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Jack Clontz’s review essay in the August 2004 BRS Quarterly includes a harsh indictment of propaganda activities engaged in by Bertrand Russell at the height of the Cold War.[1] Specifically, Clontz condemns Russell’s writing for a series of publications (Background Books) subsidized clandestinely by the Information Research Department (IRD), a shadowy branch of the British Foreign Office entrusted since 1948 with the covert dissemination of anti-Communist propaganda at home and abroad. In preparing these publications, Clontz argues, “Russell compromised himself in two important respects”: The first is that he violated his own belief in the paramount importance of the individual being able to make judgments on their merits without societal or political pressure, in the full light of evidence that should be freely available to all. By hiding the fact that he had engaged in surreptitious propaganda Russell deeply compromised himself. He also compromised himself by presenting himself as a detached, independent observer of political trends, one who was not beholden to hidden or special interests. In effect, therefore, Russell lied to his readers by not revealing the provenance of the writing of these works.[2] These are serious charges which, if possible, warrant corroboration for readers of the Quarterly with evidence from the Russell Archives. This will be assayed in the first two parts of this article. Part One will try to shed some light on Russell’s involvement with the Background Books enterprise, while Part Two will probe further into his association with the IRD. Not all Russell’s anti-Communist activities, however, were carried out in the rather cloak-and-dagger fashion associated with the intelligence and security community. In his Autobiography he was perfectly candid about acting as an unofficial spokesman for the Foreign Office in the late 1940s and early 1950s.[3] This more transparent side to Russell the Cold War propagandist will be examined in the third part of the article. The final part will review Russell’s troubled relationship with another secretly funded Cold War project, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). It will offset any negative portrait that may have emerged of Russell as a dupe or agent of powerful forces beyond his control, by showing him to be a far from pliant or passive honorary chairman of this CIA-backed organization of the international anti-Communist Left. According to Clontz, Russell was at fault less for the sometimes strident anti-Communist arguments employed in his contributions to Background Books and more for failing to disclose that these publications were sponsored by a secret propaganda arm of the British Government. Moreover, Russell did not even take advantage of a perfect opportunity to set the record straight when he decided to reprint two of these works, What Is Freedom? and What Is Democracy?, in his 1961 collection of essays, Fact and Fiction. But exactly how aware was Russell of the connection between Background Books and the IRD? Clontz cites anecdotal evidence used by Timothy Garton Ash to suggest that Russell was fully cognizant of the sources of funding for the Background Books series.[4] The publishing correspondence for “What Is Freedom?, What is Democracy? and Russell’s other contributions to Background Books was not conducted through the IRD (not surprisingly), but by the “journalist and literary agent” (the description is from his letterhead) Colin Wintle. As a wartime officer in the Special Operations Executive, Wintle had been involved with the conduct of political warfare in Nazi-occupied Europe. In 1946 he co-founded a public relations firm that would be called upon by MI6 to conduct clandestine media operations.[5] Meanwhile, the editor of Background Books, Stephen Watts, also had an intelligence and security background, having served in MI5 during the Second World War. In his letter of approach to Russell, dated 12 December 1951, Wintle reported that Watts was “interested in obtaining an authoritatively written contribution for a booklet under the title What Is Freedom?”.[6] There is nothing odd about this correspondence. Russell received numerous solicitations of this kind, some of which he accepted and rather more of which he declined. The handsome fee of £262.10 (or US $734 at 1951 exchange rates) no doubt had some bearing on his acceptance of this particular commission. More unusual is the following memorandum which Wintle enclosed with his letter: Inherent in the discussion would be the contrasts between the freedoms enjoyed outside and those enjoyed inside the Communist world. While the writer should not assume that his readers will have more than a layman’s knowledge of politics and philosophy, it would of course be inappropriate to deal with the theme in unmodified blacks and whites, or by an emotional approach. Full allowance should be made for the imperfections of the non-Communist world, but a firm stand taken about absolute standards of individual freedom—a point upon which one could well afford to dogmatise. Education perhaps provides the most telling contrasts between the two worlds. However deplorable the quality of education may be in large regions of the non-Communist world, it can claim to be free from the explicit aim of the Soviet system to confine the mind within the limits of a doctrine which is philosophically untenable. Briefly, the editor envisages an essay which would accept the proposition that the prospects of human freedom are better outside Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, and would develop arguments to show why this is so. While Russell was often asked to write on particular topics, he was not used to following such precise editorial or ideological directions. After the manuscript of What Is Freedom? had been submitted early in 1952, Wintle sent Russell a long and detailed letter asking him to tone down his criticisms of American anti-Communism. He made this request with a certain diffidence but also by reference to the opinion of “a very intelligent publisher’s reader”, who thought that “both the effectiveness and, in some quarters, the commercial acceptability of the booklet would be increased by these slight modifications” (21 March 1952). Russell’s marginal notations convey his compliance with each of Wintle’s suggestions.