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How the CIA fought the Cold War with culture: the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Encounter and its magazines, Radio Free Europe, and the covert funding through the Farfield Foundation, exposed in 1966-67.
How the CIA fought the Cold War with culture: the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Encounter and its magazines, Radio Free Europe, and the covert funding through the Farfield Foundation, exposed in 1966-67.
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American journalist Melvin Lasky launched the German cultural magazine Der Monat in the US occupation zone, paid for at first with Marshall Plan and occupation money. It set the template for a glossy, high-minded anti-communist journal aimed at European intellectuals. The magazine was later folded into the Congress for Cultural Freedom's stable of titles.
A Soviet-aligned Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace drew leading writers to the Waldorf Astoria hotel. Philosopher Sidney Hook and composer Nicolas Nabokov organized a group of anti-communist intellectuals to heckle and rebut it. The clash was the seed of the organized Western intellectual campaign that became the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
Writers, scholars and artists gathered at the Titania-Palast in West Berlin to launch the Congress for Cultural Freedom as an intellectual front against Soviet communism. Melvin Lasky, Michael Josselson and Nicolas Nabokov were central organizers, alongside figures like Arthur Koestler and Sidney Hook. The Congress would grow into a body with offices in some 35 countries.
Radio Free Europe began broadcasting from Munich into the Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe. Presented as a private effort backed by public donations, it was in fact funded by the CIA for years. It became one of the most far-reaching instruments of the cultural and information war.
Michael Josselson served as the Congress's administrative secretary and its day-to-day manager from Paris. He was also a CIA officer, and he was the Agency's key link to the organization. His double role, kept secret for years, was later confirmed when the funding was exposed.
The Congress launched Preuves as its French-language magazine, edited from Paris. It carried essays by prominent European writers and pressed an anti-Stalinist, pro-Western line among French intellectuals. It was one of a family of Congress journals that also included Encounter, Der Monat and Tempo Presente.
Composer Nicolas Nabokov took the post of Secretary-General and ran the Congress from its Paris headquarters. He shaped its program of festivals, conferences and publications across Europe, Asia and Latin America. His network of contacts among artists and musicians made him the public face of the Congress's cultural work.
The CIA created the International Organizations Division to run covert support of unions, student groups and cultural bodies as Cold War fronts. Tom Braden led the division and Cord Meyer became a senior figure in it. This office managed the Agency's secret backing of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
Nicolas Nabokov organized a month-long Congress festival that showcased modern Western art, music and dance to prove the free world's cultural vitality. It brought major orchestras, composers and works to Paris in a deliberate answer to Soviet claims of Western decadence. The event was paid for in part with the CIA money that flowed to the Congress.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra performed in Paris as the American showpiece of the Congress's 1952 festival. The tour was underwritten with Congress money that came from the CIA. Sending a celebrated American orchestra abroad was meant to display the reach and quality of Western art.
The Farfield Foundation, headed by the businessman Julius Fleischmann, passed CIA money to the Congress while appearing to be a private charity. Grants that looked like philanthropy were in fact Agency funds routed through the foundation. Farfield was the best-known of several conduits used to hide the source of the money.
Radio Liberty, first known as Radio Liberation, began beaming programs from Munich into the Soviet Union itself. Like Radio Free Europe, it was secretly financed by the CIA behind a front committee. The two stations carried news, culture and commentary to audiences the Soviet state tried to keep sealed off.
The Congress launched Encounter, an English-language monthly edited by the poet Stephen Spender and the American Irving Kristol. It became one of the most influential intellectual magazines in the English-speaking world. Its Congress backing, and the covert money behind that backing, would later make it the center of the funding scandal.
Beyond Farfield, the CIA moved cash to the Congress through a web of small trusts and pass-through foundations that made the funds hard to trace. The money paid for magazines, conferences, concerts and travel while the recipients often saw only a respectable foundation's name. This layered routing kept the Agency's hand hidden from most people who took part.
Ignazio Silone and Nicola Chiaromonte founded Tempo Presente as the Congress's Italian magazine. It joined Encounter, Preuves and Der Monat as part of a coordinated network of anti-communist cultural journals. Each spoke to intellectuals in its own country while sharing the Congress's broad line.
The Museum of Modern Art sent The New American Painting, a show of Abstract Expressionist work by Jackson Pollock and others, on a tour of European cities. The exhibitions presented free-form abstract art as a sign of American creative freedom against Soviet-mandated realism. Historians such as Frances Stonor Saunders and Eva Cockcroft argue that this promotion functioned as a weapon of the Cold War, a reading that other art scholars dispute.
The New York Times ran a five-part series describing how the CIA secretly financed foundations, student groups and cultural bodies. The reporting pointed to the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the conduits behind it. It brought the covert cultural program to a wide public for the first time.
The magazine Ramparts revealed that the CIA had secretly funded the National Student Association, setting off a wave of further disclosures. Reporters and officials quickly traced the same pattern of dummy foundations to the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its magazines. The exposure forced admissions that the Agency had bankrolled a large network of cultural and youth groups.
As the funding was confirmed, the poet Stephen Spender resigned as editor of Encounter, saying he had not known of the CIA money behind it. His resignation fed a lasting argument over which writers and editors truly knew the source of their support. Some involved insisted they were kept in the dark, a claim that remains contested case by case.
Former CIA officer Tom Braden wrote an article in the Saturday Evening Post openly defending the Agency's secret funding of the Congress, unions and other groups. He confirmed that the CIA had placed an agent inside the Congress and had paid for Encounter. The admission turned years of denial and rumor into documented fact from an insider.
To survive the scandal, the Congress for Cultural Freedom cut its CIA tie and renamed itself the International Association for Cultural Freedom. The Ford Foundation stepped in with open funding to replace the secret money. The made-over body never regained its old influence and its work steadily declined.
The renamed body wound down and closed at the end of the 1970s, ending nearly three decades of Congress activity. Its history left an open debate about state funding of art and ideas, and about whether hidden sponsorship corrupts the culture it pays for. Frances Stonor Saunders's later account gathered the declassified record into the standard reference on the affair.