Additional Praise for TheCultural Cold War

“An absorbing, distressing and, attimes, uproariously funny historyof this war of delusionary images,a battle for hearts and mindswhich was conducted bymobilising culture.”

—The Observer

“Saunders negotiates an ocean offactual material deftly and . . . isvery good on the ethical and

political ironies of the CIA’scultural projects.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“A crucial story about thedangerous, compromising energiesand manipulation of an entire andvery recent age.”

—The Times (London)

“In a deftly written narrative,Frances Stonor Saunders presentsthe stunning history of the CIA’sinvolvement in the Cold War’sintellectual landscape.”

—The Progressive

“Stories of high-level espionage . .. disturbing disclosures and a

literary style of enviable sharpnessand wit are some of the ingredientsto be relished in this marvellouslyreadable account.”

—Literary Review

“Fascinating.”—Salon

“Saunders has written a hammer-blow of a book, definitivelyestablishing the facts of the CIA’sactivities. . . . Her research isformidable, her tone tenacious, hereye for a titbit vivid, her sense ofhumour lively.”

—The Spectator

ALSO BY FRANCES STONOR SAUNDERS

The Devil’s Broker: Seeking Gold, God, andGlory in Fourteenth-Century Italy

The Woman Who Shot Mussolini

THECULTURALCOLD WAR

THE CIA AND THE WORLDOF ARTS AND LETTERS

Frances Stonor Saunders

NEW YORKLONDON

© 1999, 2013 by Frances Stonor SaundersAll rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form,without written permission from the publisher.

Requests for permission to reproduce selections fromthis book should be mailed to: Permissions Department,

The New Press, 38 Greene Street, New York, NY10013.

Published in the United Kingdom as Who Paid thePiper? by Granta Books, London, 1999

First published in the United States by The New Press,New York, 2000

This paperback edition published by The New Press,2013

Distributed by Perseus Distribution

ISBN 978-1-59558-942-2 (e-book)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcoveredition as follows:

Saunders, Frances Stonor.

[Who paid the piper?]The cultural cold war : the CIA and the world of arts

and letters / Frances Stonor Saunders.p. cm.

Originally published: Who paid the piper? London :Granta Books, 1999.

Includes bibliographical references and index.1. United States—Cultural policy. 2. United States

—Central Intelligence Agency—Influence. 3. Politics and culture—UnitedStates. 4. Arts—Political aspects—United

States. 5. Arts, Modern—20th century—UnitedStates. 6. Cold War—Social aspects—United

States. 7. Freedom and art—Political aspects—United States. I. Title

E169.12 .S285 2000327.1’4’097309045—dc

21 99-086681

The New Press publishes books that promote andenrich public discussion and understanding of the

issues vital to our democracy and to a more equitableworld.

These books are made possible by the enthusiasm of

our readers; the support of a committed group ofdonors, large and small; the collaboration of our many

partners in the independent media and the not-for-profit sector; booksellers, who often hand-sell New

Press books; librarians; and above all by our authors.

www.thenewpress.com

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

“What fate or fortune ledThee down into this place, ere thy lastday?Who is it that they steps hath piloted?”“Above there in the clear world on myway,”I answered him, “lost in a vale ofgloom,Before my age was full, I wentastray.”

Dante’s Inferno, Canto XV

I know that’s a secret, for it’swhispered every where.William Congreve, Love for Love

CONTENTS

Preface to the 2013 EditionAcknowledgments

Introduction1. Exquisite Corpse2. Destiny’s Elect3. Marxists at the Waldorf4. Democracy’s Deminform5. Crusading’s the Idea6. “Operation Congress”7. Candy

8. Cette Fête Américaine9. The Consortium

10. The Truth Campaign11. The New Consensus12. Magazine “X”13. The Holy Willies14. Music and Truth, ma non troppo15. Ransom’s Boys16. Yanqui Doodles17. The Guardian Furies18. When Shrimps Learn to Whistle19. Achilles’ Heel20. Cultural NATO21. Caesar of Argentina22. Pen Friends23. Literary Bay of Pigs

24. View from the Ramparts25. That Sinking Feeling26. A Bad Bargain

Epilogue

NotesSelect BibliographyIndex

PREFACE TO THE 2013EDITION

It took five years to complete this book, aperiod I remember with mixed emotions. Forsome inexplicable reason, I did most of thearchive research in the spring and summermonths, and so condemned myself to anether-world of neon lighting and air-conditioning set permanently to morguetemperature. In Abilene, Kansas, I woulddrive back to my motel from the Dwight D.Eisenhower Library just as the sun wasdipping over the horizon, accompanied by astack of photocopied documents that

wobbled on the passenger seat beside me—my catch of the day, landed with the net ofcuriosity (obsession?) and the single hookedline of luck. In Austin, Texas, I became thesole twilight pedestrian on the dusty fringe ofthe busy road leading from the HarryRansom Humanities Research Center to theoverpass that shouldered my gloomydowntown lodgings. In this motel all the bathplugs had been removed to prevent peoplekilling themselves by introducing a toaster orother electrical appliance to their bathwater.I never felt suicidal, but the lack of anycontact with the natural world did feel, attimes, like some kind of cosmic rebuke formy enterprise.

There was exhilaration, too, moments oftable-thumping joy at some unexpectedtreasure thrown up by a piece of paper towhich I was paying only cursory attention.

These accidental finds are a compellingargument for the importance of primary overonline research. If I can advertise oneserious advantage to being welded to a deskin an archive, while all the world seems tobe sunbathing outside, it is this: the thrill ofconnections made, of strings pulled in thetangle that result not in loose ends orGordian knots but in “evidence” and stronglines of inquiry.

Anxiety often followed. As I bundled upblocks of documents to send home (therewere simply too many to carry about withme), I fretted they would go astray. Theywent by freight, as airmail was tooexpensive, and I always arrived homemonths before they did. But every packagewas delivered in due course. The archivegrew and grew and was stored in boxesunder my bed for many years until

Professor Scott Lucas of the Department ofAmerican and Canadian studies atBirmingham University kindly agreed to takeit. There it can be consulted rather moreconveniently than in the previousarrangement.

There was also fear. Not of the kind mymother experienced (she was convinced Iwould be kidnapped by the CIA, though itwas my impression they were busy withother things). It was the fear of beingmanipulated or played. Some deceptions areso gristly they can’t be swallowed; othersbeguile the palate and are more easilydigested. Many of the people I interviewedwere professional persuaders, trained in theart of the lie (“necessary,” “noble,”“patriotic,” or otherwise)—it follows thattheir claims to be speaking the truth wouldbe hard to assess. Alongside the easy

patriotism, the scruples about oaths ofsecrecy and codes of honor, the betrayalscame easily too: So-and-so didn’t know hisass from a hole in the road; So-and-socouldn’t keep his pants on; So-and-so’s wifehad an affair with the president and then shewas murdered. Office tittle-tattle. Butoccasionally, there was a more sinister side,indiscretion aimed like a Flammenwerfer toscorch reputations.

Conversely, those who had contractedthemselves to a deception against their betternature and without any formal training wereoften transparently bad liars. Is this toostrong? Who was I to put myself in theposition of inquisitor? How could I properlyrepresent this history that I had not livedthrough or understand the urgent and fearfulrealities of the postwar world, the intricateand competing realignments in culture,

politics, and the politics of culture? Writingto me after the book was published, IrvingKristol dismissed my “whole political-ideological perspective” as “sanctimonious.”Another correspondent reported jubilantlythat “Walter Laqueur hated [the book] andsuspected that it had been written by aCatholic priest.”

I am equipped with none of thecertainties of that role. My sympathies arewith Voltaire, who argued that anyone whois certain ought to be certified. I believe thatMilan Kundera’s “wisdom of uncertainty” isa touchstone for all intellectual inquiry. TheCultural Cold War could be characterized asa polemic against conviction (which can bedistinguished from faith or belief or values)and the strategies used to mobilize oneconviction against another. In the highlypoliticized context of the cultural cold war,

this refusal to take sides was designated,pejoratively, as relativism or neutralism. Itwas not a position or sensibility tolerated byeither side—both the Soviet Union and theUnited States were committed toundermining the case for neutralism, and inthe theater of operations which is the focusof this book, Western Europe, that campaigndevolved from very similar tactics.

This is not to draw a moral equivalencebetween the two sides. I do not accept, assome critics have argued, that this book issoft on Communism, that it underestimatesthe lack of freedom, the permanent menace,the grim headlocks placed on culture in theSoviet Union and its satellite states.Shostakovich was depressed? He had everyreason to be. But when a portrait bust wascommissioned by the Soviet Committee forthe Arts, its chairman decreed, “What we

need is an optimistic Shostakovich.”(Privately, the composer was delighted bythe oxymoron.) My interest is in intellectualfreedom, and the totalitarian state cannotcountenance the Shostakovich who broodson death and mocks false hopes; it demandsan officially regulated intellectual—indeed,existential—orthodoxy. Democracy doesnot. By its very nature, it is open to all ideas,and for this reason it will inevitably finditself containing some degree of totalitarianideas.

There is a difference between thepenetration of democratic debate by a rivalideology and takeover by a totalitarianregime. Joseph McCarthy and those anti-Communists who furnished his crusade withintellectual justification were blind to thisdistinction. As Hugh Trevor-Roper put itwhen I interviewed him in 1994, “The

statement that whoever is not for us isagainst us, [that] we must take as alliesanyone who is sufficiently opposed toCommunism, and that political virtue mustbe measured by the extent and depth ofpeople’s opposition to Communism—well,in that case, Hitler would’ve been an ally.”In the name of democracy, McCarthyismreached for totalitarian tools. Is it pious orlofty to suggest that this was a stain on theAmerican conscience? After all, there wereno gulags in the United States. Or so runsthe defense of lesser-evilism. As anargument, I think it proceeds from whatIsaiah Berlin termed “counter-enlightenment,” as in irrational, thought.Why would a democracy congratulate itselfon not having gulags?

The counterfactual imagination thrived inthe Cold War. George Orwell’s concept of

“doublethink” (a cliché now, but onlybecause it was so apt in the original) exposedthe mechanisms by which ideologues tamperwith reality. Doublethink is, inter alia, “to beconscious of complete truthfulness whiletelling carefully constructed lies . . . to uselogic against logic, to repudiate moralitywhile laying claim to it.” Orwell, of course,was warning of the compromisingmanipulations by which the totalitarian stateasserts itself. Yet it was doublethink thatgave us a Congress for Cultural Freedomthat was sponsored, managed, and ultimatelydecapitated by a CIA that wassimultaneously supporting and installingright-wing dictatorships; that commandedcredibility for a campaign called “MilitantLiberty”; that saw the insistence on payingany price for freedom plunge the anti-Communist cause into the jungles of

Vietnam; that conjured the Nobel PeacePrize for Henry Kissinger in 1973(prompting Tom Lehrer to say he wouldretire from comedy, for there was no way hecould out-satirize the Stockholm committee).

The Cold War was frighteningly real—itwas not a protracted argument about a shopwindow. But it produced false realities, andThe Cultural Cold War asks to what degreeintellectuals became embroiled in thesecounterfeits and, more controversially,enlarged them. It is not so much anintellectual history as a history ofintellectuals, and of New York intellectualsin particular, that powerfully strange mix ofmen and women who supplied the frontranks of the cultural Cold War. Theyinhabited a hothouse of ideological andliterary debate out of which grew a numberof important works (Daniel Bell’s The End

of Ideology, Hannah Arendt’s The Originsof Totalitarianism, David Riesman’s TheLonely Crowd, to name a few). At first theirarguments were restricted to the crampedpages of the Partisan Review, Commentary,and the other “little magazines.” Then, aspart of the cultural consortium put togetherby the CIA (with or without theirknowledge), they suddenly acquired aninternational audience.

These cold warriors, unable to shrug offthe habit (and intellectual style) of radicaldissatisfaction, unwilling to reach out beyondthis identity, were not mellowed by thecollapse of Communism. Meeting with themwas always an invigorating experience,sometimes a bruising one. The object oftheir arguments was gone, and they enteredold age grimmer for the loss of thisadversary. Now, creaking in their saddles,

they tilted their rusty lances at new targets—the women’s movement, the New Left,Black Power, single mothers, immigration,people who failed to stand up when thenational anthem was played. This wave of“liberation” was not the freedom they hadhoped for; it crashed over them and leftthem stranded. I remember Cord Meyerchewing through a fillet steak (and my lastdollars) at a Washington restaurant, pausingonly to spit out a peevish remark about howthe sole achievement of multiculturalism wasto make it impossible to find a waiter whocould speak proper English. A few dayslater, Irving Kristol apologized to me for the“stupid” menu—“Mexican Week”—on offerin the canteen of the American EnterpriseInstitute, before pointedly ordering ahamburger.

Democracy had become too democratic

and was no longer responding to the adviceof its wise men. The new generation didn’tneed them. They had argued the world andlost. When I think of them, I think ofGertrude Stein’s observation that “America’sthe oldest country in the world, because itwas the first to enter the twentieth century.”

• • •The Cultural Cold War has had its share ofadventures. Publication in the UK in 1999kicked off with a current affairs radioprogram whose guests were a prominentbarrister, Henry Kissinger, and me. I wasmoved to silence by nerves and becamefixated on Kissinger’s fingernails, whichwere bitten down to the quick. He left thestudio mid-broadcast, apparently unhappywith the suggestion that the bombing ofCambodia and the overthrow of SalvadorAllende were illegal. In the United States,

the book was rejected at final draft stage bythe original publisher, who argued that I hadgiven insufficient weight to the notion that“America’s cause was just” and “the CIA etal were on the side of the angels.” And so itfinally appeared not under the imprint ofThe Free Press (another oxymoron?), butunder the good auspices of André Schiffrinat The New Press. At a presentation of thebook in Rome, I was sandwiched betweentwo speakers who became so enraged thatthey lunged at each other. My publisherintervened before shirt collars were torn. Ata reception in London in 2007, I wasintroduced to then–Prime Minister GordonBrown, who said he had read the book withgreat interest and thought that a program ofcultural warfare would be a very good thingin the current circumstances. As the readerof this book will understand, it was not my

proudest moment.

Since it was first published in English in1999, The Cultural Cold War has appearedin French, German, Italian, Arabic, Turkish,Bulgarian, Chinese, Portuguese, Greek, andSpanish. A Russian edition is currently beingprepared. I am greatly indebted to all theeditors and translators who have made thispossible.

LondonJuly 2013

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing this book has been a prolonged actof vagrancy, as I have dragged my unsightlyluggage chain of tatty boxes and files fromplace to place. For their kindness in takingme in, together with this caravan of archivalloot, and offering me the chance to workundisturbed, I wish to thank ElizabethCartwright-Hignett, Frank Dabell, NickHewer, Eartha Kitt, Hermione Labron-Johnson, Claudia and Marcello Salom. ToAnn Pasternak Slater and Craig Raine, I owespecial gratitude for their constant supportand solid faith. Through them, I met Ben

Sonnenberg in New York, and for thatflourishing and (on Ben’s part) eruditefriendship, I am indebted. Ann PasternakSlater also helped ease my passage bywriting a letter of recommendation which,but for her own generous embellishments,followed my draft with uncanny precision.Carmen Callil’s support was acquired lateinto the writing of this book, but counts as apowerful source of inspiration on account ofits sheer and unqualified confidence at atime when I had all but lost my own. JayWeissberg was an invaluable help: as ahistorian of film, I have yet to meet his equalin scholarship and breadth of knowledge.Further gratitude is extended to those whobecame partners in a project which had itsshare of misadventures, but who stayed forthe bumpy ride without losing their sense ofhumor: my editor, Neil Belton; my agent,

Felicity Rubinstein; everyone at GrantaBooks; copy editor Jane Robertson; JeremyBugler; Tony Cash; Tony Carew; LawrenceSimanowitz; André Schiffrin at The NewPress; and Melvin Wulf at Beldock, Levine& Hoffman. For their capacious friendshipand extraordinarily elastic patience, I amgrateful beyond words to MadonnaBenjamin, Zoë Heller, Conrad Roeber,Domitilla Ruffo, Roger Thornham, andMichael Wylde. But for my mother, JuliaStonor, and my brother, Alexander StonorSaunders, life outside of this book wouldhave run into a cul-de-sac. For theirencouragement, loving support, and endlesspropping up, I offer them shamelesslyhyperbolic thanks and the dedication to thisbook.

When I started researching the culturalCold War, I had high hopes of benefiting

from America’s Freedom of InformationAct. It is certainly the case that manypreviously classified government documentshave been released to researchers under thisact, and recent studies of the FBl have beengreatly enriched as a result. But retrievingdocumentation from the CIA is anothermatter. My initial request to the Agency in1992 has yet to be answered. A subsequentapplication was acknowledged, though I waswarned that the total cost for supplying therecords I had requested would be in theregion of $30,000. However, as the CIA’sinformation and privacy coordinator went onto explain that the chances of my applicationbeing successfully processed were virtuallynil, I had little to worry about. The Freedomof Information Act is much vaunted byBritish historians, who indeed face fargreater challenges in researching material

relating to the defense of this realm. But itsapplication, at least as far as the CIA isconcerned, is lamentable. Compensating forthis is the wealth of documentation existingin private collections. Historically, successiveAmerican administrations have spread intothe private sector. In the Cold War periodespecially, American foreign policy wasshared between government departmentsand a kind of consortium of freelance, quasi-governmental figures and institutions. It isthis balkanization, even of clandestine orcovert operations, which has ensured,paradoxically, that such operations can bescrutinized. The story is there, for thosewilling to trawl for it, in the sea of privatepapers stretching across the archives ofAmerica.

Any work relying heavily on this archivalmaterial is naturally indebted to those many

archivists and librarians who so expertly leadthe researcher in, through, and out again ofthe complexities of their collections. Thesepeople provide the joists on which the houseof history rests, though I hasten to add thatresponsibility for any structural orarchitectural blemishes rests entirely with theauthor. For their help and advice, my thanksgo to the staff of the Tamiment Library inNew York; the Joseph Regenstein Library inChicago; the Dwight D. Eisenhower Libraryin Abilene, Kansas; the National Archives inWashington, D.C.; the Butler Library atColumbia University; the George MeanyCenter in Washington, D.C.; the HarryRansom Humanities Research Center andthe Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, both inAustin, Texas; the John F. Kennedy Libraryin Boston; the Harry S. Truman Library inIndependence, Missouri. I also wish to thank

the archivists at the Public Records Office inLondon, and at Reading University Library,and the staff of the London Library.

Many people agreed to be interviewedfor this book, and suffered my repeatedvisits, telephone calls, faxes, and letters withelegant patience. All interviewees are namedin the Notes section at the end. I thank themall, but in particular Diana Josselson, whowas extremely generous with her time andbestowed on this book the benefit of hersterling memory, her firm (though notuncritical) support, and photographs fromher personal collection.

INTRODUCTION

The way to carry out good propaganda isnever to appear to be carrying it out at all.

Richard Crossman

During the height of the Cold War, the U.S.government committed vast resources to asecret program of cultural propaganda inWestern Europe. A central feature of thisprogram was to advance the claim that it didnot exist. It was managed, in great secrecy,by America’s espionage arm, the CentralIntelligence Agency. The centerpiece of thiscovert campaign was the Congress forCultural Freedom, run by CIA agent MichaelJosselson from 1950 until 1967. Its

achievements—not least its duration—wereconsiderable. At its peak, the Congress forCultural Freedom had offices in thirty-fivecountries, employed dozens of personnel,published over twenty prestige magazines,held art exhibitions, owned a news andfeatures service, organized high-profileinternational conferences, and rewardedmusicians and artists with prizes and publicperformances. Its mission was to nudge theintelligentsia of Western Europe away fromits lingering fascination with Marxism andCommunism towards a view moreaccommodating of “the American way.”

Drawing on an extensive, highlyinfluential network of intelligence personnel,political strategists, the corporateestablishment, and the old school ties of theIvy League universities, the incipient CIAstarted, from 1947, to build a “consortium”

whose double task it was to inoculate theworld against the contagion of Communismand to ease the passage of American foreignpolicy interests abroad. The result was aremarkably tight network of people whoworked alongside the Agency to promote anidea: that the world needed a paxAmericana, a new age of enlightenment, andit would be called the American Century.

The consortium the CIA built up—consisting of what Henry Kissingerdescribed as “an aristocracy dedicated to theservice of this nation on behalf of principlesbeyond partisanship”—was the hiddenweapon in America’s Cold War struggle, aweapon which, in the cultural field, hadextensive fallout. Whether they liked it ornot, whether they knew it or not, there werefew writers, poets, artists, historians,scientists, or critics in postwar Europe

whose names were not in some way linkedto this covert enterprise. Unchallenged,undetected for over twenty years, America’sspying establishment operated asophisticated, substantially endowed culturalfront in the West, for the West, in the nameof freedom of expression. Defining the ColdWar as a “battle for men’s minds,” itstockpiled a vast arsenal of culturalweapons: journals, books, conferences,seminars, art exhibitions, concerts, awards.

Membership of this consortium includedan assorted group of former radicals andleftist intellectuals whose faith in Marxismand Communism had been shattered byevidence of Stalinist totalitarianism.Emerging from the Pink Decade of the1930s, mourned by Arthur Koestler as an“abortive revolution of the spirit, a misfiredRenaissance, a false dawn of history,”1 their

disillusionment was attended by a readinessto join in a new consensus, to affirm a neworder which would substitute for the spentforces of the past. The tradition of radicaldissenter, where intellectuals took it uponthemselves to probe myths, interrogateinstitutional prerogative, and disturb thecomplacency of power, was suspended infavor of supporting “the Americanproposition.” Endorsed and subsidized bypowerful institutions, this non-Communistgroup became as much a cartel in theintellectual life of the West as Communismhad been a few years earlier (and it includedmany of the same people).

“There came a time . . . when,apparently, life lost the ability to arrangeitself,” says Charlie Citrine, the narrator ofSaul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift. “It had to bearranged. Intellectuals took this as their job.

From, say, Machiavelli’s time to our ownthis arranging has been the one greatgorgeous tantalizing misleading disastrousproject. A man like Humboldt, inspired,shrewd, nutty, was brimming over with thediscovery that the human enterprise, sogrand and infinitely varied, had now to bemanaged by exceptional persons. He was anexceptional person, therefore he was aneligible candidate for power. Well, whynot?”2 Like so many Humboldts, thoseintellectuals who had been betrayed by thefalse idol of Communism now foundthemselves gazing at the possibility ofbuilding a new Weimar, an AmericanWeimar. If the government—and its covertaction arm, the CIA—was prepared to assistin this project, well, why not?

That former left-wingers should havecome to be roped together in the same

enterprise with the CIA is less implausiblethan it seems. There was a genuinecommunity of interest and convictionbetween the Agency and those intellectualswho were hired, even if they didn’t know it,to fight the cultural Cold War. The CIA’sinfluence was not “always, or often,reactionary and sinister,”3 wrote America’spreeminent liberal historian ArthurSchlesinger Jr. “In my experience itsleadership was politically enlightened andsophisticated.”4 This view of the CIA as ahaven of liberalism acted as a powerfulinducement to collaborate with it—or, if notthis, at least to acquiesce to the myth that itwas well motivated. And yet this perceptionsits uncomfortably with the CIA’s reputationas a ruthlessly interventionist andfrighteningly unaccountable instrument ofAmerican Cold War power. This was the

organization that masterminded theoverthrow of Premier Mossadegh in Iran in1953, the ousting of the Arbenz governmentin Guatemala in 1954, the disastrous Bay ofPigs operation in 1961, the notoriousPhoenix Program in Vietnam. It spied ontens of thousands of Americans; harasseddemocratically elected leaders abroad;plotted assassinations; denied these activitiesto Congress; and, in the process, elevatedthe art of lying to new heights. By whatstrange alchemy, then, did the CIA manageto present itself to high-minded intellectualslike Arthur Schlesinger as the golden vesselof cherished liberalism?

The extent to which America’s spyingestablishment extended its reach into thecultural affairs of its Western allies, acting asunacknowledged facilitator to a broad rangeof creative activity, positioning intellectuals

and their work like chess pieces to be playedin the Great Game, remains one of the ColdWar’s most provocative legacies. Thedefense mounted by custodians of the period—which rests on the claim that the CIA’ssubstantial financial investment came withno strings attached—has yet to be seriouslychallenged. Amongst intellectual circles inAmerica and Western Europe there persists areadiness to accept as true that the CIA wasmerely interested in extending thepossibilities for free and democratic culturalexpression. “We simply helped people to saywhat they would have said anyway,” goesthis “blank check” line of defense. If thebeneficiaries of CIA funds were ignorant ofthe fact, the argument goes, and if theirbehavior was consequently unmodified, thentheir independence as critical thinkers couldnot have been affected.

But official documents relating to thecultural Cold War systematically underminethis myth of altruism. The individuals andinstitutions subsidized by the CIA wereexpected to perform as part of a broadcampaign of persuasion, of a propagandawar in which “propaganda” was defined as“any organized effort or movement todisseminate information or a particulardoctrine by means of news, specialarguments or appeals designed to influencethe thoughts and actions of any givengroup.”5 A vital constituent of this effort was“psychological warfare,” which was definedas “[t]he planned use by a nation ofpropaganda and activities other than combatwhich communicate ideas and informationintended to influence the opinions, attitudes,emotions and behavior of foreign groups inways that will support the achievement of

national aims.” Further, the “most effectivekind of propaganda” was defined as the kindwhere “the subject moves in the directionyou desire for reasons which he believes tobe his own.”6 It is useless to dispute thesedefinitions. They are littered acrossgovernment documents, the données ofAmerican postwar cultural diplomacy.

Clearly, by camouflaging its investment,the CIA acted on the supposition that itsblandishments would be refused if offeredopenly. What kind of freedom can beadvanced by such deception? Freedom ofany kind certainly wasn’t on the agenda inthe Soviet Union, where those writers andintellectuals who were not sent to the gulagswere lassoed into serving the interests of thestate. It was of course right to oppose suchunfreedom. But with what means? Wasthere any real justification for assuming that

the principles of Western democracycouldn’t be revived in postwar Europeaccording to some internal mechanism? Orfor not assuming that democracy could bemore complex than was implied by thelauding of American liberalism? To whatdegree was it admissible for another state tocovertly intervene in the fundamentalprocesses of organic intellectual growth, offree debate and the uninhibited flow ofideas? Did this not risk producing, instead offreedom, a kind of ur-freedom, wherepeople think they are acting freely when infact they are bound to forces over whichthey have no control?

The CIA’s engagement in culturalwarfare raises other troubling questions. Didfinancial aid distort the process by whichintellectuals and their ideas were advanced?Were people selected for their positions,

rather than on the basis of intellectual merit?What did Arthur Koestler mean when helampooned the “international academic call-girl circuit” of intellectual conferences andsymposia? Were reputations secured orenhanced by membership of the CIA’scultural consortium? How many of thosewriters and thinkers who acquired aninternational audience for their ideas werereally second-raters, ephemeral publicists,whose works were doomed to thebasements of secondhand bookstores?

In 1966, a series of articles appeared inthe New York Times exposing a wide rangeof covert action undertaken by America’sintelligence community. As stories ofattempted coups and (mostly botched)political assassinations poured onto the frontpages, the CIA came to be characterized as arogue elephant, crashing through the

scrubland of international politics,unimpeded by any sense of accountability.Amidst these more dramatic cloak-and-dagger exposés came details of how theAmerican government had looked to thecultural Brahmins of the West to lendintellectual weight to its actions.

The suggestion that many intellectualshad been animated by the dictates ofAmerican policy makers rather than byindependent standards of their owngenerated widespread disgust. The moralauthority enjoyed by the intelligentsia duringthe height of the Cold War was nowseriously undermined and frequentlymocked. The “consensocracy” was fallingapart, the center could not hold. And as itdisintegrated, so the story itself becamefragmented, partial, modified—sometimesegregiously—by forces on the right and left

who wished to twist its peculiar truths totheir own ends. Ironically, the circumstanceswhich made possible the revelationscontributed to their real significancebecoming obscured. As America’s obsessiveanti-Communist campaign in Vietnambrought her to the brink of social collapse,and with subsequent scandals on the scale ofthe Pentagon Papers and Watergate, it washard to sustain interest or outrage in thebusiness of Kulturkampf, which incomparison seemed to be fluff on the side.

“History,” wrote Archibald MacLeish,“is like a badly constructed concert hall,[with] dead spots where the music can’t beheard.”7 This book attempts to record thosedead spots. It seeks a different acoustic, atune other than that played by the officialvirtuosi of the period. It is a secret history,insofar as it believes in the relevance of the

power of personal relationships, of “soft”linkages and collusions, and the significanceof salon diplomacy and boudoir politicking.It challenges what Gore Vidal has describedas “those official fictions that have beenagreed upon by all together too many toointerested parties, each with his ownthousand days in which to set up his ownmisleading pyramids and obelisks thatpurport to tell sun time.” Any history whichsets out to interrogate these “agreed-uponfacts” must, in Tzvetan Todorov’s words,become “an act of profanity. It is not aboutcontributing to the cult of heroes and saints.It’s about coming as close as possible to thetruth. It participates in what Max Webercalled the ‘disenchantment of the world’; itexists at the other end of the spectrum fromidolatry. It’s about redeeming the truth fortruth’s sake, not retrieving images that are

deemed useful for the present.”8

1

Exquisite Corpse

Here is a place of disaffectionTime before and time afterIn a dim light

T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”

Europe awoke to a freezing postwar dawn.The winter of 1947 was the worst everrecorded. From January to late March, itopened a front across Germany, Italy,France, and Britain, and advanced withcomplete lack of mercy. Snow fell in St.Tropez, gale-force winds building upimpenetrable drifts; ice floes drifted to the

mouth of the Thames; trains carrying foodsupplies froze fast to the tracks; bargesbringing coal into Paris became icebound.There, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin foundhimself “terrified” by the city’s coldness,“empty and hollow and dead, like anexquisite corpse.”

Across Europe, water services, sewagedisposal, and most other essential amenitiescollapsed; food supplies dwindled and coalreserves slumped to an all-time low asminers struggled to operate winding gearwhich was frozen solid. A slight thaw wasfollowed by a further freeze-up, lockingcanals and roads under a thick layer of ice.In Britain, unemployment rose by onemillion in two months. The government andindustry stalled in the snow and ice. Lifeitself seemed to freeze: more than 4 millionsheep and 30,000 cattle died.

In Berlin, Willy Brandt, the futurechancellor, saw a “new terror” grip the citywhich most symbolized the collapse ofEurope. The icy cold “attacked the peoplelike a savage beast, driving them into theirhomes. But there they found no respite. Thewindows had no panes, they were nailed upwith planks and plasterboard. The walls andceilings were full of cracks and holes, whichpeople covered over with paper and rags.People heated their rooms with benchesfrom public parks . . . the old and sick frozeto death in their beds by the hundreds.”1

In an emergency measure, each Germanfamily was allotted one tree for heating. Byearly 1946, the Tiergarten had already beenhacked down to stumps, its statues leftstanding in a wilderness of frozen mud; bythe winter of 1947, the woods in the famousGrünewald had been razed. The snow drifts

which buried the rubble of a bombed-outcity could not conceal the devastating legacyof Hitler’s mythomaniacal dream forGermany. Berlin, like a ruined Carthage,was a desperate, cold, haunted place—defeated, conquered, occupied.

The weather cruelly drove home thephysical reality of the Cold War, carving itsway into the new, post-Yalta topography ofEurope, its national territories mutilated, thecomposition of its populations fractured.Allied occupation governments in France,Germany, Austria, and Italy struggled tocope with the 13 million people who weredisplaced, homeless, demobilized. Theswelling ranks of Allied personnel arriving inthe occupied territories exacerbated theproblem. More and more people wereturned out of their homes, to join thosealready sleeping in halls, stairways, cellars,

and bomb sites. Clarissa Churchill, as aguest of the British Control Commission inBerlin, found herself “protected bothgeographically and materially from the fullimpact of the chaos and misery existing inthe city. Waking in the warm bedroom ofsome Nazi’s ex-home, feeling the lace-edgedsheets, studying his shelf of books, eventhese simple experiences gave me a warningtinge of conqueror’s delirium, which a shortwalk in the streets or a visit to an unheatedGerman flat immediately dissipated.”2

These were heady days for the victors.In 1947, a carton of American cigarettes,costing fifty cents in an American base, wasworth 1,800 Reichsmarks on the blackmarket, or $180 at the legal rate ofexchange. For four cartons of cigarettes, atthis rate, you could hire a German orchestrafor the evening. Or for twenty-four cartons,

you could acquire a 1939 Mercedes-Benz.Penicillin and Persilscheine (whiter thanwhite) certificates, which cleared the holderof any Nazi connections, commanded thehighest prices. With this kind of economicwhammy, working-class soldiers from Idahocould live like modern tsars.

In Paris, Lieutenant-Colonel VictorRothschild, the first British soldier to arriveon the day of liberation in his capacity asbomb-disposal expert, had reclaimed hisfamily house on Avenue de Marigny, whichhad been requisitioned by the Nazis. Therehe entertained the young intelligence officerMalcolm Muggeridge with vintagechampagne. The family butler, who hadcontinued to work in the house under theGermans, remarked that nothing seemed tohave changed. The Ritz Hotel, requisitionedby millionaire intelligence officer John Hay

Whitney, received David Bruce, a Princetonfriend of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who turned upwith Ernest Hemingway and a private armyof liberators, and put in an order for fiftymartini cocktails from the manager.Hemingway—who, like David Bruce, hadserved in America’s wartime secret service,the Office of Strategic Services—set himselfand his whisky bottles up at the Ritz, andthere, in an alcoholic daze, received anervous Eric Blair (George Orwell), and themore forthright Simone de Beauvoir withher lover Jean-Paul Sartre (who drankhimself to oblivion and recorded the worsthangover of his life).

The philosopher and intelligence officerA.J. “Freddie” Ayer, author of Language,Truth and Logic, became a familiar sight inParis as he sped about in a large chauffeur-driven Bugatti, complete with army radio.

Arthur Koestler and his lover MamainePaget “got tight” dining with André Malrauxon vodka, caviar, and blinis, balyk andsoufflé sibérienne. Also in Paris, SusanMary Alsop, a young American diplomat’swife, hosted a series of parties in her “lovelyhouse full of Aubusson carpets and goodAmerican soap.” But when she steppedoutside, she found that the faces were “allhard and worn and full of suffering. Therereally is no food except for people who canafford the black market and not much forthem. The pastry shops are empty—in thewindows of teashops like Rumplemayer’s,one sees one elaborate cardboard cake or anempty box of chocolates, with a sign saying‘model’ and nothing else. In the windows ofshops on the Faubourg St. Honoré areproudly displayed one pair of shoes marked‘real leather’ or ‘model’ surrounded by

hideous things made of straw. Outside theRitz I threw away a cigarette butt and awell-dressed old gentleman pounced for it.”3

At much the same time, the youngcomposer Nicolas Nabokov, cousin of thenovelist Vladimir, was throwing away acigarette butt in the Soviet sector of Berlin:“When I started back, a figure bolted out ofthe dark and picked up the cigarette I hadthrown away.”4 As the super race scavengedfor cigarette ends or firewood or food, theruins of the Führer’s bunker were leftunmarked and barely noticed by Berliners.But on Saturdays, Americans serving withthe military government would explore withflashlights the cellars of Hitler’s ruinedReichs Chancellery and pocket their exoticfinds: Romanian pistols, thick rolls of half-burned currency, iron crosses and otherdecorations. One looter discovered the

ladies’ cloakroom and lifted some brass coattags inscribed with the Nazi eagle and theword Reichskanzlei. Vogue photographerLee Miller, who had once been Man Ray’smuse, posed fully dressed in Hitler’s bunkerbathtub.

The fun soon wore off. Divided intofour sectors and sitting like a crow’s nest ina sea of Soviet-controlled territory, Berlinhad become “the traumatic synecdoche ofthe Cold War.”5 Ostensibly working togetherin the Allied Kommandatura to achieve the“denazification” and “reorientation” ofGermany, the four powers struggled againststrengthening ideological winds whichrevealed a bleak international situation. “Ifelt no animosity to the Soviets,” wroteMichael Josselson, an American officer ofEstonian-Russian extraction. “In fact I wasapolitical at that time and this made it much

easier for me to maintain excellent personalrelationships with most of the Soviet officersI came to know.”6 But with the impositionof “friendly” governments in the SovietUnion’s sphere of influence and the massshow trials and swelling gulags in Russiaitself, this collaborative spirit was severelytested. By the winter of 1947, less than twoyears after American and Russian soldiershad hugged each other on the banks of theElbe, that embrace had dissolved into asnarl. “It was only after Soviet policiesbecame openly aggressive, and when storiesof atrocities committed in the Soviet zone ofoccupation became a daily occurrence . . .and when the Soviet propaganda becamecrudely anti-Western, that my politicalconscience was awakened,”7 Josselsonrecorded.

The headquarters of the Office of

Military Government U.S. was known as“OMGUS,” which Germans initially took tomean “bus” in English because it waspainted on the sides of double-decker busesrequisitioned by the Americans. When theywere not spying on the other three powers,OMGUS officers found themselves behinddesks piled high with columns of theubiquitous Fragebogen every Germanseeking a job was obliged to fill in,answering questions relating to nationality,religion, criminal record, education,professional qualifications, employment andmilitary service, writings and speeches,income and assets, travel abroad, and ofcourse political affiliations. Screening theentire German population for even thefaintest trace of “Nazism and militarism”was a deadly, bureaucratic task—and oftenfrustrating. Whilst a janitor could be

blacklisted for having swept the corridors ofthe Reichs Chancellery, many of Hitler’sindustrialists, scientists, administrators, andeven high-ranking officers were being quietlyreinstated by the Allied powers in adesperate effort to keep Germany fromcollapsing.

For one intelligence officer, the filling outof endless forms was no way to deal withthe complex legacy of the Nazi regime.Michael Josselson adopted a differentapproach. “I didn’t know Josselson then, butI had heard of him,” recalled the philosopherStuart Hampshire, who at that time wasworking for MI6 in London. “His reputationhad spread across Europe’s intelligencegrapevine. He was the big fixer, the manwho could get anything done. Anything. Ifyou wanted to get across the Russian border,which was virtually impossible, Josselson

would fix it. If you needed a symphonicorchestra, Josselson would fix it.”8

Speaking four languages fluently withouta hint of an accent, Michael Josselson was avaluable asset in the ranks of Americanoccupation officers. Furthermore, he knewBerlin inside out. Born in Tartu, Estonia, in1908, the son of a Jewish timber merchant,he had arrived in Berlin for the first time inthe early 1920s, swept along in the Balticdiaspora which followed the 1917revolution. With most of his close familymurdered by the Bolsheviks, return to Tartuwas impossible, and he became a member ofthat generation of men and women whomArthur Koestler referred to as the “scum ofthe earth”—the déracinés, people whoselives had been broken by the twentiethcentury, their identity with their homelandsruptured. Josselson had attended the

University of Berlin but left before taking adegree to join the Gimbels-Saks departmentstores as a buyer, becoming theirrepresentative in Paris. In 1936 heimmigrated to the States and shortlythereafter became an American citizen.

After he was inducted into the Army in1943, his European background made himan obvious candidate for either intelligencework or psychological warfare. He was dulyassigned to the Intelligence Section of thePsychological Warfare Division (PWD) inGermany, where he joined a special seven-man interrogation team (nicknamed“Kampfgruppe Rosenberg,” after its leaderCaptain Albert G. Rosenberg). The team’smission was to interrogate hundreds ofGerman prisoners every week, for thepurpose of “rapidly separating strong Nazisfrom non-Nazis, lies from truthful

responses, voluble from tongue-tiedpersonalities.”9 Discharged in 1946,Josselson stayed on in Berlin with theAmerican military government as a culturalaffairs officer, then with the StateDepartment and the U.S. High Commissionas a public affairs officer. In this capacity, hewas assigned to the “screening of personnel”in the German press, radio, andentertainment media, all of which weresuspended “pending the removal of Nazis.”

Assigned to the same division wasNicolas Nabokov, a White Russian émigréwho had lived in Berlin before immigratingto the United States in 1933. Tall,handsome, expansive, Nabokov was a manwho cultivated friendships (and wives) withgreat ease and charm. During the 1920s, hisflat in Berlin had become a center of émigrécultural life, an intellectual goulash of

writers, scholars, artists, politicians, andjournalists. Amongst this cosmopolitan groupof exiles was Michael Josselson. In the mid-1930s, Nabokov went to America, where hewrote what he modestly described as “thefirst American ballet,” Union Pacific, withArchibald MacLeish. He shared a smallstudio with Henri Cartier-Bresson in NewYork for a while, when neither had anymoney. Nabokov later wrote that “toCartier-Bresson the Communist movementwas the bearer of history, of mankind’sfuture. . . . I shared many of [his] views,but, despite the gnawing longing for myRussian fatherland, I could not accept norespouse the philo-Communist attitude of somany Western European and Americanintellectuals. I felt that they were curiouslyblind to the realities of Russian Communismand were only reacting to the fascist tides

that were sweeping Europe in the wake ofthe Depression. To a certain degree I feltthat the philo-Communism of the mid-thirties was a passing fad, cleverly nurturedby a mythology about the Russian BolshevikRevolution shaped by the Soviet AgitpropApparat.”10

In 1945, alongside W.H. Auden andJohn Kenneth Galbraith, Nabokov joined theMorale Division of the U.S. StrategicBombing Survey Unit in Germany, where hemet psychological warfare personnel, andsubsequently got a job in the InformationControl Division alongside his oldacquaintance Michael Josselson. As acomposer, Nabokov was assigned to themusic section, where he was expected to“establish good psychological and culturalweapons with which to destroy Nazism andpromote a genuine desire for a democratic

Germany.”11 His task was “to eject theNazis from German musical life and licensethose German musicians (giving them theright to exercise their profession) whom webelieved to be ‘clean’ Germans,” and to“control the programmes of Germanconcerts and see to it that they would notturn into nationalist manifestations.”Introducing Nabokov at a party, oneAmerican general said, “He’s hep on musicand tells the Krauts how to go about it.”12

Josselson and Nabokov became acongenial, if unlikely, pair. Nabokov wasemotionally extravagant, physicallydemonstrative, and always late; Josselsonwas reserved, high-minded, and scrupulous.But they did share the same language ofexile, and of attachment to the new world,America, which both believed to be the onlyplace where the future of the old world

could be secured. The drama and intrigue ofpostwar Berlin appealed to something inboth men, giving them scope to exercisetheir talents as operators and innovators.Together, Nabokov later wrote, they both“did a good deal of successful Nazi-huntingand put on ice a few famous conductors,pianists, singers and a number of orchestralmusicians (most of whom had well deservedit and some of whom should be theretoday).”13 Often going against the grain ofofficial thinking, they took a pragmatic viewof denazification. They refused to acceptthat the actions of artists under Germany’sNazi past could be treated as a phenomenonsui generis, with judgment meted outaccording to the rendering of a Fragebogen.“Josselson genuinely believed that the role ofintellectuals in a very difficult situationshouldn’t be decided in an instant,” a

colleague later explained. “He understoodthat Nazism in Germany had all been amixed grotesquerie. Americans had no idea,in general. They just waded in and pointedthe finger.”14

In 1947, the conductor WilhelmFurtwängler was the subject of particularopprobrium. Although he had openly defiedthe branding of Paul Hindemith as a“degenerate,” he later arrived at a mutuallybeneficial accommodation with the Naziregime. Furtwängler, who was appointedPrussian state councillor, as well as holdingother high posts bestowed by the Nazis,continued to conduct the BerlinPhilharmonic Orchestra and the Berlin StateOpera throughout the Third Reich. ByDecember 1946, a year and a half after hiscase had first been brought to the attentionof the Allied Control Commission, the

conductor was due to appear before theTribunal for Artists assembled in Berlin. Thecase was heard over two days. The outcomewas vague, and the tribunal sat on his file formonths. Then, out of the blue, Furtwänglerlearned that the Allied Kommandatura hadcleared him and that he was free to conductthe Berlin Philharmonic on May 25, 1947, atthe American-requisitioned Titania Palast.Amongst the papers left by MichaelJosselson is a note which refers to his part inwhat insiders referred to as the “jumping” ofFurtwängler. “I played a major role insparing the great German conductor WilhelmFurtwängler the humiliation of having to gothrough the denazification procedure despitethe fact that he had never been a member ofthe Nazi Party,” Josselson wrote.15 Thismaneuver was achieved with Nabokov’shelp, though years later both were vague

about the details of the case. “I wonderwhether you remember when was theapproximate date that Furtwängler came toEast Berlin and gave a press conferencethere threatening to go to Moscow if wewould not clear him at once,” Nabokovasked Josselson in 1977. “I seem toremember that you had something to dowith bringing him out of the Soviet sector(hadn’t you?) to my billet. I rememberGeneral McClure’s [chief of InformationControl Division] gentle fury atFurtwängler’s behaviour then . . .”16

One American official reacted angrily tothe discovery that figures like Furtwänglerwere being “whitewashed.” In April 1947,Newell Jenkins, chief of theater and musicfor the American military government ofWürttemberg-Baden, angrily demanded anexplanation for “how it happens that so

many prominent nazis in the field ofmusicology are still active.” As well asFurtwängler, both Herbert von Karajan andElisabeth Schwarzkopf were soon to becleared by Allied commissions, despite theirmurky records. In von Karajan’s case, hisNazi connections were virtually undisputed.He had been a party member since 1933 andnever hesitated to open his concerts with theNazi favorite “Horst Wessel Lied.” Hisenemies referred to him as “SS Colonel vonKarajan.” But despite favoring the Naziregime, he was quickly reinstated as the kingof the Berlin Philharmonic, the orchestrawhich in the postwar years was built up asthe symbolic bulwark against Soviettotalitarianism.17

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf had givenconcerts for the Waffen SS on the easternfront, starred in Goebbels’s propaganda

films, and was included by him on a list ofartists “blessed by God.” Her NationalSocialist Party membership number was7548960. “Should a baker stop baking breadif he doesn’t like the government?” askedher half-Jewish accompanist Peter Gellhorn(who himself had to flee Germany in the1930s). Obviously not. Schwarzkopf wascleared by the Allied Control Commission,and her career soared. She was later made aDame of the British Empire.

The question of how, if at all, artistsshould be held to account for an engagementwith the politics of their time could never beresolved by a hit-and-miss denazificationprogram. Josselson and Nabokov werekeenly aware of the limitations of such aprogram, and as such their motivation inleapfrogging its procedures could be viewedas humane, even courageous. On the other

hand, they were victims of a moralconfusion: the need to create symbolic anti-Communist rallying points introduced anurgent—and hidden—political imperative toclear those suspected of accommodating theNazi regime. This produced a tolerance ofsuspected proximity to Fascism if the subjectcould be put to use against Communism—someone had to wield a baton against theSoviets. Nabokov’s 1977 letter to Josselsonreveals that they actually had to wrestFurtwängler from the Soviets (who hadapproached the conductor with an offer totake over the Staatsoper Unter den Linden),whilst Furtwängler himself was playing bothsides against each other. His appearance atthe Titania Palast in May 1947 clearlysignaled that the Allies were not going to beupstaged by the Soviets in “the battle of theorchestras.” By 1949, Furtwängler was

listed amongst German artists traveling toforeign countries under American-sponsoredcultural programs. In 1951, he conducted atthe reopening of the Bayreuth Festival,which had been handed back to the Wagnerfamily, despite the official ban on RichardWagner (for “nationalism”).

William Donovan, head of America’swartime intelligence service, once saidfamously, “I’d put Stalin on the payroll if Ithought it would help us defeat Hitler.”18 Inan all-too-easy reversal, it was now apparentthat the Germans “were to be our newfriends, and the savior-Russians the enemy.”This, to Arthur Miller, was “an ignoble thing.It seemed to me in later years that thiswrenching shift, this ripping off of Good andEvil labels from one nation and pasting themonto another, had done something to witherthe very notion of a world even theoretically

moral. If last month’s friend could soquickly become this month’s enemy, whatdepth of reality could good and evil have?The nihilism—even worse, the yawningamusement—toward the very concept of amoral imperative, which would become ahallmark of international culture, was born inthese eight or ten years of realignment afterHitler’s death.”19

Of course, there were good reasons foropposing the Soviets, who were moving inswiftly behind the cold weather front.Communists came to power in Poland inJanuary. In Italy and France there wererumors of Communist coups d’état. Sovietstrategists had been quick to grasp thepotential of the widespread instability ofpostwar Europe. With an energy andresourcefulness which showed that Stalin’sregime, for all its monolithic intractability,

could avail itself of an imaginative vigorunmatched by Western governments, theSoviet Union deployed a battery ofunconventional weapons to nudge itself intothe European consciousness, and soften upopinion in its favor. A vast network of frontswas established, some new, some revivedfrom a dormant state since the death in 1940of Willi Munzenberg, the brain behind theKremlin’s secret prewar campaign ofpersuasion. Labor unions, women’smovements, youth groups, culturalinstitutions, the press, publishing—all weretargeted.

Experts in the use of culture as a tool ofpolitical persuasion, the Soviets did much inthese early years of the Cold War toestablish their central paradigm as a culturalone. Lacking the economic power of theUnited States and, above all, still without a

nuclear capability, Stalin’s regimeconcentrated on winning “the battle formen’s minds.” America, despite a massivemarshaling of the arts in the New Dealperiod, was a virgin in the practice ofinternational Kulturkampf. As early as 1945,one intelligence officer had predicted theunconventional tactics which were nowbeing adopted by the Soviets: “Theinvention of the atomic bomb will cause ashift in the balance between ‘peaceful’ and‘warlike’ methods of exerting internationalpressure,” he reported to the chief of theOffice of Strategic Services, GeneralDonovan. “And we must expect a verymarked increase in the importance of‘peaceful’ methods. Our enemies will beeven freer than [ever] to propagandize,subvert, sabotage and exert . . . pressuresupon us, and we ourselves shall be more

willing to bear these affronts and ourselvesto indulge in such methods—in oureagerness to avoid at all costs the tragedy ofopen war; ‘peaceful’ techniques will becomemore vital in times of pre-war softening up,actual overt war, and in times of post-warmanipulation.”20

This report shows exceptionalprescience. It offers a definition of the ColdWar as a psychological contest, of themanufacturing of consent by “peaceful”methods, of the use of propaganda to erodehostile positions. And, as the opening salliesin Berlin amply demonstrated, the“operational weapon” was to be culture. Thecultural Cold War was on.

So it was that amidst the degradation anunnaturally elaborate cultural life wasdragged to its feet by the occupying powersas they vied with one another to score

propaganda points. As early as 1945, “whenthe stench of human bodies still hung aboutthe ruins,” the Russians had staged a brilliantopening for the State Opera with aperformance of Gluck’s Orpheus, in thebeautifully lit, red plush Admiralspalast.Stocky, pomaded Russian colonels grinnedsmugly at American military personnel asthey listened together to performances ofEugène Onegin or to an explicitly anti-Fascist interpretation of Rigoletto, the musicpunctuated by the tinkle of medals.21

One of Josselson’s first assignments wasto retrieve the thousands of costumesbelonging to the former German State Opera(the Deutsches Opernhaus Company, theonly serious rival to the Russian StateOpera), which had been safely stored by theNazis at the bottom of a salt mine locatedoutside Berlin in the U.S. zone of

occupation. On a dismal, rainy day Josselsonset off with Nabokov to retrieve thecostumes. On their way back to Berlin,Josselson’s jeep, which preceded Nabokov’srequisitioned Mercedes, hit a Sovietroadblock at full speed. Josselson,unconscious and suffering from multiple cutsand bruising, was taken to a Russian militaryhospital, where Soviet women medicalofficers stitched him together again. Whenhe was well enough, he was retrieved backto his billet in the American zone, which heshared with an aspiring actor called Petervan Eyck. But for the care of his Sovietdoctors, Josselson might not have survivedto become the Diaghilev of America’scounter-Soviet cultural propagandacampaign. The Soviets had saved the manwho was, for the next two decades, to domost to undermine their attempts at cultural

hegemony.In 1947, the Russians fired another salvo

when they opened up a “House of Culture”on the Unter den Linden. The initiativedazzled a British cultural affairs officer, whoreported enviously that the institute“surpasses anything the other allies havedone and puts our poor little effort right inthe shade. . . . It is most luxuriouslyappointed—good furniture, much of itantique, carpets in every room, a brillianceof lights, almost overheated and everythingnewly painted . . . the Russians have simplyrequisitioned all they wanted . . . there is abar and smoking room . . . which looks mostinviting and almost Ritzy with its soft carpetsand chandeliers. . . . [This is a] grandiosecultural institute which will reach the broadmasses and do much to counteract thegenerally accepted idea here that the

Russians are uncivilized. This latest ventureis depressing as far as we are concerned—our contribution is so small—oneinformation centre and a few reading roomswhich have had to be closed down becauseof lack of coal! . . . We should be spurred onby this latest Russian entry into theKulturkampf to answer with an equally boldscheme for putting over Britishachievements here in Berlin.”22

Whilst the British lacked the coal to heata reading room, the Americans wereemboldened to return fire at the Soviets byopening the Amerika-Häuser. Set up as“outposts of American culture,” theseinstitutes offered respite from the bitterweather in comfortably furnished readingrooms and gave film showings, musicrecitals, talks, and art exhibits, all with“overwhelming emphasis on America.” In a

speech entitled “Out of the Rubble,” thedirector of education and cultural relationsemphasized to Amerika-Häuser personnelthe epic nature of their task: “Few peopleever have been privileged to be a part of amore important or more challenging mission,or one more replete with pitfalls than youwho have been chosen to aid in theintellectual, moral, spiritual and culturalreorientation of a defeated, conquered andoccupied Germany.” But he noted that “inspite of the great contribution which hasbeen made by America in the cultural field,it is not generally known even to Germanyor the rest of the world. Our culture isregarded as materialistic and frequently onewill hear the comment, ‘We have the skill,the brains, and you have the money.’ ”23

Thanks largely to Russian propaganda,America was widely regarded as culturally

barren, a nation of gum-chewing, Chevy-driving, DuPontsheathed philistines, and theAmerika-Häuser did much to reverse thisnegative stereotype. “One thing is absolutelycertain,” wrote one enthusiastic Amerika-Häuser administrator, “the printed materialbrought here from the United States . . .makes a deep and profound impression uponthose circles in Germany which forgenerations have thought of America asculturally backward and who havecondemned the whole for the faults of a fewparts.” Old clichés based on a historic“presupposition about American culturalretardation” had been eroded by the “goodbooks” program, and those same circles whohad upheld these slurs were now reported tobe “quietly and deeply impressed.”24

Some clichés were harder to dispel.When one Amerika-Häuser lecturer offered

a view of the “present-day position of theNegro in America,” he was met withquestions, “some of which were not inspiredby good will.” The lecturer “dealt vigorouslywith the questioners, who may or may nothave been communists.” Fortunately for theorganizers, the talk was followed “by songsperformed by a colored quintet. TheNegroes continued to sing long after officialclosing time and . . . the spirit of theoccasion seemed so congenial that it wasdecided to invite this Negro group for arepeat performance.”25 The problem of racerelations in America was much exploited bySoviet propaganda and left many Europeansuneasy about America’s ability to practicethe democracy she now claimed to beoffering the world. It was therefore reasonedthat the exporting of African Americans toperform in Europe would dispel such

damaging perceptions. An American militarygovernment report of March 1947 revealedplans “to have top-rank American negrovocalists give concerts in Germany. . . .Marian Anderson or Dorothy Maynorappearances before German audienceswould be of great importance.”26 Thepromotion of black artists was to become anurgent priority for American cultural ColdWarriors.

The American response to the Sovietcultural offensive now began to gather pace.The full arsenal of contemporary Americanachievement was shipped to Europe andshowcased in Berlin. Fresh new opera talentwas imported from America’s most nobleacademies: Juilliard, Curtis, Eastman,Peabody. The military government tookcontrol of eighteen German symphonyorchestras and almost as many opera

companies. With many native composersbanned, the market for American composerswas exponentially increased—and exploited.Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, ElliottCarter, Aaron Copland, George Gershwin,Gian Carlo Menotti, Virgil Thomson—theseand many other American composerspremiered their work in Europe undergovernment auspices.

In consultation with Americanacademics, playwrights, and directors, amassive theater program was also launched.Plays by Lillian Hellman, Eugene O’Neill,Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams,William Saroyan, Clifford Odets, and JohnSteinbeck were offered to enthusiasticaudiences huddled in freezing theaters whereicicles hung menacingly from the ceiling.Following Schiller’s principle of theater as“moralische Anstalt,” where men can see

presented the basic principles of life, theAmerican authorities devised a hit list ofdesirable moral lessons. Thus, under“Liberty and Democracy” came Ibsen’sPeer Gynt, Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple,and Robert Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln inIllinois. “Power of Faith” was expressed inthe drama of Faust, Goethe, Strindberg,Shaw. “Equality of Man” was the messageto be extracted from Maxim Gorki’s LowerDepths and Franz Grillparzer’s Medea.Under “War and Peace” cameAristophanes’s Lysistrata, R.C. Sherriff’sJourney’s End, Thornton Wilder’s Skin ofOur Teeth, and John Hersey’s A Bell forAdano. “Corruption and Justice” wasdeemed to be the theme of Hamlet, Gogol’sRevisor, Beaumarchais’s Figaro’s Wedding,and most of Ibsen’s oeuvre. And so on,through “Crime Does Not Pay”; “Morals,

Taste and Manners”; “Pursuit ofHappiness”; to the darker imperative of“Exposure of Nazism.” Deemedinappropriate “for the present mental andpsychological status of Germans” were “allplays that accept the blind mastery of fatethat unescapably [sic] leads to destructionand self-destruction, as the Greek classics.”Also blacklisted were Julius Caesar andCoriolanus (“glorifications of dictatorship”);Prinz von Homburg and Kleist (for“chauvinism”); Tolstoy’s Living Corpse(“Righteous criticism of society runs toasocial ends”); all Hamsun plays (“plainNazi ideology”); and all plays by anybodyelse who “readily shifted to the service ofNazism.”27

Mindful of Disraeli’s injunction that “abook may be as great a thing as a battle,” avast books program was launched, aimed

primarily at “projecting the American storybefore the German reader in the mosteffective manner possible.” Appealing tocommercial publishers, the occupationgovernment ensured a constant flow of“general books” which were deemed “moreacceptable than government-sponsoredpublications, because they do not have thetaint of propaganda.”28 But propaganda theywere certainly intended to be. Translationscommissioned by the Psychological WarfareDivision of American Military Governmentalone ran to hundreds of titles, ranging fromHoward Fast’s Citizen Tom Paine to ArthurM. Schlesinger Jr.’s The New Deal in Actionto the Museum of Modern Art’s Built in theUSA. There were also German editions ofbooks “suitable for children at their mostimpressionable age,” such as NathanielHawthorne’s Wonder Tales, Mark Twain’s A

Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House onthe Prairie.

The postwar reputations of manyAmericans in Germany (and the otheroccupied territories) were significantlyhelped by these publishing programs. AndAmerica’s cultural cachet soared withdistribution of works by Louisa May Alcott,Jacques Barzun, Pearl Buck, JamesBurnham, Willa Cather, Norman Cousins,William Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow, ErnestHemingway, F.O. Matthiessen, ReinholdNiebuhr, Carl Sandburg, James Thurber,Edith Wharton, and Thomas Wolfe.

European authors were also promoted aspart of an explicitly “anti-Communistprogram.” Suitable texts were “whatevercritiques of Soviet foreign policy and ofCommunism as a form of government we

find to be objective, convincingly written,and timely.”29 Meeting these criteria wereAndré Gide’s account of his disillusioningexperiences in Russia, Return from theSoviet Union; Arthur Koestler’s Darkness atNoon and The Yogi and the Commissar; andBread and Wine by Ignazio Silone. ForKoestler and Silone, this was the first ofmany appearances under the wing of theAmerican government. Approval forpublication was withheld for some books.One early casualty was John Foster Dulles’sby-now anachronistic Russia and America:Pacific Neighbors.

In art, Mrs. Moholy-Nagy appearedbefore German audiences to talk about thework of her late husband, László, and thenew and exciting direction taken by the“New Bauhaus” in Chicago. Her lecture,wrote one sympathetic journalist, “was a

very informative contribution to theincomplete conception we have of Americanculture and art.”30 This conception wasfurther enhanced by an exhibition of “Non-Objective paintings” from the GuggenheimMuseum. This was the first appearanceunder government sponsorship of the NewYork School, otherwise known as AbstractExpressionism. Lest the new be thought tooshocking, audiences were nursed withlectures on “Fundamental Thoughts onModern Art” which used comfortablyfamiliar medieval paintings to introduce “theabstract possibilities of artistic expression.”

With the memory of the Entartekunstexhibitions and the subsequent exodus of somany artists to America still painfully fresh,the impression now was of a Europeanculture broken up by the high tides ofFascism and washed up on the shores of the

new Byzantium—America. Audiences whohad experienced the mass rallies ofNuremberg were reportedly awed by onelecturer who “told of immense symphonicconcerts in the open air at night attended byaudiences equalling in numbers those whichusually only attend special sport events inour stadiums.”31

Not all efforts were of the highestcaliber. The launch of the German edition ofEllery Queen’s Mystery Magazine leftpeople like Michael Josselson stone cold.And not everyone was convinced that theYale Glee Club was the best vehicle forproving beyond all doubt “the tremendousimportance of the arts in the curriculum ofthe universities as an antidote againstcollectivism.”32 Even the Darmstadt Schoolgot off to a shaky start. A bold initiative ofthe American military government, the

“Darmstadt Holiday Courses for NewMusic” nearly ended in a riot afterdisagreement about radical new music spilledover into open hostility. One officialevaluation concluded: “It was generallyconceded that much of this music wasworthless and had better been left unplayed.The over-emphasis on twelve-tone musicwas regretted. One critic described theconcerts as ‘The Triumph of Dilettantism.’ .. . The French students remained aloof fromthe others and acted in a snobbish way [and]their teacher, Leibowitz, represents andadmits as valid only the most radical kind ofmusic and is openly disdainful of any other.His attitude is aped by his students. It wasgenerally felt that next year’s [course] mustfollow a different, more catholic pattern.”33

Darmstadt, of course, was to become thecitadel of progressive experimentation in

music within a few years.But all the symphony concerts and plays

and exhibitions could not hide the one starktruth of that long, harsh winter of 1947:Europe was going broke. A rampant blackmarket, civil unrest, and a series of cripplingstrikes (largely orchestrated by Communisttrade unions) produced levels of degradationand privation equal to anything experiencedduring the darkest moments of the war. InGermany, money had lost its value,medicine and clothes were impossible toobtain, whole families were living inunderground bunkers with no water or light,and young girls and boys offered sex toAmerican GIs in exchange for a bar ofchocolate.

On June 5, 1947, General George CatlettMarshall, the U.S. Army’s wartime chief ofstaff and now Truman’s secretary of state,

announced a plan to deal with the “greatcrisis.” Delivered at the 296th HarvardCommencement, which was attended byatomic physicist Robert Oppenheimer, D-day commander General Omar Bradley, andT.S. Eliot (all of whom, like Marshall, werereceiving honorary degrees), Marshall’s ten-minute address marked a catalytic momentin the fate of postwar Europe. Warning that“the whole world [and] . . . the way of lifewe have known is literally in the balance,”he called upon the New World to step intothe breach with a crash program of financialcredits and large-scale material assistance,and thus prevent the collapse of the OldWorld. “There is widespread instability.There are concerted efforts to change thewhole face of Europe as we know it,contrary to the interests of free mankind andfree civilization,” Marshall declared. “Left to

their own resources there will be no escapefrom economic distress so intense, socialdiscontents so violent, and politicalconfusion so widespread that the historicbase of Western civilization, of which we areby belief and inheritance an integral part, willtake on a new form in the image of thetyranny that we fought to destroy inGermany.”34

As he spoke these words, GeneralMarshall surveyed the faces of studentsgathered in the spring sunshine and saw, likeJohn Crowe Ransom before him, “theyoungling bachelors of Harvard/Lit liketorches, and scrambling to disperse/Likeaimless firebrands pitiful to slake.”35 It wasno coincidence that he had decided todeliver his speech here, rather than on someformal government podium. For these werethe men assigned to realize America’s

“manifest destiny,” the elite charged withorganizing the world around values whichthe Communist darkness threatened toobscure. The fulfillment of the MarshallPlan, as it became known, was theirinheritance.

Marshall’s address was designed toreinforce President Truman’s ideological callto arms of a few months earlier, which hadbeen immediately enshrined as the TrumanDoctrine. Addressing Congress in March1947 on the situation in Greece, where aCommunist takeover threatened, Trumanhad appealed in apocalyptic language for anew age of American intervention: “At thepresent moment in world history nearlyevery nation must choose betweenalternative ways of life,” he declared. “Thechoice is too often not a free one. One wayof life is based upon the will of the majority.

. . . The second . . . is based upon the willof a minority forcibly imposed upon themajority. It relies upon terror andoppression, a controlled press and radio,fixed elections and the suppression ofpersonal freedoms. I believe that it must bethe policy of the U.S. to support freepeoples who are resisting attemptedsubjection by armed minorities or by outsidepressure. I believe that we must assist freepeoples to work out their own destinies intheir own way.”36

After Truman’s speech, Secretary ofState Dean Acheson told congressmen: “Wehad arrived at a situation unparalleled sinceancient times. Not since Rome and Carthagehad there been such a polarization of poweron this earth. Moreover the two greatpowers were divided by an unbridgeableideological chasm.”37 Joseph Jones, the

State Department official who draftedTruman’s appeal to Congress, understoodthe enormous impact of the president’swords: “All barriers to bold action wereindeed down,” he said. Among policymakers it was felt that “a new chapter inworld history had opened, and they were themost privileged of men, participants in adrama such as rarely occurs even in the longlife of a great nation.”38

The heightened sense of the classicaldimensions of America’s postwar roleevoked by Truman’s address gave therhetorical context to General Marshall’s later,less conspicuously anti-Communist speech.The combination of the two—a package ofeconomic assistance coupled with a doctrinalimperative—delivered an unambiguousmessage: the future of Western Europe, ifWestern Europe was to have a future at all,

must now be harnessed to a pax Americana.On June 17, the Soviet daily Pravda

attacked Marshall’s proposal as an extensionof Truman’s “plan for political pressureswith dollars and a program for interferencein the internal affairs of other states.”39

Although the Soviets had been invited byMarshall to participate in his all-Europeanrecovery program, the offer was, saidGeorge Kennan, “disingenuous, designed tobe rejected.”40 As anticipated, they refusedto be part of the plan. Their objection mayhave been overstated, but in essence theSoviets were right to conflate thehumanitarian intentions of the plan with aless obvious political agenda. Far fromenvisioning cooperation with the SovietUnion, it was designed within the frameworkof a Cold War ethos which sought to drive awedge between Moscow and its client

regimes.41 “It was implicit all along that itwas important that we didn’t give theCommunists the opportunity to stick theiroar into these places,” Marshall plannerDennis Fitzgerald later wrote. “There wasalways the argument advanced that if wefailed to fully appreciate the requirements ofX, Y, and Z, that the Communists wouldtake advantage of this situation to promotetheir interests.”42 The plan’s deputy directorRichard Bissell supported this view: “Evenbefore the outbreak of the Korean War, itwas well understood that the Marshall Planwas never meant to be a wholly altruisticaffair. The hope was that strengthening theireconomies would enhance the value of theWestern European countries as members ofthe NATO alliance, eventually enabling themto assume a defense responsibility in support

of cold war efforts.”43 Secretly, thesecountries were also expected to assumeother responsibilities “in support of cold warefforts,” and to this end, Marshall Planfunds were soon being siphoned to boost thecultural struggle in the West.

On October 5, 1947, the CommunistInformation Bureau held its first meeting inBelgrade. Formed in Moscow the previousSeptember, the Cominform was Stalin’s newoperational base for political warfare,replacing the defunct Comintern. TheBelgrade meeting was used to deliver anopen challenge to the Truman Doctrine andthe Marshall Plan, both of which weredenounced as “aggressive” ploys to satisfyAmerica’s aspirations to worldsupremacy.”44 Andrei Zhdanov, architect ofStalin’s ruthless cultural policy, told theCommunists of Western Europe that “[i]f

they are prepared to take the lead of all theforces prepared to defend the cause ofnational honor and independence in thestruggle against attempts to subjugate theircountries economically and politically, thenno plan for the subjugation of Europe cansucceed.”45 Just as Marshall had chosen toaddress the intellectual heartland of America,so Zhdanov called upon the intelligentsia ofthe world to rattle their pens under thebanner of Communism and hurl their inkagainst the American imperium. “TheCommunist parties of [Europe have]achieved considerable successes inconducting work among the Intelligentsia.Proof of this is the fact that in thesecountries the best people of science, art, andliterature belong to the Communist Party,are heading the movement of the progressivestruggle among the intelligentsia and by their

creative and tireless struggle, are winningmore and more intellectuals to the cause ofCommunism.”46

Later that month, the Cominform’sideological storm troops were gathered at theEast Berlin Writers’ Congress at theKammerspiele Theater. As the “debate” (itwas nothing of the sort, of course) wore on,a young American with a pointed beard andlooking strangely like Lenin stormed theplatform and grabbed the microphone.Speaking in flawless German, he held hisposition for thirty-five minutes, praisingthose writers who had had the nerve tospeak up against Hitler and exposingsimilarities between the Nazi regime and thenew Communist police state. These weredangerous times. To disrupt the proceedingsand queer the pitch of a Communistpropaganda exercise was an act of either

madness or courage, or both. Melvin Laskyhad arrived.

Born in 1920 in the Bronx, Melvin JonahLasky grew up in the “looming presence” ofhis Yiddish-speaking grandfather, a bearded,learned man who nourished the youngLasky with passages from the legends of theJews. As one of the “best and brightest”graduates of City College of New York,Lasky emerged from its seething ideologicaldebates a staunch anti-Stalinist with a tastefor intellectual—and occasionally physical—confrontation. He joined the civil service andworked as a travel guide at the Statue ofLiberty before joining the staff of SolLevitas’s anti-Stalinist magazine, the NewLeader. Drafted into the service, he becamea combat historian with U.S. 7th Army inFrance and Germany, and was later de-mobbed in Berlin, where he became German

correspondent for both the New Leader andthe Partisan Review.

A short, stocky man, Lasky was given todrawing his shoulder blades back andpushing out his chest, as if primed for afight. Using his almond-shaped eyes toproduce deadly squints, he had acquiredfrom the brusque atmosphere of CityCollege an ill manner which rarely desertedhim. In his militant anti-Communism hewas, to use an epithet he bestowed onsomebody else, “as unmovable as the rockof Gibraltar.” Lupine and grittily determined,Lasky was to become a force to reckon withas he stormed his way through the culturalcampaigns of the Cold War. His explosiveprotest at the East German Writers’Congress earned him the title “Father of theCold War in Berlin.” His action even upsetthe American authorities, who threatened to

throw him out. Appalled by the timidity ofhis superiors, he compared Berlin to “what afrontier-town must have been like in theStates in the middle of the 19th century—Indians on the horizon, and you’ve simplygot to have that rifle handy or [if] not yourscalp is gone. But in those days a frontier-town was full of Indian-fighters. . . . Herevery few people have any guts, and if theydo they usually don’t know in whichdirection to point their rifle.”47

But Lasky knew the sheriff, and farfrom being run out of town, he was nowtaken under the wing of the militarygovernor, General Lucius Clay. To him,Lasky protested that whilst the Soviet liewas traveling around the globe at lightningspeed, the truth had yet to get its boots on.He made his case in a passionately argueddocument submitted on December 7, 1947,

to Clay’s office, which called for a radicalshake-up in American propaganda. Referredto as “The Melvin Lasky Proposal,” thisdocument constituted Lasky’s personalblueprint for staging the cultural Cold War.“High hopes for peace and internationalunity blinded us to the fact that a concertedpolitical war against the USA was beingprepared and executed, and nowhere morevigorously than in Germany,” he claimed.“The same old anti-democratic anti-American formulas on which manyEuropean generations have been fed, andwhich the Nazi propaganda machine underGoebbels brought to a peak, are now beingreworked. Viz., the alleged economicselfishness of the USA (Uncle Sam asShylock); its alleged deep political reaction(a ‘mercenary capitalistic press,’ etc.); itsalleged cultural waywardness (the ‘jazz and

swing mania,’ radio advertisements,Hollywood ‘inanities,’ ‘cheese-cake and leg-art’); its alleged moral hypocrisy (the Negroquestion, sharecroppers, Okies); etc. etc. . ..”48

In extraordinary language, Lasky wenton to define the challenge: “The time-honored U.S. formula of ‘Shed light and thepeople will find their own way’ exaggeratesthe possibilities in Germany (and in Europe)for an easy conversion. . . . It would befoolish to expect to wean a primitive savageaway from his conviction in mysteriousjungle-herbs simply by the dissemination ofmodern scientific medical information. . . .We have not succeeded in combatting thevariety of factors—political, psychological,cultural—which work against U.S. foreignpolicy, and in particular against the successof the Marshall Plan in Europe.” What was

needed now, continued Lasky breathlessly,was an “active” truth, a truth bold enough to“enter the contest,” not one which behavedlike “an Olympian bystander.” Make nomistake, he warned, the substance of theCold War was “cultural in range. And it ishere that a serious void in the Americanprogram has been most exploited by theenemies of American foreign policy. . . . Thevoid . . . is real and grave.”49

The “real and grave” void to whichLasky referred was the failure “to win theeducated and cultured classes—which, in thelong run, provide moral and politicalleadership in the community” to theAmerican cause. This shortcoming, heargued, could be partly addressed bypublishing a new journal, one which would“serve both as a constructive fillip toGerman-European thought” and “as a

demonstration that behind the officialrepresentatives of American democracy liesa great and progressive culture, with arichness of achievements in the arts, inliterature, in philosophy, in all the aspects ofculture which unite the free traditions ofEurope and America.”50

Two days later, Lasky submitted a“Prospectus for the ‘American Review’ ”whose purpose should be “to support thegeneral objectives of U.S. policy inGermany and Europe by illustrating thebackground of ideas, spiritual activity,literary and intellectual achievement, fromwhich the American democracy takes itsinspiration.” The review, he argued, woulddemonstrate that “America and Americanshave achieved mature triumphs in all thespheres of the human spirit common to boththe Old and the New Worlds,” and thereby

constitute the first really serious effort in“winning large sections of the Germanintelligentsia away from Communisticinfluence.”51

The result was Der Monat, a monthlymagazine designed to construct anideological bridge between German andAmerican intellectuals and, as explicitly setforth by Lasky, to ease the passage ofAmerican foreign policy interests bysupporting “the general objectives of U.S.policy in Germany and Europe.” Set up withGeneral Clay’s backing on October 1, 1948,under Lasky’s editorship, it was printedinitially in Munich and airlifted into Berlinaboard the Allied cargo planes on which thecity depended during the blockade. Acrossthe years, Der Monat was financed through“confidential funds” from the Marshall Plan,then from the coffers of the Central

Intelligence Agency, then with FordFoundation money, and then again with CIAdollars. For its financing alone, the magazinewas absolutely a product—and an exemplarof—American Cold War strategies in thecultural field.

Der Monat was a temple to the beliefthat an educated elite could steer thepostwar world away from its own extinction.This, together with their affiliations with theAmerican occupation government, was whatunited Lasky, Josselson, and Nabokov. LikeJean Cocteau, who was soon to warnAmerica, “You will not be saved byweaponry, nor by money, but by a thinkingminority, because the world is expiring, as itdoes not think (pense) anymore, but merelyspends (dépense),”52 they understood thatthe dollars of the Marshall Plan would notbe enough: financial assistance had to be

supplemented by a concentrated program ofcultural warfare. This curious triumvirate—Lasky the political militant, Josselson theformer department store buyer, andNabokov the composer—now stood poisedat the cutting edge of what was to become,under their guidance, one of the mostambitious secret operations of the Cold War:the winning over of the Western intelligentsiato the American proposition.

2

Destiny’s Elect

There’s no such thing as innocence.Innocence touched with guilt is as good a dealas you can get.Mike Hammer, in Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me,

Deadly

The American proposition had already beenarticulated in the Truman Doctrine and theMarshall Plan. Now, a new phase of theCold War opened up with the creation of theCentral Intelligence Agency, America’s firstpeacetime intelligence organization. Createdby the National Security Act of July 26,

1947, the Agency was originally intended tocoordinate military and diplomaticintelligence. Crucially—and in extremelyvague language—it was also authorized tocarry out unspecified “services of commonconcern” and “such other functions andduties” as the National Security Council(created under the same Act) might direct.“Nowhere in the 1947 Act was the CIAexplicitly empowered to collect intelligenceor intervene secretly in the affairs of othernations,” a government report later stated.“But the elastic phrase ‘such otherfunctions’ was used by successive presidentsto move the Agency into espionage, covertaction, paramilitary operations, and technicalintelligence collection.”1

The founding of the CIA marked adramatic overhaul of the traditionalparadigms of American politics. The terms

under which the Agency was establishedinstitutionalized the concepts of “thenecessary lie” and “plausible deniability” aslegitimate peacetime strategies, and in thelong run produced an invisible layer ofgovernment whose potential for abuse,domestically and abroad, was uninhibited byany sense of accountability.

This experience of limitless influencewas exemplified by the eponymous hero ofNorman Mailer’s monumental Harlot’sGhost: “We tap into everything,” saysHarlot. “If good crops are an instrument offoreign policy, then we are obliged to knownext year’s weather. That same demandcomes at us everywhere we look: finance,media, labor relations, economic production,the thematic consequences of T.V. Where isthe end to all that we can be legitimatelyinterested in? . . . Nobody knows how many

pipelines we have in good places—howmany Pentagon Pooh-Bahs, commodores,congressmen, professors in assorted thinktanks, soil erosion specialists, studentleaders, diplomats, corporate lawyers, nameit! They all give us input.”2

The CIA owned airlines, radio stations,newspapers, insurance companies, and realestate, and its role in world affairs grew soprodigiously over the decades that peoplebegan to suspect its presence behind everythicket. “Like Dorothy Parker and the thingsshe said, the CIA gets credit or blame bothfor what it does and for many things it hasnot even thought of doing,” one Agencyman later complained.3 Disastrousoperations like the Bay of Pigs did little toimprove the CIA’s public image. A negativestereotype emerged of a CIA peopled byruthless, Jesuitical, “ugly” Americans whose

view of the world was distorted by awilderness of mirrors.

Certainly, history continues to validatethis version. The Truman Doctrine and theNational Security Acts it inspired sanctionedaggressiveness and intervention abroad. Butthe scale of its imperial buccaneering tendsto obscure some less calamitous truths aboutthe CIA. In the beginning, its officers wereanimated by a sense of mission—“to savewestern freedom from Communistdarkness”—which one officer compared to“the atmosphere of an order of KnightsTemplars.”4

The dominant early influence was the“aristocracy” of the eastern seaboard andthe Ivy League, a Bruderbund of Anglophilesophisticates who found powerfuljustification for their actions in the traditionsof the Enlightenment and the principles

enshrined in the Declaration ofIndependence.

In this, the CIA took its character fromits wartime predecessor, the Office ofStrategic Services (OSS), set up in 1941 inthe wake of Pearl Harbor and disbanded inSeptember 1945 by President Truman, whosaid at the time that he wanted nothing to dowith a peacetime “Gestapo.” This primitivefear reflected little of the reality of OSS,which had acquired the nickname “Oh SoSocial” on account of its clubby, collegiateatmosphere. Columnist Drew Pearson calledit “one of the fanciest groups of dilettantediplomats, Wall Street bankers, and amateurdetectives ever seen in Washington.”5 “AllOSS-ers carried a pack with a carbine, a fewgrenades, some gold coins, and a death pill,”recalled Tom Braden, who worked closelywith OSS chief William “Wild Bill” Donovan

(the nickname had been earned for hisexploits against Pancho Villa). “Donovanonce left his death pill in a drawer at theDorchester Hotel and he made David Brucesend a wire from France to get the maidthere to send it out. He was quite acharacter, Bill Donovan, a legend in his owntime. He once said to me, ‘Braden, if youget in a tight spot, take your knife and driveit straight through his balls.’ ”6

Governed by legislation which prohibitedlittle and countenanced virtually anything,OSS-ers found themselves roving wartimeEurope like latter-day proconsuls. The firstOSS man to reach Bucharest after theGerman withdrawal in autumn 1944 becamea regular guest at meetings of the Romaniancabinet and boasted to colleagues, “Beforethey vote on anything, they ask me what Ithink. . . . They pass all my laws

unanimously. I never thought running acountry was so easy.”7 But running acountry was precisely what most OSS-erswere brought up to do. Recruiting from theheart of America’s corporate, political,academic, and cultural establishment,Donovan had assembled an elite corpswhich hailed from America’s most powerfulinstitutions and families. Members of theMellon family held espionage posts inMadrid, London, Geneva, Paris. PaulMellon worked for the Special OperationsExecutive in London. His sister, Ailsa (onceknown as the world’s richest woman), wasmarried to his commanding officer, chief ofOSS London David Bruce, son of a U.S.senator and a millionaire in his own right.J.P. Morgan’s sons were both in the OSS.The families Vanderbilt, DuPont, Archbold(Standard Oil), Ryan (Equitable Life

Insurance), Weil (Macy’s department store),Whitney were all represented in the ranks ofDonovan’s secret army.

Other OSS recruits included travel guidepublisher Eugene Fodor; New Yorkjournalist Marcello Girosi, who later becamethe producer of Italian and American filmsstarring Sophia Loren; Ilia Tolstoy, émigrégrandson of the famous novelist, who was amember of an OSS mission to Lhasa; andJulia McWilliams Child, later a celebritychef, who maintained OSS intelligence filesat Chungking. Raymond Guest, a polo-playing socialite and cousin of WinstonChurchill, cut a colorful swathe through OSSoperations in France and Scandinavia.Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a close friendand collaborator of Donovan’s, as wasErnest Hemingway, whose son John wasalso in OSS.

Although one critic complained of themany personnel “who seemed to be rah-rahyoungsters to whom OSS was perhaps anescape from routine military service and asort of lark,”8 there was also an assumptionthat each member of the higher echelons ofDonovan’s service “risked his future statusas a banker or trustee or highly placedpolitician in identifying himself with illegalityand unorthodoxy.”9 With the disbanding ofOSS, many of those future bankers andtrustees and politicians returned to civilianlife. Allen Dulles, Donovan’s brilliant deputywho had taken charge of OSS operations inEurope, went back to his law practice inNew York, where he became the center ofan informal cadre of campaigners for apermanent American intelligence service.Nicknamed the “Park Avenue Cowboys,”this group included Kermit “Kim”

Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore; TracyBarnes (who had helped Allen Dullesretrieve the famous Ciano diaries fromCountess Edda Ciano); Richard Helms andFrank Wisner, bringing gossip from Armyintelligence in occupied Germany; andRoyall Tyler, soon to become head of theParis office of the World Bank.

Far from causing risk to their “futurestatus,” their period in OSS enhanced theirreputations and offered another network tocombine with the old school ties that hadbrought them together in the first place.This, and their initiation into illegality andunorthodoxy, was to provide a rich resourcefor the CIA. It was this historic elite, the IvyLeaguers who cast their influence overAmerica’s boardrooms, academicinstitutions, major newspapers and media,law firms, and government, who now

stepped forward to fill the ranks of thefledgling Agency. Many of them hailed froma concentration in Washington, D.C., of ahundred or so wealthy families, known asthe “cave dwellers,” who stood for thepreservation of the Episcopalian andPresbyterian values that had guided theirancestors. Schooled in the principles of arobust intellect, athletic prowess, politessenoblige, and solid Christian ethics, they tooktheir example from men like the ReverendEndicott Peabody, whose Groton School,run along the lines of Eton, Harrow, andWinchester, was the alma mater of so manynational leaders. Trained in the Christianvirtues and the duties of privilege, theyemerged believing in democracy but wary ofunchecked egalitarianism. Reversing WillyBrandt’s celebrated declaration “We are theelected of the people, not the elect,” this was

the elect who had not been elected.Those who had not served with OSS

had spent the war rising through the ranks ofthe State Department and the ForeignOffice. They orbited around figures likeCharles “Chip” Bohlen, who later becameambassador to France. During the early1940s, his house on Dumbarton Avenue inGeorgetown was a place of intellectualferment at the center of which sat GeorgeKennan and Isaiah Berlin, who was alreadyrevered in Washington circles as “TheProphet.” One observer described Kennan,Bohlen, and Berlin as “a homogeneous,congenial trio.” Bohlen was one of thefounders of a novel branch of modernscholarship known as Kremlinology. He hadlived in Russia, knew its leaders andbureaucrats, had studied its ideologicalliterature, and could quote its classics. He

had witnessed the purges and trials of thelate 1930s and the full impact of Zhdanov’s“cultural policies.” “There are two famous‘last words,’ ” Bohlen was fond of saying.“One is ‘alcohol doesn’t affect me’; and theother is ‘I understand the Russians.’ ” For abetter understanding, he turned to IsaiahBerlin and Nicolas Nabokov, who was thenworking for the Justice Department. Bohlenused to refer to Nabokov as a “psychologicalasset,” and Nabokov returned thecompliment by calling Bohlen “my model,my source of advice.”

“These new friends had few if anyillusions about ‘Uncle Joe,’ ” Nabokov laterwrote. “In more ways than one, they werean anachronistic group in the Washington ofthose years, perhaps even in all of America.America was in a state of Sovietophiliceuphoria, which none in the house on

Dumbarton Avenue shared. The bulk ofAmerican public opinion had switched twicein three years in its feelings toward Russia.First it was against—after the partition ofPoland and the ‘fiendish’ Finnish war. Stalinin newspaper cartoons looked like a nastymixture of a wolf and a bear. Then, asabruptly, opinion was for Russia: after theNazi invasion of Russia in 1941. Stalin wassuddenly beautified, represented as a knightin armour defending the Kremlin against ahorde of Teutons, or reproduced fromMargaret Bourke-White’s slenderized andidolized profile photographs. And then, in1943, the pro-Russian feeling was enhancedby Stalingrad. ‘You will see,’ argued trustingAmericans, ‘Communism will never comeback to Russia the way it was. It will be adifferent country after the war. Didn’t Stalinbring the Patriarch back from exile? And the

writers and poets? And didn’t Stalin re-establish officers’ ranks and reinstate thehistorical national heroes, and even some ofthe tsars and saints, like Alexander Nevskyand Peter the Great?’ Not so the sceptics atDumbarton Avenue. They knew, as Kennanonce said, that Stalinism is irreversible.”10

The Dumbarton Avenue skeptics werejoined by David Bruce, Averell Harriman,John McCloy, Joseph and Stewart Alsop,Richard Bissell, Walter Lippmann, and theBundy brothers. In long exchanges, heatedby intellectual passion and alcohol, theirvision of a new world order began to takeshape. Internationalist, abrasive,competitive, these men had an unshakablebelief in their value system and in their dutyto offer it to others. They were thepatricians of the modern age, the paladins ofdemocracy, and saw no contradiction in that.

This was the elite who ran American foreignpolicy and shaped legislation at home.Through think tanks and foundations,directorates and membership in gentlemen’sclubs, these mandarins were interlocked bytheir institutional affiliations and by a sharedbelief in their own superiority. Their job wasto establish and then justify the postwar paxAmericana. And they were staunchsupporters of the CIA, which was fast beingstaffed by their friends from school,business, or the “old show” of OSS.

The foremost articulator of the sharedconvictions of America’s elite was GeorgeKennan, diplomat-scholar, architect of theMarshall Plan, and, as director of the StateDepartment’s Policy Planning Staff, one ofthe fathers of the CIA. In 1947, headvocated direct military intervention inwhat he saw as Italy’s imminent collapse

into a civil war supported by theCommunists: “This would admittedly resultin much violence and probably a militarydivision of Italy,” he told the StateDepartment, but “it might well be preferableto a bloodless election victory, unopposed byourselves, which would give theCommunists the entire peninsula at one coupand send waves of panic to all surroundingareas.”11 Truman, fortunately, didn’t goalong with this precipitate suggestion, but hedid authorize covert intervention in theItalian elections instead. By July 1947,Kennan had modified his views—not aboutthe nature of the Soviet threat but abouthow to deal with it. In his famous “X”article in the journal Foreign Affairs, he setforth the thesis which dominated the earlyyears of the Cold War. Claiming that theKremlin was committed to dominating

“every nook and cranny available . . . in thebasin of world power” with its “fanaticalideology,” he proposed a policy of“unalterable counter force,” and “firm andvigilant containment.” As part of this policy,he advocated “the maximum development ofthe propaganda and political warfaretechniques,”12 which, as director of thePolicy Planning Staff (designed to overseethe ideological-political containment ofEurope), he was perfectly placed toimplement. “The world was our oyster,” helater wrote of this office.

In a speech to the National War Collegein December 1947, it was Kennan whointroduced the concept of “the necessary lie”as a vital constituent of American postwardiplomacy. The Communists, he said, hadwon a “strong position in Europe, soimmensely superior to our own . . . through

unabashed and skilful use of lies. They havefought us with unreality, with irrationalism.Can we combat this unreality successfullywith rationalism, with truth, with honest,well-meant economic assistance?”13 heasked. No, America needed to embrace anew era of covert warfare to advance herdemocratic objectives against Soviet deceit.

On December 19, 1947, Kennan’spolitical philosophy acquired legal authorityin a directive issued by Truman’s NationalSecurity Council, NSC-4. A top secretappendix to this directive, NSC-4A,instructed the director of Central Intelligenceto undertake “covert psychologicalactivities” in support of American anti-Communist policies. Startlingly opaqueabout what procedures should be followedfor coordinating or approving such activities,this appendix was the first formal postwar

authorization for clandestine operations.Superseded in June 1948 by a new—andmore explicit—directive drafted by GeorgeKennan, NSC-10/2, these were thedocuments which piloted Americanintelligence into the choppy waters of secretpolitical warfare for decades to come.

Prepared in the tightest secrecy, thesedirectives “adopted an expansive conceptionof [America’s] security requirements toinclude a world substantially made over in itsown image.”14 Proceeding from the premisethat the Soviet Union and its satellitecountries were embarked on a program of“vicious” covert activities to “discredit anddefeat the aims and activities of the UnitedStates and other western powers,” NSC-10/2 gave the highest sanction of thegovernment to a plethora of covertoperations: “propaganda, economic warfare,

preventative direct action including sabotage,anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuationmeasures; subversion against hostile statesincluding assistance to undergroundresistance movements, guerrillas and refugeeliberation groups.”15 All such activities, inthe words of NSC-10/2, must be “soplanned and executed that any U.S.government responsibility for them is notevident to unauthorized persons, and that ifuncovered the U.S. government canplausibly disclaim any responsibility forthem.”16

NSC-10/2 established a special staff forcovert operations within the CIA but withpolicy and personnel under the PolicyPlanning Staff of the State Department (inother words, under Kennan’s control). Thisstaff was eventually called the Office ofPolicy Coordination (OPC), an innocuous

title designed “to ensure plausibility whilerevealing practically nothing of itspurpose.”17 Covert action was defined asany “clandestine activity designed toinfluence foreign governments, events,organizations or persons in support of U.S.foreign policy conducted in such a way thatthe involvement of the U.S. government isnot apparent.”18 Virtually unlimited in scopeand secrecy, OPC was without precedent inpeacetime America. Here was the dirtytricks department that Allen Dulles and thePark Avenue Cowboys had beencampaigning for. Emerging from their ranksto head this new operation was FrankWisner, who was chosen from a list ofcandidates put forward by George Kennan.

Frank Wisner, a former Wall Streetlawyer with a Mississippi twang and theunusual virtue of being a champion low

hurdler at the University of Virginia, was aveteran of OSS campaigns throughoutEurope and head of its Secret IntelligenceBranch. Staying on in military intelligenceafter the war, he was given responsibility forliaising with the Gehlen organization, theGerman Army intelligence unit preservedintact by the Americans to spy on Russia.Wisner was not a man to be delayed bymoral arguments. As Harry Rositzke, a closecolleague in OSS and later the CIAexplained, “It was a visceral business ofusing any bastard as long as he was anti-Communist.”19 “One needn’t ask him toone’s club,” was Allen Dulles’s comment onWisner’s relationship with SS GeneralReinhard Gehlen.20

Wisner had angrily resigned frommilitary intelligence when his superiorsniggled over his request for some extra

bicycles for his officers. He then joined theState Department, and from there hecontinued to run what was virtually hispersonal intelligence group, consisting of asuccession of rabbit warrens hidden deepwithin the bureaucracy of government. Itwas this group which was now merged intothe CIA under the Office of PolicyCoordination, or OPC. Wisner’s practice ofhiring Nazis did not stop when he took overOPC. “Wisner brought in a whole load offascists after the war, some really nastypeople. He could do that, because he waspowerful,”21 a CIA colleague later explained.“He was the key to a great many things, abrilliant, compulsive man, of enormouscharm, imagination, and conviction thatanything, anything could be achieved andthat he could achieve it.”22

Under Wisner’s stewardship, OPC

became the fastest-growing element in theCIA. According to Edgar Applewhite, a CIAdeputy inspector general, its staff “arrogatedto themselves total power, with no inhibitingprecedent. They could do what they wanted,just as long as ‘higher authority,’ as wecalled the President, did not expressly forbidit. They were extremely aristocratic in theirassumptions, extremely parochial about lifebetween men and women, very romantic,and arrogant. They had a heaven-sentobligation and, God knows, whatopportunity! They ate it up.”23

To facilitate the operations of OPC,Congress passed the Central IntelligenceAgency Act of 1949, which authorized thedirector of the CIA to spend funds withouthaving to account for disbursements. Withinthe next few years, OPC’s activities—itsscope of operations, its manpower and

budget—grew like a hydra. Its totalpersonnel strength grew from 302 in 1949 to2,812 in 1952, plus 3,142 overseas contractpersonnel. For the same period, its budgetincreased from $4.7 million to $82 million.One factor contributing to this expansionwas an organizational arrangement thatcreated an internal demand for projects.OPC activities were not programmed arounda financial system but around projects. Thishad important—and, in the end, detrimental—internal effects: “an individual within OPCjudged his own performance, and wasjudged by others, on the importance andnumber of projects he initiated andmanaged. The result was competition amongindividuals and OPC divisions to generatethe maximum number of projects.”24

At first, the CIA was headquartered in aseries of shambolic temporary buildings,

known as “sheds,” scattered around theCapitol and the Washington Mall. There, inthe dusty corridors, new recruits wereenthralled by “the atmosphere of wartimeand the urgency of mobilization. The hallswere full of earnest and worried men andwomen, rushing to meetings, conferring onthe run, issuing crisp instructions toassistants trying to keep up with them. Newpeople, full of enthusiasm, mingled withOSS veterans, Jedburgh colleagues with theelite of the post-war era, fresh from the IvyLeague campuses in their tweed jackets,smoking pipes, and full of daring, innovativeideas, who had flocked to the Agency as themost effective place for a non-communistliberal to do battle against the communistmenace.”25

The front line of this battle was, ofcourse, drawn up not in Washington but in

Europe. Establishing an office at TempelhofAir Base, half an hour outside Berlin, OPCseemed to hemorrhage its officers intoGermany. Added to other CIA divisions,there were 1,400 operatives attached to theGerman station at this time.

One of OPC’s first recruits in Germanywas Michael Josselson. In his notes towardsa memoir (which was never completed),Josselson wrote: “My tour of duty . . . wascoming to an end in 1948. But a return tocivilian life, which for me meant going backto the world of buying for U.S. departmentstores, a not particularly interesting career,filled me with despair. It was at that timethat an American friend who worked inintelligence introduced me to one of thechiefs of the ‘outfit’ in Germany. Therefollowed two or three more interviews inWashington, the filling out of an endless

questionnaire, and then a very long waitwhile the FBI in its clumsy fashion wastrying to find out whether there wasanything derogatory in my life history. In thefall of 1948 my clearance came through andI joined the ‘outfit’ as chief of its Berlinstation for Covert Action (CA), asdistinguished from the espionage orintelligence side (FI). Except for the ‘covert’aspect, this was in reality a continuation ofpsychological warfare, only this timedirected against the Soviets and theCommunists in East Germany. It was adefensive move, since the Soviets had longago started the psychological Cold War.”26

Josselson’s recruiter was Lawrence deNeufville, an OSS-er who had arrived inGermany with the first wave of Americantroops in 1944. Until early 1948, he servedas a consultant with the civil administration

in Berlin. He was then approached by JohnBaker, one of the CIA’s first officers inGermany, later famously declared personanon grata by the Soviets “for systematicallyviolating the norms of behavior fordiplomatic representatives” (i.e., spying)when he was second secretary of the U.S.Embassy in Moscow. “I made no applicationto join CIA or anything like that,” deNeufville later said. “I was quite happywhere I was, working on the constitution,helping to set up the Adenauer government.It was very exciting. But then one day JohnBaker walked into my office and said wouldI like to join the Agency.”27 De Neufvilleaccepted the offer and was assigned “cover”working in the office of the American highcommissioner John McCloy. His first actwas to recruit Josselson, whose work inBerlin had made him something of a legend

in intelligence circles.Meanwhile, was Nicolas Nabokov aware

of his friend’s new job? Michael Josselsonwas a fiercely private man, ideally suited tothe world of intelligence. When somerelatives who were living in East Berlinmanaged to track him down in early 1949,he curtly dismissed them, telling them not tocontact him again. Hurt, they assumed their“Americanized” cousin felt they were belowhim now. In reality, he was concerned fortheir safety. For East Berliners to have arelative in the American secret service wouldhave placed them in immediate danger. ButNabokov probably had a good idea ofJosselson’s new direction. There were morespies in Berlin at this time than functioningbicycles, and Nabokov had workedalongside many of them.

In fact, it appears that Nabokov was also

approached to join the CIA. In 1948, hefiled an application for a job in government.Since he was not a bureaucrat by nature, itis unlikely he was interested in joining theState Department (which was scorned bymany CIA recruits as “all policy and nopush-ups”), and with Allen Dulles involvedin his application it can reasonably besurmised that he was trying to get a job inintelligence. But his application ran intotrouble, and he failed to get securityclearance. His sponsor, George Kennan,deeply embarrassed, wrote, advising him towithdraw his application: “I am giving youthis advice (which causes me considerablesadness and a very real concern) onlybecause I have not been able to clarify thismatter to my own satisfaction, and cannotassure you a freedom of furtherunpleasantness if you go ahead with the plan

of working again with the Government. . . .I can only say that in my opinion the entireaction of the Government in this matter,taken as a whole, is ill-conceived, short-sighted, unjust, and quite inconsistent withany desire to utilize the services of sensitive,intelligent and valuable people. . . . I thinkthe Government has forfeited any right touse your advice, and if I were you I woulddrop the whole matter for the time being.”28

For the moment, at least, Nabokov was leftout in the cold.

And what of Melvin Lasky? Was he notan ideal candidate to join the swelling ranksof the CIA? It would later be alleged thatLasky had become an agent. This heconsistently denied. As with Thaxter inHumboldt’s Gift, the rumor “greatly addedto his mysteriousness.” His constantpresence at the forefront of the CIA’s

cultural Cold War for the next two decadeswould not go unnoticed.

3

Marxists at the Waldorf

So I say, Fascism or Communism, I take theside of love, and I laugh at men’s ideas.

Anaïs Nin

New York, March 25, 1949, a dank andslushy Tuesday. Outside the Waldorf Astoriahotel on Park Avenue and 50th Street, asmall and desultory picket, mostly men ingray gabardine coats, formed a slow circleon the sidewalk. Inside the hotel, the pacewas frantic. Unusually for this time of year,the hotel was full, and one booking inparticular was proving to be a headache.

From room 1042, a plush bridal suite onthe tenth floor, the orders came thick andfast all day. A request for extra telephones tobe installed was followed by a flurry oftelegraph messages, dictated to the hotel’swire room; more table lamps were needed;more of everything was needed. Calls toroom service issued like a constantcannonade—hamburgers, salads, steaktartare, side orders, bottles of claret, bottlesof beer, more buckets of ice, please. Notyour average honeymooners.

As waiters staggered into the suite, theywere met with a strange scene. Telephonecords webbed across the room, and at theend of the tangle callers were leaninganimatedly into each receiver. Everyavailable surface was occupied by a personor teetering piles of paper. The suite washeavy with cigarette smoke. Two secretaries

took dictation, and an assistant worked amimeograph machine which had beeninstalled in the bathroom, its floor invisiblebeneath a mounting pile of inky paper. Aperpetual flow of visitors weaved in and outof the clutter.

Amidst this ballyhoo, some members ofthe party looked on nervously as the waitersbalanced their huge trays on the edge of thebed and hovered for tips. Who was going topick up the tab? Sidney Hook, thephilosopher from New York University whohad booked the suite, seemed unconcernedabout the escalating costs of the enterprise.In the bridal suite with Hook were writerMary McCarthy and her third husband,journalist Bowden Broadwater; the novelistElizabeth Hardwick and her husband, thepoet Robert Lowell; Nicolas Nabokov;journalist and critic Dwight Macdonald;

Italian journalist and former Munzenbergally Nicola Chiaromonte; Arthur SchlesingerJr.; Partisan Review editors William Phillipsand Philip Rahv; Arnold Beichman, a laborreporter friendly with anti-Communist unionleaders; Mel Pitzele, another labor specialist;and David Dubinsky of the Ladies’ GarmentWorkers’ Union. Despite his job description,Dubinsky seemed perfectly at ease in thischaotic little intellectual parliament.

Downstairs, in the Waldorf Astoriaballroom, the hotel’s already stretched staffwere assisting with last-minute touches to aroom dressed for a conference. Flowerswere being arranged around a dais whichformed a crescent across the far end of theroom. Microphones were checked—onetwo, one two. A huge banner reading“Cultural and Scientific Conference forWorld Peace” was lifted across the wall

behind the speakers’ platform. Already,some of the thousand delegates to theconference were arriving for the inauguralreception. The demonstrators outside werepicking up, heckling guests as they walkedthrough the swing doors into the lobby.“Softies!” they shouted, as Lillian Hellman,Clifford Odets, Leonard Bernstein, andDashiell Hammett arrived. Special scorn wasreserved for the millionaire Ivy LeaguerCorliss Lamont, who was acting as“sponsor” of the conference. Son of thechairman of J.P. Morgan & Co. investmentbank, educated at Phillips Academy andHarvard, Lamont summoned up enoughpatrician reserve to ignore the insults flung athim by the angry picket.

The protest had been organized by aright-wing alliance consisting of theAmerican Legion and a group of Catholic

and patriotic societies. Its complaint was thatthe conference, which was sponsored by theNational Council of the Arts, Sciences andProfessions, was merely a “front” for theSoviets: that the Commies were here not, asthey claimed, in the interests of goodwill andintellectual exchange between the UnitedStates and the Soviet Union, but topropagandize America. And, in effect, theywere right. The conference was aCominform initiative, a daring ploy tomanipulate public opinion in America’s ownbackyard. The Soviet party, led by A.A.Fadeyev, head of the Union of SovietWriters, and including composer DmitriShostakovich, pride of their delegation, wasalso comfortably installed in rooms at theWaldorf. Its KGB “nurses” and partyapparatchiks could congratulate themselveson this coup de théâtre. The demonstrators

outside had a point: the Reds weren’t justunder the beds, they were in them.

“It was big news in the press that everyentrance of the Waldorf Astoria would beblocked by a line of nuns praying for thesouls of the participants, who had beenderanged by Satanic seduction,” wroteArthur Miller, who had accepted aninvitation to chair one of the conference’sdebates. “And on the morning of theconference I actually had to step betweentwo gentle sisters kneeling on the sidewalkas I made for the Waldorf door. Even then itwas a bewildering thing to contemplate, thisworld of symbolic gestures and utterances.”1

Although they publicly dissociatedthemselves from the demonstration outside—“The most dangerous thing we can do . . .is to leave the task of exposing Communistfronts to reactionaries”—Sidney Hook and

the bridal suite group were here for the samereason. Former Marxists and Trotskyists,they had once spun in the same Communistorbit as the American intellectuals and artistswho were, at this moment, arrivingdownstairs to attend the Soviet conference.Indeed, New York in the 1930s had oncebeen described as “the most interesting partof the Soviet Union.” But the German–Russian nonaggression pact of 1939 hadproduced a shock which had “started NewYork City, bitter and demoralized, back fromthe USSR, to America.”2 Whilst Hook andhis friends had been part of this movementaway from Marxist radicalism towards thepolitical center or right, other colleagues hadyet to abandon their sympathy forCommunism. “The Stalinists were still avery powerful gang,” editor and critic JasonEpstein later claimed. “They were like the

political correctness lot now. There wasgood reason, therefore, to question theStalinists’ right to culture.”3 The impressiveturnout of fellow travelers at the Waldorfseemed to justify the fear of many Americanideologues that Communism’s seductivespell was not broken, that the Communistdream, despite Stalin’s excesses, stilllingered.

“For me, however, the conference wasan effort to continue a good tradition thatwas presently menaced,” Arthur Miller laterwrote. “To be sure, the four years of ourmilitary alliance against the Axis powerswere only a reprieve from a long-termhostility that had begun in 1917 with theRevolution itself and merely resumed whenHitler’s armies were destroyed. But therewas simply no question that without Sovietresistance Nazism would have conquered all

of Europe as well as Britain, with thepossibility of the U.S. being forced into ahands-off isolationism at best, or at worst aninitially awkward but finally comfortabledeal with fascism—or so I thought. Thus,the sharp post-war turn against the Sovietsand in favor of a Germany unpurged ofNazis not only seemed ignoble butthreatened another war that might indeeddestroy Russia but bring down our owndemocracy as well.”4

Upstairs in the bridal suite, tempers weregetting a little frayed. Ever since the decisionhad been taken, three weeks previously, todisrupt the conference, this inchoate grouphad been working relentlessly to develop an“agitprop apparatus” of its own. The“enemy’s” preparatory activities weremonitored, and the task of disrupting themwas divided among the membership of a

burgeoning ad hoc committee. Aninternational counter-committee was named,and included Benedetto Croce, T.S. Eliot,Karl Jaspers, André Malraux, JacquesMaritain, Bertrand Russell, and IgorStravinsky. Even the Nobel Prize winner Dr.Albert Schweitzer enlisted, apparentlyuntroubled that his name also appeared inthe enemy camp as one of the “sponsors” ofthe Waldorf conference. Taking advantageof its Trojan horse position within theWaldorf, the group intercepted mailaddressed to the conference’s organizers andsabotaged their attempts to win over thepress by doctoring official statements andreleases. It issued a volley of press releases,challenging speakers and sponsors of theconference “to identify themselves as theCommunist Party members or inveteratefellow-travellers that they are.” For those

whose consciences failed to be pricked,Hook and his cohorts speeded the processby publicly disclosing “the true connectionsof the leaders of the Waldorf meeting.”Thus, the brilliant Harvard scholar F.O.Matthiessen’s membership in a host of“Communist-front organizations” (includingthe “Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee”)was revealed in a press release. Howard Fastwas listed as “Author of propaganda novels”and Clifford Odets was exposed (in less thanscientific manner) as “Another CommunistParty member according to testimony of aformer staff member of the Daily Worker.”

As the opening ceremonies of theconference drew near, ideas about how bestto subvert the proceedings differed wildly(as do later accounts of the affair). Hook,the self-appointed field marshal of the “littleanti-Communist suite,” briefed his

compagnons de guerre on how to survive aforced expulsion from the hall. Armed withumbrellas, they were to bang the floor to getattention, and then tie themselves to theirchairs. Thus anchored, their removal fromthe hall would be delayed. If they wereprevented from delivering their speeches,mimeographed copies would be distributedto reporters by Hook’s sidekicks Beichmanand Pitzele.

As it happened, these guerrilla strategieswere never called into play (although, forgood measure, umbrellas were banged onthe floor). To their surprise, the subverterswere each given two minutes to speak,though they had to wait for the first speaker,a retired bishop from Utah, to finish hisendless peroration. Mary McCarthy reservedher question for Matthiessen, author of TheAmerican Renaissance, who had described

Ralph Waldo Emerson as an ancestor ofAmerican Communism. Did Matthiessenthink Emerson would be allowed to live andwrite in the Soviet Union? she asked.Matthiessen conceded he would not, andthen added—in what was deemed “the nonsequitur of the year”—that Lenin wouldn’tbe permitted to live in the United States,either. When Dwight Macdonald askedFadeyev why he had accepted thePolitburo’s critical “suggestions” andrewritten his novel The Young Guard,Fadeyev replied, “The Politburo’s criticismhelped my work greatly.”

Nicolas Nabokov decided to attend apanel where Shostakovich was one of thespeakers. Among the musicians on theplatform were people known to Nabokov,friends even. He waved to them, and theysmiled nervously in response. After a

typically dull and predictable session,Nabokov was finally given the floor. “Onsuch-and-such a date in No. X of Pravdaappeared an unsigned article that had all thelooks of an editorial. It concerned threewestern composers: Paul Hindemith, ArnoldSchoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky. In thisarticle, they were branded, all three of them,as ‘obscurantists’, ‘decadent bourgeoisformalists’ and ‘lackeys of imperialistcapitalism’. The performance of their musicshould ‘therefore be prohibited in theU.S.S.R.’ Does Mr Shostakovich personallyagree with this official view as printed inPravda?”5

“Provokatsya! [Provocation!]” cried theRussian stooges, as Shostakovich receivedwhispered instructions from his KGB“nurse.” The composer then stood up, washanded a microphone, and, his ashen face

turned down to study the floorboards,murmured in Russian, “I fully agree with thestatements made in Pravda.”

It was an appalling episode. Rumors thatShostakovich had been ordered to attend theconference by Stalin himself had reachedthis New York gathering. He was thesacrificial lamb, appearing, said oneobserver, “pale, slight, and sensitive looking,hunched over, tense, withdrawn, unsmiling—a tragic and heartrending figure.” ArthurMiller described him as “small, frail, andmyopic,” standing “as stiffly erect as a doll.”Any display of independent spirit on his partwas a life-and-death matter. NicolasNabokov, on the other hand, was a WhiteRussian émigré who had become anAmerican citizen in 1939. He was safe.Nabokov was throwing punches at a manwhose arms were tied behind his back.

As chairman of the arts panel at whichthis confrontation took place, Arthur Millerwas appalled. “It is the memory ofShostakovich that still haunts my mind whenI think of that day—what a masquerade it allwas! . . . God knows what he was thinkingin that room, what splits ran across his spirit,what urge to cry out and what self-control tosuppress his outcry lest he lend comfort toAmerica and her new belligerence toward hiscountry, the very one that was making hislife a hell.”6

Thirty years later, Shostakovich’smemoirs appeared in the West, giving hisaccount of the Waldorf affair: “I still recallwith horror my first trip to the USA. Iwouldn’t have gone at all if it hadn’t beenfor intense pressure from administrativefigures of all ranks and colours, from Stalindown. People sometimes say it must have

been an interesting trip, look at the way I’msmiling in the photographs. That was thesmile of a condemned man. I felt like a deadman. I answered all the idiotic questions in adaze, and thought, When I get back it’s overfor me. Stalin liked leading Americans by thenose that way. He would show them a man—here he is, alive and well—and then killhim. Well, why say lead by the nose? That’stoo strongly put. He only fooled those whowanted to be fooled. The Americans don’tgive a damn about us, and in order to liveand sleep soundly, they’ll believe anything.”7

The conference continued for severaldays. T.S. Eliot sent a telegram opposing theconference. Another telegram came fromJohn Dos Passos, who urged Americanliberals to expose Soviet tyranny so that“with that exposure despotism will perishfrom its own poison.” Thomas Mann, who

once commented that anti-Communism “isthe basic stupidity of the twentieth century,”sent a cable in support of the conference.The “debates” were ritualistic and deadlydull, spiced up only by the intervention of ayoung Norman Mailer (described by onecontemporary as “a preppy Frank Sinatra”),who surprised both sides when he accusedboth the Soviet Union and the United Statesof aggressive foreign policy programs thatminimized the chance of peacefulcoexistence. “So long as there is capitalism,there is going to be war. Until you have adecent, equitable socialism, you can’t havepeace,” he said, before concluding, “All awriter can do is tell the truth as he sees it,and to keep on writing.”8 Mailer’s speechhad the magic effect of uniting antagonists ina chorus of boos.

By now the picket outside had swelled to

over a thousand, bristling with placards. Oneobserver wondered how it was “that somany noisy, tough plug-uglies are at thedisposal of the extreme right.” Hook wasastute enough to observe that theCommunism inside the Waldorf and the kindof militant anti-Communism outside on thesidewalk were feeding off each other. Hisaggressive PR campaign, run by Mel Pitzele,was now beginning to bite. The newspapermagnate and paranoid anti-CommunistWilliam Randolph Hearst ordered all hiseditors to follow the beat of Hook’s drumand denounce the “Commie” conferenceand its American “fellow travelers.”

In April, Henry Luce, owner-editor ofthe Time-Life empire, personally oversaw atwo-page spread in Life magazine whichattacked the degradations of the Kremlin andits American “dupes.” Featuring fifty

passport-sized photographs, the piece wasan ad hominem attack which prefiguredSenator McCarthy’s unofficial blacklists.Dorothy Parker, Norman Mailer, LeonardBernstein, Lillian Hellman, Aaron Copland,Langston Hughes, Clifford Odets, ArthurMiller, Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin,Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Wallace—allwere accused of toying with Communism.This was the same Life magazine which in1943 had devoted an entire issue to theUSSR, featuring Stalin on the cover, andpraising the Russian people and the RedArmy.

“It was dangerous to participate in thatfateful attempt to rescue the wartime alliancewith the Soviet Union in the face of themounting pressures of the Cold War, andone knew it at the time,” rememberedArthur Miller. “The air was growing hot with

belligerence . . . There was no denying theprobability of retribution against theconference participants as its opening daydrew near. . . . And indeed, as the monthspassed, ‘Supporter of the WaldorfConference’ or ‘Participant’ would becomean important key to the subject’s disloyalty. .. . That a meeting of writers and artistscould generate such widespread publicsuspicion and anger was something brand-new in the post-war world.”9

It certainly was dangerous. Those whowere “outed” at the Waldorf—a hotelfamous for its prewar débutante “comingout” balls—were now the subject of FBIdirector J. Edgar Hoover’s interest. HisFederal Bureau of Investigation sent agentsto cover the conference and report back onthe delegates. Back at FBI headquarters, afile was opened on the young Norman

Mailer. Files on Langston Hughes, ArthurMiller, F.O. Matthiessen, Lillian Hellman,Dashiell Hammett, and Dorothy Parker(who was listed variously as “an undercoverCommunist,” “an open Communist,” and “aCommunist appeaser”) had already beenopened in the 1930s, but their new acts ofperversion were now recorded.

In some cases, the FBI did more thanmonitor the Waldorf “Communists.” Shortlyafter the conference, an FBI agent paid avisit to the publishing firm of Little, Brown,and told employees that J. Edgar Hoover didnot want to see Howard Fast’s new novel,Spartacus, on the book-shelves.10 Little,Brown returned the manuscript to its author,who was then rejected by seven otherpublishers. Alfred Knopf sent the manuscriptback unopened, saying he wouldn’t evenlook at the work of a traitor. The book

finally came out in 1950, published byHoward Fast himself. The “Stalinists’ rightto culture” was certainly under attack.

With coverage in Life magazine, thestrange pas de deux between Communistsand former Communists at the Waldorf hadnow become a major public spectacle. Hookcongratulated himself for havingchoreographed the best scenes: “We hadfrustrated one of the most ambitiousundertakings of the Kremlin.”

Sidney Hook was born in December 1902 inNew York’s Williamsburg, a Brooklyn slumof unrivaled poverty in those years. Thiswas fertile ground for Communism, towhich Hook became a young adherent.Short in stature, his small face framed byround spectacles, Hook looked like acracker-barrel sage. But he was fiercely

intellectual, a cerebral brawler always readyto jump into the fight. Attracted to themuscular, bruising posturing of New YorkistCommunism, he moved easily between itsvarious factions, from Stalinism toTrotskyism to Bukharinism. He helpedprepare the first translation of Lenin’sMaterialism and Empiriocriticism for theAmerican Communist Party. He worked fora spell in the Marx-Engels Institute inMoscow. And he published a series ofarticles on Marxism, the most famous ofwhich, “Why I Am a Communist,”provoked a Hearst-led campaign to have himdismissed from New York University.

In the pattern of many New Yorkintellectuals, Hook’s faith in Communismbegan to weaken after a succession ofbetrayals: the 1936–37 treason trial of LeonTrotsky; the Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression

Pact of 1939; and a series of disastrouserrors of judgment, theory, and policy byStalin. Hook became a public enemy of theCommunist Party and was denounced as a“counterrevolutionary reptile,” hissupporters dismissed as “Hookworms.” By1942, Hook was informing on the writer andeditor Malcolm Cowley to the FBI. Hookthe revolutionary from Williamsburg hadbecome Hook the darling of theconservatives.11

In the late afternoon of Thursday, March27, 1949, police roped off a block on 40thStreet between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.From the balcony of the aptly namedFreedom House, Hook and his private armywaved triumphantly at a dense crowdgathered below in Bryant Square. His “teamof promoters . . . had done a splendidpublicity job,” said Nabokov, who was

particularly well suited to basking in thelimelight. Nabokov used this end-of-conference party to deliver a speech about“the plight of composers in the Soviet Unionand the tyranny of the party’sKulturapparat.” Addressing a packedaudience in the hall of Freedom House,Nabokov deplored the use that was beingmade of Dmitri Shostakovich at the “peaceconference.” Thunderous applause. Andthen Nabokov saw “a familiar face rise fromthe back row of the hall and come at me. Itwas an acquaintance of mine from Berlinwho, like me, had worked for OMGUS. Hecongratulated me warmly: ‘This is a splendidaffair you and your friends have organized,’he said. ‘We should have something like thisin Berlin.’ ”12

The “friend” who stepped forward wasMichael Josselson. His presence at the

Waldorf Astoria conference, andsubsequently at the Freedom House rally,was anything but the innocent coincidenceNabokov suggests. Josselson was there atthe express instructions of his boss FrankWisner, the CIA’s covert action wizard. This“splendid affair” was being subsidized byWisner’s outfit, and Josselson was there tokeep an eye on the investment. With thewitting collaboration of David Dubinsky—whose presence in the bridal suite wasalways something of a mystery—the CIAhad procured Hook’s stronghold in theWaldorf (Dubinsky had threatened to havethe unions close down the hotel if themanagement could not accommodate hisintellectual friends), paid the bills (Nabokovreceived a large wad of CIA dollars fromDubinsky to take back to the bridal suite),and secured wide and sympathetic press

coverage.Melvin Lasky, too, had come from

Berlin to see how Hook’s agitprop activitieswere shaping up (the two had liaised theprevious year, when Hook had been inBerlin as an “educational adviser” in theAmerican zone). Lasky thrilled to theconfrontational character of the Waldorfconference, reserving special scorn forShostakovich. “His timidity was extreme,”he later claimed. “He didn’t want to standup for anything. But there are those whosay, There are things that are bigger thanyou, Shostakovich, bigger even than yourmusic, and you have to pay an entrance fee,whether you like it or not, in the name of ahigher purpose.”13

Hook and his friends at the Waldorf feltthey had paid their entrance fee. But most ofthem were not party to the hidden

arrangement that had made theircounteraction possible. Nicola Chiaromontewas suspicious of Hook’s contacts. Hewarned Mary McCarthy, somewhatcryptically, to hold out against Hook and hislieutenants, whose many press releases inthis hectic week had included statementsexplicitly supporting U.S. foreign policy:“What the boys and Hook do in the lastanalysis, is not to say they are happy aboutthe State Department, but that finally theyare prepared to yield to American raisond’Etat as against the Russians.” This,continued Chiaromonte, was “a preordainedact of conformism and a very unconstructiveone, from, precisely, the democratic point ofview.”14

This early sensitivity is very revealing,worthy of a man whose perceptions hadbeen refined by his work as a political agent

for the Munzenberg Trust, the SovietUnion’s prewar network of frontorganizations named after its director, WilliMunzenberg. For, although Chiaromontedidn’t know it yet, he had come very closeto the truth. A little bit closer, and he wouldhave discovered that it wasn’t just the StateDepartment that had taken an interest inHook but America’s spying establishment.

Arthur Miller intuited that the Waldorfconference would turn out to be “a hairpincurve on the road of history.” Forty yearslater he wrote: “Even now something darkand frightening shadows the memory of thatmeeting . . . where people sat as in a SaulSteinberg drawing, each of them with aballoon overhead containing absolutelyindecipherable scribbles. There we were, aroomful of talented people and a few realgeniuses, and in retrospect neither side was

wholly right, neither the apologists for theSoviets nor the outraged Red-haters; to putit simply, politics is choices, and notinfrequently there really aren’t any to make;the chessboard allows no space for amove.”15

But for the CIA, the Waldorf conferencerepresented a chance to make some newmoves in the Great Game. It was a“catalytic event,” recalled CIA agent DonaldJameson. “It was the tip-off that there was amassive campaign launched in the West onan ideological assertion of influence at apolitical level.” It delivered a powerfulmessage to those in government whounderstood that the compelling nature of theCommunist delusion was not going to bedissipated by conventional methods. “Wenow understood that it was necessary to dosomething about it. Not in terms of

suppressing these people, many of whom ofcourse were very noble types. But rather aspart of a general program looking toward,ultimately, what we now can call the end ofthe Cold War.”16

4

Democracy’s Deminform

Whenever I’m a shining Knight,I buckle on my armour tight;And then I look about for things,Like Rushings-out, and Rescuings,And Savings from the Dragon’s Lair,And fighting all the Dragons there.

A.A. Milne, “Knight in Armour”

The Waldorf Astoria conference was ahumiliation for its Communist backers. “Itwas,” said one observer, “a propagandist’snightmare, a fiasco that proved the lasthurrah for the idea that the ideological

interests of Stalinist Russia could be graftedonto progressive traditions in America.”1

The American Communist Party was now inretreat, its membership at an all-time low, itsprestige irrevocably tarnished. Just whenclaims of a Communist conspiracy began totake feverish grip, Stalin’s strategists all butturned their back on America andconcentrated instead on extending influenceand neutralizing enemies in Europe.

The Cominform’s campaign to convincethe thinking man of Europe that the onlyaggrandizement the USSR sought was oneof “peace” was seriously undermined by twocrucial events in 1949. First, there wasStalin’s ruthless treatment of the Yugoslavleader Marshal Tito, whose refusal tosacrifice national interests in favor ofpropping up Soviet hegemony in the Balkanshad opened a vicious polemic between

Moscow and Belgrade. Stalin had withdrawneconomic and military advisers fromYugoslavia as part of a war of attritiondesigned to weaken this independent stance.Tito, in turn, had opened negotiations withthe West to receive Marshall Plan credits torevive his crippled economy. Stalin’s brutalinterpretation of “international Communism”strained the goodwill of European fellowtravelers, who now rallied to Tito’s defense.Second, Soviet calls for peaceful coexistencewere further undermined by the detonationof a Russian atomic bomb in August 1949.

The British answer to the phony claimsof Soviet propaganda was belatedly takingshape. The Information ResearchDepartment (IRD), which had been set up inFebruary 1948 by Clement Attlee’sgovernment to attack Communism, was thefastest-growing section of the Foreign

Office. “We cannot hope successfully torepel Communism only by disparaging it onmaterial grounds,” explained the IRD’sarchitect, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin,“and must add a positive appeal toDemocratic and Christian principles,remembering the strength of Christiansentiment in Europe. We must put forward arival ideology to Communism.”2 This,indeed, was the challenge: Westerngovernments could not simply rely ondenigrating the Soviet experiment but had aduty to offer an alternative future fromwithin a system—capitalist democracy—whose boasts often far exceeded itsachievements. “What is wrong with theworld is not the strength of Communism,which Stalin and Co. have perverted into aninstrument of Slavist expansion in a mannerwhich would have shocked Lenin, but the

moral and spiritual weakness of the non-Communist world,” argued the diplomat-spyRobert Bruce Lockhart.3

To overlook the role of the Britishgovernment in manufacturing a cozy imageof Stalin during the wartime alliance is toignore one of the crucial truths of the ColdWar: the alliance between the free world andRussia against the Nazis was the moment atwhich history itself seemed to connive in theillusion that Communism was politicallydecent. The problem facing the Britishgovernment after the Second World War washow to set about dismantling the untruths ithad systematically constructed or defendedin the previous years. “During the war, wehad built up this man, though we knew hewas terrible, because he was an ally,”explained Adam Watson, a junior diplomatrecruited to the IRD as its second-in-

command. “Now the question was, ‘How dowe get rid of the Good Old Uncle Joe mythbuilt up during the war?’ ”4 Many Britishintellectuals and writers had worked for thegovernment in its propaganda departmentsduring the war: now they were being calledupon to disabuse the British public of thoselies they had worked so inventively toprotect.

The Information Research Departmentwas, despite its innocuous title, a secretMinistry of Cold War. It drew its budgetfrom the secret vote (to avoid unwelcomescrutiny of any operations which mightrequire covert or semi-covert action), and itspurpose “was to produce and distribute andcirculate unattributable propaganda,”according to Christopher “Monty”Woodhouse, a spy who was assigned to thedepartment in 1953. Working on the trickle-

down theory, IRD compiled “factual”reports on all manner of subjects fordistribution amongst members of the Britishintelligentsia, who were then expected torecycle these facts in their own work.Nonattribution was a central anddistinguishing feature of this exercise,making it possible to reconcile twoessentially contradictory requirements: toachieve the widest possible circulation forIRD material whilst protecting the existenceof an officially sanctioned and secretlyfunded anti-Communist propagandacampaign about which the public knewnothing.

“It is important that in the UK, asabroad, there should not be created a publicimpression that the Foreign Office isorganizing an anti-communist campaign,”wrote IRD’s first chief, Ralph Murray. “It

would embarrass a number of persons whoare prepared to lend us valuable support ifthey were open to the charge of receivinganti-communist briefs from some sinisterbody in the Foreign Office engaged in thefabrication of propaganda directed at theSoviet Union.”5

“If you base your work on supplyingfacts, it’s much harder to refute than ifyou’re supplying simply propaganda,” AdamWatson later explained. “It’s about exposingthose aspects of the truth which are mostuseful to you.”6 In practice, this meant thatalthough IRD was intended to attack both“the principles and practice of Communism,and also the inefficiency, social injustice andmoral weakness of unrestrained capitalism,”it was not allowed to “attack or appear to beattacking any member of the

Commonwealth or the United States.”7 Theidea that the truth could be submitted tosuch exigencies had long amused NoëlCoward who, in his brief tenure as anintelligence officer, had delighted in over-stamping documents marked “highlyconfidential” with the words “highlytruthful.”

One of IRD’s most important earlyadvisers was the Hungarian-born writerArthur Koestler. Under his tutelage, thedepartment realized the usefulness ofaccommodating those people and institutionswho, in the tradition of left-wing politics,broadly perceived themselves to be inopposition to the center of power. Thepurpose of such accommodation wastwofold: first, to acquire a proximity to“progressive” groups in order to monitortheir activities; second, to dilute the impact

of these groups by achieving influence fromwithin or by drawing its members into aparallel—and subtly less radical—forum.

Koestler himself was soon benefitingfrom IRD’s propaganda campaigns.Darkness at Noon, whose depiction ofSoviet cruelty had established Koestler’scredentials as an anti-Communist, wascirculated in Germany under its auspices. Ina deal struck with Hamish Hamilton, directorof the eponymous publishing house andhimself closely tied to intelligence, 50,000copies were purchased and distributed bythe Foreign Office in 1948. Ironically, at thesame time, “the French Communist Partyhad orders to buy up every single copy [ofthe book] immediately and they were allbeing bought up and there was no reasonwhy it should ever stop being reprinted, soin this way K[oestler] was being enriched

indefinitely from Communist Party funds.”8

Koestler was not only acting as aconsultant for the Foreign Office’spropaganda campaign. In February 1948, hehad set off on a lecture tour of the UnitedStates. In March he met with William “WildBill” Donovan in the general’s New Yorktown house on Sutton Place. Donovan, bothas director of America’s wartime intelligenceservice and, more recently, as one of thechief architects of the newly created CIA,was a core member of America’s intelligenceand foreign policy elite. He was a lifelonganti-Communist, keeping vigil right up to themoment of his death in 1959, when hereported spotting Russian troops marchinginto Manhattan across the 59th Street bridgeoutside his window. Koestler, formerly oneof the brains behind the Munzenberg Trust,knew better than most men living how the

Soviet propaganda machine worked fromthe inside. Shortly before leaving for theStates, Koestler had met André Malraux andChip Bohlen, the newly appointedambassador to France, to discuss how bestto counter the Cominform’s “peace”offensive. Aboard a ship crossing toAmerica, Koestler had also met, bycoincidence, John Foster Dulles, brother ofAllen Dulles and future secretary of state,and the two had discussed the sameproblem. Now, Koestler was sitting downwith William Donovan to talk about how tocounter Soviet propaganda. “Discussed needfor psychological warfare,” Koestler noted inhis diary, adding that Donovan possessed a“first-rate brain.” The significance of thismeeting should not be underestimated.

