How the CIA secretly funded Encounter

Stephen Spender: unwitting spy

I am delighted to bring you a guest post by Edward McLaren. Edward is a DPhil candidate in English Literature at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where he specialises in 18th-century literature. Many of you will remember his last guest post “Jane Austen’s Rake Problem”. Today he tells us the story of Stephen Spender and the CIA. Edward is on Substack as elle laren writing And So-shu stirred in the sea.

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The Scandal of 1967

“When the deception is exposed, the recipient…appears in the role either of knave or of fool.”

This was the English modernist poet Stephen Spender writing to the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge on April 24^th, 1967. He had just had it confirmed that Encounter magazine, the paper that he had edited since 1953 and that his wife Natasha had come up with the name for, had been funded almost entirely by the Central Intelligence Agency, from the very beginning and largely without his knowledge. Certainly, there were rumours of intelligence involvement in the magazine, but rarely had Spender given them much thought until 1967, when the news was broken directly by Michael Josselson, the man who had recruited Spender on behalf of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and, unbeknownst to him, a CIA agent.

As Sarah Miller Harris notes in The CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the early Cold War (2016):

members of the General Assembly opened the Sunday Telegraph to discover an interview with Josselson, the man “who kept a secret for seventeen years” only to break his silence to a Telegraph correspondent just before yesterday’s meeting. In the interview, he insisted he was the sole person in the Congress who knew its money came from the CIA.

Further than this, Josselson explained, if the writers “did not know where the funds had come from, they could hardly be influenced by the source.” This defense was lampooned a few years later in John Leonard’s 1972 New York Times article, “The Last Word”, with the subtitle “It’s Not the Gift, It’s the Thought Behind It”.

Josselson’s public announcement of the fact the Congress for Cultural Freedom was nothing less than a CIA sham can be considered the final result of a war of attrition waged against Encounter magazine by both previous, partly distrusted whistleblowers and New Left publications like Ramparts. Importantly, in Josselson’s tell-all Telegraph interview, he denounced the idea that there was another CIA agent in the Congress than himself as well as the idea that one of the editors at Encounter was also in the CIA. This rumour came from an article written that year for The Saturday Evening Post by Tom Braden, another CIA agent, called “I’m Glad the CIA is Immoral”. Braden’s article considers that “The choice between innocence and power involves the most difficult of decisions. But when an adversary attacks with his weapons disguised as good works, to choose innocence is to choose defeat.” Braden was effectively suggesting that a covert, colossal pro-American propaganda network was justified so long as it defeated Soviet Communism.

His article infuriated both Diana Josselson, (“No one had called Mike that word—agent—until your article—written by a friend, we thought! came out”), and alienated Encounter’s editors Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, and Spender. They had had a tense relationship in the London office beforehand, with Spender regarding Kristol’s contributions to the political side of the magazine as all too anti-Communist for an “anti-anti-Communist” such as himself. But now Lasky went so far as to write to Isaiah Berlin, one of their chief contributors, “IF there were an agent planted in Encounter…it could only have been Kristol or Spender.”

As a consequence, Spender resigned and Kristol threatened to sue Tom Braden, leaving Lasky the only acting editor of Encounter. Later that year, The New York Times reported that Lasky would stay on at the publication. After discovering that the International Publishing Corporation of London was taking over the magazine’s financial burden rather than it remaining with the CIA, the co-editor and literary critic Frank Kermode also returned to the magazine. Encounter would last until 1990 even without Kristol or Spender.

Despite Lasky accusing both of them of potentially being CIA agents to Isaiah Berlin, not only did Lasky go on to admit that he knew about the CIA funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom from long before 1963, but also—ironically—he might have been a CIA agent himself. Before working on Encounter, Lasky had received Marshall Aid funding for his anti-Communist, German-language magazine Der Monat, which was distributed across Western and Eastern Europe by American intelligence services. He was also arguably responsible for planting the seed for the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the propaganda wing of the CIA to begin with. In 1947, Lasky wrote a message that was received by Lucius Clay, the Commander in Chief of the United States Forces in Europe and the man who would go on to execute the Berlin Airlift.

This message would become known as “The Melvin Lasky Proposal” and suggested,

The time-honoured U.S. formula of ‘shed light and the people will find their own way’ exaggerated the possibilities in Germany (and in Europe) for an easy conversion…We have not succeeded in combatting the variety of factors—political, psychological, cultural—which work against U.S. foreign policy, and in particular against the Marshall plan in Europe.

