FOR THE NEXT FEW YEARS, denial operations could be quantified by membership wins and losses. At its founding in 1946, the International Union of Students claimed a membership of six million students from seventy-eight countries. By 1952, it had lost about fifteen member student unions, mostly from Europe. In 1952, the Edinburgh International Student Conference hosted twenty-five countries, some of them observers. The lopsided numbers suggested that the ISC would have to fight to gain legitimacy as a representative worldwide organization. And unknown to most ISC members, the CIA would be fighting right along with them.
CIA headquarters celebrated every IUS loss, every ISC gain. Thomas Braden, the International Organizations division chief, described rejoicing the day “an agent came in with the news that four national student associations had broken away from the Communist International Union of Students and joined our student outfit instead.”1
After the Edinburgh ISC, John Simons zeroed in on the Middle East as a possible location for a future conference, hopeful that it might attract the area’s students and broaden the ISC base.2 In June 1952, he deployed former NSA president Ted Harris to explore this possibility.3 Months later, Harris’s report was pessimistic: “The whole area [is] too unstable.” To drive home the point, Harris described a scene in Beirut: “Just now, below my window Lord Mountbatten is emerging from a government office. A large crowd, thickly populated with young people[,] is being held back by police. Although the general attitude is sullen silence, I can hear cries in French and English … ‘Go Home!’” He cautioned that the NSA “could do more harm than good” in the Middle East, since “only two groups locally would be interested, Arab nationalists and Communists.”4
William Polk, who had surveyed student opinion in the Middle East for HIACOM in the summer of 1950, had already warned Simons that there was a new source of resentment in the Arab world: the U.S. government’s recognition of the State of Israel. In an eerily prescient report, Polk wrote, “The West now seemed completely overwhelming. … Its movies and advertising posters had violated Moslem ethics; its techniques and industry had uprooted and revolutionized Arab handicrafts and social structure; its cars, trains, and planes had brought Damascus and Cairo close to Paris and London; and now, before the eyes of the terrified Moslem students, the West seemed to be taking root as the nation of Israel in the heart of the Fertile Crescent.” These factors, Polk argued, were leading to “extremes, both Communism and Islam.”5
The NSA also stepped up its efforts in Asia, where the strategy of holding a regional seminar to identify noncommunist students and promote interest in the ISC remained stalled. In early January, Frank Fisher took over the Southeast Asia program. After graduating in 1951 from Harvard Law School, he had returned to Winnetka, Illinois, to establish a law practice, but following what Avrea Ingram described to a colleague as “considerable pressure (both external and internal),” Fisher agreed to defer his practice and return to work with Ingram and HIACOM.6 The strategy of employing consultants and temporary staff without student status had become accepted in the International Commission, since the NSA constitution was silent on the point. Fisher signed on for a six-month tour of Indonesia, Burma, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaya, Thailand, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.7
Before he left for Asia on April 8, Fisher conferred with John Simons, handled contacts with the Department of State, including W. Bradley Connors, the International Information Activities specialist for the Far East Division, and checked in with the Council on Foreign Relations, which passed along funds for his trip.8 Despite his consultant role, Fisher exhibited no qualms about giving direction to Ingram, chastising him on one occasion for lax information procedures, “because of the grave risk they represent to the international program of NSA.” He singled out work on Southeast Asia, where “there are several documents which should not be available for the sort of general distribution which assures their falling into the hands unfavorably disposed to NSA.”9
