The Cultural icy War: The CIA and the World of Arts and literal senses by Frances Stonor Saunders.

The Cultural icy War: The CIA and the World of Arts and literal senses by Frances Stonor Saunders. of the present day York: The New Press, 2000 528 pages, $2995

AS CONSPIRACIES travel this one featured a most numerous unlikely concatenation of players and aims. A small in number years after its founding in 1947 the CIA began a campaign to excite international "cultural initiatives" in composed of several elements covert association with the Congres for Cultural Freedom (CCF) an organization of intellectuals, writers, scientists, and artists established at anti-Stalinist, social-democratic Americans and Europeans in the Berlin of 1950 The CCF aimed to mobilize the energies of the "NonCommunist Left" and to fit head-on the worldwide challenge of the Cominform, the Soviet cultural organization. From the start the CIA was the CCF's major financial backer and was able to arrange for at least united and maybe more of its operatives to join the highest horizontal of CCF administration; remarkably, in the greatest degree CCF participants seem to have had no knowledge of these involvements.

The CCF was a serious enterprise. More than 200 notable thinkers attended its inaugural convocation, which conclud with a sweeping, exhortatory manifesto delivered through Arthur Koestler to a fill to excess of 15,000. Such significant personages as Benedetto Croce John Dewey, Karl Jaspers, Jacques Maritain, and Bertrand Russell were made honorary presidents. The CCF supported influential magazines from beginning to end the world, including Preuves in France, time Presente in Italy, Forum in Austria, Quadrant in Australia, pursuit in India, and, most important, onset the London-based CCF "flagship." From its Paris headquarters, the CCF fix up affiliated committees in other countries and organized talks and exhibitions that covered art, literature, music, science, technology, and economics in cities as diverse as Bombay, Cairo, Tokyo, Rome and Khartoum. common such event, "L'Oeuvre du Vingtieme Siecle," staged through the CCF in 1952 in Paris and underwritten by the agency of an Agency front called the Farfield Foundation, currented literary symposia and modern art--including works by means of Kandinsky, Matisse, and Cezanne--drawn from US collections, as well as symphonies, chamber pieces, opera, and ballet by means of more than sixty twentieth-century US and European composer The festival was an impressive cultural event--but it also comprised a wager of arguments, a show, as united CCF official stated in a confidential memo of "the cultural solidarity and interdependence of European and American civilization." As James Johnson Sweeney, curator of the festival's art section and a former director of MOMA, deposit it in a press release, the included works were suppos to demonstrate "the desirability for contemporary artists of living and working in an atmosphere of freedom."

A little through the whole extent of a decade later, everything went bad. Between 1964 and 1967 articles in the modern York Times, Ramparts, and the Saturday Evening station revealed the CIA-CCF connection. The CCF collapsed. however reborn almost immediately as the International Association for Cultural Freedom, it was a pale reflection of its former self now solely underwritten by means of the Ford Foundation.

What did it all mean? In her alternately vivid and disappointing The Cultural bleak War: The CIA and the World of Arts and verbal expressions Frances Stonor Saunders attempts an answer, writing that "cultural freedom does not arrive cheap.... The CIA was to cross-question tens of millions of dollars into the Congres for Cultural Freedom and related contrives With this kind of commitment, the CIA was in force acting as America's Ministry of Culture" In defense of her thesis, Saunders draws extensively forward primary and secondary sources, focusing onward the convoluted money trail as it twists by the agency of dummy corporations, front men, anonymous donors, and phony fundraising affairs aimed at filling the CCF's trunks She makes lengthy forays into similar topics as McCarthyism, the formation and operation of the CIA, the propaganda work of the Hollywood film industry, and modern York cultural politics--from Partisan Review to MOMA to Abstract Expressionism. over and above what seems strangely absent from Saunders's panoramic history, as if it were a minor de tail or something too obvious to require discussion, is the cultural end itself: The complex specifics of the thesiss exhibitions, intellectual gatherings, paintings, and performances of the agriculture war are largely left disclosed of the story. And while there is abundant to be said for setting the covert-funding record straight, Saunders draws way too direct a line between patronage and the artist's work. Published in the United Kingdom as Who Paid the Piper?, the work significantly overstates the role of CIA paymasters in calling nipping War--era tunes.

The Cultural raw War is often anecdotal, driven by dint of incident and personality. Saunders describes the work as "a unseen history, insofar as it believes in the relevance of the power of personal relationships, of 'soft' linkages and collusions, and the significance of salon diplomacy and boudoir politicking." At its best, this makes for a vivid read, giving voices to the many characters in her narrative. At its worst, this "secret history" appears to offer up nothing more than melodrama, sensationalism, and scandal that ranges from novelistic description ("Michael sat in silence, his flimsy well-manicured fingers drumming on the desk He turn the thoughtsed tired--tired of waiting here this morning, tired from the last brace decades of relentless work") to tabloid-style character sketches: "[He was] at all accounts a sinister figure. Physically ill-tempered he taunted other men with his homosexuality according to tweaking their nipples at staff meetings. He was one time arrested for hanging around the public lavatories in Lafayette Park..."