The CIA and the Cultural Cold War

by **proldic** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 4:11 pm

"The U.S. and European Democratic Left's anti-Stalinist rhetorical ejaculations...were a useful ideological cover for the heinous crimes of the West." The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited by James Petras November 1999 Monthly Review Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books), £20. This book provides a detailed account of the ways in which the CIA penetrated and influenced a vast array of cultural organizations, through its front groups and via friendly philanthropic organizations like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. The author, Frances Stonor Saunders, details how and why the CIA ran cultural congresses, mounted exhibits, and organized concerts. The CIA also published and translated well-known authors who toed the Washington line, sponsored abstract art to counteract art with any social content and, throughout the world, subsidized journals that criticized Marxism, communism, and revolutionary politics and apologized for, or ignored, violent and destructive imperialist U.S. policies. The CIA was able to harness some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West in service of these policies, to the extent that some intellectuals were directly on the CIA payroll. Many were knowingly involved with CIA "projects," and others drifted in and out of its orbit, claiming ignorance of the CIA connection after their CIA sponsors were publicly exposed during the late 1960s and the Vietnam war, after the turn of the political tide to the left. U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the "Democratic Left" and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell. The CIA, under the prodding of Sidney Hook and Melvin Lasky, was instrumental in funding the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a kind of cultural NATO that grouped together all sorts of "anti-Stalinist" leftists and rightists. They were completely free to defend Western cultural and political values, attack "Stalinist totalitarianism" and to tiptoe gently around U.S. racism and imperialism. Occasionally, a piece marginally critical of U.S. mass society was printed in the CIA-subsidized journals. What was particularly bizarre about this collection of CIA-funded intellectuals was not only their political partisanship, but their pretense that they were disinterested seekers of truth, iconoclastic humanists, freespirited intellectuals, or artists for art's sake, who counterposed themselves to the corrupted "committed" house "hacks" of the Stalinist apparatus. It is impossible to believe their claims of ignorance of CIA ties. How could they ignore the absence in the journals of any basic criticism of the numerous lynchings throughout the southern United States during the whole period? How could they ignore the absence, during their cultural congresses, of criticism of U.S. imperialist intervention in Guatemala, Iran, Greece, and Korea that led to millions of deaths? How could they ignore the gross apologies of every imperialist crime of their day in the journals in which they wrote? They were all soldiers: some glib, vitriolic, crude, and polemical, like Hook and Lasky; others elegant essayists like Stephen Spender or self-righteous informers like George Orwell. Saunders portrays the WASP Ivy League elite at the CIA holding the strings, and the vitriolic Jewish ex-leftists snarling at leftist dissidents. When the truth came out in the late 1960s and New York, Paris, and London "intellectuals" feigned indignation at having been used, the CIA retaliated. Tom Braden, who directed the International Organizations Branch of the CIA, blew their cover by detailing how they all had to have known who paid their salaries and stipends (397-404). According to Braden, the CIA financed their "literary froth," as CIA hardliner Cord Meyer called the anti-Stalinist intellectual exercises of Hook, Kristol, and Lasky. Regarding the most prestigious and best-known publications of the self-styled "Democratic Left" (Encounter, New Leader, Partisan Review), Braden wrote that the money for them came from the CIA and that "an agent became the editor of Encounter" (39<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> . By 1953, Braden wrote, "we were operating or influencing international organizations in every field" (39<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> . Saunders' book provides useful information about several important questions regarding the ways in which CIA intellectual operatives defended U.S. imperialist interests on cultural fronts. It also initiates an important discussion of the long-term consequences of the ideological and artistic positions defended by CIA intellectuals. Saunders refutes the claims (made by Hook, Kristol, and Lasky) that the CIA and its friendly foundations provided aid with no strings attached. She demonstrates that "the individuals and institutions subsidized by the CIA were expected to perform as part ... of a propaganda war." The most effective propaganda was defined by the CIA as the kind where "the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own." While the CIA allowed their assets on the "Democratic Left" to prattle occasionally about social reform, it was the "anti-Stalinist" polemics and literary diatribes against Western Marxists and Soviet writers and artists that they were most interested in, funded most generously, and promoted with the greatest visibility. Braden referred to this as the "convergence" between the CIA and the European "Democratic Left" in the fight against communism. The collaboration between the "Democratic Left" and the CIA included strike-breaking in France, informing on Stalinists (Orwell and Hook), and covert smear campaigns to prevent leftist artists from receiving recognition (including Pablo Neruda's bid for a Nobel Prize in 1964 [351]). The CIA, as the arm of the U.S. government most concerned with fighting the cultural Cold War, focused on Europe in the period immediately following the Second World War. Having experienced almost two decades of capitalist war, depression, and postwar occupation, the overwhelming majority of European intellectuals and trade unionists were anticapitalist and particularly critical of the hegemonic pretensions of the United States. To counter the appeal of communism and the growth of the European Communist Parties (particularly in France and Italy), the CIA devised a two-tier program. On the one hand, as Saunders argues, certain European authors were promoted as part of an explicitly "anticommunist program." The CIA cultural commissar's criteria for "suitable texts" included "whatever critiques of Soviet foreign policy and Communism as a form of government we find to be objective (sic) and convincingly written and timely." The CIA was especially keen on publishing disillusioned ex-communists like Silone, Koestler, and Gide. The CIA promoted anticommunist writers by funding lavish conferences in Paris, Berlin, and Bellagio (overlooking Lake Como), where objective social scientists and philosophers like Isaiah Berlin, Daniel Bell, and Czeslow Milosz preached their values (and the virtues of Western freedom and intellectual independence, within the anticommunist and pro-Washington parameters defined by their CIA paymasters). None of these prestigious intellectuals dared to raise any doubts or questions regarding U.S. support of the mass killing in colonial Indochina and Algeria, the witch hunt of U.S. intellectuals or the paramilitary (Ku Klux Klan) lynchings in the southern United States. Such banal concerns would only "play into the hands of the Communists," according to Sidney Hook, Melvin Lasky, and the Partisan Review crowd, who eagerly sought funds for their quasi-bankrupt literary operation. Many of the so-called prestigious anticommunist literary and political journals would long have gone out of business were it not for CIA subsidies, which bought thousands of copies that it later distributed free. The second cultural track on which the CIA operated was much more subtle. Here, it promoted symphonies, art exhibits, ballet, theater groups, and well-known jazz and opera performers with the explicit aim of neutralizing anti-imperialist sentiment in Europe and creating an appreciation of U.S. culture and government. The idea behind this policy was to showcase U.S. culture, in order to gain cultural hegemony to support its military-economic empire. The CIA was especially keen on sending black artists to Europe -- particularly singers (like Marion Anderson), writers, and musicians (such as Louis Armstrong) -- to neutralize European hostility toward Washington's racist domestic policies. If black intellectuals didn't stick to the U.S. artistic script and wandered into explicit criticism, they were banished from the list, as was the case with writer Richard Wright. The degree of CIA political control over the intellectual agenda of these seemingly nonpolitical artistic activities was clearly demonstrated by the reaction of the editors of Encounter (Lasky and Kristol, among others) with regard to an article submitted by Dwight MacDonald. MacDonald, a maverick anarchist intellectual, was a long-time collaborator with the CIA-run Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter. In 1958, he wrote an article for Encounter entitled "America America," in which he expressed his revulsion for U.S. mass culture, its crude materialism, and lack of civility. It was a rebuttal of the American values that were prime propaganda material in the CIA's and Encounter's cultural war against communism. MacDonald's attack of the "decadent American imperium" was too much for the CIA and its intellectual operatives in Encounter. As Braden, in his guidelines to the intellectuals, stated "organizations receiving CIA funds should not be required to support every aspect of U.S. policy," but invariably there was a cut-off point -- particularly where U.S. foreign policy was concerned (314). Despite the fact that MacDonald was a former editor of Encounter, the article was rejected. The pious claims of Cold War writers like Nicola Chiaromonte, writing in the second issue of Encounter, that "[t]he duty that no intellectual can shirk without