Focus on Washington

The scandal of the Central Intelligence Agency’s $3 million subsidy of the left-wing National Student Association is not so much that the government has used students to gather intelligence abroad: that would be a sensible and proper activity for the CIA, even if we disagree on the means used and the type of students selected. The scandal is that the Federal Government has been subsidizing domestic student politics in a significant way—and one particular ideology at that. It is a scandal that has rocked the student community, but is in the process of being muzzled here in the nation’s capital.

The word is out that there will be no investigation of the CIA in Congress. There are three primary factors behind the cover-up. The first could be called knee-jerk conservatism, the counterpart of what conservatives ridicule as “knee-jerk liberalism”: the Left made the initial attack on the CIA, therefore we must defend it, whatever the merits of the particular case. The second factor is misinformation: CIA director Richard Helms has been assuring members of the CIA watchdog committees in Congress that CIA money went for “international” operations only, and that NSA is a representative body of American students of all political philosophies. Wrong on both counts. The third factor, particularly among the members of the watchdog committees, is self-interest. Most of them are conservatives, and if they admit they knew of the NSA subsidy all along, it could prove embarrassing when their constituents find out something about NSA. If they say they didn’t know about the funding, then it raises the prospects that the watchdog has no teeth—and no eyes either.

The scandal of the Central Intelligence Agency’s $3 million subsidy of the left-wing National Student Association is not so much that the government has used students to gather intelligence abroad: that would be a sensible and proper activity for the CIA, even if we disagree on the means used and the type of students selected. The scandal is that the Federal Government has been subsidizing domestic student politics in a significant way—and one particular ideology at that. It is a scandal that has rocked the student community, but is in the process of being muzzled here in the nation’s capital.

The word is out that there will be no investigation of the CIA in Congress. There are three primary factors behind the cover-up. The first could be called knee-jerk conservatism, the counterpart of what conservatives ridicule as “knee-jerk liberalism”: the Left made the initial attack on the CIA, therefore we must defend it, whatever the merits of the particular case. The second factor is misinformation: CIA director Richard Helms has been assuring members of the CIA watchdog committees in Congress that CIA money went for “international” operations only, and that NSA is a representative body of American students of all political philosophies. Wrong on both counts. The third factor, particularly among the members of the watchdog committees, is self-interest. Most of them are conservatives, and if they admit they knew of the NSA subsidy all along, it could prove embarrassing when their constituents find out something about NSA. If they say they didn’t know about the funding, then it raises the prospects that the watchdog has no teeth—and no eyes either.