The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters

During the Cold War, Western liberal democracies championed freedom of expression as a core value, yet this freedom was enlisted in service of a concealed agenda. Frances Stonor Saunders reveals how the CIA conducted a secret campaign in which prominent Western intellectuals advocating for intellectual freedom were working for or subsidized by the CIA, often without their knowledge. Drawing on declassified documents and exclusive interviews, the book documents the CIA's covert program of cultural interventions in Western Europe and the United States between 1947 and 1967. It exposes how the agency deployed figures including Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Lowell, George Orwell, and Jackson Pollock as instruments in Cold War efforts. The work has been translated into ten languages and includes a new preface by the author.