Killing Hope (William Blum)

Killing Hope
Author	William Blum
Publisher	Common Courage Press
First published	1995 Maine
Type	Book
ISBN	978-1-56751-252-6
Source	PDF
Audiobook	Audiobook

Author's note

In addition to those described in this book, accounts of many other serious American post-World War II interventions can be found in another book by William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, chapter 17, although not in the rich detail found in the present book.

—January 2005

Introduction

Excerpts from the Introduction, 1987 edition

A brief history of the Cold War and anti-communism

Our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti-communism already has.

—Michael Parenti¹

It was in the early days of the fighting in Vietnam that a Vietcong officer said to his American prisoner: “You were our heroes after the War. We read American books and saw American films, and a common phrase in those days was “to be as rich and as wise as an American”. What happened?”²

An American might have been asked something similar by a Guatemalan, an Indonesian or a Cuban during the ten years previous, or by a Uruguayan, a Chilean or a Greek in the decade subsequent. The remarkable international goodwill and credibility enjoyed by the United States at the close of the Second World War was dissipated country by country, intervention by intervention. The opportunity to build the war-ravaged world anew, to lay the foundations for peace, prosperity and justice, collapsed under the awful weight of anti-communism.

The weight had been accumulating for some time; indeed, since Day One of the Russian Revolution. By the summer of 1918 some 13,000 American troops could be found in the newly-born state, the future Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Two years and thousands of casualties later, the American troops left, having failed in their mission to “strangle at its birth” the Bolshevik state, as Winston Churchill put it.³

The young Churchill was Great Britain’s Minister for War and Air during this period. Increasingly, it was he who directed the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Allies (Great Britain, the US, France, Japan and several other nations) on the side of the counter-revolutionary “White Army”. Years later, Churchill the historian was to record his views of this singular affair for posterity:

Were they [the Allies] at war with Soviet Russia? Certainly not; but they shot Soviet Russians at sight. They stood as invaders on Russian soil. They armed the enemies of the Soviet Government. They blockaded its ports, and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and schemed its downfall. But war—shocking! Interference—shame! It was, they repeated, a matter of indifference to them how Russians settled their own internal affairs. They were impartial—Bang!⁴

What was there about this Bolshevik Revolution that so alarmed the most powerful nations in the world? What drove them to invade a land whose soldiers had recently fought alongside them for over three years and suffered more casualties than any other country on either side of the World War?

The Bolsheviks had had the audacity to make a separate peace with Germany in order to take leave of a war they regarded as imperialist and not in any way their war, and to try and rebuild a terribly weary and devastated Russia. But the Bolsheviks had displayed the far greater audacity of overthrowing a capitalist- feudal system and proclaiming the first socialist state in the history of the world. This was uppityness writ incredibly large. This was the crime the Allies had to punish, the virus which had to be eradicated lest it spread to their own people.

The invasion did not achieve its immediate purpose, but its consequences were nonetheless profound and persist to the present day. Professor D.F. Fleming, the Vanderbilt University historian of the Cold War, has noted:

For the American people the cosmic tragedy of the interventions in Russia does not exist, or it was an unimportant incident long forgotten. But for the Soviet peoples and their leaders the period was a time of endless killing, of looting and rapine, of plague and famine, of measureless suffering for scores of millions—an experience burned into the very soul of a nation, not to be forgotten for many generations, if ever. Also for many years the harsh Soviet regimentations could all be justified by fear that the capitalist powers would be back to finish the job. It is not strange that in his address in New York, September 17, 1959, Premier Khrushchev should remind us of the interventions, “the time you sent your troops to quell the revolution”, as he put it.⁵

In what could be taken as a portent of superpower insensitivity, a 1920 Pentagon report on the intervention reads: “This expedition affords one of the finest examples in history of honorable, unselfish dealings … under very difficult circumstances to be helpful to a people struggling to achieve a new liberty.”⁶

History does not tell us what a Soviet Union, allowed to develop in a “normal” way of its own choosing, would look like today. We do know, however, the nature of a Soviet Union attacked in its cradle, raised alone in an extremely hostile world, and, when it managed to survive to adulthood, overrun by the Nazi war machine with the blessings of the Western powers. The resulting insecurities and fears have inevitably led to deformities of character not unlike that found in an individual raised in a similar life-threatening manner.

We in the West are never allowed to forget the political shortcomings (real and bogus) of the Soviet Union; at the same time we are never reminded of the history which lies behind it. The anti-communist propaganda campaign began even earlier than the military intervention. Before the year 1918 was over, expressions in the vein of “Red Peril”, “the Bolshevik assault on civilization”, and “menace to world by Reds is seen” had become commonplace in the pages of the New York Times.

During February and March 1919, a US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee held hearings before which many “Bolshevik horror stories” were presented. The character of some of the testimony can be gauged by the headline in the usually sedate Times of 12 February 1919:

DESCRIBE HORRORS UNDER RED RULE. R.E. SIMONS AND W.W. WELSH TELL SENATORS OF BRUTALITIES OF BOLSHEVIKI—STRIP WOMEN IN STREETS—PEOPLE OF EVERY CLASS EXCEPT THE SCUM SUBJECTED TO VIOLENCE BY MOBS.

Historian Frederick Lewis Schuman has written: “The net result of these hearings … was to picture Soviet Russia as a kind of bedlam inhabited by abject slaves completely at the mercy of an organization of homicidal maniacs whose purpose was to destroy all traces of civilization and carry the nation back to barbarism.”⁷

Literally no story about the Bolsheviks was too contrived, too bizarre, too grotesque, or too perverted to be printed and widely believed—from women being nationalized to babies being eaten (as the early pagans believed the Christians guilty of devouring their children; the same was believed of the Jews in the Middle Ages). The story about women with all the lurid connotations of state property, compulsory marriage, “free love”, etc. “was broadcasted over the country through a thousand channels,” wrote Schuman, “and perhaps did more than anything else to stamp the Russian Communists in the minds of most American citizens as criminal perverts”.⁸ This tale continued to receive great currency even after the State Department was obliged to announce that it was a fraud. (That the Soviets eat their babies was still being taught by the John Birch Society to its large audience at least as late as 1978.)⁹

By the end of 1919, when the defeat of the Allies and the White Army appeared likely, the New York Times treated its readers to headlines and stories such as the following:

30 Dec. 1919: “Reds Seek War With America”

9 Jan. 1920: “‘Official quarters’ describe the Bolshevist menace in the Middle East as ominous”

11 Jan. 1920: “Allied officials and diplomats [envisage] a possible invasion of Europe”

13 Jan. 1920: “Allied diplomatic circles” fear an invasion of Persia

16 Jan. 1920: A page-one headline, eight columns wide:

“Britain Facing War With Reds, Calls Council In Paris.”

“Well-informed diplomats” expect both a military invasion of Europe and a Soviet advance into Eastern and Southern Asia.

The following morning, however, we could read: “No War With Russia, Allies To Trade With Her”

7 Feb. 1920: “Reds Raising Army To Attack India”

11 Feb. 1920: “Fear That Bolsheviki Will Now Invade Japanese Territory”

Readers of the New York Times were asked to believe that all these invasions were to come from a nation that was shattered as few nations in history have been; a nation still recovering from a horrendous world war; in extreme chaos from a fundamental social revolution that was barely off the ground; engaged in a brutal civil war against forces backed by the major powers of the world; its industries, never advanced to begin with, in a shambles; and the country in the throes of a famine that was to leave many millions dead before it subsided.

In 1920, The New Republic magazine presented a lengthy analysis of the news coverage by the New York Times of the Russian Revolution and the intervention. Amongst much else, it observed that in the two years following the November 1917 revolution, the Times had stated no less than 91 times that “the Soviets were nearing their rope’s end or actually had reached it.”¹⁰

If this was reality as presented by the United States’ “newspaper of record”, one can imagine only with dismay the witch’s brew the rest of the nation’s newspapers were feeding to their readers.

This, then, was the American people’s first experience of a new social phenomenon that had come upon the world, their introductory education about the Soviet Union and this thing called “communism”. The students have never recovered from the lesson. Neither has the Soviet Union.

The military intervention came to an end but, with the sole and partial exception of the Second World War period, the propaganda offensive has never let up. In 1943 Life magazine devoted an entire issue in honor of the Soviet Union’s accomplishments, going far beyond what was demanded by the need for wartime solidarity, going so far as to call Lenin “perhaps the greatest man of modern times”.¹¹ Two years later, however, with Harry Truman sitting in the White House, such fraternity had no chance of surviving. Truman, after all, was the man who, the day after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, said: “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious in any circumstances.”¹²

Much propaganda mileage has been squeezed out of the Soviet-German treaty of 1939, made possible only by entirely ignoring the fact that the Russians were forced into the pact by the repeated refusal of the Western powers, particularly the United States and Great Britain, to unite with Moscow in a stand against Hitler;¹³ as they likewise refused to come to the aid of the socialist-oriented Spanish government under siege by the German, Italian and Spanish fascists beginning in 1936. Stalin realized that if the West wouldn’t save Spain, they certainly wouldn’t save the Soviet Union.

From the Red Scare of the 1920s to the McCarthyism of the 1950s to the Reagan Crusade against the Evil Empire of the 1980s, the American people have been subjected to a relentless anti-communist indoctrination. It is imbibed with their mother’s milk, pictured in their comic books, spelled out in their school books; their daily paper offers them headlines that tell them all they need to know; ministers find sermons in it, politicians are elected with it, and Reader’s Digest becomes rich on it.

The fiercely-held conviction inevitably produced by this insidious assault upon the intellect is that a great damnation has been unleashed upon the world, possibly by the devil himself, but in the form of people; people not motivated by the same needs, fears, emotions, and personal morality that govern others of the species, but people engaged in an extremely clever, monolithic, international conspiracy dedicated to taking over the world and enslaving it; for reasons not always clear perhaps, but evil needs no motivation save evil itself. Moreover, any appearance or claim by these people to be rational human beings seeking a better kind of world or society is a sham, a cover-up, to delude others, and proof only of their cleverness; the repression and cruelties which have taken place in the Soviet Union are forever proof of the bankruptcy of virtue and the evil intentions of these people in whichever country they may be found, under whatever name they may call themselves; and, most important of all, the only choice open to anyone in the United States is between the American Way of Life and the Soviet Way of Life, that nothing lies between or beyond these two ways of making the world.

This is how it looks to the simple folk of America. One finds that the sophisticated, when probed slightly beneath the surface of their academic language, see it exactly the same way.

To the mind carefully brought to adulthood in the United States, the truths of anti-communism are self-evident, as self-evident as the flatness of the world once was to an earlier mind; as the Russian people believed that the victims of Stalin’s purges were truly guilty of treason.

The foregoing slice of American history must be taken into account if one is to make sense of the vagaries of American foreign policy since the end of World War II, specifically the record, as presented in this book, of what the US military and the CIA and other branches of the US government have done to the peoples of the world.

In 1918, the barons of American capital needed no reason for their war against communism other than the threat to their wealth and privilege, although their opposition was expressed in terms of moral indignation.

During the period between the two world wars, US gunboat diplomacy operated in the Caribbean to make “The American Lake” safe for the fortunes of United Fruit and W.R. Grace & Co., at the same time taking care to warn of “the Bolshevik threat” to all that is decent from the likes of Nicaraguan rebel Augusto Sandino.

By the end of the Second World War, every American past the age of 40 had been subjected to some 25 years of anti-communist radiation, the average incubation period needed to produce a malignancy. Anti-communism had developed a life of its own, independent of its capitalist father. Increasingly, in the post-war period, middle-aged Washington policy makers and diplomats saw the world out there as one composed of “communists” and “anti-communists”, whether of nations, movements or individuals. This comic-strip vision of the world, with righteous American supermen fighting communist evil everywhere, had graduated from a cynical propaganda exercise to a moral imperative of US foreign policy.

Even the concept of “non-communist”, implying some measure of neutrality, has generally been accorded scant legitimacy in this paradigm. John Foster Dulles, one of the major architects of post-war US foreign policy, expressed this succinctly in his typically simple, moralistic way: “For us there are two sorts of people in the world: there are those who are Christians and support free enterprise and there are the others.”¹⁴ As several of the case studies in the present book confirm, Dulles put that creed into rigid practice.

The word “communist” (as well as “Marxist”) has been so overused and so abused by American leaders and the media as to render it virtually meaningless. (The Left has done the same to the word “fascist”.) But merely having a name for something—witches or flying saucers—attaches a certain credence to it.

At the same time, the American public, as we have seen, has been soundly conditioned to react Pavlovianly to the term: it means, still, the worst excesses of Stalin, from wholesale purges to Siberian slave-labor camps; it means, as Michael Parenti has observed, that “Classic Marxist-Leninist predictions [concerning world revolution] are treated as statements of intent directing all present-day communist actions.”¹⁵ It means “us” against “them”.

And “them” can mean a peasant in the Philippines, a mural-painter in Nicaragua, a legally-elected prime minister in British Guiana, or a European intellectual, a Cambodian neutralist, an African nationalist—all, somehow, part of the same monolithic conspiracy; each, in some way, a threat to the American Way of Life; no land too small, too poor, or too far away to pose such a threat, the “communist threat”.

The cases presented in this book illustrate that it has been largely irrelevant whether the particular targets of intervention—be they individuals, political parties, movements or governments—called themselves “communist” or not. It has mattered little whether they were scholars of dialectical materialism or had never heard of Karl Marx; whether they were atheists or priests; whether a strong and influential Communist Party was in the picture or not; whether the government had come into being through violent revolution or peaceful elections … all have been targets, all “communists”.

It has mattered still less that the Soviet KGB was in the picture. The assertion has been frequently voiced that the CIA carries out its dirty tricks largely in reaction to operations of the KGB which have been “even dirtier”. This is a lie made out of whole cloth. There may be an isolated incident of such in the course of the CIA’s life, but it has kept itself well hidden. The relationship between the two sinister agencies is marked by fraternization and respect for fellow professionals more than by hand-to-hand combat. Former CIA officer John Stockwell has written:

Actually, at least in more routine operations, case officers most fear the US ambassador and his staff, then restrictive headquarters cables, then curious, gossipy neighbors in the local community, as potential threats to operations. Next would come the local police, then the press. Last of all is the KGB—in my twelve years of case officering I never saw or heard of a situation in which the KGB attacked or obstructed a CIA operation.¹⁶

Stockwell adds that the various intelligence services do not want their world to be “complicated” by murdering each other.

It isn’t done. If a CIA case officer has a flat tire in the dark of night on a lonely road, he will not hesitate to accept a ride from a KGB officer—likely the two would detour to some bar for a drink together. In fact CIA and KGB officers entertain each other frequently in their homes. The CIA’s files are full of mention of such relationships in almost every African station.¹⁷

Proponents of “fighting fire with fire” come perilously close at times to arguing that if the KGB, for example, had a hand in the overthrow of the Czechoslovak government in 1968, it is OK for the CIA to have a hand in the overthrow of the Chilean government in 1973. It’s as if the destruction of democracy by the KGB deposits funds in a bank account from which the CIA is then justified in making withdrawals.

What then has been the thread common to the diverse targets of American intervention which has brought down upon them the wrath, and often the firepower, of the world’s most powerful nation? In virtually every case involving the Third World described in this book, it has been, in one form or another, a policy of “self- determination”: the desire, born of perceived need and principle, to pursue a path of development independent of US foreign policy objectives. Most commonly, this has been manifested in (a) the ambition to free themselves from economic and political subservience to the United States; (b) the refusal to minimize relations with the socialist bloc, or suppress the left at home, or welcome an American military installation on their soil; in short, a refusal to be a pawn in the Cold War; or (c) the attempt to alter or replace a government which held to neither of these aspirations; i.e., a government supported by the United States.

