THE FIRST TIME Clive Gray heard rumors that the 1959 World Youth Festival would be held in Vienna, he was incredulous.1 Why would the Soviets risk losing control of the festival by allowing it to be held in a noncommunist country, and why would the Austrian government, with its policy of strict neutrality, agree to it? He felt that the mere discussion of a Western location handed the Soviets a propaganda victory: it suggested confidence and openness on the part of the communists. And if the past was any guide, twenty thousand young people were likely to descend on Vienna.
The CIA went on the offensive, developing ambitious goals to “smash” the festival, “take over” the left-wing American delegation, and, most important, identify and recruit friendly foreign nationals from Africa and Asia to tie them more closely to the West, a plan later approved by the U.S. National Security Council.2 The CIA launched a multi-layered operation, each group often unaware of the others, including a contingent of nonwitting American students and handpicked young professionals with more specific assignments. One such recruit was a Smith College graduate named Gloria Steinem.
“Gloria was our leader,” murmured Moscow festival veteran Richard Medalie when he recalled her role in the Vienna operation.3 Long before Steinem became a feminist icon, she was one of the few women in the NSA-CIA club. Although Steinem, who knowingly cooperated with the CIA, is sensitive today about her work with the Agency, as NSA colleagues attest, her friend Clive Gray beams when he recounts recruiting her.4
Gray met Steinem in New Delhi, where she held a Chester Bowles Fellowship after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Smith. He recalls that his CIA case officer in New Delhi suggested he look up this “intelligent and attractive young woman.” Steinem had made a favorable impression on prominent Indians, including Indira Gandhi and Congress Party leaders. By the time Gray met her, Steinem had developed an interest in international politics; she had wanted to go to the Moscow festival in 1957, but could not find travel funds.5
When CIA officials decided to create a front organization to handle the recruitment of ordinary American students for the festival, Gray submitted Steinem’s name to Harry Lunn. Lunn, then using the Department of Defense as a cover, looked over Steinem’s credentials—noting especially her time in India and her connection to Gandhi and other Congress Party members and told Gray, “This person looks interesting. What about her?”6
Steinem became the public face of the Independent Service for Information on the Vienna Youth Festival. Incorporators included former NSA officers Leonard Bebchick, who became Steinem’s co-director, Gray (who had turned down an offer from Bill Dentzer to join the CIA full-time), and Paul Sigmund, and Moscow festival veterans Richard Medalie and George Abrams.7 On February 5, 1959, the incorporation papers were amended to reflect a simpler name: Independent Research Service (IRS).8
Medalie later described Lunn as “our puppet master,” although Steinem’s immediate boss was Bebchick. After his term as international vice president Bebchick had left the NSA and attended Yale Law School, where he did what he called “occasional chores” for the CIA. After law school, Bebchick took a job with the Civil Aeronautics Board and thought his CIA service was over. He was surprised when officials contacted him, described the plan to sabotage the festival, and asked him to run the operation.9
The Steinem group used the fact that NSA had once more boycotted the festival as its public reason for recruiting American students: “The organizers … support the position of representative student and youth groups in the U.S and Austria, the host country, along with those in numerous other non-Communist countries who have decided to boycott the Festival and deny it any official prestige. … At the same time, they [the NSA] do expect that many intelligent and patriotic Americans will wish to attend in an individual and non-representative capacity.” Thus, the IRS group would gather information that would “lessen the exploitation of their presence for propaganda purposes.”10
Moscow festival veteran George Abrams explained in Newsweek how young undergraduates could be effective advocates for American values. “When a fluffy, wide-eyed American girl of 19 is surrounded by the curious and asked hundreds of questions, her natural approach is her greatest asset.”11
While Steinem looked for wide-eyed volunteers on the nation’s campuses, overseas NSA staff, in another prong of the attack, had been trying to force the festival out of Austria. The strategy was to spark protest demonstrations in Vienna in the hope that the festival planning committee would change the location. Witting staff envisioned a joint protest by Hungarian students in exile and the Austrian student union.
