Patriotic Betrayal
The Inside Story of the CIA's Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism

Date Written:  2015-03-03
Publisher:  Yale University Press
Year Published:  2015
Pages:  552pp   Price:  $35   ISBN:  9780300205084
Resource Type:  Book
Cx Number:  CX18418

A multilayered, mystifying exposé of how the CIA infiltrated and ultimately directed the U.S. National Student Association in thwarting international communist goals from 1950 to 1967.

Abstract: 
In 1967, CIA director Richard Helms had, as he would later recall, "one of my darkest days" when President Lyndon Johnson told him that the muckraking magazine Ramparts was about to expose one of the Agency's best-kept secrets: a covert project to enroll American students in the crusade against communism. Ramparts, however, had only a small part of the story of the CIA's two-decades-long effort to suborn the National Student Association. Patriotic Betrayal tells the rest of the tale, which reads like a John le Carré novel, filled with self-serving rationalizations, layers of duplicity, and bureaucratic double-talk.