approved such a one-sided methodology.
The researchers’ excuse was that further interviews could “interfere” with a U.S. government “sensitive investigation.” But if they had asked, any number of VOA journalists could have corrected their many errors. They would have learned that my main reason for taking the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty job was to evacuate our journalists from Russia to EU countries to prevent more arrests by Putin’s secret police, and to get our reporters out of Afghanistan. Incompetent USAGM management subsequently left them stranded under Taliban rule.
For the information of these British academics who canceled our voices with assistance from unwitting taxpayers, USAGM Watch is not a “right-wing” blog; its co-founders include former VOA federal labor union leaders. The British professors also allowed U.S. government employees to slander one of USAGM Watch’s contributors — a highly regarded former senior VOA White House reporter during Barack Obama’s presidency and a lifelong Democrat.
In the British authors’ uninformed version of Cold War history, we are dismissed as “disgruntled.” Contrary to what they wrote, our response at the VOA Polish Service to the challenges in the 1980s was not “aggressive anti-Communism” but rather a carefully crafted programming policy that more than quadrupled our audience in Poland. Václav Havel agreed to my invitation to be an advisor for one of VOA’s projects. I interviewed George H.W. Bush, Cardinal Wojtyła (before he became Pope John Paul II) and Solidarity labor union leader Lech Wałęsa, as well as socialists, and communists.
Far from being “disgruntled,” we were the most successful language service in VOA’s history in our reach and impact, as attested by multiple awards from Democratic and Republican VOA directors.
USAGM officials, on the other hand, repaid us with slander for helping to bring down the Berlin Wall.
“Anti-Communists” among VOA, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty Cold War broadcasters were not at all anti-liberal; we were anti-totalitarian opponents of Russian colonialism. The largest group in the initial Radio Free Europe Polish Service who had declared party affiliations were anti-communist socialists.
It is ironic that, while portraying themselves as champions of pure journalism, the British authors (they even declined my interview request) confessed to collaborating closely with the Agency’s lawyers and, appallingly, handed over their manuscript to USAGM for review.
USAGM officials, therefore, bear direct responsibility for any errors and harm to the reputations of independent American investigative journalists. As an ardent Bernie Sanders supporter once wrote, U.S. citizens should not be required to subsidize their own defamation.
Ted Lipien is a journalist and media freedom advocate who was chief of the Voice of America’s Polish Service during Poland’s successful struggle for democracy and later served as VOA’s acting associate director and President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
