Mad Scientists, Propaganda &
Covert War Part 2
In 1942, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, then head of the OSS, assembled a team of prestigious American
scientists and asked them to develop a “truth serum.” Dr. Overholser was appointed chairman of the
research committee, which used facilities and staff at St. Elizabeth’s hospital
to study the effects of numerous drugs, including alcohol, mescaline, barbiturates,
caffeine, peyote and scopolamine. Eventually, marijuana was chosen as the most
effective. OSS documents reported that
smoking a mix of tobacco and marijuana brought about a “state of
irresponsibility, causing the subject to be loquacious and free in his
impartation of information.” 51
In 1944,
Montagu Norman resigned from the
Bank of England and founded the National Association for Mental Health,
which in 1948 gathered the world psychiatric and psychological leaders together
at an International Congress on Mental Health at the Ministry of Health in
London. At this congress, a World Federation
for Mental Health (WFMH) was formed for which Norman picked as president Brig.
Gen. Dr. John Rawlings Rees, the head of
the Tavistock Institute. The
vice-president of WFMH was Carl Jung.
Brig. Gen. Dr. John Rawlings Rees was a wartime and civilian
psychiatrist. He was a member of the group of key figures
at the original Tavistock Clinic and became its medical
director from 1934. Prior to the war, Rees led the Tavistock Clinic where the various branches
of psychiatry were being developed, including family and child psychiatry as
well as electro-shock treatment and lobotomy. During World
War II, Rees was then appointed to the War Offi ce and arranged to train officers of the OSS in psychological warfare. Together with
Henry Dicks, a fellow member of the
Tavistock Clinic group, Rees was charged
with the care of Rudolf Hess at the secret
prison locations where he was held
following his capture. In 1945, Rees was a member of the three-man British
panel, which assessed Hess’ capability to stand trial for war crimes. Rees apparently
established a relationship with Hess, whose diaries record many meetings with
Rees, referred to at this time as “Colonel Rees,” when Hess accused his captors
of attempting to poison, drug, and “mesmerize” him. 52
Rees, along with Margaret
Mead, Lawrence K. Frank,
Fremont-Smith and and Frankfurt School director Max Horkheimer, who all formed the core of the Cybernetics Group, were all in Paris together,
in the summer of 1948, to launch the WFMH.
Cybernetics Group, known among its members as the “Man-Machine Project,”
was the umbrella under which the CIA and
British Intelligence conducted their experimentation in mass population control
through the use of psychedelic drugs,
including LSD. It
was unofficially launched in 1942
at a conference in New York, sponsored by Frank
FremontSmith, the medical director of the CIA front, the Josiah Macy Foundation.
Among the participants were Warren McCulloch,
Arturo Rosenblueth, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and Lawrence K. Frank.
Rosenblueth, speaking on behalf of John von Neumann and his mentor Norbert
Wiener, proposed to gather together a group of scientists to devise experiments
in social control, based on the assumption that the human brain was merely a
complex input/output machine, and that human behavior could, in effect, be
programmed, on both an individual and societal level. A year after the founding
session of the first of many conferences, Wiener would coin the
term “cybernetics” to describe their
effort. Conference attendees included the Tavistock Institute’s Kurt Lewin and Max
Horkheimer.
The International Congress, in effect,
founded the modern psychiatric profession. The
first speaker was anthropologist and occultist Margaret Mead who would be president of the WFMH in 1956 and 1957. Mead and Lawrence K. Frank,
who would also later become president, authored the founding statement of WFMH, which they titled, Manifesto of the
First International: “The goal of mental health has been enlarged from the
concern for the development of healthy personalities to the larger tasks of
creating a healthy society… The concept of mental health is co-extensive with
world order and world community.”53
The “Chairman for Discussion” was Dr. Overholser. The technical coordinator of the
US delegation to the congress, Nina Ridenour, later wrote in Mental Health in
the United States: A Fifty Year Historythat “the World Federation for Mental Health… had been
created upon the recommendation of the
United Nations’ World Health Organization and UNESCO, because they
needed a nongovernmental mental health organization with which they could
cooperate.” 54 Ridenour alluded to the fact that the British psychological
warfare executive had itself created the core of the UN apparatus: “Having official consultive status with the United Nations and
several of its specialized agencies, the
World Federation for Mental Health is in a
position to influence some of the UN’s decisions and some aspects of its program.” 55
The two UN agencies with which the World
Federation works most closely are the World Health Organization (WHO) and the
United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Eugenics strategist Sir Julian Huxley, brother
to Aldous Huxley, was the first Director of
UNESCO, and a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund. Aldous Huxley was the author of A Brave New
World, of a dystopia where citizens are made to “love their servitude” through
the state administering the use of a drug called Soma. Huxley’s belief in the coercive powers
of drugs seems to have the basis of his involvement in MK-Ultra, in which he
played a leading role. Huxley was also inspired in his belief in the
mind-altering possibilities of hallucinogenics by the thesis of the famous
psychologist and Theosophist, William James, who believed that “religious experience”
could be replicated by the use of drugs.
