00:00In October 1956, Radio Free Europe told the Hungarian people help was coming.
00:05It was a lie the American government already knew it was telling.
00:08When Hungarians rose up against Soviet occupation,
00:11the CIA-funded radio station broadcast messages that strongly implied Western military support was on the way.
00:17Fighters on the streets of Budapest held on. They believed it.
00:20But classified National Security Council cables show that President Eisenhower had already made his decision before the first tank rolled
00:27in.
00:27No American forces. No intervention.
00:30Hungary was not worth a war.
00:332,500 people died as Soviet armor crushed the uprising.
00:37Western troops sat at the border and watched. The broadcasts kept going anyway.
00:41That is the part that is almost impossible to sit with.
00:44This was not a miscommunication.
00:46The gap between what the radio promised and what the classified record shows is too wide, too documented, too deliberate.
00:53The American government had already written those people off.
00:56Then it used their hope to keep them fighting anyway.
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