People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (forerunner of KGB)
NSA
United States National Student Association
NSC
National Security Council
NTS
Narodno-Trudovoy Soyuz
NYU
New York University
OCB
Operations Coordinating Board
ONI
Office of Naval Intelligence
OPC
Office of Policy Coordination
OSO
Office of Special Operations
OSS
Office of Strategic Services
PPS
Policy Planning Staff
PSB
Psychological Strategy Board
PSI
Public Service International
RFE
Radio Free Europe
RL
Radio Liberation (after 1964, Radio Liberty) SAC
Société Africaine de Culture
SAK
Central Organization of Finnish Trade Unions SDS
Students for a Democratic Society
SLU
St. Louis University
SMAP
Student Mutual Assistance Program
SMM
Saigon Military Mission
SO
Special Operations
SOBSI
All-Indonesian Central Labor Organization
SWP
Socialist Workers Party
UAW
United Automobile Workers
UNC
University of North Carolina
USIA
United States Information Agency
WAY
World Assembly of Youth
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A B B R E V I AT I O N S
WFDY
World Federation of Democratic Youth
WFTU
World Federation of Trade Unions
WIDF
Women’s International Democratic Federation YAF
Young Americans for Freedom
YPSL
Young People’s Socialist League
The Mighty Wurlitzer
Introduction
W. Eugene Groves was, all who knew him agreed, a young man of tremendous promise. Class valedictorian at his Indiana high school, he continued to shine as a member of the track team at the University of Chicago, where he studied physics and served as president of the student association. After graduating in 1965, he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford and then, a year later, returned home to run for the presidency of the United States National Student Association (NSA), a post that had served several previous holders as a stepping-stone to high public office.
By the age of twenty-three, the student politician had already come a long way from his hometown of Columbia City (population 5,500), where his father worked as a carpenter and his mother presided over the local Cancer Society.1
It was just as he was preparing to launch his NSA presidential campaign that Groves learned a secret about the organization that would change his life forever. Despite its appearance as a free and voluntary center for American student groups, the association was, its current president, Philip Sherburne, informed him, secretly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. This arrangement, Groves learned, dated back to the first years of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union had launched a concerted effort to win the ideological allegiance of young people in western Europe by appealing to such idealistic causes as world peace and progress. Rather than making this appeal directly, communist propagandists did so covertly, through so-called “front” organizations—groups of private citizens
2
I N T R O D U C T I O N
outwardly serving some independent purpose who were in fact financed and controlled by Moscow.
Confronted by this challenge, senior U.S. government officials decided to respond in kind. The CIA, vested with broad, unspecified powers of covert operation by its legislative charter, the National Security Act of 1947, began making secret subsidies to the National Student Association (founded, incidentally, in the same year), first through wealthy individuals posing as private donors, then, more systematically, via fake charitable foundations created specially to act as funding “pass-throughs.” Students in the NSA’s international affairs division, who had been “groomed”
by undercover intelligence officers attending NSA summer seminars and who were sworn to official secrecy, then helped channel the money abroad, where friendly foreign student organizations spent it on various activities intended to combat the influence of communist fronts. By the time that Eugene Groves was let in on the secret in 1966, the NSA’s international program had expanded beyond western Europe to include new areas of Cold War strategic significance, among them South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.