RFE had been established in 1949 as a nonprofit private corporation to broadcast news and current-affairs programs to Central and Eastern European countries in the Soviet political and military orbit (Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia, as well as three Baltic countries that had been absorbed into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [USSR] in 1940 but that the United States did not recognize as part of the USSR-Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). RL was created in 19 51 to broadcast the same type of programs into what was then the USSR. These two operations were called "surrogate" stations because they broadcast news and public-affairs programs about the target countries themselves and considered themselves competitors of the domestic services in their target areas, rather than programs primarily about the United States and the West, which was the responsibility of the Voice of America.

     Originally both RFE and RL had been funded principally and covertly by the U.S. Congress through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), but they also received some private funding, thanks to publicity campaigns that made it seem that private money was all that kept the stations afloat. Suspicions of CIA involvement in the activities of the two stations grew over time, and in 1972 CIA involvement in their operations was acknowledged and ended, and the two stations were put under the direction of the Department of State. But the State Department did not want to oversee their operations.

     In 1973 the Presidential Study Commission on International Radio Broadcasting, headed by Milton Eisenhower, officially recognized the prior role of the CIA and the fiction that all of RFE/RL's funding had come from private sources and recommended that a separate board be established to oversee the two services' operations. This recommendation resulted in the Act for the Board for International Broadcasting in 197 3. This act declared that the purpose of RFE and RL would be to provide "an independent broadcast media operating in a manner not inconsistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States and in accordance with high professional standards" and that their operations were "in the national interest." The BIB was authorized to make grants to RFE/RL, to review their mission and operations, to evaluate their effectiveness, to encourage efficient use of resources, to conduct audits, and to make sure that their operations were in no way inconsistent with the foreign policy objectives of the United States. The board was to make an annual report to the president and to Congress through the foreign relations committees of the House and Senate.

     The BIB was founded solely to oversee and serve as the conduit for funding RFE and RL. It was composed of nine bipartisan members appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Terms were three years in length, with one-third of the BIB members changing each year; no more than five members could be of the same political party. The BIB continued to function in this capacity when the two broadcasting organizations were merged into RFE/RL in 197 5. Struggles between the BIB and the RFE/RL board of directors resulted in continuing conflict. In 1982 new congressional legislation under the Pell Amendment eliminated the private corporate board and made the members of the BIB also the board of directors of RFE/RL: there were essentially two separate and parallel boards but with the same members.

     The collapse of the Soviet Union following the so-called Velvet Revolution in Eastern Europe, which resulted in the collapse of Soviet hegemony and the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989, led to a new reassessment of the extent of American international broadcasting activities and to a questioning of whether or not surrogate radio stations were still necessary. With the ardent support of many leaders in the newly democratic states of Eastern and Central Europe, RFE/RL survived, but another reorganization occurred, and a new oversight agency was created. The BIB's duties were transferred to this new agency, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, in 1994.