THE CULTURAL COLD WAR: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters.

• Author: de Neufville, Robert
• Position: Review

THE CULTURAL COLD WAR: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters by Frances Stonor Saunders The New Press, $29.95

ALTHOUGH HIS HARTFORD neighbors never knew it, my grandfather Lawrence de Neufville worked for the better part of two decades as a spy. Among other things, he helped oversee a vast cultural propaganda campaign in Western Europe for the CIA. When Frances Stonor Saunders contacted him for this fascinating new book, he was amused to think his cover would finally be blown, more than 40 years after he left the Agency. "I guess the old boys here in town will get a bit of a surprise," he said.

The linchpin of this effort, from 1950 until its link to the CIA was exposed in 1967, was the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Through the Congress and parallel organizations, the CIA secretly underwrote international conferences, art expositions, music festivals, and more than 20 magazines, including the highly respected Encounter, which was edited originally by Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol. The CIA campaign was so extensive that, at its height, it would not be wrong to say that the agency acted as a secret ministry of culture. Nearly every prominent Western intellectual in the early years of the Cold War was, wittingly or unwittingly, involved with some CIA-backed program. Among those most notably implicated were historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., French social theorist Raymond Aron, novelist and essayist Arthur Koestler, and philosopher Bertrand Russell. According to a U.S. government oversight committee, by the mid-'60s almost half the grants given out by various philanthropies--including some by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations--involved some CIA money.

The campaign was designed to bolster Western Europe against the ideological encroachment of Soviet Communism. Specifically, and in an apparent irony, the CIA wanted to highlight the way the American system protected the right of the individual "to hold and express opinions ... different from those of his rulers." CIA planners had realized that the key battle of the Cold War--and indeed the battle whose loss ultimately spelled the end of Soviet power in 1991--was not merely for physical control of Europe but for the hearts and minds of Europeans.

Saunders glosses over the hard question of whether or not it made practical sense or was ethically right to secretly finance intellectual and cultural activity. Instead, she is content to assume that the CIA campaign was sinister and...