All along, the real target of American anticommunism was organized labor. Employers were the core of the anticommunist movement and early on began building alliances. One was with the press, whose owners had their own fear of unions: as early as 1874 the New York Tribune was talking of how “Communists” had smuggled into New York jewels stolen from Paris churches to finance the purchase of arms. That same year the New York Times spoke of a “Communist reign of terror” wreaked by striking carpet weavers in Philadelphia. In 1887, Bradstreet’s decried the idea of the eight-hour workday as “communist.”
The anticommunist alliance was also joined by private detective agencies, which earned millions by infiltrating and suppressing unions. These rose to prominence in the late nineteenth century, and by the time of the Palmer Raids, the three largest employed 135,000 men. Meanwhile, the nation’s police forces began developing “red squads,” whose officers’ jobs and promotions depended on finding communist conspiracies.
Another ally was the military. “Fully half of the National Guard’s activity in the latter nineteenth century,” Fischer writes, “comprised strikebreaking and industrial policing.” Many of the handsome redbrick armories in American cities were built during that period, some with help from industry. Chicago businessmen even purchased a grand home for one general.
By the time the United States had entered the First World War, the Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Army’s new Military Intelligence branch were also part of the mix. An important gathering place for the most influential anticommunists after 1917, incidentally, was New York’s Union League Club, where Elihu Root had given his hair-raising speech about executing newspaper editors for treason. And anticommunism seamlessly fitted together with another ideology in the air, restricting immigration. John Bond Trevor, for example, an upper-crust WASP (Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt attended his wedding) got his start as director of the New York City branch of Military Intelligence in 1919. He moved on the following year to help direct a New York State investigation of subversives, which staged its own sweeping raids, and soon became active in the eugenics movement. He was influential in crafting and lobbying for the Immigration Act of 1924, which sharply restricted arrivals from almost everywhere except northwestern Europe. In a pattern still familiar today, his life combined hostility to dissidents at home and to immigrants from overseas.
• • •
What lessons can we draw from this era when the United States, despite sharing victory in the European war, truly lost its soul at home?
A modestly encouraging one is that sometimes a decent person with respect for law can throw a wrench in the works. Somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 aliens were arrested during the Palmer Raids, and Palmer and Hoover were eager to deport them. But deportations were controlled by the Immigration Bureau, which was under the Department of Labor. And there Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post, a progressive former newspaperman with rimless glasses and a Vandyke beard, was able to stop most deportations.
A true hero of this grim era, Post canceled search warrants, restored habeas corpus rights for those detained, and drastically reduced or eliminated bail for many. This earned him the hatred of Palmer and of Hoover, who assembled a 350-page file on him. Hoover also unsuccessfully orchestrated a campaign by the American Legion for Post’s dismissal and an attempt by Congress to impeach him. All told, Post was able to prevent some three thousand people from being deported.
A more somber lesson offered by the events of 1917–20 is that when powerful social tensions roil the country and hysteria fills the air, rights and values we take for granted can easily erode: the freedom to publish and speak, protection from vigilante justice, even confidence that election results will be honored. When, for instance, in 1918 and again in a special election the next year, Wisconsin voters sent a socialist to Congress, and a fairly moderate one at that, the House of Representatives, by a vote of 330 to 6, simply refused to seat him. The same thing happened to five members of the party elected to the New York state legislature.
Furthermore, we can’t comfort ourselves by saying of these three years of jingoist thuggery, “if only people had known.” People did know. All of these shameful events were widely reported in print, sometimes photographed, and in a few cases even caught on film. But the press generally nodded its approval. After the sheriff of Bisbee, Arizona, and his posse packed the local Wobblies off into the desert, the Los Angeles Times wrote that they “have written a lesson that the whole of America would do well to copy.” Knowing the facts is not enough. The public, the press, and the courts also have to believe that no one is above the law.
The final lesson from this dark time is that when a president has no tolerance for opposition, the greatest godsend he can have is a war. Then dissent becomes not just “fake news” but treason. We should be wary.
2017
TWO
Students as Spies
THANKS TO THE WHISTLE-BLOWER EDWARD SNOWDEN, we’ve learned that our national security apparatus has for years been secretly gathering the e-mails and telephone records of millions of Americans. It would be reassuring to think that such an arrogant use of power is a rare overreach. But it is not. Intelligence agencies have gone off the rails before, and for one particularly egregious instance some years ago, I had a view from a ringside seat. I’ll come back to that in a moment.
Karen Paget lays out the full history of this episode in her book Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade against Communism. Soviet communism may have vanished, but the events she describes have profound, disturbing relevance for anyone who cares about reining in the surveillance state.
Paget met her future husband when they were both undergraduates at the University of Colorado, where he became student body president. Together they attended the 1964 annual conference of the National Student Association, the country’s premier student group. Delegates came from all over the nation, as if for a presidential nominating convention. Having been raised in a small town, Paget found that for her the experience opened up an “astonishing world. . . . I was riveted by the political speeches. 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.”
