The CIA and the elites

How political theory shaped covert action

Welcome! I’m Tom Griffin and this is my intelligence history newsletter. Feel free to share this article with the button below.

James Burnham, left, with Arthur Koestler at the Congress for Cultural Freedom in West Berlin, 1950 (Flickr/Levan Ramshivili, public domain).

Two weeks after the election of Donald Trump recriminations among his opponents are in full swing. One question I have seen asked is how the left allowed the right to become the vehicle for opposition to ‘elites’.

Political theory as such isn’t my remit here, but there are useful ways in which intelligence history can illuminate this question.

If anything the concept of elites originated as a challenge to the left. Marx wrote not about ruling elites, but about the ruling class, defined in economic terms. In the Communist Manifesto, he famously wrote that ‘the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.’

On this view, political leaders were authentic representatives of the class from which they were drawn. The Tory statesman returned to his landed estates, the liberal to his business or professional interests.

In Marx's view, workers would rule the same way, returning to their factories in between parliamentary sessions. The Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin objected that the ruling minority would be ‘ex-workers, who once they become only representatives or rulers of the people, cease to be workers.’ In his copy of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy, Marx scribbled the rejoinder ‘no more than a manufacturer today ceases to be a capitalist when he becomes a member of the municipal council.’¹

The pithiest expression of this problem was perhaps Oscar Wilde's comment that 'the problem with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.'

A more systematic examination was provided by the late nineteenth century founders of elite theory, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels. These three thinkers found an influential English language interpreter in James Burnham, whose 1943 book The Machiavellians located them in a longer Italian political tradition

Burnham wrote the Machiavellians not long after his own break with Marxism, on one level he portrayed Machiavelli as a sort of 16th century Marx, openly revealing truths about political power that others kept hidden. At the same time, he was obviously attracted to the more traditional picture of Machiavelli as a scheming consigliere. Hence he included a chapter on the French thinker Georges Sorel, who was less interested in cool political analysis than in the idea of revolution as a mobilising political myth, independently of its value as a realistic goal.

In his conclusion, Burnham wondered how Machiavellian theory could be employed as a political tool. The masses could not proceed scientifically, he reasoned, but sections of the elite might be able to do.

These are comparatively small in size. Their members can and do acquire a good deal of knowledge about administration and rule. Since their members either inherit or discover a way of extracting a living from others without too much effort on their own part, they have available time and energy in which to cultivate political skills. They are careful not to overburden their ranks with squeamish idealists. There would thus seem to be no theoretic reason why sections of the elite should not be scientific about political affairs.²

This may have been abstract speculation on Burnham’s part, but it was not long before he found a suitable section of the elite. In 1944, he wrote a paper on post-war Soviet ambitions for the Office of Strategic Services, which later became the basis for his 1947 book, The Struggle for the World. ³

As a critique of and alternative to Marxism, Burnham’s ideas were an obvious fit for the fledgling CIA. In 1949, he became a consultant to its covert action wing, the Office of Policy Co-ordination.⁴ The following year he wrote a paper calling for a campaign to bring about ‘the disintegration of the Communist elite.’⁵

He was a key player in the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a CIA front organisation focused on winning over European opinion formers, a prototypically elitist strategy, even if its primary inspiration was less in theory than in the earlier practice of Communist propagandists like Willy Münzenberg.

The CIA eventually eased Burnham out of the CCF. Despite his own Marxist past, he was increasingly out of sympathy with the agency’s sponsorship of the ‘non-communist left.’⁶ In 1955, he became a founding editor of the National Review, where he would become a key voice of American conservatism.⁷

Burnham’s left to right trajectory made him something of a precursor of the neoconservative movement. Unlike 1970s vintage neoconservatives, however, he was a strong critic of Israel.⁸ His deepest legacy at the CIA may have been among the agency’s Arabists.

Near East Division Officer Miles Copeland was an assiduous student of The Machiavellians and other works influenced by the Italian elite theorists.⁹ Working in Egypt in the early 1950s, Copeland was part of a group of officials who concluded that the US needed ‘to face up to some hard realities about political power such as were expounded by reputable political philosophers from Bertrand Russell to James Burnham.’¹⁰

The result was that the CIA’s Kim Roosevelt was sent to Cairo to organise ‘a peaceful revolution.’

