من يملك كتاب "who paid the piper"

Who paid the piper

Spectator, The, Jul 17, 1999 by Isaacs, Jeremy
THE CIA AND THE CULTURAL COLD WAR
by Frances Stonor Saunders Granta, 220, pp. 509

In the late Sixties I went to Moscow to close discussion on two films we were to make for Associated-Rediffusion's This Week, one on Lenin Hills University, the other in Estonia, a first. We were in trouble with our hosts because our researcher spoke fluent Russian, and could evade his KGB minders to talk directly to folk he met, or sought out. Gleefully my colleagues told me that two dissident artists had agreed to criticise the regime on film to camera, outside the scope of what we were there to cover. It fell to me, on a comic, horrendous journey, to bring the film out, without papers for it, to London.
On the way to the airport we stopped the Zil, and packed the film in my suitcase. 'Now', said the interpreter, `we have nothing to fear but the driver.' I got through unscathed. My colleagues were stripsearched. The Soviet authorities declared this to be a serious breach of undertakings, as indeed it was, and put pressure on my bosses, in the interest of continued good relations, to destroy the film. I managed to get it broadcast, hid the negative, and passed transcripts of the interviews to Encounter, which duly published them. I cannot remember whether I knew then that Encounter was funded by the CIA. I know now.
Frances Stonor Saunders has written a hammer-blow of a book, definitively establishing the facts of the CIA's activities on the culture front of the Cold War, and itemising in intricate detail the conduits through which its funds passed, and the artists, at the end of the chain, who benefited from them. ler research is formidable, her tone tenacious, her eye for a titbit vivid, her sense of humour lively. The book is in places very funny. When Stephen Spender, who has heard rumours for years, finally learns that the CIA has funded Encounter, and that his own salary has been covered by the Foreign Office he `became very agitated and announced that he was going off to look at some picture in the National Gallery to calm himself. Calmer, and to clear the matter up once and for all, he rings Malcolm Muggeridge. Muggeridge `at that very moment was lying flat on his face in a chancel of a Scottish Cistercian monastery being filmed at prayer for a BBC television programme called A Hard Bed to Lie On.' He calls back. Stephen said, `Malcolm, you always told me my salary was coming from the Daily Telegraph and Alexander Korda.' Malcolm said, `So I did, dear boy, but you can't bet your bottom dollar where it really came from.' The prize remark, though, is Yehudi Menuhin's. He thought `much more of the CIA' for associating with `people like us'.
What does Stonor Saunders' indictment amount to? The CIA saw American culture as a propaganda weapon to win over opinion to America's side. It set up front organisations, notably The Congress for Cultural Freedom, to hold conferences and publish magazines; it paid for orchestral tours and exhibitions of paintings - the forms and colours of abstract expressionism stood for freedom against the conformities of Socialist realism. Jackson Pollock's paintings, though, which looked back at us so grandly from the Tate's walls the other day, may not have won a single convert. It was popular culture, which worked; the Beatles, in the Sixties, successfully crossed the Iron Curtain, persuading young Soviets to wear their hair-do, ape their clothes, dance to their beat. Still, promoting abstraction was a nice try.
Nor was anyone ever converted to anything at a conference of intellectuals, however stunning the landscape or luxurious the palazzo. All that such functions generate is hot air, tedium, self-importance and, perhaps, an affair. Nothing is achieved; no great harm done. Were recipients of the CIA's hospitality corrupted on these occasions? Well, maybe, but no more than anyone ever is by the offer of a supposedly 'free' lunch.
Saunders' fiercest denunciations are aimed at Encounter, and are unanswerable. Like others, I enjoyed reading it. But, magazines which claim to stand for liberal freedoms, and claim sponsorship from bodies devoted to that end, ought not to belong to governments, ought not tacitly to accept limits to the range of critical opinions they present. Encounter did, because the CIA paid the bills. Varied in content, wellwritten, studded with star names, Encounter, under Melvin Lasky and his coeditors, lived a lie which corrupted those who told it, half-corrupted those who halfbelieved it, and in the end fooled no one. Lasky, interviewed for this book, is unrepentant: `Well who's gonna give the money? The little old lady from Deduke, Iowa? Will she give you a million dollars? Well, I mean, pipe dreams! Where will the money come from?' In a choice snapshot, a door opens onto the conspirators' room. Lasky, alert, combative, meets our glance. Pugnacious as ever at a recent Cold War conversazione, he meets it still. For him, the fronts, deceptions and blatant lies were means to a good end.

