Poland's War on Radio Free Europe

For the Soviet bloc, the struggle against foreign radio was one of the principal fronts in the Cold War. Poland was at the fore-front of this war, relentlessly conducting, since the early 1950s until the collapse of the Communism, political, propaganda and intelligence operations against Radio Free Europe, regarded as the most dangerous enemy among “centers of foreign ideological subversion.” Poland's War on Radio Free Europe, 1950-1989 is the first book in English to use the unique documents of Communist foreign intelligence at length. It also employs personal interviews with the Radio Free Europe staff and collaborators and with Polish Communist party and security functionaries.

Paweł Machcewicz is a historian, professor at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw and director of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. He has taught at Warsaw University and the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and was a co-founder of the Institute of National Remembrance that took over the files of the Communist secret police in Poland.  His many books include Rebellious Satellite: Poland 1956 (2009) and recently published Poland`s War on Radio Free Europe, 1950-1989 (2014) in the Cold War Series of the Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, in cooperation with European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (www.enrs.eu).