HAD THE INTERNATIONAL UNION of Students been headquartered somewhere other than Eastern Europe, its history over the next few years might have been different. The choice of Prague originally linked the IUS with Czechoslovakia’s earlier student wartime resistance: Charles University was where the students had been massacred by the Nazis in 1939. But when Czech communists staged a government coup on February 25, 1948, they brought the country firmly into the Eastern bloc and under Soviet domination, and restricted IUS autonomy. The Czech coup constitutes a defining moment in the Cold War: it forced countries and institutions to choose sides, made advocacy of East-West cooperation increasingly unpopular, boosted the fortunes of supporters of covert government action in the United States, reshaped the NSA’s foreign policy agenda, and escalated CIA interest in the NSA.
On February 24, 1948, Jim Smith, still in Prague, walked past a bulletin board in a Charles University dormitory and noticed a flyer announcing a student rally the next day in Wenceslas Square.1 The political climate in Czechoslovakia that winter had been tense. The Communist Party had won enough seats in the 1946 election to become the most powerful partner in the coalition government, and in the intervening months communist cabinet ministers gradually purged noncommunists from their ranks. Ministers from the National Socialist Party, which had established democracy in Czechoslovakia, resigned in protest. Although President Edvard Beneš refused to accept their resignations, his stand heightened tensions among government officials.
When the communists widened their purges of noncommunists in government ministries, schools, and universities, the crisis worsened. What was left of the Beneš government teetered on the brink. If it fell, Czechoslovakia would join Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia behind the Iron Curtain.2 Such an event would also put Jim Smith in an untenable position as the de facto NSA representative in the IUS secretariat.
On February 25, Smith joined thousands of students in the courtyard of Technical High School near Wenceslas Square. Antonin Navratil, chair of the Prague Union of Students, announced that President Beneš had agreed to meet with a student delegation. Accompanied by four other students, Navratil began walking across Charles Bridge toward Hradčany Castle, where Beneš and Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk were in session.
Before they set off, Navratil urged the assembled students to remain peaceful, not to engage in shouting or singing. If the police blocked their procession, he urged, the students should quietly disperse. Navratil had good reason to be cautious. He had not obtained the required permit for a public gathering, believing it would be denied.3 Growing throngs of students pushed their way up Prague’s narrow cobblestone streets toward the castle. Those who had assembled at other locations joined the demonstration, and the crowd swelled—most estimates put the number at ten thousand.
Smith edged his way up to the front of the crowd, where he had a clear view. He later described what he saw. “The students … proceeded into a narrow street leading to the President’s Castle, and when it was about one third of the way along a squad of about twenty policemen, armed with pistols, rifles, and machine guns, formed up across the road. … The five member delegation was escorted to the Castle by two police officers and for the next twenty minutes the students faced the police at a distance of about seventy five yards.”4 Then came the police order to disperse.
“The students stood their ground for several minutes, after which the police formed a line across the road with their rifles held across their bodies, and began to press the students back. … Some of the students began to cry 17th November, comparing the incident to the massacre of 1939. … This comparison with the attack of the German Gestapo upon the student movement naturally angered the members of the police who began to drive the students more quickly down the hill.”5
What happened next is disputed. Smith heard rumors that four students had been shot. He saw one student collapsed in the street. He never heard the police give an order to fire on the crowd, although he thought that the rumors of shootings might be true because the atmosphere had been so charged. While “the students were defiant, and very slow to move,” Smith observed, “the narrowness of the street may have added to the difficulty.”6 As rumors spread, casualty estimates grew.
That afternoon, Prime Minister Klement Gottwald appeared on a balcony in Wenceslas Square and announced the formation of a communist-led government. A few days later, Masaryk, one of the government’s few remaining noncommunists, fell from his office window to his death in the courtyard below. Few in the West believed the official verdict of suicide.7
The IUS leaders refused to condemn either the coup or the continuing purges. From his sanitarium in Leysin, Switzerland, Bill Ellis demanded that Jim Smith resign in protest. Smith complied. On March 1, in Madison, Wisconsin, Bill Welsh opened a cable from Ellis that began with the dramatic phrase “Students Fired Upon,” and contained news of Ellis and Smith’s resignations from the IUS.8
After reading the telegram, Welsh concluded that the four-person negotiating team mandated by the constitutional convention and chosen by the NSA executive committee in December no longer had a purpose. The resignations made the issue of affiliation with IUS moot. Accordingly, he issued a press release to announce the resignations and the termination of the negotiating team.9 Welsh did not consult beforehand with his international vice president, Bob Smith.
