Espion Age

Published on The New Republic (http://www.tnr.com)

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They Died for Westphalia

Washington Diarist

• Leon Wieseltier
• June 8, 2012 | 12:00 am

WHAT A SPELL of cultural miseries. Oprah Winfrey commended “Pierre de Chardin” to the graduates of Spelman College and exhorted them to “let excellence be your brand.” Yale University elected to have its commencement addressed by Barbara Walters. Al Sharpton appeared in the pages of The New York Times Book Review, which warmly noted that its reviewer has lost a lot of weight and eats fish twice a week and many vegetables. And Daniel Bell was made responsible for the Iraq war. The latter comedy took place in the wastes of Salon, where it would have stayed if The New York Times had not seen fit to circulate, without challenge, the description of that great American liberal as having “essentially invented the neoconservative movement that would inspire George W. Bush in his disastrous invasion of Iraq.” Must error also be stupid? This howler first appeared in an overheated piece about some trivial connections between The Paris Review and the Congress of Cultural Freedom, which was of course supported in part by the CIA and therefore was an instrument of evil. The revelation of a friendship between The Paris Review and the Congress for Cultural Freedom is the best news I have heard about that flavorful journal since the announcement of its current editor. The solidarity of beauty and democracy has always been one of my fondest dreams...

May 29, 2012, 2:13 PM

Salon Article Rekindles Debate about Paris Review and C.I.A.

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

The Paris Review, which celebrated its 200th issue last month, has been called “the biggest little magazine in history.” Now a long article at Salon adds another epithet: “a covert international weapon of soft power.”

The article, by Joel Whitney, details The Paris Review’s indirect connections to the Central Intelligence Agency, rumors of which had circulated for decades but gained new steam a few years ago when the novelist Peter Matthiessen acknowledged that in 1953 — the year he founded the magazine with George Plimpton, Harold L. Humes and others — he was working for the C.I.A.

Mr. Matthiessen, who declined to talk with Mr Whitney, has long denied that the C.I.A. had any influence on the magazine or given it any money. “I used The Paris Review as a cover, there’s no question of that,” he told The New York Times in 2008. “But the C.I.A. had nothing to do with Paris Review.”

But Mr. Whitney, an editor at the journal Guernica, has emerged from the Paris Review’s archives at the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan with evidence that he says suggests otherwise. The archives, he contends, reveal “a number of never-reported C.I.A. ties that bypass Matthiessen or outlive his official tenure at the Agency.”

The nut of the issue is The Paris Review’s dealings with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an anti-Communist organization founded in 1950 andrevealed in 1967 to have been secretly financed by the C.I.A. Mr. Whitney found letters discussing the congress’s indirect support for the magazine, mainly by paying to reprint Paris Review articles in its own official magazines and by taking out multiple subscriptions. But he also cites letters discussing plans for the congress — or simply “the C.I.A.,” as Mr. Whitney puts it, without offering direct evidence that the editors knew of the congress’s ultimate source of money — to supplement the salary of one Paris Review editor, who would also work for the congress.

The congress, Mr. Whitney writes, may have even suggested some of The Paris Review’s famous literary interviews. “All of which means that at the dawn of the C.I.A.’s era of coups and nefarious plots,” he writes, “America’s most celebrated apolitical literary magazine served, in part, as a covert international weapon of soft power.”

Mr. Whitney stops short of implicating The Paris Review in the overthrow of the democratically elected President Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran, the ouster of Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala and other American actions. (If only just barely: one of the men the Paris Review editors discussed meeting with about editorial matters in the early 1960s, he notes, was the sociologist Daniel Bell, who “essentially invented the neoconservative political movement that would inspire George W. Bush in his disastrous invasion of Iraq.”)

But Mr. Whitney does argue that The Paris Review was part of “a secret patronage system, paid for by the taxpayer with no public debate” — patronage that was not available to magazines like Ramparts or Evergreen Review (run by the gadfly Barney Rosset, who died in February), which criticized the cold war and were put under surveillance.

Some commentators have said that Mr. Whitney’s article is little more thaninnuendo, revealing more about the money problems of small magazines than about any grand ideological conspiracy. And Mr. Whitney himself quotes some skeptical voices.

“The C.I.A. was stupid to offer secret subsidies — everything should have been funded openly,” the writer Paul Berman told him, adding: “I don’t think the little magazines did anything sinister — on the contrary. They played a noble role in Europe.”

But for Mr. Whitney, the important question is what Mr. Plimpton, who died in 2003, and the Paris Review’s other editors knew and when they knew it. In an interview, Nelson Aldrich, an early editor of the magazine who later worked for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, told him “of course” he knew the congress was backed by the C.I.A. — “effectively, if not literally.” “Why,” Mr. Whitney asks, “wouldn’t Plimpton?”

• Scott Lahti
• North Berwick, Maine

(If the C. Aubrey Smith of The Four Feathers had been a 1950s spook) "Company men were Company men in those days..."

(If the Glenn Frey of "Smuggler's Blues" had been a 1950s spook) "You ask any CIA man/He'll say there's so much we can do/From the pages of Encounter/To the Paris Review/'ris Review"

See Unz.org for the entire full-text run, especially the incomparable first fifteen years, of Encounter, the CCF-funded London monthly edited at first by Stephen Spender (1953-1966), Irving Kristol (1953-1958), Melvin Lasky (1958-1990) and Frank Kermode (1966-1967). You're going to like the way it reads. I guarantee it. See also my letter on these subjects in the NYTBR, the first of three from me last year, for February 13, 2011.