the Board.” Both the NSA president and the vice-president obviously knew that Simons’s money was official in origin, but it is not clear whether they, at this stage, were aware of its precise source. Dentzer has repeatedly insisted that he did not become witting until later, and his claims appear to be borne out by a letter of March 27, 1952, in which, having described to Ingram a visit by a “man from Central Intelligence”
requesting copies of NSA reports, he felt obliged to explain that “CI
[
The success of the Edinburgh meeting in establishing a coordinating secretariat for the International Student Conference removed any lingering doubts in the CIA’s mind about subsidizing the NSA’s international program. Grants for particular field projects multiplied, with the Asia Foundation’s precursor, the Committee for Free Asia, joining Simons as a conduit of secret subventions. In February 1952, just after returning from an extended tour of Europe, Dentzer received a telephone call from Simons inviting him and Ingram to Washington “to touch moneybags” for the new coordinating secretariat, COSEC. “Ah, the bottomless pitcher,”
Dentzer mused, whimsically.38 By the summer, Simons had been placed in charge of a more formal funding mechanism, the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs (FYSA), which began channeling covert subsidies to the NSA’s international office on a regular basis. Meanwhile Dentzer, having completed his presidential term and now fully witting of the true source of Simons’s moneybags, was assigned to Leiden as an assistant secretary to COSEC, ostensibly supported by a floating fellowship from Princeton.39 Ingram, who served an unprecedented two terms as NSA International Vice-President, succeeded Dentzer in this role the following year. Having ensured the NSA’s financial future, the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs now became the International Student Conference/
COSEC’s principal source of funding as well. An internal CIA memorandum summed up the arrangement with frank simplicity. “The ISC is controlled through one of our agents in a key position, through two leaders of the NSA, and through a foundation financed by the CIA which enables us to control its finances.”40
The later 1950s were the heyday of the National Student Association. At its peak in 1960, over 400 U.S. institutions of higher education, among
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them Ivy League schools, big state universities, and liberal arts colleges, were affiliated with the organization, giving it a breadth of representation that later bodies, including the famous Students for a Democratic Society, never quite matched.41 The international program included annual foreign relations seminars for American students, scholarships for students from the “developing world” to visit the United States, overseas leadership training projects, and extensive travel by International Commission staff members and their representatives abroad. The costs of these activities were covered by generous subsidies from the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs, with other CIA front organizations and pass-through foundations occasionally granting smaller donations. In 1957–58, for example, according to the NSA’s financial report for the year (which quite likely did not record all the money that reached the organization), the FYSA provided $55,000 for general operating expenses and supplemental grants of $76,842; other donors in the same year included the Asia Foundation, American Friends of the Middle East, and the Catherwood Foundation.42 The International Student Conference thrived, too, so that by the middle of the decade, fifty-five national unions, more than half from the developing world, had signed up to COSEC, many attracted no doubt by the travel grants that, thanks to subsidies from the FYSA, the ISC was now able to offer.43 Nor was CIA funding of the young confined to students. Covert subsidies found their way via various conduits to a bewilder-ing assortment of groups, among them the United States Youth Council (the American member of the World Assembly of Youth), Pax Romana and the International Catholic Youth Federation, and even the Young Women’s Christian Association.44