--- title: The Congress for Cultural Freedom:a CIA-funded intellectuals' network, 1950-1967 url: https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/congress-for-cultural-freedom/ description: from 1950 to 1967 the CIA paid, through private foundations, for an international association of writers and scholars that presented itself as… section: Case studies --- ![Illustration: a Cold War intelligence collage of a non-aligned-movement conference and a map spanning Latin America, Africa and Asia.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-cold-war-global-south.jpg) [Case studies](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/) # The Congress for Cultural Freedom:a CIA-funded intellectuals' network, 1950-1967 At a glance From 1950 to 1967 the CIA paid, through private foundations, for an international association of writers and scholars that presented itself as independent… - **When:** June 1950 - **Actor:** U.S. Central Intelligence Agency… - **Target:** Writers, artists, scholars and magazine readers in Western Europe, Latin America, Asia and Australia… - **Source:** Unidentified Source blurred: contractors, cutouts, buried disclosure - **Confidence:** **documented** Primary documents, court records, official disclosures - **Techniques:** [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/) [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/) [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/) Full details - **Actor:** U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (Office of Policy Coordination, later the International Organizations Division), through Michael Josselson and conduit foundations including the Farfield Foundation - **Target:** Writers, artists, scholars and magazine readers in Western Europe, Latin America, Asia and Australia; the non-communist left in particular On this page - [What happened](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/congress-for-cultural-freedom/#what-happened) - [How it works](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/congress-for-cultural-freedom/#how-it-works) - [Then and now](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/congress-for-cultural-freedom/#then-and-now) - [Positions on the record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/congress-for-cultural-freedom/#positions-on-the-record) - [Same-method test](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/congress-for-cultural-freedom/#same-method-test) - [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/congress-for-cultural-freedom/#how-to-spot-it) - [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/congress-for-cultural-freedom/#images) - [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/congress-for-cultural-freedom/#sources) On this page **In one line:** from 1950 to 1967 the CIA paid, through private foundations, for an international association of writers and scholars that presented itself as independent, ran magazines on four continents and staged a festival of modern art in Paris; most of its members and contributors were not told where the money came from. ![Diagram: CIA budget to conduit foundations such as the Farfield Foundation to the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris, which runs magazines, conferences and a 1952 festival; contributors mostly uninformed; exposure in 1966-67 and renaming as the International Association for Cultural Freedom](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/congress-for-cultural-freedom-diagram.svg) ## What happened - **25-27 March 1949.** The Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace meets at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, with Dmitri Shostakovich in the Soviet delegation. Sidney Hook's Americans for Intellectual Freedom stages a rival meeting at Freedom House; Nicolas Nabokov, Mary McCarthy and Dwight Macdonald speak there. CIA historian Michael Warner (1995) treats the Waldorf meeting and its Paris sequel as the prompt for a Western answer. - **1949-50.** Melvin Lasky, an American editor in Berlin, and Michael Josselson, a U.S. official there, propose an international conference to Washington. The CIA's Office of Policy Coordination approves and pays for it (Warner 1995). - **26-30 June 1950.** The Congress for Cultural Freedom opens at the Titania-Palast cinema in West Berlin, the day after the Korean War begins. Speakers include Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Sidney Hook, James Burnham, Raymond Aron, Franz Borkenau, Hugh Trevor-Roper and A. J. Ayer. Koestler reads a *Freedom Manifesto*, mostly drafted by Manès Sperber, which holds "as self-evident" that "intellectual freedom is one of the inalienable rights of man" and that this freedom "is defined first and foremost by his right to hold and express his own opinions, and particularly opinions which differ from those of his rulers." Benedetto Croce, John Dewey, Karl Jaspers, Jacques Maritain and Bertrand Russell become honorary presidents. - **1950-1967.