The NSA And Harvard

To the Editors of The Crimson:

It has come to the attention of the Spartacus Youth League that on February 16, recruiters from the National Security Agency, U.S. imperialism's secret spy agency, will be interviewing prospective spies and assassins at the JFK Building, Government Center, in downtown Boston. Ads in both The Crimson (17 January) and the Career Planning Newsletter direct Harvard students to contact the Career Planning Office for an interview.

We call on all to come demonstrate in protest against this monster drenched with the blood of workers and peasants in Vietnam and Chile. The Harvard Spartacus Youth League will join with students from Boston University to protest the presence of the recruiters at 11:30 on February 16, at Government Center.

The NSA, founded in 1952 by a still secret presidential directive, is ten times the size of the CIA, employing a work force of 120,000, and has a yearly budget over $10 billion. Four-fifths of all U.S. intelligence is gathered by NSA operatives from secret stations all over the world. Ostensibly responsible for the deciphering of codes, the NSA even more than its little brother the CIA is an international network of terror and reaction in the service of U.S. imperalism.

--The first American killed in Vietnam was an NSA agent.

--The USS Turner Joy and the USS Maddox, the two U.S. destroyers which invaded North Vietnamese waters in the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, were on NSA assignment.

--Che Guevara was tracked down and murdered in the Bolivian mountains in 1967 by NSA airborne operatives, who monitored his radio signals.

To those liberals, social democrats and Stalinists who call for reform of the NSA/CIA, we respond: Abolish the capitalist secret police! To reform them is only to make them better tools in the hands of the imperalists, whose interests they were created to serve. A workers revolution will sweep away all the creatures of imperalism as it rids the world of the brutal system of exploitation for profit, and prepares to build a new socialist society.

Last December, the SYL organized a demonstration "CIA Killer Spies Off Campus!" to protest William Colby's appearance at the Harvard Law School Forum. At UCLA, in 1975 the SYL as part of the Committee to End University Complicity with the CIA, organized a demonstration demanding that all complicity with the CIA be terminated and that all UCLA-CIA correspondence be published. An SYL-initiated committee at U Cal. Berkeley organized a picket and demonstration drawing over 250 participants around the slogans "CIA/NSA Recruiters off campus!" and "Abolish the CIA/NSA!" At Yale, an SYL propaganda campaign protesting the upcoming appearance of CIA recruiters on campus resulted in the cancellation of those scheduled interviews. Here in Boston, the super spy agency must be opposed by a militant protest action. "Abolish the CIA/NSA!"

In offering its services to the NSA recruiters (off campus or on), Harvard only routinely fulfills its role as the Number One think tank and training ground for the U.S. ruling class. Recruiters for the Navy and the Marines will be on campus on February 22 and 23, interviewing prospective Lt. Calleys for future My Lais. Research for government agencies, including the Army and Navy, is routinely done (the grants are announced in the administration's Gazette). As reported in the 29 January Crimson, Samuel P. Huntington of that same Government Department that gave the bourgeoisie Daniel P. Moynihan and Henry Kissinger, is in the running for Peanut King Carter's team as a member of the armed fist of U.S. imperialism, the Department of Defense. Huntington was the author of the infamous "forced draft urbanization" theory used as a justification for the massive bombing campaign which decimated the Vietnamese countryside and slaughtered thousands of civilians.

We of the SYL have no illusions in the "ivory tower" university--Harvard and all other universities are tied to the capitalist class and its state by a million threads. The Board of Overseers is infested with corporate heads and financial bigwigs. We do not call only for protesting CIA/NSA presence or military research on campus, but for the abolition of the Administration and the Board of Overseers, and nationalization of Harvard under worker-student-faculty control. We stand for open admissions with a full stipend for all students to enable all who wish to attend, and remedial and tutorial programs for those who have suffered the worthless "education" offered in ghetto and working class high schools in this race, class and sex biased society. The superior academic and research facilities of elite institutions like Harvard must not be reserved for those of wealth and privilege.

Demonstrate! Meet at 10:45 at Holyoke Center to go down to Government Center. Amy Richardson '78   for the Spartacus Youth League