Spy Schools

by Daniel Golden

  The Harvard wise men disagreed. Their 1977 guidelines prohibited students and faculty from undertaking “intelligence operations” for the CIA, although they could be debriefed about foreign travels after returning home. “The use of the academic profession and scholarly enterprises to provide a ‘cover’ for intelligence activities is likely to corrupt the academic process and lead to a loss of public respect for academic enterprises,” they wrote.

  Also forbidden was helping the CIA “in obtaining the unwitting services of another member of the Harvard community”—in other words, recruiting foreign students under false pretenses. To Bok and his advisers, this perverted the trust between professor and student on which higher education was built. Posing as a mentor, a professor might probe a foreign student’s views on international affairs, or ask about his financial situation, not to guide him but to help the CIA evaluate and enlist him. And, once it snared the student, the agency might ask him to break the laws of his home country—a request that Harvard couldn’t be a party to.

  “Many of these students are highly vulnerable,” Bok told the Senate in 1978. “They are frequently young and inexperienced, often short of funds and away from their homelands for the first time. Is it appropriate for faculty members, who supposedly are acting in the best interests of the students, to be part of a process of recruiting such students to engage in activities that may be hazardous and probably illegal under the laws of their home countries? I think not.”

  The Harvard committee acknowledged that its new rules made the CIA’s job harder. “This loss is one that a free society should be willing to suffer,” it said.

  * * *

  THE CIA SAW no reason to suffer. Admiral Stansfield Turner, CIA director from 1977 to 1981, believed that the agency should take advantage of the presence of foreign students on U.S. soil. Since recruiting foreigners in totalitarian countries is difficult, “it would be foolish not to attempt to identify sympathetic people when they are in our country,” he wrote in his autobiography. “University personnel can sometimes help the CIA in this identification, though there clearly can be a conflict between a university official’s doing that and fulfilling his responsibility to look after the student’s best interests in and out of the classroom.”

  Turner rejected Harvard’s guidelines—as well as another Church Committee recommendation that the agency tell university presidents about clandestine relationships on campus—and made clear that the agency had no intention of following them.

  If professors want to help the CIA, Turner argued in correspondence with Bok, it’s their right as American citizens, “a matter of choice or conscience.” While the agency encourages scholars to notify their universities of their CIA ties, Turner went on, many are reluctant to do so for fear of hurting their careers. “These relationships are frequently kept confidential at the insistence of the individuals themselves, their concerns being that they might otherwise be exposed to harassment or other adverse consequences as a result of exercising their right to assist their Government.”

  In his narrative, the scholar-spies, rather than the foreigners they deceptively recruited, were at risk. Harvard’s policy, he concluded, “deprives academics of all freedom of choice in relation to involvement in intelligence activities.”

  * * *

  FOLLOWING THE MAXIM that the best defense is a good offense, the CIA promulgated its own “Regulation on Relationships with the U.S. Academic Community,” which remains in effect today. Drafted by John Rizzo, a young lawyer who had recently joined the CIA from the Treasury Department, the one-page regulation ratified the status quo, permitting the agency to “enter into personal services contracts and other continuing relationships with individual full-time staff and faculty members.”

  The CIA would “suggest” that the staff or faculty member alert a senior university official, “unless security considerations preclude such a disclosure or the individual objects.”

  Since the Church Committee also raised concerns about CIA relationships with journalists and clergy, Rizzo drew up rules for dealing with them, too. It would have made sense for him to set the same standards for covert use of journalists and clergy as for academics, since there are obvious analogies between the three groups. All are expected to pursue their vision of truth, whether or not it conflicts with the national interest. All have captive flocks that trust them—students, readers and sources, and worshippers—making them potentially valuable as recruiters.

  Yet Rizzo set a higher bar for journalists and clergy. To use them, unlike a professor, would require the personal approval of the CIA director. The reason for the double standard, Rizzo said in a 2015 interview, was purely pragmatic. Of the three groups, professors were by far the most important to the agency. By the Church Committee’s reckoning, the CIA had relationships with fifty journalists and a handful of clergy, as measured against several hundred academics.

  “Academics were active on lots of campuses,” said Rizzo, who rose to become the agency’s acting general counsel before leaving in 2009 for private practice. “The judgment was, the director can’t approve every single one.”

  Harvard and the CIA bickered with one eye on the audience they wanted to impress: the rest of academia. One university, no matter how prestigious, couldn’t stare down the CIA. But if other universities lined up behind Harvard, the agency would be hard-pressed to resist.

  “I thought the Harvard policy would have a chilling effect,” Rizzo said. “We all thought it was just the beginning, the canary in the coal mine.”

  So did Halperin, who set out like Johnny Appleseed to sow the Harvard guidelines across the country. To his shock, the soil was barren. Other universities were reluctant to follow Harvard’s lead without documented evidence of covert CIA-faculty relationships, which the Church Committee had suppressed. University presidents wrote to the CIA, asking for particulars about cooperating faculty, which the agency declined to provide. Some professors complained that Harvard’s rules would infringe on their academic freedom. Steiner, the Harvard lawyer, sought support from an association of general counsels at major universities, without success. After CIA director Turner lobbied University of Michigan faculty members, they voted down proposed guidelines.

