Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Flights, Finks and Secret History with Joel Whitney

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

Joel Whitney’s book Finks is a seminal book about American intellectuals and American security agencies,  mainly because it illuminates the real story behind the CIA’s involvement with the founding of a little magazine called The Paris Review  which hit the scene in the early 1950s at the height of the Cold War. In Joel Whitney’s new book Flights,  he continues his historical excavations -  more stories about writers intellectuals and activists who found themselves in the cross hairs of American security agencies like the CIA and the FBI. Your host discusses both books with Joel Whitney and the discipline of secret history itself. 

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. Joel Whitney's book, Thinks, is one of the seminal books about American intellectuals and American security agencies, mainly because it illuminates the real story behind the CIA's involvement with the founding of a little magazine called the Paris Review, which hit the scene in the early 1950s at the height of the Cold War. In his new book, Flights, Joel Whitney tells us about other writers, intellectuals, and activists who found themselves in the crosshairs of the American security establishment. Individuals like Lorraine Hansberry, Paul Robeson, Leonard Pelletier, Angela Davis, and Malcolm X. Flights, like Finks, is an incredible book of secret

history. And I recently met up with Joel to talk to him about it. We meet a number of individuals in your new book who, like yourself, are chroniclers of secret history, like the journalist Kevin McKiernan, who covered the original AIM protest, Jennifer Harbury, an immigrant rights lawyer who dedicated most of her life to exposing the truth about the U.S. involvement in Guatemala, and Adur Rahman Muhammad, the man, you tell us, who has done the most to get the real story about what happened to Malcolm X into the world, British journalist Frances Stoner Saunders, whose book The Cultural Cold War is a cornerstone for cultural Cold War studies today. And we should add that your book starts with conversations with Seymour Hersh and James Risen,

both rock stars when it comes to secret history. So I kind of want to start with this. What do all of these individuals have in common for you, and what is it that draws you to individuals like them? That's a great place to start, and I'm glad you named some of those sort of, I don't want to say lower level, but sort of names within the bigger names. The Malcolm X scholar, who was kind of an independent scholar. I think what binds these folks together is the hegemony of the American century and its hangover that we're living through today.

In some form, all of these folks have been censored directly, indirectly, corporate censorship. I sort of lumped together with official censorship, even though they're different and we can talk about the differences. But the effects on these people of anti-communism, I think, was fairly consistent, sort of like a sliding scale from low-level persecution and pushback against great stories by Seymour Hersh up to threats of arrest with people like James Risen to reveal sources. And then, you know, with someone like Malcolm X or some of the members of the American Indian movement, much worse,

whether those killings were direct or through this weird process that I'm kind of obsessed with of amping up rifts between groups like American Indian Movement or the Black Power movements. Somewhere in my notebook, there's a little note to write an essay on the value to democracy of stubbornness. People who are just unyieldingly committed to their journalistic approach, which sometimes feeds activism, or their activist approach, which sometimes requires journalism. Someone like Jennifer Harbury was pretty well known in the Clinton era because of some work she was doing as an immigrant rights activist and lawyer down at the border.

And she saw what we're seeing now, which is that our own laws are not being enforced. In that case, it was something passed, I think, just before Reagan, protecting refugees and asylum seekers and sort of protecting people whom we now today have the tendency to call illegal aliens from persecution in their homeland so that they have a kind of quasi-protection that says basically you will get in, you're allowed to get in, and how you got in will not matter if you can show us that there's persecution going on in your home country. Jennifer Harbury was sort of born to the manner in her own way, daughter of a Yale professor, born in Connecticut, went on to Ivy League schools, I think Harvard Law, and then went back to the border and saw that this law protecting individuals from tyrannies at home was not being enforced. So she had to resort as an activist to an act of quasi-journalism, historicism. She had to go down and do her first book, Bridge of Courage, to show,

she was trying to show that there was in fact a US-sponsored genocide happening in Guatemala. And that's why these people were fleeing here, enacting this great phrase that some activists and scholars have used, including one of the grandparents of Suketu Mehta, we are here because you were there. You messed up our countries. And he extends that too, Mehta does, to climate refugees, which is increasingly going to be a cause for people coming across borders into wealthier countries. So she had to do this in the same way that some of the other, you know, James Risen had to, for instance, become a quasi-activist to defend his right to do journalism without interference from the