Despite his seven years of service with HIACOM and other evidence of his insider status, Fisher vigorously denies being made witting by the CIA. In a contemporary interview he asserted, “They didn’t have to. I was doing exactly what was called for.” Fisher also insisted that his motives were entirely altruistic: “I just wanted to get the students educated.”10 But Fisher’s résumé, left behind in the NSA archive, along with his reports from the 1952 trip, suggest a harder-nosed politics. In his résumé, written after the Southeast Asian excursion, he included as an area of expertise, “special attention to problems of communist infiltration in foreign student movements.”11
In confidential reports written after his Asian trip, Fisher concluded that the Asian seminar idea was dead, or at least out of NSA hands.12 He had met Indonesian student leaders in Jakarta and Bandung who talked about hosting a broad-based Arab-Asian conference. A dangerous plan, Fisher warned in his report to Ingram and HIACOM: such a gathering could become a “hot political conclave that will only train students to reckless political agitation.”13 He explained why. “If Arab states turn up strong, if Indian Communist-inclined students show up, if Communist China is invited and send[s] competent students, if some issue is then especially hot (Tunisia, Egypt-Sudan) such [agitation] could happen.” And the IUS, Fisher felt, would be the beneficiary.14
In terms of regional objectives, the NSA had not neglected Latin America, since the continent had the potential to yield numerous ISC members. The oft-postponed Inter-American Conference finally convened in late January 1952, not long after the Edinburgh conference. The NSA sent a five-person delegation to Brazil, including Bill Dentzer, Helen Jean Rogers, and Avrea Ingram, but added two delegates to emphasize its racial and ethnic diversity. These were Barry Farber, a Jewish student from the University of North Carolina, and Herbert Wright, an African American representing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Post-conference reports glowed with satisfaction at the way the delegation had surprised and impressed the Latin Americans.15 Rogers noted that the Brazilians “didn’t think there would be even one Negro in our NSA congress.” The conference was judged successful, since the Cuban student federation had pledged to organize a second hemispheric conference that included the NSA.16
In the late summer, Rogers enrolled in the Harvard graduate program in government, at the same time becoming Ingram’s special assistant for Latin America.17 Dentzer, Ingram, and Rogers all wrestled with the question of how to confront the widespread anti-Americanism in Latin America. Rogers blamed it on lack of personal contact. She concluded that delegates at the Brazilian conference had “no understanding of life in the US.” She reported, to her chagrin, that some students saw the United States and the Soviet Union as equal evils. She had repeatedly heard delegates claim that the United States was “subservient to the interests of the United Fruit Company, Standard Oil and other large interests.” This affected the NSA, she pointed out, since “delegates at the January conference evinced skepticism that American students could take action independent of the State Department and against unreasonable economic exploitation.”18
Rogers, Ingram, and Dentzer never argued that U.S. policy toward Latin America should change or that the NSA should protest that policy. Rather, they believed that the NSA had to change the perceptions of Latin Americans toward it. If diligence and persistence could have achieved that goal, Rogers alone might have succeeded. She interrupted her graduate studies on a daily basis to keep letters flowing to Latin American student leaders, most over Ingram’s signature.19
The international office blanketed Central and South American student unions with copies of La Vida Estudiantil, a new magazine produced by the NSA-affiliated, CIA-supported International News Center in Atlanta. HIACOM also sent out batches of the International Information Bulletin, describing student projects in housing and literacy, as well as overseas travel opportunities.20 Armed with a special FYSA grant of $20,000, Dentzer invited every Latin American student union that had attended the Brazil conference to the late-summer NSA Congress.21 The equivalent figure today would be $175,000.
