Congress for Cultural Freedom

The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) had its roots in the CIA-sponsored opposition to the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in March 1949 and the World Congress of Partisans for Peace in April 1949.

## History

### Berlin Conference

The opening conference for the CCF, in Berlin on June 26, 1950, was initially planned by a group of Germans who had formerly worked for Willi Munzenberg, meeting in Frankfurt in 1949 and including Melvin Lasky, Ruth Fischer and Franz Borkenau. Borkenau was once the official historian of the Comintern, while Fischer was a former leader in the German Communist Party whose faction was expelled. Lawrence de Neufville sent the proposal to Carmel Offie, who forwarded it to Frank Wisner. Wisner approved it and they were given a $50,000 budget on April 7, 1950. Lasky got Ernst Reuter, the mayor of West Berlin on board, along with several West German academics. Wisner wanted Lasky to stay out of sight, to hide the government connections of the conference, but instead he named himself general secretary of the conference. Sidney Hook and James Burnham organized the American delegation, which included Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "*James T. Farrell, Tennessee Williams, the actor Robert Montgomery, chairman of the American Atomic Energy Commission David Lilienthal, editor of the New Leader Sol Levitas, Carson McCullers, the black editor of the Pittsburgh Courier George Schuyler... the black journalist Max Yergan, [and] nobel Prize–winning genetic scientist Herman Muller*". The British Delegation, funded by the Foreign Office through the Information Research Department, included "*Hugh Trevor-Roper, Julian Amery, A.J. Ayer, Herbert Read, Harold Davis, Christopher Hollis, [and] Peter de Mendelssohn.*" The French delegation included "*Raymond Aron, David Rousset, Rémy Roure, André Philip, Claude Mauriac, André Malraux, Jules Romains, [and] Georges Altman; from Italy there was Ignazio Silone, Guido Piovene, Altiero Spinelli, Franco Lombardi, Muzzio Mazzochi, and Bonaventura Tecchi*"

Koestler happened to run into Jean-Paul Sartre on his way to the conference, and while he refused to attend he "*still felt a mutual fondness for [Koestler]... [and confessed] that his friendships were evaporating under the heat of his and de Beauvoir’s politics.*" The leaders of the conference were Arthur Koestler, Lasky, Nicolas Nabokov, Michael Josselson, Irving Brown, and Ignazio Silone. The Conference had five main 'debates': “Science and Totalitarianism,” “Art, Artists and Freedom,” “The Citizen in a Free Society,” “The defense of Peace and Freedom,” and “Free Culture in a Free World.”

There was tension between the anti-communist left and the blatantly reactionary faction. Burnham distinguished between good (American) and bad (Soviet) nuclear weapons, and was joined in a hardline stance by Lasky and Koestler, while Philip and Trevor-Roper, and others of the British delegation argued for a more moderate view. Schuyler and Yergan claimed that racism in the US was fading, attacking the neutral position of Sartre and others. Theodor Plievier flew in to repudiate his more moderate statement after the Korean war broke out the night before. The British delegation succeeded in removing a denunciation of Marxism from the Freedom Manifesto, which became the constitution for the Congress.

### After the Conference

The Conference was immediately declared a huge success by various parts of US government, with Wisner and Department of Defense representative Gen. John Magruder praising it, and even Truman being "*very well pleased*". Wisner demanded, however, that Lasky be removed, either due to his visible links to the US government, or because he wasn't CIA. While Lasky was officially removed, his close friend Josselson kept him on as an unofficial adviser. The project was made permanent and given the code name QKOPERA, and the base of operations was moved from Berlin to Paris. Josselson was chosen to run the project, supervised by Neufville. Irving Brown was put on the steering committee, a man who worked for Jay Lovestone, the CIA's liason for the American labor movement. He joined James Burnham, Ignazio Silone, "*Carlo Schmid (leader of the Socialists in the German Parliament), the Jewish sociologist Eugene Kogon, Haakon Lie (head of the Norwegian Labour Party), Julian Amery (British MP), Josef Czapski (Polish writer and artist), David Rousset,"* and Nicolas Nabokov. The CCF was organized in a similar way to the Cominform, as "*an International Committee of twenty-five was nominated, as were five honorary chairmen. Guiding their activities was an executive Committee of five—executive director, editorial director, research director, Paris bureau director, Berlin bureau director—who in turn would be kept in check by the general secretary*."