** The Congress settles in Paris. Josselson, a CIA officer, runs it as executive director; Nabokov is secretary general. Money reaches it through the Farfield Foundation and other foundations that pass CIA funds on as their own grants (Saunders 1999; Wilford 2008). At its peak it has offices in some 35 countries. - **The magazines.** *Preuves* (Paris, from October 1951); *Encounter* (London, from 1953, first edited by Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol); *Quest* (Bombay, from 1954); *Quadrant* (Sydney, 1956, through the Australian Committee for Cultural Freedom); *Tempo Presente* (Rome, 1956, edited by Silone and Nicola Chiaromonte); *Cuadernos* and then *Mundo Nuevo* (Paris, 1966, edited by Emir Rodríguez Monegal and published under the name of the Instituto Latinoamericano de Relaciones Internacionales). - **April-May 1952.** Nabokov's festival *L'Œuvre du XXe siècle* ("Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century") runs in Paris for about a month. The Boston Symphony Orchestra opens it with Stravinsky's *The Rite of Spring*; Stravinsky conducts *Oedipus Rex*; Berg's *Wozzeck* is staged in Paris for the first time; an exhibition shows Matisse, Cézanne, Seurat, Chagall and Kandinsky (Scott-Smith 2000). - **Late April 1966.** A five-part *New York Times* series on the CIA mentions that the agency has subsidised the Congress and *Encounter* through foundations. - **March 1967.** *Ramparts* reports CIA funding of the U.S. National Student Association and describes the network of pass-through foundations. Press follow-ups name more conduits. President Johnson appoints a committee under Nicholas Katzenbach, which on 29 March recommends ending covert federal funding of private voluntary organisations (Wilford 2008). - **20 May 1967.** Tom Braden, who ran the CIA's International Organizations Division in the early 1950s, publishes "I'm Glad the CIA Is 'Immoral'" in the *Saturday Evening Post*: "We had placed one agent in a Europe-based organization of intellectuals called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Another agent became an editor of *Encounter*." He adds: "I remember the enormous joy I got when the Boston Symphony Orchestra won more acclaim for the U.S. in Paris than John Foster Dulles or Dwight D. Eisenhower could have brought with a hundred speeches." - **May 1967 onward.** Josselson acknowledges channelling CIA money into the Congress since its founding, latterly about a million dollars a year. *Encounter* co-editors Spender and Frank Kermode resign after Lasky, editor since 1958, admits he was told in 1963. The Congress is renamed the International Association for Cultural Freedom, funded by the Ford Foundation, with Shepard Stone as president. Rodríguez Monegal leaves *Mundo Nuevo* in 1968. The IACF closes in 1979. ![The Titania-Palast in Berlin-Steglitz, 2006](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/congress-for-cultural-freedom-titania-palast-2006.jpg) *The Titania-Palast in Berlin-Steglitz, where the Congress for Cultural Freedom was founded in June 1950. Photo: Jcornelius, 2006, CC BY-SA 2.0 de. The building's memorial plaque lists its 1928 opening, the first post-war Berlin Philharmonic concert and the founding of the Free University, and does not mention the 1950 congress.* ## How it works - [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/): a government intelligence budget reaches readers as the work of a private association of intellectuals, funded by what look like philanthropic grants. Each layer (agency, foundation, Congress, national committee, magazine) puts one more step between the source and the page. The cover story was the Congress's own stated purpose, the defence of cultural freedom, so its independence from any government was part of what it offered readers. - [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/): the Congress was built around names. Five of the best-known philosophers of the day sat as honorary presidents, and magazines ran work by leading writers who, on the record, mostly did not know who paid. Their reputations vouched for the organisation, and few people asked who funded it. - [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/): the 1952 festival attached the prestige of modern music and painting to "the free world". Braden's own account measures its value as acclaim "for the U.S.". ## Then and now ![Freedom-Gram (1952), a Crusade for Freedom fundraising mailer for Radio Free Europe](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/freedom-gram-1952.jpg) *[Freedom-Gram: Help Truth Fight Communism](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/freedom-gram-1952/), Crusade for Freedom, 1952. Public domain.