Contemporary Authors

• Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World's Best Writers - January 10, 2017 OR Books, https://www.amazon.com/Finks-C-I-Tricked-Worlds-Writers/dp/1944869131

• OR Books - http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/finks-by-joel-whitney/

  Joel Whitney is a cofounder and editor at large of Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Boston Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, Dissent, Salon, NPR, New York Magazine and The Sun. With photographer Brett Van Ort, he co-wrote the 2013 TED Talks ebook on landmine eradication, Minescape. His poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, The Nation, and Agni. His Salon essay on The Paris Review and the Congress for Cultural Freedom was a Notable in the 2013 Best American Essays.

• KCRW - https://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/scheer-intelligence/joel-whitney-the-cias-cold-war-literary-influence

  Joel Whitney is a co-founder of the magazine Guernica, a magazine of global arts and politics, and has written for many publications, including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Finks describes how the CIA contributed funds to numerous respected magazines during the Cold War, including the Paris Review, to subtly promote anti-communist views. In their conversation, Whitney tells Robert Scheer about the ties the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom had with literary magazines. He talks about the CIA's attempt during the Cold War to have at least one agent in every major news organization in order to get stories killed if they were too critical or get them to run if they were favorable to the agency. And they discuss the overstatement of the immediate risks and dangers of communist regimes during the Cold War, which, initially, led many people to support the Vietnam War.

• Vice - https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pgp53z/how-the-cia-infiltrated-the-worlds-literature

  How the CIA Infiltrated the World's Literature
  Mary von Aue
  MARY VON AUE
  Jan 4 2017, 2:32pm
  The new book, Finks, reveals how great writers such as Baldwin, Márquez, and Hemingway became soldiers in America's cultural Cold War.

  When the CIA's connections to the Paris Review and two dozen other magazines were revealed in 1966, the backlash was swift but uneven. Some publications crumbled, taking their editors down with them, while other publishers and writers emerged relatively unscathed, chalking it up to youthful indiscretion or else defending the CIA as a "nonviolent and honorable" force for good. But in an illuminating new book Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers, writer Joel Whitney debunks the myth of a once-moral intelligence agency, revealing an extensive list of writers involved in transforming America's image in countries we destabilized with coups, assassinations, and other all-American interventions.

  The CIA developed several guises to throw money at young, burgeoning writers, creating a cultural propaganda strategy with literary outposts around the world, from Lebanon to Uganda, India to Latin America. The same agency that occasionally undermined democracies for the sake of fighting Communism also launched the Congress for Cultural Freedoms (CCF). The CCF built editorial strategies for each of these literary outposts, allowing them to control the conversation in countries where readers might otherwise resist the American perspective. The Paris Review, whose co-founder Peter Matthiessen was a CIA agent, would sell its commissioned interviews to the magazine's counterparts in Germany, Japan, and elsewhere. Mundo Nuevo was created to offer a moderate-left perspective to earn trust among Latin American readers, effectively muting more radical perspectives during the Cuban Revolution. Sometimes the agency would provide editors with funding and content; other times it would work directly with writers to shape the discourse. Through these acts, the CCF weaponized the era's most progressive intellectuals as the American answer to the Soviet spin machine.

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  While the CIA's involvement in anti-Communist propaganda has been long known, the extent of its influence—particularly in the early careers of the left's most beloved writers—is shocking. Whitney, the co-founder and editor at large of the literary magazine Guernica, spent four years digging through archives, yielding an exhaustive list—James Baldwin, Gabriel García Márquez, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway all served varying levels of utility to Uncle Sam. (Not that the CIA's interest were only in letters: Expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were also championed by arms of the agency.)

  But don't let that ruin Love in the Time of Cholera. Whitney explains with methodical clarity how each writer became a tool for the CIA. This nuance not only salvages many of the classics from being junked as solely propaganda, but it serves as a cautionary tale for those trying to navigate today's "post-truth" media landscape. In an era where Facebook algorithms dictate the national discourse, even the most well-meaning journalist is prone to stories that distract on behalf of the US government.

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  "It was often a way to change the subject from the civil rights fight at home," Whitney said of the CIA's content strategy during the Cold War. We can easily draw parallels to today, where the nation's most dire issues are rarely our viral subjects. With Donald Trump's presidency just weeks away, Finks arrives at a crucial time, exposing the political machinery that can affect which stories are shared and which are silenced.

  Photo courtesy of OR Books

  VICE: So why did you have to ruin all my favorite authors?
  Joel Whitney: You want to know the truth about the writers and publications you love and what their aims might have been, but that shouldn't mean they're ruined. For somebody like Richard Wright or James Baldwin or even Peter Matthiessen, I feel like there were a lot of people who joined or participated through professors. They were in their early 20s, and when you're young and your professors have national reputations, you take their attention seriously. I was a little bit more interested in where people ended up once the truth was known.