Above all, Dentzer, Ingram, and Rogers pursued the Cubans, since the fate of the future Pan-American conference rested with them. Ingram invited the head of the Federation of Cuban Students (FEU) to address the NSA Congress, in part to overcome the Cubans’ skepticism of the NSA’s motives. Havana-based students, preoccupied with overthrowing General Fulgencio Batista, the U.S.-backed dictator who had suspended the Cuban constitution, begged off. Dentzer responded with an expression of NSA support. “Our every sympathy is with you in your struggle for constitutional government, and the best interests of the university and the nation.” To further demonstrate their bona fides, he pledged that the NSA would pass a resolution at the Congress condemning Batista.22
In the end, the NSA Congress heard from Marcelo Fernández, a Cuban engineering student enrolled in the summer program at MIT in Cambridge and a future stalwart of the Fidel Castro regime.23 To the several hundred students gathered at the University of Indiana, Fernández described in dramatic detail the way Batista’s police treated university students: unarmed students and professors were “jailed and beaten in the secret police headquarters.”24 Delegates gave Fernández a standing ovation, and, as Dentzer had promised, the Congress declared its “opposition to the actions of those dictatorships existing in some Latin American countries which have violated the traditional rights of students and interfered with the autonomy of the university.”25
The Congress’s action on Cuba illustrates how the NSA’s international resolutions served regional agendas: they were not meant primarily to educate American students on foreign policy issues. The Cuban resolution, for example, would demonstrate to Latin Americans that the NSA could criticize Batista—and by extension other dictatorships—because it had no ties to the U.S. government, thereby addressing the chief source of suspicion of NSA motives. Deft phrasing enabled the international staff to link condemnation of the dictatorship with education, thereby conforming (barely) to the students as students requirement in the NSA constitution. The resolution curried favor with the Cuban student union by praising “its efforts to preserve student rights, academic freedom and the autonomy of the university which the dictatorship of General Batista has tried to destroy.”26
While the Latin America strategy held the promise of a long-term payoff, the NSA was working against the pressure of the looming third International Student Conference, scheduled for Copenhagen in January 1953. An increase in attendance was imperative. Bill Polk, the Middle East specialist for HIACOM, earlier had suggested a strategy for increasing Middle East representation. He urged Ingram to work through the (CIA-supported) American Friends of the Middle East to identify Middle Eastern students studying in the United States.27 Once they became acquainted with the NSA, he argued, selected individuals could be invited to the ISC. The plan was easy to execute, thanks to overlapping board membership—Kenneth Holland sat on the boards of both the CIA funding conduit FYSA and American Friends of the Middle East. Holland identified ten Middle Eastern students to be invited to the 1952 NSA Congress, assuring Ingram that FYSA could offer financial support for their travel and board.28
The presence of foreign students in the United States now suggested a more general strategy. Between 1952 and 1954, the CIA encouraged and often subsidized new associations of foreign students in the United States. In rapid succession, the American Friends of the Middle East launched four separate organizations: the Organization of Arab Students (OAS), the Iranian Students of America, the Associated Students of Afghanistan (ASA), and the Pakistan Students Association.29 The CIA-created Committee for a Free Asia, later renamed the Asia Foundation, also backstopped some of these projects. It circulated an English-language magazine, The Asian Student, as part of its program to combat communist influence throughout the region, and regularly featured news from the U.S. based associations.30 The CIA also supported a similar organization of African students in the United States.31
As with many student projects underwritten by the CIA, the dollar amounts required to sustain the U.S.-based associations were relatively small; the ASA’s annual budget was $10,000.32 But small resources yielded large benefits. At a minimum, foreign students provided information on the political climate in their home countries and entrée to promising leaders since many, if not most, foreign students studying in the United States were destined to become governing elites after they returned home, which suggested the value of long-term investments.
Ingram turned to the new student associations to swell attendance in Copenhagen. At Ingram’s request, the ISC secretariat (COSEC) extended an invitation to the new leader of Iranian Students of America, Houshang Pirnazar.33 In his request to John Simons for a FYSA travel grant, Ingram portrayed Iran as having no student union. In fact, Iran did have a student union but of the wrong political flavor; it belonged to the IUS and had close ties with the pro-Soviet Iranian Tudeh Party.34
At the CIA, such seemingly inconsequential acts—inviting an Iranian student to the ISC—had a broader purpose than building ISC membership. More ambitious CIA objectives were at stake. In Iran, the CIA plotted to oust its president, Mohammad Mossadegh, who, although democratically elected, had provoked the West with his decision to nationalize the Iranian oil industry. Fearing that Mossadegh would not resist Soviet influence, British and American intelligence joined forces to overthrow him.35 The installation in 1953 of a pro-West regime led by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the Shah of Iran ushered in a period of American dominance. Identifying pro-West Iranian students served the Agency’s larger agenda of deepening ties between Iran and the United States. Sometimes witting personnel at the NSA were aware of these broader agendas; sometimes these agendas were obscured, protected by the highly compartmentalized world of intelligence.
