IN HIS MEMOIR, former CIA director Richard Helms recalled February 13, 1967, as “one of my darkest days.” Helms had just finished touring the nuclear labs at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and was about to settle into his hotel room in nearby Albuquerque, when “an agitated young communications officer rush[ed] along the hallway … with one heavily sealed message from the White House in his briefcase. It was eerily succinct: Return to Washington immediately.”1
After he reached CIA headquarters, Helms paced for several hours until President Johnson returned his call. The president briefed him on the impending Ramparts article but gave him no instructions on how to pull the “scorched chestnuts away from the fire.” Helms understood Johnson’s message to mean that “it was an Agency problem from start to finish.”2
Helms knew what was at stake. “Exposure,” he wrote, “could affect the most important covert projects in existence for some two decades.” As he mentally reviewed the potential fallout, he realized that “hundreds of Third World students” would be at risk.3 (Helms later testified that in fiscal year 1967, the International Organizations division budget for students was roughly $3 million, the equivalent in 2012 of $20 million.)4 It would not matter that some students had been recruited and some were innocent of the source of their funds; all would be suspect.
At CIA headquarters, Bob Kiley braced for the worst. “There was nothing I could do about it,” he said later.5 Paradoxically, on the day the story blew, the CIA received one piece of eagerly awaited news. The Internal Revenue Service had acted on Ober’s top-secret request for financial information about Ramparts, a critical element in the strategy to shut down the magazine.6
In London, CIA staff officer Tony Smith accompanied the station chief, whom he describes as “an old drunk,” to a meeting to inform the British of the Ramparts bombshell.7 Cord Meyer’s deputy, Walpole (Tad) Davis, chaired the meeting, during which the American chief snoozed and occasionally snored. Smith was embarrassed, but he had a more delicate problem. Many people knew about his time with the NSA, and he feared that his presence in England might either implicate British students who worked with COSEC or jeopardize his current work. CIA headquarters agreed. Smith and his new bride, who also worked for the CIA, left the country under pseudonyms and took a prolonged honeymoon in Italy at taxpayer expense.8
On February 14, the New York Times hit the newsstands with the full-page ad purchased by Ramparts. It promised that the magazine’s March issue would “document how CIA has infiltrated and subverted the world of American student leaders over the past fifteen years.” The Washington Post carried a similar ad. Front-page reporting elaborated on a “case study in the corruption of youthful idealism.”9
Wire services carried the story nationwide. Edward Schwartz was in the back seat of a taxicab in Oberlin, Ohio, when he heard a radio announcer read the wire story. “An out of body experience, like listening to your obituary,” was how he later described it.10
Helms summoned CIA career staff from around the world to headquarters for damage control. So many left the London station that a young newcomer, Susan (Sue) A. McCloud, later exclaimed that she was “left holding the bag.”11 An internal CIA report later estimated the number of agents called home at around two hundred.12
Before the press disclosures, both NSA president Eugene Groves and Allard Lowenstein had briefed White House aide Douglass Cater, and now Cater tried to protect the president by announcing that Johnson “had never been informed about the student operation.”13 When the Washington Post reporter Richard Harwood printed the claim, no one, not even other Johnson aides, found it credible. The White House officials dropped the defense.14
Cater later said in an oral history that all he could do was ride out the crisis. While professing not to have known about the CIA funding, Cater offered an analysis of its development over time. “It had grown to an extent that I thought it was a very unwise public policy. CIA had imposed no substantive obligations.” He then asserted it “had grown up without the kind of supervision that it needed.”15 It is not clear how Cater could know about the nature and trajectory of the NSA-CIA relationship if he had been ignorant of its existence before January 1967. The claim is also doubtful given his intelligence background and critical role in establishing the NSA’s international program. Cater worked with many OSS and CIA colleagues over a fourteen-year period at The Reporter magazine.16 Twice in the early 1950s, he took a leave of absence to consult for the secretary of the army and the director of the Mutual Security Agency. Early in the Kennedy administration, Cater was tapped for a top-secret assignment to review psychological warfare operations across U.S. government agencies, an odd assignment for a life-long journalist, even one tuned into Washington politics.17 He clearly knew more than he acknowledged.
