Watch the rare, long lost 1967 CBS News “limited hangout” expose’ on the CIA – “In the Pay of the CIA” – An investigation of the CIA’s covert funding of organizations for its own political ends. (this program is divided into five video segments below). See also Who Are The Neocons? How Did They Develop?
Here are important expose’ volumes on the early CIA with their descriptions found on Amazon:
The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, by Hugh Wilford
In 1967 the magazine Ramparts ran an exposé revealing that the Central Intelligence Agency had been secretly funding and managing a wide range of citizen front groups intended to counter communist influence around the world. In addition to embarrassing prominent individuals caught up, wittingly or unwittingly, in the secret superpower struggle for hearts and minds, the revelations of 1967 were one of the worst operational disasters in the history of American intelligence and presaged a series of public scandals from which the CIA’s reputation has arguably never recovered.
CIA official Frank Wisner called the operation his “mighty Wurlitzer,” on which he could play any propaganda tune. In this illuminating book, Hugh Wilford provides the first comprehensive account of the clandestine relationship between the CIA and its front organizations. Using an unprecedented wealth of sources, he traces the rise and fall of America’s Cold War front network from its origins in the 1940s to its Third World expansion during the 1950s and ultimate collapse in the 1960s.
Covering the intelligence officers who masterminded the CIA’s fronts as well as the involved citizen groups–émigrés, labor, intellectuals, artists, students, women, Catholics, African Americans, and journalists–Wilford provides a surprising analysis of Cold War society that contains valuable lessons for our own age of global conflict.
Neoconservatism and the CIA, by Greg Pavlik article
The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, by Frances Stonor Saunders
In addition to being short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award upon publication in 2000, Frances Stonor Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War was met with the kind of attention reserved for books that directly hit a cultural nerve. Impassioned reviews and features in major publications such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have consistently praised Saunders’s detailed knowledge of the CIA’s covert operations. The Cultural Cold War presents for the first time shocking evidence of cultural manipulation during the Cold War. This “impressively detailed” (Kirkus Reviews) book draws together newly declassified documents and exclusive interviews to expose the CIA’s astonishing campaign wherein some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom became instruments of the American government. Those involved included George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Gloria Steinem. The result is “a tale of intrigue and betrayal, with scene after scene as thrilling as any in a John Le Carre novel” (The Chronicle of Higher Education).
The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left From the 1930s to the 1980s, by by Alan M. Wald
The New York Intellectuals is an absorbing account of an often misunderstood chapter in the history of literary radicalism and the Marxist intellectual tradition in the United States. It is enriched by more than one hundred personal interviews as well as critical interpretations of novels and short stories depicting the inner life of the group.
The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution, by Hugh Wilford
Reconstructs the history of a group of thinkers and activists including Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, and Lionel Trilling collectively known as the New York Intellectuals during the period of their greatest influence, the 1940s and 1950s. While defending the group against charges that they “sold out”, the author analyzes the contradictions between their avant-garde principles and the institutional locations they came to occupy.
Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers, by Joel Whitney
When news broke that the CIA had colluded with literary magazines to produce cultural propaganda throughout the Cold War, a debate began that has never been resolved. The story continues to unfold, with the reputations of some of America’s best-loved literary figures—including Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, and Richard Wright—tarnished as their work for the intelligence agency has come to light.
Finks is a tale of two CIAs, and how they blurred the line between propaganda and literature. One CIA created literary magazines that promoted American and European writers and cultural freedom, while the other toppled governments, using assassination and censorship as political tools. Defenders of the “cultural” CIA argue that it should have been lauded for boosting interest in the arts and freedom of thought, but the two CIAs had the same undercover goals, and shared many of the same methods: deception, subterfuge and intimidation.
Finks demonstrates how the good-versus-bad CIA is a false divide, and that the cultural Cold Warriors again and again used anti-Communism as a lever to spy relentlessly on leftists, and indeed writers of all political inclinations, and thereby pushed U.S. democracy a little closer to the Soviet model of the surveillance state.
