CIA finances European construction
đź”—The CIA Finances European Construction
From 1949 to 1959, at the height of the Cold War, the Americans, through their secret services and the Committee for a United Europe, paid the equivalent of 50 million dollars (today’s value) to all pro-European movements, including those of the Briton Winston Churchill and the Frenchman Henri Frenay. Their goal: to contain the Soviet advance…
At 82, Henri Frenay, the pioneer of the internal Resistance and founder of the Combat movement, displayed a dazzling intellectual vigor despite deafness in his right ear and a recent stomach operation. Yet he had only three months left to live. In those days of May 1988, he spoke to me about Europe in his apartment in Boulogne-sur-Seine. About the federal Europe he had vainly dreamed of between 1948-1954. About the debt that, in the event of success, the Old Continent would have owed to the Americans, especially those of the “Committee.” And he insisted once, twice, ten times, while I wondered: why on earth does this mysterious “Committee” come up so frequently in our conversations? Why? Because Frenay was confiding in me, with infinite linguistic caution, his ultimate secret: the covert financial aid of the CIA, via the American Committee for United Europe—the Committee—to the Union of European Federalists, of which he was president. It would take me about fifteen years to reconstruct this hidden network. A game worth playing, for it allowed me to open, for Historia readers, the door to one of the Cold War’s most secret compartments…
It all began in autumn 1948. Already split in two, Europe lived under the threat of total invasion by the Red Army. After the “Prague coup” in February, the Berlin blockade followed in June. A small circle of shadowy personalities then laid the foundations of the American Committee for United Europe, the ACUE—its existence would be made official on January 5, 1949, at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation house in New York. Politicians, lawyers, bankers, union leaders would mix within its board. High government figures too, such as Robert Paterson, Secretary of War; James Webb, Budget Director; Paul Hoffman, head of the Marshall Plan administration; or Lucius Clay, “proconsul” of the American occupation zone in Germany.
Were these Americans calm and steady? Not at all, for the real backbone of the ACUE consisted of intelligence men. Take its president, William Donovan. Born in 1883 in Buffalo, this Irish-American lawyer with a bulldog’s build, nicknamed “Wild Bill” by his friends, knew Europe well. In 1915, he was already carrying out a humanitarian mission there for the Rockefeller Foundation. Two years later, Donovan returned to the Old Continent to fight a splendid Great War. Back as a civilian, “Wild Bill” became a missus dominicus for the American government. His unofficial missions took him to Europe for sometimes unexpected meetings. In January 1923, while he and his wife Ruth were enjoying a well-deserved rest, they had to endure an entire evening of the rantings of another regular at the Moritz guesthouse in Berchtesgaden. Seventeen years later, the excitable man—a certain Adolf Hitler—had conquered continental Europe, and it was “Wild Bill” whom Franklin Roosevelt, worried, dispatched to London to consult Winston Churchill on Britain’s potential to resist the Nazis.
In June 1942, Donovan, the Democratic president’s trusted man for special affairs, created the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the American secret service during World War II, which he headed and left at its dissolution in September 1945, without losing touch with the world of intelligence: “Wild Bill” forged close ties with the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, officially created on September 15, 1947, by a national security law signed by Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman.
Take the ACUE’s vice-president, Walter Bedell Smith, former Chief of Staff to Eisenhower during World War II and then US Ambassador to Moscow. Starting in October 1950, the man his friends called “the Beetle” took command of the CIA. 1950 was precisely the year when academics like Frederick Burkhardt and especially William Langer, a Harvard historian, launched ACUE’s cultural section. Both close to Donovan had previously served in the OSS. Langer ran its Research and Analysis Service and, an expert in French politics, later wrote a scholarly book seeking to exonerate The American Role in Vichy (Plon, 1948).
Above all, take Allen Dulles. In the summer of 1948, he “invented” the Committee with Duncan Sandys, Churchill’s son-in-law, and George Franklin, an American diplomat. The main partner of the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, Dulles did not seem imposing at first glance with his thin glasses, his endless briar pipes, and his tweed jackets. Yet with this man in his fifties, a master spy entered the scene.
