DURING PHILIP SHERBURNE’S presidential term, NSA headquarters staff paid little attention to the upcoming International Student Conference, scheduled for August 17–27, 1966, in Nairobi, Kenya, whose dates overlapped those of the NSA Congress, August 21–September 1. As outgoing president, Sherburne had to be in Champaign-Urbana, the site of the Congress, and could not be a member of the NSA delegation. After his year-long battle with the CIA, he believed that the timing was deliberate, to keep him from gaining access to ISC delegates or otherwise causing trouble. What Sherburne did not know was that the image presented by Kiley of the ISC as an important pro-West organization that championed democracy did not match its current reality as a hotbed of radical politics. As the ISC had continued to grow more militant and unpredictable, coping with its political complexity led to new levels of deception among witting staff and CIA case officers. Nonetheless, though the ISC and COSEC had become of secondary importance to the CIA, the Agency, still its primary funder, strove to maintain as much control as possible, especially within COSEC, since the secretariat oversaw the day-to-day programs that often provided cover for individual projects.
Earlier in the spring, as part of his attempt to get the NSA out of the role of a conduit for FYSA funds, Sherburne had told Kiley that the association would no longer funnel funds to COSEC for third-party projects; the only money coming through FYSA from the NSA would be the annual dues. Kiley retorted that the decision was not Sherburne’s to make. Thinking back over the absurdity of Kiley’s statement today, the former NSA president quipped, “Whose decision was it? The NSA Congress?” Sherburne also had expressed his doubts to Kiley about the value of the ISC. “My own feeling was that if the ISC went away, it was not going to be any big loss. IUS was still there primarily because we were, I mean, the ISC was there, and that they both would just wither away.” Kiley began sending old hands to convince Sherburne otherwise.1
At this point, Kiley must be seen as playing good soldier, since he is emphatic that after the 1962 ISC in Quebec, he had concluded that the ISC “doesn’t work; it’s dumb,” and made the case to his CIA superiors for its termination. Why did they reject his advice? He speculates, “There was a kind of vested interest that had been built over time that was very hard to break.” But he also acknowledges the country-to-country relationships built through COSEC programs had become a justification for reaching foreign students, even if “it wasn’t a very efficient way.”2 That attitude could explain Kiley’s strong reaction to Sherburne’s refusal to serve as a conduit for routing these project funds. Of course Kiley would never have confided in Sherburne the crucial distinction between an out-of-control ISC, and a COSEC that still served U.S. interests through its myriad tours, seminars, and other projects.
Ironically, a few months earlier, at CIA headquarters, officials had requested that Edward Garvey seek the top position in COSEC, telling him that the ISC would soon be terminated. In April 1965, Secretary General Gwyn Morgan of Great Britain had resigned, leaving COSEC leaderless. A reluctant Garvey, then working at Langley, agreed to apply, mainly because the term would be short. (Witting students often remained with the NSA-CIA operation for five years and spent one of those years at CIA headquarters.) Today he is unsure whether his CIA superiors lied to him. “I have no clue whether [what they said was] true; there is no way to differentiate truth from fiction.” Looking back, Garvey explained that an atmosphere of such intrigue prevailed inside the CIA that “you never knew the game within the game within the game.”3
While the command to Garvey to run may have made sense to his superiors, incredulity over his candidacy prompted Jyoti Shankar Singh, one of the Americans’ closest allies, to tell Garvey to his face that he was making a mistake.4 Singh had ably run COSEC from 1962 to 1964 and was then directing the CIA-funded World Assembly of Youth. The incumbent Asian associate secretary at COSEC, Ram Labhaya Lakhina, also from India, went farther and declared his candidacy against Garvey. Lakhina, a graduate of the Foreign Student Leadership Project, had been a one-time favorite of the NSA. But about this time, and for reasons that are not clear, the NSA’s witting staff turned against him. Some say he was too pro-Palestinian. Others disparage him as too compliant and pro-British. Lakhina insists that he opposed Garvey “on principle,” and spoke for those who felt that the United States already had “excessive influence.”5
Garvey muscled his way to victory. He explained away his two-year absence from involvement in either the ISC or COSEC by telling colleagues he had been in the army.6 When Lakhina realized that Garvey had the votes, he withdrew his application. But the Garvey-Lakhina contest turned the secretariat into a virtual armed camp, divided between two strong but discordant personalities and exacerbated by policy differences. Each suspected the other of using the travel budget to line up votes for a future contest. The conflict would erupt into open warfare at the 1966 ISC in Nairobi.
