SPARING THE HOME FRONT FROM CIA MANIPULATIONS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000402940004-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 11, 2012
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: April 2, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/11: CIA-RDP90-00965R000402940004-2
lSt_.. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
2 April 1986
Sparing the home front from CIA manipulations
By Pat M. Holt
THERE is commotion again in academia - this
time at Harvard - about the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA). The question is how far a
university should allow its faculty to go in doing
research or other work for the intelligence community.
Harvard should not be discouraged from periodically
reexamining its purity, but the problem is broader and
deeper. It is how to focus the CIA's attention abroad and
keep it out of the United States.
When the CIA was created in 1947, Congress thought
it disposed of that problem by flatly prohibiting the
agency from engaging in any domestic activities. In
retrospect, that seems like a burst of naivete. We have
since learned things are not that simple. Even with good
faith on all sides, there are many gray areas - and
r,iany shades of gray.
There are many reasons for keeping the CIA out of
our domestic affairs, but the one that concerns us here is
that it should not be allowed to manipulate, or otherwise
influence, public opinion and the political process.
Congress had the same fear when it created the
United States Information Agency (USIA). That agency
is also prohibited from doing in the US what it does
abroad. Not many presidents would be able to resist the
temptation to turn the USIA or CIA loose in campaigns to
build domestic political support for presidential policies.
In one of the Harvard instances, the CIA paid a pro-
fessor $107,430 to write a book on Saudi Arabia. There
were two conditions. The payment was not to be
revealed (except presumably to the Internal Revenue
Service), and the CIA got to clear the book in advance.
One wonders how many books on Saudi Arabia have
earned $ 100,000 for their authors. This one may have
set a record.
Whether the professor should have done it is a matter
for him and Harvard. What is important from the point
of view of public policy is that clearly the CIA should not
have done it. The book has been published by the presti-
gious Harvard University Press. It will be consulted by
scholars and others, none of whom would have known
(except for a fortuitous leak) that it was secretly paid for
and approved by the CIA. No possible legitimate
intelligence objective was thereby served.
The CIA might well argue that secrecy was indicated
to avoid identifying the agency with the author's point
of view, especially if he were critical of the Saudi govern-
ment or its officials. This begs the question. This is some-
thing the CIA should not have done in any event. There
are other agencies of the government (the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Department of
Education) properly in the business of subsidizing
scholarship. It is a lame excuse to plead that the CIA has
a great deal of money and the other agencies do not.
The CIA has a bad, and in many respects undeserved,
reputation in academia. As its affair with Harvard
demonstrates, it brings many of its troubles on itself. It
has too many unavoidable problems to create unneces-
sary ones.
These difficulties are by no means confined to
academia - or to the CIA, for that matter.
A number of years ago, a CIA official wrote an article
on Vietnam for Foreign Affairs magazine. It was
published under his real name, but he was not identified
as working for the CIA. Did it matter whether he wrote it
at home or at the office?
At one time or another, the CIA has subsidized
various publications abroad. Sometimes articles in these
foreign publications are innocently quoted in American
publications as representing significant foreign opinion.
All they represent is the opinion the CIA wants for-
eigners to hold.
When Salvador Allende's socialist regime in Chile was
giving the Nixon administration sleepless nights, the CIA
planted editorials and columns in newspapers through-
out Latin America and elsewhere viewing Allende with
frantic alarm. The cumulative effect was to make other
Latin American opinion seem more anti-Allende than in
fact it was.
One wonders if something similar is now going on
with respect to Nicaragua and the "contras." People in
Congress have charged that contra leaders have been
supported, and even coached, in lobbying.
According to the widely respected magazine Aviation
Week & Space Technology, the Defense Department is
deliberately publicizing false information about certain
weapons programs in an attempt to mislead the Soviet
Union.
If the report is true, then the department is also mis-
leading Americans, including those who, as members of
Congress, appropriate money to pay for the weapons.
There is a law against this. It is said there are guidelines
whereby the truth goes to those who need to know. But
who needs to know is determined by the Defense
Department, and in any case the record does not inspire
confidence in the department's candor.
Way back in the Kennedy administration, an assistant
secretary of defense for public affairs (the official whose
job ironically is to dispense public information) asserted
the government's right to lie. Not many people are that
forthright about it, but there are plenty who act as if
they think it is all right to deceive. For those on the re-
ceiving end, there is not much difference.
Pat M. Holt, former chi ef of sta,Q''of the Senate For-
eign Relations Committee, writes on foreign affairs
from Washington.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/11: CIA-RDP90-00965R000402940004-2