10/12/2017 Edward Said reviews Who Paid the Piper by Frances Stonor Saunders LRB 30 September 1999

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Hey, Mister, you want dirty book?

Edward Said

Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders
Granta, 509 pp, 20.00, July 1999, ISBN 1 86207 029 6

E.P. Thompson called it the Natopolitan world: that is, not just Nato plus all the Cold War
military and political institutions that were integral to it, but also a mentality whose web
extended over a lot more activity and thought, even in the minds of individuals, than anyone
at the time had suspected. Of course there were the revelations in the mid-Sixties about
Encounter and the CIA, and later in the US and Britain a stream of disclosures about covert
counter-insurgency in every form, from secretly underwritten academic research to
assassinations and mass killings. Yet it still gives me an eerie feeling to read about people like
George Orwell, Stephen Spender and Raymond Aron, to say nothing of less admirable
characters of the Melvin Lasky stripe, taking part in surreptitiously subsidised anti-
Communist ventures magazines, symphony orchestras, art exhibitions or in the setting up
of foundations in the name of freedom and democracy against Soviet totalitarianism.

One of the rare dissenters, Charles Burton Marshall, is quoted here as saying that this bizarre
operation to counter Communism by trying to break down ... doctrinaire thought patterns
and anti-American attitudes throughout the world was just about as totalitarian as one can
get. Marshall belonged to an Orwellian US Government agency called the Psychological
Strategy Board (PSB) and his kind of common-sense voice, commenting on the enterprise
from within, isnt ever heard from again. On the other hand, Frances Stonor Saunderss
gripping book is stuffed with names of individuals, organisations and publications, whose
sleazy history she gives in painstaking detail.

Unfortunately, not all of her information is fully accurate or complete. It is, for example,
careless to place the artist Frank Stella in a travelling delegation of grown men when he
would have been about ten years old, and to quote from books without supplying page
numbers or publication history. The chapter on CIA infiltration of the art world is riddled
with howlers (that John Hay Whitney had his own museum is one among several mistakes
of this sort), but the gist of her argument about Abstract Expressionism and its uses as
propaganda is correct, if not wholly original.

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Who Paid the Piper? is even so a major work of investigative history, an extremely valuable
contribution to the all-important post-World War Two record. The dispiriting truth it reveals,
or confirms, is that few of our major intellectual and cultural figures resisted the
blandishments of the CIA, whether in the form of cushy foreign jaunts, under the table
subsidies Partisan Review, Commentary, Sewanee Review, Kenyon Review were its
beneficiaries, in addition to Encounter, and all its French, German, Italian and even Arabic
and Indian offshoots or contracts for organisations such as the Congress for Cultural
Freedom and the Ford Foundation, which seemed at first to exist for scarcely any purpose
other than to further US foreign policy and provide cover for the CIAs machinations. Fords
present reputation and munificence in Asia, Africa and Latin America are still tainted by this
highly political history.

Saunders sets out her themes very ably in the introduction, which situates the covert
projection of US policy objectives in the context of the Marshall Plan, the postwar
reconstruction of Europe (especially Germany) in competition with the Soviet Union, and the
creation of a massive apparatus of cultural propaganda, one of whose main purposes was to
advance the claim that it did not exist.

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Vol. 21 No. 19 30 September 1999 Edward Said Hey, Mister, you want dirty book?
pages 54-56 | 3489 words

Letters
Vol. 21 No. 21 28 October 1999

Edward Said (LRB, 30 September) ignores the fact that Encounter, even if it was
subsidised by the CIA, enriched the cultural life of this country, and no doubt others,
from the Fifties to the Eighties to an unrivalled degree. The breadth and depth of its
coverage of politics, literature, film and theatre were unique. It had plenty of left-wing
contributors, and it was a wonderful read.

The Marshall Plan, pace Said, succeeded in salvaging much of Europe from wartime
devastation. The Soviet Union managed to delay the recovery of Eastern Europe by half
a century; in the end, mercifully, it failed. Heaven knows, the CIA made many appalling
mistakes in many parts of the world. Subsidising Encounter was emphatically not one
of them.

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John Jolliffe
Shepton Mallet, Somerset

Vol. 22 No. 5 2 March 2000

In his review of Frances Stonor Saunderss Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the
Cultural Cold War (LRB, 30 September 1999), Edward Said has maligned me and
Partisan Review. Among other things, Said reports that Saunderss account of
Partisan and its editor, the insufferably pretentious William Phillips is devastating;
that the magazine was on the CIA payroll; and had been carried financially by Henry
Luce, the owner/editor of Time-Life just because Daniel Bell, who was a friend of
ours, arranged for a one-time gift of $10,000. Said also implies that, later on, Allen
Dulles chief of the CIA kept the magazine afloat. When answering Saunderss
questions, I told her that I did not know why the Luce organisation was interested in
making a contribution to Partisan Review, but that literary magazines have always lost
money and needed financial help from like-
minded people. (Said, who at the time also wrote for Partisan Review, must have been
aware of that fact.) Yes, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom allowed
contributions to the magazine to be exempted from tax after the IRS ruled that our
exemption should be revoked because we sold copies on news-stands. Yes, we once
received $2500 from the Farfield Foundation which, as we found out much later, did
funnel some CIA funds. But, according to Jack Thompson, then director of the
Foundation, whom I recently contacted, this money came from a private donor.
Moreover, when asked by Saunders why we hadnt sued when others implied that we
had been funded by the CIA, the editor, Edith Kurzweil, told her that unfortunately
little magazines did not have the money for it. Said knows that too. Moreover, the sums
Saunders claimed we received at most would have covered between 5 and 10 per cent of
one years budget.

