Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book

Chapter 8

“We tore a big hole in the Iron Curtain.”

The Russian-language manuscript of Doctor Zhivago arrived at CIA headquarters in Washington, D.C., in early January 1958 in the form of two rolls of film. British intelligence provided this copy of the novel. Inside the agency, the novel was the source of some excitement. In a memo to Frank Wisner, who oversaw clandestine operations for the CIA, the head of the agency’s Soviet Russia Division described Doctor Zhivago as “the most heretical literary work by a Soviet author since Stalin’s death.”

“Pasternak’s humanistic message—that every person is entitled to a private life and deserves respect as a human being, irrespective of the extent of his political loyalty or contribution to the state—poses a fundamental challenge to the Soviet ethic of sacrifice of the individual to the Communist system,” wrote John Maury, the Soviet Russia Division chief. “There is no call to revolt against the regime in the novel, but the heresy which Dr. Zhivago preaches—political passivity—is fundamental. Pasternak suggests that the small unimportant people who remain passive to the regime’s demands for active participation and emotional involvement in official campaigns are superior to the political ‘activists’ favored by the system. Further, he dares hint that society might function better without these fanatics.”

Maury was a fluent Russian speaker who had been an assistant naval attaché in Moscow when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. During the war, he served in Murmansk as part of the Lend-Lease program by which the United States delivered over $11 billion worth of supplies to the Soviet Union. Maury, however, had no affection for the former ally. He subscribed to the belief that Soviet action could best be understood through the prism of Russian history. “He considered the Soviet regime a continuation of imperial Russia, and thought the KGB had been founded by Ivan the Terrible,” said one of his officers.

The CIA’s Soviet Russia Division was stocked with first- and second-generation Russian-Americans whose families, in many cases, had fled the Bolsheviks. The division prided itself on its vodka-soaked parties with a lot of Russian singing. “Our specialty was the charochka, the ceremonial drinking song with its chorus of pey do dna [bottoms up!],” recalled one officer who served in the 1950s.

The American and British intelligence services agreed that Doctor Zhivago should be published in Russian, but the British “asked that it not be done in the U.S.” This approach became policy for the CIA, which calculated that a Russian-language edition produced in the United States would be more easily dismissed by the Soviet Union as propaganda in a way that publication in a small European country would not. Moreover, they feared, overt American involvement could be used by the authorities in Moscow to persecute Pasternak.

In an internal memo shortly after the appearance of the novel in Italy, agency staff also recommended that Doctor Zhivago “should be published in a maximum number of foreign editions, for maximum free world distribution and acclaim and consideration for such honor as the Nobel prize.” While the CIA hoped Pasternak’s novel would draw global attention, including from the Swedish Academy, there was no indication that the agency considered printing a Russian-language edition to help Pasternak win the prize.

The CIA’s role in operations involving Doctor Zhivago was backed at the highest level of government. The Eisenhower White House, through its Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), which oversaw covert activities, gave the CIA exclusive control over the novel’s “exploitation.” The rationale behind this decision was “the sensitivity of the operation, and that the hand of the United States government should not be shown in any manner.” Instead of having the State Department or the United States Information Agency trumpet the novel publicly, secrecy was employed to prevent “the possibility of personal reprisal against Pasternak or his family.” The OCB issued verbal guidelines to the agency and told the CIA to promote the book “as literature, not as cold-war propaganda.”

The CIA, as it happened, loved literature—novels, short stories, poems. Joyce, Hemingway, Eliot. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov. Books were weapons. If a piece of literature was unavailable or banned in the USSR or Eastern Europe, and the work might challenge or contrast with Soviet reality, the agency wanted it in the hands of citizens in the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War was twelve years old in 1958, and whatever illusions might have existed about liberating the “captive peoples” of the East were shattered by the bloodshed in Budapest and the inability of the Western powers, and in particular of the United States, to do much more than peer through the barbed wire. The United States was unable to help the striking East Germans in 1953 or the Poles who also revolted in 1956. Communism would not be rolled back for the simple reason that no one could countenance an intervention that could escalate into war between superpowers armed with atomic weapons.

In the 1950s, the CIA was engaged in relentless global political warfare with the Kremlin. This effort was intended to shore up support for the Atlantic Alliance (NATO) in Western Europe, counter Soviet propaganda, and challenge Soviet influence in the world. The CIA believed the power of ideas—in news, art, music, and literature—could slowly corrode the authority of the Soviet state with its own people and in the satellite states of Eastern Europe. The agency was in a long game. Cord Meyer, the head of the CIA’s International Organizations Division, which oversaw much of the agency’s covert propaganda operations, wrote that exposure to Western ideas “could incrementally over time improve the chances for gradual change toward more open societies.”

