The OPC gave birth to the neocons.
Linda
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://bss.sfsu.edu/fischer/IR%20360/Readings/Congress%20Cultural%20Freedom.htm
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.
|
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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).
--- In cia-drugs@yahoogroups.com, Robert Millegan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
> This network was conceived by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and
> organized by the NSC, which set up the Office of Policy Co-ordination
> to run it, staffed and funded by the CIA. Like Operation SHEEPSKIN,
> most of the so-called "freedom fighters" it recruited were little
> more than fascist collaborators from WWII. And like the Nazi
> organization ODESSA with which it often collaborated, its tentacles
> extended throughout Europe and Latin America, and even the United
> States.[1296]
>
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