The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 15 | Issue 20 | Number 5 | Oct 15, 2017

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Spies on Campus: The CIA and the FBI from the IndochinaWars to the “War on Terror”

Daniel Golden

On the crisp autumn afternoon of November26, 2007, a black car picked up GrahamSpanier, then president of Pennsylvania StateUniversity, at Dulles International Airport andwhisked him to CIA headquarters in Langley,Va. Using his identification card — embeddedwith a hologram and computer chip — hechecked in at security and was greeted by thechief of staff of the National ResourcesDivision, the CIA’s clandestine domesticservice. They proceeded to a conference room,where about two dozen chiefs of station andother senior CIA intelligence officers awaitedthem.

Spanier was expecting to brief them on thework of the National Security Higher EducationAdvisory Board, an organization he chaired andhad helped create, which fostered dialoguebetween intelligence agencies and universities.First, though, the CIA surprised him. In a briefceremony, it presented him with the WarrenMedal, said to be the agency’s highest honorfor nonemployees.

Graham Spanier

The honor recognized Spanier’s dedication toalerting college administrators to the threat ofhuman and cyber-espionage, and to openingdoors for the agency at campuses nationwide. Aformer family therapist and television talk-showhost with an unruffled, empathetic manner andfeatures — round face, white hair, blueeyes—reminiscent of Phil Donahue, Spaniersoothed many an academic’s anxieties aboutdealing with the CIA and the FBI.

Since the intelligence agencies were going tomeddle anyway, Spanier reasoned, they shoulddo so with the knowledge and consent ofcollege presidents. “My feeling was, If there’s aspy on my campus, a potential terrorist, or avisiting faculty member you believe is up to nogood, I know you’ll be pursuing it,” he told mein April 2016. “Here’s the deal. Rather thanbreak into his office, come to me — I have top-secret clearance — show me your FISA[Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] order,and I’ll have someone unlock the door.”

Spanier’s CIA medal, and a similar FBI award ayear later, symbolized a reconciliation betweenthe intelligence services and the academy. Therelationship has come full circle: fromchumminess in the 1940s and 1950s, toanimosity during the Vietnam War and civil-rights era, and back to cooperation after theSeptember 11, 2001, attacks.

US Intelligence and the Universities

Their unequal partnership, though, tilts towardthe government. U.S. intelligence seized on therenewed goodwill, and the red carpet rolled outby Spanier and other university administrators,

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to expand not only its public presence oncampus but also covert operations andsponsoring of secret research. Federalencroachment on academic prerogatives hasmet only token resistance.

The two cultures are antithetical: Academe isopen and international, while intelligenceservices are clandestine and nationalistic. Still,after Islamic-fundamentalist terrorists toppledthe World Trade Center, colleges became partof the national security apparatus. The newrecruiting booths at meetings of academicassociations were one telling indicator. The CIAbegan exhibiting at the annual convention ofthe American Council on the Teaching ofForeign Languages in 2004, as did the FBI andNSA around the same time. Since 2011 the FBI,the Office of the Director of NationalIntelligence, and the National Security Agencyhave participated on a panel at the ModernLanguage Association convention titled “UsingYour Language Proficiency and CulturalExpertise in a Federal Government Career.”

Today universities routinely offer degrees inhomeland security and courses in espionageand cyber-hacking. They vie for federaldesignation as Intelligence Community Centersf o r A c a d e m i c E x c e l l e n c e(http://www.dia.mil/Training/IC-Centers-for-Academic-Excellence/) and National Centers ofAcademic Excellence in Cyber Operations(https://www.nsa.gov/resources/educators/centers-academic-excellence/cyber-operations/).They obtain research grants from obscurefederal agencies such as Intelligence AdvancedResearch Projects Activity. Established in 2006,Iarpa sponsors “high-risk/high payoff researchthat has the potential to provide our nationwith an overwhelming intelligence advantage,”according to its website. To date, it has fundedteams with researchers representing more than175 academic institutions, mostly in the UnitedStates.

While almost all Iarpa projects are unclassified,colleges increasingly carry out secret but

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lucrative government research at well-guardedfacilities. Two years after the 9/11 attacks, theUniversity of Maryland established a centerthat conducts classified research on languagefor the Pentagon and intelligence agencies.Edward Snowden worked there in 2005 as asecurity guard, eight years before he joined thegovernment contractor Booz Allen HamiltonInc. and leaked classified files on NSAsurveillance.

The center is located off-campus. Like manyuniversities, Maryland forbids secret researchon campus, but its transparency stops at the farside of its neatly trimmed lawns.

