The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters

Rating:
Summary: An unmined field
Review: As a reading experience, the narrative is oddly fascinating; as a source of obscure information, the material is richly rewarding; but as a history of the culture wars of the early cold war period, the book is mediocre at best. The narrative succeeds because the author keeps it moving nicely, providing biographical information when needed, but never as a drag. (Turns out that key shapers of early CIA were pedigeed establishment figures, lending weight to view of the Agency as an establishment - and not a populist - response to post-war world.) The intrigues lack the usual blood and guts of CIA operations, but are fascinating nonetheless, as intellectuals battle one another on both sides of the iron curtain. Saunders has done a service by providing information from research on this little known corner of the cold war. (Who among the general readership would otherwise know of the political intrigues that surrounded the promotion of non-representational art!) As a history of the culture war, the book doesn't work nearly as well, mainly because the events unfold without much historical context to illuminate them. For example, we learn very little of why various conferences were scheduled by the CIA's front organization, The Congress fo Cultural Freedom. Were they part of a larger propaganda offensive, perhaps in response to an aggressive Soviet move, or maybe to provide a paid holiday for penniless academics. etc. By and large, the adversarial Soviet Union, a key player in the drama, remains a very shadowy and unanalyzed presense throughout.

It's always tricky in a book about the Cold War to adopt a correct distance from the material. In this case, I believe Saunders succeeds admirably given the politically charged subject matter. She's largely non-judgemental toward the leading players, most of whom are none to sympathetic. Just as importantly, she is alert to the ironies of a Congress that preaches artistic freedom, yet whose publications refuse to include material critical of U.S. policy or objectives. In the final analysis, as she indicates on the last page, this was not a contest between virtue and evil, but between competing empires, one of which still stands with all its powers of deception still intact. The author has done a nice job of documenting one of those deceptive operations in action.

Rating:
Summary: CIA AS THE U.S. AUTHOR'S SUGARDADDY
Review: From faraway London, Frances Stonor Saunders took on a thorny topic-- CIA's secret underwriting of editors and authors in the US and Europe .In effect, says Saunders,the CIA thought it prudent to bribe name brand writers when the Cold War got under way . Bribery makes great writers; Saunders' list of those who took bribes includes the best poets, novelists and pop writers of the era . But are we to believe that an Englishwoman has the right slant on the CIA? Maybe. On the other hand a secret agency , with secret budgets in the billions ( when a buck was a buck) could create any sort of media, without a single politician or president or magazine, raising a voice against the notion. Did the CIA create publishing firms ? Did it commissions books and articles ? Did it inject itself into the managements and boards of directors of media firms ? We can't tell from Saunders book. But its at least a beginning . Maybe some American will now take on the big job of telling us what the CIA is up to today in the infotainment field . After all, this is all the CIA has to do--management the media . With the cold war over, the CIA can even bribe Russians in the print and broadcasting industries .

Rating:
Summary: A Revisionist History of One 20th Century "Kulturkampf"
Review: This is a highly nuanced work- a decouverture and denouement of the scams and schemes of one particular compartment of cultural intelligence work orchestrated by one organisation- by the compilers of a new generation. Its oft stilted prose and loaded language are quite similar to that employed by Nicholas Davidow in his character assassination portrayal of major league baseball player and OSS operator Moe Berg.

Anyone who has read Simone de Beauvoir's roman-a-clef "The New Mandarins", published nearly half a century ago can match the players who hang out in her novel's fictive "Bar Rouge" (The Ritz Hotel Bar in Paris) with the names Frances Stonor Saunders chooses to name in her work. Nothing really new here.

Stonor's process of contacting and interviewing family members of those who played some role in the "Congress for Cultural Freedom" deserves praise and projects the sense of an open society that, today, is far more open than those whose machinations created the CCF could have ever imagined, or, wanted, for that matter.

Although the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, the "two Germanys" and the Vatican all conducted their own cultural operations, based on their own interests and requirements, Stonor focuses on the United States, where freedom of information laws are light years ahead of the other major players.

There's a much bigger picture to be painted here. Questions that could have been raised, that were not. For example, why did Conor Cruise O'Brien, someone with known links to the CCF argue that Albert Camus was a "grade B" writer and that he received the 1960 Nobel Prize for Literature only to counterpoise the "Communist" existentialist and acadamician Jean-Paul Sartre?

Then too, Stonor's focus on the CCF leaves out another key element of the U.S. "kulturkampf" strategy, namely, the issue of "journalistic cover." This is an area where an individual with Stonor's keen investigative talents could unearth a goldmine of information that would have relevance and demand accountability today.

With the velocity of information moving today exponentially faster than it did during the period being examined by Stonor, one wonders whether it is best to expend such outstanding investigative energy turning the old stones of the past, or to examine the new stones that are gathering no moss. As our global economy migrates toward the civic religion of democratic corporativism, this is the issue that Stonor and others should be examining.