Again, this was an excuse for a massive pro-U.S. propaganda operation in Europe and internationally. Chances are, if Spender had known about any of this from the start, he would have opposed it; later in life, in 1994, he acknowledged that he had heard rumours of CIA involvement in Encounter for a long time, “But it was as with people who come and tell you that your wife is unfaithful to you. Then you ask her yourself, and if she denies it, you are satisfied with it.” Yet, then again, perhaps Spender would not have ever been trusted with these details because he simply wasn’t a character that could be integrated into the CIA like Melvin Lasky.

In the footnotes of Who Paid the Piper? (1999), the historian Frances Stonor Saunders hides an incredible anecdote which contrasts Lasky’s active and engaged role in the agency with Spender’s role as a literary dupe:

[The British philosopher] Richard Wollheim remembered confronting both Lasky and Spender with the rumour [of Encounter being CIA funded] several years previously, when he had been asked to join the board of Encounter. ‘We discussed it over dinner at some club, and I asked for assurance on the score of the rumours then circulating about the CIA. Lasky said, “Nothing easier. You can inspect the accounts, and see for yourself.” And Stephen looked hugely relieved, and said, “See, there’s no truth to it.” But then Lasky added, “Of course, we’re not going to do that. Because why should we open the books to every Tom, Dick and Harry who falls for some crazy rumour?” At this, Stephen’s jaw dropped. He was silent throughout the rest of the meal. Wollheim declined the offer to join the board.

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Why Encounter?

In 1952, the CIA agent Michael Josselson received the “long-awaited sign-off from Washington” on founding the English-language, transatlantic magazine that he had always dreamed of. This would become Encounter. According to Sarah Miller Harris, the Congress for Cultural Freedom determined the magazine would be “an Anglo-American partnership, with one American editor and one British one.” Such a magazine was fairly easy for the Congress to organise due to the fact the Congress itself was established by the CIA, received continued financing from the CIA, and through the CIA had connections via MI6 to most British intellectuals of any significance.

Notably, the manifesto for the Congress, written in Berlin in 1950, received important amendments (in italics) by the historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and A.J.P Taylor: “The defence of existing freedoms, the reconquest of lost freedoms, and the creation of new freedoms are parts of the same struggle.”; “The defense of intellectual liberty today imposes a positive obligation: to offer new and constructive answers to the problems of our time.”; “We address this manifesto to all men who are determined to regain those liberties which they have lost and to preserve and extend those which they enjoy.” Their emphasis on the positive expansion of liberties is worth pointing out both because it served the United States’s goal of territorial expansion into Eastern Europe and because during WW2, Trevor-Roper had worked for MI8, the British radio decryption service, and Taylor was employed by clandestine Political Warfare Executive.

Such connections to British intelligence were extremely important for establishing Encounter on an operational basis. As Harris notes, the general structure of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was that “CIA operatives Frank Wisner and Tom Braden acted behind the scenes during the setting up of the Congress, while agents Michael Josselson and Lawrence de Neufville were active within the Congress itself.” Josselson and Neufville, in particular, were responsible for negotiating with Christopher “Monty” Woodhouse for MI6’s consent to publish the magazine, since they had set on publishing it from London and employing a plethora of British intellectuals. In the end, it was agreed that the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge would be responsible for paying Stephen Spender’s salary as editor on behalf of the Congress. This could be negotiated whatsoever to begin with because Muggeridge was himself an MI6 agent.

As for the real purpose of Encounter and why the CIA was interested in funding it to begin with, that had little to do with establishing influence over the British public discourse for the benefit of the United States, although the CIA regarded the British as too soft on Communism at that time and would have welcomed a more pro-American intellectual milieu. In truth, Harris indicates, Encounter’s “ultimate aim would be to appeal to Asian readers.”

Why Asia? Josselson emphasised in discussions on Encounter’s launch that it was very difficult for American voices to reach countries with “a communist or neutralist problem”. In other words, American propaganda was not very effective in China, Japan, India, or Korea especially, during the course of the Korean War, and as such countries increasingly came into the Soviet sphere of influence. Yet the attitude of these countries to British media (or propaganda) was a different story, because in 1950s and 60s,

British cultural prestige in Asia was at its zenith, despite waning British political influence. The same British Labour leaders who would avidly seek out Encounter’s pages were widely respected in Asia, where socialism was seen as a universal, unifying movement.

