Then there were the security risks inevitably involved in running a front operation from public offices in the heart of New York City. Kluger, whose experience of watching out for Stalinist agents dated back to her days with the Dewey commission in Mexico, was constantly vigilant for signs of communist infiltration. In February 1951, she urged Burnham to investigate a “Vogue Travel Service” housed in the same building as the ACCF after a Committee member had recognized a Stalinist veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade entering its offices. “I know I need not point out the advantages a travel agency has for our ‘friends,’ mail from all parts of the world, people travelling around, etc.,” she pointed out.62 A few months later, Kluger “played dumb” when “asked numerous questions concerning the financing of the Committee” by an “over-eager” visitor claiming to be from the State Department.63
Reports such as these, combined with the ongoing need to separate funding for foreign and domestic operations, persuaded the OPC to adopt extra security measures when the ACCF began handling the large sums of money required to mount Nicolas Nabokov’s 1952 Paris arts festival. To ensure that festival business was not “mixed up in the other activities of the organization,” Burnham instructed that a new checking account be set up “under the joint control of Sidney Hook and Pearl Kluger in covert understanding with an OPC representative.”64 A “Festival Account” was duly opened at the Rockefeller Center branch of the Chase National Bank, and a first payment of $40,000 deposited on October 11, 1951.65
Meanwhile, an OPC officer by the name of Albert Donnelly arrived in New York to take charge of “all necessary negotiations for the Festival.”
86
A D E E P S I C K N E SS I N N E W Y O R K
ACCF office staff were given firm instructions not to interfere. Phoning
“any person in Washington,” for example, “including Mr. B.,” was strictly out of the question. “Mr. Donnelly has certain telephone facilities at his disposal which make any further indiscretions of this nature unnecessary.”66
By the beginning of 1952, the CIA had also begun experimenting with what soon became its favorite method of laundering subsidies to its front organizations: the dummy foundation. This device was ingeniously simple. As Tom Braden explained, “We would go to . . . a well-known rich person and we would say, ‘We want to set up a foundation,’ . . . and pledge him to secrecy. . . . And then you would publish a letterhead and his name would be on it, and there would be a foundation.” The “rich person” in the case of cultural operations was Julius “Junkie” Fleischmann, the heir of a Cincinnati gin fortune and patron of several opera companies, ballet troupes, and theatrical productions—“The American Maecenas for the world of culture,” as Michael Josselson once described him.67 Junkie, who was already helping the NCFE with the Crusade for Freedom, began posing as an “angel” of the CCF in 1951: the cover story for Albert Donnelly’s presence in the ACCF office was that he had been hired as “Mr.
Fleischmann’s assistant.”68 In January 1952, Fleischmann was installed as president of the newly incorporated Heritage Foundation, whose purpose was officially recorded as aiding “those selected organizations, groups, and individuals which are engaged in increasing and preserving the cultural heritage of the free world.” By the time of Nabokov’s festival in April, the flamboyant Fleischmann was well known in CCF circles, and the Heritage Foundation, renamed the Farfield Foundation in August, was firmly established as a plausible source of the organization’s clearly abundant funds.
As far as the CIA was concerned, the ACCF had now performed its main practical function and could therefore take a backseat to the strategically far more important CCF.
Unfortunately for the Agency, this view was not shared by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom itself. By 1952, the organization had grown into a high-profile body of several hundred members engaged in a busy program of public activities.69 The question of how widely knowledge of the CIA connection was shared in this group remains controversial, but
I N T E L L E C T U A L S
87
it does seem clear that most of the organization’s officers and executive-committee members suspected some secret government involvement. Diana Trilling, for example, who ran the ACCF’s Administrative Committee during the mid-1950s, knew even before she joined the organization that the Farfield Foundation was a fake. The only question in her mind
“was whether it was a conduit . . . for the CIA or the State Department.”
She nonetheless carried on her work for the ACCF “because I did not believe that to take the support of my government was a dishonorable act.”