"What Really Happened with the CIA and The Paris Review?"

[j e l]

[you may recall that TRP blurbed Matthiessen's FAR TORTUGA.]

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/11/11/what-really-happened-with-the-cia-and-the-paris-review-a-conversation-with-lance-richardson/

What Really Happened with the CIA and The Paris Review?: A Conversation
with Lance Richardson

By Dan Piepenbring
November 11, 2025

When Peter Matthiessen’s name comes up in conjunction with The Paris
Review, two facts are sure to emerge. The first is that Matthiessen was one
of the magazine’s founders, and that his enchantingly shabby Paris
apartment provided a bumptious gathering place in its earliest days. The
second is that he was, at the time, an undercover CIA operative, and that
the creation of the magazine was somehow wrapped up in his spycraft. The
New York Times revealed Matthiessen’s CIA affiliation in a bombshell 1977
story with the headline “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A,”
which examined dozens of publications and cultural organizations that had
been secretly “owned, subsidized or influenced in some way by the C.I.A.
over the past three decades.” Matthiessen’s connection rated only three
brief sentences buried at the center of what he called a “long gray
article”; the reporter, John Crewdson, noted that there was no evidence the
CIA had used the writer “to influence the Paris Review.” Even so,
Matthiessen spent the rest of his life facing questions about his role. He
had left the agency in 1953, after about two years, but he never divulged
the details of his work for the organization, which remain unclear even
now, eleven years after his death.

Some have speculated that the Review itself received CIA support as part of
the agency’s broader effort to prop up pro-Western art and literature. At
the peak of its influence, in the fifties and sixties, the CIA fronted
money to support a broad array of cultural production, from the seemingly
innocuous to the expressly anti-communist. Among many other ventures, it
had its hand in abstract-expressionist painting, jazz, Radio Free Asia,
literary magazines, academic books on Finland and East Germany, a Roman
newspaper, and an animated film adaptation of Animal Farm. While some
artists were aware of the source of their funding, many were not. Given
that The Paris Review portrayed itself as studiously apolitical—recall
William Styron’s famous anti-manifesto in the first issue, fashioning it as
a home for “the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders”—Matthiessen’s CIA
involvement has raised questions and eyebrows since its revelation in the
seventies.

Lance Richardson’s True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen is the
first biography of the writer. Matthiessen, born in New York in 1927, was
the author of ten novels, two collections of stories, and nearly two dozen
works of nonfiction; he is the only writer to have won the National Book
Award for both fiction (for Shadow Country, in 2008) and nonfiction (for
The Snow Leopard, in 1980). A keen observer of the natural world, he
traveled widely in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean in search of
remote places where one could find a “glimpse of the earth’s morning,” as
he described it. True Nature offers a deft assessment of his work and a
capacious telling of the forces that shaped his interest in everything from
Zen Buddhism to environmentalism to cryptozoology to labor rights.
Richardson conducted hundreds of interviews over seven and a half years,
and his archival research yielded, among many other insights, a clearer
picture of The Paris Review’s first years, when Matthiessen was doing
double duty as a fiction editor and a secret agent. I spoke to Richardson
by phone to ask what he’d discovered about Matthiessen’s years in Paris.


INTERVIEWER

What do we know about why Peter Matthiessen decided to join the CIA—the
decision that led, eventually, to the founding of The Paris Review?

LANCE RICHARDSON

Before he died, in anticipation of a possible memoir, Matthiessen wrote out
a series of narratives about what he’d been doing in Paris. The title of
one of them is “THE PARIS REVIEW V. THE CIA: My Half-life as a Capitalist
Running Dog.” They were incomplete, and I had to be careful about assuming
everything was one hundred percent accurate—not because Peter was
necessarily trying to leave a trail of lies or anything, but because he was
writing this decades after it happened, and he had his own agenda. In terms
of other materials, the CIA wouldn’t give me anything. I filed FOIA
requests. I talked to their entertainment liaison, who works with
Hollywood. But they don’t declassify personnel records.

