What Wisner surely didn’t know at this stage, though, was that his advocacy of Nagy was being systematically undercut by an arm of the CIA he’d helped create: the Mighty Wurlitzer’s Radio Free Europe. With its Hungarian broadcasting staff largely composed of right-wing Hungarian exiles, RFE was not only the principal source of information on the revolution for most Hungarians, but a cheerleader for the insurrectionists to demand ever more, to not seek compromise but to hold out for the tearing down of Hungary’s political structure altogether. To this end, Imre Nagy was not the solution, but
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