By then, however, the genie was out of the bottle. The
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O’Brien, delivering a lecture entitled “The Writer and the Power Structure” to an audience of New York University alumni, implied that the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s English-language organ,
Cord Meyer was horrified. “Something has got to be done to stop this,” he told an AFL-CIO official. “It’s doing a lot of damage.”60 Eventually, Victor gave into pressure from his brother Walter to pipe down. The issue would not go away, however. Victor was profoundly disenchanted with the drift of American foreign policy in the 1960s, and the ancient rivalry between the Reuthers of the CIO and the Lovestoneites of the AFL provided the potential for further confrontations and indiscretions.
In the end, though, it was not the CIA’s traditionally troublesome labor and intellectual front groups that caused the house of cards to collapse.
The coup de grâce came from a more unexpected quarter. Law student Phil Sherburne, described in the alumni magazine of his alma mater, the University of Oregon, as an ingenuous-looking twenty-four-year-old with “a lock of brown hair that forever spills over his forehead,” became witting of the NSA’s clandestine relationship with the CIA shortly before his election as the organization’s president in 1965, having served the previous year as an unwitting National Affairs Vice-President.61 At first Sherburne appeared to toe the line, agreeing to give a speech opposing a proposal for an East-West student conference and continuing to accept Agency subsidies, via the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs, on the NSA’s behalf. Simultaneously, however, he busied himself raising funds from other sources, an activity in which he had excelled while National Affairs Vice-President, and working quietly to assert ownership of the NSA’s overseas program, by, for example, appointing only unwitting students to international office. In March 1966, Sherburne revealed to his case officers what had been his secret intention all along: as of 1966–67, the NSA would no longer accept money or direction from the CIA. The spies, not surprisingly, were taken aback and tried a variety of measures to dissuade him, including withholding $70,000 of promised funds, a measure that forced the NSA president to sack two conscientious and unsus-
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pecting staff members.62 The unassuming but steely Sherburne refused to be daunted, retaliating by preventing the CIA from using the NSA as a conduit for subsidies to the International Student Conference in Leiden.63
“Some of the fights with the Agency were really hair-raising,” he later told his successor, Eugene Groves.64 By the end of his presidency, with the organization nearly self-sufficient financially and Groves equally determined to end the relationship, Sherburne felt confident that he had broken the CIA’s grip on the NSA, and that he had done so without the covert subsidies becoming public knowledge.
Sherburne had, however, made one mistake. Shortly before leaving office, he told an unwitting NSA fund-raiser, who had developed suspicions about the organization’s finances when he was instructed not to approach a CIA dummy foundation from which Sherburne would no longer accept subsidies, about the Agency link. Initially, the fund-raiser, a Pomona College graduate by the name of Michael Wood, agreed to remain silent, but by January 1967 his conscience had got the better of him. During a mid-afternoon meeting in the dining room of New York’s Algonquin Hotel that had been arranged by public relations executive Marc Stone (brother of radical journalist I. F. Stone), a “fidgety and run-down” Wood told Warren Hinckle all about the NSA’s covert funding: the case officers, conduits, and code-names. Although the