Historian and journalist Frances Stonor Saunders, whose 1999 book exposed Central Intelligence Agency covert funding of the cultural Cold War, died of a brain tumor on August 31 at age sixty.
With her landmark 1999 debut, Frances Stonor Saunders single-handedly established a new branch of sub-history.
Investigating the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the CIA
Her 1999 debut book examined intelligence agency meddling in literature, magazines, and media between 1950 and 1967. Intelligence agencies partnered in a covert front launched by the CIA to manipulate Cold War intellectuals through propaganda and censorship.
The program relied on abstract art exhibits, classical music tours, and dozens of intellectual magazines founded across London and elsewhere. Associated fronts funded press agencies, anti-communist student activists, labor unions, ethnic studies programs, and the pro-war Vietnam Lobby, while sending moles into Hollywood back offices to censor scripts and enforce Western cultural dominance.
Editorial Battles and the Fight Over the US Edition
In a late draft, her original editor insisted she praise the CIA, a demand that nearly tanked the American edition when she refused. After her original publisher dropped the book, Frances Stonor Saunders confronted the tenets of Congress for Cultural Freedom veterans to preserve her findings. When offered to every publisher in New York, no one took it except for the Free Press, though the press published at odds with her viewpoint. During the Reagan era, the Free Press — established in 1947 — underwent a directional shift spearheaded by neoconservative Edwin Glikes. Under Adam Bellow’s leadership it grew worse, publishing Dinesh D’Souza’s work, David Brock’s books, and Charles Murray’s racist classic, culminating in 1989 when it crowned its canon with the very book she hoped to correct for its whitewash, which praised the CIA for the CCF scandal.
historian Frances Stonor Saunders died recently at age 60. Her book Who Paid the Piper? pulled back the curtain on postwar CIA funding of Western cultural institutions — despite repeated attempts to censor it, including by her American publisher..book.https://t.co/ee94jTtpl5
single-handedly established a new branch of sub-history.
Ian McEwan, novelist via Yahoo
Dressed in preppy but understated layers, she dons glasses with red frames and simple pearl earrings. Historian Christopher Lasch initially used in 1968 the expression she has worked hardest to popularize, applying it to those same New York Intellectuals — including Kristol, who established the American CCF and subsequently helped shape neoconservatism — characterizing them as high-ranking McCarthyites who on occasion backed Sen. Joseph McCarthy explicitly. Saunders found her engagement with the organization contradictory, noting it was a peculiar defense of an organization built covertly for the theft of culture to say it did not matter because they were going to do it anyway, while some of those she interviewed were bluntly honest.
Praise, Accolades, and Academic Legacy
The book earned widespread acclaim, winning the Royal Historical Society’s William Gladstone Memorial Prize and a short-listing for a prominent first-book award. In 2018, she received election as a Royal Society of Literature Fellow.
a major work of investigative history.
Edward Said, scholar via Yahoo
Said added that the dispiriting truth it reveals, or confirms, is that few of ‘our’ major intellectual and cultural figures resisted the blandishments of the CIA
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