ABSTRACT

There are certain men whose outsized roles in how America waged the Cold War seem to have been foreordained by their exploits in the Second World War and their pedigrees. Michael Josselson was not one of them. He was an Estonian refugee who chanced his way into American citizenship thanks to his employment as the European buyer for an American department store. He was a university dropout. He enrolled in the U.S. Army in 1943 and spent most of the Second World War interrogating prisoners. Thickset, with dark, side-parted hair and dark, almost-black eyes, his face carried an air of sadness. On the surface, Josselson fit no one’s idea of a key player in the Cold War. To this day, he is hardly well-known. Nevertheless, in December 1949, Josselson drafted a memorandum that would change his life, spawn one of the most important and controversial Central Intelligence Agency operations of the Cold War, and foster an organization that became a haven for some of the twentieth century’s most prominent intellectuals. Josselson was then 41 years old. He had just joined the Office of Policy Coordination, a clandestine offshoot of the CIA whose ambit covered all forms of covert action against the Soviet Union. From his second-floor office in West Berlin’s Tempelhof, Josselson penned a proposal to counter the Soviet Union’s extensive efforts to woo the world’s most prominent artists, writers, philosophers, and scientists by sponsoring a “Congress for cultural freedom” in Berlin. As Josselson envisioned it, the congress would feature prominent nonCommunist intellectuals, who would hopefully champion Western cultural and political ideals, denounce totalitarianism in all its forms, and signal that a critical mass of Western intellectuals adamantly opposed the Soviet system.1