government to protect his sources or keep their secrecy. So there is this binding thread that is me sort of wearing all their hats too, which is to say, like, we need to know this history to understand so many of the big issues. Yes. There's also the issue of history itself, though. There's also, I would say that, you know, part of this denial about our history is what makes the not understanding that we were there and that's why they are here is part of it. And some of that comes down to censorship, as you talk about in a number of the stories you relate to. But some of this history is right there out in the open. And this brings us to one of the most fascinating stories in the book, which is about the Peekskill riots and Paul Robeson.

And you have a personal connection to this story because this is where you're from. But I want to talk about this one because it seems like this one can really help us understand how and why Robeson was persecuted for his views, but more so why stories like this get pushed to the margins when it comes to our official history, the stories we tell about ourselves, our communities, our nation. Paul Robeson's story was buried in my town's history and in American history, civil rights history. And what was important to him, not just important to me about him, was not just the history of, you know, right-wing, including KKK-tied groups coming out to stop a concert, but also what the cause was and how liberals failed to hold up that cause. including KKK-tied groups coming out to stop a concert, but also what the cause was and how liberals failed to hold up that cause.

People like the Truman administration, who blushed at the idea of an anti-lynching law, which is what Robeson was pushing for, led him to become, I think, more deeply involved in the Civil Rights Congress, which was treated in that McCarthyite era as a quasi-communistic organization. But the work that it was doing was basically forerunner work to what became the mainstream civil rights era of a decade and two decades later. So this is the motion that fascinates me about American history and American politics, which is, you know, you quash it. Sometimes the center and the right come together, that great pivot from World War II to resisting Stalinism. And then you cast everything in that very, very, very clumsy light and you make people like Paul Robeson, who was a Democrat, an athlete, a lawyer, an actor, a singer, a patriot, the son of an escaped slave, a Rutgers All-American.

You make someone who's essentially an American, if not absolute hero, then at least someone to emulate, and you take them and you make them into sort of a marginalized, controversialized, quasi-communistic, beyond the pale kind of person. And so the process for any of these folks is, I think, instructive. It ought to teach us a healthy degree of skepticism that we might wear as kind of an armor against the present versions of this. Yeah, it's interesting that, you know, you immediately start talking about some of the causes for why he was demonized, but you know, we should just sort of lay out the facts of the story. He came to Peacekill to do a concert. There was opposition to it, opposition that when I first learned about it, I had a friend who was a neighbor of Pete Seeger's. So I kind of got,

he's a big Peekskill hero. I had kind of a, of also sort of a telling of the story that I was blown away. But then I saw photographs of white people on the side of the road lined up with rocks to throw at people who might be coming to attend this concert that was stopped by the racists. But it wasn't just the KKK. When you look at these photos, you see 1950s America kind of lined up on the side of the road, ready to attack in the name of anti-communism or racism, what you would add to it. And it seems that you want to like look at the forces behind what brought these people here. Yeah. I mean, I was, I was thinking about when resurrecting the Paul Ropes in history, I was thinking about January 6th in particular.

And my sense, you know, I think the moment that we're in, you have this idea that the liberals, the mainstream Democrats, the Joe Bidens and the Kamala Harris's are the ones standing up against fascism in the far right. But if you look carefully, not only at one's present moment, but also at the history of people like Truman, Johnson, in many cases, the fascism might not have been called that. It was a kind of, as I said, or sort of accepting the rules when they're

renamed as something like anti-communism. And I know that's something that can be overstated. I'm not in any way saying fascism and liberalism are the same or they're working towards the same goals, but there's often this compact between them. And in the foreign policy, the work that the Congress of Cultural Freedom and the CIA were doing, it does become blurred to the point of questionable, the difference between sort of the centrist Washington liberals

