【纽约客 20150323】魔鬼朋友—著名的冷战骗局

满仓

【中文标题】魔鬼朋友——著名的冷战骗局
【原文标题】A Friend of the Devil
【登载媒体】纽约客
【原文作者】LOUIS MENAND
【原文链接】http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/a-friend-of-the-devil



1957年莫斯科世界青年节的参与者，活动由左翼学生组织策划。中央情报局秘密潜入活动人群。

想象一下这样的两难选择。你是一个超级大国，希望让其它国家奉行你认为至关重要的治国理念——或许包括个人解放、财产私有、自由市场。旁边还有另外一个超级大国，也期望让那些国家拥抱它的理念，例如社会平等、全民所有制、计划经济。

有一天，你突然发现对面的超级大国在忙着以和平和民主的名义成立国际性组织、召开世界大会、举办节日庆典，而且还邀请其它国家的人来参与。

这些活动和节日都是幌子，组织的成员、活动内容和他们积极拥护的政治立场都是对方超级大国暗中策划的，而且还注入大笔资金来支持。更有甚者，在你看来，对方超级大国并不是一个热爱民主的国家，完全是一个极权政权。但它的口号吸引了天真的作家、艺术家、知识分子、学生和工人，这些人都相信世界和平和国际协作。

你也相信这些理念，但你认为这些口号只会强化对方超级大国的利益，而且会让你失去超级大国的地位。你该怎么办？束手旁观不是一个选择，记住，你是一个超级大国。

显而易见的一个选择是建立你自己的国际组织，支持你自己的世界大会和节日庆典，以此来提升自身的利益。但可惜的是，你不能大张旗鼓地这么做。因为你的公民恰好并不都拥抱世界和平和国际协作这个理念，看到你把他们缴纳的税金用来支持做这种事情的人，他们会不高兴。他们更喜欢看到税金被花费在国防上，实际上，他们根本就不想缴纳任何税金。

还有一个问题，就是你作为超级大国所奉行的一个原则是，政府不应当干预志愿组织的行为，比如作家协会和学生团体。你不打幌子，这是你与对方超级大国之间的关键区别。所以，似乎你的双手都被捆住了。

除非你秘密地运作一切。比如说，你把纳税人的钱伪装成来自私人募捐者或基金会的礼物，偷偷交给在全球运作的组织，以你所信奉的原则为名义，与其它国家的组织进行接触。你需要确保，这些组织的运作者要么不知道这些钱来自哪里，要么可以守口如瓶。你还需要时不时地指点方向，让正确的人来负责，让他们奉行正确的理念。

这算不算是挂幌子呢？就算是吧。但要注意一点，从根本上说，每个人的目的都是一样的，只不过他们没有意识到这个目的。没有任何人被强迫做或者说什么，当你成功地把对方超级大国推翻之后，这些行动也就不再是秘密了。而在此之前，国家安全部或许会牺牲少许的透明性，唯一的反对者就是那些已经站错队的人。

二战之后，我们这个超级大国就是用这样的方法和这样的逻辑来走出两难选择的困境。在冷战正式开始的阶段，哈里•杜鲁门在1947年3月对国会的演讲中，宣布了他的政策“支持自由人民抵抗少数分子的镇压和外部势力的入侵”——也就是共产主义的进攻，美国制造了一些幌子，秘密渗透非政府组织，以保护美国人的海外利益。

杜鲁门演讲的两年之后，1967年2月，政府的秘密行动被一名大学辍学生一举揭穿。这位辍学生名叫迈克尔•伍德，他曝光的事件是中央情报局秘密利用一个叫做全国学生联合会的组织。事件引起了连锁反应，最终导致冷战第一阶段的结束。

最开始，中央情报局主要关注国家安全局，两家机构都成立于1947年，就在杜鲁门演讲的几个月之后。双方的关系持续稳定，而且逐渐加强，直到秘密被公之于众的那一天。这个故事的细节现在首次在卡瑞•M•佩吉特的《爱国者的背叛》（耶鲁出版社）一书中被披露。

《爱国者的背叛》是一篇令人惊讶的调查报告。佩吉特不辞辛苦地梳理了相关的文档，并采访过很多在世的参与者，包括前中央情报局的官员。佩吉特自己也是故事中的一部分。1965年，她的丈夫——一位科罗拉多大学学生团体组织主席——加入国家安全局，作为亲属，她从两位前国家安全局官员、后来成为中央情报局探员那里得到了一些保密的信息。

他曾经发誓要保密，违背誓言的代价是二十年监禁。佩吉特说她当时是“一个不问政治的来自衣阿华州小镇的二十岁小女孩”，她说她很害怕。五十年之后，她依然很愤怒，于是她把自己的愤怒发泄到对双方秘密关系的调查中。在条件允许的情况下，她会一丝不苟地讲述完整的故事。

其中一个条件就是大量的信息还处于保密阶段。佩吉特设法利用《信息自由法案》捞取少量的资料，但冰山的大部分依然沉在水下，而且可能永远不会浮出水面。所以，那些真正发号施令的人和部分事实真相都笼罩着模糊的光环。这种模糊其实是认为制造的，它被包含在双方秘密的关系中。有很多的眨眼和点头等暗示性动作，让人们可以明白他们的理解一致。但同时也说明，中央情报局与国家安全局之间的历史已经无法挽回。尽管如此，《爱国者的背叛》是一篇尽其所能讲述冷战花招的标志性文章。

