Jeremy Kuzmarov is the Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and a critic of US foreign policy and intelligence operations.
Jerm
The magazine has been around since the 1970s.
The CIA is both the centre and the primary instrument of the cult of intelligence. It engages in espionage and counter espionage, in propaganda and disinformation, in psychological warfare and paramilitary activities.
— Victor Marchetti, former CIA officer
In 1950, the CIA quietly bankrolled something called the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a transnational network of writers, academics, editors and publishers, all supposedly independent, all secretly on the Agency's payroll. The CIA's own website admits it was "widely considered one of the CIA's more daring and effective Cold War covert operations".
The money was laundered through respectable foundations, principally the Ford Foundation, which one former CIA operative described as "the best and most plausible kind of funding cover". That same operative said the arrangement allowed the Agency to fund "a seemingly limitless range of covert action programs affecting youth groups, labour unions, universities, publishing houses and other private institutions".
So the template was set decades ago:
- Find the people who shape opinion (professors, editors, authors).
- Funnel money to them through a clean middleman.
- Let them produce "independent" work that happens to align with the national security state's worldview.
- Never tell the audience who's really paying.
British historian Frances Stonor Saunders documented all of this in her 1999 book Who Paid the Piper?, showing how the CIA "infiltrated and co-opted artistic movements" using funds "mostly channelled through the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Ford Foundation".
The point is that the CIA learned early on that the cheapest way to control a society is to control the people who define reality for everyone else, and that means controlling the universities.
"I'm glad the CIA is immoral."
— Thomas Braden, head of the CIA's International Organisations Division
Running the student body
Before the CIA was funding research labs, it was running the student body.
From the early 1950s through 1967, the CIA secretly funded the National Student Association, which was, at the time, the leading American organisation representing college students, with branches on roughly 400 campuses.
Aryeh Neier
Declassified CIA documents confirm that a "national student group [was] secretly aided by CIA", and the president of the association, W Eugene Groves, denied that its officers "knowingly performed intelligence functions for the CIA".
What this tells you is that the intelligence community doesn't see students as people to educate; it sees them as assets to cultivate. The campus has always been a recruiting ground, and not just for analysts, but for influence.
The Pentagon's campus billions
In his conversation with me, Jeremy mentioned around 50 universities doing nuclear weapons research.
That's the tip of a very large iceberg.
The Department of Defense is:
[O]ne of the largest sources of federally funded university research in the United States, contributing billions of dollars annually across fields including AI, cybersecurity, aerospace, and materials science.
— TrendPlus
In 2020 alone, the Pentagon's science and technology budget hit $16.1 billion, with $2.6 billion of that going to basic research. Science magazine reported that the Pentagon would steer "more than $1 billion to academic researchers" in a single year.
When a university depends on military money for its research budget, it doesn't need to be told what to study. It simply learns, over time, what gets funded and what doesn't. Dissenting research (on peace, on disarmament, on the human cost of military interventions) quietly starves.
Research that serves the war machine thrives.
It's a funding structure and it works (for the CIA).
"The trouble is, the watchdog committee never really watched the dog."
— Frank Church, on Congressional oversight of intelligence agencies
What's left out of the curriculum
I've gone on about how the CIA and the Pentagon got their hands on the universities.
Here's the other bit: what that control does to what kids are taught.
When you control the textbooks and the teachers, you don't need to censor anything. You just decide what never makes it onto the page.
The coups you were never taught about
Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Congo 1960, Chile 1973.
The CIA overthrew or undermined the governments in all four, all documented in the agency's own records.
Yet they barely surface in the standard curriculum.
If mentioned at all, it's a one-line Cold War footnote, stripped of agency and consequence.
Students walk away thinking these things just happened.
MKUltra and COINTELPRO
The 1975 Church Committee exposed MKUltra, COINTELPRO, and a web of surveillance and assassination plots.
It's taught as a closed case, resolved by FISA in 1978.
Except it wasn't.
After 9/11, the FISA Court approved surveillance at around 99.97%.
MKUltra's files were deliberately destroyed, so the true number of victims was never known.
Congress reopened hearings as recently as 2026.
"National security"
Students are taught to treat it as a self-evident good, never interrogated, never defined.
The Council on Foreign Relations made the link explicit with a report titled U.S. Education Reform and National Security.
Education isn't for producing informed citizens; it's for producing a workforce that serves the security state.
The omissions are the point
An educated population that understood the full history of US intelligence operations would never tolerate those operations continuing in its name. So the system is designed to produce a population that doesn't know enough to ask.
A society of sheep.
That's not a bug. That's the function.
When you control the curriculum, you don't need to win arguments. You just make sure the arguments never happen. And the most reliable way to do that is to make sure the people who shape the curriculum are themselves shaped by the same system that benefits from the silence.
It's a closed loop, and it's been running for the better part of a century.
