Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA's Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism
Karen M. Paget
Language: English
Pages: 632
ISBN: 2:00276559
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this revelatory book, Karen M. Paget shows how the CIA turned the National Student Association into an intelligence asset during the Cold War, with students used—often wittingly and sometimes unwittingly—as undercover agents inside America and abroad. In 1967, Ramparts magazine exposed the story, prompting the Agency into engineering a successful cover-up. Now Paget, drawing on archival sources, declassified documents, and more than 150 interviews, shows that the Ramparts story revealed only a small part of the plot.
A cautionary tale, throwing sharp light on the persistent argument, heard even now, about whether America’s national-security interests can be advanced by skullduggery and deception, Patriotic Betrayal, says Karl E. Meyer, a former editorial board member of the New York Times and The Washington Post, evokes “the aura of a John le Carré novel with its self-serving rationalizations, its layers of duplicity, and its bureaucratic doubletalk.” And Hugh Wilford, author of The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, calls Patriotic Betrayal “extremely valuable as a case study of relations between the CIA and one of its front groups, greatly extending and enriching our knowledge and understanding of the complex dynamics involved in such covert, state-private relationships; it offers a fascinating portrayal of post-World War II U.S. political culture in microcosm.
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government requires sustained effort. I expected this problem. I did not expect the CIA to reclassify in 2001 documents pertinent to the NSA that were fifty and sixty years old and had been declassified under the twenty-five-year rule. Had I requested these documents earlier, they would have been available in the National Archives and Records Administration. A request in 2003 for two 1949-vintage reclassified reports took nine years to process. The re-declassified documents contained no
intellectual, educated in Western institutions, and seemingly unreceptive to communist overtures. In April 1961, a few months after Roberto’s forces launched the first raid into Angolan territory, Time hailed him as “a determined, soft-spoken, exiled African Angolan.”61 THE NSA PLAYED an equally tricky part in its relationship with the National Union of Southern African Students (NUSAS), which it supported financially starting in the mid-1950s with FYSA grants, funds that NUSAS president John
his best to deflect the criticism, and at one point thought he had succeeded. He wrote to Roberts that Robbins was “coming around,” but they should “continue to develop him.”30 But Robbins was not the only one with questions. In May 1963, Howard Abrams confronted Shaul over the secrecy of the International Commission’s operations. Shaul admitted that there “was a great deal of truth” in the charge that the International Commission was a “self-perpetuating oligarchy,” but pointed out that many
arguments. “You don’t see Phil Sherburne angry very often,” Arons said later, reflecting on the legendary Sherburne temperament. Part of the reason he was so upset, Arons speculates, was his concern that Ramparts might sensationalize the story.71 BY EARLY FEBRUARY 1967, the Ramparts staff had become extremely nervous about the story. The journalist Adam Hochschild, who later co-founded Mother Jones magazine, worked periodically at Ramparts, though rarely on the NSA story. One evening he joined
realized that I might not appreciate his abrupt departure, especially since I was still recovering from a bout of pneumonia. So I knew that the phone call had been a pretext to leave me alone with one of the men. Still feverish, I sat on the edge of an overstuffed chair, my eyes burning and my ears ringing, and tried not to look too frightened. I pretended to read the document, but lingering fever blurred my vision, and anxiety made the words jump off the page. To this day, I have no idea what