CIA secretly backed UK cartoon
LANDMARK British animation film Animal Farm was secretly financed by the CIA, which snapped up the rights from George Orwell’s widow by promising to introduce her to her idol Clark Gable.
Black-ops mastermind Howard Hunt – the future Watergate burglar and President Nixon henchman – then tinkered with Orwell’s classic fable to send an anti-soviet message to the world.
According to new research by the National Archives, CIA spymaster Allen Dulles was desperate to find stories that could be turned into films to promote American foreign policy.
“Part of the reason the CIA were interested in Orwell was the fact his works were internationally famous,” said Cold War movie expert Dr Tony Shaw, of the National Archives. “The other reason was that Orwell was dead, and free to be manipulated as far as the intelligence agency was concerned.”
Hunt sent two colleagues working undercover in the film industry to secure the rights from Sonia Orwell, George’s widow.
To seal the deal, the CIA arranged for her to visit actor Gable in Hollywood.
The obvious production vehicle for an animated blockbuster was Disney but agency bosses feared the corporation might contain Left-wing sympathisers.
So the CIA chose small British company Halas & Batchelor, run by husband and wife John Halas and Joy Batchelor from a studio in Gloucestershire.
“The CIA was lock, stock and barrel behind the making of the film,” Dr Snow added. According to the National Archives research, the couple did not have a clue the CIA was funding the project or of their hidden agenda behind the story tweaks.
The first change was to make master pig Napoleon the central villain and make him clearly identifiable as Joseph Stalin.
The CIA plotters then persuaded the animators that the tale “needed a happy ending”.
In Orwell’s 1945 novel, the pigs get drunk with the humans at the end and announce Animal Farm will revert to its original name of Manor Farm. But in the 1954 cartoon, evil Napoleon is defeated when the animal kingdom rises in revolt against his cruel rule.
The National Archives experts say the CIA hoped the film would trigger a similar rebellion when screened in the Eastern Bloc.