  And the excuses varied. You mentioned Gabriel Garcia Márquez's advice that "when you write, it's you who informs the publication." If that's true, why did the CIA work with so many left-leaning Latin American authors, whose writing would give voice and credibility to the idea of autonomy in the region? Can we measure how successful the CIA really was in working with these artists?
  That's the thing about secrecy: Without any public discussion about what the actual goals were, there was no accountability, and you could keep moving the target. They found that with the early magazines of Latin America—the first one was Cuadernos [del Congreso por la Libertad de la Cultura]—they had their politics too much on their sleeve, and they weren't getting the readers they wanted. Cuadernos could speak to the hardliners who were already convinced that the US did some good stuff in Latin America. It helped prop up the rich, and it helped knock down purportedly Communist-influenced leftists who often turned out not to have much communism in their leftism. But during the Cuban Revolution, we see a shifting target. Rather than enabling hardliners, "soft-liners" could reach more people.

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  Basically, they enacted something that I had stumbled into as an idea behind Guernica's political coverage, which is somebody needs to referee, at all times it seems, a debate between the anti-war progressive left and the interventionist left. I was always curious why the interventionist left always was heard and the anti-war progressive left always seemed like it was marginalized.

  "The CIA's influence in publishing was on the covert ops side, and it was done as propaganda. It was a control of how intellectuals thought about the US."

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  So the CCF published writers who were just left enough to win an audience's trust?
  The way that they went about it was to use a cultural leftist like Garcia Márquez with their creative work and put their names on the cover in a sort of Trojan Horse style, so that they had a hand in the conversation during the Cuban Revolution. There was something democratic behind that, but there was also something unaccountable and not so democratic about it.

  For example, the scholar Patrick Iber pointed out a moment where Emir Rodríguez Monegal admitted that he published an anti-Vietnam war op-ed just to reestablish the idea that it wasn't a CIA instrument. It gets super complicated, but that's where I got interested. Because once I got to that level of complexity I kind of had to throw out my maybe sweet naïve tendency to sort of morally judge all that stuff. After a while, I was just sort of more interested when people changed their mind or when people had a breakdown or when somebody was so instrumentalized and weaponized that they realized it and it crushed them for a moment.

  When the CIA's connections to the Paris Review and other publications were revealed, the backlash was starkly uneven. The Beirut-based Hiwar—as well as the life and career of its editor Tawfiq Sayigh— were destroyed. Why was the Paris Review left unscathed?
  Your question just points to a central aim of the book. I think a lot of the writing that deals with this issue never looks at it next to all the coups and assassinations and interventions that made Americans so unpopular. Once Hiwar and other magazines were exposed, they were folded into all the interventions that people hate in the postcolonial world.

  The CIA's influence in publishing was on the covert ops side and it was done as propaganda. It might have been conceived by some of the participants as an altruistic funding of culture, but it was actually a control of journalism, a control of the fourth estate. It was a control of how intellectuals thought about the US. But once it was exposed, it was completely useless.

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  But not only did the Paris Review solicit this kind of propaganda literature, a lot of their editors were also monitoring writers and expats and the going-ons in France. How did they casually just replace their editors and move on?
  This "joint employ" is important because it shows a sort of soft collusion. Peter Matthiessen admitted that we were spying but he resigned when he saw how ugly it was. There are some conspiracies out there that he never resigned from the CIA (and his boss did have Deep Cover writers working for him). But I've tried to stick with what I could find, and I found that rumor to be totally unsubstantiated—worthy of a John le Carré novel. Were Nelson Aldrich and Frances Fitzgerald spying on their friends while they were working for the Congress for Cultural Freedom? I don't think so. They were basically doing magazine work and PR work, disguising it as innocent cultural work while doing sort of PR for the American Way. It's not totally inconceivable that you could imagine yourself in the way that García Márquez did, taking that money and sort of affecting its outcome more than the paymasters would. That's the conundrum, I think, and the problem with patronage in secret: It lets you tell yourself, "I don't think I was tainted" and justifying your own behavior. But as soon as you say that, you're talking against the basic journalistic principle of transparency.

  The CIA turned writers into cultural weapons even when they weren't saying anything explicitly pro-America, by simply advertising for the "American alternative." How is that different today? American writers still have a monopoly in the literature scene—are they not conveying the same narrative?
  That's a huge question, and a good question. It reminds me of the mission for Guernica during the Bush Administration. The US was committing an ugly war, and I was horrified, ashamed, but I was a lit guy who did an MFA, so what could I do to help? I feel like a lot of writers feel that way now—what can we do? I needed to be instrumentalized. There is a shame in being represented by Bush or Donald Trump and the assholes only who often cheat their way into government. I will say, I don't think positive propaganda is quite as nasty as disinformation and negative propaganda, which are almost always the same thing.

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  Once you start doing negative propaganda, I think it quickly turns into disinformation. You're willing to entertain any argument that makes your enemy look bad. In the moment The Paris Review started to chase the Boris Pasternak interview, its implicit propaganda mission changed from something like: "We need the American and Western writers to be known overseas" to a more negative one that tells Americans how unfree "they" are, without explaining much in terms of context. I can almost agree with the first gesture of wanting Americans to be known by our writers rather than our Republicans. But this is more equitable when we're willing to say, "We need Americans to know about work in translation."