  Only ten schools adopted Harvard’s policy even in diluted form. “Fortunately, very few other universities followed Harvard’s example, and this did not become a continuing problem,” Turner later wrote.

  Rizzo was surprised that the Harvard policy “never got traction.” It didn’t even stop covert activities at Harvard, where professors risked being disciplined for hiding their CIA affiliations. “I don’t remember hearing about any Harvard cooperators being scared off by the Bok guidelines,” Rizzo said.

  Forty years later, Halperin remains perplexed. “I thought once Harvard did it, everybody else would follow,” he said. “Nobody did. It was a big disappointment. If we had been able to make it the norm on major campuses, it would have had impact. I was befuddled, bewildered, and frustrated. Finally, I just gave up.”

  * * *

  THE FAILURE TO replicate the Harvard guidelines nationwide snuffed out the last chance to build a firewall between U.S. intelligence and academia. Critics of covert recruiting on campus lost momentum. Even as students from China began pouring into the United States, prompting the FBI and CIA to escalate campus recruiting, the pushback from academia diminished, especially after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The alliance that had characterized the 1940s and 1950s began to reemerge.

  In 1977, a year after the Church Committee report, a Boston-based CIA operative dropped by the office of an MIT physicist. It was the start of a long and delicate relationship in which the physicist would cooperate with the agency—and set limits on just how far his cooperation would extend.

  He was heading a federally funded MIT initiative on nonproliferation and had acquired a security clearance at the request of the U.S. government. The agent explained that the CIA was eager to consult academic expe
rts on nuclear issues. “There are several people in your department who are already helping us,” the agent said. “You travel abroad and have interactions with foreign scientists.”

  After consulting with an MIT colleague, who confided that he was already advising the CIA, the physicist agreed to the agent’s request, with the proviso that his assistance would be voluntary. “I was against the spread of nuclear weapons, but I didn’t want to be considered an employee of the CIA,” he said in 2015.

  “I felt that proliferation was a serious problem and I might be able to make a contribution, but I also had some misgivings.” He didn’t tell other MIT faculty or administrators about his new role. “I didn’t talk about it. You have the feeling most people at MIT don’t want to know.”

  As he returned from trips to such countries as Austria, Germany, Japan, and Indonesia, the CIA would call and question him. Whom did you meet? Did you talk to so-and-so? What did you learn?

  Though unpaid, having a CIA connection could be useful. For example, when the physicist wanted to learn more about Iraq’s nuclear program, he would go to the CIA’s covert office in a downtown Boston commercial building. There he would use the scrambler phone, a secure line on which he could discuss classified information, to call a scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, who was an expert on the antiquated bomb-building method that Iraq favored.

  From 1984 to 1986, while on leave from MIT as a visiting scholar with the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, he was occasionally sent on sensitive missions. On one occasion, he consulted with the CIA station chief in Vienna, who had a diplomatic cover and a spacious office in the U.S. embassy, where the physicist showed up at the appointed time. Elegantly dressed in a three-piece suit, the chief greeted his guest, locked the door, returned to his large desk, and pushed a button. A wall of bookshelves swung around to reveal a room with a large hemispherical metal-meshed enclosure. Reminded of every spy film he had ever seen, the physicist laughed and said, “Can you do that again?”

  The station chief led him into the cage, where they could talk about intercepted intelligence information without fear of surveillance. Half-apologetically, the chief explained that he came from a CIA family—his father had worked for the agency and so did his wife—but didn’t have much scientific knowledge. The physicist said he understood, and explained the intercepts in laymen’s terms for him.

  Back with MIT, he traveled again, and his debriefings resumed. Of particular interest to the CIA were his interactions with the Iranian students who had been sent to study nuclear engineering at MIT in the 1970s before the downfall of the shah in 1979. Several had returned to Iran in the mid-1980s after the new regime there, which had suspended the nuclear program begun under the shah, decided to resume it. The CIA wanted the physicist’s assessment of their capabilities.

  Then, in the late 1990s, he was asked to work directly for the agency: to go to India and establish contact with various scientists in order to obtain information that the CIA wanted. For the physicist, that crossed a line. He was willing to tell the CIA about his trips and provide scientific savvy, but not to accept its assignments or use his academic status as a cover to gather information on its behalf. “I refused,” he said. “I was not willing to act as an agent for the CIA. That was the last time I heard officially” from the agency.

  However, he did hear once more—unofficially. In February 2005, he was a member of a small group of U.S. nuclear scientists who met at the Iranian mission in lower Manhattan with Mohammad Javad Zarif, then Iran’s permanent representative to the United Nations and now its minister of foreign affairs. The scientists hadn’t notified the U.S. government of the meeting, which aimed to seek common ground on Iran’s nuclear program.

  Shortly after the physicist returned home that evening, he received a phone call. “We understand you met with Zarif,” a woman’s voice said. “We’d like to discuss it.” At a restaurant in Cambridge, he answered her questions about the discussion and his impressions of Zarif. He didn’t ask how she learned about it.