Vice President Humphrey was wrapping up a speech to Stanford University students when someone asked about the Ramparts story. Humphrey responded that the episode was “one of the saddest times our government has had in terms of public policy.” He added, “I regret that the CIA was involved in this. I think we ought to keep our democratic institutions free of government coercion.”18
Rumors soon circulated among witting staff that an outraged LBJ called the vice president and commanded him to “get back to Washington and shut the fuck up.”19 Humphrey’s aide Ted Van Dyke confirms the gist of Johnson’s order—“he was not pleased”—but added, “Johnson didn’t speak that crudely to Humphrey.”20
According to Van Dyke, the person who was both crude and out of control was Cord Meyer. Before the story broke, Meyer tried to enlist the vice president in damage control. Humphrey balked, and Meyer became so agitated he began yelling. Van Dyke cut the meeting short.21
At the State Department, Secretary Rusk was out of town. The responsibility for handling the Ramparts matter fell to Acting Secretary Nicholas Katzenbach, who later remembered that his first instinct was “to deny everything.” Upon reflection, however, he decided that “It was a can of worms and I didn’t want to know what was in the can.”22 Katzenbach sent the first of several memos to President Johnson on February 13. State was working on a “bare bones admission,” but wouldn’t have a firmer strategy until “we have seen the morning papers.” Katzenbach also told Johnson, “I am not absolutely confident that we are [in] possession of all the facts.” He feared the NSA story might “open up for questioning related programs of CIA.”23
Katzenbach’s chief of staff, Jack Rosenthal, learned what was coming over the weekend when he fielded frantic phone calls from Kiley. Despite this advance warning, Rosenthal, a former journalist, was unprepared for the conflagration. “I was taken aback by how quickly this blew up into an inferno.”24 Rosenthal, who was the head of the New York Times Foundation when I interviewed him, has seen his share of media storms, but this was the first. “I was just astonished by the speed and temperature it reached in a hurry.”25
On February 15, Rosenthal sent White House press secretary George Christian instructions on how to handle the publicity. The memo, “Subject: CIA-NSA Flap,” was so confusing that even Rosenthal decided it needed clarifying. After writing that “we will discuss it only in response to official, responsible statements made by groups who have in fact received government financial support—and maybe not even then, depending on facts,” he added, “In other words, volunteer nothing.”26
Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare John Gardner knew the revelations would affect the educational community, and he had definite opinions on the subject. He had worried about an eruption earlier in the fall. “I began to pick up little signs that there might be some things going on with the … Asian-Pacific Institute, the National Student Association, the African American Institute and the labor unions,” Gardner later recounted. It was nothing very specific, “just tiny things, but if you knew the territory, you began to wonder.” Gardner knew the territory. “I had been in the Office of Strategic Services, so I knew any number of people in the CIA. I knew how they functioned.”27 In fact, Gardner and Richard Helms had been desk mates in the OSS.
Gardner decided to approach Allen Dulles, who had now retired. But Dulles “patted me on the head” and said, “Oh John, it’s nothing.” Gardner noticed that Dulles “didn’t deny it and he didn’t acknowledge it,” but “he let me know that I was worrying needlessly.” Gardner still did not know whether the rumors about extensive CIA involvement in the private sector were true, but if they were, he thought the CIA was making “a big mistake,” which, if exposed, “could hurt wonderful people doing good work throughout the world.” He decided to warn President Johnson.28
“We were on a helicopter together,” recounted Gardner, going to Baltimore for a Social Security Honor Awards ceremony. “I tried to convey my concern. But Johnson had a tendency to talk over you if he thought you were getting into a subject that he didn’t want to talk about.” Douglass Cater and Social Security commissioner Robert Ball were seated across from Gardner and tried to help. But the whir of the helicopter blades and Johnson’s monologue defeated them. Seasoned politicians know that if you don’t know something, you don’t have to deal with it, and Johnson was a master politician. “A complete loss,” said Gardner.29
On the day the story came out, Gardner dictated his own statement, bypassing the requirement that Cabinet Secretaries clear all press releases with the White House. He declared that it had been “a mistake for the CIA ever to entangle itself in covert activities close to the field of education or scholarship or the university.”30