  Pasternak is in many ways a native informant, in that he was a foreign writer who gave testimony to a narrative that the US wanted, and so became a CIA darling.
  That's what the Pasternak story is. He wrote Doctor Zhivago as an independent dissident, but the CIA wanted to control that, and so Pasternak became a symbol of why Western democracies "were better than that" culturally.

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  You have to hear his criticism not as a one-way thing that only criticizes his system. You have to listen to these dissidents and think about your own dissidence. Who is your Pasternak, and how are you treating him while you're propping up Pasternak? That was one impetus behind the book: the question of whether we have a Pasternak now. What is Snowden compared to Pasternak? I don't know that you can make huge comparisons to one creative writer making critique versus a leaker and whistleblower. But I wanted people to see in Pasternak not just the symbol that we try to make him into as Cold Warriors. These people are now symbols, but before that, they were independent thinkers. In some cases, they were just trying to tell their stories.

  Where can we draw the line today? If writers want to avoid the blurred lines between honest expression and propaganda, should we simply swear off any sort of government funding or is it possible to be more nuanced?
  No. It's way more nuanced. We should have a wall of separation, and we have the principle in government in the separation of powers. It's not that we don't want government funding, it just can't be secret. Some principles that point back to some of our finest big principles need to be re-articulated and restated. We're in a messy, impure world, and as journalists, we'll take whatever funding we can get. [But] we have be smart about it, like what García Márquez was trying to do.

  Social media has dethroned editors as the gatekeepers of information. Do you think that makes it easier for the CIA to control the conversation?
  I feel like some of these platforms withstood the government pressure better than others. I know that Facebook constantly is changing its algorithm for ad-related purposes, but they withstood some of the pressure a little differently than Twitter, who faced pressure to reveal identities in the wake of Arab Spring and other movements.

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  But there are other ways to leverage these cultural markets. If you look at the film industry— Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, etc.—we're paying billions of dollars to lie to ourselves. I feel like at some point in the early war on terror, the Bush administration met with filmmakers, and they said, "We need to enlist you in this mission." That's not a new thing, but it felt new at the time, if you didn't know how often that kind of thing happened during the cultural Cold War.

• Paste - https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/01/joel-whitney-finks.html

  Joel Whitney Talks Finks, His New Book Revealing "How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers"
  By Bridey Heing | January 26, 2017 | 12:55pm
  Author photo by Beowulf Sheehan
  BOOKS FEATURES JOEL WHITNEY
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  Joel Whitney Talks Finks, His New Book Revealing "How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers"
  The CIA’s mystique during the Cold War was undeniable, as the Agency became a symbol for indiscretions in the name of advancing the United States’ international influence. In Joel Whitney’s new book, Finks, the author explores the CIA’s specific role in combating Soviet propaganda by creating its own. The text chronicles the relationships between the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and the literary community, revealing how the Agency helped fund literary magazines around the world, including The Paris Review.

  During the process of launching the magazine Guernica, Whitney had often encountered an idea that politics and literature should be separate. It was something that stuck with him.

  “It never landed right and I never forgot about it,” Whitney says in an interview with Paste.

  Then he learned something that seemed to counter that very thought while watching Immy Humes’ documentary about her father and The Paris Review co-founder H.L. “Doc” Humes. The film discusses the CIA’s role in establishing the supposedly apolitical magazine, so Whitney decided to do some digging. What he discovered was a network of funding and operatives that connected the Ivy League, some of literature’s biggest names and the CIA’s propaganda machine.

  Screen Shot 2017-01-26 at 12.12.58 PM.pngAlthough arrangements varied, the case of The Paris Review stands out. The CCF paid the magazine’s founders—Humes, Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton—a fee in exchange for their famed Art of Fiction interviews, which would then be syndicated in other publications. The CCF also funneled money to the founders through various organizations, and in turn the magazine’s editorial policy was apolitical in name but aligned with the CIA’s larger mission of promoting American culture. Elsewhere, editors involved with the CIA published anti-Soviet works, like Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, and also suppressed work seen as too critical of U.S. policy, including that of Dwight MacDonald and Emily Hahn.

  Funding played a key role in these arrangements, just as it does for publications today. The question of how to secure funding for niche publications is nothing new, and it’s something that Whitney himself has experienced. That perspective lends the book a nuance that many in publishing will likely find familiar, as famed writers and editors had to decide what they were and weren’t comfortable with in the name of a paycheck.

  “I have a lot of sympathy for individual artists and creators who are trying to find their way and find funding,” Whitney says, noting that he supports robust government funding for the arts when the lines between the funding source and creative side are clearly drawn and respected. “I’m pretty far from a purist. As a founding board member of Guernica, I am always sympathetic to people who want to make a magazine legacy last by securing stable funding.”

  Like many writers and editors who might see some of their own moral dilemmas reflected back to them—albeit on a much grander level—Whitney comes to the topic with a duality of experience.

  “It involves my different selves,” he says. “One day I’m a writer who is doing a sort of dissenting take on the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the next day I’m a Guernica board member thinking with my board to figure out where our next meal will come from.”

