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Chapter Two: The CIA’s University Spies - PRISP, ICSP, NSEP, and the Big Payback

What is overlooked in the growing, enthusiastic collaboration between the military-industrial complex and academe within the context of developing a powerful post-9/11 national security state is that the increasing militarization of higher education is itself a problem that may be even more insidious, damaging, and dangerous to the fate of democracy than that posed by terrorists who “hate our freedoms.

— Henry Giroux

Post 9/11 changes on American university campuses transformed university classrooms into covert training grounds for the CIA and other agencies in ways that increasingly threaten fundamental principles of academic openness as well as the integrity of a wide array of academic disciplines. Several programs developed in the past half decade found new ways to secretly place students with undisclosed ties to the CIA, FBI, NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and Homeland Security in American university classrooms.

There have long been tensions between the needs of academia and the needs of the National Security State; and even before the events of 9/11 expanded the powers of American intelligence agencies, universities were quietly being modified to serve the needs of intelligence agencies in new and covert ways. The most visible of these reforms was the establishment of the National Security Education Program (NSEP) which siphoned-off students from traditional foreign language funding programs such as Fulbright or Title VI. While traditional funding sources provide students with small stipends of a few thousand dollars to study foreign languages in American universities, the NSEP gives graduate students a wealth of funds (at times exceeding $40,000 a year) to study “in demand” languages, but with troubling pay-back stipulations mandating that recipients later work for unspecified U.S. national security agencies. Upon its debut in the early 1990s, the NSEP was harshly criticized for reaching through an assumed barrier separating the desires of academia and state (Rubin 1996). Numerous academic organizations, including, the Middle East Studies Association and the African Studies Association, Latin American Studies Association, and even the mainstream Boards of the Social Science Research Council and American Council of Learned Societies expressed deep concerns over scholars’ participation in the NSEP. And though the NSEP continues funding students despite these protests, there was some solace in knowing so many diverse academic organizations condemned this program.

But while many academics and professional associations openly opposed the NSEP’s entrance onto American campuses, there has been little public reaction to an even more troubling post-9/11 funding program which upgrades the existing American intelligence-university-interface. With little notice Congress approved section 318 of the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act which appropriated four million dollars to fund a pilot program known as the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP). Named after Senator Pat Roberts (R. Kansas, then Chair, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence), PRISP was designed to train intelligence operatives and analysts in American university classrooms for careers in the CIA and other agencies. PRISP now operates on an undisclosed number of American college and university campuses, and after the pilot phase of the program proved to be a useful means of recruiting and training members of intelligence agencies, the program continues to expand to campuses across the country.

PRISP participants must be American citizens who are enrolled fulltime in graduate degree programs with a minimum GPA of 3.4, they need to “complete at least one summer internship at CIA or other agencies,” and they must pass the same background investigations as other CIA employees. PRISP students receive financial stipends ranging up to $25,000 per year and they are required to participate in closed meetings with other PRISP scholars and individuals from their administering intelligence agency.

In 2003, the Lawrence Journal World (11/29/03) describing plans for developing this new program claimed that, “those in the program would be part of the ROTC program specializing in learning how to analyze a variety of conditions and activities based on a thorough understanding and deep knowledge of particular areas of the world” (Simons 2003). Beyond the similar requirements that participants of both programs commit years of service to their sponsoring military or intelligence branches there are few similarities between ROTC and PRISP. ROTC programs mostly operate in the open, as student-ROTC members register for ROTC courses and are proudly and visibly identified as members of the ROTC program, while PRISP students are instructed to keep their PRISP-affiliations hidden from others on campus.

The CIA’s website describes PRISP and lists sought academic specialties; these include experts on: China, the Middle East, Asia, Korea, Russia, the Caucasus, Africa and South America, and seeking language training or proficiency in: Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Dari, Turkish, Korean, or a Central Asian or Caucasian language such as Georgian, Turkmen, Tajik, or Uzbek (https://www.cia.gov/careers/opportunities/analytical/pat-roberts-intelligence-scholars-program-prisp.html, 12/15/10). PRISP also funds Islamic studies scholars and scientists with expertise in bioterrorism, counterterrorism, chemistry, physics, computer science and engineering. When PRISP was first launched in 2005, it was advertised on intelligence recruiting web sights (such as www.intelligencecareers.com or the National Ground Intelligence Center; these links have long since been removed) and was pitched on select university campuses in small, controlled recruiting sessions. In the years since its first funding, PRISP developed a low profile and an individualistic approach to finding candidates for PRISP funding.

