Dangerously naive VOA journalists make fools of themselves

I wonder if there shouldn’t be an annual Stalin Fools Prize.

I personally have no doubt that Pack, Trump’s pick for CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, is right in taking seriously warnings from the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that his predecessors at USAGM and VOA did not carry out proper security screenings for about 40% of the agency’s employees. If they did, VOA would not have hired a Russian TV reporter who had produced earlier anti-U.S. propaganda videos with conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic overtones.

For the sake of protecting VOA’s credibility, the VOA newsroom should be very worried about such lax employee vetting procedures. I listened to one of Pack’s interviews and read the letter from the 14 VOA newsroom correspondents. I found the tone of their letter to be far more similar to McCarthy’s attacks on patriotic Americans in the 1950s than any of Pack’s explanations as to why the agency’s journalists need to be better protected from intimidation and possible blackmail through better security screenings of new employees.

Very few spies are ever exposed or identified, but Fast and quite a few former VOA journalists were definitely Soviet agents of influence. Some of them ended up later working as anti-American propagandists for communist regimes.

The 14 VOA journalists who penned the letter may have forgotten that although Sen. Joseph McCarthy was a demagogue and made baseless accusations against many individuals, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of giving U.S. atomic secrets to Soviet spies.

After World War II, there was at least one active Communist agent employed by VOA, and several more employed by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, who were subsequently discovered. In the early 1950s, a communist provocateur Zbigniew Juliusz Brydak infiltrated the Voice of America bureau in Munich, West Germany, and spied on VOA journalists. He also spied on Radio Free Europe but did not get a full-time position there because its Polish Service Director, Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, suspected him of working for the Communist secret police.

Brydak recorded programs for VOA under his radio name, Stefan Michalski. He later broadcast on Polish radio false accusations against his former VOA and RFE colleagues and worked for a news magazine launched in Poland by former Voice of America editor Stefan Arski, aka Artur Salman. Arski was a socialist activist and journalist who had resigned from VOA in 1947 after being told that he would be replaced by a U.S. citizen. After working briefly for the Polish Embassy in Washington, Arski went back to Poland, joined the Communist Party and became an anti-American propagandist who viciously attacked VOA, RFE, various U.S. administrations, and the U.S. Congress. He spread Soviet propaganda lies, which he also did while working for VOA in the 1940s.

These were not innocent spy and propaganda games. Marek Walicki, my former deputy at the VOA Polish Service in the 1980s, described in two books how Brydak’s provocations before he was hired by VOA resulted in young Polish anti-Communist and former anti-Nazi World War II fighters being imprisoned, tortured, and executed by the Soviet-dominated Communist regime in Poland. Brydak tried to recruit Walicki for a clandestine trip to Poland that would have resulted in his capture by the communist secret police, but Walicki, suspecting foul play, had refused these approaches. These were dangerous times for opponents of communism, both behind the Iron Curtain and even in the West.

There is no reason to believe that such foreign intelligence activities against VOA and other USAGM journalists have stopped. In the 1980s, Communist agents also tried to recruit some of our VOA Polish Service journalists. Protection of VOA, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks is just as important now as it was during the Cold War considering who is currently ruling Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and a few other adversary countries. The attempted poisoning of Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption journalist Alexei Navalny drives this point home. Several years ago, VOA’s Russian Service posted an interview with Navalny that turned out to be completely fake. I would not be at all surprised if the same people who tried to poison Navalny and served up a fake interview to gullible VOA editors were also responsible for some of the murders and beatings of opposition journalists in Russia.

Brydak was discovered by the CIA and admitted to his spying activities. But he still managed to sneak back to Poland. Although some of the methods of exerting influence have changed since the 1950s, VOA English newsroom journalists should not delude themselves that people like Arski and Brydak no longer pose a threat to legitimate journalists and U.S. government employees.

They seem to forget that compared to former Soviet leaders, Russian President Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB intelligence officer, is far more sophisticated in manipulating foreign media and interfering in U.S. elections.

Ted Lipien is a former Voice of America acting associate director.