About this item

When news broke that the CIA had colluded with literary magazines to produce cultural propaganda throughout the Cold War, a debate began that has never been resolved. The story continues to unfold, with the reputations of some of Americas best-loved literary figures - including Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, and Richard Wright - tarnished as their work for the intelligence agency has come to light.Finks is a tale of two CIAs, and how they blurred the line between propaganda and literature. One CIA created literary magazines that promoted American and European writers and cultural freedom, while the other toppled governments, using assassination and censorship as political tools. Defenders of the "cultural" CIA argue that it should have been lauded for boosting interest in the arts and freedom of thought, but the two CIAs had the same undercover goals, and shared many of the same methods: deception, subterfuge and intimidation.Finks demonstrates how the good-versus-bad CIA is a false divide, and that the cultural Cold Warriors again and again used anti-Communism as a lever to spy relentlessly on leftists, and indeed writers of all political inclinations, and thereby pushed U.S. democracy a little closer to the Soviet model of the surveillance state.



About the Author

Joel Whitney

Joel Whitney is the author of Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers and a founder of Guernica: A Magazine of Global Arts & Politics. His writing appears in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Baffler, The Wall Street Journal, Boston Review, Salon, The Sun Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, World Policy Journal, The New Republic, Dissent, New York Magazine, The Wire (India) and The Village Voice. Finks has been called "riveting" (Kirkus) , "ingeniously researched..." (Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian's Best of the Year Roundup) , "a fascinating mix of political history [and] literary history" (New York Times) , "an essential book" (Los Angeles Review of Books) and "a powerful warning" (The New Republic) .



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