Other universities have no such compunctions.“Classified research on campuses, once highlycontroversial, is making a comeback,” VICEN e w s r e p o r t e d(https://news.vice.com/article/the-most-militarized-universit ies- in-america-a-vice-news-investigation) in 2015. The National SecurityAgency in 2013 awarded $60 mi l l ion(http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world / n a t i o n a l / n a t i o n a l -security/article24752110.html) to NorthCarolina State University in Raleigh, thelargest research grant in the university’shistory, to create an on-campus laboratory fordata analysis. Virginia Tech established aprivate nonprofit corporation in December2009 to “perform classified and highlyclassified work” in intelligence, cybersecurity,and national security. Two years later, theunivers i ty p lanted i ts f lag on pr imeintelligence-community turf. It opened aresearch center in Ballston, a neighborhood inArlington, Va., across the Potomac River fromWashington, brimming with CIA and Pentagoncontractors. The center features facilities for,according to the university, “conductingsensitive research on behalf of the nationalsecurity community.”

The Origins of the Relationship BetweenIntelligence and the Universities

Academe was present at the CIA’s creation. Itsprecursor, the Office of Strategic Services,founded in 1942, was “half cops-and-robbersand half faculty meeting,” according toMcGeorge Bundy, an intelligence officer duringWorld War II and later national security adviserto the presidents John F. Kennedy and LyndonB. Johnson. The OSS was largely an Ivy Leaguebastion. It attracted 13 Yale professors in itsfirst year, along with 42 students from theuniversity’s Class of 1943. A Yale assistantprofessor , under cover of acquir ingmanuscripts for the university library, becameOSS chief in Istanbul.

When the CIA was established, in 1947, the Ivyinfluence carried over. Skip Walz, the Yalecrew coach, doubled as a CIA recruiter,drawing a salary of $10,000 a year from eachemployer. Every three weeks he suppliednames of Yale athletes with the right academicand social credentials to a CIA agent whom hemet at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, inWashington. Although the agency graduallyexpanded hiring from other universities, 26percent of college graduates whom it employedduring the Nixon administration had IvyLeague degrees. The agency helped establishthink tanks and research centers at several topuniversities, such as MIT’s Center forInternational Studies in 1952.

Almost from its inception, the CIA cultivatedforeign students, recognizing their value asinformants and future government officials intheir homelands. It learned about them not onlythrough their professors but also through theCIA-funded National Student Association, thelargest student group in the United States.With only 26,433 international students in theUnited States in 1950, less than 3 percent oftoday’s total, the CIA relied on the associationto identify potential informants at home andabroad.

The agency, which supported the studentassociation as a non-Communist alternative to

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Soviet-backed student organizations, meddledin the group’s election of officers and sent itsactivists, including the future feminist GloriaSteinem, to disrupt international youthfestivals. “In the CIA, I finally found a group ofpeople who understood how important it was torepresent the diversity of our government’sideas at Communist festivals,” Steinem toldNewsweek in 1967. “If I had the choice, I woulddo it again.” With an assist from the CIA, thenumber of foreign students in the United Statesalmost doubled from 1950 to 1960.

The Relationship Unravels

Then it all unraveled. Ramparts, a monthlymagazine that opposed the Vietnam War,reported in 1966 that a Michigan StateUniversity program to train the SouthVietnamese police had five CIA agents on itspayroll. A year later, Ramparts revealed theCIA’s involvement in the National StudentAssociation, stirring a national outcry. TheJohnson administration responded by banningcovert federal funding of “any of the nation’seducational or private voluntary organizations”— though not of their individual members oremployees.

Privately, Johnson saw the hand of worldCommunism in both the Ramparts exposé andthe antiwar protests, and ordered the CIA andFBI to prove i t . FBI penetrat ion andsurveillance — including illegal wiretaps andwarrantless searches — expanded underPresident Richard Nixon but failed to turn upevidence of foreign funding.

The government’s crackdown on its campuscritics, along with CIA blunders such as thedisastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, in1961, fractured the camaraderie betweenintelligence agencies and academe. In 1968alone, there were 77 instances of picketing, sit-ins, and other student protests against CIArecruiters.

The disaffection was mutual. Just as Ivy Leaguegraduates began having doubts about joiningthe CIA, so older alumni who devoted theircareers to intelligence agencies bridled at theantiestablishment campus mood. “It is not true

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that universities rejected the intelligencecommunity: that community rejecteduniversities at least as early,” the Yale historianRobin Winks wrote.

