Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - How the CIA Invented Modern Art

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

During the Cold War, the CIA quietly turned modern art into a weapon. Convinced that America needed to prove its cultural superiority over the Soviet Union, the agency secretly promoted abstract expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning as symbols of American freedom. Through a front group called the Congress for Cultural Freedom and a network of fake foundations, the CIA funneled millions of dollars into touring exhibitions across Europe, partnering with the Museum of Modern Art, all without the artists ever knowing who was funding their success. The irony was staggering: many of the painters were anarchists and former communists, President Truman thought their work was garbage, and Congress called it un-American, yet the CIA bankrolled it anyway. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson examines the declassified operation that transformed paint splatters into propaganda, the strange alliance between spies and the art world, and the unsettling question of whether some of the most celebrated art of the 20th century rose on merit, or because a spy agency decided it was useful.For more, follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes wherever you listen to podcasts: https://pod.link/1828469754If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Scams, Money, & Murder to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Scams, Money, & Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new crimehouse original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Linkletter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a threat at 2 a.m. that starts with, You have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis. are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe

at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. In the winter of 1958, one of the most talked about exhibitions in Europe was a traveling show of American art. It was called the New American Painting, and it was full of the kind of art that made people argue. Enormous canvases covered in drips, slashes, and raw blocks of color by artists like Jackson Pollock and Wilhelm de Kony. After a celebrated run in Paris, the show was supposed to move on to London to the famous Tate Gallery. There was just one problem. The Tate wanted these paintings badly, but it couldn't afford to bring them across the channel.

Shipping art on this scale was expensive, and the money just wasn't there. Then, at the last minute, they were rescued. A wealthy American businessman and art lover, named Julius Fleischman, quietly stepped in and covered the cost. The paintings sailed to London, the show went on, and the crowds who came to see it never knew how close it had come to falling apart. It was a lovely little story about a generous private patron, and almost none of it was true. The money Fleischman put up wasn't really his. It had reached him through a charity called the Farfield Foundation, And the Farfield Foundation barely existed. It was a shell, a name on a letterhead.

The cash flowing through it belonged to the Central Intelligence Agency. So the Tate didn't know, the crowds didn't know, and the artists had no idea their own paintings were being ferried across Europe by U.S. intelligence. And that London show wasn't a one-time thing. It was a small piece of the strangest operation the CIA ever ran, a decade-long secret campaign to make American art famous around the globe. Some people think it went even further than that, that the CIA didn't just push modern art on the world.

It invented it. From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations, and murderous doctors. These aren't just theories. They're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is conspiracy theories, cults and crimes, a crimehouse original powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. These cases are wild, and I want to hear what you think.

At the end of each episode, please leave a comment wherever you listen. Be sure to rate, review, and follow so we can continue building this community together. And if you want even more, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus and get every episode of this show and the rest of the crimehouse lineup, ad-free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap, try free at the top of the conspiracy theories, cults, and crimes show page. For most of us, the story of modern American art is a story about genius. After World War II, a handful of painters in New York made work that was so powerful that the center of the art world

moved from Paris to Manhattan for the first time in history. It usually gets told as a pure American triumph, raw talent, finally getting its due. But there's another version, one where that triumph got a helping hand from an intelligence agency that decided these paintings were far too useful to leave to chance. Today I'm separating myths from fact. There are the rumors that America's most celebrated painters were secretly on the government's payroll, that their fame was cooked up in a back room. And then there's the paper trail, what the documents and the spies themselves admitted once the whole thing came apart. It all comes down to the question at the heart of today's episode.

Did the CIA invent modern art? Did the paintings in our greatest museums earn their place? Or did a spy agency decide they must? belonged there. All that and more coming up. In the late 1940s, on the far end of Long Island, a painter named Jackson Pollock was working out of a converted barn in a little fishing town called Springs. He had a very specific process. He'd tack an enormous sheet of raw canvas to the floor, because it was too big for any easel, and then he'd move around it, dripping, pouring, and flinging ordinary house paint straight from the can.

