From its earliest days, the Cold War was a cultural war. In the ruins of Berlin in 1945, a string of brilliant productions by the Soviet State Opera sent a US army officer named Michael Josselson scurrying to the bottom of a salt mine outside the city, where the Nazis had stashed thousands of costumes belonging to the Deutsches Opernhaus Company.
Frances Stonor Saunders does not record what became of those costumes, but it is clear that the Americans were intent on preventing the Soviets from getting their hands on them, lest they be used as hostile weapons in the new Kulturkampf.
The battle for cultural hegemony between the incipient superpowers was quickly to move beyond Berlin. The most pressing concern of the "cultural Cold Warriors" examined in this excellent book was that in post-war Europe the United States was widely viewed as a cultural wasteland. The Ivy League WASPs working in Europe for the nascent Central Intelligence Agency took this personally - as did Josselson, a Russian-Estonian Jew who had lived in the US for only a few years of his life, and who for two decades was to run the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom.
The Congress was committed to the touching idea that through exposure to the best of American literature, visual art, music and (non-communist) thought, Europeans would overcome their false view of the barbarity of American life. It was hoped that this would undermine communist claims about the effects of capitalism, and give liberal democracy the intellectual cachet it lacked in places like Paris.
From the start, the Congress was at pains to avoid being seen for what it was: a vehicle for American cultural imperialism. In this it suffered some early setbacks. Its enormous "Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century" festival in Paris in 1952 had a highly distinguished and thoroughly international programme, yet it was derided as "NATO's festival" by Combat, a French newspaper of the "Non-Communist Left" - precisely the audience at which the CIA's efforts were aimed. The festival's gigantism gave it away.
The Congress had better luck with magazines - in France, Germany, Italy, Uganda, India, Japan, Australia and elsewhere. Its "greatest asset", in Josselson's view, was En- counter, its British organ, which thrived for many years as a firmly anti-communist alternative to the New Statesman, cultivating the right wing of the Labour party. This was, then, a very different cultural Cold War from that being waged back home by Senator McCarthy, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the FBI. Indeed, the CIA's campaign was successful precisely insofar as its basic assumptions, tactics and constituency were directly contrary to those of the powerful forces in American society that were obsessed with political "subversion" among artists.
The contrast is clearest in Stonor Saunders's lively account of the political use that was made of the Abstract Expressionists. In 1947, buckling to shrill protests from Capitol Hill about the "communistic" nature of modern art, the State Department called off a high-profile travelling exhibition of "progressive" American art. Alarmed at this philistinism, the CIA came to the opposite conclusion about Abstract Expressionism, and secretly channelled funds through America's leading philanthropic organisations and art museums in a massive campaign of support for it. The Agency thereby created a climate in which Nelson Rockefeller could refer to Abstract Expressionism, which he collected on a grand scale, as "free enterprise art". The artists, many of them ex-communists, seemed to agree, creating ever-bigger paintings for ever-bigger corporate atriums. One irony among many was that they were recipients of state support on a level of which artists in most socialist states might only dream.
IN her fascination with the personalities and intrigues of Josselson and the other highbrow spooks who led the "cultural Cold War", Stonor Saunders has too little to say on the war itself. Josselson emerges as a remarkable impresario, and the ambiguities and contradictions of his position as a de facto Minister of Western Culture in Europe are explored admirably and even-handedly, but one is left wondering whether the myriad conferences, festivals and magazines sponsored by the CIA through the Congress for Cultural Freedom made any political difference.
Stonor Saunders ends her story rather abruptly in the late 1960s, when the exposure (instigated by Conor Cruise O'Brien) of the Congress as a CIA front brought Josselson's golden age to an end. By this time the "Non-Communist Left" in America, thoroughly disillusioned by the Vietnam war, was taking a dimmer view of the Kulturkampf. (Josselson himself opposed the war in Vietnam, and by the mid-1960s he preferred the CIA-free New York Review of Books to his own Encounter.) The scores of leading artists and intellectuals who had ridden the CIA's gravy train responded to the revelations with a mixture of outrage, disavowal and silence. "Suckers or hypocrites?" the author asks. The answer, in the case of the many who repressed their own healthy suspicions, is "Both".
In the sinister context of the complete works of the Central Intelligence Agency, the "cultural Cold War" is an innocuous footnote. As a chapter in the cultural history of the West, though, Frances Stonor Saunders's book deserves to take its place as a standard work and a springboard for further investigation.
Brendan Barrington is an editor and critic