Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Patriotic Betrayal 20150405

Colorado body colorado then deputy mayor of boulder and these experiences led to her coauthoring a book, running as a woman, an analysis of womens campaigns from 1920 to 1992. During the cart orer administration, she was appointed a regional director of the federal agency that supervised vista and the peace corps and other volunteer programs. Shes worked for foundations shes worked for the office of the president of the United University of california, and she has written a great deal for the magazine the american prospect. But mostly what shes been doing for the last 10 or 15 years is writing what i think is quite a remarkable book, patriotic betrayal. Its what were going to be talking with her about this evening its a subject, i think, of enormous importance. And even though its about things that happened 50 or 60 years ago, i think youll very quickly see that there is an echo in that book for many things that are going on today. So karen id like to given by just to begin by just beginning at the point in your life when you got involved with this story. You were a student, an undergraduate at the university of colorado, in the early 1960s. And then in 1964 you attended a conference of the National Student association. What was that and what was the conference like . Nsa was a membership School Pickup organization of about Membership Organization of about 300 universities and colleges in the United States. It claimed to speak for all American Students. It had huge annual conferences called congresses that mimicked political parties, and they were attended by delegates and alternates from the 300 member schools. They, about a thousand. I went not as a delegate from the university of colorado, i went as a wife. And so my First Encounter at the minnesota nsa congress was as a volunteer in the secretariat that produced mountain is of paper mountains of paper resolutions reports, etc. I should say that i married the student body president at the university of colorado, and i was also the secretary of Student Government, but it was a paid position because i wanted to be a secretary and hadnt quite figured out thats not why i was in college. [laughter] so thats, that was my initial engagement with nsa. But in your book you describe how when you went to this First National convention, it seemed to open up a whole new world to you. It was, as i try to describe and try to capture in this age i was from a town in rural iowa, had never heard of the New York Times, id never been east of chicago. I didnt watch network news. I was a cheerleader. I was a baton twirling and it twirler, and it opened up just a whole new world. And i think it did for so many people. Because there was no other way to have contact, and the regional differences or were really distinct. The accents were different, new jersey texas, boston. And it was a time when people who participated in Student Government were phi beta kappas smart, many of them were brilliant orators. Barney frank, you would have heard in the early a 60s. Jeff greenfield, the journalist thats been on cnn, abc, cbs. Amazing orator. He was the editor then of the cardinal at the university of wisconsin. So i had never heard political debate. I was from a family that was or very engaged this the community, but it was a kind of civic duty. There was i had no sense of partisanship. I didnt know the difference between republicans and democrats and almost failed a sophomore english exam on dickens because i didnt know the difference between republicans and democrats. Thats changed. [laughter] yeah. So here you were at this national convention, a thousand people. Student body prime ministers newspaper editors it seemed tremendously exciting. And then your husband got an invitation. What was that . The following spring one of the officers from nsa visited us and talk ad to him talked to him and invited him to apply for something called the interNational Student relations seminar. It was going to be held the coming summer in 65 at haverford college, pennsylvania. The nsa office at that point headquarters was in philadelphia. This was just outside. He applied and was accepted, and we had a tiny baby by then and they gave us an extra dorm room. I just want to say that that nsa baby, my oldest son, is in the audience tonight. [laughter] id like to recognize tim. So we trundled off to haverford a small family. And, again, i was the secretary. I was in a paid position to produce the material that about 12 handselected editors, area specialists, student body president s studied interNational Student politics. Many of them came expecting a course in international politics, but it is it was all about student politics. So a dozen students, student body president s and newspaper editors and so forth, who was leading the seminar . Two people who worked for nsa. There was a director and an associate director. And at this point, i mean theres no inkling other than this is the International Part of the National Student association. And i got to sit in on sessions whenever my typing was finished and the baby was asleep. And it was fascinating. And during these sessions certainly the leaders has a chance b to see what the political opinions were of the people in the room they got to see the papers that they wrote certainly would have had ample sense of what the feelings of the participants were about American Foreign policy right . Uhhuh. And i learned much much later that we all lived together for six weeks in the storm but that was also the time period in which security background investigations were conducted on any student that they wanted to hire at the end of summer. So enthen what was the next then what was the next step . Then your husband was contacted you were contacted . Well, he was offered a position at the end of the summer on the middle east desk of the National Student association for which he had zero preparation. And we went off to another congress. We moved the office moved to washington, we moved to washington. It was thrilling. I went back to school. And then in october one evening we had dinner with two people who identified themselves as former nsa officials. And after dinner we were driven somewhere northwest washington it was pitch black, to a house. And as we approached the house and as soon as the door opened the phone rang. One of the two men picked up the phone and then turned to my husband and said ive got an errand to run would you come with me . Leaving me behind with the second person. We went into the sun room, and he said to me, your husbands doing work of great importance to the United States government. Wed like id like to tell you more about the nature of that work, but before i do, i need you to sign this document. I was recovering from pneumonia, but we didnt know how to cancel the appointment, so i was still feverish. But im the daughter of several lawyers, and i know that im supposed to read fine print, only it was so fine, and i it just jumped off the page. But at that point an important point is i had no reason to distrust the United States government, as quaint as that may sound. This was 1965. 