tv Patriotic Betrayal CSPAN July 22, 2017 4:00pm-5:12pm EDT
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announcer: you're watching american history tv, all weekend, every weekend, on c-span3. like us on facebook theext on c-span bookshelf, use of students is undercover agents. she is the author of patriotic betrayal. this discussion was recorded in 2015 at the university of journalism. >> karen has had a long career. she was part of the boulder citycouncil in boulder colorado,
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then deputy mayor. this led to her writing a book. woman -- the analysis of awoman's campaign 1920 through 1992. during the carter administration she was appointed regional director of the federal agency that supervised this to and the peace corps, and other volunteer programs. she has worked for foundations, of the pentagon, the university of california, and has written a great deal for the magazine "the american prospect." most of what she has been doing betrayal,""patriotic what we are going to be talking about this evening. it is a subject of enormous importance, even though it is about rings that happened 50 or 60 years ago, i think you will
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see that there is an act go in echo in that book for things going on today. i would like to begin at the point in your life when you got involved with this story. you were a student at the university of colorado, in the early 1960's. attended au conference of the national student association. what was that? nsa was a membership school, organization of 300 universities and colleges in the united states. it claimed to speak for all american students. conferencesannual called congresses that minute political parties, attended by delegates from the member
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schools. delegate, i went as a wife. my first encounter was as a volunteer in the secretariat that produced mountains of paper, reports, etc. i married the student body president at the university of colorado and i was the secretary of student government, but it was a paid position. andnted to be a secretary, had not figure out that was not what i was in college. that was my initial engagement. >> in your book you describe how you went to this first national convention, it opened a new world to you. it was, as i try to
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capture, i had never heard of the new york times. i'd never than east of chicago. i didn't watch network news. i was a cheerleader, a baton twirler. it opened up a whole new world. i think it does for so many. there was no other way to have conduct -- contact. the accidents were different. new jersey, texas, boston. it was a time with people who participated in student government were phi beta kappa orators.t, brilliant barney frank you would have heard in the early 60's. jeff greenfield. amazing orator read editor of the cardinal at the university of wisconsin. i'd never heard political debate. i was from a family there
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engaged in the community, but it was a civic duty. i had no sense of partisanship area i didn't know the difference between republicans and democrats, and almost failed in the exam on dickens because i didn't know the difference. that has changed. [laughter] >> here you were at this national convention, a thousand people, newspaper editors. then your husband got an invitation. what was that? karen: the following spring, one of the officers from an essay talk to him, and invited him to apply for the international student relations seminar, that was going to be held the coming summer in pennsylvania. the nsa office was in philadelphia.
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he applied and was accepted. we had a tiny baby by then. they gave us an extra dorm room. he is inis say baby, the audience tonight, i would like to recognize tim. we trundled off to have deferred -- have there for -- hatherford. i was in a paid position to produce material. area specialists the student presidents, many came expecting a course in international politics, but it was all about student all it takes. students and newspaper editors, who was leading the seminar? karen: two people who work for nsa.
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a director and associate director. at this point there is no inkling other than this is the international part of the national student association. sessions whenn on my typing was finished. >> during these sessions, the leaders had a chance to see the political opinions were of people in the room. they got to see the papers. they would have had ample sense of what the feelings of the participants were about american foreign-policy. i learned much later we all live together in this dorm, that was the time in which security background investigations were conducted on any student they wanted to hire
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at the end of the summer. >> what was the next step? your husband was contacted. >> and he was offered a position at the end of the summer. the middle east desk, for which he had zero preparation. we went off to another congress, we moved to washington. it was thrilling. i would back to school. in october, one evening we had dinner with two people who identify themselves as former nsa officials. after dinner we were driven somewhere northwest washington. it was pitch black. as we approach the house, as soon as the door opened the phone rang. one of the two men picked up the phone and said i've got an air
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and run, would you come with me. leaving me behind with the second person. we went into the sunroom, and he said to me, your husband is doing work of great organs to the united states government -- great importance to the united states government. before i tell you, i need you to sign this document. i was recovering from pneumonia. i was still feverish. on the daughter of several lawyers, i know i am supposed to read fine print. that point, i have no reason to distrust the united states government. as quite as this may sound. 1965. nor did i have any idea what he was going to say.
