The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  Backed by the CIA, the Congress for Cultural Freedom became a permanent body with affiliated national committees. Over the next seventeen years, it sponsored numerous conferences, festivals, concerts, art exhibitions, seminars and magazines in more than thirty countries. Its success depended on the informal group that the State Department designated “the Noncommunist Left,” on the basis that socialists and liberals could sap communism’s prestige much more effectively than a militant like Burnham. “The noncommunist left has brought what measure of hope there is in our political life today,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in The Vital Center, the 1949 book that was effectively a manifesto for the group. Schlesinger proposed a canon of “prophets” including Koestler, Silone, Gide and “George Orwell, with his vigorous good sense, his hatred of cant.”29

  Most of the writers who befriended, published, edited, corresponded with, or positively reviewed Orwell during the 1940s ended up playing some role in this new Kulturkampf. Tribune and Partisan Review were kept afloat in the rough seas of the post-war economy by funds from, respectively, the IRD and the CIA. The British Committee for Cultural Freedom was led by Malcolm Muggeridge, Fredric Warburg and Tosco Fyvel—the same three men who met with Sonia after Orwell’s funeral to discuss his literary estate. When, in 1953, the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the IRD jointly funded a new magazine called Encounter, an Anglo-American answer to Der Monat, its publisher was Warburg and its British co-editor was Spender. Tempo Presente, the Italian equivalent, was co-edited by Silone, while the editor of the Spanish-language Cuadernos was a former POUM member.

  Accustomed to being outcasts—Koestler called them “that bunch of homeless Leftists . . . whom the Stalinites call Trotskyites, the Trotskyites call Imperialists, and the Imperialists call bloody Reds”—the members of the Noncommunist Left were now in demand and swimming in government money. Some knew; some didn’t; most refused to think about it. When the CIA’s covert funding was definitively exposed by Ramparts magazine in 1967, some contributors still maintained that they’d suspected nothing. “I was made an unwitting ‘accomplice’ of the CIA’s dirty work,” protested Dwight Macdonald. “I was played for a sucker.” One could argue that he’d played himself by not asking questions.

  Would Orwell, the absent Galahad of the Noncommunist Left, also have been a sucker? Or even an enthusiastic participant? He was no great fan of conferences and committees, but his name might well have appeared on the Encounter masthead. The Irish radical Conor Cruise O’Brien, however, thought that Orwell would have revolted against this new anti-communist orthodoxy, just as he had rejected every other dominant clique. For the Congress, O’Brien wrote after the Ramparts revelations, “it was rather fortunate that Orwell died when he died. Had he lived, it might not have been so easy to claim him. As it is, it has been possible to claim him as a patron saint, and to exploit his merits, by a sort of parasitic reversibility, in the service of some dubious activities.”

  Those activities included mucking about with his two great novels.

  In December 1951, the husband-and-wife animation team John Halas and Joy Batchelor signed a contract with producer Louis de Rochemont to make a movie version of Animal Farm. Halas assured The New York Times that the film would “deviate very little from the Orwell” and would “retain the spirit of the book.” What the couple didn’t know was that de Rochemont’s main source of financing, and the driving force behind the film, was the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the CIA department dedicated to covert operations.

  Orwell did not object in principle to fiction being used for political purposes. As a critic, he had recommended that both The Great Dictator and Take Back Your Freedom be promoted as anti-Nazi propaganda. Later, he was quite happy for Animal Farm to be used to promote anti-Stalinism. He waived royalties for translations in Eastern Europe, personally paid for the production of a Russian-language version, and wrote a preface for a 1947 Ukrainian edition to be distributed to anti-Stalinist socialists living in displaced persons camps in Germany, although most of the copies were intercepted by the US Army at the request of the Russians. The edition was prompted by the Ukrainian writer Ihor Szewczenko, who had written to tell Orwell that he had read passages to Soviet refugees and found that they were profoundly moved: “the mood of the book seems to correspond with their own actual state of mind.”