1965. No reason. Nor did i have any idea of what he was going to say. So i signed. And then i kind of, you know, i remember words of this. He said the United States government has to support france in its war against the algerian revolutionaries, but it behooves us to get to know algerian revolutionaryies future leaders. And this is part of what hes doing. I didnt have a my husband suddenly had a case officer, a code name and reporting requirements. What was his code name . His code name was his case officers code name who was male was aunt alice. [laughter] his code name was, i believe sinclair from sinclair lewis, it cant happen here. Wow. And he had to sign one of these oaths also. The same he had undergone the same ritual a week or so before i was. But they they always did this they took the wives out to undergo the same ritual because they worried about pillow talk. Yeah. They didnt want to leaf the wives hanging. Uncovered as it were. [laughter] and then what were you told about this oath and the penalties for violating it . You know, i dont i knew fairly quickly that this was a security oath under the espionage act and that if i told anybody anything that i had learned, i was subject to a 0year prison 20year prison term. So i was 20. [laughter] so then you and your husband remained in washington for a year or so . That year, we did that year. And it was a very terrifying year because for the first time the nsa president tried to oust the cia quietly and almost single handedly. So it was not a normal year. And he used to joke that one of your tasks was to identify every foreign contact you had as to whether the person was finish had procommunist tendencies or prodemocratic tendencies. And those who were made witting on the International Commission that year vowed to never identify anybody with procommunist tendencies. They decided they would say everybody had prodemocratic tendencies including 50yearold stalinists. That was a tiny rebellion. But an important point probably is that many people didnt know who else on the International Side knew or had been made witting, and some people were on staff, and they hadnt been made witting. And that was usually because there was something in the security background that was a red flag. And often it wasnt a red flag of the person or the student who was hired it had to do with his parents. So here you had a National Staff of the National Student association. How many people, several dozen people or whatever . Yes. I, you know since i wasnt in the office, there were two floors of two townhouses in washington, d. C. That housed the interNational Staff and two floors that housed the National Staff. So i would guess 40, 50 by that time. But only some of them were have signed these oaths correct. And knew that vir virtually all of the money came from the Central Intelligence agency. Anybody who had signed the security oath and was made witting had a case officer and reporting requirements. Uhhuh. And i should add got part of their got extra salary money wired directly into their bank account. Which was fairly unusual in those days. Nobody had ever heard you know, to my knowledge nobody ever heard of wiring money into a bank. Yeah. [laughter] yeah. So you stayed you and your husband stayed there for a year. A year. Then you left. And then your connection with the organization terminated then at that point. One exception, and that is with one exception and that is in the fall of 1966, early october, aunt alice showed up on our doorstep and rung the i thought we would never see these men you were back in colorado back in colorado, boulder. My husband had started law school. And, i mean, i nearly fainted ted away when i opened the door dead away when i opened the door. He took my husband down in our Unfinished Business basement and he was in pursuit of the leak. Ah. And that leads to what happened in 1966 and 1967. Right. Right. Well, maybe i can tell this part of the story. Right. Because i had some connection with it. Right. So this was 1966 october, yes, early, october 1966. Well, about two or three months after that, i at the time was a very, very young and naive reporter and editor at a magazine called ramparts which im sure some of you here are old enough to remember. And a very frightened, bushyhaired young man named michael wood came into the ramparts Office One Day with this extraordinary, unbelievable story having to do with the fact that the National Student association, which was an organization we all knew about, was secretly funded by the cia and had been for many years. And at first the ramparts editors didnt belief didnt believe him. Then the editors put people on checking out different parts of the story, and it immediately checked out. A researcher in boston, for example, began looking into the various foundations which were allegedly supporting the National Student association. One, you know theres a long list of foundations which nobody had ever heard of in connection with anything else. And it turned out all of these foundations were housed in law firms. All of the law firms said we cant discuss our clients business. And then this researcher did some further investigating, looked up these law firms in martindale hubbel, the big legal directory, and discovered every one of the law firms had something in common which was that at least one senior partner during world war ii had worked for the oss the predecessor of the cia. And at that point we knew the story was true. And then in early 1967, ramparts went public with it, and it created an enormous ruckus. Because this was a well known organization which had been presenting itself to the world for many years as the democratic voice of American Students. And then something happened which none of us at ramparts had anticipated, which is reporters began looking into what other organizations had been funded by this mysterious array of foundations and several hundred more private organizations were revealed to have been secretly funded by the cia for some years. I have to say as a journalist it was probably the most exciting story that i ever in any way was associated with even though i worked on it only in a very small way. So how was this ramparts expose experienced by nsa veterans at that point . Both those who were in the know and those who werent . Right. Well, all those in law school, and there were a good many by that point got very good grades because they all went to the law library and left the wives in charge of answering the telephone. [laughter] and, you know, but we still told no one. I mean only