“There’s no left in the US today.” Political persecution, media banishment and infiltration crippled it many decades ago.

Stuart Davies There is indeed a left in the US, but of course you will hardly ever see us represented in the government, let alone hear our voices in the corporate media. And unfortunately, the CIA and their "private sector" cohorts fund, infiltrate, and manipulate left oriented organizations and have been doing so for most of the last century.

"The detailed and engrossing 2008 book, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, by Hugh Wilford, investigates the CIA’s ideological struggle from 1947 to 1967 to win “hearts and minds” for US capitalism and prosecute the Cold War.

It was a dirty business. The CIA devised schemes to create or utilize existing social organizations, phony pass-through entities, universities, various media, artist groups, foundations and charities to service its propaganda wars—attempting to place a “progressive” and even “humanitarian” veneer upon America’s expanding grip.

Despite the passage of time since the book’s release, it remains a pertinent read for its exposure of the modus operandi of the CIA’s ideological campaigns and the role of a section of the liberal intelligentsia in supporting it. It is an eye-opener, particularly for a younger generation that has been subjected to a decades-long, non-stop attempt to whitewash the CIA and US militarism. One gets a picture of the ferociously antidemocratic and reactionary operations of US imperialism and its intelligence apparatus, a clear demonstration of the thoroughly criminal and deceitful nature of American capitalism.

Most important of all, the reader comes away with a sense of the immense significance attributed by the American ruling elite to the ideological struggle against socialism.

The author correctly emphasizes, “If anything, these practices have intensified in recent years, with the ‘war on terror’ recreating the conditions of total mobilization that prevailed in the first years of the Cold War.” He adds that the agency is “a growing force on campus.”[3]

The metaphor—a “Mighty Wurlitzer”—was coined by Frank Wisner, the head of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), a paramilitary and psychological operations group created in 1948, which was folded into the CIA in 1951. He prided himself on directing the network of organizations to play any propaganda tune on demand, likening it to the world-famous theater organ.

The agency sought out those who might be predisposed in a socialistic direction, targeting constituencies that had grievances with the status quo. It selected representatives from ethnic groups, women, African-Americans, labor, intellectuals and academics, students, Catholics, and artists and organized them into various front groups to promote anticommunism. These links, in turn, provided the agency with the cover it needed to influence strategically important sectors of foreign populations.

Ironically, as the federal government was conducting its House Un-American Activities witch-hunts and assembling the attorney general’s List of Subversive Organizations, supposedly to ferret out Communist Party “front groups,” the CIA was busy doing precisely that—creating front groups of thousands of unwitting Americans for covert political operations.

The book exposes how “radical” and “ex-radical,” labor, artistic and middle class people, a section of the American liberal intelligentsia, found themselves part of this “Wurlitzer.” [4] Significantly, this included a layer of former Communist Party members and fellow-travelers, such as novelist Richard Wright, who...[a onetime communist] tragically ended up in the arms of the American intelligence apparatus.

The agency exerted its control over these widely disparate and sometimes rancorous groups primarily through two methods. The first was the dispensation of large sums of cash—funneled either through corporations such as ITT, wealthy individuals or foundations. The second means was the vetting and grooming of the leaderships of these front groups, with the chosen individuals subjected to secrecy oaths.

Wilford explains how secrecy oaths were implemented in the case of the CIA-controlled National Student Association (NSA). “When the CIA judged it necessary to have an unwitting [uninformed of CIA control] officer made aware of the true source of the organization’s funds, a meeting would be arranged between the individual concerned, a witting colleague and a former NSA officer who had gone on to join the Agency. At a prearranged signal, the witting staffer would leave the room. The CIA operative (still identified only as ex-NSA) would explain that the unwitting officer had to swear a secrecy oath before being apprised of some vital secret, and after getting the officer to sign a formal pledge, the operative would then reveal the Agency’s hand in the Association’s affairs.”

Oaths were not just for effect. Violation carried a possible 20-year prison sentence. In later years, some of the witting later denounced the operation as entrapment and complained that they were “duped into a relationship with the CIA.” Others were in political agreement and/or saw working with the agency as a solid career move."

• This important article is in our archives. 

The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America