Clement Moore, cooling his heels in London after being expelled from France, was deployed to contact the Hungarians. In May 1958, he sought out Alpár Bujdosó, the Hungarian who had stumped U.S. campuses in 1956 under the pseudonym Istvan Laszlo and now led the Union of Free Hungarian Students. Bujdosó, then in Vienna, heard Moore out but argued that demonstrations might provoke counterdemonstrations: foreign students studying in Vienna might be in favor of the festival. He initially declined to be involved.12 (Moore reported yet another problem to the plan: festival organizers had yet to open a headquarters in Vienna, so there was nothing to demonstrate in front of or to raid—an observation that suggests the NSA had other tricks in its repertoire.)13
Moore had also discussed festival tactics with the head of the Austrian student union (OH), Herbert Mauser. At first Moore found him uncooperative. Mauser argued that the NSA should stay away from the festival altogether. Like Bujdosó, he feared that “unpredictable Austrians” might cause “physical harm.”14 His position puzzled Moore, since by spring 1958, virtually every youth and student group in Austria (including OH), except the young communists, had announced its intention of boycotting the festival. Moore concluded that Mauser was just lazy, preferring “nightclubs and glasses of beer.”15 Bruce Larkin suggested to his colleagues that the NSA carry on a friendship campaign, using every opportunity to “hot box” Mauser, and “convince him that he is really loved.” Larkin then suggested, “If necessary, [offer] some kind of incentive to play ball.”16
Mauser finally came around, although the NSA may have had nothing to do with his change of heart. The OH, Catholic Youth, Boy Scouts, and other groups formed an action committee in Vienna, and Mauser assured the NSA that he could produce a demonstration of thirty thousand along the Ringstrasse.17 When the demonstration led by Catholic Youth took place, on March 3, 1959, bands of ultranationalist Austrian youth opposed to the festival turned out for it just as Mauser had warned. Their reputation as “toughs” renewed fears of street violence during the festival.
The decision to permit the festival to be held in Vienna had caused internal dissension among top Austrian government officials. Chancellor Julius Raab, who made the initial decision, defended his position later: “Austria as a free and democratic state could not have acted otherwise.”18 But the decision incensed President Adolf Schärf and the state secretary, Bruno Kreisky, soon to be foreign minister. They felt that Raab was either appeasing or favoring the Soviets. Schärf and Kreisky decided to take matters into their own hands and create their own anti-festival operation.19 During the festival, for example, Bebchick was given a special phone number: “If you have a problem,” he was told, “here’s the person to call in the prime minister’s office.”20
Despite mounting opposition inside Austria, the WFDY-IUS festival planning committee held fast to the Vienna site. For Khrushchev, 1959 was a time of confident, almost cocky, overtures to the United States. According to his biographer, the year before the Vienna festival, Khrushchev sought every opportunity to press for a U.S. visit.21 He challenged Western allies to resolve the question of a divided Berlin. He proposed an end to nuclear weapons tests. Whatever fears the Soviets had about holding the festival in the West, the prospect of a propaganda coup seemed to override them.
WHILE EUROPEANS DEBATED the festival location, Steinem encouraged undergraduates to apply to the left-wing U.S. Committee for International Student Cooperation, which still controlled the official delegate selection. Organizers on the New York committee were overtly hostile to anyone associated with Steinem, but the Chicago organizers proved more willing to accept applications from people she recruited. Steinem and her staff screened candidates, often young professionals, for financial support, forwarding the recommended applications to C. D. Jackson, Eisenhower’s former chief psychological warfare adviser. Jackson had long-standing ties to covert intelligence operations, had helped found Radio Free Europe in the late 1940s, and constantly goaded Eisenhower to fight communism more aggressively.22 As an establishment figure, now a speechwriter and consultant to the president, and a seasoned behind-the-scenes operator, Jackson helped Steinem find corporate sponsors and camouflage CIA funds.23
Steinem had encouraged an application from Michael Harrington, leader of the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL) and Bebchick’s New York apartment mate.24 In general, socialists could be counted upon to cause trouble. They despised communists, knew their Marx and Lenin, and were great ideological infighters. Harrington was a charismatic figure, good at oratory, and able to go toe to toe with hard-line festival organizers.25
Although eager to take his first trip to Europe and meet other young socialist leaders, Harrington felt uneasy about accepting Steinem’s offer. He feared that the State Department might be behind the funds, so he put the question to YPSL colleagues. After a lengthy debate, Harrington told Steinem he would go under two conditions: he would not officially join the delegation and would remain free to attack American capitalism and foreign policy. Soon afterward, Steinem reported to Jackson that Harrington had withdrawn his application.26 Presumably Steinem or her staff did not agree to his stipulations. Witting operatives could take provocative stances against U.S. policy—they knew the boundaries—but it was quite another thing for outsiders to do so.