As Matthiessen tells it, he had finished Yale in 1950 and wanted to be a
writer, but how do you just become a writer? His English professor Norman
Holmes Pearson tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he wanted to do
something for his country. This was happening quite a lot at Yale at the
time. One of Matthiessen’s contemporaries estimated that two dozen of their
classmates were recruited for the CIA through various professors. The
agency called them the “P source,” for “professor.” Matthiessen wrote that
Pearson opened him “like an oyster.” Not because he was ideologically
driven—his politics at that point were unformed and chaotic—but because he
wanted a stipend and an excuse to go to Paris, which was a city that he and
his first wife, Patsy Southgate, really loved. The CIA then was
reputationally much more benign, at least domestically. It hadn’t yet
become known by most Americans for its involvement in coups and things like
that.

INTERVIEWER

They were active in Korea, Guatemala, and Iran in those years, arranging
paramilitary operations and working, in the last case, to bring the shah
back to power, though as you say none of that had come to light. At this
point, then, they were into election interference and some psyops, but no
exploding cigars and mind-control experiments yet?

RICHARDSON

Right. They sent Matthiessen first to D.C. to meet with James Angleton, a
now-famous spymaster who at that time headed up the agency’s Office of
Special Operations, which handled foreign intelligence,
counterintelligence, and espionage. Then Matthiessen went to spycraft
training in New York, which he called “great fun,” and he got on a boat to
Paris in 1951. He stumbled into this world of espionage as an excuse to
write a novel and be in a city that he associated with freedom.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think Matthiessen’s time in the navy, during the final stages of
World War II, may have motivated him to join the CIA?

RICHARDSON

Absolutely. He was at the Hotchkiss School during the war, in high school,
and he would watch a lot of the young men slightly older than him go off to
fight. He saw it as a rite of passage, a badge of honor. By the time it was
his turn, when he was doing basic training in Sampson, New York, V-J Day
happened. So he missed out. His letters to his girlfriends at the time are
really conflicted. He was happy the war was over, but he also felt that
he’d been denied something. Eventually, toward the end of 1945, he got sent
off anyway, to Hawaii. His job was to do the laundry of the real soldiers
who were being demobilized and sent home. He felt incredibly emasculated by
this. There’s one point in his notes for his memoir when he says, and I’m
paraphrasing here, that he saw joining the CIA as another opportunity to
make up for something he had been denied during the war.

INTERVIEWER

His apartment in Paris, at 14, rue Perceval, was integral to the romance of
the early days of The Paris Review—a kind of midcentury bohemian,
glass-walled paradise where they threw all these parties. It was heated
with lumps of coal dust, and there was a huge painting of a cat’s head on
the wall. What was his life like in Paris?

RICHARDSON

In an article Gay Talese wrote for Esquire in 1963 about those early days
of the magazine, he called the apartment “a monstrous fishbowl.” But those
parties, and that bohemian lifestyle, were just one aspect of Matthiessen’s
life. He would take the metro to meet his CIA handler in the Jeu de Paume,
and they would stroll from the museum to the gardens near the Louvre and
discuss his assignments. What he was actually working on for the CIA is
still opaque. Matthiessen described it later as “deceiving people” and
“serial lying.” Until the CIA releases its files, it’s always going to be a
bit shadowy. I assume he was spying on other expat Americans, his friends.
That’s probably why he was always cagey about it—the shame he felt about
doing that.

INTERVIEWER

Matthiessen wrote about cultivating a source he dubbed “Monsieur X,” whom
he called “a near fanatic” and “a veteran Communist agitator.” But there
was speculation that he could’ve been spying on the novelist Richard Wright
as well, right?

RICHARDSON

I would not have been surprised if he was reporting on Wright. Wright was
being watched at the time by the CIA. And then Matthiessen turns up in
Paris around the same time, and they have an overlapping social circle. It
seems unlikely to me that he wouldn’t have reported back about Wright.

INTERVIEWER

What led him from spying to starting a magazine?

RICHARDSON

The problem with Matthiessen’s cover soon became clear—the labor of a
writer is pretty invisible to the outside world. It looks like we’re just
sitting inside and not doing anything at all. Matthiessen’s handler told
him he needed a visible profession. And one day in one of the cafés he runs
into Harold “Doc” Humes, another American who was running a magazine called
the Paris News Post, which he had acquired for six hundred bucks, because
that was the trend among expats in postwar Paris. Everyone had a little
magazine going in that time—there was Merlin, Points, Zero.

