(5 of 10)
Almost instantly, there arose a chorus of indignation against "Big Brotherism." "It is a poisonous business," said Harvard College Dean John Monro. "Something very important in our national life, the real independence and freedom of our institutions, has been brought into question." Cried Minnesota's Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy, a longtime CIA critic: "Where do you draw the line? Is it all right for the CIA to tell us that 'everything goes'? This is what Hitler said. Where do we put a stop to all this?"
Up to Pittsburgh? President Johnson resorted to the hoary political expedient of naming a committee. CIA Director Helms, Under Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach, and Health, Education and Welfare Secretary John Gardner were appointed to review the operations of the CIA and other Government agencies to see if they "endanger the integrity and independence of the educational community." The President's action was not calculated to defend the agency. Griped one of the agency's oldtimers: "The CIA has become a dirty household word; it's become fashionable to knock it. Maybe we ought to just give headquarters to the Defense Department for an annex and go up to Pittsburgh, rent an apartment and start all over again."
In fact, CIA's funding of N.S.A., although legally well within its mandate, was not the agency's unilateral decision. New York Senator Robert Kennedy, who was fully aware of all intelligence operations while he was Attorney General, said last week that the CIA money funnel was an act "of the Government itself acting through a representative of the President." True enough. Three Presidents—Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson—knew all along about the CIA-N.S.A. contract.
No Abracadabra. A good deal of the protest over spies and scholars seemed less than realistic—and somewhat surprising, considering that the majority of the younger critics have practically been raised on the glamour fiction of James Bond, Alec Leamas and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. At any rate, the CIA-N.S.A. alliance never was based on any kind of abracadabra espionage.
Says Dennis Shaul, 28, an Akron attorney who was N.S.A. president in 1962-63: "If I were president now, I would continue to accept CIA funds. CIA had nothing to do with how the money was spent; there were no strings on us." Writer Gloria Steinem, an official of the Independent Research Service in the late '50s when it was CIA-funded, actually considered the agency's support beneficial: "The CIA's most important impact was that it made us unafraid to go ahead and do what we thought was right. It increased, not diminished, our freedom of action."
Allen Dulles, who was CIA director from 1953 to 1961 and drew up a blueprint for operating the agency after it was created in 1947, said last week that the N.S.A. money was well spent as counter-Communist propaganda at youth conferences. "The Soviets had to retreat in this area," he said. "The conferences weren't paying off any more." Innocuous as its N.S.A. contributions may have been, CIA might well have foreseen the possibility of trouble ahead; it could have canceled its subsidy program in the early '60s when East-West student confrontations had subsided.