THE NSA-CIA OPERATION grew so rapidly between 1952 and 1954 that it is tempting to conclude that intelligence officials never met a student problem they couldn’t solve with CIA resources. Those resources covered NSA international operations in the United States, activities related to the ISC and COSEC, including NSA dues, and other projects designed to impress foreign students. This funding was in addition to direct support for the ISC and COSEC overseas operations. Inevitably, the need for secrecy and supervision grew along with the outpouring of resources.
By mid-1954, a snapshot of expanded operations would include the following: The CIA funded the NSA International Commission administrative and staff expenses, including salaries for the international vice president, an assistant, desk officers (at hourly rates), overseas representatives, and short-term project staff.1 At the annual NSA Congress, the CIA funded special sessions for student body presidents and campus newspaper editors, leaders who shaped campus opinion on international programs and policies.2
The CIA financed NSA publications aimed at overseas students, including the International Information Bulletin, a new Spanish-language magazine, and Spanish translations of NSA Congress proceedings. It funded travel for foreign students to attend the NSA Congresses: forty in 1954, up from twenty in 1952.3 Separate grants covered hospitality for foreign guests at the Congress, and campus tours before and after it. The NSA international office, still located off-campus at Harvard, quietly routed administrative funds to NSA headquarters to equalize the vast disparity in resources, providing roughly one-fourth of the NSA domestic budget, which hovered at around $12,000.4
The CIA funded NSA delegations to a number of overseas meetings, among them the International Student Conference and meetings of the World Assembly of Youth and the World University Service, as well as special meetings, such as the Japanese International Student Conference, which was actually a fledgling attempt to build a national student union in Japan, intended to counter the IUS-affiliated Zengakuren.5 It paid the NSA’s dues to the ISC, among the highest in the conference, since dues were calculated on the basis of students represented, and the NSA claimed 800,000 to one million students.6 In the single month of May 1954, the NSA international office submitted fourteen separate proposals to FYSA, consisting of only one or two pages each, all of which had been secretly negotiated ahead of time and were assured of success.7
Internationally, CIA funds flowed in increasing amounts to the ISC and its Coordinating Secretariat (COSEC). They supported a growing COSEC staff and administrative expenses; supplied travel funds for Supervision Commission meetings, whose members expanded from five to nine countries; and funded a COSEC publications program in French, Spanish, and English that included informal bulletins, The Student magazine, and special reports.8 In 1954, the Research and Investigation Commission joined the list.
Each year, David Davis and John Simons at FYSA held secret meetings outside Leiden to discuss future funding with John Thompson, the COSEC administrative head, and with the NSA representative, first Dentzer, then Ingram.9 In some cases, FYSA contracted directly with foreign students to work within a region, as Simons did with Enrique Ibarra from Paraguay, a Pax Romana member and trusted confidant of Helen Jean Rogers.10 In addition, FYSA supported projects related to the NSA agenda that were routed through COSEC.
By 1954, Simons had become vexed by the fact that by funding a single delegate per country he put control in the hands of one person to interpret the annual ISC after he or she returned home. FYSA therefore increased its travel budget for the next ISC in Istanbul, making two awards available per country, at a cost of $66,823.90 (today more than half a million dollars), triple what was spent for the Copenhagen ISC.11 The total cost probably ran higher: Simons often financed Latin American travel directly through the New York office of Pan American Airlines.12 Although COSEC dispensed most ISC travel funds, Simons kept considerable discretion in his own hands. He created five categories of eligibility, with priority reserved for unions with a demonstrated interest in the ISC.13 Within two years, the annual cost of an ISC in today’s dollars exceeded a million dollars. These expenditures are a far cry from the later claim that the CIA gave only a few travel grants to American students.