* In the same years, the Crusade for Freedom asked Americans to sign Freedom-Grams saying they had "voluntarily contributed to build these stations", while Radio Free Europe ran mainly on CIA money. The mailer and the Congress used the same arrangement: a citizens' or scholars' front, with government money behind it and "freedom" in the name. Seventy-six years after Berlin, [The Hanover Institute: reports written for chatbots to cite](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/hanover-institute-chatbots/) shows the same layering with different parts: a state advertising agency pays a German media buyer, which pays a U.S. firm, which runs an "institute" whose reports chatbots cite. The differences are large. The Congress lasted seventeen years, employed real editors and published writers who signed their own work, most of whom were not told; the Hanover reports were unsigned and partly scored as machine-written. Hanover's funder is on the record in FARA filings and a site footer; the Congress's was concealed until journalists and a former officer disclosed it. The Congress aimed at elite opinion over decades; the Hanover pages aimed at the retrieval systems behind chatbot answers within weeks. ## Positions on the record - **The agency's position.** Braden (1967) argues that secret funding was the practical way to support non-communist organisations of the left abroad, which the U.S. Congress would not have funded openly. Warner (1995), a CIA historian writing for the agency's Center for the Study of Intelligence, describes the Berlin congress as a plan proposed by Lasky and Josselson and backed by the agency. - **The Congress's defenders.** Coleman (1989), a later editor of *Quadrant*, argues that the Congress's work reflected its members' own convictions and that the funding did not dictate what they wrote. - **Its critics.** Saunders (1999) argues that people and institutions the CIA subsidised "were expected to perform as part of a broad campaign of persuasion", and rejects the view that the agency merely supported what they would have said anyway. - **Between them.** Wilford (2008) argues that even when the CIA tried to call the tune, it did not always get what it wanted. Barnhisel (2015) finds relatively little editorial interference at *Encounter*. Scott-Smith (2002) reads the Congress as a transatlantic network advancing a political consensus in the language of apolitical culture. - **What is documented:** the CIA funding, the conduit foundations, Josselson's role, Braden's account, the 1967 admissions and resignations, and the renaming. - **What is contested:** how many contributors knew, and how far funding shaped what was published. - **What is not shown:** that any named contributor's work was commissioned or altered by the CIA, beyond the cases the sources above name. This page makes no finding on the merits of the anti-communist or pro-Soviet positions of the period. ## Same-method test The Soviet-backed peace movement used the same method from the other side. The World Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace at Wrocław (25-28 August 1948) was organised by the Polish and Soviet authorities; there Alexander Fadeyev, head of the Soviet Writers' Union, said that "if hyenas could wield a pen", they would write like "the Millers, Eliots, Malraux and other Sartres". The Waldorf-Astoria conference of March 1949 brought Soviet delegates to New York under a U.S. sponsoring council. The World Peace Council, founded in 1949-50 and launched with the Stockholm Appeal against atomic weapons, was directed and funded through the Soviet party's International Department according to a CIA study printed by the House Intelligence Committee in 1978 and to later historians (Wernicke 1998). The differences matter. The Soviet delegates were state employees under instruction, and communist sponsorship of the peace congresses was widely reported at the time, so many attendees and observers could weigh it; the Congress's funding was hidden from most of its own members for sixteen years. Wernicke (1998) finds that the World Peace Council's tie to Soviet policy led many Western peace groups to refuse to work with it; the Congress's tie to the CIA did not become public until the 1960s. Both arrangements score the same way here: a state's money and direction behind an association of intellectuals presented as independent. ## How to spot it - Follow the grant, not the masthead. Ask who funds the foundation that funds the magazine, and whether that foundation has any other visible activity. - Separate the contributor from the channel. A writer's sincerity says nothing about who paid for the platform. - Notice when independence is the product. An organisation whose main claim is freedom from government has the most to lose from a government funder, and the most reason to conceal one. ## Images | Image | Source | Licence | | --- | --- | --- | | Mechanism diagram (above) | Drawn for FRAME from the sources below (`make_diagrams.py`) | CC BY 4.0, FRAME | | Titania-Palast, Berlin-Steglitz (2006) | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Titania-Palast_Schlossstrasse_2006.jpg), Jcornelius | CC BY-SA 2.0 de | | *Freedom-Gram* (1952) | FRAME gallery | Public domain (U.S. government work) | ### Image gaps - **Photographs of the June 1950 Berlin congress.