-Caveat Lector-
>From TheNewStatesman
> How the CIA plotted against us
>
> The NS made the left seem clever. Something had to be done,
> reports Frances Stonor Saunders
>
> <Picture>"Have you seen Encounter?" Mary McCarthy asked Hannah
> Arendt in October 1953, after reading the debut issue. "It is
> surely the most vapid thing yet, like a college magazine got out
> by long-dead and putrefying undergraduates." McCarthy was not
> alone in denigrating Encounter. Anthony Hartley, also in October
> 1953, remarked somewhat prophetically that "it would be a pity if
> Encounter, in its turn, were to become a mere weapon in the cold
> war". More mischievous was an item in the Sunday Times's Atticus
> column, which referred to the magazine as "the police-review of
> American-occupied countries". And A J P Taylor, writing in the
> Listener, complained: "There is no article in the [first issue]
> which will provoke any reader to burn it or even to throw it
> indignantly into the waste-paper basket. None of the articles is
> politically subversive . . . All are safe reading for children."
>
> It is a measure of Encounter's success that it was able to ride
> these criticisms and establish itself in the "newborn
> Euro-American mind" as the leading review of its day. People
> still remember Nancy Mitford's famous article "The English
> aristocracy", a bitingly witty analysis of British social mores
> which introduced the distinction between "U and Non-U". Or Isaiah
> Berlin's four memorable essays on Russian literature, "A
> marvellous decade". Or Vladimir Nabokov on Pushkin, Irving Howe
> on Edith Wharton, David Marquand on "The Liberal revival",
> stories by Jorge Luis Borges, critical essays by Richard Ellmann,
> Jayaprakash Narayan, W H Auden, Arnold Toynbee, Bertrand Russell,
> Herbert Read, Hugh Trevor-Roper - some of the best minds of those
> decades.
>
> The cultural side of Encounter (which political nymphomaniac
> Melvin Lasky sneeringly referred to as "Elizabeth Bowen and all
> that crap") thus secured its respectability among the
> intelligentsia. And yet, when it finally folded in 1991, few were
> willing to grant it a proper testimonial. It had become gouty,
> smug, anachronistic. Reeking of the cold war at a time when that
> conflict was all but exhausted, it had become a "whifflebird",
> the name one New York intellectual invented for a fabulous
> creature that "flies backward in ever decreasing circles until it
> flies up its own asshole and becomes extinct".
>
> Encounter's demise can be traced directly to its origins as part
> of the "high-minded low cunning" of those British and American
> intelligence agents responsible for running the cultural cold
> war. Meeting in Whitehall in early 1951, the top echelons of the
> CIA and MI6 discussed the idea of an "Anglo-American
> left-of-centre publication" aimed at penetrating the fog of
> neutralism which dimmed the judgement of so many British
> intellectuals, not least those close to the New Statesman. What
> they needed was a voice that could oppose the "soft-headedness"
> and "terrible simplifications" of Kingsley Martin's magazine, and
> its "spirit of conciliation and moral lassitude vis-a-vis
> Communism".
>
> The Foreign Office's secret subventions to Tribune had been a
> gesture in this direction. In April 1950 Malcolm Muggeridge,
> after meeting its editor Tosco Fyvel, reported that Tribune was
> "obviously badly on the rocks, and I said that in the interests
> of the cold war [it] should be kept going as a counterblast to
> the New Statesman. Developed one of my favourite propositions -
> that the New Statesman's great success as propagandist had been
> to establish the proposition that to be intelligent is to be
> Left, whereas almost the exact opposite is true."
>
> The New Statesman and Nation was flourishing, its weekly
> circulation of 85,000 showing an impressive resilience to
> attempts to sap its "ideological hegemony". In these
> pre-Encounter days the CIA was dishing out secret subsidies to
> Michael Goodwin's journal Twentieth Century, on the specific
> understanding that it should address itself to rebutting the New
> Statesman's positions. "I fully agree the New Statesman is an
> important target, and must be dealt with systematically," Goodwin
> told his backers in January 1952.
>
> But Goodwin's efforts were not enough to satisfy his secret
> sponsors, who now followed up their Whitehall meetings with a
> definite proposal for a new magazine. Cleared at the highest
> levels of the CIA and MI6, the project was passed down the lines
> and into the hands of three intelligence officers: Michael
> Josselson, Lawrence de Neufville and Monty Woodhouse. Woodhouse,
> a dashing, daring spy of the old school, was assigned to the
> Information Research Department, the Foreign Office's secret
> ministry of cold war. Josselson and de Neufville were acting
> under cover of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the
> organisation born in Berlin in 1950 as the beachhead from which
> western culture would be defended against communist
> encroachments. Funded and managed by the CIA, the congress
> announced itself in its Freedom Manifesto as the protector of
> cherished liberal values, the champion of every man's "right to
> hold and express his own opinions, and particularly opinions
> which differ from those of his rulers". Ironically it was not
> Stalinism but Washington realpolitik that would ultimately pose
> the greatest threat to this noble right.
