Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA's Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade against Communism

Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA's Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade against Communism Karen M. Paget. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.Karen Paget's Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA's Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade against Communism details the complex history of the United States National Student Association (NSA) from its creation in 1947, through the thaws and freezes of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, up to the revelations in 1967 by the magazine Ramparts that America's student body had been engaged in active and covert operations with the CIA. Divided into five sections, the monograph examines the playing out of Cold War politics within the international student population as the NSA-backed International Student Conference (ISC) vied for the position of the authoritative and sole voice for students worldwide in face of a rival claim from the Sovietbacked International Union of Students (IUS). As Paget highlights, the original aims of the NSA were initially largely innocuous: to prevent a Soviet-led monopoly of influence among students worldwide, to build goodwill among foreign students, and to win adherents to democracy (395). How these aims morphed into a multi-million dollar operation which coopted willing students to conduct espionage for the CIA is the story of Patriotic Betrayal.Part One details the founding years of the NSA. Focusing on internal politics and external pressures, Paget reveals the competing efforts of left- and rightwing voices and the Catholic Church in shaping the internal composition of the NSA, as well as setting the scene for the growing involvement of the CIA in the student organization. While the opening section focuses almost exclusively on domestic affairs, the geopolitical spectrum of the study is expanded in the second part of the book to embed the NSA within a wider context of the Cold War by exploring the efforts of the NSA and, by extension, of the CIA, to expand its sphere of ideological influence in student unions around the world. In doing so, the author highlights how the NSA often adopted if not oppositional, then certainly ambivalent positions vis-a-vis US state policy: with the emergence of student bodies from Africa and Asia, the NSA was forced to address themes such as colonialism, imperialism, and racism at home and abroad which could no longer simply be dismissed as "communist propaganda" (156). The relationship between the NSA and CIA becomes even more complicated in Part Three. Although originally founded on the principal of "students as students" which was designed to place students at the heart of the Association's actions, it becomes clear that the pressures exerted through the CIA's various channels of influence rendered the NSA's pronouncements on human and civil rights at best confused: while refusing to issue a statement on the Suez Crisis on the basis that students were not involved, for instance, the NSA aligned itself to Algerian independence efforts. …