IN JULY 1962, UCLA sophomore Stephen Robbins attended the Quebec conference on his own and acquired his first taste of international student politics. Robbins’s journey from neophyte observer to president two years later changed the course of NSA history. Inquisitive by nature, sometimes brash, and always intense, Robbins began to ponder some of the oddities in the operations of the NSA International Commission. He pushed his way into the inner circle, first as chair of the NSA oversight board, then as president. When Robbins finally gained access to the NSA’s secret, his shock gave way to a determination to reduce the CIA’s stranglehold on the association.
It began as a lark. In the summer of 1962, Robbins, the chair of the sprawling NSA California-Nevada-Hawaii region, and a friend, James Mahoney, decided to observe the ISC in Quebec.1 Unaware that the NSA discouraged casual visitors, the two assumed they would be welcome. When they arrived at the Laval campus, Robbins remembers Paul Becker, the Canadian in charge of logistics, greeting them warmly, if warily, “like loose cannons.”2 The perception was not misplaced. Becker, who was sitting with NSA president Ed Garvey when the pair appeared in the doorway, can still recall Garvey’s reaction: “He groaned.”3
At the time, Robbins and Mahoney chalked up the chilly reception to the fact that they were interlopers. They moved on. Having heard about the World Youth Festival in Helsinki, they returned to New York and met with Gloria Steinem, hoping to travel with her group. But Steinem also turned them down. At this point, Robbins considered their experiences with the NSA merely a little odd.
Although he had lived abroad, before Quebec Robbins thought of himself as mainly interested in domestic affairs.4 He cared about civil liberties, civil rights, and nuclear test-ban treaties. Quebec whetted his appetite to learn more about the international side of the NSA. When he arrived in Columbus, Ohio, for the 1962 August Congress, he absorbed the lectures given by old hands on NSA history, including information about the rupture with the International Union of Students in 1948 and the formation of the International Student Conference, and the current state of student politics in Latin America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Well, thought Robbins, this is all pretty interesting.5 And he began to formulate questions—lots of them.
Robbins observed the older former NSA men who hovered around the edges of the Congress, sat in on committee sessions, and struck up informal conversations with delegates. In his mind, the presence of former NSA officers added stature to the association; despite busy lives, they seemed to care enough to devote a week or more to the Congress. Still, he found it a little peculiar that they had remained so engaged.6
Since Robbins harbored ambitions to run for president, he paid close attention to the mechanics of the elections. He spotted more anomalies. The ISRS graduates dominated the debate on international issues, but as a group he found them apolitical. Few had ever served as student body president or editor of the campus newspaper. Most were older graduate students who specialized in Africa, Latin America, or Asia. But they intimidated undergraduate delegates with their superior knowledge.7
Robbins watched as the candidate for president sailed to victory. Dennis Shaul, a twenty-four-year-old Notre Dame graduate and Rhodes Scholar, was a veteran of two World Youth Festivals, in Vienna (1959) and then as co-director with Gloria Steinem at IRS in Helsinki, and, unbeknownst to Robbins, was a former recipient of CIA per diems. Shaul later told a friend that in the past he had refused overtures to run for office because of his ambivalence over the CIA’s role.8 In 1962 he succumbed.
Robbins found the election for international affairs vice president troubling. The contest pitted Donald Smith of the University of Texas against Robert Backoff of the University of Illinois. Smith appeared to have the inside track when the contest suddenly turned ugly. Whispered innuendos and rumors about Smith’s sexuality rippled through the delegations. It was a smear campaign, decided Robbins, but by whom and why?9
When Smith squeaked to victory, Robbins realized that Smith, as a former student body president and incumbent officer, had a political base that enabled him to win without support from the ISRS graduates. Still, Robbins was not alone in his feeling that something was very wrong. Howard Abrams of the University of Michigan protested the election tactics in a letter to Shaul. In his response, Shaul acknowledged that manipulations had regrettably occurred in previous years, then cited Smith’s victory over Backoff as proof that no manipulation occurred: it was “the greatest example of a failure in this regard.”10
In fact, Smith’s election signaled a rare victory over manipulation, not its absence. The smear campaign had been a panicked response by witting officers. Outgoing NSA president Garvey today acknowledges that the CIA caucus originally backed Smith until they heard rumors, “at the very last moment,” that he was gay. (Garvey emphasized “at the ver-r-r-r-ry last moment.”)11 If true, Smith would not have been the first homosexual officer; Avrea Ingram, the 1952–54 international affairs vice president, had been gay, though not openly, a fact not widely known among his colleagues until his tragic death, a reported suicide, in 1957.12 (In 1967, the Los Angeles Times reported that after Ingram’s death Bill Dentzer swore an Ingram family member to secrecy, confided the nature of Ingram’s work, and suggested that the Russians might have killed him. The story was a fabrication, but it was a way to imply that Ingram had died as a patriot.)13 In general, according to Dan Idzik, the CIA had dealt graciously with previous (closeted) gay officers.14 The crucial issue with Smith appeared to be one of timing.
