By late 1951 the days of Burnham’s collaboration with the CIA were numbered. The relationship had been marred from the beginning by tensions of the sort that had undermined the partnership between the OPC
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and the Free Trade Union Committee. As early as December 1949, Burnham felt moved to complain about his new employer’s failure to reimburse expenses he had incurred traveling to New York on covert official business, claiming that this was symptomatic “of a way of doing business that can’t stand up against the competition in the field where we are now trying to operate.” Irritation turned to rage a few months later when he learned that Polish émigré Joseph Czapski was being given a cold shoulder by the National Committee for a Free Europe. “This is a goddamned outrage,” he told the OPC and complained on another occasion, “It is still infinitely easier for communist fronts to get money than for anti-communists to do so.”48 What appears to have upset Burnham most, though, was a series of security lapses that threatened to expose his employment by the OPC and thereby wreck his reputation as a free-thinking intellectual (a concern reminiscent of Lovestone and Brown’s complaints about overspending on labor operations in Italy). The worst of these lapses occurred in October 1951, when intelligence officer C. Hawley Oakes gave away more than he should have done in a conversation with Burnham’s principal contact in India, an intellectual and politician named Minoo Masani. “This act, besides being an incredible violation of security, political intelligence, and ordinary horse sense, has jeopardized the results and future possibilities of three years of work,” ranted Burnham. He went on to demand Oakes’s summary firing, an internal investigation, and the establishment of an operational rule to prevent such gaffes ever occurring again. His memo to Frank Lindsay was entitled “An Act of Idiocy.”49 Burnham shared the Lovestoneites’ view that the government’s political warfare agencies were peopled by “stock brokers, academic social scientists, lawyers, investment bankers, [and] members of café or conventional society out for a fling at secret missions and Washington sa-lons” who lacked a genuine “hatred of communism.” To the extent that the United States had been resisting the communist menace, charged the author of
The death blow to Burnham’s career in intelligence was the McCarthy issue. Like other ex-communists in New York intellectual circles, Burnham was ambivalent about the red-baiting antics of “Tailgunner Joe.”
Granted, the junior senator was an unscrupulous demagogue, but in communist penetration of executive agencies he had hit on a real threat
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to national security. The New York intellectuals also found the spectacle of American communists invoking the protection of civil rights guaranteed them by a constitution they were seeking to overthrow very difficult to stomach. For these reasons, Burnham ended up siding, if not with McCarthy himself, then against those anti-McCarthyites who saw excessive anticommunism as a greater threat to civil liberties in America than communism itself. For the liberal anticommunists who staffed the covert-action branches of the CIA responsible for front group operations—several of whom were themselves the victims of McCarthyism—
this position was unacceptable. “A number thought him ‘too’ hard-line, and a few went so far as to label him a ‘fascist,’” one former intelligence officer told Burnham’s biographer, Daniel Kelly. Some even feared that Burnham might try to help McCarthy when the witch-hunter turned on the Agency in 1953. By April of that year, the New York intellectual’s consultancy contract was terminated. “It is not clear whether Burnham left the CIA voluntarily or was pushed out, though the latter seems more likely,” writes Kelly. “What is certain is that he resigned under a cloud.”51
Of the eminent ex-communists who had helped create the CCF, it was Sidney Hook who remained most closely involved with the organization.
In addition to acting as the American representative on its Executive Committee, Hook was the founding chairman of the Congress’s U.S.