Who’s speaking? Eastern European Exile in Franco’s Spain and the Cold War propaganda battle

Abstract

In 1949, the Spanish national broadcasting service Radio Nacional de España (RNE) began airing on short wave its first program in the Polish language. By the end of the year, programs in five other Eastern European languages could be heard. The number of programs in different Eastern European languages and Chinese increased to sixteen by the 1960s. These programs were part of the “radio wars” for the hearts and minds of the ever-growing number of listeners across the Iron Curtain in the ensuing Cold War, alongside more well-known foreign language broadcasts such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Voice of America or the BBC. But “Radio Madrid”, as Spanish broadcasting was mostly referred to abroad, was not just like the other broadcasting stations. Like the American or British foreign language broadcasts, it set out to inform Polish, Hungarian, or Ukrainian listeners about current affairs on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and it employed political exiles from Eastern Europe to do so. At the same time, the Spanish national broadcasting service was the mouthpiece of the right-wing authoritarian dictatorship under the caudillo Francisco Franco. RNE’s broadcasting to Eastern Europe was part of a larger political strategy, as it fit right into Franco’s efforts in the postwar era to align himself with the Western anticommunist front and therefore gain acceptance for his regime by the Western powers. This chapter aims to identify the inner workings of the foreign language broadcasting of Radio National de España to Eastern Europe, and to contextualize it in the larger setting of Cold War broadcasting. It focuses on the first years of its broadcasting, and discusses its organization, cooperation, its programming and its reception in Eastern Europe.