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JOEL WHITNEY’S FINKS TRACES THE CIA’S HISTORY OF PROPAGANDA IN THE ARTS
Do you trust the CIA? Whether or not you do has a lot to do with which of the two versions of its history you read. The official version focuses on lives saved, wars averted and the bravery of individual agents. It’s also the version you get from Hollywood, in films the CIA helped make including Argo and Zero Dark Thirty.
The second version is marginal, but in many ways, ascendant. It focuses on the CIA’s coups and death squads, secret wars and extra-judicial drone strikes. Joel Whitney’s Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers falls squarely into the second camp.
Whitney chronicles the CIA’s secret establishment of literary magazines at the start of the Cold War that helped launch the careers of a generation of luminaries such as James Baldwin, Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez. They also censored authors who wanted to write about how the United States treated Black people, CIA-backed coups in Latin America and the war in Vietnam.
The magazines attempted to win over the intellectuals of other countries. Sometimes, as with The Paris Review, the CIA would offer to supplement an editor’s salary. Other times they would simply have one of their agents work as an editor. While the degree of editorial control varied, all the magazines were used to blast the Soviet Union for censoring intellectuals while simultaneously doing the exact same thing.
Whitney shows how the CIA’s early forays into magazines quickly metastasized into a broader cultural offensive. In 1958 the CIA secretly distributed Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago at the World’s Fair in Belgium so that it would be smuggled into Russia despite a ban on its publication there. The CIA pressured Ernest Hemingway to leave Cuba after Fidel Castro took power. More sinisterly, Whitney shows that Hemingway’s later claims that he was being followed by government agents ( largely dismissed as irrational paranoia) were true.
Within a few years the CIA was lobbying to deny Pablo Neruda the Nobel Prize in Literature and making sure their chosen candidate for the leadership of PEN (Arthur Miller) was selected.
This book relies on meticulous archival research, and at times it reads more like an academic treatise than commercial non- fiction. But ultimately the sluggish prose does little to detract from the excellent analysis.
Whitney repeatedly shows how the CIA used magazines (as well as newspapers, radio and television) to shape the public understanding of global events. His analysis echoes the late Princeton University professor Sheldon Wolin’s “inverted totalitarianism” theory, which argued that the United States adopted totalitarian tendencies as a means of social control during the Second World War and that those tendencies calcified during the Cold War, repeatedly justified by the desire to fight communism. Wolin argued that those totalitarian tendencies are still present in the modern day United States.
Whitney’s book also overlaps with Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, which argues that U.S. mass media is propagandistic in nature due to a variety of factors including self-censorship and widely held internalized assumptions. Critically, they see the propaganda as taking place “without overt coercion” from the State. Whitney takes it a step further, documenting overt coercion from the State in terms of spying on and censoring authors.
Finks chronicles the early days of the CIA: the funnelling of money to political parties in Italy, the decision to spy on journalists at Ramparts magazine, the coup in Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. Whitney brilliantly captures the widespread paranoia at the beginning of the Cold War and the way in which the CIA used the all-purpose excuse of fighting communism. A similar psychosis swept the United States in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 as previously illegal activities (e.g. torture, mass surveillance) were secretly authorized to combat the new all-purpose threat: terrorism.
Donald Trump has prompted concerns that he will rule as a kleptocrat openly warring with his intelligence agencies, but while many of his statements are extreme, fights between presidents and the intelligence community aren’t exactly rare. Kennedy spent years investigating the CIA after the Bay of Pigs. Johnson forced the CIA to accept questionable estimates on Vietnam and Nixon and Ford repeatedly politicized estimates on the Soviet Union. After 2003’s Iraq invasion the White House and the intelligence community waged a vicious battle over responsibility for the missing weapons of mass destruction used as justification. What does make Trump’s fight stand out is that it is happening in public and in realtime. Usually the full details of the intelligence community’s fights come out in dribs and drabs over many decades in books like Whitney’s.
Finks is a fascinating and timely book – particularly interesting in light of the ongoing debate over fake news. When so much of what comes out of Trump’s mouth is duplicitous if not mendacious, the question of who can be trusted in government is a pressing one. This book argues convincingly: it’s not the intelligence community.
THE CIA’S ... FORAY INTO MAGAZINES METASTISIZED