Few outside the NSA knew how badly Smith fared over the next year. A traditional perk of the post of international vice president was overseas travel, beginning with a fall trip to Europe. Witting staff toyed with the idea of grounding Smith. Don Emmerson, who had moved from the NSA to COSEC, discussed the problem with Paris-based Don Hoffman: “It would be extremely difficult and messy to prevent him from coming [over].”15 He suggested that instead they “send him off to obscure places; get Reiner [director of FYSA] to scare him off of financial commitments, take care of his wanderlust and get him out of the office.”16
Albert Reiner, who took over student activities at the funding conduit FYSA, played to the script. In October, he informed Smith that the foundation would be “cutting back,” that “over expenditures would not be picked up by the Foundation, that no—absolutely no—grants would be made within a few weeks before or after an event.”17 In disbelief, Smith wrote to Emmerson that Reiner “even said NSA and COSEC should not assume that the Foundation will honor all of the major part of its commitments.”18 In his correspondence, Emmerson evaded any discussion of NSA finances; no doubt because he knew that FYSA’s crackdown on the NSA would last only so long as Smith was in office.19
Relying on private mailing addresses for witting staff, threatening to cut off funding, and maintaining onsite personnel who reported to the CIA enabled the CIA’s work with the NSA and COSEC to continue unimpeded. Thomas Olson, a graduate of the University of Minnesota, managed day-to-day affairs for Smith. Like his predecessors, Olson maintained a post-office box in Philadelphia for sensitive communications. In turn, he sent confidential material for Emmerson in Leiden to a private address. The volume of correspondence was so high that Emmerson advised Olson to send some material to the secretariat so as not to arouse suspicion.20 The CIA also funded a position for the losing candidate, Robert Backoff; he handled contacts with foreign student organizations in the United States. His presence kept Smith from access and ensured a continued flow of intelligence reporting. The CIA rewarded Backoff the following year with the coveted post in Paris.21
At the end of Smith’s term, in 1963, an overseas post that he believed had been promised to him before he ran for office disappeared behind a veil of denials and obfuscations. The humiliating rejection left him bitter and puzzled.22 When Smith’s friends demanded an explanation, the new NSA president Gregory Gallo defended it as a series of misunderstandings, and implied the fault lay with Smith.23 What truly rankled Smith were the appointments of Robert T. Francis and William C. McClaskey, two men with no experience with the NSA. Both were assigned to work in Africa, the field promised to Smith.24
Since in the early 1960s the NSA was under heavy political attack from the right, Robbins and other liberals were circumspect about publicly criticizing the organization. Not long after the 1962 Congress, Richard Viguerie, the executive secretary of the Young Americans for Freedom and the future pioneer of direct mail, outlined a fifty-state plan to challenge the NSA campus by campus. Denouncing the NSA as a “tool of the radical left,” he labeled its claim to represent 1.3 million students a “fantastic fraud.”25 Having been unable to take over the leadership, the YAF hoped to destroy the NSA. In the ensuing campaign, Viguerie flipped the NSA slogan “The students of today are the leaders of tomorrow” on its head, declaring, “The leaders of tomorrow will be conservative if organizations such as YAF can reach them today.”26
By the end of the 1962–63 academic year, the YAF had helped persuade thirty-three campuses to disaffiliate; dozens more colleges or universities had considered and rejected affiliation. The list of disaffiliations included New York University (Washington Square branch), Indiana University, Ohio State University, the University of Texas, Northwestern University (Wonderlic’s alma mater), Denison University, the Universities of Missouri, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, New Hampshire, and Utah, Vanderbilt University, Xavier University, Fordham University, Tufts University, Texas Christian University, and Franklin and Marshall College, among others.27 Howard Abrams remembers that at one point it appeared that every single one of the Big Ten schools might withdraw.28
Thus Robbins pursued his criticism in private, through long letters to Marc Roberts, chair of the NSA executive committee. He denounced the use of “so-called experts” on policy committees who “in the guise of teachers” gave “biased opinions.”29 Shaul did his best to deflect the criticism, and at one point thought he had succeeded. He wrote to Roberts that Robbins was “coming around,” but they should “continue to develop him.”30
But Robbins was not the only one with questions. In May 1963, Howard Abrams confronted Shaul over the secrecy of the International Commission’s operations. Shaul admitted that there “was a great deal of truth” in the charge that the International Commission was a “self-perpetuating oligarchy,” but pointed out that many NSA critics, among them members of the Students for a Democratic Society, had been invited to attend the summer seminar.31 Abrams, who learned about the Quebec meeting at secondhand, pressed Shaul on policy issues. He wanted to know why the NSA had not stood with the progressive student unions that walked out. Why was it so tepid in its support for Third World issues? Shaul vigorously refuted the last charge. He pointed to the extremely liberal resolutions compiled in the NSA Codification of Policy, published after each student Congress.32
