CIA and the role of the left-wing of parasitism in the 1950s and 1960s

Frances Stonor Saunders has provided some historical details on the CIA's intervention into academia in the 1950s and 1960s that we review here. On the whole, our difficulty with the account is that it can become part of a recruiting war for the CIA. It mentions interventions in Iran and Chile in passing and because of the adept focus of the book, readers may get the wrong idea about the CIA as just some self- deluded intellectuals.

In some instances of details, we are also not certain--as in the suggestion that CIA managed to infiltrate the writers' organization PEN successfully. It might be good to ask who has not infiltrated PEN. We have to watch out for situations where a slight CIA association has been manufactured in order to discredit someone--disinformation. We have seen not just PEN, but people such as Kwame Nkrumah mentioned by others, through a loose sort of approach. For that matter, CIA has met Al-Qaeda, which is relevant when Bush & Cheney claim that Saddam Hussein's regime met with Al-Qaeda. The CIA ties to Al-Qaeda were much deeper than Saddam Hussein's. Beyond that, relevance depends on timing and depth of contacts. MIM looks for evidence of willing service or change of political line from what we would otherwise expect without CIA intervention. Anyone in the united $tates who deals seriously in international issues is going to bump into spies. This cannot tarnish everyone. MIM is also infiltrated by spies. The question is whether they have altered the line against the interests of the exploited. Much of what has been acknowledged below has been touched on at least tangentially by other sources.

As the Cold War recedes, writers get a chance to catch up with how the united $tates conducted purges in the political and cultural fields to oppose communism. Frances Stonor Saunders's book de-emphasizes all the CIA-sponsored bloody coups against majority-supported governments to talk about CIA as a propaganda organ. Although the McCarthyite purges were long well- known, it is now clear that after McCarthyism, the CIA functioned as a mirror-image of the global party it imagined to exist centered at the Soviet Union. The CIA ended up owning several academic journals including "Partisan Review," "Kenyon Review," "Hudson Review," "Sewanee Review," "Poetry," "The Journal of the History of Ideas" and "Daedalus," running several well-known publishing houses, editing Hollywood movies for propaganda impact and censoring anti- Amerikkkan articles at its flagship British asset "Encounter." In all of this, the role of what MIM calls the left-wing of parasitism was pivotal. CIA consciously pursued those called "left of center" or "non- Communist left." In practice, this meant anyone who did not support Stalin was a target of CIA alliance. This point is now in denial by self-interested writers at "The Nation" and other milquetoast organizations who went along with the CIA all the while issuing denials of communist "paranoia."

After World War II, Frances Stonor Saunders informs readers that British intelligence was the first to come up with the general strategy: "One of IRD's most important early advisers was the Hungarian-born writer Arthur Koestler. Under his tutelage, the department realized the usefulness of accommodating those people and institutions, who, in the tradition of left-wing politics, broadly perceived themselves to be in opposition to the centre of power. The purpose of such accommodation was twofold: first, to acquire a proximity to 'progressive' groups in order to monitor their activities; secondly, to dilute the impact of these groups by achieving influence from within, or by drawing its members into a parallel--and subtly less radical--forum."(1)

Writers with a similar temperament as Koestler played a pivotal role in the CIA's work. Those youth who have already read Koestler, Lasky, Raymond Aron and Sidney Hook should now know they were reading the official CIA line, supported with CIA money through the purchase of periodicals and books and the running of lavish conferences and social events. The most famous polemics one could read against communism had the CIA behind them. Those of us innoculated against this disease founded the MIM in the 1980s.

The facts about the CIA's functioning as a virtual anti-communist party gradually became exposed starting in the mid-1960s. The CIA even instructed people on how to lie regarding ties to the secret party that was the CIA. Among the liars are famous neo-conservative founder of today Irving Kristol who along with Lasky sent a letter to the New York Times denying what is today undisputed truth about the Congress for Cultural Freedom--that it was a large CIA front into the mid- 1960s.(2) In Irving Kristol we have one persyn encapsulating much of what MIM says-- a Trotskyist in 1940, a CIA agent in the 1950s and then the founder of neo-conservatism today. Underlying it all was the consistent belief that U.$.-exported capitalism brings progress to the Third World, and denial of Lenin's theses on parasitism and uneven development.

