TRANSCRIPT OF BROADCAST BY FULTON LEWIS, JR.

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP74-00297R000900090014-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 23, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 28, 2013
• Sequence Number: 14
• Publication Date: December 20, 1957
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release @ 50-Yr 2013/10/29: CIA-RDP74-00297R000900090014-2
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TRANSCRIPT OF BROADCAST
By
Fulton Lewis, Jr.
Station WGMS at 7-7:15 P.M.
;:toco,16 December 1957
Portions of this broadca t were omitted due to the fact
that they did not concern the Crusade for Freedom program or
CIA in any way.
Now about Radio Free Europe and its affiliated operations
which are supposed to be sending the message of freedom and
hope behind the iron curtain from Munich, Germany, and Lisbon,
Portugal, the actual operation for which the Crusade for Free-
dom collects the truth dollars from the public, from you, the
armed services, and government employees. The president of
this Free Europe operation is a retired Lt. General in the
army, Willis D. Crittenberger, who is a close personal friend
of President Eisenhower and reportedly was put into the,job
on that account. Unfortunately, I am not able to tell you
much about him on a first-hand basis because I have been try-
ing to get in touch with General Crittenberger since Wednesday,
the 6th of November, Wednesday November 6, when I first called
at the Free Europe headquarters in New York in person, and I .
never have been able to get to him yet. I have made repeated
attempts to reach him by telephone to get an appointment with
him. I have left repeated calls asking him to call me back
at my expense, I have never had the courtesy of a reply to any
of them. Whether the staff under him is intercepting,these ap-
proaches on my part I have no idea, but that could be. In any
event, the general information I have been able to get about
the general is favorable although he is a comparative newcomer
to the organization. Inquiries as to his salary 'and the sal-
aries of other officials of the organizati n have been refused
although I have from my own sources inside the Free Europe or-
ganization a report on most of them, which I have every reason
to believe is accurate.
From the same sources I'm told that the annual cost of
the Free Europe operation is about $20,000Ga year and this is
corroborated by several outside sources, individuals previously
with the organization. One of the men who originally set itup
estimates that the operation in Munich alone costs $10,0009'
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year, the one in Lisbon costs between $3,000 and $5,000 a
year. All this, of course, is for running expenses of
day-to-day performance and is over and above the capital
investment that has been made in the plan. This capital
investment is tremendous, the headquarters in Munich is a
fantastic structure with th mgt modern and expensive
equipment and a staff of people, has its own or-
ganization of security police guards, which is not to the
liking of the German government but is tolerated because
of State Department pressure. There are large apartment
buildings for the personnel with parquet floors, tile baths,
modern kitchens, spacious living rooms and fancy furniture. The
explanation of these is that they were built at a time
when no accommodations of any kind were available in Munich
and that the rents are not lower than German rents. I have
before me an official statement on this subject which says
that Radio Free Europe has an equity in the buildings which
makes them self supporting. I commend that statement to
your attention, Radio Free Europe has an equity in the build-
ings which makes them self supporting. Just how owning an
equity in the buildings can possibly make the building self-
supporting is more than I'm able to under tand. For a proj-
ect to be self supporting there has to be income from it.
An equity is a partial ownership. As for the rent, I'm in-
formed by former Free Europe employees who lived in these
apartments that there is no rent. The apartments were pro-
vided, they said, free of charge to them. There are fleets
of automobiles and warehouses and supplies of equipment, re-
placements and parts. Until recently the personnel was al-
lowed the privilege of army post exchanges but this was
stopped on protest of the German government and Washington,
and they are now given an allowance up to $1,000 a year in-
stead.
Among the Free Europe operations in Munich, for the
propaganda balloon project, in which balloons loaded with
literature were floated over Czechoslovakia, Poland, and
Hungary to be released over the cities and towns. This op-
eration was terminated in October 1956, well over a year ago.
I have before me a photostat of the original order discon-
tinuing the project on the date of December 3, 1956. This
document begins with an announcement of the suspension of
all three programs and the purported reasons in each case.
Actually, the order came from Washington. The directive
then goes on to state "maintain operational status until
further notice and keep casualties and firing to a minimum.
Operational personnel should be assigned other tasks in-
cluding: a. physical relief projects such as processing,
and transporting supplies in conjunction with the German
Red Cross; b, balloon research program editorial personnel
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should concentrate on refugee news and education service
as permitted by Austrian authorities and found useful by
the refugees themselves. This program would include phrase
books, text books, and other reading material as well as
(a) news bulletin, Hungarian; and (b) expanded mailing
projects. Selection and translation of more European titles,
improvement of mailers network, more local arrangements for
sponsorship. Then follow a detailed list of specific new
projects on which the employees who had been employed on
the defunct balloon program could be given jobs. In short,
the people who were no longer needed on the balloon project
were going to be kept on the payroll anyway and jobs were
going to be found for them. Fact of the matter is that as
of today, one year and seventeen days later, there still are
136 employees on the payroll although not one balloon has
been launched in more than 13 months. In fact, it was not
until several weeks ago, when an employee named George A.
Tripnowsky was dispatched from New York to Munich to finally
liquidate the baloon project, and he was given 45 days in
which to do it on a perdiem basis of $20 a day plus salary,
plus travel cost.
I inquired to as why it was necessary to go to this ex-
tra expense when there was still plenty of personnel in
Munich entirely capable of doing the liquidation, selling
the quonsets and equipment and supplies and so forth, and
that in fact even as Mr. Tripnowsky was on his way over there,
the head of the balloon project, Howard S. Weaver, a $15,000
a year employee who has been with it since the very begin-
ning was being brought back to New York. I was informed
Mr. Weaver had to be brought back to the United States be-
cause he was one of the individuals in the Free Europe op-
eration who had been involved in a blackmarket cigaret scan-
dal. The Free Europe headquarters in New York it seems,
sent its general council, a young man named Richard Greenleg,1
to Munich to defend the eight individuals when they were
tried in German courts, and I'm inform d by one source that
the cost of his trip and his services amounted to approxi-
mately $10,000. The Free Europe officials admitted when I
questioned them, that the cost was several thousand. Any-
way, Mr. Weaver and the other seven were all convicted and
fined and had to be recalled to the United States. You see
ladies and gentlemen, they don't tell you about these little
points when they're asking for contributions to fight Com-
munism with truth.
You may have thought that that was a very long shot
ladies and gentlemen, when I told you the road block that
was placed in my way last night in trying to locate former
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Lt. Colonel Ralph W. Clemments, of the Army Medical
Corps in Munich, who ha's important information in this
story and the fact that I thought we could lick the
road block throughihis audience; He resigned from the
army last September, had to be somewhere and this pro-
gram goes almost everywhere. So I asked you to be on
the lookout for him. Within eight minutes after I was
off the air last night, I had a telephone call from a
listener giving me his exact whereabouts and today the
colonel called himself. That's the top of the news as
it looks from here.
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