(EST PUB DATE) HEARTS AND MINDS THREE CASE STUDIES OF THE CIA'S COVERT SUPPORT OF AMERICAN ANTI-COMMUNIST GROUPS IN THE COLD WAR, 1949-1967

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• Publication Date: January 1, 1999

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Three Case Studies of the CIA's Covert Support
of American Anti-Communist Groups
in the Cold War, 1949-1967
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_Duerr(
Three Case Studies of the CIAs Covert Support
of American Anti-Communist Groups
in the Cold War, 1949-1967
Michael Warner
History Staff
Center for the Study of Intelligence
Central Intelligence Agency
1999
_Sear-et
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itional Security
Formation
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To the Memory of Michael Josselson
�SerrEr
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Foreword xi
Introduction xiii
Chapter One: The Twilight Struggle
Origins of Cold War Political Action, 1945 - 1950 (v) 1
Chapter Two: Trial and Error
The Management of Covert Subsidy
Programs, 1951 - 1966 (u) 47
Chapter Three: The Secret Alliance
The National Student Association (u) 81
Chapter Four: A Hidden Policy
The American Friends of the Middle East.fs'r 133
Chapter Five: The Matchmaker
The Congress for Cultural Freedom (u) 179
Epilogue 213
Index 221
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Acknowledgments (U)
This book took a little longer than I had anticipated when I pro-
posed it in 1992. I hope that readers will find the time well spent, for the
story of the Agency's involvement with American voluntary groups is a
fascinating one. That which is interesting in the narrative to follow owes
little to my own efforts and much to the dedicated and often brilliant men
and women who ran the operations and the associations that cooperated
with the CIA. This is their story, not mine, and I was indeed lucky to have
some of them go out of their way to assist my project. I would like to
thank all those who consented to be interviewed. I must also express par-
ticular gratitude to others who generously shared memories, insights, and
sometimes even documents, especially Arnold Beichman, Tom Braden,
Leonard Bushkoff, Philip Cherry, Cleveland Cram, Lorraine Norton Eliot
Burton Gerber, Sam Halpern, Richard Helms, Paul Henze,
Irving Kristol, Walter Laqueur, Melvin Lasky, Sue McCloud,
David Murphy, Edward Overton, Walter Pforzheimer, W
Raymond, John Richardson, Evan Thomas, and one more individual who
wished to remain anonymous. Several present and former colleagues and
Agency officers likewise merit thanks for their production assistance or
their comments on drafts, particularly Hank Appelbaum, Paul Arnold,
Nicholas Cullather, Ben Fischer, Gerald K. Haines,
Fred Hitz, Scott Koch, Brian Late11, Diane Marvin, Mary
McAuliffe, J. Kenneth McDonald, William McNair, James E. Miller,
Kay Oliver, Floyd Paseman, Neal Petersen, David Robarge, Kevin
Ruffner, Kathy Stricker,
Many can share in what credit
attaches to this book; the blame for any errors and omissions is mine
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Foreword (U)
For most Americans, including journalists and scholars, mention of
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) conjures up visions of spies, coup
plots, or paramilitary operations. Even intelligence professionals are often
only dimly aware of many of the more subtle, and sometimes more influ-
ential, CIA operations put in place to affect the world situation and to aid
US strategic interests. This insightful volume by Dr. Michael Warner,
Deputy Chief of the CIA History Staff, examines three CIA covert action
programs in the 1950s and 1960s. These programs were designed to aid
anti-Communist private, voluntary organizations during the early Cold
War. The projects involved support for and cooperation with the
National Student Association, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the
American Friends of the Middle East. CIA support for such groups and
organizations ended with the infamous "Ramparts flap" of 1967, which
revealed the Agency's involvement with the National Student Associa-
tion..(81
Fearing that the Soviet Union was winning the ideological and pro-
paganda war for the hearts and minds of scholars, intellectuals, students,
and groups of influence in the Third World, American Presidents from
Harry Truman to Lyndon Johnson approved CIA programs to shore up
and strengthen private anti-Communist US organizations. Dr. Warner
carefully charts the evolution of this CIA cooperation with the three
groups and attentively lays out CIA efforts to subsidize these organiza-
tions and to promote their non-Communist agendas abroad. Dr. Warner
concludes that the CIA often found it difficult to reconcile the controver-
sial domestic political stands of these client organizations on such issues
as Vietnam, civil rights, and the Arab-Israeli dispute, with its overall
goal of bolstering legitimate opposition to international Communism. (u)
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Hearts and Minds manages to avoid both condemnation and nostal-
gia in depicting these long-term relationships. Dr. Warner's analysis of
CIA's dealings with these organizations should be read by all intelligence
officers and specialists interested in how the CIA, a secret intelligence
organization, operates in a democratic society. Finally, it should be noted
that the views expressed herein are the author's and do not necessarily
represent those of the Central Intelligence Agency. (u)
Gerald K. Haines
Chief Historian
October 1998
Secret
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Introduction (U)
We are now conducting a cold war. . . . That cold war must have some
objective, otherwise it would be senseless. It is conducted in the belief that
if there is no war, if the two systems of government are allowed to live side
by side, that ours because of its greater appeal to men everywhere�to
mankind�in the long run will win out. That it will defeat all forms of dic-
tatorial government because of its greater appeal to the human soul, the
human heart, the human mind.
Dwight D. Eisenhower'
The Central Intelligence Agency spent almost two decades manag-
ing one of the most audacious enterprises ever launched by the United
States Government. In fighting the Cold War, CIA officers funded and
guided ostensibly private American voluntary organizations that sought
to stem Communist expansion and influence among foreign peoples and
governments. Many of these American associations were by no means
small or obscure. In fact, their very success abroad depended in part on
their authenticity at home, and that in turn flowed partly from their lucid
opinions on controversial domestic issues. The CIA's covert subsidy pro-
grams represented something unique in American history. Never before
had the US Government secretly created or penetrated private organiza-
tions on anything resembling such a scale, and, with the Cold War over, it
is unlikely that the Agency will soon have the authority and the means to
do anything like this again. (0)
This story has a clear beginning and a dramatic end. The CIA's
use of domestic voluntary groups arose from the Truman administra-
tion's efforts to stanch the spread of Communism and give the Marshall
Plan a chance to rebuild the economies and societies of Western
Europe. The programs (which had no collective operational direction or
codename) gained impetus from the Korean war, but by the mid-1960s
CIA and the Johnson administration were seeking ways to extricate
themselves from the dozens of individual covert projects that had been
' Eisenhower made this comment to personnel of the United States Information Agency; it is quot-
ed in Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War: 1945-1961
(New York: St. Martins, 1997), p. 24. (u)
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initiated. This disengagement failed spectacularly in 1967 because of
massive publicity surrounding well-documented allegations made by a
hitherto obscure political magazine, Ramparts. (u)
This study examines three of the covert action projects in detail.
The CIA provided the bulk of the operating budgets for the National Stu-
dent Association (NSA), the American Friends of the Middle East
(AFME), and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Each emerged
from the efforts of the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination's (OPC)
efforts to halt the spread of Communism in Europe and the Third World
during the early Cold War. OPC designed these programs around the
assumption that Communist agents and ideology might soon win new
adherents among important segments of foreign societies, ranging from
European intellectuals, to Brazilian students, to educated Arab Muslims.
This aspect of OPC's attack on Communism would be indirect; it would
proceed by drying the pools of potential Communist support. But OPC
as yet had few overseas assets, and it felt compelled to rely on the con-
nections and expertise of concerned American citizens to extend its influ-
ence abroad. The American citizens whom the Agency tapped were (or
soon became) witting leadership cadres who were dealing, on the
Agency's behalf, with unwitting memberships and colleagues. (u)
OPC could not consult the telephone directory for well-connected
American voluntary groups just waiting for secret subsidies to fight Com-
munism abroad. Such organizations either had to be created ex nihilo, or
their existing arrangements and policies had to change. A broad common-
ality of interests between CIA and its covert client organizations might
well have developed spontaneously in response to Stalinism and the
Korean war, but what actually occurred was that OPC secretly encour-
aged the movement toward parallel interests in the National Student
Association and other organizations. CCF and AFME were created by
OPC, and the National Student Association was actively steered by OPC
agents and money toward activist anti-Communism abroad. The NSA
case in particular illustrates a kind of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of
covert action; the act of covertly subsidizing even an existing organiza-
tion changes that organization, bringing its interests more into congru-
ence with the clandestine service that sponsors it. (u)
In each of the three cases examined here, CIA case officers and
assets jointly wielded substantial but clandestine influence over the orga-
nization's activities. In each case, moreover, CIA supervisors realized
that the Agency had taken a dangerous gamble�and that the potential for
public exposure and embarrassment was large. CIA officers and assets
worked to manage and control this risk, but ultimately they also accepted
it as a routine cost of business. Acceptance eventually bred complacency,
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but that complacency could not last in the mid-1960s as spreading
debates over the Vietnam war and US foreign policy in general seemed to
heighten the risks of exposure out of proportion to the benefits produced
by the respective operations. By then, however, it was too late, even
though the Agency was extricating itself from all three operations in the
months before the Ramparts flap. Each
-
Each project evolved differently. The Congress for Cultural Free-
dom was really the creature of one remarkable American citizen
�Michael Josselson�who kept his organi-
zation focused on its original goals and minimized its need for cover and
administrative support from American intellectuals. CIA created the
American Friends of the Middle East to turn Muslims away from Com-
munism. When its first director proved unmanageable, a strong (but gen-
erally compliant) board of directors took control of the organization,
which then served as a rather elaborate covert support mechanism for
other CIA projects. The National Student Association was unique among
these three organizations in not owing its founding to CIA, although infu-
sions of Agency money reoriented NSA early in its existence, giving it an
international focus and influence that it might not have acquired on its
own. The young men and women who ran the National Student Associa-
tion were determined not to cede international student fellowshi to the
Communists,
where they persua e t e gency's leaders to join the long struggle
against Communist youth and student fronts.
OPC's haste to meet the Soviet challenge caused operational flaws
to be built into all three of these undertakings. The three operations were
chosen for this study because collectively they represented the modus of
CIA covert political action practices before the Ramparts revelations.
They reflected the Agency's emphasis on covert subsidy projects and
American voluntary organizations during the early Cold War. All were
linked by a common funding network that led back to the CIA Director-
ate of Plans. All fell with the public collapse of that network, for reasons
that invite scrutiny and comparison. Failure stemmed partly from poor
CIA security practices that were only too evident even before the Ram-
parts flap, but also�and perhaps even more significantly�from a flaw in
the design of the Agency's specific type of political action. (0)
The CIA's strategy of aiding the "non-Communist Left" in Europe
and Asia guided the operations involving the National Student Associa-
tion and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. In addition, this strategy
indirectly justified the subsidy for the American Friends of the Middle
East, which was not part of the non-Communist Left but which sought to
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accomplish a similar goal�that of strengthening non-Western, even non-
democratic, resistance to Communism.. In all three operations the CIA
proposed and took on the covert mission of promoting what US policy-
makers regarded as America's true interests in an age when political exi-
gencies supposedly imparted a harmful rigidity to declared US foreign
policy. Various officials (inside and outside the Agency) occasionally
complained that CIA support for such partisan organizations entangled
the Agency in activities beyond its charter, but these complaints by them-
selves did not compel the Directorate of Plans to drop or reorient the
projects in question. f,$)
The three covert subsidy projects under study here took place with
the knowledge and approval of higher authority. They began as pieces of
the "psychological warfare" offensive mounted by the Democratic
administration of Harry S. Truman. They continued and gained momen-
tum under his Republican successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower. The CIA
career of Allen Dulles began in the Truman administration, but he easily
convinced his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and Presi-
dent Eisenhower that the covert subsidy operations got results as Ameri-
can propaganda efforts shifted from psychological warfare toward
encouraging a gradual "evolution" of Soviet and satellite attitudes
toward the West.' Allen Dulles and his lieutenants later had no difficulty
proving the worth of the operations to the Kennedy brothers, who were
already enthusiastic about aiding the non-Communist Left and appreci-
ated the subtle pragmatism of covert action. (u)
These operations thus were US Government policy initiatives as
well as CIA projects. The internal CIA history of Allen Dulles's tenure as
Director of Central Intelligence reflects the government-wide consensus:
The main objective of these activities was to oppose those
Communist-dominated organizations which were closely con-
trolled, ideologically as well as operationally, and which fol-
lowed the current Soviet party line. Opposition by its very
nature would have to manifest diversity and differences of
view and be infused by the concept of free inquiry. Thus
views expressed by representatives and members of the US-
supported organizations in many cases were not necessarily
shared by their sponsors . . . It took a fairly sophisticated point
of view to understand that the public exhibition of unortho-
dox views was a potent weapon against monolithic Commu-
nist uniformity of action. There were plenty of people in the
Walter Hixson contrasts "psychological warfare" with "cultural infiltration" in Parting the Cur-
tain, pp. xii, 16, 101. (u)
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US Government, including the Congress, who understood
this, and if it had not been for them, CIA could not have
funded these operations. (U)
CIA acted from the beginning as an executive agent�not as a
mere instrument�of the President and the NSC subsidizing American
anti-Communist groups that constructively questioned US foreign policy.
The Agency enjoyed wide latitude in deciding how and where to fund
such groups. Client organizations, in addition, had wills of their own.
CIA officers sponsored such groups as NSA, CCF, and AFME for their
own reasons as well as those of the White House, and the details of those
arrangements rarely if ever reached Presidents or national security advis-
ers. Buried within the latter point is the core of an explanation of what
happened before the Ramparts flap.,cer
By the time of President Kennedy's assassination, articulate critics
on both the left and the right were assaulting the political assumptions
under which OPC had originally undertaken its subsidy projects. The ris-
ing conservative movement (learning from Congress for Cultural Free-
dom veterans such as James Burnham and Sidney Hook) criticized US
assistance to groups that wavered in their lukewarm support of American
policies and even flirted with Marxism. The New Left, led briefly by uni-
versity students disaffected with the National Student Association,
blasted "the establishment" and its ways of co-opting Americans into the
military-industrial complex. (u)
These 1960s shifts in the domestic political climate exposed the
CIA's strategy of supporting the non-Communist Left to attacks from
political thinkers who rejected the social democratic ideas tacitly
endorsed by Agency subsidies. "Right-wing" anti-Communism dis-
trusted all of the Left as too wedded to egalitarianism and social plan-
ning, while new thought on the left indicted both Communism and
capitalism for complicity in building a dehumanizing, industrialized
mass society. Here lay the irony of the Agency's strategy: it simply was
not possible to subsidize some nonexistent generic form of anti-Commu-
nism, only different and mutually competing anti-Communist individuals
and groups. (u)
Support for American voluntary groups working with the non-
Communist Left�or Islamic anti-Communism, such as it was�by defi-
nition meant working with specific Americans within those client groups.
Each of the three operations studied here endured because a core group
'Wayne G. Jackson, "Allen Dulles as DCI," Volume III, "Covert Activities," July 1973, National
Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 263 (CIA), NN3-263-94-011, pp. 102104.
(0)
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of dedicated, witting individuals acted as "brokers" between the Agency
and the overt organization, keeping both client and sponsor committed
to certain covert goals. CCF had Michael Josselson; NSA had its secret
fraternity of witting officers and alumni; and AFME had the mercurial
Garland Hopkins in the beginning, and later an activist board of direc-
tors. Without agents and officers of such high ability and commitment,
the operations surveyed in this study would not have been possible. (,4
These "brokers" shared several qualities. They all were committed
to the overlapping covert and overt goals shared by the CIA and its
respective client organizations. They had remarkable abilities to accom-
plish tasks on both the "inside" and the "outside" of the operation�
within the corridors of CIA and in the public eye. Finally, all of these
brokers resigned themselves to the heavy security demands and the tacti-
cal compromises the Agency imposed on their operations. The inefficien-
cies created by CIA procedures weighed less, in the minds of these
agents, than the good that CIA money did for their respective organiza-
tions.
But these brokers inevitably had rivals and opponents as well.
There were internal rivals in the case of NSA, and outside opponents in
the cases of CCF and AFME. Their competitors could hardly have been
expected to resist the temptation to exploit leaks about CIA support in
order to influence or even harm the Agency's client organizations. (s)
Any investigation of the developing CIA operations and their even-
tual downfall needs strict methodological guidelines. This study could
have been one of several things: a comparative history of CIA-affiliated,
American-based, anti-Communist voluntary groups; an autopsy of the
Ramparts flap; or an examination of CIA's largely indirect involvement
in American domestic political debates. The study as written is none of
these things per se.4 Instead it is a little of all three�and indeed sheds
light in all three areas. This is essentially a narrative of how CIA's leaders
knowingly took a gamble at the outset of the Cold War, and then finally
lost their wager in a spectacular and catastrophic fashion. It is a story
worth telling in detail because of its intrinsic human and policy interest,
because of the damage done to the CIA by the Ramparts revelations, and
�Indeed, the story of the Ramparts flap has already been told from CIA's perspective in two classi-
fied monographs. For the origins and development of the flap, see Anthony Marc Lewis, "The 1967
Crisis in Covert Action Operations: The Ramparts Exposures," December 1970, Clandestine Ser-
vices Historical Series 196, CIA History Staff, (S). Philip W. Kaufman provides a comprehensive
overview of CIA and US Government damage control efforts in "The 1967 Reappraisal and Read-
justment in Covert Action Operations; The Katzenbach Committee Report," January 1971, Clan-
destine Services History Program 384, CIA History Staff. (s)
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because an understanding of the rise and fall of covert action with Ameri-
can voluntary groups is itself crucial to further historical research in all
three of the topics listed above. (0)
All three operations (along with many others of this type) survived
so long because successive Directors of Central Intelligence and Deputy
Directors for Plans perceived them as successful�that is, at providing
operational and strategic benefits greater than their costs. Were these per-
ceptions accurate? Comparing the accomplishments of the three projects
is mixing apples and oranges, but some tentative judgments can nonethe-
less be made. The Congress for Cultural Freedom undoubtedly was a suc-
cess, despite its being the most expensive of the three projects. CCF
helped in the 1950s to refute the canard that art flourishes only under
socialism, and in the 1960s it publicized the ways in which tyranny inevi-
tably suppresses creative thought as well as personal freedom. On the
other hand, the accomplishments of the American Friends of the Middle
East operation, and especially those of the National Student Association
operation, seem almost ephemeral today. AFME doubtless bought Amer-
ica some good will among Arab elite
/Perhaps the benefits outweighed the costs;
perhaps only the CIA could have created and preserved an AFME long
enough to allow the organization to live on without covert funds./
This study tries to help contemporary readers to understand an era
in the Agency's past and some of the reasons why that era ended in
1967. The story has continuing relevance to the ways of assessing the
potential costs and benefits of covert political action. (0)
The Sources (u)
The bulk of the documents in this study reside in retired files of the
Directorate of Operations. The DO preserved many of the relevant admin-
istrative, policy, and support files in good order, although a few minor
gaps have opened during the intervening decades. Interviews with some
three dozen retired managers, case officers, and agents fill in some of
those gaps. The historical case studies produced by the History Staff's old
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
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Clandestine Services History Program helped considerably in sketching
out the basic plan for this study. Robert Knapp's classified history of the
Agency, The First Thirty Years, proved to be an indispensable reference
tool. Retired files held outside the Directorate of Operations�particularly
by the Executive Registry, Office of Human Resource Management, and
the Inspector General�also proved valuable. (u)
Reliable open sources on CIA covert activities with American vol-
untary organizations are rare. A few books on the CIA mention some of
the operations and personalities, particularly John Ranelagh's The
Agency; Burton Hersh's The Old Boys; Evan Thomas's The Very Best
Men, and Peter Grose's Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles. Peter
Coleman's history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, The Liberal
Conspiracy, was essential. Walter L. Hixson's Parting the Curtain pro-
vided valuable policy context. Contemporary newspapers and periodicals
often illuminated the circumstances of particular decisions and incidents.
In some cases, the records of Congressional hearings and the Department
of State's Foreign Relations of the United States series provided the spe-
cific policy contexts. (u)
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Chapter One
The Twilight Struggle
Origins of Cold War Political Action,
1945-1950 (U)
With the breakdown of the wartime Grand Alliance and the resump-
tion of overt ideological hostility between East and West, Moscow in the
late 1940s accelerated Communist Party efforts to make Western public
opinion take a more favorable view of Soviet foreign policy objectives. A
favored approach was for Party members in the West to join or create
organizations that were ostensibly non-Communist�and thus attractive
to liberals and socialists�but still responsive to direction from Moscow.