To further its objectives, the CIA, using a host of front organizations and phony foundations, spent untold millions to fund concert tours, art exhibitions, highbrow magazines, academic research, student activism, news organizations—and book publishing. In Western Europe, the CIA channeled money to the non-Communist left, which it regarded as the principal bulwark against its Communist foe. The alliance between Cold War anticommunism and liberal idealism “appeared natural and right” and would not break down until the 1960s. “Our help went mainly to the democratic parties of the left and of the center,” said Meyer. “The right wing and the conservative forces had their own financial resources: the real competition with the communists for votes and influence lay on the left of the political spectrum, where the allegiance of the working class and the intelligentsia was to be decided.”

In 1950s America, during and long after the poisonous anti-Communist crusade of Senator Joseph McCarthy, it would have been impossible to get Congress to appropriate money for the State Department or any other part of the government to openly fund left-wing organizations and the promotion of the arts in Europe. Even for direct operations against the Communist Bloc, Congress would have struggled to support activities as seemingly effete as book publishing. The CIA budget was black, and perfect for the job. The agency believed with genuine fervor that the Cold War was also cultural. There was a realization that this funding—millions of dollars annually—would support activities that would “manifest diversity and differences of view and be infused by the concept of free inquiry. Thus views expressed by representatives and members of the U.S. supported organizations in many cases were not shared by their sponsors.… It took a fairly sophisticated point of view to understand that the public exhibition of unorthodox views was a potent weapon against monolithic Communist uniformity of action.” Thus the CIA “became one of the world’s largest grant-making institutions,” rivaling the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations.

President Harry Truman didn’t like the idea of a peacetime American intelligence service. Newspapers and some congressmen worried aloud about an American gestapo. And immediately after World War II, a part of the establishment felt queasy about putting down a stake in the underworld of covert operations. But as tensions with the Soviet Union grew, the need for some “centralized snooping,” as Truman called it, seemed unavoidable. The CIA was created in 1947, and, as well as authorizing intelligence gathering, Congress vested the spy agency with power to perform “other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security.” This vague authority would provide the legal justification for covert action, operations that cannot be traced to the CIA and can be denied by the U.S. government, although at first the CIA’s general counsel was uncertain if the agency could undertake “black propaganda” without specific congressional authorization. In the first years of the Cold War, various government departments, including State and Defense, continued to debate how to institute a permanent and effective capability to run missions, which ranged from propaganda efforts to paramilitary operations such as arming émigré groups and inserting them back inside the Eastern Bloc to commit acts of sabotage.

The intellectual author of U.S. covert action was George Kennan, the influential diplomat and policy planner, who argued that the United States had to mobilize all its resources and cunning to contain the Soviet Union’s atavistic expansionism. The United States was also facing a foe that, since the 1920s, had mastered the creation of the front organization—idealistic-sounding, international entities that promoted noncommunist ideas such as peace and democracy but were secretly controlled by the Kremlin and its surrogates. Washington needed a capability to “do things that very much needed to be done, but for which the government couldn’t take official responsibility.” In May 1948, the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, which Kennan headed, wrote a memo entitled “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare.” The memo noted that “the Kremlin’s conduct of political warfare was the most refined and effective of any in history” and argued that the United States, in response, “cannot afford to leave unmobilized our resources for covert political warfare.” It laid down a series of recommendations to support and cultivate resistance within the Soviet Bloc and support the Soviet Union’s émigré and ideological foes in the West.

The following month, the National Security Council created the Office of Special Projects, which was housed at the CIA although at first it was an independent office. The new group was soon renamed the equally anodyne Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). It was led by Frank Wisner, a veteran of the wartime intelligence service, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He had served for six months in Bucharest in 1944 and 1945 and watched in despair and fury as Russian troops put 70,000 Romanians of German descent onto boxcars destined for the Soviet Union, where they were to be used as slave labor. “The OSS operative was ‘brutally shocked’ by the spectacle of raw Soviet power at the same time that Russians were toasting a new era of Allied cooperation.” The experience marked Wisner. He was suffused with an evangelical, anti-Communist zeal to take the fight to the enemy.