On April 3, 1953, Richard
Helms had proposed to Director
Allen Dulles that the CIA set up
a program under Sidney Gottlieb for
“covert use of biological and chemical materials.” Thus MK-Ultra was spawned, supposedly in response
to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind control techniques on US prisoners of war in Korea.
56 The published evidence indicates that
Project MK-Ultra involved the use of
many methodologies to manipulate individual mental states and alter brain
functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs and other
chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse,
as well as various forms of torture.
57 Declassified MK-Ultra documents indicate
hypnosis was studied in the early 1950s. Experiments were conducted with
drug-induced hypnosis and with anterograde
and retrograde amnesia while under the
influence of various drugs. Experiments were often conducted without the
subjects’ knowledge or consent, a violation of the Nuremberg Code, which put limitations on the
kind of scientific experimentation
that the Nazis had become notorious for,
and that the US agreed to follow after
World War II.
Early
CIA experiments with LSD later
came to dominate many of MKUltra’s
programs. Lysergic acid diethylamide, or
LSD, was developed in 1943 by Albert Hoffman, a chemist at Sandoz AB, a
Swiss pharmaceutical house owned by S.
G. Warburg. LSD was first synthesized by Hoffmann in 1938 from ergotamine,
a chemical derived by Arthur Stoll from ergot, a grain fungus that typically grows on rye. MK-Ultra experiments included administering LSD to
CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents and members
of the general public in order to study their reactions. Subjects were usually
unwitting. While Overholser had conducted
tests on criminals from the Mafia, the CIA thought it imprudent to further tamper
with the organization. Instead, they chose “the borderline underworld,”
prostitutes, drug addicts, mentally ill patients, and other fringe types who
would be powerless to defend themselves if they ever found out what the CIA had done to them. 58 In Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA set up several brothels in San
Francisco to obtain a selection of men
too embarrassed to talk about the events. The men were dosed with LSD, the brothels were equipped with two-way
mirrors and the sessions were filmed
for later viewing and study. 59 The
CIA’s secret projects ultimately involved at least two known deaths: that
of tennis pro Harold Blauer, and Frank Olson, a biological-warfare specialist,
who threw himself through a window of the twelfth floor of New York’s Statler Hotel, after drinking cognaclaced
with LSD during a CIA symposium.
These experiments were outsourced to Canada
when the CIA recruited real-life mad
scientist, Scottish psychiatrist Donald Ewen
Cameron, creator of the “psychic driving” concept. During the
1950s, Cameron served as President of
the Canadian, American and World Psychiatric Associations, the American
Psychopathological Association and the Society of Biological Psychiatry. In
1945, because of his worldwide reputation,
Cameron had been invited to
Nuremberg to evaluate Rudolph Hess’
psychological state. Prior to that, Cameron had written a paper titled The
Social Reorganization of Germany, in which he argued that German society would
have to be transformed and reorganized. In
his analysis, Germany was made up of people who had the need for status, who
worshiped strict order and regimentation, desired authoritarian leadership and
were deeply xenophobic. The paper continued to state that German culture and
its people would have offspring that in 30 years from 1945 would be the biggest
threat to world peace. As a consequence, the West would have to take measures
to reorganize German society.
Cameron worked out of the Allan Memorial Institute
of McGill University created by the
Rockefeller Foundation in 1943. He was elected president of the American
Psychiatric Association in 1953, and
became the first president of the World
Psychiatric Association. Despite a career of honors and leadership in the early
1950s’ psychiatric circles, Cameron had
been heavily criticized in some circles for his administration of disproportionately-intense
electroshock therapy, experimental drugs and
LSD to his patients without their consent and causing some to become
comatose. Cameron had the maniacal idea
that instead of using therapy to correct
schizophrenia he could “erase” existing memories and then reprogram the
psyche. In addition to LSD,
Cameron also experimented with various paralytic drugs as well as
electroshock therapy at thirty to forty
times the normal power. His “driving” experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced coma for
weeks at a time, while playing tape
loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered
the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postpartum
depression, many of whom suffered permanently from his actions. 60 His treatments
resulted in victims’ incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting
their parents and thinking their interrogators were their parents. 61
Noam
Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consentand other works have done much to make
mainstream the notion that the press is controlled. But by characterizing it as
due to “corporate” control is misleading. In Necessary Illusions, Chomsky lists the theories of the primary
American ideologues who justified and inspired American propaganda, like Bernays and Lippman. However, Chomsky argues from a leftist perspective and
sees propaganda as a systemic issue where protagonists “internalize the values”
of a corporate-driven culture. That is just a cowardly way of avoiding pointing
to the usual suspects of “conspiracy theorists.” Because, while the ideologues
he mentions certainly formed the justifications for
American propaganda, more correctly, the unified voice of the mainstream media on various matters of national concern
cannot but result from some central command.
