In April 1949, Kennan wrote Secretary of State Dean Acheson asking for the go-ahead to launch “one of the principal instrumentalities for accomplishing a number of our most important policy objectives.”4 Acheson in turn contacted diplomatic elder and veteran anti-Bolshevik Joseph Grew, who agreed to chair the new organization. Meanwhile, corporate lawyer Allen Dulles, still without a government position yet exerting a growing behind-the-scenes influence over the emergent U.S. intelligence apparatus, attended to the legal practicalities, filing a certificate of incorporation with the State of New York in May. On June 1, 1949, Grew held a press conference, announcing the formation of the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE) (a name later shortened to the Free Europe Committee) and introducing a group of sponsors that, in the words of Frances Stonor Saunders, “read like
including Dwight Eisenhower, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Cecil B.
DeMille.5 Shortly afterward, Dulles accepted the post of executive secretary, leaving the more visible job of NCFE president to DeWitt C. Poole, a State Department expert on anticommunist propaganda who, as a young official in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, had witnessed the Bolshevik revolution and, during World War II, managed émigré relations for the OSS.
In 1951, Poole was succeeded by Time, Inc., senior executive C. D. Jackson, previously Eisenhower’s head of psychological warfare operations during the war.
According to outward appearances, the NCFE was an independent organization spontaneously formed by private American citizens, “one of those innumerable voluntary associations which make up democratic society,” as Grew put it.6 In fact, the New York–based corporation was a proprietary of Frank Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), which provided it, as per Kennan’s 1948 memo, with both secret guidance and funding, the former arriving in the shape of verbal or written directives from Washington, the latter a weekly check fetched from the Wall Street offices of investment bank Henry Sears & Co.7 Details of these arrangements were divulged to employees on a strictly “need-to-know” basis and only after a careful security vetting. There was, however, no shortage of clues as to the committee’s real nature. When questions of policy or the
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organization’s budget came up, “witting” officers would refer mysteriously to “our friends in the South” or the “Sponsor” (the committee itself was the “Fund”).8 Government classification codes appeared on internal committee memoranda, as did handwritten annotations with the initials
“F. W.”9 The whole operation had an oddly sleek feel to it for “a struggling young organization of European refugees.” Visitors to the NCFE’s headquarters expecting to find themselves in a “barren loft” discovered instead a plush suite of offices on the third floor of the Empire State Building.10 This high standard of accommodation reflected the generosity of the OPC’s patronage. “Contributions” received by the committee during the financial year 1951–52 alone amounted to $18,017,864.11
The obvious wealth of the NCFE created an urgent need for a cover story. This was provided by the “Crusade for Freedom,” a public fund-raising drive devised by Abbott Washburn, an ex-OSS officer and public relations expert who was seconded from food conglomerate General Mills for the purpose.12 Earlier in the century, the PR genius Edward L. Bernays had adapted such covert techniques as the front organization for commercial purposes, creating, for example, the Tobacco Society for Voice Culture, an apparently independent group dedicated to promoting the message that smoking improved people’s singing, on behalf of one of his clients, Ches-terfield cigarettes.13 During World War II, the U.S. public relations industry was pressed into the cause of strengthening civilian morale through the War Advertising Council (later renamed the Advertising Council), which encouraged the public to buy war bonds and conserve war materials.14 Now, Washburn was being invited to draw on this tradition of secret salesmanship and government service in order to “sell” the Cold War to the American public—and, in doing so, provide a plausible explanation for the large sums of cash sitting in the coffers of the National Committee for a Free Europe.15
Launched by General Eisenhower on Labor Day, 1950, the Crusade for Freedom employed a number of ingenious devices to stimulate the support of ordinary Americans. A “Freedom Bell,” cast (like the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall) in an English foundry, was transported around the nation on the “Freedom Train” before being shipped to Europe and, during an emotional ceremony watched by a crowd of 400,000, installed in the tower of the Schöneberg Rathaus in Berlin.16 Echoing the
“Campaign of Truth” launched earlier in the year by President Truman,
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