The older NSA cadre, among them former president Richard Murphy (1952–53) and international specialists Paul Sigmund and Helen Jean Rogers, scouted for individuals who, once in Vienna, could be provocateurs, a role quite different from encouraging young students to sign up with the American delegation. In some cases, the recruiters reached back a decade to find Cold Warriors with a taste for combat. Jack Ranso-hoff, a thirty-one-year-old nuclear engineer, agreed to disrupt a festival seminar on atomic energy. Charles Bartlett of the Chattanooga Times and News Focus steered Walter Pincus, then a twenty-seven-year-old rookie reporter, toward the festival project. Pincus, today a veteran Washington Post journalist specializing in national security issues, in an interview described Bartlett euphemistically as “plugged in,” alluding to his cooperation with the CIA.27 Pincus, a Yale graduate, had other credentials, having served for two years with the U.S. Army counterintelligence corps, where he interrogated people to probe for communist affiliations.28 He thought the festival “sounded like a good story,” but today, like so many others, Pincus emphasizes his passion to fight communism. On Bartlett’s advice, Pincus talked with the FBI both before and after his trip to protect himself from charges that he had attended a communist event. (When he returned, he received—but declined—an offer to join the CIA full-time.)29 CIA officers Harry Lunn and Bill Dentzer also went to Vienna, where they plotted strategy, advised Steinem and Bebchick, and mingled with the delegates.
By mid-July, the Independent Research Service had reached its recruiting goals. Bebchick believes that the IRS found at least 100 of the roughly 350 Americans who eventually headed for Vienna.30 The influx of IRS-identified students caused friction between the New York and Chicago festival organizers. Most had signed with the Chicago organizers. At first, the New York group refused to recognize the Chicago contingent. While it relented, the simmering conflict would erupt during the festival.
Right-wing anticommunists in the United States also organized young people to go to Vienna. Herbert Romerstein, a former Communist Party member (in his teens) turned professional anticommunist investigator, recruited conservative Catholics and other hard-liners to disrupt the festival.31 Romerstein later attributed his ten-thousand-dollar budget as a gift from Alfred Kohlberg, head of the China Lobby, a powerful anticommunist organization opposed to Mao’s China and supportive of Chiang Kai-shek.32 Even if he did receive a private contribution for the Vienna festival, the sheer scale of Romerstein’s activities in Vienna suggests U.S. government cooperation.
