Customer Reviews

Who Paid the Piper?

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This splendid book examines the US Central Intelligence Agency's role waging a cultural and propaganda war against socialist ideas in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. The CIA created, funded and ran the Congress for Cultural Freedom, while both bodies always claimed that the CCF was quite independent.

From the start of the US state's not-so-altruistic Marshall Plan, it gave $200 million a year to support the CIA's various activities, including assassinations, coups, strike-breaking, election-rigging, and setting up supposedly independent magazines (like Encounter), festivals and organisations.
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The CIA worked closely, as it still does today, with the Foreign Office and MI6. The Foreign Office's secret Information Research Department supported the 'left-wing' Labour journal Tribune and distributed its material internationally.

The US state backed moves towards a federal Europe and the EEC, rightly seeing the EEC as a capitalist bulwark against socialism. So the European Movement was "funded almost entirely by the CIA through a dummy front called the American Committee for a United Europe".

Saunders concludes, "the same people who read Dante and went to Yale and were educated in civic virtue recruited Nazis, manipulated the outcome of democratic elections, gave LSD to unwitting subjects, opened the mail of thousands of American citizens, overthrew governments, supported dictatorships, plotted assassinations, and engineered the Bay of Pigs disaster. `In the name of what?' asked one critic. `Not civic virtue, but empire.'"

In the West, during the Cold War, the freedom of expression of writers & artists was vaunted as democracy's most cherished possession. But such freedom could carry a cost. This book documents the secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West were instruments of the CIA, which infiltrated itself into every niche in the cultural sphere. CIA front org. & the Ôphilanthropic' fdns. that channeled its money ran congresses, mounted exhibitions, & organized concerts. Ambitious pub. programs & expensive translations were subsidized; & journals throughout Europe had their losses offset by generous backers who answered to the CIA. Photos.

This well documented yet understated book chronicles how the United States veered away from freedom into a kind of benevolent despotism. The book will change the way you think about the so-called "free world".

There is no tabloid journalism here, only well researched documentary detailing how secrecy and power can derail even the most well meaning governments.

There are five massive volumes about the artist Jackson Pollack, none of which mention his involvement with the CIA. If nothing else read this book for information you won't easily find elsewhere.

I read this book a few years ago and it changed the way I thought about the state's role in influencing culture. This is an excellent read!

I read this good book, in a translation to the portuguese, here in Brazil.One great part of this book is to show that brazilian former President, Fernando Henrique Cardoso(FHC), was a CIA's man more than twenty years before he became a brazilian president.
This book is biased."Uncle Sam" gave money to persons such as FHC, but at the same time, Fidel Castro was giving money to persons, such as Che Guevara or Leonel Brizola.

The question : "who paid the piper" supposes the fact CIA paid people to fight communism, using all kind of dirty methods including lies and deception. One should wonder why, with all the terrible information coming from the Soviet Union, CIA needed to use all those terrible methods, when the values of democracy were so much stronger. As for me, I'd like to know "who paid Saunders" to write such an hysterical book. When we know she works for british television, we wonder no longer (despite my respect for BBC): she's not a professional scholar, but a wannabe Woodward.

Truth is, the Cultural Cold War was fought on both sides, and from both sides, it was a secret one. In the US, after the 1976 revelations on CIA activites, it changed completely and the psychological war against the USSR became official - there was nothing to be ashamed of, thanks to Reagan. So, please, don't waste your money, and check serious books for the cultural cold war, such as the one from David Caute, Walter Hixson, Kenneth Osgood, or Laura Belmonte.