We must not forget that the CIA was formed in an era of civic trust and patriotism
James M. Murphy
The Cold War was fought on many fronts, but most of us think of it taking place on the battleground of covert action and espionage. There, the Soviet Union had home-field advantage: war was in the air in 1948, and many felt it might be lost almost before it began. George Kennan was one of them, seen in the opening chapter of Hugh Wilford’s The Mighty Wurlitzer as the “determined interventionist” who developed a Cold War strategy and a mechanism to fight it – the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), later folded into the CIA. Frank Wisner, OPC’s first chief, brought in men like himself – OSS veterans bored with civilian life, all determined not to make the same mistakes in dealing with the Soviet Union which they felt their elders had in failing to contain Hitler.
The fledgling CIA, needing a formula to turn its mission statement into action, found one in the idea behind the international front organizations created by the Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, perhaps the most gifted public relations entrepreneur of a century which had plenty of them. These “innocents’ clubs”, as Münzenberg called them, projected Soviet influence to conference-going trade unionists, students, women, lawyers and, of course, lovers of peace throughout the world. As Wilford recounts, the CIA’s International Organizations (IO) Division counter-attacked by providing covert assistance to the American National Students Association (NSA), the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Free Trade Union Committee of the American Federation of Labor (AFofL), and a number more, including some not mentioned in Wilford’s book. Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe also claimed to be supported by citizens’ contributions – which in a way they were, taking the lion’s share of IO Division’s budget.
The compromise of the CIA’s fronts after twenty or so years began with an exposé in 1967 of NSA’s intelligence involvement: the CIA’s connections to other organizations quickly became the main item of primetime news, reported with an affected gravitas which barely concealed the media’s relish at such a scoop. Exposure brought embarrassment to those who were witting, and caused resentment among some who were not, although it was hard to believe, even then, that many were as shocked, or even as surprised, as they claimed. Professor Wilford pictures the effect of the revelations on the American public as traumatic: the CIA’s patronage (in any case, its exposure) blighted careers and lives, undermined the faith in government and “stained the reputation of the nation itself”. All this seems a touch melodramatic – at least without more evidence to go on than Wilford’s reading: worse things happened to people during the Cold War, after all. While no one disputed that these operations were legal and authorized, there was a predictable outcry from those who always half-suspected that the Cold War was something largely got up by the CIA in the first place. Unwitting recipients of covert support were told they had not been beneficiaries of a forum as they might have thought, but victims of a cynical exercise which poisoned the wellspring of intellectual discourse. Some poison, some discourse, said the CIA’s defenders, recalling how far intellectual life of the early 1950s had been subordinated to politics – where most Marxists had always felt it belonged. Such arguments may be what Wilford has in mind when charging the CIA’s cultural warriors with “unquestioning belief in their own righteousness”. Whatever one thinks of the CIA’s public–private partnerships, however, few (including many of the CIA officers involved) would disagree that they had lived on past their sell-by date. While the West prospered, Stalinism lite had blundered on, alienating more hearts and minds by Gothic rigidity than its predecessor had by mass murder and territorial aggression. Propaganda professionals seemed not to have noticed that an uncontrollable media guff stream flowed nightly through every sitting room in the Western world. When these CIA projects were terminated, their disappearance was hardly noticed.
Wilford’s attempt to put this Cold War episode in perspective is particularly welcome for two important observations which, although not discoveries or exercises of uncommon sense, almost count as such, given that so much written about intelligence belongs to the genre of imaginative non-fiction. First is his recognition that, unlike Münzenberg’s factitious enterprises, the CIA's organizations had an independent, legitimate existence. Even more important, he acknowledges that the evidence does not show the CIA’s collaborators as dupes cynically manipulated by spies, or even much manipulated at all for that matter: “genuine unwittingness was a rare condition”. Most saw themselves as voluntarily cooperating with the CIA. Others were more like the imperious Jay Lovestone of the AFofL, expelled from the leadership of the American Communist Party by Stalin and lucky to have survived it, who tended to see the CIA as in collaboration with him.
There are, on the other hand, a number of other observations which many readers will find less than persuasive. Two must do as examples. Few who knew how the Agency worked would agree that these projects somehow interfered with its principal mission (or even with how the author chooses to define what the CIA’s official mission was). It is even more of a stretch to suggest that revelations concerning them nudged Americans into widespread anomie, changing them from a nation of joiners into a mass who sought the isolation of “bowling alone”. Apart from the pop sociology and national stereotyping dubious even in Tocqueville’s day, this sounds like a prosecutor’s attempt to pad his list of indictments.
