The Nobel Peace Prize, in absentia, and Cold War Radios

On December 10, 2010, the Nobel Committe in Olso, Norway, honored imprisoned dissident Liu Xiaobo, winner of the 2010 Peace Prize, in his absence. He remains in jail in China. He did not send anyone to Oslo to represent him. An empty chair on the podium seen throughout the world spoke louder than words.

There were two cases in the Cold War, when two recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize could not or would not attend the ceremony: Lech Walesa from Poland in 1983 and Andrei Sakharov from the then USSR in 1975.

Danuta Walesa traveled to traveled to Oslo, read the prepared speech and received the prize in behalf of her husband; Elena Bonner did the same in behalf of Andrei Sakharov.

In both cases, the winner heard the ceremony live from Oslo.  In Lech Walesa's case, he heard the ceremony live on December 10, 1983, while he remained in Gdansk, Poland, over the Polish Service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. His acceptance speech began:

You are aware of the reasons why I could not come to your Capital city and receive personally this distinguished prize. On that solemn day my place is among those with whom I have grown and to whom I belong - the workers of Gdansk.

Let my words convey to you the joy and the never extinguished hope of the millions of my brothers - the millions of working people in factories and offices, associated in the union whose very name expresses one of the noblest aspirations of humanity. Today all of them, like myself, feel greatly honoured by the prize.

In Andrei Sakharov's case, he heard the ceremony in Vilnius, Lithuania, on December 11, 1975, over Radio Liberty's Russian Service. Elena Bonner began with this statement:

I am here today because, due to certain strange characteristics of the country whose citizens my husband and I are, my husband's presence at the ceremony of the Nobel peace award turned out to be impossible. Today, in fact, he is not here, but in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, where the scientist Serghey Kovalyev is being tried. Due to those same strange characteristics which made it impossible for Sakharov to be in Oslo, he is at present near the court building, not inside but standing out in the street, in the cold, for the second day, awaiting the sentence against his closest friend.

Operation SPOTLIGHT: The Defection of Colonel Jozef Swiatlo and RFE

In West Berlin, on Saturday, December 5, 1953, Jozef Swiatlo, a lieutenant colonel in the Polish secret police, "defected" to the West. Swiatlo reportedly defected to the West, after he had been sent to West Berlin, with the purpose of intimidating or killing Mrs. Wanda Bronska-Pampuch, a former Communist Party member and effective Radio Free Europe Polish Service free-lance broadcaster since 1952. She had previously worked for Radio Liberation in Munich, before moving to West Berlin.

American Journalist Flora Lewis has written in her book The Red Pawn: The Story of Noel Field:

He was a man with the ineradicable spot of blood on his hands; he personally had been a torture master. His nickname was the ‘Butcher’. When the United States agreed to give him asylum it was in the knowledge that he would have to be protected for the rest of his life because the number of his victims and relatives of victims sworn to exact retribution was so great.

According to one biography, Jozef Swiatlo was born as Izak (Isaac) Fleischfarb to a “poor Jewish family” in the village Medina, Ukraine (now Poland), on January 1, 1915 and attended public school for only seven years. He was a member of a Zionist organization “Gordonia” and joined the Communist Youth Union in 1933. For "political reasons and his youthful inexperience" he was twice arrested for his political activities. In 1938, he was drafted into the Polish army.

After the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, he was captured by the German army, escaped, and fled to the Eastern Section of Poland then under Soviet army control. He joined a Soviet-backed force and marched westward with the army as a political officer in the Kosciuszko Division that remained in a Warsaw suburb during the Uprising in 1944.

Afterwards, he joined the University of Public Security and became a Polish Security Service officer in 1945. He rose to the rank of Deputy Chief of Department 10, which was responsible for protecting the Communist Party from non-Party subversive forces and "protect the purity of the Party from within the Party" by screening all appointments and conducting surveillance of Party and Government officials.

