Spy Schools

by Daniel Golden

  Once known as the refuge of out-of-office politicians, the Kennedy School now swarms with former intelligence brass. Speaking there in April 2015, CIA director John Brennan waved to “my former deputy” in the audience: Michael Morell. The former CIA deputy director is a nonresident senior fellow at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, along with ex–CIA director David Petraeus, who periodically holds court in a Belfer Center office, with fellows and students lining up to see him. Admiral Stansfield Turner, the former CIA director who feuded with then–Harvard president Derek Bok, sits on the editorial board of the Belfer Center’s quarterly journal, International Security, as does General Brent Scowcroft, former chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Legendary CIA intelligence officers Rolf Mowatt-Larssen and Charles Cogan are also affiliated with the center. Its director, Graham Allison, is on the CIA director’s advisory board.

  These connections are open, but others are less visible. The CIA has long had an understanding with the Kennedy School that its intelligence officers can attend programs undercover, as long as they don’t violate the ban established by Bok on covert recruiting. Generally, clandestine officers inform the Kennedy School administration—but not their professors or classmates—that they work for the CIA. The school keeps it quiet.

  In practical terms, this makes sense. Since the Kennedy School accepts open CIA employees such as analysts, it seems unfair to exclude case officers, who are not only the agency’s eyes and ears in the field, but its heart and soul. Surrounded by international students, they couldn’t acknowledge their real occupation without word getting back to Riyadh or Jakarta and imperiling their diplomatic status, so they have to stick to their foreign-service identities.

  Yet the presence of students who are living a lie undercuts one of the Kennedy School’s key educational goals. Its programs for future leaders are designed to overcome cultural differences and national prejudices through candid discussions with their counterparts from other countries about personal and work experiences. A student inhibited by the need to protect a false identity can’t be completely frank. In that sense, the CIA’s clandestine officers displace other government employees who could contribute more to the learning experience, both in and out of the classroom.

  “I’d be uneasy about anyone undercover,” says Columbia professor Robert Jervis, a longtime CIA consultant and member of the International Security editorial board. “It’s antithetical to the spirit of the university.”

  The issue of clandestine recruiting is particularly dicey. Without explicitly mentioning the enrollment of CIA officers in Harvard classes, the 1977 report by President Bok’s top advisers on “Relationships Between the Harvard Community and U.S. Intelligence Agencies” deplored the use of “professors, administrators or possibly students” as recruiters: “[I]t is inappropriate for a member of an academic community to be acting secretly on behalf of the government.… The existence on the Harvard campus of unidentified individuals who may be probing the views of others and obtaining information for the possible use of the CIA is inconsistent with the idea of a free and independent university. Such practices inhibit free discourse and are a distortion of the relationship that should exist among members of an academic community.”

  Both the CIA and Harvard caution undercover intelligence officers against recruiting classmates. “It’s a red line,” one Harvard administrator told me. “Everybody understands it. We believe they honor it. I have had discussions, on behalf of the school, with senior CIA training people, to make sure they know the rules.”

  Still, even if a clandestine CIA officer doesn’t formally enlist a foreign classmate—and no one monitors compliance—nothing prevents him or her from grooming a potential asset, perhaps over a beer at a Harvard Square bar or at one of the school’s many social functions. After they graduate, the intelligence officer can then renew the acquaintance overseas, or at a Harvard reunion, and tap his old Kennedy School buddy for information, still without disclosing his CIA affiliation.

  “Suppose a student is working for the CIA, and sitting next to a Russian, and says, ‘Let’s go have a beer,’ and develops a friendship, then develops a paying relationship,” says Professor Joseph Nye, a former dean of the school. “I don’t see how you know it. I don’t know how a dean would find out about it.”

  In its zeal to recruit the Kennedy School’s foreign students, the CIA has occasionally overstepped. Since September 11, 2001, the agency twice approached one Kennedy School administrator. First, it asked him to identify students who were rising stars in Pakistan’s government and police force, doubtless so it could develop them as assets. He declined. Second, it wanted to know which Palestinian National Authority officials taking executive education courses had impressed him. It offered to arrange, presumably through a front organization, for a Palestinian group to come to the school. He passed the idea to another administrator, and didn’t hear of it again.

  A foreign student once complained to Joseph McCarthy, a now-retired senior associate dean at the Kennedy School, that people unaffiliated with Harvard had taken him to lunch and tried to recruit him as a spy. “They made him feel uncomfortable,” McCarthy says.

  McCarthy dialed a phone number they had given the student. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “We’re an agency of the federal government. We can’t tell you more than that.”

  When he called again, the number was disconnected.

  Kevin Ryan, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general with intelligence experience, directs the Belfer Center’s Defense and Intelligence Project, a hub for research and analysis in those fields. He told me that the CIA has met with him, asking to debrief him about his travel abroad and to be notified of foreign guest speakers. He refused.

  “I don’t want a relationship,” he said. “I don’t want anyone to think that what I do is connected to the U.S. government. My background is already one strike against me.”