The Tavistock Institute’s studies in psychological
programming and group psychology were employed to exploit the mass hysteria
produced by the illusion of a conflict
with Soviet Communism. Prominent
among Tavistock’s faculty was
Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew. Bernays is considered the father of modern
methods of propaganda used in capitalistic and supposedly democratic societies.
According to John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, in a published review of Larry Tye’s biography of Bernays:
It is impossible to fundamentally grasp the
social, political, economic and cultural
developments of the past 100 years without some understanding of Bernays and his professional heirs in the
public relations industry. PR is a 20th
century phenomenon, and Bernays— widely
eulogized as the “father of public relations” at the time of his death in 1995—played a major role in defining the industry’s philosophy and
methods. 62 During World War I, Bernays worked for the Wilson administration, with the Committee on
Public Information. Also known as the CPI, or the Creel Committee, it was influential
in promoting the idea that America’s war
efforts were primarily aimed at
“bringing democracy to all of Europe.”
Stunned by the degree to which the slogan of “ democracy” was successful in
swaying public opinion, Bernays wondered
whether this propaganda model could be employed during times of peace. Due to
negative connotations associated with the word “propaganda,” Bernays opted for the term “Public
Relations.” Otherwise, Bernays’ theories were thoroughly anti-democratic. As he
explained, “A leader frequently cannot wait for the people to arrive at even
general understanding… Democratic leaders must play their part in… engineering…
consent to socially constructive goals and values,” applying “scientific principles and tried practices to
the task of getting people to support ideas and programs.” 63
Bernays effectively invented the modern exploitive
methods of advertising. Based on his uncle’s dubious theories, Bernays argued that humans are essentially
irrational. Therefore, instead of advertising appealing to people’s rationality
by extolling a product’s true virtues, it would be possible feed off of their
weaknesses and nurture deep-seeded feelings of guilt and insecurity to create
emotional attachments to products. This projection of psychological needs onto
a commercial product was known to Frankfurt School as a symptom of capitalism which they called the “fetishization
of the commodity.” In other words, it is the essence of materialism, the
idolization of a product by effectively worshipping it by placing hope of one’s
spiritual fulfillment in
possession of it.
In his 1965 autobiography, Bernays recalls that in 1933 Karl von Wiegand,
foreign correspondent of the Hearst newspapers, had been shown by Goebbels his propaganda library, which
Wiegand remarked was the best he had ever seen. According to Bernays, “Goebbels, said Wiegand, was using
my book Crystallizing Public Opinionas a basis for his destructive campaign
against the Jews of Germany. This
shocked me… Obviously the attack on the
Jews of Germany was no emotional outburst of the Nazis, but a deliberate, planned campaign.”64
Bernays’ thinking was heavily shared byand influenced
Walter Lippmann, who sat on
the US Committee on Public Information with
Bernays, quoting him extensively in his seminal work Propaganda. A
mentor to Allen Dulles, Lippmann was a
pioneering member of the Council on
Foreign Relations from 1922. It was Lippman who recommended Dulles as a top
recruit for Colonel House’s plan to use the United States relief program in
Europe after the war as cover for intelligence activities. As one of America’s
most respected journalists, Lippman was also famous
for being among the first to introduce
the concept of “ Cold War.” It was from
Lippmann that Noam Chomsky derived
the title for his book, when Lippman described “the manufacture of consent” as
a “revolution” in “the practice of
democracy” that had become
“a
self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government.” This, he claimed, was a natural development when “the
common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed
only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the
locality.”65
The
Truman administration of 1945 to 1953 saw a change in policy towards the
containment of communism. The new direction led the National Security Council to adopt a formal
strategy that authorized a broad array of covert action strategies including
“propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage,
anti-sabotage.” 66 Their extent was limited only by “plausible deniability,” to
ensure the concealment of US government involvement. Programs included the
State Department’s support of
film, radio, art, and exchange programs, and the Voice of America broadcasts.