No brush ever touched the surface. There was no picture of anything you could name, just motion, rhythm, and color. To a lot of people, it looked like chaos. But in 1949, the biggest magazine in the country, Life, ran a glossy feature on Pollock under a headline that asked whether he might be the greatest living painter in the United States. The nickname the press gave him after that,

Captured just how bizarre this all seemed to the average American, they called him Jack the Dipper. Pollock was part of a loose circle of painters working in New York in those years, one that came to be known as the abstract expressionists or the New York School. There was Mark Rothko, who painted huge glowing rectangles of color that seemed to float and breathe. There was Wilhelm de Kohning, a Dutch immigrant who's slashing, almost violent paintings of women, could make people genuinely furious. There was Robert Motherwell. There was Lee Krasner, a formidable painter in her own right, who also happened to be married to Pollock, and there was a whole wider circle beyond them. They all had different styles, but when tied them together was an attitude. Their canvases were

big, raw, and emotional, and they flatly refused to show you anything you could recognize. The whole point was the act of making the thing, the freedom of it. For America, this This was something brand new. For most of its history, the country had imported its culture from Europe, where the great painters and composers always seemed to live. Abstract expressionism was different. It was loud, confident, and unmistakably American, arguably the first major art movement the country could ever claim as its own. That made it a strange sort of national treasure, even to the many people who couldn't stand looking at it. And that wasn't the only thing that set these artists apart.

A lot of them had come up in the 1930s, painting for federal relief programs during the Depression, moving in radical left-wing circles. Several had been communists or something close to it. They were bohemians and outsiders, and more than a few were serious drinkers. In almost every way, they were the opposite of the establishment, and those same politics were about to put them on the wrong side of the most important conflict of the era. By the late 1940s, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a struggle that wasn't just about armies and bombs. It was about ideas, about which system, capitalism or communism, deserved the loyalty of everyone else on Earth.

And culture mattered enormously in that fight. The Soviets had a favorite line of attack, and it landed because there was a grain of truth in it. They said America was a country of billboards and vending machines with no real art and no. soul, and plenty of European intellectuals, especially in France and Italy, were more than willing to believe it. Many of them already leaned left, and to them, the United States looked like a loud, materialistic teenager standing next to the ancient capitals of European culture. There was history writing on this, too.

For the better part of a century, Paris had been the undisputed capital of the art world. Every ambitious painter alive, from Picasso to Matisse, had gone to the world. there to make a name. But the Second World War had left Europe in ruins. And for the first time in living memory, that crown was suddenly up for grabs. American officials could feel the center of gravity beginning to drift toward New York, and they wanted to claim it. Problem was they couldn't look like the money-obsessed cousin the Soviets kept describing while they did it. The Soviet Union also had a very clear idea of what proper art should look like. It was called socialist realism. It showed heroic factory workers, beaming farmers, noble soldiers, and flattering

portraits of Stalin. Art in the Soviet view was supposed to serve the state and be understood by everyone. A giant Pollock canvas dripping with tangled paint was the opposite. It didn't serve anybody. It didn't mean anything you could put into a slogan. It was pure, unruly individualism. which is exactly why some American officials thought this baffling art suddenly looked useful. Set a wild American canvas beside a tidy Soviet portrait of Stalin and the argument made itself. Over here, artists answered to no one. You could hardly ask for a better advertisement for the freedom of the West. There was just one issue, and it was a big one. The U.S. government couldn't be caught promoting it. The administration had actually learned this the hard way a few years earlier.

In 1946, the State Department spent close to $50,000 on an art show that toured through Europe. It backfired, badly. When photos of the paintings reached the public back home, people were outraged that their tax dollars had gone toward art they didn't even like. The magazine Look ran a spread under the headline, Your Money bought these paintings. all but daring its readers to be furious. President Harry Truman, who also hated modern art, once summed the whole category up as merely the vaporings of half-baked, lazy people. And in Congress, one representative after another lined up to attack the show.

