The Consortium
By Frances Stonor Saunders (1999)
Incorporated in 1936, the Ford Foundation was the tax-exempt cream of the vast Ford fortune, with assets totalling over $3 billion by the late 1950s. Dwight Macdonald described it memorably as 'a large body of money completely surrounded by people who want some'. The architects of the foundation's cultural policy in the aftermath of the Second World War were perfectly attuned to the political imperatives which supported America's looming presence on the world stage. At times, it seemed as if the Ford Foundation was simply an extension of government in the area of international cultural propaganda. The foundation had a record of close involvement in covert actions in Europe, working closely with Marshall Plan and CIA officials on specific projects. This reciprocity was further extended when Marshall planner Richard Bissell, under whose signature counterpart funds were signed over to Frank Wisner, came to the Ford Foundation in 1952, accurately predicting there was 'nothing to prevent an individual from exerting as much influence through his work in a private foundation as he could through work in the government'.19
During his tenure at Ford, Bissell met often with Allen Dulles and other CIA officials, including former Groton classmate Tracy Barnes, in a 'mutual search' for new ideas. He left suddenly to join the CIA as a special assistant to Allen Dulles in January 1954, but not before he had helped steer the foundation to the vanguard of Cold War thinking.
Bissell had worked directly under Paul Hoffman, who became president of the Ford Foundation in 1950. Arriving straight from his job as administrator of the Marshall Plan, Hoffman had received a full immersion course in the problems of Europe, and in the power of ideas to address those problems. He was fluent in the language of psychological warfare and, echoing Arthur Koestler's cry of 1950 ("Friends, freedom has seized the offensive!'), he talked of 'waging peace'. He also shared the view of Ford Foundation spokesman Robert Maynard Hutchins that the State Department was 'subjected to so much domestic political interference that it can no longer present a rounded picture of American culture'.
One of the Ford Foundation's first post-war ventures into international cultural diplomacy was the launch in 1952 of the Intercultural Publications programme under James Laughlin, the publisher of the New Directions series (which published George Orwell and Henry Miller), and a revered custodian of the interests of the avant-garde. With an initial grant of $500,000, Laughlin launched the magazine Perspectives, which was targeted at the Non- Communist Left in France, England, Italy and Germany (and published in all those languages). Its aim, he emphasized, was not 'so much to defeat the leftist intellectuals in dialectical combat as to lure them away from their positions by aesthetic and rational persuasion'. Further, it would 'promote peace by increasing respect for America's non-materialistic achievements among intellectuals abroad.' 20
Its board packed with cultural Cold Warriors, the Intercultural Publications programme also targeted those American intellectuals who felt their work was 'undermined by the prevailing stereotype of America as a mass-cult hell'. Malcolm Cowley was an early supporter of Perspectives, which offered a version of America far removed from 'movies, hardboiled detective stories, comic books and magazines in which there is more advertising than text'. One academic, Perry Miller, argued that 'no propaganda Or the American way should be included; that omission will, in itself, become the most important element of propaganda, in the best sense'.21 Perspectives never lived up to these expectations. Irving Kristol referred to it as 'that miserable Ford Foundation journal'.22 in the wake of its failure, the Ford Foundation was easily persuaded to take over sponsorship of Lasky's Der Monat. Set up under Lucius Clay's backing in October 1948, and financed through the 'Confidential Fund' of the American High Commission, Der Monat's official auspices strained its claims to be independent Lasky longed to replace this subsidy, and with the help of Shepard Stone, a foundation executive who had worked under Clay in Germany, he finally secured a grant from the Ford Foundation, declaring in the October 1954 issue, 'From now on we are absolutely and completely free and independent.'
On 21 January 1953, Allen Dulles, insecure about his future in the CIA under the newly elected Eisenhower, had met his friend David Rockefeller for lunch. Rockefeller hinted heavily that if Dulles decided to leave the Agency, he could reasonably expect to be invited to become president of the Ford Foundation. Dulles need not have feared for his future. Two days after this lunch, the New York Times broke the story that Allen Dulles was to become Director of Central Intelligence.
