K-School To Limit Role of CIA Researcher

Harvard faculty members will have to watch carefully the role of a CIA employee who will be their research associate next semester on an intelligence agency funded project at the Kennedy School, a top dean said yesterday.

The project announced Thursday has been hailed by academics as a breakthrough in CIA-university relations because the agency has agreed to abandon its usual contract terms and meet Harvard's strict guidelines on keeping research independent of sponsor control. Yet the comments made yesterday by K-School Academic Dean Albert Carnesale indicate that there is concern that the work of the $1.2 million dollar project be kept clear of all agency influence.

Under the agreement, which is considered to be the first Harvard- CIA project in recent years, the agency will forego its normal contract procedures with the result that it will be known publicly as the funder and will not ask for pre-publication review of the results.

The three-year project, which will result in case studies about intelligence use in American foreign policy, also allows CIA analyst Bill Kline to spend time at the Kennedy School helping in research work.

Academics contacted yesterday, including President Bok, said they are confident that the contract terms will assure the independence of the research. Carnesale said Kline's role in the project also needs to be limited.

The K-School will have to "make sure that [Kline's] role in no way exerts an influence on the effort," said Carnesale. "We have to be very careful that everybody knows where [Kline] is from and sensitive that he has aninterest."

According to School officials, the intelligenceanalyst will help prepare case studies about howCIA information is used by government foreignpolicy experts. The case studies will be used inconferences and training seminars involving senioragency officers and will eventually be published.

The conferences will be taught and researchdone by Harvard faculty members Ernest May, WarrenProfessor of History, Richard Neustadt, DillonProfessor of Government and Gregory F. Treverton,a lecturer at the K-School.

In recent years Bok and other academics haveexpressed concern about the ethics of scholarsagreeing to not disclose the CIA funding andallowing the agency to make changes in theirmanuscripts. Such restrictions had been standardin CIA funding agreements.

In his first public comments about the KennedySchool-CIA grant, Bok said that there is nothingwrong in accepting agency money as long as theterms meet University standards.

"It's just an opportunity to do a piece of workthat was of interest to professors. We wanted tomake it very open and be very up-front aboutdescribing it," Bok said.

He added that the CIA should not be treated anydifferently because of their covert nature.

"It is not just the CIA, it's any agency that'sdoing work in secret," Bok said. "Theserestrictions are not a way of getting back at theCIA for its actions around the world."

But Carnesale said the school "would have to beextra-careful" in the way the arrangement istreated at the school because of the"emotional-loading" of the CIA.

Paul C. Martin '52, the dean for appliedsciences and chairman of the Committee onSponsored Research in the Faculty of Arts andSciences, said there was nothing wrong withresearch being conducted by an employee of thesponsoring group as long as the project issupervised by Harvard faculty members.

Meanwhile, a CIA spokesman said that theK-School program is unprecedented because it willinvolve training that "used to be in-house."

The spokesman, Bill Devine, said the program"might be a pilot program," although he said theagency has yet to talk to other schools about it.

Devine said that the program could result inthe publication of currently classified documents."It may be that new information will be madeavailable, but there won't be a big dumpster inthe sky dropping out all the papers," he said