The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America | Date: 28 April 2011, 06:36
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The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America
By Hugh Wilford
* Publisher: Harvard University Press
* Number Of Pages:
* Publication Date: 2008-01-15
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0674026810
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780674026810
Product Description:
In 1967 the magazine Ramparts ran an expose 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 history of American intelligence and presaged a series of public scandals from which the CIA's reputation has arguably never recovered.
CIA official Frank Wisner called the operation his "mighty Wurlitzer," on which he could play any propaganda tune. In this illuminating book, Hugh Wilford provides the first comprehensive account of the clandestine relationship between the CIA and its front organizations. Using an unprecedented wealth of sources, he traces the rise and fall of America's Cold War front network from its origins in the 1940s to its Third World expansion during the 1950s and ultimate collapse in the 1960s.
Covering the intelligence officers who masterminded the CIA's fronts as well as the involved citizen groups--emigres, labor, intellectuals, artists, students, women, Catholics, African Americans, and journalists--Wilford provides a surprising analysis of Cold War society that contains valuable lessons for our own age of global conflict.
(20071201)
Summary: The Mighty Wurlitzer
Rating: 1
This was a very misleading title. It could have been more aptly entitled "The OPC/CIA gave away huge amounts of the tax payer money during the Cold War." Period.
This funding was given to anti-Communist organizations and individuals both here and abroad to help spread anti-Communist propaganda as a part of the CIA's Psychological Warfare Ops.
Although the organizations listed were numerous, most of them had already been identified by previous authors. The same applies to the individuals involved to whom Mr. Wilford constantly refers to as the "intellectuals".
I must admit I have never read a book about the CIA that maintained such an obvious hands-off, distant approach to the Agency. His kid-glove treatment of the CIA seem to imply that the Agency was comprised solely of high-minded and noble intellectuals, patrons of the arts all, and whose only desire was to protect the American public from the Red Menace gathering at their doorstep. The book never actually gets into a discussion on what the CIA actually did or how they did it except to say they gave away money. There are no real in-depth discussions of the CIA at all.
The one area that Mr. Wilford does excel in was his detailed descriptions of the friction, disagreements, infighting, and at times petty squabbling amongst the non-CIA "intellectuals" in charge of these various organizations receiving the funding. If anything, this book was more like a "CIA Fund Recipients" gossip column.
Despite the acclaim this book has recieved from others, I found it to be a failure due to its' reluctance to actully enter into any honest discussion of the Central Intelligence Agency itself (as the title implies).
How Frank Wisner's Mighty Wurlitzer "played" America never became obvious.
Summary: The Mighty Wurlitzer plays on!
Rating: 4
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....
Summary: Awesome
Rating: 5
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.
Summary: Useful study of secret CIA operations in the USA
Rating: 5
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, emigres, 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 Cath
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