Is CIA Recruiting Foreign Students On U.S. University Campuses In 21st-Century?

Most U.S. antiwar and anti-imperialist Movement activists don't think that U.S. university administrations should allow the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] to recruit on their campus foreign students who attend U.S. universities in the 21st-century. Yet as ProPublic website senior editor Daniel Golden noted in his book, Spy Schools, that Henry Holt & Co. published in 2017:

"Two trends have converged to create the surge in academic spying. The first is the growing intimacy between U.S. intelligence and academia...Deterred by student protests and faculty hostility during the Vietnam era, the CIA, FBI and other security agencies have returned in force, forging tenuous alliance of spies and scholars.

"`September 11 led to a quiet re-engagement of a lot of the academy, with the national security community,' says Austin Long, who teaches security policy at Columbia University...

"...Foreign students and professors have been pouring into the United States...There were almost one million (974,926) international students at U.S. universities in 2014-15, more than six times the 1974-75 total (154,580) and more than double that in 1994-95 (452,635)...Although the CIA is noted for its feats and failures abroad, its National Resources Division operates clandestinely in the United States, primarily recruiting foreign nationals. Henry Crumpton, who headed the division from 2003 to 2005, said that it relied on a network of `campus cooperators' numbering in the `low hundreds' to identify prospects.

"`We have cooperative contacts at the universities,' Crumpton told me. `I would meet with them sometimes. These are American citizens, for the most part, or persons legally here, cooperating because they think it's the right thing to do.'

"...Working from `lists of foreign students studying at U.S. universities,' one former CIA official used `a plethora of commercial aliases' to `make appointments with them,' according to his memoir, written under the pseudonym Ishmael Jones...Some CIA officers on clandestine missions pretend to be professors..."