What happened with the CIA and The Paris Review?

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/11/11/what-really-happened-with-the-cia-and-the-paris-review-a-conversation-with-lance-richardson/

by benbreen • 8 months ago

190 116 8 months ago

theparisreview.org

cafard• 8 months ago

Most interesting. Of Matthiessen's writing I know only the Shadow Country books.

I wonder about the biographer's practical judgment, though:

I got very ill at that altitude. A doctor, when I got back, told me I had the symptoms of pulmonary edema. But it was worth it. I’d do it all again.

[Edit] Frank Kermode's memoir Not Entitled includes some interesting pages about the CIA funding of Encounter becoming publicly known.

rdtsc• 8 months ago

On the relationship of CIA and the media there is always the 1977 classic https://www.carlbernstein.com/the-cia-and-the-media-rolling-...

An interesting tidbit I found, somewhat related:

Employees of so‑called CIA “proprietaries.” During the past twenty‑five years, the Agency has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers—both English and foreign language—which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives. One such publication was the Rome Daily American, forty percent of which was owned by the CIA until the 1970s. The Daily American went out of business this year,

cess11• 8 months ago

The Church Committee also produced interesting documents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee#External_link...

As a consequence a lot of such activities were instead moved over to special operations forces, as detailed by Seth Harp in his recent book The Fort Bragg Cartel.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730414/the-fort-bra...

toofy• 8 months ago

this is a fantastic book. immediately what i thought about the instant you mentioned the church committee.

maybelsyrup• 8 months ago

Seconding the recommendation of Harp's book, it's excellent.

webdoodle2• 8 months ago

The pike committee documents provided more information about Operation Mockingbird and the CIA's influence in the new media.

selected docs: https://maryferrell.org/php/showlist.php?docset=1107

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence/2017-06...

jesuswasjew• 8 months ago

Any source on CIA's old involvement in India's press?

defrost• 8 months ago

They absolutely didn't have their finger on the pulse in 1998 ...

https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/98-672.html

They grilled some Australian bush pilots no end over that, wanting to know how they knew what the CIA didn't.

MrBuddyCasino• 8 months ago

"Proprietaries" are also known as "cutouts", and the CIA uses those extensively in order to do things they really aren't allowed to do and to provide plausible deniability. Mike Benz [0] is a good introduction to how the CIA (and, by extension, the state department and Pentagon) work.

I promise "The History of the Intelligence State" is worth your time.

[0] https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber

Jun8• 8 months ago

Whoa! I knew that CIA funded Abstract Expressionist Art (https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20161004-was-modern-art-...) to underline American individualism and mental superiority over Soviet Russia (some say that's why "modern art" sucks, but see this excellent writeup: https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/ifnq9v/the_cia_...). However, involvement in Paris Review boggles my mind because, I love that magazine.

coldtea2• 8 months ago

to underline American individualism

"So individual that it's manipulated by a state agency!"

That really showed them those commies manipulated by their state agencies, ...oh wait!

lo_zamoyski4• 8 months ago

The best manipulation makes you think it was your idea in the first place.

chemotaxis• 8 months ago

But it did. The efforts hastened the collapse of the USSR and led to good outcomes for Central Europe. The propaganda of that era wasn't supposed to be covert because it wasn't selling something objectionable. Everyone knew who's behind Radio Free Europe, for example. It was just a way to popularize Western values, and it worked.

Mind you, it's not like the Soviets were not doing the same to export their values. They were bankrolling overseas labor organizations, academics, etc.

red-iron-pine4• 8 months ago

if communism is so wonderful then I'm sure most of the former ComBloc countries will go back to it any day now...

the equivocation and whataboutism here is mindboggling

Atlas6674• 8 months ago

They didn't just establish abstract expressionist art, they crafted a whole culture around art and the humanities. They won over the western bias. Aesthetics, depth, reason and humanity in the west was defined through the lens of the CIA. It was done so well it still resonates.