Hostility between the intelligence services anduniversities peaked with the 1976 report of theSena te Se lec t Commi t tee t o S tudyGovernmental Operations with Respect toIntelligence Activities, usually known as theChurch Committee, after its chairman, SenatorFrank Church o f Idaho . In the mostcomprehensive investigation ever of U.S.intell igence agencies, the committeedocumented an appalling litany of abuses, someundertaken by presidential order and othersrogue. The CIA, it found, had tested LSD andother drugs on prisoners and students; opened215,820 letters passing through a New YorkCity postal facility over two decades; and triedto assassinate the Cuban dictator Fidel Castroand other foreign leaders. The FBI, for its part,had harassed civil-rights and anti-Vietnam Warprotesters by wiretapping them and smearingthem in anonymous letters to parents,neighbors, and employers.

The committee also exposed clandestineconnections between the CIA and highereducation. The agency was using “severalhundred academics” at more than a hundredU.S. colleges for, among other purposes,“providing leads and, on occasion, makingintroductions for intelligence purposes,”typically without anyone else on campus being“aware of the CIA link.”

Bowing to the CIA’s insistence on protecting itsagents, the committee didn’t name theprofessors or the colleges where they taught.Typically, the academics helped with recruitingforeign students. A professor would invite aninternational student — often from a Soviet-bloc country, or perhaps Iran — to his office toget acquainted. Flattered by the attention, thestudent would have no clue he was beingassessed as a potential CIA informant. The

professor would then arrange for the student tomeet a wealthy “friend” in publishing orinvesting. The friend would buy the studentdinner and pay him generously for an essayabout his country or his research specialty.

Unaware he was being compromised, thegrateful student would compose one well-compensated paper after another. By the timethe professor’s friend admitted that he was aCIA agent, and asked him to spy, the studenthad little choice but to agree. He couldn’treport the overture to his own government,because his acceptance of CIA money wouldjeopardize his reputation in his homeland, if nothis freedom.

The Church Committee and the Attempt toControl CIA Activity on Campus

Morton Halperin knew about this deceptionand found it “completely inappropriate.” Heintended to end it once and for all. The ChurchCommittee’s report showed him the way.

From a bookshelf in his office at the OpenSociety Foundations in Washington, where heis a senior adviser, Halperin extracts the firstvolume of the committee report. He opens thethumb-worn paperback to a passage he hadunderlined 40 years before: “The Committeebelieves that it is the responsibility of privateinstitutions and particularly the Americanacademic community to set the professionaland ethical standards of its members.” Thatsentence sent him on a quest to persuadecolleges to stand up to U.S. intelligenceagencies and curb covert activity on theircampuses. His mission would provoke anunprecedented confrontation between the CIAand the country’s most famous university. Itsoutcome would shape the relationship betweenU.S. intelligence and academe and still hasrepercussions today.

Halperin had Ivy League credentials asimpeccable as any CIA recruit’s: a bachelor’sdegree from Columbia and a Yale doctorate,

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followed by six years on the Harvard faculty. Aformer White House wunderkind who’d taken atop Pentagon post under President Johnsonbefore turning 30 and then joined the NationalSecurity Council staff under President Nixon,Halperin had himself become a target of thegovernment’s covert operations, largelybecause of his misgivings about the VietnamWar. With the approval of his mentor, HenryKissinger, then national-security adviser, theNixon administration tapped Halperin’s homephone in 1969, suspecting him of leakinginformation about the secret bombing ofCambodia to reporters. It also placed him nearthe top of Nixon’s notorious “enemies list.”

As director of the Center for National SecurityStudies, a project of the American CivilLiberties Union, Halperin had lobbied Congressto create the Church Committee. He attendedits hearings and testified before it, urging a banon clandestine operations because they bypasscongressional and public oversight and areincompatible with democratic values.

Armed with the committee’s recommendation,he approached Harvard and asked it to setrules for secret CIA activity on campus. Heexpected that any restrictions placed by thenation’s most prominent university wouldspread throughout academe.

Morton Halperin, Harvard and the CIA

Harvard General Counsel Daniel Steiner, whomHalperin contacted first, was sympathetic, andurged President Derek Bok to take up the issue.As it happened, Bok was already familiar withthe Church Committee. Its chief counsel,Frederick A.O. ("Fritz") Schwarz Jr., was afamily friend and former law student of Bok,who admired his political activism, especiallyon civil rights. As a third-year Harvard lawstudent in 1960, Schwarz had organized aprotest in Cambridge to support a sit-in byblacks at the lunch counter of a Woolworth'sdepartment store in Greensboro, NorthCarolina, that refused to serve them.

