17d05d030193283f60ac573244de53e6 полностью

The effect of the Times revelations was shattering. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was plunged into controversy, as illustrious American and European intellectuals argued bitterly about who among them had been witting of the CIA connection; wracked by resignations and reviled by younger writers, the disgraced organization sank into obscurity. The powerful president of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), George Meany (who, newly available documents show, personally attended meetings with CIA chiefs in the early 1950s), resolutely denied there ever having been any secret dealings between his organization and the federal government; his statements were greeted with skepticism at home and protest abroad, where many American labor programs were abandoned for fear of violent retaliation against U.S. personnel. Dozens of other front operations collapsed under the impact of the revelations, leaving reputations and friendships in tatters. One unwitting officer of the Committee of Correspondence, who had worked for years trying to raise donations from private sources, never forgave colleagues who had known that such fund-raising was unnecessary because the CIA was bankrolling the organization and yet had allowed her to carry on because her activities helped preserve the Agency’s cover.

As for the National Student Association, it weathered the storm better than most front organizations, refocusing its efforts on domestic issues and in the process actually increasing its membership. The last tie between the NSA and the CIA was severed in August 1967, when the student group took over the title and mortgage payments on the Washington brown-stone that had served as its headquarters since 1965.7 Having managed this transaction and seen out the rest of his presidency, Eugene Groves, once apparently bound for a glittering political career, retreated into pri-

I N T R O D U C T I O N

5

vate life. “The world [has] los[t] its innocence,” he told the NSA’s 1967

congress. “I want to get out.”8

The ignominious demise of the CIA’s covert network in 1967 presented a stark contrast with the circumstances of its creation nearly two decades earlier. Then, in the late 1940s, there had been very little doubt that such measures were necessary to defeat what was perceived as a menace to the survival of the “free world.” True, the United States had the upper hand in many dimensions of the rapidly developing Cold War. Economically, it was clearly the strongest power on earth, as was shown by the unprecedented scale of the Marshall Plan aid program; and it still enjoyed sole possession of the atom bomb. However, in an equally important theater of this new kind of international conflict—the ideological struggle between capitalism and communism for the “hearts and minds” of nonaligned peoples around the world—its advantages were far less obvious. The Soviet Union could call upon communists’ considerable experience of constructing front organizations, a tactic perfected by the Communist International, or “Comintern,” during the 1930s and revived when the Communist Information Bureau—“Cominform”—was established in 1947, shortly after the proclamation of the Marshall Plan, in order to coordinate pro-Soviet Cold War propaganda. Even the British were ahead of the Americans in this game, boasting such “publicity” agencies as the Cultural Relations Department and the Information Research Department.

Something had to be done quickly, lest the United States squander its economic and military superiority in the Cold War by losing the moral argument.

Fortunately, Americans did have a few advantages in the battle for hearts and minds. To begin with, there were some people around who knew about communist front tactics because they had once been communists themselves: such men as novelist and former Comintern officer Arthur Koestler, now a fanatical anticommunist, and Jay Lovestone, onetime leader of the American Communist Party turned chief foreign policy advisor to George Meany. It was the inveterate schemer Lovestone who devised the CIA’s earliest covert operations in the field of international labor politics, secretly channeling millions of dollars to anticommunist

6

I N T R O D U C T I O N

trade unionists in Europe and further afield; Koestler helped carry the fight into the world of intellectuals and artists, organizing the 1950 rally in West Berlin out of which grew the Congress for Cultural Freedom. As the CIA was to discover, employing such ideological zealots in its covert operations could lead to serious practical complications. Still, in the first days of the Cold War, the expert advice of these men proved invaluable.

Moreover, in attracting supporters to its front organizations, the CIA could harness the American people’s much-vaunted love of association.