The Romerstein group excelled at dirty tricks. They arranged for literature and lapel pins to be printed in Germany and brought to Vienna. The material was written in the festival idiom of “peace and friendship” but contained anticommunist messages. Thousands of festival delegates snapped up the faux festival pins printed in Chinese, Russian, German, and English, only to find they contained the phrase “freedom fighters.”33 According to information later printed in the Congressional Record, the Romerstein group was also responsible for planes that flew over the festival grounds with banners that read, “Free Hungary” and “Free Tibet.” Others infiltrated the festival leadership. Charles Wiley, a Romerstein ally, bragged that since he knew “a little of Communist jargon, I passed myself off successfully as an American Communist.”34
In essence, Romerstein ran a covert operation within a covert operation. Some of his conservative recruits finagled their way into the American delegation by lying on their applications. Stephen Unsino, a student from Fordham University, a Jesuit school, applied to the Chicago committee but pretended to be from the more liberal Columbia University. Fluent in Russian, Greek, French, and Italian, Unsino volunteered to act as an interpreter, giving him unique access to the American delegation, both the IRS-recruited and the left-wing students.35
One other group may have been recruited from the United States. Thomas Garrity, a Vienna festival attendee who had been active in the NSA during the late 1940s, recalls hearing that U.S. Army recruits based at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, grew their hair long enough to pose as students and went over to disrupt the festival.36 No evidence has emerged to support the rumor, but none of the witting staff who worked on the Vienna festival rule it out. If the CIA feared right-wing Austrian toughs were spoiling for physical fights, it might have decided to take out an insurance policy.
In Europe, CIA officials worked also with pro-West youth groups to organize anti-festival strategies, among them the International Union of Socialist Youth, the World Assembly of Youth, and Pax Romana.37 British intelligence undertook a strategy parallel to the Americans: to disrupt both the leftist British delegation and the festival. Years later, a European scholar conducting research in the NATO archives stumbled on documents that indicate that NATO, too, organized counter-festival activities.38
These various operations required substantial funding, although an exact figure is impossible to calculate. Steinem drew on CIA funds from a “special account” managed by C. D. Jackson.39 She also had assistance from the chair of Chase Manhattan Bank, John J. McCloy, who while high commissioner of occupied Germany had organized against the 1951 World Youth Festival in East Berlin by hosting a simultaneous festival in West Berlin. In his banking capacity, he was able to route funds to Swiss banks. According to McCloy’s biographer Kai Bird, these funds were then transferred to Liechtenstein, picked up by car, and delivered to Vienna.40 Richard Medalie today describes the availability of funds as wildly excessive: “I had money coming out my ears.”41
AS THE AMERICAN DELEGATES gathered with the roughly seventeen thousand young people who had come to Vienna, Steinem’s group pressured festival organizers to host a meeting of the rival factions from Chicago and New York. The organizers first resisted the request and then acquiesced, and the meeting took place on July 25, the day before the opening ceremonies. Among the anticommunist Americans who headed for the confrontation was Malcolm Rivkin, a Harvard and MIT graduate who was part of the IRS group. When he first heard about the festival, Rivkin thought it would be a lark.42 He wholeheartedly agreed that the festival was a propaganda show, “a bunch of baddies dipping the flag to the Communists.”43 But since the IRS would pay his airfare, he decided to go to Vienna and laze around Europe a bit afterward.
Shortly after the meeting began, Rivkin became ticked off when festival organizers announced that Marvin Markman, head of the New York group and overtly hostile to the IRS-recruited delegates, would chair it. Rivkin decided to demand an election. To be heard, he jumped up on a table to address the crowd, which he later described in an interview as a spontaneous decision.44
What happened next is a source of dispute. Rivkin says someone from the leftist American delegation jumped him.45 Other reports accuse a French festival official, Jean Garcias, of leaping on the table to shove Rifkin off.46 Regardless of the cause, irate delegates started clubbing one another. Rivkin remembers Zbigniew Brzezinski, the future U.S. National Security Advisor, being hit over the head. Eventually, everyone cooled down. The dueling Americans realized that they weren’t getting anywhere by beating people up.47
Steve Max, a seventeen-year-old member of the New York group, had watched the brawl unfold. By 1959, the young Max had logged more time at political meetings than most politicians do in a lifetime. His father, Alan Max, had been the managing editor of the Daily Worker. In the mid-1950s, the younger Max had been active in the teen section of the pro-Soviet Labor Youth League, though in 1959 he was no longer active. (Known then and now for his droll sense of humor, Max said later that he realized young communists were swimming against the tide when meetings consisted of monotone recitals of rock-and-roll lyrics, an exercise designed to highlight bourgeois decadence.)48 Max was finding the IRS tactics incomprehensible. Its members kept demanding to see the Russians, he said, yet the five hundred–person Soviet delegation was visible to every one, since they wore identical suits. Max’s group, which included Paul Robeson, Jr., kept telling Steinem’s troops, “Go outside and see the blue suits.”49
Max observed other disruptions that he presumed came from the Steinem group, though they may have come from the Romerstein group. In a tented beer garden, left-wing Americans and Cuban delegates had warily struck up a conversation. As they talked, they started relaxing, and amicable relations were being established when, according to Max, “all of a sudden comes an American nobody knew. He sits down and picks a fight—soon everybody is screaming at everybody else. Then he leaves.”50 All dialogue ended. Today, Max shakes his head over the small act of sabotage. Most people were there to have fun.
