Customer Reviews

The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

How is it that many within the CIA were considered "liberal" by many within the FBI and their friends in the right-wing 'China Lobby' The answer is psychological warfare. Many within the CIA were affiliated with ostensibly liberal internationalist efforts, such as World Federalism, for which Agency media guru Cord Meyer showed enthusiasm.

The liberal label could be misleading, however, if the right meant that the CIA "liberals" were at odds with US Cold War foreign policy goals. Just the opposite was true. The CIA liberals had done their communications research howework, as Christopher Simpson has pointed out in his essential and skinny volume The Science of CoercionScience of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960. They realized that special publications would be needed to tame left-liberal dissent from US global ambitions.

And so publications like Encounter Magazine were created. Five of six articles would be left liberal, to win over this small BUT INFLUENCIAL group of tweedy professors and quasi-professionals who were capable of footnoting their bad moods. Once they thought that "this magazine is on our side' they would be more suceptible to the raison d'etre of the whole glossy: the monthly gatekeeping article that would keep this caffinated crew from openly opposing US Cold War Foreign Policy objectives.

Just so was the intention behind CIA subsidies for domestic front groups such as labor unions, art critics, and journalists within the US. The author deals skillfully with the individuals involved: many of the individuals did not know that their organizations were being supported by the CIA. Others did know and walked on eggshells to preserve their collegues' virgin curiosities.

The author is carefull to give people who cooperated with the Agency a fair shake. It is doubtful that Gloria Steinem could get a fairer shake than she does in this book; true she was young but a handshake or two with arch-conservative Psychological Warfare veterans like Time-Life CIA's C. D. Jackson should wake one up a bit.

The author points out that there were many times when the front group bahaved in ways contrary to the wishes of their CIA funders. In fact, one wonders if the point is not overemphasized. The point was never to turn the targetted audience into armchair McAthurs: rather it was to prevent theier becoming vocal critics of Greater Containment. A little slackening of the leash now and then would have been appropriate for these scientists of coercion.

In short, the CIA front groups, as is emphasized more strongly in Francis Stonor Saunders book (The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters ) were left-gatekeepers with rightist ends in mind. This point about the project could bear much stronger emphasis. On the other hand there is plenty of fresh detail in The Mighty Wurlitzer. The author openly acknowledges his debt to Saunders book but there is fresh information and detail in nearly every chapter. I recommend this book for everyone interested in post World War history and journalism.

One will never read The Nation in quite the same way!

This was a very misleading title. It could have been more aptly entitled "The OPC/CIA gave away huge amounts of the tax payer money during the Cold War." Period.
This funding was given to anti-Communist organizations and individuals both here and abroad to help spread anti-Communist propaganda as a part of the CIA's Psychological Warfare Ops.
Although the organizations listed were numerous, most of them had already been identified by previous authors. The same applies to the individuals involved to whom Mr. Wilford constantly refers to as the "intellectuals".
I must admit I have never read a book about the CIA that maintained such an obvious hands-off, distant approach to the Agency. His kid-glove treatment of the CIA seem to imply that the Agency was comprised solely of high-minded and noble intellectuals, patrons of the arts all, and whose only desire was to protect the American public from the Red Menace gathering at their doorstep. The book never actually gets into a discussion on what the CIA actually did or how they did it except to say they gave away money. There are no real in-depth discussions of the CIA at all.
The one area that Mr. Wilford does excel in was his detailed descriptions of the friction, disagreements, infighting, and at times petty squabbling amongst the non-CIA "intellectuals" in charge of these various organizations receiving the funding. If anything, this book was more like a "CIA Fund Recipients" gossip column.
Despite the acclaim this book has recieved from others, I found it to be a failure due to its' reluctance to actully enter into any honest discussion of the Central Intelligence Agency itself (as the title implies).
How Frank Wisner's Mighty Wurlitzer "played" America never became obvious.

Hugh Wilford, previously of the University of Sheffield, now at California State University, Long Beach, has written an astonishing account of the CIA's front operations in the USA during the Cold War. In 1967, research by Ramparts magazine exposed this covert system, which broke the law banning CIA operations in the USA.

The CIA funded front organisations within trade unions, New York intellectuals, émigrés, writers, artists, musicians, Hollywood, the National Student Association, aid workers, civil rights activists, clergy, women, and black nationalist groups like the American Society of African Culture. For example, Harvard University got $456,000 in disguised subsidies from the CIA between 1960 and 1966. The CIA collaborated with the major news media, particularly the New York Times, the Reader's Digest, Columbia Broadcasting System and Time magazine.

The CIA backed and funded the American Committee for a United Europe, which backed the emerging EEC. The CIA had a secret alliance with US Catholicism, for instance, between 1959 and 1966 it funded the Family Rosary Crusade's operations in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Australasia and Africa.