For several decades after the Second World War, national student unions were where the politically ambitious first tried out their wings. Figures as varied as Congressman Barney Frank, the assassinated Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan were all active in student unions. In the United States, the National Student Association represented some four hundred American campuses at its peak, and during the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union used student politics as a proxy battleground for their rivalry.
In 1965, Paget and her husband were invited to a National Student Association (NSA) seminar that was far more exclusive than the previous year’s annual conference, with only a dozen other students, most of them college newspaper editors or student body presidents. The group enjoyed sessions with experts on Africa and Latin America and a visit to the State Department. When the seminar ended, the NSA offered Paget’s husband a job on its international staff in Washington, DC. He was given a good salary, they were living in the nation’s capital, and at the next national NSA conference Paget got to sit on the dais while Vice President Hubert Humphrey gave a speech. “Our new life seemed almost magical,” she writes. But then one day she found herself alone with two men, one of whom “told me that my husband was ‘doing work of great importance to the United States government,’ and handed me a document to sign. . . . My host then revealed that he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency . . . and that he was my husband’s case officer.” The National Student Association, Paget discovered, was underwritten by the CIA.
Her husband, she found out, had just signed a similar document, something called a national security oath. He had been, she writes, “deeply shaken by t
he revelation, which turned our time in Washington from a period of elation to one of confusion and, later, fear. . . . We told no one . . . we felt isolated.” The couple soon learned that revealing the NSA’s CIA ties would be a felony violation of the Espionage Act, punishable by twenty years in prison. Suddenly they were in far over their heads; he was twenty-two, she was twenty, and they had a baby. What they had believed to be a democratically controlled group of student idealists turned out to be something much darker. “We kept asking ourselves: How could this have happened?”
In the many years she spent working to answer that question, the CIA sometimes stone-walled her requests for data. Her attempt to get two reports from 1949, for example, took nine years. The story she tells is an impressive, devastating evening of the score by the woman who felt trapped and violated a half-century ago. It offers a sobering lesson about what can happen when a country loses control of its intelligence services.
• • •
In the 1950s and 1960s, the National Student Association and similar unions from other Western democracies belonged to the International Student Conference (ISC), headquartered in the Netherlands. Student groups from the USSR and its allies were members of a rival federation in Prague. The two international groups competed fiercely for the allegiance of students in nonaligned countries. But the ISC, like the National Student Association, was funded largely by the CIA, and huge amounts of agency money were covertly spent on its annual meetings and in support of its sixty-person secretariat. NSA and ISC staff traveled all over the world on the CIA’s dime to lobby student unions in other countries. They also arranged grants to establish student unions to the CIA’s liking in countries that didn’t have them and to create well-funded new unions to compete with those considered too far to the left. The CIA infiltrated nearly every level of the era’s student politics: in 1959, for instance, it recruited a recent Smith College graduate named Gloria Steinem to lead some one hundred Americans in disrupting proceedings and distributing pro-Western literature at a Soviet-sponsored youth festival in Vienna.
The CIA’s control of the National Student Association gave it not just a means of influence but a fount of intelligence. NSA staffers made “fact-finding” trips to other countries, where they interviewed student activists at length and wrote reports on them; foreign student leaders also took part in NSA seminars on international issues, as Paget and her husband had done. Over the course of six weeks, a seminar leader would encourage participants to freely voice their opinions, would read what they wrote in essays, and could see who was friendly or unfriendly to American foreign policy. Hundreds of reports about the students taking part flowed back to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. These seminars were such an intelligence gold mine that the CIA organized them throughout the world: thirty-three were staged in Africa alone. One resulting report described a Congolese student as “the conservative, intelligent, French-speaking African people have been looking for.” A Cameroonian was rated well because he was “a genuine nationalist, though perhaps of the more revisionist moderate variety.”
These reports provided the CIA with information about men and women who would someday be cabinet ministers, ambassadors, and UN officials. More ominously, they also gave the agency data to trade with other intelligence services. That, after all, is something all such agencies do. Many of the governments the United States was friendly with, however, were brutal dictatorships. For example, the National Student Association was deeply involved in Iraq. In the early 1960s, the CIA backed the Baath Party, which it saw as tough on communism. The NSA dutifully passed resolutions in favor of the Baathists, and its international staff supported a new Iraqi student union to counter the existing pro-Soviet one. Once the Baathists took power in a coup, they arrested some ten thousand Iraqis, of whom they executed about half. Then a different Baathist faction seized power in a second coup and arrested students who had worked with the Americans. How many of the student victims in both groups were targeted via NSA reports that had been passed on to Iraq? We will never know.