The new direction was spearheaded by a group
known as the Georgetown Set or the
Wisner Gang, who, living in Washington, began meeting on a regular basis.
The Georgetown Set was centered around
Charles “Chip” Bohlen. Known as the
“Sovietologists,” regular meetings took place at Bohlen’s home in Georgetown with George Kennan and Isaiah Berlin. Kennan and Bohlen were among
the six “wise men” of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made, a 1986
book by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, which describes the actions of a group
of US government officials and members of
the East Coast foreign policy establishment who, beginning in the 1940s, developed
the containment policy of dealing with the Communist bloc, and crafted
institutions and initiatives such as
NATO, the World Bank, and the
Marshall Plan. The six friends, who also included Dean Acheson, W. Averell Harriman, Robert A. Lovett and John
J. McCloy were important foreign policy advisors to U.S. presidents from Roosevelt
to Lyndon B. Johnson.
Berlin, the British philosopher of Russian-Jewish
origin, was implicated in the early-1950s Kim Philby espionage scandal. Kim Philby, the son of St. John “Abdullah”
Philby, nicknamed after Rudyard
Kipling’s novel Kim, was an
Officer of the Order
of the British Empire (OBE)
from 1946 to 1965, and a
high-ranking member of British intelligence who worked as a double agent before finally defecting to the Soviet Union. Philby
was among three Cambridge graduates which brought the Cambridge Apostles to public
attention following the exposure of a spy ring in 1951, which was found to have
passed information to the KGB. Known as the Cambridge Five, the other members were
Donald Maclean, former Apostle Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and another unidentified individual. Anthony Blunt, the
grand-nephew of Wilfrid Scawen
Blunt, was an MI5 officer,
director of the Courtauld
Institute, and art adviser to the Queen. In 1963, American writer Michael
Straight, also an Apostle, and later publisher of The New Republicmagazine,
admitted to a covert relationship with the Soviets, and he named Anthony Blunt
as his recruiter and a Soviet spy. Of the five, Philby is believed
to have been most successful in providing secret information to the Soviet
Union. His activities, however, were nevertheless suspected by Joseph Stalin as secretly in the service of the
British. Kimberley Cornish, in his controversial The Jew of Linz, makes the
claim that Ludwig Wittgenstein was the éminence griseof the Cambridge spies.
The early members of the group were former
members of the OSS, and included Frank
Wisner, Philip Graham, David Bruce,
Tom Braden, Stewart Alsop and Walt Rostow. Over the next few years
others like George Kennan, Dean Acheson,
Richard Bissell, Joseph Alsop, Eugene Rostow, Chip Bohlen, Desmond FitzGerald, Tracy
Barnes, Cord Meyer, James Jesus
Angleton, Averill Harriman, John McCloy,
Felix Frankfurter, John Sherman Cooper, James
Reston, Allen Dulles and Paul
Nitze joined their regular parties. Although somelike Bruce, Braden, Bohlen, McCloy, Meyer and Harriman spent a
lot of their time working in other countries, they would always attend these
parties when in Georgetown.
It was members of the Georgetown Set that began lobbying for a new
intelligence agency. The main figure was Frank Wisner. A Wall Street attorney from
Mississippi, Dulles had appointed Wisner
as head of OSS operations in the Balkans, and he had commanded OSS detachments
in Istanbul and Bucharest during World War II. With the help of another member,
George Kennan, the Offi ce
of Special Projects was created in
1948. Wisner was appointed
director of the organization. Soon afterwards it was renamed the Office of Policy
Coordination ( OPC), which later became the espionage and counter-intelligence
branch of the CIA, newly created in
1947. Under Wisner, the OPC launched what amounted to a psychological
operations program to undermine the spread of communism, and to promote
American imperialism through the spread of “democracy.”
Also in 1948, President Truman summoned Allen
Dulles to be part of a working group tasked with making proposals on how the work of
the fledgling CIA could be improved. The
group’s efforts resulted in National Security Report 50 (NCS50),
which for the most
part reflected Dulles’s
vision of employing covert operations as one of the CIA’s central functions, and that
Wisner’s OPC should be incorporated
directly into the CIA. In 1950, Allen
Dulles himself became chief of planning for the
CIA. Shortly thereafter, he became Deputy CIA Director, and in 1953, was appointed
Director of Central Intelligence. At that time, his brother John Foster Dulles
was Secretary of State.
In 1951, to better coordinate these efforts,
Truman created the Psychological Strategy Board ( PSB). The PSB was headed by C. D.
