Patriotic Betrayal
The Inside Story of the CIA's Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism
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- CHF 26.00
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- CHF 26.00
Description de l’éditeur
In this revelatory book, Karen M. Paget shows how the CIA turned the National Student Association into an intelligence asset during the Cold War, with students used—often wittingly and sometimes unwittingly—as undercover agents inside America and abroad. In 1967, Ramparts magazine exposed the story, prompting the Agency into engineering a successful cover-up. Now Paget, drawing on archival sources, declassified documents, and more than 150 interviews, shows that the Ramparts story revealed only a small part of the plot.
A cautionary tale, throwing sharp light on the persistent argument, heard even now, about whether America’s national-security interests can be advanced by skullduggery and deception, Patriotic Betrayal, says Karl E. Meyer, a former editorial board member of the New York Times and The Washington Post, evokes “the aura of a John le Carré novel with its self-serving rationalizations, its layers of duplicity, and its bureaucratic doubletalk.” And Hugh Wilford, author of The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, calls Patriotic Betrayal “extremely valuable as a case study of relations between the CIA and one of its front groups, greatly extending and enriching our knowledge and understanding of the complex dynamics involved in such covert, state-private relationships; it offers a fascinating portrayal of post-World War II U.S. political culture in microcosm."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Paget, an editor at the American Prospect, digs deeply into the CIA's infiltration of the National Student Association in the late 1940s. She begins by tracing (in well-sourced detail) the CIA's successful recruitment, management, and direction of the NSA, which effectively turned it into a Cold War tool dedicated to influencing the opinions of international student associations while discrediting Soviet propaganda efforts. It's long been known that the CIA covertly funded the NSA and manipulated its leadership, but the extent and depth of the CIA's influence has not been documented before. The various plots and subplots that surrounded the NSA's activities from the 1950s until the Vietnam War provide interesting reading and insights into the Cold War mentality. The CIA lost control of the NSA largely due to student dissent over the Vietnam War, and the agency quickly switched from directing NSA activities to targeting the organization for domestic surveillance. It's an instructive example of how the shifting political winds of the 1960s destroyed the mutuality of America's Cold War purpose. Paget's dense story is a case study of America's 1950s embrace of anti-communist dogma and the subsequent fracturing of its political consciousness in the Vietnam era.