On specific publishers that were cia-funded

Many other presses published books either subsidized or fully funded by the CIA, intended for both academic and popular audiences. Many of these CIA publishing operations targeted a liberal intellectual audience, funding literary writers at the Paris Review the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom’s Encounter, or in Africa with Transition Magazine and in Latin America Combate, Mundo Nuevo, and Cuadernos. The CIA commissioned the John Wiley Publishing Company to publish Robert Moss’ book, Chile’s Marxist Experiment, which had originally been published by “a CIA publishing subsidiary,” Forum World Features. There were also hundreds of classic western works of fiction and nonfiction translated into foreign languages and cheaply printed and distributed throughout the underdeveloped world using publishers like Franklin Book Program. This was a key part of the CIA’s soft power myth-making campaign hoping to win the hearts and minds of those undecided about the merits of communism or capitalism.

Among the known presses that published CIA subsidized books were Scribner’s Sons, Ballantine Books, and G.P. Putnam’s Sons. The CIA was not the only US agency negotiating such propagandistic publishing agreements. Fitzhugh Green discovered that United States Information Agency (USIA) staff members, Louis Fanget, Donald McNeill and William W. Warner “would think of a book that could explain what the Soviets had done to hurt the freedom of its people; then they would offer Frederick Praeger or other publishers an advance to commission an author and publish his work for foreign markers, even if the topic would not normally sell abroad.” Through these and other maneuvers the US government secretly corrupted scholarship and warped academic freedom in ways that left the American public uninformed.

On publishing as a tool to further imperialism

Using these Cold War covert publishing operations, the CIA nurtured myths of American capitalism at home and abroad. These published works often glossed over realities of American unexceptionalism while disparaging the possibilities of other political and economic systems. These CIA backed narratives championed global democracy while ignoring American CIA interventions undermining democratically elected governments promising greater distribution of wealth, in placed like Iran and Guatemala. While in the first and final instances the Cold War’s global inequality the CIA policed was maintained by armed forces, these ideological battles were also significant. The world of CIA publishing Sol Chaneles mapped was filled with propaganda projects devoted to myth-making, not works expanding the understanding of the world.

These surviving shards of Chaneles’ work reveal him not only breaking through many of the CIA’s bureaucracies of silence, but also connecting World War Two era techniques developed to undermine fascist ideologies with the CIA’s Cold War efforts to strengthen America’s imperialist reach in the name of free-market capitalism’s global expansion. The fundamental irony he documented was how far the CIA was willing to go to undermine what might have been a free market of ideas to hard-sell propaganda claiming the necessity of free markets. But such contradictions have always been at the CIA’s existential core. Yet even though these CIA publishing operations fought on an ideological battlefield, the CIA’s Cold War was not just an ideological conflict, it was a war over relations and means of production; a global class war fought by the CIA running arms, assassinating leaders, funding insurgents and counterinsurgency operations, with these loaded books acting as one of many weapons in this global class war.