Jackson, the first Deputy Director of
Central Intelligence at CIA. In 1931,
Jackson worked with Skull and Bones
member Henry Luce at Timemagazine and
served in the OSS during the World War II along with Frank Wisner. From 1944 to 1945 Jackson was
appointed Deputy Chief at the Psychological Warfare Division at Supreme Headquarters
Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). After the war, Jackson became Managing
Director of Time-Life International. The primary aim of the PSB was to seek the breakup of the Soviet Union through propaganda. Covert operations
were not limited to the communist world, but included the “free world” as well.
As Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ian Johnson explains, “Put less
euphemistically, the US government would secretly manipulate public opinion at
home and in scores of other noncommunist countries.” 67
To
Eisenhower, who continued the strategy adopted by Truman, after coming into office in
1953, “Psychological warfare is the
struggle for the minds and wills of
men.” He regarded it a “basic truth” that “humans are spiritual beings; they
respond to the sentiment and emotions as well as to statistics and logic… The minds
of all men are susceptible to outside
influences.” 68 Wisner also established
Operation Mockingbird, a program to develop the CIA’s influence over the mainstream media. Wisner asked Philip Graham of the Washington
Postto run the project within the newspaper industry. C. D. Jackson and Cord Meyer were also recruited. According to
Deborah Davis, in Katharine the Great:
Katharine Graham and the Washington Post, “By the early 1950s, Wisner
‘owned’ respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBSand other
communications vehicles.” 69 One of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop of the
New York Herald Tribune, whose articles
appeared in over 300 different newspapers.
Other journalists willing to promote the views of the CIA included Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times),
Walter Pincus (Washington Post), William C. Baggs (Miami News), Herb Gold
(Miami News) and Charles Bartlett (Chattanooga Times). These journalists
sometimes wrote articles that were unofficially commissioned by Cord Meyer and based on leaked
classified information from the CIA.
When J.
Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy began
snooping into the CIA’s affairs, Wisner unleashed Operation Mockingbird on them. Drew Pearson,
Joseph Alsop, Jack Anderson, Walter Lippmann and Ed Murrow were all mobilized
into attack, permanently damaging McCarthy’s reputation. After 1953 the network
was overseen by Allen Dulles. As
revealed by famed journalist Carl Bernstein, of
Watergate fame, in an article entitled the “ CIA and the Media,” executives who
cooperated with the media included
William Paley of the CBS, Henry
Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham
Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News
Service. Other organizations included the ABC, the NBC, the Associated Press,
United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard,
Newsweek, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday
Evening Postand New York Herald-Tribune.
C. D. Jackson, who worked with Henry Luce at
Timeand became Managing Director of Time-Life International after the war, was
a key agent. Documents released after his death show that Jackson was in contact
with a CIA agent in Hollywood’s Paramount Studios,
who was involved in trying to influence the content of the films the company was making. Other studios,
including MGM and RKO, had similar officers, and
were probably CIA placements.
In a private letter to Sherman Adams,
Jackson claims the role of these CIA
placements was “to insert in their scripts and in their action the right ideas
with the proper subtlety.” 70 Jackson shared with Henry Luce the nature of his relationship
with famous directory Cecil B. DeMille,
which helps explain the very subtle methods used to deploy propaganda through
entertainment. DeMille was the Academy
Award-winning film producer of
epics like Cleopatra, Samson and Delilah, The Greatest Show on
Earth, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and The Ten Commandments.
He related that DeMille:
Is very much on our side and… is quite
rightly impressed with the Power of American films abroad. He has a theory, to
which I subscribe completely,
that the
most effective use
of American films is not
to design an entire picture to cope with a certain problem, but rather
to see to it that in a “normal” picture the right line, aside, inflection,
eyebrow movement, is introduced. He told me that any time I could give him
a simple problem for a country or an
area, he would find a wayof dealing with it in a picture. 71 To contain the influence
of communism, the CIA enrolled the support of the “ non-communist left.” As communist or left-leaning
intellectuals who were nevertheless opposed to the Stalinism of the Soviet Union, they could be used to steer the
political debate away from support for the Soviets. They were grouped under
a CIA project known as the Congress for Cultural Freedom ( CCF). To fund
the Congress and its other covert activities, the CIA established many front organizations like
the Fairfield Foundation, by way
ofthe Ford, Rockefeller and
Carnegie foundations. From the early 1950s, according to the later findings of
the Final Report of the Church Committee, using the cover of the
foundations allowed the CIA to fund “a
seemingly limitless range of covert action programs affecting youth groups,
labor unions, universities, publishing houses, and other private institutions.”
