It all began in a bar in Oxford, Mississippi, for the 40th anniversary celebration of The Paris Review, the day before we were all to go to a restaurant in Paris, Mississippi for a fish fry and fireworks. At the table in the bar were George Plimpton, Willie Morris, William Styron, George’s second wife, Sarah, James Linville, then the managing editor of The Paris Review, and me. I was a friend of George Plimpton and know Peter Matthiessen very well. George had invited me to join everyone. Linville told me how much he appreciated The Pied Piper, my biography of Allard Lowenstein, particularly the part about Lowenstein’s work for the CIA. ‘You know that The Paris Review was Peter Matthiessen’s cover,’ he said. ‘He is haunted by the CIA.’ I know for a fact that the New York Times had outed Matthiessen in an article published 25 December 1977 by John M. Crewdson and Joseph B. Treaster. (1) George heard every word but didn’t say anything. (The Times article said that Matth-iessen, who wrote the novel The Partisans while in Paris, used his writing career as a cover for his CIA work.)
A few years later at a dinner party in East Hampton at the home of Gaby Lieber Rodgers (ex-wife of rock and roll hall of famer Jerry Lieber), Patsy Southgate, Peter Matthiessen’s ex-wife, told me that she married Peter out of Smith College and he, just out of Yale. He was recruited to the CIA just before graduation, and the two of them went through CIA orientation together. His mission was to set up a literary magazine as his cover, but found it too difficult to do. Instead, he took over The Paris Review, founded by Harold Humes, and transformed it to suit his purpose. The original name was The Paris Literary Review, or something like that. Matthiessen got rid of Humes and brought in George Plimpton from King’s College, Cambridge to be the editor. Plimpton always said he served without salary. Patsy told me she gave Peter an ultimatum ‘You leave the CIA or I leave you.’ He didn’t and she did. She is no longer alive.
Sometime after that, at a cocktail party in Sag Harbor at the home of Martin Shepard, the publisher of Permanent Press, the novelist and playwright John Sherry, who was probably Peter Matthiessen’s closest friend, approached me and asked to speak to me alone. We sat in a secluded corner. He said that Matthiessen had just told him that Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, who had served as publisher of The Paris Review and who was always said to be its benefactor (I was at a party at Plimpton’s apartment, when Plimpton described him as just that) never put up a penny and that all the money came from CIA, which used his foundation as a conduit. Sherry said Peter was ‘full of remorse’. John Train, who had once been the managing editor of The Paris Review, was Sadruddin Aga Khan’s roommate at Harvard. After Sadruddin Aga Khan served as High Commissioner for Refugees at the United Nations, he became co-ordinator of the U.N. Humanitarian and Economic Assistance Programs relating to Afghanistan, working closely with Train, in what was code named Operation Salam. The money from the CIA and from Saudi Arabia for refugee relief went to such organizations as the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) and the Islamic Relief Organization.(2)The refugee camps set up through the auspices of Sadruddin Aga Khan and John Train were the training grounds for the mujahadeen, armed and trained there to throw the Soviets out of Afghanistan. One of the people arming and training the Afghan fighters was Osama bin Laden.
While Plimpton served as editor of The Paris Review, he was an agent of influence for the CIA, according to a former ambassador who served on the National Security Council. That is, he was not an intelligence officer as Matthiessen was, but one of the many journalists who were paid sub rosa to penetrate the media to influence policy. By deciding who would and who would not be published by The Paris Review, he had power in the culture and the ability, through the interviews of writers he published, to influence public opinion. The former ambassador said that Plimpton was ‘very close to the Congress of Cultural Freedom and very involved with their activities’.
This was all part of Eisenhower’s scheme to ‘privatize’ propaganda. The Congress of Cultural Freedom, one of whose original members was Tennessee Williams, played an important role in all of this.
Notes
1 It’s cited by Frances Stonor Saunders in Who Paid the Piper-The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, (London: Granta 1999)
2 Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003) p. 58.