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so i signed. i remember words of this. he said the united states government has to support france in its war against the algerian revolutionaries, but it will lose us to get to know the algerian revolutionaries future leaders. this is part of what he is doing. i didn't have a clue why the united states had just worked france. i did not know there were algerian revolutionaries. the most important thing is the word behooves. every time i heard the word booth -- behooves for the rest of my life the hair on the back of my neck stand up. basically he was the deputy director of the cia, covert action. the man who would taken my husband on a phony errant was robert kiley, the director of covert action five.
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i don't have words to describe how stunning a revelation this was. i didn't have -- i didn't work for nsa area i didn't have any responsibilities. but my husband suddenly had a case officer, a codename, and reporting requirements. >> what was his codename? karen: is codename -- his case officers codename was aunt alice. sinclair, froms sinclair lewis. >> he had to sign one of these oats. -- oaths. karen: he had undergone the same ritual. they always kept the wives out
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because they worried about pillow talk. they didn't want to leave the wives covered. >> what were you told about this oath? karen: i knew fairly quickly that this was a security oath under the espionage act, and if i told anybody anything that i have learned, i was subject to a 20 year prison term. i was 20. [laughter] >> you and your husband remained in washington. karen: we did that year. it was a terrifying year because for the first time the nsa president tried to oust the cia quietly, and almost single-handedly. it was not a normal year. he used to joke that one of your tasks was to identify every
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foreign contact you had asked whether the person had communist tendencies or democratic tendencies. those who were on the commission that year valid to never identify anybody with procommunist tendencies. including 50 euro -- year old stalinists. an important point is that many did not know who else on the knew.nationals die that was usually because there was something in the security background that was a red flag, often it wasn't the student who was hired that had to do -- but it had to do with his parents. >> you have a national staff, how many people? karen: since i wasn't in the
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office, there were two floors of two townhouses in washington dc that housed the international staff, and two floors that house the national staff. weret only some of them have signed these oaths. karen: and not only that the money came from the agency, but anybody who signed the security oath had a case officer and reporting requirements. and got part of their salary money wired directly into their bank account. >> which was fairly unusual. karen: to my knowledge nobody had ever heard of wiring money. year. day there for a then you left.
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your connection to the organization terminated. karen: with one exception. 1966, earlyof october, and alice showed up on our doorstep. i thought we would never see these men. back in colorado. my husband had started law school. i nearly fainted when i open the door. he took my husband down and was in pursuit of a leak. what happened in 1966 and 1967. >> right. maybe i can tell this part of the story. this was 1966. early october, 1966.
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>> two or three months after was a verythe time young and naïve reporter and editor at a paper called ramparts, which some of you are old enough to remember. camey frightened young man into the ramparts office one day storyhis unbelievable having to do with the fact the national student association, an organization we all knew about and haded by the cia been for many years. at first the ramparts editors didn't believe him. people onditors put checking out the story. it immediately checked out. a researcher in boston began looking into there is
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foundations, -- various foundations. there is a long list of foundations which nobody had ever heard of in connection with anything else. all of these foundations were housed in law firms. all of the law firms said we cannot discuss our client's business. this researcher did further investigating, look these law firms, and they all had something in common, at least one senior partner during world oss,i had worked for the the predecessor of the cia. at that point we knew the story was true. publiche ramparts went with it. it created an enormous ruckus.
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this was a well-known organization which had presenting itself for the world as a democratic voice of american students. then something happened, reporters began looking into what other organizations had been funded by this array of foundations. several organizations were secretlyto have then funded by the cia for some years. as a journalist it was the most exciting story i had ever been associated with. exposé this ramparts experienced by nsa veterans at that point? karen: all those in law school got very good grades. they all went to the law live
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and let thelibrary wives in charge of answering the telephone. we still told no one. conversation but lee took seriously, don't say anything, or you can be imprisoned for 20 years. it was years before we talked about it. thinking, at the time because the controversy was in norman's. but it was shut down fairly quickly. i remember thinking there is so much more to this story. somebody someday will probably tell it. >> you turned out to be that person. >> little did i know at that time. >> you thought about it for years. when it was in the 1990's, you
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decided you wanted to get to the bottom of this relationship. karen: i was running a foundation in the early 1980's. two attorneys came to me, they had filed a freedom of information suit on behalf of the successor to nsa, the united states student association. they had been added for five or six years. i think it was at that point the fbi had a knowledge they had a lot of files. they were going to charge two cents a page. to their shock i said how many pages. the only grant i ever awarded them on the spot. their purpose was so someone could use these documents to write a history of what happened.