there was some wittingtowitting conversation, but we still took very seriously dont say anything or you could be in prison the for 20 years in prison for 20 years. It was years, i think before we talked about it publicly. But i did think i mean i remember at the time thinking but because the controversy was an enormous eruption but then it was shut down fairly quickly. And i remember thinking at the time there is so much more to this story. And sort of walked through my head that somebody someday will probably tell it. And you turned out to be that person. [laughter] but little did i know at that time. So you thought about it for years, and then when it was sort of in the 1990s or so, you decided you really wanted to get to the bottom of how had this relationship originated well, there was one antecedent and that was when i was running a foundation in the early 80s two pro bono attorneys came to me. They had piled a freedom of information suit on behalf of the successor to nsa which is the United States Student Association, ask theyd been at id and theyd been at it for about five, six years. And it was government wide, and i think it was at that point the fbi had acknowledged that they had a lot of files, but they were going to charge ten cents a page. Now, the two lawyers had been sent by somebody no one knew i knew anything about the story. So to their shock i said how many pages . They told me, and i gave the only grant i ever awarded on the spot. [laughter] and their purpose was so that someone could use these documents to write a history of what happened. And i tried for several years talking to people about writing this history one of who was Henrik Hertzberg of the new yorker who, by way, was in this interNational Student relations seminar with us the summer of 965. And 1965. And the time wasnt right for him. But he was instrumental to my decision, because a few few years later we talked about it again as we often did, and he said, karen, why dont you do it . He said you know more than all of us put together. And i think that was the seed that sprouted. And i finally committed myself in the late 90s when i saw an ad for an open Society Institute fellowship that was the largest fellowship monetarily id ever seen in my life. And appld. Well, this brings me to another question which is, you know certainly of interest to the students here how do you support yourself when you are writing this book . Not an easy question. Yeah. And, of course, i never realized it was going to take this long. In terms of three to five years. And i was extremely fortunate. I was not only blessed by the fellowship but my former foundation colleagues gave me discretionary grants, other grants, individual donors gave me grants. I had Family Support including may i say the nsa baby who grew up to be a hightech entrepreneur, was among my donors. And that Family Support was crucial to the Long Distance run. So then you started looking into how did this relationship originate, how did this organization that had, you know, operated on a big world stage for some 20 years of the democratic voice of American Students funded almost from the start by the Central Intelligence agency . How did that happen . Well, its really interesting because i thought logically the story had to start in 1947. Why . Because the cia was founded in 47, nsa was founded in 47. And for three years i tried to fit square pegs into round holes, and i could not make there were all these subtle hidden hands in the story. So i had to make the decision to knit the clock back until i identified and found all those hidden hands. And i will say the sheer number will stagger you, because it ranges from intelligence veterans to liberals to the the state department to intelligence agencies plural to the American Catholic church, to the vatican and so forth. All played a role. And why they did so is a very complicated story. We dont have time to go into it now. But i would say it was a time when nsa was founded that half of all students were returned veterans. And that is one key. But far more important were the number dedicated to forming nsa who were intelligence veterans. Now, they all werent from the same agency, nor did they all see eye to eye. So it wasnt what i can say is that nsa was not founded as an operation. It became tied to the cia. And most importantly, the covert action unit was formed until 1948, a year after both organizations were up. And the other thing well, why were they so interested in why did they connect nsa to cia . The short answer is why were they interested in students . The soviets were interested in students. And the soviets had backed a Large International organization of students founded in 46 in prague. And the United States at that point had no national, nationwide body that could claim to speak on behalf of all American Students. And so regardless of the many different Political Tendencies that were on campus they all agreed that they should form a National Student association. But it was characteristic that it was liberal, it was the same conundrum that the editor of ramparts faced what did the cia want as i think he memorably said with a bunch of longhaired hippies . So nothing to distinguish and thats an important thing to distinguish between liberal anticommunism and the joe mccarthy or rightwing or conservative anticommunism. These were liberals who had been very much affected by the 30s startering of the coalitions shattering of the coalitions time when the communist party was perfectly legal. But when it turned out Party Members had an allegiance to the soviet union and to stalin they had hidden allegiances, and it shattered coalitions, shattered the roosevelt voting coalition and liberals concluded they werent reliable partners because they had hidden motives. So that was very key. They kid not want did not want a replay of the 1930s, and thats why i think there were so many of these behind the scenes institutions rivetted to be sure there wasnt a replay of the Student Association that the communists were out from the very get always thought that the big scandal was that this organization that was supposedly private, supposedly democratic was, in fact, being run and manipulated and funded by the cia. Uhhuh. After i read your book, i came to feel that a far darker and more disturbing part of the story was that not just that this organization had been run that way but that this organization had gathered a vast amount of intelligence about American Students but perhaps more important about students from other countries and that some of this almost certainly was passed on to foreign governments and particularly repressive ones. Tell us a little bit about that part of the story. Where i would say, i mean there was massive amounts of intelligence reporting. Mainly foreign students. I mean, they really didnt pay much attention to domestic because this seminar that you went to, that was replicated throughout the world. Well, the seminar is a tactic or a technique, but this seminar had a different purpose. It was really to recruit staff. Yeah. But using seminars and tours and friendship exchanges throughout the rest of the world was a technique. Werent there 30plus seminars in africa alone . 33 in the early 60s. And as Robert Kylie Bob kylie who was the director of cia who wasnt a former nsa president said students were important actors on most continents, but in africa they were the actors. And that was a way into 33 countries. But the best way maybe to explain what youre raising and what is in the book that is disturbing not only to me and you, but many of the participants, where did these massive number of reports go once they were inside the cia . What was the pipeline . And these were reports not just from people who conducted seminars but american student leaders making socalled factfinding trips every a report was filed on every foreign student contact. Every foreign student that you came into contact with. And the way you came into contact with them, you know, differed. But this is why you had a case officer. I mean, this is to whom you sent the report was the case officer. And probably in the mid 50s the way i guess i would frame it is that u. S. Born policy and covert actions u. S. Foreign policy and covert actions followed different tracks. In the early part of the cold war, everybody knew what the overt policy was, it was containment. Well, you know, kind of the junior diplomatic thrust was also containment. Counter the soviets with our own international organization. Well, by the miss 50s mid 50s it became extremely important to win friends with revolutionaries. So these were the students these were the contacts. These were the contacts. And it wasnt just individual contacts. Money went to the algerian students. And the algerian students were, essentially, some argument over how much autonomy they had, they were basically part of the fom. So they werent students they were students, but theyre not students the way americans think about students as football and fraternity or so they nsa interNational Staff was intent on showing that American Students stood in solidarity. Anticolonial struggles yeah. At the same time the u. S. Was still backing batista in cuba the dictator, was still allied with france against the algerian quest for independence. So you have overt Foreign Policy, you have covert Foreign Policy, and it becomes also a question of access. And it becomes then a question of working all sides of the street from the agencys point of view. Now, they will justify it, say well, we were just intelligence gathering. You know, it behooves [laughter] us to know what theyre thinking, what kind of people they are. But it was so much more than that because cia resources were going into the mechanisms that the dictators were using to repress the students that nsa was standing in solidarity with. So, you know, these are complicated stories but i think as i mentioned, one of the things that happened is that nsa was succeeding in standing in solidarity with the antibatista cuban students and had an operation friendship. After the revolution many, many students went to havana. The leaders of nsa could be found around the pool talking to che and fu dell. And, of course students fidel. And, of course, students came back impressed with the revolution, so they were creating a constituency until of course, eisenhower decided that the cia must counter fidels fliens in south america. So that is one of the more complicated stories thats laid out in the book over time. And there is a whole world, i mean, its not just students. You know, students youth jurists, women. So you have this big disjunction between overt Foreign Policy and what was going on at the covert level. But what about what happened with these thousands of reports . You found some of these reports oh, yes. And you quote them in the book. Right. Where somebody is identifying yes. I remember one where it says this is the conservative frenchspeaking african we have been long looking for. Right, right. Something like that. So socialist but not too militant. Yeah, right. I mean [laughter] but the cia was having all kinds of dealings with very repressive governments iran iraq right. Well, one of the president s at a reunion meeting said, my god, did we finger people for the shah. And why this is really important is that with the United States supporting the shah the state department kept trying to deport the very iranian students the nsa was supporting. And had they succeeded, had they been deported, they would have been executed by the shah. And they were saved only because Robert Kennedy was the attorney general, and he stepped in to stop the deportations. Debe so the geometry of this was really amazing. No one, but no one can answer even career cia people who were part of the nsa operation can answer did these reports on the dissidents go pack to the shah . Go back to the shah and the secret prison . Some say i assume they did. The shah was our ally. The head of the iranian Student Association in the United States who i interi viewed when he was the i interviewed when he was the dean of business at the American University in paris still in exile said, my god, he said they betrayed our secrets, every one of us could have been killed. And i know campus after campus story where iranian students in the early 60s that opposed the shah lived in absolute terror. I know one story where they kind of wore paper bags over their heads, slipped a letter to the editor on their plight. I think we have to assume Trading Information is what intelligence agencies do. Right. I want to ask one more dequestion, and then i want to open it up to the floor and give these other folks a chance. You worked on the book for, what 105 years . Well, i had what i call now the unabridged edition after ten or so years, and the last four or five were cutting and crafting and cutting and crafting and cutting and crafting. But you got a lot of repenitent cia people to talk to to you, it seems. Or semirepenitent. I think many of them still justify the relationship. But what they are critics of, almost all of them, is what they assessing what they did and whether or not it worked. Uhhuh. Whether their strategies were successful. And the or harshest critics the harshest critics are the witting participants. So, for example, i mean the long history of support for the algerian revolutionaries and the algerian revolution with a special algerian Scholarship Program in the United States and everything else, kylie said, you know, none of those people amounted to a hill of beans. Another one quoted if you wanted to make a kid a democrat send him into russia. You want to make him into a communist, send him to the United States. [laughter] these sound