FYSA also abandoned its policy of requiring European national unions of students to pay their own travel expenses to the ISC. As the ISC began to meet outside Europe, the distances created fears of lower turnout by even the stalwart European members. Simons included in his COSEC grant award increased money for European student unions to travel to an ISC. In between the now annual conferences, Simons awarded NSA funding to bring European students to the United States to meet with the NSA president and tour campuses, either as a reward to allies or to shore up lukewarm support for the ISC.14
With financial resources assured, Ingram and others worried far more about finding qualified personnel. By 1952, as World War II veterans left campus, few students even at the graduate level had the “sophistication” of Douglass Cater, Thomas Farmer, James Grant, or William Polk. Individual campuses had begun to protest the overreliance on Harvard students for international affairs assignments, putting the International Commission under pressure to cast a wider net for delegations and individual projects.
Had CIA funding really been aimed, as the Agency later maintained, at facilitating an agenda determined by the NSA, personnel would not have been an issue. Scores of American students were available for goodwill tours or to attend international conferences, regional seminars, work camps, and other joint ventures. One student body president, eager to attend the Istanbul conference, experienced a typical rebuff by the international vice president: “Istanbul is a very fluid and tricky affair, and we must be certain that our delegates are fully aware of the intricacies of the game.”15
But prospective personnel needed to be screened, trained, tested, and able to pass background security checks. In 1953, the CIA established a recruiting vehicle, the International Student Relations Seminar. The ISRS (pronounced IS-RIS) offered a six-week summer course for selected students.16 The CIA asked Ted Harris, then at Princeton University, to direct the seminar. Since his NSA presidency, Harris had worked for the ISS-WUS in Geneva, and for John Simons in the Middle East in the summer of 1952.
To assist Harris, the CIA selected Paul Sigmund, a Harvard graduate student in government. The twenty-three-year-old Sigmund was a smart, savvy man with a gift for argument. He explained his willingness to cooperate with the CIA in pragmatic terms: “It kept me out of Korea.”17 With the reinstitution of the military draft, CIA-engineered deferments became valuable commodities, although usually a student had to serve six months of basic training and agree to continue working with the CIA beyond his year in office.
Unlike many newcomers, Sigmund had prior experience with the NSA. As a Georgetown University undergraduate in 1948, he had moved in Catholic circles, campaigned for an NSA chapter on campus, and attended an NSA Congress. Before joining the ISRS staff, Sigmund worked as Ingram’s assistant. He handled everything from an early German student-exchange program, openly financed by the U.S. Department of State to bring leaders of the new German student union, VDS, to the United States, to foreign student hospitality at the NSA congress.18 In fact, after extensive discussions about personnel problems with Ingram and Simons, Sigmund crafted the proposal for the summer seminar.
The ISRS applicant pool included self-selected students and those who were tapped by the NSA old guard. Talent scouts included the CIA’s “P source” (professors), who identified students suited for work in psychological warfare against the Soviets, campus administrators, and deans of students. Personal interviews were mandatory. As one NSA officer put it: “The interview is … the only way of uncovering personality difficulties as well as superficial thought processes.”19 Kenneth Holland and others on the FYSA board served as the selection committee. Occasionally, the NSA argued for the admission of a student to the seminar for political reasons whom it had no intention of recruiting.
The six-week ISRS session, initially held at Harvard, and later outside NSA headquarters in Philadelphia, gave the CIA time to conduct background security checks. Some students were excluded from future employment by their politics or personality. Others were rejected if their parents had politically suspect backgrounds (that is, too leftist) or had engaged in dubious business activities. Reluctant but talented recruits might be enticed to give up their summer in return for vague promises of future overseas postings. But such offers had to be kept indefinite until security investigations were complete and the students had been tested.