When I made initial inquiries about PRISP to Senator Roberts’ staff in 2005 concerning the size and scope of PRISP I was given little useful information, but in response to my inquires Senator Roberts’ staff referred me to Mr. Tommy Glakas at the CIA. Mr. Glakas was reluctant to discuss many specific details of PRISP, but he did confirm that PRISP then funded about 100 students studying at an undisclosed number of American universities. When I asked Mr. Glakas in 2005 if PRISP was already up and running on college campuses, he first answered that it was, then said it wasn’t, then clarified that PRISP wasn’t the sort of program that was tied to university campuses-it was decentralized and tied to students, not campuses. When pressed further on what this meant Mr. Glakas gave no further information. He said that he had no way of knowing exactly how many universities currently have students participating in PRISP, claiming he could not know this because PRISP is administered not just by the CIA, but also through a variety of individual intelligence agencies like the NSA, MID, or Naval Intelligence. He stressed that PRISP was a decentralized scholarship program which funds students through various intelligence agencies. Mr. Glakas told me that he didn’t know who might know how many campuses had PRISP scholars and he would not identify which campuses are hosting these covert PRISP scholars. PRISP’s organizational structure is reminiscent of the sort of limited contact “cells” used by intelligence agencies, where an individual within an intelligence cell has only limited knowledge of other individuals in this same chain of connections — most commonly only knowing their individual “handler,” but not knowing the identities of others in the greater chain of connections.

PRISP was largely the brainchild of University of Kansas anthropologist Felix Moos-a longtime advocate of anthropological contacts with military and intelligence agencies. During the Vietnam War Moos worked in Laos and Thailand on World Bank-financed projects and over the years he has worked in various military advisory positions. He worked on the Pentagon’s ARPA Project Themis, and has been an instructor at the Naval War College and at the U.S. Staff and Command College at Fort Leavenworth. For years Moos taught courses on “Violence and Terrorism” at the University of Kansas. In the months after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon Moos elicited the support of his friend, former CIA DCI, Stansfield Turner to curry support in the senate and CIA to fund his vision of a merger between anthropology, academia, intelligence analysis and espionage training.

Professor Moos initially proposed that all PRISP students be required to master two foreign languages, and to enroll in a battery of university anthropology and history courses to learn the culture history of their selected regions (Kansas University Radio 2003). Moos’s vision for PRISP was more comprehensive than the program that eventually developed. Moos proposed having an active CIA campus presence where PRISP students would begin training as freshmen and, “by the time they would be commissioned, they would be ready to go to the branch intelligence units of their choice” (Kansas University Radio 2003).

It is tempting to describe Felix Moos as an anachronistic anthropologist out of sync with his discipline’s mainstream, but while many anthropologists express concerns about disciplinary ties to military and intelligence organizations, contemporary anthropology has no core with which to either sync or collide and there are others in the field who openly (and quietly) support such developments. Moos is a bright man, but his writings echo the musty tone and sentiments found in the limited bedside readings of Tom-Clancy-literate-colonials, as he prefers to quote from the wisdom of Sun Tzu and Samuel Huntington over anthropologists like Franz Boas or Laura Nader.

In 2002 I joined Moos (and anthropologists Robert Rubenstein, Anna Simons, Murray Wax and Hugh Gusterson) on one of the first post-9/11 American Anthropological Association panels to examine American anthropologists’ contributions to military and intelligence agencies. Moos acted incredulous that all anthropologists would not join his crusade, and he rhetorically asked, “Have anthropologists learned so little since 9/11/2001, as to not recognize the truth-and practicability, in Sun Tzu’s reminder that: ‘unless someone is subtle and perspicacious, he cannot perceive the substance in intelligence reports. It is subtle, subtle.” From the dais I could see not so subtle anthropologists in the audience employed by RAND and the Pentagon nodding their heads as if his words had hit a secret chord. Moos was clearly onto something, though at the time it was difficult to imagine just how far reaching these new connections between anthropologists and military and intelligence agencies would become.