After this defection in West Berlin in 1953, the Americans sent him to a “Defector Reception Center“ in Frankfurt, Germany. There he was “debriefed” by CIA official Ted Shackley, who established his bona fides as a “defector” and sent his findings to CIA headquarters. In his memoirs, Spymaster: my life in the CIA, Shackley wrote:

The wealth of detail that Swiatlo was able to give me about the organization, functions, and misdeeds of UB, soon made it evident that Swiatlo was uniquely able to provide answers to questions that had long remained unanswered, and I was bombarded by cable demands from headquarters that I tackle Swiatlo on other subjects.

After a debriefing that lasted five hours a day, seven days a week for three months, Shackley and Swiatlo then flew to the United States in April 1954.

The CIA then gave Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America access to Swiatlo. RFE’s Voice of Free Poland, started broadcasting his “revelations” on September 28, 1954, when Swiatlo “officially” surfaced in the United States at a press conference in Washington, D.C.

On October 20, 1954, RFE’ began a series of 78 programs entitled “Inside Story of Bezpieka and Party” that were broadcast until January 31, 1955. They were not verbatim interviews but were prepared scripts based on Swiatlo’s material. Swiatlo voiced the scripts. Other programs were broadcast throughout 1955 for a total of 141 Swiatlo programs.

Cord Meyer, one CIA officer responsible for RFE, has written: “He turned out to be a gold mine of detailed and accurate information on the corruption and personal rivalries that flourished among the leadership of the Polish Communist Party.” 

Swiatlo’s name is translated as "light" and, since listening to RFE was considered a crime, listeners referred to his programs by asking "will there be any light at your house tonight?" For the next months, RFE's other language services as well as the RFE’s sister station Radio Liberation used his “revelations.”

Swiatlo's broadcast over Radio Free Europe reportedly caused a major chain reaction in Poland with the dismissal, transfer, and worse, of thousands of Communist Party members and government officials. Perhaps as many as 150,000 party members, according to one estimate, were affected by RFE's programming.

RFE’s radio programs about Switlo were described, "a brilliant tactical decision that brought unforeseeable strategic gains," and "one of the most successful pieces of radio propaganda ever." The Polish regime responded with silence for a few weeks before it launched a heavy counter-propaganda campaign of radio commentaries, articles, poems, and cartoons.

Based on experiences in its previous balloon programs, on February 12, 1955, the Free Europe Press started sending copies of a forty-page summary of his testimony, “The Inside Story of the Bezpieka (Security Apparatus) and the Party,” to Poland.  This balloon campaign was called Operation SPOTLIGHT, which “was designed as a means of bringing to the Polish people the revelations of corruption and immorality in the hierarchy of the Polish Communist regime.”

The purpose of the Free Europe Press balloon launching-leaflet program was "to weaken the Communist control apparatus, and through, detailed exposure of Communist techniques, to enable the Polish people better to defend themselves against the Communists.” The FEP pamphlet’s forward was hard hitting:

Swiatlo is a man who has drunk from many a filthy well.  Does he regret it today?  Has he resolved to improve his ways in the innermost recesses of his heart? Does he treat his story of his experiences as an act of contrition or does he regard it as an act of vengeance of his former Party comrades.  We have no first hand information on this matter. We only know that he is to be believed.

This booklet is like a hand-grenade. It may become dangerous should you try to keep it in your possession. It may also be dangerous to repeat the text of this booklet to your neighbor. On the other hand, no harm will be caused to the public good should this pamphlet reach the hands of representatives of the regime.

From February through May 1955, over 260,000 pamphlets were launched into Poland, with only 30 per balloon, because of the pamphlet’s weight. The number of launchings would have been greater but for the weather: in April, for example, no launches took place because the winds blew from East to West. Additional brochures were sent via postal mail to members of the Polish Communist Party bureaucracy and distributed in Paris and elsewhere in the West. 

