As a creative person, finding out how much of that whole era was an operation is demoralizing. In culture it was a time when there was a <i>there</i> there. Young men could reasonably aspire to growing up to become artists and writers, in a society where ideas and discourse had coherent meaning and the politics of the nation had at least some accountability to reason. Reading that it was just another spy hustle makes me want to stop writing.<p>However, these stories also fit into the narrative that we have no culture, it was all fake, and therefore there is nothing worth preserving or protecting, only dismantling and dissolving. It's hackneyed. Another demoralizing narrative churned out by a partisan brunch chatter factory shouldn't bring us down.<p>Really, the CIA and the western intelligence community had one job. I like how the west thinks it won the cold war when all of its institutions are openly occupied by the very ideologues they were formed against. Sure, CIA backed culture industries, and Hollywood is an organ of the State Department, but in spite of these stories, the sort of people our society pays to do dirty jobs are not our protagonists, and they are not the story imo.