The American Society of African Culture: The CIA and Transnational Networks of African Diaspora Intellectuals in the Cold War

Abstract

In February 1967, the US Cold War effort suffered a major setback. The west coast magazine Ramparts revealed that the CIA was secretly funding the ostensibly independent American student organization, the US National Student Association, via an array of “pass-through” foundations. The New York Times, which previously had sat on stories about the covert US effort in the Cold War battle for “hearts and minds”, followed up the Ramparts revelation with a series of articles exposing concealed Agency subsidies to a variety of other supposedly private citizen groups with overseas programmes. This unwanted publicity profoundly damaged the image of the organizations in question, effectively destroying some, and dealt the reputation of the CIA itself a blow from which it arguably never recovered.