Spy Schools by Daniel Golden

Author:Daniel Golden
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

7

THE CIA’S FAVORITE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT

On the crisp autumn afternoon of November 26, 2007, a black car picked up Pennsylvania State University president Graham Spanier at Washington’s Dulles International Airport and whisked him to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Using his identification card embedded with a hologram and computer chip, he checked in at security and was greeted by the chief of staff of the National Resources Division, the CIA’s clandestine domestic service. They proceeded to a conference room, where about two dozen chiefs of station and other senior CIA intelligence officers awaited them.

Spanier was expecting to brief them on the work of the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, an organization he chaired and had helped create, which fostered dialogue between intelligence agencies and universities. First, though, the CIA surprised him. In a brief, confidential ceremony, it presented him with the Warren Medal that is, according to Spanier, the agency’s highest honor for non-employees. Named after late chief justice Earl Warren, and enclosed in a handsome hand-carved wooden box, the medal was about four inches in diameter and resembled a large gold coin. The front depicted an eagle and was inscribed, “For Outstanding Service to the United States.” The other side read, “To Dr. Graham B. Spanier. For your outstanding contributions to the national security of the United States of America. Thank you from a grateful nation.”

The honor recognized Spanier’s dedication to alerting college administrators to the threat of human and cyber-espionage, and to opening doors for the agency at campuses nationwide. A former family therapist and television talk-show host with an unruffled, empathetic manner and features—round face, white hair, blue eyes—reminiscent of Phil Donahue, Spanier soothed many an academic’s anxieties about dealing with the CIA and FBI.

Since the intelligence agencies were going to meddle anyway, Spanier reasoned, they should do so with the knowledge and consent of university presidents. “My feeling was, If there’s a spy on my campus, a potential terrorist, or a visiting faculty member you believe is up to no good, I know you’ll be pursuing it,” he told me in April 2016. “Here’s the deal. Rather than break into his office, come to me, I have top-secret clearance, show me your FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] order, and I’ll have someone unlock the door.”

* * *

SPANIER’S CIA MEDAL—and a similar FBI award a year later—symbolized a reconciliation between the intelligence services and academia. The relationship has come full circle: from chumminess in the 1940s and 1950s, to the animosity during the Vietnam War and civil rights eras that I remember from my youth in Amherst, Massachusetts, and back to cooperation after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Their unequal partnership, though, tilts toward the government. U.S. intelligence seized on the renewed goodwill, and the red carpet rolled out by Spanier and other university administrators, to expand not only its public presence on campus but also covert operations and sponsoring of secret research. Except for the snubbing of Game of Pawns, the FBI movie about Glenn Shriver, federal encroachment on academic prerogatives met only token resistance.

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