The Polish government reacted with counter-propaganda, e.g. this cartoon in the publication Szpiliki on March 13, 1955 with the caption: "The Free Europe Committee in Munich sent over Poland balloons carrying libelous booklets of the agent-provocateur Swiatlo."

RFE also put out details of Swiatlo in the March 1955 issue of News Behind the Iron Curtain, a monthly subscription journal published by the Free Europe Press. 

The short introduction explained the importance of the Swiatlo revelations:

Here is the mirror of what it means to “build a Socialist state,” and “what Socialist morality” is truly like. It is a tale of the evils done by the police, Party and Government to their own adherents, and horrible as it is, it is far less horrible than what all of these combined have done to the Polish people.

The Swiatlo programs also affected Radio Free Europe as the Polish broadcasting service in Munich and management in New York were divided on the programs. Robert Lang, the Director of Radio Free Europe, stationed in New York, wrote an eight-page resignation letter on March 4, 1955, in which he complained to the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of the Free Europe Committee, that the Deputy Director of RFE in New York had turned down the balloon program and was not consulted before the Free Europe Press in Munich started Operation SPOTLIGHT. He explained in the letter how the Polish émigrés in the United States were unhappy with the RFE’s use of Swiatlo and “the Polish press in this country broke out in rash of angry editorial comment, and, in brief—poof--there went our carefully built up validity.”

Lang also reveals in his letter that Swiatlo had once sued RFE for “uncoordinated publishing on his material in News From Behind the Iron Curtain” and received $2,000.  He threatened to sue again, this time for $10, 000 because he was “infuriated—particularly by the introduction that was flown in with his materials in which, among other things, he was labeled a man, “Who has drunk of every shame.” Also, Swiatlo, apparently, had first learned about SPOTLIGHT two weeks after it had started.

The controversy came to a head in a meeting of CIA, VOA, and RFE officials on October 7, 1954, at which CIA set ground rules for further interviews with Swiatlo.

In December 1956, Poland expelled Life magazine photographer Lisa Larsen, when he visa expired.  According to her, the Polish Foreign Department explained that her visa was not extended due to Life magazine’s November 26, 1956 article published under Swiatlo’s name.  The Polish press department complained that “This article by one of Poland’s worst criminals was sensational and untrue and its publication was an unfriendly act. Polish newspapers accused Swiatlo of “robbing prisoners, using illegal methods of interrogation and ordering the liquidation of at least one political prisoner while he was a police officer.”

In the February 1956 Crusade for Freedom campaign, Swiatlo’s story was used by in the United States with this nation-wide newspaper appeal prepared by the Advertising Council:

            SHAKE-UP

            Broadcasts cause removal of Polish Police officials

MUNICH--A series of-broadcasts by Radio Free Europe have caused great upheaval and embarrassment in Poland.

They were based on highly inflammatory information about corrupt Polish police operations obtained from Josef Swiatlo, Polish Security Ministry official who had defected to the West. As a result of the broadcasts, the Reds were forced to dismiss four of Swiatlo's former chiefs and reorganize the ministry.

This is just a single example of the influence of Radio Free Europe's words of truth. Up to 20 hours of truth a day are broadcast to five key satellite countries—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. And the truth is getting through, despite costly Red jamming attempts.

Millions take the risk daily to listen. Millions more hear the truth from Radio Free Europe as it is passed cautiously from mouth to mouth.

Truth builds hope and continued resistance. Each dollar sponsors a minute of truth. Send your truth dollars to: CRUSADE FOR FREEDOM, c.o. Local Postmaster 

The CIA prepared part 7 of a National Security Council report dated March 2, 1955, in which it was written: “the Polish Security Official, Josef Swiatlo, although defecting early in 1954, made outstanding contributions to U.S. intelligence and psychological warfare programs during this period.“

By the 1960s, Jozef Swiatlo, once called "the most successful Western agent in the history of the Cold War," effectively had become a nonperson. Former CIA Director Allen Dulles' book, The Craft of Intelligence, published in 1963, contained only a two-sentence and incorrect reference to Jozef Swiatlo saying that he had defected in Berlin in 1954, not 1953.

