THE MIGHTY WURLITZER

True Spies Ep. 155 - The Mighty Wurlitzer

NARRATOR: This is True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you’ll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You’ll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I’m Sophia Di Martino, and this is True Spies, from SPYSCAPE Studios: The Mighty Wurlitzer.

HUGH WILFORD: Was he ‘witting’ of the CIA's interest in the organization? Could he perhaps be called a CIA agent?

NARRATOR: This is a story about youthful idealism and what happens when not-so-ideal truths come to light. Its cast of characters is a Who’s Who list of soon-to-be movers and shakers including the future feminist icon Gloria Steinem. At the center of this story is an organization called the NSA. But not the NSA True Spies listeners might expect. No. The United States National Student Association.

HUGH WILFORD: By the mid-'60s, the NSA is starting to leak. This kind of notion that liberal idealism and anti-communism, that they go naturally hand in hand, is really starting to fall apart.

NARRATOR: Imagine a time when the highest priority of the government was in line with some of the chief motivations of activists on university campuses. In the early years of the Cold War, both the US government and the country’s largest student groups had a shared mission to bring an end to global communism. But before long, their interests appeared to diverge. In the mid-1960s, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, better known to the world as LBJ, was ramping up the number of troops deployed to Vietnam, despite widespread disapproval of Americans' involvement in the conflict. Young people communicated their distaste for the war by chanting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Any lingering camaraderie between American students and their government was dashed for good in 1967 - thanks, in part, to a new student fundraiser appointed by the NSA.

HUGH WILFORD: This is a young man called Michael Wood. And in the process of raising funds, Wood learns about the CIA's relationship with the organization. 

NARRATOR: Someone at the top of the NSA had shared some major secrets with Michael Wood. For a few months, Wood kept them under wraps but then his conscience got the better of him. 

HUGH WILFORD:  Wood eventually decides to spill the beans.

NARRATOR: This is what he spilled the beans on: for 15 years after the end of World War II, the CIA covertly funded the National Student Association and handpicked its leaders. It was an effort to gain and maintain control of young people, to cement their allegiance to the United States both at home and abroad. It was also just one string in an intricate web of tactics meant to wipe out communism around the world. The influence of those tactics was enormous. At least until 1967, when it all began to unravel. In many ways, just how the relationship between the Agency and the NSA played out is still a matter of mystery. Even some of the major players in this story were left in the dark about whether and how they were entangled with the US intelligence agency. Among those most in the know is your guide for this episode. 

HUGH WILFORD: My name is Hugh Wilford. I'm a professor of American history at California State University, Long Beach. And I am a historian of the CIA. I've written several books on the subject, including one covering CIA interest in American student affairs.

NARRATOR: Like many of the subjects of his research, Hugh never meant to get involved in American covert operations.

HUGH WILFORD: Initially I was just interested in American intellectuals and especially American intellectual life around the middle of the 20th century. And then I came across this weird story about how a group of literary critics, writers in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, were covertly funded by the CIA. I was intrigued. Was the CIA funding a bunch of literary critics? And I began researching that story.

NARRATOR: Hugh had his hands full. Because it wasn’t just writers and literary critics and students the CIA had cozied up to - cultural and religious associations, too. Labor organizations. Feminist initiatives. Racial and ethnic advocacy groups. Cultural tastemakers. Filmmakers. Musicians. 

HUGH WILFORD: And the next thing I knew, I'd really swapped from being an intellectual historian to an intelligence historian.

NARRATOR: Hugh had stumbled on a sprawling phenomenon that had begun unfolding in the years after the Second World War. It involved a vast array of cultural and social organizations, all of which, to the public, seemed to move to the beat of their own drum. But in secret, for many years, they were all being orchestrated to play the same tune.

HUGH WILFORD: There was a CIA chief, Frank Wisner, who liked to compare what he was doing with somebody playing a mighty Wurlitzer organ because he had all these contacts in the press. He'd set up various front groups. He even had contacts in Hollywood, and he liked to talk about how he could play any propaganda tune that he liked.

