The cost of the Wurlitzer to Americans was immense, both literally and figuratively. (One Rusk Committee witness put the total annual expense of “CIA support for private, voluntary organizations,” excluding the proprietary radio stations, at about $15 million.)2 Quite apart from the personal crises that enveloped many private individuals who had participated in front operations, whether wittingly or unwittingly, when these operations were exposed in 1967 (the example of student leader Eugene Groves springs to mind), there was the miasma of suspicion that attached itself to all U.S. citizens—students, journalists, clergy, and aid workers—
who were working abroad for genuine nongovernment organizations or official agencies that had resisted covert penetration, such as the Peace Corps.3
At home, the revelations of 1967 damaged popular trust in government. Coming as they did several years before Watergate and the other political scandals of the mid-1970s, they constituted the first occasion in the postwar period when Americans learned en masse that they were being systematically deceived by federal officials. The news of covert CIA
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involvement also sullied the image of that most cherished of American institutions, the citizen association, arguably contributing to the decline of associational activity, which a number of observers have identified as one of the distinguishing features of late twentieth-century American life.4 Finally, the cult of covert action that gave rise to the Mighty Wurlitzer in the first place—and the incapacitating, demoralizing bouts of hostile external scrutiny that ensued when operations were exposed—distracted the CIA from its founding mission, the gathering and analysis of intelligence about threats to national security, the prevention of another Peal Harbor. Combined with other factors, such as presidential inattention and intelligence manipulation, this failing has had unfortunate and sometimes tragic consequences, the brunt of which has been born by ordinary Americans.
Was the cost worth it? The United States eventually won the Cold War struggle for hearts and minds, but how much this victory had to do with government-funded psychological warfare measures, as opposed to the spontaneous appeal of consumer capitalism or factors internal to the communist bloc, is very much open to question. The impact of propaganda on target populations is notoriously hard to measure, and in the case of CIA front operations the researcher lacks access even to the results of the public opinion surveys conducted by overt information agencies such as the USIA. The handful of country studies undertaken by scholars to date suggests an uneven impact, with some front organizations enjoying an enthusiastic reception, others meeting with resistance or opportunistic acts of appropriation, and all prone to the vagaries of local conditions over which the CIA had little or no control. That said, one generalization does seem possible: front operations were most effective when they succeeded in attracting the support of national elites who shared a positive vision of American power in the world. Thus, for example, the internationalist, modernizing, social democratic-tinged politics of the Reutherite CIO
played far better with overseas labor movements than the hectoring anticommunism and business unionism of the AFL’s Lovestoneite foreign policy apparatus. There is perhaps a lesson to be learned here by those currently concerned about improving the United States’s image abroad.
Indeed, a number of the issues raised by the history of the Mighty Wurlitzer are very much alive today, at a time when the CIA still holds a large stake in areas of American civil society. Take U.S. universities, for exam-
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ple. In 1976, the Church Committee reported that it was “disturbed” by the Agency’s “operational use” of individual academics, which included