national congress supported Eisenberg against Lowenstein on this question—the momentum was now behind the splitters. A second meeting of the International Student Conference (ISC), held in a chilly Edinburgh in January 1952, not only endorsed NSA’s ownership of such practical programs as the Student Mutual Assistance Program, it also agreed on the creation of a permanent Coordinating Secretariat (COSEC), to be based in the Dutch town of Leiden. The IUS at last had a serious contender for leadership of the world’s students. Lowenstein’s vision—and the secret wishes of the CIA—had been realized.
At the same time that these events were unfolding, the Agency was busy extending its control of American student affairs. The Cultural Affairs Officer in Sweden, Robert Donhauser, after observing the American delegation to the Stockholm meeting, had concluded “that the present leaders of the NSA are [not] of sufficient caliber to carry through their part of the program” and recommended that more “outstanding graduate students be found to run NSA’s international program.” This was precisely what happened. In August 1951, Avrea Ingram, a twenty-four-year old identified only as a Harvard graduate student (he had joined the Harvard International Affairs Committee just a few months earlier), appeared from nowhere to win the election for International Affairs Vice-President. It was, the outgoing president, Al Lowenstein, told a friend later, the “most curious” election he had ever seen.32 (The fact that Ingram ran on a plat-form of continued cooperation with the IUS, defeating a hard-line anticommunist candidate backed by Lowenstein, suggests something of the CIA’s subtlety in its handling of potentially useful private organizations.) The same congress also witnessed the election of William Dentzer, a graduate of Muskingum College in Ohio, as National President. Dentzer shared his predecessor’s hostility toward the IUS but was less confronta-tional in the way he handled the issue.
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With the NSA’s leadership now in safer hands, the OPC reconsidered the question of the organization’s long-term funding. Covert grants for specific field projects in Latin America and Southeast Asia had increased during the summer of 1951. The NSA’s overall financial position, however, was perilously weak. In 1950–51, it had debts amounting to $25,000; its offices in Madison were in a condemned schoolhouse; and its staff was so poorly paid that Al Lowenstein later recalled one vice-president working nights at a pizza parlor to make ends meet.33 Meanwhile, the communists had scored another propaganda victory with the successful staging in August of a World Youth and Student Festival in Berlin.34 Late in September, the subject of the NSA came up in a conversation between a group of University of North Carolina students and the university’s president, Gordon Gray, who had just become head of the new government psy-war coordinating unit, the Psychological Strategy Board.35 Alerted to Gray’s interest in the National Student Association, Ingram and Dentzer went to Washington the following month and pleaded with John Sherman, the PSB’s Assistant Director of Policy Coordination, for funding. “After they left,” Sherman told a board staff meeting, “it was possible to get in touch with a department of the Government and as a result I have just been advised that a private ‘angel’ has appeared on the doorstep of the National Student Association and has provided the necessary funds.”36
The “angel” was John Simons, a founding officer of the NSA who had joined the CIA and now reappeared at the Association’s offices claiming to be the intermediary for a private donor. In early November 1951, Ingram provided Simons with a prospectus for the Student Mutual Assistance Program and the forthcoming Edinburgh conference, both of which projects, so he reported to Dentzer, “had fascinated our angel.” The following month, after meeting Simons in Cambridge, Ingram was further able to inform the NSA president “that there is a better than good chance that his sources will provide us money for the trip to Edinburgh,” but that the prospects of “an open ended agreement” with “Santa Claus” to fund
“the Secretariat which is to be set up (if we have our way)” were less favorable. Both officers consequently continued to petition such government agencies as the State Department and the Psychological Strategy Board for additional funding, but they met with little success. Indeed, in the case of the latter, the response “was downright curt,” Ingram told Dentzer. “I was at a loss to understand the obvious change of attitude on the part of
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