William Phillips
Partisan Review, New York

Vol. 22 No. 9 27 April 2000

Attacking Edward Said has become such common sport that it is almost achieving
vulgarity. Now, William Phillips (Letters, 2 March) has descended from the Olympian
heights to join the game. A pity, then, that he never gets off the sidelines.

Phillips likes to pretend he is taking issue with Saids account of my book, Who Paid the
Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, whereas in fact his dispute is with the book
itself. Saids prcis of my claims regarding Partisan Review that it received some
money from the CIA, that it was at one point carried financially by Henry Luce, and that
Allen Dulles had an interest in helping to keep the magazine afloat is a fair summary.
There is nothing malign in these claims, or in Saids reporting of them. It is Phillips
who abbreviates the issues raised in my book to the point of misrepresenting them.
They are as follows.

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In 1952, Partisan Review was on the brink of folding, in part because the US Treasury
was threatening to remove its tax-exempt status. While efforts were made to convince
the State Department that Partisan Review was a crucial vehicle for combating
Communist ideology abroad (Sidney Hook), Daniel Bell took a separate initiative,
acting as an intermediary in discussions with Henry Luce, who subsequently gave the
magazine $10,000. (In his letter to me of 5 August 1998, Phillips wrote: So far as I
recall, the sum was $5,000, not $10,000. He now appears to accept that the sum was
indeed $10,000.) The Luce grant was never publicly disclosed. The contributors were
not informed; nor were some of Partisan Reviews associate editors.

As Phillips says, literary magazines have always lost money and needed financial help
from like-minded people. Whether Phillips knew it or not, and whether he likes it or
not, certain individuals in the CIA saw themselves as like-minded people who could
ease Partisan Reviews financial difficulties. In early 1953, the magazine received a
subsidy of $2500 from the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. The money
came from the Farfield Foundation, a dummy front or pass-through set up by the CIA
in 1953 to provide the cashflow to its Congress for Cultural Freedom, of which the
American Committee was a subsidiary. At the time this grant was made to Partisan
Review, its co-editor William Phillips was cultural secretary of the American
Committee. In the same letter to me Phillips wrote: I dont recall any grant of $2500
from the American Committee, and I dont believe there was one. He thought that no
contributions to Partisan Review could have been received without my knowledge. The
statement of disbursements of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom for the
year ending 1953 clearly shows the grant was made.

Previously, Phillips was also unable to recall ever receiving any grants from the Farfield
Foundation. His memory restored perhaps by seeing some of the documentation I sent
him, he now acknowledges that the magazine did once receive a direct grant from the
Farfield Foundation, though he disputes its CIA provenance. According to Phillips, Jack
Thompson, the former director of the Farfield Foundation, has recently vouched that
this particular grant was made by a private sponsor. In 1964, Stephen Spender asked
Jack Thompson whether there was any truth to the rumour that the Farfield
Foundation was backing Encounter magazine with CIA funds. He received an
unequivocal denial. Within three years, however, the Encounter scandal had broken.
Certainly, the financial reports of the Farfield Foundation which I have do not list any
private sponsor against the grant to Partisan Review. Perhaps Phillips should ask Jack
Thompson to make public the relevant accounts of the Foundation (which was, after all,
funded by the American taxpayer, courtesy of the finance department of the CIA).

Still, as I point out in my book, in the life of a magazine harried by financial crises, these
grants hardly amount to much (Phillipss own estimate is 5 to 10 per cent of one years
budget). But in 1956, the question of PRs tax-exempt status had again been raised at
the Internal Revenue Service: not only did the magazine stand to lose this benefit in the
future, but there was also talk of making all contributions to PR during and since 1954
retroactively taxable. By 1958, a solution was forthcoming: with (and only with) the
CIAs approval, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, which had been
suspended in January 1957, was revived for the sole purpose of posing as official
publisher of Partisan Review, an arrangement which allowed the magazine to benefit

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from the Committees tax-exempt status. Behind the scenes, the CIA chief Allen Dulles
was a key figure in making this arrangement.

Partisan Review also received support from the Paris-based Congress for Cultural
Freedom, in the form of subscriptions bought for individuals overseas who received the
magazine free. From 1960, this arrangement boosted the magazines sales figures by
3000 copies a year, which were distributed outside of the US.

In May 1961, Phillips requested a grant from the Congress for Cultural Freedom to
cover his travel expenses for a planned trip to Europe. This, despite his later concession
that during the 1950s he had been inclined to question the Congresss bureaucratic
make-up and what was patently its secret control from the top. In 1990, he wrote of
those personalities who dominated the Congress for Cultural Freedom as breezy,
rootless, freewheeling, cynically anti-Communist orgmen. He claimed to be shocked by
and perhaps envious of the nouveau riche look of the whole operation, by the posh
apartments of the Congress officials, the seemingly inexhaustible funds for travel, the
big-time expense accounts, and all the other perks usually associated with the
executives of large corporations. After all, Partisan Review was always trying to make
ends meet, and my experience had led me to believe that poverty was the normal
condition for serious political outfits and literary magazines. As for secret funding, he
continued, it seems to me to violate the very nature of a free intellectual enterprise,
particularly when the financing is by a well-organised arm of the Government, with its
own political agenda.

Frances Stonor Saunders

London W11

ISSN 0260-9592 Copyright LRB Limited 2017 ^ Top

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