Bob Smith was in New York at a meeting of the World Student Service Fund when Muriel Jacobson circulated a copy of Ellis’s cable. The next day, back at Harvard, Smith conferred with Douglass Cater and others. A few days later, Smith berated Welsh by letter for acting precipitously and usurping Smith’s authority. In the future, Smith commanded, “I must control all correspondence on the IUS subject.” He cited his superior expertise, his “full understanding” of events, thanks to the Keeny report on the IUS—which the Madison office had not seen—and “long talks with Doug [Cater], Sally Cassidy and Frank Fisher.”10
Smith had already informed Welsh that he had learned during the WSSF meeting that “something new might take place.” The group had discussed “a Canadian proposal for a new world organization, which is to be consistent with the principles for which we stand.”11
Welsh’s press release canceling the negotiation team temporarily forestalled plans by Catholics to use the summer trip to discreetly explore the possibility of a new international organization. Martin McLaughlin had been one of four students chosen the previous December by the NSA executive committee to serve on the team. It was clear in Catholic circles that McLaughlin intended to use his position to explore an alternative to the IUS, despite the fact that the executive committee had explicitly forbidden any discussion of an alternative. Team members were going to be briefed by the State Department before departure, a fact that Bob Smith asked the foursome not to discuss, assuring them that they were “not beholden to the department in any way that would limit our activities.”12
But even before the coup, Bob Smith had been drawn into discussions about the IUS and alternatives with State Department and intelligence officials. While in Washington for a UNESCO Commission meeting in late January, Smith had joined Catholic leaders John Simons and Philip DesMarais at Henry Briefs’s spacious home in Bethesda for a social event that included Louis Nemzer from State Department intelligence and Don Cook from the International Exchange of Persons office. Nemzer, who had been advising the Catholics for some months, was overseeing an omnibus study of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, and kept track of IUS developments. He argued that the students’ situation in the IUS was roughly equivalent to that of American labor in the World Federation of Trade Unions, also dominated by communists, where an initiative was under way to create a pro-West rival. Smith reported the gist of these conversations to the Madison staff but omitted any mention of Nemzer’s presence.13
The coup in Czechoslovakia preempted all discussions. It ushered in a period of uncertainty and disappointment. Bob Smith reported Douglass Cater as saying, “There goes two years’ work shot to hell.”14 Smith himself wrestled with whether things could have turned out differently.15 If American students had organized earlier, joined the IUS sooner, or played a stronger leadership role in Prague, he mused, perhaps the situation could have been avoided. But after considering the question further, he decided, it probably couldn’t. He told his colleagues, “The circumstances in the higher echelons of social and political life appear to be not such as to permit too great a contrast between that which students do and the games of their elders.”16 His tone is matter-of-fact, not rebellious, merely a recognition that the NSA’s international fortunes were tied to decisions made by men in power.
The events in Czechoslovakia also galvanized advocates of covert government action. When the CIA was formed in September 1947, former military and civilian intelligence officials, among them Allen Dulles (OSS Switzerland) and Frank Wisner (OSS Romania), pushed hard for it to have a covert action arm. Both the CIA and the State Department resisted. The first CIA general counsel argued that the Agency’s charter didn’t permit covert action, while State Department diplomats feared secret activities not under their control, which carried the risk of exposure and damage to American foreign policy.17 Dulles therefore advised his good friend Wisner to join the State Department, burrow in, and wait for the time to be ripe.18
Three months later, in December, the National Security Council had authorized covert psychological warfare activities, understood as the rough equivalent of propaganda designed to undermine the morale of the enemy.19 While psychological warfare strategies were prevalent during World War II, diplomats and American citizens alike feared government-sponsored propaganda. To accommodate public sensibilities, psychological warfare activities were publicly rechristened information activities.
