UK INTELLIGENCE SECRETLY FUNDED LEFTIST MAGAZINE, THEN COVERED IT UP
Declassified files reveal the Foreign Office worked to suppress a scandal surrounding its covert financing of Encounter – a jewel in the crown of the cultural Cold War.
JOHN MCEVOY
15 APRIL 2024
www.declassifieduk.org/uk-intelligence-secretly-funded-leftist-magazine-then-covered-it-up/Encounter was an intellectual and cultural magazine set up during the Cold War with secret funds from the US and British intelligence agencies.
The magazine’s purpose was to cultivate a compatible, non-communist left, while creating content that was generally supportive of Washington’s geopolitical interests.
Encounter’s intelligence links eventually became publicly known. In 1963, however, a British journalist almost blew the lid off its secret sources of funding.
Recently declassified files show how the Foreign Office mobilised to kill the story.
‘Left-of-centre publication’
In 1951, a group of US and British intelligence officials met secretly in Whitehall to discuss plans for an “Anglo-American left-of-centre publication”.
Amid the intensification of the Cold War, the CIA and MI6 wanted to nudge the Western intelligentsia away from neutralism and towards anti-communism.
The responsibility for devising the “operations and procedures” of the publication was handed to Monty Woodhouse, an MI6 officer who also worked with Britain’s secret Cold War propaganda unit, the Information Research Department (IRD).
“The CIA and MI6 wanted to nudge the Western intelligentsia away from neutralism and towards anti-communism”
On the US side, Woodhouse was assisted by Michael Josselson and Lawrence de Neufville, two CIA officers acting under cover of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF).
The fruit of the three men’s endeavour was Encounter magazine, an intellectual and cultural journal first published in 1953, with covert funding from the CIA and UK Foreign Office.
“The deal was this”, wrote historian Frances Stonor Saunders: “Encounter’s editors were free to publish anything they wanted, as long as this did not adversely affect American interests”.
To be sure, this did not mean that Encounter was obliged “to support every aspect of official American policy” but the content would be “monitored, guided and, in extremis, controlled”.
Acceptable in left-wing circles
By 1963, the CIA and the Foreign Office viewed Encounter as an important tool in the cultural Cold War.
The fact that Encounter was “left-wingish and critical of many forms of authority”, noted Foreign Office official Leslie Glass, “makes its basic line more acceptable in [left-wing] circles we find it difficult to reach”.
Kit Barclay, the head of the IRD, added that: “The Americans and ourselves are able to suggest themes for insertion” in Encounter, “but we are not in a position to exercise day-to-day editorial control”.
He continued: “The general editorial line of Encounter is intended to be anti-Communist, but with a slightly left-wing tendency”. This was “in fact the pattern that is normally adopted for secretly subsidised newspapers or magazines. On the whole this has worked well in the case of Encounter”.
For his part, Josselson described the magazine as “our greatest asset”.