Culture of Funding Culture: The CIA and The Congress For Cultural Freedom

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The Culture of Funding Culture
Chapter · March 2013

DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748646272.003.0003
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Chapter 2
The Culture of Funding Culture: THE CIA

AND THE CONGRESS FOR CULTURAL FREEDOM
Eric Pullin
The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was the largest and longest of the
covert operations run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Lasting from
1950 until 1967, the purpose of the CCF was to promote an international
anti-communist consciousness among intellectual liberals and non-communist
Leftists. The CCF established organisations throughout the non-communist
world, sponsoring concerts, art exhibits and scholarly lectures to promote anti-
communist activism among intellectuals and artists. From 1966 to 1967, The
New York Times and Ramparts – a New Left magazine that offered criticism of
politics and culture – exposed the ‘secret’ that the CIA had covertly funded the
CCF since its establishment in 1950. Within months of breaking this scandal, the
CCF could not withstand the blow to its reputation and ceased functioning as an
effective organisation.
The circuitous and exciting story of the relations between the CIA and the
CCF has been discussed in detail by a relatively small number of historians,
which are discussed below. These historians have been limited in their ability to
explore the topic fully, because the CIA’s documents regarding covert funding
of the CCF remain closed. The CIA’s history of pathological secrecy is ‘old hat’,
but its routine obstructionism continues to rankle historians. Despite changing
its mind in May 2012, in September 2011, the CIA decreed:
that declassification reviews would now cost requesters up to $72 per hour, even
if no information is found or released. To even submit a request – again, even if no
documents are released – the public must now agree to pay a minimum of $15.1
Nevertheless, the historians considered in this chapter have initiated a penetrat-

ing discussion, not only concerning the connections between the US Intelligence
Agency and free intellectual activity, but also relating to the nature of the Cold
War, particularly its cultural theatre.
In assessing this connection, historians have divided historiographical con-
siderations into three main categories: first, the question of how to judge the
47
48 Intelligence Studies in Britain and the US
CIA–CCF collaboration (condemnation, celebration or something else?); second,

the reasons why the CIA and the CCF chose to collaborate with one another; and
finally, the degree to which the CIA controlled or influenced the activities of the
CCF’s intellectuals. Despite lively and substantive disagreements, it appears that
these historians’ work maintains a high degree of interdependence. Even as one
historian challenges the conclusions of another, there is genuine acknowledge-
ment that previous historical work has proved indispensable for moving the
study of the CIA’s largest covert operation forwards.
It might reasonably be argued that Christopher Lasch’s article, ‘The Cultural
Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for Cultural Freedom’, initiated the
historiography of the relationship between the CIA and the CCF.2 Lasch’s article
– a slightly different version of which originally appeared in Nation magazine
(the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States that
describes itself as ‘the flagship of the Left’) – offered not only a historical survey
of the CCF, but also formed part of the contemporary controversy during
the late 1960s in the wake of revelations that the CIA had secretly funded the
CCF since its inception. The revelations sparked a heated debate, which was
subsequently waged in the press over the next two decades, concerning the
autonomy of the CCF and the role of CIA in funding culture. Lasch’s article
was, in part, a response to prominent liberals, who either minimised the role of
the CIA in cultural affairs or even tried to justify it.3 For instance, John Kenneth
Galbraith, George Kennan, Robert Oppenheimer and Arthur Schlesinger Jr all
attempted to explain their involvement with the CCF in light of the revelations.
They did not deny connections to the CIA, but simply insisted that the CIA
had never compromised the CCF’s intellectual independence. Others, such as
Melvin Lasky, Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol – the latter who had edited
the CCF’s literary journal, Encounter, in the United Kingdom – co-wrote a
similar defence.4 In contrast to the almost apologetic tone of these participants,
Tom Braden – Director of the CIA’s International Operations Division (IOD)
during the 1950s and, later, a journalist – actually celebrated the Agency’s covert
funding of international cultural activities in two confrontational pieces – ‘I’m
Glad the CIA is “Immoral” ’ and ‘What’s Wrong with the CIA?’.5 Lasch’s article,
which established the condemnatory tone on the subject of the CCF’s involve-
ment with the CIA, characterised much of the Left’s press commentary through-
out the 1970s and 1980s, as well as some later historical writing.
Lasch denounced CCF intellectuals, who had ‘lent themselves to purposes
having nothing to do with the values they professed’.6 He reviled their collabora-
tion with the CIA as a corruption of free intellectual discourse, little different
from that of doctrinaire communists. The intellectuals’ claim – that, ‘in the
present crisis [the Cold War], a moral man could not remain neutral from the
The Culture of Funding Culture 49
struggle of competing ideologies’ – betrayed their intellectual bankruptcy.7

