CIA Will Survive, But a Discredited NSA Must Build Itself an 'Emancipated' Image

In Washington's Executive House Motor Hotel last Friday, dozens of reporters milled around the lobby, waiting for a statement from the National Student Association. The statement was over three hours late, and the television cameraman suggested to NSA's press liaison that the National Supervisory Board conclude its discussion in time to make the Huntley-Brinkley evening news.

Most of the reporters, however, were thinking past the NSA statement to the week coming up, in which they would get their chance to expose the Central Intelligence Agency's complex network of domestic fronts. "The NSA is piddling stuff," one of them chuckled. "Would you believe the AFL-CIO?" The New York Times had five men working full time on tracing CIA finances. Ramparts magazine had a roomful of documents in San Francisco on the CIA's domestic affairs.

In the past week, dozens of CIA exposes have filled the newspapers. But there has never been any doubt that the CIA would survive the or-deal. The National Student Association however, may have been damaged irrevocably. Its most important characteristic--its avowed independence--has been discredited. At past international conferences, members of the American delegation would often point out that NSA was different from--and by implication, superior to--all the other national student unions because it received no government money and was in no way under government control.

Highly Suspect

Even if American students can forgive the NSA--as the first week's reaction shows they might--things will not be so simple in countries where the CIA is something of a specter. In fact, foreign students who came to the United States under NSA exchange programs are now in danger of being accused by their own governments of espionage. NSA leaders realize that the organization has become highly suspect to foreign students as well as to their governments. When the story broke, they began a frenetic letter-writing campaign to explain the nature of the ties to leaders of student unions around the world.

No matter how the foreign students react to an emancipated NSA itself, they have shown their fear of the CIA before. In Berlin, for example, students recently called on the mayor to halt CIA activities at the Free University. Recruitment of German students by the CIA was described in the New York Times on Monday. The CIA appears to have confined itself to individuals and there is no evidence that it funneled large-scale grants to student organizations.

The initial reaction of American member schools has been to support NSA. While the National Supervisory Board was meeting in near-continuous session in Washington last week, dozens of members sent favorable telegrams. Not one school had disaffiliated by the beginning of this week. Surprisingly, a number of new schools had asked permission to join--it seems as if the publicity is boosting NSA's membership.

Although member colleges have remained loyal, there is a faction of American students who frankly wish NSA had decided to fold instead. They feel that NSA is a failure as a national student union, and that its dissolution might be a step towards constructing a better one.

NSA, its opponents claim, is weak because it is a federation of student governments which are themselves weak, instead of an organization of individuals. A more workable federation, one member of the anti-NSA forces in Washington suggested in an interview last week, would include representatives from a variety of campus organizations, including SDS, SNCC, and religious clubs.

In addition, it is said, NSA is not very democratic. The highest officers, who are draft-deferred and earn as much as $4000 per year, exercise almost total control. The National Supervisory Board was a "rubber stamp" for presidential decisions until last week. And the permanent staff of 35 or 40, which has whatever is left of the power, is appointed by the president. It is true that the national congress--one voting delegate from each member college--elects the president, its choice, critics say, is rigidly limited. Future officers customarily are those who have successfully negotiated a chain of training programs over which the congress has no control. In other words, the congress is told who deserves the job.

An example of the weakness of the congress, the critics point out, is its failure ever to demand a complete financial accounting. In 15 years, no NSA officer has displayed a budget for everyone to see. (This is not to say that making a budget public would have betrayed the relationship with the CIA.)

Sam Brown Jr., a Harvard Divinity student who issued NSA's statement a week ago as chairman of its Supervisory Board, concedes that NSA could benefit from some structural and procedural changes. But Bdown is one of the organization's most articulate supporters, and he thinks that the "cleansing" of NSA provides a "greater opportunity than ever before" for the creation of a strong union.

Destroying NSA, Brown is convinced, would only set back the movement toward a more powerful national student union. NSA at least has the advantage of being a going concern, with personnel and money already committed to a number of successful domestic programs. It has taken a strong stand in favor of civil rights legislation and educational reform, and sponsors a nation-wide, PBH-type tutorial program.

The only way to save "what is good in NSA," Brown believes, is to purge the organization of all underground connotations. This cannot be done, he feels, through a Presidential commission like the one President Johnson set up in immediate response to the disclosure. This three-man commission, with Richard Helms, CIA director, as one of the members, is not an adequate means of restoring NSA's credibility. "Helms Investigating Helms -- the executive investigating the executive--wouldn't even satisfy domestic critics, let alone foreign critics," Brown has said.

Investigation

Brown would like to see a "full public investigation," conducted by Congress, in which the CIA would be encouraged to declassify its files on domestic organizations. NSA has already offered to open all its files to a Congressional investigation. Such an investigation may be the only way to determine the extent of the CIA's influence over the NSA and other domestic organizations.

Tomorrow: How NSA's secret was disclosed, the nature of the CIA link, and NSA's future now that the link has been broken.