As Frances Stonor Saunders discovered in researching this arresting work, application of the Freedom of Information Act, "as far as the CIA is concerned, is lamentable" (p. viii). Many writers analyzing some aspect of the history of U.S.-Soviet relations have relied unduly, sometimes solely, on "revelations" from Moscow, on the real or imagined archives of the KGB. Yet, how can one tell the complete story, or any aspect of it, if one of the richest documentary archives is off-limits? It is like trying to figure out who won a l5-round boxing match by watching only one fighter; such an approach could easily lead to the conclusion that there is no difference between shadow-boxing and an actual fight—which is precisely the position in which too many writers relying on "KGB insiders" have found themselves. The research community—particularly professional organizations of historians—need to do a better job of pressuring Washington to release more of the files.
Still, the indefatigable Saunders recognized early on during her research that there was a "wealth of documentation existing in private collections" (p. viii). She relies heavily on these in telling the disturbing story of how the CIA established a veritable Ministry of Culture and Information that stretched across the oceans, warping intellectual life around the world.

What Is To Be Done?
At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union seamlessly replaced the Third Reich as the Enemy in the eyes of the rulers of the United States and its western allies. Washington was worried—with good reason—that peoples devastated by a conflict largely initiated by the forces of capitalism, and won in no small part because of the sacrifices of the Soviet Union, might as a consequence turn sharply to the left. They were particularly concerned that opinion-molders—artists, and intellectuals—would be in the vanguard of this movement. Like latter-day Lenins, bureaucrats and businessmen alike contemplated, "What is to be done?"
What was done, inter alia, was a massive effort to manipulate the consciousness of a generation. In pursuit of this ignoble aim, the Central Intelligence Agency owned "airlines, radio stations, newspapers, insurance companies, and real estate" (p. 33). So much money was lavished on their ignominious pursuits that CIA agent Gilbert Greenway recalled, "we couldn't spend it all.... There were no limits, and nobody had to account for it. It was amazing" (p. l05).
Much—but not all—of this was taxpayers' money. Foundations, particularly Ford and Rockefeller, became conduits for various CIA schemes. Incorporated in l936, by the late l950s the Ford Foundation had assets totaling a hefty $3 billion—a sum so immense that Dwight Macdonald described it memorably as "a large body of money completely surrounded by people who want some" (p. l39). These foundations were not minor players. One of the most controversial CIA forays into mind-control, the "MK-ULTRA (or ‘Manchurian Candidate') program" of the l950s was assisted by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation (p. 144).
A particular target of this demented largesse—at home and abroad—was what was called the "Non-Communist Left." "Indeed," writes Saunders, "for the CIA the strategy of promoting the Non-Communist Left was to become ‘the theoretical foundation of the Agency's political operations against Communism over the next two decades'" (p. 63). Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the court historian, presented the rationale for this approach in his book The Vital Center. As he recalled later, "we all felt that democratic socialism was the most effective bulwark against [communism]. This became an undercurrent—or even undercover—theme in American foreign policy during the period" (p. 63).
An initial foray into the limelight by these ideological stormtroopers took place in l949 at a major conference on world peace at the Waldorf-Astoria. T.S. Eliot, André Malraux, Bertrand Russell, and Igor Stravinsky were among those who sought to disrupt this noble effort to ban the bomb and curb the rush toward nuclear war. Sidney Hook was the leader of those who, "armed with umbrellas," pounded the floor and sought to "tie themselves to their chairs" and do everything in their might to lubricate the path for Washington's aggression (p-. 48-9).
The conference was not effectively disrupted, which may have pushed the agency into other arenas. Helping to organize and promote the book The God That Failed was one of the CIA's early successes in this realm. This work was "as much a product of intelligence as it was a work of the intelligentsia" (p. 65). In page after tormented page writers like Ignazio Silone, André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender, et al., decried the alleged perfidy of Communist parties and repented for their supposed sins in being involved in same. The book was "distributed by U.S. government agencies all over Europe. In Germany, in particular, it was rigorously promoted" (p. 66). This was part of what Sidney Hook called "the informational re-education of the French public..." (p. 70).
It was also part of an extraordinary foray into subsidized publishing, rather ironic since the CIA and the government it represented was simultaneously denouncing Communist-ruled nations for allowing the state to become involved in publishing. Two of the key journals in this regard were the Partisan Review and the New Leader, both exemplars of the "Non-Communist Left," with their mastheads sprinkled liberally (no pun intended) with the names of ex-Trotskyites and former Communists. The substantial subsidies to these journals were "in breach of [the CIA's] own legislative charter, which prohibited support of domestic organizations" (p. 164). Moreover, for supposed devotees of "free enterprise," these subventions were profoundly distorting of "the market" and, no doubt, drove potential readers—and profits—away from publications that were not so blessed.
Encounter, edited by Irving Kristol—later a fountainhead of "neo-conservatism"—was another CIA journal of this era. Stephen Spender also assisted with the publication that one London writer called "the police review of American-occupied countries" (p. 188). Kristol and company did yeoman service for the CIA as the date for the execution of the Rosenbergs approached. In league with the "Psychological Strategy Board"—an entity that merits more attention—they sought to convince Europeans particularly that there was no anti-Semitism involved in this case and that U.S. courts were reliable and just.

