Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-50

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Cultural Cold War ⁽¹⁾

Give me a hundred million dollars and a thousand dedicated people, and I will guarantee to generate such a wave of democratic unrest among the masses--yes, even among the soldiers--of Stalin's own empire, that all his problems for a long period of time to come will be internal. I can find the people.  --  Sidney Hook, 1949

The Congress itself sprang from a conference of intellectuals in West Berlin in June 1950, a gathering that itself marked a landmark in the Cold War. By a lucky stroke, the conference opened just a day after North Korea invaded the South. This coincidence lent unexpected timeliness and urgency to the conference's message: that some of the best minds of the West--representing a wide range of disciplines and political viewpoints--were willing to defy the still-influential opinion that Communism was more congenial to culture than was bourgeois democracy. Historians have surmised that this event had some CIA connection, but the handful of CIA officers who knew the full story are dead, and scholars today tend to skirt this issue because of the lack of documentation.
Agency files reveal the true origins of the Berlin conference. Besides setting the Congress in motion, [the Berlin conference in 1950] helped to solidify CIA's emerging strategy of promoting the non-Communist left--the strategy that would soon become the theoretical foundation of the Agency's political operations against Communism over the next two decades.

A Conference in New York