Notes for subscribers: Rare 1960s propaganda film about the CIA's "Radio Liberation"

Most of the weaponized immigrants you see here are Nazi collaborators of one type or another. The drive for liberty is universal!

I’m working on Part II of the series, picking up the story of Soviet Nazi collaborator Leonid Pylaev as he takes part in the creation of Radio Liberty, a covert psychological warfare project that sought to weaponize Soviet immigrants against the Soviet Union.

It should be out in about in a week or so…

In the meantime, I want to show you a great and funny short doc that the CIA’s Radio Liberty made about itself in the 1960s. It’s unique because the radio station was usually very media shy. Unlike Radio Free Europe — its fame-hungry CIA brother station that was broadcast into Eastern Europe at the exact same time — it rarely sought to sell its cause to the American people and, as far as I know it never, it never made a show of trying to raise funds from the public. It mostly kept a low profile and stayed out of the spotlight — until it was unmasked as a covert CIA op in 1969.

The film has a superb Cold War vibe. It also gives us a rare opportunity to see this CIA radio station spinning its own fable. It also gives you a sense of the scale of this thing. Just in terms of energy consumed, Radio Liberty ran the most powerful radio operation on the planet.