According to Lasch, the CCF’s members engaged in a self-negating project,
which, despite loud protestations on behalf of intellectual freedom, revealed
their lack of intellectual independence. They ‘confuse[d] intellectual values with
the interests of the intellectual class, just as they confused freedom with the
national interests of the United States’.8 Thus, the refusal of the CCF’s intellectu-
als to admit the possibility of neutrality exposed their service to the state.
Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid the Piper? extends Lasch’s moral cri-
tique by marshalling an enormous amount of evidence, which identifies where,
when and to whom the CIA provided funds. Although admitting the story
is incomplete, because obtaining CIA documents proved nearly impossible,
Saunders draws upon multi-archival sources, ranging from the papers of the
International Association for Cultural Freedom at the University of Chicago, to
US Government and private archives, to numerous personal interviews.9 Who
Paid the Piper? aims to discredit the myth of the “ ‘blank cheque” line of defence’
that allowed CCF intellectuals to disingenuously claim that CIA support had
no effect upon their writing or opinions. On the contrary, Saunders believes
intellectuals were ‘animated by the dictates of American policy-makers rather
than by independent standards of their own . . .’.10 In an interview with historian
Scott Lucas, Saunders emphasised the point, by stating that the CCF’s intel-
lectuals viewed culture as a ‘Trojan horse’, which ‘secretly carried [a] political
agenda’.11 Saunders, though reluctant to condemn unwitting intellectuals, has
little sympathy for witting intellectuals, who believed that ‘the ends justified the
means, even if they included lying (directly, or by omission) to one’s colleagues;
ethics were subject to politics’.12
Saunders describes her work as a ‘corrective’ to Peter Coleman’s The Liberal
Conspiracy,13 which she dismisses as ‘official history’.14 Although certainly
an interested partisan (Coleman served for over twenty years as editor of the
Australian CCF journal, Quadrant), his work should not be so easily cast aside.
In Coleman’s view:
cloak-and-dagger questions of who paid whom, how, and for what are in fact less
important than the astonishing story . . . of the idealistic, courageous, and far-
sighted men and women of the Congress for Cultural Freedom who fought in this
war of ideas – with its attendant suffering and atrocities – against Stalinism and its
successors.15
For Coleman, the Cold War was neither a ‘false construct’, nor an excuse to
impose pax Americana (as Saunders repeatedly asserts); rather, it was an existen-
tial crisis. Neither were intellectuals dupes of the state. Coleman admits ‘doubt’
about the integrity and autonomy of the organisation and offers several critical
assessments of the relationship between the CIA and the CCF, but he believes
assessments such as those of Lasch and Saunders obscure the ‘real’ threat to
intellectual freedom posed by the Soviets, especially in the late 1940s and early
1950s. Asserting that the goals and purposes of the CCF outweighed the risks of
CIA involvement, he proposes that there would have been danger if the CIA had
not funded the CCF. Indeed, the danger for Coleman ‘was not the immorality
of covert funding’, but the difficulty of keeping secrets in democracies such as
the United States. Rather than cynically view the CCF as a tool for imposing
pax Americana, Coleman believed that ‘it was America’s principal attempt to
win over the world’s intellectuals to the liberal democratic cause’.16 Coleman
subsequently amplified this contention:
It is unfair that it [the CIA] should be so bitterly condemned for its failures, and
should then go unpraised when it does something constructive and sensible. And
the Congress [for Cultural Freedom] would itself have been remiss if it had failed
to take money which came to it from good intent and wholly without strings or
conditions.17
This celebratory view is not shared by Giles Scott-Smith, who, neverthe-
less, avoids the condemnatory approach of Lasch and Saunders. Yet, neither
is Scott-Smith’s view of CIA-funded intellectuals a middle approach; instead,
he regards morality as beside the point. Scott-Smith grants that intellectuals
acted as ‘cultural personnel’ in the service of the state, but contends ‘that there
was a more complex process of ideological alignment going on between key
elites in the political, economic and cultural realms, and on an international
scale’.18 Scott-Smith sidesteps this, making ‘a moral argument against the
hypocrisy of those involved’, because it ‘reduce[s] the Congress to being simply
another CIA front’.19 While the CIA certainly provided money and influenced
the organisation’s direction, ‘the ideas [advocated by CCF intellectuals] were
already common among the intellectual community both in the US and Europe
before their stabilisation and institutionalisation’.20 Scott-Smith places the CIA’s
support of the CCF as part of a larger ‘battle between contesting hegemonies
over the post-war world . . .’.21
* * *
Historians of the relationship between the CIA and the CCF differ as to why the
CIA decided to fund the CCF. According to Saunders, the answer is simple and
direct. She describes the CIA as a collection of ‘Park Avenue cowboys’ and ‘pala-
dins of democracy’, whose ‘job it was to establish and then justify the post-war
pax Americana’. Saunders argues that the CCF became, almost at its inception,
part of the ‘CIA’s “Propaganda Assets Inventory” ’.22 The close involvement of
the CIA in the CCF was evidenced by the activities of Frank Wisner – head of
the Office of Policy Coordination – which conducted the CIA’s covert opera-
tions. After the CIA funded the CCF’s first conference at Berlin in 1950, Wisner
dictated the removal of Melvin J. Lasky from the CCF leadership. According
to Saunders, the nickname ‘Wisner’s Wurlitzer’ serves to indicate ‘how these
“assets” were expected to perform: at the push of a button, Wisner could play
any tune he wished to hear’.23 Apparently, the CIA began to play even more
loudly with the creation of Tom Braden’s IOD, which formalised the CIA’s
connection to the CCF, thus making the CCF ‘answerable’ to the CIA. The IOD
relished the connection to the CCF and the non-communist Left:
not to destroy or even dominate, but rather to maintain a discreet proximity to and
monitor the thinking of such groups . . . and in extremis, to exercise a final veto on
their publicity and possibly their actions, if they ever got too “radical”.24
The CIA did not conceive of the CCF as an intelligence-gathering organisation,

