NYU and Columbia University's IDA-Pentagon Connection--Part 4

Former Columbia U. Trustee/IDA Board Chair William A.M.Burden

Columbia University’s 1959-1968 IDA Connection

Columbia University’s involvement with IDA had begun early in 1959. In a May 22, 1959 letter, for example, IDA’s then-Vice President and Director of Research Albert Hill wrote that Columbia University Life Trustee “Bill Burden will probably succeed Jim McCormack as Chairman of the Board of IDA, effective Tuesday May 26th” but “until you hear to the contrary, this is confidential.” A copy of a June 29, 1959 memo, which stated “that summer study groups are being set up every year to tackle particular problems of interest to the military,” from Stanford University’s representative on the IDA board of trustees, Fred Terman, to IDA Vice-President Hill was also sent to Columbia Trustee Burden in the summer of 1959.

Besides representing Columbia on IDA’s board of trustees, as “Chairman of the Board” of IDA, Burden also represented Columbia on IDA’s executive committee. IDA’s executive committee determined “the broad general policy of” IDA on behalf of the IDA board of trustees, according to a June 8, 1959 letter from then-IDA Vice-President Albert Hill to Dr. Marvin Stern of the General Dynamics weapons manufacturer.

Former Columbia U. Physics Professor//IDA VP Charles Townes

That same year, Columbia University Professor of Physics Charles Townes moved to Washington, D.C. to replace Albert Hill as IDA’s Vice-President and Director of Research when Hill decided to return to MIT as a professor of physics. As former Columbia Professor Townes recalled in his 1995 book, Making Waves:

“…The proposed position for me was Vice President and Director of Research for the Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA]. The Institute was a non-profit `think-tank’ with a very important role, run by five or six prominent universities on the East Coast, Columbia University being one of them. It managed what was known as the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group. We had to pick the right people who would be responsible for analyzing how and whether a weapon worked and its effectiveness. We also advised a new organization, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, whose aim was to consider what could be done in space, and to help initiate new ideas and technologies of importance to national security…”

On Sept. 28 and Sept. 29, 1959, Townes, for example, attended an IDA meeting with then-CIA Deputy Director of Plans Richard Bissell Jr., another CIA official named RW Komer and then-MIT Professor Jerome Wiesner. Among the topics discussed at this Sept. 28-29, 1959 meeting were “Project Principia” weapons research for better chemical propellant, research related to U.S. military requirements in the field of human behavior and a proposal to set up an “Institute for Naval Studies” to examine “future possibilities in naval warfare.”

The de-classified 1979 IDA study noted that less than 4 months before Columbia was officially “welcomed” to become an institutional member of IDA, the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff [JCS] sent a Sept. 7, 1959 memo to the WSEG’s Director, which stated that “the JCS wanted WSEG to undertake two studies: (a) an evaluation of offensive weapons systems that might be utilized in a strategic role, particularly during the 1964-67 period; and (b) an evaluation of attack carrier striking forces and land-based tactical air forces under general and limited war situations from 1960 to 1967.”  According to the same de-classified 1979 IDA document, “both studies were undertaken as a matter of urgency and highest priority, and constituted the bulk of the WSED/IDA effort during the rest of 1959 and 1960.”

During the 1960 to late 1968 period when Columbia was an institutional member of IDA and JFK and LBJ both escalated the “limited war” in Vietnam, IDA continued to work with WSEG to produce classified weapons research reports with subject titles like the following:

1. “Evaluation of Attack Carrier Striking Forces and Land-Based Tactical Air Forces in Limited and General War, 1960-1963 (Report 48 of Aug. 15, 1960);

2.  “Evaluation of Strategic Offensive Weapons Systems” (Report 50 of Dec. 27, 1960);

3. “Nuclear Weapons Study” (Report 1 of Sept. 25, 1960);

4. “Future Developments in Carrier and Land-Based Tactical Air Forces” (Report 54 of July 19, 1962);

5. “Future Light Tactical Aircraft Weapons Systems for Close Air Support and Other missions, 1966-1972 Time Period” (Report 58 of Feb. 12, 1962);

6. “Missile Penetration Study” (Report 59—Study I of Jan. 29, 1962, Report 59—Supplement to Study I of May 29, 1962, Report 59—Study II of May 1963 and Report 59—Study III of March 1964);

7. “Terminal Vulnerability of Selected Tactical Aircraft to Anti-Aircraft Weapons” (Report 60 of March 28, 1962);

8. “Potential Military Applications of Offensive Weapons Systems in Space” (Report 66 of Apr. 1963);

9. “Allocation of Resources to Anti-submarine Warfare in the Face of Uncertainty” (Report 98 of May 1966);