The Liberal Conspiracy, by Peter Coleman
Profiles the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization of liberal writers and thinkers formed in 1950 to combat Stalin’s influence and was funded by the CIA
Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955, by Sigmund Diamond
In the early 1950s, a young Harvard professor named Henry Kissinger approached the FBI with alleged evidence of communist subversion among the foreign students of his summer seminar. His evidence was a flyer criticizing the nuclear arms build-up and promoting world peace. At the same time at Yale, young William F. Buckley, Jr., was discovering more than God while writing God and Man at Yale as an undergraduate. He was discovering J. Edgar Hoover. These are just two examples of how ambitious young men used the “special relationship” developing between the FBI and the universities to advance their fledgling careers. Revelations such as these abound in Sigmund Diamond’s Compromised Campus, an eye-opening look at the role American intelligence agencies played at some of America’s most prestigious universities.
It is often said that in the 1950s, American universities were free of the McCarthyism that pervaded the rest of the nation. Not so, says Diamond. Using previously secret materials newly made available under the Freedom of Information Act, and an impressive amount of information gained from years of research in university and foundation archives, he reveals that despite academia’s “official story” of autonomy from the federal government, in fact university administrators, faculty, and students secretly and actively sought close ties with intelligence agencies. Diamond describes the cooperation of Harvard President James B. Conant with intelligence agencies, the institution and operation of Harvard’s Russian Research Center, Yale’s shadowy “liaison agent” H.B. Fisher, who moved from problems of student drinking to cooperation with the FBI in loyalty-security matters, and the existence of formal and informal relations with the FBI and other intelligence agencies at major universities throughout the country. He calls attention to the cooperation of university presidents–Griswold of Yale, Dodds of Princeton, Wriston of Brown, Sproul of California, among others–with the FBI and state governors on the techniques of blacklisting.
Diamond shows how this interaction between intelligence agencies and American universities has had serious consequences for America ever since–on foreign policy, questions of law and constitutional government, the role of secrecy, separation of public and private activities, and the existence and control of government deceit and lawlessness. Dismissed himself from Harvard in the 1950s by McGeorge Bundy (for refusing to talk to the FBI about former associates), Diamond brings a special immediacy to this revealing study.
An explosive, headline-making portrait of Allen Dulles, the man who transformed the CIA into the most powerful—and secretive—colossus in Washington, from the founder of Salon.com and author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers.
America’s greatest untold story: the United States’ rise to world dominance under the guile of Allen Welsh Dulles, the longest-serving director of the CIA. Drawing on revelatory new materials—including newly discovered U.S. government documents, U.S. and European intelligence sources, the personal correspondence and journals of Allen Dulles’s wife and mistress, and exclusive interviews with the children of prominent CIA officials—Talbot reveals the underside of one of America’s most powerful and influential figures.
Dulles’s decade as the director of the CIA—which he used to further his public and private agendas—were dark times in American politics. Calling himself “the secretary of state of unfriendly countries,” Dulles saw himself as above the elected law, manipulating and subverting American presidents in the pursuit of his personal interests and those of the wealthy elite he counted as his friends and clients—colluding with Nazi-controlled cartels, German war criminals, and Mafiosi in the process. Targeting foreign leaders for assassination and overthrowing nationalist governments not in line with his political aims, Dulles employed those same tactics to further his goals at home, Talbot charges, offering shocking new evidence in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
An exposé of American power that is as disturbing as it is timely, The Devil’s Chessboard is a provocative and gripping story of the rise of the national security state—and the battle for America’s soul.
There are numerous more authoritative, well-researched studies on America’s intelligence community. Here are the select books that have impacted us most: Richard Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency; Patrick K. O’ Donnell, Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of WWII’s OSS; Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA; Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA; Joseph J. Trento, The Secret History of the CIA; Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence; David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government; L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the World; Victor Marchetti and John Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence; John Marks, The Search For The Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences; W. H. Bowart, Operation Mind Control: Our Secret Government’s War Against Its Own People; Ernest Volkman and Blaine Baggett, Secret Intelligence: The Inside Story of America’s Espionage Empire; Bill Moyers, The Secret Government: The Constitution In Crisis; and Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs And The Press.
How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years
It was “former” deep cover CIA agent Bill Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this synthetic “conservative movement.” Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, was later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency.
9:00 am on April 6, 2024