but simply as a body devoted to pressuring the intellectual elite, who, in turn,
influenced Europe’s political decision-makers.25
Coleman offers a somewhat more complex and counter-intuitive argument
as to why the CIA decided upon a programme of covert funding. The decision
occurred at the same time as a ‘quiet revolution’ – in the phrasing of Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. – occurred in the State Department. Under the influence of such
figures as George F. Kennan, Charles ‘Chip’ Bohlen and Isaiah Berlin, the State
Department decided to support the previously marginalised non-communist
Left, but, for domestic political reasons, could not openly exploit this strategy,
which fell to the CIA. Though ironic, Coleman regards this strategy as unsur-
prising. As support, he cites Braden’s justification that: ‘in much of Europe in the
1950s, socialist people who called themselves “left” . . . were the only people who
gave a damn about fighting Communism’.26 Precisely because the organisation
was composed primarily of liberals and the non-communist Left, ‘it was also
necessary to keep the arrangement secret, since otherwise European intellectuals
would refuse to cooperate with the Congress’.27 Hugh Wilford lends support,
though not uncritically, to this argument. He offers that: ‘it would therefore be
on the terrain of the European left that the battle for “hearts and minds” would
be at its most intense; and anti-communist leftists were potentially Washington’s
most valuable allies in this fight’. Moreover, the strategy ‘was not simply a case
of the American intelligence service “using” a left wing intellectual’.28 Often,
the reverse occurred, as the non-communist Left attempted to impose its views
upon the CIA.29
Other historians have taken a more systemic approach to explain the CIA’s
interest in intellectuals. Scott Lucas’ book, Freedom’s Crusade, argues that: ‘the
United States, just like the Soviet system, with which it contended for so long,
has an “ideology” ’.30 Though not as rigid as Marxism–Leninism, American
ideology works to justify and organise political, economic and cultural activity.
This view presents the Cold War as ‘a clash of cultures and ideologies’.31 Thus,
while CIA interest in the CCF resulted from the dictates of American ideology,
the regnant Cold War ideology of the United States was not foisted upon popu-
lations. Lucas observes that the US Government promoted ideology by cooper-
ating with an elaborate network of ‘state–private’ organisations (for example,
National Committee for Free Europe, Committee for Free Asia and MIT’s
Center for International Studies). Although the CIA might have provided sig-
nificant funding to these private organisations, the ‘impetus’ came from private
individuals, ‘with their own interests in ensuring the triumph of freedom’.32
Giles Scott-Smith also takes a systemic view, but argues against Lucas’ ‘ideol-
ogy’ thesis. Despite recognising value in examining the state–private network,
he contends that the ideological approach contains reductionist elements.
According to Scott-Smith, it has the ‘tendency to collapse all activities into this
framework of interpretation, so that every cultural event, philosophical declara-
tion and musical interlude becomes defined solely by its Cold War ideological
context’. Scott-Smith, though respectful of the force of American ideology in the
Cold War, does not regard ideology as monolithic. On the contrary, he argues
that: ‘in the ideological struggle, different traditions, motives and methods
worked in parallel, in combination, sometimes even in opposition’.33
In The Politics of Apolitical Culture, Scott-Smith frames his discussion of the
collaboration between the CIA and the CCF in terms of Antonio Gramsci’s
concept of ‘hegemony’ – the notion that society’s dominant classes have formed
and disseminated a prevailing culture that appears to be shared by all classes
in a society. Whereas Lucas considers state–private networks in terms of cohe-
sion and goals, Scott-Smith attempts to explore causes. American hegemony
in Western Europe was comparable to Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe,
except that the American form had to be maintained by persuasion, rather than
coercion. Employing the Gramscian notion that political and civil society were
connected by the alliance and coordination of political, economic and cultural
groups, Scott-Smith assesses ‘culture as a complex set of norms in the domain
of ideas, and how such norms are solidified through the influence of specific
networks operating in the interests of a ruling group in the economy’.34 Thus,
for Scott-Smith, the reasons why the CIA funded the CCF and why the CCF
accepted CIA funding are indistinguishable. Both the CIA and CCF were, from
their very beginnings, institutions created and shaped by the political demands
of the Cold War.35
Unfortunately, fleshing out this relationship is complicated, because the
CIA’s image ‘always brings with it the whiff of conspiracy’.36 This ‘whiff’
obscures the intimate role of the CIA as a component of the state. Indeed, ‘the
importance of the CIA is exactly that its personnel were able to operate on a large
scale with a separate mandate, yet its hierarchy was always in touch with the
workings of democratic government and legitimacy’.37 In pursuit of hegemonic
goals, the CIA collaborated with ‘a transnational network of elite groups and
institutions in political and civil society in order to solidify any social-ideological
consensus’.38 During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the CIA took an increasingly
autonomous, and somewhat ironic, approach to achieving US hegemony in
Europe. Scott-Smith observes that, ‘while US foreign policy (and general public
opinion) was ostensibly moving against all positions on the political left, the
CIA began to employ a strategy of undermining communist organisations and
support by promoting more moderate leftist social democratic movements’.39
Although the process did not run smoothly, the CIA believed that ‘Atlanticism
[that is developing close connections between the United States and Europe]
needed to be institutionalised not only economically, politically and militarily,
but also socially, culturally and intellectually’.40 The CIA considered the CCF as
a covert operation and attempted to use it to organise European intellectual life
‘around the concept of Atlantic unity’.41 However, the CIA could only foster a
common US–European Atlantic culture, ‘because of its connection to already
existing concerns among the European intellectual community about the future
of intellectual-cultural freedom in the post-war world’.42 In other words, the CIA
could not have even attempted to work with intellectuals unless the intellectuals
of the CCF already shared Atlanticist goals.
In order to understand why the CIA looked to support intellectual and
cultural groups during the Cold War, Volker Berghahn’s America and the
Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe takes a less consciously theoretical, yet no less
sophisticated, approach than Scott-Smith’s work. In order to make the CIA’s
funding of the CCF ‘comprehensible’, Berghahn examines the ‘U.S. govern-