[7] The next letter from Wintle in the Russell Archives, dated 17 February 1953, contains an offer to undertake on the same terms a “companion booklet” to What Is Freedom?. The editorial instructions for this book, What Is Democracy?, were less detailed than those for its predecessor, although Stephen Watts (the Background Books editor) had asked Wintle to suggest “two things”: 1) that a start might be made from the point that two opposed systems are now being called by the same name—an extreme example of the corruption of words—so that in certain contexts (e.g. ‘People’s Democracy’ in Eastern Europe) it stands for the opposite of what is meant in the West. This might clear the way for explaining that neither meaning is the original one—and then giving an historical review of the word and the idea. 2) that the conclusion might be, in effect, that however faulty Western democracy is, it is in practice at least not the negation of everything we mean by the word, as is the Communist version. Again, this advice was far more explicit than that which Russell customarily received from his editors. The proposed thrust of the new Background Book, however, would have been congenial to Russell, for he had frequently lambasted the political hypocrisy of Soviet-style democracy from the earliest days of the Cold War, such as in his essay “What Is Democracy?”, published in The Manchester Guardian seven years before his Background Book of the same title.[8] Shortly after the arrangements for What is Democracy? had been settled, Wintle had asked Russell for a 1,250-word article using as a “topical starting-point” the forthcoming Moscow show-trial of the Jewish doctors implicated in a fabricated anti-Soviet conspiracy. “You will, of course, know best how to elaborate the theme”, he continued in his letter of 24 February 1953, “but if you feel so disposed, I would like you to take a ‘high line’ and pour as much scorn as you please upon a political, social and philosophic system which produces manifestations of such barbarity while simultaneously expecting the societies of the West to admire and imitate them”. Russell’s acceptance of this request is indicated by his customary “Ans. Yes” in the upper-left corner of Wintle’s letter of 24 February. As it turned out, Stalin’s death provided Russell with an even more dramatic point of departure for this rhetorical attack on the Soviet Union. Wintle had intended the typescript[9] for overseas circulation only, but he told Russell in his letter of acknowledgement that “it would be a pity not to submit it to one of the more serious-minded provincial publications in the United Kingdom as well” (7 April 1953). However, no record has been found of its appearance in print either in Britain or abroad. The typescript is not to be confused with a similar one used by Russell for a broadcast on the late Soviet dictator which the BBC’s Central European Service supposedly decided not to air.[10] Russell’s last known assignment for Background Books appeared in another symposium, entitled Why I Oppose Communism.[11] Noteworthy among the other contributors were the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper and the poet Stephen Spender, the ex-Communist co-editor of Encounter whose apostasy had been recounted in that Cold War classic The God That Failed (1950). Russell was asked by Wintle “to write as an internationalist” (26 March 1954), although his contribution eventually appeared under the heading of “The Philosopher”. Commissioned in March 1954, publication of the pamphlet was delayed for two years, when Russell’s piece was run more or less simultaneously as “The Marxist Fraud” by the News Chronicle.[12] Later in the year the essay was reprinted again, as “Why I Am Not a Communist”, in Portraits from Memory (1956). Prior to its appearance in this collection of essays, Russell transformed some of its harsh and blanket criticism of Soviet political practice into retrospective censure of a bygone Stalinist dictatorship.[13] Similar changes would be made on a larger scale for the reprinting of What Is Freedom? and What Is Democracy? in Fact and Fiction.[14] Russell was prepared to soften the anti-Communist content of his Background Books as his own views changed and as a thaw in the Cold War set in later in the 1950s. He was arguably remiss, however, in failing to reveal the rather dubious publishing history of these works, although Russell himself may have regarded the involvement of the IRD as irrelevant to the writings in question since they merely reiterated long-held political opinions of his own. Some forty Background Books were in print five years after the series started in 1951. Roughly 300,000 copies in all were in circulation in English by this date, and a number of foreign-language editions had been produced as well. The literature for export would be dispatched to British diplomatic posts, and consular and other officials were encouraged, irrespective of costs incurred, to enlist local publishers to further assist with the distribution.[15] The Indian impression of Why Communism Must Fail,[16] for example, may have been printed on such terms.Aside from its anonymous authorship, the inaugural Background Book, What Is Communism?, set the tone for much of what followed. Many of the subsequent publications—including the two pamphlets of which Russell was sole author—offered condensed, laymen’s guides to large or controversial questions. Among titles available when Why I Oppose Communism appeared in 1956 were Leonard Schapiro’s How Strong Is Communism?, Edward Atiyah’s What Is Imperialism?, and Robert Bruce Lockhart’s What Happened to the Czechs?.[17] The literature was pitched at a mass rather than elite audience. As explained by Batchworth Press—one of the publishers of Background Books—each work was intended “to provide ordinary people, interested in what is going on in the world today, with some background information about events, institutions and ideas”.[18] They were also economically packaged and sold. Most Background Books ran to no more than forty pages and were for sale at a shilling or one shilling and six pence (US $0.14 to $0.21), although a smaller number of book-length studies retailed for five or ten times these modest sums. The IRD also arranged for the dissemination of a few previously existing and independently created works, such as R.N. Carew-Hunt’s The Theory and Practice of Communism and Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984. But securing copyright over books in print could be problematical, and it made more sense, therefore, for the IRD to act as its own commissioning editor. Sometimes the department would solicit contributions from trusted authors (like Bruce Lockhart) with Foreign Office or intelligence credentials. Whenever possible, however, they preferred to enlist authors or intellectuals whose views, like Russell’s, just happened to be more or less congruent with those of the British Government.[19] The very foundation of the IRD in 1948 had been a reflection of the Labour Government’s anxiety that recent setbacks in the Cold War—the Berlin Blockade and the Communist coup in Prague most notably—required Britain to pursue a more aggressive anti-Communist strategy. Some permanent officials at the Foreign Office wanted to turn the new department into a full-fledged instrument of political warfare, aimed at destabilizing the Communist bloc as much as shoring up domestic, allied and neutral opinion. The Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin tried to resist these pressures exerted by his departmental hard-liners, but after the Conservatives regained power in 1951 the “offensive” orientation of the IRD became rather more pronounced—a reflection in part of Prime Minister Churchill’s fascination with propaganda as a tool of politics and diplomacy, together with his “well-known appetite for covert operations”.