C.I.A. SUBSIDIZED FESTIVAL TRIPS; Hundreds of Students Were Sent to World Gatherings (NY Times, Feb. 21, 1967)
A New York freelance writer disclosed yesterday that the Central Intelligence Agency had supported a foundation that sent hundreds of Americans to World Youth Festivals in Vienna in 1959 and Helsinki, Finland, in 1962.Gloria Steinem, a 30-year-old graduate of Smith College, said the C.I.A. has been a major source of funds for the foundation, the Independence Research Service, since its formation in 1958. Almost all of the young persons who received aid from the foundation did not know about the relationship with the intelligence agency, Miss Steinem said.
Ironically, she said, many of the students who attended the festivals have been criticized as leftists. The festivals are supposed to be financed by contributions from national student unions, but are, in fact, largely supported by the Soviet Union. Miss Steinem said she had become convinced that American students should participate in the World Youth Festivals after she spent two years in India.
“I came home in 1958 full of idealism and activism, to discover that very little was being done,” she said. “Students were not taken seriously here before the civil rights movement, and private money receded at the mention of a Communist youth festival.”
Miss Steinem said she had talked to some former officers of the National Student Association, who told her C.I.A. money might be available to finance American participation in the seventh postwar festival, scheduled for Vienna in the summer of 1959. The former association officers had had ties with the C.I.A. while serving the association, which last week conceded it had taken money from the intelligence agency since 1952.
“Far from being shocked by this involvement I was happy to find some liberals in government in those days who were far-sighted and cared enough to get Americans of all political views to the festival,” Miss Steinem said.
I’m generally a fan of Robert Harris, but there’s an incredibly silly bit in his thinly veiled Tony Blair novel: The Ghost. [Spoiler alert] The big “scandal” at the heart of the novel is that the former PM’s wife had worked for the CIA . Like that wouldn’t make her even cooler….