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that such a policy of independence has been viewed and expressed by numerous Third World leaders and revolutionaries as one not to be equated by definition to anti-Americanism or pro-communism, but as simply a determination to maintain a position of neutrality and non-alignment vis-à-vis the two superpowers. Time and time again, however, it will be seen that the United States was not prepared to live with this proposition. Arbenz of Guatemala, Mossadegh of Iran, Sukarno of Indonesia, Nkrumah of Ghana, Jagan of British Guiana, Sihanouk of Cambodia … all, insisted Uncle Sam, must declare themselves unequivocally on the side of “The Free World” or suffer the consequences. Nkrumah put the case for non-alignment as follows:

The experiment which we tried in Ghana was essentially one of developing the country in co-operation with the world as a whole. Non-alignment meant exactly what it said. We were not hostile to the countries of the socialist world in the way in which the governments of the old colonial territories were. It should be remembered that while Britain pursued at home co-existence with the Soviet Union this was never allowed to extend to British colonial territories. Books on socialism, which were published and circulated freely in Britain, were banned in the British colonial empire, and after Ghana became independent it was assumed abroad that it would continue to follow the same restrictive ideological approach. When we behaved as did the British in their relations with the socialist countries we were accused of being pro-Russian and introducing the most dangerous ideas into Africa.¹⁸

It is reminiscent of the 19th-century American South, where many Southerners were deeply offended that so many of their black slaves had deserted to the Northern side in the Civil War. They had genuinely thought that the blacks should have been grateful for all their white masters had done for them, and that they were happy and content with their lot. The noted Louisiana surgeon and psychologist Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright argued that many of the slaves suffered from a form of mental illness, which he called “drapetomania”, diagnosed as the uncontrollable urge to escape from slavery. In the second half of the 20th-century, this illness, in the Third World, has usually been called “communism”.

Perhaps the most deeply ingrained reflex of knee-jerk anti- communism is the belief that the Soviet Union (or Cuba or Vietnam, etc., acting as Moscow’s surrogate) is a clandestine force lurking behind the facade of self-determination, stirring up the hydra of revolution, or just plain trouble, here, there, and everywhere; yet another incarnation, although on a far grander scale, of the proverbial “outside agitator”, he who has made his appearance regularly throughout history … King George blamed the French for inciting the American colonies to revolt … disillusioned American farmers and veterans protesting their onerous economic circumstances after the revolution (Shays’ Rebellion) were branded as British agents out to wreck the new republic … labor strikes in late-19th-century America were blamed on “anarchists” and “foreigners”, during the First World War on “German agents”, after the war on “Bolsheviks”.

And in the 1960s, said the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, J. Edgar Hoover “helped spread the view among the police ranks that any kind of mass protest is due to a conspiracy promulgated by agitators, often Communists, ‘who misdirect otherwise contented people’.”¹⁹

The last is the key phrase, one which encapsulates the conspiracy mentality of those in power—the idea that no people, except those living under the enemy, could be so miserable and discontent as to need recourse to revolution or even mass protest; that it is only the agitation of the outsider which misdirects them along this path.

Accordingly, if Ronald Reagan were to concede that the masses of El Salvador have every good reason to rise up against their god-awful existence, it would bring into question his accusation, and the rationale for US intervention, that it is principally (only?) the Soviet Union and its Cuban and Nicaraguan allies who instigate the Salvadoreans: that seemingly magical power of communists everywhere who, with a twist of their red wrist, can transform peaceful, happy people into furious guerrillas. The CIA knows how difficult a feat this is. The Agency, as we shall see, tried to spark mass revolt in China, Cuba, the Soviet Union, Albania, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe with a singular lack of success. The Agency’s scribes have laid the blame for these failures on the “closed” nature of the societies involved. But in non-communist countries, the CIA has had to resort to military coups or extra-legal chicanery to get its people into power. It has never been able to light the fire of popular revolution.

For Washington to concede merit and virtue to a particular Third World insurgency would, moreover, raise the question: Why does not the United States, if it must intervene, take the side of the rebels? Not only might this better serve the cause of human rights and justice, but it would shut out the Russians from their alleged role. What better way to frustrate the International Communist Conspiracy? But this is a question that dares not speak its name in the Oval Office, a question that is relevant to many of the cases in this book.

Instead, the United States remains committed to its all-too- familiar policy of establishing and/or supporting the most vile tyrannies in the world, whose outrages against their own people confront us daily in the pages of our newspapers: brutal massacres; systematic, sophisticated torture; public whippings; soldiers and police firing into crowds; government-supported death squads; tens of thousands of disappeared persons; extreme economic deprivation … a way of life that is virtually a monopoly held by America’s allies, from Guatemala, Chile and El Salvador to Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia, all members in good standing of the Holy War Against Communism, all members of “The Free World”, that region of which we hear so much and see so little.

The restrictions on civil liberties found in the communist bloc, as severe as they are, pale by comparison to the cottage- industry Auschwitzes of “The Free World”, and, except in that curious mental landscape inhabited by The Compleat Anti- Communist, can have little or nothing to do with the sundry American interventions supposedly in the cause of a higher good.

It is interesting to note that as commonplace as it is for American leaders to speak of freedom and democracy while supporting dictatorships, so do Russian leaders speak of wars of liberation, anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism while doing extremely little to actually further these causes, American propaganda notwithstanding. The Soviets like to be thought of as champions of the Third World, but they have stood by doing little more than going “tsk, tsk” as progressive movements and governments, even Communist Parties, in Greece, Guatemala, British Guiana, Chile, Indonesia, the Philippines and elsewhere have gone to the wall with American complicity.

During the early 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency instigated several military incursions into Communist China. In 1960, CIA planes, without any provocation, bombed the sovereign nation of Guatemala. In 1973, the Agency encouraged a bloody revolt against the government of Iraq. In the American mass media at the time, and therefore in the American mind, these events did not happen.

“We didn’t know what was happening”, became a cliché used to ridicule those Germans who claimed ignorance of the events which took place under the Nazis. Yet, was their stock answer as far-fetched as we’d like to think? It is sobering to reflect that in our era of instant world-wide communications, the United States has, on many occasions, been able to mount a large- or small-scale military operation or undertake another, equally blatant, form of intervention without the American public being aware of it until years later, if ever. Often the only report of the event or of US involvement was a passing reference to the fact that a communist government had made certain charges—just the kind of “news” the American public has been well conditioned to dismiss out of hand, and the press not to follow up; as the German people were taught that reports from abroad of Nazi wrong-doings were no more than communist propaganda.

With few exceptions, the interventions never made the headlines or the evening TV news. With some, bits and pieces of the stories have popped up here and there, but rarely brought together to form a cohesive and enlightening whole; the fragments usually appear long after the fact, quietly buried within other stories, just as quietly forgotten, bursting into the foreground only when extraordinary circumstances have compelled it, such as the Iranians holding US embassy personnel and other Americans hostage in Teheran in 1979, which produced a rash of articles on the role played by the United States in the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953. It was as if editors had been spurred into thinking: “Hey, just what did we do in Iran to make all those people hate us so?”

There have been a lot of Irans in America’s recent past, but in the absence of the New York Daily News or the Los Angeles Times conspicuously grabbing the reader by the collar and pressing against his face the full implication of the deed … in the absence of NBC putting it all into real pictures of real people on the receiving end … in such absence the incidents become non-events for the large majority of Americans, and they can honestly say “We didn’t know what was happening.”

Former Chinese Premier Chou En-lai once observed: “One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.”

It’s probably even worse than he realized. During the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in Pennsylvania in 1979, a Japanese journalist, Atsuo Kaneko of the Japanese Kyoto News Service, spent several hours interviewing people temporarily housed at a hockey rink—mostly children, pregnant women and young mothers. He discovered that none of them had heard of Hiroshima. Mention of the name drew a blank.²⁰

And in 1982, a judge in Oakland, California said he was appalled when some 50 prospective jurors for a death-penalty murder trial were questioned and “none of them knew who Hitler was”.²¹

To the foreign policy oligarchy in Washington, it is more than delightful. It is sine qua non.

So obscured is the comprehensive record of American interventions that when, in 1975, the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress was asked to undertake a study of covert activities of the CIA to date, it was able to come up with but a very minor portion of the overseas incidents presented in this book for the same period.²²

For all of this information that has made its way into popular consciousness, or into school texts, encyclopedias, or other standard reference works, there might as well exist strict censorship in the United States.

The reader is invited to look through the relevant sections of the three principal American encyclopedias, Americana, Britannica, and Colliers. The image of encyclopedias as the final repository of objective knowledge takes a beating. What is tantamount to a non-recognition of American interventions may very well be due to these esteemed works employing a criterion similar to that of Washington officials as reflected in the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times summarized this highly interesting phenomenon thusly:

Clandestine warfare against North Vietnam, for example, is not seen … as violating the Geneva Accords of 1954, which ended the French Indochina War, or as conflicting with the public policy pronouncements of the various administrations. Clandestine warfare, because it is covert, does not exist as far as treaties and public posture are concerned. Further, secret commitments to other nations are not sensed as infringing on the treaty-making powers of the Senate, because they are not publicly acknowledged.²³

The de facto censorship which leaves so many Americans functionally illiterate about the history of US foreign affairs may be all the more effective because it is not so much official, heavy-handed or conspiratorial, as it is woven artlessly into the fabric of education and media. No conspiracy is needed. The editors of Reader’s Digest and U.S. News and World Report do not need to meet covertly with the representative from NBC in an FBI safe-house to plan next month’s stories and programs; for the simple truth is that these individuals would not have reached the positions they occupy if they themselves had not all been guided through the same tunnel of camouflaged history and emerged with the same selective memory and conventional wisdom.

“The upheaval in China is a revolution which, if we analyze it, we will see is prompted by the same things that prompted the British, French and American revolutions.”²⁴ A cosmopolitan and generous sentiment of Dean Rusk, then Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, later Secretary of State. At precisely the same time as Mr. Rusk’s talk in 1950, others in his government were actively plotting the downfall of the Chinese revolutionary government.

This has been a common phenomenon. For many of the cases described in the following pages, one can find statements of high or middle-level Washington officials which put into question the policy of intervention; which expressed misgivings based either on principle (sometimes the better side of American liberalism) or concern that the intervention would not serve any worthwhile end, might even result in disaster. I have attached little weight to such dissenting statements as, indeed, in the final analysis, did Washington decision-makers who, in controversial world situations, could be relied upon to play the anti-communist card. In presenting the interventions in this manner, I am declaring that American foreign policy is what American foreign policy does.

Excerpts from the Introduction, 1995 edition

In 1993, I came across a review of a book about people who deny that the Nazi Holocaust actually occurred. I wrote to the author, a university professor, telling her that her book made me wonder whether she knew that an American holocaust had taken place, and that the denial of it put the denial of the Nazi one to shame. So broad and deep is the denial of the American holocaust, I said, that the denyers are not even aware that the claimers or their claim exist. Yet, a few million people have died in the American holocaust and many more millions have been condemned to lives of misery and torture as a result of US interventions extending from China and Greece in the 1940s to Afghanistan and Iraq in the 1990s. I enclosed a listing of these interventions, which is of course the subject of the present book.

In my letter I also offered to exchange a copy of the earlier edition of my book for a copy of hers, but she wrote back informing me that she was not in a position to do so. And that was all she said. She made no comment whatsoever about the remainder of my letter—the part dealing with denying the American holocaust—not even to acknowledge that I had raised the matter. The irony of a scholar on the subject of denying the Nazi Holocaust engaging in such denial about the American holocaust was classic indeed. I was puzzled why the good professor had bothered to respond at all.

Clearly, if my thesis could receive such a non-response from such a person, I and my thesis faced an extremely steep uphill struggle. In the 1930s, and again after the war in the 1940s and ‘50s, anti-communists of various stripes in the United States tried their best to expose the crimes of the Soviet Union, such as the purge trials and the mass murders. But a strange thing happened. The truth did not seem to matter. American Communists and fellow travelers continued to support the Kremlin. Even allowing for the exaggeration and disinformation regularly disbursed by the anti-communists which damaged their credibility, the continued ignorance and/or denial by the American leftists is remarkable.

At the close of the Second World War, when the victorious Allies discovered the German concentration camps, in some cases German citizens from nearby towns were brought to the camp to come face-to-face with the institution, the piles of corpses, and the still-living skeletal people; some of the respectable burghers were even forced to bury the dead. What might be the effect upon the American psyche if the true-believers and denyers were compelled to witness the consequences of the past half- century of US foreign policy close up? What if all the nice, clean-cut, wholesome American boys who dropped an infinite tonnage of bombs, on a dozen different countries, on people they knew nothing about—characters in a video game—had to come down to earth and look upon and smell the burning flesh?

It has become conventional wisdom that it was the relentlessly tough anti-communist policies of the Reagan Administration, with its heated-up arms race, that led to the collapse and reformation of the Soviet Union and its satellites. American history books may have already begun to chisel this thesis into marble. The Tories in Great Britain say that Margaret Thatcher and her unflinching policies contributed to the miracle as well. The East Germans were believers too. When Ronald Reagan visited East Berlin, the people there cheered him and thanked him “for his role in liberating the East”. Even many leftist analysts, particularly those of a conspiracy bent, are believers.

But this view is not universally held; nor should it be.

Long the leading Soviet expert on the United States, Georgi Arbatov, head of the Moscow-based Institute for the Study of the U.S.A. and Canada, wrote his memoirs in 1992. A Los Angeles Times book review by Robert Scheer summed up a portion of it:

Arbatov understood all too well the failings of Soviet totalitarianism in comparison to the economy and politics of the West. It is clear from this candid and nuanced memoir that the movement for change had been developing steadily inside the highest corridors of power ever since the death of Stalin. Arbatov not only provides considerable evidence for the controversial notion that this change would have come about without foreign pressure, he insists that the U.S. military buildup during the Reagan years actually impeded this development.²⁵

George F. Kennan agrees. The former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, and father of the theory of “containment” of the same country, asserts that “the suggestion that any United States administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is simply childish.” He contends that the extreme militarization of American policy strengthened hard-liners in the Soviet Union. “Thus the general effect of Cold War extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union.”²⁶ Though the arms-race spending undoubtedly damaged the fabric of the Soviet civilian economy and society even more than it did in the United States, this had been going on for 40 years by the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power without the slightest hint of impending doom. Gorbachev’s close adviser, Aleksandr Yakovlev, when asked whether the Reagan administration’s higher military spending, combined with its “Evil Empire” rhetoric, forced the Soviet Union into a more conciliatory position, responded:

It played no role. None. I can tell you that with the fullest responsibility. Gorbachev and I were ready for changes in our policy regardless of whether the American president was Reagan, or Kennedy, or someone even more liberal. It was clear that our military spending was enormous and we had to reduce it.²⁷

Understandably, some Russians might be reluctant to admit that they were forced to make revolutionary changes by their arch enemy, to admit that they lost the Cold War. However, on this question we don’t have to rely on the opinion of any individual, Russian or American. We merely have to look at the historical facts.

From the late 1940s to around the mid-1960s, it was an American policy objective to instigate the downfall of the Soviet government as well as several Eastern European regimes. Many hundreds of Russian exiles were organized, trained and equipped by the CIA, then sneaked back into their homeland to set up espionage rings, to stir up armed political struggle, and to carry out acts of assassination and sabotage, such as derailing trains, wrecking bridges, damaging arms factories and power plants, and so on. The Soviet government, which captured many of these men, was of course fully aware of who was behind all this.

Compared to this policy, that of the Reagan administration could be categorized as one of virtual capitulation. Yet what were the fruits of this ultra-tough anti-communist policy? Repeated serious confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union in Berlin, Cuba and elsewhere, the Soviet interventions into Hungary and Czechoslovakia, creation of the Warsaw Pact (in direct reaction to NATO), no glasnost, no perestroika, only pervasive suspicion, cynicism and hostility on both sides. It turned out that the Russians were human after all—they responded to toughness with toughness. And the corollary: there was for many years a close association between the amicability of US-Soviet relations and the number of Jews allowed to emigrate from the Soviet Union.²⁸ Softness produced softness.

If there’s anyone to attribute the changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to, both the beneficial ones and those questionable, it is of course Mikhail Gorbachev and the activists he inspired. It should be remembered that Reagan was in office for over four years before Gorbachev came to power, and Thatcher for six years, but in that period of time nothing of any significance in the way of Soviet reform took place despite Reagan’s and Thatcher’s unremitting malice toward the communist state.

The argument is frequently advanced that it’s easy in hindsight to disparage the American cold-war mania for a national security state—with all its advanced paranoia and absurdities, its NATO-supra-state-military juggernaut, its early-warning systems and air-raid drills, its nuclear silos and U-2s—but that after the War in Europe the Soviets did indeed appear to be a ten-foot- tall world-wide monster threat.

This argument breaks up on the rocks of a single question, which was all one had to ask back then: Why would the Soviets want to invade Western Europe or bomb the United States? They clearly had nothing to gain by such actions except the almost certain destruction of their country, which they were painstakingly rebuilding once again after the devastation of the war.

