America's Great Game (27 page)

Things began to look up for Miles after the OPC and OSO were merged into the Directorate of Plans and he moved to a new position: chief of the combined Near East divisions’ Information Planning Staff, plotting covert propaganda operations from a suite of offices next door to Kim’s. US government use of “psychological warfare”—the preferred official term for actions intended to bolster the morale of allies and undermine that of enemies—dated back to World War I, but it had never been an exclusively official business. From the beginning, psy-war had drawn heavily on ideas and methods pioneered in the American advertising industry, particularly the public relations theory of Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays. It made sense, therefore, that Copeland’s new venture should rope in executives from Madison Avenue, such as his old Counter Intelligence Corps comrade James “Eich” Eichelberger, who had gone to work for advertising giant J. Walter Thompson in Chicago after the war, acquiring a reputation as an “idea man.” During the day Miles and Eich would concoct stories for Middle Eastern audiences and then reconvene in the evening for discussion of “highbrow literary topics.”
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Partly so that he could hold his own intellectually with the likes of Eichelberger, and partly so that he could develop some ideas about revolutionary leadership that had begun forming in his mind during his
time with Husni Za‘im in Syria, Miles now embarked on a self-taught crash course in social theory. Although he read widely in the founding texts of modern sociology, including classic works by Marx and Weber, it was two more recently published books that really captured his interest. One was
The Machiavellians
(1943) by James Burnham, a former Trotskyist who had broken with Marxism and, on his way to becoming an important figure in post–World War II American conservative thought, had taken on a job as a consultant for the OPC. The other was
The Anatomy of Revolution
(1938) by the eminent historian and ex-OSS analyst Crane Brinton, who had cast a strong intellectual influence on the generation of students he taught at Harvard during the 1930s, among them Kim Roosevelt. According to Miles’s later recollection, Kim made
Anatomy
“compulsory reading for all members of his staff.”
⁶

From Burnham’s book, basically a primer in non-Marxist social thought for budding conservatives, Miles absorbed a Machiavellian sense of pessimism about human nature and the prospects for modern democracy. Brinton’s
Anatomy
, which compared four modern revolutions in an effort to detect similar underlying structures, alerted him to both revolutionary governments’ tendency to eventual collapse and the wisdom of governing elites preempting potential threats to their power. Behind Burnham and Brinton moved the figure of Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian sociologist sometimes referred to as the “Karl Marx of the bourgeoisie.” Pareto’s writings borrowed concepts from the natural sciences to depict human societies as closed systems that, after temporary disturbances, return to a state of equilibrium, rather like a body recovering from disease (Brinton repeatedly used the metaphor of fever to describe revolutions in
Anatomy)
. This idea caught on at Harvard in the 1930s among professors of a conservative bent, giving rise to talk of a Harvard “Pareto circle”; it also influenced Italian fascists like Benito Mussolini.
⁷

Miles was clearly excited by the Paretian concepts he encountered in Brinton and, especially, Burnham. He based a lecture to new CIA recruits on
The Machiavellians
and sought its author’s advice about ways to shore up revolutionary governments. Later, Miles identified three principles he had learned from Burnham: that “the first task of any ruling group is to keep itself in power . . . instead of trying to please everybody”; second, that “the behavior of a nation’s leaders must be ‘logical’—i.e. they must have a ‘deliberately held goal, or purpose’—but the leaders must never forget that they are dealing with a populace
whose motivations are mostly illogical”; and, finally, that a revolutionary government “cannot avoid the use of
some
repressive action . . . but as rapidly as possible it must systematically go about winning the support of influential groups and classes.” The successful revolutionary government, therefore, was “one that succeeds in balancing the ‘repressive’ with the ‘constructive,’ concealing the former while publicizing the latter.” Nor was Burnham’s influence on Copeland confined to specific lessons in power politics: Miles’s whole approach now had a social scientific, clinical feel to it that owed a great deal to Pareto’s notion of societies as contained, self-regulating organisms. “You can’t get angry at a diphtheria germ, it does what it does, it’s not its fault,” Miles Copeland III recalls his father saying. “You just have to understand how it works.” It was all a far cry from the fundamentally moralistic discourse of the previous generation of missionary-descended OSS Arabists.
⁸

Intellectual historians have identified the 1930s Pareto vogue as crucial in shaping the evolution of organization theory and industrial psychology, so it was no coincidence that Miles should have become interested in another new “applied” social science, management engineering. He had already demonstrated an interest in organizational dynamics in the late 1940s, when he drew up charts to manage the complex transition to the CIA from its predecessor intelligence groups. In the early 1950s, OPC boss Kilbourne Johnston introduced him to the growing body of professional literature on organization and management, or “O&M.” Combining what he read there with his new sociological knowledge and personal observations of revolutionary governments in the Middle East and Africa, Copeland wrote a thirty-page report in late 1952 on Third World leadership and bureaucracy that came to the attention of executives of the leading US management consulting company, Booz, Allen & Hamilton. Shortly afterward, he lunched with the BA&H Washington office’s director, who offered him a job helping set up the firm’s new international division. Lured by a salary double what he was being paid by the government, and perhaps only too glad for some respite from the company of old Grotonians, Miles decided to take a sabbatical from the CIA, thus becoming the first of the Agency Arabists to enter the “revolving door” between the public and private sectors.
⁹

Miles had not, however, left the government behind altogether. “You can take the boy out of the CIA, but you can’t take the CIA out of the boy,” as he explained later. Following conversations with Kim Roosevelt and Frank Wisner, Miles agreed to become what Wisner called a “loyal alumnus,” carrying out particularly sensitive duties for his former employer under the cover of his new job. BA&H did not object to this arrangement. The firm already had a history of working for government agencies, having helped the navy streamline its command structures in readiness for World War II and after the war carrying out a study of guided missile production capabilities for the air force. Later on, BA&H would become the federal government’s management consultants of choice, with a campus next door to the CIA’s Langley headquarters in McLean, Virginia. It was perhaps telling that the company’s first assignment outside the United States came in 1953, when it was contracted to carry out a land-ownership study by the Philippines government of Ramón Magsaysay, who had just come to power with the assistance of the CIA’s legendary counterinsurgency operative and “nation builder,” Edward G. Lansdale (another ad man and, allegedly, the real-life inspiration for Graham Greene’s
The Quiet American)
. BA&H’s work in the Philippines might be seen as a precursor to a broader, government-business effort to win the Cold War in the Third World by conferring on it the benefits of Western modernity, American-style—in short, by modernizing it.
¹⁰

Theodore Roosevelt and his grandson, Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt Jr., in the year of Kim’s birth, 1916.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The implacable TR and Kim’s father, the romantic adventurer Kermit Sr., shortly after their 1909 safari in East Africa.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Kim Roosevelt hunting in the Brazilian rain forest between his freshman and sophomore years at Harvard.

KERMIT AND BELLE ROOSEVELT PAPERS, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Kim with wife, Polly, and sons, Kermit III and Jonathan, in the summer of 1940, marking time in California. The following year, Kim would join the unit that became America’s wartime secret service, and precursor to the CIA, the OSS.

KERMIT AND BELLE ROOSEVELT PAPERS, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Kim’s cousin and future CIA colleague, Archie Roosevelt, Jr., during a childhood family tour of the Mediterranean.

ARCHIBALD B. ROOSEVELT JR. PAPERS, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS