In Europe the agency began funding all manner of cultural and political publishing activities, creating a certain overlap between OPC projects and those of Tom Braden. For example, Braden instructed two CIA officers in Paris, working with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, to keep their efforts from other agency staff. Thus Robert Thayer, who headed the OPC branch for France, remained unaware of this activity, Project Opera. As the Directorate for Operations emerged full blown from its fusion, the International Organizations Division under Braden held center field. Then activities became more transparent, at least within the DO.

  One propaganda coup was mostly the product of Wisner’s Wurlitzer. That was a movie version of George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm. The OPC moved Howard Hunt into cultural operations after his Albania psywar assignment, and Hunt managed to secure film rights for Animal Farm from Orwell’s widow. Carleton Alsop, a Hollywood producer and agent, and Finis Farr, a scriptwriter, both of them now with OPC’s psywar shop, played key roles. The CIA then financed the animation and filming, which began in 1951, ensuring that its script ended with a more pointed allusion to Communist totalitarianism. Midway through this process the Psychological Strategy Board took over, having become the U.S. lead authority in this field. The PSB encouraged the CIA to seek film rights to another Orwell novel, 1984, again one with Cold War propaganda potential if spun the right way. Changes to the story line of the film version of 1984 contravened Orwell’s specific instructions. The movies were not ready for distribution until 1956, by which time both OPC and the PSB had passed from the scene.

  Much of the work in the cultural field revolved around the deft floating of ideas where they might have intellectual and political impact; the strategic positioning of stories to attract the most attention and further circulation; the careful placement of people, whether cultural figures or leaders aligned with CIA, to maximize their ability to act; the intensive preparation for myriad conferences of youth and student associations, labor unions, and entities like the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Frances Stonor Saunders, the historian of CIA’s cultural Cold War, recounts this story in great detail, at least as it concerns art and literature. It has been officially confirmed that the CIA funded the journal Encounter and subsidized publication of well over a thousand books before the end of 1967. A quarter of them were in English. Some involved direct collaboration between authors and CIA personnel, and more than one agency division involved itself in these operations.

  The story of the CIA’s relations with labor centers more on Jay Lovestone, former boss of the American Communist Party, who became an agency asset in a later incarnation as a labor activist. Like Allen Dulles, Lovestone ran with that elite group who periodically lunched with Frank Wisner. Overseen by agency counterintelligence guru James J. Angleton, Lovestone provided data that guided an entire category of CIA effort. At the moment of the inception of OPC, Lovestone had become executive secretary of the Free Trade Union Committee, a quasi-independent part of the American Federation of Labor and an obvious candidate for CIA recruitment. Indications are that by 1950 Lovestone’s committee had almost quadrupled its previous annual spending as the result of CIA money. The funds were used for anti-Communist labor activities in European countries, one example being the International Center for Free Trade Unionists in Exile, based in Paris, a convenient labor counterpart to the assorted liberation fronts the CIA supported in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Lovestone’s committee contributed on other fronts as well, such as funds for the founding conference of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1950, probably an instance of serving as a conduit for laundering CIA funds.

  An intense period in the relationship came at the end of 1950. On November 24, 1950, Walter Bedell Smith, Frank Wisner, and Carmel Offie met with Jay Lovestone and other union officials, including George Meany, the AFL president. DCI Smith, incredibly, thought the cash CIA channeled to Lovestone didn’t constitute a subsidy to labor. Lovestone liked Offie; Wisner’s assistant, under increasing fire at the agency, had officially been put on Lovestone’s payroll a few months earlier (CIA continued to pay his salary). Lovestone also thought the CIA had been pinching pennies and behaving as if his committee was merely an agency proprietary. He thought OPC spent too much money on Italian unions and not enough on him. At the 1950 meeting Lovestone complained about the funding level, and Wisner countered by citing the amount the agency had actually given that year—$250,000, far more than the Free Trade Union Committee had received from its parent AFL.

