Finks
HOW THE C.I.A. TRICKED THE WORLD'S BEST WRITERS
"Another odd episode steps out from the Cold War's shadows. Riveting."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Listen to this book, because it talks in a very clear way about what has been silenced."
—John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing and winner of the Man Booker Prize
"It may be difficult today to believe that the American intellectual elite was once deeply embedded with the CIA. But with Finks, Joel Whitney vividly brings to life the early days of the Cold War, when the CIA's Ivy League ties were strong, and key American literary figures were willing to secretly do the bidding of the nation's spymasters." —James Risen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War
“A deep look at that scoundrel time when America's most sophisticated and enlightened literati eagerly collaborated with our growing national security state. Finks is a timely moral reckoning—one that compels all those who work in the academic, media and literary boiler rooms to ask some troubling questions of themselves...” —David Talbot, founder of Salon and author of The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America's Secret Government
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About the Book
When news broke that the CIA had colluded with literary magazines to produce cultural propaganda throughout the Cold War, a debate began that has never been resolved. The story continues to unfold, with the reputations of some of America’s best-loved literary figures—including Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, and Richard Wright—tarnished as their work for the intelligence agency has come to light.
Finks is a tale of two CIAs, and how they blurred the line between propaganda and literature. One CIA created literary magazines that promoted American and European writers and cultural freedom, while the other toppled governments, using assassination and censorship as political tools. Defenders of the “cultural” CIA argue that it should have been lauded for boosting interest in the arts and freedom of thought, but the two CIAs had the same undercover goals, and shared many of the same methods: deception, subterfuge and intimidation.
Finks demonstrates how the good-versus-bad CIA is a false divide, and that the cultural Cold Warriors again and again used anti-Communism as a lever to spy relentlessly on leftists, and indeed writers of all political inclinations, and thereby pushed U.S. democracy a little closer to the Soviet model of the surveillance state.
Publication January 3, 2017 • 348 pages
Paperback ISBN 978-1-682190-24-1 • E-book 978-1-682190-25-8
About the Author
Photo © Gregg Richards
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Joel Whitney is a cofounder and editor at large of Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Boston Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, Dissent, Salon, NPR, New York Magazine and The Sun. With photographer Brett Van Ort, he co-wrote the 2013 TED Talks ebook on landmine eradication, Minescape. His poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, The Nation, and Agni. His Salon essay on The Paris Review and the Congress for Cultural Freedom was a Notable in the 2013 Best American Essays. |
Read an Excerpt
….Implicit in Plimpton’s response, detailed in the pages to come, is the notion that became chronic throughout the American media that working journalists may justifiably do double duty as CIA assets, and that CIA assets may use the media in its many forms as cover, and as a soft power method of dampening blowback against its unpopular operations. Even after Humes begged his colleagues to come clean, Matthiessen’s work for the CIA, however short-lived, remained secret until a 1977 article in The New York Times by John M. Crewdson outed him among scores of others embedded across media as undercover agents. If Plimpton and Matthiessen had listened to Humes, there would have been no story implicating The Paris Review. In the same article identifying Matthiessen’s past service in that agency—out a year before The Snow Leopard would garner him the National Book Award—a former agent is quoted claiming, “‘We ‘had’ at least one newspaper in every foreign capital,’ and those that the CIA did not own outright or subsidize heavily it infiltrated with paid agents or staff officers who could have stories printed that were useful to the agency and not print those it found detrimental.”
The program that The Paris Review was part of—Matthiessen through the front door and Plimpton through the back—was astonishingly vast. While Humes argued for transparency, Plimpton, for reasons we can imagine, balked. Many of the liberal interventionists who turned to culture to beat back Soviet influence were of course well-intentioned and were legitimately concerned about the spread of Soviet ideology at home and abroad. But their good intentions were nevertheless ill-conceived. If The Paris Review played a relatively small part in the CIA’s media war, it also had many friends who joined the young CIA. Even if some could guess, no one, obviously, could know for sure what the young agency, born in 1947, would become. Furthermore, those tied to the CIA through funding designated for cultural programming were often unaware, as has been said many times before, where the money originated. But many others would lean on the contradictory line of being unaware, yet being nevertheless proud. It reeked of doublespeak and of hedging: if I had known who paid the bill, I’d have been proud to do exactly what I did do. But I didn’t know.
Exposing these ties is not for the purpose of moral condemnation. It marks my attempt to look through the keyhole into the vast engine room of the cultural Cold War, to see if this ideology (one that favors paranoid intervention into the media over adherence to democratic principle) remains with us. If so, what do we lose by accepting that our media exist, in part, to encourage support for our interventions? And if we’re ok with it during one administration, are we still ok with our tax dollars fostering the nexus of CIA contractors, military propagandists and journalists even when the opposition runs the government? Most importantly, what—if anything—can we do about it all?