"I can still remember walking into HarvardSquare on a rainy day," Bok said in a 2015interview. "There in front of Woolworth's wereSchwarz and another student picketing overWoolworth's refusal to serve Negroes in theSouth."

Bok had also met with Church Committeemember Charles Mathias, a Republican senatorfrom Maryland, and staff director WilliamMiller, to discuss whether the committeeshould call for a federal law banning covertintelligence gathering on campus. Bok knewboth of them slightly. Miller had been agraduate student in Renaissance literature atHarvard, while Bok had lobbied Mathias in1970 against G. Harrold Carswell, whom Nixonhad nominated for the U.S. Supreme Courtdespite an indifferent reputation as a federaldistrict court judge. Mathias had impressedBok by carefully reviewing Carswell's recordand then bucking a president from his ownparty and voting against the nomination, whichwas defeated 51-45.

Universities typically oppose any extension offederal power over academic decisions.Reflecting this view, Bok told Mathias andMiller at their meeting that colleges, not thegovernment, should take the lead in curtailingcovert operations. They agreed.

"The integrity of the institutions required it,"Miller said in a 2015 interview. "It could not beimposed from outside."

Bok appointed four sages to set standards.They included Steiner and Harvard lawprofessor Archibald Cox, who had becomefamous during the 1973 “Saturday NightMassacre,” when President Nixon fired him asspecial prosecutor for the Watergate scandal.Steiner met with top CIA officials, includingCord Meyer Jr., who had overseen the agency’sh idden ro le in the Nat ional StudentAssociation. Based on their discussions, Steinerwrote to Meyer, “I would conclude that the CIAfeels it is appropriate to use, on a compensated

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or uncompensated basis, faculty members andadministrators for operational purposes,including the gathering of intelligence asrequested by the CIA, and as covert recruiterson campus.”

The Harvard wise men disagreed. Their 1977guidelines prohibited students and facultymembers from undertaking “intelligenceoperations” for the CIA, although they could bedebriefed about foreign travels after returninghome. “The use of the academic profession andscholarly enterprises to provide a ‘cover’ forintelligence activities is likely to corrupt theacademic process and lead to a loss of publicrespect for academic enterprises,” they wrote.

Also forbidden was helping the CIA “inobtaining the unwitting services of anothermember of the Harvard community” — in otherwords, recruiting foreign students under falsepretenses. To Bok and his advisers, thisperverted the trust between professor andstudent on which higher education is built.Posing as a mentor, a professor might seek aforeign student’s views on international affairs,or ask about his financial situation, not to guidehim but to help the CIA evaluate and enlist him.And, once it snared the student, the agencymight ask him to break the laws of his homecountry — a request that Harvard couldn’t be aparty to.

“Many of these students are highly vulnerable,”Bok told the Senate in 1978. “They arefrequently young and inexperienced, oftenshort of funds and away from their homelandsfor the first time. Is it appropriate for facultymembers, who supposedly are acting in thebest interests of the students, to be part of aprocess of recruiting such students to engagein activities that may be hazardous andprobably illegal under the laws of their homecountries? I think not.”

The Harvard committee acknowledged that itsnew rules made the CIA’s job harder. “This lossis one that a free society should be willing to

suffer,” it said.

Admiral Stansfield Turner saw no reason tosuffer. CIA director from 1977 to 1981, hebelieved that the agency should take advantageof the presence of foreign students on U.S. soil.Since recruiting foreigners in totalitariancountries is difficult, “it would be foolish not toattempt to identify sympathetic people whenthey are in our country,” he wrote in hisautobiography. Turner rejected Harvard’sguidelines — as well as a Church Committeerecommendation that the agency tell universitypresidents about clandestine relationships ontheir campuses — and made clear that theagency had no intention of following them.

If professors want to help the CIA, Turnerargued in correspondence with Bok, it’s theirright as American citizens. Harvard’s policy, heconcluded, “deprives academics of all freedomof choice in relation to involvement inintelligence activities.”

The CIA promulgated its own “Regulation onRelationships with the U.S. AcademicCommunity,” which remains in effect today.The one-page regulation ratified the status quo,permitting the agency to “enter into personalservices contracts and other continuingrelationships with individual full-time staff andfaculty members.” The CIA would “suggest”that the staff or faculty member alert a senioruniversi ty of f ic ia l , “unless securi tyconsiderations preclude such a disclosure orthe individual objects.”

