When the CIA had a magazine

In 1953 a remarkable magazine called Encounter appeared, as if out of nowhere, in London. There were two editors — the famous English poet Stephen Spender and the New York intellectual Irving Kristol, who would later be called the godfather of the neo- conservatives. With Spender’s tentacles reaching every corner of British literature and Kristol’s shrewd sense of American thinking, they proved an impressive pair.

Their magazine was full of life and ideas. John Berryman, the first-class American poet, called Encounter “the most consistently interesting magazine now being published.” The writers ranged from Evelyn Waugh to Mary McCarthy and from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a leading American liberal, to Anthony Crosland, a Labour cabinet minister and theorist. Somehow Encounter managed to get the best work that most of these people, and a few dozen others, could produce.

For 14 years it was a success, but then it was disgraced. Ramparts, a magazine of the then New Left, disclosed that Encounter was financed by the Paris- based Congress for Cultural Freedom, a creature of the Central Intelligence Agency.

This was in 1967 when anger at the Vietnam War threw a shadow over anything done by the U.S. government — especially anything secretive.

Fighting the Cold War, Washington had noticed that Soviet propaganda was succeeding among artists and leftists. The West needed to demonstrate the superiority of freedom as against the stultifying censorship in the U.S.S.R. In 1951 the CIA made Nicolas Nabokov ( Vladimir Nabokov’s composer cousin) head of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He organized festivals and conferences around Europe while encouraging Encounter and other CIA-backed magazines in Germany, Japan and elsewhere.

Several CIA administrat ors explained why this program was necessary. No word, however, about why the promotion of freedom had to be secret — or why the CIA was involved. Spender and Kristol said they didn’t know anything about the CIA and believed Encounter was sponsored by an independent f oundation ( which turned out to be a CIA front). Melvin J. Lasky and Frank Kermode replaced them but Kermode soon resigned. Encounter, under Lasky, published some good issues but never quite recovered. Wounded, it staggered on to 1991 before disappearing.

For half a century, the literary world has believed that anyone connected with Encounter was a dupe or a secret agent. A 2015 BBC broadcast denounced it retroactively but a less harsh view has emerged, arguing that the magazine’s high quality was, on reflection, more important than its financing. The Times Literary Supplement has run two pieces praising Encounter and suggesting the CIA scandal was a fuss about nothing. A revisionist opinion has poked through, notably in the reviews of the memoirs of Matthew Spender, Stephen’s sculptor son, and in discussion of Vincent Giroud’s biography of Nicolas Nabokov.

I remember Encounter with affection as the best magazine published in English during my lifetime. When I heard about the CIA my first thought was that Encounter was probably the nicest thing the CIA ever did.

In Encounter Isaiah Berlin wrote wisely about 19th-century Russian literature and Hugh Trevor- Roper delivered a famous attack on the bloated reputation of Arnold Toynbee’s 10- volume Study of History. (“Every chapter of it has been shot to pieces by the experts.”) Waugh debated Nancy Mitford on upperclass and lower-class English usage. Dwight Macdonald, one of the brilliant American journalists of the era, spent a year in London as an associate editor and later wrote for Esquire his “Confessions of an Unwitty CIA Agent.” Persecuted Russian writers, from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Joseph Brodsky, appeared often. Poland was extensively represented by the anti-Marxist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, Hungary by Arthur Koestler. The young George Steiner made the beginnings of his reputation there. The Angry Young Men, from John Osborne to John Wain, were heard from.

The current view of Encounter and the Congress suggests that there may be something to learn from them. Paul Berman, the author of Terror and Liberalism, has pointed out that intellectual sin the Congress for Cultural Freedom campaigned against the totalitarian currents of their time “and there is no reason why this couldn’t be done in our own day.” Leon Wieseltier, a major figure in Washington journalism, has confessed that he has “Congress for Cultural Freedom envy.” David Brooks of The New York Times has argued that to deal with Islamist jihadism, the West needs an outlet like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, “to give an international platform to modernist Muslims and to introduce them to Western intellectuals.”

After generations of abuse, the 1950s solution may be worth considering. If it’s revived, it should involve many countries rather then one — it might work as an offshoot of NATO. Doing it in secret has been tried and failed and from the start it might be wise to avoid CIA participation.