If the CIA had needed further evidence that the time had come to terminate the ISC, the Nairobi meeting provided it. Hair-raising was the word Charles Goldmark chose to described it. “A disaster,” said a Swiss student leader friendly to the NSA.7 No matter which geographical region the delegates came from, no matter how current or sophisticated NSA intelligence might be on individual delegations, the Americans went to Africa with few allies and a truckload of troublesome issues.
By 1966, most Latin American student unions had joined the IUS. Membership in the ISC had dwindled to four Latin American countries: Paraguay, Costa Rica, Chile, and Mexico.8 President Johnson’s policy of “no more Cubas” had resulted in a wave of U.S.-backed military coups in Central and South America that further angered the hemisphere’s students. The 1965 U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic made militants out of moderates and anti-Americans out of all of them. The year before, several students had died in a protest over U.S. ownership in the Panama Canal Zone. The NSA dithered for over a week before issuing a terse press release, “Mourn deeply deaths of Panamanian students,” which served to increase the fury of the Latin Americans.9
Before the Nairobi meeting, Fred Berger warned Garvey, “Today NSA is hardly known to the leaders of the Latin American student movement, and most of them would assume in any case that NSA is an arm of the aggressors and imperialists, our protestation to the contrary.”10 Berger could not think of more than two Latin American countries that might consider ISC membership, Bolivia and Honduras. He put another twelve “firmly in the Marxist radical camp.” Echoing comments made today by Kiley, Berger concluded that national unions of students were not a “stable building block” to build pro-West sentiment.11
Berger also warned Garvey to expect hostility from formerly friendly unions. Costa Rican leaders, previously reliable allies, had turned against the NSA. “They opposed you for Secretary General only because you were an American, but now they oppose you also on the grounds that you are dishonest and betray the ISC’s best friends.”12 In fact, the charges of double-dealing were mostly true.
The situation was bad not simply on the Latin American front. Virtually all NSA-CIA strategies to win influence in the Middle East had failed. The dalliance with the Ba’ath parties in Iraq and Syria blew up six months after the coup in Iraq. Hard-line Ba’athists staged a second coup, after which they declared the National Union of Iraqi Students illegal. Within the year, NUIS officers closest to the Americans had been arrested and imprisoned.13 In 1964, only two Middle Eastern unions in addition to Israel’s received funding for the ISC in Christchurch: NUIS chapters in exile (London and Beirut) and the Lebanese union.14 Not long before the Christchurch ISC, Lebanon had opted for membership in both the ISC and the IUS, “to express a neutral East-West policy.”15
In the early 1960s, when the CIA was searching for a way to offset Nasser’s influence in the region, it encouraged the NSA to support the Palestinian cause since it was galvanizing Arabs across national boundaries. An initial assessment by Paris-based William Lee, a Dartmouth graduate and newcomer to the NSA, concluded that an alliance with the Palestinians could “counter some of the IUS push in Cairo and the Middle East.”16
Lee’s report cast the leadership of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) in a favorable, if condescending, light. He found them to be “exceptionally rational, moderate, and informed about the student movement by Arab standards.”17 But international staff also knew that the ISC could not survive a debate over Palestine. The Israelis viewed GUPS as an illegitimate student union, more akin to a paramilitary group, dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Lee passed on advice from Kiley to NSA headquarters: “Kiley feels COSEC initiatives are fairly limited in possibility and that NSA must try and move in.”18
The decision to develop a relationship with the Palestinians courted disaster abroad and conflict at home. Initial strategies followed conventional patterns. Lee recommended “organizing a section of GUPS in the United States” and informed the NSA that he “had already discussed this possibility with GUPS General Secretary Lutuf Ghantous.”19 He suggested the usual “trip to the United States” and “a little publicity on the Palestinian student situation” to solidify the relationship with Ghantous.20 Lee also had recommended that the NSA establish a special scholarship program, as it had done for Algerian and Angolan students.21