It is impossible, however, not to flag one major complaint: namely, that the ambiguity of a casual metaphor is exploited here to insinuate something it was never taken to mean – indeed something Wilford’s own findings seem to contradict. His book, he says, describes how the CIA attempted to “‘play’ America as if it were a giant musical instrument and how US citizens at first followed the Agency’s score, then began improvising their own tunes . . . ”. In fact, CIA officers – who often mocked its pretensions – did not understand Frank Wisner’s Mighty Wurlitzer in this way. For them and for him it stood for the entire range of the CIA’s covert-action resources across the world, of which IO Division’s projects were only one and not the dominant part. To play such an instrument was not to “play America”, but to disseminate abroad a spectrum of stories, news, interpretation and commentary which, it was hoped, would advance American interests and undermine those of its adversary. The Wurlitzer was to elaborate for a reader in India, for example, the significance of Khrushchev’s secret speech, or highlight for a reader in Brazil the defection of a KGB officer in Guatemala – matters which hardly fell in the remit of the United States Information Agency’s job of overtly “Telling America’s Story to the World”. It no more played Americans than the Cominform, which employed plenty of Soviet intelligence personnel and probably cost a great deal more, played Russians. As much as one does not want to think it either of the author or of Harvard University Press, one cannot help wondering whether this book’s subtitle was chosen for its merchandising value and meant as a wink to the CIA’s many critics that they would find here a work that suited their preconceptions. It is, admittedly, shorter and cleverer than, for example, “How the CIA and American organizations cooperated during the Cold War”; but even a play on words should play fair.
Like most intelligence services, the CIA is a bastion of secrecy which even tries to limit the scope of staff members’ knowledge to only what they need to know. For the world outside, it is not a workplace but a topic – of suspicion, curiosity and, above all, gossip. With only hearsay and rumour to work with, journalists do the best they can and conspiracy theorists do the worst. Wilford recognizes this from the start, acknowledging that “the CIA’s operational records remain tantalizingly out of reach”. Too true, and thus leaving a rather large hole in the documentation no matter how many records survive concerning those who cooperated with the Agency. Doing history about a secret intelligence service without access to the project outlines and approvals, the contact reports and operational correspondence which give it shape and make it intelligible, can seem like putting on Hamlet without the Prince.
For all that, The Mighty Wurlitzer is no less a well-intentioned and diligent work of scholarship which provides much that is new and useful, and shows a readiness to follow where the evidence, such as there is, leads. It is careful to demonstrate disinterestedness, even though it must draw on sources which may not themselves be so fastidious. For such merits, together with its clear, readable style, the reader will be grateful (and would be more so if a bibliography had been included). He may also find, however, that the book has the feel, not so much of an essay in history, as of a monograph of political science – that species of scholarship, much prized by the think tank, which aims to present findings rather than insights and, in its haste, seldom waits around for the owl of Minerva to spread its wings. In Hugh Wilford’s book, the required conclusions are briskly produced and lessons duly drawn, the principal one being the bromide that “the winning of hearts and minds should be left to the overt government agencies and genuine, nongovernmental organizations”. We are probably all agreed that this would be a good idea, as Gandhi said of Western civilization.
One is consequently left with the sense that a wider, more important story remains to be told, namely: how a society over time changes the way it squares virtue with necessity; how what was once honourable becomes something of an embarrassment. The book is, itself, part of that story of evolving sensibilities – the part which began to find its voice in the 1960s and mistrusts accounts of what went before. Because we are sometimes forced to decide whether certain means are justified by their ends, moralists will always be in work and historians always in at least two minds. Hence, when judging these events a half-century on, it is well to remember how things looked in those prelapsarian days of civic trust and unhesitant patriotism, when men whose sense of service had been formed – and perhaps to some extent deformed – in the catastrophe of one war, genuinely felt it their duty to do what they could to prevent another. A failure to discount our hindsight about such matters might well render us also suspicious of righteousness.
Wilford,
Hugh
How the CIA
THE MIGHTY WURLITZER played America
368pp. Harvard University Press. £18.95 (US $27.95).
978 0 674 02681 0
James M. Murphy is a retired intelligence officer and a freelance writer on international affairs.
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