A Cold Warrior before the CIA
Cord Meyer and the Cambridge spy
Welcome! I’m Tom Griffin and this is my intelligence history newsletter. Feel free to share this post with the button below.
My latest subscriber profile focuses on Cord Meyer, the CIA covert action chief whose subsidies to private American organisations became the subject of a major public controversy in the mid-1960s.
Before that time, he was largely known to the public as one of the founders in the late 1940s of the United World Federalists (UWF), a group whose proposals for ‘world government’ might now be described more mundanely as a plan for international arms control.
Many observers saw a striking contrast between Meyer’s youthful idealism and his later role doling out Cold War subsidies, even if many of those funds went to liberal organisations. A 1967 New York Times profile quoted an anonymous friend saying 'his whole spirit was one of great humanity. He got cold war-ized.'1
One could be forgiven for expecting Meyer’s own autobiography to endorse a conversion narrative, given a title, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA, which seems to anticipate Irving Kristol’s definition of a neconservative as ‘a liberal mugged by reality.’
In fact, Meyer attacked the Times profile for projecting ‘the assiduously cultivated myth that my career and personality represented a kind of Jekyll and Hyde development.’ He blamed a New Left critique of the CIA which needed to explain away ‘the intrusion of embarrassing evidence that many of its policies were enlightened and its leaders intelligently liberal.’2
Meyer provided some evidence against the Jekyll and Hyde theory with an account of his struggles with the Communist Party during his late 1940s political activism. Although the communists disdained the UWF, they attempted to take over another organisation he was involved in, the American Veterans Committee.
Its leadership included, among others, Oren Root, who had run Wendell Willkie’s campaign for the presidency; G. Mennen Williams, later governor of Michigan; Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr.; Robert Nathan; Gus Tyler, one of David Dubinsky’s trusted lieutenants in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union; and me. Tyler provided invaluable assistance because of his experience in the struggles against the Communists in the labor movement.3
Dubinsky’s ILGWU was a key supporter of Labour anti-communist organisations like the Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC) which would later be sponsored by the CIA. From the beginning, the FTUC had allies in the government and intelligence connections, but in the immediate postwar years those allies were not yet in command of policy and the intelligence community was itself in flux after the abolition of the Office of Strategic Services. Factional struggles within private organisations like the AVC set the stage for the bigger Cold War battles to come.
Among the members of the AVC was Merle Miller, one of those journalists whose amateur psychology Meyer would come to resent. Miller’s 1973 profile includes an intriguing list of AVC officers, most notably Michael Straight, who would later be revealed as a member of the Cambridge spy ring.4
In Facing Reality, Meyer wrote that he learned while in the CIA that the leader of a middle-ground faction in the AVC had been ‘a controlled secret agent of the KGB, at that time, and that his strategy of splitting our ranks had been devised in Moscow’.5 He confirmed in the 1990s that he was referring to Straight, who claimed to have broken with the Soviets in 1941.6
Meyer’s battles in the AVC no doubt stood him in good stead when Allen Dulles interviewed him for a CIA job in 1951. In the academic terms employed in my book, Meyer was part of an anti-communist state-private network with a substantial liberal component, although it also included elements of the non-communist left, like the FTUC head Jay Lovestone, who did not easily fit the liberal label.
That network was not simply called into existence by the arrival of CIA sponsorship, and as I hope to show in a future post on Meyer’s later career, it did not quietly disappear when CIA funding was attenuated in the 1970s. The issue remains however, how far the state-sponsored tutelage of figures like Dulles influenced the political trajectory not of only of Meyer, but of a whole generation of Cold War liberals.
A Hidden Liberal, Cord Meyer, Jr.; New York Times, 29 March 1967, archived at the CIA.
Cord Meyer, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA, Harper & Row, 1980, pp.90-91.
Meyer, 1980, p.52.
Merle Miller, One Man's Long Journey - From a one-world crusade to the 'department of dirty tricks', New York Times Magazine, 7 January 1973. Archived at the CIA.
Meyer, 1980, p.54.
For Straight's account see Michael Straight, After Long Silence, Collins, 1983, p.229. For Meyer's confirmation see Roland Perry, Last of the Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight - The Only American in Britain's Cambridge Spy Ring, Da Capo Press, 2005, p.196. This book makes the remarkable claim that Straight was still a KGB agent even after he had exposed Anthony Blunt. On the face of it, this seems hard to reconcile with Straight’s support for Fight for Freedom in 1941, or for Truman in 1948, but it is a view that seems to have been shared by Meyer. Perry discussed Straight’s case with members of James Angleton’s Counterintelligence Staff and this is a plausible source for Meyer’s own information.