Klamath Falls, Oregon was eventually chosen as the site for the campus of the International Academy of Provocateurs. Some had suggested Cairo, others Istanbul, sentiments leaning toward cities where raffish elements were well entrenched.
In the end, Klamath Falls, Oregon won out for its remoteness and its charm.
The town’s most ardent advocates were a pair of long retired OSS operatives. At the conference in Berne, Switzerland discussions were held on selecting the academy’s location, mapping out its curriculum, selecting staff and fine tuning murky objectives.
The pair successfully prevailed. They advanced the notion that a school dedicated to the cultivation of provocateurs should exist as far as possible from the maelstroms of espionage.
The supporters of Cairo and Istanbul reluctantly admitted the cities they advocated would either inadvertently or deliberately infect the school with homegrown strains of espionage and of deceit that could easily upend the institution.
A site survey team was dispatched to Klamath Falls, Oregon under the guise of a group of McKinsey and Company consultants evaluating possible sites for a global think tank. The four members of the team arrived in the fall of 1993. On their second day in town, two separate earthquakes hit, each of which unleashed extensive structural damages.
One of the damaged buildings was the former Sacred Heart Academy and Convent. This was considered by the consultants as an ideal site for the campus but they were unable to strike a deal with the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth. Eventually, an administration building on the site of a shuttered Weyerhaeuser timber mill was acquired.
Renzo Piano, the acclaimed Italian architect whose projects included the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the İstanbul Museum of Modern Art, was retained to spearhead renovations and design the expansive additional spaces.
Today, what is actually the International Academy of Provocateurs operates as the Rene Descartes Center For Global Understanding. Its faculty nurtures an ardent student body of revolutionaries, troublemakers and malcontents, enlightening and emboldening them with the finer points of cultivating instability and insurrection.
