Cultural cold war
Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-50(1)
Give me a hundred million dollars and a thousand dedicated
people, and I will guarantee to generate such a wave of
democratic unrest among the masses--yes, even among the
soldiers--of Stalin's own empire, that all his problems for a
long period of time to come will be internal. I can find the
people.
Sidney Hook, 1949
The Congress for Cultural Freedom is widely considered one of the
CIA's more daring and effective Cold War covert operations. It
published literary and political journals such as Encounter,
hosted dozens of conferences bringing together some of the most
eminent Western thinkers, and even did what it could to help
intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain. Somehow this organization
of scholars and artists--egotistical, free-thinking, and even
anti-American in their politics--managed to reach out from its
Paris headquarters to demonstrate that Communism, despite its
blandishments, was a deadly foe of art and thought. Getting such
people to cooperate at all was a feat, but the Congress's
Administrative Secretary, Michael Josselson, kept them working
together for almost two decades until the Agency arranged an
amicable separation from the Congress in 1966.(2)
The Congress for Cultural Freedom--despite the embarrassing
exposure of its CIA sponsorship in 1967--ultimately helped to
negate Communism's appeal to artists and intellectuals,
undermining at the same time the Communist pose of moral
superiority. But while CIA sponsorship of the Congress has long
been publicly known, the origins of that relationship have
remained obscure, even to Agency veterans who worked on the
project.
The Congress itself sprang from a conference of intellectuals in
West Berlin in June 1950, a gathering that itself marked a
landmark in the Cold War. By a lucky stroke, the conference
opened just a day after North Korea invaded the South. This
coincidence lent unexpected timeliness and urgency to the
conference's message: that some of the best minds of the
West--representing a wide range of disciplines and political
viewpoints--were willing to defy the still-influential opinion
that Communism was more congenial to culture than was bourgeois
democracy. Historians have surmised that this event had some CIA
connection, but the handful of CIA officers who knew the full
story are dead, and scholars today tend to skirt this issue
because of the lack of documentation.
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Agency files reveal the true origins of the Berlin conference.
Besides setting the Congress in motion, [the Berlin conference in
1950] helped to solidify CIA's emerging strategy of promoting the
non-Communist left--the strategy that would soon become the
theoretical foundation of the Agency's political operations
against Communism over the next two decades.
A Conference in New York
In March 1949, New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel played host to
one of the strangest gatherings in American history. Less than
four years after Allied troops had liberated Hitler's
concentration camps, 800 prominent literary and artistic figures
congregated in the Waldorf to call for peace at any price with
Stalin, whose own gulag had just been restocked with victims of
his latest purge. Americans, including Lillian Hellman, Aaron
Copland, Arthur Miller, and a young Norman Mailer, joined with
European and Soviet delegates to repudiate "US
warmongering." Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich told the
delegates that "a small clique of hatemongers" was
preparing a global conflagration; he urged progressive artists to
struggle against the new "Fascists'' who were seeking world
domination. American panelists echoed the Russian composer's fear
of a new conflict. Playwright Clifford Odets denounced the
``enemies of Man'' and claimed the United States had been
agitated into ``a state of holy terror'' by fraudulent reports of
Soviet aggression; composer Copland declared "the present
policies of the American Government will lead inevitably into a
third world war."
The Waldorf conference marked another step in the Communist
Information Bureau's (Cominform) campaign to shape Western
opinion. A series of Soviet-sponsored cultural conferences
beginning in September 1948 called for world peace and denounced
the policies of the Truman administration. The conference at the
Waldorf-Astoria, however, was the first to convene in a Western
country and, not coincidentally, was also the first to meet
organized and articulate opposition.
The Cominform could hardly have picked a riskier place than New
York City to stage a Stalinist peace conference. New York's large
ethnic neighborhoods were filled with refugees from Communism,
and its campuses and numerous cultural and political journals
employed hundreds of politically left-leaning men and women who
had fought in the ideological struggles over Stalinism that
divided American labor unions, college faculties, and cultural
organizations before World War II.
