Few of the CIA’s fronts were “innocents’ clubs,” to resurrect Willi Münzenberg’s contemptuous description of “fellow travelers” in the Popular Front era. Genuine unwittingness was a rare condition. Many supposed innocents had a pretty good idea what was going on, and allowed it to continue because they naturally supported the U.S. cause in the Cold War. Others were simply grateful for money, whatever its source, so they could advance their own collective or individual agendas. And some, convinced that they were better equipped to fight the Cold War than government officials, actually tried to get the upper hand in the relationship. In
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every case, some metaphor specific to the particular group involved seems more appropriate than the conventional musical or dramatic imagery: industrial relations, for example, or church-state conflict.
The evidence presented here has also placed question marks next to other widely held assumptions about U.S. front operations (most of which, it is important to note, originated in publicity generated by CIA boosters such as Tom Braden). One of these is that covert funding of voluntary organizations was forced upon government officials by the McCarthyite atmosphere of the early Cold War era. There is some truth to this claim, but it disregards the fact that the first front groups predated the worst of the postwar Red Scare, as well as the great tactical advantages that the CIA gained from secrecy, at least in the short term. These included, as an expert witness before the Rusk Committee noted in May 1967, “considerable flexibility” in determining levels of support, “a mini-mum of red tape,” and, most importantly, the appearance of independence in the eyes of target populations suspicious of American assistance “where the source of the funding is an identified U.S. Government agency.”1
Similarly, the notion that the covert action divisions of the Agency were ideologically predisposed to favor groups on the non-communist left, while again having much to recommend it, fails to account for the tensions that existed between intelligence officers and such leftists as the Lovestoneites, the New York intellectuals, and the Mensheviks, not to mention the spies’ readiness to sponsor right-wing émigré and religious groups when it served their purposes to do so. The corresponding claim that, in the cultural sphere, the CIA was particularly inclined to patronize modernist artists is undermined by evidence suggesting that, when circumstances demanded, it was also prepared to promote middle- and low-brow culture. Both politically and aesthetically, then, it seems that the Agency’s choice of clients was dictated by pragmatism rather than principle. It is surely telling that the archetypal CIA liberal, Braden, was willing to help his former employer kill off its blown NCL fronts in 1967.
What do we now know about the Mighty Wurlitzer? Modeled on the communist front, and powered by the natural energy of American associationalism, the CIA’s covert network was constructed by a group of elite men whose innate dislike of big government and official secrecy was offset by their hatred of communism and unquestioning belief in the moral righteousness of their own actions. Having failed in one of its origi-
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nal purposes, the mobilization of eastern-bloc émigrés to liberate the “captive nations,” the network was increasingly employed instead to prevent the communization of, first, western Europe, then such regions of the developing world as Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa. As this shift took place, the early influence on front operations of ex-communist ideologues gave way to a liberal, internationalist emphasis on development and modernization, with many of the citizen groups involved also active in social movements and minority struggles on the home front.
The CIA, however, was never able to resolve the fundamental contradiction between Cold War anticommunism and domestic reform at the heart of its front program; nor did the groups themselves ever succeed in reconciling their claims to representativeness at home and internationalism abroad with their covert purpose as state-funded weapons of political warfare. Eventually, when the Cold War consensus fragmented along racial, generational, and gender lines in the late 1960s, the difficulties not only of maintaining this unlikely alliance but also of keeping its existence secret became insurmountable, and the Wurlitzer collapsed. Its fate is symbolized most poignantly in the lives of the CIA officers who tried to “play”
it: the suicide Wisner, the disillusioned Meyer, and the disgraced Dulles.
Only Tom Braden emerged unscathed, and he had gotten out early.