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In CIA director Richard Helms had as he would later recall ldquoone of my darkest daysrdquo when President Lyndon Johnson told him that the muckraking magazine Ramparts was about to expose one of the Agencyrsquos best-kept secrets a covert project to enroll American students in the crusade against communism Ramparts however had only a small part of the story of the CIArsquos two-decades-long effort to suborn the National Student Association Patriotic Betrayal tells the rest of the tale which reads like a John le Carreacute novel filled with self-serving rationalizations layers of duplicity and bureaucratic double-talk In this eye-opening book Karen M Paget herself a former member of the NSA mined hundreds of archival sources and declassified documents and interviewed more than people to uncover precisely how the CIA turned the NSA into an intelligence asset during the Cold War with students usedmdashsometimes wittingly but usually unwittinglymdashas undercover agents inside America and abroad A rich and suspenseful account of an under-examined episode in the Cold War Patriotic Betrayal describes the relationship from its inception in when both the NSA and CIA were established to when public exposure forced the CIA to discontinue the arrangement while successfully engineering a cover-up of the extent of its penetration into the NSA For the first time Paget tells the full story revealing that what began as a straightforward project to thwart perceived Soviet influence in America and abroad grew and diversified and that intelligence-gathering and espionagemdashdespite subsequent CIA denialsmdashwere integral to its nature How did a domestic liberal student organization become effectively a covert arm of a secret government organization charged with advancing US foreign policy aims The answer throws a sharp light on the persistent argument heard even today about whether Americarsquos national-security interests can be secured by skullduggery and deception Patriotic Betrayal is an indispensable history of the dark side of Cold War good intentions and fills a significant gap in an important era of postwar twentieth-century history.