### Transitional Period

One of the primary goals the committee outlined was targeting the neutralists, and to accomplish this Josellson decided a moderate tone was necessary. The CIA determined that this meant Koestler had to go, and he was removed even though he had been having regular meetings at his home with "*Burnham, Brown, Raymond Aron, Lasky, and other members of the 'inner circle.'"* The former OSS agent Arthur Schlesinger was not CIA, but was aware and supportive of their involvement. He persuaded Bertrand Russell to continue to back CCF, though Russell wavered back and forth between reactionary militarism and advocating for peace and nuclear disarmament. Russell was an honorary chair, along with Benedetto Croce (replaced by Don Salvador de Madariaga when he died), John Dewey (headed the Committee for the defense of Leon Trotsky), Karl Jaspers, and Jacques Maritain. They offered Isaiah Berlin a spot, but he declined to support the CCF more covertly. Denis de Rougemont was made president of the Executive Committee, a "*broadcaster for Voice of America [who] worked closely with François Bondy in the European Union of Federalists, whose aims he would continue to pursue with covert assistance from the CIA (of which, he later said, he was ignorant) from his Geneva-based Centre Européen de la Culture (which still exists today).*" Nicolas Nabokov was elected General Secretary. "*It was decided that Lasky would stay in Berlin editing Der Monat, whose office became the headquarters of the German affiliate of the Congress. Josselson and de Neufville would move to Paris and head up the main office there, liaising with Irving Brown*".

Allen Dulles was appointed Deputy Director of Operations for the CIA in December 1950, and he hired Tom Braden, who created the International Organizations Division (IOD) for psychological warfare, sanctioned and heavily funded by NSC-68. IOD was to fund the anti-communist left without interfering except when necessary. It clarified CCF's role, assigned a reporting structure, and as a quickly growing Division showed the coming importance of CCF.

### Early Building

In January 1951 the British Society for Cultural Freedom was founded, enjoying the support of "*T.S. Eliot, Isaiah Berlin, Lord David Cecil, the heads of the British Council, the Third Programme of the BBC, and Richard Crossman, who was now the secretary-general of the Labour Party*". Stephen Spender was the chairman, and Michael Goodwin, who was editor of the journal Twentieth Century and also worked with the Information Research Department (IRD), was the honorary secretary. Twentieth Century was saved by CCF as they paid off a landlord and paid for its move to an office on Henrietta Street, also the headquarters of the British Society. Spender quit but then convinced CCF to push Goodwin out, and came back, joining Malcolm Muggeridge, Fredric Warburg, and Tosco Fyvel in the executive committee, and John Clews, another IRD man, became General Secretary.

CCF presented Polish defector poet Czesław Milosz at a press conference in May 1951. Nabokov then "*went to Brussels to address a dinner sponsored by the magazine Synthèses. Then he rushed back to promote the work of the Amis de la Liberté, a kind of rotary club arm of the Congress which organized meetings of French student groups across the country.*" In mid-June Nabokov headed to Berlin supposedly to lecture but truly to recruit. These recruiting trips eventually led to affiliates "*not just in Europe (there were offices in West Germany, Great*
Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland), but across other continents—in Japan, India, Argentina, Chile, Australia, Lebanon, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, Colombia, Brazil, and Pakistan.*" The first magazine was launched in October 1951, a French journal titled *Preuves,* aimed at Satre and de Beauvoir. After failing to find a French editor, the Swiss ex-communist François Bondy, who had worked on Der Monat with Lasky, was chosen.*

"*The Italian Association for Cultural Freedom was formed in late 1951 under Ignazio Silone and became the center of a federation of about a hundred independent cultural groups to which the association provided speakers, books, pamphlets, films, and an internationalist ethos. It produced the bulletin Libertà della Cultura, and later Tempo Presente, edited by Silone and Nicola Chiaromonte.*"

Eventually the CCF resided in Boulevard Haussman, but until then it was headquartered in rooms at the Hôtel Baltimore. CIA command met directly with Josselson, Nabokov, Bondy, and occasionally Malcolm Muggeridge, a link to the British IRD. De Neufville deferred to Josselson despite outranking him.

