Literature: An Instrument of the CIA

The U.S. espionage agency did not only use a heavy hand during the Cold War, but it also relied on a light touch in dealing with the Soviet Union.

CIA actions to subvert governments or assassinate leaders who oppose U.S. interests are well-documented. The latest edition of “Foreign Affairs” magazine (July-August 2014) documented the role of the Central Intelligence Agency in the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953, the downfall and murder of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961, and the downfall of Chile’s Socialist President Salvador Allende in 1973.

According to former intelligence agents and government employees, the role of the CIA has been exaggerated, with much of the responsibility for these cases falling on the victims themselves — that is, on the mistakes made by Mosaddeq, Lumumba and Allende. Apparently the idea is to demystify the omnipotent power of the agency to do harm. In this vein, the CIA has not been so bad. However, the agency prefers notoriety to fame: It is preferable to be seen as a relentless and effective agency in the fight against the enemies of American national security than as the “sisters of charity.”

It is clear that the CIA, founded by Harry Truman at the end of World War II, represents a history of failure that has left an undetermined number of agents and collaborators dead. In his book, “Legacy of Failure,” Tim Weiner fairly assesses the negative record of the 60-year-old agency as a legacy of ashes. Its failures go from the Korean War (1950-1953) through the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (2003).

But the agency is not a hot topic only because of its disastrous role in using a heavy hand — weapons and economics — under the presidencies of Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, James Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The New York Times Review of Books (July 10, 2014) reviews two new books about the agency’s activity which, according to foreign affairs expert Joseph S. Nye, demonstrate its use of a soft touch — culture and ideology. The books are “The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book” by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, and “Inside the Zhivago Storm: The Editorial Adventures of Pasternak’s Masterpiece” by Paolo Mancosu.

Michael Scammell, who is currently working on a new translation of the famed work “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, wrote biographies of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Arthur Koestler. In both biographies, he notes that the CIA campus in Langley, Virginia, is home to a museum that is generally closed to the public, which contains some artifacts used or captured by the agency during wartime: an Enigma machine used for encryption, Osama bin Ladin’s machine gun, and — a real novelty — a copy of the novel “Doctor Zhivago” by Russian author Boris Pasternak (1890‐1960).

Although the book on exhibit is a commercial edition, it was put there because the CIA secretly made its own samizdat, which was to be introduced clandestinely in Russia. Less well known than the movie “Doctor Zhivago,” filmed in Spain in 1965 and starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, the novel had been rejected in 1956 by the Soviet literary magazine “Novy Mir.” Soviet authorities, led by Nikita Khrushchev, characterized the novel as anti-Soviet libel, ostracizing its author, who was then obliged to reject the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958.

Pasternak’s novel — about the life of a Russian physician during the Russian Revolution, his affair with the beautiful Lara, and Bolshevik excesses — was an international bestseller. It was not published legally in the USSR until 1988, in the era of Mikhail Gorbachev. Scammel states that the CIA’s work had nothing to do with either the success of the book or Pasternak’s fame. The aggressive Soviet campaign of repression had a greater impact than the agency’s edition of the book, but the experience served as a basis for the CIA’s future program of using books as a tool of espionage, which was also linked to the famous literary magazine “Paris Review” via the anti-Communist Congress for Cultural Freedom founded in Berlin in 1950. The CIA’s soft touch — the use of literature as a foreign policy instrument — is a chapter that is still being written.