Back to World War II. OSS chief in Bern, Dulles made contact in February 1943 with the Combat delegation in Switzerland. For a while, he even financed the clandestine movement. “A stab in General de Gaulle’s back,” protested Jean Moulin in the name of Free France. “Survival of the internal Resistance threatened by financial strangulation,” retorted Frenay. Thinking first of his destitute comrades, of the maquisards in danger, he saw no reason why Combat should refuse Allied money given, it was agreed, without political strings attached. This “Swiss affair” would further poison his relationship with Moulin.
In 1946, Dulles resigned from the secret service… only to become its eminence grise, taking a leading role in drafting the presidential security law. As such, he co-founded the CIA (for insiders: the Agency, or better yet, the Company). Dulles believed that in clandestine operations, private and public forces should work together. He had already inspired, through his friends at New York’s Brook Club, the channelling of large American corporate donations to Italy’s Christian Democrats, threatened by a powerful Communist party. In 1950, he officially returned to service as the Beetle’s right-hand man and then as his successor at the head of the CIA—from February 1953 to September 1961. A record tenure, all the more impressive since his elder brother, John Foster Dulles, remained Secretary of State from 1953 until his death from illness in May 1959.
The ACUE was a remarkable melting pot, where personalities from high society and/or the CIA mingled with leaders of the powerful American Federation of Labor (AFL), whose anti-communist aversion they shared. Examples: David Dubinsky, born in 1892 in Brest-Litovsk, Russia, headed the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU): 45,000 members when he arrived in 1932, 200,000 by the late 1940s! Fierce enemy of the Nazis (most union leaders close to ACUE were Jewish), he now hated the “commies.” Jay Lovestone as well. Political advisor to the AFL, this Lithuanian by origin knew the topic well: before his expulsion and slow break with Marxism, he was general secretary of the American Communist Party between 1925 and 1929! Another choice recruit, Arthur Goldberg, the AFL’s top lawyer. Future Secretary of Labor under President Kennedy and then Supreme Court judge, Goldberg, born in 1908, had led the OSS’s union section. He was then the boss of Irving Brown, two years his junior. Brown, AFL’s representative for Europe and chief distributor of dollars to moderate trade unionists in the Old Continent. Drawing on the fledgling CIA’s secret funds, which since 1946 had financed all AFL anticommunist operations, this tough guy gave strong support, for example, to Force Ouvrière, the union born in 1947 from a split from the CGT (see “Behind Force Ouvrière, Brown, the American Friend,” Historia No. 621, December 1997). Brown’s pure and hard line contrasted with the CIA’s more nuanced approach. At the Agency, they would have preferred non-communists to remain in the CGT, even under Communist control…
Beyond individuals, there was an overall strategy. Facing the Soviet Union, Washington developed two key concepts: containment and the Marshall Plan. The idea of containment came from Russian-speaking diplomat George Kennan, who developed it in July 1947 in an article in Foreign Affairs: “The main element of US policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”
The Marshall Plan bore the stamp of its inventor, General George Marshall, US Army Chief of Staff during the war and now Secretary of State under Truman. By providing massive aid to ruined European countries, the United States, in his view, would achieve a double goal: first, to undercut the communists by quickly raising living standards; second, to prevent their own industry from sinking into depression by opening new markets.
For the Marshall-Kennan duo, there was no better tool than the CIA (see the interview with Alexis Debat, page 51). And naturally, another OSS veteran, Frank Wisner Jr., was tasked with setting up an autonomous department specializing in psychological, intellectual, and ideological warfare—the Office of Policy Coordination! Though “Wiz” was not a member of the Committee, his men provided all the necessary logistics. But hush! It’s top secret…
The ACUE unashamedly combined a certain form of American messianism with the well-understood defense of US interests. Messianic, this deeply rooted desire to put the Old Continent in the school of the New World. Beacon of threatened liberty, America had first found the way to a federation of states, a resounding success that Europe now only had to imitate… This Washingtonian Europeanism had its share of sincerity: “They call me the father of centralized intelligence, but I would rather be remembered for my contribution to European unification,” sighed Donovan in October 1952.