In 1962, the NSA made a financial contribution to a work-camp project in Gaza, cabling the GUPS leader Hassan Hammam that the grant was “a symbol of solidarity with Palestine students.”22 As contact with the GUPS increased, Tony Smith, the CIA career officer on duty as one of three NSA representatives in Paris, almost touched off an international incident. Not long after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, the GUPS congress met in Gaza. Smith presented himself as a former Air Force veteran (to explain his lack of student status) and spoke about the crisis. He distinguished between offensive and defensive missiles, and condemned the Cuban missiles as offensive. Suddenly someone in the back of the room whom Smith could not see under the glare of klieg lights shouted, “I don’t think you are who you say you are. I think you work for the CIA.”23
Smith froze. And turned red. He prayed that the color in his face was not obvious to the delegates below the high stage. “I tried to protest but not too much,” he says today. Years later, as the episode lost its sting, Smith played with the idea about writing a humorous essay “on blushing and espionage.”24 At the time, the unexpected and startling challenge underscored how careful he needed to be. He was treading on dangerous ground for other reasons: Smith’s grandfather Judge Joseph M. Proskauer was a former head of the American Jewish Committee and deeply involved in the creation of Israel.25 Smith had had unprecedented access to Israeli officials; he had met David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister, and other members of the founding generation as a child.26
Even without knowledge of Smith’s CIA or Israeli ties, the Palestinians had reason to be suspicious of the Americans. The GUPS was a complicated organization, comprised of refugee students scattered across Middle Eastern and North African countries. Numerous political tendencies coalesced within it, from Ba’athists to Nasserists to Arab nationalists and independents.27 But the GUPS also exercised significant clout in the region. The new Palestine Liberation Organization headed by Yasser Arafat funded the GUPS, although the union tried to preserve its autonomy by demanding agreed-upon objectives in writing.28
For the NSA, support for the GUPS was tricky not only because it created tension with the Israeli student union but also because the Palestinians received almost no assistance, even in the form of moral support, from European ISC members. In late March 1965, the NSA was one of two ISC delegations that attended a GUPS international seminar in Cairo whose purpose was to generate publicity for the Palestinian cause.29 Paris-based Robert Witherspoon had carefully briefed an Israeli representative before the meeting and assured him that the NSA would not support any anti-Israel resolutions.30 During the meeting in Cairo, his colleague Robert Backoff honored Witherspoon’s promises. But international vice president Norman Uphoff, making one of his few overseas trips, made off-the-cuff remarks at the GUPS seminar that infuriated the Israelis: the NSA, he assured them, “resisted taking a pro-Zionist position on Israel.”31 For months afterward, the NSA deflected inquires about the speech and claimed not to have a copy of Uphoff’s remarks, which had appeared in the Arab press.32
Uphoff’s speech became a cause célèbre for Israeli student leaders.33 Knowing how much trouble the speech could cause NSA domestically, the Israeli students played their hand craftily, periodically threatening to circulate press coverage of Uphoff’s remarks.34 In the summer of 1965, when the NSA invited Arab students to come to the United States for a special seminar, the Israeli student union did contact the American Jewish Committee, whose leaders began to pay closer attention to the association.35
Until then, and despite regular denials of bias, NSA policies were blatantly pro-Arab. Witherspoon articulated the rationale in a confidential memo: the association needed “to take a moderately pro-Arab position on the Palestine issue” if only to “compensate for ISC shortcomings.”36 In a later memo he argued that the GUPS seminar had “laid bare the scarcity of support or even interest in the Arab case on the part of Western student unions.”37 After the seminar, despite the controversy over Uphoff’s remarks, the NSA decided it needed a strong resolution on Palestine, even if it precipitated a battle at the Congress. The fight would occur over the phrase “Palestinian people” since it involved the right of refugees to return to their homeland, something the Israelis would challenge at all costs.38 Witherspoon is blunt in his guidance: the NSA should try to support the words “Palestinian people,” as a “sop to the Arabs,” unless Israeli pressure forced a compromise.39
