Why are some of the biggest names in the culture of the West during
the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s – why are they linked to the CIA?
- How do you fight a war?
You may fight it with guns, bullets, tanks, missiles, drones
or maybe even soldiers.
There’s strategy. There’s bloodshed.
Homes are demolished. Entire populations might vanish.
But, how do you win a war?
With poetry.
♪♪
In his book, “The Master and Margarita,” Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov
infamously wrote, “Manuscripts do not burn.”
The line was a reference to Soviet censorship of books, about how ideas
ultimately cannot be destroyed, even if the books that hold them are.
It’s a powerful statement about the immortality of ideas.
But while Bulgakov was right, ideas still can be replaced or made obsolete.
And that’s actually the outlook the United States unwittingly adopted
during the Cold War to fight the Soviets.
- President Truman officially announces the end of German resistance.
When Nazi Germany fell in 1945, the U.S. and the Soviet Union
rose as the two major world powers.
And naturally, they rose in direct opposition to one another.
The Cold War was, at its root, partly about competing ideas on
how to govern, how to build economies.
The Americans knew that weapons and proxy wars
wouldn’t be enough to fight the war.
They had to fight the ideas that were foundational to Soviet ideology.
And so came the art and the music.
♪♪
The CIA, for 20 years, until their program was discovered,
were secretly promoting certain artists and intellectuals and musicians
and historians and philosophers and writers,
in a covert way, it was the kind of collective, cultural NATO.
The Soviets, early in the Cold War years as well as Communists in other countries,
mocked the United States as a cultural wasteland.
They would point to Soviet art, cinema, literature
and dance as evidence of the cultural depth of the Communist state.
What, they asked, did the bastion of capitalism
and individual freedom have to offer?
♪♪
In 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency was established.
One of its main tasks was, in fact, to use culture and art
as a means of spreading American influence,
or, at the very least, thwart the influence of enemies,
and those who were part of the Western intellectual and cultural elite,
who were critical of American foreign policy,
who wanted peace and a nuclear weapon-free world.
But the CIA couldn’t be seen as forcing it.
Americans wanted to stand for freedom.
That was very much the cause, the slogan, of the U.S. Cold War effort.
The U.S. government didn’t want to be seen to be controlling
American artists and intellectuals.
Three years later, in 1950, the CIA launched the Congress for Cultural Freedom
in West Berlin as a near-direct response to a series of
Soviet-organized workshops and meetings around the world for Communists
and those who were seen to be sympathizers.
The enemy wasn’t actually really Moscow.
The real enemy for the States, I think,
were the people who were not yet convinced
that this was the American Century,
that Pax Americana was the best way to go forward.
The purpose of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was to tap into
and exploit any seeds of anti-Communist, anti-Stalinist thoughts
that may have been swimming around among American
and Western European intelligentsia.
The very first meeting attracted several notable writers and intellectuals,
like Arthur Koestler, Tennessee Williams, Bertrand Russell,
John Dewey and Irving Brown.
The CIA plowed millions of dollars into the Congress for Cultural Freedom
via fake foundations.
Within a few years, Congress for Cultural Freedom was running arts festivals,
and publishing literary magazines, and staging conferences around the world.
It also established national affiliates in nearly 40 countries.
There was no other organization at the time that was comparable,
except perhaps for the funding that the Soviet Union
were giving to their own propaganda and psychological warfare outfits.
Publications in particular were told not to publish anything
that could be seen as critical of American foreign policy.
Famously, the CCF promoted this: abstract expressionism,
a style of art that emerged in New York City following World War II.
It was the first American-born style of art
that gained international prominence - and that was by design.
Abstract expressionism didn’t have structure.
It was spontaneous.
It was seen as just pure, carnal expression of human instinct.
This provided an incredible visual challenge to Soviet realist art
which, in comparison, was deemed as controlled and contrived.
It wasn’t natural human expression, but an authoritarian one.
Jackson Pollock, known for his paint-dripping technique,
was one of the handful of artists whose work was
promoted throughout the world through CIA-funded exhibitions.
It was difficult art. It was impressive art.
It gave the impression that the United States
had this very successful high culture,
which is something that many Communists claimed it didn’t.
This is something that artists wouldn’t have been doing in the Soviet Union,
where socialist realism was the dominant cultural aesthetic,
and artists seemed very sort of controlled, very regimented.
But, here was the catch: The world - including many, if not most
of the American and Western European writers, artists and thinkers who
were involved - had no idea that the CIA was behind the CCF, allegedly anyway.
I think many more had a pretty good idea that money was coming from the CIA.
There were actual CIA officers sort of working undercover
helping run the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
There was a small unit of people who knew — and that included
some of the intellectuals who were brought in on the secret —
and they were the ones who were then getting their other intellectuals
and artists and everybody conjoined to this,
but without telling them the truth.
The program was exposed in 1966 - 16 years after being founded -
through a series of articles published by the New York Times
and an exposé in 1967 by the far-left magazine Ramparts.
It was revealed that the reach of the CCF, of the CIA’s cultural Cold War front,
was in fact pretty far and wide.
