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Reviewed by:
  • Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm
  • Neal M. Rosendorf, Independent Scholar
Daniel J. Leab , Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. ix + 195 pp. $55.00.

As readers of this journal know, over the previous decade-and-a-half a thriving sub-field has developed in Cold War studies devoted to public diplomacy, cultural foreign relations, and propaganda as venues of superpower competition. The historian Daniel J. Leab makes a worthy contribution to the literature with Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm. Leab is not the first to write about the subject of how the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) financed and oversaw the production of an animated version of George Orwell's bleak satire of the USSR under Iosif Stalin. Frances Stonor Saunders and Tony Shaw previously laid out the general narrative of the CIA's sub-rosa sponsorship of Animal Farm in, respectively, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (1999) and British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda and Consensus (2001). But Leab goes considerably beyond his predecessors in treating his subject in a full book, rather than as an element in a larger analysis, and he is aided in his effort by the good luck of having been among the first to examine the recently opened papers of the film's producer, Louis de Rochement.

In the years immediately after WorldWar II, many U.S. policymakers recognized that the developing rivalry with the Soviet Union was not only about conventional geostrategy but also about ideology, information, and persuasion. From the perspective [End Page 179] of the U.S. government, the Soviet Union was effectively deploying propaganda and the United States was not, giving Moscow the upper hand in the competition for hearts and minds and threatening "not merely to undermine the prestige of the U.S. and the effectiveness of its national policy but to weaken and divide world opinion to a point where effective opposition to Soviet designs is no longer attainable by political, economic or military means" (cited from point 2 of NSC-4, prepared in 1947). Out of this anxiety came NSC-4, which established an information and propaganda program designed to counteract Soviet activities and improve America's international image.

The program had both open and covert elements. The CIA's Office of Policy Coordination (OPC; merged in 1952 with the Office of Special Plans) was part of the latter approach. Under the direction of Frank Wisner, the OPC was intended to function as a "mighty Wurlitzer," as the CIA officer famously put it, an inexorable instrument of persuasion and subversion. Much of the funding for the OPC's activities came from hundreds of millions of dollars siphoned from the Marshall Plan, and a modest amount of that money was given to the producers of Animal Farm.

Leab crisply states that "[t]he CIA was attracted to George Orwell because of his political slant and antitotalitarian novels" (p. 1). Orwell's novella Animal Farm, first published in 1945, was an especially promising candidate for the agency's covert patronage, despite Orwell's symbolic denunciation of the 1943 U.S.-Soviet-British Teheran conference as a sell-out to Stalin and despite his approving tone toward democratic, as opposed to dictatorial, socialism.

Leab walks us through the Animal Farm film project, from its genesis in 1950 through its release in 1954 and beyond. A key figure in his retelling is the American producer Louis de Rochemont, who signed on to supervise the animated feature. De Rochemont was in many ways an ideal choice for the CIA. He had considerable experience in the film industry, including as co-creator of theMarch of Time newsreel series and producer of several well-regarded feature films, such as the 1946 espionage thriller 13 Rue Madeleine. However, more recently his Hollywood career had faltered. Moreover, he was an ardent anti-Communist who supported loyalty investigations in the film industry.

De Rochemont's papers include memoranda from the CIA critiquing in detail the script drafts they were carefully vetting. The OPC and...

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