ABSTRACT Cultural cold war played out in Arabic from the late 1950s into the early 1970s in the
conference halls, hotel lobbies, cafes, bars, magazine offices, publishing houses, kiosks,
and streets of Beirut and Cairo. Berlin, Paris, Tashkent, Khartoum, London, Baghdad1,
and Tunis all have their place in this built landscape of cultural cold war. In its focus on
Beirut and especially Cairo, though, this chapter follows the Afro-Asian People’s
Solidarity Organization, their Soviet-funded Afro-Asian Writers Association (AAWA),
and the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) there. Looking to redirect the
“Bandung spirit” of third world independence, John Hunt, undercover CIA agent at the
CCF’s Paris headquarters, underscored the centrality of the Arab world to the Congress’s
propaganda of cultural freedom: “no one needs to convince me of the importance of
doing our work in Cairo.”1 Looking to co-opt the emerging, increasingly decolonizing
third world as they widened the purview of the cultural cold war far beyond the borders
of postwar Europe, the Congress for Cultural Freedom sent prominent African American
novelist and essayist Richard Wright to the April 1955 Bandung Conference and began
publishing Latin American and Indian journals by the mid-1950s. As Afro-Asia was just
coming together in solidarity at Bandung, nonaligning itself from the Soviet and
American global axes of power as from the yoke of their former colonizers, eyes toward
Mao, it was at the same time becoming both a theater and a target of cultural cold war.