alongside their maybe McCarthyite equivalents with somewhat better vocabularies than McCarthy himself. I mean, this is a very broad stroke that I'm painting this with, but you do see this lapse into, well, the most anti-communist regimes are the far right ones. And so in places where we don't care so much about lives, you may not see too much of this in places like Europe, but in the so-called third world, as they called it under Eisenhower, when they started to care more about this in light of the nationalism movements,

that brush becomes broad, not because of anything I'm saying. Absolutely. And that dovetails with a lot of the work that I was doing. Earlier this year, I put out a secret history of my own, a nine-episode miniseries about three writers who got caught up in the cultural Cold War. It's called Not All Propaganda is Art. And one of the things that surprised me the most when I was doing the research was that some of the biggest secrets were kind of just laying there out in the open. Documents and archival collections that just haven't been looked at or perhaps overlooked is a better word. You know, for example, when I discovered how easy it was to document James Baldwin's complicity and knowledge of what was going on with the CIA's attack on Richard Wright. At first I thought, you know, I just was crazy because it made no sense that these documents haven't been used before.

And I imagine you must have felt similar when you started out in your first book, Thinks, when you were looking at the origins of the Paris Review and how that came together. Were you surprised? Yeah. At first I was frustrated. Sometimes you find solutions in your research and reporting as a result of getting stonewalled. And so I had the Paris Review, just to set the stage a little bit, was created in the so-called mid-century at a time after World War II when Paris was an important place for American expats.

And the CIA was wildly, exuberantly creating instruments of soft power diplomacy around the world. And it was creating magazines that were official, unofficial CIA magazines like Encounter and several dozen others aimed first at Europe and then at the developing world. And then it also started working with previously existing or sort of secondary journals that could do some of the soft power work. And the Paris Review was caught up in that. It was known to have been founded by an undercover CIA counterintelligence officer, also a great novelist and Zen master and environmentalist, Peter Matheson.

That part had been known, but I also thought that it wasn't told in any kind of methodical way. And so I had interviews scheduled with him. Actually, my first journalism job in New York City was at Tricycle, the Buddhist review, where he was something of a legend. And we traveled out to meet him to talk about his relationship to Zen and his sort of acolytes relationship to him as a master. But that was not for,

I was secretly thinking about the Paris Review and the CIA stuff when I went out to watch this interview happen. But I was trying to get him on the record on this and he kept putting me off for at least a year. He would give me an interview and then the day of he would cancel, sometimes as I some work on this mission of sort of anti-communism or NCL, non-communist left. I went on the hunt and I ended up at the Morgan Library where their archives are. And I had a few of these eureka

moments where it felt like it was just sitting there waiting to be typed. And this is in your book. And I think you communicate this very well. They've been there all along. So these things that you said that were known, but they weren't developed in your wonderful podcast, I think it tended to sort of politely fall into these separate bins. So for a while, you had these revisionist histories of the CIA that looked at its covert operations in this sort of heroic slash quixotic folly kind of history of error. And that was sort of the big heroic histories of the type that Tim Weiner might do, for instance. And then on the other side, you had these academic stories, the great historian who you recently interviewed, Hugh Wilford, who is an academic, who I think is looking at it within the context of the so-called cultural Cold War, separating them from each

other. And I think what I was trying to do, it echoes some of what I saw in Francis Stoner Saunders' work to take down that false separation, because these were all covert ops. Yeah. So something you brought up earlier, this thing you've become obsessed with is looking at how security agencies successfully try to create rifts, try to create damage to destroy movements, individuals, solidarity. You know, this was huge for me in 1960. I look at, you know, the relationship between Richard Wright and James Baldwin, I don't think you can tell that story without this part of it. But at the same time, I feel that intellectual historians may not be trained to go to this place because, as you point out, you use the word conspiracy theory. There is a sense that that's what conspiracy theorists do, to always kind of come back to what the security agencies might be doing

when it comes to intellectual and art history of the 20th century. But I couldn't have done the story I did without that lens. I mean, it's not, I don't believe it's possible. And it does seem that you kind of have to embrace your conspiracy theorists to do this kind of work. Well, you know, I will put some air quotes around that phrase, conspiracy theory. I'm very conscious of provable sourcing, right? And so that's why a lot of this writing is about things that happened decades before because the FOIA requests have basically been done. They've been dusted off.

