The supposed consensus also contained elements of deception and co-ercion. When the CIA judged it necessary to have an unwitting officer made aware of the true source of the organization’s funds, a meeting would be arranged between the individual concerned, a witting colleague, and a former NSA officer who had gone on to join the Agency. At a prear-ranged signal, the witting staffer would leave the room. The CIA operative (still identified only as ex-NSA) would explain that the unwitting officer had to swear a secrecy oath before being apprised of some vital secrets, and, after getting the officer to sign a formal pledge, the operative would then reveal the Agency’s hand in the Association’s affairs. “The signing of a secrecy agreement with one’s own government seemed a reasonable price to pay for timely assistance in a common cause,” reckoned one senior CIA official. Indeed, many NSA officers initiated in this manner do not appear to have nursed any sense of grievance about their treatment; several subsequently participated in the same ceremony as intelligence officers.53 Others, however, especially later in the organization’s history, did object, claiming that the secrecy agreements, which imposed a
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twenty-year prison sentence on violators, were tantamount to entrap-ment. “People were duped into this relationship with the CIA,” alleged a head of the NSA’s National Supervisory Policy Board, “a relationship from which there was no out.”54
Part of the burden of being witting was keeping secrets from unwitting fellow officers. Office memoranda were produced in different versions—
“Confidential,” “Top Secret,” and “Top Secret, Top Secret”—according to the security clearance of their recipient.55 Financial statements had to be vetted so as not to draw attention to the NSA’s overwhelming dependence on grants from the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs.56
Most demanding of all was “the everyday dishonesty, the need to clam up when in the presence of ‘non-witty’ [
Although the separation was not hard and fast, the division between witting and unwitting tended to mirror the split between the NSA’s domestic and international programs. The former was relatively democratic and spontaneous and, as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, increasingly liberal, with congresses in the early 1960s voting to express their condemnation of the McCarthyite House Un-American Activities Committee and support for the antisegregationist Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The NSA’s international officers, in contrast, while sometimes taking positions on such questions as nuclear testing that were to the left of majority opinion (presumably in order to create the impression in foreign eyes of healthy dissent from U.S. government policy),61 gradually took on the appearance of an aging hereditary elite, with the same ex-
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officers popping up at congresses year after year, unintentionally confirming the ironic adage that hung in NSA headquarters, “The student leader of today is the student leader of tomorrow.”62 The sense of there being a divide between the two programs of the NSA was exacerbated by the fact that until 1960 they were located in different places, the national offices in Philadelphia (where they had moved, to rent-free accommodation, in 1952), the International Commission in Cambridge (not coincidentally, near the headquarters of the Harvard International Affairs Committee). Perhaps even more than the age difference between the organization’s national and international officers, this awkward fact of geog-raphy symbolized the provisional nature of the alliance between domestic reformism and Cold War anticommunism that underpinned the NSA—
and much else of the CIA’s Mighty Wurlitzer besides.