Ten years ago a cultural bombshell exploded in Britain when evidence emerged from the Public Record Office in London proving that, shortly before his death in 1950, the writer George Orwell had provided a shadowy Foreign Office department with a list of “crypto-Communists” in the arts and press who were not be trusted in the Cold War propaganda conflict. “Shame!” cried many on the hard left, who accused the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four of betraying one of his key principles – independence from government – and acting like a McCarthyite or Big Brother informer. “Don't be so naive!” other commentators replied. As a democratic socialist, Orwell had every right to defend the West against the genuine threat posed by Stalinism. No one lost their lives or had their careers ruined because of his actions, they added.
Partly inspired by these arguments, historians in the late 1990s began to unearth details of Orwell's posthumous contribution to the cultural Cold War. Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, we soon learned, had been popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain, censorship notwithstanding. The British and American governments secretly had invested enormous amounts of time and money in promoting the novels' worldwide distribution, in the belief that they would serve as a graphic warning about the dangers of communist totalitarianism. Orwell became an icon during the Cold War, in other words, due at least in part to the sort of clandestine state propaganda machines he had railed against.
Since its release in 1954, rumours have circulated that the US Central Intelligence Agency was involved in the making of the controversial animated motion picture adaptation of Animal Farm. Dan Leab has built on the work of Frances Stoner Saunders and others to construct the first fully fledged book-length study of this film. It is an excellent piece of scholarship, written with verve and wit. Leab explores almost every conceivable facet of the movie: its cultural, diplomatic and political origins; its long and drawn-out production; how the movie differs from Orwell's novel in terms of its style and message; and its immediate reception and long-term impact. In doing so, Leab draws on a wide range of documentation from government, literary and filmmaking archives. His skilful use of the papers left by the now little-known Louis de Rochement, the movie's American producer, is combined with those of the British animation company he hired, Halas and Batchelor. Leab expresses anger at the CIA's unwillingness to declassify its own material on the film, but it is unlikely that this would have added anything of real significance given the extremely full account of the film that he provides us with.
Leab sets out clearly and comprehensively how the CIA financed the movie, and the lengths the agency went to in turning Orwell's novel into an anti-Soviet polemic. This included a changed ending, one that called on those living under communist rule to revolt. He thankfully resists the temptation to speculate on whether Orwell would have turned in his grave had he seen the film. More usefully, he takes issue with those putative scholars who have exploited Orwell's legacy for their own political ends, and with the sloppy, inaccurate ways in which the CIA's activities are generally written about due to the need to “expose” the agency's wrongdoings.