They've been seen once or twice and then they've been filed. So none of the work that I do involves my reader having to trust me. It's all footnoted in a scholarly way, even if those scholarly footnotes sometimes, you know, make you stop when you should keep going for the sake of story. But there are conspiracy theories on the progressive left that the CIA itself created the phrase conspiracy theory. And whether that's true or not, I haven't looked into it very carefully. It is meant as a warning. You will be marginalized. It's meant to say, don't go where we obviously don't want you to go.

And of course, scholars, independent historians, citizens, journalists have been doing that their whole careers. And so, you know, starting with Seymour Hersh and those funny little lunches that I was having with him when I did a stint in DC was a fun way for me to show that you can continue for most of your career, if not all your career, as a mainstream award-winning kind of rock star journalist and still push this, what I call, it's a hypothesis. Until you've proved your storyline that you're imagining, it's a hypothesis. In math and science, it's a hypothesis.

So what the CIA meant when they created this phrase to marginalize these stories, conspiracy theory, it's a synonym for hypothesis. And so I don't write anything down and turn it into a publication until it's basically a journalistic proof. Yeah, I think I'm really trying to hone in on this one idea, though, that the security services have tried to foment dissent

and break up movements themselves. So in my story, I have an actual audio from Daphne Park, who was the MI6 station chief for Leopoldsville when Lumumba was taken. And she's basically taking credit for setting, using this tactic. It's not something that we have every case documented, but we have enough documented that to sort of discount this lens into, you know, any movement that gets involved with security services, it seems fair for us to err on the side of looking at the hypothesis of that is what the tactic of what was going in. Yeah, they've confessed. So I guess what I was clearing my throat to say, which you just said very clearly, is in the archive, in the film, in this case, there's a Kevin McKiernan clip from Standing Rock to Wounded Knee, a reporter's journey,

of Tom Price and other, I'm not sure he's the right one, but one of the retired FBI agents that he interviews, admits that the goal of counterintelligence program of the FBI was to create paranoia, was to use that to create divisions in activist groups on the left, the new left. And in some cases, if it got to the point where they were fighting and even killing each other, he, without blushing, admits that that was one of the goals of the counterintelligence program. So in the new, in Flights, I have a few confessions like that. You've got the Malcolm X scenario in the Audubon ballroom when he's assassinated there. You've got nine informants in the room, some FBI probably and some undercover New York City police.

The man who gives a mouth-to-mouth is an undercover New York City police. The man who gives him mouth-to-mouth is an undercover New York City police officer. His boss was upset with him for trying to save Malcolm X, which tells you a lot of what you need to know. So yeah, I think by now, 50, 60 years later, you're learning that the so-called conspiracy theorists were right on a lot of these questions. And the reason that the conspiracy-called conspiracy theorists were right on a lot of these questions. And the reason that the conspiracy theories were born

was because of rumor, open secrecy, people admitting to close friends and then not admitting it later, but also to this massive propaganda of erasing. I mean, you're getting stories breaking on these things from the early 60s when the New York Times decides to look into this thing called the CIA. You're seeing the problems and the flare-ups and the blowback and the missions resulting in exactly the opposite of what was intended around the world. You're seeing that every year and every decade blow up in a major way.

And what I'm also obsessed with right now is this massive failure of American institutions. It's a failure at the level that we have to call corruption. Yeah. And I guess that, you know, I want to jump ahead to something I've actually mentioned to you before, but the Scottish writer and critic, Andrew Hagen, who I really like a lot, has this saying that the truth needs advocates. And I feel this is even more important with, you know, not just the secret history that is in both of your books, but, you know, some of the stuff you just brought up that we're facing right now at this moment. In other words, the truth is there. It's not, we don't need another book, documentary, podcast to break this stuff. We need advocates.

Or to dive into your new book, you know, Leonard Peltier is still in jail. Yeah. And, you know, I'm curious how you think about that in terms of someone who is committed to the kind of truth that should help stop injustice or free innocent people. Yes, the truth needs advocates. But think about all of the institutional failures, you know, the attack on public schools, the attack on the media that is the result of the media's failures and the media's failures to deal with its failures.