Students who enrolled expecting a general course on international relations found the curriculum disappointingly narrow. It emphasized IUS-ISC relations and specific national student unions, their politics, factions, and personalities. Seminar participants occasionally heard from academic specialists such as Harvard’s China expert John Fairbank and German expert Carl Friedrich, but by and large professors were there simply to give the seminar a patina of academic respectability.20
For the most part NSA elders served as faculty.21 John Simons taught the history of IUS-ISC relations. FYSA director David Davis lectured on the Soviets and youth activities. Helen Jean Rogers, Frank Fisher, Robert Williams, Paris-based David Duberman, and other NSA veterans handled various geographic areas, often lecturing on multiple countries and topics.22 They imparted a distinctly NSA-centric perspective on such matters as IUS calls for unity meetings (invidious) or invitations to tour the Soviet Union (harmful). Harris and Sigmund used written essays, role-playing, and seminar discussions to determine whether a student strayed outside the preferred positions.
Of all the mechanisms created by the NSA-CIA team, the summer seminar was the most successful. Critics who argue over whether the CIA controlled the NSA miss the point of a sophisticated recruitment program. As both Allen Dulles and Thomas Farmer have emphasized, the most effective agents are those who share a community of interest: men and women who passionately support the same goals and objectives as the CIA.23
The critical question is rather who crossed the threshold into the NSA-CIA fraternity and who was excluded. Once candidates became part of an NSA-CIA operation, signed the security oath, and started reporting to a CIA case officer, the boundary between student organization and spy agency blurred. The longer a witting student stayed involved, and many logged five years in return for escaping the draft, the more thoroughly the boundary dissolved, making it impossible to determine where the NSA’s interests stopped and the CIA’s began.
As the operation grew, the CIA expanded its pool of recruits to include students studying overseas on Rhodes, Rotary, or Fulbright scholarships, and people who had a demonstrated interest in international affairs, expertise in a country or region, or valuable language skills. In 1958, the NSA obtained Fulbright applications from the Institute of International Education, which were to be kept secret, locked in a filing cabinet and returned.24 The CIA eventually slipped young career staff officers who worked at headquarters, although not necessarily with youth and students, into the summer seminar to be educated in the nuances of ISC politics and prepared to represent NSA overseas.
As a condition of acceptance into ISRS, students were required to attend the late-summer NSA Congress after completing the course. They mingled with delegates and helped ensure that the Congress passed desired international resolutions. They also steered delegates toward CIA-preferred candidates for elective office. The ISRS graduates did not have to be witting; most readily deferred to signals from ISRS leadership. While the CIA identified preferred candidates, plans sometime went awry. In its first year, ISRS saved the day when it unexpectedly produced a back-up candidate.
Leonard Bebchick was the son of a tobacco distributor from New Bedford, Massachusetts, with no previous experience with the NSA. A graduate of Cornell University who originally majored in pre-med but quit after setting a record for the “highest glass breakage bill in freshman chemistry,” Bebchick had devoted his extracurricular time to the student newspaper, The Cornell Sun, and the campus radio station rather than student government.25 He became smitten with political science courses taught by Professors Mario Einaudi and Clinton Rossiter, and when he saw a flyer describing the summer seminar, Bebchick glimpsed an alternative to weeks spent in the gritty seaport of New Bedford. He applied, he remembered, primarily because “I wanted to travel abroad.” After his ISRS acceptance, Bebchick simultaneously enrolled at Harvard University’s summer school to pursue his new interest in international politics. A few weeks later, he ran for NSA office.26
Paul Sigmund recalls the circumstances.27 At the last minute, the candidate backed by the CIA for international vice president could not run, and insiders cast about for an alternative. During the Congress, Bebchick had won kudos for advancing the NSA position on foreign student exchanges. The NSA opposed allowing short-term foreign student exchanges with members of the Soviet bloc, fearing that naive students would come away impressed with the communist system and not understand how tightly the Soviets controlled the agenda. (That the NSA offered foreign students the American equivalent of short-term exchanges by calling them campus tours seemed to escape everyone’s attention.) In a heated committee session, Bebchick took on students from Swarthmore and Oberlin who argued that the NSA should support student exchanges regardless of their duration. Bebchick’s passionate support for NSA policy signaled he was a team player and could advance the right arguments.