这本书是个大部头。后面三页的缩写词索引对读者会很有帮助。（还有将近90页的注解，很多内容需要上网浏览。）从组织上讲，国家安全局与中央情报局的事物相当复杂。其中还有一些半独立的章节，除了机密性之外，它也让读者很难了解事情的原委。这些章节包括了“世界民主青年联盟”——一个成立于战后的苏联招牌组织、“国际学生联合会”——成立于1946年布拉格的世界代表大会上，一位捷克共产党员任主席，和“国家安全局”——1947年成立于威斯康辛州麦迪逊一次学生代表大会上，目的是在国际学生联合会上代表美国。

麦迪逊大会还为国家安全局设置了专门处理国际事务的分支机构，并赋予它应对国际问题的权力。关键性的举措是把位于麦迪逊的核心国家安全局机构，与位于马萨诸塞州剑桥的国际事务部分开。国家安全局的剑桥分部得到了中央情报局的大力资助，为它效力最多，麦迪逊基本没有参与。

1948年，捷克斯洛伐克发生了一次共产主义暴动，这是让战后关系急速僵化的关键事件。国际学生联合会拒绝谴责暴动事件，国家安全局于是退出会议，着手成立一个对立的组织“国际学生会议”。这两个组织——国际学生联合会和国际学生会议——成为了超级大国在冷战中的代理人，中央情报局通过国家安全局主导国际学生会议中的工作，就像国际学生联合会接受克里姆林宫的指示一样。

国家安全局绝非一尘不染。佩吉特提到，在布拉格会议之前，美国学生就受到了三个成人组织的监控和摆布：国务院、联邦调查局和天主教徒。人们往往会忽略天主教会在冷战期间高调反共的影响力，教皇个人对于共产主义渗透年轻人组织——包括国家安全局——的危险性非常关注。大主教严密监控天主教学生领袖，在国家安全局和国际学生会议中，天主教徒的投票往往是有组织的。教皇的反共倾向对于中央情报局来说过于刻板了，情报局对于J•埃德加•胡佛没有什么用处，教堂就是与他合作调查学生的背景，参议员约瑟夫•麦卡锡也在政府内搜捕共产党的行动也用不着情报局的帮忙。情报局的政治——或者说，情报局政策的政治——有些过于偏左。

例如，国家安全局是个彻底的自由派组织，民权曾经是其重要组织纲领。国家安全局的第二任局长（1948年－1949年）詹姆斯•哈里斯是一位非裔美国人（也是一位基督教徒）。第四任局长（1950年－1951年）是未来的民权反战活动人士艾拉德•劳温斯特恩（非基督教徒）。国家安全局协助成立了“学生非暴力协调委员会”，这个组织发起了塞尔玛大桥抗议活动，最终促使通过了1965年的投票选举法案。国家安全局的政策在中央情报局的大部分秘密组织中有所体现：这些人在社会上持进步的态度，反对殖民主义，甚至有社会主义倾向。

传统上的解释是，从1947年到1967年负责中央情报局秘密行动的那些人不是右翼沙文主义者，他们是自由的反共产主义者、罗斯福政府战略部门经验丰富的官员、中央情报局的先驱。他们都是好人，普遍认为苏联在对进步思想倒行逆施。

如果说人们对中央情报局怀有这种信仰，那么它则卑鄙地利用了这一点。中央情报局的官员曾经对国家安全局熟悉内情的学生们说——中央情报局的用词是“机智的”，尽管国务院支持专制的独裁，但中央情报局支持外国学生争取民主和民族解放运动。这似乎让国家安全局的学生们感觉到，他们在和正义的魔鬼讨价还价。

学生们被误导了。中央情报局仅仅是一个执行部门，局长向总统汇报，它的运作和开销受国会监控。50年代的中央情报局局长艾伦•杜勒斯是当时国务卿的弟弟。中央情报局奉行自己的外交政策，或者说它是一头“离群的野象”，这种说法正如一位参议员所说，是荒唐的。



50年代和60年代的档案被解密之后，中央情报局的秘密行动被公之于众，人们似乎觉得这个机构就像一个地下监牢，不需要承担任何责任，只会采取卑鄙的行动。但是1967年解密之后出现的一份有关中央情报局秘密行动的报告，说明它“并不是凭自身意愿行事”。1976年，一份从未公开的尖锐的国会报告指出：“根据手中掌握的证据，中央情报局并非不受控制，而是忠实地执行总统和国家安全事务部长助理的指示。”中央情报局的确没有事无巨细地向政府汇报手中的工作，但是它有理由相信，有些事情政府最好还是不要知道。否认是秘密行动的重要组成部分。中央情报局利用国家安全局来推行美国政府的政策，如果它发现有任何违背总统意愿的事情发生，立即就会拔掉插销。

那么国家安全局究竟有什么用处？这里的确存在一切模糊地带。根据佩吉特的描述，国家安全局对于中央情报局所谓的“政治战争”显然没有什么用处。安全局建立了一个幌子组织，叫做“独立研究所”（指代含糊的名称是间谍活动中常见的手法），目的是招募美国学生破坏苏联掌控下1959年在维也纳和1962年在赫尔辛基举办的世界青年联欢节。这个组织的负责人是日后女权主义者葛罗莉亚•斯坦能，她对于资金的来源一清二楚，而且从不后悔接受这些钱。后来她说：“如果我有机会再来一次，我还是会这么做。”

