How Vladmir Lenin Inspired the CIA's Long History of Covert Political Warfare

Top Secret documents released decades ago show US officials noticed how good the Soviets were at political warfare. And they were impressed.

Regular readers know that I’ve long been intrigued by CIA history (here, here, and here) and troubled by recent CIA political shenanigans (here, here, and here).

It’s safe to say I have a deep suspicion of the intelligence agency and severe doubts that it should exist at all, in no small part because even life-long agents themselves viewed “the Agency” as an evil institution.

For an engaging history, I recommend reading David Talbot’s book The Devil’s Chessboard.

All of that said, I won’t claim to be an expert on the CIA specifically or US intelligence agencies broadly. My knowledge is more wide than deep, and I still have a great deal to learn.

I bring all of this up because I recently came across an old document of some significance that I’d never heard of before titled, “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare.”

It was authored by George Kennan, the State Department Policy Planning Director who’d go on to be a successful US diplomat, for the National Security Council (which governed the CIA), and the document explained how the US government had to mobilize national resources “for covert political warfare” to combat the Soviet Union.

Kennan was not, in my opinion, a bad man. He had good instincts and sound motives, at least compared to others in the US intelligence apparatus. He was an early opponent of the Vietnam War and later was one of the first diplomatic leaders to warn against the US policy of expanding NATO up to Russia’s doorstep, something he predicted would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.”

That said, it’s clear that Kennan was not appalled by the Soviet Union’s use of covert political warfare. He was impressed by it.

“Lenin so synthesized the teachings of Marx and Clausewitz that the Kremlin’s conduct of political warfare has become the most refined and effective of any in history,” Kennan wrote in the document.

“We have been handicapped however by a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war, by a tendency to view war as a sort of sporting context outside of all political context, by a national tendency to seek for a political cure-all, and by a reluctance to recognize the realities of international relations—the perpetual rhythm of [struggle, in and out of war.]”

The document is fascinating because it appears to mark the genesis of the US government’s first formal steps into the world of political warfare—a well-documented history that includes toppling governments, assassinating world leaders, tipping elections, and torturing enemies.

All of these efforts, of course, initially targeted external parties and countries to serve “the national interest.”

This is no longer the case. The CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies no longer restrict their covert political warfare to foreign states, and I’m not talking about just Operation Mockingbird and other domestic propaganda efforts.

The CIA is clearly putting its thumb on the scales of US elections in ways that should terrify all Americans.

Harry Truman had it right more than 60 years ago when, following the Kennedy assassination, he warned that the CIA was becoming a dangerous, undemocratic force.

“For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas. I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations.”