Substantial grants earmarked for specific activities, such as the workshops, also arrived via other CIA conduits, including the Asia Foundation, the J.
Frederick Brown Foundation, the Florence Foundation, the Hobby Foundation, and the Pappas Charitable Fund.37
Who on the Committee knew what was going on? Dorothy Bauman and Rose Parsons were, of course, in on the secret. So too were successive Executive Directors Anne Hester, Alison Raymond, and Anne Crolius (indeed, it seems likely that Hester, at least, was placed directly on the Committee by the CIA: she took up her post in 1953, just after the first, anonymous grant of $25,000 was made, having worked previously for another front group, the Committee for Free Asia).38 The circle of early initiates also included two of the Committee’s most eminent members: Anna Lord Strauss, former president of the League of Women Voters, UN delegate, and great-granddaughter of famous abolitionist and woman suffrage leader Lucretia Mott; and Constance Anderson, Vassar graduate, former president of the Young Women’s Christian Association, and senior officer of numerous other women’s voluntary organizations (all of which roles she
W O M E N
159
combined with being “wife of a pediatrician, mother of two, and twice a grandmother,” so noted a Committee publicity pamphlet).39 Later, the group of the witting expanded to include Jean Picker and another former UN correspondent, Susan McKeever, brought in as “protégés” of, respectively, Strauss and Anderson.40
But not everyone knew. Early on, Bauman had agreed with Cord Meyer that the Committee’s relationship with the CIA should be revealed only on a “need-to-know” basis. As intelligence officer Spencer Arnold explained, a “rule of thumb” of front operations was to “keep the circle of knowledgeability as small as you can as long as you can. . . . The chronol-ogy of Board members learning about this association is one that grew out of the Agency’s technique.”41 Some, however, managed to defy this rule.
The feisty Picker, for example, when told “by these men from Washington” that “you can’t talk to anybody and you can’t tell your husband,” replied, “Forget it. At this point in our marriage, I’m not going to have a double life.” The CIA subsequently vetted Harvey Picker’s security status and cleared him to be made witting.42 Alison Raymond, too, dug in her heels when the Agency vetted her Latvian secretary negatively. “Finally I said to Anne Crolius, ‘I have to have her cleared. I can’t have two things going all the time in my office.’ And they did clear her finally.”43
Such incidents, though, were rare: for the most part, the witting, often despite private misgivings, played along. Indeed, compared with most other CIA front organizations, the Committee of Correspondence was extremely conscientious in its approach to security matters. A topic of constant debate in its early meetings, for instance, was the question of publicity for its activities within the United States. “If the C of C is publicized may we not expect to be questioned about our financial support?” asked an internal report on the subject. “Would it not sound a bit queer if we ‘cannot tell’ or if, like most of us, we ‘do not know’?”44 The safest option, it was agreed, was to avoid publicity altogether. In 1954 members decided that the award by the USIA of a Certificate of Merit in honor of the group’s work in “furthering understanding and friendship for the United States
. . . throughout the world” should not be revealed to the press “because the Committee does not want to be identified with a Government agency.”45
The fear of exposure remained, however. Shortly after taking over as chair of the Committee in 1960, Anna Lord Strauss held a series of private meetings with other witting members to discuss possible breaches of secu-
160
T H E T R U T H S H A L L M A K E Y O U F R E E
rity—“look out for ‘governmental extravagance,’ leatherette covers to reports, etc., [which were] not needed and show our hand,” she was advised by Rose Parsons—and to draw up a “Blueprint for action if C of C [is] accused of being government subsidized.”46