Former CIA officer Ted Shackley wrote:

Once he had fulfilled his obligations to the U.S. government, he sank quietly into private life as a legal resident of the United States.  According to what little I have heard about him, he moved to New York—whether City or State I don’t know—and opened a small business. The absence of any news to the contrary gives me confidence that his resettlement was a success.

Another CIA officer who had the chance to interview Swiatlo, after his arrival in the United States, was Tennent H. Bagley, who wrote in his book Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games:

Gave important and high-level insights into Soviet operations and techniques....This information, sent to Poland by leaflet and radio, shook the regime and led to reforms that, developed in later years, made Poland a factor in the eventual collapse of Soviet Communism.

On November 24, 1982, the Polish Intelligence service decided to "close" the examination of his case because "the lack of information where he lived, where he is, and what he did.“ 

In January 2009 the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) asked the U.S. Justice department for current information about Jozef Swiatlo. A year later, the response was one sentence advising only that Jozef Swiatlo died on September 2, 1994 in the United States.

For more information:

A. Ross Johnson, The Inside Story of the Secret Police and the Party; Origins of the Swiatlo Broadcasts on RFE, http://wolnaeuropa.org/history%20forum/content/view/17/29/ (Last viewed December 2010)

L. W. Gluchowski, The Defection of Jozef Swialto and the Search for Jewish Scapegoats in the Polish United Workers' Party, 1953-1954, Intermarium, Columbia University electronic journal of modern East Central European postwar history. 

http://www.sipa.columbia.edu/ece/research/intermarium/vol3no2/gluchowski.pdf(Last viewed December 2010)

Operation SPOTLIGHT: Regime, Press and Radio, Western Press and Radio and Internal Reactions, Feb. 12 - Mar 13, 1955, Free Europe Committee, New York, March 1955, Free Europe Press. RFE/RL Collection, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, California

The Inside Story of the Bezpieka and the Party: Jozef Swiatlo Reveals the Secrets of the Party, the Regime, and the Security Apparatus, English translation, RFE/RL Collection,

The Open Society Archives in Budapest Hungary, has most, if not all, of the interviews of Swiatlo that were broadcast over Radio Free Europe plus other documents related to his programs in eight containers, HU OSA 300-50-6.

From Cocoanuts to Body Snatchers: Walter F. Wanger, Hollywood and Radio Free Europe

The movie industry in Hollywood, California, played a major role in the development of Radio Free Europe and the Crusade for Freedom: studio giants Daryl F. Zanuck and Cecil B. DeMille were two of National Committee for Free Europe’s original directors in 1949 and remained active in behalf of Radio Free Europe in the 1950s. One of the most powerful Independent Hollywood film producers was Walter F. Wanger. Below, we will look at Wanger’s activity in behalf of the 1950 Crusade for Freedom.

Walter F. Wanger was born Walter Feuchtwanger on July 11, 1894 in San Francisco, California. During World War I, he served with the US Army and was on President Woodrow Wilson’s staff at the Paris Peace Conference.  In the 1920s, he began his career in film. By 1929, he was working for Paramount Pictures and helped in the production of Cocoanuts, the first film of the Marx Brothers.

Walter Wanger was named “the movies’ Man of the Year 1938” by the New York Theatre Arts Committee. He received an honorary Academy Award in 1946 for being president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Wanger's 1949 movie “Joan of Arc” was the first film to receive a citation award by the Christian group The Christopher’s, which acclaimed the movie “for its inspiring demonstration that a motion picture which stresses the spiritual ideal, goodness and decency, can be a popular success.”

The late 1940s witnessed the beginning of the Hollywood Blacklist when many persons working in films were prohibited from working because of their political beliefs and associations.

