Conspiracy, the CIA, and the pro-capitalist “left”

I don’t have a head for conspiracy, and I often envy those who do.

Maybe it’s better said that I have no heart for it, either. I’d rather trust than fear, and I find it quite exhausting to have “hidden motives” or to not say or do exactly what you mean to do. I’m honest to a fault (though I do prefer to think that honesty is never truly a fault), and I tend to forget that lying is a thing people do.

Of course, conspiracy isn’t only about lying. Its Latin root meant agreement and unity, people who “breathed together,” and only later took on a sense of malicious plotting. In that oldest sense, conspiracy referred to a decision to agree on something others didn’t agree on, to insist together with others that something was true.

In the beginning of Here Be Monsters, describing an ill-fated date with a man who claimed to be a bat, I wrote:

That “feeling,” I think, is the sense that you’re being invited to conspire, to agree with a crafted reality that is different from the reality you already know and trust. The sense of alarm I feel in such moments, or the way my mind quickly closes off, is then some inner acknowledgment that something crucial to my own understanding of the world will be lost if I accept the terms of their reality.

Of course, I lost nothing by declining to believe that man was really a bat. However, there are other times that I could probably benefit from a bit more head and heart for conspiracy.

Almost two decades ago, I read a strange book that I’ve never really known what to do with. I borrowed it from the Seattle Library, read it twice, returned it, and tried really hard to put it out of my mind. Unfortunately, it never actually left my mind, and comes back to haunt me at the strangest times.

That book was Who Paid The Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders. It’s quite a hefty work (over 500 pages), and the author’s writing style is quite dry, which made the book a really brutal read. Yet I read it twice, primarily because I struggled so much with my refusal to acknowledge conspiracy that I’d remembered nothing by the end of the first reading.

Who Paid The Piper is about the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a funding institution set up in West Berlin in 1950. From its founding until 1978, the CCF (and its later incarnation, the International Association for Cultural Freedom) hosted international conferences and provided financial support to leftist artists, writers, intellectuals, journals, and groups in Europe, Africa, and both Americas.

Sounds great, of course, except for one thing:

“The Congress for Cultural Freedom is widely considered one of the CIA’s most daring and effective Cold War covert operations. It published literary and political journals such as Encounter, hosted dozens of conferences bringing together some of the most eminent Western thinkers, end even did what it could to help intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain. Somehow this organization of scholars and artists — egotistical, free-thinking, and even anti-American in their politics — managed to reach out from its Paris headquarters to demonstrate that Communism, despite its blandishments, was a deadly foe of art and thought.”

That quote isn’t from Who Paid the Piper, by the way, but rather from an official history found on the CIA’s own website. You can find a lot there about it, and many articles elsewhere, enough to be feel pretty clear that there was a conspiracy here.

But what exactly was that conspiracy? That’s where things get a bit difficult. If you’ve not heard of any of this before, and if like me you’ve no heart nor head for this stuff, go make yourself a cup of tea or lean against a tree for a bit. It helps, trust me.

The Congress for Cultural Freedoms’s goal was to build an anti-communist “left,” or what they often referred to as “liberal anti-communism.” The CIA’s stated justification for creating the CCF was that the Soviets were also funding intellectuals and artists, and thus the United States needed a strong counter to these financing efforts in order to keep the “West” from going communist.

There was a problem, though. Communist-aligned organizations knew where their funding was coming from, since communism is openly conspiratorial. The core principle of communism is that workers everywhere are essentially kin, since they all share the same material conditions and struggles against the capitalist class. Thus, Communist solidarity means financially supporting Communists everywhere, and “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

On the other hand, very few of those who benefited from CIA money through the CCF knew where it was coming from. In fact, this was by design, as Thomas W. Braden, one of its early architects, openly admitted in the Saturday Evening Post:

By 1953 we were operating or influencing international organizations in every field where Communist fronts had previously seized ground, and in some where they had not even begun to operate. The money we spent was very little by Soviet standards. But that was reflected in the first rule of our operational plan: “Limit the money to amounts private organizations can credibly spend.” The other rules were equally obvious: “Use legitimate, existing organizations; disguise the extent of American interest: protect the integrity of the organization by not requiring it to support every aspect of official American policy.”

