The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was an anti-communist cultural organization during the Cold War that aimed to promote intellectual freedom and combat Soviet totalitarianism. A group of anti-communist intellectuals founded the congress in 1950 at a conference in West Berlin. At its height, the CCF was active in 35 countries and published more than 20 magazines, hosted art exhibitions, and organized conferences with prominent intellectuals. The congress aimed to enlist intellectuals and opinion makers from the non-communist left in a war of ideas against communism. In 1966 former CIA agents confirmed that the Central Intelligence Agency was instrumental in the establishment and funding of the CCF. Through this involvement, the CCF promoted western political ideology while also representing semi-autonomous intellectual movements across Europe.
Historians note the CCF's CIA funding in different contexts. Peter Coleman argues that the CCF was a participant in a struggle for the mind "of Postwar Europe" and the world at large, and was successful at combatting and undermining Soviet totalitarianism. Frances Stonor Saunders argues that the CCF functioned as a covert propaganda network "to ease the passage of American foreign policy interest abroad."
Origins, 1948–1950 The CCF was founded on 26 June 1950 in West Berlin, which had just endured months of Soviet blockade. Formation of the CCF came in response to a series of events orchestrated by Cominform, as part of a campaign to influence public opinion against US war-mongering and aggression. In 1948, the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace convened in Wrocław (Poland) on August 1948. Then in March 1950 the World Peace Council issued the Stockholm Appeal, demanding active peace amidst the threat of nuclear war. The Cominform campaign reached New York City in March 1949 with the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The conference was attended by a plethora of prominent U.S. liberals, leftists and pacifists who called for peace with the Soviet Union. Prominent participants included Dmitri Shostakovich and Aaron Copland. In response to the conference, anti-communist opponents took up residence in the upper floor of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in an attempt to discredit the peace conference. Led by ex-communist and philosophy professor Sidney Hook, the group enlisted a range of international supporters for their cause, including Benedetto Croce, T. S. Eliot, Karl Jaspers, André Malraux, Bertrand Russell and Igor Stravinsky. In a three room suite, the opposers, who called themselves Americans for Intellectual Freedom, sabotaged the conference with press releases in a media frenzy to publicize its pro-communist influence.
The Waldorf conference catalyzed a counter offense by the U.S. Office of Policy Coordination, led by Frank Wisner, who began to plan a response to the next pro-communist peace gathering scheduled for April 1949 in Paris. The subsequent counter conference of anti-communists was called International Day of Resistance to Dictatorship and War and convened on 30 April 1949. The meeting received little enthusiasm from American supporters, and was described as "too radical and neutralist".
In August 1949, several German ex-communist intellectuals along with American journalist Melvin Lasky met to discuss plans for an international conference in Berlin that would bring together ex-communists and anti-Stalinists from across Europe and America. The plan was promoted and organized by Michael Josselson and Lasky, who together proposed the plan to Washington and issued invitations. The founding conference for the Congress for Cultural Freedom was held in Berlin in June 1950 and was attended by leading intellectuals from the U.S. and Western Europe including Soviet refugees, European federalists, members of the anti-fascism movement, and union leaders. Other attendees were writers, philosophers, critics and historians: Franz Borkenau, Karl Jaspers, John Dewey, Ignazio Silone, Jacques Maritain, James Burnham, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Bertrand Russell, Ernst Reuter, Raymond Aron, A. J. Ayer, Benedetto Croce, Arthur Koestler, Richard Löwenthal, Melvin J. Lasky, Tennessee Williams, Irving Brown and Sidney Hook. There were conservatives among the participants, but non-Communist (or former Communist) left-wingers were more numerous. The Manifesto of the Congress was drafted by Arthur Koestler, with amendments added on a motion proposed by historian Hugh Trevor-Roper and philosopher A. J. Ayer.
An Executive Committee was elected in 1950 at the founding conference in Berlin, with seven members and six alternate members: Irving Brown (Haakon Lie), Arthur Koestler (Raymond Aron), Eugen Kogon (Carlo Schmid), David Rousset (Georges Altman), Ignazio Silone (Nicola Chiaromonte), Stephen Spender (Tosco Fyvel) and Denis de Rougemont who became President of the committee.
The management of the CCF was entrusted to its secretariat, headed by Michael Josselson. By the time Josselson joined the Congress of Cultural Freedom in 1950 he was "undoubtedly a CIA officer". A polyglot able to converse fluently in four languages (English, Russian, German and French), Josselson was heavily involved in the CCF's growing range of activities – its periodicals, worldwide conferences and international seminars – until his resignation in 1967, following the exposure of funding by the CIA.
Activities, 1950–1966 At its height, the CCF had offices in 35 countries, employed dozens of personnel, and published over 20 prestigious magazines. It held art exhibitions, owned a news and features service, organized high-profile international conferences, and rewarded musicians and artists with prizes and public performances.