Movie Moguls
The CIA also played a role in promoting the anticommunist fantasies of George Orwell. Howard Hunt—he of Watergate fame—acknowledged that the Agency "financed and distributed" the animated version of Orwell's Animal Farm "throughout the world." It was the "most ambitious animation film of its time," putting Walt Disney to shame; there were "eighty cartoonists, 750 scenes, 300,000 drawings in color." Of course, given such an investment, there was a compulsion to arrange the plot to fit CIA predilections. "In the original text, Communist pigs and Capitalist man are indistinguishable, merging into a common pool of rottenness. In the film, such congruity was carefully elided... and, in the ending, simply eliminated...the conflation of Communist corruption with capitalist decadence was reversed" (p. 295).
Something similar happened with the celluloid version of Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984, which the Agency also had a hand in producing. "The film actually concluded with two different endings, one for American audiences and one for British," in an effort to cater to the presumed varying political sensibilities of the two audiences. Of course, Orwell himself was no innocent. Isaac Deutscher has charged that this former colonial official "borrowed the idea of 1984, the plot, the chief characters, the symbols and the whole climate of his story from Evgeny Zamyatin's We." Orwell was not above informing either, alerting British intelligence to the alleged fact that Paul Robeson was "very anti-white." Tom Driberg was of the variety Orwell loved to fear: He was supposedly "homosexual" and an "English Jew." Not surprisingly, given his previous role as a flunky for the British Empire in Burma, Orwell "had confused the role of the intellectual with that of the policeman"—a description that could fit many in the embrace of the CIA during this period (pp. 298-300).
This conflation of roles was not uncommon for the CIA, which as the Orwell example illustrates, also saw itself as a movie mogul—though, once again simultaneously castigating Communist-ruled nations for allowing the state to become involved in cinema. CIA agent Carleton Alsop worked "undercover at Paramount Studios" and "had been a producer and agent, working on the MGM lot in the mid-l930s." By the l950s, he was writing "regular ‘movie reports' for the CIA and the Psychological Strategy Board." For the long time the Agency had seen location shooting by studios in far-away climes—a legitimate reason to brandish cameras promiscuously—as an excellent opportunity to gather intelligence. Alsop helped further this tradition. His actual job was to hound Reds out of Hollywood and introduce "specific themes into...films." In l953, Alsop "secured the agreement of several casting directors to plant ‘well dressed Negroes as a part of the American scene, without appearing too conspicuous or deliberate.'" For another film "a little tinkering on his part ensured that most of the offending scenes (the shipment of a whole tribe of Apaches by the army against their wishes to Florida, and the tagging of them like animals) had been removed or ‘their impact significantly diluted'" (pp. 290-91).
Alsop's labor was part of a larger effort by the agency to deflect attention from the U.S.'s horrible record on race, a key to portraying itself as a paragon of human rights virtue. This record, understandably, "left many Europeans uneasy about America's ability to practice the democracy she now claimed to be offering the world. It was therefore reasoned that the exporting of African-Americans to perform in Europe would dispel such damaging perceptions." This became an "urgent priority" for the CIA. As a result, "Leontyne Price, Dizzy Gillespie, Marian Anderson, William Warfield," and others, all received gigs abroad, mostly unwittingly, thanks to the CIA's efforts as booking agent (pp. 20-21, 291).