But there was calculation, too. For in December 1956, three months before his death, the same Donovan presented a united Europe as “a bulwark against the aggressive actions of the communist world.” In other words, an additional asset in the American strategy devised by Marshall, Kennan, and their successors: building Europe filled a continental void that only benefited Stalin and therefore, ultimately, protected the United States.
Let’s add a third dimension. In the minds of Agency men, nothing was nobler than clandestine action in the service of freedom. Every CIA officer knows: the United States was born in part from the support of agents of Louis XVI, Beaumarchais foremost, for the North American insurgents. Thus the American Committee operation—the most important by far conducted by the Agency in Europe during the Cold War—was justified by History.
As warm as it was, the Franco-American friendship could not loosen the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States. Thus, Committee and Agency first turned their eyes to London. Alas! Churchill, beaten in the 1945 elections, chafed in opposition. The new British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, declared in the Commons on January 2, 1948: “The free nations of Europe must now unite.” But neither he nor his Labour cabinet colleagues wanted genuine continental integration. Not that Bevin feared confronting communists: two days after his January speech, he created a secret ideological warfare body, the Information Research Department (IRD). This same IRD, judging Animal Farm and 1984 more effective than a thousand propaganda brochures, helped spread George Orwell’s works worldwide. But the united Europe card—definitely not!
Did Churchill play that card out of deep conviction or out of aversion to his leftist political rivals? Fact is, on September 19, 1946, in Zurich, the Old Lion called for an Anglo-Franco-German axis, a key element of a “kind of United States of Europe.” In May 1948, Duncan Sandys tailored the Hague Europeanist Congress to fit his statesman father-in-law. In October 1948, Churchill created the United European Movement. He became its honorary president alongside two Christian Democrats—Italy’s Alcide De Gasperi and Germany’s Konrad Adenauer—and two socialists, France’s Léon Blum and Belgium’s Paul-Henri Spaak. Unfortunately for the “American friends,” this “unionist” trend, with the notable exception of Spaak, only advocated limited European objectives: economic and political reconstruction on a democratic basis, yes, but without even partial transfer of sovereignty.
The Committee and the “federalist” trend, whose emblematic figure was Henri Frenay, wanted to go much further. In the darkest hours of World War II, Frenay, a patriotic internationalist, conceived the idea of a unified Old Continent on a supranational basis. In November 1942, as Robert Belot would reveal forty years later in his remarkable study on Frenay, the head of Combat wrote to General de Gaulle that it would be necessary to go beyond the nation-state idea, reconcile with Germany after the war, and build a federal Europe. True to himself, Frenay launched into this Europeanist crusade in 1946 alongside Alexandre Marc. Born Lipiansky in Odessa in 1904, this federalist theorist had crossed paths with Frenay in Lyon in 1941, and again after the war. Unlike the right-wing Europeanism inspired by monarchist Maurrasian theses or social Catholicism, the two friends tried to steer French federalism to the left, then boasting “several tens of thousands of members,” as the former Combat leader told me in 1988.
Left-leaning, the Union of European Federalists (UEF) was created at the end of 1946. It held its own congress in Rome in September 1948. Frenay became president of the executive bureau, alongside former Italian communist Altiero Spinelli, Mussolini’s prisoner from 1927 to 1937 and then under house arrest, and Austrian Eugen Kogon, a victim of the Nazi concentration camp system who would later analyze it in The SS State (Le Seuil, reissued 1993). These three leaders tried to ease the deep unease caused by the participation of many UEF members in the Hague Congress, where Churchill and his son-in-law Sandys had, quite literally, duped them with their “unionist” agenda.
Should one choose between the Old Lion and the French Resistance pioneer, so radical in his internationalism? Perplexity in the Committee, and thus the CIA. For Churchill, his statesman stature, wartime alliance, and clear preference for the “open sea,” the US; against, his fierce rejection of the federalist model so dear to American Europeanists and soon, his violent quarrels with the very Atlanticist Spaak. In March 1949, Churchill met Donovan in Washington. In June, he wrote to request emergency funds (personally wealthy, the former British Prime Minister had no intention of using his own money). Days later, Sandys supported his father-in-law’s request by mail: money, fast, or Churchill’s European Movement would collapse. Committee and CIA, the main funder, then released an initial tranche equivalent to just under 2 million euros. It would “prepare” the first meetings of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, which brought together a powerless consultative assembly and a committee of ministers making decisions unanimously.
