posse secret campaign to enroll american students in the crusade against communism. this discussion was recorded in 2015 at the university of california berkeley graduate school of journalism. >> karen has had a long career. she was a member of the boulder city council in boulder, colorado then deputy mayor. , this led to her writing a book. "running as a woman -- the -- gender of power other woman in politics. during the carter administration she was appointed regional director of the federal agency that supervised this to and the -- vista and the piece corps, and other volunteer programs. she has worked for foundations, for the office of the president of the university of california

and has written a great deal for the magazine "the american prospect." mostly what she has been doing is writing what i think is quite a remarkable book "patriotic , betrayal." it is what we will be talking about this evening. it is a subject of enormous importance, even though it is about things that happened 50 or 60 years ago, i think you will see that there is an 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. in 1964, you attended a conference of the national student association. what was that?

what was the conference like? karen: nsa was a membership organization of 300 universities and colleges in the united states. it claimed to speak for all american students. it had huge annual conferences called congresses that minute -- minute political parties, attended by delegates from the member schools. i went not as a 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.

i wanted to be a secretary, and had not figure out that was not what i was in college. that was my initial engagement. >> in your book you describe how when you went to this first national convention, it opened a new world to you. karen: it was, as i try to capture, i had never heard of the new york times. i never been 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 did for so many people because there was no way to have contact. the accents were different. new jersey, texas, boston. it was a time with people who -- when people who participated in student government were phi

kappa's, smart, brilliant or aiders -- orators. barney frank you would have heard in the early 60's. jeff greenfield. amazing orator. he was the editor of the cardinal at the university of wisconsin. i'd never heard political debate. i was from a family that was very 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 a sophomore english 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 talked to him and invited him to apply for something called the international student relations seminar that was going to be held the coming summer at haverford college in pennsylvania. the nsa office was in philadelphia. he applied and was accepted. we had a tiny baby by then. they gave us an extra dorm room. i just want to say that that nsa baby, he is in the audience tonight. we trundled off to hatherford. i was the secretary. i was in a paid position to produce material.

about 12 hand selected act -- editors, area specialists and duty body presidents studied politics. many of them expecting a course in international politics, but it was all about student politics. >> a dozen students and newspaper editors, who was leading the seminar? karen: two people who work for nsa. there was a director and associate director. at this point there is no inkling other than this is the international part of the national student association. i got to sit in on sessions when my typing was finished. it was fascinating. >> 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. karen: i learned much later we all live would together for six weeks in this dorm, but that was the time in which security background investigations were conducted on any student they wanted to hire 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. -- the office moved to washington, we moved to washington. it was thrilling. i went 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 er rand to 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 importance to the u.s. government. i would like to tell you more about the nature of that work. before i do, i need you to sign this document. i was recovering from pneumonia. we didn't know how to cancel the

appointment so i was still feverish. i am the daughter of several lawyers and i know i'm supposed to read fine print. it was so fine and i just jumped off the page. at that point, i have no reason -- i had no reason to distrust the united states government. as quaint as that may sound. nor did i have any idea what he was going to say. 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 both moves us to get to know the algerian future leaders. i didn't have a clue why the u.s. had to support france. i did not know there were algerian revolutionaries. the most important thing is the

word behooves. every time i heard the word for the rest of my life a hair on the back of my head with stand up. thexplained that he was deputy director of the cia, covert action. the man who would taken my husband on a phony errand was robert kiley, the director of covert action five. i don't have words to describe how stunning a revelation this was. 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? his case officers codename was aunt alice.

his codename was sinclair, from sinclair lewis. >> he had to sign one of these oaths. karen: he had undergone the same ritual. they always kept the wives out -- took the wives out for the same ritual because they worried about pillow talk. they didn't want to leave the wives covered. >> what were you told about this oath? and the penalties were violating it? karen: i knew fairly quickly that this was a security oath under the espionage act, and if i told anybody anything that i had 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 foreign contact you had asked -- as to whether the person had communist tendencies or democratic tendencies. those who were on the commission vowed tor valid -- never identify anybody with procommunist tendencies. including year old stalinists. 50 an important point is that many did not know who else on

the international side new. some people hadn't been made waiting. 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, but it had to do with his parents. >> you have a national staff, how many people? karen: since i wasn't in the office, there were two floors of two townhouses in washington dc that housed the international staff, and two floors that house the national staff. >> but only some of them would .ave signed these owes --oaths virtually all the money came from the cia. 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 -- got extra salary money wired directly into their bank account. >> which was fairly unusual. karen: to my knowledge nobody had ever heard of wiring money. you and your husband stayed there for a year and then you left. your connection to the organization terminated. karen: with one exception. in the fall of 1966, early october, aunt 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 opened the door. he took my husband down and was in pursuit of a leak.