Arthur Koestler was born into a middle-class family in Budapest in 1905. After a

Pauline conversion, he joined theCommunist Party in the early 1930s. Helater wrote that reading Marx and Engels had“the intoxicating effect of a suddenliberation.” In 1932 he went to Russia andwrote a propaganda book financed by theCommunist International, Of White Nightsand Red Days. There he fell madly in lovewith a clerk called Nadeshda Smirnova. Hespent a week or two with her, and thendenounced her to the secret police over atrifling matter. She was never heard fromagain. After Hitler’s triumph in Germany, hejoined the German exiles in Paris, where heteamed up with Willi Munzenberg. In 1936he went to Spain, probably to spy forMunzenberg. He was interned as a politicalprisoner but was saved when the Britishgovernment intervened following thevigorous activities of his first wife, Dorothy

Ascher. By 1938 he had resigned from theCommunist Party, disgusted by Stalin’s massarrests and show trials, but still believing inthe attainability of the Bolshevik utopia. Hestopped believing altogether when theswastika was hoisted at Moscow airport inhonor of Ribbentrop’s arrival to sign theHitler–Stalin Pact and the Red Army bandbroke into the “Horst Wessel Lied.” Internedin France during the war, he wrote Darknessat Noon, a chronicle of the abusesperformed in the name of ideology, whichsoon became one of the most influentialbooks of the period. On his release he madehis way to England (via the French ForeignLegion), where, after yet anotherinternment, he enlisted in the Pioneer Corps.He later joined the Ministry of Informationas an anti-Nazi propagandist, work whichearned him British citizenship.

His 1948 lecture tour in America wasdesigned to disabuse the “Babbitts of theLeft”9 of the fallacies and confusions whichstill dominated their thinking. He exhortedAmerican intellectuals to abandon theirjuvenile radicalism and engage themselves ina mature enterprise of cooperation with thepower structure: “The task of theprogressive intelligentsia of your country isto help the rest of the nation to face itsenormous responsibilities. The time forsectarian quarrels in the cosy no-man’s-landof abstract radicalism is past. It is time forthe American radical to grow up.”10 Thusdid Koestler call for a new era ofengagement, where intellectuals took it astheir duty to justify the national effort,eschewing the now anachronistic privilege ofdistance or detachment. “Since the writerhas no way to escape, we want him to take

hold of his era firmly: it is his only chance; itwas made for him and he for it,” Jean-PaulSartre was soon to declare. “Our intention isto work together to produce certain changesin the society that surrounds us.”11 Thedifference between Sartre and Koestler wasnot the quality of engagement but its object.Where Sartre remained resolutely opposedto the institutions of government asmediators of truth or reason, Koestlerenjoined his colleagues to help the powerelite in its mission to rule.

Shortly after his meeting with Donovanin New York, Koestler traveled toWashington, where he attended a round ofpress conferences, luncheons, cocktails, anddinner parties. Through James Burnham, anAmerican intellectual who had made thejourney from radicalism to the institutions ofpower with amazing speed, he was

introduced to scores of State Departmentofficials, presidential aides, journalists, andtrade union officials. The CIA in particulartook an interest in Koestler. Here was a manwho could tell them a thing or two.

The Agency had been toying with anidea for a while now: who better to fight theCommunists than former Communists? Inconsultation with Koestler, this idea nowbegan to take shape. The destruction of theCommunist mythos, he argued, could onlybe achieved by mobilizing those figures onthe left who were non-Communist in acampaign of persuasion. The people ofwhom Koestler spoke were alreadydesignated as a group—the Non-CommunistLeft—in State Department and intelligencecircles. In what Arthur Schlesinger describedas a “quiet revolution,” elements of thegovernment had come increasingly to

understand and support the ideas of thoseintellectuals who were disillusioned withCommunism but still faithful to the ideals ofsocialism.

Indeed, for the CIA, the strategy ofpromoting the Non-Communist Left was tobecome “the theoretical foundation of theAgency’s political operations againstCommunism over the next two decades.”12

The ideological rationale for this strategy, inwhich the CIA achieved a convergence,even an identity, with leftist intellectuals,was presented by Schlesinger in The VitalCenter, one of three seminal books whichappeared in 1949 (the other two being TheGod That Failed and Orwell’s NineteenEighty-Four). Schlesinger charted thedecline of the left and its eventual moralparalysis in the wake of the corruptedrevolution of 1917, and traced the evolution

of the “non-Communist Left” as “thestandard to rally the groups fighting to carveout an area for freedom.” It was within thisgroup that “the restoration of the radicalnerve” would take place, leaving “no lamp inthe window for the Communists.” This newresistance, argued Schlesinger, needed “anindependent base from which to operate. Itrequires privacy, funds, time, newsprint,gasoline, freedom of speech, freedom ofassembly, freedom from fear.”13

“The thesis which animated all this[mobilization of] the Non-Communist Leftwas one which Chip Bohlen, Isaiah Berlin,Nicolas Nabokov, Averell Harriman, andGeorge Kennan all ardently supported,”Schlesinger later recalled. “We all felt thatdemocratic socialism was the most effectivebulwark against totalitarianism. This becamean undercurrent—or even undercover—

theme in American foreign policy during theperiod.”14 Shortened to the initials NCL, theNon-Communist Left was a designationwhich soon became common usage in thebureaucratic language of Washington. “Itwas almost a card carrying group,” notedone historian.15

This “card carrying group” wasassembled for the first time under the coversof The God That Failed, a collection ofessays testifying to the failure of theCommunist idea. The book’s animating spiritwas Arthur Koestler, who had returned toLondon in a state of high excitement afterhis discussions with William Donovan andother U.S. intelligence strategists. Thesubsequent history of its publication servesas a template for the contract between theNon-Communist Left and the “dark angel”of American government. By the summer of

1948, Koestler had discussed the idea withRichard Crossman, wartime head of theGerman section of the PsychologicalWarfare Executive (PWE), a man who felt“he could manipulate masses of people” andwho had “just the right amount ofintellectual sleight-of-hand to make him aperfect professional propagandist.”16 As afellow at New College alongside IsaiahBerlin (who also had contacts with the PWEduring the war), Crossman was oncedescribed as “without principles and veryambitious,” someone who “would climbover his mother’s dead body to get a stephigher.”17 In Crossman’s book Plato Today(1937), the narrator wondered whetherparliamentary democracy was not in essence“a sham, a gaily-painted hoarding behindwhich are kept hidden the government andthe machinery of the state.” The same might

be said of The God That Failed.On August 27, 1948, Crossman involved

another psychological warfare veteran, theAmerican C.D. Jackson, in the project. “Iam writing to ask your advice. Cass Canfieldof Harpers, and Hamish Hamilton, mypublisher here, are proposing next spring topublish a book called Lost Illusions, forwhich I have taken editorial responsibility. Itis to consist of a series of autobiographicalsketches by prominent intellectuals,describing how they became Communists orfellow-travellers, what made them feel thatCommunism was the hope of the world, andwhat disillusioned them.”18 Jackson’s advicewas that the writer Louis Fischer, a formerCommunist, be invited to representAmerica’s lost illusions.

Crossman then approached MelvinLasky, by now America’s official unofficial

cultural propagandist in Germany and one ofthe earliest advocates of organizedintellectual resistance to Communism. AsCrossman received contributions for thebook, he sent them immediately on toLasky, who had them translated in theoffices of Der Monat. According to anAmerican High Commission EvaluationReport of 1950, “all but one of the articles inThe God That Failed were originalcontributions to Der Monat, or articles forwhich the magazine negotiated thecopyright. By issue 25, Der Monat hadcompleted publication of all the essays.”19

Crossman edited the English version, whichwas published in 1950 by Koestler’spublisher, Hamish Hamilton. Crossman’sclose friend from the Office of WarInformation Cass Canfield (later AllenDulles’s publisher) was responsible for the

American edition. With this background, TheGod That Failed was as much a product ofintelligence as it was a work of theintelligentsia.

The contributors were Ignazio Silone,André Gide, Richard Wright, ArthurKoestler, Louis Fischer, and StephenSpender. “We were not in the least interestedeither in swelling the flood of anti-Communist propaganda or in providing anopportunity for personal apologetics,” wroteCrossman in his introduction.20 Yet the bookachieved both these disavowed objectives.Although they collectively testified to thefailure of the Marxist utopia, the essays wereall deeply personal accounts, the apologiapro politica sua of individuals moved toexpress their disenchantment and sense ofbetrayal. A collective act of confession, thebook was also a recusant statement, a

rejection of Stalinism at a time when manystill considered such an act heresy. It was anew book of revelations for the postwar era,and appearance in it was to act as a passportto the world of official culture for the nexttwenty years.

Of the six contributors to The God ThatFailed, three had worked for WilliMunzenberg. Koestler, who once said thatfaith was wondrous, not only capable ofmoving mountains “but of making onebelieve that a herring is a racehorse,” hadbeen one of Munzenberg’s most zealousdisciples. During the 1930s, when he was aswell known in America as Edward R.Murrow would be in the 1950s, thejournalist Louis Fischer was a man whosecareer had also been closely shaped by hisexperience as a Communist working forMunzenberg. Ignazio Silone had joined the

Italian Communist Party in 1921. LikeKoestler’s, his was a true conversion (“Theparty became family, school, church,barracks”), and propelled him up the ladderof the Communist International and into thearms of Munzenberg. Quietly dropping outof Party activity after 1927, Silone retained“the ashen taste of a wasted youth.” Thefinal break came in 1931, when theCommunist Party asked him to make apublic statement condemning Trotsky. Herefused, and the Party expelled him as a“clinical case.” Speaking to a group ofGerman ex-Communists living, like him, inuneasy exile in Switzerland during the war,Silone said: “the past, including all thewounds that it has left with us, need not be asource of weakness for us. We must notallow ourselves to be demoralized by theerrors, the carelessness, the stupid things

said or written. What is required from usnow is a will so pure that new strength canbe born from the worst of ourselves: Etiampeccata.”21

Under the covers of The God ThatFailed, these former propagandists for theSoviets were recycled, bleached of the stainof Communism, embraced by governmentstrategists who saw in their conversion anirresistible opportunity to sabotage the Sovietpropaganda machine which they had onceoiled. “The God That Failed gang” was nowa nomenclature adopted by the CIA,denoting what one officer called “thatcommunity of intellectuals who weredisillusioned, who could be disillusioned, orwho hadn’t taken a position yet, and whocould to some degree be influenced by theirpeers as to what choice to make.”22

The God That Failed was distributed by

U.S. government agencies all over Europe.In Germany, in particular, it was rigorouslypromoted. The Information ResearchDepartment also pushed the book. Koestlerwas happy. His plans for a strategicallyorganized response to the Soviet threat werecoalescing nicely. Whilst the book wasrolling off the presses, he met with MelvinLasky to discuss something more ambitious,more permanent.

If The God That Failed had shown thatthere was a warm welcome for those whowished to convert, it was also true that noteverybody was ready to become acommunicant at the altar of organized anti-Communism. The Cominform was quick toexploit this reticence. After the disastrousWaldorf Astoria outing, it was extra vigilantin its preparations for its next meeting, the

World Congress of Peace, scheduled forApril 1949 in Paris. A top secret IRD cipherof March that year predicted, “Thetechnique envisaged and the organization ofthe Congress indicate that every attempt willbe made to use it simply as a rubber-stampfor whatever the Soviet Union has inmind.”23 The Cominform’s theme,apparently, was to be that “the U.S. and thewestern democracies are the war-mongersand Fascists and the Kremlin and its stoogesthe peace-loving democracies.” Alldiplomatic posts were asked to “explore allpossible action which might puncture thepropaganda value of this Congress.”24

But the American “cousins” in the CIAwere already on to the Paris conclave. Theday after the Waldorf conference had closed,Frank Wisner’s sidekick Carmel Offie askedthe State Department what it intended to do

about the Paris peace conference. Offie wasWisner’s special assistant for labor andémigré affairs, personally overseeing theNational Committee for a Free Europe, oneof OPC’s most important fronts, as well asother operations dealing with anti-Communist organizations in Europe. Offiedealt often with Irving Brown, the EuropeanRepresentative of the American Federationof Labor (AFL), whose modest titleconcealed a political role of huge importancein postwar Europe. Through Brown, vastsums of American taxpayers’ money andMarshall Plan “counterpart” funds werebeing pumped into covert operations.

Offie, a career Foreign Service officer,was by all accounts a sinister figure.Physically ugly, he taunted other men withhis homosexuality by tweaking their nipplesat staff meetings. He was once arrested for

hanging around the public lavatories inLafayette Park, an incident which made hisCIA code name, “Monk,” laughablyinappropriate. He had been tossed out of theForeign Service after the war for using thediplomatic pouch for illegal currencytransfers (he also dealt in diamonds, rubies,and, on one occasion, a shipment of 300Finnish lobsters). But he had powerfulfriends. Chip Bohlen and George Kennanknew him from Moscow Embassy days, andit was Bohlen who had persuaded Wisner totake him on. While working for OPC, it wassaid of Offie that he was the last man to seea piece of paper before it went to Wisner,and the last man to see $2 million before itdisappeared.25

Offie and Wisner now started to plan anorchestrated response to the Parisconference, which the State Department had

gloomily predicted would “persuade [the]innocents to follow [the Kremlin’s] line” andbuy into “this phony peace movement.”26

Wisner cabled Averell Harriman of theEconomic Cooperation Administration(managers of the Marshall Plan), seeking 5million francs (approximately $16,000) tofund a counterdemonstration. Harriman, agreat supporter of propaganda andpsychological warfare, was one of the firstamongst America’s political mandarins tounderstand that Russia had declaredideological war on the West and to think upways of countering “the blast of abusewhich was propelled from Moscow.”27 Hewas more than happy to provide MarshallPlan funds—referred to as “candy” byWisner—for covert operations.

Through Irving Brown, OPC contactedthe French socialist David Rousset, author

of several books on concentration camps(Les Jours de notre mort, L’Universconcentrationnaire), and his allies at thebreakaway leftist newspaper Franc-Tireur.Rousset agreed to allow Franc-Tireur to bebilled as the sponsor of the CIA-inspired dayof resistance.

For the Soviets, Ilya Ehrenburg andAlexander Fadeyev appeared at the mainconference—“a Cominform affair from startto finish”—together with Paul Robeson,Howard Fast, Hewlett Johnson, France’scommissioner for atomic energy FrédéricJoliot-Curie, the Danish writer MartinAndersen-Nexo, and the Italian socialistPietro Nenni. Charlie Chaplin sent amessage of support. A Russian Orthodoxpriest blessed the conference, and PaulRobeson sang “Ol’ Man River.” Picassoreleased his famous peace dove, which for

decades to come was used as the prestigesymbol of the Communist “peace”movement. One of the conferenceorganizers, the poet and diehard CommunistLouis Aragon, had come across a lithographof a pigeon while flicking through a folder ofrecent work in Picasso’s studio. The pigeonhad feathers like white gaiters covering itsclaws. Aragon thought it looked like a dove,and with Picasso’s permission it became thefamous “Dove of Peace.” It was soon to becaricatured by the CIA-backed Paix etLiberté movement as “the dove that goesboom” (“La colombe qui fait Boum!”), in acartoon reproduced and distributedthroughout the world by Americangovernment agencies in pamphlets,handbills, and posters.

Rousset’s counter-conference, theInternational Day of Resistance to

Dictatorship and War, took place on April30, 1949, and was endorsed by messages ofsupport from Eleanor Roosevelt; UptonSinclair; John Dos Passos (who was on hisway to becoming a staunch Republican, andalready, according to Dwight Macdonald,“neurotically scared of Russia andCommunism”); Julian Huxley; and RichardCrossman. Delegates arriving at the expenseof OPC included Ignazio Silone; Carlo Levi;the ubiquitous Sidney Hook; James T.Farrell, author of Studs Lonigan; FranzBorkenau; and Fenner Brockway. But,despite careful planning, the day was afailure. “Not since I was a boy thirty yearsago listening to the soap-boxers on MadisonSquare have I heard such banalities andempty rhetoric,”28 reported Sidney Hook. Atthe evening rally a group of anarchists seizedthe microphone and denounced the meeting,

leading Hook to conclude that the lunaticshad been let out of the asylum and theproceedings had been taken over by the“psychopathic ward on the left.”

The conference also claimed America’sfirst casualty in the Kulturkampf in theperson of Richard Wright, who was,according to Hook, “flattered by the usewhich Sartre makes of him as a kind of clubagainst American culture analogous to theuse the Communists make of Robeson.”29

Although he had contributed to The GodThat Failed, Wright was now regarded bythe anti-Communist lobby as suspect,because his break with Stalinism was made“more on personal than on politicalgrounds,” and he showed “no understandingof its true nature.”30 Wright was the onlymember of The God That Failed group tolose his membership of that group of

apostles. For the next decade, his life andactivities in Paris were monitored by the CIAand the FBI, until he died in mysteriouscircumstances in 1960.

Wisner and his allies in the StateDepartment were disappointed with theParis counter-conference. Although itattracted prominent anti-Stalinists andprovoked blasts from the French CommunistParty, its tone was “too radical andneutralist.”31 Worse, there was anti-Americanism flying on every wind. “TheFrench public, by and large, is shockinglyignorant of American life and culture,” Hookwrote. “Its picture of America is a compositeof impressions derived from reading thenovels of social protest and revolt(Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath is taken as afaithful and representative account), thenovels of American degeneracy (Faulkner)

and inanity (Sinclair Lewis), from seeingAmerican movies, and from exposure to anincessant Communist barrage which seepsinto the non-Communist press. Theinformational re-education of the Frenchpublic seems to me to be the mostfundamental as well as most pressing taskof American democratic policy in France,towards which almost nothing alongeffective lines has been done.”32

Hook’s idea that anti-Americanism couldbe eroded by cleansing European minds ofthe palsied visions of America’s preeminentnovelists seems extraordinary. In effect,what he was advocating was the purging ofthose expressions of American life which hejudged to be in conflict with thegovernment’s “democratic policy” abroad.This was a monumental distortion of thevery principles of freedom of expression,

irreconcilable with the claims of liberaldemocracy under whose auspices it wasproposed.

But Hook was right about one thing: de-atomizing the homme de bonne volonté ofSartrean Paris was going to be an uphillstruggle. Like Brecht, who from the comfortof his privileged life in East Germany praisedStalin as “the justified murderer of thepeople,” the Left Bank intelligentsia hadfailed to grasp that they were no longer“truth-seekers but defenders of abeleaguered, crumbling orthodoxy.”33 Sartrecontinued to extol Russia as the guardian offreedom, whilst his “saint” Jean Genetdenied the existence of the gulags. This, saidArthur Koestler, was the world capital offellow travelers, of agile careerists withmoderate talent like Picasso, Camus, andAnouilh, who were held in awe by those

many European intellectuals whom Koestlerdiagnosed as suffering from “the Frenchflu.” From Paris, Koestler quipped, theCommunist Party could take over Francewith one phone call.

It was clear to Wisner that he had notyet found the right group to spearhead theanti-Communist campaign in France. Inwords which show that he was alreadycontemplating a permanent base for thiscampaign, he expressed concern that “thistype of leadership for a continuingorganization would result in the degenerationof the entire idea (of having a littleDEMINFORM) into a nuts folly ofmiscellaneous goats and monkeys whoseantics would completely discredit the workand statements of the serious andresponsible liberals. We should have seriousmisgivings about supporting such a show.”34

Dismayed that the Soviets’ propagandaarmor was seemingly impregnable, a groupof German intellectuals, formerly of theMunzenberg Trust, now sat down to hatch aplan. Meeting with Melvin Lasky in aFrankfurt hotel room in August 1949, RuthFischer and Franz Borkenau (once theofficial historian of the Comintern) started tosketch out their idea for a permanentstructure dedicated to organized intellectualresistance. Fischer was the sister of GerhartEisler, a Soviet operative dubbed in 1946“the Number One Communist in the U.S.”and convicted the following year forfalsifying a visa application. Gerhart hadsince been promoted to run the East Germanpropaganda bureau, and as such he wouldbe responsible for organizing the Sovietresponse to Ruth’s plans. Ruth had herselfbeen a leader of the German Communist

Party before her faction was expelled onorder from Moscow, leading to her breakwith Stalin (and her brother). She now wroteabout her plan to an American diplomat: “Ithink we talked about this plan alreadyduring my last stay in Paris, but I have nowa much more concrete approach to it. Imean, of course, the idea of organizing a bigAnti-Waldorf-Astoria Congress in Berlinitself. It should be a gathering of all ex-Communists, plus a good representativegroup of anti-Stalinist American, English andEuropean intellectuals, declaring itssympathy for Tito and Yugoslavia and thesilent opposition in Russia and the satellitestates, and giving the Politburo hell right atthe gate of their own hell. All my friendsagree that it would be of enormous effectand radiate to Moscow, if properlyorganized.”35

Did Michael Josselson attend theFrankfurt meeting? Certainly, he wasamongst the first to hear of the plan, whichhe was soon to discuss with Lawrence deNeufville, who sent the outline proposal viadiplomatic pouch to Carmel Offie in mid-September. “The idea came from Lasky,Josselson and Koestler,” de Neufville laterexplained, “and I got Washington to give itthe support it needed. I reported it to FrankLindsay [Wisner’s deputy], and I guess hemust have taken it to Wisner. We had to begfor approval. The Marshall Plan was theslush fund used everywhere by CIA at thattime, so there was never any shortage offunds. The only struggle was to getapproval.”36

What became known as “the Josselsonproposal” reached Wisner’s desk in January1950. Lasky, meanwhile, too impatient to

wait for a response, had already pushedahead with the plan, enlisting Ernst Reuter,mayor of West Berlin, and several prominentGerman academics, who endorsed the ideaand promised support. Together, theyformed a standing committee and beganissuing invitations to intellectuals of the “freeworld” to come to Berlin to stand up and becounted. Lasky’s freelancing, however, wasnot all for the good. “As an employee ofAmerican occupation government, hisactivities on behalf of the Congress struckmore than a few observers as proof that theU.S. government was behind the event.”37

OPC officers pushed ahead withJosselson’s plan, producing a formal projectoutline with a budget of $50,000, which wasapproved by Wisner on April 7. Wisneradded one condition: Lasky and JamesBurnham, who had what might be described

as a professional interest in the plan, must bekept out of sight in Berlin “for fear theirpresence would only provide ammunition toCommunist critics.” Josselson defendedLasky when informed of Wisner’sreservations. “No other person here,certainly no German, could have achievedsuch success,”38 he cabled. Lasky by thisstage was too far out to rein in. He hadpublicly announced himself as generalsecretary of the forthcoming congress, to becalled the Congress for Cultural Freedom,and it was under his and Mayor Reuter’snames that invitations were issued andprograms were organized. For publicrelations, Lasky was joined by ArnoldBeichman, who had made such a timelyappearance at the Waldorf.

In America, James Burnham and SidneyHook were busy making arrangements for

the American delegation. Both were awareof OPC’s involvement (although Hookneglected to mention this in his memoirs,presumably thinking it of no consequence).Tickets for the American participants werepurchased by OPC, which used “severalintermediary organizations” as travel agents.The State Department was also involved inthese arrangements. Assistant secretary ofstate for public affairs Jesse MacKnight wasso impressed by the whole thing that heurged the CIA to sponsor the congress on acontinuing basis even before the conclave inBerlin had taken place.39 For once, suchoptimism was not misplaced.

5

Crusading’s the Idea

My ghosts have told me something newI’m marching to Korea;I cannot tell you what I’ll doCrusading’s the ideaYankee Doodle keep it up etc.

Robert Lowell, 1952

Late on the night of June 23, 1950, ArthurKoestler and his wife Mamaine arrived atthe Gare de l’Est to catch the night trainfrom Paris to Frankfurt, whence they wouldproceed to Berlin. As they were searchingfor their carriage, they bumped into Jean-

Paul Sartre, who was traveling on the sametrain, though he was destined for a differentconference. Sartre, unusually, was alone,and the Koestlers were relieved that Simonede Beauvoir (whom they had nicknamed“Castor”) was not there. They shared apicnic supper together, along with a policebodyguard assigned to Koestler by theFrench Sûreté following death threats fromthe Communists (which had culminated inthe Communist daily L’Humanité publishinga map pinpointing Verte Rive, Koestler’svilla in Fontaine le Port, near Paris).Although their friendship had beenincreasingly strained in recent years, theseideological opponents still felt a mutualfondness for each other, and they were ableto joke together as the train pulled out intothe hot summer night. Sartre, along withAlbert Camus, had publicly disavowed

Koestler’s Congress and refused to attend.But Koestler felt sorry for Sartre, whoconfessed that night on the train that hisfriendships were evaporating under the heatof his and de Beauvoir’s politics.

As Koestler was boarding his train, theAmerican delegates were settling intotransatlantic flights that would take up totwenty-four hours to make the journey toGermany. Although the Soviet blockade ofBerlin had recently been lifted, the only wayto reach the western sector was on militaryaircraft, which meant the delegates had toboard C-47s at Frankfurt for the final stageof what Koestler would later refer to as an“intellectual airlift.” Among them wereJames T. Farrell, Tennessee Williams, theactor Robert Montgomery, chairman of theAmerican Atomic Energy CommissionDavid Lilienthal, editor of the New Leader

Sol Levitas, Carson McCullers, the blackeditor of the Pittsburgh Courier GeorgeSchuyler, and the black journalist MaxYergan. Nobel Prize–winning geneticscientist Herman Muller brought with him astrange cargo: five thousand Drosophila fruitflies as gifts to German scientists who hadlost their strains during the war.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Sidney Hooktraveled together from Boston, Hookapparently intoxicated by the idea of howdangerous it was going to be to go to Berlin.“He had this fantasy about Communistattacks from all sides,” Schlesinger recalled.“He was quite excited about it all. I thinkmany of them were. They thought theywere going to be where the action was—especially those who hadn’t been in thewar.”1

After his first taste of blood at the

Waldorf Astoria, Hook was chafing for afull-scale campaign. “Give me a hundredmillion dollars and a thousand dedicatedpeople,” he cried, “and I will guarantee togenerate such a wave of democratic unrestamong the masses—yes, even among thesoldiers—of Stalin’s own empire, that all hisproblems for a long time to come will beinternal. I can find the people.”2 Now, flyinginto a city which was surrounded on all sidesby the Communists, Hook fantasized thatthe Russians would march into the city, “inwhich event every delegate would have beena prisoner of the [East German militarypolice] in a few hours.”3

Nicolas Nabokov had arrived in Berlin inMay to help plan the conference, togetherwith his wife, Patricia Blake, taking a charterplane run by a company called YouthArgosy, one of the “intermediaries” used by

the CIA. Chip Bohlen had urged Nabokov toget there as early as he could, to raise thebarricades on behalf of the artists who hadbeen “the most persistent whipping boys ofboth the Soviets and the Nazis.”4 JamesBurnham arrived shortly after Nabokov, andtogether they had joined up with Josselson,Lasky, Koestler, Brown, and Silone to formthe conference’s ruling apparat, which washeadquartered in Lasky’s house.

At one of the group’s meetings overdinner, Silone told how during the war hehad sacked anybody in his resistancemovement who turned out to be a British orAmerican intelligence agent, because hewanted to fight “ma guerre à moi” with aclean conscience.5 How Josselson,Burnham, and Lasky digested this statementcan only be imagined. For they knew whatSilone presumably didn’t: that he was now

part of a war being run by somebody else.Silone’s position neatly encapsulated thepainful ironies of an age that had runroughshod over the purity of people’s ideals.In the 1920s, he had run an undergroundnetwork for the Soviets, and then regrettedit. From 1928 to 1930 he had collaboratedwith Mussolini’s secret service, OVRA (thecircumstances behind this relationship weredire: his brother had been arrested by theFascists and was lingering in an Italianprison, where he was later to die). Writing tosever his relationship with his OVRA liaisonin April 1930, Silone explained that he hadresolved to “eliminate from my life all that isfalse, duplicitous, equivocal, mysterious.”6

In 1942, he wrote, “The most important ofour moral tasks today consists in liberatingour spirits from the racket of gunfire, thetrajectory of propaganda warfare and

journalistic nonsense in general.”7 In exile inSwitzerland during the war, Silone had beena contact for Allen Dulles, then America’schief of espionage in Europe; in October1944, OSS agent Serafino Romualdi wassent to the Franco-Swiss border, allegedly todeliver two planeloads of arms andammunition to the French resistance. Hisreal mission, “planned outside normalchannels,” was to smuggle Silone into Italy.And now, in 1950, Silone had once againbeen drawn into a clandestine world. Hisdefenders argue that he was ignorant of theCongress for Cultural Freedom’s hiddensponsors. But his widow, Darina, recalledthat he had initially been reluctant to attend,as he suspected that it was “a U.S. StateDepartment operation.” A few days into theconference, Koestler, who never really likedSilone, told a friend that he had always

“wondered whether basically Silone ishonest or not. Now I know he is not.”8

Also the recipients of secret benefactionwere the English delegates—Hugh Trevor-Roper, Julian Amery, A.J. Ayer, HerbertRead, Harold Davis, Christopher Hollis,Peter de Mendelssohn—whose presence inBerlin was being funded covertly by theForeign Office, through the InformationResearch Department. From France cameRaymond Aron, David Rousset, RémyRoure, André Philip, Claude Mauriac, AndréMalraux, Jules Romains, Georges Altman;from Italy there was Ignazio Silone, GuidoPiovene, Altiero Spinelli, Franco Lombardi,Muzzio Mazzochi, and Bonaventura Tecchi.By the evening of June 25, they and most ofthe other 200 delegates had arrived. Theywere assigned accommodation in billets andhotels in the American zone, and most of

them, tired after the journey, turned in earlythat night.

They awoke the next day to the newsthat Communist-backed North Koreantroops had crossed the 38th Parallel andlaunched a massive invasion of the South.As they gathered that afternoon, Monday,June 26, at the Titania Palast, for theopening ceremony of the Congress forCultural Freedom, the Berlin Philharmonicplayed them in to the tenebrous strains ofthe Egmont overture, a propitious (andcarefully selected) piece for an audiencewho saw themselves as participants in adarkly heroic drama.

Berlin’s mayor, Ernst Reuter (himself aformer Communist who had worked closelywith Lenin), asked the delegates and anaudience of 4,000 to stand for a moment ofsilence in memory of those who had died

fighting for freedom or who still languishedin concentration camps. In his openingspeech, he emphasized the drama of Berlin’ssignificance: “The word freedom, whichseemed to have lost its power, has a uniquesignificance for the person who mostrecognizes its value—the person who oncelost it.”9

For the next four days, delegates movedfrom one panel discussion to the next, fromguided tours of the Brandenberg Gate,Potsdamer Platz, and the line dividing Eastfrom West Berlin, thence to pressconferences, and on to cocktail parties andspecially organized concerts. The five maindebates were themed around “Science andTotalitarianism,” “Art, Artists andFreedom,” “The Citizen in a Free Society,”“The Defense of Peace and Freedom,” and“Free Culture in a Free World.” A

polarization of thought over how best tooppose the Communists soon emerged,neatly encapsulated in speeches given byArthur Koestler and Ignazio Silone. Koestlercalled for the formation of the Westernintelligentsia into a Kampfgruppe, a fightingsquad unequivocally pledged to topplingCommunism. “Schlesinger was there, and hemade a dry-as-dust, unemotional statement.After that we had Koestler who spoke fromthe heart, and he moved many people. Itwas a crusade—Koestler had changed thetone,”10 recalled Lawrence de Neufville,who was monitoring events closely for theCIA.

The aggressive Cold Warrior tone wasepitomized by James Burnham’s distinctionbetween “good” and “bad” atom bombs, athesis tested on the Koestlers at dinner amonth earlier. On that occasion, Burnham

had explained how the USA could renderRussia impotent in a day by dropping thebomb on all major Russian cities. “Helooked quite pleased at the idea,” notedMamaine Koestler (she also noted that“Burnham looks very sweet and gentle . . .but he is much less scrupulous about meansthan K[oestler]”—he also said “he wouldn’tnecessarily reject torture in certain cases”).11

Using the kind of language which petrifiedreality and which was one of thecontributing factors of the Cold War (onboth sides), Burnham now announced thathe was “against those bombs, now stored orto be stored later in Siberia or the Caucasus,which are designed for the destruction ofParis, London, Rome, Brussels, Stockholm,New York, Chicago, . . . Berlin, and ofwestern civilisation generally . . . But I am .. . for those bombs made in Los Alamos,

Hanford and Oak Ridge and guarded I knownot where in the Rockies or Americandeserts, [which] for five years havedefended—have been the sole defense of—the liberties of western Europe.”12 To whichAndré Philip replied that when atom bombsfall, “they do not distinguish between friendor foe, enemy or freedom fighter.”

Burnham and Hook both turned theirfire on those who used moral equivalence toquestion America’s condemnation of theSoviet Union: “Sartre and Merleau-Ponty,who refused to attend the Congress even todefend their point of view there, were quiteaware of French and American injustices toNegroes when they supported the Resistanceto Hitler,” clamored Hook. “But they cansee no justice in the western defense againstCommunist aggression because the Negroeshave not yet won equality of treatment.”13

This equality was not far off, according toGeorge Schuyler, who circulated a report todelegates, complete with statistics,demonstrating that the situation of blacks inAmerica never stopped improving, and thiswas thanks to the capitalist system’sconstant ability to adapt to change. Theblack journalist Max Yergan endorsedSchuyler’s report with a history lesson in theadvancement of African Americans since theRoosevelt era.

Burnham, who in his trajectory fromsocialism to the right had simply leapfroggedover the moderate center, had no time forthe spineless man of the left. “We haveallowed ourselves to be trapped and jailedby our words—this leftist bait which hasproved our poison. The Communists havelooted our rhetorical arsenal, and havebound us with our own slogans. The

progressive man of ‘the non-CommunistLeft’ is in a perpetual tremor of guilt beforethe true Communist. The Communist,manipulating the same rhetoric, but actingboldly and firmly, appears to the man of thenon-Communist Left as himself withguts.”14 As Burnham stood there andinveighed against the Non-Communist Left,some delegates asked themselves whetherthe black or white version of the worldoffered by the right (captured by Koestler’sbiblical invocation “Let your yea be yea; andyour nay, nay!”) was perhaps just asthreatening to liberal democracy as thatoffered by the far left.

Hugh Trevor-Roper was appalled by theprovocative tone, set by Koestler and takenup by other speakers. “There was very littlein the way of serious discussion,” heremembered. “It wasn’t really intellectual at

all in my opinion. I realized that it was areply in the same style to [the Soviet peaceconferences]—it spoke the same language. Ihad expected and hoped to hear the Westernpoint of view put forward and defended, onthe grounds that it was a better and a morelasting alternative. But instead we haddenunciations. It left such a negativeimpression, as if we had nothing to sayexcept ‘Sock them!’ There was a speech byFranz Borkenau which was very violent andindeed almost hysterical. He spoke inGerman, and I regret to say that as I listenedand as I heard the baying voices of approvalfrom the huge audiences, I felt, well, theseare the same people who seven years agowere probably baying in the same way tosimilar German denunciations ofCommunism coming from Dr. Goebbels inthe Sports Palast. And I felt, well, what sort

of people are we identifying ourselves with?That was the greatest shock to me. Therewas a moment during the Congress when Ifelt that we were being invited to summonup Beelzebub in order to defeat Satan.”15

Sidney Hook rallied to Koestler’sdefense but had to concede that his friendcould “recite the truths of the multiplicationtable in a way to make some peopleindignant with him.” He also had theirritating habit of grinning “like a Cheshirecat” every time he scored a rhetorical point.Silone was much more flexible, arguing thata Christian spirit of social and politicalreform in the West would, in and of itself,steal the fire from the god of Communism.André Philip also represented the moderateview, arguing for a middle way betweenRussia and America: “Europe today is feebleafter its long and painful sickness. The

Americans send us penicillin to treat thisillness, and the Soviets send us microbes.Naturally, any doctor would prefer a mixtureof the two. But our duty as Europeans mustbe to deal with the microbes as soon aspossible so that we no longer have need ofthe medicine.”16

To the hard-liners, this espousal of“equidistance” was nothing short of heresy.“Neutralism was, as an idea and as amovement, sponsored by the Soviets,”17

declared Melvin Lasky, taking up RobertMontgomery’s cry that “[t]here is no neutralcorner in Freedom’s room!” Reluctant tojoin in this rhetorical crusade, the Britishdelegation rallied to Talleyrand’sadmonishment “surtout pas de zèle.” “Icouldn’t see why the world should be setaflame to purge the personal guilt of people

like Borkenau and Koestler,”18 concludedHugh Trevor-Roper.

The appropriateness of political convertsproselytizing the world was becoming a keyquestion of the Berlin Congress. “Then aHerr Grimme arose, a parson of sorts with avoice like a foghorn, to argue that all theseconcrete questions were basically religious,”reported Sidney Hook. “He spoke with aneloquent emptiness and became concreteonly at the end when he descended topersonalities and made some contemptuousremark about Koestler being a ‘politicalconvert’ who now was fervently opposingwhat once he had fervently supported, thusshowing he had never surrendered hisdialectical materialism.”19

Koestler had already discovered theresentment of those who had never beenCommunists towards political converts such

as himself. Repeating the arguments,Koestler wrote: “Ex-Communists are notonly tiresome Cassandras, as the anti-Nazirefugee had been; they are also fallen angelswho had the bad taste to reveal that Heavenis not the place it is supposed to be. Theworld respects the Catholic or Communistconvert, but abhors unfrocked priests of allfaiths. This attitude is rationalized as adislike of renegades. Yet the convert, too, isa renegade from his former beliefs ordisbeliefs, and quite prepared to persecutethose who still persist in them. He isnevertheless forgiven, for he has ‘embraced’a faith, whereas the ex-Communist or theunfrocked priest has ‘lost’ a faith—and hasthereby become a menace to illusion and areminder of the abhorrent, threateningvoid.”20

The problem of the “tiresome

Cassandras” was also troubling officialcircles. Edward Barrett, assistant secretaryof state for international information, feltobliged to question the wisdom of “currenttendencies to lionize . . . ex-Communists andput them on pedestals from which to lectureall citizens who had sense enough never tobecome Communists in the first place. Someof us suspect the typical ex-Communist—particularly the recent ex-Communist—hasgreat value as an informer and tipster buthardly any as a propounder of eternalverities.”21 It was becoming increasinglyapparent that the U.S. government’sembrace of the Non-Communist Left wouldhave to be kept secret from some of its ownkey policy makers.

Josselson kept out of sight, though hekept track of everything that transpired. Heobserved Hugh Trevor-Roper’s reaction to

the crusaderish tone with growing alarm.Trevor-Roper and the rest of the Britishelement made clear their dissent wheneverthey got the opportunity. But this becameincreasingly difficult, as “the managers”(Lasky, foremost amongst them) on thepodium during the sessions carefully avoidedgiving the “table thumpers” the floor. Laskywas everywhere, organizing, cajoling,drafting press releases, staging the dramaticentrance of Theodor Plievier, the Germanauthor of Stalingrad and a formerCommunist who was hiding in Stuttgart.Plievier had originally recorded his messageto the Congress. But on hearing the news ofthe invasion of Korea, he flew to Berlin,defying the danger that he might bekidnapped by the Soviets or East Germanswhile visiting Berlin (though the likelihood ofsuch a calamity was reduced by the

provision of around-the-clock security bythe Americans).

Lasky’s high profile infuriated Wisnerback at OPC. There was good reason to beconcerned. On June 24, the eve of theCongress, the office of Gerhart Eisler,propaganda chief of the East Germangovernment, issued a statement tracing a firein the Communist House of Culture in EastBerlin to the coterie of “American police spyMelvin Lasky.” Eisler’s statement, whichwas reported in American newspapers, saidthe attempt to burn down the Communistclub was intended as a prelude to theopening of the Congress for CulturalFreedom (which Eisler described as “animperialist intellectual six-day bicycle race”),but that the plot had misfired and the flameswere quickly extinguished. Lasky, whenasked about the incident, answered with his

customary sarcasm: “Yes, it’s true. We triedto set the house on fire by dropping firefliesdisguised as potato bugs from ahelicopter.”22 But Wisner was not amused,cabling instructions to Berlin that Lasky beremoved from any visible connection withthe Congress.

But it was to take more than the removalof Lasky to stem the rumors surrounding theCongress. Some delegates speculated aboutwho was footing the bill. The grand scale onwhich the Congress was launched at a timewhen Europe was broke seemed to confirmthe rumor that this was not quite thespontaneous, “independent” event itsorganizers claimed. Lawrence de Neufvillehad so much money he didn’t know what todo with it: “I don’t where the money camefrom. I never had checks or anything, I justseemed to have the cash in marks. We all

did.”23 This did not escape the notice ofTrevor-Roper, who began to smell a rat.“When I arrived I found the whole thing wasorchestrated on so grandiose a scale . . . thatI realized that . . . financially it must havebeen funded by some powerful governmentorganization. So I took it for granted fromthe beginning that it was organized by theAmerican government in one form oranother. That seemed to me obvious fromthe start.”24 Years later, the CIA’s TomBraden reflected that simple common sensewas enough to find out who was behind theCongress: “We’ve got to remember thatwhen we’re speaking of those years thatEurope was broke. If there was a dime to behad anywhere it was probably in somecriminal organization. There wasn’t anymoney. So they naturally looked to the

United States for money.”25

The conference concluded on June 29with a dramatic speech from ArthurKoestler, who cried triumphantly to a rallyof 15,000 gathered under a blistering sun atthe Funkturm Sporthalle, “Friends, freedomhas seized the offensive!” He then read outthe Freedom Manifesto, a fourteen-pointdeclaration which was offered as a newconstitution for cultural freedom. Drafted byKoestler after an all-night session at Lasky’sbase at the Hotel am Steinplatz inCharlottenberg, the manifesto was “pushedthrough by him, Burnham, Brown, Hookand Lasky by forceful offensive tactics, sothat virtually no opposition wasencountered,” according to MamaineKoestler.26 But one article of the declarationwhich expressed intolerance of Marxist ideaswas vigorously contested by the British

contingent, who demanded that theoffending reference be excised. Essentially,the British were objecting to the assumptionthat guided the more militant anti-Communists at the conference—just as itdid many American foreign policy makers—that the writings of Marx and Lenin wereless “political philosophy than the fieldmanual of Soviet strategy.”

After incorporating the Britishamendments, the manifesto was adopted asthe moral and philosophical cornerstone ofthe Congress for Cultural Freedom.Addressed to “all men who are determinedto regain those liberties which they have lostand to preserve and extend those which theyenjoy,” the document stated: “We hold it tobe self-evident that intellectual freedom isone of the inalienable rights of man. . . .Such freedom is defined first and foremost

by his right to hold and express his ownopinions, and particularly opinions whichdiffer from those of his rulers. Deprived ofthe right to say ‘no,’ man becomes aslave.”27 It declared freedom and peace tobe “inseparable,” and warned, “Peace canonly be maintained if each governmentsubmits to the control and inspection of itsacts by the people whom it governs.” Otherpoints stressed that a prerequisite of freedomwas “the toleration of divergent opinions.The principle of toleration does not logicallypermit the practice of intolerance.” No one“race, nation, class or religion can claim thesole right to represent the idea of freedom,nor the right to deny freedom to othergroups or creeds in the name of any ultimateideal or lofty aim whatsoever. We hold thatthe historical contribution of any society is tobe judged by the extent and quality of the

freedom which its members actually enjoy.”The manifesto went on to denounce therestrictions on freedom imposed bytotalitarian states, whose “means ofenforcement far surpasses that of all theprevious tyrannies in the history ofmankind.” “Indifference or neutrality in theface of such a challenge,” it continued,“amounts to a betrayal of mankind and tothe abdication of the free mind.” Itexpressed a commitment to “The defence ofexisting freedoms, the reconquest of lostfreedoms,” and (at Hugh Trevor-Roper’sinsistence) to “the creation of new freedoms. . . [to] new and constructive answers to theproblems of our time.”28

Here indeed was a manifesto to readfrom the barricades. Koestler, a modern-dayRobespierre (albeit one whose two Americanbodyguards hovered close by), thrilled to the

occasion. This was the framework forjudging the commitment of individuals andinstitutions to total freedom of expression, tothe uninhibited flow of ideas and opinions. IfCommunists and Fascists alike hadsystematically violated the principle ofhabeas corpus, here was a pledge to resistany attack on the principle of habeasanimam. This document was a litmus testfor liberty. By it, the Congress for CulturalFreedom itself would stand or fall.

As the conference closed, its Washingtonsponsors began celebrating. Wisner offeredhis “heartiest congratulations” to all thoseinvolved. He in turn was congratulated byhis political patrons. Defense Departmentrepresentative General John Magruderpraised it as “a subtle covert operationcarried out on the highest intellectual level . .. unconventional warfare at its best.”

President Truman himself was reported tobe “very well pleased.” Americanoccupation officials in Germany sensed ithad given “a palpable boost to morale ofWest Berlin, but believed its most importanteffect would ultimately be felt by westernintellectuals who had been politically adriftsince 1945.” The Congress for CulturalFreedom, one report claimed, had “actuallyimpelled a number of prominent culturalleaders to give up their sophisticated,contemplative detachment in favor of astrong stand against totalitarianism.”29

This conclusion was perhaps a littleexaggerated, designed to sell the Congress tohigh-level strategists in government.Certainly, Hugh Trevor-Roper and theBritish contingent were yet to be convinced.Immediately after his return to England,news reached Trevor-Roper that State

Department officials had complained to theirForeign Office counterparts that “your manspoiled our Congress.” This was enough toconfirm Trevor-Roper’s suspicions about therole of the American government in theBerlin affair. But it also revealed officialirritation with the way Trevor-Roper hadconducted himself. Josselson—and hissuperiors in the CIA—understood thatrenewed efforts would have to be made towin over British intellectuals to their project.

6

“Operation Congress”

We must make ourselves heard round theworld in a great campaign of truth. This taskis not separate and distinct from otherelements of our foreign policy.

President Harry Truman, 1950

Despite the recalcitrance of some Britishdelegates, Wisner was satisfied that theBerlin conference had more than repaid hisinvestment. Although its future was stilluncertain, it was now added to the CIA’s“Propaganda Assets Inventory,” an officiallist documenting the ever-growing number of

conduits and individuals on which theAgency could rely. Known unofficially as“Wisner’s Wurlitzer,” the nickname revealsthe Agency’s perception of how these“assets” were expected to perform: at thepush of a button, Wisner could play anytune he wished to hear.

Wisner returned to the problem ofMelvin Lasky, whose peacock presencethroughout the Berlin conference had soinfuriated him. His earlier command to haveLasky removed from center stage havingbeen so blatantly ignored, he wrote an angryinternal memo, “Berlin Congress for CulturalFreedom: Activities of Melvin Lasky,”stating that Lasky’s visibility was “a majorblunder and was recognized as such by ourbest friends in the State Department. . . . Itbetrays an unfortunate tendency, apparentlymore deep-rooted than I expected, to

succumb to the temptation of convenience(doing things the easy way) and irrespectiveof security and other technicalconsiderations of the utmost importance.”1

Wisner was unequivocal: unless theheadstrong Lasky was removed from theCongress for Cultural Freedom, the CIAwould not continue to support theorganization.

Wisner’s memo was cabled to Germany.“The OPC officer who received it explodedand cabled back a histrionic protest, butthere was nothing to be done. Lasky had togo, and OPC contrived to have himremoved from the project.”2 There are twopossible explanations for this: either Laskyhad some kind of relationship with OPC andwas therefore a real security risk because herefused to lie low; or he was, as he alwaysclaimed, an independent operator, in which

case his removal represented the first ofmany such strong-arm tactics on the part ofCIA. The OPC officer charged with Lasky’sremoval was Michael Josselson, whosetendency to explode when provoked wouldcost him dearly in the future. Lasky andJosselson had already developed the strongbond which observers later found to beunbreakable. The psychology of thisrelationship is hard to fathom: Lasky’sinfluence on Josselson, who was in everyway his superior, was unique. “Josselsonwas sometimes vexed by Lasky’s wilfuldeafness,” wrote one Congress insider. “Hewas sometimes exasperated by Lasky’sfailure to imagine the consequences of hiswords and actions, but at the same time helooked on him with indulgent admiration,even wonderment.”3

To some, Lasky’s hold on Josselson had

an Oedipal angle. “Josselson adored Laskyas the son he never had. He alwaysdefended him,”4 Natasha Spenderremembered. Lasky objected to thissobriquet, preferring to describe it as a“brotherly” relationship.5 Either way,Josselson soon realized that his theatricaldefense of Lasky was bad strategy. So heagreed to Wisner’s demand that Lasky beofficially removed from the project.Unofficially, Lasky would remainJosselson’s closest adviser for the entire lifeof the Congress. And other rewards wouldfollow.

With Lasky apparently out of the way,Wisner now moved to establish the Congressfor Cultural Freedom as a permanent entity.Its continuance had been approved by anOPC Project Review Board in early 1950,and it was given the code name

QKOPERA.6 One of Wisner’s first decisionswas to move the base of operations for theCongress from Berlin to Paris. There werepowerful symbolic reasons for leaving theoutfit in Berlin, but it was deemed too muchof a security risk, too vulnerable toinfiltration by the other side.

Wisner offered Josselson the job ofrunning the Congress for the CIA, underLawrence de Neufville, who was tosupervise it from the Agency’s French Labordesk. Both men accepted, resigning theircover jobs with the American occupationgovernment in Germany but taking withthem their code names, “Jonathan F. Saba”(Josselson), and “Jonathan Gearing” (deNeufville). Next, Wisner anchored IrvingBrown to the Congress by appointing him akey member of the steering committeewhich had been formed shortly after the

Berlin conference. “More helpful than all theKoestlers and Silones put together,” Brownwas once described as a “one-man OSS”and “a character out of an E. PhillipsOppenheim novel.” He worked for JayLovestone, a former Comintern delegatewho now headed up the CIA’s secret liaisonwith the American labor movement. Brownwas extremely adroit in pursuing objectivesby clandestine routes and had beenshortlisted by George Kennan in 1948 as acandidate to head up OPC, the job thateventually fell to Frank Wisner.7 “I don’tbelieve I ever saw Irving [Brown] with anickel that didn’t belong to CIA,”remembered Tom Braden, who was soon totake over QKOPERA. “He would say it wasfrom the labor unions. It was a good cover.Brown was the paymaster, but he enjoyedparticipation in the planning of operations.

He was an intelligent guy with a wideacquaintanceship.”8

Also appointed to the steering committeewas James Burnham. A constant presence inpolicy making and intelligence circles,Burnham was considered indispensable tothe success of the Congress, a vital liaisonbetween the intelligentsia and Wisner’soffice. “Burnham was a consultant to OPCon virtually every subject of interest to ourorganization,” wrote E. Howard Hunt, theCIA dirty trickster who later emerged as oneof the Watergate “plumbers.” “He hadextensive contacts in Europe and, by virtueof his Trotskyite background, was somethingof an authority on domestic and foreignCommunist parties and frontorganizations.”9

Not everybody was happy withBurnham’s “Trotskyite background,”

though. According to CIA executive MilesCopeland, there was initially “some fussabout the Burnham flirtation with the‘extreme Left’ (wasn’t he in a ‘cell’ of somekind that included Sidney Hook, IrvingKristol, and Daniel Bell?), but all was okaywhen someone remembered [a] remark tothe effect that if Jim were a seriousCommunist he would have joined the Partyand not been a mere Trotskyist. Besides, asone who had been on the far Left andswung to the far Right, he had goodcompany in the CIA’s stable of on-callconsultants.” Describing Burnham as “ahundred per cent capitalist and imperialist, abeliever in Mom, apple pie, baseball, thecorner drugstore, and . . . American styledemocracy,” Copeland said that he hadlearned from him the following principle:“The first task of any ruling group is to keep

itself in power.”10 One Cold Warrior referredto him as “a very articulate expounder of thedirty tricks department.”11 In early 1953,Burnham would play a crucial part in theCIA’s Operation AJAX, which unseatedMohammad Mossadegh in Tehran andreplaced him with the shah. Wisner haddecided that the plan was far too crude andneeded “a touch of Machiavelli,” by whichhe meant a history lesson from Burnham. Inhis book The Machiavellians (whichbecame a manual for CIA strategists),Burnham used, in addition to Machiavelli,the ideas of major modernist Europeanthinkers—Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto,Robert Michels, Georges Sorel—to“challenge egalitarian political theory andshow the persistence and inevitability of eliterule, even in an age of equality.” An oldacquaintance of Burnham’s once said that

the only time she ever saw him manifest anyreal intellectual enthusiasm was when hetalked about Machiavelli.12

Alongside Irving Brown, Josselson, deNeufville, and Lasky (undeterred by hisearlier dismissal), Burnham worked at givingthe Congress for Cultural Freedom apermanent footing. Meeting at the end ofNovember 1950 in Brussels, the steeringcommittee designed a functioning structurefor the organization, working from adocument drawn up by Lasky in July.Among those present were Ignazio Silone,Carlo Schmid (leader of the Socialists in theGerman Parliament), the Jewish sociologistEugene Kogon, Haakon Lie (head of theNorwegian Labour Party), Julian Amery(British MP), Josef Czapski (Polish writerand artist), David Rousset, Irving Brown,and Nicolas Nabokov.

Essentially, the structure sketched out byLasky was the one adopted: an InternationalCommittee of twenty-five was nominated,as were five honorary chairmen. Guidingtheir activities was an Executive Committeeof five—executive director, editorial director,research director, Paris bureau director,Berlin bureau director—who in turn wouldbe kept in check by the general secretary. InLasky’s diagram, this structure looked like amirror image of a Cominform apparat.“They had names just like the CommunistParty,” observed one historian. “The CIAset up these cultural foundations as shadoworganizations of the Communist Party,including secrecy being at the core of it.They were really speaking to each other.”13

Nicolas Nabokov once jokingly referred tothe Congress’s ruling body as “our PolitBureau-Boys.”

Also discussed at the November meetingwas a report by Arthur Koestler entitled“Immediate Tasks for the TransitionPeriod.” Here Koestler outlined the“technical tasks” which needed to beaccomplished as a follow-up to the Berlinconference. Under the heading “PoliticalCampaign in the West,” Koestler, who hadbeen repeatedly snubbed by the neutralists atthe Berlin conference, wrote, “Our aim is toget those who still hesitate over to our side,to break the influence of the Joliot-Curies onthe one hand and of the cultural neutralistslike Les Temps modernes on the other.”14

Challenging the intellectual basis forneutralism was one of the principalobjectives of American Cold War policy, andit was now assumed as an official “line” ofthe Congress. The CIA’s Donald Jamesonexplained: “There was a particular concern

about those who said, ‘Well, East is East andWest is West and to hell with both of you.’[We tried] to move them at least a little bitover on the Western side of things. Therewere a lot of people who felt that neutrality .. . was a position that was compromised. Itwas an attitude that one hoped would bediminished. But on the other hand I thinkthere was a general recognition that youdidn’t want to jump on somebody neutraland say, ‘You’re no good either, you’re justlike the Commies,’ because that would pushthem off to the left, and that was certainlynot desirable. But the neutrals were certainlya target.”15

Koestler too had become a target. Hisdocument was discussed by the steeringcommittee in his absence. He wasn’t evenon the committee. Koestler’s intolerance ofdisagreement, his irrational anger and

arrogant assertion of his own genius, hadnow persuaded Washington that he wasmore of a liability than an asset. Since theJune conference, Koestler had been holdingregular meetings at his home at Verte Rivewith Burnham, Brown, Raymond Aron,Lasky, and other members of the “innercircle.” He had, said Mamaine, become“quite obsessed with the Congress” and was“barely able to sleep.” These gatherings didnot go unnoticed. In August 1950, theFrench Communist weekly L’Action arrivedat the imaginative conclusion that Koestlerwas planning terrorist militia from his homewith Burnham and Brown.

Josselson was now persuaded that amoderate tone was essential if the Congressfor Cultural Freedom was going to achieveone of its principal tasks: the winning over ofthe waverers. The response from

headquarters was to authorize the removalof Koestler from his central position in theorganization. Thus, the man who had drawnup the Manifesto for Cultural Freedom wasnow eased out. Paragraph 3 of the manifestostated: “Peace can be maintained only ifeach government submits to the control andinspection of its acts by the people whom itgoverns.”16 The CIA, by marginalizingKoestler and by its covert governance ofwhat was to become the largest suchagglomeration of intellectuals and “freethinkers,” was effectively acting in breach ofthe very declaration of rights it had paid for.To promote freedom of expression, theAgency had first to buy it, then to restrict it.The market for ideas was not as free as itappeared. For Koestler it was a devastatingbetrayal. He suffered some kind of “nervouscrack up,” flew to the States, and watched

bitterly as the Congress for CulturalFreedom moved away from his ideas.

Arthur Schlesinger was another valuablecontact for the Congress. He was part ofwhat Stuart Hampshire, Isaiah Berlin, andStephen Spender nicknamed “the apparat,the controlling group.” Writing tocongratulate Irving Brown after the Berlinmeeting, Schlesinger noted enthusiastically,“I think we may have here an immenselypowerful instrument of political andintellectual warfare.”17 Schlesinger knewsomething about such matters from hiswartime work in the Office of StrategicServices (OSS), where he had been assignedto the Research and Analysis department,which earned the nickname “the campus” onaccount of its tweedy aura.

Schlesinger had maintained close contactwith the exclusive “club” of OSS veterans,

many of whom, including himself, went onto become leading statesmen and presidentialadvisers. He knew Allen Dulles, who in1950 invited him to sit on the ExecutiveCommittee of Radio Free Europe, whichwas set up that year by the CIA (itsparticipation shielded from public view by itsfront organization, the National Committeefor a Free Europe). Schlesinger had alsobeen exposed to covert operations when heworked as an assistant to Averell Harriman,head of the Marshall Plan in Europe. “Therewas a general feeling that the Soviet Unionwas spending a lot of money on organizingits intellectuals, and we had to do somethingto respond,”18 Schlesinger recalled. UnderHarriman, he became involved in the secretdistribution of counterpart funds toEuropean trade unions, dealing often withIrving Brown.

Schlesinger’s relationship with Brownwas now soldered by the mutual secret theyshared. For Schlesinger was one of thehandful of non-Agency people who knewfrom the outset the true origins of theCongress for Cultural Freedom. “I knewbecause of my intelligence links that theoriginal meeting of the Congress in Berlinwas paid for by the CIA,” Schlesinger lateracknowledged. “It seemed not unreasonableto help the people on our side. Of all theCIA’s expenditures, the Congress forCultural Freedom seemed its mostworthwhile and successful.”19

One of Schlesinger’s first tasks was topersuade Bertrand Russell, one of theCongress’s honorary patrons, not to resign.This the philosopher had threatened to doafter reading Hugh Trevor-Roper’s“mischievous reports” in the Manchester

Guardian, which had described events inBerlin as something uncomfortably close toa Nazi rally. Visiting Russell in London withKoestler on September 20, 1950,Schlesinger listened as Russell told of hisalarm at Trevor-Roper’s report (which A.J.Ayer had endorsed) and his subsequentdecision to withdraw. Russell appeared coldtowards Koestler (the philosopher had oncemade a pass at Mamaine Koestler, and aresidual sexual jealousy between the twomen continued to hamper their friendship),but finally accepted his and Schlesinger’sarguments.

Bertrand Russell, world-renownedmathematician and philosopher, wasubiquitous in 1950, the year which broughthim the British Order of Merit and the NobelPrize. He had met and disliked Lenin: “Hisguffaw at the thought of those massacred

made my blood run cold. . . . My most vividmemories were of bigotry and Mongoliancruelty.” Russell had startled admirers when,in 1948, in a speech in the bomb-damagedmain hall of Westminster School, hesuggested threatening Stalin with the atomicbomb.20 At this time, Russell was “violentlyanti-Communist [and] insisted that on ourside military strength and rearmament tookprecedence over all other matters.”21

Russell was also prized by IRD, from whomhe was happy to receive “little tit-bits fromtime to time.” But if Russell was a “hawk”then, by the mid-1950s he was urgingnuclear disarmament (“His aristocratic arsehas sat/on London paving stones/along withqueens and commies,” wrote one poet).22

His politics seemed to change with the wind,and he was to cause the Congress and its

American backers much heartburn over theyears of his patronage until he finallyresigned in 1956. But for now, his nameadded luster and satisfied what somedetected was Josselson’s weakness for thetalisman of celebrity.

Like Russell, the other honorarypresidents were all philosophers and all“representatives for the newborn Euro-American mind.”23 Benedetto Croce was apolitical conservative and monarchist whohad no time for socialism or for organizedreligion (his works were listed on the VaticanIndex of Prohibited Books). Now in hiseighties, he was revered in Italy as theeloquent father of anti-Fascism, a man whohad openly defied Mussolini’s despotism andhad been adopted as the moral leader of theresistance. He had also been a valuablecontact for William Donovan on the eve of

the Allied landings in Italy. Croce died in1952, and was replaced by Don Salvador deMadariaga, who was also closely linked toDonovan through the European Movement.John Dewey, who had headed theCommittee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky,represented pragmatic American liberalism.Karl Jaspers, the German existentialist, hadbeen an unrelenting critic of the Third Reich.A Christian, he had once publicly challengedJean-Paul Sartre to state whether or not heaccepted the Ten Commandments. JacquesMaritain, a liberal Catholic humanist, was aFrench resistance hero. He was also a closefriend of Nicolas Nabokov. Isaiah Berlin wasapproached to join this rosary ofphilosopher-patrons but refused on thegrounds that such public support for an anti-Communist movement would place hisrelatives in the East in danger. He did,

however, promise to support the Congress inany modest way he could. It was Lawrencede Neufville’s recollection that Berlin did sowith the knowledge that the Congress wasbeing secretly funded by the CIA. “He knewabout our involvement,” said de Neufville.“I don’t know who told him, but I imagine itwas one of his friends in Washington.”24

As with all professional organizations,the early days were marked by constantshufflings in the ranks as members jostledfor jobs. Denis de Rougemont, who hadnever been a Communist and was fromneutral Switzerland, was made president ofthe Executive Committee. Author ofL’Amour et l’Occident, de Rougemonthailed from the non-Marxist, anti-Fascistleft. After the war, he had been abroadcaster for Voice of America andworked closely with François Bondy in the

European Union of Federalists, whose aimshe would continue to pursue with covertassistance from the CIA (of which, he latersaid, he was ignorant) from his Geneva-based Centre Européen de la Culture (whichstill exists today).

For the job of general secretary,Josselson lobbied hard for his preferredcandidate, Nicolas Nabokov, who, even if hedidn’t know it, had auditioned for a leadingrole when he had declaimed at the Berlinconference: “Out of this Congress we mustbuild an organization for war. We must havea standing committee. We must see to it thatit calls on all figures, all fightingorganizations and all methods of fighting,with a view to action. If we do not, we willsooner or later all be hanged. The hour haslong struck Twelve.”25 Nabokov was dulyelected to the post.

Apart from his old friend Josselson,Nicolas Nabokov had powerful sponsors.There was Chip Bohlen, “that thoroughbredAmerican” who had made America “a truehome” for Nabokov in the early 1940s andwho was to remain, said Nabokov, “mymodel, my source of advice, often mycomforter.” And there was George Kennan,who had earlier been so embarrassed whenNabokov’s application for governmentemployment had failed. Nabokov’s namealso appeared on a top secret list ofpsychological warfare personnelrecommended for employment in sensitiveposts, circulated to the Office of theSecretary of the Army in 1950.26 Thiscombination of powerful political patronsensured that Nabokov’s security clearancewas not held up as it had been a few yearsearlier.

Irving Brown, the paymaster, offeredNabokov $6,000. Nabokov, with two youngsons to put through school and currentlyreceiving a salary of $8,000 for his teachingjobs at the Peabody Conservatory and SarahLawrence College, said he needed more:“Don’t forget that in this job, there will berepresentational expenses involved. I don’tintend to give parties, but I will have to seemany people, cajole them, invite them tomeals, etc. etc.”27 Actually, Nabokov lovedto give parties, and he would give manylavish ones at the CIA’s expense over thenext sixteen years. For the moment,however, the question of Nabokov’s salarywas unresolved. Irving Brown, who hadaccess to a huge slush fund, had many otherpokers in the fire. Whilst he was anenergetic supporter of the Congress, hisnatural inclination was to spend the money

available on funding the CIA-backed ForceOuvrière in its attempts to break up theCommunist dockers’ unions in Marseilles,where Marshall Plan supplies and shipmentsof American arms were daily beingblockaded. The matter was resolved whenJames Burnham stepped forward in January1951 with a promise to boost Nabokov’ssalary. “Other arrangements to compensateme for my considerable loss of income willbe made here, and will not appear on thebooks of the operation in Europe,”28

Nabokov told Brown, apparently untroubledby Burnham’s flexible approach toaccountancy. For the first year or so,Burnham virtually “ran” Nabokov.

It was decided that Lasky would stay inBerlin editing Der Monat, whose officebecame the headquarters of the Germanaffiliate of the Congress. Josselson and de

Neufville would move to Paris and head upthe main office there, liaising with IrvingBrown, who was instructed to rent andequip a suitable property. As they werepreparing to leave Germany, Josselson andde Neufville learned of an exciting newdevelopment back at CIA headquarters inWashington: Allen Dulles had just joined theAgency, and he brought with him anassistant called Tom Braden. Things weregoing to change.

Allen Dulles joined the CIA in December1950 as deputy director of operations. Thiswas a position of immense scope, givingDulles responsibility for collectingintelligence and for supervising FrankWisner’s division, the Office of PolicyCoordination. One of his first acts was torecruit Tom Braden, one of his most dashingOSS officers, a man who had cultivated

many high-level contacts since his return tocivilian life. Wiry, sandy-haired, and with acraggy, handsome visage, Braden looked likea composite of John Wayne, Gary Cooper,and Frank Sinatra. He was born in 1918 inDubuque, Iowa, to a father who was aninsurance agent and a mother who wroteromantic novels. She taught him a love forthe work of Ring Lardner, Robert Frost, andErnest Hemingway. He graduated fromDartmouth with a degree in political sciencein 1940, then got so excited at the outbreakof war that he enlisted in the British Army.He was assigned to the 8th Army, 7thArmoured Division—the famous DesertRats—where he became best friends withStewart Alsop. Both were to join OSS,parachuting into occupied France to fight inthe woods with the Communist-dominatedresistance. After the war, Braden and Alsop

co-authored a book, Sub Rosa: The OSSand American Espionage, in which theydescribed OSS as providing its men “withopportunities for the most amazingadventures recorded in any war since that ofKing Arthur.”

Returning to civilian life, Braden spentthe next few years campaigning for apermanent intelligence service. In late 1950,Allen Dulles telephoned and asked him to behis assistant at CIA. Braden accepted.Assigned the code name “Homer D.Hoskins,” Braden was initially withoutportfolio, nominally assigned to Wisner’sOPC but in reality working directly forDulles. Within a few months, he had gainedan intimate knowledge of the Communistpropaganda offensive, and a limitedappreciation for the American response.“How odd, I thought to myself as I watched

these developments, that Communists, whoare afraid to join anything but theCommunist Party, should gain mass alliesthrough organizational war while weAmericans, who join everything, were sittinghere tongue-tied.”29

William Colby, a future CIA director,reached the same conclusion: “TheCommunists made no secret of their belief inwhat they called ‘the organizationalweapon’: organize the Party as the keycommand troop, but then organize all theother fronts—the women’s groups, thecultural groups, the trade unions, the farmergroups, the cooperatives—a whole panoplyof organizations so that you could include asmany of the people in the country aspossible within those groups and therebyunder basically Communist leadership andeven discipline.”30

“If the other side can use ideas that arecamouflaged as being local rather thanSoviet supported or stimulated, then weought to be able to use ideas camouflaged aslocal ideas,” Braden reasoned.31 Anoverview of Wisner’s OPC convincedBraden that it was overburdened withprojects which lacked a central focus. OneCIA official described it as an “operationaljunk heap.” “There was an InternationalOrganizations Branch, but it was ahodgepodge of little jobs the Agency hadaround, and it was totally unimportant,”Braden recalled. “I went to Al [Allen Dulles]and said, ‘Why don’t we merge these thingsinto one division?’ Maybe Al was hoping Iwould come up with something like this.”32

Whilst Dulles was enthusiastic, Braden’sproposal was received with consternation bythose CIA staffers who believed that covert

operations meant organizing the overthrowof “unfriendly” foreign leaders like JacoboArbenz. If the infant Agency was halffaculty (it was already known as “thecampus”), then it was also half cops androbbers. Alongside the pipe-smoking Yaliesthere were the kind of people, said Braden,who hadn’t understood that the war hadended. They were dangerously headstrong,and their thinking was of a kind with that ofmen like General MacArthur, who wanted toextend the Korean war by bombingManchuria, or the secretary of the navyFrancis P. Matthews, who in 1950 hadexhorted the world to prepare itself foranother global conflagration. “I was muchmore interested in the ideas which wereunder fire from the Communists than I wasin blowing up Guatemala,” Bradenexplained. “I was more an ‘intellectual’ than

a gung-ho guy.”33

Braden’s division chief tried to block hisproposal by arguing that it “crossed divisionlines,” a bureaucratic maneuver ofmonumental pettiness. A “helluva fight”ensued, which Braden lost. He wentimmediately to Dulles’s office and resigned.Dulles, furious, snapped up the telephoneand called Frank Wisner. “What the hell’sgoing on?” he demanded. “Allen was allover Wisner,” Braden remembered. “Hetook my side completely. And that’s how Icame to set up the InternationalOrganizations Division under the DDP[deputy director of plans], who was Wisner.But I didn’t pay much attention to Wisner, Ijust went over his head straight to Allen. Ihad to handle it carefully, because Frankwas ostensibly my superior.”34

The formation of this new division

(abbreviated to IOD) coincided with—andits activities were sanctioned by—a newNational Security directive, NSC-68.Drafted in March 1950 by the new directorof the Policy Planning Staff, Paul Nitze(who had replaced Kennan), NSC-68became “the supreme documentary symbolof the cold war,” and was based on theassumption of a Communist monolith whoseguiding spirit resided in the Kremlin.35 Thedirective concluded that “[p]ractical andideological considerations . . . both impel usto the conclusion that we have no choice butto demonstrate the superiority of the idea offreedom by its constructive application.”“Truth also needs propaganda,” thephilosopher Karl Jaspers had recentlydeclared. Here was the mandate whichauthorized America’s Cold Warriors to take“constructive” measures to ensure that the

truth triumphed over deceit. The budgetaryprovisions set out by NSC-68 revealed theimportance now given to this task: in thenext two years, the $34 million spent onpsychological warfare in 1950 was to bequadrupled.

“In the contest for men’s minds, truthcan be peculiarly the American weapon,”secretary of state Edward Barrettannounced. “It cannot be an isolatedweapon, because the propaganda of truth ispowerful only when linked with concreteactions and policies . . . a highly skilful andsubstantial campaign of truth is asindispensable as an air force.”36 The truth,like the century, was to belong to America.If deceit needed to be used to promote thetruth, then so be it. It was what Koestlercalled “fighting against a total lie in the nameof a half-truth.”

“The purpose of the IOD,” said Braden,“was to unite intellectuals against what wasbeing offered in the Soviet Union. The ideathat the world would succumb to a kind ofFascist or Stalinist concept of art andliterature and music [was] a horrifyingprospect. We wanted to unite all the peoplewho were artists, who were writers, whowere musicians, and all the people whofollow those people, to demonstrate that theWest and the United States was devoted tofreedom of expression and to intellectualachievement, without any rigid barriers as towhat you must write and what you must sayand what you must do and what you mustpaint [Braden’s emphasis], which was whatwas going on in the Soviet Union. I think wedid it damn well.”37

The IOD operated according to the sameprinciples that guided Wisner’s management

of the Non-Communist Left. The purpose ofsupporting leftist groups was not to destroyor even dominate but rather to maintain adiscreet proximity to and monitor thethinking of such groups; to provide themwith a mouthpiece so they could blow offsteam; and, in extremis, to exercise a finalveto on their publicity and possibly theiractions if they ever got too “radical.” Bradenissued clear instructions to his newlyestablished IOD posts in Europe: “Limit themoney to amounts private organizations cancredibly spend; disguise the extent ofAmerican interest; protect the integrity of theorganization by not requiring it to supportevery aspect of official American policy.”38

Braden’s new division had been createdto provide a better institutional base forentities like the Congress for CulturalFreedom, and it was to him that its

managers were now answerable. The realobjectives of the Congress were clarified. Itwas not to be a center for agitation but abeachhead in Western Europe from whichthe advance of Communist ideas could behalted. It was to engage in a widespread andcohesive campaign of peer pressure topersuade intellectuals to dissociatethemselves from Communist fronts or fellowtraveling organizations. It was to encouragethe intelligentsia to develop theories andarguments which were directed not at amass audience but at that small elite ofpressure groups and statesmen who in turndetermined government policy. It was not anintelligence-gathering source, and agents inother CIA divisions were warned not toattempt to use it as such. It was to provide“independent” support for American foreignpolicy objectives which sought to promote a

united Europe (through membership ofNATO and the European Movement, thelatter being substantially endowed by theCIA), which included a reunified Germany.It was to act as an emissary for theachievements of American culture and workto undermine the negative stereotypesprevalent in Europe, especially France,about America’s perceived culturalbarrenness. And it was to respond tonegative criticism of other aspects ofAmerican democracy, including its civilrights record.

The people who had been chosen by thesteering committee to animate the newlyconsolidated Congress were all subject tosecurity checks, as were those who came tobe closely involved with the controlling“apparat” and all future employees of theCongress. For the CIA, there were Michael

Josselson and Lawrence de Neufville. Theirneeds were serviced by a specially assignedcase officer who, in the course of a three-year watch, would liaise with a counterpartof equal rank in Washington who in turn wasaccountable to an IOD branch chief. Thechief of Branch Three looked after theCongress. He answered to the IOD deputydivision chief and the division chief(Braden). As the Congress grew, variousadditional Agency personnel were assignedto look after its finances and activities. Farfrom being what Koestler had initiallyenvisaged as a “small, shoestring operationlike Willi Munzenberg’s,” with “little money,only scant personnel and no Cominformbehind us,”39 the Congress had now becomean “asset” of one of the fastest-growingdivisions in the CIA.40

True to form, Braden decided to run

operation QKOPERA “out of lines,” and tothis end he instructed de Neufville not to tellWisner’s man running the French desk,Robert Thayer, anything about his activities.Above Braden’s head, Allen Dulles privatelytold de Neufville he was “to keep up withIrving Brown and find out what he wasdoing,” though de Neufville would soonreport back to Dulles that this “was almostimpossible because he was running it like itwas his own operation, and he never saidmuch about what he was doing.”41 Notsurprisingly, Dulles, Wisner, and Bradennever acquired reputations as goodmanagers.

Josselson and de Neufville were quick toestablish the Paris office and sort out “thehousework,” Agency-speak for the domesticarrangements common to all front activities.Whilst they dealt with the fixtures and

fittings, Nabokov arrived to take up his newpost as general secretary, moving from NewYork with Patricia Blake to a little apartmentin rue d’Assas overlooking the LuxembourgGardens. “There were no modernprecedents, no models in the westernworld,” he wrote of the organization he nowrepresented. “No one before had tried tomobilize intellectuals and artists on aworldwide scale in order to fight anideological war against oppressors of themind, or to defend what one called by thehackneyed term ‘our cultural heritage.’ Thiskind of ideological war had so far been theappanage of Stalinists and Nazis. . . . Tolead a rational, ice-cold, determinedlyintellectual war against Stalinism withoutfalling into the easy Manichean trap ofphony righteousness seemed essential to me,especially at a time when in America that

ideological war was getting histrionicallyhysterical and crusaderishly paranoiac.”42

With an energy and enthusiasm whichrarely deserted him, Nabokov threw himselfinto his new career as impresario of thecultural Cold War. In May, the Congress“presented” a prize intellectual defector at apress conference in Paris. He was the youngcultural attaché at the Polish Embassy, apoet and translator of The Waste Land,Czesław Milosz. Milosz had been a memberof the Polish delegation to the WaldorfAstoria conference in 1949, and there, afterhis “first exposure to the democratic left hejust fell in love with us,” according to MaryMcCarthy. Brilliantly stage-managed byNabokov, Milosz’s appearance on the sideof the angels was an early coup for theCongress.

Soon after, Nabokov, accompanied by

Denis de Rougemont, went to Brussels toaddress a dinner sponsored by the magazineSynthèses. Then he rushed back to promotethe work of the Amis de la Liberté, a kind ofrotary club arm of the Congress whichorganized meetings of French student groupsacross the country and at the Maison desJeunesses des Amis de la Liberté in Paris. Inmid-June, Nabokov was on the road again,this time bound for Berlin, where he was tolecture on “art under the totalitariansystem.” “This is of course no ‘LectureTrip’ for me,” he wrote to James Burnham,“but my first ‘Prise de Contact’ with theGerman field of operation.”43 This was thefirst of many such scouting expeditionsundertaken by the Congress’s executives,from which mushroomed affiliates not justin Europe (there were offices in WestGermany, Great Britain, Sweden, Denmark,

Iceland), but across other continents—inJapan, India, Argentina, Chile, Australia,Lebanon, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay,Colombia, Brazil, and Pakistan.

Back in Paris, Nabokov played a majorpart in launching the Congress’s firstmagazine, Preuves (“proof” or “evidence”).The idea of creating a cultural-politicalmagazine in the tradition of the great Frenchreviews was first discussed in February 1951at the Executive Committee meeting inVersailles. What was needed was a journalwhich could compete with Les Tempsmodernes and encourage defections fromSartre’s stronghold. “Who was the realantagonist?” one historian later asked. “Itwasn’t the Soviet Union or Moscow. Whatthey were really obsessed with was Sartreand de Beauvoir. That was ‘the other side.’”44 “The Left Bank intellectuals were the

target,” a Congress insider confirmed. “Or,perhaps, the people who listened to themwere the target.”45 But finding an editor whoenjoyed enough stature to lure thesecompagnons de route into a more centristarrondissement proved to be difficult. ByJune 1951, Nabokov was becomingdesperate, writing to tell Burnham that “thequestion of the French magazine gives mesleepless nights. It is so hard to findsomeone of the stature of Aron or Camuswho would be willing to undertake theeditorship . . . the difficulty here is thatalthough people talk a lot aboutcommitment, nobody wants to commithimself. There is a kind of lassitude andapathy or rather tiredness in the air whichone has to struggle against daily.”46

Having failed to attract a French editor,the Executive Committee decided to give the

job to François Bondy, a Swiss writer ofGerman mother tongue who had been aCommunist Party activist until the Hitler–Stalin Pact of 1939. A key appointment tothe Congress Secretariat in 1950 (as directorof publications), Bondy had collaborated onDer Monat with Melvin Lasky, who calledhim “the editorial adviser of our time parexcellence.” Under Bondy, the first issue ofPreuves was finally launched in October1951. Aimed at establishing an Atlanticist,anti-neutralist, and pro-American consensus,Preuves was unmistakably the house organof the Congress, giving it a voice as well asadvertising its activities and programs. Assuch, it immediately faced what ManèsSperber called “une hostilité presque totale,”but Bondy stood firm in the face of virulentattacks from both the left and the right.47

The Congress in these early days was

received with almost universal suspicion.Activists who supported it convincedthemselves that these suspicions were simplyexcrescences of the anti-Americanism so invogue at the time; those who were unable todo so simply sublimated their concerns.Detractors, however, took every opportunityto question the Congress’s legitimacy as a“free” and “independent” organization. Thatit was able to survive these challenges is amark of the dogged persistence of those (onthe “inside” and on the “outside”) whobelieved in its purpose. When GeorgesAltman, editor of Franc-Tireur, andFrançois Bondy were dispatched to Rome inlate 1950 to engineer support for an Italianaffiliate, they were repeatedly asked,“Who’s paying for all this?” and “By‘freedom’ do you mean Americancapitalism?” Communist observers seemed

to be present, they said, at most of theirmeetings, and many Italian intellectuals wereclearly susceptible to “the totalitariantemptation.” Others, like Alberto Moravia,were reported to be more concerned aboutneo-Fascism than Communism. In theirreport to Josselson, Bondy and Altmanstressed the provincialism and anti-Americanism of Italian intellectuals. Therewere “great possibilities” for the Congress inItaly, but these would mature only as theresult of “slow, indirect, diversified andextremely discreet action.”48

The Italian Association for CulturalFreedom was formed in late 1951 underIgnazio Silone and became the center of afederation of about a hundred independentcultural groups to which the associationprovided speakers, books, pamphlets, films,and an internationalist ethos. It produced the

bulletin Libertà della Cultura, and laterTempo Presente, edited by Silone and NicolaChiaromonte. But no sooner was the Italianaffiliate assembled than it started to fallapart. Nabokov was dispatched to Rome totry and nudge the Congress’s interests alongbut, like Bondy and Altman before him, hefound the intellectuals apathetic and tooready to listen to “curious rumours” aboutthe Congress. Complaining to Irving Brownabout “the Silonesque lethargy of our Italianoutfit,” Nabokov said that radical measureswere needed to get blood into the Italian“apparatus.” “Silone thrones invisible [sic]in heaven and prevents the kids in the officefrom doing their work. I wrote him twoletters, I wire [sic] to ask him to descendfrom his summer vacation for a day to seeme here in Rome . . . no answer to anything.I see dozens of people daily. Most of them

are ready to join, work, help (includingMoravia) but all say that so long as Silone isthe sole master here, no work will be done,”Nabokov whined.49 Alarmed by its“quixotic,” “bellicose,” and “arrogant”attitude to the Church, Nabokov also wroteto Jacques Maritain and urged him to write a“long letter to the Vatican authorities”explaining that the Congress for CulturalFreedom and the Italian Association had“different policies.”50

Nabokov also traveled to London to rallysupport for the British affiliate, the BritishSociety for Cultural Freedom, which hadbeen founded in January 1951 at theAuthors’ Society in Whitehall Court.Meeting with T.S. Eliot, Isaiah Berlin, LordDavid Cecil, the heads of the BritishCouncil, the Third Programme of the BBC,and Richard Crossman, who was now the

secretary-general of the Labour Party,Nabokov was able to report back to Paristhat the Congress had powerful allies inEngland. Separately he told Burnham that“[m]any [British intellectuals] think of ourCongress as some kind of semiclandestineAmerican organization controlled by you. . .. I think our constant efforts should bedirected towards proving to Europeanintellectuals that the Congress for CulturalFreedom is not an American secret serviceAgency.”51 Using language normally favoredby “witting” collaborators of the intelligenceservices, Nabokov asked Burnham tocommunicate to “our friends in America”the “fundamental paradox of the situationhere: we may have little time left, but wemust work as if we had all the time in theworld. The process of transforming the‘Operation-Congress’ into a broad and a

solid front opposed to totalitarianism is goingto take a lot of time and I am afraid a lot ofmoney.”52

7

Candy

We couldn’t spend it all. I remember oncemeeting with Wisner and the comptroller. MyGod, I said, how can we spend that? Therewere no limits, and nobody had to account forit. It was amazing.

Gilbert Greenway, CIA agent

Acquiring a niche in the competitivemarketplace of Cold War culture required asubstantial investment. Initially, it fell toIrving Brown to act as the financial conduitfor the CIA’s cultural programs. “I’d give$15,000, $10,000, $5,000 at a time to

Brown, off the budget, but I was neverreally sure what he did with it,” Tom Bradenrecalled.1 But this was small changecompared to the total funds at Brown’sdisposal. “The key to all this is thecounterpart funds,” Lawrence de Neufvillelater revealed. “People couldn’t say in U.S.Congress, ‘Oh, look what they’re doing withtaxpayers’ money,’ because it wasn’t ourmoney, it was a by-product of the MarshallPlan.”2 In an innovative move under theearly years of the Marshall Plan, it wasproposed that, in order to make the fundsperform double duty, each recipient countryshould contribute to the foreign aid effort bydepositing an amount equal to the U.S.contribution in its central bank. A bilateralagreement between the country and theUnited States allowed these funds to be usedjointly. The bulk of the currency funds (95

percent) remained the legal property of thecountry’s government, while 5 percentbecame, upon deposit, the property of theU.S. government. These “counterpartfunds”—a secret fund of roughly $200million a year—were made available as awar chest for the CIA.

In December 1950, Richard Bissell, whohad taught economics at Yale and MIT inthe 1930s, was deputy administrator of theMarshall Plan. One day, Frank Wisner calledon Bissell in his Washington office. Bissell,who knew Wisner socially through theGeorgetown set, described him as “verymuch part of our inner circle of people—top-level civil servants who were involved inmany of the government enterprises we tookon.” Bissell recalled that Wisner said “heneeded money and asked me to help financeOPC’s covert operations by releasing a

modest amount from the five percentcounterpart funds. . . . Whether anyoneanticipated that these [funds] would includecovert activities is difficult to say. This wasmost definitely a gray area. I was somewhatbaffled by the request since I was veryuninformed about covert activities. Wisnertook the time to assuage at least some of myconcerns by assuring me that Harriman hadapproved the action. When I began to presshim about how the money would be used,he explained I could not be told. . . . We inthe Marshall Plan were dealing directly orindirectly with quite a number of the peoplewho were beneficiaries of the CIA’s earlycovert action programs.”3

Counterpart funds had been used underHarriman’s administration of the MarshallPlan to subsidize the OPC’s countermove atthe International Day of Resistance to

Dictatorship and War of April 1949. Theyhad also played a crucial part in the Italianelections of 1948. Now Irving Brown wasable to boost his CIA slush fund withMarshall Plan “candy.” Of the multitude ofcovert projects financed through Brown,approximately $200,000 (equivalent to $1.5million in 1999) was earmarked for the basicadministrative costs of the Congress forCultural Freedom in 1951. This paid thesalaries of François Bondy, Denis deRougemont, Pierre Bolomey (a protégé ofAltman’s who had been appointedtreasurer), an administrator, and severalsecretaries. Bondy and de Rougemontreceived their salaries in dollars, transferredby Brown through American Express to anaccount in the Société de Banque Suisse,Lausanne. The others were paid in Frenchfrancs. The total monthly expenditure for

running the Secretariat at this time wasaround 5 million francs. Brown was alsobankrolling Les Amis de la Liberté atroughly the same amount. Into a privateaccount in Germany, he was depositing40,000 German marks for the Congressoffice there, covering salaries and officeexpenses. The Italian office received severalthousand dollars a month through theaccount of Codignola Trista, editor of thejournal Nuova Italia. Michael Goodwin,secretary of the British Society for CulturalFreedom, had access to a monthly subsidyof £700, deposited into his account atWestminster Bank in St. James’s Park.

Before Brown secured a permanenthome for the Congress in BoulevardHaussman, his rooms at the Hôtel Baltimoreon Avenue Kleber served as theorganization’s temporary headquarters.

Dropping in unannounced for a drink oneevening, a young American woman who wasworking in the Labor Division of theMarshall Plan noticed a list of names withdollar amounts next to them lying byBrown’s telephone. Brown had left the roomto make the drinks for his unexpected guest.She thought she detected the presence ofsomebody other than Brown in the suite.Eventually, unable to hide any longer,Michael Josselson appeared from thebathroom, whence he had speedily retreatedin order not to be seen. Diana Dodge, whowas in two years to become Josselson’swife, thought the scene highly amusing.Josselson was deeply embarrassed.

The scene at the Hôtel Baltimore showsthe improvisational nature of the Congressfor Cultural Freedom in its early days. “Inthe beginning, it was all very well motivated,

and we just went along how we thoughtbest,”4 said de Neufville. Gradually thingsstarted to coalesce as the CIA developed abureaucracy for containing such operationsand providing them with “guidance.” “Therewere various meetings [between] some ofthe top Congress people, including Laskyand others, and the Agency people whowere in charge,”5 recalled Donald Jameson,a CIA expert on Russian affairs who wasperipherally involved with QKOPERA.“Most of the time there would be betweenten and fifteen people in a conference room.And we would sit around and talk aboutwhat ought to be done, where it ought to bedone, and it was very much an openexchange. This was the tone that the peoplewho were in the Agency chain of commandset in, and I think it was very wise to do so.As a matter of fact, if it hadn’t been done

that way, the people on the other side—onthe Congress side—would have quit. I thinkat least a great many of them. They werenot time-servers who were concerned aboutsticking to the Agency just because theyneeded a check.”6

The people on the other side of the tableto whom Jameson referred were Josselson,Nabokov, Lasky, Bondy, and occasionallyMalcolm Muggeridge, who provided a lineinto the British IRD. This was the “apparat,”the group chosen to be party to the CIA’sguidance, which, despite the genteel natureof its delivery, in effect meant the layingdown of the political line that Washingtonexpected the Congress to follow. There was,as Jameson explained, a reciprocity: the CIAwould pass on American foreign policyobjectives, and by return they listenedattentively to a group whose unique access

to the intellectual currents of WesternEurope could ease or even modify themethods and arguments used to formulatethese objectives.

Josselson, although clearly a part of theAgency chain of command, also took his jobof representing the Congress’s interests veryseriously. This was a uniquely hard positionto hold, and to hold credibly. Technically, hewas subordinate to de Neufville, but deNeufville rarely, if ever, tried to overrulehim. “I saw Josselson every day, or if not,every week, and I would go to Washingtonwith whatever he wanted to accomplish,”said de Neufville. “If I agreed, which Iusually did, I would try and help. I saw myjob as trying to facilitate the development ofCongress by listening to people likeJosselson who knew better than I did. Hedid a wonderful job.”7

“Josselson is one of the world’s unsungheroes,” Tom Braden later said. “He did allthis frenetic work with all the intellectuals ofEurope, who didn’t necessarily agree onmuch beyond their basic belief in freedom,and he was running around from meeting tomeeting, from man to man, from group togroup, and keeping them all together and allorganized and all getting something done. Hedeserves a place in history.”8 Similarly,Arthur Schlesinger remembered Josselson as“an extraordinary man” who could “play anyinstrument in the orchestra.” But there was adarker side to Josselson’s heroictemperament. His great talent for listeningwithout talking was occasionally strained bythe talent of others for talking withoutlistening. “Mike sometimes got impatientwith all this chatter. Sometimes he felt thesepeople were too precious, too talmudic.

Then he would just put his hands over hisears and say, ‘Enough! I just can’t listen toany more of this. Let’s just get on with it!’ ”remembered one colleague. “He was prettyblunt, and he had a very low boiling point—he’d go up in smoke pretty quickly.”9

Another Congress insider felt that Josselsonwas “almost always on the verge of anemotional explosion.”10 Josselson, who oncerevealed that his mother used to “makescenes,” did his best to control his temper.But by avoiding confrontation, he oftenproduced an “enormously heavyatmosphere,” loaded with silent rage andpunctuated by piercing looks from his darkeyes. Forty years later, Ben Sonnenberg, awriter who had a brief and infelicitousflirtation with the CIA in the 1950s,shuddered at the memory of Josselson’sheart of darkness. “The name Michael

Josselson still gives me the willies,” hesaid.11

Josselson could not stand intellectualshilly-shallying because he regarded the jobin hand with such urgency. So when IrvingBrown reported that the British Society forCultural Freedom was stalling in the face ofdivisiveness and infighting, and was goodonly for “receptions and sherry parties” (onemember said its “chief activity was invitingeminent intellectuals to lunch in expensiveSoho restaurants”), Josselson resolved toimpose his authority on the British affiliate.Formed in January 1951, it had got off to ashaky start. Its chairman, Stephen Spender,soon fell out with the honorary secretary,Michael Goodwin, and by the end of 1951the executive committee was disintegrating.Goodwin, as editor of the journal TwentiethCentury, the famous monthly launched in

1877 as the Nineteenth Century and After,was a vital contact for the Paris office,which had saved his journal from liquidationin early 1951 by paying off an angrylandlord and financing the move to a newoffice in Henrietta Street, which also becamethe headquarters of the British Society. Thiswas followed by two emergency subsidies toTwentieth Century of $2,000 and £700 tomeet outstanding printing and paper bills inAugust 1951, plus a further monthly subsidyof £150 to “cover the magazine’s monthlydeficit.” Goodwin, who was later to becomea features and drama director at the BBC,not only offered Josselson a vehicle inEngland in the form of Twentieth Century,he also provided a useful link to Britishcovert cultural propaganda efforts: he wasworking as a contract employee for theInformation Research Department.

Josselson’s subsidy to Goodwin’s journalwas given on the specific understanding thatTwentieth Century should address itself torebutting the New Statesman and Nation’spositions. Goodwin confirmed in a letter ofJanuary 1952 that this campaign wasbuilding up momentum, reporting thatTwentieth Century is “keeping up a runningfire of comment upon a variety of subjects[in the New Statesman] which amounts intotal to a systematic critical destruction oftheir position.” For good measure, he added,it was also preparing to undermine SovietStudies, a Glasgow quarterly “which isprobably the chief source of Stalinistapologetics in this country.”12

But Josselson was never entirely happywith the Twentieth Century arrangement. “Itwasn’t lively enough. It wasn’t the rightvehicle,” Michael Josselson’s wife Diana

said.13 Goodwin’s attacks on the NewStatesman were all well and good, but hisjournal had not done enough to address theproblems indicated by Nabokov in a letter ofDecember 19, 1951, in which Nabokovreported the “widespread dissatisfaction” ofthe International Executive Committee. “MrSpender will suggest to you and to yourBoard of Editors urgent and importantchanges which are fully endorsed by IrvingBrown, de Rougemont and myself,” wroteNabokov sternly.14 These changes should beeffected immediately, he added, or elseCongress support would dry up. To whichGoodwin replied sharply on December 31:“No good can result to anyone unless thereview remains, and is known to remain,independent . . . [the review] should bepermitted to operate ‘without strings.’ ”15

Things went from bad to worse forGoodwin. In January 1952, Spender was atthe center of what looked like a coup toreplace Goodwin as secretary of the BritishSociety, sending him a curt letter ofdismissal. Spender himself had resigned inpique a few weeks previously, along withWoodrow Wyatt and Julian Amery, and toldNabokov that he was coming to Paris toexplain his reasons for doing so. There hehad convinced the Congress’s inner circlethat the British affiliate could not functionwith Goodwin at the helm, and obtained aletter for his dismissal, which he nowforwarded to Goodwin. Goodwin in turnblamed Spender for Wyatt’s resignation andurged Nabokov to keep Spender “withinbounds.” But Goodwin was still forced toresign. Spender rejoined the executivecommittee, which from now on was

controlled by Malcolm Muggeridge andFredric Warburg, with Tosco Fyvel “tailingalong as the third person in the trinity.” Forsomebody who was consistentlycharacterized as a watery, silly soul, Spenderdisplayed a gritty determination to get whathe wanted out of this situation.16 W.H.Auden called him “a Dostoevskyian HolyFool” and “a parody Parsifal.” Isherwoodcalled him an “essentially comic character”who revealed truth through farce. Othersfound a “wincing bewilderment” (IanHamilton), or a “loose-jointed mind, misty,clouded, suffusive,” in which “nothing hasoutline” (Virginia Woolf). In a life pitted bycontradiction and ambiguity, Spender hadalready developed a talent for retreatingbehind these dubious aureoles.

Goodwin’s resignation was a blow toJosselson, who lost in him a direct contact

with the Information Research Department.But IRD soon made good the deficit,inserting their man John Clews into theBritish Society as its general secretary. Soon,Clews was using his position as a distributionpoint for IRD material, writing Nabokov totell him in June 1952 that he had had “a longtalk with Hannah Arendt and haveintroduced her to one or two of our ForeignOffice experts, as a result of which I amsupplying her with a lot of source materialthat she needs for her new book. . . . If youknow of any other people that are comingover here and who wish to make similarcontacts to those made by Dr. Arendt, justlet me know and I will arrange them.”17

Clews also sent material to Josselson,reminding him (as if he needed to) that thedocuments could be used freely, “but theirsource must not be stated.”

With Clews’s appointment, the troublesin the British Society seemed to betemporarily resolved. Tosco Fyvel, editor ofTribune and a key member of the Congresssteering committee, agreed to “keep awatching brief on arrangements in London.”But Josselson was still not satisfied. HughTrevor-Roper’s public criticisms of theCongress after its Berlin inauguration hadleft a legacy of suspicion, and many Britishintellectuals were reluctant to identifythemselves with an organization whose realorigins were deemed to be obscure. Thetrouble was that the hand of the Americangovernment was seen by many Britishintellectuals to be reaching into their pie.“We used to joke about it,” said an officer ofthe British Society for Cultural Freedom.“We’d take our friends out to lunch, andwhen they offered to pay, we would say,

‘Oh no, don’t worry, the Americantaxpayers are paying!’ ”18 Many were yet tobe persuaded that such blandishments weredesirable.

8

Cette Fête Américaine

This Eisenhower splurge . . .Elizabeth Bishop

In early 1951, Nabokov sent a confidentialmemo to Irving Brown outlining a plan for amajor festival of the arts. Withcharacteristically clumsy syntax (Nabokovnever achieved the stylistic ease andgrammatical correctness in written Englishthat came so readily to Josselson), heexplained that its purpose would be toengineer “the first close collaboration of top-ranking American artistic organizations in

Europe with European ones and also ofAmerican artistic production on a footing ofcomplete equality with European artisticproduction. Hence it is bound to have anextremely beneficial all-round effect uponthe cultural life of the free world by showingthe cultural solidarity and interdependence ofEuropean and American civilization. Ifsuccessful, it will help to destroy thepernicious European myth (successfullycultivated by the Stalinists) of Americancultural inferiority. It will be a challenge ofthe culture of the free world to the un-culture of the totalitarian world and a sourceof courage and ‘redressement moral,’ inparticular for the French intellectuals, for itwill again give a kind of sense andpurposefulness to the dislocated anddisintegrated cultural life of France and mostof Europe.”1

Brown reacted hesitantly to the idea, asdid Josselson, de Neufville, and Lasky.Nabokov had to summon up all his powersof persuasion to gain approval—and largeamounts of money—for his “dreamfestival.” Lasky was always uncomfortablewith Nabokov, whom he described sniffilyas “the dandy of the revolution. People likeNicky were absolutely infatuated by thefireworks and the frou-frou and therazzmatazz.” Lasky the City Collegeideologue had trouble accepting Nabokov’sunique brand of aristocratic bohemianism.But even he had to concede that Nabokov’splan to “introduce a note of flamboyancy,hype, propaganda, fireworks, Mardi-Gras-next-Tuesday, or whatever, to widen theaudience and show you’re not just grim,bespectacled intellectuals with noses to theideological grindstone, but aesthetes, fun-

loving people” could bring “positiveresults.”2

Back at the International OrganizationsDivision, Tom Braden was enthusiastic.Nabokov’s claim that “no ideologicalpolemic about the validity and meaning ofour culture can equal the products of thisculture itself”3 struck an immediate chordwith Braden, who had recently seen a playstaged in Warsaw under the auspices of theState Department and found it “dreadful,like most of their stuff. It wouldn’t impresspeople in Waterloo, Minnesota, let aloneParis. It was a given that the StateDepartment didn’t know its ass from a holein the road. They weren’t with it, they didn’tknow how to use what they had, everythingthey did was third or fourth rate.”4 With afew notable exceptions (like the Frank Lloyd

Wright show which toured Europe in 1951–52), this indictment of State Departmentcultural initiatives was justified. Who wouldbe impressed by window displays given overto celebrating the American way of lifewhich included an exhibit on the“Manufacture of Nylon in the UnitedStates”? And was the “simplicity and charmof manner” of the Smith College ChamberSingers with “their fresh and winsomeappearance in white gowns” enough toconvince French audiences that the center ofculture had shifted to America?5 “Who goesto an exhibition of photographs showing theglories of America?” asked Tom Braden. “Idisregarded it as all balderdash. If you’regoing to do it, get the best. Al [Allen Dulles]and myself, we knew better. It soundsarrogant, but that’s what we thought. Weknew. We knew something about art and

music, and State didn’t.”6

Braden had also clipped an article in theNew York Times criticizing “America’sfoolish disregard of the importance of the‘cultural offensive,’ ” and pointing out thatthe Soviet Union spent more on culturalpropaganda in France alone than the UnitedStates did in the entire world. Americaneeded something big and flashy to make adecisive intervention in the Kulturkampf.Nabokov’s plan promised just that, and bythe end of April 1951, Braden had securedapproval for the festival at a CIA projectreview board.

On May 15, 1951, the Congress forCultural Freedom’s executive committeeinstructed Nabokov, as secretary-general ofthe International Secretariat, to move theplan forward. Nabokov immediately availedhimself of a first-class air ticket to the

States, stopping first in Hollywood to see his“old friend” Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky (likeSchoenberg, Thomas Mann, and, for awhile, Bertolt Brecht) was one of “the godsof high culture [who] had disembarked fromEurope to dwell, almost incognito, amongthe lemon trees and beach boys and neo-Bauhaus architecture and fantasyhamburgers” of Southern California.7 Inthese incongruous surroundings, Stravinskygreeted his White Russian friend andpromised to appear at the festival. Nabokovstayed long enough in Tinseltown to squeezein a meeting with Jose Ferrer, who was soexcited by Nabokov’s plans that he laterwrote telling him to return to Hollywood, asthere was plenty of money there to boost thecoffers, and that he, Ferrer, would doeverything he could to help.

After a whirlwind tour of America,

Nabokov returned to Europe with a clutchof contracts and promises to appear at thefestival, whose date had been fixed for April1952. Igor Stravinsky, Leontyne Price,Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, the NewYork City Ballet, the Boston SymphonyOrchestra, the Museum of Modern Art inNew York, James T. Farrell, W.H. Auden,Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, Allen Tate,Glenway Westcott—works or appearancesby all these were penciled into Nabokov’sprogram. Returning to Europe, he was soonable to announce that Jean Cocteau, ClaudeDebussy, William Walton, Laurence Olivier,Benjamin Britten, the Vienna Opera, CoventGarden Opera, the Balanchine troupe,Czesław Milosz, Ignazio Silone, Denis deRougemont, André Malraux, Salvador deMadariaga, and Guido Piovene were also onthe program.

Not surprisingly, given Nabokov’s ownvocation as a composer, the music sectionbegan to emerge as the most significant partof the festival. Here Nabokov intended tocounter, composer by composer, Stalinism inthe arts. “The political, cultural and moralmeaning of the Festival and of its programshould not be overt,” his proposal argued.“It should be left to the public to make itsinevitable logical conclusions. Practically allthe works [to be] performed belong to thecategory branded as ‘formalist, decadent andcorrupt’ by the Stalinists and the Sovietaestheticians, including the works of Russiancomposers (Prokofiev, Schostakovich [sic],Scriabine and Strawinksy [sic]).”8 Thescene at the Waldorf, where Nabokov hadchallenged Shostakovich to repudiateStalinism’s assault on music, was now set toachieve its crescendo.

Nabokov’s grandiose plans representedthe first serious challenge for the CIA’snewly emergent cultural propagandamachine. The organizational skills and fund-raising powers of Braden’s fledgling IODwere truly to be tested. A “festival account”was opened in New York, with theAmerican Committee for Cultural Freedomacting as the laundry for CIA and StateDepartment funds. The money waschanneled through the Farfield Foundation, adummy front or “pass-through” set up bythe CIA expressly to deal with the cash flowfor the festival, but later maintained as theprincipal conduit for Agency subsidies to theCongress because of its usefulness. Financialsupport for the British part of the festivalwas secured through negotiations with IRDand Woodrow Wyatt, who, as “a personalfriend of the Secretary of the Exchequer Mr

Gaitskell,” promised to raise additional cash.Braden’s IOD was also directly involved

in negotiating for the Boston SymphonyOrchestra. Nabokov had already secured theinterest of his old friend Charles Munch, theorchestra’s artistic director. But there wereproblems. The orchestra’s travel expensesalone were “huge,” according to Nabokov.The festival also clashed with the highlylucrative Pops season, which meant theorchestra faced the possibility of losingrevenue. But Braden was not prepared tolose what was widely considered the bestsymphony orchestra in America. So heturned to Charles Douglas Jackson, anardent Cold Warrior who had taken leavefrom Time-Life to work on Eisenhower’selection campaign. “C.D.,” as he wasknown, was also a trustee of the BostonSymphony Orchestra. Together with Julius

Fleischmann, president of the dummyFarfield Foundation and the festival’s“angel,” C.D. formally “invited” theorchestra to play at the festival. Officially,they were acting for the Congress forCultural Freedom. Unofficially, they wererepresenting the CIA, which had alreadypledged $130,000 (listed as a donation from“prominent individuals and associations”)towards the costs of the tour. The orchestrawas secured.

On April 1, 1952, the Masterpieces ofthe Twentieth Century, or Oeuvre duVingtième Siècle, festival opened in Pariswith a performance of the Rite of Spring bythe Boston Symphony Orchestra underPierre Monteux, the same maestro who hadconducted it thirty-nine years earlier. It wasa glittering event, with Stravinsky, flankedby the French president Vincent Auriol and

Madame Auriol, in attendance. Over thenext thirty days, the Congress for CulturalFreedom showered Paris with a hundredsymphonies, concertos, operas, and balletsby over seventy twentieth-centurycomposers. There were performances bynine orchestras, including the BostonSymphony Orchestra, the ViennaPhilharmonic, the West Berlin RIASOrchestra (funded by Marshall Plancounterpart funds), the Suisse Romande ofGeneva, the Santa Cecilia orchestra ofRome, the National RadiodiffusionFrançaise. Topping the bill were thosecomposers who had been proscribed byHitler or Stalin (some, like Alban Berg, hadthe honor of being banned by both). Therewere performances of works by theAustrian-born Arnold Schoenberg, drivenout of Germany as a Jew and a composer of

“decadent music” in 1933 and characterizedas “anti-aesthetic, anti-harmonic, chaotic andinane” by Russian music “critics”; PaulHindemith, another refugee from NaziGermany, now derided by Stalinists forinitiating a whole school of “graphic, linearpseudo-counterpoint which is slavishlyfollowed by so many pseudo-modernists inEurope and America”; and Claude Debussy,under whose “Impressionist tree” the “fleursdu mal of modernism” had been allowed togrow, according to Sovietskaya Muzyka.

Also chosen to represent the “validity ofthe creative effort of our century” wereworks by Samuel Barber, William Walton,Gustav Mahler, Erik Satie, Béla Bartók,Heitor Villa-Lobos, Ildebrando Pizzetti,Vittorio Rieti, Gianfranco Malipiero, GeorgesAuric (listed with Darius Milhaud inSovietskaya Muzyka as “servile teasers of

the snobbish bourgeois tastes of a capitalistcity”), Arthur Honegger, Jean Françaix,Henri Sauguet, Francis Poulenc, and AaronCopland (who was grouped withpsychiatrists Freud and Borneigg,philosopher Bergson, and “gangsters”Raymond Mortimer and Bertrand Russell asfalse authorities to whom Sovietmusicologists and critics should never refer).Stravinsky, who had fled Paris in 1939,conducted his own work Oedipus Rex, forwhich Jean Cocteau designed the set anddirected the choreography. (The AmericanCommittee for Cultural Freedom had madea last-minute appeal for Cocteau to bedropped from the festival program, cablingNabokov on April 9, 1952, to say it had justlearned that Cocteau “has signed theCommunist-inspired document protesting theexecution of the Soviet spies in Greece. This

is so obviously Communist-inspired that thefeeling here is that he should be droppedfrom the Exposition program.” He wasn’t.)

The State Department paid for VirgilThomson’s adaptation of Gertrude Stein’sFour Saints in Three Acts, which starredLeontyne Price. Nabokov later boasted toArthur Schlesinger: “I started her career andbecause of this she has always been willingto do things for me which she couldn’t dofor anybody else.” Curiously, FrankWisner’s sister, Elizabeth, also claimed shehad discovered and promoted Price, whoreferred to herself as the Wisners’“chocolate sister.” One of the great sopranosof her time, Leontyne Price had the addedadvantage—for her sponsors, at least—ofbeing black. On November 15, 1951, AlbertDonnelly Jr., who appeared suddenly in theAmerican Committee as Festival Secretary

(and disappeared as soon as the festival wasfinished), wrote to Julius Fleischmann:“There has been mention here amonginterested friends of a certain Negro singer,Leontine [sic] Price, who was, I believe, MrNabokov’s protégée. She is supposed to beexcellent. Could you sound out Mr Nabokovas to whether we should try to get her forFour Saints? I have not as yet discussed herwith Virgil Thomson. There is also a strongfeeling that for psychological reasons theentire cast of Four Saints should beAmerican Negro: to counter the ‘suppressedrace’ propaganda and forestall all criticismsto the effect that we had to use foreignnegroes because we wouldn’t let our own‘out.’ ”9

The art and sculpture exhibition wascurated by James Johnson Sweeney, artcritic and former director of New York’s

Museum of Modern Art, which wascontracted to organize the show. Works byMatisse, Derain, Cézanne, Seurat, Chagall,Kandinsky, and other masters of early-twentieth-century modernism were culledfrom American collections and shipped toEurope on April 18, aboard the appropriatelynamed SS Liberté. Sweeney’s press releasemade no bones about the propaganda valueof the show: as the works were created “inmany lands under free world conditions,”they would speak for themselves “of thedesirability for contemporary artists of livingand working in an atmosphere of freedom.On display will be masterpieces that couldnot have been created nor whose exhibitionwould be allowed by such totalitarianregimes as Nazi Germany or present-daySoviet Russia and her satellites, as has beenevidenced in those governments’ labelling as

‘degenerate’ or ‘bourgeois’ of many of thepaintings and sculptures included.”10

This was to be a kind of reverseEntartekunst, in which the “official” art ofthe free world was anything the totalitariansloved to hate. And although these wereEuropean masterpieces, the fact that all theworks in the show were owned by Americancollectors and museums delivered anotherclear message: modernism owed its survival—and its future—to America. The art showwas a great popular success (despite HerbertRead’s criticism that it was too retrospective,and presented the art of the twentiethcentury as a fait accompli, a closed period),attracting the highest attendance of any sincethe war, according to Alfred Barr, director ofthe Museum of Modern Art.

Julius Fleischmann, a multimillionairefamed for his stinginess, was in his element,

dishing up CIA money and taking all thecredit for it. “His” contribution of over$7,000 made possible the transfer of the artshow to the Tate and earned the effusivethanks of the Arts Council of Great Britain,which reported that it was “a resoundingsuccess. Already over 25,000 visitors haveseen it and it has had an excellent press.”

The literary debates were a mixed affair.Appearing on the podium were Allen Tate,Roger Caillois, Eugenio Montale, GuidoPiovene, James T. Farrell, GlenwayWestcott, William Faulkner, W.H. Auden,Czesław Milosz, Ignazio Silone, Denis deRougemont, André Malraux, Salvador deMadariaga, and Stephen Spender. The pressreaction was tepid. Critics detected adisparity between the caliber of first-ratewriters and mediocre writers and were boredby “long-winded” speeches. The journalist

for Carrefour (usually sympathetic, beingleft-wing and anti-Stalinist) listened toStephen Spender but noted only his “brick-red complexion” and “shock of hair pointingtowards infinity.” Denis de Rougemont wasjudged to be “the best by far . . . sober,clear, he skilfully poses the problem of theauthor in society.” But Guido Piovene gavean address “as stiff as his collar. It is difficultto understand him; then suddenly you arenot listening any more. . . . At the door anItalian journalist told me that he had leftbecause he was bored. ‘Authors were meantto write,’ he said. I felt this to be anotherfundamental truth.”11 Another critic,regretting the absence of Albert Camus andJean-Paul Sartre, pointed out that the otherFrench intellectuals present—RaymondAron, André Malraux, René Tavernier, JulesMonneret, Roger Nimier, Claude Mauriac,

Jean Amrouche—all had “the same politicalideas,” which meant that outsiders listeningto them would get a false idea “of ouraesthetic and moral conceptions.”

Sartre had refused to attend the festival,commenting drily that he was “not as anti-Communist as all that.” Had he been there,he may well have felt, like his hero inNausea, that he was “alone in the midst ofthese happy, reasonable voices. All thesecharacters spend their time explainingthemselves, and happily recognizing thatthey hold the same opinions.” In her romanà clef The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoirdescribed the same ennui: “Always the samefaces, the same surroundings, the sameconversations, the same problems. Themore it changes, the more it repeats itself. Inthe end, you feel as if you’re dying alive.”

First there had been The God That

Failed. Now, apparently, this congregationhad found a God who could not: the God ofanti-Communism. Certainly, Sartre’s brandof selfish, noncollective existentialism couldoffer nothing to these communicants, whoenvisaged a progressive culture which wasessentially consensual and presupposed apositive relation between the intellectual andthat section of society—political and“private”—which supported him. Sartre wasthe enemy not just because of his positionon Communism, but because he preached adoctrine (or anti-doctrine) of individualismwhich rubbed against the federalist “familyof man” society which America, throughorganizations like the Congress for CulturalFreedom, was promoting. (The SovietUnion, by the way, found Sartre equallyuncongenial, branding existentialism “anauseating and putrid concoction.”)

The Americans were very happy to be inParis. Elizabeth Hardwick and RobertLowell, who were traveling in Europe at thetime, “couldn’t resist” dropping in on thefestival, and reported that everyone thereseemed to be having “a marvellous time.”Janet Flanner, writing as “Genet” for theNew Yorker, devoted the whole of her May1952 “Letter from Paris” to the festival. “Ithas spilled such gallons of captious Frenchnewspaper ink, wasted such tempests ofargumentative Franco-American breath, andafforded, on the whole, so much pleasure tothe eye and ear that it can safely be called,in admiration, an extremely popular fiasco,”she wrote.12 Like most other reviewers, shefound the literary conferences “dull.”Faulkner “disappointingly mumbled nothingbut a few incoherent words,” unable to findanything intelligent to say on the “absurd

topics, set by the Congress committee, suchas ‘Isolation and Communication’ or ‘Revoltand Communion.’ ” The only Frenchman“of any literary quality” who agreed toappear was “General de Gaulle’s presentpolitical lieutenant, André Malraux, who[merely] said, ‘America is now part ofEurope.’ ”13

“Cette fête américaine” became a pipinghot French dinner-table conversation piece.Combat, a Non-Communist Left daily, ran aseries by Guy Dumur, who concluded:“Confusedly, these cultural entertainmentswere tied to the signing of the treaty for aEuropean Army and to the AdmiralFechteler report [a reference to a report,possibly spurious, in which the admiral wassupposed to have advised the NationalSecurity Council of the inevitability of warby 1960] which, true or false, has fed the

anti-American mythology and rekindledEurope’s great fear. And this irritatingmixture of chauvinism and inferioritycomplex as regards America (so little knownby the French) . . . has bizarrely, but notinexplicably, found an outlet in decrying thisexposition of the arts of Europe, to whichthe Americans, somewhat clumsily, wishedto render homage.”14

But another piece in Combat derided“NATO’s Festival” and complained aboutthe “noisy presentation of these events”from which “French musicians among thebest have been forgotten, probably becausethey have never been heard of in Alabamaor Idaho. . . . But we would overcome ournational pride if a very special target was nothidden behind the whole venture. Freedomand culture do not have to be defined by aCongress; their main characteristic being to

bear neither limitation nor prejudice, norsponsorship. . . . For our part, in thisnewspaper where the words ‘freedom’ and‘culture’ are always understood without anyidea of compromising, we can but deplorethe use which is made of these words inconnection with the Festival’smanifestations. The value and interest ofthese events do not need the help of an‘inspired’ Barnum, nor an ‘Atlantic’ flag.”15

Nabokov’s original intention ofconcealing the propaganda value of thefestival had failed. This had been, said JanetFlanner, “the biggest cultural propagandaeffort, either private or governmental, sincethe war . . . the propaganda focus [being]naturally anti-Communist.” In a Franceweary of the subvention of art to parti pris,the Congress’s attempt to lasso themasterpieces of the twentieth century to a

political agenda was widely resented. In anopen letter to the festival organizers, SergeLifar, the famously intemperate head of theballet troupe at the Paris Opera, angrilyaccused the Congress of undertaking an“absolutely meaningless” crusade in France“against a possible and unforeseeablecultural subjection [by Communism].”Apparently forgetting the Vichy years, Lifarasserted that “France is the only countrywhere ‘spiritual domestication’ isunthinkable. If one considers France’s longpast struggle for freedom of thought andindividual independence, one can hardlyunderstand how you dare come here andtalk about freedom and criticize ourintellectual activities. Dear sirs, you havemade a big mistake: from the point of viewof spirit, civilization and culture, France doesnot have to ask for anybody’s opinion; she is

the one that gives advice to others.”16

Franc-Tireur, the leftist daily, challengedLifar’s right to speak as a champion ofFrance, “the cause of which he is not wellqualified to support, inasmuch as the serviceof art is not incompatible with the devotionto the cause of freedom and human dignity,especially at a time when these causes wereoppressed as they were during the Germanoccupation which did not prevent Mr. Lifarfrom dancing.” Touché. The article went on:“Please let us forget about politics orpropaganda. That gloomy mystificationwhich puts creative minds in the artistic orscientific fields at the service of the state orthe chief, has not been established by thefree world [which] allows the spirit to blowanywhere. . . . Freedom’s wings have notbeen cut yet.”17

Franc-Tireur seemed to have recovered

from that “barely concealed anti-Americanism” of a few years earlier, andsupported the festival wholeheartedly. It wasnow edited by Georges Altman, a memberof the Congress steering committee. Alsofavorable was Figaro Littéraire, whichpraised the festival as “great proof ofunbiased artistic activity.” Again, notsurprising, given that the paper’s editor inchief was Maurice Noel, a friend ofRaymond Aron, who in turn introduced himto the Congress. The main paper, Le Figaro,was also closely aligned to the Congressthrough the good offices of Mr. Brisson, theeditor in chief, whom Nabokov fastidiouslycultivated over long lunches.

At the hands of the Communist press,the Congress received a thorough mauling.L’Humanité attacked the festival as part of asinister design “to facilitate the ideological

occupation of our country by the UnitedStates, to have French minds imbued withbellicist and fascist ideas, the acceptance ofwhich would permit the enrolment of Frenchintellectuals in a ‘cultural army,’ areinforcement of the European army. . . .Cultural exchanges become for theAmericans a means . . . to reinforce theinfiltration, spying and propaganda programsset up by Burnham and approved by theAmerican Congress, through the so-called‘security credits’ . . . The famous statementmade by Mr Henry Luce, that ‘TheTwentieth Century must, to a great extent,become an American century’ gives us thetrue meaning of the venture called‘Twentieth Century Festival.’ ”18 “TheUnited States nowadays are playing the partthat Rome once played towards Greece.New Hadrians are not emperors any more

(not even ‘presidents’): they are bankers orcar manufacturers,” read one article inCombat.

Diana Josselson remembered the Parisof this period as brimful with anti-Americanism, a “Yanqui Go Home”mentality everywhere: “[T]he people onemet weren’t really like that, but they didhave an idea that the typical American wasgross.” Many Americans were irked by thisungenerous response to their largesse. “Icould get quite distressed at Europeans if Iallowed myself to,” confessed C.D. Jackson.“How Europeans can indulge in ‘Americans,go home’ out of one corner of their mouth,while out of the other corner it is, ‘If a singleAmerican division leaves European soil it isthe end of the world,’ seems a little silly tome, and not in keeping with Europe’s famedlogical mind.”19

Overall, Nabokov’s festival ultimatelycontributed “a further painful twist toknotted Franco-American propagandarelations.”20 De Neufville, who was neverpersuaded that the festival was a good idea,later said that it “seemed a very expensivecover story. But then it was picked up byWashington, and they pushed money at usbecause they thought it was a great idea. Itjust had a kind of snowball effect. Was it asuccess? Well, what was it trying to do? Didit spread the message of cultural freedom? Idon’t know. It served its purpose as a coverstory, I suppose. I mean, it introducedFleischmann as the patron of all this stuff. Itwas a mixed effort. I guess it was a bigshow-window for things from the U.S. to beshown competitively with European culture,and [Washington] got enthusiastic aboutthat.”21

Melvin Lasky was unmoved. “TheBoston Symphony Orchestra cost a packet,”he complained. (In fact, the total cost ofbringing the orchestra to Europe was$166,359.84.) Lasky continued, “I thought[the festival] was trivial. It’s unimportantwhether foreigners think Americans can playmusic or not. This whole thing wasn’t agravy train, there weren’t oodles of money,as people have said—it was skimpy. So tospend such large sums on this kind ofspectacular hype—it didn’t make sense.”22

“Anti-Americanism in France then was verystrong, and Nicolas’s festival was designedto counter that. It was thrilling. But it gavemore weight to the idea that America wasbehind the Congress,” Diana Josselsonconcluded.23

Nevertheless, the festival had twotangible results. First, it launched the Boston

Symphony Orchestra as a billboard forAmerica’s symphonic virtuosity. After itstriumphant appearance at the Paris festival,the orchestra traveled through most majorcities in Europe, taking in The Hague,Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt, Berlin,Strasbourg, Lyons, Bordeaux, and London.The juggernaut of American culture, itbecame the CIA’s answer to the agitproptrains of old.

C.D. Jackson wrote excitedly of the“overwhelming success and acceptance ofthe Boston Symphony on its European tour .. . It was not an easy job to put across, butfrom the standpoint of the Great Cause, itwas essential, and it more than justified thepreliminary blood, sweat, and tears. One ofthe greatest, if not the greatest, hazards thatwe face in Europe is European non-acceptance of America on matters other than

Coca-Cola, bathtubs, and tanks. . . . Thecontribution of the BSO in this intellectualand cultural area is immeasurable butimmense.”24 Braden was similarly enthused,and later remembered “the enormous joy Igot when the Boston Symphony Orchestrawon more acclaim for the U.S. in Paris thanJohn Foster Dulles or Dwight D. Eisenhowercould have brought with a hundredspeeches.”25

The second positive achievement of thefestival was that it established the FarfieldFoundation as an apparently credible backerfor the Congress. This meant that IrvingBrown no longer needed to fork out cashfrom his slush fund, and he now began torecede into the background. The Farfieldwas incorporated on January 30, 1952, as a“non-profit organization.” According to itsbrochure, “It was formed by a group of

private American individuals who areinterested in preserving the cultural heritageof the free world and encouraging theconstant expansion and interchange ofknowledge in the fields of the arts, letters,and sciences. To this end, the Foundationextends financial aid to groups andorganizations engaged in the interpreting andpublicizing of recent cultural advances andto groups whose enterprises in literary,artistic or scientific fields may serve asworthy contributions to the progress ofculture. The Foundation offers assistance toorganizations whose programs tend tostrengthen the cultural ties which bind thenations of the world and to reveal to allpeoples who share the traditions of a freeculture the inherent dangers whichtotalitarianism poses to intellectual andcultural development.”26

First president of the Farfield, and theCIA’s most significant single front man, wasJulius “Junkie” Fleischmann, the millionaireheir to a huge yeast and gin fortune, wholived in Indian Hill, outside Cincinnati. Hehad helped finance the New Yorker andboasted a bulging portfolio of artisticpatronage: he was a director of New York’sMetropolitan Opera; a fellow of the RoyalSociety of the Arts, London; a member ofthe advisory committee of the Yale DramaSchool; a director of Diaghilev’s BalletRusse de Monte Carlo; a director of theBallet Foundation of New York; and afinancial backer of many Broadwayproductions. Michael Josselson referred tohim as “the American Maecenas for theworld of culture.” His personal wealth andvaried artistic patronage made him an ideallyplausible angel for the CIA’s sponsorship of

the Congress for Cultural Freedom.Braden later described Junkie as one of

the many “rich people who wanted to be ofservice to government. They got a certainamount of self-esteem out of it. They weremade to feel they were big shots becausethey were let in on this secret expedition tobattle the Communists.”27 A fully roped-inmember of Wisner’s OPC from its earlydays, Junkie was a habitué of the dustycorridors of the sheds on the WashingtonMall, proud of his role as a front (initiallythrough the Fleischmann Foundation) forcovert activities. But in the shake-up thatfollowed the formation of the InternationalOrganizations Division, Junkie got pushedaround. “The trouble was he took it tooseriously,” said Braden. “He began to thinkhe was the boss of these fronts. They werejust using his name, but he started to believe

it was for real. I remember he started tellingme what he wanted. He’d tell me he wantedhis foundation to do this, and not that. Andthat was the last thing I needed. . . . In theend, we offered him the Farfield as a kind ofsubstitute. But it was only ever a front.Whoever was president was just a name,and those old guys from New York all sat onthe board just to do us a favor.”28

“The Farfield Foundation was a CIAfoundation and there were many suchfoundations,” Tom Braden went on toexplain. “We used the names of foundationsfor many purposes but the foundation didn’texist except on paper. We would go tosomebody in New York who was a well-known rich person and we would say, ‘Wewant to set up a foundation,’ and we wouldtell him what we were trying to do, andpledge him to secrecy and he would say, ‘Of

course I’ll do it.’ And then you wouldpublish a letterhead and his name would beon it, and there would be a foundation. Itwas really a pretty simple device.”29 Aspresident of the Farfield Foundation, Junkiecould be presented to unwitting outsiders asthe private angel of the Congress forCultural Freedom. “It was good to have apatron to display,” Diana Josselsoncommented, “and he loved his role. But therelationship became a chore and a bore,because it diverted Michael from moresubstantive things while he made a big showof being deferential to the big patron.”30

The directors of the Farfield met everyother month in New York where therewould usually be a “guest” from theCongress—Nabokov, Josselson, orMuggeridge. They approved the payments,asking no questions, acting out what

Muggeridge called “the comedy” as apatriotic duty. There was also an annualboard meeting, which Diana Josselsondescribed as “a very big farce, of course.Michael would go, and Junkie. The wholerelationship was farcical, in a way, becausewe just played it straight. They would justpass on a set of pre-prepared actions.”31

As the Congress’s secretary-general,Nabokov surely knew to which governmentagency he owed the extraordinary largesseenjoyed by the Paris office during hismammoth festival. Years later, he wouldconfess to Josselson that “Queen JulianaFleischmann” had never been plausible. Hehad always thought of “the plutocraticJunkie” as “a poor conduit.” But officially,Nabokov knew nothing and maintained (justas implausibly) that “[c]uriously enough, notfor a moment did the question of money

cross my mind. It probably should have,because it was hard to imagine the Americanlabor unions subsidizing a grandioselyexpensive modern-arts festival and not inAmerica, but in Paris, of all places. . . . Notin my wildest dreams could I have expectedthat my ‘dream festival’ would be supportedby America’s spying establishment, nor did Iknow that the fare for my delightful firstclass flight to Paris was being paid by theCIA via the labor union’s Europeanrepresentative, the cheerful Mr. Brown. Andsoon, very soon, that same spy mill wouldbe using ‘passing’ foundations to pumpmoney to such groups as our CulturalCommittee, to American colleges, to refugeeorchestras, and whatnot.”32

Could Nabokov really have been inignorance, unaware that he was entangled ina deliberate deception? Or had he, like so

many of his contemporaries, become, likeGraham Greene’s Alden Pyle, just anotherQuiet American? “He didn’t even hear whatI said; he was absorbed already in thedilemmas of Democracy and theresponsibilities of the West; he wasdetermined—I learnt that very soon—to dogood, not to any individual person but to acountry, a continent, a world. Well, he wasin his element now with the whole universeto improve.”33

9

The Consortium

“Sire—over what do you rule?”“Over everything,” said the king, withmagnificent simplicity.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Cultural freedom did not come cheap. Overthe next seventeen years, the CIA was topump tens of millions of dollars into theCongress for Cultural Freedom and relatedprojects. With this kind of commitment, theCIA was in effect acting as America’sMinistry of Culture.

A central feature of the Agency’s efforts

to mobilize culture as a Cold War weaponwas the systematic organization of anetwork of “private” groups or “friends”into an unofficial consortium. This was anentrepreneurial coalition of philanthropicfoundations, business corporations, andother institutions and individuals whoworked hand in hand with the CIA toprovide the cover and the funding pipelinefor its secret programs in Western Europe.Additionally, these “friends” could bedepended on to articulate the government’sinterests at home and abroad, whilstappearing to do so solely on their owninitiative. Maintaining their “private” status,these individuals and bodies were in factacting as the CIA’s designated Cold Warventure capitalists.

The inspiration behind this consortiumwas Allen Dulles, who had started to build

its foundations after the war, when he andhis brother John Foster Dulles were partnersat the law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. InMay 1949, Allen Dulles presided over theformation of the National Committee for aFree Europe, ostensibly the initiative of a“group of private American citizens,” but inreality one of the CIA’s most ambitiousfronts. Incorporated on May 11, 1949, inNew York, the declared purpose of theNational Committee for a Free Europe, Inc.,was “to use the many and varied skills ofexiled East Europeans in the development ofprograms which will actively combat Sovietdomination.”1 Committed to “the belief thatthis struggle can be resolved as much byforce of ideas as by physical means,” thecommittee was soon to extend its reach intoall areas of the cultural Cold War. “The StateDepartment is very happy to see the

formation of this group,” announcedSecretary of State Dean Acheson. “It thinksthat the purpose of this organization isexcellent, and is glad to welcome its entranceinto this field and give it its heartyendorsement.”2 This public blessing wasintended to mask the official origins of thecommittee and the fact that it operatedsolely at the discretion of the CIA, whichprovided 90 percent of its financial supportthrough unvouchered funds. BehindAcheson’s endorsement was anotherconcealed truth. Although the committee’sfounding statute included the clause, “Nopart of the activities of the corporation shallbe the carrying on of propaganda,” this wasprecisely and specifically what it wasdesigned to do.3

Moving to the CIA in December 1950,Allen Dulles became “the Great White Case

Officer” of the National Committee for aFree Europe, working with Carmel Offie,who had overseen it for Wisner’s OPC sinceits creation a year earlier. Dulles now tookcharge of organizing its committees, securingits budget allocation, and designing itsstrategies. One of the earliest pioneers of thequango, Dulles understood that the successof America’s Cold War program dependedon “its ability to appear independent fromgovernment, to seem to represent thespontaneous convictions of freedom lovingindividuals.”4 For this aspect alone, theNational Committee for a Free Europe, Inc.,serves as the paradigm for the CIA-led“corporatization” of the foreign policymachinery in the Cold War period.

