ONE EVENING AFTER DARK, sometime in mid-October 1965, I took a car ride that led me into uncharted territory. Two men, who over dinner earlier that evening had introduced themselves as former U.S. National Student Association (NSA) officials, drove my husband and me to a house somewhere in northwest Washington, D.C. The moment we entered the house, the phone rang. One of the men said he had to run an “urgent errand” and asked my husband to accompany him. I was left alone with the other man, who ushered me into a sunroom and took a chair opposite me.
Until that moment, my husband and I had been excited by our involvement with the NSA. Both from small towns, we had met at the University of Colorado and married in 1964. In August of that year, along with thousands of students from across the nation, we traveled to the University of Minnesota for the annual NSA Congress. I volunteered to type and run off stencils that contained the hundreds of reports, resolutions, and amendments debated by the delegates. After a week or so of committee meetings, students gathered in a large hall for sessions that often lasted into the early hours of the morning. By then, I had proved a reliable volunteer and was asked to sit onstage and take notes, a backup record in case the tape recorder failed.
Seated behind the podium at a table with other note takers, I had a full view of the large hall, its long rows of tables crammed on each side with delegates. Tall signs marked off the different regions. NSA Congresses mimicked political party conventions, which I had seen only on television. August in the Midwest is hot and steamy, and everyone smoked. My eyes smarted from the heat and tobacco haze that hung over the hall, but I was riveted by the political speeches; some delegates were funny, a few droned, but many were gifted orators. I had never seen or heard anything like it. I had grown up more devoted to cheerleading and baton twirling than political or intellectual pursuits. If I read a newspaper at all it was for the local sports section.
Some months after the Minnesota Congress, in the spring of 1965, an NSA official came to Boulder and encouraged my husband to apply for the association’s prestigious international summer seminar to be held at Haverford College, just outside NSA headquarters in Philadelphia. I embraced the idea, eager to taste more of the astonishing world I had first relished in Minnesota. He was accepted, and I was hired to type material for the seminar; the NSA even gave us an extra dorm room for our five-month-old baby. We joined eleven remarkable men and one woman: most were college newspaper editors or student body presidents; others were graduate students who specialized in African, Asian, or Latin American area studies. Whenever my work was caught up or the baby asleep, I was permitted to sit in on the formal sessions and absorb lectures about African or Latin American student politics.
On one occasion we traveled as a group from Philadelphia to Washington to visit the State Department, where we watched a film on John F. Kennedy called Years of Lightning, Day of Drums. The movie was intended for overseas audiences, and we felt privileged at being allowed to see it. And weepy. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 was still fresh for all of us, and no one emerged from the film with a dry eye.
In the final days of the seminar, the NSA offered my husband a salaried post on the international staff. This meant postponing law school and moving to Washington, D.C., where the NSA headquarters was relocating. Again with my enthusiastic support, he accepted.
Before the move, we once more attended the annual NSA Congress in late August, a requirement for all seminar participants. We drove through the night to reach Madison, Wisconsin, stopping for a brief time in Chicago. This time, I worked as paid staff in the secretariat that churned out convention material. Not yet aware of the women’s movement, I was thrilled when the NSA president decided that a woman should sit onstage during a speech by Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey lest he need a drink of water. The war in Vietnam was a huge issue, and Humphrey was coming to defend President Lyndon B. Johnson’s policy. As I sat onstage taking notes, I understood more of the debate and watched the votes with an avidity I had lacked the summer before. On the spur of the moment, my husband ran for national affairs vice president and lost by one vote.
Despite his loss, the international job offer remained secure, and after we moved to Washington, I enrolled at George Washington University as a junior, having taken a year out of college for the birth of our son. The new NSA headquarters, four-story twin townhouses off S Street near Dupont Circle, hummed with excitement. It was posh in comparison with the ramshackle Philadelphia office that previously housed the NSA: the international staff had two whole floors at the top. Our new life seemed almost magical. Then came the evening with the NSA veterans.
Once I was seated in the sunroom, the man sitting across from me asked whether I had noticed the strong bond among former NSA members. I nodded, remembering the older men I had seen at the NSA Congress in Madison, looking oddly out of place among the hundreds of undergraduates. He then told me that my husband was “doing work of great importance to the United States government,” and handed me a document to sign.
My husband had tried to prepare me. He had undergone a similar ritual with the same two men a few weeks earlier and realized that I might not appreciate his abrupt departure, especially since I was still recovering from a bout of pneumonia. So I knew that the phone call had been a pretext to leave me alone with one of the men. Still feverish, I sat on the edge of an overstuffed chair, my eyes burning and my ears ringing, and tried not to look too frightened. I pretended to read the document, but lingering fever blurred my vision, and anxiety made the words jump off the page. To this day, I have no idea what was in the small print, and I never again saw the document. I knew only that I was never to reveal what I was about to learn. As an apolitical twenty-year-old from a small town in Iowa, I had no reason to distrust the U.S. government. I signed.
My host then revealed that he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, that the CIA funded the NSA international program, and that he was my husband’s case officer (with the unlikely code name “Aunt Alice”). I caught key phrases: “the United States had to support France in its war with Algeria, because France and the U.S. were allies … but … we all knew that the nationalists would win … it behooves the United States to get to know … student leaders … future rulers.” I knew nothing about the Algerian war for independence or U.S. foreign policy, and I hadn’t a clue why the United States couldn’t have supported the Algerians. But the word behooves left an indelible mark. For years afterward, whenever I heard someone say “behooves,” the hair on the back of my neck would stand up.