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i tried for several years talking to people about writing this history. the time was not right for him. but he was instrumental to my decision because a few years later we talked about it again and he said karen, why don't you do it. you know more than all of us put together. that was the see that sprouted. latemitted myself in the 1990's when i saw an ad for a fellowship that was the largest fellowship monetarily i'd ever seen in my life. i applied. >> this brings me to another question. how do you support yourself when you're writing this? karen: not an easy question.
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i never realized it was going to take this long. i thought in terms of 3-5 years. i was extremely fortunate. my former foundation colleagues gave me grants, individual donors gave me grants. support including the nsa baby. crucial.ly support was >> you started looking into how did this relationship originate. how did this organization that operated on a world stage for 20 funded almost from the start by the cia. >> i thought logically the story
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had to start in 1947. that is when the cia was founded in the nsa was founded. for three years i tried to fit square pegs into round holes and i could not make -- there were these hidden hands in the story. i had to make the decision to bring the clock back until i found all of those hidden hands. the sheer number will stagger you read it ranges from intelligence veterans to liberals, to the state department, to intelligence agencies, to the vatican and so forth. all played a role. why they did so is a complicated story. i would say it was a time when nsa was founded that half of all students will return to veterans.
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it is far more important, the numbers dedicated to forming nsa who were intelligence veterans. -- forl work from the the same agency. what i can say is nsa was not founded as an operation. cia, and tied to the the covert action unit was formed until 1948. the other thing, why were they so interested, why did they cia, why were the they interested in students? the soviets were interested in students. they had backed a large organization of students founded and crawled -- in prague. the united states had no nationwide body that could claim
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to speak on behalf of all american students. regardless of the different political tendencies that were on campus, they all agreed that they should form a national student association. it was liberal. it was the same conundrum the editor of ramparts phase. what did the cia want with a bunch of long-haired hippies? it was always liberal. it was important to distinguish .hat these were liberals who had been 30'smuch affected by the shattering of the coalitions that included communists, when the communist party was perfectly legal. when it turned out party leaders
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had allegiance to stalin, they had hidden allegiances, and it shattered organizations, shattered the roosevelt voting coalition. the liberals conclude they were partners.le they did not want to replay of the 1930's. that is why there were some many of these other behind the scenes make sure there wasn't a replay of the american student union, that the communists were out from the get-go. >> one thing which reading your i hadade me realize, always thought that the big scandal was that this organization that was supposedly private was in fact being run and manipulated by the cia.