Proliferating committees andsubcommittees, boards of directors andtrustees, the National Committee for a Free

Europe boasted a membership which readlike Who’s Who. Interconnectedness wasvital and gave new meaning to Paul Valéry’sjokey comment that it was the ambition ofEuropeans to be governed by a committeeof Americans. There was Lucius Clay, whoas high commissioner in Germany had giventhe green light to Der Monat; GardnerCowles, president of the Cowles publishinggroup and a trustee of the FarfieldFoundation; Oveta Culp Hobby, a Museumof Modern Art trustee who allowed severalfamily foundations to be used as CIAconduits; the Cold War cardinal FrancisSpellman; C.D. Jackson, psychologicalwarfare veteran and Time-Life executive;John C. Hughes, U.S. ambassador toNATO; Junkie Fleischmann; ArthurSchlesinger; Cecil B. DeMille; SpyrosSkouras; Darryl Zanuck; and Dwight D.

Eisenhower. There were businessmen andlawyers, diplomats and Marshall Planadministrators, advertising executives andmedia moguls, film directors and journalists,trade unionists and, of course, CIA agents—plenty of them.

These men were all witting. To theAgency, a “witting” individual was “a manof their world, he knew the language, thecode words, the customs, the recognitionsymbols. To be ‘witting’ was to belong tothe club. To talk the language. Tounderstand the high signs. To know thefraternity grip. The ‘unwitting’ was out inthe cold, unaware of what went on aroundhim, ignorant of the elite conceptions thatguided the closed circle of intelligence.”5

Recalling the ease with which he couldengage his fellow Americans in covertprojects, CIA agent Donald Jameson said,

“There was almost nobody in this countrythat I couldn’t go to in those days and say,‘I’m from the CIA and I’d like to ask youabout so and so,’ and at the very least get arespectful reception and a discussion.”6 CIAagents rarely had to knock—the door wasopen.

Just twelve months after its creation, thisnucleus of “private” operators had advancedDulles’s Free Europe Committee (as itbecame known) from its “tentativebeginnings into a broad and well-definedprogram, with operations on a verysubstantial scale.” It was “an instrument inhand—timely, already well-fashioned” forpursuing “the victory of ideas.” Its personnelnumbered 413, of which 201 wereAmericans, many of European origin, and212 “specialist” exiles from EasternEurope.7 The budget for its first year alone

was $1,703,266. A separate budget of $10million was set aside for Radio Free Europe(RFE), founded in Berlin in 1950 under theauspices of the committee. Within a fewyears, RFE had twenty-nine stationsbroadcasting in sixteen different languagesand was using “every trick of oratory knownto Demosthenes or Cicero in [its]‘Phillippics’ against every individual whosupports the Stalinist regime.”8 It was alsosoliciting the services of informers behindthe Iron Curtain, monitoring Communistbroadcasts, underwriting anti-Communistlectures and writings by Westernintellectuals, and distributing its “research”internationally to scholars and journalists(including those affiliated with the Congressfor Cultural Freedom).

The fund-raising arm of the Free EuropeCommittee was the Crusade for Freedom,

for which a young actor named RonaldReagan was a leading spokesman andpublicist. The Crusade for Freedom wasused to launder money to support a programrun by Bill Casey, the future CIA director,called the International Refugee Committeein New York, which allegedly coordinatedthe exfiltration of Nazis from Germany tothe States, where they were expected toassist the government in its struggle againstCommunism.

Dulles kept a firm grip on the committeeby placing CIA officers in key positions. If aproblem arose which needed to be resolved“out of channels,” Dulles would simply calla meeting with the committee’s principals ina New York club or hotel. Top secretdocuments record a series of such meetingsconvened by Dulles at the KnickerbockerClub and the Drake Hotel (in this case, in a

bedroom booked for the occasion—howmany Cold War campaigns were wagedfrom hotel bedrooms?). Other meetingswere held in Allen Dulles’s or FrankWisner’s offices at CIA headquarters.

“The USA was a big operation, verybig,” says the narrator of Humboldt’s Gift.Commenting on the dedication of America’selite as they manned this privateer, HenryKissinger wrote: “It is to the lasting credit ofthat generation of Americans that theyassumed these responsibilities with energy,imagination and skill. By helping Europerebuild, encouraging European unity, shapingthe institutions of economic cooperation, andextending the protection of our alliances,they saved the possibility of freedom. Thisburst of creativity is one of the gloriousmoments of American history.”9 HenryBreck, a CIA case officer and Groton

School alumnus, expressed it another way:“Of course, if you’re in a real war you mustfight hard—and the upper classes fight thehardest. They have the most to lose.” Whenthey were not huddled together in clubs orhotel rooms, Breck’s upper classes appliedthemselves with equal commitment to thebusiness of entertaining. Lively, self-confident, voluble, Wisner and his colleagueswere driven to enjoy a good party, just asthey were driven to save the world fromCommunism. Wisner loved to do a dancecalled the Crab Walk. Angleton, a legendaryconsumer of martinis (and, sometimes,anything he could get hold of), used todance free form to Elvis Presley tunes atparties, weaving enthusiastically, and oftenby himself. Maurice Oldfield, chief of MI6,known as “C,” also loved to dance.“Maurice . . . would come visit us in Rhode

Island and dance under the trees at night,”recalled Janet Barnes.10 As the worldbecame stranger, “the pattern morecomplicated,” theirs was indeed “a lifetimeburning in every moment.”

It seems amazing that men who partiedso hard and drank so prodigiously continuedto function in their day jobs. The brokers ofa new world order, they delayed burnoutonly because the potential gains were soimmense. Back at their desks the next day,they busied themselves with finding newways of securing their investments andenlarging their assets. “We generally reachedout to find Americans who would consent totake the money into their accounts and thenuse it to contribute in various ways,” saidcovert action agent William Colby. “If youwent to any American institution, company,anything else, and said, ‘Will you help your

country by passing this money?’ they’dsalute and say, ‘Absolutely, I’d be delighted.’It’s easy to pass money around the world tothe desired end objective. It might not beone bulk payment but various smallpayments going in the right direction. Thisgoes all the way to the rather more nakedthing that I was sometimes engaged in,putting bundles of local currency in the backof my car and driving out and transferringthem to another fellow’s car.”11

The American companies and individualswho agreed to collaborate with the Agencyin this way were known as “quiet channels.”These channels could also be establishedafter contact was made the other way round.“Often times, private American groups cameto us,” remembered case officer LeeWilliams. “We didn’t just always go to them.There was a commonality of purpose that

seemed to us to dissolve any major concernabout the morality of what we weredoing.”12

In 1956, in the wake of the Hungarianuprising, J.M. Kaplan, president of theWelch Grape Juice Company and presidentand treasurer of the Kaplan Foundation(assets: $14 million), wrote to Allen Dullesoffering his services in the fight againstCommunism. Kaplan offered to devote his“unending energy to utilize every idea andingenuity to the overriding aim of breakingup the Communist conspiracy, searching outand working out every practicalopportunity.”13 Dulles subsequentlyarranged for a CIA “representative” to makean appointment with Kaplan. The KaplanFoundation could soon be counted as anasset, a reliable “pass-through” for secretfunds earmarked for CIA projects, amongst

them the Congress for Cultural Freedom andan institute headed by veteran socialist andchairman of the American Committee forCultural Freedom Norman Thomas.

The use of philanthropic foundationswas the most convenient way to pass largesums of money to Agency projects withoutalerting the recipients to their source. By themid-1950s, the CIA’s intrusion into thefoundation field was massive. Althoughfigures are not available for this period, thegeneral counsel of a 1952 Congresscommittee appointed to investigate U.S.foundations concluded, “An unparalleledamount of power is concentratedincreasingly in the hands of an interlockingand self-perpetuating group. Unlike thepower of corporate management, it isunchecked by stockholders; unlike thepower of government, it is unchecked by the

people; unlike the power of the churches, itis unchecked by any firmly establishedcanons of value.”14 In 1976, a SelectCommittee appointed to investigate U.S.intelligence activities reported on the CIA’spenetration of the foundation field by themid-1960s: during 1963–66, of the 700grants of over $10,000 given by 164foundations, at least 108 involved partial orcomplete CIA funding. More importantly,CIA funding was involved in nearly half thegrants made by these 164 foundations in thefield of international activities during thesame period.

“Bona fide” foundations such as Ford,Rockefeller, and Carnegie were considered“the best and most plausible kind of fundingcover.”15 A CIA study of 1966 argued thatthis technique was “particularly effective fordemocratically run membership

organizations, which need to assure theirown unwitting members and collaborators,as well as their hostile critics, that they havegenuine, respectable, private sources ofincome.” Certainly, it allowed the CIA tofund “a seemingly limitless range of covertaction programs affecting youth groups,labor unions, universities, publishing houses,and other private institutions” from the early1950s.16

“There was a cover branch at CIAwhose job it was to help provide cover, likethe foundations we used for our operations,”Braden explained. “I paid no attention to thedetails. The Finance Department wouldhandle it, and talk to the cover officer. Itwas just a mechanism which you used. TheFarfield Foundation was one of them. Idon’t know the names of all of them, I can’tremember. But it was a criss-cross of

money. There was never any danger of theCIA running out of money.”17

The crisscross of money filtered its waythrough a raft of host foundations, someacting as fronts, some as conduits. Knownto have wittingly facilitated CIA funding“passes” were over 170 foundations,including the Hoblitzelle Foundation (a pass-through for the Farfield), the LittauerFoundation (a donor to the Farfield), theMiami District Fund (another “donor” to theFarfield), the Price Fund (a CIA dummy),the Rabb Charitable Foundation (whichreceived CIA money from the phony PriceFund, then passed it to the Farfield), theVernon Fund (like the Farfield, a CIAdummy front with a rubber-stamp board ofdirectors), and the Whitney Trust. On theirboards sat the cream of America’s social,financial, and political establishment. Not for

nothing did these foundations announcethemselves as “private.” Later, the joke wasthat if any American philanthropic or culturalorganization carried the words “free” or“private” in its literature, it must be a CIAfront. This was the consortium at work,calling in favors across the old school tiesnetwork, the OSS network, the boardroomsof America.

The board of the Farfield Foundationalone provides a fascinating map of theseintricate linkages. Junkie Fleischmann, itspresident, was a contract consultant forWisner’s OPC, and thereafter a witting CIAcover for the Congress for CulturalFreedom. His cousin Jay Holmes waspresident of the Holmes Foundation,incorporated in 1953 in New York. Holmesbegan making small contributions to theCongress for Cultural Freedom in 1957.

From 1962, the Holmes Foundation actedformally as a pass-through for CIA money tothe Congress. The Fleischmann Foundation,of which Junkie was president, was alsolisted as a donor to the Farfield Foundation.Also on the board of the FleischmannFoundation was Charles Fleischmann,Junkie’s nephew, who was brought into theFarfield as a director in the early 1960s.

Another Farfield trustee was CassCanfield, one of the most distinguished ofAmerican publishers. He was a director ofGrosset and Dunlap, Bantam Books, anddirector and chairman of the editorial boardof Harper Brothers. Canfield was theAmerican publisher of The God That Failed.He enjoyed prolific links to the world ofintelligence, both as a former psychologicalwarfare officer and as a close personalfriend of Allen Dulles, whose memoirs The

Craft of Intelligence he published in 1963.Canfield had also been an activist and fund-raiser for the United World Federalists in thelate 1940s. Its then president was CordMeyer, later Tom Braden’s deputy, whorevealed that “[o]ne technique that we usedwas to encourage those of our memberswho had influential positions in professionalorganizations, trade associations, or laborunions to lobby for passage at their annualconventions of resolutions favorable to ourcause.”18 In 1954 Canfield headed up aDemocratic Committee on the Arts. He waslater one of the founding members of ANTA(American National Theater and Academy),reactivated in 1945 as the equivalent of theforeign affairs branch of American theater,alongside Jock Whitney, another of theCIA’s “quiet channels.” Canfield was afriend of Frank Platt, also a Farfield director,

and a CIA agent. In the late 1960s, Platthelped Michael Josselson get a job withCanfield at Harper’s. Canfield was also atrustee of the France–America Society,alongside C.D. Jackson, Grayson Kirk(president of Columbia University), DavidRockefeller, and William Burden (who wasits president).

William Armistead Moale Burden, aswell as being president of the France–America Society, was a director of theFarfield. A great-great-grandson ofCommodore Vanderbilt, Burden was a keypresence in the American establishment. Hewas a member and director of the Councilon Foreign Relations, a private think tankmade up of America’s corporate and socialelite, which acted as a kind of shadowforeign policy-making unit (other membersincluded Allen Dulles, John McCloy, and

David Rockefeller). During the war, heworked for Nelson Rockefeller’s intelligenceoutfit and sat as chairman of an advisorycommittee of the Museum of Modern Art inNew York. In 1956, he became president ofthe museum. In that year, he also sat on theState Department’s “Books Abroad”Advisory Committee. Formerly assistantsecretary of state for air, he was a financierwho had special interests in aviationfinancing, having been associated withBrown Brothers; Harriman and Company;and Scudder, Stevens and Clark in NewYork, and a director of numerouscompanies, including American MetalCompany Ltd., Union Sulphur and OilCorporation, Cerro de Pasco Corporation,and the Hanover Bank. He was a visitingmember of faculty committees at Harvardand MIT, co-chairman of the government-

sponsored “Salute to France” (Paris, spring1955), and U.S. ambassador to Brussels in1960.

Another Farfield executive was GardnerCowles, a donor of the Iowa-based GardnerCowles Foundation, whose substantial tax-exempt assets came from the huge profits ofthe Cowles Magazines and BroadcastingCompany, of which he was president. Hewas also a corporate member of the Crusadefor Freedom and a sponsor of the periodicalHistory, published by the Society ofAmerican Historians and funded by “privatedonations.” The journal was as much aproduct of the Cold War as the Crusade forFreedom and included in its list of“sponsors” William Donovan, Dwight D.Eisenhower, Allen Dulles, and Henry Luce.

The longest-serving executive director ofthe Farfield Foundation was John “Jack”

Thompson, who held the post from 1956 to1965. Thompson was recruited to the CIAby Cord Meyer, whom he had known since1945, when both were assistants to the U.S.delegation at the San Francisco conferenceconvened to establish the structure of thenew United Nations organization. Formerlya protégé of Lionel Trilling at Columbia,Thompson was well known in New Yorkliterary circles. Jennifer Josselson, Michael’sdaughter, referred to him as “Uncle Jack.”

Other Farfield directors included WilliamVanden Heuvel, a New York lawyer whowas close to both John and Bobby Kennedyand to Arthur Schlesinger (he was also aboard member of the Emergency RescueCommittee, alongside William Donovan andCass Canfield); Joseph Verner Reed,president of Triton Press, vice president ofthe Hobe Sound Company, Florida, and a

member of the Drama Advisory Panel forthe International Exchange Program ofANTA; Fred Lazarus Jr., chief donor of theFred Lazarus Foundation (which in 1956made a substantial contribution to theFarfield) and later an advisory member ofthe National Endowment for the Arts;Donald Stralem, president of UnitedCommunity Defense Services Inc. anddonor, along with his wife, Jean, to theShelter Rock Foundation (which“piggybacked” CIA money destined for theCongress for Cultural Freedom into theFarfield coffers in 1962, the year in whichStralem replaced Fleischmann as presidentof the Farfield); Whitelaw Reid, formereditor of the New York Herald Tribune; andRalph P. Hanes, director of the HanesFoundation, North Carolina. A good friendof Junkie’s, Hanes and his wife, Barbara,

cruised with the Fleischmanns and theWisners in the Bahamas. Finally, of course,there was Michael Josselson, whose nameappeared on the foundation’s letterhead asits international director and who receivedhis CIA salary through the foundation.

Farfield was by no means exceptional inits incestuous character. This was the natureof power in America at this time. Thesystem of private patronage was thepreeminent model of how small,homogenous groups came to defendAmerica’s—and, by definition, their own—interests. Serving at the top of the pile wasevery self-respecting WASP’s ambition. Theprize was a trusteeship on either the FordFoundation or the Rockefeller Foundation,both of which were conscious instruments ofcovert U.S. foreign policy, with directorsand officers who were closely connected to,

or even themselves, members of Americanintelligence.

Incorporated in 1936, the FordFoundation was the tax-exempt cream of thevast Ford fortune, with assets totaling over$3 billion by the late 1950s. DwightMacdonald described it memorably as “alarge body of money completely surroundedby people who want some.” The architectsof the foundation’s cultural policy in theaftermath of the Second World War wereperfectly attuned to the political imperativeswhich supported America’s loomingpresence on the world stage. At times, itseemed as if the Ford Foundation wassimply an extension of government in thearea of international cultural propaganda.The foundation had a record of closeinvolvement in covert actions in Europe,working closely with Marshall Plan and CIA

officials on specific projects. This reciprocitywas further extended when Marshall plannerRichard Bissell, under whose signaturecounterpart funds were signed over to FrankWisner, came to the Ford Foundation in1952, accurately predicting there was“nothing to prevent an individual fromexerting as much influence through his workin a private foundation as he could throughwork in the government.”19 During histenure at Ford, Bissell met often with AllenDulles and other CIA officials, includingformer Groton classmate Tracy Barnes, in a“mutual search” for new ideas. He leftsuddenly to join the CIA as a specialassistant to Allen Dulles in January 1954,but not before he had helped steer thefoundation to the vanguard of Cold Warthinking.

Bissell had worked directly under Paul

Hoffman, who became president of the FordFoundation in 1950. Arriving straight fromhis job as administrator of the Marshall Plan,Hoffman had received a full immersioncourse in the problems of Europe, and in thepower of ideas to address those problems.He was fluent in the language ofpsychological warfare and, echoing ArthurKoestler’s cry of 1950 (“Friends, freedomhas seized the offensive!”), he talked of“waging peace.” He also shared the view ofFord Foundation spokesman RobertMaynard Hutchins that the StateDepartment was “subjected to so muchdomestic political interference that it can nolonger present a rounded picture ofAmerican culture.”

One of the Ford Foundation’s firstpostwar ventures into international culturaldiplomacy was the launch in 1952 of the

Intercultural Publications program underJames Laughlin, the publisher of NewDirections (which published George Orwelland Henry Miller) and a revered custodianof the interests of the avant-garde. With aninitial grant of $500,000, Laughlin launchedthe magazine Perspectives, which wastargeted at the Non-Communist Left inFrance, England, Italy, and Germany (andpublished in all those countries’ languages).Its aim, he emphasized, was not “so muchto defeat the leftist intellectuals in dialecticalcombat as to lure them away from theirpositions by aesthetic and rationalpersuasion.” Further, it would “promotepeace by increasing respect for America’snon-materialistic achievements amongintellectuals abroad.”20

Its board packed with cultural ColdWarriors, the Intercultural Publications

program also targeted those Americanintellectuals who felt their work was“undermined by the prevailing stereotype ofAmerica as a mass-cult hell.” MalcolmCowley was an early supporter ofPerspectives, which offered a version ofAmerica far removed from “movies, hard-boiled detective stories, comic books andmagazines in which there is more advertisingthan text.” One academic, Perry Miller,argued that “no propaganda for theAmerican way should be included; thatomission will, in itself, become the mostimportant element of propaganda, in the bestsense.”21 Perspectives never lived up tothese expectations. Irving Kristol referred toit as “that miserable Ford Foundationjournal.”22 In the wake of its failure, theFord Foundation was easily persuaded totake over sponsorship of Lasky’s Der

Monat. Set up under Lucius Clay’s backingin October 1948 and financed through the“Confidential Fund” of the American HighCommission, Der Monat’s official auspicesstrained its claims to be independent. Laskylonged to replace this subsidy, and with thehelp of Shepard Stone, a foundationexecutive who had worked under Clay inGermany, he finally secured a grant from theFord Foundation, declaring in the October1954 issue, “From now on we are absolutelyand completely free and independent.”

On January 21, 1953, Allen Dulles,insecure about his future in the CIA underthe newly elected Eisenhower, had met hisfriend David Rockefeller for lunch.Rockefeller hinted heavily that if Dullesdecided to leave the Agency, he couldreasonably expect to be invited to becomepresident of the Ford Foundation. Dulles

need not have feared for his future. Twodays after this lunch, the New York Timesbroke the story that Allen Dulles was tobecome director of Central Intelligence.

The new president of the FordFoundation was announced shortly after. Hewas John McCloy, the archetype oftwentieth-century American power andinfluence. By the time he came to the FordFoundation, he had been assistant secretaryof war, president of the World Bank, andhigh commissioner of Germany. In 1953 healso became chairman of the Rockefellers’Chase Manhattan Bank and chairman of theCouncil on Foreign Relations. After John F.Kennedy’s assassination, he was a WarrenCommission appointee. Throughout hemaintained his career as a Wall Streetattorney for the seven big oil companies andas director of numerous corporations.

As high commissioner in Germany,McCloy had agreed to provide cover forscores of CIA agents, including Lawrence deNeufville. Although officially employees inhis administration, unofficially they wereaccountable to their chiefs in Washington,who were under few obligations to tellMcCloy what they were really up to. Apolitical sophisticate, McCloy took apragmatic view of the CIA’s inevitableinterest in the Ford Foundation when heassumed its presidency. Addressing theconcerns of some of the foundation’sexecutives, who felt that its reputation forintegrity and independence was beingundermined by involvement with the CIA,McCloy argued that if they failed tocooperate, the CIA would simply penetratethe foundation quietly by recruiting orinserting staff at the lower levels. McCloy’s

answer to this problem was to create anadministrative unit within the FordFoundation specifically to deal with the CIA.Headed by McCloy and two foundationofficers, this three-man committee had to beconsulted every time the Agency wanted touse the foundation, either as a pass-throughor as cover. “They would check in with thisparticular committee, and if it was felt thatthis was a reasonable thing and would not beagainst the foundation’s long-term interests,then the project would be passed along tothe internal staff and other foundationofficers [without them] knowing the originsof the proposal,”23 explained McCloy’sbiographer Kai Bird.

With this arrangement in place, the FordFoundation became officially engaged as oneof those organizations the CIA was able tomobilize for political warfare against

Communism. The foundation’s archivesreveal a raft of joint projects. The EastEuropean Fund, a CIA front in whichGeorge Kennan played a prominent role, gotmost of its money from the FordFoundation. The fund forged close linkswith the Chekhov Publishing House, whichreceived $523,000 from the FordFoundation for the purchase of proscribedRussian works and for Russian translationsof Western classics. The foundation gave$500,000 to Bill Casey’s InternationalRescue Committee and substantial grants toanother CIA front, the World Assembly ofYouth. It was also one of the single largestdonors to the Council on Foreign Relations,the independent think tank which exertedenormous influence on American foreignpolicy and which operated (and continues tooperate) according to strict confidentiality

rules, which include a twenty-five-yearembargo on the release of its records.

Under a major grant from the FordFoundation, the Institute of ContemporaryArts, founded in Washington in 1947,expanded its international program in 1958.On the ICA’s board of trustees sat WilliamBundy, a member of the CIA’s Board ofNational Estimates, and son-in-law offormer secretary of state Dean Acheson. Hisbrother, McGeorge Bundy, becamepresident of the Ford Foundation in 1966(coming straight from his job as specialassistant to the president in charge ofnational security, which meant, among otherthings, monitoring the CIA). Benefiting fromthe foundation’s largesse were HerbertRead, Salvador de Madariaga, StephenSpender, Aaron Copland, Isak Dinesen,Naum Gabo, Martha Graham, Robert

Lowell, Robert Penn Warren, and RobertRichman, who were all fellows of the ICA’sCongress of Cultural Leaders. This was ineffect an extension of the work of theCongress for Cultural Freedom, which itselfwas one of Ford Foundation’s largestgrantees, receiving $7 million by the early1960s.

One of the earliest CIA supporters of theCongress for Cultural Freedom was FrankLindsay, to whom de Neufville wasreporting in the buildup to the 1950 Berlinconclave. Lindsay was an OSS veteran whoin 1947 had written one of the first memosrecommending that the United States createa covert action force to fight the Cold War.The paper attracted the attention of FrankWisner, who asked him to come on boardand run his European operations at OPC. Asdeputy chief of OPC (1949–51), Lindsay

was responsible for setting up the “stay-behind” groups in Western Europe. In 1953,he joined the Ford Foundation, and fromthere he maintained close contact with hisconfreres in the intelligence community.

Lindsay was later joined at thefoundation by Waldemar Nielsen, whobecame its staff director. Throughout histenure there, Nielsen was a CIA agent. In1960, he became executive director of thePresident’s Committee on InformationActivities Abroad. In his various guises,Nielsen worked closely with C.D. Jackson,with whom he shared a contempt for the“fundamental disregard for psychologicalfactors among a good many of the hautesfonctionnaires in this town.” Nielsen wasalso a close friend of the Congress forCultural Freedom, whose efforts hewholeheartedly supported.

The key link between the Congress andthe Ford Foundation was Shepard Stone,who had established a reputation as anexpert in the structure and procedures bywhich the American government and privategroups participated in world affairs. TheSunday editor of the New York Times beforethe war, he went on to serve with G-2 (armyintelligence), before becoming director ofpublic affairs under John McCloy inGermany, in which guise he had securedgovernment sponsorship for Der Monat. Anold hand at psychological warfare, JohnMcCloy thought highly enough of Stone torecommend him as a worthy successor tothe outgoing director of the PsychologicalStrategy Board in 1951. Stone did not getthe job and instead joined the FordFoundation. Throughout his career, he wasso closely connected to the CIA that many

believed he was an Agency man. “Shep wasnot a CIA man, though he may have fishedin those waters,”24 one agent commentedvaguely. In 1953, he spent a month inEurope, at Josselson’s invitation, visiting keyCongress people. With Stone as director ofthe Ford Foundation’s International Affairsdivision from 1954, his value to theCongress was further enhanced.

The Rockefeller Foundation, no lessthan the Ford, was an integral component ofAmerica’s Cold War machinery.Incorporated in 1913, its principal donor wasthe legendary John D. Rockefeller III. It hadassets exceeding $500 million, not includingan additional $150 million in the RockefellerBrothers Fund Inc., a major think tankwhich was incorporated in New York in1940. In 1957 the fund brought together themost influential minds of the period under a

Special Studies Project whose task was toattempt a definition of American foreignpolicy. Subpanel II was designated to thestudy of International Security Objectivesand Strategy, and its members includedHenry and Clare Boothe Luce, LaurenceRockefeller, Townsend Hoopes(representing Jock Whitney’s company),Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, FrankLindsay, and William Bundy of the CIA.

The convergence between theRockefeller billions and the U.S. governmentexceeded even that of the Ford Foundation.John Foster Dulles and later Dean Rusk bothwent from the presidency of the RockefellerFoundation to become secretaries of state.Other Cold War heavies such as John J.McCloy and Robert A. Lovett featuredprominently as Rockefeller trustees. NelsonRockefeller’s central position on this

foundation guaranteed a close relationshipwith U.S. intelligence circles: he had been incharge of all intelligence in Latin Americaduring the Second World War. Later, hisassociate in Brazil Colonel J.C. King becameCIA chief of clandestine activities in theWestern hemisphere. When NelsonRockefeller was appointed by Eisenhower tothe National Security Council in 1954, hisjob was to approve various covertoperations. If he needed any extrainformation on CIA activities, he couldsimply ask his old friend Allen Dulles for adirect briefing. One of the most controversialof these activities was the CIA’s MK-ULTRA (or “Manchurian Candidate”)program of mind-control research during the1950s. This research was assisted by grantsfrom the Rockefeller Foundation.

Running his own intelligence department

during the war, Nelson Rockefeller had beenabsent from the ranks of OSS and indeedhad formed a lifelong enmity with WilliamDonovan. But there was no prejudiceagainst OSS veterans, who were recruited tothe Rockefeller Foundation in droves. In1950, OSS-er Charles B. Fahs became headof the foundation’s division of humanities.His assistant was another OSS veterannamed Chadbourne Gilpatric, who arrivedthere directly from the CIA. These two werethe principal liaisons for the Congress forCultural Freedom and responsible fordispensing large Rockefeller subsidies toJosselson’s outfit.

As important as Nelson Rockefeller washis brother David. He controlled thedonations committee of the ChaseManhattan Bank Foundation, was vicepresident and then president of the bank

itself, a trustee of the Council on ForeignRelations, chairman of the ExecutiveCommittee for International House, and aclose personal friend of Allen Dulles andTom Braden. “I often briefed David, semi-officially and with Allen’s permission, onwhat we were doing,” recalled Braden. “Hewas of the same mind as us, and veryapproving of everything we were doing. Hehad the same sense as I did that the way towin the Cold War was our way. SometimesDavid would give me money to do thingswhich weren’t in our budget. He gave me alot of money for causes in France. Iremember he gave me $50,000 for someonewho was active in promoting a unitedEurope amongst European youth groups.This guy came to me with his project, and Itold David, and David just gave me thecheck for $50,000. The CIA never came

into the equation.”25

These freelance transactions gave newmeaning to the practice of governmentalbuccaneering and were an inevitable by-product of the semi-privatization ofAmerican foreign policy during these ColdWar years. Out of the same culture,however, came later Oliver North–typedisasters. The comparison is apt: for, justlike the architect of Irangate, “with hissteadfast gaze, his inexorable sense ofmission and his palpable conviction that theend justifies the means,”26 these earlierfriends of the CIA were never once afflictedby doubt in themselves or their purpose.

10

The Truth Campaign

It is not enough to write in Yiddish; one musthave something to say.

Y.L. Peretz

Nicolas Nabokov’s massive festival of thearts of 1952 had provided an opportunity totest the range of America’s covertpropaganda capability. But in an era whichhad yet to discover Marshall McLuhan’smaxim that “the medium is the message,”government strategists now wonderedexactly what the message was. Or, as WaltRostow, former OSS-er and special adviser

to Eisenhower, would later put it: “Theproblem with dirty tricks was that we did notknow what to say.”1 Who better than anadvertising executive to define the message?

In the early 1950s, one man alone didmore than any other to set the agenda forAmerican cultural warfare. As president ofthe National Committee for a Free Europeand, later, special adviser to Eisenhower onpsychological warfare, C.D. Jackson wasone of the most influential covert strategistsin America. Born in New York in 1902, hisfather was a wealthy industrialist importingmarble and stone from Europe. Graduatingfrom Princeton in 1924, C.D. joined thefamily firm and traveled extensively inEurope, cultivating contacts which wouldprovide a valuable resource during lateryears. In 1931 he joined Henry Luce’sTime-Life empire as an advertising

executive. During the war, he was one ofAmerica’s leading psychological warfarespecialists, serving as deputy chief for theOffice of War Information Overseas, NorthAfrica and Middle East, and then deputychief of the Psychological Warfare Division(PWD) of SHAEF (Supreme HeadquartersAllied Expeditionary Force, which was underEisenhower’s command).

After the war, C.D. returned to Time-Life Inc., where he became vice president ofTime. He was an early activist in AllenDulles’s New York crowd, one of the ParkAvenue Cowboys. Then, in 1951, he wasinvited to take part in a CIA-sponsoredstudy recommending the reorganization ofthe American intelligence services. This ledto a job as an “outside” director of CIAcovert operations via the Truth Campaignand the National Committee for a Free

Europe, of which he became president.There he rounded up a roster of prominentAmericans—including General Eisenhower—ready to lend their names to thecommittee. He sat on the Radio Free EuropeExecutive Committee, alongside JayLovestone, and, occasionally, ArthurSchlesinger. He was also a director of theUnited Negro College Fund and a trustee ofthe Boston Symphony Orchestra (alongsideCold Warriors Henry Cabot Lodge, JacobKaplan, and Edward Taft), and he sat on theboards of the Lincoln Center for thePlanning of Arts, the Metropolitan OperaAssociation (alongside Cornelius VanderbiltWhitney), and the Carnegie Corporation ofNew York.

Eisenhower knew C.D. Jackson wellfrom his wartime campaigns in Europe andAfrica and had been tutored by him in the

art of manipulating audiences. It was underC.D.’s influence that Eisenhower had beenpersuaded to hire a public relations companyduring his election campaign, making himthe first presidential candidate to do so (andleading one writer to invent the jokeymantra, “Philip Morris, Lucky Strike, Alka-Seltzer, I Like Ike”). No sooner hadEisenhower entered the White House inJanuary 1953 as thirty-fourth president ofthe United States, he made a keyappointment to his staff: C.D. Jackson wasto be special adviser to the president forpsychological warfare, a position whichmade C.D. an unofficial minister forpropaganda with almost unlimited powers.

C.D.’s first task was to consolidateAmerica’s covert warfare capability.Psychological warfare and propagandaoperations at this time were split amongst

the State Department; the EconomicCooperation Administration, which ran theMarshall Plan; military intelligence; the CIA;and, within the CIA but often quiteindependently, Wisner’s OPC. Seeing thesegovernment departments riddled withorganizational disputes and interdepartmentalrivalry, C.D. took the view that they werebehaving like “professional amateurs” andcomplained of an “absolute paucity of policyin Washington, a complete vacuum.” Therewas, he argued, “an opportunity and aproblem. The opportunity is to recapture ourworld dynamic, which is not dollars butideas. Our dynamic up to now—self-protection and dollars—must be replaced bythe earlier American dynamic of dedicationto an ideal. Here we are faced with thepossibility of a resurgence of the Americanproposition throughout the world . . . the

problem is how to preserve the dynamic ofthis thing without having to pull in ourhorns.” In short, what was needed was acomprehensive “policy blueprint and planfor US psychological warfare,” whose targetwas “winning World War III without havingto fight it.”2

“Our aim in the Cold War is notconquering of territory or subjugation byforce,” President Eisenhower explained at apress conference. “Our aim is more subtle,more pervasive, more complete. We aretrying to get the world, by peaceful means,to believe the truth. That truth is thatAmericans want a world at peace, a world inwhich all people shall have opportunity formaximum individual development. Themeans we shall employ to spread this truthare often called ‘psychological.’ Don’t beafraid of that term just because it’s a five-

dollar, five-syllable word. ‘Psychologicalwarfare’ is the struggle for the minds andwills of men.”3

To overcome the fragmented and self-competing proliferation of covert operationsacross the government, the Department ofDefense and the CIA had proposed anindependent board to coordinatepsychological operations. Despite StateDepartment resistance, George Kennanchampioned the idea and was instrumental inpersuading President Truman to sign a secretdirective establishing the PsychologicalStrategy Board on April 4, 1951. It was thisboard (its Orwellian title was soon reducedto its initials, PSB) which was nowinstructed to draw up the “policy blueprint”that C.D. Jackson had called for.

The PSB’s “doctrinal” or “ideological”plan was first proposed in a strategy paper

called PSB D-33/2. The paper itself is stillclassified, but in a lengthy internal memo aworried PSB officer, Charles BurtonMarshall, quoted freely from the passageswhich most exercised him. “How [can] agovernment interpose with a wide doctrinalsystem of its own without taking on thecolor of totalitarianism?” he asked. “Thepaper does not indicate any. Indeed, itaccepts uniformity as a substitute fordiversity. It postulates a system justifying ‘aparticular type of social belief and structure,’providing ‘a body of principles for humanaspirations,’ and embracing ‘all fields ofhuman thought’—‘all fields of intellectualinterests, from anthropology and artisticcreations to sociology and scientificmethodology.’ ” Marshall (who was tobecome a staunch opponent of the PSB)went on to criticize the paper’s call for “ ‘a

machinery’ to produce ideas portraying ‘theAmerican way of life’ on ‘a systematic andscientific basis.’ ” “It anticipates ‘doctrinalproduction’ under a ‘coordinationmechanism,’ ” Marshall observed. “It asserts‘a premium on swift and positive action togalvanize the creation and distribution ofideas.’ . . . It foretells a ‘long-termintellectual movement’ as growing out of thiseffort and having the aim not only to countercommunism but indeed to ‘break downworldwide doctrinaire thought patterns’providing an intellectual base for ‘doctrineshostile to American objectives.’ ” Hisconclusion was adamant: “That is just aboutas totalitarian as one can get.”4

Marshall also took issue with the PSB’sreliance on “ ‘non-rational social theories’ ”which emphasized the role of an elite “ ‘in amanner reminiscent of Pareto, Sorel,

Mussolini and so on.’ ” Weren’t these themodels used by James Burnham in his bookThe Machiavellians? Perhaps there was acopy usefully to hand when PSB D-33/2was being drafted. More likely, JamesBurnham himself was usefully to hand.Certainly, it was Burnham’s theory of eliterule that Marshall was now challenging.“Individuals are relegated to tertiaryimportance,” Marshall continued. “Thesupposed elite emerges as the only groupthat counts.” The elite is defined as thatnumerically “limited group capable andinterested in manipulating doctrinal matters,”the men of ideas who pull the intellectualstrings “in forming, or at least predisposing,the attitudes and opinions” of those who inturn “lead public opinion.”5 According toMarshall’s exegesis, the PSB planned towork on the elite in each area so as to

predispose its members to “the philosophyheld by the planners.” Use of local eliteswould help conceal the American origin ofthe effort “so that it appears to be a nativedevelopment.” But it wasn’t just aimed atforeigners. Though the paper disavowed anyintention of propagandizing Americans, it didcommit itself to a program of indoctrinationin the military services by injecting the rightideas into servicemen’s comic books andhaving their chaplains propagate them.6

Mr. Marshall’s trenchant criticismsstruck right at the very fundamentals ofAmerica’s secret cultural warfare program.The theory of the elite which underpinnedthe PSB’s doctrinal paper was exactly thesame model as that used by the CIA tojustify its embrace of the Non-CommunistLeft and its support of the Congress forCultural Freedom. Commenting on the use

of the intellectual elite to develop “thephilosophy held by the planners,” CIA agentDonald Jameson intended no irony when hesaid, “As far as the attitudes that the Agencywanted to inspire through these activities areconcerned, clearly what they would like tohave been able to produce were people, whoof their own reasoning and conviction,were persuaded that everything the UnitedStates government did was right.”7

But Marshall’s criticisms fell on deafears. PSB director Raymond Allen wasmoved to the lofty announcement, “Theprinciples and ideals embodied in theDeclaration of Independence and theConstitution are for export and . . . are theheritage of men everywhere. We shouldappeal to the fundamental urges of all menwhich I believe are the same for the farmerin Kansas as for the farmer in the Punjab.”8

And in May 1952, the newly strengthenedPSB formally took over supervision of thepace and timing of CIA’s psychologicalwarfare program, code named “Packet.”This gave it oversight of the CIA’s campaignto exert pressure on overseas “opinionleaders,” including journalists andcommentators, artists, professors, andscientists, to whom Communism hadappealed so successfully. Winning backthese influential figures to the cause of“liberty and freedom” required a program of“learned operations like seminars, symposia,special tomes, learned journals, libraries,exchange of persons, endowedprofessorships etc.” Under this rubric, thePSB now assumed supervision of the MoralRearmament Movement, the Crusade forFreedom, Radio Free Europe, Paix etLiberté, the American Committee for

Cultural Freedom, and even operationsinvolving broadcasting from ships, “three-dimensional moving pictures,” and “the useof folk songs, folklore, folk tales, anditinerant storytellers.” By June 1953,“Packet” was just one part of the PSB’s“Doctrinal Program,” whose “psychologicalobjectives” were defined in a new paper as“appealing to intellectuals, scholars andopinion-forming groups” in order to “breakdown worldwide doctrinaire thought patternswhich have provided an intellectual basis forCommunism and other doctrines hostile toAmerican and Free World objectives.” Thiscampaign of persuasion, it was reasoned,would “create confusion, doubts and loss ofconfidence in the accepted thought patternsof convinced Communists [and] captivecareerists.” The CIA was ordered to “givehigh and continuing priority to all activities

supporting the objectives of this program.”9

Less than two years after its creation, thePSB “had finally succeeded in establishingitself as an integral part of the developmentand implementation of foreign policy.”10

Enjoying unrivaled access to the secretmachinations of the PSB and thegovernment departments it embraced, C.D.Jackson became the most sought-after figurein that tight circle of power which came tobe known as “the invisible government.”Sitting like some eastern potentate orDelphic oracle, he received a steady flow ofvisitors seeking his wisdom on a wide rangeof matters. His detailed log files of thesevisits provide a unique insight into the worldof clandestinity. From the PSB cameofficers armed with plans for doctrinalwarfare, which included floating all mannerof printed propaganda over the Iron Curtain

in helium balloons. From the InformationResearch Department came Adam Watson,to present C.D. with a memorandum onBritish psychological warfare policy, “whichWatson assured me was absolutely uniqueand unprecedented action on HMG’s part.In this connection he brought up problem ofBritish sharing virtually all intelligence withus and we sharing nothing with them. I toldhim operators here very much aware of thatsituation, and that I had hopes it would beaccelerated very soon.” Watson became avalued contact for C.D., whom he had firstmet in 1951 at the British Embassy inWashington, where Watson was liaising withthe CIA. Thereafter, C.D. “worked veryclosely with him” and recommended Watsonto Nelson Rockefeller (who succeeded C.D.in his White House post in 1954) assomeone who “would really like [a] much

more useful unofficial, relaxed, give-and-take relationship.”11 Watson was also toprove a powerful, if discreet, ally of theCongress for Cultural Freedom for manyyears. From the Congress for CulturalFreedom came Julius Fleischmann, “todiscuss possibilities of Congress for CulturalFreedom sponsoring European junket forMetropolitan Opera,” and later Daniel Bell,“to talk about Miloscz [sic] and upcomingscientific meeting under sponsorship ofCongress for Cultural Freedom.”12

With C.D. Jackson in the White House,the Congress for Cultural Freedom gained apowerful ally in Washington. Tom Bradenmoved quickly to establish a relationshipwith C.D., and the two met regularly todiscuss “accumulated matters.” Theircollaboration on the Boston SymphonyOrchestra tour of 1952 had convinced C.D.

of the usefulness of the Congress, which hepraised as “the only outfit I know of that isreally making an anti-Communist anti-neutralist dent with intellectuals in Europeand Asia.”13 And he held many of itsactivists in high regard, recommendingseveral of them as candidates forgovernment work, including Sidney Hook;James Burnham (“a very articulateexpounder of the ‘dirty tricks department’”); New Leader editor Sol Levitas(“definitely on the side of the angels”); andDaniel Bell, who had worked for the Luce-owned Fortune and was, said C.D.,“thoroughly knowledgeable on Communistcold war techniques.”14 He was also alongtime admirer of Nicolas Nabokov. It wasC.D. who had recommended Nabokov inthe list of psychological warfare personnelsuitable for employment in sensitive posts

submitted to the Office of the Secretary ofthe Army in 1950.

C.D.’s alliance with the Congressextended over many years (in 1954 hebecame a board member of the AmericanCommittee) and brought it numerousbenefits, besides the prestige of his discreetsupport. If the Congress needed coverage inLuce’s magazines, C.D. was there to secureit. If it sought convergence with the FreeEurope Committee and Radio Free Europe,C.D. would act as liaison. If it needed“private” donations, C.D. could call upon hisvast range of business contacts to providethe necessary cover. But most importantwas the political cachet C.D. brought to anorganization which had surprisingly fewdefenders in the capital. “Nobody had areputation in Washington for supporting it,and nobody was sure they wanted a

reputation for supporting it,” Lawrence deNeufville said. “Most people were mystifiedby it. We created it, but we didn’t have anyreal machinery for it in Washington.”15 Thatthe Congress for Cultural Freedom survived,and even thrived, in the context of suchskepticism must be credited to the heroicefforts of Michael Josselson.

After the hectic workload of the past fewyears, Michael Josselson took a short breakfrom the struggle for the minds and wills ofmen. On February 14, 1953, he marriedDiana Dodge in a civil ceremony withLawrence de Neufville as witness. Both hadbeen married before. Josselson had marriedColette Joubert in Havana in 1940, but theyhad divorced and were estranged. Alwaysfiercely private, he never spoke of her toanyone. But he did preserve a faded clipping

from a New York newspaper of February1963 reporting Colette’s gruesome murder—she was found bound and choked to deathwith a gag after being sexually assaulted inher Upper East Side apartment.

Michael and Diana honeymooned inMajorca. Shortly after their return to Paris,Michael “came clean,” telling his new wifehe was employed by the CIA, and that theCongress for Cultural Freedom was anAgency “proprietary.” Diana, who hadalready observed from Michael’sinvolvement with the Congress that therewas more to him than his import-exportbusiness card announced, had onceentertained the idea he might be working forthe Russians. To her relief, she nowdiscovered he was on the “right” side. Dianawas assigned a code name—“JeanEnsinger”—and from then on they formed a

kind of partnership.Diana Josselson was well suited to the

task. A former Fulbrighter, she had anintricate knowledge of labor affairs, firstfrom working as an editor of a digest of theU.S. labor press, then from her work in theLabor Division of the Marshall Plan, whichoperated under the influence of JayLovestone and Irving Brown. “I was youngand fresh-faced, and a great success with allthe labor leaders,” Diana recalled brightly.Her job in the Labor Division entailedwriting reports on Communist trade unionsin Europe, for which she had access to topsecret intercepts. This sensitive workrequired clearance from the CIA. Diana laterlearned that counterpart funds at the disposalof the CIA were being used to cover hersalary.

Together, “Jean Ensinger” and “Jonathan

F. Saba” would write cables and memosencoded for dispatch to Washington. Thesewould be handed over to a CIA case officerover martinis in the Josselson apartment.“All case officers had the same attaché casewith a false bottom, and they put the cablesin there. It really was very funny, becauseyou could recognize them a mile away—they all had the same standard model case.It was a riot. We’d read the incoming cables,then I’d flush them down the toilet,”16

Diana remembered. She was well cut out forthe job and knew how to keep a secret, evenfrom her own mother. Once, case officerLee Williams went out to buy jars of babyfood for Jennifer, the Josselsons’ first andonly child. When he returned, Diana wasobliged to introduce him to her mother, whohad come over from the States to help withthe baby. Noticing a copy of Jane Eyre lying

on the table, Diana stammered, “This is, er—Mr. Rochester.” “How strange! Mr.Rochester. Just like in Jane Eyre!”exclaimed her unsuspecting mother. ThatDiana didn’t simply use Lee Williams’s realname, which of itself would have revealednothing, indicates how intricately herimagination was caught up in the GreatGame. When Diana’s mother was eventuallytold the truth, she too was “very excited bythe whole thing.”17

Now completely au fait with Michael’sjob, Diana was daily more admiring of hisextraordinary expertise. His ability tocoordinate the exigencies of Washington andthe often volatile temperaments of theCongress intellectuals left her amazed.“There’s no way the Congress could havehappened without him,” she later said. “Theatmosphere of the Congress in its heyday

was as I imagine the first hundred days ofthe Kennedy administration were. It waselectric. You felt you were in touch witheverything going on everywhere. Thingswere blossoming, it was vital. Michael wouldknow everything. It was dazzling how in themorning he could be talking aboutplaywrights in Bolivia, and then aboutwriters in Asia in the afternoon, and then heand Nicolas would be on the phone in theevening talking in four different languages. Iremember sitting with Stravinsky at a café inParis, and his wife telling me how to makeblinis. It was an extraordinary time for us.The Cold War, the Congress for CulturalFreedom—it was like the French Revolutionor the Oxford Movement. That’s what it feltlike.”18

The Josselsons met often with TomBraden, who regularly toured his operations

in Europe. They would go to a restaurant orthe Roland-Garros tennis tournament, orthey would take Braden to the bicycle racesat the Vélodrome d’Hiver, “that stadium ofdreadful memory” where the Jews had beentaken during the massive roundup underVichy. The Josselsons also maintainedregular contact with Irving Brown,sometimes meeting him at his table at a gaynightclub called L’Indifférent. On oneoccasion, they arrived there to find Brownhanding over large amounts of cash to “athug from Marseilles.”19 Brown at this timewas building up “the MediterraneanCommittee,” a group of vigilantes paid tostand guard at French ports whiledockworkers unloaded Marshall Plansupplies and U.S. arms for NATO. OnBrown’s ability to syncopate these activities,Braden commented wryly, “It was unusual

for somebody who was taking a highlyvisible part in beating up commie goons inthe docks of Marseilles to also be interestedin the Congress for Cultural Freedom.”20

“The American Federation of Labor hadreal experience of Communism, and thatwas the obvious place to stage the fightfrom,” Diana Josselson explained. “Brownloved all the strong-arm business, strike-breaking in Marseilles and so forth. Michaeland I were amused by the whole thing ofgoing to a nightclub and meeting a uniontough whom Irving would be giving moneyto, and I’m sure Irving was equally amusedby the intellectuals. I suppose the attractionof the Congress crowd for Irving—whodidn’t know his Picassos or his Baudelaires—was that it was glamorous, and thecontacts were good.”21

At weekends, Michael and Diana relaxed

by trawling the antiques shops and galleriesof the Left Bank. They lunched on opensandwiches and aquavit, followed by tea atthe Café de Flore (Sartre’s favorite) or theDeux Magots. On Sundays, they wouldpicnic at Fontainebleau or take a boat out onthe Seine. Sometimes they would meet upwith de Neufville, forming a congenial trio,bound both by genuine friendship and by thesecret they shared. De Neufville returnedfrom one shopping excursion with Josselsonthe proud owner of two paintings byBraque. Years later, when the Josselsons’daughter, Jennifer, had become an expert inmodern art, she reluctantly declared them tobe fakes.

With Josselson’s imprimatur stamped onthe Paris office, the Congress was acquiringa reputation as a well-organized center ofintellectual resistance to Communism.

Through Preuves, it projected asophisticated political voice which also spoketo the major artistic and cultural issues of theperiod. Although the German affiliate of theCongress wobbled from one crisis to thenext, Josselson could rely on Melvin Lasky(and soon Der Monat, which the Congresstook over from the Ford Foundation in1954) to carry the Congress’s interests there.Affiliates in other countries experienced avariety of teething problems, all of whichtestified to the near impossibility of gettingintellectuals to work together without fallingprey to faction fights and woundedsensibilities. But their problems seemed likeso many storms in a teapot compared to thehurricanes which raged in the AmericanCommittee.

11

The New Consensus

An artist must be a reactionary. He has tostand out against the tenor of his age, and notgo flopping along; he must offer some littleopposition.

Evelyn Waugh

I choose the West.Dwight Macdonald, 1952

The American Committee for CulturalFreedom was founded in New York inJanuary 1951, and the principal force behind

it was Sidney Hook, who became its firstchairman and who was, according toLawrence de Neufville, a “contractconsultant” for the CIA. Irving Kristol,another graduate of New York City College,served as executive director, for which hewas paid an annual salary of $6,500. Thisrose to $8,500 in 1954, when Kristol wasreplaced by Sol Stein, who arrived straightfrom the U.S. Information Service, wherehe had worked in a unit dedicated toideological analysis. The committee, as theofficial American affiliate of the Congress,was intended to reflect the broad coalition ofliberal and left-of-center constituencieswhich made up the host organization. Butwhere the Congress had been able tomarginalize its hard-line activists likeKoestler, it had no such power over theAmerican Committee, which soon divided

down the middle between the moderates andthe militants. “In those days you were either‘hard’ or ‘soft’ on Communism,” explainedJason Epstein, who remembered DianaTrilling, in carnal mood, “standing behindLionel’s [Trilling] chair at a dinner partyonce and saying, ‘None of you men areHARD enough for me!’ They wereridiculous people, really, who lived in ateacup.”1

Living in the teacup with the Trillingswas a powerful combination of conservativeintellectuals from what was jokingly referredto as “the Upper West Side kibbutz.” Theyincluded James Burnham, ArnoldBeichmann, Peter Viereck (whose father hadbeen a notorious Fascist sympathizer), theart critic Clement Greenberg, and ElliotCohen, editor of Commentary and anunofficial adviser on Communism to

executives at the Luce publications. In styleas well as content, theirs was haute anti-Communism. “Some people like Beichmannand the Trillings (mostly Diana) wereviolently pro-American, and they thought wewere falling down on the job. Diana inparticular was quite vitriolic,” recalled IrvingKristol.2 Another insider remembered “akind of feverish sense of superiority amongstmany Americans: we’ve won the war, nowwe’re going to reorganize Europe our way.These people were mostly gunslingers fromNew York, and they favored a moral highroad of intransigence and considered ours tobe a lower road of appeasement. Some eventhought that the Congress had beenpenetrated by Communists.”3

Representing the moderate element ofthe American Committee were ArthurSchlesinger, the Cold War theologian

Reinhold Niebuhr, James T. Farrell, RichardRovere of the New Yorker, former SocialistParty chairman and six-time candidate forU.S. president Norman Thomas, andPartisan Review editor Philip Rahv.Swinging between the two factions wereIrving Kristol (who later became an ardentReaganite); the other Partisan Revieweditor, William Phillips; and Sidney Hook.Hook in particular had an interest inmaintaining peace between the two groups:he was at this time promoting thecommittee’s interests with CIA directorWalter Bedell Smith (whom Allen Dullesreplaced in 1953), and Gordon Gray, firstdirector of the Psychological Strategy Board(these meetings failed to merit a mention inHook’s autobiography).4 These contactswith high-level intelligence operatives testifyto a much more knowing engagement with

clandestine cultural warfare than Hook wasever ready to admit to. His article in the NewYork Times Magazine of March 1951—“ToCounter the Big Lie—A Basic Strategy”—was clipped and filed by the PSB, C.D.Jackson, and the CIA. In it, Hook describedthe threat to democracy posed byinternational Communism and called for “the[exhaustion] of every possibility of effectivepolitical warfare in defense of democraticsurvival. . . . The democracies must take theoffensive in political warfare against thetotalitarian regime of the Soviet Union andkeep the offensive. . . . How successful thispolitical warfare would be cannot be foretoldin advance. But it is surely worth the cost ofa half dozen bombers to launch it.”5 ForHook, the American Committee was abazooka in America’s political arsenal, andhe worked with his customary zeal to

consolidate its position.It was to the moderates that Josselson

turned in an effort to keep the AmericanCommittee politically attuned to theCongress. But Schlesinger and his allieswere unable to contain the unruly clique ofhard-liners, and disagreements between thecommittee and the Paris office surfacedalmost immediately. The Americans scornedNabokov’s massive festival in Paris,accusing the Congress of frivolity. ElliotCohen, who in his politics was only slightlyless extreme than James Burnham, askedwhether, “With this kind of hoopla, we arelosing sight of our function and goals, and ifwe lose sight, who else is there around?”6

Another critic mocked it as “appealing tosnobs and esthetes” and destroying theCongress’s reputation as “a seriousintellectual power.”7

The fascination with power was muchevident in the American Committee, andculminated in 1952 with a Partisan Reviewsymposium which confirmed a new andpositive relationship between intellectualsand the nation-state. Running in issue afterissue, the symposium was called “OurCountry and Our Culture.” Its purpose,wrote the editors, was “to examine theapparent fact that American intellectualsnow regard America and its institutions in anew way. Until little more than a decadeago, America was commonly thought to behostile to art and culture. Since then, the tidehas begun to turn, and many writers andintellectuals now feel closer to their countryand its culture. . . . Politically, there isrecognition that the kind of democracywhich exists in America has an intrinsic andpositive value: it is not merely a capitalist

myth but a reality which must be defendedagainst Russian totalitarianism. . . . Europe isno longer regarded as a sanctuary; it nolonger assures that rich experience of culturewhich inspired and justified a criticism ofAmerican life. The wheel has come fullcircle, and now America has become theprotector of western civilization.”8

Intellectual life in New York during the1930s had been gauged almost exclusively inrelation to Moscow, and there to articulateits concerns was Partisan Review, createdby a group of Trotskyites from City College.Starting its life as a house organ of theCommunist-dominated John Reed Club,Partisan Review created a sophisticatedlanguage to articulate Marxist ideas. But theevents of 1939–40 destroyed its moorings.With the signing of the German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, many intellectuals began to

veer away from the orthodoxies of LeninistCommunism towards the dissidentradicalism of Trotsky. Some simplyabandoned the left altogether, movingtowards the political center and even theright. Partisan Review now found itselfcreating a counter-language to articulate anti-Stalinism and redefine radicalism in a non-Communist context.

Returning to the idea of America like somany repentant prodigals, intellectuals andartists emerged from the “dark period” ofthe 1930s to discover “an exhilaration at thesudden and overwhelming appearance ofnew possibilities, in life as in consciousness.There was a world out there which no-one,it seemed, had bothered to look at before,and everyone, happily shedding his Marxistblinkers, went rushing off to look.”9 Theseborn-again intellectuals, in their search for

something to replace the historical absoluteswhich had failed them so absolutely, foundthe answer in “America” or, more glibly,“Americanism.” The literary equivalent ofAaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the CommonMan,” Partisan Review’s symposiumsignaled this act of discovery of America asif for the first time. “American artists andintellectuals have acquired a new sense ofbelonging to their native land,” wroteWilliam Phillips, “and have generally cometo feel that their own fate is tied to the fateof their country.”10 As intellectualsdeveloped a congenial connection toAmerica, so America came to see them in anew light. “Intellect has associated itself withpower, perhaps as never before in history,and is now conceived to be in itself a kind ofpower,” Lionel Trilling observed.11

“It was perhaps the first time since the

French Revolution when the significantcomponents of an intellectual communitydecided that it was no longer de rigueur tobe adversarial; that you could support yourcountry without cheapening intellectual andartistic integrity,” noted the historian CarolBrightman.12 This new perception ofintellectuals was confirmed when Timemagazine ran a cover story called“Parnassus: Coast to Coast,” whichconcluded that “The Man of Protest has . . .given way to the Man of Affirmation—andthat happens to be the very role that theintellectuals played when the nation wasnew.”13 This was the moment at whichdeviationist Marxists began to transformthemselves from refusniks into “all-rightniks”; when City College ideologues,together with their more waspishcompagnons de guerre, like Dwight

Macdonald, lost their taste for the classstruggle and were being improbably askedfor letters of recommendation by aspiringstudents. “The speed with which I evolvedfrom a liberal into a radical and from a tepidCommunist sympathizer into an ardent anti-Stalinist still amazes me,” DwightMacdonald later wrote.14 Describing thispolitical transformation, his biographerconcluded: “Dwight’s independence, his self-proclaimed negativism, his refusal to acceptany kind of nationalist loyalty had markedhis political vision and sustained his politicallife. It was not a matter of betrayal ofcommitment: he had simply arrived throughhis own painful analysis to a point where hehad no viable political position other than the‘lesser evil.’ For him it was a discouragingdilemma. Even as he continued to identifywith a radical, or at least dissenting,

tradition, and still felt himself to be amember of an alienated elite in opposition toAmerican nationalism, imperialism and massculture, he was, even if inadvertently,coming to support the maintenance ofAmerican power abroad and establishedinstitutions at home.”15 Philip Rahvobserved such developments with growingalarm, and warned: “Anti-Stalinism hasbecome almost a professional stance. It hascome to mean so much that it excludesnearly all other concerns and ideas, with theresult that they are trying to turn anti-Stalinism into something which it can neverbe: a total outlook on life, no less, or even aphilosophy of history.”16

The headquarters of “professional” anti-Stalinism was the American Committee forCultural Freedom, and the magazines whoseeditors sat on its board, namely

Commentary, the New Leader, and PartisanReview. But now, just as the center wasbeginning to hold, Partisan Review was onthe brink of folding, in part because the U.S.Treasury was threatening to strip it of its tax-exempt status. Sidney Hook wrote adramatic plea to Howland Sargeant, assistantsecretary of state, on October 10, 1952,defending Partisan Review’s record as aneffective vehicle for “combatting communistideology abroad, particularly amongintellectuals,” and begging for its taxexemption to be preserved. Daniel Bell alsotook the initiative, acting as an“intermediary” in discussions with HenryLuce, who saved the magazine with a grantof $10,000 (at the same time, Luce donatedseventy-one shares of Time Inc. stock to theAmerican Committee). “To the best of myknowledge, that grant was never publicly

disclosed, not even to the contributors andsome of Partisan Review’s associateeditors,” Daniel Bell later wrote.17 Quitewhat Luce expected in return for hisinvestment is not clear. Jason Epstein laterclaimed that “what was printed in PartisanReview soon became amplified in Time andLife.”18 Certainly, Luce’s generous financialsupport of what had once been anauthorized voice of the AmericanCommunist Party lends new meaning to themuch discussed “de-radicalization” ofAmerican intellectuals during the Cold War.

The CIA had first been alerted to thefinancial difficulties of Partisan Reviewthrough Irving Brown. A year before theLuce grant was made, Sidney Hook hadwritten to Brown asking for help in the fightto keep Partisan Review and the NewLeader alive. “Our advices are from many

of our European friends that anti-Americanand especially neutralist sentiment is risingin Western Europe. This at the same time asthat splendidly anti-neutralist democraticorgan the New Leader really faces extinctionbecause of rising costs. Its disappearance,”wrote Hook, “would be a culturalcalamity.”19 He made the same case forPartisan Review, and asked Brown to helpsecure a guaranteed foreign circulation offour to five thousand for both magazines.Brown passed the problem on to Braden atthe International Organizations Division.Shortly afterwards, the New Leader’s editor,Sol Levitas, found himself in Tom Braden’soffice. “God, I can remember that guysitting across the table, pleading with me formoney,” Braden recalled.20

Levitas, a Russian émigré who hadworked with Trotsky and Bukharin, had

powerful supporters in America’s intelligencecommunity. C.D. Jackson praised him fordoing “an excellent job in providing virtuallythe only objective, unslanted, pro-American,high-quality, left-wing literature that exists oneither side of the Atlantic,” and said he was“definitely on the side of the angels.”21

Certainly, Allen Dulles thought so. In 1949,Levitas had run a piece by Dulles advocatinga “commission of internal security” toexamine subversive influences in the UnitedStates and to “use the institutions ofdemocracy to destroy them.” With AllenDulles helping the White House reorganizeAmerica’s intelligence service, this “wasrather like the head of MI5 writing for theNew Statesman.”22 At this time too,although the New Leader was issuing franticappeals for funds to pay off its $40,000debts, it started appearing in April 1950 as a

new New Leader with an expensive Time-like magazine format. Sitting oppositeBraden a couple of years later, Levitas hadfound another angel who could save hismagazine. Braden agreed to subsidize theNew Leader, arranging to hand over cashsums to Levitas at his, Braden’s, office, onat least three occasions. “It wasn’t a hugesum,” Braden said, “probably in the regionof $10,000 a time. But that was enough tokeep the magazine from going under.”23

Meanwhile, Braden’s deputy CordMeyer had taken up Partisan Review’scause. Further to the Luce grant of $10,000,the magazine received a subsidy of $2,500in early 1953 from the AmericanCommittee’s “festival account,” which stillcontained some residual funds left over fromNabokov’s extravaganza of the previousyear. The festival account, it will be

remembered, was the pipeline for CIAdollars, which were “piggybacked” throughthe phony Farfield Foundation. When thisgrant was made to Partisan Review, its co-editor William Phillips was cultural secretaryof the American Committee. Phillips latersaid he did not recall this grant and wasalways adamant that his magazine had neverbeen the recipient of CIA support.

By subsidizing American journals, theCIA was acting in breach of its ownlegislative charter, which prohibited supportof domestic organizations. In the case ofPartisan Review and the New Leader, therewere two very persuasive reasons forignoring this legal nicety: first, the journalsprovided an ideological bridgehead forAmerican and European intellectuals whosecommon ground was anti-Communism, butwho were separated by geopolitical and

cultural differences; secondly, financialsupport provided what Josselson describedas a “shield” against the anticipated “anger”of Partisan Review and the New Leaderwhen they discovered—as they soon would—that their position in the marketplace ofideas was about to be seriously challenged.

12

Magazine “X”

What, then, shall we do? Stick, so far aspossible, to the empirical facts—alwaysremembering that these are modifiable byanyone who chooses to modify the perceivingmechanism.

Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza

Encounter magazine, which ran from 1953to 1990, held a central position in postwarintellectual history. It could be as lively andbitchy as a literary cocktail party. It was hereNancy Mitford published her famous article“The English Aristocracy,” a bitingly witty

analysis of British social mores whichintroduced the distinction between “U andNon-U.” It printed Isaiah Berlin’s “AMarvellous Decade,” four memorable essayson Russian literature, Vladimir Nabokov onPushkin, Irving Howe on Edith Wharton,David Marquand on “The Liberal Revival,”stories by Jorge Luis Borges, critical essaysby Richard Ellmann, Jayaprakash Narayan,W.H. Auden, Arnold Toynbee, BertrandRussell, Herbert Read, Hugh Trevor-Roper—some of the best minds of those decades.It was read in England and America, Asiaand Africa. Promiscuous in its attention tocultural subjects, it was strangely silent, orsimply obscure, on many political issues. Inall cases, it was resolutely ideological, aninteger of anti-Communist Cold Warthinking. It never broke even but ran at asubstantial deficit, needing to double its

circulation in order to get out of the red. Itwas intelligent. And it was profligately linkedto the intelligence world. Michael Josselsonreferred to it as “our greatest asset.”

Postwar austerity had claimed CyrilConnolly’s Horizon in 1950, followedshortly thereafter by John Lehmann’sPenguin New Writing. The LondonMagazine was teetering financially, and F.R.Leavis, despite a generous grant from theRockefeller Foundation, was almost throughwith Scrutiny. Only the New Statesman andNation flourished, its weekly circulation of85,000 showing an impressive resilience toattempts to undermine it. Josselson’s secretsubsidies to Twentieth Century were part ofthis campaign. As well as cash, the journal,together with the British Society for CulturalFreedom, had received explicit instructionsto “engage in a permanent polemic with The

New Statesman and Nation.”1 The CIA,mindful of the lackluster British performanceat the Berlin conference of 1950, was eagerto penetrate the fog of neutralism whichdimmed the judgment of so many Britishintellectuals, not least those close to the NewStatesman. That Kingsley Martin’s magazinehad not embraced the idea of a socialistvision fully divorced from Moscow rankleddeeply with American Cold Warriors.

British intelligence, too, was interested inprojecting a voice which could oppose theNew Statesman’s policy of ambivalence, its“soft-headedness” and “terriblesimplifications.” The Information ResearchDepartment’s support of Tribune, whosematerial was excerpted and distributedinternationally by foreign service officers,was a gesture in this direction. MalcolmMuggeridge and Woodrow Wyatt, both

closely linked to IRD, met with Tribuneeditor Tosco Fyvel in April 1950 to discussthe future of the magazine, but Muggeridgeconcluded, “They are obviously badly onthe rocks, and I said that in the interests ofthe cold war they should be kept going as acounterblast to the New Statesman.Developed one of my favourite propositions—that the New Statesman’s great success aspropagandists had been to establish theproposition that to be intelligent is to be Leftwhereas almost the exact opposite is true.”2

IRD’s support of Tribune was notenough to persuade Fyvel of its long-termfuture, and by late 1951 he was talking of anew “Anglo-American Left-of-Centrepublication.” Writing to Irving Brown, Fyvelsaid that plans for such a publication “haveadvanced, and several people are anxiousthat I should make a start. I have discussed

the idea directly or by letter with DenisHealey, Maurice Edelman, Dick Crossman,Arthur Schlesinger, David Williams andothers—for obvious reasons this issomething quite outside Congress for Cult.Freedom activities.”3 The obvious reasonfor keeping the magazine separate from theCongress was, as Fyvel well knew, becausethe American government had agreed not toconduct propaganda activities in Britain. TheCIA had “virtually declared a moratorium on[Agency] money . . . being used in thatparticular country. There is a sort ofgentlemen’s agreement on that matter.”4 Butthis was about to change.

Independently of each other, Britishintelligence and the CIA had been battingaround the idea of creating a new magazinewhich could address the perceived deficit inthe bank of intellectual anti-Communism in

Britain. This duplication of effort came tolight during a series of meetings held atFrank Wisner’s initiative in London in early1951. Accompanied by Washington-basedMI6–CIA liaison Kim Philby (whose friendsBurgess and Maclean were just monthsaway from their defection to the SovietUnion), Wisner had traveled to London todiscuss with British intelligence “matters ofcommon interest.” During a series ofmeetings attended by MI6 and members ofthe Foreign Office, according to Philby,Wisner “expatiated on one of his favouritethemes: the need for camouflaging thesource of secret funds supplied to apparentlyrespectable bodies in which we wereinterested. ‘It is essential,’ said Wisner in hisusual informal style, ‘to secure the overtcooperation of people with conspicuousaccess to wealth in their own right.’ ” At

this, Philby was amused to see a ForeignOffice official scribbling a note which read:“people with conspicuous access to wealthin their own right = rich people.”5

It was during the Wisner “mission” toLondon that the question of a high-levelpublication aimed at encouraging a leftistlexicon free of Kremlin grammar was firstaired. The two services realized they hadbeen pursuing the same idea. Wisner and hisSecret Intelligence Service (SIS)counterparts agreed this would be folly, andthey settled on a joint operation. By late1951, the joint proposal had been cleared atthe highest levels, and it was now passeddown the lines. Philby delegated to hisassistant in Washington John BruceLockhart, nephew of the great Robert BruceLockhart, an intelligence supremo of bothwars who in 1917 had been arrested by the

Soviets as a spy and imprisoned in theKremlin. As his uncle’s star faded, Lockhartthe younger had himself forged ahead as amodel intelligence officer. He had headed upthe military branch of “C” (SIS) in Italyduring the war and was an expert onpenetrating Communist organizations inEurope. Lockhart was well respected inWashington, where he had forged a closerelationship with Frank Wisner. WhenWisner wanted to get his son, Frank WisnerJr., into Rugby College, Lockhart, who hadbeen schooled there, was happy to arrangeit. Wisner trusted Lockhart but not Philby.Philby in turn was unable to repress hisdislike of Wisner, whom he describedwitheringly as “a youngish man for soresponsible a job, balding and running self-importantly to fat.”6

John Bruce Lockhart also enjoyed a

good relationship with Lawrence deNeufville, with whom he had liaised inGermany after the war. It was Lockhart whonow set up a meeting for de Neufville andJosselson with IRD’s Christopher MontyWoodhouse in London. Woodhouse was aman of profligate talent. He had beenintroduced to the writings of Euripides andLucretius at the age of eleven, and beforethe war had been tutored at New College,Oxford, by Richard Crossman and IsaiahBerlin (who deployed “an intense, low-pitched buzz of monologue” in tutorials and“was known as the only man in Oxford whocould pronounce ‘epistemological’ as onesyllable”).7 Taking a double first in 1939,Woodhouse was dreaming of an academiccareer lecturing on Plato and Aristotle whenwar broke out. His education thereafter wasquite different—“barrack-square, gun-drill,

parachuting, guerrilla warfare, sabotage,intelligence”—and eventually led him to fighta heroic guerrilla war in occupied Greece.8

A dashing, daring spy of the old school,Woodhouse was a key player in preparationsto overthrow Iran’s premier, MohammadMossadegh, working alongside KimRoosevelt in a coup engineered jointly bythe CIA and SIS which installed the ultra-right monarchy of the shah.9 On his returnfrom Tehran, Woodhouse was assigned todeep cover work for the InformationResearch Department. He ran a separateoffice, provided by SIS, opposite St.James’s Park tube station. This office wasstaffed by a handful of junior Foreign Officepeople who were nominally registered toIRD but were in effect run as asemiautonomous team by Woodhouse.

Reluctant to “do business” in his own

club, the Reform, Woodhouse agreed tomeet at the Royal Automobile Club on PallMall, where de Neufville held an overseasmembership. De Neufville and Josselsontraveled to London from Paris for themeeting. It was here, in the late spring of1952, that British and American intelligencemade one of the most significantinterventions in the course of postwarintellectual history. Over lunch in the RAC’sdining room, they outlined their plan for thelaunch and covert sponsorship of a newhighbrow magazine. Woodhouse, who wasauthorized to clear the project, did sowithout hesitation. Working for variousdifferent geographical divisions of theForeign Office, this project stood at themore “mundane end of the spectrum” forWoodhouse. But he was a keen advocate ofpsychological warfare, into which the

proposal so neatly fell. The tone of theconversation at the RAC left him in nodoubt that this was to be a subtlecontribution to the covert propagandastruggle.

His only caveat was that the Britishshould be allowed to keep a finger on thepulse. It was agreed that the Congress forCultural Freedom, through a designated CIAcase officer, would consult with Woodhouseon “operational” procedures relating to themagazine. In addition, SIS wished tomaintain a financial interest in the project, asmall contribution which would come fromIRD’s secret vote. Woodhouse suggestedthat this contribution be earmarked for thesalaries of the British editor and hissecretary. This would avoid the improprietyof the CIA remunerating British subjects.

Further, he said that the Foreign Office’s

principal interest in such a project was toacquire a vehicle for communicating anti-Communist ideas to intellectuals in Asia,India, and the Far East. To guaranteedistribution of the magazine in these spheresof influence, the Foreign Office would buyup a specified number of copies to beshipped and distributed through the BritishCouncil. Beyond this, the financial liabilityfor the magazine rested with the Congressfor Cultural Freedom. Josselson confirmedthat funds were to be made availablethrough the Farfield Foundation, althoughthe magazine would be encouraged tofunction as a business, to allay suspicion.Finally, Josselson told Woodhouse that twocandidates had been short-listed for the jobof co-editing the magazine. Subject tosecurity clearance by both services, it wasagreed that these two candidates be

approached by the Congress for CulturalFreedom. With the working structure inplace, the meeting closed with an agreementthat Josselson and de Neufville wouldadvance the project, and then meet againwith Woodhouse. Woodhouse, meanwhile,started looking for suitable “fronts”—Wisner’s “rich people”—through which tochannel IRD money to the new magazine.

The American candidate for the post ofco-editor was Irving Kristol, the executivedirector of the American Committee forCultural Freedom. Born in 1920, the son ofa New York clothing subcontractor, in 1936he went to City College, where hebefriended Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, andMelvin Lasky. There he became involvedwith the Young People’s Socialist League, ananti-Communist leftist organization at thecollege, and the Trotskyites. Small in stature,

Kristol compensated by developing themuscular political stance so typical of CityCollege undergraduates, accompanied by areadiness to jump his opponents, whichwould acquire him a reputation as anintellectual bruiser. Graduating cum laude in1940, he went to work as a freight handlerin Chicago and helped edit the ex-Trotskyistmagazine Enquiry until he was called up.Drafted as an infantryman in 1944, he sawcombat in France and Germany and wasdischarged in 1946. He went to England andbegan working for Commentary, returning toNew York in 1947 to become its managingeditor.

The British candidate was StephenSpender. Born in 1909 to a famous liberalfamily, he had a protected childhood (“Myparents kept me from children who wererough”10), and developed a languid,

easygoing nature and an attraction to utopianideas. At Oxford in the 1920s he came underthe lifelong influence of W.H. Auden andachieved fame soon after with his first book,Poems, which oozed the sexual and politicalmood of the interwar period. He wasimmediately identified with Auden, CecilDay-Lewis, and Louis MacNeice as a Poetof the Thirties, the decade which broughtpolitics into the deepest chambers ofliterature and saw Spender joining theCommunist Party, though only for a fewweeks. His was more that kind of “Englishparlour Bolshevism” than anything else,typical of Spender’s butterfly politics. Later,he was to describe his changes of belief andcommitment as a matter of “my uttervulnerability and openness.”11 AnitaKermode inverted Henry James Sr.’sfamous remark (about Emerson), that he

was like “a clue without a labyrinth,” todescribe Spender as “a labyrinth without aclue.”12 Another Jamesian phrase suitedSpender well: he was “a man without ahandle.”

Spender later surmised that the reasonhe had been chosen to co-edit theCongress’s new magazine “was aconsequence of my essay in The God ThatFailed.” More perhaps than his disavowal ofCommunism, it was Spender’s positiverelationship with the United States whichmade him an ideal candidate. In 1948,Spender had written a paean to America—“We Can Win the Battle for the Mind ofEurope”—in which he claimed that “whereAmerican policy finds dubious allies andhalf-hearted friends, American freedom ofexpression in its greatest achievements hasan authenticity which can win the most vital

European thought today. . . . If Americachose to do so she could play an educationalrole in Europe today which would bringthousands of students to understand the bestin American civilization and the Americanconception of freedom. . . . For what isrealistic today is to expect nothing ofpropaganda and political bludgeoning, but totake part in showing Europeans the greatestcontemporary achievements of Americancivilization, education and culture.”13

Spender could barely contain his excitement,going on to state that “a word from themouth of an American or English man ofletters” is regarded as “almost somethingmiraculous” by European students. TheMarshall Plan, he wrote, was well and good,but “it is necessary also to strengthen the oldcivilization of the West in Europe with thefaith and the experience and the knowledge

of the new Europe which is America.”14

Such sentiments were echoed by many otherWestern intellectuals. Raymond Aronannounced that he was “entirely convincedthat for an anti-Stalinist there is no escapefrom the acceptance of Americanleadership.”15 It could hardly be said (as itlater was) that America’s intervention in theKulturkampf had no native support whenpeople like Spender and Aron identified thesurvival of Europe with the American savior.

Spender had other attractive qualities forhis prospective employers. As part of the“MacSpaunDay” (MacNeice, Spender,Auden, Day-Lewis) group, he provided animportant link to London’s literaryaristocracy, which still clung to many of thesnobbish excrescences of the Bloomsburyperiod but whose members surrenderedpromptly to Spender’s charm. Josselson had

experienced at first hand the intransigence ofthe British element at the Congress’s Berlindebut, and many American strategists wereirked by the superior air affected by theBritish intelligentsia. “There’s someimportant background to all this,” StuartHampshire explained. “In 1949, I believe,the Ford Foundation came to London, andthey held a big meeting in a hotel, to whichthey summoned the leading intellectuals. Atthat time, they had capital reserves whichwere worth more than the whole of thesterling area. So, the intellectuals come, andthe Ford Foundation offers them the earth,but they say, ‘We’re fine, thank you. We’vegot All Souls, and that’s enough for us.’ TheBritish were under-whelmed. They did askfor a few things, but they were so small theAmericans thought they were mad. And thecontext for this is that there was a very

deep, Freud-like anti-Americanism; a kind ofWykehamish snobbery meets Chinese left-wingery, epitomized by people like Empsonand Forster. I remember Forster staying withLionel Trilling in New York once. Trilling—who’d written a book about Forster, andwas a rather pathetic Anglophile who’dnever been to England at that point—wasvery nervous. Forster told him he needed tobuy a shirt for some occasion, and Trillingtook him to Brooks Brothers. But whenForster got there, he took one look and said,‘My God, I can’t possibly buy anythinghere.’ That summed it up.”16

Spender, who had worked for the BritishControl Commission in occupied Germanyafter the war, was well attuned to the needsof government in the area of cultural politics.Since then, he had spent a good deal of timein America, where he found himself under

the wing of John Crowe Ransom, AllenTate, and the conservative duo Ben Tateand Senator Robert Taft. Cultivating hisBritish colleagues with equal charm, Spenderwas just the bridge the Americans needed tomake an advance on their recalcitrant allies.But his most irresistible talent, claimed hiswife, Natasha, was for being easily conned.“Of course,” she said, “Stephen had all theright credentials to be chosen as a front: hewas one of the great recanters [ofCommunism], and he was eminentlybamboozable, because he was so innocent.His father was bamboozled by LloydGeorge. They’re a very trusting family; itnever occurs to them to think that people aretelling them lies.”17 The cost of thiscongenital naïveté would later prove to behigh.

In February 1953, Spender, who was

teaching in Cincinnati, received a letter fromJosselson inviting him to come to Paris todiscuss “an English edition of Preuves.”From Kristol, Spender learned that “[d]uringa quick trip to Paris which I made a coupleof weeks back I spent a great deal of timediscussing [this matter] with Mike Josselson,François Bondy and Mel Lasky; moreover,Josselson and myself went to London for aday to talk the matter over with Warburg,Muggeridge and Fyvel.”18

Shortly before this London meeting, deNeufville and Josselson had met again withWoodhouse. They agreed on an arrangementfor a publishing “deal” whereby FredricWarburg, the publisher of Orwell, wouldlend his company’s name to the magazine.In a letter from Josselson to Warburg, heconfirmed that the Congress “assumed fullresponsibility for the prompt payment of all

bills presented in connection with theproduction and distribution of Encounter”and full liability for libel. Josselson made itclear to Warburg that “neither he nor hisfirm is to have any influence whatsoeverover the editorial side of the magazine.”19

By the time of their second meeting,Woodhouse and de Neufville had struck up afirm rapport. De Neufville’s credentials wereno less impressive than Woodhouse’s. Bornin London, he had taken degrees at NewCollege and Harvard before becoming aReuters correspondent. “We got onextremely well, saw very much eye to eye,”Woodhouse remembered. “I always got onextremely well with my Americancolleagues, provided they weren’t lunatics,”he added, in a tone which suggested manywere. “Whenever Larry came over toLondon, I met him. Or if I went to

Washington, I’d meet him there, with myman in Washington, Adam Watson.”20 Thetwo were to meet regularly over the nextcouple of years, until de Neufville returnedto America, and Woodhouse went on tobecome director of the Royal Institute ofInternational Affairs. As this was the onlyarea where their responsibilities overlapped,they discussed “operations and methods” forEncounter and “the British operation” ingeneral over drinks at the RAC.

“Operations and methods” initially meantputting in place what Woodhouse describedas “a cash flow and a line of contact.” “Becareful of thinking there was a system foranything in those days. It was allimprovised,” de Neufville later explained.21

Brought in to help with the improvisationand to act as a go-between for MI6 and theCongress for Cultural Freedom was

Malcolm Muggeridge. Muggeridge had madea long journey from those days as a boywhen he had sung “The Red Flag” with hisfather from a Labour Party platform inCroydon. His book Winter in Moscow(1933), which presented the shattering of hisRussian utopia, was one of the firstexposures of the Soviet myth written fromthe left and had marked the beginning of hispolitical transformation into an agent forMI6. A member of the Congress for CulturalFreedom’s steering committee, he wasfirmly aligned with its anti-neutralist, pro-American stance, reasoning, “If I accept, asmillions of other Western Europeans do, thatAmerica is destined to be the mainstay offreedom in this mid-twentieth century world,it does not follow that American institutionsare perfect, that Americans are invariablywell behaved, or that the American way of

life is flawless. It only means that in one ofthe most terrible conflicts in human history, Ihave chosen my side, as all will have tochoose sooner or later, and propose to stickby the side I have chosen through thick andthin, hoping to have sufficient courage not tolose heart, sufficient sense not to allowmyself to be confused or deflected from thispurpose, and sufficient faith in thecivilization to which I belong, and in thereligion on which that civilization is based, tofollow Bunyan’s advice and endure thehazards and humiliations of the way becauseof the worth of the destination.”22

“Secrecy,” wrote Muggeridge in TheInfernal Grove, “is as essential toIntelligence as vestments and incense to amass, or darkness to a spiritual seance, andmust at all costs be maintained, quiteirrespective of whether or not it serves any

purpose.”23 Ever excited by a bit of cloak-and-dagger intrigue, even if he doubted itsnecessity, Muggeridge was delighted to beinvolved with the Congress’s new publishingventure. His first job was to secure the “richpeople” who could pose as credible privatebackers of the magazine. At a meeting in aFleet Street pub, Muggeridge was able toreport to Woodhouse that his search forfinancial conduits had turned up two willingcandidates.

The first was émigré film directorAlexander Korda. As a friend of Ian Flemingand a former employer of Robert BruceLockhart (who worked for him as an adviseron the international distribution of films),Korda enjoyed close links to Britishintelligence. Following the approach fromMuggeridge, Korda agreed to allow IRD touse his bank account as a “piggyback” for

subsidies to the new magazine. The otherconduit brought in by Muggeridge was hisold friend Lord Victor Rothschild.Rothschild was closely connected to themagazine until the mid-1960s but always asa shadow, never in the open.

There were still practical issues to beresolved, and Muggeridge and Warburg—now referred to by CIA case officers as“The Cousins”—went to Paris at the end ofFebruary 1953 to thrash matters out. JasperRidley, then secretary of the British Societyfor Cultural Freedom, was instructed to buytheir tickets and pay for their hotels. On hisreturn, Warburg asked Ridley to write him acheck on the British Society’s account for£100 for his “expenses” in Paris. Ridley,whose weekly salary was about £10, wasamazed. “I think that Warburg eitherpocketed the £100 or spent it in buying

jewellery for his attractive wife Pamela deBayou,”24 he later surmised.

On March 5, 1953, Michael Josselsonwrote to Stephen Spender with an accountof the meeting between Muggeridge,Warburg, Fyvel, Nabokov, Bondy, andJosselson. “We need a magazine with widerappeal than Horizon; more like Der Monat.You and Kristol would be an ideal team ofeditors. There should be an editorial boardwith, perhaps, Muggeridge and Hook, whowill be spending a whole year in Europefrom July 1953. Muggeridge and Warburgare willing to put all the funds which MrMuggeridge has meanwhile been successfulin raising for the British Society into themagazine.”25 Referring to this arrangement,Spender wrote to Kristol, “It looks as if weare both to be employed by the British

Committee.”26 He was half right. Kristol,the American, would be paid with fundsfrom the CIA’s Farfield Foundation;Spender, with money from the Britishtreasury’s secret vote.

By March 1953, Kristol had moved toParis and was busy collecting copy for themagazine. The Paris office, whichenvisioned a journal that would serve “as themouthpiece of the Congress,” produced fourdrafts for a cover under Josselson’sdirection. Neither Kristol nor Spender (whowas still in the States) could agree on a title.The working title, “Outlook,” was judged tobe banal, so they racked their brains andthumbed the thesaurus, and bandied about“Symposium,” “Culture and Politics,”“Congress,” “Witness,” “Vista,”“Testimony,” “Writing and Freedom”(Kristol wanted to avoid the words

“freedom” and “liberty” because of an“aroma of boredom”), “Messenger,”“Across Seas,” “East-West Review,”“Compass,” “Connect,” “Exchange,”“Interchange,” “Present,” “Turning Point,”“Circumference.” At one point, Kristolsimply referred to it as “Magazine X.”27

Perhaps this would have been the mostappropriate title, in the light of theclandestine spirit behind it. The title“Encounter” first surfaced in a letter datedApril 27, 1953, from Kristol to Warburg, butKristol said he was not enthusiastic about it.

On April 30, 1953, Alexander Kordawrote his first check for £250. So,presumably, did Victor Rothschild, thoughno record exists to confirm when his“donations” started. Thus camouflaged,British intelligence passed funds toEncounter from its inception. The cash flow

was boosted by the regular arrival of abrown envelope at Encounter’s office. Thecourier was a member of Woodhouse’s staff.So, too, was the magazine’s office manager(and later managing editor) MargotWalmsley, who came straight from her jobas a clerical officer with IRD and remainedthe Foreign Office’s “line of contact” intoEncounter for over two decades. Walmsleylater remarked to a bemused FrankKermode that if he wanted to know anythingabout Encounter, she could tell him“everything.” Dying in 1997, Walmsleynever disclosed that she was a ForeignOffice employee.

Later, the IRD paid the money into aprivate account at publishers Secker &Warburg, and Warburg would then arrangefor a check for the same amount to be madeout to the British Society for Cultural

Freedom, of which he was treasurer. TheBritish Society, by now no more than a frontfor IRD’s cash flow to Encounter, thenmade over the same amount to themagazine. In intelligence phraseology, thiskind of funding mechanism was known as a“triple pass.” Thus, circuitously, HerMajesty’s government paid StephenSpender’s salary. Woodhouse himself neverspoke to Spender of this arrangement,though he had ample opportunity to do so.“His children and my children were at thesame kindergarten, and we used to meeteach other there,” Woodhouse recalled. “Iwould’ve tended to assume that he didknow, and therefore didn’t particularly feelthe need to talk to him about it. This wasour sort of drill in that kind of world.”28

Spender was later adamant that he hadnever been told of these arrangements.

By June 1953, Encounter magazine wasup and running, operating out of the BritishSociety for Cultural Freedom’s office on119B Oxford Street, before moving inSeptember to offices in the Haymarket.Printing bills and other expenses for its firsttwelve months were met by a grant of$40,000 from the Farfield Foundation, afigure Kristol and Spender were advised byJosselson to “keep to yourselves.” Kristol,who had been in London since May, wasjoined by his wife, the historian GertrudeHimmelfarb, and their young child William.Shortly afterwards, Spender arrived fromCincinnati. Both were listed as shareholdersin Encounter Ltd., which was registered inDecember 1953, with the majority sharesheld by Junkie Fleischmann, as president ofthe Farfield Foundation, and PierreBolomey, as treasurer of the Congress for

Cultural Freedom.In a notable rewriting of history, both

Spender and Kristol would later record theircollaboration as some kind of honeymoon.“In view of the fact that Stephen and I weretwo such very different people I think wegot along surprisingly well,”29 said Kristol. “Iworked very happily with Irving Kristol,”30

said Spender. They did consider each otherfriends, then as later. But their professionalrelationship was problematic from the start.Spender was willowy, emotional, wincinglynonconfrontational, and as an editorsometimes didn’t “know his arse from hiselbow,” according to Philip Larkin.31 Kristol,by contrast, was mulish anduncompromising, inured by years ofBrooklyn arguments to sentimental orintellectually precious behavior. Small in

stature, he shared with Lasky and Hook ashortness of temper. “It’s crazy to think thatIrving Kristol—a former Trotskyite fromBrooklyn—could go over there and dealwith all those British intellectuals and correcttheir prose!” said one CIA agent.32 But itwasn’t just Spender and his British friendswho needed to watch out for Kristol.Josselson discovered very early on thecaliber of the man he had chosen. “Irvinghad stand-up rows with the Paris office,”said Natasha Spender, who recalled hearingfrom Stephen that Kristol was given toshouting down the telephone at Josselsonthat if he wanted a “house magazine” hecould go find himself another editor.33

In July, Kristol sent Josselson theprospective table of contents for the firstissue: Denis de Rougemont on India, a shortmeditation on death by Albert Camus, pages

from the notebooks of Virginia Woolf, twoJapanese short stories, a memoir of ErnstToller by Christopher Isherwood, LeslieFiedler on the Rosenbergs, Nicolas Nabokovon Soviet music, Josef Czapski on AndréMalraux’s Voices of Silence, Irving Kristolon the Congress’s “Science and Freedom”conference, Herbert Lüthy on the recentrevolts in East Germany andCzechoslovakia, and Edith Sitwell onHollywood. Book reviews had beenpromised by Muggeridge, Spender, HughSeton-Watson, John Kenneth Galbraith, andNathan Glazer. Pieces by Koestler and Aronwere dropped from the first issue afterNabokov warned Kristol that they were toomilitantly anti-Communist.

Concerned that the lineup for the firstissue was not political enough, Josselsonwrote as much to Kristol. Kristol replied

tartly: “I’m not sure about your crypticremark about the ‘political contents’ livingup to expectations. The magazine,obviously, should be a ‘cultural’ periodical—with politics taken, along with literature, art,philosophy, etc. as an intrinsic part of‘culture,’ as indeed it is. The ratio ofspecifically political to literary etc. articleswill naturally vary from number to number.In the first number, politics is relativelysubordinate, since we are aiming to capturethe largest possible audience. I have a veryclear idea of what the Congress wants, andof how one should go about getting it. But Ican’t operate efficiently with the Paris officebreathing down my neck, sending editorialdirectives, etc.”34

In another fiery letter, Kristol againremonstrated with Josselson, telling him:“We here in London are not inept morons,

and I sincerely believe that we can betterjudge the situation than you can in Paris.You and your colleagues in Paris think thecover is lousy? Well, maybe you’re right.Then again, maybe you’re wrong—magazine covers are not, after all, yourspecialty. I think the cover is good, thoughdoubtless capable of improvement;Muggeridge thinks it’s very good. . . . Youthink the first issue is insufficiently political?But then you obviously haven’t studied thetable of contents carefully. . . . You think thefirst issue is too literary? Well, you’re wrong.. . . Perhaps I’m deluding myself, but Ireally think that, in Encounter, the Congresshas hold of something far more importantthan even you realize. You, apparently,would be satisfied if we could achieve thestanding of Preuves. My god, man, we’reway past that (again, unless I’m deluding

myself). Potentially, we have it in us tobecome, in a few months, the Englishlanguage cultural periodical, and not only inEngland but for Asia too. Give us a fewmonths, and we’ll be the idol of theintelligentsia, East and West—a magazine inwhich an Asian—or European andAmerican!—writer would give his eye-teethto appear. I mean this seriously; and if I’mwrong, then you ought to get yourselfanother editor. But you’ve got to give ustime, and editorial freedom, to achieve this. .. . Your attitude to sales puzzles me: you sayyou’re less interested in them than in themagazine’s ‘impact.’ But isn’t one ameasure of the other?”35 Had Kristol knownof the financial scaffolding by whichEncounter was to be held up, he would haverealized this last question was redundant.

Clearly, Kristol was not going to play the

role of megaphone soap-boxer for Josselson.Spender invented the concept of “KristolPower” to describe his colleague’sadamantine pose. After one threat too many,Josselson would indeed find himself anothereditor. But for the time being, Encounterneeded stability, and Josselson had no choicebut to stick with Kristol.

The Paris office had won the fight withKristol to drop Koestler and Aron, but inreturn they had to concede an article byLeslie Fiedler which made them deeplyuneasy. Kristol had originally invited hisfriend Fiedler to submit an article on KarlMarx, but Fiedler showed no enthusiasmand offered him instead a piece on theRosenbergs. If Kristol wanted something“provocative” for the first issue, he had gotit.

On the morning of their execution, Juliusand Ethel Rosenberg sat down in their cell atSing Sing prison to write a letter to their twoyoung children, Robert and Michael.“Always remember that we were innocentand could not wrong our conscience,” theletter ended. Just after eight o’clock on theevening of June 19, 1953, minutes beforesundown announced the start of the JewishSabbath and on the eve of their fourteenthwedding anniversary, the Rosenbergs wereput to death in the electric chair. First Julius,then Ethel. Before being strapped into thechair, Ethel turned to the prison matron,reached out her hand, and drew her close tokiss her on the cheek.

The Rosenbergs had been convicted inMarch 1951 of transmitting Americanatomic secrets to the Soviets. Afterretreating to a synagogue to contemplate his

sentence, Judge Kaufman returned to thecourt to condemn the Rosenbergs to deathfor their part in what he described as a“diabolical conspiracy to destroy a God-fearing nation.”36 Never before in Americahad capital punishment been imposed onanyone convicted in peacetime of espionage.The international outcry which followedpresented America’s propagandists with theirmost urgent challenge since the openingsallies of the Cold War. The question of theRosenbergs’ guilt (and there could be littlereal doubt that they were guilty) was not thecentral issue: to most observers, the caseagainst them was incontrovertible. But it fellto American strategists to convince theworld not simply that the verdict wasincontestable but that the punishment fittedthe crime.

“When two innocents are sentenced to

death, it is the whole world’s business,”Jean-Paul Sartre exclaimed, definingFascism not “by the number of its victimsbut by the way it kills them.” He added thatthe execution was “a legal lynching that hascovered a whole nation in blood.”37 Tomake sure the whole world knew it was itsbusiness, the Communists orchestrated amassive campaign for clemency, organizingcoverage in the Communist-controlled press,and arranging for Communist-frontorganizations to petition Americanembassies. London received thousands ofpetitions and protests bearing severalthousand signatures. Paris reported that itwas receiving telegrams, letters and petitionsat the rate of approximately fifty per day.

In France, especially, the Rosenberg casebecame the symbolic rallying point foranyone who had a bone to pick with the

American government. Protests were stagedall over France, and many of them turnedinto anti-American riots. One man was killedin a “Libérez les Rosenbergs” rally in thePlace de la Concorde.38 Melvin Lasky,although “queasy” about the use of capitalpunishment during peacetime, ridiculed theseprotests as the product of “fashionable anti-American resentments.”39 Certainly, none ofthe Communist-backed lobbies formed todefend the Rosenbergs publicized the factthat on the same day that the RosenbergDefense Committee was founded in France,eleven former leaders of the CzechCommunist party were executed in Prague.Nor did they discuss the fact that moreCommunists had been shot by Stalin than inany Fascist country; or that in the SovietUnion workers were sent to hard laborcamps if they were more than five minutes

late for work on two occasions; nor thatwhen artists were told to enter a competitionfor a statue to celebrate Pushkin’s centenary,the first prize went to a sculptor whosestatue showed Stalin reading Pushkin’swork.

Yet Melvin Lasky’s analysis remainsfantastically simplistic. The U.S. ambassadorin Paris, Douglas Dillon, had pointedlycautioned the secretary of state in a cabledated May 15, 1953, that the majority ofpeople in France were “overwhelmingly of[the] opinion that [the] death sentence [is]unjustifiable” and warned that “people whourge clemency should not all be taken asunconscious dupes of [the] Communists.”40

Clearly, the clemency drive could not bepassed off solely as a Communistconspiracy. One American intelligence reportstated that in Western Europe, “pleas for

clemency have very recently emerged in theSocialist and independent press and fromofficial Socialist groups, and in Englandsome Labor opinion supports clemency.Such non-Communist pleas for clemencyare based on certain doubts about the guiltof the Rosenbergs, and on the ground thatclemency will play less into the hands ofCommunist propagandists than willexecution and consequent martyrdom.”41

The whole American psychologicalwarfare apparatus now faced a massivechallenge. For the next six months, right upto the Rosenbergs’ execution in June, itpulled together all its resources to convincethe non-Communist world that Americanjustice was just. The Psychological StrategyBoard (PSB) was ordered to coordinate thecampaign, whose central objective was toplace the Rosenbergs in the context of a

negative Communist archetype—theCommunist as monster, which needed“bloody sacrifices.” It compiled reports forbriefing the president and all his men, basedon embassy dispatches and CIA reports, andissued a volley of instructions to allAmerican posts abroad. But whilst PSB-generated reports which showed theRosenbergs were “fairly convicted and guiltyas charged” were well amplified in theEuropean press, many U.S. diplomaticrepresentatives continued to press forclemency. In France, Ambassador Dillonremained deeply concerned “with theadverse effect in Western Europe of theexecution,” and pressed for the sentence tobe reappraised “in terms of the highernational interest.”42

As PSB examined “the entire scope ofthe Rosenbergs’ execution, particularly the

impact of such a decision on foreignpsychology, and its effect on U.S. prestigeand U.S. leadership,”43 C.D. Jackson wastaking a slightly different tack. Though hewas confident that the Rosenbergs “deserveto fry a hundred times for what they havedone to this country,” he was bent onextracting a confession of guilt from them.This of course would have changed thewhole complexion of the case. In a hand-delivered letter to the attorney general,Herbert Brownell, dated February 23, 1953,C.D. wrote that “it is worth one more try tocrack at least one of the Rosenbergs. . . .Cracking the Rosenbergs,” he went on, “isnot a ‘third degree’ problem but apsychiatric problem. Therefore, would it notbe possible to get some really skillful Jewishpsychiatrist, say Dr Karl Binger, to attemptto insinuate himself into their confidence

during these next 30 days, and if they didshow signs of coming along, a stay ofexecution for another 30 or 60 days could bearranged while the work progressed.”44

In May, C.D. came up with anotheridea. In a “memo for the file” on WhiteHouse notepaper, C.D. wrote: “Spoke toBrownell and urged him to play war ofnerves with Rosenbergs, including ifnecessary temporary stay of execution bythe President. Brownell advised that thematron had managed to ingratiate herself,and that they had hopes in that direction.Urged upon Brownell that the warden,matron, prison doctor, and anybody elseinvolved should have impressed upon themthe subtleties of the situation and the gamethat was being played, rather than let themplay it by ear. This was no longer a policematter. Brownell agreed to do something

along these lines.”45 Just how far the matronwas able to ingratiate herself remains amatter of speculation. From Ethel’s lastgesture, however, one can deduce that shecame pretty close.

Meeting in cabinet on June 19, 1953, thedate set for the execution, a nervousEisenhower admitted he was “struck by theelement in his mail reflecting honest doubt”about the Rosenberg judgment, and said itseemed “strange our judicial system shouldbe attacked in so clear-cut a case.”46

Herbert Brownell assured Eisenhower therewas “no question of doubt here . . . merely atechnicality.” “The public doesn’t know oftechnicalities,” snapped Eisenhower. Towhich Brownell answered, “Who’s going todecide, pressure groups or the judicialsystem? The Communist objective is toshow that Dwight Eisenhower can be

pressured.”47 Again, Eisenhower showed hisimpatience, telling Brownell he was“concerned only with honest citizens.” C.D.Jackson now cut in, and acknowledged thatsome people were finding the death sentencehard to understand in light of the fact it hadnot been passed down on other convictedspies like Klaus Fuchs. To which C.D.’sfriend Henry Cabot Lodge (recentlyappointed Eisenhower’s tactical expert onCommunism) replied confidently, “All canbe easily explained.” “Not easily to me,”snorted Eisenhower.48

As all hope of clemency began to recede,even Michael Josselson had been moved tocall for mercy. “Michael thought they wereguilty, but that they shouldn’t be executed,because it was such bad PR. He sent apersonal telegram to Eisenhower asking for

clemency,”49 Diana recalled. Additionally,Josselson organized for Denis de Rougemontto cable an appeal to the White House onJune 13, 1953. “The Writers, Scientists andArtists Association with the InternationalCongress for Cultural Freedom appeal toyou for clemency for the Rosenbergs,” readthe Western Union telegram. “We believethat such an action on your part would be inthe humane tradition of western democracyand would serve the cause of freedomthroughout the world.”50 Even Pope PiusXII intervened, asking Eisenhower to temperjustice with charity, but to no avail. “Wewere devastated at the execution. It was sostupid,” said Diana Josselson.51

• • •In late July, Irving Kristol received LeslieFiedler’s piece, titled “A Postscript to the

Rosenberg Case.” Fiedler, a former memberof the Young Communist League and theSocialist Workers Party, had drifted awayfrom the left by the early 1940s and wasnow writing “virulent anti-Communist essaysso full of dubious psychologizing and callsfor atonement by the entire left that HaroldRosenberg felt compelled to publish alengthy rebuttal called ‘Couch Liberalismand the Guilty Past.’ ”52 It was in this moodthat Fiedler had penned his thoughts on theRosenberg case.

Fiedler noted that, at first, not even theCommunists were interested in identifyingthemselves with the couple, as they were“so central to their whole espionage effortand so flagrantly guilty.” He made adistinction between the “factual” Rosenbergcase and a second, “legendary” Rosenbergcase in which, thanks to a carefully

orchestrated fellow-traveling mythology,they had been built up as martyrs in thetradition of Dreyfus. And thus, as “the flagsof the gallant old causes were unfurled,”liberal-minded people everywhere had beenthe victims of “a kind of moral blackmail.”53

He went on to blame the Communists forthe Rosenbergs’ suffering and death, allegingthat it was “willed by the makers ofCommunist opinion and relished by them, asevery instance of discrimination against aNegro in America is willed and relished, asfurther evidence that they are right.” He hadbeen there, said Fiedler, right in the thick ofa Europe reveling in its anti-Americanism.He had seen “the faces of the Communistcrowds surging and screaming before theAmerican Embassy” in Rome, and he hadseen “nothing but joy.” “Death to the Killersof the Rosenbergs!” the crowd had chanted,

before going off “to sit afterwards over abottle of wine, content with a good day’swork.” As for the Rosenbergs, well, theywere “unattractive and vindictive” but“human,” taking an interest in their children,“concerned with operations for tonsillitis andfamily wrangles.” But Fiedler was sorepulsed by the couple that he had difficultyfitting the Rosenbergs to a “human” story,so he went on to claim that they had in fact“dehumanized” themselves by becoming“official clichés,” even up to the moment oftheir death. “It is a parody of martyrdomthey give us, too absurd to be truly tragic,”he wrote. Commenting on the letters thecouple wrote to each other from theirseparate cells in Sing Sing prison, Fiedlerseemed affronted as much by EthelRosenberg’s literary style (or lack thereof) asby Julius’s failure to be sufficiently intimate

with his wife and accomplice. “We havegrown used to Communist spies lying incourt with all the conviction and fervour oftrue victims; there was the recent example ofAlger Hiss, to name only one;54 but we hadalways hoped that to their wives at least, indarkness and whispers, they spoke thetruth.” But they couldn’t speak in anythingother than code, even to each other, and so,Fiedler asked, as they were not “martyrs orheroes—or even human beings. . . . Whatwas there left to die?”55

Sidney Hook, when he saw proofs of thearticle, was alarmed. James T. Farrell hadonce said of Hook that “he submits theliving complex reality of history to a logicmachine, and chops it up. The way in whichhe practices ‘selective emphasis’ amounts toledgerdemaine [sic]. . . . All kinds ofproblems and contradictions . . . are going to

get in his hair, and he’ll have to wash themout.”56 Hook could quickly identify thesedefects in others if not in himself, and hewas sure that Fiedler’s analysis was going tostick in the Congress’s hair. Writing toKristol (who had sent him the proofs), hecounseled that the piece be run with thefollowing apologia: “These remarks shouldnot be construed as an attack against humanbeings who are dead—for we must respectthe dead as human beings—but the point isthat in their political life the Rosenbergsabandoned their role as human beings andput themselves forward as political symbols.We are therefore making an analysis not ofhuman personalities but of a politicalmyth.”57 A less succinct version of Hook’ssuggested addition did find its way intoFiedler’s text, but its impact was lost in anarticle which remained striking for its human

meanness.News of the Fiedler piece spread fast,

and within a week the entire print run of10,000 copies of Encounter’s first issue soldout (how many of these were advance“purchases” by the Foreign Office is notknown; according to Tom Braden, the CIAalso “paid circulation funds to get itaccepted”). Given the dearth of high-leveljournals in England, there was never anychance that Encounter’s debut would be metwith indifference. Now its name was oneverybody’s lips, and no dinner party passedwithout a heated discussion of its contents.Within days, the fallout began to reach theEncounter office in the form of a bulgingmailbag. From Christopher Isherwood camepraise for an “exciting and unstuffy” debut.Leonard Woolf wrote that he found everyarticle “above the average” and described

the Fiedler piece as “exceptionally good.”From a distance, Melvin Lasky deduced

that the Fiedler piece would guarantee abitter struggle for Encounter. Signs that thiswas the case appeared in a trio of lettersreceived by Spender on the morning ofOctober 22, 1953. Writing to Josselson,Spender quoted from E.M. Forster’s letter,which expressed particular resentment at theRosenberg article, “not for its factualfindings which may be correct, but for thecontempt and severity with which it treatsEthel Rosenberg’s last days. Most offensivewas the ‘compassionate’ ending with itsmysterious assertion that here was a humanbeing who had acted in a non-human fashionand who would be pardoned by the humanbeing who had written the article. I wonderhow he will act if he is ever condemned todeath?”58

Czesław Milosz didn’t like theRosenberg piece either, Spender toldJosselson. Worse still, T.S. Eliot, writing inanswer to Spender’s request for an article,said he had doubts about the effectivenessof Encounter, as it was so “obviouslypublished under American auspices.” If hewanted to say something to influenceAmerican opinion, wouldn’t he be better offsaying it in a paper published in America forAmerican consumption? “The point is thatEliot here states the kind of reputation wehave to try and live down of being amagazine disguising American propagandaunder a veneer of British culture,”59

Spender explained. Agreeing with HughGaitskell’s comment that “any politics wepublished would be suspect through peopleknowing that we had American support,”Spender concluded that “any direct anti-

Communist sentiments simply defeat theirown ends.” He went on to tell Josselson thathe found the letters “deeply disturbing,”adding, “As far as my own personal positionis concerned, the implied criticism that I amputting in articles which serve Americanpurposes is naturally very painful to me.”60

“There was a puerile anti-Americanism inEngland at that time,” said Natasha Spender.“Eminent, respectable people were full ofreactionary clichés about America being anadolescent country, and all that. AndStephen was constantly being criticized bythese people, who said they wouldn’t evenhave a copy of Encounter in their house,because it was so obviously ‘American.’And this made him very angry, because hewanted to defend those colleagues whom headmired from his time in America.”61

Fiedler, apparently, was one defense too

far for Spender. Monty Woodhouseremembered being “staggered” whenSpender “more or less exploded and said hewasn’t going to take part in a ‘propagandaexercise’ anymore. I assumed he shared myviews and the views of all of us on thedesirability of intellectual reaction to theCommunists. I thought it was intellectuallytoo simple for him to say he was beingfrustrated in some way.”62 Spender didacknowledge that the Rosenberg article hadnot offended everyone, and he defended itas “not at all propaganda.” But he wasdeeply worried that it was broadly regarded“as being the kind of Trojan Horsecontained within Encounter.”63

This, and more, was implied in AnthonyHartley’s review in the Spectator, whichclaimed to have detected “something of thepomposity of official culture” in the

magazine’s first issue, and remarked, “Itwould be a pity if Encounter, in its turn,were to become a mere weapon in the coldwar.”64 The Cambridge don and criticGraham Hough referred to Encounter as“that strange Anglo-American nursling” andclaimed it was not as free as it declared: “It’snot free from ‘obsession’ or ‘idées fixes,’ ”he said, adding that it had “a very oddconcept of culture indeed.” In a sideswipe atEncounter’s sponsors, he remarked that hedid “not like to contemplate the concept ofcultural freedom that could make it possibleto write or to print [the Fiedler] piece.”65

More mischievous was an item in theSunday Times “Atticus” column whichreferred to the magazine as “the police-review of American-occupied countries.”A.J.P. Taylor, writing in the Listener, simplyignored the fuss about the Rosenberg piece

to complain, “There is no article in thepresent number which will provoke anyreader to burn it or even to throw itindignantly into the waste-paper basket.None of the articles is politically subversive.. . . All are safe reading for children. Most ofthem are written by the elderly and theestablished.”66 “Have you seen Encounter?”Mary McCarthy asked Hannah Arendt. “It issurely the most vapid thing yet, like a collegemagazine got out by long-dead andputrefying undergraduates.”67

Privately, Spender told friends that hehad always been against running the Fiedlerpiece but had felt “he could not opposeKristol on everything in the first issue” andappreciated Kristol’s need to make his markin his new milieu. But he also confided thatthe Fiedler piece was as good a way as anyof “letting British readers know just how

awful a certain type of American intellectualcould be.”68 This echoed the view of HaroldRosenberg who, despairing at Fiedler’s lackof depth, wrote that the article had achievednothing beyond confirming the widely heldbelief that “everyone in America lives on abillboard.”

Just as Fiedler’s piece dividedEncounter’s readers, so it drove a wedgebetween its co-editors and broadened thegap between them. By March 1954,Spender was writing to Josselson tocomplain that Kristol never agreed to any ofhis suggestions, and that unless Kristolwould “admit his own ignorance” in certainmatters, Encounter risked losing the positionit had attained. He further accused Kristol ofrunning the magazine as if he, Spender, werenot there (indeed, for much of that year hewasn’t, as he had been, according to

Natasha Spender, “coerced by Josselson andNabokov” into undertaking a foreign tour onbehalf of the Congress): “I am writing to younow because I have complained dozens oftimes verbally to you without it having theslightest effect,” Spender admonishedKristol. “I must be certain that plans forimproving the magazine are not simplyblocked by your unwillingness to consultme, or anyone else.”69 Josselson took upSpender’s corner, writing frequently tochastise Kristol for ignoring advice andwarning him to improve the look of themagazine and “to offer the readerssomething worthwhile instead of the ‘crap’we have been offering them so far andwhich can only have hurt the magazine.”70

Within two years of Encounter’s launch,the Spender–Kristol relationship had frayedbeyond repair. “I find it impossible to work

with Irving because there is no basis and nomachinery for cooperating,” Spender toldJosselson. “I therefore think it would bequite dishonest to go on working with[him].”71 Whilst Josselson battled to resolvethe situation, another, more serious, problemarose.

13

The Holy Willies

Then let no cantankerous schismCorrupt this our catechism.

John Crowe Ransom, “Our Two Worthies”

The Rosenberg case had thrown up a painfuldilemma for America. When McCarthy’sminion Roy Cohn had publicly boasted tothe Europeans of his role in the prosecutionof the Rosenbergs, he had reinforced asuspicion that the trial was linked to theMcCarthy witch hunt. Although technicallyquite separate issues, the feeling spread inEurope that the two phenomena were

conflated.McCarthy emerged at a time when many

Europeans were alert to evidence of a“parallel nastiness” in America and theSoviet Union. “The poison blows across theAtlantic like some horrible prevailing wind,”1

wrote a young American diplomat’s wife inFrance at the height of McCarthy’scampaign. The senator from Wisconsincompensated for his meager intellect with aloud mouth and an inveterate dishonesty (hislimp, he claimed, was the result of a warwound, though actually it was acquired byslipping on a staircase). Mamaine Koestlerfound him repellent, describing him as “ahairy-pawed thug” (though she believed hewas doing a rather fine job of exposing“infiltrators”). Richard Rovere wrote that noother politician of the age had “surer, swifteraccess to the dark places of the American

mind.”2 By the early 1950s, McCarthy wasranting about “a great conspiracy, on a scaleso immense and an infamy so black as todwarf any previous venture in the history ofmen.” Encouraged by the trials of AlgerHiss, the Rosenbergs, and other pro-Sovietagents in the United States, whichcontributed some plausibility to his Orwellianfixations, Joe McCarthy even accusedGeneral George Catlett Marshall of servingKremlin policy. Under his hectoringchairmanship of the Senate Subcommitteeon Investigations, accusations and blacklistsbecame the order of the day. Arthur Millerwas given a prison sentence (later quashedon appeal). Lillian Hellman was blacklistedand dubbed the era the “Scoundrel Time.”

“Apart from I. F. Stone, whose four-page self-published weekly newsletterpersistently examined the issues without

obeying the rule that every question had tobe couched in anti-Communist declarations,there was no other journalist I can nowrecall who stood up to the high wind withouttrembling,” wrote Arthur Miller. “With thetiniest Communist Party in the world theU.S. was behaving as though on the verge ofbloody revolution.”3 Membership of theCommunist Party was some 31,000 in 1950,skidding to just a few thousand by 1956, themajority of whom were said to be FBIundercover agents. “I always believed theold adage that the FBI kept the CommunistParty alive through their dues payments oftheir agents,”4 said William Colby. For writerHoward Fast, “The Communist Party of theUnited States, in fact, at that moment, waspractically a branch of the JusticeDepartment.”5

Chrome tail fins on new Cadillacs, bobbysocks and Jell-O, hula hoops and Frigidaires,Chesterfields and food blenders, golf, UncleIke’s grin, Mamie’s hats: welcome to theNifty Fifties. This was the America of Lifemagazine, a place with a booming consumereconomy, a society at ease with itself. Butbehind this there was another America—brooding, dark, ill at ease; an America whereowning a Paul Robeson record could beconsidered an act of subversiveness; wherea school textbook called ExploringAmerican History, co-authored by a Yalehistorian, offered children the followingadvice: “The FBI urges Americans to reportdirectly to its offices any suspicions theymay have about Communist activity on thepart of their fellow Americans. The FBI isexpertly trained to sift out the truth of suchreports under the laws of our free nation.

When Americans handle their suspicions inthis way, rather than by gossip and publicity,they are acting in line with Americantraditions.”6 “Exalting young tattlers was amark of totalitarian societies, but it took theCold War to include informing among theinventory of ‘American traditions,’ ” wroteone historian.7 The tenor of this sullen moodwas registered in James Dean’sWeltschmerz, Marlon Brando’s nose-pickinginsouciance, Lenny Bruce’s verbal violence,early manifestations of what would laterbecome mass protest movements. But thesewere isolated moments, dark hints whichwere lost in the clamor of “official” culture,in the din of Mickey Spillane’s hate-filledand corrosive logorrhea or in the noisyexploits of Captain America, the Marvelcomics hero who had switched so easilyfrom battling Nazis to exposing Communists

and who now warned: “Beware, commies,spies, traitors, and foreign agents! CaptainAmerica, with all loyal, free men behindhim, is looking for you, ready to fight untilthe last one of you is exposed for the yellowscum you are!”8

This was the America of Roy Cohn andDavid Schine, McCarthy’s “dreadful duo.”One commentator described Cohn as“unspeakable,” Schine as “a gildedjackanapes.” Cohn was a brilliant lawyerwho got his law degree from Columbia whenhe was just nineteen, and at twenty-fivebecame McCarthy’s counsel on the HouseUn-American Activities Committee(HUAC). Highly ambitious and arrogant,Cohn wept every time he heard “The Star-Spangled Banner.” David Schine, the son ofa wealthy hotel magnate and educated atAndover and Harvard, was Cohn’s closest

friend. Schine loved nightclubs, fast cars,and attention. In early 1953, Cohn got him ajob on McCarthy’s subcommittee. Schinehad few qualifications except the authorshipof a nutty book called Definition ofCommunism, copies of which were placednext to Gideon’s Bibles in hotels owned byhis father.

In the spring of 1953, when the impactof the Rosenberg trial was exposing awidespread resentment at America’spresence in Europe, Cohn and Schineundertook an inspection tour of of America’sofficial information outposts. They arrived inthe wake of Stalin’s death, which wasannounced by the Kremlin on March 5. Buttheir next move was as powerful a reminderas any that the mental halitosis of Stalinismwas still abroad. After visiting United StatesInformation Agency (USIA) libraries in

seven countries, they announced that 30,000books of the 2 million on the shelves wereby “pro-Communist” writers and demandedtheir removal. The State Department, farfrom defending its libraries (which werevisited by 36 million people annually) issueda craven directive prohibiting any material,including paintings, by “any controversialpersons, Communists, fellow-travellers, etcetera.” Thus, with Kafkaesque vagueness,were the works of hundreds of Americanwriters and artists consigned to the dustbinof politics.

There followed a volley of telegramsbetween the State Department and all USIAmissions (Berlin, Bremen, Düsseldorf,Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich, Hanover,Stuttgart, Freiburg, Nuremberg, Paris) as thebook-banning gathered pace: “Remove allSartre volumes from all Amerika Hauser

collections.” “All books by following listedauthors to be removed: Hammett, Dashiell;Kay, Helen; Weltfish, Gene; Hughes,Langston; Seaver, Edwin; Stern, Bernhard;Fast, Howard.” “Remove all (repeat all)works of following listed individuals: Abt,John; Julius, J.; Singer, Marcus; Witt,Nathan.” “All works by the followingauthors are hereby ordered removed:Dubois, W. E. B.; Foster, William; Gorki,Maksim [sic]; Lysenko, Trofim; Reed, John;Smedley, Agnes.”9 Herman Melville washarpooned, and all books illustrated byRockwell Kent were withdrawn. On April20, 1953, the U.S. Embassy in Paris cabledthe Department of State: “The followingbooks have been withdrawn from the USIAlibrary in Paris and in the provinces: HowardFast, The Proud and the Free, TheUnvanquished, Conceived in Liberty;

Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man; TheodoreHaff, Charlie Chaplin; Langston Hughes,Weary Blues, Ways of White Folks, Big Sea,Fields of Wonder, Montage of a DreamDeferred, Not Without Laughter, Histoiresdes Blancs.”10

American cultural prestige was beingground underfoot as government agenciesand missions truckled to McCarthy. Theaverage number of titles shipped abroad byUSIA in 1953 plunged from 119,913 to 314.Many books removed from libraries hadbeen burned under the Nazis. Committed tothe pyre for a second time were ThomasMann’s The Magic Mountain, Tom Paine’sSelected Works, Albert Einstein’s Theory ofRelativity, Sigmund Freud’s writings, HelenKeller’s Why I Became a Socialist, and JohnReed’s Ten Days That Shook the World.Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” was

banned by the United States at the sametime as it was outlawed by Maoist China.Seemingly unstoppable, the McCarthy-inspired cultural cleansing bankruptedAmerica’s claims to be the harbinger offreedom of expression.

Nobel Prize winner and famed anti-NaziThomas Mann now found that his Americancitizenship offered less than the hoped-forprotection from the totalitarian impulses hehad escaped. Denounced by theMcCarthyites for being soft on Communismand labeled “America’s Fellow-TravelerNumber One” by Plain Talk magazine, helonged to leave America, which he called“an air-conditioned nightmare.”11 Anotherprize for Cohn and Schine was DashiellHammett, who in 1951 served twenty-twoweeks of a six-month jail sentence forrefusing to identify the contributors to the

Civil Rights Bail Fund, which had been setup to provide bail for arrested Communists.In 1953, he was called to testify atMcCarthy’s Senate PermanentInvestigations Subcommittee, where heagain refused to name names, this timeinvoking the Fifth Amendment. Cohn andSchine now demanded the removal of all hisbooks from State Department libraries. WithThe Adventures of Sam Spade taken off theradio by NBC, Hammett was deprived of hismain source of income. Having fought forAmerica in two world wars, he died inpoverty in 1961. In spite of FBI efforts toprevent it, he was buried at his own requestin Arlington National Cemetery.12

Most of the living authors banned underState Department directives were also thesubjects of voluminous—and oftenridiculous—files at J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

The activities and movements of RobertSherwood, Archibald MacLeish, MalcolmCowley (in whose file Sidney Hook wasnamed as the FBI’s informant), John CroweRansom, Allen Tate, Howard Fast, F.O.Matthiessen, Langston Hughes, and ofcourse all the old bêtes noires from theWaldorf Astoria conference were monitored.When Ernest Hemingway complained to hisfriends that he was under surveillance by theFBI, they thought he was losing touch withreality. His file, released in the mid-1980sand running to 113 pages, confirmedHemingway’s suspicions: he was followed,tapped, and harassed by Hoover’s men forover twenty-five years. Shortly before hetook his life, and suffering from deepdepression, Hemingway checked into a clinicin Minnesota under an assumed name. Apsychiatrist at the clinic contacted the FBI to

check that there were no objections toHemingway registering himself in this way.13

The file on poet William Carlos Williamsdescribes him as “a sort of absent mindedprofessor type” who uses “an“expressionistic” style which “might beinterpreted as being ‘code.’ ” This wasenough to ensure that when Williams wasappointed Consultant in Poetry to theLibrary of Congress in 1952, he did notserve because he failed the security test (thepost remained vacant until 1956). The poetLouis Untermeyer was placed on the FBI’sSecurity Index (which classified him as anational security risk) in 1951.14 Shortlyafterward, Untermeyer locked himself in hisapartment, refusing to come out for almost ayear and a half, hostage to an“overwhelming and paralyzing fear.”15 The

essayist Murray Kempton believed thatHoover was “stark, raving mad” andimagined that his “nights were haunted bythe suspicion that somewhere there might besomeone who didn’t revere him.”16

Discussing the problem of culturalcensorship on July 10, 1953, Eisenhower’scabinet concluded weakly that “we cannotscreen without looking like a fool or a Nazi.Can be done quietly if enough time andintemperate souls were taken out. Definiteintention now to select new books toconform with law.”17 This was hardly therobust response needed. Letters wereflooding in to American posts all overEurope, criticizing the book banning. TheBritish—who had taken the decision to leavecopies of Mein Kampf on the shelves ofGerman libraries after the war “until itbecomes a joke”—took a very dim view.

Part of the problem was that Eisenhower,instead of getting down in the mud withMcCarthy, thought he could eclipse him withhis own anti-Communist crusade, a strategyendorsed by his secretary of state, JohnFoster Dulles. McCarthy, meanwhile, hadhis doubts even about Eisenhower. Rumorswere circulating that, under Ike’s supremecommand in postwar Europe, there hadbeen massive penetration of Americangovernment offices—especially in Germany—by Communists. Surprisingly, it wasNicolas Nabokov who fanned the flames ofthis allegation, feeding information to theAlsop brothers about the seriousness of theinfiltration, claiming that the CommunistFifth Column had virtually controlled theEisenhower command.

Also under attack was the StateDepartment’s Voice of America. As

McCarthy staged televised hearings featuringwild tales of Communist penetration ofAmerica’s foreign broadcast service,employees who had helped build the serviceup were summarily sacked. In March 1953,a Voice of America producer called down tothe music library for a recording of the“Song of India” but was told by the librarianhe couldn’t have it, as “it’s by Rimsky-Korsakov, and we’re supposed not to useanything by Russians.”

McCarthy’s attacks on the StateDepartment were relentless and culminatedin the accusation that Dean Acheson—“thispompous diplomat in striped pants with aphony British accent”—was “coddlingcommunists.” The charge that Acheson, thearchitect of the Truman Doctrine, was softon Communism rang a little hollow.McCarthy himself most likely didn’t believe

it. But the fact that Acheson waxed hismustache and bought his suits in Savile Rowwas a real indictment. Like Mussolini beforehim, McCarthy was an autarchist—hewanted “Made in America.” His was thevoice of the yahoos who rejected theAnglicized values of people like Acheson.McCarthyism was a movement—or amoment—fired with populist resentmentagainst the establishment. In turn,McCarthy’s vulgar demagoguery wasreceived as an insult by the ruling elite. Herepresented what A.L. Rowse in Englandscorned as “the Idiot People”; he offendedBrahmin taste, which recoiled at mediocrity,hick mentality, the dreaded midcult. Politicalmandarins like the Alsop brothers, Josephand Stewart, viewed McCarthy as “aheartland populist stirring up passions againstthe country’s foreign policy elite. . . . They

also viewed [his] attack on the StateDepartment as an attack on theinternationalist philosophy that had guidedAmerican foreign policy since the end of thewar. Nobody was saying it explicitly, but itseemed clear to the brothers that ifMcCarthy succeeded in bringing down theDepartment’s internationalists, the resultwould be a new wave of isolationism.”18

“Nearly every liberal in the federalgovernment was viewed with suspicion,”said Lyman Kirkpatrick, who served as CIAinspector general during the McCarthyperiod. “It had something of the atmospherethat must have been present during theFrench Revolution when denunciations andtrials led to the guillotine. While there wasno guillotine in Washington, there wasperhaps an even worse fate in thedestruction of an individual’s career, and the

wrecking of his life.”19 Having permanentlydamaged the morale of the StateDepartment, McCarthy turned an eyetowards the CIA, a “major and much moreimportant target, particularly from the pointof view of getting him greater personalpublicity.”20

It was those “internationalists” groupedaround the CIA’s International OrganizationsDivision who had the most to lose. By late1952, McCarthy’s suspicions had transferredto Braden’s outfit, after the senator learnedthat it had “granted large subsidies to pro-Communist organizations.”21 This was acritical moment: McCarthy’s unofficial anti-Communism was on the verge of disrupting,perhaps sinking, the CIA’s most elaborateand effective network of Non-CommunistLeft fronts. “One of the oddities of the

CIA’s venture in cultural politics was thatwhat it did should have been done openlyand publicly through the United StatesInformation Agency, or some other suchbody,” explained Arthur Schlesinger. “Thereason it couldn’t be was because of JoeMcCarthy, because if Joe McCarthy knewthat the U.S. government was funding Non-Communist Left magazines, and socialistand Catholic trade unions, that would havecaused great trouble. So it was in order toavoid McCarthy that the CIA did thesethings in a covert way.”22 “It all had to beoff the budget,” said one CIA officerattached to the Congress for CulturalFreedom, “as none of this would ever havegot through Congress. Imagine the ridiculoushowlings that would’ve gone up: ‘They’re allCommunists! They’re homosexuals!’ orwhatever.”23

“A lot of these covert operationsironically were placed at risk because ofMcCarthy, who threatened at one point toblow their cover because, from hisperspective, this was an American agency,the CIA, going into cahoots with lefties,”explained historian Kai Bird. “It was anembarrassment, it was discrediting the ideathat America was a sophisticated,democratic society capable of having arational political debate. But it was alsothreatening to blow major intelligenceoperations that had long-term implicationsfor building a political consensus andkeeping Western Europe within NATO andwithin a Western alliance.”24

With McCarthy’s bloodhounds sniffingaround the Agency’s Non-Communist Leftprogram, the CIA needed to recede as far aspossible into the background. But at this

critical moment, the American Committeefor Cultural Freedom opened its mouth. Inearly March 1952, the committee held aclosed meeting to discuss what its responseto McCarthy should be. It was immediatelyapparent that the committee was hopelesslydivided. James T. Farrell and DwightMacdonald were in no doubt about thedangers of McCarthyism. “The Stalinistmenace is largely licked in America,although not on the world plane,” arguedFarrell. “But we are seeing the developmentof a group of McCarthyite intellectuals.”25

He went on to define McCarthyism as“know-nothingism,” as an undue pressure toconformity and orthodoxy. Macdonaldoffered two positions: “the ‘pure’ one . . .which means making no distinction betweenCommunists and non-Communists inmatters of civil rights and cultural freedom;

and the ‘impure’ one, which meansdefending only people . . . who are penalizedon false or unproven charges ofCommunism.”26 He hoped the committeewould take the former position but thought itshould at least take the latter. Bertram Wolfecountered that “the dangers in Americatoday are a direct result of ‘our’ failure to dothe job of exposing Stalinists. If we don’t doit, the ‘men with clubs’ will.”27

Another member warned the committeeagainst its “tendency to attach itself toready-made controversies and then take the‘official’ position . . . it has fallen into therole of defending the present line of thegovernment. What it should be concernedwith is discovering new problems and issues.The others will be taken care of by a vastpropaganda machine.”28 Supporting this

view was Richard Rovere, associate editorof the New Yorker, who said, “It is clearlyour job to let the country know and letEurope know that it is possible to be againstMcCarthyism as well as against Communisttotalitarianism. The main problem here isthat politics are beginning to determineculture.”29 But Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell,Clement Greenberg, and William Phillips,speaking for the majority view, refused tosupport a general condemnation ofMcCarthy.

