So far as I know, I have never taken money from the C.I.A. (though I have worked for some organizations that have had C.I.A. connections, including, apparently, my present employer). The same can’t be said for any number of prominent writers and artists, from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to Jackson Pollock.

During the early years of the cold war, they were supported, sometimes lavishly, always secretly, by the C.I.A. as part of its propaganda war against the Soviet Union. It was perhaps the most successful use of “soft power” in American history. Yet once the facts came out in 1967 the episode became a source of scandal and controversy that continues to percolate to this day. How close should presumably independent intellectuals get to their government?

Many books and articles were written about all this until 1999, when one book, Frances Stonor Saunders’ “Cultural Cold War,” swept the field. Saunders was highly critical of the “octopus-like C.I.A.” and those intellectuals who allowed themselves to be used as pawns in the government’s cold war game. But though her book was diligently researched and vigorously argued, it can hardly be considered the last word — if only because the issue doesn’t allow for last words.

Now the historian Hugh Wilford has come out with “The Mighty Wurlitzer,” and it can be seen as a direct rejoinder to Saunders. The story, Wilford says, is complicated. Far from being pawns, the intellectuals on the C.I.A. payroll were willing participants in what they understood as the legitimate cause of opposing Soviet tyranny. They took money for what they would have done anyway; the C.I.A. simply allowed them to be more effective at doing it. Who was using whom? Even more complicated is the question of secrecy. Many, if not most of the beneficiaries didn’t know where the money was coming from (or didn’t want to know). They professed outrage when the truth was revealed. Were they right to be upset?

There’s enough ethical quicksand here to sink an aircraft carrier. It’s clear that the C.I.A.’s cultural war wouldn’t have been nearly as effective if it had been public (if only because Congress would never have agreed to subsidize the American liberals, European Socialists and avant-garde artists that the sophisticated C.I.A. was happy to take under its wing).

The controversy over secrecy seems to boil down to ends and means: the end was preventing Communist domination of Europe; the means were those that spy agencies, but not artists and writers, are accustomed to using. Wilford himself would have preferred the program to be public, but his book suggests we should be careful before rushing to judgment. He quotes several unapologetic participants, including Diana Trilling: “I never liked the secrecy but was willing to live with it because I thought we were doing useful work.”