A book charges that, in an effort to thwart Communism, the CIA financed prominent American cultural figures
By JEFF SHARLET
The most exciting pages of Frances Stonor Saunders's new book may well be those of its index. Unlike Joe McCarthy's infamous secret list, they actually name names. But in the case of The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (The New Press, April), the accused are not Communists taking orders from Moscow, but anti-Communists on the take from the Central Intelligence Agency.
Ms. Saunders insists that she's not on a witch-hunt. "I have no secret list that I'm waving around," she says. "And I gave everyone in the book a chance to explain themselves."
Most of them, she notes, preferred full denial. "Many suffer from a sort of moral dyslexia," she says.
The Cultural Cold War is a tale of intrigue and betrayal, with scene after scene as thrilling as any in a John Le Carre novel. The most disturbing revelations of the book are not so much what the C.I.A. did as whom it persuaded -- openly or under cover -- to do the dirty work of propaganda.
Obsessed with convincing the world that independent intellectuals -- unlike those in the employ of the Soviet state, which Ms. Saunders condemns -- supported what it called "the American way," the agency secretly spread around vast sums of money to advance the careers of the American and foreign intellectuals it deemed most dependable.
"We couldn't spend it all," one former agent said of the cash at the C.I.A.'s disposal for grants, conferences, exhibitions, and publishing subsidies. "There were no limits, and nobody had to account for it. It was amazing."
Determined to cloak its generosity as privately financed rewards based on merit alone, the C.I.A. laundered the money through established organizations such as the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, and through outfits the C.I.A. created itself, such as the Farfield Foundation, a now-defunct front whose name still graces a great many C.V.'s. The secret propaganda program tainted even those whose grants and awards were honestly won, charges Ms. Saunders.
Then again, she points out, with the amount of C.I.A. dollars in circulation, it is hard to say who was a straight shooter and who was sniping for the agency.
The passengers on the C.I.A. gravy train, according to the agency's own records and other documents Ms. Saunders tracked down, included some decidedly unusual suspects. Take, for instance, the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the poet Stephen Spender, the painter Mark Rothko, the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy, the musician Dizzy Gillespie. Who would've guessed that such people were on the C.I.A. dole -- or that of its British counterpart, MI5 -- either wittingly or, in the worst parlance of the dark years of American anti-Communist paranoia, as "dupes"?
But they were, according to Ms. Saunders's evidence. Currently the arts editor of the British magazine New Statesman, she came to her project as a television documentarian, and she applies the tools of an investigative journalist to her task. Although the story of involvement by Western intelligence in the world of arts and letters has been hinted at before in the pages of publications as diverse as The New York Times and the long-defunct Ramparts, never has it been spelled out with such apparent thoroughness and careful double-checking.
Ms. Saunders claims that 70 percent of the information in the book appears in print for the first time, gleaned from foundation records, private collections of papers, and interviews with former intelligence employees and collaborators -- as well as the aforementioned dupes.
She has vastly expanded the list of people in that category. There's the critic Sir Isaiah Berlin and his truculent friend, Sidney Hook; both Trillings, Lionel and Diana; a whole passel of poets, including Robert Lowell, T.S. Eliot, and Cszelaw Milosz; novelists Isak Dinesen, Peter Matthiessen, and Robert Penn Warren; and too many journal editors, singers, composers, playwrights, actors, filmmakers, painters, sculptors, and general all-around high-culture heroes to list here.
Such people were foot soldiers in a cultural cold war, charges Ms. Saunders. For two decades, they accepted grants, travel stipends, and commissions from a wide variety of C.I.A. front organizations designed to win the hearts and minds of intellectuals tempted by "neutralism."
As in the old labor song "Which Side Are You On?" the C.I.A. believed there were no real neutrals in the cold war. You were either one of "ours," or -- like Jean-Paul Sartre, who especially irked Western intelligence strategists -- one of "theirs."
According to Michael Warner, a historian currently employed by the C.I.A. whom Ms. Saunders cites, the agency's goal was the promotion of a "non-Communist left." Thomas Wardell Braden, a former C.I.A. coordinator of the effort (and later the creator of the TV series Eight Is Enough, an unusual entry in the high-culture crusade he has waged most of his life), told Ms. Saunders that he and his colleagues never intended to do any more than "monitor thinking" and, in some situations, "exercise a final veto on publicity by the non-Communist left and possibly their actions, if they ever got too 'radical.'"
Who knows what form such a veto might have taken? The freethinkers rarely got so out of hand that a restful stay at a C.I.A.-financed writers' colony in the Italian Alps wouldn't calm their revolutionary rumblings.
One didn't have to bow to Washington to partake of such goodies. There was instead the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a high-minded outfit whose membership roster reads like a who's who of European and American intellectuals.
"I was amazed," says Ms. Saunders, "at how many people were willing to suck at the teats of the Congress, when it was widely known that somebody was behind it, probably the American government. I was amazed that so many people were willing to take coin without knowing where it came from."