Humes was a real character, a bit of a loose cannon. He was wearing a cape
when Matthiessen saw him at the café that day. He brought on Matthiessen as
his fiction editor. But Matthiessen saw the Paris News Post as a
lightweight endeavor. He suggested one day to Doc that they flick it off
and make something better. Doc jumped at the idea—or, if you take his word
for it, it was really his idea, and he planted it in Matthiessen’s head.
Peter didn’t want to be the top editor, so he phoned up his friend George
Plimpton, whom he’d known since they were children on the Upper East Side.
Plimpton was in Cambridge, England, at the time, about to graduate, not
sure what he was going to do with his life. And he seized the opportunity
to come over to Paris and start editing this new magazine, with Matthiessen
still on as the fiction editor.

INTERVIEWER

So, in a funny way, it was really the fact that writing is far too
solitudinous an activity that gave us The Paris Review. Along with the CIA,
of course. Matthiessen was intimately involved with choosing work for the
first issues—he really did two jobs at once. I mean, it wasn’t like he was
phoning it in at the magazine. But did the CIA ever give The Paris Review
money?

RICHARDSON

The question of whether the CIA ever directly funded The Paris Review is an
incredibly complicated one. The editors were all raising money to run the
magazine, canvassing all their parents’ friends. Julius Fleischmann, of the
instant-yeast family, was one of Matthiessen’s father’s friends. He and
Matty Matthiessen would drink highballs on boats down in the Caribbean
together. Fleischmann was a well-known philanthropist and arts patron, but
it came out later that he was also a frontman for the CIA. So it’s hard to
say, when he gave money to the Review, if it was his own money or if he was
funneling it to the magazine through the Farfield Foundation, which the
agency used to fund pro-Western propaganda.

INTERVIEWER

You write about “arguably the most contentious document in the Paris Review
archive,” a letter from Matthiessen soliciting funding from Fleischmann.
His donation was comparatively small—a thousand dollars.

RICHARDSON

That was still quite a lot of money, but not compared to the check that the
Farfield Foundation sent to a more political London literary magazine
called Encounter in the same year, 1953, for forty thousand dollars. A few
years later, there’s a letter in the archive in which Plimpton gets his
secretary to go back to Fleischmann for more money, and Fleischmann’s
secretary says, Sorry, we can’t help you. So if the magazine really was of
interest to the CIA as an ideological tool, why would they give a small
donation and then decline any further donations later? I think they were
interested in the magazine purely as a cover for Matthiessen, and once
Matthiessen quit his spying job, in 1953, they no longer needed it. He was
working as the fiction editor by then, and brought in stories like Sue
Kaufman’s “Tea at Le Gord,” which Plimpton especially liked, and which
appeared in the third issue. It’s about an American student negotiating the
price of a homestay with a French woman.

INTERVIEWER

You could argue that, ideologically, the magazine’s founders toed the CIA
line unintentionally. In the biography, you have this amazing quote from an
interview Patsy Southgate gave to Talese in 1963—“They’re a bunch of
reactionaries; their idea of a radical step is to eliminate the comma.” Did
your research change your thinking about the politics of the magazine in
those early days?

RICHARDSON

Talese is meticulous with his archives. In his basement on the Upper East
Side there’s a box of files of interviews with all the original Review
people, and he very graciously allowed me to see them. Southgate, by the
time he spoke with her, was Matthiessen’s ex-wife, and she was quite bitter
about their relationship and her time in Paris. She gave an interview where
she’s strafing all the founders of the magazine, saying that they were
trying on these bohemian masks because they were “very insecure about their
maleness,” as a way of making up for not doing anything in the war—that it
was very macho, and she was relegated to the kitchen. Her version of the
story hadn’t really been told—and provides more of a feminist take on the
early years of The Paris Review. A lot of the existing accounts of The
Paris Review’s founding had involved a lot of mythmaking. They were more
like Plimpton burnishing the legend of the magazine, the expat community,
the parties, and the scrappiness of the staff—a legend that started
somewhat unintentionally with Talese’s article in Esquire,which is actually
fairly caustic about the privilege and entitlement of these young men.
Talese did not come from that world. His father was a tailor—he always
likes to tell that story—so he was skeptical of the whole thing. But
because that article is so evocative of an era, he helped create the legend
of The Paris Review, and then Plimpton ran with it, because that’s who he
was.

