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In the wake of the N.S.A. flap, it was also disclosed last week that CIA has been pumping money into international labor organizations, which have set themselves the laudable task of bringing fair labor standards and union democracy to underdeveloped nations. Among the labor groups identified as agency dependents was the international division of the American Newspaper Guild. Oddly enough, press pundits could not seem to raise the same kind of uproar over CIA involvement in their own union as they did over its supposed subversion of youth.
At any rate, the academic community's hand-wringing over the suspicious color of CIA money spent for national security did not seem wholly justified. There is hardly a university in the nation that does not accept—indeed depend on—hefty grants from the Defense Department. CIA itself uses dozens of scholars and university specialists as consultants. In 1951, CIA gave —directly and without masquerade—$300,000 to finance M.I.T.'s topflight Center for International Studies. Until last spring, M.I.T. continued to accept agency funds, then terminated the contract "for practical, not moral reasons."
Why? Indeed, Max Millikan, the sage director of M.I.T.'s International Center, frowned on the surge of CIA-phobia. "The number of my friends around here who have swallowed this 'invisible government' line is disturbing," he said. "They think there is an entirely separate foreign policy being concocted by people in dark corners. When they say that this kind of work is immoral, what they're saying is that it's immoral to have anything to do with telling the President what the world is really like."
Nevertheless, almost every time CIA calls attention to itself, there is a spate of demands that it be reviewed, reformed or removed. As a CIA man pointed out wryly last week, such criticism can only lead to great jubilation in the halls of Moscow's KGB, Department D—for Disinformation—the arm of Soviet counterespionage whose main function is to discredit CIA. Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, when asked about increasing demands for heavier congressional surveillance over CIA, replied: "I don't believe in exploding our intelligence agency. The British don't do it."
One reason is that any full-time civilian department devoted to the dark arts of espionage is remarkably new to the U.S. Until Pearl Harbor, American espionage was essentially the property of the military services. The Japanese sneak attack was one of history's most flagrant failures of applied foreknowledge, Sun Tzu-style. To fill the vacuum, the Office of Strategic Services was hastily constituted during World War II, and it was from this agency that CIA evolved into a permanent peacetime department under the 1947 National Security Act.
"Significant Contributions." CIA is only one of nine agencies* in the U.S. intelligence community, but it is primus inter pares and the right arm of the National Security Council. Master Spy Allen Dulles not only sketched its functions but also the kind of men the nation needed to attract to such duty. "The agency," he suggested to Congress, "should be directed by a relatively small but elite corps of men with a passion for anonymity and a willingness to stick at that particular job."