Gloria Steinem and friend not credited, from Maria Shriver’s article at www.interviewmagazine.com. (Maria Shriver as in Arnie.) Photograph by Mikael Jansson.
I’ve taken to skimming the glossary of William Egan Colby’s autobiography, Honorable Men, for names which I wouldn’t expect to be there. As a final brief post before Christmas, I give you Colby’s words on “Gloria Steinem”, the eighty-year-old feminist extraordinaire and stepmom to actor Christian Bale.
Probably the CIA’s greatest impact during this period [early 1950s] was in the field of international front organizations. The Soviets had spawned dozens of international political fronts to influence and control labor, student, women’s, journalists’, cultural, lawyers’, and veterans’ groups throughout the world. To counter this effort CIA called back from OSS days or recruited new liberal activists like Tom Braden, Cord Meyer and a host of others, and put them to work organizing rival front groups. To operate in the international filed these men needed Americans fully qualified to speak for the various constituencies. In labor there was no question; the AFL-CIO was, if anything, ahead of the government in identifying the danger posed by the Soviet threat to free labor and in building an international movement of free labor unionists in opposition to the government- and party- controlled officers of the Communist countries. Over the years CIA never provided financial help to the AFL-CIO; the shoe was on the other foot as the movement did indeed watch carefully what was happening with foreign labor movements, and had plenty of access to the White House if something displeased them.
But in other fields, the Americans were disorganized or did not have the resources and capability for conducting a worldwide contest with the Soviet front groups. Thus, CIA found American leaders who could organize such movements, wanted to contest the false Soviet-founded fronts claiming the field, and saw no problem in receiving assistance for that work from a variety of anonymous donors and foundations serving as covers for the CIA. Gloria Steinem has been wrongly accused of being a CIA tool in her work with movements of this type. As she has replied, the CIA only helped her and others go to foreign political conferences, where she presented the kind of independent, spontaneous positions and image that is truly representative of America’s freedom. This kind of support constituted CIA’s “operation” in a number of fields, from the National Student Association to the Congress of Cultural Freedom, and it met and defeated the Communists with their own organizational tactics, different in that ours espoused and incorporated freedom as its key.
I’d often wondered where Francis Stonor Saunders got the idea to study CIA involvement in non-communist left groups; she published her book on this topic The Cultural Cold War in 2000. Colby told her, and anyone else who was listening, everything they needed to know back in 1978. Have a very merry!
Just a little more liberal Hollywood and the CIA. ;) Thanks, imagecollect.com
PS. If you’d like to learn more about the old OSS liberal activists Colby et alia “called back”, check out my post on the bitter Julia Child, and her strange husband Paul.
