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spent, with left-wing literati sometimes purloining it for purposes that had little or nothing to do with the superpower conflict. The CIA might have tried to call the tune, I concluded, but the piper did not always play it, nor the audience dance to it.16
This book, therefore, has two main aims. One is to provide the first comprehensive account of the CIA’s covert network from its creation in the late 1940s to its exposure twenty years later, encompassing all the main American citizen groups involved in front operations, not just in Europe but in the Third World as well. The other is to portray the relationship between the CIA and its client organizations in as complete and rounded a manner as possible, combining intelligence history with the specific social history or histories of the groups concerned. My hope is that, by telling both sides of the story, the groups’ as well as the CIA’s, I will shed new light not only on the U.S. government’s conduct of the Cold War, but also on American society and culture in the mid-twentieth century.
Finally, a few words about the principles of selection underpinning the structure of this book. Although my survey of CIA front operations is intended to be comprehensive, it is not exhaustive. It is highly likely that we still do not know the identity of all the groups that received covert subsidies. One, Patrick Peyton’s Family Rosary Crusade (described in Chapter 8) has only just come to light. In any case, it would be impossible to discuss in detail between the covers of a single volume every committee and project that is known to have been CIA-financed. Instead, what I have chosen to do is identify the main groups within American society that participated in the covert network and devote a chapter to each, concentrating on the activities of the most important organizations and individuals involved. This means that certain front operations, those that involved only a handful of U.S. citizens (in other words, ones that did not mobilize a distinct social group) and served little purpose beyond providing a funding conduit to foreign recipients, will receive merely passing mention.17
What follows, then, is the story of how the CIA attempted to mobilize a cross-section of American society in the Cold War struggle for hearts and minds—to “play” America as if it were a giant musical instrument—
and how U.S. citizens at first followed the Agency’s score, then began im-provising their own tunes, eventually turning harmony into cacophony.
O N E
Innocents’ Clubs
T H E O R I G I N S O F T H E C I A F R O N T
One day in late October 1940, during the first year of the Nazi occupation, two hunters were making their way home through woods just north of the small French town of Montagne, near Grenoble, when the excited barking of their dogs drew them to an old oak tree. Propped up against the trunk, almost concealed by drifting autumn leaves, was the badly decom-posed body of a man, its head almost entirely denuded of flesh. Around the neck was a knotted cord, which had apparently snapped after having been suspended from an overhanging branch. A search of the corpse carried out later that day by the town’s mayor and coroner turned up documents that revealed the body as being that of a German citizen named Willi Münzenberg. Unclear as to just who this man was, and not wanting to attract the attention of the Gestapo, the French officials rapidly reached a verdict of suicide, despite the absence of a note and the body’s failing to display injuries usually associated with self-inflicted hanging.1
If the inhabitants of Montagne had not heard the name Münzenberg before, there were many in Europe—and, for that matter, several in the United States—who had. Born in 1889, the son of a violent, alcoholic innkeeper in southeastern Prussia, the handsome young radical had cut his teeth organizing communist youth in local factories, earning a reputation with the German authorities as a sort of professional malcontent.
“He gave the impression,” recalled the novelist Arthur Koestler, “that bumping against him would be like colliding with a steam roller.”2 Struck by his ideological fervor and tactical ingenuity, Leon Trotsky brought
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Münzenberg into the small circle of Marxist intellectuals that surrounded exiled Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in Zurich. Münzenberg was not, however, in the company of Russian revolutionaries who in 1917 famously boarded the train that carried them in a sealed compartment to the Finland station in Petrograd. Instead, he moved to Berlin and, as the highest-ranking Bolshevik outside the Soviet Union, set about leading the western world into revolution.
