Alexander Cockburn: The CIA's New Campus Spies

Alexander Cockburn: The CIA's New Campus Spies

PRISP participants must be American citizens who are enrolled fulltime 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.

From his enquiries Dr Price has determined 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.
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Anyone doubting the superior merits of open intelligence has only to study the sorry saga of the non-existent 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 PRSIP 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 Price 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 Price maintains, "These PRSIP students are also secretly compiling dossiers on their professors and fellow students."


oops - lost this tale / tant pis