THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY AND ACADEMIA

Marshall Windmiller

Former Professor of International Relations
San Francisco State University

Remarks delivered to the Bay Area Chapter of the Association of Former Intelligence
Officers (AFIO) at the Fort Mason Officers Club, February 26, 1992.

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I very much appreciate this opportunity to meet with you, and to share some thoughts about the relationship between the academic community and the intelligence community. It is a relationship about which there is a great deal of controversy and frequent tension. And since both institutions are necessary to the security and welfare of our democracy, it is important that they understand each other, and relate to each other in a constructive manner.

My remarks this evening are based on three assumptions which I suspect are shared by most people in this room. First of all, I assume that good foreign policy requires that the policy makers have good information. Foreign policy is only as good as the information on which it is based.

Second, in order to have good information, intelligence agencies are necessary, and we should strive to have the best intelligence organizations possible.

And third, in a democracy all agencies of government must be accountable. This is especially true of large bureaucracies, which, as Max Weber tells us, have a tendency to become more concerned with the welfare of the bureaucrats, than with the problems the bureaucracies were created to deal with. The intelligence community is a conglomerate of several very large bureaucracies, and they are vulnerable to all the phenomena that apply to bureaucracies in general.

We in academia know about large bureaucracies, because we have plenty of our own. We have faculty bureaucracies, administrative bureaucracies, and even student bureaucracies. All of them have developed sophisticated techniques for protecting themselves, not always with the primary mission of education uppermost in mind. I am sure you have read in the press recently about some of the creative uses of government money devised by bureaucracies at Stanford.

But there is an important difference between intelligence bureaucracies and all the others, and it is this: by necessity, and by law, intelligence bureaucracies are entitled to operate in secrecy. This complicates enormously the problem of accountability.

Secrecy, and attitudes toward it, are at the heart of most of the tension between the academic community and the intelligence community. Intelligence agencies need and value secrecy; the academy values and needs openness. Secrecy is essential to the work of intelligence; openness is vital to academic inquiry and to education. Relations between the intelligence community and the academy are bound to run afoul of these contradictions.

Yet both institutions have common interests. We both want as much access to information as possible. We both want to know the facts about what is going on in the world, and understand what they mean. In fact we both want information of a depth and complexity beyond what the general public wants, or is equipped to understand.

Consequently, we are both engaged in work which the taxpayers who pay our salaries will never fully understand. So far they have been willing to support us both on faith.

While our positions on secrecy are contradictory, there are also contradictions in our attitudes toward truth. The CIA has chosen as it's motto the biblical quotation about how knowing the truth will make us free, but the attitude toward truth in the agency is radically different from that in the academy, let alone the bible.

It is accepted that the agency may engage in black and gray propaganda, and operate disinformation campaigns as appropriate instruments of foreign policy. This is the use of falsehood in its most subtle and sophisticated form. Needless to say, it is totally unacceptable in the academy, and several well publicized actions of the intelligence community have created an atmosphere of distrust.

For example, one of the consequences of disinformation campaigns is what is known in the jargon as "blowback". An unknown quantity of intelligence agency-sponsored black and grey propaganda has ended up in our libraries, and our students are citing it in all innocence in their term papers. We all know about the Penkovskiy papers and a few other examples, but the CIA has denied to the congress and the public the titles of most of the propaganda books it commissioned, and so we in the academy don't know how much junk we may be inadvertently assigning to our students.

Another example is the Vietnam order of battle controversy, and the testimony brought forth during General Westmoreland's libel action against CBS. This case is a powerful example of how truth yields to politics when bureaucratic interests are at issue. We can argue about whether or not the president and his advisers were in fact deceived about what was happening in Vietnam. But it seems to me incontrovertible that the intelligence community, under political pressure, adjusted known truth to support bureaucratic needs.

Another example of behavior damaging to the relationship is the practice of DCIs lying to the congress and the public on a broad range of topics. One of them was indicted for contempt of congress, pleaded nolo contenders, and was fined a modest sum. Another conveniently died before he was called to account, and a third insisted that he "was out of the loop" and was subsequently elevated to the highest office in the land.