  Just a few months later Lovestone submitted even more ambitious proposals—the CIA should give him a larger amount permitting multiyear programs. By then Allen Dulles was pressing for Carmel Offie, whom he suspected of leaking CIA data to Lovestone, to be put on the shelf, activating a new channel (who eventually became Jim Angleton). Lovestone met Director Smith and senior officials again in April 1951, to no avail. Carmel Offie left the Lovestone committee two months later. The CIA subsidies for the Free Trade Unions Committee dried up, but not before the agency had handed out $464,000. Lovestone began to speak of the CIA as “Fizzland” and its officers as “Fizzheads,” but he continued reporting and, from time to time, seeking cash for initiatives by later groups he worked with. The CIA, for its part, built deeper connections to the AFL and other labor groups.

  With regard to the CIA and journalism, there was no single avenue. Instead a multifaceted association developed. Not only were journalistic positions valuable to the CIA as ostensible occupations for undercover agency officers, but the media remained a principal resource in the quest to plant stories and ideas. Project KM/Forget was the code name for a secret effort to insert stories in the media in one country, then resurface them elsewhere. There were many more like it. The CIA meanwhile grew ever more useful to the media as a font of background information for journalists and broadcasters. The relationship quickly became symbiotic. So entwined were the two sides that there would be virtual agency slots at media corporations. For its part the CIA assigned officers as liaisons with specific outlets. For example, through the 1950s Alfred C. Clark at the agency’s New York office was CIA’s link to the New York Times. His predecessor had been James Hunt, who opened a New York office for the CIG as early as December 1946. In the mid-1950s J. B. Love Reeves, a CIA liaison to other New York major media who was identified as meeting a variety of executives of broadcasting corporations and magazines including CBS, fulfilled the same function.

  Carl Bernstein, who gained fame with Bob Woodward as Washington Post reporters who revealed the Watergate conspiracy of the Nixon administration, later wrote an exposé of the CIA and the media which asserted that the agency had used more than four hundred journalists as assets. The detailed investigation of U.S. intelligence by a Senate committee at that time supplied the number fifty as a total, while the CIA director of that era publicly admitted to three dozen. The New York Times, in a series of articles in December 1977, found that more than thirty but possibly as many as a hundred newsmen had worked as salaried CIA contract officers while reporting the news, that at least eighteen journalists had refused CIA recruitment offers, and that at least a dozen CIA officers had worked abroad under journalistic cover. The Senate investigation confirmed that more than a dozen U.S. news organizations or publishing houses had provided cover for CIA officers, though “a few” of these were not aware of that fact.

  A typical charge of CIA involvement has been leveled at the New York Times reporter Sidney Gruson. But the agency itself held a different view. At the time of CIA’s operation in Guatemala, the agency convinced itself that Gruson’s stories aided its enemies. Efforts to get rid of Gruson went as high as Allen Dulles approaching the Times’s publisher.

  The question of penetration in the media, not simply in the United States but globally, is central to any assessment of the efficacy of CIA psychological warfare action. The Times reports just cited found that allegations of CIA connections involved more than twenty major media organizations, that at times the agency Wurlitzer had had as many as eight hundred propaganda assets on the payroll, and that the CIA had infiltrated a dozen foreign news organizations and actually owned or subsidized fifty more, including newspapers, press agencies, and other communications entities. Agency entities or close relations, according to the Times, included Forum World Features, Continental Press Service, Editors Press Service, the Center for International Studies at MIT, and more. The CIA owned printing companies in Italy, India, and Japan, the newspaper Daily American in Rome (in which it held a controlling interest), plus others. Without more detailed analysis than is possible here, no conclusion can be drawn as to real effectiveness, but it can be confidently stated that these operations were large components of the U.S. clandestine program, vigorously pursued and waged over many years.