that leads to what happened in 1966 and 1967. >> right. maybe i can tell this part of the story. i had some connection with this. this was 1966. karen: early october, 1966. >> two or three months after that, i at the time was a very young and naive reporter and editor at a magazine called ramparts, which some of you are old enough to remember. a very frightened young man came into the ramparts office one day with this unbelievable story having to do with the fact the national student association, an organization we all knew about

was secretly funded by the cia and had been for many years. at the ramparts editors didn't first, believe him. then the editors put people on checking out the story. it immediately checked out. a researcher in boston began looking into various foundations which were allegedly supporting the national student association. there is a long list of foundations which nobody had ever heard of in connection with anything else. it turned out 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 up and they all had , something in common, at least one senior partner during world war ii had worked for the oss, the predecessor of the cia. at that point we knew the story was true. in early 1967, the ramparts went public with it. it created an enormous ruckus. this was a well-known organization which had been 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 revealed to have then secretly -- have been secretly funded by the cia for some years.

as a journalist it was the most , exciting story i had ever been associated with. even though i worked on it only in a small way. how was this ramparts expose experienced by nsa veterans at that point? those who were in the know and not? karen: all those in law school got very good grades. they all went to the law library and let the wives in charge of answering the telephone. we still told no one. there was some conversation but we still took very seriously, don't say anything or you can be imprisoned for 20 years. it was years before we talked about it. i remember at the time thinking,

because the controversy was an enormous irruption, then it was shut down 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 decided you wanted to get to the bottom of how this relationship originated. 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 act it for five or six years. i think it was at that point the

fbi had acknowledged they had a lot of files. joint -- going to charge $.10 a page. to their shock i said how many pages. they told me and i said the only grant i ever awarded on the spot. their purpose was that someone could use these documents to write a history of what happened. i tried for several years talking to people about writing this history. one of whom was hendrik hertzberg of the new yorker. who was in this international seminar with us the summer of 1965. the time wasn't 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 seed that sprouted. i committed myself in the late 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. i never realized it was going to take this long. i thought in terms of 3-5 years. i was extremely fortunate. i was not only blessed by the fellowship, but my former foundation colleagues gave me discretionary grants, individual donors gave me grants. i had family support including the nsa baby. he grew up to be a high-tech entrepreneur. that family support was crucial.

>> you started looking into how did this relationship originate. how did this organization that operated on a world stage for 20 years, funded almost from the start by the cia. how did that happen? >> i thought logically the story had to start in 1947. thense the cia was founded and the nsa was founded. i tried to fit square pegs into round holes and i could not make -- there were all these subtle hidden hands in the story. i had to make the decision to move the clock back until i identified and found all of those hidden hands. i will say the sheer number will

stagger you because it ranges from intelligence veterans to liberals, to the state department, to intelligence agencies, to the vatican and so -- american catholic church to the vatican and so forth. all played a role. why they did so is a complicated story. i don't have time to go into it now. i would say it was a time when nsa was founded that half of all students were returned veterans. it is far more important, the the number dedicated to forming nsa who were intelligence veterans. they all were not from the same agency, nor did they cia to i. ye to eye. they see e what i can say is nsa was not founded as an operation. it became tied to the cia, and the covert action unit was formed until 1948.

a year after both organizations were up. the other thing, why were they so interested, why did they connect nsa to the cia, why were they interested in students? the soviets were interested in students. the soviets had backed a large organization of students founded in 46 in prague. the united states had no nationwide body that could claim 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 characteristic that was liberal, it was the same conundrum that the editor of ramparts phase. what did the cia want with a bunch of long-haired hippies? it was always liberal.

