Surprise Action Seen as Good-Will Gesture : Soviets Halt Jamming of Radio Liberty

For the first time since it went on the air 35 years ago, Radio Liberty, originally a CIA-sponsored project to broadcast news to the Soviet Union in defiance of Moscow’s censors, is getting through without jamming, the U.S. government announced Wednesday.

U.S. officials said the halt in jamming probably was intended by Moscow as a good-will gesture before Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s meeting next week with President Reagan and President-elect George Bush.

The action also removes one Western objection to convening an international human rights conference in Moscow. The Soviet Union wants such a meeting to take place in 1991.

The Board for International Broadcasting, the U.S. agency that took over sponsorship of Radio Liberty and its sister station, Radio Free Europe, after their CIA affiliation became an embarrassment more than a decade ago, said the jamming ended without fanfare Tuesday night.

No Reason Given

The board said reports from inside the Soviet Union on Wednesday confirmed that the broadcasts are being heard clearly. The Soviets did not give any reason for the step or even announce that it had taken place.

The Soviets also ended their jamming of Radio Free Europe broadcasts to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Radio Free Europe, which broadcasts to Eastern European nations other than the Soviet Union, covers the three Baltic states because the United States has never recognized their annexation by the Soviet Union almost 50 years ago. Hungary and Romania stopped jamming Radio Free Europe earlier, while Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia are still jamming the station.

Broadcasting Surrogate

Ben Wattenberg, vice chairman of the board, said Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe are designed as “surrogate home broadcasting services,” transmitting the sort of news programming “that we believe would be broadcast in those countries if the countries were free.”

Radio Liberty broadcasts in 12 languages to the Soviet Union and Afghanistan.

Malcolm S. Forbes Jr., chairman of the board, speculated that the jamming--which is illegal under the United Nations Charter, the Helsinki accords on human rights and a stack of international communications agreements--had become an embarrassment to the Soviet Union.

Forbes, who visited the Soviet Union in September, said that some Soviet officials observed that the jamming “made them look foolish, gave the broadcasts the mystique of a forbidden fruit and it just wasn’t something that a great power should be trying to do.”

BBC No Longer Jammed

The Soviet Union stopped jamming British Broadcasting Corp. and Voice of America broadcasts last year.

Wattenberg said the Soviets may have concluded that the jamming of Radio Liberty was not worth the cost--estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars annually--because advances in audio and videocassette technology means that it is no longer possible to seal off a nation from outside information.

Despite the jamming, the programs often could be heard in the countryside, although the jamming in major cities was far more effective.

According to Soviet emigre sources, Radio Liberty programming has become somewhat less strident recently, which may have made it less of an irritant to Soviet authorities.