Then there was the need to keep the secret from other Committee members who, in most cases, were close friends and old colleagues. Successive Treasurers of the organization, for example, were deliberately kept in the dark about its chief source of income. Betka Papanek, the Committee’s main fund-raiser in the early years, “worked like a dog to raise money,” Alison Raymond recalled. “We would tell her to write this foundation or write that foundation. Then she would get some money, and she would be absolutely thrilled and everybody congratulated her. It was such a farce. It was a terrible thing to do to anybody.”47 Papanek’s successor as Treasurer, Rosalind Harris, explained, evidently with some bitter-ness, “You’d get a list of foundations, and one of us would write this one, and another would write that one, and we always got the money. We’d have serious meetings, I as treasurer and three others, deciding how we were going to get this year’s money. That was all a charade. It was all hype.” Just why the post of treasurer appears not to have been included in the circle of the Committee’s witting officers is not clear. The explanation offered later for Betka Papanek’s unwitting status was that she was married to a Czech citizen and therefore failed the CIA’s security clearance. However, the fact that Rosalind Harris was also excluded raises the possibility that the Agency found it useful for cover purposes to have unwitting Committee officers sincerely engaging in private fund-raising activities.
“To put on an act like that,” Harris suspected, “was carrying it beyond just not telling.”48
It was this issue above all—the fact that some members knew while others did not—that caused controversy when the CIA’s covert patronage was exposed by the
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bers that the statement was “only to be used when needed. It is still our understanding that the less attention we bring to ourselves, the better.”)49
Not everyone was persuaded, however. Unwitting members were asking awkward questions, and legitimate, non-CIA foundations refused to res-cue the organization from the financial mess left by the collapse of the Agency’s pass-throughs until the witting made some acknowledgment of their complicity.
Eventually, it was decided to make a clean breast of it. The CIA agreed to send an officer to a special July meeting of the Committee to explain to its members, unwitting as well as witting, the nature of the Agency’s past interest in the organization. Susan McKeever, who, clearly unable to shake off old habits, coyly introduced the officer in question, Spencer Arnold, as “a representative of our past donors,” hoped that his talk might persuade the unwitting that they had not been “used” and “weld us into a group—erase misunderstanding, build up trust in each other.”50 As the meeting unfolded, however, some members grew more, rather than less, restive. They demanded to know, for example, “how much reporting we did to the CIA—did reports from individual letters go to them?” Despite assurances from Arnold and the witting that the Agency had never exploited the Committee for intelligence purposes, the questioning continued.51
Beset by arguments and starved of funding, the Committee gradually gave up its various functions, sending its last correspondence in February 1969. Not even its dissolution, however, put an end to the protests of the unwitting. In 1970, Eleanor Coit, Elizabeth Jackson, and Alice Clark signed a statement that they demanded be placed with the Committee’s papers, which were to be deposited at Smith College, Massachusetts. The signatories wanted “to have it on record” that they had not known about the CIA funding “until the closing months of the Committee’s existence.”
We believe (to use Eduard Lindeman’s words) that “the Democratic Way of Life rests firmly upon the assumption that means must be conso-nant with ends.” The use of CIA funds for the Committee’s work seems to us to have been contrary to this ideal, so basic to the democratic way of life.52
Later still, in a series of oral history interviews, several unwitting members of the Committee elaborated on the reasons they disapproved so
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strongly of secret official subsidies. All were troubled by the contradiction between the group’s professed commitment to truth, as expressed in the motto on its letterhead, and the deception involved in CIA funding.