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book, i cameyour and moredjuster disturbing part of the story was not just this organization had been run that way, but had gathered a vast amount of intelligence about american students, students from other countries, that some of this almost certainly was passed to foreign governments. tell us about that part of the story. karen: there was massive amounts of intelligence reporting. mainly foreign students. they didn't pay attention to much domestic. >> this seminar was replicated throughout the world. seminar had a different purpose. it was to recruit staff. using seminars and friendship
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exchanges, throughout the rest of the world was a technique. 30 seminars ine africa alone? karen: 33. robert kiley was a former nsa president. he said students were important to others on most con nuts -- continents, but on africa they were in the actors. the best way to explain what you are raising, and what in the book is disturbing, not only to me and you, but many participants, where did these massive number of reports go once they were inside the cia? what was the pipeline? >> these were reports not just the people who conducted seminars but leaders making
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fact-finding trips. karen: a report was filed on every foreign student contact. every student that you came in contact with, the way you came into contact with them differed. this is why you had a case officer. this is to whom you sent the report. mid-50's, the way i would frame it, u.s. foreign-policy and covert actions followed different tracts. in the early part of the cold war, everyone knew what the policy was, containment. the junior diplomatic thrust was also containment. counter the soviets with their own organization. camee mid-50's, what important was to win friends, by
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showing you stood in solidarity with the revolutionaries, with anti-imperialists, and that met demonstrating your solidarity with algerian revolutionaries, and he shot dissidents -- anti-shaw dissidents. these were the contacts. it wasn't just individual contacts. somewere essentially argument over how much economy they had. they weren't students. way were students like the americans think about students. football and fraternity. staff wasational intent on showing american students stood in solidarity. at the same time the u.s. was
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still backing batista in cuba. you have overt foreign-policy. you have covert foreign-policy. it becomes also a question of access. it becomes a question of working off of the street from the agency's point of view. they will justify it and say we were just intelligence gathering. it believes us to know what they are thinking. but it was so much more than that. cia resources going into the mechanisms dictators were using to prepress the students. storiese complicated but one of the things that happened is nsa was succeeding
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in standing in solidarity with students. and had a friendship. the leaders of nsa could be , studentsing to che came back impressed with the revolution. they were creating a constituency until eisenhower decided the cia must counter the's influence in south africa. -- south america. there is a world. it is not just students. this disjunction between overt foreign-policy and the covert level. >> what happened with these thousands of reports? you found
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some of these reports, and you quote them in the book, someone identifying -- this is the conservative african we have been looking for. socialist but not too militant. having all sorts of dealings with repressive governments. karen: one of the nsa presidents for my god, did we finger -- finger people for the shaw. with united states supporting the shaw, the state department kept trying to deport the iranian students nsa was supporting. had they succeeded, they would have been executed. they were saved because robert
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kennedy was the attorney general and he stepped in to stop deportations. the geometry of this is amazing. ,o one but no one can answer even career cia people can answer, did these reports on the dissidents go back to the shaw? some say they did. the head of the iranian student association, who i interviewed one he was the dean of business said my god, they betrayed our secrets. every one of us could have been killed. campus after campus, stories were iranian students that oppose the shaw lived in terror.
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one story where they wore paper bags over their heads to slip a letter to the editor. >> trading information is what intelligence agencies do. i want ask one more question. the book for 10, 15 years? karen: i had the unabridged edition after 10 or so years. the last four or five were cutting and crafting. >> you got a lot of repentant cia people to talk to you. many of them still justified the relationship. what they are critics of, almost all of them, assessing what they did in whether or not it work.
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whether their strategies were successful. critics are the wedding participants. example, the long history of support for the algerian revolutionaries, with the special algerian scholarship, kiley said none of those people amounted to a hill of beans. another one quoted if you wanted to make a kid a democrat, send them to russia. if you want to make them into a communist, send them to the united states. >> these sound like cynical people. wouldn't -- some are repentant. i would say the early ones were simpler. may be in their defense, they were passionate anti-communists.
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they describe themselves as believing in the fight against communism as much as our generation believed in fighting for civil rights and desegregation. wordone of the reasons the patriotic is in the title. to impugnthe tendency motive. that doesn't let them off the hook. you have to make judgments about what they did, and the consequences of the operation. i see no reason to impugn their motive. fight to give some of these folks a chance to ask questions. had someo of you have experience with this world karen wrote about. >> wait for the microphone. this is all being recorded.
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>> your husband and the other agents that were recruited were all volunteer -- voluntarily serving as agents, correct? karen: no. let me try to explain. there were two routes to working for nsa on the international program. one is as i described. you are hired. you are elect did. , asks youakes you out to sign a document. then you learn what you are really working for. was it voluntary? in the sense that yes, they believed in the objectives being described to them. thisen want to say forcefully, i think the puppet argument is irrelevant. it misses the point of a good
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recruitment program. you are looking for people who will share your community of interests. at that point you agree. did some feel trapped? yes. great?e real yes. it changes over time. but it wasn't as if they were asked, would you like to? and they could say yes or no. once you sign that security oath the whether you think it is a mmed.idea, you are mu >> but you could quit. you couldn't tell anybody what you did. but you could quit. >> i believe i am correct in saying many only stayed one year. people in effect that felt
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the need to exit, exited after one year. but nobody did quit. >> wait for the microphone. >> what was the relationship tween the cia and the fbi? karen: tents. hoover opened an investigation into the formation of nsa, had agents at all the first meetings . investigated every delegate, and continued to do so until the fall of 19 the. in 1960, not long after the anti-house un-american activities committee demonstrations, because nsa
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it, i have aish declassified memo that said it is inconceivable that this group is a communist. he reopened the investigation. >> what you described is the exact mirror of what the kgb did , in terms of case study, case handlers. about and having writing their daily life. karen: there are many parallels. somebody who was defending what they did early on what say we had to fight fire with fire. that would be their defense. there were many parallels. >> another question?