Wanger and the Crusade for Freedom

Lucius Clay wrote to Walter Wanger on July 11, 1950, asking him to join the National Crusade Council, described “as an advisory group of distinguished leaders from all segments of American Life.” Wanger answered on July 18, 1950, when he wrote,

Your letter has been one of the few bright signs that I have encountered in a long, long time.

For more years than I care to say I have been advocating a crusade to make individual citizens realize his responsibility and realize what could be accomplished if we would mobilize ourselves for intelligence and liberty in a practical way.

On July 21, 1950, Lucius D. Clay wrote to Wanger thanking him for joining the Crusade for Freedom Council and supplying his speeches in support of the Crusade campaign:

Thank you for your whole-hearted response to our invitation to join the Crusade Council, and also for the copies of your speeches.

I know from them that you understand what we are trying to do.  Moreover, it is in a field in which your work has made you and expert. I shall look forward to obtaining your wise counsel as the Crusade progresses, and I hope we may meet soon.

Walter Wanger became the Crusade for Freedom chairman for the city and county of Los Angeles, California. The film magazine Hollywood Box Office announced Wanger’s appointment in August 1950. 

Crusade for Freedom national headquarters in New York sent Wanger a check on August 29, 1950, for $3,750, which was half of the city’s operating budget for the Crusade campaign. Included in the accompanying letter were instructions on account procedures for placing contributions into the operating account.

Wanger gave a speech about the Crusade for Freedom to the Greater Los Angeles Press Club on August 30, 1950, in which he said:

So my proposal is not that you look as this Crusade as something, which requires more lip service and the usual amount of space devoted to ordinary worth causes, either. I propose that you study it and think about it in terms of your own interests. Without the powerful voice of the American press, we will commit the same sin here as we have done overseas. We will whisper our faith into a rain barrel.  But if you ... voluntarily ...for that is what I understand a “free” press to mean ... if you treat the spreading of the story of this Crusade as your share of the job that amounts to a fight for our very lives ... then I know that fight can be won.

On September 13, 1950, Wanger wrote to the Lost Angeles Board of Education giving details of the upcoming arrival of the Freedom Bell at Exhibition Park and asked, “We will be most sincerely grateful if you will consider an order either to dismiss school at noon on September 21st, or to arrange for scheduled visits by school groups during the day ... we sincerely urge that you take favorable action so that our school children may come, see, and about the significance.” 

Walter Wanger wrote to Ronald Reagan of the Screen Actors Guild on 21 September 1950:

Dear Ronnie:

Thank you very much for sending me a copy of the wire ... It is very

gratifying to me, as a member of the Motion Picture Industry, to know that the entire industry is willing and anxious to aid in the CRUSADE and on behalf of the entire committee for the CRUSADE FOR FREEDOM I want to thank you and the Guild for pledging your wholehearted support to our drive.

On September 28, 1950, more than 3,000 college students from Los Angeles City and State colleges attended a Crusade for Freedom rally. Famed jazz group The Dave Brubeck Trio and students provided music and the faculty gave short speeches. Walter Wanger then came on the stage as the “chief speaker” and spoke about the Crusade for Freedom:

The thing we are trying to tell the world, through radio stations we are building as an important part of this Freedom Crusade, is a thing we could show them far more clearly if it was possible to broadcast a television picture of the scene here today to the nations behind the Iron Curtain.

We’re apt to think the world knows what we are like. But unhappily enough, they don’t. We have to tell them. That is the purpose of the crusade. Here you are, students from every walk of life, every group, here studying and happy. You are America personified – the kind of America that we must prove to the rest of the world is a real and possible thing.

Wanger then exhorted the students to sign the Freedom Scrolls:

We all have a chance, here and now – today, to add our signatures to those who believe as we do, that our system works and works well for our best interests. If you do not believe that, and then do not sign. But is you like this scene spread out here today and want to assure that it will not be replaced by something far different, far uglier, then sign the Freedom Scrolls. Make yourself heard. Do not lose this opportunity by default.