INTERVIEWER

How do you think the revelations about Matthiessen’s intelligence work
affected his relationship with Plimpton and the magazine? You note that his
editorial correspondence with the Review mostly stopped sometime around the
summer of 1955, and that once he moved back to New York he felt
increasingly detached from the day-to-day operations. He would mail his
story selections to Plimpton in Paris, whom he felt was “needlessly
abrasive” in his responses to writers. They had a fight about this sometime
in the late fifties or in 1960, at the latest, and Matthiessen resigned as
fiction editor, though he remained on the magazine’s board as a founder.
But it’s not until later that he decides to come clean about his CIA
involvement. He told Plimpton in 1964 or ’65, and I don’t think there’s a
record of how that went. But Humes, whom he told in ’66, had recently taken
a heroic dose of LSD and had a breakdown—

RICHARDSON

Doc was in London having a mental health crisis, and Peter was like, Now is
the right time to tell you that all of your paranoid fantasies are actually
based in reality. His timing was a little questionable. Humes threatened to
resign from the magazine afterward, and Plimpton had to talk him down—which
meant Plimpton was now upset at Peter, too, for rocking the boat. Plimpton
was shocked and outraged, too. Their friendship was already tinged with
ambivalence. Plimpton looked at what Matthiessen was doing, and wanted to
be a writer himself, but became better known as an editor. Matthiessen
looked at Plimpton and, I think, saw him as a bit of dilettante. There was
some animosity. I’m speculating here, but I imagine Plimpton resented that
Matthiessen’s CIA affiliation gave a taint to his life’s project. There was
a bit of grit in the shell even decades later. In 1988, Matthiessen
submitted a short story to the magazine about a CIA agent, and Plimpton
supposedly threw it across the room because he thought it was rubbish.
Matthiessen got very mad about that. The story, “Lumumba Lives,” which was
published in Wigwag, went on to become a runner-up for the O. Henry Award.
But that reaction is telling—these were grown men throwing each other’s
papers across the room.

INTERVIEWER

Maybe there’s also a difference in the ways they wore their WASP
backgrounds. Both men came from rich, patrician families, eager to keep up
appearances, worried about how things looked on the outside. I think of
Plimpton with his table at Elaine’s, ever the bon vivant. Meanwhile,
Matthiessen wrote of his urge to “simplify” himself. He craved acceptance
from men with blue-collar backgrounds, and he took pains to expunge himself
from the Social Register, literally. His interests in Zen and LSD, his
ceaseless wandering—was he always, in a sense, running away from his past?

RICHARDSON

Matthiessen felt he had to atone for all the advantages he’d enjoyed coming
from this powerful family. Around 1968, he got involved with social justice
movements, with Cesar Chavez and then later with the American Indian
Movement. He wrote a two-part New Yorker profile of Chavez, which he then
expanded into a book. And then In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, his chronicle
of the shoot-out at Pine Ridge in 1975, where two FBI agents and a Native
man died, was the most controversial thing he ever wrote. He was subjected
to a lawsuit from the governor of South Dakota and another from an active
FBI agent. His third wife, Maria, said to me at one point that he felt like
he had to make up for not only his own privilege, but to atone for all the
dreadful things America had done. He took this enormous burden on his
shoulders, and he put it on the shoulders of his children as well. It was
part of the problem of his home life—his own neurosis about where he’d come
from, which he then foisted onto his children.

INTERVIEWER

You write that his family “were often made to feel like rocks in his
rucksack that he was desperate to offload.” Given that sense of conflict,
and his later political leanings more generally, why do you think he could
never fully admit what he’d done for the CIA?

RICHARDSON

He never legally had clearance to talk about it publicly. It wasn’t
declassified. So on one level, he would say he wasn’t allowed to. On
another level—and probably a more significant one—I think part of his
evasiveness was just because there was shame involved for him. When he did
get involved with Chavez’s United Farm Workers, and also the American
Indian Movement, these were groups that had already been infiltrated by
government agents. If Matthiessen were exposed as actually having been one
of those government agents, he would lose all credibility with these
people, and everything he’d done to further their cause would be thrown out
the window. There’s an amazing letter that he wrote to Leonard Peltier in
2008, after the Times had run a piece about Doc Humes that mentioned the
CIA link. And Matthiessen says that he’s ashamed of his former association,
but that it had been over for more than half a century, and it never had
anything to do with his commitment to Peltier’s cause. Leonard writes back
and says, I’ve known about this for decades—it doesn’t matter at all.

