Windborne Message

Over hilly Sudetenland and the spires of Prague, thousands of white paper leaflets fluttered down. Each night for four nights 2,000 plastic balloons spilled out 2,000,000 leaflets. That was the way the people of Red Czechoslovakia got the real story last week of how Locomotive Engineer Jaroslav Konvalinka raced his Prague-Asch "freedom train" across the Czech border into Germany (TIME, Sept. 24).

Konvalinka himself helped the West's new private and enterprising propaganda agency, Winds of Freedom,* launch its balloons at the German town of Selb, where the train, with 108 people aboard, had ended its escapade. The leaflets carried pictures of Konvalinka, the train, and a group of 18 of the 31 Czechs who did not go back to Czechoslovakia. They also carried a message from Konvalinka scotching the Reds' late, lame explanation that the train had been "kidnaped by U.S agents." Wrote Konvalinka: "My countrymen, I beg you not to believe Americans were involved. It is just one more of the many lies . . . No, there were no terrorists, no secret foreign plot. The only terrorists are the Communists; the only foreigners are those from Russia."

The freedom train was one of those rare, imaginative exploits which are worth a barrel of slogans, and Winds of Freedom was quick to capitalize on it. So were the authorities. Cutting through the red tape which frequently keeps Iron Curtain refugees bound in detention camps for frustrating months, officials made plans to have all 31 of the freedom train passengers resettled in Canada within a month.

* A project of Crusade for Freedom, which, like Radio Free Europe, is run by the National Committee for a Free Europe, Inc.

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