  The notion of government agencies actually rewriting books for the purposes of propaganda, however, was a different matter. Every time Batchelor submitted a new draft of her Animal Farm screenplay, the “investors” would demand changes. Perhaps Napoleon and Snowball could have the same facial hair as Stalin and Trotsky? Could she cut back on the farmers so as to focus the blame on the pigs (and to avoid offending the agriculture industry)? Snowball was too sympathetic; why not make him a “fanatic intellectual”? And so on. One memo bemoaned Orwell’s “apparent inference [sic] that Communism is good in itself but that it was betrayed by Stalin & Co.” De Rochemont’s right-hand man Lothar Wolff pushed back against some of the sillier suggestions, but the investors were relentless and usually got their way.30 Furthermore, budget constraints led to the erasure of several characters and plot points essential to Orwell’s allegory.

  The OPC’s biggest issue with Animal Farm was the ending. Famously, the pigs and humans form a tense rapprochement over beer and cards and the other animals can no longer tell the difference between the revolutionaries and the oppressors. According to the cold war calculus, however, any focus on the perfidy of capitalist democracies was unhelpful. In the movie, the farmers are gone and the pigs’ decadence spurs the animals into a second revolution. It could be argued that Orwell left that possibility open in the book’s final paragraph: for the first time, the animals keenly realise that the revolution has been betrayed, so they might do something about it. But having animals from neighbouring farms join forces to trample Napoleon and his cronies to death made a travesty of Orwell’s melancholy ending. By the time Batchelor’s thoughtful, Orwell-derived voiceover was replaced with cold war boilerplate, Halas and Batchelor must surely have worked out the identity of the meddling investors.

  Yet when the film premiered in New York on December 29, 1954, it turned out that all the painstaking effort to ensure that Animal Farm sent exactly the right CIA-approved message was helpless against critics’ own biases. There were still reviewers who variously interpreted the movie as anti-fascist, subversively pro-communist, a “bitter satire on the Welfare State,” or blandly apolitical. While the FBI’s file on Orwell claimed that the movie had “hit the jackpot,” the public wasn’t interested either way—Animal Farm flopped, only later reaching a wide audience when it became standard viewing in schools. David Sylvester in Encounter judged it “a failure aesthetically, imaginatively, and intellectually,” seemingly unaware that both movie and magazine were backed by the CIA.

  Perhaps the movie suffered from unfortunate timing. It was released just a few weeks after the BBC’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and its attendant controversy—a subject which overshadowed Animal Farm in the promotional interviews that Sonia gave to the US press. “Did she approve of their interpretation?” asked Today’s Cinema. “I must be loyal to the brave BBC,” she said. “But not really.” In Britain, the studio attempted to piggyback on the TV play’s success with the promotional tagline “Pig Brother is watching you.”

  By that point Peter Rathvon, the former president of RKO Pictures, had obtained the rights to Nineteen Eighty-Four and secured $100,000 from the United States Information Agency to help make “the most devastating anti-Communist film of all time.” He sought advice on the screenplay from Sol Stein from the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, who attempted to do to this story what the OPC had done to Animal Farm. Stein took similar exception to Orwell’s downbeat conclusion: “I think we agreed that this presents a situation without hope when, in actuality, there is some hope . . . that human nature cannot be changed by totalitarianism and that both love and nature can survive even the horrendous e
ncroachments of Big Brother.” He suggested a grossly sentimental alternative in which Winston flees from the Chestnut Tree Café to the Golden Country, where he rediscovers his unquenchable humanity. Thankfully, Rathvon quashed that idea.

