coincidence of strategic aims. Looking at the relationship from the intellectuals’ point of view, it is possible to see acceptance of the Agency’s patronage as a self-interested measure designed to help them achieve certain independently held goals at a time when financial backing from established liberal philanthropies was being withheld. Later, as strands of the New York intellectual community fed into the neoconservative movement, new sources of institutional support would become available in the shape of conservative corporations and think tanks, and the need for an alliance with secret federal agencies would pass.
F I V E
The Cultural Cold War
W R I T E R S , A R T I S T S , M U S I C I A N S , F I L M M A K E R S
Spying and writing have always gone together. In Britain, where the modern intelligence agency was born, intellectuals moved smoothly back and forth between secret government service and the literary life, some, like journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, even spending the morning at the typewriter before consulting with MI6 after lunch.1 Somerset Maugham, Compton Mackenzie, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, John Le Carré: all placed their powers of observation and divination at the disposal of the British secret state while mining their experience of intelligence work in their fiction. It was not just a case of satisfying the reading public’s apparently insatiable appetite for the espionage novel. There seemed to be some basic connection between the roles of writer and spy: both were iconic, even heroic, figures in modern culture, necessarily detached from ordinary society, yet gifted—cursed, perhaps—with unique insight into the darkest realms of human existence. “I, from very early, lived a secret life, an inward life,” Le Carré once told an interviewer. “I seemed to go about in disguise.”2
In this respect, the spies of the CIA were no different from their British counterparts. Indeed, the “man of letters” was, if anything, even more conspicuous a figure in the upper echelons of the American secret service than in MI6. During World War II, Norman Holmes Pearson, a noted Yale professor of literature and editor, with W. H. Auden, of the five-volume Viking
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war, when the OSS was resurrected as the CIA, the task of counterintelligence—protecting one’s secrets from theft by rival agencies—was inherited by another “Yalie,” James Jesus Angleton, whose obsession with hunting for “moles” later came to verge on paranoia. A founding editor of the influential “little magazine”
One of Angleton’s several protégés in the Agency, Cord Meyer, had edited the Yale
Of course, once one was in the CIA, writing had to take second place to spying. Unless, like E. Howard Hunt, one was specifically tasked with improving the Agency’s public image by penning flattering fictional portrayals of it, the challenge of fighting the international communist movement and all its devious stratagems was so demanding that it left little time for the literary life.6 Besides, men like Tom Braden, who during the war had run missions for the OSS in occupied France, were impatient to return to the fray, to abandon the contemplative life for the active. Moreover, even if there was little opportunity to write poetry in the heat of the Cold War, there was another, no less honorable part for these CIA officers to play in the process of artistic creation, one for which, by dint of their patrician backgrounds and educations, they were extremely well suited: that of cultural patron.
As well as being a political, an economic, and (only when other methods failed) a military conflict, the confrontation between the United States and Soviet Union was a clash of cultures. The communists were fond of pointing toward their cultural achievements as proof that they, not the western bourgeoisie, were the true heirs of the European Enlightenment. Witness the excellence of Soviet cinema, theater, dance, art, music, and literature. The United States, in comparison, was a cultural wasteland, its few artists treated as mere ornaments by its capitalist class, and its workers cretinized by the idiotic products of its culture industries.