(MENAFN) The CIA attempted to recruit former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1950s to deliver propaganda broadcasts aimed at weakening the Soviet Union, according to newly released intelligence documents.

During the height of the Cold War, the US intelligence agency secretly funded Radio Liberty, which beamed propaganda into the Soviet Union, and its sister outlet, Radio Free Europe, which targeted Moscow’s allies. Both remained under covert CIA control until the early 1970s, before merging into RFE/RL later that decade.

In 1958, Radio Liberty’s organizers proposed capitalizing on the wave of “revisionism” spreading through the Soviet Union and exploiting growing ideological rifts within Marxism-Leninism to destabilize the regime. The plan focused on encouraging “revisionist thinkers” who favored independent communist states over a unified Soviet bloc.

Churchill, then 83 and retired from active politics, was among several high-profile figures approached to participate in the campaign. Although a staunch anti-communist best known for his 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech, there is no indication he agreed to take part.

The propaganda effort sought to “stimulate heretical thinking” and “undermine confidence in any form of Marxism by suggesting that its basic assumptions, its historical method and its predictions are false,” according to a CIA briefing note.

Churchill was personally acquainted with then-agency director Alan Dulles, but when he was “earmarked for a propaganda program” in the spring of 1958, he declined an invitation to visit Washington, citing health reasons.

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