>
> It fell to Josselson, de Neufville and Woodhouse to devise the
> "operations and procedures" for creating and running the magazine
> that was to become the house organ of the Congress for Cultural
> Freedom. Lunching at the RAC Club on Pall Mall one day in spring
> 1952, they agreed on how the then unnamed journal would be
> financed and distributed, who (subject to security clearance by
> both services) would edit it, and how its editorial content would
> be monitored, guided and, in extremis, controlled. The finance
> was handled mostly by the CIA, which used a dummy foundation to
> piggy-back dollars to Encounter's London account. For their part
> the British supplied a lesser amount, either in brown envelopes
> handed over to the magazine's managing editor or in cheques
> signed by the film director Alexander Korda and the millionaire
> Victor Rothschild, both of whom were willing "fronts".
>
> What follows is, as they say, history. Encounter, edited by
> Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol, then Stephen Spender and
> Melvin Lasky, was outed in 1967 as a recipient of CIA funding.
> Spender resigned, Lasky stayed on. Pooh-pooh, said its
> apologists, who defended Encounter's impeccably independent
> credentials and derided claims that cultural freedom had been in
> any way compromised. Tut-tut, said its detractors (many of whom
> had received generous fees to write for it), we always knew that
> there was something fishy about it. And that was that. The axe
> fell on the cover-up, rather than on what one historian has
> described as "the sweetheart deal that western intellectuals
> enjoyed with the dark angel of American government for nearly two
> decades".
>
> The deal was this: Encounter's editors were free to publish
> anything they wanted, as long as this did not adversely affect
> American interest. "We agreed that all articles on controversial
> topics should be seen by us before they were shown to anybody
> outside," wrote one of the front-office Metternichs of the
> Congress for Cultural Freedom, admonishing Encounter's editors
> for accept-ing a piece critical of US foreign policy in China.
> "We agreed that one of the fundamental policies of Encounter
> should be to work towards a better understanding between England
> and America."
>
> New documentary evidence shows that Encounter received, and was
> receptive to, CIA "guidance". This explains what Bob Silvers,
> editor of the New York Review of Books, referred to as its
> "peculiar blind spot - it hardly ever contained any critical
> articles about the US, as if this was forbidden territory". For
> this acquiescence, Encounter earned the moral indignation of
> Conor Cruise O'Brien, who in 1966 attacked it, famously, for
> serving the power structure at a time when American soldiers were
> dying in Vietnam.
>
> Encounter's wishy-washy record on McCarthyism should also be
> viewed in this context. It was a matter of policy that the
> Congress for Cultural Freedom and its journals leave McCarthyism
> well alone, as one English activist later recalled: "It was
> clearly understood that we must not criticise the American
> government, or the McCarthyism which was then at its height in
> the US." Generally managing to avoid the issue altogether, when
> it did examine it, Encounter's tone was far from condemnatory. In
> an essay of extraordinary obfuscation, Tosco Fyvel argued that,
> although McCarthy was to be regretted, he had to be viewed in the
> context of America's "insistent search for new national security,
> for a world, indeed, made safe for democracy". This, concluded
> Fyvel, was infinitely preferable to "European weariness, and
> scepticism of any such achievement".
>
> Encounter is rightly remembered for its unflinching scrutiny of
> cultural curtailment in the communist bloc. But its mitigation of
> McCarthyism was less clear-sighted: where the journal could see
> the beam in its opponent's eye, it failed to detect the plank in
> its own.
>
> Back at CIA headquarters in Washington, Encounter was regarded
> proudly as a "flagship", an effective vehicle for advancing the
> arguments for a pax Americana. It even became a calling card for
> CIA agents. Arranging a meeting with Ben Sonnenberg, a rich young
> wanderer who worked for the CIA in the mid-1950s, an agent told
> him, "I'll be carrying a copy of Encounter, so you'll know who I
> am". Josselson, the CIA agent who headed the Congress for
> Cultural Freedom, referred to it as "our greatest asset". In
> agency-speak an "asset" was "any resource at the disposition of
> the agency for use in an operational or support role".
>
> Crucially, the CIA's operational principle dictated that
> organisations receiving its support should not be required "to
> support every aspect of official American policy". This meant
> that a leftish agenda could survive in an organ like Encounter.
> But while it "was left-wing in the sense that it gave expression
> to some left-wing views, it wasn't a free forum at all, which it
> purported to be", according to the British philosopher Richard
> Wolheim. "I think the effect of it was to give the impression
> that it was the whole spectrum of opinion they were publishing.
> But invariably they were cutting it off at a certain point,
> notably where it concerned areas of American foreign policy."
> This, according to one CIA chief, was precisely how Encounter was
> expected to perform: "It was propaganda in the sense that it did
> not often deviate from what the State Department would say US
> foreign policy was."
>
> Encounter never shrank from exposing the useful lies by which
> communist regimes supported themselves. But by "keeping silent on
> any hot controversial issues" as Dwight MacDonald wrote, and "by
> excessive diplomacy and hush-hush attitude toward all the fakery
> and shoddiness that's for years been growing so in our whole
> intellectual atmosphere", Encounter suspended that most precious
> of western philosophical concepts - the freedom to think and act
> independently - and trimmed its sails to suit the prevailing
> winds. Encounter, "a weapon in the cold war", is gone, the New
> Statesman is going strong. Is there a lesson here?
A<>E<>R
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