Central Intellectual Agency

...So was it all worth it...

...He became head of the organization's successor, the International Association for Cultural Freedom...

...That is no mean...

...The same Irving Brown had been elected to the original 1950 Congress for Cultural Freedom executive board, no doubt in keeping with the old Leninist slogan of uniting "workers of brain and brawn...

...Still, by funding literary and intellectual magazines like Encounter, the CIA—whether intentionally or not— made it possible to read regularly some of the best prose and poetry of the twentieth century...

...Berghahn misses one important aspect of the CIA's involvement: the connection with American labor...

...The congress had, as America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe shows, no endowment or physical assets of its own, but "it ran a multimillion dollar enterprise"—although, it must be added, always under the supervision of the CIA...

...Had the money been openly handed to managerial intellectuals to play with, the Congress for Cultural Freedom might have worked out...

...At which point, Diana Trilling, then the chairman of the American congress, fired off to the parent congress a brutal question: "How untruthful about America may a man be and still be useful to an organization which is pledged to truth and which numbers among its affiliates an American branch...

...Plenty—and the CIA man in Paris, the likable Michael Jos-selson, knew it...

...The second was the struggle to overcome the anti-Americanism of European intellectuals...

...standing...

...Berghahn writes that the congress "had representatives and select membership circles operating in most of western Europe, the United States, and an array of Asian, African and Latin American nations...

...As ambassador Philip Habib said about Irving Brown, the AFL operative in Europe who distributed the money where it would do the most anti-Soviet good: "We didn't use the sonofabitch, the sonofabitch used us...

...The battle against the Soviet campaign of ideas and letters against the West was won, at last, after four decades, and it was surely one of the great victories of contemporary civilization...

...That was a shame, for there were some spectacular intellectual achievements to the congress's credit, notably its magazines: Encounter in England, Der Monat in Germany, Preuves in France, Tempo Presente in Italy, Cuadernos in Latin America, and Quest in India...

...These were battles of high purpose in the campaign against communism, but they were filled with low skirmishes...

...BY ARNOLD BEICHMAN Between 1950 and 1970, two battles of the Cold War raged across Western Europe and the United States...

...A fat lot of good it did—since anti-American Europeans, whether left or right, remain incorrigible to this day...

...The second battle of the intellectuals' Cold War, the attempt to overturn European anti-Americanism, has yet to be won, and probably never will be...

...As Berghahn describes it, "The Congress for Cultural Freedom had been turned into an organization that was much more responsive to European intellectuals' preoccupations...

...When the American congress publicly condemned Bertrand Russell for his 1956 magazine article charging that the United States was a police state run by J. Edgar Hoover, the Paris headquarters rebuked the Americans for daring to criticize Lord Russell—an honorary Congress for Cultural Freedom chairman no less...

...The first was the fight against the Soviet Union's effort to control the world of ideas and letters...

...Among the earlier ones were Peter Coleman's judicious study The Liberal Conspiracy and Frances Stonor Saunders's The Cultural Cold War, a tirade against anything and everything the Congress for Cultural Freedom did...

...I should note, in the interest of full disclosure, that I was a later chairman of the American affiliate...

...After War World II, the Kremlin relaunched its cultural offensive against the West, and the then-newly created CIA sought to command the free world's countermeasures...

...The Congress for Cultural Freedom drove from its board Arthur Koestler and Sidney Hook because they were hard-line anti-Commu-nists—and by shunting these hard-liners to the sidelines, the CIA operation "won the support of a significant number of highly regarded European academics, intellectuals, businessmen and politicians," says Berghahn approvingly...

...When the Congress for Cultural Freedom leadership persisted in its secrecy, he resigned...

...Under AFL president George Meany and his successor, Lane Kirkland, the AFL (and later the AFL-CIO) took large CIA subventions to help finance their fight against entrenched Communist labor unions, especially in France and Italy...

...Berghahn, however, has availed himself of the archived papers of the late Shepard Stone, whose justifiable claim to fame was the years he devoted to the democratization of the defeated Nazi state as an officer of the United States High Commission in West Germany...

...And, like the CIA, the resulting congress seemed more concerned with Europe than America...

...Berghahn's book, an important contribution to intellectual history, is the most recent volume on the Congress for Cultural Freedom...

...Stone came in at the tag-end of the Congress for Cultural Freedom story and tried, with the financial help of a reluctant Ford Foundation, then the largest philanthropic organization in the world, to salvage something from what was the still quivering postexposé Congress for Cultural Freedom corpse...

...The details are now mostly forgotten, but in a scholarly volume called America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe, Volker R. Berghahn, a history professor at Columbia University, has resurrected them, centering his story on the fascinating character of Shepard Stone, the American bureaucrat, editor, writer, and intellectual cold warrior...

...It supported a dozen or more intellectual and scholarly journals in major languages of the world, and it organized large and expensive international conferences on central themes of contemporary concern...

...The effect was fiascoes like the international organization (the "Congress for Cultural Freedom Secretariat") hoping to win the admiration of European intellectuals by demanding in vain that its American affiliate (the "American Committee for Cultural Freedom") support a pardon of the Rosenbergs, the atomic spies, on the eve of their execution...

...So the Europeans were wined and dined, and, lured by juicy honoraria, these poules de luxe agreed to be wafted to the loveliest places in the Mediterranean at high season for conferences and seminars...

...In 1950 it secretly planned and financed what became known as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, headquartered in Paris, at the very heart of the European anti-Americanism that was being fanned by Stalinist intellectuals...

...Those too young to remember may ask: What was so wrong about CIA financing...

...The CIA's role was exposed in 1967, which—given the bad odor of Cold War spying—pretty much ended the Congress for Cultural Freedom's moral A Hoover Institution research fellow, Arnold Beichman is author of Anti-American Myths: Their Causes and Consequences...

...Berghahn quotes a letter in which Josselson says he tried hard "to protect all those associated with the Congress from any damage to their reputation which might result from a discovery of the CIA connection...

...The Congress for Cultural Freedom was an extraordinary organization that had as its guiding philosophy Daniel Bell's classic, The End of Ideology (although Berghahn over-credits the book with almost mystical omnipresence...

...But the labor leaders never allowed the CIA or the State Department to dictate their policies...

...In short, the CIA reduced the congress to a CIA department...

...Brown kept pressing the Congress for Cultural Freedom leadership to get "legal": either to take CIA funds openly or else find non-CIA financing...

...But the CIA, captivated by a sense of omniscience, wanted to run, if not the actual content of magazines like Encounter, then at least the political activities of the Congress for Cultural Freedom...