In the Media
- “The links between the world of literature and the U.S. surveillance apparatus” — FINKS author Joel Whitney interviewed on Scheer Intelligence (2/5/2021)
- “George and Mary Oppen were branded enemies of the state. Their FBI files document just how deep their activism went, and the price they paid for it.” — FINKS author Joel Whitney writes for the Poetry Foundation (1/18/2021)
- “Lorraine Hansberry Was an Unapologetic Radical” — FINKS author Joel Whitney writes for Jacobin (12/21/2020)
- JOEL WHITNEY discusses FINKS: HOW THE CIA TRICKED THE WORLD’S BEST WRITERS on Loud & Clear (5/1/2018)
- Swarajya calls FINKS “an invaluable addition to growing studies of government propaganda in the cultural sphere.” (12/7/2017)
- An excerpt from FINKS, published at The Baffler, has been selected as a Notable in Best American Essays (9/20/2017)
- “When a democratic government seeks to remove the ban on lying to you, be very skeptical indeed, because you’re in for a long, bumpy ride.” JOEL WHITNEY on the contemporary relevance of FINKS, at The Nation (6/26/2017)
- “An informative view of a time when writers and intellectuals were probably in the limelight more than they are now.” FINKS is reviewed at Penniless Press (6/16/2017)
- Part one of an extended interview with JOEL WHITNEY at The Nation (6/1/2017)
- FINKS is “a riveting account of the CIA’s machinations to recruit some of the world’s leading writers,” says The National (5/11/2017)
- FINKS is reviewed alongside other books on the CIA at January Magazine (5/9/2017)
- JOEL WHITNEY “points the flashlight at the US government.” FINKS has been reviewed at the History News Network (5/4/2017)
- JOEL WHITNEY put together a playlist for FINKS at Large Hearted Boy (5/1/2017)
- Siddhartha Deb praises FINKS in The Baffler (4/6/2017)
- “In 1967, much of the intellectual world learned that the United States had outsmarted itself.” FINKS in The Wire (3/15/2017)
- “A compelling tapestry.” FINKS in WINNIPEG FREE PRESS (2/22/2017)
- “Fascinating” FINKS in THE NEW YORK TIMES (2/13/2017)
- “Fascinating” FINKS in THE NEW YORK TIMES (2/13/2017)
- JOEL WHITNEY in LEFT BUSINESS OBSERVER (2/3/2017)
- “Will appeal to readers curious about the political agendas behind CIA manipulation” FINKS in LIBRARY JOURNAL (1/27/2017)
- “What he discovered was a network of funding and operatives that connected the Ivy League, some of literature’s biggest names and the CIA’s propaganda machine.” FINKS in PASTE MAGAZINE (1/26/2017)
- “Entertaining” FINKS in FREE BEACON (1/25/2017)
- “How a legitimate news or cultural organization could be useful and have its levers pulled in the subtle game of the cultural Cold War.” JOEL WHITNEY in Guernica (1/25/2017)
- “A fascinating and timely book” FINKS in National Post (1/20/2017)
- “Impressive in scope, depth and its marshalling of declassified documents” FINKS in The Globe and Mail (1/20/2017)
- “Why would the CIA use socialists to fight communism?” JOEL WHITNEY on Russia Today (1/17/2017)
- “A fine historical book” FINKS in The Los Angeles Review of Books (1/9/2017)
- “How the CIA Infiltrated the World’s Literature” FINKS in VICE (1/6/2017)
- “8 Books you Need to Read in January”: FINKS in Vulture (1/4/2017)
- “He had no idea he’d be helping the CIA”: FINKS in Guernica (1/4/2017)
- “A powerful warning”: FINKS in New Republic (1/4/2017)
- “Fidel Castro Edited Gabriel García Márquez’s Manuscripts”: FINKS in Flavorwire (12/9/2016)
- “In a quietly seething letter, he wrote that he felt like a cuckold.”: FINKS in The Baffler (12/7/2016)
- “An accomplished intellectual, Whitney writes with authority.”: FINKS in Spinwatch (12/5/2016)
- “I was fascinated by Joel Whitney’s ingeniously researched book”: FINKS in The Guardian Best Books in 2016 (12/2/2016)
- “What is the link between culture and the US military industrial complex?”: Joel Whitney on Russia Today (11/21/2016)
- “Using extensive research of primary sources, including never-before-seen correspondence, Whitney raises difficult moral questions that still resonate today”: Joel Whitney is interviewed in BOMB (11/17/2016)
- “Riveting” JOEL WHITNEY receives a starred review from Kirkus Reviews (9/7/2016)
- “‘Finks’ Explores the Blurred Line Between Propaganda and Literature” JOEL WHITNEY in Truthdig (8/5/2016)
- “A Lit’r’y Coup”: an excerpt from FINKS (7/12/2016)