[20] Most routine work of the IRD, however, remained focused on the Western side of the Cold War divide. Unlike the more conspicuous and overt approach characteristic of American propaganda, the British preferred to wage the Cold War by more discreet means. This is not to suggest that the IRD was half-hearted or genteel, merely that it tended to dwell less than did American agencies on the threat posed by a powerful and belligerent Soviet Union, and more on the defects of Communism and the manifest superiority of Western democratic institutions and ideals.[21] The Background Books series certainly conformed with this general approach to propaganda of the IRD, as did its other line of approach (indeed, its main one) to people such as Russell—namely, the circulation of (presumably) factually accurate but ideologically slanted information in sub-classified reports for unattributed use by those privy to them. It is highly likely that Russell would have been regarded as a prize asset by the IRD, whether an independent author of works such as What Is Freedom? and What Is Democracy? or a trusted recipient of the semi-confidential intelligence documents described above. By the late-1940s Russell commanded world-wide recognition and respect. Many of his shorter political writings were commissioned by or reprinted in newspapers overseas, and he also reached a wide and varied international audience from his broadcast work for the BBC’s external services. One revealing gauge of the esteem in which Russell was held by the IRD is that even routine correspondence with him was conducted by successive departmental chiefs, John Peck and John Rennie. A close confidant of and former wartime private secretary to Churchill, Peck had taken over as head of the IRD from Ralph Murray after the Conservative Party’s general election victory in October 1951. Peck, in turn, was succeeded by Rennie late in 1953. Rennie held the office until 1958 and subsequently (1968–1973) served as director of MI6. Although it is not clear whether Russell knew Peck and Rennie headed the IRD, they conducted their correspondence with Russell on stationary with Foreign Office letterhead or bearing the address of the IRD’s headquarters at 12 Carlton House Terrace in south-west London. On 15 November 1951 Russell thanked Peck for sending him some documents on “Rural Life in Russia”, which he promised “to study with care”.[22] Unfortunately, neither this report nor a companion investigation of “Town Life in the Soviet Union”[23] appear to be in the Russell Archives. Among the substantial holdings of typescripts, manuscripts and off-prints by other authors, however, is a cache of Foreign Office documents from the early Cold War years, containing among other things two other reports in the same series of critical exposés of Soviet tyranny and backwardness: “Education in the Soviet Union” and “Religion in the Soviet Union”.[24] (Both sets of mimeographed documents seem to have been based mainly on the testimony of former Soviet citizens who had found refuge in the West.) On at least two separate occasions, Russell also received documents from the IRD detailing the ideology, activities and objectives of the Communist-aligned peace movement. The second of these enclosures, Peck promised, would “explain the true nature of the [World] Peace Congress to be held in Vienna in December [1952]” .[25] On 14 July 1952 Peck had dispatched to Russell a copy of the “Interpreter”, an obviously official study which “purposes to show the salient facts of Soviet policy during the month and to demonstrate how Soviet diplomatic activity and propaganda and the activities of the Soviet political warfare network throughout the world form a coherent whole”.[26] Peck also asked if Russell might be interested in receiving this briefing paper every month. (Russell accepted the offer but, rather innocently perhaps, wondered whether a subscription fee would be required.) Further correspondence from Russell, dated 15 May 1953, suggests that Peck had also sent Russell some material on the political persecution or “brainwashing” of Chinese intellectuals by the Communist regime.[27] In his letter to Russell of 14 July 1952, Peck had alluded to translations from Soviet sources which he had been forwarding to Russell “from time to time”. There is a considerable quantity of such material at the Russell Archives. These translated items include several polemical attacks on Russell in the Soviet press, where he was frequently pilloried in the decade after the Second World War.[28] On 1 September 1951, for example, Peck sent Russell the “latest bouquet from Pravda”, a piece entitled “The Prophecies of an Obscurantist” from the issue of 20 August 1951. Beginning in April 1950, Russell would also receive from the IRD every few months or so a batch of translations from Soviet journals and newspapers illustrating the relationship between science and the state behind the Iron Curtain. This was a topic of particular interest to Russell, and, as one IRD official promised, the translations would reveal “the exact nature of the Kremlin’s assault on freedom in science”.[29] The last batches of material on Soviet science (Russell seems to have received nothing more after early 1956) also contained translated reports of Soviet military thinking about nuclear weapons which Russell referred to anecdotally in a couple of his anti-nuclear writings.[30] All of these enclosures were accompanied by instructions from the IRD that recipients were “free to use the information contained in these translations, but we should be grateful if you did not refer to the Foreign Office as your source”.[31] From the point of view of attribution the same guidelines were applied by the IRD to the intelligence reports and notes which were sent to Russell on occasion and distributed fairly widely on the same semi-confidential basis. Although the evidence in the Russell Archives pertaining to the IRD is somewhat fragmentary, it reinforces what historical accounts have said about the department’s cultivation of such prominent public intellectuals as Russell. Sponsored book publishing became one of its “favoured methods of disseminating information as the Foreign Office believed that the public would more readily accept information which did not emanate from official sources, and that the most effective propaganda was attributable to authoritative or prominent authors”.