Fund for International Student Co-operation

The Fund for international Student Co-operation was based in London and aimed to "'further co-operation among students of the free world'. Under its organiser, Scottish manager of the European Movement and future Labour MP George Foulkes, it hedl seminars for Third World students visiting Britain and organised weekend seminars for NUS officials. In 1967, the Radical Student alliance issued a pamphlet... which speculated that FISC was a CIA front. FISC officials vigorously denied the claim"^[1]

The Secretary of the fund from 1965-67 was Margaret Ramsay who had previously (from 1962) been Associate secretary at the International Student Conference which was a CIA front and later (in 1969) joined MI6.^[2]

Among their activities FISC sorganised a trip to Chile in 1966:

Jack Straw was branded "chief trouble-maker" by the British embassy in Chile while on a student trip that nearly ended in disgrace, according to secret papers released today. The report, into how the student visit to help build a youth centre came to a "nearly disastrous" end, accused Mr Straw of deliberately trying to cause "a minor scandal" for the purposes of "childish politicking" within the National Union of Students (NUS).

In a strongly worded dispatch from the first secretary at the British embassy in Santiago, the future foreign secretary's student group were described as "somewhat less than ideal representatives of British youth". The 1966 trip was organised by the now closed Fund for International Student Cooperation and designed to foster closer relations between British and Chilean students.

But a letter to the Foreign Office from AJD Stirling dated September 23, 1966 described the students as "depressingly immature". Stirling wrote: "I understand that about half of them have aspirations to office in the NUS and most seemed more interested in advancing their own or their associates' candidacies than in the job on hand. "Their childish politicking and the disorganisation to which they arrived hastened the splitting of the party into quarrelling factions." Three years later Mr Straw became president of the NUS, a post he held until 1971.^[3]

Notes

1. ^ Stephen Dorril, MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations, London: fourth Estate, p. 475.
2. ^ Stephen Dorril, MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations, London: fourth Estate, p. 475.
3. ^ Staff and agencies Student Straw 'chief troublemaker' on Chile trip The Guardian, Thursday March 6, 2003 12.15pm update