On February 24, 1982, the Voice of America held a celebration to mark the 40th anniversary of its founding. It was believed that the first Voice of America radio broadcast in German was aired on February 24, 1942, but it may have aired three weeks earlier, possibly on February 1, 1942. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan came to the VOA building at 330 Independence Avenue, SW in Washington, DC to deliver a special address. In referring to the early years of the Voice of America during World War II and first VOA Director John Houseman, President Reagan most likely did not know that Houseman was a radical pro-Soviet propagandist who in mid-1943 was forced to resign for hiring communists, some of whom remained with VOA until the late 1940s and continued to broadcast Soviet propaganda in support of communist dictator Josef Stalin. They were slowly replaced in the late 1940s and the early 1950s with anti-communist refugee journalists from Eastern Europe. Under strong pressure from the U.S. Congress, the content of VOA broadcasting changed from supporting Soviet foreign policy to exposing communist atrocities in the later years of the Cold War.

In the early 1950s, the U.S. State Department launched its public diplomacy program called “The Campaign of Truth” designed to counter Soviet propaganda using the Voice of America (VOA) and the State Department’s public diplomacy programs. They were described in “The Campaign of Truth: How You Can Help” pamphlet published probably sometime in early 1952. At that time, the Voice of America was operating within the State Department since 1945. Before that, VOA, established in 1942, was part of the Office of War Information (OWI), which President Truman abolished shortly after the end of the war. The launch of “The Campaign of Truth” by the State Department coincided with management and programming reforms designed to make VOA broadcasts more effective against Soviet propaganda. Prior to about 1950-1951, VOA programs were generally not focusing on the Soviet Union and did not pay much attention to human rights violations in the Soviet block countries. “The Campaign of Truth” represented a radical change from the World War II and the immediate post-war period when pro-Soviet Voice of America officials and journalists enthusiastically promoted Soviet propaganda and supported Stalin’s plans for establishing communist governments in East-Central Europe. Some of their influence continued until the early 1950s but was rapidly declining compared to what it was during the war. When the Voice of America started broadcasting, the first permanent VOA chief news writer and editor was Howard Fast who later joined the Communist Party USA and in 1953 received the Stalin Peace Prize. He resigned from his job at VOA in 1944 and became a reporter and editor for the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker. A few of wartime VOA broadcasters, among them Stefan Arski (aka Artur Salman), Mira Złotowska Michałowska and Adolf Hoffmeister, went to work for Soviet-dominated communist regimes, and others were slowly replaced in the late 1940’s and the early 1950s with anti-communist refugee journalists from Russia and Eastern Europe. One of them was Helen Yakobson who as a young child had left Russia in 1925 with her parents, was educated in China and came to the United States as an immigrant in 1938. Voice of America programming started to change in the early 1950s largely in response to heavy bipartisan criticism in the U.S. Congress. Changes in VOA programming were also prompted by the escalation of tensions in relations with Russia and Soviet Block countries, the outbreak of the Korean War, and the creation of Radio Free Europe as a competing U.S.-funded radio organization. The “Campaign of Truth: How You Can Help” pamphlet included a photograph of a woman radio announcer holding a script in front of the microphone with the Russian sign “Voice of the United States of America.” According to a former Voice of America Russian Service director Marina Oeltjen, the woman in the photograph was Helen Zhemchuzhny Bates Yakobson (1913-2002). Yakobson had joined the Voice of America as it was being reformed and was put to work on the Russian-language program which was launched in 1947, but she was no longer working for VOA when the pamphlet was published by the State Department in 1952 although as a..Read More

  During World War II, the federal government’s Office of War Information (OWI),  where Voice of America (VOA) radio broadcasts for overseas audiences were started in 1942, produced news and factual war information as well as deceptive propaganda for both international and domestic audiences. Much of OWI’s and VOA’s propaganda output in radio broadcasts and in print was anti-Nazi and anti-Japanese. News and information radio broadcasts and publications for the press were in many cases truthful on facts, but in some instances important facts were omitted or distorted and opinions were designed to deceive audiences. This usually happened when OWI and VOA officials and journalists felt that negative information about America’s  all important important military ally—the Soviet Union—needed to be censored and replaced with false claims of Stalin’s presumed support for democracy to advance U.S. war aims or sometimes to satisfy their own personal ideological preferences even against the wishes of the White House, the State Department or the Pentagon.