Resultantly, Josselson insisted that at least one article should be written on Asian cultural or political affairs per issue of the magazine. Despite managing to secure and promote the likes of such international talents as Osamu Dazai, Dom Moraes, and al-Tayyib Salih, this effort was not very successful. Josselson hoped to get a circulation of three thousand in India very quickly, but in the first year the paper only managed a fifth of that. Consequently, he wrote angrily to Irving Kristol in 1954: “please continue to solicit and print Asian contributions to ENCOUNTER and thereby perform the mission which was assigned to ENCOUNTER by the Congress.”

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Why Spender?

As well as being a well-known poet and critic, Spender had briefly joined the English Communist Party for a few weeks in 1936, writing for The Daily Worker newspaper on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, before becoming disillusioned with the ideology. In his own words, Spender eventually considered the fact he was appointed as an editor of Encounter to be “a consequence of my essay in The God That Failed.” This was the 1949 collection of six anti-Communist and often pro-American essays, one of which—by Louis Fischer—coined the term “Kronstadt” (Crown State), for the moment where communists decide not just to leave the party, but to become anti-Communists.

As Stonor-Saunders clarifies, The God That Failed was also “distributed by U.S. government agencies all over Europe. In Germany, in particular, it was rigorously promoted.” One of the writers, Arthur Koestler, also met Melvin Lasky after discovering that the book had been published by The Information Research Department, a secret anti-Communist propaganda agency and an extension of the British foreign office. Thus, Stephen Spender made the anti-Communist noises that the CIA approved of and he had been wielded, without his knowing, by intelligence agencies before.

This made him a good candidate. But there were also other reasons why Spender was chosen. For one, Spender wasn’t just anti-Communist but very pro-American. In 1948, he wrote the essay “We Can Win the Battle for the Mind of Europe”, suggesting “where American policy finds dubious allies and half-hearted friends, American freedom of expression in its greatest achievements has an authenticity which can win the most vital European thought today.” He even went so far as to say that, whilst the Marshall Plan was good, “It is necessary also to strengthen the old civilization of the West in Europe with the faith and the experience and the knowledge of the new Europe which is America.” In contrast, the British intellectuals that trusted and surrounded Spender did not share his pro-American attitude. It wasn’t just that the American and British governments had the opposite policy on China, with the Americans trying to ingratiate themselves with Chiang-Kai Shek, and the British recognising and trading with Chairman Mao’s China. In practice, the British intellectuals disliked and talked down to the Americans.

For example, when Adam Watson was liaising with the CIA in the British Foreign Office, he reported a “Henry James syndrome” in the Anglo-American relationship, with “the innocent Americans being taken for a ride by these cunning Europeans.” But the philosopher Stuart Hampshire recalls an even more striking case.

In 1949, I believe, the Ford Foundation came to London, and they held a big meeting in a hotel, to which they summoned the leading intellectuals. At that time, they had capital reserves which were worth more than the whole of the sterling area. So, the intellectuals come, and the Ford Foundation offers them the earth, but they say, “We’re fine, thank you. We’ve got All Souls, and that’s enough for us.” The British were underwhelmed…And the context for this is that there was a very deep, Freud-like anti-Americanism; a kind of Wykehamish snobbery meets Chinese left-wingery, epitomized by people like Empson and Forster

As a result, Stephen Spender’s English charm and publishing connections enabled him to break through barriers that Kristol and Josselson could not. Making him the editor of Encounter made an American operation like the CCF more palatable to such “cunning Europeans” as would otherwise have dismissed it out of hand. Also, before writing for Encounter, Spender had served as literary editor for Cyril Connolly’s Horizon, another transnational English-language magazine, during the distribution of which he accumulated W.H. Auden, Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, Freddie Ayer, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot as friends and confidantes. This meant that when it came time to publish the first volume of Encounter, Spender could get Leonard Woolf to send pages from Virginia’s diary and other treasures. “Cecil Day-Lewis sent a poem on Pegasus, Albert Camus an essay on death, and Edith Sitwell, the grande dame of avant-garde British poetry, contributed two poems.” Sarah Miller Harris further notes: “From Christopher Isherwood came a sketch of Ernst Toller, the German Communist playwright…[and] Nabokov penned “No Cantatas for Stalin”, on the stultifying effects of socialist realism for Soviet music.”