** Searches of Wikimedia Commons in English and German found none, including among the Bundesarchiv's donated photos. Press-agency photos are copyrighted. **Possibly fillable** from the Bundesarchiv's own image database, which was not searched. - **Covers of *Encounter*, *Preuves*, *Tempo Presente*, *Quadrant*, *Quest* and *Mundo Nuevo*.** Copyrighted; not used. - **The 1952 festival programme and posters.** No openly licensed copy found. - **Braden's *Saturday Evening Post* article (1967).** Copyrighted page layout; quoted instead. - **Nicolas Nabokov at the State Department's International Broadcasting Division (late 1940s).** A public-domain Truman Library photo is on [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Charles_Thayer_Seated_With_Two_Men_Regarding_Broadcasts.jpg), but the file could not be downloaded from the build environment (rate-limited). **Fillable.** - **Portraits of Josselson and Lasky.** No openly licensed photos found. Two Italian photographs on Commons (Silone and Spender at a 1961 Rome conference; Spender in 1951) are marked public domain in Italy, but their U.S. status is unclear, so they are not used. - **The Waldorf-Astoria conference and pickets (1949).** No openly licensed photo found; U.S. wire photos are copyrighted. ## Sources - [Thomas W. Braden, "I'm Glad the CIA Is 'Immoral'", *Saturday Evening Post*, 20 May 1967, pp. 10-14 (Internet Archive scan)](https://archive.org/details/im-glad-the-cia-is-immoral-by-thomas-w.-braden-the-saturday-evening-post-may-20-1967-pp.-10-12-14); [reprint at the *Saturday Evening Post*](https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/reprints/im-glad-the-cia-is-immoral/); [*Saturday Evening Post*, "Why Americans Don't Trust the CIA" (2016), quoting it](https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/12/americans-dont-trust-cia/) - [Michael Warner, "Cultural Cold War: Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-50", *Studies in Intelligence* 38:5 (1995), CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence](https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/origins-congress-cultural-freedom.pdf) - Frances Stonor Saunders, *Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War* (Granta, 1999); U.S. edition *The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters* (New Press, 2000). - Hugh Wilford, *The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America* (Harvard University Press, 2008). - Peter Coleman, *The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe* (Free Press, 1989). - Giles Scott-Smith, *The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and Post-War American Hegemony* (Routledge, 2002). - [Giles Scott-Smith, "'The Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century' Festival and the Congress for Cultural Freedom: Origins and Consolidation 1947-52", *Intelligence and National Security* 15:1 (2000)](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02684520008432589) - Greg Barnhisel, *Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy* (Columbia University Press, 2015). - [Günter Wernicke, "The Communist-Led World Peace Council and the Western Peace Movements", *Peace & Change* 23:3 (1998)](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0149-0508.00087) - [William Barrett, "Culture Conference at the Waldorf", *Commentary*, 1949](https://www.commentary.org/articles/william-barrett-2/on-the-horizon-culture-conference-at-the-waldorf/) - [University of Chicago Library, Guide to the International Association for Cultural Freedom Records 1941-1978](https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/findingaids/view.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.IACF) - [*Ramparts*, "NSA and the CIA", March 1967 (Internet Archive)](https://archive.org/details/nsa-and-the-cia) - U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, *The CIA and the Media*, hearings, 1977-78 (Government Printing Office, 1978), which printed the CIA study "Soviet Covert Action and Propaganda" on the World Peace Council. - Patrick Iber, *Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America*, Harvard University Press, 2015 (*Mundo Nuevo* and ILARI).