To support their Old Continent partners, ACUE and CIA set up complex financial circuits. Uncle Sam’s dollars—5 million euros between 1949 and 1951, the same amount annually thereafter—came mainly from funds allocated specifically to the CIA by the State Department. They were initially distributed discreetly by the leaders of the European Movement: Churchill, his son-in-law, Secretary General Joseph Retinger, and treasurer Edward Beddington-Behrens. In October 1951, Churchill’s return to Downing Street, the British Prime Minister’s residence, did not dry up this flow: between 1949 and 1953, the CIA paid the unionists over 15 million euros, on the condition that they redistribute part to their rivals in the Federation, the right-wing of French federalism, which in turn passed a share to the UEF. Substantial sums, but nothing compared to the largesse that the Stalinist international apparatus, the Cominform, was simultaneously investing in the underground financing of national Communist Parties and countless “mass fronts”: the World Federation of Trade Unions in Prague, the Peace Movement, youth, student, and women’s movements…
For Frenay, it was clear: federal Europe was now the only effective shield against communist expansionism. But how to move forward with such a lack of money? The UEF was not rich. Its president even less so, his honesty recognized by all—after his time at the Ministry of Prisoners, Deportees and Refugees, Frenay, a former career officer with no personal fortune, left the army under the Diethelm law. As in the “Swiss affair,” would financial salvation come from the American ally? Yes, assured ACUE men in summer 1950 to a French UEF representative visiting New York. In line with the official American government position in favor of European integration, their help would not be subject to any political or other conditions—an essential condition for Henri Frenay. And indeed, from November 1950, ACUE would secretly finance, up to 600,000 euros, one of the major initiatives of Frenay and left-wing federalists: the creation in Strasbourg, parallel to the official Council of Europe, of a Congress of European Peoples, also called the European Vigilance Committee.
Socialists (Edouard Depreux), clergymen (Father Chaillet, founder of Témoignage chrétien), trade unionists, cooperative movement activists, business representatives, and even Gaullists such as Michel Debré or Jacques Chaban-Delmas joined the project. Poorly managed in the media, the initiative failed by a small margin. All the more reason to increase financial support, the work of ACUE Secretary General Thomas Braden. Known for his liberal opinions, this friend of painter Jackson Pollock did not hesitate when Donovan, his former OSS boss, asked him to leave his post at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In July 1951, Frenay in turn traveled to the United States under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom—an organization we’ll encounter again. It was an opportunity to meet Committee leaders and those of the Ford Foundation (but not the CIA, with whom he would never have direct contact) to tell them of the federalists’ material needs. The Americans got the message, “loud and clear”…
By then, Braden was no longer among ACUE’s official leaders. On the principle of communicating vessels, the secret agent and aesthete had just joined Dulles at the CIA. The two men shared a sensible idea: faced with the communists, it was not conservatives who needed convincing, but the European anti-Stalinist left, of which Frenay was one of the best representatives. Braden went further: “Just as the enemy is grouped in the Cominform, let’s structure ourselves globally by major sectors: intellectuals, youth, reformist trade unionists, moderate left…” Agreed, replied Dulles. Thus was born the CIA’s Division of International Organizations. Run by Braden, this directorate centralized, among other things, Agency aid via ACUE to European federalists. In 1952, the American Committee for United Europe thus funded the short-lived Initiative Committee for a European Constituent Assembly, with Spaak as president and Frenay as secretary general.
Falling out with the “Federation,” their right-wing rival that had so far served as an intermediary for CIA-ACUE funds via Churchill’s movement, Frenay’s friends were soon on the verge of suffocation. To address the emergency, Braden, a maestro of underground funding through more or less fake private foundations, now set up direct payments to left-wing federalists via American quasi-governmental branches. In Paris, a hub of CIA operations in Europe alongside Frankfurt, payments were made via the Office of Special Representative, originally designed to interface with the fledgling European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), or the US Information Service (USIS). Later, a dedicated ACUE office would open.
