Congress For Cultural Freedom - Involvement of The CIA

Involvement of The CIA

In 1967, the magazine Ramparts and the Saturday Evening Post reported on the CIA's funding of a number of anti-communist cultural organizations aimed at winning the support of supposedly Soviet-sympathizing liberals worldwide. These reports were lent credence by a statement made by a former CIA covert operations director admitting to CIA financing and operation of the CCF. The CIA web site states that "he Congress for Cultural Freedom is widely considered one of the CIA's more daring and effective Cold War covert operations."

In May 1967 Thomas Braden, head of the CCF's parent body the International Organizations Division, responded to the Ramparts article by publishing an article entitled, I'm Glad the CIA is "Immoral", in the Saturday Evening Post, where he defended the activities of the International Organizations Division unit of the CIA. Braden admitted that for more than 10 years, the CIA had subsidized Encounter through the CCF, which it also funded, and that one of its staff was a CIA agent.

Theories about the Australian arm of the IACF have abounded since 1975, when then Australian Governor-General John Kerr, an IACF member and, according to William Blum, as cited by John Pilger, a member of the executive board of the Australian branch, dismissed the government of then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.

Greenberg freely admits that the CCF was funded through CIA fronts, and singles out for praise the role of Professor Sidney Hook, who founded the U.S. predecessor to the CCF, Americans for Intellectual Freedom. Greenberg also notes that at the founding conference of the CCF in Berlin, the honorary chairmen included John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Benedetto Croce, Karl Jaspers and Jacques Maritain.