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i was wondering if you came in the -- across anything when immigration act was change. beot of students that may are your contemporaries at international meetings, they may have been applying for visas. my parents after the 1965 immigration act. and had friends in america india. did you think any of these files were influential in who got immigration approved or not approved? karen: i am not sure. , whether theon was work of nsa and cia had anything to do with affecting weather for peoplegranted
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trying to immigrate, -- >> or who was recruited. karen: they could arrange for a visa. they could arrange to deny visas, and did both. i don't think it had in general for specific people had to do with immigration. wantedrgeted person they . a lot of the big meetings, there were things they did not want. they often chose a country cooperative that would deny visas to anybody they didn't want to get to the meeting. >> it sounds like we are still hearing the tip of the iceberg, and there is more that you edited out, as well as remains
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in the book. , from theerstanding perspective of the young person who was recruited, there is a question, whether many of them would feel now that they were suffering moral injury. they ended up behaving in ways that had they understood potential consequences, they would have changed their actions. they have ended up doing things that in fact they now feel morally repugnant and are injured by it. questionat is a tough to answer. gomy mind i would have to individual by individual. there are certainly an notes that individuals have told me,
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i'm not very proud of that. but many of them still feel they did nothing wrong. say theyhem will didn't understand that the cia was working all sides of the street. we didn't really know anything about the cia until the bay of pigs.-- pay of pigs.y of nothing to ramparts new about the cia. so, you can charge them with willful blindness, but i don't. was genuinely felt this
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y's intelligence service. they speak in terms of doing the lord's work. true believers. i believe -- and believe that it was justified. >> they put a lot of obstacles in your way. thatreclassified documents had been previously declassified. karen: i am not sure that was personal. i was stunned to find many documents from 1949 reclassified in 2001. woman whovely young was as stunned as i was at the national archives. she said i don't understand this. she said let me run it up, and she came back crestfallen.
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said i am sorry, this has to go through other agencies. when they have to go through other agencies it will take a while. i said right. the cia. she said we are not allowed to give out that information. [laughter] that iere three reports wanted. she said i don't understand. i finally got them. it took nine years. the two that said what we were doing to the bad guys. what the bad guys were doing to us. i didn't get what we were doing to the bad guys. >> wasn't there a hint of a threat against you when you started writing the book? >> people always used to say to me are you frightened? answer, i am more afraid
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of writing a bad sentence. when they put obstacles in your path, but is a good way to frame it, they are subtle. you're never quite sure you just received a threat or not. one person who had been a career agent, who posed as an nsa representative, who went back into the agency, all of a sudden said to me what you going to do about clearing your book with the agency. i said what you mean? i never worked for them. everything i am doing is in the public domain. security both very seriously, he said. so that unnerved me a bit.
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>> can you talk about the intelligence community's response to the article and the people who wrote it. hysterical.counts, that is all of the accounts of the cia reaction. by the time ramparts started working, the deputy director asked for a run down on the known ramparts people. these were freelance, occasional riders -- writers. they had half of the known people who worked for ramparts. -- response was to sit up set up a top location run by a
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ramparts.after we still don't know all of the things they did. wrote theomas, who very best men, interviewed a man who is no longer living who returned to headquarters and told the story evan. , awas reporting to his boss third ranking cia official at that point. when he described what they had oh, you have a spot of blood. he would not tell evan tomas more about what they did. but he did say they had terrible things in mind to do to ramparts. >> i would be very curious.