In the summer of 1965, the NSA undertook elaborate preparations to guarantee a successful Palestinian resolution. The CIA funded a special seminar for Arab students. Afterward, the seminar’s hand-picked participants were invited to the NSA Congress to mingle with the delegates.40 With Middle East seminar participants in tow, the NSA witting staff managed a nearly impossible feat at the 1965 Congress: they crafted a resolution that delighted the Arabs, especially the Palestinians, and assuaged (barely) the Israelis, though not without considerable conflict, drama, and a threatened walkout by the Israelis.41
Over the next year, a policy shift in the Johnson administration, along with scrutiny by the American Jewish Committee, prompted the NSA to fashion a more balanced position. Staff began to describe the NSA role as that of a broker and peacemaker of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Our task,” Backoff amended, “is to keep the big powers from war there and find a peaceful solution.”42
Charles Goldmark welcomed the policy change. “It is healthier for NSA to play a completely independent role in the Middle East rather than cottoning to the Arabs at every turn.”43 The international vice president also told Witherspoon in Paris, “We have dumped on the Israelis long enough and although we should not go overboard in that direction, some gesture to demonstrate our good faith is needed.”44 An opportunity presented itself in the spring of 1966, when the Israelis invited an NSA delegation for a visit, all expenses paid.45
By the time of the Nairobi ISC in August 1966, the GUPS was so fractured that the NSA speculated its leaders might not come. Nonetheless, the NSA believed that other delegations would take up the Palestinian cause. The collision course within the ISC that the NSA had hoped for so many years to avoid seemed inevitable, but it was one that the NSA itself had charted.
If NSA allies in Latin America and the Middle East were limited in number, witting staff could still count on a significant showing by Asian student unions friendly to the NSA.46 Ever since the 1956 regional seminar in Colombo, the CIA had funded an annual Asian seminar, and a meeting for Asian student press, and in 1965 the Agency had established an Asian Press Bureau. The escalating war in Vietnam was now threatening to shake up the region’s solidarity, but not in a way the NSA desired.
Several other ingredients contributed to the volatile mix of delegations heading toward Nairobi. In a gesture of goodwill, COSEC had invited the student unions that walked out of the Quebec meeting in 1962. COSEC had also invited the IUS to send a delegation. While the latter was standard practice, cooperative host governments had usually found a way to deny the visas of the IUS members. The Kenyan government appears not to have played along, since numerous IUS members reached Nairobi.47
On August 17, seventy-one delegations streamed into Nairobi University College for the ten-day conference. As expected, Europe and Africa produced the largest number of national unions of students, seventeen and thirteen, respectively. No one from Algeria, Morocco, or Tunisia attended. Two rival Angolan revolutionary groups sent representatives: Jorge Sangumba was aligned with Jonas Savimbi, who had broken away from Holden Roberto, and Carlos Octavio (Belli) Belo represented the Soviet-backed MPLA. Israel and four other Middle Eastern unions attended, but two were aligned with the IUS.48 Khosrow Shakeri from the Confederation of Iranian Students in Paris was openly anti-American. Lebanon’s representative came from the U.S.-based Organization of Arab Students. Only Kuwait’s union could be counted a friend of the West.
The NSA delegation arrived early and included Duncan Kennedy (Paris), Thomas Olson (COSEC), Chuck Goldmark (NSA), Fred Berger (NSA), and an eleventh-hour addition—John Gerhart, a Harvard graduate then in Kampala, Uganda. NSA overseas representatives had had their eye on Gerhart for nearly a year, and decided to see how he performed at a large meeting.49 Goldmark had given him instructions to meet and talk with Africans as soon as he reached Nairobi but to “steer the conversation away from internal ISC politics.”50 The reason soon became clear.