Writing to Hannah Arendt with news ofthese divergent positions, Mary McCarthyrevealed that she had “got an intimation ofthe Hook group’s line, which seems to bethat the goings-on of McCarthy . . . are notwithin the province of a committee forcultural freedom.”30 She had also been told,in confidence, “that the Committee,

acknowledging that there is really noCommunist menace here, is principallyinterested in raising funds to fightCommunism in Western Europe, or, rather,to fight neutralism, which is taking first placeas a Menace. This was proffered [to] me as‘between ourselves.’ ”31 On the other hand,continued Mary McCarthy, there was afeeling that “the great thing to be combatedwas a relapse into neutralism over here.That if Hook and Co. relaxed their effortsfor a moment, stalinism would reassert itselfin government and education, culminating inappeasement abroad. I couldn’t tell whetherthis was a genuine fear (it seems sofantastic) or a rationalization. I can’t believethat these people seriously think thatstalinism on a large scale is latent here, readyto revive at the slightest summons. . . . Theylive in terror of a revival of the situation that

prevailed in the thirties, when the fellow-travelers were powerful in teaching,publishing, the theatre, etc., when stalinismwas the gravy-train and these people wereoff it and became the object of social slights,small economic deprivations, gossip andbackbiting. These people, who are success-minded, think in terms of group-advancement and cultural monopoly andwere really traumatized by the brief stalinistapogee of the thirties. . . . In their dreams,this period is always recurring; it is ‘realer’than today. Hence they scarcely notice thedeteriorating actuality and minimize SenatorMcCarthy as not relevant.”32

To date, the split in the AmericanCommittee over McCarthyism had beenkept relatively private. But on March 29, itaired its divisions publicly in an open debatesponsored by the committee entitled “In

Defense of Free Culture,” which was staged,appropriately enough, in the Starlight Roomof the Waldorf Astoria. In the morningsession, Dwight Macdonald, MaryMcCarthy, and Richard Rovere spoke outagainst Senator McCarthy. But in theafternoon, Max Eastman, the darling of theAmerican left in the early 1930s, delivered aspeech which showed how complete theprocess of deradicalization could be.Denying there was a witch hunt going on, heaccused the Communists and their fellowtravelers of inventing the term as “a smeartactic.” “As a half-burned witch from thosehysterical days,” said Eastman, “I beg toassure you that what you call a witch-hunt ischild’s play at a Sunday School picniccompared to what American people can dowhen they really get going.”33 He went on toaccuse the national executive of “failing us in

[the] struggle against infiltration by theenemies of freedom,” and for good measurehe leveled the same charge at FreedomHouse, Americans for Democratic Action,and the American Civil Liberties Union (ofwhich he was a member), denouncing themall as so many “fuzzy-minded liberals who,in the name of cultural freedom, are givingtheir best help to an armed enemy bent ondestroying every freedom throughout theworld.”34

Some reports say the audience wasstunned; some say it was jubilant. In hisspeech that morning, Richard Rovere hadtaken Irving Kristol to task for seldomcoming out “with the kind of blunt truthabout McCarthy that he wishes other peopleto speak about the Communists.” He hadaccused McCarthy of having “as low aregard for the truth as any Soviet historian”

and concluded gloomily that “the certain,and perhaps inevitable, truth is that the HolyWillies are on the march everywheretoday.”35 Now, according to Max Eastman,such sentiments simply indicated thatRovere was himself a sucker for Sovietpropaganda.

After the meeting, Rovere wrote toSchlesinger expressing his desolation atEastman’s outburst and begged him to dosomething about it. Who did Schlesingerturn to? Frank Wisner. Schlesinger laterrecalled, rather improbably, that although hehad known of the CIA’s initial investment inthe Berlin launch of the Congress forCultural Freedom, he had thereafter“assumed that the foundations were paying.Like everybody else, I thought they werebona fide. . . . I didn’t know it was CIApaying for it all.” Half a century later,

Schlesinger was still reticent about anyformal relationship with the CIA in thismatter: “Sometimes I’d meet Frank Wisnerat Joe Alsop’s house, and he would ask mein a kind of social way what was happeningat the American Committee, and I would tellhim.”36 So presumably it was in the form ofa “social” gesture that Schlesinger wrote toWisner on April 4, 1952, together withcertain enclosures “all of which,” notedWisner, “present a rather alarmingpicture.”37 In response to Schlesinger’scommunication, Wisner penned an internalmemo, “Reported Crisis in the AmericanCommittee for Cultural Freedom,” which isextraordinarily revealing and worth quotingin full:

CIA memo from Deputy Director,Plans (Wisner) to Deputy Assistant

Director for Policy Coordination re:Reported Crisis in the ACCF

1. Attached hereto is a letterdated 4 April from ArthurSchlesinger Jr. to myself, togetherwith certain enclosures, all of whichpresent a rather alarming picture. Ihad not heard about thesedevelopments prior to my receipt ofSchlesinger’s letter, and I am mostanxious to have an OPC evaluationof this matter, which very well maynot be a tempest in a teapot.

2. My offhand reaction to thismess is that the position of neitherthe pro-McCarthyites or anti-McCarthyites is the correct one fromour standpoint, and that it is mostunfortunate that the matter evercame up in such a way as to bring it

to this kind of head. I can understandhow an American committee forcultural freedom, standing alone, andbeing in fact a group of Americanprivate citizens interested in culturalfreedom, would feel that it wouldhave to take a position onMcCarthyism. However, that is notthe nature of the AmericanCommittee for Cultural Freedomwhich, according to my recollection,was inspired if not put together bythis Agency for the purpose ofproviding cover and backstopping forthe European effort. If such is thecase, we are stuck with theCommittee in that we have aninescapable responsibility for itsconduct, its actions and its publicstatements. Under the circumstances

the raising of the issue ofMcCarthyism, whether to condemn itor to support it, was a seriousmistake in my opinion. The reason issimply that this injects us into anextremely hot American domesticpolitical issue, and is sure to get usinto trouble and to bring down on ourheads criticism for interference in amatter that is none of our concernwhatsoever.

3. If you agree with the foregoinganalysis and reaction, we shouldconsider promptly what should bedone now that the fat is in the fire. Ifit were possible to do so, it would bemy thought that the entire debate onthis subject, from the beginning, beexpunged from the record and thematter thus laid to rest. I know that

this will not satisfy either faction, butit might be possible for us to putacross to the members of bothfactions that we are talking aboutEurope and the world outside theU.S., and that we should stick to ourlast—and that if we do not do so theentire effort will be exposed and shotdown because of our involvement indomestic political issues. An appealto unity and concord and thepreservation of this valuable effortmight be successful. In any case it isthe only approach that I can thinkof.38

The significance of the memo ismanifold. It shows Arthur Schlesingeralerting Frank Wisner to developments in theAmerican Committee which he, Schlesinger,

finds disturbing (Schlesinger had earliercomplained to Nabokov that the organizationwas riddled with “neurotic” anti-Communists and was becoming “aninstrument for these bastards”39). It revealsthe origins of that committee, whichadvertised itself as a “free” and“independent” body, as a “backstop”40 for alarger CIA effort in Western Europe. Itshows that Wisner was in no doubt as to theAgency’s responsibility for the AmericanCommittee’s conduct, actions, and publicstatements. Because it was created by theAgency, the question of its freedom to doand say as it wanted was, to Wisner’s mind,academic. If it were indeed what it said itwas—an independent group of privatecitizens—then it could do what it wanted.But it wasn’t what it said it was: it was partof Wisner’s Wurlitzer, and as such it could

be expected to play the right tune or, ifnecessary, remain silent. Legally, of course,the CIA had no right to interfere in thebusiness of a domestic organization. Wisneradmits as much in the memo.

Further, that Wisner could write so freelyof “expunging the record” offers a disturbingpicture of the CIA’s attitude to such groups.The Agency had a power of veto over itsfront activities, and Wisner was nowadvocating the use of that veto. Also clearfrom the memo is the fact that Wisner felthe had a direct line into the AmericanCommittee, which he now wanted toactivate to persuade both factions within thegroup to forget their differences and dropthe subject of McCarthyism altogether.

“The American Committee for CulturalFreedom was just a front in order to createthe impression of some American

participation in the European operation,”said Tom Braden. “When they startedraising the McCarthy issue, oh God, wasthat embarrassing, especially for Allen[Dulles]. That was a good enough reasonwhy there shouldn’t be an AmericanCommittee, certainly in Allen’s mind. Hewould’ve been aghast at such publicacknowledgment of someone in theCongress for Cultural Freedom opposingMcCarthy. He of course hated McCarthy,but he knew you gotta handle him with very,very delicate kid gloves: don’t cross him orget him involved in anything. The idea thatpeople like Burnham or Schlesinger—peopleof that stature—would be getting up andmaking a big stink about McCarthy wasreally out of the question, at least in Allen’smind.”41

Plainly, it was a matter of policy that the

Congress for Cultural Freedom and itsaffiliates leave McCarthyism well alone, asone English activist later recalled: “It wasclearly understood that we must not criticizethe American government, or theMcCarthyism which was then at its height inthe U.S.”42 This was one of the mattersdiscussed by de Neufville and MontyWoodhouse in their “operations andmethods” meetings and complemented aForeign Office directive to the InformationResearch Department that none of itsactivities “should appear to be attacking theUnited States in any way.” Encounter’scontribution to the subject of McCarthyismshould be viewed in this context. It generallymanaged to avoid the issue altogether, andwhen it did examine it, the tone was farfrom condemnatory. In an essay ofextraordinary obfuscation, Tosco Fyvel

ventured that the mood in America whichattended the rise of McCarthy was akin tothe mood of England in 1914, when “acentury of English security crumbled.” “Thecold hate for the enemy (the Hun),passionate faith in the justice of Britain’scause, angry intolerance towards socialists,pacificists, other dissenters”—these, arguedFyvel, were emotions comparable toAmerica’s “abrupt loss of [its] sense ofsecurity” on the day peace broke out in1945, with the “inaugural of the new atomic-bomb age, and with the Soviet Unionlooming up as a powerful opponent.” Allthat had followed had been an attempt,albeit “painful,” to adjust. AlthoughMcCarthy was to be regretted, he had to beviewed in the context of America’s “insistentsearch for new national security, for a world,indeed, made safe for democracy.” This,

concluded Fyvel, was infinitely preferable to“European weariness, and scepticism of anysuch achievement.”43

The idea that Europeans hadfundamentally misunderstood thecircumstances surrounding McCarthyismwas taken up by Leslie Fiedler, who arguedthat it was wrong to assume, as did so many“vague anti-capitalists all over the world,”that “because McCarthy bellows againstCommunist infiltration, this is sufficientproof that the whole idea is absurd.”Assuming “innocence by association,” thesepeople rushed to defend anyone who wasaccused by McCarthy. Dismissing as“comedy” claims that Americans wereconstantly “twittering back and forth” in fearof McCarthy, Fiedler concluded that theWisconsin senator was a windmill againstwhom it was futile to “waste one’s blows”

when there were “real monsters” to befought.44

The “lesser evil” card was also playedby the young British conservative PeregrineWorsthorne, who announced in theNovember 1954 issue of Encounter that“America has a chequered past, and will nodoubt have a chequered future, and thesooner we accept this inevitable fact thesooner we will be able to take full advantageof her manifold blessings without harping onthe blemishes. Legend created an AmericanGod. The God has failed. But unlike theCommunist God which, on closerexamination, turned out to be a devil, theAmerican God has just become human.”45

Encounter is rightly remembered for itsunflinching scrutiny of cultural curtailment inthe Communist bloc. But its mitigation ofMcCarthyism was less clear-sighted: where

the journal could see the beam in itsopponent’s eye, it failed to detect the motein its own.

Surely it was to be expected that thosewho claimed to honor the cause of freedomshould find a way to deplore that whichassaulted or dishonored it? The AmericanCommittee had been right to raise the issueof McCarthyism, and the CIA was at faultfor trying to suppress the debate. But Wisnerwas not a man to be delayed by suchniceties. In his memo, he had suggested thatan “appeal to unity and concord and thepreservation of this valuable effort might besuccessful.” This appeal was swiftlyorganized. Nabokov’s letter to ArthurSchlesinger, written in the fullness ofpreparations for the Paris “Masterpieces”festival in April 1952, echoes Wisner’smemo with uncanny precision: “Frankly, I

would deplore a split in the AmericanCommittee. It would endanger the work ofthe Congress, and our French Organization,to an incalculable degree,” he warned. “Itshould be made clear to Europeans thatMcCarthy is a man, not a movement.46. . . Iam convinced that we must attack theindividual actions and methods ofMcCarthy, but I question the utility and thelogic of resolutions against ‘McCarthyism,’which would tend to imply, at least forEuropeans, that McCarthy represents anauthentic popular movement in the UnitedStates.” Nabokov went on to urgeSchlesinger “to do everything you can toprevent a split in the American Committee. Icannot put my conviction strongly enoughthat such a rupture would virtually representa death blow to our work here.”47

Case officer Lee Williams revealed that

if there were problems with Congresscommittees or affiliates or editors steppingtoo far out of line, then one way of gettingthe Agency’s veto in place without it beingseen as such was to leapfrog all thebureaucracy and get a message directly tothe offenders from someone “on high”within the Congress structure.48 This jobusually fell to Julius Fleischmann, who onone famous occasion warned the editors ofEncounter that their funding might bejeopardized if they insisted on running acontroversial article. Nabokov appears tohave assumed a similar function, both hereover the question of the AmericanCommittee’s intrusion into the McCarthyminefield and on future occasions. EitherNabokov was “positioned” to intercede insuch instances without his knowing at whosebehest or, more likely, he did so wittingly.

“If we had fought back from thebeginning instead of running away, thesethings would not be happening now,”49

wrote John Steinbeck at the height of theMcCarthy crusade. “The terrible thing is thatmany of those victimized, and the Americanpeople as a whole, accepted this sentence ofGuilty,” wrote John Henry Faulk. “Theyaccepted the right of vigilantes to bringcharges, to make the decision and topronounce the sentence. And we all keptquiet. We felt that silence would make ussafe.”50

Whilst Soviet writers and artists werepersecuted on a scale which does not, andcannot, bear comparison with the McCarthycampaign in America, both scenarios sharedsimilar elements. A visit by the Alsopbrothers to “the McCarthy lair on CapitolHill” contained all the motifs of the Soviet

nightmare, with McCarthy himself bearingmore than a passing resemblance to aStalinist apparatchik or secret policeman.“The anteroom is generally full of furtive-looking characters who look as though theymight be suborned State Departmentmen,”51 the Alsops wrote. “McCarthyhimself, despite a creeping baldness and acontinual tremor which makes his headshake in a disconcerting fashion, isreasonably well cast as the Hollywoodversion of a strong-jawed private eye. Avisitor is likely to find him with his heavyshoulders hunched forward, a telephone inhis huge hands, shouting cryptic instructionsto some mysterious ally. ‘Yeah, yeah. I canlisten, but I can’t talk. Get me? Yeah? Youreally got the goods on this guy?’ Thesenator glances up to note the effect of thisdrama on his visitor. ‘Yeah? Well, I tell you.

Just mention this sort of casual to NumberOne, and get his reaction. Okay?’ Thedrama is heightened by a significant bit ofstage business. For as Senator McCarthytalks he sometimes strikes the mouthpiece ofhis telephone with a pencil. As Washingtonfolklore has it, this is supposed to jar theneedle off any concealed listening device. Inshort, while the State Department fears thatSenator McCarthy’s friends are spying on it,Senator McCarthy apparently fears that theState Department’s friends are spying onhim.”52

Here was the rationale for Wisner’smemo: the reason for stopping the debatewas because McCarthy was breeding a“miasma of neurotic fear and internalsuspicion,” and outside the United Statesthis threatened the very fundamentals of theCIA’s efforts to achieve convergence with

the Non-Communist Left.But within the conservative element of

the American Committee, the Alsop accountwas dismissed as the product of a feveredimagination. “There are some, who shouldknow better, who have asserted that wewere going through the worst period ofpolitical terror and hysteria in our history,”wrote Sidney Hook. “This description of thepresent state of America [is] a fantasticexaggeration of the facts.”53 Kristol, too,mocked claims that McCarthyism wascreating “an atmosphere of dread.”Answering Arthur Miller’s claim thatBroadway was suffering from the “knuckle-headedness of McCarthyism” with its“Congressional investigations of politicalunorthodoxy,” Kristol wrote in the New YorkTimes that Miller was guilty of “expressingabsurdities.”54 In 1953, Kristol stated

famously that “there is one thing theAmerican people know about SenatorMcCarthy; he, like them, is unequivocallyanti-Communist. About the spokesmen forAmerican liberalism, they feel they know nosuch thing.” At the same time, StephenSpender concluded gloomily, “Every nowand then an American writer crosses himselfwith a pious anti-communist sentiment, andone suspects that instead of saying AveMaria, he is really saying Ave McCarthy.”55

Josselson had been against setting up theAmerican Committee from the verybeginning, and in the wake of the McCarthy“flap,” he felt vindicated. Braden, too, hadconsidered it unwise, saying later: “I think itwas Sidney Hook’s idea, but I thought it wasa mistake. It seemed to me it was setting upa rival organization to the Congress in Paris,and also it would be full of hardliners. Some

of the American Committee people werepretty close in character to McCarthy.Worse, these were people who had access tothe ears of influential people in the StateDepartment, and this could create problemsfor the Agency.”56 Despite thesereservations, Frank Wisner had managed toconvince Allen Dulles, then still deputydirector for operations, that an Americanbranch of the Congress for CulturalFreedom was an unavoidable necessity. Itwas, said Melvin Lasky later (and perhaps atthe time?), “part of the endemic, integralnature of the covert thing. The Agencycouldn’t participate in domestic affairs, andyet you had to have an Americancommittee. How could you not? It would’vebeen an inexplicable anomaly. You sayyou’re international, so where are theAmericans? It would’ve been like going into

a prize fight with only one glove. It was theweakest side of this covert thing, but youhad to have it. How not?”57

However, faced with the committee’sdisintegration in a public display of acrimonyand recrimination over whether or not tooppose McCarthy, Josselson and his CIAsuperiors had real reason to be concerned.The danger was that if the AmericanCommittee folded, it would regroup underthe same name, but without the moderatewing represented by Schlesinger and Rovereand their “sensible” friends. The last thingJosselson needed was a hard-line pressuregroup quite at odds with the Europeaneffort.

Those who expected the AmericanCommittee to defend cultural freedom fromthe depredations of McCarthyism weredisappointed. “Its wishy-washy stand on this

question caused the Congress muchembarrassment throughout the world,”58

Josselson later said. It did publish a book,McCarthy and the Communists by MidgeDecter and James Rorty, but its main attackwas aimed at McCarthy’s lazy methodsrather than his pursuit of allegedCommunists. Appearing in 1954, it was abelated and rather ambiguous contribution(that it was published at all provoked JamesBurnham to lead a walkout of theconservative wing of the AmericanCommittee; at about the same time,Burnham also ended his lifelong associationwith Partisan Review). That the AmericanCommittee for Cultural Freedom, likeEncounter, sought to deny or minimize therisks to culture of McCarthy is a troublinglegacy. Depressed by the lack of anysustained analysis of the problem, Mary

McCarthy wrote to Hannah Arendt of hervision of a “curious amalgam of leftelements, anarchist elements, nihilistelements, opportunist elements, all stylingthemselves conservative, in a regularNarrenschiffe [ship of fools]. . . . The greateffort of this new Right is to get itselfaccepted as normal . . . and this, it seems tome, must be scotched, if it’s not already toolate.”59

While Senator McCarthy planned his assaulton the CIA, Allen Dulles took over as itsdirector. Unlike his brother John FosterDulles, whose “Black Protestantism” andaggressive anti-Communism restrained himfrom challenging McCarthy, Allen Dulleswas determined to prevent a “jumped-uphack from Wisconsin” from destroying theAgency. He warned his employees that he

would fire anyone who went to McCarthywithout his personal authorization. SomeCIA personnel had already receivedmysterious phone calls from McCarthy’sassociates, who included a shady Baltimorefigure called Ulius Amoss, a GreekAmerican who had been booted out of theOSS (itself quite an achievement) and nowran a private intelligence agency called theInternational Services of InformationFoundation, which McCarthy quietlysubcontracted to dig up the dirt on CIAstaffers. Suddenly, Agency personnel werebeing told by anonymous callers that “it wasknown that they drank too much, or werehaving an ‘affair,’ and the caller would makeno issue of this if they would come aroundand tell everything they knew about theAgency” to a McCarthy devotee.60

But Amoss proved he could not handle

the opening of an envelope, much less aserious investigation into members of theespionage establishment. McCarthy’s firstshot—an attack on William Bundy in July1953—blew up in his face. Bundy, amember of the CIA’s Board of NationalEstimates (and Dean Acheson’s son-in-law),had contributed $400 to the Alger Hissdefense fund. This, deduced McCarthy,meant that Bundy must be a Communist. “Ijust happened to be in Allen’s office whenthis came up,” recalled Tom Braden, “andBundy was there. Allen told him, ‘Get out ofhere, and I’ll deal with it.’ Bundy took a fewdays’ leave, and Allen went directly toEisenhower and said he wasn’t going to fuckabout with this mess from Wisconsin.”61

Dulles actually told the president he wouldresign unless McCarthy’s attacks werestopped.

This, finally, is what seems to haveprompted Eisenhower to action. After VicePresident Richard Nixon was dispatched topressurize McCarthy into dropping his plansfor a public investigation, the senatorsuddenly became “convinced” that “it wouldnot be in the public interest to hold publichearings on the CIA, that that perhaps couldbe taken care of administratively.”62 Thistook the form of a compromise wherebyMcCarthy agreed to make his complaintsagainst the Agency in the privacy of AllenDulles’s office. Bringing with him lists ofalleged “homosexuals” and “rich men” inCIA employ, he demanded a vast internalpurge of the CIA. If Dulles failed to comply,McCarthy threatened to pursue a publicinvestigation. “The pressure took its toll.Security standards were tightened. In onecase, the CIA’s loss was Hollywood’s gain.

A young political science graduate with aclassic New York accent called Peter Falk[of Columbo fame] applied for entrance tothe CIA’s training program in 1953, but hisapplication was rejected because he hadonce belonged to a left-wing union.”63

The employees of Braden’s IOD weresubject to special scrutiny because of theiralleged political liberalism. Braden’s directorof trade union operations was fired becausehe had briefly belonged to the YoungCommunist League in the 1930s. But worsewas to come. In late August 1953, Bradenwas sailing in Maine with Richard Bissell,who had taken a short break from his job atthe Ford Foundation to enjoy his yacht theSea Witch. While anchored in PenobscotBay, Braden received an urgent messageinforming him that the McCarthyites haddiscovered “a red” at the Agency. The man

in question was Braden’s deputy CordMeyer Jr., who had been recruited by AllenDulles in 1951. With Dulles and Braden bothaway on vacation, there was nothing tostand between Meyer’s pants and the forceof McCarthy’s boot. He was suspendedwithout pay pending a security investigationand found himself rereading Kafka’s TheTrial, understanding as never before “theplight of his bewildered hero, who couldnever discover why or by whom he hadbeen accused.”64

Cord Meyer wasn’t red. He wasn’t evenpink. Among the charges listed in a three-page document was the fact that he hadonce shared a lecture platform with HarlowShapley, a Harvard astronomer known forhis leftist political views. Also noted wasMeyer’s association with the NationalCouncil of the Arts, Sciences and

Professions, which had been cited as aCommunist front by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Both allegedcrimes dated to the immediate postwar yearswhen Meyer had been a leader of theAmerican Veterans’ Committee, a liberalorganization designed to offer an alternativeto the ultra-conservative American Legion,and a founder of the United WorldFederalists, which called for worldgovernment and was more utopian thanliberal.

“My immediate boss, Tom Braden, wasconsistently supportive and encouraged meto believe that there was never any doubtthat I would be able to clear myself,”65

Meyer later wrote. And indeed, there wasnever any real chance that McCarthy’scharges would stick. On Thanksgiving Day1953, two months after his suspension,

Meyer received a telephone call from AllenDulles: he had been entirely cleared of thedisloyalty charges and was free to comeback to the Agency. The episode was tomark Meyer for the rest of his life, and itserves to illustrate one of the greatparadoxes of Cold War America: whilst CIAmen worked around the clock to defeatCommunism, they were being tailed byfellow Americans who claimed to be bent onthe same objective. If Juvenal had wonderedwho was guarding the guards, the questionhere was more who was slaying the dragonslayers?

McCarthy was finally eclipsed in late1954, and he died an alcoholic in 1957. ButDwight Macdonald’s characterization ofMcCarthyism as a “mock-heroic epic . . . aninterlude in our political history so weird andwonderful that future archeologists may well

assign it to mythology rather than history”66

was wishful thinking. America wouldstruggle to exorcize the demons McCarthyhad raised for years to come; at the time,“the values he espoused and theassumptions on which he had based hiscrusade remained mostly unchallenged.” Asone observer put it, “McCarthy wascensured and quashed, but notMcCarthyism.”67 The search for the truth,the desire to get to the bottom of things, thevery process of intellectual inquiry, becametainted by its association with witch hunts.

Or was it the other way around? Perhapsthe question is, could McCarthyism havehappened without the Truman Doctrine?Was the departure from the elementary rulesfor the ascertainment of truth, wherejudgment was clouded by fear and hostility,where what Murray Kempton described as

“over attendance upon the excessive”distracted men “from noticing how bad thenormal is,” the essence of Cold Warthinking? “Our leaders became liberatedfrom the normal rules of evidence andinference when it came to dealing withCommunism,” Senator William Fulbrightlater argued. “After all, who ever heard ofgiving the Devil a fair shake? Since we knowwhat he has in mind, it is pedantry to splithairs over what he is actually doing. . . . Theeffect of the anti-Communist ideology wasto spare us the task of taking cognizance ofthe specific facts of specific situations. Our‘faith’ liberated us, like the believers of old,from the requirements of empirical thinking.. . . Like medieval theologians, we had aphilosophy that explained everything to us inadvance, and everything that did not fitcould be readily identified as a fraud or a lie

or an illusion. . . . The perniciousness of[anti-Communist orthodoxy] arises not fromany patent falsehood but from its distortionand simplification of reality, from itsuniversalization and its elevation to thestatus of a revealed truth.”68

Far from denting the CIA, McCarthyeventually contributed to its enhancedprestige. Thanks to him, the CIA’sreputation as something of a haven forforeign policy “freethinkers” was confirmed.Richard Bissell, who joined the Agency inJanuary 1954, remembered it as “a placewhere there was still intellectual ferment andchallenge and things going on [while] muchof the challenge and sense of forwardmotion had gone out of other parts of thegovernment.”69 Its director Allen Dullesemerged even stronger than before.According to Tom Braden, “Power flowed

to him and, through him, to the CIA, partlybecause his brother was secretary of state,partly because his reputation as the masterspy of the Second World War hung over himlike a mysterious halo, partly because hissenior partnership in the prestigious NewYork law firm of Sullivan and Cromwellimpressed the small-town lawyers ofCongress.” And now, in the face ofMcCarthy’s attack on the Agency, Dulleshad won, and “his victory vastly increasedthe respectability of what people then called‘the cause’ of anti-Communism. ‘Don’t jointhe book burners,’ Eisenhower had said.That was the bad way to fight Communism.The good way was the CIA.”70

14

Music and Truth, ma non troppo

It occurs to me that the apparatus for thecreation and maintenance of celebrities isvastly in excess of material fit to becelebrated.

Philip Larkin

In contrast to the American Committee,whose failure to take a coherent stand on asingle major issue accelerated its imminentdemise, the Congress in Europe had, by themid-1950s, clearly staked out its territory.Under Josselson’s firm hand, it hadestablished a reputation as a serious alliance

of intellectuals committed to demonstratingthe fallibility of the Soviet mythos, and thesuperiority of Western democracy as aframework for cultural and philosophicalinquiry. Whilst the composition of its innercircle—or “apparat”—remained unchanged,the Congress could now boast a membershipstudded with the names of eminentintellectuals and artists.

Julian Huxley, Mircea Eliade, AndréMalraux, Guido Piovene, Herbert Read,Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, Robert PennWarren, W.H. Auden, Thornton Wilder,Jayaprakash Narayan—these and manyother luminaries graced the pages ofEncounter, Preuves, and the raft of othermagazines created by or affiliated to theCongress. Directed at Latin Americanintellectuals was Cuadernos, launched in1953 from Paris under the editorship of

novelist and playwright Julian Gorkin. InVienna, the Congress launched Forummagazine in early 1954 as a monthly editedby novelist and critic Friedrich Torberg.“Freddy the Torte,” as he was nicknamed,was an extraordinary character who repelledand attracted people in equal measure.Koestler wrote admiringly that he was “thelast Mohican of the Danube, of an OldVienna which perhaps existed only in ourfantasy.” Others found him arrogant andintolerant. The Communists attacked him as“an American agent . . . slanderer . . . andinformer,” and dismissed the anti-neutralisttone of his magazine as an Americanconspiracy. Forum developed the usualCongress themes, and Torberg enjoyed agood working relationship with the Parissecretariat. But Josselson sometimes had todiscipline him, as on one occasion in 1957

when Forum reprinted an article from theright-wing National Review. This, saidJosselson, was “beneath the dignity of aCongress journal.” “It will not happenagain,” a chastened Torberg replied.

Science and Freedom was launched inautumn 1953 after a Congress conference ofthe same name. Held in Hamburg in July1953, the conference had attracted grants of$10,000 from the Rockefeller Foundationand $35,000 from the Farfield Foundation.The eponymous journal was edited byMichael Polanyi, who was appointed to theExecutive Committee in the same year. Indrawing attention to racial segregation inAmerica, as well as apartheid in SouthAfrica, Polanyi’s journal spoke about issueson which the Congress was, on the whole,muted. It also recognized détente longbefore most people knew the meaning of the

word, encouraging intellectual exchangeswith the Soviet bloc and a softening of theWest’s Cold War stance. But as a biannualbulletin with a tiny readership, its voice wasnever more than a reed in the strong gusts ofCold War polemics.1

Soviet Survey started in 1955 as amonthly newsletter edited by the historianWalter Laqueur, who was also theCongress’s official representative in Israel.Described by Josselson as “one of the bestinternational experts on the Soviet Union,”Laqueur wrote extensively on the Russianaffairs under the pen name Mark Alexander.Under him, Soviet Survey producedinvestigations of intellectual, artistic, andpolitical life in the Eastern bloc whichoffered an insight “unique amongst Westernpublications.”2 Whilst claims that it

“crackled with excitement”3 may beoverstated, it certainly earned a wide anddedicated readership. Bizarrely, even someCommunist journals felt they could usefullyborrow material from Soviet Survey, causingJosselson to write anxiously to Laqueur that“we don’t want pro-Soviet publication[s] tosugarcoat their propaganda with some of ourmaterial.”4

In April 1956, the first issue of TempoPresente appeared in Italy. Edited by IgnazioSilone and Nicola Chiaromonte, it was thefirst serious challenge to Nuovi Argomenti, ajournal founded in 1954 by Alberto Moraviawhich closely resembled Sartre’s Les Tempsmodernes. Tempo Presente took theresemblance one step further, its title adeliberate echo of Sartre’s. Cynics wouldlater argue that this amounted to intellectualtheft and illustrated claims that one major

CIA strategy was to create or support“parallel” organizations which provided analternative to radicalism over which they hadno control. Certainly, Tempo Presente“opened its pages to many defectors fromthe Italian Communist Party in the late1950s,”5 including the writers Italo Calvino,Vasco Pratolini, and Libero de Libero. Itspages were also open to dissident writersfrom the Eastern bloc who, together with theregular stable of Congress contributors, keptup a sustained attack on the vagaries ofCommunist totalitarianism.

The Congress also established apresence further afield, projecting its voiceinto areas which were considered susceptibleto Communism or neutralism. It had amagazine in Australia, Quadrant, whichaimed to reduce the influence of that largecorps of Australian intellectuals who were

drawn “to an alarming extent to the magneticfield of Communism.” Its editor, Catholicpoet James McAuley, believed that “men’sminds will be won only when anti-Communist positions can radiate a counter-attraction,” and under him Quadrant (whichstill exists) became a lively focus for theAustralian Non-Communist Left.6

In India, the Congress published Quest,which first appeared in August 1955.Culturally limited by being in English, thelanguage of administration and not literature,it was attacked by Indian Communists for“insidious” American propaganda, but likeCuardernos in Latin America, at least it gavethe Congress a foothold in difficult terrain. Itprobably didn’t deserve John KennethGalbraith’s sneer that “it broke new groundin ponderous, unfocused illiteracy.”Certainly, Prime Minister Nehru didn’t like

it, as he always distrusted the Congress asan “American front.” In Japan, there wasJiyu, one of the most heavily subsidized ofall the Congress magazines. Its attempts tomoderate anti-American opinion amongJapanese intellectuals were initially toowatery, and in 1960 the Congress decided tobreak entirely with the publisher andrelaunch with a team under direct control ofthe Paris office. Japan, it was deemed, was“far too tricky ideologically” to leave themagazine in even semi-independent hands.7By the mid- to late 1960s, the Congress hadextended its publications program to includeother areas of strategic interest: Africa, theArab world, and China.

“The real mystery is how thosemagazines worked,” said one CIA agent.“All those intellectuals wouldn’t go to acocktail party together, but they were all in

Preuves, Tempo Presente, Encounter. Youjust couldn’t have done it in America.Harper’s couldn’t do it, the New Yorkercouldn’t do it. They couldn’t get IsaiahBerlin and Nancy Mitford and all the others.Even Irving Kristol couldn’t do it when hecame back from London. I suppose theanswer is: Michael Josselson.”8 Well, thatwas half the answer. There was MichaelJosselson, and there was Melvin Lasky.Diana Josselson explained the relationship:“Michael was publisher and editor in chief.Lasky was vice president and, to a certainextent, Michael’s mouthpiece. Michael triedto arrange periodic meetings between thevarious editors, and Lasky was understoodto be the main guy if Michael wasn’t there.They were in close contact and saw thingssimilarly.”9

Melvin Lasky later claimed that

Josselson had initially wanted him to beSpender’s co-editor at Encounter, but thathe, Lasky, did not want to leave Berlin, sohe recommended Irving Kristol instead. Itseems more probable that the reason Laskydid not find himself at the helm of theCongress’s flagship magazine was the sameas that given by Wisner in 1950 when heordered Lasky to be removed from theorganizing body of the Congress in Berlin:he was too closely connected to theAmerican government. By 1953, Laskycould argue that this was no longer the case.His magazine Der Monat was nowsponsored by the Ford Foundation, whichhad recently given him a further grant of$275,000 to publish books under DerMonat’s auspices. But there remained a hazeof suspicion around Lasky which was hardto dispel. Josselson did his best, receiving

Der Monat into the fold of Congressmagazines at the end of 1953, when theinitial Ford Foundation grant expired. In thisway, Josselson was able to legitimizeLasky’s relationship with the Congress. Asthe editor of one of its magazines, Laskynow found himself officially at the center ofits policy-making apparat.

As a member of the “Tri-MagazineEditorial Committee” set up to coordinateeditorial policy for Encounter, Der Monat,and Preuves, Lasky was now part of a smallteam which decided how the Congress’sthemes were articulated. Meeting regularly inParis and joined by Josselson, Nabokov, andde Rougemont, this committee analyzed theperformance of the magazines and agreed onsubjects for discussion in forthcomingissues. Lasky argued consistently for adeeper commitment to States-side themes

(Eudora Welty should be approached to do a“De-Segregation” piece; someone shouldwrite about “the Great American Boom”;Gian Carlo Menotti could do something onthe theme of “highbrow and lowbrow”), andincreased emphasis on Soviet affairs.Another favorite bête noire—andconsistently the target of a kind of insensatehatred in Congress magazines—was Jean-Paul Sartre, whose break with MauriceMerleau-Ponty in 1955 (after Merleau-Ponty announced his divorce fromCommunism) should, said Lasky, besignaled in Congress magazines under theheading “Sartre est mort.”10 Sartre wasrepeatedly dismissed in the pages ofEncounter and Preuves as a lackey ofCommunism, a miserable timeserver whosepolitical and creative writings perpetuatedthe Communist delusion and “rejoiced in

violence.”The extent of Lasky’s influence on the

three magazines is revealed in a report datedApril 1956—“Some Notes on Preuves,Encounter and Der Monat”—in which hesummarized their achievements and set forthhis agenda for their future. The magazineshad established themselves, he wrote, as“part of the community, a piece of theenvironment, with their own institutionalweight. They have become symbols in thecultural life of two ancient nations of free,humane, and democratic international (andtransatlantic) exchange.”11 But he cautionedhis fellow editors against “insisting, in thematter of American material, that the USAbe constantly projected ‘positively,’ that allthe European anti-American stereotypes bemade short shrift of.” Although he concededthat some “anti-American slips” which had

appeared in the magazines were “regrettableand to be avoided in the future,” Laskyargued against straining the quality oftransatlantic understanding. “Let’s notalways be forcing the matter. (And-what-have-we-done-today-to-stop-people-thinking-of-us-as-Barbarians?) We—notunlike everybody else—have too manyproblems (including materialism, cynicism,corruption, violence) consistently to comeout with a positive word of cheer for theStars-and-Stripes forever. Let Europeanwriters grumble. Let’s grumble a bitourselves (paradoxically, one of our mostsympathetic sounds).”12

In effect, Lasky was conceding thatcritics of the Congress magazines whocomplained of a pro-American bias werebasically right. Encounter, in particular, mustnow address the charge that it was a “Trojan

horse” for American interests, that it “had apeculiar blind spot—it hardly ever containedany critical articles about the U.S., as if thiswas forbidden territory.”13 In the earlyyears, certainly, Encounter went to greatlengths to erode any antipathy towardsAmerica and its institutions. Anti-Americanism was variously characterized as“a psychological necessity to manyEuropeans,” a device which enabled them“to indulge simultaneously in self-hatred”(America as “mythicized image of all [they]hate”) and “self-righteousness” (Fiedler); oras a way of heightening “the gratificationwhich British intellectuals derive from theirnational self-contemplation” (Edward Shils);or as a mechanical reflex of “modernliberalism,” epitomized by the NewStatesman and Nation, with its “perniciousanaemia,” “stereotyped reactions,” and

“moral smugness” (Dwight Macdonald in1956, at the height of his Cold Warriorism).Lasky’s recommendations only partiallysucceeded. Although Al Alvarez, writing in1961, noticed a change—“the paranoiacthrob of genuine propaganda is rarely heardin Encounter these days”14—othersremained unconvinced, sharing ConorCruise O’Brien’s view that “Encounter’sfirst loyalty is to America.”15

Back at CIA headquarters inWashington, Encounter was regardedproudly as a “flagship,” a congenial vehiclefor advancing the notion of a culturalcommunity linked, and not separated, by theAtlantic. It even became a kind of callingcard for CIA agents. Arranging a meetingwith Ben Sonnenberg, a rich youngwanderer who worked briefly for the CIA inthe mid-1950s, an agent told him, “I’ll be

carrying a copy of Encounter, so you’llknow who I am.”

The CIA’s faith in the Congress’sjournals was matched by its financialcommitment. Although the details are, defacto, hard to come by, some financialaccounts have survived, scattered aroundthe dusty recesses of a number of archives.According to the Statement ofDisbursements for the period endingDecember 31, 1958, the Farfield Foundationpaid the salaries of the “editorial secretariat”of the Congress to the tune of $18,660 perannum. This covered Bondy, Lasky(presumably), and the American editor ofEncounter (the British editor’s salary, it willbe remembered, was the responsibility ofBritish intelligence). In 1959, Encounterreceived $76,230.30 from the Farfield(almost double the initial annual grant of

$40,000). In the same year, Cuadernosreceived $48,712.99 and Preuves$75,765.07. Additionally, $21,251.43 wasallocated for the “administration” ofCongress periodicals. Grants to Der Monat(approximately $60,000 per annum) werechanneled through a variety of fronts. In1958, earmarked funds were piggybackedthrough the Miami District Fund. By 1960,the grant was diversified, this time comingvia the Florence Foundation ($27,000) andthe Hoblitzelle Foundation ($29,176), animprobable donor given that its “Purposeand Activities” were listed in the Directoryof American Foundations as providing“support to organizations within Texas,primarily in Dallas, with emphasis on aid forthe handicapped.” This route was also usedfor supplying funds to Tempo Presente,which received $18,000 and $20,000,

respectively, from the same foundations in1960. The total disbursements for Congressperiodicals in 1961 was $560,000, rising to$880,000 in 1962. At the same time,Farfield’s commitment to the Congress (inother words, the direct cost to the CIA insalaries, administration, rent, etc.) wasrunning at approximately $1 million (or $6million in 1999 dollars) per annum.

Despite Lasky’s claim that this was nogravy train, it certainly began to look likeone. “Suddenly there were limousines,parties with lashings of smoked salmon andso on, and people who couldn’t normallyafford the bus ticket to Newark were nowflying first class to India for the summer,”16

recalled Jason Epstein. “In the heyday of allthis activity the airlines were crowded withdons and writers carrying branded culture toevery corner of the habitable globe,”17

Malcolm Muggeridge later wrote. EvenBritish intelligence was aghast at the scale onwhich its American counterpart wasendowing the cultural Cold War.Remembering those “Elysian days” inLondon “when the first arrivals came amongus, straight from their innocent nests inPrinceton or Yale or Harvard, in Wall Streetor Madison Avenue or Washington, D.C.,”Muggeridge was amazed at “[h]ow short atime the honeymoon period lasted! Howsoon our British setup was overtaken inpersonnel, zest and scale of operation, aboveall, in expendable cash! . . . The OSS–CIAnetwork, with ramifications all over theworld, came to outclass our once legendarySecret Service as a sleek Cadillac does anancient hansom cab.”18

Traveling happily in that Cadillac wasNicolas Nabokov, busy doing what he did

best: arranging the glamour. Nabokov’sbewildering range of contacts andfriendships was invaluable in gainingcredibility and status for the Congress. Histerms of endearment were testimony to hiscapacity for guaranteeing the affection andloyalty of these friends. Schlesinger wasaddressed as “Arthuro”; Isaiah Berlin as“Carissimo,” “Dear Doctor,” and “Uncle”;Natasha Spender as “Sweetie Pie” andStephen as “Milyii Stiva”; GeorgeWeidenfeld as “Dear Little Königskind”;Edward Weeks, editor of Atlantic Monthly,as “Caro Ted”; Edward d’Arms of theRockefeller Foundation as “Chat.”

Nabokov, though a mediocre composerhimself and certainly no intellectual, was oneof the great impresarios of the postwaryears, recognizing talent and encouragingcreative genius. During the winter of 1953–

54, he settled into a temporary residency asmusical director of the American Academyin Rome. This meant he was well placed toorganize the Congress’s first major forayinto the music scene since the Masterpiecesfestival of 1952. Indeed, in many ways, thefestival which Nabokov now set aboutarranging was the official answer to HerbertRead’s criticism of the retrospective natureof the Paris venture. “Let our next exhibitionbe, then, not a complacent look at the past,but a confident look into the future,”19 Readhad urged. Now, after flying to New York tohold a press conference in February 1953,Nabokov took up the challenge. “With thatfestival we shut the door of the past,” hesaid. “We said, in effect, here are greatworks. They are no longer ‘modern’ eventhough they originated in the twentiethcentury. They are now a part of history.

Now, I have a new plan . . . we are going tohave a composers’ contest that is unlike anyother competition ever held. Twelve youngand promising but internationally unknowncomposers are to be invited to Rome, allexpenses paid. Each will bring a score andthese will be performed. . . . Finally, aspecial jury, democratically elected by allthose attending the conference, will pick outof these twelve a winning work. And theaward itself is staggering: first, there will be acash prize; second, there will be a promiseof performance by three major orchestras inEurope and three in America; third, thework will be published; and fourth, it will berecorded by a leading company. Not onlythat—even the eleven losers can’t reallylose,” Nabokov went on, sounding more andmore like a Chicago booster. “They will get,in addition to a free trip to Rome, a

guarantee by the conference that their workswill also be published and the copying of theparts paid for. Now,” he asked, “is that aprize or isn’t it?”20

The International Conference ofTwentieth Century Music, scheduled to takeplace in Rome for two weeks in mid-April1954, announced the Congress’scommitment to the promotion of avant-garde composition. It was to place theCongress firmly on the map as part of thevanguard in musical experiment. And itoffered the world a rich sample of the kindof music expressly forbidden by Stalin.

The Italian government was meant todeposit 2.5 million lire into Nabokov’sAmerican Express account in Rome by wayof a subsidy for this event, but the moneynever arrived (confirming Nabokov’s fearthat it would end up “getting lost somewhere

in the ruins of the Forum”). No matter, therewas money enough pouring in from theFarfield Foundation, a portion of which wasused to endow the competition with prizestotaling 25,000 Swiss francs ($6,000) for thebest concerto for violin and orchestra, shortsymphony, and chamber music for solovoice and instruments. The press releaseannounced that the festival, “designed toprove that art thrives on freedom,” was thebeneficiary of a generous donation from“U.S. gin and yeast heir JuliusFleischmann.” Junkie was also brought inonce again to negotiate with the BostonSymphony Orchestra, which agreed to givethe winning composition its first Americanperformance at its subsidiary Tanglewood(by 1953, eight of the eleven members ofthe international music advisory board of theCongress were associated with the

Tanglewood music school).As was his custom, Nabokov sent the

first invitation to his old friend IgorStravinsky, offering to pay expenses up to$5,000 for the maestro and his wife, plustheir secretary, to attend the festival inRome. In addition, Stravinsky agreed tohead up the music advisory board for thefestival, alongside Samuel Barber, BorisBlacher, Benjamin Britten, Carlos Chavez,Luigi Dallapiccola, Arthur Honegger,Francesco Malipiero, Frank Martin, DariusMilhaud, and Virgil Thomson (who,according to Nabokov, “knew all the boysand girls at the Rockefeller Foundation”).Charles Munch had proposed that ArturoToscanini be invited to join the board, butNabokov objected on the grounds that “[t]hename of Toscanini connected with a projectconcerning contemporary music sounds, to

say the least, anachronistic. The goodMaestro . . . has been a consistent anddetermined enemy of contemporary music,and has at many occasions attacked its mainprotagonists.”21

In early 1954, the Congress set up afestival office in the noble surroundings ofthe Palazzo Pecci, courtesy of Count Pecci-Blunt, a close friend of Nabokov’s and,despite his sumptuous title, an Americancitizen. Treasurer Pierre Bolomey organizeda credit line with the Congress’s ChaseNational Bank account at Basel, throughwhich CIA money was funneled. Pecci-Blunt made a personal contribution of$1,300 to the festival’s slush fund. A further$10,000 was channeled through Denis deRougemont’s Centre Européen de laCulture, which in turn was receiving moneyfrom the Farfield Foundation. De

Rougemont’s outfit was given top billing onthe program. Arrangements were alsosecured for the travel of Leontyne Price,and round-trip tickets were dispatched toAaron Copland, Michael Tippett, JosephFuchs, and Ben Weber.

By March 1954, Nabokov was ready toannounce the lineup for the festival. With aheavy concentration on atonal,dodecaphonic composition, the aestheticdirection of the event pointed very much tothe progressive avant-garde of Alban Berg,Elliott Carter, Luigi Dallapiccola, and LuigiNono. Amongst the “new” composers werePeter Racine Fricker, Lou Harrison, andMario Peragallo, whose work wasinfluenced in varying degrees by twelve-tonecomposition. They were, on the whole, wellreceived. Musical America noted that “mostof the composers and critics making up the

advisory and executive committeesresponsible for the concerts . . . have notbeen known in the past for the friendlinessto dodecaphonic principles or proponents.For this reason, the programs they offeredwere not only surprising, but encouraging aswell.”22 A recent convert to twelve-tonemusic was Stravinsky, whose presence inRome signaled a major moment in theconvergence of modernist tributaries in the“serialist orthodoxy.” For Nabokov, therewas a clear political message to be impartedby promoting music which announced itselfas doing away with natural hierarchies, as aliberation from previous laws about music’sinner logic. Later, critics would wonderwhether serialism had broken itsemancipatory promise, driving music into amodernist cul-de-sac where it sat, restrictedand difficult, tyrannized by despotic

formulae, and commanding an increasinglyspecialized audience. Towards its “squawksand thumps,” wrote Susan Sontag, “wewere deferential—we knew we weresupposed to appreciate ugly music; welistened devoutly to the Toch, the Krenek,the Hindemith, the Webern, the Schoenberg,whatever (we had enormous appetites andstrong stomachs).”23 Even the mostdeferential amongst those attending theCongress festival in Rome broke intowhistles and shouts when one performanceturned into a “private soliloquy.” And whenHans Werner Henze’s twelve-tone operaBoulevard Solitude was premiered, theaudience could be forgiven for feeling as if itwere traveling along a via Dolorosa.

Perhaps sensing a challenge to his ownbrand of difficulty, Pierre Boulez wroteNabokov a furious letter larded with insults.

Nabokov, he said, was encouraging a“folklore of mediocrity,” nurtured by pettybureaucrats who were obsessed with thenumber twelve—“A Council of Twelve, aCommittee of Twelve, a Jury of Twelve”—but who understood nothing of the creativeprocess. Boulez went on to accuse theCongress of manipulating young composersby offering large prizes (the winners wereLou Harrison, Giselher Klebe, Jean-LouisMartinet, Mario Peragallo, and VladimirVogel). It would be more honest, he said, togive them handouts, rather than go throughwith the charade of the “spectacular publicgestures of a Cincinnati banker.” He endedwith the suggestion that the Congress’s nextventure be a conference on “the role of thecondom in the Twentieth Century,” asubject he deemed to be “in better taste”than its previous initiatives.24 A stunned

Nabokov wrote in response that he hopedBoulez’s letter would not be found in abottom drawer by somebody in the future,as it “dishonoured both his intelligence andhis judgement.” Having neither the time northe energy to pursue the matter, Nabokovasked Boulez to refrain from ever writing tohim again.

As well as subsidizing those composersand performers who attended the Romefestival, the Farfield Foundation wasendowing other groups and artists through aseries of grants made mostly at Josselson’sdiscretion. In January, it gave $2,000 to theMozarteum Akademie Orchester of Salzburgfor an International Youth Orchestra Course.From his “special discretionary fund” at theFarfield, Josselson rewarded the exiledPolish composer Andrzej Panufnik, who hadmade a hair-raising escape from Warsaw via

Zurich to London, with an obligation-free“yearly fellowship of $2,000 to be paid in 12monthly instalments,” starting in September1954. According to Nabokov, the gratefulPanufnik declared himself “entirely ready tocooperate and collaborate with us for he isentirely sold on the ideals of the Congressfor Cultural Freedom.”25

Also in September 1954, Josselsoninitiated a monthly grant of $300 to YehudiMenuhin’s maître, the exiled Romanianmusician Georges Enesco. A year afterEnesco’s death in 1955, the Farfield paid fora memorial concert given by the BostonSymphony Orchestra, which was againtouring Europe largely at the CIA’s expense(via the Free Europe Committee).26

Referring to the orchestra’s triumphant 1956tour, C.D. Jackson was moved to declare: “‘Culture’ is no longer a sissy word. A nation

like ours can be virile. A nation like ours canbe fantastically successful economically. Butin a strange way the glue that holds thingstogether is the nation’s coefficient ofidealism. . . . The tangible, visible andaudible expression of national idealism isculture. Of all the expressions of culture,music is the most universal. Of all theexpressions of present-day musical culture,the Boston Symphony Orchestra is thebest.”27

The year 1956 also saw the launch ofthe Metropolitan Opera in Europe. Onceagain, C.D. was there to lend his everysupport, arguing, “The United Statesengages in many activities designed toproject the correct image of the U.S. abroad.Sometimes we are successful, sometimesnot. It is admittedly a nebulous andimprecise business. But the one area which

is as close to sure-fire as any that have beentried, is the cultural projection of America—provided, of course, that the selection ofwhat constitutes American culture isintelligently made and that nothing is sentover except highest quality. I believe that theMet would wow them.”28 The PsychologicalStrategy Board, which in 1953 had invitedJunkie Fleischmann to negotiate the tour,agreed with Jackson, and pulled together amassive $750,000 to finance it. Most of thisappears to have come from the CIA.Although C.D. acknowledged that this was“an awful lot of money for a culturalpropaganda impact,” he urged Allen Dullesnot to underestimate the potential gains,adding that “this impact would be absolutelyterrific in the capitals of Western Europe,including Berlin.”29 Junkie agreed andproduced his own exquisitely opportunistic

rationale for the tour: “We, in the UnitedStates, are a melting pot,” he said, “and, bybeing so, have demonstrated that peoplescan get along together irrespective of race,color or creed. Using the ‘melting pot’ orsome such catch phrase for a theme wemight be able to use the Met as an exampleof how Europeans can get along together inthe United States and that, therefore, somesort of European Federation is entirelypracticable.”30

Thus did America’s Cold Warriorsweave their tangled web, wherein theMetropolitan Opera could be used to rallyaudiences to the concept of free-worldfederalism.

At the same time as C.D. was workingon the Psychological Strategy Board’s ideaof a Metropolitan Opera tour, he was dealingwith another, more controversial aspect of

the company’s plans. In March 1953, he hadlearned that Rudolf Bing, the Met’s generalmanager, wanted to engage WilhelmFurtwängler as guest conductor for the1953–54 season. Asked whether he thoughtthe State Department might object to thisappointment, C.D. was able to report thatthere would be no “Departmental eyebrow-raising on the subject of Mr Furtwaengler.”He did warn that there may be “a publicrelations problem” from the Met’sstandpoint but concluded with the followingwords of encouragement: “My five cents’worth is that by the time he will be gettingover here, no one would care if he had beenthe Beast of Belsen.”31

Though they were to express it moredelicately, the American Committee forCultural Freedom apparently felt much thesame way. When, in February 1955, the

Jewish group Betar protested against theappearance of Herbert von Karajan at aNew York performance given by the BerlinPhilharmonic—“Music Lovers, do notattend tonight’s bloody concert!”—thecommittee lobbied the American Federationof Musicians to oppose such protests. In acable signed by James T. Farrell, on behalfof “three hundred leaders of the Americancultural community,” the committeedenounced Betar’s protest as “anencroachment on cultural freedom.”Interestingly, at no point did the committeetake issue with Betar’s allegation that vonKarajan had been a member of the Naziparty. On the contrary, it conceded this wasa “deplorable” fact. But the charge was not“relevant to the non-political nature of theorchestra’s appearance here” and ignoredthe fact that the Berlin Philharmonic “has

rendered signal service to the cause of freeculture in Europe and symbolizes thecourageous resistance of the people of Berlinto Communist totalitarianism, whichsurrounds their isolated outpost.”32 Thecable concluded with the suggestion that aportion of the profits from the orchestra’stour be donated to victims of the Nazis.

The American Committee wasapparently unaware of how far it wasstraying from its 1953 “Statement ofPrinciples,” in which it declared itself to be“vitally concerned with political issues asthese affect the conditions of culturalfreedom and cultural creativity. It isconsequently intractably opposed tototalitarianism of whatever kind, fortotalitarianism is the very negation of theseconditions.”33 This same statement haddeplored “the plain and shameful fact that,

even today, Communists and Communistsympathizers are conceded a measure ofrespectability in intellectual and culturalcircles which would never have beenaccorded to a Nazi or neofascist.”

That the American Committee could beso blind to the contradictory—and morallyinconsistent—nature of its attitude toindividuals like von Karajan or Furtwänglerseems astonishing. Three months later,George Kennan, one of the architects of thestrategy of harnessing culture to the politicalimperatives of the Cold War, was todemonstrate that he too was vulnerable tothe same confusion. Addressing theInternational Council of the Museum ofModern Art on May 12, 1955, Kennandeplored the fact that, “[i]n recent years,there has grown up among us a mostreprehensible habit, a totalitarian habit in

fact, of judging the suitability of culturalcontributions by whatever political colorationwe conceive their creators to have acquired.I know of nothing sillier than this. A paintingis not more or less valuable because theartist once belonged to this or that party orcontributed to this or that group. The valueof a symphony concert seems to me to bequite unaffected by the nature of the politicalregime under which the conductor may oncehave plied his trade. . . . After all, culturalevents are not political livestock exhibits inwhich we put forward human figures to beadmired for the purity of their ideologicalfeatures.”34

America’s cultural Cold Warriors foundthemselves caught in a dangerous paradox:where the bogeyman of Nazism was raised,they campaigned vigorously for theseparation of art and politics; but where

dealing with Communism, they wereunwilling to make such a distinction. Thisegregious illogicality had first surfaced backin the late 1940s, during the “denazification”of Germany. Then, whilst Furtwängler hadbeen rewarded with high-profile concertsalongside Yehudi Menuhin, Bertolt Brechtwas ridiculed by Melvin Lasky in DerMonat.35 The whole premise of the culturalCold War, of the Congress for CulturalFreedom, was that writers and artists had toengage themselves in the ideologicalstruggle. “You’re talking about the leadingwriters, the leading musicians, and painters—whoever was willing to associate with theidea of fighting for what Camus calledliterature ‘engagé,’ someone who wascommitted not just to writing but to writingas an expression of a system of values. Andwe were for that, we were for that, and we

supported it,”36 explained the CIA’s LeeWilliams. That America’s cultural ColdWarriors could so easily “disengage” when itsuited them to do so is disturbing.

No such tolerance was accorded to thefellow travelers and neutralists whom theAmerican Committee was bent on exposing.Nobody could seriously argue, at least bythe mid-1950s, that Communism couldplausibly be considered the central andoverriding enemy of cultural freedom withinthe United States. But professional anti-Communists, like all professionals, wantedto protect and even expand their market. Arough count of organized anti-Communistlobbies and pressure groups in Americaduring the 1950s—a time generallyacknowledged to mark the Fifth Column’slowest point—suggests unparalleledproliferation. There being no real

Communist threat in America to fight, anti-Communists were in reality, to recycleChurchill’s phrase, “chained to a deadbody.”

“Slowly and gradually one’s colleagueswill get around to one,” James T. Farrell hadaccurately predicted in 1942. “I trust mycolleagues to do this. I have great confidencein their developing capacities to become mypolicemen, and the guardian of my soul. Myfaith in their potentialities to be shameful isinvincible: you cannot shake that dogma ofmy faith. All these little guardian angels ofthe soul of America.”37 By now, the hard-line element of the Committee had earned ita dubious reputation as a “truth squad.” Itappeared to have lost all sense of proportionand wandered far from its declared purpose,which was to strengthen the social andpolitical conditions for cultural creativity and

free intellectual inquiry. Schlesinger wrote ofa feeling of disgust at the “elements ofvindictiveness in the harrying of fellowtravelers, as if we were refighting in thefifties the old, dead battles of the thirties andthe forties . . . we now have better things todo than to pay off old scores. A committeededicated to cultural freedom can hardly errin being magnanimous.”38 From CornellUniversity, a colleague of Sol Stein wrote insimilar vein: “Sol, my boy, what you need isa whiff of the fresh air of upstate New Yorkor Kansas or Seattle or just about any otherplace but the middle of Manhattan. Are youreally so sure that all those bitter literarybattles of the late 1930s, and the battles oftoday as well, are really that important in thehistory of the United States?”39

And this was the point. Americanintellectual history had seesawed over the

past two decades from the left dissecting theright to the right dissecting the left, and thesight of men tearing at each other’s viscerain this way was unedifying. Balkanized intosquabbling academic fiefdoms, both factionsmissed the one important truth: absolutism inpolitics, whether in the form ofMcCarthyism, or liberal anti-Communism,or Stalinism, was not about left or right, itwas about refusing to let history tell thetruth. “It’s so corrupt, it doesn’t even knowit,” said Jason Epstein in an uncompromisingmood. “When these people talk about a‘counter-intelligentsia,’ what they do is to setup a false and corrupt value system tosupport whatever ideology they’recommitted to at the time. The only thingthey’re really committed to is power, and theintroduction of Tzarist-Stalinist strategies inAmerican politics. They’re so corrupt they

probably don’t even know it. They’re little,lying apparatchiks. People who don’t believein anything, who are only againstsomething, shouldn’t go on crusades or startrevolutions.”40

Commenting on the “contrapuntalrelationship with Communism” of manyintellectual Cold Warriors, George Urban, adirector of Radio Free Europe, concludedthat this responded to a “compulsion toargue, fence, and fight, almost regardless ofthe objectives.41. . . Their protestations weretoo intense, their cynicism too stark, andtheir analyses too reflective of the worldthey thought they had left behind. Theymarched in negative step, but in step all thesame.”42

Josselson, who at this time wasrecovering from an operation which left him

stranded—though clearly not inactive—in adeck chair, wrote to Sidney Hook that hewas “more convinced than ever that anatural death of the present [AmericanCommittee] would be the best thing tohappen for everyone concerned . . . thisgroup is incompatible [sic] to do anything inany field except in the field of pettyquarrels.”43 One way of ensuring thecommittee’s demise was to withdraw itssubsidies, and in October 1954 Josselson didjust that. The monthly deposits from theFarfield Foundation to the AmericanCommittee had already been stopped inearly 1953, and now, with the withdrawal ofan annual payment of $4,800 from the Parisoffice, the group faced imminent financialruin.

Sidney Hook, who had set up thecommittee in consultation with the CIA, was

appalled at the Congress’s decision to cut itsfinancial ties. Ignoring Josselson’sdetermination to see the committeeextinguish itself, he went directly to AllenDulles to plead for more money. Sol Stein(who warned that “if American intellectualslose their voice in West Europe for want of$20,000 a year, then some new Gibbonbetter start sharpening his pencil now”) wasfully briefed on this development, as wasNorman Thomas, the former socialistcandidate for U.S. president, who nowoccupied an executive position in theAmerican Committee. Furthermore, bothmen were separately lobbying theintelligence community through “our friendDr. Lilly,” a Psychological Strategy Boardofficer and CIA consultant. Knowing thatNorman Thomas was a close friend andneighbor of Allen Dulles, Stein further

suggested that Thomas telephone Dulles, to“remind [him] of his interest in our workand suggest that speed is essential in comingto our assistance.”44 Thomas replied that hethought it “would do harm rather than goodto call Allen Dulles without some moreimmediate excuse” but said that, “on the fairchance that Dulles may be up in the countrythis weekend, I will try to get in touch withhim on Sunday.”45 This was April 1955. ByMay, the committee’s coffers were swollenwith a grant of $4,000 from the CIA’s AsiaFoundation and $10,000 from the FarfieldFoundation. Josselson had been overruled.

Arthur Schlesinger now wrote plaintivelyto Cord Meyer to extend his complaintsabout “certain members” of the ExecutiveCommittee, who, bolstered by the CIA’srenewed largesse, were once againexperiencing an inflation of their own

importance. Meyer explained by return that“[w]e certainly don’t plan on any continuinglarge scale assistance, and the single grantrecently made was provided as the result ofan urgent request directly from Sidney Hookand indirectly from Norman Thomas. Ourhope is that the breathing space provided bythis assistance can be used by thosegentlemen, yourself, and the other sensibleones to reconstitute the ExecutiveCommittee and draft an intelligent program.. . . If this reconstitution of the leadershipproves impossible we then, I think, will haveto face the necessity of allowing theCommittee to die a natural death, although Ithink this course would result in unhappyrepercussions abroad.” Meyer ended theletter thanking Schlesinger for “sitting on topof the loose talk,” suggesting that they meettogether soon to “discuss the whole problem

in some detail.”46

The Dulles–Meyer strategy provedcompletely fallible, as Josselson had alwaysfeared. The injection of extra dollars simplyserved to defer the moment of final conflictbetween the gunslingers in New York andthe sophisticates of the Paris operation.Within less than a year, the mutual distrustand acrimony, which had first surfaced afterNabokov’s 1952 Paris festival, broke intothe open. On March 26, 1956, theManchester Guardian published a letterfrom Bertrand Russell which referred to“atrocities committed by the FBI” during theRosenberg trial and compared America with“other police states such as Nazi Germanyand Stalin’s Russia.” Josselson reactedimmediately, suggesting to Irving Kristol thathe find an “intelligent Americancorrespondent in London” to interview

Russell in such a way as to “show thatRussell has not seen any new evidence inthe Rosenberg case and that his statementwas based on some Communist propagandawhich in his senility he can no longerdistinguish from truth.”47

But whilst Josselson was preparing toundermine Russell’s claims through acarefully angled interview, the AmericanCommittee decided to wade in feet first. Aletter of protest was sent directly to Russell,accusing him of an “extraordinary lapsefrom standards of objectivity and justice”and doing “a major service to the enemieswe had supposed you engaged to combat.”Had it occurred to Russell to consider “thepropriety of any friend of cultural freedom,and in particular an officer of the Congressfor Cultural Freedom . . . in making falseand irresponsible statements about the

process of justice in the United States”?48

Not surprisingly, Russell’s response to theletter was to resign as honorary chairman ofthe Congress.

Josselson was furious, not least becausethe letter to Russell was “transmitted to us inthe most peremptory fashion.” It wasunthinkable that such a communicationcould have been sent by any other affiliateof the Congress without Josselson’s priorapproval. After calling an emergencyquorum of the Executive Committee inParis, Josselson forwarded its officialcensure of the American outfit for its failureto “consult with us when taking actions,within the body of the Congress, which canhave serious international consequences.”49

It was too late to retrieve Russell, whosefourth resignation from the Congress reallywas his last. In June 1956, his name was

removed from the letterhead of all Congressstationery.

The trouble did not end there. Twomonths later, the resignation of James T.Farrell as national chairman of the AmericanCommittee was splattered across theheadlines. Farrell was a complex man.Whilst an avowed anti-Communist, he couldnot abide the posturing of so many NewYork intellectuals whose “Park Avenueavant-gardism” was simply an excuse not toget down to better work. He himself hadrenounced politics once before, writing toMeyer Schapiro in 1941, “I’ve decided thatthere is not much I can do in the worldtoday, and there are enough people posing asstatesmen. So, I am going to work hard atmy own work.”50 But then the temptationsof a crusade against Communism hadproved hard to resist, and he too had taken

up the charge. In the end, he was defeatednot by Communism but by the pettyvigilantism of his fellow crusaders.“Monomania,” George Orwell had oncewarned, “and the fear of uttering heresiesare not friendly to the creative faculties.”Farrell’s letter of resignation reeked of ColdWar fatigue. “We have never been able tosink our roots deeply into American life,” hecomplained. “We have not been able tocontribute sufficiently to the fight againstcensorship in this country . . . the time hascome for all who believe in the liberal spiritto make a new effort towards achieving itsresurgence. . . . We are constantly standingon the edge of becoming a politicalCommittee with views on foreign policy andmany other issues. In doing that, we are indanger of mixing politics and culture.” Healso stressed his personal reason for

resigning, which was a thinly veiled warningto other writers on the American Committee:“If I want to write better, I must give moretime to it and to study.”51

This might have been the end of it butfor the fact Farrell chose to announce hisresignation first to the New York Times. Hecalled the paper late on Monday night,August 27, 1956, apparently muchdisinhibited by drink. He caviled at theAmerican Committee’s failure to cohere as amass organization, its failure to do anythingabout censorship in the United States, itslack of concern with American civil liberties,and its weaseling on the McCarthy issue.Diana Trilling was elected by the board ofdirectors to accept Farrell’s resignation,which she did in a letter ringing with icycontempt.

In Paris, the news of Farrell’s resignation

was met with incredulous rage by MichaelJosselson, who wrote angrily: “We fail tounderstand why the Committee did not usethe 24 hour period of grace between thetime when Mrs Trilling received the call andthe time that the story actually went to pressto have Jim Farrell withdraw his originalstatement and have it replaced by astatement of his resignation which wouldhave been agreeable to everyoneconcerned.”52

Enough was enough. When IrvingBrown received a letter asking him tobackpay three years of membership dues tothe American Committee, he simply ignoredit. Junkie Fleischmann withdrew from itsboard in October 1956, saying he was fartoo busy with the Paris operation. OnJanuary 31, 1957, Sidney Hook wrote toNabokov that the American Committee had

“reluctantly decided to suspend its activeorganizational life” because of financialstraits.

15

Ransom’s Boys

It’s my contention that the CIA not onlyengaged in a cultural cold war in the abstractand purely pragmatic way, but that they hadvery definite aims in view, and they had avery definite aesthetic: they stood for HighCulture.

Richard Elman

In September 1954, Cord Meyer took overthe International Organizations Divisionfrom Tom Braden, who “retired”1 from theCIA and moved to California to edit anewspaper purchased for him by Nelson

Rockefeller. Meyer inherited a divisionwhich constituted the greatest singleconcentration of covert political andpropaganda activities of the by now octopus-like CIA.2 Furthermore, he did so in anatmosphere increasingly favorable to covertactivity, as a top-secret report submitted toPresident Eisenhower in the same monthshows: “As long as it remains nationalpolicy, another important requirement is anaggressive covert psychological, political andparamilitary organization more effective,more unique, and if necessary, more ruthlessthan that employed by the enemy. No oneshould be permitted to stand in the way ofthe prompt, efficient, and secureaccomplishment of this mission. It is nowclear that we are facing an implacable enemywhose avowed objective is worlddomination by whatever means and at

whatever cost. There are no rules in such agame. Hitherto acceptable norms of humanconduct do not apply. If the U.S. is tosurvive, longstanding American concepts of‘fair play’ must be reconsidered. . . . It maybecome necessary that the American peoplebe made acquainted with, understand andsupport this fundamentally repugnantphilosophy.”3

Yet the importance of the InternationalOrganizations Division was not alwaysreflected in the caliber of the staffersassigned to it. Tom Braden had struggled toinspire his own assistant, only to be met withtotal indifference. “His name was LieutenantColonel Buffington. He left memoseverywhere, but he didn’t do jack-shit,” saidBraden. “He was a total waste of time, hedid nothing all day. He would come in atnine, hang up his hat, read the New York

Times, then go home again.”4 In a jokeyattempt to trace the genealogy of caseofficers arriving in Paris, Josselson and hisintimates referred to them as George I,George II, George III, and so on. George IVwas Lee Williams, also jokingly known as“Nickel and Dime” (a play on his codename) and, fleetingly, as “Mr. Rochester.”Williams made a better impression than mostof his predecessors, valiantly straddling thetwo cultures of an increasinglybureaucratized CIA and the Congress, whichwas almost bohemian in contrast. “Iremember driving along in Paris with Cord[Meyer] once after a meeting with Mike,and Cord turned to me and said, ‘You know,Lee, Mike really likes you,’ ” Williamsremembered. “Son of a bitch! It’s like hewas surprised. But Mike liked me because Inever tried to teach him his job—I sat at his

feet, I was deferential to him.”5 ButJosselson’s real ally was Lawrence deNeufville, and he, after ten years in Europe,wanted to go home. Assigned new cover inthe New York office of Radio Free Europe,he left Paris in late 1953.

De Neufville was never going to be aneasy act to follow, and after him Josselsoncame increasingly to think of the Congresscase officers as “messenger boys.” “At thebeginning the CIA were good, interestingpeople like Lawrence de Neufville, whosehearts were in the right places,” said DianaJosselson. “But then they became less andless impressive, and Michael came to likethem less. Every now and then a caseofficer would appear and I could seeMichael trying to disengage, but they wouldcling on. Michael would never have askedanything substantive of them. He was

friends with them, talked about their familiesand careers, and I had the idea that theyadmired him, but Michael was determined toprotect the Congress from the Agency, andfrom the possibility the relationship might berevealed.”6 According to Diana, therelationship between Michael and hisAgency colleagues became increasingly acharade: “Since they wanted to pretend theywere in control, Michael probably welcomedthe opportunity to inform them ofdevelopments, to help the illusion along.”Diana, who dutifully served case officerswith the obligatory martini cocktails whenthey came to the Josselsons’ apartment, laterdismissed them as “a necessary evil. Theyweren’t half as important to me as mymaid.”7

One of the problems for Cord Meyerwas that it was difficult to attract Agency

staffers to his division. Not that there wasany shortage of suitable candidates. By themid-1960s, it was the Agency’s boast that itcould staff any college from its analysts, 50percent of whom held advanced degrees, 30percent of which were doctorates, promptingone State Department official to say that“there are more liberal intellectuals persquare inch at CIA than anywhere else ingovernment.” But these collegiate types hadnot joined the Agency to do what they coulddo on campus. They were seekingadventure, not a job looking after the kind ofpeople they could meet at high table. “Thepeople in the International OrganizationsDivision were looked upon by a great many[Agency] people as some kind of fluff on theside, particularly by those who felt what weought to be doing is hard intelligence andlet’s recruit the spies and get the documents

and the rest of this is just a bunch ofnonsense,”8 said CIA officer DonaldJameson. “Some people in CIA didn’t thinkit was proper to be spending all this moneyon all these leftists,”9 Lawrence de Neufvilleconfirmed. So Cord Meyer began to lookelsewhere.

“Cord brought unique intellectualcachet,” said Lee Williams. “He had uniqueaccess to the intellectual community inAmerica, and he had huge respect forliterary men.”10 Entering Yale in 1939,Meyer had studied English verse “from themetaphysical poets of the SeventeenthCentury to the modern poetry of Yeats andT. S. Eliot under Professor Maynard Mack,who left us a permanent respect for thegraceful majesty of that achievement and anambition in some of us to try to write as

well.”11 Meyer tried his hand at poetry,publishing some “passable” verses in theYale Lit, of which he subsequently becameeditor.

In 1942, Meyer graduated in Englishliterature with a brilliant summa cum laude.His literary ambitions were thwarted by thewar, in which his twin brother was killed,and Meyer himself lost an eye in Guamwhen a Japanese grenade exploded at hisfeet (subsequently earning him the CIAnickname “Cyclops”). Thereafter, he penneda few articles and, in 1980, his memoirs,Facing Reality.

As editor of the Yale Literary Magazine,Meyer was following in the footsteps ofJames Jesus Angleton, who became theCIA’s legendary chief of counterintelligence.A literary radical, Angleton had introducedEzra Pound to Yale and founded the

magazine of verse Furioso in 1939 (hisname as editor appeared on the mastheadeven when he was chief of counterespionagein Rome). Angleton was the vital link inwhat became known as “the P source” (“P”standing for “Professor”), which describedthe Agency’s connection with the IvyLeague. Prominent members of “the Psource” included William Sloane Coffin, agraduate of Yale who was recruited by AllenDulles. Recalling his decision to join theAgency, Coffin later said: “Stalin madeHitler look like a Boy Scout. I was verystrongly anti-Soviet. In that frame of mind Iwatched the Korean War shape up. But Ididn’t follow it too closely, or question thecauses. When I graduated from Yale in1949, I was thinking of going into the CIA,but I went into the seminary instead. After ayear at the Union Theological Seminary,

when war with the Soviet Union seemed tobe threatening, I quit to go into the CIA,hoping to be useful in the war effort. TheCIA financed the non-Communist left; theygave with minimal strings attached. In thosedays, I had no quarrel with American policy—but, in retrospect, I wouldn’t be soinnocent and smirchless.”12 Coffin’s IvyLeague recruits included Archie Roosevelt,who had read English at Harvard under thefamous head of Wadham College MauriceBowra (who was on exchange from Oxfordfor a year), and Archie’s cousin Kermit“Kim” Roosevelt, who was a few yearsahead of him at Groton School and Harvard.

Another major Ivy League connection—and the epitome of “the P source”—wasProfessor Norman Holmes Pearson, arevered humanist famous for editing theViking five-volume Poets of the English

Language with W.H. Auden, an officer ofboth the American Studies Association andthe Modern Language Association, a trusteeof the Bryher Foundation, and an executorof the poet H.D.’s estate. Pearson was alsoan OSS–CIA incunabulum. He trained manyof the most promising minds at Yale,including Angleton and Richard Ellmann,whom he recruited to OSS.13 He himselfworked with X-2, the counterintelligencebranch of OSS, working in London duringthe war under Kim Philby, who laterdescribed him as “naive.” Pearsonsupervised the wartime accumulation of fileson a million enemy agents and organizations,a practice he “strongly felt should becontinued after the war, despite itsoffensiveness to traditional Jeffersoniannotions of government. Such quaintobjections . . . were quickly overcome, as

the term ‘enemy’ acquired a very liberaldefinition.”14 Returning to Yale, he presidedover “the promotion of American studies athome and abroad. Like foreign-area studies,this new discipline was of clear imperialimport, in that it allowed us to understandour unique fitness for our postwar role asthe world’s governor, and encouraged a finerappreciation of our cultural sophisticationamong the ruled.”15 Consistent with thisview was Pearson’s preface to the Rinehartedition of Thoreau’s Walden, in which heminimized the radicalism of the greatAmerican individualist and sought to releasehim from any association with anarchy,stressing that his writings were in support ofbetter government, “a symbol of theindividual freedom on which we like to thinkthe American way of life is based.”

Pearson’s most famous protégé was

James Jesus Angleton. Born in Idaho in1917, Angleton as a teenager was sent toMalvern College in Worcestershire, where heworked at becoming “more English than theEnglish. He absorbed Old World courtesyand the quiet good manners that neverdeserted him. Indeed, the years gave him aEuropean persona (he also spent longholidays in Italy) that obscured his Yankbackground, and gave him a slight Englishaccent.”16 He was at Yale from 1937 to1941, where he worked on the Yale LiteraryMagazine alongside McGeorge Bundy, thefuture national security adviser; WalterSullivan, who later became science editor ofthe New York Times; and the poet E. ReedWhittemore Jr. In 1938, Angleton met EzraPound in Rapallo, and they became firmfriends, Pound later describing him as “oneof the most important hopes of literary

magazines in the U.S.” When Angletonwrote his will in 1949, he left “a bottle ofgood spirits” to Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings,and other poet friends from Furioso, andconcluded with the following credo: “I cansay this now, that I do believe in the spirit ofChrist and the life everlasting, and in thisturbulent social system which strugglessometimes blindly to preserve the right tofreedom and expression of the spirit. In thename of Jesus Christ I leave you.” Despitethese sentiments, Reed Whittemoreremembered that Angleton (whose motherwas Mexican) was embarrassed by hismiddle name because “it suggested he wasnot an upper-class Englishman, which wasthen the image he was trying to project.”17

An old hand at conspiracy from OSS,Angleton carried his talents to the CIA,where he developed a seemingly limitless

capacity for Byzantine intrigue. He firstmajor success was the orchestration ofAmerica’s covert campaign to secure victoryfor the Christian Democrats in the 1948Italian elections. This campaign, closelywatched and supported by George Kennanand Allen Dulles, was America’s firstsuccessful act of political Cold Warfare.According to Kim Philby, Angleton waspromoted to chief of the CIA’s Office ofSpecial Operations in 1949. For twentyyears he was in charge of the Agency’sCounterintelligence Staff (CI) andresponsible for all liaisons with Alliedintelligence from 1954. He also ran acompletely independent group of journalist-operatives who performed sensitive andfrequently dangerous assignments. CIAcontemporaries knew virtually nothing ofthis group, who worked under “deep snow”

cover and whose secrets Angleton keptlocked away in a safe in his office to whichonly he had access.

An accomplished grower of wild orchids(and the model for “Mother” in AaronLatham’s roman à clef Orchids for Mother);a world-class fly fisherman; a publishedphotographer; a skillful worker in gemstonesand leather; a fan of Italian opera, PaulNewman, Robert Redford, Marlon Brando,Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, cricketmatches, and European soccer, Angletonwas an extraordinary, eclectic figure. ClareBoothe Luce once told him, “There’s nodoubt you are easily the most interesting andfascinating figure the intelligence world hasproduced, and a living legend.”18 Standingsix feet tall, always dressed in dark clothes,Angleton, said one admirer, had “the look ofa Byron—very lean and starved about the

jaws.” He was the very image of the poet-spy, the inspiration for many romantic mythsabout the CIA as an extension of theAmerican liberal literary tradition.

Cord Meyer’s own extensive network of“P source” contacts now drew him toKenyon College, where his favorite poetsAllen Tate and John Crowe Ransom taught.It was here, in 1938, that Ransom hadfounded the Kenyon Review, a magazinewhich shaped the literary sensibility of ageneration, its prestige securing a high placeon the cultural Dow Jones for the lazybackwater town of Gambier. Here, also in1938, a pool of talent had been residing atDouglass House, a “carpenter-Gothic”building in the center of campus, earmarkedas the ideal “isolation block” for John CroweRansom’s studious, eccentric poet protégés.Known as “Ransom’s Boys,” this group

included Robie Macauley, Randall Jarrell,John Thompson, David Macdowell, PeterTaylor, and the more senior Robert Lowell,a faculty member.19

As a student at Olivet College, Michigan,in 1937 Robie Macauley had listened tolectures by Katherine Anne Porter and AllenTate, and observed Ford Madox Fordwandering around the campus “like apensioned veteran of forgotten wars”(Macauley later wrote the preface to the1961 edition of Ford’s Parade’s End).During the war, Macauley served for fouryears with G-2, the U.S. Army CounterIntelligence Corps, working as a specialagent hunting down Nazis. He laterfictionalized the experience in a collection ofshort stories, The End of Pity, which wonhim the Furioso Fiction Prize. After taking apostgraduate degree at the University of

Iowa, he returned to Kenyon College to joinJohn Crowe Ransom as an assistant on theKenyon Review. In August 1953, Ransomtold a colleague that he had “high hopes ofmaking a Fellow out of Robie if he doesn’ttake a job with Central Intelligence, as I’veheard he’s going to.”20 Cord Meyer hadpersonally offered Macauley a job in theInternational Organizations Division. Afterconsidering the offer over the summer,Macauley accepted. “Cord recruited him tobe a case officer to work with Josselsonbecause I guess he thought he could speakthe right language,” said Lee Williams.21

Meyer scooped his second Ransom’sboy when he recruited John “Jack”Thompson, who in 1956 became executivedirector of the Farfield Foundation, a job heheld, under contract to the CIA, for over adecade. After Kenyon, Thompson had

authored a number of scholarly articles andcommanded quite a degree of influenceamongst the New York literati. “He gotpicked up by John Crowe Ransom and theFugitive Group, then later by Lionel andDiana Trilling in New York, whereThompson was teaching English atColumbia University,” remembered his closefriend Jason Epstein. “The Trillings, whowere fantastic snobs, were obsessed withThompson and his wife. So Trillingsuggested Jack as director of the FarfieldFoundation, probably because he [Trilling]hoped to get money from it for theAmerican Committee for CulturalFreedom.”22 At the time, it all seemed like agood idea to Thompson. “The KGB wasspending millions,” he said, “but we had ourfriends, too. We knew who was deserving,and who was not; we knew what the best

stuff was, and we were trying to avoid thestandard democratic crap of seeing thatfunds went to one Jew, one black, onewoman, one Southerner. We wanted toreach our friends, and help them, the peoplewho agreed with us, and were trying to dogood things.”23 Despite Thompson’s longcollaboration with the CIA, his entry in oneedition of the Directory of AmericanProfessors, under “Politics,” reads “radical.”

As well as Thompson and Macauley,one other member of the Douglass Housegroup would also be played as an “asset” byCord Meyer but to disastrous, if darklycomic, effect. To Ransom he was “morethan a student, he’s more like a son to me.”His name was Robert Lowell.

From the less prestigious classrooms of asmall experimental boys’ school in St. Louis,Missouri, Cord Meyer now added the young

novelist John Hunt to his list of new recruits.Born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, in 1925,Hunt had attended Lawrenceville School inNew Jersey before leaving to enlist in theMarine Corps in 1943. Discharged in 1946with the rank of second lieutenant, heentered Harvard on a scholarship in thesame year. There, he was editor of StudentProgressive, the publication of the HarvardLiberal Union. Graduating in 1948 with amajor in English literature and a minor inGreek, Hunt married that autumn andmoved to Paris, where he started writingfiction, took classes at the Sorbonne, andfound himself enchanted and fascinated bythe Hemingway notion of an American inParis. Following the birth of a daughter inJuly 1949, he returned to the United Statesto enter the Writers’ Workshop of theUniversity of Iowa, where he also taught in

the classics department. There, he metRobie Macauley. In 1951 Hunt joined thefaculty of the Thomas Jefferson School inSt. Louis, where he stayed until June 1955,when the novel he had begun in Paris—Generations of Men—was accepted forpublication by Atlantic, Little Brown. It wasaround this time that Meyer recruited Huntas a case officer for the Congress forCultural Freedom.

A combination of the enormous pressureof work and his own highly strungtemperament had begun to affect MichaelJosselson’s health, and in October 1955,aged forty-seven, he suffered his first heartattack. So Meyer decided to send in secondlieutenant John Hunt to lighten the load.There followed the peculiar charade of Huntbeing formally interviewed by Josselson,who had already been supplied with a

curriculum vita and a list of glowingreferences. John Farrar of Farrar Strausrecommended Hunt for his “executiveability, a careful head and a sense of missionfor the things we all believe in.” TimothyFoote, assistant editor at Time-Life in Paris,was confident that he would be “awfullyuseful to have around in almost anyreasonable enterprize [sic],” adding that “heis a strong believer in Americanresponsibilities overseas, but he does not feelthat the United States should apologize forher efforts or influence in foreigncountries.”24 Interviewed by Josselson inFebruary 1956, Hunt was formallyappointed to the Congress Secretariat shortlyafterwards. It can only be assumed that therésumé and the letters of recommendationwere part of Hunt’s cover, useful to have inthe files in order to give the appearance that

his appointment was entirely above board.For Hunt, the Congress was, like

Melville’s sea, “my Yale College and myHarvard.” Although he could not expect toachieve the authority that Josselson had wonafter years of diligent and scrupulousmanagement of both dollars andtemperaments, the Congress benefited fromthe injection of new blood. The advent ofMeyer’s recruits signaled a new era in theCongress’s relationship with the CIA. Itended the drought of case officers properlysuited to the job, providing Josselson withadjutants who were intellectually compatiblewith the demands of the Congress. Josselsonand Macauley in particular got on extremelywell. They took motoring trips together withtheir wives, sometimes joined by Hunt andhis wife. Photographs show them tannedand relaxed, with Macauley and Hunt

looking the archetypal 1950s Americans,handsomely sporting crew cuts, chino pants,and black-framed sunglasses. Back on thejob, they often shared a joke at Agencyexpense. When newly arrived CIA agentScott Charles revealed that he was taking adifferent route to the office each day in casehe was being followed, Josselson, Macauley,and Hunt thought this was hystericallyfunny.

“Robie Macauley didn’t think like them[the CIA] or act like them. He wasn’tcynical or smart-alecky,” said DianaJosselson, who had been a friend ofMacauley’s since 1941. “He only ever gotone thing wrong with Michael, which wasthat he wouldn’t respond when Michaelasked angrily or explained angrily aboutsome situation. Michael would get more andmore angry, and his blood pressure would

rise, and he’d repeat himself again, andRobie would just sit there and say nothing. Itold him once that he wasn’t handlingMichael properly, that he should saysomething and not let Michael get allsteamed up like this.”25

Meyer’s recruitment drive demonstrateda strengthened commitment to the Congress,but this was proving to be a mixed blessing.The arrival of Warren Manshel in 1954, forexample, was resented by Josselson, whofelt that the Agency’s presence within theCongress “apparat” was becomingdisproportionate. Manshel, said DianaJosselson, “was sent over by the CIA toreport on the Congress. He was planted onMichael, who had to find some kind ofcover for him. He was part of a series ofshifting relationships outside of theimmediate staff, and Michael just had to put

up with him.”26 He also had to put up withScott Charles, who was placed in the Parisoffice as an auditor. “I rather liked him,”said Diana. “Later, after Michael had died, Iedited his guidebook on Geneva.”27

By the mid-1950s, Josselson’s allegiancewas primarily to the Congress, whose needshe instinctively ranked higher than those ofthe CIA. He felt that the Congress neededthe Agency only for the money (and CordMeyer was keeping a close eye on hisdollars, inserting CIA accountant KenDonaldson into the Congress as its London-based “Comptroller General”). Josselson hadeven tried to free the Congress from itsfinancial dependency on the Agency, makinghis own overtures to the Ford Foundation.As Ford had already supported the Congressto the tune of several million dollars by themid-1950s, it might reasonably be expected

that it would consider assuming the fullfinancial burden. But the Agency refused torelinquish its grip on the Congress, andJosselson’s discussions with the FordFoundation were doomed from the outset.

Far from diminishing, the CIA’s presencein the cultural life of the period nowincreased. From New York, Lawrence deNeufville wrote to Josselson with ideas fordiscussion in Encounter, including a piece onthe subject of “the conscience of theindividual versus the requirements ofhierarchy,” which Josselson hastilyrecommended to Spender and Kristol. They,presumably, were ignorant of the specialinterest Josselson had in the intricacies ofsuch a subject. Other Agency men wereunable to resist the pull of the pen. JackThompson continued to write for scholarlyjournals like the Hudson Review, and in

1961 he published The Founding of EnglishMetre, a brilliant study of English poetry.Robie Macauley wrote for the KenyonReview, the New Republic, the IrishUniversity Review, Partisan Review, andthe New York Times Book Review. Duringhis tenure at the CIA, he continued to writefiction, notably The Disguises of Love(1954) and The End of Pity and OtherStories (1958).

The London firm of Hodder andStoughton published a book on Afghanistanby Edward S. Hunter, another CIA operativewho used the cover of a freelance writer androamed Central Asia for years. FrederickPraeger, a propagandist for the Americanmilitary government in postwar Germany,published between twenty and twenty-fivevolumes in which the CIA had an interest ineither the writing, the publication, or the

distribution. Praeger said it either reimbursedhim directly for the expenses of publicationor guaranteed, usually through a foundation,the purchase of enough copies to make itworthwhile.

“Books differ from all other propagandamedia,” wrote a chief of the CIA’s CovertAction Staff, “primarily because one singlebook can significantly change the reader’sattitude and action to an extent unmatchedby the impact of any other single medium[such as to] make books the most importantweapon of strategic (long-range)propaganda.”28 The CIA’s clandestine booksprogram was run, according to the samesource, with the following aims in mind:“Get books published or distributed abroadwithout revealing any U.S. influence, bycovertly subsidizing foreign publications orbooksellers. Get books published which

should not be ‘contaminated’ by any overttie-in with the U.S. government, especially ifthe position of the author is ‘delicate.’ Getbooks published for operational reasons,regardless of commercial viability. Initiateand subsidize indigenous national orinternational organizations for bookpublishing or distributing purposes. Stimulatethe writing of politically significant books byunknown foreign authors—either by directlysubsidizing the author, if covert contact isfeasible, or indirectly, through literary agentsor publishers.”29

The New York Times alleged in 1977 thatthe CIA had been involved in the publicationof at least a thousand books.30 The Agencyhas never made public its publicationsbacklist, but it is known that books in whichit had an involvement include Lasky’s LaRévolution Hongroise; translations of T.S.

Eliot’s The Waste Land and Four Quartets;and, naturally, those books published by theCongress for Cultural Freedom or itsaffiliates, including anthologies of verse,Herbert Lüthy’s Le Passé Présent: Combatsd’Idées de Calvin à Rousseau; PatriciaBlake’s Half-Way to the Moon; New Writingfrom Russia (1964, an Encounter book);Literature and Revolution in Soviet Russia,edited by Max Hayward and LeopoldLabedz (Oxford University Press, 1963);History and Hope: Progress in Freedom byKot Jelenski; Bertrand de Jouvenel’s The Artof Conjecture; The Hundred Flowers, editedby Roderick MacFarquhar; Nicolo Tucci’sautobiographical novel Before My Time;Barzini’s The Italians; Pasternak’s DoctorZhivago; and new editions of Machiavelli’sThe Prince. Under the imprint of theChekhov Publishing Company, which was

secretly subsidized by the CIA, Chekhov’sworks were widely translated anddistributed.

In addition to John Hunt, whose firstcalling was as a writer, the Agency boastedseveral other active novelists. In Paris, Yalegraduate Peter Matthiessen, later thecelebrated author of The Snow Leopard, co-founded and wrote for the Paris Review andpenned the novel Partisans whilst he wasworking for the CIA. Another of CordMeyer’s recruits was Charles McCarry, whowas later seen as America’s answer to Johnle Carré. There was also James Michener,whose long career writing blockbusters withsuch modest titles as Poland, Alaska, Texas,and Space was punctuated by a spell withthe Agency. In the mid-1950s, Michenerused his career as a writer as cover for hiswork in eliminating radicals who had

infiltrated one of the CIA’s Asian operations.To this end, he was placed in the CIA’s AsiaFoundation. He later said that “a writer mustnever serve as a secret agent for anything oranybody.”

Then there was Howard Hunt, author ofsuch novels as East of Farewell, Limit ofDarkness, and Stranger in Town (whichhelped win him a Guggenheim Fellowship).Whilst working for Wisner’s OPC, HowardHunt was signed to do several paperbackoriginals with the Fawcett PublishingCorporation under the Gold Medal imprint.In Mexico, he was responsible for theMarxist writer-intellectual El Campesino’sbook Life and Death in the USSR, one ofthe first personal revelations of Stalinistterror to come out of Latin America. Thebook was widely translated and distributedwith CIA assistance. He also assigned case

officer William Buckley to help anotherintellectual, Chilean Marxist EudocioRavines, finish his equally influential bookThe Yenan Way.

In late 1961, Howard Hunt joined TracyBarnes’s newly established DomesticOperations Division. Barnes, who served asdeputy director of the Psychological StrategyBoard, was a strong advocate of the use ofliterature as an anti-Communist weapon andworked hard to strengthen the CIA’spublishing program. “The new divisionaccepted both personnel and projectsunwanted elsewhere within CIA,” HowardHunt later wrote, “and those covert-actionprojects that came to me were almostentirely concerned with publishing andpublications. We subsidized ‘significant’books, for example, The New Class byMilovan Djilas (the definitive study of

Communist oligarchies), one of a number ofFrederick A. Praeger Inc. titles sosupported.”31

“Under one ghost’s name or another, Iwas helping on a few pro-CIA novels . . . aswell as overseeing one or two scholarlyworks, not to mention dashing off anoccasional magazine piece on the newinvidiousness of the old Commie threat,”says Harry Hubbard in Mailer’s Harlot’sGhost. Even travel guides could contain theinsights of CIA agents, several of whomfloated about Europe using the celebratedFodor guides as cover. Eugene Fodor, aformer OSS lieutenant, later defended thispractice, saying the CIA contributors “wereall highly professional, high quality. Wenever let politics be smuggled into thebooks.”32 Lyman Kirkpatrick, executiveassistant to the director of CIA, contributed

the “Armies of the World” article each yearto the Encyclopædia Britannica, which wasowned by former assistant secretary of statefor public affairs William Benton.Sometimes, reviews of books in the NewYork Times or other respected broadsheetswere penned by CIA writers under contract.CIA agent George Carver signed articlesunder his own name in Foreign Affairs(though he omitted mention of who hisemployers were). In England, MontyWoodhouse wrote articles for Encounter andthe Times Literary Supplement.

The phenomenon of writer as spy, spyas writer was by no means new. W.Somerset Maugham used his literary statusas cover for assignments for the BritishSecret Service during the First World War.His later collection of autobiographicalstories Ashenden was a bible for intelligence

officers. Compton Mackenzie worked forMI5 in the 1930s and was later prosecutedby Her Majesty’s government for revealingthe names of SIS personnel in his bookAegean Memories. Graham Greene derivedmuch fictional material from his experienceas an undercover agent for MI5 during—and, it is said, after—the Second World War.He once famously referred to MI5 as “thebest travel agency in the world.”

“Intellectuals, or a certain sort ofintellectuals, have always had a romanceabout intelligence services,” observed CarolBrightman. “It’s a kind of coming-of-ageexperience, going into the intelligenceservices, especially on certain campusessuch as Yale.”33 For novelist Richard Elman(not to be confused with Joyce biographerRichard Ellmann), there was also a sharedaesthetic concern: “It’s worth considering

what these people had in common. Theywere all Christians, in a nonsectarian, T.S.Eliot kind of way. They believed in a higherauthority, a higher truth which sanctionedtheir anti-Communist, anti-atheist crusade.T.S. Eliot, Pound, and other modernistsappealed to their elitist sensibilities. The CIAeven commissioned a translation of Eliot’sFour Quartets and then had copies air-dropped into Russia. These were men, asmuch as Shaw and Wells, for whom thesocialist ‘century of the common man’ wasunwelcome—they wanted the UncommonMan and High Culture. So, they weren’t justputting money into culture willy-nilly.”34

Allen Ginsberg even fantasized that T.S.Eliot was part of a literary conspiracymounted by Eliot’s friend James JesusAngleton. In a 1978 sketch called “T.S. EliotEntered My Dreams,” Ginsberg imagined

that “[o]n the fantail of a boat to Europe,Eliot was reclining with several passengers indeck seats, blue cloudy sky behind, ironfloor below us. ‘And yourself,’ I said, ‘Whatdid you think of the domination of poeticsby the CIA. After all, wasn’t Angleton yourfriend? Didn’t he tell you his plan torevitalize the intellectual structure of theWest against the so-to-speak Stalinists?’ Eliotlistened attentively—I was surprised hewasn’t distracted. ‘Well, there are all sorts ofchaps competing for dominance, politicaland literary . . . your Gurus for instance, andthe Theosophists, and the table rappers anddialecticians and tea-leaf-readers andIdeologues. I suppose I was one such, in mymiddle years. But I did, yes, knowAngleton’s literary conspiracies, I thoughtthey were petty—well meant but of noimportance to Literature.’ ‘I thought they

were of some importance,’ I said, ‘since itsecretly nourished the careers of too manysquare intellectuals, provided sustenance tothinkers in the Academy who influenced theintellectual tone of the West. . . . After all,Intellectual tone should be revolutionary, orat least Radical, seeking roots of dis-easeand Mechanization and dominance byunnatural monopoly. . . . And theGovernment through foundations wassupporting a whole field of ‘Scholars ofWar.’ . . . The subsidization of magazineslike Encounter which held Eliotic style as atouchstone of sophistication and competence. . . failed to create an alternative free vitaldecentralized individualistic culture. Instead,we had the worst of Capitalist Imperialism.’”35

The defense of “high” culture mountedby people like Angleton was automatic. “It

would never have occurred to us todenounce anyone or anything as ‘elitist,’ ”Irving Kristol once said. “The elite was us—the ‘happy few’ who had been chosen byHistory to guide our fellow creatures towarda secular redemption.”36 Raised onmodernist culture, these elitists worshippedEliot, Yeats, Joyce, and Proust. They saw itas their job “not to give the public what itwants, or what it thinks it wants but what—through the medium of its most intelligentmembers—it ought to have.”37 In otherwords, high culture was important as notonly an anti-Communist line of defense butalso the bastion against a homogenized masssociety, against what Dwight Macdonaldviewed with horror as “the spreading oozeof Mass Culture.”38

The paradox of a defense of democracy

mounted by patricians who were essentiallydeeply suspicious of it is hard to ignore.Positioning themselves like an elite ofprinces holding the pass against barbarism,they were modernists terrified of modernityand its blood-dimmed tide. In a valedictoryaddress to Kenyon College in 1940, RobertLowell had given voice to the darkest fearsof this aristocracy: “For all of you know thatas the Philistines and Goths proceed in theirspiritless way to dismember civilization, theywill come to all the golden palaces oflearning, they will come at last to Milton,Groton, St. Paul’s and St. Mark’s and there,the students who are neither efficient norhumane nor cultured will be doing what theyare doing. And the indignant Goths andPhilistines will turn these poor drones out ofthe hive and there will be no old limbs, forthe new blood, and the world will revert to

its unwearied cycles of retrogression,advance and repetition.”39

Convinced that they had to shore uptheir defenses against the coming ruin, thesewere the Aurelians who in 1949 had decidedto award Ezra Pound the Bollingen Prize forPoetry for his Pisan Cantos. One anecdotetells how one day Paul Mellon, a generousphilanthropist, complained to Allen Tate andJohn Crowe Ransom about how manywriters were leftists. Mellon himself wasadvanced in his taste in art but conservativein politics, almost a sine qua non of ColdWar angels. Tate replied to the effect thatwriters were always needy, so why didn’tMellon put up some money for fellowships,awards or whatever, which would make therecipients much happier and less inclined tobe revolutionary? So Mellon put up theBollingen-Mellon awards as private

endowments worth about $20,000 each.“Why did they propose Pound?” asked

Richard Elman. “Because he represented theultimate in the mandarin culture they weretrying to preserve and promote.”40 Theaward sparked a huge controversy, not leastbecause Pound was in a hospital for thecriminally insane at the time, the onlyAmerican charged with treason in theSecond World War. His wartime broadcastsfor Mussolini’s Minculpop had includedtirades against “Mr. Jewsevelt,” “FranklinFinkelstein Roosevelt,” “StinkieRoosenstein,” and “kikes, sheenies, and theoily people.” He argued that Mein Kampfwas “keenly analyzed history” and called itsauthor “a saint and a martyr” in the traditionof Joan of Arc. America, he said, “had beeninvaded by vermin.” Karl Shapiro, editor ofPoetry magazine, wrote that he was “the

only dissenter from the Bollingen Prize toPound, except Paul Green, who abstained.Eliot, Auden, Tate, Lowell—all voted theprize to Pound. A passel of fascists.” WhenWilliam Barrett attacked the jury’s decision,Allen Tate challenged him to a duel.

The decision to award Pound the prizere-inflamed all the art-versus-politicsdisputes that had been raging since the1930s, and seemed to confirm what manyon the left feared: that there was adisposition amongst those who calledthemselves liberals to forgive, or at leastignore, the historic compromises which hadled many artists—many of whom were nowcomfortably relocated in America—to usetheir creative talent in flattery of Fascism. Ata time when art and artists were so highlypoliticized, it seemed insufficient to state, asthe Bollingen jury did, that “[t]o permit

other considerations than that of poeticachievement to sway the decision woulddestroy the significance of the award andwould in principle deny the validity of thatobjective perception of value on whichcivilized society must rest.”41 How could artbe autonomous on the one hand and, whereconvenient, pressed into political service onthe other?

16

Yanqui Doodles

I can paint better than anybody!Jackson Pollock, in de Kooning’s dream

During his presidency, Harry Truman likedto get up early and make for the NationalGallery. Arriving before the city had risen,he would nod silently to the guard whosespecial duty it was to unlock the door for thepresident’s pre-breakfast stroll through thegallery. Truman relished these visits andrecorded them in his diary. In 1948, aftergazing at assorted Holbeins and Rembrandts,he entered the following observation: “It’s a

pleasure to look at perfection and then thinkof the lazy, nutty moderns. It is likecomparing Christ with Lenin.” Publicly, hearrived at similar judgments, claiming thatthe Dutch masters “make our modern daydaubers and frustrated ham and egg menlook just what they are.”

In his scorn for the moderns, Trumanarticulated a view held by many Americansthat linked experimental, and especiallyabstract, art to degenerate or subversiveimpulses. Those European vanguardists whohad fled the Fascist jackboot were nowstartled to find themselves in an Americawhere modernism was once again beingkicked about. This was, of course,consistent with the cultural fundamentalismof figures like McCarthy and part of theconfusing process by which America, whilstadvocating freedom of expression abroad,

seemed to begrudge such freedoms at home.On the floor of Congress, a high-octaneassault was led by a Republican fromMissouri, George Dondero, who declaredmodernism to be quite simply part of aworldwide conspiracy to weaken Americanresolve. “All modern art is Communistic,”he announced, before moving on to aderanged but poetic exegesis of its variousmanifestations: “Cubism aims to destroy bydesigned disorder. Futurism aims to destroyby the machine myth. . . . Dadaism aims todestroy by ridicule. Expressionism aims todestroy by aping the primitive and insane.Abstractionism aims to destroy by thecreation of brainstorms. . . . Surrealism aimsto destroy by the denial of reason.”1

Dondero’s neurotic assessment wasechoed by a coterie of public figures whoseshrill denunciations rang across the floor of

Congress and in the conservative press.Their attacks culminated in such claims as“ultramodern artists are unconsciously usedas tools of the Kremlin” and the assertionthat, in some cases, abstract paintings wereactually secret maps pinpointing strategicU.S. fortifications.2 “Modern art is actually ameans of espionage,” one opponent charged.“If you know how to read them, modernpaintings will disclose the weak spots in U.S.fortifications, and such crucial constructionsas Boulder Dam.”

This was not a propitious time formodernists. Most vulnerable to the attacksof the Dondero caucus was a group of artiststhat emerged in the late 1940s as theAbstract Expressionists. In reality, they werenot a group at all—“it is disastrous to nameourselves,” de Kooning once warned—but adisparate band of painters bound more by a

taste for artistic adventure than by anyformal aesthetic common denominator. Butthey were linked by a similar past: most ofthem had worked for the Federal ArtsProject under Roosevelt’s New Deal,producing subsidized art for the governmentand getting involved in left-wing politics.Foremost amongst them was JacksonPollock, who in the 1930s had beeninvolved in the Communist workshop of theMexican muralist David Alfalo Siquieros.Adolph Gottlieb, William Baziotes, andseveral other Abstract Expressionists had allbeen Communist activists. The fact thattheirs had been more an “untheorizedaffiliation with the ‘left’ ” than anythingdeeper was immaterial to Dondero and hisallies, who, unable or unwilling to distinguishbetween the biography and the work,conflated the political record of the artist

with his aesthetic expression and damnedboth.3

Where Dondero saw in AbstractExpressionism evidence of a Communistconspiracy, America’s cultural mandarinsdetected a contrary virtue: for them, it spoketo a specifically anti-Communist ideology,the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise.Nonfigurative and politically silent, it was thevery antithesis to socialist realism. It wasprecisely the kind of art the Soviets loved tohate. But it was more than this. It was,claimed its apologists, an explicitly Americanintervention in the modernist canon. As earlyas 1946, critics were applauding the new artas “independent, self-reliant, a trueexpression of the national will, spirit andcharacter. It seems that, in aestheticcharacter, US art is no longer a repository ofEuropean influences, that it is not a mere

amalgamate of foreign ‘isms,’ assembled,compiled and assimilated with lesser orgreater intelligence.”4

Elevated as chief representative of thisnew national discovery was JacksonPollock. “He was the great Americanpainter,” said fellow artist Budd Hopkins. “Ifyou conceive of such a person, first of all,he had to be a real American, not atransplanted European. And he should havethe big macho American virtues; he shouldbe rough-and-tumble American—taciturn,ideally—and if he is a cowboy, so much thebetter. Certainly not an Easterner, notsomeone who went to Harvard. Heshouldn’t be influenced by the Europeans somuch as he should be influenced by our own—the Mexicans and American Indians andso on. He should come out of the native soil,not out of Picasso and Matisse. And he

should be allowed the great American vice,the Hemingway vice, of being a drunk.”5

Everything about Pollock was right.Born on a sheep ranch in Cody, Wyoming,he entered the New York scene like acowboy—hard talking, heavy drinking,shooting his way from the Wild West. Thiswas, of course, a mythical past. Pollock hadnever ridden a horse and had left Wyomingas a young child. But the image was so apt,so American, and no one disbelieved it.Willem de Kooning once told of a dreamhe’d had of Pollock flinging open the doorsof a bar like a screen cowboy and shouting,“I can paint better than anybody!” Pollockhad the grittiness of Marlon Brando, thebrooding rebelliousness of James Dean. Nextto Matisse—by now barely able to lift apaintbrush, the compromised and impotentfigurehead of an aging European modernism

—Pollock was virility incarnate. He came upwith a technique known as action painting,which involved laying a huge canvas flat onthe ground—preferably outdoors—anddripping paint all over it. In creating thesplurgy, random knot of lines whichthreaded their way across the canvas andover the edges, he seemed to be engaged inthe act of rediscovering America. Ecstatic,loose, fueled by drink, modernism inPollock’s hands was a kind of tremendousdelirium. Although one critic described it as“melted Picasso,” others rushed to celebrateit as “the triumph of American painting,”which spoke for what America was:vigorous, energetic, freewheeling, big. It wasseen to uphold the great American myth ofthe lone voice, the intrepid individual, atradition Hollywood enshrined in films suchas Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and, later,

Twelve Angry Men (the AbstractExpressionists once styled themselves “TheIrascibles”).

By 1948, the art critic ClementGreenberg, himself a brawling, boozing,one-man slugfest, was making prodigalclaims for the new aesthetic: “When onesees . . . how much the level of Americanart has risen in the last five years, with theemergence of new talents so full of energyand content as Arshile Gorky, JacksonPollock, David Smith . . . then theconclusion forces itself, much to our ownsurprise, that the main premises of WesternArt have at last migrated to the UnitedStates, along with the center of gravity ofindustrial production and political power.”6

America, in other words, was the place anartist no longer felt he had to “escape from,in order to mature in Europe.”7 Commenting

on this claim, rather than agreeing with it,Jason Epstein later said: “America—andespecially New York—had now become thecenter of the world politically and financiallyand, of course, it had become the centerculturally, too. Well, what would a greatpower be without an appropriate art? Youcouldn’t be a great power if you didn’t haveart to go with it, like Venice withoutTintoretto or Florence without Giotto.”8 Theidea that Abstract Expressionism couldbecome a vehicle for the imperial burdenbegan to take hold. But its emergence at atime of such political and moral odiumpresented its would-be promoters with asubstantial dilemma.

Despite the patent idiocy of Dondero’sprotests, by the late 1940s he had achievedthe collapse of successive attempts on thepart of the State Department to deploy

American art as a propaganda weapon. Thephilistines scored an early victory in 1947when they forced the withdrawal of a StateDepartment exhibition called “AdvancingAmerican Art,” a selection of seventy-nine“progressive” works, including those ofGeorgia O’Keeffe, Adolph Gottlieb, andArshile Gorky, which was scheduled totravel to Europe and Latin America. Theshow reached Paris, then moved on toPrague, where it was such a success that theRussians immediately sent in a rivalexhibition. The official rationale for thisventure was to “dispel for the foreignaudience any notion of the academic orimitative character of contemporaryAmerican art.”9 “This time we are exportingneither domestic brandy in imitation cognacbottles nor vintage non-intoxicating grapejuice, but real bourbon, aged in the wood—

what may justly be described as the wine ofthe country,”10 eulogized one critic.

Far from advancing the cause ofAmerican art, the show signaled itsignominious retreat. Vigorously contested inCongress, it was denounced as subversiveand “un-American.” One speaker detected amalicious intent to “tell the foreigners thatthe American people are despondent, brokendown or of hideous shape—thoroughlydissatisfied with their lot and eager for achange of government. The Communistsand their New Deal fellow travelers haveselected art as one of their avenues ofpropaganda.”11 “I am just a dumb Americanwho pays taxes for this kind of trash,” criedanother, a worthy progenitor of Jesse Helms.“If there is a single individual in thisCongress who believes this kind of tripe is . .. bringing a better understanding of

American life, then he should be sent to thesame nut house from which the people whodrew this stuff originally came.”12 The showwas canceled, and the paintings were soldoff at a 95 percent discount as surplusgovernment property. Responding to thecharge that many of the artists representedin the exhibition had dabbled in left-wingpolitics (then a sine qua non of any self-respecting vanguardist), the StateDepartment issued a craven directiveordering that in the future no American artistwith Communist or fellow-travelingassociations be exhibited at governmentexpense. And with this, “the perception ofavant-garde art as un-American had nowbeen incorporated into official policy.”13

A terrible vision of the barbarians at thegates of the palace of high art nowinsinuated its way into the imagination of the

cultural elitists. Dwight Macdonalddenounced these attacks asKulturbolschewismus and argued that, whilethey were proposed in the name ofAmerican democracy, they actually mirroredtotalitarian attacks on the arts. The Soviets—and indeed much of Europe—were sayingthat America was a cultural desert, and thebehavior of U.S. congressmen seemed toconfirm that. Eager to show the world thathere was an art commensurate withAmerica’s greatness and freedom, high-levelstrategists found they couldn’t publiclysupport it because of domestic opposition.So what did they do? They turned to theCIA. And a struggle began to assert themerits of Abstract Expressionism againstattempts to smear it.

“We had a lot of trouble withCongressman Dondero,” Braden later

recalled. “He couldn’t stand modern art. Hethought it was a travesty, he thought it wassinful, he thought it was ugly. He put up aheck of a fight about painting, and he madeit very difficult to get Congress to go alongwith some of the things that we wanted todo—send art abroad, send symphoniesabroad, publish magazines abroad, whatever.That’s one of the reasons why it had to bedone covertly; it had to be covert because itwould have been turned down if it had beenput to a vote in a democracy. In order toencourage openness we had to be secret.”14

Here again was that sublime paradox ofAmerican strategy in the cultural Cold War:in order to promote an acceptance of artproduced in (and vaunted as the expressionof) democracy, the democratic process itselfhad to be circumvented.

Once again, the CIA turned to the

private sector to advance its objectives. InAmerica, most museums and collections ofart were—as they are now—privatelyowned and privately funded. Preeminentamongst contemporary and avant-garde artmuseums was the Museum of Modern Art(MoMA) in New York. Its president throughmost of the 1940s and 1950s was NelsonRockefeller, whose mother, Abby AldrichRockefeller, had co-founded the museum in1929 (Nelson called it “Mommy’sMuseum”). Nelson was a keen supporter ofAbstract Expressionism, which he referredto as “free enterprise painting.” Over theyears, his private collection alone swelled toover 2,500 works. Thousands more coveredthe lobbies and walls of buildings belongingto the Rockefeller-owned Chase ManhattanBank.

Supporting left-wing artists was familiar

territory for the Rockefellers. Whenchallenged over her decision to promote theMexican revolutionary Diego Rivera (whohad once chanted “Death to the Gringos!”outside an American embassy), AbbyAldrich Rockefeller had argued that Redswould stop being Reds “if we could get themartistic recognition.” A one-man show forRivera, the second in MoMA’s history, dulyfollowed. In 1933, Nelson Rockefeller hadsupervised Rivera’s commission to paint amural at the newly erected RockefellerCenter. Inspecting Rivera’s work one day,Nelson noticed that one figure had taken onthe unmistakable features of Vladimir IlichLenin. He politely asked Rivera to removeit. Rivera politely refused. At Nelson’sinstruction, the mural was surrounded byguards whilst Rivera was handed a check forhis full fee ($21,000) and served notice that

his commission was canceled. In February1934, the mural, which had been nearlycompleted, was destroyed withjackhammers.

Although this particular piece ofpatronage was unsuccessful, the principlewhich guided it was not abandoned.Establishment figures continued to believethat leftist artists were worth supporting. Inthe process, it could be hoped that thepolitical clamor of the artist might bedrowned out by the clink of the patron’scoin. In a famous article entitled “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Clement Greenberg, theart critic who did the most to put AbstractExpressionism on the map, set out theideological rationale for acceptingsponsorship from an enlightened patron.Published in Partisan Review in 1939, thearticle still stands as the definitive article of

faith for the elitist and anti-Marxist view ofmodernism. The avant-garde, wroteGreenberg, had been “abandoned by thoseto whom it actually belongs—our rulingclass.” In Europe, traditionally, support wasprovided “by an elite among the rulingclasses . . . from which [the avant-garde]assumed itself to be cut off, but to which ithad always remained attached by anumbilical cord of gold.”15 In the UnitedStates, he argued, the same mechanism mustprevail. The really deep connection betweenAbstract Expressionism and the cultural ColdWar can be found here. It was according tothis principle that the CIA, together with itsprivate venture capitalists, operated.

Tom Braden, in particular, was attractedto the Greenbergian proposition thatprogressive artists need an elite to subsidizethem—just like their Renaissance forebears.

“I’ve forgotten which pope it was whocommissioned the Sistine Chapel,” he said,“but I suppose that if it had been submittedto a vote of the Italian people there wouldhave been many, many negative responses:‘It’s naked’ or ‘It isn’t the way I imaginedGod’ or whatever. I don’t think it wouldhave gotten through the Italian parliament, ifthere had been a parliament at the time. Ittakes a pope or somebody with a lot ofmoney to recognize art and to support it.And after many centuries people say, ‘Look!The Sistine Chapel, the most beautifulcreation on earth.’ It’s a problem thatcivilization has faced ever since the firstartist and the first multimillionaire—or pope—who supported him; and yet if it hadn’tbeen for the multimillionaires or the popes,we wouldn’t have had the art.”16 Patronage,in Braden’s terms, carried with it a duty to

instruct, to educate people to accept notwhat they want, or think they want, butwhat they ought to have. “You have alwaysto battle your own ignoramuses or, to put itmore politely, people who just don’tunderstand.”17

“There is a perverse way of looking atthis question, which is to say the CIA tookart very seriously,” commented art criticPhilip Dodd. “The great thing aboutpoliticians when they get involved in art is itmeans something to them, whether it’s theFascists or the Soviets or the American CIA.So there may be a really perverse argumentthat says the CIA were the best art critics inAmerica in the Fifties because they sawwork that actually should have beenantipathetic to them—made by old lefties,coming out of European surrealism—andthey saw the potential power in that kind of

art and ran with it. You couldn’t say that ofmany of the art critics of the time.”18

“Regarding Abstract Expressionism, I’dlove to be able to say that the CIA inventedit all, just to see what happened in NewYork and downtown Soho tomorrow!”19

joked Agency man Donald Jameson, beforemoving to a more sober explanation of theCIA’s involvement. “We recognized that thiswas the kind of art that did not haveanything to do with socialist realism andmade socialist realism look even morestylized and more rigid and confined than itwas. And that relationship was exploited insome of the exhibits. Moscow in those dayswas very vicious in its denunciation of anykind of nonconformity to its own very rigidpatterns. So one could quite adequately andaccurately reason that anything theycriticized that much and that heavyhandedly

was worth support one way or another. Ofcourse, for matters of this sort [it] couldonly have been done through theorganizations or the operations of the CIA attwo or three removed, so that therewouldn’t be any question of having to clearJackson Pollock, for example, or doanything that would involve these people inthe organization—they’d just be added atthe end of the line. I don’t think that therewas any significant relationship between usand Robert Motherwell, for example. And itcouldn’t have been any closer and certainlyshouldn’t have been any closer either,because most of them were people who hadvery little respect for the government inparticular and certainly none for the CIA. Ifyou had to use people who consideredthemselves one way or another closer toMoscow than to Washington, well, so much

the better perhaps.”20

Operating at a remove from the CIA,and therefore offering a plausible disguisefor its interests, was the Museum of ModernArt. An inspection of MoMA’s committeesand councils reveals a proliferation of linksto the Agency. First and foremost wasNelson Rockefeller himself, who had headedup the government’s wartime intelligenceagency for Latin America, named theCoordinator of Inter-American Affairs(CIAA). This agency, among other activities,sponsored touring exhibitions of“contemporary American painting.”Nineteen of these shows were contracted toMoMA. As a trustee of the RockefellerBrothers Fund, a New York think tanksubcontracted by the government to studyforeign affairs, Rockefeller presided oversome of the most influential minds of the

period as they thrashed out definitions ofAmerican foreign policy. In the early 1950s,he received briefings on covert activitiesfrom Allen Dulles and Tom Braden, wholater said, “I assumed Nelson knew prettymuch everything about what we weredoing.” A reasonable assumption, givenNelson’s appointment as Eisenhower’sspecial adviser on Cold War strategy in 1954(replacing C.D. Jackson) and hischairmanship of the Planning CoordinationGroup, which oversaw all National SecurityCouncil decisions, including CIA covertoperations.

Rockefeller’s close friend was John“Jock” Hay Whitney, a longtime trustee ofMoMA who also served as its president andchairman of the board. Educated at Groton,Yale, and Oxford, Jock had converted asubstantial inheritance into a vast fortune by

bankrolling fledgling companies, Broadwayplays, and Hollywood movies. As director ofRockefeller’s motion picture division atCIAA in 1940–42, Jock oversaw productionof such films as Disney’s Saludas Amigos,which brimmed with inter-Americangoodwill. He joined the Office of StrategicServices (OSS) in 1943, was captured insouthern France by German soldiers inAugust 1944, and loaded onto a trainheading east before making a daring escape.After the war, he set up J.H. Whitney & Co.as “a partnership dedicated to thepropagation of the free-enterprise system bythe furnishing of financial backing for new,undeveloped, and risky businesses thatmight have trouble attracting investmentcapital through more conservativechannels.”21 A prominent partner wasWilliam H. Jackson, a polo-playing friend of

Jock’s who also happened to be deputydirector of the CIA. Jock had a position onthe Psychological Strategy Board and found“many ways of being useful to the CIA.”22

Another link was William Burden, whofirst joined the museum as chairman of itsAdvisory Committee in 1940. Descendedfrom “commodore” Vanderbilt, Burdenepitomized the Cold War establishment.Formerly secretary of state for air, he toohad worked for Rockefeller’s CIAA duringthe war. He had also earned a personalfortune and a reputation as “a venturecapitalist of the first rank.” Chairingnumerous quasigovernmental bodies andeven the CIA’s Farfield Foundation (ofwhich he was president), he seemed happyto perform as a front man. In 1947, he wasappointed chairman of the Committee onMuseum Collections, and in 1956 he

became MoMA’s president.Under Burden’s presidency, “policy was

made by [René] d’Harnoncourt so far as theoperations of the museum were concerned,”with consultations conducted “pretty muchon a rubber-stamp basis.”23 This gaved’Harnoncourt scope to exercise hisconsiderable talents as the Cardinal Wolseyof the court circles surrounding MoMA.Standing at six feet five inches and weighing230 pounds, the Viennese-bornd’Harnoncourt was an extraordinary figure,“a descendant, direct and collateral, of acloud of Middle European noblemen whoflourished as chamberlains and provosts to acloud of Dukes of Lorraine, Counts ofLuxembourg, and Hapsburg emperors.”24

He immigrated to the States in 1932 andduring the war worked in the arts section ofthe CIAA. Nelson then recruited him to the

museum, of which he became director in1949. D’Harnoncourt believed that “modernart in its infinite variety and ceaselessexploration” was the “foremost symbol” ofdemocracy and openly lobbied Congressduring the 1950s to finance a culturalcampaign against Communism. AlthoughBraden maintained that “the guys at MoMAliked to handle things in-house,” heconcluded that René d’Harnoncourt was“most likely the Agency’s contact at themuseum.” Certainly d’Harnoncourt wasconsulting with the National SecurityCouncil’s Operations Coordinating Board(which had replaced the PsychologicalStrategy Board). He also reported regularlyto the State Department. These liaisons givea certain piquancy to the comment that, likehis ancestors, d’Harnoncourt “exhibited agift for making himself indispensable to a

succession—and quite often an overlapping—of patrons.”25

William Paley, heir to the Congress CigarCompany, was yet another MoMA trusteewith close links to the intelligence world. Apersonal friend of Allen Dulles, Paleyallowed CBS, the network he owned, toprovide cover for CIA employees in anarrangement similar to that authorized byHenry Luce at his Time-Life empire (Lucewas also a MoMA trustee). At the height ofthis relationship, CBS correspondents joinedthe CIA hierarchy once a year for privatedinners and briefings. These dinners,“grown-up affairs with good table talk andgood cigars,” were held at Dulles’s home orat his private club, the Alibi, in Washington.Of Paley’s involvement with the CIA, oneCBS executive said, “It’s the single subjectabout which his memory has failed.”26

On and on go the names, on and on gothe links. Joseph Verner Reed, for example,was a MoMA trustee at the same time as hewas a trustee of the Farfield Foundation. Sowas Gardner Cowles. So was JunkieFleischmann. So was Cass Canfield. OvetaCulp Hobby, a founding member of MoMA,sat on the board of the Free EuropeCommittee and allowed her familyfoundation to be used as a CIA conduit.While Hobby was secretary of state forhealth, education and welfare underEisenhower, her assistant was one JoanBraden, who had previously worked forNelson Rockefeller and was married to TomBraden. Before he joined the CIA, Tom hadalso worked for Nelson Rockefeller asMoMA’s executive secretary from 1947 tolate 1949.

As Gore Vidal once said, “Everything

has so many chains of association in ourunexpectedly Jacobean republic that nothingany longer surprises.” Of course it could beargued that this congruity revealed nothingmore than the nature of American power atthe time. Just because these people kneweach other, and just because they weresocially (and even formally) enjoined to theCIA, doesn’t mean that they were co-conspirators in the promotion of the newAmerican art. But the coziness of therelationship ensured the durability of claimsthat MoMA was in some official wayconnected to the government’s secretcultural warfare program. This rumor wasfirst examined in 1974 by Eva Cockroft in aseminal article for Artforum called “AbstractExpressionism: Weapon of the Cold War,”which concluded: “Links between culturalcold war politics and the success of Abstract

Expressionism are by no means coincidental.. . . They were consciously forged at thetime by some of the most influential figurescontrolling museum policies and advocatingenlightened cold war tactics designed to wooEuropean intellectuals.”27 Moreover,Cockroft asserted, “In terms of culturalpropaganda, the functions of both the CIA’scultural apparatus and MoMA’s internationalprograms were similar and, in fact, mutuallysupportive.”28

“I didn’t have anything to do withpromoting Pollock or whomever,” saidLawrence de Neufville. “I don’t evenremember when I first heard of him. But Ido remember hearing that Jock Whitney andAllen Dulles agreed they had to dosomething about modern art after the StateDepartment caved in. Perhaps that’s how

you might define ‘mutually supportive.’ ”29

There is no prima facie evidence for anyformal agreement between the CIA and theMuseum of Modern Art. The fact is, itsimply wasn’t necessary.

MoMA’s defenders have consistentlyattacked the claim that the museum’ssupport of Abstract Expressionism was inany way linked to the covert advancementof America’s international image. Curiously,one argument they use is that MoMAactually neglected the movement when itfirst emerged. “The Modern’s exhibitions ofAbstract Expressionism, more so at home,but also abroad, came on the whole onlyduring the later fifties, by which time themovement’s first generation had alreadybeen followed by a second,”30 wroteMichael Kimmelman in a rebuttalcommissioned by MoMA. To argue that

MoMA simply missed what was right underits nose is disingenuous and ignores the factthat the museum had steadily andconsistently collected works by the AbstractExpressionists from the time of their earliestappearance. From 1941, MoMA acquiredworks by Arshile Gorky, Alexander Calder,Frank Stella, Robert Motherwell, JacksonPollock, Stuart Davis, and Adolph Gottlieb.In May 1944, the museum sold at auction“certain of its nineteenth century works ofart to provide funds for the purchase oftwentieth century works.” Although receiptsfrom the sale were disappointing, enoughcash was made available to purchase“important paintings by Pollock,Motherwell, and Matta.” Thus, as might beexpected of a museum of modern art, andparticularly one which acknowledged that itheld “a tremendous moral responsibility

toward living artists whose careers andfortunes can be drastically affected by theMuseum’s support or lack of it,”31 was thenew generation of American paintersbrought into its fold.

That these acquisitions were made in theface of internal opposition furtherdemonstrates a resolve to consolidateAbstract Expressionism’s right to canonicalrecognition. When some members of theCommittee of Museum Collections,encouraged by adverse newspaper criticism,“vigorously questioned the validity of certainacquisitions, including paintings called‘abstract expressionist,’ ”32 their protestswere ineffectual; and nobody stood in theway when one committee member resignedin protest against the purchase of a Rothko.As for foreign tours, Motherwell, MarkTobey, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Gottlieb were

all selected for the exhibition “AmericanPainting from the 18th Century to thePresent Day,” which opened in London in1946 before proceeding to other Europeancapitals. This was one of the earliestappearances of Abstract Expressionism in agroup show under official auspices(sponsorship was provided by the StateDepartment and the Office of WarInformation). The same year, the MoMAshow “Fourteen Americans” includedGorky, Motherwell, Tobey, and TheodoreRoszak. By 1948, Lincoln Kirstein, a formerMoMA activist, was moaning in Harper’sthat the museum “has done its job almosttoo well” by making itself into “a modernAbstract Academy” whose tenets he definedas “improvisation as method, deformation asformula, and painting . . . as an amusementmanipulated by interior decorators and high-

pressure salesmen.”33 In 1952, some fiftyAmerican artists, including Edward Hopper,Charles Burchfield, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, andJack Levine, attacked MoMA, in what cameto be known as the “Reality Manifesto,” for“coming to be more and more identified inthe public eye with abstract andnonobjective art,” a “dogma” which they feltstemmed “very largely from the ModernMuseum and its unquestioned influencethroughout the country.” In the same year,the Communist monthly Masses andMainstream lampooned abstract art and its“shrine,” the Museum of Modern Art, in atirade whose title—“Dollars, Doodles, andDeath”—was eerily prophetic.