The CCF published its first magazine, Preuves, in October 1951. The publication was edited and organized by Françios Bondy, a Swiss writer who had been appointed to the congress secretariat in 1950. Preuves became the forefront of CCF activities and ideology, serving as a blueprint for following publications. The magazine faced criticism in Paris for its promotion of Atlanticist foreign policy and was dubbed by critics as the "American Magazine". In 1953, the CCF launched the Encounter magazine in London, designed to influence intellectual literacy in the UK towards Anglo-American interests. As well as sponsoring and publishing multiple magazines, the CCF worked with affiliates across Europe and Africa by creating non-profit organizations covertly funded by the CIA.
Between 1950 and 1966 the Congress sponsored numerous conferences. A selective list describes 16 conferences in the 1950s held principally in Western Europe, but also in Rangoon, Mexico City, Tokyo, Ibadan (Nigeria) and South Vietnam: the Founding Conference in Berlin was followed in 1951 by the First Asian Conference on Cultural Freedom, held in Bombay. A further 21 conferences over an even wider geographical area are listed for the first half of the 1960s.
In the early 1960s, the CCF mounted a campaign against the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, an ardent communist. The campaign intensified when it appeared that Neruda was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964 but he was also published in Mundo Nuevo, a CCF-sponsored periodical. Other prominent intellectuals targeted by the CCF were Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Thomas Mann who was becoming increasingly pro-Soviet. From 1950 to 1969, the CCF financed German writers such as Heinrich Böll and Siegfried Lenz.
Promotion of literature and art On April 1, 1952, the congress hosted the Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century, an art festival highlighting 20th century and modernist art movements with a selection of concertos, symphonies, and art galleries. The event was proposed and organized by Nicholas Nabokov who was acting as CCF Secretary General of the International Secretariat. The festival orchestra performances featured composer works by Arnold Schoenberg, Claude Debussy, and Paul Hindemith. The art and sculpture exhibition featured works by Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kadinsky, and other masters of the early modernist movement. The festival received mixed reviews, with critics noting the lack of diversity and the pro-American curations.
From 1953 to 1990, the CCF's Encounter magazine published an array of essays, articles, and stories from prominent intellectual minds in Europe. Authors included Nancy Mitford, Isaiah Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Ellmann, W. H. Auden, Arnold Toynbee, Bertrand Russell, Herbert Read, and Hugh Trevor-Roper. The featured literature focused on ideology and cultural topics rather than political ones, stressing anti-communist themes. Many essays were translated into multiple languages for transnational publications, such as works featured in Africane and Black Orpheus.Rubin, Andrew N. Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War. Princeton University Press, 2012, 29-30. https://books.google.com/books?id=sDeE9r_6HdsC&dq=Jiyu+hiwar&pg=PT234#v=onepage&q=Jiyu%20hiwar&f=false. CCF sponsored publications often omitted literary texts that did not align with the values of democracy and "cultural freedom". From 1950 to 1969, the CCF financed German writers such as Heinrich Böll and Siegfried Lenz.Saunders, Frances Stonor. Who Paid the Piper?: the CIA and the cultural Cold War. Granta Books, 1999.
CIA involvement revealed, 1966 In April 1966, The New York Times ran a series of five articles on the purposes and methods of the CIA."The C.I.A.: Maker of Policy, or Tool? Agency Raises Questions Around World; Survey Discloses Strict Controls But Reputation of Agency Is Found to Make It a Burden on U.S. Action", The New York Times, April 25, 1966, p. 1."How C.I.A Put an 'Instant Air Force' Into Congo to Carry Out United States Policy", The New York Times, April 26, 1966, p. 30."C.I.A. Operations: A Plot Scuttled, or, How Kennedy in '62 Undid Sugar Sabotage", The New York Times, April 28, 1966, p. 28."C.I.A Operations: Man at Helm, Not the System, Viewed as Key to Control of Agency", The New York Times, April 29, 1966, p. 18.Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? Studies in Intelligence; Routledge, 2013. . The third of these 1966 articles began to detail false-front organizations and the secret transfer of CIA funds to the US State Department or to the United States Information Agency (USIA) which "may help finance a scholarly inquiry and publication, or the agency may channel research money through foundations – legitimate ones or dummy fronts"."C.I.A Is Spying From 100 Miles Up; Satellites Probe Secrets of the Soviet Union", New York Times, April 27, 1966, p. 28. In these articles, The New York Times cited the CIA's funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its Encounter magazine.
In 1967, the US magazines Ramparts and The Saturday Evening Post reported on the CIA's funding of a number of anti-communist cultural organizations aimed at winning the support of Soviet-sympathizing liberals worldwide.Hilton Kramer, "What was the Congress for Cultural Freedom?" The New Criterion, Volume 8, January 1990, p. 7. These reports were lent credence by a statement made by a former CIA covert operations director admitting to CIA financing and operation of the CCF. The CIA website states that "the Congress for Cultural Freedom is widely considered one of the CIA's more daring and effective Cold War covert operations."