Global, locally

By Charles Sowell  

SEPTEMBER 9, 2010 3:23 p.m. (0)

John Seitz shares a small office with two other professors at Wofford College.

He used to work for the Central Intelligence Agency.

In Pakistan.

But he didn’t know his true employer until later, sometime after he did a lot of the research that ultimately became the textbook “Global Issues,” which is in its fifth printing.

It was the 1960s and he had been working for the State Department in the office of Aid for International Development (AID) in Iran, Brazil and in Liberia. Then Seitz went on to work for the Asia Foundation.

“When they hired me I didn’t know it was a CIA sponsored front.”

Once he was told his true employer he had 24 hours to decide whether he wanted the job.

“Since they weren’t in the operations side of things (spying and overthrowing governments) I decided to give it a try,” he said.

At 79, he’s semi-retired and maintains an office on the Wofford campus to work on updates to “Global Issues.”

“It took a few years for it to sink in that all we were doing (in the office of Aid for International Development) is spending a lot of money without much hope of a good result. When I first went to Iran we only had one person in our office who spoke Farsi.”

Understanding the culture of the people was crucial, Seitz said.

“In Iran at the time the shah handed out jobs to tribal groups and opposition leaders to ensure loyalty,” he said. “It seemed simple to me, being naive as I was at the time and working in the government section, to point out that all these people essentially doing nothing wasn’t accomplishing much.”

The CIA had much more qualified employees than the State Department, Seitz said, and they got things done – things that had a profound effect – since there was little in the way of government oversight.

His first boss in Pakistan was a PhD in Asian studies. He understood the culture and the people. And since CIA wasn’t worried about what Congress would say (then) they’d do things like start up businesses in the hopes of creating an entrepreneurial spirit in the people.

“The CIA foundation was sort of like a government within the government. They didn’t really have to answer to anyone. So if you wanted to send some left-leaning bright young person to college in the United States in the hope that he’d come to appreciate the West, you could without having a congressional panel looking over your shoulder.”

Seitz began having second thoughts after four years with the Asia Foundation.

“I got to thinking that if this ever got out the people we’d helped would be in a lot of trouble,” he said. “As it worked out I was able to turn in my resignation just after being offered the top job in Afghanistan, so it wasn’t like I was leaving with my head down.”

Shortly thereafter the Asia Foundation’s true role in the region was revealed at length in The New York Times.

After leaving Pakistan, Seitz, who was born in Seneca Falls, N.Y., went on to get his doctorate in political science at the University of Wisconsin.

“If you’d asked me to pick out a more unlikely place for a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee to land than Spartanburg, I’d never have come up with the answer.”

But it was a good fit from the start, he said.

“Wofford has always been a teaching college and not one of those publish or perish kind of places,” he said.

He was able to devote nearly seven years to the writing of “Global Issues.”

Seitz still teaches one course a year, on Global Issues, in the spring semester.

“I learn a lot from the students,” he said. “Once a kid asked me what I meant by ‘third world poor’ and that got me to thinking of a way to illustrate it. I found it in the fact that mothers in rural Brazil don’t cry when their child dies in infancy.

“Death is so common there (and in other poverty stricken parts of the world) that young mothers don’t allow themselves to become emotionally attached to their babies until they are about two years old.”

That’s when the child generally has shown they are going to make it.

“That’s when the mom gives them a name.”