In the 1920s, a German Communist leader named Willi Mtinzenberg,
building on Leninist techniques of political struggle, had pioneered tech-
niques for directing and exploiting progressive Western sympathy for the
cause of revolutionary socialism in the Soviet Union.' In the 1930s the
Communist International (better known as the Comintern) adopted the
methods developed by Miinzenberg in directing the actions of Commu-
nists who had newly joined an array of anti-Fascist organizations. Several
front groups (including the League of American Writers, the American
Artists Congress, and the American Committee for Democracy and Intel-
lectual Freedom), even operated in the United States. Stalin had dis-
banded the Comintern in 1943, as a gesture of wartime solidarity with its
Western allies. Soon after V-E Day, however, the Soviets began rebuild-
ing their old front groups and founding new ones (such as the World Fed-
eration of Trade Unions and the World Peace Council). Communists and
' Mtinzenberg, a co-founder of the German Communist Party and member of the Weimar Reich-
stag, created his Comintern-staffed "Trust" to garner famine relief for the Soviet Union. He later
oversaw its expansion in filmmaking and publishing, and in its cooperation with Soviet foreign in-
telligence organizations. Mfinzenberg called his front groups "innocents' clubs"; Stephen Koch,
Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West (New York:
Free Press, 1994), pp. 12-28. (H)
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their sympathizers also penetrated existing nonpartisan organizations,
soon co-opting or at least disrupting several American labor unions and
voluntary groups.2 (u)
The United States at this point had little capability or inclination to
respond in kind. During the war Washington had accumulated an ener-
getic if uncoordinated congeries of "psychological warfare" activities,
based mainly in the Office of War Information (OWI) and the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS). Demobilization soon claimed both agencies;
their employees were released and their files dispersed around Washing-
ton. By early 1946, only the Department of State's tame Voice of Amer-
ica and an interagency discussion group�the State-War-Navy
Coordinating Committee�remained of the US Government's briefly far-
ranging foreign and domestic propaganda, "informational," and covert
action capabilities.' (u)
The Truman administration's announcement in 1947 of the Mar-
shall Plan to rebuild Europe spurred Moscow to redouble its efforts to
influence public opinion in Western Europe. In September 1947, Stalin's
lieutenants founded the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform),
which in turn ordered the French and Italian Communist Parties to mobi-
lize the masses against the Marshall Plan.4 French and Italian Commu-
nists responded with tumultuous (but ultimately futile) campaigns of
strikes and propaganda. Communists in other parts of Europe caused
trouble as well.' (u)
Washington's concern over Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe had
been one of several factors leading to the creation of the Central Intelli-
gence Agency in 1947. The Communist-run strikes in France and Italy,
followed by the Communist coup d'etat in Czechoslovakia in February
1948, suggested to Agency officials and the American foreign policy
establishment that Stalin might not give the Marshall Plan (which Con-
gress was still debating) time to rebuild the economies of Western
Europe. The Soviet Union, while technically not at war with anyone, had
launched a campaign of political subversion that truly was a "cold
war"�one that confused the already murky issue of "peacetime" versus
"wartime" intelligence operations. (u)
'For instance, see Michael Straight's description of the Communist attempt to gain control of the
American Veterans Committee, After Long Silence (New York: W.W. Norton, 1983), pp. 233-240.
(u)
'Edward P. Lilly, "The Psychological Strategy Board and its Predecessors: Foreign Policy Coor-
dination, 1938-1953," in Gaetano L. Vincitorio, editor, Studies in Modern History (New York: St.
John's University Press, 1968), pp. 354-355. See also Edward P. Barrett, Truth is Our Weapon
(New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1953), pp. 52-53. (u)
'Adam Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-73 (New York: Holt, Rine-
hart & Winston, 1974), pp. 448-449, 460-461. (U)
'Franz Borkenau, European Communism (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953), pp. 519-531. (u)
ISP�efer
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Josef Stalin. (u)
Truman administration officials had to respond to the ambiguous
situation with a creative ambiguity of their own. In November 1947, the
new National Security Council (NSC) briefly considered assigning peace-
time psychological warfare to the Department of State. Secretary of State
George Marshall soon dissuaded the NSC from this step, complaining
-Secret-
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that covert missions might embarrass his Department and harm Ameri-
can diplomacy. State and the military, however, still wanted a degree of
control over psychological operations and decided that the fledgling CIA
ought to get this capability: the Agency not only had a worldwide net of
operatives, but it also controlled unvouchered funds, which could obviate
the need to approach Congress for new appropriations.' In December
1947, the National Security Council�despite the misgivings of Director
of Central Intelligence (DCI) Roscoe Hillenkoetter�issued NSC 4-A.
Pointing to the "vicious psychological efforts of the USSR, its satellite
countries and Communist groups," this directive determined that CIA was
the logical agency to conduct
covert psychological operations designed to counteract Soviet
and Soviet-inspired activities which constitute a threat to
world peace and security or are designed to discredit and
defeat the aims and activities of the United States in its
endeavors to promote world peace and security.' (U)
NSC 4-A made the DCI responsible for psychological operations, but
left him little guidance or means to do so. The Morale Operations
Branch of OSS had died with that Office's dissolution in 1945. OWI had
perished around the same time, and its overseas informational arm
(including the Voice of America) languished in the Department of State's
new International Information and Education Division. Congress compli-
cated the situation still further in early 1948, directing the new Economic
Cooperation Administration (ECA; which would manage the Marshall
Plan) to ensure that America got a proper share of the credit for rebuild-
ing Europe. The Congressmen also passed the Smith-Mundt Act, thereby
giving a statutory basis to State's foreign information activities and mak-
ing the Secretary of State the chief architect of national information pol-
icy. Nevertheless, a NSC study complained a few years later that:
We had the tools and blueprint but there was no foreman to
tell the agency mechanics what their share was and how it fit-
ted into and contributed to the national plan . . . . Neither State
6Arthur B. Darling, The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government, to 1950 (Uni-
versity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), pp. 253-262. Anne Karalekas, "History
of the Central Intelligence Agency," in William M. Leary, ed., The Central Intelligence Agency:
History and Documents (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1984), pp. 40-41. (0)
'National Security Council, NSC 4-A, 17 December 1947, reprinted in Department of State, For-
eign Relations of the United States, 1945-1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment
(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1996), pp. 643-644. (0)
--Secret-
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nor Defense liked the other to dictate its area of psychologi-
cal operations. Other than NSC, which had its own problems,
there was no body of sufficient stature to direct the existing
machinery into an effective coordinated operation.' (U)
The DCI in turn assigned the covert action mission to the CIA's Office of
Special Operations (0S0). At roughly the same time, the Agency's
Office of Reports and Estimates organized its own "International Organi-
zations Group" to analyze Soviet psychological warfare efforts. Other
Western governments and intelligence services were taking similar steps
at roughly the same time. Britain's Labour government, for instance, in
early 1948 created the Foreign Office's Information Research Department
(IRD), which was paid out of Secret Intelligence Service funds to spread
anti-Soviet ideas and publications. IRD would soon assist "subversive
operations" as well. 9 (u)
The NSC responded to the Czech and Berlin crises of early 1948 by
expanding the covert action mandate. DCI Hillenkoetter's cautious
(though not unsuccessful) use of covert action had satisfied neither State
nor Defense officials. Policy Planning Staff chief George Kennan argued
that the US Government needed a capability to conduct "political war-
fare" (Kennan may well have been the anonymous author of a memo
calling for covert operations amounting to the "logical application of
Clausewitz's doctrine [that war is simply politics by other means] in time
of peace"). Believing this role was too important to be left to the CIA,
Kennan led the Department of State's bid to win substantial control over
covert psychological operations, which would be run by a small staff
nominally subordinate to the NSC. The military backed State's efforts,
advocating an independent�or at least more powerful�office for psy-
chological warfare.'� (U)
Edward P. Lilly, National Security Council, "Psychological Operations, 1945-1951," 4 February
1952, Harry S. Truman Library, Psychological Strategy Board files, box 15. Sarah-Jane Corke,
"Bridging the Gap: Containment, Covert Action and the Search for the Missing Link in American
Cold War Policy, 1948-1953," Journal of Strategic Studies 20 (December 1997). (U)
'Foreign and Commonwealth Office, "IRD: Origins and Establishment of the Foreign Office Infor-
mation Research Department, 1946-48," History Notes, August 1995, pp. 5-7. W. Scott Lucas and
C. J. Morris, "A very British Crusade: the Information Research Department and the Beginning of
the Cold War," in Richard J. Aldrich, editor, British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War, 1945-
51 (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 95-105. (1.1)
'Darling, The Central Intelligence Agency, pp. 263-268. (u)
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DCI Hillenkoetter saw what was coming and tried to resist it, com-
plaining that CIA would lose control over psychological warfare." His
complaints tempered but did not stave off the NSC's decision to inter-
vene in a new directive, NSC 10/2, issued in June 1948 as the Soviets
tightened their blockade on West Berlin. NSC 10/2 ostensibly expanded
CIA's writ while actually infringing upon the Agency's freedom of
action. It directed CIA to conduct "covert" rather than merely "psycho-
logical" operations, including
propaganda; economic warfare; preventive direct
action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition
and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile
states, including assistance to underground resistance
movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups,
and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in
threatened countries of the free world.
NSC 10/2 also shifted covert action to a new CIA office�soon styled
the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC)�that would be administra-
tively quartered in CIA but supervised by the Department of State and the
military. In wartime, the entire apparatus was supposed to shift to the
Joint Chiefs' control and conduct unconventional operations against the
enemy.'2 OPC officially came into being in September 1948 under the
directorship of Frank G. Wisner, an OSS veteran who had been serving as
deputy to the Assistant Secretary of State for the Occupied Areas.'3 (u)
As CIA's Assistant Director for Policy Coordination, Wisner's mis-
sion was broad but vague.'4 NSC 10/2's phrase "covert operations" cov-
ered a wide range of activities. The mandate's ambiguity reflected its
novelty; few American officials had experience with such methods and
had no body of doctrine governing their use in peacetime. Even so, OPC
threw itself into a wide variety of operations, including specific responses
to NSC 10/2's call to support "indigenous anti-Communist elements in
threatened countries of the free world." (u)
"Hillenkoetter to Sidney Souers, National Security Council, "Psychological Operations," 11 May
1948, reprinted in Department of State, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, pp. 676-677.
Hillenkoetter to James S. Lay, National Security Council, 9 June 1948, reprinted in Ibid., pp. 703-
704. (u)
'National Security Council, NSC 10/2, 18 June 1948, reprinted in Ibid., pp. 713-714. (U)
''Darling, The Central Intelligence Agency, pp. 262-273. Karalekas, "History of the Central Intel-
ligence Agency," pp. 41-42. (u)
'''The title "Assistant Director" is equivalent to the modern CIA position of "Deputy Director," de-
noting a rank inferior only to the Director of Central Intelligence and the Deputy Director of Cen-
tral Intelligence. The second-in-command at OPC held the title "Deputy Assistant Director of
Policy Coordination." (u)
.,Seerei
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George Kennan urged OPC to undertake several projects with
American organizations.
Wide World
OPC took formal policy guidance from the NSC but received
many of its early instructions in personal contacts with George Kennan.
Wisner had been at his desk only days when Kennan steered him toward
an operation that would serve as a prototype for later political action
projects. Kennan urged Wisner to find ways to help non-Communist
labor unions in Western Europe. Fearing that the Marshall Plan would
not succeed if Communist-dominated unions were able to block su lies
and services crucial to the rebuilding of the Continent
_SeRret�
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These early contacts also helped set the precedent for OPC taking its pol-
icy guidance more-or-less informally and personally, instead of through
the interagency channels that the State-Army-Navy Coordinating Com-
mittee (SANACC) and the NSC staff were then laboring to create."
At the same time, the Office undertook a massive "gray" propa-
ganda effort using refugees and �gr�from Eastern Europe.19 As
streams of refugees fled westward from Stalin's reach, George Kennan
had seen an opportunity. State's Voice of America had begun broadcast-
ing to Russia in February 1947, and that same year Assistant Secretary
of State for Public Affairs William Benton had proposed the creation of
a quasi-public foundation to run America's international broadcasting.2�
Kennan added his own twist to these ideas. He believed the US Govern-
ment needed an instrument with which to deal with the �gr�and coor-
dinate their activities against the Soviet Union, and he passed this task to
OPC. The Office brought Kennan's idea to life in 1949 by creating the
'8 Lilly, "The Psychological Strategy Board," pp. 358-359. (u)
'91n the evolving parlance of psychological warfare, gray propaganda (as opposed to black and
white propaganda) connoted statements or material by ostensibly independent third parties that
generally supported US policies. "White" propaganda was officially and obviously produced by
the US Government. "Black" propaganda was designed to look as though it emanated from an en-
emy source. An example of black propaganda, in an early 1950's context, would be a fake Com-
munist Chinese editorial denouncing Stalin. (u)
"Barrett, Truth is Our Weapon, p. 67. (u)
_Seerer
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Frank a Wisner, the activist first Assistant Director for Policy
Coordination. (u)
National Committee for Free Europe (NCFE), which the following year
gave birth to Radio Free Europe. Based in New York City, NCFE was a
private organization ostensibly run by concerned American and �gr�
figures but actually controlled by OPC.2' (u)
2' NCFE's founding is chronicled in some detail by Sig Mickelson, America's Other Voice: the Story
of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1983), pp. 14-22. (u)
erer-
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OPC's experience with NCFE taught OPC how to manage certain
problems inherent in such operations. "The front organization concept is
an old one," Wisner's deputy Menitt Ruddock reported in early 1949:
The [US] Government has shied away from it in the past .
because of (a) fears that Government support and participation
could not long be concealed; (b) the reluctance of prominent in-
dividuals to associate themselves with a facade or pure front;
and (c) fears that the people who would consent to joining a
front might be hard to handle and/or try to run with the ball.
Ruddock believed that, in creating NCFE, OPC had devised a new tech-
nique intended to minimize these problems. US Government support for
the National Committee hid behind a series of organizational and finan-
cial structures that impeded outside scrutiny, and helped both NCFE and
the government to deny rumors of clandestine dealings. In addition,
those who publicly ran NCFE were carefully chosen private figures
(such as New York attorney Allen Dulles and Ambassador Joseph C.
Grew) who sympathized with American foreign policy objectives. The
broad convergence of interests between Washington and NCFE obviated
any need for the CIA to exercise direct control over NCFE's operations.22
1erg
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policies. Conferences scheduled for Mexico City, New York, and Paris
aimed at convincing Western artists, writers, and scholars that Moscow
was the last hope for world peace.27 (u)
The "peace offensive" came to the United States in March 1949
with the opening of the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World
Peace at New York City's Waldorf-Astoria Hote1.28 Conference organizers
copied the format of the Comintern-inspired congresses of writers and
artists of the 1930s, attracting a panoply of American writers and artists,
including Lillian Hellman, Aaron Copland, and Arthur Miller. The dele-
gates joined with European and Soviet delegates to repudiate "U.S. war-
mongering." Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, for example, told
the delegates that "a small clique of hatemongers" was preparing a glo-
bal conflagration, and he urged progressive artists to struggle against the
new "Fascists" who were seeking world domination. Shostakovich, who
had recently penned an ode to Stalin's forestry program, also described
for his 800 listeners "the unheard-of scope and level of development
reached by musical culture in the USSR." American panelists echoed the
Russian composer's fear of a new global conflict. Playwright Clifford
Odets, for example, denounced the "enemies of Man" and claimed that
fraudulent reports of Soviet aggression had whipped the United States
into "a state of holy terror." Composer Aaron Copland declared "the
present policies of the American Government will lead inevitably into a
third world war." (u)
The Cominform could hardly have picked a riskier place than New
York City to stage a Stalinist peace conference. The City's ethnic com-
munities brimmed with refugees from Communism, and its campuses and
numerous cultural and political journals employed hundreds of politi-
cally left-leaning men and women who had fought in the bitter ideologi-
cal struggles over Stalinism that divided American labor unions, college
faculties, and cultural organizations before World War II. A handful of
liberal and socialist New York writers, led by philosophy professor Sid-
ney Hook, had seen an opportunity to steal a little of the publicity
expected for the upcoming conference. Hook, a fierce ex-radical, was
"International Organizations Group (Office of Reports and Estimates), "Weekly Summary No.
31," 14 December 1948, Office of Transnational Issues Job 78-01617A, box 49. (U)
"The conference's American sponsor was the National Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Profes-
sions, in coordination with the Paris-based World Congress of Intellectuals, an organization linked
to the Cominform. International Organizations Group, "Weekly Summary No. 8," 22 February
1949, Office of Transnational Issues Job 78-01617A, box 49 (declassified). (u)
""Shostakovich Bids All Artists Lead War on New 'Fascists," New York Times, 28 March 1949,
p. I. Richard H. Parke, "Our Way Defended to 2,000 Opening 'Culture' Meeting," New York Times,
26 March 1949, p. 1. Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties
(New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 453. (U)
,Seerti
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teaching philosophy at New York University and writing for a socialist
magazine, The New Leader Ten years earlier, he and his mentor John
Dewey had founded a controversial group called the Committee for Cul-
tural Freedom, which attacked both Communism and Nazism.3� Hook's
new group called itself the "Americans for Intellectual Freedom" and
boasted some big names of its own, such as critics Dwight MacDonald
and Mary McCarthy, composer Nicolas Nabokov, and commentator Max
Eastman.3' (u)
Arnold Beichman, a labor reporter friendly with anti-Communist
union leaders, remembered the excitement of tweaking the Soviet dele-
gates and their fellow conferees. "We didn't have any staff, we didn't
have any salaries to pay anything. But inside of about one day the place
was just busting with people volunteering." One of Beichman's union
friends persuaded the sold-out Waldorf to base Hook and his group in a
three-room suite ("I told them if you don't get that suite we'll close the
hotel down," he informed Beichman), and another labor connection
installed ten phone lines on a Sunday moming.32 (u)
Funds for the counterattack came from a variety of sources, includ-
ing David Dubinsky (president of the International Ladies Garment
Workers Union) and Hook's own modest savinffs "
Hook and his friends stole the show. They interrogated the Soviet
delegates at the conference's panel discussions and staged an evening
rally of their own in Bryant Park.35 News stories on the peace conference
"Sidney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (New York: Carroll & Graf Pub-
lishers, 1987), P. 261. (u)
"Nabokov was a cousin of novelist Vladimir Nabokov and a contact of columnist Joseph Alsop,
whose call to DCI Hillenkoetter got Nabokov a meeting with the Director in 1948. There is no
record of what they discussed. See the Director's telephone and appointments log for 27 and 29
January 1948, Executive Registry Job 80R01731R, box 26, folder 873. (c)
"Arnold Beichman, interview by Michael Warner, tape recording, McLean, VA, 17 March 1994
(hereinafter cited as Beichman interview) (Administrative Internal Use Only). Recordings, tran-
scripts and notes for the interviews conducted for this study are on file in the CIA History Staff,
CIA. (u)
"Hook, Out of Step, p. 388. (u)
"Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle
for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York, Free Press, 1989), pp. 5-6. (U)
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reported the activities of the Americans for Intellectual Freedom in detail.
"The only paper that was against us in this reporting was the New York
Times," recalled Beichman. "It turned out years later that [the Times'
reporter] was a member of the Party."36 (u)
As soon as the Waldorf Congress closed, OPC started preparing for
future peace conferences. The Office still had only a handful of staffers,
but it tried to make up in energy what it lacked in structure and experi-
ence. Carmel Offie asked OPC's Department of State supervisor, Robert
Joyce of the Policy Planning Staff, whether State intended to mount a
similar "riposte" to a coming Communist-run peace conference in
Paris." Offie had recently served in Frankfurt and was well acquainted
with Irving Brown and his wide net of contacts in Western Europe; he
had both the experience and influence to direct OPC's efforts in this new
field. �..4
Over the next few weeks, OPC communicated a makeshift covert
action plan for the Paris conference through at least three separate chan-
nels. The AFL's Irving Brown and Raymond Murphy of State's Bureau of
European Affairs wrote to the Paris Embassy's First Secretary, Norris
Chipman, while Wisner himself cabled Averell Harriman seeking 5 mil-
lion francs (roughly $16,000) from the Economic Cooperation Adminis-
tration (ECA) to fund a counterdemonstration.39 Murphy graphically
explained the need for a response to the Communist peace conference:
Now the theme is that the United States and the western
democracies are the war-mongers and Fascists and the Krem-
lin and its stooges the peace-loving democracies. And there is
a better than even chance that by constant repetition the Corn-
mies can persuade innocents to follow this line. Perhaps not
immediately but in the course of the next few years because
there is a tremendous residue of pacificism [sic], isolationism
and big business [sic] to be exploited. For example, a reces-
sion in the United States might cause people to lose interest
" Beichman interview, 17 March 1994. (0)
IICarmel Offie, Special Assistant, Office of Policy Coordination, to Robert P. Joyce, Policy Plan-
nine Staff Department of Spite "P-re Conference in Paris," 28 March 1949, European Division
. CIA analysis of the upcoming conference is contained in
International Organizations Group, "Weekly Summary No. 15," 12 April 1949, Office of Transna-
tional Issues Job 78-016I7A, box 49 (declassified).)