In 1952, another coup overthrew the King Farouk monarchy in Egypt and installed Muhammad Naguib as president, an act that opened up similar opportunities for American influence in the Middle East. Ingram also brokered travel funds to Copenhagen for two Egyptian students from the new U.S.-based Organization of Arab Students.36 Once again, in the formal request for FYSA funding, Ingram portrayed Egypt as having no organized student union. That claim was also false. The nationalist, but not communist, League of Egyptian Students belonged to the IUS. As a practical matter, Egyptian officials typically denied students passports to travel abroad, so the league was not a major player in the IUS.37 But the United States hoped that the new Naguib regime would look favorably on both the NSA and the pro-West ISC.
Frank Fisher and Helen Jean Rogers also identified foreign students met during their respective travels in Asia and Latin America, and supplied names in confidence to COSEC. Fisher profiled Asian students on his tour through the region, while Rogers used Catholic networks in Latin America to scour for potential ISC invitees. Once Simons cleared the travel funds, Fisher acted as a broker. He cabled the hand-picked Asians: “Limited funds now available for travel grants to Copenhagen international student conference,” suggesting they “contact COSEC Leiden, the Netherlands.”38 Rarely did a flattered student turn down the opportunity to travel.
The fiction that FYSA, the source of travel funds either directly or through COSEC, was a private American foundation gave director David Davis and assistant director John Simons a rationale for attending the ISC.39 Thus, unknown to the foreign students gathered in Copenhagen, CIA career staff were observing their behavior, soliciting their political views during informal chats, and reporting the results to their superiors. As were the NSA witting staff. The NSA archival files contain reports on every aspect of the Copenhagen conference: a record of daily events, profiles by country, profiles by delegation, and individual delegate information.40 A list of still-classified files at CIA headquarters protects the identity of students recruited during this time, but declassified indexes show that there were recruitments, again confirming that from its inception the CIA used the ISC for more than denial operations.41
All the frantic organizing prior to Copenhagen paid off, at least in NSA eyes. Ingram was ecstatic with the turnout.42 More than a hundred observers and delegates from thirty-four countries came to Denmark. Thirty-one national unions of students requested and received delegate status. The Copenhagen ISC constituted, Ingram later wrote, “the largest student gathering of legitimate student federations in the world ever that has taken place.”43 The turnout, he raved, was “successful in excess of our most optimistic hopes.”44 In a letter to Frank Fisher, Ingram sounded the same theme and observed that the increased attendance, “for the first time, placed the balance of power outside the European Commonwealth countries and approach.”45
State Department officials decided to take their own measure of its success. U.S. embassies in Asia were asked to survey press coverage of the Copenhagen meeting, “covertly to determine feasibility of forming a new international student organization.”46 Cables warned the overseas officials that the IUS, “realizing the potential power of COSEC, has used all available means of media to discredit it.” The results of the survey were uniformly disappointing. New Delhi cabled back, “No comment in the press or from local students circles on this conference.” A Bangkok official “found no discussions of the International Student Conference at Copenhagen.” The Rangoon (Burma) cable read, “No reaction … has been observed.”47
Not only was favorable publicity on the ISC scant, the IUS secretariat in Prague ginned up negative press, circulating a broadside under the provocative title “Glass Hats, US State Department, and the Leiden Secretariat (Or How They Came to Copenhagen).” It described how delegates compared notes on who had paid for their travel and discovered a common source. The delegates then raised questions on the plenary floor about the American foundation behind the largess. The IUS editors identified the men on the FYSA board by name, but focused on the industrialists.48
To the chagrin of the NSA, a delegate from Indonesia—the number one priority in Southeast Asia—publicly criticized the gathering.49 Busono, a student then at Charles University in Prague, and later imprisoned in Indonesia for anti-government activities, published an account of the Copenhagen conference in IUS News. He ridiculed the ISC’s claim to be a genuinely representative international student body. “A whole afternoon and evening devoted to discussion on what exactly is a NUS [national union of students] resulted in a 100 word resolution.”50
Busono asked rhetorically: “Why did the Iranian delegate come from New York? An Egyptian from California? Why were there no delegates from the two largest Asian countries, Japan (750,000 students) and China (3 million students)? Why did the Danish government deny the Burmese delegate a visa? Why did most Asian delegates come from European cities, for example, Paris, London or The Hague?”51
The Indonesian highlighted the larger problem for the ISC, its insistence on being apolitical. “This we altogether reject! In our country every organization has the struggle for national independence in its programme, because this is a pre-requisite for a democratic education and for better conditions of life and study.” Busono then quoted Subroto, the new president of the Indonesian student federation (PPMI), who was thought by the NSA to be a solid ally, and said that he “confirmed” that “the only representative student union is IUS.”52 Americans had identified the Western-friendly Subroto as the person who might lead the PPMI out of the IUS.53 Whether or not Subroto made the remarks ascribed to him, the public spotlight put him in a difficult position.