Stealing the Show
A handful of liberal and socialist writers, led by philosophy
professor Sydney Hook, saw their chance to steal a little of the
publicity expected for the Waldorf peace conference. A fierce
ex-Communist himself, Hook was then teaching at New York
University and editing a socialist magazine called The New
Leader. Ten years earlier he and his mentor John Dewey had
founded a controversial group called the Committee for Cultural
Freedom, which attacked both Communism and Nazism. He now
organized a similar committee to harass the peace conference in
the Waldorf-Astoria.
Hook's new group called itself the Americans for Intellectual
Freedom. Its big names included critics Dwight MacDonald and Mary
McCarthy, composer Nicolas Nabokov, and commentator Max Eastman.
Arnold Beichman, a labor reporter friendly with anti-Communist
union leaders, remembered the excitement of tweaking the Soviet
delegates and their fellow conferees: ``We didn't have any staff,
we didn't have any salaries to pay anything. But inside of about
one day the place was just busting with people
volunteering." One of Beichman's union friends persuaded the
sold-out Waldorf to base Hook and his group in a three-room suite
(``I told them if you don't get that suite we'll close the hotel
down,'' he explained to Beichman), and another union contact
installed 10 phone lines on a Sunday morning.
Hook and his friends stole the show. They asked embarrassing
questions of the Soviet delegates at the conference's panel
discussions and staged an evening rally of their own at nearby
Bryant Park. News stories on the peace conference reported the
activities of the Americans for Intellectual Freedom in detail.
``The only paper that was against us in this reporting was The
New York Times," recalled Beichman. ``It turned out years
later that [The Times reporter] was a member of the Party.''
Covert Action Prospect
In Washington, members of Frank Wisner's fledgling Office of
Policy Coordination (OPC) chuckled at the news reports from New
York and wondered how a group like the Americans for Intellectual
Freedom could help OPC and the CIA in countering the Soviet peace
offensive. OPC was the Agency's new covert action arm, a
bureaucratic hybrid formed only a few months earlier and still
struggling to establish a mission and identity. (It comprised
only a handful of staffers in the spring of 1949, and it looked
to the State Department and private contacts for operational
ideas). Soviet operatives, on the other hand, had a wealth of
experience to draw from, having learned from the late Willi
Mnzenberg before the war how to build front groups that were
ostensibly non-Communist--and thus attractive to liberals and
socialists--but were still responsive to Soviet direction. OPC
had no such expertise, but it did have a cadre of energetic and
well-connected staffers willing to experiment with unorthodox
ideas and controversial individuals if that was what it took to
challenge the Communists at their own game.
The day after the Waldorf congress closed, Wisner's flamboyant
and ubiquitous aide Carmel Offie asked the Department of State
what it intended to do about the next big peace conference,
scheduled for Paris in late April. Offie was Wisner's special
assistant for labor and migr affairs, personally overseeing two
of OPC's most important operations: the National Committee for
Free Europe, [and other operatives who] passed OPC money to
anti-Communist unions in Europe. Offie dealt often with Irving
Brown, who had extensive Continental contacts.
In response to Offie, the Department of State cabled Paris
proposing a US-orchestrated response to the conference, but
Wisner in Washington and Brown in New York thought the suggested
steps too weak. OPC took matters into its own hands in the bold
but ad hoc manner that marked the Office's early operations. A
series of meetings and conversations over the next few days
resulted in a new plan, which OPC communicated through at least
three separate channels. At the time there [were few] OPC
station[s abroad, and various officials acted] as the Office's
representative[s. One of them] soon heard from Brown and Raymond
Murphy of State's Office of European Affairs. Wisner himself
cabled Averell Harriman of the Economic Cooperation
Administration (the managers of the Marshall Plan) seeking 5
million francs (roughly $16,000) to fund a counterdemonstration.