While fighting for "freedom," the U.S. Government did everything it said its enemies did. Had it stopped at funding conferences and social events, CIA intervention would have been no different than the Soviet social- imperialist interventions, but of course, the U.S. Government had power to go further. Here is just a short list of the most stunning items MIM encountered:

FBI Director Hoover told Little, Brown not to publish Howard Fast's "Spartacus," and they backed out. CIA had extensive ties to publishers including famous textbook publishers and none of Little, Brown's competitors published it.(3) Of course it helps when CIA is also a major purchaser that cannot be ignored.

The US Information Agency came under instructions to remove all pro-communist and "fellow traveller" books from its foreign libraries--30,000 different books total.(4)

The State Department ordered that all communist and "fellow traveller" art not be shown at State Department sponsored art exhibitions.(5)

A CIA agent producer at Paramount in Hollywood edited and changed countless scenes in movies to make Amerika look better.(6) Of special concern was the portrayal of Blacks that Stalin had made hay on.

For that matter, FBI long ago started creating its own Hollywood films.(7)

In other words, in fighting genuine communism, the imperialists marketed "freedom" and did not deliver. We communists did not deliver it either, but we did deliver guaranteed health-care, shelter, food and jobs--to double life expectancies in China and the USSR. We followers of Stalin and Mao carried out open dictatorship, while the rich people of Amerika settled for false phrases about freedom.

The Marxist theory says that while there is a state there will be repression, because various social groups will seize it to oppress other social groups. So the only way to stop that and achieve freedom is by eliminating classes and similar social groups. By giving everyone a job, shelter etc., the USSR and Mao's China made steps toward a situation where people would have no profit motivations for political repression of others. In sum, the communist movement delivered freedom for some who did not have it before and also repressed others, but what the communist movement did that its opponents did not do is make steps toward the removal of the underlying causes and motivations for repression.

The CIA and other imperialists really only succeeded by spreading money around. It bought grass-tips leaders with salaries and purchases of books and periodicals in runs of the tens of thousands. In some thousands of cases, CIA paid for publication of a book. Roderick MacFarquhar's 1960 book at Praeger about Mao's China titled One Hundred Flowers was a case in point.(8) MacFarquhar became an oft- cited authority in the media and chair of Harvard's "Government Department"--an example of a worthwhile CIA investment.

So CIA success in the 1950s and 1960s stemmed not so much from "freedom" but selective purchasing and also the ease of showing off Amerika as the richest country in the world. The CIA strategy is not a winner for the world as a whole. It cannot make everyone an anti- communist by giving every citizen of the world a CIA-funded journal to run to oppose communism. Quite the contrary, the U.$. wealth that CIA was showing off and using depended on exploitation of the Third World, kept down by CIA-supported death squads that attacked labor unions and created coups against governments not deemed to aid U.$. exploitation sufficiently.

Even in their own internal politics, CIA had those they purged, not to mention files CIA people kept on other CIA people. The CIA originally fell out with Melvin Lasky. The CIA's own story also goes that it drove a poet stir-crazy, as in running around Latin America standing on statues naked and proclaiming Hitler. He had to be tossed as a CCF leader. When the CIA entered the "culture war," it found it had all the same problems as the vanguard parties it was criticizing.

Like vanguard parties, CIA also had its persuasion failures. CCF's nominal leader Bertrand Russell resigned in disgust. Richard Wright bolted for the communist side and when CIA intervened to deny Pablo Neruda a Nobel Prize for Literature because of his "Stalin Prize," CIA nemesis #1 Sartre got the prize instead. Fortunately for CIA, by the time these two received their Nobel prizes, the political ground had shifted anyway.

For that matter, according to Frances Stonor Saunders, President Lyndon Johnson himself ordered the whole lot of the center- left to be tossed--"liberals, intellectuals and communists." He was not going to get the reliable help he needed on Vietnam, so one interpretation goes that CIA eventually purged the left-wing of parasitism too, spit it out after using it against Stalin era communism and Stalin's immediate aftermath.

