“A nation of joiners” was how historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., famously described his compatriots in 1944, echoing Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation of more than a hundred years earlier that “Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite.”9 The potential Cold War applications of this trait were first spotted by diplomat and scholar George F. Kennan, who, recently declassified government records reveal, deserves recognition not only for having invented the idea of “containment” but also for being the principal architect of the CIA’s covert network. “Throughout our history, private American citizens have banded together to champion the cause of freedom for people suffering under oppression,” noted Kennan in a crucial planning paper of 1948. “Our proposal is that this tradition be revived specifically to further American national interests in the present crisis.”10 There was, of course, a strong element of expediency, even opportunism, about this tactic, just as there was in the Comintern’s and, later, the Cominform’s propagandistic appeals to “fellow travelers’” desire for world peace. That said, none of the U.S. front organizations of the Cold War period were merely official fabri-cations; all drew strength, to greater and lesser degrees, from the spontaneous energies of American associationalism.
Last, but not least in importance, the U.S. government could count on its citizenry to show it an extraordinary measure of goodwill and support in its crusade against communism. This was in part the legacy of World War II and the recent experience of total mobilization against a global threat to freedom. It also reflected the peculiarly intense anticommunism of the era, which served as an extremely strong cohesive force in postwar American society, binding together disparate groups in a powerful ideological consensus. To be sure, there always were those who felt uneasy about the secrecy involved in front operations (by aping the tactics of their totalitarian enemy, were not Americans in danger of becoming the
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thing they despised?) or feared the possibility that such activities might distract the CIA from what was supposed to be its cardinal purpose, the acquisition and analysis of foreign intelligence. By and large, though, there was little public inclination to question the wisdom or the ethics of the means by which government officials conducted the Cold War.
Indeed, for at least the first decade of its existence, until the early 1960s (a period often referred to within the Agency as the “Golden Age” and identified with the leadership of Allen W. Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence between 1953 and 1961), the CIA enjoyed a reputation for competence and probity that now, many years and intelligence scandals later, is hard to credit. As one Agency officer recently remarked, “There was almost nobody in this country that I couldn’t go to . . . and say ‘I’m from the CIA . . .’ and at the very least get a respectful reception and a discussion.”11
It was against this background of perceived international crisis and domestic political consensus that the CIA constructed an array of front organizations that Frank Wisner, the Agency’s first chief of political warfare, liked to compare to a “Mighty Wurlitzer” organ, capable of playing any propaganda tune he desired.12 In the roughly twenty-year period before the revelations of 1967, there were three broad phases of front operation mounted by the CIA—or, if you like, tunes played on the Mighty Wurlitzer. First, there were organizations intended to provide a cover for émigrés and refugees from the communist-bloc countries, who were viewed as a potential secret army capable of infiltrating and undermining the Soviet empire from within (although the theme of “liberation,” or “rollback,”
would fade after the abortive Hungarian uprising of 1956). Then, in rapid succession, came a series of operations designed to shore up civil society in western Europe against communist destabilization, most of which mobilized groups on the so-called non-communist left (or “NCL,” in the Washington parlance of the day): trade unionists, intellectuals, and students.
Finally, as the Cold War began to spread into new theaters in the so-called Third World during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the CIA secretly sponsored a host of new programs, often ostensibly concerned with development or modernization, but also intended to ensure that the “developing nations” did not succumb to communism. These programs tended to
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involve what would later be labeled “minority” groups, such as women and African Americans.