It's quite an achievement to have created a show that manages to be crowd-pleasing and provocative at the same time, and I hope he continues in this vein. For all his showing-off, Brand is using his influence to spread a message – a bit like the men he wants to emulate:
"Choose your heroes carefully or the culture will choose them for you."
"In 1953, the CCF launched Encounter, a joint Anglo-American monthly journal involving MI6 agent C.M. Woodhouse, a covert action veteran who had been involved in Operation Ajax in Iran (a joint CIA/MI6 plot to overthrow the elected government of Mohammed Mossadeq). The magazine exchanged facilities with Socialist Commentary and used many of the same staff and writers.
Encounter became one of the most influential liberal journals in the West.
As the CCF network grew, it embraced many prominent figures in the Labour Party - among them Anthony Crosland, who began attending CCF seminars along with Hugh Gaitskell, Denis Healey, Rita Hinden, Daniel Bell and a bevy of American and European politicians and academics.
Crosland's book The Future of Socialism was a major new political thesis which had been influenced by CCF conferences, in which he argued that growing affluence had radically transformed the working class in Europe and thus Marx's theory of class struggle was no longer relevant. The book was immediately adopted as the gospel of Labour's new leadership under Hugh Gaitskell.
During the 1950s, Gaitskell and his friends in the Socialist Commentary group adopted the argument forcibly put in the New Leader that a strong united Europe was essential to prevent the West from Russian attack. They received support from a New York-based group called the American Committee on United Europe, whose leadership included General Donovan, wartime head of the OSS (the fore-runner of the CIA), George Marshall, the U.S. Secretary of State, and Allen Dulles of the CIA.
How the CIA plotted against us
The NS made the left seem clever. Something had to be done, reports Frances Stonor Saunders
"Have you seen Encounter?" Mary McCarthy asked Hannah Arendt in October 1953, after reading the debut issue. "It is surely the most vapid thing yet, like a college magazine got out by long-dead and putrefying undergraduates." McCarthy was not alone in denigrating Encounter. Anthony Hartley, also in October 1953, remarked somewhat prophetically that "it would be a pity if Encounter, in its turn, were to become a mere weapon in the cold war". More mischievous was an item in the Sunday Times's Atticus column, which referred to the magazine as "the police-review of American-occupied countries". And A J P Taylor, writing in the Listener, complained: "There is no article in the [first issue] which will provoke any reader to burn it or even to throw it indignantly into the waste-paper basket. None of the articles is politically subversive . . . All are safe reading for children."
It is a measure of Encounter's success that it was able to ride these criticisms and establish itself in the "newborn Euro-American mind" as the leading review of its day. People still remember Nancy Mitford's famous article "The English aristocracy", a bitingly witty analysis of British social mores which introduced the distinction between "U and Non-U". Or Isaiah Berlin's four memorable essays on Russian literature, "A marvellous decade". Or Vladimir Nabokov on Pushkin, Irving Howe on Edith Wharton, David Marquand on "The Liberal revival", stories by Jorge Luis Borges, critical essays by Richard Ellmann, Jayaprakash Narayan, W H Auden, Arnold Toynbee, Bertrand Russell, Herbert Read, Hugh Trevor-Roper - some of the best minds of those decades.
The cultural side of Encounter (which political nymphomaniac Melvin Lasky sneeringly referred to as "Elizabeth Bowen and all that crap") thus secured its respectability among the intelligentsia. And yet, when it finally folded in 1991, few were willing to grant it a proper testimonial. It had become gouty, smug, anachronistic. Reeking of the cold war at a time when that conflict was all but exhausted, it had become a "whifflebird", the name one New York intellectual invented for a fabulous creature that "flies backward in ever decreasing circles until it flies up its own asshole and becomes extinct".
Encounter's demise can be traced directly to its origins as part of the "high-minded low cunning" of those British and American intelligence agents responsible for running the cultural cold war. Meeting in Whitehall in early 1951, the top echelons of the CIA and MI6 discussed the idea of an "Anglo-American left-of-centre publication" aimed at penetrating the fog of neutralism which dimmed the judgement of so many British intellectuals, not least those close to the New Statesman. What they needed was a voice that could oppose the "soft-headedness" and "terrible simplifications" of Kingsley Martin's magazine, and its "spirit of conciliation and moral lassitude vis-a-vis Communism".
The Foreign Office's secret subventions to Tribune had been a gesture in this direction. In April 1950 Malcolm Muggeridge, after meeting its editor Tosco Fyvel, reported that Tribune was "obviously badly on the rocks, and I said that in the interests of the cold war [it] should be kept going as a counterblast to the New Statesman. Developed one of my favourite propositions - that the New Statesman's great success as propagandist had been to establish the proposition that to be intelligent is to be Left, whereas almost the exact opposite is true."
