James F. Brown, Radio Free Europe Chief, Dies at 81 James F. Brown, who as the director of Radio Free Europe in the early 1980s played a seminal behind-the-scenes role in the rise of the Solidarity movement, which eventually toppled the Communist Party in Poland, died in Oxford, England, on Nov. 16. He was 81 and lived in Oxford. The cause was an infection after a broken leg, his wife, Margaret, said. Although he was a British citizen, Mr. Brown was named director of Radio Free Europe, a network financed by the American government, in 1978, bringing a deep knowledge of Eastern European history to the job. He was director until 1984, when he resigned because of disagreements with the Reagan administration. Based in a white stucco building on the edge of the fashionable English Gardens section of Munich, Radio Free Europe was started in 1950 with the intent of undermining Communist regimes in five Soviet-bloc countries: Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Its broadcasters were mostly exiles from those countries. Until 1972, Radio Free Europe and its sister network, Radio Liberty, were covertly financed by the Central Intelligence Agency. Radio Liberty, which Mr. Brown did not lead, broadcast into the Soviet Union. When the C.I.A."s role was exposed, Congress made the networks quasi-governmental agencies with an independent board of directors. In their early years Radio Free Europe's broadcasts were hard-edged, emphasizing the likelihood of Communism's impending demise. That changed after Russian tanks rolled into Budapest in November 1956, crushing the Hungarian revolution. "Just prior to and during the revolution, R.F.E. did broadcasts that were incendiary, very polemical," Arch Puddington, the author of "Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty" (University of Kentucky, 2000), said Thursday. After the revolution collapsed, there were investigations, leading to a change in the tone of the broadcasts. Mr. Brown and the tonal change proved a good fit. He joined the network as a research analyst soon after the Hungarian revolution. By 1969 he was director of research. In 1976 he was named deputy director; two years later he took over as network director. By that time Radio Free Europe had already become more like a conventional international broadcasting service, but still with an anti-Communist message for the millions who managed to tune in despite government efforts to jam the broadcasts. "He was a prudent and moderate sort of man who wanted to ensure that the mistakes of "56 were not repeated," Mr. Puddington said. On the other hand, he was very important in establishing the R.F.E. strategy on how it covered the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1980, the most serious challenge to Communist authority since 1956. Robert Hutchings, deputy director of Radio Free Europe from 1979 to 1983, agreed. Dr. Hutchings, who was later American ambassador at large to Eastern Europe and is now a diplomat in residence at Princeton, said Mr. Brown "was the antithesis of a propagandist." Yet, he said, "we learned from Lech Walesa" - the founder of the Solidarity movement and later Poland's president - "that he only found out about the spread of strikes in the coastal area on the Baltic from Radio Free Europe, and it was on the basis of that information that he created the interfactory strike committee that became Solidarity." Founded in August 1980, Solidarity became a national protest movement and rocked the Polish Communist dictatorship until martial law was imposed on Dec. 13, 1981. Throughout that period, Dr. Hutchings said, Radio Free Europe was in constant communication with Mr. Walesa, Roman Catholic Church officials and reform-minded members of the Communist Party, "all in an effort to promote a process of peaceful democratic change." Although Solidarity was suppressed, it survived as other anti-Communist movements evolved in the Soviet bloc. And in June 1989 - under an agreement reached between the Polish government, Solidarity and church officials - a free election was held in Poland, leading to the first non-Communist government in Eastern Europe in 40 years. "Jim Brown set a strategy of giving comprehensive and sympathetic coverage of the movement," Mr. Puddington said, "while reminding listeners of the geographical realities that still existed, meaning that the Soviet Union was right next to Poland and precipitous actions by Solidarity might provoke a Red Army invasion." Radio Free Europe, Mr. Brown wrote in an unpublished memoir, "broke the Communist information monopoly and gave East Europeans the chance to think and judge for themselves." James Franklin Brown was born on Staten Island on March 8, 1928, one of two children of Josiah and Tabitha Evans Brown. His father, a British citizen, had been a miner in England but came to the United States and became a streetcar conductor. When Josiah Brown died in 1933, his wife returned to England with the children. James Brown received a degree in history, with a focus on Eastern Europe, from Manchester University in 1953. A year later he married Margaret Wood. Besides his wife, he is survived by two daughters, Julia Mortimer and Alison Rolfe, and six grandchildren. Mr. Brown joined Radio Free Europe after serving four years in the Royal Air Force. He resigned from the network in 1984 because he felt that the Reagan administration's insistence on avid anti-Communist programming was counterproductive. "Détente always weakened, not strengthened, Communism," he wrote in his memoir. In 1992, Mr. Brown wrote in his memoir, he met Vaclav Havel, the dissident Czech playwright who had been elected president of Czechoslovakia in 1989. Mr. Havel enthusiastically greeted him, saying, "Jim! We were colleagues! Mr. Brown wrote. That made everything worthwhile. Correction: December 30, 2009 An obituary on Dec. 7 about James F. Brown, the Radio Free Europe director who played a behind-the-scenes role in the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, misstated the year Radio Free Europe began broadcasting. It was 1950, not 1951.