The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune?

During the late 1940s the newly created CIA, in a loose alliance with anti-communist intellectuals and trade unionists, launched a massive, clandestine effort to win the Cold War allegiance of the European left. Drawing on numerous personal interviews and document collections on both sides of the Atlantic, this book examines in detail the origins of the CIA's covert campaign and assesses it's impact on the US's principal Cold War ally, Britain, focusing particularly on attempts to combat communist penetration of British trade unions, stimulate support within the Labour party for key American strategic aims, such as European union, and influence the politics of Bloomsbury "literati". The results of this secret intervention were complex and far-reaching. CIA support for such ventures as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its London-based magazine, "Encounter", subtly transformed the political culture of the British left, making it more Atlanticist and less socialist. In other ways, however, the hiddenhand of American intelligence failed to control its British "assets", whose behaviour often frustrated their secretive patrons in Washington. For that matter, not even the CIA's agents on the American non-communist left proved reliable instruments of its will.

Hugh Wilford is Lecturer in American History and Director of American Studies at the University of Sheffield.