Nonetheless, special attention needs to go to the dupes of the CIA in the left-wing of parasitism. In the most liberal periods of CIA work it bribed and worked with anyone who was not pro-Stalin. For the rewards of their work in uniting everyone to the right of Stalin in anti-communism, the CIA got the Vietnam War and all politics ended up being remade. The imperialist leaders wanted to get out, but they could not, because no politician could explain to the labor aristocracy why U.$. imperialism should back down in the face of communism.

The non-communist so-called "left" also got the blood of half a million Indonesians in 1965 on its hands. CIA expanded from the hundreds into the thousands. Now there are a total of over 100,000 international spies. What has to be understood by many who only yesterday were talking about the "totalitarianism" of political movements with smaller parties than the CIA, is that the U.$. intelligence community dwarfs civilian politics in the united $tates. This is the new element for our day. The people of the early CIA are often still around among us, people like Irving Kristol, but what is really different today is size. As MIM has explained, the parasitic strata in the economy grow in an imperialist society--especially prison guarding, spying, soldiering and weapons manufacturing.

Frances Stonor Saunders described the thinking of JFK cabinet member Schlesinger and the line of the CIA:

"In what Arthur Schlesinger described as a 'quiet revolution', elements of the government had come increasingly to understand and support the ideas of those intellectuals who were disillusioned with Communism but still faithful to the ideals of socialism. . . . 'the theoretical foundation of the Agency's political operations against Communism over the next two decades'."(9)

It is not a coincidence that MIM moved forward in the 1980s, because MIM bashed Trotskyism and put forward the line against parasitism. Blunting advance everywhere was CIA in the background, but where the MIM line was the angle of attack, there was at least a contrast with the CIA line.

Famous Trotskyists were having their misdeeds covered for by CIA. Max Eastman shown in the "Reds" movie ended up a supporter of Joe McCarthy.(10)

CIA agent of Nixon fame, a real sick puppy, Howard Hunt said of his compatriot James Burnham, "'he had extensive contacts in Europe and, by virtue of his Trotskyite background, was something of an authority on domestic and foreign Communist parties and front organizations.'"(11)

The kind of ex-pseudo-communists that wrote the Black Book of Communism are a favorite of CIA. When the CIA mounted its equivalent of D-Day to try to find someone to compete with Sartre in France, it ended up with anti-Stalin trash:

"Having failed to attract a French editor, the Executive Committee decided to give the job to Francois Bondy, a Swiss writer of German mother tongue who had been a Communist Party activist until the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939."(12)

The original impetus of U.S. government cooperation with the left-wing of white nationalism and the pro-Stalin communists was WWII. When WWII ended, cooperation with pro-Stalin people ended.

CIA apologist David Engerman says that federal involvement in Soviet Studies brought money to the humynities fields in universities. He also says that the Marx-influenced Frankfurt School found itself co- opted into the CIA predecessor organization.(13)

On the other hand, CIA fronts called Russian Research Centers at Harvard and Columbia would not accept members of the genuine communist parties.(14) So it is that the CIA, Harvard and Columbia handed us at MIM an easy tactical retort: the ONLY people to oppose the U.$. government are pro-Stalin communists. All the rest are fatuous intellectuals accepted even into the CIA. That should make it pretty easy for any young communist activist to decide who to side with. MIM is the antidote to CIA-run politics.

Notes:
1. Frances Stonor Saunders (hereafter FSS), The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters NY: The New Press, 1999, p. 609.
2. FSS, op. cit., p. 378.
3. FSS, op. cit., p. 53.
4. FSS, op. cit., p. 193.
5. FSS, op. cit., p. 257.
6. FSS, op. cit., p. 290.
7. FSS, op. cit., p. 287.
8. FSS, op. cit., p. 245.
9. FSS, op. cit., p. 63.
10. FSS, op. cit., p. 200.
11. FSS, op. cit., p. 87.
12. FSS, op. cit., p. 101.
13. DAVID C. ENGERMAN, "The Ironies of the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and the Rise of Russian Studies in the US."
14. DAVID C. ENGERMAN, "The Ironies of the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and the Rise of Russian Studies in the US."