Harvard and the CIA bickered with one eye onthe audience they wanted to impress: the restof academe. One university, no matter howprestigious, couldn’t stare down the CIA. But ifother universities lined up behind Harvard, theagency would be hard-pressed to resist.

Halperin set out like Johnny Appleseed to sowthe Harvard guidelines across the country. Tohis shock, the soi l was barren. Otheruniversities were reluctant to follow Harvard’s

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lead without documented evidence of covertCIA-faculty relationships, which the ChurchCommittee had suppressed. Universitypresidents wrote to the CIA, asking forparticulars about cooperating faculty members,which the agency declined to provide. Someprofessors complained that Harvard’s ruleswould infringe on their academic freedom.

Only 10 colleges adopted Harvard’s policy evenin diluted form.

Forty years later, Halperin remains perplexed.“I thought once Harvard did it, everybody elsewould follow,” he says. “Nobody did. It was abig disappointment. If we had been able tomake it the norm on major campuses, it wouldhave had impact. I was befuddled, bewildered,and frustrated. Finally, I just gave up.”

CIA moves to mend the breach with theuniversities

The CIA moved to mend the breach withacademe. In 1977 it started a “scholars-in-residence” program in which professors onsabbatical from their universities were givencontracts to advise CIA analysts and made“privy to information that would never beavailable to them on campus.” In 1985 theagency added an “officers-in-residence”component, which placed intelligence officersnearing retirement at universities at CIAexpense.

The effectiveness of the officers-in-residenceprogram was “very mixed,” said the former CIAanalyst Brian Latell, who ran it from 1994 to1998. Before he took over, he said, “we weresending Dagwood Bumsteads who should havebeen forced into retirement.” Some were justhanging around campus with nothing to do.Latell set standards; the officers must haveadvanced degrees and be allowed to teach. Atits peak, the program had officers in residenceat more than a dozen universities.

The CIA supplied not only teachers but also

students, intervening in a cherished academicbailiwick: admissions. In some cases itarranged schooling for valuable foreigninformants who were in danger and had to fleeto the United States.

In other instances, the CIA compensatedforeign agents by arranging their children’s orgrandchildren’s admission to an Americancollege and paying their tuition, typicallythrough a front organization. “When you’rerecruiting a foreigner, you look at, ‘What can Ido for this guy?’ Sometimes a guy will say, ‘Iwant my daughter to go to a good Americanschool,’ ” says Gene Coyle, who went to IndianaUniversity as a CIA officer in residence. Heretired from the agency in 2006 and is now aprofessor of practice at Indiana.

“The answer may be, ‘We may be able to lineher up with a scholarship from the AardvarkSociety of Boston.’ Instead of giving Daddy coldhard cash, when he has to explain where hegets it, his daughter gets the Aardvark Societysecond-born scholarship for people fromUzbekistan.”

While the CIA can pul l str ings at topuniversities when it needs to, some informantsask for less selective colleges. “We sent anawful lot of Arabs” to state universities in theSouthwest, an ex-officer recalls. “They allwanted to study petroleum engineering. Thoseschools had a huge Arab population, and theyfit right in.”

A generational shift underlies the increasingties between the intelligence community andacademe. Baby-boomer professors who grew upprotesting the CIA-aided misadventures of the1960s began to retire, replaced by thoseshaped by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,the first Gulf War, and 9/11. Younger facultymembers are more likely to regard thecollecting and sifting of intelligence as a vitaltool for a nation under threat and a patrioticduty compatible with — even desirable for —academic research.

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Barbara Walter considers it a public service toeducate the CIA. The political scientist at theUniversity of California at San Diego givesunpaid presentations at think tanks fronting forthe agency, sometimes for audiences whosename tags carry only their first names. WhenCIA recruiters have visited UCSD, she hashelped them organize daylong simulations offoreign-policy crises to measure graduatestudents’ analytic abilities — and even role-played a CIA official.

She’s aware that some older faculty colleaguesfrown on those activities. “My more seniorcolleagues would absolutely not be comfortableconsulting with the CIA or intelligenceagencies,” she says. “Anybody who remembersor had exposure to the Vietnam War has thisvisceral reaction.”

Graham Spanier was the exception to Walter’sdictum. The Vietnam War didn’t prejudice himagainst intel l igence agencies. As anundergraduate and graduate student at IowaState University, he told me, he had been an“establishment radical.” Spanier, who hadstudent and medical deferments and so didn’tserve in the war, led peaceful, law-abidingdemonstrations against it but disapproved ofconfrontational tactics, such as taking overadministration buildings. Once, when a marchthreatened to turn unruly, he borrowed a policeloudspeaker to urge calm.

