Nancy Hanover — The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America

Long but fascinating. Factoid: Gloria Steinem was a CIA operative as a student.

The detailed and engrossing 2008 book, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, by Hugh Wilford, investigates the CIA’s ideological struggle from 1947 to 1967 to win “hearts and minds” for US capitalism and prosecute the Cold War.

It was a dirty business. The CIA devised schemes to create or utilize existing social organizations, phony pass-through entities, universities, various media, artist groups, foundations and charities to service its propaganda wars—attempting to place a “progressive” and even “humanitarian” veneer upon America’s expanding grip.

Despite the passage of time since the book’s release, it remains a pertinent read for its exposure of the modus operandi of the CIA’s ideological campaigns and the role of a section of the liberal intelligentsia in supporting it. It is an eye-opener, particularly for a younger generation that has been subjected to a decades-long, non-stop attempt to whitewash the CIA and US militarism. One gets a picture of the ferociously antidemocratic and reactionary operations of US imperialism and its intelligence apparatus, a clear demonstration of the thoroughly criminal and deceitful nature of American capitalism.

Most important of all, the reader comes away with a sense of the immense significance attributed by the American ruling elite to the ideological struggle against socialism.
The author correctly emphasizes, “If anything, these practices have intensified in recent years, with the ‘war on terror’ recreating the conditions of total mobilization that prevailed in the first years of the Cold War.” He adds that the agency is “a growing force on campus.”[3]

The metaphor—a “Mighty Wurlitzer”—was coined by Frank Wisner, the head of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), a paramilitary and psychological operations group created in 1948, which was folded into the CIA in 1951. He prided himself on directing the network of organizations to play any propaganda tune on demand, likening it to the world-famous theater organ.

The Dark Side

The first target for covert recruitment was émigrés from Germany, Eastern Europe and the USSR. Wilford refers here to operation “PAPERCLIP,” codename for the funneling of ex-Nazis with military or technical expertise into the US. He briefly notes the employment of Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s chief of military intelligence on the Eastern Front, whose network was “folded into” American and, several years later, German intelligence.

Wilford’s unfortunate tendency to sanitize US imperialism repeatedly undermines his exposures, a case in point being his description of the Gehlen connection. For example, rather than Wilford’s rather dry mention of it, Joseph Trento, author of The Secret History of the CIA, describes the same facts with more appropriate emphasis:

“… Gehlen convinced [Alan] Dulles [the first civilian director of the CIA, formerly with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Office of Policy Coordination] that the Unites States must provide protection for thousands of high-ranking Nazis. … ‘Nothing was more important than the recruitment of these Nazis who had escaped all over Europe. … You have to remember they were considered the ultimate anti-Communists … the American authorities were willing to recruit any useful Nazi …’”

Trento cites Robert T. Crowley, who played a significant role in managing the Nazis for the US. Trento concludes with the politically incriminating appraisal: “This partnership between the ex-Nazis and the OSS/CIA dominated US activity against the Soviet bloc for the next three decades.” [5]…

Early Media Involvement

From today’s vantage point, the suppression of information and collusion of journalists with the CIA is hardly a revelation. Nonetheless, the book points to the depth of this ongoing relationship from the earliest period of CIA operations.

In 1977, Carl Bernstein calculated that there were about 400 journalists who had worked for the CIA since 1952. But Wilford aptly notes that the number of individual journalists processing government stories was far less significant than the institutional collaboration between the agency and the major news media.

The author points out that Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, was a good friend of CIA Director Allen Dulles and signed a secrecy agreement with the agency. He says that under the terms of this arrangement, the Times provided at least ten CIA officers with cover as reporters or clerical staff in its foreign bureaus, while genuine employees were encouraged to merely spy. Dulles cultivated the media—they were excellent sources of information abroad.…

Wilford writes that Columbia Broadcasting System’s news president was in such constant telephone contact with CIA headquarters that, tired of leaving his office for the proverbial pay phone, he installed a private line to bypass the switchboard.…

There were also the news magazines. Like the New York Times, Henry Luce’s Time provided CIA officers with journalistic credentials. Wilford notes that “overall … the collaboration was extraordinarily successful, so much so it was difficult to tell precisely where the Luce empire’s overseas intelligence network ended and the CIA’s began.”….

 Youth Infiltration

The CIA and NSA also sponsored international youth festivals to “rescue Third World youth from the clutches of communist propagandists.” A leader in this operation was feminist icon Gloria Steinem. She accepted a paid position as director of the Independent Service for Information, “a CIA operation from beginning to end,” according to Wilford, and was made “witting.” Among her compatriots in this group was Zbigniew Brzezinski, at the time a Harvard graduate student, whom she described as “a star member of the Independent Service.”… 

WSWS
The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America

Nancy Hanover