“Angelo.” With no surname necessary, the mere mention put Washington’s late-Cold War intelligence establishment on edge. Their tormenter was but a thirtysomething staffer on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Contrarily, to the Cold Warriors sacrificing their all to defend the nation from Communist subversion and nuclear-missile threats, that single name, like a messenger from heaven, brought comfort and joy.

Angelo Codevilla knew and understood that the country that took him in as a boy would preserve itself and its Founding principles by having the most capable intelligence and counterintelligence services the world had ever seen. “Most capable” didn’t mean the largest, or the most lavishly funded, or supplied with the most high-tech gear. It meant having the most creative, most principled, most virtuous, and wisest people doing the job.

Angelo watched the United States’ intelligence apparatus deteriorate. Visiting CIA headquarters over the years, he passed the stone inscription that the late and great CIA director Allen Dulles placed as what he intended as a permanent greeting: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free”—the Gospel According to John. In the last year of his life, Angelo saw the videos of CIA corridors festooned with mind-numbing murals and telescreens about diversity, equity, and inclusion. To Angelo Codevilla, who spoke Latin, DEI meant “of God.” A new god, a false one, possesses the American intelligence community today.

The evolution to this point was entirely predictable, and Angelo called it out early. He had the most remarkable track record of any American. Close to a half-century ago on the brand-new Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Angelo called out the CIA, not for its cult of secrecy, but for its cult of untruthfulness.

A Relentless Force in Intelligence Oversight

Angelo arrived in the Senate in 1977, just as George H. W. Bush left his 11-month stint as CIA director, and as the liberal senator Frank Church wrapped up sensational hearings and reports about the Intelligence Community.

Angelo’s committee work and intellectual rigor were so distinguished that Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential transition team chose him to be part of its intelligence and diplomatic section. He had built a rapport with Reagan’s campaign manager, the distinguished OSS veteran William J. Casey. Casey had done the unthinkable during World War II by proposing, then running, operations behind German lines after D-Day to open the invasion route for allied American, French, and British Empire forces to march to Berlin.

Rapport and mutual respect grew to deep trust when Casey ran the CIA. Angelo became Bill Casey’s man in the Senate. But Angelo Codevilla was never the CIA’s man. To him, the CIA was just a bureaucracy that performed a necessary function. He believed that that bureaucracy was performing its function poorly, and going in the wrong direction. No bureaucracy, he believed, was sacred. Certainly none should ever be permanent.

Angelo wasn’t even Bill Casey’s man. He was his own man. He stood true to his principles, never feared burning bridges, and often anticipated enjoying the flames.

Angelo trusted and admired President Reagan for the good in him, and for his ideals. He worked closely in a fraternal and trusting relationship with Reagan’s national security advisor, Judge William Clark. Casey brought the Senate staffer Angelo to private White House meetings with President Reagan.

Angelo found himself in the curious situation—or, knowing him, he created that situation—of serving on the Senate committee whose job was to oversee the CIA, while also working with the CIA director himself to get ahold of the dysfunctional and demoralized bureaucracy. The CIA wasn’t being truthful with Congress, and it wasn’t being truthful with Casey either.

It wasn’t a matter of the CIA’s being secretive. Angelo had all the necessary clearances. It was a matter of being truthful. This bothered Angelo immensely. So did incompetence. And so did ideological blinders. Angelo was never in awe of the CIA or the FBI, though he did say once, 33 years ago, that the FBI merited some of his esteem. That was then.

That year, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, he wrote a monumental work, Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century, on what a successful intelligence community should look like, how it should act, and why. The CIA was far, far behind the curve, looking backward instead of forward. “The major elements of U.S. intelligence will have to be rethought and rebuilt,” he said.

Of course, they were not rethought or rebuilt until after their hand was forced—after the September 11 terror attacks. Even then, the rethinking and rebuilding were done entirely wrong. Instead of the eternal standards of philosophical soundness and professional excellence that Angelo laid out in 1991, the U.S. intelligence system treated its bureaucratic instincts as sacrosanct, taking critical theory as its lodestar, and glowering establishmentarians cemented the new order.

The CIA leveraged its network of mid- to late-career bureaucrats—the Old Boys—to manage perceptions by leaking to the press, helping write or actually writing the popular histories, dominating the academic studies of intelligence, and credentialing those who would play well with others.