that is an important thing to distinguish between liberal anti-communism and the joe mccarthy or right-wing or conservative anti-communism. these were liberals who had been very much affected by the 30's shattering of the coalitions that included communists, when the communist party was perfectly legal. when it turned out party leaders -- meddlers had at allegiance to stalin, they had hidden allegiances, and it shattered organizations, shattered the roosevelt voting coalition. the liberals conclude they were not reliable partners. that was very key. they did not want to replay of the 1930's. that is why there were some many that of these other behind the scenes institutions to 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 book made me realize, i had originally thought i knew about this. i had always thought that the big scandal was that this organization that was supposedly private was in fact being run and manipulated by the cia. after i read your book, i came to feel that a far darker and more disturbing part of the story was that 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. karen: this seminar had a different purpose. it was to recruit staff. using seminars and friendship exchanges, throughout the rest of the world was a technique. >> weren't there 30 seminars in africa alone? karen: 33. robert kiley was a former nsa president. he said students were important actors on most continents, but in africa, they were the actors. that was -- 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 from people who conducted seminars, but american student leaders making so-called fact-finding trips. karen: a report was filed on every foreign student contact. every foreign student you came into contact with. the way you came in to contact with them differed. this is why you had a case officer. this is to whom you sent the report. in the 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 -- with our own organization. by the mid-50's, what came -- what became important was to win friends for the u.s. by showing you stood in solidarity with the revolutionaries, with anti-imperialists, with anti-colonials. that meant demonstrating solidarity without jury in anti-batistaes, revolutionaries. >> these were the contacts. >> these were the contacts. it wasn't just individual contacts. money went to the algerians. they were essentially some

argument over how much autonomy they had. students.not they were students, but not the way americans think about them. nsa international staff was intent on showing american students stood in solidarity. at the same time the u.s. was 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 behooves 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 repress the students. these are complicated stories but one of the things that happened is nsa was succeeding in standing in solidarity with students. and had a friendship. vana.students want to havha the leaders of nsa could be found talking to che, students came back impressed with the revolution. they were creating a constituency until eisenhower decided the cia must counter

fidel's influence in south africa. -- south america. that is one of the more complicated stories that has played out over time. there is whole a world. it is not just students. you have this disjunction between overt foreign-policy and what was going on at the covert level. >> what happened with these thousands of reports? you found some of these reports, and you quote them in the book, someone identifying -- this is the conservative african we have been looking for. karen: socialist but not too militant. >> the cia was having all sorts of dealings with repressive governments. rian iran, iraq, and so on.

karen: one of the nsa presidents said my god, did we finger for 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 kennedy was the attorney general and he stepped in to stop deportations. the geometry of this is amazing. no 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 in the united states, 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 where iranian students that oppose the shah lived in terror. one story where they wore paper bags over their heads to slip a letter to the editor on their plight. >> trading information is what intelligence agencies do. i want ask one more question. i want to open it up to the floor and get these other people a chance. you worked on 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. cutting and crafting. cutting and crafting. >> you got a lot of repentant cia people to talk to you. or semi-repentant. karen: i think 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. ed. whether their strategies were successful. the harshest critics are the witting participants. for example, the long history of support for the algerian algeriannaries the revolution, 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." [laughter] >> these sound like cynical people. maybe not so repentant after all. [laughter] karen: i wouldn't -- some are repentant. i would say the early ones where it was simpler. i should say maybe in their defense, they were passionate anti-communists. they describe themselves as believing in the fight against communism as much as our generation believed in fighting for civil rights and desegregation. it's one of the reasons the word patriotic is in the title. i deplore the modern tendency to impugn motive. they didn't believe passionately.

