What it said
The founding text was a good one. At the Berlin meeting in June 1950 Arthur Koestler read a Freedom Manifesto, mostly drafted by Manès Sperber.
intellectual freedom is one of the inalienable rights of man
is defined first and foremost by his right to hold and express his own opinions, and particularly opinions which differ from those of his rulers.
An American reader hears the Declaration of Independence in that "self-evident," and is meant to. The manifesto's second clause, the right to differ from one's rulers, is close to the core of the First Amendment. The trouble is not what it said. The trouble is who was paying for the room.
Seventeen years later one of the men who had arranged the money explained it in a national magazine.
We had placed one agent in a Europe-based organization of intellectuals called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Another agent became an editor of Encounter.
Who made it and why
The prompt was the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, 25 to 27 March 1949, with Dmitri Shostakovich in the Soviet delegation. Sidney Hook's Americans for Intellectual Freedom held a counter-meeting at Freedom House, where Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, and Nicolas Nabokov spoke. A CIA historian, Michael Warner, writing in 1995 for the agency's own Center for the Study of Intelligence, treats that meeting and its Paris follow-up as the trigger for a Western reply.
In Berlin, Michael Josselson, a U.S. official, and Melvin Lasky, an American editor, proposed an international conference. The CIA's Office of Policy Coordination approved it and paid for it. It opened on 26 June 1950 at the Titania-Palast cinema in West Berlin, the day after war broke out in Korea. The speakers included Raymond Aron, A. J. Ayer, James Burnham, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Franz Borkenau, Ignazio Silone, Hook, and Koestler. John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Karl Jaspers, Benedetto Croce, and Jacques Maritain accepted honorary presidencies.
The Congress then moved to Paris and became permanent. Josselson, a CIA officer, was executive director; Nabokov was secretary general. The money came through the Farfield Foundation and other foundations that passed CIA funds along as if they were their own grants. At its height the Congress had offices in about 35 countries and a string of magazines: Preuves in Paris from October 1951; Encounter in London from 1953, first edited by Irving Kristol and Stephen Spender; Quest in Bombay from 1954; Tempo Presente in Rome and Quadrant in Sydney, both 1956; and in Latin America Cuadernos, then Mundo Nuevo, edited from Paris by Emir Rodríguez Monegal from 1966.
In April and May 1952 Nabokov staged a month-long Paris festival, L'Œuvre du XXe siècle. The Boston Symphony Orchestra opened with The Rite of Spring; Stravinsky conducted Oedipus Rex; Paris saw its first staging of Berg's Wozzeck; and an exhibition hung Cézanne, Seurat, Matisse, Kandinsky, and Chagall. Braden later wrote that he remembered the enormous joy I got when the Boston Symphony Orchestra won more acclaim for the U.S. in Paris than John Foster Dulles or Dwight D. Eisenhower could have brought with a hundred speeches
.
What it got right or wrong
The ideas were defensible and many of the people were sincere. Defending a writer's right to disagree with the people in power was a decent cause in 1950 and is a decent cause now. Peter Coleman, a later editor of Quadrant, argues that the Congress reflected its members' own convictions and that the money did not dictate what they wrote. Greg Barnhisel found relatively little editorial interference at Encounter. Hugh Wilford concludes that even when the agency tried to call the tune, it did not always get it.
Frances Stonor Saunders takes the opposite view: that those the CIA subsidized were expected to perform as part of a broad campaign of persuasion
, and that the agency was not simply backing what they would have said anyway. Giles Scott-Smith reads the Congress as a transatlantic network that pushed a political consensus while speaking the language of apolitical culture.
That argument is genuinely open, and this page does not settle it. How many contributors knew, and how much the funding shaped the pages, are contested. The sources do not show that the CIA commissioned or altered any named contributor's work beyond the cases they themselves name.
What is not open is the concealment. An organization whose selling point was independence from governments was funded by a government, and its own members were mostly not told. That was wrong on the Congress's own terms, because its manifesto staked everything on the difference between free opinion and opinion sponsored by rulers.
A writer has a right to know who owns the platform
Most of the Congress's audience was abroad, so the First Amendment question is indirect. The liberty question is not. A writer who publishes in a magazine has a right to know who owns the platform, because it bears on the writer's reputation and on what readers will assume. Contributors here were asked to lend their names to a funder they could not see. That is not voluntary participation in any full sense.
Braden's defense makes the constitutional problem explicit. He argued that secret funding was the practical way to back non-communist groups of the left abroad, which the U.S. Congress would not have funded in the open. Put plainly: the executive branch spent public money on a program because it believed the legislature would refuse. On the libertarian reading, that is the strongest argument against the program, not for it.
The other side of the Cold War did the same thing more crudely. The World Peace Council, founded in 1949 and 1950, was directed and funded through the Soviet party's International Department, according to a CIA study the House Intelligence Committee printed in 1978 and later historians. At the Wrocław congress of August 1948, Alexander Fadeyev of the Soviet Writers' Union said that if hyenas could wield a pen
they would write like Western authors he named. Communist sponsorship of those congresses was widely reported at the time, so attendees could weigh it. The Congress for Cultural Freedom's sponsor was hidden from most of its own members for sixteen years. A free society should hold itself to the stricter standard, not the looser one.
Its legacy
The cover came off in stages. A five-part New York Times series on the CIA in late April 1966 mentioned subsidies to the Congress and Encounter through foundations. In March 1967 Ramparts reported CIA money behind the U.S. National Student Association and mapped the pass-through foundations. President Johnson appointed a committee under Nicholas Katzenbach, which on 29 March 1967 recommended an end to covert federal funding of private voluntary organizations. Braden's article followed on 20 May.
Josselson then acknowledged that CIA money had flowed into the Congress from the start, latterly about a million dollars a year. At Encounter, Spender and Frank Kermode resigned after Lasky, editor since 1958, admitted he had been told in 1963. The Congress was renamed the International Association for Cultural Freedom, with Ford Foundation money and Shepard Stone as president. Rodríguez Monegal left Mundo Nuevo in 1968. The association closed in 1979.
The same years produced a domestic version of the arrangement, aimed at ordinary donors rather than intellectuals: see the Crusade for Freedom and Radio Free Europe. For a federal effort that worked through private writers in the open, with a subsidy but with real names, compare the Writers' War Board. The test the Congress failed is a simple one: follow the grant back past the masthead and the foundation, and ask whether the people whose names are on the page could see where it ended.
Sources
- FRAME case study, The Congress for Cultural Freedom, for the chronology, manifesto text, magazines, festival, and positions on the record.
- Thomas W. Braden, "I'm Glad the CIA Is 'Immoral'," Saturday Evening Post, 20 May 1967, pp. 10-14.
- Michael Warner, "Cultural Cold War: Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-50," Studies in Intelligence 38:5 (1995).
- Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? (Granta, 1999); U.S. edition The Cultural Cold War (New Press, 2000).
- Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Harvard University Press, 2008).
- Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy (Free Press, 1989).
- Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture (Routledge, 2002); "'The Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century' Festival and the Congress for Cultural Freedom," Intelligence and National Security 15:1 (2000).
- Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists (Columbia University Press, 2015).
- Günter Wernicke, "The Communist-Led World Peace Council and the Western Peace Movements," Peace & Change 23:3 (1998). U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, The CIA and the Media (1978).
- Ramparts, "NSA and the CIA," March 1967. University of Chicago Library, International Association for Cultural Freedom Records. Patrick Iber, Neither Peace nor Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2015).