Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) (June 1950 to 1967?)
The CCF was the 1950 brainchild of a group of private individuals who come up with the idea of fighting Stalin’s brand of communism by using the non-communist left writers in Europe and the US. It became a section of the CIA with the secretly funding (subsidizing) writers, publishers and literary, magazine companies, as well as artists and musicians. This covert operation was difference from operation Mockingbird, which entailed CIA hiring news journalist and news organizations to write and published disinformation and propaganda. I will explain later that CIA propaganda operation, directed at Americans.
Truman signed the National Security directives PSBD-33/2 establishing the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) in April 1951. Its first chairman was Gordon Gray and served until May 1952. Gray was Truman’s assistant secretary of the army in 1947; two years later, he was appointed Secretary of the Army (1949 to 1950). Eisenhower then appointed Gray his National Security Advisor from 1958 until 1961.
The mission of the Psychological Strategy Board (CIA codenamed “Packet”) was to centralize and coordinate the psychological warfare operations of the CIA, Department of Defense, and State Department. According to one of the officers who worked in this secret project, Charles Burton Marshall, it was run by a group of self-appointed elites.
By May of 1952, Psychological Strategy Board took over the supervision of “psychological warfare program to influence overseas “opinion leaders.” They assumed the supervision of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom; the Moral Rearmament Movement, the Crusade for Freedom, which was the funding conduit for CIA Director (DCIA) Dulles’s National Committee for a Free Europe Radio Free Europe; and Paix et Liberte. Dulles was DCIA from February 26, 1953 to November 29, 1961)
The National Committee for a Free Europe, later known as Free Europe Committee, was an anti-communist Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) front organization,[1] founded on June 1, 1949, in New York City, which worked for the spreading of American influence in Europe and to oppose the Soviet one.
The committee was founded by Allen Dulles, later to be Director of Central Intelligence, in conjunction with DeWitt Clinton Poole. Early board members included Dwight Eisenhower, Lucius D. Clay, Cecil B. DeMille, Henry Luce, Mark Ethridge, Charles Phelps Taft II and DeWitt Wallace.[2][3]
From 1951 to 1952, Charles Douglas Jackson served as its president. The organization created and oversaw the anti-communist broadcast service Radio Free Europe.[4] CIA subsidies to the Free Europe Committee ended in 1971 which caused restructuring to its operations.[5]
The Free Europe Committee sent balloons with leaflets from West Germany to the Eastern Bloc countries. Each balloon was able to drop 100,000 leaflets.[6]
General Charles Douglas (C. D.) Jackson (March 16, 1902 – September 18, 1964) was a United States government propagandist[1][2] and senior executive of Time Inc. As an expert on psychological warfare he served in the Office of Strategic Services in World War II and later as Special Assistant to the President in the Eisenhower administration .
After the war, he became Managing Director of Time-Life International from 1945 to 1949. He later became publisher of Fortune Magazine. From 1951 to 1952, he served as president of the anticommunist Free Europe Committee. He was a speech writer for Dwight Eisenhower‘s successful 1952 presidential campaign. He was assigned to be Eisenhower’s liaison between the newly-created CIA and the Pentagon.
From February 1953 to March 1954, Jackson served as adviser to the President on psychological warfare.[4] He worked closely with the Psychological Strategy Board and was a member of the Operations Coordinating Board. He was also a member of the Committee on International Information Activities, which was known, after its chairman, William Harding Jackson, as the Jackson Committee.[5]
During 1953 and 1954, Jackson was key in establishing the Bilderberg Group and ensuring American participation. He attended meetings of the group in 1954, 1957, 1958, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, and 1964.[6]
Jackson was a defender of Radio Free Europe, stating, “Over the years, Radio Free Europe has never, in a single broadcast or leaflet, deviated from its essential policy, and did not broadcast a single program during the recent Polish and Hungarian developments which could be described as an ‘incitement’ program.”[7][8]
He later served in a position at the United Nations. From 1958 to 1960, he served as a speechwriter and White House manager after the departure of Sherman Adams and the death of John Foster Dulles. In 1960, he was publisher of Life magazine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Douglas_Jackson
Paix et Liberté was a French organizations of the anti-Communist apparatus that published, distributed and cupboards hundreds of thousands of posters in France in the 1950s. These were posters denouncing the Stalinist regime and the Communist Party and its leaders. It was substantially subsidized by the CIA.
Detailed logs kept at the White House showed PSB planners had to consult with Charles D. Jackson before their plans became operational. Brigadier General Charles Jackson, Deputy Chief at the Psychological Warfare Division, SHAEF, HQ in West German from 1944 to 1945.
Jackson was the guy who purchased Abraham Zapruder film (of JFK’s assassination) on behalf of Time/Life Inc. magazine. He ordered it locked in a vault at the Time/Life building in Manhattan for years. The magazine only published still photos made from the film. The film was later faked to hide curtain facts, for example, the limousine coming to a complete stop during or after shots were fired at it. But that story requires another book in order for me to describe all the evidence. Henry Luce, the owner of the Time magazine empire, was a friend of Allen Dulles and Luce help in establishing CCF.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) (codenamed QK/OPERA) was run by CIA boss Frank Wisner and ended up in the CIA International Organizations Division. Reporting to Wisner was the CIA’s Lawrence de Neufville, who worked at the CIA’s French Labor desk.