But Shaul also told Abrams that he was distressed to hear that a “small revolution” was brewing, aimed at the International Commission.33 He was partially correct. Robbins, Abrams, and others decided to avoid a confrontation at the 1963 Congress, however, to focus on reforming the oversight mechanisms of the NSA. Their plan was to abolish the thirty-three-member National Executive Committee and substitute a smaller National Supervisory Board (NSB). The intention, Robbins explains today, was to permit genuine oversight, which was harder to do with a large committee. The proposal created four meta-regions (Far Western, Mid-Western, Northeastern, and Southeastern), which each had two or three representatives, depending on the number of member schools in the region.34
Shaul paid little attention to the reform package. He had his hands full trying to balance the left and right factions within the NSA. By the summer, sit-ins, pickets, and demonstrations were no longer being confined to soda counters or large corporations—protesters now were attacking policies of the Kennedy administration. Shaul had little interest in antagonizing administration officials, especially since he was hoping to persuade Robert F. Kennedy to address the Congress.35
Shaul’s problems piled up. In early summer, a coalition of civil rights organizations announced a march on Washington for late August to pressure Congress to pass stalled civil rights legislation. At that point, the Kennedy administration was opposed to the march, fearing it might set back the legislation. Further complicating things for Shaul, the dates conflicted with the NSA Congress, ensuring a contentious debate over whether the NSA should support the march. In May, Indiana University—site of the August Congress—voted to withdraw from the NSA. Pre-signed contracts made it impossible to cancel the Congress, but it was an awkward situation.
In late July, Shaul took steps to defuse the tension. He invited SDS activist Paul Booth to discuss “how far the Association can go at this moment in its social action policies.”36 He also asked Booth to take charge of a Congress seminar on education and the Cold War.37 Booth agreed. Shaul also sought to placate the right. Richard Meece, head of the Young Republican National Federation, had attacked Shaul for sitting on the liberal Americans for Democratic Action board while presiding over the NSA. In a Washington Post interview, Meece charged that the NSA was “not committed to open debate.”38 Shaul notified Meece that he had resigned from the ADA board and acknowledged that his acceptance of the position had been a mistake.39
At the 1963 Congress, Shaul tried to reconcile the left and right, telling delegates, “We must restore the philosophy of student government; restore what it means to be a participant in democracy.” He described American students as “politically powerless for too long,” even using the leftist depiction of students as “downtrodden reserves in society.” The key, he told delegates, was balance. The association was not afraid of direct action but must uphold principles of nonviolence. The national leadership of the NSA was “sensitive to the charge that the association is run by an elite,” but changes would have to “come from within.”40
The reform package proposed by Robbins and others to establish a ten-member National Supervisory Board passed without controversy, although it left intact the separate International Advisory Board. Robbins was elected chair. He was joined by liberals Howard Abrams and Mary Beth Norton from the University of Michigan. Norton, later a pioneering feminist historian, cooperated despite her frequent annoyance at her male colleagues. She says today of the NSA: “The worst sexism I ever encountered.” During the Congress, she steamed when Robbins told her that “girls couldn’t chair large meetings.” But she put aside her personal feelings because like the others she cared about the NSA and did not want to play into the hands of the right wing.41
At the Congress, despite the usual fear of insurgent candidacies, the elections went smoothly for the CIA caucus. Gregory Gallo from the University of Wisconsin, an ISRS graduate and Catholic moderate, won the presidency.42 The international position went to Harvard University’s Alex Korns, who had been groomed for the post since 1961, when he worked on an Algerian students’ conference. He had since assisted foreign student delegations and served as assistant director of ISRS. Before his election, Korns had even written his senior thesis using confidential NSA documents. The thesis itself was marked “confidential.”43
After the Congress, Robbins returned to UCLA for his senior year. His new position as NSB chair gave him more clout for his persistent questioning of NSA operations. Now he focused on policy, starting with the NSA position on Iraq. In February 1963, Ba’athists in Iraq had spearheaded a coup against the ruling prime minister, General Abdul Karim Kassem. The NSA Congress, prodded by the international staff, had congratulated Iraqi students on the revolution and praised their role in it. A similar resolution hailed the Ba’athist-led revolution in Syria. What Robbins knew about the Ba’ath Party, he said in a later interview, “reeked of fascism.”44 But before confronting the NSA leadership about these resolutions, Robbins decided to seek out the opinion of Arab students on the UCLA campus. What he learned increased his doubts.