Angelo had his own exceptional network, however. He played five-dimensional chess in his sleep. He knew all about bureaucratic warfare and subversion both as a scholar and as a practitioner. He knew exactly whom to call, when, and what to say.

Certain senators dreaded him. So did select high-ranking CIA and FBI officials.

He had a bipartisan spleen. On the Senate Intelligence Committee, Codevilla gleefully terrorized Republicans and Democrats alike with pointed, relentless inquiries that exposed intellectual inconsistencies and sheer sloppiness. He forced analysts and policymakers alike to address inconvenient facts as facts. They hated him for it, but many of them admitted he was right in private.

Angelo was known for his broad smile of iron teeth long before the Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko (or a KGB officer assigned to the pliant Washington Post reporter Dusko Doder, who related it to the American audience) came up with the term to describe Mikhail Gorbachev.

“Iron teeth” applied to Angelo far better than it did to the Soviet leader. Codevilla’s militant joviality while pummeling Washington’s morally corrupt and weak-minded power elite flummoxed both friends and enemies. Hit hardest were the victims of Codevilla’s intellectual inquisitions. They could never quite tell whether the iron smile was a signal of genuine joy in shepherding one lost in a sea of laziness and prejudice toward logical reasoning, or whether the smile was a precursor to a deadly verbal salvo until it was too late.

Challenging the Old Boys’ Club

Angelo was a perceptive talent spotter. He sized you up quickly. He would go out of his way to help those whom he deemed earnest. He reveled in discussions of facts, reason, and philosophy. One didn’t have to agree with him to be his friend. But if you were out, you were out permanently. He despised what he called “dishonest treachery.”

Treachery is part of the intelligence profession. It has to be. Angelo studied treachery and respected it. Dishonest treachery, to Angelo, was treachery executed in a morally wrong way and for morally wrong reasons. The world is treacherous. People are treacherous. To navigate treachery for a cause larger than oneself, one had to understand treachery, expect it, and deal with it on its own terms.

Born in Italy during the collapse of Mussolini’s fascist regime during World War II, Angelo always focused on the fundamentals. He always referenced the classics. He was the only member of the Senate Intelligence Committee staff, and perhaps the only person on earth, who read and studied the Intelligence Community’s entire supersecret annual budget, line by line—a pile of papers two feet high—year after year.

Angelo had a fear-inducing way of questioning intelligence leaders. He would say, “I asked Aristotle’s simple questions of officials throughout the Intelligence Community: What is the purpose of this activity? Why do you do this rather than something else? Do you do this for the sake of that, or vice versa? By what criteria do you judge your products good or bad?”

“I was astounded,” he remarked, “at how little thought had been given to decisions that affected thousands of careers, billions of dollars, and the nation’s very future. All too often the answers to my questions were ‘We’ve always done it this way,’ and ‘How insulting for you to ask!’”

Angelo understood strategy the way others pretended to.

He was offending the Agency or the Bureau. Not the missions. The mission is never first in a permanent bureaucracy.

Reasoned arguments were not part of the debate. The custom, then as now, was to attack the questioner and defend the bureaucracy. Decades before DEI and LGBTQ+, the FBI had its own informal acronym for its personnel: DEB, or Don’t Embarrass the Bureau.

“The attack is usually three-pronged,” Angelo explained when unpacking bureaucratic argumentative tactics. “First, this person must be revealing classified information. Second, this person does not know the whole story and we who do know it are forbidden from commenting, except to say ‘You’re wrong.’ Third, this person’s demeaning tone precludes a rational explanation of some admittedly valid points.”

“So, in practice, three points boil down to one: Leave the field of intelligence for the Old Boys.”

The Old Boys would retire or die out, having mentored a new set of Old Boys or New Genders, or whatever the flavor of the month may be, but the goal would be the same: silence honest discussion about intelligence, counterintelligence, and whatever has become of “national security.” Making truth-telling politically incorrect, and therefore wrong or immoral—and thus evil and professionally destructive—remains a defense tactic for intelligence-agency bureaucrats. Angelo decried political correctness very early as it came into vogue. As it was killed off in favor of a more virulent strain, wokeness, he continued his crusade against it.