Moos became the early post-9/11 leader publicly pushing for more open connections between anthropology and the CIA, but he was rotated out of the public spotlight pretty early on in this discourse. I’ve heard several different reasons suggested, ranging from the off-putting media effect of his faintly lingering German accent and his penchant for speaking in what has been described as “1940s sound bites.” After I published my initial PRISP exposé in CounterPunch, other media picked up the story (e.g., Willing 2006) and David Glenn wrote a story on PRISP in The Chronicle of Higher Education and later had a live online interview (3/23/05) with Professor Moos answering live questions from readers about PRISP, and his answers showcased his awkward reading from a dated script.

Moos explained to David Glenn how the War on Terror must sweep aside all reticence about bringing the CIA and other intelligence agencies onto our classrooms and into our hearts, arguing that:

The United States is at war, and thus, simply put, the existing cultural divide between the intelligence community, the U.S. military and academe has become a critical, dangerous, and very real detriment to our national security at home and abroad.

The former global symmetry of inter-nation conflict has become the asymmetry of terrorism and insurgency. Long gone are the days where academic anthropology might occasionally be applied to tourism and gender studies but not to critical area and language studies with a direct, practical use to national defense…..All of us have to re-examine our perceptions of each other, rather than simply claiming that the CIA in the United States, if not worldwide, now threatens the fundamental principles of academic transparency (Glenn 2005b).

President Bush’s declaration that the United States was at war with the concept of “terrorism” was vital to Moos, and something odd happened as he answered almost each of the queries from readers: Moos preferred answering questions with an odd formulaic montra stating, “ the United States is at war…” or “we are at war,” again and again with repeated answers. The effect was striking like a form of pastiche used by Stephen Colbert, as he would personalize this formula in all sorts of ways, such as when a question from a scholar from Yale was presented, he answered with the phrase, “The United States is at war, and that includes Yale and all American anthropologists…;” and when a scholar from U.C. Santa Barbara challenged him with a question, he began his reply stating “The United States is at war and that includes U.C. Santa Barbara.” Finally after nine separate uses of the chanting phrase, “we are at war,” one online participant wrote Moos: “You obviously enjoy typing the words, ‘we are at war.’ Do you think that typing the words, ‘we are at war’ gives you and the CIA license to ignore the past abuses of intelligence agencies? Who do you think ‘we’ are at war with anyway?” (Glenn 2005b).

Moos had no answer; all he could muster was a question in reply: “Are you serious?” Moos was certainly serious. In some ways, his was a more honest and forthright presentation of how academia would be expected to become subservient to the needs of state for intelligence gathering and analysis than the claims made by Montgomery McFate and other latter-day national security spokes-anthropologists.

In 1995 Moos testified before a commission modifying the AAA’s code on anthropological ethics that anthropologists should be allowed to engage in secretive research, arguing that, “In a world where weapons of mass destruction have become so terrible and terrorist actions so frightful, anthropologists must surrender naïve faith in a communitarian utopia and be prepared to encounter conflict and violence. Indeed they should feel the professional obligation to work in areas of ethnic conflict…moreover, as moral creatures so engaged, anthropologists should recognize the need to classify some of their data, if for no other reason than to protect the lives of their subjects and themselves” (Moos 1995). More recently, when the AAA reinstated ethical prohibitions against secret research in 2008, Moos remained in silence and did not even bother arguing his position with the Association.

It is PRISPs devotion to secrecy that is the root problem of its presence on our campuses as well as with Moos’ vision of anthropology harnessed for the needs of state. Moos’ fallacy is his belief that the fundamental problem with American intelligence agencies is that they are lacking adequate cultural understanding of those they study, and spy upon-this fallacy is exacerbated by orthodox assumptions that good intelligence operates best in realms of secrecy. America needs good intelligence, but the most useful and important intelligence can largely be gathered openly without the sort of covert invasion of our campuses that PRISP silently brings.