Is it really possible to argue that MoMAcame on board late? When Sidney Janistook the group show “American VanguardArt for Paris” to the Galerie de France in

late 1951, it was a resounding failure.Reviews were lukewarm at best and mostlydownright hostile. Not one picture was sold.“It was too early,” Janis concluded. Otherprivate gallery owners who championed theNew York School were in no doubt that itwas indebted to MoMA’s early recognition.“I must say that the Modern Museum wasone of the first to accept people likeMotherwell, Gottlieb, Baziotes,” saidSamuel Kootz of the Kootz Gallery.“[Alfred] Barr was an enthusiast for thoseparticular three men and conveyed thisenthusiasm to people like Burden, or NelsonRockefeller, and others of the Modern groupof Trustees.”34

Alfred Barr was the authoritativetastemaker of his day, and his advocacy ofAbstract Expressionism was integral to itssuccess. Born in 1902 in Detroit, Barr

entered Princeton in 1918 and emerged witha burning interest in art, military history, andchess (reflecting his concern with strategyand tactics). In 1929, at Abby AldrichRockefeller’s invitation, he became MoMA’sfirst director, a post he held until 1943, whenhe was replaced by René d’Harnoncourt.Barr continued to keep an office in themuseum and in February 1947 wasappointed director of Museum Collections.In a New Yorker profile, Dwight Macdonalddescribed him as “shy, frail, low of voice,and scholarly of mien, the austerity of hisbeak-nosed, bespectacled face relieved onlyby the kind of secret smile one sees onarchaic Greek statues or on the carefullylocked features of a psychoanalyst.” ButMacdonald noticed that there was more toBarr than “simply another nice old absent-minded professor. In his quiet, rectitudinous

way, he is more than something of apolitician . . . ‘the fine Italian hand of AlfredBarr’ has had its part in creating anatmosphere of intrigue in the museum,where things are not necessarily what theyseem to such an extent that one bewilderedartist has called the place ‘The House ofMystery if not Mirth.’ ” Macdonald went onto quote Peggy Guggenheim—who oncesaid of Barr that she “hated his cageyquality”—and another contemporary whodetected “something of the Jesuit aboutAlfred. But as the Jesuits practiced theirwiles ad majorem Dei gloriam, so Barrmanoeuvres away for the greater glory ofmodern art and the museum.”35

Behind MoMA’s strategies in this highlypoliticized period, there is evidence of Barr’s“Italian hand.” As part of a deliberatemaneuver to quieten opposition to the

museum’s cultivation of AbstractExpressionism, he followed “a two-prongedpolicy that, for reasons of tact or diplomacy,was never acknowledged, but wasmanifested, especially in the museum’sexhibition program.”36 Thus, there was noshortage of exhibitions catering to theprevailing taste for romantic orrepresentational painting, leading one criticto charge that the museum was dedicatedless to the “art of our time” than to the “artof our grandfathers’ time.”37 Butsimultaneously, Barr was acquiring works bythe New York School, and canvassingdiscreetly for broader institutional support. Itwas he who persuaded Henry Luce of Time-Life to change his editorial policy toward thenew art, telling him in a letter that it shouldbe especially protected, not criticized as inthe Soviet Union, because this, after all, was

“artistic free enterprise.”38 Thus was Luce—who held the phrase “America’sintellectual health” permanently at the tip ofhis tongue—won over to Barr’s andMoMA’s interests. In August 1949, Lifemagazine gave its center-page spread toJackson Pollock, landing the artist and hiswork on every coffee table in America. Suchcoverage (and Barr’s effort to secure it)destroys the case for neglect.

But it was loans to Europe fromMoMA’s collection which best illustrate thefortunes of the New York School. Under theauspices of the International Program, whichwas established in 1952 through a five-yearannual grant of $125,000 from theRockefeller Brothers Fund, the museumlaunched a massive export program ofAbstract Expressionism, which Barr himselfreferred to as a form of “benevolent

propaganda for foreign intelligentsia”39

(another MoMA activist called it “animmense asset toward foreignunderstanding”). Director of the programwas Porter McCray, Yale graduate and yetanother veteran of Nelson Rockefeller’sSouth American intelligence outfit. InDecember 1950, McCray took a year’sleave of absence from his job as director ofMoMA’s Department of CirculatingExhibitions to become an attaché in the U.S.Foreign Service, assigned to the culturalsection of the Marshall Plan in Paris. Of thismove, Russell Lynes wrote in his history ofMoMA that “[t]he Museum now had, andwas delighted to have, the whole world (orat least the world outside the Iron Curtain) inwhich to proselytize—though this time theexportable religion was home-grown ratherthan what had been in the past its primary

message, the importable faith fromEurope.”40 In France, McCray saw atfirsthand the negative impact of the StateDepartment’s official proscription of (so-called) left-wing artists, leaving what oneAmerican Embassy official called “a gap inAmerican interests and activities which notonly is impossible for Europeans tounderstand but which plays into the hands ofthe Communists by appearing to justify theircharge that America fails to share the basicvalues of western civilization.”41 McCrayreturned to MoMA with a mission to correctthis impression. Under him, the museum’sloans for touring exhibitions increaseddramatically, even “to a somewhatdisquieting degree,” according to one internalreport, leaving the museum “deprived ofmost of its best American paintings for 18months” in 1955. By 1956 the International

Program had organized thirty-threeinternational exhibitions, including the UnitedStates’ participation in the Venice Biennale(the only country to be privatelyrepresented). At the same time, loans toU.S. embassies and consulates increaseddramatically.

“There was a series of articles relatingthe Museum of Modern Art’s InternationalProgram to cultural propaganda and evensuggestions that it was associated with theCIA—and since I worked there throughthose years I can say, categorically,untrue!”42 said Waldo Rasmussen, assistantto McCray. “The main emphasis of theInternational Program was about art—itwasn’t about politics, and it wasn’t aboutpropaganda. And in fact it was important foran American museum to avoid thesuggestion of cultural propaganda, and for

that reason it wasn’t always advantageous tohave connections with American embassies,or American government figures, becausethat would suggest that the exhibitions wereintended as propaganda, and they werenot.”43

The Museum of Modern Art was freeneither from propaganda nor fromgovernment figures. When, for example, itaccepted the contract to supply the artexhibit for the Congress for CulturalFreedom’s 1952 Masterpieces festival inParis, it did so under the auspices of trusteeswho were fully cognizant of the CIA’s role inthat organization. Moreover, the exhibit’scurator, James Johnson Sweeney (a memberof MoMA’s advisory committee and of theAmerican Committee for Cultural Freedom),publicly endorsed the propaganda value ofthe show when he announced, “On display

will be masterpieces that could not havebeen created nor whose exhibition would beallowed by such totalitarian regimes as NaziGermany or present-day Soviet Russia andher satellites.”44 The view that abstract artwas synonymous with democracy, that itwas “on our side,” was also stressed byAlfred Barr, who borrowed from Cold Warrhetoric when he maintained, “The modernartist’s nonconformity and love of freedomcannot be tolerated within a monolithictyranny and modern art is useless for thedictator’s propaganda.”45

Of far greater significance thanNabokov’s Masterpieces exhibition was the1953–54 tour of the show “TwelveContemporary American Painters andSculptors,”46 the first by MoMA dedicatedexclusively to the New York School.

Opening at the Musée National d’ArtModerne in Paris, it was the first significantexhibition of American art to be held in aFrench museum for over fifteen years. Topreempt the accusation that it wasspearheading a “cultural invasion” of France(whose own cultural chauvinism could notbe underestimated), MoMA claimed that theshow was the result of requests initiated bythe host museum. In fact, the opposite wasthe case. According to a dispatch from theAmerican Embassy in Paris, “In earlyFebruary 1953, the Museum [of ModernArt] requested the Cultural Relations Sectionof the Embassy to discuss with Jean Cassou,Director of the Musée National d’ArtModerne at Paris, the possibility of puttingon the present show. M. Cassou had alreadyscheduled all of his exhibition space until thespring of 1954. On learning, however, that

this exhibition would be available, hereorganized his plans and put off anexhibition of the Belgian painter, Ensor,which had been planned.”47 The dispatchcomplained of the embassy’s inability “totake any action on this request because ofthe absence of any art program under theauspices of the United States Government,”but went on to state that “[i]n the case of theexhibition of American art underconsideration, however, this deadlock wasbroken by action of the Nelson RockefellerFund, which allotted funds to the Museumof Modern Art in New York to be used forinternational exhibitions.”48

Unable to assume any official role in theexhibition, the American Embassy confineditself to acting as a quiet liaison betweenMoMA and its French hosts. These includedthe Association Française d’Action

Artistique, which was attached to both theMinistry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministryof National Education. The association cameforward with a significant “donation” for adeluxe catalogue, posters, and “all publicityfor the show.” The link is interesting: theassociation was also a “donor” to theCongress for Cultural Freedom, and itsdirector, Philippe Erlanger, was, according toJunkie Fleischmann, “one of those people inFrance who has been most helpful andcooperative every time that we haveapproached him with any problems havingto do with the Congress.”49 Erlanger was, infact, a designated CIA contact at the FrenchForeign Office. Through him, the Congressfor Cultural Freedom (and, on this occasion,MoMA) acquired a credible conduit forofficial French funds to cultural propagandainitiatives. René d’Harnoncourt, who

attached sufficient importance to the showto install it in person, could not have beenignorant of this connection. Elements of theFrench press picked up on the politicalmaneuvering behind the show, and snidereference was made to the Musée d’ArtModerne as a new outpost of “United Statesterritory” and to the painters on show thereas “Mr. Foster Dulles’s twelve apostles.”

As “Twelve Contemporary AmericanPainters and Sculptors” was being packedup for its next destination (it traveled on toZurich, Dusseldorf, Stockholm, Oslo, andHelsinki), MoMA was already preparing forits participation in an exhibition which wouldbring it once again into a direct relationshipwith the Congress for Cultural Freedom.Writing to Nabokov on April 9, 1954,Monroe Wheeler, MoMA’s director ofexhibitions and publications, confirmed that

“[o]ur Coordination Committee has agreedthat we should cooperate as much as we canwith your project for an exhibition ofpaintings by artists between the ages of 18and 35. We would like to suggest formembership on your International AdvisoryCommittee the Museum’s Director ofPainting and Sculpture, Mr AndrewCarnduff Ritchie.”50

The result of this collaboration was the“Young Painters” show, which opened at theGalleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome,then moved to the Palais des Beaux-Arts inBrussels, the Musée National d’Art Modernein Paris, and the Institute of ContemporaryArts (ICA) in London. Of the 170 paintingsin the exhibit, nearly all were abstract works.Ritchie, who believed that artists working inthe abstract mode were in some wayresponding to “the weakness, even sterility,

of most non-Communist figurative painting,”selected works by Richard Diebenkorn,Seymour Drumlevitch, Joseph Glasco, JohnHultberg, Irving Kriesberg, and TheodorosStamos. Thus, whilst European audienceswere still being introduced to the first waveof Abstract Expressionists, Ritchie wasalready delivering the second.

As usual, the Congress for CulturalFreedom rustled up large cash prizes to beawarded to the three best paintings (Hultbergshared the first prize for best painting withGiovanni Dova and Alan Reynolds, eachreceiving 1,000 Swiss francs, or $2,000,“donated” by Fleischmann). Funds toorganize the show, and for its transportationand publicity during the year that it toured,were provided directly by the FarfieldFoundation. MoMA’s International Programpicked up the tab for transporting the works

to and from Europe, using money suppliedby the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. TheCongress’s media network did its part inamplifying the show’s influence. Preuvesdevoted half of its October 1956 issue to theexhibition and published an internationalsurvey of young painters on the subject ofabstraction versus figurative art.51 Josselson,who averred that “the problems of modernpainting happen to be a hobby of mine,”forwarded the survey to Nelson Rockefeller,and said that it ranked “high among thetopics of discussion in Paris today.”52

The collaboration with the Congressbrought MoMA access to the mostprestigious art institutions in Europe. Sittingon the Congress Arts Committee were thedirectors of the Palais des Beaux-Arts inBrussels, Switzerland’s Museum of ModernArt, London’s ICA, the Kaiser Friedrich

Museum in Berlin, the Musée Nationald’Arte Moderne in Paris, the GuggenheimMuseum (New York and Venice), and theGalleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome.Combined with the economic strength ofMoMA (and, behind the scenes, the FarfieldFoundation), this committee had the breadthand scope to influence aesthetic tastes acrossEurope. As one reviewer of “YoungPainters” wrote, “The fact that theexhibition conforms to the prevailing tastefor various currents of abstract art andoffers no surprises is probably attributable tothe composition of the selection jury. Almostall members of the jury are museumdirectors and as such cannot be expected tooutpace the established best.”53

There can be little doubt that thisprevailing orthodoxy was carved outaccording to a political, and not a solely

aesthetic, agenda. It was an agendapersonally sanctioned by PresidentEisenhower, who, unlike Truman beforehim, recognized the value of modern art as a“pillar of liberty.” In an address whichexplicitly endorsed the work of MoMA,Eisenhower declared: “As long as artists areat liberty to feel with high personal intensity,as long as our artists are free to create withsincerity and conviction, there will behealthy controversy and progress in art. . . .How different it is in tyranny. When artistsare made the slaves and the tools of thestate; when artists become chiefpropagandists of a cause, progress isarrested and creation and genius aredestroyed.”54 These sentiments were echoedby a former chairman of MoMA’sInternational Program, August Heckscher,who claimed the museum’s work was

“related to the central struggle of the age—the struggle of freedom against tyranny. Weknow that where tyranny takes over,whether under Fascism or Communism,modern art is destroyed and exiled.”55

George Kennan rallied to this “free art”ideology, telling an audience of MoMAactivists in 1955 that they had a duty “tocorrect a number of impressions that theoutside world entertains of us, impressionsthat are beginning to affect our internationalposition in very important ways.”56 These“negative feelings,” said Kennan, were“related to cultural rather than politicalconditions.” His next point startled everyone:“The totalitarians recognized that only ifthey appeared outwardly to enjoy theconfidence and enthusiasm of the artistscould they plausibly claim to have created ahopeful and creditable civilization. . . . And I

find it sad that they should have come to thisappreciation so much sooner than many ofour own people.”57 What, asked Kennan,was the nature of the task ahead? “We have. . . to show the outside world both that wehave a cultural life and that we caresomething about it. That we care enoughabout it, in fact, to give it encouragementand support here at home, and to see that itis enriched by acquaintance with similaractivity elsewhere. If these impressionscould only be conveyed with enough forceand success to countries beyond ourborders, I for one would willingly trade theentire remaining inventory of politicalpropaganda for the results that could beachieved by such results alone.”58

The Congress for Cultural Freedom’ssupport for experimental, predominantlyabstract painting over representational or

realist aesthetics must be viewed in thiscontext. From the statements of TomBraden and Donald Jameson, it is evidentthat the CIA felt it had a part to play inencouraging consent for the new art. Fromthe records of the Farfield Foundation, it canalso be shown that the Agency expressed itscommitment with dollars. In addition tosupporting the “Young Painters” show,several donations were passed from theFarfield to MoMA, including $2,000 to itsInternational Council in 1959, for theprovision of books on modern art to Polishreaders.

There is further, incontrovertibleevidence that the CIA was an activecomponent in the machinery whichpromoted Abstract Expressionism.Immediately after the 1955–56 “YoungPainters” show closed, Nicolas Nabokov

had started to plan a follow-up. Despite afaltering start, the proposal was finallyapproved in early 1959. Junkie Fleischmann,by now chairman of the Congress Music andArts Committee, as well as a member ofMoMA’s International Arts Council (anexpanded version of the InternationalProgram), provided the link between the twoorganizations. Once again, MoMA selectedthe American participation for the show,mostly from works which had already beenshipped to Europe for the Biennale de Paris.By the end of the year, Nabokov’s secretarywas able to tell Junkie that news of theplanned exhibition had “swept through theartistic circles like a tornado. Every youngpainter in Paris, every gallery director, everyart critic are [sic] telephoning [the Congress]to find out what it’s all about. It’s going tobe a terrific hit.”59

Originally entitled “Sources poétiques dela peinture actuelle,” the show which finallyopened in January 1960 at the Louvre’sMusée des Arts Décoratifs was called, moreprovocatively, “Antagonismes.” Dominatingthe exhibition were works by Mark Rothko(who was in France at the time), SamFrancis, Yves Klein (in his first showing inParis), Franz Kline, Louise Nevelson,Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey, and JoanMitchell. Many of the paintings had beenbrought to Paris from Vienna, where theCongress had exhibited them as part of awider, CIA-orchestrated campaign toundermine the 1959 Communist youthfestival. This show had cost the CIA$15,365, but for its expanded version inParis it had to dig deeper. A further $10,000was laundered through the HoblitzelleFoundation, to which was added $10,000

from the Association Française d’ActionArtistique.

Although the press paid “lavishattention” to the “Antagonismes” show, theCongress was obliged to acknowledge thatreviews were “on the whole very spiteful.”Although some European critics had beenwon over to the “magnificent resonances”and the “breathless, dizzy world” ofAbstract Expressionism, many others werebaffled or outraged by it. In Barcelona, acritic reviewing “The New AmericanPainting,” which MoMA toured that year,was appalled to learn that two canvases—one by Jackson Pollock, the other by GraceHartigan—were so big that the upper part ofthe metal entrance door of the museum hadto be sawn off to get them in. “The Biggestin the World,” announced La LibreBelgique, which worried that “this strength,

displayed in the frenzy of a total freedom,seems a really dangerous tide. Our ownabstract painters, all the ‘informal’ Europeanartists, seem pygmies before the disturbingpower of these unchained giants.”60

References to the size, the violence, theWild West abounded, “as if the critics hadgot hold of the wrong catalogue, and thoughtthe pictures were painted by Wyatt Earp orBilly the Kid.”61

It was not only European artists who feltdwarfed by the gigantism of AbstractExpressionism. Adam Gopnik laterconcluded that “oversized abstractwatercolors [had become] the single style ofthe American museum, forcing twogenerations of realists to live in basementsand pass still-lifes around like samizdat.”62

John Canaday reflected that, by 1959,

“Abstract Expressionism was at the zenith ofits popularity, to such an extent that anunknown artist trying to exhibit in New Yorkcouldn’t find a gallery unless he was paintingin a mode derived from one or anothermember of the New York School.”63 Criticswho “suggested that Abstract Expressionismwas abusing its own success and that themonopolistic orgy had gone on long enough”could find themselves, said Canaday, in a“painful situation” (he claimed his own lackof appreciation for the New York Schoolhad earned him a death threat).64 PeggyGuggenheim, returning to the States in 1959after a twelve-year absence, was“thunderstruck, the entire art movement hadbecome an enormous business venture.”

The Museum of Modern Art, describedby one critic as the “overgeared cartel ofModernism,” held tenaciously to its

executive role in manufacturing a history forAbstract Expressionism. Ordered andsystematic, this history reduced what hadonce been provocative and strange to anacademic formula, a received mannerism, anart officiel. Thus installed within the canon,the freest form of art now lacked freedom.More and more painters produced more andmore paintings which got bigger and biggerand emptier and emptier. It was this verystylistic conformity, prescribed by MoMAand the broader social contract of which itwas a part, that brought AbstractExpressionism to the verge of kitsch. “It waslike the emperor’s clothes,” said JasonEpstein. “You parade it down the street andyou say, ‘This is great art,’ and the peoplealong the parade route will agree with you.Who’s going to stand up to Clem Greenbergand later to the Rockefellers who were

buying it for their bank lobbies and say,‘This stuff is terrible’?”65 Perhaps DwightMacdonald was right when he said that “fewAmericans care to argue with a hundredmillion dollars.”66

What of the artists themselves? Did theynot object to the Cold War rhetoric—whatPeter Fuller called “the ideologicallaundering”—that often accompaniedexhibitions of their work? One of theextraordinary features of the role thatAmerican painting played in the culturalCold War is not the fact alone that it becamepart of this enterprise but that a movementwhich so deliberately declared itself to beapolitical could become so intenselypoliticized. “Modern painting is the bulwarkof the individual creative expression, alooffrom the political left and its blood brother,

the right,”67 the artist Paul Burlin haddeclared. For critic Harold Rosenberg,postwar art entailed “the political choice ofgiving up politics.” “Yet in its politicallyshrewd reaction against politics, in itsostensible demonstration that competingideologies had depleted themselves anddissipated adherents . . . the new paintersand their supporters had of course becomefully engaged in the issues of the day.”68

Was their work entirely at odds with thesocial and political function to which it wasput? Barnett Newman, in his introduction tothe catalogue of the 1943 show “FirstExhibition of Modern American Artists,”wrote: “We have come together as Americanmodern artists because we feel the need topresent to the public a body of art that willadequately reflect the new America that istaking place today and the kind of America

that will, it is hoped, become the culturalcenter of the world.”69 Did Newman cometo regret this national context? Willem deKooning found “this American-ness” to be“a certain burden” and said, “If you comefrom a small nation, you don’t have that.When I went to the Academy and I wasdrawing from the nude, I was making thedrawing, not Holland. I feel sometimes anAmerican artist must feel like a baseballplayer or something—a member of a teamwriting American history.”70 Yet in 1963, deKooning was proud to receive thePresidential Medal of Freedom. “The idea ofan isolated American painting . . . seemsabsurd to me, just as the idea of creating apurely American mathematics or physicswould seem absurd,”71 said JacksonPollock, who died at the wheel of his

Oldsmobile before he faced the choice ofwhether or not to accept such honors.

Robert Motherwell, who was initiallyhappy to be part of the “mission to makepainting in America equal to paintingelsewhere” later thought it “strange when acommodity is more powerful than the menwho make it.”72 Repudiating nationalistclaims for Abstract Expressionism, in the1970s he supported the English abstractartist Patrick Heron when he challengedAmerica’s right to exert a monopoly incultural leadership and wrote of Heron’s“gallant efforts re. N[ew] Y[ork]Imperialism . . . your generation in Englandmade a heroic effort to reach beyondgentlemanly art [which] was not then or nowgiven its just due” because of New York’s“want of generosity toward your generationin Britain.” Motherwell added that he looked

forward to “an unchauvinistic story ofmodern art,” and ended by reassuring Heronthat “not all Americans are mongols.”73

Motherwell was a member of theAmerican Committee for Cultural Freedom.So were Baziotes, Calder, and Pollock(though he was sodden with drink when hejoined). The realist painter Ben Shahnrefused to join, referring to it as the“ACCFuck.” Former fellow travelers MarkRothko and Adolph Gottlieb both becamecommitted anti-Communists during the ColdWar. In 1940 they helped found theFederation of Modern Painters andSculptors, which started by condemning allthreats to culture from nationalistic andreactionary political movements. In thefollowing months, the Federation became anactive agent for anti-Communism in the artworld. It sought to expose Party influence in

various art organizations. Rothko andGottlieb led these efforts to destroy theCommunist presence in the art world. Theirdedication to that cause was so strong thatwhen the Federation voted to cease itspolitical activities in 1953, they resigned.

Ad Reinhardt was the only AbstractExpressionist who continued to cleave to theleft, and as such he was all but ignored bythe official art world until the 1960s. Thisleft him in a perfect position to point out theinconsistencies in the lives and art of hisformer friends, whose drunken evenings atthe Cedar Tavern had given way to homesin the Hamptons, Providence, and Cape Codand whose group photos, like “TheIrascibles” of 1950, had been replaced byfeatures in Vogue magazine showing theseangry young men looking more like thestockbrokers who listed them as

“speculative” or “growth” painters andreported a market for AbstractExpressionism “boiling” with activity.Reinhardt roundly condemned his fellowartists for succumbing to the temptations ofgreed and ambition. He called Rothko a“Vogue magazine cold-water-flat-fauve,”and Pollock a “Harper’s Bazaar bum.”Barnett Newman was “the avant-gardehuckster-handicraftsman and educationalshopkeeper” and “the holy-roller explainer-entertainer-in-residence” (a comment whichprovoked Newman to sue). Reinhardt didn’tstop there. He said that a museum should be“a treasure house and tomb, not a countinghouse or amusement centre.”74 Hecompared art criticism to “pigeon droolings”and ridiculed Greenberg as a dictator-pope.Reinhardt was the only AbstractExpressionist to participate in the March on

Washington for civil rights in August 1963.It is hard to sustain the argument that the

Abstract Expressionists merely “happened tobe painting in the Cold War and not for theCold War.”75 Their own statements and, insome cases, political allegiances undermineclaims of ideological disengagement. But it isalso the case that the work of the AbstractExpressionists cannot be reduced to thepolitical history in which it is situated.Abstract Expressionism, like jazz, was—is—a creative phenomenon existingindependently and even, yes, triumphantlyapart from the political use which was madeof it. “There’s no doubt that we need tounderstand all art in relationship to its time,”argued Philip Dodd. “In order to make senseof Abstract Expressionism, we need tounderstand how it was made during anextraordinary moment in European and

American relationships. At a political levelthese were a generation of radicals beachedby history, and at a national level theyemerged just at the moment when Americabecame the great cultural imperium of thepostwar period. All these things need to beunderstood in order to be able to assess theirachievements. But their art cannot bereduced to those conditions. It is true thatthe CIA were involved—I lament that asmuch as anybody else laments it—but thatdoesn’t explain why it became important.There was something in the art itself thatallowed it to triumph.”76

Jackson Pollock was killed in a car crashin 1956, by which time Arshile Gorky hadalready hanged himself. Franz Kline was todrink himself to death within six years. In1965, the sculptor David Smith diedfollowing a car crash. In 1970, Mark Rothko

slashed his veins and bled to death on hisstudio floor. Some of his friends felt that hekilled himself partly because he could notcope with the contradiction of beingshowered with material rewards for workswhich “howled their opposition to bourgeoismaterialism.”

“The country is proud of its dead poets,”says the narrator of Humboldt’s Gift. “Ittakes terrific satisfaction in the poets’testimony that the USA is too tough, too big,too much, too rugged, that American realityis overpowering. . . . The weakness of thespiritual powers is proved in thechildishness, madness, drunkenness, anddespair of these martyrs. . . . So poets areloved, but loved because they just can’tmake it here. They exist to light up theenormity of the awful tangle.”77

First Lieutenant Michael Josselson, Berlin, 1948. ACultural Affairs Officer for the American MilitaryGovernment, he would shortly be recruited to the CIA.

Tom Braden, the CIA agent who put together theInternational Organizations Division, the nerve centreof America’s secret cultural Cold War. Braden’sdivision ran dozens of ‘fronts’, including the Congress

for Cultural Freedom.

The ‘apparat’ at a working lunch. John Hunt, MichaelJosselson and Melvin Lasky.

Stephen Spender, Manès Sperber, Minoo Masani,Michael Josselson, Denis de Rougemont, NicolasNabokov at the meeting of the Executive Committeeof the Congress for Cultural Freedom, January 1957.

Stephen Spender, chosen by the CIA and MI6 to co-edit Encounter magazine. ‘Stephen had all the rightcredentials to be chosen as a front,’ said Natasha

Spender. ‘He was eminently bamboozable, because hewas so innocent.’

Irving Kristol, co-editor of Encounter from 1953 to1958. Arriving in London from New York, Kristol tookto wearing a bowler hat to work.

Michael Josselson, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, JuliusFleischmann, and the sociologist Peter Dodge in Milan,September 1955, to discuss ‘The Future of Freedom’.

Dwight Macdonald with Michael Josselson, Milan,September 1955, during ‘The Future of Freedom’conference. The debates, said one observer, were

‘deadly boring’, but there were heated exchangesbehind the scenes over the proposal to put DwightMacdonald in the editorial chair at Encounter.

Nicolas Nabokov, composer and impresario, the ‘frontman’ for the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Nabokovis flanked by his wife, Marie-Claire, and Michael

Josselson. Vienna Opera House, 1957.

Nicolas Nabokov and the actor Peter van Eyck in theJosselsons’ apartment, Paris, March 1958, to celebrateMichael Josselson’s birthday. Van Eyck and Josselsonhad shared a billet in post-war Berlin.

John Hunt, Robie Macauley and Michael Josselsonmapping things out in the hills above Geneva.

Michael Josselson embraces his friend and colleague,Lawrence de Neufville, and de Neufville’s wife,Adeline. De Neufville had recruited Josselson to theCIA in 1948, and together they set up the Paris-basedCongress for Cultural Freedom as a permanent body in1950. De Neufville returned to the US in 1954, leavingJosselson to cope with a series of disappointingsuccessors.

Raymond Aron and his wife Susanne, MichaelJosselson, and Denis de Rougemont, enjoying a day outin the Swiss mountains. Aron felt deeply compromisedby the exposure of the Congress as a CIA front,though it is alleged he had been in on the secret foryears.

John Hunt and Michael Josselson, sitting beneath thebrass wall plate of the Congress. The plate had beenstolen from outside the Paris office some yearspreviously, and, to their amazement, had been spottedon the wall of a Geneva restaurant, where DianaJosselson took this photograph in 1969.

A most effective partnership: Michael Josselson, code-name ‘Jonathan F. Saba’, and his wife Diana, code-name ‘Jean Ensinger’.

17

The Guardian Furies

In 1787, at an inn near Moulins, an old manwas dying—a friend of Diderot’s, whoseideas had been molded by the philosophes.The local priests were baffled: they had triedeverything in vain; the good man refused thelast sacraments, saying he was a pantheist.Monsieur de Rollebon, who was passing byand who believed in nothing, bet the Curé ofMoulins that he would take less than twohours to bring the sick man back to Christiansentiments. The Curé took the bet and lost:taken in hand at three in the morning, the sickman confessed at five and died at seven.“You must be very good at arguing,” said theCuré, “to beat our own people!” “I didn’targue,” replied Monsieur de Rollebon, “Imade him frightened of hell.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

Whilst Abstract Expressionism was beingdeployed as a Cold War weapon, Americahad turned up an even more potentdiscovery—God. Religious faith in the morallaw had been enshrined in the Constitutionof the United States in 1789, but it wasduring the height of the Cold War thatAmerica discovered how useful theinvocation of the highest hosanna could be.God was everywhere: He was in 10,000balloons containing Bibles which werefloated across the Iron Curtain by the BibleBalloon Project in 1954; His imprimatur wasstamped on an act of Congress of June 14,1954, which expanded the Pledge ofAllegiance to include the words “One NationUnder God,” a phrase which, according toEisenhower, reaffirmed “the transcendenceof religious faith in America’s heritage andfuture; in this way we shall constantly

strengthen those spiritual weapons whichforever will be our country’s most powerfulresource in peace and war”;1 He even beganto appear on dollar bills after Congressordained that the words “In God We Trust”become the nation’s official motto in 1956.

“Why should we make a five-year planfor ourselves when God seems to have hada thousand-year plan ready-made for us?”2

asked one American historian. Under theterms of this logic, political virtue was to besubmitted to a long-standing Christiantradition of obedience to the law of God. Byinvoking the ultimate moral authority,America acquired an unanswerable sanctionfor her “manifest destiny.”

Destiny’s elect had been taught, like theboys at Groton School, that “[i]n history,every religion has greatly honored thosemembers who destroyed the enemy. The

Koran, Greek mythology, the OldTestament. . . . Doing in the enemy is theright thing to do. Of course, there are somerestraints on ends and means. If you go backto Greek culture and read Thucydides, thereare limits to what you can do to otherGreeks, who are part of your culture. Butthere are no limits on what you can to do aPersian. He’s a barbarian. The Communistswere barbarians.”3

The religious imperative motivated ColdWarriors such as Allen Dulles, who, broughtup in the Presbyterian tradition, was fond ofquoting from the Bible for its use of spies(by Joshua into Jericho). When the CIAmoved into its vast new complex in theVirginian woods in 1961, Dulles arranged forone of his favorite quotes from scripture tobe engraved on the wall of the Langleylobby: “And ye shall know the truth, and the

truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).Henry Luce, the child of Americanmissionaries, was fond of drawing on thesame divine reference: “The great Christianpromise is this: Seek and ye shall find. . . .That is the promise and the premise onwhich American is founded.” Luce seldommissed Sunday church or went to bedwithout first praying on his knees. His wife,Clare Boothe Luce, converted to RomanCatholicism after her daughter Anne waskilled in a car accident in 1943. Thecountry’s most publicized conversion, itprompted some detractors to derision.According to one widely repeated jape, thepope interrupted a doctrinal argument withMrs. Luce, when she was Americanambassador to Italy, to remind her, “But,Madam, I too am a Catholic.” She claimedcredit for persuading Eisenhower to become

a Presbyterian in the run-up to the 1952election campaign.4

“Neither profit nor personal glorymotivated Luce as deeply as his missionaryurge to improve his countrymen, and heexercised his power in the sincere, if notunanimously shared belief that he knewwhat was good for them,” wrote one earlybiographer.5 He insisted that “the Americancapacity for successful cooperation isdirectly related to our country’sconstitutional dependence on God” andbelieved that “no nation in history, exceptancient Israel, was so obviously designed forsome special phase of God’s eternalpurpose.”6 To Luce, the Cold War was aholy war, in which Time Inc. was committedto the “dominant aim and purpose” ofdefeating Communism throughout the world.

“Is that a declaration of private war?” heonce asked Time Inc. executives. “And if so,may it not be unlawful and probably mad?Perhaps so, but there are some mighty fineprecedents for the declaration of privatewar.”7 Nowhere was the parallel with themercenaries of the crusades, or the privatearmada of Francis Drake, so powerfullydrawn.

The theologian most favored by Lucewas Reinhold Niebuhr, an honorary patronof the Congress for Cultural Freedom and aCold War “realist” who believed that theestablishment of a calculated balance ofpower was paramount, with foreign policythe exclusive responsibility of an eliteauthority. For members of that elite, Niebuhrwas, of course, a congenial authority figure.Martin Luther King, on the other hand,claimed to have learned from him the

“potential for evil.” Niebuhr served upliberal helpings of theology to Time-Lifereaders, winning Sidney Hook’s approval forsuccessfully reviving the doctrine of originalsin as a political tool and making “God aninstrument of national policy.”8 Indeed, withthe religious imperative insinuating its wayinto every major Cold War policy plank, thewhole edifice of American power in the1950s seemed to rest on one fundamental,monist proposition: that the future would bedecided “between the two great camps ofmen—those who reject and those whoworship God.”9 “We must not be confusedabout the issue which confronts the worldtoday,” President Truman had warned. “It istyranny or freedom. . . . And even worse,communism denies the very existence ofGod.”10 The manufacturing of such a

concept—which reduced the complexity ofworld relations to a struggle between thepowers of light and darkness—meant thatthe rhetoric of American foreign policy hadcome to rest on distinctions which resistedthe processes of logic or rationality. GeorgeSantayana, writing in 1916, had describedthe philosophical process by which suchdistortions come to dominate the historicalprocess: “Imagination that is sustained iscalled knowledge, illusion that is coherent iscalled truth, and will that is systematic iscalled virtue.”11

Such distinctions were lost on the youngpreacher Billy Graham, who amplifiedTruman’s warnings with the theory that“Communism is . . . master-minded bySatan. . . . I think there is no otherexplanation for the tremendous gains ofCommunism in which they seem to outwit

us at every turn, unless they havesupernatural power and wisdom andintelligence given to them.”12 NormanMailer inferred a different diagnosis:“America’s deepest political sickness is thatit is a self-righteous nation.”13

It was in this climate of doctrinaldogmatism that Senator Joe McCarthyflourished. In The Crucible, Arthur Millercompared the Salem witch hunts with theMcCarthy period to demonstrate a parallelguilt, two centuries apart, “of holding illicit,suppressed feelings of alienation and hostilitytoward standard, daylight society as definedby its most orthodox opponents. Withoutguilt the 1950s Red-hunt could never havegenerated such power.”14 The main point ofboth inquisitions was to establish guilt bypublic confession, with the accused expected

to “damn his confederates as well as hisDevil master, and guarantee his sterling newallegiance by breathing disgusting old vows—whereupon he was let loose to rejoin thesociety of extremely decent people.”15 Acurious feature of McCarthy’sSubcommittee and the Un-AmericanActivities hearings was that they showed“less interest in the names supplied than intesting the sincerity of the witness’sconfession.” Leslie Fiedler, who, like hisfriend Irving Kristol, discovered religion inthe early 1950s, described the process as akind of symbolic ritual when he said that“The confession in itself is nothing, butwithout the confession . . . we will not beable to move forward from a liberalism ofinnocence to a liberalism of responsibility.”16

Much drawn to the symbolism of publicconfession was the American Committee for

Cultural Freedom. Elia Kazan, who hadnamed names at a McCarthy hearing in April1952, had been rewarded with membershipon the American Committee, which wasnow happy to fight his battles for him.Defending Kazan’s Actor’s Studio from theattacks of a hard-line anti-Communist group,Sol Stein, in a Jesuitical mood, argued thatKazan was fulfilling the “proper role foranti-Communists in the theatre [which] isthat of missionary to their politicallybackward brethren who have taken muchtoo long a time in appreciating the fact thatservice to front groups in this countrycontributes to the power of the Sovietmammoth.”17 “Those who sided with theCommunists in the past ought to be given anopportunity to direct their energies intogenuinely anti-Communist enterprises andefforts, if that is in line with their present

convictions,” reasoned Stein.18 Kazan, hesaid, should be given space to offer the“political Johnny-come-latelies anopportunity for redemption in order thattheir talents might be enlisted against ourcommon enemy.”19 This was not enough toreassure the extreme anti-Communistpressure group, Aware, Inc., whocomplained that Kazan was continuing towork with “unregenerates” like MarlonBrando, Frank Silvera, and Lou Gilbert andhad failed to employ “any active anti-Communists.”20

The American Committee also saw fit toappoint to its executive body America’s mostfamous informer, Whittaker Chambers,whose testimony had sunk the career ofAlger Hiss. Whittaker had elevated the art ofsnitching to new heights, provoking one

senior colleague at Time-Life (whereChambers was an editor) to tell him, inLuce’s presence, “I think your favoritemovie would be The Informer.” Sol Steinwrote excitedly to Chambers that hisnomination had precipitated “a number ofpost-midnight anonymous calls threateningto wipe the [board members] ‘off the face ofthe earth.’ Dear God, I suppose thisfoolishness will always be with us,” heconcluded.21

“At issue,” wrote Chambers in Witness,his 1952 autobiography, “was the questionwhether this sick society, which we callWestern civilization, could in its extremitystill cast up a man whose faith in it was sogreat that he would voluntarily abandonthose things which men hold dear, includinglife, to defend it.”22 Presenting himself asjust such a David, Chambers got $75,000

from the Saturday Evening Post for takingup his sling against Communism, whichserialized the book over eight weeks. “Youare one of those who did not return fromHell with empty hands,”23 André Malrauxtold him after reading Witness.

With God and Mammon on their side,American anti-Communists were able toreap the benefits of what had become aflourishing sub-profession. In Hollywood,the crusade to cleanse American culture ofall godless impurities was seized upon byHedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, twosyndicated gossip columnists who were tomoral hygiene what Mrs. Beeton was to aclean kitchen. Richly salaried, they were“the guardian Furies, the police matronsplanted at the portals to keep out the sinful,the unpatriotic, and the rebels againstpropriety unworthy to breathe the same pure

air as such apostolic exemplars as Louis B.Mayer, Harry Cohn, Jack Warner, DarrylZanuck, Sam Goldwyn, and a handful ofothers. The ladies’ ferocity towardsCommunism was matched only by theirduplication of some of its practices.”24

Hopper and Parsons, though they maynot have thought of themselves as such,were “militant libertists,” the phrasedesignating a top-secret campaign on thepart of the Pentagon, the Navy, the NationalSecurity Council, and the OperationsCoordinating Board to insert the theme of“freedom” into American movies. OnFriday, December 16, 1955, a secretgathering was convened by the Joint Chiefsof Staff to discuss the how the idea of“Militant Liberty” could be exploited byHollywood. According to a top-secret report,“Militant Liberty” was designed to “explain

the true conditions existing underCommunism in simple terms and to explainthe principles upon which the Free Worldway of life is based” and “to awaken freepeoples to an understanding of themagnitude of the danger confronting theFree World; and to generate a motivation tocombat this threat.”25 “The idea was tocreate a slogan, a political catchword thatmost people would have the impression hadarisen spontaneously but which in fact hadbeen intentionally introduced into theculture,” explained cultural historianChristopher Simpson. “It was a prettysophisticated propaganda operation for itstime.”26 As the basis for a doctrinalcampaign, Militant Liberty was approved atthe highest levels. But it was not until thefollowing year that the Pentagon finallyfound a concrete formula by which to

deliver its message. In June and July 1956,representatives of the Joint Chiefs of Staffheld several meetings in California with aposse of Hollywood figures dedicated toexpunging Communism: John Ford, MerianCooper, John Wayne, and Ward Bond.

The meetings, which were held in theMGM office of John Ford, lasted up to sixhours. According to a memo of July 5,1956, “Mr Wayne stated that in his pictures,produced by him (BacJac Productions), the[Militant Liberty] program would be insertedcarefully.” To see how this might be done,Wayne invited everyone to his home at 4570Louise Avenue, Encino, the followingevening. “After dinner, the movies TheyWere Expendable and The Quiet Man wereshown and studied by Mr. Wayne and Mr.Ford for the manner in which favorableslants for the Navy and free-world cultural

patterns had been introduced in the twofilms.”27

At another meeting, Merian Cooperpointed out that a series of films being madeby Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney “lacked atheme . . . and that he wished that he hadhad this (e.g. Militant Liberty) and furtherstated that he would put it in the others.”28

It was arranged that Whitney would bebriefed accordingly. A successfulindustrialist, Cornelius “Sonny” VanderbiltWhitney shared in the vast Whitney fortunewhich had fallen to his cousin Jock tomanage. Like Jock, he was also close to theCIA (their cousin was Tracy Barnes) andmore than ready to help it: as a trustee,Cornelius allowed the Whitney Trust to beused as a CIA conduit. He was also part ofthe team involved in formulating apsychological warfare initiative called the

National Security Information Agency. Wellknown as a producer (in 1933, he went intobusiness with David O. Selznick, andtogether they produced A Star Is Born,Rebecca, and Gone with the Wind), in 1954he set up C.V. Whitney Pictures Inc. andstated, “I want to film what I would describeas an ‘American Series’ to show our peopletheir country and also to make certain thatthe rest of the world learns more aboutus.”29 The first picture in the AmericanSeries was The Searchers, produced at acost of $3 million and directed by JohnFord.

During the war, John Ford had beenchief of the Field Photographic Branch ofOSS. His job was to photograph the work ofguerrillas, saboteurs, and Resistance outfitsin occupied Europe. Special assignmentsincluded producing top-secret films which

were screened to government leaders. In1946 he incorporated his own productioncompany, Argosy Pictures. The principalinvestors, besides Ford and Merian Cooper,were all OSS veterans: William Donovan,Ole Doering (a member of Donovan’s WallStreet law firm), David Bruce, and WilliamVanderbilt. Ford was entirely in sympathywith the idea that the government’sintelligence agencies should suggest themesfor Hollywood audiences and asked them to“leave six copies of the Militant Libertybooklet with him and send him a dozenmore so that he could pass them on to hisscript writers so that they can learn thenomenclature of the concept.” He furtherrequested that a representative of the JointChiefs of Staff come to the Pensacola,Florida, location of the movie Eagles Wings,“for assistance in putting Militant Liberty

elements in the movie.”30

There to help get the message acrosswas Merian Cooper, who had fought againstPancho Villa and as an army flier had beenshot down over France by the Germans in1918. Becoming a producer with RKO inthe 1930s, he was responsible for teamingFred Astaire with Ginger Rogers. Also onthe set of Eagles Wings was Ward Bond,president of the Motion Picture Alliance forthe Preservation of American Ideals, anorganization dedicated to runningCommunists out of the industry and toaiding HUAC. Bond, said one acquaintance,“would do anything that made him feelimportant, even at the expense of stompingon people.” Ford (who was himselfdisgusted by McCarthy’s blacklists) used tosay, “Let’s face it. Ward Bond is a shit. Buthe’s our favorite shit.” Here was the

Hollywood consortium at work, made up ofa group of men who had known each otherfor decades and who looked to one anotherfor authorization and support.

Militant Liberty could only havehappened in an America so conscious of asense of imperial burden. Articulating theimperatives (and sacrifices) of the paxAmericana, these films celebrated duty, thegroup, the response to command, thedominance of male derring-do. It was in thiscontext that John Wayne, who went toextraordinary lengths to avoid militaryservice in the Second World War, came to beregarded as the model of an Americansoldier, the personification of“Americanism.” “The Duke” was thefrontier man, taming the world. In 1979,Congress struck a medal in his honor. Theinscription read simply, “JOHN WAYNE,

AMERICA.” But his was the America ofred-baiting and ethnic prejudice. As theeponymous hero in Big Jim McLain (1952),he starred in one of the crudest B-filmexpressions of Commie-hating (the film wasmade as a tribute to HUAC).

Movies, like propaganda, trade in fiction,but if this fiction is adroitly manufactured, itwill be taken for reality. To perform thisfunction well, Hollywood had longunderstood the need to cut its mythicalpatterns to suit the prevailing political andsocial mood. Thus it had switched frommaking anti-Bolshevik films in the 1920sand 1930s to glorifying Russia as a wartimeally (in films such as The North Star, Daysof Glory, Song of Russia, and the notoriousMission to Moscow, which had actuallywhitewashed the Moscow Trials and praisedthe Russians as defenders of democracy) to

producing a rash of anti-Communist films inthe 1950s—The Red Nightmare, The RedMenace, Invasion USA, I Was a Communistfor the FBI, Red Planet Mars, Iron Curtain,My Son John, Invasion of the BodySnatchers. Walk East on Beacon, which wasscripted and financed by the FBI, was J.Edgar Hoover’s personal favorite. Theirtitles as unconvincing as their plots, thesefilms all revealed a neurotic obsession withthe outsider, the unknown, “the Other.” Justas Captain America had switched frombattling Nazis to battling Communists, theattitude of American films towards Germanychanged radically, the vanquished enemynow portrayed as heroic fighters and worthyopponents (Rommel, the Desert Fox, 1952;The Sea Chase, 1955; The Enemy Below,1957). As Monday’s enemies becameTuesday’s friends, Hollywood showed how

easily it could rip off the “Good and Evillabels from one nation and [paste] them ontoanother.”31

Whilst such films played well to adomestic audience in thrall to exaggeratedclaims of the Communist menace—mostAmericans were now convinced that “theRussians were coming and the bomb wouldsoon fall in the night”32—in the internationalmarket they were poor performers. For aEurope still wounded by the memories ofFascism, the insensate hatred and verbalviolence of Hollywood’s anti-Communistofferings were unattractive in the extreme.Faring better were Disney’s cartoons, andfeel-good films such as Roman Holiday andThe Wizard of Oz. But not all Europeanswere seduced by these fictive paradises.Buried deep in the clauses of successivetrade agreements (starting with the Blum–

Byrnes accord of 1946) were provisionsguaranteeing an increase in the quota ofAmerican films shown in countries such asFrance. Such agreements were met withindignant criticism in French intellectualcircles and even, in 1948, led to violentstreet battles.

American strategists were surprisinglyslow to respond to widespread resentment inEurope at the saturation levels of Hollywoodimports. There was no diplomaticrepresentation at the 1951 Cannes FilmFestival, nor any formal delegation ofAmerican motion picture leaders, writers,technicians, or artists. By contrast, theRussians had sent their deputy minister ofcinema, as well as the renowned directorPoudovkine, who gave a brilliant résumé ofSoviet achievements. After receiving reportsthat America had looked “very silly” at

Cannes, the U.S. government resolved togive the motion picture industry moreattention.

On April 23, 1953, after his appointmentas special consultant to the government oncinema, Cecil B. DeMille strode into C.D.Jackson’s office. Writing to Henry Luce twoweeks later, C.D. said DeMille “is verymuch on our side and . . . is quite rightlyimpressed with the power of American filmsabroad. He has a theory, to which Isubscribe completely, that the most effectiveuse of American films is not to design anentire picture to cope with a certain problem,but rather to see to it that in a ‘normal’picture the right line, aside, inflection,eyebrow movement, is introduced. He toldme that any time I could give him a simpleproblem for a country or an area, he wouldfind a way of dealing with it in a picture.”33

DeMille’s acceptance of a consultancywith the Motion Picture Service (MPS) wasa coup for government propagandists.Working through 135 U.S. InformationService posts in eighty-seven countries, theMPS had a huge distribution network tohand. Awash with government funds, it waseffectively a “producer,” with all thefacilities available to a production company.It employed producer-directors who weregiven top-security clearance and assigned tofilms which articulated “the objectives whichthe United States is interested in obtaining”and which could best reach “the pre-determined audience that we as a motionpicture medium must condition.”34 Itadvised secret bodies like the OperationsCoordinating Board on films suitable forinternational distribution. In June 1954, itlisted thirty-seven films for showing behind

the Iron Curtain, including: Peter Pan; TheJolson Story; The Glenn Miller Story; TheBoy from Oklahoma; Roman Holiday; LittleWomen; Showboat; The Caine Mutiny; Go,Man, Go (a history of the HarlemGlobetrotters); Alice in Wonderland; andExecutive Suite.

The MPS also regulated Americanparticipation in film festivals abroad, thusfilling the embarrassing vacuum of the 1951Cannes Festival. Naturally, it worked hard toexclude “American motion picture producersand films which do not support Americanforeign policy, which in some cases areharmful”35 from being shown atinternational festivals. Instead, it pushedfilms like The Bob Mathias Story (AlliedArtists, 1954), “an almost perfect portrayalof the best phase of American life—a smalltown boy with his family, his sweetheart, his

career, his interest in sports—all building upto his two-time triumph as one of theoutstanding athletes in the history of theOlympics . . . if it hasn’t got the Americanvalues we want on the screen, then we havegot to start looking for a new set of values topublicize.”36

In the search for allies in Hollywoodwho best understood “the propagandaproblems of the U.S.” and who wereprepared “to insert in their scripts and intheir action the right ideas with the propersubtlety,” C.D. Jackson, as usual, wasembarrassed for choice. In January 1954, heset down a list of “friends” who could beexpected to help the government: Cecil B.DeMille, Spyros P. Skouras, and DarrylZanuck at Fox; Nicholas Schenk, presidentof MGM, and producer Dore Schary;Barney Balaban, president of Paramount;

Harry and Jack Warner; James R. Grainger,president of RKO; Universal’s president,Milton Rackmil; Columbia Picturespresident, Harry Cohn; Herbert Yates atRepublic; Walt and Roy Disney; and EricJohnston of the Motion Picture Association.

But C.D.’s most valuable asset inHollywood was CIA agent Carleton Alsop.Working undercover at Paramount Studios,Alsop had been a producer and agent,working on the MGM lot in the mid-1930s,then with Judy Garland in the late 1940s andearly 1950s, by which time he had alreadyjoined Frank Wisner’s PsychologicalWarfare Workshop. In the early 1950s, heauthored regular “movie reports” for theCIA and the Psychological Strategy Board.These reports were compiled in response toa double need: first, to monitor Communistsand fellow travelers in Hollywood; and

second, to summarize the achievements andfailures of a covert pressure group—headedup by Carleton Alsop—charged withintroducing specific themes into Hollywoodfilms.

Alsop’s secret reports makeextraordinary reading. They reveal just howfar the CIA was able to extend its reach intothe film industry, despite its claims that itsought no such influence. One report, datedJanuary 24, 1953, concentrated on theproblem of black stereotyping in Hollywood.Under the heading “Negroes in pictures,”Alsop reported that he had secured theagreement of several casting directors toplant “well dressed negroes as a part of theAmerican scene, without appearing tooconspicuous or deliberate. ‘Sangaree’ whichis shooting doesn’t permit this kind ofplanting, unfortunately, because the picture

is period and laid in the South. It willconsequently show Plantation negroes.However, this is being off-set to a certaindegree, by planting a dignified negro butlerin one of the principal’s homes, and bygiving him dialogue indicating he is a freedman and can work where he likes.”37 Alsopalso reported that “some negroes will beplanted in the crowd scenes” in the comedyfilm Caddy (starring Jerry Lewis). At a timewhen many “negroes” had as much chanceof getting into a golf club as they had ofgetting the vote, this seemed optimisticindeed.38

In the same report, Alsop referred to thefilm Arrowhead, which, for once, showed areadiness to question America’s treatment ofthe Apaches. But this, said Alsop,“presented a serious problem” in that “theCommies could use [it] to their advantage.”

Happily, a little tinkering on his part ensuredthat most of the offending scenes (thearmy’s shipment of a whole tribe of Apachesagainst their wishes to Florida and thetagging of them like animals) had beenremoved or “their impact significantlydiluted.” Other changes were achieved byredubbing lines of dialogue after the picturehad already closed. Presented “on acommercial and patriotic basis,” Alsopencountered no opposition from the movie’sproducer, Nat Holt.39

The Soviets never lost an opportunity tounderline America’s poor record in racerelations. In 1946 James Byrnes, Truman’ssecretary of state, found himself “stumpedand defeated” when he attempted to protestSoviet denial of voting rights in the Balkans,only to find the Soviets replying, rightly, that“the Negroes of Mr. Byrnes’ own state of

South Carolina were denied the sameright.”40 Alsop’s efforts in Hollywood werepart of a broader campaign to discreditSoviet claims about Americandiscrimination, low pay, unequal justice, andviolence against African Americans. For hispart, C.D. Jackson wanted to confront theissue head on and argued, “It is time we stopexplaining in terms of ‘this dreadful blot onour scutcheon’ and look the whole world inthe eye.”41 To this end, psychologicalwarfare experts on the OperationsCoordinating Board (in close collaborationwith the State Department) established asecret Cultural Presentation Committeewhose chief activity was to plan andcoordinate tours of black American artists.The appearance on the international stage ofLeontyne Price, Dizzy Gillespie, MarianAnderson, William Warfield, the Martha

Graham Dance Troupe, and a host of othermultiracial and black American talent duringthis period was part of this covertlysupervised “export” program. As was theextended tour of what one covert strategistdescribed as the “Great Negro folk opera”Porgy and Bess, which traveled throughWestern Europe, South America, and thenthe Soviet bloc for more than a decade, itscast of seventy African Americans “livingdemonstration of the American Negro aspart of America’s cultural life.”42

Curiously, the rise of this blackAmerican talent was in direct proportion tothe demise of those writers who had firstgiven voice to the poor status of blacks inAmerican society. In 1955, the Russianmagazine Inostranaya Literatura (“ForeignLiterature”) carried two short stories byErskine Caldwell which caused American

propagandists to choke on their breakfast.“The first story is entitled ‘Crazy Money’(originally published in English as ‘TheWindfall’), and it is innocuous,” wrote JohnPauker of the U.S. Information Agency(USIA). “The second story, however, isvicious: it is entitled MASSES OF MEN,and deals with corporate knavery, Negropoverty and the rape of a 10-year-old girl for25¢.”43 The USIA’s concern was taken upby the American Committee for CulturalFreedom, which promised to pressureCaldwell into publicly disclaiming the story.Echoing Sidney Hook’s complaints of 1949that Southern writers reinforced negativeperceptions of America, with their “novelsof social protest and revolt” and “Americandegeneracy and inanity,”44 the AmericanCommittee now resolved to “steer clear ofincestuous Southerners. Their work gives an

exceedingly partial and psychologicallycolored account of our manners andmorals.”45 This was no isolated judgmentbut one taken up by many cultural ColdWarriors, including Eric Johnston, who ledthe assault on the Southerners from hisoffice in Hollywood: “We’ll have no moreGrapes of Wrath, we’ll have no moreTobacco Roads. We’ll have no more filmsthat show the seamy side of Americanlife.”46 Sales of books by Caldwell,Steinbeck, Faulkner, and Richard Wright(the “sepia Steinbeck”) slumped in thisperiod.

Back in Hollywood, Carleton Alsop wasever alert to portrayals of Americanseediness. In one report, he warned of ascreenplay based on “a novel called ‘Giant’by Edna Ferber.” This, he said, was “one towatch,” because it “touches upon the

following three problems: 1. Unflatteringportrayal of rich, uncouth, ruthlessAmericans (Texans). 2. Racial denigration ofMexicans in Texas. 3. Implication wealth ofAnglo-Texans built by exploiting Mexicanlabor.” Alsop’s solution was simple: “I’ll seeto it that it is killed each time someone triesto reactivate it at Paramount.”47 He wasonly partially successful: Warner Brothers,not Paramount, made the film, JamesDean’s last, in 1956.

Alsop’s reports continued to measure thepolitical temperature in Hollywood, detailingthe intricate job of nursing producers andstudios into accepting what the CIA labeledits “Hollywood formula.”48 Out came thenegative stereotypes, in came thecharacterizations which represented ahealthy America. “Have succeeded inremoving American drunks, generally in

prominent, if not principal roles, from thefollowing pictures,” announced Alsop.“Houdini. Drunken American reporter. Cutentirely. This may need a retake to correct.Legend of the Incas. Removed all heavydrinking on part of American lead fromscript. Elephant Walk. Keeping drunkennessto strict plot purposes only. Leininger andthe Ants. All heavy drinking by Americanlead is being cut out of script.”49

On the subject of “pictures striking atReligion” Alsop was especially sensitive:when one studio started developing thescreenplay for d’Annunzio’s Daughter ofIorio, in collaboration with Alberto Moravia,Alsop was convinced it would be “100%anti-clerical,” and wondered, “How can westop this one? I suppose the Vatican shoulddo something about it. Don’t think I’mtaking too much of a pro-Catholic attitude

which may be coloring my outlook. In thisbattle for the minds the first step theCommies must take is to debunk religion.”50

Even more troubling was RobertoRossellini’s Francesco, Giullare di Dio, histreatment of the life of St. Francis. “This isreally something,” Alsop wrote. “Youcouldn’t hope for a better picture debunkingreligion than this . . . St. Francis and hiscompanions . . . are characterized in such anextreme oversimplified manner, that you getthe feeling they are a bunch ofnincompoops, not all there mentally andsome of them perhaps homosexuals.”51

Alsop had joined Wisner’s OPC at the sametime as Finis Farr, a writer with Hollywoodconnections who had worked with JohnO’Hara. Recruited to the PsychologicalWarfare Workshop, Alsop and Farr were run

by Howard Hunt, a former OSS-er whosetaste for black propaganda (he later said he“thought black”) earned him a job runningCIA training courses in political andpsychological warfare.

Shortly after George Orwell’s death in1950, Howard Hunt had dispatched Alsopand Farr to England to meet the author’swidow, Sonia. They were not there toconsole her but to invite her to sign over thefilm rights to Animal Farm. This she dulydid, having first secured their promise thatthey would arrange for her to meet her heroClark Gable. “From this [visit],” wroteHoward Hunt, “was to come the animatedcartoon film of Orwell’s Animal Farm,which the CIA financed and distributedthroughout the world.”52

The rights having been acquired, Huntset about securing a producer who could

front for the CIA. He settled on Louis deRochemont, who had employed Hunt whenhe made The March of Time, a series ofmonthly documentaries of which Time Inc.was the parent corporation.53

In liaison with Hunt and using CIA fundsinjected by Alsop and Farr, de Rochemontbegan production of Animal Farm onNovember 15, 1951. Chosen to make themost ambitious animated film of its time(eighty cartoonists; 750 scenes; 300,000drawings in color) was the British firm ofHalas and Batchelor Cartoon Films Ltd.Hungarian-born John Halas had come toEngland in 1936 and worked on Music Man,the first English cartoon in Technicolor.Teaming up with his wife, Joy Batchelor, heproduced over a hundred government filmsfor the British Central Office of Information,many of which helped publicize the Marshall

Plan and NATO.Animal Farm publisher Fredric Warburg

took a keen interest in the Halas productionand kept his friends in the Congress forCultural Freedom briefed on its progress. Hevisited the studio several times in 1952–53to view sequences and to add his suggestionsfor script changes (perhaps it was Warburgwho suggested that the old major, theprophet of the revolution, should be giventhe voice and appearance of WinstonChurchill?). At the same time, he wasoverseeing a new edition of Animal Farm,to be published by Secker & Warburg withstills from the Halas and Batchelorproduction.

The screenplay was also scrutinized bythe Psychological Strategy Board. Accordingto a memo of January 23, 1952, its officerswere yet to be convinced by the script,

finding its “theme somewhat confusing andthe impact of the story as expressed incartoon sequence . . . somewhat nebulous.Although the symbolism is apparently plain,there is no great clarity of message.”54

Curiously, the critique of America’sintelligence bureaucrats echoed the earlierconcerns of T.S. Eliot and William Empson,both of whom had written to Orwell in 1944to point out faults or inconsistencies in thecentral parable of Animal Farm.

The script problems were resolved bychanging the ending. In the original text,Communist pigs and capitalist man areindistinguishable, merging into a commonpool of rottenness. In the film, suchcongruity was carefully elided (Pilkingtonand Frederick, central characters whomOrwell designated as the British and Germangoverning classes, are barely noticeable)

and, in the ending, simply eliminated. In thebook, “[t]he creatures outside looked frompig to man, and from man to pig, and frompig to man again; but already it wasimpossible to say which was which.”Viewers of the film, however, saw analtogether different denouement, where it isthe sight of the pigs which impels the otherwatching animals to mount a successfulcounterrevolution by storming thefarmhouse. By removing the human farmersfrom the scene, to leave only the pigsreveling in the fruits of exploitation, theconflation of Communist corruption withcapitalist decadence was reversed.

Even greater liberties were proposedwhen the CIA turned to Orwell’s later work,Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell died beforemaking over the film rights, but by 1954they ended up in the hands of producer

Peter Rathvon. Rathvon, a good friend ofJohn Ford’s, had been president of RKOuntil he was ousted by Howard Hughes in1949. That year, he formed the MotionPicture Capital Corporation, which wasengaged in film production and financing.The corporation—and Rathvon himself—enjoyed a close relationship with the U.S.government, financing films for the MotionPicture Service. According to Lawrence deNeufville, Howard Hunt solicited Rathvon’scollaboration on the film version of Orwell’sclassic. Through Rathvon’s corporation,government money was made available tostart production on the film,55 whichappeared in 1956, starring Edmond O’Brien,Jan Sterling, and Michael Redgrave.

Orwell’s nightmare vision of the future inNineteen Eighty-Four appealed to culturalstrategists on a number of levels. CIA and

Psychological Strategy Board officers (forwhom the book was required reading) seizedon its examination of the dangers oftotalitarianism, ignoring the fact that Orwellwas inveighing against the abuses that allcontrolling states, whether of the right orleft, exercise over their citizens. Althoughthe book’s targets were complex, the overallmessage was clear: it was a protest againstall lies, against all tricks played bygovernments. But American propagandistswere quick to designate it in terms of aspecifically anti-Communist tract, leadingone critic to argue, “Whatever Orwellbelieved he was doing, he contributed to theCold War one of its most potent myths. . . .In the 1950s it was marvellous NATONewspeak.”56 On another level, NineteenEighty-Four was a book packed withdistrust of mass culture and the dangers of

universal slavery through bland ignorance(Winston’s reaction to the popular songbeing trilled by the prole woman hanging outher washing perfectly encapsulates this fearof the “mass-cult” and its easy soporificdullness). Again, its political target was lessspecific than universal: the abuse of languageand logic—what Peter Vansittart called “thesqualid menace of Political Correctness”—was imputed to Us as well as Them. In thefilm version, this distinction was obscured.

The manipulation of Orwell’s parable tosuit the prejudices and assumptions of thefilm’s makers was, of course, entirelyconsistent with the parti pris of the culturalCold War. Helping to provide a structure forthis partisan interpretation was none otherthan Sol Stein, executive director of theAmerican Committee for Cultural Freedom,whom Rathvon consulted on several

occasions for his advice on the screenplay.Stein had plenty to give. First, the script“should have a great deal of relevance to thespecifics of present day totalitarianism. Forinstance, the ‘Big Brother’ posters ought tohave the photograph of an actual humanbeing, not a cartoon-like caricature of Stalin.In other words, the probability of BigBrother’s real existence should not bediminished by linking him to the now deadStalin.”57 Nothing in the film should becaricature, Stein went on, “but merely anextension of something we can directlywitness today.” For instance, where“members of the Anti-Sex League aresupposed to wear sashes across theirchests,” Stein worried that “such sashesdon’t correspond to anything in totalitarianlife as we know it but rather to the sashesworn by diplomats on ceremonial

occasions.”58 Stein therefore suggested thatthey wear armbands instead. Similarly,where Orwell had introduced trumpets in thenovel, Stein wanted them “eliminated”because, for Americans, trumpets were“associated with pageantry.”59

But it was the ending which mostexercised Stein, who told Rathvon: “Theproblem with the ending, as I understood it,is that it ends on a note of total despair:Winston Smith is robbed of his humanityand he has capitulated to the totalitarianstate. I think we agreed that this presents asituation without hope when, in actuality,there is some hope . . . hope that humannature cannot be changed by totalitarianismand that both love and nature can surviveeven the horrendous encroachments of BigBrother.”60 Stein proposed that Rathvon

drop Orwell’s ending in favor of thefollowing resolution: “Julia gets up and walksaway from Winston. Couldn’t Winston alsoleave the café, not go after Julia but in theopposite direction and as he walksdespondently along the street, couldn’t hesee the children’s faces, not the faces of thechild who tattled on her father but the facesof children who have managed to maintainsome of their natural innocence. . . . Hebegins to walk faster, and the music comesup stronger until Winston is again near thesecluded spot where he and Julia foundrefuge from the totalitarian world. Again wesee the blades of grass, the wind in the trees,and even perhaps, through Winston’s eyes,another couple nestling together. It is suchthings that for Winston, and for us, stand forthe permanence that Big Brother cannotdestroy. And as Winston walks away from

this scene, we hear on the sound track hisheart beating and he is breathless as herealizes what it is that Big Brother cannottake away from humanity, what will alwaysbe in contrast and in conflict with the worldof 1984, and perhaps to clinch this point ofview, we can see Winston looking at hishands: two fingers on his left hand, twofingers on his right hand, and he knows thattwo plus two make four. As he realizes this,we continue to hear his heart beating, and byextension, the human heart beating—louder,as the film ends.”61

The film actually concluded with twodifferent endings, one for Americanaudiences and one for British. Neitherfollowed Stein’s saccharine suggestions,though the British version was faithful to theidea of Stein’s ending, with Winston gunneddown after crying, “Down with Big

Brother!,” promptly followed by Julia. In thebook, in direct contrast, Orwell explicitlydenied the possibility of the human spiritrising above the pressures of Big Brother.Winston is entirely overcome, his spiritbroken—“The struggle was finished. He hadwon the victory over himself. He loved BigBrother.” Orwell’s specific instructions thatNineteen Eighty-Four should not be alteredin any way had been convenientlydisregarded.

The films Animal Farm and 1984 wereboth ready for distribution in 1956. Sol Steinannounced that they were “of ideologicalinterest to the American Committee forCultural Freedom” and promised to see thatthey got as “wide distribution as possible.”62

Steps to encourage a favorable reception ofthe films were duly taken, including“arranging for editorials in New York

newspapers” and distribution of “a verylarge quantity of discount coupons.”

It could be argued that “forgeries” areinherent in all transitions from text tocelluloid; that the making of a film is in itself—and not necessarily malignly—an act oftranslation or even reinvention. IsaacDeutscher, in his essay on Nineteen Eighty-Four titled “The Mysticism of Cruelty,”claimed that Orwell “borrowed the idea of1984, the plot, the chief characters, thesymbols and the whole climate of his storyfrom Evgeny Zamyatin’s We.”63 Deutscher’spersonal recollection of Orwell was that he“dwelt on ‘conspiracies,’ and that hispolitical reasoning struck me as a Freudiansublimation of persecution mania.” Worriedby Orwell’s “lack of historical sense and ofpsychological insight into political life,”Deutscher cautioned: “It would be

dangerous to blind ourselves to the fact thatin the West millions of people may beinclined, in their anguish and fear, to fleefrom their own responsibility for mankind’sdestiny and to vent their anger and despairon the giant Bogy-cum-Scapegoat whichOrwell’s 1984 has done so much to placebefore their eyes. . . . Poor Orwell, could heever imagine that his own book wouldbecome so prominent an item in the programof Hate Week?”64

But Orwell himself was not entirelyinnocent of such Cold War manipulations.He had, after all, handed over a list ofsuspected fellow travelers to the InformationResearch Department in 1949, a list whichexposed thirty-five people as fellow travelers(or “FT” in Orwell-speak), suspected frontmen, or “sympathizers,” amongst themKingsley Martin, editor of the New

Statesman and Nation (“Decayed liberal.Very dishonest”); Paul Robeson (“Very anti-white. Wallace supporter”); J. B. Priestley(“Strong sympathizer, possibly has somekind of organizational tie-up. Very anti-USA”); and Michael Redgrave (ironically,given his later appearance in the film1984).65 Deeply suspicious of just abouteverybody, Orwell had been keeping a bluequarto notebook close to hand for severalyears. By 1949, it contained 125 names, andit had become a kind of “game” Orwell likedto play with Koestler and Richard Rees inwhich they would estimate “to what lengthsof treachery our favourite bêtes noireswould go.”66 The criteria for inclusion seemto have been pretty broad, as in the case ofStephen Spender, whose “tendency towardshomosexuality” Orwell thought worth noting(he also said he was “very unreliable” and

“Easily influenced”). The American realistJohn Steinbeck was listed solely for being a“Spurious writer, pseudonaif,” whilst UptonSinclair earned the epithet “Very silly.”George Padmore (the pseudonym ofMalcolm Nurse) was described as “Negro[perhaps of] African origin?,” who was“anti-white” and probably a lover of NancyCunard. Tom Driberg drew heavy fire, beingall the things Orwell loved to fear:“Homosexual,” “Commonly thought to beunderground member,” and “English Jew.”67

But, from being a kind of game, whatOrwell termed his “little list” took on a newand sinister dimension when he volunteeredit to the IRD, a secret arm (as Orwell knew)of the Foreign Office. Although the IRD’sAdam Watson would later claim that “[i]tsimmediate usefulness was that these werenot people who should write for us,” he also

revealed that “[their] connections withSoviet-backed organizations might have tobe exposed at some later date.”68 In otherwords, once in the hands of a branch ofgovernment whose activities were not opento inspection, Orwell’s list lost anyinnocence it may have had as a privatedocument. It became a dossier with veryreal potential for damaging people’sreputations and careers.

Fifty years later, Orwell’s authorizedbiographer, Bernard Crick, stood firmly byOrwell’s action, claiming it was “no differentfrom responsible citizens nowadays passingon information to the anti-terrorist squadabout people in their midst whom theybelieve to be IRA bombers. These were seenas dangerous times in the late forties.”69

This defense has been echoed by thosedetermined to perpetuate the myth of an

intellectual group bound by their ties toMoscow and united in a seditious attempt toprepare the ground for Stalinism in Britain.There is no evidence that anybody onOrwell’s list (as far as it has been madepublic) was involved in any illegalundertaking and certainly nothing whichwould justify the comparison to Republicanterrorists. “Homosexual” was the onlyindictment which bore any risk of criminalconviction, though this does not seem tohave deterred Orwell in his bestowal of theword. British law did not prohibitmembership in the Communist Party, beingJewish, being sentimental or stupid. “So faras the Right is concerned Orwell can do nowrong,” Peregrine Worsthorne has written.“His judgement in these matters is trustedabsolutely. So if he thought the Cold Warmade it justifiable for one writer to be

positively eager to shop another, then that isthat. End of argument. But it shouldn’t bethe end of argument. A dishonourable actdoes not become honourable just because itwas committed by George Orwell.”70

This is not to say that Orwell was wrongto be concerned about what he called “thepoisonous effect of the Russian mythos onEnglish intellectual life.”71 He of all peopleknew the cost of ideology and the distortionsperformed in its name by “liberals who fearliberty and the intellectuals who want to dodirt on the intellect.”72 But by his actions, hedemonstrated that he had confused the roleof the intellectual with that of the policeman.As an intellectual, Orwell could command anaudience for his attacks on BritishRussomania, openly, by engaging hisopponents in debate in the pages of Tribune,

Polemic, and other magazines and papers.In what way was the cause of freedomadvanced by answering (suspected)intellectual dishonesty with subterfuge?

“If I had to choose a text to justifymyself, I should choose the line fromMilton: ‘By the known rules of ancientliberty,’ ” Orwell wrote in the preface toAnimal Farm. The phrase, he explained,referred to his strong faith in the “deep-rooted tradition” of “intellectual freedom . . .without which our characteristic Westernculture could only doubtfully exist.” Hefollowed with a quote from Voltaire: “Idetest what you say; I will defend to thedeath your right to say it.”73 Months beforehis own death, Orwell seemed to be saying,“I detest what you say; I will defend to thedeath your right to say it; but not under anycircumstances.” Commenting on what she

saw as Orwell’s move to the right, MaryMcCarthy remarked it was a blessing hedied so young.

18

When Shrimps Learn to Whistle

Freedom just became a series of clichés . . .the Cliché Uh-Huh: “Not all societies thatseem free are as free as they seem” . . . theCliché Dubious: “Freedom is Indivisible.”

Dwight Macdonald, 1956

“Attention! Attention! Dear listeners, youwill hear now the manifesto of theFederation of Hungarian Writers. . . . This isthe Federation of Hungarian Writers. Toevery writer in the world, to all scientists, toall writers’ federations, to all scientificassociations, to the intellectual elite of the

world, we ask you all for your help andsupport. There is but little time. You knowthe facts. There is no need to give you aspecial report. Help Hungary. Help theHungarian people. Help Hungarian writers,scientists, workers, peasants, and ourintelligentsia. Help. Help. Help.”

Sunday, November 4, 1956. At 8:07a.m., minutes after broadcasting thismessage, Radio Budapest fell silent. Pouringinto the capital under cover of night, theSoviet army had begun its brutal suppressionof the October uprising. Over the next fewmonths, 15,000 Hungarians would die, and5,000 would be arrested without trial. As itstank divisions rolled down the centralboulevards of Budapest, it was as if theSoviet Union was punishing the world forpassing such bad judgment on her—Stalinism is dead? Long live Stalinism!

After a decade of plotting and analyzingand collecting intelligence and drawing upstrategies for the liberation of the “captivenations” of Europe, America now stoodimmobile and apparently aghast at thisflexing of Soviet muscle. “The Hungarianrevolutionaries died, despairing of the freeworld which was willing to share theirtriumph but not their struggle,”1 wrote abitter Manès Sperber on November 11. Butwith the simultaneous Anglo-French-Israeliinvasion of Suez, Eisenhower found himselfstuck in the moral mud, circumscribed bythe cruelly obvious parallels of imperialaggression.

But it was not just Suez which paralyzedAmerica: whilst government strategists andintelligence supremos had spent yearsscheming for just such an event as theHungarian uprising, it was as a chimera, an

abstract game which turned out to be all butuseless in the face of reality. “OperationFocus,” by which the CIA believed itself tobe scrutinizing Hungarian affairs since theearly 1950s, turned out to be hopelesslyblurred. Lawrence de Neufville, who hadbeen assigned to Radio Free Europe in 1954,remembered that in his first month there hehad asked, “What happens if a man in araincoat comes here and says, ‘We’ve beenlistening to all this stuff and we’re ready tostart a revolution?’ They discussed it in aspecial board meeting, and they didn’t knowwhat to do. It was a house of cards, and Itold them so. They were all busy thinkingthey were doing good and nobody was doingany real plotting. And then events caught upon them.”2

During the October uprising, Radio FreeEurope had repeatedly encouraged the

insurrectionists. According to some claims, iteven promised armed support, though thiswas—and still is—vigorously denied by theCIA. But according to de Neufville, theAgency was in no position to make suchdenials because, unbelievably, it had no ideawhat the Hungarian section was actuallybroadcasting. “The whole thing was a shamand a delusion,” he explained. “Radio FreeEurope was regularly sending guidances toWashington and Munich about itsbroadcasts, but it was just all mud in youreye, because they simply ignored their ownguidances. Moreover, the U.S. governmenthad an arrangement with the British for themonitoring and translating of broadcastsfrom Eastern Europe, but amazingly nobodyever translated Radio Free Europebroadcasts, so Washington simply didn’tknow what was going out on their radio.

The CIA shouldn’t have denied theHungarian broadcasts, because they simplydidn’t know.”3 The full transcripts of RadioFree Europe’s Hungarian broadcasts in thosecrucial days of October 1956 have neverbeen found.

As the realization hit that the Octoberrevolution had failed, thousands ofHungarians fled to Austria to escape Sovietreprisals. Pouring over the border, theymade mostly for Vienna. Again, theAmericans were completely unprepared.Writing to Shepard Stone at the FordFoundation, Josselson warned that “thesituation involving the refugees seems to bereaching a state of intolerable chaos. Ourown office in Vienna as well as all those whohave returned from there in the last fewdays speak of an impending catastropheunless some major steps are taken

immediately.”4 Also in Vienna was FrankWisner, who had arrived from Washingtonjust in time to witness the detritus of thefailed revolution. Wisner became soemotionally distressed that he started todrink heavily. By the time he got to his nextstop, Rome, the local CIA men there werestruggling to get him through drink-soddenevenings. In Athens he ate some raw clams,from which came hepatitis, high fever, anddelirium. Wisner’s family and friendsattributed his eventual decline as AllenDulles’s chief deputy to the emotionalconfusion of that autumn. Increasinglyirritable and irrational, he had a nervousbreakdown in 1958 and was replaced asDulles’s deputy.5

Melvin Lasky was also quickly on thescene, dashing back and forth from Viennato the Hungarian border in a state of high

excitement. Whilst Wisner found himself in apersonal Gethsemane, Lasky was flushedwith the satisfaction of a prophecy fulfilled.“Hungary, well, that did for us,” he recalledbrightly. “I mean, you didn’t have to pay apenny for it. It was the justification for theanalysis, for our analysis, which said thattotalitarianism is all a farce. And it placedfreedom, bourgeois freedom, firmly on theagenda.”6 Joining forces with FriedrichTorberg, whose Forum office became theimpromptu headquarters for the Congress’sHungarian campaign, Lasky set up a registerfor refugee intellectuals and students andworked to find them places in Europeanuniversities (at a rate of fifteen a day). Healso started compiling a dossier ofdocuments (with help from his friends atRadio Free Europe and Voice of America)called La Révolution Hongroise, a white

book published in England by Secker andWarburg, and in the United States byPraeger.

In Paris, the Congress came into its own,its offices at Boulevard Haussman heavingwith people. “It was a high point of tensionand passion. It was incredibly exciting, likethis was what we were there for,”7 said JohnHunt, who had arrived at the Congress onlya few months earlier. Calling into play itsextensive network of contacts and affiliates,the Paris office coordinated public protestsfrom Santiago to Denmark, Lebanon to NewYork, Hamburg to Bombay. In Sweden, thelocal committee persuaded eight Nobel Prizewinners to sign a cable of protest to MarshalBulganin. The American Committeeorganized a mass meeting attended byKoestler and Silone (they wantedHemingway and cabled Josselson for help in

locating him, but he replied, “Hemingwaypresumably in Europe whereaboutsuncertain”). By January 1957 the Parisoffice was able to report, “Never beforehave the actions of the various NationalCommittees been so unified or strong.”8

Another outcome of the Hungarian crisiswas the formation of the PhilharmonicaHungarica, an orchestra assembled atJosselson’s initiative under the musicaldirection of Antal Dorati with ZoltanRozsnyay as conductor. Rozsnyay hadescaped to Vienna along with a hundredmembers of the Budapest Philharmonic assoon as the Soviet tanks started shelling theHungarian capital. With an initial grant of$70,000, the orchestra became a powerfulfocus for the Kulturkampf, and still tourstoday.

But perhaps the most exciting

development for Josselson and his“intellectual shock troops” was the news thatSartre had publicly repudiated theCommunist Party, branding the Sovietleadership “a group which today surpassesStalinism after having denounced it.” Writingin L’Express on November 9, 1956, hedenounced Soviet policy since the SecondWorld War as “twelve years of terror andstupidity” and “wholeheartedly” condemnedthe intervention in Hungary. Reservingspecial invective for his own country’sCommunists, he declared: “It is not, andnever will be possible to resume relationswith the men who are currently running theFrench Communist Party. Every one of theirphrases, their every move, is the outgrowthof thirty years of lies and sclerosis. Theirreactions are those of completelyirresponsible persons.”9 The Congress ran

off thousands of copies of Sartre’sstatement, distributing it along with that ofCamus, who threatened to lead a boycott ofthe United Nations if it failed to vote for“the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops”from Hungary and to “publicly denounce itsbankruptcy and failure” if the UN fell shortof this demand. “There seems to be . . . abreakaway of the French intellectuals in adescending order of communists, fellow-travellers, progressists, anti-anti-communists,and now anti-communist-communists,”10

Josselson remarked gleefully. Louis Aragon’sCommunist-backed Comité National desEcrivains was, he said, “virtually torpedoed.. . . It is safe to say that the Communist‘mystique’ has been smashed.” But he alsonoted, “The French Socialist party couldhave taken advantage of the situation were itnot for the ill-fated intervention in Egypt.”11

A further truth about the Suez conflictnow established itself in Josselson’s mind.“It is obvious that if Europe is not tosuccumb it has to become independent of itsMiddle Eastern oil sources,” he told onecorrespondent. “A program of intensifiedscientific research for the replacement of oilby other sources of energy may be theanswer.”12 Specifically, Josselson meantnuclear energy. Attempts to gain acceptancefor atomic power had long been anAmerican foreign policy priority. In 1952,C.D. Jackson had noted in his log files that“matters were progressing on LIFE on anarticle by Gordon Dean to remove the guiltcomplex from America on the use of the A-Bomb.”13 Jackson was also closely involvedin preparing Eisenhower’s famous “Atomsfor Peace” address to the United Nations onDecember 8, 1953, in which the president

proposed a unilateral reduction of atomicweapons and outlined the means of divertingthe military uses of nuclear power to civilianuses. Never one to miss a propagandaopportunity, Jackson submitted a memo toFrank Wisner in February 1954 in which hesuggested extending the Eisenhowerproposal to include “the announcement of aplan to erect the first atomic power reactorin Berlin.” There were, said C.D., “verypractical as well as propaganda reasons fordoing this. Every ounce of fuel, liquid orsolid, used in Berlin has to be brought intothe city across Soviet territory. In spite ofthe reserve stocks we have accumulated, anew blockade would be very serious.”14 Anatomic power plant, he reasoned, “would beable to supply the basic [energy] needed totake care of the city under siege conditions.”The propaganda value, “vis-a-vis the

Germans and the Soviets,” was “obvious.”In fact, as propaganda, it would not even benecessary to take “a final decision as to theactual erection of the power plant. The ideacould be leaked simply as an idea. A surveygroup could wander around Berlin lookingfor a suitable site; a rubble area could befenced off and put under guard withmysterious signs; and the project for thetime being could be limited to the rumorstage, which from the standpoint of theBerliners and the Soviet observers is almostas good as actually getting on with thework.”15

Josselson possessed nothing close to thisMachiavellian reasoning. He was genuinelytaken by Eisenhower’s idea of “beatingnuclear swords into ploughshares.”16 Hismotives were sincere, if naive: in a letter toNabokov, he wrote, “It is obviously the case

that the exploitation of atomic energy willradically change the lot of mankind andsociety. I remain firmly convinced that it willalso mark the swan song of Marxism, andprovide a new philosophical and sociologicalbasis for mankind, just as the industrialrevolution provided the basis for Marx’stheories.”17 Welcoming the Eisenhowerproposal to pool atomic energy resources forpeaceful purposes as “a stroke of genius,”Josselson was keen to promote the ideathrough the Congress journals but had runup against a wall of indifference. “I havebeen desperately trying to have[Eisenhower’s] proposal followed up with aseries of articles in Preuves, from whichthey would have been picked up by otherjournals in Europe,” he told de Neufville inJanuary 1954. “Alas, the three non-communist leading scientists in France have

declined under one pretext or another. . . . Itis the usual case of a good idea not beingfully exploited because people are either toolazy or too busy or just don’t give a damn.18

Yet this is one idea that can instill new hopeand confidence among some prettydesperate Europeans.” Josselson ended bysaying, “If you have any ideas, please don’tkeep them to yourself.”19

What happened next provides a rareinsight into the workings of the clandestinebureaucracy behind the Congress forCultural Freedom. Josselson’s letter waspassed to C.D. Jackson at the White House.Jackson passed it on to Tracy Barnes at theCIA, with the suggestion that William Tylerbe invited “to ghost this piece for theappropriate big-name European scientist.”Tyler was public affairs officer at theAmerican Embassy in Paris (though his

many functions suggest that this was acover). “Besides writing impeccableAcademie French,” said Jackson, “Tyler hasthe added advantage of having been in onmany of the . . . drafts of this speech, sothat he has a complete grasp of thephilosophy of the speech.” Jackson toldBarnes to put this idea “right back toJosselson” as a matter of urgency, as thenext issue of Preuves was about to close.20

Whilst Josselson nurtured his plans for anuclear-powered Europe united behind theconcept of democratic freedom, DwightMacdonald was in Egypt to witness Westernempires behaving badly, on assignment forEncounter, whose associate editor he hadjust become. Macdonald, who looked, saidone friend, like a mad professor with abutterfly net, was at a high point in hiscareer: he had just finished his lengthy

profile of the Ford Foundation for the NewYorker and relished the chance to work on ahighbrow magazine like Encounter. So itwas odd that his stint in Cairo should havefailed to stimulate him into any goodreportage. Indeed, when he heard a shellslamming into a building near his hotel, heupped and moved into the suburbs, wherehe hid for several days without contactingthe Encounter office. Macdonald, who haddescribed his arrest in 1940 for picketing theSoviet Consulate in New York as “greatfun,” seemed now to have lost his taste forrisk, never once venturing out of the city tosee the war zone. “We paid a couple ofhundred pounds for his ticket and paid thehotel, so that Dwight could do a Suezpostmortem,” recalled Lasky, “but what hewrote was absolutely unpublishable. He hadwriter’s block out there, and then he came

back and would sit around the office formonths at a time and all there would be wasthis writer’s block.”21

Macdonald’s appointment to Encounterhad been controversial from the start.Josselson had never been satisfied withKristol’s editorship, and the two had clashedover what the magazine should be from thevery first issue. Josselson felt that Kristolwas too precious about Cold War issues anddemanded more emphasis on the politicalside of the magazine. “We are not publishingcultural magazines with a capital C. I amdisturbed about your failure to grasp this,”22

Josselson lectured Kristol (in a remark whichcomes close to justifying one critic’scomment that Encounter was a magazine ofpolitical propaganda with a cultural decor).Lasky, as ever, agreed with Josselson: “Wewere concerned in the mid-fifties that

Encounter wasn’t paying enough attention toSoviet and Eastern bloc affairs. But Kristoldidn’t want to do this—he had a kind ofnervous, compulsive fear of ideologicaldiscussion.”23 Despite calling Kristol to heelat a series of meetings in Paris, by early1955 Josselson was completely exasperated.“You will remember that at our ExecutiveCommittee meeting everyone was inagreement that the period spent so far byEncounter in overcoming covert and overtresistance was time well spent,” Josselsonwrote mysteriously, “but that now it wastime to go one step further.”24 Kristol’sresponse was hardly compliant. “Basically,”he wrote, “I have to do things my way. . . .If my way turns out to be inadequate,there’s always a ‘final solution.’ ”25

Whilst Kristol referred idly to his own

extinction, Josselson was already one stepahead, quietly instructing Nabokov andLasky to do the rounds and ask forrecommendations for a replacement editor.Isaiah Berlin, who was habitually consultedon such matters, suggested H. StuartHughes. Another suggestion was PhilipHorton, a former OSS-er and the CIA’s firststation chief in Paris in 1947, who nowworked for The Reporter. Spender,meanwhile, was busily engaged inundermining Kristol’s position. “I think itmust be because he is so intenselycompetitive that he regards every decision asa kind of conflict in which he has to score avictory, either by keeping the decision tohimself or by sabotaging it if it is made byhis colleague,”26 he told Josselson, leavinghim in no doubt of the benefits of removingKristol: “If Irving goes we can then begin

discussing things which could be decidedimmediately but which he turns into longdrawn out battles.”27 Nabokov, meanwhile,had another candidate in mind, and wrote tofriend and confidant “Arthuro” Schlesingerto ask if he could “very, very tactfully”sound out Dwight Macdonald. Schlesingerwas very enthusiastic. So was MalcolmMuggeridge, whose comment that Kristolwas a “very nice fellow but perfectly uselessand incapable of cutting any ice here”concealed what Lasky claimed was “abiological hatred—he thought he was abarbarian.”28

Josselson agreed to discuss thepossibility with Macdonald in New York andwent to meet him there in June 1955. Thetwo got on well, but Josselson worried thatMacdonald’s gadfly temperament would notbe easy to house within the Congress tent.

He was, said Josselson, too “lone wolf.”When Sidney Hook got wind of the meeting,he threatened to resign from the executivecommittee and said he would “blow theCongress out of the water”29 if Macdonaldwere appointed. Kristol, who had been keptin the dark throughout these negotiations,was incredulous when he finally learned thatMacdonald was being considered as hisreplacement. “It was ridiculous—he was ananarchist and a pacifist!”30 he laterexclaimed.

By the time of the Congress’s Future ofFreedom conference in Milan, the matterwas still unresolved. During that middleweek of September 1955, the delegates’hotel steamed with intrigue. StuartHampshire remembered more of the boudoirpoliticking than of the debates themselves(which were, according to Hannah Arendt,

“deadly boring”). Whilst George Kennanwas intoning on “The Strategy of Freedom”(a typical Kennan theme—freedom, likeforeign policy, needed to be strategicallyorganized), Sidney Hook’s bedroom becamethe focus of a cell opposed to Dwight’sappointment. A quick shuffle down thecorridor led to Arthur Schlesinger’sbedroom, which was where the faction insupport of Dwight’s appointment gathered.“Dwight was vetoed, principally by SidneyHook,” Hampshire remembered. “And I sawvery strongly then that there was a centralcontrol—the apparat at work. Certainly,Dwight would have been a loose cannon.You never knew what he might do or saynext. And they weren’t going to have it.”31

But Schlesinger dug his heels in: “Isupported him. So did the CIA, and theypressured Josselson to accept, which he did

reluctantly.”32 Eventually, a compromisewas worked out whereby Macdonald wouldjoin Encounter for one year as a“contributing editor,” and Kristol would stayon. Writing to explain the arrangement toMuggeridge, Josselson said that he had givenKristol “such a heavy dose of franktreatment bordering on brutality that asalutary change in his attitude can beexpected.”33 But within months, suchexpectations were dashed. The snipingcontinued, and Josselson found himselfwriting in exasperation to Kristol: “I couldnot bite your head off if you would not stickyour neck out. I don’t know where youdraw the line between editorial criticism andissues of principle.”34 To Daniel Bell,Josselson privately confessed, “I sometimesfeel that Irving will change his ways when

shrimps can learn to whistle.”35

Josselson had instinctively hadmisgivings about Macdonald. No sooner hadhis appointment (and a generous salary of$12,000 plus expenses) been confirmed thanDwight submitted an article to Encountercalled “No Miracle in Milan.” His remarkson the luxurious accommodation enjoyed bythe delegates, and their apparent lack ofconcentration at the conference debates, leftSpender and Kristol in a spin. Contrary towhat Macdonald had anticipated—beforecoming to London he wrote to Spender thathe was “Pleased as Punch” to hear aboutthe Congress’s attitude to Encounter; its“hands-off policy . . . sounds positivelyidyllic”36—the article was discussed withNabokov, Bondy, Lasky, and Josselsonbefore finally being passed back toMacdonald with a raft of suggested

amendments. It was finally published inDecember 1955, a month after a far morerespectful account by the conservativesociologist Edward Shils appeared. But thismeddling was a taste of things to come.

In the wake of the tumultuous events of1956, the Congress had struck its form.Although it did not think of itself“exclusively as a militant organization forideological combat and exposure of crimes,falsehoods, and inquisition,”37 this wasprecisely what it excelled at. More formalarrangements for this kind of activity werecompleted in October 1957, when Laskypresided over the formation of theCongress’s Forum Service, which offered“background information and analysis” tosubscribers worldwide. In fact, Forum WorldFeatures (as it was renamed) was a classicCIA undercover operation, with John Hay

Whitney once again acting as a front,registering the company under his name as aDelaware corporation with offices inLondon. By the 1960s, Forum WorldFeatures was the most widely circulated ofthe CIA-owned news services.

Nevertheless, under Josselson’s carefulstewardship, the Congress continued to beseen as the only independent internationalorganization which consistently proclaimedthe value of freedom. “It was a matter ofcreating an area of cultural freedom itself,within which the great enterprises ofliterature, art, and thought could bepursued,” explained a Congress statement.“In order to oppose a world in whicheverything serves a political purpose, whichis for us unacceptable, it was necessary tocreate platforms from which culture couldbe expressed without regard to politics and

without confusion with propaganda, wherethe direct concern would be for ideas andworks of art in themselves.”38 This was thecriterion by which the Congress, ultimately,would stand or fall. Of course, thepropaganda imperative was neverrelinquished by the Congress’s secret angels.Josselson’s job was to make sure that thisimperative was carefully concealed, and forthe moment at least it seemed to be working:people were flocking to the Congress. Ifever there were such a thing as anti-Communist chic, it was now.

Once again, the personal cost to MichaelJosselson was high. In August 1957, heunderwent a gruesome operation whichinvolved stripping out and replacing arteriesin his leg. As he recuperated, Melvin Laskycheered him with news of the “Battle ofBrecht,” in which the Congress ranged its

artillery against Communist “idolizers” of the“Communist millionaire” at a conferenceheld in Berlin, scoring another hit in“German Kulturpolitik.” More cheering stillwas the news that the Ford Foundation hadconfirmed a new grant of £500,000 to theCongress and that the RockefellerFoundation was also renewing its largesse.

But the final say that year went to theSoviets when they launched the world’s firstsuccessful satellite into orbit on October 4.Weighing less than 200 pounds, Sputnik 1(the name meant “fellow traveler”) carriedenormous weight in international affairs. Asit bleeped across the globe, it instantlycreated an atmosphere of panic in the U.S.government. “I guess sputnik buries oldIke’s reputation for all posterity . . . first inwar, first in peace, first on the [golf] links—but second to the moon,”39 Lasky told one

correspondent. When, one month later,America’s attempt to launch a much smallersatellite came crashing down to the groundin full view of the world’s news cameras, thetaste of defeat was bitter indeed.

19

Achilles’ Heel

Power was the first thing that went wrongwith the CIA. There was too much of it, andit was too easy to bring to bear.

Tom Braden

By the late 1950s, the CIA had come to seeEncounter as its standard, agreeing withJosselson’s assessment of the magazine as“our greatest asset.” In Agency-speak, an“asset” was “any resource at the dispositionof the agency for use in an operational orsupport role.”1 The Agency’s operationalprinciple, as established by Tom Braden,

dictated that organizations receiving itssupport should not be required “to supportevery aspect of official American policy.”2

This meant that a leftish agenda couldsurvive in an organ like Encounter. Butwhilst it “was left wing in the sense that itgave expression to some left wing views . . .it wasn’t a free forum at all, which itpurported to be,”3 according to Britishphilosopher Richard Wollheim. “I think theeffect of it was to give the impression that itwas the whole spectrum of opinion theywere publishing. But invariably, they werecutting it off at a certain point, notablywhere it concerned areas of Americanforeign policy. It was skillfully done: therewere opinions that were published incriticism of America, but it was never reallycritical.”4 And this, according to Tom

Braden, is how Encounter was expected toperform: “It was propaganda in the sensethat it did not often deviate from what theState Department would say U.S. foreignpolicy was.”5 When Braden offered a degreeof laxity, he certainly didn’t intend thatEncounter should be free to denounce anyor every aspect of official American policy.And this, in 1958, is precisely what it wasset to do.

Early that year, Dwight Macdonaldresurfaced in New York after his tenure atEncounter. To break the journey, he hadstopped for two months in Tuscany, wherehe was overwhelmed with a sense of thefecundity of European tradition. Back inNew York, where taxi drivers swore andpublic manners were “atrocious,” hesuffered a serious case of culture shock. Hesat down to write about his feelings of

revulsion—at the violence, the tawdriness,the “shapelessness” of America, a countrywithout style, without a sense of past orpresent, bent on extracting the greatestamount of lucre. “The national motto shouldbe not ‘E Pluribus Unum,’ not ‘In God WeTrust,’ but: ‘I got mine and screw you,Jack!’ ”6 he asserted angrily.

What Macdonald wrote was a protractedlament for a country which he saw asalready in decline. With so many intellectualsstreaming across the threshold to embrace“American” culture, Dwight the maverickrediscovered an urge to strike a posture“against the American grain.” In January, hesent his thoughts to Encounter in an articleentitled simply “America! America!”Spender accepted it without, he laterclaimed, reading it through properly. ButIrving Kristol was appalled. He found it

“John Osborne–ish,” unhealthily “self-lacerating,” poorly constructed. “Dwight wasa wonderful journalist but utterlyunpredictable and sometimes capable ofbeing quite silly,”7 he said, adding thatbecause Dwight came from a privilegedbackground he knew nothing about America,and the same impediment prevented himfrom understanding En gland, to whichAmerica was so disadvantageouslycompared in his piece. “He knew nothingabout England; he never went to a footballgame in England, he never went to a rugbygame in England. His knowledge of Englandwas from the various clubs in the St.James’s area. He was a hick—he said‘GROS-VENOR Square,’ for God’s sake!”8

This, from a man who had taken to wearinga bowler hat and carrying an umbrella on hisway to work, was strong stuff. Lasky, too,

thought it was “a very poor article” andechoed Kristol’s claim that Macdonald knewnothing about the real America because “hewas a Yale man and a Greenwich Villageman, and that’s about what he knew. Andwhen he came over to England he had allthe clichéd positions of an innocent MarkTwain American abroad. He lovedeverything British. He loved the pubs, andhe loved the names of the streets and thesquares and everything. We wereembarrassed. Americans could be so naiveand at such a low level. It was a terriblearticle. I told Mike [Josselson] at the timethat Dwight was the Achilles’ heel of theCongress, and I was right,”9 Laskyconcluded smugly.

But Macdonald’s sin was far greater thanhis mispronunciation of “GrosvenorSquare.” As a critique of contemporary

America, the article certainly had itsweaknesses. As the exclamatory nature of itstitle made clear, it was an instinctual ratherthan a seriously argued rebuttal of Americanvalues. It compared America with Englandand Italy in a way which demonstrated aromantic weakness in Macdonald foridealizing foreign cultures. Yet it was also anextraordinarily apposite piece, exploiting awealth of data and recent research, touchingon just about every area of American lifewhich was of concern to its publicists. AsMacdonald set about knocking every sacredcow, it was uncanny, as if he had readsomewhere a hit list of all the negativestereotypes American covert operators werebent on eradicating. He denounced rampantmaterialism unmatched by any spiritualgrowth, violent crime, the unhinderedadvance of advertising billboards, the lack of

discrimination amidst literary critics, theprevalence of racial discrimination. Heattacked John Foster Dulles as “the piousArtful Dodger,” the perfect prototype ofAmerica’s grossness and hypocrisy; HenryLuce as “a Boy Scout acting like agangster”; Vice President Nixon for hisgauche behavior in Venezuela (for which hehad been deservedly “chronically mobbed”);President Eisenhower for being a gunslingingreactionary; George Walker, vice presidentof Ford Motors, for acting like “an Easternpotentate”; the American labor unions forbeing more interested in public relations thanthe class struggle, and their leaders DavidDubinsky and Walter Reuther for being “sodamned virtuous.”10 On and on went thiscatalogue of contemporary American sins,Macdonald’s animosity towards thedecadent American imperium taking him to

new depths of disgust: “When one hearsEuropeans complaining about theAmericanization of Europe, one wishes theycould spend a few weeks over here and geta load of the real thing. . . . Even the SovietRussians, for all their ruthlessness, barelycovered by the fig of ideology, seem tospeak a more common language with otherpeoples than we do.”11

Despite finding the piece “utterlyridiculous,” Kristol agreed to run it, claiminghe had no choice given Stephen’sacceptance. No sooner was it accepted thanthe Paris bureau got hold of a copy. Spenderand Kristol were instantly urged not to run itand warned that Junkie Fleischmann hadsaid it would hurt the Congress andjeopardize its funding. “I was easily movednot to run it, since I hadn’t liked it in thefirst place,” Kristol later claimed. “Stephen

was a little more recalcitrant. But in the endwe said [to the Paris office], if it’s reallygoing to make life that much more difficultfor you, we can do without the article. Andthen Dwight published it elsewhere,complaining about censorship. Rejecting anarticle is not censorship. I’ve been an editorof magazines all my life, and I’ve rejectedplenty of articles and I’ve never regardedthat as a form of censorship.”12

It fell to Spender to tell Macdonald thatthey would not be able to run the piecewithout considerable alterations. Havingreread the article, Spender said, he felt itwas one-sided and too critical. He addedthat Nabokov had read the article and had“become very upset.” Macdonald wasfurious to learn that “General Secretary andGrand Master of International DecorumNicolas Nabokov” had been providing the

editors of Encounter with “advice” andsuggested to “Stephenirvingnicholasmike orwhoever’s around and decides things” thatfrom now on the editors simply “consult theParis office at once, on receipt of a‘controversial’ MS, so as to find outimmediately what it thinks.”13 As it happens,this was precisely what the editors weredoing.

With Macdonald refusing to take onboard any cuts, the piece was finally axed. Ithad been accepted, rejected, accepted,rejected. “I feel badly about it,” saidSpender in an interview shortly before hisdeath. “That’s the only article that was notpublished in Encounter as a result of verystrong pressure being brought on us by theCongress for Cultural Freedom. It’sabsolutely the only article. When there wastrouble about it I thought it was a rather

foolish kind of article, and I thought thatprobably if I had looked at it, I would eitherhave wanted to alter it or I would haverejected it. Now looking back on it, this isthe one thing that I regret very much,because I think even if having looked at thearticle I didn’t like it, I still should’veinsisted, made a point on which one resigns:that we publish this article because we hadaccepted it, and the only reason for rejectingit was its anti-Americanism.”14

But it wasn’t just the Paris office thatintervened. According to Diana Josselson(who thought that “the whole [article] wasvery désabusé”), this was “the one exampleof editorial intervention by the CIA, andMichael fought it very hard, but he didn’twin.”15 How did the Agency come by thearticle in the first place? If, as the orthodoxyupheld by those involved goes, Congress

publications were not previewed by theAgency, how did news of the Macdonaldpiece reach it? Josselson was receivingadvance copies of Preuves and at least thetable of contents of Encounter. But surely itwas not in his interests to pass this fierypiece on to his superiors in Washington?Josselson always preferred to deal withproblems independently of the Agency,whose affiliation with the Congress he cameincreasingly to resent. There is no doubt,however, that “America! America!” did therounds in the corridors of Washington. Mostprobably, the article arrived there via theCIA’s case officer in the Congress (whowas, at that time, Lee Williams).

If the only thing wrong with the piecewas its submission to cheap anti-Americanism, why did the Agencyjeopardize the credibility of Encounter, its

“greatest asset,” in an effort to suppress it?Surely, here was a great opportunity todemonstrate Encounter’s “bona fides,” toerode the view that it was uncritical ofAmerican failures, to rebalance the acousticswhich, said some critics, had alwayssounded odd? More to the point, if thearticle was as ridiculous as everyoneclaimed, then what possible damage could itdo to anyone other than its author?

Contrary to what Diana Josselson laterremembered, Josselson was in fact againstrunning the offending article from thebeginning. He called it “the most blatantlyanti-American piece I have ever read” andsaid it belonged in “Literaturnaya Gazeta.”16

He knew that Macdonald “will probablyraise a stink and attack us publicly but I amready to face it.” His fingerprints were allover the decision to ax it. Running it would

have done considerable harm to Encounter’sreputation in Washington, and it would alsohave made Josselson look nothing short of arenegade. His own credibility was on theline.17

For those hardened clandestine operatorswho viewed the International OrganizationsDivision as a bit of “fluff on the side,” whosneered at the idea of aiding and abettingpeople or organizations who were supposedto be “friends” or have “the same point ofview,” the Macdonald flap was avindication. Richard Helms, Wisner’s deputyand later CIA director, gave voice to thisskepticism when he told a select committee,“The clandestine operator . . . is trained tobelieve that you really can’t count on thehonesty of your agent to do exactly whatyou want or to report accurately unless youown him body and soul.”18 That anybody in

the employ of the CIA could have expectedto domesticate the famously iconoclasticMacdonald seemed sheer folly.

All these arguments are distractions fromthe real reason for axing Macdonald’s article.The anti-Americanism was one thing, but inand of itself it might perhaps have beentolerated in a diluted form. But Macdonald’sdecision to conclude his attack with a précisof a lengthy article summarizing a report onthe behavior of American servicemencaptured during the Korean war was a steptoo far. Excerpted by Eugene Kinkead in theNew Yorker the previous autumn, the report,commissioned by the U.S. Army, was adamning indictment on the conduct ofAmerican prisoners: they “often becameunmanageable. They refused to obey orders,and they cursed and sometimes struckofficers who tried to enforce orders . . . on

winter nights, helpless men with dysenterywere rolled outside the huts by theircomrades and left to die in the cold.” Theaverage American soldier seemed “lostwithout a bottle of pills and a toilet thatflushed.”19 Most disturbingly, the report alsoindicated a high level of collaboration andindoctrination. Amazingly, the army hadmade its report public, thus creating anightmare for government propagandists.20

The inclusion of this data inMacdonald’s piece was the one good reasonwhy publication in Encounter wasguaranteed to be met with an official veto. Itwas precisely this last part which caused thetrouble. And yet, years later, none of thosedirectly involved in dropping Macdonald’spiece was able to recall the Kinkead issue.“I’m not aware that there was any collapseof morale among American soldiers at the

end of the Korean War,” said Irving Kristol.“And if there were, Dwight wouldn’t knowabout it, since what did he know about theKorean War? He sat in New York writing forthe New Yorker, he knew nothing about theKorean war, he’d never been to Korea. Idon’t think he had ever visited a regiment.About military dissatisfaction in the ranks,about that I had heard nothing. I don’tremember its being in Dwight Macdonald’sarticle at all.”21

Likewise, Melvin Lasky, when asked,could remember nothing of this. Nor couldStephen Spender. Nor could DianaJosselson. This can only be put down to acase of collective historical amnesia.Kristol’s memory failure in particular isworth noting: writing to him in October 1958(by which time the now infamous article hadbeen printed in Dissent, a magazine to the

left of Partisan Review, and Kristol had leftLondon to work for The Reporter in NewYork), Josselson said, “Now, as to hisexhibitionist piece about America which youand Stephen were wrong in accepting in thefirst place, you may also recall that youasked him to re-write it and to leave out thewhole section about Korea which hadalready appeared in The New Yorker. He didnot do this.”22 In 1959, Kristol was stillembroiled in the Kinkead controversy andattacked him in person in a televiseddebate.23 For this he earned Josselson’s(rare) approval and a new and “avid reader”of The Reporter.

By axing the Macdonald article (itsbelated appearance in Tempo Presente, afterit had already been published in Dissent,was poor recompense), the credibility of theclaim that CIA support came without strings

attached was jeopardized. “This was allabout efforts to create vehicles which bydefinition were articulators of Westernvalues, of free and open debate,” claimedCongress case officer Lee Williams. “Wedidn’t tell them what to do, that would’vebeen inconsistent with the Americantradition. This doesn’t mean there weren’tthemes we wanted to see discussed, but wedidn’t tell them what to do. . . . We did notfeed the line to anyone. We believed weshould let the facts speak for themselves, letthe dialogue go on, let the free voices have aplace to express themselves. There was no‘Thou shalt think in this way,’ ‘Thou shaltput out this line,’ ‘Thou shalt print thisarticle.’ That was totally foreign to what wewere doing.”24 William Colby alsovigorously challenged the claim that journalslike Encounter were expected to perform as

“dollar megaphones” for the CIA. “Therewas not a imposition of control from theCIA,” he said. “We were supporting but notbossing, not telling what to do. You might sitdown and as good friends you could argueabout whether this particular line wouldmake sense of that, but there was no senseof, This is it, bang! it comes fromWashington, no answers. No. That goes forMoscow but it didn’t go for Washington.”25

Both the Agency and the intellectuals itsubsidized have done much to protect thisaltruistic myth. The Macdonald affairsuggests a different reality. “The CIAclaimed that it was sponsoring freedom ofexpression. Of course that wasn’t true,” saidJason Epstein. “When Dwight Macdonaldwrote his article for Encounter, the editorsof the magazine, responding to what theyknew to be the [Congress’s] position,

refused to publish it. That doesn’t say muchfor promoting freedom of expression. [TheCIA] was promoting a policy and a politicalline: that was what it was paying for andthat’s what it expected to get. Freedom ofexpression had nothing to do with it.”26

Macdonald himself referred to Nabokov andJosselson as the “front office Metternichs”of Encounter. “You’d think USA wasVenezuela, such touchy national pride,” henoted drily. “Especially nice that thecensorship is by a congress for culturalfreedom!”27 American sociologist NormanBirnbaum took up this point in an open letterto the Congress, arguing that the directiveexcluding the article from Encounter was“an unmitigated insolence” and clearlyshowed that there was a gap between whatthe Congress preached and what it practiced:“The Congress for Cultural Freedom has for

some years been lecturing the intelligentsiaon the indivisibility of freedom. It’s right:freedom is indivisible, it has to be fought foron issues large and small, and extendedagainst a hundred dogmatisms and pettytyrannies—not least, apparently, those of itsself-appointed champions.”28 Birnbaumwent further, accusing the Congress ofsubmitting “liberty” to the exigencies ofAmerican foreign policy: “It seems tosubscribe to something very like a Stalinistview of the truth: truth is, whatever servesthe interests of the Party.”29

The charge that the Congress haddishonored the cause it professed hit hard.Josselson smarted, convinced that the meansjustified the ends but deeply troubled by theaccusation that the Congress identified truthwith the edicts of John Foster Dulles orAllen Welsh Dulles. He skirted the issue

entirely when he wrote to explain the wholeaffair to Macdonald in April 1958, in a letterthat was watery and unconvincing: “Youmust understand that Irving and Stephenmust eat, that you must be paid for yourarticles, that Encounter must be able to saythe things that it is best qualified to saywithout jeopardizing its future.”30

Macdonald’s response was to say,“Eliminating irreverent remarks about TheAmerican Way of Life from Encounterbecause some grey-flannel-suited Madison-Avenue philanthropoid might cut down onsupplies is indeed a miserable business.”31

“The duty that no intellectual can shirkwithout degrading himself is the duty toexpose fictions and to refuse to call ‘usefullies’ truths,” Nicola Chiaromonte hadannounced in the second issue of Encounter.Whilst Encounter never shrank from

exposing the useful lies by whichCommunist regimes supported themselves, itwas never truly free itself of “the bear-trapof ideology,” of that pervasive Cold Warpsychology of “lying for the truth.” By“keeping silent on any hot controversialissues, by excessive diplomacy and hushhush attitude toward all the fakery andshoddiness that’s for years been growing soin our whole intellectual atmosphere,”32

Encounter suspended that most precious ofWestern philosophical concepts—thefreedom to think and act independently—and trimmed its sails to suit the prevailingwinds.

It has been said that “a magazine articlesays what it says, and anyone can examineits arguments and disagree with it—it cannotbe a covert performance.”33 Encounter’sstrange silences, its deliberate concealment

of what lay below the bottom line, and itsexclusion of material inconvenient to itssecret backers suggest that the contrary istrue. As one historian put it, “The pertinentquestion about Encounter’s independencewas not whether there were instructionscabled to the editors from Washington, butwho chose the editors in the first place, andwho established the clear bounds of‘responsible’ opinion within whichdifferences were uninhibitedly explored.”34

Supporting this argument, Jason Epsteinexplained, “It was not a matter of buying offand subverting individual writers andscholars, but of setting up an arbitrary andfactitious system of values by whichacademic personnel were advanced,magazine editors appointed, and scholarssubsidized and published, not necessarily ontheir merits—though these were sometimes

considerable—but because of theirallegiance.”35

Josselson had always been very hands-on with Encounter. He drew up the firstmock covers, he reviewed and revisedcontents lists for the early editions, andcontinued to receive advance notice of itscontents from the editors. He reprimandedthem when standards dropped andconstantly cajoled them into consideringarticles or subjects for discussion.Sometimes he sounded as if he was issuingan order: enclosing a press release on theCongress’s Asian conference to be held inRangoon in January 1955, he told Kristolsimply, “It is essential that this Conferencebe written up in Encounter.”36 Sometimes itwas more teasing: “I have a New Year’swish: a really first-rate discussion of theproblem of co-existence in Encounter. Many

of our friends, including Muggeridge andIrving Brown, have the same wish.”37 Orurging Spender to open the literary pages toa new generation of American writers likeSaul Bellow, J.D. Salinger, Truman Capote,or Shirley Ann Grau. Or advising Kristol topublish a review of George Padmore’s bookPan-Africanism or Communism (“I think itis quite important that this book be reviewedin Encounter by one of ‘our’ people”).38

Josselson’s approach to Preuves was thesame and frequently moved its editorFrançois Bondy to resentment. In June1952, Bondy had actually threatened toresign if the executive committee continuedto discuss Preuves policy in his absence andto claim the right to issue editorialinstructions.

Equally, Josselson did his utmost toprotect the magazines from Agency

interference. But the claim that the axing ofMacdonald’s piece was unique in the historyof Encounter cannot be upheld. If this weretrue, then one might deduce that thecontents of Encounter suited the exigenciesof the Agency, which subsequently felt ithad no need to exercise its veto. One criticdescribed this process as “the inevitablerelations between employer and employee inwhich the wishes of the former becomeimplicit in the acts of the latter.”39 Butaccording to Tom Braden, the Agency hadmeddled at least once before: “We had sometrouble with Encounter from time to time,and I used to say, ‘Let them publish whatthey want.’ But there was one time—it wasover some question of foreign policy—andLarry [de Neufville] sent me a query aboutan article and we had to veto it. I think ithad to do with U.S. policy toward China.

Encounter was to publish a piece that wascritical of U.S. policy, and we had a helluvafight back at the office. I remember going upand talking to Allen Dulles, and he refusedto get involved. He just said, ‘You handle it.’So we finally axed it, and I am sorry weaxed it.”40

Monty Woodhouse, who was liaisingwith de Neufville at this time, was “wellaware that the Congress for CulturalFreedom was axing pieces. But I neverknew of any formal guidelines for this whichwere precisely laid down anywhere.”41

Woodhouse could not recall whether or notLeslie Fiedler’s article on the Rosenbergswas seen by members of the intelligencecommunity before publication, but it seemslikely that such a controversial interventionin an area of critical importance to the U.S.government would have commanded the

CIA’s attention.The article to which Braden referred

appeared on Josselson’s desk on July 28,1954, sent to him from London by Spender.The essay was by Emily Hahn, an eccentriccontributor to the New Yorker andundisputed expert on China. (She had livedin Hong Kong during the 1930s and 1940sand had insisted on taking Joseph Alsop toan opium den when he visited in 1941. Bothfound themselves interned in the same HongKong camp after the Japanese invasion of1942.) Josselson wrote by return that he“found it utterly shocking. It will certainlynot make any new friends in England. I ampassing it on to Nicolas and François andshall call you or Irving about it before thisletter reaches you.”42 Two days later,Nabokov wrote to Kristol and Spender:“Before going into the matter of Miss Emily

Hahn’s piece, let me re-state some of theprinciples upon which we had all agreed inthe course of the talks we had at the time oflaunching Encounter, as well as in ourvarious subsequent meetings. We agreed thatall articles on controversial topics shouldbe seen by us before they are shown toanybody outside. We agreed that one of thefundamental policies of Encounter should beto work towards a better understandingbetween England and America andconsequently, that all political issues shouldbe discussed on the highest possible plane sothat whenever controversy takes place, itshould be stated in a manner as not to beoffensive to national feelings on either sideof the ocean. We have all read Miss Hahn’spiece . . . all of us had the same negativereaction to this article. We feel that MissHahn gives an erroneous, superficial and

slipshod statement of the American point ofview on China. We feel that Miss Hahn’sarticle is offensive in matters of style,temper and contents.”43 Bondy concurredwith Nabokov, saying the piece was full of“hysterical abuse.”

After pointing out what this hystericalabuse was, Nabokov asked, “Now, wheredo we go from here? . . . We would suggestthat you should attempt to secure from MissHahn a re-write of her article, which wouldresult in a complete change of toneeliminating its most abusive passages. Inaddition to Miss Hahn, you secure anotherarticle stating the American point of view onthe Chinese problem but on a high anddignified level and in a more concise form. Ifthis cannot be done, we think that MissHahn’s article should be dropped and thiscrucial issue raised again at a later date with

more responsible persons than Miss Hahnrepresenting the American point of view.”44

In case this admonition wasn’t enough,on August 19, the newly installed deputysecretary of the Congress, CIA agent WarrenManshel, stepped forward with a raft ofsuggested amendments to the piece. “We areall in agreement here that it would be unwiseto publish the piece,” he wrote. “If yourcommitments are irreversible, however, andthe article has to appear, then the followingsections will have to be changed as aminimum condition of its publication.”45

There followed an exhaustive list of thesections in question, with detailed notes inManshel’s hand. But still he urged theeditors to reconsider, warning them that “theHahn may well cook our goose.” The articlenever appeared. The reasons for itsexclusion, which were withheld from

Encounter’s readers and contributors, lendcredence to the later charge that in themagazine where a truth was “uncomfortablefor the Soviet Union it is promulgated;where it is uncomfortable for the UnitedStates it is mitigated.”46

20

Cultural NATO

Mr Yermilov, turn in your grave: you havetaken CIA money!

Nicolas Nabokov

Shortly after the Macdonald debacle, MelvinLasky was invited to succeed Irving Kristolat Encounter. Josselson, whosedetermination to replace Kristol had notwaned, was delighted when Lasky agreed totake the London job. Kristol packed hisbags. Josselson at last felt assured that thepolitical side of the magazine was in the righthands. There would be no excuse—and no

need—for the Agency to meddle from onhigh. No sooner had he settled into theeditorial chair than Lasky received wordfrom Fredric Warburg that Spender’s salarywas being paid by the British Society forCultural Freedom, “although theorganization does not really exist.”1 WithEncounter serving the interests the BritishSociety had been created to advance, theSociety itself had ceased to function. But itwas a useful front for MI6’s subsidies, forwhich Victor Rothschild had now becomethe principal conduit. Correspondencebetween Rothschild, Warburg, andMuggeridge reveals how the money (£750per quarter) was first passed to Rothschild’saccount at the Bury St. Edmund’s branch ofthe Westminster Bank, then to the Secker &Warburg Private Account, before beingtransferred to the Barclays Bank account of

the British Society, which then “donated”the same amount to Encounter. In July1960, Fredric Warburg suggested that “thislunatic procedure of going through a non-existent society with two members, MalcolmMuggeridge and F.J. Warburg” be replacedby a “direct payment made between thehouse of Rothschild and Panton House”2

(Encounter’s address).Amazingly, in all the years that Spender

worked at Encounter, his salary was fixed at£2,500 per year. “It never changedthroughout his time there,” Natasha Spenderremembered. “That’s why he had to take allthose jobs in America.”

One effect of Spender’s meager salarywas that he had to find other ways ofboosting his income, chiefly by joining theinternational lecture circuit. This meant longabsences from the Encounter office, which

suited Lasky perfectly, giving him scope tosharpen the magazine’s political edgeundisturbed. Chiefly, Lasky’s objectiveseems to have been to move the magazinecloser to that group of Labour Party thinkersand politicians whom covert strategists hadlong since recognized as having “at long lastmade the amazing discovery that there isprobably more practical Socialism in theU.S. than there is in the Labour Party, if bySocialism one means individual welfareinstead of doctrinaire class warfare, and thatby and large the American worker is a darnsight better off than his British oppositenumber—and furthermore, is a much freerman. In other words, [they are] in theprocess of discovering American dynamicdemocratic capitalism.”3

The Labour Party’s prestige had peakedat the end of the Second World War,

bringing it a landslide victory in the generalelection of 1945, which ousted Churchill.But by the bitter winter of 1947, enthusiasmwas on the wane, and the Cold War haddriven a significant rift into the party. Thoseon the left divided into anti-Stalinists andthose who looked to accommodate theSoviet Union, whilst those on the right werecommitted to defeating Communism. Thelatter group was organized around thejournal Socialist Commentary and countedamongst its most prominent members DenisHealey, Anthony Crosland, Rita Hinden, andHugh Gaitskell. It was this group—known asthe “revisionists” because of theircommitment to modernizing the LabourParty, which included abolishing the famousClause IV pledge to nationalization—whichoffered the CIA the hook it was seeking toharness British political thought to its designs

for Europe. These were clearly drawn up insuccessive U.S. policy documents as theconsolidation of the Atlantic Alliance and theEuropean Defense Community, and thecreation of a Common Market, objectiveswhich required the countries of Europe tosacrifice certain national rights in favor ofcollective security. But as Washingtonstrategists well knew, England in particularheld fast to its habits of sovereignty. As oneState Department report concluded gloomily,“the United Kingdom can hardly be said tobe gladly giving up certain sovereign rights inthe interest of collective security [exceptthose which it] has been forced by the logicof circumstances to make.”4

The principal pressure group foradvancing the idea of a united Europe inpartnership with America was the EuropeanMovement, an umbrella organization

covering a range of activities directed atpolitical, military, economic, and culturalintegration. Guided by Winston Churchill,Averell Harriman, and Paul-Henri Spaak, theMovement was closely supervised byAmerican intelligence and funded almostentirely by the CIA through a dummy frontcalled the American Committee on UnitedEurope, whose first executive secretary wasTom Braden. The cultural arm of theEuropean Movement was the CentreEuropéen de la Culture, whose director wasDenis de Rougemont. Additionally, a hugeprogram of grants to student and youthassociations, including the European YouthCampaign (EYC), was inaugurated byBraden in 1950. Responding to CIAguidance, these organizations were at thecutting edge of a campaign of propagandaand penetration designed to draw the sting

from left-wing political movements andgenerate acceptance of moderate socialism.As for those liberal internationalistsinterested in the idea of a Europe unitedaround internal principles and not accordingto American strategic interests, they wereconsidered by Washington to be no betterthan the neutralists. The CIA and thePsychological Strategy Board werespecifically instructed to “guide media andprograms toward destruction” of thisparticular heresy.

Central to the whole operation was JayLovestone, Irving Brown’s boss, who from1955 was run by James Jesus Angleton.Lovestone’s task was to infiltrate Europeantrade unions, weed out dubious elements,and promote the rise of leaders acceptable toWashington. During this period, Lovestonesupplied Angleton with voluminous reports

on trade union affairs in Britain, compiledwith the assistance of his contacts in theTrades Union Congress and the LabourParty. Angleton allowed his counterparts inBritish intelligence (those few whom hetrusted) to share Lovestone’s “inside dope.”Essentially, it was the Lovestonites (even ifthey didn’t think of themselves as such)within British Labour circles who foundthemselves in the ascendant by the late1950s. To make fast its line into this group,the Agency deployed the Congress forCultural Freedom, at whose expenseGaitskell undertook trips to New Delhi,Rhodes, Berlin, and the 1955 Future ofFreedom conference in Milan (which alsoattracted Rita Hinden and Denis Healey).After losing his parliamentary seat in 1955,Anthony Crosland—whose influential bookThe Future of Socialism read “like a

blueprint for an Americanized Britain”5—was employed by Josselson to help plan theCongress’s International Seminars under thedirectorship of Daniel Bell, who had beenimported from America for this end. By theearly 1960s, Crosland had worked his wayonto the Congress’s International Council.Rita Hinden, a South African academicbased at the University of London, wasdescribed by Josselson as “one of us” and inthe mid-1960s was instrumental in securinga grant from Josselson to expand the FabianSociety’s journal, Venture. The magazine’scommitment to a strong united Europebecame synonymous with Gaitskellitethinking. Denis Healey, whose Atlanticistcredentials brought him into close contactwith the American Non-Communist Left (hewas London correspondent of the NewLeader), became another staunch ally of the

Congress and of Encounter in particular.Healey was also one of the recipients andrecyclers of material produced by theInformation Research Department. In turn,he supplied IRD with information on LabourParty members and trade unionists.6

Of these, Hugh Gaitskell, leader of theLabour Party, was the key figure, and nosooner had Lasky arrived in London than heattached himself to the small group ofintellectuals who gathered at Gaitskell’shouse in Frognal Gardens, Hampstead.Gaitskell, who had specialized in propagandaduring his wartime work for the SpecialOperations Executive and who was alsoclose to IRD, could not have been ignorantof Encounter’s institutional ties. And so itwas that when he launched his celebratedattack on the fellow-traveling left at the 1960Labour Party conference in Scarborough,

some people found themselves asking whohe was traveling with. Writing after theconference to Michael Josselson, Laskyreported that Gaitskell had personallythanked him, Lasky, for Encounter’ssupport of his policies. Moreover, saidLasky, Encounter had been cited on thedebating floor of the conference, evidencethat the magazine was receiving “muchkudos.”7

When Labour under Harold Wilson beatthe Conservatives in the 1964 generalelection, Josselson wrote to Daniel Bell, “Weare all pleased to have so many of ourfriends in the new government”8 (there werehalf a dozen regular Encounter writers inWilson’s new cabinet). Lasky broughtEncounter much closer to the politicalagenda of its hidden angels. The price,according to Richard Wollheim, was high. “It

represented a very serious invasion ofBritish cultural life—and it boreresponsibility for the complacency of manyBritish intellectuals and the Labour Partyover the Vietnam War.”9

It was the cultural side of the magazine(not to mention attractive fees) whichcontinued to attract the best contributions,and for this the CIA still had Spender tothank. “People wouldn’t have written forEncounter at all if it wasn’t for Stephen,”said Stuart Hampshire. “All the good stuff—which Lasky used to call ‘Elizabeth Bowenand all that crap’—was commissioned byStephen. He gave the magazine itsrespectability.”10 Certainly, it did much tosustain the Congress’s reputation as anorganization dedicated primarily to culture,rather than politics.

But the Cold War constantly strained the

idea that culture and politics could be keptseparate. Indeed, the Kulturkampf was aliveand well, as the Congress’s celebration ofthe fiftieth anniversary of Tolstoy’s death inthe summer of 1960 demonstrated.American intelligence had long had aninterest in Tolstoy as a symbol of “theconcept of individual freedom.” Itsconnection went back to OSS days, whenIlia Tolstoy, émigré grandson of the famousnovelist, was an OSS officer. Othermembers of the Tolstoy family were inregular contact with the PsychologicalStrategy Board in the early 1950s andreceived funds from the CIA for theirMunich-based Tolstoy Foundation. In 1953,C.D. Jackson noted in his log file that he hadpromised one supplicant that he wouldtelephone Frank Lindsay (Wisner’s formerdeputy who had moved on to the Ford

Foundation) regarding funds for the TolstoyFoundation.

In December 1958, Cass Canfield toldNabokov that the Farfield Foundation wasinterested in supporting a “westerncelebration of Tolstoy” to answer a Tolstoyfestival planned by the Soviets, which hecorrectly predicted would appropriate thegreat writer as a precursor of Bolshevism.“The contrast between the two presentationswould be obvious to any independentthinker and this ought to make excellentpropaganda for us,”11 reasoned Canfield. Itfell to Nabokov to devise “a dignifiedanswer to Communist propaganda,” and thistook the form of a lavish affair held on theVenetian island of San Giorgio in June andJuly 1960. Scores of prominent writers andscholars attended, including AlbertoMoravia, Franco Venturi, Herbert Read, Iris

Murdoch, George Kennan, JayaprakashNarayan, and John Dos Passos. SixteenSoviet scholars were invited, but in theirstead came four “stooges.”

“In retrospect, it is very funny toremember, for instance, the silhouettes oftwo Russians, a thin, long one and a short,stocky one,” Nabokov later wrote. “The thinone was the Secretary General of the Unionof Soviet Writers, the short one an odiousSOB called Yermilov, a nasty little partyhack. They were standing, both of them, inline to receive their per diem and travelallowance from my secretary, or rather theadministrative secretary of the Congress forCultural Freedom. They had come, or ratherhad been sent, to attend a conferencecommemorating the 50th anniversary of thedeath of Tolstoy.” Nabokov closed therecollection on a jubilant note: “Mr

Yermilov, turn in your grave: you have takenCIA money!”12

“Expenses, the most beautiful word inmodern English,” V.S. Pritchett oncedeclared. “If we sell our souls, we ought tosell them dear.” Those who did not queueup for per diems in Venice could stand inline for them at another Congress eventtaking place that June in Berlin, the“Progress in Freedom” conference. Writingto Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy gave awonderfully bitchy account of the personalrivalries and intellectual obfuscations whichdominated the conclave: “The main event,from the point of view of sheer scandal, wasa series of furious clashes between Mr Shilsand William [Phillips], on the subject ofmass culture, naturally. I swear Shils is DrPangloss reborn and without Dr Pangloss’scharm and innocence. I said so, in almost as

many words, when I got into the fightmyself. Another feature of the Congress was[Robert] Oppenheimer, who took me out todinner and is, I discovered, completely andperhaps even dangerously mad. Paranoidmegalomania and sense of divine mission . .. [Oppenheimer] turned to NicholasNabokoff [sic] . . . and said the Congresswas being run ‘without love.’ After he hadrepeated this several times, I remarked that Ithought the word ‘love’ should be reservedfor the relation between the sexes. . . .George Kennan was there and gave a verygood and stirring closing address (whichought to have crushed Mr. Shils and all hisLuciferian camp forever) but the rumor wasthat he was crazy too, though only partlycrazy.”13 Aside from these and other such“public idiocies,” Mary McCarthy reportedthat “the Congress was fun. I enjoyed the

gathering-in of old friends and new ones,which had a sort of millennial character,including the separation of the sheep fromthe goats.”14

Also benefiting from CIA largesse thatyear was a group of journals invited to takeadvantage of the Congress’s clearinghouse,which was set up as “an effective andsystematic means for placing before a broadinternational public much excellent materialwhich now reaches a somewhat limitedaudience.”15 As well as finding outlets formaterial produced by Congress-ownedpublications, the clearinghouse was intendedto act as a distribution point for othercultural journals deemed worthy ofmembership in the Congress’s “world familyof magazines.” These included PartisanReview, Kenyon Review, Hudson Review,Sewanee Review, Poetry, the Journal of the

History of Ideas, and Daedalus (the journalof the American Academy of Arts andSciences), which under the umbrella of theCouncil of Literary Magazines also receivedFarfield Foundation grants to improvecirculation abroad. Additionally, theCongress joined up with the Council ofLiterary Magazines to award an annualfellowship of $5,000 to an American writer.Who was appointed to manage the award?No less than Robie Macauley, whosucceeded John Crowe Ransom as editor ofKenyon Review in July 1959.16 During theyears the Review was tied to the Congress,Macauley was able to increase circulationfrom 2,000 to 6,000. It was his boast that hehad “found ways of making money that Mr.Ransom had never thought of.”17 But inother ways, Kenyon Review suffered underMacauley’s editorship. His long absences, a

sine qua non of his employment with theCIA, and his high-handed manner (in 1963he abruptly abolished the board of advisoryeditors) had a strong negative impact on thejournal. The benefits to the Congress, bycontrast, were considerable. By formalizingits relationship with these prestigiousAmerican journals, the Congress could nowboast a publishing combine of unparalleledscope and influence, a kind of thinkingman’s Time-Life Inc.