"Hersh, The Old Boys, pp. 255, 259. Warner, The CIA Under Harry Truman, p. xxxviii. (u)
"Irving Brown to Norris Chipman First Secretary US Embassy Paris 4 April 1949
this request was also signed by DCI
Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter. The 5 million francs would come from Marshall Plan "counterpart
funds." See also Morgan, A Covert Life, p. 149. (0)
_Seeret"
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in bolstering Europe. . . I think you will agree that this phony
peace movement actually embraces far more than intellectu-
als and that any counter-congress should emphasize also that
the threat to world peace comes from the Kremlin and its
allies.40 (U)
Working with Irving Brown, Chipman contacted French socialist
David Rousset and his allies at the breakaway leftist newspaper Franc
Tireur, which in turn organized an "International Day of Resistance to
Dictatorship and War," inviting Hook and other prominent anti-Commu-
nists.'" OPC also covertly paid the travel costs of the German, Italian, and
American delegations. The latter comprised Sidney Hook and novelist
James T. Farrell; neither knew of OPC's involvement.42 (u)
The Paris counterconference disappointed its American observers.
Although it attracted a number of prominent anti-Stalinists and provoked
angry blasts from French Communists, its tone was too radical and neu-
tralist for Hook and Farrell, who felt obliged to defend US foreign policy
against criticism by philosopher Jean Paul Sartre and other participants.43
OPC and State agreed with Hook's assessment.'" Carmel Offie did not
believe that OPC had to rely on Rousset and his Franc Tireur crowd to
reach French and European anti-Stalinists. Frank Wisner added a pointed
postscript:
We are concerned lest this type of "leadership" for a continu-
ing organization would result in the degeneration of the entire
idea (of having a little "DEMINFORM") into a nuts folly of
miscellaneous goats and monkeys whose antics would com-
pletely discredit the work and statements of the serious and
responsible liberals. We would have serious misgivings about
supporting such a show [emphasis added[.45 (U)
"Raymond E. Murphy, Bureau of European Affairs De
See also Hook, Out of Step, p. 399.
"Carmel Offie to Norris Chipman, 4 May 1949,
Paris Rally Hails Freedom in Peace," Nev York Times, I May 1949. D. 12. Hook Out of Sten
pp. 400-401.
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
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Irving Brown made his extensive European contacts available to OPC..0(�c0)."
OPC now shelved Irving Brown's idea of holding a "World Confer-
ence for Intellectual Freedom and Peace" in France that summer.46 Never-
theless, the idea took on a life of its own when Sidney Hook chatted in
jg.c.rer
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Paris with his friend Melvin J. Lasky about the prospects for a perma-
nent committee of anti-Communist intellectuals from Europe and Amer-
ica. Observers on both sides of the Atlantic concluded that the Continent
needed a real conference of anti-Communists.47 Sidney Hook expressed
the thought in typically apocalyptic terms:
Give me a hundred million dollars and a thousand dedicated
people, and I will guarantee to generate such a wave of demo-
cratic unrest among the masses�yes, even among the sol-
diers�of Stalin's own empire, that all his problems for a
long period of time to come will be internal. I can find the
people." (U)
In August 1949 an important meeting took place in Frankfurt.
Melvin Lasky, together with a pair of German ex-Communist refugees
from Nazism, Franz Borkenau and Ruth Fischer, hatched a plan for an
international conference of the non-Communist Left in Berlin the follow-
ing year.49 Each of the three brought unique experiences and perspectives
to their meeting. Lasky, only 29, had been a journalist and US Army his-
torian during the war. He was already prominent in German intellectual
circles as an anti-Communist and as the founding editor of Der Monat, a
literary review sponsored by the American occupation government as a
means of bringing Western writers back into the ken of the German pub-
lic. In 1947, Lasky had taken no small risk by denouncing Stalin's latest
purge of the Russian intelligentsia at a Communist-sponsored writers'
conference in East Berlin. He had attended the Paris peace conference in
April 1949, as had Borkenau, who had been a disappointed member of
the German delegation." The third person present at that Frankfurt meet-
ing, Ruth Fischer (given name Elfriede Eisler), knew perhaps as much as
anyone in the West about Communist political action operations. She
had recently published Stalin and German Communism, a study drawn
from her experience as a former leader of the German Communist Party
"Sidney Hook, Out of Step, p. 432. (u)
"Sidney Hook cited in Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, p. 15. (u)
"Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, p. 15. (u)
50ColemanTheJ,thraLCLmsiii
Borkenau, European Corn-
mumsm, p. 106..01
_5P-ere
17
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and a member of the Weimar Republic's Reichstag. Stalin and German
Communism had included an analysis of Willi Miinzenberg's creation and
use of front groups in the 1920s and 1930s.51 (u)
Fischer drafted a proposal for a Berlin conference, explaining the
idea as a way of using the Cominform's methods against it to sow doubt
and dissension in the European Communist parties, particularly in
France and Germany.52 She also gave the proposal to a diplomat friend in
Paris, Norris Chipman. Fischer's cover letter added rhetorical flourish:
I think we talked about this plan already during my last
stay in Paris, but I have now a much more concrete approach
to it. I mean, of course, the idea of organising a big Anti-Wal-
dorf-Astoria Congress in Berlin itself. It should be a gathering
of all ex-Communists, plus a good representative group of
anti-Stalinist American, English and European intellectuals,
declaring its sympathy for Tito and Yugoslavia and the silent
opposition in Russia and the satellite states, and giving the
Politburo hell right at the gate of their own hell.
All my friends agree that it would be of enormous effect,
and radiate to Moscow, if properly organised. It would create
great possibilities for better co-ordination afterwards, and
would also lift the spirits of Berlin anti-Stalinists, which are
somewhat fallen at present.
Fischer hoped to talk to "a few friends in Washington" about the idea
upon her return to the States." (u)
Officials in Washington began to take notice, although Ruth Fis-
cher's association with the scheme tainted it in some eyes. Carmel Offie
had been alerted by Jay Lovestone in early August that Fischer would
soon seek official American support for some venture; Lovestone warned
Offie not to rely on Fischer "for any serious business."54 Chipman
5' Ruth Fischer, Stalin and German Communism: A Study in the Origins of the State Party (Cam-
bridge: Harvard, 1948), pp. 610-614. Fischer's estranged brother, Gerhart Eisler, had been a Com-
intern agent in New York and was dubbed "the Number One Communist in the US" shortly before
he was convicted (in 1947) of falsifying an exit visa. Freed on bail, he slipped his FBI tail and
boarded a Polish ship; afterward he worked for many years as a propagandist in East Germany.
Robert J. Lamphere and Tom Shachtman, The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent's Story (New York:
Random House, 1986), pp. 44, 48-49, 64. (u)
"Ruth Fischer to Norris Chipman, 24 August 1949, in Political and Psychological Staff Job 78-
01614R, box I, folder 5, (Unclassified).
...Seerer
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pouched the Fischer proposal to Offie in mid-September, and OPC offic-
ers debriefed Fischer herself in Washington a few weeks later. Some of
the officers who heard her were unimpressed with the idea, but Offie
seems to have thought the proposal worth a closer look." (s)
In any event, OPC apparently did not know how to get the Fischer
plan off the ground. The proposal sat around until January 1950, when
OPC officer Michael Josselson stepped forward to promote it. Josselson
had witnessed the shaky beginnings of the anti-Communist counteroffen-
sive at the Waldorf-Astoria and Paris that spring, while on leave from his
duties as a cultural officer for the American occupation government in
Germany. He told his composer friend Nicholas Nabokov that Berlin
needed something similar." In September 1949 Josselson transferred to
the Office of Policy Coordination. Soon he talked with Lasky about the
proposed conference." jeii)
Michael Josselson was perhaps the perfect man for the job of
implementing the Berlin conference idea for OPC. Born in Estonia in
1908, the son of a Jewish timber merchant, he moved with his family to
Berlin during the Russian Revolution. As a young man Josselson studied
at the Universities of Berlin and Freiburg, but he took a job as a buyer for
the American Gimbels-Saks retail chain before earning a degree. Gimbels
eventually made him its chief European buyer and transferred him to
Paris, and then on to New York before the war. Josselson became an
American citizen in 1942. Drafted the next year, he made sergeant and
served as an interrogator in the US Army's Psychological Warfare Divi-
sion. Like Melvin Lasky, Josselson stayed on in Berlin after demobiliza-
tion to work with the American occupation authorities. Berlin was an
ideal post for Josselson, who spoke excellent English, French, German,
and Russian." (u)
The drama and intrigue of postwar Berlin awakened something in
Josselson and. gave him scope to exercise his considerable talents as an
operator, administrator, and innovator. His enthusiasm was boundless,
his energy immense. He was soon working with the de-Nazification
effort, helping to "rehabilitate" prominent Germans such as conductor
Wilhelm Furtwangler and theater director Jurgen Fehling. In addition,
"Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, pp. 5-6.
"Josselson's personal history is attested in Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, pp. 40-43,
�Saertrr
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Michael Josselson with German conductor Jurgen Fehling. (u)
having received an order in late September 1946 to create a new Berlin
newspaper in time to influence the city's first postwar elections, sched-
uled for 20 October, Josselson accomplished the impossible with time to
spare. In a city where 13 dailies already competed for readers (and for the
limited supply of politically acceptable journalistic talent), Josselson
took less than two weeks to hire the paper's staff and set its format and
political line. The newspaper hit the streets�with a circulation of
100,000�in time to influence Berlin's first free elections in 14 years.59
In addition, Josselson, in his capacity of Chief of Intelligence for the mil-
itary government's Information Control Branch, soon became a valued
59Frank L. Howley, Office of Military Government (Berlin), to Lucius D. Clay, Commanding Gen-
eral, Office of Military Government for Germany, "Recommendation for Award," 8 January 1947,
in Michael Josselson personnel file, Office of Personnel Job 67-00982R, box 9.r,er
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contact of CIA's Berlin Operations Base.�
In Josselson's hands, the still-amorphous Fischer plan began to
take specific shape. Where Fischer had proposed an essentially political
gathering, Josselson advocated an explicitly cultural and intellectual con-
ference to be called the "Congress for cultural freedom" [sic], which
would seize the initiative from the Communists by reaffirming "the fun-
damental ideals governing cultural (and political) action in the Western
world and the repudiation of all totalitarian challenges." A sponsoring
committee of American and European thinkers would organize the event
and formally invite the participants. In addition, the congress could be
used to bring about the creation of some sort of permanent committee,
which with the right people and "a certain amount of funds" could main-
tain the congress' momentum. Josselson's proposal reached OPC Head-
quarters on or about 25 January 1950.6'
Josselson's interest in the congress idea gave Lasky all the encour-
agement he needed. Lasky, though unwitting of OPC's interest in the
plan, forged ahead while Headquarters deliberated. In late December, he
sent a proposal of his own to Sidney Hook, apparently presenting roughly
the same proposal that Josselson had sent to Washington. Hook liked the
idea." Lasky's free-lancing, however, was not all for the good. As an
employee of the American occupation government, his activities on
behalf of the congress struck more than a few observers, both friendly
and hostile, as proof that the US Government was behind the event." (u)
" Dana B. Durand, "Report on Berlin Operations Base: January 1946�March 1948," 8 April
1948, republished as Clandestine Services Historical Paper CSHP-24, 22 October 1966, CIA His-
tory Staff, p. 58.4.).�
Hook, Out of Step, p. 432. Hook replied to Lasky on 11 January 1950. A copy of Hook's letter
somehow reached OPC's John E. Baker, chief of Area III of the Operations Division's Foreign
Branch B, before the Josselson proposal arrived from Germany. The copy is in Political and Psy-
chological Staff Job 78-01614R, box 1, folder 5 (Secret). (J)
"Communist organs would indeed accuse Lasky, on the eve of the Congress, of being an agent of
the US Army and "the American secret service"; "Paper in Soviet Zone Hits Culture Parley," New
York Times, 25 June 1950, p. 5. (u)
..-gerrEr
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Melvin J. Lasky (with beard) meets the press, June 1950. (u)
OPC officers liked Josselson's plan. A group of them, including
Offie, met on 6 February and gave Josselson the green light to proceed
while Headquarters produced a formal project proposa1.64 James Burnham,
on leave from New York University, worked as a consultant to the plan-
ners. Time was of the essence, although Headquarters soon realized that
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the congress could not be held before May or even June. On 7 April, Frank
Wisner approved the $50,000 project, adding that he wanted Lasky and
Burnham kept out of sight for fear that their presence would only provide
ammunition to critics of the conference in Berlin.65.1,..s.).-
Meanwhile, Lasky had appointed himself the driving force behind
the event. When informed of Wisner's wish that Lasky remain inconspic-
uous, Josselson defended Lasky, informing Headquarters that Lasky's
name as General Secretary on the event's masthead had been largely
responsible for the enthusiasm that the upcoming congress had gener-
ated among European intellectuals. "No other person here, certainly no
German, could have achieved such success," cabled Josselson.� This
disagreement between Josselson and Headquarters would cause a prob-
lem later in the year and presage other disputes during the long life of
the Congress for Cultural Freedom. (u)
The upcoming congress in Berlin rolled ahead, gathering sponsors
and patrons. Lasky and his Berlin Committee easily gathered five interna-
tionally known philosophers to lend gravitas to the event as its honorary
co-chairmen.� Sidney Hook and James Burnham took charge of the
details for the American delegation, working with Department of State
officials (in frequent contact with their OPC colleagues) to arrange
travel, expenses, and publicity. OPC bought tickets for the American del-
egation, passing most of the funds through the National Committee for
Free Europe and Jay Lovestone's Free Trade Union Conference.� The
Department of State in particular proved an enthusiastic partner in the
enterprise. The Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Edward
Barrett's aide, Jesse MacKnight, thought highly of the Congress partici-
pants and their potential for debunking the Communist peace offensive;
before the Berlin conclave even took place, he urged the CIA to sponsor
the congress on a continuing basis.69..4.66)."
the nve were John Dewey, Bernedetto Croce, Karl Jaspers, Jacques Marlton), and Bertrand Rus-
sell. (U)
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Sidney Hook (lighting cigarette) with James Burnham (left) in
Berlin. (u)
The Threat to the Future (u)
While the Congress for Cultural Freedom gathered momentum,
OPC was having less success with another of its anti-Communist initia-
tives. The 1940s saw something of a romance with "youth" in Europe and
America. Social theorists of all political stripes made much of the then-
trenchant observation that teenagers and young adults were the leaders of
tomorrow and thus represented "the future." All of this attention seemed
misplaced to some observers: Evelyn Waugh's novel, Brideshead Revis-
ited (1944), for instance, snickered at contemporary shibboleths about
"what the world owed to Youth." Nonetheless, US Government officials
proved as likely as not to consider youth groups and youth attitudes
essential to social stability and progress. This assumption begat a concern
over the Communist Party's well-publicized hope of expanding the gains
of Communism through clever appeals to young people. Using the World
_Seerei
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Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) as a tool in its peace offensive,
Moscow sponsored giant festivals replete with pageantry and stirring
political sentiments, culminating in carefully worded (and always pro-
Soviet) calls for peace and social justice. (u)
College students, as a subset of "youth," were another target of
Communist organizational efforts. The new WFDY soon gained a part-
ner: the International Union of Students (IUS). Students from 38 nations
attending the first World Student Congress in Prague in August 1946
founded IUS to promote worldwide student fellowship. Eastern European
Communists and Soviet agents dominated the organization's secretariat,
however, orchestrating programs and debates; indeed, the IUS's first vice
president, Soviet official Alexandr Shelepin, later rose to head the KGB
under Nikita Khrushchev.70 (u)
From the outset, Western observers complained about the IUS's
politicization. IUS leaders squelched any protests through harsh rhetoric
and parliamentary legerdemain. The conferences' one-sided declarations
on controversial political issues also fostered doubts among many West-
ern delegates, who worried that such pronouncements could alienate stu-
dents hoping to build national student unions at home.7' The 25 American
students who attended the IUS's founding Congress in Prague agreed
among themselves that American college students needed a stronger
voice in international student affairs, and that the only way to win more
influence at such events as the IUS Congress was through a truly repre-
sentative, national student organization. (u)
More than a few American student leaders in 1946 and 1947 turned
their attention to creating such an organization in the United States. Simi-
lar attempts had foundered in the 1920s and 1930s, when groups con-
structed on overtly political platforms received little nationwide support,
while other organizations that originally were intended to be broadly rep-
resentative splintered into political factions.72 None of these organiza-
tions had survived World War II with significant national representation
or credibility. (U)
'John J. Dziak, "Soviet Deception: The Organizational and Operational Tradition," in Brian D.
Dailey and Patrick J. Parker, Soviet Strategic Deception (Lexington: MA: Lexington Books, 1987),
pp. 12-13. (It)
"Peter T. Jones, The History of US National Student Association Relations with the International
Union of Students, 1945-1956 (Philadelphia: Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1956), pp. 12-24.
(u)
"Martin M. McLaughlin, Political Processes in American National Student Organizations (Ann
Arbor: Edwards Brothers, 1948), pp. 15-23. See also Cord Meyer, Facing Reality: From World
Federalism to the CIA (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 96. (U)
>weer
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The American delegates to the Prague student congress thus faced
long odds against them when they tried to fashion a new, national stu-
dent association. They nevertheless had two advantages over their pre-
war predecessors: the enthusiastic cooperation of Catholic students and
colleges, and the relative maturity of postwar student leaders, many of
whom were veterans. Having interrupted or postponed their studies to
serve in the military, they had returned to campus older and more experi-
enced than most of their classmates. Both factors helped these leaders to
avoid the mistakes of previous student organizations." Their careful plan-
ning bore fruit in August 1947 at the University of Wisconsin, where
Catholic students led the delegates in founding the United States National
Student Association (NSA), a confederation of student governments and
college student councils. Catholic and liberal student leaders fought back
attempts by the leftist minority to politicize the new association. Instead,
these students founded a relatively stable organization dedicated to the
interests and concerns of "students as students."74 (u)
NSA's left wing never came close to co-opting the Association, but
the NSA's foreign policy orientation remained a battleground for several
years. Catholic students comprised only a minority of NSA delegations
and offices. One of their leaders, Martin McLaughlin of Notre Dame,
noted that a politically liberal but largely uncoordinated bloc of non-
Catholics held the balance of power in the Association. This bloc
opposed Communism and politicization but still viewed the Catholics as
too eager to pick fights with their leftist rivals." NSA did not formally
affiliate with the IUS, and it cut off membership negotiations with the
Union after the IUS secretariat failed to condemn the mistreatment of
Czech students in the February 1948 Communist coup in Prague. NSA's
move to distance itself from the IUS, however, did not end internal
debates over the Association's dealings with the IUS and that body's
increasingly disgruntled delegations from other Western nations. Western
European students soon quietly began discussing the creation of a com-
peting international student union�a step that NSA explicitly rejected in
1948. NSA's leaders at that time still saw no profit in turning the field of
international student activities into another battleground of the Cold War
by leading a revolt within IUS or inducing other national student unions
to bolt the Union and create a rival organization.76 (U)
"McLaughlin, Political Processes in American National Student Organizations, pp. 51, 65-67. (u)
(U)
"Ibid. (U)
"Peter T. Jones, The History of US National Student Association Relations with the International
Union of Students, 1945-1956 (Philadelphia: Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1956), pp. 57-68.
(u)
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NSA and the Communist threat to student life came to OPC's atten-
tion in the spring of 1949. Deputy ADPC Merritt Ruddock's friend
George A. "Abe" Lincoln, on the faculty of the United States Military
Academy at West Point, wrote Ruddock about a rumor he had heard from
one of his cadets. It seemed a certain "National Scholastic Association"
had asked this cadet's girlfriend to spend the coming summer doing
"humanitarian work" behind the Iron Curtain. The whole thing smelled
fishy to Lincoln:
I don't know whether the US has a similar program draw-
ing people from the iron curtain regions to see the US way of
life. I don't know whether our people are paying any attention
to this "humanitarian" endeavor or whether it warrants atten-
tion. But it seems to me to be in the area of your business .
I feel very keenly that we can be gravely hurt in this cold
war in the area of our colleges and universities. It was their
weakness that magnified our stupidity during the thirties . .
May be we can't afford another such woolly-headed emotional
orgy in the field where our pick and shovel local leaders are
trained during their most formative years.
Will you show this to Frank [Wisner]?"
Ruddock relayed to Lincoln Wisner's interest and requested more infor-
mation." Wisner also queried the FBI about the "National Scholastic
Association," but what he learned�if anything�apparently was not pre-
served in CIA's permanent files." (u)
Given OPC's unsystematic approach and still-evolving procedures,
its most important operational challenge in this field was finding someone
with firsthand knowledge of the problem. In 1949, Frank Lindsay's Oper-
ations Division fortuitously hired several young Catholics who had just
such knowledge and contacts in the small world of student and youth
leaders. Between them, they identified for OPC the individuals who
would eventually cement the CIA-NSA relationship in 1952.80 (U)
G.A. Lincoln to Merritt K. Ruddock, 31 March 1949, Information Management Staff Job 78-
04938R, box 1, folder I. (u)
"Ruddock to Lincoln, 8 April 1949, Information Management Staff Job 78-04938R, box 1, folder
1 (Secret). (U)
erer
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,.......13.
