Of course, these distinctions were not hard and fast: the different phases overlapped, with some front organizations operating in two and a few in all three. Also, despite often having very different ideological and regional orientations, the groups that made up the CIA’s covert network had certain basic features in common. For example, all were composed of private American citizens who had preexisting links to similar groups overseas, often based on some shared identity: generational in the case of the student groups, racial in the case of the African American organizations, and so on. These links provided the CIA with the cover it needed to influence strategically important sectors of foreign populations, but they also tended to set up a tension within the groups between members’
nationality as Americans on the one hand and their transnational identities on the other.
Partly in order to manage this tension, the Agency sought some degree of control over its front operations. It exercised this control through individuals located within the organizations concerned, normally salaried officers such as executive directors or secretaries, who were witting about the true source of their funding and pledged to secrecy—although just how much control the Agency exercised, and how many witting as opposed to unwitting members the groups contained, remain questions of lively controversy even today.
Finally, while their politics might have varied in other important respects, the groups were united by a shared ideological conviction so important it was almost an article of faith: all were anticommunist. In the early years of the Cold War, when the anticommunist consensus was at its height, this belief was enough to ensure that the CIA’s front operations remained secret. Later, however, as the consensus began to disintegrate under the strain of the Vietnam War, secrecy became impossible to maintain, and the scene was set for “the biggest security leak of the Cold War,” as Eugene Groves called the
Writing the history of the Mighty Wurlitzer is not an easy task, given the shroud of official secrecy that still surrounds it today, fifty years on.
The CIA has declassified only a tiny proportion of the presumably vast
I N T R O D U C T I O N
9
cache of records generated by this sprawling operation, preferring instead a policy of releasing groups of documents relating to specific, already well-known moments in its history, such as, for example, the Guatemalan coup of 1954. The job is not impossible, however. For one thing, while the CIA’s operational records remain tantalizingly out of reach, the front organizations themselves have generally left behind substantial and publicly accessible collections of their working files, many of which contain strong traces of their relationship with their clandestine patron. For another, there already exists a small corpus of scholarly monographs and articles about particular front operations, written by intrepid souls using often highly ingenious research methods to overcome official secrecy.14
Valuable though this literature undoubtedly is, there are at least two respects in which it strikes the present author, at least, as inadequate. First, there simply is not enough of it. Granted, quite a lot has been written about CIA patronage of the arts, especially American abstract painting, including the most important book published in the field to date, Frances Stonor Saunders’s enterprisingly researched and entertainingly written
The other main problem with the existing literature about this subject, which has less to do with coverage than with interpretation, became apparent to me as I researched my previous book, a study of how U.S. Cold War front operations affected Britain and, in particular, the British left.