Some of them pointed out that several of the artists had left-wing or communist backgrounds. After that, the State Department folded. It canceled the tour, called the paintings home, and eventually dumped the entire collection at a fire sale auction for a small fraction of what it had paid. The lesson in Washington was clear. Backing modern art out in the open was political suicide, and the timing made everything worse. These were the years of Senator Joseph McCarthy when the hunt for hidden communists was building toward a fever pitch. Careers were being destroyed on little more than rumors.

In that climate, a government official who stood up to champion, a bunch of paint-splattering ex-radicals, wasn't just risking being ridiculed. He was risking his own neck. So the safest thing any politician could do was stay as far away from modern art as humanly possible. That meant American officials were caught in a real bind. They had the perfect symbol of American freedom, art so wild and individual that no totalitarian state would ever allow it. But the instant the government tried to pay for that art in public, Congress, and the voters revolted.

What they needed was a backer who could fund the work in total secrecy, one that never had to ask Congress for a dime and never had to explain where the money went. It turned out the United States had just finished building an organization that fit that description perfectly. In 1947, the same year the advancing American art disaster played out, President Truman signed the law that created the Central Intelligence. agency.

The early CIA wasn't the agency we picture today. At first, it was run by a particular kind of East Coast man, people who were old money, who went to Yale and Harvard, collected paintings and wrote novels on the side. Next to the red-baiting crusaders in Congress, or J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, they thought of themselves as sophisticated, worldly, and open-minded. And they moved in exactly the same world as the people

who ran American Art. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, MoMA, was founded in 1929, in part by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. By the late 1940s, it was the most powerful institution in American art, and its trustees weren't just similar to the men building the CIA. In some cases, they were the very same people. So when the agency went looking for a way to fight the Cold War with culture, it didn't have to look far. In 1950, it built a secret new division to do exactly that, and to run it, picked someone who knew the art world from the inside. Just a year earlier, he'd been running the day-to-day operations at the MoMA.

Now he was going to take the most rebellious art in America and quietly turn it into a weapon for the U.S. government. I'm Claire Buckley, and if your idea of relaxing is listening to seriously unsettling stories before bed, then you are going to love my podcast Pretty Scary. From terrifying true crime, haunting ghost tales, creepy alien encounters and anything weird, it's the stories that leave you staring at the ceiling afterwards, questioning absolutely everything. Lock your doors, get comfy and prepare to dive into the darkness.

Just search for Pretty Scary with Claire Buckley. The man tasked with turning modern art into a weapon was named Tom Braden, and his resume tells you almost every. everything you need to know about how this operation worked. From 1947 until late 1949, Brayden was the executive secretary of the Museum of Modern Art, one of the top administrative posts at the most important art museum in the country. Then in 1950, he left the art world and joined the CIA, where he was handed a brand new unit called the International

Organization's Division, or IOD. Braden's new division had a broad, and ambitious goal to win over the artists, writers, and intellectuals of Western Europe. And some of the ways they tried to do this had nothing to do with painting. It secretly backed an animated version of George Orwell's Animal Farm and sent American jazz musicians and symphony orchestras touring across Europe. When the Boston Symphony played a triumphant run of concerts in Paris, that was the campaign too, living proof that America could produce world-class, culture of its own. The point was to flood the world with evidence of American culture and American

freedom. And one of the tools in that kit was going to be this wild new version of American art. But there was an obvious catch, and the agency understood it completely. If these left-wing anti-establishment artists ever discovered that the U.S. government, let alone the CIA, was promoting their work, a lot of them would simply refuse to play along. So the CIA settled on an approach, it referred to internally as the long leash. The idea was to support the art from a distance through two or three layers of middlemen so the money could never be traced back to the bureau. That way, there was no need to involve a painter like Pollock directly, and never any risk

of him saying no. Of course, the CIA couldn't run any of this under its own name. It needed a front, a public organization that could do the work out in the open. with no visible link back to the agency. It helped build one in the summer of 1950, and it chose the spot deliberately, West Berlin, surrounded by Soviet-controlled territory right on the front line of the Cold War.

