Radio Free Europe Promised Aid To Hungarian Rebels, Documents Confirm

Newly released documents concerning Radio Free Europe broadcasts during the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the Soviets confirm what many Hungarians remembered and others suspected: that commentators encouraged the Hungarians to battle on in the false understanding that they would receive reinforcements from the West.

The documents were among those made public this week at a conference on historians’ access to archives from the cold war era.

The main item shedding new light on the broadcasts is an internal Radio Free Europe memorandum written by William Griffith, then a political adviser at the Munich-based station, a few weeks after the rebellion was crushed.

Griffith noted that a broadcast on Oct. 27, four days after the revolt began, “fairly clearly implies that foreign aid will be forthcoming if the resistance forces succeed in establishing a ‘central military command.”’

A program on the following day, Griffith said, stated that “Hungarians must continue to fight vigorously because this will have a great effect on the handling of the Hungarian question by the Security Council.” Without saying so directly, the author of the broadcast, a Hungarian emigre, implied that the United Nations would give active support to Hungarians if they kept on fighting, Griffith said.

At the time of the revolt, Radio Free Europe was covertly financed in part by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Many Hungarians still remember listening to the broadcasts, which many said gave tremendous hope - false hope, it turned out - that help was on the way.

On Nov. 4, for example, the day the Soviets suppressed the rebellion, a Radio Free Europe broadcaster, Zoltan Thury, told his listeners, “In the Western capitals a practical manifestation of Western sympathy is expected at any hour.” Griffith noted in his memo that Thury’s broadcast constituted the “most serious policy violation of all.”