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  WHETHER BECAUSE OF Ryan’s response or for other reasons, the CIA does not send representatives to the project’s weekly seminars, even though other U.S. government and military officials often take part, along with Kennedy School students and fellows. But it can’t resist the chance to cultivate decision makers enrolled in the Kennedy School’s executive education programs. Considered cash cows for the school, such programs typically last two to four weeks and award certificates of attendance rather than degrees. In the Senior Executive Fellows program for federal managers and their foreign counterparts, participants who ostensibly work in foreign trade for the Commerce Department occasionally request two certificates—one in their official alias, and one in their real name.

  “We accept people paid for and sponsored by the U.S. government even if we don’t know their identity,” a person familiar with that program told me.

  To Tad Oelstrom, a former Air Force lieutenant general who oversees the Senior Executives in National and International Security program, having spies hidden in the student body can enhance the educational experience. About seventy students, half American and half foreign, take the two-week, $12,500 course, which is given twice a year and has trained many luminaries-to-be, including heads of the National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency.

  The student body probably includes foreign intelligence officers, Oelstrom told me. “We don’t know who they are. You would suspect that some of them come here with other missions in mind.”

  As for U.S. agents, “Sometimes I know, sometimes I don’t,” though he may be aware that the CIA is paying their tuition. “We don’t pry into their background.” Generally, they tip off Oelstrom in advance, and he accommodates their cover. “We ask, ‘What would you like reflected on the photo roster?’” If they want to be omitted from the roster, that’s okay, too. He’s not worried that they’ll try to recruit classmates: “Agencies have been a part of the program for so long. I can’t say it would never happen.”

  Fo
reign or domestic, Oelstrom says, spies are welcome. Discussions are unclassified, and classes help prepare students for the real, open, uncertain world, where intelligence leaks and espionage are a fact of life. For managers accustomed to secure environments, recognizing that they must be able to communicate without using classified information is part of learning to lead.

  It’s also fodder for jokes. When the students gather for the first time, they’re given thirty seconds apiece to introduce themselves. “If someone says, ‘I’m from the intelligence community, and my name is Jim Smith,’ I go tongue-in-cheek, ‘And his real name is…’ It settles everyone down.”

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  IN 1986, ROBERT M. Gates approached the Kennedy School with an unexpected proposal. Then the CIA’s deputy director, Gates felt that the agency had become too cloistered and inward-looking. He was also fed up with finger-pointing between CIA analysts and White House policy makers over intelligence failures.

  His concept, honed by discussions with the school, was that the CIA would pay it to run executive education courses for senior managers in U.S. intelligence. The classes would discuss case studies, developed by the school, on decision making that involved intelligence issues, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

  The Harvard Intelligence and Policy Program signified a rapprochement between the CIA and Harvard after the Bok-Turner confrontation. The program also became its own case study in the balancing of national security and academic freedom, and in the complexities of collaboration between an intelligence service built on secrecy and a university that bans classified research on campus.

  “The CIA had as little experience of writing unclassified contracts as Harvard had of concluding contracts with an intelligence agency,” Professor Philip Zelikow, who would become one of the main teachers in the program and oversee the case studies, later wrote.

  Having recently endured a scandal over undisclosed CIA funding for a conference hosted by the director of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard administrators were wary of Gates’s overtures and fearful of another media bashing. “We thought we’d get clobbered,” Albert Carnesale, then the Kennedy School’s academic dean, told me.

  To overcome Harvard’s skepticism, the CIA broke with long tradition. It agreed that the program would be unclassified and, after months of wrangling, yielded its claim to prior review of material. It also facilitated case studies by declassifying documents and making people available for interviews. To Harvard’s relief, media coverage at the program’s launch in December 1987 was favorable: “CIA Waives Secrecy Rule for $1 Million Harvard Study,” ran the Boston Globe headline.

  The case studies and courses, which lasted one to three weeks, satisfied Harvard and the CIA enough that they renewed the contract throughout the 1990s. The negotiations, though, were always contentious. One year, the CIA still hadn’t signed the contract on June 29, the day before Harvard’s fiscal year ended. Nancy Huntington, the program administrator, called Harvard’s general counsel to say that she and Professor Ernest May were fielding the program without funds and would go to jail tomorrow. The university got in touch with the CIA, which sent a courier with the contract.

  George Tenet, who became CIA director in 1997, was less committed than his predecessors to the Harvard experiment. Then, in 1999, the Kennedy School developed a case study of the American response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Titled Politics of a Covert Action: The US, the Mujahideen, and the Stinger Missile, it exposed the jousting behind President Reagan’s decision in 1986, over the CIA’s opposition, to send Stingers to the Afghan rebels.

  Compelling and meticulously researched, the study identified three former CIA station chiefs in Pakistan. It also described the rapport between Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan’s president from 1978 until his death in 1988, and William Casey, CIA director from 1981 to 1987. “Casey became Zia’s closest contact in the Reagan administration,” it reported.