ment and the funding of culture’, and also, though not using this phrasing, the
US culture of funding.43 He explains that US agencies were deeply involved in
the physical, political, economic and cultural reconstruction of Europe during
the post-war years. The United States devoted significant effort to rebuilding a
devastated Europe for its own sake, but saw containing Soviet expansion as the
primary motivation for restructuring the continent. Several overt initiatives (for
example, the Marshall Plan and NATO) and covert operations (for example, the
subsidisation by the US High Commission for Germany of journals such as Die
Neue Zeitung and Der Monat) funnelled millions of US dollars into fostering
democracy and capitalism in Europe. Early in the Cold War, the United States
established a pattern of investing in ‘contain[ing] the spread of leftist radicalism
. . . to foster the idea of an “Atlantic community of nations” in its fight against
“totalitarianism” in both its Stalinist and fascist guises’.44 More to the point,
cultural covert activities in Europe began well before the CIA’s decision to
fund the CCF. However, the Americanising aspects of these efforts generated
significant ‘cultural resistance’ among Europeans. Such activities necessitated
building alliances with Europe’s non-communist Left and its liberals, but the
cost-conscious US Congress looked negatively at funding programmes devoted
to encouraging these groups. Thus, opposition from the Left, abroad, and the
Right, at home, necessitated secrecy.45
What were the alternatives to CIA funding? Although not explicitly address-
ing the subject, Lasch would not have thought the question important. He
equated ‘foundations’, such as the Ford Foundation (multi-billion dollar charita-
ble organisation that funded international cultural and economic development),
with the ‘state’, describing both ‘modern bureaucracies’ as ‘money spending
agencies’ that manipulated ‘professionalised intellectuals’. Moreover, Lasch did
not take seriously the intellectual integrity of the CCF’s members, because, as
mentioned above, they confused their own values with the interests of the state.
Thus, they made no meaningful or independent choices.46 Saunders grants her
subjects slightly more autonomy. In evaluating the motivations of intellectuals’
collaboration with the CIA, Saunders asks whether they were ‘suckers or hypo-
crites?’47 Her short answer is hypocrites. Saunders concedes that:
not all of them were “witting” in the sense that they were active participants in the
deception. But they all knew, and had known for some time. And if they didn’t,
they were, said their critics, cultivatedly, and culpably ignorant.48
As for seeking funds from large philanthropic organisations, she regards the
Ford Foundation as part of the problem, as just another front, effectively no
different than the Fairfield Foundation, created by Julius Fleischman as a CIA
front or ‘dummy’ organisation. ‘At times’, she argues, ‘it seemed as if the Ford
Foundation was simply an extension of the government in the area of cultural
propaganda’.49 For Saunders, the fact that the CCF even sought out the Ford
or Rockefeller Foundations indicates the reach of the CIA, because the CIA
had agents moving in and out of all of these organisations. Although the CCF
received $7 million (the equivalent of over $52 million in 2012) from the
Ford Foundation by the early 1960s, she does not seriously regard the Ford
Foundation as a legitimate funding alternative for the CCF.50
According to Coleman, the ‘major fault’ of secret funding ‘was less in the
initial CIA funding – the early post-war years were an “emergency” – than in
allowing it to continue until 1966’.51 Coleman suspects that it would have been
a relatively easy matter for the CCF to obtain private funding, from, say, the
Rockefeller Foundation, after the initial ‘emergency’. Lucas and Scott-Smith,
though, counter this statement, arguing that this was never a meaningful option.
Lucas notes that the Ford Foundation was ‘wary’ of receiving political direction
from the US Government, and Scott-Smith describes the major foundations as
being ‘never more than bit player[s] in Congress funding’.52 Coleman thinks it
reasonable that the CCF turned to the CIA. After the initial CIA-funded confer-
ence in Berlin, the CCF had no reliable source of funds, because neither the State
Department nor the US Congress would fund the CCF. Only the CIA proved a
viable funding source, but the CCF wanted ‘to keep the arrangement secret, since
otherwise European intellectuals would refuse to cooperate with the Congress’.53
The CIA indirectly provided funds to the CCF, through ‘actual foundations
or ones created for the purpose’ – that is, ‘dummy’ organisations, such as the
Fairfield Foundation. Despite efforts to conceal the money connection, the
‘covert’ relationship between the CCF and the CIA seemed to be an open secret
around the world. Indeed, Coleman comments that British and French intellec-
tuals often nettled CCF officials about being tools of the American government.
Margery Sabin observes that, ‘the origin of American money was less shrouded
in secrecy in India than in America, where the mystery of who-knew-what-when
about the CIA sponsorship is still being disputed’. Thus, as Coleman shows, ‘the
attempt at cover was hardly successful’. ‘Whatever the rumors or allegations’,
asserts Coleman, ‘they were in the early 1950s of secondary importance to the
Congress intellectuals, who had been desperately calling for a greater American
commitment if European freedom were to survive’. His apologia notwithstand-
ing, Coleman concedes that ‘if it had not been possible to find other sources
of funds, it could be said in hindsight that it would have been better to have
reduced the Congress’s range of activities’.54
Although many intellectuals would have preferred the CCF be funded openly
by the State Department, Berghahn offers that they had little choice. He explains
that, having successfully participated in World War II against Nazi totalitarian-
ism, they saw nothing nefarious in the cooperation between government and
private organisations in the fight against communist totalitarianism. On the
contrary, they ‘viewed the Cold War against the Soviet Union that followed in
1945 as a comprehensive conflict that justified the continued application of the
principles of close cooperation that had guided the hot war against Hitler’.55
Nevertheless, intellectuals loathed covert funding. Michael Josselson –
Administrative Secretary of the CCF – initially hoping that support would
come from the AFL–CIO, reluctantly accepted CIA money, because he ‘received
assurances that there would be no interference by the agency with any activity’
and that ‘no attempt [would] ever be made to use the new organization for any
intelligence or penetration purposes’.56 Josselson basically trusted the CIA, but
realised that public exposure of the connection with the CIA could damage the
CCF’s credibility, as well as the personal reputations of the intellectuals involved
in the organisation. Thus, he continuously, yet unsuccessfully, sought an income

