You Had To Be There

National Interest, The, Winter, 1999 by Walter Laqueur

Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999), 509 pp., [pounds]20.

THE CONGRESS for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was founded at a big public meeting of intellectuals in Berlin, in the summer of 1950. Appropriately, the event coincided exactly with the outbreak of the Korean War--appropriately, because its establishment was the American response to an earlier Soviet initiative--in Wroclaw, Poland--to mobilize European writers, artists and intellectuals in its Cold War effort. (It was at Wroclaw on that occasion that the Stalinist apparatchik, Alexander Fadeyev, displaying his credentials as a literary critic, observed that if hyenas and jackals could write they would do so in the style of T.S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre.) Given the political circumstances of the time, the sense of an urgent need for such a response was widespread: most of Eastern Europe had just been folded into the Soviet empire, the communists had triumphed in China, there were huge communist parties in France and Italy, and a large segment of Western intellectual opinion--perhaps the preponderant part--either f avored the Soviet position or was neutral between it and the American one.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom was to exist for seventeen years, and some of the journals it sponsored continued to appear well after that. With its headquarters in Paris and its dozen or so periodicals, its frequent conferences and seminars, the Congress was supported by the CIA as part of that organization's covert activities, money being channeled through several existing foundations. This was kept a secret at the time, and it is doubtful whether anyone but Michael Josselson, the secretary-general of the CCF and a covert CIA operative, and possibly one or two others within the organization, knew about it. Not that it would have been considered a matter of paramount concern by the key figures in the organization had they known, because at the time the sense of freedom under attack was so strong that help would have been accepted from just about any quarter. It was an unfortunate arrangement, bound to backfire sooner or later, but there was no alternative at hand. There was no American agency dealing wit h cultural activities abroad on the lines of the British Council or the Alliance Francaise, and there was not a ghost of a chance that the U.S. Congress would have passed legislation for a project over which, by necessity, it would not have had control.

THESE FACTS, in broad outline, have been known since the mid-1960s. Why, then, should the CCF still attract the attention of writers in various counties to this very day? The brief answer is that at the height of its influence, in the 1950s and early 1960s, the CCF was a huge success. Its outreach was considerable and it played a notable role in the "war of ideas", which to a large extent was what the Cold War amounted to. While the financial cost involved was small by any standard, the journals the Congress published were among the best of their time, and the conferences and seminars it organized were influential. Together, they contributed, among other things, to changing the Labour Party in Britain and the Social Democratic Party in Germany from organizations with a narrow class base to truly popular parties, capable of holding their own (and governing) in the modern world. By now, it should also be clear that the political orientation of the CCF, not only with regard to the Soviet Union and the future of communism but generally, was a sound one--while the fashionable neutralist ideologies of the time were just as clearly wrong. Thus, books and articles about the CCF continue to be published, some admiring, others evidently unwilling to forgive it for having been prematurely right.

Frances Stonor Saunders, an Oxford-educated television producer, belongs to the latter camp. She has invested much effort in studying the archival evidence and interviewing some of the surviving CIA officials involved. She depends heavily on information supplied by Josselson's widow and Natasha Spender, the wife of the late Stephen Spender, poet and joint editor of Encounter. She presents interesting stories in the best (and worst) tradition of investigative journalism--uncovering, for instance, vital evidence that George Orwell's widow, Sonia, agreed to give Hollywood the film rights for Animal Farm only after she had been promised an assignation with Clark Gable. If true, it is a good story, even if it has nothing to do with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. But once we pass from the realm of entertainment to matters of substance, Saunders proves to be less than a reliable guide.

Cousider, to begin with, the choice of the title: Who Paid the Piper? It is unlikely that she, or anyone else holding views similar to hers, would have given such a title to a history of the Russian Revolution, despite the fact that Lenin received a great deal of German money and was only able to take command of the event after being transported from Zurich to St. Petersburg courtesy of the German army. But she has no hesitation imputing complete political dependence on its source of funds in the case of the Congress, even though it is clear from the body of her book that poor Michael Josselson in Paris and the CIA in Langley, Virginia, found it impossible to control the intellectuals of the CCF in a dozen capitals. In fact they did not seriously try to do so. Instructions were seldom issued, and on the few occasions when an attempt was made in that direction, it was almost always ignored. This state of semi-anarchy may have quite literally shortened Josselson's life.