但是这项行动并没有邀请国家安全局加入，它也没有被用来提升美国在海外的价值观，尽管这是成立这家机构的原因之一。中央情报局在国家安全局内安插探员，并在幕后操控，确保那些顺从的学生可以当选组织的领导人，以及他们期望的策略可以得到实施。他们极为谨慎地开始了一个秘密资助的夏季活动“国际学生关系研讨会”，并利用这个机会培养国家安全局未来的领导人。有不少参加过研讨会的国家安全局成员后来在局里任职。

从根本上讲，国家安全局就像是一副手套，让美国政府的双手可以在里面与某些人打交道，而这些人不知道与他们合作的就是美国政府，他们以为对方不过是一个独立于政府的学生组织，更不知道国家安全局是一个幌子。

那么中央情报局为什么要这么做呢？首先，国家安全局是一个保险盒，中央情报局把资金注入他们青睐的外国学生组织，表面上的批准来自于国家安全局。其次，国家安全局是一个招募处，它让中央情报局可以发现其它国家学生领袖中潜在的情报来源。第三，参加国际会议的国家安全局成员需要提交书面总结报告，或者事后被询问详细情况，这是中央情报局重要的情报来源。

中央情报局并不信奉“今天的学生，明天的领袖”这句格言，它认为全国学生组织的领袖很可能有一天会成为这个国家政府中的重要人物。当机会真的出现（这样的机会很多），美国政府会审查他们的档案。佩吉特写到：“消息灵通的专员们会慢慢积累数千名外国学生的政治倾向、性格特点和理想志愿等信息。他们在外国学生工会内部提交这些动态的政治分析细节。”

这看起来似乎很温和，但其中存在着问题，因为总是要有一个“国务院演红脸，中央情报局演白脸”的过程。与国务院打交道的是与美国正式建立外交关系的国家，在外交关系的约束下，你不能直接与试图推翻对方政府的组织产生关系，更不能承认其合法地位。这就是为什么一个可以采取秘密行动的组织会提供这方面的便利。中央情报局可以在私下培植反对派力量，美国政府可以游走于是非边缘。

佩吉特认为，在某些情况下，中央情报局所收集的有关持不同政见的学生的信息，最终或许会落入现任政权的手中，他们会利用这些信息来逮捕和消灭内部的敌人。她怀疑若干个美国曾经插手干涉事务的国家都出现过类似的现象，包括伊拉克、伊朗和南非。但这只是猜测，佩吉特的书中没有提到任何还在冒烟的枪管，也就是没有任何具体的案例讲述中央情报局把学生的姓名交给外国政府。原因当然与资料保密有关。没有一家情报机构曾公开他们与之接触的人员身份，这些信息属于冰山的最底部。

很难让人相信的是这种关系持续了那么久。国家安全局是接受中央情报局秘密资助的众多机构之一，在双方长久、稳定的关系中，至少有数百人了解内情，但直到迈克尔•伍德，从未有人公开过这些信息。这些信息或许会证实某些事情：在国家安全局内部那些天真的学生、傲慢的成年人（在中央情报局和国家安全局，学生们被称为“小家伙”）、超越一切良心不安的反共力量。

有一件事无法证实，那就是中央情报局的谍报手段。中央情报局的秘密资金体系隐藏得并不深，1964年出现了一个使其公之于众的机会。一个众议院下属委员会在调查慈善基金会的免税状态时，发现无法从国税局那里取得一个纽约慈善基金会J•M•卡普兰基金的信息。委员会的主席、一位得克萨斯州议员怀特•帕特曼推测，国税局不配合的原因是中央情报局在其中阻挠。帕特曼并不退缩，作为报复，他公布了8家基金会的名单。从1961年到1963年之间，它们向J•M•卡普兰基金注入了将近100万美元的资金。《纽约时报》上一篇文章的标题是“帕特曼向中央情报局‘秘密’网络发起攻击：据称情报局资助私企作为它的秘密‘渠道’”，其中公布了8家“渠道”基金会的名称。在一次与中央情报局和国税局代表的闭门会议之后，帕特曼宣布，即使中央情报局有牵涉其中，也不是他的委员会所关注的问题。他不再追查这件事。

但是马脚早已露出，就像他们所发明的那些明目张胆的名称一样——哥谭基金会、博登信托公司、安德鲁汉密尔顿基金会，这8家基金会是中央情报局的保险盒。情报局找到一些他们知道富有同情心的富人，请他们挂名管理虚拟的基金会。于是这些人走马上任，基金会的名字有了，有时候还会租个办公室便于注册地址，这样一个“渠道”就完成了。这些假基金会成员甚至还会召开年度会议，讨论一些“生意”，费用由情报局支付。这些假基金会被用来把资金转移到情报局希望支持的组织中。有时候中央情报局通过假基金会把资金转移到合法的慈善基金会，比如卡普兰基金会，之后资金又被转移到类似全国学生联合会的组织中。有时候，这些保险盒的唯一工作就是给中央情报局的受益者写支票。



中央情报局并非无处不在。来自假基金会的金额和目标组织所接受的金额一分不差，也就是说，如果卡普兰的账簿上显示有一笔2000美元的款项支付给国家安全局，那么收入项上必然有一笔2000美元的捐款来自情报局的一个假基金会。

