Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World's Best Writers

democracy a little closer to the Soviet model of the surveillance state.. Defenders of the "cultural" CIA argue that it should have been lauded for boosting interest in the arts and freedom of thought, but the two CIAs had the same undercover goals, and shared many of the same methods: deception, subterfuge and intimidation.Finks demonstrates how the good-versus-bad CIA is a false divide, and that the cultural Cold Warriors again and again used anti-Communism as a lever to spy relentlessly on leftists, a

Praise for Finks "Another odd episode steps out from the Cold War's shadows. Finks is a timely moral reckoning." David Talbot, founder of Salon and author of The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America's Secret Government "An illuminating read and a cautionary tale about the potential costspolitical and artisticof accommodating power."Ben Wizner, ACLU Director of Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. Riveting." Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Listen to this book, because it talks in a very clear way about what has been silenced." John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing and winner of the Man Booker Prize "With Finks, Joel Whitney vividly brings to life the early days of the Cold War, when key American literary figures were willing to secretly do the bidding of the nation'

JOEL WHITNEY's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Baffler, New York Magazine, and The Sun, among others. His essays have twice been designated as Notable in Best American Essays, and he received a 2017 PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing for his work on Guernica, which he co-founded. For his poetry, which has appeared in The Paris Review, The Nation