THE CIA'S CHARLES RIVER LINK

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00806R000100020048-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 12, 2010
• Sequence Number: 48
• Publication Date: October 13, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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a4TtE APPEARED,
ON PAG
NATIONAL SECURITY
BOSTON GLOBE
13 October 1985
The CIA's Charles River link
Intelligence agency has long courted Boston-area academics and institutions
By Jeff McConnell
Special to the Globe
The controversy over Harvard
professor Nadav Safran's ac-
ceptance of 350,000 from the
Central Intelligence Agency
to run a conference at the un-
iversity's Center for Middle Eastern Stud-
ies attracted wide attention last week. It
is only the most recent development in
the longstanding relationship between
the CIA and area universities - a relation-
ship that might be called "The Charles
River Connection."
Just last April 17. CIA director Wil-
liam Casey made a rare public appear-
ance at the Hyatt Regency Hotel on the
banks of the Charles in Cambridge.
There. he addressed a conference spon-
sored by Tufts University's Fletcher
School of Law and Diplomacy. The sub-
ject was terrorism. Although the press
had not been invited. the audience was
filled with experts on terrorism and other
Influential academics.
In retrospect. It is clear that Casev was
using the Charles River Connection to
create a prestigious forum for offeringjus-
tification of controversial CIA activities.
More than a month before Casey
spoke - on March 8 - a car bomb had
detonated in a Beirut suburb outside the
home of a Shiite leader linked by US intel-
Ilgence to previous bombings against
American facilities. The blast had killed
80 innocent bystanders and wounded
200 but had left the Shiite leader un-
harmed. Four weeks after Casey's talk.
the Globe reported that
the bombing had been
carried out at the direc-
tion of a Lebanese hit
squad set up and
trained by the CIA to
carry out "pre-emptive
strikes" against sus-
The CIA has
long cultivated
the Charles
River
Connection.
and the
courtship
continues
under CIA
director
William Casey.
pected anti-American terrorists. The
March 8 action. however. had occurred
without CIA authorization, the Globe
said, and an "alarmed" Reagan adminis-
tration had quickly canceled the entire
hit-squad program to prevent potential
embarrassment.
Casey's speech gave the administra-
tion's rationale for this controversial CIA
operation: "We cannot and will not ab-
stain from forcible action to prevent, pre-
empt or respond to terrorist acts where
conditions merit the use of force." The
Continued
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speech was an unmistakable attempt at
damage control by placing the adminis-
tration's rationale in the public record. In
this way, his speech was the latest in a
long line of public pronouncments by CIA
leaders whose purpose has been to as-
suage the Agency bureaucracy, often re-
luctant to go along with operations lack-
ing full government support, and to lobby
academics and other opinion-makers.
who could provide crucial backing in case
of a flap.
Almost since its creation, the CIA has
carefully cultivated the Charles River
Connection. In 1950, this link was for-
malized Into Project TROY, a secret gath-
ering of Cambridge academics charged
with developing ways to overcome Soviet
jamming and to reach the citizens of
Eastern Europe with US propaganda
broadcasts.
Within a year, the TROY effort evolved
into the Center for International Studies.
or CENTS, an MIT-Harvard think tank
placed at MIT largely because Harvard
rules prohibited university involvement
in classified research. The Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence reported in
1976 that the CIA "assisted in the estab-
lishment in 1951 and the funding" of
CENIS "to research worldwide political.
economic. and social change... In the in-
terest of the entire Intelligence communi-
ty While it was unable to establish a for-
mal institutional relationship to Harvard.
the CIA sought other looser ties to the
Harvard community. With top-level
White House approval, the CIA set up an-
nual summer seminars at Harvard for
foreign leaders and scholars. A consult-
ing relationship was created with the
head of Harvard's Center for Internation-
al. Studies, Robert Bowie. Durwood Lock-
ard, Kermit Roosevelt's deputy In the
Agency's Near East Division. resigned in
1957 to become assistant head of the Cen-
ter for Middle Eastern Studies where Pro-
fessor Safran is now in charge. Several of-
ficials and faculty members of the Har-
vard Business School founded and helped
to administer front organizations for the
CIA.
MIT's formal institutional link was
severed 20 years ago. after being exposed
In the anti-CIA best seller. "The Invisible
Government." Harvard's institutional
ties were curtailed soon afterward when
Ramparts. a muckraking magazine, re-
vealed that the CIA had funded and con-
trolled the National Student Association
for 15 years.
Nevertheless, the Agency has fought
hard since then to preserve ties to individ-
ual professors in positions of influence.