On Capitol Hill, CIA allies had trouble getting their stories straight. Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee contradicted one another about whether they had ever been briefed. Senator Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) fumed that the CIA “had never told the Russell committee of its NSA secret subsidies.”31 Senator Richard Russell (D-Ga.), who chaired the Armed Services Committee, retorted, Oh yes it had.32 Within a week, Senator Russell came out swinging on behalf of the CIA. He dismissed the argument that academic freedom had been damaged as “just a lot of hogwash.”33
Eight congressmen, including George E. Brown, Jr. (D-Calif.), wrote to President Johnson to demand “an immediate investigation at the highest level.”34 Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.) introduced a resolution that would require a congressional investigation.35
Amid the uproar, Congresswoman Edith Green (D-Ore.) tweaked those who had condemned the NSA as subversive. “The House Committee on Un-American Activities must be chagrined that left-leaning students and labor leaders who have so aroused its ire are representatives of organizations financed and perhaps guided by a government agency it previously considered an unimpeachable ally. It would be an amusing spectacle to see the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Central Intelligence Agency investigate each other.”36
Conservative senators, on the other hand, were not amused. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) thundered, “The CIA … was building socialism behind the backs of the American people.” The Agency “had developed its own agenda, getting Americans to accept the glorious utopia promised by international socialist government.”37 Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Az.) and his protégés in the Young Americans for Freedom called for an immediate congressional investigation into the radical leftist NSA.38
For weeks, Cord Meyer had worked the Hill like a man possessed, visiting influential chairmen in the House and Senate. Meyer’s nightmare scenario included public hearings and klieg lights. His biggest concern was Senator J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.), the powerful chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a growing critic of Johnson’s policies in Vietnam. Meyer believed that Fulbright was the “key to damage control, even though he was not on the [CIA] oversight committee.” After two meetings with Fulbright, Meyer concluded, “He did not entirely accept my explanation and clearly thought that a decision to terminate should have been made at an earlier date.”39
In Leiden, COSEC general secretary Ram Labhaya Lakhina changed position a number of times. First he said he knew nothing about anything. When pressed to confirm that Groves had flown to Europe to brief him just days earlier, he acknowledged the visit but said that Groves had not explained what was going on. During a subsequent investigation by the Supervision Commission, he amended his statement: “Looking back, Groves did place [sic] some remarks indicating what was going to happen, but in such a vague manner, that only if I did know already, I would have understood that he knew too.”40
Still protesting his ignorance, Lakhina defended the International Student Conference against all comers. He described the charges against the ISC and COSEC as “baseless and reckless.” He condemned the CIA funding of the NSA as a “cynical betrayal of the ideals of American students as well as students in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe affiliated with the ISC.” Finally, on behalf of COSEC, he condemned “the Government of the United States of America and its Central Intelligence Agency for the corruption of an apparently democratic student organization.” He called for the suspension of the NSA from ISC membership.41 If witting NSA operatives are correct that the CIA backed Lakhina’s election to the position of secretary general, his performance can be considered audacious. Even if he was unaware of CIA support, his vigorous protest served CIA interests.
On February 15, President Johnson announced that he had requested the CIA “to cease all aid to youth and student programs and to review other agency-funded anti-Communist programs housed in nongovernmental organizations.”42 LBJ then washed his hands of the controversy by appointing a three-member commission (the Katzenbach Committee) to investigate: Cabinet Secretary John Gardner, CIA director Richard Helms, and Under Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach. He gave them just weeks to report.
Cord Meyer later acknowledged that the president’s move had been crucial in warding off congressional hearings.43 But Johnson’s announcement gave Helms a jolt. It implied that there might be additional covert CIA projects which were not yet publicly disclosed.44 Nor had Johnson taken responsibility for the NSA program. Two former presidents who might have borne some of the blame, Truman and Kennedy, were dead. The CIA was still in danger of being left out in the cold.