The New Statesman and Nation was flourishing, its weekly circulation of 85,000 showing an impressive resilience to attempts to sap its "ideological hegemony". In these pre-Encounter days the CIA was dishing out secret subsidies to Michael Goodwin's journal Twentieth Century, on the specific understanding that it should address itself to rebutting the New Statesman's positions. "I fully agree the New Statesman is an important target, and must be dealt with systematically," Goodwin told his backers in January 1952.
But Goodwin's efforts were not enough to satisfy his secret sponsors, who now followed up their Whitehall meetings with a definite proposal for a new magazine. Cleared at the highest levels of the CIA and MI6, the project was passed down the lines and into the hands of three intelligence officers: Michael Josselson, Lawrence de Neufville and Monty Woodhouse. Woodhouse, a dashing, daring spy of the old school, was assigned to the Information Research Department, the Foreign Office's secret ministry of cold war. Josselson and de Neufville were acting under cover of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the organisation born in Berlin in 1950 as the beachhead from which western culture would be defended against communist encroachments. Funded and managed by the CIA, the congress announced itself in its Freedom Manifesto as the protector of cherished liberal values, the champion of every man's "right to hold and express his own opinions, and particularly opinions which differ from those of his rulers". Ironically it was not Stalinism but Washington realpolitik that would ultimately pose the greatest threat to this noble right.
It fell to Josselson, de Neufville and Woodhouse to devise the "operations and procedures" for creating and running the magazine that was to become the house organ of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Lunching at the RAC Club on Pall Mall one day in spring 1952, they agreed on how the then unnamed journal would be financed and distributed, who (subject to security clearance by both services) would edit it, and how its editorial content would be monitored, guided and, in extremis, controlled. The finance was handled mostly by the CIA, which used a dummy foundation to piggy-back dollars to Encounter's London account. For their part the British supplied a lesser amount, either in brown envelopes handed over to the magazine's managing editor or in cheques signed by the film director Alexander Korda and the millionaire Victor Rothschild, both of whom were willing "fronts".
What follows is, as they say, history. Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol, then Stephen Spender and Melvin Lasky, was outed in 1967 as a recipient of CIA funding. Spender resigned, Lasky stayed on. Pooh-pooh, said its apologists, who defended Encounter's impeccably independent credentials and derided claims that cultural freedom had been in any way compromised. Tut-tut, said its detractors (many of whom had received generous fees to write for it), we always knew that there was something fishy about it. And that was that. The axe fell on the cover-up, rather than on what one historian has described as "the sweetheart deal that western intellectuals enjoyed with the dark angel of American government for nearly two decades".
The deal was this: Encounter's editors were free to publish anything they wanted, as long as this did not adversely affect American interest. "We agreed that all articles on controversial topics should be seen by us before they were shown to anybody outside," wrote one of the front-office Metternichs of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, admonishing Encounter's editors for accept-ing a piece critical of US foreign policy in China. "We agreed that one of the fundamental policies of Encounter should be to work towards a better understanding between England and America."
New documentary evidence shows that Encounter received, and was receptive to, CIA "guidance". This explains what Bob Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, referred to as its "peculiar blind spot - it hardly ever contained any critical articles about the US, as if this was forbidden territory". For this acquiescence, Encounter earned the moral indignation of Conor Cruise O'Brien, who in 1966 attacked it, famously, for serving the power structure at a time when American soldiers were dying in Vietnam.
Encounter's wishy-washy record on McCarthyism should also be viewed in this context. It was a matter of policy that the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its journals leave McCarthyism well alone, as one English activist later recalled: "It was clearly understood that we must not criticise the American government, or the McCarthyism which was then at its height in the US." Generally managing to avoid the issue altogether, when it did examine it, Encounter's tone was far from condemnatory. In an essay of extraordinary obfuscation, Tosco Fyvel argued that, although McCarthy was to be regretted, he had to be viewed in the context of America's "insistent search for new national security, for a world, indeed, made safe for democracy". This, concluded Fyvel, was infinitely preferable to "European weariness, and scepticism of any such achievement".
Encounter is rightly remembered for its unflinching scrutiny of cultural curtailment in the communist bloc. But its mitigation of McCarthyism was less clear-sighted: where the journal could see the beam in its opponent's eye, it failed to detect the plank in its own.