that would free the CCF from its dependence upon the CIA.57 Obtaining
alternative funding sources proved increasingly difficult throughout the 1950s.
The Ford Foundation provided some grants to the CCF, but believed that ‘the
covert CIA connection constantly put its worldwide prestige in jeopardy’.58 The
more the CCF became dependent upon the CIA, the less the Ford Foundation
wanted anything to do with the CCF. In 1962, the Ford Foundation examined
the CCF’s annual budget of $1.8 million and found that $1.4 million came from
‘government sources’.59 In the early 1960s, efforts to attract institutions, such
as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Sloan
Foundation (multi-million dollar private international philanthropic organi-
sations, established and operated by members of the Rockefeller and Sloan
families), foundered for similar reasons. Ironically, these foundations refused
to make significant grants to the CCF, ‘without heavy Ford participation’. Thus,
it seemed that CIA funding was a vicious circle, from which the CCF could not
escape.60
* * *
Perhaps the most troubling issue related to the CIA’s covert funding of the CCF
is that of influence. Historians differ not only as to the nature of CIA influence
over the CCF, but also as to the extent of CIA control. With the CIA paying the
CCF’s bills, many have wondered what the CIA’s return on investment was.
Lucas, Scott-Smith and Berghahn offer indirect analyses of the CIA’s influence
over the CCF. As discussed above, these historians believe that the context in
which the CIA and CCF entered into collaboration helps to explain the nature
and extent of the CIA’s influence. Lucas’ Freedom’s War is relatively indiffer-
ent as to whether or not the CIA controlled the CCF, but it does argue that the
CIA’s covert activities undoubtedly contributed to the ‘drive for ideological
consensus’.61 Scott-Smith argues that ‘the boundary between state and civil
society becomes more blurred as the liberal idea of an independent social sphere
becomes indefensible’.62 In essence, his point is not that the CIA exerted influ-
ence as an arm of the state over the private CCF. Rather, he contends that the
two acted in cooperation to mobilise cultural opinions on behalf of the state’s
hegemonic goals. Although Berghahn delves deeply into the origins of the CCF
and its relationship with the CIA, his goal is to explore the networks established
by Atlanticists during the Cold War. Unconcerned with the issue of influence,
he asks the broader question relating to ‘how far the entire culture war effort
was a success or failure’.63 He concludes that, despite enormous power, the
CIA’s covert support of the CCF ironically contributed to the European anti-
Americanism that it tried to combat.
Interestingly, Lasch did not accuse the US Government of dictating edito-

