When Radio Free Europe Exposed Bulgarian Agent Provocateur Ivan Mirchev

We have already looked at the time, when Radio Free Europe in the early 1950s exposed, through its broadcasts, “blackmailers, informers and quislings” in Czechoslovakia and Romania. Below is a look at when RFE exposed one “secret agent” in Bulgaria: Ivan Merchev.

Radio Free Europe first broadcast as the "Voice of Free Bulgaria" via shortwave on August 11, 1951. The first broadcast featured an address by Dr. G.M. Dimitrov, President of the Bulgarian National Committee and editor of its newspaper. In part he said, "No earthly power has been able to halt the fight of the people against tyranny, injustice and terror."

Voice of Free Bulgaria

Bluebook March 1955

The RFE broadcast expose of Ivan Merchev was recounted by journalist Robert Bendiner in the March 1955 issue of Bluebook magazine:

The Battle of the Microphones

Ivan Mirchev was a minor Communist functionary in Bulgarian town of Russe," the story goes.

For a state tobacco inspector he was regarded as a pretty easy-going fellow. 

He not only listened sympathetically to gripes about the regime but contributed some of his own. And to a few of the local farmers he even talked confidentially about forming an underground anti-Communist cell. Nobody but his superior in the secret police, he assumed, knew that his reports had sent Neighbor X to a forced labor camp in Tutrakan, or Comrade Y to a solitary cell in Sofia.

Then one evening, after a hard and dirty day’s work, he flipped on the radio and caught the voice of Radio Free Europe:

'Today we will take up the case of Ivan Mirchev, a former insurance agent and now a secret agent of the State Security Service in Russe. Dear listeners, try to remember his name well, because some day you will need it. … Here in brief is the career of this traitor to the Bulgarian people.'

What followed was a complete description of Mirchev, down to the mole on his chin, and a full account of his shady operations --with names, dates and details.

As a secret operative, Comrade Mirchev was done. And when you are done in a Communist state, you are apt to be well done --a point that broadcasters for Radio Free Europe are fond of driving home. There are hundreds of Mirchevs in Bulgaria and thousands of their counterparts in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania, and they are not sleeping well. 

While diplomats have wrangled and politicians scolded, Radio Free Europe has been laying down a deadly electronic barrage on the Iron Curtain countries, since July 4, 1950.

Source

Robert Bendiner

"The Battle of the Microphones"

Bluebook Magazine

March 1955

Vol 100, #5. p. 30

The Urgent Whisper from Barbara: Radio Free Europe Begins Broadcasting on July 4, 1950

"Barbara"

Radio affects most people intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener...That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience. 

Marshall McLuhan

Sixty-one years ago, on July 4, 1950, Radio Free Europe transmitted its first program, as the “Voice of Free Czechoslovakia,” only 30 minutes in length, as an “audience building broadcast” that would continue for the next 10 days. The press notice released on July 3, 1950, in the United States in the name of the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE) outlined not only the ideological basis for the programming, but also publicly established the “cover” of the Central Intelligence Agency’s true sponsorship of Radio Free Europe:

The American people, and exiled leaders of Eastern Europe, will speak to the enslaved peoples behind the Iron Curtain tomorrow with a new and powerful voice as Radio Free Europe takes to the air using its newly completed European transmitters.

Owned and operated by the National Committee for a Free Europe, Inc., a group of private American citizens, Radio Free Europe will broadcast the true story of freedom and democracy to the eighty million people living in Communist slavery between Germany and Russia. Freed of diplomatic limitations, the broadcasts will be hard-hitting.

The National Committee for a Free Europe, Inc., was formed in June 1949, as a private organization open to membership to all interested in halting communism and saving freedom for the world.

In February 1950, CIA gave NCFE a stockpiled World War Two shortwave mobile transmitting unit, nickhamed "Barbara," that consisted of 

• studio van
• transmitter van
• generators
• fuel supply truck
• flatbed truck for antenna towers

The first broadcast from "Barbara" took place on a former Luftwaffe Air Base in Lampertheim (near Frankfurt), West Germany. There is no documentary or anecdotal evidence that the first broadcast was actually heard by anyone, other than those working at the “Barbara” transmitting site. Regular broadcasting to Czechoslovakia and Romania began on July 14, 1950.

Time magazine reported on July 17, 1950, under the rubric “Urgent Whisper," 

This week Czech and Rumanian radio listeners could hear music, plays and satires forbidden by their Communist masters—as well as the voices of men long exiled. These forbidden broadcasts came from a Radio Free Europe transmitter deep in Western Germany.

RFE's lone 7½-kilowatt transmitter is only a whisper compared to the worldwide 58-station network of Voice of America. But RFE, a branch of the National Committee for a Free Europe founded last year by a group of private U.S. citizens, expects to make up in pungency for its lack of volume. Explains Banker Frank Altschul, chairman of RFE: "Unhampered by diplomatic restrictions, we can slant our programs in a more definitely anti-Soviet way than the Voice."

Welcomed by the State Department as a freewheeling, free-speaking ally in the propaganda war, RFE plans to boost its power with five transmitters now on order. It intends, eventually, to speak strongly to every Communist satellite from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

The New York Times reported, “New ‘Voice’ Talks to Europe Like Member of the Family.” Some grass-root newspapers in the United States printed this editorial about Radio Free Europe and it’s “secret-location” transmitter:

Many wise statesmen have been appealing insistently to the free world to exert greater effort to the grimy "struggle for men's mind." They have pounded repeatedly on the idea that it isn't enough to combat Russian Communism with economic and military measures: that freedom must be shown to be the great cause it really a way of life eminently superior to the slavery imposed by Moscow.

The first imaginative stride in this direction has now been taken. From a secret radio transmitter in Europe, a new series of programs is being beamed to the countries behind the Iron Curtain … Radio Free Europe, as the new transmitter is called, is the product of the National Committee for Free Europe, which was organized about a year ago by outstanding American citizens.

We must make plain to decent people everywhere that the language of Communism is the language of falsehood, that Russia's words can never be believed because words to the Soviet Union are simply weapons in the psychological theater of war.