The list of activities, artists, writers, and groups funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom is quite terrifying. They funded scores of literary journals, funded the work and organized the exhibitions of painters such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, promoted Julia Child (who was herself a spy with the CIA’s predecessor, the OSS), produced a film version of Orwell’s Animal Farm with an alternative ending, and even funded a popular travel guide company, Fodor’s, as a front organization for their agents’ work:

It was not unusual for the C.I.A. to use artists, writers, journalists, musicians and others for their own gain during the Cold War—both covertly and overtly. Three years after George Orwell’s death, a film version of Animal Farm was released in 1954. It was a fairly faithful rendition of the book, but instead of Orwell’s finale, in which both the humans and pigs are left in egregious light, the film removed the humans, leaving only the dirty pigs, i.e., the fascists. The silent producer of the film was, in fact, the CIA, and it was none other than E. Howard Hunt who visited Orwell’s widow to successfully wrest the rights from her so they could make the more overtly anti-Soviet version.

The agency saw in the abstract art of modern artists like Pollock, de Kooning, and Rothko a kind of very American assertive individualism and so promoted their work abroad, often funding exhibitions. The CIA first funded the Paris Review, and one of its founding editors, the novelist and naturalist Peter Matthiessen, was a spy. Jazz greats Dave Brubeck and Louis Armstrong, among others, were sent around various parts of the planet on CIA-funded tours. Sometimes the artists knew the U.S. government was paying for it. Other times, as in the case of Nina Simone, who was sent on a 1961 tour of Nigeria underwritten by the agency, the performer had no clue.1

The few artists, intellectuals, and activists who did know about the program were also those put in charge of it. For instance, one of its primary directors was Irving Brown, leader of the largest federation of unions in the United States: the AFL-CIO. Through Brown, CIA money was channeled to other union leaders with knowledge of the funding sources. Two of these — Jay Lovestone and David Dubinsky — then used that money to fund anti-communist unions in the United States and Europe and even to create new ones. Again, from Braden’s own account:

Once chief of the Communist Party in the United States, Lovestone had an enormous grasp of foreign-intelligence operations. In 1947 the Communist Confèdèration Gènèrale du Travail led a strike in Paris which came very near to paralyzing the French economy. A takeover of the government was feared.

Into this crisis stepped Lovestone and his assistant, Irving Brown. With funds from Dubinsky’s union, they organized Force Ouvrière, a non-Communist union. When they ran out of money, they appealed to the CIA. Thus began the secret subsidy of free trade unions which soon spread to Italy. Without that subsidy, postwar history might have gone very differently.

But though Lovestone wanted our money, he didn’t want to tell us precisely how he spent it. We knew that non-Communist unions in France and Italy were holding their own. We knew that he was paying them nearly two million dollars annually. In his view, what more did we need to know?

CIA funding was hardly limited to keeping unions from going communist. Besides organizing international literary and intellectual events (and funding an international tour of the Boston Symphony Orchestra), the CCF’s primary legacy was the creation or support of scores of journals, most notably one called Encounter. One of the co-founders of that journal — Irving Kristol — was already part of the CCF, while the other one, Stephen Spenders, claimed never to have known where all the money was coming from and resigned after it became public.

Irving Kristol is commonly called the “godfather of neoconservatism,” a political ideology primarily composed of former “anti-communist liberals” who became increasingly upset about anti-American sentiment within the United States. Especially appalled by protests against the Vietnam war, they argued that only a strong interventionist foreign policy could truly bring freedom and democracy (aka capitalism) to the world and protect the United States from “existential” threats.

If you’re old enough to remember the presidency of George W. Bush, you already know the legacy of neoconservatism. Neoconservative ideas are what guided the United States into attacking Iraq despite it having no connection to the 9/11 attacks, and then to expand the “war on terror” to the rest of the Middle East in order to “protect American freedom.” Democrats and Republicans alike quickly got swept up by these invasions, agreeing with each other that this was not only necessary but also a moral obligation.