The new president of the Ford Foundation was announced shortly after. He was John McCloy, the archetype of twentiethcentury American power and influence. By the time he came to the Ford Foundation, he had been Assistant Secretary of War, president of the World Bank, and High Commissioner of Germany. In 1953 he also became chairman of the Rockefellers' Chase Manhattan Bank, and chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. After John F. Kennedy's assassination, he was a Warren Commission appointee. Throughout, he maintained his career as a Wall Street attorney for the seven big oil companies, and as director of numerous corporations.
As High Commissioner in Germany, McCloy had agreed to provide cover for scores of CIA agents, including Lawrence de Neufville. Although officially employees in his administration, unofficially they were accountable to their chiefs in Washington, who were under few obligations to tell McCloy what they were really up to. A political sophisticate, McCloy took a pragmatic view of the CIA's inevitable interest in the Ford Foundation when he assumed its presidency. Addressing the concerns of some of the foundation's executives, who felt that its reputation for integrity and independence was being undermined by involvement with the CIA, McCloy argued that if they failed to cooperate, the CIA would simply penetrate the foundation quietly by recruiting or inserting staff at the lower levels. McCloy's answer to this problem was to create an administrative unit within the Ford Foundation specifically to deal with the CIA. Headed by McCloy and two foundation officers, this three-man committee had to be consulted every time the Agency wanted to use the foundation, either as a pass-through, or as cover. 'They would check in with this particular committee, and if it was felt that this was a reasonable thing and would not be against the foundation's long-term interests, then the project would be passed along to the internal staff and other foundation officers [without them] knowing the origins of the proposal,'23 explained McCloy's biographer, Kai Bird.
With this arrangement in place, the Ford Foundation became officially engaged as one of those organizations the CIA was able to mobilize for political warfare against Communism. The foundation's archives reveal a raft of joint projects. The East European Fund, a CIA front in which George Kerman played a prominent role, got most of its money from the Ford Foundation. The fund forged close links with the Chekhov Publishing House, which received $523,000 from the Ford Foundation for the purchase of proscribed Russian works, and translations into Russian of western classics. The foundation gave $500,000 to Bill Casey's International Rescue Committee, and substantial giants to another CIA front, the World Assembly of Youth. It was also one of the single largest donors to the Council on Foreign Relations, an independent think-tank which exerted enormous influence on American foreign policy, and which operated (and continues to operate) according to strict confidentiality rules which include a twenty-five-year embargo on the release of its records.
Under a major grant from the Ford Foundation, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, founded in Washington in 1947, expanded its international programme in 1958. On the ICA's board of trustees sat William Bundy, a member of the CIA's Board of National Estimate, and son-in-law of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. His brother, McGeorge Bundy, became president of the Ford Foundation in 1966 coming straight from his job as Special Assistant to the President in Charge of National Security, which meant, among other things, monitoring the CIA). Benefiting from the foundation's largesse were Herbert Read, Salvador de Madariaga, Stephen Spender, Aaron Copland, Isak Dinesen, Naum Gabo, Martha Graham, Robert Lowell, Robert Penn Warren and Robert Richman, who were all Fellows of the ICA's Congress of Cultural Leaders. This was in effect an extension of the work of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which itself was one of Ford Foundation's largest grantees, receiving $7 million by the early 1960s.
One of the earliest CIA supporters of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was Frank Lindsay, to whom de Neufville was reporting in the build-up to the 1950 Berlin conclave. Lindsay was an OSS veteran who in 1947 had written one of the first memos recommending that the US create a covert action force to fight the Cold War. The paper attracted the attention of Frank Wisner, who asked him to come on board and run his European operations at OPC. As Deputy Chief of OPC (1949-51), Lindsay was responsible for setting up the 'stay-behind' groups in western Europe. In 1953, he joined the Ford Foundation, and from there he maintained close contact with his confreres in the intelligence community.
