FINKS: How The CIA Tricked The World’s Best Writers by Joel Whitney

[Anthony Thorne]

Out in a couple of months from OR Books.

http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/finks-by-joel-whitney/

When news broke that the CIA had colluded with literary magazines to produce cultural propaganda throughout the Cold War, a debate began that has never been resolved. The story continues to unfold, with the reputations of some of America's best-loved literary figuresincluding Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, and Richard Wrighttarnished as their work for the intelligence agency has come to light.

Finks is a tale of two CIAs, and how they blurred the line between propaganda and literature. One CIA created literary magazines that promoted American and European writers and cultural freedom, while the other toppled governments, using assassination and censorship as political tools. Defenders of the "cultural" CIA argue that it should have been lauded for boosting interest in the arts and freedom of thought, but the two CIAs had the same undercover goals, and shared many of the same methods: deception, subterfuge and intimidation.

Finks demonstrates how the good-versus-bad CIA is a false divide, and that the cultural Cold Warriors again and again used anti-Communism as a lever to spy relentlessly on leftists, and indeed writers of all political inclinations, and thereby pushed U.S. democracy a little closer to the Soviet model of the surveillance state.


"It may be difficult today to believe that the American intellectual elite was once deeply embedded with the CIA. But with Finks, Joel Whitney vividly brings to life the early days of the Cold War, when the CIA's Ivy League ties were strong, and key American literary figures were willing to secretly do the bidding of the nation's spymasters." James Risen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War

"A deep look at that scoundrel time when America's most sophisticated and enlightened literati eagerly collaborated with our growing national security state. Finks is a timely moral reckoningone that compels all those who work in the academic, media and literary boiler rooms to ask some troubling questions of themselves..." David Talbot, founder of Salon and author of The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America's Secret Government

[Peter Lemkin]

What didn't they try to control?....and still do! They were also backing avant-garde art and artists and the museums that showed their work. The propaganda war both against the perceived 'enemy' and the American People never ended.