Max Millikan

Max F. Millikan was an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was a member of the Project Troy study group of 1950 to 1951, took leave in January 1951 to head the Office of Research and Reports at the Central Intelligence Agency, and became the first director of the Center for International Studies at MIT in 1952.

Early career

Millikan was born in Chicago on December 12, 1913, the son of Robert Andrews Millikan. He took a B.S. in physics at Yale University in 1935, studied at the University of Cambridge in 1935 and 1936, and received a Yale Ph.D. in 1941. He worked at the Office of Price Administration in 1942 and at the War Shipping Administration from 1942 to 1946, as principal economist and then assistant director of its Division of Ship Requirements. From January to June 1946 he was chief of the Economic Intelligence Branch of the Division of Research for Europe at the State Department. In 1947 he was assistant secretary of the President's Committee on Foreign Aid, and from 1948 a consultant to the Economic Cooperation Administration. He served on the Air Force Human Resources Professional Advisory Committee and joined the MIT faculty as an associate professor in 1949.¹

CIA service, 1951 to 1952

MIT's biographical note for his papers states that he took a leave of absence in 1951-1952 to serve as assistant director of the Central Intelligence Agency.¹

In a letter stamped January 30, 1951, Millikan wrote that "I have gone on leave from MIT to head up the Office of Research and Reports in this Agency," and that the office's mission "has been focused much more sharply on economic matters." He asked the addressee, whose name is redacted, to come to Washington for a survey of work in the field because "General Smith has asked me to request" it.² On October 29, 1951 he wrote to another recruit that he had been "down here for the last nine or ten months trying to put together for General Smith an organization to do economic research," that he had been reluctant "to become involved in a Government job again," and that he had been persuaded "to take a leave of absence from M.I.T." because there was "a particularly urgent job to be done in this Agency on which might depend in some measure our success in the international conflict in which we are now engaged."³

A memorandum of conversation dated January 22, 1951 lists "Dr. Max Millikan, Central Intelligence Agency" among the participants in a discussion with State Department officers of psychological intelligence and of the intelligence support to be given to the Office of Policy Coordination in the psychological field. The memorandum records his concern that placing the production of that intelligence in several organizations would bring "the shortcomings of decentralization."⁴ A memorandum of March 6, 1951, addressed to the intelligence chiefs of the State Department, the Army, the Navy and the Air Force, was issued "for the Director of Central Intelligence" over Millikan's typed name as Assistant Director, Research and Reports.⁵

A letter of November 26, 1951 over his typed signature, filed as AD/RR, tells a correspondent whose name is redacted that "Walt Rostow at the Center for International Studies has sought my assistance in finding him someone to help out with some research."⁶ A letter of March 3, 1952 from Stuart A. Rice of the Bureau of the Budget addresses him as Special Consultant, Central Intelligence Agency.⁷

Project Troy and the Psychological Strategy Board

MIT's biographical note for his papers describes Project TROY as "a study group (of which Millikan was a member) contracted by the Department of State in 1950."¹ He does not appear in the participant list printed by Bessner.⁸

A CIA historian's note of an interview with Millikan on March 5, 1952, titled "Origin of PSB," records that the stream "which seems to have flown directly to the creation of the PSB in the early part of 1951" was the "Troy Project," and that "Millikan participated in a 'contract study,' State and MIT, in the fall of 1951," a date corrected by hand to 1950. The note says the study's objective "was to find some means of penetrating the 'Iron Curtain,'" that "The men in Cambridge spent some three months," and that "Secretary Webb was much impressed with the report." Millikan is recorded as saying that "the best way into the problem proved to be through the 'defectors,'" that he "did not have time to go further into the detail of the 'Troy Project,'" and that the study's recommendation to the State Department "had considerable to do with the creation of the PSB." The interviewer, A. B. Darling, recorded Millikan's view that the Psychological Strategy Board, consisting of the Under Secretaries of State and Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence, was a compromise, with a director "of caliber and distinction" comparable to the Director of Central Intelligence in relation to the National Security Council. Darling added that he wished he had asked Millikan about establishing an "Office of Psychological Warfare within the Central Intelligence Agency."⁹

The Center for International Studies

The Center for International Studies, known as CENIS, began operating at MIT in the fall of 1951.¹⁰ MIT's biographical note for his papers states that the center, "established in January 1952, continued the contract work undertaken for the government under Project TROY," and that Millikan "assumed the directorship on February 1, 1952."¹ The center's own history states that it "was founded in 1951 in response to the Cold War struggles between the United States and the Soviet Union," and that in 1952 "a young MIT economist named Max F Millikan became the Center's first director."¹¹ The historian Daniel Bessner describes Millikan as an economics professor who had spent a year at the CIA, and reports that he accepted the offer to serve as the center's first director in February 1952.¹⁰