Today Bebchick is proud of his performance. “I confronted the argument bang on. I hit the ball out of the park.” Another source of pride was going up against Allard Lowenstein, who sided with the students favoring short-term exchanges. After only “two or three months with NSA,” Bebchick says, the CIA “thought my instincts were basically sound politically,” and “they threw their weight to me.” More humbly, Bebchick added that they were “sort of desperate.”28 Bebchick was elected vice president for international affairs.
Some time after Bebchick’s election, Farmer invited him to the stately Mayflower Hotel, situated a few blocks from the White House. As Bebchick underwent the ritual of signing the security oath, he remembers Farmer stating that “each year we make two people witting, and they have the decision of whether or not they want to go along with it.”29
Bebchick did not hesitate, he said in an interview, despite his total ignorance of the CIA. “I mean, they were as covert as anything could be in the Cold War.” He recalls telling Farmer, “I’d studied with Hans Morgenthau and I’m all for this.” (Morgenthau, a professor at the University of Chicago, was known for advocating realpolitik in international relations.) Bebchick today defends his participation: “We were doing God’s work,” he says, lightly pounding his fist on his law library table for emphasis. “We were not starry-eyed idealists; we were all pretty hardened people, all political types who had a realistic assessment of what the world was all about, and yet we felt we were doing God’s work.”30 This mingling of religious fervor, a sense of a higher calling, the desire to fight communism, and a lack of moral qualms about working under-cover, tied the students more firmly to the CIA than any security oath ever could.
At the Mayflower, Farmer told Bebchick that some in the CIA had resisted making him witting. “They went to Uncle Allen [Dulles], and he had to make the decision whether Bebchick should become witting or not,” he said, speaking of himself in the third person. Bebchick speculated that his liberal positions on the Cornell Sun, where he argued in favor of China’s admission to the U.N., among other issues, had created concern.31
The high-level reassurance from Dulles gave the liberal Bebchick a feeling of protection, as well as importance. “Here we were,” says Bebchick, “out in international meetings condemning American policy being advocated by John Foster Dulles, the Republican secretary of state for Eisenhower and Allen Dulles’s brother. We always felt comfortable about doing that because we knew our guy was Uncle Allen, and Uncle Allen would go and talk to brother John.”32
The NSA needed more than secret protection from Uncle Allen to survive. It required bipartisan political support from top-level U.S. government officials to ward off attacks by right-wing conservatives and hard-line anticommunists, including Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was being fed information by J. Edgar Hoover, no fan of the CIA, which he felt infringed on his territory.33 In the early 1950s, flamboyant McCarthy supporter Fulton Lewis, Jr., among others, picked up where Allen Crow from Detroit had left off in 1947, and accused the NSA of communist sympathies. On his weekday radio program, when Lewis wasn’t advocating the impeachment of Harry Truman, declaring the U.N. a “colossal farce,” or describing Europe as “full of Marxists and appeasers,” he was ranting against the NSA.34 Paradoxically, after years of wariness toward Catholics, NSA liberals began touting their prominence in the NSA as evidence that charges of communist penetration were false.35 Key senators, congressmen, and even presidents credentialed the NSA by sending congratulatory telegrams to the annual congresses.36
During his term (1953–54), Bebchick also recalled Farmer telling him that the NSA “was presented to the National Security Council,” or a similar body, as an example of “a highly successful CIA-controlled front in the American battle against communism.”37 While Bebchick’s use of the phrase “CIA-controlled front” slips out effortlessly in conversation, this kind of language makes other NSA-CIA veterans cringe. Nothing is more vehemently denied than the notion that the CIA controlled the NSA or its international offspring. The report Bebchick referenced was most likely one to the Committee on International Information Activities, commissioned by President Eisenhower at the beginning of his term.38
Farmer misled Bebchick on one crucial point: that only two NSA officers were witting. While it was technically true that only two elected NSA officials were witting, Bebchick was stepping into an ongoing CIA operation, one with career opportunities and a well-established, if subtle, hierarchy. At a minimum, during Bebchick’s term, the NSA-CIA team consisted of Cord Meyer, Jr., and Farmer, full-time career officers at CIA headquarters; Simons, a CIA career officer at FYSA; Ingram, who replaced Dentzer on COSEC; David Duberman, the NSA representative in Paris; and Ted Harris and Paul Sigmund of ISRS. Dentzer, Bill Ellis, Helen Jean Rogers, and other HIACOM desk officers also took specific CIA assignments.39
