WHY CIA WAS COMPELLED TO INVESTIGATE U.S. RADICALS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01315R000400260005-8
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 8, 2004
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: February 1, 1975
• Content Type: NSPR

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Ns a result of the ever-pressing de-1 Ci I
nds of the present, it is not all that By DeWITT S. COPP
I remembered today that between -
:5-1970 the nation was wracked by In February 1966, the Paris American
i-war upheaval over the issue of U.S. Committee to Stop War (PACS) was or- With regard to deserters, within PACS
by a small group of resident and its connected groups, there were two
olvement in Vietnam. In the violence ganized
schools of thought. One school was for
their protests, leftist revolutionaries. Americans.
9 student radicals wreaked massive In a statement of principles PACS encouraging desertion, giving aid and
did desert.
PACS
ers
assistance pub and financial damage on a host thd ata nv ie of the immense wea thland of these effortsoemer ed the Amer?n
bli lic and private institutions.
p power of their country, and of its gigan- Deserters Committee with open support-
For example, in 1968, at Stanford tic, fearful nuclear arsenal the United' from the NLF.. It was headquartered
-uversity in Palo Alto, Calif., "pro- i States has a solemn duty to revise its in Stockholm, Sweden, backed by 25
.tern" burned the Navy ROTC build- I now sadly obsolete foreign policy and fronts, and also drew support from the
g at a cost of $75,000, burned the join the world in combatting the vicious U.S. from a number of other like-minded
esident's office at a cost of $230,000 circle constituted by' ignorance, poverty, organizations such as SDS.
d staged a sit-in that cost the univer- hunger and, above all, war...." The second school of thought was
ss hen com -pared o o not s a large PACS held bimonthly meetings. The smaller in nature but more subversive
when comto others of a sim- b p in concept. It went under the initials
_r nature and purpose. ~ meetings were open to the public and.,
their stated purpose was to hear "talks; FRITA-Friends of Resisters in the
In that half-decade of turbulence there by specialists on the national and' Army. Later the "F" was dropped,
is, of course, ample evidence to show international repercussions of the and it was known as RITA.
at the directing arm behind the anti- imperialist policies of our government."; Between 1966 and October 1968, when
etnam coalition was to be found One such specialist featured by PACS he was expelled from France, RITA's
r agh organizations Students was 'the Australian journalist, Wilfred founder was known under the namesi
r a D Demmocra tic ic Society y (SDS), the
rotskyite Socialist Workers party ! Burchett. In November 1974, Burchett Max Watts and Mr. Cook. Actually he
,WP) and the National Peace Action lost a libel suit against a former was Thomas Schwaetzer, an Austrian aalition (NPAC). In their own words Australian senator who had accused him geophysicist." Whatever his cre-
ey were intent upon tearing apart the of being a spy for both the Soviets and dentials, after aiding many U.S, desert-:
brie of political and public stability, the Chinese. At the trial, former U.S. ers to find jobs and relocate, he came to
.d although Americans got their daily POWs from both the Korean and 'the believe, under his own orders or someone
Ise of home-grown protests, sabotage Vietnam Wars testified against Burchett. else's, that he could do more for the
:d violence, little attention was paid to Earlier ex-KGB agent Yuri Kroptkov, cause by keeping the potential deserter
le extension and spread of these ac- who defected in 1963, gave evidence in the service where he could spread the
that in the early '60s Burchett had, Marxist gospel of anti-Americanism and
pities into the countries of our NATO
lies and throughout Western Europe. boasted to him that he was on the payroll anti-militarism.
of the party in Hanoi. In Kroptkov's Toward this end, Schwaetzer, and such
As columnists Evans and Novak mind there was no doubt that the Aus- colleagues. as French author and pro-
have pointed out in a recent article, tralian was, like himself, a. member of Communist Jean Paul Sarte, arranged to
President Lyndon Johnson became. the KGB. bring out a single-page %%eekly news-
worried that the anti-Vietnam move- It would certainly follow that relation paper titled ACT-the RITA's news-
ment might be under Soviet KGB or ships of PACS members with specialists letter, It, like its New York -courite"rpai,
international . Communist control. of Burchett's type would come under The Bond, was a protest tract, written by
As a result, he directed the Central - , CIA scrutiny. U.S., deserters attempting to spread
Intelligence Agency to look into the dissension within the ranks.
matter, and quite naturally the move.. Additionally, as PACS had pointed.
ment and activities of those Amer- out, it had aligned itself with a number ? Until his deportation to Austria,
':cans traveling and living abroad of French Marxist fronts such as the Schwaetzer was busily engaged in
who were engaged in the action - Mouvement Contre I'Armement Ato- attempting to arrange distribution of his -
mique, the Comite Vietnam National as i propaganda effort at U.S. NATO bases
came under mCIA e scrutiny. well as establishing "cordial relation- in Holland and West Germany. That
In r the aforeme milked five-year
citizens' ships with representatives of both the; his efforts apparently had negligible
to Europe, while DRV [Hanoi] and the NLF [Vietcong", results is beside the point. His intent
~arveeled than back 28 and forth million
~,
pother 5.5 million resided there under National. Liberation Front]." Beyond! would no doubt have attracted the .at-.
arious resident conditions. Paris early these affiliations PACS membership,: tention not only of the CID but also of
-t had become a center of both an anti- which grew to an estimated 850, was to' the CIA. U.S. 'citizens were involved,
ietnam and an anti-American move- be found scattered among a gaggle of and 'as 'a matter of normal procedure
ent: This was so partially because of similar groups whose overt purpose was files would be opened on them. -
e strength. of the French Communist to protest U.S. policies in Vietnam, In March 1968 two American banks
arty and North Vietnamese influence, and elsewhere while championin the in Paris and the TWA office were
nd partially because Washington and Hanoi-Moscow line, and whose covert bombed..So was the American Express
anol agreed to use Paris as a lace t activities involved aiding U.S. desert- building. The French police and
Ap?rovedo FMF1,6IL A169b0J104y4M W4 Bt$~bl3ffSRA1004002ts v 6genCe, Direction
lestie over peace. case of possible Soviet espionage con-
de la Securite du Territorire (DST)
nections.. were unable to apprehend the saboteurs,