The tendency has been to portray the CIA as very much the dominant partner in the patronage relationship, with the front groups obliged to toe the official line, thanks to the Agency’s control of the purse strings. The most influential expression of this interpretation is Saunders’s
10
I N T R O D U C T I O N
spent, with left-wing literati sometimes purloining it for purposes that had little or nothing to do with the superpower conflict. The CIA might have tried to call the tune, I concluded, but the piper did not always play it, nor the audience dance to it.16
This book, therefore, has two main aims. One is to provide the first comprehensive account of the CIA’s covert network from its creation in the late 1940s to its exposure twenty years later, encompassing all the main American citizen groups involved in front operations, not just in Europe but in the Third World as well. The other is to portray the relationship between the CIA and its client organizations in as complete and rounded a manner as possible, combining intelligence history with the specific social history or histories of the groups concerned. My hope is that, by telling both sides of the story, the groups’ as well as the CIA’s, I will shed new light not only on the U.S. government’s conduct of the Cold War, but also on American society and culture in the mid-twentieth century.
Finally, a few words about the principles of selection underpinning the structure of this book. Although my survey of CIA front operations is intended to be comprehensive, it is not exhaustive. It is highly likely that we still do not know the identity of all the groups that received covert subsidies. One, Patrick Peyton’s Family Rosary Crusade (described in Chapter 8) has only just come to light. In any case, it would be impossible to discuss in detail between the covers of a single volume every committee and project that is known to have been CIA-financed. Instead, what I have chosen to do is identify the main groups within American society that participated in the covert network and devote a chapter to each, concentrating on the activities of the most important organizations and individuals involved. This means that certain front operations, those that involved only a handful of U.S. citizens (in other words, ones that did not mobilize a distinct social group) and served little purpose beyond providing a funding conduit to foreign recipients, will receive merely passing mention.17
What follows, then, is the story of how the CIA attempted to mobilize a cross-section of American society in the Cold War struggle for hearts and minds—to “play” America as if it were a giant musical instrument—
and how U.S. citizens at first followed the Agency’s score, then began im-provising their own tunes, eventually turning harmony into cacophony.
O N E
Innocents’ Clubs
T H E O R I G I N S O F T H E C I A F R O N T
One day in late October 1940, during the first year of the Nazi occupation, two hunters were making their way home through woods just north of the small French town of Montagne, near Grenoble, when the excited barking of their dogs drew them to an old oak tree. Propped up against the trunk, almost concealed by drifting autumn leaves, was the badly decom-posed body of a man, its head almost entirely denuded of flesh. Around the neck was a knotted cord, which had apparently snapped after having been suspended from an overhanging branch. A search of the corpse carried out later that day by the town’s mayor and coroner turned up documents that revealed the body as being that of a German citizen named Willi Münzenberg. Unclear as to just who this man was, and not wanting to attract the attention of the Gestapo, the French officials rapidly reached a verdict of suicide, despite the absence of a note and the body’s failing to display injuries usually associated with self-inflicted hanging.1
If the inhabitants of Montagne had not heard the name Münzenberg before, there were many in Europe—and, for that matter, several in the United States—who had. Born in 1889, the son of a violent, alcoholic innkeeper in southeastern Prussia, the handsome young radical had cut his teeth organizing communist youth in local factories, earning a reputation with the German authorities as a sort of professional malcontent.