King Farouk himself would supervise the liquidation of the old and its replacement by the new, thereby defusing the revolutionary forces which CIA agents had identified as much as two years earlier and which were by then reported to be on the verge of bubbling over. Second, if this failed, he was to look around for other possibilities - a handsome front man, a strong man, or some combination of the two.¹¹

This programme looks very much very much like an application of Burnham’s suggestion that ‘a scientific ruling class could avoid catastrophic revolution not by stopping revolutionary change in society but only by guiding the change, controlling it, and thus bringing it about in a more orderly manner.’¹²

In the event, the revolution did bubble over and it was the strong man solution which prevailed, in the person of Gamal Abdel Nasser. According to Copeland, Nasser had an understanding with Roosevelt that this would not be a democratic revolution.

…it was agreed that in future relations between our two governments we would eschew use of such phrases as ‘re-establishing democratic processes’ and ‘truly representative government’. These, if used at all, would be confined to exchanges which might be revealed to the public. Between us there would be a private understanding that the preconditions for democratic government did not exist and wouldn't exist for many years.¹³

Given Egypt’s long history of dynastic rule, it would be wrong to over-state the role of American political theory in subsequent developments. On possible interpretation of Copeland’s account is that the Americans, unlike the British, simply reasoned themselves into accepting what was likely to happen regardless. Nevertheless, American influence was perhaps less supportive than it might have been of such liberal traditions as Egypt had developed over the preceding century.

If the CIA’s embrace of the Egyptian military owed something to Burnham’s influence, the arbitrary nature of military rule was in some tension with his ideas. Though sceptical of democracy, he did believe in liberty, understood as the rule of law, possible only through a Machiavellian balance of forces in which the ‘clash of opposed interests will the more surely preserve liberty when the state guards against too great inequality in privilege and wealth.’¹⁴

This more populist side of Burnham’s thought provides some precedent for contemporary rhetoric in which ‘elite’ is a term of abuse rather than aspiration. What would Burnham have made of Trump’s MAGA movement against the elites?

Conservative writer Michael Lind suggested in 2021 that ‘Burnham’s contrast of “democratism” with constitutional government is as incompatible with the cult of the populist demagogue Donald Trump as it is with the high-handed religious fervor of today’s progressives.’¹⁵

Burnham’s record of ‘anti-anti-McCarthyism’ suggests some doubt about how rigorous his constitutionalism was in practice, but Lind was on surer ground in predicting how his ideas would be misinterpreted.¹⁶

It is possible, perhaps likely, that populist conservative politicians and pundits may come to use the term “managerial elites” to mean only the left-leaning Democrats who dominate the civil service, K-12 teaching, universities, and the mainstream media, while remaining silent about their own billionaire corporate backers.¹⁷

Burnham, on the other hand, was too much of a Machiavellian too see the fall of one elite without looking for the rise of another.

1. David McLellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Oxford, 1977, p.563.

2. James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, Putnam and Company, 1943, p.197.

3. Roger Kimball, The Power of James Burnham, The New Criterion, September 2002. Archived at the Internet Archive.

4. Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left and Cold War: Calling the Tune? Frank Cass, 2003, p.49.

5. Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left and Cold War: Calling the Tune? Frank Cass, 2003, p.91.

6. Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left and Cold War: Calling the Tune? Frank Cass, 2003, p.106.

7. Francis P. Sempa, James Burnham: The Partisan Review Years, The University Bookman, 14 August 2022.

8. Jeet Heer, When Conservatives Loved the Palestinians, Sans Everything, 25 February 2008.

9. Hugh Wilford, America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East, Basic Books, 2013, Chapter 11.

10. Miles Copeland, The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics, Simon & Schuster, 1969, p.60.

11. Miles Copeland, The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics, Simon & Schuster, 1969, p.62.

12. James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, Putnam and Company, 1943, p.199.

13. Miles Copeland, The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics, Simon & Schuster, 1969, p.66.

14. James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, Putnam and Company, 1943, p.53.

15. Michael Lind, The Importance of James Burnham, The Tablet, 2 September 2021.

16. Roger Kimball, The Power of James Burnham, The New Criterion, September 2002. Archived at the Internet Archive.

17. Michael Lind, The Importance of James Burnham, The Tablet, 2 September 2021.