I needn't recount the long record of deliberate untruths propagated by the intelligence community. Many of them can be justified on grounds of national security, although that concept is beginning to wear a bit thin. I will also not go into illegal operations like

MKULTRA, COINTELPRO, and CHAOS which in a variety of ways were damaging to the universities. But the consequence of all this is that there is a residual feeling in the academic community that intelligence personnel function under ethical standards that are different from those of the academy, that consequently academics ought to be very cautious in their dealings with them, and always assume that there may be a hidden agenda. For academics to visit Langley, may be like beauty contestants visiting Mike Tyson's hotel room. Even if you aren't violated, your reputation is likely to be affected.

I want to mention two cases that I believe illustrate the problem of relations between the two communities. One of them is 15 years old; the other occurred last year. In a sense it is a tale of two presidents of two different universities, each with a different attitude toward the intelligence community.

The first resulted from the investigations of the Church Committee in 1976 into the covert penetration by the CIA of the academic community. This followed press exposure of CIA manipulation of the National Student Association. In its report, the Church Committee said that the CIA was employing several hundred American academics located in over a hundred American colleges and universities for secret "operational use." The committee said that this activity was compromising the integrity of the universities, but it declined to recommend legislation to prevent it. Instead, the committee suggested that the universities develop their own policies concerning the contacts that university personnel might have with the intelligence community.

Following the committee's advice, President Derek C. Bok of Harvard appointed a committee to study the issues raised by the Church committee and to recommend policy. After many months of study, the Harvard committee made a series of recommendations. I won't go into detail, but in general they required that relationships between members of the university community and the intelligence community were acceptable so long as they were reported to the appropriate deans. Research contracts were also all right so long as they were public.

But there were certain specific prohibitions, the most important of which was that there be no covert recruiting, or agent spotting, within the Harvard University community.

In June of 1977, President Bok forwarded these guidelines to the then DCI, Admiral Stansfield Turner. Admiral Turner replied that it was agency policy to have all contracts with universities approved by senior management officials of those universities, that all recruiting for CIA "staff employment" would be overt, and that the agency would not obtain the unwitting services of staff and faculty of American academic institutions.

But Turner insisted that if a faculty member wanted to have an independent relationship with the agency, and didn't want anyone at the university to know about it, the agency would respect that as a matter of privacy. In other words, the agency would not defer to the Harvard guidelines, would continue covert recruitment of faculty and students on university campuses, and would not report relations with academic "walk-ins."

In his response to Director Turner of December 5, 1977, President Bok said:

Covert recruiting by university personnel and its attendant practices bring a new and disturbing element into the relationships among members of the academic community, represent a serious intrusion of the government into our campus and classrooms, and violate the privacy of individuals within the community. The use of a professor for operational purposes while he is abroad for academic purposes, such as attending a conference in his field, is simply a use of the academic profession as a cover and consequently compromises the integrity of the profession and casts doubt on the true purposes of the activities of all academics.

After this exchange of letters, President Bok went back to the congress and told them that Harvard had established guidelines that the CIA refused to respect. The Congress did nothing about it, and that, as far as I know, is where the matter rests today.

The second incident I would like to discuss took place just last year at the Rochester Institute of Technology. RIT is one of the leading research institutions for imaging technology, a subject in which the intelligence community is intensely interested.

The President of RIT is Dr. M. Richard Rose, a retired Colonel in the US Marine Corps Reserve. On February 7, 1991 he announced that he was taking a four-month leave in order to do confidential work for the federal government. His public statement strongly implied that he was going to participate in Desert Storm. "When so many young men and women are making great personal sacrifices on behalf of their country," he said, "the least I can do is serve in an area that maximizes my military, educational and management experiences. "

About two months later it became known that his work in Washington had nothing to do with the Gulf War. Instead, as he admitted later, he was in Langley helping the CIA develop programs to train personnel to deal with intelligence requirements in the post-Cold War environment.

When the faculty council learned of this, it asked him to return to the campus and explain what was going on. He declined to do so, leaving the impression that he had a greater loyalty to the CIA than he had to the university.

On May 24 the matter became a public controversy when the local newspaper revealed that the university had produced a study entitled Japan 2000 for the CIA. Someone had leaked a copy of a draft to a reporter who quoted extensively from the text. Among the phrases quoted was the following:

Mainstream Japanese ... are creatures of an ageless, amoral, manipulative and

controlling culture -- not to be emulated -- suited only to this race, in this place.

As you might imagine, this association of the university with the notion that morality is linked to genetics, caused an uproar on the campus. Faculty and students organized to demand what was going on, and to know the nature of the relationship of the university to the CIA. Wire services picked up the story and it was carried in newspapers and magazines nationwide and abroad. RIT was seen as lending its name to racist propaganda, and to serving as a front for the CIA. It is not the sort of image that a university likes to project.

