Suzanimal
03-30-2015, 01:13 PM
A new book tells the story of how the CIA used unwitting college kids to send in reports from Third World countries. And I was one of them.
In 1963, I was a 20-year-old college senior who’d never been out of the country. With parents of modest means, summers meant working for spare cash, not backpacking through Europe or lounging on the beaches of Majorca. So when an invitation came to spend a month traveling through Southeast Asia as part of a student delegation, I leapt at the chance.
We’d be traveling under the banner of the U.S. National Student Association, a confederation of more than 300 colleges and universities across the country, and one whose liberal positions on civil rights and foreign policy had made it a target of a concerted conservative assault. (William F. Buckley’s Young Americans for Freedom was constantly urging student governments to disaffiliate). More significant, NSA (the student group, not the National Security Agency) was, I knew, a proudly independent organization, neither speaking for, nor subservient to, the U.S government—a sharp contrast with organizations like the International Union of Students, a Prague-based wholly-owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the NSA gave rhetorical and financial support to dissident student groups in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, fighting repressive governments supported by official U.S. policy.
So for 30 days, a dozen of us traveled to Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. We met with government officials, got briefings from officials at various American embassies, and had conversations with fellow students that stretched far into the night. On one occasion, in Manila, we met a close friend of the son of then-Philippine President Macapagal, who was clearly well to the left of the government. As we did throughout the trip, my fellow Americans and I wrote extensive memos about who we met and what we talked about, and mailed them to NSA headquarters in Philadelphia. It was, I knew, another way of establishing links between our independent student group and young compatriots all over the world.
And little more than three years later, I learned that I had been an unwitting part of a worldwide lie…and that there was at least a plausible chance that I had helped put that young Filipino’s liberty, and maybe life, in danger.
In March 1967, a disaffected NSA staffer revealed the truth: that ever since 1950, the NSA, along with a host of student and youth groups around the world, had been funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. A series of dummy foundations set up by the agency funneled money into existing foundations, which in turn dispatched funds to the NSA for travel grants, scholarships for foreign students, and monies for international student organizations that competed with Soviet-run groups for “the hearts and minds” of students who—it was assumed with good reason—would wind up leading their nations.
...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/29/was-i-a-cia-spy-50-years-on-i-still-don-t-know.html?via=desktop&source=twitter
In 1963, I was a 20-year-old college senior who’d never been out of the country. With parents of modest means, summers meant working for spare cash, not backpacking through Europe or lounging on the beaches of Majorca. So when an invitation came to spend a month traveling through Southeast Asia as part of a student delegation, I leapt at the chance.
We’d be traveling under the banner of the U.S. National Student Association, a confederation of more than 300 colleges and universities across the country, and one whose liberal positions on civil rights and foreign policy had made it a target of a concerted conservative assault. (William F. Buckley’s Young Americans for Freedom was constantly urging student governments to disaffiliate). More significant, NSA (the student group, not the National Security Agency) was, I knew, a proudly independent organization, neither speaking for, nor subservient to, the U.S government—a sharp contrast with organizations like the International Union of Students, a Prague-based wholly-owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the NSA gave rhetorical and financial support to dissident student groups in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, fighting repressive governments supported by official U.S. policy.
So for 30 days, a dozen of us traveled to Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. We met with government officials, got briefings from officials at various American embassies, and had conversations with fellow students that stretched far into the night. On one occasion, in Manila, we met a close friend of the son of then-Philippine President Macapagal, who was clearly well to the left of the government. As we did throughout the trip, my fellow Americans and I wrote extensive memos about who we met and what we talked about, and mailed them to NSA headquarters in Philadelphia. It was, I knew, another way of establishing links between our independent student group and young compatriots all over the world.
And little more than three years later, I learned that I had been an unwitting part of a worldwide lie…and that there was at least a plausible chance that I had helped put that young Filipino’s liberty, and maybe life, in danger.
In March 1967, a disaffected NSA staffer revealed the truth: that ever since 1950, the NSA, along with a host of student and youth groups around the world, had been funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. A series of dummy foundations set up by the agency funneled money into existing foundations, which in turn dispatched funds to the NSA for travel grants, scholarships for foreign students, and monies for international student organizations that competed with Soviet-run groups for “the hearts and minds” of students who—it was assumed with good reason—would wind up leading their nations.
...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/29/was-i-a-cia-spy-50-years-on-i-still-don-t-know.html?via=desktop&source=twitter