Although the magazine received a starting budget of just $30,000 from the Congress, its tremendous success—selling out its run of 10,000 copies in its first week—can mainly be attributed to the cachet of Stephen Spender’s personal connections and investment in the project as editor. After seeing for himself Spender’s excitement about the magazine in 1952, Isaiah Berlin wrote of Spender to Arthur Schlesinger, “I see precisely why Mr. Hutchins [of the Ford Foundation] has decided to call his Californian estate ‘Itching Palms.’”

Nevertheless, Spender’s wife Natasha indicated during a telephone interview in 1997, that there was also a less flattering reason why Spender was selected by the CIA.

Of course, Stephen had all the right credentials to be chosen as a front: he was one of the great recanters [of Communism], and he was eminently bamboozable, because he was so innocent. His father was bamboozled by Lloyd George. They’re a very trusting family; it never occurs to them to think that people are telling them lies.

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The Aftermath

Following Josselson’s 1967 announcement of the CIA funding behind the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Lyndon B. Johnson’s government condemned the agency, with Democratic Representative Watkins Abittt criticising the CIA for “continuing to spend money [on groups which] openly and repeatedly attacked American interests.” By this, he meant not just Encounter, but Michael Wood’s National Student Association, a radical student group on the left that Ramparts had previously reported received CIA funding. In the case of the Student Association, in all likelihood the CIA spent money on it in order to control a potentially pro-Soviet activist space rather than permitting Stalinist undercurrents within it from getting out of control.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of Josselson’s announcement, the General Assembly of the CCF released a press statement asserting its “activities had been entirely free of influence or pressure from any financial backers [whilst it] condemned in the strongest terms the way in which the CIA had deceived those concerned and had caused their efforts to be called into question”. This seems to be true: the intellectuals published by Encounter and the CCF, with the exception of Melvin Lasky, did not know that the magazine was CIA run.

According to Spender’s biographer John Sutherland, “Spender knew nothing of the CCF’s covert political connections with the CIA.” In fact, the operation worked by selecting a staff that would be pro-American and anti-Communist on their own, and then allowing this staff to write their own material whilst remaining none the wiser about CIA involvement. Hilariously, the only demonstrable instance of the CIA vetoing a piece in the history of Encounter, was an article that Spender had already rejected but Irving Kristol wanted to include in the magazine: it was written by the opium addict Emily Hahn, and praised Chiang Kai-shek. In this case, the CIA opposed it because it was too blatantly pro-American and wouldn’t sell well with either the British or the intended Asian audience of Encounter. In 1975, the Church Report of the U.S. Senate found the CCF to be another example of CIA overreach. The CIA’s support for the CCF and groups like it “undermined the crucial independent role of the private sector, “blur[ring] the very difference between ‘our’ system and ‘theirs’ that these covert programs were designed to preserve.”

As for Spender, when he worked out that MI6 had arranged to pay his salary one last time, he donated the money to Indian famine relief, before moving on in 1972 to found the Index on Censorship: a pro-freedom of expression charity. Spender never bought another issue of Encounter, and when he died in 1995, his widow lamented what the revelation about the CIA funding the CCF had done to him:

All those wasted years, all the arguments, all the upsets…He was so tired, so weary from all the bickering, and he never seemed to have the time to write poetry, which is what he most wanted to do.

But three years after the scandal of 1967, Spender wrote the poem “Art Student” whilst staying in Connecticut. To my mind, its last stanza captures something of his mood in relation to what happened.

The point is, they’ll produce some slight sensation —
Shock, indignation, admiration. He bets
Some student will stand looking at them
For hours on end and find them beautiful
Just as he finds any light outside a gallery,
On a junk heap of automobiles, for instance,
More beautiful than sunsets framed inside.
That’s all we can do now. Send people back
To the real thing
— the stinking corpse.

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Sources

Sarah Miller Harris, The CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the Early Cold War: The Limits of Making Common Cause, Taylor and Francis, 2016.

John Sutherland, Stephen Spender: The Authorised Biography, Penguin, 2005.

Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, Granta Books, 1999.

Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the struggle for the Mind of Post-War Europe, The Free Press, 1989.

“I’m Glad the CIA is Immoral”, by Thomas W. Braden, The Saturday Evening Post, 1967.

The God That Failed, ed. Richard Crossman, Harper and Brothers, 1949.