NARRATOR: A Wurlitzer organ - a massive, hulking instrument. If you’re not familiar, picture multiple keyboards flanked with dozens of pedals and pipes, decked out with bells and whistles - literally, bells and whistles - plus xylophones and triangles. You get the idea. Together, all of that sound makes it seem as though there’s a full orchestra in action, when in fact it’s just one nimble musician. And in the CIA of the 1950s, the music maker in command was Agency chief Frank Wisner.

HUGH WILFORD: It kind of conveys the idea that he was in control of everything, right? He could play any tune that he wanted to though, actually in practice, it wasn't quite that easy for him.

NARRATOR: There’s a reason that the CIA’s Mighty Wurlitzer, like its namesake, fell out of fashion. While the CIA had control of its massive propaganda instrument in the aftermath of World War II, by the second half of the 1960s, Wisner’s orchestra was no longer playing in tune with the national mood.

HUGH WILFORD: Sometimes some of the outlets and the groups and individuals that that he was trying to use just for propaganda purposes, it turned out that they had ideas of their own about how to win the Cold War, the battle for our hearts and minds because CIA operations involved these people who were ostensibly private and had often had their own agendas, their own reasons for wanting to go into battle with the communists. It wasn't always easy for the CIA to completely control them.

NARRATOR: But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The origins of the CIA’s entanglement with the National Student Association date back many years earlier to the early 20th century. That’s because the first seeds were planted not in the United States, but in the Soviet Union. Even before World War II, Soviet leaders were embedding their ideologies into influential organizations around the world.

HUGH WILFORD: The communists had been doing it for decades, and they started doing it again immediately after World War II, so the Americans were actually quite late to this. And really, to some extent, all of this was defensive. It was a reaction to stuff that the communists were already doing.

NARRATOR: It wasn’t just a reaction. It was a mirror image. When US intelligence began to get its tentacles into social and cultural groups, it was taking a page directly out of the Soviet playbook.

HUGH WILFORD: Originally there was an organization called Communist International, which was an organization formed of representatives of various local communist parties, but which really effectively operated as a way for Soviet communists to control communist movements elsewhere in the world.

NARRATOR: The Second World War saw a brief period of goodwill between the United States and the Soviet Union, who were united in the fight against Nazi Germany, Japan, and Italy. Hugh says that as a gesture of goodwill to their allies, Communist International, or Comintern, was put on ice. 

HUGH WILFORD: But then when the alliance fell apart after World War II, it was effectively revived in the form of the Communist Information Bureau, which was shortened to Cominform. So Cominform was really Comintern reborn and was able to draw on all this experience and list of front contacts that the Soviets had going back for decades.

NARRATOR: Cominform had an expansive remit. In essence, it was a propaganda vehicle, with the primary aim of gaining communist goodwill across Europe. To do that, communist officials mobilized various front organizations that they could manipulate to do their bidding. The British had already adopted Cominform’s tactics before the US showed up late to the party. But in typical American fashion, when the United States decided to follow suit, it did so with bells on.

HUGH WILFORD: They had these advantages that the Soviets didn't always, despite all the Soviet experience in the field of front operations. They were able to draw on advertising, on PR, on Madison Avenue. Right? American sales techniques were the big advantage, really, that the US brought to the Cold War because and people involved literally spoke about it in these terms - that they were looking to sell the US cause to overseas audiences. So they had access to this range of techniques and even advertising firms got involved in this operation.

NARRATOR: Propaganda was big business in postwar America, whether consumers recognized it or not. But the Americans also waged a quieter, less commercial war against communism. There, too, they borrowed tactics from their enemy.

HUGH WILFORD: The communists had already gotten involved in international student politics: the International Union of Students, formed just after World War II, with communist backing and communist encouragement. So the CIA was concerned that the West might be losing the battle for hearts and minds of young people throughout the world. 

NARRATOR: But why would the Soviet Union and the CIA both make a play for students? Surely there were more powerful groups they could target. 

HUGH WILFORD: There is this adage that the student leaders of today are the world leaders of tomorrow. It's this perception that you can't really afford to lose this demographic that could be so influential in the future, so initially, the focus is on making sure that Western Europe doesn't fall to communist ideology. But then as the ‘50s wears on and the focus of the Cold War is increasingly shifting to what was known as the Third World, there is this growing interest in making sure that rising young leaders of Third World countries go to the American camp, rather than the Communist.