There, a glittering roster of writers, scholars, and artists gathered to launch a new international body called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. On the surface, it looked like a genuine independent society of the world's leading minds. Club of writers, musicians, historians, and artists devoted to defending free thought against Soviet censorship. In reality, it had been created with CIA money and was effectively run by the Bureau, too. At its height, the Congress had offices in 35 countries, published more than 20 magazines,

through glittering international conferences, put on art exhibitions, and handed out prizes. The agency poured tens of millions of dollars into it over the years. One historian later described the CIA of this era as America's secret ministry of culture. Inside the agency, they even had a nickname for the whole machine, the mighty Whirlitzer, after the theater organ. The joke went that you could push a button in Washington and the CIA's message would be delivered through hundreds of newspapers, magazines, and cultural groups around the world. Its flagship was a London magazine called Encounter, which published some of the most respected writers in the West and carried real intellectual weight. But the Congress also bankrolled sister magazines across France, Germany, Italy, and beyond, and its target audience was very specific.

All of it was aimed at the taskmasters of Western Europe, the writers, critics, and celebrated artists whose opinions set the terms for everyone else. Many of them sneered at America and leaned toward Moscow. Some of the biggest names in the world, including Pablo Picasso, were card-carrying communists. The CIA thought that if they could win those people over, they would win over the wider culture. That was the entire game.

Which brings us back to that show in London, the one from the very top of this episode, saved at the last second by a generous millionaire. Remember the Farfield Foundation, the charity that supposedly put up the money? That was the whole trick, and it sat at the heart of how this operation stayed hidden. The CIA almost never handed cash directly to an artist or a museum. Instead, it ran the money through a sprawling network of foundations that looked from the outside like ordinary private charities.

Some were real philanthropic funds that had agreed, to quietly pass money along. Others, like Farfield, were essentially hollow, set up for the specific purpose of laundering the agency's money into the cultural world. Tom Braden himself later described just how simple it was to build one of these fronts.

The agency would go to some wealthy, trustworthy person, explain what it was trying to do, swear him to secrecy, and print up a letterhead with his name on it. And that was it. A foundation now existed. In Braden's own words, it was, quote, really a pretty simple device. Julius Fleischman, the businessman who rescued that London show, was president of the Farfield Foundation.

He also happened to sit on an international committee at the Museum of Modern Art, right alongside other men with ties to the CIA. That was no accident. MoMA was the other half of the machine. The Congress for Cultural Freedom could supply the cover and the cash, but it needed a partner that actually had the paintings, the curators, and the expertise to mount world-class exhibitions. The Museum of Modern Art had all that. Plus, its leaders were already woven into this Cold War project at nearly every level. Actually, the museum had been working

with the U.S. government even before the CIA existed. During World War II, it took on dozens of federal contracts and toured American art through Latin America to keep the region friendly to Washington. Serving American foreign policy was nothing new for MoMA. The Cold War was just the next chapter. For most of this period, the museum's president was Nelson Rockefeller, a member of the famous Rockefeller family who would one day become vice president of the United States. Unlike some other politicians of the era, Rockefeller loved modern art, and he was refreshingly blunt about what he thought it was good for. He liked to call it free enterprise painting. Several of the museum's other powerful figures had come straight out of the wartime intelligence

service, the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, and in 1952, MoMA set up an international program to push American art out into the world. Most of its budget came from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, not from the agency directly, but the program worked closely. with the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the CIA straight-up funded some of the shows. In the mid-1950s, the Congress and MoMA toured a show of young abstract painters across Europe. The money to make it happen came directly from the Farfield Foundation, and the people organizing these shows were clear about the message they were trying to send. At one Congress festival in Paris, the curator, James Johnson Sweeney,

boasted that the art on display could never have come, quote, from such totalitarian regimes as Nazi Germany or present-day Soviet Russia. And this time it worked. A decade earlier, when the government had openly put its name on American art, the whole effort had blown up in its face. Now, with the funding buried and the government nowhere in sight, the same kind of art was conquering Europe. As the new American painting toured Europe in 1958 and 1950s,