Wisner divided his planned clandestine activity into five areas—psychological warfare, political warfare, economic warfare, preventive direct action, and miscellaneous. He wanted the ability to do just about anything, from proselytizing against the Soviet Union to using émigré proxies to launch violent attacks and create some kind of anti-Communist resistance. The organization’s powers continued to expand under new National Security directives, as did its personnel and resources. There were 302 CIA staffers involved in covert operations in 1949. Three years later, there were 2,812, with another 3,142 overseas contractors. These spies and officers were located at forty-seven locations worldwide; the budget for their operations in the same three-year period grew from $4.7 million to $82 million. In 1952, OPC was merged with the Office of Special Operations to create the Directorate of Plans.

One young recruit, the future CIA director William Colby, said Wisner instilled his organization with “the atmosphere of an order of Knights Templar, to save Western freedom from Communist darkness.” Wisner was also “boyishly charming, cool but coiled, a low hurdler from Mississippi.” He wanted people with that “added dimension”; war veterans like himself, athletic and smart but not bookish, from the best schools, and especially Yale.

Attracted by the sense of epic struggle and feeling certain about the moral clarity of the moment, writers and poets enlisted with the CIA. James Jesus Angelton, the CIA’s counterintelligence chief, was an editor at The Yale Literary Magazine and cofounded the literary magazine Furioso. He counted Ezra Pound among his closest friends. Cord Meyer Jr., another alumnus of the Yale Literary, had published fiction in The Atlantic Monthly and continued to hanker for the writing life when he was running the agency’s propaganda operations. When one of Meyer’s recruits, Robie Macauley, formerly of The Kenyon Review, left the agency to become the fiction editor of Playboy, Meyer told him, “I might even send you a story under an appropriate pseudonym.” John Thompson was another hire from The Kenyon Review. John Hunt was recruited around the time his novel Generations of Men appeared. Peter Matthiessen, a cofounder and editor of the Paris Review, wrote his novel Partisans while working for the agency.

“I went down to Washington in the spring of 1951 to enlist in a struggle that was less violent but more complex and ambiguous than the war I had volunteered to join ten years before,” said Meyer, a combat veteran who was wounded on Guam and lost one of his eyes.

To funnel its money to the causes it wanted to bankroll, the CIA created a series of private, high-minded organizations. Prominent Americans were recruited to serve on their boards and create the illusion that these entities were stocked with the kind of wealthy benefactors whose involvement would explain away streams of cash. Among the first was the National Committee for a Free Europe, incorporated in 1949 with offices in New York. Members included Dwight D. Eisenhower, soon to be president; film moguls Cecil B. DeMille and Darryl Zanuck; Henry Ford II, the president of Ford Motor Company; Cardinal Francis Spellman, the archbishop of New York; and Allen Dulles, the new organization’s executive secretary. Dulles would join the CIA in 1951 and become director in 1953. Most of these volunteers were made aware of or deduced CIA involvement. The Free Europe Committee, as it was renamed, purported to be self-financing through a national fund-raising campaign called the Crusade for Freedom. In fact, only about 12 percent of the FEC budget came from fund-raising, most of that corporate largesse. The bulk of the cash came via a weekly check that the CIA routed through a Wall Street bank.

The Free Europe Committee’s principal project was Radio Free Europe, which began broadcasting in Czech, Slovak, and Romanian on July 4, 1950, followed soon after by programming in Polish, Hungarian, and Bulgarian. Radio Free Europe was followed in 1953 by a second station directed at the Soviet Union, Radio Liberation. This broadcaster, later and better known as Radio Liberty, was backed by another nonprofit front, the American Committee for Liberation. The committee, with offices in midtown Manhattan, had a less august board of Americans and was more secretive; at the first board meeting it was simply announced that the money to finance Radio Liberation would come from the “personal friends of the committee members.” The agency decided to give Radio Liberation less obviously patrician backing because it was finding that it was sometimes difficult to command the large egos of the Free Europe Committee. Although both broadcasters were designed to further U.S. foreign policy and security interests, they enjoyed a good deal of autonomy if for no other reason than the CIA was unable to manage two large news organizations. After beginning as somewhat shrill mouthpieces, they settled down and became credible news organizations, particularly after 1956 when Radio Free Europe’s role in encouraging the Hungarian revolutionaries, and creating the chimera of impending American intervention, was roundly criticized. Occasionally, secret messages were embedded in broadcasts and some officers used the radio stations as cover. But, for the most part, an American management team oversaw émigré editors with little direct interference from Washington, D.C. There was, in fact, no need to exercise stringent editorial control. The CIA saw the kind of message it wished to direct flow naturally from the routine judgments of the anti-Communist staffs. Radio Liberation acted as a surrogate domestic broadcaster largely focused on what was happening inside the Soviet Union, not around the world.

Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation broadcast from Munich. The CIA, through the American Committee for Liberation, also established a number of related fronts in Munich such as the Institute for the Study of the Soviet Union and the Central Association of Post-War Émigrés, known by its Russian initials TsOPE. The agency’s vast presence in Munich was an open secret. One Radio Liberation employee doubted that there was “a single stoker or sweeper at [broadcast headquarters] who did not have some inkling of the true state of affairs.” The KGB called Munich diversionnyi tsentr, the “center of subversion.”

About one-third of the urban adult population in the Soviet Union listened to Western broadcasts. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called it “the mighty non-military force which resides in the airwaves and whose kindling power in the midst of communist darkness cannot even be grasped by the Western imagination.” In 1958, the Soviet Union was spending more on jamming Western signals than it spent on its own domestic and international broadcasting combined.

The Free Europe Committee also established its own publishing unit, the Free Europe Press. It couldn’t reach over the Iron Curtain via shortwave but it took to the air in its own way. On August 27, 1951, near the Czechoslovakian border in Bavaria, the FEC released balloons that were carried by the prevailing winds across the frontier. Dignitaries from the United States participated in a ceremony marking the first launch of balloons, including the chairman of the Crusade for Freedom, Harold Stassen; the newspaper columnist Drew Pearson; and C. D. Jackson, a former Time-Life executive, who would become one of Eisenhower’s key advisers on psychological warfare. The balloons were designed to burst at 30,000 feet, scattering their cargo of thousands of propaganda leaflets on the land below. “A new wind is blowing. New hope is stirring. Friends of freedom in other lands have found a new way to reach you,” read one of those first leaflets, prepared by the Free Europe Press. “There is no dungeon deep enough to hide truth, no wall high enough to keep out the message of freedom. Tyranny cannot control the winds, cannot enslave your hearts. Freedom will rise again.”

“We tore a big hole in the Iron Curtain,” Stassen told Time magazine.

Over the next five years, the FEC launched 600,000 balloons, dropping tens of millions of pieces of propaganda across Eastern Europe, including a letter-size magazine. The Czechoslovakian air force tried to shoot down the balloons. The United States put an end to the program in 1956 after the government of West Germany began to object to “an extremely worrisome violation of airspace sovereignty from the territory of the Federal Republic.” The Czechoslovakian government falsely alleged that a balloon brought down an airplane. One balloon did cause a household fire in Austria. (A housewife overturned a cooking burner after she was startled by a balloon landing on her home.) The program was simply too random and crudely visible.

The agency turned to mailing books.

In April 1956, Samuel S. Walker Jr., the director of the Free Europe Press, called a meeting of the young Americans and Eastern Europeans who worked for him at their offices on West Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan. On the agenda was a potential new project: mailing books across the Iron Curtain. The Eastern Europeans, who had experience sending packages to their relatives, believed it was plausible to mail propaganda. Others, including one of the Free Europe Committee’s leading academic advisers, Hugh Seton-Watson of the University of London, feared that Communist censors would intercept books from the West. The final decision rested with Walker, still in his twenties, a former chairman of the Yale Daily News who had abandoned a career at Time for the intrigue of the Free Europe Press. “Let’s do it,” he said. The “friends down south,” as the CIA was called, backed a plan that called for mailing books to specific individuals in official positions “to reduce the efficiency of the communist administration by weakening loyalty of the party and state cadres.” That didn’t work too well. The first mailings, mostly political articles, some translated, some not, were sent from New York and cities across Europe. Many packages never made it to their intended targets, or were turned in to the authorities. Through trial and error, the book program’s developers learned that if they had books shipped directly from a publisher they often got through—even provocative titles such as Albert Camus’s The Rebel. The Free Europe Press began to send lists of books to a wider audience of Eastern Europeans with an offer that if the recipient made a selection the titles would be mailed at no cost. Eventually, the head of the program, George Minden, a former Romanian refugee, told his staff to concentrate on “providing a minimum basis for spiritual understanding of Western values, which we hope to supply through psychology, literature, the theater and the visual arts. This will take the place of political and other directly antagonizing materials.” An early planning memo in 1956 said, “There should be no total attacks on communism.… Our primary aims should be to demonstrate the superior achievements of the West.”

The CIA entity purchased books and rights from major U.S. and European publishers, including Doubleday & Company, Harper & Brothers, Harvard University Press, Faber and Faber, Macmillan Publishing Company, Bertelsmann, and Hachette. All business and invoicing was run through the International Advisory Council, another CIA front with offices on East Sixty-fifth Street.

