Visitors to the famed Vysehrad cemetery in Prague might see a gravestone with a tragic comic face and the engraved words:

JARA KOHOUT
*9.XII.1904 +23.X.1994
HEREC

HEREC is the Czech word for actor. The life of Jara Kohout and the role he played in the Cold War will be examined briefly below.

On August 13, 1951, at approximately 1 a.m., the first of large balloons were lofted carrying leaflets destined for readers behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia. Over the next five years, the skies of Central Europe were filled with over 500,000 balloons -- some of which were as tall as 60 feet -- carrying over 300,000,000 leaflets, posters and books.

In this article, I will update my article of April 28, 2010, and briefly describe what happened during that early morning in August 1951 along the Czechoslovak border.

60 years ago this week (July 27, 1950), the Freedom Bell, one of the icons of the Cold War, was cast in Croydon, England, at the foundry of Gillett & Johnston, Ltd. The Freedom Bell is today in the Schoenberg City Hall in Berlin—site of President John F. Kennedy’s famous words: “Ich bin ein Berliner”. In this article, I will update my article on the Freedom Bell that appeared in Historytimes.com on October 23, 2009.

At the request of the National Committee for Free Europe (NCFE), the public relations company John Price Jones wrote a plan in late 1949 that called for a symbol to be used in proposed upcoming fund raising campaign in 1950. In January 1950, DeWitt Poole of NCFE called his friend Harry Bullis, then Chairman of General Mills Corporation in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and asked him for assistance in fulfilling the fund-raising plan. Bullis agreed and contacted Abbott Washburn, World War II OSS veteran and public relations expert at the General Mills Corporation, who consented to cooperate with the fledgling Crusade for Freedom team.

The recent “spy swap” in Vienna has been compared in the Westeran media to those that took place in the Cold War.  Actually, there were only three known cases: 1962, 1985, and 1986 on the Glienecke Bridge (Bridge of Unity) between Postsdam and then West Berlin.

The first took place on February 10, 1962, at 8:44 AM, when famed U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, who was forced down over the USSR in May 1960, was exchanged for convicted KGB agent Colonel Rudolf Ivanovich Abel.