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By NATHAN GLAZER
New York Times Book Review
THE MIGHTY WURLITZER: How the CIA Played America.
By Hugh Wilford.
Illustrated. 342 pp. Harvard University Press. $27.95.
This is a book whose content somewhat contradicts its title. “Mighty Wurlitzer” was the metaphor Frank Wisner, the first chief of political warfare for the Central Intelligence Agency, used to describe the C.I.A.’s “array of front organizations.” They were, he said, “capable of playing any propaganda tune he desired.” But Wisner rather exaggerated what he was able to do, as one learns from this remarkably detailed and researched book by Hugh Wilford, a British scholar now at California State University, Long Beach. For these organizations were not exactly “front organizations” as the term was understood by the Communist Information Bureau, or Cominform, the model that the young C.I.A. was trying to match.
The Kremlin had set up the Cominform in the early years of the cold war to coordinate the activities of scores of Communist-controlled professional, artistic and intellectual groups, and the C.I.A. decided to create or influence its own array of organizations and publications among intellectuals, labor organizations and citizen groups. But the leaders of just about all of these groups had minds of their own, and most of the organizations had been established independently of the C.I.A. For example, the small magazines Partisan Review and The New Leader, which, Wilford says, received C.I.A. funds in one way or another, owed nothing to the agency, either in their founding or in their operations. The idea of “fronts” hardly applies to them.
There were indeed fronts directly established by the C.I.A. for a particular goal, and the story Wilford tells of them in “The Mighty Wurlitzer” is fascinating, involving a surprising collection of well-known figures in American life. Consider the Independent Service for Information, set up at Harvard specifically for the purpose of getting some young anti-Communist Americans to attend a huge youth festival being organized by the Communists in Vienna in 1959. This was one of a series of events in which the Soviet Union promoted its versions of peace and progress, as contrasted with the cold-war policies of the capitalist United States.
(Continued here.)
New York Times Book Review
THE MIGHTY WURLITZER: How the CIA Played America.
By Hugh Wilford.
Illustrated. 342 pp. Harvard University Press. $27.95.
This is a book whose content somewhat contradicts its title. “Mighty Wurlitzer” was the metaphor Frank Wisner, the first chief of political warfare for the Central Intelligence Agency, used to describe the C.I.A.’s “array of front organizations.” They were, he said, “capable of playing any propaganda tune he desired.” But Wisner rather exaggerated what he was able to do, as one learns from this remarkably detailed and researched book by Hugh Wilford, a British scholar now at California State University, Long Beach. For these organizations were not exactly “front organizations” as the term was understood by the Communist Information Bureau, or Cominform, the model that the young C.I.A. was trying to match.
The Kremlin had set up the Cominform in the early years of the cold war to coordinate the activities of scores of Communist-controlled professional, artistic and intellectual groups, and the C.I.A. decided to create or influence its own array of organizations and publications among intellectuals, labor organizations and citizen groups. But the leaders of just about all of these groups had minds of their own, and most of the organizations had been established independently of the C.I.A. For example, the small magazines Partisan Review and The New Leader, which, Wilford says, received C.I.A. funds in one way or another, owed nothing to the agency, either in their founding or in their operations. The idea of “fronts” hardly applies to them.
There were indeed fronts directly established by the C.I.A. for a particular goal, and the story Wilford tells of them in “The Mighty Wurlitzer” is fascinating, involving a surprising collection of well-known figures in American life. Consider the Independent Service for Information, set up at Harvard specifically for the purpose of getting some young anti-Communist Americans to attend a huge youth festival being organized by the Communists in Vienna in 1959. This was one of a series of events in which the Soviet Union promoted its versions of peace and progress, as contrasted with the cold-war policies of the capitalist United States.
(Continued here.)
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