72
Frances Stoner Saunders, the author of Who Paid
the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Co l d Wa r, documented that the CCF was created under the auspices of the Georgetown Set and a group of activists
and planners headed by Allen Dulles
called “the Park Avenue Cowboys.” Dulles and his group comprised of Frank Wisner,
C. D. Jackson, Kermit Roosevelt, Tracy
Barnes, Richard Helms, and Royall Tyler who would go on to
head the World Bank. The Georgetown Set was centered around Charles
“Chip” Bohlen, who had spent many years
in Russia, and was posted after the war
as Ambassador to France where he helped
direct the CCF’s international
secretariat. He was the mentor to Nicolas Nabokov, the Soviet exile and composer who became
General Secretary of CCF. Kennan was
instrumental in creating the secret intelligence apparatus which would run CCF and was an influential participant in
many of its symposia.
The
CCF was simultaneously the major overseas partner of the International
Research Department (IRD), a section of
Britain’s Foreign Office, designed to provide “a rival ideology to communism”
by appealing to Christian ideals. The focus of the IRD was, now that the war
was over, to discredit Stalin though he had
been celebrated as a powerful ally throughout the war. Adam Watson, the IRD’s
second-in-command explained, “During the war, we had built up this man, though
we knew he was terrible, because he was an ally. Now the question was, ‘How do
we get rid of the Good Old Uncle Joe myth built up during the war?”73 The IRD’s
purpose, according to Christopher “Monty” Woodhouse, a spy who was assigned to
it in 1953, “was to produce and distribute and circulate attributable
propaganda.” The IRD would provide “facts” to be regurgitated by the British
intelligentsia. This meant, according to Watson, that although the IRD was
allowed to attack both “the principles and practice of communism, and also the inefficiency, social injustice and moral weakness
of unrestrained capitalism,” it was in no way to “attack or appear to be
attacking any member of the Commonwealth or the United States.” 74
Working for the IRD was Lord Bertrand Russell, one of five honorary chairmen of the CCF, who admitted being happy to “receive
little tidbits from time to time.” 75 Russell, the so-called peace-lover, had
startled his admirers when he wrote an infamous article for the 1946 Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientistsadvocating a preventive US atomic bomb strike on
the Soviet Union. Already, in 1946,
following the events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Russell had written similar
sentiments to one of his numerous mistresses, Gamel Brenan: “There is one thing and only one thing that can save
the world, and that is a thing which I should not dream of advocating. It is
that America should make war on Russia
during the next two years, and establish world empire by means of the atomic
bomb.” 76
One of the IRD’s most important early advisors
was Arthur Koestler, who was connected
to the Frankfurt School intellectuals
and whose Darkness At Noon, which criticized the Soviets and established his
reputation as an antiCommunist, was circulated under its auspices. The CIA arranged for the printing 50,000 copies
of the book through Luce’s Timemagazine.
Koestler was also the author of The Thirteenth Tribe, which proposed the
errant theory widely popular in conspiracy circles that European Jews were descendants of the Khazars.
The New York Times in 1977 related that the CIA had been involved in the publication of
at least a thousand books. Though the
CIA never revealed the list, it is known that books in which it had an
involvement include Melvin Lasky’s La Revolution
Hongroise, translations of T. S.
Eliot’s The Waste Landand Four Quartets, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivagoand new
editions of Machiavelli’s The Prince. In
the mid-1950s, James Michener used his
career as an author as a cover for his work in eliminating radicals who had
infiltrated one of the CIA’s Asian
operations.
“Intellectuals, or a certain sort of
intellectuals, have always had a romance about intelligence services,” remarked
Carol Brightman. “It’s a kind of coming of age experience, going into the intelligence
services, especially on certain campuses such as Yale.” 77 The intersection of
artists and intelligence has a long tradition, with past examples
including Somerset Maugham working for
the British Secret Service during World
War I, Graham Greene working undercover for MI5 and
Joseph Conrad for MI6. Others
also included Ian Fleming and John le Carré. James Jesus Angleton, who became one of
the founder-offi cers of the CIA
was a poet and, as a Yale undergraduate, editor of the literary magazine Furioso,
which published many of the best-known poets of the inter-war period, including
Ezra Pound, with whom he was friends. One of Angleton’s several protégés, Cord Meyer, had edited the Yale Litand
published short stories in the Atlantic Monthlybefore joining the CIA. There was also Howard Hunt, who wrote East of Farewell,
Limit of Darkness, and Stranger in Town, which won him a Guggenheim Fellowship.
In 1948, aboard a ship crossing to America on
his way to a lecture tour, Koestler met with
John Foster and Allen Dulles and
discussed how best to counter the Soviet propaganda. Once in America, Koestler then met with Bill Donovan, one of
the chief architects of the CIA, to
discuss the same. Koestler established a
working relationship with the CIA, and
together they targeted what the State Department called the “ Non-Communist
Left.” In Europe they would target the Democratic Socialist movement, while in
the US their focus of attack included many of the supporters of President
Roosevelt’s New Deal.
