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that drove many of the Americans involved, especially Steinem. “It’s a realization that, pretty often, the men who run Everything are just guys with gravy on their vests and not too much between the ears,” she wrote her aunt and uncle with youthful exuberance (and perhaps a hint of her later feminism), “and that you (one) can do something toward putting monkey wrenches in the totalitarian works and convincing the uncommitted that it’s smarter to stay that way than to trade Western colonialism for Communist imperialism. . . . I think it struck a lot of us the same way,” she continued. “I suppose that this was my small world equivalent of going off to join the Spanish Revolution.”84

It was the sense of an idealistic, dynamic, even noble cause that Steinem tried to articulate in 1967, when CIA funding of the Independent Research Service was revealed. Among the many individuals named in that year of revelations, Steinem was one of the most forthright in acknowledging her wittingness and explaining the reasons why she had become involved in a front operation. “I’m fine,” she told George Abrams, when he asked if she was prepared to deal with questions about the Independent Research Service. “I’ll take the heat on this.”85 By now a prominent journalist, she appeared on Walter Cronkite’s evening news program and gave interviews to several newspapers. “Far from being shocked by this involvement,” she told the New York Times, “I was happy to find some liberals in government in those days who were farsighted and cared enough to get Americans of all political views to the festival.” To the Washington Post, she presented this picture of the CIA: “In my experience the Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent, and honorable.”86

It is not hard to see why Steinem should have taken this view of the CIA: her brush with the Mighty Wurlitzer took place when the alliance between Cold War anticommunism and liberal idealism still appeared natural and right. By 1967, however, the Cold War consensus had broken down irretrievably, and her comments proved ill-judged. Indeed, Steinem would live to regret her candor about this issue more perhaps than any other incident in her long and controversial career. Defenders of the CIA, including several former intelligence officers writing their memoirs, invoked her remarks as evidence of the Agency’s liberalism and the basically consensual nature of Cold War front operations, in the process remind-ing their readers of Steinem’s role in the ISI.87 Even more distressing

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for Steinem personally was the resurrection of the episode within the women’s movement during the 1970s, when radical feminists who objected to her relatively moderate position in the sex war seized on it as evidence that she was a secret agent of the patriarchal power structure.

Steinem tried repeatedly to end discussion of the episode by painstakingly explaining the reasons for her involvement in the ISI, as she had in 1967, but all to no avail: the story simply would not die.88 Others implicated in the revelations who were less honest about their wittingness were to get off much more lightly.