If you missed all this because you were lucky enough not to have been old enough yet, you need to know that the arguments for those invasions were staggeringly ridiculous. Liberal feminists declared that bombing Iraq would liberate women, liberal gays assured everyone that homosexuals would welcome the bombs. A prominent sex columnist and editor of a popular Seattle newspaper, Dan Savage, argued in favor of the war this way:

These developments–a Republican administration recognizing that support for dictators in Third World countries is a losing proposition; a commitment to post-WWII-style nation-building in Iraq–are terrific news for people who care about human rights, freedom, and democracy.2

“Human rights, freedom, and democracy” aren’t really the words one might objectively associate with military slaughter, yet for some reason this rallying cry caught the imaginations of millions like a dark spell. And while this appeared to be a new neoconservative talking point, it was the exact same thing the CIA leaders of the Congress for Cultural Freedom — and also their beneficiaries — proclaimed repeatedly. Communism was the “enemy” of “human rights, freedom, and democracy,” and to their minds those things were also a synonym for capitalism and the United States itself.

The core narrative of “anti-communist liberalism” is a barely-veiled continuation of the Christian “City of God” narrative, which sees Christendom beset on all sides by the powers of pagan darkness. In this newer iteration, the liberal democracies of the “West” are the city of God, fighting a constant battle for its own survival against the “principalities and powers” of authoritarian, fascist, and communist movements throughout the world. After the fall of the Soviet Union, though, new enemies needed to be found, leading especially to the creation of the threat of “Islamofascism,” a thing that never really existed except in their morbid imaginations.

The thing to remember here, though, is that the threat was never seen as just an external one. The point of the CCF’s funding of journals, writers, and artists was to shift the left within America itself away from class analysis and criticism of the United States towards an anti-communist, pro-American leftism.

At this point, it’s pretty fair to ask why anyone might call such a thing leftist at all. If it doesn’t criticize capitalism, and if it assumes the general goodness of the United States, then what distinguishes it from conservatism or really anything else? Actually, we already know what such a left looks like, because it’s exactly the left we see in the United States now.

Here, I’ll stop for a moment and breathe, because I told you I’ve no head nor heart for conspiracy and this stuff really makes me feel a bit weak.

Okay. Now, I’ll quote the conservative author John Gray, himself far from sympathetic to communism of any sort.

Gray and others have noticed that what they call “woke” ideology (more accurately called social justice identitarianism) seems to have replaced neoconservatism as the dominant moral-political force in American leftism. Again, remember that neoconservatism sprung out of anti-communist liberalism, and many of the early proponents were former leftists themselves.3 Their adoption (and in some cases conversion) to neoconservativism resulted from a belief that the Anglo-American style of liberal democracy (the “City of God”) needed to be defended from external and internal threats at all costs.

In order to defend liberal democracy effectively, though, the rest of the world needed to see it as the highest goal they could possibly attain for themselves, as well. Liberal Democracy was the “end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama (then a neoconservative) declared, and all the rest of the world was merely trying to catch up.

John Gray’s observation is that social justice identitarianism is now the way the United States attempts to convince the rest of the world — and its own people — of its righteousness. It’s a barely-retooled version of the old “human rights, freedom, and democracy” narrative propagated by the Congress for Cultural Freedom to create an anti-communist, pro-American left.

Again, let’s ask: what does a left look like that doesn’t criticize capitalism or the United States? It looks like intersectional social justice.

… nothing within the framework of intersectional social justice is incompatible with the continuation of capitalism or of the United States’ military policies. A non-binary or a trans soldier is just as capable of enforcing the will of the capitalist class upon the people of other nations as a cisgendered one. Investing in black-owned businesses and hiring more black woman bankers, stock brokers, mortgage lenders, or corporate board members and CEOs would not actually alter capitalism itself, only the aesthetic of capitalism and the skin color of capitalism’s managers.4

Remember the “woke” CIA recruitment ad? The one where the speaker says:

When I was seventeen I quoted Zora Neale Hurston’s “How it Feels to Be Colored Me” in my college application essay…. …I’m a woman of color, I am a mom, I am a cisgender millennial who’s been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise.