CIA officer Michael Josselson worked in CCF’s Paris headquarters. James Burnham, the former Trotskyite, was hired as a contract agent/consultant and was the primary liaison between the CIA and the intellectual community.
The paymaster for the operation was Irving Brown, who also ran CIA’s covert programs directed against the growing communist influence within labor unions, throughout Europe.
Recently discovered archival reports written by special agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics indicate that Brown was under investigation in the mid-1960s for trafficking in drugs, or money-laundering from drug-trafficking (which provided funds for covert operations). US documents linked him to notorious French crime bosses and Italian mafia figures.
The Fairfield Foundation and several other foundations were created by the CIA as fronts to hide the fact that the funds were from CIA. Once programs were established, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations took over major aspects of the funding, with the help of other leading US family foundations. Former German High Commissioner McCloy had personally written to mid-1960s Ford Foundation president McGeorge Bundy, to secure funding for Congress for Cultural Freedom after the covert operation was blown in 1967- made public by Tom Braden’s story in the Saturday Evening Post.
Braden was recruited into Special Operations Executive (SOE). SOE consisted of teams of British Special Forces soldiers who parachuted or somehow got behind enemy lines, dressed in civilian clothes during World War Two.
They were deployed into any country under the occupation of Nazi Germany including France, Belgium, Netherlands, Poland, Denmark and Yugoslavia. The SOE was extremely active in helping the French Resistance.
In 1944, along with Stewart Alsop he went to work with Allen Dulles at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). After the war Braden co-wrote with Alsop a history of the OSS called Sub Rosa: The O.S.S. and American Espionage (1946). When Allen Dulles joined the CIA as Deputy Director of Operations in December 1950 and he brought in Tom Braden (CIA alias Homer D. Hoskins) as his assistant.
Braden suggested to Allen Dulles that he should be allowed to establish International Organizations Division (IOD) to counteract Soviet propaganda by which helping to establish anti-Communist front groups in Western Europe. The International Organizations Division was dedicated to infiltrating academic, trade and political associations.
Braden oversaw the funding of groups such as the National Student Association, the Congress of Cultural Freedom, Communications Workers of America, the American Newspaper Guild and the National Educational Association. According to Braden, the CIA was putting around $900,000 a year into the Congress of Cultural Freedom (or about $2.5 million in 2015 dollars). CIA skimmed hundreds of millions of dollars from the Marshall Plan to finance its activities, funneling the money through fake philanthropic foundations it created or real ones like the Ford Foundation. Gilbert Greenway, a former CIA officer, recalled. “There were no limits, and nobody had to account for it. It was amazing.”
In November, 1954, Braden left the CIA. CIA officer Cord Meyer replaced him as head of International Organizations Division and CCF.
Gene Pope, the Enquirer’s publisher, had worked for the CIA since his twenties when he served in psyops for the CIA’s Italy desk. He left the CIA to serve in Korea War. After that he bought the failing New York Enquirer with a loan from mafia boss Frank Costello. He transformed it into the National Enquirer with CIA hovering as an editorial presence. The National Enquirer joined Reader’s Digest, to which CIA assigned the cryptonym LP/OVER. Respectable publishing houses like Farrar, Starus & Giroux cooperated with CIA.” (Sources: memoir of his father, by Paul David Pope)
http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-addendum-to-our-man-in-haiti.html
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the poet Stephen Spender, who was co-editor of Encounter, knew about the CIA’s role. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who was in the OSS and knew about some of the CCF’s activities, argued that the agency’s role was benign, even necessary. He stated, “Compared with the coups the CIA sponsored in Guatemala, Iran and elsewhere, its support of the arts was some of its best work…It enabled people to publish what they already believed. It didn’t change anyone’s course of action or thought.” I agree.
If you want to research which books and left-of-centre, literary magazines were subsidized by the CIA, go to my sources. Here is a short list of magazines Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, and Poetry, Partisan Review, Paris Review, Daedalus and Encounter. This picture of the CIA’s secret war of ideas had cameo appearances by scores of intellectual celebrities like the critics Dwight Macdonald and Lionel Trilling, the poets Ted Hughes and Derek Walcott and the novelists James Michener and Mary McCarthy, all of whom directly or indirectly benefited from the CCF operation.
It may have been the only good thing the CIA has done or will do, notwithstanding a lot of liberal writers feeling embarrassed because they were used by the “man”.
The CIA recognized from the beginning that it could not openly sponsor artists and intellectuals in Europe because there was so much anti-American feeling there. Instead, it decided to woo intellectuals out of the hard core, communist party orbit by secretly promoting a non-Communist left of democratic socialism. (Sources: The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters by Frances Stonor Saunders)
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/031800-02.htm
Dynastic Successions Book 