After the communists took over in Czechoslovakia, qualms about covert action evaporated. In June 1948, National Security Council directive 10/2 broadened the authorized covert activities to include political warfare and subversion so that the government’s hand in such activities could be disguised or plausibly denied. In September 1948, Wisner became head of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), an obscurely named office buried in the State Department that oversaw covert activities.20 Funds, but not overall direction, came from the CIA. The ambiguous status of the OPC gave Wisner a free hand—too free in the judgment of many, for he was accountable to no one. Wisner soon staked a claim on a portion of Marshall Plan moneys designed to rehabilitate the European economy, which added millions to his stash of unvouchered funds, nicknamed “candy,” or “catnip” by some American labor union recipients.21
Armed with these funds, Wisner mobilized quickly to fight Soviet-backed international organizations, placing an initial priority on labor and youth. The OPC secretly passed money to American labor organizations to build opposition to the World Federation of Trade Unions.22 Nemzer and the U.S. intelligence analysts had completed their exhaustive study of communist influence in the World Federation of Democratic Youth, its national affiliates, and individual youth leaders by April 1, 1948, and concluded that the organization was under communist domination.23
By then, planning for an alternative international youth group had already begun. Since 1945, professional youth staff, among them YM-YWCA officials, had worked with their British counterparts, who were upset over the formation of WFDY and its claim to represent all young people. The London launch of the WFDY had also motivated British government officials to seize the initiative.24 In the United States, government officials encouraged an existing, adult-led Association of Youth Serving Organizations, under the auspices of the National Social Welfare Assembly, to reorganize into the Young Adult Council, and anticipate the creation of something new.25 In 1946, Bill Ellis and Muriel Jacobson initially represented the YW-YMCA in this group before it was renamed, and until Ellis asked to be relieved of his duties to join the Prague 25.26 In August 1948, six months after the Czech coup, a pro-West alternative, the World Assembly of Youth (WAY), held its first meeting in London and included American delegates from the Young Adult Council.27 Despite all this activity in youth and labor arenas, a student counteroffensive against the International Union of Students lagged behind. In October 1947, Raymond Murphy, the head of EUR/X and preoccupied with the study of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, lamented that lack of time had prevented an equally comprehensive study of the IUS and its members.28
The lack of adequate intelligence was not the only deterrent to a student counteroffensive to the IUS. To the surprise of NSA leaders, European student unions did not defect en masse after the coup in Czechoslovakia. In a contemporary interview, Paul Bouchet, a French resistance leader in World War II, cited wartime resistance movements to explain his sanguine view of communists in the IUS. “We knew these people. We worked with these people.”29 For many European students, communists were fellow students battling for their beliefs, not automatons spouting Soviet lines. Even if individual European student leaders wanted to disaffiliate, and only the most conservative did, overturning existing policies in their respective national organizations required time and debate.
In addition, IUS leaders vigorously defended their actions in the wake of the coup. General Secretary Thomas Madden campaigned effectively throughout the spring to retain European members. A report written by British National Union of Students president W. Bonney Rust, who was not a communist, examined the charges that Czech students had been fired upon during the march to the castle. He found a single incident during which two students grappled with a policeman and a rifle went off, wounding one student in the foot.30 Rust publicly urged Bill Ellis and Jim Smith to reconsider their resignations.
Rust’s attitude underscored the difficulty of organizing an American-led initiative against the IUS. If the British were not ready to be allies, who would be? Nor could NSA leaders afford to articulate a clear policy until the August 1948 NSA Congress when delegates would decide to reject affiliating with the IUS. In addition, the young NSA leaders were often stunned by the hostility they encountered from European student leaders. In September 1948, Bob Smith would observe an IUS council meeting in Paris and find widespread suspicion of the Americans’ motives. He reported that even NSA friends, “those who shared our anxieties [about] partisanship in the I.U.S.[,] had tended to write us off as too headstrong and tactless, and therefore unwelcome allies.”31
State Department officials, by contrast, had decided months earlier that the IUS issue was settled: the secretary of state informed overseas American embassies in March that the NSA would take “no further action toward affiliation or [have] contact with IUS.”32 In similar cables he took for granted that the NSA would back a pro-Western alternative organization, discussed the obstacles a new organization would confront, and predicted outcomes.33 Not surprisingly, the Catholic activists vigorously supported this position, having pledged themselves to work for an alternative to the IUS as early as 1946. Not long after the Czech coup, Vincent J. Flynn, president of St. Thomas College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and a Catholic adviser to the NSA, was informed confidentially that John Simons “knows a great deal about these plans,” and referred to “the possibility of establishing a new, and Western nation, Union of Students.”34
When the NSA Congress met seven months after the events in Czechoslovakia, the undergraduates who determined NSA policy—or thought they did—begged to differ. Nearly a thousand students and observers packed Memorial Union Building at the University of Wisconsin for the first annual NSA Congress. Outgoing vice president Bob Smith set the stage for the IUS debate. He described his hope for a junior United Nations that would prove “we were not going to be isolationistic.” He praised Czechoslovakia as “a bridge-country between the East and West.” He then blamed the communist coup and the failure of the IUS to condemn the coup for dashing American hopes, telling the delegates that “the parallel between documents of the IUS and the Cominform is too sharp to ignore.”35
Smith’s rejection of the IUS diverged from his earlier views. The previous February, after receiving Spurgeon Keeny’s report, Smith had left the door open to cooperation. He observed to the Madison staff, “We can’t sit back behind the ‘iron curtain’ and hurl invectives if there is any door open through which we might travel.”36 By August, he regarded the door as shut tight.