The Postwar Art Scene
One of the agency's most notable roles was in shaping the postwar scene in painting. Nelson Rockefeller, a "keen supporter" of this form, termed it "free enterprise painting," in that it supposedly represented the "freedom" that capitalism was thought to bring to the artist (p. 258). Decades ago, the progressive artist, Eva Cockroft connected the promotion of this form of support to "cultural cold war politics" (p. 263). Serge Guilbaut wrote an entire book detailing this curious relationship between artists who allegedly represented "freedom," but were promoted vigorously by the CIA and their minions. MOMA, which was essential in this process, had among its trustees William Paley (who allowed CBS "to provide cover for CIA employees") and Henry Luce of Time-Life, who provided the same service to the Agency (p. 262). One CIA front—the American Congress for Cultural Freedom (ACCF)—was instrumental in supporting "abstract painting over representational or realist aesthetics" (p. 272). The leading lights of abstract painting—Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and others—were part of the ACCF; the progressive artist, Ben Shahn, "refused to join, referring to it as the ‘ACCFuck.'" Painters like Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb "led these efforts to destroy Communist presence in the art world" (p. 278). This was yet another contradiction in an era replete with them: "a movement which so deliberately declared itself to be apolitical" was "intensely politicized" (p. 275).
The illogic of the Cold War twisted artists and propagandists alike into pretzel-like contortions. It was argued that art should be "autonomous" and above politics on the one hand, yet "pressed into political service" when necessary on the other (p. 251). In order to promote an art form deemed to be the essence of democracy, the democratic process itself had to be subverted, as the CIA exceeded its charter. Artists like Rothko were "showered with material rewards for works which ‘howled their opposition to bourgeois materialism.'" In the ultimate version of drip art, he "slashed his veins and bled to death on his studio floor" (p. 278).
Yes, the CIA manipulated minds, though, to be sure, not all minds required adroit manipulation. As one analyst put it, "‘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' " (p. 4). Certainly it was easier to swim with the tide than against it. The problem, of course, was that the CIA was helping to push currents in certain directions, thereby foiling alternative routes. Still, as Carol Brightman has observed, the height of the Cold War "was perhaps the first time since the French Revolution when significant components of an intellectual community decided that it was no longer de rigueur to be adversarial...." This was a time when en masse U.S. intellectuals "lost their taste for the class struggle" (p. l6l).
Nevertheless, there was an ongoing battle within the Agency about the feasibility of some of these efforts, with many on the extreme right discomfited by the alliance with the "Non-Communist Left" (NCL), co-opting Negroes (they felt they should have been put in their place instead), and all the rest. Ramparts, the sadly departed muck-raking California journal, exposed the lineaments of this "cultural cold war" in the l960s. For this they were pursued and harassed relentlessly. Yet, what truly wounded this effort was an exposé by former CIA agent and Rockefeller toady, Tom Braden, in the Saturday Evening Post, entitled "I'm Glad the CIA Is ‘Immoral.' " One insider concluded that Braden's handiwork was "‘part of a coordinated, authorized operation to end the CIA's alliance with the NCL'" (p. 399).
Though these particular initiatives may have been terminated, it is a great mistake to conclude—as the author suggests—that the "cultural" initiatives of the CIA have ended. Along with a touch of an anti-communism—which, after all, was the rationale for the CIA's depredations that the author so eloquently deplores—this is a weakness in an otherwise estimable book.
The author's bibliography is priceless: Future researchers must not ignore her citations to the C.D. Jackson Papers at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, nor the Congress for Cultural Freedom Papers at the University of Chicago. And, although the CIA has kept a padlock on most of its files, it is easy to discern the continuing influence of their nefarious activities: The viruses they let loose in the l950s are continuing to infect intellectuals—particularly on the west bank of the Atlantic Ocean. The malady can be detected in those who steadily maintain an allergy toward class struggle, display a penchant for discourses that defy objective meaning, and confuse the roles of intellectual and cop. Frances Stonor Saunders has performed a service by reminding readers that, while some of us may have forgotten about the existence of a cultural cold war, this raging conflict has not forgotten about us.

Notes:

Gerald Horne is professor of history and director of the Institute of African-American Researcy Center at the University of North Carolina. The book was originally published as Who Paid the Piper (London: Granta, 1999).