Robbins pressed Korns to explain why the NSA had given “unqualified support to the Ba’ath Party in Iraq.” He pointed out that the regime seemed anything but democratic and submitted a list of particulars. Before the coup, for example, Iraq had twenty-six newspapers; now there were two. The “repression of civil liberties in Iraq and Syria,” Robbins charged, had reached “severe proportions.”45
Korns defended NSA policy, even though in the compartmentalized world of the CIA, he surely knew only part of the story. The CIA had worked for years to oust Kassem because he was deemed too tolerant of the Iraqi Communist Party. The agency scoffed at the argument that Kassem used communists to counter Nasser’s Pan-Arabian appeal.46 In fact, in 1958, the U.S. Senate had summoned CIA director Allen Dulles to explain the “intelligence failure” that allowed Kassem to come to power.47
The Iraqi Ba’ath Party became the CIA’s chosen instrument to overthrow Kassem. Despite its socialist orientation, the United States believed that the Ba’ath could be a bulwark against Soviet penetration. In 1959, the CIA deployed a young Iraqi Ba’athist named Saddam Hussein to assassinate Kassem. He failed and had to flee to Cairo, where the CIA gave him ongoing financial support.48
In February 1963, after a successful CIA-backed coup, Kassem was killed by an Iraqi firing squad. James Critchfield, CIA chief of the Near East division, later called it a textbook example of a CIA operation: “We really had the t’s crossed.”49 A Ba’ath leader also later acknowledged, “We came to power on a CIA train.”50 But the most serious aspect of the coup, with implications for the NSA, was the preparation by the CIA of a list of alleged communists and leftists targeted for elimination under the new regime.51 The list included leading members of the IUS-affiliated General Union of Iraqi Students (GUSIR).
Before the coup, the NSA had done its part to oust Kassem by backing a new organization, the National Union of Iraqi Students (NUIS), formed in Baghdad on November 23, 1961, to challenge the pro-Soviet GUSIR.52 The NSA gave NUIS broad press coverage and, through COSEC, urged ISC members to protest against Kassem.53 At one point, the NSA used documents smuggled out of Iraq to prepare anti-GUSIR material.54 U.S. embassy officials in Iraq tracked the progress of NUIS, and nudged it along.55 NUIS officers were encouraged to move up the date of a scheduled congress so that a delegation would be able to attend the 1962 ISC in Quebec.56
Six months or so after Quebec, NUIS called for a student strike, which some historians say helped divert attention from other aspects of the coup.57 When the predictable violence broke out, NUIS blamed Kassem. Once again, the NSA played a supporting role, publicly praising NUIS for being “at the core of a new effort to bring down the Kassem government.”58
In the aftermath of the coup, NSA field staff reports glowed with satisfaction. Exiled Iraqi student Walid Khadduri at Michigan State University praised the NSA, writing to headquarters that he was “singularly pleased by the USNSA-COSEC commitment prior to the February 8 revolution.”59
But the coup was followed by large-scale violence. By March 1963, the Ba’athists had arrested an estimated ten thousand Iraqis and executed an estimated five thousand.60 The Soviet Union charged the United States with enabling a bloodbath. A senior U.S. official later observed, “We were frankly glad to be rid of them [the communists].”61 No one has admitted to supplying student names to the new regime, but every year NSA staff turned in hundreds of reports that contained assessments of foreign students. It apparently never occurred to witting staff that the information might flow through their CIA case officers into a broader CIA pipeline, a fact that today haunts many of them. But the consequences of the killings for Iraq were serious: the former National Security Council adviser Roger Morris maintained that the arrests and murders decimated Iraqi elites.62
