Northwestern
University's CIA Connection
by bob feldman
12 December 2002
Between 1982 and 1989 Henry Bienen was employed as a Central
Intelligence Agency [CIA] consultant. In recent years, former
CIA Consultant Bienen has been the president of Northwestern University.
Northwestern University is not the first liberal institution
of higher education to be involved with the CIA. As long ago as
1968, The Closed Corporation: American Universities In Crisis
by James Ridgeway noted that "through foundations" the CIA "dispursed
funds to universities for work which interested it." The same
book also recalled:
"MIT's Center for International Studies began as a CIA front.
Michigan State's police-training program in South Vietnam was
a dodge for the CIA agents. Cornell's School of Industrial and
Labor Relations was supported by the CIA...Harvard University
received money from more than a dozen CIA passes...Columbia University's
research on income in East Central Europe was financed by the
CIA...Joseph Strayer, a medieval historian [at Princeton] is perhaps
the agency's most devoted consultant."
According to the 1991 book CIA Off-Campus by Ami Chen
Mills, "CIA spokesperson Sharon Foster said in 1988 that the CIA
has enough professors under Agency contract 'to staff a large
university.'" The same book also observed:
"As of the late 1970s, approximately 5,000 professors were doing
CIA work in some capacity, either `spotting' U.S. or foreign recruitment
candidates, participating in research and grant work or carrying
out more active programs like foreign police training. It is estimated
that about 60 percent of these academics were aware of the nature
of their employment, while another 40 percent did the CIA's bidding
in the dark—through front companies or foundations. In the
1990s, the number of academics on the CIA payroll has undoubtedly
increased."
In a November 1972 acknowledgment which appeared in his book
Kenya: The Politics Of Participation And Control (that
was written under the auspices of the Harvard Center for International
Affairs), Northwestern University President Bienen wrote that
"I am especially grateful to Samuel Huntington." Coincidentally,
in 1985 "the former director of Harvard's Center for International
Affairs, Samuel P. Huntington, was...uncloaked as a CIA ‘asset’
working secretly with a CIA consultant and publishing documents
that were...paid for...by the Agency" (CIA Off Campus by
Ami Chen Mills).