CIA and the Cultural Cold War, by Frances Saunders

It's now an established fact that the CIA funded visual artists including Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, jazz musicians including Dizzie Gillepsie and Hollywood films and television as part of the so-called Cultural Cold War. It's also no secret that various US security and defence agencies continue to do ...

The CIA and the Cultural Cold War focused on the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and its efforts to penetrate les belles-lettres. Similarly, Hugh Wilford's The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America looked at the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) co-conspirators in the culture war. German ...

At the heart of Steve Slick's September 26 review of my book Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers, lies an unstated riddle: When do democratic institutions allow themselves to censor? Slick is not exceptionally praising of my book, which is itself a critique of a secrecy regime that begins when ...

The CCF's connections with the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were definitively established 16 and 17 years later in reports by The New York Times and Ramparts magazine, respectively: the CIA, operating through a series of dummy foundations, had been instrumental in organizing and ...

Why would an apolitical magazine interest the CIA? Would it have been just for his [Matthiessen's] cover, as I later found out he said? Or would it have been of interest for its own doings? And that's when I discovered the story, told through people like Frances Stonor Saunders [The Cultural Cold War: The ...

THIS YEAR, 2017, will mark the 50th year of American intellectuals being shocked that the CIA stuck its hands into our literary magazines. We've known of this scandal at least since 1967, when Ramparts magazine detailed how the CIA had helped found and fund a number of writers', artists', and ...

Around the world, the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) claimed to represent the cause of autonomous cultural expression and democratic ... The familiar story of the “cultural Cold War” is about North America and Western Europe, and most often about the Congress for Cultural Freedom's ...

These highbrow dirty wars are meticulously and thrillingly chronicled in Saunders' The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and The World of Arts and Letters. In 1950 the CIA created the Congress for Cultural Freedom, whose mission was to use the arts to "nudge the intelligentsia of Western Europe away from its ...

The full story of the CIA and modern art is told in 'Hidden Hands' on Channel 4 next Sunday at 8pm. The first programme in the series is screened tonight. Frances Stonor Saunders is writing a book on the cultural Cold War. Covert Operation. In 1958 the touring exhibition "The New American Painting", ...

James Petras is the author of thirty-six books and several hundred refereed articles. His most recent book is The Left Strikes Back (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998). Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books), £20. This book provides a ...