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State-Private Networks and Intelligence Theory
From Cold War Liberalism to Neoconservatism
Tom Griffin
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eBook - ePub
State-Private Networks and Intelligence Theory
From Cold War Liberalism to Neoconservatism
Tom Griffin
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About This Book
This book examines the United States neoconservative movement, arguing that its support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was rooted in an intelligence theory shaped by the policy struggles of the Cold War.The origins of neoconservative engagement with intelligence theory are traced to a tradition of labour anti-communism that emerged in the early 20th century and subsequently provided the Central Intelligence Agency with key allies in the state-private networks of the Cold War era. Reflecting on the break-up of Cold War liberalism and the challenge to state-private networks in the 1970s, the book maps the neoconservative response that influenced developments in United States intelligence policy, counterintelligence and covert action. With the labour roots of neoconservatism widely acknowledged but rarely systematically pursued, this new approach deploys the neoconservative literature of intelligence as evidence of a tradition rooted in the labour anti-communist self-image as allies rather than agents of the American state.This book will be of great interest to all students of intelligence studies, Cold War history, United States foreign policy and international relations.
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1Labour anti-communism before the Cold War
DOI: 10.4324/9781003104612-2
Scholars of the cultural Cold War have long recognised the need to situate the period in a longer historical perspective, as a way to understand the extent to which âin the ideological struggle, different traditions, motives and methods worked in parallel, in combination, sometimes even in oppositionâ (Scott-Smith 2006, pp.85â6). Writers such as Wilford (2003, p.125) have turned to the pre-Second World War activities of the non-Communist left as a way of understanding the autonomy of the private side of the post-war state-private network.
The alliance between the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Lovestoneite strand of the American left was among the developments of this period which would shape the traditions, networks and institutional forms of the American state-private network during the Cold War. This heritage also provided a key intellectual resource for neoconservative intelligence theorists in seeking to reshape and rebuild that state private network from the 1970s onwards.
The AFL in the First World War
The AFL came into this alliance with its own heritage of transnational action, most significantly its support for Woodrow Wilsonâs policy of intervention in the First World War and the resulting allied propaganda effort. In October 1916, its leader Samuel Gompers was appointed to the Advisory Commission of the Council of National Defense. In a speech to the AFLâs 1917 convention, Wilson invited its leaders to serve on the National Labor Conference and later on the National War Labor Board (van der Pijl, 1984, p.59).
War-time full employment helped to ensure that Wilsonâs policy enjoyed strong support among trade union officials and skilled workers. However, continuing economic insecurity meant that more radical anti-war socialist currents found a hearing among immigrant workers. This stratification of the labour force was reflected in an element of Anglo-Saxon chauvinism in Wilsonian ideology and in the segregationist policy of the AFL (van der Pijl, 1984, p.60.)
The AFLâs internationalism, like Wilsonâs interventionist foreign policy, did not long outlast the war. Yet the period set a pattern that would endure. It marked the first emergence of an Atlanticist programme that drew support from a broad range of class interests, within which sections of organised labour had a significant, if subordinate and contested, role.
This early phase of Atlanticism broke down in the 1920s amid sharpening conflict over the reconstruction of Europe (van der Pijl, 1984, p.62). It would take another World War to spark its re-emergence.
The early years of American Communism
The divisions within the American labour movement over the First World War were paralleled in Europe, where the outbreak of conflict shattered the Socialist International, as social democrats rallied to their rival national standards (Eley, 2002, p.123).
The Russian revolution compounded wartime divisions, and the left split definitively as the Bolsheviks sponsored the emergence of communist parties around the world (Eley, 2002, p.177).
The Communist International or Comintern soon developed its own mass propaganda organisation, which owed much to wartime precedents. At its centre was the brilliant young German communist, Willi MĂźnzenberg. In 1921, MĂźnzenberg established the Berlin-based Internationale Arbeiterhilfe to send famine relief to the Soviet Union (Koch, 1996, pp.23â6). This was the first major project in a vast propaganda network that would become known as the MĂźnzenberg Trust. MĂźnzenberg pioneered many of the techniques of mass persuasion that would become familiar during the 20th century (Wilford, 2008, p.12). A number of the key propagandists of the Cold War, for West as well as the East, would learn their trade in the Comintern organisations of the inter-war period (Saunders, 1999, p.65).
