National Strategy Information Center

The National Strategy Information Center (NSIC), founded in 1962, was the first right-wing think tank to address such issues as national security strategy, low-intensity conflict, operations of intelligence agencies, political warfare, and the role of nongovernmental groups, especially labor unions, in furthering foreign and military policy goals. (1) Over the past four decades, NSIC has worked with the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies in studies of political and psychological warfare and in their collaboration with conservative labor union operations, especially in Europe and Latin America.

In addition to the support it has received directly or indirectly from the U.S. government, NSIC depends on grants from right-wing foundations. Launched with start-up funding from the Coors family, NSIC has in recent years depended on the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. (2)

Among NSIC's founding directors were such right-wing figures as Joseph Coors, Frank Barnett, William Casey, Frank Shakespeare, and Prescott Bush, Jr., brother of George H.W. Bush. Barnett, who was one of the most prominent members of the Committee on the Present Danger, became a leading advocate of political warfare, psychological operations, and low-intensity conflict strategy in the 1980s. Barnett co-edited a National Defense University report on the subject with Carnes Lord-who, like former NSIC associates Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt, is a disciple of Straussian political philosophy. (3)

Lord was a member of the working group convened by NSIC in preparation for its report The Future of U.S. Intelligence, which was coauthored by Shulsky and Schmitt. Lord also served as the top national security aid in the office of Vice President Dan Quayle, where he worked alongside William Kristol, codirector of the Project for the New American Century.

NSIC president Roy Godson served as a consultant to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) during the Reagan years, when Schmitt was PFIAB's executive director. At the same time, Godson served as one of the main intermediaries between the private Nicaraguan contra support network and the National Security Council. He has long been closely connected with neocon-directed organizations, such as the Coalition for the Democratic Majority and the League for Industrial Democracy. Moreover, Godson was the longtime director of the International Labor program at Georgetown University, where NSIC's own Consortium for the Study of Intelligence is also housed.

Funding Sources

Contact Information

1730 Rhode Island Avenue, NW
Suite 500
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: (202) 429-0129

(2) "Grant Data Matrix: National Strategy Information Center," Mediatransparency.org, 2003.

(3) Carnes Lord and Frank Barnett, Political Warfare and Psychological Operations: Rethinking the U.S. Approach (National Defense University and National Strategy Information Center, 1989).

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