The CIA's Campus Spies

This article is from the www.counterpunch.org webpage. Dr David Price
is an old friend of mine. I have tremendous respect for his
scholarship. He's doing bang up work in anthropology and in the study
of the compromise of academia through covert government action (I
don't know what the name of that particular academic discipline would
be).

The history of the the U of W in this regard is interesting and
shameful (see his book "Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the
FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists" available at the U
bookstore.

It might be interesting to use our information seeking expertise to
try to learn how (and if) the U is involved in the latest wave of this
insidious practice.

Weekend Edition
March 12 / 13, 2005
*** A CounterPunch Special Investigation ***
Exposing the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program
The CIA's Campus Spies
By DAVID H. PRICE
The secrecy surrounding the current use of university classrooms as
covert training grounds for the CIA and other agencies now threatens
the fundamental principles of academic openness as well as the
integrity of a wide array of academic disciplines. A new test program
that is secretly placing CIA agents in American university classrooms
for now operates without detection or protest,. With time these
students who cannot admit to their true intentions will inevitably
pollute and discredit the universities in which they are now enrolled.
There have long been tensions between the needs of academia and the
needs of the National Security State, and even before the events of
9/11 expanded the powers of American intelligence agencies, our
universities were quietly being modified to serve the needs of the
intelligence community in new and covert ways. The most visible of
these reforms was the establishment of the National Security Education
Program (NSEP) which siphoned-off students from traditional foreign
language funding programs such as Fulbright or Title VI. While
traditional funding sources provide students with small stipends of a
few thousand dollars to study foreign languages in American
universities, the NSEP gives graduate students a wealth of funds (at
times exceeding $40,000 a year) to study "in demand" languages, but
with troubling pay-back stipulations mandating that recipients later
work for unspecified U.S. national security agencies. Upon its debut
in the early 1990s, the NSEP was harshly criticized for reaching
through an assumed barrier between the desires of academia and state.
Numerous academic organizations, including, the Middle East Studies
Association and the African Studies Association, Latin American
Studies Association, and even the mainstream Boards of the Social
Science Research Council and American Council of Learned Societies
expressed deep concerns over scholars' participation in the NSEP. And
though the NSEP continues funding students despite these protests,
there was some solace in knowing so many diverse academic
organizations condemned this program.
But while many academics reacted with anger and protest to the NSEP's
entrance onto American campuses, there has been no public reaction to
an even more troubling post-9/11 funding program which upgrades the
existing American intelligence-university-interface. With little
notice Congress approved section 318 of the 2004 Intelligence
Authorization Act which appropriated four million dollars to fund a
pilot program known as the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program
(PRISP). Named after Senator Pat Roberts (R. Kansas, Chair, Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence), PRISP was designed to train
intelligence operatives and analysts in American university classrooms
for careers in the CIA and other agencies. PRISP now operates on an
undisclosed number of American college and university campuses, and if
the pilot phase of the program proves to be a useful means of
recruiting and training members of the intelligence community then the
program will expand to more campuses across the country.
Currently, PRISP participants must be American citizens who are
enrolled fulltime in graduate degree programs with a minimum GPA of
3.4, they need to "complete at least one summer internship at CIA or
other agencies," and they must pass the same background investigations
as other CIA employees. PRISP students receive financial stipends
ranging up to $25,000 per year and they are required to participate in
closed meetings with other PRISP scholars and individuals from their
administering intelligence agency.
Less than 150 students a year are now authorized to receive funding
during the pilot phase as PRISP evaluates the program's initial
outcomes. Beyond a few articles in a Kansas newspaper praising Senator
Roberts, as well as University of Kansas anthropologist Felix Moos'
role in lobbying for the PRISP, there has been a general media silence
regarding the program. The few guarded public statements issued
describing PRISP stress supposed similarities between existing ROTC
programs and the PRISP. For example, the Lawrence Journal World
(11/29/03) published claims that, "Those in the program would be part
of the ROTC program specializing in learning how to analyze a variety
of conditions and activities based on a thorough understanding and
deep knowledge of particular areas of the world." Beyond the similar
requirements that participants of both programs commit to years of
service to their sponsoring military or intelligence branches there
are few similarities between ROTC and PRISP. ROTC programs mostly
operate in the open, as student-ROTC members register for ROTC courses
and are proudly and visibly identified as members of the ROTC program,
while PRISP students are instructed to keep their PRISP-affiliations
hidden from others on campus.
