Radio Free Europe: Airwave of Spies. And my Dad.

The voices crackled over the airwaves, carrying news and dissent through the static-laced void of the Iron Curtain. In a cramped apartment in Budapest, a family huddled around a shortwave radio, tuning past the droning, state-approved reports to find a different voice—one that spoke of things the regime didn’t want them to hear. A Western voice. A free voice. It was Radio Free Europe (RFE), the beacon that crackled into kitchens, garages, and cell meetings across Eastern Europe, delivering the news as it was, not as the Politburo wanted it to be.

In 1960 my family moved to London. My dad was working for Radio Free Europe. They had an office in Portman Square. I’m a kid so I’m not sure what I think of all this. I remember the square and the office. There’s was a radio studio. It seemed my dad was doing good. Our apartment was filled with political refugees. We knew who the bad guys were.

Information War

By the 1960s, Radio Free Europe had become a lifeline to those behind the Iron Curtain, reporting on everything from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Prague Spring of 1968. It broadcast messages from exiles, dissidents, and defectors, slipping past Soviet censors in a battle not fought with guns but with words. For listeners, RFE wasn’t just radio—it was proof that the world hadn’t forgotten them.

But who controlled the voice on the other end of the signal?

CIA Brainchild

My dad worked for the CIA. He never admitted it until at the end of his life he told me everyone worked for the CIA in one way or another. It was all just information gathering and writing reports and sending them back to Washington.

RFE’s origins were no mystery in Washington. Launched in the late 1940s as part of the U.S. psychological warfare strategy, it was bankrolled by the CIA under a front organization: the National Committee for a Free Europe. Money moved through shell accounts, and editorial lines were subtly shaped by intelligence officers who saw the station as a powerful tool against Soviet influence. In Munich, where RFE’s main studios were based, journalists—many of them Eastern European exiles—produced news that challenged communist narratives, while intelligence operatives monitored reactions behind the Curtain.

We had a piece of the Iron Curtain in our living room. It was a twist of barbed wire in a plexiglass shell. I always imagined a spy, most likely my dad, clipping a piece of it as he crawled under on a spy mission.

By the mid-1960s, the game was changing. Public scrutiny was growing, and Congress was starting to pull at the edges of CIA secrecy. The agency’s grip loosened, and by 1971, the funding shifted officially to a government-sponsored model under the Board for International Broadcasting. But throughout the ‘60s, CIA fingerprints still marked RFE’s broadcasts—even if the hand directing them was pulling back into the shadows.

London’s Portman Square RFE

London was still dealing with the aftermath of WW 2 in 1960. We lived walking distance to Portman Square. In New York, we lived a world apart from my dad and his mysterious work. In London, we were in his world. The RFE office was on the north side of the square in a red brick townhouse. It wasn’t one of those quaint quiet squares. It was squashed between two busy streets of traffic.

Munich was the heart of RFE, but London’s Portman Square held its own secrets. The unassuming office space, tucked away just off the bustling shopping center of Oxford Street, functioned as a hub for Cold War media operations, intelligence gathering, and liaison activities. While RFE officially had no major presence there, British and American intelligence networks operated in the same circles—using London as a quiet meeting ground for journalists, diplomats, and spies.

A lot of that happened around the dinner table of our home. My mother was an excellent host and we were often asked to pass trays of hors d’oureves. I never knew who was eating all those pigs in a blanket, but I loved walking around those rooms seeing all the men dressed in suits and the women in their cocktail dresses. I can still smell the colognes and perfumes.

What was RFE’s agenda? The answer isn’t in any declassified memo, but whispers from former operatives suggest that Portman Square played a role in coordinating fundraising, recruitment, and strategic alignments. Britain, after all, had its own stake in the information war, and the MI6-CIA relationship often blurred the lines between broadcasting and intelligence work.

Danger Radio

The Soviets knew the power of words. They jammed RFE signals, flooded the airwaves with counter-propaganda, and accused it of being a pure CIA mouthpiece—sometimes exaggerating, but never entirely wrong. The reality was more complex: RFE started as a covert U.S. operation but evolved into something bigger—an instrument not just of espionage, but of resistance and truth for those who had none.

Those days are gone. RFE funding is cut. Soft power is cut. We’re in another world. No longer a world of spies and no need for radio propaganda. It’s bots and algorithms now.

My dad moved on from Portman Square and Radio Free Europe. He joined the American Embassy in London. I always wondered how he managed that parallel move that kept us in London. His career took us to South Africa and then Australia, but I think that little townhouse in Portman Square was the most intriguing of his jobs. I’ve always had a deep love of radio. Maybe it began back there in Portman Square.