degrading himself is the duty to expose fictions and to refuse to call `useful lies,' truths," certainly did not apply to Encounter and its distinguished list of contributors when it came to dealing with the `useful lies' of the West. One of the most important and fascinating discussions in Saunders' book is about the fact that CIA and its allies in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) poured vast sums of money into promoting Abstract Expressionist (AE) painting and painters as an antidote to art with a social content. In promoting AE, the CIA fought off the right-wing in Congress. What the CIA saw in AE was an "anti-Communist ideology, the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise. Non-figurative and politically silent it was the very antithesis of socialist realism" (254). They viewed AE as the true expression of the national will. To bypass right-wing criticism, the CIA turned to the private sector (namely MOMA and its co-founder, Nelson Rockefeller, who referred to AE as "free enterprise painting.") Many directors at MOMA had longstanding links to the CIA and were more than willing to lend a hand in promoting AE as a weapon in the cultural Cold War. Heavily funded exhibits of AE were organized all over Europe; art critics were mobilized, and art magazines churned out articles full of lavish praise. The combined economic resources of MOMA and the CIA-run Fairfield Foundation ensured the collaboration of Europe's most prestigious galleries which, in turn, were able to influence aesthetics across Europe. AE as "free art" ideology (George Kennan, 272) was used to attack politically committed artists in Europe. The Congress for Cultural Freedom (the CIA front) threw its weight behind abstract painting, over representational or realist aesthetics, in an explicit political act. Commenting on the political role of AE, Saunders points out: "One of the extraordinary features of the role that American painting played in the cultural Cold War is not the fact that it became part of the enterprise, but that a movement which so deliberately declared itself to be apolitical could become so intensely politicized" (275). The CIA associated apolitical artists and art with freedom. This was directed toward neutralizing the artists on the European left. The irony, of course, was that the apolitical posturing was only for left-wing consumption. Nevertheless, the CIA and its cultural organizations were able to profoundly shape the postwar view of art. Many prestigious writers, poets, artists, and musicians proclaimed their independence from politics and declared their belief in art for art's sake. The dogma of the free artist or intellectual, as someone disconnected from political engagement, gained ascendancy and is pervasive to this day. While Saunders has presented a superbly detailed account of the links between the CIA and Western artists and intellectuals, she leaves unexplored the structural reasons for the necessity of CIA deception and control over dissent. Her discussion is framed largely in the context of political competition and conflict with Soviet communism. There is no serious attempt to locate the CIA's cultural Cold War in the context of class warfare, indigenous third world revolutions, and independent Marxist challenges to U.S. imperialist economic domination. This leads Saunders to selectively praise some CIA ventures at the expense of others, some operatives over others. Rather than see the CIA's cultural war as part of an imperialist system, Saunders tends to be critical of its deceptive and distinct reactive nature. The U.S.-NATO cultural conquest of Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR should quickly dispel any notion that the cultural war was a defensive action. The very origins of the cultural Cold War were rooted in class warfare. Early on, the CIA and its U.S. AFL-CIO operatives Irving Brown and Jay Lovestone (ex-communists) poured millions of dollars into subverting militant trade unions and breaking strikes through the funding of social democratic unions (94). The Congress for Cultural Freedom and its enlightened intellectuals were funded by the same CIA operatives who hired Marseilles gangsters to break the dockworkers' strikes in 1948. After the Second World War, with the discrediting in Western Europe of the old right (compromised by its links to the fascists and a weak capitalist system), the CIA realized that, in order to undermine the anti-NATO trade unionists and intellectuals, it needed to find (or invent) a Democratic Left to engage in ideological warfare. A special sector of the CIA was set up to circumvent right-wing Congressional objections. The Democratic Left was essentially used to combat the radical left and to provide an ideological gloss on U.S. hegemony in Europe. At no point were the ideological pugilists of the democratic left in any position to shape the strategic policies and interests of the United States. Their job was not to question or demand, but to serve the empire in the name of "Western democratic values." Only when massive opposition to the Vietnam War surfaced in the United States and Europe, and their CIA covers were blown, did many of the CIA-promoted and -financed intellectuals jump ship and begin to criticize U.S. foreign policy. For example, after spending most of his career on the CIA payroll, Stephen Spender became a critic of U.S. Vietnam policy, as did some of the editors of Partisan Review. They all claimed innocence, but few critics believed that a love affair with so many journals and convention junkets, so long and deeply involved, could transpire without some degree of knowledge. The CIA's involvement in the cultural life of the United States, Europe, and elsewhere had important long-term consequences. Many intellectuals were rewarded with prestige, public recognition, and research funds precisely for operating within the ideological blinders set by the Agency. Some of the biggest names in philosophy, political ethics, sociology, and art, who gained visibility from CIA-funded conferences and journals, went on to establish the norms and standards for promotion of the new generation, based on the political parameters established by the CIA. Not merit nor skill, but politics -- the Washington line -- defined "truth" and "excellence" and future chairs in prestigious academic settings, foundations, and museums. The U.S. and European Democratic Left's anti-Stalinist rhetorical ejaculations, and their proclamations of faith in democratic values and freedom, were a useful ideological cover for the heinous crimes of the West. Once again, in NATO's recent war against Yugoslavia, many Democratic Left intellectuals have lined up with the West and the KLA in its bloody purge of tens of thousands of Serbs and the murder of scores of innocent civilians. If anti-Stalinism was the opium of the Democratic Left during the Cold War, human rights interventionism has the same narcotizing effect today, and deludes contemporary Democratic Leftists. The CIA's cultural campaigns created the prototype for today's seemingly apolitical intellectuals, academics, and artists who are divorced from popular struggles and whose worth rises with their distance from the working classes and their proximity to prestigious foundations. The CIA role model of the successful professional is the ideological gatekeeper, excluding critical intellectuals who write about class struggle, class exploitation and U.S. imperialism -- "ideological" not "objective" categories, or so they are told. The singular lasting, damaging influence of the CIA's Congress of Cultural Freedom crowd was not their specific defenses of U.S. imperialist policies, but their success in imposing on subsequent generations of intellectuals the idea of excluding any sustained discussion of U.S. imperialism from the influential cultural and political media. The issue is not that today's intellectuals or artists may or may not take a progressive position on this or that issue. The problem is the pervasive belief among writers and artists that anti-imperialist social and political expressions should not appear in their music, paintings, and serious writing if they want their work to be considered of substantial artistic merit. The enduring political victory of the CIA was to convince intellectuals that serious and sustained political engagement on the left is incompatible with serious art and scholarship. Today at the opera, theater, and art galleries, as well as in the professional meetings of academics, the Cold War values of the CIA are visible and pervasive: who dares to undress the emperor? James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghampton University, New York, and author of: Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st Century with Henry Veltmeyer (Zed Books, 2001), The Dynamics of Social Change in Latin America with Henry Veltmeyer (McMillan, 2000), Empire or Republic: Global Power or Domestic Decay in the US with Morris Morley (Routledge, 1995), Latin America in the Time of Cholera: Electoral Politics, Market Economics, and Permanent Crisis with Morris Morley (Routledge, 1992), Latin America: Bankers, Generals and the Struggle for Social Justice (Rowman & Littlefield, 1986), Class, State, and Power in the Third World, With Case Studies on Class Conflict in Latin America (Rowman & Littlefield, 1981) The Nationalization of Venezuelan Oil (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 197<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> , The United States and Chile: Imperialism and the Overthrow of the Allende Government (Monthly Review Press, 1975), Latin America: From Dependence to Revolution (John Wiley & Sons, 1973), Peasants in Revolt; A Chilean Case Study, 1965-1971 (Univ of Texas, 1973), How Allende fell: a study in U.S.-Chilean relations (Spokesman Books), Cultivating revolution; the United States and agrarian reform in Latin America (Random House, 1971) Politics and Social Forces in Chilean Development (University of California Press, 1969). James Petras' web site in english is at: <a href="http://www.rebelion.org/petrasenglish.htm">www.rebelion.org/petrasenglish.htm</a> A superset list of his articles in Spanish is at: <a href="http://www.rebelion.org/petras.htm">www.rebelion.org/petras.htm</a>

