>Of course, Washington's point is not to get any valuable information
>on foreign leftists' party affiliations that Gloria Steinem informed
>on (the Redstockings' expose is at
><http://www.cia-on-campus.org/surveil/festival.html>) -- which would
>have been available from published sources or its own work without her
>-- but to give a bad name to feminism in general and American feminism
>in particular internationally, poison international solidarity (it
>becomes difficult to trust any American feminist when the face of
>American feminism, which Steinem has been in mass culture, has served
>as a paid informant to the CIA?), and seek to control American
>feminists (by winning its leaders on its side, promoting
>pro-Washington feminists' ideas through its resources, etc.)
Well, this is wrong in two ways. First, Steinem wasn't a feminist then (in 1959), she was a slightly published 24-year-old journalist just returned from a 2-year fellowship in India. None of the IRS publications promotes feminism per se, although one does talk about how great things are for black people in the U.S. (in 1959) "A Review of Negro Segregation in the U.S."
Her quotes in the Washington Post in 1967 reflect that she wasn't really focusing on the movement, feminist or otherwise, or she would've been more circumspect. (The Ramparts exposé's of CIA funding were breaking, the article was a response to that.) Women's Liberation (as opposed to NOW) doesn't burst on the scene till 1968, and it is decidedly unfriendly to the CIA, being composed of civil rights workers and student movement/anti-war organizers.
Second, the CIA could've gotten those affiliations and information in other ways, but you can't fairly argue that paying anti-communists to attend and report on the World Youth Festivals is not one of the ways they did so. Still, probably her most important role on behalf of the CIA was to provide an anti-communist propaganda machine at the Festivals in Vienna and Helsinki. In Vienna, this included recruiting and paying for anti-communist U.S. youth to attend, publishing 400,000 copies of a daily newspaper for the three weeks of the festival, and distributing 36,000 books by liberal anti-communists and socialists. Samuel Walker reported to C.D. Jackson, "Gloria's group continues to do yeoman service, distributing books etc. to the point where the cry has gone up 'Never before have so many Young Republicans distributed so much Socialist literature with such zeal.'" (The letter is quoted in Kai Bird's 1992 book on John J. McCloy, which also mentions that Steinem directly reported to C. D. Jackson "in great detail on the left-wing affiliations of various Americans associated with the allegedly Soviet-backed U.S. Festival Committee.")
Her role in the feminist movement is more direct and later, and has more to do with domestic than foreign distortions. As she said in 1967, "The CIA's big mistake was not supplanting itself with private funds fast enough." The goal was to _look_ independent and spontaneous.
Jenny Brown