Like the majority of organizations exposed as CIA fronts in 1967, AMSAC denied all knowledge of secret government funding, posing as a victim of successful official deception. At first sight, this claim appears to be borne out by the organization’s records and, for that matter, the personal papers of many of the prominent individuals involved, all of which are conspicuously free of any of the coded references to covert dealings usually detectable in such documents. There is, however, one striking exception to this rule, a memorandum entitled “Disclosures in the
“None of this was documented” indicates that the organization was un-usually conscientious about observing front group security protocols. In short, far from being dupes of the CIA, AMSAC’s African Americans were among the Agency’s most effective secret agents.
Given that members of AMSAC’s Executive Council were in on the secret, it does not come as a surprise to learn that the organization’s officers were fully witting too—indeed, had sworn secrecy oaths in the same manner as had the NSA’s international staff. Interviewed many years
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later, Yvonne Walker recalled how, shortly after she was appointed Managing Director, friends began calling to find out what she was involved in
“because [she] was being checked on by the FBI.” “I didn’t know what was going on either, and then finally one day two members of the CIA showed up for an appointment with Dr. Davis. I didn’t know who they were at the time, but they . . . called me into the office and explained to me what was going down, and that they would require me to take an oath.”
Subsequently, Walker and other officers of the organization would meet with their CIA case officers in hotel rooms, usually in New York but, on at least one occasion, in Washington, D.C., as well. “They [the CIA officers]
were kept fully informed . . . by Dr. Davis on everything that was going on,” Walker remembered, “and I’m sure that they helped to steer some of the plans.”80 These briefings probably also involved a certain amount of foreign intelligence gathering on the part of the Agency. Although Davis later advised against “such an organization being used for intelligence purposes,” the reports on their travels overseas submitted by such AMSAC
officers as Ted Harris to the New York office give the strong impression of having been written with a readership in Washington or Langley also in mind.81 Harris’s move from New York to the Congo in 1961 is suggestive of his importance to CIA operations in Africa: the murder of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in January of that year had cleared the way for the creation of a U.S.-friendly government in the central African republic, and the purpose of Harris’s new institute in Leopoldville was to train local politicians in western administrative techniques (and, probably, channel CIA subsidies to them).
When asked which elements of the AMSAC program had been shaped by the CIA, Walker became a little vague, referring to “the festival, the cultural exchange programs, and what have you.”82 In her 1967 memo, Hill was more specific, citing three examples of “the harm done to AMSAC and its goals by having decision-making occur beyond the control of the Executive Board”: the opening of the Lagos office, an initiative that seemed to her “designed to suit some unexplained and not unanimously approved ends”; the organization’s “inability to develop the fullest rapprochement with SAC,” a consequence of “the long history of rumor that associated our financing with the CIA or some other non-obvious source”; and, finally, “the unpredictability or almost capricious nature” of the Agency’s funding, which made impossible “intelligent long-range pro-
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gram planning.” In other words, Hill’s quarrel was not with the ethical propriety of secret subsidies—“I felt that, as AMSAC was a weak and new organization, it perhaps could, or should, take help from any source, provided we were left free to pursue our own goals”—rather it was the group’s resulting lack of control over its own affairs.83