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In any case, Burnham and Hook appear to have developed a working relationship in which the former liaised secretly with the OPC in Washington while the latter publicly managed day-to-day front affairs in New York. This was the basis of what was perhaps their single most important contribution to the U.S. effort in the cultural Cold War, their role in the planning of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.33 A month after leading the resistance to the March 1949 Waldorf conference, Hook traveled to Europe to help with the organization of a similar rally against the Paris World Peace Congress (for which Carmel Offie and Irving Brown secretly arranged OPC funding). While there, he met with Melvin J. Lasky, a young New York intellectual working for the American military government in Germany, where he edited the politico-cultural review Der Monat (a model for the later journals published by the CCF, such as Encounter). Hook and Lasky discussed the possibility of creating a permanent body of anticommunist intellectuals to act as a democratic counterweight to the Cominform. In August, Lasky talked with Ruth Fischer, a former Comintern officer and sister of Gerhart Eisler, head of Cominform operations in East Berlin, about her plans to stage a massive anticommunist demonstration in West Berlin, “giving the Politburo hell right at the gate of their own hell,” as she put it.34 This idea was taken up by Michael Josselson, a CIA officer stationed in Berlin who had witnessed the Americans for Intellectual Freedom rally in New York earlier in the year (“We should have something like this in Berlin,” he had told a friend in the AIF), and was passed up the line to Frank Wisner in Washington.35 Formal approval of the project was not granted until April 1950, but by this point Lasky was enthusiastically pressing ahead with arrangements, inviting a dazzling array of intellectual celebrities to Berlin for a conference to be held in June. Meanwhile, Burnham took over the planning at the American end, disbursing funds, drafting the conference program, and securing travel documents for the American delegation. He and his wife, Marcia, traveled to Germany on June 15, eleven days before the Congress

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was due to begin, both their tickets paid for by the OPC (her presence in Berlin was “necessary to make certain that the other delegates shall regard me as a private individual,” he explained to his employers).36 Hook traveled on June 25, his absence from NYU covered by a substitute teacher whose salary of $150 had been paid by the OPC via Burnham.37

The Congress for Cultural Freedom met at Berlin’s Titania Palast over four oppressively hot late June days, each of which witnessed, in the words of CCF historian Peter Coleman, “moments of high drama—defections from the East, political conversions, intellectual confrontations.”38 The ex-communists were dominant throughout, both in public, with Arthur Koestler “censoring and lecturing the delegates” (as an anonymous report in the Lovestone papers put it), and behind the scenes, where an unof-ficial steering committee composed of Koestler, Burnham, Hook, Lasky, and Irving Brown met every evening over a nightcap to plan the next day’s business.39 The ghost of Willi Münzenberg was discernible in the plan for a permanent body, which was adopted in the months afterward and whose structure resembled, in the words of Frances Stonor Saunders,

“a mirror image of a Cominform apparat. ” As Burnham explained in one of his OPC memoranda, “The basis and aim of Soviet strategy imply the basis and aim of the only feasible American counter-strategy.” (The philosopher’s analyses of the Soviet system and proposals to destroy it often had a decidedly Marxian flavor; another ex-communist, Louis Fischer, once described Burnham as “communistically anticommunist.”)40

As the CCF was established on a permanent footing, however, with headquarters in Paris under the command of Josselson and national affiliates dotted around the “free world,” the ex-communist influence waned, replaced by a corresponding professionalization of the operation’s management, much as there had been in the OPC’s labor program. The first hint of this development came in April 1949, after the OPC-sponsored rally against the Peace Congress in Paris had descended into organizational chaos. Dismayed by reports of a stage-invasion by a group of anar-chists, Frank Wisner voiced his apprehension that the plan to create an organization of anticommunist intellectuals (or “little Deminform,” as he called it) might turn “into a nuts folly of miscellaneous goats and monkeys whose antics would completely discredit the work and statements of the

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