  Perhaps most surprising, though, is that one gets the sense that none of the CIA’s arrangements were much of a secret.

  “It seems to be that it was discussed in private among friends more than it was discussed in public, but that’s the nature of an open secret,” Whitney says, although there were a few exceptions.

  But Finks isn’t a cut-and-dry case of black and white. Although the CIA’s use of unwitting authors in their propaganda wing is unsettling (and many of their tactics far more chilling), the context in which these relationship developed complicates matters. As Whitney points out, the fear of the Soviet threat was gripping in the 1950s, even though we now understand it to have been greatly overstated. But that fear acted as a motivator for the CIA to use all of the tools at their disposal to fight the enemy, including cultural soft power.

  “The takeaway for me was how terrible long-term decisions can be made in a moment of terror, because eventually that terror can go away and can be seen as overblown,” Whitney says.

  Among those decisions made in fear was censorship. Editors at publications like The Paris Review and The Kenyon Review acted as gatekeepers who adhered to a vague set of guidelines and determined what was “responsible” to print. In the case of Emily Hahn, who wrote a piece on U.S. policy in China that was deemed too critical to publish, there’s a paper trail that shows what direct censorship looked like.

  “Emily Hahn’s example made some of Congress for Cultural Freedom brass so annoyed that they went on the record behind the scenes in a letter—which survived—reminding their operatives or editors that anything controversial had to be shown to the CIA brass,” Whitney says. “That doesn’t speak well for the CIA’s notion of cultural freedom if they thought they needed to censor the editors they had selected.”

  To further complicate the narrative, the work being done by publications like The Paris Review has always been strong, even when hemming to the CIA’s line. As Whitney explains, the writers who were championed by these publications are still among the most celebrated of our time, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ernest Hemingway and James Baldwin.

  But Finks demonstrates, there was an eventual backlash in the literary community against these arrangements with the CIA. As the Agency’s image became tainted by covert operations around the globe, many left-leaning writers and editors began opting out of the propaganda machine they had once turned to for funding. The irony, of course, is that by turning away from the CIA, many writers became the best case for the very values the CIA had hoped to promote through the CCF.

  “A lot of the ones we still admire and want to admire for their work came out on the right side of this,” Whitney says. “If they kept their independent thought intact and kept their ability to dissent, then they were the best exemplars of American freedom of thought and cultural freedom.”

Joel Whitney: FINKS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Joel Whitney FINKS OR Books (Adult Nonfiction) 25.00 1, 3 ISBN: 978-1-68219-024-1
Who would have thought that the Zen-saintly author of The Snow Leopard might have been a spook?If the FBI was a bunch of working stiffs, the
CIA was a patrician fraternity—at least back in the early days, when its members were recruited from the dining halls of Princeton, Yale,
and Harvard. So it was that when George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, and Harold Humes cooked up the Paris Review as a high-flown literary
journal, they landed CIA funding in a number of guises, including direct payment for keeping an eye on what the expat community was up to in
those early years of the American-Soviet rivalry. Fifteen years later, writes Guernica founding editor Whitney in the opening pages of this lidblowing
account, Humes would have regrets, for “any association with the super-secret spy agency—notorious for coups,
assassinations, and undermining democracy in the name of fighting communism—tainted the reputations of those involved.” But
that was 1967, when things began to go south, and not just in Vietnam. In 1951, it was another story; the agency was handing out fistfuls of
money to youngish intellectuals in an odd episode of “publishing exuberance,” all with an eye to beating the Soviets at the
culture game. Whitney enlists an unlikely cast of characters, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Pablo Neruda (“in an acrobatic feat, the
CIA’s campaign to discredit Neruda did not preclude it from using his work to gain the trust and readership of Latin
Americans”), and James Baldwin, all caught up in this net. If the story of the CIA’s involvement in the publication of Boris
Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago is already well-known, many other incidents in Whitney’s narrative will come as surprises, few of
them entirely agreeable. But in the end, the plan seems to have backfired inasmuch as many of the principals, Matthiessen included, drifted
leftward and became fierce critics of their sponsors and the government behind them. Another odd episode steps out from the Cold
War’s shadows. Riveting.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Joel Whitney: FINKS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463215972&it=r&asid=26eff7b5907f6e678e86c98f4e0c1032. Accessed 23 June
2017.
6/23/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1498234104912 2/2
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463215972

• The Globe and Mail
  https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/review-joel-whitneys-finks-explores-how-the-cia-used-writers-to-fight-the-cold-war/article33682531/
  Word count: 1013

  Review: Joel Whitney's Finks explores how the CIA used writers to fight the Cold War
  JOHN SEMLEY
  Special to The Globe and Mail
  Published Friday, Jan. 20, 2017 10:45AM EST
  Last updated Friday, Jan. 20, 2017 10:45AM EST
  2 Comments Print

  Title Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers
  Author Joel Whitney
  Genre Non-Fiction
  Publisher OR Books
  Pages 329
  Price $37.50
  Since finishing Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia a few weeks ago, I have been gripped by one singular ambition: moving to Moscow.