“We were not selling a brand name, sowe didn’t always insist on the Congressimprimatur being used,”18 explained JohnHunt. So many Congress journals were notreadily recognizable as such. Amongst thesewas Hiwar, the Congress’s Arabicmagazine, which appeared in October 1962,its first issue carrying an interview with T.S.Eliot and a plea by Silone for the

independence of the writer and theautonomy of art. Attempts to conceal theCongress’s ownership of the magazine wereunsuccessful, and it was instantly attackedas a “Trojan horse.” One Muslim newspaperclaimed that the Congress was trying “topropagate its evil theories by spreadingmoney here and there, by establishingattractive magazines and by giving bigreceptions and conferences” and called forthe Congress to be “exposed andboycotted.”19

Other Congress journals launched in the1960s included Transition in Uganda, whichattracted writers like Paul Theroux andachieved a respectable circulation of 12,000before its offices were raided and its editorsimprisoned in 1968. In London, Censorshipwas launched in 1964 under MurrayMindlin, an eclectic figure who had

translated Joyce’s Ulysses into Hebrew. Theadvisory editors were Daniel Bell, ArmandGaspard of Switzerland, Anthony Hartley,Richard Hoggart, and Ignazio Silone. It costthe Congress $35,000 a year and ran at asubstantial loss. When it folded in winter1967, the New Statesman was moved toannounce, “This is bad news for writers,publishers and artists everywhere.”Josselson, who never got on with MurrayMindlin, was less inclined to mourn (he saidits “relative success was due in part tosubjects on sex which it featured from timeto time”). Censorship was the model forIndex on Censorship, founded in 1972 byStephen Spender with a substantial grantfrom the Ford Foundation.

But of all the magazines linked to theCongress, the case of Partisan Review is themost intriguing. “The real riddle of Partisan

Review has always seemed to me thequestion of how the mouthpiece of so smalland special a group . . . has managed tobecome the best-known serious magazine inAmerica, and certainly, of all Americanmagazines with intellectual ambitions, theone most read in Europe,” pondered LeslieFiedler in 1956.20 Part of the answer to theriddle lay in the funding of the magazine, asFiedler teasingly implied when he said that a“detailed study of the economic ups-and-downs of PR would make [a] full-scalearticle.”21 From 1937 through 1943, themagazine was largely subsidized by theabstract painter George Morris; after 1948,its chief source of financial support wasAllan B. Dowling, who until 1951 “backed itsinglehanded, and has since then beenpresident of and a chief contributor to thefoundation which currently publishes the

magazine.”22 Fiedler made no mention ofHenry Luce, whose generous donation of1952 had been kept a secret. But he hadnoticed, along with others, that PartisanReview “is referred to in such mass-circulation journals as Life and Time, withperfect confidence that it will stir the properresponses in their vast audience.”23

Certainly, no mention was made of theCIA, whose alleged involvement withAmerica’s most influential intellectual journalhas long since puzzled historians. It isknown that Partisan Review receivedFarfield Foundation dollars (via theAmerican Committee) in early 1953, andthis at Cord Meyer’s instigation. It alsoreceived “a grant for expenses” fromFarfield in the early 1960s.24 But in the lifeof a magazine harried by financial crises, this

hardly amounts to much. In 1957, thequestion of PR’s tax-exempt status had againbeen raised at the Internal Revenue Service:not only did the magazine stand to lose thisstatus, but there was also talk of making allcontributions to PR during and since 1954retroactively taxable. “This I considerabsolutely outrageous,” wrote C.D. Jacksonto Cord Meyer.25

C.D. and Meyer rallied to PartisanReview’s cause. First they put in “a goodword” for the journal with the TaxExemption Branch of the Internal Revenue.Subsequently, William Phillips reported toC.D. that he was encouraged by the InternalRevenue’s initial response. Second, C.D.appealed directly to Allen Dulles. OnNovember 12, 1957, C.D. sent Daniel Bell aconfidential memo relaying the CIA’sposition on the matter: “They have no direct

monetary or operational interest in thePartisan Review. The present editor,however, is sympathetic to the Congress forCultural Freedom, and is cooperating.Financial difficulties for Partisan Reviewmight result in a change of managementdetrimental to [the CIA’s] interest.Therefore, they have an indirect interest inseeing to it that favorable consideration isgiven to this request for tax exemption.”26

Partisan Review’s problems had alsobeen discussed at an OperationsCoordinating Board (OCB) meeting in April1956. Following up with a memo to thePolicy and Planning Staff of the U.S.Information Agency, the OCB called foraction on a proposal to help boost PR’srevenue. Without identifying the author(most likely it was Sidney Hook, a memberof PR’s Publications and Advisory Board

and “official spokesman” for the magazine,according to Fiedler), the OCBrepresentative quoted in full from thisproposal, which began, “As you know, for along time I have complained about the factthat special foundation and other support isoften arranged for new magazines, but thatthe old stand-bys and work horses in theanti-Communist field, such as the NewLeader and Partisan Review, don’t gethelped, or helped as much as theyshould.”27

After talks with William Phillips,continued the proposer, it seemed that the“ideal situation [would be] if the AmericanCommittee for Cultural Freedom might bethe means through which subscriptions, asgifts, to magazines like Partisan Reviewmight be passed on to those foreignintellectuals most in need of them. I am

thinking not only of those who are resolutelyon our side . . . but also of that vast army ofintellectuals who have not been sold onCommunism but who think of America asan equally imperialistic, materialistic, culture-less and semi-barbaric country.”28 “I thinkthere is major value in this type of proposal,especially if the concern of the U.S.government is not apparent, in reaching thetargets indicated in the ideologicalapproach,”29 concluded the report. Within amonth, Partisan Review was able to giveElizabeth Bishop a generous grant of$2,700. The money came from theRockefeller Foundation, to the tune of$4,000 a year for three years to be disposedof in literary fellowships. This may wellhave been a coincidence, but it is curiousthat, despite repeated requests for financialassistance, the Rockefeller Foundation had

refused every previous appeal from themagazine’s editors for the past ten years.

In early 1958, William Phillips traveledto Paris, where he met with MichaelJosselson to discuss “the future of PR.” OnMarch 28, 1958, Phillips wrote to askwhether Josselson had considered whetheror not “some of the things we talked aboutcould be done.”30 Within a few months, theAmerican Committee for Cultural Freedom—moribund since its ignominious and defacto suspension in January 1957—had beenresuscitated for the sole purpose of standingas official publisher of Partisan Review, anarrangement which was to last for the nextten years. Commenting on this development,Hook told Josselson that there was “no realdesire to continue the Am. Com. except toaccommodate PR . . . Phillips will go to anylengths to get help for PR.”31 Josselson

himself later recollected, “The Committeewould have disappeared entirely if at the lastmoment it had not decided to let the editorsof Partisan Review take advantage of its taxexempt status, and since then the only‘activity’ of the Committee has consisted inposing as sponsors of PR.”32 According tothis account, the American Committee wasnot subsidizing Partisan Review butproviding it with a tax loophole.

But according to Daniel Bell, “forseveral years, PR received some financialsupport from the Congress for CulturalFreedom, in the form of subscriptionsbought for individuals overseas whoreceived the magazine free. So far as Iknow, that funding was also kept secret.”33

Partisan Review’s fortunes were nowharnessed to the Congress, which from 1960boosted the magazine’s sales figures to the

tune of 3,000 copies a year, which weredistributed by the Congress outside of theUnited States. At the same time, theCongress extended similar help to the otherhigh-level cultural magazines with which ithad long been affiliated: Kenyon Review(1,500 copies), Hudson Review (1,500),Sewanee Review (1,000), Poetry (750),Daedalus (500), and the Journal of theHistory of Ideas (500). Purchase of thesecopies cost $20,000 per annum. Scheduledinitially to run for a three-year period, theCongress’s total commitment to thesemagazines came to $60,000, plus $5,000 foradministrative costs. Fredric Warburg wascontracted to distribute Partisan Review inEngland.34 He was also offered first refusalon a Partisan Review anthology, Literatureand Modernity (edited by Phillips and PhilipRahv), whose contributors were nearly all

connected at one time or another with theCongress for Cultural Freedom (includingKoestler, Chiaromonte, Mary McCarthy,and Alfred Kazin).

Partisan Review’s fortunes continued toimprove. “I saw Will Phillips the othernight,” Kristol wrote to Josselson in March1960, “and he remarked mysteriously thatPartisan Review’s problems are nowcompletely solved, though he wouldn’t gointo details. . . . He even went so far as tosay that they have more money than theythought they needed!”35 But Phillips neededeven more: “I don’t suppose the Congresscould pay my fare on some grant basis for atrip to Europe this June on some necessarybusiness?”36 he asked Josselson a year later.Phillips made this request for a grant despitewhat he later described as his instinct “toquestion [the Congress’s] bureaucratic

makeup and what was patently its secretcontrol from the top.” In 1990, he wroteproudly of the fact that “neither Rahv nor Iwas considered personally or politicallyreliable enough” to be invited to the 1950launch of the Congress, whose personalitieshe described as “breezy, rootless,freewheeling, cynically anti-Communistorgmen.”37 Trading insults, Lasky laterdescribed Phillips as something of afreewheeler himself. “He bluffed his waythrough everything. Why the hell was hesent over to Paris? He just sat around in theDeux Magots.”38

William Phillips later maintained that heowed no debt at all to the Congress. Whilstconceding he had been “a fringe player inthe global propaganda game,” he wrote ofthis as a de facto consequence of hismembership of the American Committee’s

Executive Board, to whose “internalproceedings and calculations [and] finances”he was not, he said, privy. Phillips alsoclaimed to be “shocked by—and perhapsenvious of—the nouveau riche look of thewhole operation, by the posh apartments ofthe Congress officials, the seeminglyinexhaustible funds for travel, the big-timeexpense accounts, and all the other perksusually associated with the executives oflarge corporations. After all, PartisanReview was always trying to make endsmeet, and my experience had led me tobelieve that poverty was the normalcondition for serious political outfits andliterary magazines. As for secret funding,”he continued, “it seems to me to violate thevery nature of a free intellectual enterprise,particularly when the financing is by a well-organized arm of the government, with its

own political agenda.”39

Others, of course, had a different viewof secret funding. Just as Partisan Reviewbegan to benefit from the deal with theAmerican Committee for Cultural Freedom,so the New Leader received renewedmunificence from its covert backers. InFebruary 1956, C.D. Jackson wrote to AllenDulles with a proposal to raise money forSol Levitas’s magazine. Time Inc. had beensubsidizing the New Leader to the tune of$5,000 per annum since 1953, in exchangefor “information on worldwide Communisttactics and personalities, with particularreference to Communist activities within thelabor movement.”40 But this was a fractionof the money needed to keep the magazineafloat. By Jackson’s calculation, nothingshort of $50,000 would keep it solvent. “Ifcapitalistic enterprise can muster the wisdom

to appreciate that the particular tone of voicewith which Levitas speaks to a particulargroup of people here and abroad is uniqueand uniquely important, and is willing toback that hunch with quite a few thousanddollars,” he told Dulles, “I hope that you willbe able to go along with the currentproposal. It seems to me to be the bestformula I have yet seen for all of us to haveour Levitas and let him eat, too.”41 Dulleswas easily persuaded, as he had been onprevious occasions, that an Agency grant tothe New Leader “well justified the highpayoff potential.” By the summer of 1956,the “Save the New Leader” drive hadearned the magazine the $50,000 it needed.The U.S. Information Agency pledged$10,000, as did the Ford Foundation, Mr.H.J. Heinz, and Time Inc. The remaining$10,000 came in the form of a “donation” of

$5,000 from Washington Post publisherPhilip Graham and $5,000 which was listedsimply as “unforseeable manna.”42

As ever, the Congress for CulturalFreedom was folded into the newarrangements, for both Partisan Review andthe New Leader. Collaboration with theCongress, in the form of joint publications,formal syndication agreements, andexchange of knowledge, brought bothjournals further material benefits. Theprolific activity of the Congress in theseyears had made it a compelling feature ofWestern cultural life. From the platforms ofits conferences and seminars and across thepages of its learned reviews, intellectuals,artists, writers, poets, and historiansacquired an audience for their views whichno other organization—except for theCominform—could deliver. The Paris office

was a ferment, attracting visitors from allover the world and even, in 1962, a bombwhich exploded in the hallway (an eventhailed by one member as “a great andglorious and long expected, indeed wellmerited honour and a memorable date in theannals of the Congress”).43 For second- andthird-generation would-be Hemingways, theCongress was now the repository of all thoseromantic myths of literary Paris, and theycame to it in droves.44

The Congress’s high profile alsoattracted some unwelcome scrutiny. In1962, it was the subject of a brilliantlyperceptive parody by Kenneth Tynan andhis BBC That Was the Week That Was team.“And now, a hot flash from the Cold War inCulture,” began the sketch. “This diagram isthe Soviet cultural block. Every dot on themap represents a strategic cultural

emplacement—theatre bases, centres of filmproduction, companies of dancers churningout intercontinental balletic missiles,publishing houses issuing vast editions of theclassics to millions of enslaved readers.However you look at it, a massive culturalbuild-up is going on. But what about us inthe West? Do we have an effective strike-back capacity in the event of an all-outcultural war?” Yes, the sketch continued,there was the good old Congress for CulturalFreedom which, “supported by Americanmoney, has set up a number of advancedbases in Europe and elsewhere to act asspearheads of cultural retaliation. Thesebases are disguised as magazines and bearcode names—Encounter, which is short for‘Encounterforce Strategy.’ ” A “Congressspokesman” was then introduced, whoboasted of a cluster of magazines which

were a “kind of cultural NATO,” the aim ofwhich was “[c]ultural containment, or, assome of the boys like to put it, a ring aroundthe pinkoes. In fact, I wouldn’t say we hadan aim. I’d say we had a historic mission.World readership. . . . But whateverhappens, we in the Congress feel it our dutyto keep our bases on a round-the-clock, red-warning alert—always watching what theother fellow is doing, instead of wastingvaluable time on scrutinizing ourselves.”45

The satire was biting and impeccablyresearched. Whilst the Congress“spokesman” denounced the philistinism ofthe Soviet minister of culture, Tynan hadhim reveal, without a hint of irony, who theCongress’s enlightened patrons were: theMiami District Fund, Cincinnati, theHoblitzelle Foundation, Texas, and the SwissCommittee for Aid to Hungarian Patriots.

Such references to the Congress’sfinancial suppliers, though they missed theultimate target, caused Josselson sleeplessnights and confirmed his fear that the realAchilles’ heel of the Congress was the CIA.Tensions between Josselson and his Agencybosses had been mounting ever since thecollapse of the American Committee in early1957. Josselson, temperamentally incapableof playing the monkey to anyone else’sorgan-grinder, now found himselfincreasingly at odds with Cord Meyer, whorefused to let go his grip. Meyer had neverrecovered from his Kafkaesque treatment atthe hands of the McCarthyites in 1953.Added to that was a string of personaltragedies which had made him increasinglygloomy and intractable. “Waves ofDarkness,” Meyer’s 1946 short story abouthis experience of war and near fatal injury

on the beaches of Guam, also described thetragic motion of his future life. In 1956, hisnine-year-old son Michael was killed by aspeeding car. Less than a year after that,Cord separated from his wife, Mary PinchotMeyer.46

Increasingly mulish and unreasonable,Meyer had become a relentless, implacableadvocate for his own ideas, which seemed togravitate around a paranoiac distrust ofeveryone who didn’t agree with him. Histone was at best argumentative, at worsthistrionic and even bellicose. “Cord enteredthe Agency as a fresh idealist and left awizened tool of Angleton,” said TomBraden. “Angleton was master of the blackarts. He bugged everything in town,including me. Whatever Angleton thought,Cord thought.”47 Arthur Schlesinger, an oldfriend of Meyer’s, now found himself the

victim of this idealist-turned-angry-intellectual-gendarme: “He became so rigid,so unbending. I remember once he called meand suggested we meet for a drink. So Iinvited him over, and we sat upstairs in myhouse and talked. Years later, I asked CIAfor my file, and the last document in the filewas a report on me by Cord Meyer! In myown house, over a drink, and he wrote areport on me. I couldn’t believe it.”48 Justlike James Stewart’s character inHitchcock’s Rear Window, Meyer andAngleton ended up mirroring the deviancethey tried to monitor.

In October 1960, Josselson met CordMeyer and a group of IOD men in a room ata Washington hotel. A heated argumentensued, in which, according to one witness,Josselson was being “taught to suck eggs”by his CIA colleagues. Josselson, who had

what Diana described as “this mind-bodything,” felt his blood pressure soar and histemples thump before he crashed to thefloor. “He was demonstrative with hisemotions,” said John Thompson. “He’d getinto arguments and faint and have heartattacks. He was very European.”49 Thisheart attack was real enough. At two in themorning local time, Diana was awakened byLou Latham, the Paris station chief (whowas in Washington when it happened) to saythat Michael had been rushed to the hospitalafter collapsing. Diana boarded the firstflight out of Paris that morning, with four-year-old Jennifer in tow. Stopping briefly ata hotel to leave Jennifer with Diana’smother, Diana then made for the GeorgeWashington University Hospital. There shefound Michael lying in an oxygen tent. Forthe next few weeks, she kept constant vigil

at his side. Slowly, he started to pullthrough. And in this prone state, he awokeonce more to the urgency of his mission.“All the time Michael was in hospital, hewould ‘brief’ me, and I would take notes,”remembered Diana. “And then I’d go to thedoor of his room and ‘brief’ Lee [Williams]and the other goons who turned up. It wasfun to turn the tables on them.”50

Whilst Josselson was still under anoxygen mask, Bill Durkee, Meyer’s deputydivision chief, turned to Lee Williams whilethey were walking up a Washington streetand said, “Now we’ve got him where wewant him.”51 Reflecting on this years later,Diana concluded that whilst the Agencyvalued Michael for the job he was doing,“he must have been at the same time a thornin their side, going his own way, resistingthem whenever they tried to assert control.

Michael tried to keep them happy by tellingthem about was cooking on various stovesand by force of personality kept them frombeing aware of their unimportance. He wasfriends with them, talked about their familiesand careers, and I had the idea—nowshaken—that they admired him. Durkee,I’m now finally aware, was speaking for thelot of them. They must have been suspiciousof all these intellectuals, foreigners to boot,and suffered from having all the money andAmerican power, and not getting any creditfor it. . . . Besides, Michael was not a Yaleman, he was practically a Russian and aJew, and it was he who was hobnobbingwith famous people, not they.”52

Still, it was clear that his health wouldnot permit Josselson to expend so muchenergy on the Congress anymore. It wasagreed that he should move permanently to

Geneva, where he would continue to workfor the Congress but at one remove. JohnHunt would take over responsibility forrunning the Paris office, including dealingwith the Agency. When Hunt had arrived atthe Congress in 1956, he spent the first twoyears, he later said, behaving like “a cleaningboy, never saying anything, just watchingand learning.”53 Gradually, he had becomewhat he described as “Operations Officer”to Michael’s “Executive Officer.”Essentially, these roles remained unchangedfor the life of the Congress. But withJosselson now working, with the aid of asecretary, from his home in Geneva, Huntfound himself in administrative control ofthe Paris headquarters.

21

Caesar of Argentina

I never bade you goTo Moscow or to Rome,Renounce that drudgery,Call the Muses home.

W.B. Yeats, “Those Images”

John Hunt took over the Paris office at apropitious time. The “Eisenhower splurge”on the arts was followed by the Kennedyadministration’s announcement that itdesired a “productive relationship” withartists. Kennedy made the point when heinvited 156 of the more famous of them

(including Arthur Miller, Andrew Wyeth,Ernest Hemingway, Ludwig Mies van derRohe, Igor Stravinsky, Pierre Monteux, PaulHindemith, Archibald MacLeish, RobertLowell, and Stuart Davis) to attend theinaugural festivities. “The inauguration musthave been fun,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote toLowell. “I see bits of it over and over in thenewsreels. But I don’t like that RomanEmpire grandeur—the reviewing stand, forexample, looks quite triumphal.”1 But tomany Cold Warriors, the imperialatmosphere was inspirational, as one admirertold Kennedy in early 1961: “Just as inancient times a Roman, wherever he went,could proudly proclaim ‘civis Romanussum,’ now once again, similarly, whereverwe go and with head erect and with pride,we can proclaim, ‘civis Americanus sum.’ ”2

On May 11, 1962, Robert Lowell was

again invited to the White House, this timefor a dinner in honor of André Malraux, thenFrench minister of culture. Kennedy jokedat the reception that the White House wasbecoming “almost a café for intellectuals.”But Lowell was skeptical and wrote after theWhite House dinner: “Then the nextmorning you read that the Seventh Fleet hadbeen sent somewhere in Asia and you had afunny feeling of how unimportant the artistreally was, that this was sort of windowdressing and that the real government wassomewhere else, and that something muchcloser to the Pentagon was really running thecountry. . . . I feel we intellectuals play avery pompous and frivolous role—weshould be windows, not window-dressing.”3

Although rarely expressed openly, therewas a growing inclination amongst someintellectuals to view the government’s

beneficence with suspicion. But the questionof corruption did not unduly exercise theCIA, under whose auspices much of thisbounty was being distributed. “There aresome times when you might as well beseduced,” said Donald Jameson. “I thinkthat almost everybody in a position ofsignificance in the Congress [for CulturalFreedom] was aware that somehow or otherthe money came from someplace, and if youlooked around there was ultimately only onelogical choice. And they made that decision.The main concern for most scholars andwriters really is how you get paid for doingwhat you want to do. I think that, by andlarge, they would take money fromwhatever source they could get it. And so itwas that the Congress and other similarorganizations—both East and West—werelooked upon as sort of large teats from

which anybody could take a swig if theyneeded it and then go off and do their thing.That is one of the main reasons, really Ithink, for the success of the Congress: itmade it possible to be a sensitive intellectualand eat. And the only other people who didthat really were the Communists.”4

Whether they liked it or not, whetherthey knew it or not, scores of Westernintellectuals were now roped to the CIA byan “umbilical cord of gold.” If Crossmancould write in his introduction to The GodThat Failed that “[f]or the intellectual,material comforts are relatively unimportant;what he cares most about is spiritualfreedom,” it seemed now that manyintellectuals were unable to resist a ride onthe gravy train. Some of the Congress’sconferences “were mainly show, and theattendees sometimes reminded one of the

smart set commuting between St Tropez insummer and St Moritz or Gstaad in winter,”wrote the Sovietologist Walter Laqueur,himself a regular attendee at theseconferences. “There was a snobbism,particularly in Britain; the outwardappearance of refinement, wit andsophistication combined with a lack ofsubstance; college high-table talk and CaféRoyal gossip.”5 “These stylish andexpensive excursions must have been a greatpleasure for the people who took them atgovernment expense. But it was more thanpleasure, because they were tasting power,”said Jason Epstein. “When visitingintellectuals came to New York, they wereinvited to great parties; there was veryexpensive food all around, and servants, andGod knows what else, far more than theseintellectuals themselves could have afforded.

Who wouldn’t like to be in such a situationwhere you’re politically correct and at thesame time well compensated for the positionyou’ve taken? And this was the occasion forthe corruption that followed.”6

Those who were not receiving per diemsin New York could take advantage of theVilla Serbelloni in Bellagio, in northern Italy.Poised on a promontory between thenorthern lakes of Lecco and Como, the villahad been bequeathed to the RockefellerFoundation by Principessa della Torre eTasso (née Ella Walker). The foundationmade the villa available to the Congress asan informal retreat for its more eminentmembers—a kind of officers’ mess wherefrontliners in the Kulturkampf could recovertheir energy. Writers, artists, and musicianson residency there would be met by achauffeur in a blue uniform with the small

insignia “V.S.” on his lapel. Guests receivedno “grant” as such, but accommodation wasfree, as were all travel expenses, meals, andthe use of the tennis court and swimmingpool. Writing on the villa’s elegant stationery,Hannah Arendt told Mary McCarthy: “Youfeel as though you are suddenly lodged in akind of Versailles. The place has 53servants, including the men who take care ofthe gardens. . . . The staff is presided overby a kind of headwaiter who dates from thetime of the ‘principessa’ and has face andmanner of a great gentleman of fifteenth-century Florence.”7 McCarthy replied thatshe had discovered such luxurioussurroundings were not conducive to hardwork. The villa was also a congenial venuefor the Congress’s June 1965 seminar,“Conditions of World Order,” held inassociation with Daedalus and the American

Academy of Arts and Sciences.For a chosen few, there was also the

possibility of joining Hansi Lambert (themillionairess friend of the Congress who alsoplayed host at her winter retreat in Gstaad)or Junkie Fleischmann for Mediterraneancruises in their yachts. The Spenders wereguests of both. When Stephen told ErnstRobert Curtius of his cruise from Corfu toIschia in August 1955, the German saidsimply, “You were a communist, and nowyou go on yachts in the Mediterranean, ja,ja.”8 For those who preferred terra firma,the Congress arranged accommodation inEurope’s more prestigous establishments. InLondon, there was the Connaught; in Rome,the Inghilterra; and at Cap Ferrat, the Grand.In Paris, Irving Brown continued to entertainat his home away from home, the RoyalSuite at the Hotel Baltimore.

Despite his reservations about acceptinggovernment patronage, Robert Lowell wasable to suppress them in favor of a first-classticket to South America, offered by theCongress for Cultural Freedom in May1962. For several years, his great friendElizabeth Bishop, who was living in Rio deJaneiro, had been urging him to come; now,the offer of Congress funds prompted himinto action. Bishop was delighted. The StateDepartment people in Brazil “behave soSTUPIDLY and rudely,” she wrote, and“usually send very minor and dull novelistsand professors.”9 Lowell’s visit promised tobe much more interesting.

The Congress had been trying toincrease its influence in South America forseveral years. Its journal there wasCuadernos, edited by Julian Gorkin. Gorkinhad founded the Communist Party of

Valencia in 1921, and worked in anunderground network for the Comintern,learning, amongst other things, how to forgepassports. Breaking with Moscow in 1929,he alleged that the Soviets had tried topersuade him to become an assassin.Towards the end of the Spanish Civil War hefled to Mexico, the traditional roost forBolsheviks on the run, and there survivedfive attempts on his life, one of which lefthim with a hole in his skull. As editor ofCuadernos, his job was to try and penetratethe “great distrust” in Latin America, wherethe only way to achieve significant impact,he joked, would be constantly to attack theUnited States and sing the praises of Sartreor Pablo Neruda. Gorkin wasn’t helped bythe CIA-backed coup in Guatemala of 1953and the Cuban Revolution of 1958. In thewake of American intervention in these

areas, this was a period of “euphoria for theLatin American Communists and theirallies,”10 but Gorkin battled the odds, givingthe Congress an important niche in a hostileenvironment.

Lowell arrived in Rio de Janeiro with hiswife Elizabeth Hardwick and their five-year-old daughter, Harriet, in the first week ofJune 1962. Nabokov was there to meetthem at the airport with Elizabeth Bishop.Things went fine until Lowell’s familyboarded the ship back to New York onSeptember 1, and he was left to continue thetour south to Paraguay and Argentina.Accompanying him was Keith Botsford, theCongress’s “permanent rovingrepresentative” in South America, who was“plugged into the trip” by John Hunt in orderto keep an eye on the poet (in CIA parlance,Botsford was Lowell’s “leash”). It was in

Buenos Aires that the trouble started. Lowellthrew away the pills prescribed for his manicdepression, took a string of double martinisat a reception in the presidential palace, andannounced that he was “Caesar ofArgentina” and Botsford his “lieutenant.”After giving his Hitler speech, in which heextolled the Führer and the supermanideology,11 Lowell stripped naked andmounted an equestrian statue in one of thecity’s main squares. After continuing in thisvein for several days, Lowell was eventuallyoverpowered, on Botsford’s orders, wrestledinto a straitjacket, and taken to the ClínicaBethlehem, where his legs and arms werebound with leather straps while he wasinjected with vast doses of Thorazine.Botsford’s humiliation was completed whenLowell, from this position of Prometheusbound, ordered him to whistle “Yankee

Doodle Dandy” or “The Battle Hymn of theRepublic.”12

Later that month, Nabokov telephonedMary McCarthy. His voice was tremulousand weary as he informed her that Lowell“was in a mental ward in Buenos Aires andthat Marilyn Monroe committed suicidebecause she had been having an affair withBobby Kennedy and the White House hadintervened.”13 Sharing Nabokov’s disgust,Mary McCarthy concluded: “Our age beginsto sound like some awful colossal movieabout the late Roman Emperors and theirMessalinas and Poppaeas. The BobbyKennedy swimming pool being the bath withasses’ milk.”14

The Lowell incident was an unmitigateddisaster. Chosen by the Congress as “as anoutstanding American to counteract . . .

Communist people like [Pablo] Neruda,”15

Lowell turned out to be an emissary fornothing beyond the powerful properties ofThorazine. He had badly let his side down(and in turn was badly let down byBotsford). Amazingly, neither Hunt norJosselson dumped Botsford but continued touse his services as their “representative” inLatin America. More amazingly, less than ayear later, they even considered sendingLowell to represent the Congress at aconference in Mexico. But Josselson stalled,afraid that Lowell would “follow hispsychiatrist’s recommendations as little as hedid the last time . . . there is no guaranteewhatsoever that he will not again give somelunatic speeches in favour of Hitler.”16

Botsford, who had no desire to repeat hisprevious experience, warned against sendingLowell, and it was agreed that Robert Penn

Warren and Norman Podhoretz were morereliable candidates to send behind theTortilla Curtain.

Although Josselson had his doubts aboutBotsford (“I am not even sure that he iscapable of telling you straight facts”),17

Hunt’s protégé continued to flourish in theCongress.18 He now told Hunt that Brazilianintellectuals regarded the Congress as a“yanqui” front, and suggested that theCongress become more discreet, modest,and “invisible,” supporting only projects thathad strong local support. But Hunt rejectedthat approach, telling him that no area of theworld should be neglected in the fight againstCommunism.19 And in this mood acampaign to undermine the poet PabloNeruda was vigorously pursued by Hunt andBotsford.

In early 1963, Hunt received a tip-offthat Pablo Neruda was a candidate to winthe Nobel Prize for Literature for 1964. Thiskind of inside information was extremelyrare, as deliberations of the Nobel committeeare supposed to be conducted in hermeticsecrecy. Yet by December 1963, awhispering campaign against Neruda hadbeen launched. Careful to obscure theCongress’s role, when Irving Kristol askedHunt if it was true the Congress was“spreading rumors” about Neruda, Huntreplied teasingly that it was inevitable thatthe poet’s candidacy for the Nobel Prizewould excite controversy.20

Actually, since February 1963, Hunt hadbeen organizing the attack. Julian Gorkinhad earlier written to “a friend inStockholm” about Neruda, and told Huntthat “this man is ready to prepare a small

book in Swedish on ‘Le cas Neruda.’ ”21

But Hunt doubted the usefulness of such abook, and told Congress activist RenéTavernier that a fully documented reportwritten in French and English should beprepared for circulation to certainindividuals.22 Hunt stressed that there wasno time to lose if the scandal of Neruda’swinning the Nobel Prize was to be averted,and he asked Tavernier to organize thereport in collaboration with Julian Gorkinand his Swedish “friend.”23

Tavernier’s report focused on thequestion of Neruda’s political engagementand argued that it was “impossible todissociate Neruda the artist from Neruda thepolitical propagandist.”24 It charged thatNeruda, a member of the Central Committeeof the Chilean Communist Party, used his

poetry as “an instrument” of a politicalengagement which was “total andtotalitarian”; this was the art of a man whowas a “militant and disciplined” Stalinist.Great use was made of the fact that Nerudahad been awarded the 1953 Stalin Prize forhis poem to Stalin, “his master,” whichTavernier labeled “poetic servility.”25

Tavernier sent the proofs of the article toHunt at the end of June. Hunt decided itneeded pepping up and told its author toconcentrate on the nature of Neruda’spolitical engagement and to focus on theanachronism of his Stalinist position, whichbore little relation to the more tolerant moodof contemporary Russia. Hunt finished inprofessorial tone, telling Tavernier that heexpected to see the revised report in a matterof days.26

“It’s obvious they would’ve campaigned

for Neruda not to get the Nobel Prize. It’s agiven,” said Diana Josselson.27 Accordingly,Michael Josselson had written to Salvadorde Madariaga, the philosopher and honorarypatron of the Congress, to seek hisintervention. But de Madariaga wassanguine, arguing that “Stockholm aurait uneréponse facile et impeccable: on a déjàcouronné Nobel la poésie chilienne en lapersonne de Gabriela Mistral. Un point,c’est tout. Et la politique n’y a rien àfaire.”28 Politics, of course, had everythingto do with it.

Pablo Neruda did not win the 1964Nobel Prize for Literature. But there was nocause for celebration in the offices of theCongress when the winner was announced.It was Jean-Paul Sartre. He, famously,refused to accept the award. Neruda had towait until 1971 before he was honored by

the Swedish Academy, by which time hewas Chile’s ambassador to France,representing the democratically electedgovernment of his friend Salvador Allende(who was then undemocratically unseatedand murdered in 1973, with the help of thelong arm of the CIA).

In 1962, just months after the constructionof the Berlin Wall, Nicolas Nabokov wasinvited by Willy Brandt, the mayor of WestBerlin, to become adviser on internationalcultural affairs to the Berlin Senate. Thisappointment solidified an old friendship, andit brought Nabokov back to the city whichhe felt closest to. “Brandt and Nabokov goton very well,” remembered StuartHampshire. “Brandt was financed by theAmericans, and so was the Berlin culturalprogram. Brandt was perfectly at ease with

this, it didn’t worry him in the least. Nickywas highly sophisticated, he knew all theright people, so he was perfect for the job oforganizing Berlin’s cultural affairs.”29 ForNabokov, West Berlin had lost some of its“cosmopolitan glamour,” and the timeseemed ripe for its renewed investment inthe “cultural game.” According to JohnHunt, Nabokov had “never been ready totake on the world for his convictions,” andhe seemed now to have lost interest in thetired old paradigms of the Cold War. Hisplans and proposals for Berlin, which wasnow divided by a concrete wall, containednone of the old anti-Communist rhetoric. “Itwas clear to me that in such a game oneshould try to gain the support andparticipation of scholars and artists from theSoviet Union and Socialist Bloc,”30 hewrote, in a mood full of the warmth of

détente. To this end, he befriended theSoviet ambassador to East Berlin PyotrAndreyetvitch Abrassimov. The two spenthours together at the Soviet Embassy,Abrassimov eventually acceding toNabokov’s passionate requests to haveSoviet artists represented at the Berlin ArtsFestival, of which he was also director. ForAbrassimov, this was a bold decision: Sovietintelligence was keeping a close eye onNabokov. With a KGB spy planted onBrandt as an adviser, the Russians knew allabout Nabokov’s affiliations with the CIA-backed Congress.

Josselson wasn’t entirely happy withNabokov’s new appointment, “but heswallowed it,” according to Diana. Nabokov,who was spending more and more time inBerlin, appeared to be wandering away fromthe Congress but not from its expense

account. Josselson, who had always urgedrestraint, could do little to limit NicolasNabokov’s congenital extravagance. “He hadvery expensive taste, and this had to be paidfor,”31 said Stuart Hampshire. But the link,which was formally agreed between theCongress and Brandt’s office, did bring theCongress an opportunity to be represented atthe Berliner Festwochen, and in 1964 itfinanced the appearance there of GünterGrass, W.H. Auden, Keith Botsford, CleanthBrooks, Langston Hughes, Robie Macauley,Robert Penn Warren, James Merrill, JohnThompson, Ted Hughes, Herbert Read,Peter Russell, Stephen Spender, RogerCaillois, Pierre Emmanuel, Derek Walcott,Jorge Luis Borges, and Wole Soyinka (JohnHunt and François Bondy went asmonitors).

But Josselson couldn’t swallow his

resentment at what he saw as Nabokov’sdesertion. “He was jealous,” saidHampshire. “He used to refer to ‘my group’of intellectuals. He flattered them, and heexpected their loyalty. Nicky was part of his‘group,’ and then he got interested insomething else. Josselson was angry andhurt.”32 By the end of 1964, Josselson’spatience was wearing thin, and he wrote acaustic letter asking Nabokov why he hadseen fit to claim expenses from the Congressfor a trip to London which clearly originatedin the interests of Berlin. With Nabokovcurrently receiving a generous salary fromthe Congress (Josselson had drawn nearly$30,000 from the Farfield to cover hisactivities there over a four-year period, ofwhich $24,000 was set aside for his salary),why, Josselson asked, couldn’t he draw suchexpenses out of the 50,000 Deutschmarks

he was receiving from Berlin’s taxpayers?Peeved that Nabokov had told him nothingof his visits to Abrassimov in the Sovietsector, or of Abrassimov’s visit toNabokov’s house with Rostropovich,Josselson ended angrily by telling Nabokov:“I don’t want to know anything more aboutwhat you are doing. . . . Let’s just suspendour official relationship until May 1 [whenthey were due to meet] and let’s keep ourfingers crossed that with your doings youwill not unduly damage our friendship.”33

Unable to resist one final slight, Josselsonhoped that the Christmas holidays wouldgive Nabokov “an opportunity to reflect . . .and to compose some music instead ofrushing around madly and rushing, whoknows, towards a precipice.”34

A dark cloud was gathering overNabokov and Josselson’s relationship. When

Josselson learned that Nabokov wasplanning to undertake a trip to Moscow withAbrassimov to secure the participation ofSoviet artists at the Berlin Festival, he wrotein urgent tones, urging him not to make thetrip. Nabokov aborted the journey at the lastmoment but demanded an explanation fromJosselson. This was forthcoming but crypticin the extreme: “I did not for one minuteworry about your safety nor was Iconcerned about any consequences fromyour connection with the Congress. Believeme, I was only concerned about yourselfand about a very embarrassing situation youcould find yourself in, not immediately, butmaybe a year or two from now. I don’t wantto write about this, but rest assured thatwhat I have in mind is not something that Ijust picked up out of the air. . . . Also,please bear in mind that you have many

enemies in Berlin who are only waiting foran opportunity to knife you, and in yourown interest, you would do well to cut theground from under these people and theirmalicious gossip.”35 There was more thanjust hurt behind Josselson’s objections to hisfriend’s new career move: Nabokov hadbecome a security risk. “You could becomean unwitting instrument of Soviet policy inGermany,” he now warned him. “You[have] already made a first step in thatdirection.”36

Shortly after this letter, in August 1964, avery worrying situation arose. In the courseof a congressional investigation into the tax-exempt status of private Americanfoundations by Congressman WrightPatman, a leak occurred which identified anumber of foundations (eight in all, known

as “The Patman Eight”) as CIA fronts: theGotham Foundation, the Michigan Fund, thePrice Fund, the Edsel Fund, the AndrewHamilton Fund, the Borden Trust, theBeacon Fund, and the Kentfield Fund.These foundations, it transpired, were “maildrops,” often consisting of nothing morethan an address, set up to receive CIAmoney which could then be transferredelsewhere with apparent legitimacy. Aftermoney was transferred to the mail drop, the“second pass” or “pass-through” wouldoccur: the front foundation would make a“contribution” to a prominent foundationwidely known for its legitimate activities.These contributions were duly listed asassets received by the foundations in theirannual 990-A forms filed with the InternalRevenue Service, which every tax-exemptnonprofit organization was obliged to

submit. This, of course, was where thesystem was most vulnerable. “Maybe therewasn’t really any other way to do it,” saidDonald Jameson, “but these foundationswere required to file all kinds of taxdocuments and one thing and another, whichthey complied with to some extent. Whichmeant that when . . . people began exposingthem, they could go to the tax records andlink A to B to C to D directly through thesethings, and that was very unfortunate.”37

The “third pass” occurred when thelegitimate foundation made a contribution tothe CIA-designated recipient organization.William Hobby, president of the HoustonPost and trustee of the Hobby Foundation,explained how this worked: “We were toldthat . . . we would receive certain fundsfrom the CIA. Then we’d receive a letter,say from Organization XYZ, asking for

funds. We granted the funds.” No questionsasked. “We believed that [the CIA] knewwhat they were doing.”38

The 990-A forms of four otherfoundations illustrated this pass-throughoperation: the M.D. Anderson Foundation ofHouston; the Hoblitzelle Foundation ofDallas; the David, Josephine and WinfieldBaird Foundation of New York; and theJ.M. Kaplan Fund of New York. Each ofthese foundations were IOD “assets.” From1958 to 1964 the Anderson Foundationreceived $655,000 of CIA money throughphony foundations such as the Borden Trustand the Beacon Fund. It then disbursed thesame amount to the CIA-supportedAmerican Fund for Free Jurists, Inc., a NewYork–based organization later known as theAmerican Council for the InternationalCommission of Jurists. The Baird

Foundation received a total of $456,800between 1961 and 1964 in “pass-throughs”and piped the money on to CIA programs inthe Middle East and Africa. The KaplanFund—best known as the benefactor ofNew York’s “Shakespeare in the Park”season—gave almost a million dollarsbetween 1961 and 1963 to the Institute ofInternational Labor Research Inc. of NewYork. The institute focused on CIA projectsin Latin America, including a seedbed fordemocratic political leaders called theInstitute of Political Education, which wasrun by Norman Thomas and Jose Figueresin Costa Rica. The funding came from theCIA, channeled to the Kaplan Fund throughdesignated pass-throughs: the Gotham,Michigan, Andrew Hamilton, Borden, Price,and Kentfield funds—six of the PatmanEight. The president and treasurer of the

Kaplan Foundation was Jacob M. Kaplan,who, it will be remembered, offered hisservices to Allen Dulles in 1956. TheHoblitzelle Foundation received a similaramount from the CIA between 1959 and1965. The bulk of it ($430,700) was passedstraight to the Congress for CulturalFreedom.

The Patman leak opened the hatch,however briefly, on the engine room of theCIA’s covert funding. Combined with theinformation freely available for inspection atthe IRS, it enabled a few imaginativejournalists to piece together part of thejigsaw. In September 1964, the New Yorkleftist weekly The Nation asked: “Should theCIA be permitted to channel funds tomagazines in London—and New York—which pose as ‘magazines of opinion’ andare in competition with independent journals

of opinion? Is it proper for CIA-supportedmagazines to offer large sums in payment ofsingle poems by East European and Russianpoets regarded as men of a character whomight be encouraged to defect by what, inthe context, could be regarded as a bribe? Isit a ‘legitimate’ function of the CIA tofinance, indirectly, variously congresses,conventions, assemblies and conferencesdevoted to ‘cultural freedom’ and kindredtopics?”39

Cord Meyer remembered that “[t]hestory was carried on the back page of theNew York Times and caused little stir at thetime, although within the Agency it causedus anxiously to review and attempt toimprove the security of [our] fundingmechanisms.”40 “We used to have exercisesat the Agency where we would askourselves what would happen if you took

the back off the radio and started looking atwhere all those wires led,” said LeeWilliams. “You know, what if someone wentdown to IRS and looked at one foundationgiving a grant and then seeing that thefigures didn’t tally? This was somethingwhich really worried us when the rumorswere building up. We talked about it, andtried to find a way of protecting the peopleand organizations which were about to beexposed.”41 But Hunt and Josselson, whowere both in London when the story broke—Josselson at the Stafford Hotel, Hunt atDuke’s Hotel—were suddenly very exposed.“We’re in trouble,” Josselson told Huntbluntly on the telephone.

Josselson had been alert to the dangerwell before the Patman exposures. Peoplewere beginning to jabber at cocktail parties—“half the problem was that people in

Washington couldn’t keep their mouthsshut,” said Diana Josselson. Paul Goodmanhad hinted explosively at the truth as early as1962, when he wrote in Dissent that“Cultural Freedom and the Encounter ofideas are instruments of the CIA.” Therecan be little doubt that Josselson had beenforewarned of Patman’s findings two yearslater, thus accounting for his mysteriousletter to Nabokov of June 1964.

Josselson had long fretted that theCongress’s cover was insecure, and in 1961he had persuaded Cord Meyer that theyshould find a crop of new “sponsors.” “Inanswer to Michael’s and the CIA’sapprehensions, they rather smartly thoughtthey would diversify the source of funds,and so they did,”42 recalled Diana Josselson.Nabokov went to New York in February1961 to talk to foundation trustees.

Curiously, none of the foundations heapproached came through. It seems asthough his trip was just a smokescreen,designed to make it look like the Congresswas actively and openly seeking financialpartners, whilst in fact the backroom dealswere already being agreed between the CIAand other foundations. By 1963, theCongress’s statement of receipts showed abrand-new set of donors. These were theColt, Florence, Lucius N. Littauer,Ronthelym Charitable Trust, Shelter Rock(whose “donor” was Donald Stralem, aboard member of the Farfield Foundation),Sonnabend, and Sunnen foundations.

As for the Farfield Foundation, itscredibility as an “independent” foundationhad become increasingly stretched. “It wasmeant to be a cover, but actually it wastransparent. We all laughed about it, and

called it the ‘Far-fetched Foundation,’ ” saidLawrence de Neufville. “Everybody knewwho was behind it. It was ridiculous.”43

Junkie Fleischmann’s legendary personalmeanness seemed to ensure the rumors nowcirculating at every Washington and NewYork party that he was not the real “angel”of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.Nabokov later told Josselson that “Junkiewas the stingiest rich man I have everknown.”44 Natasha Spender likewiserecalled that “Junkie was famously mean. Ata dinner party in a Cincinnati restaurant withJunkie and others, I had to borrow a dimefrom him to make a telephone call. Whenwe were going back in the taxi, Stephen saidto me, ‘You must send that dime backtomorrow morning.’ And I thought he wasjoking, but he wasn’t. So I sent the dime

back.”45

It was now reasoned that if the FarfieldFoundation were to disburse funds toAmerican—as well as international—projects, then the CIA’s interest, thussandwiched, would become lessconspicuous. “The Farfield was engaged inother activities because it needed to coverfor the foundation, in case anyone inquiredwhat it was doing,”46 explained DianaJosselson. The Farfield report for the periodJanuary 1, 1960, to December 31, 1963,lists some of the hundreds of grants madefor that period. Recipients included theAmerican Council of Learned Societies; theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences;the Modern Language Association; theDancers’ Workshop; the Festival of TwoWorlds at Spoleto, Italy (contributionstowards general expenses and the

participation of American students and forthe expenses of the poet Ted Hughes); theInstitute for Advanced Studies in theTheatre Arts; the Living Theater of NewYork; the New York Pro Musica; theAssociation of Literary Magazines ofAmerica; Partisan Review (“a grant forexpenses”); and the International Institute inMadrid (a grant to preserve the personallibraries of Federico García Lorca, JoséOrtega, and Fernando Almalgro). Under“Travel and Study,” the Farfield gavefellowships to scores of individuals,including Mary McCarthy (“to prepare ananthology of new European writing”); theChilean painter Victor Sanchez Ogaz; thepoet Derek Walcott (“for travel in the UnitedStates”); Patricia Blake; Margerita Buber-Neumann; Lionel Trilling (for a trip toPoland, Rome, Athens, and Berlin); and

Alfred Sherman, contributor to TheSpectator, for a trip to Cuba.

Ironically, it was the sheer scale of theFarfield Foundation’s endowments whichmade it especially vulnerable to discovery. Inthe wake of the Patman revelations, itwouldn’t have taken a Conan Doyle todeduce who was the schemer behind thefoundation. Astonishingly, not a singlejournalist thought to inquire any further. TheCIA did take a “hard look at this techniqueof funding,” but, to the later amazement of aSelect Committee inquiry into the matter, itdid not “reconsider the propriety of bringingthe independence of America’s foundationsinto question by using them as conduits forthe funding of covert action projects”47—thevery situation that had prompted Patman toleak his findings in the first place. “The reallesson of the Patman Flap is not that we

need to get out of the business of usingfoundation cover for funding, but that weneed to get at it more professionally andextensively,”48 reasoned the chief of covertaction’s Staff Program and EvaluationGroup.

This thinking was egregiously flawed, aslater events would show. Josselson certainlydid not subscribe to it. He knew that thecurrent funding mechanisms were hopelesslyvulnerable and that he was sailing a leakyboat. “The seas got rougher and rougher,and navigation got harder and harder, butstill they were navigating, but in a state ofconstant alert,”49 said Diana Josselson.From late 1964, Josselson tried frantically tosteer the Congress for Cultural Freedomaway from the pending revelations and thedamage they would cause. He consideredchanging its name. He once again

investigated cutting the financial link withCIA, to be replaced entirely by FordFoundation funding. Above all, he attemptedto direct the Congress away from its ColdWar perspective and to minimize theplausibility of any suggestion that it was atool of the U.S. government in this ColdWar. In October, he told the executivecommittee at its meeting in London: “Ifrankly wouldn’t like to see the Congress’sraison d’être to be the Cold War. Isomewhat get the feeling that this is itsraison d’être, and, frankly, I don’t like it.”50

22

Pen Friends

. . . a new kind of manhas come to his blissto end the Cold War he has borneagainst his own kind flesh.

Allen Ginsberg, “Who Be Kind To”

The year 1964 was a bad one for ColdWarriors. The myths upon which they reliedwere being systematically exploded. Firstthere was the publication of The Spy WhoCame In from the Cold. Written in fivemonths by a junior diplomat in the BritishEmbassy in Bonn using the nom de plume

John le Carré, it sold 230,000 copies inAmerica and a further two million more inpaperback in 1965, when Paramountreleased its film version. Le Carré traced thenovel’s origins to his own “great and abidingbitterness about the East–West ideologicaldeadlock.” Richard Helms, who was then incharge of CIA undercover operations,detested it. Le Carré was now rankedalongside Graham Greene (whose 1955novel The Quiet American had appalledAmerica’s clandestine community) asauthors the Agency liked to hate. They were“dupes,” said Frank Wisner, “ill-wishing andgrudge-bearing types.”

This was followed by Stanley Kubrick’sfilm Dr. Strangelove, which satirized themadness of Cold War ideology. In a letterpublished in the New York Times, LewisMumford called it “the first break in the

catatonic cold war trance that has so longheld our country in its rigid grip . . . what issick is our supposedly moral, democraticcountry which allowed this policy to beformulated and implemented without eventhe pretense of public debate.”1

Then, on September 18, 1964,America’s single most influential ColdWarrior, C.D. Jackson, died in a New Yorkhospital. Days before, Eisenhower hadflown down from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,to see the critically ill C.D. The BostonSymphony Orchestra, which owed its globalreputation largely to C.D.’s support, held amemorial concert for him, with the soloistsVitya Vronsky and Victor Babin playingMozart. Later, the orchestra’s summerschool, Tanglewood, set up the C.D.Jackson Master Awards and Prizes in hismemory. Sponsoring the prize were many

alumni of that special school of ColdWarriorism over which C.D. had presided.

By 1964, these people were alreadywalking anachronisms, members of adiminishing sect whose demise, though byno means complete, seemed ensured by awave of revulsion and protest against thevalues they represented. They were like somany “whifflebirds,” the name one NewYork intellectual invented for a fabulouscreature that “flies backwards in everdecreasing circles until it flies up its own asshole and becomes extinct.”2 With the rise ofthe New Left and the Beats, the culturaloutlaws who had existed on the margins ofAmerican society now entered themainstream, bringing with them a contemptfor what William Burroughs called a“snivelling, mealy-mouthed tyranny ofbureaucrats, social workers, psychiatrists

and union officials.”3 Joseph Heller inCatch-22 suggested that what Americadeemed sanity was actually madness. AllenGinsberg, who in his 1956 lament Howl hadmourned the wasted years—“I saw the bestminds of my generation destroyed bymadness”—now advocated the joys of openhomosexuality and hallucinogenic “Peyotesolitudes.” Munching LSD, singing the bodyelectric, reading poetry in the nude,navigating the world through a mist ofBenzedrine and dope, the Beats reclaimedWalt Whitman from stiffs like NormanPearson Holmes and sanctified him as theoriginal hippie. They were scruffy rebelswho sought to return chaos to order, incontrast to the obsession with formulaewhich characterized magazines likeEncounter.

Exasperated by these developments,

Sidney Hook wrote to Josselson on April 20,1964: “In Europe they have a theatre of theabsurd, and in existentialism a philosophy ofthe absurd. In the U.S., the latestdevelopment among intellectuals is ‘a politicsof the absurd’—whose slogans are ‘Downwith U.S.’ ‘America stinks!’ ‘Long Live Sex’etc. It is really very amusing—Mailer,Podhoretz etc. And they have a new andfervent disciple—Mr Jack Thompson whosediscretion, I fear, is no better than hisintelligence.”4 Thompson had discretionenough to realize that it was the better partof valor and stayed on as executive directorof the Farfield.

Nineteen sixty-four also marked the firstbirthday of the New York Review of Books.Guided by Barbara Epstein and RobertSilvers, the review’s instant success clearlysignaled that not all American intellectuals

were happy to act as Cold War legitimistsorbiting around the national security state.As the ruling consensus began to fragment,the review signaled the emergence of anewly critical intelligentsia, free to speak onthose issues on which magazines likeEncounter, bound as it was to a consensualdiscipline, were virtually mute. If theimpression had been given that all New Yorkintellectuals had, by some kind of reversealchemy, transformed themselves frombright radicals into just another base metal ofthe CIA and the rest of the Cold Warestablishment, here was evidence to thecontrary. Far from being apologists forAmerican power, these were thinkers whorallied to the review’s readiness to denounceimperialism just as it denouncedCommunism. And, to the horror of the CIA,it became the flagship for intellectual

opposition to the Vietnam War. “We had abig problem with the yin and yang of theNew York Review crowd, especially when itgot so anti-Vietnam and so left wing,”5

remembered Lee Williams, who was lessthan forthcoming about what measures weretaken to counteract the Review, limitinghimself to saying that “it wasn’t a punch,counterpunch situation.”6

Michael Josselson himself was notimpervious to the new spirit. Although hetook pains to conceal his growingdisillusionment with “the Americanproposition,” privately he conceded that hewas appalled by the shape it had assumed.Years later, he was to write that “theexperience of working with and for the‘outfit’ [had become] truly traumatic. . . . Inthe 1950s our motivation was buttressed byAmerica’s historic promises . . . in the

second half of the 1960s our individualvalues and ideals [had] been eroded by ourintervention in Vietnam and by othersenseless U.S. policies.”7 The claimedmissile gap, the doomed U-2 flights, the Bayof Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis—all theseimperial blunders had underminedJosselson’s faith in the American Centuryand in the government agencies charged withrealizing it. Even Harry Truman, whoseadministration had founded the CIA in 1947,said he now saw “something about the waythe CIA has been functioning that is castinga shadow over historic positions, and I feelthat we need to correct it.”8 In an era whichwas beginning to embrace the idea ofdétente, Josselson now looked to move theCongress away from the habits of Cold Warapartheid and towards a dialogue with theEast. Through its relationship with PEN, the

Congress was ideally poised to do just that.By the mid-1960s, International PEN

had seventy-six centers in fifty-fivecountries, and was officially recognized byUNESCO as the organization mostrepresentative of all the writers of the world.Its task, fixed by statute, included a promiseto avoid in all circumstances engagement “instate or party politics.” It was this refusal tosuccumb to bias or parti pris, coupled with arobust defense of freedom of expression,which guaranteed the worldwide expansionof PEN during the Cold War years. But thetruth is that the CIA made every effort toturn PEN into a vehicle for Americangovernment interests. And the Congress forCultural Freedom was the designated tool.

The Congress had long taken an interestin PEN, despite Arthur Koestler’s perorationthat it was run by a bunch of “arseholes”

who worried that the campaign for culturalfreedom “meant fanning the Cold War.”9

Initially, the Congress’s efforts had beendirected at keeping Eastern bloc delegatesout of PEN, fearing that the Communistswould attempt to infiltrate the organizationand influence its debates. “We are preparedto talk to Russian writers, Russian artists,Russian scientists,” Nabokov had written toRichard Crossman in 1956, “but we do notwant to meet and talk to Soviet bureaucratsor Soviet officials in their stead.Unfortunately . . . we are much too oftenconfronted with precisely that type ofsubservient and police-minded Sovietbureaucrat (stony look, square shoulders,blue serge suit and baggy pants) whom wewant to avoid.”10 Rightly concerned to keepthese impostors out, the Congress had liaisedsuccessfully with PEN secretary David

Carver. When news reached Josselson in1956 that the Communists planned “to makea big push” at the PEN conference in Japanthe next year, he easily persuaded Carverthat the Congress’s “top battery” (listed as“Silone, Koestler, Spender, Milosz etc.”)should be brought out in opposition.

John Hunt, himself a member ofInternational PEN (he had joined in 1956after publishing his first novel, Generationsof Men), had a “friendly relationship” withDavid Carver, who acted as an unofficialagent for Encounter, distributing copies ofthe magazine at PEN meetings. In 1964,Hunt decided that Carver was overworkedand needed help. So the Congress offered toprovide help in the person of KeithBotsford, who had kicked his heels in SouthAmerica for a while after the Lowell fiascobefore returning to the United States to

become co-editor with Saul Bellow of theliterary magazine the Noble Savage. Now,once again, he was conveniently on hand tohelp his friend Hunt and duly appeared atthe offices of International PEN in Londonin autumn 1964. “It never occurred to me towonder why Botsford suddenly turned upthe way he did,” said a PEN activist. “Butnow I think of it, it was a bit odd.”11

The French section of PEN wasinfuriated to learn of Botsford’s appointmentand wrote angrily to Carver to demand anexplanation. Defending the appointment,Carver said that he had been working withBotsford for some time “in terms ofcomplete harmony and close cooperation . .. [his] position is quite simple anduncomplicated. The English ExecutiveCommittee has appointed him my assistantand deputy and as I combine the offices of

General Secretary of the English Centre andInternational Secretary, it follows that Inaturally expect him to help me over thewhole range of my work.”12 The Frenchhad good reason to be worried. Suspicionsabout the nature of Botsford’s links to theCongress for Cultural Freedom and aboutthat organization’s links, in turn, to the U.S.government made them fear that theAmericans were attempting to take overPEN. They were right.

It was Keith Botsford who telephonedArthur Miller in 1965 and said he wanted tocome and see him with David Carver. Miller,who was in Paris at the time, knew Botsfordvaguely from the Noble Savage, to which hehad contributed two short stories. “Now hewas saying something about ‘PEN,’ ofwhich I had only vaguely heard,” recalledMiller. The next day, Botsford arrived in

Paris with Carver, who invited Miller tobecome the next president of InternationalPEN. “The point now was that they hadcome to the end of the string,” Miller laterwrote. “The recent détente policy called fornew attempts to tolerate East–Westdifferences, which PEN had not yet gainedthe experience to do. A fresh start wasneeded now, and it was me.”13 But, saidMiller, “I had a suspicion of being used andwondered suddenly whether our StateDepartment or CIA or equivalent Britishhands might be stirring this particular stew. Idecided to flush them out. . . . PEN stoodstuck in the concrete of what I would soonlearn were its traditional Cold War anti-Soviet positions, but like the westerngovernments at this point, it was now tryingto bend and acknowledge Eastern Europe asa stable group of societies whose writers

might well be permitted new contacts withthe West.” Miller told one historian that “itpassed through my mind—that thegovernment might have wanted me tobecome president of PEN because theycouldn’t otherwise penetrate the SovietUnion, and they figured that traveling behindme could be their own people. Theywouldn’t expect me to do it, I don’t think.One of the early people who approached meabout PEN—I can’t remember his namenow—but people later would say about him,‘Why, that guy was an agent all the time.’Now I have no evidence of that—it wasgossip.”14

The Americans wanted an Americanpresident of PEN, and they were about toget one. Carver had in fact been “going allout to get John Steinbeck” (winner of the1962 Nobel Prize for Literature), but he

never materialized, and Miller was thesecond choice. For the French, neithercandidate was suitable. They wanted at allcosts to keep the Americans out. As soon asthey learned of Carver’s intentions to find anAmerican candidate, French PEN putforward one of its own in the person ofMiguel Angel Asturias, the great LatinAmerican novelist and a member of PEN’sFrench Center. Josselson referred to him indisgusted tones as “that old Nicaraguanfellow-travelling war-horse Asturias”15 andwrote in urgent tones to Manès Sperber,who was then living in Paris, asking him toappeal to André Malraux, de Gaulle’sminister of culture and a longtime friend ofthe Congress, to block the Asturiascandidacy. Sperber was hesitant, writingback that the Ministry of Culture hadnothing to do with PEN, an independent

organization. But Josselson insisted, tellingSperber that nothing less than Frenchprestige was at stake and as such thegovernment would surely take an interest. IfAsturias was elected, Josselson claimed, “itwould be a catastrophe” because it wouldsignal “the end of our friend Carver.”16

Carver, with full backing from hisAmerican friends, continued to pursue hisown candidate, writing an eight-page openletter to PEN members in April 1965,challenging the legitimacy of the Frenchcandidacy, accusing the French Center offalsifying the facts, and dismissing Asturiasas a man who lacked every qualificationneeded for the job of the internationalpresidency. After receiving a copy ofCarver’s letter, veteran Cold Warrior LewisGalantière, a member of the executive boardof American PEN, warned his confreres,

“The French offensive is . . . designed notonly to thwart the election of an Americaninternational president, but also to capturethe International Secretariat. . . . I considerthe French move to be one more example ofthe over-weening hubris that has seizedFrench officialdom (for I do not doubt thatthis has the approval of the Quaid’Orsay).”17

Members of the executive board of theAmerican Center included several friends ofthe Congress other than Galantière. Onemember in particular stands out on theletterhead: Robie Macauley. With Macauley,the CIA had a man with executive power inAmerican PEN. This meant that when CordMeyer decided to send him to London as theIOD’s case officer for PEN, his interests inits activities there would appear to beperfectly natural. Nonetheless, to make sure

his cover was tight, Macauley was aGuggenheim Fellow and then a FulbrightResearch Fellow for the two years he was inEngland. With Botsford and Macauley inLondon and Carver a recipient of Congressfunds (and, more directly, of Farfield funds),the CIA had achieved excellent penetrationof PEN.

In the midst of the battle over thepresidency, Carver and Botsford forgedahead with plans for the next big PENCongress, scheduled to take place at Bled inYugoslavia in the first week of July 1965.John Hunt agreed to fund a group of writersto attend the meeting, and KennethDonaldson, the CIA’s London-based“Comptroller General,” was instructed toorganize payment to PEN out of theCongress’s account. The list of proposeddelegates was compiled by John Hunt, with

the strict proviso that “if any of theseindividuals cannot go, the PEN ClubSecretariat must have the approval of theCongress in Paris to use the funds to sendsomeone else.”18 Hunt’s list included DavidRousset, Helmut Jaesrich (Lasky’s successoras editor of Der Monat), Max Hayward,Spender, Chiaromonte, and Silone. Under aseparate grant from the Farfield Foundation,travel expenses were provided for CarlosFuentes and Wole Soyinka.19 Together withthe other delegates, they elected ArthurMiller as PEN’s new president.

Having scored a victory at the BledCongress, John Hunt started preparing forthe next PEN conclave, due to take place inNew York the following June. This would bethe first time in forty-two years that theAmerican Center had played host to anInternational PEN Congress. With the stakes

this high, the CIA decided to bring out thefull battery of its covert arsenal. TheCongress for Cultural Freedom, for one, wasto play a significant role (it had already given£1,000 to Carver in June 1965 to startorganizing the New York “campaign,” whichwas fine-tuned over lunch with Hunt at theChanterelle restaurant on Brompton Road).The Ford Foundation made a timelyintervention, awarding American PEN a“substantial grant” ($75,000) in January1966, and the Rockefeller Foundationcoughed up an additional $25,000. The CIAalso channeled money to American PENthrough the Asia Foundation and the FreeEurope Committee. With such investmentsat stake, John Hunt wrote to David Carveron February 9, 1966, telling him that hethought it wise to try and limit theirliability.20

Hunt’s proposed insurance was to placethe Congress for Cultural Freedom’s seminarorganizer, Marion Bieber, either in Carver’soffice or in New York for three weeks priorto and during the conference itself, at theCongress’s expense. Bieber, who wasworking for the Institute of ContemporaryHistory in London, was a veteran of suchcampaigns from her work in the 1950s asdeputy executive secretary of the Congress.With such a “topflight” person placed in theheart of English or American PEN, Huntcould be assured that his interests would beprotected.

At the same time, Hunt wrote to LewisGalantière, now president of American PEN,to make a similar offer. Who better thanRobie Macauley, recently returned toWashington, whose cover as editor of theprestigious Kenyon Review meant that he

was above suspicion? Macauley wassubsequently placed at the disposal ofAmerican PEN as a kind of fixer-factotum.21 Additionally, Hunt agreed to paytravel expenses for prominent Westernintellectuals (of his choice) to attend thecongress.

The 34th International PEN Congresstook place from June 12–18, 1966. Itsorganizers—both overt and covert—congratulated themselves that the prestige ofhosting the event meant that “a blot on theU.S. record was thereby removed.” A reportof the conference described euphoricallyhow “[t]he preeminence of the U.S. as thepace-setter of contemporary civilization wastriumphantly confirmed by the [fact] that thecongress took place in New York City.”Organized around the theme of “The Writeras Independent Spirit,” the “concentration

on the writer’s role in society and hisconcerns as artist was something whichredounded to the credit of our country.”22

But not all observers came to the sameconclusion. In a lecture delivered at NewYork University on the eve of the PENconference, Conor Cruise O’Brien took aheavy sideswipe at the idea of intellectualindependence. “The Dr. Jekyll of thecongress’s general theme, ‘the writer asindependent spirit,’ is . . . in danger ofturning into Mr. Hyde, ‘the writer as publicfigure,’ ” he said. Whereas writers in thepast could be accused of being “strangers topolitical passions” (Julien Benda), now theywere “liable to be distracted or debauchedby them.”23 O’Brien went on to summarizea recent article in Encounter, in which DenisBrogan had praised the magazine for itsstruggle against la trahison des clercs, the

phrase Benda had used to attack writers oftalent who made themselves spokesmen andpropagandists for political causes. This, of amagazine which was so “congenial to theprevailing power structures,” struck O’Brienas misleading. Far from being politicallyquietist, O’Brien found that Encounter hadconsistently followed a political line, a keyelement of which “was the inculcation ofuniformly favorable attitudes in Britaintowards American policies and practices.”24

The New York Times reported O’Brien’sclaims, which hung over the PEN meeting,and signaled the beginning of the end of theCongress for Cultural Freedom.

23

Literary Bay of Pigs

Remember the figure of Marx—thebourgeois politicians of the 1840s, after ’48—who were clinging to the coattails of the oneahead, and trying to kick the one who wasclinging to their own coattails? Well, a lot ofcoattails are going to be torn in the days tocome . . . and I have grave fears that in theprocess of tearing coattails and kicking, theremay be an injured testicle or two.

James T. Farrell

Conor Cruise O’Brien’s charge thatintellectuals in the West were serving the“power structure” hit hard at a time when

American soldiers were dying in Vietnam.Something was rotten in the state ofDenmark, and many of the professional anti-Communists grouped around the Congressfor Cultural Freedom now found they couldnot “escape the trap [their] deepestconvictions had set for [them].”1 Ascustodians of the American Century, theybelieved, like the conservative columnistJoseph Alsop, that the Vietnam War was“the logical and righteous extension ofAmerica’s postwar vision and destiny.”2

“Come Vietnam, and our anti-Stalinism getsused to justify our own aggression,” JasonEpstein claimed. “These people get into areal bind now. They’re caught with theirpants down: they have to defend Vietnambecause they’ve toed the anti-Communistline for so long that otherwise they stand tolose everything. They did help make

Vietnam possible; they did help make ourpolicy with China possible; they did helpmake possible the brutal anti Stalinismembodied in people like McCarthy; they didcontribute to the stagnation of intellectualculture in this country.”3

Arriving at the same conclusion, RobertMerry, biographer of the Alsop brothers, haswritten: “Years later it would becomefashionable to view the war as a policyaberration, a national tragedy that couldhave been avoided if America’s leaders hadsimply seen clearly enough to avoid thecommitment entirely. But this would ignorethe central reality of U.S. involvement inVietnam—that it was a natural, and henceprobably inevitable, extension of theAmerican global policy established at thedawn of the post-war era.”4

“There is literally a miasma of madness

in the city. I am at a loss for words todescribe the idiocy of what we are doing,”5

wrote Senator William Fulbright, who hadundertaken an extraordinary journey fromCold War ideologue to outspoken dissenter.Inveighing against the pax Americana andthe hopeless illogicality of its foreign policy,Fulbright led the charge of the New Left—towhich he never properly belonged—againstwhat he saw as an uncritical acquiescence inthe American imperium: “Neither in theexecutive branch of our government nor inCongress were more than a few, isolatedvoices raised to suggest the possibility thatSoviet policy in Europe might be motivatedby morbid fears for the security of theSoviet Union rather than by a design forworld conquest. Virtually no one in aposition of power was receptive to thehypothesis that Soviet truculence reflected

weakness rather than strength, intensified bythe memories of 1919, when the westernpowers had intervened in an effort—however half-hearted—to strangle theBolshevik ‘monster’ in its cradle. Our ownpolicy was formed without the benefit ofconstructive adversary proceedings.”6

With equal conviction, Norman Mailerargued that America’s war in Vietnam was“the culmination to a long sequence ofevents which had begun in some unrecordedfashion toward the end of World War II. Aconsensus of the most powerful middle-agedand elderly Wasps in America—statesmen,corporation executives, generals, admirals,newspaper editors, and legislators—hadpledged an intellectual troth: they had swornwith a faith worthy of medieval knights thatCommunism was the deadly foe of Christianculture. If it were not resisted in the postwar

world, Christianity itself would perish.”7

It was against this backdrop of criticaldissent that the New York Times began totake an interest in what lay hidden in thedark recesses of the closet of Americangovernment. In April 1966, its readers wereastonished by a splatter of revelations aboutthe CIA. “The ramifications of CIA activitiesat home and abroad seem endless,” read onearticle. “Though satellites, electronics andgadgets have taken over much of thedrudgery of espionage, there remains a deepinvolvement of human beings, who projectthe agency into awkward diplomaticsituations, raising many issues of policy andethics. That is why many persons areconvinced that in the CIA a sort ofFrankenstein’s monster has been createdthat no one can fully control. . . . Is thegovernment of a proud and honorable

people relying too much on the ‘black’operations, ‘dirty tricks,’ harsh and illicit actsin the ‘back alleys’ of the world? Is theresome point at which meeting fire with fire,force with force, subversion withsubversion, crime with crime, becomes soprevalent and accepted that there no longerremains any distinction of honor and pridebetween grim and implacable adversaries?These questions are a proper and necessaryconcern for the people of the U.S.”8

One article, on April 27, 1966, reiteratedConor Cruise O’Brien’s claims—which werenow common knowledge—that Encountermagazine had been a recipient of CIA funds.There the matter might have rested but forLasky’s impetuous next move. He ran anarticle by Goronwy Rees—a man laterdescribed as a “ridiculous and subsequentlydiscredited fisher in Cold War waters”9—

which, rather than simply rebuttingO’Brien’s charges against Encounter, libeledhim by questioning his conduct when he wasa UN representative in the Congo a fewyears previously. O’Brien immediatelyissued a libel suit against Encounter. WithLasky absent (he had taken a trip to SouthAmerica) and Spender in America, FrankKermode, who had stepped in as co-editorof Encounter (and who had not been shownRees’s column before publication) was leftto face the music.

In May of the previous year, Spenderhad written to Josselson with the news thathe had been appointed consultant poet forthe Library of Congress, the Americanequivalent of poet laureate (predecessorsincluded Frost and Lowell, but Spender wasthe first non-American ever to be offered thehonor). Initially, Josselson was furious,

writing to Muggeridge in June that Spender“was unable to resist the call of a firstsiren.”10 It was agreed that Spender shouldgive up his Encounter salary for the yearthat he would be away, but Josselson, keento maintain some kind of financial hold overSpender, arranged “to continue to take careof him quite handsomely.”11 This, he toldMuggeridge, was “strictly confidential.”Spender, meanwhile, had suggested thatFrank Kermode would be a suitablereplacement, at least for the time he wasabsent.

Lasky was delighted with thisdevelopment. His relationship with Stephen(or “Stee-fen,” as he used to call him,perhaps, said Kermode, as “a sort of quietreproach to the poet for not spelling hisname, American fashion, with a v”) hadalways been strained and was now at

breaking point. “As good as these [past]years have been, full of work and not a fewsuccesses, the worst part of them has beenStephen-in-the-next-office,” he complainedto Josselson. “How elated I have been atevery prospect of his absence—and howcalm things were then. . . . I always in thepast (last year, five years ago) pooh-poohedthe notion of getting a replacement. But Isometimes indulge in horrified speculation atwhat my life will be like with him around inthe next years. . . . To have to live with thatkind of nagging, based on his own dailytroubled guilty conscience, getting amaximum of glory for a minimum of work,doing only really his own books, plays,anthologies, articles, reviews, broadcasts . . .sinks me into despair. I don’t mind doing itall—in fact, love it. I do mind beingconstantly harassed by his uneasy sense of

cheating. . . . Does he deserve it all? Mustwe always live under the cloud of hisinsincerity and characterlessness?”12

Josselson eventually came round to Lasky’sview, agreeing that “the more time Spenderspends in London, the more chances thereare for clashes and for his going aroundbitching and gossiping to his outsidefriends.”13

But those closest to Josselson had theirdoubts about Kermode, too. Although noone came close to Philip Larkin’smemorable description of him as a “jumpedup book drunk ponce” (Larkin also mockedhim in verse: “I turned round & showed/mybum to Kermode”), they damned him withfaint praise. Edward Shils described himwitheringly as an average little professor.14

Robie Macauley told Josselson that he didn’t

like him as a person, though he enjoyed hiswriting. “I am grateful for your remarksabout Kermode,” Josselson told Macauley.“I, too, like his writings, but haven’t methim. From what you say about hispersonality, I can deduct that there is sure tobe trouble ahead. . . . At the same time, ifKermode proves to be strong enough, hecan do a lot for the magazine, because it isthe whole literary part, including the reviewsection, that is so weak.”15 In the sameletter, Josselson made an extraordinaryconfession: “I am having my problems withEncounter. I am beginning to get bored withit. I haven’t confessed this to anyone else,except Diana who feels the same way. I findthe New York Review of Books so muchmore exciting and get greater satisfactioneven out of Commentary.”16

Despite the reservations of Josselson’s

inner circle, Kermode was officially invitedto co-edit the magazine with Lasky insummer 1965. Kermode, who understoodhe was being asked to handle the literaryside with Lasky the uncontested boss,thought it odd that Lasky didn’t choosesomeone better qualified, someone who atleast lived in London (Kermode lived inGloucestershire and had a teaching job inBristol). Actually, Kermode’s distance fromthe daily running of the magazine made hima perfect candidate. “What I took to be ahandicap was in fact my chief qualification.Somewhere in my mind or heart, mixed inwith mere vanity, and . . . my reluctance todisregard the wrong road, I knew I wasbeing set up.”17 Nevertheless, Kermodeaccepted the offer. He immediatelydiscovered that “the whole Encounteroperation” was “mysterious.” He could not

discover the circulation of the journal orhow it was really financed. He was offeredvery little say in the makeup of the journaland soon concluded that “it would havemade very little difference if I’d neverturned up at all.”18

Kermode, like everybody else, had heardthe rumors linking Encounter to the CIA.Spender told him that he too had beendisconcerted by such allegations but wassatisfied that denials he had received fromJosselson and the Farfield Foundation wereproof to the contrary.19

In fact, by the time Kermode came onboard, Encounter was no longer sponsoredby the Congress for Cultural Freedom butwas being published by Cecil King’s DailyMirror Group. Well, officially at least, that’show things stood. The King deal had beenput together in response to a batch of critical

reviews of Encounter, which had included a1963 editorial in the Sunday Telegraphreferring to a secret and regular subventionto Encounter from “the Foreign Office.”Such reports clearly threatened Encounter’scredibility, so the search for private angelsbegan in early 1964. By July of that year,the editors were able to announce inEncounter that in future all financial andbusiness affairs would be handled by CecilKing’s International Publishing Corporation.As part of this deal, a controlling trust wasestablished consisting of Victor Rothschild,Michael Josselson, and Arthur Schlesinger.Schlesinger’s appointment was made in spiteof Shils’s warning that this would simplyreduce the time in which Spender’s twistedversion of events would travel toSchlesinger, and thence from Schlesinger tothe “New York gang.”20 Josselson took a

more generous view, reasoning that as“President Kennedy’s premature death hasleft Arthur at somewhat loose ends . . . Ithought it would be a nice gesture on ourpart to assure him at least one trip a year toEurope, which he could not afford on hisown.”21

Of this new arrangement, MalcolmMuggeridge wrote disparagingly toJosselson, “I now realize, that in fact, King’sassumption of financial responsibility willalter nothing. He (or rather the InlandRevenue) will be out-of-pocket, instead ofthe Congress. Otherwise everything will beas it was. . . . I was partly responsible forstarting Encounter, and have subsequentlytried in a desultory sort of way to help italong . . . [it’s been successful, but] thereare certain dangers, due to the circumstancesin which it was founded—belated

involvement in a phase of the Cold Warwhich is over; too close and overtassociation with the Congress which, thougha condition of its coming into existence inthe first place, has now becomeinconvenient and unnecessary. I had hopedthat the change in financial responsibilitymight provide an opportunity, to some extentat any rate, to circumvent these dangers. Inow see that I was mistaken.”22

As Muggeridge well knew, the King dealkept Encounter very much in the intelligencefold. For a start, the Congress for CulturalFreedom did not, contrary to public claims,fully relinquish editorial or even financialcontrol of the magazine, as Josselson latermade clear in a letter: “one aspect of theproblem involved in making arrangementswith publishers for some of our journals,viz. that we must find publishers who can be

relied upon not to tamper with the contentsor with the general line of the journals or notto replace the editors of our choice. We werefortunate in this respect to find a Cecil Kingin England and a Fischer Verlag in Germany[which took over Der Monat], but suchpeople or publishers are rare.”23 In fact, thedeal with King specifically stated that “theeditorial salaries of the two senior co-editorsand a partial remuneration for an assistanteditor” would remain the responsibility ofthe Congress. “These have in the past notbeen directly a part of Encounter’sexpenses, and they will continue to be aseparate expense,”24 Josselson stated. Therest of Encounter’s regular subvention fromthe Congress—£15,000 annually—would,said Josselson, be redirected in the form ofan outright grant to Encounter Books Ltd.The deal with Fischer Verlag assumed the

same characteristics: ostensibly, theInternational Publications Company tookover the publishing of Der Monat. In reality,the Congress was still the owner of thejournal after it purchased 65 percent of theshares in this company with a “special grantof $10,000.” These shares were “held intrust by [an intermediary] for theCongress.”25 In both cases, the Congress forCultural Freedom remained the editorialarbitrator, whilst concealing its influence andfinancial commitment.

Furthermore, with Victor Rothschild, SirWilliam Hayter, and by 1966 AndrewSchonfield on the board of trustees—a“grisly trio,” according to Muggeridge—Encounter found itself just as closely tiedto British intelligence as it had always been.Before becoming warden of New College,Oxford, Hayter had been ambassador to

Moscow and then deputy under secretary ofstate at the Foreign Office. Prior to this, hehad been head of the Services LiaisonDepartment and chairman of the UK JointIntelligence Committee. As such he sat inwith the Joint Planners under the Chiefs ofStaff, dealing with all intelligence questionsand visiting various British intelligence postsoverseas. Significantly, it was Hayter’s draftproposal of December 1948 calling for apsychological warfare outfit “to wage theCold War” which helped persuade Attlee’sCabinet to set up the Information ResearchDepartment, with which Hayter wassubsequently closely involved. AtWinchester, he had been a contemporary ofRichard Crossman, and at New College, ofHugh Gaitskell. Like them, he was a socialdemocrat and broadly in sympathy with theLabour wing that Encounter under Lasky

had cultivated so assiduously. AndrewSchonfield, director of the Royal Institute ofInternational Affairs, was also well known tothe intelligence community. VictorRothschild, of course, was there in hiscapacity as a front for the Foreign Office.The members of this network all felt athome with Cecil King, who, according toPeter Wright’s Spycatcher, was himself a“long-term contact” of MI5, an associationwhich would have disposed him to besympathetic to the covert cultural operationsof the CIA.

But Josselson’s efforts to remove theCongress’s assets from damaging allegationswere doomed to fail. There were now moreholes than boat. If rumors had circulated onthe cocktail circuits of London, Paris, andNew York for years, now they werebeginning to harden into fact. Mary

McCarthy later told her biographer CarolBrightman that Josselson intercepted a lettershe had drafted to the New York Timesaround 1964 asserting the independence ofthe Congress’s magazines, “because heknew it wouldn’t be true. He said, ‘Just layoff, dear. Forget it.’ ” Why didn’t theAgency fold its tent and leave the Congress,which was fully able to look after itself, toits own devices? What kind of hubris orvanity was it that inspired the ill-fateddecision to cling to the Congress whenJosselson himself was pleading forindependence? “They held on, I suppose,because it was one of their few successes.But they should’ve let go if they really caredabout the integrity of the Congress,”26 saidDiana Josselson. But covert action has abureaucratic momentum which is hard tobreak. For two decades, CIA officers had

been conditioned by a project-based systemwhich encouraged growth rather thanleanness. By attaching undue significance tothe elephantine size of its worldwideclandestine “infrastructure,” the Agencyfailed to note that the risk of exposure wasexponentially increased. “This is the onlycountry in the world which doesn’trecognize the fact that some things are betterif they are small,”27 Tom Braden latercommented.

“Nobody, of course, was supposed toknow who was financing the Congress forCultural Freedom,” said Jason Epstein. “Butby the middle of the Sixties anybody whodidn’t know it was a fool. Everybody knew.The director of the Farfield Foundation[Jack Thompson] at the time was a verygood friend of mine, and I would confronthim with this and say, ‘Oh come on, Jack,

what’s the point of pretending?’ And hewould say, ‘Oh no, no, no. That’s not true,that’s not true at all. We’re an independentoutfit, nothing to do with the CIA.’ ”28 Oneday, whilst lunching with Spender, Epsteinsaid, “Stephen, I think this whole outfit isbeing paid for by the Central IntelligenceAgency, and you haven’t been told and youshould find out right now what’s going on.”And Spender replied, “I will—I’m going tospeak to Jack Thompson and find out rightnow whether what you tell me is true.” Awhile later Stephen called Epstein and said,“Well, I did confront Jack and he told me itwasn’t true, so I think it’s not true.” “Andthat’s how it would go,” Epstein laterremarked. “Nobody wanted to admit whatthe sponsorship really was. But I thinkeverybody knew and nobody wanted tosay.”29

Spender had been investigating therumor since at least 1964. A letter from JohnThompson to Spender, dated May 25, 1964(three months before the Patmanrevelations), in which Thompson dismissedas ridiculous the claim that the FarfieldFoundation was a front for the Americangovernment,30 is proof of this. Two yearslater, Spender wrote to Junkie Fleischmann,raising the same query about funding. CIAagent and Farfield director Frank Platt hadsent Spender’s letter on to Josselson with acover note saying: “Sorry this letter toJunkie took so long a time getting over toyou, but it has made the rounds.” Only afterSpender’s letter had been seen by the CIAdid Fleischmann add his own strenuousdenials, writing to Spender, “Certainly as faras Farfield is concerned, we have neveraccepted any funds from any government

agency.”31 This was, of course, a grossdeception.

According to a story told by MaryMcCarthy, Spender had once been theobject of an extraordinary confession byNicolas Nabokov. McCarthy claimed tohave been told by Spender that on anoccasion when he was riding in a taxi withNabokov suddenly Nabokov had turned tohim and spilled the beans, then jumped outof the taxi just at that moment. “This was asecondhand story, passed on by Mary tome,” conceded Carol Brightman. “But youcan imagine it happening. You can imaginethat incidents like that happened dozens oftimes, over and over again. And it must havebeen a sort of a joke.”32 “I think Nabokovdiddled Stephen from the very beginning,”33

Natasha Spender later said. Certainly,

Spender had been aware of the rumors from1964 and before, as Wollheim’s accountshows.

Nonetheless, Spender had added hissignature to that of Kristol and Lasky in aletter to the New York Times dated May 10,1966, which stated, “We know of no‘indirect’ benefactions . . . we are our ownmasters and part of nobody’s propaganda,”and defended the “independent record of theCongress for Cultural Freedom in defendingwriters and artists in both East and Westagainst misdemeanours of all governmentsincluding that of the US.”34 Unofficially,Spender was not at all sure that this was thewhole truth. “I should be annoyed by all theechoes I hear from all sides of yourconversations all around the world,”Josselson was later obliged to write. “TheNY Times seems to be your favorite subject

these days and you seem to be bringing it upwith every one you talk to, and what’s moreyou seem to volunteer your agreement withthe NY Times allegation [concerning theCIA’s support of Encounter] without anyshred of evidence.”35

A week before the Kristol–Lasky–Spender letter was published, John Hunt hadflown to New York from Paris. He wentstraight to Princeton, where he met RobertOppenheimer to discuss the New York Timesallegations and to ask if there would be anyway that he and certain others would agreeto sign a letter testifying to the independenceof the Congress. Oppenheimer was happy tooblige. Stuart Hampshire, who was inPrinceton at the time, later recalled that“Oppenheimer was amazed that I wasamazed, and amazed that I was upset at theNew York Times revelations. But I was

upset, yes. There were people who were putin a terrible position. Oppenheimer wasn’tamazed because he was half in it himself.He knew full well. He was part of theapparat. I don’t think it bothered himmorally. If you’re imperially minded, whichthe Americans were at the time, you don’tthink much about whether it’s wrong or not.It’s like the imperial British in the nineteenthcentury. You just do it.”36

The letter went off to the New YorkTimes on May 4 and was published on May9, just a day before the Spender–Lasky–Kristol letter. Signed by John KennethGalbraith, George Kennan, RobertOppenheimer, and Arthur Schlesinger, itstated that “the Congress . . . has been anentirely free body, responsive only to thewishes of its members and collaborators andthe decisions of its Executive Committee.”37

But it didn’t explicitly deny the CIA link,leading Dwight Macdonald to comment thatit “was an evasion, not a lie, but not meetingthe issue either.”38 Schlesinger later claimedthat the letter was his idea and that he hadcontacted Oppenheimer and the others toask for their cooperation. However, giventhe time scale, the text of the letter musthave been agreed on by Hunt before he leftOppenheimer.

A few people saw through the stratagem.Angus Cameron, Howard Fast’s editor atLittle, Brown (who had resigned in protestwhen the firm rejected Spartacus in 1949),commented: “I think of liberals, generallyspeaking, as people who support theestablishment by being niggling little sidecritics who can always be depended on tosupport the establishment when the chips aredown. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., is the classic

example of that.”39 Papers in Schlesinger’sown archives testify to this. He was asource, a consultant (if not a paid one), afriend, a trusted colleague to Frank Wisner,Allen Dulles, and Cord Meyer. Hecorresponded with all of them over morethan two decades on subjects ranging fromthe American Committee for CulturalFreedom and Encounter to the reception ofPasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. He was evenhelping the CIA get coverage for themes itwanted aired, agreeing on one occasion toCord Meyer’s suggestion that he,Schlesinger, “suggest to the editor” of anItalian journal “that he run a series of articleson the problem of civil liberties inside theSoviet system as companion pieces to thearticles on the status of civil liberties insidethe US.”40 And who was to doubt theprobity of Schlesinger, a member of

Kennedy’s Kitchen Cabinet?In the midst of all these maneuvers,

Frank Kermode had been to see a topLondon silk to take advice on O’Brien’s libelaction against Encounter. The solicitorrecommended defending the action on thebasis of an arcane legal defense called“qualified privilege.” A friend of bothKermode and O’Brien urged Kermode notto defend the action. Kermode wavered.Then, invited to lunch at the Garrick withJosselson, he received solemn word thatthere was no truth whatsoever in O’Brien’sallegations. “I am old enough to be yourfather,” Josselson said, “and I would nomore lie to you than I would to my ownson.” Josselson was, of course, lying.“Michael was determined to protect theCongress from damaging revelations, and sowas I,” Diana Josselson later said. “I had no

problem in lying about it. We sort of workedas a double act.”41 “Truth was reserved forthe inside,” Tom Braden later wrote. “Tothe outsider, CIA men learned to lie, to lieconsciously and deliberately without theslightest tinge of the guilt that most men feelwhen they tell a deliberate lie.”42

Other than taking Kermode to lunch atthe Garrick Club, what else did MichaelJosselson do? A trial involving Encounterwould result in exposure of evidenceregarding its less-than-conventional fundingand publishing arrangements, evidencewhich would have been especiallyembarrassing in the light of repeated officialdenials. And yet, curiously, Josselson failedto ensure that the whole thing was settledout of court, and instead allowed Kermodeto go ahead. O’Brien had even offered todrop the action if an apology was printed. It

was certainly within Josselson’s power tostop the whole thing. But he didn’t.

Conor Cruise O’Brien, meanwhile, hadchosen to have the writ for libel served in aDublin court. To Kermode’s horror, helearned that the defense of qualified privilegewas not recognized in Ireland. Encounter’slegal advisers now recommended theysimply ignore the writ, as the magazine hadno assets in Ireland. But before Kermodehad time to consider this advice, he wasovertaken by events which instantly madethe Encounter defense redundant.

24

View from the Ramparts

There was a girl in Norfolk, Virginia, whowas suing a man for alleged rape. The judgesaid to her: “When did this rape occur?”“When did it occur, Judge?” said she. “Why,hell, it was rape, rape, rape all summer long.”

Michael Josselson

In early 1966, the CIA learned that theCalifornia-based magazine Ramparts waspursuing leads on the Agency’s network offront organizations. Richard Helms, deputydirector for plans, immediately appointed aspecial assistant to pull together “information

on Ramparts, including any evidence ofsubversion [and] devising proposals for[CIA] counteraction.”1 By May 1966,Helms was feeding the White House withthe inside “dope” on Ramparts as part of acampaign to smear the magazine, its editors,and its contributors. Much of theinformation supplied by Helms had beenproduced as the result of a trawl throughAgency records, with additional dirt suppliedcourtesy of the FBI.2

Helms, who was convinced thatRamparts was being used as a vehicle by theSoviets, ordered a full investigation of itsfinancing but failed to turn up any evidenceof foreign involvement. After readingthrough the Ramparts file, presidentialassistant Peter Jessup penned a memo withthe memorable subject line “A Right Crossto the Left Temple”: “In view of Ramparts’

dedication to smearing the Administrationand the murky background of itssponsorship, one might think that someagency of the government would bepursuing the threads involved here.”3 Aweek later, the magazine Human Events rana smear under the title “The Inside Story of‘Ramparts’ Magazine.” Its journalists weredismissed as “snoops,” “eccentrics,”“ventriloquists,” and “bearded NewLeftniks” who had a “get-out-of-Vietnamfixation.” Signed by one M.M. Morton, “thepen name of an expert on internal securityaffairs,” the article bore all the hallmarks ofa CIA plant—as did a News-Weekly piece ofthe same week, “Who Really Mans theRamparts?,” and an article in theWashington Star, both of which announced“serious doubts about the bona fides” ofRamparts, which was described as “not only

a muckraker, but a muckraker with amalevolent motive.”

For more than a year the CIA dideverything it could to sink Ramparts. “I hadall sorts of dirty tricks to hurt theircirculation and financing,” deputy inspectorgeneral Edgar Applewhite later confessed.“The people running Ramparts werevulnerable to blackmail. We had awful thingsin mind, some of which we carried off. . . .We were not the least inhibited by the factthat the CIA had no internal security role inthe United States.”4

Amazingly, given the awfulness of theCIA’s intentions, Ramparts survived to tellthe tale. Just as the CIA feared, Rampartswent ahead and published its investigationinto CIA covert operations in April 1967.The magazine’s findings were swiftly pickedup in national newspapers, and an “orgy of

disclosures” followed, leading onecommentator to conclude, “Before verylong, every political society, philanthropictrust, college fraternity and baseball team inAmerica will be identified as a front for theCentral Intelligence Agency.”5 It wasn’t justdomestic American fronts that wereexposed, of course. As details of the CIA’ssponsorship of the Congress for CulturalFreedom and its magazines emerged,everything O’Brien had said aboutEncounter appeared to be true. Spender,who was still in the States at the time thestory broke, went into an instant spin.Desperate to contain him, Josselson andLasky both appealed to Isaiah Berlin, whowas known to have “a moderating effect onStephen’s temperament” and who wasteaching at the City University of New Yorkat the time. “Dear Isaai Mendelevich,” wrote

Josselson on April 8, “what I wanted todiscuss with you cannot very well be doneover the phone. I am very seriouslyconcerned about Stephen and Encounterending up by being real victims of thepresent mess, if Stephen (like Natasha inLondon) keeps on pouring oil on the flames.I am genuinely fond of both of them, hencemy concern, and I also know that if any onecan influence Stephen, it is you. Thesituation is serious indeed, but surelyEncounter’s future cannot be solved bymaking drastic moves under pressure.”6

“There is indeed a problem aboutStephen and Encounter, and Arthur[Schlesinger] who has just informed Laskythat the issue is dead here and there is noneed to have a meeting about all this inLondon is, I think, being somewhatoptimistic,” wrote Berlin by return.

“Whatever may be the reactions here . . .the issue is likely to go boiling on in London,since both Stephen and Kermode are said tobe troubled. It seems to me that whateverthe future of Encounter . . . there will besome sense in publishing some kind ofstatement telling the readers that the editorsof Encounter were not aware of the sourcesof funds to the Congress of [sic] CulturalFreedom; which will be true of at any ratemost of them—how much Lasky did ordidn’t know I have, of course, no means oftelling. . . . At any rate I think you shouldprobably recommend that a meeting of therelevant parties be held in London for thepurpose of settling this issue. Transatlantictelephone calls to Stephen in Chicago, theothers in London, Arthur in New York,yourself in Geneva, etc. etc. won’t beenough. You will never see the situation as a

whole unless there is some kind of meetingto settle the moral, intellectual, andorganisational future of Encounter.”7

In London, meanwhile, Kermode’sdefense of the libel action was irretrievablylost. Furthermore, he was convinced that,although the new sponsorship of Encounterunder Cecil King “was perfectly licit,” themagazine “was still in rather devious waysunder the control (however delicatelychannelled) of the CIA.” Kermode wrote toLasky to detail his complaints and to tell him“that in the absence of very persuasiveexplanations I couldn’t go on working withhim. He didn’t answer the letter but cameout to Gloucestershire to talk it over. As wewalked, hour after hour, round the gardenand paddock, he gave me the fullest accountthat could have been expected of his relationto the Congress and of the history of

Encounter.”8 This was the moment ofLasky’s soi-disant confession: he admitted toKermode that he had known of CIA supportfor some years now, but that he could notpossibly say this publicly.

Soon after—and at Isaiah Berlin’s urging—an emergency meeting of the Encountertrustees was convened, attended by Lasky,Kermode, Spender (who flew back from theStates), Edward Shils, Andrew Schonfield,and William Hayter. They met in a privateroom at Scott’s restaurant on theHaymarket, just a few yards away from theEncounter office. Shils and Schonfielddefended the CIA’s actions, but Kermodeand Spender announced their intention toresign. Lasky refused to resign andinveighed against Spender, calling him ahypocrite. Then he dropped a bombshell.Spender should get off his high horse about

CIA funding and consider this: his salary hadfor years been covered by a subventionfrom the Foreign Office. “Spender becamevery agitated and announced that he wasgoing off to look at some picture in theNational Gallery to calm himself,”9

Kermode remembered.By the time Spender got home to St.

John’s Wood, he was, said Natasha, “in ashocked and angry state. Melvin hadapparently said something to Stephen abouthis salary which Stephen said wascompletely incomprehensible.”10 Spenderdecided to clear the matter up once and forall by speaking to Muggeridge. “Malcolmhad effectively been Stephen’s employerthroughout all this. As it happened, he spoketo Kitty [Malcolm’s wife], who saidMalcolm couldn’t speak to him as he was inScotland. At that very moment, Malcolm

was lying flat on his face in a chancel of aScottish Cistercian monastery being filmedat prayer for a BBC television programcalled A Hard Bed to Lie On. Anyway, anhour after, Malcolm called back. By thistime, Stephen was absolutely fuming. I wason the other phone, so I could hear whatwas said. Stephen said, ‘Malcolm, youalways told me my salary was coming fromthe Daily Telegraph and Alexander Korda.’And Malcolm said, ‘So I did, dear boy, butyou can’t bet your bottom dollar where itreally came from.’ You know that scene inThe 39 Steps, where he’s looking for theman with the missing finger? There’s aterrible moment when he realizes who theman is. That’s the feeling we had whenMuggeridge finally admitted it.”11 EricBentley later told Spender that Lasky, too,had been in on the secret: “Mel told me

there was nothing in the rumors—which Ihave heard for years. When things startedhumming a year ago, I asked him to say‘No’ point blank to a clearly worded letter. .. . Silence. At which point my attitude is:Mel can keep his Cold War.”12 After hisintemperate outburst against Spender and hishuge gaffe in revealing the source of hissalary, Lasky was in a very precariousposition.

Having secured the full backing of CecilKing (who rejected calls for his resignation,saying, “It would surely be folly for us tolose the baby with the bath water”13), Laskynow turned to Isaiah Berlin, writing him anoily letter on April 13. He hoped he was notburdening him, Lasky said, but “you havebeen so much part of our history—oursplendours and, alas, our miseries—that Ifeel you ought to be kept completely

informed.”14 Lasky said that it had beenagreed “that we should end the story byissuing a dignified statement, and also bysettling the O’Brien affair . . . simply andquickly, if possible, on the basis of costs toO’Brien and the publication of the 10 linesof apology he wants. Why not? Emotionsmay rebel, but reason dictates.” Laskyended by asking the great philosopher to“drop me a word with your thoughts andadvice. As you know, they mean much, anddeeply, to me!”15

These were fulsome words for a manrevered by many as “The Prophet” butwhom Lasky privately scorned as “amugwump” and “a fence-sitter.”16 Thetrouble with Berlin, said Lasky, was that“[h]e wasn’t a crusader. There are somecrusaders with temperament who say, devil

take the hindmost, and there are those whoare prudent. In the heat of the campaign youfeel let down, you want to say, like Henrythe Fourth, ‘Where were you?’ ”17 ButBerlin had always been there, the wise manto whom the Washington elite had turned allthose years ago when it first came up withthe idea of embracing the Non-CommunistLeft. Could he have managed not to knowabout the CIA’s involvement in this?Anecdotal evidence suggests he was aware,though not actually willing to take an activepart. Stuart Hampshire recalled that Berlinwas repeatedly approached by members ofthe intelligence community: “They wereconstantly making overtures to Berlin to bemore involved. I remember they onceapproached him at Aspen, Colorado—thatwas CIA all over, they ran it—because theythought he was the ideal liberal to head up

some organization or other. And he said hewasn’t interested, but he suggested[somebody else].”18 Another story has itthat Berlin “was once asked by one of thelargest American foundations which wantedto ‘cut a swathe’ in philosophy, ‘What canwe do to help you? Pragmatism made agreat contribution, but now is passé; howabout existentialism?’ Berlin had amomentary vision of subsidized CIA cafés inParis, but replied that the only things hewanted were paper, a pen, and theoccasional discussion.”19

In his letter to Berlin, Lasky enclosed thetext of the editorial statement which hadbeen drafted by the trustees, and which wasdue to be printed in the next issue ofEncounter. “In view of recent newspaperreports concerning the employment of CIAfunds by some U.S. foundations to support

cultural and educational organizations, wewish to make the following statement,” itread. “We are distressed by the news that somuch of world-wide American philanthropyfrom U.S. foundations should have beenbased on indirect and covert governmentalsubventions. This practise was unwise,unsound, and deplorable. We find it painfulto learn that some of the grants which, in thepast, came to us from the Congress forCultural Freedom in Paris and which weaccepted in good faith should have derivedfrom such funds, whose real sources wereso obscured. The leading writers andscholars who have been responsiblyassociated with the Congress in Paris havemade it clear that there was never anyinterference in their policies or activities byany donor, known or unknown.ENCOUNTER in its turn has from the

outset been independent and entirely freefrom any form of interference. The Editorsalone have always been solely responsiblefor what they published, and the Congressnever, in any way or on any occasion, hadany say in editorial policy . . .ENCOUNTER continues to exercise itsfreedom to publish what it pleases.”20 Thestatement was never published.21

Berlin, who at this point had noknowledge of Lasky’s collusion in the secretbehind Encounter, as confessed days beforeto Kermode, answered Lasky’s letter onApril 18. He approved of the decision tosettle with O’Brien out of court, and then,with great pragmatism—schadenfreude even—signposted the way out of the complicatedweb: “You could perfectly well say that likeother organizations in need of financialassistance you went to the Congress for

Cultural Freedom; they went to otherFoundations of a prima facie respectablekind; that recipient bodies are not in thehabit of examining the sources of income ofthe prima facie respectable bodies whichsupport them; but that since theserevelations there is natural embarrassmentand reluctance about accepting such sums.This is more or less what the AsiaFoundation [another CIA front] said and itseems to me adequate . . . the proper role ofEncounter is simply to say that they acted asthey did in ignorance . . . and that now thatyou have been made an honest journal ofthe fact that you received grants indirectlyfrom the CIA merely places you on anequality with a great many otherorganizations, who could not possibly havebeen expected to know what the ultimatesources of their funds were, or something of

that kind. Men of sense and goodwill willunderstand this; those who lack it willcontinue to snipe anyway.”22 If Berlin feltany moral repulsion at the complexdeception he was here describing, he didn’tshow it. Rather, he borrowed from therhetoric of the open society to defend whatin reality was the attempted management ofthat society by a closed shop.

Publicly, however, Isaiah Berlin wassoon to take a different tack. When the storyof Encounter’s relationship with the CIAemerged, he spurned the magazine andattacked Josselson and Lasky for having“compromised decent people.” Hisbiographer Michael Ignatieff asserts thatBerlin was as shocked as anybody by thissurreptitious relationship and that “hecertainly had no official or unofficialrelationship with either British intelligence or

the CIA.”23 Ridiculing this claim in hisreview of Ignatieff’s book, ChristopherHitchens wrote, “The Encounter disavowal,taken literally, would mean that Berlin wasabnormally incurious, or duller than we havebeen led to suppose, or had wasted his timein Washington.” Berlin’s double stand on thewhole issue emanated from his allegiance “tothe Anglo-American supranational‘understanding,’ ” which, says Hitchens,“frequently bore the stamp of realpolitikand, well, calculation.”24

The trustees’ meeting at Scott’srestaurant having resolved nothing, a secondemergency conference was called for theweekend of April 21, for which ArthurSchlesinger now flew in from New York.According to Natasha Spender, it wasdecided at this meeting that Lasky shouldresign, and he agreed to do so. This would

be announced in a statement of the trusteesto be published in Encounter. Lasky hadopened by making a “terrific personal attackon Stephen, saying that he must’ve knownwhat was going on. All the other trusteestold Lasky that this was totally out of orderand should be struck from the record,”25

Natasha recalled. Edward Shils said hewould find a position for Lasky in Chicago,and the next week Shils flew back with thataim in view. But the day after the meeting,Lasky had changed his mind, saying he hadno intention of resigning, and he wasn’tgoing to agree to the statement at all.

A few days before this meeting, Natashatook a telephone call from Michael Josselsonin Geneva: “And he told me not to rock theboat, and he went on and on about how hewas trying to protect Stephen. And I think Isaid, ‘Whose boat? I don’t think Stephen

and Frank are in the same boat as Mel.’ ”26

Having failed to calm either Natasha orStephen by telephone, Josselson now tried adifferent tactic. In an attempt to removethem both from the fray, he hinted to JunkieFleischmann that maybe the Spendersneeded a holiday. But it didn’t wash. “I wasabsolutely furious with Junkie when, on topof everything that was going on, he sent us atelegram saying would we like to spend aweek on his yacht,” fumed NatashaSpender. “We sent him a stinker back, andthat was that. We never saw him again.”27

The Junkie proposal came to nothing, soJosselson now wrote directly to Stephen.First, he said that Lasky’s comments at thetrustees’ meeting about the Foreign Officesubvention had been misinterpreted, theresult of a confusion, and that he had onlybeen referring to a rumor which had

disturbed him deeply. “I was afraid that ifMel was sufficiently nettled he would do justwhat he finally did at the Trustees’ meeting.I had tried to prevent this as best I could andhence my plea to you and to Natasha not torock the boat too much and my assurancethat I was only trying to protect everybody. Igot particularly alarmed after I heard fromBrigitte Lasky that Natasha had snubbed herat a recent party.” Josselson went on to saythat Natasha Spender had been publicly andbitterly critical of Lasky. “In view of whatshe’s been through, I forgive Natashaeverything,” wrote Josselson. “But thisconversation with her convinced me that itwas not only a matter of her disliking Mel,but of her hating him—excuse the harshword—pathologically.”28 Josselson went onto apologize for Lasky’s outburst againstSpender—“Mel has since told me how much

he regrets having let himself get carriedaway”—and implored Spender not to resign.“I still believe that Encounter is a trulymagnificent achievement and I would hate tosee it go under, and go under ignominiously,if the three of you—because obviously Melwould also resign—cannot view what hashappened more dispassionately, morephilosophically.”29 Josselson offered apalliative: he hinted heavily that Lasky wasdue for a career change (“I think he shouldlook for a situation in the academic world”)and that the tenth anniversary of hiseditorship of Encounter, due in 1968, would“be psychologically a good time” for him toleave. Josselson also revealed that he hadexperienced “recurring moments of despair”over the whole affair, but that this was givena perspective by “a much greater problem . .. that of remaining an American citizen in

the face of the war in Vietnam.” Finally, hesaid he had had no ulterior motives forkeeping the funding secret: “I was in aposition to help hundreds of people all overthe world do what they themselves wantedto to do, whether it was to write books,paint pictures, pursue certain studies, travelwhen and where they wanted to go, or editmagazines. . . . All this I enjoyed doing, andif you think the CIA got anything out of it,believe me, the shoe was on the otherfoot!”30

On May 8, 1967, the New York Timesran a front-page story under the headline“Stephen Spender Quits Encounter.”Spender was quoted as saying he had heardrumors for several years that the magazinewas being supported by CIA funds, “but Iwas never able to confirm anything until amonth ago. In view of the revelations that

have been made and allegations which maystill be made about past sources ofEncounter funds, I feel that any editor whowas knowingly or unknowingly involved inreceiving these should resign. I have doneso.”31 So did Kermode, which left onlyLasky at the helm. And there he clung,despite calls for his resignation and to theconsternation of Josselson, who knew thegame was up. Later that afternoon, astatement was issued by Cecil King: “Weconsider that Encounter without Mr Laskywould be as interesting as Hamlet withoutthe prince.”

“When the whole thing blew, I was inPortofino with Isaiah and other friends,”Stuart Hampshire recalled. “I remember thatsix of us cabled in defense of Stephen inLondon, but Mary McCarthy refused tosign, saying, ‘Oh, you’re just turning on our

little New York boy.’ Stephen was veryupset, and Natasha even more so. Andparticularly with Lasky. But why were theysurprised at his behavior? Did they reallyexpect him to resign? I mean, that’s notwhat he would have done. Of course not.”32

Writing to Spender some days later,Muggeridge said that he found it “monstrousthat in spite of everything Mel should remainin the chair.”33

Some days after Spender’s resignation,Natasha, accompanied by a friend, went tocollect his belongings from the Encounteroffice. To her horror, she found thatStephen’s “locked cupboard had beenbroken into, and [Lasky’s secretary] said,‘Oh well, we had a burglary here last week.’”34 Stuart Hampshire, who had beggedSpender “to keep a record of everything, to

maintain a personal archive,” was notsurprised when he later learned of this. Itwas, he said, “obvious.”35

25

That Sinking Feeling

You think you aredoing the pushing,But it is you who arebeing pushed.

Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust

On May 13, five days after Spender andKermode resigned, Michael Josselson andJohn Hunt found themselves sitting in whathad been Josselson’s office on the secondfloor of the Boulevard Haussman. Josselson,accompanied by Diana and Jennifer, hadarrived in Paris from Geneva, where from

his sparsely elegant flat in the Plateau duChampel he had been battling tirelessly forthe past weeks to contain the fallout. In thestreets below the Boulevard Haussman,cafés were opening to welcome the Saturdayshoppers as they disgorged into the springsunshine. Somewhere amongst them, Dianawas taking Jennifer to buy a costume for herend-of-term ballet recital. But she wasdistracted and moved through the crowdtowards the Galeries Lafayette feelingstrangely disengaged.

In a room adjoining the office whereJosselson and Hunt sat, the GeneralAssembly of the Congress for CulturalFreedom was locked in conference. Chairedby Minoo Masani (leader of the oppositionparty in India), the meeting consisted ofRaymond Aron, Daniel Bell, PierreEmmanuel, Louis Fischer, Anthony Hartley,

K.A.B. Jones-Quartey, Ezekiel Mphahlele,Nicolas Nabokov, Hans Oprecht, MichaelPolanyi, Denis de Rougemont, YoshihikoSeki, Edward Shils, Ignazio Silone, andManès Sperber. Flying in from all corners ofthe globe, they faced the unenviable task ofpassing judgment on Josselson and Hunt—whose letters of resignation lay on the tablebefore them—and deciding the fate of theCongress. Sitting like philosopher-kings, theyknew that their word would be final.

“Mike and I sat in his office most of theday right beside the meeting room,”remembered John Hunt. “We sat there alone—what do you do at such a moment, withthe jury across the hall?”1 Michael sat insilence, his slender, well-manicured fingersdrumming on the desk. He looked tired—tired of waiting here this morning, tired fromthe last two decades of relentless work. His

hair was side-parted and combed across thedome of his head, revealing a high foreheadand small eyes at the center of which sathuge black pupils.

The “jury,” meanwhile, debated theevidence. For two decades, MichaelJosselson had maintained an enormous lie—with John Hunt a secondary transgressor,having been involved in the deception foronly half that time. The seriousness of thisconcealment had immediate implications forhundreds of people. Beyond that, itpresented a moral dilemma that would neverbe easily resolved. Both men had madestatements about their relationship with theCIA and its relationship, in turn, to theCongress. Josselson had accepted fullresponsibility for what he still maintainedhad been a necessary lie. The GeneralAssembly’s opprobrium was by no means

guaranteed. Sperber, Polanyi, and Silonespoke up for Josselson and Hunt and urgedthe Assembly to take “a fighting position.”Sperber said something to the effect of “Tohell with all this, we don’t care what theNew York Times says! We helped set this upand run it for fifteen years, we’ve dealt withtougher things than this in our political life,so let’s just go on as before, if there’ssupport for it.”2 But there wasn’t. Aron andEmmanuel, especially, were bound to seethings a little differently. As Frenchmenbelonging to an organization based in Pariswhich was now tainted by associations withAmerican intelligence, their reputations hungin the balance. “They had a huge stake inthis,” Hunt later said.3 Aron, in fact, was sovexed by the matter before him that hewithdrew stormily from the meeting,slamming the door as he left the room.

By lunchtime, no agreement had beenreached, and at Masani’s suggestion theytook a break. Reconvening in the afternoon,the meeting dragged on until finally, at sixo’clock, Nabokov and de Rougemontappeared before Josselson and Hunt, thedraft statement of the Assembly in theirhands. “They read it out to Michael, me andHunt,” said Diana, who had left Jenniferwith a friend to admire her new tutu andtaken up position at her husband’s side. “Itwas shameful. There was no reference toMichael’s and John’s contribution. Michaeland John went pale-faced and walked out.Nicolas and Denis said to me, ‘What do youthink?’ I said, ‘I think it stinks.’ I think I wasweeping.”4 Why, asked Diana from behindbitter tears, was there no mention ofMichael’s devotion to the Congress, hisunswerving dedication to the cause of

cultural freedom? Why had they ignored thefact that without Michael, and indeed John,there would have been no Congress at all?Was this how intellectuals repaid the man towhom they were all indebted? Raising theirskirts and fleeing at the first sign of trouble?Was no one prepared to stand and fight?

At this point, Nabokov, always a man offlamboyant gestures, clutched his chest andhad—or faked—a heart episode. Somebodywas dispatched to get a glass of water andan aspirin. His confusion at this moment, ifnot the swooning fit, was genuine. Whatcould Michael have expected? These werehis friends, and he had misled them all theseyears. He had concealed the fact that he wasa CIA employee, that the Congress forCultural Freedom was the child of a covertCIA operation. What mettle was he made ofthat he now showed such indignant hurt?

Did he really believe himself to be a manmore sinned against than sinning? Suddenly,Nabokov, the man whose fortunes had beenso deeply linked to Josselson’s, began to seemore clearly. This was Michael’s life, hisfaith. It was all he had. There was nothingelse.

Nabokov and de Rougemont, horrified atthe idea they had behaved ungraciously,promised Diana that they would persuadethe General Assembly to redraft thestatement. Mollified, Diana went out to lookfor Michael and John. A while later, theylistened as the revised communiqué wasread out. The next day, it was released tothe world’s press.

“The General Assembly . . . expresseddeep regret that the information conveyed toit had confirmed reports that CentralIntelligence Agency funds had been used . . .

and that the Executive Director should havefound it necessary to accept such aidwithout the knowledge of any of hiscolleagues. The Assembly affirmed its pridein the achievements of the Congress since itsestablishment in 1950. It wished to expressits conviction that its activities had beenentirely free of influence or pressure fromany financial backers and its confidence inthe independence and integrity of all thosewho had collaborated in its work. Itcondemned in the strongest terms the way inwhich the CIA had deceived thoseconcerned and had caused their efforts to becalled into question. The effect of suchaction, the Assembly stated, tends to poisonthe wells of intellectual discourse. TheAssembly repudiated entirely theemployment of such methods in the worldof ideas. . . . The Assembly took note of the

resignations tendered by [Michael Josselson]and [John Hunt]. It expressed its renewedgratitude to them for the fact that despite thedifficulties attendant on the mode offinancing of Congress activities theymaintained the complete independence andintellectual integrity of the organization andconsequently requested them to continue toperform their duties.”5

The wording of the statement was, inmany ways, disingenuous. Firstly,Josselson’s resignation was accepted by theAssembly. This was later confirmed by bothDiana Josselson and John Hunt, who said,“My distinct recollection was that Mike,whatever the minutes may say, was in effecttold that he couldn’t stay on. I was in adifferent category—in their minds—so thisdidn’t apply to me.”6 Secondly—and moreimportantly—it was simply inadequate to

say that Josselson had accepted CIA aid“without the knowledge of any of hiscolleagues.” “I can tell you that several ofthe most important Congress people knewthe truth because their governments had toldthem,” Hunt later revealed. “Aron was told.Malraux obviously knew. And so didMuggeridge and Warburg, who were told byMI6 after the two agencies reached anagreement regarding Encounter.”7

“Who didn’t know, I’d like to know? Itwas a pretty open secret,”8 said Lawrencede Neufville. The list of those who knew—or thought they knew—is long enough:Stuart Hampshire, Arthur Schlesinger,Edward Shils (who confessed to NatashaSpender that he had known since 1955),Denis de Rougemont, Daniel Bell, LouisFischer, George Kennan, Arthur Koestler,Junkie Fleischmann, François Bondy, James

Burnham, Willy Brandt, Sidney Hook,Melvin Lasky, Jason Epstein, MaryMcCarthy, Pierre Emmanuel, Lionel Trilling,Diana Trilling, Sol Levitas, RobertOppenheimer, Sol Stein, Dwight Macdonald.Not all of them were “witting” in the sensethat they were active participants in thedeception. But they all knew, and hadknown for some time. And if they didn’t,they were, said their critics, cultivatedly, andculpably, ignorant. “Mike did try and tellsome people, but they said they didn’t wantto know,” Hunt claimed. “They knew, andthey knew as much as they wanted to know,and if they knew anymore, they knew theywould have had to get out, so they refusedto know.”9 Attending the General Assemblymeeting as an observer was the Australianpoet James McAuley, founding editor ofQuadrant. He noted that “there was a

contradiction between their wish to (1)support Mike in friendship—and in honestybecause none of them had been really muchdeceived—and (2) take up a public positionof outraged innocence.”10 Hunt’s wife,Chantal, who had worked for the FrenchMinistry of Culture and, briefly, for theCongress, was dismissive of such moralfuzziness: “Everyone in France, in my circleat least, knew the truth about who wasbehind the Congress,” she claimed. “Theyall talked about it. They would say, ‘Why doyou want to go and work there? It’s CIA.’Everyone knew except, apparently, thosewho worked for it. Isn’t that odd? I alwaysthought so.”11 “Mostly they all deniedknowing anything about it,” said DianaJosselson, “but they made crummy liars.”12

And what of Nicolas Nabokov, who had

made every step of the journey from thoseearly days in Berlin to this painfuldenouement in Paris alongside Josselson?Did he really believe his own angry rebuttalto charges of CIA involvement, in which hehad said, “I deny everything. The Congressfor Cultural Freedom . . . has never had anylink, direct or indirect, with the CIA . . . thewhole thing has been set up by the Soviets”?13 Could anyone seriously believe thatNabokov, in all these years, had never beentold—or figured out for himself—that“behind this stood the heavy guns of ‘theVirginian woods’ ” (his own words)? MaryMcCarthy’s story, in which Nabokovapparently revealed the truth to Spender in aLondon taxi, suggests otherwise, as doesChantal Hunt’s recollection of Nabokovtelling her “in conspiratorial whispers overlunch one day” that he knew. Stuart

Hampshire later noted with some irony thatNabokov “wasn’t particularly devastated atthe revelations.”14 As Nabokov stood beforeJosselson on that miserable day of May 13,waving a resolution in his face whichcondemned him for deceiving his colleagues,the fact that he was eminently unsuited topass judgment appeared not to drive a fumeacross his mind.

In his memoirs, Nabokov damned the“abysmal and needless impropriety of themethod of thinking (or absence of thinking)that preceded the decision to pass moneythrough the CIA to cultural organizations.”15

He added that this was “especially glaringwhen one thinks that the Cold War was thetoughest, most complex ideological war sincethe early Nineteenth Century, and that thisimpropriety occurred in a country that usedto have a century-old tradition of what

Camus called ‘moral forms of politicalthinking.’ It still hurts me to think of those‘wanton bruises of immorality’ and the factthat a marvellous structure built with loveand care by brilliantly intelligent, dedicated,and profoundly incorruptible freethinkingmen and women was dragged into the mudand destroyed because of the oldest andmost persistent hubris: unreasoned action.”16

Privately, though, Nabokov showed nothingof this moral indignation: “I do not feel thatone should be apologetic about the fundingof the Congress from the CIA,” he told onecorrespondent. “Many of us suspected somesort of funding of this kind and it was the‘talk of the town’ in many capitals ofEurope, Asia, Latin America and Africa.The point is not the funding, but what theCongress has done.”17

Feeling much like a contemporary Job—

the “perfect and upright” man harassed forhis virtue—Josselson left Paris after firstseeing his doctors and then meetingMcGeorge Bundy, presumably to discuss theimplications for the CIA of the exposures(according to the Washington Post,McGeorge Bundy was the man whosupervised the CIA’s operations underKennedy and Johnson). Back in Geneva, hehad barely time to unpack before thevolcano erupted. In the wake of the GeneralAssembly’s acknowledgment that the CIAhad subsidized the Congress, newspapersacross the world had a field day. Josselsoncollapsed, leaving Diana to answer a barrageof angry telephone calls. To the Spenders,she wrote that Josselson’s “day-and-nightcontinuous battle under constant strain,trying to save what he can of the Congress”work in some form or another has me in a

state of perpetual worry. . . . The messcontinues; it’s like a Hydra.”18 Utterlydespondent, she declared, “I want out, and anew life, and never to have anything to dowith all these people ever again, except on abasis of friendship with those who arefriends.”19

But the issue of friendship itself had nowbecome hopelessly confused. “My dearMike,” wrote Natasha Spender, “It’s theHUMAN aspect which is so distressing. Ican see, looking back in the light of presentknowledge, that everybody has been aprisoner of this situation in different degreesand ways. It must have been awful for youto have to deceive your friends to whomyou have always been so benevolent. ButI’m sure it was wrong of the CIA to expectit, for the repercussions in personal tormentand relationships are endless, and if one

minds intensely, as one does, then onegrieves over trusts broken which cannot beretrieved . . . So it really comes back to thefact that if a colleague withholdsinformation, he is robbing his colleagues oftheir freedom and their honour, which inturn destroys the trust of their friends andultimately too many people have suffered . .. I expect that you too, are relieved to be outof a false situation which robbed you of theright to be candid to your friends. . . . Whatwas really wrong about the silence imposedon you by the CIA is (from their point ofview) that requiring you to treat your friendsthis way was forcing you to adopt the sameethics as the Communists and thereforemaking their methods of the West somehowon a par with those of the East in thatrespect.”20

The “shit-storm,” as Josselson would

later refer to it, continued unabating.Incredibly, it was Tom Braden who nowwhipped it up to new furies when he pennedan article for the Saturday Evening Post.Appearing under the headline “I’m Glad theCIA Is ‘Immoral’ ” in the May 20 edition, itwas written, said Braden, to correct the“concatenation of inane, misinformedtwaddle” appearing in the newspapers. ButBraden did more than correct inaccuracies:he volunteered hitherto secret informationwhich would never have been uncovered byother means—solid proof to end all theambiguities (and the possibility of any moredenials). Explaining that those on the left in1950s Europe “were the only people whogave a damn about fighting Communism,”21

he gave a detailed account of how theInternational Organizations Division hadsought convergence with these people. He

described the IOD’s relationship withAmerican labor officials and even accusedVictor Reuther of spending CIA money“with less than perfect wisdom.” Heconfirmed that money “for the publication ofEncounter” had been provided by the CIA,and then went on to claim that “an agentbecame an editor of Encounter.” He addedthat CIA agents planted in this way “couldnot only propose anti-Communist programsto the official leaders of the organizations,but they could also suggest ways and meansto solve the inevitable budgetary problems.Why not see if the needed money could beobtained from ‘American foundations’? Asthe agents knew, the CIA-financedfoundations were quite generous when itcame to the national interest.”22 Listing thebattery of fronts deployed by the IOD,Braden said, “By 1953 we were operating or

influencing international organizations inevery field.”23 Operating? Influencing? Ofcourse, had he wanted to, he could simplyhave written of “support,” “friendly advice.”This was, after all, the official line which theAgency had always spun.

The effect of Braden’s article was tosink the CIA’s covert association with theNon-Communist Left once and for all. Sowhat possessed him to write it? His ownexplanation was that his old friend StewartAlsop rang him up in California and askedhim to write a piece for the SaturdayEvening Post to set the record straight. “Ithink I regarded it as catching up withhistory,” Braden said. “I was in on thebeginning, and it was now twenty yearslater, and there were still things going on,and my thought was, it’s become ridiculous,it’s time to stop this pony show.”24 Braden

began drafting the article in early March.With a long lead of nearly three months, hehad plenty of time to finesse it. He andAlsop conferred several times by telephone,and Braden sent several drafts in, each onebecoming more and more revelatory.

Braden himself claimed he wanted “toset the record straight,” iron out themistruths. But in his article, he deliberatelydisguised code names, giving his own asWarren G. Haskins when it was Homer D.Hoskins. Why, in the midst of his incendiaryrevelations, did Braden bother to protectcode names? Was he thinking of the secrecyagreement which every CIA agent signed aspart of the swearing-in process? When askedabout this secrecy agreement, Braden gavean extraordinary answer: “They could’vereminded me of my secrecy agreement, butI had forgotten I’d even signed it. Cross my

heart, I didn’t know I had signed a secrecyagreement. I had signed it, but I didn’tremember this. If I had remembered, Iwouldn’t have done it.”25 “If Tom wasplaying by the rules as a retiree, he wouldhave had to get approval for what hewrote,” said Lawrence de Neufville. “I don’tthink he was playing by the rules.”26

There is another scenario, one to whichseveral CIA agents—and even Bradenhimself—later found themselves attracted.“Tom was a company man, and he knew allabout the secrecy agreement,” said JohnHunt. “This agreement had been invoked inthe past, and Braden, if he was really actingindependently, would have had much tofear. My belief is that he was an instrumentdown the line somewhere of those whowanted to get rid of the NCL [Non-Communist Left]. Don’t look for a lone

gunman—that’s mad, just as it is with theKennedy assassination. There were lots ofinterested parties. Braden is witting only upto a point. Maybe [Richard] Helms calledhim and said, ‘I’ve got a job for you.’ I dobelieve there was an operational decision toblow the Congress and the other programsout of the water. I discussed Braden’s piecewith Mike, and we hypothesized that it waspart of a coordinated, authorized operationto end the CIA’s alliance with the NCL. Butwe never got to the bottom of it.”27

Jack Thompson also speculated alongthe same lines. “An old device when youwant to run down an operation is, you blowit. I have an imaginary scenario: PresidentJohnson is sitting at his desk in the OvalOffice, and he’s shuffling through somepapers. He finds a copy of Encountermagazine. And he says, ‘Hey, what’s this?’

And someone says, ‘It’s your magazine, Mr.President.’ And he says, ‘My magazine? Mymagazine! These are guys who think my waris wrong, and they’re writing in mymagazine?’ And that’s it.”28

Thompson’s fictional scenario is worthlooking into. Lyndon Baines Johnson was aman of the 1930s, the poor Texas boy afloatin the world of East Coast sophisticates, andhe had no truck with all those intellectuals,no sense of the glamour which hadsurrounded Jack Kennedy’s Athenianinterlude. Johnson’s idea of a culturalfestival was limited to something that “wouldplease the ladies.” Two years beforeBraden’s article appeared, on June 14, 1965,American intellectuals had turned a WhiteHouse Festival of the Arts—originallyconceived by the Johnson’s advisers as “atool to quiet opposition to the war”—into an

angry platform on Vietnam. Robert Lowellhad refused his invitation (duly noted in hisFBI file), as had Edmund Wilson, with a“brusqueness” that stunned the festival’sorganizer, Eric Goldman. Dwight Macdonalddid attend, but arrived bearing a petitionsupporting Lowell and denouncing Americanpolicy which was signed by Hannah Arendt,Lillian Hellman, Alfred Kazin, Larry Rivers,Philip Roth, Mark Rothko, William Styron,and Mary McCarthy (among the uninvited).Over dinner, Macdonald collected nine moresignatures, almost coming to blows withCharlton Heston, who accused Macdonaldof being short of “elementary manners” andasked him, “Are you really accustomed tosigning petitions against your host in hishome?”29 Johnson was left with the feelingafterwards that the White House had beentaken over by “a gang of traitors.”30

The event was an unmitigated disaster,and “President Johnson’s reaction to it hadadded bricks to a wall between the Presidentand these groups,” according to EricGoldman. “Mercifully, much of the storywas unknown. But enough had becomepublic to make the wall seem as impassableas the barbed concrete between East andWest Berlin.”31 Johnson was quoted assaying there was a conspiracy between“these people” to insult him and his officeand “to hurt their country at a time ofcrisis.”32 They were “sonsofbitches,”“fools,” “traitors” who had blown a minorevent “into a situation which could haveanything but minor significance.” Thepresident also told two of his aides, RichardGoodwin and Bill Moyers, that he was “notgoing to have anything more to do with theliberals. They won’t have anything to do

with me. They all just follow the Communistline—liberals, intellectuals, Communists.They’re all the same.”33

James Burnham, who had helped toharness the Congress for Cultural Freedomto the CIA in its earliest days but who haddone so in the interests of a veryconservative kind of realpolitik, saw in theshambles proof of what he had long beenwarning was a “fundamental flaw” in theCIA’s thinking. “The CIA mounted most ofthese activities in the perspective of ‘thenon-Communist Left,’ ” he wrote. “The CIAestimated the NCL as a reliably anti-Communist force which in action would be,if not pro-Western and pro American, at anyrate not anti-Western and anti-American.This political estimate is mistaken. The NCLis not reliable. Under the pressure of criticalevents the NCL loosened. A large portion—

in this country as in others—swung towardan anti-American position, and nearly all theNCL softened its attitude towardCommunism and the Communist nations.Thus the organizational collapse is derivativefrom the political error. This political error isthe doctrine that the global struggle againstCommunism must be based on the NCL—adoctrine fastened on CIA by Allen Dulles.Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and aboveall Vietnam have put the NCL doctrine andpractice to a decisive test. A large part of theorganizations and individuals nurtured byCIA under the NCL prescription end upundermining the nation’s will and hamperingor sabotaging the nation’s security.”34 Theidea that Lyndon Johnson might havesubsequently interested himself in thedissolution of the CIA’s relationship with theNon-Communist Left is not hard to imagine.

