Sixty years ago this August, one of the strangest information wars ever fought raged over the skies of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. From that summer month onward, thousands of balloons with compact, car-sized payloads floated across the Iron Curtain landscape, dropping tens of millions of newspapers, political leaflets, and stickers into cities and villages.

Launched by Radio Free Europe and Free Europe Press, these documents urged peasants to refuse to cooperate with collective farms. They exhorted Slovaks and Czechs to boycott national elections. They included embarrassing secret memos suppressed by Communist governments.

"The balloons also provoked a degree of official Communist fury never elicited by RFE broadcasts," writes Radio Free Europe historian Arch Puddington, who describes the campaign in his book Broadcasting Freedom. "Regime leaders were reduced to profanity when the subject of the balloons came up." Some even protested the tactic before the United Nations.

The initiative went through three names: Operation Prospero, Operation Focus, and Operation Veto. These aerial information assaults were imaginative and daring, but they did not change much in Eastern Europe. In November of 1956, the West abandoned the crusade. Why did this bold action fail? Because while Prospero and its subsequent versions cut a huge hole through the Iron Curtain's information wall, Radio Free Europe wasn't always sure what to tell the people of Prague, Budapest, and Krakow.

For its time, the medium was powerful, but the message was ineffective, one-sided, and unclear. In our age of Facebook and Twitter revolutions, it's worth taking a critical look at the Cold War's Battle of Balloons.

Nothing haphazard

By 1951, Soviet Communism dominated almost all the Eastern and Baltic states. It is no cliché to note that resistance to this fate was futile. In 1953, Soviet troops brutally crushed a worker's revolt in East Germany. Three years later, USSR tanks rolled into Hungary and destroyed that country's reform government.

At the same time, the United States and its allies launched organizations to respond to this development. Free Europe Press was a by-product of the Free Europe Committee—established in 1949 and initially chaired by Allen Dulles, head of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Radio Free Europe was created in 1950 to broadcast to Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania from Central Europe. A parallel unit called Radio Liberty was established three years later to transmit directly to the Soviet Union. The CIA put up much of the early money to keep these operations going. That funding subsidized Prospero and its successive campaigns.

How did Prospero work? "There was nothing haphazard about the balloon operation," Puddington notes. Free Europe Press constructed launch sites in Bavaria and along the eastern borders of Austria and West Germany. The bases were situated to easily float air vessels across Poland, Hungary, and most of Czechoslovakia. One launch site resembled a small airport, complete with barracks, a dining hall, and a meteorology lab.

At first, Prospero deployed relatively small rubber balloons, designed to burst at certain atmospheric heights, thus dropping their payloads in designated areas. These could only target cities and villages a short distance away, and so the campaign turned to bigger plastic devices. These could float at higher attitudes, and they included dry ice as ballast. "When the dry ice was exhausted the leaflet container tipped over releasing the leaflets," explains the military historian Herbert A. Friedman.

Often the operators would first launch a "pilot balloon" and follow its trajectory to see what the prevalent wind and weather would allow. By the late stages of the program, balloons capable of rising 75,000 feet above the earth carried hundreds of pounds of leaflets across the Eastern European landscape. A razor blade gadget sliced into the bags of propaganda at the right time, releasing thousands of documents. Some leaflets journeyed all the way to Central Turkey.

You have been warned

The three balloon campaigns had different objectives. Prospero targeted workers in Czechoslovakia's main industrial cities, especially Prague. It exploited widespread discontent over that country's recent monetary reform, which included currency devaluation.

The main leaflet included a picture of Czechoslovakia's crown note, which it called the "hunger crown." The other side read as follows: "Czechs and Slovaks, know this: The regime is weaker than you think. Power lies with the people, and the people stand opposed. With unity and courage, organize your strength. Down with the collective. Insist on workers' rights today. Demand concessions—tomorrow, Freedom."

Next came Operation Veto. This initiative targeted Czechoslovakia's 1954 parliamentary and municipal elections. There was no serious opposition to the Communist Party, but Veto leaflets urged readers to press candidates on a variety of fronts: the right to independent unions, the chance to opt out of state-supervised collective farms, and the right to change jobs. The pamphlets bolstered the content of Radio Free Europe broadcasts.

Last came Operation Focus, similar to Veto, but directed at Hungary's dubious electoral process. Focus urged Hungarians to press candidates for religious freedom and cultural independence. The music of the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok, for example, was banned by the government in the early 1950s. Following the dispersal of these pamphlets over the country, an RFE announcer would often mention their presence over the airwaves, directing his comments at Communist Party officials.

"Do not be a blind tool in the hands of the usurpers of power," one broadcast told Party functionaries. "Now you have received this warning from the Hungarian people in writing so you cannot claim that no one has warned you."