CIA as Patron of the Arts

[Dan Clore]

Some real life horror:

Book tells how commie-hating CIA became a patron of
the arts

Date: 01/04/00

By LAURENCE ZUCKERMAN in New York

George Orwell's Animal Farm has a chilling finale in which
the farm animals look back and forth at the tyrannical pigs
and the human farmers and find it "impossible to say which
is which".

That ending was altered in the 1955 animated version, which
removed the humans. Another example of Hollywood butchering
great literature? Yes, but in this case the film's secret
producer was the Central Intelligence Agency.

The CIA, it seems, was worried that the public might be too
influenced by Orwell's pox-on-both-their-houses critique of
the capitalist humans and communist pigs. So after his death
in 1950, agents were dispatched (by none other than E. Howard
Hunt, later of Watergate fame) to buy the film rights to
Animal Farm from his widow to make its message more overtly
anti-communist.

Rewriting the end of Animal Farm is just one example of the
often absurd lengths to which the CIA went, as recounted in a
new book, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts
and Letters (The New Press) by Frances Stonor Saunders, a
British journalist.

Much of what Saunders writes about, including the CIA's covert
sponsorship of the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom
and the British opinion magazine Encounter, was exposed in the
late '60s, generating a wave of indignation.

But by combing through archives and unpublished manuscripts
and interviewing several of the principal actors, Saunders has
uncovered many new details and gives the most comprehensive
account yet of the period between 1947 and 1967.

This picture of the CIA's secret war of ideas has cameo
appearances by scores of intellectual celebrities like the
critic Lionel Trilling, the poets Ted Hughes and Derek Walcott
and the novelists James Michener and Mary McCarthy, all of
whom directly or indirectly benefited from the CIA's largesse.

Travelling first class all the way, the CIA sponsored art
exhibitions, conferences, concerts and magazines to press its
larger anti-Soviet agenda.

Saunders provides ample evidence, for example, that the
editors at Encounter and other agency-sponsored magazines
were directed not to publish articles directly critical of
Washington's foreign policy.

She also shows how the CIA bankrolled some of the earliest
exhibits of abstract expressionist painting outside the
United States to counter the socialist realism being advanced
by Moscow.

In one memorable episode, the British Foreign Office
subsidised the distribution of 50,000 copies of Darkness at
Noon, Arthur Koestler's anti-communist classic. But the French
Communist Party ordered its operatives to buy up every copy of
the book, giving Koestler a windfall in royalties.

The agency also changed the ending of the film version of
Orwell's 1984.

In the book, the protagonist, Winston Smith, is entirely
defeated by the nightmarish totalitarian regime. At the end,
Orwell writes, Winston realised that "He loved Big Brother".

In the film, Winston and his lover, Julia, are gunned down
after Winston defiantly shouts: "Down with Big Brother!"

Such changes came from the agency's obsession with snuffing
out a notion then popular among many European intellectuals:
that East and West were morally equivalent.

But instead of illustrating the differences between the two
systems by taking the high road, the agency justified its
covert activities by referring to the unethical tactics of
the Soviets.

Some of the participants, like Arthur Schlesinger, who knew
about some of the CIA's cultural activities, argue that the
agency's role was benign, even necessary.

Compared with the coups the CIA sponsored, he said, its
support of the arts was some of its best work.

"It enabled people to publish what they already believed,"
he said. "It didn't change anyone's course of action or
thought."

The New York Times

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Dan Clore

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[rbm...@library.syr.edu]

Thanks, Dan. That was very interesting, and a little scary, and a bit
funny. You wonder just how effective the CIA thought it was being
and if they ever figured out that they weren't being effective. (Or
that they were. Which is a scarier thought.)

Randy

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