This remark illustrates Wilford’s somewhat cool attitude toward what many saw, with some legitimacy, as a worldwide conflict between tyranny and freedom. Lovestone had been the leader of the American Communist Party until he was expelled by Stalin himself. Clearly he knew a great deal about Soviet Communism and would not brook any interference or accept any guidance from C.I.A. officials, who in those early days were often from Ivy League colleges. Lovestone called them “fizz kids.” Of course Lovestone was not dependent on C.I.A. money  the A.F.L. had its own resources. But the C.I.A. was eager to support an organization like the A.F.L. in its anti-Communist work. Similarly with Walter and Victor Reuther in the C.I.O.

“Newly available evidence,” Wilford concludes, “shows that the old imagery of puppet masters and marionettes fails utterly to capture the complexities of partnership between the Lovestoneites of the A.F.L. and the ‘fizz kids’ of the C.I.A.” This will hardly be surprising to the knowledgeable. And Wilford explains that the C.I.A.’s involvement with the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, an influential cold-war association of writers and scholars dominated by New York intellectuals, was very much the same story.

Even when C.I.A. control was greatest, many American anti-Communists saw themselves not as doing the agency’s bidding but as pursuing common ends  contesting Communist influence among intellectuals, trade unionists, blacks, women’s groups, student groups and the like. There seem to be few cases where the C.I.A. wanted a group to do things that its leaders did not want to do. Rather, the issue that created conflict was generally the C.I.A. insistence on hiding its involvement  concealing the source of money and swearing “witting” leaders to secrecy, with penalties if they revealed what they knew (though there seem to be no cases, at least in this book, where any penalties were imposed).

After the C.I.A.’s activities were exposed, there were few who said they had been used, though rather more who said they were sorry to have kept the C.I.A. connection secret. Norman Thomas is one who, according to Wilford, expressed regret. Along with Victor Reuther, Allard Lowenstein and Bayard Rustin, Thomas was involved with the C.I.A.-sponsored Committee on Free Elections in the Dominican Republic, which lent “international credibility to a 1966 ballot effectively rigged against the socialist former president, Juan Bosch.” This is one of those passages that lead a reader to wonder if Wilford has fully grasped the nature of the conflict between socialists and Communists at that time. After all, Thomas and Rustin were socialists; there must have been other reasons than Bosch’s socialism that caused them to oppose him.

Thomas was an acquaintance of Allen Dulles, the director of central intelligence, and could call on him when there was a financial emergency. Likewise, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a former member of the O.S.S., the predecessor to the C.I.A., personally knew senior officers of the agency and would brief them on cultural developments he was aware of. He frequently saw Frank Wisner, the manager of the Mighty Wurlitzer, “on the Georgetown dinner party circuit,” and they would commiserate about the debates New York intellectuals insisted on having over McCarthyism, which the C.I.A. found unhelpful. It was a time, as Wilford writes, “when the alliance between cold-war anti-Communism and liberal idealism still appeared natural and right.” That alliance explains much that current readers may find surprising in this book. It explains as well the outrage many writers have expressed about the C.I.A. connection over the past few decades.

There is a great deal to be learned from this book. Wilford has consulted an astonishing number of scholarly and popular accounts, along with the papers and records of some of the central participants and organizations. He’s done a remarkable job of research. If, on occasion, he doesn’t appear in full command of the story, I would trace that to his inability to see the degree to which the Communists were pariahs to the anti-Stalinist left. So, when he writes that “much of the American left had rejected the Dewey commission’s finding that Trotsky was innocent of the charges leveled against him by Stalin,” one wonders just what “left” he could possibly have in mind. I suspect it is those who were Communist-influenced or sympathetic to the Soviet Union. There aren’t many such slips, however. Wilford has mastered an enormously complex tale in almost every detail.