Murphy graphically explained the need for a response to the
Communist peace offensive:
Now the theme is that the United States and the Western
democracies are the war-mongers and Fascists and the Kremlin and
its stooges the peace-loving democracies. And there is a better
than even chance that by constant repetition the Commies can
persuade innocents to follow this line. Perhaps not immediately
but in the course of the next few years because there is a
tremendous residue of pacificism [sic], isolationism and big
business [sic] to be exploited. For example, a recession in the
United States might cause people to lose interest in bolstering
Europe .... I think you will agree that this phony peace movement
actually embraces far more than intellectuals and that any
counter-congress should emphasize also that the threat to world
peace comes from the Kremlin and its allies.
Working with Brown, [OPC's representative] contacted French
socialist David Rousset and his allies at the breakaway leftist
newspaper Franc-Tireur, which in turn organized a meeting called
the International Day of Resistance to Dictatorship and War,
inviting Sidney Hook and other prominent anti-Communists. OPC
covertly paid the travel costs of the German, Italian, and
American delegations. The latter included Hook and novelist James
T. Farrell; both were unwitting of OPC's involvement.
Disappointment in Paris
The Paris counter-conference on 30 April 1949 disappointed its
American backers. Although it attracted prominent anti-Stalinists
and provoked blasts from the French Communist Party, its tone was
too radical and neutralist for Hook and Farrell. OPC and State
agreed with Hook's assessment. The main problem, Offie noted, was
the barely concealed anti-Americanism of the Franc-Tireur group
and many of the intellectuals it had invited. This flaw was
aggravated by the loose organization of the meeting itself, which
at one point was disrupted by a noisy band of anarchists. Offie
did not believe that OPC had to rely on Franc-Tireur to reach
European anti-Stalinists. Wisner added a pointed postscript to
Offie's memo:
We are concerned lest this type of leadership for a continuing
organization would result in the degeneration of the entire idea
(of having a little DEMINFORM) into a nuts folly of miscellaneous
goats and monkeys whose antics would completely discredit the
work and statements of the serious and responsible liberals. We
would have serious misgivings about supporting such a show
[emphasis added].
One small forward step was taken in Paris, however. Hook had
chatted with a former editor of The New Leader named Melvin Lasky
about the prospects for a permanent committee of anti-Communist
intellectuals from Europe and America. This idea would soon take
on a life of its own.
Considering Berlin
Several people in Europe and America almost simultaneously
decided that what was needed was a real conference of
anti-Communists. Paris would have been the logical choice, but,
as was demonstrated in April, Paris seemed too ethereal,
evanescent, and neutralist in the struggle between liberty and
tyranny. Parisians who cared about world affairs were often
Stalinists; novelist Arthur Koestler quipped that from Paris the
French Communist Party could take over all of France with a
single phone call.
Berlin was much better. Surrounded by the Red Army and just
recently rescued from starvation by the US Air Force's heroic
resupply efforts, West Berlin was an island of freedom in a
Communist sea. The Soviet blockade of Berlin had been lifted in
May 1949, but morale in the Western sector had flagged over the
summer as the proud but exhausted West Berliners wondered what
would befall them next.
In August 1949, a crucial meeting took place in Frankfurt.
American journalist Melvin J. Lasky, together with a pair of
ex-Communists, Franz Borkenau and Ruth Fischer, hatched a plan
for an international conference of the non-Communist Left in
Berlin the following year. Lasky, only 29, was already prominent
in German intellectual circles as the founding editor of Der
Monat, a journal sponsored by the American occupation government
that brought Western writers once more into the ken of the German
public. Borkenau too had been in Paris the previous April as a
disappointed member of the German delegation. Fischer--whose
given name was Elfriede Eisler--was the sister of Gerhart Eisler,
a Soviet operative dubbed in 1946 ``the Number-One Communist in
the US'' and convicted the following year for falsifying a visa
application. She herself had been a leader of the German
Communist Party before her faction was expelled on orders from
Moscow, leading her to break with Stalin (and with her brother
Gerhart).
