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According to Sakwa, Kennedy would complain to his aides after visits from Meyer, “Why does CIA send that shit to see me?”)46 Shortly after the delivery of the memo to Schlesinger, Sakwa was effectively hounded out of the Agency, and his attempt to find other government employment at the State Department was blocked by Meyer. The whistle-blower was still seeking reinstatement and compensation for unfair dismissal in 1979.47

Given that the CIA’s own covert action divisions were no longer water-tight, it was hardly surprising that the Agency’s front organizations were also beginning to spring leaks. Rumors about secret official subsidies had circulated in émigré, intellectual, and labor circles ever since the early 1950s. “It was meant to be a cover, but actually it was transparent,”

one intelligence officer admitted of the Farfield Foundation, the Agency’s main conduit to the cultural world. “We all laughed about it, and called it the ‘Far-fetched Foundation.’”48 Extra security measures were adopted, including the use of genuine philanthropies, such as the J. M. Kaplan Foundation of New York and the Hobby Foundation of Houston, Texas, to piggyback covert subsidies between the CIA’s dummy donors and front organizations. (“We have for a period of several years cooperated with [the CIA] on several projects,” William P. Hobby, a trustee of the Hobby Foundation and editor of the Houston Post, later told the New York Times. “We are proud . . . to have been of service to the Federal Government.”)49

There was even talk between Richard Helms and Frank Wisner “of phas-ing out CIA support . . . in favor of . . . open funding from private organizations and perhaps some semi-official government sources,” a course of action also strongly recommended in 1960 by the Sprague Committee (another of President Eisenhower’s several reviews of overseas information programs).50 However, the secret funding continued, probably as a result of bureaucratic territoriality and inertia; indeed, judging by the example of the American Newspaper Guild, the CIA appears, if anything, to have expanded into new fields of front operation during the early 1960s.

(“So much for the adage against fixing things that aren’t yet ‘broke,’”

Helms later reflected wryly.)51 The loose talk carried on as well. To cite just one example, the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME), an organization created in 1951 to facilitate U.S. contacts with pro-western Arabs, was the target of repeated allegations by American Zionists that it

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was secretly funded by the U.S. government. The charge later turned out to be accurate: AFME’s main source of funding was the Dearborn Foundation, the same pass-through philanthropy that supported the Committee of Correspondence.52

In April 1966, when Ramparts published its exposé of the CIA’s hand in the Vietnam Project at Michigan State University (MSU), the Agency’s covert network truly began to unravel. Hinckle and Scheer had earlier provided glimpses of the Mighty Wurlitzer at work in their coverage of the war in Indochina, including Ramparts pieces on Tom Dooley and the Vietnam Lobby.53 The Michigan story was, however, the magazine’s first thoroughgoing investigation of an Agency front operation, based, like the others that followed, on firsthand testimony from a disillusioned “witting asset”—in this instance, former project director Stanley K. Sheinbaum.54

The article caused consternation at an apparently unprepared CIA headquarters in Langley, where the new DCI, William F. Raborn, Jr., urgently instructed Security Director Howard J. Osborn to provide him with a “run down” on Ramparts on a “high priority basis.”55 As Osborn’s deputies scrambled to assemble information about the magazine and its staff, another internal task force set about investigating, in the words of Richard Helms, “all of our relationships with academic institutions and academi-cians,” with the aim, presumably, of plugging possible future leaks of the sort that had just happened at MSU.56 After Raborn had been briefed, Osborn’s team turned its attention to digging up material on Ramparts “of a derogatory nature,” Raborn recalled, concentrating in particular on the magazine’s sources of funding. They hoped to find evidence showing Hinckle and his colleagues to be “a subversive unit.”57 The goal clearly was to find a legal way of shutting down the publication, thereby preventing further revelations about the CIA’s front operations.