A week later, Hyland began handing out a different story. Kissinger now claimed he "did not open anyone's mail," but had received a copy of the flyer from "a number of participants" who showed him their letters. Kissinger says now he "does not recollect" calling the FBI. How then does he explain the official evidence, which is stamped "Security Information" and printed on United States Government stationery? Hyland reports that Kissinger contends the FBI would never release such a memo about him to anyone else because the Freedom of Information Act only permits the release of records on a specific person to that individual alone. Diamond says he filed under a subject--Harvard University-- rather than a name, and so had every right to read the documents.

The other obvious source, the Boston Division of the FBI, is equally uncooperative. Joel Carlson, assistant agent at the Boston bureau, says the FBI never comments on documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. According to the Boston bureau's files, their SAC man back then was J.J. Kelly, but Carlson says they have no record of his whereabouts and declared him "either retired or deceased."

The other man most likely to know the full story also died recently. William Yandell Elliott, director of the Summer School in Kissinger's time and legendary conservative king of the Government Department, tutored Kissinger as an undergraduate and later appointed him director of the seminar-a program they masterminded together but kissinger ran alone. Elliot wanted Kissinger to be the internationalist in Washington that he had always hoped to be and would probably have approved of Kissinger's decision to approach the FBI as the proper way to protect Harvard from potential communist encroachment. David Landau '72 writes in Kissinger: The Uses of Power, that even measured against the standard of the early McCarthy era, Elliot "was a violent Cold Warrior, one who would not tolerate the slightest deviation from the path of unrelenting struggle against the Stalinist Terror." Most Harvard faculty and administrators who knew him back then agree that if Kissinger consulted with anyone before notifying the FBI, Elliot would have been the man. Marguerite Hildebrand, who was executive secretary for the Summer School at the time and had an office just above Kissinger's, says that Kissinger had always kept Elliot informed of the seminar's progress and problems.

Elliot's wife, Louise Elliot, who now lives out on Hidden Valley Farm in Haywood, Virginia, does not remember her husband mentioning the incident. Her sons, William and David, who have sorted most of Elliot's papers, have found nothing relevant to the FBI encounter.

Why Kissinger felt moved to volunteer the letters to the FBI is a mystery to Louise Elliot. "It doesn't make sense to me unless he thought a crime was being committed," she says. Donald Price, professor of Government and a colleague of Kissinger's, also finds the incident "a very surprising story." Most Harvard Faculty members who were around in kissinger's time now say they would never volunteer information to the FBI--not then, not now. "I would be very astounded if anyone were to tell me it happened very much then," Price declares.

A few did seek out the FBI--but only when they considered an incident dangerous. Thomas Crooks, for instance, who became assistant director of the Summer School in 1957, once called the FBI after he received a letter that threatened an "important figure." But the letters to the seminar participants did not pose a threat--even a veiled one--to anyone.

Benjamin Brown, a close friend of Kissinger's who ran the International Seminar in Kissinger's absence in the early '60s, also cannot understand Kissinger's motives for placing himself at the FBI's disposal. "It seems a little overly zealous," he admits.

But it was political prescience rather than zealous patriotism that probably most impelled Kissinger to offer his services to the bureau. Kissinger knew he could eventually use the international network of contacts he made through friendships with seminar participants. To risk their disillusionment with the American way, provoked by anti-American tracts such as the flyer, would in the long run weaken his diplomatic muscle. Kissinger, his colleagues believe, thought in these lifetime terms. "I've often said myself that Kissinger either consciously or unconsciously had a sense of destiny." Price says. Steven R. Graubard, who worked closely with Kissinger on the seminar, writes in Kissinger: Portrait of a Mind of the invaluable service the seminar provided in Kissinger's dipolmatic coming-of-age:

After only a few years, Kissinger's network of foreign friends--persons in the prime of their political or professional lives--was unrivaled. No American could boast acquaintance with a more diverse group of European and Asian intellectuals...It is difficult to exaggerate the help that Kissinger received from his International Seminar friends.

Thomas Schelling, Littauer Professor of Political Economy and a colleague of Kissinger's, phrased it more succinctly in a 1974 interview with the New York Post: "Henry collected a repertory of people. I don't think it was altruism."

Beyond purely self-interested intentions, Kissinger's activity with the FBI exposes an insecurity which most Kissinger biographers inevitably claim lies beneath his arrogance. At Harvard, this anxiety displayed itself in his retreating behavior and his distaste for faculty polities. In over-reacting to a critical pamphlet. Kissinger once more allowed his suspicious temperament to take charge of his actions. Landau recognizes this tendency in his writing as well:

There is one strain in Kissinger's writing that appears again and again, no matter what the subject under discussion. It is a gruesome, intractable fear of revolution, a deep horror of internal upheavals which cause social order and international stability to collapse around them.

In his paranoia, Kissinger perceived a threat to international equilibrium in a flyer calling for world peace.