Kissinger coyly wrote his mentor Elliott at the conclusion of the pilot event in 1951. “I, for one, have no illusions on this score.”11 Most who took part in the Harvard International Summer School, however, remembered Kissinger rather than Elliott.
Inevitably the question arises: was the future Nobel Peace Prize winner
“witting” about the CIA’s bankrolling of the International Summer School?
In 1967, when the
This is a claim repeated by his biographers, one of whom describes him flying into a rage on learning that the American Friends of the Middle East was a front.12 However, it is difficult to reconcile this display of unwittingness with the letters to H. Gates Lloyd, in which Kissinger carefully item-ized the expenses of the Summer School. Indeed, other documents among William Elliott’s papers suggest that the then graduate student might even have acted as a contract consultant for the OPC: Elliott’s letter to Lloyd of November 15, 1950, urging progress with the Summer School proposal, enclosed “papers for Mr. Kissinger,” which the professor had apparently
“discussed” with Cleveland Cram, another senior intelligence officer.13
Whether Kissinger’s status with the CIA was ever “regularized” remains unclear. In July 1951, Elliott felt compelled to point out to Frank Wisner that his student’s name had been “about a year in the mill,” despite the necessary security clearance having been granted.14 In any case, it does seem improbable that someone of Kissinger’s political acumen could have
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dealt as extensively as he did with the CIA without having some inkling of just whom he was doing business with.
More important than the question of Henry Kissinger’s wittingness is the broader pattern of CIA activity on Cold War American university campuses to which the Summer School episode points. Harvard was not unique in this respect. Yale, its campus adorned by a statue of alumnus and Revolutionary-era spy Nathan Hale (a replica of which stands in front of the CIA’s Langley headquarters), was the single most fertile recruiting ground for the Agency in its first years, yielding among others Cord Meyer and two of the brightest stars of the “Golden Age” of covert operations, Richard Bissell and Tracy Barnes. The domination of American counterintelligence by Yalies James Angleton and Norman Holmes Pearson (who, after serving in the OSS, helped set up his alma mater’s American Studies program) has already been noted. CIA research and analysis was presided over for much of the Agency’s early existence by Sherman Kent, a Yale history professor and author of a widely read text,
Countless other less well-known institutions contributed to the secret Cold War effort: the
The CIA’s backing of Kissinger’s enterprise also points to the mobilization of yet another important citizen group in the superpower struggle for hearts and minds: young people and students. Long before the start of the Cold War, communist propagandists had recognized the importance of winning the loyalty of student leaders—the world leaders of tomorrow—
and the peculiar susceptibility of young people to appeals cast in the idealistic language of peace and progress. There was even a separate Young Communist International (KIM) created by Willi Münzenberg for this
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