《纽约时报》发表了一篇评论员文章，说：“这种行为应当停止……用政府的情报资金成立基金会来资助国外的研究所、组织、杂志和报纸，是对中央情报局收集、评估信息这种使命的扭曲。”1996年，这份报纸发表了一系列有关中央情报局间谍行动的文章，其中揭露中央情报局资助文化自由代表大会及其在欧洲下属的杂志。还报道说，情报局资助一些美国学术人员到国外旅游。中央情报局对此没有任何表态，似乎事不关己。

这时，迈克尔•伍德出现了。伍德来自加利福尼亚州格伦代尔，1964年他从波莫纳学院退学，成为洛杉矶瓦茨街区的一位民权运动组织者。他的工作引起了全国学生联合会的注意，后者给他提供了一个工作的机会。那时，国家安全局代表了来自400多所美国大学的100万名学生，它的办公室刚刚搬到华盛顿特区（在中央情报局的帮助下），比邻杜邦环岛附近的四层别墅区。伍德很快被提升为发展部负责人，专门负责筹款。

他发现了一些奇怪的事情，国家安全局似乎没有人对筹款感兴趣。集资方案往往是敷衍了事，而且伍德发现，国家安全局局长、把他招进来的菲利普•薛伯恩自己也在商谈捐款事宜。伍德找到薛伯恩，对他说除非他能全权负责筹款的工作，否则他就辞职。于是薛伯恩邀请他共进午餐，那是1966年的3月。

薛伯恩在俄勒冈州的一个农场长大，伍德很喜欢他。他们在康涅狄格大街一家叫做Sirloin and Saddle的餐厅吃饭，薛伯恩没有遵守自己的保密协议，把有关中央情报局的事情告诉了伍德。他说他急切地想结束这种关系，并请伍德把他们的对话保密。伍德知道，如果他把他们谈话的内容公之于众，薛伯恩必将被捕入狱。但他非常不喜欢中央情报局用资金控制国家安全局这件事。当年秋天，伍德被国家安全局开除，佩吉特说他无法与办公室人员相处。但是他已经决定把事情公开，因此在私下里复印国家安全局的财务记录。

佩吉特并没有解释伍德如何与媒体接触，总之他遇到了马克•斯通，这位媒体公关恰好是西海岸一家杂志《壁垒》的调查记者I•F•斯通的哥哥。这份杂志尽管创刊时间只有四年，但是在年轻主编沃伦•辛克的带领下，已经成为新左派著名的丑闻揭发者，发行量迅速上升。这家杂志开始调查伍德的故事，这件事似乎令人难以置信，而且无法证实。但调查人员发现了一些记录，显示两年前帕特曼所提到的8家虚假基金会中的几家就是国家安全局的金主。中央情报局都懒得改个名字。1967年2月，杂志的文章已经准备好了。

中央情报局听到了风声，它召集往届国家安全局的局长召开了一个新闻发布会。局长们承认接受过中央情报局的资金，但是明确表示，中央情报局绝不会左右国家安全局的政策导向。他们希望这样的安排可以抵消杂志的文章所带来的影响。

《壁垒》也听说中央情报局要抢先报道它的独家新闻。辛克买下《纽约时报》和《华盛顿邮报》的广告版面，在2月14日情人节那一天宣布：“《壁垒》杂志三月号将报道中央情报局如何渗透并破坏美国学生领袖社团。”这个广告让《纽约时报》和《华盛顿邮报》的记者忙成一团，纷纷致电中央情报局要求发表评论。于是，在《壁垒》广告出现的同一天，两家报纸都发表了有关中央情报局资助国家安全局的文章。

这一次，报道火了起来。伍德被要求参加ABC的“问题与答案”节目，有人问他是否认为自己毁掉了中央情报局这个冷战时期最重要的机构。CBS播出了一个小时由麦克•华莱士主持的节目，标题是“中央情报局的钱”。主要杂志期刊纷纷发表封面文章。

国家安全局的线头一被扯出，中央情报局秘密行动这张美丽的地毯开始全盘崩溃。记者发现，资金的来源牵涉到18个假基金会和21个合法基金会，《洛杉矶时报》发现了超过20个受赠方。情报局把钱交给全国教会理事会、汽车工人联合会、国际法学家委员会、国际营销研究所、美国中东友好协会、泛美基金会、美国报纸工会、全国教育协会、美国通讯工人联合会和俄罗斯境外主教会议。一些受馈赠的组织是中央情报局的自由欧洲电台和自由俄罗斯基金的下属组织，他们经常呼吁公众捐款，但实际上是政府的下属机构，由中央情报局资助。有一些组织不了解自身运作资金的来源，还有一个由社会主义者诺曼•托马斯领导的组织也受中央情报局的资助。

《壁垒》的报道彻底消灭了秘密的资助体系，就像辛克在他的回忆录中兴高采烈地宣称：“如果你有一个柠檬，就去做柠檬水。”“绝少见到的一件事情是，在政府事务中，你说砰，有人说我死了。”不仅如此，真相被公之于众导致整个秘密资助行动产生了负面效果。与外国精英套近乎的努力带来的结果是与他们更加疏远。1967年之后，美国在国际文化交流活动中，无论是官方还是非官方，都是被怀疑的对象。文化冷战分崩离析了。

在书的结尾，佩吉特努力想让她的故事有一些正面的效果，中央情报局与国家安全局合作的某些事情帮助美国赢得了冷战。她的结论是，这些记录“充其量算是喜忧参半，大部分令人郁闷”。例如，没有任何证据证明国家安全局曾经说服任何人放弃共产主义思想。她认为，最正面的结果是，苏联没有独占国际学生事务这个领域。这场游戏中还有更多的幌子。




原文：

Participants in the 1957 World Youth Festival, in Moscow, which was sponsored by left-wing student organizations. The C.I.A. infiltrated the festival.