At NSA headquarters, exhausted and distraught officers faced a press onslaught. Reporters from the Washington Post, the Washington Star, the Los Angeles Times, and other major newspapers swarmed the office. In the middle of the chaos, the NSA National Supervisory Board convened in closed session at the nearby Dupont Hotel. Paranoia ran so high that notebooks were collected at the end of the day and put in safety-deposit boxes.45
When one board member said he had heard that electronic bugs could be embedded in ashtrays, the board changed hotels. On another occasion a briefcase was left unattended in a hotel hallway, and panic ensued.46 A former nonwitting NSA National Affairs officer, James A. Johnson, then on the NSB, told friends that he feared “he might be shot dead on the street.”47 Robert Kuttner, also a nonwitting NSA staff member who handled foreign student exchanges under Groves, said in a later interview, “We scared ourselves silly.”48
Philip Sherburne appeared before the Board and tried to answer questions without violating the “no details” pledge negotiated by his lawyer. Groves and Stearns knew the least but filled in what they could. Recalling those frantic days, NSB member Jean Hoefer Toal faults herself for not being more astute. “We should have figured out something was wrong,” if for no other reason than because of “all these older men, wearing clothes from the middle ’50s who came to the [NSA] Congress.” Toal, today chief justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court, found the revelations “horrifying,” especially “the way they scared you to death if you told,” referring to the security oaths.49
Ricki Radlo, one of the youngest NSB members, battled feelings of shock and betrayal.50 As a freshman at the 1965 NSA Congress, she had unwittingly served the CIA’s Vietnam agenda as a member of the Radical Middle Caucus led by Donald Emmerson. In retrospect, she understood how easily students could be manipulated. In an interview she groped for words to describe how these events affected her. She went from being an idealistic “good government type” to having “an incredible feeling of unease” and then to “a sense of surrealism.”51 When Radlo tried to describe the situation to adult outsiders, “They thought I was absolutely nuts.” Yet with the press clamoring for a response, “we had to pull ourselves together.”52
On Friday, February 17, NSB chair Sam Brown issued a statement on behalf of the board that read, in part, “We are shocked at the ethical trap into which young men of great integrity have been placed by covert actions of the CIA.”53 He asserted that students had been duped into signing the security oath. He called for a congressional inquiry. He described the NSA staff as engaged in spying.54
Brown did not stop there. Traveling from campus to campus, he condemned the CIA-NSA relationship to anyone who would listen. Assistant U.S. Postmaster Richard Murphy, the former NSA president who had threatened Richard Stearns, was so furious that he took a leave of absence and followed Brown around the country, making sure CIA defenders countered Brown’s assertions. Finally, someone in the top echelon of the Johnson administration demanded that Murphy stop and return to Washington.55
Meanwhile, behind the scenes at the White House and State Department, aides scrambled to find evidence that a president had authorized the CIA-NSA operations. National Security Advisor Walt Rostow scoured the files from the top-secret 303 Committee going back to its antecedent 5412 Committee under Eisenhower.56 He could not find any document before February 25, 1959, that might indicate White House approval. The last entry, for December 3, 1964, concerned the counter-festival program against the scheduled 1965 World Youth Festival in Algiers. In a classified memo to President Johnson, Rostow defended the absence of documentation, describing the limited role of the 303 Committee as being “to examine new programs.”57
The State Department searched its own 303 Committee files and put a different spin on the missing authorizations. The NSA relationship exemplified “a trend by CIA officers to bypass … the Department to clear operations on a piecemeal basis with Country Directors or Assistant Secretaries.” Therefore, the department lacked “adequate detail on how certain programs are to be carried out.”58
The CIA offered a third explanation. Invoking the authority from a 1947 National Security Council directive, officials told the White House that “many of CIA’s continuing covert action projects and programs were therefore begun when responsibility for policy conformity rested with the DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] in accordance with existing NSC directives.” Under the Truman administration, between 1949 and 1952, the CIA director had approved eighty-one covert actions on internal authority. The unidentified writer of this top-secret memo, perhaps Cord Meyer, explained that the decision on whether to brief the president resided with the CIA director.59
In other words, this CIA document, not declassified until 1999, more than thirty years after the fact, reveals that Allen Dulles (or his predecessor) alone approved covert projects, and that Dulles alone decided whether a sitting president needed to know about them.60 The Katzenbach Committee could not make this admission public without adding to the mess. Since no one could find anything definitive on presidential authorization, the White House remained silent on the issue.
