Spy Schools

September 15, 2017

Readers unfamiliar with American and foreign intelligence agencies' (mostly) covert exploitation of America's universities doubtless will find Pulitzer Prize winner Golden's (The Price of Admission) journalistic expose shocking. Even worse is the apparent complicity of administrative policymakers and more than a few presidents of academia, some with intimate ties to foreign espionage. Students on the low-income, high-IQ side of the sociological divide reportedly are at higher risk of encountering slick recruiters from the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other intelligence agencies, and are courted with promises of employment and even cash payouts. The CIA, claims Golden, has gone as far as staging academic conferences in order to coax Iranian nuclear scientists to defect; an isolated liberal arts college in southeast Ohio exchanged faculty with an infamous Chinese spy school. These revelations sound absurd but are public record. Such aggressive infiltration of academia wasn't tolerated during the Cold War. Academic specialists feared losing credibility, and putting their students in danger. Foreign governments providing valuable research loathed the CIA and understandably had zero interest in cultivating American spies--attitudes and official postures which crumbled after 9/11. VERDICT A sobering chronicle of intelligence agencies battling under the guise of national security for dominion over weaponized technology and its creators.--William Grabowski, McMechen, WV

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2017
An examination of how colleges and universities have become enmeshed in the world of espionage.Pulitzer Prize winner Golden (The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges--and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, 2006) turns his considerable fact-finding skills to an eye-opening chronicle of how higher education has evolved into a key source for obtaining military and technological intelligence. The proliferation of international students at American universities has aided the CIA and FBI in gaining recruits in the global war of clandestine information gathering. Government agencies also infiltrate campuses through professors, often with the support of top university administrators. Beyond recruiting, they work with admissions offices and place students. An especially fertile area for spies is graduate and midcareer students. The schools targeted for espionage range from small colleges to large state universities to Ivy League institutions; Harvard's Kennedy School of Government is one of the latter highlighted by Golden. Foreign governments also see U.S. universities as vehicles for obtaining intelligence, and there are further battlegrounds at foreign universities and campuses of U.S. universities abroad. Such activities show how much the political climate has changed on campuses since the 1960s and '70s and the congressional inquiries, such as the Church Committee, of that time. The author presents a stark picture of the expansion of espionage from the old cloak-and-dagger methods to the classrooms and research centers. While the CIA has long recruited on college campuses, the FBI has evolved as an organization after 9/11; its expanded mission to ferret out foreign intelligence is conveniently met at colleges, which readily cooperate. With American institutions of higher education so committed to big-time athletics and--as Golden insightfully recounts--widely engaged in espionage, the question arises: what happened to the traditional role of education on our campuses? A provocative look at the transformation of academia to a broad chessboard of international espionage.

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