  I desire nothing more than getting an exorbitant, unturndownable job offer at a media company in the Russian capital, moving there and working diligently at spreading Kremlin propaganda and misinformation. My motivations – beyond the rather obvious allure of “being evil” – are simple. Pomerantsev, a Russian-born Brit who made a similar move, makes the idea seem so bizarrely enticing. As described in his book, Putin’s post-post-perestroika Russia is a place of astonishing intellectual fertility. It’s a place where TV producers, film directors and journalists engage with high-level philosophy and critical theory, all in the aim of serving the authoritarian interests of the state.

  It sounds awful (or indeed, straight-up evil) but it offers a certain kind of clarity: In Putin’s Russia, no matter how slippery the ground may seem, you always know where you stand. Sure, everything may be a sham. But at least everyone knows it’s a sham.

  It may all seem reprehensible. Certainly, such media operations constitute an ostensible affront to what Joel Whitney, in his new book about America’s own insidious control of domestic and foreign journalism, identifies as “the traditional adversarial role of media, a role that at least theoretically checked government power and guarded against overreach.” But what Whitney’s Finks makes astonishingly, harrowingly clear is that such affronts are a matter of course in the United States as well, where intellectuals, editors and self-styled belletrists were employed as CIA stooges during the Cold War. Sometimes they have had plausible deniability. But in many more cases, they collaborated all too willingly.

  As a central study, Whitney looks in depth at the history of The Paris Review. The quarterly literary magazine was founded in Paris in 1953 by George Plimpton, Harold L. Humes and Peter Matthiessen, an undercover CIA agent. As described by Whitney, such highbrow magazines were devised as part of a larger government initiative to trump up U.S. culture during the Cold War. As he puts it, “Many policymakers felt that Western Europeans were being softened to the horror of Communism thanks to towering Soviet and Russian cultural achievements. Americans, in a word, needed to become boosters of their high culture.”

  Enter the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an anti-Soviet arts advocacy group underwritten by the CIA. The CCF toured the Boston Symphony Orchestra around Europe and funded abstract expressionist art exhibitions. As Whitney writes of the CIA’s covert funding of seemingly liberal, abstract art, “the paint splashes of Jackson Pollock did not lend themselves to a Marxist or anti-imperialist narrative.” It’s a kind of sophisticated political duplicity worthy of Putin: Where older conservatives might balk at funding and promoting works of art comprised of dribbles and streaks of paint, the CIA and the CCF adopted a more nuanced, “keep your enemies closer” approach. A lighter, diet-pop version of Western-sponsored socialism was ultimately preferable to the looming spectre of whole-hog Sovietism.

  When the CIA wasn’t endowing would-be cultural combatants, they were keeping a chary watch of them. Paris Review editor Peter Matthiessen was tasked with spying on American expats living in the French capital, while black American author and civil-rights figure James Baldwin was routinely monitored. CIA fronts funded foreign literary publications such as Spain’s Mundo Nuevo, and covertly published Russian-language editions (terribly translated, apparently) of Doctor Zhivago, a novel deemed by Russian publishers as anti-Soviet. CIA appendages also underwrote Hollywood films that were censored and rewritten to prune out seemingly anti-U.S. themes – the legendary director John Ford proved a willing collaborator, requesting government propaganda booklets in order to better express the CIA’s cultural mission of “militant liberty.”

  Even George Orwell, one of the 20th century’s savviest political writers and outspoken critics of authority, found himself the punchline of a bad CIA joke when the 1954 film adaptation of Animal Farm was revised to serve the Cold War agenda. Where Orwell’s story ends on a melancholic idea that the capitalists (the humans) and communists (the animals) were ideologically indistinguishable from each other, the movie made the animals seem the clear villains, flattening Orwell’s original satire into plain ol’ pro-capitalist, pro-U.S. propaganda.

  Indeed, there’s a depressingly Orwellian tenor to many of the revelations packed into Finks, from doublespeakish concepts such as “militant liberty” to the grander, and seemingly paradoxical, program of “fostering cultural freedom through routine acts of censorship.” Impressive in scope, depth and its marshalling of declassified documents, Whitney’s book proves that sophisticated cultural propaganda campaigns are by no means the exclusive province of looming totalitarian regimes. As Russian/U.S. tensions reheat once again, Finks also offers a reminder that it’s not one or another government, but the totality of government power itself that proves illegitimate – even if some forms of power seem more illegitimate than others.