Consider the following strategic dilemma. You are a superpower that hopes to convert other nations to principles you hold vital—these might be individual liberty, private property, and free markets. There is another superpower out there that is hoping to do the same thing, to persuade other nations to embrace its principles—for example, social equality, state ownership, and centralized planning.

One day, you realize that this rival superpower has been busy creating international organizations and staging world congresses and festivals in the name of peace and democracy, and inviting people from other nations to participate.

These organizations and festivals are fronts. Their membership, their programs, and the political positions they enthusiastically adopt are all clandestinely orchestrated by the rival superpower, which is pumping large amounts of money into them. What’s more, in your view that rival superpower is not a peace-loving democracy at all. It’s a totalitarian regime. Yet its slogans attract unwary writers and artists, intellectuals, students, organized labor—people who believe in world peace and international coöperation.

You believe in those things, too. But you think that the slogans are being used to advance your rival’s interests, one of which is to rob you of your superpowers. What do you do? Doing nothing is not an option. Remember, you are a superpower.

The obvious response is to create your own international organizations and sponsor your own world congresses and festivals, and use them to promote your interests. Sadly, however, you cannot do this in a public and transparent way. For it happens that your citizens are not all that taken with the ideals of world peace and international coöperation, and they would not be pleased to see you spend their tax dollars to support the kind of people who advance that agenda. They would prefer to see their tax dollars spent on defense. In fact, they would prefer for there to be no tax dollars at all.

There is also the problem that one of your principles as a superpower is the belief that governments should not interfere with the activities of voluntary associations, such as writers’ congresses and student groups. You don’t believe in fronts. This is a key point of difference between you and your rival superpower. So your hands appear to be tied.

Unless you could do it all in secret. Suppose you directed taxpayer dollars through back channels, disguised as gifts from private benefactors and foundations, to organizations that operated internationally, and that reached out to groups in other countries in the name of the principles you believe in. You would want to be sure that the people running those organizations either didn’t know where the money was coming from or could be trusted to keep it a secret. You might need to pull strings occasionally to get the right people in charge and the right positions enthusiastically adopted.

Wouldn’t that be like creating fronts? Sort of. But here’s the thing: fundamentally, everyone would be on the same page. They just might not be knowingly on the same page. No one would be forced to do or say anything. After you succeeded in stripping your rival of its superpowers, there would no longer be a need for secrecy. Until that day arrived, however, national security might demand this tiny bite out of the principle of transparency. The only people who could object would be people who were already on the wrong side.

After the Second World War, our superpower solved this dilemma in exactly this way and on exactly this line of reasoning. From the more or less official start of the Cold War, Harry Truman’s speech to Congress in March, 1947, announcing his policy “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”—that is, Communist aggression—the United States created fronts and secretly infiltrated existing nongovernmental organizations in order to advance American interests abroad.

Almost exactly twenty years after Truman’s speech, in February, 1967, the government’s cover was spectacularly blown by a college dropout. The dropout’s name was Michael Wood, and the operation he exposed was the C.I.A.’s covert use of an organization called the National Student Association. The revelation had a cascading effect, and helped to mark the end of the first phase of the Cold War.

The C.I.A. had its eye on the N.S.A. from the start—both were born in 1947, a few months after Truman’s speech—and the relationship gained steadily in strength and intimacy until the day the secret became public. Its story is now told in detail for the first time, in Karen M. Paget’s “Patriotic Betrayal” (Yale).

“Patriotic Betrayal” is an amazing piece of research. Paget has industriously combed the archives and interviewed many of the surviving players, including former C.I.A. officials. And Paget herself is part of the story she tells. In 1965, her husband, a student-body president at the University of Colorado, became an officer in the N.S.A., and, as a spouse, she was informed of the covert relationship by two former N.S.A. officials who had become C.I.A. agents.

She was sworn to secrecy. The penalty for violating the agreement was twenty years. Paget describes herself back then as “an apolitical twenty-year-old from a small town in Iowa,” and she says that she was terrified. Fifty years later, she is still angry. She has channelled her outrage into as scrupulous an investigation of the covert relationship as the circumstances allow.

One circumstance is the fact that a good deal of material is classified. Paget was able to fish up bits and pieces using the Freedom of Information Act. But most of the iceberg is still underwater, and will probably remain there. So there is sometimes an aura of vagueness around who was calling the tune and why.

The vagueness was also there by design. It was baked into the covert relationship. There was a lot of winking and nodding; that’s what helped people believe they were on the same page. But it means that much of the history of what passed between the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. is irrecoverable. Still, “Patriotic Betrayal” is a conscientious attempt to take the full measure of an iconic piece of Cold War subterfuge.

