The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America

by Hugh Wilford

Book Overview

In 1967 the magazine Ramparts ran an expos 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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 067403256X
• ISBN13: 9780674032569
• Release Date: May 2009
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.6" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

The Mighty Wurlitzer plays on!

This is a useful overview of CIA Cold War front operations. The most significant failings are that (1) it implies the CIA's covert apparatus for influencing public opinion was focused solely on the perceived Communist threat, and (2) that the Wurlitzer no longer plays to the world audience. However, we know that the carefully cultivated array of "media assets" Frank Wisner began to assemble had other applications during the Cold War era that had nothing to do with Communism and "the Soviet threat." We can also see evidence that the same methods are currently being applied to managing public opinion about pivotal current events. The author completely avoids any discussion of the CIA's extensive covert role in the UFO controversy, for example. When hundreds of thousands of "flying saucer" stories began to fill the nation's newspapers in the late 1940s and early 1950s, CIA officials, under direction of Dr. H.P. Robertson, used its Wurlitzer to calm public concerns about an invasion from outer space by covertly working to ridicule and debunk such reports. Top CIA officials also infiltrated key UFO-research groups such as NICAP, orchestrated anti-UFO propaganda programs via CBS TV and other news networks, and worked to squelch embarrassing leaks from airline pilots, military eyewitnesses, and others who knew too much. What is now becoming known is that the CIA's concerns stemmed partly from an alarming pattern of surveillance exhibited by the UFOs, particularly surveillance of our nuclear weapons facilities. In the mid-1960s and again in the mid-1970s, for example, UFOs hovered over and sometimes disabled many of our Minuteman nuclear-tipped missiles. We know this from regional press accounts, government documents, and former Minuteman personnel who have recently broken their silence about these astonishing events. (For further details, see Faded Giant, UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Coverup, 1941-1973, UFOs and Nukes by Robert Hastings (ufohastings.com), and my own modest effort, The Missing Times.) One academic study showed that upwards of a million articles about UFOs appeared in the nation's newspapers between 1947 and 1966 alone. Yet, this is unmentioned in nearly all contemporary American History books. Such is the power of Wisner's Wurlitzer! In the wake of the events of 9-11, thousands of academics, government officials, eyewitnesses, architects, scientists, and engineers have called attention to the many serious problems with the official explanation. Public opinion polls also show widespread skepticism about what the Bush White House says took place. And yet, the American news media will never even discuss these facts. Most reporters today know that keeping their jobs depends on keeping their mouths shut about certain sensitive topics. And the Mighty Wurlitzer plays on....

Awesome

As a citizen, you SHOULD read this book. Over the years, I have read a lot of texts that speculated about the role the U.S. government played in certain events -- sometimes with hard facts, often with only anecdotal evidence. This book is well-researched and documents its claims. It's a snapshot into the dangerous mix that fear and power often creates -- a message for all people, in all countries, at all times.

Useful study of secret CIA operations in the USA

Hugh Wilford, previously of the University of Sheffield, now at California State University, Long Beach, has written an astonishing account of the CIA's front operations in the USA during the Cold War. In 1967, research by Ramparts magazine exposed this covert system, which broke the law banning CIA operations in the USA. The CIA funded front organisations within trade unions, New York intellectuals, émigrés, writers, artists, musicians, Hollywood, the National Student Association, aid workers, civil rights activists, clergy, women, and black nationalist groups like the American Society of African Culture. For example, Harvard University got $456,000 in disguised subsidies from the CIA between 1960 and 1966. The CIA collaborated with the major news media, particularly the New York Times, the Reader's Digest, Columbia Broadcasting System and Time magazine. The CIA backed and funded the American Committee for a United Europe, which backed the emerging EEC. The CIA had a secret alliance with US Catholicism, for instance, between 1959 and 1966 it funded the Family Rosary Crusade's operations in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Australasia and Africa. Associations that accepted covert state patronage violated their own proclaimed principles of voluntary association. Many members of these organisations knew about the CIA's role, but many did not. Americans were systematically deceived by the state. And the CIA's undemocratic covert activities did not cease with the 1967 exposures, or with the end of the Cold War. Even now the CIA is `a growing force on campus', as the Wall Street Journal recently noted. This book exposes the CIA's role in the USA and leaves one asking what it did and does in Britain.

Fair, Balanced on Trees; Forest Focus Could Be Sharper

How is it that many within the CIA were considered "liberal" by many within the FBI and their friends in the right-wing 'China Lobby' The answer is psychological warfare. Many within the CIA were affiliated with ostensibly liberal internationalist efforts, such as World Federalism, for which Agency media guru Cord Meyer showed enthusiasm. The liberal label could be misleading, however, if the right meant that the CIA "liberals" were at odds with US Cold War foreign policy goals. Just the opposite was true. The CIA liberals had done their communications research howework, as Christopher Simpson has pointed out in his essential and skinny volume The Science of CoercionScience of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960. They realized that special publications would be needed to tame left-liberal dissent from US global ambitions. And so publications like Encounter Magazine were created. Five of six articles would be left liberal, to win over this small BUT INFLUENCIAL group of tweedy professors and quasi-professionals who were capable of footnoting their bad moods. Once they thought that "this magazine is on our side' they would be more suceptible to the raison d'etre of the whole glossy: the monthly gatekeeping article that would keep this caffinated crew from openly opposing US Cold War Foreign Policy objectives. Just so was the intention behind CIA subsidies for domestic front groups such as labor unions, art critics, and journalists within the US. The author deals skillfully with the individuals involved: many of the individuals did not know that their organizations were being supported by the CIA. Others did know and walked on eggshells to preserve their collegues' virgin curiosities. The author is carefull to give people who cooperated with the Agency a fair shake. It is doubtful that Gloria Steinem could get a fairer shake than she does in this book; true she was young but a handshake or two with arch-conservative Psychological Warfare veterans like Time-Life CIA's C. D. Jackson should wake one up a bit. The author points out that there were many times when the front group bahaved in ways contrary to the wishes of their CIA funders. In fact, one wonders if the point is not overemphasized. The point was never to turn the targetted audience into armchair McAthurs: rather it was to prevent theier becoming vocal critics of Greater Containment. A little slackening of the leash now and then would have been appropriate for these scientists of coercion. In short, the CIA front groups, as is emphasized more strongly in Francis Stonor Saunders book (The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters ) were left-gatekeepers with rightist ends in mind. This point about the project could bear much stronger emphasis. On the other hand there is plenty of fresh detail in The Mighty Wurlitzer. The author openly acknowledges his debt to Saunders book but there is fresh information and detail i