[32] The IRD obviously hoped that the reasoned anti-Communist arguments of its Background Books (not to mention the other publishing fronts used by the IRD) would reach a wide audience. But its overall strategy was perhaps better illustrated by the premium attached by the IRD to its distribution to a wide range of public figures of material such as that sent to Russell by Peck and Rennie. This indirect modus operandi clearly reflected a Foreign Office preference (which the post-war Labour Government tried unsuccessfully to challenge) for targeting the shapers of opinion at home and abroad—journalists, academics, politicians, trade unionists, student and youth leaders—rather than appealing directly to the masses.[33] As Lynn Smith has written of these IRD briefing papers: By such means, the most critical accounts of post-war British propaganda have alleged, Labour politicians, leftist intellectuals and institutions such as the BBC were co-opted into a titanic ideological struggle being directed by some of the most reactionary elements in British public life.[35] Such interpretations perhaps over-estimate the influence of the IRD and the credulity and pliability of the journalists and others, including Russell, who were privy to the IRD’s reports. According to the then head of the BBC’s Eastern European Service, the IRD was regarded as “just another source of factual information” to be taken or left alone as desired.[36] It is difficult to conceive of him being entirely credulous of these official documents, especially since his assessments of the international situation tended to draw on a range of sources. Yet, it seems that, on occasion, Russell’s published work did draw on information supplied to him by the IRD. His critical commentary on the Lysenko affair, for example, was based upon two pages of notes in Russell’s hand taken from a mimeograph that is not present among the Foreign Office documents in the Russell Archives but is similar both in physical appearance and content to some of the other IRD material.[37] Interestingly, when his relationship with the IRD was petering out in the mid-1950s, Russell used translations from the Soviet armed forces journal Red Star to bolster an anti-nuclear case that was definitely at odds with policies pursued or approved by the British Government.[38] A meticulous analysis of Russell’s political writing between, say, 1948 and 1955 would be necessary to determine the precise nature and extent of his use of IRD material. Nevertheless, at the very least, it is disconcerting to think that Russell felt at all comfortable in using non-attributable material to which he was privy only because of a covert propaganda agency’s desire to influence (perhaps even deceive) opinion-shapers such as himself. If Russell was conscripted, either unwittingly or (as the balance of evidence presented here suggests) knowingly, into Britain’s covert Cold War propaganda campaign, he was only a small cog in a very large machine. As Andrew Defty has written in his recent study of the IRD, propaganda in the post-war era was employed on an unprecedentedly grand scale by peacetime standards and for a variety of purposes besides combatting Communism, however central that political objective was to the overall effort. The Labour Governments of 1945–51 presided over perhaps the greatest expansion of the British Government’s propaganda apparatus until the election of the Labour Government in 1997. Propaganda was used widely by the Labour Governments: to explain their policies at home and abroad; to reassure Britain’s allies, most notably the USA, about Labour’s socialist policies; to promote trade; to counter colonial insurgency; to promote good relations with the newly independent colonies; and to undermine Britain’s enemies.[39] In addition to his clandestine cooperation with the IRD, Russell was also part of the public face of British propaganda during the early Cold War. The IRD was merely one of several Foreign Office branches concerned with propaganda work; other government departments engaged in similar activities—openly as well as in secret. The more benign and transparent (yet sometimes indistinguishable) counterpart of covert government propaganda operations was official publicity. At the apex of the institutional structure for the production and dissemination of material in this category, both at home and abroad, stood the Central Office of Information (COI). Established in 1946, the COI was a successor organization of sorts to the much-derided wartime Ministry of Information.[40] The new agency lost the departmental ranking that had been enjoyed by the Ministry of Information, but it remained independent—notwithstanding the strenuous efforts of the Foreign Office to subordinate the COI’s overseas role to its departmental control. Rather than directing information policy across the board—this remained the preserve of each Cabinet-level department—the mandate of the COI was more of a coordinating one, to ensure publicity for material produced in other official circles. Additionally, an Overseas Press Services Division was responsible for keeping foreign news sources informed about government policy, for promoting balance in their coverage of British affairs, and for publicizing British accomplishments in industry, science, technology and culture. In tandem with these functions, this Division also commissioned feature articles about current events—ideally from prominent authors like Russell—and the COI regularly acquired the overseas rights to a range of articles from the British national, weekly and periodical press. The COI operated from the premise that “every British newspaper or book sold abroad, every film show, and every photograph or article published helps to determine the way in which the peoples of the world think and feel about Britain; and it is the way in which the world thinks and feels about Britain that is the basic concern of the Information Services”.[41] The overseas representatives of the British Council—set up by the Foreign Office in the 1930s to foster a positive image of Britain abroad—performed a complementary role by sponsoring a wide variety of “British” cultural activities all over the world. In the fulfilment of these essentially cultural and educational objectives, Russell made a small but not insignificant contribution. A number of his writings were reissued by the COI in the manner described above, including his series of BBC talks on “Living in an Atomic Age” (reprinted in New Hopes for a Changing World), his 1956 radio broadcast on “The Story of Colonization”, and the last of his contributions to Background Books, the essay “Why I Am Not a Communist”. An article entitled “British Opinion on Hungary” was specially commissioned by the Overseas Press Services Division in response to the Soviet suppression of the anti-Communist uprising in that country in 1956. But this seems never to have been circulated, perhaps because Russell took aim not only at Soviet actions in Hungary but also those of Britain and France in Suez.