The CIA: patron of the arts The best Cold War critics were found in Foggy Bottom

Like most writers, I think a lot about money, though I know it’s considered bad form to say so. It’s not that I don’t share my fellow artists’ prejudice that money is dirty, that commerce compromises personal integrity and profanes the sacred, that quantitative approaches to value are insidious, or that selling out is a vice. It’s that I am interested in the ways art, especially non-commercial art, gets produced and distributed to an audience, as well as in the mystery of what the people and institutions who put up the resources hope to gain from their investments in such apparently useless items as novels, paintings, plays, and symphonies. This, it seems to me, is no less significant a part of the human drama of making art than the long creative struggle that culminates in the inspired breakthrough. Perhaps that is why, earlier this year, a friend recommended Frances Stonor Saunders’ 1999 book Who Paid the Piper? to me, and why I have since recommended it to everyone I know.

Saunders tells the story of one of the more fascinating — and troubling — patronage networks ever developed. From 1947 until 1967 when it was exposed by the muckraking journalists at Ramparts, the Central Intelligence Agency acted as the United States’ unofficial Ministry of Culture, covertly organising and financing conferences, musical performances, art shows, plays, films, books, magazines, and academic journals as a part of an extensive propaganda campaign Saunders calls the “cultural Cold War”. Originally focused on Western Europe, the cultural Cold War spread to Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and came to include domestic operations in violation of the Agency’s charter.

At the centre of these operations was the Congress for Cultural Freedom. A front organisation based in Paris, it was directed by a taciturn Estonian former salesman named Michael Josselson and a flamboyant Belarusian composer named Nicolas Nabokov, the first cousin of the novelist. This odd couple met in White Russian émigré circles in Weimar Berlin, found their way to US military intelligence during the war, and receive top billing in Saunders’ cast of hundreds. Who Paid the Piper? is as gripping as a spy novel, all the more so for being true.

According to Saunders, the CIA’s main objectives in waging the cultural Cold War were twofold. The first was to counter the Soviet narrative, widely held among intellectuals in Western Europe, that the United States was a soulless consumer society whose way of life was bereft of cultural achievement. The second was to foster and cultivate what became known at the Agency and State Department as the “Non-Communist Left”, a group of former communists disillusioned with the Soviet Union under Stalin, and who could be relied on to rally on behalf of values such as freedom of expression and democracy whenever criticism of US race relations and military adventures abroad was voiced. For these ends, the Agency decided, avant-garde art — atonal music, jazz, modernist literature, and, above all, abstract expressionist painting — would be particularly useful. “High culture,” Saunders writes, “was not only important as an anti-Communist line of defense, but also a bastion against a homogenised mass society.” It was what would allow the United States to lay claim to the mantle of “Western civilisation” inherited from Europe after the devastation of the war.

During its first two decades, the CIA was probably the most culturally sophisticated workplace in the country. For its personnel it drew heavily on the brain drain from Europe and from graduates of the Ivy League, especially the aristocrats of Yale; by the mid-Sixties, half of its employees held advanced degrees, and almost a third held doctorates. Nicolas Nabokov was a friend of Diaghilev and Stravinsky; James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s chief of counter-intelligence, studied New Criticism and published Pound, William Carlos Williams, and E. E. Cummings in Yale’s literary magazine; British art critic Philip Dodd was not exaggerating when he said that in the Fifties the most perceptive critics of modern painting were to be found in Foggy Bottom. Many who worked at the agency took to their roles as cultural patrons with genuine relish: Tom Braden, assistant to Truman’s Director of Intelligence Allen Dulles, compared his colleagues to the Medici and Renaissance popes.

Initially, the main obstacle to the cultural Cold War were the paranoiacs and philistines in Congress, who, to this day, prefer kitsch to high culture, and for whom the Non-Communist and Communist Left was a distinction without a difference. In 1947, George Dondero, a Republican from Michigan, put the kibosh on “Advancing American Art”, a travelling exhibition supported by the State Department, whose budget was public. “Modern art is communistic,” Dondero said, “because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful country, our cheerful and smiling people, and our material progress.” Meanwhile, another Republican in his caucus claimed that, “If you know how to read them, modern paintings will disclose the weak spots in US fortifications, and such crucial constructions as the Boulder Dam.” To circumvent such embarrassments, which contributed to the perception the CIA was trying to combat, the Agency came up with an ingenious solution: using a small portion of Marshall Plan funds as an off-the-books slush fund to distribute “candy” without Congressional oversight.

The CIA had more tricks up its sleeve. Recognising that cultural programmes suspected of being astroturfed by the US state would be less effective as propaganda, the CIA laundered the money through a consortium of private foundations — including the Ford, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations, whose board of directors all maintained close personal and professional ties to the foreign policy establishment. These, alongside lesser-known foundations, spent the money directly, or funnelled it through the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

It was, by all measures, a tremendous success. George Kennan, the architect of America’s containment policy, told the curators at MoMA, without a doubt the CIA’s most significant asset in the cultural Cold War, that he “would willingly trade the entire remaining inventory of political propaganda for the results that could be achieved” by institutions like the museum’s International Program. For America’s “cultural mandarins”, painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were ideal vehicles for the worldview they were trying to promote. Their art “spoke to a specifically anti-Communist ideology, the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise. Non-figurative and politically silent, it was the very antithesis of socialist realism.”

