Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War

During the Cold War, writers and artists were faced with a huge challenge. In the Soviet world, they were expected to turn out works that glorified militancy, struggle, and relentless optimism. In the West, freedom of expression was vaunted as liberal democracy’s most cherished possession. But such freedom could carry a cost. This book documents the extraordinary energy of a secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West were instruments – whether they knew it or not, whether they liked it or not – of America’s secret service. Frances Stonor Saunders shows how the CIA infiltrated itself into every niche in the cultural sphere. Its front organizations and the ‘philanthropic’ foundations that channelled its money ran congresses, mounted exhibitions, organized concerts and flew symphony orchestras around the world. They sponsored high and abstract art as a riposte to the dullness of socialist realism. Ambitious publishing programmes and expensive translations were subsidized; and journals throughout Europe, and beyond, had their losses offset by generous backers who answered to the CIA. Arthur Koestler, Melvin Lasky, Tom Braden, Nicolas Nabokov and Michael Josselson were among the gallery of flamboyant operators who ran the campaigns, and flattered and seduced contributors and editors. Stonor Saunders has written what is, in effect, a brilliant, critical, collective biography of this freewheeling circle. The best of them had a genuine passion for Western values; others were driven by an inverted and cynical Leninist zeal. The idealists found themselves compromising the very values of intellectual freedom that motivated them; and all of them were tarnished when the thin veil of secrecy was torn off in the late 1960s. Stonor Saunders’ portraits of individuals in this group – whether high-toned members of the Ivy League élite or tough Jewish ex-leftists – are vivid, hard-etched, and often moving. This is the compulsively readable story of a covert system of patronage unprecedented in modern history.