[42] If Russell’s earlier attractiveness to the COI reflected the convergence of his political outlook with that of the British Government, the waves created by his Hungary piece suggest that the official mind was beginning to grasp that his views were becoming, by this time, increasingly antithetical to their own. In addition to this miscellany of contributions to the more indirect side of Britain’s Cold War propaganda efforts, Russell also worked more directly for the British Government. By his own admission, for example, he was sent to Berlin during the 1948 Blockade “by the Government … to help to persuade the people of Berlin that it was worthwhile to resist Russian attempts to get the Allies out of Berlin”.[43] Reinforcing the “official” character of this mission in 1948, Russell was given a military passport and temporary standing in Britain’s armed forces, allowing him, he recalled with amusement, for his “first and only time … to parade as a military man”.[44] Russell’s Autobiography placed a similar interpretation on his visit earlier the same month (October 1948) to Norway, where “the Government sent me … in the hope of inducing Norwegians to join an alliance against Russia”.[45] More than two years previously, in June 1946, Russell had undertaken a lecture tour of Switzerland arranged by the British Council. He also visited Holland and Belgium in September and October 1947 and Sweden in May 1948, although his speaking engagements on these trips abroad do not seem to have been carried out under official auspices. The tour of the Low Countries had been sponsored by the New Commonwealth Society, a political movement which, like Russell, was dedicated to promoting international control of atomic energy—by coercive means if necessary.[46] On returning to Britain Russell was alerted by C.R.A. Rae of the Foreign Office to the “hornet’s nest in Moscow” which his lectures on world government and atomic energy had stirred.[47] Enclosed with this letter were some translated copies of Soviet newspaper criticisms of Russell, including a piece from the journal Trud deriding him as a “Philosopher Bomb-Thrower”. Russell’s reply is missing from the Russell Archives but Rae’s next communication acknowledged with thanks “your letter about your tour in the Low Countries”.[48] The correspondence is interesting because it shows that Russell was privy to Foreign Office material even before the inception of the IRD, and suggests that he already enjoyed a close and comfortable association with the department. Russell may also have been in contact with senior figures in Britain’s armed forces at this time. In private correspondence he alludes to “conversations with professional strategists”.[49] Among other things, such discussions may have been responsible for one of the most intriguing public speaking engagements that Russell was asked to take on during the early Cold War—namely, the annual lecture on “The Future of Mankind” which he gave to the Imperial Defence College each December from 1947 to 1952.[50] In his Autobiography Russell recalled how the invitations to speak here eventually “stopped coming after the lecture in which I remarked that, knowing that they believed you could not be victorious in war without the help of religion, I had read the Sermon on the Mount, but, to my surprise, could find no mention of H-bombs in it”.[51] In their respective biographies of Russell, Ronald Clark and Ray Monk both imply that Russell’s autobiographical recollections exaggerated his role as a roving emissary for the Foreign Office in the late 1940s and early 1950s.[52] Yet, Clark especially uses evidence that conveys a contrary impression. On 28 December 1949, Russell told his friend Irina Wragge-Morley that his impending visit to Paris (to lecture at the Sorbonne and at the Centre d’Études de Politiques Étrangères) was “for the Foreign Office”. The following March, three months before embarking on tours of Australia and the United States, Russell told the same correspondent that he was “busy globe-trotting for the Foreign Office”.[53] The Russell Archives also contains letters from the Foreign Office itself, deepening the impression left by the personal correspondence quoted by Russell’s biographer Clark (and referenced to “private sources”) that Russell indeed made trips for the Foreign Office. On 2 October 1951 Angus Malcolm of the Information Policy Department—a “purely propaganda section” of the Foreign Office according to Philip Taylor[54]—thanked Russell for informing him of his intention to visit France early the following year en route to England from Germany. Malcolm had already “written to our Embassy in Paris and asked them what subjects they would like you to speak on”.[55] A couple of weeks later Malcolm again wrote Russell, asking if he would be willing to visit Brussels as well as Paris on the same trip to the continent, “particularly as the Ambassador [to Belgium] is so keen on the project”.[56]As it turned out, these lecturing plans were scuttled by Russell’s cancellation of his German trip, but the correspondence suggests that the Foreign Office regarded nothing unusual about the arrangements that were planned. Moreover, the initiative for them, on this occasion, had not come from the department but from Russell himself. This article has so far presented Russell as a public intellectual whose reputation for independence and integrity was at best tarnished by overly cozy relations with various official agencies and at worst much more seriously damaged by his participation in covert propaganda work. As seen in Part Three, however, Russell’s actions were broadly consistent with the energetic and open support which he extended to the anti-Communist foreign policies of the post-war Labour Governments and of the last Churchill administration in its early years. Recent contributions to Russell studies have debated the extent of Russell’s belligerence towards the Soviet Union during his so-called preventive war phase, when he had seemed willing, at the very least, to threaten Russia with atomic weapons to force its acceptance of a system of international governance more binding than that of the United Nations.