Before Gloria Steinem became the most visible face of American feminism, she ran a CIA front. From 1958 to 1962, she founded and directed the Independent Research Service, an organization the Central Intelligence Agency funded almost entirely through Cord Meyer's International Organizations Division. Her mandate: recruit American students to Soviet-sponsored World Youth Festivals in Vienna (1959) and Helsinki (1962), distributing propaganda while collecting intelligence on foreign participants. The Agency's own declassified CREST files document this infrastructure of covert student funding. Steinem knew the CIA bankrolled the operation; most of the students she recruited did not.
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