NSA

Several National Student Association delegates yesterday suggested that even though the Central Intelligence Agency has contributed money to NSA, it has not influenced NSA policy. This view is dangerously naive.

While the present national leaders of NSA have refused to comment on the extent of CIA influence, past officials--some who knew of the relationship and some who did not--are beginning to talk. They indicate that the CIA groomed the leaders of the NSA's International Commission and that the agency has had access to student reports on young leaders from this and other countries.

The relationship with the CIA is too serious to be dismissed, as one delegate did publicly yesterday, as a mistake that NSA must never repeat. In fact, the mistake may be serious enough to mean the dissolution of NSA.

Many of its members are openly embittered by NSA's secretly arranged relationship--one verging on dependence--with the CIA. Many young idealists who devoted a year or more to NSA work are understandably claiming that they were duped.

At international youth conferences in the past, NSA delegations reaped propaganda advantage by declaring that they were the only major group in attendance which was not sponsored by its country's government. That claim has been exposed as a lie.

NSA's public activities in the past have been generally laudable: the group contributed to civil rights actively in the South in the early 1960's and has maintained more enlightened foreign policy positions than the government. But however satisfactory its public past may have been, the recent disclosures of CIA involvement will probably convince many of its members and supporters that NSA is no longer useful.