Its relationship with Safran is one exam-
A new link
with Tufts
Moreover, in the last decade, the
Charles River Connection has even ex-
panded, moving inland to include an-
other school administered with the coop-
eration of Harvard: the terrorism confer-
ence's sponsor, Tufts' Fletcher School.
The CIA's relationship to Fletcher, in
fact, represents the emergence of a new
institutional link, though one far less for-
Mal than that which did exist with MIT's
CENIS. This new link began soon after
Casey's predecessor, Stansfield Turner,
took office in 1977. Turner sought to re-
verse the decline In CIA-academic rela-
tions brought about by Watergate and
the flurry of CIA-related investigations
that followed. He met as many university
presidents as he could. He tried to per-
suade Derek Bok. Harvard's president. to
modify proposed restrictions on faculty
involvements with the CIA. When MIT be-
gan looking at similar restrictions, he in-
vited Jerome Wiesner, MiT's president, to
a briefing at his office In Langley, Va.
Both men turned him down.
He had more success with Tufts' Jean
Mayer. Although, according to the college
newspaper. Tufts turned down CIA offers
of more than $200,000 to conduct studies
on world hunger and the newly discov-
ered Mexican oil fields, Mayer and Turner
became personal friends.
Meanwhile, at Fletcher, the Scaife
Foundation, known for promoting the
CIA through a number of grants to uni-
versities and the media, sponsored a 1979
conference on intelligence. Two Fletcher
professors responsible for that confer-
ence, Uri Ra'anen and Robert Pfaltzgraff.
who were later involved in the terrorism
conference that brought Casey to Cam-
bridge, thereafter joined presidential can-
didate Ronald Reagan's advisory team on
foreign policy and intelligence.
After Reagan's 1980 election, they in-
sisted they did not want government
posts. but their Fletcher colleague. W.
Scott Thompson. became associate direc-
tor at the US Information Agency. Stan-
field Turner and. after his resignation.
Casey's former deputy director, Bobby
Ray Inman. joined the advisory board of
Fletcher's security studies program. The
CIA reportedly began recruiting as many
Fletcher graduates as the State Depart-
ment.
Richard Shultz, a consultant to var-
ious US governemnt agencies concerned
with national security afair, was hired
at Tufts to teach courses on the theory
and practice of intelligence; few universi-
ties have such courses. For much of Rea-
gan's first term, CIA's post of academic
coordinator was even held by a Fletcher
alumnus, Ralph E. Cook. During this
time. Tufts, unlike MIT and Harvard, de-
clined to formulate guidelines on faculty
ties to the CIA.
New concern
on campuses
Tufts' CIA ties have been a source of
controversy there. On Wednesday, picket-
ers prevented Agency recruiters from en-
tering the career placement building.
Last year. an information session by CIA
recruiter Stephen Conn was disrupted by
demonstrators who formed a human wall
between Conn Ind the audience. Several
Tufts deans were later persuaded enough
by the demonstrators' position that CIA
recruiting procedures violated university
regulations that they instituted a tempo-
rary ban on the recruiting of undergrad-
uates. After private protests from univer-
sity trustees and others, however. Mayer
rescinded the ban, insisting that the
deans had been without authority to initi-
ate It.
At Harvard last week, questions about
CIA sponsorship of Safran's Mideast con-
ference were called "a matter of serious
concern to me" by A. Michael Spence.
dean of the faculty of arts and sciences. In
an interview with the Harvard Crimson,
Safran disputed whether the matter was
actually a "serious concern." Harvard of-
ficials said they were Investigating
whether Safran had complied with rules
that require the reporting of outside
grants and the sharing of grant money
with the university. There were also ques-
tions.as to whether Safran had fully com-
plied with the Harvard guidelines on CIA
relationships In receiving $107,430 from
the CIA to help write his just-published
book, "Saudi Arabia, The Ceaseless (guest
for Security."
Are the concerns of Tufts' protesters
and of Harvard's administrators about
CIA relationships with their universities
warranted?
it is difficult, obviously, to know the
nature and full extent of the Charles Riv-
er Connection in its present form. Still.
some lessons can be learned by studying
the Charles River Connection in its earli-
er form.
The personal papers of Max Millikan,
CENIS' director during the 15 years of
CIA funding, have recently been opened
to the public. Those papers, together with
CIA documents released under the Free-
dom of Information Act and interviews
with people formerly associated with
CENTS. demonstrate some of the dangers
inherent in a university relationship to a
secret government agency.