By the 1980s, the question that still dared not be asked had given birth to a $300 billion military budget and Star Wars.

There are available, in fact, numerous internal documents from the State Department, the Defense Department, and the CIA from the postwar period, wherein one political analyst after another makes clear his serious skepticism of “The Soviet Threat”—revealing the Russians’ critical military weaknesses and/or questioning their alleged aggressive intentions—while high officials, including the president, were publicly presenting a message explicitly the opposite.²⁹

Historian Roger Morris, former member of the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, described this phenomenon:

Architects of U.S. policy would have to make their case “clearer than the truth,” and “bludgeon the mass mind of top government,” as Secretary of State Dean Acheson … puts it. They do. The new Central Intelligence Agency begins a systematic overstatement of Soviet military expenditures. Magically, the sclerotic Soviet economy is made to hum and climb on U.S. government charts. To Stalin’s horse-drawn army—complete with shoddy equipment, war- torn roads and spurious morale—the Pentagon adds phantom divisions, then attributes invasion scenarios to the new forces for good measure.

U.S. officials “exaggerated Soviet capabilities and intentions to such an extent,” says a subsequent study of the archives, “that it is surprising anyone took them seriously.” Fed by somber government claims and reverberating public fear, the U.S. press and people have no trouble.³⁰

Nonetheless, the argument insists, there were many officials in high positions who simply and sincerely misunderstood the Soviet signals. The Soviet Union was, after all, a highly oppressive and secretive society, particularly before Stalin died in 1953. Apropos of this, former conservative member of the British Parliament Enoch Powell observed in 1983:

International misunderstanding is almost wholly voluntary: it is that contradiction in terms, intentional misunderstanding—a contradiction, because in order to misunderstand deliberately, you must at least suspect if not actually understand what you intend to misunderstand. … [The US misunderstanding of the USSR has] the function of sustaining a myth—the myth of the United States as “the last, best hope of mankind.” St. George and the Dragon is a poor show without a real dragon, the bigger and scalier the better, ideally with flames coming out of its mouth. The misunderstanding of Soviet Russia has become indispensable to the self-esteem of the American nation: he will not be regarded with benevolence who seeks, however ineffectually, to deprive them of it.³¹

It can be argued as well that the belief of the Nazis in the great danger posed by the “International Jewish Conspiracy” must be considered before condemning the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Both the Americans and the Germans believed their own propaganda, or pretended to. In reading Mein Kampf, one is struck by the fact that a significant part of what Hitler wrote about Jews reads very much like an American anti-communist writing about communists: He starts with the premise that the Jews (communists) are evil and want to dominate the world; then, any behavior which appears to contradict this is regarded as simply a ploy to fool people and further their evil ends; this behavior is always part of a conspiracy and many people are taken in. He ascribes to the Jews great, almost mystical, power to manipulate societies and economies. He blames Jews for the ills arising from the industrial revolution, e.g., class divisions and hatred. He decries the Jews’ internationalism and lack of national patriotism.

There were of course those Cold Warriors whose take on the Kremlin was that its master plan for world domination was nothing so gross as an invasion of Western Europe or dropping bombs on the United States. The ever more subtle—one could say fiendishly-clever—plan was for subversion … from the inside … country by country … throughout the Third World … eventually surrounding and strangling the First World … verily an International Communist Conspiracy, “a conspiracy,” said Senator Joseph McCarthy, “on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”

This is the primary focus of this book: how the United States intervened all over the world to combat this conspiracy wherever and whenever it reared its ugly head.

Did this International Communist Conspiracy actually exist?

If it actually existed, why did the Cold Warriors of the CIA and other government agencies have to go to such extraordinary lengths of exaggeration? If they really and truly believed in the existence of a diabolic, monolithic International Communist Conspiracy, why did they have to invent so much about it to convince the American people, the Congress, and the rest of the world of its evil existence? Why did they have to stage manage, entrap, plant evidence, plant stories, create phony documents? The following pages are packed with numerous anti-commiespeak examples of US-government and media inventions about “the Soviet threat”, “the Chinese threat”, and “the Cuban threat”. And all the while, at the same time, we were being flailed with scare stories: in the 1950s, there was “the Bomber Gap” between the US and the Soviet Union, and the “civil defense gap”. Then came “the Missile Gap”. Followed by “the Anti-ballistic missile (ABM) Gap”. In the 1980s, it was “the Spending Gap”. Finally, “the Laser Gap”. And they were all lies.

We now know that the CIA of Ronald Reagan and William Casey regularly “politicized intelligence assessments” to support the anti-Soviet bias of their administration, and suppressed reports, even those from its own analysts, which contradicted this bias. We now know that the CIA and the Pentagon regularly overestimated the economic and military strength of the Soviet Union, and exaggerated the scale of Soviet nuclear tests and the number of “violations” of existing test-ban treaties, which Washington then accused the Russians of.³² All to create a larger and meaner enemy, a bigger national security budget, and give security and meaning to the Cold Warriors’ own jobs.

Post-Cold War, New-World-Order time, it looks good for the Military-Industrial-Intelligence Complex and their global partners in crime, the World Bank and the IMF. They’ve got their NAFTA, and soon their World Trade Organization. They’re dictating economic, political and social development all over the Third World and Eastern Europe. Moscow’s reaction to events anywhere is no longer a restraining consideration. The UN’s Code of Conduct on Transnational Corporations, 15 years in the making, is dead. Everything in sight is being deregulated and privatized. Capital prowls the globe with a ravenous freedom it hasn’t enjoyed since before World War I, operating free of friction, free of gravity. The world has been made safe for the transnational corporation.³³

Will this mean any better life for the multitudes than the Cold War brought? Any more regard for the common folk than there’s been since they fell off the cosmic agenda centuries ago? “By all means,” says Capital, offering another warmed-up version of the “trickle down” theory, the principle that the poor, who must subsist on table scraps dropped by the rich, can best be served by giving the rich bigger meals.

The boys of Capital, they also chortle in their martinis about the death of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century—without exception—has either been crushed, overthrown, or invaded, or corrupted, perverted, subverted, or destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States. Not one socialist government or movement—from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in Salvador—not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home.

It’s as if the Wright brothers’ first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon this, took notice of the consequences, nodded their collective heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Man shall never fly.

1. China 1945 to 1960s

Was Mao Tse-tung just paranoid?

For four years, numerous Americans, in high positions and obscure, sullenly harbored the conviction that World War II was “the wrong war against the wrong enemies”. Communism, they knew, was the only genuine adversary on America’s historical agenda. Was that not why Hitler had been ignored/tolerated/appeased/aided? So that the Nazi war machine would turn East and wipe Bolshevism off the face of the earth once and for all? It was just unfortunate that Adolf turned out to be such a megalomaniac and turned West as well.

But that war was over. These Americans were now to have their day in every corner of the world. The ink on the Japanese surrender treaty was hardly dry when the United States began to use the Japanese soldiers still in China alongside American troops in a joint effort against the Chinese communists. (In the Philippines and in Greece, as we shall see, the US did not even wait for the war to end before subordinating the struggle against Japan and Germany to the anti-communist crusade.)

The communists in China had worked closely with the American military during the war, providing important intelligence about the Japanese occupiers, rescuing and caring for downed US airmen.¹ But no matter. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek would be Washington’s man. He headed what passed for a central government in China. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS, forerunner of the CIA) estimated that the bulk of Chiang’s military effort had been directed against the communists rather than the Japanese. He had also done his best to block the cooperation between the Reds and the Americans. Now his army contained Japanese units and his regime was full of officials who had collaborated with the Japanese and served in their puppet government.² But no matter. The Generalissimo was as anti-communist as they come. Moreover, he was a born American client. His forces would be properly trained and equipped to do battle with the men of Mao Tse-tung and Chou Enlai.

President Truman was up front about what he described as “using the Japanese to hold off the Communists”:

It was perfectly clear to us that if we told the Japanese to lay down their arms immediately and march to the seaboard, the entire country would be taken over by the Communists. We therefore had to take the unusual step of using the enemy as a garrison until we could airlift Chinese National [Chiang’s] troops to South China and send Marines to guard the seaports.³

The deployment of American Marines had swift and dramatic results. Two weeks after the end of the war, Peking was surrounded by communist forces. Only the arrival of the Marines in the city prevented the Reds from taking it over.⁴ And while Mao’s forces were pushing into Shanghai’s suburbs, US transport planes dropped Chiang’s troops in to seize the city.⁵

In a scramble to get to key centers and ports before the communists, the US transported between 400,000 and 500,000 Nationalist troops by ship and plane all over the vastness of China and Manchuria, places they could never have reached otherwise.

As the civil war heated up, the 50,000 Marines sent by Truman were used to guard railway lines, coal mines, ports, bridges, and other strategic sites. Inevitably, they became involved in the fighting, sustaining dozens, if not hundreds of casualties. US troops, the communists charged, attacked areas controlled by the Reds, directly opened fire on them, arrested military officers, and disarmed soldiers.⁶ The Americans found themselves blasting a small Chinese village “unmercifully”, wrote a Marine to his congressman, not knowing “how many innocent people were slaughtered”.⁷

United States planes regularly made reconnaissance flights over communist territory to scout the position of their forces. The communists claimed that American planes frequently strafed and bombed their troops and in one instance machine-gunned a communist-held town.⁸ To what extent these attacks were carried out by US airmen is not known.

There were, however, American survivors in some of the many crashes of United States aircraft. Surprisingly, the Reds continued to rescue them, tend to their wounds, and return them to US bases. It may be difficult to appreciate now, but at this time the mystique and the myth of “America” still gripped the imagination of people all over the world, and Chinese peasants, whether labeled “communist” or not, were no exception. During the war the Reds had helped to rescue scores of American fliers and had transported them through Japanese lines to safety. “The Communists”, wrote the New York Times, “did not lose one airman taken under their protection. They made a point of never accepting rewards for saving American airmen.”⁹

When 1946 arrived, about 100,000 American military personnel were still in China, still supporting Chiang. The official United States explanation for the presence of its military was that they were there to disarm and repatriate the Japanese. Though this task was indeed carried out eventually, it was secondary to the military’s political function, as Truman’s statement cited above makes abundantly clear.

The American soldiers in China began to protest about not being sent home, a complaint echoed round the world by other GIs kept overseas for political (usually anti-communist) purposes. “They ask me, too, why they’re here,” said a Marine lieutenant in China at Christmas-time, 1945. “As an officer I am supposed to tell them, but you can’t tell a man that he’s here to disarm Japanese when he’s guarding the same railway with [armed] Japanese.”¹⁰

Strangely enough, the United States attempted to mediate in the civil war; this, while being an active, powerful participant on one side. In January 1946, President Truman, apparently recognizing that it was either compromise with the communists or see all of China fall under their sway, sent General George Marshall to try and arrange a cease-fire and some kind of unspecified coalition government. While some temporary success was achieved in an on-and-off truce, the idea of a coalition government was doomed to failure, as unlikely as a marriage between the Czar and the Bolsheviks. As the historian D.F. Fleming has pointed out, “One cannot unite a dying oligarchy with a rising revolution.”¹¹

Not until early 1947 did the United States begin to withdraw some of its military forces, although aid and support to the Chiang government continued in one form or another long afterward. At about this same time, the Flying Tigers began to operate. The legendary American air squadron under the leadership of General Claire Chennault had fought for the Chinese against the Japanese before and during the world war. Now Chennault, Chiang’s former air force adviser, had reactivated the squadron (under the name CAT) and its pilots-of-fortune soon found themselves in the thick of the fray, flying endless supply missions to Nationalist cities under siege, dodging communist shell bursts to airlift food, ammunition, and supplies of all kinds, or to rescue the wounded.¹² Technically, CAT was a private airline hired by the Chiang government, but before the civil war came to an end, the airline had formally interlocked with the CIA to become the first unit in the Agency’s sprawling air-empire-to-be, best known for the Air America line.

By 1949, United States aid to the Nationalists since the war amounted to almost $2 billion in cash and $1 billion worth of military hardware; 39 Nationalist army divisions had been trained and equipped.¹³ Yet the Chiang dynasty was collapsing all around in bits and pieces. It had not been only the onslaught of Chiang’s communist foes, but the hostility of the Chinese people at large to his tyranny, his wanton cruelty, and the extraordinary corruption and decadence of his entire bureaucratic and social system. By contrast, the large areas under communist administration were models of honesty, progress and fairness; entire divisions of the Generalissimo’s forces defected to the communists. American political and military leaders had no illusions about the nature and quality of Chiang’s rule. The Nationalist forces, said General David Barr, head of the US Military Mission in China, were under “the world’s worst leadership”.¹⁴

The Generalissimo, his cohorts and soldiers fled to the offshore island of Taiwan (Formosa). They had prepared their entry two years earlier by terrorizing the islanders into submission—a massacre which took the lives of as many as 28,000 people.¹⁵ Prior to the Nationalists’ escape to the island, the US government entertained no doubts that Taiwan was a part of China. Afterward, uncertainty began to creep into the minds of Washington officials. The crisis was resolved in a remarkably simple manner: the US agreed with Chiang that the proper way to view the situation was not that Taiwan belonged to China, but that Taiwan was China. And so it was called.

In the wake of the communist success, China scholar Felix Greene observed, “Americans simply could not bring themselves to believe that the Chinese, however rotten their leadership, could have preferred a communist government.”¹⁶ It must have been the handiwork of a conspiracy, an international conspiracy, at the control panel of which sat, not unexpectedly, the Soviet Union. The evidence for this, however, was thin to the point of transparency. Indeed, ever since Stalin’s credo of “socialism in one country” won out over Trotsky’s internationalism in the 1920s, the Russians had sided with Chiang more than with Mao, advising the latter more than once to dissolve his army and join Chiang’s government.¹⁷ Particularly in the post-World War II years, when the Soviet Union was faced with its own staggering crisis of reconstruction, did it not relish the prospect of having to help lift the world’s most populous nation into the modern age. In 1947, General Marshall stated publicly that he knew of no evidence that the Chinese communists were being supported by the USSR.¹⁸

But in the United States this did not prevent the rise of an entire mythology of how the US had “lost” China: Soviet intervention, State Department communists, White House cowards, military and diplomatic folly, communist dupes and fellow-travelers in the media … treachery everywhere …

The Truman administration, said Senator Joseph McCarthy with characteristic charm, was composed of “egg-sucking phony liberals” who protected the “Communists and queers” who had “sold China into atheistic slavery”.¹⁹

Yet, short of an all-out invasion of the country by large numbers of American troops, it is difficult to see what more the US government could have done to prevent Chiang’s downfall. Even after Chiang fled to Taiwan, the United States pursued a campaign of relentless assaults against the communist government, despite a request from Chou En-lai for aid and friendship. The Red leader saw no practical or ideological bar to this.²⁰ Instead, the United States evidently conspired to assassinate Chou on several occasions.²¹

Many Nationalist soldiers had taken refuge in northern Burma in the great exodus of 1949, much to the displeasure of the Burmese Government. There, the CIA began to regroup this stateless army into a fighting force, and during the early 1950s a number of large- and small-scale incursions into China were carried out. In one instance, in April 1951, a few thousand troops, accompanied by CIA advisers and supplied by air drops from American C46s and C47s, crossed the border into China’s Yunnan province, but they were driven back by the communists in less than a week. The casualties were high and included several CIA advisers who lost their lives. Another raid that summer took the invaders 65 miles into China where they reportedly held a 100-mile-long strip of territory.

While the attacks continued intermittently, the CIA proceeded to build up the force’s capabilities: American engineers arrived to help construct and expand airstrips in Burma, fresh troops were flown in from Taiwan, other troops were recruited from amongst Burmese hill tribes, CIA air squadrons were brought in for logistical services, and enormous quantities of American heavy arms were ferried in. Much of the supply of men and equipment came in via nearby Thailand.

The army soon stood at more than 10,000 men. By the end of 1952, Taiwan claimed that 41,000 communist troops had been killed and more than 3,000 wounded. The figures were most likely exaggerated, but even if not, it was clear that the raids would not lead to Chiang’s triumphant return to the mainland—although this was not their sole purpose. On the Chinese border two greater battles were raging: in Korea and Vietnam. It was the hope of the United States to force the Chinese to divert troops and military resources away from these areas. The infant People’s Republic of China was undergoing a terrible test.

