The intelligence agency aimed for the wartime prime minister to broadcast on Radio Liberty, intending to destabilize the Soviet Union politically.
The Telegraph has reported that the CIA attempted to recruit British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1950s to broadcast propaganda on the agency-supported Radio Liberty, as part of an effort to undermine the Soviet Union.
During the height of the Cold War, the CIA-funded radio station focused propaganda broadcasts on the Soviet Union, while its counterpart, Radio Free Europe, targeted Moscow’s allies. Both were secretly controlled and financed by the US intelligence agency until 1972, then merged into RFE/RL four years later.
In 1958, Radio Liberty’s management proposed capitalizing on the wave of “revisionism” then affecting the Soviet Union and exploiting developing ideological schisms within Marxism-Leninism to weaken the government, the Telegraph reported on Saturday, referencing declassified CIA documents.
The agency’s focus was reportedly on leveraging “revisionist thinkers,” individuals who favored separate Communist states over a unified Soviet bloc.
Churchill – then 83 years old and having withdrawn from active politics – was among several prominent individuals identified to deliver these broadcasts, the Telegraph noted. Although Churchill was a staunch anti-Communist, a fact evident in his renowned “Iron Curtain” speech delivered in Fulton in 1946, the report states there is no indication he accepted the invitation.
The programs intended to “stimulate heretical thinking” and “undermine confidence in any form of Marxism by suggesting that its basic assumptions, its historical method and its predictions are false,” the newspaper quoted a CIA briefing note as stating.
Churchill personally knew Alan Dulles, the then-director of the agency. However, in the spring of 1958, “when he was earmarked for a propaganda program,” he declined an offer to travel to Washington due to health issues, according to the Telegraph.
More recently, RFE/RL continued to receive funding from Washington under the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) until President Donald Trump’s budget cuts, which were part of his broader initiative to reduce government spending. Last month, USAGM announced it would eliminate more than 500 staff positions, following hundreds of layoffs in the preceding months.