Three of the four members of the NSA team chosen in December had traveled in Europe over the summer, and returned divided on the IUS question. Two (Lawrence Jaffa of Harvard Divinity School and William Birenbaum of the University of Chicago) took a hard line: they urged delegates to break off all contact.37 By contrast, Robert (Rob) West, a self-possessed Nebraskan with a Yale degree, fought for cooperation. West argued that the NSA could participate in IUS travel, educational, and cultural activities without becoming a full member. In his mind, refusing to cooperate constituted an active step toward a new war. As he had told Bob Smith when he learned of Ellis and Jim Smith’s resignations, “I guess I’d better re-reconvert my uniform,” a reference to his previous wartime service.38 The fourth team member, Martin McLaughlin, had resigned from the team.
The Congress delegates agreed with West and refused to close the door on cooperation. They voted to suspend, rather than terminate, negotiations with the IUS and to cooperate with individual IUS departments. The young delegates went a step farther and forbade NSA officers to try to establish a rival organization.39
Despite West’s view on cooperation with the IUS, the Harvard group and Bob Smith, as part of a slate-making deal with Catholic delegates, backed him to head the NSA international office. But West’s ability to implement NSA policy was hampered by the fact that the slate also included for president a Catholic, who would not be able to escape Vatican and American hierarchy pressure to hold the line against cooperation with the IUS. The delegates constrained West, perhaps inadvertently, by renewing the mandate of the Harvard International Activities Committee, continuing its influence over the NSA International Commission. Pressure also came from NSA founders who remained active in international student affairs. Bob Smith, John Simons, and Bill Ellis (after he returned to the United States), among others, continued to serve on World Student Service Fund committees. Not bound by NSA Congress policy, they pushed for a Western rival to the IUS.
The Catholic president-elect, James T. (Ted) Harris, was an African American from La Salle College in Pennsylvania. Harris had refused to campaign for the top position but accepted a draft after the coalition of liberals and Catholics cleared the field of other candidates. Judging from archival correspondence, the pressure on Harris over the next year must have been searing. Catholics constantly pressured him to rein in Rob West. They scrutinized West’s every utterance, once attacking him for using the word dogma in an NSA newsletter, convinced it was a deliberate slur on Catholics, even though West used it in a non-Catholic context. The bishops’ conference Youth Department director, Joseph Scheider, who had replaced Father Bermingham, called West’s use of the word a “malicious, filthy insult to any Catholic.”40
West stirred up a more serious ruckus in the spring of 1949. He learned that IUS leaders Josef Grohman and Thomas Madden planned to tour the United States, and offered NSA hospitality. Archbishop Cushing initially demanded that all Catholic colleges withdraw from the NSA immediately.41 Catholic advisers, including Father Flynn, disagreed, believing that the church’s investment in the NSA was too great to begin anew. If they had not prevailed, the NSA would have collapsed: it could not have withstood the loss of a third of its members. The hospitality issue became moot when U.S. government officials denied Grohman a visa. But the Catholic Church had made a point: it could act as effectively as sentries to police desired boundaries, even if this meant overriding NSA policy and overruling the actions of elected officials.
While the Catholics kept West in check, the Harvard group continued to pursue its own agenda. Over the next two years, a handful of intelligence war veterans tied the NSA’s international agenda to Frank Wisner’s new CIA-funded covert action unit and its Cold War agenda.