On February 17, Helms switched tactics. He tried to persuade long-serving congressmen to attest that the president had authorized the operations. He met in closed session with legislators well known for their ability to deflect criticism aimed at the CIA—Congressman L. Mendel Rivers (D-S.C.), chair of the House Armed Services Subcommittee, and ranking member William H. Bates (R-Mass.). After the session, Rivers and Bates greeted reporters and praised the CIA. They piously declared that their committee would have “failed in its duty” had it not enabled the NSA to fight communist penetration.61 Then they asserted that the NSA-CIA connection had been known to every administration since 1952, and to the Armed Forces Subcommittee “for several years.”62
The Washington Post quoted Rivers as saying that he “could see no reason to apologize for helping send students to international conferences as voices of the free world.”63 Rivers denied Sam Brown’s assertion that spying took place. “Espionage was not involved—the survival of freedom was.”64 Thus, the lie that the CIA had merely slipped a few travel dollars to American students so they could attend international meetings began its march around the world before, in the words of the old adage, truth had time to put on its pants.
On February 21, Senator Robert F. Kennedy finally pulled Helms’s smoldering chestnuts out of the fire. He announced publicly that it was unfair for the CIA to “take the rap” for funding the NSA. He asserted that Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson had all approved the operations.65
A CIA colleague of Kiley’s, who requested anonymity, confided the inside story of how Kennedy came to make this statement. Helms allegedly called Kiley with a long-winded hypothetical about a senator, say one from New York, who might even be a former attorney general, who might defend the CIA-NSA operations. What would Kiley suggest the senator say? Kiley, the story continues, put his feet up on the desk while talking to Helms and started talking. Helms asked to have the extemporaneous speech in writing. Kiley agreed and dashed for the elevator. When the doors opened on the seventh floor, the director’s level, he found Helms pacing in front of them. When Kiley returned to his office, he casually suggested to his colleagues that they check out the TV monitor at noon for an announcement by Senator Kennedy from New York.66
In his memoir, Cord Meyer was still thankful. One of “the most damning lines of attack,” he acknowledged, was the lack of policy approval. “I was grateful to Kennedy for his timely intervention but not surprised, since I had personally briefed him when he was attorney general on these programs on a number of occasions and received his enthusiastic encouragement to expand our activity in this field.”67 No one questioned Kennedy’s knowledge of what former administrations might have done. No one pursued Cater’s earlier claim that Johnson did not know about the relationship. With this single statement, the press ceased to ask questions about presidential authorization, and the issue disappeared.
Little by little, the CIA began to stifle the public outrage. A covert action operation of significant breadth and depth was reduced to a few travel grants. Decisions made largely by Allen Dulles and other CIA officials were attributed to Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. But other lines of attack still needed to be addressed. Among the more serious charges: the CIA had compromised the independence of a private organization. Who better to ward off these charges than witting participants?
Twelve former NSA presidents, all signers of the security oath, issued a press release on February 25: “Allegations that we were ‘trapped’ or ‘duped’ are arrant nonsense.” They scoffed at the idea that the CIA had interfered with the NSA’s activities: “Attempts at control would not have been tolerated.” They trotted out the well-worn argument that NSA policies and programs were “consistently independent of and often in conflict with the positions of the government.” They repeated the lie that each year only two officers were informed of the relationship. Conspicuously absent from the signatories were Allard Lowenstein, Stephen Robbins, Philip Sherburne, and Eugene Groves.68 The signers included CIA career agents William Dentzer, Harry H. Lunn, Jr., and Robert P. Kiley. All three had administered the security oath to others, acted as CIA case officers, and given direction to new inductees. The other signers, James Edwards, Stanford L. Glass, Harald C. Bakken, K. Ray Farabee, Donald A. Hoffman, Richard A. Rettig, Edward Garvey, W. Dennis Shaul, and Gregory M. Gallo, worked for the CIA beyond their presidential year (with the exception of Farabee), several for five or more years.69 Edwards, by then a Wall Street lawyer, gave a rare interview and came up with a quip that gained currency in the defense of CIA: “Actually we thought NSA was running CIA rather than the other way around.”70
The CIA scored another victory when Gloria Steinem emerged as a prominent defender. She told Newsweek: “In the CIA, I finally found a group of people who understood how important it was to represent the diversity of our government’s ideas at Communist festivals. If I had the choice, I would do it again.”71
Three elements of a canonical CIA narrative were now in the public domain: the CIA’s support for the NSA consisted of a few travel grants; top government officials approved the relationship; and the CIA never exercised control over the association or damaged its independence. Dentzer took this to extremes during a 1980 interview when he dismissed the significance of the whole operation: “Oh, someone must have called up Allen Dulles and said ‘Give these people a few bucks.’”72
