Excerpt from Financial Times Newspaper:
I started with Rich Cummings, former director of security for RFE/RL. He had joined the radio stations’ Munich headquarters just months before Carlos the Jackal, funded by the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, bombed the building, and he recalled the early years of his tenure as deadly serious, with constant worries about infiltration by spies. He also reminded me that the stations themselves were a microcosm of the internal dynamics of the cold war: many of the various nationalities who worked there had almost as much dislike for one another as they did for communism. In one memorable event, two staffers who had been doing some hard drinking in the headquarters canteen let their nationalist passions escalate into a fight in which one man put his cigarette out on the other’s forehead. In retaliation, the branded man bit off his opponent’s finger.
Cummings, who still lives in Germany, continues to delve into the history of the cold war. His book, Cold War Radio, is scheduled for publication next year. I asked him if he thought the US had won it. “I think the objectives that I read from the CIA in the late 1940s and the state department in 1949 to 1950 were reached with the final fall of communism in Russia in 1991. It doesn’t mean we won. It means that [we met] the objectives, and those were simply to give the people [of the eastern bloc] a chance to do what they wanted to do. But, did we win? I don’t think we, meaning America, really won anything.”
The cold guard
By Henry Hamman
Published: October 11 2008
I started with Rich Cummings, former director of security for RFE/RL. He had joined the radio stations’ Munich headquarters just months before Carlos the Jackal, funded by the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, bombed the building, and he recalled the early years of his tenure as deadly serious, with constant worries about infiltration by spies. He also reminded me that the stations themselves were a microcosm of the internal dynamics of the cold war: many of the various nationalities who worked there had almost as much dislike for one another as they did for communism. In one memorable event, two staffers who had been doing some hard drinking in the headquarters canteen let their nationalist passions escalate into a fight in which one man put his cigarette out on the other’s forehead. In retaliation, the branded man bit off his opponent’s finger.Cummings, who still lives in Germany, continues to delve into the history of the cold war. His book, Cold War Radio, is scheduled for publication next year. I asked him if he thought the US had won it. “I think the objectives that I read from the CIA in the late 1940s and the state department in 1949 to 1950 were reached with the final fall of communism in Russia in 1991. It doesn’t mean we won. It means that [we met] the objectives, and those were simply to give the people [of the eastern bloc] a chance to do what they wanted to do. But, did we win? I don’t think we, meaning America, really won anything.”
The cold guard
By Henry Hamman
Published: October 11 2008
Rich,
ReplyDeleteI can't wait for your book to come out to purchase it.
Then when I hopefully will see you at the Class Reunion, you can autograph it for me!
We will have to set up a table for you for a book signing!
Hugs, Rose