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The Charles River Connection origin-
ally grew out of the Ivy League back-
grounds and common war and postwar
experience of its participants. As a result,
CENIS' staff had more than mere profes-
sional ties to high CIA officials. In many
cases, there were close friendships that
went back many years. The year before
he was appointed to head CENIS, for ex-
ample. Millikan took a sabbatical from
his MIT teaching duties to oversee the
CIA's Office of Economic Research. Here,
he met many of the Agency officials he
did not already know from the war or
from his student days at Yale. A former
MIT colleague and Yak friend. Richard
Bissell, had been MIF"s first choice to
head CENTS; later Bissell Joined, then
headed, CIA's Clandestine Services.
These relationships allowed hidden ar-
rangements that did not entirely conform
to the rules and understandings that
were supposed to gove CENIS' oper-
ations. One cardinal ruule at CENIS was
that there was to be no CIA involvement
In any of the center's many overseas pro-
grams. Working relationships with the
governments of, say, Italy or India, it was
feared, would be destroyed if it were
learned that CENIS projects abroad were
secretly financed or monitored by the US
government.
This rule was repeated on a number of
occasions to foreign governments, to the
MIT administration and among CENIS
staff members themselves. Yet, it was
bent and sometimes even broken. Max
Millikan, part of whose salary was com-
ing at the time directly from the CIA, sent
at least one account of a trip to India, and
probably more, to Langley. He and sever-
al other staff members who worked
abroad had paid consulting relationships
with the CIA.
In the case of CENIS' Africa program.
an artificial arrangement was set up in
which its "domestic" side was funded by
the CIA, its "foreign" side by the Carnegie
Foundation. A former CENIS staff mem-
ber confirmed In an interview that the
rule was broken on at least one other oc-
casion as well, although he declined to
say when or where.
Another rule required that CENIS'
sources of funds be identified. Even CIA
money was listed In MIT documents as
coming from "government contracts."
However, government money was chan-
neled to two CENIS staffers through a CIA
front, apparently without any MIT offi-
cial. except perhaps Millikan, knowing
better.
This front, the Society for the Investi-
gation of Human Econolgy, secretly fi-
nanced MKULTRA. the CIA's mind-con-
trol program. One CENIS recipient. Edgar
Schein, has admitted knowing the true
source of his funds. Butthe other, Antho-
ny Wiener, did not learn of it until MKUL-
TRA documents were declassified in
1977. One document stated that although
Wiener was unwitting, a security check
was to be run "with an eye to future po-
tential utilization of this individual."
Of all the rules governing CENTS ac-
tivities, the most important was that pro-
hibiting CENIS involvement in covert op-
erations. Yet, from its origins In Project
TROY, the center's research had an.
"operational" orientation.
In CENIS' first years. Millikan and
Walt Rostow, then an MIT history profes-
sor, were regularly solicited by the CIA
and the White House for their views on
covert psychological warfare programs
like Radio Free Europe. So seriously were
Millikan's views taken that, in 1954,
C. D. Jackson urged him to succeed Jack-
son as head of the Operations Coordinat-
ing Board, the White House group that
oversaw covert CIA operations. CENIS
was financed through the CIA's Clandes-
tine Services. Millikan saw Richard Bis-
sell and other covert operators on a regu-
lar basis.
The changing
relationship
Still, those with firsthand knowledge
of the CIA relationship have been sur-
prised to learn that Millikan and Bissell
at one point went so far as to discuss the
possible use of CENIS for covert oper-
ations. In April 1960. Millikan and others
were concerned about the future of CIA
funding after the next president took of-
fice.
Since CENIS did work not just for the
CIA, but for the entire intelligence com-
munity. there was concern that a new re-
gime at Langley might see this particular
Charles River connection as expendable.
It was apparently to reduce CENTS' ex-
pendability that Millikan sought to create
a closer connection
in an internal CENIS memo. Millikan's
assistant asked whether, at an upcoming
meeting with MIT officers. Millika;,
should "mention negotiations with Bis-
sell for cooperation with operations? A
delicate topic in view of [the MIT] admin-
istration's evident worries on this score."
In separate interviews, both Millikan's
assistant and Richard Bissell said they
had no memories of any such negotia-
tions.
The new Charles River Connection
does not grow out of common Ivy League
backgrounds and war experiences. But
the potential for bending the rules re-
mains, as well as the need for account-
ability.
The CIA has fought hard against legal
restrictions on university relationships.
Meanwhile, the courts have placed severe
limitations on the kinds of information
on those relationships the CIA must
make public under the Freedom of Infor-
mation Act.
Faced with these impediments to ac-
countability. students, faculty, adminis-
trators and alumni concerned over im-
proper secret ties to the government have
little recourse but to act on their own. At
stake could be the reputations of their
universities and the relationships of con-
fidence upon which academic freedom It-
self rests.
Jeff McConnell is coauthoring a book.
"CIA to America." to be published next
year.
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