NARRATOR: In other words, it wasn’t just American hearts and minds that the CIA desired to win to their side. American students could be a conduit, they believed, in the spreading of anti-communist ideology in the places most vulnerable to Soviet influence. The CIA would disseminate its propaganda in precisely the manner Cominform disseminated theirs -  with the assistance of front organizations, many of whose members would be left in the dark about the arrangement. And one front group was perfectly positioned for the job: the US National Student Association.

HUGH WILFORD: It was founded in 1947 by a group of American liberals looking to combat communist influences on international student affairs.

NARRATOR: The NSA had a national office in Madison, Wisconsin. And you might think that would be its headquarters. But in fact, the NSA had an international office as well based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the home of Harvard University. From there, it extended its reach across the Atlantic. All the better for the CIA.

HUGH WILFORD:  It took the battle to the communists at international student conferences and through various other programs. Initially, I guess, focused on trying to make sure that students in Western European countries were anti-communist and pro-American, but then increasingly active in the developing world.

NARRATOR: With such a broad international influence, you can see why the NSA would make an appealing organization for the intelligence agency to get its hooks in - which the CIA did, fast.

HUGH WILFORD: It began as a genuinely private entity. But within a few years of its founding, the CIA was systematically funding its international program. Initially, the money just goes through some private businessmen who, I guess, are happy to have CIA officers as friends. And they're persuaded to hand over checks to the NSA. But then within a few years, by the early ‘40, the CIA creates pass-through foundations, apparently private charities which actually are effectively laundering funds for the CIA.

NARRATOR: You’ve heard of shell companies used to hold and hide the assets of oligarchs. That’s essentially what the US was setting up to send money to the NSA. And, while this was a covert operation, plenty of students were aware of what was going on.

HUGH WILFORD: The leaders of the NSA are a little apprehensive about getting mixed up with the CIA. And several officers are like…  “Should we be accepting this money?” And some people think fairly strongly that they shouldn't.

NARRATOR: But despite their reservations, the Agency’s reach in the organization grew quickly.

HUGH WILFORD: The CIA also increasingly controls the international office located in Cambridge of the NSA and makes sure effectively that its own candidates at annual elections, at annual meetings of the organization and its own candidates, and get elected to offices in the international office. And, indeed, sometimes actually serving CIA officers are representing the NSA overseas at international meetings.

NARRATOR: One imagines a graying operations officer trying to pass himself off as an undergraduate by stammering out a few lines of teenage slang. But as Hugh describes it, the whole setup was much more subtle. In part because these two organizations - the CIA and the NSA - shared the same ideals. They were more or less on the same page.

HUGH WILFORD: I think to some extent there's a lot of youthful idealism around. And people who genuinely see it as “save the Third World for the Americans, make sure that they're not hoodwinked by the communists into becoming pro-Soviet.” But I think there are also a few people who perhaps have a notion that the money is coming from somewhere a little murky.

NARRATOR: But was any of this really all that bad? The CIA wasn’t spying on the NSA - or at least, that wasn’t their primary task.

HUGH WILFORD: Some NSA officers were tasked with gathering information about what was going on. There was espionage going on, but it wasn't, the NSA wasn't serving primarily as a front for espionage. It was looking to ensure that these world leaders of tomorrow were pro-American and not pro-communist. 

NARRATOR: And that was all well and good with the few students who were in on the secret. So long as they, too, felt pro-American. In order to achieve its goals with the NSA, the CIA knew it would need to embrace young individuals fighting for progressive causes, which is why, in 1950, it came to support a charismatic activist named Allard K. Lowenstein. 

HUGH WILFORD: Lowenstein, who was, by all accounts, an absolutely brilliant orator, just didn't hold back in his speeches to international audiences. Their official records suggest that the CIA actually found him almost too anti-communist, too much of a loose cannon.

NARRATOR: Almost too much but not too much for their purposes.

HUGH WILFORD: The CIA, I think, pulled some strings because he had a reputation as being - in addition to his liberal activism - he was also a very vehement anti-communist. And so, the CIA was interested in supporting him within the organization. 

