The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

Hendrik Hertzberg’s review of The Pied Piper, my biography of Allard Lowenstein [NYR, October 10, 1985] makes on mention of the vast amount of direct evidence in the book supporting the undeniable conclusion that Lowenstein worked for the CIA. For example:

—His diary entries disclose that he was providing information to Thomas Hughes, Director of Intelligence at the State Department.

—Secret State Department cables obtained through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that Lowenstein offered money to Spanish student groups to keep them anti-Communist.

—Entries in Lowenstein’s diary reveal he was engaged with Peace Corps volunteers in a covert operation to overthrow Dr. Hastings Banda, the right-wing president of Malawi.

—Documents in Lowenstein’s personal papers disclose that he offered money to various anti-Communist African liberation movements and anti-Communist, anti-apartheid movements in South Africa and Namibia. While traveling in Africa, Lowenstein stayed at the lavish Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi.

—A letter shows that in 1979, Lowenstein was paid $7,000 by the Anglo American Corporation of South Africa for a trip there to help prevent a Communist revolution. Lowenstein reported to then Deputy Director of the CIA, Frank Carlucci, during the trip, according to an interview with Carlucci. Carlucci acknowledges that Lowenstein aided him in installing Mario Soares as prime minister of Portugal while Carlucci was ambassador there.

—Lowenstein clearly knew of the CIA’s funding of the National Student Association before the disclosures of the Sixties. The CIA Vaughn Index on the NSA, released under the Freedom of Information Act, reveals that the CIA/NSA link can be traced to 1949, a year before Lowenstein became president of the NSA.

Lowenstein’s Selective Service records, which I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, reveal he obtained an occupational deferment while he served as president of the NSA and then an academic deferment to go to law school during the Korean war. (Lowenstein was elected president of the NSA in 1950 on the strength of a speech supporting US military intervention in Korea.) Ramparts magazine documented in 1967 that officers of the NSA who cooperated with the CIA in running the NSA’s programs received such deferments prior to 1966. Ramparts never thought to obtain Lowenstein’s draft status while he was president of NSA, and so overlooked his involvement. Lowenstein received his occupational deferment because of his work for the NSA involving breaking up the international student movement because of Communist influence. The conference in Stockholm at which he did this was organized by the CIA.

Lowenstein lied to Newsday reporter Edward Hershey when he told him he had to fight his way into the army in 1954 because of his bad eyes. In fact, Lowenstein was declared I-A and passed his physical four years earlier. His eyes were good enough to earn him the rank of “Marksman” while serving in the peacetime army in Germany.

Hertzberg lends credence to the conclusion that Lowenstein worked for the CIA when he writes in his review: “It is entirely possible that Lowenstein met CIA people during his travels, even that he traded information with them. There would be nothing scandalous in that.” Traded information? Can anyone imagine the CIA station chief in Dar es Salaam extending a warm handshake to Allard Lowenstein and saying, “Say, you’re Allard Lowenstein, aren’t you? I’m the CIA station chief. Let’s trade information.”

This is, of course, total nonsense. CIA operatives do not “trade information” with “a free-lance do-gooder of left-wing anti-Communist leanings.” They do, however, trade information with other CIA operatives and informants.

Documents in Lowenstein’s CIA file obtained after publication of The Pied Piper further support the Lowenstein CIA affiliation, notwithstanding Hertzberg’s convoluted reasoning. On February 19, 1962, the Chief of the Personnel Security Division of the CIA received a memorandum from the Chief of the Contact Division stating: “It is requested that priority security checks be procured on Subject as described in the attachment. Our deadline is 23 February 1962 for approval to contact Subject on an ad hoc basis. Information to be discussed will be classified through ‘Confidential.”’ The language that follows, quoted out of context by Hertzberg, is: “3. Subject will be asked to respond to (word deleted) requirements pertaining to the Soviet educational system; teaching methods; calibre of faculty; subjects emphasized, etc.” Lowenstein visited the Soviet Union with Mrs. Roosevelt five years earlier. This could not be a debriefing of that trip, which would have been done directly afterwards. A reasonable interpretation of this spook talk is that Lowenstein was going to be used to report on Soviet propaganda methods and recruitment activities in areas where Lowenstein had contacts and expertise, i.e., southern Africa.

According to Federal Bureau of Investigation records, an FBI informant reported on February 5, 1962 that Lowenstein twice told students he had an “affiliation with the Central Intelligence Agency.” The informant was incredulous, so the matter was brought to the attention of the CIA. The February 19, 1962 memorandum states that “Subject reportedly has stated that he has done some work for the CIA. If he were used in a (word deleted) capacity, then this is an indiscretion regarding which our field representative would like to know something about the background before any contact is made.”