Neither West nor his successor as international affairs vice president, Erskine Childers, seemed to have suspected the CIA’s interest in the NSA.42 Both men fought to preserve NSA autonomy from the U.S. government. Neither was a leftist. Both were liberal Democrats. Cold Warriors often argue that it is unfair for a younger generation of liberals to condemn their actions by applying the values and standards of a different era to the immediate postwar period. Yet West and Childers belonged to the same generation as the Cold Warriors, and both placed democratic process and self-determination over compliance with U.S. government objectives, whether openly stated or discreetly whispered.43
West realized late in his term that the HIACOM members were sometimes excluding him from important decisions while regularly supplying men with stellar credentials to direct NSA projects. During West’s term, a third-year law student at Harvard, Thomas Farmer, took over an anticipated project involving German students. Farmer, a World War II veteran who was fluent in German—his father taught in Berlin until 1933—moved in elite circles; he was on a first-name basis with publishers, journalists, and diplomats, including former secretary of war John J. McCloy and the U.S. ambassador to England, Lewis Douglass.44 West readily accepted Farmer’s application, especially since Farmer hinted that he could pay his own way to Germany.45
Farmer had another credential of greater significance: he was a former intelligence officer (1942–45) attached to the War Department’s general staff; and in 1949 he had joined a military intelligence reserve unit in Boston. In a later interview, Farmer implied that others who worked under HIACOM auspices belonged to the same unit, but declined to identify them.46 His admission helps explain the perfect match over the next few years between individual projects and the older war veterans who directed them.
In Farmer’s case, the German project was initiated by American military authorities eager to end the isolation of German students. While the U.S. occupation government had sanctioned the formation of a German student union, officials remained wary of the political views of young people. Over the summer of 1949, with funds from the U.S. government and the Rockefeller Foundation, Farmer led a six-person team from three countries—the United States, Sweden, and Great Britain—to survey the attitudes of German students, looking carefully at arenas where Nazism or fascism might still flourish.47
Farmer would parlay his NSA experience into a full-time position with the CIA in 1951, overseeing youth and student operations, initially as Allen Dulles’s assistant. “I knew very little about the NSA,” he said in an interview, recalling his early experience. “I mean I just knew that I needed some sort of legitimacy for this German project. I never thought beyond that.” Then he amended his statement to say he was grateful to the NSA because it led him to Olof Palme, the future prime minister of Sweden, then in charge of foreign relations for the Swedish Student Federation, and Farmer’s Swedish partner in the German project.48
Farmer credits Palme with educating him about the danger of the IUS. Palme had warned him that the IUS “was having a major political impact in Western Europe and other countries.” Farmer recalled, correctly, that Palme was so angered by the coup in Czechoslovakia that he married a Czech national for the sole purpose of helping the woman leave the country. In general, Farmer identified the 1948 coup as “a watershed, the thing that really woke us up.” Before this event, he said, as a liberal Democrat, he had been “reluctant about the Cold War.”49
With Palme’s conversations in mind, at the end of the summer of 1949, Farmer went to Bad Nauheim to finish writing his report and spend time with his old friend John J. McCloy, the new high commissioner for Germany. During this visit, Farmer said later, he dreamed up a second phase for the project. He hashed over the details with McCloy and his assistant Shepard Stone, described by one CIA officer as a “little Wisner,” a phrase meant to portray Stone as a covert action entrepreneur.50 Farmer’s idea was to convene a summer seminar in Germany that emphasized democratic student self-government, hosted by student leaders from Europe, the United States, and Great Britain.