In Iran, the CIA in the 1950s had helped the Shah to depose a leftist prime minister and establish his notoriously ruthless secret police. But at the same time, NSA staff—some of them genuinely opposed to despotism and unwitting about the CIA connection—were helping an anti-Shah union of Iranian students in the United States, all the while filing the usual reports about the union’s members. “My God,” a former NSA president burst out at an alumni gathering decades later. “Did we finger people for the Shah?”
For twenty years, the CIA successfully kept its control over the National Student Association secret. Students recruited for the NSA’s international staff, or those who were urged to run for its key elective offices, were carefully vetted by veterans of the organization who had the CIA’s interests in mind. Once in place, and pleased to have an exciting job with the chance to travel, a new NSA official would be told that he (it was almost always a he) was about to be given some highly confidential information. Who would turn down the chance to hear a secret—and who won’t promise, in return, to keep it?
Given the CIA’s vast budget, money was never a problem: once an NSA project had been approved by Langley, the financial spigot gushed in response to a mere one- or two-page funding proposal. Over a million dollars in today’s money was spent organizing a single conference in Ceylon in 1956. A decade later, using various foundations as conduits, the CIA was spending twenty times that much on student operations each year. In case anyone asked questions about the lavish funding for NSA programs or the association’s comfortable double townhouse headquarters near Dupont Circle—were there no strings attached to any of these plentiful foundation grants?—there was a handpicked advisory board that could be counted on to say that all was on the level. But then suddenly everything came unglued.
• • •
In January 1967, I was working as a young staff writer at the San Francisco–based Ramparts magazine, which had established itself as a saucy new journal of investigative reporting. One day a frightened, bushy-haired young man named Michael Wood approached us with a story so far-fetched that at first no one believed him. Wood explained that he had been hired as the National Student Association’s fund-raiser. Like anyone in such a role, he knew that an organization’s most promising source of donations was those who had already given. But he was baffled when he was specifically told not to contact a number of foundations that had been the NSA’s most generous supporters, such as the innocuously named Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs. He repeatedly protested to the friend who had hired him, NSA president Philip Sherburne, and eventually Sherburne sat him down for a confidential talk. After having been elected, Sherburne said, he had been horrified to learn that most of the NSA’s money was coming from the CIA. He had brought in Wood to try to raise funds from other sources so that this embarrassing connection could be severed.
The CIA, however, was alarmed at the prospect of losing its hold over the student union. To prevent this from happening, it began playing hardball. The shadowy Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs abruptly claimed that the NSA owed it large amounts of money. A number of staff members, including Sherburne himself, had their CIA-arranged draft deferments canceled—with hundreds of thousands of American troops fighting in Vietnam, this was a lethal threat. And when the CIA learned that Sherburne had violated his national security oath by talking to Wood, the agency became nastier still. Fearful of a possible prison term, Sherburne had sought legal advice from Roger Fisher, a distinguished Harvard Law School professor. Soon after, a senior CIA official appeared at Fisher’s office and asked him to drop his client. When Fisher refused, the man hinted that there could be unfortunate consequences for Fisher’s brother, a foreign aid official stationed in Colombia. Fisher, to his credit, was not swayed.
Meanwhile, having made up his mind to disclose the secret, Michael Wood came to Ramparts, which began trying to confirm his extraordinary tale. When a Ramparts researcher in Boston be
gan to investigate the foundations that Wood said had funded the National Student Association, he discovered that most were housed in law firms, where attorneys refused to talk about their clients. The researcher then consulted a legal directory and suddenly realized that the law firms all had something striking in common: each had at least one senior partner who, during the Second World War, had served in the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA.
Several of us at Ramparts were working on the story. My own part was small: I rewrote one section of it and traveled to interview a former NSA officer, who, unsurprisingly, denied everything. It soon became clear that the CIA knew what we were up to, and the magazine took all sorts of frantic precautions: we made furtive calls from pay phones and hired a bored-looking Pinkerton guard to sit by the front desk. Wood came and went from the office, and one evening when he and I and a few others were working late, we were jarred by a string of loud explosions in the street outside. Was this how it was all going to end? Should we dive for cover? But it turned out there was no CIA assault team. The office was on the edge of Chinatown, and we had forgotten that it was the Chinese New Year.
In mid-February 1967, after pursuing the story for several weeks, we got word that the National Student Association was about to call a press conference, intending to reveal the CIA ties itself and put its own spin on the revelation. The issue of Ramparts with the exposé was still being edited, and this was of course decades before the Internet. What could be done? Warren Hinckle, the magazine’s editor, had the brilliant idea of placing a full-page advertisement announcing the story in the next morning’s New York Times and Washington Post. The NSA was upstaged, the story and its reverberations were on newspaper front pages for a week, and a group of members of Congress signed a protest letter to the president. This began a long period of public embarrassment for the CIA, climaxing in the 1970s with the disclosure that it had tried to assassinate several foreign leaders.
Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays Page 3
