A Friend of the Devil Inside a famous Cold War deception. BY LOUIS MENAND

[Mark Thibodeau]

My "Harper's Rundown" provides a precis of the March issue's extensive
review of this book.

Here it is!

*THE FOURTH BRANCH, How the CIA infiltrated student politics*

Adam Hochschild discusses *Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the
CIA’s Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against
Communism*, a nearly 600-page behemoth of a book by Karen Paget. It’s a
book about the author’s involvement, in the early post-war era, with the
National Student Association. The author and her husband, both university
students from Minnesota, became involved with the association, only to
discover later—once they were in over their heads—that it was a CIA front,
and that revealing this fact to the world at large would land the both of
them in jail.

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 student organization turned out to be something much darker. “We
kept asking ourselves: How could this have happened?” Paget has spent many
years working to answer that question, and the result is an important and
carefully researched book about events that eerily foreshadow the Snowden
era.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the National Student Association and student unions
from other Western democracies belonged to the International Student
Conference, a federation headquartered in the Netherlands, while student
groups from the USSR and its allies were members of a rival federation, the
International Union of Students. The two organizations 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.

Reading this review, I was reminded of Frances Stonor Saunders’ essential *The
Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters* (2000), an
epic and impeccably researched overview of the CIA’s involvement in the
creation and steering of “Western culture” at a level and to a degree
previously thought possible only in the fever dreams of the most paranoid
of conspiracy theorists. Anyone familiar with the findings in Saunders’
work will hardly be surprised that “the CIA’s control of the National
Student Association gave it not just a means of influence but a fount of
intelligence.” I mean, of course it did.

American students were essentially conscripted into writing what were, in
effect, intelligence briefs about members of student unions from countries
all over the world, including in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and
Africa, where some truly evil dictatorships held sway. An example of why
this is a bad thing:

The reports provided the CIA with information about the 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 intellgence
services. That is what all such agencies do. Many of the governments the
United States was friendly with, however, were brutal dictatorships. The
National Student Association was deeply involved, for example, in Iraq. In
the early 1960’s, the agency backed the Baath Party, which was seen as
tough on communism. The association dutifully passed resolutions in favor
of the Baathists, and its international staff supported a new Iraqi student
union to counter the existing pro-Soviet organization. Once the Baathists
took power in a coup, Paget notes, they arrested some 10,000 Iraqis, of
whom they executed about half. … How many of the student victims in both
groups were targeted via National Student Association reports that had been
passed on to Iraq?

The story of how *Ramparts Magazine* first broke this story back in the
1967 is intriguing all on its own.

When Michael Ansara, a Ramparts researcher in Boston, began to investigate
the foundations that had funded the National Student Association, he
discovered that most were housed in law firms, where attorneys refused to
talk about their clients. Ansara then consulted a legal directory and
realized that the law firms all had something in common: each had at least
one senior partner who, during the Second World War, had served in the
Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA.

Were you aware that the CIA had helped the South African government find
Nelson Mandela in 1962? Yuppers… they did do that thing.

To combat a Soviet front organization, we create a front organization of
our own; to build allegiances against secret-police regimes, we finger
people for the shah’s secret police; to fight the brutality of al Qaeda, we
brutally torture prisoners.

‘Twas ever thus, it seems. One wonders how long this can go on… and what
the endgame ht be.

On Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 7:37 AM, Jerome Park <jeromepark3141 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> The C.I.A. had its eye on the N.S.A. from the start—both were born in
> 1947, a few months after Truman’s speech—and the relationship gained
> steadily in strength and intimacy until the day the secret became public.
> Its story is now told in detail for the first time, in Karen M. Paget’s
> “Patriotic Betrayal” (Yale).
>
> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/a-friend-of-the-devil/
>
>
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