That said, it is partly the advantage of hindsight that makes this alliance now appear so fragile. At the end of the 1950s, on the eve of the election of John F. Kennedy, the prospect of combining patriotic service in the war against communism with the uplifting of the poor and oppressed, both at home and abroad, still seemed positively enchanting to many young Americans. Hence the undeniable dynamism of a major CIA-financed student enterprise launched in 1959 with the aim of rescuing Third World youth from the clutches of communist propagandists: the Independent Service for Information on the Vienna Youth Festival (ISI).
It was the fall of 1958 and, like many educated young women of her generation, Gloria Steinem was having difficulty finding a rewarding job. Dazzlingly bright and talented, just returned from a year-and-a-half-long scholarship trip to India, where she had befriended Indira Gandhi and the widow of revolutionary humanist M. N. Roy, the twenty-four-year-old Smith graduate was reduced to sleeping on the floors of friends’ apart-ments as she hunted for work in New York. Then came a call from Clive S. Gray, a young man she had met in Delhi, where he was ostensibly working on a doctoral dissertation about the Indian higher education system.
Some former officers of the NSA had just created an organization to encourage attendance by young, non-communist Americans at a youth festival being held the following summer by the communists in Vienna. Was she interested in running it?
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The suggestion immediately appealed to Steinem, not just because it meant paid work but because it also offered an outlet for the political idealism awakened in her by her Indian experiences, and soon after the call from Gray she met in New York with another former NSA president turned CIA officer, Harry Lunn (who, like most other young men of her acquaintance, promptly fell in love with her). Next she traveled to Cambridge, there to be interviewed by two former NSA Vice-Presidents for International Affairs, Len Bebchick and Paul E. Sigmund, Jr., and Boston lawyer George Abrams. By January 1959, she had taken up the post of Director of the Independent Service for Information, with offices in Harvard Yard and a salary of $100 a week, plus $5 per diem “because Cambridge rents were so expensive” (a generous allowance fixed by the infatuated Lunn).63
The ISI was a CIA operation from beginning to end. Spectacularly staged festivals celebrating the themes of international peace and friendship were a crucial element in the communist campaign to capture young hearts and minds: witness the success of the 1951 Berlin rally, which had helped concentrate CIA minds on student affairs. The fact that the Vienna World Festival of Youth and Students was being planned personally by the new head of the KGB, former student leader Alexander Sheljepin, was some measure of the importance it was accorded in the Kremlin.64
The CIA had attempted to disrupt an earlier festival, held in Moscow in 1957, by providing funding to the NSA delegation, briefing its members before they departed, and encouraging the use of crude wrecking tactics like stink bombs and fake invitations to nonexistent official receptions. The 1959 rally in Vienna was the first to be held outside the communist bloc, and this greatly increased the scope for such activities. The NSA, however, was officially boycotting Vienna—hence the need for other measures to ensure attendance by anticommunist American students. Lunn, Sigmund, and Bebchick were all working directly for the CIA when they organized the ISI. So too was Gray, whose real purpose in India was talent-spotting potential agents in the student movement. As for Steinem herself, she became witting when she began asking questions about the ISI’s funding, and the undercover CIA officers explained that the Boston grandees and foundations apparently subsidizing the venture were in fact pass-throughs for secret official funds.
With staff, accommodation, and funding in place, the ISI now set about preparing the festival counteroffensive. A booklet-exposé entitled
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“The Background of the Vienna Youth Festival” was sent to a mailing list of 6,000. Other pamphlets and fact sheets on subjects such as “negro segregation” were issued to young Americans traveling to Vienna to help them prepare for encounters with possibly hostile Third World students.65
In the weeks immediately before the start of the festival, the ISI even staged “Meet the Critic” role-playing workshops in New York, with Steinem and Bebchick, dressed as “Mohini, an Indian girl, and Kofi, a Ghanaian,”
peppering departing students with awkward questions about U.S. foreign policy.66 “We wanted to show that we were for self-determination and not for colonialism or imperialism,” explained one ISI volunteer worker,