  The movie’s Oscar-nominated screenwriter, William Templeton, had previously written an acclaimed 1953 adaptation for the CBS anthology series Studio One, but the opening credit (“freely adapted from the novel 1984 by George Orwell”) warned that more liberties would be taken this time. Those liberties were not, however, propagandistic. Templeton and director Michael Anderson seemed far less interested in politics than in the romance between the two badly miscast (and inexplicably American) leads: the burly gangster movie star Edmond O’Brien as Winston and the glowingly cheerful Jan Sterling as Julia. Just before the couple are arrested by the Thought Police in the novel, Winston says flatly, “We are the dead.” In the movie, Julia trills, “It’s wonderful to be alive!” The CIA might have appreciated the portentous voiceover (“This, then, is a story of the future. It could be the story of our children if we fail to preserve their heritage of freedom”), but probably not the poster, which depicted Winston and Julia in a passionate clinch while an officer of the Anti-Sex League (who does not appear in the novel) spied on them through a telescreen. “Will Ecstasy Be a Crime . . . in the Terrifying World of the Future? Amazing wonders of tomorrow! Nothing like it ever filmed!”

  Anderson shot two different endings. American audiences still saw Winston come to love Big Brother, but British viewers were surprised to see Winston and Julia defiantly crying, “Down with Big Brother!” before being gunned down. It is a mark of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s uncommon bleakness that a “happy” ending is one in which its protagonists are shot to death, having achieved nothing. “The change seemed to me to show that they had not understood the book at all,” protested Sonia, who was so cross that she refused to attend the premiere. “It was awful.” Rathvon had the chutzpah to claim that it was “the type of ending Orwell might have written if he had not known when he wrote the book that he was dying.” Like Animal Farm, the movie failed to impress critics and audiences in either country when it was released in 1956. Even the US government couldn’t make Orwell a box-office smash.

  Many of Orwell’s friends and fans saw his appropriation by the right as a species of bodysnatching, while his critics maintained that he had brought it on himself. Decades after his death, the debate was reopened by the discovery of Orwell’s own secret participation in cold war skulduggery.

  On March 29, 1949, Orwell received a visit at Cranham from his friend and former crush, Celia Paget, who told him about her new job at the IRD. According to Paget’s report, Orwell “expressed his wholehearted and enthusiastic approval of our aims” and recommended some suitable writers. A week later, he sent a letter volunteering to send Paget “a list of journalists & writers who in my opinion are crypto-Communists, fellow-travellers or inclined that way & should not be trusted as propagandists.” Orwell had been keeping a pale blue quarto notebook of names of people in public life who he believed had Soviet sympathies, just as he had once speculated about who might sell out in the event of a Nazi invasion (he always loved making lists). Over the past year or so, the Soviet Union had seized control of Czechoslovakia, bullied Yugoslavia, blockaded Berlin, and persecuted Jewish writers, and Orwell was furious that Stalin still had prominent apologists. Paget replied enthusiastically, and Orwell sent her an abbreviated list of thirty-eight names, culled from his notebook’s 135. “It isn’t very sensational,” he wrote, “and I don’t suppose it will tell your friends anything they don’t know.”

  The notebook does not show Orwell at his finest. Many of the entries are petty, gossipy, mean and tenuous, his uncertainty betrayed by the numerous question marks, asterisks and crossings out that darken the pages. If he had handed the notebook to the IRD, it would have been reckless, shabby behaviour. But he kept it private, and took great care in editing and amending the list for Paget. “The whole difficulty is to decide where each person stands, & one has to treat each case individually,” he told Richard Rees. It was “very tricky” working out whether someone was a true believer, an opportunist, a half-hearted sympathiser, or merely stupid.

  It is legitimate to be disappointed by the very act of sending such a list to a government agency (even a Labour one), but the edited version was at least largely accurate. Orwell was particularly concerned by fellow-travellers within the Parliamentary Labour Party such as Konni Zilliacus and John Platt-Mills—men he had already attacked in print as “publicity agents of the USSR.” They were who he had in mind in his statement about the message of Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Members of the present British government . . . will never willingly sell the pass to the enemy . . . but the younger generation is suspect and the seeds of totalitarian thought are probably widespread among them.” Anyone who reminded him of the people who had pursued him in Spain, or attempted to block his writing for political reasons, raised his hackles. For the crime of criticising Stalin, he complained in 1946, “I have been obliged at times to change my publisher, to stop writing for papers which represented part of my livelihood, to have my books boycotted in other papers, and to be pursued by insulting letters, articles . . . and even threats of libel action.”