  A project of the Tom Braden era characteristic of the agency’s International Organizations Division was the funding of the National Student Association. This group of members of student governments at colleges throughout the United States, had been formed in 1947 at the University of Wisconsin. It forthrightly broke with the International Union of Students the following year when that organization refused to condemn the Soviet-inspired coup in Czechoslovakia, though with headquarters in Prague the IUS knew well enough what had really happened. (A Russian “student executive” with the group went on to head the Soviet KGB.) The CIA paid heed to the National Student Association after that, while the group took the initiative in helping create a non-Communist alternative, the International Student Conference, formed in 1950 at Stockholm.

  Membership dues were not enough to fund the association and its worldwide counterpart, and grants were sparse, compared to Soviet funding for the competition. The NSA seemed too leftist during that era of McCarthyism. Neither the State Department nor Congress had any interest. One of the student founders subsequently joined the CIA, alerting bosses to the wealth of Russian aid going to the Prague-based competitors. Wisner’s shop began to funnel a small amount of money to the National Student Association before the end of 1951, but Tom Braden multiplied and routinized this flow. Before it ended the CIA had given plenty of cash to the association in addition to paying for rent, supplies, and much else besides. Braden assigned his deputy, Cord Meyer, who had had pre-CIA experience with world peace association efforts, to supervise.

  The National Student Association project worked this way: The student group held summer seminars each year, where the CIA combed the field for its preferences, then supported those people in the association’s elections. Meyer and other agency apologists assert that the CIA made sure that only the NSA president and vice president were witting of the agency connection and that each year these newly elected officials could make the choice to end the relationship. The CIA money supposedly supported only the NSA’s international efforts. That construction fails to show, however, that the agency had a first shot each year in influencing the choice of leadership; and that the group’s leaders, confronting the prospect of losing a benefactor that took care of all their overhead costs should they decide to terminate the CIA link, may not have had a real choice.

  During the National Student Association project, the CIA paid expenses for some 250 Americans to attend conferences of international youth groups, forming the core basis for U.S. delegations at meetings held in Vienna, Helsinki, and Moscow in the late 1950s and early 1960s. An American attending the Sixth World Youth Festival in Moscow in 1957 was specifically directed by the CIA to purchase samples of Soviet-manufactured items and report on Russian surveillance measures at the meeting. Attendees were debriefed more generally by CIA officers who mined them for what they could learn about Soviet intentions.

  Braden’s student project evinced methods common to similar CIA operations with a variety of ostensibly purely private groups. All this required money. Spreading money around without revealing its CIA origins proved a challenge. The Marshall Plan funds early on suggested the possibilities. Around 1951, recounts Richard Bissell, then a senior Marshall Plan administrator, he received a visit from Frank Wisner, whom he knew socially but with whom he had not previously done business. Wisner asked Bissell to help finance OPC operations by diverting a portion of the so-called counterpart funds the administrators controlled. This money, in local currencies, was contributed to the Plan by European countries in exchange for the assistance they received. Concerned with an apparently rising security threat to Europe in the wake of the Korean War, Bissell gave Wisner the money. The practice continued as OPC transitioned to the Directorate for Operations and until the Marshall Plan ended in 1952. Bissell moved on to the Ford Foundation, extremely concerned about foreign policy issues; the Ford Foundation began moving closer to the CIA orbit. Bissell believed the real Russian threat lay in internal subversion, not military action, especially in the Third World. This position quite matched CIA arguments.

  Not long afterward Bissell became a CIA consultant. Among his assignments he helped Frank Lindsay on the study that examined how the Iron Curtain might be rolled back without war. The report ended up gathering dust on some shelf, but its most important consequence is the conclusion Bissell drew from it—psychological warfare by itself would never defeat Russia. The Ford Foundation began to commission work at MIT’s Center for International Studies, the agency’s academic think tank, set up by CIA and headed by a former agency deputy director. The CIA began moving cash through the Ford Foundation. In the mid-1950s, as the foundation came under the tutelage of H. Rowan Gaither, the flow increased and ramified. Conduits other than Ford were developed, foundations were set up as CIA shell corporations, and prominent individuals were used to represent undisclosed clients.