By the time Bebchick assumed office, the CIA had additional safeguards in place to ensure fidelity from elected officers. One was financial: Bebchick was told, as were all future NSA international vice presidents, that his salary was not guaranteed. The NSA would “carry me for six weeks,” he related, “and then I would have to go out and raise money.”40 But he was not to worry because “there were places to look for money.” On advice from Ingram, Bebchick contacted a “Mr. Smith” from Texas, who promptly agreed to fund his salary.41 This provision made it appear to the uninitiated that the International Commission had to fund itself or go out of business. In practice, it further insulated the international program from prying eyes.
The other safeguard was a new position inside the International Commission. In early 1953, FYSA began funding an assistant to the international vice president. The first assistant, Edward Gable from the University of Southern California, was identified by one of his professors. Ingram traveled to California to interview Gable, who knew nothing about the NSA but accepted the offer. At the time, Ingram’s secretary, Catherine (Kitty) Fischer, remembered feeling displaced. “I just couldn’t understand why we needed another person.”42
Gable might work for Ingram, but soon after he took the position, he received a reminder of who held the purse strings. In a written account, “The Day John Simons Was Here,” Gable described Simons’s thorough scrutiny of the international office. “I must admit that by the time we had gone through the rooms I was beginning to feel as if it were a congressional investigation,” he told Ingram.43 Simons also reviewed the activities of HIACOM, which was equally unexpected since technically HIACOM was a committee of the Harvard Student Council, and Simons funded individuals, not HIACOM per se.
The CIA relationship with the NSA also was solidified by the natural deference that students then exhibited to their seniors: freshmen to sophomore, junior to senior. Typically, top NSA officers were recent college graduates, but close enough in age to others on the NSA-CIA team to create an atmosphere of camaraderie. Bebchick noted that NSA veteran Helen Jean Rogers immediately took him under her wing. He regularly stopped by her apartment near campus, where they would have tea and “she would fill me in.”44
During his term, Bebchick also deferred to former NSA president Bill Dentzer. Under normal circumstances, as the elected official in charge of the NSA international program, Bebchick could expect to lead the U.S. delegation to the ISC. Instead, he asked Dentzer whether he should attend.45 While Dentzer answered in the affirmative, he informed Bebchick that other important decisions were to be in more senior hands. Bebchick, in turn, relayed these to Bill Ellis, writing, “You will be in charge of making all final decisions on administrative, financial matters.” Rogers would be “more or less in charge of the policy end of the affair.”46
Despite this deference, Bebchick insists today that he felt like a free agent. “We were given general guidelines and briefings, but basically they relied on our good judgment. I would take guidance. I would listen. I would generally go along. If I thought it was crazy, I would say no.”47 Asked if he could remember advice that he rejected, Bebchick could not. But he went on to contrast his year in office to his later experience with the CIA during the World Youth Festival in 1959 where policy control was more stringent.48
Within the NSA, Bebchick learned to be more secretive. After one meeting of the international advisory board, he told James Edwards, the president, that “Helen [Jean Rogers] and Bill [Dentzer] expressed extreme [underlined four times] displeasure over certain aspects of the consolidated financial statement.49 Furthermore, “they were shocked to find the sources of income explicitly stated, including exact contributions from the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs, the Committee for Free Asia, and William Smith.” NSA policy, he reminded the also witting Edwards, was never “to make public the exact amount of the contribution.”50
Bebchick also reported the “most serious slip”: the identification of FYSA funds in the financial report. Rogers and Dentzer told him it was “unwise and dangerous to reveal the exact amount of support, particularly when such aid constitutes such a predominant portion of the IC’s budget.” Bebchick’s watchdogs had pointed out the financial data were “exactly what the IUS has been dying to get their hands on for years. They now have the documentation to establish a close, if not organic, relationship between the Foundation [FYSA] and the IC [International Commission].” Rogers and Dentzer warned that the disclosures raised the “question of policy control” and could have “domestic repercussions, as well as disastrous international ones.”51
These statements are particularly illuminating: they leave no doubt that Helen Jean Rogers and Bill Dentzer understood that the risks of public disclosure were not limited to IUS enemies in Prague or Moscow; they violated the NSA constitution.
