Part One — Halas and Batchelor's Animal Farm and the CIA.

The Cold War forced the CIA to get into the movie business. The agency optioned rights to the classic George Orwell book Animal Farm (left) and had it adapted into film (right). Book cover courtesy of Harcourt Books, cover art by Ralph Steadman; top and bottom right images © The Halas & Batchelor Collection Limited. Courtesy of the Animation Research Centre Archive.

Our country’s use of animated propaganda during WWII is fairly well known, but propaganda made after the Iron Curtain went up is rarely seen or discussed. Animation scholars have been aware of a few pieces of a strange looking puzzle, but nothing began to make much sense until Frances Stoner Saunders published The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters in 2000. (Published in England as Who Paid the Piper?) Even with the publication of her book, it wasn’t clear that animation had much of a role in an organized effort to defeat Communism as she only discusses one animated film, Halas and Batchelor’s Animal Farm. It isn’t a cute Disney product for kids, but a handsome intelligent dramatic feature for adults that includes a strong anti-Communist message.

Frances Stoner Saunders' book The Cultural Cold War exposes the extent of the CIA's involvement in the arts.

While Saunders’ book received many favorable reviews and most mentioned the CIA having a hand in the creation of Animal Farm, the information seemed trivial compared to more sensational revelations including the CIA financing the publication of several fine art books, and their using Nelson Rockefeller and the Museum of Modern Art in New York to present art exhibits of Jackson Pollock’s paintings and other abstract expressionists to counter the social realism being advanced by Moscow!

Saunders’ book is the result of six years of meticulous research using records made available to her through to the Freedom of Information Act, papers in private hands and interviews. The CIA did not cooperate with her research, but formerly classified documents were made available by the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, John F. Kennedy Library and other private and public institutions with special collections.

It may seem odd that Hollywood movies, progressive magazines, books, modern paintings, jazz, pop music and other segments of American culture could somehow be used as tools of a secret CIA anti-Communist propaganda war. Saunders explains that as early as August 18, 1945 an intelligence officer with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (the OSS was established during WWII and was the forerunner of the CIA) wrote, “Without atomic weapons the Soviets would be using unconventional ‘peaceful’ tactics to propagandize, subvert, sabotage and exert…pressures upon us, and we ourselves shall be more willing to bear these affronts and ourselves to indulge such methods — in our eagerness to avoid at all costs the tragedy of open war.”