affiliate, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. The roots of the ACCF, which first met at New York University’s Faculty Club on Washington Square in December 1950 and received its certificate of incorporation on January 5, 1951, can be traced to the prior organizational history of the New York intellectuals, in particular the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which Hook had created in response to the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939.52 However, the ACCF also had another, less obvious dimension. As far as the CIA was concerned, its main purpose was to support the international program of the Congress for Cultural Freedom by creating, as Tom Braden put it later, “the impression of some American participation in the European operation.”53 In addition, during a crucial phase of the CCF’s early existence, after the Free Trade Union Committee had withdrawn from the cultural field and before the Agency began setting up fake
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foundations as financial conduits to its fronts, the ACCF functioned as one of its parent organization’s main sources of funding.
It is possible to infer something of the scale and nature of this “backstopping” operation from the Burnham papers. Covert government money arrived at the ACCF’s offices on East Forty-Fourth Street either directly via Burnham (in March 1951 and again in May, for example, the OPC
consultant paid his NYU colleague Hook $1,000)54 or, more often, via other front organizations, principally the NCFE.55 The funds were then dispatched abroad by the ACCF’s executive secretary, Pearl Kluger, an ex-Trotskyist who in the late 1930s had run the Dewey commission of inquiry and was sufficiently trusted by Hook and Burnham to be made “witting” of the CIA connection. Using this method, the OPC disbursed $2,000 to the organizers of a conference in New Delhi intended to secure a foothold for the CCF on the Indian subcontinent; $3,500 to Japan in an effort to kick-start a national affiliate there; and $15,000 to underwrite a series of anticommunist youth rallies in Berlin.56 Although Burnham, mindful of the injunction against the CIA’s operating within the United States, made it clear to Kluger that the funds were “primarily for use abroad,” some money also found its way to eastern European émigrés in New York, whose fuzzy national status allowed a slight bending of the rules. The beneficiaries of this covert patronage were the wily Menshevik Boris Nicolaevsky and his partner, Anna Bourgina, who received several installments of $2,000 for the research they were undertaking on a “Black Book” about Soviet repression of cultural freedom.57
The Burnham papers also hint at some of the operational problems involved in this complex and devious exercise. Kluger, confronted with the task of managing the international CCF’s finances and, at the same time, providing cover for the ACCF by organizing public meetings in New York, felt increasingly overburdened and underresourced. “When I complained to our friend that Santa Claus did not come down the chimney this month,” she told Burnham in March 1951, “he said he had not understood that this was a six-months Christmas.”58 With such large sums going out to so many different parts of the globe, it was not always possible to keep a close eye on how CIA funds were actually spent. A banker’s draft of $1,000 sent to organizers of the CCF affiliate in India simply disappeared; Burnham suspected an Indian editor of purloining it for his magazine.59
Nicolaevsky was spotted walking the corridors of the Voice of America’s
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offices, presumably in search of further handouts. “Is some of Bourgina’s money as well as some of the other funds which he collects from various agencies and institutions going to finance his present intrigues?” wondered Burnham.60 The intellectuals’ habit of appropriating CCF subsidies for their own private purposes, which was to become a chronic problem in the United States’s cultural Cold War effort, helps explains why the ACCF’s “donor” requested a monthly accounting of the organization’s spendings, in a move reminiscent of earlier attempts to monitor the FTUC’s outlays. “Unless the donor is completely informed of the American Committee’s activities,” Pearl Kluger was told, “he is not in a position to approve further grants of money for the development of the Committee’s projects.”61