...eSeerer
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Realizing that it could accomplish nothing immediately, OPC set
its sights on the IUS's Second World Student Congress, scheduled for
Prague in August 1950.85 In the meantime, Erskine Childers, NSA's Inter-
national Vice President and Donald Sullivan's friend, was searching for a
dozen student delegates for the Prague Congress (as well as the money
to pay their fares).86 OPC's Operations Division swung into action when
it learned of this opportunity to sponsor the NSA delegation. As NSA's
then-Executive Secretary Fred Houghteling told the story years later, a
friend from Harvard contacted him at NSA's Madison headquarters and
asked about the delegates NSA had selected. A few days later, the friend
showed up again with two other men and that evening drove Houghtel-
ing to an isolated spot outside Madison. When they stopped the car, they
told him that "the government" would fund NSA's delegation but would
make it look as if the money (reportedly $10,000 to $12,000) had come
from two wealthy philanthropists who wished to keep their gift quiet. A
few weeks later Houghteling traveled to Chicago with another (unwit-
ting) NSA staffer to formally "ask" for donations from the donors, them-
selves in secret contact with OPC." (u)
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A Bolt From the Blue (u)
Early in 1950, President Truman directed Secretary of State Dean
Acheson and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson to reexamine Amer-
ica's strategic objectives. China had just fallen to the Communists, while
the Soviets had tested their own atomic bomb, and a shaken White
House felt the need for some clear thinking about the world situation and
the risks for the United States. The report that Acheson and Johnson sub-
mitted in mid-April, known as NSC-68 (and drafted by the Department of
State's Paul Nitze), painted the global battle between freedom and tyr-
anny in lowering terms. Passages about "the struggle for men's minds"
(lately a favorite phrase of Acheson's) stated that the Soviets were
already waging full-scale psychological warfare against the West:
Every institution of our society is an instrument which it is
sought [sic] to stultify and turn against our purposes [by the
Communists]. Those that touch most closely our material and
moral strength are obviously the prime targets, labor unions,
civic enterprises, schools, churches, and all media for influ-
encing opinion.
eret--
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Frustrating the Kremlin's designs called for "a vigorous political offen-
sive against the Soviet Union." One could read NSC-68, with only a lit-
tle interpolation, as a call for a US-led effort to save international
nongovernmental and voluntary organizations from Communist subver-
sion." (0)
President Truman did not formally approve NSC-68 until after the
Korean war broke out in June 1950, but OPC officials knew the gist of
the paper as soon as it reached the Oval Office. Indeed, Truman called
publicly on 20 April for "a sustained, intensified program to promote the
cause of freedom against the propaganda of slavery." "We must," said
the President, "make ourselves heard around the world in a great cam-
paign of truth."" (0)
NSC-68, if approved, would bring dramatic changes. The National Secu-
rity Council had determined that war with the Soviet Union was a distinct
possibility,
(b)(1)
North Korea's invasion of South Korea in June 1950 galvanized an (b)(3)
already-alarmed Washington and ensured NSC-68's approval. Overnight
the official mood�which had grown cautiously optimistic in early 1949
with the success of the Berlin airlift but darkened again with the fall of
China and the Soviet A-bomb test�turned grim and warlike. Congress
suddenly approved huge budget hikes for the President's overt psycho-
logical offensive, the "Campaign of Truth," which would be run out of
the Department of State's United States Information Service.93 Edward
Barrett later noted that "American Congressmen, like Americans in gen-
eral, were suspicious of anything that could be labeled propaganda"; but
"if you dressed it up as warfare, money was very easy to come by."94
"National Security Council, NSC-68, 14 April 1950, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950,
vol. 1, pp. 240, 263, 282. (u)
" Barrett, Truth is our Weapon, p. 73. See also Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda,
Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (New York: St. Martin's 1997) p. 14. (u)
93 Barrett, Truth is our Weapon, pp. 80-82. (u)
" Hixson, Parting the Curtain, p. 15. (u)
_Soeret-
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The Congress for Cultural Freedom opened in West Berlin's Tita-
nia Palace on Monday, 26 June 1950, a day after the arriving American
delegates had learned that troops of Communist North Korea had
launched a massive invasion of the South:96 This pointed reminder of
Berlin's own vulnerability heightened the pervading apprehension and
grim determination of the almost 200 delegates and 4,000 spectators�a
mood that the Congress's opening caught and reflected. The strains of
Beethoven's dramatic Egmont Overture evoked an earlier struggle against
oppression and preceded Lord Mayor Reuter's request for a moment of
silence in memory of those who had died fighting for freedom or were
still languishing in Stalin's concentration camps. Many of those present
in the Titania Palace may well have felt themselves part of a great gesture
of defiance directed at the Stalinist empire. (u)
Rhetorical leadership of the subsequent sessions fell spontaneously
to two eloquent Europeans with very different views, according to histo-
rian Peter Coleman. One was a quiet Italian socialist writer named Igna-
zio Silone, who had defied both Fascism and Communism. His opposite
number was the anglicized Hungarian novelist Arthur Koestler, a bril-
liant foe of tyranny who nonetheless, according to Sidney Hook, "was
capable of reciting the truths of the multiplication table in a way that
would make some people indignant with him." Although both Silone and
Koestler had written about their breaks with the Communist Party in a
new book titled The God That Failed, they represented two poles of opin-
ion on the best way to oppose Communism. Koestler favored the rhetori-
cal frontal assault, sparing neither foe nor friend (he irritated some
delegates who thought he was denouncing socialism and the British
"The American delegation included Sidney Hook, James Burnham, novelist James T. Farrell, play-
wright Tennessee Williams, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., actor Robert Montgomery, and David
Lilienthal, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. Other Americans present included Max
Yergan and, of course, Melvin Lasky. (u)
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Lord Mayor Ernst Reuter addresses the opening session of the
Berlin Congress for Cultural Freedom. (u)
Labour government). Silone was subtler, urging the West to promote
social and political reforms to co-opt Communism's still-influential moral
appeal.� (u)
Silone's ideas echoed the strategy that OPC adopted to guide its
operations. Instead of backing the political right in Europe and Asia,
OPC would back the "non-Communist left" as the most reliable bulwark
against Communism. Silone and other thinkers of the non-Communist
left suggested that only socialism or social democracy could lend the
West the vision and the legitimacy to attain peace and prosperity�and
thus dry up the sources of Communism's popular support. Whatever
their misgivings about socialism, OPC officers conceded the strategic
acumen of this thought. (u)
The competing ideas of Koestler and Silone lent a certain dramatic
tension to the Congress, but their rivalry by itself confirmed that debate
in the West was truly free, with room for all shades of anti-totalitarian
opinion. The speeches and papers at the Congress, delivered by some of
the free world's leading moral and social thinkers�who had temporarily
set aside their differences to unite in a defense of democracy�
impressed many as a brilliant and courageous defiance of the forces of
"Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, pp. 22-32. The Koestler and Silone essays were written in
1949 and published in Richard Crossman, ed., The God That Failed: Six Studies in Communism
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950). Hook, Out of Step, p.438. (u)
33
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Franz Borkenau (left) and Ignazio Shone in Berlin. (U)
darkness outside the gates. "Friends, freedom has seized the offensive!"
shouted Arthur Koestler as he read the Congress's "Freedom Manifesto"
before 15,000 cheering Berliners at the closing rally on 29 June.98 The
irony was subtle but real; Koestler had once worked for Soviet operative
Willi Mfinzenberg managing front groups for Moscow, and now he was
unwittingly helping the Central Intelligence Agency's efforts to establish
a new organization designed to undo some of the damage that Stalin's
agents had done over the previous generation." (u)
Having set the Congress in motion, OPC sat back and watched while
events played themselves out. Michael Josselson kept out of sight,
although he watched everything that transpired. Hook, Burnham, Lasky,
and Brown caucused every night to monitor the Congress' progress and
to plan for the next day's sessions.'�� The men whom OPC brought
together in Berlin needed no coaching on the finer points of criticizing
Communism. Although the delegates had publicly debated tactics, Ameri-
can occupation authorities concluded that the delegates' unanimity in
"Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, pp. 1, 27-28. The "Freedom Manifesto" was reprinted in
Hook, Out of Step, pp. 456-458. (u)
99See Koestler's untitled essay in Crossman, ed., The God That Failed . 71-72.
'"Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, p. 27.
-SPX-Vefr-
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Arthur Koestler addresses the Congress's closing rally. (u)
denouncing tyranny of all stripes had "actually impelled a number of
prominent cultural leaders [in Germany] to give up their sophisticated,
contemplative detachment in favor of a strong stand against totalitarian-
ism."101 (t)
OPC Headquarters hailed the success of the Berlin Congress. Frank
Wisner offered his "heartiest congratulations" to all involved,m while
OPC's institutional sponsors also judged the affair a hit. Department of
Defense liaison John Magruder, in a memo to Secretary of Defense
Louis Johnson, deemed it "a subtle covert operation carried out on the
highest intellectual level" and "unconventional warfare at its best."�3
Johnson himself showed the after-action reports to President Truman and
subsequently reported that the President was "very well pleased."m4 (u)
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Slow Progress (u)
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The Prague Congress that August proved to some Western observ-
ers that IUS had become a thoroughly Stalinized institution. NSA dele-
gate Robert West scribbled notes during one of the Congress'
orchestrated demonstrations of solidarity with North Korea:
After sixteen and one-half minutes, chair requested delegates
take their seats, but this entirely ignored . . . demonstration
continued unabated. Each individual Korean carried by group
of students through aisles between tables. Songs and clapping
continue at end of twenty minutes. Demonstration ended sud-
denly at twenty and one-half minutes . . . delegates returned
rather quietly to seats. At end of paragraph they picked up
last sentence of [IUS President Josa] Grohmann . Hands Off
Korea shouted in unison. From where I sit, I can see Scots, in
red academic robes, seated in the midst of the confusion. I
know also, British and Danes and South Africans are seated.
Swede has walked away from seat.
The unhappy Americans and the other Western European delegates began
meeting together in the evenings to complain about the IUS's Stalinist
tack. They agreed to discuss formal cooperation between their respective
student unions at a conference in Scandinavia the following December.108
(u)
The delegates' report convinced NSA's leaders that the time had
come to end the policy of practical cooperation with the IUS. Neverthe-
less, NSA still refused to commit itself to supporting a new Western
group for fear of splitting the international student world into rival blocs.
The NSA Congress in Ann Arbor in August 1950 reflected this ambiva-
lence by electing as president Allard K. Lowenstein, who favored a split,
and as international affairs vice president Herbert Eisenberg, who still
thought it premature to make a total break with the IUS. This policy dis-
pute and the consequent argument over the relative power of the offices
of president and international affairs vice president weakened NSA for
the entire 1950-51 school year.'�9 (U)
'"Jones, The History of US National Student Association Relations with the International Union of
Students, pp. 75-78. The three Americans representing NSA in Prague were Robert West, Eugene
Schwartz, and William Holbrook. See also International Organizations Division (Office of Reports
and Estimates), "Weekly Summary No. 33," 22 August 1950 Office of Transnational Issues Job
78-01617A, box 49 (declassified)
"'Jones, The History of US National Student Association Relations with the International Union of
Students, pp. 79-80. (u)
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The Stockholm International Student Conference (ISC) in Decem-
ber 1950 did not accomplish the rupture with IUS that OPC had
desired, although it marked another small step forward from the
Office's point of view. Lowenstein and Eisenberg, joined by Schmidt
�Secret-
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(who did not disclose her connection to OPC), attended for NSA."'
Some of the European delegates criticized Lowenstein's plea for a com-
plete break with IUS and the formation of an explicitly anti-Communist
international organization. Their hope for continued cooperation with
IUS had grown noticeably dimmer, however, and with regrets the dele-
gates agreed to formalize their own separate cooperation, establishing an
office and a set of loose procedures for a permanent "International Stu-
dent Conference.""4.4,Fk
The
most important objection, in Buffington's eyes, was the fact that NSA had
never knowingly taken government money for fear of compromising its
independence. Buffington also saw a more practical obstacle to coopera-
tion in the lingering dispute between Lowenstein and Eisenberg over the
Association's policy toward the IUS.116fc.)
Buffington's hesitation may have stemmed, at least in part, from
NSA's inability to persuade foreign student groups that the time had
come to abandon the IUS and create a truly independent international stu-
dent organization. Western delegates had been shaken by the Prague con-
ference in August 1950, but their new and loosely organized cooperative
"'Lowenstein later claimed that he had paid his own way to Stockholm and took no OPC money.
He also noted that someone had pitched him a "suspicious" offer to pay for the trip; he declined
the funds when the source refused to divulge the money's origin. CIA files suggest this contact was
made by John Simons, who dined with Lowenstein in New York City on 14 December 1950. See
David Harris, Dreams Die Hard (New York: St. Martin's, 1982), p. 168. (b)(1)
- (b)(3)
Jones, The History of US National Student Association Relations with the International Union of
Students, pp. 80-81. (u)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
"'Milton Buffington to Lewis Thompson, "United States National Student Association," 17 Feb-
ruary 1951, in Warner, The CIA Under Harry Truman, pp. 383-384. Buffington may have taken
Lowenstein's aforementioned refusal to accept unattested funds for his Stockholm trip as proof that
the current officers of NSA would refuse to cooperate with OPC. (u)
�Seeret�
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arrangement did not look promising except as a pathway to a more vital,
permanent organization. While they waited, Buffington and his col-
leagues in OPC turned their attention and resources to the problem of
building a relationship with a seemingly more promising organization,
the World Assembly of Youth. (U)
CCF Moves to Paris (u)
Almost before the last chairs were folded in Berlin's Titania Palace
the previous June, various OPC officers and contacts began campaigning
for approval of a project to support the Congress for Cultural Freedom on
a permanent basis. The Congress already was continuing on by virtue of
its own momentum and a small OPC subsidy, with token offices in Ber-
lin and Paris and a pair of committees that had been nominated in
June.'"7 Michael Josselson pouched to Washington a copy of Melvin
Lasky's outline of the form and mission of a permanent Congress for
Cultural Freedom. He pointed out that events were moving rapidly; an
informal steering committee comprising Melvin Lasky, Irving Brown,
and Arthur Koestler was meeting in Paris to decide the final shape of the
permanent Congress.'"8 (u)
For the time being, however, Frank Wisner�in effect agreeing
with James Burnham that a permanent Congress could pull European
opinion away from neutralism�had decided that Eastern Europe Divi-
sion had to remove Melvin Lasky and Burnham from prominent positions
in any ongoing project."' Burnham was happy to step aside, agreeing
that he made an easy target for the Congress' critics.m
Lasky was another matter. Michael Josselson had defended Lasky's
involvement in April, and EE Division�while admitting that Lasky was
The Congress's governing body at this point was a 5-man executive committee comprising Irv-
ine Brown Ienazio Silone Arthur Koestler Carlo Schmid and David Rougget
See also Coleman, The Liberal
Conspiracy, p. 34.
,SerrEr
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a lightning rod�nonetheless agreed with Josselson that Lasky had been a
key to the Berlin gathering's success.'2' This apologia infuriated Wisner.
In a scathing memo to EE, the ADPC declared himself "very disturbed"
by the "non-observance" of his April command to have Lasky moved to
the sidelines of the project. Lasky's visibility was "a major blunder," rec-
ognized as such "by our best friends in the Department of State." Wisner
made himself clear: unless the headstrong Lasky left the Congress for
Cultural Freedom, OPC would not support the organization.122 EE had no
choice but to cable Wisner's instructions to Germany.'23 Michael Jossel-
son exploded and cabled a histrionic protest, but there was nothing he
could do.'24 Lasky had to go, and OPC contrived to have him removed
from the project and canceled his operational clearance.'"�.)�
The Congress' steering committee formally established the Con-
gress for Cultural Freedom as a permanent entity on 27 November 1950.
The Agency's Project Review Board had approved the project�QKOP-
ERA�earlier that same month.
The new
organization chose a seven-member Executive Committee, with the
Swiss aristocrat Denis de Rougemont as its President.127 Josselson's
Louis Glaser to Frank Lindsay, "Activities of Mr. Melvin Lasky in connection with Congress for
Cultural Freedom (Project PDQUICK)," 4 August 1950, Political and Psychological Staff Job 78-
01614R, box 1, folder 4..(..s.)-
'22Frank Wisner to C.D.G. Breckinridge, "Berlin Congress for Cultural Freedom; activities of
Melvin Lasky," 8 August 1950, Political and Psychological Staff Job 78-0161412 box 1 folder a
CStaoret,
Wisner viewed Lasky's actions as interference
Hi a covert operation ny the employee of another US agency, and he made sure that his contacts in
the Department of State knew of his unhappiness. State's Jesse MacKnight agreed with Wisner on
this issue, lamenting that the activities of officially connected Americans in Germany were particu-
larly difficult to control (from a public relations standpoint) because they were milder the
of the High Commission for Germany.
12/The other members of the committee were Irving Brown, Arthur Koestler, Eugen Kogon, David
Rousset, Stephen Spender, and Ignazio Silone. Raymond Aron, among others, served as an alter-
nate member. Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, p. 37. Apparently Irving Brown was the only wit-
ting member of the Executive Committee.7
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
41
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friend Nicolas Nabokov became Secretary General and principal execu-
tive officer
The organization's move to Paris had already prompted OPC to
transfer the project from the Eastern Europe Diyision
Western Europe Division Michael Josselson resigned
is_____job with the American occupation government in Germany to
take the post of Administrative Secretary in Paris
Josselson would be the CIA's and the Con-
gress's "enlivening spirit" for the next 17 years. f,g)
Conclusion (u)
By January 1951 the Central Intelligence Agency had decided and
begun to use American intellectuals and college students (as well as other
segments of American society) as unwitting apologists for US policies
abroad. Agency officials perceived this to be a matter of necessity; given
the global emergency, stopping Communism seemed to justify desperate
expedients. The Soviets and their satellites at roughly this time were
reportedly thought by American "intelligence agencies" to be spending
$1.5 billion a year on domestic and foreign propaganda (with 10 percent
of that in France alone!).'" Neither the NSA nor the CCF operations was
very far along yet, and within a few years senior Agency officials would
have second thoughts and voice misgivings about the risk of scandal.
These worries would prove decisive in the case of the Congress for Cul-
tural Freedom, but would not significantly affect the operation involving
the National Student Association.
With little explicit guidance from the White House or the NSC on
using domestic voluntary associations, but general praise for the Con-
gress' conference in Berlin, OPC felt encouraged to proceed. The new
DCI, Walter Bedell Smith, was still asking the NSC to exercise a strong
coordinating role in national psychological strategy. OPC filled the pol-
icy vacuum with its own ideas and projects. (U)
'Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, p. 43.
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
KopEi= '
(b)(1)
Barrett, 7ruth is Our Weapon, pp. 172, 183. (u)
(b)(3)
.S41' *Pet"
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The Office, having no corporate operational experience or covert
infrastructure of its own, chose to rely on American voluntary organiza-
tions with foreign contacts for operational entr�and cover. OPC officers
quickly learned that such organizations themselves did not yet exist, at
least not in forms that would have allowed OPC to make secure and
effective use of them as psychological warfare instruments. Nonetheless,
various individuals in and around the National Student Association and
the short-lived "Americans for Intellectual Freedom" wanted very much
to fight Stalinism in Europe. Thus OPC applied itself to the task of subsi-
dizing and assisting the activities of these people, hoping they might
gain influence and followings in their respective circles. No coercion
was involved or necessary; OPC simply ensured that funds would be
available to finance certain forms of anti-Communist activism and orga-
nizing by the ri lit sorts of American
The record of this early period shows no specific instance of OPC
officials objecting that CIA-supported organizations were attempting to
influence the views of American citizens on foreign policy issues. Some
OPC components chose to encourage and reward vocal anti-Communist
intellectuals like Sidney Hook and James Burnham at a time when US
policy toward Moscow was a live issue in American political debates.
Other OPC branches worked somewhat less effectively to ensure that the
National Student Association's leaders�hitherto ambivalent about the
necessity and wisdom of open confrontation with the Communist-domi-
nated International Union of Students saw with their own eyes the face
of Stalinism at the Prague IUS conference in August 1950. The fact that
OPC was not yet (as of mid- 1951) subsidizing NSA's day-to-day opera-
tions owed more to the individual personalities in both organizations and
the inexperience of Office personnel than to any reluctance to inject
covert funds into an American student group. (U)
'" Walter Hixson verges on such a mischaracterization in his division of American Cold War pol-
icies.into "aggressive psychological warfare" versus the "evolutionary approach"; Parting the Cur-
tain, pp. xiv, 101, 115. 0.0
oeve
43
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Indeed, the Office of Policy Coordination had taken sides at home
as well as abroad. ADPC Frank Wisner glimpsed danger in OPC's
involvement in domestic political life. In November 1950, with the
Korean war raging and the US Government anticipating a global conflict
with the Soviet Union, he reminded his OPC staff and division chiefs that
the ultimate objective of any proposed undertaking must
clearly be to produce an effect upon a foreign state or group.
