THE GROOVE ISSUE 5 - HOW THE CIA SECRETLY INFLUENCED ART AND CULTURE AND OTHER HIGHLY CREATIVE SPY TALES
Welcome to the fifth issue of The Groove.
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Love,
Maria
HOW THE CIA SECRETLY INFLUENCED ART AND CULTURE AND OTHER HIGHLY CREATIVE SPY TALES
Andrew Wyeth, Cristina’s World, 1948. Tempera on panel. This was one of the paintings exhibited in Modern Art in the United States, a large traveling exhibition secretly financed by the CIA in 1955-1956.
We are being watched. That’s a fact. Not only by our government, but by those of other countries too. And by all the tech companies that handle all our data and know every one of our moves. And there’s industrial and corporate espionage too. And cyberspying. In short: forget about your constitutional right of privacy (granted in the First, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment).
Everyone is paranoid about fake news, stolen identities, security breaches, data leaks, apps that suck your soul, viruses created in labs, Siri and Alexa recording your every move, and Google knowing everything about you all the time, everywhere. Not surprisingly, nobody trusts anyone or anything. Espionage, intelligence assessment, counterintelligence, and conspiracy theories have existed since ancient times, but they have been our daily bread for the past four years.
Spies are such interesting characters and espionage and surveillance are activities ripe with creativity in real life, fiction, and all forms of art. Think about it: the perils, the excitement of a double life, the code words, the missions, the adrenaline hits. At the end of the day, it all boils down to humans who invent strategies or machines to follow us, deceive us, get information from us, or trick us into what’s not.
Margaretha Gertruida Macleod was a Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan better known by her stage name of Mata Hari. She was executed by the firing squad in France in 1917 at the age of 41, after being convicted of spying for Germany during World War I. The archetype of the femme fatale, who seduces men to extract information, started with Mata Hari and generated thousands of lucrative artistic representations, including a 1931 MGM eponymous movie starring Greta Garbo, five stage musicals, an opera, and a two-act ballet. And that’s not counting all the “inspired by” characters that don’t necessarily reveal Mata Hari as the original source. You know the story of a spy has never-ending angles of creativity and continuously fascinates people when even new agey-pop author Paulo Coelho, who has sold more than 250 millions books worldwide, released The Spy: A Novel of Mata Hari in 2017, one hundred years after her death.
The brilliant Ian Fleming created the most famous spy of all time in 1953 when he wrote Casino Royale and breathed life into James Bond. Fleming wanted his Secret Service Agent to have the plainest name, because all the things that happened around him and to him were so outlandish, there was no need to give his agent a flamboyant moniker. Fleming featured Bond in 12 novels and two short story collections. From 1962, when the story was first adapted into film with Dr No, starring Sean Connery, until today - the James Bond films are the longest continually running movie series of all time (with 27 of them to be precise), and have grossed over $7 billion. But the whole James Bond franchise doesn’t stop there: there are TV series, video games, board games, clothing, coffee table books, housewares, sunglasses, toys, and 007 Elements: an immersive experience/museum atop the Austrian Alps, all of which adds a couple more billions in revenue to the brand. I’m not joking when I say that creativity around spies multiplies and so does the money.
Mata Hari in 1906
People love stories about undercover agents and there’s no one better to tell these stories than those who have been closest to the source. Like John le Carré, who actually worked for the British Security Service (MI5) and for the Secret Intelligence Agency (MI6), and left his job at the latter when his third novel, The Spy Who Came From the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller. Other books like The Looking Glass War (1965) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) also explored stories of espionage and followed similar successful paths. The author has written 26 novels, four non-fiction books, four screenplays, and has also sold the rights to his books for ten film adaptations and another seven for TV series. Le Carré, who is 88, is estimated to have a net worth of $100 million, and it all started with a spy.
Can you think of more lucrative characters than spies? Besides Bond, there’s Mission Impossible, The Saint, Johnny English, Austin Powers, Kingsman, Charlie’s Angels and The Bourne series….and those are just the ones I can think off the top of my head. Add to that at least 150 different TV and streaming series around secret agents, undercovers and informants, plus thousands of books as well.
