“providing leads and making introductions for intelligence purposes, collaboration in research and analysis, intelligence collection abroad, and preparation of books and other propaganda materials.”5 In the years that immediately followed, American academic leaders, most notably the president of Harvard University, Derek Bok, attempted to impose some control over CIA activities on campus, drawing up codes of professional conduct to govern dealings between individual academics and intelligence officers. This campaign had little effect.6 The Agency refused to abide by the guidelines and continued to employ professors for recruitment, research, and intelligence-gathering purposes, even at Bok’s own university, where in 1986 Professor Nadav Safran, director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, was censured for using CIA money to organize an international conference without informing the attendees.7 If anything, these practices have intensified in recent years, with the “war on terror” recreating the conditions of total mobilization that prevailed in the first years of the Cold War. A few intractable individuals still speak out, alleging a fundamental conflict between the values of scholarly inquiry and secret intelligence; but the CIA is, according to the
The front group also has in recent years undergone a revival of sorts.
Neoconservative intellectuals—the ideological and, in several cases, biological descendants of the New York intellectuals of an earlier generation—have employed tactics and techniques first used on American soil by the Old Left during the 1930s, which were then resurrected by a CIA front, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, during the 1950s.
Ventures such as the Project for a New American Century (the invention of William Kristol, son of ACCF officer and neocon intellectual “godfa-ther,” Irving Kristol) prosecute the neoconservatives’ notion of a “global democratic revolution” in the Middle East.9 There have even been reports linking Azar Nafisi’s
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Cold War.10 Meanwhile, in an ironic and ghastly symmetry, radical Islamic groups posing as community welfare organizations have used the front tactic in an effort to recruit young British Muslims for further terror-ist attacks on western targets. (It is not clear at this stage to what extent this practice has spread to the United States.)11 Far from dying out after the end of the Cold War, the front group is alive and well, and living in Bradford, England.
Should western intelligence services use the tactic themselves in the war on terror? The example of the U.S. front groups created in the early years of the Cold War suggests that such operations do not necessarily en-tail cynical manipulation and passive obedience. Indeed, the CIA’s state-private network was built to a great extent on shared values and involved a surprising amount of self-assertion on the part of the private citizens who belonged to it. Nevertheless, no matter how much one dwells on the consensual and voluntarist aspects of the relationship, the fact remains that the front tactic was based on secrecy and deception, making it all the more problematic when undertaken in a nation avowedly dedicated to the principles of freedom and openness. “Operations of this nature are not in character for this country,” concluded George Kennan, who had been perhaps the most influential advocate of communist-style propaganda methods at the beginning of the Cold War, in 1985. “I regret today, in light of the experience of the intervening years, that the decision was taken.”12
CIA front operations in the Cold War blighted individual careers and lives; their eventual exposure stained the reputation of the nation itself.
Public diplomacy, the winning of hearts and minds, should be left to overt government agencies and genuine, nongovernment organizations. This is the most valuable lesson to be drawn from the history of the Mighty Wurlitzer.
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Notes
Introduction
1. Anon., “‘Warm, Open’ Scholar,”
2. Ibid.
3. W. Eugene Groves, “President’s Report to the Twentieth National Student Congress,” 1967, box 62, folder President’s Report, U.S. National Students Association Papers, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. For more on the revelations and their aftermath, see chap. 10.