rial policy to the CCF. Instead, he questioned whether the CCF’s intellectuals
‘criticized the American government or any aspect of the officially sanctioned
order’.64 So assimilated and internalised were the opinions of editors of CCF
organs, such as the British CCF journal Encounter, that there was no need for the
CIA to dictate editorial policy. The editors self-censored and did so in a way that
masked any connection to the US Government. Although many CCF intellectu-
als protested that they had never been pressured by the CIA, Lasch countered
that, even if true, this did not ‘prove their independence from the official point
of view’.65 When the revelations exposed the CIA’s funding of the CCF, the intel-
lectuals ‘continued to protest their innocence, as if innocence, in the narrow and
technical sense, were the real issue in the matter’.66 Few positions exposed the
CCF’s absorption of official perspectives as much as its strong stand against non-
alignment. When India demanded its right to pursue independent policies in the
Cold War, the CCF lamely chastised ‘the immorality of neutralism’.67 Instead of
considering that non-alignment might represent free thought, the intellectuals
condemned non-alignment as a form of fellow travelling or cowardice.
Although sympathetic to Lasch’s assessment, Saunders does not feel that it
goes far enough in considering the CIA’s means of control. As the title to the
British edition (Who Paid the Piper?) suggests, Saunders contends that the CIA
maintained tremendous influence over the CCF and did so primarily through
the means of funding. In the early 1950s, the CIA paid for the first conference in
Berlin and later boosted its ‘slush fund’ by diverting $200,000 to the CCF from
the Marshall Plan. Above all, ‘dummy’ organisations, such as the Miami District
Fund, the Hoblitzelle Foundation and, of course, the Fairfield Foundation,
provided significant ‘grants’ to the CCF. She further points out that the CCF
received increasing amounts from the CIA in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
However, she concedes that Josselson constantly worried about CIA funding as
the CCF’s ‘Achilles’ heel’ and that he devoted significant energies to freeing the
CCF from financial dependence upon the CIA.68 Though sensitive to Josselson’s
anxiety, Saunders contends that his exertions only emphasised the CIA’s influ-
ence over the CCF. The signal example used by Saunders to illustrate the CIA’s
‘Wurlitzer’ was the quashing of an article by Dwight Macdonald concerning US
conduct in the Korean War for Encounter (Fall 1958).69 ‘By axing the Macdonald
article . . .’, Saunders asserts, ‘the credibility of the claim that CIA support came
without strings attached was jeopardized’.70
Unsurprisingly, Coleman’s argument is quite different. He claims that the
CIA exerted a deleterious influence on the CCF, not by shaping or controlling
its opinions, but by moving the CCF to the Left. According to Coleman, the CCF
continued cleaving to the non-communist Left even after the Soviets withdrew
from the culture war in the mid 1950s, because the CIA’s ‘misjudgement that this
was where the leadership of the intellectual community remained’.71 He argues
that such an approach might have been appropriate in the early 1950s, but it no
longer worked in the 1960s. As for covert funding, Coleman regards it as a viable
short-term approach, because, as mentioned above, the means of funding mat-
tered less than the end goals. Nonetheless, over the long-term, the CCF, under the
patronage of the CIA, remained fixed in Left thinking, until its demise in the late
1960s. Although moving, and keeping, the CCF to the Left appears to be the CIA’s
most important influence on the organisation, Coleman, in any case, favourably
assesses the work of the CCF and laments its demise: ‘In contributing in so bril-
liant and timely a way to this public awareness throughout the world in a period
of great danger, the Congress for Cultural Freedom was a historic success’.72
Hugh Wilford’s work occasionally echoes that of Coleman, but lacks his
admiration for the CCF. Rather than hold a brief either for or against the CCF,
Wilford sets his task as determining the degree to which the CIA exerted influ-
ence over cultural affairs. As such, his two critical texts – The CIA, The British
Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? and The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the
CIA Played America – both directly challenge Saunders’s ‘tacit suggestion
that the Agency called the tune of those intellectuals who received its secret
patronage’.73 Although genuinely impressed by her thorough research, Wilford
contends that her ‘portrayal of the Agency’s cultural influence’ needs revision.74
Above all, he argues that ‘the implied claim in the British title of Saunders’s
book, Who Paid the Piper? – that America’s Cold War spy establishment called
the tune of western intellectual life is problematic in several respects’. He agrees
that Saunders has correctly identified some examples of CIA influence (for
example, the removal of Lasky from CCF leadership and the editorial intru-
sions at Encounter – indeed, he confirms Saunders in describing Encounter ‘as
very much a joint Anglo–American intelligence operation’), but believes her
narrow focus on such episodes leaves a distorted picture of CIA influence. He
argues that the CIA actually had a difficult time accounting for its investment
in culture. Above all, ‘the CIA could not always predict or control the actions of
the musicians, writers, and artists, it secretly patronized’.75 Neither was the CIA
able to ‘dictate’ how cultural elites would react to the ‘cultural blandishments’
promoted by the CIA.76 For instance, several British intellectuals of the CCF
obstructed and hampered the American Cold War effort in a number of ways.
They were quarrelsome (arguing incessantly amongst themselves and with the
CCF’s leaders); they often defined culture at odds with the CIA; and they ignored
the wishes of their paymasters. Yet, there was little that the CIA could do, other
than complain behind closed doors, because secrecy prevented the Agency from
exposing the intellectuals’ non-compliance.77
Wilford’s description of the CIA’s attempts at controlling intellectuals evokes

