The late feminist activist and journalist Gloria Steinem once worked with the CIA.
Steinem led a CIA-backed organization that reportedly recruited young Americans to disrupt Soviet Union-supported festivals and share alternatives to communist ideas. She maintained through her life that her involvement with the CIA was an innocent arrangement and claimed in a 1967 New York Times article that the CIA never asked her to report on other Americans or foreign nationals.
After American journalist and feminist activist Gloria Steinem died at age 92 on Sept. 3, 2026, a rumor spread online that she once worked with the CIA.
Social media users on X, TikTok and Reddit claimed she was a CIA “asset,” “cop” or “operative,” or that she led an organization that was actually a front for CIA operations.
Steinem repeatedly and publicly acknowledged working with the CIA. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, she ran the Independent Research Service, a CIA-backed organization that recruited young Americans, reportedly to disrupt Soviet Union-supported festivals and promote alternatives to communist ideas.
As such, we have rated this claim as true.
Whether she actively spied for the CIA is unclear. In 1967 news articles, Steinem insisted she was never asked to pass information to the CIA.
Steinem admits involvement after exposé
“This was the organization that made life so miserable for the organizers of the communist-leaning world youth festivals in Vienna in 1959, and in Helsinki in 1962,” the
According to a 2016 New York Times article about Steinem, after the Ramparts issue ran, Steinem publicly acknowledged to the Times and The Washington Post that the CIA was a major financial backer of the Independent Research Service.
While the Times said the Independent Research Service simply received financial support, the Post said Steinem “worked closely with the Central Intelligence Agency” and “had great praise for the CIA agents whom she collaborated with.”
“I found them liberal and farsighted and open to an exchange of ideas,” Steinem said, according to the Post. “I never felt I was being dictated to at all.” Steinem told both newspapers that very few people involved in the Independent Research Service knew of the CIA’s involvement.
The Post’s article also quoted another director of the Independent Research Service, Dennis Shaul, who said, “The Helsinki Festival was a disaster from their (the Communist world’s) point of view, and I think we can take a good deal of credit for that.”
In March 1967, Steinem appeared on a CBS documentary, “In the Pay of the CIA: An American Dilemma,” to tell her story about her time taking “secret CIA funds,” per a CBS news release archived in the CIA’s public records.
A clip of her interview in that documentary appears to be available on YouTube. In the clip, she acknowledges working for the CIA and, again, says the CIA did not interfere with her point of view.
“I had the conventional liberal’s view of the CIA as a right-wing incendiary group, and I was amazed to discover that this was far from the case, that they were enlightened, liberal nonpartisan activists,” she said (at 2:17).
We reached out to CBS to ask for an official copy of the documentary and await a response.
Steinem responds to feminist
In 1975, Redstockings, a radical feminist group, attacked Steinem’s involvement with the CIA and called Steinem’s insistence that she was never asked to gather information for the CIA a “serious lie.”
“The Report on the Vienna Youth Festival, published with her name on it as Director of the Independent Research Service, contains 13 pages devoted solely to biographies, political affiliations, and even pseudo-political analyses of individuals from all the countries participating in the festival,” Redstockings wrote.
Redstockings also said it questioned Steinem’s motives for entering the women’s movement and was “suspicious of her sudden rise to prominence as a ‘women’s liberation leader’ at a time when, unlike other prominent women’s liberationists, she was active in no women’s group, she had not written a feminist book, won a Congressional seat or played a superb game of tennis.”
The New York Times reported in 2016 that Steinem said the criticism from other feminists “hurt more than anything.”
“They never called to ask me what I did,” she said.
In the same 2016 article, Steinem maintained that her relationship with the CIA was innocent.
“It’s so interesting now, because the initials C.I.A. will make people believe anything,” she said. “It just wasn’t like that. It just was so uncontrolled. As I remember saying at the time, if this was our grandmother’s money we’d be doing the same thing.”