How is it that no one noticed the burgeoning operation or the influx of so many new resources? Only one adult adviser, Dennis Trueblood, from the dean’s office at the University of Indiana, who chaired the NSA Advisory Committee, ever officially questioned the financial arrangements. When he submitted his resignation after the 1952 Congress, he laid out five problem areas within the organization, topped by “international policy and fund control. Being a voluntary association of student governments, NSA has a policy of accepting funds with ‘no strings attached.’ However, when funds are accepted, and the source not published, there is immediate question as to the ‘strings attached.’”52
Since Trueblood was sympathetic to the danger of the IUS, he suggested that external educators review all policies and funding sources. “Such a plan would enable the educational world to have representatives aware of NSA internal operations in this field and would at the same time provide for a certain amount of secrecy in the operation of certain phases of the international program.”53
In response, Ingram appeared to strengthen the oversight of the international program by establishing a new International Advisory Board (IAB). In fact he further insulated it from scrutiny. Ingram made sure that old hands outnumbered non-witting appointees. When the (probably) unwitting IAB chair, Sylvia Bacon, prepared the 1954–55 fiscal report to the NSA Congress plenary session, it included the following statement: “The money received to finance the 1954–55 operation of the International Commission is not tainted. The Commission has not sold its soul to either right or left wing groups.”54 No one demanded evidence or even a financial accounting.
When nonwitting undergraduate veterans of the NSA looked back, many concluded that the one area the CIA could not manipulate was officer elections. But they pictured CIA agents as outsiders with no connection to the NSA. In some years, candidates for NSA office were witting before they announced their candidacies. In 1954, both top officers had been recruited beforehand.
That year the candidate for president was Harry Lunn, a brash, opinionated University of Michigan graduate, former editor of the Michigan Daily, with little NSA experience but a developing taste for travel and the good life. A few months before his graduation, Edwards and Bebchick tried to recruit Lunn for the ISRS summer seminar. Lunn wanted assurances of a foreign post afterward. Neither Edwards nor Bebchick could make that decision; they cabled Lunn that an overseas position was “contingent on summer performance.”55 On May 23, after another exchange of letters and phone calls, Lunn declined the offer.56 A week later, he changed his mind. He later told a New York Times journalist that the CIA recruited him during this time, which explains his change of heart.57
John Simons had sweetened the NSA proposition. Knowing that Lunn needed to earn a living during the summer, Simons awarded him a grant to produce a booklet titled “How to Run a Campus International Program.”58 While it paid the bills, Lunn was far from enthusiastic. According to Bebchick, “Harry hated that assignment, just hated it.”59 Yet the project gave Lunn carte blanche to travel around the country and survey campus-based international projects. Presumably, it gave the CIA time to complete its security investigation, normally conducted during the ISRS seminar. By the end of the summer, the booklet was complete and Lunn—with CIA support and a mere three months of contact with the NSA—was elected president.