[57] Regardless of its degree, the mere fact of this belligerence is worthy of comment, for it separated Russell from sections of the Left with whom he would have been comfortable in association at previous and subsequent points of his political life. This is not to suggest, however, that anti-Communist tendencies were alien to the democratic socialist movement in Britain (or elsewhere for that matter). The Labour Party was steeped in anti-Communism, owing in large part to the determined resistance mounted during the inter-war period by people such as Ernest Bevin (Foreign Secretary from 1945 to 1951) to Communist encroachment in the trade unions. But for Russell, as is well known, the formative influence on his anti-Communist political thinking was rather different: namely, the disillusioning experience of his journey to revolutionary Russia in 1920, from which the highly critical account, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, emerged later the same year. And nothing in the political development of the Soviet Union prior to the death of Stalin had caused Russell to soften the stand taken in his book. It is not difficult, therefore, to fathom the attractiveness to Russell of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. This international movement of anti-Communist leftist intellectuals was founded in 1950; the following year Russell agreed to serve as one of its honorary chairmen, along with Benedetto Croce, Karl Jaspers, Reinhold Niebuhr, John Dewey, Jacques Maritain, and Salvador de Madariaga. [58]The founders and sponsors of the CCF, including Russell, believed that culture no less than politics was a critical arena of Cold War conflict and that it was imperative to challenge the perceived domination of the arts and letters by Communists and fellow-travellers. This intellectual struggle was to be waged through academic conferences and seminars, writers’ congresses, and literary and political journals. The institutional base of the CCF was in Paris, but a number of national affiliates were created and operated with considerable autonomy. Both the CCF and the journals which were published under its auspices—Encounter in Britain, Preuves in France, and Cuadernos in Latin America—received clandestine subsidies via fake charitable foundations set up by the CIA. It is apparent, however, that Russell (and many other CCF luminaries) were genuinely unaware of their organization’s sources of financial support, which were exposed in 1967. Russell regarded the CCF as a liberal bulwark not only against Communism but also against the excesses of right-wing anti-Communism. When the organization appeared to Russell to be insufficiently vigilant in the face of this second threat, he became alienated from it and eventually resigned in 1957. By the latter date, Russell’s views on the Soviet Union had undergone some modifIcation, at least to the extent that he no longer saw any good in placing on record his fundamental objections to Soviet-style dictatorship.[59] He even exhibited on occasion a modicum of optimism about the prospects for internal reform being carried out by the post-Stalin leadership, as indicated by some revealing revisions that were introduced to the reprint in Portraits from Memory of “Why I Am Not a Communist”. When Russell had written this essay for a Background Book in 1954 he thought that it was merely “possible that in the course of time Russia may become more liberal”. Two years later he altered this passage to suggest that there were “signs” that it “will” proceed in this direction.[60] At the same time that Russell’s hitherto staunch anti-Soviet posture was beginning to soften somewhat in the mid-1950s, he was growing increasingly disturbed by the reactionary side-effects of Cold War anti-Communism on American political and intellectual life. Ever since the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 (if not before) he had regarded the threats to civil liberties and academic freedom posed by the phenomenon of McCarthyism as intrinsically bad. But he also came to harbour a deeper fear—namely, that any further escalation of the Senator’s brand of strident anti-Communism, would be ruinous of the (already attenuated) prospects for a stable peace. He felt that it was particularly irresponsible and reprehensible, therefore, for an ostensibly liberal organization such as the CCF to be complicit in promoting this form of anti-Communism in the highly charged atmosphere of American domestic politics. Russell’s first challenge to what he regarded as the misdirected anti-Communism of the CCF arose in 1953 after he discovered that its U.S. branch, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF), had smeared as pro-Communist (with classic guilt-by-association tactics) a symposium on the Bill of Rights hosted by the purportedly fellow-travelling Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. Russell asked his name to be removed from the CCF’s letterhead list of honorary chairmen and was dissuaded from this course only by assurances that the fractious American affiliate had been acting independently of the parent body of which he was a sponsor. He again reacted angrily the following year, when the ACCF asked him to withdraw his endorsement of a seventy-fifth birthday tribute to Einstein that was being staged at Princeton by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee.[61] Two years later, in 1956, Russell drew the ire of the ACCF once more when he publicly (and polemically) protested the conviction and continuing imprisonment of Morton Sobell, a co-accused of the executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. What especially irked critics such as Sidney Hook and Norman Thomas (both directors of the ACCF) were Russell’s sweeping condemnation of criminal justice in the United States and the bolstering of this critique by reference to a book on American civil liberties by Corliss Lamont, a notorious fellow-traveller. After Russell’s opening salvo in Sobell’s defence provocatively compared “Nazi atrocities” with “atrocities committed by the FBI”,[62] he opened himself up—neither for the first nor the last time in his public life—to charges of anti-Americanism. Given Russell’s impeccable anti-Soviet credentials, it was more difficult to smear him as pro-Communist, but after his campaign for Sobell was publicized in the National Guardian (a progressive New York weekly), Sidney Hook accused Russell of “being used—and effectively used—as a weapon in the Communists’ political war against the United States”.[63] The ACCF objected strenuously to the manner in which Russell had defended Morton Sobell.[64] Russell took their open letter to him as an inexcusable ad hominem attack and as a cue, at last, to resign the honorary chairmanship of the parent body which he had been holding with some reluctance for the past three years. This decision was deferred for almost a year as the executive of the international organization strove desperately to deter one of their “biggest attractions” from taking such a regrettable step. This characterization of Russell was made by the CIA’s most highly placed operative in the CCF, the latter organization’s executive director, Michael Josselson.[65] Russell’s break with the Congress for Cultural Freedom is significant in two respects. First, it reveals how seriously the non-Communist left was divided over the types of anti-Communism that were desirable. The controversy had pitted Russell against liberal or social democratic intellectuals for whom he might otherwise have felt a certain affinity. As he told the American Socialist Party leader, Norman Thomas: “You and I are on the same side in most matters, and I have every wish to avoid magnifying our differences”.