By Ted Lipien for Cold War Radio Museum The Argonaut Building in New York City at 224 West 57 and Broadway, where first Voice of America (VOA) radio programs were produced in 1942, is now the headquarters of Open Society Foundations (OSF), formerly the Open Society Institute, originally created and funded by billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros to help countries move…
My photo with the great Polish patriot, anti-Nazi fighter, and political leader Stefan Korboński was taken on June 20, 1976 in front of the White House on the day of my daughter’s baptism. Stefan and his wife, Zofia Korbońska, my colleague in the Polish Service of the Voice of America (VOA), were Leokadia W. Lipien’s (Lodi Rohrer) godparents. Stefan Korboński (2…
2019 MP3 Recording of Original VOA Audio, Video with NASA Photographs, Transcript and Images of VOA’s 1969 LP Record by Cold War Radio Museum
In 1948, Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Senate charged that Voice of America (VOA) broadcasts contained “baloney,” “lies,” “insults,” “drivel,” “nonsense and falsehoods,” amounting to “useless expenditures” and “a downright tragedy.”
In 1948, U.S. senators called VOA programs “ridiculous,” “unjustified” and “deplorable.” Liberal, moderate, and conservative lawmakers, some of whom even accused the Voice of America of “slander” and “libel” in how several U.S. states were described in radio programs acquired from NBC under a government contract, did not seek to de-fund and close down VOA but wanted to make it more effective in presenting America to the world and in countering propaganda from Soviet Russia. Their criticism eventually led to partial personnel and programming reforms in the early 1950s. In 2019, history seems to be repeating itself, with similar problems being reported at the Voice of America as the United States tries to respond to propaganda from Putin’s Russia, communist China, theocratic Iran and other nations under authoritarian rule. Today, there is little interest in the U.S. Congress and no obvious signs of management reforms, while some of the problems seem now more difficult to solve than those besetting the broadcaster in 1948.
During the Cold War, Voice of America (VOA) broadcast mostly radio programs. Most of the radio transmissions were delivered through shortwave. VOA would send out QSL cards as a written confirmation of reception to those listeners who requested them by letter. The 1978 QSL card from VOA was a post card with pictures of San Francisco, the White House and the Statue of…
Rep. Howard H. Buffett, father of American investor Warren Buffett, was concerned in 1947 about domestic propaganda activities by the Voice of America.
As the U.S. Congress was debating in June 1947 the eventual passage of the Smith-Mundt Act, which implicitly placed restrictions on domestic dissemination of government news through the Voice of America (VOA) while funding expansion of State Department’s cultural and academic exchange programs, Congressman Howard Buffett (R-NE) expressed concerns that officials in charge of VOA may have been secretly planning domestic propaganda activities. As it turned out, State Department officials had no plans to distribute U.S. government radio broadcasts domestically because such a move would kill the funding not only for VOA but also for the public diplomacy programs the State Department cared about most of all. Congressman Buffett was right, however, that U.S. diplomats were using VOA to influence U.S. public opinion to drum up support for their information outreach budget.
By Ted Lipien for Cold War Radio Museum
Two extraordinary refugees from Poland helped to expose in 1956 to the U.S. Congress anti-U.S. propaganda activities of a communist journalist Stefan Arski, also known as Artur Salman.
The News Bureau room of the Office of War Information (OWI), November 1942, at about the same time Howard Fast started writing Voice of America newscasts. The photograph’s official caption said: “It is arranged much the same way as the city room of a daily newspaper. Here, war news of the world is disseminated. In the foreground, are editors’ desks handling such special services as trade press, women’s activities, and campaigns. The news desk is in the background.” Smith, Roger, photographer. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540.
“I established contact at the Soviet embassy with people who spoke English and were willing to feed me important bits and pieces from their side of the wire. I had long ago, somewhat facetiously, suggested ‘Yankee Doodle’ as our musical signal, and now that silly little jingle was a power cue, a note of hope everywhere on earth…”[ref]Howard Fast, Being Red (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990), 18-19.[/ref]
Howard Fast, 1953 Stalin Peace Prize winner, best-selling author, journalist, former Communist Party member and reporter for its newspaper The Daily Worker, decribing his role as the chief writer of Voice of America (VOA) radio news translated into multiple languages and rebroadcast for four hours daily to Europe through medium wave transmitters leased from the BBC in 1942-1943. Howard Fast, Being Red (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990), pp. 18-19.