By tradition, the Supervision Commission would choose the new COSEC leadership before presenting the candidates for approval at the annual conference. Candidates who were not selected would usually gracefully withdraw before the final vote, thus allowing COSEC to present a united front to the ISC delegates. Not this time.
Garvey later tried to describe what turned out to be the nastiest and most convoluted election in COSEC history. “All of the student unions on the left were trying to get me to run [for reelection] against Ram [Labhaya Lakhina] because they saw him as a very conservative alternative.”51 Garvey realizes today that it is hard to believe that the left would support an American over an Indian, but he insists that this was the case. Garvey, eager to return to law school, declined to run again. Instead he caucused with European activists from France and Belgium and backed Wilfred Rutz from Switzerland. In Garvey’s view, Rutz, who was present at the siege of the Capuchin monastery with Berger, was the radical. Complicating the issue was the question of CIA support. Garvey describes CIA insiders as furious with his decision to support Rutz.52
Despite the backstage politicking, the now eleven-member Supervision Commission voted in favor of Lakhina. Today Lakhina boasts that he was the first secretary general to represent “the Third World,” a claim Garvey dismisses as ludicrous: Jyoti Shankar Singh, he insists, was “an incredibly effective voice from the Third World.”53 Lakhina also claims to be the first ISC secretary general candidate to win “without American support.”54 Again Garvey scoffs: “That’s the conceit. Who were ‘the Americans’ in this situation? Just because he didn’t have my support didn’t mean he didn’t have the support of …”55 He did not complete the sentence. Tom Olson, then an experienced witting team member whose next position after Nairobi would be at FYSA with Harry Lunn, fills in Garvey’s statement: Lakhina had the support of the CIA.56
Yet Duncan Kennedy, whose next assignment would be at CIA headquarters, recalls taking a perverse delight in Lakhina’s victory precisely because Kennedy thought it was a loss for the Americans: “I took a ma-li-cious pleasure in it, mal-li-cious pleasure.”57 He explains his rebellion. “It was here,” in Nairobi, the future Harvard theorist of critical legal studies recalls, that “I began to ask myself whether I might be on the wrong side of history.” His doubts must be seen as indicating the continued fraying of the tattered liberal consensus.58 Ronald J. J. Bell from Scotland, a Lakhina supporter, later summed up the antics of the NSA delegation: it exhibited “signs of anarchy.”59
To top it off, when Lakhina’s victory over Rutz was announced, most delegates saw it as a victory for the British and stood up to sing “God Save the Queen.” Fernando Duran from Costa Rica, who was among the singers, notes today that it was obvious to him that the battle was between the imperialists, and the British had won.60
Such was the atmosphere in Nairobi when the IUS secretary general, Nouri Abdul Razzak Hussain, an Iraqi who was considered pro-Soviet by the Americans and who had fled Iraq at the time of the CIA-backed anti-Kassem coup in 1961, was granted permission to address the delegates.61 The IUS chief emphasized many of the same themes Garvey had in his opening speech, especially the need to seek world student unity, with its implication that the IUS and the ISC should merge, and then he fielded questions. A few NSA allies raised issues stemming back to 1948, when the IUS had failed to condemn the Czech coup, but Hussain fielded them deftly. At the end of the session, delegates gave Hussain a standing ovation and then voted to cooperate with the IUS—a complete repudiation of the long-standing NSA and ISC position—and the clearest statement yet that the Cold War between the two student internationals was over.62 A South African delegate later praised the “end to Cold War claptrap.”63
The general secretary of the Palestinian GUPS had managed to get to Nairobi for the conference, and received a boisterous welcome and a favorable vote on the controversial refugee question. Predictably, the Israelis walked out. The fact that the bill for all this disaffection was being footed by the CIA adds to its surreal quality today.