The president of the CCF’s Executive Committee was Denis de Rougemont. Denis de Rougemont was the director of the cultural
arm of the European Movement, the Centre European de la Culture. In addition, a
large program of grants to students and youth associations including the
European Youth Campaign (EYC) was incepted by Tom Braden in 1950. As Saunders explained, “Responding
to CIA guidance, these organizations
were at the cutting edge of a campaign of propaganda and penetration designed to
draw the sting from leftwing political movements and generate acceptance of
moderate socialism.” 78
De Rougemont, a Swiss national, had introduced
Paris to the works of Nazi philosopher
Martin Heidegger, Soren Kierkegaard, and
Karl Barth before World War II, through his magazine Hic et
Nunc. De Rougemont wrote the classic work, Love in the Western World, which
explores the psychology of love from the legend of Tristan and Isolde to Hollywood. At the heart of his inquiry is
what he regards as the inescapable conflict in the West between marriage and
passion. Marriage is a formal
convention associated with social and religious responsibility, while passion
has its roots in the accounts of unrequited love celebrated by the troubadours
of medieval Provence, acknowledging their debt to the Sufis .
These early poets, according
to de Rougemont, preached an Eros-centered theology, by which this mystical erotic tradition was
inherited in the West.
Koestler along with the CIA’s Michael
Josselson and Melvin Lasky
planned the founding of the Berlin Congress in 1950 to launch CCF.
Koestler also wrote the founding Manifesto adopted at that conference. Lasky, an American, was an expert in cultural
warfare and had been promoted by German High Commissioner John J. McCloy. Based in Berlin, Lasky ran Der Monat, a Germanlanguage
anti-communist cultural journal which became a
CCF publication. Lasky was also the correspondent for New Leader of Sol Levitas of the American branch of
the CCF, the American Committee for
Cultural Freedom ( ACCF), as well as
Partisan Review. First serving as the voice of the American Communist
Party, the Partisan Reviewbecame staunchly
anti-Communist after Stalin became leader of the Soviet Union. Levitas was a protégé of Allen Dulles and C. D. Jackson, and provided intelligence reports
from his international correspondents to
Henry Luce.
In early 1951, Wisner travelled to London to meet with his
counterparts in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service ( SIS). Over a series of
meetings it was decided to create a
flagship intellectual journal for CCF,
which became known as Encounter. It was
agreed that the Americans and British would have joint oversight over the
London-based magazine and joint funding.
Irving Kristol, executive director of the American branch of the ACCF was chosen by Sidney Hook to become co-editor with
British Fabian Stephen Spender. Sidney Hook, first chairman of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (
ACCF), was then a contract consultant to the
CIA and liaised with director
Walter Bedell Smith and PSB
director Gordon Gray. Hook had been an early student at the Frankfurt School
during his Marxist youth in the 1920s.
His From Hegel to Marxwas a compilation of lecture notes from
the Frankfurt School founder Karl Korsch,
a leading Comintern operative at the time and later a close associate of Bertrand Russell in launching the linguistics
project today associated with MIT’s Professor Noam Chomsky. 79
While studying at Oxford, Spender was taken
in by several leading literary personalities such as, according to his
biographer David Leeming, T. S. Eliot
and Virginia
Woolf who served as surrogate parents; and W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, both initiates of the Children of the Sun, who served as older
brothers. Isherwood and Auden, who served
as British intelligence operatives, were both homosexuals. Later living for a
time in Weimar, Germany, Spender became a well-known poet but his poetry
contained allusions to his pedophilic affairs. “Whatever happens,” he wrote, “I
shall never be alone. I shall always have a boy, a railway fare, or a
revolution.” 80
At the outset, Encounterran articles by Julian Huxley, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren,
W. H. Auden, Thornton Wilder, Jayaprakash Naryan, the Traditionalist
historian Mircea Eliade, Andre Malraux,
and Guido Piovene. In Who Paid the Piper: The
CIA and the Cultural Co l d Wa r,
Frances Stonor Saunders revealed a broad list of intellectuals also on the CIA payroll, including: Isaiah Berlin, Lionel and Diana
Trilling, Julian Huxley, Robert
Lowell, Daniel Bell, Mary McCarthy, Mark Rothko, Arthur Schlesinger, and Edward Shils.