This effect may even be the ultimate reception abroad of an
idea which has been produced and disseminated within the
United States. It is not appropriate to undertake any activity
which has the objective or primary effect of influencing the
foreign or domestic policies of the United States, or of influ-
encing the internal security of the United States, or which has
as its target a domestic group in the United States. '31
OPC's insensitivity to certain larger issues inherent in the use of
Americans as unwitting apologists for official policy mirrored the feeling
that pervaded official Washington. The authors of NSC-68, for their part,
seemed more concerned about unintended consequences abroad rather
than at home:
The integrity of our system will not be jeopardized by any
measures, covert or overt, violent or non-violent, which serve
the purposes of frustrating the Kremlin design, nor does the
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necessity for conducting ourselves so as to affirm our values
in actions as well as words forbid such measures, provided
only that they are appropriately calculated to that end and are
not so excessive or misdirected as to make us enemies of the
people instead of the evil men who have enslaved them.
NSC-68 had sounded a note of caution, however, urging due care "to
avoid permanently impairing our economy and the fundamental values
and institutions inherent in our way of life."32 This concern, in the eyes
of some observers, would later seem prophetic. (u)
NSC-68, Foreign Relations the United States, 1950, Volume I, pp. 244, 289. (U)
�,Serrer
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Chapter Two
Trial and Error
The Management of Covert Subsidy Programs,
1951-1966 (U)
The CIA's use of American voluntary organizations to stiffen resis-
tance to Communism abroad gained an attentive patron with the arrival
of Allen Dulles as the first Deputy Director for Plans (DDP) in January
1951. Dulles had experience with these activities as one of the ostensible
founders of the National Committee for Free Europe, and he also had
taken an interest in OPC'F7operations. He was intrigued by the pos-
sibilities for taking the offensive against Communism in other fields as
well. Dulles' attention to these matters persisted as he rose to Deputy
Director of Central Intelligence and then succeeded Gen. Walter Bedell
Smith as DCI at the beginning of the Eisenhower administration. His
long tenure as Director coincided with the maturation and middle age of
the Agency's operations with American voluntary groups. (,e1
CIA operations involving American voluntary groups expanded so
quickly during the early 1950s that the Agency had to devise elaborate
procedures to fund, manage, and protect its operations. A growing profes-
sionalism became noticeable as the Directorate of Plans (formed by the
1952 merger of OPC and OSO) applied better people and practices to
covert political action. Nevertheless, the sheer size of the covert subsidy
program, which leant substantial institutional momentum to its individ-
ual operations, also made it increasingly difficult to fund them in a
secure manner. This study will examine three individual operations in
later chapters, but before doing so it will explain, in this chapter, how this
covert action program grew so large and why it did so without correcting
what ultimately proved to be fatal weaknesses. (u)
�Sur,r-et-
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The Creation of 10 (u)
In April 1951, DDP Allen Dulles brought Thomas Braden to CIA.
Just 33 years old, Braden already owned a distinguished resume. Raised
in Iowa, he graduated from Dartmouth and spent three years in the Brit-
ish Army before joining the Office of Strategic Services in 1944. He had
co-authored (with Stewart Alsop) Sub-Rosa: The OSS and American
Espionage, served as Executive Secretary for New York's Museum of
Modern Art, and directed Gen. William J. Donovan's American Commit-
tee for a United Europe (which was passing OPC money to selected
groups working for European unity).'
DDP Dulles initially gave Braden Carmel Oftie's labor portfolio
(Offie had resigned in May 1950). Dulles also removed the coordination
of labor operations from Wisner's OPC, but when Dulles became Deputy
Director of Central Intelligence (DDCI) he hit upon a better idea for han-
dling such sensitive programs. In August 1951, Dulles had OPC's Special
Projects Division renamed the International Organizations Branch, and
had it placed in a new Psychological Staff Division (PY). Dulles then put
Tom Braden in charge of the International Organizations Branch and
added to the Branch's duties the management ofroperations and the
National Committee for Free Europe.2.4.s.).
Braden soon began looking for new responsibilities for his branch.
He talked to several division chiefs, persuading them without much diffi-
culty to give him control over the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the
Committee for Free Asia (CFA) projects.' He also drafted a broad mis-
sion statement for the reconstituted 10 Branch and passed it to the new
Assistant Director for Policy Coordination, Kilbourne Johnston.
Braden's ambitious plan proposed a counteroffensive against Moscow's
drive to unite the discontented of the world against America and the
West:
It is the function of the [International Organizations] Branch to ex-
pand and direct this counter-offensive. Through the penetration,
control and support of selected non-governmental groups . . this
Branch will seek to unite the private and unofficial resources of
the non-Soviet world in support of affirmative US policy objec-
tives and to destroy the effectiveness of Soviet international pro-
grams.
'Thomas W. Braden, interview by Michael Warner, tape recording, Prince William County, VA,
26 August 1993 (hereafter cited as Braden intrrviewl J,R1
Serra'
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Braden cited eight operational areas, ranging from emigre radio broad-
casts to "exploitation" of Western culture, as parts of a broad assault on
Soviet power and influence.' (
The fate of Braden's proposal demonstrated two things. First it
showed the close attention that Allen Dulles paid to international
and cultural projects, and his willingness to protect JO Branch and its
projects from bureaucratic attacks. Second, it highlighted the novelty of
the covert actions that OPC undertook with groups such as the Congress
for Cultural Freedom and the National Student Association. These
actions were unconventional responses to the Soviet peace offensive, and
their merit was not always noticed by the intelligence professionals in
the Office of Special Operations or even by other OPC hands in the area
divisions. While other offices skirmished with Communism in Europe
and the Third World, in Braden's view, his staff would operate on a stra-
tegic scale by attacking the enemy's will and his capacity to initiate hos-
tile action. (u)
Resistance to Braden's ideas in OPC did not take long to emerge.
The main problem was the already-hoary internal OPC dispute over the
boundary between plans and operations. Would the 10 Branch have oper-
ational control, superior to that of the area divisions, over the operations
it had planned and initiated in their respective countries? Or would the
branch limit its activities to reviewing the plans of other divisions?
Braden insisted his effective international programs cut across the
regional boundaries of OPC's area divisions, and categorically rejected
any proposal that would let the area divisions write project proposals
while JOB merely offered advice. He had several objections to such a
plan. Chief among them was his concern that the area divisions would
tend to devote their resources and attention to operations of immediate
regional concern, and would have difficulty judging the needs and rele-
vance of transnational organizations. (u)
ADPC Johnston seems to have sided with his area division chiefs.
Deputy Director for Plans Frank Wisner, who apparently saw no easy
solution to the dispute, chose to stay out of the fray. He did nothing about
'Thomas Braden, Psychological Division, to Kilbourne Johnston, Assistant Director for Policy Co-
ordination, "Objectives of the International Organizations Branch," 19 November 1951, cited in
Anne B. Crolius' draft history, "Covert Action in the Cold War: An Historical Perspective of the
International Organizations Division, 1951-1962," a draft monograph in the Clandestine Services
Historical Series, 2.242, CIA History Staff, 1972, pp. 14-17.
5Torn Braden to Kilbourne Johnston, "Relations of International Organizations Branch to Area Di-
visions," 29 November 1951,
Secret
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Braden's 29 November memo for a month; Braden was still nagging him
to read it the day after Christmas.6 Even after Wisner read the memo, he
did nothing to help or hinder Braden's plan.
By this time, Braden had appealed to Dulles over the heads of both
Johnston and Wisner. On 20 December, Braden asked Dulles to resolve
the dilemma of an 10 liaison officer who had been assigned to
but was reluctant to leave the States without knowing whether to report
back to JO Branch or Western Europe Division (WE) at Headquarters.
Braden pushed the issue of operational control, suggesting that JO Branch
be upgraded to a division and authorized to "develop and operate"
projects with international organizations. The time had come to fish or
cut bait:
Failing orders incorporating something like the above [solu-
tion], the 10 Branch could, I presume, continue to exercise its
present rather haphazard duties of advising area divisions on
international organizations whenever such advice is sought. I
think there is real doubt whether the Branch should be contin-
ued in order to perform these duties.'
A few days later Dulles passed Braden's memo back to Wisner with
his own pointed comment: "I am inclined to believe that an Int. Org. [sic]
office is desirable and that it should have sufficient authority to act if
properly coordinated."'
Dulles had intervened not just to help his protege Tom Braden;
other divisions had legitimate complaints about the problems involved
with coordinating international operations. The Far East Division griped (b)(1)
that a WE Division officer, without coordinating his action with FE, had (b)(3)
encouraged a group to join the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
Shortly after that, the chief of the Contract and Coordination Staff urged
Braden to consolidate OPC operations with the National Student Associa-
tion in 10 Branch or risk "a chaotic financial, security and control situa-
tion."" Braden helpfully attached copies of both complaints to his 20
December memo to Dulles. (c)
'Tom Braden to Frank Wisner, Deputy Director for Plans "Relation of International Organizations
Branch to Area Divisions," 26 December 1951,
'Tom Braden to Allen Dulles, Deputy Director for Central Intelligence "Function of the TO
Branch," 20 December 1951, �.?
'Ibid. (u)
'Richard 0. Stilwell, Chief, Far East Division, to Torn Braden, "Allocation of Responsibility for
Projects re International Organizations," 18 December 1951 (Confidential). Emmett D. Echols,
Deputy Comptroller, Office of Finance, "OPC Utilization of the USNSA," 13 December 1951
(Confidential). Both memos are attached to Tom Braden to Allen Dulles, "Function of the 10
Branch."..(,,re
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Secret
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A//en IL Mlles, Si jinn m511 (,12 (),f cove) politifill action. HO
Allen Dulles now explicit support soon helped to resolve matters.
ADPC Johnston was frequently away from his office that winter and left
many decisions to his deputy, Gerald Miller. Dulles phoned Miller about
the dispute soon after New Year's, and Miller replied with a compromise
proposal on 21 January 1952. He and Braden had come together and,
after "many hours of conference and discussion," had worked out an
arrangement. They agreed that 10 Branch should have sole control over
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labor operations and the "national committees" (NCFE and CFA), but
that the Branch should only "maintain CIA influence" over organizations
that were clearly international in scope but not manageable by any single
area division. '� (s)
Frank Wisner forwarded the memo to Dulles without taking a posi-
tion on its content; he apparently decided that discretion was the better
part of valor after he surmised that Dulles was going to resolve the dis-
pute personally. On 2 February, Dulles replied to Miller's suggestions (in
a memo that Wisner promptly passed to Miller, delegating to the Acting
ADPC the authority to deal directly with Dulles on the new matter).
Dulles agreed that 10 Branch should handle those organizations and
activities in the "cultural, youth, student[,] cooperative, veterans and
elds" deemed "clearly international" in character by the DDP (in
consultation with the ADPC). JO Branch would also coordinate all of its
outgoing cables through the relevant area divisions. Dulles sent Wisner a
second draft of the arrangement on 11 February."
One matter remained unsettled. Braden had let his lieutenants Cord
Meyer and William Durkee persuade him that the International Organiza-
tions Branch had grown so large that it ought to be rechristened as a divi-
sion. Wisner's staff and division chiefs reacted coolly to this idea. "We
got enough bosses now. We got enough people now. We don't want peo-
ple cutting across area lines. That would be a balls up," Braden recalled
them saying at a meeting convened to discuss it. Braden left the meeting
furious, marching in to Dulles' office to resign.12 Once there, however,
he learned that Frank Wisner, who was not present at the meeting, had
asked Dulles to override the division chiefs and authorize creation of a
new division." The International Organizations Division officially began
operations on 10 March 1952. (4
10 got off to a fast start. Braden finally had the authority and the
staff to run the programs professionally and to implement ideas that had
languished in OPC safes for the last two years. He also had a big budget.
DCI Smith approved expenditures of more than $28 million on JO
projects for Fiscal Year 1953. Much of this money went to the "national
committees" (NCFE and CFA), but 10 budgeted more than $2.3 million
The ADPC's memo to Dulles is cited in Crolius; the cover letter is Frank Wisner to Allen Dulles,
"Organization and Procedures for Dealing with International Organizations," 24 January 1952,
History Staff Job 83-00036R, box 2, folder 92.
" Allen Dulles to Frank Wisner, "Organization and Procedures for Dealing with International Or-
ganizations," drafts dated 2 and 11 February 1952. The 2 February draft is in Deputy Director of
Operations Job 79-01228A, box 8, folder 7, S; the 11 February draft is in History Staff Job 83-
0003612, box 2, folder 92. (s)
Braden interview, 26 August 1993..10;4.
Thomas W. Braden, "Fin Glad the CIA is 'Immoral'," Saturday Evening Post, 20 May 1967,
p. 11. (u)
-S�eepet-
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A typically crowded and busy office in one of OPC's branches..(Rr
on its cultural, labor, and "voluntary" projects.' TO's staff expanded as
well. Within two years of TO's creation, its original three branches had (b)(1)
become five: Branch 1, (NCFE); Branch 2, (the Asia Foundation [for- (b)(3)
merly CFAD; Branch 3, (Organizations); Branch 4 and Branch 5,
(the American Committee for Liberation, which ran Radio Liberty). 15..k, (b)(1)
TO Division also gained an overseas branch
(b)(3)
/but better
LCPIP1T, the new branch was OPC's response
to management problems encountered by the new Congress for Cultural
Freedom in 1951. CCF case officer Michael Josselson had initially (b)(1)
(b)(3)
solved the problem in 1951 by creating a parallel station within the
to work specifically with international organizations. LCPIPIT
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
'Troilus, 'Covert Action in the Cold War, pp. 33-34.1*
ertrt
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(b)(1)
(b)(3)
LCPIPIT
IO's place in the organizational hierarchy never reflected its full
influence and importance in CIA. When OPC merged with the Office of
Special Operations in August 1952, 10 became part of Frank Wisner's
Directorate of Plans and was nominally subordinate to Gerald Miller as
Chief of Political and Psychological Warfare; it remained so for two more
years, after which it reported directly to the DDP, like the area divisions.
Miller also nominally assumed the ADPC's ex officio role of deciding
which organizations were "clearly international" and thus in JO's baili-
wick.18 Nevertheless, neither he nor Wisner closely supervised Braden's
operations. Braden often reported first to Allen Dulles, an arrangement
that, Braden later claimed, Wisner never protested)�X
The rationalization of CIA control over international covert
projects soon made a difference in the way these operations ran. Braden
ensured that his programs had high-level approval. In autumn 1952 his
global program won a formal endorsement from the Review Group of
President Truman's short-lived Psychological Strategy Board, a predeces-
sor of later interagency covert action authorization committees.2� Internal
DDP reviews of projects that 10 adopted from the area divisions soon
began noting that the operations seemed to work more smoothly under
IO's inanagement.21 This trend continued and eventually won 10 a reputa-
tion, even among critics of its operations, as one of the Directorate of
Plans' best-run divisions. 22.4,$;.'
'9Braden interview, 26 August 1993..cie}
Assistant to the Director, to Walter B. Smith, QKOPERA, 14 July 1952,
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1) (b)(1)
(b)(3) (b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
_Secret"
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Indeed, the year 1952 marked a watershed in the history of CIA's
involvement with American voluntary groups, marking the beginning of
the steady, professional maintenance of these operations (at least at the
division level) that continued for many years. That year's presidential
election also brought the end of General Smith's directorship. Under
President Eisenhower and his new DCI, Allen Dulles, JO no longer had
to coordinate each of its operations with the Department of State (now
run by Dulles' brother, John Foster).231.s..)
Cord Meyer, Tom Braden's deputy, took over JO when Braden
resigned in 1954, but high-level support for JO's program continued.
DCI Dulles took a personal interest in 10's activities and in effect made
Meyer one of his senior advisers on covert action. Meyer, two years
younger than Braden, had followed a similar career path and had gained
firsthand knowledge of Communist front-group tactics. Like Braden, he
had attended an Ivy League school (Yale), served in World War II (as a
Marine lieutenant he lost an eye on Guam), and gone on to become a
publicist for liberal international causes (particularly world federalism).
Meyer joined the American Veterans Committee in 1946 and helped that
organization defeat a Communist effort to infiltrate and co-opt it. After
Meyer finished his graduate courses at Harvard in 1951, Allen Dulles
offered him a CIA position "at a middle level of executive responsibil-
ity." Impressed by Dulles and reassured about CIA by Walter Lippmann,
Meyer took the job and joined the International Organizations Branch
that October.24
\(u)
Financing Covert Operations (u)
JO had a cool though necessarily symbiotic relationship with other
Directorate of Plans divisions. The creation of JO in 1952 marked the
beginning of a lasting rivalry between its operators and other DDP offic-
ers. The more conventionally minded officers in the area divisions, many
of whom had intelligence experience in OSS regarded their
JO colleagues as Ivy League aesthetes, and viewed IO's projects as "frip-
pery."" JO staffers, for their part, saw themselves as practicing skills of a
different and higher order: 10 sought to influence events, not just to
"Braden interview, 26 August 1993.
"Cord Meyer, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA (New York: Harper & Row,
1980), pp. 50-65. (u)
"For a traditionalist view of the 10-area divisions rivalry, see Joseph B. Smith, Portrait of a Cold
Warrior (New York: (J.P. Putnam's Sons, 1976), pp. 162-164,206. (U)
Echwer
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Cord Meyer, Jr. headed the International Organizations Division
and later au, Covert Action Staff. (u)
"report" them. In some projects, such as the operation involving the
National Student Association, 10 managers and case officers seemed to
feel that, although they cooperated with other CIA components for mutu-
ally desired purposes, they were outside the Agency's mainstream." (U)
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JO's psychological and political warfare operations depended almost
from the beginning on a complicated network of agents and proprietary
(b)(1 )rganizations that passed CIA money to intended recipients and ensured
(b)(3)1at the money went for approved purposes. The Agency (mainly through
secretly constructed this network in the early 1i4sn,
clawing on me ties ot triendship and collegiality that linked CIA's princi-
pals to wealthy, philanthropic, and politically moderate northeastern fam-
ilies and businessmen. Cooperation
to be close, but it naturally nroc uced a certain amount of friction
In consequence, the CIA's funding net-
work retained a particular vulnerability to legal and political changes
affecting the foundation community at large a weakness that could
have been fixed only through painstaking cooperation among the Agency
offices involved.
OPC's earliest covert subsidy operations relied on allied private
organizations
Sometimes the case officer or agent in the
field simply handed over the money with the explanation that it had come
from a fictitious "anonymous donor." These ad hoc arrangements quickly
proved untenable, however, because the sums involved were often too
large to explain away as the beneficence of any single individual. Most
CIA client organizations needed attributable and plausible sources for
their funding.X
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Faced with these problems, the Agency created its own dumm
charitable foundations.3�
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Looked at in one way, JO Division had willy-nilly become one of
the world's largest grant-making institutions. By the mid-1960s, the mag-
nitude of the CIA's involvement in the foundation community was stag-
gering. The Final Report of the Church Committee in 1976 placed this
intrusion in perspective:
Excluding grants from the "Big Three" Ford, Rockefeller,
and Carnegie of the 700 grants over $10,000 given by 164
other foundations during the period 1963-1966, at least 108
involved partial or complete CIA funding. More importantly,
CIA funding was involved in nearly half the grants the non-
"Big Three" foundations made during this period in the field
of international activities [emphasis in original]."
"Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activi-
ties, "Final Report: Foreign and Military Intelligence, Book I," 94th Congress, 2d Session, 1976,
p. 182. (U)
SeereT
so
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The CIA had come to play such a large role in the nation's foundation
community that Agency officials, even years before the Ramparts expose,
could not have shut down the covert subsidy effort without causing seri-
ous dislocations in an important sector of American society. (u)
The sheer size of the DDP's funding network increased the inci-
dence of seemingly minor mistakes and disclosures that revealed por-
tions of the Agency's activities. The network's complexity also made it
difficult for CIA officials to grasp the nature and scope of its problems,
let alone design comprehensive solutions to shore up its security. The
year 1957 marked another turning point for the covert subsidy programs,
although no one at the time recognized the watershed. (U)
In New York City a new, nonprofit organization, the Foundation
Library Center, began amassing information on America's thousands of
foundations. The Library had a loose association with New York Univer-
sity but received sustaining grants from the Ford Foundation and the Car-
negie Corporation. Its chief executive�longtime foundation officer F.
Emerson Andrews saw the Library as a way to raise the foundation
community's collective standards by making it obvious which organiza-
tions were real foundations and which were fronts or even tax scams.
Andrews and more than a few of his formally unwitting colleagues in the
New York foundation community had already divined that the CIA or
the "US Government" secretly backed many foundations. Gossip and
speculation about CIA covert funding activities would worry Agency
officials for years to come.Ti(u)
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The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) independently took a step in late
1957 that increased the possibility of the breakdown Ann Walton fore-
told. Responding to growing Congressional and public concern over
unorthodox financial practices by some tax-exempt foundations, the IRS
began requiring all tax-exempts to file a detailed form called the 990-A.
The first part of the form, for internal IRS use, required charitable foun-
dations to list the source and amount of each gift received. The second
part which the IRS made available to the public upon request�required
an item-by-item list of the foundation's grants. Typically, the instructions
accompanying the revised tax forms proved confusing. Foundation
accountants frequently attached both lists, of donors and beneficiaries, to
the public part of their returns. IRS clerks often did not catch these errors,
according to Ann Walton, and they carelessly filed both sections in pub-
licly available tiles.4 Files in IRS district offices soon bulged with data
on the activities of many Agency-associated foundations and funding
mechanisms." (u)
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This is
44.1. .,��� teely
frol�gi. Pole Iva;
!II* at.re Wit oi.mtiarti.
