During the height of the Cold War, the U.S.
Government committed vast resources to a secret program of cultural propaganda
in Western Europe. A central feature of this program was to advance the claim
that it did not exist. It was managed, in great secrecy, by America’s espionage
arm, the Central Intelligence Agency. The centerpiece of this covert campaign
was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from
1950 until 1967. Its achievements – not the least its duration- was considerable.
At its peak, the Congress for Cultural Freedom has offices in thirty-five
countries, employed dozens of personnel, published over twenty prestige
magazines, held art exhibitions, owned a news and features service, organized
high-profile international conferences, and rewarded musicians and artists with
prizes and public performances. Its mission was to nudge the intelligentsia of
Western Europe away from its lingering fascination with Marxism and Communism
towards a view more accommodating of ‘the American way.’
Drawing on an extensive, highly influential network of intelligence personnel,
political strategists, the corporate establishment, and the old school ties of
the Ivy League universities, the incipient CIA started, from 1947, to build a ‘consortium’
whose double task was to inoculate the world against the contagion of Communism
and to ease the passage of American foreign policy interests abroad. The result
was a remarkably tight network of people who worked alongside the Agency to
promote an idea: that the world needed a pax
Americana, a new age of enlightenment, and it would be called the American
Century.
The consortium the CIA built up –consisting of what Henry Kissinger described
as ‘an aristocracy dedicated to the service of this nation on behalf of
principles beyond partisanship’- was the hidden weapon in America’s Cold War
struggle, a weapon which, in the cultural field, had extensive fallout. Whether
they liked it or not, whether they knew it or not, there were few writers,
poets, artists, historians, scientists, or critics in postwar Europe whose
names were not in some way linked to this covert enterprise. Unchallenged,
undetected for over twenty years, America’s spying establishment operated a
sophisticated, substantially endowed cultural front in the West, for the West, in the name of freedom of
expression. Defining the Cold War as a
‘battle for men’s minds.’ It stockpiled a vast arsenal of cultural weapons:
journals, books, conferences, seminars, art exhibitions, concerts, awards.
Membership of this consortium included an assorted group of former radicals and
leftist intellectuals whose faith in Marxism and Communism had been shattered
by evidence of Stalinist totalitarianism. Emerging from the Pink Decade of the
1930s, mourned by Arthur Koestler as an ‘abortive revolution of the spirit, a
misfired Renaissance, a false dawn of history,’ their disillusionment was
attended by a readiness to join in a new consensus, to affirm a new order which
would substitute for the spent forces of the past. The tradition of the radical
dissenter, where intellectuals took it upon themselves to probe myths,
interrogate institutional prerogative, and disturb the complacency of power,
was suspended in favor of supporting ‘the American proposition.’ Endorsed and
subsidized by powerful institutions, this non-communist group became as much a
cartel in the intellectual life of the West as Communism ha been a few years earlier
( and included many of the same people).
‘There came a time . . .
when, apparently, life lost the ability to arrange itself,’ says Charlie
Citrine, the narrator of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s
Gift. “It had to be arranged. Intellectuals took this as their job. From
say, Machiavelli’s time to our own this arranging has been one great gorgeous tantalizing
misleading disastrous project. A man like Humboldt, inspired, shrewd, nutty,
was brimming over with the discovery that the human enterprise, so grand and
infinitely varied, has now to be managed by exceptional persons. He was an
exceptional person, therefore he was an eligible candidate for power. Well, why
not?’ Like so many Humboldts, those intellectuals who had been betrayed by the
false idol of communism now found themselves gazing at the possibility of
building a new Weimar, an American Weimar. If the government – and its covert
action arm, the CIA – was prepared to assist in this project, well, why not?
That former left wingers should have come to be roped together in the same
enterprise with the CIA is less implausible than it seems. There was genuine
community of interest and conviction between the Agency and those intellectuals
who were hired, even if they didn’t know it, to fight the cultural Cold War.
The CIA’s influence was not ‘always, or often, reactionary and sinister,’ wrote
America’s preeminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. ‘In my experience
its leadership was politically enlightened and sophisticated.” This view of the
CIA as a haven of liberalism acted as a powerful inducement to collaborate with
it – or, if not this, at least to acquiesce to the myth that it was well
motivated. And yet this perception sits uncomfortably with the CIA’s reputation
as a ruthlessly interventionist and frighteningly unaccountable instrument of
American Cold War power. This was the organization that masterminded the
overthrow of Premier Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, the ousting of the Arbenz
government in Guatemala in 1954, the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation in 1961,
the notorious Phoenix Program in Vietnam. It spied on tens of thousands of Americans;
harassed democratically elected leaders abroad; plotted assassinations; denied
these activities to Congress; and, in the process, elevated the art of lying to
new heights. By what strange alchemy, then, did the CIA manage to present
itself to high-minded intellectuals like Arthur Schlesinger as the golden
vessel of cherished liberalism?