In his response to Robbins, Korns downplayed the violence. He relied on field staff reports to assure Robbins that the Ba’ath Party was “ably led” and had “a promising program.”63 He acknowledged that it was difficult to defend the Iraqi student union as democratic, but with the exception of the Lebanese union, Korns argued, no student union in the Middle East could be defended on civil libertarian grounds. “Nevertheless, I would defend a policy of close cooperation with the Ba’ath unions on the grounds that these unions are the most dynamic and significant in the Middle East.”64 He repeated the argument that NUIS had a broad base, “seems to enjoy the enthusiastic support of a large number of Iraqi students,” and was at the “forefront of the Ba’ath movement.”65 He ignored reporting that showed that it had gained favor with the Chinese, who saw the IUS member GUSIR as pro-Soviet.66
Korns also confided to Robbins that the NSA expected the Iraqis to control five ISC votes, “Syria, Jordan, Libya, and perhaps Palestine,” all countries where the Ba’ath Party was active. Further, he added, Iraqi “influence might extend to Morocco.”67 In NSA-CIA terms, that prospect spelled bonanza. The expectation continued the pattern of placing large hopes for an entire region on changes in one country.
Robbins did not buy Korns’s explanation. “It seems to me that the resolution congratulated the Iraqui [sic] and Syrian students on their ‘democratic revolution.’ If this was not the case, then I would like to withdraw my comments.”68 Robbins knew perfectly well that the text read, “Recognizing the courageous effort of the National Union of Iraqi students in the successful revolution of 8 February 1963, against the dictatorial and brutal regime of General Kassem, USNSA congratulates NUIS as it begins its new role in striving to create a free and open society in Iraq.”69
But Robbins also knew he had reached an impasse. The undergraduate from California could not compete with the International Commission no matter how much history he knew or how many Arabs he consulted. Robbins mentally filed the NSA’s support for the Iraqi and Syria Ba’ath parties as another mystery.70
Robbins may have been too much of a neophyte to grasp the politics of the ISC in Quebec the year before, but he came to understand what the NSA had in store for the militant students who had walked out. Publicly, the NSA pledged fealty to the resolution to invite the dissidents to the next conference. Privately, the NSA-CIA team was discussing a “splitting strategy” to permanently force unfriendly members out of the ISC.71
How much Robbins knew about the strategy is unclear, but he suspected enough to call it a campaign of harassment and protest to Korns.72 “I do not believe that the proposed plan to eliminate the extreme left from the ISC is sound. The recent coup in the Dom Rep will probably make the Lat American Unions even more restive, but I am inclined to believe that, even if you win, you will succeed only in gratifying the [International] Commission’s lust for absolute control over all variables and the negative results could be disastrous. It seems to me that enough power exists now to control COSEC and I wish you would provide me with concrete evidence of programs or activities that would be improved or facilitated by eliminating this group from the Conference.”73
After Quebec, Korns privately called the ISC an “artificial bucket of worms,” so he either agreed with Robbins or had decided to placate him.74 “Your misgivings about this idea are well founded,” he wrote back, “and I am far from sure in my own mind as to what will have to be done at the next ISC.”75 He suggested that an answer might be to strengthen the secretariat. If COSEC were given the “normal powers and privileges of an executive, it [would] be in a much better position to defend itself and to counter disruptive tactics within the ISC.”76 Korns’s suggestion reflected a growing consensus that the ISC-COSEC problems were structural and not the consequence of its membership.77
Rather than try to convince Robbins of the merit of individual policies, NSA president Gallo and Korns decided to coopt him. Not long after Robbins’s letter about the Quebec ISC, the two officials invited Robbins to join an NSA delegation to Asia scheduled to depart in December 1963.78 Robbins accepted.
