Comment by thirstywhimbrel

Did anyone actually read why these magazines were "highly ranked"?

> the CIA actually thought that Levitas’s anti-Communism was too ferocious, unrelenting, and “conservative.” ... the CIA wanted a more moderate and “sophisticated” voice ... The New Leader remained progressive in the context of U.S. domestic politics; it was one of the first publications to publish Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

> Like other magazines affiliated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Mundo Nuevo published essays critical of U.S. policy in Latin America and Vietnam. Its usefulness, from the U.S. government’s point of view, consisted in its defense of the responsibility of the artist as an independent critic of power ...

I'm probably the only one in this thread, but I actually think some of these cases fall short of crimes against humanity.

I mean, of all the dirty secret squirrel things governments do, if I had to pick, then (1) funding the early publication of 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail' and (2) encouraging artists to challenge entrenched power (to include US policy) would be pretty high on my list.