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THE CIA AS CULTURE VULTURES
Cassandra Pybus
IN BEST AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS 1999, Peter Craven has graciously reproduced Peter Coleman's long review of my book The Devil and James McAuley, together with the one by Robert Manne first published in ABR. By some oversight he neglected to include any response from me. A pity really, because I want to express my appreciation to Peter Coleman for having shown me that I had not scrutinised carefully enough the CIA's funding of Quadrant.
I have been back to the archives to do just that.
At the National Library, the access Peter Coleman had previously given me to the papers of the Australian Association of Cultural Freedom (AACF) had been revoked, but, luckily, at the Mitchell Library in Sydney I found that my access to the Quadrant papers was still current. One does have to be very patient working in archives, especially since the Quadrant papers run to many, many disordered boxes. Yet eventually I managed to find nearly every auditor's report, plus the account books and financial statements for Quadrant scattered between the boxes, which allowed me to compile a very complete picture of their funding. All rather puzzling.
In his initial review in the Weekend Australian, Peter Coleman sternly corrected my view that the CIA had provided a substantial subsidy to Quadrant, insisting that the subsidy was merely 'some $40 a week'. In Craven's book he has firmed up the figure to 'two hundred pounds per year', which is closer to $80 a week in today's money. Yet these are not sums which correspond to anything in the official record. The accounts tell me the subsidy to Quadrant began at 800 pounds a year, that is $310 a week in today's money, and rose steadily to $1000 a week in the mid 1960s. Nor was Quadrant the sole beneficiary of this largesse. The reach of the CIA's covert patronage into Australian cultural life was much deeper than I had at first appreciated, though Quadrant remains its lasting legacy.
Let me explain the CIA connection.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom was established by the CIA in 1950 as a key element in their strategy to combat Soviet propaganda, with Michael Josselson, chief of the Agency's Berlin Office for Covert Action, as the executive director of the Paris Secretariat. He was later joined by another agent, John Hunt, and by the late fifties there were five CIA operatives working in the Secretariat. In its first year the CIA outlay on the Congress for Cultural Freedom was $200,000, close to 2 million dollars in 1999 terms. Later they set up the Fairfield Foundation as a front, one of any number of private foundations used to launder CIA money, of which the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation were especially prominent. In just such a way a whole raft of organisations and magazines were funded. For more than two decades, the thirty-five committees of Congress for Cultural Freedom were the main CIA conduit for cultural funding.
In 1951 Josselson was approached by Australian businessman, Richard Krygier, who offered his services as Cultural Freedom's antipodean representative. Josselson asked Krygier to distribute Congress publications in Australia, for which he would receive a retainer. Josselson later agreed, without enthusiasm, that Krygier set up an Australian committee and publish a bulletin.
Krygier chose the retired Chief Justice, Sir John Latham, as the president of the Australian committee and together they invited like-minded individuals to join the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom (AACF). There was no membership fee. Financial support from Paris enabled them to publish a newsletter and run an office with Richard Krygier as administrative secretary. The initial grant from the Paris office was $84,000 in 1998/99 dollars.* One of AACF's earliest activities was to sponsor Doris Fitton's production of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, while Krygier published a bulletin which included material culled from the various magazines funded by the Congress.
Josselson was not happy with the make-up of the Australian committee since the CIA strategy was to court intellectuals of the non-communist left, not fund a bunch of zealous anti-communists. Nor did he care for the highly polemical thrust of Krygier's bulletin. Alarmed by Josselson's dissatisfaction, Krygier sought the advice of the editor of Encounter, Irving Kristol, who suggested that Krygier ask Josselson for money for an Australian literary quarterly, along the lines of Encounter. Kristol gave Krygier to understand that Encounter was an independent magazine subsidised by the Congress, though in reality Encounter was set up and funded as a joint operation by British Intelligence and the CIA.
Just as Encounter had been established in England as a counter to The New Statesman, so Krygier sought funding from Josselson for a magazine to challenge Meanjin. Clem Christesen, the editor of Meanjin, was well aware of the hostility toward him from the AACF and deeply suspicious of its financial backing. In 1954 he claimed in an editorial that the Congress for Cultural Freedom was funded by the CIA, a view he had privately expressed in concerned letters to Sir John Latham. Outraged, Krygier intensified his determination to destroy Meanjin. On Krygier's behalf Bill Wentworth made persistent requests of ASIO for the file on Christesen during 1955 and demanded that ASIO do an analysis of Meanjin's contributors to assess their left-wing connections. In Krygier's report to Josselson in July 1956, he passed on documents which Colonel Spry from ASIO had pushed under his door one night, naming communists and fellow-travellers at Melbourne University, notably Christesen and his wife, Nina.
In 1956 Josselson agreed to additional funding of $16,100 for an Australian magazine (that is $310 a week) which brought the AACF grant for that year to $94,000. The anticommunist thrust in Quadrant was seen as its selling point, but the magazine did not fare well. By the end of the second year it was $27,000 in debt and in May 1959 Josselson agreed to cover this debt and henceforth he raised the annual subsidy to $33,000. ($635 a week.) In 1960, in addition to the increased grant for Quadrant, the Paris office provided the AACF with $150,000 in grants which included $67,000 for a seminar on Constitutionalism in Asia and the publication of a book of the same name, ostensibly by ANU Press. Nearly $10,000 was provided to underwrite covert activity against the 1959 Peace Congress in Melbourne. Curiously $3800 of this went to pay Frank Knopfelmacher's hefty phone bill.