Hertzberg would like to dismiss this language as insignificant. But the 1962 date conforms to the recruitment date given me by several intelligence operatives attached to the CIA and military intelligence who knew Lowenstein, including a US Army Major General assigned to counterintelligence. These are legitimate sources of the kind relied on by all journalists. There are several of them and they are credible. I submit that the work Lowenstein said he performed before 1962 for the CIA was smuggling out Hans Beukes, the “colored” student from South West Africa, at the behest of the CIA. The sources who have worked for both the CIA and military intelligence reported that Lowenstein did this, and I have no reason to disbelieve it. Moreover, Hertzberg is incorrect when he insists that Lowenstein readily agreed to get Beukes out of South Africa when Beukes requested help. He resisted this request when it was made by Beukes. “Al didn’t know why they should do this,” Emory Bundy told me. But Lowenstein did agree to do it after he was asked to by the CIA.

Hertzberg refers to a cable in Lowenstein’s CIA file in his attempt to rebut my book. From the embassy in Madrid, dated 20 September 1962, it states: “To our knowledge, he represents no one but himself in spite of propensity for name dropping.” In The Pied Piper, I discuss similar cables from the embassy in Madrid to the State Department concerning Lowenstein’s use of the names of Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther, and Norman Thomas and wonderment over his supply of funds and his ability to stay at an expensive suite at the Madrid Hilton. This was before Lowenstein inherited any money and at a time when his ostensible income was virtually nil. That an embassy official did not know of Lowenstein’s CIA affiliation is not surprising. As several former CIA agents told me, each person working for the Agency is assigned a cryptograph to conceal his identity, even within the Agency itself.

Contrary to Hertzberg’s assertion, Lowenstein’s CIA file was not with Lowenstein’s papers at Chapel Hill when I and a research aide examined them. When I learned from Lowenstein’s sister, Dorothy DiCintio, that Gary Bellow had the file, I repeatedly tried to get him to give it to me. My last effort in the summer of 1984 was rejected by Bellow because, he said, I “couldn’t be trusted with it.” The file was made available to me through the efforts of Grove Press’s attorney Martin Garbus after publication of The Pied Piper during the course of his battles with Ronald Tabak, who was trying to stop publication of the book and demanding changes in the manuscript under threat of litigation. Indeed, when David Sobel, a lawyer for the United States Student Association trying to get the complete CIA file on the National Student Association, requested the Lowenstein CIA file from the Lowenstein Collection at Chapel Hill, only a copy of Gary Bellow’s 1975 Freedom of Information Act request was sent to him and not the CIA file of thirty-seven documents released to Bellow. If this file was at Chapel Hill, as Bellow alleges, why then was it not released to Sobel? The answer is because it was, as Gary Bellow had told me, in his office at Harvard.

Lowenstein was clearly concerned about what the FBI and the CIA might release about his CIA affiliation under a Freedom of Information Act request. The only damaging information was the material in the portions of his CIA file that was released to him. Because of the Privacy Act, this was available to him but not to the general public.

Finally, I rely on not one but three entries in Lowenstein’s diary to show that he informed on suspected Communists in the civil rights movement.

Richard Cummings

Bridgehampton, New York

To the Editors:

Hendrik Hertzberg (The Second Assassination of AI Lowenstein) takes Grove Press to task for publishing The Pied Piper: Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream, by Richard Cummings, suggesting we didn’t take enough care to check the facts. He’s wrong. We carefully checked the research on which Cummings based his book, including the tapes of interviews with former Lowenstein associates who contributed to the Documentation Concerning Serious Factual Errors in Forthcoming Book by Richard Cummings Purportedly About Allard K. Lowenstein, which has been privately circulated by Gary Bellow and others.

Hertzberg, declaring his bias in favor of Lowenstein, accepted these “documents” at face value. Had he checked, he would have discovered that many of the “documents” in this collection are clearly contradicted by these tapes in the very own voices of the authors of these “documents.”

Hertzberg assures us that Lowenstein was never an agent of the CIA, treating such suspicion as if Lowenstein had been accused of membership in a criminal organization. If the CIA was a criminal organization, what does this make of such people as Reverend William Sloane Coffin and William Buckley, Jr., not to mention myself who was proud to have been asked—and accepted—to be a member of the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. We know that Lowenstein himself boasted of his connection with the CIA in a document (originating from the CIA) cited by Hertzberg himself.

Perhaps we’ll never know for sure whether Lowenstein served as a CIA agent until the CIA opens its files to the public. Cummings, in addition to his sources and interviews with many former Lowenstein intimates, also cites literally hundreds of publicly known events, associations and episodes, all thoroughly documented. Together they make an extraordinarily convincing case.

Ultimately, the issue of CIA membership really diverts our attention from the very real accomplishments in Cummings’ book. The Pied Piper, as so many of its reviewers have noted, is an important contribution to recent American history, because it reveals like no book before it the effect on American domestic and foreign policy of our obsession with anti-Communism in the past forty years. In particular, it highlights the bankruptcy of American liberalism—the collapse of The Best and The Brightest in the face of the ogre of Communism—through the actions of one of its most attractive and articulate leaders. We are proud to have brought this book to the attention of a new generation of readers who have much to learn from our recent past.