On June 24 the RIT Board of Trustees appointed a Review Panel of three trustees, five faculty members, two students and one alumnus. The Panel then retained a Senior FactFinder to ascertain the facts. They chose an outsider, Professor Monroe H. Freedman, a Distinguished Professor of Legal Ethics at Hofstra University. He holds a law degree from Harvard and serves on the Committee on Professional and Judicial Ethics of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.

Professor Freedman found that getting the facts was not easy. In its report, the Freedman panel said that it was impeded by a

lack of candor, obstruction, or false and misleading statements. As a result, an indeterminable amount of information that may be material to our inquiry has not been obtained, either because the information remains classified, or because erroneous assertions and less than forthright responses delayed the process or caused confusion in the inquiry.

The Japan 2000 study was in fact a report of a study group which the CIA had convened. The group consisted of academics, representatives of the business community, and CIA personnel. Professor Freedman and the Chair of the Review Panel spent a day at Langley, and talked to senior agency officials, but they would not reveal the names of the CIA participants of the conference nor permit the Panel to see the verbatim transcript.

Back on the campus the Panel was told by a student that relevant documents were being shredded. Upon inquiry this was discovered to be true. Andrew Dougherty, the Executive Assistant to the President (and incidentally a member of AFIO), admitted that he had given instructions to get rid of all documents which had the names of people who were "under cover". The Panel was able to acquire bags of the shredded documents. Professor Freedman consulted several forensic experts and was told that it was not practical to reconstruct them. Perhaps he should have consulted the student experts on this technique in Teheran.

Despite all the difficulties, the Panel learned that the penetration of RIT by the CIA was extensive. Some faculty and students had security clearances that their colleagues did not know about. Some students and faculty were working on secret contracts, some witting, some not. According to the Panel report, one Dean expressed concern that this practice

"effectively establishes two classes of people at the university, with those that are willing to obtain security clearances, and capable of doing so, in a privileged category."

Curricula and courses at RIT were adjusted to meet secret requirements of the CIA. According to the Panel report, "the CIA had a decisive impact on the development of the Ph.D program from its earliest stages......

To manage a lot of this secret activity, the university created the RIT Research Corporation. One of the projects which it undertook was called the "IDV Project". It was classified, and the Review Panel was unable to find out much about it. They did learn that it was related to something called an International Identity Validation Data System that the CIA had proposed in 1988. In context, and in the absence of adequate information, perhaps the academic community may be forgiven for suspecting it was some sort of computerized, global, big brother system.

Discovery of the IDV Project prompted the RIT Panel to recall the MKULTRA project of the 1953-1966 which the CIA organized to investigate the feasibility of using mind altering drugs for intelligence purposes. Drugs were given to unwitting subjects, two of whom died as a result. Many academics got involved in various aspects of this project without knowing the identity of the sponsor, or the use to which their research would be put.

When details of MKULTRA and similar programs were finally revealed to a shocked public a lot of damage was done to public confidence in both the intelligence and academic communities. Individual reputations were ruined. The same thing is happening again with the RIT scandal.

So what lessons should we draw from all this. What kind of university president does the greatest service to the American democracy: a Derek Bok who will cooperate with the intelligence community only on projects which are not secret, or an M. Richard Rose who allows the CIA to do whatever it wishes on his campus?

Obviously I come to this question with the biases of a life-long academic. In my view President Bok is right, and President Rose is wrong. The free, independent universities are of enormous value to democracies. They train the elites that govern, and they give birth to the ideas and strategies that rejuvenate society and help it adjust to changing times. Clandestine penetration by the intelligence community ultimately does them great harm. If, as a consequence, the idea of institutional integrity loses its meaning, then academics who think nothing of secret collaboration with the CIA, will also think nothing of secret collaboration with Hitachi, Matsushita, Toshiba and whoever offers the best deal.

Stansfield Turner devotes several pages to this issue in his 1985 book, Secrecy and Democracy. He explains why he would not comply with the Harvard guidelines.

The reason I did not comply with Harvard's request was that I felt it was not reasonable to ask an academic to disclose only his relationships with the CIA and ignore the relationships, formal and informal, he might have with corporations, foundations, or other government agencies. Any relationship can compromise a professor's objectivity and affect his teaching responsibilities, one with the CIA no more or less than one with a business that pays him as a consultant.