by **DrDebugDU** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 4:28 pm

Can you do me a favor and copy it to the Data Dump's CIA section as well <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/wink.gif ALT=";)"> Some more stuff about the CCF (already in the Data Dump): Congress for Cultural Freedom In 1967, Ramparts magazine and the Saturday Evening Post reported on the CIA's funding of a number of anti- communist cultural organizations aimed at winning the support of Soviet-sympathizing liberals worldwide. These reports were lent credence by a statement made by a former CIA covert operations director admitting to CIA financing and operation of the CCF. In July, 2004, the Australian political party Citizen's Electoral Council (CEC), a member of the Lyndon LaRouche movement, released a pamphlet called Children of Satan III—The Sexual Congress For Cultural Fascism, claiming that the CCF was a CIA cultural warfare unit sponsoring hideous modernist and postmodernist "art" in an effort to undermine the population's ability to think, and claimed Jackson Pollock was a supporter of the CCF, to that end. Theories about the Australian arm of the IACF have abounded since 1975, when then Australian Governor-General John Kerr, an IACF member, dismissed the government of then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, a move that some at the time interpreted as coup d'etat engineered from the United States. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_for_Cultural_Freedom">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Con...al_Freedom</a> How Dulles Ran the CCF The Congress for Cultural Freedom Making the Postwar World Safe for Fascist Kulturkampf The CCF as a cold war assault on classical culture -- by Steven Meyer & Jeffrey Steinberg, 2004-06-25 source: Executive Intelligence Review (...) How Dulles Ran the CCF CCF was run through Frank Wisner's Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), which gave CCF the codename QKOPERA. Reporting to Wisner was the CIA's Lawrence de Neufville, who worked at the Agency's French Labor desk. Michael Josselson of the CIA worked in CCF's Paris headquarters. James Burnham, the former Trotskyite, was hired as a consultant to OPC and was the primary liaison between the CIA and the intellectual community. The bag man and paymaster for the operation was Irving Brown, who also ran CIA covert programs through European trade-union covers. Recently discovered archival material from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics indicates that Brown was under investigation in the mid-1960s for trafficking in drugs, or money-laundering from drug- trafficking (which provided funds for covert operations). U.S. documents linked him to notorious French crime bosses and Italian mafia figures. The Fairfield Foundation and several other foundations were created by the CIA as fronts to pass funds. Once programs were established, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations took over major aspects of the funding, with the help of other leading U.S. family foundations. Former German High Commissioner McCloy had personally written to mid- 1960s Ford Foundation president McGeorge Bundy, to secure funding for the Congress at the moment that the CIA was exposing its former ties to CCF via the Tom Braden Saturday Evening Post story. Victor Marchetti, the former top CIA officer who wrote the first major expose of the Agency's covert operations, the 1974 [book] The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, explained that the Agency had gone overboard in their use of front foundations: "The CIA's culture-loving, optimistic, freewheeling operators, however, made serious tactical errors in funding these 'private' institutions. Over the years, the Agency became involved with so many groups that direct supervision and accounting were not always possible. Moreover, the Agency violated a fundamental rule of intelligence in not carefully separating the operations of each organization from all the others. Thus, when the first disclosures of CIA involvement were published early in 1967, enterprising journalists found that the financing arrangements and the conduit foundations were so intertwined and over-used that still other groups which had been receiving CIA funds could be tracked down." <a href="http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp/ArticleDisplay.php?Article=Kulturkampf#Dulles">www.modernhistoryproject....mpf#Dulles</a> <a href="http://demopedia.democraticunderground.com/index.php/Congress_for_Cultural_Freedom">demopedia.democraticunder...al_Freedom</a> And because of the publication of this there was the 1966 Ramparts Affair 1966 Ramparts Affair In June, 1965, Desmond FitzGerald was appointed as head of the Directorate for Plans. He now took charge of Mockingbird. At the end of 1966 FitzGerald discovered that Ramparts, a left-wing publication, had discovered that the CIA had been secretly funding the National Student Association. (1) FitzGerald ordered Edgar Applewhite to organize a campaign against the magazine. Applewhite later told Evan Thomas for his book, The Very Best Men: "I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off." (2) This dirty tricks campaign failed to stop Ramparts publishing this story in March, 1967. The article, written by Sol Stern, was entitled NSA and the CIA. As well as reporting CIA funding of the National Student Association it exposed the whole system of anti-Communist front organizations in Europe, Asia, and South America. It named Cord Meyer as a key figure in this campaign. This included the funding of the literary journal Encounter. (3) <a href="http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmockingbird.htm">www.spartacus.schoolnet.c...ngbird.htm</a> Sources (1) Cord Meyer, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA (1980) pages 86-89 (2) Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA (1995) page 330 (3) Thomas Braden, interview included in the Granada Television program, World in Action: The Rise and Fall of the CIA (June, 1975)

by **proldic** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 4:34 pm

Obviously, I'm a newbie to all this.

by **DrDebugDU** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 4:39 pm

It's a great story. I didn't know about the MOMA stuff. So I've learned something new from your story. It explains why the MOMA has so much money and power. They were backed by the CIA and the CIA is closely linked to the bankers. The thing we are trying with the Data Dump is just to throw all the stuff on one pile, so it's easier to find it again without having to go through the problem of finding the original posts/websites were the stuff came from.