Associations that accepted covert state patronage violated their own proclaimed principles of voluntary association. Many members of these organisations knew about the CIA's role, but many did not. Americans were systematically deceived by the state. And the CIA's undemocratic covert activities did not cease with the 1967 exposures, or with the end of the Cold War. Even now the CIA is `a growing force on campus', as the Wall Street Journal recently noted.

This book exposes the CIA's role in the USA and leaves one asking what it did and does in Britain.

THE MIGHTY WURLITZER is a fascinating look at the myriad ways the CIA attempted to help control and spread Communism, not just in the United States, but in Europe, South America, and ultimately Southeast Asia, via front organizations. It tells how myriad groups, such as women, blacks, educators, etc., were provided money and guidance clandestinely over the course of the 1940's through 1967, when fronts were exposed by the periodical Ramparts and the New York Times. Ultimately, one walks away wondering if anything socially important that came from that period wasn't touched by the CIA, and, considering the explosiveness of the 1960's in the United States, if the CIA even considered the affects of the steps they took to stop the Red Menace from spreading.

There were so many acronyms and initialisms in this book that I'd forget what they stood for every time I picked it up after setting it down. The style and subject also became tedious at times. Otherwise, a good volume.

Descriptions of the CIA and the organizations it backed reminded me of my college days, when I roomed with the president of SDS. (Since I was apolitical, I was the only one who'd split the rent with him.) Little did I know that the other side was behaving equally immaturely.

I thought I heard the strains of The Mighty Wurlitzer recently when Frank Wisner's son visited Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and (rightly or wrongly) I was not at all surprised to learn that organized counterdemonstrations materialized the next day. After reading Wilford, Marchetti, Prouty, and Hunt, I'm amazed at how many people refuse to see the CIA in the honey trap set for Julian Assange, or in the cyber attacks on his site. The CIA did publically announce an anti-Assange team, after all. (Not that the book is about espionage, but it *is* partly about infiltration, demonstrations, manipulation and dirty tricks.)

In summary, if you don't mind appearing paranoid to the unwitting, and if you don't mind a slow read, the book is quite revealing. Don't worry. There are no CIA fronts at all anymore... and the nonexistent fronts are so obvious by now that it doesn't really matter.

Disclaimer
OK. Maybe I *am* paranoid, but then so was James Jesus Angleton, and he was on the inside, so his delusions must have been well-founded. Also, the book clearly wasn't meant to have this effect. It was just meant to be dull and studious. But Hey! There you are.

This is a useful overview of CIA Cold War front operations. The most significant failings are that (1) it implies the CIA's covert apparatus for influencing public opinion was focused solely on the perceived Communist threat, and (2) that the Wurlitzer no longer plays to the world audience.

However, we know that the carefully cultivated array of "media assets" Frank Wisner began to assemble had other applications during the Cold War era that had nothing to do with Communism and "the Soviet threat." We can also see evidence that the same methods are currently being applied to managing public opinion about pivotal current events.

The author completely avoids any discussion of the CIA's extensive covert role in the UFO controversy, for example. When hundreds of thousands of "flying saucer" stories began to fill the nation's newspapers in the late 1940s and early 1950s, CIA officials, under direction of Dr. H.P. Robertson, used its Wurlitzer to calm public concerns about an invasion from outer space by covertly working to ridicule and debunk such reports. Top CIA officials also infiltrated key UFO-research groups such as NICAP, orchestrated anti-UFO propaganda programs via CBS TV and other news networks, and worked to squelch embarrassing leaks from airline pilots, military eyewitnesses, and others who knew too much. What is now becoming known is that the CIA's concerns stemmed partly from an alarming pattern of surveillance exhibited by the UFOs, particularly surveillance of our nuclear weapons facilities. In the mid-1960s and again in the mid-1970s, for example, UFOs hovered over and sometimes disabled many of our Minuteman nuclear-tipped missiles. We know this from regional press accounts, government documents, and former Minuteman personnel who have recently broken their silence about these astonishing events. (For further details, see Faded Giant, UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Coverup, 1941-1973, UFOs and Nukes by Robert Hastings (ufohastings.com), and my own modest effort, The Missing Times.)

One academic study showed that upwards of a million articles about UFOs appeared in the nation's newspapers between 1947 and 1966 alone. Yet, this is unmentioned in nearly all contemporary American History books. Such is the power of Wisner's Wurlitzer!

In the wake of the events of 9-11, thousands of academics, government officials, eyewitnesses, architects, scientists, and engineers have called attention to the many serious problems with the official explanation. Public opinion polls also show widespread skepticism about what the Bush White House says took place. And yet, the American news media will never even discuss these facts. Most reporters today know that keeping their jobs depends on keeping their mouths shut about certain sensitive topics.

And the Mighty Wurlitzer plays on....

As a citizen, you SHOULD read this book. Over the years, I have read a lot of texts that speculated about the role the U.S. government played in certain events -- sometimes with hard facts, often with only anecdotal evidence. This book is well-researched and documents its claims.

It's a snapshot into the dangerous mix that fear and power often creates -- a message for all people, in all countries, at all times.