Taking Another Look at the Safran Affair

To the Editors of The Crimson:

There are several matters of fact as well as broader issues concerning scholars and the Central Intelligence Agency which are raised by your continuing reports on Professor Nadav Safran.

In your reports you continue to suggest that Professor Safran gave the CIA censorship rights whereas his contract says in substance that the pre-publication clause is standard, being designed to insure that no classified materal is revealed, but since the research covered by the contract is entirely based on open sources, approval of publication can be expected. There is nothing in the contract about editing or censoring the manuscript. This is precisely what happened as the Dean's report confirmed.

But my main concern is that openess of funding has received a disproportionate amount of attention in this matter, especially in relation to what I consider to be the more fundamental issue of the openess of sources. Any work based on materals not accessible to other scholars competent in a field is unacceptable as a work of scholarship because it cannot be subjected to examination and assessment by peers. Openess of sources is thus indispensable for attainment of the primary purpose of the university, the discovery and communication of truths about important matters. As Professor Safran's Saudia Arabia is based entirely on unclassified materals, it poses no problem in regard to the scholarly effort to get closer to the truth about this important matter. The great interest in the issue of "openess" over sources of funding and relative neglect of the question of openess of sources reflects an erosion of the belief that scholars and scholarship, regardless of their sources of funding and their different political perspectives, do share the norm and the practice of a commitment to truth and unbiased use of evidence. Do we really want to live in an intellectual climate in which our opinion of a book or article rests on who paid the piper? If things come to that, I can see little reason why any young person with integrity would want to become a scholar.

For example, the Crimson editors have not examined the greatest threats to such openess as it concerns research in political and social science. This is the threat posed by dictatorships and closed societies all over the world to researchers who write about them. Works based on selective access to documents cannot be assessed by other scholars not so privileged. Nor can we be fully confident of works written by scholars who have been given access to materials denied to others. While such problems may be less interesting than the hot topics of money and CIA, they are at least as important, and pose a greater danger to the credibility of American scholarship than does assistance to American intelligence agencies by scholars using unclassified materials.

"Area studies," such as the study of the Middle East, are particularly frought with these dangers. It is common knowledge that most departments of Middle East studies in the United States pay scant if any serious attention to Israel, and that the field is highly politicized. What American scholars of the Middle East write is often not far removed from the Arab-Israeli conflict. Nor is the fact that Nadav Safran is both Jewish and supportive of the broad contours of Israeli policy incidental to events of the last six months. Is not the politicization of this discipline and the role played by Middle East politics in American scholarship as equally important and interesting as the story you've been pursuing? One wonders if The Crimson has willingly or unknowingly allowed itself to be used as vehicle in the conflicts of the Middle East.

I cannot help by suspect that the driving force of your pursuit of Professor Safran and others who have worked for the CIA is simply the fact that they have had any contact with the CIA at all rather than the issue of his openess or lack of openess about funding. Are you suggesting that you would have no objections if more Harvard professors did work for American intelligence agencies as long as they were open about funding?

In the 1940s, left-wing scholars such as Herbert Marcuse and Barrington Moore, Jr. proudly worked in the Office of Strategic Services, to contribute to the defeat of the Nazis. Now that the primary political-military threats to free societies come from communist states and international terrorism the academic elite has become more reluctant to offer its assistance. Our intelligence about threats to the life and liberty of the United States and its allies can always be improved and one way to improve it is for the American academic elite to offer help when the country is needs it. Scholars are under no obligation to offer assistance to the CIA but should their convictions impel them to do so, their decisions should be respected no less than those of the left-leaning scholars of the 1940s who went to Washington to fight Hitlerism. What was right for Marcuse and Moore in the 1940s is no less so for Safran and Huntington in the 1980s.

If the editors of The Crimson have some suggestions as to how the intelligence services of the United States can be improved in the face of the hostility of the American intellectual and academic elite, they should let us know what they are. If not, opposition to academic assistance to the CIA amounts to condemning American intelligence analysis to a lower level of sophistication than is either prudent, safe or necessary. If The Crimson wants to enhance the divorce between scholarship and the CIA, it should also realize that such a divorce has serious and harmful consequences for the country as a whole. The Safran affair and to a lesser degree the Betts and Huntington issue indicate again that in the current climate at Harvard it takes courage to assist American intelligence agencies. It is not often that a scholar can both contribute to advancing knowledge and, at the same time, help his country. It is crucial that we defend the individual liberty of scholars to do so. Those such as Nadav Safran, as well as Samuel Huntington and Richard Betts who try to balance these potentially conflicting commitments deserve our respect and suppport. Jeffrey Herf   Research Associate   Center for International Studies   Resident Tutor, Adams House