The Los Angeles Times the next day carried a story about the rally entitled, “Campus Thronged at Crusade Rally. Hundreds of Students Sign Scrolls as Wanger Explains Freedom Movement.” 380,000 Los Angeles citizens eventually responded to the Crusade activities by signing the Freedom Scroll and contributing $59,000. 

On November 8, 1950, General Clay wrote a thank-you letter to Wanger, in which he said, “It is with great humility that I address this note to you in acknowledgement of the part you have played in the Crusade for Freedom as chairman of Los Angeles.”

On December 26, 1950, Wanger wrote to General Clay,

I want to congratulate you on the tremendous accomplishment and feel that you’ve shown the way to what is really important. I hope that the Crusade will continue, because our moral Crusade is just as important as armament at the present time.  After all, we have won two wars by military skill, yet we have been unable to establish peace, which demands a moral point of view.

If there is anything that I can do to help you know you can call upon me to the limit of my ability.

Post-Crusade Life

Wanger was not without controversy, however, and had to publicly defended himself because of his alleged “leftist sympathies.” He even was denounced as a “Communist sympathizer” and “Hollywood Communist-fronter”, who had used the Crusade for Freedom to cover up his political past, and the FBI looked into his background. Wanger made a public disavowal of his past associations and newspapers carried his response.

In 1951, Wanger learned that his wife, actress Joan Bennett was having an affair with Jennings Lang, a theatrical agent. During a confrontation with Lang, which could easily have been a Hollywood movies scene, Wanger shot Lang twice. Wanger was tried, convicted and served four months in jail.

He resumed his career as a producer for such films I Want to Live (1958, for which Susan Haywood won the Academy Award for best actress. His other films included the cult film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954). Wanger also was one of the co-producers for the film Cleopatra (1963).

Walter F. Wanger died on November 18,1968; he was 74 years old.

For more information:

See the Wikipedia entry for an interesting analysis of the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_the_Body_Snatchers

For more Hollywood activities in support of Radio Free Europe, see Saturday Night at the Movies: Ronald Reagan and Cold War Radios

The Walter F. Wanger Papers, Wisconsin Society Archives, Madison, Wisconsin, is a collection of 13 archives boxes, 92 cartons of personal and family papers, business records and film production files of Walter Wanger from 1930 to 1960,

Matthew Bernstein. Walter Wanger: Hollywood Independent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

July 25, 1953: Riding the Czech “Freedom Tank” through the Iron Curtain

Freedom Tank at RFE in Munich

The Iron Curtain, with rows of barbed wire, armed patrols, land mines and guard towers, did not stop the flow of persons who were determined in finding ways to "escape" the “Communist-dominated” countries of East Europe. 

One daring and ingenious method was crashing through the Iron Curtain in a “Freedom Tank.” The episode was then used to rally Americans behind the Crusade for Freedom and Radio Free Europe. 

After two years of planning and preparation, on July 25, 1953, a World War Two German “armored car,” covered with foliage for camouflage, driven by Vaclav Uhlik, and carrying seven passengers, rolled over three rows of barbed wire of the Iron Curtain near the Bavarian town of Waldmuenchen, along the Czechoslovakia-German border. 

Vaclav Uhlik, his wife and two children, two former Czech soldiers Walter Hora and Vaclav Krejciri, Josef Pisarik, and Libuse Hrdonkova were in the vehicle. 

The “armored car” was described as a ““Freedom Tank”,” because the sheet metal armor had been on it in such a way that, at first glance from a distance, it did resemble a Czecho-slovak army vehicle. Czech border guards saw the vehicle, but, apparently, they were so surprised but its actions they did not shoot at it or otherwise attempt to prevent the escape. The eight passengers were taken by German police and handed over to American military authorities, for processing as “refugees.”  