In between raids on China, the “Chinats” (as distinguished from the “Chicoms”) found time to clash frequently with Burmese troops, indulge in banditry, and become the opium barons of The Golden Triangle, that slice of land encompassing parts of Burma, Laos and Thailand which was the world’s largest source of opium and heroin. CIA pilots flew the stuff all over, to secure the cooperation of those in Thailand who were important to the military operation, as a favor to their Nationalist clients, perhaps even for the money, and, ironically, to serve as cover for their more illicit activities.

The Chinats in Burma kept up their harassment of the Chicoms until 1961 and the CIA continued to supply them militarily, but at some point the Agency began to phase itself out of a more direct involvement. When the CIA, in response to repeated protests by the Burmese Government to the United States and the United Nations, put pressure on the Chinats to leave Burma, Chiang responded by threatening to expose the Agency’s covert support of his troops there. At an earlier stage, the CIA had entertained the hope that the Chinese would be provoked into attacking Burma, thereby forcing the strictly neutral Burmese to seek salvation in the Western camp.²² In January 1961, the Chinese did just that, but as part of a combined force with the Burmese to overwhelm the Nationalists’ main base and mark finis to their Burmese adventure. Burma subsequently renounced American aid and moved closer to Peking.²³ For many of the Chinats, unemployment was short-lived. They soon signed up with the CIA again; this time to fight with the Agency’s grand army in Laos.

Burma was not the only jumping-off site for CIA-organized raids into China. Several islands within about five miles of the Chinese coast, particularly Quemoy and Matsu, were used as bases for hit-and-run attacks, often in battalion strength, for occasional bombing forays, and to blockade mainland ports. Chiang was “brutally pressured” by the US to build up his troops on the islands beginning around 1953 as a demonstration of Washington’s new policy of “unleashing” him.²⁴

The Chinese retaliated several times with heavy artillery attacks on Quemoy, on one occasion killing two American military officers. The prospect of an escalated war led the US later to have second thoughts and to ask Chiang to abandon the islands, but he then refused. The suggestion has often been put forward that Chiang’s design was to embroil the United States in just such a war as his one means of returning to the mainland.²⁵

Many incursions into China were made by smaller, commando-type teams air-dropped in for intelligence and sabotage purposes. In November 1952, two CIA officers, John Downey and Richard Fecteau, who had been engaged in flying these teams in and dropping supplies to them, were shot down and captured by the communists. Two years passed before Peking announced the capture and sentencing of the two men. The State Department broke its own two-year silence with indignation, claiming that the two men had been civilian employees of the US Department of the Army in Japan who were presumed lost on a flight from Korea to Japan. “How they came into the hands of the Chinese Communists is unknown to the United States … the continued wrongful detention of these American citizens furnishes further proof of the Chinese Communist regime’s disregard for accepted practices of international conduct.”²⁶

Fecteau was released in December 1971, shortly before President Nixon’s trip to China; Downey was not freed until March 1973, soon after Nixon publicly acknowledged him to be a CIA officer.

The Peking announcement in 1954 also revealed that eleven American airmen had been shot down over China in January 1953 while on a mission which had as its purpose the “air-drop of special agents into China and the Soviet Union”. These men were luckier, being freed after only 2 1/2 years. All told, said the Chinese, they had killed 106 American and Taiwanese agents who had parachuted into China between 1951 and 1954 and had captured 124 others. Although the CIA had little, if anything, to show for its commando actions, it reportedly maintained the program until at least 1960.²⁷

There were many other CIA flights over China for purely espionage purposes, carried out by high-altitude U-2 planes, pilotless “drones”, and other aircraft. These overflights began around the late 1950s and were not discontinued until 1971, to coincide with Henry Kissinger’s first visit to Peking. The operation was not without incident. Several U-2 planes were shot down and even more of the drones, 19 of the latter by Chinese count between 1964 and 1969. China registered hundreds of “serious warnings” about violations of its air space, and on at least one occasion American aircraft crossed the Chinese border and shot down a Mig-17.²⁸

It would seem that no degree of failure or paucity of result was enough to deter the CIA from seeking new ways to torment the Chinese in the decade following their revolution. Tibet was another case in point. The Peking government claimed Tibet as part of China, as had previous Chinese governments for more than two centuries, although many Tibetans still regarded themselves as autonomous or independent. The United States made its position clear during the war:

The Government of the United States has borne in mind the fact that the Chinese Government has long claimed suzerainty over Tibet and that the Chinese constitution lists Tibet among areas constituting the territory of the Republic of China. This Government has at no time raised a question regarding either of these claims.²⁹

After the communist revolution, Washington officials tended to be more equivocal about the matter. But US actions against Tibet had nothing to do with the niceties of international law.

In the mid-1950s, the CIA began to recruit Tibetan refugees and exiles in neighboring countries such as India and Nepal. Amongst their number were members of the Dalai Lama’s guard, often referred to picturesquely as “the fearsome Khamba horsemen”, and others who had already engaged in some guerrilla activity against Peking rule and/or the profound social changes being instituted by the revolution. (Serfdom and slavery were, literally, still prevalent in Tibet.) Those selected were flown to the United States, to an unused military base high in the Colorado mountains, an altitude approximating that of their mountainous homeland. There, hidden away as much as possible from the locals, they were trained in the fine points of paramilitary warfare.

After completing training, each group of Tibetans was flown to Taiwan or another friendly Asian country, thence to be infiltrated back into Tibet, or elsewhere in China, where they occupied themselves in activities such as sabotage, mining roads, cutting communication lines, and ambushing small communist forces. Their actions were supported by CIA aircraft and on occasion led by Agency contract mercenaries. Extensive support facilities were constructed in northeast India.

The operation in Colorado was maintained until some time in the 1960s. How many hundreds of Tibetans passed through the course of instruction will probably never be known. Even after the formal training program came to an end, the CIA continued to finance and supply their exotic clients and nurture their hopeless dream of reconquering their homeland.

In 1961, when the New York Times got wind of the Colorado operation, it acceded to a Pentagon request to probe no further.³⁰ The matter was particularly sensitive because the CIA’s 1947 charter and Congress’s interpretation of it had traditionally limited the Agency’s domestic operations to information collection.

Above and beyond the bedevilment of China on its own merits, there was the spillover from the Korean war into Chinese territory—numerous bombings and strafings by American planes which, the Chinese frequently reported, took civilian lives and destroyed homes. And there was the matter of germ warfare.

The Chinese devoted a great deal of effort to publicizing their claim that the United States, particularly during January to March 1952, had dropped quantities of bacteria and bacteria-laden insects over Korea and northeast China. It presented testimony of about 38 captured American airmen who had purportedly flown the planes with the deadly cargo. Many of the men went into voluminous detail about the entire operation: the kinds of bombs and other containers dropped, the types of insects, the diseases they carried, etc. At the same time, photographs of the alleged germ bombs and insects were published. Then, in August, an “International Scientific Committee” was appointed, composed of scientists from Sweden, France, Great Britain, Italy, Brazil and the Soviet Union. After an investigation in China of more than two months, the committee produced a report of some 600 pages, many photos, and the conclusion that:

The peoples of Korea and China have indeed been the objectives of bacteriological weapons. These have been employed by units of the U.S.A. armed forces, using a great variety of different methods for the purpose, some of which seem to be developments of those applied by the Japanese during the second world war.³¹

The last reference has to do with the bacteriological warfare experiments the Japanese had carried out against China between 1940 and 1942. The Japanese scientists responsible for this program were captured by the United States in 1945 and given immunity from prosecution in return for providing technical information about the experiments to American scientists from the Army biological research center at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The Chinese were aware of this at the time of the International Scientific Committee’s investigation.³²

It should be noted that some of the American airmen’s statements contained so much technical biological information and were so full of communist rhetoric—“imperialist, capitalist Wall Street war monger” and the like—that their personal authorship of the statements must be seriously questioned. Moreover, it was later learned that most of the airmen had confessed only after being subjected to physical abuse.³³

But in view of what we have since learned about American involvement with chemical and biological weapons, the Chinese claims cannot be dismissed out of hand. In 1970, for example, the New York Times reported that during the Korean War, when US forces were overwhelmed by “human waves” of Chinese, “the Army dug into captured Nazi chemical warfare documents describing Sarin, a nerve gas so lethal that a few pounds could kill thousands of people in minutes. … By the mid-nineteen-fifties, the Army was manufacturing thousands of gallons of Sarin.”³⁴

And during the 1950s and 1960s, the Army and the CIA conducted numerous experiments with biological agents within the United States. To cite just two examples: In 1955, there is compelling evidence that the CIA released whooping-cough bacteria into the open air in Florida, followed by an extremely sharp increase in the incidence of the disease in the state that year.³⁵ The following year, another toxic substance was disseminated in the streets and tunnels of New York City.³⁶

We will also see in the chapter on Cuba how the CIA conducted chemical and biological warfare against Fidel Castro’s rule.

In March 1966, Secretary of State Dean Rusk spoke before a congressional committee about American policy toward China. Mr. Rusk, it seems, was perplexed that “At times the Communist Chinese leaders seem to be obsessed with the notion that they are being threatened and encircled.” He spoke of China’s “imaginary, almost pathological, notion that the United States and other countries around its borders are seeking an opportunity to invade mainland China and destroy the Peiping [Peking] regime”. The Secretary then added:

How much Peiping’s “fear” of the United States is genuine and how much it is artificially induced for domestic political purposes only the Chinese Communist leaders themselves know. I am convinced, however, that their desire to expel our influence and activity from the western Pacific and Southeast Asia is not motivated by fears that we are threatening them.³⁷

2. Italy 1947-1948

Free elections, Hollywood style

“Those who do not believe in the ideology of the United States, shall not be allowed to stay in the United States,” declared the American Attorney General, Tom Clark, in January 1948.¹

In March, the Justice Department, over which Clark presided, determined that Italians who did not believe in the ideology of the United States would not be allowed to emigrate to, or even enter, the United States.

This was but one tactic in a remarkable American campaign to ensure that Italians who did not believe in the ideology of the United States would not be allowed to form a government of a differing ideology in Italy in their election of 1948.

Two years earlier, the Italian Communist Party (PCI), one of the largest in the world, and the Socialist Party (PSI) had together garnered more votes and more seats in the Constituent Assembly election than the Christian Democrats. But the two parties of the left had run separate candidates and thus had to be content with some ministerial posts in a coalition cabinet under a Christian Democrat premier. The results, nonetheless, spoke plainly enough to put the fear of Marx into the Truman administration.

For the 1948 election, scheduled for 18 April, the PCI and PSI united to form the Popular Democratic Front (FDP) and in February won municipal elections in Pescara with a 10 percent increase in their vote over 1946. The Christian Democrats ran a poor second. The prospect of the left winning control of the Italian government loomed larger than ever before. It was at this point that the US began to train its big economic and political guns upon the Italian people. All the good ol’ Yankee know-how, all the Madison Avenue savvy in the art of swaying public opinion, all the Hollywood razzmatazz would be brought to bear on the “target market”.

Pressing domestic needs in Italy, such as agricultural and economic reform, the absence of which produced abysmal extremes of wealth and poverty, were not to be the issues of the day. The lines of battle would be drawn around the question of “democracy” vs. “communism” (the idea of “capitalism” remaining discreetly to one side). The fact that the Communists had been the single most active anti-fascist group in Italy during the war, undergoing ruthless persecution, while the Christian Democrat government of 1948 and other electoral opponents on the right were riddled through with collaborators, monarchists and plain unreconstructed fascists … this too would be ignored; indeed, turned around. It was now a matter of Communist “dictatorship” vs. their adversaries’ love of “freedom”: this was presumed a priori. As one example, a group of American congressmen visited Italy in summer 1947 and casually and arbitrarily concluded that “The country is under great pressure from within and without to veer to the left and adopt a totalitarian-collective national organization.”²

To make any of this at all credible, the whole picture had to be pushed and squeezed into the frame of The American Way of Life vs. The Soviet Way of Life, a specious proposition which must have come as somewhat of a shock to leftists who regarded themselves as Italian and neither Russian nor American.

In February 1948, after non-Communist ministers in Czechoslovakia had boycotted cabinet meetings over a dispute concerning police hiring practices, the Communist government dissolved the coalition cabinet and took sole power. The Voice of America pointed to this event repeatedly, as a warning to the Italian people of the fate awaiting them if Italy “went Communist” (and used as well by anti-communists for decades afterward as a prime example of communist duplicity). Yet, by all appearances, the Italian Christian Democrat government and the American government had conspired the previous year in an even more blatant usurpation of power.

In January 1947, when Italian Premier Alcide de Gasperi visited Washington at the United States’ invitation, his overriding concern was to plead for crucial financial assistance for his war-torn, impoverished country. American officials may have had a different priority. Three days after returning to Italy, de Gasperi unexpectedly dissolved his cabinet, which included several Communists and Socialists. The press reported that many people in Italy believed that de Gasperi’s action was related to his visit to the United States and was aimed at decreasing leftist, principally Communist, influence in the government. After two weeks of tortuous delay, the formation of a center or center-right government sought by de Gasperi proved infeasible; the new cabinet still included Communists and Socialists although the left had lost key positions, notably the ministries of foreign affairs and finance.

From this point until May, when de Gasperi’s deputy, Ivan Lombardo, led a mission to Washington to renew the request for aid, promised loans were “frozen” by the United States for reasons not very clear. On several occasions during this period the Italian left asserted their belief that the aid was being held up pending the ouster of leftists from the cabinet. The New York Times was moved to note that, “Some observers here feel that a further Leftward swing in Italy would retard aid.” As matters turned out, the day Lombardo arrived in Washington, de Gasperi again dissolved his entire cabinet and suggested that the new cabinet would manage without the benefit of leftist members. This was indeed what occurred, and over the ensuing few months, exceedingly generous American financial aid flowed into Italy, in addition to the cancelation of the nation’s $1 billion debt to the United States.³

At the very same time, France, which was also heavily dependent upon American financial aid, ousted all its Communist ministers as well. In this case there was an immediate rationale: the refusal of the Communist ministers to support Premier Ramadier in a vote of confidence over a wage freeze. Despite this, the ouster was regarded as a “surprise” and considered “bold” in France, and opinion was widespread that American loans were being used, or would be used, to force France to align with the US. Said Ramadier: “A little of our independence is departing from us with each loan we obtain.”⁴

As the last month of the 1948 election campaign began, Time magazine pronounced the possible leftist victory to be “the brink of catastrophe”.⁵

“It was primarily this fear,” William Colby, former Director of the CIA, has written, “that had led to the formation of the Office of Policy Coordination, which gave the CIA the capability to undertake covert political, propaganda, and paramilitary operations in the first place.”⁶ But covert operations, as far as is known, played a relatively minor role in the American campaign to break the back of the Italian left. It was the very overtness of the endeavor, without any apparent embarrassment, that stamps the whole thing with such uniqueness and arrogance—one might say swagger. The fortunes of the FDP slid downhill with surprising acceleration in the face of an awesome mobilization of resources such as the following:⁷

•  A massive letter writing campaign from Americans of Italian extraction to their relatives and friends in Italy—at first written by individuals in their own words or guided by “sample letters” in newspapers, soon expanded to mass-produced, pre-written, postage-paid form letters, cablegrams, “educational circulars”, and posters, needing only an address and signature. And—from a group calling itself The Committee to Aid Democracy in Italy—half a million picture postcards illustrating the gruesome fate awaiting Italy if it voted for “dictatorship” or “foreign dictatorship”. In all, an estimated 10 million pieces of mail were written and distributed by newspapers, radio stations, churches, the American Legion, wealthy individuals, etc.; and business advertisements now included offers to send letters airmail to Italy even if you didn’t buy the product. All this with the publicly expressed approval of the Acting Secretary of State and the Post Office which inaugurated special “Freedom Flights” to give greater publicity to the dispatch of the mail to Italy.

The form letters contained messages such as: “A communist victory would ruin Italy. The United States would withdraw aid and a world war would probably result.” … “We implore you not to throw our beautiful Italy into the arms of that cruel despot communism. America hasn’t anything against communism in Russia [sic], but why impose it on other people, other lands, in that way putting out the torch of liberty?” … “If the forces of true democracy should lose in the Italian election, the American Government will not send any more money to Italy and we won’t send any more money to you, our relatives.”

These were by no means the least sophisticated of the messages. Other themes emphasized were Russian domination of Italy, loss of religion and the church, loss of family life, loss of home and land.

Veteran newsman Howard K. Smith pointed out at the time that “For an Italian peasant a telegram from anywhere is a wondrous thing; and a cable from the terrestrial paradise of America is not lightly to be disregarded.”

