Winds of Freedom

The guardians of the Iron Curtain suppress news and ideas from the free world, keep out visitors, jam broadcasts. But they cannot turn back the wind, which in Central Europe blows from West to East. The thought of using this wind to talk to the people in Red Europe has long fascinated Westerners. One night last week, thought became action.

In a Bavarian stubble field stood leaders of the Crusade for Freedom, a private international organization pledged to keep the free world in contact with the peoples isolated by Communist rule.

The Crusade's 1951 chairman, Harold Stassen, and Fellow Crusaders C. D. Jackson and Drew Pearson, looking like three Statues of Liberty, held high above their heads big rubber balloons. At signal they solemnly let go. The balloons rose into a cloud-flecked, moonlit sky. Then for several hours hydrogen hissed from tanks as some 2,000 other balloons were filled and released in the glare of lamps from a truck convoy.

Bouncing Message. The wind carried the balloons at 30 m.p.h. high over a line of low, dark hills on the horizon, where lay the Czech border. At 30,000 feet, the rubber balloons exploded, releasing thousands of leaflets. Another type of balloon, pillow-shaped, of glistening, translucent polyethylene, slowly oozed hydrogen through the plastic pores and sank to earth; it would give a ghostly effect as it bounced along the ground over hedges or lodged against walls and trees. On it, in five-inch letters, was printed the single word svoboda (Czech for "freedom"). Inside were more leaflets:

"A new wind is blowing. New hope is stirring. Friends of freedom in other lands have found a new way to reach you. They know that you also want freedom. Millions of free men and women have joined together and are sending you this message of friendship over the winds of freedom . . . There is no dungeon deep enough to hide truth, no wall high enough to keep out the message of freedom. Tyranny cannot control the winds, cannot enslave your hearts. Freedom will rise again."

On the back of each leaflet were listed wave lengths and schedules of major free-world stations broadcasting to Czechoslovakia. From Munich, Radio Free Europe urged Czech students, postmen, housewives, civil servants to pick up the leaflets and distribute them as widely as possible.

Cautious Contact. What might the balloon barrage accomplish? Crusade for Freedom is not, so far, suggesting revolt, for revolt--like General Bor's in Warsaw --can be premature and disastrous. Instead, the balloons are an imaginative experiment in contact, bearing a message of hope until the time might be ripe for other words.

First official Czech reaction came from

Geneva. At a U.N. Economic and Social Council meeting, Czech Delegate Arnost Tauber objected bitterly to the balloons, called them "further proof of subversive activities by the U.S. Government." Said Crusader Stassen: "We tore a big hole in the Iron Curtain."

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