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WSL: The National Student Association? You cannot continue to fund them, but you could continue… FSS: You could perhaps pay the mortgage on an office. WSL: I am interested about the extent that, in the 1980s, the National Endowment for Democracy, quasi-public, fills that gap with domestic organizations. FSS: I always thought that the CIA was already in USIA. You see, there is one crucial pattern to this book. People were on the whole quite open and quite easy to talk to if I could produce, from archives or from other interviews, evidence.

FSS: That probably is. It is evident from the beginning that the appointment of Kristol probably was a misjudgement on behalf of the CIA backers because he did not have the temperament to be easily controlled. You see straight away that he is disillusioned and highly irate at the idea that Paris, the headquarters of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, is dictating the editorial line to London, and there is an exchange of fiery letters between Kristol and Josselson, the chief CIA operative working with the Congress in which Kristol says, ‘What are you up to?

There is still this huge gap in the examination and analysis of how intellectual ideas in Europe developed post-war because nobody has, apparently, gone through every issue of Der Monat, gone through the careers of the individual writers. WSL: An example of that ‘individual’ approach was a paper at the Middelburg conference by Ingeborg Philipsen on this one person who is trying to be a covert operator and set up a Danish chapter of the CCF. The cultural cold war in Western Europe 26 FSS: The danger of this kind of operation, of course is that it attracts the kind of people who want to go in for a bit of derring-do.