Shortly after George Orwell’s death in 1950, two C.I.A. operatives — sent to England by E. Howard Hunt, who would help plan the Watergate break-in two decades later — met with his widow, Sonia, to buy the film rights to “Animal Farm.”
Among the notable revelations in her book “Who Paid the Piper?: The C.I.A. and the Cultural Cold War” (1999), the author and documentarian Frances Stonor Saunders showed that the spy agency’s anti-Soviet activities after World War II included producing an animated adaptation of “Animal Farm,” Mr. Orwell’s 1945 satirical fable of the Russian Revolution in which totalitarian pigs rule a barnyard.
The 1954 cartoon made a significant change to Mr. Orwell’s finale by cutting the human characters out of a celebratory dinner hosted by the pigs and including local farmers.
In the book, the other animals, watching from outside the farmhouse, look at the exploitative humans and pigs but find it “impossible to say which was which.” But in the movie, the starving, oppressed animals stage a counterrevolution by storming the farmhouse where only the pigs are present and the Stalinist porcine leader, Napoleon, is killed.
“By removing the human farmers from the scene, to leave only the pigs reveling in the fruits of exploitation,” Ms. Stonor Saunders wrote, the C.I.A. made the film more overtly anti-communist.
Ms. Stonor Saunders died on Aug. 31 in hospice care in Chichester, in southern England. She was 60 and had lived in London. Her brother Alexander Stonor Saunders said the cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer.
“Who Paid the Piper?” documented years of covert efforts by the C.I.A. to manipulate public opinion in Western Europe against communism. Among them was the creation of front organizations like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which backed magazines and journals like Encounter in Britain and Der Monat in Germany. The agency also sponsored art exhibitions and music tours and funded pro-democracy student activists.
“While some of the C.I.A.’s activities were exposed in the late 1960s, many artists and intellectuals claimed ignorance,” the journalist Laurence Zuckerman wrote in The New York Times in 2000, when “Who Paid the Piper?” was published in the United States under the title “The Cultural Cold War: The C.I.A. and the World of Arts and Letters.” “But Ms. Stonor Saunders make a strong case that several people, including the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the poet Stephen Spender, who was co-editor of Encounter, knew about the C.I.A.’s role.”
To finance its activities, Ms. Stonor Saunders wrote, the C.I.A. siphoned hundreds of millions of dollars budgeted for the Marshall Plan, the United States’ foreign aid program that helped European nations recover from World War II.
“We couldn’t spend it all,” Gilbert Greenway, a former C.I.A. officer, told Ms. Stonor Saunders. “There were no limits, and nobody had to account for it.”
Mr. Greenway was one of the retired C.I.A. officials who cooperated with Ms. Stonor Saunders’s reporting long after its activities had ended.
“Along came this intelligent young woman, and they opened up to her,” Mr. Stonor Saunders, her brother, said in an interview. “They wanted to share what they knew.”
Frances Stonor Saunders was born on April 14, 1966, in Windsor, England, west of London. Her father, Donald Slomnicki, moved to England at the end of the war and worked as an investment banker; his family anglicized its name to Saunders. Her mother, Julia (Stonor) Saunders, was a member of one of England’s oldest, aristocratic Roman Catholic families.
Frances’ parents divorced when she was 11, and she and Alexander went to live with their mother, whose eclectic set of friends included the novelist Graham Greene and the singer Eartha Kitt.
After graduating from St. Mary’s School Ascot, Ms. Stonor Saunders studied English language and literature at the University of Oxford’s St. Anne’s College and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1987.
She worked as Ms. Kitt’s assistant on a tour and was the ghostwriter of her 1989 memoir, “Confessions of a Sex Kitten.” Ms. Kitt was known for her sultry onstage persona and for playing Catwoman on the 1960s television series “Batman.”
Ms. Stonor Saunders worked as a stringer for The Associated Press in Rome and as a freelance writer before she began making documentaries for Channel 4 in Britain in the 1990s.
“Hidden Hands: A Different History of Modernism,” a four-part series that aired in 1995 and of which she produced two, was the precursor to “Who Paid the Piper?”
It showed how the C.I.A. promoted American Abstract Expressionist artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko in touring exhibitions “as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom and the cultural power of the U.S.,” Ms. Stonor Saunders wrote in The Independent at the time.
The artists were not aware of the link to the agency, she wrote.
Donald Jameson, a former C.I.A. case officer, confirmed to Ms. Stonor Saunders that the spy agency used Abstract Expressionists as cultural propaganda.
“Moscow in those days was very vicious in its denunciation of any kind of nonconformity to its own very rigid patterns,” Mr. Jameson told her for an article in The Observer in 1999. “So one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticized that much and that heavy-handedly was worth support one way or another.”
“Who Paid the Piper?” was published four years after the documentary aired and won the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Book Prize.
Writing in The Observer, the critic Peter Conrad praised Ms. Stonor Saunders for her “absorbing, distressing and, at times, uproariously funny history of this war of delusionary images, a battle for hearts and minds which was conducted by mobilizing culture.”
She later worked as arts editor of The New Statesman, a weekly cultural and political magazine, and wrote for The Guardian and other publications.
Over the last two decades, she wrote and hosted radio documentaries for the BBC on subjects that included Donald Trump’s connection to the lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn as well as on the mathematician-philosopher Jacob Bronowski, the writer and host of the 1973 BBC series “The Ascent of Man.”
“She saw the world inside out and upside down — utterly rejected any received wisdom; had disdain for lazy thinking,” Fiona Leach, who produced some of Ms. Stonor Saunders’s documentaries, wrote in an email.
Ms. Stonor Saunders wrote three books after “Who Paid the Piper?”: “Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman” (2004), about a notorious 14th-century British mercenary; “The Woman Who Shot Mussolini” (2010), the story of Violet Gibson, an Irish woman who in 1926 tried to assassinate the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini; and “The Suitcase: Six Attempts to Cross a Border” (2021), a memoir that focuses on her father’s life, from his years as a Romanian refugee to his descent into Alzheimer’s disease in his 50s.
“The Suitcase” won the PEN Ackerley Prize (now the Ackerley Prize) for biography and autobiography.
In addition to her mother and brother, Ms. Stonor Saunders is survived by a half brother, Hugo Saunders.
As Ms. Stonor Saunders researched “Who Paid the Piper?,” her mother worried that the C.I.A. might kidnap the author.
Ms. Stonor Saunders had a different concern.
“It was the fear of being manipulated or played,” she wrote. “Some deceptions are so gristly they can’t be swallowed; others beguile the palate and are more easily digested. Many of the people I interviewed were professional persuaders, trained in the art of the lie (‘necessary,’ ‘noble,’ ‘patriotic’ or otherwise) — it follows that their claims to be speaking the truth would be hard to assess.”
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