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• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/outlandish-assertions-response-joel-whitney/
  Word count: 686

  Outlandish Assertions: Response to Joel Whitney
  By Greg Barnhisel

  39 0 1

  JANUARY 19, 2017

  IN JOEL WHITNEY’S RESPONSE to my review of his book Finks, which was to be published as a Letter to the Editor here today, but which he preemptively published in Guernica instead, he displays some of the same flaws that mar the book itself: overplaying evidence and allowing sensationalist language, rather than careful argument, to support his claims. Where he’s pulled back on some of that sensationalist language in his response, he instead attacks me for claims that I never made.
  In his response, Whitney says that the most “outlandish… assertion” in my review is that Finks is excessively conspiratorial and relies far too heavily on claims that the Paris Review was guilty of “nefarious puppeteering” (I had “marionetteering” in my original draft, which I still like better, but editors are wise). He defends himself by pointing to a couple of instances where he grants that the Paris Review played a relatively small part in the Cultural Cold War. However, the structure of the book as a whole and the overheated language he uses throughout (including many ominous section-ending rhetorical questions), dramatically overplay the importance of this one journal. I will not try the patience of LARB‘s readers here by walking them through how Whitney uses the Paris Review, but I invite them to read the book and judge for themselves whether Whitney’s argument lives up to its rhetoric. I also encourage them to read the many other works on the Cultural Cold War (by Frances Stonor Saunders, Giles Scott-Smith, Hugh Wilford, Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, Patrick Iber, Russell Cobb, and others) whose authors have done primary-source research that Whitney mines for his book.
  Whitney’s charge that I am ignoring the bulk of CIA interference in the editorial decisions of Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) magazines has little to do with what I actually wrote. His primary source for information on the magazine Encounter, Saunders, documented only three such instances in her book The Cultural Cold War, and in my own research in the magazine’s papers (at the University of Chicago, the University of Texas, and Boston University) I found nothing additional. Whitney’s assertion that Saunders alluded to “twenty or thirty” others in an interview with him adds no actual evidence to the record. If there was CIA meddling in other CCF magazines, that neither surprises me nor disproves my point. I was speaking only about Encounter, as I have investigated the archives only of Encounter.
  Whitney states that “some of [the Paris Review]’s interviewees might have liked to know that their […] interview was recycled into the official magazines of the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” and implies that I think, on the contrary, that this was ridiculous. Not at all! As a writer, I’d certainly like control over what happens to everything I write after first publication; and if I’m ever interviewed, I’d love to be able to exercise approval over what a journalist or publisher can do with that interview. My only point is that this isn’t how things work in the magazine business, and grandstanding that the reprinting of a famous writer’s interview without the interviewee’s permission is some sort of “betrayal” or coercion, as Whitney does in his book, is disingenuous.
  Whitney also knocks me for willfully ignoring the unwillingness of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF) to stand up for the civil-rights movement. That is true, but irrelevant to the point I was making: that it’s not accurate to claim that the ACCF and the Paris-based CCF were working hand in glove.
  I do regret faulting Whitney for claiming that Sen. Joseph McCarthy chaired the House Un-American Activities Committee. As he points out in his response, I was indeed reviewing advance uncorrected proofs of the book, which did include that statement. Since that erroneous statement has been corrected in the final print version, I withdraw that criticism with my apologies.

• The National
  http://www.thenational.ae/arts-life/the-review/book-review-joel-whitneys-finks-is-a-riveting-account-of-the-cias-plot-to-recruit-literature-to-americas-cause
  Word count: 1648

  Book review: Joel Whitney’s Finks is a riveting account of the CIA’s plot to recruit literature to America’s cause
  After the Soviet Union suppressed publication of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, above, the CIA obtained a microfilm to publish it in English. Courtesy Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images
  Book review: Joel Whitney’s Finks is a riveting account of the CIA’s plot to recruit literature to America’s cause
  Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

  January 12, 2017 Updated: January 12, 2017 01:36 PM

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  Art can be an instrument of change. But it is never insulated from the conditions in which it is produced. The conditions of its production can therefore also influence the change it might seek.

  Since the start of the Cold War there was an attempt by both sides in the conflict to instrumentalise art as a means of ideological domination. The artistic landscape was consequently fraught with political landmines. Artists had to navigate this terrain with caution. Some became willing instruments of policy, some were coerced into it, some made expedient compromises, and many were snared unwittingly.

  The eastern bloc’s means of control were explicit, hence they are better known. They were exemplified in the persecution, fear and exile suffered by the likes of Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. They have also been fictionalised in popular films like Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others.

  Less known however, are the means that the ‘free world’ used to turn the intellectual climate in its favour. Decidedly more tolerant of dissent than its eastern counterpart, the West developed a system of rewards and exclusion to amplify favourable voices and marginalise critical ones.

  This vast apparatus was orchestrated and conducted by the analytical wing of the CIA, which in its halcyon days drew the best and the brightest from Ivy League universities. Erudite and urbane, these recruits were conscious of the revolutionary mystique of Soviet communism and sought to counteract this by promoting a strong anti-communist line emphasizing western ideals of freedom and openness.

  Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers is Joel Whitney’s riveting account of the CIA’s machinations to recruit some of the world’s leading writers in this ideological contest. Part-literary history and part-investigative research, the book unravels hitherto unknown details about the CIA’s vast cultural operation.

  Whitney’s story pivots around The Paris Review, one of the finest literary publications, best known for its series of interviews with such literary giants as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, T S Eliot, Thornton Wilder and Vladimir Nabokov. The magazine also published original fiction and poetry from the likes of Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin, V S Naipaul and Philip Roth.