The NSA still had to face a debate over Vietnam. The CIA tried to reprise a successful strategy developed for the 1965 NSA Congress, but the results bordered on farce. The centerpiece was to be a direct appeal from South Vietnamese students. In Saigon, General Lansdale and Charles Sweet had obtained the requisite clearances from the Vietnam government for a delegation, but infighting in the Saigon Students Union over who should go became so intense that the delegation arrived five days late and nearly missed the debate. (When they arrived, the delegation was misidentified as members of the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam, an identification with the Viet Cong that delegation member and Buddhist leader Nguyan Kim Khanh believed was deliberate.)64 When delegate Nguyen Tan Thiet spoke, in barely decipherable English, even his colleagues agreed that he did not help the cause.65
It probably did not matter what Thiet argued on the floor. Most of the delegates, regardless of political ideology or partisan affiliation, opposed the U.S. presence in Vietnam. Costa Rica’s Fernando Duran, although a noncommunist Social Democrat, said in an interview, “I will tell you bluntly we were sympathetic to the Viet Cong.”66 If the United States had lost the support of long-time friend Costa Rica, it had lost the war for public opinion inside the conference.
But it was the French who brought the proceedings to a standstill by suggesting the delegates send a telegram to President Johnson and demand that he “withdraw American soldiers from Vietnam.”67 It was one thing to pass resolutions highly critical of United States foreign policy; the CIA had learned to live with a certain amount of anti-Americanism because it enhanced the ISC image as an independent body. It was quite another thing for a CIA-funded organization to directly challenge the U.S. president on foreign policy.
Kiley says today that after Nairobi he knew it was “all over.”68 While there is no reason to doubt his exasperation, his actions after the ISC do not conform with this view. The now biennial International Student Conferences might be painful, but COSEC programs were still in place, and within these it was business as usual. Goldmark, who eked out one of the few NSA victories at Nairobi when he won election as an associate secretary to COSEC, made this explicit in his post-Nairobi report. “Political resolutions set the tone and spirit of the ISC, but bear little relationship to its normal day-to-day activities.” In Nairobi, he continued, “most of the Association’s suggestions for ISC programs were accepted… and perhaps most importantly, the Association’s representatives were able to conduct a number of highly successful bilateral discussions on programs with other national unions.”69
Kiley seems to have bided his time, waiting for Sherburne to leave. In mid-September, Kiley set up a meeting with the new NSA president, Eugene Groves. Over several meetings, as Groves later testified in a closed hearing, Kiley and Matt Iverson painted “a fairly congenial picture” of the past NSA-CIA relationship. Their report astonished Groves, who by then had conferred with Sherburne and had a different perspective on what was going on. Yet when Groves indicated his hesitation about continuing the relationship, he said that Kiley argued that a rupture between the NSA and the CIA “would destroy a lot of what they considered very good institutions.”70
Never having attended an ISC, Groves was unable to assess Kiley and Iverson’s report. Nor did he have access to a transcript from Nairobi. He needed time to think. “I postponed any sort of judgment in the hope of getting more details and fuller knowledge of exactly the extent of the relationship, of how valuable such institutions as the International Student Conferences were, and how this relationship would develop.”71 Besides, he later admitted, “there was no point in antagonizing the CIA before I know how to fight them.”72
By nature, Groves tended to weigh all sides of an issue. Trained in mathematics, he approached situations in a calm, reasoned manner. During the 1966 NSA Congress he had responded to an emotional frenzy on the plenary floor over the free speech movement with the unpopular argument that “college administrations had received the message and were opening doors to discussion of grievances without waiting for riots.”73
At the same time, Groves’s position on Vietnam and other issues hewed to the left. Like Uphoff, Groves belonged to the Student Peace Union. Unlike Uphoff, Groves did not have the socialist’s animosity toward communism. Over the next few weeks, Kiley kept up the pressure on Groves to continue the CIA relationship. He resisted. Kiley pushed.
