The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America

Framsida
Harvard University Press, 15 jan. 2008 - 342 sidor

In 1967 the magazine Ramparts ran an exposé revealing that the Central Intelligence Agency had been secretly funding and managing a wide range of citizen front groups intended to counter communist influence around the world. In addition to embarrassing prominent individuals caught up, wittingly or unwittingly, in the secret superpower struggle for hearts and minds, the revelations of 1967 were one of the worst operational disasters in the history of American intelligence and presaged a series of public scandals from which the CIA's reputation has arguably never recovered.

CIA official Frank Wisner called the operation his "mighty Wurlitzer," on which he could play any propaganda tune. In this illuminating book, Hugh Wilford provides the first comprehensive account of the clandestine relationship between the CIA and its front organizations. Using an unprecedented wealth of sources, he traces the rise and fall of America's Cold War front network from its origins in the 1940s to its Third World expansion during the 1950s and ultimate collapse in the 1960s.

Covering the intelligence officers who masterminded the CIA's fronts as well as the involved citizen groups--émigrés, labor, intellectuals, artists, students, women, Catholics, African Americans, and journalists--Wilford provides a surprising analysis of Cold War society that contains valuable lessons for our own age of global conflict.

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Innehåll

Introduction
1
Innocents Clubs THE ORIGINS OF THE CIA FRONT
11
Secret Army EMIGRES
29
AFLCIA LABOR
51
A Deep Sickness in New York INTELLECTUALS
70
The Cultural Cold War WRITERS ARTISTS MUSICIANS FILMMAKERS
99
The CIA on Campus STUDENTS
123
The Truth Shall Make You Free WOMEN
149
Saving the World CATHOLICS
167
Into Africa AFRICAN AMERICANS
197
Things Fall Apart JOURNALISTS
225
Conclusion
249
Notes
257
Acknowledgments
319
Index
321
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Om författaren (2008)

Hugh Wilford is Associate Professor of History, California State University, Long Beach.

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