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).

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