And some delighted responses found their way back to New York. “We are swallowing them passionately—strictly speaking they are being passed from hand to hand,” wrote a student from Łódž in Poland who got copies of works by George Orwell, Milovan Ðjilas, and Czesław Miłosz. “They are treated as greatest rarities—in other words, the best of bestsellers.” A Polish scholar who received Doctor Zhivago wrote, “Your priceless publications will serve not only me but a large group of friends as well … and will be treated as [a] sensation!”

Shortly after the Free Europe Press began its mailings in 1956, the CIA, through the American Committee for Liberation, approved a book program for the Soviet Union. The agency funded the creation of the Bedford Publishing Company, another group in New York City, and its plan was to translate Western literary works and publish them in Russian. “The Soviet public, who had been subject to tedious Communist propaganda … was starved for Western books,” wrote Isaac Patch, the first head of Bedford Publishing. “Through our book program we hoped to fill the void and open up the door to the fresh air of liberty and freedom.” An initial CIA grant of $10,000 grew into an annual budget of $1 million. Bedford Publishing opened offices in London, Paris, Munich, and Rome, and in those days when money flowed freely, the staff held their annual meetings at places like Venice’s San Giorgio Maggiore. Among the works translated were James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Rather than mailing books, because the controls were stronger in the Soviet Union than in parts of Eastern Europe, Bedford Publishing concentrated on handing out books to Soviet visitors to the West or placing books with Westerners traveling to the Soviet Union so they could distribute them upon arrival. The company also stocked the U.S. embassy in Moscow with titles. Some miniature paperbacks, printed at CIA headquarters, were on the shelves at Stockmann, the famous Helsinki department store where Westerners stocked up on goods before or during stints in Moscow. Members of the Moscow Philharmonic, who were passed books while on tour in the West, hid them in their sheet music for the trip home. Books were also spirited home in food cans and Tampax boxes.

In its first fifteen years, Bedford distributed over one million books to Soviet readers. The program continued until the fall of the Soviet Union, and across the Eastern Bloc as many as 10 million books and magazines were disseminated. One KGB chief grumbled that Western books and other printed material are “the main wellspring of hostile sentiments” among Soviet students.

While the CIA’s literary tastes were broad, they were not indiscriminate. The agency’s publishing was guided by both the background of its officers and contractors and their understanding of the mission. The novelist Richard Elman complained that “the CIA has stood foursquare behind the Western Christian traditions of hierarchy, elitism, and antimillennial enlightenment of the benighted and has opposed revolutionary movements in literature as well as politics. It has been a staunch advocate of legitimacy, and it has carefully chosen to subsidize or disseminate the writings of literary artists such as V. S. Naipaul and Saul Bellow who were similarly inclined.” This may be somewhat overstated given the breadth and numbers of books sent East, but a full analysis of the CIA aesthetics will remain impossible until it reveals all the titles it subsidized, translated, and disseminated—a list, if it exists, that remains classified.

The CIA chief of covert action boasted in 1961 that the agency could: “get books published or distributed abroad without revealing any U.S. influence, by covertly subsidizing foreign publications or booksellers; get books published which should not be ‘contaminated’ by any overt tie-in with the U.S. government, especially if the position of the author is ‘delicate’; [and] get books published for operational reasons, regardless of commercial viability.”

Indeed, the CIA commissioned its own works—as many as a thousand publications—because the “advantage of direct contact with the author is that we can acquaint him in great detail with our intentions; that we can provide him with whatever material we want to include and that we can check the manuscript at every stage.” One example was a book by a student from the developing world about his experience studying in a communist country. A reviewer for CBS, who didn’t know the book’s provenance, said, “Our propaganda services could do worse than to flood [foreign] university towns with this volume.” The New York Times reported in 1967 that a book purporting to be the journal of Soviet double agent Col. Oleg Penkovsky in the months before he was exposed and executed was an agency creation. The Penkovsky Papers, published by Doubleday, was ghostwritten from CIA files, including agency interviews with Penkovsky, by a Chicago Daily News reporter and a KGB defector who worked for the CIA. “Spies don’t keep diaries,” a former CIA official told The Times, backing assertions that the “journal” was at best a clever concoction.

“Books differ from all other propaganda media,” wrote the CIA chief of covert action, “primarily because one single book can significantly change the reader’s attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium … this is, of course, not true of all books at all times and with all readers—but it is true significantly often enough to make books the most important weapon of strategic (long-range) propaganda.”

The remark was eerily reminiscent of Maxim Gorky’s statement at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934: “Books are the most important and most powerful weapons in socialist culture.”