The Old Boy networks that he called out from the 1970s became, or were already part of, what he would later define as “the ruling class.”

Why? What for? And Other Inconvenient Questions

Before the pale riders of cultural Marxism penetrated the Intelligence Community, Angelo was hammering away at the sheer aimlessness of American intelligence collection and analysis, most of which he saw as existing for its own sake.

After World War II and the bipartisan general consensus about containment of Communism, defining American national interests was easy: take the fight to the Communists, who were strategically mobilized to tear apart our country and our culture by any means necessary, both ideologically and physically. By defining national interests, even broadly, America could define the scope of its foreign-intelligence, counterintelligence, and national-security services.

Even the beginning faced deep flaws, plus tensions about growing globalism. That mission was poorly understood and became diluted over time, with priorities left up to “experts” from the Washington establishment and the Ivy League, further distorted by critical theorists of the Frankfurt School variety. Reagan temporarily disrupted that trend, but his monumental mission to bring down the USSR itself required immense intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities.

The end of the Soviet Union allowed anyone with eyes to see that the intelligence establishment had become, as Codevilla had warned from his Senate staff perch, a huge intelligence-industrial complex that existed more for itself than for the national interest, whatever that national interest had become.

Codevilla became one of the first serious people after the Cold War to question why the United States was pouring so many resources into technologies to spy on everything possible around the world. Surveying America’s colossal human- and technological-intelligence might in 1992, he asked, “What for?”

Then, he crystallized the obvious but inconvenient facts. “To what does all of this amount? The activities to which we loosely refer as the U.S. technical collection system was never planned according to any single purpose, nor are they administered by a single organization,” he said. Some congressional oversight “sometimes prod[s] the system toward coherence. Yet coherence is elusive, because coordination is ex post facto to budgetary planning.”

Angelo’s unwelcome observation went unheeded, with Osama bin Laden proving the point with his ingeniously simple attacks of September 11, 2001, and all the Saudi and Qatari funding behind them. The al-Qaeda leader was but the most famous of a parade of “known wolves.” A bright and aggressive CIA man in Sudan tried to arrange bin Laden’s capture or elimination before he carried out the acts of terror he was openly planning, but he found little support up the intelligence chain, and zero at the top of the CIA and in the Clinton White House. So, bin Laden was allowed to remain free to attack.

It took a madman in a cave to force the United States to drop everything and try to add coherence to American intelligence. When that coherence came, it arrived in the hurried form of a huge centralized security apparat with near-limitless capabilities: the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, an überpowerful post which, in the wrong hands, would build coherence by abusing power and politicizing the apparat, resulting, by the time of Codevilla’s death, in a largely incoherent intelligence politburo, a rogue state deeply embedded within a state, whose modus operandi became guided by a revived Comintern’s critical theory and wokeness.

“Intelligence concerns human activities, and human beings, unlike God, go to great lengths to disguise their work. So perhaps the most serious charge that can be made against the fruits of U.S. intelligence concerns not the collectors but another set of people: The counterintelligence officers who should have guarded the integrity of the collectors’ work,” Angelo wrote in Informing Statecraft. American counterintelligence failed to do so, and Codevilla is one of the very few scholars to explain why.

Weaponized Language

Angelo carefully studied language and the weaponization of words and grammar. He disdained wishy-washy intelligence products, full of caveats, euphemisms, and that terrible passive voice.

He embraced the ancient treasure of virtue. Here I speak of virtue in the Aristotelian, Hebraic, and Christian senses. Niccolò Machiavelli changed the public understanding of virtue, influencing philosophers of liberalism in subsequent centuries. He taught how to change language to trick the reader to agree with the opposite of the original definition and intent, and to reason, with easy logic, that evil was a virtue.

This was the most subversive aspect of Machiavelli’s writings. Subversion is an operational part of intelligence, though seldom adequately practiced by the CIA abroad or identified and combated by the FBI to protect our constitutional republic at home (though competently waged against the American public). Most readers of Machiavelli rely on translations. Angelo grew frustrated with some of those translations, even those by the finest scholars. Raised in an Italian-speaking home, he read Machiavelli in its original form and discovered that, especially in the case of the Florentine’s most important work, The Prince, the translators had “cleaned up” the Florentine evil genius’s imprecise uses of words, his often poor grammar, double meaning, or doublespeak, and indeed his bad use of pronouns. The cleanups improved the flow and readability of the translations, and arguably corrected Machiavelli’s sloppy mistakes.

