Throughout the Cold War, scholars and artists from Eastern Europe and from the West brokered official and informal ties between their separate geopolitical “worlds.” Simultaneously they built transnational networks that functioned within the interconnected “worlds” of literature, music, or history writing. In this dissertation, I explore such professional interactions that bridged across the Iron Curtain, like scholarship programs, international conferences, and literary residencies. I ask why states on different sides of the geopolitical struggle made Cold War encounters possible and how the participating individuals experienced them. While I focus on Hungarian-U.S. relations, I offer generalizable insights for East European region and the wider global context. My work questions the historiographic narrative on the division and total competition between “East” and “West.” Through this approach, I join a wave of new research that rejects the idea of the supposed isolation of Soviet bloc countries, aiming to reimagine the Cold War through the lens of transnational history. I show that because the cultural and educational exchanges of the period were created through the meeting of geopolitical and professional aims, connecting the national and the global dimensions, they functioned as transnational projects. I argue that by examining such Cold War encounters from the perspective of Hungarian and U.S. cultural and academic elites – who acted as transnational mediators – the established image of zero-sum geopolitical confrontation needs to be counterbalanced by that of cooperation and mutuality. To demonstrate this, I analyze the entwined and conflicting agendas of authorities, institutions, and intellectuals. I show how governments and their intelligence agencies wanted to instrumentalize scholars and artists for geopolitical purposes – and how these non-state actors used the framework of the Cold War as a tool for professional development and institution-building. Throughout the dissertation, I map scholarly and artistic networks that, although born of a geopolitical conflict and funded with ideological aims, managed to transcend the strict constrains of the Cold War and produce enduring ties and knowledge. By highlighting the experiences and voices of such transnational intermediaries, I strive to return agency to the diverse non-state actors navigating geopolitical pressures, thereby reclaiming their “hearts and minds.”