Lindsay was later joined at the foundation by Waldemar Nielsen, who became its staff director. Throughout his tenure there, Nielsen was a CIA agent. In 1960, he became Executive Director of the President's Committee on Information Activities Abroad. In his various guises, Nielsen worked closely with C. D. Jackson, with whom he shared a contempt for the 'fundamental disregard for psychological factors among a good many of the hautes fonctionnaires in this town'. Nielsen was also a close friend of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, whose efforts he wholeheartedly supported.
The key link between the Congress and the Ford Foundation was Shepard Stone, who had established a reputation as an expert in the structure and procedures by which the American government and private groups participated in world affairs. The Sunday editor of the New York Times before the war, he went on to serve with G-2 (army intelligence), before becoming Director of Public Affairs under John McCloy in Germany, in which guise he had secured government sponsorship for Der Monat. An old hand at psychological warfare, John McCloy thought highly enough of Stone to recommend him as a worthy successor to the outgoing director of the Psychological Strategy Board in 1951. Stone did not get the job, and instead joined the Ford Foundation. Throughout his career, he was so closely connected to the CIA that many believed he was an Agency man. 'Shep was not a CIA man, though he may have fished in those waters,'24 one agent commented vaguely. In 1953, he spent a month in Europe, at Josselson's invitation, visiting key Congress people. As director of the Ford Foundation's International Affairs division from 1954, Stone's value to the Congress was further enhanced.
The Rockefeller Foundation, no less than the Ford, was an integral component of America's Cold War machinery. Incorporated in 1913, its principal donor was the legendary John D. Rockefeller III. It had assets exceeding $500 million, not including an additional $150 million in the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Inc., a major think-tank which was incorporated in New York in 1941. In 1957 the fund brought together the most influential minds of the period under a Special Studies Project whose task was to attempt a definition of American foreign policy. Subpanel II was designated to the study of International Security Objectives and Strategy, and its members included Henry and Clare Booth Luce, Laurence Rockefeller, Townsend Hoopes (representing Jock Whitney's company), Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Frank Lindsay and William Bundy of the CIA.
The convergence between the Rockefeller billions and the US government exceeded even that of the Ford Foundation. John Foster Dulles and later Dean Rusk both went from the presidency of the Rockefeller Foundation to become secretaries of state. Other Cold War heavies such as John J. McCloy and Robert A. Lovett featured prominently as Rockefeller trustees. Nelson Rockefeller's central position on this foundation guaranteed a close relationship with US intelligence circles he had been in charge of all intelligence in Latin America during the Second World War. Later, his associate in Brazil, Colonel J. C. King, became CIA chief of clandestine activities in the western hemisphere. When Nelson Rockefeller was appointed by Eisenhower to the National Security Council in 1954, his job was to approve various covert operations. If he needed any extra information on CIA activities, he could simply ask his old friend Allen Dulles for a direct briefing. One of the most controversial of these activities was the CIA's MK-ULTRA (or 'Manchurian Candidate') programme of mind-control research during the 1950s. This research was assisted by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Running his own intelligence department during the war, Nelson Rockefeller had been absent from the ranks of OSS, and indeed had formed a lifelong enmity with William Donovan. But there was no prejudice against OSS veterans, who were recruited to the Rockefeller Foundation in droves. In 1950, OSS-er Charles B. Fahs became head of the foundation's division of humanities. His assistant was another OSS veteran named Chadbourne Gilpatric, who arrived there directly from the CIA. These two were the principal liaisons for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and responsible for dispensing large Rockefeller subsidies to Josselson's outfit.