The letters threatening to cut off gifts may have been equally intimidating. “Such letters,” wrote a Christian Democrat official in an Italian newspaper, “struck home in southern Italian and Sicilian villages with the force of lightning.” A 1949 poll indicated that 16 percent of Italians claimed relatives in the United States with whom they were in touch; this, apparently, was in addition to friends there.

•  The State Department backed up the warnings in the letters by announcing that “If the Communists should win … there would be no further question of assistance from the United States.” The Italian left felt compelled to regularly assure voters that this would not really happen; this, in turn, inspired American officials, including Secretary of State George Marshall, to repeat the threat. (Marshall was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.)

•  A daily series of direct short-wave broadcasts to Italy backed by the State Department and featuring prominent Americans. (The State Department estimated that there were 1.2 million shortwave receivers in Italy as of 1946.) The Attorney General went on the air and assured the Italian people that the election was a “choice between democracy and communism, between God and godlessness, between order and chaos.” William Donovan, the wartime head of the OSS (forerunner of the CIA) warned that “under a communist dictatorship in Italy,” many of the “nation’s industrial plants would be dismantled and shipped to Russia and millions of Italy’s workers would be deported to Russia for forced labor.” If this were not enough to impress the Italian listeners, a parade of unknown but passionate refugees from Eastern Europe went before the microphone to recount horror stories of life behind “The Iron Curtain”.

•  Several commercial radio stations broadcast to Italy special services held in American Catholic churches to pray for the Pope in “this, his most critical hour”. On one station, during an entire week, hundreds of Italian-Americans from all walks of life delivered one-minute messages to Italy which were relayed through the short-wave station. Station WOV in New York invited Italian war brides to transcribe a personal message to their families back home. The station then mailed the recordings to Italy.

•  Voice of America daily broadcasts into Italy were sharply increased, highlighting news of American assistance or gestures of friendship to Italy. A sky-full of show-biz stars, including Frank Sinatra and Gary Cooper, recorded a series of radio programs designed to win friends and influence the vote in Italy. Five broadcasts of Italian-American housewives were aired, and Italian-Americans with some leftist credentials were also enlisted for the cause. Labor leader Luigi Antonini called upon Italians to “smash the Muscovite fifth column” which “follows the orders of the ferocious Moscow tyranny,” or else Italy would become an “enemy totalitarian country”.

To counter Communist charges in Italy that negroes in the United States were denied opportunities, the VOA broadcast the story of a negro couple who had made a fortune in the junk business and built a hospital for their people in Oklahoma City. (It should be remembered that in 1948 American negroes had not yet reached the status of second-class citizens.)

•  Italian radio stations carried a one-hour show from Hollywood put on to raise money for the orphans of Italian pilots who had died in the war. (It was not reported if the same was done for the orphans of German pilots.)

•  American officials in Italy widely distributed leaflets extolling US economic aid and staged exhibitions among low-income groups. The US Information Service presented an exhibition on “The Worker in America” and made extensive use of documentary and feature films to sell the American way of life. It was estimated that in the period immediately preceding the election more than five million Italians each week saw American documentaries. The 1939 Hollywood film “Ninotchka”, which satirized life in Russia, was singled out as a particularly effective feature film. It was shown throughout working-class areas and the Communists made several determined efforts to prevent its presentation. After the election, a pro-Communist worker was reported as saying that “What licked us was ‘Ninotchka’.”

•  The Justice Department served notice that Italians who joined the Communist Party would be denied that dream of so many Italians, emigration to America. The State Department then ruled that any Italians known to have voted for the Communists would not be allowed to even enter the terrestrial paradise. (A Department telegram to a New York politico read: “Voting Communist appears to constitute affiliation with Communist Party within meaning of Immigration Law and therefore would require exclusion from United States.”) It was urged that this information be emphasized in letters to Italy.

•  President Truman accused the Soviet Union of plotting the subjugation of Western Europe and called for universal military training in the United States and a resumption of military conscription to forestall “threatened communist control and police-state rule”. During the campaign, American and British warships were frequently found anchored off Italian ports. Time, in an edition widely displayed and commented upon in Italy shortly before the election, gave its approval to the sentiment that “The U.S. should make it clear that it will use force, if necessary, to prevent Italy from going Communist.”⁸

•  The United States and Italy signed a ten-year treaty of “friendship, commerce and navigation”. This was the first treaty of its kind entered into by the US since the war, a point emphasized for Italian consumption.

•  A “Friendship Train” toured the United States gathering gifts and then traveled round Italy distributing them. The train was painted red, white and blue, and bore large signs expressing the friendship of American citizens toward the people of Italy.

•  The United States government stated that it favored Italian trusteeship over some of its former African colonies, such as Ethiopia and Libya, a wholly unrealistic proposal that could never come to pass in the post-war world. (The Soviet Union made a similar proposal.)

•  The US, Great Britain and France maneuvered the Soviet Union into vetoing, for the third time, a motion that Italy be admitted to the United Nations. (The first time, the Russians had expressed their opposition on the grounds that a peace treaty with Italy had not been signed. After the signing in 1947, they said they would accept the proposal if other World War II enemies, such as Bulgaria, Hungary and Rumania were also made members.)

•  The same three allied nations proposed to the Soviet Union that negotiations take place with a view to returning Trieste to Italy. Formerly the principal Italian port on the Adriatic coast, bordering Yugoslavia, Trieste had been made a “free city” under the terms of the peace treaty. The approval of the Soviet Union was necessary to alter the treaty, and the Western proposal was designed to put the Russians on the spot. The Italian people had an intense sentimental attachment to Trieste, and if the Russians rejected the proposal it could seriously embarrass the Italian Communists. A Soviet acceptance, however, would antagonize their Yugoslav allies. The US prodded the Russians for a response, but none was forthcoming. From the Soviet point of view, the most obvious and safest path to follow would have been to delay their answer until after the election. Yet they chose to announce their rejection of the proposal only five days before the vote, thus hammering another nail into the FDP coffin.

•  A “Manifesto of peace to freedom-loving Italians”, calling upon them to reject Communism, was sent to Premier de Gasperi. Its signatories included two former US Secretaries of State, a former Assistant Secretary of State, a former Attorney General, a former Supreme Court Justice, a former Governor of New York, the former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and many other prominent personages. This message was, presumably, suitably publicized throughout Italy, a task easy in the extreme inasmuch as an estimated 82 percent of Italian newspapers were in the hands of those unsympathetic to the leftist bloc.

•  More than 200 American labor leaders of Italian origin held a conference, out of which came a cable sent to 23 daily newspapers throughout Italy similarly urging thumbs down on the Reds. At the same time, the Italian-American Labor Council contributed $50,000 to anti-Communist labor organizations in Italy. The CIA was already secretly subsidizing such trade unions to counteract the influence of leftist unions,⁹ but this was standard Agency practice independent of electoral considerations. (According to a former CIA officer, when, in 1945, the Communists came very near to gaining control of labor unions, first in Sicily, then in all Italy and southern France, co-operation between the OSS and the Mafia successfully stemmed the tide.)¹⁰

•  The CIA, by its own later admission, gave $1 million to Italian “center parties”, a king’s ransom in Italy 1948,¹¹ although another report places the figure at $10 million. The Agency also forged documents and letters purported to come from the PCI which were designed to put the party in a bad light and discredit its leaders; anonymous books and magazine articles funded by the CIA told in vivid detail about supposed communist activities in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; pamphlets dealt with PCI candidates’ sex and personal lives as well as smearing them with the fascist and/or anti-church brush.¹²

•  An American group featuring noted Italian-American musicians traveled to Rome to present a series of concerts.

•  President Truman chose a month before the election as the time to transfer 29 merchant ships to the Italian government as a “gesture of friendship and confidence in a democratic Italy”. (These were Italian vessels seized during the war and others to replace those seized and lost.)

•  Four days later, the House Appropriations Committee acted swiftly to approve $18.7 million in additional “interim aid” funds for Italy.

•  Two weeks later, the United States gave Italy $4.3 million as the first payment on wages due to 60,000 former Italian war prisoners in the US who had worked “voluntarily” for the Allied cause. This was a revision of the peace treaty which stipulated that the Italian government was liable for such payments.

•  Six days before election day, the State Department made it public that Italy would soon receive $31 million in gold in return for gold looted by the Nazis. (The fact that only a few years earlier Italy had been the “enemy” fighting alongside the Nazis was now but a dim memory.)

•  Two days later, the US government authorized two further large shipments of food to Italy, one for $8 million worth of grains. A number of the aid ships, upon their arrival in Italy during the election campaign, had been unloaded amid ceremony and a speech by the American ambassador.

A poster prominent in Italy read: “The bread that we eat—40 per cent Italian flour—60 per cent American flour sent free of charge.” The poster neglected to mention whether the savings were passed on to the consumer or served to line the pockets of the baking companies.

•  Four days before election day, the American Commission for the Restoration of Italian Monuments, Inc. announced an additional series of grants to the Italian Ministry of Fine Arts.

•  April 15 was designated “Free Italy Day” by the American Sympathizers for a Free Italy with nation-wide observances to be held.

•  The American ambassador, James Clement Dunn, traveled constantly throughout Italy pointing out to the population “on every possible occasion what American aid has meant to them and their country”. At the last unloading of food, Dunn declared that the American people were saving Italy from starvation, chaos and possible domination from outside. His speeches usually received wide coverage in the non-left press. By contrast, the Italian government prohibited several of its own ambassadors abroad from returning home to campaign for the FDP.

In his historic speech of 12 March 1947, which came to be known as “The Truman Doctrine”, the president had proclaimed:

I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.¹³

It scarcely needs to be emphasized how hypocritical this promise proved to be, but the voices which spoke out in the United States against their government’s crusade in Italy were few and barely audible above the roar. The Italian-American Committee for Free Elections in Italy held a rally to denounce the propaganda blitz, declaring that “Thousands of Americans of Italian origin feel deeply humiliated by the continuous flow of suggestions, advice and pressure put on the Italians, as though they were unable to decide for themselves whom to elect.”¹⁴

The Progressive Party also went on record, stating: “As Americans we repudiate our Government’s threat to cut off food from Italy unless the election results please us. Hungry children must not go unfed because their parents do not vote as ordered from abroad.”¹⁵ The party’s candidate for president in 1948 was Henry Wallace, the former vice-president who was an outspoken advocate of genuine detente with the Soviet Union. History did not provide the opportunity to observe what the reaction would have been—amongst those who saw nothing wrong with what the United States was doing in Italy—if a similar campaign had been launched by the Soviet Union or the Italian left in the United States on behalf of Wallace.

Though some Italians must have been convinced at times that Stalin himself was the FDP’s principal candidate, the actual Soviet intervention in the election hardly merited a single headline. The American press engaged in speculation that the Russians were pouring substantial sums of money into the Communist Party’s coffers. However, a survey carried out by the Italian bureau of the United Press revealed that the anti-Communist parties spent 7 1/2 times as much as the FDP on all forms of propaganda, the Christian Democrats alone spending four times as much.¹⁶ As for other Soviet actions, Howard K. Smith presented this observation:

The Russians tried to respond with a few feeble gestures for a while—some Italian war prisoners were released; some newsprint was sent to Italy and offered to all parties for their campaign. But there was no way of resisting what amounted to a tidal wave.

There is evidence that the Russians found the show getting too rough for them and actually became apprehensive of what the American and British reaction to a Communist victory at the polls might be. (Russia’s concern about conflict with the West was also expressed within a month of the Italian elections in one of the celebrated Cominform letters to Tito, accusing the Yugoslavs of trying to involve the Soviets with the Western powers when “it should have been known … that the U.S.S.R. after such a heavy war could not start a new one”.)¹⁷

The evidence Smith was alluding to was the Soviet rejection of the Trieste proposal. By its timing, reported the New York Times, “the unexpected procedure caused some observers to conclude that the Russians had thrown the Italian Communist Party overboard.”¹⁸ The party’s newspaper had a difficult time dealing with the story. Washington did as well, for it undermined the fundamental premise of the Italian campaign: that the Italian Communist Party and the Soviet Union were indistinguishable as to ends and means; that if you buy the one, you get the other as well. Thus the suggestion was put forth that perhaps the Soviet rejection was only a tactic to demonstrate that the US could not keep its promise on Trieste. But the Soviet announcement had not been accompanied by any such propaganda message, and it would not explain why the Russians had waited several weeks until near the crucial end to deliver its body blow to their Italian comrades. In any event, the United States could only come out smelling a lot sweeter than the Russians.

When the Broadway show had ended its engagement in Italy, the Christian Democrats stood as the clear winner with 48 percent of the vote. The leftist coalition had been humiliated with a totally unexpected polling of but 31 percent. It had been a crusade of the kind which Aneurin Bevan had ascribed to the Tories: “The whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century,” the British Labour leader wrote, “is being deployed to enable wealth to persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power.”

3. Greece 1947 to early 1950s

From cradle of democracy to client state

Jorge Semprun is a Spaniard, a Frenchman, a novelist and film-writer, former Communist, former inmate of Buchenwald. He was at the infamous Nazi concentration camp in 1944 with other party members when they heard the news:

For some days now, we had talked of nothing else. … At first some of us had thought it was a lie. It had to be. An invention of Nazi propaganda, to raise the morale of the people. We listened to the news bulletins on the German radio, broadcast by all the loudspeakers, and we shook our heads. A trick to raise the morale of the German people, it had to be. But we soon had to face up to the evidence. Some of us listened in secret to the Allied broadcasts, which confirmed the news. There was no doubt about it: British troops really were crushing the Greek Resistance. In Athens, battle was raging, British troops were retaking the city from the ELAS forces, district by district. It was an unequal fight: ELAS had neither tanks nor planes.

But Radio Moscow had said nothing, and this silence was variously interpreted.¹

The British army had arrived in Greece during October and November 1944, shortly after the bulk of the Germans had fled, an evacuation due in no small part to ELAS, the People’s Liberation Army. Founded during the course of 1941–42 on the initiative of the Greek Communist Party, ELAS and its political wing EAM cut across the entire left side of the political spectrum, numbering many priests and even a few bishops amongst its followers. The guerrillas had wrested large areas of the country from the Nazi invaders who had routed the British in 1941.

ELAS/EAM partisans could be ruthless and coercive toward those Greeks who did not cooperate with them or who were suspected of collaboration with the Germans. But they also provided another dramatic example of the liberating effects of a world war: the encrusted ways of the Greek old guard were cast aside; in their place arose communities which had at least the semblance of being run by the local residents, inchoate institutions and mechanisms which might have been the precursor of a regenerated Greek society after the war; education, perhaps geared toward propaganda, but for the illiterate education nonetheless; fighting battalions of women, housewives called upon for the first time to act independently of their husbands’ control … a phenomenon which spread irrepressibly until EAM came to number some one to two million Greeks out of a population of seven million.²

This was hardly the kind of social order designed to calm the ulcers of the British old guard (Winston Churchill for one) who had long regarded Greece as their private manor. The Great Man was determined that the Greek king should be restored to his rightful place, with all that that implied, and the British military in Greece lost no time in installing a government dedicated to that end. Monarchists, quislings, and conservatives of all stripes found themselves in positions of political power, predominant in the new Greek army and police; members of EAM/ELAS found themselves dead or in prison.³

In the early days of the world war, when defeating the Nazis was the Allies’ overwhelming purpose, Churchill had referred to ELAS as “those gallant guerrillas”, and ELAS’s supporters had welcomed the British in early November 1944 with a sign reading, “We Greet the Brave English Army. … EAM.”⁴

But the following month, fighting broke out between ELAS and the British forces and their Greek comrades-in-arms, many of whom had fought against ELAS during the war and, in the process, collaborated with the Germans; others had simply served with the Germans. (The British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, acknowledged in August 1946 that there were 228 ex-members of the Nazi Security Battalions—whose main task had been to track down Greek resistance fighters and Jews—on active service in the new Greek army.)⁵ Further support for the campaign against ELAS came from the US Air Force and Navy which transported more than two British divisions into Greece.⁶ All this while the war against Germany still raged in Europe.