by **proldic** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 4:39 pm

Ramparts, March 1967, pp. 29-38 A Short Account of International Student Politics and the Cold War with Particular Reference to the NSA, CIA, etc. I. Some Necessary Background The chill of the Cold War was already in the air in August of 1946, when some 300 students from 38 countries assembled in the flag-bedecked Artists' Hall in Prague for the first World Student Congress. Among the delegates were 24 American students, many of them World War II veterans, representing various youth and student organizations and ten prominent universities. The communists were in the majority at the Congress, and disputes arose as to the proper role of international student organizations. Still, the Congress ended on an amicable note, with a call for further cooperation and the building of a truly representative international student organization -- which came into existence shortly afterwards, and was named the International Union of Students (IUS). The American delegates, who came to be known as the Prague 25, returned home, fully convinced that a new, truly representative national organization had to be created which could fittingly represent the U.S. student community in the international student world. Establishing themselves as an organizing committee, the Prague 25 issued a call for a national conference of student leaders to organize a new national union of students. They were remarkably successful. In the summer of 1947, a new body known as the United States National Student Association (NSA) held its Constitutional Convention in Madison, Wisconsin. By the time of this convention, the atmosphere of the IUS had become even more openly pro-communist than it had been in Prague. However, it was not until the communist coup had taken place in Czechoslovakia in 1948 and the IUS had failed to condemn the communists' mishandling of Czech students that the break between NSA and IUS became official. Finally, in 1950, NSA met in Stockholm with 18 other national student groups to form a new international student body which was ultimately called the International Student Conference (ISC). During the first meetings, the overwhelming majority of the delegates were opposed to the conception of the ISC as a "rival," set up to fight the IUS and international communism. The delegates to the first ISC wanted to avoid controversial political questions and any further schism of the international student world. The new international organization grew quickly and impressively. By the middle '5Os, over 55 national student unions were participating, more than half of which were from the underdeveloped "Third World," and the ISC had a huge budget providing for many programs of technical assistance, education and student exchanges. The ISC became the pacesetter for international student politics and NSA was on its way to becoming the most powerful force within the new international organization. As the ISC grew, the students of the underdeveloped world pressed the hardest for it to take political stands on controversial issues such as colonialism and racism. And as the "Third World" student unions started to press political issues in the ISC, it was usually the NSA delegation that played the moderating role, trying to keep the ISC focused on the problems of "students as students." In a sense, the very growth of the ISC engendered its problems. Most student unions, originally attracted to the organization out of resentment against the strictures imposed by the IUS, became alienated from it when, partly under NSA's prodding, the ISC began to set forth its own tight Cold War positions. By the 1960's, the situation had begun to reverse itself: the IUS was making gestures for consultations that might lead to a reunification of the world student movement, while the ISC -- with NSA in the lead -- kept to a rigid Cold War line and put off most of these overtures. At its peak in 1960, over 400 schools were affiliated with NSA. Its staff operations and budget grew every year. Though there was little income from the dues of its constituent members, NSA picked up financial support for its operations from a number of foundations. Most of this went entirely to NSA's international operations. NSA was able to sponsor yearly international relations seminars, foreign student leadership training projects, scholarships for foreign students, and still maintain a large travel budget for its international commission staff and its overseas representatives. Despite the formal democracy in NSA, there was little relationship between its overseas operations and its on-campus base. NSA Congresses were massive affairs attended mostly by students sent as delegates from the student governments of NSA's member schools. They had little knowledge of NSA's year-round staff operations. International affairs and the operations of NSA's international staff were debated by a select few who could usually move the rest of the Congress on the basis of their esoteric expertise. Overseas representatives of NSA and delegates to the ISC were never elected by the NSA Congress. NSA has always shown two faces. Its domestic programs, its Congresses and its regional meetings have always been open and spontaneous. If NSA national leaders were occasionally over-cautious, they still moved with the liberal currents of opinion among American students. In the '50s, NSA took even more liberal stands than the prevailing apathy among students might have suggested. And in the '60s, NSA responded to the new militant protest mood on the campuses. It supported students against the draft, opposed the war in Vietnam, and participated in civil rights struggles. It played a crucial role in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was one of its staunchest supporters, a position which cost it the affiliation of many schools in 1961. Yet NSA's overseas image has been very different. Despite its liberal rhetoric, NSA-ers abroad seemed more like professional diplomats than students; there was something tough and secretive about them that was out of keeping with their openness and spontaneity back home. In the light of all this, it is not surprising that a number of NSA's critics have pointed a suspicious finger at its international operations. Nor is it a shock to discover that some people in the left wing of NSA, like Paul Potter, who was elected national affairs vice president in 1961 and went on to become president of Students for a Democratic Society, revealed that they had always suspected NSA's international operations of being tightly tied in with the State Department. Very few ever seriously raised the more sinister spectre of CIA involvement. II. Some Fancy Financing It is widely known that the CIA has a number of foundations which serve as direct fronts or as secret "conduits" that channel money from the CIA to preferred organizations. An intimation of the scope of this financial web was afforded the public on August 31, 1964, when Texas Congressman Wright Patman, in the course of an investigation into the use of foundations for tax dodges, announced that the J.M. Kaplan Fund of New York was serving as a secret conduit for CIA funds. As soon as Patman made his announcement, representatives of the CIA and Internal Revenue came scurrying to his office for a hasty conference. Patman apparently was satisfied with the results. Without retracting his allegations about the Kaplan Fund he announced: ". . . The CIA does not belong in this foundation investigation." Before bringing down the curtain of secrecy, he did, at least, reveal one fact of substance. It turned out that a number of other foundations had contributed to the Kaplan Fund during the crucial years of 1961-63 when the Fund had been serving the CIA. Five of these foundations were not even on the Internal Revenue Service's list of tax-exempt foundations. They were the Borden Trust, the Price Fund, the Edsel Fund, the Beacon Fund and the Kentfield Fund. The implication was clear that some or all of these were the channel through which the CIA money passed into the Kaplan foundation coffers. Ramparts was provided with an unusual insight into the manner in which the CIA uses legitimate foundations with liberal interests, such as the Kaplan Fund, in a recent conversation with the president of a prominent New England foundation who asked to remain anonymous: "I didn't want my foundation dragged through the CIA mud." In 1965 he was approached by what he described as "two nice middle-aged Irish cop types who flashed CIA cards at me." The men asked the foundation president if they could look over the list of organizations that his foundation supports. He volunteered the list to them and after looking it over, the agents said that there were organizations on the list that they would also be willing to support. The CIA men explained, "We are trying to pose an alternative to communism and want to back third-force programs, which we could not do if it was known that this support comes from a government source." The agents then proposed to support some of the organizations already on the foundation's list as well as suggesting new prospective recipients. The agents promised that if this arrangement was accepted, they would be able to channel CIA money into the foundation without it ever being traced back to the CIA. They said that they were very skilled at these manipulations. The president, however, took the proposal directly to the board which rejected it by a vote of four to one, out of what the foundation president called "a 19th century sense of morality. We just did not like the secrecy of it." The CIA-suspect Funds mentioned in the Patman investigation are a key to understanding part of NSA's finances. Conveniently, they are spread all over the country (Borden in Philadelphia, Price in New York, Beacon in Boston, Kentfield in Dallas and Edsel, whose last known address was in San Francisco). When a Ramparts reporter checked out the addresses officially listed by the foundations, he usually found himself in a law office where no one was willing to talk about the Funds. Two foundations that have supported the international programs of NSA -- the J. Frederick Brown Foundation and the Independence Foundation -- have received regular contributions from four of these CIA-linked Funds: Price, Borden, Kentfield, and Edsel. Both the J. Frederick Brown and the Independence Foundations list the same address, 60 State Street, Boston, which is also the address of the prestigious law firm of Hale and Dorr. Paul F. Hellmuth, a well-known Boston attorney and a member of Hale and Dorr, and David B. Stone, a Boston businessman and philanthropist, are the trustees of the Independence Foundation. Hellmuth alone is the trustee of the J. Frederick Brown Foundation. Of the two, J. Frederick Brown is less important as a source of NSA funds. It made only $3300 in contributions to NSA, in 1963. It also made contributions to the American Friends of the Middle East, among other organizations with overseas interests. In an article in the May 9, 1966 issue of The Nation, Robert G. Sherrill implied that the American Friends had CIA ties. No official of the organization denied the allegations. As far as NSA is concerned, the Independence Foundation is the more important of Mr. Hellmuth's two interests. Independence got its tax-exempt status in 1960. Since then, most of its funds have come from other trusts and foundations. In 1962, for example, the Independence Foundation received a total of $247,000, of which only $18,500 came from individuals or corporations; all the rest came from other foundations. Of the total, the four Funds cited in the Patman investigation gave $100,000. Between 1962 and 1965, NSA received $256,483.33 in grants for its international programs from Independence. Much of that sum went to pay for NSA's International Student Relations Seminars, yearly extravaganzas which served as effective training grounds for future NSA international leaders. NSA is still coasting