One such figure was Jay Lovestone, born in 1897 into a Lithuanian Jewish family which emigrated to the United States (US) ten years later (Morgan, 1999, p.5). In 1915, he entered the City College of New York, an institution which had a large working class Jewish student contingent at a time when Ivy League universities still practised antisemitic discrimination (Morgan, 1999, p.10).
In 1919, Lovestone and his friend Bertram Wolfe became founder members of the Communist Party of America, led by Charles Ruthenberg, despite Lovestoneâs doubts about the viability of a party that was dominated by non-English-speaking immigrant workers (Morgan, 1999, p.19). Lovestone was thrown into both overt and underground work for the party. He produced a slew of pamphlets, one of which attacked the AFL as the âLabor Lieutenants of American Imperialismâ (Morgan, 1999, p.32). By the time he was sent to Berlin in 1922, as a delegate to a Friends of the Soviet Union conference, he was under surveillance by the FBI (Morgan, 1999, pp.30â31).
Lovestone made his first visit to Moscow in 1925, then in the midst of a succession battle following the death of Lenin. Joseph Stalin was allied to Nikolai Bukharin against Kamenev and Zinoviev in the power struggle (Morgan, 1999, pp.48â9). Lovestone formed a close friendship with Bukharin, who he had first met in New York in 1916â17 (Alexander, 1981, p.16).
This alliance was to prove fateful when Lovestone found himself engaged in his own succession battle as acting Secretary of the American Communist Party following the death of Ruthenberg in 1927 (Morgan, 1999, p.66). This internal struggle pitted the Ruthenberg-Lovestone faction against a rival group led by William Foster and James Cannon. According to Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, the Foster-Cannon group was closer to the American trade union movement and more domestically oriented because of its strength in the Mid-West, while the Ruthenberg-Lovestone faction was more responsive to influences from Moscow (Alexander, 1981, p.14). According to the Cannonite Max Shachtman,
we had pretty well the view that the Lovestone group ⌠was composed of intellectuals, of New York intellectuals, whereas the Foster-Cannon group represented the proletarian elements in the party, the native elements in the party, and to a large extent this was true.(Alexander, 1981, p.14)
Both sides took their differences to Moscow, where Lovestone still had support from Bukharin, though Foster found allies among supporters of Stalin. On their return, Lovestone won an apparently decisive victory in the August 1927 Party Convention (Morgan, 1999, p.69). During his short period of uncontested supremacy, he threw the party into the 1928 presidential election campaign, hiring thousands of professional canvassers and encouraging them to resort to tricks to get the signatures needed to place the Communist candidate, William Foster, on the ballot (Morgan, 1999, p.71).
As a supporter of Bukharin, Lovestone was part of a strong faction in the international Communist movement during this period, which included leading figures such as the Germans Arthur Ewert, Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer and the Italian Palmiro Togliatti (Cohen, 1980, p.294). In the course of that year, however, they faced a growing challenge from Stalinists advocating what would become the âThird Periodâ policy, a shift to the left based on the expectation of imminent revolution in Western Europe (Cohen, 1980, p.292). Those like Bukharin who were sceptical about this prospect were accused of âright deviationâ (Morgan, 1999, p.70; Cohen, 1980, p.294). Lovestoneâs analysis of âthe tremendous reserve powers of American capitalismâ marked him out as vulnerable (Morgan, 1999, p.68).
