Short answers, pulled from the story.
Radio Free Europe was created in 1949 through the National Committee for a Free Europe, a CIA front organization formed by Allen Dulles in New York City. Radio Liberty followed in 1951, founded by the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia.
RFE/RL received covert funding from the CIA until 1972. After the CIA's ties were publicly exposed in the late 1960s, Congress took over funding responsibility. In 1974, a new body called the Board for International Broadcasting was created to receive congressional appropriations and distribute them to the radio stations.
On the 21st of February 1981, a bomb struck the Munich headquarters, causing $2 million in damage and injuring several employees. Stasi files attributed the bombing to a group under Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (Carlos the Jackal), paid for by Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu. Former KGB general Oleg Kalugin separately said it was planned over two years by KGB Counterintelligence Department K, with the involvement of a KGB mole inside the station named Oleg Tumanov.
The Soviet government used radio jamming controlled by the KGB, and the Central Committee ordered factories to remove short-wave reception components from Soviet-made radios. By 1958, the Soviet Union was spending more on jamming than on all its own domestic and international broadcasting combined. Jamming of all foreign broadcasts, including RFE/RL, ended abruptly on the 21st of November 1988 at 21:00 CET.
On the 15th of March 2025, the United States Agency for Global Media terminated grants to RFE/RL following a directive from the Trump administration. RFE/RL sued USAGM on the 18th of March to block the termination. The European Union subsequently pledged $6.2 million and Sweden pledged $2 million to help sustain the organization.
RFE/RL is headquartered in Prague, where it moved in 1995 from Munich, taking over the former Czechoslovak Federal Assembly building. After the September 11 attacks, American and Czech authorities agreed to relocate the Prague office away from the city center for security reasons; the organization began broadcasting from that new location on the 19th of February 2009.