The proposal meshed with McCloy’s desire to end the isolation of German students and imbue them with democratic norms. But the seminar, despite being called a summer seminar, was a year-round project, one that provided an arena for networking, discussion, and alliance-building among Europeans concerning IUS strategy. (In 1952, the seminar, now funded by the CIA, was renamed the International Student Seminar, and continued to serve as a European student caucus, enabling the NSA to spot early signs of trouble in the U.S.-European alliance.)51
Although Rob West had been excited by the German project, he soon came to realize how little influence he had over it. While in Bad Nauheim, Farmer intercepted a letter that West wrote to Palme, in which West worried that the NSA was now working for the American government. Apparently not embarrassed by reading mail intended for someone else, Farmer shot back a response calling West’s concern “silly. … I can understand your worries about us deteriorating into becoming mere employees of Harry S. Truman. But I think I can assure you that these worries are unjustified. Hell, we didn’t even have to sign an anticommunist affidavit, which[,] I guess, is the best assurance that we are still solidly entrenched in the lofty spheres of student self-government.”52
If West felt excluded by Farmer and others, his successor, Erskine Childers from Stanford University, encountered active opposition. The Irish-born Childers, a pale, often sickly student, was a political sophisticate with an unusual heritage. He was the grandson of the famed Irish patriot and novelist Robert Erskine Childers, who fought for independence and was martyred.53 Childers agonized over whether to run for NSA office. He would have to become a U.S. citizen, thus ending the Childers legacy in Ireland, a prospect he found heart-breaking. But Childers made up for his delicate constitution with a formidable commitment to peace. Why did he decide to run? “A principle and an attitude,” he explained at the time, “before the tragedy of a world divided on both sides.”54
It was during Childers’s campaign for the international affairs vice presidency at the 1949 Congress in Madison that the CIA made its first (though perhaps its clumsiest) attempt to intervene in NSA elections. Dismayed at the prospective election of an advocate of cooperation with the IUS, the CIA tried to find an alternative to Childers. Around nine o’clock on Sunday morning, Norman Holmes, a delegate from the University of Wisconsin, heard a knock on his door. He opened it to CIA agent Craig Colgate. Holmes had met Colgate the year before when he and a friend, Roy Voegeli, had been NSA observers at a Brussels meeting of dissident student unions and the IUS Council. Colgate had subsequently debriefed the two in Paris. (Voegeli later spent two years working for the CIA.)55 Now Colgate urged Holmes to run for office.56 Holmes declined, although he was a vocal opponent of any form of cooperation with the IUS, calling it in plenary debate “an instrument of Soviet foreign policy.”57
Presumably Childers knew nothing of the CIA’s intervention, but he felt keenly the campaign tactics used against him. “The tricks, the deliberate attempts to distort and to confuse, the foul personal talk behind hands and doors—all this in an effort to have NSA tell the world that we had forgotten the most fundamental of inspirations… hope and faith in men and their destiny!” But he could withstand the attacks, he wrote. As a child he had been “kicked by English boys” and called a traitor.58 As disappointing as NSA electoral politics were turning out to be, they did not match the brutality of his former political world. Childers handily beat his opponent, William Holbrook of the University of Minnesota, 212–124.59
The 1949 Congress policy outcomes did nothing to allay the internal tensions of the previous year. Once again, delegates affirmed their desire for limited cooperation with the IUS. Yet once again they elected a Catholic, Robert Kelly of St. Peter’s College in New Jersey, as president. Kelly had demonstrated his fealty to the Catholic hierarchy the year before. As a member of the NSA executive committee, Kelly had initially supported West’s offer of hospitality to Grohman and Madden on their U.S. tour, but changed his mind after it caused an uproar among Catholic clergy.60 Kelly could be counted upon to hold the line against any gestures of cooperation Childers might make.