Public reaction to the CIA activities in the United States polarized quickly; there were CIA defenders and CIA critics. There was also a larger category of people who had no idea what it was all about. As NSB member Steven Parliament traveled around the country, trying to convince member schools to remain loyal, he had the same experience as Radlo: people were confused. “It didn’t sound real.” Some asked, “What on earth do they want of us?” Others asked, “What did they get?” No one could really answer.73
IN EARLY MARCH 1967, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by J. William Fulbright, heard testimony that challenged the CIA’s version of events on every score. But the testimony was closed to the public. Only a handful of senators attended, and the transcript remained classified until 1997.74
On March 6, Michael Wood told the senators that the CIA claims were lies. One by one, he addressed the Agency’s contentions. One of the “most distressing things” was the State Department’s assertion that “only two people each had been involved” in a given year. He challenged the scope of the operation, telling the senators the students did commit espionage for the CIA, and that the international agenda was determined by the CIA.75
Wood explained the difference between a subsidy and an operation: “The last and gravest misrepresentation was to represent the relationship as a subsidy.”76 He described it as “an integral relationship in which staff of NSA … became junior bureaucrats in Covert Action No. 5 or the Plans Divisions of the CIA.” He pointed out that programs were approved by the CIA bureaucracy, not the NSA constituency.77
But the senators, away from the cameras and assured of secrecy, were in a playful mood. Senators Eugene McCarthy, Clifford Case (R-N.J.), and Fulbright teased one another about their reported complicity in organizations alleged in the press to be receiving CIA subsidies. Senator McCarthy quipped, “I found that I am a director of at least eight of these organizations at this point.”78 Senator Case referred to the Ramparts article and teased, “Are you a pipe, a conduit?” Chairman Fulbright chimed in, “You are?” McCarthy chortled, “I am. Do you want me to leave the room?” Senator Claiborne Pell (D-R. I.) joined the repartee with the news he was on “that Cuban Freedom Committee.” The all-in-fun exchange ended in laughter.79
Ten days later, on March 16, Eugene Groves and Richard Stearns entered Room 116 of the Capitol to explain what they knew of the NSA-CIA relationship. This time the closed session consisted of only four senators—John Sparkman (D-Ala.), Albert Gore, Sr. (D-Tenn.), Case, and Fulbright.
According to the declassified transcript, on March 6, Senator Fulbright had told his colleagues in private, “The thing that disturbed me very much when I first read the report about this case in The Washington Post, well, my first reaction was, what is the Senate for? I guess we are serving as a front to make people think we have a democracy for the boys who really run the country, who are the very people that are described in this article, who have the foundations and who control the CIA and all the other agencies.” Senator Joseph S. Clark (D-Penn.) supported him, saying, “I felt that ever since I came here.”80
But by the time Fulbright spoke publicly, in an article for the New York Times Magazine, his tone was measured: “The fair evaluation of any human act requires that due account be taken of the time and circumstances in which the act took place.”81 Cord Meyer, who had been at odds with Fulbright over Vietnam, later called his public remarks “restrained,” noting that “his attitude was important in moderating the congressional reaction.”82 Fulbright’s mildly critical piece, “We Must Not Fight Fire with Fire,” presented the NSA-CIA relationship as “a clear case of cold-war expediency.” But Fulbright said he did not understand why it continued “when communism is no longer a threat.”83
In a 1982 oral history interview, Richard Helms praised the damage control effort. He singled out statements from Senators Russell and Kennedy as crucial. “The fact that Senator Russell spoke up publicly and said that he had known about the agency’s support of the National Student Association, followed by the public statement by Robert Kennedy that he had also known about this and had approved it, turned off the firestorm that was about to begin over this.”84
President Johnson had given the Katzenbach Committee six weeks to complete its work. The investigation, such as it was, fell largely to one man, Katzenbach’s aide Jack Rosenthal. After some negotiation, Helms agreed to let Rosenthal view original documents held at the CIA headquarters. For several days, a chauffeur-driven car picked up the young aide and drove him to Langley. Upon entering the CIA building, Rosenthal would be escorted into a small, windowless room, where he waited for a man to bring in a locked metal case. The CIA employee would carefully unlock the case, lift out a stack of documents, and sit outside the closed door. At the end of each day, he would return, scoop up the documents, and lock them back inside the metal case.85
Rosenthal could not believe what he read. “There were literally hundreds of organizations.” He tried to approach the task as a journalist and organize the material in categories. “Some were quaint or outdated or of no consequence”; some he could not understand; a handful required a policy judgment. He tried to visualize concentric circles with the outer circle containing projects that could be made public. A second ring contained projects with limited disclosure. The inner ring, projects that were too difficult to deal with quickly, which could be sent to a future commission or “be kicked upstairs.”86 Once he came up with a system, he called it drudge work.