Still, Bebchick says Lunn came close to losing the election. One of his main opponents was a student from Southern California, Kay Wallace Longshore, a man whom Bebchick described as “open at the collar, rough and ready, independent-minded.” During the first roll call, Lunn was trailing Longshore. Bebchick hustled over to Pete Weston from the Great Northwest region, “and I put my hand down around his shoulder … and I said it would make a great deal of difference to the future of our association” if he could get his delegation to support Lunn.60
Bebchick continued, “They caucused, and changed their vote. Harry won by the skin of his teeth, 4 or 5 votes, and that’s what did it.” Bebchick and Weston were not close friends, but Bebchick believes Weston responded favorably because “I was the leadership,” and the leadership had asked him to switch candidates.61
Lunn rose rapidly on the CIA career ladder, eventually becoming a case officer and later FYSA director. His personality, which former colleagues at the Michigan Daily describe as one of not suffering fools gladly, or at all, evoked strong feelings from those who dealt with him. A few found him charismatic and charming; many found him arrogant, overbearing, and occasionally ruthless. A later NSA president considered him a snake. Friends say Lunn “loved the life of the spy.”62
The year Lunn squeaked by as president, Paul Sigmund won the position of international affairs vice president. By then, Sigmund had been witting for several years, as Ingram’s assistant (1952–53), ISRS assistant director (1953), and ISRS director (1954).63 Over time, the CIA suffered a few defeats. But by then, other mechanisms were in place. These included the security oath, the absence of a guaranteed salary, an assistant who reported to the CIA, and the presence of a savvy overseas team that could bypass top officers.
While Lunn may have hated his summer assignment, the survey of existing programs shaped the signature achievement of his presidency. The resulting Foreign Student Leadership Project (FSLP) adopted a direct approach to grooming overseas leaders. The project brought to the United States hand-picked foreign students from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East for a year of education, with paid tuition and living expenses.64 On campus, the scholarship students were encouraged to participate in student government. The NSA hoped the students would return home and create a student union or take over an existing one.
The FSLP brought the CIA into dangerous territory. The 1947 statute authorizing the CIA placed strictures against operations within the United States. The project, located in Cambridge, was risky enough for the CIA to seek a bona-fide philanthropy as a partner. After a year of negotiations, the Ford Foundation agreed to help fund the project. John Simons became secretary of the FSLP board, and David Davis served ex-officio. Without any representation from the Ford Foundation, the FYSA board reviewed applicants submitted by witting staff.65 The CIA promoted Ted Harris to direct the FSLP.
The program rarely worked as intended: few foreign students wanted to stay for a single year, fewer still became enamored of student government. Those who returned home typically had lost their political base. But the FSLP did bring dozens of talented students to the United States, and many of these later became prominent in their home countries or in international organizations, including a future U.N. secretary general.
Ironically, the CIA had to seek a presidential executive order to prevent other U.S. intelligence agencies from raiding this tempting pool of talent.66 CIA career officers who dealt with FSLP acknowledge that the bar on recruitment of a foreign student while on U.S. soil did not apply after the student returned home, but they are coy about particulars.67
Before his term expired Sigmund visited Paris in June 1955 for an annual CIA-NSA discussion of personnel assignments, and then attended a lavish party for James Edwards, the former president, who was spending the year in France as an NSA representative. Sigmund gaped as he saw that every table “was equipped with its own faucet running wine—not water.”68 It was an apt metaphor. The CIA spigot flowed not with wine or water but with clandestine funds, and the result could be just as intoxicating. Only in retrospect would those involved in the NSA operation realize that these were halcyon days.
Stalin’s death in 1953 unleashed new political forces in Eastern Europe. Two years later, nationalist leaders in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America shook up the international system by refusing to choose sides in the Cold War. The problems faced by the NSA-CIA team became more difficult, and less subject to technical fixes, however generous the resources. The tendency to reduce problems to programs or projects persisted but proved inadequate to the challenge of combating powerful new political currents. The NSA’s witting staff struggled to keep up with the changes.