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This spontaneous willingness of the moviemakers to cooperate with U.S. officialdom manifested itself in many ways. Some ways were overt (boosting the Army or Navy in war movies, for example, or helping the United States Information Agency make pro-American documentaries), others covert. The most dramatic instance of the latter was Militant Liberty, a multi-agency propaganda campaign devised in 1954 with the aim of embedding American-style democratic values in foreign cultures, especially in such new theaters of the Cold War as Central America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. (Secret planning documents identified “target” countries for “testing” the program, including Japan.)60 Although the architects of Militant Liberty did not limit themselves to cinema—other

“informational” techniques discussed included letter-writing and leader exchanges—they did attach particular importance to film production, reflecting the common assumption of Cold War western propagandists that the moving image was the most appropriate medium for “Third World”

audiences. Among the several Hollywood personalities who volunteered their services for this program were eminent director and former OSS

filmmaker John Ford; the cinematic embodiment of the American mascu-line ideal, actor John Wayne; and world-famous studio boss/director Cecil B. DeMille (who had already agreed to serve as film consultant to the recently created USIA).61 Along with a few other key studio players, such as Twentieth Century–Fox boss Darryl Zanuck, this group composed what Frances Stonor Saunders has called the “Hollywood consortium,” an informal but powerful group of movie artists and moguls who shared the belief that (in the words of foreign market specialist Eric Johnston), “We need to make certain our films are doing a good job for our nation and our industry.”62

Not only did the CIA seek to influence the production of commercial

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films—“to insert in their scripts and in their action the right ideas with the proper subtlety,” as C. D. Jackson put it;63 the Agency also occasionally initiated film projects. The best documented instance of the latter practice is the animated version of George Orwell’s celebrated 1945 no-vella Animal Farm, a satirical allegory about Stalinism that depicts an uprising against humans by a group of farmyard animals and the subsequent transformation of the animal revolution into a totalitarian state ruled by pigs and dogs. The Information Research Department, the secret anticommunist “publicity” unit in the British Foreign Office, had already exploited the Cold War propaganda potential of Orwell’s fable, sponsoring the publication of several foreign-language translations and even producing a cartoon-strip version for dissemination in South America, Asia, and the Middle East (one official noted the happy coincidence that “both pigs and dogs are unclean animals to Muslims”).64 In 1950, the OPC went a step further, with Joe Bryan’s Psychological Warfare Workshop recruiting anticommunist documentary-maker Louis de Rochemont to produce a movie version of the tale.65 Having secured the appropriate rights from Orwell’s widow, Sonia Blair, de Rochement turned to the British animation studio of husband and wife John Halas and Joy Batchelor to make the film.66 Halas and Batchelor’s undisputed brilliance as animators was no doubt one factor in this choice, but it is likely that de Rochemont and his backers in the OPC were also motivated by tactical and financial considerations: having the film produced in Britain would both save money (costs there would be lower than at a U.S. studio like, say, Disney) and disguise the American hand in the project.67

Scheduled to take only eighteen months to film, Animal Farm was not in fact completed until November 1954, at a total cost of over $500,000, of which a CIA shell corporation, Touchstone, Inc., provided about $300,000.68 The highly labor-intensive nature of frame-by-frame animation was one reason for the film’s extended production and cost: in all, 300,000 man-hours (and over two tons of paint) were required to produce 250,000 drawings and 1,000 colored backgrounds.69 Another cause of the delay, according to the memoirs of Psychological Warfare Workshop officer Howard Hunt, was “the leaden weight of a bureaucracy which began spreading within OPC,” with “accountants, budgeteers, and administrators” all demanding a say in the operation (a further manifestation, presumably, of the professionalizing drive that took place under “Beetle”

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