1,4 Aa4.1' Oi tem, line
c..G1
ITORIA I.
OLVANISTS
ithICY 0 tn IT MS I'
MO' WPC 110110MLY tONOVIIS
MT WIIIIIMNALINSIWOMIS
0 rim Yaks lin masons
r, CIA 1,4,, T.ey poo.1 tke
rrfl
Utr. M.' ...I
The Washington Post's largely accurate depiction of the CIA covert funding network,
February 1967 (6)
-Secret-
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The CIA under Allen Dulles allowed the threat of exposure to
grow to unmanageable proportions. By the summer of 1958 the three
Agency components most directly responsible for the funding network�
JO Division, Central Cover, and the Office of General Counsel had
received warnings from New York and had spotted danger signs. More
urgent warnings would come in the early 1960s. Agency officials spent
the next eight years worrying about these threats, but trying only sporadi-
cally and ineffectively to minimize them. (u)
Responding to the Threat (u)
Responsibility for maintaining the covert funding network's secu-
rity spread across several Agency components as the network grew in
size and complexity. As covert subsidy projects proliferated, so did the
needs of the operational divisions to pass ever-larger sums to more cli-
ents. And more and more Agency components and officers had to share
responsibility for managing the funding network. By the late 1950s, the
funding needs of Cord Meyer's International Organizations Division
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NSAM 38 ordered the Bureau
of the Budget (BoB) to study the possibilities of new funding arrange-
ments and consider terminating some programs."
'Belie, "The Central Cover Staff," pp. l39-140.�,
"Thomas A. Parrott, National Security Council, memorandum for the record, "Minutes of Special
Group Meeting, 9 February 1961," 9 Febmary 1961, Executive Registry Job 80B01676R, box 19,
folder lel.
"McGeorge Bundy, National Security Adviser, to David Bell, Director, Bureau of the Budget,
"Questions arising from CIA support of certain activities" (National Security Action Memoran-
dum no. 38), 15 April 1961, CIA Executive Registry.I,$)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
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(b)(1)
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-
ently never materialized
' The study that NSAM 38 called for appar-
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General Counsel Lawrence Houston worried about the security of
the fitruling network. (u)
:Suctrer
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An angle Representative Wright Patman's comments to the press
exposed a critical portion of landing network in l964..1.,i?}
Wide World 0
0Morton Mintz, "I tearing 1A)oks Into CIA Role in Tax Probe of Charity Fund," Washington Post,
1 September 1964, A13. Jacob Merrill Kaplan, founder of the Fund, had built the Welch Grape
Juice fortune. (u)
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When Johnson asked what the Agency intended to do, McCone said there
was little that it could do except keep quiet and develop new methods to
fund its clients." le
Three days later the New York Times added insult to injury. In an
editorial that presaged the shift in elite opinion that would one day turn
on CIA's covert action mission, the Times intoned:
The use of Government intelligence funds to get foundations
to underwrite institutions, organizations, magazines and news-
papers abroad is a distortion of CIA's mission on [sic] gather-
ing and evaluating information. It means operating behind a
mask to introduce governmental direction into cultural and
scientific spheres where it does not belong�at least not in a
democracy like ours.'" (u)
Efforts To Avert Disaster (ti)
"John A. McCone, Memorandum for the Record, "Discussion with the President-1 September
1964," 2 September 1964,
"Misusing CIA Mom. ," New York 'limes, 4 September 1964. (U)
"n.uses and lessons of February 1967 Ramparts and Associated Expo-
(b)(1)
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TnubdfT96Th new alarm sounded. Agency officials heard
rumors that David Wise, the muckraking author of The Invisible Govern-
ment, was writing a new and even more troubling book about the
Agency's use of legitimate foundations]
s eveloped, Dav-
new oo e .spto age Establishmen was not published until
after the Ramparts flap in 1967./
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Paul B. Henze of Covert Action Staff studied the funding network's
vulnerabilities.
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Ramparts later later explained how its investigators pieced together an
outline of CIA's funding network. At some point in 1966, its editors
learned (presumably from Group Research or the New York Times) that
four of the Patman Eight had passed money to a pair of charitable
foundations in Boston: the Independence and J. Frederick Brown Foun-
dations. These groups used the same address, and both had made grants
to the National Student Association and the American Friends of the
Middle East. Ramparts' editors also remembered that Robert Sherrill's
Nation article had suggested that AFME took CIA money. Its young
reporters kept digging, even though no one in any of the foundations in
question would talk to them. Ramparts somehow learned that the Sidney
and Esther Rabb Charitable Foundation had given NSA $6,000 to retire
an outstanding debt in 1964. In that same year the Rabb Foundation
received $6,000 from the Price Fund of New York one of the CIA-affil-
iated funding instruments exposed by Representative Patman. This coin-
cidence was made even more interesting by the fact that Rabb had
matched its gifts from Price and other suspicious organizations with
large grants to other American anti-Communist groups. For instance,
Rabb had received $15,000 from the Independence Foundation and
shortly thereafter passed an equal sum to the Farfield Foundation, the
patron of the Congress for Cultural Freedom another group rumored to
have CIA ties. The large matching gifts and grants provided the key,
allowing Ramparts' reporters to follow the subsidy trail from the
Agency's clients all the way back to a shadowy group of paper founda-
tions run from law offices that presumably received payments directly
from the CIA." (U)
-"Sol Stern, "NSA: A Short Account of the International Student Politics & the Cold War with Par-
ticular Reference to the NSA, CIA, Etc.," Ramparts, March 1967, pp. 31-33. (U)
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DCI Richard M. Helms. (u)
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Conclusion (u)
The dam-break in February 1967 resulted from a perennial Agency
weakness in the Cold War era�an early unwillingness and later inability
to redress chronic problems that were serious enough to involve more
than one directorate but not urgent enough to force the DCI's personal
intervention. Specifically, the Agency's management of its domestic
covert subsidy program suffered from an unintended side effect of Allen
Dulles' enthusiasm for covert political action and his willingness to over-
look problems that such operations encountered. Dulles sponsored the
program but rarely bothered himself with its details; his benevolent
neglect allowed the funding network to grow beyond the bounds of oper-
ational security. (u)
Without Dulles' intervention on behalf of his protege Tom Braden,
there quite possibly never would have been an International Organiza-
tions Division. The area divisions strongly opposed its creation, and
DDP Frank Wisner seemed inclined to respect their advice. Although JO
functioned efficiently under Braden' and his successor, Cord Meyer,
Dulles's patronage enhanced its bureaucratic status and helped to keep
its budget growing to proportions that eventually placed an intolerable
strain on Agency support offices. By the time Dulles left the Agency in
late 1961, 10 had earned a reputation for good management that pro-
tected its programs and allowed them to live on even after the Division
itself merged with the Covert Action Staff. (u) .
Although Allen Dulles promoted the Agency's huge covert subsidy
programs, he should not bear the sole responsibility for their collapse.
DCI John McCone and DDP Richard Helms hardly involved themselves
in CIA's internal debates about securing the funding network in the early
1960s. The Patman revelations of 1964 finally alerted senior officials to
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the fragility of this network, but the Agency's damage control efforts still
worked with a lack of urgency. Not until summer 1966�two years after
the Patman revelations did any Agency officer attempt to learn the full
extent of the danger and predict that the funding network would collapse
in a very public and embarrassing fashion. The CIA probably could not
have protected some of its more vulnerable clients and agents any better
than it did, but DCIs McCone, Raborn, and Helms shared a measure of
responsibility for not acting earlier and more decisively to save opera-
tions that might have been spared during the Ramparts flap in 1967. (U)
The anti-Communist groups and fronts that the Agency subsidized
required plausible but secret funding sources. These requirements�plau-
sibility and secrecy�ultimately proved mutually contradictory. In retro-
spect, what seems most remarkable about the Agency's covert, anti-
Communist funding network is not that it collapsed, but that it survived
long enough to affect the course of the Cold War. The three case studies
that follow examine the ways in which CIA client groups maintained
(and ultimately lost) their cover as independent actors, and how they tried
to counter the machinations of the Soviet Union. (0
"Secret-
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Chapter Three
The Secret Alliance
The National Student Association (U)
The Central Intelligence Agency's involvement with the National
Student Association .(NSA) began at the height of the Cold War, when
both organizations realized they shared a desire to fight Communist con-
trol of Western and Third World student groups. Soon after they began
cooperating, the Agency and the Association separately discovered that
they could make use of each other to achieve goals that were only indi-
rectly related to fighting Communism. The Agency found NSA to be a
useful cover mechanism, a recruiting ground, and a source of operational
information. In turn, CIA money heightened NSA's profile among domes-
tic and foreign students and increased the influence of certain offices
and officers within the Association. (u)
Within NSA "a clique developed that was basically using associates
. . . for ulterior purposes," noted one Association officer in 1967. The
Agency case officers who dealt with this clique came from the same
milieu:
These CIA men are not evil. They are quite intelligent, often
very liberal. They seemed to believe in and want to do the
same things that NSA wanted to do. Moreover, because they
were often former officers of NSA, they were considered
good friends, whose judgment was trusted, who possessed a
monopoly of information regarding the international student
movement; discussions with them were often very comfort-
able, and such pressure as there was, was very subtle.'
Indeed, a cohesive group of witting student leaders cum CIA
agents and officers in effect brokered the link between the Agency and
the Association. The student members of this group collectively were
rather like an elite campus secret society monitored and defended by its
distinguished but clandestine alumni. They persuaded both CIA and
'Richard a Steams, "We Were Wrong," Mademoiselle, August 1967, p. 3.51. (u)
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NSA to continue the worldwide struggle against Communist domination
of the student movement long after the initial alarm over the Soviet-dom-
inated International Union of Students (IUS) had subsided. "People used
to joke among themselves, `who co-opted whom?" recalled one veteran
of both NSA and CIA.2 "Actually we thought NSA was running CIA
rather than the other way around," an unnamed former Association
officer explained.' The history of the NSA�CIA relationship is a chroni-
cle of how this informal group coalesced, persevered for roughly 15
years, and then in the mid-1960s found it impossible to perpetuate itself.
(U)
Launching HBEPITOME
NSA's August 1951 Congress demonstrated that the organization
was moving closer to a consensus on the need to resist Communist
inroads in the student world.' Nevertheless, many delegates still opposed
the creation of a Western union of students for fear such a polarizing step
might alienate students from the nonaligned nations.' NSA President
Allard Lowenstein later claimed that his anti-IUS speech in Stockholm
in December 1950 had "outraged" NSA's strong left wing, which nomi-
nated for NSA president a Swarthmore student opposed to Lowenstein's
call for a new international student organization. At the NSA Congress
in 1951, Lowenstein thwarted the left by supporting the successful candi-
dacy of his friend and fellow liberal, William T. Dentzer, Jr., who had just
graduated from Muskingum College. NSA then elected Dentzer's ally,
Avrea Ingram of Harvard, as its new international affairs vice president
after the popular choice for that office, Lowenstein's former girlfriend,
Helen Jean Rogers, stepped aside. Rogers had just returned from a con-
ference of Latin American students in Rio de Janeiro and impressed the
delegates with her "lurid tales of Communist student terror in the streets,"
'Stuart H. Loory, "Mystery Death Hides CIA Tics," Los Angeles Times, 26 February 1967. (u)
5Peter T. Jones, The History of US National Student Association Relations with the International
Union of Students., 1945-1956 (Philadelphia: Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1956), pp. 83-84.
(U)
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Lowenstein later remembered.' The 1951 Congress marked the decisive
defeat of NSA's left, which would not challenge the Association's domi-
nant liberals again until the 1960s. 0_0
Quoted in David Harris, Dreams Die Hard (New York: St. Martin's, 1982), pp. 168-169. (U)
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OPC's Milton Buffington told his superiors that NSA was "not receptive
to accepting government subsidy," NSA's International Vice President
Herbert Eisenberg informed a friend and former NSA officer "I am
going to approach the State Department and see if they can put us in
touch with some underwriting in case things get really tough."" Helen
Jean Rogers complained to Eisenberg's successor, Avrea Ingram:
I feel terrible about this money thing, Avrea, and if you have
any more suggestions I will certainly see them. But no one
here [in Washington] has any more ideas. At the Department
of State they just sigh and look depressed and say we're won-
derful and isn't it too bad, but they just don't know. DRAT IT.
After all we went through in Rio and all the progress that has
been made, and now for the lack of a few thousand dollars�
the whole thing is likely to fall. [Spelling and punctuation in
(U)
"Milton Buffington to Lewis Thompson, "United States National Student Association," 17 Febru-
ary 1951, in Warner, The CIA under Harry Truman, pp. 383. Herbert Eisenstein to Erskine
Childers, 9 February 1951, Hoover Institution, United States National Student Association (Inter-
national Commission) Papers, box 26, "Erskine Childers" file. (u)
'Helen Jean Rogers to Avrea Ingram, 25 May 1952, Hoover Institution, United States National
ctudora Ontoriviti6611 C P'mnerc hox 96 "F Ch�I I " File (iii
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(b)(1)
(b)(3)
The US
uongress published the lowest (and perhaps the most accurate) estimate
in 1980, guessing that the World Federation of Democratic Youth and
the International Union of Students together spent about $2.5 million a
year. This figure may have reflected a fading of Moscow's interest in
youth and student organizations." (oil
Operations (u)
With HBEPITOME approved, 10 had all the pieces of the CIA�
NSA relationship set)11 the patterns they would retain for more than a
decade. A nucleus of
NSA would carry on the original ideals of
the covert partnership. The 1950s and early 1960s saw a rationalization
and a growing sophistication in the operational ties between CIA and
NSA, as the two organizations covertly explored opportunities and
devised new activities.
JO's dealings with the National Student Association comprised
only a portion of the much larger H.BEPITOME program (which 10 con-
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Operational Accomplishments (u)
Two DDP appraisals reflect the evolution and accomplishments of the
HBEPITOME program's use of the National Student Association. The two studies
reflect: a) NSA's evolution beyond what in the 1950s were, for the most part, parlia-
mentary victories in international student gatherings, to more concrete achievements
in the 1960s; and b) the geographic widening of NSA's interests and impact.
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The International Union of Students soon seemed to confirm CIA
fears of Communist organizational adaptability by moving away from
the Stalinist rigidity that had alienated many Western and Third World
student leaders. In 1955, the same year that Moscow dissolved the Corn-
inform, the IUS secretariat reversed course and began calling for cooper-
ation among all national student unions. Some ISC members,
particularly the French, soon realized that they could gain leverage within
COSEC and the ISC by endorsing IUS calls for cooperation and joint
projects. Even more important, the emerging international debates over
colonialism and development began to blur formerly sharp East-West dis-
tinctions of the early Cold War and to complicate relations within the
ISC. The IUS labeled the United States an imperialist power and publi-
cized complaints by colonial student groups while dismissing the ISC's
moderate criticisms of colonialism.36 (U)
International Student Conference gatherings themselves became
tense during debates over the wording of proposed anti-imperialist reso-
lutions and disputes over the seating of delegations from not-yet-indepen-
dent colonies. The ISC reached a low point at the 1962 Conference in
Quebec. Representatives of 27 Third World student groups stormed out
after losing a vote to seat a group of Puerto Rican students as a
"national" delegation, and the American delegates braced themselves for
the worst after hearing a rumor that the Cubans would soon douse the
lights and charge the American table.
Throughout these controversies, NSA continued to wield influence
in COSEC and the ISC. Unfortunately for the CIA's purposes, the clear
objectives of the original HBEPITOME program were no longer directly
relevant to the unfolding international situation. With the West European
colonial powers on the defensive in the ISC�and the United States itself
accused of "imperialism"�NSA could do little to inoculate Third World
"Jones, The History of US National Student Association Relations with the International Union of
Students, pp. 105-109. (u)
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students against the perceived allure of Communism. NSA's foreign rep-
resentatives and delegations spent their energy working to moderate
Third World sentiments against imperialism and the United States. 4,Fer
Sccrct
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Operational Problems (u)
Throughout the long covert partnership with NSA, CIA officers
worried about maintaining the fiction that the Association operated with-
out any secret assistance from the US Government. NSA was an indepen-
dent, private organization, and it had to remain one if it was to have any
hope of influencing foreign students with CIA's money and direction.
Secret
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Student-run organizations, however, were (and are) notoriously anarchic
and underfunded. The relationship between a democratic student organi-
zation and a covert action agency thus had to balance the competing
demands of credibility and security. The Agency tried to ensure that the
security and accounting procedures followed by its NSA agents left them
plenty of latitude to conduct themselves like typical student leaders. (u)
NSA's need to maintain its cover as an independent student group
became acute in the mid-1950s as the cooperation between the Agency
and the Association expanded into a wide variety of events and ongoing
activities. CIA funds and guidance enabled NSA to build a large interna-
tional program in just a few years. NSA posted its student representa-
tives in Asia and Europe, underwrote popular educational travel and
exchange programs, flew its officers and delegates to meetings all over
the world, and ran a summer seminar for promising American students
interested in foreign affairs. These activities constituted the raison d' etre
of CIA's subvention for NSA; they fostered the Association's influence
among foreign student
L_I______ r')
typically worked closely together to hide
the Agency's involvement. Witting NSA officers had to be able to explain
why NSA's International Commission operated so differently from .the
rest of the Association. The Agency's subsidy was .small by CIA stan-
dards but still represented the bulk of NSA's budget. NSA's international
affairs vice president regularly had to explain how an organization of �
American students had so much money to spend on world travel and
overseas representatives, and why the various charitable foundations pro-
viding this largess would not also subsidize the Association's domestic
programs. Perceptive observers such as those at Ramparts magazine
eventually noticed that the differences between NSA's national and inter-
national activities reflected more just than an unequal distribution of its
own resources. The Association's International Commission, especially
its overseas representatives somehow seemed
odd to one writer in Rampat ts:
NSA has always shown two faces. Its domestic programs, its
Congresses and its regional meetings have always been open
and spontaneous . . . 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."
'Sol Stem, "NSA: A Short Account of the International Student Politics & the Cold War with Par-
ticular Reference to the NSA, CIA, Etc.," Ramparts, March 1967, p. 30. (U)
Scutt
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Secret
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Allard K. Lowenstein, fortner president of the National Student
Association and an influential alumnus. (u)
Wide World
"Milton Buffington, Special Projects Division, to Lewis Thompson, Chief, Special Projects Divi-
sion, "United States National Student Association," 17 February 1951, in Michael Warner, The CIA
under Harry 7i-uman p 383 (u)
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4reemi_
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(b)(1)
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LEPIPIT
tomorrow."
'The student leader of today is the student leader of
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Politics (u)
The allegations and speculation arising from the Ramparts expose
in 1967 prompted observers to wonder just how much influence CIA had
The CIA monitored NSA political statements primarily to ensure
that the Association said nothing that would diminish its influence
abroad. This was a difficult task. Rising calls for national liberation in the
Third World combined with the more sophisticated approach of the IUS
_Secret-
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after Stalin's death to put enormous strains on COSEC and the Interna-
tional Student Conference by the late 1950s. Many delegations from
emerging Third World states urged the ISC to condemn colonialism and
take up other issues that NSA (and the CIA) regarded as parochial and
potentially divisive. Rumblings against American "imperialism" abroad
and racial discrimination at home could be heard in International Student
Conferences even in the II 950s.59 The ISC's West European delegates, for
their part, objected to criticism from their present and former colonies.
(u)
NSA had to walk a fine line between these two blocs. As the most
influential member of the ISC, NSA tried to maintain its credibility with
Third World students by demonstrating its sympathy for the legitimate
and peaceful aspirations of the nonaligned world. Foreign student leaders
paid close attention to NSA's domestic political activities as well. NSA
had to prove its commitment to civil rights and reform at home as well
as abroad. (u)
NSA's officers recognized the new situation and bent over back-
ward to be sympathetic to the concerns of Third World students. The
Association consistently applied the formula that its founders had devised
in their battles with the IUS in the 1940s�that international student
groups should debate political issues only insofar as those issues affected
"students as students." The ISC did not always follow the "students as
students" formula (and officially dropped it in 1960), but for a decade
that rubric gave NSA's delegates the flexibility they needed to act as
mediators in many contentious sessions of the International Student Con-
ference. In the contemporary American political context, it stamped
NSA as a moderately liberal organization, squarely in the mainstream of
American political discourse. Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy,
and Johnson all considered NSA politically safe and routinely sent greet-
ings and sometimes emissaries to its national Congresses each August.
(u)
The CIA rarely intervened in NSA's debates over political issues,
participating only on the margins when Agency officers feared the Asso-
ciation could split apart in political disputes or fall into the hands of
extremists (of either the left or the right) who would fritter away the
goodwill and influence that NSA had painstakingly acquired among for-
eign student leaders. Over the years CIA case officers contended with
"For instance, the 7th International Student Conference, held in lbadan, Nigeria, in September
1957, passed a resolution calling for an end to racial discrimination in the United States. (U)
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three major developments that threatened the political balance that NSA
tried to maintain: the civil rights struggle, the rise of conservatism as a
political movement, and the Vietnam War. (0)
Debates over civil rights in the 1950s proved serious enough to
jeopardize the Association's very existence. NSA's leaders
believed the Association should do what it
could to promote an end to segregation on America's college campuses.