Angelo found that Machiavelli’s mistakes were purposeful, intended to convey or obscure meaning. So he set out to re-translate The Prince, in a literal but what he called an inelegant translation, and packed it with footnotes to explain the calculated plays on words and puns to distort language and understanding.

Machiavelli was all about power for power’s sake—not for higher ideals, as Allen Dulles or Bill Casey later sought. It was simply power politics. Angelo explained how the mistranslators of Machiavelli, inadvertently or otherwise, taught people to dispense with goodness and all forms of higher purpose, to break down human relationships and society for the purposes of power. Machiavelli twisted the meaning of virtue into a “tool for wretchedness,” suggesting that evil may be praiseworthy, twisting the concepts of evil and good. The Prince, Angelo said, marked the center of gravity from the standpoint of the sovereign: “Do I do virtuous things that don’t keep me #1, or do I do evil things and stay on top?” It refers to no higher purpose than that.

And so Angelo foresaw, whether translating Machiavelli or writing on—and acting for—intelligence, counterintelligence, and national security, that the machinery created to defend our constitutional republic has been perverted to seek and preserve power for power’s sake. The CIA as a bureaucracy, the FBI as a bureaucracy, Old Boy networks against citizens, the ruling class, political correctness, wokeness, critical theory, and cultural Marxism are all effectively automatons stockpiling power for their own sake.

Subversion

Treachery had a love child called subversion. Few mainstream American studies of intelligence or counterintelligence over the past six decades or so devote much attention to subversion—how both to defend ourselves and our society against it, and to utilize it against our enemies. Codevilla treated subversion as a natural human behavior. He devoted a whole chapter to it in Informing Statecraft.

He also made a study of one of the 20th century’s most notorious subversives, the Italian Comintern man Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci took the gradualist, cultural-Marxist approach to revolution, combining the evils of Marxism with the evils of Machiavelli and a dash of Mussolini to give us an early strain of critical theory.

Few besides Gramsci knew and applied Machiavelli as well as Angelo. Gramsci did it to subvert and destroy Western civilization. Codevilla understood and explained Machiavelli in a bid to save civilization and its moral foundations, and to save its chief protector, at least then: the United States of America.

Angelo also understood Gramsci’s kindred spirits at the Germany-based Frankfurt School, also a Comintern enterprise, which was rooted at Columbia University and fanned out through the Ivy League and West Coast universities. The Frankfurt School populated the OSS Research and Analysis Branch during World War II, infiltrated the early CIA’s intelligence directorate and its analytical products with a cultural-Marxist worldview, and penetrated the FBI after Robert Mueller’s centralization and indiscriminate mass hires following 9/11, which is quite likely why President Obama asked Congress to extend Mueller’s statutory ten-year term limit as director for another two years, making the then cognitively impaired Mueller the second-longest-reigning FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover. This wreaked damage that the rest of us are only beginning to understand as we see the rot of critical theory permeate the Intelligence Community, just as it has our military and educational systems.

Angelo called it early. In a work on political warfare that he wrote in 2006 titled Political Warfare: Means for Achieving Political Ends, he noted that, as dangerous as the enemy spies are who steal secrets, they merely steal secrets. Alger Hiss was a valuable Soviet spy, but his greatest value to the Soviet enemy was something else by far: a major controlled agent of influence and recruiter for Moscow within the Democratic and diplomatic establishments.

Worse than the spies who steal secrets and the controlled agents of influence, Angelo warned, were the subversive, uncontrolled fellow travelers, the so-called innocents and useful idiots who followed and mainstreamed the work of controlled agents—the men who designed the sellout to Stalin at Yalta, for example.

Since World War II, United States foreign policy succeeded despite, not because of, its giant intelligence-industrial apparat, Codevilla argued in his 1992 book. Informing Statecraft is so fundamental, and its principles and guidance so timeless, that it remains among the most important and informative volumes on both statecraft and intelligence more than three decades later. A future president should require all his intelligence, national security, and foreign-policy appointees to master the book.