"So far as I know, there was no C.I.A. money," William Philips, a former editor of The Partisan Review, told The Chronicle. In The Cultural Cold War, Ms. Saunders charges that the small-circulation journal benefited in a number of ways from C.I.A. largesse. Now listing along with a dwindling readership largely of retired cold warriors of the left, the journal once had such a broad circle of influence that magazines like Time and Life could cite it with the confidence that readers would recognize its ideas as of the finest pedigree.
Intelligence officials considered the U.S. government well-served by the journal's thoughtful rebuttals to Communism. On several occasions, they took steps to ensure that those rebuttals would continue. When the Internal Revenue Service threatened to take away The Partisan Review's tax-exempt status in 1957, an Eisenhower adviser wrote to the sociologist Daniel Bell, a member of the Partisan Review crowd, that the C.I.A. had "an indirect interest in seeing to it that favorable consideration is given to the journal's request for tax exemption."
Which it was, via a sort of receivership under the auspices of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, a branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Sidney Hook, then a philosopher at New York University, told the Congress's director (and C.I.A. employee) Michael Josselson that the committee -- of which he had long been a crucial member -- existed solely "to accommodate [The Partisan Review]."
Mr. Philips says if that was so, nobody told him. He insists that his correspondence with Mr. Josselson and a 1958 visit to Paris to discuss with him "the future of PR" were innocent. "We were all anti-Communist," he says, so such conversations "made sense."
Which is more than can be said for Ms. Saunders's book, he adds. "It's too bad that it's so expensive to sue for libel."
But when pressed, Mr. Philips is at a loss to explain why the Congress for Cultural Freedom purchased 3,000 copies of the Review for European distribution. "They did that for a lot of journals," he says.
Indeed. The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, Poetry, Daedalus, and The Kenyon Review all benefited from a C.I.A.-backed program to boost the sales of the right sort of publication. The Kenyon Review was edited by C.I.A. agent Robie Macauley; The Paris Review was cofounded by then-C.I.A. employee Peter Matthiessen.
Nicolas Nabokov, a composer and organizer of music and arts festivals for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, once boasted that he'd "started the career" of the opera singer Leontyne Price. If so, he did it with money from the C.I.A., which held as an explicit agenda the presentation of African-American artists to Europe to counter Soviet propaganda about American racism. Likewise, the Congress for Cultural Freedom not only subsidized existing magazines, but started new ones, such as the Ugandan (now American) journal Transition, to undermine Communism's claims in the former colonial world.
Such magazines constituted a "cultural NATO," one Congress spokesman said at the time. "Or, as some of the boys like to put it, a ring around the pinkoes."
Transition later won its independence, but other magazines never stepped out of the C.I.A.'s shadow. Encounter, a British magazine that from its inception in 1953 to its demise in 1991 published an astonishing range of prominent thinkers, relied throughout its life mostly on covert American and British government financing. In return, through a subtle policy of omission, it presented the illusion of an intellectual elite with virtually nothing critical to say about American foreign policy. "Our greatest asset," the C.I.A. agent Michael Josselson called the magazine.
Irving Kristol, who with Stephen Spender was Encounter's founding editor and is now an editor of The Public Interest, did not return calls from The Chronicle seeking comment on his involvement with Encounter and the C.I.A.
The agency's influence may have been felt most strongly in the art world. Through organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation, as well as what Ms. Saunders believes was the participation of art institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the C.I.A. was a behind-the-scenes critic, helping to put Abstract Expressionism on the map.
Nelson Rockefeller, an enthusiastic supporter of the C.I.A.'s propaganda efforts, called the work of painters such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock "free enterprise painting." The agency hoped that promoting such work as a robust American form would prove the sophistication of American culture, and at the same time counter more explicitly political art, such as the work of Ben Shahn, that the agency considered soft on Communism.
Suspicions of government backing existed even at the time of the first big Abstract Expressionist shows, in the late 1940's. But the art critic Clement Greenberg argued that artists needed patrons, and that patrons were people with power; it always had been so, and always would be.
The C.I.A.'s Mr. Braden agreed. "I've forgotten which pope it was who commissioned the Sistine Chapel," he told Ms. Saunders, "but I suppose that if it had been submitted to a vote of the Italian people there would have been many, many negative responses. You always have to battle your own ignoramuses." The finest thoughts, he argued, were too valuable for a vote. "In order to encourage openness, we had to be secret," he said.
Or as Jack Thompson, a C.I.A. official who taught literature at Columbia University and headed the Farfield Foundation, told Ms. Saunders, "We knew who was deserving and who was not. We were trying to avoid the standard democratic crap. We wanted to reach our friends, and help them, the people who agreed with us."
Ironically, argues Ms. Saunders, with all the resources at their disposal, men like Mr. Thompson and Mr. Braden failed. "They were fighting a rear-guard action for high culture," she says. "What they said they were upholding were the cherished liberal ideals of the intellectual as a free agent and the tools of the intellectual life as totally unbounded -- the direct opposite of what was going on in the Soviet Union. My argument is that by those standards, they stand or fall. And ultimately I think they fall."
The C.I.A., meanwhile, is keeping its own assessment secret. Its response to Ms. Saunders's book? "We decline to comment," was all the press office had to say when contacted by The Chronicle.
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Section: Research & Publishing
Page: A19