  It’s important to remember that Orwell was advising Paget on who to avoid for the specific purpose of writing for the IRD. Beyond that, there is no evidence that the list damaged the careers of anybody on it, nor that it was intended to do so. The knowledge that the actor Michael Redgrave went on to play the O’Brien figure in the 1956 movie proves that it wasn’t used as a blacklist, as does the fact that the only person Orwell fingered as “some kind of Russian agent,” Austrian-born journalist Peter Smollett, wasn’t exposed as a Soviet spy until after his death in 1980. Smollett was almost certainly the man who advised Jonathan Cape to drop Animal Farm when he was head of Soviet relations at the Ministry of Information.

  Orwell’s intentions also have to be judged in the light of his support for free speech. He had called any attempt to suppress Western communist parties “calamitous” and rallied members of the Freedom Defence Committee against a government effort to purge the civil service of communists. He told Woodcock that, while governments had the right to combat infiltration, Labour’s approach was “vaguely disquieting, & the whole phenomenon seems to me part of the general breakdown of the democratic outlook.” Ironically, Orwell himself had been monitored by the British government since he was a journalist in Paris in 1929. One police sergeant, surveilling him at the BBC, reported that he held “advanced communist views,” although his superior officer, after reading Orwell’s journalism, rightly concluded that “he does not hold with the Communist Party, nor they with him.”

  Nevertheless, when Orwell’s letter to Paget was made public in 1996, his detractors on the left relished the irony of Saint George playing the role of Thought Policeman.31 Here was the (very faintly) smoking gun that served to justify decades of animosity. “I always knew he was two-faced,” said the Marxist historian Christopher Hill. “There was something fishy about Orwell . . . it confirms my worst suspicions about the man.” Journalist Alexander Cockburn couldn’t disguise his glee: “The man of conscience turns out to be a whiner, and of course a snitch, an informer to the secret police, Animal Farm’s resident weasel.” More in sorrow than in anger, Orwell’s former Tribune colleague Michael Foot expressed disappointment, while his nephew, the campaigning journalist Paul Foot, said: “I am a great admirer of Orwell, but we have to accept that he did take a McCarthyite position towards the end of his life.”

  McCarthyite? No, we don’t have to accept that at all.

  Nineteen days after Orwell’s death, Joseph McCarthy, the forty-one-year-old junior senator from Wisconsin, told an audience of Republican women in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he possessed a list of scores of communists working in the State Department, and thus initiated one of the most shameful episodes of the cold war.

&nbs
p; McCarthy was one of those hot-breathed monsters who surface noisily from the depths of the American id from time to time to maul the democratic values that they claim to defend. Bombastic, narcissistic, power-hungry and pathologically dishonest, McCarthy might have been designed in a laboratory with the specific purpose of offending Orwell. “I always disagree when people end by saying that we can only combat Communism, Fascism, or what not if we develop an equal fanaticism,” Orwell told Richard Rees. “It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself.”

  As a law student, McCarthy had enjoyed gambling and boxing, and he applied both skills to politics. By the time he began his crusade, Soviet spies such as Alger Hiss had been exposed, the major trade unions had been purged, and party membership was in free fall. The fear of communist infiltration was exponentially greater than the danger, and that created an opening for an expert fear-monger. Within months, McCarthy was a magazine cover star and celebrity speaker who pulled in up to $1,000 a day in donations. The historian Ted Morgan defined McCarthyism as “the use of false information in the irrational pursuit of a fictitious enemy.” To use Orwell’s word, it was phantasmagoric, and it destroyed innocent lives. In Hollywood, victims of the McCarthyite blacklist included two performers from Studio One’s “1984”: star Eddie Albert and narrator Don Hollenbeck, who committed suicide a few months after the broadcast. Director Paul Nickell considered his version an implicit critique of McCarthy’s methods.