Recent revelations about domestic spying by the CIA made me relive my own experience in this department. It started very innocently. Someone named Bogdan Walewski called me at Columbia University, where I was teaching at the time. Though he was a Polish citizen, he explained that he worked for the United Nations. He asked if he could drop by for a quick visit to discuss trends in American culture. Curious, I agreed. Soon, a young man who spoke English well was in my study at Fayerweather Hall. He wanted to know what I thought about several recent Broadway plays and various orchestras that performed in Carnegie Hall in the preceding year. After a while, he allowed that he greatly benefited from my sophisticated observations and wondered if my wife and I would be his guests at dinner at an expensive French restaurant in New York.
A very lavish dinner and pleasant chit chat were all that transpired the second time I met Mr. Walewski. But all this changed when he called to set a time for a third visit. I marked my calendar for January 13, 1965. This time he was all business. When he arrived in my office, he told me that he was well aware that I was Jewish and a refugee from Nazi Germany. He had read about my adamant opposition to granting West Germany a finger on the nuclear trigger, as laid out in the extensive debate I'd had with Herman Kahn on the subject, moderated by New York Times military editor Hanson Baldwin and published in a recent issue of the New York Times Magazine.
Walewski explained that the USSR was very concerned about this matter and that I could, single-handedly, help stop the Germans dead in their tracks if I would get him a report my colleague Richard Neustadt had prepared on the subject for President Johnson. I knew nothing about the report other than that I had read somewhere that it was for the "president's eyes only," which meant it was more highly classified than top secret. It took me a long minute to realize that I was being asked to spy. It is not exactly part of the daily routine of a university professor or, I guess, of anyone else.
I told Walewski to leave my office that instant and that I was going to report this conversation to the FBI even before he hit the door. He warned me that "I will let it be known that Minerva and you are not actually married but merely living together." While this might have troubled someone in some other parts of the US, it was not a big deal in the campus community. I told him to get going and immediately called the local FBI. I expected some high-ranking agents to rush over and interview me, maybe even ask me to set a trap for the guy. Instead, I got someone at some switchboard that, to my utter amazement, was uninterested in my story. The person seemed to take my name and phone number largely to get me off the line. I had been asked to deliver to the Soviets a crucial document prepared for the president's eyes only! I guess they thought I had made up the whole story. I decided to put it in writing and sent a memo to the agent in charge of the FBI in New York City. In response, I received what obviously was a form letter, appreciating my communication. Heck, I concluded, if nobody cared about Soviet spies hiding in the middle of New York City, on the payroll of the United Nations, I had other fish to fry. After fuming for a few more days, I more or less forgot about the whole affair, although occasionally I still puzzled over it. Was the FBI that inept?
Almost exactly 25 years later, in July 1990, I received a letter from Manassas, Virginia -- from Walewski. He asked to see me one more time. He wanted to apologize. He had been serving as an American agent and was ordered to check on my loyalty to my country. (He later was caught while spying for the United States in Warsaw, and he was released in 1985 in a spy exchange between the US and the communist bloc. He was planning to write a book about his experiences.)
When I first reported this incident in my memoir My Brother's Keeper I wrote that I believed that such domestic spying was a matter of the past. Sadly I know better now. Whoever, is next in the White House will have to launch a new drive to ensure that while our security is protected, so are our individual rights.
To learn more about Amitai Etzioni's latest book, Security First; For A Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy (Yale University Press, 2007), go to www.securityfirstbook.com