Garry Wills mentions this in Confessions of a Conservative, and it's one of my favorite details about Frank Meyer: he'd occasionally wonder if National Review was actually a CIA outfit—WFB of course had been in the CIA. So was his sister Priscilla (NR managing editor)
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Replying to @MatthewSitman
Burnham and Kendall were also ex-CIA (or, really, "ex-CIA" since they maintained contact with agency). Bill Casey, future CIA head, raised the initial seed money for NR. Howard Hunt also circled around. What do we make of all this?
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Replying to @HeerJeet @MatthewSitman
That the CIA was capable of being responsible for more than the CCF, and is paradoxically actually less important than its footprint seems to indicate. Burnham didn't need the CIA to be the dude he became. Neither, for that matter, did Buckley.
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Yeah, it's not so much WFB & JB were pawns of CIA as they were a faction in CIA, opposed to the non-communist Left faction. Part of mission of NR, I think, was to provide a counterweight to the NCL.
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