NARRATOR: By his early 20s, Lowenstein had made a name for himself as an opponent of the Jim Crow laws that perpetuated racial segregation in the American South. Years later, he would go on to speak out against the apartheid regime in South Africa. He’d later become a member of the US House of Representatives. At the time he was made president of the NSA, anti-communism was a key tenet of his personal ideology. In that sense, he was very much aligned with the CIA. But just how aligned, that may have been a different story.

HUGH WILFORD: Was he ‘witting’ of the CIA's interest in the organization? Could he perhaps be called a CIA agent? 

NARRATOR: This is a question that has gripped historians like Hugh ever since the program came to light. Not just about Allard Lowenstein, but about many of the people who were involved in the organization. Were they, in the CIA parlance, “witting”? Meaning, were they clued into where their money was coming from and how decisions about their leadership were being made? According to Hugh, Lowenstein’s ‘wittingness’ is almost beside the point. He may not have understood the machinations of the organization he was leading but he was still doing the CIA’s bidding with much more zeal than the US government itself would ever be able to express.

HUGH WILFORD: This is a minor pattern I noticed in these sorts of CIA operations. Several of them featured young people like this who were really gung-ho, liberal, anti-communists and determined to denounce communism to any audience that would listen - and actually too in-your-face for the CIA, which was trying to soft-pedal this a little bit because it didn't want to offend neutralist opinion in Europe and then in the Third World by coming on too strong, I mean, too pro-American and anti-communist.

NARRATOR: Years later, once the CIA’s involvement came to light, Lowenstein denied knowing about the NSA’s arrangement with the Agency. And those claims were later backed up.

HUGH WILFORD: A memo came to light indicating that actually, he was unwitting. He didn't know about the CIA's interest.

NARRATOR: But despite a shared interest in anti-communism, a lot of NSA affiliates never wanted their ‘wittingness’ to be revealed. It wasn’t a good look. 

HUGH WILFORD: I think a great many people who claim they didn't know that the CIA was behind their apparently non-government organizations were actually not telling the entire truth. 

NARRATOR: One individual stands out as a notable exception. 

HUGH WILFORD: Gloria Steinem, to her credit, I think really does. 

NARRATOR: Gloria Steinem. Feminist hero, journalist, and CIA asset? Like Allard Lowenstein, the young Gloria Steinem was an idealist with charisma to burn. Her engagement with the CIA predates her days as a freelance journalist or feminist campaigner. Like many other 20-somethings, in 1958, she had yet to take off in her career.

HUGH WILFORD: Gloria Steinem is a young, very smart, very talented graduate student. But she hasn't yet got a job that she really wants. She is in India on a fellowship and is spotted by an undercover CIA officer. And then on her return to the US, she is persuaded to set up an office, again, in Cambridge near to Harvard, to educate American students about what the Soviets are doing in terms of trying to influence international student politics. But more specifically, there is a Soviet-organized international student meeting coming up in Vienna in 1959.

NARRATOR: Steinem has never denied that she was made ‘witting’. A big job offer was on the table and she knew precisely who would be paying her salary.

HUGH WILFORD: She is given the money to start preparing a delegation of young American student leaders to attend this conference, partly just to disrupt it because it is a Soviet front operation, but also to try and win over representatives from developing world nations who were there to the American cause - persuade them that America has their interests at heart and is equally as idealistic and sincere as the communist powers.

NARRATOR: You might be thinking, “This all sounds a bit unlike the Gloria Steinem I know.” But the darkest days of civil unrest, violence, and political upheaval that would strike the United States were still to come. And the reputation of the nation’s highest intelligence agency hadn’t yet been dealt its first significant blows - we’ll get to that. Steinem didn’t know what was around the corner when she accepted the job in the late 1950s.

HUGH WILFORD: She didn't have a problem with it because she thought it was a good cause. She was impressed by the CIA officers that she met as she thought they were as idealistic as she was, that they had the best interests of Third World students at heart. And so for all of those reasons, she was very happy to be involved.

NARRATOR: And ultimately, so was the CIA. They’d made a big bet on a woman in her early 20s and that bet paid off.

HUGH WILFORD: She did a great job getting American students over to Vienna and really doing a pretty good job of disrupting the event. She oversaw a press putting out critical coverage of the event as it was ongoing. Her unit hired a jazz band that played loudly in the background, celebrating American jazz, but also disrupting proceedings. She made sure that a Polish emigre, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was part of the American delegation.

