Before completing this article Vivien Halas read it again and responded with a very insightful comment that places the film in a historical perspective. She wrote, “My own feeling about Animal Farm is that the influence was possibly as much commercial as political. That it was normal for the USA government to try to promote their point of view through ‘culture/art’ and not as bad as some of the more blatant political interference that has gone on (is still going on). That they mostly put funds in the way of artists who would have done what they did anyway. That this is what has happened throughout history when monarchs, popes or other powerful institutions have patronized artists, composers, etc. This practice is good or bad depending which side you are on. No doubt there has always been bad behavior by people who want power/money/or are just plain megalomaniacs or zealots. Sometimes good things have come about as side effects. Recorded history is rarely accurate and even first hand accounts are not necessarily truthful as memory is notoriously unreliable.”

On a few occasions the CIA’s failures have been disclosed to us by the news media, but their successes are almost never made public. No matter how you feel about their meddling with feature films, it appears their involvement in the making of Animal Farm was a successful covert operation and it was kept a secret from the public for almost 50 years.

Other Declassified Government Propaganda Projects
On March 17, 1998 the United Kingdom’s Public Record Office declassified documents revealing the British government funded a newspaper comic strip in the early 1950s based on Orwell’s Animal Farm. It ran in several countries including Brazil, Burma, Eritrea, India, Mexico, Thailand and Venezuela. There was also a strip produced by the studio that was drawn by Harold Whitaker to promote the release of the film in England. Vivien writes, “This was not propaganda, but promotion (assuming that there is a difference between political and commercial manipulation).”

The CIA also had a hand in the adaptation of Orwell's book 1984 into film in the mid-1950s.

Thanks to Saunders’ research we now know that Orwell’s 1984 was made into a live-action feature with funds from the CIA. Work on the British production began in 1954. Like the animated Animal Farm the ending was changed.

Saunders discusses the CIA influencing the content of other live-action projects, and says Carleton Alsop wrote regular movie reports from Hollywood to the CIA that detailed how specific pro-American propaganda themes were introduced into features. For example, he mentioned how well- dressed blacks were included in country club crowd scenes in The Caddy, a Jerry Lewis comedy from 1953. The scenes were to impress people who had been told by the Soviet propaganda ministry that we were a racist, segregated nation. Saunders notes that these images were “extremely optimistic.” In 1953 many blacks couldn’t vote, and many schools and most country clubs were segregated.

Howard Beckerman recalls that, “In 1962 I did animation for a largely live-action, stock footage, CBS production called The Road to the Wall. It was narrated by James Cagney and related to the history of Communism and how it led to the then new Berlin wall…I naively enjoyed working on the film because of the historical research we had to do, but the director, Al Kouzel, who was more attuned to these things and unhappy with the assignment, helped me understand that we were working on a very biased presentation…It was a film made for propaganda that was passed off as a straight documentary.”

When The Road to the Wall was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary short, CBS shared credit as co-producer with the Department of Defense. Apparently the press and public didn’t look into the government’s role in the production. I recall Bert B. Cohen (my father, a high school world history teacher) was upset that the film contained serious historical mistakes, but I doubt he and others who spotted them realized they were deliberate. Beckerman says, “It was revealed about ten years later, in an exposés, how government agencies were creating such films as blatant anti-Russian or anti-Communist propaganda.”