But not everyone. Raúl Castro, Fidel’s older brother and a member of the Cuban Communist Party, returned from the Vienna youth festival determined to make Havana a haven for youth organizing, especially in the Western hemisphere.51
After they arrived in Vienna, the veterans of the Moscow festival realized that there had been a flaw in their planning. According to Richard Medalie, it had been easy in Moscow to talk to ordinary Russians on the street and get his message across. By contrast, the Vienna festival was in the tightly controlled Messegelände parade grounds. Festival organizers policed the entry and exit gates. Those without credentials, especially Steinem and her provocateurs, had to sneak in and out through a hole in the fence. Some foreign delegations, especially those from Eastern Europe and China, were not accessible outside the parade grounds. The Chinese stayed in private homes and were surrounded by guards. Hungarians were housed on a guarded barge on the Danube. Unlike Moscow, “There was no mandate to be open,” Medalie explained.52 Even if they could get inside the huge pavilion, without maps or guides the saboteurs were soon caught up in milling crowds; it was like an exceptionally crowded state fair.
The IRS found that the ideal spot to distribute pro-Western literature was along the campground fence, a sensitive area for festival organizers. While distributing pamphlets from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, an Ohio woman tussled with a festival official. Western media reported that she had been “slapped in the face by a festival guard.”53 In another incident, Bebchick described how a “wonderful pregnant girl from Iowa … got knocked to the ground,” and then admitted, “We used her, and she used herself … on the front lines.”54 Press reports of these incidents, many of them deliberately provoked by the Steinem group, reinforced the Americans’ message that festival officials were so threatened by free expression they resorted to physical violence.
Bebchick described Brzezinski as an “excellent agent provocateur”: the Polish-born Harvard instructor stirred up trouble by exploiting the traditional animosity between Polish and Russian delegates. Medalie also remembered that he and Brzezinski “went to the East European compounds and pretended we were Soviet delegates. We acted boorishly and insulted everyone in Russian.”55
Some provocations were uniquely American. Nothing disrupted formal sessions more than the New Orleans marching jazz band, whose trumpets, drums, and saxophones blared lively anthems like “When the Saints Go Marching In.” The band performed admirably, Bebchick claimed: “Every time we wanted to break up a session, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, we would send the marching band out and they would draw people away from the meetings to listen.”56 The Yale Russian Chorus was also pressed into service and performed the same function.57
Other American tactics were designed to spark anger against the festival organizers. The Americans sent out fancy invitations to phantom cocktail parties. When thirsty invitees showed up for the party, the theory held, their disappointment would turn into wrath, and they would blame the festival host committee—and therefore the Soviets—for incompetence. These tactics were first used at the 1951 festival in Berlin. Many years later, a congressional hearing found that the repertoire in 1951 included “forged invitations, false promises of free bed and board, false notices of cancellations,” and, appallingly, “attacks on participants with explosives, firebombs, and tire-puncturing equipment.”58 If the more aggressive techniques were used in Vienna, no one has claimed credit for them.
