Weaponizing Anthropology. David H. Price
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Foster bragged that the CIA then secretly employed enough university professors “to staff a large university.” Most experts estimate that this presence has grown since 2001 (Mills 1991:37).
The quiet rise of programs like PRISP or ICCIE (see Chapter Four) should not surprise anyone given the steady cuts in federal funding for higher education, and the resulting pressures for more mercenary roles for the academy. In the post-World War Two decades, scholars naively self-recruited themselves or followed classmates to the CIA, but increasingly those of us who have studied the languages, culture and histories of peoples around the world have also learned about the role of the CIA in undermining the autonomy of those cultures we study, and the steady construction of this history has hurt the agency’s efforts to recruit the best and brightest post-graduates. For decades the students studying Arabic, Urdu, Basque or Farsi were predominantly curious admirers of the cultures and languages they studied, the current shift now finds a visible increase in students whose studies are driven by the market forces of new Wars on Terrorism. If the CIA can use PRISP to indenture students in the early days of their graduate training-supplemented with mandated summer camp internships immersed in the workplace ethos of CIA-the company can mold their ideological inclinations even before their grasp of cultural history is shaped in the relatively open environment of their university. As these PRISP graduates enter the CIA’s institutional environment of self-reinforcing Group Think they will present a reduced risk of creating cognitive dissonance by bringing new views that threaten the agency’s narrow view of the world. Institutional Group Think can thus safely be protected from external infection.
Healthy academic environments need openness because they, unlike the CIA, are nourished by the self-corrective features of open disagreement, dissent, and synthetic-reformulation. The presence of the PRISP’s secret sharers brings hidden agendas that sabotage these fundamental processes of academia. The Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program infects all of academia with a germ of dishonesty and distrust as participant scholars cloak their intentions and their ties to the hidden masters they serve.
Intelligence Scholar Loan Sharks
After I published my initial CounterPunch exposé on PRISP in January 2005, secondary stories followed on newspaper wire services, Democracy Now, NPR, in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Senator Pat Roberts soon began publicly speaking about the program, assuring the public there were no reasons to worry about PRISP spreading domestic surveillance on campus. Neoconservative anthropologist Stanley Kurtz used his column in the National Review to claim that I wouldn’t be happy until CIA agents killed themselves, absurdly writing, “So long as CIA recruits openly identify themselves to every Pakistani villager they talk to, Price is happy. Assisted suicide for aspiring CIA analysts may be morally acceptable to Professor Price, but I suspect Roberts Fellows may feel differently” (Kurtz 2005). The Wichita Eagle reported, “Roberts noted that legal safeguards against domestic spying are in place that weren’t in the 1950s and 1960s, when the anti-Communist fervor of former Sen. Joe McCarthy and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover created a climate that contributed to agency abuses. Specifically, a 1981 presidential executive order clearly prohibits physical surveillance of American citizens by agencies other than the FBI” (Wichita Eagle 2/13/05). This was a remarkable statement. Pat Roberts, then Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, appeared to not even understand that the U.S. Patriot Act dismantled safeguards preventing domestic surveillance by the CIA and other agencies. More revealing is that when pressed by reporters, Roberts and sources at CIA did not dispute the likelihood that having undisclosed CIA operatives amongst the ranks of academics could seriously damage the credibility of American academics conducting domestic and foreign research. This blasé attitude concerning the collateral damage of hapless academic bystanders won Roberts no friends in the academy as most academics realize the damage from such actions can be widespread.
But beyond Roberts’ reassuring words on the propriety of secretly sending intelligence agents to our classrooms, there was a quiet enthusiasm for the first cloned offspring of PRISP. And like its progenitor PRISP, this program was birthed in an atmosphere of public silence. In December 2004 when Congress approved the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (S. 2845), they established a Director of National Intelligence. One of the Director’s charges is to oversee a new scholarship program known as the Intelligence Community Scholars Program (ICSP). Though modeled after PRISP, the similarities and differences between these two programs reveal emerging trends not only in intelligence funding, but in the intelligence apparat’s new expectations for outcome-based funding in higher education.
The Director of National Intelligence is responsible for determining which specific fields and subjects of study will be funded under ICSP. Like the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, the ICSP authorizes directors of various unnamed intelligence agencies to make contractual agreements with students. But unlike the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, these ICSP students receive unspecified levels of funding for up to four years of university training. Congress specifies that ICSP participants owe two years of intelligence agency work for every year of funded education, with a ceiling of four years of study allowed unless overridden by the Director of National Intelligence.
Unlike previous intelligence-linked scholarship programs, the ICSP does not specifically limit the expenses incurred by participants. But given that the National Security Education Program’s current authorization of over $40,000 of annual “academic” expenses for students, it is reasonable to assume that the ICSP will likewise allow over $160,000 of expenses over a four-year period.
One reason why intelligence agencies are so interested in recruiting social sciences and area studies students in the early stages of their education is because of a desire for early indoctrination of these students. Regardless of such efforts to select and shape these individuals, it seems inevitable that at least some will develop more critical attitudes towards these agencies as a result of their education or experiences with these agencies. But suppose a few ICSP students’ studies in a university history class lead them to read works like Philip Agee’s Inside the Company (Agee 1976) or John Stockwell’s In Search of Enemies (Stockwell 1979) and they decide they made a mistake in enrolling in the ICSP? If so, they will face serious penalties.
The 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act stated that if ICSP recipients decline to work for their sponsoring intelligence agency upon completing of their education, then the student “shall be liable to the United States for an amount equal to the total amount of the scholarships received[and] the interest on the amounts of such awards which would be payable if at the time the awards were received they were loans bearing interest at the maximum legal prevailing rate, as determined by the Treasurer of the United States, multiplied by three” (US Congress 2004, Public Law 108-458:h, 2. b). In other words, spy or have a lousy credit rating for the rest of your life.
Such penalties are routine boilerplate language used in other “payback”-based federal scholarship legislation. But the CIA, NSA, FBI and other intelligence agencies are not like the Department of Education, the NSF, or other mundane federal agencies. After all, CIA lawyers who argue that “water-boarding,” intense shaking, shabah-posturing, and prolonged-hooding do not constitute illegal torture might just as easily argue that the “maximum legal prevailing” interest rate is that established by the payday loan industry.
Get Ready for the Big Payback
In 2008 I was contacted by a recipient of another pay-back national security related scholarship program who provided me with documentation establishing how the US government was pressuring him to engage in national security related work, of face financial penalties. Over a decade earlier, Nicolas Flattes, then an anthropology student at the University of Hawai’i, was awarded a Boren Scholarship from the National Security Education Program (NSEP), then a relatively new funding source for students in the social sciences studying foreign cultures of strategic interest to U.S. policy makers. Flattes’ NSEP scholarship allowed him to travel abroad to study food security issues and sustainable agriculture in southern India, in a gender development studies program focusing on nongovernmental organizations’ community initiatives.
Flattes signed a standard NSEP contract stating that after graduation he would work at an approved U.S. governmental agency dealing with national security issues, by posting his resume on NSEP’s website or applying