Cloak-and-Dagger in the Classroom

[Ivo Skoric]

In communist countries, this was just a fact of life. Like long lines 
for meat. University professors just learned to be careful to veil 
their opinions in language that, usually poorly educated, secret 
police fellows would not entirely comprehend. The spies were 
everywhere, though. If you studied sociology or political science, 
you could be certain that in the classroom of 20 at least one student 
was there on assignment. The operative word for that policy was 
"workers liberation". Communists in ol' Yugoslavia liked the sound of 
word "freedom," too. For them, it meant their victory over Nazis, and 
more importantly, their installment in power. For the sake of 
preserving that liberty won, they did not shun to throw thousands of 
people in prison, for a mere sentence uttered against them. I hope 
the US does not intend to move in that direction.
ivo

On 28 Jan 2005 at 15:14, CERJ at igc.org wrote:

Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch, in whose latest issue Dr. David
Price writes about the PRISP program (available through the web site
www.counterpunch.org).  Dr. Price can be reached at
dprice at stmartin.edu.

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/2/2005/1051

The CIA's new campus spies
by Alexander Cockburn
Friday, January 25, 2005

After disclosure of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's effort to set
a new and spectacularly unaccountable version of the CIA in the
Pentagon, the sprouting forest of secret intelligence operations set
up in the wake of 9/11 is at last coming under some scrutiny.  Here's
a sinister one in the academic field that escaped scrutiny until this
week.

Dr. David Price, of St. Martins College, in Olympia, Wash., is an
anthropologist long interested in the intersections of his discipline
with the world of intelligence and national security, both the CIA 
and
the FBI.  Now he's turned the spotlight on a new test program,
operating without detection or protest, that is secretly placing CIA
agents in American university classrooms.  With time, these students
-- who cannot admit to their true intentions -- will inevitably
pollute and discredit the universities in which they are now 
enrolled.

Even before 9/11, government money was being sluiced into the
academies for covert subsidies for students.  The National Security
Education Program (NSEP) siphoned off students from traditional
foreign language funding programs and offered graduate students good
money, sometimes $40,000 a year and up, to study "in demand"
languages, but with payback stipulations mandating that recipients
later work for unspecified U.S. national security agencies.

When the NSEP got off the ground in the early 1990s, there was some
huff and puff from concerned academics about this breaching of the
supposed barrier between the desires of academia and the state.  But
there wasn't even a watch-pup's yap about Congressional approval for
Section 318 of the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act, which
appropriated $4 million to fund a pilot program known as the Pat
Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP), named after Senator 
Pat
Roberts (R.-Kan., Chair, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence).

PRISP is designed to train intelligence operatives and analysts in
American university classrooms for careers in the CIA and other
agencies.  The program now operates on an undisclosed number of
American college and university campuses.  Dr. Price has discovered
that 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.

PRISP participants must be American citizens who are enrolled full
time in graduate degree programs.  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.

Dr. Price has determined from his inquiries that less than 150
students a year are currently authorized to receive funding during 
the
pilot phase as PRISP evaluates the program's initial outcomes.  PRISP
is apparently administered not just by the CIA, but also through a
variety of individual intelligence agencies like the NSA, MID or 
Naval
Intelligence.

Secrecy is the root problem here, with the usual ill-based assumption
that good intelligence operates best in clandestine conditions.  Of
course 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.

Anyone doubting the superior merits of open intelligence has only to
study the sorry saga of the nonexistent WMDs, whose imagined threat 
in
vast stockpiles was ringingly affirmed by all the secret agencies
while being contested by analysts unencumbered by bogus covert
intelligence estimates massaged by Iraqi disinformers and political
placemen in Langley and elsewhere.

Dr. Price says, "The CIA makes sure we won't know which classrooms
PRISP scholars attend, this being rationalized as a requirement for
protecting the identities of intelligence personnel."  But this
secrecy shapes PRISP as it takes on the form of a 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 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," Dr.
Price continues, " I have read too many FBI reports of students
detailing the 'deviant' political views of their professors."  In one
instance elicited by Dr. Prince from files he acquired under FOIA, 
the
FBI arranged for a graduate student to guide topics of 'informal'
conversation with anthropologist Gene Weltfish that were later the
focus of an inquiry by Joseph McCarthy).  Today, Dr. Prince 
maintains,
"These PRISP students are also secretly compiling dossiers on their
professors and fellow students."

The confluence between academe and intelligence is longstanding and
pervasive.  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.

But if the CIA can use PRISP to corral students, haul them along to
mandatory internships and summer sessions, and douse them in the 
ethos
of CIA, then it can surely shape their intellectual outlook even
before their grasp of cultural history develops in the relatively 
open
environment of their university.

Academic environments thrive on open disagreement, dissent and
reformulation.  As Dr. Prince writes, "The presence of PRISP's secret
sharers brings hidden agendas that sabotage fundamental academic
processes.  The Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program infects all
academia with the viruses dishonesty and distrust as participant
scholars cloak their intentions and their ties to the cloaked masters
they serve."


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