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i can add a little bit to this. later, i applied for my cia files. i got many pages of them, heavily rejected. sometimes just a few words. a very low person on the totem pole. only peripherally involved in this story. withoutme out of it much respect for what we journalists call the fact checking process. example, they had a lot of personal details about me, my parents, my wife's parents. one of the things they had my wife and i, had briefly been civil rights workers in mississippi. we got married the following year.
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we asked people to make a contribution to a civil rights organization that we worked for. the got translated into words gave his wedding presents to goodwill. [laughter] files wasing in their not wildly accurate, who knows. karen: rights. >> you never got a clue as to what they were planning. karen: i know they had a plant. i don't know who that was. >> we never figured it out. karen: what they also did, they felt, this is a point where they could not believe the emerging dissent was homegrown. they were convinced it was funded by foreign sources.
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>> because this was 67. karen: they immediately got the irs involved to audit rampart. because they were so confident if they could confine foreign money they could shut the whole thing down. ramparts -- by the publish, everyone had moles in each other's camp. nsa held a preemptive press conference. on the very day of that add the new york times, the irs granted and said they would do it. by that time it was too late.
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>> they never found the moscow gold. karen: they never found the moscow gold. what were the watergate burglars looking for? lists. foreign funders. this notion that the soviets were behind it, the head of covert operations, responsible for youth and students, he wrote likens thend he ramparts exposure to unilateral disarmament. apocalyptic vision of that exposure. >> patrick. thathave a question on point. he writes in his autobiography
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about the dismantling of these networks that have been so constructed, they had to be taken apart with much regret on his part. it seems to me with some gap of time they are reconstructed through the national endowment for democracy. i wonder if the u.s. government finds any way to continue to do the operations it feels are important, even after they are supposed to be shut down. absolutely. that is one of the places i would look. >> andy. >> i was a young reporter in
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washington. i worked for a show on abc where my colleagues had been president of the national student association. later i was doing a broadcast for early pbs. it was about the use of intellectuals around the world, 25 years after the end of the war. i was in india. i didn't know anyone. i had a researcher who said i will get you some journalists. one guy was the editor of a magazine. neutral. this was beginning the vietnam war. he was an editor, like the new republic.
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, interviewed aim couple of other people. broadcast airs, and i get a call from a magazine called problems of communism. did you ever run into that? a cia operation that had intellectuals running for them. problems of communism. nothing is coming to mind. he was one of ours. he was cia. i discovered a british intellectual magazine, also funded by the cia. fundingstimates of cia for a 20 year. is high. 80% of all.
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appointed a three person commission and gave them for weeks to report after the ramparts. of the cia director , the undersecretary of state, and john gardner, who was secretary of health, education and welfare. the real work fell to jack rosenthal. short, a long story he was escorted to langley. he's one of the few people who have seen the number of operations that were being run through private domestic organizations. he said there were hundreds. he was staggered.
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>> what about foreign operations? karen: you know, that is outside the scope of the book. i don't think i can answer your question. >> you mentioned robert kennedy briefly at one point. it made me think back to the trip he took to south africa, at the invitation of the south african national students union. i am wondering, the complexities of his relationship to the cia is very intriguing. did you come across interesting aspects of that? what will surprise people, because he was sucked into the bay of pigs, he became
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quite an advocate of covert operations. people who nsa launched the anti-world festivals -- counter festivals, met with him and were praised for their work. presidents, he was being reassured that all past presidents had cooperated with the cia and he adored the kennedy family. said, would you like to have your picture taken with robert kennedy? supportive of these writes a lotur about these. it is not directly in a -- in a footnote. one of his rationales was, he saw foreign policy was shifting, it was not just diplomat to diplomat.
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rotterinvolving much constituencies whether they were students or journalist or lawyers. in the fall of 1967, a number of us who were entering graduate programs here at uc berkeley were at five-year fellowships from the ford foundation. -- find being to fan out whether you could be a ta, you would get your phd faster. the rumor when around that the money was coming from that cia. i have no idea whether this is true or not. it turned out that a fairly high proportion of the people who got those fellowships were very involved in the antiwar movement and took longer to get their phd's than other people because
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of their activity. people thought that -- people cia quite pleased that the was funding us. i have no idea if this was true or not. do you have any idea whether the cia was funding money through the ford foundation? and if so, why? karen: there is one instance in my book, i cannot speak to in general, attitudes very. . was -- attitudes vary there is one program, the foreign student leadership project, which was a joint venture by ford and cia. i think the reason for that, in what theynce, is that brought to the american campuses under the nsa program. the cia is for bit in by law to operate domestically. i think it felt it really needed a mature partner of stature.
