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  • The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America
  • Laura A. Belmonte
Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. 342 pp. $27.95.

In an age in which the failures of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are fodder for late-night comedians, Hugh Wilford's nuanced book is a welcome reminder of the agency's complexities and contradictions. Building on the work of fine scholars like Kenneth Osgood, Scott Lucas, Helen Laville, and Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Wilford has produced a marvelously researched and engagingly written account of the diverse array of private groups that the CIA enlisted in its battle against the global spread of Communism during the early Cold War. Frank Wisner, the agency's first chief of political warfare, compared these "front organizations" to a "Mighty Wurlitzer" able to produce any propaganda tune he wished. Wilford demonstrates that the "fronts" were often much less potent and considerably more cacophonous than Wisner and other CIA leaders claimed.

Alarmed by the creation of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) in the fall of 1947, the CIA searched for ways to combat Communist-controlled labor, cultural, and political groups. Combining newly created "private" organizations and publications and collaborations with existing entities, the agency built a sweeping network of émigrés, unionists, intellectuals, artists, writers, students, women, Catholics, African Americans, and journalists who promoted the American national interest, both wittingly and unwittingly. In 1967, after the leftist magazine Ramparts revealed ties between the CIA and the National Student Association, a storm of subsequent media coverage exposed covert CIA sponsorship of a stunning number of other U.S. citizen groups. The news triggered bitter denunciations and impassioned defenses of [End Page 246] the front network. Many groups collapsed under the impact of the disbelief and distrust unleashed by the revelations. Others severed their ties with the CIA and managed to survive.

The furor obscured the moral clarity present when the front network was established in the late 1940s. At that point, few of those involved in private organizations promoting democratic capitalism abroad questioned the ethics of accepting CIA funds and assistance. Bound by a common belief in the superiority of the American way of life, a wide array of individuals participated in the CIA's global outreach efforts. Former Communists like novelist Arthur Koestler and labor organizer Jay Lovestone used their first-hand knowledge of Communist tactics to help the CIA craft its covert operations. Lovestone engineered early CIA infiltration of the international labor movement, and Koestler organized the 1950 rally of artists and intellectuals in West Berlin that spawned the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the best-known and most hotly disputed CIA collaboration. CIA officials soon discovered the difficulties inherent in harnessing the energies of such disparate individuals and groups. Although many of the so-called fronts eagerly accepted CIA money, they continued to pursue their own objectives.

Even organizations directly founded by the CIA proved challenging to manage. The agency could count on Americans' penchants for "joining" and anti-Communism to facilitate the creation of viable groups, but many citizen leaders balked at the secrecy involved in the front network. Others wondered whether covert sponsorship of private groups detracted from the intelligence-gathering and analysis at the core of the CIA's mission.

Undaunted by the notoriously slow pace and small scale of the CIA's declassification of its historical records, Wilford has ingeniously interwoven agency materials, documents from various front organizations, and secondary scholarship to provide the most exhaustive account of the covert network ever written. Although others have examined key facets of front operations, such as those relating to the arts or women, Wilford is the first scholar to fit the pieces into a cohesive, convincing whole.

The book presupposes a great deal of knowledge about the history of the Cold War and the CIA, but it offers absorbing portraits of the well-known Americans who collaborated with the agency. The story of feminist icon Gloria Steinem's work for the Independent Service for Information, a project established by the CIA to encourage anti-Communist U.S. students to attend a huge Communist rally in Vienna in 1959...

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