Robbins went to Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia. “It was a fabulous experience,” Robbins said later.79 He met student counterparts and had audiences with top political leaders. The excursion also gave Robbins access to overseas international staff, whom he peppered with questions. Soon Korns was writing them frantic letters to find out what Robbins had learned, “so as to be prepared for his next onslaught.”80
Korns sent one note to Paris-based George Hazelrigg, who had caught up with the NSA delegation in Manila, reminding him, “We have up to now denied all intent to ‘exclude’ national unions at the next ISC.”81 What had Hazelrigg divulged about Quebec? Korns suspected that the answer to his question was “too much,” but blamed himself. “Don’t feel too badly,” he told Hazelrigg, “I should have warned you in advance.”82
Throughout the spring of 1964, NSA headquarters continued to try to bring Robbins into the fold. Gallo and Korns urged him to apply for the summer seminar, and Robbins toyed with the idea; the Asia trip had spurred his interest in international affairs. But his concerns over the peculiarities in the international program kept mounting. He declined the invitation—a decision he now describes as among “the best I ever made.”83
Just before graduation, Robbins had one more encounter with NSA headquarters that left him troubled. He was called into the UCLA chancellor’s office to discuss a telegram from Gallo and Korns that protested the upcoming visit from the shah of Iran to receive an honorary degree from the university. Could Robbins explain the cable? He could not. While Robbins had no use for the shah and saw him as dictatorial and corrupt, the NSA cable struck him as inappropriate. He also wondered why, as the head of the NSA Supervisory Board, he would have been left in the dark about Gallo and Korns’s intentions. He contacted NSA headquarters to ask for an explanation.84
Before long, the UCLA chancellor received a two-page letter of apology and an explanation of NSA policy from Gallo and Korns. They were concerned, they said, about the shah’s repressive policies, and they saw only two viable options for a post-shah regime: a pro-communist government and the noncommunist National Front, heirs to former President Mossadegh, whom they called “a fierce national leader.” Thus, NSA policy was “to shore up National Front elements among Iranian students and convince them that they have friends in the West and thereby help to insure that if the Shah is ever overthrown his place will be taken by democratic rather than Communist revolutionaries.”85 (Left unmentioned was Mossadegh’s overthrow by the CIA in 1953 for being too nationalist and too lenient with communists.)
Unknown to Robbins—and most of the NSA constituency—the NSA had, through its witting members, become deeply involved with the anti-shah Iranian Student Association in the United States (ISAUS), assisting with funds but also filing extensive reports. This involvement was not simply another case of the CIA working both sides of the street. The shah was a firm ally of the United States, and the CIA was working closely with the Iranian secret police in SAVAK, a bureau that it had helped established. The support for the dissidents appears, on the basis of the evidence, to have been a matter rather of encouraging NSA staff to gain access to these students.86
Unlike student dissidents supported by the NSA in the past, in fact, the Iranian students in the United States were in a life-threatening situation. SAVAK agents, often attached to the Iranian Embassy, pursued them throughout the United States.87 To allay the shah’s suspicion that ISAUS was getting help from the U.S. government, the State Department asked the Justice Department to deport any Iranian students suspected of being communist. Back in Iran, the students faced the shah’s firing squad.88
The ISAUS president, Ali Mohammed S. Fatemi, was among those who received deportation orders—and who had reason to fear the shah. His uncle Hassan Fatemi had been the foreign minister in the Mossadegh government; the two had intended to escape from Iran to the United States together, but on the eve of their departure, his uncle was arrested by the shah’s agents and later executed.89 Fearing that he faced a similar fate, Fatemi filed a lawsuit to prevent his deportation.90 In his efforts he had the support of the attorney general of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy, who resisted State Department requests to enforce the deportation order. After Kennedy had ordered an FBI investigation of the Iranian dissidents, he told a friend, “The FBI report is in, and not a bloody one of these kids is a Communist, so I just told Rusk [Secretary of State] to go chase himself.”91
By the time Robbins was asked to explain NSA policy on Iran, in May 1964, some of the Iranian students, including Fatemi, had given up on the possibility of peaceful change and had formed the Student Revolutionary Preparedness Committee.92 Today, Fatemi renounces violence as “never legitimate,” and seems embarrassed about this period of his life.93 But according to NSA reports at the time, Fatemi’s colleague Faraj Ardalan moved the committee’s agenda ahead and slipped secretly into Algiers, where with the assistance of President Ben Bella, he planned “to establish a training school for Iranians who in the future would commence para-military anti-Iranian Government activities.”94 Ironically, the NSA dithered before offering this committee a small amount of funding, only to have its offer rejected. One staff member in contact with Fatemi and Ardalan observed in a later interview, “They didn’t want us to know as much as we wanted to know.”95
Even the witting NSA staff did not seem to understand the danger posed to Iranian students by their constant reporting on them, and the risk that SAVAK could get hold of the information. Fatemi today condemns the reporting as a betrayal of the Iranian students’ secrets and adds, “Every one of us could have been killed.”96 Robbins, of course, was unaware of the gap between NSA policy as explained by Gallo and Korns and these dangerous games. But the whole episode made him more determined than ever to probe the secrets of the International Commission.