like very cynical people [laughter] and maybe not so repenitent after all. [laughter] well, i wouldnt some of them are repenitent. I would say the early ones where it was simpler. They were passionate anticommunists. They described themselves a believing in the fight against communism every bit as much as our generation believed in fighting for civil rights and against desegregation. I deplore the modern tendency to impugn motives. They did believe passionate tally. And that doesnt let them off the hook. You have to look at what they did and make judgments about what they did and the consequences of the entire operation. But i see no reason to impugn their motives even if some of them have become quite cynical. Okay. So id like to give some of these folks here a chance to ask questions. Okay. And i think one or two of you at least have had some experience with this world that karen wrote about. Starting over here. I just want to clarify weve got wait for the microphone because this is all being recorded for booktv. I just want to clarify, your husband and the other agents that were recruited were all volunteer voluntarily serving as agents correct . No. Well, let me, let me try to explain it in a they all there were two routes to working for nsa on the international program. One route is as i describe, youre hired youre elected, somebody from past years takes out, asks you to sign a document you do. Then you learn what your who youre really working for. Now, was it voluntary . In the sense that yes, they believed in the objectives that were being described to them. And i i often i want to say this sort of forcefully because i think the puppet argument is irrelevant. It misses the point of a good recruitment program. You are looking for people who will share your what alan dulles called community of interest at that point, you agree. Did some of them feel trapped . Yes. Did some of them feel great . Yes. And it changes over time. And it depends. So, but it wasnt as if they were asked would you like to. And they could say yes or no. Once you signed that security oath whether you think the its a good idea or a bad idea youre mummed. Right. But you could quit. You could. No one was forcing you to stay in that, that job. I mean you couldnt tell anybody what you did right. You could quit and just say im not writing reports anymore. And i believe im correct in saying many only stayed one year. Most did five years in different positions and then spent a year inside at headquarters. The people in effect the people who felt the need to exit exited after one year. But nobody, youre right nobody did quit. Okay. What is the relationship wait for the mic. Wait for the mic so itll get recorded. What was the relationship between cia and the fbi . Tense. [laughter] hoover opened an investigation into the formation of nsa, had agents at all the first meetings investigated every single delegate and alternate and continued to do so until 19 the fall of 1950 either 1 or 2. Then in 1960, not long after the antihouse on [inaudible] here in San Francisco and because nsa voted to abolish it, i have a declassified memo from hoover who said it is inconceivable that this group which is taking a communist party line isnt communist. So he reopened his investigation. But he had to do it carefully. I have a second point. What you describe is the exact mirror of what the kgb did in terms of case study case handlers names and also having writing about their detail life. Uhhuh their daily life. There are many parallels. Yeah. Many parallels. I think somebody who was defending what they did early on would say we had to fight fire with fire. I mean, that would be their defense. But there were many parallels. Okay. Other questions over on that side. Uhhuh. I was wondering if you came across anything about how so the 1965 is when the immigration act was, the new immigration act was changed so a lot of the students that maybe met your contemporaries in 1963 our 1964 or 1964 at International Meetings they may have a few years later been applying for visas and come here. I know that my parents came after the 1965 immigration act but they had friends who were americans in england or in india, and that was one of reasons why they decided to come here. It sounded good to them. So do you think any of these files were influential in who got their immigration approved or not approved . Im not sure i i couldnt hear the question because of the echo. Question was whether the work of nsa and cia was doing had anything to do with affecting whether visas were granted for people [inaudible] visas were granted for people trying to emigrate or who was recruited to get professional visas. They could. Arrange for a visa. They could also arrange to deny visas and did both. But i dont think it had in general, for specific people i dont think it, in general, had to do with immigration. Very targeted person that they wanted or a lot of big meetings there were people they did not want. And so they often, if it was if their power to do so, chose a country, cooperative ally that would deny visas to anybody they didnt want to get to the meeting. Yeah. It sounds like were hearing sill the tip of the iceberg in that theres a lot more that you edited out as well as remains in the book. But if im understanding the central kind of feature from the perspective of the young person who was recruited theres sort of an assertion and a question which is whether many of them would feel now that they were suffering moral injury which is to say that they ended up behaving in ways that had they understood potential consequences, they would have changed their actions. And so theyve ended up doing things that, in fact, they now feel morally repugnant and are injured by it. Thats a really tough question to, you know, to answer because in my mind id have to go into i e mean, there are certainly anecdotes that individuals have said, told me and said im really not very proud of that. You know . But many of them still feel that they did nothing wrong. And many of them will say they didnt understand that the cia was working all sides of the street because throughout the 50s, i mean we didnt really know anything about the cia until the bay of pigs the attempt to overthrow the castro regime in 1961. The first book on the cia was called the invisible government, and that was written in 1964. The leak to ramparts knew nothing about the cia and went in hot pursuit of the one book that existed. So, you know, you can charge them, you know, with kind of willful blindness but i think i dont because they genuinely felt this was many of them felt this was their countrys intelligence service, many of them i mean, they speak in terms of doing the lords work, you know . True believers. And believed that it was justified. When you started writing the book, they put a lot of obstacles in your way, right . They didnt they