The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America
Intelligence in Recent Public Literature
Hugh Wilford. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. 342 pages, including notes and index.
Once upon a time, serious and well-meaning people believed communism to be the wave of the future. They thought that only scientific socialism could build just societies in which the arts and the intellect could flourish; that the Soviet Union was the place where the future existed today; and that the avuncular Josef Stalin was the only true opponent of fascism in all its capitalist and warmongering forms.
Once upon a time, the Central Intelligence Agency ran a world-wide covert action campaign to counter such nonsense in societies in which communism might take hold. Almost every CIA station had case officers dedicated to working with labor unions, intellectuals, youth and student organizations, journalists, veterans, women’s groups, and more. The Agency dealt directly with foreign representatives of these groups, but it also subsidized their activities indirectly by laundering funds through allied organizations based in the United States. In short, the Agency’s covert political action depended on the anti-communist zeal of private American citizens, only a few of whom knew that the overseas works of their ostensibly independent organizations were financed by the CIA until the campaign’s cover was disastrously blown in 1967.
British historian Hugh Wilford has just given us the best history of the covert political action campaign to date. Wilford is now associate professor of history at California State University (Long Beach), but before arriving there he spent years in pursuit of the documentation that he sensed had to exist in the organizational remains of the groups that the Agency had funded. His work brought him metaphorically to my door at the CIA History Staff, as the truth-in-reviewing code obliges me acknowledge. Full disclosure also bids me say that I wrote on the covert action campaign in a still-classified monograph published by CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence in 1999.
Where I had viewed the CIA’s campaign from the inside looking out, Wilford’s new book The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America does the job from the outside in. Wilford exploits contemporary public accounts, memoirs, and, most important, the remaining files of the various private groups involved. The Mighty Wurlitzer surpasses early attempts like Peter Coleman’s The Liberal Conspiracy (1989) and Frances Stonor Saunders’ Cultural Cold War (2000). [1] The former book had examined only one organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and took a congratulatory tone that was disliked by some reviewers. The latter cast a wider net and surveyed a congeries of cultural, artistic, and intellectual groups, but its conspiracy-mongering style undermined its judgments.
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol52no2/intelligence-in-recent-public-literature-1.html