Groves later described the escalation of tension. “Some of the agents … frantically accused me of undermining all the free world institutions that had been so painstakingly created over the last 15 years.”74 He considered going public, but wondered who would believe him. “I would have been totally ineffective without a much more extensive personal knowledge of the relationship and a casebook of collaborating evidence.”75
Groves, responsible for a staff of nearly fifty people, began to experience the isolation that had plagued Robbins and Sherburne. “I’ve never felt so alone in my life,” he said later.76 But he also had to make decisions. The NSA president officially appointed overseas representatives, even if he didn’t recruit the majority of them. Sherburne had left these positions vacant when his year as president was over to help Groves gain more control over the appointments. The international staff at NSA headquarters understood that directives were to come from Groves, but few were forthcoming.77
Moreover, Groves faced financial problems. Despite Sherburne’s budget-cutting measures and his belief that the deficit had been retired, Lunn informed Groves that the NSA still owed another $20,000 to make up its deficit to FYSA. In addition, Lunn told Groves that the accumulated debt stood at $375,585. Regardless of whether the debt actually existed, new officers did not have the information necessary to challenge the figure.78
At first, Groves had been reluctant to involve the new international vice president, Richard (Rick) Stearns. Someone had warned him that Stearns was “not really reliable, and might like to play the game.”79 Stearns’s trajectory from the 1964 ISRS to overseas representative in Beirut to his election suggested to Groves that he might already be part of the NSA-CIA team. Stearns insisted during an interview that he had not been but emphasized that he was a committed Cold Warrior: “Fighting communism was something I believed in very strongly.”80
After a few weeks of working together, Groves warmed to Stearns and decided to trust him.81 Since Groves, like others, had a healthy respect for the twenty-year prison term attached to security oath violations, he decided not to approach Stearns directly. He asked Kiley to handle it, and the three of them met at Kiley’s home in Georgetown, when the oath was administered and the secret revealed. Stearns reacted as many others had: sharing information with your own government was one thing. He didn’t object to that. But the covert funding was quite another, especially “the extent to which we were the captive financially of this network of foundations.”82
When they left Kiley’s house, Stearns and Groves walked the mile or so from Georgetown to the NSA office. Stearns remembers telling Groves: “We’ve got to find a way out.”83 He did not have moral objections to the CIA as such, but he felt strongly that the NSA should represent students’ interests, “and not the interests of the United States government directly.”84
Like Sherburne, Groves and Stearns had lukewarm feelings about the ISC and COSEC, at least what little they knew of them. The methodical Groves proposed an evaluation to assess the organizations’ strengths and weaknesses. That way, he and Stearns could reach a conclusion in an objective manner. Kiley nixed the idea.85
Pressure on the new officers also came from Goldmark, who had settled into his COSEC position in Leiden. Freed from his conflicting loyalties to Sherburne, Goldmark urged Groves to consider the CIA as “any other funding source.” After all, Groves recalled him saying, “It’s easier to get it from them than from the Ford Foundation.”86
After weeks of sustained pressure, the two NSA officers began to relent. Faced with a looming budget crisis to pay for international commission staff and programs, and increasingly fearful they might destroy an international organization they knew little about, they conceded, as Groves put it later.87
After Kiley assured them that new funds would come without strings, Groves and Stearns accepted a FYSA grant for $56,000 (technically, two separate awards of $28,000).88 Privately they dubbed it a “kiss-off” grant, the last they would ever accept from a CIA conduit.89 But having been schooled by Sherburne, Groves spelled out the terms on which he would take the money. He demanded that the CIA reporting requirements cease—no more profiling of foreign students or foreign student unions, no more contact with CIA case officers or career staff. All overseas representatives must report to him and Stearns. Kiley appeared to consent.90
Neither Groves nor Stearns shared the decision to take CIA funds with Sherburne—an omission that later had major consequences for them all. They did tell Edward Schwartz, who was furious. But Schwartz’s focus remained on American campuses, which were exploding in protest over the war. He agreed to remain quiet. In exchange, Schwartz says he extracted a promise: neither Groves or Stearns nor the CIA must interfere with his campus activities.91 The two officers readily agreed to something over which they had little control, although by tradition the CIA rarely interfered with national staff.
With these negotiations complete, Groves and Stearns thought their secret was safe and tried to restore some semblance of normalcy at NSA headquarters. They never dreamed that a grant from the association’s oldest funding source would mean anything in particular to Michael Wood.