Ingram privately denounced Busono as an IUS plant, but the criticism struck a nerve, since not only NSA enemies were making it: an ISC member and NSA ally from the National Federation of Canadian University Students, Charles Taylor, had made similar comments after he observed an IUS meeting in Bucharest in September 1952. He had shared his report with the NSA and described the apoliticism of the ISC as the hardest charge to defend. “It is clear that in many parts of the world, notably many Asian countries, such a distinction is ludicrously unrealistic, and to an Asian[,] insistence on such a distinction can easily be interpreted as showing an attitude of little concern for his problem.”54
Ingram’s personal notes after the Copenhagen meeting show that he wrestled with the problem raised by Busono and Taylor. The NSA was caught between “Europeans—completely non-political” and “Latin Americans—completely political.”55 The Europeans, he wrote, were unprepared for the “impact of under-developed area participation.” The eight Latin American delegations wanted the conference “to adopt a more political tone,” seemed irritated with the emphasis on “practical projects and nothing else, and constantly threatened to withdraw.”56
But the problem was broader and deeper than Ingram appeared to understand. In retrospect, it seems obvious that NSA strategies to expand the ISC would eventually exacerbate, not mitigate, the problem of political demands. The more successfully the conference attracted students from outside Europe, the more frequently such demands would arise. Similarly, it appears not to have occurred to the NSA-CIA team that with numerical growth would come new voting blocs and unpredictable alliances. In 1953, Ingram registered dismay that Yugoslavia tried (and failed) to gain a seat on the Supervision Committee by allying with a bloc of Latin American unions. Why would Latin American students cooperate, he wondered.57
Despite hints of trouble ahead, Ingram, Simons, Dentzer, and others continued their efforts to recruit new members. They did not abandon a practical-projects approach, but tried to modify it. The NSA experimented with a junior version of the U.S. foreign aid program known as Point Four, which emphasized technical-assistance grants and self-help.58
The suggestion had come from Harvard’s Jim Grant, who had joined the Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA), which oversaw the Point Four program.59 John Simons asked Bill Ellis, now a student at Harvard Law School, to test the feasibility of Grant’s idea in Asia. Ellis, who did occasional contract work for Simons, set off for Burma, Indonesia, India, and Pakistan.60
The formal proposal for Ellis’s trip captures the earnest if naive faith of the organizers that American know-how could replace politics. It depicts students from underdeveloped countries as prone to agitation and sets out the necessity of rerouting their energy. Asian students needed to move beyond the “outmoded tactics” used during independence movements, when their “major purpose was to create havoc and unrest for the Western power.” If their energy could be redirected into national development goals, such as rural reconstruction projects, students could work with the West rather than against it.61
U.S. government cables notifying American embassies about Ellis’s trip contain the same optimistic view of technical programs. They describe his mission: “to establish friendly relations between the university students in this area and students in the United States and other parts of the free world; to strengthen the moderate student movement; and to help make the student movements in the area positive assets for national development and reconstruction.”62 Prospective projects would “show the students that their governments are rendering constructive service to the people and that problems cannot be solved by simple panaceas as advocated by the Communists but required technical skills, time, money, and hard work.”63
When Ellis reached Asia, he found much to confirm the stereotype of students as political agitators, but little to suggest the viability of technical-assistance programs. He arrived in Burma just after elections at the University of Rangoon, during which students had discovered the government’s attempt to intervene against suspected communist influence. Amid demonstrations, protests, and general chaos, rival students set ballot boxes on fire.64 Ellis narrowly escaped a police raid on a Rangoon dormitory. A rural reconstruction program at this time, he concluded with understatement, “would be most unwise.”65 In a letter to Ingram, Ellis added a caution that was ignored in practice: “In any case, we must not give the appearance that we have loads of money and that everyone can take us for suckers. I hate to say that, but it is in some ways unfortunately true.”66
