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The revelation left Groves in an agonizing quandary. Described by friends as “warm and open,” he was instinctively repelled by the elements of secrecy and deception involved in the relationship between the CIA and the NSA, not least of which was the requirement that those students who had sworn the secrecy oath—or, to use the Agency’s own operational terminology, been made “witting”—conceal the truth about the NSA’s funding from those who were “unwitting.”2 An earnest believer in the principles of citizen action and voluntarism, Groves was also dismayed by the U.S. government’s apparent disregard for the NSA’s independence as a nongovernment organization. Finally, while no long-haired student radical—he habitually wore a dark suit with a vest and, if quizzed about his politics, would describe himself as a “liberal” or “reformer”—Groves was profoundly disturbed by what he perceived as terrible errors in recent American foreign policy, particularly the war in Vietnam. The student leader’s first instinct, therefore, was to try and “get the rascals out” by revealing all.3

As he pondered his situation, however, Groves began to imagine the dreadful consequences that might befall his beloved NSA if he were to go

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public. Its reputation as an international representative of the nation’s youth, already under attack from youth groups both to its left (such as the Students for a Democratic Society) and its right (the Young Americans for Freedom), would be damaged beyond repair; shadowy figures in Washington might extract revenge by revoking its officers’ draft deferments or canceling its tax-exempt status; individuals such as Roger Pulvers, an NSA exchange student studying in Warsaw, might find themselves in personal danger. And what of the possible risks to Groves himself? “Will they shoot me on a street corner when they find out that I know without having signed a security oath?” he wondered.4

In the end, Groves’s hand was forced by the news, casually dropped into conversation by former NSA president and prominent liberal activist Allard Lowenstein, that a muckraking California magazine, Ramparts, was about to run a story exposing the CIA link, based on files pilfered from the association’s headquarters by a disgruntled former officer. A hastily convened series of meetings between NSA leadership and CIA officials followed. Groves, who by now had been elected president, was outspoken in his condemnation of the clandestine contract between the two organizations. “My antagonism flustered some of the agents, who frantically accused me of undermining all the free world institutions that had been so painstakingly created over the last fifteen years,” he recalled later.5 Eventually, after consultation with the White House, the CIA gave permission for the NSA to draft a preemptive press statement admitting to and repu-diating the relationship. Despite grave personal misgivings, Groves agreed that, prior to its release, he would conceal the story from inquiring reporters and other officers of the organization who were still unwitting. He also secured Roger Pulvers’s recall from Poland, explaining to the bewildered and tearful student in a London hotel room that a CIA analysis had concluded it was dangerous for him to remain behind the Iron Curtain.

The story eventually broke in February 1967 when the New York Times simultaneously published an advertisement for the Ramparts exposé and a statement by the NSA. If the latter was intended to staunch the flow of revelations, it failed miserably. To the horror of Groves and count-less other Americans, the Times went on in the weeks that followed to print a series of reports revealing covert CIA sponsorship of an astounding variety of other U.S. citizen groups engaged in Cold War propaganda bat-

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tles with communist fronts. High-ranking officials in the American labor movement, it emerged, had worked clandestinely with the Agency to spread the principles of “free trade unionism” around the world. Anticommunist intellectuals, writers, and artists were the recipients of secret government largesse under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and its many national affiliates. University professors, journalists, aid workers, missionaries, civil rights activists, even a group of wealthy women known as the Committee of Correspondence, all had belonged to the CIA’s covert network of front operations.6