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I thought they were of some importance since [they] secretly nourished the careers of too many square intellectuals, provided sustenance to thinkers in the Academy who influenced the intellectual tone of the West. . . . And the Government through foundations was supporting a whole field of “Scholars of War.” . . . The subsidization of magazines like Encounter which held Eliotic style as a touchstone of sophistication and competence . . . failed to create an alternative free vital decentralized individualistic culture. Instead, we had the worst sort of Capitalist Imperialism.55

The picture Ginsberg paints is overdrawn. In fact, when Encounter began appearing in 1950s London, Eliot had thought it so “obviously published under American auspices” that he kept his distance from it.56

Similarly, in New York, several intellectuals refused to join the American Committee for Cultural Freedom—Columbia University art historian Meyer Schapiro, for example, turned down his invitation on the grounds that the ACCF was not “a ‘Committee for Cultural Freedom,’ but an organization for fighting the world Communist movement.”57 Others quit when the ACCF took what they deemed to be too equivocal a position on McCarthyism. Even those who stayed behind failed to toe the CIA’s line, pursuing a hard-line anticommunist political agenda that had more to do with their peculiar ideological evolution from anti-Stalinist Marxists into neoconservatives than the needs of the national security state. Their example reminds us that political conviction mattered more than secret financial inducements in shaping the ideas of the cultural Cold War, that

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intellectuals as well as government officials were capable of determining political outcomes (as shown in the eventual triumph of neoconservatism over liberal anticommunism), and that Angletonian conspiracies did not always work.

In addition, modernism and CIA patronage did not necessarily go hand in hand. Indeed, where the performing arts were concerned, the Agency appears to have been aesthetically blinkered, giving a wide berth to the most experimental (and, we can now see, the most promising) work of the period. The evidence linking abstract expressionism and the American secret service is also more ambiguous than many revisionist accounts would have us believe. To give Ginsberg his due, it is in the realm of literature that the link between modernism and the CIA appears clearest, not only in the tastes of officers like Angleton (whose famous description of the spying business as a “wilderness of mirrors” was culled from Eliot’s Gerontion)58 but also in the covert subsidies to little magazines such as Partisan Review. In the end, then, the most important blowback from the CIA’s cultural operations abroad may have been to shore up the authority of the old, Partisan Review– led literary avant-garde at a time when it was being challenged by new movements that wanted to experiment with more traditional, “American” forms (such as Ginsberg’s Beats). This is not to claim that the Agency can be credited with (or blamed for) the continuing dominance of modernism in American literary culture during the 1950s and 1960s. Still, it is worth wondering how writing might have developed in Cold War America without the “umbilical cord of gold” that united spy and artist.59

Of course, whether the literary highbrows of the International Organizations Division liked it or not, the truth was that the great majority of foreigners derived their main impressions of the United States not from Partisan Review, MoMA, or the BSO, but from American popular culture and, most of all, the slick, spectacular, mass entertainments of Hollywood.

This presented the spies with a problem. Noncommercial cultural enterprises such as little magazines needed patronage and were therefore susceptible to (some) external control. The massively profitable U.S. movie industry offered no such point of entry, even though its products had great potential for influencing—negatively as well as positively—the interna-

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tional image of America. Fortunately for the CIA, two factors predisposed the major Hollywood studios that dominated the industry to take a “responsible” position in the cultural Cold War. One was a strong tendency toward self-censorship, the result of many years’ experience avoiding the commercially disastrous effects of giving offense to either domestic pressure groups like the American Legion or foreign audiences. The other was the fact that the men who ran the studios were intensely patriotic and anticommunist—they saw it as their duty to help their government defeat the Soviet threat.