“Spotlihgt” was the code name chosen for the operation launched on 12 February 1955 by the New York-based Free Europe Committee and Radio Free Europe. It consisted of sending thousands of balloons over communist Poland with boxes containing the brochure ‘Behind the scenes of the security services and the party’ attached to them. It included discrediting material against the communist regime. It was an American response to the system of stations developing in Poland at the time to jam radio signals coming to Poles from the free world.

Attached to the balloons, the brochure contained statements by Józef Światło, or Izaak Fleischfarb – a prominent functionary of the Security Office, deputy director of the Department X of the Ministry of Public Security. Before escaping to the West in the early 1950s, he had a brilliant career in the security apparatus of communist Poland. Thanks, among other things, to his acquaintance with Mieczysław Mietkowski (Mojżesz Bobrowiecki) – Deputy Minister of Public Security (1945-1954). Światło was quickly promoted and got to know many people from this milieu.
The balloon action was modelled on the earlier operations ‘Prospero’, ‘Veto’ and ‘Focus’, which were directed against the Czechoslovak and Hungarian communists. During the first two months of the Polish operation, 232,000 pamphlets were distributed, with plans to deliver as many as 3 million. The seemingly innocent balloons were of great concern to the communist authorities. To minimise the effects of the balloon action, ad hoc measures were taken, but efforts were also made to find a comprehensive solution – in 1956, Minister of the Interior Władysław Wicha issued an ordinance ‘on the organisation of a system of immediate notification of flying balloons with anti-state propaganda materials’.  The People’s Republic of Poland would have had a unique anti-balloon defence system but work on this bizarre idea was stopped in 1958.
The balloon action of 1955 was not the Polish public’s first contact with balloons. They had appeared by chance downwind in 1951, when the Free Europe Committee released 2,000 balloons equipped with leaflets addressed to Czechs and Slovaks. At the time, Minister Stanislaw Radkiewicz reacted by issuing a relevant order to his subordinate security services.
The Communists were always, whether in 1951 or 1955, afraid of free speech, which, thanks also to favourable winds, reached the Polish sky with the balloons.