In mid-January 1945 ELAS agreed to an armistice, one that had much of the appearance and the effect of a surrender. There is disagreement amongst historians as to whether ELAS had been militarily defeated or whether the Communists in the ELAS and EAM hierarchy had received the word from Stalin to lay down the gun. If the latter were the case, it would have been consistent with the noted agreement between Stalin and Churchill in October 1944, whereby spheres of influence in Eastern Europe were allocated between the two powers. In this cynical (as Churchill acknowledged) Monopoly game Britain had landed on Greece. Churchill later wrote that Stalin had “adhered strictly and faithfully to our agreement of October, and during all the long weeks of fighting the Communists in the streets of Athens not one word of reproach came from Pravda or Izvestia”.⁷ Nor, as Jorge Semprun noted, from Radio Moscow.

“It is essential to remember,” Professor D.F. Fleming has pointed out in his eminent history of the cold war, “that Greece was the first of the liberated states to be openly and forcibly compelled to accept the political system of the occupying Great Power. It was Churchill who acted first and Stalin who followed his example, in Bulgaria and then in Rumania, though with less bloodshed.”⁸

A succession of Greek governments followed, serving by the grace of the British and the United States; thoroughly corrupt governments in the modern Greek tradition, which continued to terrorize the left, tortured them in notorious island prison camps, and did next to nothing to relieve the daily misery of the war-torn Greek people.⁹ “There are few modern parallels for government as bad as this,” CBS’s chief European correspondent Howard K. Smith observed at the time.¹⁰

In the fall of 1946 the inevitable occurred: leftists took to the hills to launch phase two of the civil war. The Communists had wrenched Stalin’s strangulating hand from their throats, for their very survival was at stake and everything that they believed in.

The British were weighed down by their own post-war reconstruction needs, and in February 1947 they informed the United States that they could no longer shoulder the burden of maintaining a large armed force in Greece nor provide sizeable military and economic aid to the country. Thus it was that the historic task of preserving all that is decent and good in Western Civilization passed into the hands of the United States.

Several days later, the State Department summoned the Greek chargé d’affaires in Washington and informed him that his government was to ask the US for aid. This was to be effected by means of a formal letter of request; a document, it turned out, to be written essentially by the State Department. The text of the letter, the chargé d’affaires later reported, “had been drafted with a view to the mentality of Congress … It would also serve to protect the U.S. Government against internal and external charges that it was taking the initiative of intervening in a foreign state or that it had been persuaded by the British to take over a bad legacy from them. The note would also serve as a basis for the cultivation of public opinion which was under study.”¹¹

In July, in a letter to Dwight Griswold, the head of the American Mission to Aid Greece (AMAG), Secretary of State George Marshall said:

It is possible that during your stay in Greece you and the Ambassador will come to the conclusion that the effectiveness of your Mission would be enhanced if a reorganization of the Greek Government could be effected. If such a conclusion is reached, it is hoped that you and the Ambassador will be able to bring about such a reorganization indirectly through discreet suggestion and otherwise in such a manner that even the Greek political leaders will have a feeling that the reorganization has been effected largely by themselves and not by pressure from without.¹²

The Secretary spelled out a further guideline for Griswold, a man the New York Times shortly afterwards called the “most powerful man in Greece”:¹³

During the course of your work you and the members of your Mission will from time to time find that certain Greek officials are not, because of incompetence, disagreement with your policies, or for some other reason, extending the type of cooperation which is necessary if the objectives of your Mission are to be achieved. You will find it necessary to effect the removal of these officials.¹⁴

These contrivances, however, were not the most cynical aspects of the American endeavor. Washington officials well knew that their new client government was so venal and so abusive of human rights that even confirmed American anti-communists were appalled. Stewart Alsop for one. On 23 February 1947 the noted journalist had cabled from Athens that most of the Greek politicians had “no higher ambition than to taste the profitable delights of a free economy at American expense”.¹⁵ The same year, an American investigating team found huge supplies of food aid rotting in warehouses at a time when an estimated 75 percent of Greek children were suffering from malnutrition.¹⁶

So difficult was it to gloss over this picture, that President Truman, in his address to Congress in March 1947 asking for aid to Greece based on the Greek “request” (the “Truman Doctrine” speech), attempted to pre-empt criticism by admitting that the Greek government was “not perfect” and that “it has made mistakes”. Yet, somehow, by some ideological alchemy best known to the president, the regime in Athens was “democratic”, its opponents the familiar “terrorists”.¹⁷

There was no mention of the Soviet Union in this particular speech, but that was to be the relentless refrain of the American rationale over the next 2 1/2 years: the Russians were instigating the Greek leftists so as to kidnap yet another “free” country and drag it kicking and screaming behind the Iron Curtain.

The neighboring Communist states of Bulgaria, Albania, and particularly Yugoslavia, in part motivated by old territorial claims against Greece, did aid the insurgents by allowing them important sanctuary behind their borders and furnishing them with military supplies (whether substantial or merely token in amount is a debatable question). The USSR, however, in the person of Joseph Stalin, was adamantly opposed to assisting the Greek “comrades”. At a meeting with Yugoslav leaders in early 1948 (a few months before Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet Union), described by Milovan Djilas, second-in-command to Tito, Stalin turned to the foreign minister Edvard Kardelj and asked: “Do you believe in the success of the uprising in Greece?”

Kardelj replied, “If foreign intervention does not grow, and if serious political and military errors are not made.”

Stalin went on, without paying attention to Kardelj’s opinion: “If, if! No, they have no prospect of success at all. What, do you think that Great Britain and the United States—the United States, the most powerful state in the world—will permit you to break their line of communication in the Mediterranean? Nonsense. And we have no navy. The uprising in Greece must be stopped, and as quickly as possible.”¹⁸

The first major shiploads of military assistance under the new American operation arrived in the summer of 1947. (Significant quantities had also been shipped to the Greek government by the US while the British ran the show.) By the end of the year, the Greek military was being entirely supported by American aid, down to and including its clothing and food. The nation’s war-making potential was transformed: continual increases in the size of the Greek armed forces … fighter-bombers, transport squadrons, air fields, napalm bombs, recoilless rifles, naval patrol vessels, communication networks … docks, railways, roads, bridges … hundreds of millions of dollars of supplies and equipment, approaching a billion in total since the end of the world war … and millions more to create a “Secret Army Reserve” fighting unit, composed principally of the ex-members of the Nazi Security Battalions referred to earlier.¹⁹

The US Military Mission took over the development of battle plans for the army from the ineffective Greek generals. The Mission, related British military writer Major Edgar O’Ballance, “took a tough line and insisted that all its recommendations be carried into effect, at once and in full”.²⁰ Eventually, more than 250 American army officers were in the country, many assigned to Greek army divisions to ensure compliance with directives; others operated at the brigade level; another 200 or so US Air Force and Navy personnel were also on active duty in Greece.

All military training methods and programs were “revised, revitalized and tightened up” under American supervision²¹… infantry units made more mobile, with increased firepower; special commando units trained in anti-guerrilla tactics; training in mountain warfare, augmented by some 4,000 mules (sic) shipped to Greece by the United States … at American insistence, whole sections of the population uprooted to eliminate the guerrillas’ natural base of operation and source of recruits, just as would be done in Vietnam 20 years later.

“Both on the ground and in the air, American support was becoming increasingly active,” observed C.M. Woodhouse, the British colonel and historian who served in Greece during the mid-1940s, “and the theoretical line between advice, intelligence and combat was a narrow one.”²²

The Greek leftists held out for three terrible years. Despite losses of many tens of thousands, they were always able to replenish their forces, even increase their number. But by October 1949, foreseeing nothing but more loss of lives to a vastly superior destruction-machine, the guerrillas announced over their radio a “cease fire”. It was the end of the civil war.

The extent of American hegemony over Greece from 1947 onwards can scarcely be exaggerated. We have seen Marshall’s directives to Griswold, and the American management of the military campaign. There were many other manifestations of the same phenomenon, of which the following are a sample:

In September 1947, Vice-Prime Minister Constantine Tsaldaris agreed to the dissolution of the government and the creation of a new ruling coalition. In doing so, said the New York Times, Tsaldaris had “surrendered to the desires of Dwight P. Griswold … of [US] Ambassador MacVeagh, and also of the King”.²³ Before Tsaldaris addressed the Greek legislature on the matter, MacVeagh stepped in to make a change to the speech.²⁴

Over the next several years, each of the frequent changes of prime minister came about only after considerable American input, if not outright demand.²⁵ One example of the latter occurred in 1950 when then American Ambassador Henry Grady sent a letter to Prime Minister Venizelos threatening to cut off US aid if he failed to carry out a government reorganization. Venizelos was compelled to step down.²⁶ The American influence was felt in regard to other high positions in Greek society as well. Andreas Papandreou, later to become prime minister himself, has written of this period that “Cabinet members and army generals, political party leaders and members of the Establishment, all made open references to American wishes or views in order to justify or to account for their own actions or positions.”²⁷

Before undertaking a new crackdown on dissidents in July 1947, Greek authorities first approached Ambassador Macveagh. The ambassador informed them that the US government would have no objection to “preventive measures if they were considered necessary”. Reassured, the Greeks went ahead and rounded up 4,000 people in one week.²⁸

An example of what could land a Greek citizen in prison is the case of the EAM member who received an 18-month sentence for printing remarks deemed insulting to Dwight Griswold. He had referred to the American as “the official representative of a foreign country”.²⁹

“In the economic sphere,” Andreas Papandreou noted, the United States “exercised almost dictatorial control during the early fifties requiring that the signature of the chief of the U.S. Economic Mission appear alongside that of the Greek Minister of Co-ordination on any important documents.”³⁰

Earlier, American management of the economy may have been even tighter. A memorandum from Athens dated 17 November 1947, from the American Mission to Aid Greece to the State Department in Washington, read in part: “we have established practical control … over national budget, taxation, currency issuance, price and wage policies, and state economic planning, as well as over imports and exports, the issuance of foreign exchange and the direction of military reconstruction and relief expenditures.”³¹

There was, moreover, the creation of a new internal security agency, named and modeled after the CIA (KYP in Greek). Before long, KYP was carrying out all the endearing practices of secret police everywhere, including systematic torture.

By the early 1950s, Greece had been molded into a supremely reliable ally-client of the United States. It was staunchly anti-communist and well integrated into the NATO system. It sent troops to Korea to support the United States’ pretence that it was not simply an American war.

It is safe to say that had the left come to power, Greece would have been much more independent of the United States. Greece would likely have been independent as well of the Soviet Union, to whom the Greek left owed nothing. Like Yugoslavia, which is also free of a common border with the USSR, Greece would have been friendly towards the Russians, but independent.

When, in 1964, there came to power in Greece a government which entertained the novel idea that Greece was a sovereign nation, the United States and its Greek cohorts, as we shall see, quickly and effectively stamped out the heresy.

4. The Philippines 1940s and 1950s

America’s oldest colony

I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed (to) Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way—I don’t know how it was, but it came: (1) That we could not give them [the Philippine Islands] back to Spain—that would be cowardly and dishonorable; (2) that we could not turn them over to France or Germany—our commercial rivals in the Orient—that would be bad business and discreditable; (3) that we could not leave them to themselves—they were unfit for self-government—and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain’s was; and (4) that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.

—William McKinley, President of the United States, 1899¹

William McKinley’s idea of doing the very best by the Filipinos was to employ the United States Army to kill them in the tens of thousands, burn down their villages, subject them to torture, and lay the foundation for an economic exploitation which was proudly referred to at the time as “imperialism” by leading American statesmen and newspapers.

After the Spanish had been driven out of the Philippines in 1898 by a combined action of the United States and the Filipinos, Spain agreed to “cede” (that is, sell) the islands to the United States for $20 million. But the Filipinos, who had already proclaimed their own independent republic, did not take kindly to being treated like a plot of uninhabited real estate. Accordingly, an American force numbering at least 50,000 proceeded to instill in the population a proper appreciation of their status.

Thus did America’s longest-lasting and most conspicuous colony ever come into being.

Nearly half a century later, the US Army again landed in the Philippines to find a nationalist movement fighting against a common enemy, this time the Japanese. While combatting the Japanese during 1945, the American military took many measures aimed at quashing this resistance army, the Huks (a shortening of Hukbalahap—“People’s Army Against Japan” in Tagalog). American forces disarmed many Huk units, removed the local governments which the Huks had established, and arrested and imprisoned many of their high-ranking members as well as leaders of the Philippine Communist Party. Guerrilla forces, primarily organized and led by American officers and composed of US and Filipino soldiers of the so-called US Army Forces in the Far East, undertook police-type actions which resulted in a virtual reign of terror against the Huks and suspected sympathizers; disparaging rumors were spread about the Huks to erode their support amongst the peasants; and the Japanese were allowed to assault Huk forces unmolested.

This, while the Huks were engaged in a major effort against the Japanese invaders and Filipino collaborators and frequently came to the aid of American soldiers.²

In much of this anti-Huk campaign, the United States made use of Filipinos who were collaborating with the Japanese, such as landlords, large estate owners, many police constables, and other officials. In the post-war period, the US restored to power and position many of those tainted with collaboration, much to the distaste of other Filipinos.³

The Huk guerrilla forces had been organized in 1942, largely at the initiative of the Communist Party, in response to the Japanese occupation of the islands. Amongst American policy makers, there were those who came to the routine conclusion that the Huks were thus no more than a tool of the International Communist Conspiracy, to be opposed as all such groups were to be opposed. Others in Washington and Manila, whose reflexes were less knee-jerk, but more cynical, recognized that the Huk movement, if its growing influence was not checked, would lead to sweeping reforms of Philippine society.

The centerpiece of the Huk political program was land reform, a crying need in this largely agricultural society. (On occasion, US officials would pay lip-service to the concept, but during 50 years of American occupation, nothing of the sort had been carried out.) The other side of the Huk coin was industrialization, which the United States had long thwarted in order to provide American industries with a veritable playground in the Philippines. From the Huks’ point of view, such changes were but prologue to raising the islanders from their state of backwardness, from illiteracy, grinding poverty, and the diseases of poverty like tuberculosis and beri-beri. “The Communist Hukbalahap rebellion,” reported the New York Times, “is generally regarded as an outgrowth of the misery and discontent among the peasants of Central Luzon [the main island].”⁴

A study prepared years later for the US Army echoed this sentiment, stating that the Huks’ “main impetus was peasant grievances, not Leninist designs”.⁵

Nevertheless, the Huk movement was unmistakably a threat to the neo-colonial condition of the Philippines, the American sphere of influence, and those Philippine interests which benefited from the status quo.

By the end of 1945, four months after the close of World War II, the United States was training and equipping a force of 50,000 Filipino soldiers for the Cold War.⁶ In testimony before a congressional committee, Major General William Arnold of the US Army candidly stated that this program was “essential for the maintenance of internal order, not for external difficulties at all”.⁷ None of the congressmen present publicly expressed any reservation about the international propriety of such a foreign policy.

At the same time, American soldiers were kept on in the Philippines, and in at least one infantry division combat training was re-established. This led to vociferous protests and demonstrations by the GIs who wanted only to go home. The inauguration of combat training, the New York Times disclosed, was “interpreted by soldiers and certain Filipino newspapers as the preparation for the repression of possible uprisings in the Philippines by disgruntled farm tenant groups.” The story added that the soldiers had a lot to say “on the subject of American armed intervention in China and the Netherlands Indies [Indonesia],” which was occurring at the same time.⁸

To what extent American military personnel participated directly in the suppression of dissident groups in the Philippines after the war is not known.

The Huks, though not trusting Philippine and US authorities enough to voluntarily surrender their arms, did test the good faith of the government by taking part in the April 1946 national elections as part of a “Democratic Alliance” of liberal and socialist peasant political groups. (Philippine independence was scheduled for three months later—the Fourth of July to be exact.) As matters turned out, the commander-in-chief of the Huks, Luis Taruc, and several other Alliance members and reform-minded candidates who won election to Congress (three to the Senate and seven to the House) were not allowed to take their seats under the transparent fiction that coercion had been used to influence voters. No investigation or review of the cases had even been carried out by the appropriate body, the Electoral Tribunal.⁹ (Two years later, Taruc was temporarily allowed to take his seat when he came to Manila to discuss a ceasefire with the government.)