reclassified documents that had previously been declassified . And well, im not sure that was personal. [laughter] i was stunned to find stunned to find many documents from 949 reclassified 1949 reclassified in 2001. And i had a lovely young woman who was as stunned as i was at the national archives. And she said i dont understand this. She said let me run it up to d class. And she came back crestfallen. She had a slip of paper, and she came back crest fallen and said crestfallen and said im sorry, this has to go through other agencies, and it will take a while. And i said right, the cia. She said were not allowed to give out that information. [laughter] and there were three reports from 49 that i wanted, and she said i just dont understand. I said well and i finally got two of them. It took nine years. Nine years. I got the two that told what we were doing to the bad guys. The one i didnt get was no, excuse me. I got the two that said what the bad guys were doing to us. I didnt get the one that said what we were doing to the bad guys. And wasnt there a sort of a hint of a threat against you when you started writing the book . Well one of the things can i mean people always used to say to me arent you frightened . And, i mean my flip answer was always im much more afraid of writing a bad sentence than i am of the cia. And when they put obstacles in your path, and thats a good way to frame it theyre quite subtle. So youre never quite sure whether youve just received a threat or not. And, but one person who had been a career agent who then posed as an nsa representative who then went back into the agency whos long since retired, all of a sudden said to me what are you going to do about clearing your book about the agency . And i said, what do you mean . He said, you signed the security oath. And i said, i never worked for them. Everything im doing is in the public domain. Its not a problem. They take that security oath very seriously, he said. [laughter] so that unnerved me a bit. You talk a little bit about the intelligence communitys response to the ramparts article and the people who wrote it and worked on it . [laughter] by all accounts, hysterical. I mean, thats by all accounts. Thats not my words, that is all the accounts of the cia reaction. By the time ramparts started working on the nsa story, the Deputy Director asked for a rundown on the known ramparts people. And i think these were freelance and occasional writers, and the cia already had dossiers on at least half of the known people who worked for ramparts. And one response was to set up a top secret operation in the vaults of cia headquarters run by a man named richard ober to go after ramparts. And we still dont know all the things that they did. But evan thomas, who wrote a great book called the very best men, interviewed a man whos no longer living named Eddie Applewhite who returned to headquarters, and he told the story to evan. He was reporting to his boss Desmond Fitzgerald who, i think, was the third ranking cia official at that point. And when he described what they had done to ramparts, fitzgerald said, oh, eddie, you have a spot of blood on your pin afore. And he eddie, would not tell evan thomas about what they did and he did say they had terrible things in mind to do to ramparts. I would be very curious as someone who worked [laughter] for ramparts at that time, i can add a little to this. Okay. Many years later i applied for my cia files under the freedom of information act and i got many, many pages of them heavily redacted. Sometimes just a few words on a page. And it was amazing because i was a very, very, very low person on the totem pole at ramparts, and id been only peripherally involved. But i did come out of it without much respect for what we journalists call the factchecking process. Ill just give you one little example. They had a lot of personal details about me, my parents, my wifes parents, so forth. And one of the things they had discovered was well, one of the things that happened and then heres how it got reported my wife and i had briefly been civil rights workers in mississippi in 1964. We got married the following year, and we asked people in lieu of wedding presents to make a contribution to a Civil Rights Organization such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that wed worked for. This got translated by a cia agent into the words gave his wedding presents to goodwill. [laughter] so if everything in their files was as wildly inaccurate as that that right. Who knows what the intelligence files right. You never got a clue for just exactly that they were planning to do for ramparts . I know they had a plant. I dont know who that was. We never figured it out either. What they also did is they felt this was at a point in which in general they could not believe the emerging dissent in the United States was home grown. Because this was in 67, huge opposition to the vietnam war. Right. They immediately im sorry i forgot to say this before one of their strategies was they immediately got the irs involved to audit ramparts because they were so confident that if they could find foreign contributions, foreign money they could shut the whole thing down. And on the day that ramparts the way i put it, by the time ramparts published, everybody had moles in each ohs camp. So nsa had a press conference, ramparts found out about it and took out a fullpage ad in the New York Times. On the very day of that ad, the New York Times the irs i granted, said that they would do it, they would audit ramparts. But, you know, at that time it was too late. And they never found the moscow gold. They never found the moscow gold. [laughter] but i will tell you, this is a very important thread because people forget what were the watergate burglars looking for . Lists. Foreign funders. Foreign funders of mcgoverns and the Antiwar Movement. This notion that the soviets were behind it, cord meyer who was head of can covert operations and, therefore, responsible for youth and students, he wrote a memoir in about 85 885, and he likened the exposures to unilateral disarmament. Apocalyptic, really, vision of that exposure. Patrick. Yeah, i have a question on that point actually, and i dont know if this is in scope of your book but meyer writes in his book about the networks that have been so carefully deconstructed that because of the ramparts flap now have to be taken apart with much regret on his part. But it seems to me that maybe with some gap of time they are sort of reconstructed through the National Endowment for democracy beginning in the 1980s. But i i wonder if the u. S. Government finds any way to continue to do the operations that it feels like are important even after theyre supposed to be shut down by order of absolutely. [inaudible] absolutely. Absolutely. And thats one of the places id look. Andy. Wait for the mic here. I was a young