Rosenthal describes his encounters with Meyer as surprisingly cordial. He had heard of Meyer’s harsh reputation, yet Meyer, rather than trying to browbeat him, tried to explain the rationale behind the operations. Meyer argued that the CIA wanted to work with liberals who were unable to obtain congressional funding, yet another explanation for the covert nature of the funding that soon gained currency.87
Meyer may have been pleasant to Rosenthal, but privately he was in a rage. He blamed the American public, the treachery of students, and the media. On March 10, he confided to his diary that, while it would take some time for him to understand what happened and why, he was certain of three things: “1) There is in this country a widespread conviction that ‘the Cold War’ was at best a struggle peculiar to the 1950s and at worst a confrontation that we ourselves provoked against an innocent Stalin. 2) Many of the most intelligent youth believe that if the means are pure the end will be good and that the survival of democratic institutions can only be insured by making them totally open, no matter what. 3) The N.Y. Times and the Washington Post are committed to the proposition that the CIA is a worse danger to American democracy than any conceivable external enemy and must be exposed as such.”88
Throughout February and March, reporters from major newspapers around the country found evidence of CIA connections to more organizations. On February 18, the Washington Post carried three separate stories that identified additional foundations and organizations linked to the CIA.89 Reporters retraced Ramparts investigator Michael Ansara’s steps and discovered that funds given to these conduits corresponded dollar for dollar to awarded grants. The Los Angeles Times identified at least twenty-one conduits and foundations and more than fifty grantees.90 One Washington Post headline read, “O What a Tangled Web the CIA Wove,” and the article detailed CIA recruitment of “intellectuals, students, educators, trade unionists, journalists, and professional men.”91
Despite the extensive reporting, a chorus of denial rose along the eastern seaboard. George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, called charges of CIA involvement in labor “a damned lie.” He brazenly asserted, “Not one penny of CIA money has ever come in to the AFL or the CIO to my knowledge over the last twenty years.”92 A few months later, former CIA agent Tom Braden undercut Meany’s sweeping denials when he published a defense of the CIA’s domestic programs in the Saturday Evening Post, and described the Agency’s passing cash to the AFL-CIO’s chief international operative, Jay Lovestone.93 Allen Dulles and Braden never spoke again. Despite Braden’s revelations, both Meany and Love-stone continued to deny the accusations. The pattern continued with the American Newspaper Guild, the American Fund for Free Jurists, the National Council of Churches, and numerous others.
