Congress for Cultural Freedom

Based on Wikipedia: Congress for Cultural Freedom

The CIA's Secret War for Hearts and Minds

In the summer of 1950, while American soldiers were dying in Korea, a different kind of battle was being waged in a hotel ballroom in West Berlin. Philosophers, novelists, and poets from across the Western world had gathered not to write manifestos or read poetry, but to launch what would become one of the most ambitious covert operations in Central Intelligence Agency history.

They called it the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Its mission was nothing less than winning the Cold War—not with tanks or nuclear weapons, but with ideas.

A Conference to Counter a Conference

The story begins in a hotel suite at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. In March 1949, hundreds of prominent Americans—writers, scientists, musicians—had gathered for the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace. The Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich was there. So was Aaron Copland, the quintessentially American composer of "Appalachian Spring" and "Fanfare for the Common Man."

The conference called for peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union. To many observers in Washington, it looked like communist propaganda dressed up in cultural clothing.

But something unexpected happened at the Waldorf that week. A group of anti-communist intellectuals, led by a philosophy professor named Sidney Hook, rented rooms on an upper floor of the same hotel. Hook was an ex-communist himself, one of many American leftists who had soured on the Soviet Union after Stalin's purges and the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. From their makeshift headquarters, Hook's group launched a guerrilla media campaign, flooding journalists with press releases that cast the peace conference as a front for Soviet interests.

It was scrappy. It was improvised. And it worked well enough that powerful people in Washington took notice.

Frank Wisner's Response

One of those powerful people was Frank Wisner, who ran the Office of Policy Coordination—a deliberately bland name for what was essentially the CIA's covert operations division. Wisner understood something that many Cold Warriors missed: the battle against communism couldn't be won solely through military strength or economic pressure. It had to be won in the realm of ideas, in universities and literary magazines, in concert halls and art galleries.

The Soviets, after all, were masters at this game. The Cominform—the Communist Information Bureau, Moscow's international coordination body—had been staging peace conferences and cultural events across Europe. In August 1948, the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace had convened in Wrocław, Poland. In March 1950, the World Peace Council issued the Stockholm Appeal, calling for a ban on nuclear weapons and gathering millions of signatures worldwide.

These weren't just propaganda exercises. They were sophisticated attempts to shape global opinion, to position the Soviet Union as the defender of peace and the United States as a warmonger. And they were succeeding, particularly among European intellectuals who had their own reasons to distrust American power.

Wisner decided that the United States needed its own cultural offensive. But it had to be different from Soviet efforts—more subtle, more genuinely intellectual, and crucially, it had to appear independent of government control.

Berlin, 1950

The city they chose for the founding conference could not have been more symbolic. West Berlin in June 1950 was an island of Western capitalism surrounded by Soviet-controlled East Germany. Just a year earlier, Stalin had tried to strangle the city with a blockade, cutting off all road and rail access. The Western Allies had responded with the Berlin Airlift, flying in food and coal for eleven months straight.

The blockade had failed. West Berlin survived. And now it would host a gathering designed to show that Western intellectuals could mount their own challenge to Soviet cultural dominance.

The list of attendees reads like a who's who of mid-century Western thought. There was Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher and mathematician, who had won the Nobel Prize in Literature just the year before. Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian-British author whose novel "Darkness at Noon" had become the definitive literary indictment of Stalinist terror. The American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who would later serve in the Kennedy White House. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers. The Italian novelist Ignazio Silone. The American playwright Tennessee Williams.

Many of these men—and they were almost all men—shared a particular background. They were leftists, but anti-communist leftists. Some, like Koestler, had actually been Communist Party members before becoming disillusioned. Others, like Schlesinger, were New Deal liberals who saw Soviet totalitarianism as a betrayal of genuine progressive values.

This was deliberate. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was designed not to preach to the converted, not to rally conservatives who already hated communism, but to win over the non-communist left—the artists and academics and opinion-makers who might otherwise be tempted by Soviet promises of peace and social justice.

The Man Behind the Curtain

If the intellectuals were the public face of the Congress, its real driving force was a man most of them knew little about. Michael Josselson was a Russian-born American who spoke four languages fluently and had spent the war years working for U.S. intelligence in Europe. By 1950, he was "undoubtedly a CIA officer," as historians would later establish.

Josselson became the head of the Congress's secretariat, which meant he controlled its day-to-day operations. For the next seventeen years, he would orchestrate a remarkable range of activities: publishing magazines, organizing conferences, funding research, sponsoring art exhibitions, and building relationships with intellectuals across five continents.

He was, by all accounts, extraordinarily good at his job. He had a genuine appreciation for literature and ideas, and he understood that heavy-handed propaganda would backfire. The Congress's publications and events had to be genuinely interesting, genuinely intellectual, or the people it was trying to influence would see through them immediately.

An Empire of Ideas

At its height, the Congress for Cultural Freedom operated in thirty-five countries. It employed dozens of staff members and published more than twenty magazines in different languages around the world.

The first of these magazines was Preuves, which launched in Paris in October 1951. Edited by the Swiss writer François Bondy, it became a model for what the Congress was trying to accomplish: high-quality cultural journalism that happened to align with Western, liberal democratic values. Critics in Paris dismissed it as "the American Magazine," but it found readers and influenced debates.

The most famous Congress publication was Encounter, founded in London in 1953. Its editors included the poet Stephen Spender and the American journalist Irving Kristol—who would later become known as the "godfather of neoconservatism." Encounter published work by some of the most celebrated writers in the English-speaking world: Isaiah Berlin, W.H. Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Nancy Mitford. It was erudite, cosmopolitan, and genuinely well-edited. Many readers had no idea that CIA money was keeping it afloat.