reporter producer in the mid 60s in washington and id already worked for a show on abc where my colleague had been president of the National Student association. We talked about it, mark thurstonberg. Anyway, late arer i was doing a broadcast later i was doing a broadcast for early pbs, and it was about views of early intellectuals 25 years after the end of war. And i was in india, and i didnt know anybody in india, and i had a researcher who was a friend of this guy who said well ill get you a bunch of journalists. One guy was billed to me as the editor of a magazine, pretty liberal in india. India, in those days was very neutral. This was the beginning of the vietnam war, 65. And i was told he was an editor he was like the new republic his publication. So i interviewed him. I interviewed a couple of other people in india but this guy was very very pro the american position in vietnam. So the broadcast airs and i get a call from a magazine called problems of communism. Did you ever run into that . It was a cia operation in washington that had a lot of intellectuals problems of communism . Its a journal. Ive heard of it, i dont know more about it. I really nothing is coming to my mind right now. Guy says to me that was a great broadcast, you know, that guy you had from india, hes one of ours. [laughter] what do you mean . Well, he was cia. And then i discovered encounter magazine which was a british intellectual magazine that was also funded by the cia. The estimates of cia funding of all international Foreign Policy books for about a 20year period is very high 80 of all . Uhhuh. You know, lbj appointed a threeperson commission and gave them about four weeks to report after the ramparts flap which is the cias word for catastrophe. [laughter] and it consisted of helms, the cia direct or, katzenbach who was the undersecretary of state and john gardner who was at that point secretary of health, education and welfare. But the real work fell to Jack Rosenthal who had been the New York Times foundation. So to make a long story short he was escorted to langley and hes one of the few people who have ever seen the number of operations that were being run through private, domestic organization, and he said there were hundreds. He was staggered. What about foreign operations . Pardon me . What about foreign operations like this gentleman in india . You know, i just its outside the scope of the book and i dont know i dont think i can answer your question. Somebody in [inaudible] you mentioned Robert Kennedy briefly at one point, and it made me think back to the trip he took to south car which was at south africa which was at invitation of the South African National Students union i think. Uhhuh. And im wondering, you know, the complexities of his relationship to the cia and so forth is very intriguing, and im wondering if you came across interesting aspects of that in researching this. What will surprise people because he was so furious about being, his brother being sucked into the bay of pigs, started under the eisenhower regime is that he actually became quite an advocate of covert operations. And many of the nsa people who launched the counterfestivals met with him and were praised for their work. And, for example one of the nsa president s edgar i have, when he was being reassured that all past president s had cooperated with the cia, and he adored the Kennedy Family as he said. Went bob kylie, who was making him witting, said would you like of to have your picture taken with Robert Kennedy, he says he felt like hed died and gone to heaven. So he was very supportive of these kinds of and Arthur Schlessinger writes a little bit about this, and i have that. Of its not direct tally in the book its in a footnote about what his rationale was because he and one of them was that he saw Foreign Policy was shifting that it wasnt just diplomat to diplomat that it was involving much broader constituencies whether they were youth or students or journalists or lawyers. In the back yeah. In the fall of 1967, a number of us who were entering graduate programs here at uc berkeley were given fiveyear fellowships from the Ford Foundation. And do the idea to find out whether if you didnt have to be a ta, you would get your ph. D. Faster. The rumor went around a couple of years later that that money was actually coming from the cia. I have no idea whether this is true or not. People thought i mean, it turned out that a fairly high proportion of the people who got those fellowships were very involved in the Antiwar Movement and actually took longer to get their ph. D. S than other people because of their activity. Some people thought that people were quite pleased at the idea that the cia was funding us. But i have no idea if this was true or not, but do you have any idea whether the cia was funding money through the Ford Foundation . And if so, why . Well theres one instance in my book. I cant speak to in general. And attitudes vary. And i was able to read some of the oral histories of Ford Foundation people. But there is one program that ive written about the foreign Student Leadership project which was a joint venture by ford and cia. And i think reason more that in that instance for that in that instants is that foreign students were being brought to american campuses under this nsa program, and the cia is forbidden by law to operate domestically. And i think it felt it really needed a, you know a kind of mature partner of stature. And so, but it was handled by a special committee at ford. And ive actually read those archives. They have been involved. But whether they were involved in that program, i have no idea. The only one i know is the one ive written about. But the one ive written about did produce some illustrious student leaders, future leaders including kofi annan. Given all your research into the cia ask cia and students do you look at the events of the arab spring differently than the average american, and if you do how do you look at them differently . I shuddered when i saw the microphone going to this young man. [laughter] my son. [laughter] he always asks me the hard questions. Thats its a great question and im not even sure i can answer it satisfactorily. But i would like to think about it. The one thing i of course learned is that what you see is not what you get. That there are all kinds of forces being stirred up. And ill give you a parallel quick example and that is that we backed all the nationalities in the soviet union because we saw that they could maybe help to break up the soviet union. Well, i would say in certain instances the chickens are really coming home to roost. You have to be very you stir up nationalism for shortterm interest, but you may have longterm, serious problems. And i think thats one of the lessons that comes throughout the book. And i guess the other one that quickly occurs to me is that one of the