George R. Urban

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Dr. George R. Urban Former director of Radio Free Europe and director of the Centre for Policy Studies. Hungarian by birth, George Urban was one of the leading organisers in the West of the democratic front against Cold War communism. Urban was known for his interviews (Raymond Aron, Arnold Toynbee and Arthur Koestler) which appeared in Melvin Lasky's Encounter. After the exposure of the CIA funding in 1968 Urban moved to Los Angeles as a senior research associate of the school of politics and international relations at the University of Southern California. Here, with Roger Swearingen, he founded the journal Studies in Comparative Communism.

Urban's interviews resulted in several books, including Can We Survive Our Future? (1972, with Michael Glenny), a symposium about the state of the planet, and Detente (1976), a series of discussions about East-West relations with experts such as Leopold Labedz, Sir William Hayter and Dean Rusk.

From 1983 to his retirement in 1986, Urban was in Munich as the director of Radio Free Europe, bringing fresh impetus to "the unmasking of communism". A member of the BBC European Service from 1947-60, a middle-ranking program executive with Radio Free Europe between 1961-65 and a Reagan appointed director of RFE in Munich 1982-85.

During the Reagan-Thatcher era, Urban was part of the inner circle of foreign policy advisers as a director of the International board of the Centre for Policy Studies and on the board of the Centre for Research into Communist Economies (CRCE) based in 57 Tufton Street.[1]

'Diplomacy and Disillusion at the Court of Margaret Thatcher: An Insider's View' his diaristic memoir of Thatcher states he first met her in January 1981

  1. The CRCE Newsletter No. 27 Winter 2006/2007