10. “Tactical Aircraft vs. Surface-to-Air Missiles” (Report 70 of Feb. 1964);

11. “Study of Tactical Reconnaissance and Surveillance” (Report 86 of Sept. 1965);

12. “Preliminary Analyses of Combat Air Operations in Southeast Asia” (Report 90 of Nov. 1965);

13. “Interdiction of the Ho Chi Minh Trail” (Report 103);

14. “Operational Reliability Test, M-16 A-1 Rifle System” (Report 124 of Feb. 1968);

15. “Analysis of Combat Aircraft Losses in Southeast Asia,” (Report 190 of Feb. 1967 and Report 128 of Apr. 1968)

16. “Strategic Offensive Weapons Employment in the Presence of Defenses” (Report 132 of June 1968); and

17. “Strategic Offensive Weapons Employment in the Time Period About 1975” (Report 148 of Aug. 1968).

All of the secret weapons research project work done with the WSEG by IDA that produced these classified reports for the Pentagon were approved by the IDA Trustees Executive Committee--whose Chairman was Columbia Life Trustee William A.M. Burden. As page 89 of the Cox Commission’s Crisis At Columbia: Report of the Fact-Finding Commission Appointed to Investigate the Disturbances at Columbia University book observed in late 1968, “…the Executive Committee, of which Mr. Burden was Chairman, approved all work conducted by IDA, including classified projects directly related to the prosecution of the Vietnam War.” 

Former Columbia U. Prez/IDA Exec.Cmt. Member Grayson Kirk

Between 1960 and late 1968 Columbia’s then-president, Grayson Kirk, also represented Columbia on IDA’s board of trustees and served on the IDA Trustees Executive Committee with Columbia Trustee Burden. And as the North American Congress on Latin America [NACLA]’s 1968 pamphlet, Who Rules Columbia?, recalled:

“On March 30, 1967, IDA’s Vice-President and General Manager, Norman L. Christeller, told reporters from the Columbia Daily Spectator that `We consider Columbia to be one of the three or four primary university sponsors of the IDA. President Kirk has always been an active member of our board’…Columbia has, in fact, held contracts for IDA; in 1964, for instance, the Electrical Engineering Department received a contract from IDA worth $18,950 for a study of missile-tracking radar (the project was conducted by Herbert Dern of the ERL staff under IDA contract no. 50-13).”

According to a Dec. 11, 1948 Pentagon directive, “the purpose” of the WSEG, with which IDA staff produced its reports, was “to provide…analyses and evaluation of present and future weapons systems under probable future combat conditions” and to “make comprehensive analyses and evaluations of weapons and weapons systems under projected conditions of war at the request of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the Research and Development Board.” Yet on Nov. 21, 1966 then-Columbia University President and IDA Executive Committee Member Grayson Kirk told a group of 300 to 500 antiwar students at Columbia during the Vietnam War Era:

“Whenever the University institutionally undertakes to espouse this or that position in a partisan situation, it jeopardizes the long-run autonomy which is the heart and soul of all University life.

“This in my judgment, is something that the University, no university must do, no university can do. And the university that undertakes to do this, to become a partisan active agent with respect to this or that facet of controversial foreign policy endangers those values that make our universities in a democratic society I suppose the most important agency in that society. And, if they are that important in these days, and I think they are, they are important simply because they have been able to maintain and hold to that degree this impartiality, with respect to contending public issues, that creates respect for the quality of discussion that goes on in the university.

“Therefore for all these reasons, it seems to me that it is not desirable, it is not feasible, it is not possible for the University to attempt to make a value judgment about any division of the federal government.”

Although Kirk claimed in 1966 that his University had not “become a partisan agent with respect to this or that facet of controversial foreign policy,” in Lt. General A.J. Goodpaster’s now-declassified Memo for Record regarding an Oct. 1963 “Meeting in Dep. Secretary Gilpatrick’s Office—WSEG/IDA Relationship,” the then-Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, wrote:

“The meeting was held in the office of the Deputy Sec Def, Mr. Roswell L. Gilpatrick. Attending was the Chairman of the JCS, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, the DDR & E Dr. Harold Brown, Lt. Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster, Assistant to the Chairman of the JCS; and, for the IDA trustees, Mr. William A.M. Burden, Chairman of the Board; James R. Killian, Jr. of MIT; and Grayson Kirk of Columbia University. The IDA trustees reviewed the history of the establishment of IDA and the background of some of the IDA/WSEG difficulties. The JCS Chairman emphasized the value of an effective working relationship between the WSEG [Weapons Systems Evaluation Group of the Pentagon] military element and WSED [Weapons Systems Evaluation Division of IDA]…” (end of part 4)

(part 4 of article that originally appeared on ZNet website in August 2018)