In its first issue, published in Beirut in November of 1962, Tawf?q ??yigh's literary journal ?iw?r (1962-67) introduced itself to its Arabic readership, announcing a journal "in which literary authors and thinkers from all regions of the Arab world would write, and which would be concerned with the living issues that interest our nation [ummatan? wa-wa?anan?] ... from within [min al-d?khil]." Yet there were doubts circulating even before this first issue was distributed, as writers in the Arabic press wondered at what ??yigh, an established Arab poet who had just returned to Beirut after teaching in London upon completing his studies at Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford, was up to publishing ?iw?r from Beirut with the support of an organization with its main offices in Paris. By the eve of the 1967 Arab defeat to Israel, that organization -- the International Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded by the American Central Intelligence Agency in 1950 to foster the Non-Communist Left worldwide through literary and cultural initiatives -- too was in a state of Cold War collapse, a literary scandal that played out on pages of journals and newspapers across not only the Arab world, but the major cities of Europe, Africa, India, China, Japan, and Latin America. This paper will chart the debates in Arabic journals of the 1960s surrounding the publication, funding and ultimate demise of ?iw?r, considering in particular authors whose work appeared in ?iw?r, including Yus?f Idr?s, al-?ayyib ??lih, and Luw?s ?Awa?. An American imperial infiltration of Arabic literature, an anthology of some of the most important authors publishing Arabic prose and poetry from 1962-67, ?iw?r's legacy remains constitutive of the field of Arabic literature into the present.