http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/95unclass/Warner.html
Cultural cold war
Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-50(1)
By
Michael Warner, "Origins of the Congress of Cultural Freedom,
1949-1950" Studies in Intelligence, vol
38 no. 5 1995 unclassified edition
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.
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.
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.
Photo:"Sidney Hook speaking at the opening
session."
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.
Photo:
"Author Arthur Koestler, Irving Brown, and
Professor James Burnham."
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.
Photo:
"Final session (at Funkturm)."
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.
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).
