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Sometimes it was too late to prevent the making of films that might provide grist for the communist mill. The Gary Cooper western High Noon, for example, was doubly unfortunate in its unsympathetic portrayal of American townsfolk and its featuring a Mexican prostitute character. “I could write the French, Italian, [and] Belgian commie reviews for this picture right now,” the agent reflected gloomily, before going on to recount his efforts to sabotage the film’s chances in the 1953 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awards. Not all of this agent’s actions were destructive: another strong theme in the letters is the author’s desire to counter adverse publicity about U.S. race relations by having films depict

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African Americans mixing on equal terms with whites. One proposal to play up “the negro angle” involved planting black spectators in a crowd watching a golf game in the Martin and Lewis comedy The Caddy and showing others “using a nice up-to-date car.”79

The secret Hollywood reports do indeed “make extraordinary reading,”

as Frances Stonor Saunders asserts.80 However, it is possible to overestimate their significance. For one thing, they show that independent filmmakers, such as Billy Wilder, were able to elude the CIA agent’s influence. “Since this is a picture which would be made outside the aegis of one of the major companies,” he wrote of the Japanese baby idea, “it is difficult to keep track of it, and impossible to bring ‘front office’ pressure to bear on points in which we are interested.”81 For that matter, not all attempts to massage the content of Paramount movies succeeded: director Norman Taurog and studio head Y. Frank Freeman refused to plant black actors on the golf links in The Caddy for fear they might upset southern white moviegoers—an example of the limits of CIA manipulation in the face of commercial and domestic political pressure—while drunkenness crept back into a number of productions (in Money from Home, for example, in the shape of a red-nosed English jockey).82

Just who was this Hollywood CIA agent? It seems that Frances Stonor Saunders was mistaken in identifying the author of the reports as Carleton Alsop, an OPC officer with interests in Hollywood who worked on the production of Animal Farm. By piecing together clues in the letters, such as the author’s membership in various Academy Awards committees, film historian David Eldridge has established that the CIA’s man in Hollywood was in fact Luigi G. Luraschi, a longtime Paramount executive and, in 1953, head of foreign and domestic censorship at the studio, whose job it was (as he put it himself) “to iron out any political, moral or religious problems and get rid of the taboos that might keep the picture out of, say, France or India.”83 (Other studios, including MGM and RKO, had similar officers.)

As Eldridge shows, replacing Alsop with Luraschi, a veteran foe of the Hollywood communist movement as well as an expert on foreign film markets, causes the activities reported in the anonymous letters to appear in a different light, as less like external meddling and more an extension of existing studio self-regulation. In the early 1950s the studios evinced greatly increased sensitivity to foreign audience reactions because of do-

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mestic problems facing the industry, including threats to the major studios’ oligopoly and the growth of television ownership. One response to these developments was the creation by the Motion Picture Association of America of an International Committee consisting of studio foreign specialists, which for much of the early 1950s was chaired by none other than Luraschi (a fact that helps explain why the letters’ author has such good knowledge of the internal affairs of other studios besides Paramount). In other words, CIA operations in Hollywood, such as they were, originated in a shared set of assumptions and goals. Indeed, the irony was that the Agency enjoyed better relations with the movie industry than it did with several organizations it directly funded and controlled, such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the American Committee for Cultural Freedom.

S I X

The CIA on Campus

S T U D E N T S

On April 20, 1951, a Harvard student by the name of Henry A. Kissinger wrote a letter to the Georgetown address of H. Gates Lloyd, a Princeton graduate, Philadelphia investment banker, and intelligence officer in Joe Bryan’s Psychological Warfare Workshop. “At our recent conversation you asked me to furnish you with a number of phase lines for our project,”