PRISP is an open secret, and the CIA apparently prefers that it stay
more secret than open-as the CIA's website does not maintain an active
link with detailed information on PRISP. Currently PRISP limits its
advertising to intelligence recruiting web sights (such as
www.intelligencecareers.com or the National Ground Intelligence
Center) and to small, controlled recruiting sessions. PRISP recruits
scholars with "advanced area expertise in China, Middle East, Korea,
Central Asia, the Caucasus," with a special emphasis given to scholars
with previous linguistic expertise in "Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Urdu,
Pashtun, Dari, Korean, or a Central Asian or Caucasian language such
as Georgian, Turkmen, Tajik, or Uzbek." PRISP also funds Islamic
studies scholars and scientists with expertise in bioterrorism,
counterterrorism, chemistry, physics, computer science and
engineering.
Inquiries made to Senator Roberts' staff concerning the current size
and scope of PRISP yielded little useful information and Roberts'
staff referred me to Mr. Tommy Glakas at the CIA. Mr. Glakas was
reluctant to discuss many specific details of PRISP, but he did
confirm that PRISP now funds about 100 students who are studying at an
undisclosed number of American universities. When asked if PRISP was
up and running on college campuses Glakas first answered that it was,
then said it wasn't, then clarified that PRISP wasn't the sort of
program that was tied to university campuses-it was decentralized and
tied to students, not campuses. When pressed further on what this
meant Mr. Glakas gave no further information. He said that he had no
way of knowing exactly how many universities currently have students
participating in PRISP, claiming he could not know this because PRISP
is administered not just by the CIA, but also through a variety of
individual intelligence agencies like the NSA, MID, or Naval
Intelligence. He stressed that PRISP was a decentralized scholarship
program which funds students through a various intelligence agencies.
Mr. Glakas said he didn't know who might know how many campuses had
PRISP scholars and he would not identify which campuses are hosting
these covert PRISP scholars.
The Intelligence Scholars Program did not spring forth out of a
vacuum. Like the Patriot Act, the germs of PRISP were conceived years
ago and were waiting for the right rendez-vous of fear with
opportunity to be born. PRISP is largely the brainchild of University
of Kansas anthropologist Felix Moos-a longtime advocate of
anthropological contacts with military and intelligence agencies.
During the Vietnam War Moos worked in Laos and Thailand on World
Bank-financed projects and over the years he has worked in various
military advisory positions. He worked on the Pentagon's ARPA Project
Themis, and has been as an instructor at the Naval War College and at
the U.S. Staff and Command College at Fort Leavenworth. For years Moos
has taught courses on "Violence and Terrorism" at the University of
Kansas. In the months after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center
and Pentagon Moos elicited the support of his friend, former CIA DCI,
Stansfield Turner to curry support in the senate and CIA to fund his
vision of a merger between anthropology, academia, intelligence
analysis and espionage training.
Professor Moos initially proposed that all PRISP students be required
to master two foreign languages and use anthropology and history
classes to learn the culture history of the regions they are studying.
Moos's vision for PRISP was more comprehensive than the current pilot
program and it included classes on topics such as bioterrorism and
counterterrorism. Moos proposed having an active CIA campus presence
where PRISP students would begin training as freshmen and, "by the
time they would be commissioned, they would be ready to go to the
branch intelligence units of their choice." If the pilot phase of
PRISP goes well, this may be the direction in which this program
develops-though it is doubtful that PRISP would expand in any way
which openly identified participants.
It is tempting to describe Moos as an anachronistic anthropologist out
of sync with his discipline's mainstream, but while many
anthropologists express concerns about disciplinary ties to military
and intelligence organizations, contemporary anthropology has no core
with which to either sync or collide and there are others in the field
who openly (and quietly) support such developments. Moos is a bright
man, but his writings echo the musty tone and sentiments found in the
limited bedside readings of Tom-Clancy-literate-colonials, as he
prefers to quote from the wisdom of Sun Tzu and Samuel Huntington over
anthropologists like Franz Boas or Laura Nader. Two years ago at an
interesting and confrontational panel examining anthropological
connections to intelligence agencies at the annual American
Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings, I watched an angry Moos
strike an action pose and rhetorically ask, "Have anthropologists
learned so little since 9/11/2001, as to not recognize the truth-and
practicability, in Sun Tzu's reminder that: 'unless someone is subtle
and perspicacious, he cannot perceive the substance in intelligence
reports. It is subtle, subtle." From the dais I could see not so
subtle anthropologists in the audience employed by Rand and the
Pentagon nodding their heads as if his words had hit a secret chord.
Moos was clearly onto something.
