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Shortly after this announcement, Burnham himself enlisted in the struggle for the world, joining the OPC as a full-time advisor on anticommunist political warfare. Burnham’s role in the OPC was secret, but it is possible to piece together a fairly detailed picture of this New York intellectual’s duties as covert operative from clues scattered throughout his personal papers at the Hoover Institution in California. A Princeton classmate, journalist Joseph J. Bryan III, now head of the OPC’s Psychological Warfare Workshop (the unit responsible for coming up with the oversized condom proposal for the Free Europe Committee), first approached Burnham in the hope of engaging his services “as an expert consultant.”11 Evidently, Burnham himself must have raised the matter of his Trotskyist past, because in a subsequent letter Bryan felt the need to reassure him that “the chief of my branch” (in other words, Frank Wisner) did not share his “apprehension about possible embarrassment to the administration.”12 In any event, by July 1949 the philosophy professor had obtained the necessary security clearance to begin his consultancy with the

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OPC.13 In August he moved his household from New York to Washington, claiming that he was taking a sabbatical from NYU to work as a “freelance writer.”14 Burnham began his new job in October. He never visited the OPC’s offices on the Mall, where his identity was concealed by the code names “Hamburn” or “Kenneth E. Hambley”; he wrote regular memoranda and planning papers from an upstairs office in his rented Georgetown townhouse, which also provided “cover for contacts, intelligence de-briefings, planning, and actions in connection with various official needs and projects.”15 Even the most routine of intellectual activities now served as a disguise for Burnham’s new work. In November 1950 he used an invited lecture at the prestigious Groton School in Massachusetts (alma mater of many prominent figures in the early CIA) as cover for a trip to deal with various pieces of OPC business in New York City.16

According to E. Howard Hunt (a CIA officer before achieving notori-ety as one of Richard Nixon’s White House “plumbers”), in the years that followed, Burnham provided the OPC with advice on “virtually every subject of interest to our organization.”17 A particular area of expertise was émigré affairs. Burnham was OPC’s main point of contact with the group of Polish exiles gathered around the Paris-based journal Kultura, including the charismatic Joseph Czapski, with whom he developed a proposal for a refugee institute that would eventually become the NCFE’s Free Europe University in Strasbourg.18 He also intervened on behalf of Czeslaw Milosz with the American immigration authorities, liaising with the exile relief organization the International Rescue Committee to expedite the Polish writer’s visa application (but only after having interviewed Milosz personally to satisfy himself that rumors he was a Soviet agent were baseless).19 Indeed, counterintelligence appears to have been one of Burnham’s main functions, with the ex-Trotskyist using his inside knowledge of the communist movement to advise the OPC about possible infiltration of its front operations. He was perennially suspicious on this score, once even suggesting that Allen Grover, AMCOMLIB’s secretary, was known within Time, Inc., as a “comintern representative.”20 At the same time, Burnham peppered the OPC with a constant barrage of proposals for anticommunist psychological warfare: the circulation of “rumors and stories about Stalin’s health”; the creation of stock cartoon characters lampooning communist officials; “desirable semantic changes” in American propaganda, such as the use of the word “colony” instead of “satellite”

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to refer to the captive nations in eastern Europe, so as to associate the Soviet Union with imperialism.21 According to one former CIA officer, Miles Copeland, Burnham was even consulted by Kermit Roosevelt when the latter was planning the 1953 coup in Iran.22 Copeland himself also looked to the eminent ex-communist intellectual for enlightenment about the great ideological issues of the day, an attitude echoed by Burnham’s admiring OPC aide, Warren G. Fugitt, who years later fondly recalled afternoons spent in Burnham’s Georgetown living room “with the likes of Max Eastman declaiming in front of the fireplace, Raymond Aron waiting for us to ask precisely the right question, and Arthur Koestler furious about something.”23