A few months later, in August, Robbins headed to his third NSA Congress, to be held at the University of Minnesota. Despite his unanswered questions, he had decided to run for president. He believed—correctly—that the NSA establishment would oppose him, but the witting staff had greater concerns. The electoral drama focused not on the presidential race but on the international contest. The small revolution that Dennis Shaul once worried about had made its appearance. On August 27, SDS activist Paul Booth from Swarthmore College took the stage and told delegates, “We need a year of close, critical scrutiny of the international affairs of this union of students.” Booth was running for international vice president with a campaign platform that NSA constituents needed to have a “meaningful way” to affect the policy of the International Commission. In a reference to the Quebec ISC, he charged, “Delegates had no say in the critical issue of NSA relations within the ISC and its relations with radical unions of students in the underdeveloped world.” He urged the delegates to break up the “monopoly of relevant information” that blocked full participation, stating, “There is no good reason why secrets should be kept from us.”97
To the cheering and whistling crowd, Booth declared that if, within a year, access to information were not opened, “it may be necessary to propose the creation of an elected independent watchdog group—with access to all files and the job of sending out monthly reports to student governments.” In a surprise move, Booth then withdrew from the race and endorsed his opponent, Norman Uphoff, a 1963 graduate of the University of Minnesota, then at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, and called for a “unanimous election by acclamation.”98
In a later interview, Booth explained his thinking. He had felt powerless to “affect the course of events, even after four years of being an active and loyal participant in NSA affairs.” His campaign speech was motivated in part by his irritation at “the appearance of adults who ran around the place. If only,” Booth joked, “we had known the concept of transparency.”99
Absent transparency, Booth could not have known that Norman Uphoff had CIA backing. Uphoff, a tall, affable man, likes to remind people that his full name is Norman Thomas Uphoff, a reference to his godfather, Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas.100 His parents were prominent Quaker activists in Wisconsin peace and labor circles, and at the University of Minnesota Uphoff had headed the Student Peace Union and served as student body president. As a pacifist, he opposed the Vietnam War. In this respect, Uphoff’s politics tacked close enough to the SDS to make his candidacy acceptable.
But Uphoff also held the traditional socialist antipathy toward communism that distinguished his politics from those of the SDS. In fact, the Steinem group had twice sent Uphoff and Student Peace Union activists abroad to cause trouble at Soviet-sponsored events. He attended the Helsinki World Festival of Youth in 1962, where he helped prepare a big banner for the final parade that read, “No Test, East or West.” He says it got the desired reaction: “The Soviet delegation went nuts and tore the banner apart.”101
Agency officials had approached Uphoff months before the Congress after rumors circulated that Jeffrey Greenfield, the outspoken editor of the Daily Cardinal at the University of Wisconsin, might run. Witting staff had had plenty of opportunity to test Greenfield, since he had traveled to Asia in the same delegation with Robbins. Today Greenfield scoffs at the notion that he was a threat. “If they had just asked.”102 Despite his very liberal politics, he disclaimed any affinity for the SDS, noting that as a New Yorker who grew up on the Upper West Side, he had long memories of the Stalin-Hitler Pact and popular front politics. But Greenfield was first and foremost a journalist, as inquisitive (and smart) as Robbins, and therefore perhaps not a welcome candidate.
At the same time, whether or not they identified with the SDS, Uphoff, Greenfield, and Robbins, along with other liberals, were moving to the left on a variety of issues. In fact, Greenfield wrote Robbins’s campaign speech. Had the CIA been able to find a way to keep Robbins from knowing the NSA’s secret, it surely would have done so. Everyone in the Agency knew that he took nothing on faith, questioned everything, and, by his own admission, rarely removed the bit from his teeth.