The claim that more open source, non-classified intelligence is what is needed is less far fetched than it might seem. In Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 historian Robin Winks recounts how in 1951, the CIA’s Sherwood Kent conducted an experiment in which a handful of Yale historians used nothing but declassified materials in Yale’s library to challenge CIA analysts (with access to classified data) to produce competing reports on U.S. military capacities, strengths and weaknesses focusing on a scale of detail down to the level of military divisions (Winks 1996:457-459). The written evaluation of this contest was known as the “Yale Report,” which concluded that over 90% of material in the CIA’s report was found in the Yale library. Kent further estimated that of the remaining 10% of “secret” materials, only half of this could be expected to remain secret for any length of time. President Truman was so furious with the results of the Yale Report that he suppressed its distribution, arguing that the press needed more restrictions governing the release of such sensitive materials, while Republican pundits joined the furor claiming that Yale liberals were trying to leak state secrets.

Evidence of the power of open intelligence is close at hand, consider only how American scholars’ (using publicly available sources) analysis of the dangers for post-invasion Iraq out-performed the CIA’s best estimates. As one who has lived in the Middle East and read Arabic news dailies online for years while watching the expansion of American policies that appear to misread the Arab world I suspect that a repeat of the Yale Report experiment focusing on the Middle East would find another 10% intelligence gap, but with the academy now winning due to the deleterious effects of generations of CIA intellectual inbreeding. Perhaps the Agency has become self-aware of these limits brought on by the internal reproduction of its own limited institutional culture, and in its own misshapen view it sees PRISP as a means of supplying itself with new blood to rejuvenate under cover provided by public classrooms. But such secrecy-based reforms are the products of a damaged institutional mind trying to repair itself.

Some might misread criticism of the CIA’s secret presence on our campuses as contradicting my critique of the need for more outside and dissenting input in intelligence circles, but such a reading would misunderstand the importance of openness in academic and political processes. The fundamental problems with American intelligence are exacerbated by secrecy-when intelligence agencies are allowed to classify and hide their assumptions, reports and analysis from public view they generate self-referential narrow visions that coalesce rather than challenge top-down policies from the administrations they serve. Intelligence agencies do need to understand the complex cultures they study, but to suggest that intelligence agencies like the CIA are simply amassing and interpreting political and cultural information is a dangerous fantasy: The CIA fulfills a tripartite role of gathering intelligence, interpreting intelligence, and working as a supraconstitutional covert arm of the presidency. It is this final role that should give scholars and citizens pause when considering how PRSIP and other university-intelligence-linked programs will use the knowledge they take from our open classrooms.

The CIA has made sure we won’t know which classrooms PRSIP scholars attend; this is rationalized as a requirement for protecting the identities of intelligence personnel. But this secrecy shapes PRISP as it takes on the form like a cell-based covert operation in which PRISP students study chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, anthropology and foreign languages without their fellow classmates, professors, advisors, department chairs or presumably even research subjects (creating serious ethics problems under any post-Nuremberg professional ethics code or Institutional Review Board) knowing that they are working for the CIA, DIA, NSA or other intelligence agencies.

In almost two decades of Freedom of Information Act research I have read too many FBI reports of students detailing the deviant political views of their professors (These range from the hilarious: As anthropologist Norman Humphrey was reported to have called President Eisenhower a “duckbilled nincompoop”; to the Dadaist: wherein former Miss America, Marilyn van Derbur, reported that sociologist Howard Higman mocked J. Edgar Hoover in class; to the chilling: as when the FBI arranged for a graduate student to guide topics of “informal” conversation with anthropologist Gene Weltfish that were later the focus an inquiry by Joseph McCarthy) to not mention the likelihood that these PRSIP students are also secretly compiling dossiers on their professors and fellow students (Higman 1998; Price 2004). I would be remiss to not mention that students are not the only ones sneaking the CIA onto our campuses. There are also unknown thousands of university professors who periodically work with and for the CIA--in 1988 CIA spokeswoman Sharon Foster bragged that the CIA then secretly employed enough university professors “to staff a large university.” Most experts estimate that this presence has grown since 2001 (Mills 1991:37).