The purpose of denying these candidates their seats was equally transparent: the government was thus able to push through Congress the controversial Philippine-US Trade Act—passed by two votes more than required in the House, and by nothing to spare in the Senate—which yielded to the United States bountiful privileges and concessions in the Philippine economy, including “equal rights … in the development of the nation’s natural resources and the operation of its public utilities”.¹⁰ This “parity” provision was eventually extended to every sector of the Philippine economy.¹¹

The debasement of the electoral process was followed by a wave of heavy brutality against the peasants carried out by the military, the police, and landlord goon squads. According to Luis Taruc, in the months following the election, peasant villages were destroyed, more than 500 peasants and their leaders killed, and about three times that number jailed, tortured, maimed or missing. The Huks and others felt they had little alternative but to take up arms once again.¹²

Independence was not likely to change much of significance. American historian George E.Taylor, of impeccable establishment credentials, in a book which bears the indication of CIA sponsorship, was yet moved to state that independence “was marked by lavish expressions of mutual good will, by partly fulfilled promises, and by a restoration of the old relationship in almost everything except in name. … Many demands were made of the Filipinos for the commercial advantage of the United States, but none for the social and political advantage of the Philippines.”¹³

The American military was meanwhile assuring a home for itself in the Philippines. A 1947 agreement provided sites for 23 US military bases in the country. The agreement was to last for 99 years. It stipulated that American servicemen who committed crimes outside the bases while on duty could be tried only by American military tribunals inside the bases.

By the terms of a companion military assistance pact, the Philippine government was prohibited from purchasing so much as a bullet from any arms source other than the US, except with American approval. Such a state of affairs, necessarily involving training, maintenance and spare parts, made the Philippine military extremely dependent upon their American counterparts. Further, no foreigners other than Americans were permitted to perform any function for or with the Philippine armed forces without the approval of the United States.¹⁴

By early 1950, the United States had provided the Philippines with over $200 million of military equipment and supplies, a remarkable sum for that time, and was in addition to the construction of various military facilities.¹⁵ The Joint US Military Advisory Group (JUSMAG) reorganized the Philippine intelligence capability and defense department, put its chosen man, Ramon Magsaysay, at its head, and formed the Philippine army into battalion combat teams trained for counter-insurgency warfare.¹⁶ The Philippines was to be a laboratory experiment for this unconventional type of combat. The methods and the terminology, such as “search-and-destroy” and “pacification”, were later to become infamous in Vietnam.

By September, when Lt. Col. Edward G. Lansdale arrived in the Philippines, the civil war had all the markings of a long, drawn-out affair, with victory not in sight for either side. Ostensibly, Lansdale was just another American military adviser attached to JUSMAG, but in actuality he was the head of CIA clandestine and paramilitary operations in the country. His apparent success in the Philippines was to make him a recognized authority in counter-insurgency.

In his later reminiscences about this period in his life, Lansdale relates his surprise at hearing from informed Filipino civilian friends about how repressive the Quirino government was, that its atrocities matched those of (or attributed to) the Huks, that the government was “rotten with corruption” (down to the policeman in the street, Lansdale observed on his own), that Quirino himself had been elected the previous year through “extensive fraud”, and that “the Huks were right”, they were the “wave of the future”, and violence was the only way for the people to get a government of their own. (The police, wrote a correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, were “bands of uniformed thieves and rapists, more feared than bandits … the army was little better.”)¹⁷

Lansdale was undeterred. He had come to do a job. Accordingly, he told himself that if the Huks took over there would only be another form of injustice by another privileged few, backed by even crueller force. By the next chapter, he had convinced himself that he was working on the side of those committed to “defend human liberty in the Philippines”.¹⁸

As a former advertising man, Lansdale was no stranger to the use of market research, motivation techniques, media, and deception. In CIA parlance, such arts fall under the heading of “psychological warfare”. To this end, Lansdale fashioned a unit called the Civil Affairs Office. Its activities were based on the premise—one both new and suspect to most American military officers—that a popular guerrilla army cannot be defeated by force alone.

Lansdale’s team conducted a careful study of the superstitions of the Filipino peasants living in Huk areas: their lore, taboos, and myths were examined for clues to the appropriate appeals that could wean them from supporting the insurgents. In one operation, Lansdale’s men flew over these areas in a small plane hidden by a cloud cover and broadcast in Tagalog mysterious curses on any villagers who dared to give the Huks food or shelter. The tactic reportedly succeeded into starving some Huk units into surrender.¹⁹

Another Lansdale-initiated “psywar” operation played on the superstitious dread in the Philippine countryside of the asuang, a mythical vampire. A psywar squad entered a town and planted rumors that an asuang lived in the neighboring hill where the Huks were based, a location from which government forces were anxious to have them out. Two nights later, after giving the rumors time to circulate among Huk sympathizers in the town and make their way up the hill, the psywar squad laid an ambush for the rebels along a trail used by them. When a Huk patrol passed, the ambushers silently snatched the last man, punctured his neck vampire-fashion with two holes, held his body by the heels until the blood drained out, and put the corpse back on the trail. When the Huks, as superstitious as any other Filipinos, discovered the bloodless comrade, they fled from the region.²⁰

Lansdale regularly held “coffee klatsches” with Filipino officials and military personnel in which new ideas were freely tossed back and forth, à la a Madison Avenue brain session. Out of this came the Economic Development Corps to lure Huks with a program of resettlement on their own patch of farm land, with tools, seeds, cash loans, etc. It was an undertaking wholly inadequate to the land problem, and the number that responded was very modest, but like other psywar techniques, a principal goal was to steal from the enemy his most persuasive arguments.²¹ Among other tactics introduced or refined by Lansdale were: production of films and radio broadcasts to explain and justify government actions; infiltration of government agents into the ranks of the Huks to provide information and sow dissension; attempts to modify the behavior of government soldiers so as to curtail their abuse of people in rural areas (for the Huks had long followed an explicit code of proper conduct towards the peasants, with punishment meted out to violators), but on other occasions, government soldiers were allowed to run amok in villages—disguised as Huks.²²

This last, revealed L. Fletcher Prouty, was a technique “developed to a high art in the Philippines” in which soldiers were “set upon the unwary village in the grand manner of a Cecil B. De Mille production”.²³ Prouty, a retired US Air Force colonel, was for nine years the focal point officer for contacts between the Pentagon and the CIA. He has described another type of scenario by which the Huks were tarred with the terrorist brush, serving to obscure the political nature of their movement and mar their credibility:

In the Philippines, lumbering interests and major sugar interests have forced tens of thousands of simple, backward villagers to leave areas where they have lived for centuries. When these poor people flee to other areas, it should be quite obvious that they in turn then infringe upon the territorial rights of other villagers or landowners. This creates violent rioting or at least sporadic outbreaks of banditry, that last lowly recourse of dying and terrorized people. Then when the distant government learns of the banditry and rioting, it must offer some safe explanation. The last thing that regional government would want to do would be to say that the huge lumbering or paper interests had driven the people out of their ancestral homeland. In the Philippines it is customary for the local/regional government to get a 10 percent rake-off on all such enterprise and for national politicians to get another 10 percent. So the safe explanation becomes “Communist-inspired subversive insurgency.” The word for this in the Philippines is Huk.²⁴

The most insidious part of the CIA operation in the Philippines was the fundamental manipulation of the nation’s political life, featuring stage-managed elections and disinformation campaigns. The high-point of this effort was the election to the presidency, in 1953, of Ramon Magsaysay, the cooperative former defense department head.

Lansdale, it was said, “invented” Magsaysay.²⁵ His CIA front organizations—such as the National Movement for Free Elections—ran the Filipino’s campaign with all the license, impunity, and money that one would expect from the Democratic or Republican National Committees operating in the US, or perhaps more to the point, Mayor Daley operating in Chicago. Yet the New York Times, in an editorial, was moved to refer to the Phillippines as “democracy’s showcase in Asia.”²⁶

The CIA, on one occasion, drugged the drinks of Magsaysay’s opponent, incumbent president Elpido Quirino, before he gave a speech so that he would appear incoherent. On another occasion, when Magsaysay insisted on delivering a speech which had been written by a Filipino instead of one written by Lansdale’s team, Lansdale reacted in a rage, finally hitting the presidential candidate so hard that he knocked him out.²⁷

Magsaysay won the election, but not before the CIA had smuggled in guns for use in a coup in case their man lost.²⁸

Once Magsaysay was in office, the CIA wrote his speeches, carefully guided his foreign policy, and used its press “assets” (paid editors and journalists) to provide him with a constant claque of support for his domestic programs and his involvement in the US-directed anti-communist crusade in southeast Asia, as well as to attack anti-US newspaper columnists. So beholden was Magsaysay to the United States, disclosed presidential assistant Sherman Adams, that he “sent word to Eisenhower that he would do anything the United States wanted him to do—even though his own foreign minister took the opposite view”.²⁹

One inventive practice of the CIA on behalf of Magsaysay was later picked up by Agency stations in a number of other Third World countries. This particular piece of chicanery consisted of selecting articles written by CIA writer-agents for the provincial press and republishing them in a monthly Digest of the Provincial Press. The Digest was then sent to congressmen and other opinion makers in Manila to enlighten them as to “what the provinces were thinking”.³⁰

Senator Claro M. Recto, Magsaysay’s chief political opponent and a stern critic of American policy in the Philippines, came in for special treatment. The CIA planted stories that he was a Communist Chinese agent and it prepared packages of condoms labeled “Courtesy of Claro M. Recto—the People’s Friend”. The condoms all had holes in them at the most inappropriate place.³¹

The Agency also planned to assassinate Recto, going so far as to prepare a substance for poisoning him. The idea was abandoned “for pragmatic considerations rather than moral scruples.”³²

After Magsaysay died in a plane crash in 1957, various other Filipino politicians and parties were sought out by the CIA as clients, or offered themselves as such. One of the latter was Diosdado Macapagal, who was to become president in 1961. Macapagal provided the Agency with political information for several years and eventually asked for, and received, what he felt he deserved: heavy financial support for his campaign. (Reader’s Digest called his election: “certainly a demonstration of democracy in action”.)³³

Ironically, Macapagal had been the bitterest objector to American intervention in the Magsaysay election in 1953, quoting time and again from the Philippine law that “No foreigner shall aid any candidate directly or indirectly or take part in or influence in any manner any election.”³⁴

Perhaps even more ironic, in 1957 the Philippine government adopted a law, clearly written by Americans, which outlawed both the Communist Party and the Huks, giving as one of the reasons for doing so that these organizations aimed at placing the government “under the control and domination of an alien power”.³⁵

By 1953 the Huks were scattered and demoralized, no longer a serious threat, although their death would be distributed over the next few years. It is difficult to ascertain to what extent their decline was due to the traditional military force employed against them, or to Lansdale’s more unorthodox methods, or to the eventual debilitation of many of the Huks from malnutrition and disease, brought on by the impoverishment of the peasantry. Long before the end, many Huks were also lacking weapons and ammunition and proper military equipment, bringing into question the oft-repeated charge of Soviet and Chinese aid to them made by Filipino and American authorities.³⁶ Edward Lachica, a Filipino historian, has written that “The Kremlin did pay lip service to the Communist movement in the Philippines, praising the Huks for being part of the ‘global struggle against the U.S.’, but no material support was offered.”³⁷

“Since the destruction of Huk military power,” noted George Taylor, “the social and political program that made the accomplishment possible has to a large extent fallen by the wayside.”³⁸

Fortress America, however, was securely in place in southeast Asia. From the Philippines would be launched American air and sea actions against Korea and China, Vietnam and Indonesia. The Philippine government would send combat forces to fight alongside the United States in Vietnam and Korea. On the islands’ bases, the technology and art of counter-insurgency warfare would be imparted to the troops of America’s other allies in the Pacific.

5. Korea 1945-1953

Was it all that it appeared to be?

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true.

—H.L. Mencken, 1919

How is it that the Korean War escaped the protests which surrounded the war in Vietnam? Everything we’ve come to love and cherish about Vietnam had its forerunner in Korea: the support of a corrupt tyranny, the atrocities, the napalm, the mass slaughter of civilians, the cities and villages laid to waste, the calculated management of the news, the sabotaging of peace talks. But the American people were convinced that the war in Korea was an unambiguous case of one country invading another without provocation. A case of the bad guys attacking the good guys who were being saved by the even better guys; none of the historical, political and moral uncertainty that was the dilemma of Vietnam. The Korean War was seen to have begun in a specific manner: North Korea attacked South Korea in the early morning of 25 June 1950; while Vietnam … no one seemed to know how it all began, or when, or why.

And there was little in the way of accusations about American “imperialism” in Korea. The United States, after all, was fighting as part of a United Nations Army. What was there to protest about? And of course there was McCarthyism, so prevalent in the early 1950s, which further served to inhibit protest.

There were, in fact, rather different interpretations to be made of what the war was all about, how it was being conducted, even how it began, but these quickly succumbed to the heat of war fever.

Shortly after the close of the Second World War, the Soviet Union and the United States occupied Korea in order to expel the defeated Japanese. A demarcation line between the Russian and American forces was set up along the 38th Parallel. The creation of this line in no way had the explicit or implicit intention of establishing two separate countries, but the cold war was soon to intrude.

Both powers insisted that unification of North and South was the principal and desired goal. However, they also desired to see this carried out in their own ideological image, and settled thereby into a routine of proposal and counter-proposal, accusation and counter-accusation, generously intermixed with deviousness, and produced nothing in the way of an agreement during the ensuing years. Although both Moscow and Washington and their hand-picked Korean leaders were not always displeased about the division of the country (on the grounds that half a country was better than none), officials and citizens of both sides continued to genuinely call for unification on a regular basis.

That Korea was still one country, with unification still the goal, at the time the war began, was underscored by the chief US delegate to the UN, Warren Austin, in a statement he made shortly afterwards:

The artificial barrier which has divided North and South Korea has no basis for existence either in law or in reason. Neither the United Nations, its Commission on Korea, nor the Republic of Korea [South Korea] recognize such a line. Now the North Koreans, by armed attack upon the Republic of Korea, have denied the reality of any such line.¹

The two sides had been clashing across the Parallel for several years. What happened on that fateful day in June could thus be regarded as no more than the escalation of an ongoing civil war. The North Korean Government has claimed that in 1949 alone, the South Korean army or police perpetrated 2,617 armed incursions into the North to carry out murder, kidnapping, pillage and arson for the purpose of causing social disorder and unrest, as well as to increase the combat capabilities of the invaders. At times, stated the Pyongyang government, thousands of soldiers were involved in a single battle with many casualties resulting.² A State Department official, Ambassador-at-large Philip C. Jessup, speaking in April 1950, put it this way:

There is constant fighting between the South Korean Army and bands that infiltrate the country from the North. There are very real battles, involving perhaps one or two thousand men. When you go to this boundary, as I did … you see troop movements, fortifications, and prisoners of war.³

Seen in this context, the question of who fired the first shot on 25 June 1950 takes on a much reduced air of significance. As it is, the North Korean version of events is that their invasion was provoked by two days of bombardment by the South Koreans, on the 23rd and 24th, followed by a surprise South Korean attack across the border on the 25th against the western town of Haeju and other places. Announcement of the Southern attack was broadcast over the North’s radio later in the morning of the 25th.

Contrary to general belief at the time, no United Nations group—neither the UN Military Observer Group in the field nor the UN Commission on Korea in Seoul—witnessed, or claimed to have witnessed, the outbreak of hostilities. The Observer Group’s field trip along the Parallel ended on 23 June. Its statements about what took place afterward are either speculation or based on information received from the South Korean government or the US military.

Moreover, early in the morning of the 26th, the South Korean Office of Public Information announced that Southern forces had indeed captured the North Korean town of Haeju. The announcement stated that the attack had occurred that same morning, but an American military status report as of nightfall on the 25th notes that all Southern territory west of the Imjin River had been lost to a depth of at least three miles inside the border except in the area of the Haeju “counter attack”.

In either case, such a military victory on the part of the Southern forces is extremely difficult to reconcile with the official Western account, maintained to this day, that has the North Korean army sweeping south in a devastating surprise attack, taking control of everything that lay before it, and forcing South Korean troops to evacuate further south.

Subsequently, the South Korean government denied that its capture of Haeju had actually taken place, blaming the original announcement, apparently, on an exaggerating military officer. One historian has ascribed the allegedly incorrect announcement to “an error due to poor communications, plus an attempt to stiffen South Korean resistance by claiming a victory”. Whatever actually lay behind the announcement, it is evident that very little reliance, if any, can be placed upon statements made by the South Korean government concerning the start of the war.⁴

There were, in fact, reports in the Western press of the attack on Haeju which made no mention of the South Korean government’s announcement, and which appear to be independent confirmations of the event. The London Daily Herald, in its issue of 26 June, stated that “American military observers said the Southern forces had made a successful relieving counter-attack near the west coast, penetrated five miles into Northern territory and seized the town of Haeju.” This was echoed in The Guardian of London the same day: “American officials confirmed that the Southern troops had captured Haeju.”

