Abstract
This chapter analyzes interviews that the radio stations Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America conducted with refugees from Eastern Europe. It examines how these interviews were used to create knowledge about the region and how refugee stories reflected the paradigms of East European and Western (primarily American) propaganda. This chapter concentrates on the fears refugees had about the Communist security services and their networks of informers. Refugees often made claims about Communist security services that wildly overstated their numbers. These claims then resurfaced in RFE radio broadcasts, further supporting beliefs in Eastern Europe about the omniscience of police informers. This chapter also speculates on the reluctance of Western analysts to consider information that contradicted claims about the ubiquity of police terror in Eastern Europe, even when it came directly from the same refugees.
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