Sometime in the 1980s, in a lecture hall at a provincial ag school, a recruiter from the Central Intelligence Agency tried to tempt the soil-science and animal-husbandry majors into a career. A group of shaggy high-school townies disrupted the talk, asking him questions about the Agency’s long history of bloody covert actions and dirty tricks. Each time the recruiter responded, the townies flashed a large placard to the audience that read “LIE.”
I was not only in that front row, but I had made the sign. Although raised in a Republican household, by age 15 I had come to believe that anything involving the Reagan administration was to be combated, and that the CIA in particular was behind pretty much everything nasty, mendacious, and oppressive going on in the world. As far as I knew, I shared these beliefs with every other Western leftist.
It turns out that we were right, at least in some key ways. The scope of CIA covert actions during the Cold War is staggering, even stretching to the world of arts and letters. The Agency infiltrated or created dozens of groups, calling the tune for the Congress for Cultural Freedom and even Partisan Review, which obligingly played the CIA’s song. These revelations should make us question seriously the so-called independence of postwar American intellectual life.
At least, that’s how the story has gone since the 1999 publication of Frances Stonor Saunders’s Who Paid the Piper?—or even before that, since Serge Guilbaut described How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art with subventions from the Agency. Such scoops continue to be published: just in the past two years we have heard again about the CIA’s hand in the Paris Review, and Eric Bennett accused the Iowa Writers’ Workshop of “flattening” American fiction at the Agency’s behest.
By now, though, this shouldn’t be news. CIA underwriting of cultural groups has been an open secret since 1966, when Ramparts and The New York Times detailed the Agency’s role in creating and sustaining the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Jason Epstein and Christopher Lasch both agonized at furious length in 1967 about what Lasch called “the cultural Cold War.” A spate of Artforum articles in 1973-74 developed the then-novel claim that Abstract Expressionism’s dominance in the art world was at least partially due to its usefulness as a Cold War weapon.
Inexplicably, later writers continued to be shocked, shocked! by news that the CIA had its fingers in postwar culture. Guilbaut’s 1983 book was a sensation—to be fair, it is a brilliant title, and a fine and well-researched study. It also benefited from leftists’ rekindled hatred of the CIA at a time when it was up to its old tricks in Central America, southern Africa, and the Middle East.
Archives flew open with the end of the Cold War, scholars jumped in, and everything old became new again. Over the last 15 years, dozens more studies have appeared, ranging from the meticulous and scholarly to the sensationalistic.
But apart from adding pieces to the larger puzzle whose outlines we already know, all of this solid scholarship and investigative journalism doesn’t change the big picture. So why does each new revelation get trumpeted and—now—spread virally among lefty journalists and academics? In part, a CIA connection makes history sexier, more interesting, more relevant to the world beyond the ivory tower. But these exposés rely far too heavily on academics’ hostile feelings toward the CIA in order to obscure the fact that there is little to see that we haven’t known for decades.
I don’t deny that I’ve thrilled at finding CIA fingerprints in literary history. My graduate-student mind was blown when I read the letters between the publisher James Laughlin and James Jesus Angleton. At the time of their correspondence, Laughlin and Angleton were Ivy League literati and Ezra Pound acolytes; later, Angleton became the legendarily obsessed and tragic chief of counter-intelligence at the CIA. In more recent research I discovered that William Casey, a former OSS agent who became CIA director under Reagan, had been on the board of directors of Perspectives USA, Laughlin’s short-lived 1950s magazine of modernist art and culture.
What I find troubling in much of this work is its implicit certainty that any institution with a CIA connection was a sock puppet for the national-security state. While they may have been intended as propaganda, the projects simplistically smeared by these exposés are richer, more complicated, less unidirectional, and ultimately less important to the Agency than they have been shown to be.
Take Encounter. For years a leading literary-cultural journal in the Anglo-American world, Encounter was founded in 1953 with funds from the Congress for Cultural Freedom. When the CIA connection came to light, Encounter’s editors swore that they knew nothing about it and that the journal’s editorial line had never been influenced from the outside. Nonsense, Saunders charged. If Encounter’s editors hadn’t known that the CIA was overseeing the magazine, she argued, they were willfully blind. To prove her point, she pointed to two articles she claims were spiked at the CIA’s instigation.
And then ... that’s it. Two articles in a 14-year span? If Encounter was a CIA mouthpiece, it was one of few words. It was, to be sure, solidly and relentlessly anti-Communist, but this was not remarkable for a major cultural journal of the time. Notwithstanding the investigative work they’ve done, Saunders and many who followed her have been too quick to dismiss Encounter based only on its tainted origins. Few take time to read the magazine, to test their belief that Encounter was an instrument of the CIA.
According to Jason Harding of Durham University, in Britain, who is completing a book on Encounter, the journal’s “editorial constraints were not completely different from those of other magazines, which have patrons, policies and disagreements about the sort of material they publish. Encounter’s editors were extremely independent-minded, not to say high-minded, and contributions from Isaiah Berlin and Lionel Trilling characterized Encounter’s principled defense of liberal pluralism during the Cold War.”