By Ted Lipien
In my book, Wojtyła’s Women: How They Shaped the life of Pope John Paul II and Changed the Catholic Church, I describe how future Pope John Paul II, whom I had interviewed in Washington D.C. for the Voice of America (VOA) in 1976 when he was Kraków’s Archbishop, became familiar with many stories of immense suffering of Polish women under both Nazi and Soviet occupation.[ref]Lipien, Ted (Tadeusz Lipień). Wojtyła’s Women: How They Shaped the life of Pope John Paul II and Changed the Catholic Church, Winchester, UK: O Books, 2008. Lipien, Ted. Wojtyła a kobiety: Jan zmienia się Kościół. Warszawa: Świat Książki, 2010.[/ref]
Throughout World War II, the arrests and forced deportations of Polish families to labor camps by Soviet Russia received practically no mainstream media coverage in the United States. After the Soviet Union became an important military ally against Nazi Germany with the sudden collapse of Stalin’s alliance with Hitler and his attack on Russia in June 1941, the propaganda agency of the Roosevelt administration–the Office of War Information (OWI)–deliberately covered up Stalin’s crimes, both the deportations of millions of people to Siberia and the mass executions of Polish prisoners of war.
A statement made on the floor of the U.S. Senate on February 8, 1940 by Senator John A. Danaher (R-Connecticut) may have been the first major public reference in the United States to the 1940 deportations of Poles and other nationalities to Gulag forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. Senator Danaher inserted in the Congressional Record the text of a resolution adopted by of the Star of Liberty Society, Group 803, of the Polish National Alliance in Stamford, Conn. It mentions in one sentence “the deportation of large numbers of Poles to Siberia.” The Polish-American organization in Connecticut adopted the resolution on January 14, 1940. By then the news of the first deportations of Poles from Soviet-occupied eastern Poland to Siberia and other parts of the Soviet Union had already reached some Polish-Americans but was not known to most Americans.
Following the August 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact and the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, which started World War II, the Soviets began the first mass deportation of Poles on February 10, 1940 from the occupied eastern part of Poland. Whole families were arrested, usually early in the morning, and sent in overcrowded cattle train wagons to forced labor camps in the depths of Siberia and in other parts of the Soviet Union. Many elderly and infants died during the transport–bodies of some of the children tossed by guards into the snow; others left behind at various stops during the journey lasting many days with little food or water. Many more prisoners would die later in the Gulag camps, work settlements and collective farms from slave labor, harsh weather conditions, starvation, and lack of medial treatment.
There was almost a complete media silence in the West about the deportations. Western journalists either did not know or were afraid or unwilling to report on what was happening to millions of Stalin’s prisoners. In addition to Polish citizens, the Soviets also imprisoned and deported Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Tatars, Jews and members of many other ethnic and religious groups. Even after the war, the story of the deportees was rarely told. Many of those who had survived the Gulag camps, became refugees in the West unable to return to their homes.
Wojtek can you hear me?
Wojtek do you still remember me?
Wojtek czy pamietasz? Wojtek czy jeszcze pamietasz mnie?