[66] Where Thomas (and Sidney Hook) differed from Russell was in the enduring intensity of their anti-Communism and especially in the persistence of their determination to avoid all political contact with Communists and fellow-travellers. Russell was far from naïve about the risks of such associations but had decided by the mid-1950s that the pressing need for an ideologically diverse peace initiative outweighed the risk of such an enterprise being tarnished as pro-Soviet or captured by the Communist-aligned peace movement.[67] Second, and of more direct relevance to the present article, Russell maintained a vigorous independence throughout his troubled association with the CCF. Indeed, his relations with the organization grew progressively more combative. While his future in the CCF remained in doubt in the fall of 1956—on account of his still unresolved dispute with the American Committee—Russell took umbrage at the failure of the international Congress to denounce the Franco-British-Israeli attack on Egypt with the same vigour that it had censured Soviet military intervention in Hungary.[68] Clearly Russell was not following a script that the CCF’s pay¬masters in the CIA (and IRD[69]) may have expected him act to out. Like other British intellectuals in the Congress, Russell evidently “favoured a definition of cultural freedom that was more expansive than, and therefore, sometimes in conflict with, that of the CCF”. Far from accepting the guiding hand of the CIA, their behaviour “often confounded and frustrated the intentions of their secretive American patrons”.[70] Russell’s truculence was a source of acute consternation to the parent body in Paris which, as indicated already, regarded Russell as an invaluable patron—especially of its work in Europe and Asia. Michael Josselson might privately dismiss Russell as an “old fool”, but he was nevertheless furious with the CCF’s American affiliate for provoking the dispute which led to the latter’s relinquishment of his honorary chairmanship.[71] Favouring a more subtle approach to the cultural Cold War than the liberal anti-Communists in the American Committee, the CIA’s Josselson believed that it was imperative for the CCF to find room for those who wished to criticize the United States. But perhaps Russell’s breach with the Congress could not have been averted. His departure was, in a sense, a telling reflection of a sea change in outlook on the Cold War that had taken place since he agreed to sponsor the organization some six years previously (around the same time that he embarked upon the publishing venture with Background Books). The most succinct appraisal of this transformation has been supplied by Russell himself: I was brought around to being more favourable to Communism by the death of Stalin in 1953 and by the Bikini test in 1954; and I came gradually to attribute, more and more, the danger of nuclear war to the West, to the United States of America, and less to Russia. This change was supported by developments inside the United States, such as McCarthyism and the restriction of civil liberties.[72] When Russell tendered his resignation from the CCF for a final time in January 1957, he had already embarked on an anti-nuclear quest which led first to the inauguration of the Pugwash movement and then to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The heroic years of public protest which followed are of course integral to Russell’s biography. But they may also have served to divert attention from some murkier activities engaged in by Russell the Cold War propagandist. It is to be hoped that the present article has added some clarity to this earlier phase of Russell’s political life simply by laying out some of the pertinent evidence in a systematic fashion. For a still clearer picture to emerge, however, it will be necessary to scrutinize more closely all of Russell’s Cold War associations and contacts, perhaps from other as yet untapped sources of archival information. Bertrand Russell Research Centre McMaster University Hamilton, ON bone@mcmaster.ca [1] "Bertrand Russell and the Cold War: Orwell's List", Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly no. 123 (August 2004), 29-38. [2] Ibid., 34. [3] The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell. Vol. 3: 1944-1967 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), pp. 19-21. [4] See Timothy Garton Ash, "Orwell's List", New York Review of Books, 25 Sept. 2003; referred to by Clontz, "Bertrand Russell and the Cold War", 33. [5] See P. Lashmar and J. Oliver, Britain's Secret Propoganda War (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), 31. I am grateful to Amanda White of the BRRC for supplying me this reference. [6] RA1 410 (Wintle), the archival location for all correspondence between Russell and Wintle referred to in this section. [7] The Letters and closures pertaining to What Is Freedom? were not Wintle's earliest contacts with Russell. The first correspondence from him in the Russell Archives is is dated 3 May 1951. From that letter it is apparent that Wintle had also shepherded to publication Russell's first contribution to Background Books, the essay "Dictatorship Breeds Corruption" in the symposium Why Communism Must Fail (London: Batchworth Press, 1951). Wintle then wanted 1,200 words from Russell on "What Communists Really Think of Christian (or Islamic) Socialists". Wintle explained further that he had in mind something with a strong anti-Communist flavour: "As I view it, one of the points is the essential dishonesty of prresent Communist attempts to encourage the establishment of ‘popular front’ governments—especially in the East—in which Communists and various brands of Socialists are supposed to combine, and the Socialists’ unawareness that they are being invited to sup with their Communist ‘brothers’ in order that the latter shall eat them!” The notation on Wintle’s letter indicates that Russell responded affirmatively to this suggestion, although it is not known whether the typescript “Communism and Christian Socialism” (RA1 220.019220) ever appeared in print. [8] 4 May 1946, p. 4 (B&R C46.05). [9] "Stalin's Legacy", RA2 220.148003 [10] "A New Russian Policy?", RA2 220.148004; see Autobiography 3: 20. [11] London: Phoenix House, 1956 (B&R B117). [12] 26 March 1956, p. 4 (B&R C56.03). [13] Détente or Destruction, 1955–1957 (The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell 29), edited by Andrew G. Bone (London and New York, Routledge, 2005), pp. 55–6. [14] See Stephen Hayhurst, “Russell’s Anti-Communist Rhetoric before and after Stalin’s Death”, Russell, n.s. 11 (summer 1991): 67–82. [15] See Andrew Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda, 1945–1953: The Information Research Department (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 166. [16] Bombay: Democratic Research Service, 1951 (B&R B101.1b). [17] See the list of titles on the back cover of Why I Oppose Communism. [18] Quoted in