The defense of these operations given after 1967 by the CIA officers who dispensed the patronage and the youth leaders who wittingly accepted it consists of two main claims. The first is that U.S. government funding for a liberal organization such as the NSA had to be kept secret because of McCarthyism. “Back in the early 1950s, when the cold war was really hot,” wrote Tom Braden in 1967, “the idea that Congress would have approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society’s approving Medicare.”45 There is a great deal of truth in this argument. As noted earlier, McCarthyism threatened other front operations involving ex-leftists and even damaged the careers of liberals within the CIA. The NSA too was the victim of red-baiting during the early 1950s, by a right-wing group called Students for America, who saw in the Associ-
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ation’s stand against racial segregation evidence of communist subversion.46 Nonetheless, the desire of enlightened liberals to circumvent conservative yahoos was only one, and probably not the most compelling, of the factors requiring secrecy. Equally if not more important was the perceived need to preserve for these organizations the appearance of private citizens acting voluntarily in the defense of world freedom—as enjoined by George Kennan in 1948—and to avoid stimulating the sort of foreign suspicion that an overtly U.S. government-sponsored initiative was likely to provoke. As a confidential White House report compiled immediately after the 1967 revelations ruefully observed, “We cannot expect to duplicate with overt funding the flexibility, responsiveness, and directly targeted results obtained by [the] CIA.”47
The other main plank in the defense case—that the relationship between the CIA and the NSA was an entirely consensual one based on shared values and common objectives48—likewise has some substance to it, but just as many holes. To begin with, the consensus, if indeed such consensus existed, was to a great extent artificially manufactured by the CIA, beginning with the selection of the NSA’s officers. Each year promising graduates would be invited to attend the student foreign relations seminars, held in the summer at Bryn Mawr. There they would be given a history of the NSA, published by the University of Pennsylvania’s Foreign Policy Research Institute (another Agency beneficiary), and scrutinized by undercover CIA operatives, usually themselves former NSA staffers.49
One ex–National President turned intelligence officer, Robert Kiley, later remembered, “The international student relations seminar, particularly during the 1950s–early ’60s, was a fantastic mechanism, not just for attracting people but for really giving them a deep immersion and exposure to an awful lot of people.”50 If the individuals groomed in this fashion lacked a current educational affiliation—a necessary qualification for NSA office—credentials might be secured through some obliging institution, such as the Harvard University Graduate Student Council or Roosevelt University in Chicago.51
The next stage—democratic elections at the NSA’s annual congress—
was potentially the most difficult to manage. However, the support, both public and behind the scenes, of witting incumbent officers, combined with the political inexperience of the student delegates, most of whom were attending for the first time, usually ensured the victory of the favored
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candidates. In 1961, for example, the young civil rights activist Tom Hayden tried to win the support of the Congress for his candidacy as National Affairs Vice-President, but withdrew when he realized that the NSA “old guard” regarded him as “too militant” (earlier his application for a place at the international summer school had been rejected “on the strange grounds that I already was sufficiently knowledgeable about foreign policy”). On the final night of the meeting, Hayden obtained from the president’s office a yellow notepad containing a chart of the political forces at work at the Congress: on one side was a box featuring the names Hayden and Haber (Al Haber was a University of Michigan undergradu-ate who the previous year had launched Students for a Democratic Society); on the other was the conservative youth organization Young Americans for Freedom (also only just founded, in 1960); and, in the middle, with lines leading to it from the boxes, was a circle containing the words
“Control Group.” “It was a diagram for preventing the election of a ‘militant’ like myself,” Hayden surmised, “drawn by someone skilled in manipulating student movements abroad, now bringing his or her talents home.”
Having despaired of transforming the NSA into a vehicle for his growing political radicalism, Hayden turned instead, much to the delight of his friend Haber, to the fledgling SDS.52