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PPPM. The U.S., as leader of the free world, could not comfortably sit by while Moscow made its grandstand play for the imaginations and loyalties of the world's youth. National student organizations were proliferating everywhere, and in 1950, N.S.A. and 20 other groups formed the International Student Conference as the West's counterweight to the aggressive International Union of Students, a Communist-subsidized youth front. The logical instrument of U.S. policy was CIA. The agency institutionalized its direct financial support of N.S.A. under its PPPM (Psychological, Political and Paramilitary) program, in 1952. William Dentzer, now a U.S. AID director in Peru, was the N.S.A. president that year, and he made the deal whereby CIA would secretly funnel cash into the N.S.A. treasury through congeries of private pipelines.
The use of front foundations to handle CIA money is an old technique. More than a score of obscure philanthropies have turned out to be contributors of millions to free-world student groups, notably the World Assembly of Youth in Brussels, the International Student Conference, which is headquartered in The Netherlands, the Independent Research Service in Washington, and the U.S. Youth Council in New York. Over the past 15 years, funds were donated to one organization or another in the name of the Independence Foundation, the J. Frederick Brown Foundation, and the Sidney and Esther Rabb Charitable Foundation, all of Boston, the San Jacinto Fund of Houston, the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs of New York. In several cases, the forms that tax-exempt foundations are required to submit as public records with the Internal Revenue Service were strangely missing from the files of district offices.
The San Jacinto Fund has neither a listed phone nor an office address, operates out of the office of an accountant. Others, too, proved to be desk-drawer operations—without staff, office space or listed telephone numbers. Dummy fronts or not, these foundations over the past 15 years had contributed as much as 80% of N.S.A.'s budget.
Ignored Success. From the first, the operation was supposed to be accomplished with characteristic CIA attention to secrecy. Only N.S.A. presidents (who serve one-year terms) and a couple of other top officers were told about the arrangement. They were required to sign a national-security pledge that they would never reveal that information—at the risk of a maximum 20-year prison sentence for violating its terms. Over the years, N.S.A. actually did have dribbles of cash coming from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, as well as from the State Department, but CIA was by far the most generous banker.
The CIA money was earmarked for the international program only, but the agency made no attempt to influence the students' policies. In the years since the CIA fund began, N.S.A. has taken many vigorous anti-Administration stands: it castigated the U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic and has consistently condemned Viet Nam policy. Some critics argue that the State Department should have supplied the heavy financing, but N.S.A. as a result might have been much more restricted in its independence of expression. The CIA-N.S.A. arrangement seemed to be mutually profitable.