Sounds more appealing than rooting about in 500 boxes of records... "Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms." -Dostoevsky
In his review of Frances Stonor Saunders's ''Cultural Cold War'' (April 23), Josef Joffe informs us that ''everybody who was anybody'' wrote for the journals Encounter and Der Monat, which were sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency. Among those who did not were Simone de Beauvoir, E. H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Eric Hobsbawm, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Thomas Mann, Pandit Nehru, Jean-Paul Sartre and C. Wright Mills. Indeed, some of these figures were criticized harshly in the journals for their failure to manifest cold war orthodoxy. Joffe suggests that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 justifies the C.I.A.'s hidden subsidies to intellectuals. Had there been more discussion of alternative policies in the West, however, the wall might have fallen 20 years earlier. The C.I.A.'s ideological campaign may have prolonged the cold war. Joffe is not without his doubts. He declares that the covert nature of the C.I.A.'s operation ''sticks in the craw.'' Yet he thinks those working with the C.I.A. were right to do so, since ''they believed in what they were doing.'' As an editor of a great European weekly, would Joffe think it compatible with his responsibilities to his colleagues and readers were he to collaborate, covertly, with the C.I.A. -- even in a good cause? Norman Birnbaum http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/21/books/l-intellectual-espionage-225789.html
Joffe suggests that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 justifies the C.I.A.'s hidden subsidies to intellectuals. Had there been more discussion of alternative policies in the West, however, the wall might have fallen 20 years earlier. The C.I.A.'s ideological campaign may have prolonged the cold war.
Joffe is not without his doubts. He declares that the covert nature of the C.I.A.'s operation ''sticks in the craw.'' Yet he thinks those working with the C.I.A. were right to do so, since ''they believed in what they were doing.'' As an editor of a great European weekly, would Joffe think it compatible with his responsibilities to his colleagues and readers were he to collaborate, covertly, with the C.I.A. -- even in a good cause?
Norman Birnbaum
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/21/books/l-intellectual-espionage-225789.html