on Independence's largesse. The building which houses NSA's present headquarters is occupied under a 15-year rent-free agreement with the Independence Foundation. Originally, NSA purchased the building with a down payment and a yearly mortgage payment to be secured from Independence. But Independence suddenly changed its mind and bought the property back from NSA. Deeds on file with the clerk of the District of Columbia reveal that NSA sold the property on October 20th, 1965, to the First National Bank, but that the bank was acting as a "trustee under an undisclosed trust." The undisclosed party is Paul Hellmuth, who secured the property, and leased it to the Independence Foundation which turned it over to NSA for the 15-year free rent agreement. Shortly after NSA moved into its new plush Washington offices in the fall of 1965, a reporter from the Washington Post, who was doing a feature article on NSA, asked NSA President Phil Sherburne who was paying the rent on the building. Sherburne refused to divulge this information. This secrecy in protecting the names of NSA's benefactors was not unusual. In fact, NSA has never made a full financial accounting to its own Congresses. The Independence Foundation has served NSA's overseas operations in other indirect ways. It has provided a number of scholarships for former NSA officers, usually in the neighborhood of $3000 per year. The purpose of these scholarships was to enable former NSA officers to function as overseas representatives where they were free to make contacts with foreign student unions and roam as free operatives for NSA, sending back periodic reports. Ostensibly, the overseas representatives were supposed to be in overseas universities, but this was entirely pro forma. Independence has not restricted its largesse exclusively to NSA. In the period between 1961 and 1965 it spent $180,000 in financing an interesting operation known as the Independent Research Service (IRS). This was the organization that made life so miserable for the organizers of the communist-leaning world youth festivals in Vienna in 1959, and in Helsinki in 1962. The Independent Research Service actively recruited a delegation of hundreds of young Americans to attend the festivals in order to actively oppose the communists. The travel expenses of all the delegates were fully paid for and the bill was footed as well for a jazz group, an exhibition of famous American painters and a daily newspaper printed in five languages, all of which accompanied the delegates. Although the official position of the NSA Congress was not to participate in the youth festivals, important NSA officers and ex-officers were very active in the Independent Research Service activities in Vienna and Helsinki. The director of the IRS during the Helsinki Youth Festival was Dennis Shaul, who was elected NSA president shortly thereafter. Shaul has also been the recipient of one of the Independence Foundation's "scholarships" in 1964. When questioned by a Ramparts reporter about some of the activities and sources of funds for his Independence Foundation, Mr. Hellmuth, a normally outgoing man, became guarded and curt. He refused to divulge the addresses or any other information about the money which had been donated to both of his foundations. However, he was quite voluble about his close friendship with the officers of NSA. Still another foundation which has given to NSA is the Sidney and Esther Rabb Charitable Foundation of Boston. The similarities between the Rabb Foundation and the J.M. Kaplan Fund are striking. Rabb, like Kaplan, is a Jewish businessman, prominent in liberal democratic circles. The records show that up until 1963 the Rabb Foundation's only source of income was from Rabb himself. And up to that year, the Rabb Foundation's contributions were minimal and only to local charities. Then, in 1963, two contributions to the Rabb Foundation flowed in from the Price Fund of New York -- one of the Funds named in the Patman investigation, and a contributor to the J. Frederick Brown and Independence Foundations. The contributions were for $25,000 and $15,000 respectively. Strikingly, in the same year, the Rabb Foundation itself made two unusual and large contributions in precisely the same amounts -- one for $25,000 to Operations and Policy Research Incorporated, a Cold War-oriented strategy organization; and $15,000 to the Farfield Foundation. Farfield, in its turn, has been a frequent contributor to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, previously identified in the New York Times as having received CIA funds. During 1964, the Rabb Foundation again received unusual contributions, from three Funds, and also made three matching disbursements. It received $25,000 from the Tower Fund, and turned over the exact sum of $25,000 as a grant to the International Development Foundation which has been engaged in organizing anti-communist peasant unions in Latin America. It was particularly active in the Dominican Republic during that country's period of revolution and American intervention. The Rabb Foundation also received a $20,000 contribution from the Appalachian Fund, and during that year made a disbursement of $20,000 to the American Society of African Culture. Finally, the Rabb Foundation received $6000 from the ubiquitous Price Fund, and during the same year it turned over -- would you believe -- $6000 to the United States National Student Association to help retire an NSA deficit. Rabb made at least one other contribution to NSA in 1965 in the amount of $5000. It is not always easy to obtain information on the foundations which have sustained NSA's international operations. Take the San Jacinto Foundation, for example. In the past, San Jacinto has not only funded important portions of NSA's international program, but it has also given huge sums of money to the program budget of the ISC. In particular, it has been overly generous in supporting The Student, an ISC publication printed in five languages and distributed all over the world as an anti-communist weapon. One other interesting fact about the San Jacinto Foundation is that, like the J. Frederick Brown Foundation, it has contributed to the CIA-suspect American Friends of the Middle East. No one at NSA, or ISC for that matter, appears to have the vaguest notion of what the San Jacinto Foundation is, who is on its board of directors or where its money comes from. San Jacinto has also apparently managed to avoid the reporting procedures required by law of all tax-exempt foundations. No records for it have been entered at the district office of the Internal Revenue Service in Austin, or with the secretary of the State of Texas, or with the county clerk. San Jacinto's mailing address is the offices of F.G. O'Conner in the San Jacinto Building in downtown Houston. Mr. O'Conner is the secretary of the foundation. When asked by Ramparts' peripatetic reporter for some information about the foundation, Mr. O'Conner, a graying, distinguished-looking man in his sixties replied, it is a private, closed foundation, never had any publicity and doesn't want any. As far back as anyone can remember, the mainstay of NSA's overseas operations has been the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs of New York City, founded in 1952. In contrast to the likes of Independence and San Jacinto, FYSA has a for-real office, a full-time staff and an eminently respectable board of directors. In recent years, FYSA annually pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars per year into NSA's treasury. The figure for October 1965 to October 1966 was $292,753.60. It provided a general administrative grant of up to $120,000 per year and funded projects such as NSA's magazine, The American Student, foreign student participation at NSA Congresses, technical assistance projects; and its funds paid NSA's dues to the ISC. In addition, FYSA could be relied upon to pick up any operating deficit that NSA incurred during the year, and FYSA gives "scholarships" to ex-NSA officers for overseas study. FYSA has also been the chief U.S. source for channeling money overseas to national unions of students favored by the NSA leadership. And FYSA has been practically the only external source of support, except for the mysterious San Jacinto Foundation, of the programs of the ISC. Between 1962-1964, ISC records show that these two foundations provided over 90 per cent of ISC's program budget (most of it from FYSA) -- a gargantuan total of $1,826,000 in grants completed or in progress. The ISC would be literally impotent as an international organization without the support of FYSA, having been unable to establish any sizable alternative sources of funding. The executive secretary of FYSA is Harry Lunn, a tall, ruddy-faced, balding man in his middle thirties, himself a past president of NSA, who used to make applications for grants to the foundation which he now directs. Lunn vehemently denied the suggestion that his foundation might be channeling CIA money for NSA, although he would not release a financial statement to this magazine. After his presidency of NSA (1954-55) had terminated, Lunn became a member of an ISC delegation to Southeast Asia. Then, following a short stint in the Army, he went to the Department of Defense as a research analyst. From there he went on up the ladder to the political desk of the American embassy in Paris and then on up to the Agency for International Development, where he worked on the Alliance for Progress. It was from this last position that Lunn came to FYSA in 1965. Lunn also took part in the activities of the militantly anti-communist Independent Research Service at the Vienna Youth Festival in 1959, while he was attached to the Department of Defense. Lunn's career is a case study in the intimate relationship between NSA, international student politics and the Cold War. It is living documentation of a slogan that used to hang in NSA's old Philadelphia headquarters: "The student leader of today is the student leader of tomorrow." III. An Extraordinary Conversation The scene was the Sirloin and Saddle, a plush, dimly-lit, continental style restaurant on Washington, D.C.'s Connecticut Avenue. It was lunchtime, the third week of March 1966, and over a table an earnest conversation was taking place that eventually resulted in the exposure of the CIA's 15-year infiltration of the National Student Association. There were two people there that day. One of them was Phil Sherburne, NSA president for 1965-1966. Athletic-looking, blonde, self-possessed, his NSA post was his latest stop in a meteoric career in student politics. Sherburne's luncheon companion that eventful day was 23-year-old Michael Wood. NSA's director of development, or fund raising chief. Wood, too, had risen rapidly in student politics. He left Pomona College during his senior year to become a civil rights worker in Watts, where one of his projects had caught the eye of an NSA officer. He became an NSA consultant in the spring of 1965, and was soon promoted to the post of director of development. Besides raising money for NSA, he helped Sherburne work out new programs, and had even been consulted by the White House staff on possible Presidential proposals about the draft and the lowering of the voting age. He had received a letter from Douglass Cater, special assistant to the President, commending him for his excellent reports. Wood was talking to Sherburne because he was troubled. He had been running into irritating roadblocks in trying to raise money for NSA. He had encountered a curious lack of concern among other members of the Association's international staff about the rigorous preparation usually required for foundation fund raising. The amount of money needed often ran into hundreds of thousands of dollars, yet the proposals being submitted to the foundations funding the international program were ill-prepared, perfunctory and brief. Furthermore, President Sherburne was negotiating with the foundations without Wood's participation. After six months