Felix Moos' notion of scholar-spies in part draws upon an imagined
romantic history of anthropologists' contributions to the Second World
War, which, while this is a widespread notion, it is one increasingly
undermined by FOIA and archival-based historical research of the
complexities (both ethical and practical) of anthropologists plying
their trade in even this "good" war. Back in 1995 Moos testified
before a commission modifying the AAA's code on anthropological ethics
that anthropologists should be allowed to engage in secretive
research, arguing that, "In a world where weapons of mass destruction
have become so terrible and terrorist actions so frightful,
anthropologists must surrender naïve faith in a communitarian utopia
and be prepared to encounter conflict and violence. Indeed they should
feel the professional obligation to work in areas of ethnic
conflict.But, as moral creatures so engaged, they would of course have
to recognize the necessity of classifying some of their data, if for
no other reason than to protect the lives of their subjects and
themselves."
It is this devotion to secrecy that is the root problem of the PRSIP's
presence on our campuses as well as with Moos' vision of anthropology
harnessed for the needs of state. Moos' fallacy is his belief that the
fundamental problem with American intelligence agencies is that they
are lacking adequate cultural understanding of those they study, and
spy upon-this fallacy is exacerbated by orthodox assumptions that good
intelligence operates best in realms of secrecy. America needs good
intelligence, but the most useful and important intelligence can
largely be gathered openly without the sort of covert invasion of our
campuses that PRISP silently brings.
The claim that more open source, non-classified intelligence is what
is needed is less far fetched than it might seem. In Cloak and Gown:
Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 historian Robin Winks recounts
how in 1951, the CIA's Sherwood Kent conducted an experiment in which
a handful of Yale historians used nothing but declassified materials
in Yale's library to challenge CIA analysts (with access to classified
data) to produce competing reports on U.S. military capacities,
strengths and weaknesses focusing on a scale of detail down to the
level of military divisions. This written evaluation of this contest
was known as the "Yale Report," which concluded that over 90% of
material in the CIA's report was found in the Yale library. Kent
further estimated that of the remaining 10% of "secret" materials,
only half of this could be expected to remain secret for any length of
time. President Truman was so furious with the results of the Yale
Report that he suppressed its distribution, arguing that the press
needed more restrictions governing the release of such sensitive
materials, while Republican pundits joined the furor claiming that
Yale liberals were trying to leak state secrets.
Evidence of the power of open intelligence is close at hand, consider
only how American scholars' (using publicly available sources)
analysis of the dangers for post-invasion Iraq out-performed the CIA's
best estimates. As one who has lived in the Middle East and read
Arabic news dailies online for years while watching the expansion of
American policies that appear to misread the Arab world I wonder if a
repeat of the Yale Report experiment focusing on the Middle East might
not find another 10% intelligence gap, but with the academy now
winning due to the deleterious effects of generations of CIA
intellectual inbreeding. Perhaps the Agency has become self-aware of
these limits brought on by the internal reproduction of its own
limited institutional culture, and in its own misshapen view it sees
PRISP as a means of supplying itself with new blood to rejuvenate
under cover provided by public classrooms. But such secrecy-based
reforms are the products of a damaged institutional mind trying to
repair itself.
Some might misread my criticism of the CIA's secret presence on our
campuses as contradicting my critique of the need for more outside and
dissenting (even informed hairbrained dissenting) input in
intelligence circles, but such a reading would misunderstand the
importance of openness in academic and political processes. The
fundamental problems with American intelligence are exacerbated by
secrecy-when intelligence agencies are allowed to classify and hide
their assumptions, reports and analysis from public view they generate
self-referential narrow visions that coalesce rather than challenge
top-down policies from the administrations they serve. Intelligence
agencies do need to understand the complex cultures they study, but to
suggest that intelligence agencies like the CIA are simply amassing
and interpreting political and cultural information is a dangerous
fantasy: The CIA fulfills a tripartite role of gathering intelligence,
interpreting intelligence, and working as a supraconstitutional covert
arm of the presidency. It is this final role that should give scholars
and citizens pause when considering how PRSIP and other
university-intelligence-linked programs will use the knowledge they
take from our open classrooms.
The CIA makes sure we won't know which classrooms PRSIP scholars
attend, this is rationalized as a requirement for protecting the
identities of intelligence personnel. But this secrecy shapes PRISP as
it takes on the form like a cell-based covert operation in which PRISP
students study chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, anthropology
and foreign languages without their fellow classmates, professors,
advisors, department chairs or presumably even research subjects
(creating serious ethics problems under any post-Nuremberg
professional ethics code or Human Subject Review Board) knowing that
they are working for the CIA, DIA, NSA or other intelligence agencies.