Officers of the Association supported gradual integration not only for its
own sake but also to protect the Association's image among students in
the developing world
The Association's civil rights activities and programs began
expanding rapidly in 1960. NSA offered financial and legal aid to black
students engaged in lunch counter sit-ins in the South. It also played a
role in the formation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC). SNCC, in fact, grew out of an NSA workshop designed to
teach political organizing skills to Southern students
.For several
years NSA 's national affairs vice president held an ex officio seat on
SNCC's board.63 National affairs vice presidents such as Tim Jenkins and
Paul Potter worked closely with student activists and radicals, keeping
NSA for a time in the vanguard of the civil rights movement. 64 For the
"International Commission, National Student Association, "Report on Little Rock," published in
late 1957, Political and Psychological Staff Job 78-02918R, box 4, folder 8, pp. 11-12. (u)
"Steven V. Roberts, "Move to End CIA Tie Held Reflection of New Campus Views," New York
Times, 16 February 1967, p. 16. Stern, "NSA," p. 30. (u)
'Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1988), pp. 39, 51, 60. See also
Todd Gitlin, The Attics: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), pp. 128, 139. (u)
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NSA's support for integration infuriated some Association mem-
bers and observers. Student governments at several Southern colleges
withdrew from NSA over its stand, particularly after the Association
applauded the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision in
1954. In the late 1950s a few fraternities and sororities campaigned
against NSA for endorsing calls for excision of the whites-only clauses
still included in the constitutions of certain Greek-letter organizations.
Segregationist commentators in the South also attacked NSA, usually
accusing it of aiding Communist aims. Typical were charges by J.B. Mat-
thews, who in 1958 accused NSA of fellow traveling: he said that its pro-
grams embraced the Communist line on education, and that its adult
leaders and advisers showed the "high degree of left-wing and pro-Com-
munist infiltration of the organization" (Rep. john Bell Williams ID-MS]
subsequently inserted the Matthews tract in the Congressional Record)66
(U)
'Congressional Record�House, 14 July 1958, pp. 12517-12519. See also "Student Group is Led
by Reds,' The Citizens' Council, August 1958, P. I. This segregationist pamphlet was published
in Jackson, Mississippi;
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IO's concern intensified after the birth of a conservative youth
group, the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), in 1960. Founded with
the guidance and patronage of columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., YAF
denounced NSA as the tool of an isolated liberal clique that was soft on
Communism." Harvard student leader Howard Phillips, an NSA mem-
ber affiliated with YAF, rallied NSA's conservative minority and sparked
a contentious but ultimately futile parliamentary assault on the liberal
(and witting) Association leadership at the 1961 NSA Congress.69 YAF
continued its attacks during the following months, mounting a campaign
that persuaded student bodies at several more colleges to withdraw from
T\TC A 7� (TO
Uhi1cngc and NSA's response are described in John A. Andrew III, The Other Side of the
Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1997), pp. 91-97. (u)
"Donald Hoffman, International Organizations Division, to Chief, Branch 6 International Organi-
zations Division, "Right-wing Attacks a =ainst the United States 'it
February 1962,
'Ibid., pp. 2, 5. ko)
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(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Progres-
sive activists who were beginning to call themselves the New Left
focused their energies on a small but re-energized group, the Students for
a Democratic Society (SDS). "Part of the reason the SDS got formed,"
"Ibid., pp. 5-6. ([1)
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Growing Mistrust (u)
For an SDS view of the struggle, see Hayden, Reunion, pp. 35-39, 48-52. (u)
..sere,Fee
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Sherburne later told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
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Philip Sherburne determined to break NSA's ties to CIA. (u) Walter Bennett ID
that Robbins at that time had urged him to run for NSA president with a
plan for raising new funds for the Association that would allow NSA to
break the tie to the Agency."
"US Senate, Foreign Relations Committee, unpublished testimony of Philip Sherburne, 6 March
1967, pp. 56-58, cited hereafter as "Sherburne testimony." The Foreign Relations Committee de-
classified this testiinony in 1997. See also Stearns, "We Were Wrong," p. 353. (U)
.secrve.t.
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Sherburne had resolved privately to do what he could to extricate
NSA from its clandestine ties to CIA. Soon after his election, Sherburne
started making ominous remarks about the CIA-NSA relationship. CA/
B5 learned that Sherburne and some of his fellow agents had begun to
question the morality of NSA's links to CIA; they viewed CIA "in very
James Bondian terms . . . [and believed CIA was] out to undermine and
subvert any individual or organization who disagrees" with US poli-
cies." One of Sherburne's aides was reported to be emotionally distressed
by the very existence of the covert relationship." Sherburne himself
showed more rationality in his misgivings. He concluded that NSA
should criticize American actions in Southeast Asia and lead the nation's
students to exercise a more active role in national political debates. He
also proposed that the CIA subsidy come packaged more like regular
foundation grants, with NSA submitting a prospectus for a proposed pro-
gram and the Agency paying the cost of the particular project plus a stan-
dard 20 percent for administrative overhead."
Sherburne testimony, p. 61. (U)
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Sherburne's unease about the morality of the CIA tie undoubtedly
mingled, in his mind, with a concern over NSA's leftward political drift.
The challenge from the Young Americans for Freedom had given way to
a series of attacks by the radical Students for a Democratic Society. SDS
criticized NSA's foreign and domestic liberalism for being wedded to
"establishment" ideas and values, especially in the context of the growing
debate over the Vietnam war. SDSers even examined NSA's annual
reports and publicly concluded that NSA must have been taking covert
payments from the US Government." Indeed, the mood on many cam-
puses was growing antagonistic toward US foreign policy, and the 1965
NSA Congress approved resolutions criticizing the escalating war in
Vietnam and the Johnson administration's recent military intervention in
the Dominican Republic. Sherburne almost certainly believed that his
own power in NSA, as well as the Association's influence among college
students, depended to a significant degree on his ability to keep abreast of
the political shift on America's campuses. (u)
"US Senate, Foreign Relations Committee, unpublished testimony of Eugene Groves, 16 March
1967, p. 167; hereafter cited as "Groves testimony." This transcript was declassified by the Foreign
Relations Committee in 1997. (0)
"Sherburne testimony, p. 110. (E)
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�Secret�
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Tom Hayden of the Students for a Democratic Society,
which accused NSA of taking coveHfund,v. (u)
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(b)(1)
(b)(3)
\Sherburne was
unhappy with the cuts; he had already laid staffing and fundraising plans
believing that NSA would receive a larger subsidy from the Agency.103
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The CIA's funding cutback meant immediate hardship for NSA.
Sherburne informed the Association's National Supervisory Board in
March 1966 that the national headquarters might have to release several
staffers because grants were likely to fall far short of expenses. '�5
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Sherburne test! nonv p 66 0_0
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mPhilip Sherburne to the NSA National Supervisory Board, 17 March 1966, in Political and Psy-
chological Staff Job 78-02918R, box 5, folder 16. (u)
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Sherburne at this point unknowingly set in motion the chain of
events that led to the Ramparts expose. According to Ramparts, in
March 1966 Sherburne privately told a friend Michael Wood of
Scent
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Pomona College, NSA's Director for Development�about the covert
relationship. Wood, who had joined NSA in the spring of 1965, had
grown frustrated with the inexplicable secrecy and apparent slackness in
NSA's fundraising efforts. He went to Sherburne shortly before the lat-
ter's trip to South Vietnam and threatened to resign if he did not receive
more responsibility. At the same time, Wood's staff had tired of his com-
plaints about alleged sloppy work. 1�7 To keep peace in the office while
he was traveling in Southeast Asia, Sherburne invited Wood to lunch
one afternoon and explained to him exactly why the Association could
not give him full authority over NSA fundraising. Although Sherburne
apparently believed that considered Wood a security risk, he
divulged to Wood the Agency's links to NSA, piling secret on secret in
what must have been something of an emotional release.m8 (u)
From the CIA's perspective, the NSA Congress in August 1966
went badly. One delegate told Time magazine that the Congress was
really a conclave of "the left left-wingers and the right left-wingers."'"
'"Stern, "NSA," p. 35. Wood's problems with his staff�a situation unmentioned by the Ramparts
article�were noted on page 3 of Larry Rubin's "diary," released by the NSA-affiliated United
States Student Press Association in mid-1967; a copy of the notes is contained in Political and Psy-
chological Staff Job 78-02918R, box 5, folder 29. (U)
'"Sherburne testimony, p. 77. (u) Michael Wood testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Commit-
tee on the same day as Sherburne, and both transcripts were bound (and declassified) together.
Wchrirl' It h 1 � � �� Ft �'t 1 � � "NA/ t ,t � "� c s 1,5
u"-I he Silent Spry
" Ti,,,,' 74 Fohnviry IWO n 15 (1 0
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"'Sherburne testimony, p. 116. (u)
'"The Crowded Left," Time, 9 September 1966, p. 46. (0)
Soc-ret-
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NSA pre.vident Eugene Groves. (u)
AP 0
Sherburne had recruited a like-minded successor in Eugene Groves a
graduate of the University of Chicago's physics department and a
Rhodes Scholar whom CA/B5 had flagged as an "SDS candidate" a year
earlier. Groves beat a more conservative challenger in the presidential
election." Groves and his fellow officers remained centrists in relation
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to other student leaders, but the spectrum of student politics had shifted
leftward. The Congress passed a Vietnam resolution that was more stri-
dent than its 1965 version, calling for an immediate bombing halt and a
withdrawal of American troops. Few delegates defended the Johnson
administration's Vietnam policy; many wanted even stronger criticism
than that contained in the final resolution. The Congress also passed a
resolution calling for an end to the peacetime draft.'I5 (u)
"Student Unit Asks US Abolish Draft, Set Up Alternatives," New York Times, 1 September 1966,
p. 6. (u)
W. Eugene Groves, "President's Report�,Part I," submitted to the 20th Congress of the National
Student Association, August [967, pp. 2-4; a copy is contained in Political and Psychological Staff
Job 78-029I8R, box 5, folder 29 (Unclassified). See also Groves testimony, pp. 135,137. (u)
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The previous September, Groves had implemented additional econ-
omies in the hope of trimming NSA's budget deficit. As a consequence,
Michael Wood lost his job as Director of Development. Ramparts later
claimed that Wood decided around this time to use Sherburne's revelation
to force the Association to cut its CIA ties.'" The truth may have been
simpler: Wood apparently was retaliating against the people who had
fired him.'" Sometime in early autumn, Wood took a 50-page memo
detailing what he knew to Ramparts magazine, which set to work investi-
gating his story.'" CO
The CIA and NSA knew nothing about Ramparts' investigation
until New Year's Day 1967, when Groves learned from antiwar activist
and former NSA president Allard Lowenstein that the magazine was
"'Eugene Groves and Richard Stearns to NSA Overseas Representatives, 5 October 1966, copy
contained in Political and Ps cholo ical Staff Job 78-029I8R box 5 folder 15
\NSA
officer Richard Stearns later suggested that NSA's independent fundraising had been successful
enough to reassure the Association's leaders that NSA could survive without CIA funds; Stearns,
"We Were Wrong," p. 354. (3)
'''Groves testimony, pp. 137-138, 147. (U)
Stern, "NSA," P. 36. (u)
'"Groves, "President's Report�Part I," p. 3. (u)
"The CIA and 'The Kiddies,'" Newsweek, 27 February 1967. (u)
Se.t
171
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editing an article on NSA's ties to the CIA. Groves and other NSA offic-
ers soon learned that Michael Wood was Ramparts' main source. Sher-
burne, by then a student at Harvard Law School, persuaded Wood to fly
to Washington on 22 January, where he and Groves pleaded with Wood
to retract his story. Sherburne and Groves had little concern about the
potential damage to the CIA and its operations, but they wanted to mini-
mize any repercussions for NSA, as well as to ensure the safety of NSA's
exchange student in Poland, Roger Pulvers.'" Wood apparently passed
this information back to Ramparts' editors, who now worried that
Groves and NSA might pre-empt the scheduled expos�y giving the
story to another publication or by briefing the press themselves:26 (u)
For the next three weeks Groves and Ramparts jockeyed to be the
first to go public with the story of the covert relationship. Both needed a
little more time. Ramparts' publication schedule forced its editors to sit
on the news until mid-February; they also hoped to buttress the article
against potential libel suits by wringing admissions from NSA's current
officers. Groves sensed what Ramparts needed and he refused to cooper-
ate.'" As he considered various ways of revealing the CIA�NSA link to
the public, Groves decided that NSA had to find some way to compel the
US Government to acknowledge the existence of the covert relationship.
(U)
Such an acknowledgment, Groves believed, would protect NSA's
tax exemption and draft deferments and would leave the Association eli-
gible for overt government and foundation grants in the future. Groves.
quietly sought advice from former NSA officers and sympathetic public
figures such as the Rev. William Sloane Coffin at Yale. In Washington,
he, called on Senator J. William Fulbright and White House aide Dou-
glass Cater, one of the founders of NSA.'" On 8 February Groves flew
to Europe to visit the ISC and meet with Roger Pulvers in London.
Groves later claimed that he had bought a little extra time for Pulvers
'"Sherburne testimony, p. 100. Groves testimony, pp. 145-146. (0)
''Groves, "President's Report�Part I," p. 5. Groves and other officers had confided in Lowenstein
in November 1966, disclosing the fact of the CIA�NSA relationship and asking his advice about
ending it; Harris, Dreams Die Hard, p. 159. (J)
'"Stern, "NSA," P. 37." (u)
'"Groves, "President's Report�Part I," pp. 5-6. Cord Meyer, Memorandum for the Record, "Con-
versation with Mr. S. Douglass Cater, Jr., Special Assistant to the President Re Ramparts' Article
on Agency Connections with the US National Student Association (USNSA)," 25 January 1967,
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by stonewalling a pair of New Republic writers (James Ridgeway and
Andrew Kopkind) whom Michael Wood had tipped about the impend-
ing revelations.'" (u)
During this time the Agency did what it could to minimize the
impact of the impending Ramparts expose. CA/B5 knew nothing for cer-
tain about the story until 23 January, when Sherburne called to say that
Michael Wood had been Ramparts' source. A few days later Sherburne
admitted that he himself had leaked the information to Wood. It quickly
became obvious that Ramparts had devoted considerable resources to the
investigation. Contacts from around the country warned CA that Ram-
parts reporters had approached them, and that some of these journalists
had mentioned that the investigation was co-sponsored by the Institute
for Policy Studies (IPS), a Washington think tank closely tied to the anti-
war movement.'" (u)
W. Eugene Groves, "NSA and the CIA: On People and Power," in Philip R. Werdell, editor, The
CIA and the Kiddies, 1967 (this is a collection of reproduced articles and essays held at the Library
of Con *ress� the Groves essa does not seem to have been published elsewhere). (u
"'Scheer subsequently admitted to columnist Carl Rowan that he had discussed NSA with IUS of-
ficials in Prague, but he insisted that 1US had not steered either himself or Ramparts in the NSA
investigation; see Carl Rowan, "Miasma of Political Mistrust Grows," Washington Star, 24 Febru-
ary 1967. (U)
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Eugene Groves reached his Rubicon on 13 February 1967. He had
flown home from Europe the day before, satisfied that Roger Pulvers was
safely out of Poland and that public disclosure would not do irreparable
harm to NSA's sister student unions abroad.'" Ramparts, upon learning
through its own sources in NSA headquarters that a public statement was
imminent, prepared a full-page advertisement trumpeting its scoop to run
in the 14 February edition of the New York Times. Seeing the camera-
ready ad laid out in the newsroom, Times reporter Neil Sheehan called
NSA headqua -noon of the 13th and read it to Groves, who (b)(1)
in turn called with word that the hour of reckoning had (b)(3)
Coale.
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Groves thus gave the New York Times a story as big as the one
uncovered by Ramparts----the first public acknowledgment by a CIA cli-
ent of the Agency's role in supporting domestic anti-Communist organi-
zations. While denying that NSA had performed intelligence missions
for the CIA, Groves admitted that the Association's international pro-
gram had received Agency funds since the early 1950s.'" Scooped by
Groves "President's Re ort�Part I,''
6-7 tt
'"Neil Sheehan, "A Student Group Concedes it Took Funds from CIA," New York Times, 14 Feb-
ruary 1967, p. 1. (tt)
Secret
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THE NEW 1�01/E IMES, 10E,SIME, FEHRUART II. 190.
f An Editorial Announcement]
In its March issue, Ramparts maga-
zine will document how the CIA has
infiltrated and subverted the world of
American student leaders, over the
past fifteen years.
this used students to spy;
it has used students to pres-
sure international .student
organizations into taking
Cold War positions; and it
has interfered, in.a most
shocking manner, in the
internal workings of the
nation's largest and 'oldest
student organization
Tho/ft,000 word account of the operations of the CIA
within America's largest student organization is a case
study in tile corruption of youthly idealism. It is also a
singularly disquieting indication of the extent to which
the government's secret intelligence apparatus wormed
its way into American institunons.
The story in the March Ramparts also presents an
atniving.account of how the CIA bends so-called inde-
pendent foundations to its clandestine financial purposes,
using them .as conduits for espionage money. Names are
named mid dollar amounts�cited. �
.. It is, additionally, the poignant story of the recent
attempts by student leaders to throw off their financial
siicbIej to the CIA, and �Nile highly- placed liberals in
the government who tried�and failed� to help them.
Rampart, writ dedil:,ite this sits is, the Jens of thou7
Amerie,m Ninth:tits whosentabroad,
or worked hard in liberal student polities at home? un-
aware that their leaders had sold out their indep6n-d-eicee.
When you read this extraordinary article, yon will feel
that ilie CIA owes the youth of this country an aplogy.
114 &mad El Oa 14.1r0 lbannora 411/04 14 stanaly Way. Ina ba
tOt 1s55t1 to >a )4.a nnakAr to $100551 1051 $055 0050 U504 14.4. yta ma W.*
acic Approved for Release: 2025/05/09 CO1514877
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The blow to the Agency's covert action network did not for many
years, however, inspire either the private or the public sectors to fund
American groups working overseas to promote American goals and val-
ues. The Katzenbach report had noted that more donors seemed willing to
support worthy projects abroad than had been the case in the early
1950s. It suggested that covert funding fostered "foreign doubts about the
independence" of private organizations, which in turn impaired the bene-
fits they sought to confer. The committee recommended a new "public-
private mechanism" to allocate public funds openly. (U)
President Johnson appointed a panel of Congressmen, public ser-
vants, and private experts to consider this recommendation. The panel�
the Committee on Overseas Voluntary Activities informally took its
name from its chairman, Secretary of State Dean Rusk.' This Rusk Com-
mittee did not live up to expectations. Despite the introduction of several
bills in Congress to create new mechanisms for spending public money
on worthy causes abroad, the Committee drifted, fruitlessly debating the
details of various funding proposals in sessions attended by few of the
panel's more senior and influential members.' The committee's final
Robert Phelps, Panel on CIA Subsidies Divided over Alternatives," New York Times,
18 December 1967, p. 1. (ml)
Secret
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report, issued in May 1968, fell on deaf ears in the midst of the tumultu-
ous primary campaign to succeed Lyndon Johnson as president. The idea
of a public-private partnership subsequently languished until 1983, when
Congress joined the Reagan Administration to create the National
Endowment for Democracy. (u)
The Rusk Committee had stumbled on the problem of deciding
which American political views merited public support. Indeed, the Ram-
parts revelations reverberated so widely not merely because they raised
anew the sensitive question of a secret agency's place in a democratic
society, but because they credibly showed the Agency playing favorites
by supporting mostly liberal groups and activists. Many of those who
criticized the Agency accused it of intervening in domestic politics. (u)
Comments from both sides of the political spectrum demonstrated
the anger of many Americans over the Agency's operations. NSA's con-
servative rival, the Young Americans for Freedom, dismissed the govern-
ment's contention that the CIA had subsidized only the Association's
dealings with foreign students and had steered clear of domestic politics:
The inescapable conclusion is that when a subsidy is given an
organization rather than individuals�and a political organiza-
tion, moreover, with extensive activities both domestic and
foreign it is impossible to separate the subsidy into two dif-
ferent components, labeled "here" and "there." (U)
Writing from a New Left perspective, Todd Gitlin and Bob Ross
tacitly agreed with the Young Americans for Freedom that the CIA had
underwritten NSA's allegedly staid, establishment liberalism. Gitlin and
Ross found this objectionable enough, but directed most of their anger at
the way in which the leaders of NSA had subtly convinced New Left
activists that they had won modest but significant influence in Associa-
tion councils. "Free and open" debate reigned in NSA, but Gitlin and
Ross alleged that this openness was just a CIA stratagem:
The left was courted with a flair for what Herbert Marcuse
calls "repressive tolerance" a legitimating function which
drained opposition away from the main issue: the purpose of
NSA in the first place. And the left cooperated too nicely.