Dr. Gabriel Rockhill does excellent work expounding on this in his discussion "The Intellectual World War: Class Struggle in Theory". He studied in France under Derrida, Iragray, Badiou, Foucaultians, and other prominent thinkers and came to discover the connections himself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q521mBZ7ThU

It's kind of a long lecture, but absolutely mind blowing.

bazoom422• 8 months ago

They didn’t “establish” abstract expresssionist art. They helped promote it just as they helped promote jazz music and other US culture. It was not like CIA developed art or jazz musicians in a lab, they just realized it was great marketing for US culture, especially as communist-bloc art and culture became increasingly bland and conformist.

It was probably one of the best investments CIA ever made.

api3• 8 months ago

This is just high brow conspiracist stuff.

I find it fascinating sometimes that both the left and the right are fundamentally conspiracist in their worldview. For the left it’s a Marxist class conspiracy and for the right it tends to be a variety of conspiracies by out groups (Jews, gays, supposed devil worshippers, etc.) to undermine the social order. The failure of far left and far right experiments is always explained by conspiracies. And of course the far left and the far right are conspiracies from each others point of view!

They truth is the US state promoted and funded all kinds of US culture to boost US cultural exports and influence the world, hopefully away from the Soviet sphere. What the culture was was less important than the fact that it was not Soviet.

It wasn’t some sophisticated conspiracy. Bureaucracy gets a mandate: promote America as a product. Bureaucrats look for things that are American or Western that don’t seem to be too “red” and fling money in their general direction. The bias against anything that seems “red” explains the funding of modern “aaaaht” devoid of coherent intellectual content. Art backed by bureaucrats always tends to be bland since it’s always a safe choice in the bureaucracy.

Not saying it was great. They funded a lot of shite which probably distorted things and boosted a lot of stuff that would have been footnotes in art history otherwise.

There’s also a long history of military recruitment propaganda through Hollywood. It’s basically a genre of film. Some of them are damn good popcorn movies but it’s obvious that they are propagandizing young men to join up. Top Gun comes to mind.

caycep• 8 months ago

It always struck me as a government funded Mad Men agency.

Kind of like how InQTel is like a government funded Kleiner Perkins

pessimizer4• 8 months ago

The CIA funded an enormous amount of the anti-Communist left and elite art. It was the best investment they ever made.

I'm sorry, but that confident citation of the reddit thread is the same confident dismissal that CIA funded outlets were giving contemporaneously. The CIA didn't "come up" with abstract expression, it poured money into it (and mostly the ecosystem around it) and made it far more dominant than it would have been. The way you got a book published about art is to have indirectly taken money from the CIA at many points in your career, likely with absolutely no awareness of it.

The reasons those paintings were selling for enormous amounts of money, especially to institutions, is because intelligence would grease the wheels on some other deal they wanted to make, and buying a painting that was just paint splatter was the payment. That created a market that unconnected people would enter organically, and tastes would reconfigure around what sold (because art is what rich people will pay for.)

It's a tactic that is still very much active for the intelligence services. They offer quid pro quo to shills who finance things that they want to happen. They finance media outlets who employ critics and pundits with the tastes they want to encourage, and fluff the incomes and find tax breaks (or just direct grants) for the people that produce the stuff. And upper-middle class elites follow the herd and ridicule the people who don't understand nuance.

Now it's so cheap, too. They just have to hand out "upvotes" and get control of the algorithms. They don't even have to write the comments, just virtually praise establishment-loving morons who will say anything for more praise. Also make sure they never go broke or stay in jail for more than a week or two.

benchly• 8 months ago

Some days, everything feels like one big psyop.

PunchyHamster• 8 months ago

Looking at current US political situation with left being entirely inept with strongest point being "we're not the other guys"

... no, CIA funding modern art was not good

lo_zamoyski4• 8 months ago

Also Time magazine.

It's not uncommon to hear from people who lived behind the Iron Curtain how propagandistic American media is. If anything, it's less coarse than the Soviet variety.