the image of herding cats. Despite confirming Saunders’ appraisal that many
intellectuals were, in fact, witting, Wilford believes that the same evidence that
indicates their knowledge of covert funding also indicates their distaste for it.
They knew of it, but they did not like it. This basic fact mattered a great deal.
Whatever intellectuals ‘knew or did not know about the CIA’s hand in their
affairs, it did not prevent them from treating the organisation as if it were a
genuine, privately run committee, indeed, as if it were their own’.78 On the
contrary, the risks to the CIA’s covert operations in cultural spheres were sig-
nificant, because of ‘literary intellectuals’ notorious unpredictability and fierce
sense of independence’.79 Passionate disputes among the CCF’s intellectuals
and the organisation’s leadership in Paris show further difficulties in managing
an international covert operation. In particular, ex-communist intellectuals
thought ‘they had a much better understanding of the Cold War enemy than
the U.S. government’ and often defiantly made that point to their paymasters.80
Even money itself was a risk for the CIA, as they often fumed in impotent rage
as ‘intellectuals had a habit of appropriating CCF subsidies for their own private
purposes, which was to become a chronic problem in the United States’s cultural
Cold War effort’.81
The few studies that have considered the CCF’s activities in specific countries
tend to confirm Wilford’s arguments about the CIA’s limited ability to call the
tune. Ingeborg Philipsen’s study of Denmark describes the Danish CCF as a con-
tentious group that could not be ‘characterized by internal unity. From the start
there were disagreements among the intellectuals about its aims and purposes’.
Moreover, the CCF in Denmark was ‘not . . . one big propaganda machine con-
trolling everything’. The Danish CCF ‘played out of tune, they played a different
tune – or they refused to play at all’. Tity de Vries, comparing the Dutch CCF
as ineffectual in relation to the affiliates in Britain, France or Germany, sees the
affiliate in the Netherlands as a fairly lacklustre organisation, which had little
connection to international intellectuals. Dutch intellectuals held an ambiva-
lent perception of American culture and society and tended to be politically
apathetic. For de Vries, uniquely Dutch considerations had ‘more influence on
the intellectuals’ position concerning the CCF than the Cold War policy of the
Dutch government or their individual political positions’. In addition, my own
work and that of Margery Sabin draw similar conclusions about the activities
of the CCF in India. Sabin argues that, in order to understand the attraction
of Indian intellectuals to the CCF, one has to attend to the factional struggles
within Indian politics after independence. ‘It was not love of America’, she
asserts, that attracted these figures to the Indian Congress for Cultural Freedom
(ICCF), but ‘a hope that they could use rather than be used by their new spon-
sors’. My work contends that Indian intellectuals ‘certainly received CIA money,
yet they disagreed vehemently with US foreign policy’, and they used ‘the ICCF
as a vehicle for promoting their own domestic opposition to the Nehru govern-
ment’. Indeed, ‘they routinely ran the organization according to concerns having
very little to do with the dictates of American foreign policy’.82
In many ways, Wilford (along with several other authors who focus on spe-
cific countries) shows the ineffectiveness of the CIA at the precise moment – the
late 1940s and 1950s – when the agency was at the height of its power. Wilford’s
work suggests that the cultural Cold War was a collaborative exercise, in which
the CIA cooperated with – not dictated to – international partners in the private
sphere. The ‘cultural war’ waged by the CIA and its intellectual collaborators
often appears as a multifarious and irregular affair, in which minor actors
frequently wielded unanticipated power. Although recognising the significant
role played by the CIA in the cultural Cold War, Wilford suggests that intel-
lectuals acted with more independence and less hypocrisy than is argued by
Lasch and Saunders. In this regard, many of Coleman’s arguments resonate with
Wilford, but, it bears repeating, Wilford has no stake either in rehabilitating or
condemning the CCF. He intimates that, despite her formidable archival work,
Saunders’ interpretative conclusions actually obscure the actual influence that
the CIA possessed over the CCF. Wilford’s work suggests that a sober assess-
ment of CIA influence necessitates looking past celebratory or condemnatory
appraisals.
* * *
Together, the historians discussed in this chapter have developed a rich
and diverse assessment of the relationship between the CIA and the CCF.
Unfortunately, they have done so, despite conducting painstaking multi-archi-
val work, without the benefit of CIA documents. Therefore, their engaging
disagreements, valuable interpretations and conclusions must remain contin-
gent. Indeed, the CIA’s retention of documents, many which are now over a
half-century old, prevents historians from exploring the degree to which the
CIA coordinated its CCF operations with other international covert activities.
Berghahn and Wilford convincingly demonstrate the limits of the CIA’s power
to influence intellectuals, but inspection of the CIA’s records will enable histo-
rians to assess whether or not the CIA believed it earned a good return on its
investment in intellectuals. Historians still need to know what the CIA expected
culture to accomplish. Indeed, did the CIA regard itself as trying to impose the
pax Americana described by Saunders? Or was its approach to culture more
complex? Moreover, documents can address questions as to how much the
international covert operation with the CCF actually cost. In the event that
the documents remain closed, perhaps the best avenue for continued research
on the subject of the CIA’s involvement with the CCF is transnational history.
Historians must continue to have an expansive notion of the cultural Cold
War. Scholars would be wise to follow Berghahn’s integrative approach, which
examines the CIA’s ‘cultural war’ as part of a broader ‘culture’ of international
‘cultural conflict’. It is absolutely imperative to examine the Soviet side of the
equation, especially during the 1940s and 1950s. Nevertheless, the historians dis-
cussed in this chapter have prompted a valuable debate about the cultural Cold
War. Lasch, Saunders and Coleman carried the arguments of the cultural Cold
War into historiography, though they have all provided valuable foundational
work. Although Scott-Smith, Lucas and Wilford have moved beyond mere
debate, their theoretical affinity with one another is by no means clear. If Lucas
focuses upon goals and Scott-Smith upon causes, then Wilford concentrates
upon results. Despite disagreements over emphasis, Scott-Smith and Lucas both
assert that the CIA’s Cold War was a negotiated process. Scott-Smith respects
Lucas’ recognition of the state–private network as a vehicle for promoting ideol-
ogy, but ultimately regards the ideological approach as reductionist. Meanwhile,
Berghahn’s discussion of historical context establishes that there needed to be
a US culture of funding before the US Government could fund culture. The
current discussion of the relationship between the CIA and the CCF appears to
have moved beyond condemnatory and celebratory approaches, but, until the
CIA becomes more forthcoming, our conclusions about the cultural Cold War
must remain provisional.
Notes
1 Nate Jones, ‘The CIA’s Covert Operation Against Declassification Review and
Obama’s Open Government’, Unredacted: The National Security Archive, Unedited
and Uncensored, available at: http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/the-cias-
covert-operation-against-declassification-review-and-obamas-open-government/;
Nate Jones, ‘CIA Stops Charging Declassification Fees . . . For Now. White House and
Congressional Intervention Still Needed’, Unredacted: The National Security Archive,
Unedited and Uncensored, available at: http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/
cia-stops-charging-mdr-fees-for-now-white-house-and-congressional-intervention-
still-needed/.
2 Christopher Lasch, ‘The Cultural Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for
Cultural Freedom’, in Barton J. Bernstein (ed.), Towards a New Past: Dissenting
Essays in American History (New York, NY: Vintage Books: 1967), pp. 322–59. The
article first appeared as ‘The Cultural Cold War’, The Nation, 11 September 1967, pp.
198–212. Citations refer to the book.
3 Irwin Unger, ‘Book Reviews: Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American
History’, Journal of American History, 55(2), September 1968, p. 369. Unger described
the article as ‘little more than red baiting in reverse’. Meanwhile, David Donald,
‘Review Note: Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History’, American
Historical Review, 74(2), December 1968, pp. 532–3. Here, Donald mocked Lasch’s as
the ‘voice of outraged youth’.
4 Stephen Spender, Melvin J. Lasky, and Irving Kristol, ‘Letter’, New York Times, 10
May 1966, p. 44.
5 Thomas W. Braden, ‘I’m Glad the CIA is “Immoral” ’, The Saturday Evening Post, 20
May 1967, pp. 10–14; Thomas W. Braden, ‘What’s Wrong with the CIA?’, Saturday
Review, 5 April 1975, pp. 14–18.
6 Lasch, ‘The Cultural Cold War’, p. 325.
9 Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War
(London: Granta Books, 1999). This book was published in the United States as The
Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York, NY: The
New Press, 1999). Some will certainly regard Saunders’s conclusions as strident, but
most will agree that she has performed a valuable service, in terms of crafting a broad
and detailed narrative of the activities of the CCF.
10 Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, pp. 4, 6.
11 W. Scott Lucas, ‘Revealing the Parameters of Public Opinion: An Interview with
Frances Stonor Saunders’, in Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendam (eds), The
Cultural Cold War in Western Europe 1945–1960 (London and Portland, OR: Frank
Cass, 2003), pp. 19, 26; Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold
War, p. 415; Scott Lucas, ‘Introduction: Negotiating Freedom’, in Helen LaVille and
Hugh Wilford (eds), The US Government, Citizen Groups and the Cold War (London
and New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), pp. 3–4. Lucas regards Who Paid the Piper? as
‘part of a continuing response to a Cold War history that presents itself as official,
triumphal or definitive’.
12 Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, p. 415.
13 Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the
Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1989).
14 Lucas, ‘Interview’, p. 30; Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played
America (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 279, note 11.
Wilford describes The Liberal Conspiracy as ‘a semi-official account, which nonethe-
less remains useful’.
15 Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, pp. xiii, 246.
16 Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, pp. xi, 246–7. See, also, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones,
The CIA and American Democracy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1989), p. 87. Coleman argues along lines similar to Jeffeys-Jones – in the wake of the
funding revelations, the CIA was the ‘victim of an excess of democracy’.
17 Peter Coleman, ‘Supporting the Indispensable’, New Criterion, 18(1), September
1999, p. 63.
18 Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural
Freedom, the CIA and Post-War American Hegemony (London and New York, NY:
Routledge, 2002), p. 3.
19 Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture, p. 84.