“ I had the grea tes t respec t fo r l awenforcement,” he said. “I was always in theforefront of change, but I believed in workingthrough the system. I wanted to be at the table,making change, rather than outside thebuilding, yelling and having no effect.”

As he advanced in his career, gaining a seat atthe table of administrators who hammered outacademic policy, he paid little heed to theChurch Committee or to CIA and FBI activities.Then, in 1995, he was appointed president ofPenn State. Because the university conductsclassified research at its Applied Research

Laboratory, Spanier needed a securityclearance. While he was being vetted, he readnewspaper accounts linking a University ofSouth Florida professor, Sami Al-Arian, and anadjunct instructor, Ramadan Shallah, toPalestinian Islamic Jihad, an Iran-backedterrorist group. Spanier was struck by USFPresident Betty Castor’s lament that she’d hadno idea of Al-Arian’s alleged fund-raising forterrorists and that the FBI had not given her“one iota” of information.

The soft-spoken Shallah had been named headof Islamic Jihad and vowed war against Israel.The director of the international-studies centerat USF was quoted as saying, “We couldn’t bemore surprised.”

Spanier made his own vow: Never be surprised.As a university president, he thought, “I wantto be the first to know, not the last.”

He convened a meeting in his conference roomof every government agency that might conductan investigation at Penn State, from the FBIand CIA to the Naval Criminal InvestigativeService (the university does Navy research) andstate and local police departments. “What Isaid to them is, ‘If there is a significantnational-security or law-enforcement issue onmy campus, you can trust me. I understand theimportance and sensitivity of such matters. Iwould like you to feel comfortable coming tome to talk about it, rather than sneakingaround behind my back.’ ”

They agreed to stay in touch. From then on, anFBI or CIA agent — usually both — would dropby once a month to brief him or ask his advice,typically about counterintelligence orcybersecurity issues involving foreign studentsor visitors. In 2002, David W. Szady became theFBI’s assistant director for counterintelligence.A quarter-century before, he had goneundercover at the University of Pittsburgh,posing as a chemist to befriend Soviet students.Now, like Spanier, he wanted to smoothrelations between intelligence agencies and

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academe. Soon, FBI and CIA officials askedSpanier to expand the Penn State experimentnationwide.

The result was the National Security HigherEducation Advisory Board (NSHEAB),established in 2005 with Spanier as itschairman. It consisted, then as now, of 20 to 25university presidents and higher-educationleaders, though some initially were nervousabout their membership becoming public,fearing a campus backlash that nevermaterialized. Spanier, conferring with the FBIand CIA, chose the members, primarily fromprestigious research universities. At the FBI,Szady says, “nobody thought we could get it upand running,” because academe was perceivedas hostile turf.

Board members receive security clearancesand go to FBI and CIA offices periodically forclassified briefings. The agenda for an October2013 meeting at FBI headquarters, forexample, included the investigation of EdwardSnowden for leaking classified NationalSecurity Agency documents; the BostonMarathon bombing; Russian threats tolaboratories and research; and Department ofDefense-funded students abroad “beingaggressively targeted” by Iranian intelligence.Afterward the FBI hosted a dinner for boardmembers at a gourmet Italian restaurant indowntown Washington.

“There’s a real tension between what the FBIand CIA want to do and our valid and necessaryinternational openness,” says one boardmember, Rice University’s president, DavidLeebron. “But we don’t want to wake up onemorning and find out that there are people oncampus stealing our trade secrets or puttingour country in danger. We might be uneasybedfe l lows, but we’ve got to f ind anaccommodation.”

Spanier, the FBI and the CIA

The FBI and Spanier reached an understandingthat it would notify him or the board aboutinvestigations at U.S. universities. In return forbeing kept in the loop, Spanier opened doorsfor the FBI throughout academe. He gave FBI-sponsored seminars for administrators at MIT,Michigan State, Stanford, and otheruniversities, as well as for national associationsof higher-education trustees and lawyers. Manyof them arrived at his talks “with a healthydegree of skepticism,” he told me. Displayinghis American Civil Liberties Union membershipcard to prove that he shared their devotion toacademic freedom, Spanier would assure themthat the FBI had changed since J. EdgarHoover’s henchmen snooped in student files.

He also acted as a go-between for the CIA withuniversity leaders who weren’t on the national-security board: “What a CIA person can’t do iscall the president’s office, and when thesecretary answers, say, ‘I’m from the CIA, and Iwant an appointment.’ It doesn’t work, and it’snot credible.