So, two reasons:

1. The more conspicuous varieties of manipulation in the Soviet Union and elsewhere sensitized people to the existence of such manipulation everywhere else, even in subtler and more insidious forms.

2. The classic "fish don't know what water is": what Americans can't see, because they were raised from birth and marinating in it, foreigners can spot more readily by contrast.

And because the US was effectively a sort of godfather and guardian of countries west of the Iron Curtain following the War, it had a lot of pull with the media in those countries and cooperated with the appropriate people to promote and cement the Pax Americana.

throwawayqqq11• 8 months ago

3. You can actually afford to bring more nuanced, maybe even self-critical reports because your moral baseline is more then a superficial symbol like "freedom".

TeeMassive2• 8 months ago

I like to read the propaganda / state funded media of most major nation states of the world: Al Jazeera, TRT, CGTN, RT, BBC, CBC, PBS, etc.

Western "propaganda" is the most insidious and frankly insane. At least with other state media it is clear they are being advocates and their own population don't believe it and won't defend it in private conversations. But in the West we have a way to make people want to believe, it is very uncanny. If I see another "let's go to war for Afghan/Iranian/Syrian women" documentary from the CBC I will lose my mind.

underlipton2• 8 months ago

It's a little stunning how well this also describes dynamics of racism in the US. Very Baldwin-esque observations. Something to consider any time you hear criticism, on the basis of "bias", of the assessment of someone from a group who have themselves been subjected to "more conspicuous varieties" of bigotry than the average American.

Might also be applied to class consciousness. An acquaintance (liberal, Southern, white) once described the voting patterns of less-affluent white Southerners as, essentially, trying to front-run the greed and cruelty of the elite class. Give them what they think they want, even if it hurts, so that they don't linger on the subject and come up with something worse. A dynamic where you really would have to know your oppressor better than they know themselves, or you.

mk89• 8 months ago

I think that thanks to the internet we have more access to a lot of literature like never before, so in theory we can recognize certain "patterns" more easily now than some years ago.

People from the East Europe will tell you that American media is clearly a propaganda machine, but they themselves grew up during difficult times and the one lesson they all learnt is: don't trust. You cannot trust your neighbors, you cannot trust your friends, you cannot trust anyone.

Therefore, media in the West appears as a big pile of propaganda (which in many cases is true). However, they also have their own propaganda, maybe "drier" and more straightforward, but one way or another, all countries need to keep the flock of humans in line.

mzl• 8 months ago

The classic "fish don't know what water is": what Americans can't see, because they were raised from birth and marinating in it, foreigners can spot more readily by contrast.

Learning that US schoolchildren recite the pledge of allegiance in school baffled my mind when I first realized it was actually true. As an outsider, it sounded like an obvious parody/caricature of nationalism, especially with the religious part.

2b3a51• 8 months ago

Two quotes from OA

"He had left the agency in 1953, after about two years, but he never divulged the details of his work for the organization"

Seems part of the deal for these kinds of job?

"In terms of other materials, the CIA wouldn’t give me anything. I filed FOIA requests. I talked to their entertainment liaison, who works with Hollywood. But they don’t declassify personnel records."

The reciprocal part of the deal.

The 'old boys network' recruitment as we call it in the UK fits the pattern. I suppose that there was a desire to have eyes and ears among the new elite peer group.

I imagine that the Agency was compartmentalised so a cultural adjutant in Paris would not necessarily know about activities in Iran.

(The Snow Leopard remains a favourite book of mine).

fallingfrog2• 8 months ago

"Given that The Paris Review portrayed itself as studiously apolitical—recall William Styron’s famous anti-manifesto in the first issue, fashioning it as a home for “the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders”—Matthiessen’s CIA involvement has raised questions and eyebrows since its revelation in the seventies."

This is actually a bit of a tell, because the best way to make ideology palatable is to make it seem like common sense (which is easy if that ideology is already in power). As zizek said, it is when you believe you have stepped outside ideology that you are most fully ensnared by it.

A lot of people think, "I am not ideological, I just use common sense, I am apolitical." Sorry but this is a game you must play whether you want to or not- trying to avoid making a choice is still making a choice.

