 Consequently, it was a source of embarrassment when the revelation broke that the CIA had helped finance the activities of the Congress of Cultural Freedom and of these publications. Inferentially, Hook believed that the funding source did not corrupt the integrity of these publications or taint their legitimacy as forums of critical inquiry. From the other direction, there was surprise that the CIA was prepared to fund publications that had been openly critical of many aspects of American foreign policy and domestic affairs. Interestingly, the acronym in the bureaucratic files of the CIA that referred to the funding of this project was “NCL,” that is, the non-communist left. Hook believed that it represented a degree of prudential wisdom by the United States government to be willing to support a non-capitalist, anti-communist cultural enterprise that was not necessarily faithful to the line projected in American foreign policy, since it had developed a significant body of criticism against both the theory and the practice of totalitarian communism.