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members who were traveling abroad about how to send reports to Washington via staff at American embassies. Alison Raymond once used this method to transmit a list of women invited to a communist-organized peace conference she had obtained from a contact in Egypt. (The woman concerned, “Lily,” had at first resisted her overtures, but Raymond went to bed one night to find the list nestling on her pillow.) There was also the odd hint about what sort of public activities the Committee should be carrying out. “Sometimes they’d say, ‘We hope this year you’ll take a look at . . . ,’ wherever, upheavals in Kenya one time,” recalled Anne Crolius.
“It was not clear to us at the time, one was able to understand later.” The 1963 workshop held in Iran was, according to Anderson, the result of such gentle pressure. Evidently, then, despite repeated statements by both parties to the contrary, there was an ongoing effort by the CIA to intervene discreetly in the organization’s affairs. As Crolius primly put it,
“They hoped the Committee would follow the positions they thought were good.”62
Still, the importance of such interference should not be overstated.
Several factors protected the Committee from excessive official meddling, one of which was the male intelligence officers’ lack of knowledge about women’s affairs. When in 1955 the Committee sought more detailed guidance from the Dearborn Foundation about what precisely it meant by “expanded activity,” the foundation grew surprisingly reticent. “We want to assist you in your program,” its secretary and treasurer, John H. Jamison, told Rose Parsons, “but feel you have the specialized and detailed knowledge, not available to us, to provide the necessary leadership. . . . [T]he initiative can and must come from you.”63 When Dorothy Bauman began working with CIA men on other operations, she discovered that “none of them knew anything about this organization, either that or it was sort of a laughingstock. I think they thought Cord Meyer was probably out of his mind to underwrite me.”64 Even Meyer himself, one senses in Bauman’s accounts of their meetings together, was relieved to be able to turn over to her responsibility for a field that was both unfamiliar and perhaps less interesting to him than were other areas of covert operation.
More significant still was the simple fact that the CIA did not have to impose terms on the Committee because the women involved tended to share many of its values anyway. This was partly a consequence of the natural ideological sympathy that existed between anticommunist internationalists like Bauman and Meyer, as evidenced by their shared reverence
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for the United Nations. Also important was the women’s assumption that, like generations of female Americans before them, they had a patriotic duty to serve their country when it was at war. Hence, in the discussions that took place during the first days of the Committee’s existence, there was very little sense of the rigid distinction between governmental and nongovernmental, official and voluntary, public and private that during the late 1960s would underlie much of the debate about the CIA’s covert network. For example, no member protested when it was announced at an October 1952 meeting that Bauman proposed to consult with a senior State Department official.65 Similarly, when an idea originally conceived by the Committee was adopted by the Psychological Strategy Board, it was reported in Committee papers as a matter for self-congratulation.66
The war atmosphere of the early 1950s, similar in many ways to that of the early 1940s, both determined and sanctioned such behavior.
This is not to say that the women’s loyalty was entirely unquestioning.
One suggestion tentatively advanced by the Dearborn Foundation in 1955, that the Committee channel funds to foreign women wanting to set up similar organizations abroad, was dismissed by Committee members as being outside the group’s frame of reference.67 One also detects, very occasionally, glimmerings of anxiety among the witting about the Committee’s
“autonomy.” During her meeting with Anna Lord Strauss in 1960, Constance Anderson wondered out loud whether “taking from them assignment of people” was not giving “too much power” to the CIA. Perhaps the Committee should find “another leg to stand [on] besides [the] Dearborn,”
suggested Susan McKeever.68 Such moments were exceptional, though.
For the most part, the witting members of the Committee of Correspondence appear to have found the notion of government service—even secret government service—entirely unobjectionable.