Ruth Fischer mentioned the plan to a diplomat friend[:]
I think we talked about this plan already during my last stay in
Paris, but I have now a much more concrete approach to it. I
mean, of course, the idea of organizing a big
Anti-Waldorf-Astoria Congress in Berlin itself. It should be a
gathering of all ex-Communists, plus a good representative group
of anti-Stalinist American, English, and European intellectuals,
declaring its sympathy for Tito and Yugoslavia and the silent
opposition in Russia and the satellite states, and giving the
Politburo hell right at the gate of their own hell. All my
friends agree that it would be of enormous effect and radiate to
Moscow, if properly organized. It would create great
possibilities for better co-ordination afterwards and would also
lift the spirits of Berlin anti-Stalinists, which are somewhat
fallen at present.
Fischer hoped to talk to ``a few friends in Washington'' about
the idea during her trip there that fall.
[OPC's representative] pouched the Fischer proposal to Offie in
mid-September. [OPC] officers seemed unimpressed with the Berlin
conference idea, but Offie still thought the proposal was worth a
closer look.
Offie's interest notwithstanding, the Berlin congress idea
remained in a bureaucratic limbo for the next two months. No one
apparently seemed to know quite what to do with it. American
occupation authorities in Germany probably knew that the proposed
conclave would have little credibility among European
intellectuals if it were obviously sponsored by the US
Government. At the same time, Truman administration officials
were not exactly looking for motley bands of former Communists to
sponsor at a time when the White House was already taking flak at
home for being soft on Communism.
An Ideal Organizer
The answer was covert funding. Michael Josselson stepped forward
to promote the proposal late in 1949. Josselson had witnessed the
shaky beginnings of the anti-Communist counteroffensive in New
York and Paris that spring while he was still working as a
cultural officer for the American occupation government in
Germany. He told his composer friend Nicolas Nabokov that Berlin
needed something similar. At some point that autumn Josselson
talked with Melvin Lasky about the Berlin conference idea.
Josselson was the perfect man for the job of putting together
such an event. Born in Estonia in 1908, his father, a Jewish
timber merchant, moved his family to Berlin during the Russian
Revolution. As a young man Josselson attended the Universities of
Berlin and Freiburg, but he took a job as a buyer for the
American Gimbels-Saks retail chain before he earned a degree.
Gimbels eventually made him its chief European buyer and
transferred him to Paris in 1935, and then on to New York before
the war. Josselson became an American citizen in 1942. Drafted
the following year, he made sergeant and served as an
interrogator for the US Army in Europe. Like Melvin Lasky,
Josselson stayed on in Berlin after demobilization to work with
the American occupation government. Berlin was an ideal post for
Josselson, who spoke English, French, German, and Russian with
equal ease.
The drama and intrigue of postwar Berlin awakened something in
Josselson and gave him scope to exercise his considerable talents
as an operator, administrator, and innovator. His enthusiasm was
boundless, his energy immense. In Josselson's capable hands
the still-amorphous Fischer plan took specific shape. Where
Fischer had proposed an essentially political gathering, the
self-taught Josselson sensed that an explicitly cultural and
intellectual conference, to be called ``the Congress for cultural
freedom,'' could seize the initiative from the Communists by
reaffirming "the fundamental ideals governing cultural (and
political) action in the Western world and the repudiation of all
totalitarian challenges."
With the backing of several prominent Berlin academics, a
committee of American and European thinkers would organize the
event and invite participants, selecting them on the basis of
their political outlook, their international reputation and their
popularity in Germany. In addition, the congress could be used to
bring about the creation of some sort of permanent committee,
which, with a few interested people and a certain amount of
funds, could maintain the degree of intellectual and rhetorical
coordination expected to be achieved in Berlin. The Josselson
proposal reached Washington in January 1950.
Michael Josselson's interest in the congress idea gave Lasky all
the encouragement he needed. Lasky, unwitting of OPC's hand in
the plan, forged ahead while official Washington made up its
mind. He sent a similar proposal of his own to Sidney Hook, his
old boss, who liked the idea. In February, Lasky enlisted Ernst
Reuter, Lord Mayor of West Berlin, and several prominent German
academics, who endorsed the plan and promised their support.