  The account of how it was outmaneuvered by an assistant undersecretary of defense and several members of Congress (including the Texas representative later lionized in the 2007 film Charlie Wilson’s War) roiled the agency. “I was told they objected to naming Zia-ul-Haq so prominently; apparently they thought it was a secret he cooperated with the CIA,” Kirsten Lundberg, its author, told me.

  The CIA appeared to be “upset in general that the interviews were on the record; somehow it had been their impression that all the interviews were classified,” Lundberg continued. “They wanted us to classify the entire case. Failing that, they wanted us to turn over all the interview transcripts and the tapes. We did not.” Harvard attorneys backed the decision.

  “The fight dragged on for months, and left bitterness,” recalled Peter Zimmerman, a longtime Kennedy School administrator whose current title is senior associate dean for strategic program development. “It made it easy for the CIA to move on.” Disillusioned with transparency, the CIA didn’t renew the contract.

  Although managers from the CIA’s analytical branch made up most of the students, some came from the clandestine service and enrolled under aliases. The Kennedy School gave them end-of-course certificates with their names blanked out.

  After one course ended, a CIA participant called Huntington in distress, asking her if the program was “private.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I ran into someone at the [Harvard] Institute of Politics and my cover was blown,” he said.

  Since the Harvard Intelligence and Policy Program classes were limited to American intelligence personnel, fictional identities posed no ethical obstacle. The use of cover in the mid-career program raises more serious issues. That one-year program typically has almost twice as many international students as Americans. Of the 214 participants in 2015–16, 79 were American, including 31 from the federal government and military. The 135 foreign students represented 75 countries; 36 came from Asia, and 24 from the Middle East. The estimated ten-month cost per student was $88,862, including $45,697 in Harvard tuition, an $8,040 mid-career surcharge, and $23,380 for room and board.

  Americans and Russians, Arabs and Israelis, Turks and Armenians gather every Thursday for a student-led seminar. “Part of my job was to try to create an environment where all those people can get into a room and you don’t have fistfights every day,” recalls a former program staffer. “Some of the best conversations have a little tension in them. The trick is to create that environment, either in the classroom or out, without it boiling over. Sometimes it boils over.”

  The international roster reads like a CIA shopping list. “In my year, we had a Jordanian diplomat who became a senior adviser to the king,” says a former CIA analyst. “A German diplomat. A Brazilian diplomat … There’s no doubt that’s a rich environment for conversations, dialogue, and introductions. It’s always interesting to know what foreign officials are doing, and helpful to meet people who would serve as contacts overseas.”

  Mid-career participants also make valuable contacts outside the program. Because they can fulfill its eight-credit requirement by taking courses throughout the university, they get to know other Kennedy School and Harvard students. During school vacations, they go on student-organized treks worldwide, from Kenya to Korea. They’re often greeted by influential alumni who arrange meetings with government and business honchos.

  About twenty-five mid-career students traveled to Washington, D.C., on an October weekend in 2015. Their itinerary included the State Department, National Security Council, U.S. Institute of Peace, House Armed Services Committee, and the Pentagon, where they met Rear Admiral Peter Fanta, a Kennedy School graduate. Accidentally separated from the group outside the White House, one student began chatting with the man next to her in line, who turned out to be an FBI special agent. When she told him that she was in the Kennedy School mid-career program, he asked if she had any interest in working for the FBI. “We’re recruiting heavily,” he said. “How about the CIA?”


  Most mid-career graduates, including former CIA personnel, say that they learned a lot. Past and future government officials on the faculty “brought a wealth of their own experience to the table,” said retired CIA officer Regis Matlak. They taught him to think about foreign affairs in a more sophisticated way by placing an issue in chronological context, tracing its historic roots, and avoiding simplistic analogies.

  I can relate to the group dynamics. In 1998–99, I was a fellow in a Stanford University program for mid-career journalists. It was similar in many ways to the Kennedy School’s mid-career program. Accompanied by spouses and children, experienced professionals from the United States and around the globe assembled in Palo Alto. We pondered the world’s problems at weekly seminars, gravitated toward the same courses and professors, bonded on excursions to wine country and Monterey Bay, and enjoyed casual evenings of conversation and camaraderie in each other’s homes. I voiced opinions freely—perhaps too freely!—and so did other fellows. Then we scattered again. Today, almost two decades later, I still feel a kinship with them. I keep in touch with several whom I consider friends for life, and eagerly await reunions.

  My classmates were aware of my true occupation and employer, and accepted my attitudes and experiences at face value, as I did theirs. Had one of us been an undercover intelligence officer, though, he or she could have taken advantage of those trusting relationships to groom an informant or two.

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  AN ADMISSIONS COMMITTEE of more than twenty-five professors and administrators reviews mid-career candidates; each file is read multiple times. They’re judged on three criteria: Can they handle the academic work? Are they outstanding at their jobs? Do they have potential to rise higher? CIA clandestine officers apply under their covers, typically as foreign-service officers. Furnished with strong recommendations—for example, “he’ll make a great ambassador someday”—from embassy colleagues accustomed to safeguarding CIA covers, they’re usually admitted. Once they arrive, they confess their secret to key Kennedy School administrators, who promise to honor it.