The Iraq War is the big one that I'm thinking of, the cultivated, curated, censored lies that were told. And I give credit to the New York Times for reviewing its coverage of the Iraq war. It's kind of a mini internal church committee. But, you know, there are folks out there who think that these things, these, you know, every sort of decade that there's a church committee or, you know, an impeachment or something like that, they think that is doing the work of protecting the truth and sort of being advocates for the truth. I think we're falling behind. I think the institutions are just corrupting so quickly before us that we're in this moment where we don't know how, like the pandemic was

a great moment of, well, why don't people believe each other here? You know, why don't people believe each other's testimony? And so there are many institutions that need to take heed and become these truth advocates. Let's see where one of the characters in your book lands. You have a great essay on Graham Greene, who plays a big role in this thing I just did. In fact, my series is almost bookended by The Quiet American from 1956 and Our Man in Havana in 1960. He takes a flight that you tell us about in your research into him and the quiet American, which seems pretty important to how he came to understand America and thinking about his own role and what he was doing in his work. And we want to tell us about that and sort of what he

took from that. Yeah. One of the nuances that I leave out is that Graham Greene had a brother who was in MI6, I think. And he thought of himself as both a journalist and a novelist. And I think his brother could hook him up, as it were, to sort of embed in these counterinsurgency operations around the world. And, you know, in the early 50s, he was also, because of that, he was able to write for magazines like Life.

And so he was in Vietnam as the French were fighting to maintain control. And he does a fly along with a French pilot. And I bookend my essay with that flight because, you know, he's looking through the lens of the colony, the organizers of the colony, the rank and file foot soldiers. Well, I guess if you're in a plane, not really a foot soldier. And he does that fly along in a way that's considered an ordinary sort of participatory journalistic stunt. And his knees are literally on the back of the pilot. And you might think the pilot who in other cases has been ordered to drop napalm,

you might moralize him in a certain way. But somewhere in The Quiet American, it becomes clear that this guy doesn't really like his job. He knows he's trying to hold on to the colony and he's dropping napalm on innocent civilians. So this spins into the novel, The Quiet American, this article that was probably rejected by Life because it was a little too truthy. And so he folds it into the novel. He talks about realizing that the atrocities that were being committed were being committed on behalf of the U.S. and or the French.

But they're being rewritten as communist atrocities. And he's not being allowed to tell this in Life magazine, we learn. And then he successfully tells it in The Quiet America, which becomes a bestseller and lands on the bestseller list, I think, for 16 weeks. Two years later, it's optioned for a film and lands to LSEIA Spook, who spent a lot of time there. Completely perverts the ending so that it was actually a communist atrocity. But the communists were clever enough to attribute it to us, so-called. So this pilot, he talks about this amazing process that I think we're going to see in Ukraine. We may well see in Gaza, which is the peace that was there sort of laid out by the diplomats in the beginning. After all this bloodshed, and in the case of Vietnam,

there's napalm. In the case of Gaza there's napalm in the case of Gaza there's just sort of a rate of killing that's unprecedented um and in Ukraine and Russia you could say the same in the end it's it's going to be stopped by something diplomatic like that and uh I think the phrase the soldier used used was the peace that we had at the beginning is the peace we're going to end up with at the end, making nonsense of all these years. And so I think that's the recurring move that you see in American history that from my parents' lifetime forward through mine

up to post sort of anti-communist, the anti-communist hangover that we're in, the sort of Neo-McCarthy-like Cold War 2.0 age that we're in. It's literally like our institutions have erased everything we should have learned about Joe McCarthy and anti-communism and these wars that go on and go on and go on and then end up in the same peace that we would have had in the beginning. So to me, that's what you learn from this episode between

Graham Greene and Edward Lansdale and the CIA. Joel Whitney's book of essays is called Flights, and it's out now from Or Books. And you can find Not All Propaganda is Art, the miniseries we ran earlier this year in the TOE feed. The Theory of Everything is a proud and founding member of Radiotopia from PRX, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.