Together these men formed a standing committee and began issuing
invitations.
Lasky's freelancing, however, was not all for the good. As an
employee of the American occupation government, his activities on
behalf of the congress struck more than a few observers, both
friendly and hostile, as proof that the US Government was behind
the event. This would later cause trouble for Lasky.
OPC officers also liked Josselson's plan. Headquarters produced a
formal project proposal envisioning a budget of $50,000. Time was
of the essence, although OPC soon realized that the congress
would have to postponed to May or even June. Wisner approved the
project outline, which essentially reiterated Josselson's
December proposal, on 7 April, adding that he wanted Lasky and
Burnham kept out of sight in Berlin for fear their presence would
only provide ammunition to Communist critics of the event.
Enthusiastic Response
It was already too late to rein in Lasky. He had appointed
himself the driving force behind the event, inviting participants
and organizing programs. Josselson defended Lasky when informed
of Wisner's comment. Josselson explained that Lasky's name on the
event's masthead as General Secretary had been largely
responsible for the enthusiasm that the congress had generated
among European intellectuals. ``No other person here, certainly
no German, could have achieved such success,'' cabled Josselson.
The congress in Berlin rolled ahead that spring gathering
sponsors and patrons. World-renowned philosophers John Dewey,
Bertrand Russell, Benedetto Croce, Karl Jaspers, and Jacques
Maritain agreed to lend gravitas to the event as its honorary
chairmen. OPC bought tickets for the American delegation, using
[several intermediary organizations] as its travel agents. Hook
and another NYU philosophy professor named James Burnham took
charge of the details for the American delegation. The Department
of State proved an enthusiastic partner in the enterprise,
arranging travel, expenses, and publicity for the delegates.
Indeed, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Jesse
MacKnight was so impressed with the American delegation that he
urged CIA to sponsor the congress on a continuing basis even
before the conclave in Berlin had taken place.
Dramatic Opening
The Congress for Cultural Freedom convened in Berlin's Titania
Palace on 26 June 1950. American delegates Hook, James Burnham,
James T. Farrell, playwright Tennessee Williams, historian Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr., actor Robert Montgomery, and chairman of the
Atomic Energy Commission David Lilienthal had been greeted on
their arrival the previous day with the news that troops of North
Korea had launched a massive invasion of the South. This pointed
reminder of the vulnerability of Berlin itself heightened the
sense of apprehension in the hall. The Congress's opening caught
and reflected this mood. Lord Mayor Reuter asked the almost 200
delegates and the 4,000 other attendees to stand for a moment of
silence in memory of those who had died fighting for freedom or
who still languished in concentration camps.
The time had come to choose sides. Austrian physicist and
Congress panelist Hans Thirring dramatized this feeling by
repudiating his own prepared remarks, which were essentially
neutralist in tone, because the Korean invasion had betrayed his
trust in Stalin's peaceful aspirations. German writer Theodor
Plievier made a spectacular entrance after flying in from hiding
in West Germany, defying the danger that he might be kidnapped by
the Soviets or East Germans while visiting Berlin.
Leadership of the Congress sessions spontaneously devolved on two
eloquent Europeans with very different views: the Italian
socialist Ignazio Silone and the Anglicized Hungarian writer
Arthur Koestler. Although both had penned autobiographical essays
about their breaks with the Party for a new book titled The God
That Failed, they represented the two poles of opinion over the
best way to oppose the Communists. Koestler favored the
rhetorical frontal assault, and his attacks sometimes spared
neither foe nor friend. Silone was subtler, urging the West to
promote social and political reforms in order to co-opt
Communism's still-influential moral appeal.
These competing themes lent a certain dramatic tension to the
Congress, but their rivalry by itself helped to make the point
that debate in the West is truly free, with room for all shades
of anti-totalitarian opinion. In the end, it was liberty that
really mattered. "Friends, freedom has seized the
offensive!" shouted Koestler as he read the Congress's
Freedom Manifesto before 15,000 cheering Berliners at the closing
rally on 29 June. The irony was subtle but real; Koestler had
once worked for Soviet operative Willi Mnzenberg managing front
groups for Moscow, and now he was unwittingly helping the CIA's
efforts to establish a new organization designed to undo some of
the damage done by Stalin's agents over the last generation.