Admiral Turner did make one concession. He issued instructions that if the agency wanted to employ a professor, and if the professor's university required disclosure, but the professor did not want the relationship disclosed, then the case would be submitted to the DCI himself for his approval before the professor was engaged.

Admiral Turner followed a formula. If the University required that professors report all of their external relationships, for example, as consultants to businesses and foundations, then he would not approve an unreported CIA connection. If however the university required that only relations with the CIA be reported, then he would approve the hire. In other words, he would not accept discrimination against the CIA alone.

I think Admiral Turner has a point, but it is based on an assumption that requires examination. He seems to be of the opinion that there is no significant difference between the CIA on the one hand, and businesses, foundations, and other government agencies on the other. One might note that this opinion is shared by some of the more extreme campus leftists. I think this is mistaken. Most businesses and foundations do not have a covert action capability, or a history of operations like AJAX, MKULTRA, MONGOOSE, ZRRIFLE, MKDELTA AND MKNAOMI. The CIA is not just another business, it is a very special business where agents are trained to build up trust in order to betray it. And therefore universities, where trust is a sine qua non, must be particularly careful in their relationships with intelligence agencies.

Admiral Turner notes in, his book that very few universities followed Harvard's example, and therefore there was no real problem for the agency. And in light of subsequent events, it appears that the agency gets pretty much what it wants out of Harvard and most other universities.

I believe that my opinion on the propriety of this is a minority view. I suspect there are plenty of academics who are quite willing to cooperate secretly with the intelligence community. Every so often it gets into the press, and creates a scandal.

In the fall of 1985 Nadav Safran, Director of the Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies, convened a conference of scholars on the subject of Islamic fundamentalism. The conference was held at the request of, and was funded by, the CIA. Professor Safran did not disclose this sponsorship either to the university or to the conference participants. The CIA also gave Safran $107,000 to sponsor a book he published on Saudi Arabia. He did not acknowledge the CIA sponsorship in the book itself. This and subsequent incidents raise the question whether the Harvard guidelines are more window dressing actual policy.

I would argue, that in the long run, and alas, Americans, unlike the Japanese, are not inclined to think about the long run, but in the long run, relationships such as those enjoyed by the CIA at RIT will damage the intelligence community as well as the university, in at least two ways.

First, they will increase public distrust of the intelligence community and of the people who collaborate with it. Surely neither the CIA nor the FBI wants to be perceived as an American Stasi.

Second, because academics are notoriously poor keepers of secrets, relationships like those at RIT and Harvard will eventually be exposed. The result will be more scandals, and they will have an effect on the intelligence community's recruitment process by reducing the number of principled people of real ability who might seek careers in intelligence. Who wants a career that may result in a lifelong stigma?

The intelligence community needs a constant supply of bright liberal arts graduates with training in science, economics, international relations and foreign languages. If it wants to recruit the best among them, it must do so openly.

What else needs to be done to make sure that the intelligence community can recruit capable people and get access to the expertise developed in the academic community?

We have read a great deal lately about the adjustments the intelligence community will have to make because of the end of the cold war. There is discussion not only about new intelligence requirements, but also about fundamental restructuring in order to save money in hard times.

Senator Boren, Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has introduced S.2198, an extensive revision of the National Security Act of 1947. It would relieve the DCI of his responsibility to coordinate the entire intelligence community, a function which he has never been able to carry out effectively, and create a new post, that of Director of National Intelligence with great authority over the intelligence budget.

If the bill becomes law, it may result in more openness and less emphasis on covert action. DCI Gates is already talking about more openness in the CIA, and a more liberal policy regarding the declassification of archival documents of historical value. Greater openness would make it much easier for academics to cooperate. It would also help to separate analysis and intelligence production administratively from clandestine collection and covert action.

Along with reorganization, congress might also consider changing the name of the

CIA. The name is a relic of the cold war, and carries a lot of freight that a truly reformed agency need not be burdened with.

But in the final analysis all of this depends greatly on the foreign policy of the United States. If we, as the one surviving superpower, are going to undertake to be the world's policeman, then the intelligence community will become a key instrument of a new world order that will greatly resemble old world imperialism. As the costs of such a policy become more burdensome, there will be new turbulence on university campuses. In those circumstances, the prospects for a more mutually beneficial relationship between the intelligence and academic communities will not be very bright.