INTERVIEWER

I notice that Matthiessen had a fondness for the word primordial—that he
was attracted to an idea of prehistory, and that he sought out landscapes
that still evoked the world as it was before humankind put it under the
plow. What do you think was driving his wandering from place to place, and
his interest in remoteness especially?

RICHARDSON

Matthiessen had this idea of what he called “the island.” He was always
looking for a lost paradise, and in the late sixties he considered writing
a book called “The Search for an Island.” His editor wrote in a memo that
Matthiessen’s “most deep-felt interest is in finding a place isolated from
the world.” Sometimes it was a physical place—he typed up a note once about
having a “bay for crabs and oysters” and a house “close-chinked against the
wind, with its pine fire and fat pile of drying wood”—but sometimes it was
more of an abstraction. In either case it was a place where you could exist
without all the encrustations of ego and the expectations that inevitably
emerge as you become older. You’re in a childlike state. You can think of
it as an Eden before the fall, a prelapsarian place where you can be your
pure self without having to worry about, I don’t know, paying taxes and all
the responsibilities we have as members of society.

He yearned for the island, and he found it in his life, in fleeting
glimpses. The most important one he found was Shey Gompa, the “Crystal
Monastery,” in Nepal. The weeks that he spent there were some of the
happiest in his life, following the wolves or the blue sheep, meditating,
just existing. I wanted to go there and physically be in that space. Even
though I was only there briefly because I was ill, I got it. It’s an
extraordinary place, so high that you feel like you’re at the edge of the
atmosphere. I felt for a moment what it was he’d been searching for.

INTERVIEWER

What drew you to Matthiessen as a subject?

RICHARDSON

I read his book The Snow Leopard about fifteen years ago. It came out in
1978, and covers the two months he spent in the Himalayas, when he was
mourning the death of his second wife and hoping to glimpse this
legendarily elusive animal of the mountains. I couldn’t initially explain
why this book struck me so forcefully. It was something about his
sensibility. Matthiessen took science and spirituality—these two modes of
thinking that we often treat as incompatible—and wrote in both registers
simultaneously. I was really interested in how this allowed him to see the
world. He had this unique capacity to glimpse these two separate traditions
at once.

INTERVIEWER

And that led you to a kind of method biography in which you followed in his
footsteps, taking a trip to the Himalayas like the one in The Snow Leopard.
How did that trip—which you describe as somewhat disastrous—inform your
biography?

RICHARDSON

Initially the idea of the trip to the Himalayas was just what I put in the
book proposal, because I wanted to have an adventure. I wasn’t even
planning on doing a biography. I was going to write a book about the
landscape and animals Peter had written about. I was going to revisit them
and see how they had changed. In the process of doing the research, it
became clear that his life was so far-flung, that he had never settled, and
that he had seen so much of the twentieth century from these unexpected
angles. It was impossible to categorize his work, which was much more
idiosyncratic than was sometimes believed—he wrote one novel, Far Tortuga,
entirely in Caribbean dialect—and he never succeeded in figuring himself
out. So I backed into the biography. But I had been like, Yeah, sure, I’ll
go walk across the Himalayas. How hard can it be? I had no idea what I was
getting myself into. I got very ill at that altitude. A doctor, when I got
back, told me I had the symptoms of pulmonary edema. But it was worth it.
I’d do it all again.

INTERVIEWER

Matthiessen wrote so well about the natural world and the environment, and
yet he resented being pigeonholed as a nature writer. Why do you think he
didn’t like that term?

RICHARDSON

He thought it was passive and soft. He was more interested in something
aggressive or active that was connected to his desire to create change. He
preferred the term “environmental writer”—he didn’t see a difference
between being an environmental writer and being an environmental activist.
But he resisted that, too, because in his mind, he was a novelist. He had a
hierarchy of forms of writing, and at the very top was the novelist. When
it came to nonfiction, he saw that as a lower tier, as a type of
cabinetmaking, whereas fiction was art. He really bristled at having become
more famous for his nonfiction than his fiction. And ultimately, in 2008,
when he won the National Book Award for his novel Shadow Country, he saw
that as a vindication. That meant more to him than all the success of The
Snow Leopard, a book that he always felt very conflicted about—which I find
extraordinary. If I wrote something on the level of The Snow Leopard, I
would hang up my hat. I’d be done.

--30--

--jel