Quadrant was one of twenty magazines the Congress for Cultural Freedom established in Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. Within the Secretariat there was an editorial committee to articulate the policy for the magazines. The key players were two CIA agents: John Hunt and Robbie Macauley, editor of the prestigious US literary journal Kenyon Review. In correspondence with Hunt and Macauley in 1962, Donald Horne floated the idea of a seminar in Sydney for the editors of all the Congress magazines outside Europe, hosted by Quadrant. John Hunt agreed to provide the AACF with $25,000 in addition to the annual grant of $98,000 for this purpose. Robbie Macauley and William Phillips of Partisan Review (also subsidised by the CIA) came from America, as well as editors from Indonesia, Nigeria, India, Korea and Japan to mingle with an assortment of Australian intellectuals and magazine editors. Clem Christesen declined his invitation.
Seminars on New Guinea, funded to the tune of $76,500, and a Sunday Seminars series organised by Donald Horne, were among several other initiatives that the Paris Secretariat agreed to fund in addition to salaries, office rental, overseas trips and visits from international heavyweights. They also agreed to underwrite a book on the Communist Party of Australia, once again ostensibly published by ANU Press, and they provided a small grant to the magazine Dissent.
In 1965 Josselson was persuaded to increase the Quadrant grant to $52,000 per annum ($1000 a week) so that the magazine could become bi-monthly. He agreed to the increase in the hope that McAuley's anti-communism could be dampened down by the more liberal influence of Donald Horne as co-editor. As Krygier reported to McAuley, Josselson thought Quadrant was 'too right wing' and wanted to distance the magazine from its regular contributors, Frank Knopfelmacher and Bob Santamaria. 'I intend to ignore all of this', he wrote from Paris. Donald Horne lasted barely two years before he quit in frustration and was replaced by Peter Coleman.
By the mid 1960s the CIA was alive to fostering an anti-communism in Asia and so too was Quadrant. In 1964 the magazine began publishing 'Reports from Vietnam' which were strongly supportive of the American puppet regime in South Vietnam which was installed by and advised by the CIA. In 1965 McAuley reprinted an article 'The Real Revolution in South Vietnam' written by CIA agent, George Carver. At this time McAuley began to work on plans for the AACF to expand into South East Asia, with Josselson's support. The Congress for Cultural Freedom provided over $200,000 to its Australian affiliate for various South East Asian projects in 1966: a trip to Vietnam in February for Jim McAuley, Peter Coleman, Frank Knopfelmacher and Owen Harries, while Donald Horne was funded to go to Vietnam and Korea the following year. A conference on 'Democracy and Development in South East Asia', held at the University of Kuala Lumpur and funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, followed immediately on the heels of the first Vietnamese visit. Josselson wrote to McAuley to say that he wanted to consolidate the conference by establishing some kind of South East Asian institute, along the lines of the international institute the Congress funded in Latin America. With less enthusiasm he also agreed to fund a seminar in support of American intervention in Vietnam at Melbourne University and underwrote the publishing cost of the book Vietnam: Seen From East and West, nominally published by Thomas Nelson.
Even as they continued to shell out the money, the CIA paymasters remained unhappy with the AACF's refusal to court left-liberal intellectuals. The whole point of the covert operation was subtlety; to win over the left-leaning intellectuals to the American position, not further alienate them. The fierce prosecution of the US position in Vietnam was disturbing to both Josselson and Hunt. Like many in the CIA, they were appalled by the US engagement in Vietnam and wished to keep the Congress for Cultural Freedom clear of this political minefield. A difference of opinion between the Paris office and the AACF about Vietnam was a complication in getting the funding to establish a South East Asian institute. The greater complication was an exposé in the New York Times in April 1966 which pinpointed a funding link between the CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
After a series of exposés and repudiations of the CIA connection in 1967 McAuley published a careful response in Quadrant admitting the funding from the CIA was 'deplorable', but no more than 'a well-intentioned blunder'. His defence that he had been an unwitting recipient of CIA largesse has been restated by Peter Coleman. 'McAuley, like everyone else, was unaware of its ultimate source", he writes. Yet how was McAuley so unaware when Clem Christesen knew the money came from the CIA as far back as 1956? How was it that the editor of Quadrant had shown so little curiosity as to the source of money being so liberally handed out? A quick perusal of McAuley's editorials give the flavour of the invective he would employ should the editor of a left-wing magazine discover he had 'unwittingly' been receiving 40% of his income from the KGB.
As an observer at the General Assembly of the Congress of Cultural Freedom where Josselson and Hunt offered their resignations in May 1967, McAuley wrote to Krygier that he found the stance of 'outraged innocence' among Congress members was totally hypocritical, since 'none of them had been really much deceived'. Himself included. He knew all along that Quadrant was on the American government payroll in the service of American foreign policy. It didn't really matter to him where the money came from. 'I had assumed it was probably State Department funds and that didn't give me any worries', he admitted in an interview with Catherine Santamaria. 'None of it caused me any internal distress.'
As Peter Coleman says, not even I would have the chutzpah to question the 'adamantine integrity' of this man.
*All the amounts have been converted into 1998/99 dollars according to the CPI index following the ABS catalogue 6401.0. The funding information comes from the Quadrant papers ML MSS 3570.
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