You Had To Be There.

• Author: Laqueur, Walter
• Position: Review

Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999), 509 pp., [pounds]20.

THE CONGRESS for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was founded at a big public meeting of intellectuals in Berlin, in the summer of 1950. Appropriately, the event coincided exactly with the outbreak of the Korean War--appropriately, because its establishment was the American response to an earlier Soviet initiative--in Wroclaw, Poland--to mobilize European writers, artists and intellectuals in its Cold War effort. (It was at Wroclaw on that occasion that the Stalinist apparatchik, Alexander Fadeyev, displaying his credentials as a literary critic, observed that if hyenas and jackals could write they would do so in the style of T.S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre.) Given the political circumstances of the time, the sense of an urgent need for such a response was widespread: most of Eastern Europe had just been folded into the Soviet empire, the communists had triumphed in China, there were huge communist parties in France and Italy, and a large segment of Western intellectual opinion--perhaps the preponderant part--either f avored the Soviet position or was neutral between it and the American one.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom was to exist for seventeen years, and some of the journals it sponsored continued to appear well after that. With its headquarters in Paris and its dozen or so periodicals, its frequent conferences and seminars, the Congress was supported by the CIA as part of that organization's covert activities, money being channeled through several existing foundations. This was kept a secret at the time, and it is doubtful whether anyone but Michael Josselson, the secretary-general of the CCF and a covert CIA operative, and possibly one or two others within the organization, knew about it. Not that it would have been considered a matter of paramount concern by the key figures in the organization had they known, because at the time the sense of freedom under attack was so strong that help would have been accepted from just about any quarter. It was an unfortunate arrangement, bound to backfire sooner or later, but there was no alternative at hand. There was no American agency dealing wit h cultural activities abroad on the lines of the British Council or the Alliance Francaise, and there was not a ghost of a chance that the U.S. Congress would have passed legislation for a project over which, by necessity, it would...