Its like with fashion, for example- you may think that by wearing khaki shorts and sandals with socks that you are avoiding making fashion choices, but what is actually happening is that you are simply making very bad fashion choices.

I rather think that one of the psychological principles beneath authoritarianism is that making choices requires effort, and so people try to avoid it, and the easiest way to do that is by copying whatever everyone else is doing. When a person in this mode sees other people doing things that are different or unusual or out of place, they are reminded that in fact they have free will, and that other choices were always possible, and that is a disturbing and uncomfortable thought.

shermantanktop2• 8 months ago

Fashion may not be the best example, given the propensity of fashion trends to drive large numbers of people to do ridiculous things. My recent favorite is the mania for women wearing a loose sweater but tucking it in to their waistband in the front. I’m sure it has a name, but I don’t know what it’s called.

EDIT: it’s called the “millenial tuck.”

I guess what I’m saying is that I wear shorts, I know some people think that’s bad, but their opinion is invalidate by their own ugly clothing choices. So we’re all guilty.

fallingfrog2• 8 months ago

Sure- when I talk about trying to avoid choices when it comes to fashion, I am describing myself. I thought when I was young that people who i saw presenting themselves in a way that seemed deliberate were being artificial, and in order to be authentic i should avoid trying to present any specific image to the world.

What I was actually doing was wearing whatever my relatives gave me for Christmas. So, in my attempt to avoid making any choice I just ended up dressing like a nerd- which of course, I was, but I guess the point is that trying to avoid a choice is also a choice. We are all guilty, as you say!

creaturemachine• 8 months ago

It's called a French Tuck.

bugglebeetle• 8 months ago

given the propensity of fashion trends to drive large numbers of people to do ridiculous things.

This seems like it would make it the perfect corollary to ideology…?

Zigurd• 8 months ago

Now we have American Dynamism. So unsubtle that they say the quiet part out loud way before it's history: https://a16z.com/storytelling-in-american-dynamism-lessons-f...

qgin• 8 months ago

The online troll farms of today make me nostalgic for an age when intelligence agencies were putting effort into promoting jazz and modern art for national security reasons.

HPsquared• 8 months ago

In 100 years, people will be looking at vintage memes in university classes and writing papers on them.

xhkkffbf• 8 months ago

Maybe in 100 months or 100 days.

But you really should say that kids will be telling LLMs to write a paper about the memes.

mikkupikku5• 8 months ago

Trolling is to discourse what modern art is to art.

ferguess_k• 8 months ago

CIA had/has very deep root in Europe during the Cold War. Propaganda Due and Operation Gladio were part of the story. The whole movie Godfather III was inspired by Propaganda Due.

webdoodle2• 8 months ago

Operation Mockingbird was such a wide sweeping apparatus. After Carter fired 75% of the CIA, due to the revelations in the Church and Pike Committee's, those newly unemployed spooks all got jobs directly in the news media, bypassing the need for agents or that pesky Smith-Mundt Act. Every major news outlet in the English speaking world was printing or re-printing there propaganda.

Operation Mockingbird 2.0 has been ongoing since at least 2005, and involves social media, smartphones, psychological profiles, and now AI handlers. It is still run by the CIA, but indirectly, instead using the Billionaires SummerCamp in Sun Valley Idaho as a yearly propaganda conference. Along with the bottomless purse that Citizen's United provided, they can now spend any amount of money on propaganda by using dark money superpacs.

etc-hosts2• 8 months ago

I can't remember the names of all of the parts of the CIA right now, there are two, but Carter ended up having 5 percent of the Clandestine Services fired. that's it.

mannanj• 8 months ago

People forget the CIA is funded by and supports the rich. They hold themselves accountable, and often operate in missions contrary to the best interest of the American people. The media, thus, captured by the CIA as we all know, does not represent the interest of the people.

djaouen• 8 months ago

His first wife’s name was Patsy Southgate???

What happened with the CIA and The Paris Review?

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