Balony svobody – Tomek Prokop (2014)

The book "Balloons of Freedom: The Leaflet Operations of Radio Free Europe 1951-1956" is the first comprehensive Czech account of one chapter in the history of the Cold War. Between 1951 and 1956, several propaganda campaigns were conducted from German territory using leaflets delivered over Czechoslovakia by small balloons. This was historically the largest project for airborne leaflet distribution in Czechoslovakia. Among the balloon campaigns of Radio Free Europe, those aimed at Czechoslovakia were by far the largest compared to similar projects for Hungary and Poland. The official executing organizations were the American National Committee for Free Europe and its auxiliary organization, the Crusade for Freedom. However, the real initiators were the CIA and the U.S. government, which undoubtedly covered the significant financial costs of the projects. The distribution of leaflets was one of the steps in the psychological warfare that the American government sought to employ in response to the perceived communist threat at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s. By depicting the contemporary foreign-political context, the work sheds light on the circumstances surrounding the inception of the idea for the balloon operations of Radio Free Europe. It also describes...