National Committee for a Free Europe

Headed by Carmel Offie, and with Alan Dulles taking special interest, the NCFE became a powerful group all while appearing linked only to corporations, despite receiving much of its funding from the CIA. "'Proliferating committees and subcommittees, boards of directors and trustees, the national Committee for a Free Europe boasted a membership which read like Who’s Who. Interconnectedness was vital and gave new meaning to Paul Valéry’s jokey comment that it was the ambition ofEeuropeans to be governed by a committee of Americans. There was Lucius Clay, who as high commissioner in Germany had given the green light to Der Monat; Gardner Cowles, president of the Cowles publishing group and a trustee of the Farfield Foundation; Oveta Culp Hobby, a Museum of Modern Art trustee who allowed several family foundations to be used as CIA conduits; the Cold War cardinal Francis Spellman; C.D. Jackson, psychological warfare veteran and Time-Life executive; John C. Hughes, U.S. ambassador to NATO; Junkie Fleischmann; Arthur Schlesinger; Cecil B. DeMille; Spyros Skouras; Darryl Zanuck; and Dwight D. Eisenhower. There were businessmen and lawyers, diplomats and Marshall Plan administrators, advertising executives and media moguls, film directors and journalists, trade unionists and, of course, CIA agents—plenty of them.'"Radio Free Europe was founded by the committee in 1950. "'The fund-raising arm of the Free Europe Committee was the Crusade for Freedom, for which a young actor named Ronald Reagan was a leading spokesman and publicist. The Crusade for Freedom was used to launder money to support a program run by Bill Casey, the future CIA director, called the International refugee Committee in new York, which allegedly coordinated the exfiltration of Nazis from Germany to the States, where they were expected to assist the government in its struggle against Communism.'"