It’s a dense book. Readers will be glad for the three-page guide in the back to abbreviations and acronyms. (There are also nearly ninety pages of endnotes, with more references accessible online.) Organizationally, the N.S.A.-C.I.A. affair was quite complex. There were a number of quasi-independent parts—another reason, besides the secrecy, that it was hard to see what was really going on.

The parts included the World Federation of Democratic Youth, or W.F.D.Y., a Soviet front organization created right after the war; the International Union of Students, or I.U.S., formed at a world congress of students in Prague in 1946, with a Czech Communist elected president; and the N.S.A. itself, which was founded at a student convention in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1947, in order to represent the United States in the I.U.S.

The Madison convention also created an N.S.A. subcommittee on international affairs and gave it authority to deal with international issues. The key move was the separation of the main N.S.A. office, which was in Madison, from the international division, which was housed in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was the Cambridge branch of the N.S.A. that received most of the C.I.A.’s funding and did most of the C.I.A.’s bidding. Madison was kept out of the loop.

In 1948, there was a Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, a crucial event in the hardening of postwar relations. When the I.U.S. refused to condemn the coup, the N.S.A. withdrew and set about forming a rival group, the International Student Conference, or I.S.C. These two organizations, the I.U.S. and the I.S.C., became superpower proxies in the looking-glass war that was the Cold War. Through the N.S.A., the C.I.A. tried to orchestrate what happened in the I.S.C., just as the I.U.S. was responsive to the demands of the Kremlin.

The N.S.A. was never a virgin. Paget reveals that, even before Prague, American students were subject to surveillance and scheming by three groups of grownups: the State Department, the F.B.I., and the Catholic Church. It can be forgotten how influential a role the Church’s highly disciplined anti-Communism played in Cold War affairs. The Holy Father took a personal interest in the danger of Communist infiltration of youth organizations, including the N.S.A.; the bishops kept a close eye on Catholic student leaders; and Catholics usually voted as a bloc in N.S.A. and I.S.C. meetings.

The Pope’s anti-Communism was too rigid for the C.I.A. The agency also had little use for J. Edgar Hoover, with whom the Church collaborated in investigating students’ backgrounds, or for Senator Joseph McCarthy and his hunt for Communists in the government. Agency politics—or, rather, the politics of agency policies—were farther to the left.

The N.S.A., for example, was a forthrightly liberal organization. Civil rights was part of the agenda early on. The N.S.A.’s second president (1948-49), James (Ted) Harris, was an African-American (and a Catholic). Its fourth president (1950-51) was the future civil-rights and antiwar activist Allard Lowenstein (not a Catholic). The N.S.A. helped found the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, a principal organizer of the march from Selma that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act, in 1965. And the N.S.A.’s politics were typical of most of the organizations in the C.I.A.’s covert network: they were socially progressive, anti-colonialist, and sometimes even socialist.

One customary explanation is that the people who ran covert operations at the C.I.A. from 1947 to 1967 were not right-wing jingoists. They were liberal anti-Communists, veterans of Roosevelt’s Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the C.I.A. They were good guys who despised the Soviet Union as a traitor to progressive principles.

If people held this belief about the C.I.A., the agency exploited it. C.I.A. officials used to tell N.S.A. students who were in the know—the agency’s term for them was “witting” (or “witty”)—that, while the State Department supported authoritarian dictatorships, the C.I.A. supported foreign students who were involved in democratic resistance and national liberation movements. This was supposed to make the N.S.A. students feel that they had bargained with the right devil.

The students were being misled. The C.I.A. is part of the executive branch. Its director reports to the President; its operations and expenditures are subject to congressional oversight. The director of the C.I.A. during the nineteen-fifties, Allen Dulles, was the Secretary of State’s brother. The notion that the C.I.A. was running its own foreign policy, or that it was a “rogue elephant,” as one senator later called it, is absurd.

After the revelations of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, when many of the C.I.A.’s undercover operations were exposed, people began talking about the agency as though it were some kind of underground cell, an organization with no accountability, up to its own dirty tricks. But a report on the C.I.A.’s covert operations made immediately after the 1967 revelations concluded that the agency “did not act on its own initiative.” In 1976, a more critical congressional report, which was never officially released, stated, “All evidence in hand suggests that the CIA, far from being out of control, has been utterly responsive to the instructions of the President and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.”

It’s true that the C.I.A. did not always fully inform Administrations about what it was up to, but the agency had reason to believe that there were some things Administrations preferred not to know. Deniability is a crucial ingredient of covert operations. The C.I.A. used the N.S.A. to further the policies of the American government. If it had been found doing anything contrary to the wishes of the President, its plug would have been pulled very fast.

So what, exactly, was the N.S.A. useful for? This is where things get murky. According to Paget’s account, the N.S.A. was apparently not used for what the C.I.A. called “political warfare.” The agency did create a front organization called the Independent Research Service (inventing titles that are as meaningless as possible is part of the spy game) for the purpose of recruiting American students to disrupt Soviet-controlled World Youth Festivals in Vienna, in 1959, and Helsinki, in 1962. The person in charge was the future feminist Gloria Steinem, who knew perfectly well where the money was coming from and never regretted taking it. “If I had a choice I would do it again,” she later said.

