In 1978, Hatchet News Editor Maryann Haggerty wrote:
The Central Intelligence Agency regarded GW as a “hot spot” during the late sixties and early seventies, according to a set of formerly-secret documents released last week under the Freedom of Information Act.
The CIA clipped campus newspapers and kept in contact with campus informants from December 1967 to June 1973 in an effort to learn more about this threat, the “Project Resistance” records say.
Some of the newly-released documents refer directly to GW. One memo, dated Dec. 9, 1968, details a conversation between a CIA agent and an informant at the student union cafeteria.
The informant, according to the agent’s memo, “advised that the active membership of Students for a Democratic Society was approximately 100, but that the strength of the organization, counting sympathizers, is between four and five hundred … it was his opinion, and strictly his opinion, that the demonstration (at President Nixon’s inauguration) will lead to riots, possibly as severe as the April 1968 riots.”
In one report, filed right before the opening of the fall 1969 semester, GW is grouped with Columbia and Harvard as a “hot spot.” According to this report, the “well reasoned objective … of (President Lloyd H.) Elliott at George Washington … is to keep campus revolt familial if possible, localized if possible and under control within the academic commune.” The report also said that GW “will increase its Negro enrollment by 25 percent.”
According to the agency’s report to its files summarizing Project Resistance, “This project was originated in an effort to identify any threat against Agency personnel, installations, or projects, and to determine if there were any foreign sponsorship, encouragement, or training involved.”
According to the same report, “voluminous information was obtained in an attempt to identify any threat against Agency personnel, installations, or projects. The file does not reflect whether or not any such threat surfaced. The project was terminated when it was deemed that the threat to the agency had diminished considerably.”
The document continues, “The file reflects that the Deputy Director for Support (a CIA official) was concerned because student demonstrations began to show a sense of organization, central direction, commonalty of demonstrations and techniques, and common or repeated phraseology in literature and materials. In essence: organization.”
Another document details the plans of GW and other D.C. schools for Nixon’s first inauguration. “The George Washington University chapter of SDS expects to be active during the weekend and allegedly will muster some 3,000 to 5,000 demonstrators and sympathizers,” the report says, repeating information the agency obtained from publications.