Our dinner companions that night, Robert Kiley and Matthew Iverson, did have bona-fide credentials as former NSA officials, but they were also the director and deputy director, respectively, of CIA Covert Action, Branch Five: Youth and Students (Covert Action 5). In CIA-speak, my husband and I had been made “witting”—inducted into the secret knowledge that the CIA funded and ran the international program of the United States National Student Association. The document I had signed was a security oath under the Espionage Act. I don’t recall whether Iverson used the terms felony or prison when he talked to me that night, but I soon understood that revealing what he’d told me was a crime punishable by up to twenty years in prison.
Beyond keeping silent, my burden was minimal, since I didn’t work for the NSA. But my husband had reporting requirements. Part of his salary came secretly from the CIA, deposited directly into our bank account.
Like so many student leaders before him, my husband trusted the officials who asked him to sign the security oath. He, like me, trusted the U.S. government. As student body president at the University of Colorado, he had been to Selma, Alabama, for the civil rights march and thought of federal action as key to ending segregation. But he had never imagined that the CIA was involved in the NSA—something he learned only after he signed the oath.
He was deeply shaken by the revelation, which turned our time in Washington from a period of elation to one of confusion and, later, fear. We took the oath literally and seriously. We told no one. We sought no counsel. Aged twenty (me) and twenty-two (my husband), we felt isolated. And we kept asking ourselves: How could this have happened?
IN LATE AUTUMN 1966, reporters on the small San Francisco–based Ramparts magazine got a tip that the CIA was involved with the U.S. National Student Association. The editors were flummoxed. The NSA was a liberal organization. It supported the civil rights movement, raised bail money for jailed activists, condemned the anticommunist witch hunts of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and at its last Congress had debated supporting civil disobedience against the draft and the Vietnam War. Most Ramparts journalists, part of an emerging radical culture that did not take the communist threat seriously, viewed the CIA, as the investigative reporter Judith Coburn put it, as “right-wing assassins.” Any connection between the CIA and a liberal organization made no sense.
Coburn later reflected that she, like many of her Ramparts colleagues, had no understanding of liberal anticommunism. By the 1960s, many people associated the fight against communism with Senator Joseph McCarthy, congressional committees that hunted down suspected communists, new conservatives who called themselves Goldwaterites and condemned Richard Nixon for being soft on the Soviets, and the far-right John Birch Society, which advocated the impeachment of liberal Supreme Court justice Earl Warren. “Liberal anticommunism” sounded like an oxymoron.
But it was not only the liberal politics of the NSA that befuddled the young journalists. They asked why the CIA would be involved with kids who played at “sandbox politics.”
The Ramparts team shared the peculiarly American conceit that students were not significant political actors but teenagers preoccupied with football and fraternities or caught up in the emerging culture of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Elsewhere in the world, students took to the streets, toppled governments, overthrew dictators, or at the very least shaped educational policy. Street protests would soon come to the United States over the Vietnam War, but in 1966 protest had been largely confined to “teach-ins,” extended debates over American foreign policy that fell squarely within the academic tradition. While political awareness was growing on the nation’s campuses, the wider public did not take students seriously.
These two features of the National Student Association, its liberalism and its youthful constituency, not only puzzled the Ramparts journalists; they help explain how the CIA was able to camouflage its relationship with the organization for nearly two decades. The latter, in particular, also helped the CIA deflect the charges after Ramparts broke the story the following year, citing names of foundations that operated as CIA conduits, witting officers of the NSA, and details of some covert operations.
In the wake of the Ramparts disclosures, the CIA maintained that its role had been minimal: the agency had merely awarded a few travel grants for NSA members to attend international meetings. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The CIA ran an operation through the NSA, global in scope, which disguised and protected the hand of the U.S. government—the very definition of covert action. The Ramparts investigators had caught glimpses of this global reach but were overwhelmed by its breadth, hampered as they were by limited resources and the sphinxlike silence that met them whenever they questioned anyone who knew anything. Thus, even after Ramparts created a firestorm in 1967 with its charges, the public was left wondering what the students had actually done for the CIA and what the CIA had gotten in return.
The answers are by no means simple, and they change over time. What began as a straightforward operation to thwart Soviet influence at home and abroad grew, multiplied, and divided like a vast spider plant. Intelligence gathering and espionage—despite subsequent CIA denials—were integral to its nature. In its later stages, the NSA funneled support to a wide variety of revolutionaries: Algerians, anti-Batista Cubans, Angolan and Mozambique liberationists, and anti-Shah Iranian activists. The NSA also pushed the Palestinian cause in the Middle East until American Jewish groups caught wind of its activities. It meddled in the internal politics of foreign student bodies, its work occasionally eased by suitcases of CIA cash. But because the NSA was both liberal and a student organization, virtually no one suspected its importance to the CIA.
In fact, following the Ramparts story, in 1967 the CIA orchestrated a successful cover-up to prevent the public from peering into its extensive private-sector operations. The White House, the U.S. Congress, and the State Department helped keep the shroud intact. Witting NSA participants kept silent, honoring their security oaths or bowing to Agency pressure (and a few threats) to reveal no details, a tactic known informally as a non-denial denial, something that acknowledged the CIA presence (non-denial) but withheld its significance (denial). (The phrase suggests that the CIA understood well the power of the old adage “the devil is in the details.”)
How did a liberal student organization become, effectively, an arm of a covert government organization? The answer lies in the very origins of the NSA, founded in 1947 to represent American students, and in the actions of prewar progenitors—Roosevelt liberals, prominent educators, youth professionals, and U.S. government officials—committed to a noncommunist student organization at home and the projection of American student leadership overseas. After World War II, the number of individuals and institutions concerned with keeping the student movement free from communist penetration would expand to include the Catholic Church and U.S. intelligence agencies. This informal coalition existed largely behind the scenes, its actions neither nefarious nor clandestine. But during and after the war, the various members built the networks and relationships that allowed the CIA to see operational opportunities in the new student organization.