But that operation did not involve the N.S.A. Nor was the N.S.A. used only to promote American principles abroad, although that was part of the reason for funding it. The C.I.A. embedded agents in the N.S.A., and it worked behind the scenes to insure that pliable students got elected to run the association and that the desired policy positions got adopted. It took the extra precaution of starting up a covertly funded summer program, called the International Student Relations Seminar, and using it to groom future N.S.A. leaders. A number of N.S.A. members who went through the seminar went on to have careers at the agency.

Essentially, the N.S.A. functioned as a glove that concealed the American government’s hand and allowed it to do business with people who would never knowingly have done business with the American government. These people thought that they were dealing with a student group that was independent of the government. They had no idea that the N.S.A. was a front.

And what did this permit the C.I.A. to do? First, the N.S.A. was used as a cutout. The C.I.A. funnelled financial support to favored foreign-student groups by means of grants ostensibly coming from the N.S.A. Second, the N.S.A. was a recruitment device. It enabled the agency to identify potential intelligence sources among student leaders in other countries. And, third, N.S.A. members who attended international conferences filed written reports or were debriefed afterward, giving the C.I.A. a huge database of information.

The C.I.A. did not buy into the adage that the student leader of today is the student leader of tomorrow. It calculated that the heads of national student organizations were likely some day to become important figures in their countries’ governments. When that happened (and it often did), the American government had a file on them. “Over time, witting staff reported on thousands of foreign students’ political tendencies, personality traits, and future aspirations,” Paget writes. “They submitted detailed analyses of political dynamics within foreign student unions and countries.”

This may seem benign enough, but there was a problem. It had to do with the “State Department bad guys, C.I.A. good guys” routine. The State Department deals with nations with which the United States has diplomatic relations. Having diplomatic relations with a foreign government prohibits you from negotiating with, or acknowledging the legitimacy of, groups committed to that government’s overthrow. This is why it’s convenient to have an agency that operates clandestinely. The C.I.A. could cultivate relations with opposition groups secretly, and this permitted the American government to work both sides of the street.

Paget thinks that, in some cases, the information the C.I.A. gathered about students who were political opponents of a regime may have ended up in the hands of that regime, which could then have used the information to arrest and execute its enemies. She suspects that this may have happened in several countries where the American government was involved in regime change, including Iraq, Iran, and South Africa.

But it’s all speculation. There are no smoking guns in Paget’s book—no specific cases in which the C.I.A. made students’ names available to a foreign government. And the reason, of course, has to do with the classified material. No intelligence agency will ever release documents that reveal the identities of people with whom it had contacts. That information is at the very bottom of the iceberg.

It’s odd that the relationship remained secret as long as it did. The N.S.A. was one of many organizations covertly funded by the C.I.A. Over the life of those relationships, hundreds of people must have been in the know. But until Michael Wood spilled the beans no one ever spoke up publicly. This is a testament to something: in the case of the N.S.A., the naïveté of the students; the arrogance of the grownups (at the C.I.A., N.S.A. students were referred to as “the kiddies”); the power of anti-Communism to trump every scruple.

One thing it is not a testament to is the C.I.A.’s tradecraft. The evidence of the agency’s covert funding system was hidden in plain sight. The world got a peek in 1964, when a House of Representatives subcommittee ran an investigation into the tax-exempt status of philanthropic foundations. The committee had trouble getting information from the I.R.S. about a certain New York-based charitable foundation, the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

The chair of the committee, a Texas congressman named Wright Patman, surmised that the reason the I.R.S. was not coöperating was that the C.I.A. was preventing it. Patman didn’t appreciate the disrespect; in retaliation, he made public a list of eight foundations that, between 1961 and 1963, had given almost a million dollars to the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

“PATMAN ATTACKS ‘SECRET’ C.I.A. LINK: Says Agency Gave Money to Private Group Acting as Its Sub-Rosa ‘Conduit’ ” was the headline in the Times, which published the names of the eight “conduit” foundations. After a closed-door meeting with representatives from the C.I.A. and the I.R.S., Patman emerged to announce that if there was a C.I.A. connection it was no longer of interest to his subcommittee, and that he was dropping the matter.

But the cat was partway out of the bag. As their transparently invented names suggest—the Gotham Foundation, the Borden Trust, the Andrew Hamilton Fund, and so on—these eight foundations were C.I.A. cutouts. The agency had approached wealthy people it knew to be sympathetic and asked them to head dummy foundations. Those people were then put on a masthead, a name for the foundation was invented, sometimes an office was rented to provide an address, and a conduit came into being. The members of the phony boards even held annual meetings, at which “business” was discussed, expenses paid by the agency.

The dummy foundations were used to channel money to groups the agency wanted to support. Sometimes the C.I.A. passed funds through the dummies to legitimate charitable foundations, like the Kaplan Fund, which in turn passed it along to groups like the National Student Association. Sometimes the cutouts existed solely to write checks to the C.I.A.’s beneficiaries.

The C.I.A.’s name did not appear anywhere. The giveaway was the dollar-for-dollar equivalence of the amount received from the dummy and the amount granted to the target group. If the expenses side of Kaplan’s books showed a two-hundred-thousand-dollar grant to the N.S.A., the income side would show a two-hundred-thousand-dollar donation from one of the agency’s dummy foundations.

