The ACCF and CCF were organizations that, during the
Cold War, sought to encourage intellectuals to be critical of the
Soviet Union and
Communism, and to combat, according to a writer for
The New York Times, "the continuing strength of the Soviet myth among the Western cultural elite. Despite all that had happened - the
Moscow show trials, the
Nazi-Soviet pact, the assassination of
Leon Trotsky, the Russian attack on
Finland, the takeovers in
Eastern Europe, the mounting evidence of the
gulag -
Joseph Stalin still retained the loyalty of many writers, artists and scientists who viewed the Soviet Union as a
progressive alternative to the 'reactionary,' 'war-mongering'
United States." The CCF was funded by the
CIA, as well as the ACCF (via the CIA officer James Burnham and front organizations like the
National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE). Within the American committee, ex-communist intellectuals affirmed most vehemently the need for resistance to communism:
Franz Borkenau (member of the
Communist Party of Austria until 1929),
Sidney Hook (Communist
fellow traveler in the 1920s);
Arthur Koestler (member of the
Communist Party of Germany from 1931 to 1938) and
James Burnham (member of the
Fourth International from 1934 to 1940). Koestler and Borkenau fully supported the idea of setting up a frontal opposition movement to international communism. Burnham even spoke out in favor of the manufacture of American
atomic bombs. ==Members==