American intelligence and counterintelligence understand little of this in terms of performing their missions that the public has entrusted to them. Nor does Congress, which makes the laws.

Nor do the courts which interpret them. Nor do all but a very few of the nation’s schools. And so Angelo Codevilla’s approach to intelligence laid the foundations for his studies of America’s national character and of the ruling class.

Enduring Character

To Angelo, America’s superpower status was an exception to its exceptionalism, an anomaly brought about by its defeat of fascism and its brief but squandered winning of the Cold War over the Soviet Union and Communism. The post-Soviet world, he reasoned, was time for America to return to its founding roots.

Nations have character. Their governments affect society, the moral order, and family. In a vicious circle, politics make or break all. The Founding Fathers of the United States were all men of character. They spoke openly of virtue, not in the twisted Machiavellian sense, but in its real essence.

A coherent and strategic foreign policy was a core element of the American Revolution, the founding of the American constitutional republic, and the growth of the United States and the American dream to become a superpower. The greatest successes occurred when American intelligence, like the federal government itself, was very limited and very small, and when U.S. strategic goals were simple and understandable to the average citizen who could support them.

Times are different, but the principle remains. The United States needs a strong foreign secret-intelligence service to collect and analyze information on issues vital to its national interests to inform a president and his administration. It needs a similar service to conduct activities covertly that diplomats and the military cannot or should not do. It needs a robust counterintelligence service to neutralize foreign spying and influence against us, and a moderate security service to defend against violent or subversive internal threats to the Constitution.

Sheer size bears no relation to strength and robustness. As the world’s sole superpower, the United States built a Leviathan government that created a new ruling class through a form of bureaucracy and corporatism that linked political power and wealth. It attacked family, religious belief, and personal character. Surveying history, and stressing the profound America chronicled by Alexis de Tocqueville, Angelo in 1997 recognized the culture wars underway that ultimately begat today’s critical theory of wokeness.

How could America keep the peace in the world if it wasn’t even at peace with itself? Angelo naturally wrote a book about it: To Make and Keep Peace, subtitled Among Ourselves and with All Nations. Much earlier, with Paul Seabury, he wrote one of the most important modern textbooks of peace’s opposite, titled War: Ends and Means. And then, he provided a collection of essays during the Global War on Terrorism, titled No Victory, No Peace, which observed, in what would mark the early part of a forever war, “The Bush Administration has not achieved peace because it has not sought victory.” That was back in 2005.

Angelo constantly asked the annoying question, “Why go to war if you don’t intend to win?”

A common thread bound all his works on conflict, defense, intelligence, peace, and treachery. That thread was about keeping America first, a solid and reasoned approach without the politicized jingoism, and tempered by a firm grounding in American Founding principles and the Western moral tradition.

As time went by, after Reagan’s successful strategy brought down the Soviet Union and the military-industrial and intelligence-industrial complexes mushroomed to what they are today, Angelo focused extensively on the elites who run American politics and policy, and the uniparty that became known as the Swamp and the permanent ruling class.

As an aside, perhaps Angelo’s most impactful legacy, more than forty years ago, was to build up a leader in the U.S. Senate to push for a space-based weapons system to shoot down incoming ballistic nuclear missiles. This effort involved constant coordination with the Reagan White House. A Soviet active-measures campaign aimed at weak and treacherous politicians and other elites kept Congress from providing the funds to build and deploy that revolutionary, workable system. The prospect of an American strategic missile-defense system wrecked the Soviets’ nuclear war calculus and, with Reagan’s own nuclear modernization, tricked the Kremlin into bankrupting the USSR with needless new weapons programs that Reagan planned to negotiate away. However, Congress never funded a functional space-based missile defense, and, to this day, America remains completely vulnerable to a strategic nuclear-missile attack.

The ruling class, as personified by President George W. Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton, never tried to understand the nature of the jihadist enemy. Angelo called them out for it at the time. Unlike in domestic politics, where they worked tirelessly to keep themselves in power, he observed, they never sought to win abroad. The same was true for the permanent class within the military and intelligence communities. Indeed, by the 2000s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had completely removed the word “victory” from its annual 400-page Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms.