As important as Nelson Rockefeller was his brother, David. He controlled the donations committee of the Chase Manhattan Bank Foundation, was vice-president then president of the bank itself, a trustee of the Council on Foreign Relations, chairman of the Executive Committee for International House, and a close personal friend of Allen Dulles and Tom Braden. 'I often briefed David, semi-officially and with Allen's permission, on what we were doing,' recalled Braden. 'He was of the same mind as us, and very approving of everything we were doing. He had the same sense as I did that the way to win the Cold War was our way. Sometimes David would give me money to do things which weren't in our budget. He gave me a lot of money for causes in France. I remember he gave me $50,000 for someone who was active in promoting a united Europe amongst European youth groups. This guy came to me with his project, and I told David, and David just gave me the cheque for $50,000. The CIA never came into the equation.'25
These freelance transactions gave new meaning to the practice of governmental buccaneering, and were an inevitable byproduct of the semi-privatization of American foreign policy during these Cold War years. Out of the same culture, however, came later Oliver North-type disasters. The comparison is apt for, just like the architect of Irangate, 'with his steadfast gaze, his inexorable sense of mission and his palpable conviction that the end justifies the means',26 these earlier bends of the CIA were never once afflicted by doubt in themselves or their purpose.
Excerpt from Who Paid the Piper, by Frances Stonor Saunders, pp 139-145 (London, 1999)
Footnotes:
1 Certificate of Incorporation of Committee for Free Europe, Inc., 11 May 1949 (CJD/DDE).
2 Dean Acheson, quoted in G. J. A. O'Toole, Honorable Treachery A History of U. S. Intelligence, Espionage, and Covert Action from the American Revolution to the CIA (New York Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991).
3 Certificate of Incorporation of Committee for Free Europe, Inc., op.cit. According to the Committee's 'Confidential Report on Friendship Stations', one of its major objectives was 'to increase disintegrating psychological pressures on the Soviet power center' and 'to forge new psychological weapons for an offensive cold war'. The report also argued that 'propaganda divorced from action ultimately recoils upon the user', a timely warning in view of what was to unfold in Hungary in 1956 (see below Chapter 18).
4 Blanche Wiesen Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower A Divided Legacy of Peace and Political Warfare (New York Doubleday, 1981).
5 Harrison E. Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor.
6 Donald Jameson, interview, Washington, June 1994.
7 National Committee for a Free Europe Inc., 'Report to Members', 5 Jan 1951 (CDJ/DDE).
8 Philip Barbour, Radio Free Europe Committee, to Frank Altschul, 'Report from Research Department', 23 March 1950 (FA/COL).
9 Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (London Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979).
10 Janet Barnes, quoted in Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men. The CIA gave Thomas unprecedented access for his book, as did the families of 'the very best men' of his title. Both as an historical study and as a collective biography, therefore, it is the most definitive account to date, and as such I am indebted to it.
11 William Colby, interview, Washington, June 1994.
12 Lee Williams, interview, Washington, June 1994.
13 J. M. Kaplan to Allen Dulles, 10 August 1956 (CDJ/DDE).
14 Final Report of the Cox Committee, 1952, quoted in Rene Wormser, Foundations Their Power and Influence (New York Devin-Adair, 1958).
15 Final Report of the Church Committee, 1976.
16 Ibid.
17 Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, June 1994.
18 Cord Meyer, Facing Reality From World Federalism to the CIA (Maryland University Press of America, 1980).
19 Richard Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior.
20 James Laughlin, quoted in Kathleen D. McCarthy, 'From Cold War to Cultural Development The International Cultural Activities of the Ford Foundation 1950-1980', Daedalus, vol.116/1, Winter 1987.
21 Quoted in Kathleen D. McCarthy, ibid.
22 Irving Kristol to Stephen Spender, 25 March 1953 (CCF/CHI).
23 Kai Bird, interview, Washington, June 1994.
24 John Hunt, interview, Uzes, July 1997.
25 Tom Braden, interview, Virginia, August 1996.
26 Neil Beal 'Encounter', London Magazine, February-March 1995.