The most interesting clue to what reallyhappened lies in the question of Braden’ssecrecy agreement. At 2 p.m. onWednesday, April 19, 1967, Walt Rostow,Johnson’s special assistant, typed a “secretmemo” to the president which read simply:“I assume you know of the forthcomingBraden article on the CIA in the SaturdayEvening Post. Here is the story from DickHelms.” Braden’s piece appeared in the May20, 1967, edition of the Post, fully a monthafter Rostow had notified the president of it.Richard Helms, who was now director ofthe CIA, was, according to Rostow’s memo,aware of the article and conceivably of itscontents also. The CIA had ample time inwhich to invoke its secrecy agreement withBraden and prevent him publishing thepiece.

Rostow’s memory on the matter was

unsure. “I knew Braden only socially as anamiable person to talk to. I don’t rememberthe memorandum. I don’t remember hispiece,” he said. “I assume Helms told me,and I assume I told the president. But itwasn’t a big deal, it didn’t impress me at thetime.”35 Why then would Rostow havebothered to write a secret memo to thepresident about something which didn’timpress him? “Anything that would create apolitical item that would have an effect onthe presidency, I would keep himinformed,”36 Rostow replied, somewhatcontradictorily.

In fact, Rostow and Helms had plenty ofoccasion to keep the president informed. AtRostow’s suggestion, Dick Helms had beeninvited to attend the Tuesday Lunch, themost important high-level national securitymeeting in the Johnson years, “because I

thought the president should have anintelligence man he could consult with.”37

The subject of discussion at these weeklylunches by 1967 was almost exclusivelyVietnam.

Another question: why was the CIA soconcerned about the Ramparts’ stories thatthey mounted a full-scale intelligenceoperation and yet made no attempt to stopBraden? “I think it’s quite probable that theywere anxious to get rid of all these things,”Braden concluded. “Stewart [Alsop] mayhave known this. I always assumed that bythis time there would’ve been those in theAgency who wanted to get rid of things likethis that were virtually blown already.Everyone knew—the cognoscenti, andpeople like Stew certainly knew that thesethings were all CIA fronts. I always had it inthe back of my mind that they wanted it

killed, but I can’t prove it.”38

Stewart Alsop “was a CIA agent,”according to one high-level CIA official.Other sources said Alsop was particularlyhelpful to the Agency in discussions withofficials of foreign governments—askingquestions to which the CIA was seekinganswers, planting misinformationadvantageous to the United States, andassessing opportunities for CIA recruitmentof well-placed foreigners. Stewart’s brotherJoseph dismissed as “absolute nonsense” theclaim that Stewart was an “agent,” saying, “Iwas closer to the Agency than Stew was,though Stew was very close.”39 But he wenton: “I dare say he did perform some tasks—he did the correct thing as an American. . . .The Founding Fathers [of the CIA] wereclose personal friends of ours. . . . It was asocial thing. I have never received a dollar, I

never signed a secrecy agreement. I didn’thave to . . . I’ve done things for them whenI thought they were the right thing to do. Icall it doing my duty as a citizen. . . . TheCIA did not open itself at all to people it didnot trust. Stew and I were trusted, and I’mproud of it.” Stewart Alsop referred toDulles and his crowd as the “braveeasterners,” and reveled in being part of that“tight establishment, the bruderbund.”40

In one crucial respect, Braden’s articledid not have the expected outcome. Hisclaim that the Agency had planted an agentat Encounter could only have been intendedto expose that agent and precipitate hisresignation. This man, Braden laterelaborated, “was one of our agents, a manof distinct intellectual achievement andwriting ability, and we paid his salary.”41

Irving Kristol, who was now co-editor with

Daniel Bell of a journal called the PublicInterest (which had been launched with thehelp of a generous grant of $10,000 fromJosselson), was landed right in the soup.“When Tom Braden published that article,saying that there had been a CIA agent atEncounter, I was furious, because I knewdamn well that I had not been a CIA agent,and I certainly knew that Stephen Spenderhad not been a CIA agent,” he later said.“What in God’s name Mr. Braden had inmind when he wrote that article I do notknow.”42 Spender, who was never in theframe, said: “I just can’t believe it wasKristol, I really can’t. I know it wasn’tme.”43

That left Lasky. Years later, he was,predictably, totally scornful of Braden’sclaim, calling him “a doddery, foolish oldman.” Dismissing the whole affair as so

much James Bond melodrama, “thesyndrome of the spy-and-the-molenetwork,” Lasky said, “I’ve never edited aCIA magazine and I never have and neverwill.”44 Who was the CIA agent? “Was ityou? Was it me? Was it who?” he replied.“Listen, we did what we did. No, no, no,this was a fantasia, and not to be takenseriously, certainly not by historians.”45 ButBraden, thirty years later, was categorical.There was no fantasy.

The Josselsons were devastated byBraden’s betrayal. “I’ve always kept suchnice memories of you at the six day bikeraces, etc. not to mention a high regard foryour professional performance, so that I amall the more sad at the gratuitous betrayal ofMike and his friends in your article,” wroteDiana. “Your totally false statement clearlyimplicating Irving K., whom you apparently

forgot was completely unwitting . . . hascreated a situation of chaos and personalsuffering which I believe you cannotimagine, though you may realize you havedealt a deathblow to a good magazine. . . .As I know from lived experience through allthese gruelling years, and as you must knowin your heart, too, Tom: if ever there was aman who was a free agent, who answeredonly to the dictates of his own conscience, itwas [Mike].”46 Diana ended by imploringBraden to issue an apology and retract hisstatement that Josselson was planted inCongress. Her letter was never answered.

Curiously, despite what wouldtechnically be known as a “flap” in theAgency, there was apparently only “a littlebit of concern that this wasn’t necessarilythe happiest thing that ever happened.”47

Tom Braden got off without any official

censure. Furthermore, the careers of thoseagents who had been closely involved withthe blown NCL program were in no wayprejudiced. Cord Meyer and his cohorts allmoved swiftly on to bigger and better things(in Meyer’s case, to become London stationchief with responsibility for the entire CIAoperation in Western Europe). Only thosewho had been recruited from the Non-Communist Left itself were now deemeddispensable. Robie Macauley got scuffedaround a bit and, according to DianaJosselson, “eventually they squeezed himout.” He left the Agency—and KenyonReview—for a job as fiction editor ofPlayboy magazine. John Thompson, whohad begun flirting with the New Left in themid-1960s, was also dropped from what heliked to call “the Good Ship Lollipop.”Writing of America in 1968, he told the

Josselsons that everything that wasn’tVietnam was going to be about the AfricanAmericans (though the word he used todescribe them was distinctly colonial).48

Josselson, despite the fact that he hadresigned from the CIA some time before theGeneral Assembly meeting of May 13 (“Heleft primarily to protect the Congress, so thatif asked he could say he was no longer withthe Agency,”49 said Diana), was irretrievablycompromised. His pension was derisory andcertainly no reflection of the enormouscontribution he had made. In 1965,Josselson was “employed” by the FarfieldFoundation as its international director for aperiod of two years at a salary of $21,000,which was paid in twelve installments. Now,in principle at least, the CIA had no furtherfinancial obligations towards Josselson. ButFrank Platt and John Thompson, conscious

that he had been left high and dry, arrangeda termination retirement plan for Josselsonof $30,000 a year, payable from the capitalreserve of the Farfield. According toThompson, this reserve amounted to $1million. Unable, for some reason, to returnthis fund to its donors, Thompson suggestedthat it be made immediately available.50

Josselson’s handshake, more brass thangolden, accounted for a fraction of the“termination fund” of the Farfield. How therest was disbursed is not recorded.

Even before the Ramparts’ exposuresappeared, Senator Mike Mansfielddemanded a wide-ranging congressionalinvestigation of all clandestine financing bythe CIA. President Johnson opted insteadfor a special three-man committee composedof undersecretary of state NicholasKatzenbach; secretary of health, education,

and welfare John Gardner; and CIA directorRichard Helms. The KatzenbachCommittee’s final report, issued on March29, 1967, concluded, “It should be thepolicy of the U.S. government that nofederal agency shall provide any covertfinancial assistance or support, direct orindirect, to any of the nation’s educational orprivate voluntary organizations.”51 Thereport set December 31, 1967, as the targetdate for the termination of all such covertagency funding. This was to allow the CIAopportunity to make a “number ofsubstantial terminal grants”—a techniqueknown as “surge funding”—to many of itsoperations (in the case of Radio FreeEurope, this was enough to carry it over fora full two years of operations).

The Katzenbach report has been widelyreferred to as the instrument by which the

government enjoined the CIA in future fromthis type of activity. But the CIA had a verydifferent interpretation of what it could do inthe post-Katzenbach era. According to theSelect Committee Report on GovernmentIntelligence Activities of 1976, deputydirector of plans Desmond FitzGeraldcirculated the following guidance to all fieldoffices after the report was published: “a.Covert relations with commercial U.S.organizations are not, repeat, not barred. b.Covert funding overseas of foreign-basedinternational organizations is permitted.”52

In other words, in the field ofinternational covert operations, nothing at allhad changed. Thus, when the CIA decidedto continue funding Forum World Features(a Congress for Cultural Freedom spin-off)beyond 1967, it did so with no impediment.For although Johnson adopted the

Katzenbach report as official governmentpolicy, it was not issued as an executiveorder or enacted as a statute. It had no firmlegal status. Reading between the lines (andobserving that there was no bottom line), aneditorial in The Nation judged that the reportwas “piously expedient,” “evasion bydefinition,” and concluded, “Mr Johnson’sringing slogan, The Great Society, begins tosound like one of the more cynicalutterances of the Bourbon monarchs.”53

Ten years later, a government inquirycriticized the fact that “[m]any of therestrictions developed by the CIA inresponse to the events of 1967 appear to besecurity measures aimed at preventingfurther public disclosures which couldjeopardize sensitive CIA operations. Theydid not represent significant rethinking ofwhere boundaries ought to be drawn in a

free society.”54

26

A Bad Bargain

In this vile world, everything is true or falseaccording to the color of the glass throughwhich you view it.

Calderon de la Barca

Throughout the rest of 1967, and well into1968, Josselson found himself in a state ofmental and physical exhaustion, dailyreminded of the confusion and bitterness hisactions had occasioned. “It is inconceivablefor me how any one who believed infreedom, in the open society, in the moralcorrespondence between means and ends,

could have thought it proper to accept fundsfrom an agency of international espionage,”wrote Jayaprakash Narayan, chairman of theIndian Congress for Cultural Freedom. “Itwas not enough to assess that the Congresshad always functioned with independence. .. . The Agency was only doing what it musthave considered useful for itself.”1 Writingto announce he was quitting the Indianoffice, K.K. Sinha said, “Had I any idea . . .that there was a time bomb concealed in theParis headquarters, I would not havetouched the Congress.”2 For some, therewere real explosives to be dealt with: inJapan, one Congress activist’s house wasfire-bombed, and he had to seek policeprotection. In Uganda, Rajat Neogy, theeditor of Transition, had no sooner deducedthat the damage to his magazine would be“incalculable” than he was arrested and

imprisoned.“There were real victims,” said Diana

Josselson, “and Michael felt anguish,remorse, and at times he questioned hisjudgment for going along with things at all.We wavered over the Jesuitical line of theends justifying the means, but in the end weagreed it had been the right thing to do. Butthe real damage to people’s reputationsanguished him terribly.”3 “There werepeople in India, in the Lebanon, in Asia, inAfrica—men and women who cast their lotin with the Congress on the strength ofrepresentations that I, Mike, and othersmade—who then found themselves caughtin the hurricane,” said John Hunt. “And Iknow many of them suffered deeply, and noamount of high-strategy moralizing ordiscussion will make that fact go away. Theyput their honor and life on the line, and I

haven’t forgotten that. You can’t overridethe moral dilemma by using phrases like‘raison d’état’ or ‘the cunning of history’ orwhatever. But I’d do it all over again if I hadthe chance. You can have regrets and stillsay it was all worthwhile.”4

In Europe and America, far from whatK.K. Sinha called “the din of the advancingthreat,” reactions were mixed. MichaelPolanyi found the fuss around the CIArevelations “contemptible,” and said, “Iwould have served the CIA (had I known ofits existence) in the years following the war,with pleasure.”5 Koestler described it merelyas “a storm in a teacup” which would blowover. Yehudi Menuhin thought “much moreof the CIA” for associating with “people likeus.”6 George Kennan, predictably, issued aringing defense, saying, “The flap about CIA

money was quite unwarranted, and causedfar more anguish than it should have beenpermitted to cause. I never felt the slightestpangs of conscience about it. This countryhas no Ministry of Culture, and CIA wasobliged to do what it could to try to fill thegap. It should be praised for having done so,and not criticized.”7

The idea that the CIA’s involvement inthe cultural life of the West could berationalized as a necessary evil ofdemocracy found increasingly fewsupporters. Writing of a “deeper sense ofmoral disillusionment,” Andrew Kopkindargued, “The distance between the rhetoricof the open society and the reality of controlwas greater than anyone thought. . . .Everyone who went abroad for an Americanorganization was, in one way or another, awitness to the theory that the world was torn

between communism and democracy, andanything in between was treason. Theillusion of dissent was maintained: the CIAsupported socialist cold warriors, fascist coldwarriors, black and white cold warriors. Thecatholicity and flexibility of CIA operationswere major advantages. But it was a shampluralism, and it was utterly corrupting.”8

This position, much repeated, was attractivefor its moral simplicity. But it was toosimple. The real point was not that thepossibility of dissent had been irrevocablydamaged (Kopkind’s own arguments werewitness to that), or that intellectuals hadbeen coerced or corrupted (though that mayhave happened too), but that the naturalprocedures of intellectual inquiry had beeninterfered with. “What most irritated us,”wrote Jason Epstein, “was that thegovernment seemed to be running an

underground gravy train whose first-classcompartments were not always occupied byfirst-class passengers: the CIA and the FordFoundation, among other agencies, had setup and were financing an apparatus ofintellectuals selected for their correct cold-war positions, as an alternative to what onemight call a free intellectual market whereideology was presumed to count for lessthan individual talent and achievement, andwhere doubts about established orthodoxieswere taken to be the beginning of all inquiry.. . . It had at last become clear how bad abargain the intellectuals had made, that itcould never have been in the interest of artor literature, of serious speculation of anykind, or even of humanity itself, for them toserve the will of any nation.”9

“Do you think I would have gone on theEncounter payroll in 1956–7 had I known

there was secret U.S. Government moneybehind it?” Dwight Macdonald angrily askedJosselson in March 1967. “If you do, we arereally out of contact. One would hesitate towork even for an openly Government-financed magazine. . . . I think I’ve beenplayed for a sucker.”10 Suckers orhypocrites? Despite rubbing up against the“front-office Metternichs” when they hadaxed his article in 1958, Macdonald had hadno hesitation in asking Josselson in 1964 ifhe could employ his son Nick for thesummer—at a time when anybody who wasanybody had at least heard rumorsconnecting the Congress to the CIA. Andwhat about Spender, who in the summer of1967 broke down in tears at a party inEvanston, Illinois, when fellow guestsresponded ungenerously to his protestationsof innocence? “There they all were, like so

many David Levine caricatures—Daniel Belland his wife, Pearl Kazin Bell; RichardEllmann; Hannah Arendt; Stephen Spender;Tony Tanner; Saul Bellow; HaroldRosenberg; Mrs. Polanyi,” recalled one ofthe less famous guests. “They had all beeninvolved with the Congress in some way oranother. After the spaghetti, they all angrilyengaged in calling each other ‘naive’ for nothaving known who their backers really wereand for not passing the information on to therest. ‘I never trusted Irving,’ said HannahArendt. She said the same thing aboutMelvin Lasky. Daniel Bell busily defendedboth his friends. The argument becamemore and more fierce. Spender began toweep; he had been used, misled, knewnothing, never had. Some guests were heardto say Stephen was being ‘naive.’ Othersseemed to think he was just ‘faux naïf.’ ”11

“Stephen was very upset,” said StuartHampshire. “People have been very meanabout Stephen, saying he must have known.I don’t think he did. Maybe he didn’t try toohard to find out, but he didn’t really knowanything about government orintelligence.”12 Lawrence de Neufville,however, recalled things differently: “I knowpeople who knew he knew, but you can’tblame him for denying it, because everythingwe did had to be plausibly denied, so hecould very well plausibly deny it. Josselsonknew that Spender had been told, and hetold me so.”13 “My attitude on hearing ofSpender and his wounded sensibilities after itall blew up—and maybe this is colored bymy sense of guilt—was that he had to haveknown,” said Tom Braden. “And I think hedid know.”14 Natasha Spender, who always

protested her husband’s innocence,concluded mournfully that his was the roleof Prince Mishkin in The Idiot.

Suckers or hypocrites? When TomBraden was shown Partisan Review’sfamous “Statement on the CIA,” drafted byWilliam Phillips and published in summer1967, he laughed out loud. “We would liketo make public our opposition to the secretsubsidization by the CIA of literary andintellectual publications and organizations,and our conviction that regular subsidizationby the CIA can only discredit intellectuallyand morally such publications andorganizations,” read the statement. “We lackconfidence in the magazines alleged to havebeen subsidized by the CIA, and we do notthink they have responded appropriately tothe questions that have been raised.”15

Looking at the signatories—seventeen in all,

including Hannah Arendt, Paul Goodman,Stuart Hampshire, Dwight Macdonald,William Phillips, Richard Poirier, PhilipRahv, William Styron, and Angus Wilson—Braden said simply, “Of course theyknew.”16 Perhaps James Farrell had beenright when he said that “those PartisanReview people fear clarity as the devil doesholy water.”17

From Geneva’s Plateau du Champel, aresidential square whose silence was brokenonce a week when the vegetable marketarrived, Josselson could only watch bitterlyas the Congress, now renamed theInternational Association for CulturalFreedom, moved on without him under itsnew director, Shepard Stone. For the firstyear, John Hunt was retained, at ShepardStone’s invitation, to “help with the budget.”Initially, Josselson would call his former

“second lieutenant” every day. “He wouldsay, ‘Let’s do this’ or ‘Let’s do that,’ ” Huntremembered. “And I would say, ‘Listen,Mike, Shep’s in charge now.’ It was verysad. Mike was going on as if nothing hadreally changed.”18 “Josselson was a rathertragic character,” Stephen Spender said. “Ithink that he was in the position of anambassador who stays in a country too long,and instead of representing the peoplewho’ve sent them there starts representingthe people to whom he’s sent, which is whyambassadors are never allowed to stay toolong in countries because they tend to switchin this way. And I think that this kind ofswitch happened with Josselson. If you viewthe whole thing as a kind of operation,Josselson was the godfather and he reallyloved us all, and he was also an extremelycultivated man who cared greatly about

literature and music and so on, but he alsowas a bullying and domineering person, whotook his responsibilities frightfully seriouslyand was not at all frivolous about it. He wasreally broken, I think, when the whole thingwas exposed.”19

Shepard Stone, the Ford Foundationexecutive who had brokered millions ofdollars of philanthropic funds for theCongress, had been Josselson’s candidatefor his successor, but, according to Diana,“Michael soon realized it was a mistake.Michael was retained as a consultant, andthe Congress being Michael’s life, he wrotemany memos, but they were not answered.It was difficult for Shep, because he didn’twant to be Michael’s boy, his figurehead.But it wasn’t done in a very elegant way.Michael disagreed with things that he did,such as peeling off the country and regional

associations that weren’t of interest to him—in other words, India, Australia, anythingthat wasn’t European. Shep had no feelingfor this at all—he hadn’t been there, sothose guys were just out. He revealed aprofound lack of understanding ofintellectuals. When presentations were madeyear after year to the Ford Foundation forfunds, Shep would ask Michael to do itbecause he wasn’t capable of doing ithimself.”20

Now financed entirely by the FordFoundation, the Congress had apparentlyachieved the independence which hadeluded Josselson. Yet according to JohnHunt, behind the scenes there was a bittercontest between the British, French, andAmerican secret services to secureleadership of the organization in thatsummer of 1967. “The fear was always that

one of these organizations in which there’dbeen an American involvement in thebeginning would be taken over by a friendlyservice,” he explained. “The thinking wasthat the callow, dumb, quiet Americans willgo on putting up the money, and we[Europeans] will put up the brains, and we’llhave a perfect, tidy operation, and we’ll runit.”21 In the end, everyone got a slice. TheAmericans got their candidate in as presidentand chief executive (Shepard Stone’s entirecareer, from the High Commission inGermany to the Ford Foundation and nowthe Congress, was littered with intelligenceconnections; in his memoirs, the EastGerman spymaster Markus Wolf alleged thatStone was a CIA case officer); the Frenchinserted their man Pierre Emmanuel—whoseaffiliations to the Deuxième Bureau had longbeen rumored—as director; and the British,

a while later, got their man in as co-director.He was Adam Watson, the SIS–CIA liaisonin Washington in the early 1950s and thepsychological warfare expert who hadcoordinated the Information ResearchDepartment’s secret relationship with theCongress for Cultural Freedom. Everythinghad changed, but nothing had reallychanged.

Nothing except for the rivalries andtensions which Josselson could rightly flatterhimself he had contained for so many years.The bitchiness and friability of temperamentinherent in all intellectual conclaves nowcame to dominate an organization which hadlost the élan and sense of purpose which hadmade it so prominent at the height of theCold War. From Geneva, Josselson could donothing to stop the reconstituted Congressfrom sailing towards its own oblivion.

Nabokov wrote occasionally with news,dismissing its new masters as “Lescompères.” Equally disparaging was EdwardShils, who broke with the organization in1970. It was, he said, utterly discredited, amere chatfest for complacent, overfedintellectuals.22 In another letter to Josselsonhe wrote that he had no news of theCongress, though he had received aninvitation to meet some “leading goyim,” towhich his response was a flat refusal.23 Heshared with Sidney Hook an impression ofStone as a “bumbling jackass” . . . “a fool,enjoying a position and perquisitescompletely undeserved.”24 The only thingStone understood about world affairs, saidShils, was how to work an expense account.But the question that most troubled Shils,and which he said he would never be able to

answer, was how the Communists, for alltheir evil deeds, had managed to command—and keep—the moral high ground.25

With the old nomenklatura no longerinterested in its activities and having lost theinterest of its backers, the InternationalAssociation for Cultural Freedom finallyvoted to dissolve itself in January 1979.

In 1959 George Kennan had written toNabokov that he could think of “no group ofpeople who have done more to hold ourworld together in these last years than youand your colleagues. In this country inparticular, few will ever understand thedimensions and the significance of youraccomplishments.”26 For decades, Kennanremained convinced that the articles of faithupon which he had helped design the paxAmericana were the right ones. But in 1993,

he renounced the monist credo upon whichthis had rested, saying, “I should make itclear that I’m wholly and emphaticallyrejecting any and all messianic concepts ofAmerica’s role in the world, rejecting, thatis, an image of ourselves as teachers andredeemers to the rest of humanity, rejectingthe illusions of unique and superior virtue onour part, the prattle about Manifest Destinyor the ‘American Century.’ ”27

It was upon this proposition—that it wasAmerica’s destiny to assume responsibilityfor the century in place of a worn-out,discredited Europe—that the central mythsof the Cold War had been built. And it was,in the end, a false construct. “The cold waris a delusionary struggle between realinterests,” Harold Rosenberg had written in1962. “The joke of the cold war is that eachof the rivals is aware that the other’s idea

would be irresistible if it were actually putinto practice. . . . The West wants freedomto the extent that freedom is compatible withprivate ownership and with profits; theSoviets want socialism to the extent thatsocialism is compatible with the dictatorshipof the Communist bureaucracy. . . . [In fact]revolutions in the twentieth century are forfreedom and socialism . . . a realistic politicsis essential, a politics which would get ridonce and for all of the fraud of freedomversus socialism.”28 With these words,Rosenberg damned the Manichean dualismby which the two sides had lockedthemselves into a convulsive pas de deux,caught in the “despotism of formulae.”

Milan Kundera once attacked “the manof conviction,” and asked: “What isconviction? It is a thought that . . . hascongealed. . . . That is why a novelist must

systematically desystemize his thought, kickat the barricade that he himself has erectedaround his ideas.” Only then, said Kundera,would “the wisdom of uncertainty” emerge.The legacy of the 1967 revelations was akind of uncertainty, but one which fell shortof Kundera’s “wisdom.” It was anuncertainty cultivated to obscure what hadhappened or to minimize its impact.Disgusted by what he saw as the lack ofaccountability amongst those intellectualswho had “aided and abetted” the CIA’s“cultural manipulations,” novelist RichardElman detected a “false blasé attitude[which] makes everything seem alike or, asone expects, a kind of comme il faut forvenality and corruption, which perceives theworld as essentially a paradigm for boredom.. . . Nothing is quite worth discerning, andnobody can be truly honest.”29 Renata

Adler’s roman à clef Speedboat captured themoral murkiness: “Intelligent people, caughtat anything, denied it. Faced with evidenceof having denied it falsely, people said theyhad done it and had not lied about it, anddidn’t remember it, but if they had done it,or lied about it, they would have done it andmisspoken themselves about it in an interestso much higher as to alter the nature ofdoing and lying altogether.”30

Primo Levi, in The Drowned and theSaved, offered a similar, thoughpsychologically more sophisticated, insight:“There are . . . those who lie consciously,coldly falsifying reality itself, but morenumerous are those who weigh anchor,move off, momentarily or forever, fromgenuine memories, and fabricate forthemselves a convenient reality. . . . Thesilent transition from falsehood to sly

deception is useful: anyone who lies in goodfaith is better off, he recites his part better,he is more easily believed.”31

If those who took part in the culturalCold War really believed in what they weredoing, then they can’t be said to have beenconsciously deceiving anybody. If it was alla fiction, a fabricated reality, it was no lesstrue for that. Someone once said that if adog pisses on Notre Dame, it doesn’t meanthere’s anything wrong with the cathedral.But there’s another proverb, one whichNicolas Nabokov was fond of quoting: “Youcan’t jump into the lake and come out dry.”The democratic process Western culturalCold Warriors rushed to legitimize wasundermined by its own lack of candor. The“freedom” it purveyed was compromised,“unfree,” in the sense that it was anchoredto the contradictory imperative of “the

necessary lie.” The context of the Cold War,as drawn up by the more militantintellectuals within the Congress for CulturalFreedom, was one where you operatedunder the sign of total fealty to an ideal. Theends justified the means, even if theyincluded lying (directly or by omission) toone’s colleagues; ethics were subject topolitics. They confused their role, pursuingtheir aims by acting on people’s states ofmind, choosing to slant things one wayrather than another in the hope of achievinga particular result. That should have beenthe job of politicians. The task of theintellectual should have been to expose thepolitician’s economy with the truth, hisparsimonious distribution of fact, his defenseof the status quo.

Pursuing an absolutist idea of freedom,they ended up by offering another ideology,

a “freedomism,” or a narcissism of freedom,which elevated doctrine over tolerance forheretical views. “And of course ‘TrueFreedom’ is actually a better name thanfreedom tout court,” says Anthony inEyeless in Gaza. “Truth—it’s one of themagical words. Combine it with the magic of‘freedom’ and the effect’s terrific. . . .Curious people don’t talk about true truth. Isuppose it sounds too queer. True truth; truetruth. . . . No, it obviously won’t do. It’s likeberi-beri, or Wagga-Wagga.”32

EPILOGUE

Some people’s minds freeze.David Bruce

After that disastrous summer of 1967,Nicolas Nabokov received a generousfinancial settlement of $34,500 from theFarfield Foundation, and moved to NewYork to lecture on “The Arts in Their SocialEnvironment” at City University on afellowship secured with Arthur Schlesinger’shelp. Nabokov and Stephen Spenderexchanged bits of gossip about their formerconfreres and joked about writing “a funnyGogol like story about a man who, whateverhe did and whoever his employer, found he

was always being paid for by the CIA.”1 In1972, they had a minor tiff. Isaiah Berlinadvised Nabokov to let the matter drop.“Let him be,” he said. Berlin also cautionedNabokov not to go public with his memoriesof the Congress when, in 1976, thecomposer half joked, half threatened towrite a book called “Les Riches Heures duCIA.” “If you [are] serious about this, let meearnestly advise you not to do this,” Berlinadmonished. “One’s memory is notinfallible; the subject is, to say the least,sensitive . . . I doubt if you can want to befor the rest of your life the centre ofunending rows. . . . So let me stronglyadvise you to leave that minefield alone.”2

Such reluctance to examine the past wasshared by many. Spender, whose friendshipwith Nabokov had survived the tiff of 1972,recorded in his journals that in March 1976

he had attended a ceremony at the FrenchConsulate in New York at which Nabokovwas awarded the Légion d’Honneur:“Atmosphere of comedy as the Consul madea speech, going through [Nabokov’s] wholelife, drawing throughout it a distinctionbetween what he called ‘creation’ and‘career.’ Although the festivals he hadorganized were listed, the Congress forCultural Freedom was skirted adroitly. Thehollowness of French rhetoric on suchoccasions is so transparent that it acquires akind of sincerity.”3

For his remaining years, Nabokovcontinued to teach and compose. His lastmajor project was to score the music forBalanchine’s Don Quixote, performed bythe New York City Ballet. Reviewing it forthe New Yorker, Andrew Porter wrote:“There is nothing, alas, that can be done

about Nicolas Nabokov’s wretched score,which lays a deadening hand on the evening.It is short-breathed, repetitive, feeble in itslittle attempts to achieve vivacity byrecourse to a trumpet solo or a gongstroke.”4 Nabokov’s motto, said one friend,could have been “Go along, Get along.”Perhaps he had inherited this from hisfather. A young intelligence officer inpostwar Berlin had once met Nabokov’sninety-year-old father at a party. “The oldman, like all the Nabokovs, had been aliberal in Imperial Russia. I observed himgoing over to some high-ranking Soviets andsaying, ‘You know, I was always on the sideof the people!’ and then shuffling over to[his host] on the other side of the room withthe same ingratiating smile, and saying, ‘Iknew your grandfather, his ImperialHighness, Grand Duke Alexander

Mikhailovich very well!’ I wondered howanybody of ninety could feel the necessityfor such hypocrisy!”5

Nabokov died in 1978. His funeral,according to John Hunt, “was quite a scene.All the five wives were there. Patricia Blakewas on crutches after a skiing accident, andshe kept saying, ‘I feel like I’m still marriedto him.’ Marie-Claire took up the whole ofthe first pew, as if she was still married tohim. Dominique, who was his wife when hedied, said she was made to feel like shedidn’t exist; she was the only one who hungback. Another one draped herself over hiscoffin and tried to kiss him on the mouth.”6

It was a fitting exit for a man who had livedby flamboyant gestures.

John Hunt left the InternationalAssociation for Cultural Freedom, asplanned, at the end of 1968. In a secret

ceremony on a houseboat on the Seine, hewas awarded a CIA medal for servicesrendered. He then turned up at the SalkInstitute in California as its executive vicepresident. In 1969 Hunt wrote to Josselsonthat the sign he’d be carrying in theChristmas parade was “FUCK YOU HOCHI MINH.” He watched bitterly asAmerica as he knew it started to fall apart.He told Josselson that he felt like an alien inhis own country.7 After toying with the ideaof working with Robie Macauley at Playboy,Hunt became executive vice president of theUniversity of Pennsylvania. In 1976, hewrote a play about Alger Hiss which wasperformed at the Kennedy Center. He laterretired to the south of France.

Irving Kristol founded the PublicInterest with Daniel Bell and in 1969became Henry R. Luce Professor of Urban

Values at New York University. By then, hehad already begun calling himself a “neo-conservative,” which he defined as “a liberalwho has been mugged by reality.” Heattached himself to the American EnterpriseInstitute and the Wall Street Journal, gavelectures to corporate groups for huge fees,and was dubbed “Patron Saint of the NewRight.” His writing showed more and morehow this young radical had aged into amorose reactionary at odds with the worldaround him with its sexual license,multiculturalism, welfare mothers, andrevolting students. He had become, likeLasky, like so many others, ArthurKoestler’s “Twentieth Century man,” a“political neurotic [who] carries his privateIron Curtain inside his skull.”8 In 1981, hewrote an open “Letter to the Pentagon” inwhich he deplored the fact that American

soldiers failed to stand properly to attentionduring the national anthem. He called for thereinstitution of “proper military parades”because “[t]here is nothing like a parade toelicit respect for the military from thepopulace.”9 Looking back on the CIA’sintervention in cultural politics, he remarked,“Aside from the fact that the CIA, as asecret agency, seems to be staffed to anextraordinary extent by incorrigibleblabbermouths, I have no more reason todespise it than, say, the Post Office.”10 OfEncounter, he concluded: “I think it’sinteresting that the only British magazineworth reading at the time was funded by theCIA, and the British should be damngrateful.”11

Melvin Lasky stayed on as editor ofEncounter until it folded in 1990. By this

time, few were ready to grant it a propertestimonial. In its last years, “Encounteroften seemed something of a caricature of itsformer self, routinely given over as itbecame to cold war mongering, with many adire warning against the perils of nucleardisarmament.”12 The tory editor of theTimes Literary Supplement, FerdinandMount, did write a valedictory onEncounter’s achievements and acclaimedMelvin Lasky as a “prophet uniquelywithout honour in his adopted homeland.”13

But this isolated tribute cut little ice withthose who believed that Lasky shouldperhaps have stayed at home.

After the withdrawal of CIA funds,Encounter swayed from one financial crisisto the next, and Lasky spent much of histime in these final years seeking backers. In1976, Frank Platt (who stayed on in the

CIA) wrote to Josselson, “Wonderful pictureof . . . Mel talking with violent right wing(Makes old man Hunt look like Gus Hall)head of Coors beer empire in Denver whileback. He wanted to take over mag, make ithis own. Wore shoulder holster and Colt 45throughout meeting! No thank you MasterCoors.”14 Whilst Lasky was “out in thesticks looking for green,” Platt did his bit tohelp by requesting money from the WilliamWhitney Foundation. Later, whenconfronted with the issue of the CIA’ssupport of Encounter, Lasky fired back,“Well, who’s gonna give the money? Thelittle old lady wearing sneakers fromDeduke, Iowa? Will she give you a milliondollars? Well, I mean, pipe dreams! Wherewill the money come from?”15

Every English co-editor to work withLasky had resigned (Spender, Kermode,

Nigel Denis, D.J. Enright) except for thelast, Anthony Hartley. Lasky did his best tokeep what was left of the old gang together,organizing “A Last Encounter” in Berlin in1992, a celebration of the end of the ColdWar over which Lasky presided, “his beardsharp enough to stab any fellow-traveller.”16

Gathered there were the veterans of theKulturkampf: Irving Kristol and his wife, theconservative historian Gertrude Himmelfarb;Edward Shils; François Bondy; RobertConquest; Leo Labedz; Peter Coleman; menand women from Radio Liberty and RadioFree Europe—frail in form, some of them,but the fire still burning bright. This, saidBernard Levin, was “the motley armywhich, without a shot fired, fought for thetruth against lies, for reality against mirages,for steadfastness against capitulation, forcivilization against barbarism, for the

peaceful word against the brutal blow, forapplauding courage against excusingcowardice, for put most simply, democracyagainst tyranny. And we were right: entirely,completely, provably, joyfully, patiently andtruthfully right.”17 The ranks of this “armyof the truth” had been thinned by death—Hook, Koestler, Aron, Malraux, Nabokov,Sperber. But they were also reduced byLasky, who did not invite the longest-servingmember of Encounter’s staff, MargotWalmsley, or Diana Josselson, or theSpenders. Michael Josselson’s name was notmentioned once.

Levin’s “motley army” did not shedtears when the Soviet system finallyimploded. And yet the radio propagandistGeorge Urban spoke for them all when hesaid he felt “a curious pang of loss. Asparring partner who had in some ways

served me well had fallen by the wayside. Apredictable foe beyond the hills, often heardbut seldom seen, had paradoxically been asource of reassurance. Having a great enemyhad been almost as good as having a greatfriend and—at times of disaffection withinour own ranks—arguably better. A friendwas a friend, but a good adversary was avocation. Or was it, I sometimes wondered,that my long preoccupation with the‘dialectic’ had so thoroughly infected methat I could imagine no life beyond anadversarial one?”18

Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall,George Urban was approached by a formerKGB officer who claimed to have run theKremlin’s propaganda school. “And did youfind our writings in Encounter useful as aclue to what the ‘enemy’ was plotting?”asked Urban. “Useful, useful—I found it so

fascinating that gradually you and yourcolleagues weaned me away from my oathand my ideology and made me into adissident,” came the answer. “You see, theEncounter syllabus was too persuasive. Itspawned doubt, then occasionalinsubordination, and finally open dissent inthe mind of a master spy!”19 Urban relatedthe incident to Lasky, who was ecstatic tolearn that the enemy had studied Encounter.“It stunned me! What a compliment, theKGB were using this thing! We felt at thetime that this ideological spearhead that wecold warriors thought up was hitting ontarget, and turns out we were right.”20

“People like Lasky thought in exactly thesame way as the Russians did. It was all justa strategic game to them,” concludedNatasha Spender.21

Frank Platt stayed on at the FarfieldFoundation as its director until 1969 (whenits pre-1967 funds were still beingdisbursed). In September 1976, Platt actedas a “clearinghouse” and “liaison” for PEN’sWriters in Prison Committee in London.Two months later, he told Josselson, “I’vebeen asked by Kurt [Vonnegut], Jack Mac[Michael Scammell], others if I’d consideroverseeing/taking over PEN Writers inPrison work, keeping in touch withScammell in London at Index [onCensorship] who is taking it on forInternational PEN. Coordinator more like it.Said yes, of course. Interesting work. Travelinvolved.”22 At the same time, Platt fedJosselson with regular nuggets of gossipabout the CIA, which he liked to refer to as“the chocolate factory.” After Cord Meyerwas publicly exposed as the London station

chief in 1975 (when thirty-four Labour MPsdemanded his expulsion), Platt wroteteasingly: “In the Land of The Blind the OneEyed Man saw the writing on the wallperhaps? Who knows. The [Agency] is inone hell of a mess is ALL I know. Tantpis.”23 Meeting Meyer at a Georgetownparty some time later, one journalist watchedin horror as he harassed an elderly Canadiandiplomat over the issue of Canadiansecessionism. “The diplomat, who had aserious heart ailment, was visibly distressed,but Meyer ploughed on, without wit, taste,or mercy,” wrote the journalist, unaware ofthe eerie resonance of the scene, following,more than a decade later, the one in whichJosselson had suffered a heart attack. Asanother observer put it, “Meyer’s generationand class never, in Cromwell’s phrase,bethought themselves in the bowels of Christ

that they might be mistaken.”24

On February 23, 1983, James Burnhamreceived the Presidential Medal of Freedomfrom Ronald Reagan, whose career inpolitics had been launched under the bannerof the Crusade for Freedom. The citationread: “Since the 1930s, Mr. Burnham hasshaped the thinking of world leaders. Hisobservations have changed society and hiswritings have become guiding lights inmankind’s quest for truth. Freedom, reasonand decency have had few greaterchampions in this century than JamesBurnham.”25 A week later, Arthur Koestlercommitted suicide with an overdose ofbarbiturates and alcohol in his London flat.Dying with him was his third wife, CynthiaJeffries. He was seventy-seven, she wastwenty years younger. In 1998, Koestler wasliterally taken off his pedestal when his

bronze bust was removed from publicdisplay at Edinburgh University followingrevelations by biographer David Cesaranithat he had been a violent rapist. “Enmeshedin antique conflicts, unimpressive over-production and lifelong bad behaviour,[Koestler’s] time is simply gone,” wrote onereviewer after reading Cesarani’s book.26

Burnham died in 1987, but his spirit lived onin William Buckley, whose National ReviewBurnham had edited. In 1990, Buckleydeclared that “the United States’ protractedopposition to Communism is one of ourtruly ennobling experiences.”27

Tom Braden went on to enjoy asuccessful career as a syndicated columnistand co-host of the CNN talkshow Crossfire.In 1975, whilst a government committeewas preparing the fullest ever review of U.S.intelligence activities, Braden penned a

swinging attack on a CIA subsumed bypower, arrogance, and an obsession withlying. “It’s a shame what happened to theCIA,” he wrote. “It could have consisted ofa few hundred scholars to analyzeintelligence, a few hundred spies in keypositions, and a few hundred operatorsready to carry out rare tasks of derring-do.Instead, it became a gargantuan monster,owning property all over the world, runningairplanes and newspapers and radio stationsand banks and armies and navies, offeringtemptation to successive Secretaries ofState, and giving at least one President[Nixon] a brilliant idea: since the machineryfor deceit existed, why not use it?”28 Bradenconcluded by advocating the dissolution ofthe CIA and the transfer of its remainingfunctions (those few which could still bejustified) to other departments. “I would

turn the psychological warriors andpropagandists over to the Voice of America.Psychological warriors and propagandistsprobably never did belong in a secretagency.”29 He also wrote theautobiographical book Eight Is Enough,which was adapted for television in 1977.He finally retired to Woodbridge, Virginia, toa house guarded by two enormous butsoppy Alsatians.

Lawrence de Neufville left the CIAshortly after the Hungarian uprising of 1956.He took a variety of jobs before becoming astockbroker. He remained a loyal friend toMichael Josselson, whom he had recruitedall those years ago in Berlin. Interviewed forthis book from his home in West Hartford,Connecticut, he was amused at the thoughtthat his cover would finally be blown. “Iguess the old boys here in my town will get

a bit of a surprise,”30 he joked. He diedbefore he could witness their reaction.

William Colby went on to mastermindthe Phoenix Program in Vietnam, whichinvolved the torture and murder of over20,000 Vietcong. As CIA director from 1973to 1976, he was responsible for sackingJames Jesus Angleton. Under him, theAgency stumbled from one public relationsfiasco to the next. After his retirement, hecontinued to reap the benefits of his careerin espionage by selling his services asconsultant to the heads of Eastern Europeanintelligence services after the collapse of theSoviet Union. He died in April 1996, afterfalling headlong into the swirling waters ofthe Potomac River.

After resigning from Encounter, StephenSpender attached himself to the New Leftand rediscovered his revolutionary fervor.

Mary McCarthy came across him in June1968 at a Sorbonne meeting convened byrevolting students. “Stephen Spender wasvery good throughout,” she told HannahArendt. “I saw a great deal of him. I thinkhe was expiating the CIA.31 For him,amusingly, the moral problem turned on hishouse in Provence—a ruin they bought andhave been slowly fixing up with the revenue,drearily earned, of his American lectures; hedecided, in the first days, that he did not‘own’ that house and that if the revolutiontook it, OK. Whenever he would be talkingto some especially enragé student, he wouldsay to him, mentally, ‘Yes, yes, you canhave my house!’ He took money around toa group of American draft-resisters, whomhe found in total isolation in a room in oneof the Facultés and virtually, he thought,starving.”32 In 1972, he founded Index on

Censorship with a grant from the FordFoundation. He was knighted in 1983, agrand old citizen of the republic of letters. Inlater years, Spender acknowledged thatpeople had been telling him of Encounter’slinks to the CIA for years, “[b]ut it was aswith the people who come and tell you thatyour wife is unfaithful to you. Then you askher yourself, and if she denies it, you aresatisfied with it.”33 Spender never read orbought another issue of Encounter. When hedied in 1995, one of the last links to the1930s, that rubescent dawn which was toturn into the darkest of ages, was broken.His widow, Natasha Spender, recalledbitterly, “All those wasted years, all thearguments, all the upsets,” of Stephen’sassociation with the Congress for CulturalFreedom. “It had a terrible effect on him,”she said. “He was so tired, so weary from all

the bickering, and he never seemed to havethe time to write poetry, which is what hemost wanted to do.”34

Michael Josselson died in January 1978.Despite strenuous efforts to findemployment, he had been knocked back byvirtually all his former collaborators. In1972, he was refused a fellowship by theAmerican Council of Learned Societies.Shepard Stone wrote to Senator WilliamBenton, owner and publisher ofEncyclopædia Britannica, to recommendJosselson, but no work was forthcoming.Even Gimbel-Saks, Josselson’s old firm,could find nothing for him. Time Inc. toldhim it couldn’t find a place for him, despitehis “extraordinary credentials.” In March1973 he was informed he had not beennominated for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Hewas also turned down by the Hoover

Institution on War, Revolution and Peace.Eight years before he died, and with

Diana’s collaboration, he sat down to write abiography of General Barclay de Tolly, whowas replaced by Field Marshal Kutuzov incommand of the Russian armies fightingNapoleon in 1812. The general’s directdescendant Major Nicholas de Tolly hadserved with the U.S. military government inBerlin. Perhaps Josselson had met him andbeen impressed by the tale of a greatEstonian commander unjustly humiliated,and of whom Pushkin had written:

In vain! Your rival reaped thetriumph early plantedIn your high mind; and you,forgotten, disenchanted,The sponsor of the feast, drewyour last breath,

Despising us, it may be, in thehour of death.

Josselson’s funeral in January 1978 wasa quiet affair. Writing of it to Hook, Laskysaid: “Had he died on that occasion whenthey repaired his heart some 14 years ago,the funeral would have been a European, aWestern occasion—a thousand would havebeen there to bid him farewell.”35 Accordingto Diana, Lasky himself “turned up atMichael’s funeral and ‘stole the show.’ ”36

Also present was a representative of the CIAwho chose the moment to present Dianawith Michael’s service medal. “It was soungermane—as if they were saying, you didthis for the medal, and nothing could befurther from the truth. I refused to acceptit.”37 Diana continued to live in theapartment at Plateau du Champel,

surrounded by mementos and photographsof those heady days when the Congress forCultural Freedom had seemed to her like theFrench Revolution or the Oxford Movementor the first hundred days of the Kennedyadministration. Michael, she said, had “livedfor the Congress, and in the end he died forit. But it was the best thing in my life. Theywere wonderful years.”38

And what of that Bruderbund, the “innerclub of men less mortal and more patriotic,”that tiny minority who knew what everyoneelse should know but didn’t, making theirown secret judgments in the name of a newage of enlightenment? “They wanted to haveit both ways, to be walking with the devil inthe shadows secretly, and to be walking inthe sun,”39 said one CIA veteran. For many,the contrast was too much. Proponents ofthe Cold War, they were also in some

measure its victims, destroyed by the moralambiguities of the Great Game.

In the later years of the Congress, JackThompson, the former protégé of JohnCrowe Ransom who had ended up holdingthe rudder of the “SS Farfield” (a CIAnickname for the Farfield Foundation),became “obsessed with saving Africans fromthe Russians, and he traveled there a lot,”according to Jason Epstein. “He would offerfellowships to African scholars andintellectuals, and their governments wouldallow them to go on condition they neverreturned (they were glad to get rid of them).So what Jack was doing, without realizing it,was getting them exiled. You can expect toget into a mess if you take your country’sclaims literally.”40 Frank Wisner took hisown life in 1965, having never recoveredfrom his nervous breakdown after the failed

revolution in Hungary. Other suicidesincluded Royall Tyler, one of Allen Dulles’smost flamboyant early collaborators, whotook his life in 1953; and James Forrestal,secretary of defense after the Second WorldWar and one of the men who had helpeddesign America’s clandestine action arm,who killed himself in 1949. Washington Postpublisher Philip Graham turned a shotgun onhimself in 1963. “He was all out for themost conventional sort of success. Heachieved it on the largest scale. And then,somehow, it turned to dust and ashes in hismouth,”41 Joseph Alsop told Isaiah Berlin, inwhat serves as an epitaph for them all.

Behind the “unexamined nostalgia forthe ‘Golden Days’ of American intelligence”lay a much more devastating truth: the samepeople who read Dante and went to Yaleand were educated in civic virtue recruited

Nazis, manipulated the outcome ofdemocratic elections, gave LSD to unwittingsubjects, opened the mail of thousands ofAmerican citizens, overthrew governments,supported dictatorships, plottedassassinations, and engineered the Bay ofPigs disaster. “In the name of what?” askedone critic. “Not civic virtue, but empire.”42

NOTES

The following archival collections were consulted:

AB/MoMAAlfred H. Barr Papers,Museum of Modern Art,New York

ACCF/NYU

American Committee forCultural FreedomPapers, TamimentLibrary, New YorkUniversity, New York

AWD/PU

Allen Welsh DullesPapers, Seeley MuddManuscript Library,Princeton UniversityBritish Council Records,

BC/FO924/PRO Public Records Office,Kew, London

BCCB/FO924/PRO

British ControlCommission, Berlin,Public Records Office,Kew, London

CCF/CHI

Congress for CulturalFreedom Papers, JosephRegenstein Library,University of Chicago,Illinois

CDJ/DDE

C.D. Jackson Papersand Records, Dwight D.Eisenhower Library,Abilene, Kansas

CIA.HSC/RG263/NARA

CIA History SourceCollection, NationalArchives & RecordsAdministration,Washington, DCDwight MacdonaldPapers, Sterling

DM/STER Memorial Library, YaleUniversity

ENC/S&W/RU

Encounter Papers,Secker & Warburg, MS1090, ReadingUniversity, Reading

FA/COLFrank Altschul Papers,Butler Library, ColumbiaUniversity, New York

GG/DDEGordon Gray Papers,Dwight D. EisenhowerLibrary, Abilene, Kansas

GO/UCLGeorge Orwell Papers,University College,London

HL/COLHerbert Lehman Papers,Butler Library, ColumbiaUniversity, New York

IB/GMC

Irving Brown Papers,American Federation ofLabor-Congress of

Industrial Relations,George Meany Center,Washington, DC

IRD/FO1110/PRO

Information ResearchDepartment, PublicRecords Office, Kew,London

MJ/HRC

Michael JosselsonPapers, Harry RansomHumanities ResearchCenter, Austin, Texas

MS/COLMeyer Schapiro Papers,Butler Library, ColumbiaUniversity, New York

NN/HRC

Nicolas NabokovPapers, Harry RansomHumanities ResearchCenter, Austin, Texas

NSF/LBJNational Security Files,Lyndon Baines JohnsonLibrary, Austin, Texas

NSF/JFKNational Security Files,John F. KennedyLibrary, BostonUniversity

OCB/Cen/DDE

Operations CoordinatingBoard, Central FileSeries, Dwight D.Eisenhower Library,Abilene, Kansas

OMGUS/RG260/

Office of MilitaryGovernment UnitedStates, NationalArchives & NARARecords Administration,Washington, DC

PEN/HRC

International PENPapers, Harry RansomHumanities ResearchCenter, Austin, Texas

PSB/DDE

Psychological StrategyBoard Records, DwightD. Eisenhower Library,Abilene, Kansas

PSB/HT

Psychological StrategyBoard Records, Harry S.Truman Library,Independence, Missouri

RH/COLRandom House Papers,Butler Library, ColumbiaUniversity, New York

SCHLES/JFKArthur M. SchlesingerJr. Papers, John F.Kennedy Library, Boston

SD.CA/RG59/

State Department,Cultural Affairs Office,National Archives &Records NARAAdministration,Washington, DC

SD.PPW/RG59/NARA

State Department,Political andPsychological Warfare,National Archives &Records Administration,Washington, DC

WHO/DDE

White House Office,Office of the StaffSecretaries: Records1952–1961/CabinetSeries, Dwight D.Eisenhower Library,Kansas

WHO/NSC/DDE

White House Office,National SecurityCouncil Staff Papers1948–1961, Dwight D.Eisenhower Library,Kansas

All interviews, unless otherwise stated, were with theauthor.

Introduction

1. Arthur Koestler, in The God That Failed: SixStudies in Communism, ed. Richard Crossman(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950).

2. Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (New York:

Viking, 1975).3. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days:

John F. Kennedy in the White House (London:André Deutsch, 1965).

4. Ibid.5. National Security Council Directive, July 10,

1950, quoted in Final Report of the Select Committeeto Study Governmental Operations with Respect toIntelligence Activities (Washington, DC: U.S.Government Printing Office, 1976). Hereafter, thisreport is referred to as Final Report of the ChurchCommittee, 1976, after its chairman, Senator FrankChurch.

6. Ibid. My italics.7. Archibald MacLeish, New York Times, January

21, 1967.8. Tzvetan Todorov, “The Communist Archives,”

Salmagundi, Summer 1997.

1. Exquisite Corpse

1. Willy Brandt, quoted in “The Big Chill,”Sunday Times, January 5, 1997.

2. Clarissa Churchill, “Berlin Letter,” Horizon 13,no. 75 (March 1946).

3. Susan Mary Alsop, To Marietta from Paris,1945–1960 (New York: Doubleday, 1975). See alsoAntony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, Paris After theLiberation, 1944–1949 (London: Hamish Hamilton,1994).

4. Nicolas Nabokov, Old Friends and NewMusic (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951).

5. James Burnham, quoted in Peter Coleman, TheLiberal Conspiracy: The Congress for CulturalFreedom and the Struggle for the Mind of PostwarEurope (New York: The Free Press, 1989).

6. Michael Josselson, “The Prelude to My Joiningthe ‘Outfit’ ” (MJ/HRC).

7. Ibid.8. Stuart Hampshire, interview, Oxford,

December 1997.9. Josselson, “Prelude to My Joining the ‘Outfit.’

”10. Nicolas Nabokov, Bagázh: Memoirs of a

Russian Cosmopolitan (London: Secker & Warburg,1975).

11. Benno D. Frank, Chief, Theater & MusicControl, OMGUS Education & Cultural RelationsDivision, June 30, 1947, “Cancellation of Registrationfor German Artists” (OMGUS/RG260/NARA).

12. Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music.13. Ibid.14. Melvin Lasky, interview, London, August 1997.15. Josselson, “Prelude to My Joining the ‘Outfit.’

”16. Nicolas Nabokov to Michael Josselson,

October 28, 1977 (MJ/HRC).17. At a meeting of the “Referendary Commission

at the Ministry for Education for Judging the PoliticalAttitude of Artists, Singers, Musicians, Conductors,and Producers Performing Independently or Intendedto be Employed in the Federal Theatres,” Vienna,March 25, 1946, it was agreed that “the notoriousshortage of first rate conductors makes it imperativethat Karajan should work in Austrian musical life,especially at the 1946 Salzburg Festival, all the more sosince invitations sent to four prominent conductors ofworld fame (Toscanini, Bruno Walter, Lord Beecham,Erich Kleiber) have, so far, been declined. There is no

doubt, too, that Karajan must be classed as a firstconductor of European competency.” (NN/HRC).

18. William Donovan, quoted in R. Harris Smith,OSS: The Secret History of America’s First CentralIntelligence Agency (Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 1972).

19. Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (London:Methuen, 1987).

20. Gregory Bateson, Research & Analysis, OSS,to General Donovan, August 18, 1945(CIA.HSC/RG263/NARA).

21. Richard Mayne, Postwar: The Dawn ofToday’s Europe (London: Thames & Hudson, 1983).Mayne’s book is a vivid reconstruction of the physicaland psychological conditions of post-Fascist Europe. Iam indebted to his chapter on Berlin during the Alliedoccupation.

22. R.E. Colby, British Control Commission, Berlin,to Montague Pollock, March 19, 1947(BCCB/FO924/PRO).

23. Alonzo Grace, Director, Education & CulturalRelations Division, “Out of the Rubble: An Address onthe Reorientation of the German People,”

Berchtesgaden, undated (OMGUS/RG260/NARA).24. W.G. Headrick, OMGUS Information Control

Division, “Facts About the US Information Centers inGermany,” August 19, 1946(OMGUS/RG260/NARA).

25. Amerika-Haus Review, July 1950(OMGUS/RG260/NARA).

26. OMGUS Education & Cultural RelationsDivision, Theater & Music Section, “Periodic Report,”March 1947 (OMGUS/RG260/NARA).

27. Lionel Royce, Theater & Music Section,OMGUS Education & Cultural Relations Division, toHans Speier, Office of War Information, Washington,May 12, 1945 (OMGUS/RG260/NARA).

28. Douglas Waples, Publications Section,OMGUS Information Control Division, “Publicationsfor Germany: Agenda for Psychological WarfareDivision and Office of War Information Conference,”April 14, 1945 (OMGUS/RG260/NARA).

29. Ula Moeser, OMGUS Information ControlDivision, “Political Education Program,” undated(OMGUS/RG260/NARA).

30. Quoted in Amerika-Haus Review, July 1950

(OMGUS/RG260/NARA).31. Ibid.32. Ralph Burns, Chief, OMGUS Cultural Affairs

Branch, “Review of Activities,” July 1949(OMGUS/RG260/NARA).

33. Ibid.34. George C. Marshall, Harvard Commencement

Address, June 5, 1947, printed in Foreign Relations ofthe United States, 1947, vol. 3 (Washington, DC:U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947).

35. John Crowe Ransom, “Address to the Scholarsof New England” (Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Poem),June 23, 1939, in Selected Poems (New York: Knopf,1964).

36. Harry S. Truman, Address to Congress, March12, 1947, printed in Harry S. Truman, Memoirs: Yearof Decisions (New York: Doubleday, 1955).

37. Dean Acheson, quoted in Joseph Jones,Fifteen Weeks (New York: Viking, 1955).

38. Jones, Fifteen Weeks.39. Pravda, June 17, 1947.40. George Kennan, quoted in Walter L. Hixson,

George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1989).41. Hixson, George F. Kennan.42. Dennis Fitzgerald, quoted in ibid.43. Richard Bissell, Reflections of a Cold

Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs (New Haven,CT: Yale University Press, 1996).

44. Quoted in Americans for Intellectual Freedom,“Joint Statement on the Cultural and ScientificConference for World Peace,” March 1949(ACCF/NYU).

45. Andrei Zhdanov, “Report on the InternationalSituation,” in Politics and Ideology (Moscow: 1949).

46. Ibid.47. Melvin Lasky to Dwight Macdonald, October

10, 1947 (DM/STER).48. Melvin Lasky, “The Need for a New, Overt

Publication,” December 7, 1947(OMGUS/RG260/NARA).

49. Ibid.50. Ibid.51. Melvin Lasky, “Towards a Prospectus for the

‘American Review,’ ” December 9, 1947(OMGUS/RG260/NARA).

52. Jean Cocteau, quoted in Serge Guilbaut,“Postwar Painting Games,” in ReconstructingModernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

2. Destiny’s Elect

1. Final Report of the Church Committee, 1976.2. Norman Mailer, Harlot’s Ghost (London:

Michael Joseph, 1991).3. Quoted in New York Times, April 25, 1966.4. William Colby, Honorable Men: My Life in

the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978).5. Drew Pearson, quoted in Smith, OSS.6. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, July 1996.7. Quoted in Smith, OSS.8. Ibid.9. Ibid.

10. Nabokov, Bagázh.11. George Kennan, quoted in Hixson, George F.

Kennan.12. George Kennan (writing as “X”), “The Sources

of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs 26 (July 1947).13. George Kennan, National War College

Address, December 1947, quoted in InternationalHerald Tribune, May 28, 1997.

14. Deborah Larson, The Origins ofContainment: A Psychological Explanation(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).

15. National Security Council Directive 10/2,quoted in Final Report of the Church Committee,1976.

16. Ibid.17. Ibid.18. Ibid.19. Harry Rositzke, quoted in Evan Thomas, The

Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA (NewYork: Touchstone, 1996).

20. Allen Dulles, quoted in Thomas, Very BestMen.

21. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, August 1996.22. Harrison E. Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor:

The New York Times and Its Times (New York:Ballantine, 1980).

23. Edgar Applewhite, quoted in Thomas, VeryBest Men.

24. Final Report of the Church Committee, 1976.

“The winners in Wisner’s office were the managerswho could produce the most projects. His model was alaw firm: the more clients, the more cases, the morereward.” Thomas, Very Best Men.

25. Colby, Honorable Men.26. Josselson, “Prelude to My Joining the ‘Outfit.’

”27. Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview,

February 1997.28. George Kennan to Nicolas Nabokov, July 14,

1948 (NN/HRC).

3. Marxists at the Waldorf

1. Miller, Timebends. For the Waldorf Astoriaconference, see also Carol Brightman, WritingDangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World(New York: Lime Tree, 1993), and Nicolas Nabokov’scolourful, though not entirely reliable, account inBagázh.

2. Lionel Abel, quoted in New York 1940–1965,ed. Leonard Wallock (New York: Rizzoli, 1988).

3. Jason Epstein, interview, New York, June 1994.

4. Miller, Timebends.5. Nabokov, Bagázh.6. Miller, Timebends.7. Dmitri Shostakovich, Testimony: The Memoirs

of Dmitri Shostakovich, ed. Solomon Volkov (NewYork: Harper & Row, 1979). There remains somedoubt as to the “authenticity” of Shostakovich’smemoirs. Published well before the era of glasnost,they are widely suspected of being used as propagandaby the Soviets. But propaganda or not, Shostakovichcan be seen to represent a body of Eastern bloc artistswho resented the simplemindedness of some Americananti-Communists.

8. Norman Mailer, quoted in Brightman, WritingDangerously.

9. Miller, Timebends.10. It is unlikely, though not impossible, that Hoover

had read the manuscript of Spartacus. In the FBI’scampaign against American writers, questions ofcontent were nearly always secondary to the status ofthe author. In Howard Fast’s case, his record as aCommunist Party member and his appearance at theWaldorf conference were enough to secure Hoover’s

wrath. See Natalie Robins, Alien Ink: The FBI’s Waron Freedom of Expression (New York: WilliamMorrow, 1992).

11. Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy.12. Nabokov, Bagázh.13. Melvin Lasky, interview, London, August 1997.14. Nicola Chiaromonte, quoted in Michael

Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Lifeand Politics of Dwight Macdonald (New York:Basic Books, 1994).

15. Miller, Timebends.16. Donald Jameson, interview, Washington, DC,

June 1994.

4. Democracy’s Deminform

1. Brightman, Writing Dangerously.2. Ernest Bevin, “Top Secret Cabinet Paper on

Future Foreign Publicity Policy,” January 4, 1948(IRD/FO1110/PRO).

3. Robert Bruce Lockhart, The Diaries ofRobert Bruce Lockhart, 1939–1965, ed. KennethYoung (London: Macmillan, 1980).

4. Adam Watson, telephone interview, August1998.

5. Sir Ralph Murray to Chief of Defence Staff,June 1948 (IRD/FO1110/PRO).

6. Adam Watson, telephone interview, August1998.

7. Bevin, “Top Secret Cabinet Paper on FutureForeign Publicity.”

8. Mamaine Koestler, Living with Koestler:Mamaine Koestler’s Letters 1945–1951, ed. CeliaGoodman (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985).

9. As in George Babbitt, “the eponymous anti-hero of Sinclair Lewis’s brilliant 1922 novel who, in themidst of a mid-life crisis, is temporarily seduced fromsolid American values by the lure of Bohemian waysand superficial radicalism,” David Cesarani, ArthurKoestler: The Homeless Mind (London: WilliamHeinemann, 1998). Cesarani’s excellent biographygives a detailed account of Koestler’s 1948 trip to theUnited States.

10. Arthur Koestler, quoted in Iain Hamilton,Koestler: A Biography (London: Secker & Warburg,1982).

11. Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Temps modernes,October 1954.

12. Michael Warner, “Origins of the Congress forCultural Freedom,” Studies in Intelligence 38, no. 5(Summer 1995). A historian working for the CIA’sHistory Staff, Warner has access to classified materialunavailable to other scholars. As such, this article isinvaluable. But it contains several errors and deliberateomissions and should be read with that in mind.

13. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: AFighting Faith (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press,1949).

14. Arthur Schlesinger, interview, New York,August 1996.

15. Carol Brightman, interview, New York, June1994.

16. C.D. Jackson to John Osborne, April 30, 1947(CDJ/DDE).

17. Lockhart, Diaries of Robert Bruce Lockhart,1939–1965.

18. Richard Crossman to C.D. Jackson, August 27,1948 (CDJ/DDE).

19. HICOG Frankfurt, “Evaluation Report,” 1950

(SD.CA/RG59/NARA).20. Crossman, God That Failed.21. Ignazio Silone, Emergency Exit (London:

Gollancz, 1969).22. Lee Williams, interview, Washington, DC, June

1994.23. IRD, Top Secret Cypher, March 24, 1949

(IRD/FO1110/PRO).24. Ibid.25. Anthony Carew, “The American Labor

Movement in Fizzland: The Free Trade UnionCommittee and the CIA,” Labor History 39, no. 1(February 1998).

26. Quoted in Warner, “Origins of the Congress forCultural Freedom.”

27. Lockhart, Diaries of Robert Bruce Lockhart,1939–1965.

28. Sidney Hook, quoted in Coleman, LiberalConspiracy.

29. Sidney Hook, “Report on the International Dayof Resistance to Dictatorship and War,” PartisanReview 16, no. 7 (Fall 1949).

30. Ibid.

31. Warner, “Origins of the Congress for CulturalFreedom.”

32. Hook, “Report on the International Day.”Hook’s italics.

33. Miller, Timebends.34. Frank Wisner, quoted in Warner, “Origins of the

Congress for Cultural Freedom.”35. Ruth Fischer, quoted in Warner, “Origins of the

Congress for Cultural Freedom.”36. Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview,

February 1997.37. Warner, “Origins of the Congress for Cultural

Freedom.”38. Ibid.39. Ibid.

5. Crusading’s the Idea

1. Arthur Schlesinger, interview, New York,August 1996.

2. Sidney Hook, Politics, Winter 1949.3. Sidney Hook, “The Berlin Congress for

Cultural Freedom,” Partisan Review 17, no. 7 (1950).

4. Nabokov, Bagázh.5. Ignazio Silone, quoted in Goodman, Living with

Koestler.6. Ignazio Silone, April 3, 1930, printed in La

Stampa, April 30, 1996.7. Ignazio Silone, quoted in Coleman, Liberal

Conspiracy.8. Arthur Koestler, quoted in Coleman, Liberal

Conspiracy.9. Ernst Reuter, quoted in Congress for Cultural

Freedom brochure, undated (CCF/CHI).10. Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview,

February 1997.11. Mamaine Koestler, in Goodman, Living with

Koestler.12. James Burnham, “Rhetoric and Peace,”

Partisan Review 17, no. 8 (1950).13. Hook, “Berlin Congress for Cultural Freedom.”14. Burnham, “Rhetoric and Peace.”15. Hugh Trevor-Roper, interview, London, July

1994.16. André Philip, “Summary of Proceedings,”

Berlin 1950 (CCF/CHI).

17. Melvin Lasky, interview, London, July 1994.18. Hugh Trevor-Roper, interview, London, July

1994.19. Hook, “Berlin Congress for Cultural Freedom.”20. Arthur Koestler, quoted in Hamilton, Koestler.21. Edward Barrett, Truth Is Our Weapon (New

York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1953). Barrett’s sentimentswere shared by many others. Arthur Koestler wasonce confronted by an American journalist who toldhim that “people who had once been Communistsshould shut up and retire to a monastery or a desertisland, instead of going around ‘teaching other peoplelessons.’ ” Barrett’s reference to the usefulness of ex-Communists as “informers” or “tipsters,” however, isinteresting, an indication that the U.S. government’ssecret strategy of embracing the Non-Communist Leftwas quick to establish itself.

22. Melvin Lasky, quoted in Boston Globe, June24, 1950.

23. Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview,February 1997.

24. Hugh Trevor-Roper, interview, London, July1994.

25. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, June 1994.26. Mamaine Koestler, in Goodman, Living with

Koestler.27. Manifesto of the Congress for Cultural

Freedom, July 1950 (CCF/CHI).28. Ibid.29. Quoted in Warner, “Origins of the Congress for

Cultural Freedom.”

6. “Operation Congress”

1. Frank Wisner, “Berlin Congress for CulturalFreedom: Activities of Melvin Lasky,” in Warner,“Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.”

2. Warner, “Origins of the Congress for CulturalFreedom.” See also Thomas, Very Best Men, 263fn.

3. Edward Shils, “Remembering the Congress forCultural Freedom,” 1990 (unpublished proofs).

4. Natasha Spender, interview, Maussane, July1997.

5. Melvin Lasky, interview, London, August 1997.6. “All CIA operations had cryptonyms preceded

by a two-letter ‘diagraph’ for signals security.”

Thomas, Very Best Men.7. George Kennan to Robert Lovett, June 30,

1948 (SD.PPW/RG59/NARA).8. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, July 1996.9. E. Howard Hunt, Undercover: Memoirs of

an American Secret Agent (New York: Berkley,1974).

10. Miles Copeland, National Review, September11, 1987.

11. C.D. Jackson to Abbott Washburn, February 2,1953 (CDJ/DDE).

12. James T. Farrell to Meyer Schapiro, September11, 1941 (MS/COL).

13. Carol Brightman, interview, New York, June1994.

14. Arthur Koestler, “Immediate Tasks for theTransition Period,” July 4, 1950 (IB/GMC).

15. Donald Jameson, interview, Washington, June1994.

16. Manifesto of the Congress for CulturalFreedom, July 1950 (CCF/CHI).

17. Arthur Schlesinger to Irving Brown, July 18,1950 (IB/GMC).

18. Arthur Schlesinger, interview, New York,August 1996.

19. Ibid.20. Peter Vansittart, In the Fifties (London: John

Murray, 1995).21. Lockhart, Diaries of Robert Bruce Lockhart,

1939–1965.22. James Simmons, “The Ballad of Bertrand

Russell,” in Judy Garland and the Cold War(Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1976).

23. Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of ApoliticalCulture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom andthe Cultural Identity of Post-War AmericanHegemony 1945–1960 (unpublished PhD thesis,Lancaster University, 1998).

24. Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview,February 1997.

25. Nicolas Nabokov, Address to the Congress forCultural Freedom, Berlin, July 1950 (CCF/CHI).

26. C.D. Jackson to Tyler Port, March 8, 1950(CDJ/DDE).

27. Nicolas Nabokov to Irving Brown, December6, 1950 (IB/GMC).

28. Nicolas Nabokov to Irving Brown, January 17,1951 (IB/GMC). Quite what the source of this extraremuneration was remains unclear. Soon, however,Nabokov’s salary supplement was listed as an expenseof the American Committee for Cultural Freedom,which in turn was supported by grants from theFarfield Foundation, a CIA front.

29. Tom Braden, “I’m Glad the CIA Is ‘Immoral,’” Saturday Evening Post, May 20, 1967.

30. William Colby, interview, Washington, June1994.

31. Braden, “I’m Glad the CIA Is ‘Immoral.’ ”32. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, July 1996.33. Ibid.34. Ibid.35. National Security Council Directive, March

1950, quoted in Scott Lucas, “The PsychologicalStrategy Board,” International History Review 18,no. 2 (May 1996). See also Trevor Barnes, “TheSecret Cold War: The CIA and American ForeignPolicy in Europe 1946–56, Part II,” HistoricalJournal 25, no. 3 (September 1982). Barnes revealsthat the idea of a Kremlin master plan for global

domination was viewed with some suspicion by agroup of CIA analysts. Project Jigsaw, a top-secretreview of world Communism, set up in late 1949,concluded there was no such master plan, even if theKremlin did manipulate the Communist parties of othernations. Jigsaw was probably influenced by Kennan,who was rethinking his views about the USSR. But itsconclusions were so unorthodox that they weresmothered, even within the Agency itself.

36. Barrett, Truth Is Our Weapon.37. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, June 1994.

Braden used another phrase: “the battle for Picasso’smind.” Taken literally, this would of course have beena Sisyphean task. When Cleve Gray, a youngAmerican painter serving in the U.S. Army, followedthe pilgrimage trail to Picasso’s studio after theliberation, he arrived late one morning to find Picassoin his underpants, having just got out of bed. Picassostood by the side of the bed holding a copy of theCommunist newspaper L’Humanité in one hand whilehe held out the other for Jaime Sabartès, his factotum,to thread it through a shirt sleeve, then he transferredthe newspaper to the other hand while Sabartès pulled

on the other sleeve. Picasso was just about to join theCommunist Party, telling the world “one goes to theCommunist Party as to a spring of fresh water.” Thescene is described in Beevor and Cooper, Paris Afterthe Liberation, 1944–1949.

38. Braden, “I’m Glad the CIA Is ‘Immoral.’ ”39. Arthur Koestler to Bertrand Russell, 1950,

quoted in Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy.40. Other branch chiefs were given responsibility

for the IOD’s burgeoning group of fronts, whichBraden created in a punch for punch response toSoviet deviousness. He answered the Communist-backed International Association of DemocraticLawyers with the International Commission of Jurists;for the World Peace Council, there was the NationalCommittee for a Free Europe; the Cominform-backedWomen’s International Democratic Federation waschallenged by the International Committee of Women;the International Union of Students by the CIA-infiltrated National Students’ Association; the WorldFederation of Democratic Youth by the WorldAssembly of Youth; the International Organization ofJournalists by the International Federation of Free

Journalists; the World Federation of Trade Unions bythe International Federation of Free Trade Unions.

41. Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview,February 1997.

42. Nabokov, Bagázh.43. Nicolas Nabokov to James Burnham, June 6,

1951 (CCF/CHI).44. Carol Brightman, interview, New York, June

1994.45. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March

1997.46. Nicolas Nabokov to James Burnham, June 27,

1951 (CCF/CHI).47. Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy.48. François Bondy and Georges Altman to

Michael Josselson, October 1950 (IB/GMC).49. Nicolas Nabokov to Irving Brown, September

3, 1951 (IB/GMC).50. There were strong reasons for trying to silence

the anti-clericalist clamor of the Italian outfit. At thistime, Lawrence de Neufville was involved in highlysensitive talks with the Vatican as part of a CIAinitiative to deploy Catholic trade unions throughout

Europe as a counterforce to Communist-dominatedlabor groups. The potential embarrassment to the CIAof one of its “assets” publicly criticizing the Churchwas great.

51. Nicolas Nabokov to James Burnham, June 6,1951 (CCF/CHI).

52. Ibid.

7. Candy

1. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, July 1996.2. Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview,

February 1997.3. Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior.4. Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview,

February 1997.5. Donald Jameson, interview, Washington, June

1994.6. Ibid.7. Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview,

February 1997.8. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, June 1994.9. John Hunt, interview, Uzés, July 1997.

10. Walter Laqueur, “Anti-Communism Abroad: AMemoir of the Congress for Cultural Freedom,”Partisan Review, Spring 1996.

11. Ben Sonnenberg, interview, New York,February 1997. After he had been appointed secretaryof the British Society for Cultural Freedom in late1952, Jasper Ridley was summoned to Paris to explainwhy he had concealed the fact that he had oncebelonged to the Communist Party. According to DianaJosselson, her husband “had to clear Congressemployees with the CIA,” and this oversight had madehim look “very stupid” in Washington. Ridley’s accountof the arraignment which followed is chilling:“Nabokov questioned me, but his questions and myanswers were interrupted by Josselson, who walkedaround the room, barking out questions andinterjections . . . he could have been an actor playingthe part of a domineering, bullying Soviet apparatchik.”Jasper Ridley, telephone interview, August 1997.

12. Michael Goodwin to Nicolas Nabokov, January15, 1952 (CCF/CHI).

13. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March1997.

14. Nicolas Nabokov to Michael Goodwin,December 19, 1951 (CCF/CHI).

15. Michael Goodwin to Nicolas Nabokov,December 31, 1951 (CCF/CHI).

16. Jasper Ridley recalled a Spender who wascapable of outright hostility. Visiting him at his housearound this time to discuss some matter relating to theBritish Society for Cultural Freedom, he found Spenderin a steely mood, and his wife Natasha Litvin “evenmore hostile; she went on playing the piano withoutgreeting me or turning round to look at me.” JasperRidley, telephone interview, August 1997.

17. John Clews to Nicolas Nabokov, June 27, 1952(CCF/CHI).

18. Jasper Ridley, telephone interview, August1997.

8. Cette Fête Américaine

1. Nicolas Nabokov to Irving Brown, undated,1951 (IB/GMC).

2. Melvin Lasky, interview, London, August 1997.3. Nicolas Nabokov to Irving Brown, undated,

1951 (CCF/CHI).4. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, July 1996.5. Thomas Jennings, Public Affairs Officer,

American Consulate, Marseilles, to State Department,“Report on Concerts of Smith College ChamberSingers in Southern France,” August 11, 1952(SD.CA/RG59/NARA).

6. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, July 1996.7. Susan Sontag, “Pilgrimage,” New Yorker,

December 21, 1987.8. Nicolas Nabokov to Irving Brown, undated,

1951 (IB/GMC).9. Albert Donnelly Jr. to Julius Fleischmann,

November 15, 1951 (ACCF/NYU). America wasdisposed to let the right kind of African Americans“out,” but evidently not those who threatened todamage the interests of the United States. When theReverend Adam Clayton Powell, celebratedcongressman and ex-Harlem minister, announced hewas going to attend the 1955 Bandung Conference,C.D. Jackson attempted to persuade NelsonRockefeller to block his visa request, on the basis that“[t]here was a time not so long ago when [Powell’s]

Communist flirtations were pretty shocking.” C.D.Jackson to Nelson Rockefeller, March 28, 1955(CDJ/DDE).

10. James Johnson Sweeney, press release, April18, 1952 (ACCF/NYU).

11. Quoted in American Embassy, Paris, report toState Department, “Local Press Reaction to Congressfor Cultural Freedom,” May 9, 1952(SD.CA/RG59/NARA).

12. Janet Flanner, “Letter from Paris,” NewYorker, May 20, 1952.

13. Janet Flanner, “Festival of Free World Arts,”Freedom and Union, September 1952.

14. Guy Dumur, Combat, quoted in AmericanEmbassy, Paris, report to State Department, “LocalPress Reaction to Congress for Cultural Freedom,”May 9, 1952.

15. Ibid.16. Serge Lifar, quoted in ibid.17. Franc-Tireur, quoted in ibid.18. L’Humanité, quoted in ibid.19. C.D. Jackson to Klaus Dohrn, August 16, 1956

(CDJ/DDE).

20. Flanner, “Festival of Free World Arts.”21. Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview,

February 1997.22. Melvin Lasky, interview, London, August 1997.23. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, May 1996.24. C.D. Jackson to Francis Hatch, September 5,

1952 (CDJ/DDE).25. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, June 1994.26. Farfield Foundation brochure (CCF/CHI).27. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, August 1996.28. Tom Braden, telephone interview, October

1997.29. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, June 1994.30. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March

1997.31. Ibid.32. Nabokov, Bagázh.33. Graham Greene, The Quiet American

(London: Bodley Head, 1955).

9. The Consortium

1. Certificate of Incorporation of Committee for

Free Europe, Inc., May 11, 1949 (CJD/DDE).2. Dean Acheson, quoted in G.J.A. O’Toole,

Honorable Treachery: A History of U.S.Intelligence, Espionage, and Covert Action fromthe American Revolution to the CIA (New York:Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991).

3. Certificate of Incorporation of Committee forFree Europe, Inc. According to the committee’s“Confidential Report on Friendship Stations,” one of itsmajor objectives was “to increase disintegratingpsychological pressures on the Soviet power center”and “to forge new psychological weapons for anoffensive cold war.” The report also argued that“propaganda divorced from action ultimately recoilsupon the user,” a timely warning in view of what wasto unfold in Hungary in 1956 (see Chapter 18).

4. Blanche Wiesen Cook, The DeclassifiedEisenhower: A Divided Legacy of Peace andPolitical Warfare (New York: Doubleday, 1981).

5. Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor.6. Donald Jameson, interview, Washington, June

1994.7. National Committee for a Free Europe Inc.,

“Report to Members,” January 5, 1951 (CDJ/DDE).8. Philip Barbour, Radio Free Europe Committee,

to Frank Altschul, “Report from ResearchDepartment,” March 23, 1950 (FA/COL).

9. Henry Kissinger, The White House Years(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979).

10. Janet Barnes, quoted in Thomas, Very BestMen. The CIA gave Thomas unprecedented accessfor his book, as did the families of “the very best men”of his title. Both as a historical study and as acollective biography, therefore, it is the most definitiveaccount to date, and as such I am indebted to it.

11. William Colby, interview, Washington, DC, June1994.

12. Lee Williams, interview, Washington, DC, June1994.

13. J.M. Kaplan to Allen Dulles, August 10, 1956(CDJ/DDE).

14. Final Report of the Cox Committee, 1952,quoted in René Wormser, Foundations: Their Powerand Influence (New York: Devin-Adair, 1958).

15. Final Report of the Church Committee, 1976.16. Ibid.

17. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, June 1994.18. Cord Meyer, Facing Reality: From World

Federalism to the CIA (Lanham, MD: UniversityPress of America, 1980).

19. Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior.20. James Laughlin, quoted in Kathleen D.

McCarthy, “From Cold War to Cultural Development:The International Cultural Activities of the FordFoundation 1950–1980,” Daedalus 116, no. 1 (Winter1987).

21. Quoted in McCarthy, “From Cold War toCultural Development.”

22. Irving Kristol to Stephen Spender, March 25,1953 (CCF/CHI).

23. Kai Bird, interview, Washington, DC, June1994.

24. John Hunt, interview, Uzés, July 1997.25. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, August 1996.26. Neil Berry, “Encounter,” London Magazine,

February–March 1995.

10. The Truth Campaign

1. Walt Rostow, telephone interview, July 1997.2. C.D. Jackson, “Notes of Meeting,” April 28,

1952 (CDJ/DDE).3. Dwight D. Eisenhower, quoted in Cook,

Declassified Eisenhower.4. Charles Burton Marshall to Walter J. Stoessel,

May 18, 1953 (CDJ/DDE).5. Ibid.6. Ibid.7. Donald Jameson, interview, Washington, DC,

June 1994. “From the [CIA’s] point of view this imageis really of a dog being led on a very long leash.Central to its success with intellectuals, who were saidto be committing themselves to freedom, andindependence, was the Agency’s calculation that some,if not most, should be permitted to remain ‘unwitting’because they were in basic agreement with Agencypolitics, or could be more cooperative and useful ifpermitted to act as if they were unwitting.” RichardElman, The Aesthetics of the CIA (unpublishedmanuscript).

8. Raymond Allen, quoted in Scott Lucas, “ThePsychological Strategy Board,” International History

Review 18, no. 2 (May 1996).9. Psychological Strategy Board, “US Doctrinal

Program,” June 29, 1953 (PSB/DDE).10. Lucas, “Psychological Strategy Board.”11. C.D. Jackson, Log Files (CDJ/DDE).12. Ibid.13. C.D. Jackson to Henry Luce, April 28, 1958

(CDJ/DDE).14. C.D. Jackson to Abbott Washburn, February 2,

1953 (CDJ/DDE).15. Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview,

April 1997.16. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March

1997.17. Ibid.18. Ibid.19. Ibid. Irving Brown’s contacts were many and

varied, and with such large cash sums at his disposalhe found himself dealing with some dangerouscharacters. Recently discovered documents reveal thatthe Federal Bureau of Narcotics was tailing Brown inthe mid-1960s on suspicion of trafficking drugs (ormoney laundered from drug trafficking operations) to

the United States. The documents link Brown tonotorious French crime bosses and their Italiancounterparts in the Mafia. Federal Bureau ofNarcotics, memorandi, October 1965. I am grateful toTony Carew for showing me these documents.

20. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, July 1996.21. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March

1997.

11. The New Consensus

1. Jason Epstein, interview, New York, June 1994.2. Irving Kristol, interview, Washington, DC, July

1996.3. John Hunt, interview, Uzés, July 1997.4. Sidney Hook’s contacts with the CIA and the

Psychological Strategy Board are referred to in a letterfrom Gordon Gray to Hook, October 4, 1951(GG/DDE). According to Lawrence de Neufville,Hook was “a regular consultant to CIA on matters ofmutual interest.” In 1955, Hook was directly involvedin negotiations with Allen Dulles and Cord Meyer atthe CIA to secure funding for the ailing American

Committee for Cultural Freedom.5. Sidney Hook, “To Counter the Big Lie—A

Basic Strategy,” New York Times Magazine, March11, 1951.

6. Elliot Cohen, quoted in Coleman, LiberalConspiracy.

7. Norbert Muhlen, quoted in Coleman, LiberalConspiracy.

8. “Our Country and Our Culture,” PartisanReview, May–June 1952.

9. Norman Podhoretz, Making It (London:Jonathan Cape, 1968).

10. William Phillips, quoted in Wallock, New York .11. Lionel Trilling, quoted in Wallock, New York .12. Carol Brightman, interview, New York, June

1994.13. Quoted in Wallock, New York .14. Macdonald, “Politics Past.”15. Wreszin, Rebel in Defense of Tradition.16. Philip Rahv, quoted in Hugh Wilford, The New

York Intellectuals (Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 1995).

17. Daniel Bell to John Leonard, editor, Sunday

Times Book Review, October 16, 1972 (MJ/HRC).18. Jason Epstein, interview, New York, June 1994.19. Sidney Hook to Irving Brown, October 31,

1951 (IB/GMC).20. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, August 1996.21. C.D. Jackson to Abbott Washburn, February 2,

1953 (CDJ/DDE).22. Richard Fletcher, “How CIA Money Took the

Teeth out of British Socialism,” in Dirty Work: TheCIA in Western Europe, ed. Philip Agee and LouisWolf (New York: Dorset Press, 1978).

23. Tom Braden, telephone interview, June 1998.

12. Magazine “X”

1. Jasper Ridley, telephone interview, August 1997.“I fully agree the New Statesman is an importanttarget, and must be dealt with systematically,” MichaelGoodwin told Nicolas Nabokov, January 15, 1952(CCF/CHI). Goodwin’s efforts were not enough tosatisfy his secret sponsors. Washington’s interest indestroying the influence of the New Statesman waslater taken up by the American Committee for Cultural

Freedom, which despised the journal’s “spirit ofconciliation and moral lassitude vis-a-vis Communism”and proposed the “publication of ‘An Inventory of theNew Statesman and Nation,’ exposing its line ofcompromise with totalitarianism, for world-widedistribution to English-reading intellectuals.” AmericanCommittee for Cultural Freedom, memorandum,January 6, 1955 (ACCF/NYU).

2. Malcolm Muggeridge, Like It Was (London:Collins, 1981).

3. Tosco Fyvel to Irving Brown, August 4, 1951(IB/GMC).

4. C.D. Jackson to William Griffin, May 11, 1953(CDJ/DDE).

5. Kim Philby, My Silent War (New York: GrovePress, 1968).

6. Ibid.7. Christopher Montague Woodhouse, Something

Ventured (London: Granada, 1982).8. Ibid.9. Kim Roosevelt left the CIA in 1958 and went on

to become a partner in a Washington PR firmrepresenting, among other international clients, the

government of Iran.10. Stephen Spender, “My Parents,” in Collected

Poems, 1928–1985 (London: Faber & Faber, 1985).11. Stephen Spender, Journals, 1939–1983

(London: Faber & Faber, 1985).12. Anita Kermode, interview, Devon, July 1997.13. Stephen Spender, “We Can Win the Battle for

the Mind of Europe,” New York Times Magazine,April 25, 1948.

14. Ibid.15. Raymond Aron, “Does Europe Welcome

American Leadership?” Saturday Review, January 13,1951.

16. Stuart Hampshire, interview, Oxford,December 1997.

17. Natasha Spender, telephone interview, August1997.

18. Irving Kristol to Fredric Warburg, February 26,1953 (ACCF/NYU).

19. Michael Josselson to Stephen Spender, May 27,1953 (CCF/CHI).

20. Christopher Montague Woodhouse, telephoneinterview, July 1997.

21. Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview,April 1997.

22. Malcolm Muggeridge, “An Anatomy ofNeutralism,” Time, November 2, 1953.

23. Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of WastedTime: The Infernal Grove (London: Collins, 1973).

24. Jasper Ridley, letter to the author, October 31,1997.

25. Michael Josselson to Stephen Spender, March5, 1953 (MJ/HRC).

26. Stephen Spender to Irving Kristol, undated(ACCF/NYU).

27. Irving Kristol to Stephen Spender, March 26,1953 (ACCF/NYU).

28. Christopher Montague Woodhouse, telephoneinterview, July 1997.

29. Irving Kristol, interview, Washington, June1994.

30. Stephen Spender, interview, London, July 1994.31. Philip Larkin, in Selected Letters of Philip

Larkin, 1940–1985 (London: Faber & Faber, 1992).32. John Thompson, telephone interview, August

1996.

33. Natasha Spender, interview, Maussane, July1997.

34. Irving Kristol to Michael Josselson, September15, 1953 (CCF/CHI).

35. Irving Kristol to Michael Josselson, September16, 1953 (CCF/CHI).

36. Judge Irving Kaufman, quoted in New YorkTimes, April 5, 1951.

37. Jean-Paul Sartre, quoted in Stephen J.Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

38. Ben Bradlee, A Good Life: Newspaperingand Other Adventures (London: Simon & Schuster,1995).

39. Melvin Lasky, interview, London, August 1997.40. Douglas Dillon to State Department, May 15,

1953 (CJD/DDE).41. Bowen Evans, Office of Intelligence Research,

to Jesse MacKnight, Psychological Strategy Board,January 14, 1953 (PSB/DDE).

42. Douglas Dillon to State Department, May 15,1953 (CJD/DDE).

43. Charles Taquey to C.E. Johnson, Psychological

Strategy Board, March 29, 1953 (CJD/DDE).44. C.D. Jackson to Herbert Brownell, February

23, 1953 (CJD/DDE).45. C.D. Jackson, “Memo for the File,” May 27,

1953 (CJD/DDE).46. Handwritten notes of the cabinet meeting, June

19, 1953 (WHO/DDE).47. Ibid.48. Ibid.49. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March

1997.50. American Committee for Cultural Freedom to

President Eisenhower, June 13, 1953 (CCF/CHI).51. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March

1997.52. Quoted in Wilford, New York Intellectuals.53. Leslie Fiedler, “A Postscript to the Rosenberg

Case,” Encounter, October 1953.54. Alger Hiss was a promising diplomat who, in

1949, fell under suspicion of being a Soviet spy in theState Department. Indicted by a federal grand jury forperjury, his case filled the newspapers and consumedAmerica’s body politic. He was finally convicted of

perjury—though not of espionage—and sentenced toprison in January 1950 for five years.

55. Fiedler, “Postscript to the Rosenberg Case.”56. James T. Farrell to Meyer Schapiro, September

4, 1940 (MS/COL).57. Sidney Hook, quoted in Irving Kristol to

Michael Josselson, August 4, 1953 (CCF/CHI).58. E.M. Forster, quoted in Stephen Spender to

Michael Josselson, October 22, 1953 (MS/COL).59. Stephen Spender to Michael Josselson,

October 22, 1953 (MS/COL).60. Ibid.61. Natasha Spender, telephone interview, May

1997.62. Christopher Montague Woodhouse, telephone

interview, December 1997. Woodhouse was unable torecall where this scene had taken place. Woodhouseoccasionally bumped into Spender at social gatherings.He was also a contributor to Encounter, though hewas scrupulous in protecting his affiliations to MI6from both its editors and, naturally, its readers.

63. Stephen Spender to Michael Josselson,October 22, 1953 (CCF/CHI).

64. Anthony Hartley, The Spectator, October 9,1953. If Hartley had misgivings at this time, he musthave persuaded himself that he was in error. In 1962,when he became foreign editor of the Spectator, halfhis salary was paid by Encounter, of which heeventually became co-editor, alongside Melvin Lasky.There was something of a pattern to this kind ofconversion. Josselson tracked critics, whether ofEncounter or the Congress generally, and devoted hisenergy to bringing them “onside.” In 1955, only monthsafter he had reported in the New Statesman thatEncounter was “viewed with suspicion, because itwas so obviously subsidized and people wanted toknow by whom, and who laid down its ‘line,’ ” DavidDaiches was featured as a contributor to Encounter, asmall but significant gain in what Neil Berry describesas Encounter’s campaign “to sap the NewStatesman’s ideological hegemony.” Berry,“Encounter.”

65. Graham Hough, text of a broadcast for theThird Program, BBC Radio, May 1954 (CCF/CHI).

66. A.J.P. Taylor, The Listener, October 8, 1953.67. Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt, in

Between Friends: The Correspondence of HannahArendt and Mary McCarthy 1949–1975, ed. CarolBrightman (London: Secker & Warburg, 1995).

68. Richard Wollheim, telephone interview,December 1997.

69. Stephen Spender to Irving Kristol, April 24,1954 (CCF/CHI).

70. Michael Josselson to Irving Kristol, October 4,1954 (CCF/CHI).

71. Stephen Spender to Michael Josselson, July 10,1955 (CCF/CHI).

13. The Holy Willies

1. Alsop, To Marietta from Paris.2. Richard Rovere, quoted in Whitfield, Culture

of the Cold War.3. Miller, Timebends.4. William Colby, interview, Washington, June

1994.5. Howard Fast, quoted in Robins, Alien Ink .6. Quoted in Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War.7. Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War.

8. Quoted in Taylor D. Littleton and MaltbySykes, Advancing American Art: Painting, Politicsand Cultural Confrontation at Mid-Century(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989).

9. State Department and USIA cables, April–July1953 (SD.CA/RG59/NARA).

10. American Embassy, Paris, to StateDepartment, April 20, 1953 (SD.CA/RG59/NARA).

11. Tom Braden remembered being “veryalarmed” by the news that Thomas Mann waspreparing to “defect” back to Europe. Mann did indeedreturn to Europe, for good, in 1952.

12. Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War.13. Robins, Alien Ink .14. Ibid.15. Miller, Timebends.16. Murray Kempton, quoted in Robins, Alien Ink .17. Handwritten notes of the cabinet meeting, July

10, 1953 (WHO/DDE).18. Robert W. Merry, Taking on the World:

Joseph and Stewart Alsop, Guardians of theAmerican Century (New York: Viking Penguin, 1996).

19. Lyman Kirkpatrick, The Real CIA (New York:

Macmillan, 1968).20. Ibid.21. Roy Cohn, McCarthy (New York: New

American Library, 1968).22. Arthur Schlesinger, interview, New York, June

1994.23. John Hunt, interview, Uzés, July 1997.24. Kai Bird, interview, Washington, June 1994.25. James T. Farrell, quoted in American

Committee for Cultural Freedom, “Minutes of PlanningConference,” March 1, 1952 (IB/GMC).

26. Macdonald, “Politics Past.”27. Bertram Wolfe, ibid.28. Boris Shub, ibid.29. Richard Rovere, ibid.30. Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt, March 14,

1952, in Brightman, Between Friends.31. Ibid.32. Ibid.33. Max Eastman, “Who Threatens Cultural

Freedom in America?,” March 29, 1952(ACCF/NYU).

34. Ibid.

35. Richard Rovere, “Communists in a FreeSociety,” March 29, 1952 (ACCF/NYU).

36. Arthur Schlesinger, interview, New York,August 1996.

37. Frank Wisner, Deputy Director CIA, to DeputyAssistant Director for Policy Coordination, in ColdWar Records: The CIA Under Harry Truman, ed.Michael Warner (Washington, DC: Center for theStudy of Intelligence, CIA, 1994).

38. Ibid.39. Arthur Schlesinger to Nicolas Nabokov, June

18, 1951 (NN/HRC).40. According to the Final Report of the Church

Committee, 1976, “backstopping” was the CIA termfor “providing appropriate verification and support ofcover arrangements for an agent or asset inanticipation of enquiries or other actions which mighttest the credibility of his or its cover.”

41. Tom Braden, telephone interview, October1997.

42. Jasper Ridley, letter to the author, October 31,1997.

43. T.R. Fyvel, “The Broken Dialogue,”

Encounter, April 1954.44. Leslie Fiedler, “McCarthy,” Encounter, August

1954.45. Peregrine Worsthorne, “America—Conscience

or Shield?,” Encounter, November 1954.46. This “McCarthy-as-man-not-phenomenon” line

echoes the CIA view of how to approach the subject.It seems reasonable to assume that Nabokov wasrepeating Wisner’s official “guidance” on this subject,as indeed was Leslie Fiedler in his Encounter essay(“McCarthy”), which focused on McCarthy as a livinggargoyle, “his palsied head trembling.”

47. Nicolas Nabokov to Arthur Schlesinger, April21, 1952 (ACCF/NYU).

48. Lee Williams, interview, Washington, July 1996.49. John Steinbeck, quoted in Vansittart, In the

Fifties.50. John Henry Faulk, quoted in Vansittart, In the

Fifties.51. Joseph and Stewart Alsop, “Why Has

Washington Gone Crazy?,” Saturday Evening Post,July 29, 1950.

52. Ibid.

53. Sidney Hook, “To Counter the Big Lie—ABasic Strategy,” New York Times Magazine, March11, 1951.

54. Irving Kristol, letter to New York Times,August 10, 1952 (ACCF/NYU).

55. Stephen Spender to Czesław Milosz, October12, 1953 (CCF/CHI).

56. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, July 1996.57. Melvin Lasky, interview, London, August 1997.58. Michael Josselson to Shepard Stone, January

12, 1968 (MJ/HRC).59. Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt, December

2, 1952, in Brightman, Between Friends.60. Cohn, McCarthy.61. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, August 1996.62. Smith, OSS.63. Ibid.64. Meyer, Facing Reality.65. Ibid.66. Dwight Macdonald, quoted in Wreszin, Rebel

in Defense of Tradition.67. Littleton and Sykes, Advancing American Art.68. William Fulbright, “In Thrall to Fear,” New

Yorker, January 8, 1972.69. Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior.70. Tom Braden, “What’s Wrong with the CIA?”

Saturday Review, April 5, 1975.

14. Music and Truth, ma non troppo

1. Josselson decided to close down Science andFreedom in 1961. Kingsley Martin alleged that thiswas done in a fit of Cold War pique because theCommittee on Science and Freedom was planning apublic symposium on nuclear politics. Josselson was apassionate advocate of atomic power, and he mightwell have been hesitant about Polanyi’s intentions. ButPolanyi himself was showing all the signs of mentalillness at this time, perhaps a nervous breakdown, soit’s hard to tell. Josselson decided to sponsor a newand more scholarly quarterly, Minerva, to be edited byEdward Shils.

2. Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy.3. Ibid.4. Michael Josselson to Walter Laqueur, April 1,

1955 (CCF/CHI).

5. Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy.6. James McAuley, “Proposal for an Australian

Quarterly Magazine,” undated (IB/GMC). McAuley’ssuccessor was Peter Coleman, who in 1989 publishedThe Liberal Conspiracy, which advertised itself asthe full account of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.Yet Coleman also conceded that he had failed toacquire any “significant news from official sourcesabout the extent of the CIA’s involvement.” In theabsence of such information, he decided that “thecloak-and-dagger questions of who paid whom, how,and for what” were insignificant enough to ignorealtogether. As a former activist of the organization hewrites about, Coleman is necessarily partisan, but hiscredentials as official historian of the Congress areimpeccable, and The Liberal Conspiracy is aninvaluable resource.

7. Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy.8. John Thompson, telephone interview, August

1996.9. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March

1997.10. Melvin Lasky, “Some Notes on Preuves,

Encounter and Der Monat,” April 1956 (CCF/CHI).11. Ibid.12. Ibid.13. Robert Silvers, quoted in Brightman, Writing

Dangerously.14. Al Alvarez, New Statesman, December 29,

1961.15. Conor Cruise O’Brien, New Statesman,

December 20, 1962.16. Jason Epstein, interview, New York, June 1994.17. Malcolm Muggeridge, New Statesman, May

19, 1967.18. Malcolm Muggeridge, Esquire, January 1973.19. Herbert Read, “Masterpieces of the Twentieth

Century” address, Paris, April 1952 (ACCF/NYU).20. Nicolas Nabokov, New York Herald Tribune,

February 8, 1953.21. Nicolas Nabokov to Julius Fleischmann, May 6,

1953 (ACCF/NYU).22. Musical America, May 1954.23. Sontag, “Pilgrimage.”24. Pierre Boulez to Nicolas Nabokov, undated,

1954 (CCF/CHI).

25. Nicolas Nabokov to Julius Fleischmann,September 7, 1954 (CCF/CHI).

26. Enesco had expressed his desire to be buried inhis homeland, Romania. But according to DianaJosselson, when Enesco died in May 1955, Nabokovand Josselson were involved in a frantic bid to preventhis body from leaving France. They succeeded, andEnesco was buried in Paris, at the Père Lachaisecemetery.

27. C.D. Jackson to Cecil Morgan, March 26, 1957(CDJ/DDE).

28. C.D. Jackson to Theodore Streibert, Director,USIA, July 28, 1955 (CDJ/DDE).

29. C.D. Jackson to Allen Dulles, May 20, 1953(CDJ/DDE).

30. Julius Fleischmann to C.D. Jackson, February17, 1953 (CDJ/DDE).

31. C.D. Jackson to George Sloan, March 17, 1953(CDJ/DDE).

32. American Committee for Cultural Freedom toAl Manuti, American Federation of Musicians,February 21, 1951 (ACCF/NYU).

33. American Committee for Cultural Freedom,

“Statement of Principles,” 1953 (IB/GMC).34. George F. Kennan, “International Exchange in

the Arts,” Address to the Council of MoMA, 1955,printed in Perspectives, Summer 1956.

35. When Lasky discovered in 1956 that hisresearch assistant on his white book on Hungary (TheHungarian Revolution) had been a much-reviledNazi, his first reaction was one of pragmatism: “Oh myGod, now they’re going to tear into the book, it’ll besmeared by his association.” But Lasky thought it bestto do nothing: “I swallowed my anxieties and left himon the project.” Melvin Lasky, interview, London,August 1997.

36. Lee Williams, interview, Washington, June1994.

37. James T. Farrell to Meyer Schapiro, July 25,1942 (MS/COL).

38. Arthur Schlesinger to James T. Farrell, March16, 1955 (ACCF/NYU).

39. Clinton Rossiter to Sol Stein, November 10,1955 (ACCF/NYU).

40. Jason Epstein, interview, New York, August1996.

41. Hannah Arendt once described ex-Communistsas Communists “turned upside down.” The point thatshe and George Urban make is that the Cold War wasan adversarial cause and, as such, appealed to theradical image many intellectuals held of themselves.“The vocabulary of opposition remained intact, thesense of a militant critique was preserved, even if itstarget had been switched from capitalism tocommunism.” Andrew Ross, No Respect:Intellectuals and Popular Culture (London:Routledge, 1989).

42. George Urban, Radio Free Europe and thePursuit of Democracy: My War Within the Cold War(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).

43. Michael Josselson to Sidney Hook, November23, 1955 (CCF/CHI).

44. Sol Stein to Norman Thomas, April 27, 1955(ACCF/NYU).

45. Norman Thomas to Sol Stein, April 28, 1955(ACCF/NYU).

46. Cord Meyer to Arthur Schlesinger, May 16,1955 (SCHLES/BU). Although Schlesinger recalledonly a social relationship with his CIA friends during

these years, his own papers, deposited at the John F.Kennedy Library in Boston, indicate a deeperinvolvement. Schlesinger appears to have acted asMeyer’s line into the American Committee for CulturalFreedom, sending him minutes of its executivemeetings and generally keeping him informed ofinternal developments. How formal this arrangementwas is unclear, but in a memo to President KennedySchlesinger later acknowledged serving “as a periodicCIA consultant” in the years since the Second WorldWar. Arthur Schlesinger, “Subject: CIAReorganization,” June 30, 1961 (NSF/JFK).

47. Michael Josselson to Irving Kristol, April 7,1956 (CCF/CHI). Russell was certainly not senile, buthe was showing signs of his will to “live till ninety sothat I can say all the wrong things.” In Josselson’smind, Russell could no longer say anything right, and by1963 he was wondering hopefully whether “the s.o.b.”would “do us the favour of dying.” Michael Josselsonto Edward Shils, April 10, 1963 (MJ/HRC).

48. American Committee for Cultural Freedom,open letter to Bertrand Russell, New York Times, April6, 1956 (ACCF/NYU).

49. Congress for Cultural Freedom ExecutiveCommittee to American Committee for CulturalFreedom, April 24, 1956 (IB/GMC).

50. James T. Farrell to Meyer Schapiro, August 5,1941 (MS/COL).

51. James T. Farrell, letter of resignation, toNorman Jacobs, August 28, 1956 (MS/COL).

52. Michael Josselson to Norman Thomas,September 27, 1956 (ACCF/NYU).

15. Ransom’s Boys

1. According to CIA mythology, “retirement” issomething of a misnomer. “Once a CIA man, always aCIA man,” goes the mantra. The process by whichpeople who left the Agency continued to remainfaithful (and useful) to it was known as “sheep-dipping.” However, many would later allege thatBraden did not fit this archetype; that he was, in fact, awhistle-blower.

2. Final Report of the Church Committee, 1976.3. Doolittle Study Group on Foreign Intelligence,

quoted in Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War.

4. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, August 1996.5. Lee Williams, interview, Washington, July 1996.6. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, May 1996.7. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March

1997.8. Donald Jameson, interview, Washington, June

1994.9. Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview,

February 1997.10. Lee Williams, interview, Washington, July 1996.11. Meyer, Facing Reality.12. William Sloane Coffin, quoted in Jessica

Mitford, The Trial of Dr Spock, the Rev. WilliamSloane Coffin, Jr., Michael Ferber, MitchellGoodman and Marcus Raskin (London: Macdonald,1969). Coffin later returned to his original calling, andbecame chaplain at Yale University.

13. William Corson, The Armies of Ignorance:The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire (NewYork: Dial Press, 1997).

14. Doug Henwood, “Spooks in Blue,” GrandStreet 7, no. 3 (Spring 1998).

15. Ibid.

16. Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James JesusAngleton, the CIA’s Master Spy Hunter (New York:Simon & Schuster, 1991).

17. Ibid.18. Clare Boothe Luce, quoted in Mangold, Cold

Warrior.19. Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography

(New York: Random House, 1982).20. John Crowe Ransom to David McDowell,

August 11, 1953 (RH/COL). Ransom’s insouciance atthe news of his protégé’s job offer from the CIAsuggests that he may well have been Meyer’s officialunofficial “line of contact” at Kenyon.

21. Lee Williams, interview, Washington, July 1996.22. Jason Epstein, interview, New York, June 1994.23. John Thompson, quoted in Elman, Aesthetics

of the CIA.24. Timothy Foote to Michael Josselson, March 5,

1956 (CCF/CHI).25. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March

1997.26. Ibid.27. Ibid.

28. Chief of Covert Action Staff, CIA, quoted inFinal Report of the Church Committee, 1976.

29. Ibid.30. New York Times, December 25, 1977.31. Hunt, Undercover. The New Class was

published in collaboration with the Congress forCultural Freedom.

32. Eugene Fodor, quoted in New York Times,December 25, 1977.

33. Carol Brightman, interview, New York, June1994.

34. Richard Elman, interview, New York, June1994. Richard Elman also believed that “the CIA’sinterest in imaginative literature and its creators andpublishers has been depicted by some as misguidedbenevolence, or even a championing of Western valuesand human freedoms against the totalitarian mind, but itwas also profoundly meant to be an Agency ‘dirtytrick,’ the means of influencing consciousness, anattempt to ‘preempt,’ in Agency lingo.” Elman,Aesthetics of the CIA. See also Jason Epstein, “TheCIA and the Intellectuals,” New York Review ofBooks, April 20, 1967, in which he claims that the CIA

and its allies “were not moved by a disinterested loveof the intellect or by deep aesthetic convictions, theywere interested in protecting and extending Americanpower.”

35. Allen Ginsberg, “T. S. Eliot Entered MyDreams,” City Lights Journal, Spring 1978.

36. Irving Kristol, quoted in Peter Steinfels, TheNeoconservatives: The Men Who Are ChangingAmerican Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster,1979). As Christopher Lasch pointed out, the elitism ofthose intellectuals who had once been attracted toLeninism was in no way contradictory: “even afterthey had dissociated themselves from [Leninism’s]materialist content, they clung to the congenial view ofintellectuals as the vanguard of history.” ChristopherLasch, “The Cultural Cold War,” The Nation,September 11, 1967.

37. Allen Tate, quoted in Marian Janssen, TheKenyon Review, 1939–1970 (Mijmegen: M. Janssen,1987).

38. Dwight Macdonald, quoted in Ross, NoRespect. Alexander Solzhenitsyn used a similar, ifmore graphic, metaphor when he described American

popular culture as liquid manure seeping under thedoor.

39. Robert Lowell, valedictory address, KenyonCollege, 1940, quoted in Hamilton, Robert Lowell.

40. Richard Elman, interview, New York, June1994.

41. Bollingen judges, quoted in William Barrett, “APrize for Ezra Pound,” Partisan Review 16, no. 4(1949).

16. Yanqui Doodles

1. George Dondero, quoted in William Hauptman,“The Suppression of Art in the McCarthy Decade,”Artforum, October 1973. In 1957, George Donderoreceived a Gold Medal of Honor from the AmericanArtists Professional League (AAPL), “for hiscongressional exposure of Communism in art.” AAPLpress release, March 30, 1957.

2. Harold Harby, quoted in Hauptman,“Suppression of Art in the McCarthy Decade.”

3. The Communist affiliations of these artistswere carefully documented by the Committee on Un-

American Activities, whose files were quoted in theCongressional Record of May 1947. The blacklist runsto over forty names, including William Baziotes, StuartDavis, Arthur Dove, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston,and John Marin. House Congressional Record, May13, 1947.

4. Frederic Taubes, Encyclopædia Britannica,1946.

5. Budd Hopkins, quoted in Frances StonorSaunders, Hidden Hands: A Different History ofModernism (London: Channel 4 Television, 1995).

6. Clement Greenberg, “The Decline of Cubism,”Partisan Review, March 1948.

7. Robert Hughes, American Visions: The EpicHistory of Art in America (New York: Knopf, 1997).

8. Jason Epstein, interview, New York, June 1994.9. Littleton and Sykes, Advancing American Art.

“It was within [a] broad context of cultural diplomacythat ‘Advancing American Art’ was formed andprojected as one element in an international definitionof American reassurance, stability, and enlightenment.”

10. Alfred M. Frankfurter, quoted in ibid.11. Quoted in Littleton and Sykes, Advancing

American Art.12. Senator Brown, House Congressional Record,

May 14, 1947.13. Jane De Hart Mathews, “Art and Politics in

Cold War America,” American Historical Review 81,no. 4 (October 1976).

14. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, June 1994.15. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and

Kitsch,” Partisan Review, Fall 1939.16. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, June 1994.17. Ibid.18. Philip Dodd, interview, London, July 1994.19. Donald Jameson, interview, Washington, June

1994.20. Ibid.21. E.J. Kahn, “Man of Means,” New Yorker,

August 11, 1951.22. David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The

Espionage Establishment (New York: RandomHouse, 1967).

23. Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern: AnIntimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art(New York: Atheneum, 1973).

24. G. Hellman, “The Imperturbable Noble,” NewYorker, May 7, 1960.

25. Ibid.26. Quoted in Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the

Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.27. Eva Cockroft, “Abstract Expressionism:

Weapon of the Cold War,” Artforum 12, no. 10 (June1974).

28. Ibid.29. Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview,

April 1997.30. Michael Kimmelman, “Revisiting the

Revisionists: the Modern, its Critics, and the ColdWar,” in Studies in Modern Art 4 (New York:Museum of Modern Art, 1994).

31. Museum of Modern Art, Report of theTrustees, 1945, in Alfred Barr, Painting andSculpture in the Museum of Modern Art 1929–1967: An Illustrated Catalogue and Chronicle(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977).

32. Ibid.33. Lincoln Kirstein, Harper’s Magazine, October

1948.

34. Samuel Kootz, quoted in Lynn Zelevansky,“Dorothy Miller’s ‘Americans’ 1942–1963,” in Studiesin Modern Art 4.

35. Dwight Macdonald, “Action on West 53rdStreet,” New Yorker, December 12 and 19, 1953.

36. Zelevansky, “Dorothy Miller’s ‘Americans’1942–1963.”

37. Reviewing the retrospective show of 1943,“Romantic Painting in America” (which includedBingham, Burchfield, Eakins, Homer, and Watkin),Greenberg dismissed it as representing “a period inwhich dry bones are being re-clad with flesh, corpsesresuscitated and illusions revived by our failing nervesin every field of endeavor.” Clement Greenberg, “Art,”The Nation, January 1, 1944.

38. Alfred Barr to Henry Luce, March 24, 1949(AB/MoMA).

39. Alfred Barr, introduction to The NewAmerican Painting catalogue, 1958. Fully illustrated,the catalogue was produced thanks to “two generousdonations—one from a British donor, who wishes toremain anonymous, and one from the USIA.”

40. Lynes, Good Old Modern.

41. American Embassy, Paris, to StateDepartment, June 11, 1953 (SD.CA/RG59/NARA).

42. Waldo Rasmussen, interview, New York, June1994.

43. Ibid.44. James Johnson Sweeney, press release, April

18, 1952 (ACCF/NYU).45. Alfred Barr, “Is Modern Art Communistic?,”

New York Times Magazine, December 14, 1952.46. The twelve artists were Jackson Pollock,

Arshile Gorky, John Kane, David Smith, Ben Shahn,Alexander Calder, John Marin, Morris Graves, StuartDavis, Edward Hopper, Ivan Albright, and TheodoreRoszak.

47. American Embassy, Paris, to StateDepartment, June 11, 1953 (NA, RG59). Jean Cassouwas a crucial link between the art establishments inNew York and Paris. A minor poet appointed to directthe Musée National d’Art Moderne as a reward for hisactivities in the Resistance, he was an hautfonctionnaire who knew less about art than how toattach himself to politically significant groups, not leastthe Congress for Cultural Freedom.

48. Ibid.49. Julius Fleischmann to Bob Thayer, February 25,

1960 (CCF/CHI).50. Monroe Wheeler to Nicolas Nabokov, April 9,

1954 (CCF/CHI).51. The Congress’s magazines provided a useful

base for critics favorable to the new art. MichaelJosselson was fully appreciative of the politicalsignificance of abstraction, which he believed to bedemocracy’s answer to socialist (read “social”)realism. After a public debate in early 1954 at whichAlberto Moravia was reported to have rallied to theCommunist point of view regarding socialist realism,Josselson was furious. He wrote immediately toNicolas Nabokov, who was then in Rome, instructinghim to organize a meeting at which Moravia’sstatements would be discredited and Moravia himselfwould be shown up as a “hypocrite.” MichaelJosselson to Nicolas Nabokov, January 22, 1954(CCF/CHI). The following year, after reading anarticle by the New Statesman’s art critic John Bergerwhich criticized a London exhibition of Italian paintersfor excluding such realists as Renato Guttuso (whose

work, wrote Berger, proved that “it is neithernecessary for a Western European artist to cut off hisright hand and paint as though he were an oldacademician in Moscow, nor to cut off his left to feelat home in the Museum of Modern Art, New York”),Melvin Lasky wrote Josselson: “If ever thatdevastating brochure on the New Statesman andNation is ever [sic] done, it should include the credo ofits art critic, party-liner John Berger, which is printedon p.180 of the issue of 5 February [1955]. Look at it—and tear your bloody hair out.” Melvin Lasky toMichael Josselson, February 7, 1955 (CCF/CHI).

52. Michael Josselson to Porter McCray, October8, 1956 (CCF/CHI).

53. Press clipping (source unidentifiable), summer1955 (ACCF/NYU).

54. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Freedom in the Arts,”MoMA 25th Anniversary Address, October 19, 1954,in Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, 1954.

55. August Heckscher, MoMA 25th AnniversaryAddress, in Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, 1954.Heckscher worked at the New York Herald Tribune,a Whitney-owned publication which consistently

championed the Abstract Expressionists.56. Kennan, “International Exchange in the Arts.”57. Ibid.58. Ibid. My italics.59. Ruby D’Arschot to Julius Fleischmann,

October 28, 1959 (CCF/CHI).60. Quoted in Clifford Ross, Abstract

Expressionism: Creators and Critics (New York:Abrams, 1990).

61. Quoted in ibid.62. Adam Gopnik, “The Power Critic,” New

Yorker, March 16, 1998.63. John Canaday, New York Times, August 8,

1976.64. Ibid.65. Jason Epstein, interview, New York, June 1994.66. Macdonald, “Action on West 53rd Street.”67. Paul Burlin, quoted in Serge Guilbaut, How

New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1983).

68. Alan Filreis, “Beyond the Rhetorician’s Touch:Stevens’s Painterly Abstractions,” American LiteraryHistory, spring 1992.

69. Barnett Newman, catalogue introduction to theFirst Exhibition of Modern American Artists,Riverside Museum, January 1943.

70. Willem de Kooning, quoted in Ross, AbstractExpressionism.

71. Jackson Pollock, quoted in Ross, AbstractExpressionism.

72. Robert Motherwell, quoted in Ross, AbstractExpressionism.

73. Robert Motherwell to Patrick Heron,September 2, 1975. I am grateful to Patrick Heron forshowing me this letter.

74. Ad Reinhardt, quoted in Annette Cox, Art-as-Politics: The Abstract Expressionist Avant-Gardeand Society (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press,1982).

75. Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of ApoliticalCulture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom andthe Cultural Identity of Post-War AmericanHegemony, 1945–1960 (unpublished PhD thesis,Lancaster University, 1998).

76. Philip Dodd, interview, London, July 1994.77. Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift.

17. The Guardian Furies

1. Dwight D. Eisenhower, quoted in Whitfield,Culture of the Cold War. Whilst propagandists in theEisenhower administration liked to talk of deployingspiritual weapons, the Department of Defenselaunched a program of expenditure on a stockpile ofnuclear and nonnuclear weapons amounting to $354billion in less than six years.

2. Daniel Boorstin, quoted in Littleton and Sykes,Advancing American Art.

3. Paul Nitze, quoted in Thomas, Very Best Men.4. Eisenhower’s ancestors had been Mennonites,

but when they settled in Texas there was noMennonite church, so they read from the Bible.

5. John Kobler, Henry Luce: His Time, Life andFortune (London: Macdonald, 1968).

6. Ibid.7. Ibid.8. Sidney Hook, “The New Failure of Nerve,”

Partisan Review, January 1953. In December 1951,the director of the Psychological Strategy Boardrecommended to Tracy Barnes of the CIA thatNiebuhr be approached as a possible “consultant” to

the PSB. Gordon Gray to Tracy Barnes, December 21,1951 (GG/DDE). This, combined with Niebuhr’sposition as chairman of the Advisory Committee of thePolicy Planning Staff (which oversaw the creation ofthe CIA), meant that the theologian was ideally placedto “to make God an instrument of national policy.”

9. Whittaker Chambers, Witness (Chicago:Regnery, 1952).

10. Harry S. Truman, Address to Congress, March12, 1947, in Truman, Memoirs.

11. George Santayana, quoted in Gore Vidal,Palimpsest (London: André Deutsch, 1995).

12. Billy Graham, quoted in Whitfield, Culture ofthe Cold War.

13. Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night (NewYork: New American Library, 1968).

14. Miller, Timebends.15. Ibid.16. Leslie Fiedler, quoted in Littleton and Sykes,

Advancing American Art.17. Sol Stein to Aware, Inc., January 28, 1955

(ACCF/NYU).18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.20. Aware, Inc. to Sol Stein, February 26, 1955

(ACCF/NYU).21. Sol Stein to Whittaker Chambers, December

20, 1954 (ACCF/NYU).22. Chambers, Witness.23. André Malraux, quoted in Whitfield, Culture of

the Cold War.24. Miller, Timebends.25. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Presentation of ‘Militant

Liberty’ to Chief of Naval Operations,” December 16,1955 (PSB/HT).

26. Christopher Simpson, interview, Washington,June 1994.

27. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Report of Conference inCalifornia in Connection with Cornelius VanderbiltWhitney’s ‘American Film Series’ and ‘MilitantLiberty,’ ” July 5, 1956 (PSB/HT).

28. Ibid.29. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, quoted in ibid.30. Joint Chiefs of Staff, ibid.31. Miller, Timebends.32. Vidal, Palimpsest.

33. C.D. Jackson to Henry Luce, May 19, 1953(CDJ/DDE).

34. Turner Shelton, Motion Picture Service, toCecil B. DeMille, May 11, 1953 (CDJ/DDE).

35. Geoffrey Shurlock to Andrew Smith, MotionPicture Service, September 28, 1954(WHO/NSC/DDE).

36. Ibid.37. Carleton Alsop, Hollywood Reports, 1953

(CDJ/DDE).38. Ibid. Despite the stand taken by the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored Peopleagainst “the stereotypical representation in films ofNegroes as bumbling, comical characters,” Hollywoodmade no positive advance in its treatment of AfricanAmericans on-screen. Indeed, between 1945 and 1957the number of black movie performers declined from500 to 125. In the 1953 film Skirts Ahoy, the blackmusician Billy Eckstine was forbidden to look at anywhite actress during his performance.

39. Ibid.40. Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain:

Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945–1961

(New York: Macmillan, 1997).41. C.D. Jackson to Abbott Washburn, January 30,

1956 (CDJ/DDE).42. C.D. Jackson to Nelson Rockefeller, April 14,

1955 (CDJ/DDE). In the same letter, Jackson warnedhis CIA colleagues not to get the “smarty pants” ideaof using these artists as intelligence sources—“I don’tthink that these people are emotionally capable ofplaying a double role”—but he did agree that “[a]fterthey return they can of course be skillfully debriefed.”

43. John Pauker, USIA, to Sol Stein, October 20,1955 (ACCF/NYU).

44. Sidney Hook, “Report on the International DayAgainst Dictatorship and War,” Partisan Review 16,no. 7 (Fall 1949).

45. T.S. Colahan to Sol Stein, October 1955(ACCF/NYU).

46. Eric Johnston, quoted in Hixson, Parting theCurtain. U.S. government propagandists wereuniformly wary of Steinbeck, and indeed that wholeschool of American literature deemed to carry loadedsocial data. In July 1955, a psychological warfareexpert urged the government to withdraw its

sponsorship of the Museum of Modern Art’sphotographic exhibition The Family of Man because itportrayed American society “in a Grapes of Wrathtype of display of an old or wealthy upper class” andleft “the impression that all US laborers aredowntrodden or exploited,” and as such was “aCommunist propagandist’s dream.” P.J. Corso,Operations Coordinating Board, July 1955 (OCB.Cen/DDE). One critic detected in all this a “paranoidquest for decontamination.” Tom Hayden, quoted inRoss, No Respect.

47. Carleton Alsop, reports.48. Reference to the CIA’s “Hollywood Formula”

is made in C.D. Jackson’s log journal for May 15,1953. Although heavily censored by governmentclassification experts, the entry is the only knowndocumentary evidence that the CIA had developed aformal strategy for penetrating the motion pictureindustry. According to the diary, C.D. met that daywith Tracy Barnes’s deputy John Baker (de Neufville’srecruiter) to discuss the CIA’s “Hollywood Formula,”which appears to have been the concern of Baker,Barnes, and Wisner, with Alsop as their man on the

West Coast.49. Carleton Alsop, reports.50. Ibid.51. Ibid.52. Hunt, Undercover.53. De Rochemont had won favor as an

independent producer with House on 92nd Street, inwhich valiant FBI agents did combat with Germanspies. The film was praised for its realistic—deRochemont called it “nonfiction”—restaging of anactual case from J. Edgar Hoover’s files. According toone historian, de Rochemont “had a career-longobsession with spies,” a useful credential for someonewho was about to work with several of them.Lawrence de Neufville, who met him in England duringthe filming of Animal Farm, recalled de Rochemont’sexcitement at “hanging around with guys from theAgency, like he was in one of his own films.”Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview, April1997.

54. Richard Hirsch, PSB, to Tracy Barnes,“Comment on Animal Farm Script,” January 23, 1952(PSB/HT).

55. Official financing for 1984 included a $100,000subsidy from the U.S. Information Agency, to makewhat its chairman described as “the most devastatinganti-Communist film of all time.” Tony Shaw, TheBritish Cinema, Consensus and the Cold War1917–1967 (unpublished manuscript).

56. Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culturein Postwar Britain (London: Athlone Press, 1997).

57. Sol Stein to Peter Rathvon, January 30, 1955(ACCF/NYU).

58. Ibid.59. Ibid.60. Ibid.61. Ibid.62. Sol Stein, memo to the American Committee

for Cultural Freedom, January 11, 1955 (ACCF/NYU).63. Isaac Deutscher, “The Mysticism of Cruelty,”

quoted in Alexander Cockburn, Corruptions ofEmpire (London: Verso, 1987).

64. Ibid.65. George Orwell, The Complete Works of

George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker &Warburg, 1998).

66. Richard Rees, quoted in Michael Sheldon,Orwell: The Authorised Biography (London:Heinemann, 1991).

67. George Orwell, in Davison, Complete Worksof George Orwell. Orwell was fiercely anti-Zionist,believing that “[t]he Zionist Jews everywhere hate usand regard Britain as the enemy, more even thanGermany.” For this reason, he advised IRD that it was“bad policy to try to curry favour with your enemies”and warned them not to think that “anti-anti-semitism isa strong card to play in anti-Russian propaganda.”George Orwell to Celia Kirwan, April 6, 1949(IRD/FO1110/PRO).

68. Adam Watson, telephone interview, August1998. My italics.

69. Bernard Crick, Evening Standard, July 11,1996.

70. Peregrine Worsthorne, The Spectator, July 29,1996.

71. George Orwell, “The Prevention of Literature,”Polemic, no. 2, 1945.

72. George Orwell, “The Freedom of the Press,”1944, printed in New Statesman, August 18, 1995.

73. Ibid.

18. When Shrimps Learn to Whistle

1. Manès Sperber, November 11, 1956, quoted inMichael Josselson to Shepard Stone, undated(CCF/CHI).

2. Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview,April 1997.

3. Ibid.4. Michael Josselson to Shepard Stone, undated

(CCF/CHI).5. Thomas, Very Best Men.6. Melvin Lasky, interview, London, August 1997.7. John Hunt, interview, Uzés, July 1997.8. Quoted in Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy.9. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Express, November 9,

1956.10. Michael Josselson to Shepard Stone, undated

(CCF/CHI).11. Ibid.12. Ibid.13. C.D. Jackson, Log Files (CDJ/DDE).

14. C.D. Jackson to Frank Wisner, February 27,1954 (CDJ/DDE).

15. Ibid.16. Richard Crockatt, The Fifty Years War: The

United States and the Soviet Union in WorldPolitics 1941–1991 (London: Routledge, 1995).

17. Michael Josselson to Nicolas Nabokov, January23, 1954 (CCF/CHI).

18. Curiously, Eisenhower himself, who laterobserved that “the proposals were revolutionary,”offered scant follow-up to his address at the time. Theproposals were rebuffed by the Soviets.

19. Michael Josselson to Lawrence de Neufville,undated (CDJ/DDE).

20. C.D. Jackson to Tracy Barnes, January 5, 1954(CDJ/DDE).

21. Melvin Lasky, interview, London, August 1997.22. Michael Josselson to Irving Kristol, December

1, 1955 (CCF/CHI).23. Melvin Lasky, interview, London, August 1997.24. Michael Josselson to Irving Kristol, quoted in

Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy.25. Irving Kristol to Michael Josselson, quoted in

Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy.26. Stephen Spender to Michael Josselson, July 10,

1955 (CCF/CHI).27. Ibid.28. Melvin Lasky, interview, London, August 1997.29. Ibid.30. Irving Kristol, interview, Washington, July 1996.31. Stuart Hampshire, interview, Oxford,

December 1997.32. Arthur Schlesinger, interview, New York,

February 1997.33. Michael Josselson to Malcolm Muggeridge,

September 19, 1955 (CCF/CHI).34. Michael Josselson to Irving Kristol, December

10, 1955 (CCF/CHI).35. Michael Josselson to Daniel Bell, October 29,

1955 (CCF/CHI). The expression was borrowed fromNikita Khrushchev, who once gloomily predicted thatonly when shrimps learned to whistle would the ColdWar end.

36. Dwight Macdonald to Stephen Spender, June 2,1955 (CCF/CHI).

37. Congress for Cultural Freedom brochure,

undated (CCF/CHI).38. Ibid.39. Melvin Lasky to Boris Shub, November 6, 1957

(CCF/CHI).

19. Achilles’ Heel

1. Final Report of the Church Committee, 1976.2. Braden, “I’m Glad the CIA Is ‘Immoral.’ ”3. Richard Wollheim, telephone interview,

December 1997.4. Ibid.5. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, June 1994.6. Dwight Macdonald, “America! America!”

Dissent, Fall 1958.7. Irving Kristol, interview, Washington, June

1994.8. Ibid.9. Melvin Lasky, interview, London, August 1997.

10. Macdonald’s attacks on the American laborleadership dated back to the 1930s, when he haddismissed them as “sit-down-strikers-turned-bourgeois-pragmatists,” completely absorbed into the capitalist

system and its consumer culture. In his own journal,Politics, he had ridiculed Walter Reuther as a“boyscout labor fakir.”

11. Macdonald, “America! America!”12. Irving Kristol, interview, Washington, June

1994.13. Dwight Macdonald to

“Stephenirvingnicholasmike,” April 16, 1958(DM/STER).

14. Stephen Spender, interview, London, July 1994.15. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March

1997.16. Michael Josselson to John Hunt, May 27, 1958

(MJ/HRC).17. Josselson, though he liked Macdonald as a

person, was always wary of his gadfly tendencies.When, in 1956, Spender revealed plans to commissiona piece by Macdonald on the European Coal and SteelCommunity, Josselson warned Spender to give the idea“a little more thought. [It] would be very sound if therewas not the danger of his coming up with a completelydestructive piece.” Spender subsequently dropped theidea.

