The agency wanted the wartime prime minister to present on Radio Liberty, aiming to undermine political stability in the Soviet Union
The CIA tried to recruit British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill to spread propaganda broadcasts on the agency-backed Radio Liberty in the 1950s, in an effort to undermine the Soviet Union, the Telegraph has reported.
At the height of the Cold War, the CIA-funded radio station targeted the Soviet Union with propaganda broadcasts, while its sister organization, Radio Free Europe, focused on Moscow’s allies. Both were covertly controlled and funded by the US intelligence agency until 1972 and merged into RFE/RL four years later.
In 1958, Radio Liberty’s controllers suggested riding the wave of “revisionism” gripping the Soviet Union at the time, and taking advantage of emerging ideological divisions within Marxism-Leninism to undermine the government, the Telegraph wrote on Saturday, citing declassified CIA documents.
The agency was reportedly focused on exploiting “revisionist thinkers,” who opposed a united Soviet bloc, in favor of divided individual Communist states.
Churchill – then 83 years old and retired from frontline politics – was one of several prominent figures targeted to deliver these broadcasts, the Telegraph wrote. While Churchill was an ardent anti-Communist, as reflected in his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton in 1946, there is no evidence he accepted the invitation, the report says.
The programs aimed to “stimulate heretical thinking” and “undermine confidence in any form of Marxism by suggesting that its basic assumptions, its historical method and its predictions are false,” the newspaper cited a CIA briefing note as saying.
Churchill knew then-agency director Alan Dulles personally. However, in spring of 1958, “when he was earmarked for a propaganda program,” he declined an offer to visit Washington for health reasons, according to the Telegraph.
More recently, RFE/RL continued to be funded by Washington under the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) until President Donald Trump’s budget cutbacks, part of his broader agenda to slash government spending. Last month, USAGM announced it would be cutting more than 500 staff, after hundreds of layoffs in the months prior.
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