The Times published an editorial saying that “the practice ought to stop. . . . The use of Government intelligence funds to get foundations to underwrite institutions, organizations, magazines and newspapers abroad is a distortion of C.I.A.’s mission on gathering and evaluating information.” In 1966, the paper ran a series of articles on the C.I.A.’s spying operations, in which it revealed that the C.I.A. was funding the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its many European-based magazines. The paper also reported that the agency had funded some American academics when they travelled abroad. The C.I.A. seems to have done nothing in response to these stories, and nothing came of them.

Then Michael Wood made his appearance. Wood was from Glendale, California. In 1964, he had dropped out of Pomona College to become a civil-rights organizer in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. His work there attracted the attention of the National Student Association, and it offered him a job.

By then, the N.S.A. represented about a million students from more than four hundred American colleges. It had just moved its offices (with help from the C.I.A.) to Washington, D.C., to adjoining four-story town houses near Dupont Circle. Wood was soon promoted to the position of director of development—fund-raising.

He discovered something strange. No one at the N.S.A. seemed terribly interested in raising money. Grant proposals were perfunctory, and Wood learned that the president of the N.S.A., Philip Sherburne, the man who had hired him, was negotiating for donations on his own. Wood confronted Sherburne and told him that unless he was given control of all fund-raising activities he would have to resign. Sherburne invited him to lunch. This was in March, 1966.

Sherburne had grown up on a dairy farm in Oregon. Wood liked him. They met in a restaurant on Connecticut Avenue called the Sirloin and Saddle, where Sherburne violated his secrecy agreement and told Wood about the C.I.A. He told Wood that he was desperately trying to terminate the relationship (which was true), and asked him to keep their conversation secret.

Wood knew that if he revealed the contents of the conversation Sherburne could go to jail. But he hated the thought that the C.I.A. had financial leverage over the N.S.A. That fall, Wood was fired from the N.S.A. Paget reports that he was not getting along with people at the office. But he had already decided to go public, and had begun surreptitiously making copies of N.S.A. financial records.

Paget doesn’t explain how Wood contacted the press. The story is that he met Marc Stone, a public-relations man who happened to be the brother of the investigative journalist I. F. Stone, and who represented a West Coast magazine called Ramparts. Though only four years old, Ramparts had become a slick muckraker with a New Left slant and a rapidly growing circulation under its young editor, Warren Hinckle.

The magazine began looking into Wood’s story, which seemed hard to believe and impossible to confirm. But its researchers discovered records showing that some of the eight dummy foundations named by Patman two years before were donors to the N.S.A. The C.I.A. had not even bothered to change their names. By February, 1967, the magazine had a story ready to go.

The C.I.A. got wind of the magazine’s investigation. It gathered past presidents of the N.S.A. and scheduled a news conference at which the presidents were to admit receiving C.I.A. money but swear that the C.I.A. had never influenced N.S.A. policy. They thought this would defuse any story that the magazine eventually published.

Ramparts, in turn, got wind of the C.I.A.’s plan to scoop its scoop. Hinckle bought ads in the New York Times and the Washington Post. These ran on February 14th, Valentine’s Day; they announced, “In its March issue, Ramparts magazine will document how the CIA has infiltrated and subverted the world of American student leaders.” Placing the ad tipped off the Times and the Post, and their reporters called the C.I.A. for comment. And so, on the same day the Ramparts ads appeared, both newspapers ran articles on the C.I.A.’s covert funding of the N.S.A.

This time, the story caught fire. Wood went on ABC’s “Issues and Answers,” where he was asked whether he thought that he had destroyed the C.I.A. as an effective instrument in the Cold War. CBS News broadcast an hour-long program, hosted by Mike Wallace, called “In the Pay of the CIA.” The major news magazines ran cover stories.

Once the N.S.A. thread had been pulled, the whole tapestry of C.I.A. covert operations started to unravel. Reporters discovered that the money trail wound through some eighteen dummy foundations and twenty-one legitimate foundations. The Los Angeles Times found more than fifty grantees. The agency gave money to the National Council of Churches, the United Auto Workers, the International Commission of Jurists, the International Marketing Institute, the American Friends of the Middle East, the Pan American Foundation, the American Newspaper Guild, the National Education Association, the Communications Workers of America, and the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Church Outside Russia.

Some of the funded groups were creatures of the C.I.A. Radio Free Europe and the Free Russia Fund, which regularly appealed to the public for contributions, had actually been created by the government and were funded by the C.I.A. Other organizations had C.I.A. agents planted in them. A few groups had no idea about the real source of the funds they lived on. An organization headed by the socialist Norman Thomas got money from the C.I.A.

The Ramparts story effectively killed the covert-funding system. As Hinckle put it in his delightful memoir, “If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade,” “It is a rare thing in this business when you say bang and somebody says I’m dead.” More than that, the revelations meant that the whole covert-funding operation had backfired. An effort to curry the allegiance of foreign élites ended up alienating them almost completely. After 1967, every American venture in international cultural relations, official or unofficial, became suspect. The cultural Cold War came apart.

Paget struggles at the end of her book to find an upside to the story she tells, some case in which C.I.A. involvement in the N.S.A. helped the United States win the Cold War. The record, she concludes, “is mixed at best and frequently dismal.” There is no evidence, for example, that the N.S.A. ever persuaded anyone to renounce Communism. The most that can be said, she thinks, is that the Soviet Union did not get to have the field of international student affairs all to itself. There was another front in the game.

每天的晨吟

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左右都不好