CIA STOOGES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00149R000300300016-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 22, 1999
• Sequence Number: 16
• Publication Date: February 25, 1967
• Content Type: OPEN

Sanitized - A
T `A T REPUBLIC A Journal of Opinion Volume 156 Number 8 Issue 2726 February 25, 1967
Published weekly (except Ju y~ and August when it is biweekly) and distributed by The New Republic, 1244 19th St., N.W.,
Washington, D. C. 20036. Phone FEderal 8-2494. Single copy 35C. Yearly subscription, $9; Foreign $1o; Armed Forces per-
sonnel or students, $6. Send all remittances and correspondence about subscriptions, undelivered copies, and changes of
addresses to Subscription Department, The New Republic, 381 West Center Street, Marion, Ohio 43302. Copyright ? 1967
by Harrison-Blaine of New Jersey, Inc. Item g. Second Class Postage Paid at Washington, D. C. Indexed in Readers' Guide.
COMMLNT 5-9
CIA Stooges, Mini-Truce in Vietnam, For
the Young, ITT and ABC Merger
Law and Prudence in the Powell Case
-Alexander M. Bickel 9
Unionizing the Academics -James Brann 1o
The Two Italys -Philip Ben ti
China - John K. Fairbank 13
- Minoru Ornori 14
The Red Guard Invasion
- Leo Muray 15
Missiles and Anti-Missiles
- by Dana *e Zele 16
The Future-Planners
-Andrew Kopkind ig
More from Germany
- by Stanley Kauffmann
Books - Reviews by Gerald W. Johnson,
Alex Campbell, Grattan Freyer,
Richard M. Elman, Martin Lowenkopf 25
POEM by Freda Downie 27
MovwEs by Pauline Keel 35
Music by Robert Evett 38
CORRESPONDENCE 39
Editor-in-Chief - Gilbert A. Harrison
Managing Editor -Alex Campbell
Books and Arts Editor - Robert Evett
Associate Literary Editor -Stanley Kauffmann
Associate Editors - James Ridgeway,
Andrew Kopkind
Staff Writer -David Sanford
Assistant to the Editors - F. R. Ruskin
Copy Editor-Lucille Davis
Contributing Editors: Alexander M. Bickel,
Robert Brustein, Asher Brynes, Robert Coles,
Joseph reatlierstone, Nelen Fuller,
Frank GetIein, Irving Howe, Christopher
Jencks, Gerald W. Johnson, Pauline Kael
Publisher -Garth Hite
Circulation Manager-Bertha Lehman
Business Manager - Glenon Matthiesen
New York Advertising Representative-
E. Laurence White Jr., Good-Laidley-White
5o East 42nd Street, New York, N. Y. xoo17
CIA Stooges
CPYRGHT
e igence Agency won voluntarily e ,
even though its congressional watchdogs now include Senators
Fulbright, Mansfield and Hickenlooper. But its past meddling and
blunders continue to catch up with it, and the latest revelation about
them calls for a congressional crackdown. This year marks the CIA's
twentieth birthday, but any celebrating is rendered out of order by
the admission by Eugene Groves, president of the National Student
Association, that for about 15 years the association, which also is
20 this year, has been taking secret subsidies from the CIA totaling
millions of dollars. The covert financing was handled by private
foundations that acted as the CIA's go-betweens, Groves, a 1965
Rhodes scholar, says that "in the past two years" the student leaders
"came to believe" that the relationship was "inconsistent with the
democratic, open nature of the NSA." However, they were still taking
the money last year, when they got the not unhandsome sum of
$50,000. Until recently the NSA leaders in the know apparently were
quite happy with their furtive relationship with the big spy outfit,
but "conditions have changed," Groves saysro Would it be uncharitable
to suggest the change of heart was because the money was tapering
off anyway and people like Fulbright - and Ramparts magazine -
were getting too close to the facts for NSA's comfort?
Groves says that "at no time" did the student organization "serve
any intelligence, function" or provide "information of a sensitive
nature" to any government agency. Others say it did, and a NSA
president who knew about the link between his association and the
CIA and didn't let on has a formidable credibility problem. What is
an "intelligence function" and what information is or isn't "sensi-
tive"? Some people now say that for years the NSA has kept detailed
iles filled with intimate information about American students who
o abroad as well as about foreign students into whose confidence
SA leaders, "acting internationally," in the NSA's own phrase,
managed to worm themselves. All this information was sedulously
collected on the pretext of studying student politics around the world,
but it now seems that most of it or all of it was furnished to the CIA,
or money received. Much of it no doubt was trivial. Some of the
noopers apparently followed the fashionable interrogative line of
robing as far as possible into personal habits, especially sex ones,
f their unsuspecting victims. In doing so, presumably they were
aithfully carrying out instructions. The subjects' ideological affilia-
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 Sanitized - Approved For Release : CIA-RDP75-00149R000300300016-2
CPYRGHT THE NEw REPUBLIC
tions of course were not neglected. It may be surmised
that the CIA now has or thinks it has (amateur spies
are notoriously unreliable, even when they forfeit their
amateur status for pay) the dirt on past and present
student leaders, in this country and in countries abroad,
who have been fingered for it by its NSA informants.