of this confusion, Wood told Sherburne, with whom he had grown quite close, that he either had to be given full responsibility for the fund raising program or he would have to resign. It was at this time that Sherburne invited him to a heart-to-heart lunch conference. The following is Wood's account of what transpired during this and subsequent conversations: Sherburne began by telling Wood that NSA had "certain relationships with certain government agencies engaged in international relations" which Wood didn't know about. This, explained Sherburne. was why Wood couldn't have full responsibility for NSA's fund raising. Wood was astonished. "You mean the CIA?" he asked. Sherburne nodded yes. Sherburne then told Wood that he was supposed to have been informed of the CIA relationship after he was appointed director of development, but that other NSA staff members and CIA contacts had decided he was politically unreliable. As well as having been a civil rights worker, Wood had gained a reputation as something of a radical. Because he couldn't be told of the CIA relationship, it was necessary to keep him in the dark about certain aspects of NSA funding. Sherburne told Wood he hoped that everything said over lunch that day would be kept secret. He was divulging the information only because he did not want Wood to leave NSA. Later he explained that he wanted a friend he could trust with whom to discuss the CIA relationship, other than staffers who were already involved. The CIA, said Sherburne, had managed to inject itself into the Association's international operations in the early 1950's. Since that time, virtually every president and international affairs vice president of the organization had been aware of the CIA relationship and had cooperated. Sherburne went on to say that most of the foundations that had funded NSA's international operations were merely passing along CIA money. Moreover, some of them had made up NSA's yearly deficits, and had financed the purchase and renovation of NSA's new offices in Washington. This explained the mystery surrounding the acquisition and the rent for NSA's new national offices. Among the CIA-front foundations specifically mentioned, according to Wood, were the Independence Foundation, the San Jacinto Foundation, the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs, the Sidney and Esther Rabb Foundation, and the J. Frederick Brown Foundation. To the best of Sherburne's knowledge, CIA money did not pass through the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Asia Foundation, and other groups which had also funded NSA international programs in the past. Sherburne presented the Agency's involvement in international student politics as a fait accompli; he argued that the CIA's vast supply of money was absolutely essential. Although he had serious doubts about the desirability of the relationship, he felt that NSA could not get as much money from any other source; moreover, the Agency had supported many worthwhile and liberal overseas programs. In any event, Sherburne felt that a sudden termination of the relationship would leave NSA in disastrous financial straits. The CIA was interested almost exclusively in NSA's international programs. Over the years no staff member who worked exclusively on NSA's national program was involved in a CIA relationship, and few, if any, even knew about it. Keeping the CIA connection secret was made easier by the fact that NSA's national and international departments were in different cities from 1947-1960. During their frequent conversations, Sherburne gave Wood a partial glossary of "black" language that was used by NSA's CIA operatives whenever they discussed the relationship in a semi-public place. They referred to the CIA as the "firm" and not the Agency; people were not described as operatives or agents but as being "witty"; those who worked inside the Agency bureaucracy were referred to as the "fellas" or the "boys." Frequently, important NSA-ers were given code names for their contacts with the Agency. Sherburne's code name was "Mr. Grants" (based on his facility for fund raising). Sherburne told Wood that normal procedure involved a careful evaluation by former NSA international officers of international staff members for their reliability -- as well as a full national security check by the CIA. If a member passed the test, he was made "witty." The prospective "witty" staff member would usually be taken out to lunch by another already "witty" staff member, and a representative of the CIA. NSA dealings were with Covert Action Division No. Five of the CIA's Plans Division, and the personnel they dealt with there were themselves former NSA officers. Thus, when the new officer was taken to lunch, he at first assumed that he was merely going out with another staff member and an NSA alumnus. The prospective "witty" staff member was told at lunch that there was information relating to work on the international staff which affected national security and which he should know about, but which required him to sign a national security oath. If he signed the oath, which pledged him to keep secret any information that was then divulged, he was then told about the CIA relationship and asked to cooperate. The implication was clear that if the international staff member ever divulged any of the information about the relationship, there could be severe legal penalties. Thus the international officers were placed in a position in which they could not acknowledge the existence of the relationship, even to other "non-witty" NSA-ers. Sherburne made the first breach in a 15-year wall of secrecy. The typical "witty" international staff member would first consult with an Agency representative about his overseas programs. Grants for international programs, travel allowances and expense accounts for NSA members going to overseas student conferences, would then all be supplied by CIA-front foundations. So intimately was the CIA involved in NSA's international program, that it treated NSA as an arm of U.S. foreign policy. The point is illustrated by a story that Sherburne told Wood. At one point during his tenure in office, Sherburne was to attend the International Student Travel Conference in Istanbul. There had already been much talk in NSA circles of opening up some bilateral contact with student unions in Soviet-bloc countries. Sherburne felt his trip to Turkey would provide a good opportunity to meet with Soviet students and discuss possible student exchanges. Sherburne sent off a cable to the Soviet National Union of Students saying that he would be in Istanbul and requesting permission to travel on to Moscow for a meeting with the Soviet student organization. But the CIA got wind of Sherburne's cable and admonished him for doing such things without first consulting the Agency. A CIA agent explained to Sherburne that since KGB (the Soviet "CIA") assumed that NSA took its cues from the U.S. government, Sherburne's gesture might be interpreted as an official change in CIA policy on bilateral student contacts. Sherburne, even though he was president of the United States National Student Association, was enjoined against making such diplomatic overtures without first requesting permission from the Agency. The Soviet Union has always spent a good deal of money working with student and youth groups, especially in underdeveloped countries. The CIA's instrument for countering Soviet efforts was NSA, working through the International Student Conference. Former "witty" NSA staffers were always in the Secretariat of the ISC. And NSA, with the CIA's aid, was able to play a major role in cooperating with favored national unions of students all over the world. No other union of students in the Western world has the kind of financial backing as NSA. The Canadian Union of Students, for example, operates on a budget of about $14,000 a year for its international programs, all of which comes from the dues of member schools. NSA, with its almost unlimited funds, was able to conduct a full program of foreign diplomacy. Of course, the CIA was also interested in intelligence. "Witty" NSA international staff members would pass along reports on foreign student leaders directly to the Agency. This information helped the CIA in evaluating the political tendencies of prospective political leaders in critical areas of the world. One of the lures the CIA dangled before NSA was the assurance that this intelligence gathering role did not seem to require NSA to violate its foreign policy principles. The CIA is interested in alternatives to communism in the underdeveloped world, even if the only alternative is a moderate left. "Witty" staff members were told that, in working with the CIA, they would be providing the information that would help get a more enlightened foreign policy presented in high Washington circles. Thus an NSA international staffer, while on an overseas assignment cleared with the CIA, visited student groups in Spain that were militantly protesting against the Franco dictatorship's suppression of free student unions. This NSA-er, a genuine supporter of the Spanish students, joined a protest meeting and was roughed up by the Spanish police, jailed, and held incommunicado for three days. The same staff member had previously gone to the Dominican Republic shortly after the American intervention there. He brought back a report on his contacts with university students who had participated in the civil war on the side of the constitutionalists. To NSA the CIA relationship was a comfortable one. It meant lots of money, a sense of doing important work, overseas travel, and, perhaps most important of all, very little feeling of having sold out one's political convictions. The CIA relationship meant something more personal, too. For years elected (and appointed) officials and staffers of NSA have been getting draft deferments. The deferment given for having an "occupation vital to the national interest" would last as long as the member worked for NSA; it was then possible for him to go on to graduate school and receive a student deferment again. The standard practice was for the president of NSA to send a letter to the local draft board stating that the staff member's services were required in an area that affected the national interest. Always included was a Cold War paragraph about how NSA was combatting communism. In what had become almost a form letter, the NSA president, asking for an occupational deferment for his staff member, wrote: "NSA is largely responsible for the creation and maintenance of the International Student Conference, which was established in 1950 to combat the communist-controlled International Union of Students. More than 50 countries -- almost every state with a national union this side of the Iron Curtain -- now participate in the International Student Conference." During 1965-66 the war in Vietnam escalated, and a panic developed in the NSA office when staff members suddenly found themselves re-classified I-A under the impact of the increased draft quotas. Sherburne took the matter of the office staff's status to the Selective Service Presidential Review Board, and also went directly to General Hershey. No NSA staff members, "witty" or "non-witty," were drafted. The Agency looks after its own. IV. The President Rebels When the CIA made Phil Sherburne "witty" it got more than it bargained for. Sherburne has a tough-minded, gritty independence that soon led him into conflict with those who were paying NSA's bills. Not only did Sherburne break the CIA cult of secrecy, but he also began fighting for NSA autonomy in international programming. Sherburne's initial attitude to the Agency was friendly but reserved. He was willing to take CIA money for NSA projects and to consult with the Agency on matters of common interest, but he was the first NSA president who demanded full control of international programs. Previously, international programs -- scholarships, student exchanges, conferences and the like -- had all been worked out