The penetrating sound of friends transcend the pages of time
And the bear turns his ear as the bell of the universe chimes
He remembers as though it was yesterday as he looks back
He was a little brown bear tightly held by a child in a sack
The waves of the Caspian brought to Persia many broken souls
A cascade of hopeful, starving and helpless deported Poles
They were housed in civilian camps with clothes and a meal
And Persia allowed them many gifts just to help them heal
One day a Polish soldier appeared with a young girl he can’t forget
He traded the boy a handful of coins and bought the girl a pet
She took her gift into a civilian camp but quickly saw her error
This was not the place to raise this mischievous, little bear
After three months he was given to a group of Polish army men
With blessings that he could become their mascot in a pen
The young soldiers accepted their gift with excitement of a boy
They fed and hugged the little bear and filled his heart with joy
They nursed him from a vodka bottle filled with sweet milk
And cuddled him in their sleeping bags like a tiny piece of silk
They taught him how to play and showered him with love
And he believed that he had been given a family from above
He was no different than the soldiers who took him in
They had both been abandoned in a world full of sin
The soldiers had suffered a lot and the bear gave them hope
And together they were bound like a tightly twisted rope
They taught him how to smoke and how to drink their beer
And when he wrestled them to the ground, everyone would cheer
The rays of the Middle East sun would become a soldier’s wrath
But a hole was dug in sand with water so the bear could have a bath
He was a smiling little warrior and from the wild easy to tame
And so the soldiers decided that Wojtek should be his name.
They taught him to speak Polish and showed him that they cared
And recognized him as a Polish spirit wrapped in the body of a bear.
Wojtek never thought of himself as anything other than a man
He lived his life in unison under a highly orchestrated plan
They battled the Mediterranean but their greatest challenge lay ahead
But Wojtek was refused the ship to Italy and their hearts filled with dread
Someone said he was a bear and only soldiers could be on the ship
So they enlisted him as a Private so he could make the trip
So now he had a number, was a soldier in every sense of the word
And nobody in the 22nd Transport thought this was absurd
He continued to boost the morale of soldiers fighting to death
And became legend for many who had taken their last breath
He watched the ammunition being carried by exhausted men
It was just as easy for him to do the same job as a team of ten
So he proudly carried the boxes to show his soldiers that he could
And they cheered and bestowed their pride as every soldier should
The battle had been fought for so long on this shattered, bloody hill
But this time it would take more than just courage and skill
The thirst for freedom was carried in every soldier’s boot
And Wojtek did everything but pick up a gun and shoot
He was a story to many who heard about the things he had done
He enlightened and uplifted the soldier’s spirits with Polish fun
The battle raged and the smoke of thunderous canons filled the air
And alongside the Polish soldiers fought this majestic bear
He become the mascot of the regiment that he served so well
And their emblem became Wojtek carrying the bloody shell
And when the war was over the soldiers had to rebuild their lives
But where do you put a bear that was strong enough to survive?
They took him to Scotland where many soldiers had decided to go to
And finally realized that Wojtek’s best home would be Edinburgh Zoo
Wojtek had come on a long journey and for a time been free
Walking on the grounds with soldiers and enjoying the shade of a tree.
It broke every soldier’s heart to leave their brother behind the cage
He was one of them, but now the reality of life was on a new stage
So the Polish soldiers who stayed, visited him every chance they had
And shared a cigarette as they talked of good times and bad
The dimensions of time take Wojtek back to where he is today
But if you speak Polish ……he can hear what you say
Wojtek czy pamietasz ? Wojtek czy pamietasz mnie?
Wojtek do you remember ? Wojtek do you still remember me?
And Wojtek turns his head and looks the soldier square in the eye
And tears stream down the cheeks of both in a silent, bonded cry
Tak braciszku pamiętam, tak braciszku jeszcze cię pamiętam
Yes my brother I remember. Yes my brother I still remember you.
Wojtek we will all remember you.
We will never forget you.hania kaczanowska 2015
A Soviet-instigated plan to kill an anti-communist woman journalist in the early years of the Cold War was linked to her attempts to tell the story of thousands of Polish children who in 1940-1941 had been deported with their families from eastern Poland to Siberia and Central Asia where many died from brutal treatment. The assassination plan was revealed in 1953-1954 by a defector to the West from communist-ruled Poland and was never carried out.
In July 1979 an American businessman and former journalist David Harold Karr who had arranged the building of the first Western hotel in Moscow was found dead under reportedly suspicious circumstances in Paris, France. Karr’s new biography, The Millionaire Was a Soviet Mole: The Twisted Life of David Karr, by Harvey Klehr, expected to be published in July 2019, will…