Moving on to India, Ellis was confronted with a complex student scene. When the IUS was founded, three Indian student federations had sought delegate status. Eventually, the pro-Soviet All India Student Federation won out. Although Jim Grant, Melvin Conant, and Frank Fisher had all visited India during their Asian trips, little had come of their work. U.S. embassy officials in New Delhi continued to identify promising Indian student leaders, and warn against those they believed to be communists.67
In 1950, the Congress Party under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had encouraged the founding of the National Union of Students India (NUSI), but it had weak campus roots and could not meet ISC criteria for membership. A further obstacle was A. J. Shelat, a Gujarati socialist and medical student, who had won the NUSI presidency by one vote. For months, Shelat had been on the warpath against the World University Service (as the International Student Service was now named) in Geneva, and by extension the United States, since Americans supplied the bulk of WUS funds. He bombarded the NSA with diatribes against the WUS India committee, accusing its leader, Virendra Agarwala, and his “batches of henchmen” of squandering “thousands of rupees.”68 How can it be democracy, Shelat demanded, if “Geneva nominates one person in India who in turn nominates all the rest?”69 The conflict was most unusual. The NSA drew heavily on WUS country committees for trusted contacts in Europe and Asia, and the overlap between WUS and ISC activists (including John Thompson, Olof Palme, and Bill Ellis) was considerable. Not in India.
But Shelat was also anticommunist. He argued that with the right deployment of resources the “commies could be smashed.”70 When Ellis got to India, he tried to convince Shelat to end his opposition to the WUS and attend the next ISC meeting as an observer, following up after his return to the United States with further exhortations: “You have a definite obligation both to yourselves and foreign students to come to Istanbul”; it would be an opportunity “to express your point of view,” especially since “you continually expressed your disappointment with the manner and superficial approach which has characterized the actions of the USNSA and other western student organizations.”71
As a further inducement, Ellis proposed that Shelat “come armed with a specific proposal for the joint planning and implementation of a technical team of students who would travel and work with NUSI in India from May until September.”72 Most foreign students readily took this kind of bait, and Shelat did not disappoint. Sometime after the 1954 ISC in Istanbul, he obtained a FYSA grant.73 Thus began a decade of U.S. subsidies, both open and clandestine, to Indian students, along with considerable meddling in their internal affairs.
The NSA soon scrapped a student Point Four program in favor of more direct approaches. ISC rules permitted recognition of national committees if they were representative and intended to become student unions. In 1953, the CIA poured resources into developing national committees in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, and Jamaica. Over the years, such funding became a reliable way into a country’s student politics, regardless of whether a national committee or a national student union ever materialized.
The approach in Egypt illustrates the CIA’s technique. In the spring of 1953, Simons commissioned a Harvard student and Fulbright scholar, Frederick C. Thomas, to identify existing student groups in Egypt.74 Notwithstanding Thomas’s major finding, that “there are no non-political student organizations in Egypt,” Simons and the NSA pushed ahead with plans to encourage the creation of an Egyptian national committee. Sometime before August, the NSA identified a potential organizer, Abdul Haz Shaaban, an Egyptian student studying at the University of Michigan, who was about to return to Egypt. Before he left the United States, Shaaban attended the 1953 NSA Congress.