Where the Iron Curtain was pierced

The August 3, 1953, issue of Time magazine carried an article about the “Freedom Tank” that was entitled “The Wonderful Machine” and described the escape:

Sleepy police patrols in Pilsen hardly glanced at it. By 5 a.m. the car had reached the barbed-wire border area. Vaclav wrenched the wheel, lurched off the road and into the wire barrier. Czech border guards stood by, mouths agape, as the machine snorted through the wire and crossed into West Germany. None fired, or even raised a Tommy gun. The car rumbled westward for several miles before West German police caught up with it

Carl Koch of Radio Free Europe reportedly negotiated the purchase of the vehicle and the “tank” was delivered to Radio Free Europe in Munich, which broadcast the story of the escape of the refugees. 

The “Freedom Tank” was then sent to the United States in September 1953.

Escapee Libuse Hrdonkova met Leonard Cloud, an American soldier in Prague following the end of World War Two, when he was stationed there. He then returned to the United States only to return to Czechoslovakia in 1949, when they married. His visa expired, and he was forced to leave Czechoslovakia without her. 

She had not seen him since he left Czechoslovakia. She finally succeeded on her 21st attempt to leave Czechoslovakia. She departed Germany in September 1953 to be re-united with her husband in Iowa. 

Her arrival in the United States was a “red carpet” affair, named “Project Silver Lining,“ with welcoming speeches, a welcoming telegram from the Governor, a marching band, motorcade, and parade through Sioux City, Iowa. Upon arriving in Sioux City, she said, "I'm so happy to be in a free country. It's wonderful." For years, she spoke at various civic functions throughout the United States about the virtues of freedom.

On display in Washington, D.C.

The “Freedom Tank” was delivered to the Washington meeting of the Crusade for Freedom and American Heritage Foundation organizers in October 1953, attended by over 400 delegates. A Paramount Pictures newsreel, released October 23, 1953, covered the events of the meeting and at one point showed some of those who attended the meeting looking intently at the “Freedom Tank”. Audiences in movie theaters heard Jackson Beck, the film’s narrator, solemnly proclaim:

This symbol of resistance to Kremlin tyranny was constructed by Vaclav Uhlik, a Czech mechanic. For three years, Mr. Uhlik listened to Radio Free Europe broadcasts and from them took courage and hope while he worked patiently and in secret to build this vehicle in which he and seven others dashed across the frontier to freedom. Behind the iron curtain are seventy million Vaclav Uhliks to whom this crusade for freedom is the messenger of the Lord.

Vaclav Uhlik, his family and the other passengers went to the United States in December 1953. Bill Watson, narrating a Paramount Pictures newsreel showing their arrival at New York's Idlewild airport, said:

Arriving in New York from Frankfurt, Germany, seven Czechoslovak refugees are ready to participate in the fund raising campaign for Radio Free Europe, whose broadcasts sustained their hope and courage. They crashed through the iron curtain last summer in a fake armored car in a daring escape plan.

They newly-arrived refugees were settled in Springfield, Massachusetts, with the assistance of the American Heritage Foundation, which financially supported the families. They were able to supplement their income through television appearances and newspaper and magazine interviews. 

During the Crusade for Freedom newspaper campaign, Vaclav Uhlik was quoted in Advertising Council advertisements, “People believe RFE broadcasts like the Bible.”

Ed Sullivan tv show

The “escapees” appeared as “heroes” on American television shows and numerous newspaper and magazine articles were featured in the Crusade for Freedom’s campaign, showing them before the RFE microphone. 

There was even a Crusade publicity photograph with television personality Ed Sullivan and the Uhlik family posing with the “tank” -- The Uhlik family had appeared on Ed Sullivan’s popular Sunday-night CBS national television program.

During a Crusade parade in New York, on January 21, 1954, the tank broke down during the planned 15-mile drive from the Bronx to the City Hall in Manhattan.  The first problem was a radiator leak and Vaclav Uhlik and Waler Hora, his fellow Czech escapee, fixed it to the sound of newspaper photographer's flash bulbs. There were other problems and finally the motor just stopped running. It had to be towed to Times Square, but by then it was too late for the final leg of the trip to the City Hall.  