Münzenberg’s first major assignment was to raise money for victims of the ghastly famine that swept the Volga region of Russia in the early 1920s. Despite massive incompetence in the actual handling of funds and an obsession with discrediting outside humanitarian interventions such as Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Association, Münzenberg’s famine appeal was a propaganda coup, generating considerable sympathy for the Bolshevik regime, not least in the United States, where the Friends of Soviet Russia committee “literally raised more money in its first two months than it knew what to do with.”3 Out of these early efforts grew the so-called Münzenberg trust, a vast media empire of newspapers, publishing houses, movie houses, and theaters which, “on paper at least,” stretched from Berlin “to Paris to London to New York to Hollywood to Shanghai to Delhi.”4 The financial profitability of these ventures has probably been overestimated—Münzenberg’s most recent biographer thinks that the
“Red Millionaire” was in fact a poor businessman who lost rather than made money for Moscow5—but their effectiveness as instruments of propaganda has not. Particularly successful were Münzenberg’s various “front”
groups, committees superficially devoted to some undeniably benign cause, such as anti-imperialism, peace, or antifascism, whose real purpose was to defend and spread the Bolshevik revolution. Using such devices as letterhead adorned with famous names, spectacular cultural festivals, and carefully stage-managed mock trials, these organizations proved irresistible to politically well-meaning progressives, whose participation made them, in effect, “fellow travelers” of the international communist movement. Münzenberg referred to the front committees as his “Innocents’
Clubs.”6 “These people have the belief that they are actually doing this themselves,” he once told an associate. “This belief must be preserved at any price.”7
The apotheosis of the front tactic came in August 1935, when the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International proclaimed the
T H E O R I G I N S O F T H E C I A F R O N T
13
People’s Front against fascism. The Popular Front, as it was known, lived up to its name. In the United States, for example, writers and artists flocked to the antifascist cause. Just returned from the front line in the Spanish Civil War, Ernest Hemingway told the Second Congress of the League of American Writers that fascism was “a lie told by bullets.”8
Movie stars such as Melvyn Douglas, Paul Muni, and James Cagney sponsored the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. “This machine kills fascists,” proclaimed the guitar of hobo balladeer Woody Guthrie. And these were only the most conspicuous converts. Across the whole spectrum of American society, citizen groups gravitated to the Front. African Americans, already impressed by communists’ apparent sympathy for their civil rights (the International Labor Defense, which saved nine young black men accused of raping two white women from a legal lynching in Scottsboro, Alabama, was a branch of Münzenberg’s International Workers Relief) joined the National Negro Congress. Factory workers in heavy industries, long regarded as untouchable by the established trade unions, formed the rank-and-file of communist-led organizing drives that coalesced in a new national labor confederation, the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Student protestors, attracted by the campus campaigns of the American Student Union, formed a national mass youth movement some thirty years before the university strikes of the 1960s.9
Of course, for every U.S. citizen who joined a front organization, there were many more who kept their distance. For anticommunist Americans, then and since, the Popular Front was cheap political theater, a marionette show in which foreign puppet-masters pulled the strings of the naïve and foolish. Recently this view has apparently been vindicated, in dramatic fashion, by a series of documentary revelations that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War. First, historians who gained access to the archives of the Communist International and the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) in Moscow discovered papers showing that not only had American communists received large sums of cash from the Kremlin (rumors of “Moscow gold” had circulated for years without hard evidence to back them up) but also that the CPUSA leadership, including no less a figure than the Party’s General Secretary throughout the Popular Front era, Earl Browder, had actively connived in spying by Soviet agents in the United States during the 1930s and early 1940s.10
Then, in 1995, the National Security Agency revealed the existence of
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VENONA, a top-secret Cold War signals intelligence operation that had succeeded in decoding a number of messages between Soviet diplomats in America and Moscow that had been intercepted during World War II.
Here was proof that many of the claims about Soviet espionage made in the reckless, overcharged, anticommunist atmosphere of the late 1940s and early 1950s were in fact true. Julius Rosenberg, executed for treason in 1953 and long afterward thought to be a victim of judicial murder, was indeed an “atom spy.” Many of the U.S. government officials accused of espionage by the emotionally unstable “blonde spy queen” and FBI informer Elizabeth Bentley really had, it turned out, passed government secrets to the Soviets. There were even intercepts strongly suggesting that Alger Hiss, the suave, patrician New Dealer at the center of the period’s most controversial spy case, was a Soviet agent after all (although Hiss’s defenders are disputing this interpretation of VENONA even now).11