The quiet rise of programs like PRISP or ICCIE (see Chapter Four) should not surprise anyone given the steady cuts in federal funding for higher education, and the resulting pressures for more mercenary roles for the academy. In the post-World War Two decades, scholars naively self-recruited themselves or followed classmates to the CIA, but increasingly those of us who have studied the languages, culture and histories of peoples around the world have also learned about the role of the CIA in undermining the autonomy of those cultures we study, and the steady construction of this history has hurt the agency’s efforts to recruit the best and brightest post-graduates. For decades the students studying Arabic, Urdu, Basque or Farsi were predominantly curious admirers of the cultures and languages they studied, the current shift now finds a visible increase in students whose studies are driven by the market forces of new Wars on Terrorism. If the CIA can use PRISP to indenture students in the early days of their graduate training-supplemented with mandated summer camp internships immersed in the workplace ethos of CIA-the company can mold their ideological inclinations even before their grasp of cultural history is shaped in the relatively open environment of their university. As these PRISP graduates enter the CIA’s institutional environment of self-reinforcing Group Think they will present a reduced risk of creating cognitive dissonance by bringing new views that threaten the agency’s narrow view of the world. Institutional Group Think can thus safely be protected from external infection.

Healthy academic environments need openness because they, unlike the CIA, are nourished by the self-corrective features of open disagreement, dissent, and synthetic-reformulation. The presence of the PRISP’s secret sharers brings hidden agendas that sabotage these fundamental processes of academia. The Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program infects all of academia with a germ of dishonesty and distrust as participant scholars cloak their intentions and their ties to the hidden masters they serve.

Intelligence Scholar Loan Sharks

After I published my initial CounterPunch exposé on PRISP in January 2005, secondary stories followed on newspaper wire services, Democracy Now, NPR, in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Senator Pat Roberts soon began publicly speaking about the program, assuring the public there were no reasons to worry about PRISP spreading domestic surveillance on campus. Neoconservative anthropologist Stanley Kurtz used his column in the National Review to claim that I wouldn’t be happy until CIA agents killed themselves, absurdly writing, “So long as CIA recruits openly identify themselves to every Pakistani villager they talk to, Price is happy. Assisted suicide for aspiring CIA analysts may be morally acceptable to Professor Price, but I suspect Roberts Fellows may feel differently” (Kurtz 2005). The Wichita Eagle reported, “Roberts noted that legal safeguards against domestic spying are in place that weren’t in the 1950s and 1960s, when the anti-Communist fervor of former Sen. Joe McCarthy and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover created a climate that contributed to agency abuses. Specifically, a 1981 presidential executive order clearly prohibits physical surveillance of American citizens by agencies other than the FBI” (Wichita Eagle 2/13/05). This was a remarkable statement. Pat Roberts, then Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, appeared to not even understand that the U.S. Patriot Act dismantled safeguards preventing domestic surveillance by the CIA and other agencies. More revealing is that when pressed by reporters, Roberts and sources at CIA did not dispute the likelihood that having undisclosed CIA operatives amongst the ranks of academics could seriously damage the credibility of American academics conducting domestic and foreign research. This blasé attitude concerning the collateral damage of hapless academic bystanders won Roberts no friends in the academy as most academics realize the damage from such actions can be widespread.

But beyond Roberts’ reassuring words on the propriety of secretly sending intelligence agents to our classrooms, there was a quiet enthusiasm for the first cloned offspring of PRISP. And like its progenitor PRISP, this program was birthed in an atmosphere of public silence. In December 2004 when Congress approved the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (S. 2845), they established a Director of National Intelligence. One of the Director’s charges is to oversee a new scholarship program known as the Intelligence Community Scholars Program (ICSP). Though modeled after PRISP, the similarities and differences between these two programs reveal emerging trends not only in intelligence funding, but in the intelligence apparat’s new expectations for outcome-based funding in higher education.

The Director of National Intelligence is responsible for determining which specific fields and subjects of study will be funded under ICSP. Like the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, the ICSP authorizes directors of various unnamed intelligence agencies to make contractual agreements with students. But unlike the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, these ICSP students receive unspecified levels of funding for up to four years of university training. Congress specifies that ICSP participants owe two years of intelligence agency work for every year of funded education, with a ceiling of four years of study allowed unless overridden by the Director of National Intelligence.