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-- it was handled by a special committee at fort. i had read -- at ford. i had read those archives. they had been involved, but i do not know if they were involved in those programs. the one that i know is that when i have written about. the one i have written about does produce some illustrious student future leaders. >> given all your research into youcia and students, do look at the events of the arab spring differently than the average american? if you do, how do you look at them differently? karen: i shuddered when i saw the microphone going to this young man. [laughter] karen: my son.
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he always asks me the hard questions. it is a great question. i am not even sure i can answer it satisfactorily, but i would like to think about it. is that,hing i learned what you see is not what you get. there are all kinds of forces being stirred up. i will give you a parallel example. back all thewe nationalities in the soviet union. we saw that they could maybe help the breakup of the soviet union. , the chickens are coming home to roost. you start up nationalism for short term interest, but you may have long-term serious problems. is one of the
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lessons that comes throughout the book. the other one that we occurs to me is that, one of the strategies, even among revolutionaries was to pick the moderates, to identify moderates. situations,nary moderates almost always lose out to militants. almost always. we really do not do a good job of handpicking revolutionary leaders, or moderate revolutionary leaders, or leaders. even in patriotic the trail, it is littered with people who -- saddam hussein used to work for the cia. we used him to try to kill the iraqi leader and he miss. the cia finally overthrew kassim in 1963. this is why this at a coal seat agents talkal cia
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about ripping people. there can be a short term collusion, but you cannot buy rent. there are so many instances of their swear someone who served turnsterest today either against us, or does not serve our interest down the road. have not hadat, i time to follow the current revolution. [laughter] >> one or two more questions. the revolutions from ramparts were disastrous for the nsa, but you referred to the fact that there were many, many institutions that were being funded i the cia. i wonder what the effect of those institutions was? karen: nsa to the public brent.
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many other organizations and institutions denied -- tried to test it out. tried to test it out. ofre is a limited amount research on the labor operation, which was massive and huge. exposure, most organizations and institutions were off their funding. institutions and organizations that have nothing to do with it, then you see stockton 67 and take a closer look. nsa wasconsequence for -- the big consequence for nsa was, in a short term it grew very radical and students rallied around it.
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but, they cannot do any international work. they were absolutely suspect. that was true decades later. do not believe that they do international work. if they do, it is very limited. weight -- wait. the title the book your -- title of the book you're doing? karen: yes, and almost at me the whole 15 years to get the title. i was searching for something that would capture the theme of idealism and duplicity. much know that these two terms, patriotic and betrayal, ntion. tension -- inte
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where you come out as a reader is up to the reader where you fall in that tension. an objection by some of the waiting participants to the book, it is the title because they do not feel the betrayal is warranted. again, that is the distinction between the aspirations, intentions, altruism and commitment to fighting communism and judging the consequences. i do not see any way around. either whether it is a dictionary definition or because it involves things in the book. you cannot have a secret government operation run through whoseate organization reason for being is an exercise in democratic self-government. it allows for people to say that this was a patriotic operation.
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thank you. have one final question, then i will let you sign some books. is there a copy of your book on its way to edward snowden? [laughter] karen: i have no idea. >> i hope there is because i see a connection between these two revelations. of what happens when the country loses control of its intelligence. i want to thank you very much, karen for being with us tonight. [applause] karen: thank you. in the back,books which i am sure you would be got to sign. karen: i would be happy to sign. thank you so much for coming.
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>> on history bookshelf, here from the countries this known american history writers of the past decade, every saturday at 4:00 p.m. eastern. you can watch any of our programs at any time when you visit our website, c-span.org/history. you are watching american history tv, all weekend, every weekend on c-span3. next on american history tv, a panel on the legacies of world war i with the focused on the middle east. they talk about the defeat and collapse of the ottoman empire, which controlled the middle east for hundreds of years. and had this led to a post of british and french partition.
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