Some of the 20th century’s most influential personalities,
from feminist Gloria Steinem to philosopher Isaiah Berlin,
had been, sometimes knowingly, involved in projects that served as CIA fronts.
Throughout this period, from 1950 to 1966,
the CIA’s involvement in the arts also creeped into film.
They saw an opportunity in George Orwell, in particular.
Orwell, who wrote such middle school classics as 1984 and Animal Farm,
described himself as a Democratic Socialist,
and was actually pretty anti-Stalinist and anti-Soviet-style socialism,
something which was unusual among leftist circles at the time.
The British government started this trend of translating Orwell’s novels,
like 1984 and Animal Farm,
and distributing them to foreign audiences.
It was such good work. It was so readable.
It was so accessible to foreign audiences.
And the CIA, I think noticed this and followed the British example.
His books “Animal Farm” and "1984" explored themes of totalitarianism,
government control, repression of free speech
and even individual identity and human relationships.
And that’s where the CIA turned to Hollywood.
When the animated film, “Animal Farm,” was released in 1954,
there was one major difference between the book and the film: the ending.
In the book, the oppressed farm animals look at both the human farmers
and the pigs, and they’re unable to differentiate between the two.
It was a metaphor for the tyranny of both capitalism and communism.
The farmers were the capitalists and the pigs were the communists.
But that didn’t fly with the CIA.
The CIA covertly provided funding for the film, and produced
an ending that only included the pigs - meaning no equivocation.
When the book, “1984,” was made into a movie,
the CIA again altered the ending.
Instead of the protagonist succumbing to the authoritarian regime,
they had him let out one last gasp of defiance.
It’s small, but it mattered.
But the CIA’s involvement in Hollywood during the Cold War didn’t stop there.
One of the biggest propaganda talking points of the Soviet Union was
to point out the treatment of Black Americans.
Jim Crow was, after all, alive and well for much of the Cold War.
So the CIA hired a guy, more or less.
In Hollywood, the CIA had a very secret sort of organization that was
scouting films, looking around at the films that were in production,
and trying to insert positive racial stereotypes.
But that wasn’t the only way the U.S. tried to counter the narrative of racism.
Enter the jazz ambassadors.
Much in the same way that abstract expressionism was seen to represent
American individual freedom through its spontaneity, so too was jazz.
In 1956, the U.S. State Department started a jazz ambassadorship project.
The idea was simple: Take some of the most notable and talented
American jazz musicians, and send them around the world.
In particular, the idea was to send them to decolonizing countries,
which were seen as ripe for influence — whether Soviet or American.
Jazz was very interesting because, like abstract expressionism,
it was a kind of thing that confused the Soviets.
There were cultural orthodoxies in the Soviet Union and in its satellites,
which, if they were broken by artists,
there was immediate reaction from the Soviet authorities.
Dizzy Gillespie was the first ambassador.
He toured the Middle East, South Asia and the Balkans.
♪♪
Gillespie’s success translated to more tours from American musicians,
such as Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck and Duke Ellington.
♪♪
While the program was, for the U.S. government, pretty straightforward,
it wasn’t for the musicians who were involved in it.
Remember, this is happening in the late ’50s and throughout the ’60s.
There’s a Civil Rights Movement in the United States,
there’s Jim Crow and there is a lot of violence.
How could they tour the world boasting the homestead of tolerance
and harmony the United States was, while their kin couldn’t even sit
at the same lunch counters as some of their fellow Americans
because of the color of their skin?
They went on the tours, but they had their own protests.
Gillepsie refused to be briefed by the State Department before his first tour.
He said he had 300 years of all the briefing he needed.
Louis Armstrong actually backed out of a Soviet Union tour in 1957
in response to the events in Little Rock, Arkansas, when nine black
students were prevented by the National Guard
from integrating into a local high school.
♪♪
OK, so I started off by saying that you win a war with poetry.
So, how much of a victory was the program
for the Americans against the Soviets?
I think the CIA probably would have been very pleased with the results
of its efforts in terms of how many Western intellectuals
the Congress was able to rope into its activities,
and all of the conferences, and festivals and literary magazines that came out of it.
But long-term, this always had the potential to sort of blow up in the CIA’s face.
It wasn’t a victory for culture, for literature, or for art, or for jazz
or for any other form of cultural or artistic expression.
Because, in my view, that needs to exist, and can only really breathe
if it's not locked in some kind of embrace of the political institutions
in which it finds itself. It’s about reacting to and against those things.
It’s hard to know this history, coupled with all the other clandestine
CIA efforts to, you know, undermine movements and governments,
and not feel like you can’t trust anyone or anything.
Especially these days when social media in particular makes it almost impossible
to know how much you’re experiencing is organic
versus how much, well, isn’t.
If it’s being done properly, you’re not going to know about it.
But you kind of, there is an acoustic sometimes that’s wrong.
Things emerge and they seem to be very well-funded.
And it’s like, where did all this come from?
Those are the things that I always look at and sort of wonder a bit.
But be careful because it can make you a bit paranoid.
Yeah, just a bit paranoid.
Fair warning by the way, the CIA did not approve this script
before we started filming.
Although I’m expecting a call sometime soon.
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