At the Congress, Shaaban had brought tangible evidence that a new Egyptian-American alliance was in the making, reading a personal greeting from Egyptian president Muhammad Naguib. Newly elected NSA president James Edwards and international affairs vice president Leonard Bebchick thanked Shaaban for his message as a sign of “a spiritual bond between the students and peoples of this country and your nation which we hope has found root and will flourish.”75 A few months later, the two NSA officers traveled to Cairo and met with Naguib personally in his palace office. During this period of optimism, Simons awarded Shaaban funds for a National Egyptian Committee.76
To nudge developments along, the NSA hired a new coordinator for the Middle East, Robert Williams, who had worked previously with African students.77 Williams enrolled in the African Studies program at Boston University and kept in touch with Shaaban on behalf of HIACOM.78 In a typical letter, Williams might ask casually, “Have you had an opportunity to discuss the formation of an Egyptian National Union of Students with students from AUC [American University in Cairo], Al Alzar or Cairo University?”79 Williams would then hint that the World University Service might establish a center in Cairo that could be headquarters for the Egyptian National Union. He could make such offers because the CIA had placed a witting American student on the WUS staff in Geneva to ensure coordination.80
One of Williams’s more blatant suggestions was that a delegation from the U.S. Organization of Arab Students travel to Egypt “for the purpose of organizing a Pan-Arab student Conference to be held somewhere in the Arab world during the summer of 1954.”81 Within months, the NSA would come to abhor the idea of Pan-Arabism, but at the time it seemed like an expedient hook for corralling Middle Eastern students. Ted Harris, then in Egypt on a Fulbright, followed up on Williams’s suggestion.
Harris reported that Shaaban was skeptical of the whole idea, and Shaaban himself bluntly wrote to Williams, “I do not believe that the sponsorship of such a conference from a group outside the area (such as North America or Paris) is a very wise way of ensuring support in this area. I would rather wait until we have our own national union.”82 In 1954, a military coup overthrew Naguib and ushered in the regime of Gamal Abdul Nasser, beginning an era of intense Egyptian nationalism. The NSA would try a second time before abandoning its effort.
Just before Naguib was deposed, the ISC met in the Middle East, or, rather, as close as regional politics made possible. The Istanbul locale would be remembered for several things: freezing temperatures, the presence of an IUS representative, many new observers and members, and most of all a compromise intended to loosen the strictures of students as students and accommodate the demand to debate political issues.
Bill Dentzer, then a Yale law student and still working with the CIA, joined the NSA delegation to Istanbul. During the conference, Dentzer brokered a deal between the Europeans and the more political of the unions. The result was a new vehicle called the Research and Investigation Commission (RIC). Delegates who wanted to condemn a dictator or call for the ouster of a colonial power could request an investigation of conditions in a particular country so long as the issue was linked to academic freedom or educational opportunity. If a majority of ISC delegates agreed, the commission would assemble an international team, conduct an investigation, and report back the following year. In this way, hot political topics would be removed from immediate debate and return as fact-laden briefs. At the time, it seemed like a brilliant solution to the problem of political demands.
The Americans—who justified the cost of RIC as a weapon to use against communist regimes—won backing at Istanbul for an investigation of East Germany. By contrast, non-Western ISC delegates, who had little interest in Cold War problems, voted to investigate educational conditions under the Perón dictatorship in Argentina and racial discrimination in South Africa, a harbinger of investigations to come, when RIC would be turned against the United States and its own racial policies.
Dentzer’s high-profile role won him the RIC chairmanship. He enhanced his reputation by securing immediate funding for the commission and its first investigation of racial conditions in South Africa. He notified his colleagues that he had “personally secured a grant from Mr. C. V. Whitney, a sportsman and breeder of winning race horses.”83 By now adept at handling cover stories, Dentzer assured the others he had informed Whitney that “we could accept no funds if any strings were attached, and he fully understood and agreed with this procedure.”84 Dentzer and his immediate successors kept a tight rein on RIC, at least initially, by dint of a procedural detail. Unlike the Supervision Commission, which required candidates to have support from home student unions, RIC could nominate anyone to be an investigator. It could therefore hand-pick its personnel and prevent the appointment of firebrands.
The Istanbul conference drew student leaders from forty countries, a number high enough to justify a publicity campaign afterward. COSEC press releases made the bold claim that the only countries missing in Istanbul were those from the Iron Curtain and satellite countries.85 Denial operations seemed to be heading for a smashing success, at least as long as no one looked too carefully at the composition of the delegations.
The ISC may have lacked a natural constituency, but CIA resources proved it could play the numbers game at least as effectively as the IUS. Whether the International Student Conference could inspire loyalty or win new friends for the West without generous material incentives remained to be seen.