When the CIA turned writers into operatives

A very interesting novel I read, some years ago, is Fall from Grace, by Larry Collins (the co-author of other bestsellers with Dominique Lapierre).

A review by Ken Follett, another bestselling author:

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/16/books/on-the-altar-of-ove...

Reminds me of this...

William F. Buckley didn't just support the cold war — he actually participated in early CIA actions. In 1951 he became a deep cover CIA agent stationed in Mexico, reporting directly (and only) to E. Howard Hunt (who would later play a role in the Bay of Pigs invasion). Two years before his death, 79-year-old Buckley remembered a strange aftermath to his CIA work more than half a century before:

    In 1980 I found myself seated next to the former president of Mexico at a ski-area restaurant. What, he asked amiably, had I done when I lived in Mexico?

    Buckley's honest answer? "I tried to undermine your regime, Mr. President."*

https://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2008/02/28/the-collected-contro...

The US won the cold war in that famous kitchen when it became clear the USSR cannot make consumer goods.

A mistake that the Chinese made certain not to replicate.

Too much importance is made on free press, elections, freedom of expression. I was involved on a trade mission to Vietnam and nobody mentioned pride month.

Modern science can adjust narratives based on human brain responses, e.g. papers from public research started a decade ago could inform LLM feedback, https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2012/04/departm...

> FY2012 budget states a plan to “initiate investigations into the relationship between… neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, emotion-cognition interactions, and narrative structures.”

This article is a short overview and review of the podcast series mini-series "Not all propaganda is art"

The podcast's self-description is:

> “Not All Propaganda is Art” tells the story of three writers who got caught up in the Cultural Cold War between the years of 1956 and 1960: New Yorker writer and “little magazine” champion Dwight Macdonald, British theater critic and “Angry Young Man” Kenneth Tynan, and legendary Native Son novelist Richard Wright, who at this time was living in exile in France in protest of American racism. All three collaborated with and were targeted by American, British, and French security agencies in Cold War propaganda battles over contested intellectual ideas like the critique of mass culture and politically engaged art.

https://theoryofeverythingpodcast.com/

New Yorker neglects to mention if editors and publishers were involved. The word "publish" occurs 4 times, "editor" nil. Two of the CIA authors wrote for New Yorker. Who was the editor at the time? Meta inquiry would then wonder if this very article by New Yorker is yet another CIA article, to "manage perception".

What is the perception?

'Cold War antics' of a 'bygone era'. Or is CIA still manipulating journals and content? New Yorker is silent on this topic.

The russkies were doing the same. Read Thomas Rid's Active Measures. Choice quote from KGB colonel on publishing in western media: "If we didn't have the free press we would have had to invent it"

Everything CIA touches turns into shit x_x

As a creative person, finding out how much of that whole era was an operation is demoralizing. In culture it was a time when there was a there there. Young men could reasonably aspire to growing up to become artists and writers, in a society where ideas and discourse had coherent meaning and the politics of the nation had at least some accountability to reason. Reading that it was just another spy hustle makes me want to stop writing.

However, these stories also fit into the narrative that we have no culture, it was all fake, and therefore there is nothing worth preserving or protecting, only dismantling and dissolving. It's hackneyed. Another demoralizing narrative churned out by a partisan brunch chatter factory shouldn't bring us down.

Really, the CIA and the western intelligence community had one job. I like how the west thinks it won the cold war when all of its institutions are openly occupied by the very ideologues they were formed against. Sure, CIA backed culture industries, and Hollywood is an organ of the State Department, but in spite of these stories, the sort of people our society pays to do dirty jobs are not our protagonists, and they are not the story imo.

Any idea to think it is not going on right now?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird.

It's certainly going on today, especially in various three-letter agencies trying to control the narrative and keep the truth from public view -- see the Twitter Files by Taibbi and others.