### Oeuvre du Vingtième Siècle (Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century)

Nabokov came up with the idea of an extravagant festival to display American art in early 1951, and after some persuasion convinced the CCF leaders to support it. The money came from the CIA and State Department, channeled through the Farfield Foundation, set up specifically for the purpose by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. British funds came from the IRD and Woodrow Wyatt. The CIA spent $130,000 to entice the Boston Symphony Orchestra to come, and with the support of a reactionary trustee of the Orchestra, Charles Douglas Jackson, and Nabokov's old friend, the orchestra's artistic director Charles Munch, they succeeded.

The festival opened April 1, 1952, and "*over the next thirty days, the Congress for Cultural Freedom showered Paris with a hundred symphonies, concertos, operas, and ballets by over seventy twentieth-century composers. There were performances by nine orchestras, including the Boston Symphony orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic, the West Berlin RIAS orchestra (funded by Marshall Plan counterpart funds), the Suisse romande of Geneva, the Santa Cecilia orchestra of Rome, the national Radiodiffusion Française. Topping the bill were those composers who had been proscribed by Hitler or Stalin*" including works of Stravinsky, who attended, Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, Claude Debussy, Samuel Barber, William Walton, Gustav Mahler, Erik Satie, Béla Bartók, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Ildebrando Pizzetti, Vittorio Rieti, Gianfranco Malipiero, Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Jean Françaix, Henri Sauguet, Francis Poulenc, and Aaron Copland. The State Department payed for a production of Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts, starring Leontyne Price. Albert Donnelly Jr. specifically requested that Price star and that the entire cast be "*American negro: to counter the ‘suppressed race’ propaganda and forestall all criticisms to the effect that we had to use foreign negroes because*
we wouldn’t let our own ‘out.’*" Various modernist sculptures and paintings, often from Europe but from American collections, and often opposed by Soviet critics, were shipped to the festival.*

The literary debates included Allen Tate, Roger Caillois, Eugenio Montale, Guido Piovene, James T. Farrell, Glenway Westcott, William Faulkner, W.H. Auden, Czesław Milosz, Ignazio Silone, Denis de Rougemont, André Malraux, Salvador de Madariaga, and Stephen Spender. They weren't well received due to the singular point of view.

Janet Flanner covered the event for the New Yorker, and Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell "'*couldn't resist' dropping in*". There was a large amount of resistance to the propaganda of the festival from the French, but CCF was beginning to take control of the media:

> Franc-Tireur seemed to have recovered from that “barely concealed anti-Americanism” of a few years earlier, and supported the festival wholeheartedly. It was now edited by Georges Altman, a member of the Congress steering committee. Also favorable was Figaro Littéraire, which praised the festival as “great proof of unbiased artistic activity.” Again, not surprising, given that the paper’s editor in chief was Maurice Noel, a friend of Raymond Aron, who in turn introduced him to the Congress. The main paper, Le Figaro, was also closely aligned to the Congress through the good offices of Mr. Brisson, the editor in chief, whom Nabokov fastidiously cultivated over long lunches.
>
>

Some concluded the festival ended up being a very expensive cover story, introducing Julius Fleischmann as the patron while using CIA and State Department funds. It did launch a massive European tour for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a central piece in promoting US 'high culture'.

###

## Funding

The funding of CCF came from various CIA sources, both budgeted and outside the budget. Frank Wisner convinced Richard Bissel to continue the Marshall Plan policy of using counterpart funds (matching funds by the governments supported by the Marshall Plan) to fund covert actions. With this added to his CIA slush fund, Irving Brown used about $200,000 on CCF programs in 1951 (over 2 million in 2019 dollars).

## Organizations and Publications

### Publications

#### France:

* *Preuves*
* *Franc-Tireur:* Ed. Georges Altman (member of CCF steering committee). Formerly 'anti-American'
* *Le Figaro:* Brisson- editor in chief- had lunches with Nabokov
	+ *Figaro Littéraire:* Maurice Noel- editor in chief- friends of Raymond Aron who introduced him to CCF