UNDER THE CLOAK OF THE CIA
The exposure by Ramparts magazine of the Central Intelligence Agency's subversion of the National Student Association, a body to which most student governments in the American universities belong, constitutes one of the most sensational scandals in years in the United States. The extent of CIA infiltration of the American campus may cause little surprise abroad, particularly in colonial countries where CIA activities have long been experienced at first hand. In the United States, on the other hand, there is wide popular acceptance of the official propaganda that America enjoys full freedom and democracy and is untainted by a secret political police that manipulates public opinion and exercises insidious control over communication media and public institutions.
; Set up as a cold-war spy agency under the Truman administration, the CIA became one of the hallmarks of the McCarthyite period. During the early fifties, exposure of its totalitarian practices would have occasioned little public shock. With the erosion of McCarthyism, the CIA has become increasingly suspect in the public mind. Since Johnson's plunge into the Vietnam civil war, a broader and broader sector of the American people have worried about the role of the CIA in dragging the country into this dirty military adventure on the Asian mainland.
Coming on top of a "credibility gap" so wide that it is now beyond the capacity of the administration to close it, the exposure of the CIA can have considerable impact on the political mood of the American people, deepening and broadening the opposition to the war in Vietnam. The exposure of the CIA directly discredits the two-party systen, since all the top figures in government, both Democratic and Republican, ranging from Robert Kennedy to the most reactionary racists were acquainted with the activities of. the CIA, approved them, and indeed sponsored them in the first place.
Although the March issue of Ramparts magazine has not yet appeared on the newsstands at this writing (February 19), the advance notice cf the contents was sufficient to set off a nationwide furor. Within days, following the information and clues provided by Ramparts, the big newspapers had uncovered a mass of further startling facts and. information about the "cloak and dagger" outfit whose "highly sophisticated modern techniques" turned out to be mainly the not so new means of buying up people and subsidizing organizations, books, magazines, newspapers, radio and television stations, unions and any institution that it could bend to its sinister purposes.
A by-product is a list that lengthens each day of institutions that served as direct fronts for the CIA or relied almost exclusively on CIA funds for their "anti- Communist" activities abroad. A wealth of hard, specific facts now confirm to the hilt the repeated charges made in other countries of how certain bodies were serving as spy agencies for the CIA. These charges up to now had always been met in the United States with supercilious smiles and arrogant references to foreigners -- unacquainted with free America: and lacking experience in the democratic processes -- always "seeing plots" and sinister motives in American activities abroad.
The exposure of the CIA has already gone so far that it would appear exceedingly difficult for this bipartisan replica of the secret political police of totalitarian states to buy its way out despite the virtually unlimited funds placed at its disposal for which it has to make no accounting, not even to its own sponsors.