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Comment by truth on August 14, 2016 at 2:51pm

Was I a CIA Spy? 50 Years On, I Still Don’t Know
A new book tells the story of how the CIA used unwitting college kids to send in reports from Third World countries. And I was one of them.

In 1963, I was a 20-year-old college senior who’d never been out of the country. With parents of modest means, summers meant working for spare cash, not backpacking through Europe or lounging on the beaches of Majorca. So when an invitation came to spend a month traveling through Southeast Asia as part of a student delegation, I leapt at the chance.

We’d be traveling under the banner of the U.S. National Student Association, a confederation of more than 300 colleges and universities across the country, and one whose liberal positions on civil rights and foreign policy had made it a target of a concerted conservative assault. (William F. Buckley’s Young Americans for Freedom was constantly urging student governments to disaffiliate). More significant, NSA (the student group, not the National Security Agency) was, I knew, a proudly independent organization, neither speaking for, nor subservient to, the U.S government—a sharp contrast with organizations like the International Union of Students, a Prague-based wholly-owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the NSA gave rhetorical and financial support to dissident student groups in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, fighting repressive governments supported by official U.S. policy.

http://whowhatwhy.us9.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a9c27247b8a9046...