NARRATOR: Another big name - Jimmy Carter’s future National Security Advisor.

HUGH WILFORD: And he went into the Russian camp and used his knowledge of Russian to sow dissension between people attending from Eastern bloc countries. So it was all judged a tremendous success. The Kennedy White House apparently was delighted by Steinem's work.

NARRATOR: It was a perfect marriage of youthful idealism and American ideology. But youth fades. And times change. And as the US entered the 1960s, circumstances began to evolve.

HUGH WILFORD: Back in the late ‘50s the young, idealistic students weren't necessarily longhairs. It was before Vietnam had become the cause that it did. And before the counterculture and Gloria Steinem looked kind of pretty square in the late ‘50. 

NARRATOR: Steinem wasn’t the only person in the organization who was ‘witting’, of course. Plenty of other student officials had been made aware of the role the CIA was playing in keeping the NSA on message. And as those young people experienced a widening gap between their ideals and those of the Agency, their willingness to play along to the tune of the Mighty Wurlitzer began to falter. 

HUGH WILFORD: Increasingly, as the 1960s come and young, idealistic Americans part - and thanks largely to the Vietnam War - are less inclined to see America as a force for good in the world and to marry liberalism with anti-communism. They start to ask, ”Is this something that our government should be doing? Is this something our organization should be doing?” 

NARRATOR: One of those witting students with doubts about the CIA’s influence was sitting at the very top of the organization. He was the national president of the NSA, and his name was Philip Sherburne.

HUGH WILFORD: Phillip Sherburne decides he wants to try and flush the CIA out of the organization so he starts trying to raise other funds, and he advertises for and appoints a fundraiser. And this is a young man called Michael Wood.

NARRATOR: Ah yes. Remember him? Michael Wood. The truth-telling fundraiser. 

HUGH WILFORD: In the process of raising funds, Wood learns about the CIA's relationship with the organization. He realizes that all of the organization's previous funders were, in fact, passed through fake foundations. 

NARRATOR: Sherburne experienced deep ambivalence about the secret links between the two organizations. For Michael Wood, it was a little more black and white. He was inclined to blow the whistle.

HUGH WILFORD: Phil Sherburne, who wants the CIA gone, tries to persuade him not to because he's trying to get the CIA out without damaging the organization's image, which is why he's trying to get genuinely private funding for it. And meanwhile, the CIA is leaning on Phil Sherburne and saying, “No, this needs to remain a CIA operation.” 

NARRATOR: But for Sherburne, this wasn’t just a tussle with an employer or a benefactor. The NSA’s national president had something far more important on the line.

HUGH WILFORD: One of the things that the CIA dangled to NSA officers for, in return for their cooperation, they could get draft deferments. And the CIA says, “Yeah, and if we withdraw our funding and our protection you will probably be drafted.”

NARRATOR: Nearly 400,000 men of eligible age were drafted to fight in Vietnam in 1966. And young men like Sherburne were being offered a very attractive ‘out’ - play along with the CIA and you can be guaranteed that your number won’t be called up. That left Sherburne caught between defending his principles and defending his own life.

HUGH WILFORD: Because it looks like this is going to be exposed. The CIA is starting to really resort to dirty tricks at this point. What had been initially this quite harmonious consensual relationship became abusive in 1967.

NARRATOR: Wood wrestled with the implications of what he’d learned for months. But finally, he decided to turn to the press. One afternoon at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City, Wood sat down with an editor at a national magazine. He’d chosen the publication carefully, knowing they’d be sympathetic to his cause.

HUGH WILFORD: This West Coast magazine called Ramparts has become a mouthpiece for the emerging student new-left on American campuses. It’s a really kind of surprisingly glossy magazine for a radical new left kind of underground publication. It's a really significant institution in terms of the 1960s counterculture and new left. It has an important relationship with the Black Panther Party as well. The leading Panther, Eldridge Cleaver, is on the editorial board. And, unlike most of the underground newspapers of the day, it has a big national readership outside of university campuses.

NARRATOR: The previous year, Ramparts had run an expose on the CIA’s covert training of South Vietnamese police at Michigan State University. Wood had every reason to believe that the editor would want to run with another scoop about Agency misdeeds. Sitting in the Algonquin dining room, the editor was taken aback. Why would the CIA want to sidle up to a bunch of long-haired kids? Nevertheless, he took the story back to Ramparts and their journalists began to look into Wood’s allegations.