Far and away the most heralded aspect of the anti-festival operation, then and later, was the publicity blitz. Steinem worked with Samuel Walker, Jr., a vice president of the Free Europe Press, associated with Radio Free Europe, to put out a daily newspaper in six languages. In deference to the Austrian government’s sensitivity over the broadcaster’s controversial role in the Hungarian uprising and lingering bitterness among refugees, Walker camouflaged his identity by creating a temporary front called the Publications Development Corporation.59 Steinem also had recruited Clay Felker, a journalist from Esquire magazine, to help her put out the daily. The plan hit an initial snag: a propaganda blitz required a distribution system.
Denied easy access to the festival grounds, the small Steinem team improvised. Since no toilet paper had been supplied to the outhouses serving the delegates, someone thought up the idea of furnishing them with the daily newspaper to use as a substitute. Of course, no one knows whether the toilet user would be able to read the paper; did a Spanish-speaking delegate find a message in Spanish or was he or she forced to peruse an Arabic edition? Walter Pincus later defended the distribution as superior to having thousands of papers snatched up by festival organizers and put in the trash.60
Walker later crowed that “400,000 copies of a daily newspaper” had been published.61 He also estimated that 36,000 books had been distributed to festivalgoers, including 1984 and other works by George Orwell, and books by Milovan Đjilas, a Yugoslav critic of Tito and author of The New Class.62 The avalanche of anticommunist propaganda led Walker to write to C. D. Jackson afterward and claim, “Never before have so many Young Republicans distributed so much Socialist literature with such zeal.”63 Yet one wonders whether the greatest effect of the blitz was that it fulfilled a bureaucratic need inside the CIA to measure success. Counting the number of publications distributed was far easier than assessing American influence on the political opinions of festival participants.
Today Bebchick deems the anti-festival operation a success for its propaganda value. “I said at the time, and I still believe, that it doesn’t matter what happens in Vienna. The only thing that matters is what the world thinks happened in Vienna.”64 The “icing on cake,” he asserts, was the ability of Steinem’s group to influence international press coverage. “We did a masterful job in controlling the press. We learned what lazy slobs they are. They will take whatever you feed them.” The American embassy in Vienna sent Steinem and Bebchick daily press clips, which reinforced their cynical view. “There was one bastard that we couldn’t control, and only one,” Bebchick said with grudging admiration. “That was Abe Rosenthal [of the New York Times]. He went his own way. He reported things. He did not take a handout. He did his own analysis. He was the only true journalist.”65
Tipped by Steinem’s group to cover certain issue seminars, the compliant press focused on the actions and statements of the young professionals from the United States. “Anti-Reds invaded discussion seminars and forced Communist speakers into debate with embarrassing questions,” read one article.66 During another seminar, Pincus sparred with Paul Robeson, Jr., while CBS filmed their confrontation. Pincus said he strode to the microphone to challenge the nonsense he was hearing only to find it turned off. Pincus demanded that the seminar be opened up to everyone who wanted to speak. Robeson, he recalled, kept asking him in return, “Why are you here if you aren’t committed to the ideals of the festival?”67
Paradoxically, the strategy of bringing naive and nonwitting students to Vienna dismayed the older cadre. “The kids treated it as a lark,” Pincus complained; “we wanted substance.”68 Festival organizers would buy off the young Americans with free tickets to major events, such as performances of the Bolshoi ballet, although Bebchick confesses today that he sneaked off to see the Peking Opera. Still, Bebchick and others stole as many tickets to events as they could get their hands on to minimize the turnout, loot that today resides in Bebchick’s basement.69
Fed up with the college-weekend atmosphere, Pincus, Bebchick, and Brzezinski decided to dramatize the West’s message. The trio found some banners, tied them together, and cut out letters to spell “Freedom.” In preparation for the final parade, they dragged a wooden plank up to the top of a building and lay in wait. At dusk, the plotters threw the plank across a gap between two buildings and unfurled the banner. As the lights in their building went out, they scrambled across the plank to the adjacent building, out of reach of the pursuing police.70