Winning sporadic victories, small programs like the 1961 Aca-
demic Freedom Project, many of us on the left thought we had
9"CIA/NSA: The Central Issue," New Guard, April 1967. Reprinted in Philip Werdell, ed., The
CIA and the Kiddies (a pamphlet held at the Library of Congress, 1967). (u)
Surd
217
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stepped the first inch toward the final mile. But the crucial fac-
tor was control, and here the elite were not about to allow any-
one more than that first inch." (U)
Public anger directed at CIA thus arose partly from concern that
the Agency had covertly steered American opinion toward support for the
nation's established foreign policies and the elites who made them. The
criticisms leveled by the New Left and the Young Americans for Free-
dom revolved around the same complaint: that the supposedly open polit-
ical debates within NSA were covertly channeled toward certain policy
outcomes and away from others by secret agents subsidized by unwit-
ting taxpayers. "The few who knew prostituted us all," complained one
former NSA officer in 1967.2 (u)
The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the National Student Associa-
tion, and the American Friends of the Middle East expressed not merely
anti-Communism but, more significantly, the "political philosophy" that
permeated CIA and much of the government's foreign policy appara-
tus�at the height of the Cold War. Here is the pattern behind the
Agency's choices of "brokers" in all three of the organizations studied.
The philosophy shared by the Agency and its agents was militantly lib-
eral, in the sense of a self-conscious defense of rationality and democratic
procedural freedoms against threats from the Left and the Right.131
"Todd Gitlin and Bob Ross, "The CIA at College: Into Twilight and Back," Village Voice, 1967;
Reprinted in Werde cd., The CIA and the Kiddies. (u)
'Stuart H. Lot) "Mystery Death Hides CIA Ties," Los Angeles Times, 26 February 1967. The
officer speaking was Robert W. Beyers, NSA's director of public relations in 1954-55. (u)
''See Gary Gerstle's discussion of this in "The Protean Character of American Liberalism," Amer-
icon Historical Review 99 (October 1994): pp. 107 D1072. (u)
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(b)(1)
(b)(3)
One NSA officer complained to Senator Fulbright in 1967 that CIA had
adopted a rigidly anti-Communist posture in its covert funding decisions;
that the Agency needed to be exercising "a good deal more intelligent
discretion . . . rather than supporting the group that was ... on the face of
it the most pro-American, but rather supporting one which was most use-
ful politically."'' A LOS Angeles Times reporter asked in print around the
same time: "How good can CIA be at judging changing political trends
abroad if it did not notice the change in, attitudes among American stu-
dents?"'
IOKOPERA
'US Senate, Foreign Relations Committee, unpublished testimony of Richard Stearns, 16 March
1967, p. 165. The Foreign Relations Committee declassified this transcript in 1997. (U)
'Loory, "Mystery Death Hides CIA Ties." (u)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Sul ct
219
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, u
220
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Index
A
Acheson, Dean, 30, 134
Alsop, Stewart, 48
(b)(1)
(b)(3)I
American Artists Congress, I .
American Committee for a United
Europe, 48
(b)(3)
(b)(1) Europe,
Committee for Cultural
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Freedom, 180
187-93,
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
American Committee for Liberation of
the Peoples of the Soviet Union,
53
(b)(1) American
14,
(b)(3)
Federation of Labor (AFL),
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
American Veterans Committee, 55
Americans for Intellectual Freedom,
13-14,43
Andrews, F. Emerson, 60
Anti-Semitism, accusations of, 136,
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Aron, Raymond, 210
Asia Foundation, The, 48. 53
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Beichman Arnold 13-14 191 196
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Berlin, 5, 17-21, 23, 31, 40-41, 42,
179 193
Borkenau, Franz, 17, 183
Braden, Thomas W., 48-50, 52, 55, 79,
84-85, 87-88,
207-08
Brown v. Board of Education decision,
104
Brown, Irving, 14-16, 34, 40,
-Strret
221
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(b)(1 ) Brown, Pat, 200
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Buckley, Jr. William F., 105, 200
Buffington, Milton VV.,
F-7
40,
Bunting, Earl, 158n, 174
Burnham, James, xvii, 10-11, 22-23,
34,40,43, 183, 191,208
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Carnegie Foundation, 60
Cater, Douglass, 122
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Berlin Operations Base, 21
Eastern Europe Division
(EE), 11
International Organizations
Division (10), 48, 52-63, 79,
Project Review Board41.(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(and Committee),
I I
Psychological Staff
Division (PY), 48
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
i_o_ecial Projects Division,
48 (b)(1)
Western Europe Division(b)(3)
(WE), 42, 50,
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Office of Policy Coordination
(OPC), 6-11, 15-16, 19, 21-24
27-49, 1371 (b)(1)
(b)(3)
Office of Reports and Estimates
(ORE), 5
Office of Special Operations
(0S0), 5, 49,
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
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Childers, Erskine, 29 (b)(1)
China, 30, (b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Chipman, Non-is, 14-15, 18
Church Committee (see Congress,
LCPIPIT, 53-54, 100,
181-82, 199
United States)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
Coffin, William Sloane, 122
(b)(3)
Coleman, Peter, 32, 210
Coming Defeat of Commhib
(Burnham). 10-11
QKOPERA (Congress for
(b)(3)
Cultural Freedom
Committee for Cultural Freedom
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1) _
(b)(3) (National
Student Association
(0)(1) operation), 81
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
security concerns,
(American
Friends of the Middle East
operation). 133-77
Chessman, Caryl, 200
(101())
Committee on Overseas Voluntary
Activities (Rusk Committee,
1967), F7216-17
Communism, xiv, 2, 10, 12-13, 24, 26,
32-34, 42, 81-82, 87
137- 131,
179, 193-94
Communist Information Bureau
(Cominform), 2, 18, 93, 184r�
Communist International (Comintern),
1, 12
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Congress, United States,
134-35,
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
SeProt
223
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(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Dewey, John, 13, 23n
Domestic politics; covert activities'
influence on, xii, xviii
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Senate Committees
Foreign Relations, 128,
128,
(b)(1)
Select Committee to
(b)(3)
Donovan, William J., 134, 140
Study Governmental
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Operations with respect
to Intelligence (the
Church Committee), 59
Dos Passos, John, 201 (b)(1)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(3)
Dubinsky, David, 13
Duce, James Terry, 135,
Congressional Record, 104 Dulles, Allen W., xvi, 10,
47-52,
54-55, 63 71, 79,
134,
(b)(1)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
190.
(b)(3)
Dulles, John Foster, xvi, 55, 196
Durkee, William, 52
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Coordinating Secretariat
International Student
ence (COSEC),
of the
Confer-
Eastman, Max, 13, 188
102,
Copland, Aaron, 12
(b)(1)
Economic Cooperation Administratii(b)(1)
(ECA), 4, 14, (b)(3)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
Croce, Bernedetto, 23n
Conference
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
for
Eddy, William A., 135 (b)(3)
(b)(1)
Eisenberg, Herbert, 37 84 (b)(3)
Cultural and Scientific
Eisenhower, Dwight D. (and Eisen-
World Peace (Waldorf confer-
ence, 1949), 12-14, 187
hower adminiArati
'(b)(1) ("1)
Czechoslovakia, 2, 130
55, 102, ("3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Eisler, Gerhart, 18n
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
Ellison, Ralph, 201
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Emigres and refugees, from
Communism, 9,
11 (b)(1)
191,
(b)(1)
Encounter, 179, 183-84,
(b)(1) (b)(3)
Dector, Moshe, 190
Defense, Department of, 35
Engert, Cornelius Van H.,
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
Europe, Eastern, 2, 25, 194,
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Dentzer, Jr., William T., 82,
Europe, Western, 2,7, 11,
14, 25, 26 (b)(3)
127n
Executive Order 10450 (1953), 190
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Der Monat, 17
u�,1 tL
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Approved for Release: 2025/05/09 C01514877
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Farrell, James T., 15, 32n
Fascism, 12,
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),
190-92
Fettling, Jurgen, 19
Fischer, Ruth (Elfriede Eisler), 17-19
Fisher, Roger, 128
FitzGerald, Desmond, 172
Fleischmann, Julius
Ford Foundation,
209
Gardner, John, 213
Garvey, Edward R.,
127n
Geneva, 210
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Gestapo, 192
Gildersleeve, Virginia, 135
Gitlin, Todd, 217
God That Failed, The 32
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Groves Eu ene,
Franc-Tireur, 15
France, 2, 16, 184-85
Free Europe University in Exile, 184
(b)(1)
(b)(3) Galbraith, John Kenneth, 206
Gallo, Gregory,
Fulbright, Sen. J. William, 122, 128n,
219
Furtw1ingler, Wilhelm, 19
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
H (b)(3)
b1
119-24,126-29''''(b)(3)
Harriman, W. Averell, 14
Harvard University, 29, 55(b1
(b)(3)
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, xiv
Hellman, Lillian, 12
Helms, Richard M.
9-80,
Heritage Foundation
Foundation)
Hersey, John, 201
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(see Farfteld
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(3)
Hilger, Gustav, 11
Hillenkoetter, Roscoe H., 5-6
Hobby Fopundation, 174
127n (b)(1)
(b)(3)
ere-
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(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(31
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1 )independence Foundation, 76,
127n
(b)(3)independent Research Service, 127n
(b)(1 ) India, 179, 206
Ingrain, S. Avrea' 82, 84
(b)(3) Institute Ior Policy Studies, 123
Hoffman, Donald A.,
127n
Holbrook, William, 37n
Hook, Sidney, xvii, 12-13, 15-17, 21,
32, 34, 43, 192, 194, 196,
208
Hopkins, Garland Evans, 135,
Hoskins, Harold B., 134,
Houghteling, Fred, 29,
Houghton, Jr., Arthur Amory,
127n
Hunt, John C., 206, 208-09
Hutchison, Elmo, 69
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Imperialism, accusations of, 93, 102,
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 61,
(b)(1)
(b)(3) 171
International Association for Cultural
Freedom (IACF), 209
International Ladies Garment Workers
Union, 13
International Student Conference and
Conferences, 127n,
129-30
Ibadan (1957) 102n
)(3)
Stockholm (1950)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
82 (W(1 )
(b)(3)
International Union of Students (IUS),
25-26, 29, 37-39, 82n,
130
Congresses
Havana (1997), 130
Prague (1946), 25-26,
Prague (1950), 29
r-i37, 39, 43
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Israel, 135, 137,
177
Italy, 2
(b)(1)
, 170-71, (b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Secret
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J. Frederick Brown
174
Foundation, 76,
Japan, 138, 179, 208
Jaspers, Karl, 23n
Jerusalem, 155n
Jerusalem Post, l 71
Johnson, Louis, 30, 35
Johnson, Lyndon B. (and Johnson ad-
ministration), 0 102, 120,
126, 129, 200 l3, 216-17
(b)(1) Johnston, Kilbourne, 48
(b)(3) Jordan, 155n
Josselson, Diana, 210
(No yosselson, Michael, xv, xviii,
\ (31 34, 40-42, 53, 179-202,
/� /Joyce, Robert P., 14,
'(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
19-22,
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Katzenbach, Nicholas DeB., 213
Katzenbach panel (1967), 175, 214
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
1.L., 171
Kerman, George F., 5, 7-8
Kennedy, John F., (and Kennedy
administration), xv
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
102
Kennedy, Robert F.,
Kentfield Fund, 12,
Khrushchev, Nikita, 25
Kiley, Robert R.,
127n
Kimball, Hazel Monona, 137-38
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Koestler, Arthur, 32-34, 183, 186,
Korea, North, 31-32, 37
Korean War, xiv, 31-32,
Kristol, Irving, 183, 189, 196, 206
Krygier, Richard, 209
L
Labor, covert operations involving, 2,
7
Langer, William, 133
Laqueur, Walter, 196, 210
Lasch, Christopher, 208
Lasky, Melvin J., 17, 19,
40-41,
(b)(3)
League of American Writers, 1
Lebanon, 137
Levitas, Sol, 190
Liberalism, as guiding principle of
operations, 218-19
Libya, 134,
(b)(1)
Lidice, 137 (b)(3)
Lilienthal, David, 32n
Lincoln, George A. "Abe", 27
Lindsay, Franklin A., 27,
Lippmann, Walter, 55
Los Angeles Times, 219
Lovestone, Jay, 18
Lowenstein, Allard K., 37
121-22
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(1) (b)(3)
(b)(3)
82, 98, MO )
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
Macdonald, Dwight, 13, 188 (b)(3)
MacKnight, Jesse, 23
Magruder, John, 35
Marcuse, Herbert, 217
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
-gerret-
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(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Maritain, Jacques, 23n
Marshall Plan, 2-4, 7, 11
Marxism, xvii, 180
Masterworks of the Twentieth Century
(Paris, 1952), 185
Matthews, J.B., 104
McCarthy and the Communists (Rorty
and Dector), 190-91
McCarthy, Mary, 13, 188
McCarthy, Sen. Eugene, 213
McCarthy, Sen. Joseph, 187, 191, 193,
McCone, John A. 70, 79-80,
McDonald, James G., 137
McGovern, Sen. George, 200
McGrath, Rep. Thomas C., 171
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Nabokov, Nicolas, 13, 19, 42,
91
Gamal Abdel, 150-51,
Nasser,
Nation,
I I
171
National Committee for Free Europe
(NCFE), 9-10, 23,
National Endowment for Democracy,
217
Mexico City peace conference
(1949), 12
(N(1 ) Meyer, Jr., Cord, 52, 55, 63
(b)(3) 79'
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
127,
(b)(3)
National Review, 200
National Security Council (NSC), 3-8,
11,31
NSAM 38 (1961), 64,
NSC 4-A (1947), 4
NSC 10/2 (1948), 6
NSC 29/1 (1952), 139n
NSC 47/5 (1951), 139
NSC 68 (1950), 30-31,
44-45
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Middle East, 133, 135-36,
National Student Association (NSA;
)
06
see also , 26_77 (b)(1
81-(b)(3)
Miller, Arthur, 12
Miller, Gerald, 51-52, 54
Montgomery, Robert, 32n
Milnzenherg, Willi, 1, 18, 34
Congresses
University of Maryland
1.967 129
University of Wisconsin
(1947), 26
"Student as students"
formula, 26, 102
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
-tSerret-
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(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Near East Report,
171 Patman Re Wri ht 65 68
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
New Leader, 13, I (b)(1 )
New Left, 10(=1217 tbw3)
New Republic, 123, 128�
New York City, 12, 60,
New York Post, 140
New York Times, 14, 70,
77, 174, 185,
Nigeria, 102n (b)(1 )
Nitze, Paul, 30 (b)(3)
Non-Communist Left, xv, xvi, xvii 33,
_ 199, 208, 210,
North Africa, 138,
Norway, 179
0
124,
(b)(1 ) Odets, Clifford, 12
(b)(3) offie, Carmel,
(b)(1) 48
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
IS, 18-19, 22,0
Oppenheimer, Robert, 206
Overton, Jr., Edward W., 158n, 160,
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3) Palestine, 134-37,
174,
169
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Pearson, Drew, 171
PEN Conference (Tokyo, 1957), 201
Penrose, Jr., Stephen, 134, 137
Phillips, Howard, 105
Phillips, William, 196
Podhoretz, Norman, 193, 196
Poland, 11, 122, 124
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)(b)(1 )
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Preuves., 184, (b)(1)
Prokofiev, Sergei, 185 (b)(3)
Psychological warfare, xyi, 2, 4-6, 30,
31,43 (b)(1)
(b)(3)
Pulvers, Roger, 122, 14
(b)(1 )Paris, 40, 42,
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
Paris peace conference (103. 17
Patman Eight, the,
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
171
Raborn, William, 80 (b)(3)
Radio Free Europe, 9
Ramparts, xiv, , xviii, 60, 76,
121-26, 177, 206-07,
213
Ramparts flap
xv, xvii, xvin,
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
117 126-29, 169,
177,
Reagan, Ronald, 217
Reuter, Ernst, 32
Rice, Elmer, 188
Rockefeller Foundation, 59
Rogers, Helen Jean, 82-84,
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
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(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
Approved for Release: 2025/05/09 C01514877
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
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(b)(1)
(b)(3)
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(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Rome, 179,
Roosevelt, Jr., KerjmiLJ3344,
158-
Rorty, James 190
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Ross, Bob, 217
de Rougemont, Denis, 41
Rousset, David, 15
Rovere, Richard, 188
Ruddock, Merritt, 10, 27,
137-38
Russell, Bertrand 23n 192
Sartre, Jean Paul, 15
Saudi Arabia, 153
Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M., 32n,
206, 208,
Schuyler, Charles, 191 (b)(1 )
Schwartz, Edward, 129 (b)(3)
Selective Service (the Draf"1 ' 20'
128 (b)(1)
Shaul, W. Dennis, 127, 132(3)(3)
Sheehan, Neil, 124, 174
Sherburne, Philip, 126,
128 (b)(1)
Sherrill, Robert G., 75, 17 (b)(3)
Shostakovich, Dmitri, 12, 185
Sidney and Esther Rabb Charitable
11-()
Silone, Ignazio, 32-33F-1
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Smith, Walter B., 42, 52, 55
Smith-Mundt Act (1948), 4
So vie
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1) (b)(1 )
(b)(3) (b)(3)
Spender, Stephen, 191 208,
(b)(1) (b)(1)
(b)(3) (b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Survey, 196,
140,
�1196
State-Army-Navy Coordinating
Committee (SANACC), 8
State-War-Navy Coordinating
Committee (SWNCC), 2
Stearns, Richard G., 81,
Steinbeck, John, 201
Stalin, Josef, 1, 8, 111, 17, 32, 34,
102, 185, 193
Stalinism, xiv, 8, 43, 93, 187
State, Department of, 2-5, 11, 14, 31,
41, 55, ,I126,E] 13,(b)( 1 )
� 1
17((b)(3)
Stone, Shepard,
Straight, Michael, 2n
Strategic Services, Office of (OSS), 2, (b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
127
4,133, 1
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Students for a Democratic
(SDS) 106 114
Society
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Sullivan, Donald F.
Sweden, 179
29
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
-Secret-
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(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
T (b)(3)
(b)(1 )'Third World; Communist and CIA
operational interest in, 81,
180, 192,
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
United States Student Association, 129
United States Youth Council (World
Assembly of Youth), 40,
127n, 129
(b)(1 )
(b)(3)
194,
V
(b)(1 ) Thomas, Norman, 190,
(b)(3) Thompson, Dorothy, 139-40, 153,
Vietnam, 200
Vietnam War, 103, 120
(b)(1)
Village Voice, 128 (b)(1)
(b)(3)nme,
(b)(3)
118
Tito, Josep 13roz, 18 (b)(1)
Voice of America, 2, 4, 8
de Tolly, Barclay, 210 (b)(3)
Trilling, Diana, 190-91, 193,
71208
Truman, Harry S. (and Truman
Administration), xvi,
2-3, 30,
(b)(1 )
135, 137,
(b)(3)
31,35,L 54, 102,
139 (b)(1)
War Information, Office of (OWI),
2, 4
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR), 11-12, 18, 25, 34,
135, 180,
184-85, l92,213
peace offensive (1948-49),
I 1-17
Information Research
Department (Foreign Office),
5
Waugh, Evelyn, 24
(b)(1 )
(b)(3)
Wisconsin, University of, 26
Wisner, Frank G., 6-1711, 14-15, 23, \ii
27, 35, 40-41, 44, 49-50, kijik
52, 54, 79 137
(b)(1 )
(b)(3)
Wood, Michael, 117-18,
(b)(3)
131,(b)(1 )
213,
World Assembly of Youth (WAY),
40, 127n
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
-SQQ�pet- (b)(3)
`r1 I Approved for Release: 2025/05/09 001514877
Approved for Release: 2025/05/09 C01514877
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
World Federation of Democratic
Youth (WFDY) 25,
World Federation of Trade Unions
(WFTU), 1
World Peace Council,
Wroclaw (Poland) peace conference
(1948), II
Yale University, 55, 98, 122
Yergan, Max, 32n
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Young Americans for Freedom (YAF),
105 217-18
Yugoslavia, 18
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Zionism, 135-37, 140
160n,
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
--Secret'
232 Approved for Release: 2025/05/09 C01514877
Approved for Release: 2025/05/09 C01514877
During the Cold War, American
Presidents from Harry Truman to
Lyndon Johnson endorsed CIA covert
action programs to support overseas
efforts by anti-Communist American
voluntary organizations. This is the
story of three such covert subsidy
programs, including two of the best
known - those involving the National
Student Association and the Congress
for Cultural Freedom. The entire
network abruptly collapsed when
exposed in the 1967 "Ramparts flap."
In Hearts and Minds, this story is told
for the first time from the original
documents.
Michael Warner is the Deputy Chief of
the History Staff in the CIA's Center for
the Study of Intelligence. Before joining
the History Staff in 1992, he served as a
military and then a political analyst in
the Directorate of Intelligence. He
studied at the University of Maryland
and the University of Wisconsin, and
earned his doctorate in history at the
University of Chicago.
SECRET
Approved for Release: 2025/05/09 C01514877