The Congress also sponsored conferences—more than thirty of them between 1950 and 1966, held everywhere from Tokyo to Mexico City to Ibadan, Nigeria. It organized art exhibitions. It gave prizes to musicians and artists. In 1952, it mounted a major festival called "Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century," showcasing modernist art and music in Paris. The festival featured works by composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Claude Debussy, and paintings by Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, and Wassily Kandinsky.

There was a strategic logic to promoting modernism. Abstract art and avant-garde music represented precisely the kind of creative freedom that Soviet cultural doctrine condemned as "decadent" and "bourgeois." By celebrating Jackson Pollock and Igor Stravinsky, the Congress was making an implicit argument: this is what freedom looks like. This is what you lose under totalitarian rule.

The Targets

The Congress for Cultural Freedom didn't just promote its allies. It actively worked to undermine intellectuals it considered threats.

The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was one target. Neruda was an ardent communist, a genuine believer who had written odes to Stalin, and by the 1960s he was being mentioned as a potential Nobel Prize winner. The Congress mounted a campaign against him, though it couldn't stop him from eventually winning the prize in 1971.

Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist philosopher, was another target. Sartre had become increasingly sympathetic to communism in the 1950s, visiting the Soviet Union and defending its policies. So was Simone de Beauvoir, his partner and intellectual collaborator. The novelist Thomas Mann, who had spent the war years in American exile but was growing more critical of Western policies, also attracted the Congress's attention.

The Congress financed writers it approved of, including the German novelists Heinrich Böll and Siegfried Lenz, both of whom would go on to win major literary prizes. The line between patronage and propaganda was often blurry.

The Revelation

The secret couldn't last forever.

In April 1966, The New York Times published a series of five articles investigating the CIA's methods and purposes. One of these articles mentioned that the agency had been secretly funding the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its Encounter magazine. The story didn't attract enormous attention at first—it was one revelation among many.

But in early 1967, Ramparts magazine, a muckraking publication based in San Francisco, published a much more detailed exposé. Former CIA officers confirmed what many had long suspected: the Congress for Cultural Freedom had been a CIA operation from the beginning. Its funding came through an elaborate network of dummy foundations designed to hide the agency's involvement.

Then came the most dramatic confirmation of all. Thomas Braden, who had run the CIA division that oversaw the Congress, wrote an article for The Saturday Evening Post with the provocative title "I'm Glad the CIA is 'Immoral.'" Braden defended the operation, arguing that it had been necessary to counter Soviet influence. But in doing so, he confirmed the essential facts: for more than a decade, the CIA had secretly subsidized Encounter and the Congress, and at least one staff member at the magazine had been a CIA agent.

The Fallout

The revelations forced a reckoning.

Stephen Spender, who had been one of Encounter's founding editors, resigned in outrage. He insisted he had never known about the CIA funding—a claim many found hard to believe. Other Congress figures expressed similar shock, though historians continue to debate how much various participants actually knew.

In some parts of the world, the consequences were severe. In Uganda, President Milton Obote had the editor of Transition magazine, Rajat Neogy, arrested and imprisoned. Transition had been associated with the Congress, and Obote saw the CIA revelations as proof that the magazine had been a tool of Western imperialism. Neogy eventually left Uganda in 1968, and the magazine ceased publication.

The Congress itself tried to survive by renaming itself the International Association for Cultural Freedom and finding new funding from the Ford Foundation. But the magic was gone. Without the covert backing of the CIA, without the elaborate machinery of secret funding, the organization couldn't maintain its reach. National committees shut down one by one. Magazines folded. In 1977, the Paris office closed, and two years later the Association voted to dissolve itself.

What It Meant

More than half a century later, historians still argue about the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Was it a noble effort to defend intellectual freedom against Soviet totalitarianism? Or was it a covert propaganda operation that manipulated writers and thinkers into serving American foreign policy interests?

Peter Coleman, a journalist and former CIA agent who wrote a sympathetic history of the Congress, argues that it was genuinely valuable. The Congress raised awareness of Soviet repression, he says, and its publications were high-quality intellectual journals that contributed meaningfully to debates. The CIA funding, in his view, didn't compromise the integrity of the work.

Frances Stonor Saunders, whose book "Who Paid the Piper?" is the most comprehensive critical account, sees it differently. The Congress, she argues, functioned as "a covert propaganda network to ease the passage of American foreign policy interest abroad." It wasn't just defending freedom; it was promoting a particular vision of American-led Western capitalism and suppressing alternative viewpoints.

The truth, as other historians have argued, is probably somewhere in between. The Congress was both things at once: a genuine intellectual enterprise and a covert operation. Many of its participants produced work that would have been valuable regardless of who was paying for it. Yet the secrecy of the funding arrangement fundamentally compromised the Congress's stated mission of defending intellectual freedom. How can you champion open inquiry when your own financing is a lie?

The Legacy

Some of the Congress's creations outlasted it. Encounter continued publishing until 1991, the same year the Soviet Union collapsed. The Australian magazine Quadrant and The China Quarterly are still being published today. The ideas and debates that the Congress helped foster—about totalitarianism, about the relationship between culture and politics, about the responsibilities of intellectuals—remain relevant.

The records of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its successor organization are now stored at the University of Chicago and New York University, available to any researcher who wants to examine them. The secrets are out. The debates continue.

And perhaps that's the strangest legacy of all. The CIA set out to win a war of ideas, and in some ways it succeeded. Soviet communism did collapse. Western liberal democracy did prevail, at least for a time. But the methods the agency used—the secrecy, the manipulation, the hidden hands—undermined the very values it claimed to be defending.

You cannot champion intellectual freedom through deception. That contradiction was built into the Congress for Cultural Freedom from the beginning, and it was only a matter of time before the contradiction tore it apart.