BEBCHICK ALSO ADMITS that the central objective of the whole operation—establishing contact with Asian and African students—was a failure.71 Like many who worked with the CIA, he stresses the future importance of attracting these students: “These were students, two or three years after we met them, who were representing their countries at the U.N., became foreign ministers, etc.” Witting participants had been instructed to “make contact” and “start a relationship,” then turn the names over to the CIA for follow-up.72
Cliff Thompson, a Rhodes Scholar and former president of the Executive Board of the Harvard Crimson, later published an account of the festival in the paper. Thompson pointed out that it was unrealistic to fantasize about “repartee in a Vienna wine cellar” with students from Africa or Asia. He questioned the pursuit of delegates who came as athletes or performers, and quoted a fellow conspirator as saying, “There’s no good in a PhD candidate talking politics with a 16-year-old banjo player.”73
Clive Gray today scoffs at the idea that festivals were a place to recruit foreign nationals. He described the Indians who attended the Vienna festival as “total opportunists” and “absolute dregs,” not worth anyone’s pursuit.74 The point of the countermeasures, as Gray viewed it then, was to “make a stand,” and show the Soviets that Americans “were not taking it lying down.”75 He said one could have “fleeting contact” with Third World delegations but by and large “you didn’t know who they were.” But Gray has changed his view of the festival’s importance. He now says that the United States “could have ignored the whole thing and it wouldn’t have made much difference.”76
CIA liberals regarded the counterfestival operation as a success, especially after the New York Times ran a headline that read, “Reds Displeased with Red Fete.”77 The article claimed that the Soviets had concluded that they had underestimated the intensity of Western opposition. In addition, Steinem received high marks for her work in the United States and Vienna. When planning began for the next anti-festival operation in Helsinki, Finland in 1962, Steinem was asked to reprise her role and agreed. By then, the CIA had acquired an enthusiastic backer of counter-festival operations in the person of Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother and U.S. attorney general.78 In Helsinki, the CIA set up its own nightclub and targeted Africans, who were thought to love jazz. The tactic was as dubious as expecting parlays in Vienna wine cellars to pay off, although it resulted in memorable images of Steinem parting the beaded curtains to enter the nightclub as if she were Mata Hari.79
In a little-known postscript to the Vienna festival, Gray remembered standing around chatting with the CIA’s Bill Dentzer when the long-time head of the IUS, Jiří Pelikán, walked by. By then, Dentzer had spent eight years fighting the IUS as NSA president, COSEC associate secretary, and CIA career staff, yet he did not recognize Pelikán; Gray had to point him out. The long-standing NSA policy of refusing contact with the IUS lest it confer legitimacy on the organization meant that Americans never evaluated their opponents firsthand.80
The policy against all contact remained in place even after the Eisenhower administration decided to hold talks with the Soviet premier. In fact, on the eve of the Vienna World Youth Festival, Americans watched television coverage of a conversation in Moscow between Vice President Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev. The riveting encounter, dubbed the Kitchen Debate since it occurred in a model Soviet kitchen, should have signaled to the NSA that a policy of no contact might be difficult to maintain. If the United States could engage in détente, what prevented Americans students from dialogue with the IUS?
In 1959, the political world again shifted in important ways. The Cuban revolution stirred the imagination of Latin Americans, who sought to duplicate Castro’s feat. African countries won independence from European colonial powers in increasing numbers, and joined together in newfound solidarity.
Khrushchev revised Soviet policy toward liberation movements. In the years after the Bandung conference, the Chinese, rather than the Russians, had emerged as the more aggressive supporters of revolutionary movements. In response, the Kremlin gradually altered its orthodoxy on how revolutions should occur (with Soviet guidance) and who should lead them (the proletariat).81
At the same time, American students were developing their own ideas about revolution and the threat of communism. The constituency pressure at the 1958 NSA Congress for a hard-hitting arms embargo against Batista’s Cuba had presaged the change. But a revival of campus interest in politics was not confined to liberal students. The NSA would soon be pushed and pulled in opposite directions by liberals and conservatives, leading to some of the most turbulent years in the organization’s history, and ultimately challenging the CIA operation.