Hayhurst, “Russell’s Anti-Communist Rhetoric”, 71. [19] See Defty, op. cit., 165. [20] Ibid., 182, and (more generally) 246–9. [21] See Philip M. Taylor, “The Projection of Britain Abroad, 1945–51”, in British Foreign Policy, 1945–56, edited by Michael Dockrill and John W. Young (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), p. 23. [22] RA1 710.054249. [23] Sent to Russell 14 Nov. 1951. Peck’s letter 7 Aug. 1952 (RA2 910 F14b). [24] See Peck 7 Aug. 1952 & 29 Dec. 1953, RA2 910 F14b & 14c. [25] 20 Nov. 1952, RA2 910 F14b. See also T.S. Tull to Russell, 15 Aug. 1951, ibid, F14a. [26] RA1 710.054250. [27] RA2 750. [28] See RA2 910 F14a. [29] J.H.A. Watson to Russell, 25 April 1950, RA2 910 F14a. [30] See “The Road to Peace”, Papers 28: 359 and “Science and Human Life”, Papers 29: 16. [31] See Peck to Russell 29 June 1952, ibid., F14b. [32] Defty, op. cit., 165. [33] See Ibid., 248. [34] Quoted in Defty, op. cit., 6, from Smith, “Covert British Propaganda: The Information Research Department, 1947–1977”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 9 (1980): 67–83. [35] The literature is reviewed by Defty in his introduction. [36] Quoted in Defty, op. cit., 6. [37] I am grateful to Kenneth Blackwell for drawing my attention to Russell’s notes, which are filed with his typescript carbon version (“Scientists in Slavery”, RA1 220.018840) of the article published as “First Sign of De-cay”, News Review, London, 27, no. 11 (17 Mar. 1949) 10-11 (B&R C49.07). The anonymous mimeograph is entitled “The Conflict between Science and State in the U.S.S.R.” (RA2 910 C20). [38] See above note 30. [39] Defty, op. cit., 17. [40] See Mariel Grant, “Towards a Central Office of Information: Continuity and Change in British Government Information Policy, 1939–51”, Journal of Contemporary History, 34 (1999): 49–67. [41] Quoted in Taylor, “Projection of Britain Abroad”, 17. [42] See Papers 29: 123–4. [43] Autobiography 3: 19–20. [44] Ibid., 20. [45] Ibid., 21. [46] Founded in 1932 by the wealthy Liberal businessman and politician David Davies (Baron Davies of Llandinam), the New Commonwealth Society had always stood for a tough-minded internationalism. Dismayed by the ambivalence towards sanctions of the League of Nations Union in the early 1930s, the rival organization patronized by Davies had campaigned for international arbitration by a tribunal whose decisions would be en¬forced by an International Police Force. [47] 5 Nov. 1947, RA2 910 F14a. [48] 19 Nov. 1947, ibid. Enclosed with this letter was a confidential assessment made by Britain’s Chargé d’Affaires in Moscow of the latest ideological offensive launched by the high priest of Stalinist cultural policy, Andrei Zhdanov. [49] To Walter Marseille, 5 May 1948. Six years later this letter was published (see Papers 28: 72), adding to the controversy that dogged Russell throughout the 1950s—not to mention posthumously (see below, n. 57)—and arising from his alleged prior advocacy of preventive war. [50] See Ronald Clark, The Life of Bertrand Russell (London: Jonathan Cape and Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975), p. 523. Only the first of Russell’s six annual lectures to the Imperial Defence College was published; it was reprinted subsequently in Unpopular Essays (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1950), Chap. 3. [51] Autobiography 3: 19. [52] Clark, Life of Bertrand Russell, 503–4; Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), 304. [53] Clark, Life of Bertrand Russell, 504. [54] “Projection of Britain Abroad”, 16. [55] RA1 710.052346. [56] 19 Oct. 1951, RA1 710.052347. [57] See Ray Perkins, Jr., “Bertrand Russell and Preventive War”, Russell, n.s. 14 (winter 1994–95): 135–53.; David Blitz, “Did Russell Advocate Preventive Atomic War against the USSR?”, Russell, n.s. 22 (summer 2002): 5–45; and the exchange between Perkins and Blitz in Russell, n.s. 22 (winter 2002–03): 161–72. [58] See the contrasting accounts of Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: The Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1989) and Frances S. Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000), as well as reviews of these two works by, respectively, Louis Greenspan (“Liberal Conspirators”, Russell n.s. 10 [winter 1990–91]: 180–3) and David Blitz (“Cultural Cold War”, Russell, n.s. 21 [winter 2001–02]: 176). [59] “I have taken a great deal of time to sift truth from propaganda in regard to Communist countries”, he had told a Mr. Beer on 1 February 1955, “and I am left with a conviction that Communist régimes are very bad. But I no longer think that much purpose is served by saying so in public” (quoted in Papers 29: 54). [60] See Papers 29: 58. [61] See Papers 28: 179. [62] “The Sobell Case”, The Manchester Guardian, 26 March 1956, p. 6 (B&R C56.04); Papers 29: 153. [63] 18 June 1956; quoted in B. Feinberg and R. Kasrils, eds., Bertrand Russell’s America. Vol. 2: 1945–1970 (Boston: South End Press, 1983), p. 86. [64] See “Bertrand Russell Taken to Task”, The Manchester Guardian, 6 April, p. 6. [65] See Hugh Wilford, “‘Unwitting Assets?’: British Intellectuals and the Congress for Cultural Freedom”, Twentieth Century British History, 11 (2000): 58. Russell’s final breach with the Congress is also covered in Papers 29: xxxviii–xli; Bertrand Russell’s America, 2: 78–81, 97–8; Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy, 165–7; and Saunders, Cultural Cold War, 231–2. [66] “The State of U.S. Civil Liberties”, The New Leader, 40, no. 7 (18 Feb. 1957): 16–18 (B&R C57.04); Papers 29: 175. Before long, as it turned out, the passionate commitment of both Thomas and Russell to the cause of nuclear disarmament had revived a “basis for cooperation … which transcended their sharp disagreement about the impact of the Cold War on American civil liberties” (James Duram, “From Conflict to Cooperation: Bertrand Russell, Norman Thomas, and the Cold War”, Russell, nos. 25–8 [1977]: 66). [67] See the present author’s “Russell and the Communist-Aligned Peace Movement in the mid-1950s”, Russell, n.s. 21 (summer 2001): 31-57. [68] See Papers 29: xxxvii–xxxviii. [69] For example, the British CCF publication Encounter received a small and secret stipend from the IRD, which also bought up copies of the monthly magazine for overseas distribution (see Defty, op. cit., 205). Other ties existed between the IRD and the British Society for Cultural Freedom (the CCF’s British affiliate). Two of its executive officers, secretary Michael Goodwin and national organizer John Clews, had connections to the Foreign Office or IRD, while a third, chairman Malcolm Muggeridge, helped set up a covert subsidy to the British organization from MI6 (see Wilford, “British Intellectuals and the Congress for Cultural Freedom”, 49, 56–7). [70] Wilford, “British Intellectuals and the Congress for Cultural Freedom”, 58, 42. [71] See Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy, 166. [72] Autobiography 3: 20. |