Unlike previous intelligence-linked scholarship programs, the ICSP does not specifically limit the expenses incurred by participants. But given that the National Security Education Program’s current authorization of over $40,000 of annual “academic” expenses for students, it is reasonable to assume that the ICSP will likewise allow over $160,000 of expenses over a four-year period.

One reason why intelligence agencies are so interested in recruiting social sciences and area studies students in the early stages of their education is because of a desire for early indoctrination of these students. Regardless of such efforts to select and shape these individuals, it seems inevitable that at least some will develop more critical attitudes towards these agencies as a result of their education or experiences with these agencies. But suppose a few ICSP students’ studies in a university history class lead them to read works like Philip Agee’s Inside the Company (Agee 1976) or John Stockwell’s In Search of Enemies (Stockwell 1979) and they decide they made a mistake in enrolling in the ICSP? If so, they will face serious penalties.

The 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act stated that if ICSP recipients decline to work for their sponsoring intelligence agency upon completing of their education, then the student “shall be liable to the United States for an amount equal to the total amount of the scholarships received[and] the interest on the amounts of such awards which would be payable if at the time the awards were received they were loans bearing interest at the maximum legal prevailing rate, as determined by the Treasurer of the United States, multiplied by three” (US Congress 2004, Public Law 108-458:h, 2. b). In other words, spy or have a lousy credit rating for the rest of your life.

Such penalties are routine boilerplate language used in other “payback”-based federal scholarship legislation. But the CIA, NSA, FBI and other intelligence agencies are not like the Department of Education, the NSF, or other mundane federal agencies. After all, CIA lawyers who argue that “water-boarding,” intense shaking, shabah-posturing, and prolonged-hooding do not constitute illegal torture might just as easily argue that the “maximum legal prevailing” interest rate is that established by the payday loan industry.

Get Ready for the Big Payback

In 2008 I was contacted by a recipient of another pay-back national security related scholarship program who provided me with documentation establishing how the US government was pressuring him to engage in national security related work, of face financial penalties. Over a decade earlier, Nicolas Flattes, then an anthropology student at the University of Hawai’i, was award­ed a Boren Scholarship from the National Security Education Program (NSEP), then a relatively new funding source for students in the social sciences studying foreign cultures of strategic interest to U.S. policy makers. Flattes’ NSEP schol­arship allowed him to travel abroad to study food security issues and sustainable agriculture in southern India, in a gender development studies program focusing on nongovernmental organizations’ com­munity initiatives.

Flattes signed a standard NSEP con­tract stating that after graduation he would work at an approved U.S. govern­mental agency dealing with national se­curity issues, by posting his resume on NSEP’s website or applying to specific federal agencies. All NSEP scholars enter into such payback agreements — though there are conflicting accounts of what participants have been told they must do to meet these demands.

Back in the pre-9/11 days of 1998, Flattes was comfortable with the prospect of fulfilling this national security work after graduation. But the radical shift in militaristic foreign and domestic policy and the ascendancy of unchecked pow­ers for U.S. intelligence agencies quelled Flattes’ desire to work in any national se­curity capacity after 9/11.

When Flattes completed his Master’s degree in June 2001, he posted his re­sume as he was required to do under the guideline and he went on to other things. Flattes had no further contact with NSEP until 2008, when he received a letter from the Department of Defense (eventually forwarded from a decade-old address) notifying him that he must either begin work for a U.S. agency in­volved in national security work, or repay the cost of his scholarship along with penalties. As the parent of a young child, Flattes worked part time and lived on lim­ited income. Upon receiving the letter, he contacted NSEP and tried to work out a five-year payment plan but was told he could either begin work at a national secu­rity related position (which would both forgive the debt and provide a salary), or he must repay his loan over a two-year period. After some discussion, he was told he could pay off his loan in three years. Flattes could afford a four-year re­payment schedule, but on his budget a three-year schedule was impossible.