by NSA staff members and their CIA contacts. But the Agency resisted Sherburne's reforms and applied pressure through their foundations. For the first time in years there were delays in the granting of funds from foundations such as FYSA and San Jacinto. But Sherburne fought back. He refused to release the funds (paid for by FYSA) that would have paid the dues of NSA to the International Student Conference. Finally, most of the money was released to NSA and a modus vivendi of sorts was reached. Eventually, Sherburne told Wood, Covert Action Division No. Five became so upset at its errant child, it considered severing ties with the NSA altogether. Sherburne's effort at establishing some independence left its financial marks. Previously, any year-end operating deficits were quickly picked up by FYSA or some other foundation. In 1962-63 NSA had blundered into a disastrous financial venture with a book cooperative and wound up with approximately a $70,000 deficit. After NSA made a pro forma appeal to alumni that brought in practically nil, several key CIA foundations and individuals came through with the cash and the debt was miraculously retired in two years. The cost of NSA's move from Philadelphia and at least $35,000 worth of furniture and renovations for the new Washington offices were just as easily absorbed. Among others, FYSA put up $15,000 and two men, Thomas Millbank and George Baker, put up $10,000 and $5000 respectively. Millbank and Baker are both well-established New York corporate executives and fellow members of the Racquet and Tennis Club. These two men once joined with FYSA in making an $18,000 grant to the ISC for a Latin American student conference. When asked about his interest in NSA and international student politics by this magazine, Mr. Millbank, once an assistant naval attache in Cairo, said: "It is none of your business," and promptly hung up the phone. At the end of a year of relative independence, Sherburne was faced with approximately a $35,000 deficit that no one picked up. The deficit has remained, despite staff cutbacks. The "firm" doesn't like rebellious children. By the end of a year of wrangling with the CIA, Sherburne was convinced that it was impossible to maintain an independent but friendly relationship. In an attempt to find new funds that would free NSA of its financial dependence on the CIA, Sherburne went to see Vice President Humphrey in July of 1966. Humphrey had been friendly to NSA, had addressed its National Congress in 1965, and had met Sherburne once previously. Sherburne told the Vice President about the CIA ties and NSA's financial predicament. Humphrey promised to help NSA get other, independent sources of financing. Humphrey kept his word and wrote to Roger Blough, Chairman of the Board of U.S. Steel, David Rockefeller of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and Henry Ford, among others. In a typical letter (the one to Roger Blough), Humphrey said: I have been very much impressed by the work done over the past few years by the National Student Association. I know the officers of the Association well. As with other such groups the NSA has had a continuing financial difficulty. I believe that this organization should be able to find support in the private sector, which will enable it to continue its work independently and in the best spirit of private initiative. Despite Humphrey's entreaties, only a few hundred dollars rolled in from "the private sector." Thus NSA went to its 1966 Congress, the deficit still on its back, and its relationship with the CIA badly damaged. Sherburne continued to resist Wood's suggestions that he make a thoughtful public statement about the relationship and have it openly discussed as a public issue. Yet what Sherburne had accomplished was considerable. For the first time in years, new national officers were elected without apparent commitments to the CIA relationship. The only problems bothering the new officers were their knowledge of the past, and the large financial deficit -- for it appeared that Humphrey's friends in the "private sector" were not as interested in supporting NSA as a rather un-public part of the "public sector" had been. V. Epitaph to a Caper Phil Sherburne finally went to Harvard Law School after his year of escapades with the CIA. He was in Cambridge when Ramparts called him early last month to get his reaction to Mike Wood's revelations. In a subdued voice he said: "I think I would prefer not to say anything until I have had a chance to look at the article pretty carefully. . . . I think the article should be discussed by the current administration of NSA, and that anything that I would say would be resolved in discussions with them." Then he was asked, "Did you sign a national security oath?" Sherburne paused a few moments and said, "At his point I don't want to make any comment." Sherburne was under enormous pressure, not only out a remaining loyalty to NSA, but also from the CIA. That "enlightened" organization had viciously turned on him for talking to Wood, and was trying hard to intimidate him into publicly denying Wood's story. Sometime in the middle of January, the NSA officers and Sherburne heard that Michael Wood had passed his information along to Ramparts. Sherburne called Wood and asked him to fly to Boston, where Sherburne pleaded with him for an entire day to retract his story. Then they both flew to Washington for four more days of intense and harrowing discussion with two of the current NSA national officers, an NSA staff member, and a former national affairs vice president. In the Washington conversations with Wood, the officers of NSA desperately tried to dissuade him from giving the information to this magazine. Wood refused and instead urged the officers to affirm the story publicly, which would be the only way of salvaging NSA's dignity. The officers would not commit themselves. There followed two weeks of hectic caucusing and emergency meetings at NSA headquarters. NSA officers visited a number of well-known NSA alumni, including Douglass Cater of the White House staff, to ask their advice. At least one of the officers also went straight to the Agency. The current CIA operative whom he contacted is a former NSA president. He is officially employed by the Agency for International Development in Washington. At one point the officers assembled the staff, told them of the impending story and flatly denied that it was true. They suggested that Wood was making up the story to revenge NSA for having lost his job as director of development. Finally, another staff meeting was called and it was admitted that the story was true. Meanwhile, on the west coast, two Ramparts editors were talking to Ed Schwartz, NSA's current national affairs vice president. Schwartz, talkative and quick-witted, had been the leader of the liberal caucus in NSA. He was in Berkeley, working as a behind-the-scenes student political advisor-negotiator during the University of California campus crisis precipitated by the firing of Clark Kerr. It seems a direct, ironic result of Cold War politics that Schwartz had to drop his liberal Berkeley activities and cross the Bay to discuss his organization's cooperation with the CIA. Through a long and tiring discussion that lasted most of one night, Schwartz did not deny NSA's relationship to the CIA. Instead, he pleaded that great damage would be done to the good works of NSA by the revelation of this relationship. As the discussion ended, he muttered something about losing his draft deferment. A few days later, in Washington, D.C., a Ramparts editor had an almost identical conversation with two other NSA officers. The talk began in NSA's national headquarters, a four-story colonial-style brick building in a quiet residential section. On the desk in President Gene Groves' office there was an autographed picture of Hubert Humphrey. With Groves was Rick Stearns, the international affairs vice president. During the conversation neither Stearns nor Groves denied NSA's CIA connections in the past but stated that "all of our current financing comes from legitimate sources which observe the normal legitimate reporting procedures." And yet NSA's current budget records grants totaling $56,673.30 from FYSA. Stearns was asked, "Will you flatly say you have had no contact with the CIA during your time in office?" He shook his head. Stearns and Groves pleaded that disclosure of the CIA relationship would be disastrous for NSA. It would put them in an awful political predicament. If they publicly admitted past CIA connections, it would tarnish NSA's image badly at home and abroad, and hurt its chances of receiving grants from other government agencies. NSA staff members also feared CIA retaliation, especially the loss of their draft deferments. Having kept quiet about the CIA since their election, the officers now went into action to minimize the effects of the forthcoming disclosures. NSA President Gene Groves flew off to Leiden, Holland for an emergency Summit meeting with the leaders of the ISC. Groves came back convinced that NSA must make some acknowledgment of the CIA relationship -- but at the urging of his colleagues in Leiden there would be as few details as possible admitted. If older Americans have been a little put off by the style of the draft card burners or the Mario Savios, there has always been somewhat of a consensus about the good works of the young men and women of the United States National Student Association. The NSA seemed to mix the idealism of the community organizers, the FSM activists and the Peace Corps with the buttoned-down practicality of young junior executives. The quality which rank and file NSA-ers have cherished most about themselves is independence, especially independence from government controls. It was this quality that was supposed to distinguish their organization from national unions of students in the communist world. The quality for the most part was genuine, for the rank and file never knew of the CIA connection. There were many arguments put forward by NSA's current officers as to why the CIA-NSA relationship should be kept secret, and many similar arguments desperately made to Mike Wood as to why he should not have given the information to anyone. Of all the reasons given -- by Stearns and Groves to Ramparts' editor in Washington, and by others who pleaded with Wood -- the most pathetic, which appeared again and again, was this: exposing the story would not only hurt NSA, it would hurt the CIA. Covert Action Division No. Five, after all, was not in the business of assassinating Latin American leftists, it was supporting liberal groups like NSA, groups with international programs in the best tradition of cultural exchanges between countries. NSA might be anti-communist, but certainly no one could ever argue that its anti-communism was more militant or more narrow-minded than that of the average American. Rather, it was less so. Thus the exposure of the NSA-CIA tie would deeply hurt the enlightened, liberal internationalist wing of the CIA. Conservative congressmen, such as L. Mendel Rivers of the House Armed Services Committee, would cut off Agency funds for these purposes, and the hard-liners in CIA's "core" would be proven right in their contentions that the Agency shouldn't give large sums of money to support liberal students, no matter what intelligence it was getting in return. The twisted sickness of this Orwellian argument should speak for itself. Yet it is extraordinary, and frightening, that it could be so easily made by the talented young liberals at the head of NSA. One would think the idea of "an enlightened wing of the CIA" would be an obvious contradiction in terms. But the idea's acceptance and support by a generation of student leaders indicates how deeply the corruption of means for ends has become ingrained in our society, and how much dishonesty is tolerated in the name of the Cold War. _________________ By Sol Stern, with the special assistance of Lee Webb, Michael Ansara and Michael Wood.

