Spies and academia. David Glenn publishes a fascinating report on a new US government program that will send academics into the intelligence agencies and abroad:

It is the program's semisecrecy that most alarms its critics. After all, they point out, it is intended to train deskbound analysts, not people who will serve in the agencies' covert, or "operations," arms. Why, then, the need for opacity?

For skeptics, the presence of anonymous intelligence personnel on campus raises memories of the cold-war era, when the FBI kept elaborate files on professors' political affiliations, and the research agendas of area-studies centers were shaped by the CIA's needs. If the government wanted a forecast of Ukraine's potato harvest for 1956, Harvard University's Russian Research Center would produce one. In 1951 the CIA secretly financed (and guided) the anthropology association's first effort to create a comprehensive database of its members. The roster included information about what languages the scholars spoke, which countries they had visited, and their political contacts overseas...

More notoriously, American social scientists occasionally joined secret research projects that were intertwined both with the CIA and with authoritarian regimes overseas. In the late 1960s, several anthropologists worked on classified projects designed to stabilize the government of Thailand. Among other things, they surveyed villagers about their attitudes toward communism. It is believed (although not known for certain) that the Thai military used the survey data when deciding where to conduct counterinsurgency operations.

Read the whole piece.

Posted by Laura at March 22, 2005 03:37 PM