  Use of this method mushroomed right into the 1960s. An internal agency study in 1966 found this technique “particularly effective for democratically-run membership organizations, which need to assure their own unwitting members and collaborators, as well as their hostile critics, that they have genuine, respectable, private sources of income.” The funneling of money through legitimate foundations in fact became the most effective way to conceal CIA’s role. Looking at major grants (at the time, more than ten thousand dollars) made by foundations other than the Big Three (Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller), the 1966 CIA review of grants made over the previous three years found the agency money involved in nearly half the awards for international activity and a third of those for scientific and social science initiatives. Of the total of seven hundred such grants, more than a hundred had been fully or partially funded by the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Not only were the funding techniques important tools in CIA’s bag of tricks, the projects they financed were weapons in the Cold War, often instruments of psychological warfare. But, like Richard Bissell, there were many in government who appreciated that psywar was not enough. Those officials, particularly the secret warriors, wanted real covert military capability. Forces for unconventional warfare could back up the CIA’s psychological operations and its covert action and take over where they left off. Such forces soon joined America’s covert legions.

  An impetus for the creation of military units for special warfare was congressional action in 1950. Building on America’s traditional commitment to freedom, and Washington’s interest in the “captive nations,” a proposed bill set aside funds for a legion of Eastern European emigrés who might be sent back into their countries. This Lodge Bill became Public Law 587, passed by the 81st Congress in June 1950, on the eve of the Korean War. It led the army to provide for the creation of a “Special Forces Regiment” of three battalions with a total of about 2,500 men, half of whom might be foreign recruits.

  The Lodge Bill also envisioned an equal number of foreign enlistments in the U.S. Army. The military raised the ceiling to 12,500. But by August 1952 fewer than half that number had applied. Of those, just over 400 received required security clearances, and only half actually enlisted. Only 22 wound up assigned to the new Special Forces. The project would be revived as a bid to create an emigré force with a set-aside of $100 million introduced by Rep. Charles Kersten as an amendment to the Mutual Security Act of 1951. The concept would be accepted but never finally implemented.

  While the emigré dream perhaps did not come to fruition, the Special Forces themselves did. Once again it was the Korean War that furnished the impetus. At army headquarters, increased need arising from the war, combined with continuing interest in psywar, led to establishment of an Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare under the experienced leadership of Gen. Robert McClure. This office also had charge of “special warfare” planning. Although in 1950 only seven active army officers had specializations in psywar, by 1952 there were entire units devoted to radio and leaflet propaganda, and the army had set aside the personnel spaces for a new unit, the Tenth Special Forces Group. A year later the group had actually recruited and trained seventeen hundred officers and men.

  A complement to the U.S. Army units also materialized. This was the creation of special units composed of Displaced Persons or citizens of the occupied countries. Recruits for the units made up the “labor battalions” referred to earlier in discussion of the Albania operation. Roughly forty thousand persons joined the battalions, living in military barracks, receiving some training, available to be armed. In 1953 the Eisenhower administration, responding to the Kersten initiative, considered broadening the labor battalions into a Volunteer Freedom Corps. Championed by psychological warfare expert C. D. Jackson, Ike’s National Security Council talked over the concept several times and dreamed of a corps of as many as a quarter-million persons. A committee studied the proposition, but it was finally dropped amid diplomatic difficulties. In late 1954, Jackson attempted to revive the Freedom Corps, lobbying White House officials and Allen Dulles for months without success. Dwight Eisenhower showed interest in these schemes and did much to keep them alive, at least until the Hungarian revolution. As for Charles Kersten, in 1955 Allen Dulles tried to get his brother to enlist Kersten for a State Department job, and Foster countered by suggesting he be sponsored for membership on the Committee for a Free Europe board. The CIA’s Dulles shot that down by adverting that Kersten’s Cold War stance struck him as a bit too “overt.”