Michael Josselson

Michael Josselson (2 March 1908, Tartu, Governorate of Livonia – 7 January 1978, Geneva, Switzerland) was a CIA agent.

He was sent to Berlin with a team charged with conducting interrogations of German prisoners of war with the aim of distinguishing convinced Nazis from those who were not.

He recruited former communist intellectuals (André Malraux, Denis de Rougemont, Arthur Koestler, Franz Borkenau, Andre Gide, Raymond Aron, Bertrand Russell, Michael Polanyi, and others) to lead an ideological struggle in Europe against the influence of Marxist ideas, in the name of freedom of expression.

In 1967, the magazines Ramparts and Saturday Evening Post investigated the CIA's funding of a number of anti-communist cultural associations.

Josselson devoted his last years to writing a biography of General Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly, The Commander, which was published posthumously in 1980.