by **Starman** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 5:33 pm

Aieiei ...Yet more bits and pieces I didn't know, ie. the CIA stage-managing MOMA and celbrating AE as truly 'liberated' and 'free' art, by which to innoculate the West against creative 'political' thinking -- God DAMN it. I'm rather astonished, as much by what I DIDN'T know about the CIA's involvement in the cultural war as by what the CIA was involved with. In general terms I knew about COINTELPRO and the subversion of social justice and anti-war movements, and knew that writers and professors had been enlisted by the CIA to manage and direct public discussion and awareness, but THIS level of behind-the-scenes intrigue and propaganda extending to modern art and art criticism I really didn't know -- It makes it much easier to now put stock in claims that the whole 60s Peace and Love/Hippie movement was being covertly managed and stage-directed. In retrospect, whatta farce, ie, 'Intellectual Freedom' was a Con all along. I can't help thinking that these many techniques to 'defend' American Interests and Values was itself an enormous indictment of the corrupted American principles that were being marketted, as somehow vulnerable to Communist ideology. Of course, following JFK's assassination/coup, American principles were being spoiled and transmuted into a shallow stage-play legitimizing the increasingly destructive policies of neoliberalism and the Federal Reserve ponzi-scheme, by which the third-world was being pillaged and exploited, and along with all the foul consequences of gross materialism and environmental ruin and decadent social decay. It's just a end-justifies-means gang-bang, isn't it? Proldic posted, in part: "The U.S. and European Democratic Left's anti-Stalinist rhetorical ejaculations, and their proclamations of faith in democratic values and freedom, were a useful ideological cover for the heinous crimes of the West. Once again, in NATO's recent war against Yugoslavia, many Democratic Left intellectuals have lined up with the West and the KLA in its bloody purge of tens of thousands of Serbs and the murder of scores of innocent civilians. If anti-Stalinism was the opium of the Democratic Left during the Cold War, human rights interventionism has the same narcotizing effect today, and deludes contemporary Democratic Leftists. "The CIA's cultural campaigns created the prototype for today's seemingly apolitical intellectuals, academics, and artists who are divorced from popular struggles and whose worth rises with their distance from the working classes and their proximity to prestigious foundations. The CIA role model of the successful professional is the ideological gatekeeper, excluding critical intellectuals who write about class struggle, class exploitation and U.S. imperialism -- "ideological" not "objective" categories, or so they are told." **** The US-engineered and directed Latin American Death Squads were an absolute horror -- In hindsight, what still amazes me is how thoroughly this whole period was excised from the public mind (or what passes for it!). But the Yugolsavian project featured much of the same kind of massive PR con-game, turning the true victims into perpetrators -- which a large number of people STILL don't understand. How can I avoid being cynical and disgusted at a public so fundamentally misinformed and dumbed-down stupid? The Afghan and Iraq 'wars' (war crimes and atrocities) are 'just' following the same horrible script. Re: The West's Role in Betraying Yugoslavia and Encouraging Genocide <a href="http://emperors-clothes.com/gilwhite/alija2.htm">emperors-clothes.com/gilwhite/alija2.htm</a> Painting Fascists as Victims, and Their Victims as Fascists The mainstream media turned Bosnia upside down By Francisco Gil-White [Posted on 17 June 2003] This is a three-part series that documents and explains what really happened in Bosnia. 1 | Who was Izetbegovic? Moderate democrat or radical Islamist? 2 | Painting fascists as victims, and their victims as fascists: The mainstream media turned Bosnia upside down 3 | Who started the war in Bosnia? And who committed genocide? Was it the Bosnian Serbs, as NATO and the mass media alleged, or the Bosnian Muslim followers of Alija Izetbegovic? *** [ www.tenc.net ] Emperor’s Clothes charges that, in Bosnia, the US and its NATO allies deliberately trained, financed, and politically supported a faction of Muslim fundamentalists whose goal was to create - through violence - a fascist-clerical state. This is what caused the Bosnian civil war. Put bluntly, what happened is that NATO supported a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide against innocent Bosnian Serb civilians, and then NATO blamed the victims, as if *they* had been the ones carrying out a genocide. Is Emperor’s Clothes right about all this? In the first part of this series I showed that Alija Izetbegovic espoused a violent Muslim fundamentalist ideology. This I did by quoting directly from Izetbegovic’s own book: ‘Islamic Declaration,’ where he explains very clearly that Muslims may not organize under any secular system and that the only proper behavior towards ‘infidels’ is violence.[<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/alien.gif ALT="0]"> Alija Izetbegovic did not speak for all Bosnian Muslims. In fact, he spoke for a minority of them, as we shall see. Despite Izetbegovic’s violent writings having been famous from the start (in Yugoslavia, and in the Muslim world), this is how the New York Times described him in April 1992: “The Bosnian President, Mr. Izetbegovic, a Muslim Slav regarded by Western diplomats as a moderate…”[1] And then on May 8th, the New York Times wrote: “…President Alija Izetbegovic, a moderate Muslim Slav…”[2] In just one month, Izetbegovic’s supposed moderation went from being vouched for by Western diplomats to become a simple and obvious fact of the world which the Times could state with zero comment. Propaganda moves faster than the speed of light. The question of when Izetbegovic wrote his Islamist manifesto is important of course. Since he wrote it around 1970, it is in principle possible that by 1990 his views had changed. But this case has to be made in a decisive way, naturally, before anybody calls Izetbegovic a "moderate." The violent fundamentalism he espoused in 1970 would not cease to be relevant, and any responsible journalist would have to explain with facts why people should not be concerned that Alija Izetbegovic might still be a dangerous fanatic. And yet the New York Times did not even bother to attempt such an explanation when defending Izetbegovic as a supposed moderate. What the New York Times did, rather, was omit saying anything about Izetbegovic's past writings, and in this way it gave its readers the appearance that the label "moderate" could be applied to this man with zero controversy. But matters are worse. It turns out that Izetbegovic did not win the 1990 elections in Bosnia. So he proceeded to *seize* it illegally from Fikret Abdic, the non-fundamentalist and pro-Yugoslav Muslim who was (1) allied with the Serbs; (2) more popular than Izetbegovic; and (3) who had defeated Izetbegovic at the polls.[3] What does this reveal? Well, if the most popular Bosnian Muslim leader, Fikret Abdic, was allied with the Serbs, then most Bosnian Muslims were not interested in fighting the Serbs - on the contrary: they wanted to preserve a united Yugoslavia. But this in turn implies that the Serbs were not trying to exterminate the Bosnian Muslims, as the Western media repeatedly claimed, because if they had been, why would most Muslims be allying with them? Finally, it is obvious from this that the multiculturalist and moderate Bosnian Muslim leader was Fikret Abdic, not Alija Izetbegovic, as the media claimed. There was never any question about this, in fact. The reason Izetbegovic was famous for having published Islamist writings in the 1970s is that such activities got Mr. Izetbegovic tried and imprisoned in Yugoslavia, for a few years, on the charge of inciting dangerous and fanatical ideas.[3a] And the key point is this: Izetbegovic *re-issued* "Islamic Declaration" in 1990 - the same year that he ran for the presidency of Bosnia and lost the election to Fikret Abdic. This was an election that coincided with a political crisis about the future of Bosnia, so Izetbegovic was obviously using his violent book to define himself as the leader of a movement that meant to turn Bosnia into a Muslim fundamentalist and racist theocracy. It is the height of scandal, therefore, that the New York Times should neither mention this book nor give an explanation when it calls Izetbegovic a "moderate." But matters are, in fact, worse still. [ see url cited for full article ] It's all enuff to make me sick. Starman

by **proldic** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 7:54 pm

A few weeks ago PBS Frontline did a real slick segment on Beslan which -- essentially -- a) portrayed the Russian authorities as reckless, and implied that they were really to blame for the results of the seige (interestingly I don't remember that kind of "balance" from PBS when it came to Waco) b) cast the hostage-takers - and the fundamentalist Chechyn groups in a relatively nice light, at least compared to the Russians. They humanized them. And they had these 2 very well-spoken young whippersnapper reporter couple from the Washington Post who were there for awhile saying, oh it was blowback from all the years of Russian oppression, and there was absolutely no truth to the Russian claims of international (and in the initial reports, western) involvement. No conspiracy, they said. No a-q link.

The CIA and the Cultural Cold War

The CIA and the Cultural Cold War

Great

got it..

Re: got it..

Ramparts, March 1967

re: CIA and Cultural Cold War

USA > Afghanistan > Yugoslavia > Chechnya > Besl

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