did believe passionately. 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. even if some of them did become quite cynical. >> i will fight to give some of these folks a chance to ask questions. one or two of you have had some experience with this world karen wrote about. starting over here. wait for the microphone. this is all being recorded. >> i just want to clarify, your husband and the other agents that were recruited were all 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 route is as i described. you are hired. you are elected. somebody from past years takes

you out, asks you to sign a document, you do. 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. i often -- i want to say this forcefully, because i think the puppet argument is irrelevant. it misses the point of a good recruitment program. you are looking for people who will share your community of interests. at that point you agree. did some feel trapped? yes. did some of them feel great? yes. it changes over time. and it depends. 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, whether you think it is a good idea or a bad idea, you are mummed. >> but you could quit. no one is forcing you to stay in a job. you couldn't tell anybody what you did. but you could quit. karen: i believe i am correct in saying many only stayed one year. most did five years in different positions and then spent a year at. the people in effect that felt the need to exit, exited after one year. you are right. nobody did quit. >> wait for the microphone. so it will get recorded. >> what was the relationship tween the cia and the fbi? karen: tense. hoover opened an investigation into the formation of nsa, had

agents at all the first meetings. investigated every single andgate and alternate continued to do so until the fall of 1951 or 1952. then in 1960, not long after the anti-house un-american activities committee demonstrations here in san francisco -- and because nsa voted to abolish it, i have a declassified memo from hoover that said it is inconceivable that this group, who is taking a line, 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.

names, and having writing about their daily life. karen: there are many parallels. >> yeah, many parallels. karen: somebody who was defending what they did early on will say we had to fight fire with fire. that would be their defense. there were many parallels. >> another question? >> i was wondering if you came across anything when immigration act was changed. a lot of students that may be are your contemporaries at international meetings, they may have been a few years later applying for visas. my parents came after the 1965 immigration act.

but they have friends who were americans in england and in india. did you think any of these files were influential in who got immigration approved or not approved? karen: i am not sure. i could not hear the question because of the echo. >> the question was whether the work of nsa and cia had anything to do with affecting whether visas were granted for people trying to immigrate -- >> or who was recruited to get professional visas. karen: they could arrange for a visa. they could also arrange to deny visas, and did both. but i don't think it had in general for specific people had to do with immigration. a very targeted person that they wanted. a lot of the big meetings, there

were people they did not want. they often chose a country , cooperative ally, 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 in the book. if i'm understanding, from the perspective of the young person who was recruited, there is a sort of assertion and a question, which is whether many of them would feel now that they were suffering moral injury. which is to say that 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. karen: that is a tough question to answer. in my mind, i would have to go individual by individual. there are certainly anecdotes, individuals have told me, "i'm not very proud of that." but many of them still feel they did nothing wrong. many of them will say they didn't understand that the cia was working all sides of the street. because throughout the 1950's that i mean, we didn't really know anything about the cia until the bay of pigs.

the attempt to overthrow the castro regime. the leak to ramparts knew nothing about the cia. and went in hot pursuit of the one book that existed. so, you can charge them with willful blindness, but i don't. they genuinely felt this was -- many of them felt -- that this was their country's intelligence service. they speak in terms of doing the lord's work. true believers. and believe that it was justified. >> when you started writing a book, they put a lot of obstacles in your way. right? they reclassified documents that had been previously declassified. karen: i am not sure that was personal. [laughter]

karen: but i was stunned to find many documents from 1949 reclassified in 2001. i had a lovely young woman who was as stunned as i was at the national archives. she said "i don't understand this." she said "let me run it up to declass," and she came back crestfallen. she 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] there were three reports from 1949 that i wanted. she said i don't understand. i finally got them. it took nine years.

the two that told what we were doing to the bad guys. no, i got the two that said 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? karen: people always used to say to me -- aren't you frightened? my flip answer was, i am more afraid of writing a bad sentence than i am of the cia. when they put obstacles in your path, and that 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 then posed as an nsa representative, who went

back into the agency, who is long since retired, 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. they take that security oath very seriously, he said. so that unnerved me a bit. >> can you talk about the intelligence community's response to the article and the people who wrote it and worked on it? karen: by all accounts, hysterical. that is all of the accounts of -- not my words -- all of the accounts of the cia reaction.

by the time ramparts started working on the story, the deputy director asked for a run down on the known ramparts people. these were freelance, occasional riders -- writers. the cia already have dossiers on half of the known people who worked for ramparts. one response was to set up a top secret location run by a man to go after ramparts. we still don't know all of the things they did. but evan tomas, who wrote "the very best men," interviewed a man who is no longer living who is eddie applewhite, who returned to headquarters and told the story evan. he was reporting to his boss, a third ranking cia official at that point.