Back at CIA headquarters in Washington, Encounter was regarded proudly as a "flagship", an effective vehicle for advancing the arguments for a pax Americana. It even became a calling card for CIA agents. Arranging a meeting with Ben Sonnenberg, a rich young wanderer who worked for the CIA in the mid-1950s, an agent told him, "I'll be carrying a copy of Encounter, so you'll know who I am". Josselson, the CIA agent who headed the Congress for Cultural Freedom, referred to it as "our greatest asset". In agency-speak an "asset" was "any resource at the disposition of the agency for use in an operational or support role".
Crucially, the CIA's operational principle dictated that organisations receiving its support should not be required "to support every aspect of official American policy". This meant that a leftish agenda could survive in an organ like Encounter. But while it "was left-wing in the sense that it gave expression to some left-wing views, it wasn't a free forum at all, which it purported to be", according to the British philosopher Richard Wolheim. "I think the effect of it was to give the impression that it was the whole spectrum of opinion they were publishing. But invariably they were cutting it off at a certain point, notably where it concerned areas of American foreign policy." This, according to one CIA chief, was precisely how Encounter was expected to perform: "It was propaganda in the sense that it did not often deviate from what the State Department would say US foreign policy was."
Encounter never shrank from exposing the useful lies by which communist regimes supported themselves. But by "keeping silent on any hot controversial issues" as Dwight MacDonald wrote, and "by excessive diplomacy and hush-hush attitude toward all the fakery and shoddiness that's for years been growing so in our whole intellectual atmosphere", Encounter suspended that most precious of western philosophical concepts - the freedom to think and act independently - and trimmed its sails to suit the prevailing winds. Encounter, "a weapon in the cold war", is gone, the New Statesman is going strong. Is there a lesson here?
Among the Labour politicians targeted by British Briefing were Neil Kinnock, shadow health secretary Robin Cook, spokesman for social services Michael Meacher and spokesmen for local government David Blunkett (an ironic list of names considering those MPs' right-wing credentials today). The Labour MP Chris Mullin was singled out for his "perpetual vendetta against British security arrangements", while Derbyshire MP Harry Barnes was labelled as "quite a vigorous Stalinist underminer of British parliamentary democracy". Other organisations were tarred with the Communist brush, notably the charity Shelter (for its "Communist affiliations"), the Institute for Race Relations ("effectively controlled by revolutionary socialists") and the World Council of Churches.
The newsletter was printed by the anti- Communist Industrial Research and Information Service (IRIS), whose parent body had been Common Cause. Copies were circulated to "political leaders, MPs, journalists and others", who were requested to treat it as confidential. British Briefing was funded to the tune of £270,000 over a three year period by Crozier's friend Rupert Murdoch.
The 61 was active in attacking the Labour Party in the run-up to the 1981 general election, with Douglas Eden writing a series of articles for the Daily Telegraph alleging Communist penetration of Labour. Tony Kerpel, a Tory councillor in Camden, designed for the Coalition for Peace Through Security a poster of Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich in 1918 with his piece of paper signed by Hitler, alongside a picture of Labour leader Michael Foot with a piece of paper. The captions under the pictures read: "1938, Neville Chamberlain" and "1981, Michael Foot" with the wording at the foot of the poster stating: "Don't let appeasement cause another World War". The poster was published by Norris McWhirter's Freedom Association.
On February 26th 1985, Crozier met again with Thatcher, when the prime minister asked him to help with a propaganda campaign against the municipal councils, including the Greater London Council (GLC); Crozier suggested a full counter- subversion programme. Also present was the CIA's William Casey, who proposed a "suitably substantial budget" for this rapid expansion of Crozier's UK operations.
Crozier planned action on several fronts, which he called: "penetration, legislation, influence and publicity". An organisation called Campaign Against Council Corruption (CAMACC) was set up, whose director Tony Kerpel was later appointed to the post of special adviser to Kenneth Baker, secretary of state for the environment. In Parliament, CAMACC's main activist was The 61's Edward Leigh MP. CAMACC briefed various peers and drafted speeches for them in relevant debates in the House of Lords. Letters and news coverage were secured in national papers and the councils were branded in much of the British public's imagination as "loony lefties" who were misusing public funds.
With Thatcher's approval, Brian Crozier liaised with Keith Joseph in "certain psychological actions" in the election year of 1987. One move was to brief the television presenter David Frost for a proposed interview with Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Frost met with Crozier at the Connaught Hotel on 6th January, where Crozier supplied a detailed background paper on Kinnock's "views, activities and personal relations in politics". The interview took place on May 24th during the election campaign and Crozier reported that a number of his points were raised by Frost; the interview "made a considerable impact" against Labour.
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