Saunders is clear that real harm is done, in that truth is compromised. But she pays attention to the piper, not to the tune. The CIA and the FBI had Hollywood movies made at their behest, though we can spot the motivation of I Was Communist for the FBI a mile off. The CIA tried to tinker with the endings of adaptations of films of Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984, to our loss. But I don't believe that Pollock dribbled a single paint can differently because the CIA took an interest in his work, or that the Boston Symphony's Brahms varied by a beat.
Comparisons are unavoidable; Hitler's vicious assault on `degenerate art, Stalin's brutal compelling of the party line, forcing Shostakovich to recant, Mao's Cultural Revolution, show what tyranny can do in bending culture. The CIA pussyfooted, and achieved little. Art, in one sense always the product of a political environment, nevertheless went its own sweet way.
Distastefully, in places, Stonor Saunders over-eggs a rich pudding. The Cuban missile crisis was not `an imperial blunder.' The catalogue of suicides on her last page is misplaced; these were private deaths. But, authoritatively, her book takes us back to years of ideological confrontation, with the world at stake. It holds up a mirror in which we ask ourselves: did we do right? battle, together with the threat of a landing in Norway and another in the Bay of Biscay. This 1943 deception went under the codename 'Cockade' while that connected with the actual D-day landings (operation Overlord) went under the codename `Fortitude'. Hesketh's account includes Cockade in some detail, perhaps the first time the overall deception campaigns have been described in so complete a manner.
It was not until the plan for Overlord had been written and submitted to the British chiefs of staff in the middle of July 1943 that attention was turned to deception plans for the following year. However, it was soon recognised that strategic deception planning (with the aim of, roughly speaking, keeping German reinforcements out of France) could not proceed before the Teheran conference scheduled for later in the year. Cossac therefore concentrated on tactical deception, with the aim of keeping German reserves away from the Normandy bridgehead.
A plausible military deception plan was one thing; making sure the deceptive measures reached the enemy was another. The line between 'display' which convinces and that which is too obvious is a fine one. Neither could Cossac be sure that any display would be seen by the Germans since they were conducting no aerial reconnaissance in any depth over Britain and, by the beginning of 1941, what little German espionage activity remained was controlled by British Intelligence. These double agents (the most celebrated and influential of which was the Catalan 'Garbo' - shades here of Stephen Maturin?) were therefore to play a major part in the deception operation, adding corroborative evidence to that which the Germans gathered by conventional aerial reconnaissance and - most important - from singles interception. What emerged, however, was the other way round: German intelligence relied primarily on information fed through this handful of agents, controlled by MIS and MI6, their 'technical' intelligence-gathering - surprisingly limited -- being used to corroborate the agents' reports.

The big question is, of course, to what extent the German general staff held back crucial reserves, strategic and tactical, on the strength of the Fortitude campaign. Arguably, there were enough forces not committed to fighting on the Eastern Front and in Italy, or as garrisons in countries whose armies were waiting for the opportunity to come out of their barracks fighting, to throw the Allied landings back into the sea by D+5 - if only they had been released. But it is equally arguable that the positioning of reserves, especially tactical, had as much to do with standard military practice as with Allied deception: any movement of reserves was going to be a prey to formidable air interdiction. Hesketh recognises, charmingly, this danger in assessing the effectiveness of Fortitude by quoting Aesop's fly, which sat on the axletree of a chariot wheel and said, `What a dust do I raise!'
The great thrill of this book is in reading an account written, essentially, at the time. Its freshness is at once apparent. Its detail is immense and fascinating in both the military dimension and the human with its double agents and their controllers. Oh that it might have been published in time for some of those who controlled Germany's fortunes to see how methodically and imaginatively - and above all on such slender evidence - they were deceived!

Bibliography for: "Who paid the piper?"

Isaacs, Jeremy "Who paid the piper?". Spectator, The. FindArticles.com. 21 Jul, 2009. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...7/ai_n8865589/