when he described what they had done, he said oh, you have a spot of blood. he would not tell evan thomas more about what they did. but he did say they had terrible things in mind to do to ramparts. >> i would be very curious. as someone who worked on ramparts at the time, i can add a little bit to this. many years later, i applied for my cia files under the freedom of information act, and i got many pages of them, heavily redacted -- sometimes just a few words on the pages. i was a very low person on the totem pole. i am only peripherally involved in this story. i did come out of it without much respect for what we journalists call the fact

checking process. i will just give you one little example -- they had a lot of personal details about me, my parents, my wife's parents. one of the things they had discovered was, well, one of the things that happened was my wife and i had briefly been civil rights workers in mississippi. we got married the following year. we asked people in lieu to make a contribution to a civil rights organization, such as the student nonviolent coordinating committee that we worked for. this got translated by the cia agent into the words "gave his wedding presents to goodwill." [laughter] if everything in their files was that wildly accurate, who knows.

karen: rights. >> you never got a clue as to what they were planning. karen: no. 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 in the united states was homegrown. they were convinced it was funded by foreign sources. in 1967, there was huge opposition to the vietnam war. i am sorry i forgot to say this before, but they immediately got the irs involved to audit rampart. because they were so confident that if they could find foreign money, they could shut the whole thing down. on the day ramparts -- by the

time ramparts published, everyone had moles in each other's camp. nsa held a preemptive press conference. ramparts found out about it and took out a full-page ad in "the new york times," the irs granted and said they would do it. they would audit ramparts. by that time it was too late. >> they never found the moscow gold. karen: they never found the moscow gold. but i will tell you, this is a very important threat because people forget -- what were the watergate burglars looking for? lists. foreign funders. foreign funders in the antiwar movement. this notion that the soviets were behind it -- the head of covert operations, responsible for youth and students, he wrote

a memoir in about 1985, and he likens the ramparts exposure to "unilateral disarmament." apocalyptic vision of that exposure. >> patrick. >> i have a question on that point. i do not know if this is in the scope of your book, but he writes in his autobiography about the dismantling of these networks that have been so constructed over 15, 20 years of operation, that because of the blasts, 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 beginning in the 1980's. 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. karen: absolutely. absolutely. that is one of the places i would look. >> andy. wait for the microphone. here. >> i was a young reporter in and producer in the mid-1960's in washington. i had already worked for a show on abc where my colleague had been president of the national student association. we talked about it. mark furstenberg. anyway, later, i was doing a broadcast for early pbs. it was about the views of intellectuals around the world, the united states, 25 years after the end of the war. i was in india.

i did not know anybody in india. i had a researcher who said i will get you some journalists. one guy was built to me as the editor of a magazine. pretty liberal in india. india in those days was neutral. this was beginning the vietnam war. 1965. he was an editor, like the new republic. i interviewed him, interviewed a couple of other people. this guy was very pro-american position in vietnam. so the broadcast airs, and i get a call from a magazine called "problems of communism." did you ever run into that? this was a cia operation that had intellectuals running for them.

karen: "problems of communism." >> it is a journal. karen: nothing is coming to mind. "he was one of, ours. he was cia." i discovered a british intellectual magazine, also funded by the cia. karen: the estimates of cia funding for all international foreign policy books is very high. 80% of all. lbj appointed a three-person commission and gave them four weeks to report after the ramparts flap. which is the cia both the word for catastrophe. it consisted 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. he had done the "new york times" foundation. to make a long story short, 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. >> what about foreign operations? don me?part of m >> what about foreign operations? karen: you know, that is outside the scope of the book. i don't think i can answer your kennedy.>> you mentioned robert briefly, and it made me think took tothe trip he

south africa, which was at the invitation of the south african national students union, i think. -- thendering complexities of his relationship to the cia and so forth is intriguing. i am wondering if you came across interesting aspects of that in researching this? karen: what will surprise people, because he was so furious about his brother being sucked into the bay of pigs, he actually became quite an advocate of covert operations. from the eisenhower regime. many of the nsa people who launched the anti-world festivals -- counter festivals -- met with him and were praised for their work. one of the nsa presidents, ed garvey, he was being reassured that all past presidents had cooperated with the cia, and he adored the

kennedy family. when bob kiley said, would you like to have your picture taken with robert kennedy? he said he felt like he had died and gone to heaven. he was very supportive of these kinds -- arthur schlesinger writes a lot about these. it is in a footnote. one of his rationales was, he saw foreign policy was shifting, that it was not just diplomat to diplomat. that it was involving much broader- constituencies, whether they were youth or 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. the idea being to find out

whether it if you did not have to be a ta, if you would get your phd faster. the rumor went around a couple years later that that money was actually coming from the 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 actually took longer to get their phd's than other people because of their activity. so people thought that -- people were quite pleased at the idea that the cia was funding us. but 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 vary. -- and attitudes vary.