Bessner says that soon after Millikan arrived at the center he asked Gaither of the Ford Foundation for money. When Hans Speier learned of the request, he visited Millikan in February 1952 to discuss a center for research in international communication. Millikan was reticent, believing that MIT's comparative advantage lay in economic and political studies, but Speier "convinced him otherwise." Bessner attributes the Ford trustees' grant of $875,000 to CENIS in the spring of 1952 to Speier's efforts.¹⁰

In April 1956 the Office of National Estimates of the CIA circulated to its Board, and proposed possibly to pass to the Director of Central Intelligence, Millikan's comments, sent on the center's letterhead, on the draft National Intelligence Estimate 100-3-56, "Sino-Soviet Policy and Its Probable Effects in Underdeveloped Areas." They were accompanied by an imaginary statement by Molotov written by Walt Rostow.¹²

Millikan wrote the preface to Rostow's The Dynamics of Soviet Society (W. W. Norton, 1953) as director of the center, which the title page credits to "W. W. Rostow in collaboration with Alfred Levin, and with the assistance of others at the Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology."¹³ A CIA Office of Security memorandum of April 11, 1958 records that Rostow was approved as a consultant to the agency's Office of Research and Reports in March 1951, with status extended to June 1953, and that Alfred Kohlberg wrote to Senator Styles Bridges in October 1957 criticizing the agency for supporting the center.¹⁴

In February 1961 Allen W. Dulles wrote to Millikan, as director of the center, that he was "very deeply interested in the proposal in your letter of January 23," and that he expected to attend at least part of the meetings of May 18 to 21, 1961, when Millikan would review the center's first ten years.¹⁵

Quantico Vulnerabilities Panel, 1955

In June 1955 Millikan was one of eleven experts whom Nelson Rockefeller invited to Quantico, Virginia, to study methods of exploiting Communist bloc vulnerabilities. The panel met June 5 to 10. Walt Rostow of the Center for International Studies was designated its chairman. The other members were Frederick Dunn, C. D. Jackson, Ellis A. Johnson, Paul Linebarger, Philip Mosely, George Pettee, Stefan Possony, Hans Speier and Charles A. H. Thomson.¹⁶ Millikan was also one of the twelve members of the second panel, which was often called Quantico II. That group met in Washington in late August and at Quantico in September 1955, and its source book contains two papers by Millikan, "Thresholds of U.S. Effort" and "Economic Policy as an Instrument of Political and Psychological Policy."¹⁷¹⁸

Funding

Patrick Oster of the Chicago Sun-Times reported in the Washington Post of September 11, 1977 that the CIA had secretly financed an MIT research project on how to turn Soviet scientists into agents, carried out by Anthony J. Wiener, "who at the time was affiliated with MIT's Center for International Studies, which was set up in 1951 with CIA money and had as its first director Max F. Millikan, a former assistant director of the agency." The article placed the project under "Project MK-ULTRA" and said the money passed through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.¹⁹ Time of February 24, 1967 reported "directly and without masquerade" "$300,000 to finance M.I.T.'s topflight Center for International Studies," and that MIT then "terminated the contract 'for practical, not moral reasons.'" In the same article Millikan, described as "the sage director of M.I.T.'s International Center," was quoted: "The number of my friends around here who have swallowed this 'invisible government' line is disturbing."²⁰ Testifying before the Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Andreas Lowenfeld said of the center in 1951 and 1952: "they had some kind of contract with the CIA," and, asked whether he knew it was a CIA operation, "I was never formally told, but it became apparent." Asked whether Walt Rostow was in charge, he said: "He was acting, I guess … and then Mr. Millikan came."²¹

A Philadelphia Inquirer clipping in agency files, headlined "Penn Denies Campus Has CIA Agents," states: "On April 26, Dr. Max Millikan, director of the MIT Center of International Studies, said the college would reluctantly drop research contracts with the CIA because they were 'subject to misinterpretation.'" It quotes Millikan, "There never was a secret" about the contracts.²² A letter of April 21, 1971, on the center's letterhead and sent to Richard Helms by a writer whose name is redacted in the copy, states that "some years ago our Center for International Studies cancelled contracts with the CIA." The writer places the break with the agency: "It was the CIA and not the university which declined to continue relations on such terms."²³

Death

MIT's archival description of his papers states that Millikan was a member of the MIT faculty from 1949, was appointed professor of economics and director of the Center for International Studies on returning to MIT in 1952, and held both posts until his death on December 14, 1969.¹ MIT's account of the center says that its first director served for more than fifteen years and urged faculty to become "social science entrepreneurs."¹¹ MIT News in 2026 describes him as an adviser to President John F. Kennedy who drafted the proposal for the Peace Corps, and says that a 1961 memorandum from him to Kennedy helped inspire its creation.²⁴

The MIT President's report for 1969 to 1970 states that he was "Director of the Center since a few months after its founding in 1952" and died on December 14, 1969, aged 56, and the Dean's report for that year calls him "A valued member of both the Department of Economics and the Department of Political Science."²⁵