The extent to which America’s spying establishment extended its reach into the
cultural affairs of its Western allies, acting as unacknowledged facilitator to
a broad range of creative activity, positioning intellectuals and their work
like chess pieces to be played in the Great Game, remains one of the Cold War’s most provocative legacies.
The defense mounted by the custodians of the period- which rests on the claim
that the CIA’s substantial financial investment came with no strings attached –
has yet to be seriously challenged. Amongst intellectual circles in America and
Western Europe there persists a readiness to accept as true that the CIA was
merely interested in extending the possibilities for free and democratic cultural
expression. ‘We simply helped people to say what they would have said anyway,’
goes this ‘blank check’ line of defense. If the beneficiaries of CIA funds were
ignorant of the fact, the argument goes, and if their behavior was consequently
unmodified, then their independence as critical thinkers could not have been
affected.
But official documents relating to the cultural Cold War systematically
undermine this myth of altruism. The individuals and institutions subsidized by
th CIA were expected to perform as part of a broad campaign of persuasion, of a
propaganda war in which ‘propaganda’ was defined as ‘any organized effort or
movement to disseminate information or a particular doctrine by means of news,
special arguments or appeals designed to influence the thoughts and actions of
any given group.’ A vital constituent of this effort was ‘psychological
warfare,’ which was defined as ‘the planned use by a nation of propaganda and
activities other than combat which communicate ideas and information intended
to influence the opinions, attitudes, emotions and behavior of foreign groups
in ways that will support the achievement of national aims.’ Further, the ’most
effective kind of propaganda’ was defined as the kind where ‘the subject moves in the direction you
desire for reasons which he believes to be his own.’ It is useless to
dispute these definitions. They are littered across government documents, the données of American postwar cultural
diplomacy.
Clearly, by camouflaging its investment, the CIA acted on the supposition that
its blandishments would be refused if offered openly. What kind of freedom can
be advanced by such deception? Freedom of any kind certainly wasn’t on the
agenda in the Soviet Union, where those writers and intellectuals who weren’t
sent to the gulags were lassoed into serving the interests of the state. It was
of course right to oppose such un-freedom. But with what means? Was there any
real justification for assuming that the principles of Western democracy
couldn’t be revived in postwar Europe according to some internal mechanism? Or
for not assuming that democracy could be more complex than was implied by the
landing of American liberalism. To what degree was it admissible for another
state to covertly intervene in the fundamental processes of organic intellectual
growth, of free debate and the uninhibited flow of ideas? Did this not risk
producing, instead of freedom, a kind of ur-freedom, where people think they
are acting freely when in fact that are bound to forces over which they have no
control?
The CIA’s engagement in cultural warfare raises
other troubling questions. Did financial aid distort the process by which
intellectuals 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 he lampooned the
‘intellectual academic call-girl circuit’ of intellectual conferences and
symposia? Were reputations secured or enhanced by membership of the CIA’s
cultural consortium? How many of those writers and thinkers who acquired an
international audience for their ideas were really second-raters, ephemeral
publicists, whose works were doomed to the basements of secondhand bookstores?
In 1966, a series of articles in the New
York Times exposed a wide range of covert actions undertaken by America’s
intelligence community. As stories of attempted coups and (mostly botched)
political assassinations poured onto the front pages, the CIA came to be characterized
as a rogue 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 the American
government had looked to the cultural Brahmins of the West to lend intellectual
weight to its actions.
The suggestion that many intellectuals had been
animated by the dictates of American policy makers rather than by independent
standards of their own generated widespread disgust.. The moral authority
enjoyed by the intelligentsia during the height of the Cold War was now seriously
undermined and frequently mocked. The ‘consensocracy’ was falling apart, the
center could not hold. And as it disintegrated, so the story itself became
fragmented, partial, modified – sometimes egregiously – by forces on the right
and left who wished to twist its peculiar truths to their own ends. Ironically,
the circumstances which made possible the revelations contributed to their real
significance becoming obscured. As America’s obsessive anti-Communist campaign
in Vietnam brought her to the brink of social collapse, and with subsequent
scandals on the scale of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, it was hard to
sustain interest or outrage in the business of Kulturkampf, which in comparison
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 be heard.’ This book attempts to record
those dead spots. It seeks a different acoustic, a tune other than that played
by the official virtuosi 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 significance of salon diplomacy and boudoir
politicking. It challenges what Gore Vidal has described as ‘those official
fictions that have been agreed upon by all together too many too interested
parties, each with his own thousand days in which to set up his own misleading
pyramids and obelisks that purport to tell sun time’. Any history which sets
out to interrogate these ‘agreed-upon-facts’ must, in Tzvetan Todorov’s words,
become ‘an act of profanity. It is not about contributing to the cult of heroes
and saints. It’s about coming a close as possible to the truth. It participates
in what Max Weber called the ‘disenchantment of the world’; it exists at the
other end of the spectrum from idolatry. It’s about redeeming the truth for truth’s
sake, not retrieving images that are deemed useful for the present..’