In a decade and a half of Freedom of Information Act research I have
read too many FBI reports of students detailing the deviant political
views of their professors (These range from the hilarious: As
anthropologist Norman Humphrey was reported to have called President
Eisenhower a "duckbilled nincompoop"; to the Dadaist: Wherein former
Miss America, Marilyn van Derbur, reported that sociologist Howard
Higman mocked J. Edgar Hoover in class; to the chilling: As when the
FBI arranged for a graduate student to guide topics of "informal"
conversation with anthropologist Gene Weltfish that were later the
focus an inquiry by Joseph McCarthy) to not mention the certainty that
these PRSIP students are also secretly compiling dossiers on their
professors and fellow students. Of course I would be remiss to not
mention that students are the only ones sneaking the CIA onto our
campuses. There are also unknown thousands of university professors
who periodically work with and for the CIA--in 1988 CIA spokeswoman
Sharon Foster bragged that the CIA then secretly employed enough
university professors "to staff a large university." Most experts
estimate that this presence has grown since 2001.
The quiet rise of programs like PRISP should not surprise anyone given
the steady cuts in federal funding for higher education, and the
resulting pressures for more mercenary roles for the academy. In the
post-World War Two decades, scholars naively self-recruited themselves
or followed classmates to the CIA, but increasingly those of us who
have studied the languages, culture and histories of peoples around
the world have also learned about the role of the CIA in undermining
the autonomy of those cultures we study, and the steady construction
of this history has hurt the agency's efforts to recruit the best and
brightest of post-graduates. For decades the students studying Arabic,
Urdu, Basque or Farsi were predominantly curious admirers of the
cultures and languages they studied, the current shift now finds a
visible increase in students whose studies are driven by the market
forces of Bush's War on Terrorism. If the CIA can use PRISP to
indenture students in the early days of their graduate
training-supplemented with mandated summer camp internships immersed
in the workplace ethos of CIA-the company can mold their ideological
inclinations even before their grasp of cultural history is shaped in
the relatively open environment of their university. As these PRISP
graduates enter the CIA's institutional environment of
self-reinforcing Group Think they will present a reduced risk of
creating cognitive dissonance by bringing new views that threaten the
agency's narrow view of the world. Institutional Group Think can thus
safely be protected from external infection.
But while PRISP protects and intensifies the inbred-limited-thinking
at CIA and elsewhere, it threatens the academic integrity of
anthropology and other academic disciplines that unwittingly become
complicit partners with these intelligence agencies. The CIA has long
recognized that anthropology, with its broadly traveled and culturally
and linguistically competent practitioners has highly useful skill
sets. And while we should not read too much into published reports
that the CIA-directed torture techniques at Abu Ghraib were fine-tuned
for high levels of culturally specific humiliation by the reading of
anthropologist Raphael Patai's book The Arab Mind (Patai's scholarship
is stained with Orientalist stereotypes and it doesn't take an
insider's knowledge that Arabs generally abhor dogs and sexual
humiliation to presume that tormenting bound naked men with vicious
dogs would be an effective means of torture), anthropologists have
long had their work pilfered by American intelligence agencies. To
cite but two documented examples, in 1951, the CIA cut a covert deal
with the AAA's executive board providing the CIA access to data on
anthropologists' cultural and linguistic specialties as the CIA
secretly produced a roster of AAA members for the AAA on the CIA's
computers; and, in 1962 the U.S. Department of Commerce illegally
translated Georges Condominas' ethnography, We Have Eaten the Forest
on highland Vietnamese Montagnards for use as a counterinsurgency
tool. Though no scholar can control the uses of information they make
public, there does need to be an awareness of how any knowledge can be
abused by others--and as awareness of the presence of PRISP spreads,
many scholars may find themselves engaging in new forms of
self-censorship and doublethink.
Healthy academic environments need openness because they (unlike the
CIA) are nourished by the self-corrective features of open
disagreement, dissent, and synthetic-reformulation. The presence of
the PRISP's secret sharers brings hidden agendas that sabotage these
fundamental processes of academia. The Pat Roberts Intelligence
Scholars Program infects all of academia with a germ of dishonesty and
distrust as participant scholars cloak their intentions and their ties
to the cloaked masters they serve.

David Price teaches anthropology at St. Martin's College in Olympia,
Washington. His latest book, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and
the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists has just been
published by Duke University Press. His Atlas of World Cultures has
just been republished by the Blackburn Press. He can be reached at:
dprice@stmartin.edu