22 Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, pp. 35, 37
23 Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? p. 85.
24 Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? p. 98 [emphasis original].
25 Hugh Wilford, The CIA, The British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune?
(London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2003), p. 105. Wilford agrees that Wisner
removed Lasky from CCF leadership, but argues that Lasky’s removal indicates the
difficulties, not the power, of CIA attempts to manage cultural activities.
26 Coleman, ‘Supporting the Indispensable’, pp. 46–7.
27 Coleman, ‘Supporting the Indispensable’, p. 220.
28 Wilford, The CIA, The British Left and the Cold War, p. 88.
30 Scott Lucas, Freedom’s Crusade: The American Crusade against the Soviet Union
(New York, NY: New York University Press, 1999), p. 2.
31 Though not focusing upon the CIA–CCF relationship, Lucas explores the context of
state–private relationships. Elke van Cassel, ‘The Reporter Magazine (1949–1968),
The US Government and the Cold War’, in Helen LaVille and Hugh Wilford (eds),
The US Government, Citizen Groups and the Cold War (London and New York, NY:
Routledge, 2006), p. 118.
32 Van Cassel, ‘The Reporter Magazine (1949–1968), The US Government and the Cold
War’, p. 135. This emphasises the ‘connections’ between the private ventures and the
US intelligence community in promoting American ideology.
33 Giles Scott-Smith, ‘Building a Community around the Pax Americana: The US
Government and Exchange Programmes during the 1950s’, in Helen LaVille and
Hugh Wilford (eds), The US Government, Citizen Groups and the Cold War (London
and New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), pp. 85–6.
43 Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard
Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 112.
44 Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe, p. 112.
46 Lasch, ‘The Cultural Cold War’, pp. 328, 346.
51 Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, p. 244.
52 Lucas, Freedom’s Crusade, p. 108; Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture,
p. 123. Neither narrative continues past the mid-1950s or gives extended discussion
of foundation activities.
54 Margery Sabin, Dissenters and Mavericks: Writings about India in English, 1765–2000
(New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 143; Coleman, ‘Supporting the
Indispensable’, pp. 48–9, 221.
55 Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe, p. 174
56 Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe, pp. 219–20.
59 Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe, pp. 233–5.
61 Lucas, Freedom’s Crusade, p. 282.
63 Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe, pp. xviii, 284–95.
68 Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 91, 106–7, 125–7, 341.
69 Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 320, 322.
70 Lucas, ‘Interview’, pp. 22–3.
72 Coleman, ‘Supporting the Indispensable’, pp. 246–7.
73 Wilford, The CIA, The British Left and the Cold War, pp. 2, 263.
74 Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, p. 9.
75 Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, pp. 113–14.
79 Wilford, The CIA, The British Left and the Cold War, pp. 103, 109, 114.
80 Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, pp. 91, 97.
81 Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, pp. 84–5, 114.
82 Ingeborg Philipsen, ‘Out of Tune: The Congress for Cultural Freedom in Denmark
1953–1960’, in Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendam (eds), The Cultural Cold
War in Western Europe 1945–1960 (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2003),
pp. 237, 250; Tity de Vries, ‘The Absent Dutch: Dutch Intellectuals and the Congress
for Cultural Freedom’, in Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendam (eds), The
Cultural Cold War in Western Europe 1945–1960 (London and Portland, OR: Frank
Cass, 2003), p. 265; Sabin, Dissenters and Mavericks, p. 143; Eric Pullin, ‘“Money
Does Not Make Any Difference to the Opinions That We Hold”: India, the CIA, and
the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1951–58’, Intelligence and National Security,
26(2–3), April–June 2011, p. 379.
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The Culture of Funding Culture: THE CIA

Nevertheless, the historians considered in this chapter have initiated a penetrat-

CIA–CCF collaboration (condemnation, celebration or something else?); second,

struggle of competing ideologies’ – betrayed their intellectual bankruptcy.7

The CIA did not conceive of the CCF as an intelligence-gathering organisation,

in the organisation. Thus, he continuously, yet unsuccessfully, sought an income

Interestingly, Lasch did not accuse the US Government of dictating edito-

Wilford’s description of the CIA’s attempts at controlling intellectuals evokes

21 Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture, p. 84.

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