In April of 1952, CCF held a month-long festival in Paris
entitled Masterpieces of the 20th Centuryorganized by Nabokov. To convince the world of the
superiority of America’s culture to that of the Soviets, the CIA, over thirty days, sponsored American
jazz artists, opera recitals, and European tours of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 1967, after Braden was designated to expose the
Congress as a CIA front, he wrote a
famous article in the Saturday Evening Post, titled “I’m Glad the CIA Is ‘Immoral’,” in which he wrote:
I remember the enormous joy I got when the Boston Symphony Orchestra won more acclaim
for the US in Paris than John Foster Dulles
or Dwight D. Eisenhower could have
bought with a hundred speeches. And then there was Encounter, the magazine published in England
and dedicated to the proposition that cultural achievement and political
freedom were interdependent. Money for both the orchestra’s tour and the
magazine’s publication came from the
CIA, and few outside of the CIA
knew about it. We had placed one agent in a Europe-based organization of
intellectuals called the Congress for Cultural
Freedom. Another agent became an editor of
Encounter. The agents could not only propose anti-Communist programs to
the official leaders of the organizations but they could also suggest ways and
means to solve the inevitable budgetary problems. Why not see if the needed money
could be obtained from ‘American foundations’? As the agents knew, the CIA-financed foundations were quite generous when it
came to the national interest.
The
CIA also sponsored tours of African-American opera star Leontyne Price to counter Soviet propaganda
that not only could America not produce high culture, but that American capitalism unfairly exploited and subjugated its
Black population. Nabakov boasted to Arthur
Schlesinger, “I started her career and because of this she has always
been willing to do things for me which she couldn’t do for anyone else.” Frank Wisner’s sister also claimed to have
discovered and helped Price, who referred to herself as the Wisners’ “chocolate
sister.” 81
The festival was used to showcase all the
leading lights of the modernist movement. The conference opened with a performance
by the Boston Symphony of the “ Rite of Spring,” by Igor Stravinsky, Theodor Adorno’s collaborator and close friend
to Aldous Huxley. Also getting top
billing were Adorno’s teachers, Schoenberg
and Alban Berg, the leading creators of atonal music, as well as Paul
Hindemeith and Claude Debussy. Other works performed were those by Gustav
Mahler, Bela Bartok, Samuel Barber, Erik Satie, Francis Poulenc, and Aaron
Copland, among others. The festival offered Paris its first productions of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, Benjamin
Britten’s Billy Budd, and Gertrude
Stein’s and Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts. The Paris show included
works by Matisse, Derain, Cezanne, Seurat, Chagall, Kandinsky, and others regarded as masters of
early-twentieth-century modernism.
The definitive
articulation of the pretentions of modernism was the essay Avant-Garde and Kitschby New York art
critic Clement Greenberg, published in 1939 in
Partisan Review, later to become affiliated with the CIA. Greenberg argued that
avant-garde culture has historically been opposed to “high” or
“mainstream” culture, but also rejected the artificially
synthesized mass culture that has been produced by industrial capitalism. Consumer culture, driven by the
profit motive, not the ideals of true “art,” is
therefore kitsch. A similar view was
argued by members of the Frankfurt School,
including Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their essay The Culture
Industry: Enlightenment as MassDeception(1944),
and also Walter Benjamin
in his highly
influential The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936). Instead
of Greenberg’s kitsch, members of the
Frankfurt School coined the term “mass culture” to refer to the
commercially produced culture of a newly emerged Culture industry, as the antithesis
of avant-garde culture.
It was the
CIA that brought to prominence the new modern art movement of Abstract Expressionism, including the works
of Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell,
Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, whose works were all showcased at the Paris
festival, at the modern art and sculpture exhibit organized by New York’s Museum
of Modern Art ( MoMA). MoMA, which was developed in 1929 primarily by Abby
Aldrich Rockefeller, the wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr, has been important in
developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world. MoMA became a project of their son Nelson Rockefeller,
a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and played an important role in CCF
and its art projects. Nelson Rockefeller
was a keen supporter of Abstract Expressionism,
calling it “free enterprise painting.” 82George
Kennan and Allen Dulles were
major supporters of modern art, and the
Fairfield Foundation also funded
MoMA. Dulles’s personal liaison to the intelligence community who ran CCF in Paris was Tom Braden who had been Nelson Rockefeller’s executive secretary
for MoMA from 1947 to 1949, before
joining the CIA. In the 1950s, Nelson
received briefings on covert activities
from Allen Dulles and Tom Braden, who recalled, “I assumed Nelson knew
pretty much everything about what we were doing.” Nelson Rockefeller had headed the government’s wartime intelligence
agency for Latin America, named the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs
(CIAA), which, among other activities, sponsored exhibitions contracted through
MoMA.
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