Jim Brown: Director of Radio Free Europe during the Cold War

Jim Brown played an important role in the Cold War through a long career with Radio Free Europe (RFE), ending as Director from 1978 to 1984, when he resigned because of disagreements with the Reagan administration.

RFE was one of the good project on which the CIA spent its money. The funding remained covert (although many people knew or guessed) in the early 1970s, when Congress voted for open financing under a new Board for International Broadcasting. Based in Munich, RFE broadcast in local languages to Eastern Europe, acting as an exiled domestic radio station providing news and comment that was unavailable in the tightly censored media of the communist world. Audiences were huge, and included the regimes themselves, so the station became an important factor in East European politics, particularly in Poland, which after the Cold War awarded him the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit.

As Brown wrote in his unpublished memoir: "It broke the communist information monopoly and gave East Europeans the chance to think and judge for themselves... It tried to keep Eastern Europe's societies together....

This was RFE's basic task, and it was a worthy one. On a more individual, personal level it kept East Europeans company... levelling with its audience, not trying to lever it. Several East Europeans whom I met after 1989 stressed that it was this companionable, almost pastoral, function of RFE that helped keep their spirits up and for which they were the most grateful."

In 1992 he was introduced to Vaclav Havel, who greeted him warmly with the words... "Jim! We were colleagues!" - a tribute to RFE's important role in disseminating the writings of human rights movements in Eastern Europe. For Brown, "That made everything worthwhile".

Brown was born in the United States of British parents. When his father (a miner who became a tram conductor in the US) died, he moved to Britain with his mother, went to school there, and graduated in History from Manchester University before doing an MA under Sir Lewis Namier.

In 1957, after National Service in the RAF, he joined RFE as an editor and then became a research analyst for Bulgaria and Romania. This was shortly after the major reassessment of RFE that followed the Hungarian uprising in 1956, which was crushed by Soviet tanks at the cost of thousands of Hungarian lives and the imprisonment or exile of many others.

In that period Washington had been indulging in rhetorical promises to roll back the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, and RFE was widely accused of having fomented the uprising and fostered unrealistic hopes of Western help. A detailed investigation found that there had been no direct encouragement to revolt or promise of help, but the shrill, exhortatory tone and several very irresponsible broadcasts, including advice on military tactics, were strongly condemned and certainly did great damage. As a result, major changes were made in policies and personnel.

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