But spies also use art and culture to infiltrate people’s minds in real life. In 1995, Donald Jameson, a former CIA agent, publicly confirmed the rumor: policy “long leash” was created by the agency to promote American art and culture in all of its expressions against anything that meant rigidity or lack of creativity, especially communism. Abstract Expressionism, a fresh and incipient American art movement, was secretly funded by the CIA to show the world how creative and cultured the US was vis-a-vis its favorite frenemy, the Soviet Union. Those ambitious group exhibitions showing exuberant paintings by Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell, among many other artists, traveled to the best museums in in eight different European cities including the Tate Modern in London and the Reina Sofia in Madrid, paid for by American taxpayers. The most successful of those shows was The New American Painting and toured for almost two years, culminating with a big fanfare at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1959.
Other influential CIA-financed exhibitions included Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century a festival held in Paris in 1952 that hosted exhibitions and talks on art and literature and Modern Art in the United States which featured a large body of work – 113 framed paintings, 21 sculptures and over 90 prints from the collection of MoMA which traveled to London, The Hague, Barcelona and Zurich between 1955 and 1956. Literary journals like Encounter and The Paris Review were also funded, organized, and curated by the CIA, with many secret agents holding top editorial and business positions in them.
It is also believed that the 1990 song Wind of Change, by the German rock band Scorpions, was commissioned by the CIA to support the fall of the Berlin Wall and to highlight the perils of communism, particularly of the Soviet Union. There’s even a podcast by The New Yorker journalist Patrick Radden Keefe that explores how this specific song was concocted by the CIA and how America disseminates its propaganda through music around the world.
Jackson Pollock, The She-Wolf, 1943. Oil, gouache, and plaster on canvas. This was one of the paintings exhibited internationally in shows financed by the CIA in the 1950s
In 1979, a mob of Iranian supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini took over the United States Embassy in Teheran, holding the 52 Americans inside hostage for 14 months. Six people managed to escape and were hiding in several places, including the Canadian Embassy. President Jimmy Carter and the CIA sat down to discuss a creative solution to bring the six State Department employees back home. The CIA presented a plan: a visual artist called Tony Mendez, turned spy, would disguise himself as an Irish filmmaker and other agents would go alongside him pretending to be the crew of a Canadian film company. The sci-fi movie they were supposed to film was called Argo.
Amazingly, the Argo crew commanded by Mendez and formed exclusively by CIA agents entered Iran without problems and they were able to rescue the six Americans that had fled the American Embassy, flying out of Iran in a Swissair flight. Operation Argo was kept secret for decades until 2012 when Ben Affleck adapted the story into a feature film whose box office hit $232 million and won three Oscars: Best Motion Picture, Adapted Screenplay and Film Editing. Finally Argo was made into a movie, just not a sci-fi one. If this isn’t creativity coming full circle, then I don’t know what it is.
Artists who are exceptionally good researchers can also make good spies and unmask hidden truths for us. Julia Scher is a respected American artist, who after graduating from art school and having several side jobs, decided to open her own security-equipment company called “Safe and Secure Productions” in the 1980s. For many years in parallel to her art practice she installed house alarms, security systems, and locks in women’s houses. Since the early 1990s, Scher was posing prescient questions in the intersection of technology, AI, privacy, surveillance, and social control in public spaces. She has created several performances, videos, and installations that revolve around those topics and which continue to be relevant now, even though 30 years have passed since she started making them.
Julia Scher, Surveillance Bed III, 1994. Installation at Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin
The American photographer Taryn Simon chooses projects where she becomes both undercover detective and narrator. In her series The Innocents (2012), she investigated mistakes made by the judiciary that sent people to jail charged with crimes they didn’t commit. She documents them in her photographs and gives us the straight facts. So does Jill Magid, a brilliant conceptual artist who has infiltrated police departments in several countries, like when she was commissioned by the Dutch Secret Service to “help improve its public persona”, interviewing eighteen of their employees and later making an art piece with all of the information she got there. Unfortunately, the work was censored by the Secret Service’s commissioner, and even a separate handwritten report that she had also created was confiscated.
Why are people so fascinated with spies? I believe that as long as there are secrets and duplicity, people will be intrigued and crave the truth behind the lies. Given the way we are being spied upon by governments and corporations, the obsession with this theme isn’t going anywhere. Although with the current state of our politics and lack of corporate controls on data handling, it’s most likely that any positive outcomes will only be provided in fictional settings, unfortunately.
Are there creative solutions fostered by the private sector that can be implemented to curb espionage? What else could artists do to bring more education and empowerment to society in regards to surveillance and data usage? When is the act of spying ethical?
More on these topics to come next week.