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The students finally had the money to carry out their growing foreign exchange programs. CIA was able to guarantee first-class student representation at international affairs. The fulminations against CIA last week were based largely on the assumption that students had been "manipulated" for espionage purposes, but most critics chose to ignore the success of N.S.A. delegates in representing the U.S. abroad with vigor, eloquence and sophistication.
The Firm. Even in 1965, there were growing rumors among many students that most of N.S.A.'s money was coming from the Federal Government. CIA had not yet been publicly fingered as the association's moneybags, but the State Department was a subject of dark suspicion. That year, N.S.A. President-to-be-Philip Sherburne, a graduate of the University of Oregon, was invited to a room at Arlington's Marriott Motor Hotel. Two CIA men met him for what had become an annual routine for top N.S.A. officials: they told him that he would have access to important facts about the organization if he would sign the security pledge. He agreed. First, he learned that he had been judged "witty" (CIA jargon for the one who passes security clearance) and second, that nearly all of N.S.A.'s funds came from "the firm" (code slang for CIA).
That struck the idealistic young Sherburne as all wrong and "destructive of a democratic organization." He decided to try to dig up money for N.S.A. elsewhere. He hired eight young staffers, told them he had just enough money to pay their salaries for two months, and sent them out to solicit funds so they could keep their jobs. Eventually, they managed to raise $400,000, including some $180,000 from the Office of Economic Opportunity, to coordinate a program for tutoring deprived children.
As Sherburne's term of office came to an end in mid-1966, he felt he had accomplished everything necessary to clean up the CIA situation once and for all. He had even negotiated a cagey deal whereby the CIA-linked Independence Foundation agreed to turn over its lease on a converted stone house to N.S.A. for 15 years—without mentioning to the agency that he was about to sever their connection.
Big Brotherism. Sherburne made one little slip. He broke his secrecy pledge to confess the CIA connection to one of his staff men—red-bearded. New Leftist Michael Wood, 24, from California's Pomona College. Wood insisted that Sherburne make a dramatic public renunciation of the CIA ties. Sherburne refused, arguing reasonably enough that the relationship was about to end and that nothing would be gained by stirring up a storm. Wood compiled a 50-page letter to Ramparts, which then embarked on a two-month investigation of the CIA-N.S.A. liaison.
Sherburne and the current N.S.A. president, Rhodes Scholar Eugene Groves, 23, tried to dissuade Ramparts from printing the article. The CIA was not very happy either, and put heavy pressure on N.S.A. men to deny whatever the magazine published. Gene Groves refused, called a press conference and admitted all—adding that N.S.A.'s connection with CIA had been terminated. The State Department also issued a stiff little corroboration that N.S.A. had been subsidized since the early 1950s.