i was able to read the oral histories of forward -- ford foundation people. there is one program i have written about, the foreign student leadership project, which was a joint venture by ford and cia. i think the reason for that, in that instance, is that foreign students were being brought to american campuses under this cia program. and the cia is forbidden by law to operate domestically. i think it felt it really needed a kind of mature partner of stature. but it was handled by a special committee at ford. i have actually read those archives. involved, but whether they were involved in that program, i have no idea. the only one i know about is the i have written about. one but the one i have written about does produce some

illustrious student future leaders. >> given all your research into the cia and students, do you 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. he always asks me the hard questions. it is a great question. and i am not even sure i can answer it satisfactorily, but i would like to think about it. the one thing i learned is that what you see is not what you get. that there are all kinds of forces being stirred up. i will give you a parallel click example. -- parallel, quick example.

and that is we backed all the nationalities in the soviet union. because we saw that they could maybe help the breakup of the soviet union. i would say, in certain instances, the chickens are coming home to roost. you stir up nationalism for short term interest, but you may have long-term serious problems. i think that is one of the lessons that comes throughout the book. and i guess the other one that quickly occurs to me is that one of the strategies, even among the revolutionaries was to pick the moderates, to identify moderates. in revolutionary situations, moderates almost always lose out to militants. almost always. and we really do not do a good job of handpicking revolutionary leaders, or moderate revolutionary leaders, or leaders.

even in "patriotic betrayal," 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 missed. the cia finally overthrew kassim in 1963. but people -- this is why the cynical cia agents talk about renting people. because there can be a short-term collusion of interest, but you cannot buy rent. there are just so many interests -- instances of this, where someone who served our interests today either turns against us, or does not serve our interest down the road. apart from that, i have not had time to follow the current revolution. [laughter] about one or two more questions. i see one right here.

>> the revolutions from "ramparts" were disastrous for nsa, but you referred to the fact that there were many, many institutions that were being funded by the cia. i wonder what the effect on those institutions was? karen: nsa took the public brunt. most of the other organizations and institutions denied -- kind of tried to tough it out. to this day, some of the archives are classified. so there is a limited amount of research on the labor operation, which was massive and huge. because of the exposure, most organizations and institutions lost their funding.

there are often institutions and organizations in you think have absolutely nothing to do with it, and then all of a sudden, stocktontockton 1967, 1968, and you go and take a closer look. the big consequence for nsa was, in the short-term, it grew very radical, and students rallied around it. but, they could not do any international work. they were absolutely suspect. and that was true decades later. to this day, i do not believe that they do international work. and if they do, it is very limited. >> wait. wait for the microphone. >> what's the title of the book

you're doing? karen: yes. the title is "my doing," and it almost took me the whole 15 years to get the title. i was searching for something that would capture the twin themes of idealism and duplicity. and i very much know that these two terms, "patriotic" and "betrayal," are in tension. where you come out as a reader is very much up to the reader, to decide where you fall in that tension. an objectionere is 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, there in tension, their altruism, their commitment to

fighting communism and judging the consequences. and i do not see any way around. either whether it is a dictionary definition or it is because of all the things involved in the book, you cannot have a secret government operation run through a private organization whose reason for being is an exercise in democratic self-government. it allows for people to say that this was a patriotic operation. thank you. >> i 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. yours, and his, of what happens when the country loses control of its intelligence apparatus.

so i want to thank you very much, karen, for being with us tonight. karen: thank you. [applause] >> there are books in the back, which i am sure you would be glad to sign. karen: i would be happy to sign. thank you so much for coming. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> you are watching american history tv. programming on american history every weekend on c-span 3. follow us on twitter, @csp