SIGMUND REPLIES

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Belatedly I have received a copy of your CRIMSON article of March 15. 1967. and I hope that it is not typical of a type of reverse McCarthysim induced in the United States by the Ramparts article on the NSA. For your information I am not now and never have been the least interested in securing the names of "Americans who expressed sympathy with Communist speakers" and I hope that you will inform the unnamed "acquaintance" of the unnamed "Lowell House tutor" who is the source of your story about a supposed approach made nine years ago that this is the case.

Did it never occur to the sophisticated intelligence of a CRIMSON reporter that such an offer by one Harvard tutor to another was so unlikely as to be almost ludicrous? And if the CIA were interested in getting names it surely could find better sources than a Lowell House tutor and an organization (The Independent Service) that helped to finance the trips to Vienna among others of Michael Harrington and half the officers of the Student League for Industrial Democracy, the predecessor of SDS.

I think you owe me an apology for a gratuitous slur on my character as well as for a generally nasty article based on unauthorized possession of my Harvard curriculum vitae.