  But in 1953 when it was launched, one of The Paris Review’s three co-founders, the novelist Peter Matthiessen, was working for the CIA and used the magazine as a cover. George Plimpton, the magazine’s other co-founder, was also aware that the magazine’s benefactor, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), was heavily funded the by the CIA. The CCF sustained The Paris Review by mass purchasing its copies, syndicating its content, and paying extra for material that aligned with Cold War imperatives. The CCF also tried to influence the magazine editorially.

  The CIA also engaged in more direct interventions. When the Soviet Union tried to suppress Boris Pasternak’s now-classic Doctor Zhivago, which took an independent stance on the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the author had the book published in translation in Italy. But the CIA managed to secure a microfilm of the manuscript and also facilitated its publication in English.

  Its bigger coup however, was in getting copies of the book in the original Russian smuggled back into the Soviet Union. The CIA purchased thousands of copies of Doctor Zhivago to put it on best-seller lists and lobbied for the author to receive the Nobel Prize. But the CIA merely complicated the author’s precarious situation at home; and when Pasternak finally won the Nobel, his Soviet persecutors presented it as proof of his collusion with the West (though he had never consented to any of it). Facing pressure and threats at home, Pasternak declined the prize.

  But if CIA lobbying could help secure a Nobel, it could also help deny it. In 1964, after rumours spread that the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was being considered for a Nobel, the CIA-funded CCF kicked into action to deny him it. Few doubted Neruda’s poetic genius: his work appealed to lay and literary audiences alike. But the fraught history of US interventions in Latin America had turned Neruda not just into an anti-imperialist, but also into an admirer of anti-American strongmen. Neruda wrote odes not just to Stalin and Fidel Castro, but also to Fulgencio Batista, the dictator that Castro would later overthrow. This put Neruda beyond the pale for the staunchly anti-communist and anti-totalitarian CCF who lobbied hard against him and the 1964 prize instead went to Jean-Paul Sartre.

  Finks is replete with these and many other literary anecdotes that make it a highly-readable book. It is most compelling as a work of literary history. Its understanding of the intersection between art and politics is subtle and dimensional. The storytelling is gripping with a sense of drama. The sections on Gabriel García Márquez’s literary fortunes and Hemingway’s life in Cuba are particularly good.

  But while it is richly detailed with a wealth of primary sources, the book does not always succeed as investigative journalism. It often makes inferences that aren’t warranted by the evidence presented. It also makes false equivalencies that diminish its credibility. John Berger’s book in the UK being withdrawn by a publisher in response to harsh reviews over a sympathetic comment on the Soviet invasion of Hungary is not comparable to Pasternak in the Soviet Union being denied the opportunity to be published (not to mention his persecution and harassment).

  Though Whitney presents indisputable evidence that the CCF favoured authors who would adopt a strongly anti-communist line, his claims of censorship rest on shaky grounds. Whitney shows, for example, that a sharp polemic against the United States by Dwight MacDonald was declined by Encounter, the CCF’s flagship publication, but the essay was published in Twentieth Century, another magazine run by the CCF. James Baldwin was able to use CCF publications to write not just strong condemnations of racism but also to report on the CCF’s own dysfunction.

  The analysis is also marred by assumptions that grant little agency to individuals. Arthur Koestler, Jayaprakash Narayan or Ignazio Silone did not need CCF patronage to take a tough line against communism. Nor for that matter was CCF reducible to its CIA funding: after all, it was an initiative led by Bertrand Russell, John Dewey and Jacques Maritain – hardly evangelists for US power; and it wasn’t operating in a vacuum: the Soviets had been investing in cultural warfare since 1925. So to accuse someone like Narayan of "carr[ying] water for US anti-communism" just because of his CCF affiliation is to sully a man’s integrity based on dubious association.

  The book also reprises conventional left-wing mythology on Afghanistan in which the Soviets invaded "after the United States lured them there" (by funding extremist insurgents). As a matter of fact, extant Soviet records show that the Politburo authorized the invasion only to pre-empt the implosion of Afghanistan’s pro-Soviet PDPA (People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan) government whose infighting had culminated in the prime minster ordering the president arrested and killed. The insurgency had started almost a year before the invasion (mainly in response to the PDPA’s murder spree, executing 27,000 to 50,000 Afghans). And Soviet military presence in Afghanistan predated the July 1979 CIA authorisation; the invasion came later. The terrors Afghans faced were real, not a CIA creation; and the insurgency was popular, regardless of US interest.

  These demurrals aside, the book is a timely reminder of the distorting effect of power on artistic endeavours. As Whitney notes, this is particularly ironic when the values being promoted are freedom of expression and individual liberty. As the paradigm has shifted from the Cold War to the war on terror, with a greater emphasis on "information dominance", the need to remain on guard against new attempts at manipulation remains urgent.

  As Whitney notes, there have already been such cases of manipulation with the CIA’s laundering of history in films such as Zero Dark Thirty and Argo. Meanwhile Russians are perfecting new forms of "hybrid warfare" in which disinformation plays a central role.

  If there is one lesson to be learned from this book, it is that we can’t afford to be exclusive in our sympathies – or scepticisms – and we must always maintain a sense of proportion. Because the conditions for intellectual freedom are as important as intellectual freedom itself.

  Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is a lecturer in digital journalism at the University of Stirling.

• Patrick Iber
  https://patrickiber.org/2017/01/04/literary-agents-my-review-of-joel-whitneys-finks/
  Word count: 972

  “LITERARY AGENTS,” MY REVIEW OF JOEL WHITNEY’S “FINKS”
  January 4, 2017 · by patrickiber · in Cold War, Intellectuals, Reviews, US and the World, writing. ·
  finks_cvf

  Up now at the New Republic (and in the January 2017 print edition), my review of Joel Whitney’s “Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers.” The introduction:

  Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet who defected to the West in 1951, was struck by the ostentatiousness of American cultural programs: “You could smell big money from a mile away.” The era’s finest little magazines, titles like Partisan Review and The Paris Review, published enduring fiction, poetry, and essays. The writings of Clement Greenberg and Lionel Trilling set the high-water mark for art and literary criticism. Richard Wright wrote the mournful poem that would provide the title for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2015 best-seller, Between the World and Me. The artists who waged the radical political battles of the 1930s emerged in the 1950s as cultural institutions, achieving a prominence—even a celebrity—that has eluded subsequent generations.

  Plenty of observers, however, suspected that the free market of ideas had been corrupted. World tours, fancy conferences, prestigious bylines and book contracts were bestowed on artists who hewed to political positions favored by the establishment, rather than on the most talented. In 1966, The New York Timesconfirmed suspicions that the CIA was pumping money into “civil society” organizations: unions, international organizations of students and women, groups of artists and intellectuals. The agency had produced the popular cartoon version of George Orwell’s anticommunist classic Animal Farmin 1954. It flew the Boston Symphony Orchestra on a European tour in 1952, to counter prejudices of the United States as uncultured and unsophisticated. It promoted the work of abstract expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock because their artistic style would have been considered degenerate in both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

  The propriety of such largesse, both for the CIA and its beneficiaries, has been hotly debated ever since. Jason Epstein, the celebrated book editor, was quick to point out that CIA involvement undermined the very conditions for free thought, in which “doubts about established orthodoxies” were supposed to be “taken to be the beginning of all inquiry.” But Gloria Steinem, who worked with the CIA in the 1950s and ’60s, “was happy to find some liberals in government in those days,” arguing that the agency was “nonviolent and honorable.” Milosz, too, agreed that the “liberal conspiracy,” as he called it, “was necessary and justified.” It was, he allowed, “the sole counterweight to the propaganda on which the Soviets expended astronomical sums.”

  Today’s intellectuals approach their labors in a very different set of circumstances. The struggle for academic patronage and the strained conditions of nearly all media properties have led to fewer jobs and fewer venues for substantial writing; the possibility of leading a public-facing life of the mind now seems vanishingly small, which only heightens nostalgia for the golden age of the 1950s. Yet the shadow of the CIA lurks behind the achievements of that time. The free play of ideas—the very thing that was supposed to distinguish the United States from the Soviet Union in the first place—turned out to be, at least in part, a carefully constructed illusion. What if the prominence of midcentury intellectuals, the sense that they were engaged in important political and artistic projects, is inseparable from the fact that they were useful to America’s Cold War empire?

  This was written before Trump’s election, but the conclusion has proved prescient on the discussion of social media and fake news that we are currently having:
  Whitney sounds a powerful warning about the dangerous interaction between the national security state and the work of writers and journalists. But the precise experience of the cultural Cold War is unlikely to be repeated. A global ideological conflict, cast in civilizational terms, made the work of intellectuals worth subsidizing. Today’s intellectuals are no longer needed as chits in a great power conflict, and our nostalgia for the Cold War generation’s prestige seems increasingly misplaced: An era of heroic thinkers now looks instead like a grubby assortment of operatives, writers who appeared to challenge the establishment without actually being dangerous to it. Jason Epstein was right. The CIA created conditions that subverted the essential task of an intellectual: to cast a critical eye on orthodoxy and received wisdom.

  Today the state maintains its capacity to influence political thinking, but the frontiers have shifted. Freedom is now defended less in little magazines than on social media. In 2014, the U.S. Agency for International Development was caught nurturing a Cuban version of Twitter—a logical extension of the CIA’s work in the ’50s and ’60s. And as Edward Snowden’s revelations demonstrate, the promotion of freedom through open communications remains uncomfortably intertwined with the potential for surveillance. What’s more, the vehicles we employ for personal speech are not only subject to electronic censorship and propagandistic manipulation by governments: They are also corporate properties. While social media can facilitate the circulation of ideas and the defense of free thought, they also depend on profit-chasing and maximizing saleable engagement. In such a highly mediated and monitored system, the line between participation and unwitting collaboration can be difficult to discern.

  Cold War intellectuals didn’t always realize the function they performed as “finks,” as accessories to power in systems they would have preferred not to validate. Today the specific configuration of state interference may have changed, but we remain subject to forces that shape our opinions and the boundaries of our thinking in ways we cannot see clearly. How will we recognize it in ourselves if we, too, are finks?