Of all the identified recipients of CIA largess, the United States Youth Council (USYC) had the trickiest problem. It received 90 percent of its funding from FYSA, publicly identified by Ramparts as a CIA conduit.94 Second, former NSA officers and staff held top positions in the USYC and had already acknowledged the CIA-NSA relationship, among them Gregory Gallo, who had led Stephen Robbins to his CIA induction ceremony.95 Since it was impossible to claim complete ignorance, the USYC conducted a brief investigation, which largely consisted of paying a visit to CIA paymaster Harry Lunn. The subsequent report took the non-denial denial defense to new levels: USYC officials found no evidence to suggest that FYSA was a conduit.96
Lakhina’s vigorous defense of COSEC did not survive the April 1967 Supervision Commission meeting.97 Lakhina had solicited statements in advance from former British and American student officers attesting to the independence of the secretariat. The responses, available in the ISC archives, are almost comically identical. Most arrived on the same day. Edward Garvey, who reluctantly came to COSEC on orders from CIA headquarters, wrote, “During my term of office with the ISC Secretariat I had absolutely no reason to suspect that any relationship existed between the CIA and the ISC nor do I believe that any such relationship existed.”98 George Foulkes and Gwyn Morgan from Britain similarly said there was “no reason to suspect” any relationship. Jyoti Shankar Singh, then head of the CIA-funded World Assembly of Youth, varied his response slightly: “There was no reason or evidence to believe that any of the money provided to ISC originated from any secret agency.”99 Former COSEC directors John M. Thompson and Hans Dall took up another common refrain: whatever the source of funding, there were “no strings attached.”100
The strategy did not work. The Supervision Commission members, meeting in Leiden, voted not to accept any new grants from FYSA or the San Jacinto Fund. By the third day of the meeting, everyone realized that the survival of the ISC was at stake. Numerous student unions had already resigned in protest. The Supervision Commission ordered a full investigation, unaware of the irony that it was CIA funds that had enabled them to convene.101
The investigation was doomed from the beginning. The British representatives, who like the NSA had a stake in preventing the disclosure of intelligence involvement, led the investigation.102 Harry Lunn stonewalled. He called the request to view FYSA records an “invasion of privacy” of board member Amory Houghton’s business affairs. Investigators pressed Lunn on the contradiction between his acknowledged role as NSA president, and his denial that FYSA was a conduit. Lunn gave three answers, all lies. First, he claimed that “FYSA was not involved in this relationship during his term of [NSA] office.” Then he portrayed Houghton as “most upset” over allegations that FYSA was a conduit, since the charge was “totally untrue.” Finally, he denied that FYSA was a Cold War instrument, going so far as to state that it had made funds available to communist students but they “had not been collected.”103
Despite the fact that CIA-funded recipients remained under siege, Cord Meyer evinced optimism about the Agency’s ability to continue covert operations. On March 20, he wrote to his deputy Tad Davis that he had seen the Katzenbach Committee report in draft. “Although we will be severely restricted in our contacts with domestic institutions, they are trying to give us leeway in which to operate.”104 A few days later, on March 29, the formal report was submitted to President Johnson, who subsequently announced an executive order prohibiting CIA use of private-sector organizations. Despite the apparent blanket prohibition, Meyer wrote to another CIA lieutenant, “New ground rules will be restrictive but not prohibitive.”105
The damage control measures might have pleased CIA officials but not those who wished to see a full investigation. Even NSA president Groves characterized the Katzenbach Committee report as a whitewash.106 For his part, Douglass Cater lambasted Groves for divulging details of the NSA-CIA relationship, and also for revealing that the two had spoken before the Ramparts article was published. Groves apologized to Cater for “compromising his position,” and tried to explain his actions. He defended the phrase “ethical trap” used in the NSA press release, pointing out that it had replaced even sharper language.107
Groves tried to put his actions in a larger context. “A large portion of our mail has exhibited condemnation of past officers who, in the constituents minds, have sold out a generation of young Americans.” He suggested that Cater see this anger “as a manifestation of a growing disaffection, not simply with the current administration, but with the processes of national government itself.” Groves pointed to the war, the draft, and disappointment with progress on civil rights. There is a feeling, he told Cater, that “government is inherently dishonest.”108
Groves was not alone in his criticism of the Katzenbach Committee. NSA veteran Curtis Gans, then staff director for Americans for Democratic Action, organized a protest petition that called for an impartial investigation. It was signed by Groves along with fifty former NSA staff and officers.109 The petition also praised Sherburne and Groves’s actions against the more inflammatory charges by left-wing critics.
The protests came to naught. The CIA, the State Department, the White House, and most of Congress had no interest in further investigation. The flap had been contained. In May, Cord Meyer received one of three medals he was to be awarded for distinguished service.110 Soon after, Helms appointed him chief of station in London. Kiley rose within the CIA to become Helms’s assistant.
During the summer of 1967, former NSA president Dennis Shaul stopped off in London to see Eden Lipson, a University of California graduate who had been active in the association. During a long evening, Shaul tried to justify the CIA relationship. According to Lipson’s notes made immediately afterward, Shaul averred, “The big fish are still under water.”111