  * * *

  THE CIA MOVED to mend the breach with academia. In 1982, it brought fourteen college presidents to its Langley headquarters to meet the director and other top officials. In 1977, it started a “scholars-in-residence” program in which professors on sabbatical from their universities were given contracts to advise CIA analysts and made “privy to information that would never be available to them on campus.” In 1985, the agency added an “officers-in-residence” component, which placed intelligence officers nearing retirement at universities at CIA expense.

  The effectiveness of the officers-in-residence program was “very mixed,” said former CIA analyst Brian Latell, who ran it from 1994 to 1998. Before he took over, “we were sending Dagwood Bumsteads who should have been forced into retirement.” Some were just hanging around campus with nothing to do. Latell set standards; the officers must have advanced degrees and be allowed to teach.

  Some universities refused to participate. Latell sought to place a well-qualified officer with a doctorate and teaching experience at Yale. He enlisted support from senior faculty who fondly remembered the days when Yale professors and alumni forged the OSS. Nevertheless, Yale president Richard Levin rejected the proposal, Latell said. Asked about the incident, Levin said he had only a “vague recollection” of it.

  At the University of California, Santa Barbara, the CIA officer in residence drew criticism by displaying a reticence more suited to his clandestine background than to the open academic culture. “Whether or not his ‘no comments’ and refusals to talk about subjects were excessive, he apparently felt that he had to minimize exposure and say very little,” according to a CIA history of the program. Faculty initiated petitions against him, and a student protest “led to numerous arrests and the kind of flare-up that a host university and the Agency equally wish to avoid.” He “inspired suspicion rather than confidence,” and “quickly left.”

  At its peak, the program had officers in residence at more than a dozen universities, but the CIA has trimmed it back in recent years. The CIA and elite colleges both undervalued the program, Art Hulnick felt. The agency rarely invited the officers to talk about life on campus, while premier universities such as Harvard and MIT didn’t consider them qualified to teach.

  Boston University had no such qualms. After more than two decades at the CIA as an analyst, speechwriter for two directors, liaison to the German government, and academic affairs coordinator, Hulnick became an officer in residence at BU in 1989. The university assigned him a fourth-floor office—“In case they storm the building, they won’t get you,” his department chair joked—and he developed and taught courses on intelligence strategy. When his three-year stint in the program ended, he didn’t return to the CIA. Instead he joined BU’s international relations faculty and wrote two books and numerous articles before retiring in 2015.

  After Hulnick’s classes, he and his students routinely repaired to Cornwall’s pub in Kenmore Square for refreshments. He sensed that some were foreign spies, who took his courses as a sort of in-service training. “I could tell,” Hulnick said in a 2015 interview in his Brookline, Massachusetts, living room, which had framed maps on the walls and a keyboard that he occasionally plinked. “There’s a certain level of jargon. They were trying to get the American take on how intelligence is supposed to work.”

  One Russian student, for instance, who had been to Thailand and spoke fluent Thai, had “all the hallmarks of a KGB officer.” Hulnick had to buy lunch for another Russian as a prize for deciphering a coded message he wrote on the blackboard. “She had family connections to the Russian mafia, and a lot of them were ex-KGB. She came from that world.”

  Like universities, the CIA never forgets its alumni. One day its clandestine domestic arm, the National Resources Division, asked Hulnick if he knew any foreign students of interest.

  “I said, ‘I can point people out, but that’s it,’” Hulnick recalled. He would
n’t arrange meetings. “They said, ‘We’ll take it from there.’ I couldn’t be involved beyond spotting a student.”

  One student whom Hulnick spotted for the agency in the 1990s came from Kuwait’s ruling family. “He was in my class. We talked about it. I picked out the name. I asked him and he said, ‘Yeah, I’m a prince.’”

  * * *

  THE CIA SUPPLIED not only teachers but also students, intervening in a cherished academic bailiwick: admissions. In some cases it arranged schooling for valuable foreign informants who were in danger and had to flee to the United States. “Foreign nationals who have worked in place for years, and have done a heroic service, at some point may need to be exfiltrated out of their home country,” says Henry Crumpton, the former head of the CIA’s National Resources Division. “During that resettlement process, the agency goes to great lengths to help them establish a new life with a new identity. A big part of that is finding jobs, which may require more education for the former agent who has defected and his family.”

  In other instances, the CIA compensated foreign agents by arranging their children’s or grandchildren’s admission to an American college and paying their tuition, typically through a front organization. “When you’re recruiting a foreigner, you look at, ‘What can I do for this guy?’ Sometimes a guy will say, ‘I want my daughter to go to a good American school,’” says Gene Coyle, who came to Indiana University as a CIA officer in residence. He retired from the agency in 2006 and is now a professor of practice at Indiana, teaching classes on national security and espionage history.

  “The answer may be, ‘We may be able to line her up with a scholarship from the Aardvark Society of Boston.’ Instead of giving Daddy cold hard cash, when he has to explain where he gets it, his daughter gets the Aardvark Society second-born scholarship for people from Uzbekistan.”