Some NSA members not in the plot were beginning
to get suspicious of the same old faces, by now practi-
cally middle-aged, that showed up at international stu-
dent conferences year after year, were in regular
attendance at Brussels and Leyden and were constantly
making trips to Africa and Latin America. Now that
Mr. Groves has spilled the beans, suspicion has turned
to certainty as far as NSA itself is concerned, and ex-
tends to such connected organizations as the US Youth
Council, the World Assembly of Youth, the Interna-
tional Student Conference, numerous fraternal and
labor organizations, and the foundations with which
they have had financial relations.
Once their cover was blown, NSA leaders at an-
guished meetings in their Washington headquarters
(bought and paid for by the CIA) joined the CIA and
the State Department in attempted explanations. The
favorite apologia is that in the early nineteen-fifties.
communist countries were very busy financing and
controlling student "front" organizations. It was felt
that fire had to be fought with fire, and that when
competing with communists this country could not
safely rely on independent individuals but had to stoop
to subsidized spokesmen, though in the case of NSA
some students praiseworthily did speak out freely.
But this can be only part of the story. Why a secret
subsidy? Because, it's said, people wouldn't listen
to American students if they knew they took money
from the government. This excuse won't wash; NSA
gets money openly from many government sources,
including the State Department. The United States
Information Agency recently offered the same foolish
defense of its practice of secretly subsidizing selected
books that are foisted on an unsuspecting public, both
here and abroad, as free and independent productions.
Reed Harris, a USIA director, told the House Appro-
priations Committee, "we control things- from the very
idea down to the final edited manuscript." USIA Assist-
nt Director Ben Posner confessed to the committee
that "we have not in the past divulged the govern-
ment's connection with" those books. Asked why, he
eplied: "It minimizes their value." The governments of
other countries, including the Soviet Union, subsidize
books for distribution abroad but don't bother to
retend they aren't.
Less than a year ago, the CIA was found to have
infiltrated a Michigan State University project in South
Vietnam; then it was discovered that George A. Carver
r., who cozened the highly respected political quarterly
Foreign Affairs into printing an article on t e ict
Cong, was in fact a full-time employee of CIA. That
affiliation was concealed.
The revelations about NSA, taken in conjunction
with other recent happenings, are bound to create a
backlash in the rest of the world that will hurt this
country. The puritan found rolling dead drunk in the
ditch rarely gets much sympathy from those to whom
he has been delivering high-minded homilies. A lot of
people are going to conclude that bought students are
part of a bigger picture that includes corporations
which bug one another's board rooms for industrial
secrets, and congressmen who are up for sale. This
backlash we must live with as best we can, but im-
mediate and thoroughgoing scrutiny of CIA is manda-
tory if the country isn't to have a serious problem at
home, with an outraged student body. American col-
lege youths are already deep in cynicism about their
society. Now these students must reflect that the same
kind of people who have been denouncing radical
activities on the Berkeley campus, and demanding
loyalty oaths, were busy in the back room calling
signals for the biggest organization of college students,
almost from its inception. The 1965-66 NSA president
admits he was rebuked by CIA for suggesting a Mos-
cow meeting with a Soviet student organization.
"What-the country needs most of the university," the
former president of Chicago once said, "and what only
the university can supply, is intellectual leadership.
The university could fashion the mind of the age. Now
it is the other way around, the demands of the age are
fashioning the mind, if one may use the expression, of
the university." Disillusioned students will need some
convincing that they are getting an education in order
to serve Dr. Hutchins' expressed goal, instead of being
the stooges or dupes of the government and the Central
Intelligence Agency. They will never be convinced if,
in addition to knowing that more than half the income
of the universities now comes in the form of federal
grants for "research," they have reason to believe that
their own student leaders are recruits of the CIA.
The only way to tackle this particular credibility
gap is for Congress to intervene. Left to itself, and
notwithstanding the integrity of Undersecretary of
State Katzenbach, the Executive branch will cover up,
not clean up the mess. Congress should take a sharp
look at the law which permits tax-exempt foundations
to receive funds without publicly disclosing their
source. More important it is up to Congress to cut the
CIA back to its original size and confine it strictly to
its duties as they were first defined in the 1947 Na-
tional Security Act - to "correlate and evaluate" secu-
rity information. Thus realigned, the CIA wouldn't
have quite so many millions of dollars to bribe the
students or any other Americans.
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