strategies even among the revolutionaries was to pick the moderates, to identify moderates. Well in revolutionary situations moderates almost always lose out to militants. Almost always. And we really dont do a good job of hand picking revolutionary leaders or moderate revolutionary leaders or leaders. Even in patriotic betrayal, its littered with people who Saddam Hussein used to work for the cia. We used him to the try to kill to try to kill the iraqi leader, and he missed. We finally the c irk a finally overview kasim in 63. But the people, this is why the cynical cia agents talk about renting people. Because there can be a shortterm collusion of interest, but, you know, they say you cant buy. You rent. And so there are many, there are just so many instances of this where someone who served our interests today either turns against us or doesnt serve our interest, you know down the road. And apart from that i havent really had time to to follow the current revolutions. [laughter] how about one or two more questions . I see one right here. The revelations from ramparts were, of course, disastrous for nsa. But you had referred to the fact that there were many, many institutions that were being funded by the cia. And i wonder what the effect on those institutions was. Nsa took public brunt. Most of the other organizations and institutions denied, kind of tried to tough it out. You know to this day some of the george meanny archives are classified so that there is a limited amount of research on the labor operation which was massive and huge. Because of the exposure most organizations and institutions lost their funding. So there are often institutions or organizations you think have absolutely nothing to do with this and all of a sudden you see collapsed 67, stopped 67 stopped in 68, and you go back and take a closer look. So, you know nsa the big consequence for nsa was in the short term it grew very radical, and students rallied around it. To try to but they could not do any international work. They were absolutely suspect. And that was true decades later. To this day, i dont believe that they do international work. And they do, its very limited. I have a question. Was the wait wait wait for the microphone. Thank you for asking that question. Was the title of the book your doing . Yes. The title is my doing. It took me almost the whole 15 years [laughter] to get the title. And i was searching for something that would capture the twin themes of idealism and duplicity. And i very much know that these who terms patriotic and betrayal and where you come out as a reader is very, very much up to the reader to decide where you fall in that tension. And i think be theres an objection by some of the witting participants to the book its the title, because they do not feel that betrayal is warranted. And, again thats the distinction between their aspirations, their intention, their altruism their commitment to fighting communism and judging the consequences. And i dont see any way around either whether its a dictionary definition, or its because of all the things you read in the book. You cannot have a secret government operation run through a private organization whose reason for being is an exercise in democratic selfgovernment. And, but there, you know, it allows for people to say this was a patriotic operation. Thank you. I have one final question, then im going to let you sign some books. Okay. Is there a copy of your book on its way to Edward Snowden . [laughter] on its way to Edward Snowden . I have no idea. [laughter] well, i hope there is, because i see a connection between these two with revelations, yours and his, what happens when a country loses control of its intelligence apparatus. So i want to thank you very much karen, for being with us tonight. Thank you. [applause] and there are books in the back which im sure you will be glad i will. Ill be happy to sign. Thank you so much for coming. [inaudible conversations] is there a Nonfiction Author or book youd like to see featured on booktv . Send us an email to booktv cspan. Org, tweet us booktv or post on our wall facebook. Com booktv. If we dont head off the growing number of crises and get ahead of these environmental disasters, we will find them running out of control. Now, this is the map i promise to show you. This is summary for 2014 of the climate anomalies. It was warm everywhere in the world except for one little place which was us. So [laughter] other than that or if you happened to live out, if you happened to be i guess, a cod in the north atlantic [laughter] you felt, you felt warm everywhere except the deep south of the and its doing it again this year. Now what are we going to do about all of this . Well, i do believe that Sustainable Development is the calling card of our time because it is the philosophy that says we need a holistic approach that puts economic, social and environmental objectives in many a to holistic framework in a 40 list aric framework on par to holistic framework on par. Not just chasing gnp, not just chasing the bottom line of income but an economic, or social and environmental framework that holistically combines these societal objectives. As an analytical framework, it is the study of complex, nonlinear, interacting natural and human systems. So Sustainable Development is both a an analytical approach as well as a moral approach in my view, both a policy and a normative framework for our time. What is important and, i think, maybe very lucky for us is that the 193 Member States of the United Nations decided in 2012 that we must put Sustainable Development as the core organizing principle for Global Development for the coming generation. And so at the United Nations september 527, the world will adopt Sustainable Development goals. Im putting a lot of hope in this because in general the world doesnt agree on very much of anything. But when it does agree on some things, at least they can get noticed. And the fact that the world is going to agree most likely pending the outcome of the ongoing negotiations at the u. N. I believe it to be a core organizing principle for the coming generation. Author sean mcfate is next on booktv. The associate professor at the National Defense university and former military mercenary talks about the use of mercenaries in warses around the world today. He said were headed towards a future that will resemble the middle ages where suring mercenaries was the norm. Thank you, pierre. Thank you for hosting this and thank you for making it out today on a, you know less than auspicious weather day. This book is about the return of private military force in International Relations today, and i wrote this not simply as an International Relations scholar, but also as a practitioner. I work for a Company Called [inaudible] for several years in africa, and i saw while i was working there many press reports many