To support its broadcasting activity, the Radio Free Europe needed news from official sources behind the Iron Curtain as well as from reliable independent sources. For the purpose of securing these sources Field Offices were opened in Athens, Berlin, Bonn, Brussels, Geneva, London, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, and Vienna.
The information reports (referred to as “Information Items”) are based on interviews conducted with Hungarian immigrants and defectors in Western refugee camps and immigration offices or with Western travelers coming back from the Eastern Bloc as well as on RFE correspondence with anonymous sources from the socialist countries. The production and collection of these Items continued uninterrupted until 1972, when a scandal over RFE broke out in the US Congress. The Radio leadership at that time, urged by higher authorities at home, decided to destroy the Information Items. Only fragments have survived, and these can now be found in the OSA collections.
These documents provide information on a wide variety of topics relating to the former communist countries—from the communist party to prison conditions, from military issues to defectors, from economic problems to the reception of and reaction to RFE broadcasts. This particular selection contains primarily Items relating to Hungarian refugees who left the country after 1956.

The documents presented are organized in chronological order, by report reference code, and then by title; each of them contains an English summary with the core information in Hungarian.

For further details see archival description at: http://www.osa.ceu.hu/db/fa/300-40-4.htm