Recovered history: How the CIA recruited students in the 1950s & 1960s

Tom Hayden, Nation - In 1962, curious about youth festivals and eager to see the world, I interviewed as a possible participant in an American (anti-communist) delegation to the Soviet-sponsored Helsinki Youth Festival in Finland, one of several of the era. Their purpose was to confront the communist delegates with a counter-narrative about American democracy and firmly oppose any rapprochement or coexistence between capitalism and communism. Neutralism in the Cold War was considered as being soft on Communism.

In the end, I didn't attend. But I will never forget the smart, attractive woman who interviewed me. A graduate of Smith College, her name was Gloria Steinem. This was one year before she worked at the Playboy Club in New York City and six years before she wrote A Bunnys Tale in Show magazine and described herself as an active feminist in 1969.

The CIAs Harry Lunn, according to Patriotic Betrayal, encouraged Steinem to become the public face of the Independent Service for Information, an anti-communist delegation controlled and funded by the CIA, on the Vienna Youth Festival; by early 1959, it had been renamed the Independent Research Service. She was one of the few women in the National Students Assn-CIA club, Paget writes, noting that Steinem, who knowingly cooperated with the CIA, is sensitive today about her work with the agency.

Steinem recruited about one hundred Americans into a delegation to confront the 17,000 youth at the 1959 Vienna Youth Festival under the banners of Marxism and national liberation. Her bloc employed dirty tricks to disrupt the proceedings, including distributing anti-communist propaganda to fill a shortage of toilet paper and invading discussion groups to attack communist dogma. Pleased with her work in Vienna, the CIA sent Steinem to lead a similar delegation to Helsinki in 1962, where the CIA courted African students with American jazz and, according to Paget, left memorable images of Steinem parting the beaded curtains to enter the nightclub as if she was Mata Hari.

Another figure I met at the turn of the 1960s was Allard Lowenstein, who had attended every NSA conference since the groups inception and had obscure but real connections to State Department and CIA powers behind the scenes. Lowenstein courageously helped smuggle black South Africans into the West, was an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during Mississippi Summer in 1964, led the national Dump Johnson campaign in 1967 and 1968, was elected to Congress in 1968, and eventually was murdered in 1980 by a disturbed protg, Dennis Sweeney, who claimed that Lowenstein had planted a communication device in his teeth.

Personally, I never made it into a CIA front group, though I tried hard enough. I was unwitting, in spook-speak. Witting was what the agency called people in the know. They first tested and recruited them into high positions in the student world, then administered a surprise security oath before telling them they were part of the CIA.

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Note: A number of my college friends were successfully recruited by the CIA in the 1950s but I was apparently too much of a wild card to even be approached. In the 1960s, Harry Lunn (mentioned above) had a gallery on Capitol Hill and was one of my advertisers in the DC Gazette.  I knew vaguely of his CIA connections. During the 1960s riots some people seemed to think I had something to do with it all - among them Harry Lunn who  told me late one night that if anyone firebombed his gallery he was going to come and personally burn my house down. - Sam Smith