While many people rushed in to declare it merely a cynical adoption of identity politics by the government — as if they were merely responding to some consumer trend — the Congress for Cultural Freedom is at least one example of how the CIA has previously thrown its weight and funding towards a neutered “leftism.”

The problem with conspiracy is that it’s damn hard to tell when it’s happening, and the consequences of getting the details wrong can make you look quite crazy. Most conspiracy theories are quite correct that there’s something happening, but they get the causation wrong.

But again, conspiracy doesn’t just mean some hidden plot, but also agreement. The open conspiracy of communism was that everyone saw themselves in solidarity with each other, shared the same goals, and sent funds to other groups to help them succeed. The underlying belief to that solidarity was that the success of one group would lead to the success of others, making their respective struggles easier and more winnable.

On the other hand, the conspiracy of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was hardly open. Only a few knew where the money was actually coming from or why they were even receiving it. Neither the readers of nor the writers for “leftist” journals filled with articles defending capitalism and the American “way of life” had any way of knowing it was the CIA paying them.

Certainly, anti-capitalist leftist writers submitting to those journals might have wondered why their work was never published. Certainly, the editors of anti-capitalist journals may have blamed themselves for their failures to keep their projects afloat while their competitors did so well. Certainly, the readership of leftist journals during that time would have believed that the dominance of pro-capitalist “leftist” narratives reflected actual public opinion. And certainly, they all could be forgiven for feeling a bit crazy, wondering if there was something else happening but afraid of ever voicing their suspicions.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom was revealed to be a CIA front in 1967. Many of its beneficiaries immediately distanced themselves from it, while others defended its work and even called it “anti-American” to criticize it. After being unmasked, it was renamed the International Association for Cultural Freedom and funded through the Ford Foundation, which had previously helped channel CIA funding for other projects. In 1979 it was “officially” dissolved. Almost all of the previous journals shut down in the following years, until by 1991 only four journals and one affiliate organization were left. Two of those journals shut down that year, and the affiliate foundation, “The European Intellectual Mutual Aid Fund,” was absorbed by another organization students of conspiracy might recognize: the explicitly anti-communist and pro-identity politics Open Society Foundations of George Soros.

There’s no clear evidence that I know of which proves the CIA continues to fund pro-capitalist “leftists,” though as the famous neoconservative Donald Rumsfeld said, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”5 Looking around, it’s not unreasonable to suspect it’s still happening. Especially in the strange way that, post-Occupy, the left in the United States suddenly became obsessed with identity, oppression, and the existential threat of “fascism” lurking behind every anti-American critique, it’s hard to imagine this was all just by accident.

We’ll not know what’s actually happening now until later, if ever. It took 19 years for the CCF to be unmasked, and it’s difficult to imagine the deep state didn’t learn any lessons from their embarrassment. We get bits and clues here and there, like when prominent pro-American antifascist leaders work alongside ex-CIA and current DHS officials,6 but going too far down those paths will make you feel quite crazy.

And anyway, merely knowing about a conspiracy doesn’t actually change the power of the conspiracy itself. If conspiracy is at its very root “agreement,” then what is needed to fight it are other agreements. Getting people to agree that capitalism is the problem isn’t all that difficult to imagine, though it will of course require convincing people to stop fighting each other.

Making leftism anti-capitalist again would mean no longer looking for the demonic forces ( “able-ism,” “fascism,” “racism,” “fatphobia,” “cisheteronormativity,” etc) hiding in the behaviours and souls of our neighbors, and instead conspiring with them to make all our material conditions more livable. The capitalists won’t like that, of course, nor will their institutions and agents, and they’ve got a lot more money and power than we do.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s precisely because they have all that money and all that power that they need to keep us fighting each other instead of them.