Nor would the CIA have had to pull strings to get Western intellectuals to argue against Stalinism. “The Congress for Cultural Freedom certainly existed largely thanks to CIA organization,” Giles Scott-Smith of the University of Leiden tells me, “but its content was made up of values and interests that many in the post-war world stood by.”
Especially in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, some of the participants—Arthur Koestler, for example—were more vehemently anti-Communist than even the CIA thought advisable. “Many of those who received secret subsidies actually outdid the CIA in their zeal, making them dangerously loose cannons in what was supposed to be an oblique, ‘soft sell’ strategic operation,” says Hugh Wilford, a historian at California State University at Long Beach.
For me, the politics aren’t Encounter’s most interesting feature. Read as a literary magazine, it served as a place to mourn the passing of modernism while dismissing the movements that sought to succeed it.
Eric Bennett proffers another oversimplification in his otherwise Rube Goldbergian explanation of how the CIA “flattened literature,” published earlier this year in The Chronicle Review. He explains that in the 1960s Paul Engle, director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, used CIA money to urge Iowa students to pursue writing in a few approved styles—modernism, magical realism, or pure realism—but discouraged sprawling, experimental postmodernism, with its intellectual ambitions.
Influenced by the Southern New Critics and Lionel Trilling, Iowa rewarded writing that “fortif[ied] the particular, the individual, the situated, the embedded, the irreducible,” Bennett says. It didn’t want writing that played intellectual games; that way lay Stalinism. And thus, because of Iowa’s unmatched influence on postwar American writing, the Cold War not only “underwrote” creative writing but gave it “its individual shape.”
There are a lot of jumps to make here: from the New Critics and Trilling to the CIA-backed Farfield Foundation to Engle to Iowa’s curriculum to generations of MFAs. We are asked to accept much of this on the strength of circumstantial evidence and Bennett’s resentment at Iowa’s denigration of postmodernism, his preferred style. It also strains credulity that the CIA would have endorsed the depictions of the United States that came out of Iowa. John Cheever, Richard Yates, Raymond Carver—the America depicted by these Iowa teachers was either a soul-draining suburban wasteland or a grimy lower-middle-class gantlet.
Another writer asks us to believe that George Plimpton carried water for the CIA just as he had done for the 1963 Detroit Lions. In a 2012 piece in Salon, Joel Whitney revisits the story (first broken in 1977!) that Peter Matthiessen had been a CIA operative when he and Plimpton founded the Paris Review. Whitney reports that even after Matthiessen left, the Review’s editors courted the Congress for Cultural Freedom for money to help with its editors’ living expenses in Paris. “In its vast quest to beat the Soviets in cultural achievement and showcase American writing to influential European audiences and intellectuals,” Whitney pants, “the Congress may have even suggested some of the famed Paris Review interviews.”
Yes, maybe; or, the Congress may just have bought Plimpton a few crêpes au jambon et fromage and a vin ordinaire. Whitney’s “may have even suggested” formulation is hardly persuasive, and his argument by implication is further undermined by his misunderstanding of the Congress, whose magazines included relatively little American writing.
In some places, in fact, the CIA’s money worked against the Agency’s desires for a pro-American intelligentsia. The CCF underwrote magazines and writers’ conferences in sub-Saharan Africa, intending them as anti-Communist bulwarks. Peter Kalliney of the University of Kentucky and Asha Rogers, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oxford, have shown how these institutions fostered anti-imperial debates that opposed American influence in the developing world. Even the CIA can’t always get what it wants, it seems. “The CIA was keen to win over intellectuals and artists,” Wilford says. “But this didn’t mean that the CIA controlled the world’s writers and artists, or that it amounted to the complete control that some CIA officers might have hoped for. The world’s artists and intellectuals proved too slippery and unpredictable for that.”
This shouldn’t, though, absolve these institutions of all taint of their compromised origins. Furthermore, those origins, and the cynicism their exposure sparked, probably did cause collateral damage. “Encounter is full of very wonderful work,” Adam Piette of the University of Sheffield warns, “and it was a various and exciting thing to read, but its editors were selected by a pernicious process, and no amount of revision will magic away the ideological harm that selection and its exposure did to public perception of Cold War literature in America.”
It’s not surprising that these scoops would be getting renewed traction in the culture right now. After its disgraceful showing in the lead-up to the Iraq war, the Agency is enjoying a moment in the sun. The film Zero Dark Thirty and the Showtime series Homeland have given audiences a CIA full of sympathetic characters, and the popular FX series The Americans, with its KGB protagonists, is even making viewers nostalgic for the Cold War. And thanks to Edward Snowden, the CIA is not currently the most reviled American spy shop.
Cultural historians undermine their own credibility, though, when they overstate the scale and significance of these sub rosa cultural operations. Ultimately, they weren’t all that important to the Agency. Relatively little money went to these projects, and even the most sensationalistic exposés make it clear that CIA involvement was largely limited to monetary support. There is little evidence of the careful oversight, vetting, and direction that characterizes the CIA’s more notorious interventions. It’s flattering to think that the institutions that matter so much to us—art exhibitions, literary magazines, scholarly conferences—also matter to spymasters and covert agents. They do: But we need to keep in mind that it’s on a sliding scale.
Greg Barnhisel is an associate professor and chair in the English department at Duquesne University. His new book, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy, is to be published by Columbia University Press early next year.