“Before anybody would do that, I would call thepresident,” Spanier continued. “The presidentsall knew me. They would take my call. … Iwould say, ‘Someone from the CIA would like tocome. There’s no issue on your campus now’ —occasionally there was an issue; most often itwas a get-acquainted meeting. Sometimes Iwould just give the first name. ‘Someone willcall your assistant; it’s Bob.’ … That worked100 percent of the time.”

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Spanier facilitated CIA introductions to thepresidents of both Carnegie Mellon and OhioState. A Pittsburgh-based CIA officer beganvisiting Jared Cohon, Carnegie Mellon’spresident from 1997 to 2013, once or twice ayear. “I know there was direct activity withselected faculty,” Cohon says. “They wereinterested in what the faculty might haveobserved when they went to fore ignconferences. My impression, what I heard fromthe CIA, was that it was more defensive thanoffensive. Trying to make sure those facultyweren’t recruited by a foreign power.

“I was uneasy about it, and I am uneasy,” headds. “I’m a kid of the ’60s, and I remember allthe protests on campus. The idea of the CIAbeing on campus would have turned peoplecrazy. Things have changed dramatically inthat regard.”

Spanier frequently traveled abroad, visitingChina, Cuba, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and othercountries of interest to the CIA. On his return,the agency would debrief him. “I have been inthe company of presidents, prime ministers,corporate chief executives, and eminentscientists,” he told me. “That’s a level of lifeexperience and exposure you don’t have as acase officer or even a State Departmentemployee.”

I asked if U.S. intelligence had ever instructedhim to gather specific information — in otherwords, if he had ever acted as an intelligenceagent. He smiled and said, “I can’t talk aboutit.”

His lofty contacts enabled Spanier to steerfederal research funds to universities ingeneral and Penn State in particular. WhenRobert Gates, who as president of Texas A&MUniversity had been Spanier’s “close colleague”on the higher-education-advisory board,became U.S. secretary of defense, in December2006, they brainstormed about academe’s rolein national defense. The result was thePentagon-funded Minerva Initiative, which

supports social-science research on regions ofstrategic importance to U.S. security.

At meetings with the CIA’s chief scientist or thehead of the FBI’s science-and-technologybranch, Spanier invariably asked, “What’s yourgreatest need?” He rarely heard the answerwithout thinking, We can do that at Penn State.Then he would approach the director of theappropriate Penn State laboratory, explainwhat the CIA or FBI wanted, and say, “Whydon’t you go and talk to them?”

Spanier resigned as Penn State president in2011 and as chairman of the National SecurityHigher Education Advisory Board soonafterward, during a firestorm over child sexabuse by Jerry Sandusky, a former assistantfootball coach. University trustees hired LouisFreeh to investigate. He and Spanier had beenfriendly for years. Freeh was FBI director whenSpanier welcomed the bureau to Penn State. In2005, Freeh inscribed a copy of his memoir, MyFBI, to Spanier with “warm wishes andappreciation for your leadership, vision andintegrity.”

Freeh’s 2012 report portrayed Spanier quitedifferently. It accused him and others ofconcealing the child-sex-abuse allegations fromtrustees and authorities and exhibiting “astriking lack of empathy” for victims. Spanierdenied the allegations and sued Freeh andPenn State separately, contending that theywere scapegoatingd him. The universitycountersued. In March a jury convicted Spaniero f one misdemeanor count o f ch i ldendangerment for failing to report the abuse.In June he was sentenced to two months in jail,followed by at least two months of house arrest.

The CIA and FBI on Campus since 9.11

Thanks to Spanier, CIA and FBI agents couldnow stride onto campus through the main gate,with university presidents personally arrangingtheir appointments with faculty members andstudents. But, except possibly at Penn State,

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they still slipped in through the back doorwhenever it suited them, ignoring their pactwith Spanier that they would inform universityleaders of their campus investigations.

For example, the FBI didn’t notify universitiesduring the 2011 Arab Spring, when itquestioned Libyan students nationwide,including Mohamed Farhat, a graduate studentat Binghamton University, of the StateUniversity of New York.

“I’m a talkative guy,” Farhat told me. “I amvery truthful. I don’t like hiding.” Married withthree children — the eldest, a daughter, born inLibya, and two sons born in the United States— Farhat grew up in Zliten, a town about 100miles east of Tripoli. He studied electricalengineering at a technical college, but it boredhim, and he discovered that he had an aptitudefor English. Within a few years he was teachingEnglish at every level from middle school tocollege.

When Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of the dictatorMuammar Gaddafi, decreed that the Libyangovernment would provide 5,000 scholarshipsfor s tudy abroad, Farhat se ized theopportunity. He arrived in the United States inDecember 2008 and, after a year of Englishlanguage study in Pittsburgh, enrolled atBinghamton.

As democratic uprisings sprouted throughoutthe Arab world in 2011, Farhat canceled hisc lasses for the semester and jo inedcybergroups opposing the Gaddafi regime.There were about 1,500 Libyan students in theUnited States, and Farhat knew many of them.Soon friends began calling to let him know thatthe FBI had interviewed them, and that he, too,should expect a visit.

A worried Farhat contacted Ellen Badger, thendirector of Binghamton’s international-studentsoffice. She was accustomed to rebuffing FBIinquiries. When a university admits a foreignstudent or visiting scholar, it issues him or her

a document required for a visa. It transmits thesame information electronically to thedepartments of State and Homeland Security,but not to the FBI, which, unlike the other twoagencies, has no regulatory authority over thispopulation. Unless the FBI had a subpoena,under the federal Family Educational Rightsand Privacy Act she could provide only“directory information,” which includes basicstudent data, such as dates of attendance,degrees and awards, and field of study.

“There was a clear understanding they [theFBI] were going to chat with me in thefriendliest way and would be happy with anyinformation I could give,” Badger says. “I wouldrespond in the friendliest way and give themnothing. That’s how the dance went.”

She reassured Farhat: The FBI would probablycome to her first, and she would take care of it.Instead, the FBI bypassed Badger. Because theCIA was “somewhat blind” regarding on-the-ground intelligence in Libya, the FBI had beenassigned to question students about thesituation there, one insider told me. Agentswere instructed to interview Libyan studentsoff-campus, without alerting professors oradministrators. To protect informants fromexposure, the bureau wanted to be as discreetas possible.

An agent knocked on the door of Farhat’sapartment in a three-story brick building westof campus, showed identification, and said hewanted to schedule a time to talk with him. Itnever occurred to Farhat to refuse.

“I have no idea about rights,” he says. “This isnot part of our culture. To me, the FBI are theultimate power.”

Two agents showed up on the appointedmorning. They sat at his kitchen table andunfolded a black-and-white map of Libya,asking where he was from. It was the first offive visits from the FBI, each lasting more thanan hour, over a period of two months. The same

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local agent came every time, accompanied byone of two agents with experience abroad; onespoke a little Arabic. At the initial interview,they explained that they wanted to make surethat he wasn’t threatening, or threatened by,any pro-Gaddafi Libyans.

That mission reflected the bureau’s concernthat, since most Libyan students in the UnitedStates were on government scholarships, somemight be loyal to Gaddafi — and planning actsof terror against the United States forsupporting the revolution against him. Thatworry turned out to be misplaced. “Thestudents hated Gaddafi,” the insider recalled. “Idon’t want to say it was a waste of time, but wesatisfied ourselves that there was no threatfrom the Libyans.”

The agents proceeded to their other purpose:gathering intelligence. They asked Farhatabout Libyan society and customs and his lifefrom secondary school on. What disturbed himmost were the questions about his and hiswife’s friends and relatives, from other Libyanstudents to his uncles in the military. Theagents wanted names, email addresses, phone

numbers. Because they told him that they knewhis email address and Facebook affiliations, hecoughed up his most-frequent contacts,figuring that the bureau could track themanyway.

By the fourth visit, Farhat says, “I wasannoyed.” The next time, he decided, would bethe last. “I will tell them, ‘No more,’ ” hepromised himself. As it turned out, he neverhad to muster the courage to defy them,because on the fifth session they wrapped up,then never returned.

Farhat didn’t tell Badger about the agents untilafterward. “My reaction was regret,” she says.“What you want to do in a situation like this ismake sure students are informed of theirrights. They don’t have to answer anyquestions. They can decline a visit. They canset terms: ‘ I want the director of theinternational office there.’ ‘I want a facultymember there.’ They have control.

“I never got to give that little speech.”

This is an expanded version of an article thatappeared in The Chronicle Review.

Daniel Golden is an American writer. A senior editor for ProPublica(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica), he is a former writer for The Wall Street Journaland a managing editor for Bloomberg News. His series on Corporate Tax Inversions wonBloomberg’s first Pulitzer Prize in 2015. He is the author of The Price of Admission: HowAmerica’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside theGate (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000WJVKBC/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20). His most recentbook is Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America'sUniversities (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XRGRY2R/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20).