It drew crowds and serious reviews in city after city. Critics who had long dismissed American culture as shallow and commercial now took these painters seriously, treating them as the important new movement of the age. The perception the CIA had set out to change was actually changing, and the center of the art world was finally shifting from Paris to New York. And part of the reason was something the CIA did a few years. before that tour. Venice, Italy is home to the world's most prestigious international art exhibition, the Venice Biennale. At the Venice Biennale, each participating country shows its art in its own national pavilion, a small building that the country itself owns and controls.

The United States was and is the exception. Its pavilion had been built back in 1930 by a private gallery, not by Washington. And in 1954, the Museum of Modern Art bought it outright. For the next eight years, a private museum in New York owned and operated America's official national pavilion at the biggest art event on the planet. To this day, it's the only national pavilion in the Biennale's history that no government has ever owned.

And it let the United States do precisely what it had wanted to do all along, put American modern art on the world state. with no taxpayer money and no vote in Congress. By 1954, even the view from the White House had shifted. Truman had despised modern art. Eisenhower embraced it. That year, he spoke at MoMA's 25th anniversary and called artistic freedom a pillar of liberty. It was the same argument the whole operation was built on. Free societies create great art, and dictatorships crush it, or as a as Eisenhower put it, under tyranny, progress is arrested, and creation and genius are destroyed. It was a beautiful speech about freedom. It was also a sales pitch, and through all of it,

the foundations, the fronts, the touring shows, the pavilion in Venice, the artists themselves had no idea any of it was happening. In the summer of 1956, at just 44 years old, Jackson Pollock was killed in a car crash not far from his home on Long Island, driving drunk. He died a world-famous painter, celebrated across Europe and America, and he went to his grave without knowing some of that fame had been quietly engineered, that his tangled, dripping canvases, had been crossing Europe as ammunition in a war he'd never enlisted in. Tom Braden, for his part, had no doubts about how well it had worked. Years later, he said that this kind of cultural work had won more admiration for the United States abroad than its top diplomats could have bought with a hundred speeches.

The operation kept its momentum for more than a decade. Silent, invisible, and enormously effective. The public never suspected a thing, and it might have stayed buried forever, except in the mid-1960s, a small, cash-strapped, radical magazine started tugging on a loose. thread. And once it did, the whole secret began to come apart. Some mysteries have haunted us for centuries. Others are unfolding right now. How does a modern airliner with 239 people on board disappear from the sky without a trace? This is history's greatest mysteries, a history channel original podcast brought to you by Rewind Studios. Adapted from the hit TV show, every episode,

into one of the world's greatest enigmas, the vanishings, the myths, the lost relics, and the unexplained. With contributions from top historians, authors, scientists, and researchers, we separate fact from folklore and evidence from rumor, from unsolved crimes to buried treasure, to the deaths and disappearances of famous figures.

These are the stories we think we know, but dig beneath the legend and the truth gets far strange. Follow History's Greatest Mysteries, available now wherever you listen to podcasts. By the mid-1960s, the CIA had quietly made itself one of the most powerful forces in the American art world. It had helped turn a handful of New York painters into international symbols of freedom, and almost no one knew. Then, it all fell apart. For years, the folks in art circles had been whispering that something about the story wasn't quite right. They pointed out that the sudden global triumph of American painting had been a little too smooth, a little too well-funded to be entirely natural. But it was never anything more than a

