[D66] How the CIA tricked the world's best writers

[J.N.]

    http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/finks-by-joel-whitneyfinks cover


    Finks

*HOW THE C.I.A. TRICKED THE WORLD'S BEST WRITERS*


JOEL WHITNEY <http://www.orbooks.com/joel-whitney/>

*"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/*


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.

325 pages • Paperback ISBN 978-1-682190-24-1 • E-book 978-1-682190-25-8

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