Encounter (magazine) in the context of "Stephen Spender"

Encounter was a literary magazine founded in 1953 by poet Stephen Spender and journalist Irving Kristol. The magazine ceased publication in 1990 and the operations closed in 1991. Published in the United Kingdom, it was an Anglo-American intellectual and cultural journal, originally associated with the anti-Stalinist left. The magazine received covert funding from the Central Intelligence Agency who, along with MI6, discussed the founding of an "Anglo-American left-of-centre publication" intended to counter the idea of Cold War neutralism. The magazine was rarely critical of American foreign policy and generally shaped its content to support the geopolitical interests of the United States government.

Spender, who served as co-editor until 1965 and then as a contributing editor, resigned in 1967, together with his replacement Frank Kermode, after the covert CIA funding for the magazine was revealed. Thomas W. Braden, who headed the CIA's International Organisations Division's operations between 1951 and 1954, said that the money for the magazine "came from the CIA, and few outside the CIA knew about it. We had placed one agent in a Europe-based organization of intellectuals called the Congress for Cultural Freedom." Roy Jenkins observed that earlier contributors were aware of U.S. funding but believed it came from philanthropists, including a Cincinnati gin distiller.