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Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War
 
 
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Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War (Paperback)

by Frances Stonor Saunders (Author) "During the height of the Cold War, the US government committed vast resources to a secret programme of cultural propaganda in western Europe ..." (more)
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Amazon.co.uk Review
In the post-war period, the CIA funded not just the right-wing bits of European intellectual life but also the centre, in order to detach intellectuals from the Left, and this book tells us how. It is touching on the career of Michael Josselson, the principal intellectual bagman who in 1950 became the Congress' Administrative Secretary, and his eventual betrayal by various people like Stephen Spender who scapegoated him. Sanders demonstrates that, in the early days, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the emergent CIA were less dominated by the far right than they later became, and that the idea of helping out progressive moderates--rather than being Machiavellian--actually appealed to the men at the top.

Many intellectuals were still drawn to Stalin's Russia. Saunders superbly traces the crisis of conscience that McCarthyism and its associated bookburning in US libraries caused, and the subsequent rise of more moderate ideals. Saunders does not discuss the way the cult of Kennedy grows out of the same soil as a lot of this stuff--he was an excuse to love America after all. This is an exhaustive account, which, despite neglecting some important side issues, is an essential book. --Roz Kaveney --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description
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.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Fine study of intellectual corruption, 2 Jun 2008
By William Podmore (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This splendid book examines the US Central Intelligence Agency's role waging a cultural and propaganda war against socialist ideas in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. The CIA created, funded and ran the Congress for Cultural Freedom, while both bodies always claimed that the CCF was quite independent.

From the start of the US state's not-so-altruistic Marshall Plan, it gave $200 million a year to support the CIA's various activities, including assassinations, coups, strike-breaking, election-rigging, and setting up supposedly independent magazines (like Encounter), festivals and organisations.
.
The CIA worked closely, as it still does today, with the Foreign Office and MI6. The Foreign Office's secret Information Research Department supported the 'left-wing' Labour journal Tribune and distributed its material internationally.

The US state backed moves towards a federal Europe and the EEC, rightly seeing the EEC as a capitalist bulwark against socialism. So the European Movement was "funded almost entirely by the CIA through a dummy front called the American Committee for a United Europe".

Saunders concludes, "the same people who read Dante and went to Yale and were educated in civic virtue recruited Nazis, manipulated the outcome of democratic elections, gave LSD to unwitting subjects, opened the mail of thousands of American citizens, overthrew governments, supported dictatorships, plotted assassinations, and engineered the Bay of Pigs disaster. `In the name of what?' asked one critic. `Not civic virtue, but empire.'"

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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Cutlure's dark corners., 12 Jul 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War (Hardcover)
This is a wonderful work of both scholarship and story-telling. It demonstrates something one hadn't previously figured about the CIA, that it contained pockets of idealism and a desire to work with the non-communist Left. Out of the CIA came the backing for Abstract Expressionism, the music of Schoenberg. But of it also came the successful campaign to deprive Pablo Neruda of the Nobel first time round. Everyone working in the field of culture should read this book and consider how far political allegience should be allowed to go with art? Only a kiss or all the way? Frances Stonor Saunders has wonderfully re-created the times. This is a marvellous book
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5.0 out of 5 stars With "Freedom" Fighters Like These Who Needs Totalitarians?, 13 Jul 2009
By S Wood (Scotland) - See all my reviews
A fine, readable book on the CIA programme to fund allegedly leftist/high cultural movements during the first half of the so called cold war. The cast of characters are a fairly unlikeable bunch - examples Nicholas Nabokov (3rd rate composer and cousin to the much more talented novelist), Irving Kristol (grandpa to the neo-conservative movement), Arthur Koestler (one time communist, writer and rapist, full time loud mouth). It hardly surprises one that those shady characters sold their souls to the CIA. What is surprising that it took so long for their cover to be blown.

Other characters include those on the right of the labour party in Britain, and other ostensible leftists such as Willy Brandt. The pious and owlish Issiah Berlin pops up here, then there, with advice and support but always keeping himself comfortably in the plausible deniability zone. The more one knows of Issiah Berlins life the less comfortable one is with his writings and reputation, he was a one time spy for the putative Israeli state - and now an "independent" operator around the edges of the CIA's underhand program. What next one wonders? George "Big Brother" Orwell, a writer who I think is seriously overated, makes an appearance for his shabby informing to the secret services of his fellow writers. Of course one cant blame Orwell for the CIA production of Animal Farm but it is fascinating to look over their shoulders as they make the changes to make it politically correct in the CIA sense of that overused phrase. Sometimes, when reading this book, you get the impression that these self proclaimed and government funded freedom fighters are incapable of defending their point of view, or attacking their opponents, in the open with the pen which is what this reader thought cultural freedom in a democratic society might entail.

The book takes sometime to get going, there being a large cast of characters to introduce. While it is undoubtedly an important and interesting book, constant immersion in the activities of such entities as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Encounter, CIA, MI5, Information Research Department, etcetera, etcetera can have a dampening effect on your soul. As can the accounts of McCarthyism which had a devestating effect on a huge number of progressives in the United States.

That said, it has its entertaining side to - the level of bitching between our warriors for "Cultural Freedom" is sustained at a high level: Stephen Spenders level of naivety is awe inspiring, Koestlers crassness makes one wince. Its most valuable service is in puncturing myths of the Good vs the Bad that was the official plot line for the Cold War.

A worthwhile book, and a fascinating read - and one that has a renewed relevance in recent years given the with us or against us polarisation of the War on Terror.
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