Ties With CIA Got NSA Deferments, 91% of Funds

W. Eugene Groves, president of the National Student Association, said yesterday that his organization had received more than $3.3 million from 1952 to February, 1967, as an "intelligence and operation wing" for the Central Intelligence Agency.

In a prepared report to the 20th National Student Congress, meeting at the University of Maryland, he said that at one point the CIA was providing 91 percent of the NSA's budget.

"It protected us from McCarthy, it helped some people get draft deferments, and it probably put in a good word to the Internal Revenue Service when NSA applied for tax-exempt status," Groves said.

"But the power lay (at CIA headquarters) in Langley. The first person to be dialed in time of trouble was the head of Covert Action No. 5," he added.

Groves claimed that the NSA often didn't know the whereabouts of members of its overseas staff while they were serving as "CIA agents and informers."

The NSA, largest student organization in the country, began severing ties with the CIA last February after Ramparts Magazine exposed the connection. Groves announced Friday that the break had been completed, with the NSA acquiring title to its Washington headquarters building from the CIA.

NSA overseas representatives "were chosen not on the basis of their familiarity with American student politics, or their commitment to NSA, but on their ability in intelligency tasks," he said.

Groves said only one school, Colorado State College in Greeley, quit the NSA as a result of the disclosure of the CIA tie. Brandeis University suspended its membership for a year.

He also reported that the CIA had first started feeding the NSA in 1952, when $55,494--or 79 percent of the NSA budget--came from CIA fronts.

CIA support rose steadily during the next 10 years and reached a peak in 1962, when CIA "conduits" gave the NSA more than $70,000, Groves added.