HUGH WILFORD: These young radical reporters launched their own investigation just using the tax records of the fake foundations. They work out what's been going on, that this isn't just the NSA. There's a whole bunch of other organizations involved as well.

NARRATOR: Meanwhile, American intelligence officials caught wind of the investigation.

HUGH WILFORD: The CIA, realizing that this is all about to come out, decides to try and anticipate the story and get control of the narrative by holding a press conference about it, getting the NSA to hold a press conference. But then, Ramparts editors scoop themselves. They pay for a full-page advertisement in The New York Times, basically conveying the essence of their story in order to beat the CIA to the exposure - and it's a very effective strategy.

NARRATOR: The advertisement drove plenty of readers to the Ramparts investigation. And it also got The Times involved.

HUGH WILFORD: Its own reporters started investigating this story and exposing CIA links. Not just American students, but American labor groups, organizations of intellectuals, and many other entities as well.

NARRATOR: Slowly, it became apparent to the American public that all the bells and whistles of the Wurlitzer organ had been playing the CIA’s tune. Wood’s allegations to Ramparts were just the tip of the iceberg.

HUGH WILFORD: After all this is exposed, a lot of the organizations don't survive it. There's a lot of infighting. Rows break out between those who were witting or were denying they were witting unconvincingly, and those who genuinely didn't know that the CIA was involved.

NARRATOR: Someone who doesn’t deny her involvement is Gloria Steinem. And in the court of public opinion, her decision to lead the festival in Vienna nearly a decade prior hasn’t fared so well after all.

HUGH WILFORD: She's very candid about this. She says she knew all along that the CIA was behind it because she had been made witting, but I think her honesty over this situation really came back to haunt her. And I think it's actually one of the things that still have the potential to wound her a little bit, this claiming that she was a CIA agent, which is sometimes how it's been phrased.

NARRATOR: Ms. Steinem’s office declined an interview for this podcast. The late ‘60s were a divisive time in American politics. But condemnation of the CIA’s involvement in groups like the NSA became a bipartisan issue.

HUGH WILFORD: It's pretty devastating for the CIA itself when all this comes out. It's really the first time that Americans learn en masse that their government has been systematically misleading them. It's okay for the CIA to be active overseas, possibly even involved in operations like overthrowing governments, but for the CIA to be this active at home - funding these apparently homegrown organizations - that really troubles a lot of Americans.

NARRATOR: So does the fact that they used students for the job.

HUGH WILFORD: Has the CIA rather ensnared young idealistic people exploiting their desire to do good in the world? That is the theme of all of this, that these cynical older people in positions of power rather abused their relationship with these student officers and their organization.

NARRATOR: The loss of trust from the American people was a major blow to the CIA. The message from both right and left was clear: “Intelligence officials had no place butting into private organizations or the lives of young people. At least not at home on American soil.”

HUGH WILFORD: The Ramparts revelations of 1967 are really the beginning of a series of scandals affecting the CIA that culminates in a series of congressional investigations in the 1970s, which really wrecked the Agency's public image and severely rein in its powers. And the CIA has never been quite as free to operate and as unaccountable ever since. 

NARRATOR: The floodgates had been opened. And you’d think that would be the end of domestic spying on social groups. And yet, still, the worst violations of public trust were yet to come. Next time on True Spies we’ll look at another incursion into the lives of civilians, just two years after the Ramparts revelations. 

JEFFREY HAAS: COINTELPRO was a clandestine program that J. Edgar Hoover had started in the’60s, and it targeted all the movements, but in particular the Black movement. And he said the motive was to disrupt, destroy, and neutralize the Panthers by any means necessary. 

NARRATOR: It’s a harrowing chapter in FBI history, and this time, the consequences are fatal.

JEFFREY HAAS: There was one other COINTELPRO objective that was specifically an order from Hoover to the FBI offices: prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the black masses.

NARRATOR: You can learn more about the CIA’s covert relationship with the National Student Association in Hugh Wilford’s book The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America. I’m Sophia Di Martino. Join us next week for another liaison with True Spies.