At the Sixth Comintern Congress in July 1928, Bukharin defended Lovestoneâs view, arguing that âIn no country is capitalism so strong as it is in the United States of America⌠Is it a terrible thing to say that there is little likelihood of an immediate revolutionary situation?â (Morgan, 1999, p.73). Lovestone returned Bukharinâs loyalty, allowing Foster to outflank him by backing Stalin and the Third Period (Morgan, 1999, p.76). The third factional leader, James Cannon, threw in his lot with Trotsky on the delegationâs return to the US (Morgan, 1999, p.76). This prompted Lovestone to launch a purge, which according to Howe and Coser âsurpassed anything before known in the American radical movement,â with the Trotskyist leadersâ homes raided, their meetings disrupted and their newspaper sellers attacked (Alexander, 1981, p.19).
Ironically, this move came as Stalin was preparing to purge Bukharinâs supporters from the Comintern (Alexander, 1981, p.7). The February 1929 convention of the Communist Party USA was dominated by Lovestoneâs supporters, yet his position was fatally undermined when a delegation from Moscow demanded he go to Russia to work for the Comintern (Alexander, 1981, p.20).
Lovestone responded by organising a delegation to Moscow, which found itself confronted by a special American Commission of the Comintern led by Stalin himself. In a speech on 6 May, Stalin insisted that the American Communist Party base itself on âthe general features of capitalism, which are the same for all countries, and not its specific features in any given countryâ (quoted in Alexander, 1981, p.22).
On 12 May, the Commission presented a draft address accusing Lovestone of American âexceptionalism.â In response, the American delegation attempted to activate precautionary measures to take control of party property. However, after the delegation refused to accept the address, following a Comintern presidium meeting on 14 May, Lovestoneâs support in the American party collapsed (Alexander, 1981, p.26).
While officially awaiting reassignment from the Comintern, Lovestone escaped from Moscow on 11 June, with assistance from a Latvian contact in Soviet intelligence, Nicholas Dozenberg (Morgan, 1999, p.101). He was expelled from the American Communist Party within the month (Morgan, 1999, p.103). Several hundred loyalists were forced out with him, all that was left of his majority in the party a few months earlier (Morgan, 1999, p.105; Alexander, 1981, p.28).
Brandlerâs International Communist Opposition (ICO)
Events in America mirrored a wave of expulsions that had already begun in Europe. In Germany, veteran Comintern activists Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer responded to their expulsion in January 1929 with the formation of a new vehicle, the Communist Party of Germany (Opposition) (KPO) (Alexander, 1981, p.137). By late 1929, similar organisations had begun to emerge in a number of European countries, including France and Austria (Alexander, 1981, p.262).
In line with this trend, the Lovestoneite faction in the United States formed the Communist Party of the USA (Majority Group) in October 1929, and launched their own newspaper, Revolutionary Age, the following month (Alexander, 1981, p.28).
The second conference of the KPO in November 1929 laid out what would become the official position of the right opposition groups. Their goal, in the words of Revolutionary Age correspondent M.N. Roy, was to âsave the Party and the International,â rejecting âeven the slightest tendency in the direction of organization of a new partyâ (quoted in Alexander, 1981, p.140).
The first move towards uniting the various right opposition groups took place in March 1930, when a number of groups agreed to form an information centre based in Berlin. The first full conference of the ICO took place in the same city in December 1930, with delegates from Germany, Norway, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland and the Unites States, and messages from Austria, Italy, Finland and Canada (Alexander, 1981, p.279).
The platform agreed in Berlin reiterated the ICOâs claim to be a part of the Communist International, but sharply criticised Stalinâs doctrine of the Third Period, emphasising the importance of united front tactics and of trade union unity (Alexander, 1981, pp.280â81).
As the American delegate, Jay Lovestone reported from the conference that
Our platform very correctly emphasizes the Leninist tactical attitude toward trade unions and the need for the militants and communists working in the mass unions. The necessity of united front tactics, the need of the Partyâs winning the majority of working class are brought home very clearly.(Alexander, 1981, p.279)
The abandonment of the Stalinist dual-union policy was crucial in allowing the Lovestoneites to regain a foothold in the mainstream American labour movement. A key figure in this respect was Charles âSashaâ Zimm...