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John Le Carré RIP + How the Cold War Began

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Dec 24, 2020—After putting up the post below in tribute to John Le Carré, I began reading his first novel Call for the Dead, which I had photographed copies of for the post. Right away, on page 7, I was sorta stunned to find a reference to a key historical episode, often overlooked or forgotten nowadays, that had been documented in a book I acquired and published fifteen years ago. The narrator of Le Carré’s compact, 128-page Cold War thriller explains why protagonist George Smiley, a British intelligence officer from just after the end of WWI to 1943, emerged from retirement just as WWII was ending. The reason was “The revelations of a young Russian cypher-clerk in Ottawa [which] had created a new demand for men of Smiley’s experience.” That cypher-clerk was Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko, whose defection author Amy Knight wrote about in her 2005 book, How the Cold War Began: The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies. Her nonfiction book tells an amazing story of how Gouzenko, with his wife and children in tow, left Soviet quarters intending to defect, but  struggled to find an embassy that would give him asylum. He was the first defector of the Cold War, and it was still in 1945! He became something of a media sensation in Canada, and would later appear in media there with a hood over his face to disguise his identity, as seen on he cover of the edition we brought out.

Amy Knight has since become a client of my literary agency; I sold her book Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder to St Martin’s in 2017, and we will be working to sell another Russia-related book by her in 2021.

Original post below from Dec 15:
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In honor of the late spymaster John Le Carré, who passed this week at age 89, I was happy to take these handsome copies off a bookshelf in my library. Call for the Dead is a particularly fine copy, a first US edition of his first novel that I found in a Maine antique store in the 1990s, published here by Walker & Company in 1961. By happenstance I was an editor at Walker in 1987, where I had the mantle of publishing espionage fiction, which is when I learned that Walker was Le Carre’s first US publisher, later bringing out The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

The copy of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy pictured here published in 1974 by Knopf,  is also a first edition, and the copy of the book that my late brother Joel and I read of the book.

In 2004, a book business friend George Gibson, then publisher at Walker, now with Grove Atlantic, harked back to Walker’s early days by reissuing Call for the Dead with a Foreword by P.D. James, and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold with Joseph Kanon providing the Foreword.

 

#espionage #books #spies

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The CIA, Patron of Abstract Expressionism

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Hiding in plain sight is confirmation in a 1995 story from Britain’s Independent newspaper that after WW II and continuing on throughout the ’50s the CIA promoted Abstract Expressionism, ostensibly to show America’s openness to cultural variety, as compared with the rigid Constructivism in Soviet arts. I had somehow missed the story by reporter Frances Stonor Saunders, which, thanks to fellow Tweeps @nwoah and @roc_cayard, resurfaced this evening on Twitter. Among many fascinating revelations it reports that

In 1958 the touring exhibition “The New American Painting”, including works by Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell, [Rothko] and others, was on show in Paris. The Tate Gallery was keen to have it next, but could not afford to bring it over. Late in the day, an American millionaire and art lover, Julius Fleischmann, stepped in with the cash and the show was brought to London. The money that Fleischmann provided, however, was not his but the CIA’s. It came through a body called the Farfield Foundation, of which Fleischmann was president, but far from being a millionaire’s charitable arm, the foundation was a secret conduit for CIA funds. So, unknown to the Tate, the public or the artists, the exhibition was transferred to London at American taxpayers’ expense to serve subtle Cold War propaganda purposes. A former CIA man, Tom Braden, described how such conduits as the Farfield Foundation were set up. “We would go to somebody in New York who was a well-known rich person and we would say, ‘We want to set up a foundation.’ We would tell him what we were trying to do and pledge him to secrecy, and he would say, ‘Of course I’ll do it,’ and then you would publish a letterhead and his name would be on it and there would be a foundation. It was really a pretty simple device.” Julius Fleischmann was well placed for such a role. He sat on the board of the International Programme of the Museum of Modern Art in New York–as did several powerful figures close to the CIA.

Eisenhower-era support of boundary-busting art seems ironic now, but the article also points out the truth that the CIA, notwithstanding its Cold Warrior status, it

sponsored American jazz artists, opera recitals, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s international touring programme. Its agents were placed in the film industry, in publishing houses, even as travel writers for the celebrated Fodor guides. And, we now know, it promoted America’s anarchic avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism.

In this regard, I recall that the first publishing house I worked for in New York was Walker & Company, whose founder Samuel Walker was long rumored to have been a member of OSS during the war, the CIA’s forerunner, and involved with Radio Free Europe during the Cold War. I remember seeing books in the Walker company library, titles published in the ’50s and ’60s, that were labeled as printed in Poland, suggesting to me that the company still had some level of involvement with America’s outreach to Eastern Europe during the Cold War. This may even explain how Walker happened to be the first American publisher of John Le Carre bringing out Call for the Dead in 1961 and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold in 1963, long before he was well known.

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