UK intelligence secretly funded leftist magazine, then covered it up
Encounter was an intellectual and cultural magazine set up during the Cold War with secret funds from the US and British intelligence agencies.
The magazine’s purpose was to cultivate a compatible, non-communist left, while creating content that was generally supportive of Washington’s geopolitical interests.
Encounter’s intelligence links eventually became publicly known. In 1963, however, a British journalist almost blew the lid off its secret sources of funding.
In 1951, a group of US and British intelligence officials met secretly in Whitehall to discuss plans for an “Anglo-American left-of-centre publication”.
Amid the intensification of the Cold War, the CIA and MI6 wanted to nudge the Western intelligentsia away from neutralism and towards anti-communism.
The responsibility for devising the “operations and procedures” of the publication was handed to Monty Woodhouse, an MI6 officer who also worked with Britain’s secret Cold War propaganda unit, the Information Research Department (IRD).