rumor, the kind of thing a cynical art student might mutter at a party and get laughed out of the room for. The idea that someone powerful, like the CIA, was secretly behind modern art, sounded ridiculous, paranoid even. Except it turned out to be true. And the confirmation came from the spies themselves. The unraveling started in 1966, when the New York Times ran a series of reports suggesting that the CIA had been secretly bankrolling all sorts of supposedly independent American groups, things like cultural societies, student unions, and charities. Then in early In 201967, a young radical magazine called Ramparts blew the whole thing wide open. Ramparts revealed that the CIA had been secretly bankrolling the National Student Association,

one of the country's biggest student groups. And once reporters started following that trail of money, they uncovered the rest of the hidden machine. They tracked down the foundations, the fronts, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom sitting right in the middle of it. Just like that, the secret was out. Then one of the men responsible did something almost nobody expected. Instead of denying it, he bragged.

In May of 1967, that same Tom Braden, former MoMA executive, former chief of the CIA's cultural division, published an article in the Saturday evening post. The title read, I'm glad the CIA is immoral. In it, Brayden confirmed the entire scheme. He admitted the CIA had secretly funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He admitted it had planted an agent inside and quietly financed one of Europe's most respected intellectual magazines for years. And he explained, without a hint of remorse,

why all of it had to stay secret. He said that Congress would have never approved this kind of spending. In one now-famous line, he wrote that getting Congress to sign off on these projects during the anti-communist fever of the 1950s was, quote, about as likely as the John Birch Society's approving Medicare. His reasoning was cold and simple. This was a war, and in a war, you use every weapon you've got, culture included. In order to encourage openness in the wider world, the agency had decided it needed to work in the dark. To promote freedom, it had chosen to lie. Braden had no regrets, but plenty of other people did. His confession on top of the ramparts' revelations meant there was no denying it anymore, and as the story spread, it left a trail of ruined

reputations and furious, humiliated writers behind it. The most prestigious journal the CIA had been secretly funding was a London-based magazine called Encounter, co-edited by the celebrated poet Stephen Spender. When the truth finally surfaced, Spender seemed truly shocked. He and a fellow editor resigned in disgust. And they weren't alone. All across Europe and America, proud members of the Congress for Cultural Freedom were suddenly wondering whether their prizes and paychecks had come from American intelligence. For many of them, the answer was yes. The betrayal stung for years. These people had believed they were part of something free and independent.

Instead, they'd been on the CIA's payroll the whole time. Some never fully trusted the intellectual establishment again. So that's what's confirmed. On the record, much of it straight from the mouths of the people who ran the operation, the CIA created and secretly, funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom. It laundered money through fake foundations. It bankrolled magazines, orchestra tours, and exhibitions of modern art. And the Museum of Modern Art, with its deep ties to that very same world, helped carry American painting out into the Cold War as a glittering

symbol of freedom. But this is also where the story tends to get stretched beyond what the evidence actually supports. You'll often hear this whole saga crushed down into one punchy claim that the CIA invented abstract expressionism, that the agency created the movement, made Jackson Pollock famous on purpose, and manufactured the entire thing from nothing. But that's not quite true. No document anywhere shows the CIA paying Jackson Pollock to pick up a paint can or telling Rothko what to put on a canvas, or willing the movement into existence in the first place. These artists were working in New York long before any spy took an interest in them. Critics and collectors were already arguing about them.

The loudest voice belonged to a New York critic named Clement Greenberg, who insisted early and often that Jackson Pollock was the most important painter his generation had produced. Greenberg was a true believer, arguing purely on the merits of the work, and he'd been banging that drum for years before the agency ever came calling. The talent was real, it was homegrown, and plenty of people were championing it for reasons that had nothing to do with the Cold War. Even the former CIA officer who admitted the agency exploited the art, was careful on this exact point.