Over the next year, Childers encountered situations that left him puzzled, dismayed, and ultimately furious. Like West, he soon realized that he shared the stage with a growing cadre of former NSA officers and older Harvard men who were united in their ambition to create a rival to the IUS. When Childers attended his first WSSF meeting in New York, he was appalled at the members’ eagerness to create a rift with the IUS. Afterward he wrote, “I do not believe for one moment that the strategy to use with communism is either to back away from it, or to present so adamantly converse a front as to make any working relationship [with the IUS] almost impossible.”61 He stopped attending the WSSF meetings and designated a proxy, Elmer Brock, who later reported to Childers that there were no real students involved.62
Childers also joined West in his concern over the German seminar. He was unsure whether the NSA should participate with anything so closely aligned with the U.S. government. He questioned the promotion of Shepard Stone, a former newsman, not because he knew about Stone’s involvement with covert action but because Stone stressed a public relations approach to German education, which Childers interpreted as superficial and lacking in serious pedagogy. Then, in the spring of 1950, Childers made a proposal that galvanized his opponents. He suggested that a large NSA delegation, perhaps twelve students, attend the Second World Student Congress in Prague. Their observations and report, he reasoned, might resolve the IUS membership issue once and for all. Philip DesMarais, who had worked with Martin McLaughlin and John Simons since 1946, quickly alerted NSA adviser Father Vincent Flynn to “this serious and dangerous project.”63
The CIA saw Childers’s proposal differently. With a little stage-managing, Childers’s observers could be turned into a global intelligence-gathering unit to test foreign student opinion on the IUS and an alternative organization. This plan required a more direct intervention in the NSA. Whether or not Frederick Delano Houghteling, a Harvard student active in the NSA and HIACOM since 1947, arrived at Madison headquarters as a witting CIA participant, he left as one.64
Many years later, after the NSA/CIA disclosures, Houghteling told a reporter the story of how he became witting. Late one night he and an unnamed “friend from Washington” drove to the outskirts of Madison, where they stopped beside a cornfield on a deserted road and blinked their headlights. Headlights from a second car blinked back. Houghteling and his friend walked over to the second car, where a man gave Houghteling a document to sign pledging him to secrecy and outlined a plan to finance the delegation’s summer travel.65
Since Houghteling was pledged to secrecy, injecting covert funds into the NSA headquarters budget required an elaborate ruse and the help of an unwitting accomplice. The man chosen was Craig Wilson, editor of NSA News in the Madison office. When Wilson first heard about the plan to send twelve students abroad as ambassadors during the summer of 1950, he figured it was a pipe dream; the NSA did not have that kind of money. Then one day, while they were lounging around the office, Wilson said, Houghteling announced that he could raise $12,000. “My father has friends who are interested in our plans. We need to make a formal presentation to a couple of key people … a man in Chicago … the other in Wilmington, Delaware.” Houghteling invited Wilson to come along.66
Wilson describes himself today as a working-class kid from Detroit more at home driving a taxicab than pitching to wealthy donors. He found Houghteling’s invitation peculiar. After all, Houghteling had the Harvard pedigree, the family connections—he was related to the Roosevelts on the Delano side—and the ease to deal with the wealthy. But Wilson was up for the adventure and said yes.67
The first leg of the trip took the two from Madison to the downtown Loop of Chicago. Wilson later described the visit. “The Chicago contact turned out to be an attorney … [who] listened attentively … and commended us for our good intentions.” When the attorney seemed uninterested in the NSA and preferred reminiscing about “the good times he had canoeing with his girl on Lake Mendota,” Wilson concluded that their pitch—given by Houghteling—had failed.68
The two men climbed back into Houghteling’s old grey Chevrolet sedan and drove east nonstop to Delaware. The next contact, a man of ostentatious wealth, lived outside Wilmington. He led Houghteling and Wilson on a tour of his mansion and grounds. Every time Wilson tried to turn the conversation to the NSA, the industrialist interrupted and seemed bored. Chalk up another failure, Wilson thought, as he gaped at the opulence surrounding him and struggled at dinner with his first finger bowl. As the two men made the long return trip back to Madison, Houghteling kept reassuring a despondent Wilson, “You did fine.”69
To Wilson’s amazement, two $6,000 checks soon arrived at the NSA office. The identity of the two benefactors was concealed from most of the staff, but penciled notations on a document in the NSA archives make it possible to identify them as the Chicago lawyer Laird Bell and the Wilmington industrialist Thomas E. Brittingham, Jr. Both men were very wealthy and had impressive credentials in either governmental or philanthropic circles. Bell was a member of the CIA-created Committee for a Free Europe and a personal friend of Allen Dulles. Brittingham was a major donor to the University of Wisconsin.70
Seventeen years later, Houghteling confided the truth to Wilson, who quotes him as saying, “I played my part. You played yours. The difference was that I was in on the secret and you were not.”71 He also expressed his delight in obtaining CIA funding to a New York Times reporter: “I thought it was a great coup.”72 This charade suggests a major shift in channeling funds to NSA, since these funds appear to be the first to come from Frank Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination, the government’s covert action unit, and not through the World Student Service Fund as more established philanthropies had done.