Epilogue
Having set the Congress in motion, OPC sat back and watched while
events played themselves out. The men that OPC brought together
in Berlin needed no coaching on the finer points of criticizing
Communism. Josselson kept out of sight, although he kept track of
everything that transpired. In Josselson's eyes, Silone seems to
have won his debate with Koestler; Josselson personally eschewed
the frontal assault in favor of the subtle approach. Indeed,
Josselson's Congress for Cultural Freedom would later be
criticized (by American anti-Communists, in particular) for
tolerating too much criticism of America's own shortcomings by
figures on the anti-Communist left. And thus was born not only
the Congress for Cultural Freedom but also one of its most
controversial features.
Reactions in the US Government to the Berlin conference initially
ranged from pleased to ecstatic. Wisner offered his
"heartiest congratulations" to all involved. OPC's
political sponsors were also gratified. Defense Department
representative Gen. John Magruder deemed it ``a subtle covert
operation carried out on the highest intellectual level" and
"unconventional warfare at its best'' in a memo to Secretary
of Defense Louis Johnson. American occupation officials in
Germany sensed the Congress had given a palpable boost to the
morale of West Berlin, but believed the event's most important
effect would ultimately be felt by Western intellectuals who had
been politically adrift since 1945. Although Congress delegates
had argued over strategies for combating Stalinism, their
spontaneous and sincere unanimity in denouncing tyranny of all
stripes had "actually impelled a number of prominent
cultural leaders to give up their sophisticated, contemplative
detachment in favor of a strong stand against
totalitarianism."
Almost before the last chairs were folded in Berlin, [at least
one OPC officer] began campaigning for covert backing for the
Congress on a permanent basis. Wisner agreed that a standing
Congress could pull European opinion away from neutralism, but
ordered Lasky and Burnham removed from prominent positions in any
ongoing project. Burnham was happy to step aside, agreeing that
he made an easy target for Communist critics of the Congress.
The unwitting Lasky was another matter, at least as far as [one
OPC officer] was concerned. Josselson had defended Lasky in
April, and OPC's new Eastern Europe Division (EE) agreed with
Josselson that Lasky had been a key to the Congress's success.
This apologia infuriated Wisner because it betrayed ``an
unfortunate tendency, apparently more deeprooted than I had
suspected, to succumb to the temptation of convenience (doing
things the easy way).''
In a scathing memo to EE, Wisner declared himself "very
disturbed" by the "non-observance" of his April
command to have Lasky moved to the sidelines of the project;
Lasky's visibility was ``a major blunder and was recognized as
such by our best friends in the State Department.'' Wisner made
himself clear: unless the headstrong Lasky was removed from the
Congress for Cultural Freedom, OPC would not support the
organization. He tempered this bitter pill a little in a
postscript. According to Wisner, Secretary of Defense Johnson was
so impressed with the Berlin conference that he had sung its
praises before President Truman, who was reported to be ``very
well pleased.''
EE had no choice but to cable Wisner's instructions to Germany.
[The OPC officer who received it exploded] and cabled back a
histrionic protest, but there was nothing to be done. Lasky had
to go, and OPC contrived to have him removed from the project.
With Burnham and Lasky gone, the Congress's steering committee
established the organization as a permanent entity in November
1950 (CIA support, under a new project name, had already been
approved by OPC's Project Review Board). Josselson swallowed his
pride and went along, resigning his job with the American
occupation government to become the Congress's Administrative
Secretary for the next 16 years.
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Footnotes
(1)This article is an excerpt from a larger classified draft
study of CIA involvement with anti-Communist groups in the Cold
War. The author retains a footnoted copy of the article in the
CIA History Staff. This version of the article has been redacted
for security considerstions (phrases in brackets denote some of
the redactions).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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