He joked that he'd love to be able to claim the CIA invented abstract expressionism, then admitted that all the agency really did was, recognize art that already existed and put it to work. So the honest version is more subtle than the headline, and I'd argue it's actually more disturbing. The CIA didn't invent this art. What it did was quietly co-op to its meaning. It took paintings these artists had made about their own private struggles,

about anguish and solitude and freedom, and repackaged them as an advertisement for the United States. It helped decide which art traveled the world and which art hung in the rooms that mattered. The agency didn't create the genius. It curated it for its own purposes without ever telling a soul. The canvas never changed. What changed was the story wrapped around it and who was paying to tell it. But I think the wildest part of all this is how much it stopped being a secret.

This isn't one of those cases where the government has spent decades. stonewalling and denying, the man who ran the operation confessed in a national magazine in 1967, and over the years, historians filled in the rest. In 1974, an art historian named Eva Crockcroft was the first to connect the operation to abstract expressionism in print, and in 1999, the British writer Francis Stoner Saunders documented the entire apparatus working straight from the CIA's own paper trail. Her book was called The Cultural Cold War, and in 2002, the CIA's own in-house journal reviewed it at length. The agency accused of the conspiracy was now writing book reports about it. In other words, the conspiracy is real, documented, and sitting in plain sight. It's just that the reality is stranger and more complicated than the myth ever was. Which brings me to the question at the heart of this entire thing. All of this art is still with us. It hangs in the greatest museums in the world, and those Cold War canvases are now some

of the most valuable objects on the planet. And it's undeniable. When you walk into a gallery and stop in front of a Rothko or a Pollock, you feel something, kind of a hush, a sense that you're standing in front of something that matters. So how much of that feeling is truly yours? And how much of it was shaped 70 years ago by people who decided this person who decided this This particular art should be famous, partly because it was useful to them. Does knowing the CIA's fingerprints are on this story change the way you see the paintings,

or does it not change a thing? Please tell me in the comments wherever you're listening. I'd love to know where you stand on this. There's a final piece to this. We tend to assume that the great enemy of art is censorship, a government that bans books, jails poets, and tells painters exactly what they're allowed to paint. that's real. That's exactly what the Soviet Union did. It was clumsy and obvious, and in the end, it failed. Their state-approved art came out looking as stiff and lifeless as the system that demanded it.

What the United States did was subtler and way more effective. It didn't censor its artists. It celebrated them. It took the wildest, most rebellious art it could find, held it up to the world and said, this is what freedom looks like. The only catch was that the artist themselves had no idea they were just pawns in a game. That's what makes this so hard to shake. If a painting can be a masterpiece and a piece of propaganda at the same time, then the question the CIA left us with isn't really about spies. It's about how we decide what's great and whether we ever really decide it for ourselves. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Conspiracy Theory's Cults and Crimes. Come back next time. We'll hear another story about the real

people at the center of the world's most notorious cults, conspiracies, and criminal acts. Conspiracy theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crimehouse original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crimehouse, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crime House on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Conspiracy Theory, Cults and Crimes wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your conspiracy theories, cults and crimes listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus. You'll get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crimehouse lineup ad-free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To

Join, go to Crimehouseplus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap, try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theory's Cults and Crimes show page. Conspiracy Theory's Cults and Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson, and is a Crimehouse original, powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theory's Cults and Crimes team, Max Cudler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Pritzofsky, Lori Marinelli, Alynella, Alyssa, Fox, Sarah Camp, Mara de la Rosa, Claire Swartzlander, and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening. I'm Sarah Turney. And I'm Courtney Nicole. We're the host of the Crime House original podcast, The Final Hours. Crime has impacted both of our families, teaching us how the last conversations the misbred flags can change everything. On the final hours, we examine the moments before a disappearance and the questions that never got answered. A podcast that puts the

moments before it disappears under a microscope. Listen to and follow the final hours, available now wherever you get your podcasts. Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new crimehouse original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Linkletter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers. then they swab. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a threat at 2 a.m.

that starts with, you have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit pod on YouTube.