NSEP personnel told Flattes that a four-year repayment plan was out of the question, and that if he did not meet NSEP’s demands he would have to pay a 28 per cent penalty, could have his wages garnished, and collections would be turned over to a private collection agency. Flattes says he left messages for Boren Scholarship and Fellowship Director Christopher Powers, saying he was sending the first of his four-year payments. Flattes described a bizarre ep­isode that occurred after he sent the first of his four-year payments via Canadian Registered Purolator service, when he received a frightening phone call from someone claiming that FBI and D.C. po­lice were investigating the letter he’d sent as a suspected anthrax scare, and they demanded to know the contents of the envelope. The check Flattes sent to NSEP was never signed for, and he believes this was done to produce a trail of plausible deniability, allowing NSEP to claim he was in default so that they could increase pressure on him to seek national security related work.

After NSEP failed to accept his pay­ment, Flattes received a letter from the Treasury Department demanding re­payment of his NSEP scholarship with an added 28 per cent penalty. Flattes’ believed that NSEP “had no intention of setting up a payment plan and wanted to turn the matter over to another agency as soon as possible.” Flattes told me he felt like he was “being shaken down by a loan shark in a government suit,” but instead of being given the choice between paying up now or taking a tire-iron to his kneecap, he was told he could either come up with payments beyond his budget, sell his skills for national security work as part of a terror war he does not support, or he could have his credit rating decimat­ed. Not pleasant choices for a man with a conscience and a child to feed. Flattes acknowledged that he must pay back his scholarship funds. What he objected to is NSEP’s harsh tactics and their efforts to pressure him into national security work.

Flattes questioned what events triggered the push for him to fulfill his service re­quirement at this particular point in time. The NSEP service agreement he signed in 1998 did not specify when this service must be completed (today, the program requires services within three years of graduation). Because Flattes served as a Cryptologic Technician Technical in the U.S. Navy from 1985-1989, he believed the NSEP’s actions could be an effort designed to press him back into ser­vice involving intelligence work. In the Navy, Flattes specialized in Electronic Intelligence where he obtained “a secu­rity clearance that was two levels above Top Secret which is rare for enlisted personnel. This field has definite links and cooperation with U.S. intelligence agencies. Basically you work for one, you work for all in a sense.” Flattes says he had specialized training in areas that would now be of direct interest to intel­ligence agencies regardless of specific changes over the last two decades, and he can’t help but wonder if his NSEP debt was being used to try and leverage him into intelligence work that he is unwilling to undertake in the political setting of post 9/11 America.

The significance of the NSEP’s pres­sure on Flattes is not that he has to pay back his scholarship funds: he contrac­tually agreed to do this when he signed his NSEP contract. The significance of Flattes’ account is threefold: first, Flattes raises the possibility that NSEP may be using his debt to pressure him to get him to do classified national security work; second, it documents the forms of coer­cion awaiting participants in intelligence and national security payback scholar­ship programs, who come to think better of working in national security settings once they finish their education; finally, his treatment counters claims that schol­ars participating in NSEP will not later be forced to either complete their national security requirements or pay back funds with penalties.

Perhaps the most unusual element of Flattes’ case is that we, the public, have some knowledge of it. Flattes’ willingness to speak out helps establish how the coer­cive potential of NSEP and other national security linked payback programs lever­age scholars into governmental service supporting policies that they personally oppose. Because of the private nature of the repayment demands, it is unknow­able how routine such high-pressure de­mands are.

Institutional privacy policies prevented Boren Scholarship Director, Christopher Powers, from commenting on the spe­cifics of Flattes’ case, but he did tell me that the “vast majority of [NSEP funded scholars] to date have fulfilled the pro­gram’s service requirement through a variety of jobs throughout the federal sector and in higher education.” But the public does not know how many former NSEP recipients have caved to the pro­gram’s demands and quietly slunk off to work for the CIA, NSA, FBI, Homeland Security or other agencies designated to meet contractual obligations of servitude. We don’t know how many NSEP scholar­ship recipients later work in intelligence or national security settings. That some meet their payback requirements in ways that have little or nothing directly to do with national security does not dimin­ish the significance of those who do, and such connections between scholars and national security are the stated reason for NSEP’s existence.

Because NSEP’s “payback” is always distant, fluid and ill-defined at the time that students join the program, participants cannot know what they are agreeing to do when they receive these funds. Faculty advisors at students’ institutions often play a key role in students’ NSEP decisions.