18. Richard Helms, quoted in Final Report of theChurch Committee, 1976.

19. Macdonald, “America! America!”20. Government officials had long known of the

deplorable behavior of American POWs, but hadworked fastidiously to conceal the facts from a wideraudience. On April 23, 1953, C.D. Jackson noted in hislog file: “Big telephone hassle today on indoctrinatedKorean prisoners being returned. Got agreement fromDulles and [Walter Bedell] Smith that [it] should beadvised that it was imperative for the Pentagon to seeto it that all indoctrinated POWs should be kept in oneplace and . . . to release a story on this rather than letthese indoctrinated jokers jump the gun on us.” C.D.Jackson Log Files (CDJ/DDE).

21. Irving Kristol, interview, Washington, June1994. Kristol had evidently forgotten his letter toMacdonald in which he wrote: “I do wish you wouldreconsider the Korean episode.” Irving Kristol toDwight Macdonald, May 19, 1958 (DM/STER).

22. Michael Josselson to Irving Kristol, October 31,1958 (MJ/HRC).

23. Thirty years later, Kristol acknowledged that

American soldiers stationed in Germany after theSecond World War would have behaved appallingly butfor the rule of military law. Asked if he would haveexpressed such doubts at the time, he replied, “No. Outof loyalty, I wouldn’t. I’m American, I’m a patriot.”

24. Lee Williams, interview, Washington, June1994.

25. William Colby, interview, Washington, June1994.

26. Jason Epstein, interview, New York, June 1994.27. Dwight Macdonald, quoted in Wilford, New

York Intellectuals.28. Norman Birnbaum, open letter to the Congress

for Cultural Freedom, November 3, 1958, printed inUniversities and Left Review, December 1958(MJ/HRC).

29. Ibid. Birnbaum found it hard to believe “thatthe defence of the west is in good hands when theseconsist of those New York Jews whose devotion toAmerica is matched only by their conspicuous want ofall the American virtues, aided by that section of theBritish intelligentsia—a large one, I fear—recruitedfrom those boys who weren’t good at rugby at

boarding school.” Quoted in Wilford, New YorkIntellectuals.

30. Michael Josselson to Dwight Macdonald, April28, 1958 (DM/STER).

31. Dwight Macdonald, letter to the editor,Universities and Left Review, December 16, 1958(DM/STER).

32. Dwight Macdonald, quoted in Wreszin, Rebelin Defense of Tradition.

33. Derwent May, The Times, July 2, 1996.34. Steinfels, Neoconservatives.35. Epstein, “CIA and the Intellectuals.”36. Michael Josselson to Irving Kristol, December

6, 1954 (CCF/CHI).37. Michael Josselson to Irving Kristol, December

23, 1954 (CCF/CHI).38. Michael Josselson to Irving Kristol, August 9,

1956 (CCF/CHI).39. Epstein, “CIA and the Intellectuals.”40. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, July 1996.41. Christopher Montague Woodhouse, telephone

interview, December 1997.42. Michael Josselson to Stephen Spender, July 28,

1954 (CCF/CHI).43. Nicolas Nabokov to Irving Kristol and Stephen

Spender, July 30, 1954 (CCF/CHI). My italics.44. Ibid.45. Warren D. Manshel to Irving Kristol, August

19, 1954 (CCF/CHI).46. Conor Cruise O’Brien, “Journal de Combat,”

New Statesman, December 20, 1963.

20. Cultural NATO

1. Fredric Warburg to Melvin Lasky, October 8,1958 (ENC/S&W/RU).

2. The correspondence relating to the Rothschild“donations” to Encounter runs from June 1958 toOctober 1960 (ENC/S&W/RU).

3. C.D. Jackson to Nelson Rockefeller,November 18, 1954 (CDJ/DDE).

4. Herbert F. Propps, American Embassy,London, “Lack of Published Material on UnitedKingdom Willingness to Modify Sovereignty in theInterest of Collective Security,” to State Department,December 9, 1952 (SD.CA/RG59/NARA).

5. Berry, “Encounter.”6. As head of the Labour Party’s International

Department in 1948, Denis Healey helped to distributeIRD papers. He also sent regular reports onCommunist activities in the European trade unionmovement to the department. Later, he acted as anintermediary in introducing useful Eastern Europeanémigrés to IRD officers (IRD/FO1110/PRO).

7. Melvin Lasky to John Hunt, October 11, 1960(CCF/CHI).

8. Michael Josselson to Daniel Bell, October 28,1964 (MJ/HRC).

9. Richard Wollheim, quoted in Neil Berry,“Encounter.”

10. Stuart Hampshire, interview, Oxford,December 1997. Similarly, Isaiah Berlin describedSpender’s role as lending Encounter its “certificate ofrespectability to the English intelligentsia.”

11. Cass Canfield to Nicolas Nabokov, December23, 1958 (CCF/CHI). The Soviets and the Americanstussled over many revered cultural figures during theseyears. Responding to what it called the “spiritualvandalism” of the Soviets when they attempted, in

1952, to exploit the memories of Victor Hugo andLeonardo da Vinci as “partisans of the Soviet way oflife,” the American Committee for Cultural Freedomclaimed Hugo and Leonardo as apostles of free cultureto whom the Soviet model would have been“repugnant.”

12. Nabokov, Bagázh.13. Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt, June 20,

1960, quoted in Brightman, Between Friends.14. Ibid.15. Congress for Cultural Freedom press release,

July 1, 1959 (CCF/CHI).16. Macauley was at the time still a case officer

for the Congress and unable to take up hisresponsibilities at Kenyon. When he acceptedRansom’s offer, he had just received the KenyonFellowship in Fiction and “had already madearrangements to spend that year abroad.” By autumn1959, he still hadn’t returned to Kenyon, leavingRansom feeling “mightily fagged out” and obliged tokeep “the home fires burning about seven weeks aftermy retirement waiting for Robie.” John CroweRansom, quoted in Janssen, Kenyon Review.

17. Robie Macauley, quoted in Janssen, KenyonReview.

18. John Hunt, interview, Uzés, July 1997.19. Quoted in Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy.20. Leslie Fiedler, “Partisan Review: Phoenix or

Dodo?,” Perspectives, Spring 1956.21. Ibid.22. Ibid.23. Ibid.24. Farfield Foundation Annual Report 1962–1963

(CCF/CHI).25. C.D. Jackson to Cord Meyer, November 1,

1957 (CDJ/DDE).26. C.D. Jackson to Daniel Bell and Allen Grover,

November 12, 1957 (CDJ/DDE).27. Quoted in Edward Lilly, Operations

Coordinating Board, to Arthur Vogel, U.S. InformationService, April 9, 1956 (WHO/NSC/DDE).

28. Ibid.29. Ibid.30. William Phillips to Michael Josselson, March

28, 1958 (CCF/CHI).31. Sidney Hook to Michael Josselson, December

8, 1959 (MJ/HRC).32. Michael Josselson to Shepard Stone, January

12, 1968 (MJ/HRC).33. Daniel Bell to John Leonard, editor, Sunday

Times Book Review, October 16, 1972 (MJ/HRC).34. Warburg appears to have been less than

energetic in his role as Partisan Review’s Englishdistributor, leading the publisher Roger Straus, in his“official” capacity as an “adviser” to Partisan Review,to wonder “what the hell you guys are doing about thedistribution business that I discussed with yourconfreres.” Roger Straus to Fredric Warburg, June 30,1959 (ENC/S&W/RU).

35. Irving Kristol to Michael Josselson, March 9,1960 (CCF/CHI).

36. William Phillips to Michael Josselson, May 10,1961 (MJ/HRC).

37. William Phillips, “The Liberal Conspiracy,”Partisan Review, Winter 1990.

38. Melvin Lasky, interview, London, August 1997.39. Phillips, “Liberal Conspiracy.”40. Time Inc.–New Leader contract, May 14, 1964

(CDJ/DDE). This contract followed the same template

as the one drawn up in 1953.41. C.D. Jackson to Allen Dulles, February 21,

1956 (CDJ/DDE).42. William Furth to Henry Luce and C.D.

Jackson, “Confidential memo re. New Leader,” July24, 1956 (CDJ/DDE). Delegated to organize the drivewas veteran Cold Warrior Frank Lindsay, formerlydeputy chief of the CIA’s Office of PolicyCoordination, then a Ford Foundation executive andnow a management consultant at McKinsey &Company.

43. Herbert Luthy to Michael Josselson, February19, 1962 (MJ/HRC).

44. In some cases, the route was via the ParisReview, the journal founded by George Plimpton andCIA agent Peter Matthiessen in 1953. Nelson AldrichJr. worked as an editorial assistant there before movingon to the Congress. Frances FitzGerald, daughter ofthe CIA division chief in charge of operations againstCastro, worked at the Paris Review in the summer of1962 and then, after holidaying with the Wisners inTangier, graduated to a job in the Congress. GeorgePlimpton later stressed that “the Paris Review never

received any monetary aid from the Congress or anyother agency of that sort and nor was there anyevident political or sociological slant to anything Peter[Matthiessen] as an editor picked for the magazine.Frankly, I must say that I personally would havewelcomed funds from the Congress to help keep usafloat. Encounter, Preuves, and other magazinessupported by the Congress were superb publications—with no strings attached in terms of what waspublished that I could ever see. What a shame thatthese days it’s all seen in such an ugly light . . .reputations tainted by association with the least of it. Iguess we were lucky.” George Plimpton, letter to theauthor, August 27, 1997.

45. Kenneth Tynan, “Congress for CulturalFreedom,” That Was The Week That Was, 1962.

46. Mary Pinchot Meyer was found dead on thetowpath of a Washington canal in 1964, murdered in anapparently motiveless attack. She had beenromantically linked to John F. Kennedy and recordedher affair in a diary which CIA dirty trickster JamesJesus Angleton stole from her house (after havingpicked the lock) the day after her death.

47. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, July 1996.48. Arthur Schlesinger, interview, New York,

August 1996.49. John Thompson, telephone interview, August

1996.50. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March

1997.51. Lee Williams, interview, Washington, July 1996.52. Diana Josselson, letter to the author, 4 April

1997.53. John Hunt, interview, Uzés, July 1997.

21. Caesar of Argentina

1. Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell, March 1,1961, in Elizabeth Bishop: One Art, The SelectedLetters, ed. Robert Giroux (London: Pimlico, 1996), p.394.

2. Frank Altschul to John F. Kennedy, January 30,1961 (FA/COL).

3. Robert Lowell to Edmund Wilson, May 31,1962, quoted in Hamilton, Robert Lowell.

4. Donald Jameson, interview, Washington, June

1994.5. Laqueur, “Anti-Communism Abroad.”6. Jason Epstein, interview, New York, June 1994.7. Hannah Arendt to Mary McCarthy, August 22,

1972, in Brightman, Between Friends.8. Ernst Robert Curtius, quoted in Stephen

Spender, Journals. Michael Josselson oncecomplained that it was hard to get a meeting withSpender, who was always “off on some cruise orlecturing somewhere else.”

9. Elizabeth Bishop to Marianne Moore, August17, 1954, quoted in Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell.

10. John Mander, quoted in Coleman, LiberalConspiracy.

11. Lowell had an obsessive and morbid interest inHitler. Jonathan Miller, who stayed with him in NewYork in the late 1950s, remembered discovering thatwithin the (suspiciously fat) covers of Lowell’s copy ofLes Fleurs du Mal was hidden a well-thumbed copyof Mein Kampf.

12. Hamilton, Robert Lowell.13. Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt, September

1962, quoted in Brightman, Between Friends.

14. Ibid.15. Keith Botsford, quoted in Ian Hamilton, Robert

Lowell.16. Michael Josselson to John Thompson,

September 4, 1963 (MJ/HRC).17. Michael Josselson to John Thompson, July 10,

1964 (MJ/HRC).18. Botsford’s variety of jobs for the Congress

included keeping an eye on an outfit calledColombianum, a Jesuit-run organization whichcultivated left-wing intellectuals in Latin America, runby a priest called Padre Arpa, whom Josselsondescribed as “a Jesuit Communist homosexual dressedin Dior.”

19. John Hunt to Keith Botsford, March 29, 1963(CCF/CHI).

20. John Hunt to Irving Kristol, December 23, 1963(CCF/CHI).

21. René Tavernier to John Hunt, February 28,1963 (CCF/CHI).

22. John Hunt to René Tavernier, July 1, 1963(CCF/CHI).

23. Ibid.

24. René Tavernier, “Pablo Neruda,” June 1963(CCF/CHI).

25. Ibid.26. John Hunt to René Tavernier, July 1, 1963

(CCF/CHI).27. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March

1997. The year 1963 also saw the CIA spend $3million in an effort to influence Chile’s general election,the equivalent of a dollar per vote, twice as much pervoter as Goldwater and Johnson spent in the 1964 U.S.presidential campaign. See Thomas, Very Best Men.

28. Salvador de Madariaga to Michael Josselson,January 1, 1963 (MJ/HRC).

29. Stuart Hampshire, interview, Oxford,December 1997.

30. Nabokov, Bagázh.31. Stuart Hampshire, interview, Oxford,

December 1997.32. Ibid.33. Michael Josselson to Nicolas Nabokov,

December 10, 1964 (NN/HRC).34. Ibid.35. Michael Josselson to Nicolas Nabokov, June

29, 1964 (MJ/HRC).36. Ibid.37. Donald Jameson, interview, Washington, June

1994.38. William Hobby, quoted in Newsweek , March 6,

1967.39. Editorial, The Nation, September 14, 1964.40. Meyer, Facing Reality.41. Lee Williams, interview, Washington, June

1994.42. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March

1997.43. Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview,

February 1997.44. Nicolas Nabokov to Michael Josselson, March

19, 1977 (NN/HRC).45. Natasha Spender, telephone interview, May

1997.46. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March

1997.47. Final Report of the Church Committee, 1976.48. Quoted in ibid.49. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March

1997.50. Michael Josselson, quoted in Congress for

Cultural Freedom, “Minutes of the ExecutiveCommittee Meeting,” London, October 1964(CCF/CHI).

22. Pen Friends

1. Lewis Mumford, quoted in Whitfield, Cultureof the Cold War.

2. Gwynne Nettler, quoted in Wreszin, Rebel inDefense of Tradition.

3. William Burroughs, quoted in Littleton andSykes, Advancing American Art.

4. Sidney Hook to Michael Josselson, April 20,1964 (MJ/HRC). Hook was wrong, surely aboutNorman Podhoretz, who scorned the Beat rebellion as“the revolt of the spiritually underprivileged and thecrippled of soul.”

5. Lee Williams, interview, Washington, July 1996.6. Ibid.7. Michael Josselson, “The Story Behind the

Congress for Cultural Freedom,” unpublished

manuscript (MJ/HRC).8. Harry S. Truman, 1963, quoted in New York

Times, April 25, 1966.9. Arthur Koestler to Michael Josselson, July 24,

1963 (MJ/HRC).10. Nicolas Nabokov to Richard Crossman,

November 1956 (CCF/CHI).11. Elizabeth Paterson, interview, London, July

1997.12. David Carver to Jean de Beer, Secretary

General, French PEN, March 10, 1965 (PEN/HRC).13. Miller, Timebends.14. Arthur Miller, quoted in Robins, Alien Ink .

Miller learned in 1986, when he finally managed to gethis FBI dossier, that the reason he had been chosenwas just as he had speculated: he was considered to beacceptable to both East and West, the perfect PENpresident at a time when the organization’s veryexistence was in grave question.

15. Asturias was in fact Guatemalan. He was anoutspoken enemy of the Congress, and specifically ofBotsford, whose “games” in South America he heartilydisapproved of.

16. Michael Josselson to Manès Sperber,November 24, 1964 (MJ/HRC).

17. Lewis Galantière to Members of the ExecutiveBoard, American PEN, April 26, 1965 (PEN/HRC).

18. Tim Foote to Kenneth Donaldson, April 28,1965 (CCF/CHI).

19. According to PEN’s own report of the Bledconference, the CIA’s Free Europe Committee, ofwhich Lewis Galantière was an active member, alsoprovided money. Most likely, it was Allen Dulles whoorganized the grant. Dulles, although retired from theCIA, continued to play an active part in the Cold Warmachinery he had erected. Furthermore, he washimself a newly elected member of PEN.

20. John Hunt to David Carver, February 9, 1966(CCF/CHI).

21. John Hunt to Lewis Galantière, March 4, 1966(CCF/CHI).

22. PEN report, June 1966 (PEN/HRC).23. Conor Cruise O’Brien, “Politics and the

Writer,” May 19, 1966, printed in Conor: A Biographyof Conor Cruise O’Brien, ed. Donald H. Akenson(Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1994).

24. Ibid.

23. Literary Bay of Pigs

1. Merry, Taking on the World.2. Ibid.3. Jason Epstein, interview, New York, June 1994.4. Merry, Taking on the World.5. William Fulbright, “In Thrall to Fear,” New

Yorker, January 8, 1972.6. Ibid.7. Mailer, Armies of the Night.8. New York Times, April 27 and 29, 1966.9. Karl Miller, Dark Horses: An Experience of

Literary Journalism (London: Picador, 1998).10. Michael Josselson to Malcolm Muggeridge,

June 25, 1965 (MJ/HRC).11. Ibid. Natasha Spender was later perplexed by

Josselson’s reference to such financial arrangements,which she said were never put in place.

12. Melvin Lasky to Michael Josselson, undated(MJ/HRC).

13. Michael Josselson, “Memo for the Record:

Talks with Muggeridge, London 25 and 28 February1964,” March 3, 1964 (MJ/HRC).

14. Edward Shils to Michael Josselson, November2, 1967 (MJ/HRC).

15. Michael Josselson to Robie Macauley,December 30, 1965 (MJ/HRC).

16. Ibid.17. Frank Kermode, Not Entitled: A Memoir

(London: HarperCollins, 1996).18. Ibid.19. Richard Wollheim remembered confronting

both Lasky and Spender with the rumor several yearspreviously, when he had been asked to join the boardof Encounter. “We discussed it over dinner at someclub, and I asked for assurance on the score of therumors then circulating about the CIA. Lasky said,‘Nothing easier. You can inspect the accounts, and seefor yourself.’ And Stephen looked hugely relieved, andsaid, ‘See, there’s no truth to it.’ But then Lasky added,‘Of course, we’re not going to do that. Because whyshould we open the books to every Tom, Dick andHarry who falls for some crazy rumor?’ ” At this,Stephen’s jaw dropped. He was silent throughout the

rest of the meal. Wollheim declined the offer to join theboard. Richard Wollheim, telephone interview,December 1997.

20. Edward Shils to Michael Josselson, February28, 1964 (MJ/HRC).

21. Michael Josselson to Malcolm Muggeridge,April 27, 1964 (MJ/HRC).

22. Malcolm Muggeridge to Michael Josselson,June 9, 1964 (MJ/HRC).

23. Michael Josselson to James Perkins, July 20,1966 (MJ/HRC).

24. Michael Josselson to Cecil King, May 10, 1964(MJ/HRC).

25. Michael Josselson to Ulrich Biel, May 14, 1964(MJ/HRC).

26. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, May 1996.27. Braden, “What’s Wrong with the CIA?”28. Jason Epstein, interview, New York, June 1994.29. Ibid.30. John Thompson to Stephen Spender, May 25,

1964 (MJ/HRC).31. Julius Fleischmann to Stephen Spender,

September 16, 1966 (MJ/HRC).

32. Carol Brightman, interview, New York, June1994.

33. Natasha Spender, interview, Maussane, July1997.

34. Melvin Lasky, Irving Kristol, Stephen Spender,letter to New York Times, May 10, 1966.

35. Michael Josselson to Stephen Spender, October2, 1966 (MJ/HRC).

36. Stuart Hampshire, interview, Oxford,December 1997.

37. John Kenneth Galbraith, George Kennan,Robert Oppenheimer, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. letterto New York Times, May 9, 1966.

38. Dwight Macdonald to Michael Josselson,March 30, 1967 (MJ/HRC).

39. Angus Cameron, quoted in Robins, Alien Ink .40. Cord Meyer to Arthur Schlesinger, February 1,

1954 (SCHLES/JFK).41. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, May 1996.42. Braden, “What’s Wrong with the CIA?” Cord

Meyer epitomized this sanguine attitude. In hismemoirs he wrote: “American assistance todemocratic political parties and institutions seemed

essential if a free and pluralistic society was to survivein Western Europe. The fact that our assistance had tobe kept secret did not disturb me. The Europeanpolitical and cultural leaders who solicited our aid intheir unequal struggle with the Soviet-subsidizedapparatus made it a condition that there be no publicity,since the Communist propaganda machine couldexploit any overt evidence of official American supportas proof that they were puppets of the Americanimperialists. Discretion and secrecy were required ifour assistance was not to be self-defeating.” Meyer,Facing Reality.

24. View from the Ramparts

1. Final Report of the Church Committee, 1976.2. Ramparts, like all other “subversive” literature,

found its most avid readers at FBI headquarters. Atwenty-five-page FBI memo analyzed the “topics andthemes” of the magazine, presumably in order to makeplans to harass it. A CIA report attached to the memoconcluded that most of the writers listed in theRamparts glossary had “most frequently and most

vehemently expressed major Communist themes intheir published articles.”

3. Peter Jessup to Walt Rostow, April 4, 1967(NSF/LBJ).

4. Edgar Applewhite, quoted in Thomas, VeryBest Men.

5. Andrew Kopkind, “CIA: The Great Corrupter,”New Statesman, February 24, 1967.

6. Michael Josselson to Isaiah Berlin, April 8,1967 (MJ/HRC).

7. Isaiah Berlin to Michael Josselson, April 16,1967 (MJ/HRC).

8. Kermode, Not Entitled.9. Ibid.

10. Natasha Spender, telephone interview, May1997.

11. Ibid.12. Eric Bentley to Stephen Spender, undated. I am

grateful to Natasha Spender for showing me this letter.13. Cecil King to Michael Josselson, April 28, 1967

(CCF/CHI).14. Melvin Lasky to Isaiah Berlin, April 13, 1967. I

am grateful to Dr. Henry Hardy for showing me this

letter.15. Ibid.16. Melvin Lasky, interview, London, August 1997.17. Ibid.18. Stuart Hampshire, interview, Oxford,

December 1997.19. Ben Whitaker, The Foundations: An Anatomy

of Philanthropy and Society (London: Eyre &Methuen, 1974). According to Christopher Hitchens,Isaiah Berlin “may have been designed, by origins andby temperament and by life experience, to become oneof those witty and accomplished valets du pouvoirwho adorn, and even raise the tone of, the better classof court. But there was something in him thatrecognized this as an ignoble and insufficient aspiration,and impelled him to resist it where he dared.”Christopher Hitchens, “Moderation or Death,” LondonReview of Books, November 26, 1998.

20. Melvin Lasky to Isaiah Berlin, April 13, 1967.21. In its place, buried on the back page of

Encounter’s July 1967 issue, came an announcementof editorial changes at the magazine. Signed by thetrustees, there was no mention of the CIA.

22. Isaiah Berlin to Melvin Lasky, April 18, 1967(MJ/HRC).

23. Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life(London: Chatto, 1998).

24. Hitchens, “Moderation or Death.” The exactnature of Isaiah Berlin’s relationship with British andAmerican intelligence will probably never be known.The British spy Robert Bruce Lockhart recordedseveral wartime meetings with the young Berlin whenhe was working for the British government inWashington. Lockhart was under the impression thatBerlin was working for the Psychological WarfareExecutive, but Berlin’s coterie have vigorouslycontested this. It has also been alleged that during thewar Berlin featured on the Secret IntelligenceService’s (SIS) secret list, the Special Register, whichmeant he had rendered service to SIS in the past andhad agreed to join it during wartime. Freya Stark,Graham and Hugh Greene, and Malcolm Muggeridgewere also said to be on the list. As for Americanintelligence, it can be said, at least, that Berlin enjoyedan informal relationship with the CIA, whose memberswere not shy about approaching the philosopher for his

support, as recalled by Stuart Hampshire andLawrence de Neufville, who said that Berlin was toldof the Agency’s involvement in the Congress forCultural Freedom. None of this means that Berlincolluded with covert operators, but it does suggest adegree of proximity which, in and of itself, may rewardfurther research.

25. Natasha Spender, telephone interview, May1997.

26. Ibid.27. Ibid.28. Michael Josselson to Stephen Spender, April

26, 1967 (MJ/HRC).29. Ibid.30. Ibid.31. Stephen Spender, quoted in New York Times,

May 8, 1967.32. Stuart Hampshire, interview, Oxford,

December 1997.33. Malcolm Muggeridge to Stephen Spender, May

22, 1967 (MJ/HRC).34. Natasha Spender, telephone interview, August

1997.

35. Stuart Hampshire, interview, Oxford,December 1997.

25. That Sinking Feeling

1. John Hunt, interview, Uzés, July 1997.2. Manès Sperber, quoted by Hunt, ibid.3. John Hunt, interview, Uzés, July 1997.4. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March

1997.5. General Assembly of the Congress for Cultural

Freedom press release, May 13, 1967 (CCF/CHI).6. John Hunt, interview, Uzés, July 1997.7. Ibid.8. Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview,

February 1997.9. John Hunt, interview, Uzés, July 1997.

10. James McAuley, quoted in Coleman, LiberalConspiracy.

11. Chantal Hunt, interview, Uzés, July 1997.12. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, May 1996.13. Nicolas Nabokov, July 1966, unidentifiable

clipping (CCF/CHI).

14. Stuart Hampshire, interview, Oxford,December 1997.

15. Nabokov, Bagázh.16. Ibid.17. Nicolas Nabokov to J.E. Slater, August 11,

1971 (MJ/HRC).18. Diana Josselson to the Spenders, May 18, 1967

(MJ/HRC).19. Diana Josselson to Stephen Spender, May 26,

1967 (MJ/HRC).20. Natasha Spender to Michael Josselson,

undated (MJ/HRC).21. Braden, “I’m Glad the CIA Is ‘Immoral.’ ”22. Ibid.23. Ibid.24. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, August 1996.25. Tom Braden, telephone interview, October

1997.26. Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview,

April 1997.27. John Hunt, interview, Uzés, July 1997.28. John Thompson, telephone interview, August

1996.

29. Charlton Heston, quoted in Hamilton, RobertLowell.

30. Brightman, Writing Dangerously.31. Eric Goldman, quoted in Hamilton, Robert

Lowell.32. Ibid.33. Lyndon B. Johnson, quoted in Whitfield,

Culture of the Cold War.34. James Burnham, “Notes on the CIA

Shambles,” National Review, March 21, 1967.35. Walt Rostow, telephone interview, July 1997.36. Ibid.37. Ibid.38. Tom Braden, telephone interview, October

1997.39. Joseph Alsop, quoted in Carl Bernstein, “The

CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.40. Ibid.41. Braden, “I’m Glad the CIA Is ‘Immoral.’ ”42. Irving Kristol, interview, Washington, June

1994.43. Stephen Spender, interview, London, July 1994.44. Melvin Lasky, interview, London, July 1994.

45. Ibid.46. Diana Josselson to Tom Braden, May 5, 1967

(MJ/HRC).47. Lee Williams, interview, Washington, June

1994.48. John Thompson to Michael Josselson, July 7,

1968 (MJ/HRC).49. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March

1997.50. John Thompson to Michael Josselson, October

28, 1967 (MJ/HRC).51. Final Report of the Katzenbach Committee,

quoted in White House press release, March 29, 1967(NSF/LBJ).

52. Desmond FitzGerald, quoted in Final Reportof the Church Committee, 1976.

53. Editorial, The Nation, April 10, 1967.54. Final Report of the Church Committee, 1976.

26. A Bad Bargain

1. Jayaprakash Narayan to Raymond Aron, June22, 1967 (CCF/CHI).

2. K.K. Sinha to John Hunt, June 1, 1967(CCF/CHI).

3. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March1997.

4. John Hunt, interview, Uzés, July 1997.5. Michael Polanyi, quoted in Coleman, Liberal

Conspiracy.6. Yehudi Menuhin to Nicolas Nabokov, May 14,

1966 (CCF/CHI).7. George Kennan to Shepard Stone, November

9, 1967 (CCF/CHI).8. Kopkind, “CIA: The Great Corrupter.”9. Epstein, “CIA and the Intellectuals.” Epstein’s

point about second-class passengers traveling firstclass had earlier been made by Conor Cruise O’Brien,who argued that the success of operations likeEncounter lay in attracting writers of high principle toprovide a kind of cover for “writers of moderatetalents and adequate ambition” who were, in effect, aTrojan horse, engaged in “sustained and consistentpolitical activity in the interests . . . of the powerstructure in Washington.” Conor Cruise O’Brien,“Politics and the Writer.”

10. Dwight Macdonald to Michael Josselson,March 30, 1967 (CCF/CHI).

11. Richard Elman, interview, New York, June1994.

12. Stuart Hampshire, interview, Oxford,December 1997.

13. Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview,February 1997.

14. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, July 1996.15. “Statement on the CIA,” Partisan Review 34,

no. 3 (Summer 1967).16. Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, July 1996.17. James T. Farrell to Meyer Schapiro, July 27,

1942 (MS/COL).18. John Hunt, interview, Uzés, July 1997.19. Stephen Spender, interview, London, July 1994.20. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March

1997.21. John Hunt, interview, Uzés, July 1997.22. Edward Shils to Michael Josselson, November

11, 1975 (MJ/HRC).23. Edward Shils to Michael Josselson, December

11, 1975 (MJ/HRC).

24. Sidney Hook to Michael Josselson, September23, 1973, and November 2, 1972 (MJ/HRC).

25. Edward Shils to Michael Josselson, February10, 1976 (MJ/HRC).

26. George Kennan to Nicolas Nabokov, June 19,1959, quoted in Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy.

27. George Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill: APersonal and Political Philosophy (New York:Norton, 1993).

28. Harold Rosenberg, “The Cold War,” inDiscovering the Present: Three Decades in Art,Culture and Politics (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1973).

29. Elman, Aesthetics of the CIA.30. Ibid.31. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

(London: Michael Joseph, 1988).32. Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (London:

Chatto & Windus, 1936).

Epilogue

1. Stephen Spender to Nicolas Nabokov, August

26, 1970 (NN/HRC).2. Isaiah Berlin to Nicolas Nabokov, December

18, 1972, and December 21, 1976 (NN/HRC).3. Spender, Journals.4. Andrew Porter, “Musical Events,” New

Yorker, February 17, 1973.5. Ibid.6. John Hunt, interview, Uzés, July 1997.7. John Hunt to Michael Josselson, undated, 1969

(MJ/HRC).8. Arthur Koestler, “A Guide to Political

Neuroses,” Encounter, November 1953.9. Irving Kristol, quoted in Wilford, New York

Intellectuals.10. Irving Kristol, Neo-Conservatism: The

Autobiography of an Idea, Selected Essays 1949–1995 (New York: Free Press, 1995).

11. Irving Kristol, interview, Washington, June1994.

12. Berry, “Encounter.”13. Ferdinand Mount, quoted in ibid.14. Frank Platt to Michael Josselson, October 13,

1976 (MJ/HRC).

15. Melvin Lasky, interview, London, July 1994.16. Bernard Levin, The Times, October 15, 1992.17. Ibid.18. Urban, Radio Free Europe.19. Ibid.20. Melvin Lasky, interview, London, August 1997.21. Natasha Spender, interview, Maussane, July

1997.22. Frank Platt to Michael Josselson, November

11, 1976 (MJ/HRC).23. Frank Platt to Michael Josselson, December

15, 1977 (MJ/HRC).24. Godfrey Hodgson, “Superspook,” Sunday

Times Magazine, June 15, 1975.25. Unidentifiable clipping, February 23, 1983

(MJ/HRC).26. Michael Hofmann, The Guardian, January 23,

1998.27. William Buckley, quoted in Vidal, Palimpsest.28. Braden, “What’s Wrong with the CIA?”29. Ibid.30. Lawrence de Neufville, telephone interview,

April 1997.

31. Mary McCarthy came to much the sameconclusion about Nicola Chiaromonte. On May 22,1969, she wrote: “It may be that he’s been deeplyscarred or crippled, poor man, by the CIA experienceand that whatever he writes or thinks is in some way ajustification for it, over and over.” Chiaromonte diedin an elevator after giving a broadcast on Italian radioon January 18, 1972.

32. Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt, June 18,1968, in Brightman, Between Friends.

33. Stephen Spender, interview, London, July 1994.34. Natasha Spender, telephone interview,

Mausanne, August 1997.35. Melvin Lasky to Sidney Hook, quoted in

Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy.36. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, May 1996.37. Ibid.38. Diana Josselson, interview, Geneva, March

1997.39. Edgar Applewhite, quoted by Richard Elman,

interview, New York, June 1994.40. Jason Epstein, interview, New York, June 1994.41. Joseph Alsop to Isaiah Berlin, quoted in Merry,

Taking on the World.42. Henwood, “Spooks in Blue.”

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abel, Lionel. The Intellectual Follies: A Memoir ofthe Literary Venture in New York and Paris.New York: Norton, 1984.

Acheson, Dean. Present at the Creation. New York:Norton, 1969.

Agee, Philip, and Louis Wolf. Dirty Work: The CIA inWestern Europe. New York: Dorset Press, 1978.

Alsop, Susan Mary. To Marietta from Paris, 1945–1960. New York: Doubleday, 1975.

Barrett, Edward. Truth Is Our Weapon. New York:Funk & Wagnalls, 1953.

Beevor, Antony, and Artemis Cooper. Paris After theLiberation, 1944–1949. London: HamishHamilton, 1994.

Bell, Daniel. The End of Ideology: The Exhaustion

of Political Ideas in the Fifties. New York: FreePress, 1960.

Bellow, Saul. Humboldt’s Gift. New York: Viking,1975.

Bernstein, Barton J., ed. Toward a New Past:Dissenting Essays in American History. NewYork: Knopf, 1967.

Bissell, Richard. Reflections of a Cold Warrior:From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs. New York: YaleUniversity Press, 1996.

Bradlee, Ben. A Good Life: Newspapering andOther Adventures. London: Simon & Schuster,1995.

Brands, H.W. The Devil We Knew: America and theCold War: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Brightman, Carol. Writing Dangerously: MaryMcCarthy and Her World. New York: Lime Tree,1993.

———. ed. Between Friends: The Correspondenceof Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975. London: Secker & Warburg, 1995.

Broadwater, Jeff. Eisenhower and the Anti-Communist Crusade. Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 1992.Cesarani, David. Arthur Koestler: The Homeless

Mind. London: William Heinemann, 1998.Chambers, Whittaker. Witness. Chicago: Regnery,

1952.Chiaromonte, Nicola. The Worm of Consciousness

and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, 1976.Church, Senator Frank, chairman. Final Report of the

Select Committee to Study GovernmentalOperations with Respect to IntelligenceActivities. Washington, DC: U.S. GovernmentPrinting Office, 1976.

Cline, Ray. Secrets, Spies and Scholars. Washington,DC: Acropolis, 1976.

Cockburn, Alexander. Corruptions of Empire.London: Verso, 1987.

Cohn, Roy. McCarthy. New York: New AmericanLibrary, 1968.

Colby, William. Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA.New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978.

Coleman, Peter. The Liberal Conspiracy: TheCongress for Cultural Freedom and theStruggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe. New

York: The Free Press, 1989.Cook, Blanche Wiesen. The Declassjfied

Eisenhower: A Divided Legacy of Peace andPolitical Warfare. New York: Doubleday, 1981.

Corson, William. The Armies of Ignorance: The Riseof the American Intelligence Empire. New York:Dial Press, 1997.

Crockatt, Richard. The Fifty Years War: The UnitedStates and the Soviet Union in World Politics,1941–1991. London: Routledge, 1995.

Crossman, Richard, ed. The God That Failed: SixStudies in Communism. London: HamishHamilton, 1950.

Diggins, John Patrick. Up from Communism:Conservative Odysseys in American IntellectualHistory. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

Fromkin, David. In the Time of the Americans. NewYork: Vintage, 1995.

Goodman, Celia, ed. Living with Koestler: MamaineKoestler’s Letters, 1945–1951. London:Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985.

Green, Fitzhugh. American Propaganda Abroad.New York: Hippocrene, 1988.

Gremion, Pierre. L’Intelligence etL’Anticommunisme: Le Congrès pour la libertéde la culture à Paris, 1950–1975. Paris: Fayard,1995.

Grose, Peter. Gentleman Spy: The Life of AllenDulles. London: André Deutsch, 1995.

Guilbaut, Serge. How New York Stole the Idea ofModern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedomand the Cold War. Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1983.

Hamilton, Iain. Koestler: A Biography. London:Secker & Warburg, 1982.

Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography. NewYork: Random House, 1982.

Hersh, Burton. The Old Boys: The American Eliteand the Origins of the CIA. New York:Scribner’s, 1992.

Hixson, Walter L. George F. Kennan: Cold WarIconoclast. New York: Columbia University Press,1989.

———. Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Cultureand the Cold War, 1945–1961. New York:Macmillan, 1997.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in AmericanPolitics and Other Essays. New York: Knopf,1965.

Hook, Sidney. Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in theTwentieth Century. New York: Harper & Row,1987.

Howe, Irving. A Margin of Hope: An IntellectualAutobiography. London: Secker & Warburg,1983.

Hunt, E. Howard. Undercover: Memoirs of anAmerican Secret Agent. New York: Berkley,1974.

Kahn, E.J. Jock: The Life and Times of John HayWhitney. New York: Doubleday, 1981.

Keller, William H. The Liberals and J. EdgarHoover: The Rise and Fall of a DomesticIntelligence State. Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1989.

Kennan, George F. Around the Cragged Hill: APersonal and Political Philosophy. New York:Norton, 1993.

Kermode, Frank. Not Entitled: A Memoir. London:HarperCollins, 1996.

Kirkpatrick, Lyman. The Real CIA. New York:Macmillan, 1968.

Kissinger, Henry. The White House Years. London:Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979.

Kobler, John. Henry Luce: His Time, Life andFortune. London: Macdonald, 1968.

Koestler, Arthur. The Stranger on the Square.London: Hutchinson, 1984.

Kristol, Irving. Neo-Conservatism: TheAutobiography of an Idea, Selected Essays,1949–1995. New York: Free Press, 1995.

Larson, Deborah. The Origins of Containment: APsychological Explanation. Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1985.

Lasch, Christopher. The Agony of the American Left.New York: Vintage, 1969.

Littleton, Taylor D., and Maltby Sykes. AdvancingAmerican Art: Painting, Politics and CulturalConfrontation. Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press, 1989.

Lottman, Herbert. The Left Bank: Writers, Artists,and Politics from the Popular Front to the ColdWar. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982.

Lynes, Russell. Good Old Modern: An IntimatePortrait of the Museum of Modern Art. NewYork: Atheneum, 1973.

McAuliffe, Mary S. Crisis on the Left: Cold WarPolitics and American Liberals. Amherst:University of Massachusetts Press, 1978.

Mailer, Norman. Armies of the Night. New York:New American Library, 1968.

———. Harlot’s Ghost. London: Michael Joseph,1991.

Malraux, André. Anti-Memoirs. New York: RandomHouse, 1968.

Mangold, Tom. Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton,the CIA’s Master Spy Hunter. New York: Simon& Schuster, 1991.

Mayne, Richard. Postwar: The Dawn of Today’sEurope. London: Thames & Hudson, 1983.

Merry, Robert W. Taking on the World: Joseph andStewart Alsop, Guardians of the AmericanCentury. New York: Viking Penguin, 1996.

Meyer, Cord. Facing Reality: From WorldFederalism to the CIA. Lanham, MD: UniversityPress of America, 1980.

Michaud, Yves, ed. Voire, Ne Pas Voire, Faux Voire.Nimes: Editions Jacqueline Chambon, 1993.

Miller, Arthur. Timebends: A Life. London: Methuen,1987.

Miscamble, Wilson D. George F. Kennan and theMaking of American Foreign Policy. Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Muggeridge, Malcolm. Chronicles of Wasted Time:The Infernal Grove. London: Collins, 1973.

———. Like It Was. London: Collins, 1981.Nabokov, Nicolas. Old Friends and New Music.

London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951.———. Bagázh: Memoirs of a Russian

Cosmopolitan. London: Secker & Warburg, 1975.O’Toole, G.J.A. Honorable Treachery: A History of

U.S. Intelligence, Espionage, and Covert Actionfrom the American Revolution to the CIA. NewYork: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991.

Pells, Richard H. Not Like Us: How EuropeansHave Loved, Hated, and Transformed AmericanCulture Since World War II. New York: BasicBooks, 1997.

Philby, Kim. My Silent War. New York: Grove Press,

1968.Phillips, William. A Partisan View: Five Decades of

the Literary Life. New York: Stein, 1983.Podhoretz, Norman. Making It. London: Jonathan

Cape, 1968.———. The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature

and Politics Meet. New York: Simon & Schuster,1986.

Ranelagh, John. The Agency: The Rise and Declineof the CIA. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.

Reich, Carey. The Life of Nelson Rockefeller, 1908–1958. New York: Doubleday, 1997.

Riebling, Mark. Wedge: The Secret War Between theFBI and CIA. New York: Knopf, 1994.

Robins, Natalie. Alien Ink: The FBI’s War onFreedom of Expression. New York: WilliamMorrow, 1992.

Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals andPopular Culture. London: Routledge, 1989.

Ross, Thomas B., and David Wise. The EspionageEstablishment. New York: Random House, 1967.

Salisbury, Harrison E. Without Fear or Favor: TheNew York Times and Its Times. New York:

Ballantine, 1980.Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Vital Center: A

Fighting Faith. Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press,1949.

———. A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in theWhite House. London: André Deutsch, 1965.

Silone, Ignazio. Emergency Exit. London: Gollancz,1969.

Sinfield, Alan. Literature, Politics and Culture inPostwar Britain. London: Athlone Press, 1997.

Smith, R. Harris. OSS: The Secret History ofAmerica’s First Central Intelligence Agency.Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972.

Sonnenberg, Ben. Lost Property: Confessions of aBad Boy. London: Faber & Faber, 1991.

Spender, Stephen. Engaged in Writing. New York:Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1958.

———. Journals, 1939–1983, ed. John Goldsmith.London: Faber & Faber, 1985.

Steinfels, Peter. The Neoconservatives: The MenWho Are Changing American Politics. NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 1979.

Stone I.F. The “I. F. Stone’s Weekly” Reader, ed.

Neil Middleton. New York: Random House, 1973.Thomas, Evan. The Very Best Men: The Early Years

of the CIA. New York: Touchstone, 1996.Truman, Harry S. Memoirs: Year of Decisions. New

York: Doubleday, 1955.Urban, George. Radio Free Europe and the Pursuit

of Democracy: My War Within the Cold War.New York: Yale University Press, 1997.

Vansittart, Peter. In the Fifties. London: John Murray,1995.

Vidal, Gore. Palimpsest. London: André Deutsch,1995.

Walker, Martin. The Cold War and the Making ofthe Modern World. London: Fourth Estate, 1993.

Wallock, Leonard, ed. New York, 1940–1965. NewYork: Rizzoli, 1988.

Warner, Michael, ed. Cold War Records: The CIAUnder Harry Truman. Washington, DC: Centerfor the Study of Intelligence, CIA, 1994.

Whitfield, Stephen J. The Culture of the Cold War.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Wilford, Hugh. The New York Intellectuals.Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.

Winks, Robin. Cloak and Gown: Scholars in theSecret War, 1939–1961. New York: WilliamMorrow, 1987.

Woods, Randall B. Fulbright: A Biography.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Woodhouse, Christopher Montague. SomethingVentured. London: Granada, 1982.

Wreszin, Michael. A Rebel in Defense of Tradition:The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald.New York: Basic Books, 1994.

Young, Kenneth, ed. The Diaries of Robert BruceLockhart, 1939–1965. London: Macmillan, 1980.

INDEX

Abrassimov, Pyotr Andreyevitch, 295–96Abstract Expressionism, 20, 212–19, 221–25, 229–34Abt, John, 161Acheson, Dean, 22, 109, 119, 164, 175L’Action, 76Actor’s Studio, 238Adler, Renata, 349Alexander, Mark, 180Allen, Raymond, 125Allende, Salvador, xiii, 295Allied Control Commission, Berlin, 13–14Alsop, Carleton, 244–47Alsop, Joseph, 168; beliefs, 31, 164, 310–11; CIA

connections, 339; on Philip Graham, 359; view ofMcCarthyism, 172; view of Vietnam War, 310–11;

war experiences, 273Alsop, Stewart: beliefs, 31, 164, 310–11; Braden’s

article, 335, 338–39; CIA connection, 338–39;friendships, 80; view of McCarthyism, 172; view ofVietnam War, 310–11; war service, 80

Alsop, Susan Mary, 9Altman, Georges, 64, 86, 89, 103Alvarez, A. A., 183American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 280, 291,

300American Civil Liberties Union, 167American Committee for Cultural Freedom: CIA

supervision, 126, 168–70; Farrell’s resignation,195–96; leadership and membership, 127–28, 131–33, 195–96, 225–26, 232, 238–39; moneylaundering role, 97–98, 107; Partisan Review, 135,136, 282–85; political stance, 131–33, 135, 165–74,179, 190–92, 238, 246, 249, 251; relationship withCongress, 131, 133, 173–74; response to Russell’sletter, 194–95; suspension, 195, 283; view of ex-Nazis, 190; views of McCarthyism, 165–74

American Council for the International Commission ofJurists, 298

American Council of Learned Societies, 300, 357–58American Enterprise Institute, xii, 353American Federation of Labor (AFL), 56, 150American Fund for Free Jurists, Inc., 298American Legion, 39, 176American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA),

114, 115American Veterans’ Committee, 176Americans for Democratic Action, 167Amerika-Häuser, Berlin, 17–18Amery, Julian, 64, 75, 93Les Amis de la Liberté, 85, 89Amoss, Ulius, 175Amrouche, Jean, 101Andersen-Nexo, Martin, 57Anderson, Marian, 18, 245Anderson Foundation, 298Andrew Hamilton Fund, 297Angleton, James Jesus: appearance, 202; and British

Labour Party, 277; CIA career, 199, 200–202, 287,357; education and background, 111, 199, 200–201;Italian election campaign (1948), 201; Ivy Leagueconnections, 199, 200; relationship with T. S. Eliot,

208Anouilh, Jean, 59‘Antagonismes’ exhibition (1960), 229–30Applewhite, Edgar, 34, 321Aragon, Louis, 57, 257Arbenz, Jacobo, 3, 81Archbold family, 29Arendt, Hannah, xii; on Congress-CIA connections,

345; correspondence with Mary McCarthy, 157,166–67, 174, 279–80, 291, 357; IRD connection,93; Lowell petition, 336; Milan conference (1955),261; Partisan Review statement, 346; at VillaSerbelloni, 291

Argosy Pictures, 240–41Aron, Raymond: on American leadership, 143; Berlin

conference (1950), 64; Congress GeneralAssembly, 329, 330; Congress ‘inner circle,’ 76;death, 354; Encounter piece, 149; knowledge ofCIA aid, 332; Paris festival (1952), 101, 103

Artforum, 221Ascher, Dorothy, 52Asia Foundation, 193, 207, 308, 325Association Française d’Action Artistique, 226–27, 230

Association of Literary Magazines of America, 300Astaire, Fred, 241Asturias, Miguel Angel, 306–7Attlee, Clement, 49, 315–16Auden, W. H.: Berliner Festwochen, 296; Bollingen

Prize vote, 210; Encounter essays, 138, 179; Parisfestival (1952), 97, 100; Poets of the EnglishLanguage, 200; in postwar Berlin, 12; andSpender, 93, 142–43

Auric, Georges, 99Auriol, Vincent, 98Ayer, A. J. (‘Freddie’), 9, 64, 77

Babin, Victor, 303Baird Foundation, 297–98Baker, John, 35–36Balaban, Barney, 244Balanchine, George, 97, 351–52Barber, Samuel, 18, 97, 99, 186Barnes, Janet, 111Barnes, Tracy, 30, 116, 207, 240, 259Barr, Alfred, 100, 223–24, 226Barrett, Edward, 68, 82Barrett, William, 210

Bartók, Béla, 99Barzini, Luigi, 207Batchelor, Joy, 247Bay of Pigs, 3, 28, 304, 359Baziotes, William, 213, 223, 232BBC, 87, 92, 286, 323Beacon Fund, 297, 298Beichmann, Arnold, 39, 41, 61, 132Bell, Daniel, xii; awareness of CIA funding, 332; on

Brown and Lasky, 345;Censorship, 281; Congress General Assembly, 329,

332; Congress work, 127, 277, 345; education, 142;Luce discussions, 135; and McCarthyism, 166;Partisan Review, 135, 282, 283–84; politics, 74;The Public Interest, 339, 352–53; relationship withJosselson, 261, 278

Bell, Pearl Kazin, 345Bellow, Saul, 2, 272, 305, 345Benda, Julien, 309Bentley, Eric, 323Benton, William, 208, 358Berg, Alban, 98, 187Bergson, Henri, 99

Berlin, Isaiah, xi; awareness of CIA involvement, 324–25; career, 54; and Congress, 76, 78; Encounter,138, 181, 260, 321–22, 323–25; influence inWashington, 30–31, 323–24; New College, 54,140–41; Non-Communist Left policy, 53, 324; onParis (1947), 7; PWE service, 54; relationship withNabokov, 87, 185, 351

Berlin Arts Festival, 295Berlin conference (1960), 279–80Berlin Congress (1950), 60–61, 62–71, 72, 75, 139,

143–44, 168Berlin Philharmonic, 13–14, 65, 190Berliner Festwochen, 295–97Bernstein, Leonard, 18, 39, 44Betar, 190Bevin, Ernest, 49Bible Balloon Project, 235Bieber, Marion, 308Bing, Rudolf, 189Binger, Karl, 152Bird, Kai, 118, 165Birnbaum, Norman, 270Bishop, Elizabeth, 95, 283, 289, 291–92

Bissell, Richard, 23, 31, 88–89, 116, 176, 177Blacher, Boris, 186Blair, Eric. See Orwell, GeorgeBlake, Patricia, 63, 84, 206, 300, 352Blum–Byrnes accord (1946), 242Bohlen, Charles (‘Chip’): Berlin conference (1950), 63;

influence, 30–31, 79; Koestler meeting, 51;Kremlinology, 30–31; Non-Communist Left policy,53; relationship with Nabokov, 31, 63, 79;relationship with Offie, 57

Bollingen Prize for Poetry, 210–11Bolomey, Pierre, 89, 148, 187Bond, Ward, 240, 241Bondy, François: Berlin meeting (1992), 354; CIA

funding knowledge, 332; Congress work, 85–86,90, 296; Encounter, 144, 146–47, 184, 262, 273,354; European Union of Federalists, 79; Preuves,86, 144, 272; salary payment, 89, 184; work in Italy,86–87

Borden Trust, 297, 298Borges, Jorge Luis, 138, 296Borkenau, Franz, 58, 59, 67Boston Symphony Orchestra, 123; European tour

(1952), 104–5, 127; European tour (1956), 188–89;Jackson memorial concert, 303; Paris festival(1952), 97, 98, 104–5; Rome festival (1954), 186–87; Tanglewood school, 186, 303

Botsford, Keith, 292–93, 296, 305–6, 307–8Boulez, Pierre, 188Bourke-White, Margaret, 31Bowen, Elizabeth, 278Bowra, Maurice, 200Braden, Joan, 221Braden, Tom: on American Committee, 170, 173; on

Angleton, 287; on art, 216, 217–18, 219, 220, 229;on Brown, 74, 88; career after CIA, 356; CIAcareer, 80–84, 114, 197–98, 221, 277; on CIApolicy, 264, 316, 319, 356; on Congress funding, 69,113; on Dondero, 216; on Donovan, 28–29; onDulles, 177–78; on Encounter, 155, 264–65, 272;encounter with McCarthyism, 165, 175–76; onFarfield Foundation, 106, 113; on Fleischmann, 106;International Organizations Division, 81–84, 96,97–98, 175–76, 197–98; on Josselson, 91;marriage, 221; on McCarthyism, 170, 175–76; onMeyer, 287; New Leader funding, 136; OSS

experiences, 28–29, 80; Paris festival (1952), 96,105; on Partisan Review statement, 346;relationship with Jackson, 127; relationship withJosselson, 80, 84, 129–30, 339–40; on Rockefellers,121, 219; Saturday Evening Post article, 334–36

Bradley, Omar, 21Brando, Marlon, 160, 201, 214, 238Brandt, Willy, 7–8, 30, 295, 332Brecht, Bertolt, 59, 96–97, 191, 262–63Breck, Henry, 111Brightman, Carol, 134, 208, 316, 317Brisson, M., 103British Council, 87, 142British Labour Party, 276–78British Society for Cultural Freedom, 87, 89, 91–94,

138, 146–48, 275Britten, Benjamin, 97, 186Broadwater, Bowden, 39Brockway, Fenner, 58Brogan, Denis, 309Brooks, Cleanth, 296Brown, Gordon, xiiiBrown, Irving: AFL post, 56; American Committee,

196; Berlin conference (1950), 63, 70, 76; onBritish Society, 91–92; Brussels meeting (1950),75; Congress appointment, 73–74; Encounter, 139,272; entertaining, 291; Freedom Manifesto, 70;fund management, 56, 73–74, 77, 79, 84, 88, 89,105, 107, 128, 129; Marseilles activities, 79–80,129–30; Paris Congress office, 80, 89–90; Pariscounter-conference (1949), 57; Paris festival(1952), 95; Partisan Review, 135–36; relationshipwith Nabokov, 86–87; relationship with Schlesinger,77; Twentieth Century, 92

Brownell, Herbert, 152Bruce, Ailsa (Mellon), 29Bruce, David, 9, 29, 31, 240, 351Bruce, Lenny, 160Buber-Neumann, Margerita, 300Buckley, William, 207, 356Buffington, Lieutenant Colonel, 198Bukharin, Nikolai, 136Bulganin, Nikolai, 256Bundy, McGeorge, 119, 201, 333–34Bundy, William P., 119, 120, 175Bundy brothers, 31

Burchfield, Charles, 223Burden, William, 114–15, 220Burgess, Guy, 140Burlin, Paul, 231Burnham, James: awareness of CIA funding, 332;

Berlin conference (1950), 60–61, 63–64, 65–66,70; Congress steering committee, 74; Encounter,332; Jackson’s opinion of, 127; Paris festival(1952), 103; Partisan Review, 174; politicalopinions, 52, 65–66, 74–75, 125, 132, 170, 337;Presidential award, 355–56; relationship withKoestler, 52, 76; relationship with Nabokov, 80, 85,87; ‘Upper West Side kibbutz,’ 132

Burroughs, William, 303Byrnes, James, 245

Caillois, Roger, 100, 296Calder, Alexander, 222, 232Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 343Caldwell, Erskine, 245–46Calvino, Italo, 181Cameron, Angus, 318Campesino, El, 207Camus, Albert, 333; attitude to Berlin conference

(1950), 62; Encounter piece, 149; on Hungary(1956), 257; Koestler’s opinion of, 59; on literature,191; Paris festival (1952), 101

Canaday, John, 230–31Canfield, Cass, 54, 114, 115, 221, 279Cannes Film Festival (1951), 242–43Capote, Truman, 272Carnegie Corporation, 123Carnegie Foundation, 113Carrefour, 101Carter, Elliott, 18, 187Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 11–12Carver, David, 305–8Carver, George, 208Casey, Bill, 110, 118–19Cassou, Jean, 226CBS, 220–21Cecil, Lord David, 87Censorship, 281Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): budget, 35;

censorship, 269–74; covert funding revelations,294–301, 311–12; creation, 27–33; funds, 26, 88–89, 113; headquarters, 35, 236; operation AJAX,

74; ‘quiet channels,’ 112. See also Congress forCultural Freedom; International OrganizationsDivision (IOD); National Committee for a FreeEurope; Office of Policy Coordination (OPC)

Central Intelligence Agency Act (1949), 34Central Office of Information (COI), 247Centre Européen de la Culture, 79, 187, 277Cesarani, David, 356Chambers, Whittaker, 238–39Chaplin, Charlie, 44, 57Charles, Scott, 204Chase Manhattan Bank, 118, 121, 217Chase Manhattan Bank Foundation, 121Chavez, Carlos, 186Chekhov Publishing Company, 118–19, 207Chiaromonte, Nicola, 39, 46–47, 86, 180, 271, 284, 308Child, Julia McWilliams, 29Churchill, Clarissa, 8Churchill, Winston, 29, 248, 276–77Ciano, Countess Edda, 30City College of New York, 24, 131, 133–34, 142Civil Rights Bail Fund, 162Clay, Lucius, 24–25, 26, 109, 117

Clews, John, 93Cockroft, Eva, 221Cocteau, Jean, 26, 97, 99Coffin, William Sloane, 199–200Cohen, Elliot, 132, 133Cohn, Harry, 239, 244Cohn, Roy, 159, 161, 162Colby, William, 81, 111–12, 160, 269, 357Coleman, Peter, 354Colt Foundation, 299Combat, 102, 104Cominform (Communist Information Bureau), 23–24,

39–40, 49, 51, 56, 57, 75Comintern, 23, 59, 292Comité National des Ecrivains, 257Commentary, xii, 132, 135, 175, 313Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, 78Communist Party: American, 45, 160; Italian, 55, 181Conditions of World Order seminar (1965), 291Congress for Cultural Freedom, xi–xii; art policy, 225–

30; Berlin conference (1950), 60–61, 62–71, 72–73, 139, 143–44, 168; British intelligence, 139–40;CIA management, 1; establishment, 73–76; Forum

Service, 262; Freedom Manifesto, 69–71; funding,69, 77, 79, 89, 105–7, 108, 112–14, 119, 167–68,262, 286–87, 290, 316–18, 324; honorary presidentsand patrons, 77–79, 237; Hunt’s position, 204;Jackson’s support, 127–28; Josselson’s role, 90–92,128–30, 179, 262–63, 301; Koestler’s position, 75–76; Lasky’s position, 72–73; leadership, 1;McCarthyism, 165, 170; Milan conference (1955),261; Der Monat, 130; Nabokov’s position, 79, 85,87; New Leader, 285–86; objectives, 83, 262–63,270–71, 301; Paris festival (1952), 96–97, 97–98;Paris headquarters, 73–74, 80, 129, 130, 256, 286;Partisan Review, 281–86; personnel, 77–79, 83–84, 204; Preuves, 86, 130, 258; relationship withPEN, 305–9; resources, 1; Russell’s position, 77–78, 194–95; Silone’s position, 64; steeringcommittee, 74–75, 103; structure, 75; suspicions of,86; That Was The Week That Was, 286; VietnamWar, 310. See also American Committee forCultural Freedom; British Society for CulturalFreedom; Encounter

Congress of Cultural Leaders, 119Connolly, Cyril, 138

Conquest, Robert, 354Cooper, Merian, 240, 241Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), 219–

20Copeland, Miles, 74Copland, Aaron: European premières, 18; ‘Fanfare for

the Common Man,’ 134; Ford Foundation grant,119; Life magazine’s attack on, 44; Paris festival(1952), 97, 99; Rome festival (1954), 187

Council of Literary Magazines, 280Council on Foreign Relations, 114, 118, 119, 121Counterintelligence Staff (CI), 201Covent Garden Opera, 97Covert Action Staff, 35, 206Coward, NoÎl, 50Cowles, Gardner, 109, 115, 221Cowley, Malcolm, 45, 117, 163Crick, Bernard, 252Croce, Benedetto, 41, 78Crosland, Anthony, 276, 277Crossman, Richard: Berlin conference (1949), 58;

education, 315; The God That Failed, 54–55, 290;magazine project, 139; New College, 54, 140–41;

on propaganda, 1; relationship with Nabokov, 87,305

Crusade for Freedom, 110, 115, 126, 355–56Cuadernos, 179, 181, 184, 292Cuba, revolution (1958), 292Cultural Presentation Committee, 245cummings, e.e., 201Cunard, Nancy, 252Curtius, Ernst Robert, 291Czapski, Josef, 75, 149

Daedalus, 280, 284, 291Daily Mirror Group, 314Daily Telegraph, 323Dallapiccola, Luigi, 186, 187Dancers’ Workshop, 300d’Annunzio, Gabriele, 246–47d’Arms, Edward, 185Darmstadt School, 20–21David, Josephine and Winfield Baird Foundation, 297–

98Davis, Harold, 64Davis, Stuart, 222, 289de Beauvoir, Simone, 9, 62, 85, 101

de Gaulle, Charles, 102de Kooning, Willem, 212, 213, 214, 232de Mendelssohn, Peter, 64de Neufville, Lawrence: art policy, 221–22; on Berlin

(Isaiah), 78; Berlin conference (1950), 60, 65, 69,119; on Braden, 336; career, 35–36, 118, 119; onCongress, 90–91; Congress appointment, 73–74,75, 80, 83–84; death, 356–57; Encounter, 140, 142,144–45, 170, 205, 272, 332; on Farfield Foundation,299–300; on funding, 78, 88, 199; on Hook, 131;IRD connection, 140, 141; on Nineteen Eighty-Four, 248–49; Paris festival (1952), 95, 104; Parisoffice, 80, 84; Radio Free Europe post, 198, 255;relationship with Josselson, 35–36, 73–74, 90–91,128, 130, 198, 258, 356–57; on Spender, 345–46

de Rochemont, Louis, 247de Rougemont, Denis: Brussels meeting, 85; career,

78–79; Centre Européen de la Culture, 187, 277;Congress position, 79, 89; Encounter, 149; GeneralAssembly meeting, 329–33; Paris festival (1952),97, 100–101; relationship with CIA, 79, 89, 187,332; Rosenberg petition, 153; salary payment, 89;Tri-Magazine Editorial committee, 182; Twentieth

Century, 92Dean, Gordon, 257–58Dean, James, 160, 214, 246Debussy, Claude, 97, 98Declaration of Independence, 28Decter, Midge, 174DeMille, Cecil B., 109, 243, 244Democratic Committee on the Arts, 114Denis, Nigel, 354Deutscher, Isaac, 251Dewey, John, 78d’Harnoncourt, René, 220, 223, 227Diebenkorn, Richard, 227Dillon, Douglas, 151, 152Dinesen, Isak, 119Disney, Roy, 244Disney, Walt, 219, 242, 244Disraeli, Benjamin, 19Dissent, 269, 299Djilas, Milovan, 207Dodd, Philip, 218, 233Doering, Ole, 241Domestic Operations Division, 207

Donaldson, Kenneth, 205, 307–8Dondero, George, 212–13, 215, 216Donnelly, Albert, Jr., 99Donovan, William: career, 14–15, 29–30, 115;

character, 28–29, 51; death, 51; History, 115;relationship with Croce, 78; relationship with JohnFord, 241; relationship with Koestler, 51, 53–54;relationship with Rockefeller, 121; on Stalin, 15

Dorati, Antal, 257Dos Passos, John, 43, 58, 279Dova, Giovanni, 227–28Dowling, Allan B., 282Driberg, Tom, 252Drumlevitch, Seymour, 227Dubinsky, David, 39, 46, 266Dubois, W. E. B., 161–62Dulles, Allen, 189; American Committee, 173, 193; art

policy, 219, 221–22; career, 30, 64, 108–9; CIAposition, 80, 84, 116, 132, 174–75, 177–78; Councilon Foreign Relations, 114; Encounter, 272; FreeEurope Committee, 108–11; History, 115; Italianelection campaign (1948), 201; Macdonald’sarticle, 270; memoirs, 114; NCL policy, 337; New

Leader, 136, 285; OPC, 33; P source recruitment,199–200; Partisan Review, 282; relationship withBissell, 116; relationship with Braden, 80–81, 84,96; relationship with Kaplan, 112; relationship withMcCarthy, 170, 174–76; relationship with Nabokov,36; relationship with Paley, 220–21; relationshipwith Schlesinger, 77, 318–19; relationship with theRockefellers, 117, 120, 121, 219; relationship withWisner, 34, 256; religion, 236

Dulles, John Foster: anti-Communist strategy, 163–64,174–75; art policy, 227; career, 108, 120; Koestlermeeting, 51; Macdonald’s attack on, 266;publications, 20; reputation, 105, 270

Dumur, Guy, 102DuPont family, 29Durkee, Bill, 288

East Berlin Writers’ Congress, 23–24East European Fund, 118Eastman, Max, 167Economic Cooperation Administration, 57, 123Edelman, Maurice, 139Edsel Fund, 297Ehrenburg, Ilya, 57

Einstein, Albert, 44, 162Eisenhower, Dwight D.: art policy, 228; atomic policy,

257–58; censorship policy, 163–64; election, 98,117, 123; Free Europe Committee, 109; History,115; Macdonald’s attack on, 266; McCarthyism,163, 175, 178; psychological warfare policy, 122;relationship with CIA, 197; relationship withJackson, 122, 123, 219, 302–3; religion, 235, 236;reputation, 105; space race, 153; Suez andHungary (1956), 254–55

Eisler, Gerhart, 59–60, 69Eliade, Mircea, 179Eliot, T. S.: Bollingen Prize vote, 210; CIA translations,

206, 208; Encounter, 156, 209; Harvard degree,21; Hiwar, 281; Nabokov meeting, 87; Orwellcriticisms, 248; quoted, 7; Waldorf counter-committee, 41, 43; works, 199, 208, 209

Ellmann, Richard (biographer), 138, 200, 208, 345Elman, Richard, 197, 208, 210, 349Emergency Rescue Committee, 115Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 42, 143Emmanuel, Pierre, 296, 329, 330, 332, 347Empson, William, 144, 248

Encounter, 138–58; attacks on Sartre, 182; CIAsuggestions, 205; editors, 142, 157–58, 259, 275–76, 312–13, 353–54; emergency trustees’ meetings,322–27; end, 354–55; first issue, 148–50, 154–55;funding, 150, 154–58, 171, 184, 275–76, 310, 314–16, 324–25, 335, 344–45, 353–54; Hahn’s essay,272–74; influence, 353–55; Josselson’s role, 270–72, 319, 321–22; King deal, 314–16, 322; LabourParty ties, 276, 277–78; launch party, 345–46;Macdonald’s article, 264–72; McCarthyism, 170–72, 174; New York Times revelations, 309, 311–12,316, 327; O’Brien’s charges, 309, 310, 312, 319,325; origins, 138–48; Ramparts investigation, 320–22; Spender’s resignation, 326–28, 357; Spender’sstory, 317; style and contributors, 138, 149, 179,181–84, 207–8, 264–65, 303–4

Encounter Books Ltd., 315Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 208, 358Enesco, Georges, 188Enquiry, 142Enright, D. J., 354Ensor, James Sidney, 226Epstein, Jason: on American art, 215, 231; on CIA

censorship, 270; on CIA spending, 184, 290–91,316–17, 332, 344–45; on counter-intelligentsia, 192;on Encounter, 271; New York Review of Books,303–4; relationship with Thompson, 203, 316–17,359; on Stalinists, 40; on Time and Life, 135; on theTrillings, 131–32; on Vietnam, 310

Erlanger, Philippe, 226–27European Movement, 78, 83, 276–77European Union of Federalists, 79European Youth Campaign (EYC), 277L’ Express, 257

Fabian Society, 277–78Fadeyev, Alexander, 39, 42, 57Fahs, Charles B., 120Falk, Peter, 175Farfield Foundation: American Committee, 193; Centre

Européen de la Culture, 187; Congress ArtsCommittee, 228; Congress publications, 184;directors and trustees, 105–7, 109, 113–16, 202,220, 221, 303, 355, 359; Encounter, 142, 147, 148,184; establishment, 97–98, 105–7; festival account,97–98, 136; funding, 113–14, 188–89, 299–301;Josselson’s role, 188–89, 193, 296, 340–41;

Nabokov’s settlement, 351; Partisan Review, 280,282; PEN congress, 308; presidents, 98, 105–6,220; reputation, 299–300, 317; Rome musicfestival, 185–87; Science and Freedom conference,180; Spender’s concern, 314, 317–18; Tolstoyfestival, 279; Young Painters show, 228

Farr, Finis, 247Farrar, John, 204Farrell, James T.: American Committee, 132, 195–96;

on American politics, 191–92, 310; Berlinconference (1950), 63; on Hook, 155; InternationalDay of Resistance (1949), 58; Karajan protest,190; Paris festival (1952), 97, 100; on PartisanReview, 346; resignation from AmericanCommittee, 195–96; view of McCarthyism, 165–66

Fast, Howard: books banned, 161, 162; on CommunistParty, 160; FBI file, 163; government translation ofworks, 19; Spartacus rejection, 44–45, 318;Waldorf conference, 41; World Congress of Peace,57

Faulk, John Henry, 172Faulkner, William, 19, 58, 100, 102, 246Fawcett Publishing Corporation, 207

Fechteler, Admiral, 102Federal Arts Project, 213, 217Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 35, 44–45, 58,

160, 162–63, 194, 242Federation of Hungarian Writers, 254Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, 232Ferber, Edna, 246Ferrer, José, 97Festival of Two Worlds, Spoleto, 300Fiedler, Leslie: on anti-Americanism, 183; on Partisan

Review, 281–83; Rosenberg article, 149, 150, 154–58, 272; view of McCarthyism, 171, 238

Figaro Litteraire, 103Figueres, Jose, 298Fischer, Louis, 54–55, 329, 332Fischer, Ruth, 59–60Fischer Verlag, 315Fitzgerald, Dennis, 23FitzGerald, Desmond, 341Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 9Flanner, Janet, 101–3Fleischmann, Charles, 114Fleischmann, Julius (‘Junkie’): American Committee,

196; awareness of CIA funding, 332; character,105–6, 299–300; Congress Music and ArtsCommittee, 229–30; Encounter, 148, 172, 266,317; on Erlanger, 226–27; Farfield Foundation, 98,105–6, 113–14, 115, 148, 317; Free EuropeCommittee, 109; Metropolitan Opera tour, 189;MoMA, 221, 226–27, 229–30; Paris festival(1952), 98, 100–101, 104; relationship withJackson, 127; Rome music festival (1954), 186;yacht, 291, 326; Young Painters show, 227

Fleischmann Foundation, 106, 113–14Fleming, Ian, 146Florence Foundation, 184, 299Fodor, Eugene, 29, 208Fodor guides, 208Foote, Timothy, 204Force Ouvrière, 79Ford, Ford Madox, 202Ford, John, 240–41Ford Foundation: background, 116–17; Bissell’s

position, 176; Hungary (1956), 255; ICA, 118;Index on Censorship, 281, 357; influence, 344–45; Intercultural Publications programme, 117;

London meeting (1949), 144; Macdonald’s profileof, 116, 259; Der Monat, 26, 117, 130, 182; NewLeader, 285; PEN, 308; presidents, 116, 118;relationship with CIA, 113, 116, 117–19;relationship with Congress for Cultural Freedom,119–20, 130, 205, 301, 347

Foreign Affairs, 32, 208Foreign Service, 225Forrestal, James, 359Forster, E. M., 144, 155Forum, 179–80, 256Forum World Features, 262, 341Foster, William, 161–62Françaix, Jean, 99France–America Society, 114Francis, Sam, 230Franc-Tireur, 57, 86, 103Fred Lazarus Foundation, 115Free Europe Committee. See National Committee for

a Free EuropeFreedom House, 45–46, 167Freedom Manifesto, 69–71, 76Freud, Sigmund, 99, 162

Fricker, Peter Racine, 187Frost, Robert, 80, 312Fuchs, Joseph, 187Fuchs, Klaus, 153Fuentes, Carlos, 308Fugitive Group, 203Fulbright, William, 177, 311Fuller, Peter, 231Furioso, 199, 201, 202Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 13–14, 189–91Future of Freedom conference (1955), 261, 277Fyvel, Tosco, 93, 139, 144, 146–47, 170

Gable, Clark, 247Gabo, Naum, 119Gaitskell, Hugh, 98, 156, 276, 277–78, 315Galantière, Lewis, 307, 308Galbraith, J. K., 12, 149, 181, 318Gardner, John, 341Gardner Cowles Foundation, 115Garland, Judy, 244Gaspard, Armand, 281Gehlen, Reinhard, 34Gehlen organization, 33–34

Gellhorn, Peter, 14Genet, Jean, 59Gershwin, George, 18Gide, André, 19, 54–55Gilbert, Lou, 238Gillespie, Dizzy, 245Gilpatric, Chadbourne, 120Gimbel-Saks, 11, 358Ginsberg, Allen, 209, 302, 303Girosi, Marcello, 29Glasco, Joseph, 227Glazer, Nathan, 149The God That Failed, 53–56, 58, 101, 114, 143Goebbels, Joseph, 14, 25, 67Goldman, Eric, 336–37Goldwyn, Sam, 239Goodman, Paul, 299, 346Goodwin, Michael, 89, 91–93Goodwin, Richard, 337Gopnik, Adam, 230Gorki, Maxim, 18, 161–62Gorkin, Julian, 179, 292, 294Gorky, Arshile, 214–15, 222, 223, 234

Gotham Foundation, 297, 298Gottlieb, Adolph, 213, 215, 222, 232Graham, Billy, 237Graham, Martha, 119, 245Graham, Philip, 285, 359Grainger, James R., 244Grass, Günter, 296Grau, Shirley Ann, 272Gray, Gordon, 132Green, Paul, 210Greenberg, Clement, 132, 166, 214–15, 217, 231, 233Greene, Graham, 208, 302Greenway, Gilbert, 88Groton School, 30, 111, 116, 200, 210, 219, 236Guatemala coup (1953), 3, 292Guest, Raymond, 29Guggenheim, Peggy, 224, 231

Haff, Theodore, 162Hahn, Emily, 272–74Halas, John, 247Halas and Batchelor, 247–48Hamilton, Hamish, 50–51, 54Hamilton, Ian, 93

Hammett, Dashiell, 39, 44, 161, 162Hampshire, Stuart: on Berlin (Isaiah), 324; on

Encounter, 278; on Ford Foundation, 144; onJosselson, 10–11, 295–96; knowledge of CIAfunding, 332, 345–46; on Milan conference (1955),261; on Nabokov, 295–96, 333; on New York Timesrevelations, 318; Partisan Review statement, 346;on Schlesinger, 76; on Spender, 278, 327–28, 345–46

Hanes, Barbara, 115Hanes, Ralph P., 115Hanes Foundation, 115Hardwick, Elizabeth, 39, 101–2, 292Harper Brothers, 54, 114Harper’s, 114, 181, 223Harriman, Averell, 31, 53, 57, 77, 89, 277Harrison, Lou, 187, 188Hartigan, Grace, 230Hartley, Anthony, 156, 281, 329, 354Hayter, Sir William, 315–16, 322Hayward, Max, 206, 308Healey, Denis, 139, 276, 278Hearst, William Randolph, 44, 45

Heckscher, August, 228Heinz, H. J., 285Heller, Joseph, 303Hellman, Lillian, 18, 39, 44, 160, 336–37Helms, Jesse, 215Helms, Richard: Braden article, 338; CIA career, 268,

302, 320, 336; Park Avenue Cowboys, 30;Ramparts investigation, 320, 341

Hemingway, Ernest, 9, 19, 29, 80, 163, 203, 256, 289Hemingway, John, 29Henze, Hans Werner, 188Heron, Patrick, 232Hersey, John, 18Heston, Charlton, 337Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 148, 354Hindemith, Paul, 13, 42, 99, 289Hinden, Rita, 177–278, 276Hiss, Alger, 154, 159, 175, 238–39, 352History, 115Hitchens, Christopher, 325Hitler, Adolf, 8, 9–10, 24, 40–41, 51, 98, 163, 199–200,

292; Hitler–Stalin Pact (1939), 40–41, 45, 52, 85,133

Hiwar, 281Hobby, Oveta Culp, 109, 221Hobby, William, 297Hobby Foundation, 297Hoblitzelle Foundation, 113, 184, 230, 286, 297–98Hodder and Stoughton, 206Hoffman, Paul, 116Hoggart, Richard, 281Hollis, Christopher, 64Holmes, Jay, 113Holmes, Norman Pearson, 303Holmes Foundation, 113Holt, Nat, 245Honegger, Arthur, 99, 186Hook, Sidney: American Committee, 131, 132, 173,

193, 196; on anti-Americanism, 58–59, 66, 246,303; awareness of CIA funding, 332; background,45, 74; Berlin conference (1950), 61, 63, 66–67, 70;death, 354; Encounter, 147, 155, 260–61; FBIinformant, 163; on France, 58–59; Jackson on, 127;on Koestler, 67; Lasky correspondence, 358; MaryMcCarthy on, 166–67; on McCarthyism, 173; onNiebuhr, 237; Paris counter-conference (1949), 58;

Partisan Review, 135–36, 282–83; on Stone, 348;Waldorf conference, 38–47

Hoopes, Townsend, 120Hoover, J. Edgar, 44–45, 163, 242Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, 358Hopkins, Budd, 214Hopper, Edward, 223Hopper, Hedda, 239Horizon, 138, 146Horton, Philip, 260Hough, Graham, 156–57House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC),

161, 176, 238, 241Howe, Irving, 138, 142Hudson Review, 205, 280, 284Hughes, H. Stuart, 260Hughes, Howard, 248Hughes, John C., 109Hughes, Langston, 44, 161, 162, 163, 296Hughes, Ted, 296, 300Hultberg, John, 227–28Human Events, 320L’ Humanité, 62, 103–4

Hungary, rising (1956), 254–57Hunt, Chantal, 332, 333Hunt, Howard, 74, 207, 247, 248–49Hunt, John: Berliner Festwochen, 296; on Braden, 336;

career, 203–4, 207, 352; Congress role, 204, 256,281, 288, 289, 344, 346, 347; General Assemblymeeting, 329–33; on Nabokov, 295; on Nabokov’sfuneral, 352; Neruda campaign, 293–94; New YorkTimes revelations, 299, 318; PEN, 305, 307–8;relationship with Botsford, 292, 293; relationshipwith Josselson, 204, 352

Hunter, Edward S., 206Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 116–17Huxley, Aldous, 138Huxley, Julian, 58, 179

Ignatieff, Michael, 325Index on Censorship, 281, 355, 357Indian Congress for Cultural Freedom, 343Information Research Department (IRD): Berlin

Congress (1950), 64; British Society for CulturalFreedom, 92–94; Encounter, 140–41, 142, 146,147–48; establishment and role, 49–50, 315–16;Gaitskell’s relationship, 278; Healey’s relationship,

278; Jackson’s relationship, 126–27; McCarthyism,170; Muggeridge’s relationship, 90, 139; Orwell’srelationship, 251–52; Paris festival (1952), 97–98;Russell’s relationship, 78; World Congress report,56; Wyatt’s relationship, 139

Inostranaya Literatura, 245–46Institute for Advanced Studies in the Theatre Arts, 300Institute of Contemporary Arts, 119Institute of International Labor Research Inc, 298Institute of Political Education, 298Intercultural Publications, 117Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 297, 299International Association for Cultural Freedom, 346,

348, 352International Conference of Twentieth Century Music,

186International Day of Resistance to Dictatorship and

War, 58, 89International Institute, Madrid, 300International Organizations Division (IOD): Braden’s

position, 81–82, 96; establishment and role, 81–82;Macdonald flap, 268; McCarthyism, 165, 175–76;Paris festival (1952), 98; Partisan Review, 136;

personnel, 83–84, 197–98, 201, 202; relationshipwith American Labor, 335; relationship withCongress for Cultural Freedom, 83

International PEN. See PEN World Association ofWriters

International Program, 224, 225, 229International Publishing Corporation, 314, 315International Refugee Committee, 110International Rescue Committee, 118–19International Services of Information Foundation, 175Iran, Mossadegh overthrow, 3, 74, 141Isherwood, Christopher, 93, 149, 155Italian Association for Cultural Freedom, 86–87, 89Italy, elections (1948), 89, 201Ivy League, 1, 28, 30, 35, 199–200

J. M. Kaplan Fund, 298Jackson, Charles Douglas (C. D.): on anti-

Americanism, 104; background and career, 98,122–23; on Boston Symphony Orchestra’sEuropean tour (1956), 188–89; death, 302–3;France–America Society, 114; Free EuropeCommittee, 109; The God That Failed, 54;Hook’s article, 132; influence, 122, 126;

Metropolitan Opera tour, 189–90; New Leader,136, 285; nuclear strategy, 257–59; Paris festival(1952), 98, 104–5; Partisan Review, 282;Psychological Strategy Board, 124–25, 189;Psychological Warfare role, 122–25, 219; racediscrimination strategy, 245; relationship withCongress for Cultural Freedom, 127–28;relationship with Eisenhower, 122, 123, 219;relationship with Hollywood, 243–44; relationshipwith IRD, 126–27; relationship with Nielsen, 119;Rosenberg case, 152–53; Tolstoy Foundation, 279

Jackson, William H., 219–20Jaesrich, Helmut, 308James, Henry, Sr., 143Jameson, Donald: on art, 218, 229; on CIA funding,

290, 297; on CIA’s status, 110; on Congress forCultural Freedom, 90; on intellectual elite, 125; onIOD, 199; on IRS records, 297; on neutrality, 75–76; on Waldorf conference, 47

Janis, Sidney, 223Jarrell, Randall, 202Jaspers, Karl, 41, 78, 82Jelenski, Kot, 206

Jenkins, Newell, 13Jessup, Peter, 320Jiyu, 181John Reed Club, 133Johnson, Hewlett, 57Johnson, Lyndon B., 334, 336–38, 341Johnston, Eric, 244, 246Joint Chiefs of Staff, 239–40, 241Joliot-Curie, Frédéric, 57, 75Jones, Joseph, 22Jones-Quartey, K. A. B., 329Josselson, Diana (Dodge): background, 128–29;

Braden letter, 339–40; on CIA case officers, 198,204–5; on Congress funding, 299, 301, 316;Encounter, 313, 319, 354; on Farfield Foundation,106–7, 300; first meeting with Michael, 90; onFleischmann, 106–7; on Lasky, 181–82, 358; onlying, 319; on Macdonald article, 267, 268, 269;marriage, 128–30; on Michael, 92, 130, 153, 198,267, 287–88, 343–44, 347; Michael’s illness, 287–88; Michael’s resignation, 330–32, 334, 340–41; onNabokov, 295–96; on Neruda campaign, 294; onParis festival, 104, 105; Paris life, 128–30, 329,

358; Paris work, 90, 128–29; Rosenberg case, 153Josselson, Jennifer: career, 130; childhood in Paris, 129,

329, 330; father’s illness, 288; relationship withThompson, 115

Josselson, Michael: American Committee, 173–74,193; appearance, 330; army experiences, 10–11;art policy, 228; background, 10–11; Berlinconference (1950), 60, 63–64, 68, 71, 143;character, 91; Congress for Cultural Freedom role,1, 74, 83–84, 90–91, 128, 179, 205, 262, 287–88,319, 329–41, 347–48; Congress funding anxieties,301; Cultural Affairs Officer, 11, 20; death, 205,357–58; denazification programme, 11–14;disillusionment with US policies, 304; Encounter,138, 139, 141–42, 144–45, 146–47, 148–50, 155–56, 157–58, 205, 259–63, 264, 275, 278, 312–18,319, 321–22, 354; Farfield Foundation, 106–7, 115–16, 188, 340–41; first meeting with Diana, 90;General Assembly meeting, 329–33; Geneva post,288; health, 16, 192–93, 205, 262–63, 287–88, 334,343, 355; Hungarian crisis, 256–57; influence, 26;jeep injury, 16; literary style, 95; Lowell incident,293; magazines, 179–82, 316, 339; marriage, 125–

30; music grants, 188–89; New Leader, 137; NewYork Times revelations, 299; nuclear energystrategy, 257–59; OPC position, 35; Paris festival(1952), 95; Paris office, 80, 84, 129–30, 288;Partisan Review, 137, 283, 284; PEN, 304, 307;quoted, 320; relationship with Berlin (Isaiah), 321–22, 325; relationship with Braden, 80, 84, 129–30,339–40; relationship with CIA, 204–5, 287;relationship with de Neufville, 35–36, 73–74, 90–91, 128, 130, 198, 258, 356–57; relationship withFleischmann, 106–7; relationship with Hunt, 204,288, 352; relationship with Koestler, 76; relationshipwith Lasky, 26, 61, 75, 130, 181–82, 260, 262–63;relationship with Macdonald, 345; relationship withNabokov, 12–13, 26, 36, 79, 129, 258, 295–96;relationship with Russell, 92, 194–95; relationshipwith Williams, 198, 202; remorse, 343; resignation,330–32, 334, 340–41; retirement, 340–41, 347–48,358; Rosenberg case, 153; social life, 130; Suezcrisis, 257–58, 259; Twentieth Century, 92, 139;Waldorf Astoria conference, 46

Joubert, Colette, 129Journal of the History of Ideas, 280, 284

Jouvenel, Bertrand de, 206Julius, J., 161

Kaplan, Jacob M., 112, 123, 298Kaplan Foundation, 112, 298Karajan, Herbert von, 13–14, 190Katzenbach, Nicholas, 341Katzenbach Committee report, 341Kay, Helen, 161Kazan, Elia, 238Kazin, Alfred, 284, 336–37Keller, Helen, 162Kempton, Murray, 163, 177Kennan, George: artistic philosophy, 190–91, 229;

awareness of CIA funding, 332; Berlin conference(1960), 280; career, 82; on CIA money, 344; EastEuropean Fund, 118; influence, 30–31; Italianelection campaign (1948), 201; and Italian electioncampaign (1948), 32; on Marshall Plan, 22; NewYork Times letter, 318; Non-Communist Leftsupport, 53; political philosophy, 32–33, 190–91,261, 348; Psychological Strategy Board, 124;relationship with Brown, 74; relationship withNabokov, 36, 79, 348; relationship with Offie, 57;

on Stalinism, 31; Tolstoy festival, 279Kennedy, John F., 115, 118, 289–90, 314, 334, 336Kennedy, Robert, 115, 293Kent, Rockwell, 162Kentfield Fund, 297, 298Kenyon College, 202Kenyon Review, 202, 205, 280–81, 284, 308, 340Kermode, Anita, 143Kermode, Frank: Encounter editorship, 147, 312–14,

321–22; O’Brien’s libel action, 319, 321–22, 323,324–25; resignation, 327, 329, 354

Kimmelman, Michael, 222King, Cecil, 314–16, 323, 327King, J. C., 120King, Martin Luther, Jr., 237Kinkead, Eugene, 268Kirk, Grayson, 114Kirkpatrick, Lyman, 164–65, 208Kirstein, Lincoln, 223Kissinger, Henry, xii, xiii, 1–2, 111, 120Klebe, Giselher, 188Klein, Yves, 230Kline, Franz, 230, 234

Knopf, Alfred, 44–45Koestler, Arthur: awareness of CIA funding, 332, 344;

Berlin conference (1950), 60, 62–71, 75; career,51–52; Congress for Cultural Freedom, 75–76, 84,131, 284; death, 354, 356; on deracinés, 11;Encounter, 149, 150; Freedom Manifesto, 69–71;The God That Failed, 53–55; Hungarian crisis,256; on international conferences, 4; love life, 51,77, 356; on the 1930s, 2; on Paris, 59; on PEN,305; in postwar Berlin, 9; promotion of works, 19–20, 50–52; relationship with CIA, 52–53;relationship with Crossman, 54; relationship withDonovan, 51, 53–54; relationship with IRD, 50–51;relationship with Orwell, 251; relationship withRussell, 77; relationship with Sartre, 52, 62; onTorberg, 179; on truth, 82; on Twentieth Centuryman, 353; US lecture tour, 51–52

Koestler, Cynthia (Jefferies), 356Koestler, Mamaine (Paget), 9, 62, 65, 70, 76, 77, 159Kogon, Eugene, 75Kootz, Samuel, 223Kopkind, Andrew, 344Korda, Alexander, 146, 147, 323

Korean War, 64–65, 81, 199–200, 268Kriesberg, Irving, 227Kristol, Irving, x, xii; American Committee, 131, 132;

background, 74, 131, 142; career, 352–53; onelitism, 209; Encounter editorship, 142, 146–50,182, 194, 259–62, 265, 266, 271–72, 275, 339;Encounter first issue, 149–50, 154–55, 157; family,148; Last Encounter (1992), 354; Macdonald’sarticle, 266, 269; McCarthyism, 167, 173; Nerudacampaign, 293–94; New York Times letter, 317–18;on Partisan Review, 284; on Perspectives, 117;The Public Interest, 339, 352–53; relationship withJosselson, 148–50, 259–60, 270, 271; relationshipwith Spender, 148, 157–58; religion, 238; salarypayment, 147

Kristol, William, 148Kubrick, Stanley, 302Kundera, Milan, x, 349Kuniyoshi, Yasuo, 223

Labedz, Leopold, 206, 354Lambert, Hansi, 291Lamont, Corliss, 39Laqueur, Walter, x, 180, 290

Lardner, Ring, 80Larkin, Philip, 148, 179, 313Lasky, Brigitte, 326–27Lasky, Melvin: on American Committee, 173–74;

appearance, 24, 142; awareness of CIA funding,332; background and career, 24, 142; Berlinconference (1950), 60–61, 63–64, 67, 69–70, 71,72–73; blueprint for cultural Cold War, 25–26; CIApublications, 206; CIA rumour, 36–37, 339, 345;Congress for Cultural Freedom role, 72–73, 75, 80,90, 130, 182; Encounter, 144, 155, 181–82, 259,260, 262, 275–76, 278, 312–14, 321–28, 353–54,420–22; Encounter funding issue, 317, 321–28,332; Hungarian crisis, 256; Koestler meeting, 56;Last Encounter (1992), 354; on Macdonald article,265, 269; Der Monat, 26, 54, 80, 86, 117, 182–83,191; New York Times letter, 317–18; Paris festival(1952), 95–96, 104–5; relationship with Gaitskell,278; relationship with Josselson, 26, 61, 73, 130,181–82, 260, 262–63, 354, 358; relationship withNabokov, 26, 95–96; relationship with Spender,312–13, 321, 322–23, 325–26, 354; Rosenbergcase, 151; salary payment, 184; on Sputnik, 263;

Tri-Magazine Editorial Committee, 182; Waldorfconference, 46

Latham, Aaron, 201Latham, Lou, 287–88Laughlin, James, 117Lazarus, Fred, Jr., 115Le Carré, John, 207, 302Leavis, F. R., 138Lehmann, John, 138Lehrer, Tom, xiiLenin, Vladimir Ilich, 42, 45, 49, 65, 71, 77–78, 217Levi, Carlo, 58Levi, Primo, 349Levin, Bernard, 354Levine, Jack, 223Levitas, Sol, 24, 63, 127, 136, 285, 332Lewis, Cecil Day, 142–43Lewis, Jerry, 244Lewis, Sinclair, 58Libero, Libero de, 181Libert‡ della Cultura, 86La Libre Belgique, 230Lie, Haakon, 75

Lifar, Serge, 103Life magazine, 44–45, 135, 160, 224, 257–58, 282Lilienthal, David, 63Lincoln Center for the Planning of the Arts, 123Lindsay, Frank, 60, 119, 120, 279Lippmann, Walter, 31The Listener, 157Littauer Foundation, 113Little, Brown, 44–45, 204, 318Living Theater of New York, 300Lockhart, John Bruce, 140Lockhart, Robert Bruce, 49, 140, 146Lodge, Henry Cabot, 123, 153Lombardi, Franco, 64Lovestone, Jay, 74, 123, 128, 277Lovett, Robert A., 120Lowell, Elizabeth (Hardwick), 39, 101–2, 292Lowell, Harriet, 292Lowell, Robert: Bollingen Prize vote, 210; Consultant

Poet, 312; ICA, 119; Paris festival (1952), 101–2;quoted, 62, 210; Ransom’s Boys, 202, 203; SouthAmerican tour, 291–93; Vietnam protest, 336–37;Waldorf conference, 39; White House dinner, 289–

90Luce, Clare Booth, 120, 202, 236Luce, Henry: American Committee grant, 135–36;

attitude to Communism, 44, 132; History, 115;Macdonald’s attack on, 266; MoMA, 221, 224;Partisan Review, 135–36, 282; relationship withJackson, 122, 127, 243; religion, 236–37;Rockefeller Foundation Subpanel II, 120; Time-Lifeempire, 122–23; on Twentieth Century, 104

Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, 299Lüthy, Herbert, 149, 206Lynes, Russell, 225Lysenko, Trofim, 162

M. D. Anderson Foundation, 297–98MacArthur, Douglas, 81Macauley, Robie: Berliner Festwochen, 296; CIA

career, 203, 280–81, 307, 308, 340; KenyonReview, 205, 280–81, 340; on Kermode, 313; PEN,307, 308; Playboy, 340, 352; published works,205–6; Ransom’s Boys, 202–3; relationship withHunt, 203, 204, 352; relationship with Josselson,202, 204–5

Macdonald, Dwight: ‘America! America!’ article, 264–

72; on art, 216, 231; awareness of CIA funding,332, 345, 346; on Barr, 223–24; on Dos Passos, 58;Encounter editorship, 259–62; on Ford Foundation,116, 259; on mass culture, 209; McCarthyism, 165–66, 167, 176–77; on New Statesman, 183; on NewYork Times letter, 318; Partisan Review statement,346; political views, 134–35; quoted, 131, 254; Suezassignment, 259; Vietnam protest, 336–37; Waldorfconference, 39, 42

Macdowell, David, 202MacFarquhar, Roderick, 206Machiavelli, Niccolo, 74, 125, 207Mack, Maynard, 199Mackenzie, Compton, 208MacKnight, Jesse, 61MacLaine, Shirley, 201Maclean, Donald, 140Macleish, Archibald, 5, 11, 163, 289MacNeice, Louis, 142–43Madariaga, Salvador de, 78, 97, 100, 119, 294Magruder, John, 71Mahler, Gustav, 99Mailer, Norman, 27–28, 43, 44, 208, 237, 303, 311

Malipiero, Francesco, 186Malipiero, Gianfranco, 99Malraux, André: awareness of CIA funding, 332;

Berlin conference (1950), 64; on Chambers, 239;death, 354; Encounter, 149, 179, 332; Koestlermeeting, 51; Ministry of Culture, 289–90, 307;Paris festival (1952), 97, 100–101, 102; in postwarBerlin, 9; Waldorf conference, 41; White Housedinner, 289–90

Manchester Guardian, 77, 194Manifesto for Cultural Freedom, 69–71, 76Mann, Thomas, 43, 96–97, 162Mansfield, Mike, 341Manshel, Warren, 205, 273–74Maritain, Jacques, 41, 78, 87Marquand, David, 138Marshall, Charles Burton, 124–25Marshall, George Catlett, 21–22, 159–60Marshall Plan, 27; announcement, 21–23; CIA use of

funds, 60, 88–89, 116; COI publicity films, 247;confidential funds, 26, 56–57, 88, 116; counterpartfunds, 88–89, 99; cultural section, 225; Kennan’srole, 32; management, 57, 88–89, 123; Marseilles

blockade, 79–80, 129–30; Soviet rejection, 22–23;Spender on, 143; Tito’s negotiations, 48–49; use offunds for cultural struggle, 23

Martin, Frank, 186Martin, Kingsley, 139, 251Martinet, Jean-Louis, 188Marx, Karl, 71, 258Marx-Engels Institute (Moscow), 45Masani, Minoo, 329, 330 Masses and Mainstream,

223Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century, 98, 171, 185–

86, 225–26Matisse, Henri, 100, 214Matta, Roberto, 222Matthews, Francis P., 81Matthiessen, F. O., 19, 41–42, 44, 163Matthiessen, Peter, 207Maugham, W. Somerset, 208Mauriac, Claude, 64, 101Mayer, Louis B., 239Maynor, Dorothy, 18Mazzochi, Muzzio, 64McAuley, James, 181, 332

McCarry, Charles, 207McCarthy, Joseph, xi, 44, 159–60, 163–78, 212, 237–

38, 241, 287, 310McCarthy, Mary: awareness of CIA funding, 332; on

Berlin conference (1960), 279–80; Congress ofCultural Freedom, 284; correspondence withHannah Arendt, 157, 166–67, 174, 279–80, 291,357; on Encounter, 157; Farfield Foundationfunding, 300; on Josselson’s censorship, 316;Lowell petition, 336–37; on Marilyn Monroe’sdeath, 293; on McCarthyism, 166–67; on Milosz,84–85; on Orwell, 253; relationship with Nabokov,293; on Spender, 317, 333, 357; Spender’sresignation, 327; Waldorf conference, 39, 42, 46

McCloy, John, 31, 36, 114, 118, 120McClure, General, 14McCray, Porter, 224–25McCullers, Carson, 63McLuhan, Marshall, 122Mellon, Paul, 29, 210Mellon family, 29Melville, Herman, 162Menotti, Gian Carlo, 18, 182

Menuhin, Yehudi, 188, 191, 344Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 66, 182Merrill, James, 296Merry, Robert, 310–11Metropolitan Opera, 106, 123, 189–90Meyer, Cord, xii; American Committee funding, 193–

94; background, 136, 176, 287; CIA career, 115,197, 198–99, 287, 298–99, 340, 355; Congressfunding, 205; family, 287; IOD head, 197; manners,355; McCarthyite investigation, 176, 287; NewYork Times revelations, 298–99; Partisan Review,136, 282; PEN, 307; recruits, 198–99, 202–5, 207;relationship with Josselson, 198, 202, 287–88;relationship with Schlesinger, 287, 318–19; UnitedWorld Federalists, 114, 176

Meyer, Mary Pinchot, 287MI5, 136, 208, 316MI6, 10, 140, 145, 275, 332Miami District Fund, 113, 184, 286Michels, Robert, 74–75Michener, James, 207Michigan Fund, 297, 298Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 289

Milhaud, Darius, 99, 186Militant Liberty, xi–xii, 239–41Miller, Arthur: FBI file, 44; Kennedy inauguration, 289;

McCarthyism, 160, 173, 237–38; PEN presidency,306–7, 308; on political reversals, 14–15; Waldorfconference, 40, 42–43, 44, 47

Miller, Henry, 117Miller, Lee, 9Miller, Perry, 117Milne, A. A., 48Milosz, Czesław, 84–85, 97, 100, 127, 156, 305Milton, John, 253Mindlin, Murray, 281Mistral, Gabriela, 294Mitchell, Joan, 230Mitford, Nancy, 138, 181MK-ULTRA programme, 121Modern Language Association, 200, 300Moholy-Nagy, László, 20Der Monat: aims, 26; financing, 26, 117, 120, 130, 182,

184, 315; The God That Failed, 54–56; influence,86, 146; Jaesrich’s work, 308; Lasky’s work, 26,54, 80, 86, 182–83, 191; origins, 26, 109, 120

Monneret, Jules, 101Monroe, Marilyn, 293Montale, Eugenio, 100Monteux, Pierre, 98, 289Montgomery, Robert, 63, 67Moral Rearmament Movement, 126Moravia, Alberto, 86, 87, 181, 246–47, 279Morgan, J. P., 29Morris, George, 282Mortimer, Raymond, 99Morton, M. M., 320–21Mosca, Gaetano, 74–75Mossadegh, Mohammed, 3, 74, 141Motherwell, Robert, 219, 222, 223, 232Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of

American Ideals, 241Motion Picture Capital Corporation, 248Motion Picture Service (MPS), 243Mount, Ferdinand, 353Moyers, Bill, 337Mozarteum Akademie Orchester, 188Mphahlele, Ezekiel, 329Muggeridge, Kitty, 323

Muggeridge, Malcolm: background, 145–46; BritishSociety, 93; Congress for Cultural Freedom, 90,107, 145–46; Encounter, 144, 145–47, 149, 260,261, 272, 275, 312, 314–15, 327, 332; onEncounter funding, 323; Farfield Foundation, 107;on Kristol, 261; MI6, 332; in postwar Berlin, 8–9;relationship with IRD, 90, 139; religious conversion,323; on US intelligence, 184–85

Muller, Herman, 63Mumford, Lewis, 302Munch, Charles, 98, 186Munzenberg, Willi, 15, 39, 51–52, 55, 84Munzenberg Trust, 46–47, 51, 59–60Murdoch, Iris, 279Murray, Ralph, 50Murrow, Edward R., 55Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, 19, 97,

100, 109, 114, 190–91, 216–17, 219–32Mussolini, Benito, 64, 78, 125, 164, 210

Nabokov, Nicolas: Antagonismes show, 229–30;appearance, 11; background, 11–12; Berlinconference (1950), 63; Berlin Senate Adviser,295–97; British Society for Cultural Freedom, 92–

93; career, 351–52; Congress for Cultural Freedomdevelopment, 75; Congress for Cultural Freedomposition, 79, 85, 87, 107, 348; Congress fundingissue, 299–300, 333; death, 352, 354; denazificationprogramme, 11–14; Encounter, 146–47, 149, 260,267, 270, 273; General Assembly meeting, 329,330–31, 333; on Lowell and Monroe, 293;McCarthyism, 164, 171–72; NCL strategy, 53;Paris festival (1952), 95–107, 122, 133, 226; Parisoffice, 85; in postwar Berlin, 9, 12, 16; Preuves,85; proverb, 350; relationship with Bohlen, 31, 63,79; relationship with Burnham, 80, 85, 87;relationship with CIA, 36, 90, 107, 317, 333;relationship with Jackson, 127; relationship withJosselson, 12–13, 26, 36, 78, 129, 258, 296–97,330–31, 348; relationship with Kennan, 36, 79, 348;relationship with Lasky, 26, 95–96; relationshipwith Maritain, 78; relationship with Schlesinger,169, 171–72, 185, 260, 351; relationship withSpender, 92–93, 185, 317, 333, 351; Rome musicalfestival (1954), 185–88; salary payment, 79, 296;on Soviet relations, 305; Tolstoy festival, 279; Tri-Magazine Editorial Committee, 182; US

government rejection, 36; Waldorf conference, 39,42, 45–46; Young Painters show, 229

Nabokov, Vladimir, 9, 138Narayan, Jayaprakash, 138, 179, 279, 343The Nation, 298, 341National Committee for a Free Europe, 56, 77, 108–11,

122, 123, 127, 188–89, 221, 308National Council of the Arts, Sciences and

Professions, 39, 176National Endowment for the Arts, 115National Review, 180, 356National Security Acts, 27, 28National Security Council, 27, 32–33, 102, 120–21, 220,

239National Security Information Agency, 240National War College, 32NATO, 23, 83, 129, 165, 247Navy, US, 239Nehru, Jawaharlal, 181Nelson Rockefeller Fund, 226Nenni, Pietro, 57Neogy, Rajat, 343Neruda, Pablo, 292, 293–95

Nevelson, Louise, 230New Deal, 15, 213, 215New Leader, 24, 63, 127, 135–36, 278, 283, 285New Statesman and Nation, 92, 136, 138, 183, 251,

281New York City Ballet, 97, 352New York Herald Tribune, 115New York Pro Musica, 300New York Review of Books, 303–4, 313New York Times, 4, 96, 117, 120, 173, 195, 198, 201,

206, 208, 298–99, 302, 309, 311, 316, 317–18, 327New York Times Magazine, 132The New Yorker, 102, 106, 132, 166, 181, 223, 259,

268, 272–73, 352Newman, Barnett, 231–32, 233Newman, Paul, 201News-Weekly, 321Niebuhr, Reinhold, 19, 132, 237Nielsen, Waldemar, 119Nimier, Roger, 101Nin, Anaïs, 38Nitze, Paul, 82Nixon, Richard M., 175, 266, 356

The Noble Savage, 305, 306Noel, Maurice, 103Non-Communist Left (NCL), 53–54, 66, 68, 83, 117,

125, 165–66, 173, 181, 278, 324, 335, 336, 337–38,340

Nono, Luigi, 187North, Oliver, 121NSC-4A, 32–33NSC-10/2, 33NSC-68, 82Nuova Italia, 89Nuovi Argomenti, 181Nurse, Malcolm. See Padmore, George

O’Brien, Conor Cruise: on Encounter, 183, 309, 310,312, 321; libel action, 310, 319, 321–22, 323, 324–25

O’Brien, Edmond, 249Odets, Clifford, 18, 39, 41, 44Office of Military Government, U.S. (OMGUS), 10, 46Office of Policy Coordination (OPC): Berlin

conference (1950), 60–61; Braden’s work, 80–81;budget, 34–35; Congress for Cultural Freedom, 73;establishment, 33–34; Free Europe Committee, 56;

funding, 89; operations, 119, 123; personnel, 33–35,57, 106, 247

Office of Strategic Services (OSS): chief, 15;disbanded, 29–30; establishment, 28–29; Sub Rosaaccount, 80; wartime personnel, 9, 28–32, 64, 76–77, 80, 120, 200, 201, 219, 240–41, 247, 260, 279

Office of War Information Overseas, North Africanand Middle East, 122

Offie, Carmel, 56–57, 60, 109Ogaz, Victor Sanchez, 300O’Hara, John, 247O’Keeffe, Georgia, 215, 222Oldfield, Maurice, 111Olivier, Laurence, 97O’Neill, Eugene, 18Operation Focus, 255Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), 220, 239, 243,

245, 282–83Oppenheimer, Robert, 21, 280, 318, 332Oprecht, Hans, 329Orwell, George (Eric Blair): Animal Farm, 247–48,

250–51; concept of doublethink, xi; death, 247, 248;on monomania, 195; Nineteen Eighty-Four, 53,

248–51; in postwar Berlin, 9; publishers, 117, 145,247–48; relationship with IRD, 251–52

Orwell, Sonia, 247

‘Packet,’ 126Padmore, George (Malcolm Nurse), 252, 272Paget, Mamaine. See Koestler, Mamaine (Paget)Paine, Tom, 162Paix et Liberté, 57–58, 126Paley, William (Bill), 220–21Panufnik, Andrzej, 188Pareto, Vilfredo, 74–75, 125Paris: ‘Antagonismes’ show (1960), 229–30;

International Day of Resistance to Dictatorshipand War, 58; Masterpieces festival (1952), 95–107,122, 133, 136, 185–86; World Congress of Peace(1949), 56, 57–59

Paris Review, 207Parker, Dorothy, 28, 44Parsons, Louella, 239Partisan Review, xii, 174, 269; Congress’s clearing-

house, 280; creation, 133; editors, 39, 132;financing, 135–37, 281–85, 300; Greenberg’sarticle, 217; Lasky’s work, 24; Literature and

Modernity (anthology), 284; ‘Statement on theCIA,’ 346; symposium (1952), 133–34

Pasternak, Boris, 207, 319Patman, Wright, 297, 298, 300–301Pauker, John, 245–46Peabody, Endicott, 30Pearson, Drew, 28Pearson, Norman Holmes, 200–201Pecci-Blunt, Count, 187PEN World Association of Writers, 304–9, 355Pentagon, 240, 353Pentagon Papers, 5Peragallo, Mario, 187, 188Peretz, Y. L., 122Perspectives, 117Philby, Kim, 140, 200, 201Philharmonica Hungarica, 257Philip, André, 64, 66, 67Phillips, William: American Committee, 132, 136; Berlin

conference (1960), 280;Partisan Review editorship, 39, 132, 134, 136, 282–85;

‘Statement on the CIA,’ 346; view ofMcCarthyism, 166

Phoenix Program, 3, 357Picasso, Pablo, 57–58, 59, 214, 369n37Pioneer Corps, 52Piovene, Guido, 64, 97, 100–101, 179Pitzele, Mel, 39, 41, 43–44Pius XII, Pope, 153Pizzetti, Ildebrando, 99Plain Talk , 162Platt, Frank, 114, 317, 340–41, 353–54, 355Plievier, Theodor, 68Podhoretz, Norman, 293, 303Poetry, 210, 280, 284Poirier, Richard, 346Polanyi, Michael, 180, 329, 330, 344Polemic, 253Policy Planning Staff, 32, 33Pollock, Jackson, 213–14, 218–19, 222, 224, 230, 232,

233, 234Porter, Andrew, 352Porter, Katherine Anne, 202Poudovkine, Vsevolod, 242–43Poulenc, Francis, 99Pound, Ezra, 199, 201, 208, 210–11

Praeger, Frederick, 206, 207, 256Pratolini, Vasco, 181Pravda, 22, 42Preuves: aims, 86; contributors, 179, 182; editorial

policy, 182, 272; financing, 184; Josselson’sinvolvement, 258, 259, 267, 272; launch, 85, 86;status, 130, 149; Young Painters issue, 228

Price, Leontyne, 97, 99–100, 187, 245Price Fund, 113, 297, 298Priestley, J. B., 251Pritchett, V. S., 279Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), 120, 277; Animal

Farm screenplay, 248; board members, 207, 220;doctrinal paper, 125–26; establishment, 124–25;Metropolitan Opera tour, 189; movie reports, 244;Nineteen Eighty-Four, 248–49; psychologicalwarfare programme, 124–26; relationship withAmerican Committee, 132; relationship withTolstoy family, 279; replacement, 220; Rosenbergcase, 152

Psychological Warfare Division (PWD), 11, 19, 122Psychological Warfare Executive (PWE), 54Psychological Warfare Workshop, 244, 247

The Public Interest, 339, 352–53Pushkin, Alexander, 138, 151, 358

QKOPERA, 72–73, 84, 90Quadrant, 181, 332Queen, Ellery, 20Quest, 181

Rabb Charitable Foundation, 113Rackmil, Milton, 244Radio Free Europe: de Neufville’s work, 198, 255;

establishment, 77; Executive Committee, 77, 123;financing, 110, 341; Hungarian broadcasts, 254–56;Last Encounter meeting (1992), 354; PSBsupervision, 126; relationship with Congress, 127;stations, 110; Urban’s position, 192

Radio Liberty, 354Rahv, Philip, 39, 132, 135, 284, 346Ramparts, 320–23, 338, 341Ransom, John Crowe: Bollingen Prize, 210; FBI file,

163; Kenyon Review, 280–81; protegés, 202–3,359; quoted, 21, 159; relationship with Spender, 144

Rasmussen, Waldo, 225Rathvon, Peter, 248–50

Ravines, Euducio, 207Ray, Man, 9Read, Herbert: Berlin conference (1950), 64; Berlin

Festwochen, 296; Encounter, 138, 179; funding,64, 119, 296; ICA, 119; Paris festival (1952), 100,185–86; Tolstoy festival, 279

Reagan, Ronald, 110, 132, 355–56Redford, Robert, 201Redgrave, Michael, 249, 251Reed, John, 162Reed, Joseph Verner, 115, 221Rees, Goronwy, 312Rees, Richard, 251Reid, Whitelaw, 115Reinhardt, Ad, 233The Reporter, 260, 269Reuter, Ernst, 60, 65Reuther, Walter, 266, 335Reynolds, Alan, 227–28Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 52Richman, Robert, 119Ridley, Jasper, 146Riesman, David, xii

Rieti, Vittorio, 99Ritchie, Andrew Carnduff, 227Rivera, Diego, 217Rivers, Larry, 336–37Robeson, Paul, 57, 160, 251Rockefeller, Abby Aldridge, 216–17, 223Rockefeller, David, 114, 117, 121Rockefeller, John D., III, 120Rockefeller, Laurence, 120Rockefeller, Nelson: briefings on covert activities, 219;

MoMA presidency, 216–17, 219, 221, 223; NationalSecurity Council position, 120; relationship withBraden, 197; relationship with Josselson, 228;relationship with Whitney, 219; Special StudiesProject, 120; wartime intelligence work, 114, 120–21, 219, 224–25; White House adviser, 127, 219

Rockefeller Brothers Fund, 120, 219, 224, 228Rockefeller Foundation: CIA funding cover, 113; music

contacts, 186; Partisan Review funding, 283; PENfunding, 308; relationship with Congress forCultural Freedom, 120–21, 262; relationship withUS government, 116, 120–21; Science andFreedom conference, 180; Scrutiny funding, 138;

Special Studies project, 120; Villa Serbelloni, 291Rogers, Ginger, 241Romains, Jules, 64Rome musical festival (1954), 185–88Romualdi, Serafino, 64Ronthelym Charitable Trust, 299Roosevelt, Archie, 200Roosevelt, Eleanor, 58Roosevelt, Franklin, 213Roosevelt, Kermit (‘Kim’), 30, 141, 200Rorty, James, 174Rosenberg, Albert G., 11Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius, 149, 150–58, 159, 161, 194Rosenberg, Harold, 154, 157, 231, 345, 348–49Rositzke, Harry, 34Rossellini, Roberto, 247Rostow, Walt, 122, 338Rostropovich, Mstislav, 296Roszak, Theodore, 223Roth, Philip, 336–37Rothko, Mark, 222, 230, 232, 234, 336–37Rothschild, Victor: Berlin house, 8–9; Encounter

connection, 146, 147, 275, 314, 315–16; war

service, 8–9Roure, Rémy, 64Rousset, David, 57–58, 64, 75, 308Rovere, Richard, 132, 159, 166, 167–68, 174Rowse, A. L., 164Royal Institute of International Affairs, 316Rozsnyay, Zoltan, 257Rusk, Dean, 120Russell, Bertrand, 41, 77–78, 99, 138, 194–95Russell, Peter, 296Ryan family, 29

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 29, 108Salinger, J. D., 272Santayana, George, 237Sargeant, Howland, 135Saroyan, William, 18Sartre, Jean-Paul, 235; books banned, 161; Burnham’s

attack on, 66; Congress policy towards, 85, 182,292; Hungarian crisis, 257; Nobel Prize, 294–95;Paris festival (1952), 101; political philosophy, 52,59; in postwar Berlin, 9; relationship with Koestler,52, 62; relationship with Wright, 58; religion, 78,235; Rosenberg case, 151; Les Temps modernes,

85, 181; view of Russia, 59Satie, Erik, 99Saturday Evening Post, 239, 334–36, 338Sauguet, Henri, 99Scammell, Michael, 355Schapiro, Meyer, 195Schary, Dore, 244Schenk, Nicholas, 244Schiller, Friedrich von, 18Schine, David, 161, 162Schlesinger, Arthur: American Committee, 132, 133,

167–69, 170, 171–72, 174, 193–94; awareness ofCIA funding, 77, 167–68, 332; Berlin conference(1950), 63, 65, 76, 168; on CIA, 3, 165, 287; CIAfile, 287; Encounter, 139, 260, 314, 321–22, 325–26; on fellow travelers, 192; Free EuropeCommittee, 109; government translations of works,19; on Josselson, 91; McCarthyism, 165, 167–69,171–72; on NCL, 53; OSS work, 76–77; publishedworks, 19, 53; Radio Free Europe, 77, 123;relationship with CIA, 77, 167–68, 287, 318–19;relationship with Congress for Cultural Freedom,76–77; relationship with Nabokov, 169, 171–72,

185, 260, 351; relationship with Spender, 314;relationship with Vanden Heuvel, 115; relationshipwith Wisner, 168–69, 318–19; Waldorf conference,39

Schmid, Carlo, 75Schoenberg, Arnold, 42, 96–97, 98–99Schonfield, Andrew, 315–16, 322Schuyler, George, 63, 66Schwarzkopf, Elisabeth, 13–14Schweitzer, Albert, 41Science and Freedom, 180Scott, Charles, 205Seaver, Edwin, 161Secker and Warburg, 147–48, 248, 256, 275Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), 140–41Seki, Yoshihiko, 329Sellers, Peter, 201Selznick, David, 240Seton-Watson, Hugh, 149Sewanee Review, 280, 284Shahn, Ben, 232Shapiro, Karl, 210Shapley, Harlow, 176

Shelter Rock Foundation, 115, 299Sherman, Alfred, 300Sherwood, Robert, 18, 163Shils, Edward, 322; on anti-Americanism, 183;

awareness of CIA funding, 332; Berlin conference(1960), 280; General Assembly meeting, 329; onIACF, 348; on Kermode, 313; Last Encountermeeting, 354; on Milan conference, 262;relationship with Lasky, 326; on Schlesinger, 314

Shostakovich, Dmitri, xi, 39–40, 42–43, 45–46, 97Silone, Darina, 64Silone, Ignazio, 54–55, 63–64, 180; Berlin conference

(1950), 63–64, 65, 67; Congress for CulturalFreedom, 64, 75, 329, 330; Hiwar, 281; Hungariancrisis, 256; Italian Association for CulturalFreedom, 86–87; OPC funding, 58; Paris counter-conference (1949), 58; Paris festival (1952), 97,100; PEN, 305, 308; political beliefs, 55; USgovernment promotion of works, 19–20; wartimeexperiences, 63–64

Silvera, Frank, 238Silvers, Robert, 303–4Simpson, Christopher, 240

Sinclair, Upton, 58, 252Singer, Marcus, 161Sinha, K. K., 343, 344Siquieros, David Alfalo, 213Sitwell, Edith, 149Skouras, Spyros P., 109, 244Smedley, Agnes, 162Smirnova, Nadeshda, 51Smith, David, 214–15, 234Smith, Walter Bedell, 132Socialist Commentary, 276Sonnabend Foundation, 299Sonnenberg, Ben, 91, 184Sontag, Susan, 187Sorel, Georges, 74–75, 125Soviet Studies, 92Soviet Survey, 180Sovietskaya Muzyka, 99Soyinka, Wole, 296, 308Spaak, Paul-Henri, 277The Spectator, 156–57Spellman, Francis, 109Spender, Natasha: on anti-Americanism, 156; on

Fleischmann, 299–300, 326; on Josselson, 73, 326;on Kristol, 148–49; on Lasky, 73, 325–26, 355;Mediterranean cruises, 291; relationship withJosselson, 326, 334; relationship with Nabokov,185, 317; relationship with Shils, 332; on Stephen,144, 157, 275, 317, 322–23, 346, 357; on Stephen’sresignation, 327–28

Spender, Stephen: appearance, 101; awareness of CIAfunding, 313–14, 317, 321–22, 327, 345–46, 357;background, 142–45; Berliner Festwochen, 296;British Society for Cultural Freedom, 91–93;career after Encounter, 357; character, 93, 144;on Congress for Cultural Freedom, 76; Congressfunding, 296, 308; Consultant Poet for Library ofCongress, 312–13; death, 357; Encountereditorship, 142–45, 146–50, 260, 278; Encounterresignation, 326–28, 329, 357; Ford Foundationfunding, 119; The God That Failed, 55, 143;Hahn’s essay, 273; Index on Censorship, 281,357; knighthood, 357; Macdonald’s articles, 261–62, 265, 266–67; on McCarthyism, 173;Mediterranean cruises, 291; New York Times letter,317–18; Orwell on, 251–52; Paris festival (1952),

100–101; PEN, 305, 308; Ramparts revelations,321–23; relationship with Fleischmann, 291, 299–300; relationship with Josselson, 205, 326–27, 334,345, 346–47; relationship with Kristol, 148, 150,157–58, 260, 339; relationship with Lasky, 312–13,321, 322–23, 326–27, 354; relationship withNabokov, 92–93, 185, 317, 333, 351; Rosenbergcase, 155–56; salary payments, 147, 148, 275–76,322–23

Sperber, Manès, 86, 254–55, 307, 329, 330, 354Spillane, Mickey, 27, 160Spinelli, Altiero, 64Sputnik, 63Stalin, Joseph: Big Brother image, 249–50; Brecht’s

view, 59; Cominform, 23; death, 161; Hungarianrising, 254–57; music policy, 98–99, 186; Nazi–Soviet pact, 40–41, 45, 52, 85, 133; Neruda poem,294; regime, 15, 151, 161, 172; show trials, 52;statue, 151; and Waldorf conference, 40, 43, 45;wartime American view of, 31, 40–41, 44, 45;wartime British view of, 49; Yugoslav policy, 48–49

Stamos, Theodoros, 227Stein, Gertrude, xii, 97, 99

Stein, Sol, 131, 192, 193, 238–39, 249–51, 332Steinbeck, John, 18, 58, 172, 246, 251–52, 306Stella, Frank, 222Sterling, Jan, 249Stern, Bernhard, 161Stone, I., 160Stone, Shepard, 117, 120, 255, 346–48, 358Stralem, Donald, 115, 299Stralem, Jean, 115Stravinsky, Igor: Kennedy inauguration, 289; Paris

festival (1952), 96–97, 98, 99; Pravda article on,42; relationship with Nabokov, 97; Rome festival(1954), 186, 187; Waldorf conference, 41, 42

Student Progressive, 203Styron, William, 336–37, 346Suez crisis (1956), 254–55, 257–58, 259Sullivan, Walter, 201Sullivan and Cromwell, 108, 177–78Sunday Telegraph, 314Sunday Times, 157Sunnen Foundation, 299Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force

(SHAEF), 122

Sweeney, James Johnson, 100, 225–26Swiss Committee for Aid to Hungarian Patriots, 286Synthèses, 85

Taft, Edward, 123Taft, Robert, 144Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de, 67Tanglewood musical school, 186, 303Tanner, Tony, 345Tate, Allen: Bollingen Prize, 210; Encounter, 179; FBI

file, 163; Kenyon College, 202; Paris festival(1952), 97, 100; relationship with Mellon, 210;relationship with Spender, 144

Tate, Ben, 144Tavernier, René, 101, 294Taylor, A. J. P., 157Taylor, Peter, 202Tecchi, Bonaventura, 64Tempo Presente, 86, 180–81, 184, 269Les Temps modernes, 75, 85, 180Thayer, Robert, 84Theroux, Paul, 281Thomas, Norman, 112, 132, 193, 298Thompson, John (‘Jack’), 202–3, 336–37, 359; Berliner

Festwochen, 296; CIA career, 115, 202–3, 340,359; Congress funding, 316–17; on Encounter,336–37; Farfield Foundation, 115, 202–3, 303, 359;published works, 205; relationship with Josselson,287–88, 340–41; relationship with Ransom, 202–3,359; relationship with Spender, 316–17; relationshipwith Trilling, 203

Thomson, Virgil, 18, 97, 99–100, 186Thoreau, Henry David, 162, 200Thurber, James, 19Time magazine, 122–23, 134, 282Time-Life, 98, 122–23, 204, 224, 237, 238Times Literary Supplement, 208, 353Tippett, Michael, 187Tito, Marshal, 48–49, 60Tobey, Mark, 222, 223, 230Todorov, Tzvetan, 5Toller, Ernst, 149Tolly, Barclay de, 358Tolly, Nicholas de, 358Tolstoy, Ilia, 29, 279Tolstoy, Leo, 19, 279Tolstoy Foundation, 279

Torberg, Friedrich, 179–80, 256Torre e Tasso, Principessa della, 291Toscanini, Arturo, 186–87Toynbee, Arnold, 138Transition, 281, 343Trevor-Roper, Hugh, xi; Berlin conference (1950), 64,

66–71, 77; criticisms of Congress, 93–94;Encounter contributions, 138; IRD funding, 64;suspicions of government funding, 69

Tribune, 93, 139, 253Trilling, Diana, 131–32, 195–96, 203, 332Trilling, Lionel, 115, 131–32, 134, 144, 179, 203, 300,

332Tri-Magazine Editorial Committee, 182Trista, Codignola, 89Trotsky, Leon, 55, 78, 133, 136Truman, Harry S.: art policy, 212–13, 228; Berlin

conference (1950), 71; on CIA, 304; onCommunism, 237; foreign policy, 72; and Italianelection campaign (1948), 32; Marshall Plan, 21–23; OSS, 28; PSB, 124; Truman Doctrine, 22, 27

Truman Doctrine, 22, 23, 27, 28, 164, 177Truth Campaign, 123

Tucci, Nicolo, 206–7‘Twelve Contemporary American Painters and

Sculptors’ exhibition, 226–27Twentieth Century, 92, 139Tyler, Royall, 30, 359Tyler, William, 259Tynan, Kenneth, 286

United Nations, 115, 257–58United Negro College Fund, 123United States Information Agency (USIA), 161–62,

165, 245–46, 282–83, 285United World Federalists, 114, 176University of Iowa, 203Untermeyer, Louis, 163Urban, George, 192, 354–55U.S. Information Service, 131

Valéry, Paul, 109van Eyck, Peter, 16Vanden Heuvel, William, 115Vanderbilt, William, 241Vanderbilt family, 29, 114, 220Vansittart, Peter, 249

Venice Biennale, 225Venture, 277–78Venturi, Franco, 279Vernon Fund, 113Vidal, Gore, 5, 221Vienna Opera, 97Vienna Philharmonic, 98Viereck, Peter, 132Vietnam: Phoenix Program, 3, 357; Vietnam War, 278,

304, 310Villa, Pancho, 28–29, 241Villa-Lobos, Heitor, 99Vogel, Vladimir, 188Vogue magazine, 233Voice of America, 79, 164, 254, 356Voltaire, x, 253Vonnegut, Kurt, 355Vronsky, Vitya, 303

Wagner, Richard, 14Walcott, Derek, 296, 300Waldorf-Astoria Conference (1949), New York, 38–

47, 48, 56, 60, 84–85, 163Walker, Ella, 291

Walker, George, 266Wall Street Journal, 353Wallace, Henry, 44Walmsley, Margot, 147, 354Walton, William, 97, 99Warburg, Frederic: Animal Farm, 247–48; British

Society, 93, 146; Encounter, 144–45, 146–48;Encounter funding, 146–47, 275, 332; Parisexpenses, 146; Partisan Review, 284

Warburg, Pamela (de Bayou), 146Warfield, William, 245Warner, Harry, 244, 246Warner, Jack, 239, 244, 246Warren, Robert Penn, 119, 179, 293, 296Washington Post, 285, 333–34, 359Washington Star, 321Watergate, 5, 74Watson, Adam, 49, 50, 126–27, 145, 252, 347Waugh, Evelyn, 131Wayne, John, 241, 270Weber, Ben, 187Weeks, Edward, 185Weidenfeld, George, 185

Weil family, 29Weltfish, Gene, 161Welty, Eudora, 182West Berlin RIAS Orchestra, 98Westcott, Glenway, 97, 100Wheeler, Monroe, 227Whitman, Walt, 303Whitney, Cornelius Vanderbilt, 123, 240Whitney, J. H. & Co., 120, 219Whitney, John ‘Jock’ Hay: art policy, 221–22;

background, 219–20; company, 120, 219–20;fortune, 219–20, 240; Forum World features, 262;MoMA, 219–20; in post-war Berlin, 8–9;relationship with CIA, 114, 219–20, 262;relationship with Rockefeller, 219; war service, 8–9, 219–20

Whitney family, 29Whitney Foundation, 353–54Whitney Trust, 113, 240Whittemore, E. Reed, Jr., 201Wilder, Thornton, 18, 179Williams, David, 139Williams, Lee: CIA career, 129, 299; on CIA financial

channels, 112; on CIA revelations, 299; on CIA–Congress relationship, 172, 269; Macdonald article,267, 269; on Meyer, 199, 202; on New YorkReview of Books, 304; relationship with Josselson,129, 198, 288; on writers, 191

Williams, Tennessee, 18, 63Williams, William Carlos, 163Wilson, Angus, 346Wilson, Edmund, 339Wilson, Harold, 278Wisner, Elizabeth, 99Wisner, Frank: Berlin conference (1950), 60, 69, 71, 72;

budget, 88–89; career, 33–34; Congress forCultural Freedom, 72–74; death, 359; Deminformplans, 59; Free Europe Committee, 111; health,256; Hungarian crisis, 256; on Le Carré, 302;McCarthyism, 168–69, 171, 173–74; Non-Communist Left, 83, 173; OPC, 33–34, 80, 106;OSS, 30, 33–34; Paris counter-conference, 57–59,58; Psychological Warfare Workshop, 244, 247;relationship with Braden, 82, 84; relationship withBritish intelligence, 140; relationship with Lasky,69, 72–73; relationship with Lindsay, 119;

relationship with Nazis, 33–34; relationship withSchlesinger, 168–69, 318–19; social circle, 111, 116;Waldorf conference, 46

Witt, Nathan, 161Wolf, Markus, 347Wolfe, Bertram, 166Wollheim, Richard, 264, 278, 317, 394n19Woodhouse, Christopher ‘Monty’: education and

career, 140–41; Encounter, 144–45, 146, 148, 208,272; on IRD, 49–50; meetings with de Neufvilleand Josselson, 140–42, 144–45, 170; relationshipwith Spender, 148, 156; writings, 208

Woolf, Leonard, 155Woolf, Virginia, 93, 149World Assembly of Youth, 119World Bank, 118Worsthorne, Peregrine, 171, 252Wright, Frank Lloyd, 44, 96Wright, Peter, 316Wright, Richard, 54–55, 58, 246Wyatt, Woodrow, 93, 98, 139Wyeth, Andrew, 289

Yale Glee Club, 20

Yale Lit, 199–200, 201Yates, Herbert, 244Yeats, W. B., 199, 209, 289Yergan, Max, 63, 66Yermilov, Vladimir, 275, 279Young Communist League, 175–76‘Young Painters’ show (1955–56), 227–30

Zamyatin, Evgeny, 251Zanuck, Darryl, 109, 239, 244Zhdanov, Andrei, 23, 31

Publishing in the Public Interest

Thank you for reading this book publishedby The New Press. The New Press is anonprofit, public interest publisher. NewPress books and authors play a crucial rolein sparking conversations about the keypolitical and social issues of our day.

We hope you enjoyed this book and thatyou will stay in touch with The New Press.Here are a few ways to stay up to date withour books, events, and the issues we cover:

• Sign up atwww.thenewpress.com/subscribe to

receive updates on New Press authors andissues and to be notified about localevents

• Like us on Facebook:www.facebook.com/newpressbooks

• Follow us on Twitter:www.twitter.com/thenewpress

Please consider buying New Press booksfor yourself; for friends and family; or todonate to schools, libraries, communitycenters, prison libraries, and otherorganizations involved with the issues ourauthors write about.

The New Press is a 501(c)(3) nonprofitorganization. You can also support our workwith a tax-deductible gift by visitingwww.thenewpress.com/donate.