[who] prefers to remain anonymous.”13 By this point, the organization had
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acquired a new name, the Committee of Correspondence, which deliberately conjured the memory of the colonial resistance organizations formed by American patriots before the Revolutionary War. Its motto, which was emblazoned across its letterhead, was taken from John 8:32: “The Truth Shall Make You Free.” The choice would later strike some as unfortunate, not least because in 1961 Allen Dulles had the same words engraved on the lobby wall of the CIA’s new headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
The first years of the Committee of Correspondence’s existence coincided with some important changes in the CIA’s Cold War effort. In 1954, Tom Braden quit the Agency to publish a newspaper in California (“I was kind of glad to get out of it because it was heavy—all these things going on,” he later explained, “worrisome—the things that could go wrong, big things”), and Cord Meyer took over as Chief of the International Organizations Division.14 Meyer’s previous career as a world federalist, combined with the fact that in 1953 he had been suspended from active service while undergoing a security investigation (during which both Braden and Dulles had rallied valiantly in his defense),15 meant that his promotion consolidated IOD’s reputation as a relatively liberal and internationalist corner (the
“Greenwich Village,” as one intelligence officer put it) of the CIA.16
Meanwhile, the stock of psychological warfare generally, and front operations in particular, was rising, thanks to both the personal support of new president Dwight Eisenhower, whose enthusiasm for psy-war dated back to World War II, and a series of high-level committee reports that urged ever bolder action in the superpower struggle.17 “It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means, and at whatever cost,” noted the presidential Doolittle Committee in 1955. “We must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us.”18 Responding to this recommendation, the National Security Council issued NSC 5412, a series of directives that was intended to increase presidential control over the CIA by establishing a Planning Coordination Group (also known as the Special Group and, during Lyndon Johnson’s administration, the 303 Group), but had the effect of removing the Agency further still from congressional oversight. Allen Dulles reveled in his new freedom, hatching yet more covert opera-
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tions over Sunday lunches with his brother Foster.19 Meanwhile, the focus of the Cold War continued to shift geographically, from Europe to the decolonizing “periphery,” where conditions demanded new, more subtle propaganda methods.
Nowhere was the effect of these changes on the Mighty Wurlitzer more evident than in the program of the Committee of Correspondence. At first the organization’s activities were straightforwardly, even crudely, anticommunist. A letter challenging communist claims that the United States was using biological weapons in the Korean War (charges of “germ warfare” were a staple of early Cold War Soviet propaganda) was addressed to the Cominform-controlled Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). Signed by many prominent American women, among them Parsons’s friend and role model Eleanor Roosevelt, the “germ warfare letter” was distributed to the