On learning this during dinner with friends, Angelo grew incensed but was not at all surprised, switching the conversation to pose the question, “Why have a military if our leaders say nothing of victory?”

This need for an endlessly growing spy machine resulted more through the incrementalism of American interventionism and forever wars than through a grand design for a giant foreign and domestic spy apparat, or so we’d like to think, but the result was the same. A grandly designed spy apparat would have been more logical and effective than the one we have.

Angelo Codevilla flew with the high and mighty, not because he craved being among them but because he knew he had to be.

Even in Washington, he always took the time to mentor young people to become the next generation of diplomats, spies, and national security leaders.

He taught, among remarkable colleagues, at Boston University during the years when BU President John Silber was on the cusp of transforming the middling school into a top-flight institution with a world-class national-security and international diplomacy program—a transformation that died with Silber and swirled down the loo of intellectual mediocrity, wokeness, and the scam of critical-race-theory corruption. Still, Boston University’s very woke Pardee School of Global Studies, of which Angelo was never on the faculty because the school didn’t exist at the time, proudly claims him as a professor emeritus.

Mere Bureaucracies in Need of Replacement

Government bureaucracies are just bureaucracies. When they atrophy and abuse the public trust, they should be abolished. In an orderly way, their essential functions can be transferred to another bureaucracy that can do the job, or, better yet, they can be culled to create a new bureaucracy to last for as long as it faithfully executes its intended purpose.

Angelo agreed that we don’t need the FBI and CIA as they are. But that doesn’t mean that America doesn’t need strong foreign-intelligence, counterintelligence, and even internal-security agencies to defend the country and its interests from foreign adversaries. Bureaucracies come and go. And just as the FBI and the CIA came from parts of the distant past, Angelo argued in his later years that it was time for them to go in favor of something better.

Replacements would have to be designed according to the priorities of America’s mission in the world, which he saw as driven by the American people’s priorities for the central government to serve them, with their consent as the governed, and not for the ruling class to serve itself. The people determine their needs, the elected officials determine strategies and policies to fulfill those needs, and then the officials design and authorize the intelligence apparatus necessary to execute those strategies and policies.

And this is where Angelo labored his last. For years he had referred to the America seen by Tocqueville—its mission, its place in the world, its relations with foreign countries, and its securing its own defense. His last work, published posthumously in 2022, drew lessons in statecraft from an intellectual and political giant and near-forgotten contemporary of Tocqueville, President John Quincy Adams.

Although America had leading political families such as the Adamses even when Tocqueville made his observations, there was no ruling class. America’s founders fought relentlessly to avoid the emergence of a national class of elites, even though several states in the federation had their own dominant political or economic families and clans. But there was no massive, permanent central government with a constellation of companies with business models of milking the taxpayers’ udders. There was no interstate ruling class.

The superficiality of popular American history almost passes over John Quincy Adams, viewing him as the son of a Founding Father and a one-term president during a period of undistinguished one-termers.

In America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations: Lessons in Statecraft from John Quincy Adams, Codevilla described a true American foreign policy, one as consistent with the vision of the Founding Fathers as with present-day America First nationalism. Adams was the brilliant but practically forgotten 19th-century secretary of state and president who, as a five-year-old, had been brought by his parents, John and Abigail Adams, to watch the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775.

John Quincy Adams effectively founded U.S. foreign policy and grand strategy. He authored the Monroe Doctrine to preserve the independence of the new American republics from Mexico to South America, and to keep European powers out of the region.

In studying Adams’s extraordinary experiences as diplomat, secretary of state, president, and statesman, Codevilla showed America’s successes in determining its own national interests in geopolitics by limiting them, reducing the need for a global, expeditionary military and a centralized, European-style security state to prop up, among other things, a ruling class. He celebrated John Quincy Adams’s principles and achievements—among them, ghostwriting the extraordinarily successful Monroe Doctrine as secretary of state—and tracked American foreign policy and geostrategy from Adams’s time to the present, uncovering a consistency of principles regardless of international circumstances.

Application of those principles is directly associated with America’s rise. Abandonment of them, over time, tracks with America’s relative decline. Revival of them, Codevilla would argue, would be cause for optimism.