The Third World War

Munich. Continuing scandals—zealously kept from the notice of the U.S. taxpayers, who pay the bills— rock the multi-million-dollar Radio Free Europe organization. Eric Hazelhof, boss of RFE’s operating center here, has been compelled to resign, along with the personnel director, M. C. Mac-Neill, and David Penn, a political consultant. The immediate occasion was a protest by 28 Czech and Slovak employees against Hazelhof’s appointment of Oswald Kostrba as head of the Czechoslovak section. The protesters claimed that Kostrba was incompetent, opposed to RFE’s goals, and compromised by strong pro-Communist links dating back to wartime activities in Benes’ entourage. Kostrba was associated with a Communist agent, M. L. Freund (or Frojka), executed by the Russians in the Slansky trial (1952), and with a Bavarian deputy named Frenzel, who has just been arrested by the Bavarian police, in seeming connection with the Kostrba flap. Within the past four years a dozen of RFE’s Czech staff have defected to the East. RFE retained M. F. Machacek as its Czech representative in Paris for two years after the French police reported him as an enemy agent, until he too (in 1958) jumped the Curtain. The Bavarian government is so skeptical about RFE people that it refuses them entry to refugee camps.

Burnham

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James Burnham

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Munich. Continuing scandals—zealously kept from the notice of the U.S. taxpayers, who pay the bills— rock the multi-million-dollar Radio Free Europe organization. Eric Hazelhof, boss of RFE’s operating center here, has been compelled to resign, along with the personnel director, M. C. Mac-Neill, and David Penn, a political consultant. The immediate occasion was a protest by 28 Czech and Slovak employees against Hazelhof’s appointment of Oswald Kostrba as head of the Czechoslovak section. The protesters claimed that Kostrba was incompetent, opposed to RFE’s goals, and compromised by strong pro-Communist links dating back to wartime activities in Benes’ entourage. Kostrba was associated with a Communist agent, M. L. Freund (or Frojka), executed by the Russians in the Slansky trial (1952), and with a Bavarian deputy named Frenzel, who has just been arrested by the Bavarian police, in seeming connection with the Kostrba flap. Within the past four years a dozen of RFE’s Czech staff have defected to the East. RFE retained M. F. Machacek as its Czech representative in Paris for two years after the French police reported him as an enemy agent, until he too (in 1958) jumped the Curtain. The Bavarian government is so skeptical about RFE people that it refuses them entry to refugee camps.

Burnham