One newspaper carried the story with the headline, “Home-Made Czech Tank Meets Waterloo in Bronx.” For the remainder of the nation-wide tour, the “Freedom Tank” was placed on a flatbed truck with a poster, “Czech “Freedom Tank” Escaped from Iron Curtain. Support Crusade for Freedom.”

Americans were encouraged to sign Freedom Scrolls showing their continuing support for the Crusade and Radio Free Europe. A large empty telephone cable reel was also on the flatbed truck and was used as a “short snorter” to tape, glue, or somehow connect the Freedom Scrolls together and roll them around it. For example, on February 22, 1954, in New Castle, Pennsylvania, the “Freedom Tank” was on display for a few hours. American Legion volunteers pasted together and attached 80 Freedom Scrolls with 6000 signatures (75 on each scroll) to Scrolls from other cities that already were wrapped around the cable reel.

At a “kickoff” banquet for the Crusade for Freedom fund-raising campaign in Des Moines, Iowa, in January 1954, Libuse Cloud said that her mother and family did not know of her escape plans and “learned immediately of her escape over Radio Free Europe, which “sometimes feels like a voice from heaven.” She added, "I knew the bad life was behind me. I was free. I was no longer a slave. I was a human being again ... Radio Free Europe is giving our people hope and courage at a time, when life is very hard and difficult for them."

On Tuesday evening, January 12, 1954, the CBS television network aired a 30-minute drama entitled "The Scrap Iron Curtain." The drama, part of the CBS "Suspense" series, was written by Reginald Lawrence and stared Bart Burns as Vaclav Uhlik. 

The program's preview description read: "Dramatization of the true story of Vaclav Uhlik, a Czech machinist who built and armed car and last July transported his wife, two children and four friends to the town of Waldmuenchen in the Western Zone of  Germany." The program was "presented in conjunction with Radio Free Europe." Another preview description read, "Dramatic documentary account of eight Czechs, prisoners of the Communists behind the Iron Curtain, who made a fantastically bold dash for freedom in a homemade armored car. Political melodrama, written for the Crusade for Freedom program, packs considerable excitement."

In Lima, Ohio, Pangles,"Lima's Leading Food Market", combined sponsorship of a Crusade for Freedom advertisement with one for its store in the February 19, 1954, local newspaper edition. On February 26, 1954, the "Freedom Tank" arrived in Lima, Ohio. Pangles sponsored another advertisement with a copy of the Freedom Scroll, and these words:

it's at PANGLES - Tonight 6 p.m. Famous FREEDOM TANK. SIGN THIS SCROLL. See and hear the local persons who will participate in this big program and history making event!

For the 1956 Crusade campaign, the Advertising Council produced a two recording set for radio stations in the United States. One was a 15 minute radio “dramatic playlet” entitled “The Tank that Jan built,” narrated by famed actor Vincent Price. The second recording was that of personal appeals from Hollywood stars Walter Brennan, Bing Crosby, Alan Ladd, Pat O’Brien, Jimmy Steward, Robert Stack, Barbara Stanwyck and Dick Powell, plus television stars Art Linkletter, Dinah Shore and Jack Webb.

The "Freedom Tank" was on display for years at the Ford Museum in Detroit, Michigan, before it was sold to a local farmer. Military vehicle collector Jim Gilmore in Pennsylvania now owns the “Freedom Tank," which is currently located in the state of Michigan.

The photograph of where the "Freedom Tank" crashed through the Iron Curtain  is taken from an album of the Czech Border guards entitled "The Tactic of the Enemy" that is now in the collection of the Czech police in Prague.

Other photographs of "Freedom Tank" courtesy of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Collection, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Film clip taken from a 1953 newsreel.

Vaclav Uhlik died in 1977.

Libuse (Lela) Cloud died on December 1, 2012; she was 90 years old.