Young Soviets were chaperoned at all times and transported between events in buses with blacked-out windows; restaurant waiters were instructed to serve the Chinese delegation in silence. Austrians in Jackson’s CIA-funded covert network responded by arranging bus trips to the Hungarian border so that delegates could see for themselves the watchtowers and barbed-wire fences.75 Perhaps the greatest problem for the festival organizers was the atmosphere of Vienna itself. “The Soviets took a great risk in holding an obviously staged propaganda show in a charmingly free city,” wrote Samuel S. Walker, Jr., director of the Free Europe Press, to Jackson, “and grimness, as usual, has given way to charm, artificiality to naturalness, regimentation to the Austrian spirit of casual rebellion.”76
Meanwhile, Steinem and her ISI troops, who had taken up position in Vienna the week before the festivities commenced, launched a series of sorties against the communist foe. These began within the official U.S. delegation, with calls for democratic leadership elections. This pre-cipitated a split between communists and non-communists, reckoned by one of Jackson’s operatives to be “among the more effective anti-Festival occurrences.”77 Next came a fusillade of publicity intended to counteract the Moscow-produced festival newspaper and take advantage of an Austrian press boycott. Steinem presided over an International News Bureau, which became the most important source for western news coverage of the event and prompted a formal complaint from the Soviet ambassador to the Austrian government (a cause of immense gratification to ISI staff).
“Gloria is all you said she was, and then some,” Sam Walker reported to Jackson. “She’s operating on sixteen synchronized cylinders and has charmed the natives. . . . I think you will be pleased with this (i.e. friends) aspect of things all the way up and down the line.”78 There were also efforts to sow dissension within the ranks of the communist delegations.
Having sneaked into the Soviet encampment, Zbigniew Brzezinski (the son of a Polish diplomat) walked openly among its Russian residents deliberately bumping into them and saying in Russian, with a heavy Polish accent, “Out of my way, Russian pig!” in a deliberate attempt to stir ill
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feeling between the Russian and Polish contingents. Every day there were hotel-room meetings to discuss strategy and plan the next day’s tactics. “I remember Gloria lying in bed in a sort of frilly robe while the rest of us sat around the bed strategizing,” said Brzezinski later. “I thought it was kind of an amusing and slightly eccentric scene.”79
The communists responded by tailing ISI staff, strong-arming anyone they found trying to enter delegates’ quarters without proper documenta-tion, and organizing events intended to divert American students from attending meetings of the U.S. delegation, such as swimming parties in the Danube. The Americans were not deterred so easily, however. On the final day of the festival, Brzezinski, one of his Harvard students, and Walter Pincus, later of the
To be sure, there was a strong element of youthful high jinks about all this. Pincus later summed up his memories of the festival as like “a college weekend with Russians.”81 However, it would be a mistake to underestimate the impact of the ISI’s activities. Combined with “Operation Dynamic Boycott,” as Jackson called the antifestival Austrian media campaign he had orchestrated, they undoubtedly helped persuade the communists to think twice before venturing beyond the Iron Curtain again.82 The next youth festival was held in the Finnish capital of Helsinki in 1962 and, as before, Steinem and the ISI (or Independent Research Service, as it had been renamed in late 1959) were on hand to foil the plot. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy took a personal interest this time, requiring a detailed review of the group’s preparations for the event. After the festival, he was so pleased with the results that he invited the student activists to his office, along with Cord Meyer of the CIA, to congratulate them in person.83
It would also be unfair to ignore the powerful sense of liberal idealism
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