When it came to literature, it is estimated that the CIA was responsible, in whole or in part, for the publication of at least 1,000 books, including translations of T.S. Eliot, Chekhov, and Pasternak. It sponsored the staging of a play by Gertrude Stein and film adaptations of George Orwell; it was responsible for the compendium The God That Failed, whose arguments about the Soviet Union are unknowingly regurgitated by Right-wing podcasters today. When the poet Robert Lowell had a manic episode that saw him strip naked and mount an equestrian statue in downtown Buenos Aires, he was straitjacketed and repatriated with the help of the Congress’ man in Latin America, who was acting as the CIA’s “leash”.

One comes away from Who Paid the Piper? with the impression that there was hardly any important mid-century artist or intellectual who didn’t get a taste of the CIA’s candy. The Beats and the Black Arts Movement seem to have come away clean, but following Saunders’ methods, I looked into the career of my favourite poet of the period, Frank O’Hara, who worked at MoMA’s International Division. I discovered that the “New Spanish Painting and Sculpture” show he set up was financed with a grant from the CBS Foundation, which was headed by the cigar mogul William Paley, a personal friend of Allen Dulles. O’Hara’s itinerary in Spain — which is listed in the first two lines of his beloved poem “Having a Coke With You” — was made possible by a CIA front.

Magazines too, including The New Yorker, were beneficiaries. Dwight Macdonald’s Partisan Review — the great magazine of its era — could thank the intelligence community not only for secret payments, but also for tax-exempt status, improved circulation, and the platforming of its articles in midcult organs like Time, whose VP was then moonlighting as a psychological warfare specialist. No story of the cultural Cold War could exclude the London-based Encounter (the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s flagship journal) co-founded by the New York intellectual Irving Kristol and the British poet Stephen Spender, who comes off as a pathetic, self-deluding ignoramus in Saunders’ account. To name only a few, W.H. Auden, Isaiah Berlin, Jorge Luis Borges, Nancy Mitford, and Bertrand Russell all appeared in its pages.

I finished Who Paid the Piper? with mixed emotions. On the one hand, if we’re going to have a ruling class, it’s better for it to have good taste. There have always been patrons, but what is historically unique about today’s moguls, oligarchs, and financiers is that they show no interest whatsoever in high culture; indeed, things have got so bad that taste is no longer thought necessary to legitimate wealth, or even to distinguish the ultra-rich from competitors. In its long, sordid history as an instrument of that class, the CIA has wasted money on worse things than non-objective art, little magazines, and 12-tone compositions.

Today, what are politely called the intelligence and defence communities seem perfectly content to dispense with such niceties as cultural legitimation, and to rely instead on brute force and flooding the zone of everyone’s attention with shit.

On the other hand, in the name of democracy, market competition, and freedom of expression the American state pursued a programme insulated from public scrutiny, damaged the careers of artists who were unwilling to play ball, and grafted the thorn of propaganda onto the flower of 20 years of cultural production. In her concluding assessment of the cultural Cold War, Saunders does not mince words:

Behind the ‘unexamined nostalgia for the “Golden Days” of American intelligence’ lay a much more devastating truth: the same people who read Dante and went to Yale and were educated in civic virtue recruited Nazis, manipulated the outcome of democratic elections, gave LSD to unwitting subjects, opened the mail of thousands of American citizens, overthrew governments, supported dictatorships, plotted assassinations, and engineered the Bay of Pigs disaster. ‘In the name of what?’ asked one critic. ‘Not civic virtue, but empire.’

I had a similar feeling of ambivalence when, shortly after, I read that the Trump administration would be zeroing out the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. State funding is a way for society to show what is valuable to it: the amount of money distributed by the NEA could be found in the cushions of the couches at the Pentagon, and the administration is not getting out of the culture game altogether. Instead it is proposing to shower cash on reactionary kitsch: to take but one example, in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, $40 million was appropriated to build a National Garden of American Heroes, which would feature 250 statues of such worthies as the gun-manufacturer Samuel Colt, the mouse-manufacturer Walt Disney, William “Wild Bill” Donovan (the founder of the CIA) and Sam Walton (the founder of Walmart). Why? According to the text of the 2021 Executive Order 13978 in which the idea was originally proposed, “The National Garden is America’s answer to [a] reckless attempt to erase our heroes, values, and entire way of life. On its grounds, the devastation and discord of the moment will be overcome with abiding love of country and lasting patriotism. This is the American way.” George Dondero couldn’t have said it better himself.

Yet I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed to learn how many imprints, magazines, and artists whose work I admired, in no small part because of their willingness to oppose state policy, had applied for grants in the first place. Although the NEA, founded in 1965, is — or was — an independent federal agency, it is still, like the infinitely more consequential USAID, an arm of US soft power. So often we are blackmailed into supporting dubious institutions because the short-term consequences of dismantling them for the people who are dependent on their funding would be disastrous. Money, as I was saying, is dirty, whether it comes from inheritance, private foundations, or the state; at the end of the day, it is hard to begrudge artists who are doing something more interesting than the market is willing to reward from getting it however they can. A world in which there is both hard and soft power may be preferable to a world in which there is only hard power, but it is important to remember that he who pays the piper sometimes calls a discordant tune.

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