Frank Wisner’s deputy in the clandestine OPC unit, Franklin Lindsay, confirmed during an interview that the office supplied the funds, even recalling the amount decades later. “We were just getting organized,” Lindsay remembered, “and it wasn’t a lot of money.”73
Even by today’s standards, the NSA summer project appears staggering in its scope and ambition. Twelve students, many of them undergraduates, fanned out to interview student leaders from the British Isles, Scandinavia, Belgium, Luxemburg, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece, Turkey, the Near East, French North Africa, Nigeria, Central Africa, the West Indies, and Southeast Asia.74 They were asked to explore the attitudes of foreign student leaders toward the IUS, without taking a position on the IUS or an alternative to it. Each received lengthy written instructions to guide his or her contacts and questioning. Each was asked to file a written report. Most undergraduates were thrilled for a chance to travel, and there is no evidence that anyone thought surveying student opinion was objectionable. Once again, the Harvard committee found men uniquely qualified for the sensitive assignments in Yugoslavia, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. These men, who had expertise far beyond that of the undergraduates, were forerunners of future CIA-funded NSA international staff and overseas representatives.
William (Bill) Roe Polk, originally from Texas, traced his ancestry to an American president. On his résumé, he claimed fifteen years of experience in South America, “including work in the student movement at the University of Chile,” and “a year and a half in the Middle East.”75 Polk would soon take over as HIACOM chair. Frank Fisher, the World War II veteran who had served on the Harvard committee since its inception, took the assignment to Yugoslavia.76
The Asian assignment went to a man with exceptional credentials. Harvard law student James P. (Jim) Grant was born in China, the son of American missionaries, and spoke fluent Mandarin. He spent World War II in the Burma-China Theater, and at the age of twenty-three accompanied General George Marshall on his historic 1945 mission to negotiate a peace pact between the warring armies of Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. Grant remained in China as a special assistant to Walter S. Robertson, an American diplomat charged with overseeing the truce. When the truce failed, Grant transferred to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in northern China, but a year later he left for another special assignment—to conduct negotiations with Zhou Enlai, prior to the collapse of Chiang Kai-shek’s army.77
Grant periodically interrupted his law studies when the U.S. government needed him. In 1948–49, he took a year’s leave of absence to establish the U.S.-China Aid Mission, the equivalent in Asia of the Marshall Plan in Europe, and a program that the Truman administration hoped might counter Mao’s communist appeal. When Mao’s forces overwhelmed those of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, Grant moved the office to Canton (Guangdong); his wife escaped from the communist zone on the last plane out of Langzhou.78
In 1949–50 Grant squeezed in another year of law school before agreeing to close out the China aid program in Formosa (now Taiwan). Once in the region, he traveled for the NSA. The one credential Grant omitted from the résumé he submitted to the NSA was his military intelligence background—he probably belonged to the same military intelligence reserve unit in Boston as Farmer.79 Grant continued to work with the NSA for several years.
No other Western national student union had the resources to travel so widely or the sophisticated personnel to gather the kind of intelligence the CIA wanted. The NSA gained unrivaled access to student opinion, and often had a chance to mold it. Even students who did not have a secret relationship with the CIA readily followed requests to submit detailed reports on their conversations to the new Paris office of the NSA, established that summer to handle travel arrangements.
Unaware of Houghteling’s connection to the CIA, Erskine Childers expected to head the traveling international team. But as soon as he reached Europe, he received a steady flow of instructions from the Madison office. Increasingly irritated, he protested. President Kelly rebuffed him, then dealt the final blow: he ordered Childers home from Europe.80
Kelly’s excuse was that Childers was needed in Ann Arbor, site of the forthcoming NSA Congress in August. Childers cared deeply about the NSA and did not want to engage in open conflict that might harm the still fledging organization. He returned as ordered. In the end, the large delegation envisioned by Childers to assess the Second World Student Congress in Prague dwindled to three observers. The trio was instructed to take no initiative and refrain from making any commitments on behalf of NSA.
On August 24, 1950, Olof Palme of the Swedish Student Federation flew into Prague to chair an informal caucus of European, Canadian, and American students.81 Palme had hoped for an agreement on the need to establish both an alternative international organization and a permanent secretariat to administer projects conducted under its auspices. He found the student union leaders still sharply divided.82 Finally, Palme persuaded them to convene again in Stockholm in December, subject to two major conditions: there would be no discussion of a new international organization and no discussion of political matters.83
It would have been difficult under any circumstances to create a pro-West rival to the IUS, since few student unions were clamoring for it. It would be even harder to build such an organization while publicly denying its Cold War raison d’être. Yet this was precisely what happened.