Skousen's efforts at campus espionage in 1969 collapsed after a faculty member wrote a memo urging him "to give the lie to this rumor . . . that you have organized a `spy' ring to check on the alleged pro-Communist sympathies of professors."
Only one of these agent provocateurs, a political science major, confessed the espionage. This student stopped spying because he found no Communist sympathizers at BYU, and "I decided that I was involved in a questionable activity and that I should withdraw and cease to function as an agent in any way."
[Undated, handwritten memo from "M. G. F." (poss. Merwin G. Fairbanks, director of student publications) to "Cleon Skousen," with copies to ELW (Ernest L. Wilkinson), RKT (Robert K. Thomas), BEL (Ben E. Lewis), RJS (Robert J. Smith), and "Dan Ludlow," folder 16, Hillam Papers; emphasis in original; Woods statement, 27 May 1969, 4; BYU Directory, 1968-69, s.v. "Phares Quincy Woods." From D. Michael Quinn, Ezra Taft Benson and Mormon Political Conflicts, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 26:2 (Summer 1992), also in Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power Salt Lake City (Signature Books, 1994), Chapter 3.]
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