Like Jean Monnet, ECSC president, Frenay dreamed in 1952 of a European army, a decisive step toward political Europe in his view. ACUE warmly approved. Provided for by the Treaty of London in March 1952, this European Defense Community would include—most controversially—German contingents. The treaty still had to be ratified by national parliaments. Frenay enthusiastically threw himself into the new battle, only to clash once again with de Gaulle, who refused the EDC in the name of national sovereignty and, already, the ultra-secret French atomic project, and with the communists, opposed on principle to anything that went against Moscow. According to Robert Belot—whose biography of the Combat leader should be published this spring by Seuil—Frenay even asked ACUE to fund the publication of a brochure refuting… Gaullist arguments against the EDC.
Stalin died in March 1953. The following year, Cord Meyer Jr., a Kennedy family associate, replaced Braden as head of the CIA’s Division of International Organizations. But 1954 would mainly see the crushing failure of the Europeanists: the final burial of the EDC. Discouraged, Frenay then resigned as president of the Union of European Federalists. From October 1955, the “American friends” placed their hopes on a newcomer, Jean Monnet’s Action Committee for the United States of Europe. Linked to Donovan and especially to the US ambassador in Paris, David Bruce, a close friend of Frank Wisner, Monnet was too shrewd a connoisseur of the Anglo-Saxon world to accept CIA dollars directly. Given his caution, American help for his Europeanist current had to take other routes. In 1956, Monnet was thus offered the equivalent of 150,000 euros by the Ford Foundation. He declined, preferring that the money go to Professor Henri Rieben, a pro-European Swiss economist and academic newly appointed to HEC Lausanne. Rieben used the funds transparently to create a European research center.
In 1958, the return of General de Gaulle, staunchly hostile to federalist ideas, crushed the last hopes of the UEF and its American friends. The ACUE dissolved in May 1960, and then the CIA’s covert funding ceased. In twelve years, the Agency had nevertheless paid Europeanists of all stripes the equivalent of 50 million euros without ever being caught red-handed! But how long could the great secret last?
The first warning came in 1962. Too revealing about American funding, a university thesis on Europeanist movements had to be “buried” in England. This remarkable work was by the son of one of Frenay’s resistance comrades, Georges Rebattet, creator in April 1943 of the National Maquis Service. Georges Rebattet, who succeeded Joseph Retinger in 1952 as secretary general of the European Movement, and who, for the most part, cleaned up its finances.
A second shock came in the mid-1960s. The American press (the New York Times and the leftist magazine Ramparts) closed in on one of the “Braden-Meyer trust” subsidiaries, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, where top anti-totalitarian European intellectuals—Denis de Rougemont, Manhès Sperber, Franz Borkenau, Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler, and sometimes Malraux and Raymond Aron—mingled. Funded by the CIA via the Fairfield Foundation, the Congress published in French one of its most prestigious journals, Preuves. Playing the transparency card, Braden then made a splash: “I am proud that the CIA is immoral,” he declared in 1967 to the British magazine Saturday Evening Post, to which he made sensational revelations about the CIA’s covert funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and about Irving Brown’s role in union circles. Radio silence, however, on support for the Europeanist movements—the secret of secrets…
The final twist came in June 1970, when pro-European Conservative Edward Heath entered Downing Street. At his request, the Information Research Department launched a vast campaign to surreptitiously popularize Europeanism in British media and political circles. In 1973, Britain joined the Common Market; on June 5, 1975, 67.2% of British voters ratified the decision by referendum. In this reversal in favor of Europe, one man worked tirelessly: none other than the head of the CIA’s London station, Cord Meyer Jr.—the same Cord who, twenty years earlier, had succeeded his friend Braden as head of the Agency’s Division of International Organizations.
RĂ©mi Kauffer
French journalist specializing in intelligence and secret services.
Source of the article in French now unavailable.