The Foreign Service Journal, May 2023

48 MAY 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Broadcasting Behind the (Opening) Iron Curtain Mark G. Pomar, a senior fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas, Austin, is the author of Cold War Radio: The Russian Broadcasts of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (Potomac Books, 2022). He taught Russian studies at the University of Vermont (1975-1982) and then joined RFE/RL as the assistant director of the Russian Service. He later became director of the USSR Division at the Voice of America and executive director of the Board for International Broadcasting, a U.S. federal agency that oversaw Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. From 1993 to 2008, he was a senior executive and president of IREX, a large U.S. international nonprofit that administers programs in education, civil society, and media, and the founding CEO and president of the U.S. Russia Foundation, a private U.S. foundation based in Moscow, from 2008 to 2017. The era of open communication following the end of the Cold War has thrown up new, more complex challenges. BY MARK G . POMAR O n Sept. 26, 1988, Valentin Falin, the chair of Novosti Press Agency, and Charles Z. Wick, director of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), opened the U.S.-USSR Information Talks, a three-day conference in Moscow aimed at expanding free access to informa- tion and increasing the number of cultural activities, exchanges, and exhibits. Building on the success of the May-June 1988 Moscow Summit—when President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev final- ISTOCK/NATALIA MISINTSEVA PUBLIC DIPLOMACY: THE COLD WAR AND BEYOND FOCUS