Similarly, the New York Herald Tribune reported, also on the 26th, that “South Korean troops drove across the 38th Parallel, which forms the frontier, to capture the manufacturing town of Haeju, just north of the line. The Republican troops captured quantities of equipment.” None of the accounts specified just when the attack took place.

On the 25th, American writer John Gunther was in Japan preparing his biography of General Douglas MacArthur. As he recounts in the book, he was playing tourist in the town of Nikko with “two important members” of the American occupation, when “one of these was called unexpectedly to the telephone. He came back and whispered, ‘A big story has just broken. The South Koreans have attacked North Korea!’” That evening, Gunther and his party returned to Tokyo where “Several officers met us at the station to tell us correctly and with much amplification what had happened … there was no doubt whatever that North Korea was the aggressor.”

And the telephone call? Gunther explains: “The message may have been garbled in transmission. Nobody knew anything much at headquarters the first few hours, and probably people were taken in by the blatant, corrosive lies of the North Korean radio.”⁵

There is something a little incongruous about the picture of American military and diplomatic personnel, practicing anti-communists each one, being taken in on so important a matter by communist lies—blatant ones no less.

The head of South Korea, Syngman Rhee, had often expressed his desire and readiness to compel the unification of Korea by force. On 26 June the New York Times reminded its readers that “on a number of occasions, Dr. Rhee has indicated that his army would have taken the offensive if Washington had given the consent.” The newspaper noted also that before the war began: “The warlike talk strangely [had] almost all come from South Korean leaders.”

Rhee may have had good reason for provoking a full-scale war apart from the issue of unification. On 30 May, elections for the National Assembly were held in the South in which Rhee’s party suffered a heavy setback and lost control of the assembly. Like countless statesmen before and after him, Rhee may have decided to play the war card to rally support for his shaky rule. A labor adviser attached to the American aid mission in South Korea, Stanley Earl, resigned in July, expressing the opinion that the South Korean government was “an oppressive regime” which “did very little to help the people” and that “an internal South Korean rebellion against the Rhee Government would have occurred if the forces of North Korea had not invaded”.⁶

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, in his reminiscences, makes it plain that the North Koreans had contemplated an invasion of the South for some time and he reports their actual invasion without any mention of provocation on that day. This would seem to put that particular question to rest. However, Khrushchev’s chapter on Korea is a wholly superficial account. It is not a serious work of history, nor was it intended to be. As he himself states: “My memories of the Korean War are unavoidably sketchy.” (He did not become Soviet leader until after the war was over.) His chapter contains no discussion of any of the previous fighting across the border, nothing of Rhee’s belligerent statements, nothing at all even of the Soviet Union’s crucial absence from the UN which, as we shall see, allowed the so-called United Nations Army to be formed and intervene in the conflict. Moreover, his reminiscences, as published, are an edited and condensed version of the tapes he made. A study based on a comparison between the Russian-language transcription of the tapes and the published English-language book reveals that some of Khrushchev’s memories about Korea were indeed sketchy, but that the book fails to bring this out. For example, North Korean leader Kim Il-sung met with Stalin to discuss Kim’s desire “to prod South Korea with the point of a bayonet”. The book then states unambiguously: “Kim went home and then returned to Moscow when he had worked everything out.” In the transcript, however, Khrushchev says: “In my opinion, either the date of his return was set, or he was to inform us as soon as he finished preparing all of his ideas. Then, I don’t remember in which month or year, Kim Il-sung came and related his plan to Stalin” (emphasis added).⁷

On 26 June, the United States presented a resolution before the UN Security Council condemning North Korea for its “unprovoked aggression”. The resolution was approved, although there were arguments that “this was a fight between Koreans” and should be treated as a civil war, and a suggestion from the Egyptian delegate that the word “unprovoked” should be dropped in view of the longstanding hostilities between the two Koreas.⁸ Yugoslavia insisted as well that “there seemed to be lack of precise information that could enable the Council to pin responsibility”, and proposed that North Korea be invited to present its side of the story.⁹ This was not done. (Three months later, the Soviet foreign minister put forward a motion that the UN hear representatives from both sides. This, too, was voted down, by a margin of 46 to 6, because of North Korea’s “aggression”, and it was decided to extend an invitation to South Korea alone.)¹⁰

On the 27th, the Security Council recommended that members of the United Nations furnish assistance to South Korea “as may be necessary to repel the armed attack”. President Truman had already ordered the US Navy and Air Force into combat by this time, thus presenting the Council with a fait accompli,¹¹ a tactic the US was to repeat several times before the war came to an end. The Council made its historic decision with the barest of information available to it, and all of it derived from and selected by only one side of the conflict. This was, as journalist I.F. Stone put it, “neither honorable nor wise”.

It should be kept in mind that in 1950 the United Nations was in no way a neutral or balanced organization. The great majority of members were nations very dependent upon the United States for economic recovery or development. There was no Third World bloc which years later pursued a UN policy much more independent of the United States. And only four countries of the Soviet bloc were members at the time, none on the Security Council.¹²

Neither could UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie, of Norway, be regarded as neutral in the midst of cold war controversy. In his memoirs, he makes it remarkably clear that he was no objective outsider. His chapters on the Korean War are pure knee-reflex anti-communism and reveal his maneuvering on the issue.¹³ In 1949, it was later disclosed, Lie had entered into a secret agreement with the US State Department to dismiss from UN employment individuals whom Washington regarded as having questionable political leanings.¹⁴

The adoption of these resolutions by the Security Council was possible only because the Soviet Union was absent from the proceedings due to its boycott of the United Nations over the refusal to seat Communist China in place of Taiwan. If the Russians had been present, they undoubtedly would have vetoed the resolutions. Their absence has always posed an awkward problem for those who insist that the Russians were behind the North Korean invasion. One of the most common explanations offered is that the Russians, as a CIA memorandum stated, wanted “to challenge the US specifically and test the firmness of US resistance to Communist expansion.”¹⁵ Inasmuch as, during the existence of the Soviet Union, the same analysis was put forth by American political pundits for virtually every encounter between the United States and leftists anywhere in the world, before and after Korea, it would appear that the test was going on for an inordinately long period and one can only wonder why the Soviets never came to a conclusion.

“The finishing touch,” wrote I.F. Stone, “was to make the ‘United Nations’ forces subject to MacArthur without making MacArthur subject to the United Nations. This came on July 7 in a resolution introduced jointly by Britain and France. This is commonly supposed to have established a United Nations Command. Actually it did nothing of the sort.”¹⁶ The resolution recommended “that all members providing military forces and other assistance … make such forces and other assistance available to a unified command under the United States” (emphasis added). It further requested “the United States to designate the commander of such forces.”¹⁷ This would be the redoubtable MacArthur.

It was to be an American show. Military personnel of some 16 other countries took part in one way or another but, with the exception of the South Koreans, there could be little doubt as to their true status or function. Eisenhower later wrote in his memoirs that when he was considering US military intervention in Vietnam in 1954, also as part of a “coalition”, he recognized that the burden of the operation would fall on the United States, but “the token forces supplied by these other nations, as in Korea, would lend real moral standing to a venture that otherwise could be made to appear as a brutal example of imperialism” (emphasis added).¹⁸

The war, and a brutal one it was indeed, was fought ostensibly in defense of the Syngman Rhee regime. Outside of books published by various South Korean governments, it is rather difficult to find a kind word for the man the United States brought back to Korea in 1945 after decades of exile in America during the Japanese occupation of his country. Flown into Korea in one of MacArthur’s airplanes, Rhee was soon maneuvered into a position of prominence and authority by the US Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK). In the process, American officials had to suppress a provisional government, the Korean People’s Republic, that was the outgrowth of a number of regional governing committees set up by prominent Koreans and which had already begun to carry out administrative tasks, such as food distribution and keeping order. The KPR’s offer of its services to the arriving Americans was dismissed out of hand.

Despite its communist-sounding name, the KPR included a number of conservatives; indeed, Rhee himself had been given the leading position of chairman. Rhee and the other conservatives, most of whom were still abroad when chosen, perhaps did not welcome the honor because the KPR, on balance, was probably too leftist for their tastes, as it was for the higher echelons of the USAMGIK. But after 35 years under the Japanese, any group or government set up to undo the effects of colonialism had to have a revolutionary tinge to it. It was the conservatives in Korea who had collaborated with the Japanese; leftists and other nationalists who had struggled against them; the make-up of the KPR necessarily reflected this, and it was reportedly more popular than any other political grouping.¹⁹

Whatever the political leanings or intentions of the KPR, by denying it any “authority, status or form”,²⁰ the USAMGIK was regulating Korean political life as if the country were a defeated enemy and not a friendly state liberated from a common foe and with a right to independence and self-determination.

The significance of shunting aside the KPR went beyond this. John Gunther, hardly a radical, summed up the situation this way: “So the first—and best—chance for building a united Korea was tossed away.”²¹ And Alfred Crofts, a member of the American military government at the time, has written that “A potential unifying agency became thus one of the fifty-four splinter groups in South Korean political life.”²²

Syngman Rhee would be Washington’s man: eminently pro-American, strongly anti-Communist, sufficiently controllable. His regime was one in which landlords, collaborators, the wealthy, and other conservative elements readily found a home. Crofts has pointed out that “Before the American landings, a political Right, associated in popular thought with colonial rule, could not exist; but shortly afterward we were to foster at least three conservative factions.”²³

Committed to establishing free enterprise, the USAMGIK sold off vast amounts of confiscated Japanese property, homes, businesses, industrial raw materials and other valuables. Those who could most afford to purchase these assets were collaborators who had grown rich under the Japanese, and other profiteers. “With half the wealth of the nation ‘up for grabs’, demoralization was rapid.”²⁴

While the Russians did a thorough house-cleaning of Koreans in the North who had collaborated with the Japanese, the American military government in the South allowed many collaborators, and at first even the Japanese themselves, to retain positions of administration and authority, much to the consternation of those Koreans who had fought against the Japanese occupation of their country. To some extent, these people may have been retained in office because they were the most experienced at keeping the country running. Another reason has been suggested: to prevent the Korean People’s Republic from assuming a measure of power.²⁵

And while the North soon implemented widespread and effective land reform and at least formal equality for women, the Rhee regime remained hostile to these ideals. Two years later, it enacted a land reform measure, but this applied only to former Japanese property. A 1949 law to cover other holdings was not enforced at all, and the abuse of land tenants continued in both old and new forms.²⁶

Public resentment against the US/Rhee administration was aroused because of these policies as well as because of the suppression of the KPR and some very questionable elections. So reluctant was Rhee to allow an honest election, that by early 1950 he had become enough of an embarrassment to the United States for Washington officials to threaten to cut off aid if he failed to do so and also improve the state of civil liberties. Apparently because of this pressure, the elections held on May 30 were fair enough to allow “moderate” elements to participate, and, as mentioned earlier, the Rhee government was decisively repudiated.²⁷

The resentment was manifested in the form of frequent rebellions, including some guerrilla warfare in the hills, from 1946 to the beginning of the war, and even during the war. The rebellions were dismissed by the government as “communist-inspired” and repressed accordingly, but, as John Gunther observed, “It can be safely said that in the eyes of Hodge [the commander of US forces in Korea] and Rhee, particularly at the beginning, almost any Korean not an extreme rightist was a communist and potential traitor.”²⁸

General Hodge evidently permitted US troops to take part in the repression. Mark Gayn, a correspondent in Korea for the Chicago Sun, wrote that American soldiers “fired on crowds, conducted mass arrests, combed the hills for suspects, and organized posses of Korean rightists, constabulary and police for mass raids.”²⁹ Gayn related that one of Hodge’s political advisers assured him (Gayn) that Rhee was not a fascist: “He is two centuries before fascism—a pure Bourbon.”³⁰

Describing the government’s anti-guerrilla campaign in 1948, pro-Western political scientist John Kie-Chiang Oh of Marquette University has written: “In these campaigns, the civil liberties of countless persons were often ignored. Frequently, hapless villagers, suspected of aiding the guerrillas, were summarily executed.”³¹

A year later, when a committee of the National Assembly launched an investigation of collaborators, Rhee had his police raid the Assembly: 22 people were arrested, of whom 16 were later found to have suffered either broken ribs, skull injuries or broken eardrums.³²

At the time of the outbreak of war in June 1950, there were an estimated 14,000 political prisoners in South Korean jails.³³

Even during the height of the war, in February 1951, reported Professor Oh, there was the “Koch’ang Incident”, again involving suspicion of aiding guerrillas, “in which about six hundred men and women, young and old, were herded into a narrow valley and mowed down with machine guns by a South Korean army unit.”³⁴

Throughout the war, a continuous barrage of accusations was leveled by each side at the other, charging the enemy with engaging in all manner of barbarity and atrocity, against troops, prisoners of war, and civilians alike, in every part of the country (each side occupied the other’s territory at times), trying to outdo each other in a verbal war of superlatives almost as heated as the combat. In the United States this produced a body of popular myths, not unlike those emerging from other wars which are widely supported at home. (By contrast, during the Vietnam War the inclination of myths to flourish was regularly countered by numerous educated protestors who carefully researched the origins of the war, monitored its conduct, and publicized studies sharply at variance with the official version(s), eventually influencing the mass media to do the same.)

There was, for example, the consensus that the brutality of the war in Korea must be laid overwhelmingly on the doorstep of the North Koreans. The Koch’ang Incident mentioned above may be relevant to providing some counterbalance to this belief. Referring to the incident, the British Korea scholar Jon Halliday observed:

This account not only serves to indicate the level of political violence employed by the UN side, but also confers inherent plausibility on DPRK [North Korea] and Southern opposition accusations of atrocities and mass executions by the UN forces and Rhee officials during the occupation of the DPRK in late 1950. After all, if civilians could be mowed down in the South on suspicion of aiding (not even being) guerrillas—what about the North, where millions could reasonably be assumed to be Communists, or political militants?³⁵(Emphasis in original.)

Oh’s account is but one of a number of reports of slaughter carried out by the South Koreans against their own people during the war. The New York Times reported a “wave of [South Korean] Government executions in Seoul” in December 1950.³⁶ René Cutforth, a correspondent for the BBC in Korea, later wrote of “the shooting without trial of civilians, designated by the police as ‘communist’. These executions were done, usually at dawn, on any patch of waste ground where you could dig a trench and line up a row of prisoners in front of it.”³⁷ And Gregory Henderson, a US diplomat who served seven years in Korea in the 1940s and ’50s, has stated that “probably over 100,000 were killed without any trial whatsoever” by Rhee’s forces in the South during the war.³⁸ Following some of the massacres of civilians in the South, the Rhee government turned around and attributed them to Northern troops. One way in which the United States contributed directly to the war’s brutality was by introducing a weapon which, although used in the last stage of World War II, and in Greece, was new to almost all observers and participants in Korea. It was called napalm. Here is one description of its effect from the New York Times.

A napalm raid hit the village three or four days ago when the Chinese were holding up the advance, and nowhere in the village have they buried the dead because there is nobody left to do so. … The inhabitants throughout the village and in the fields were caught and killed and kept the exact postures they had held when the napalm struck—a man about to get on his bicycle, fifty boys and girls playing in an orphanage, a housewife strangely unmarked, holding in her hand a page torn from a Sears-Roebuck catalogue crayoned at Mail Order No. 3,811,294 for a $2.98 “bewitching bed jacket—coral”. There must be almost two hundred dead in the tiny hamlet.³⁹

The United States may also have waged germ warfare against North Korea and China, as was discussed earlier in the chapter on China.

At the same time, the CIA reportedly was targeting a single individual for termination—North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. Washington sent a Cherokee Indian, code-named Buffalo, to Hans V. Tofte, a CIA officer stationed in Japan, after Buffalo had agreed to serve as Kim Il Sung’s assassin. Buffalo was to receive a considerable amount of money if his mission succeeded. It obviously did not, and nothing further has been revealed about the incident.⁴⁰

Another widely-held belief in the United States during the war was that American prisoners in North Korean camps were dying off like flies because of Communist neglect and cruelty. The flames of this very emotional issue were fanned by the tendency of US officials to exaggerate the numbers involved. During November 1951, for example—long before the end of the war—American military announcements put the count of POW deaths at between 5,000 and 8,000.⁴¹ However, an extensive study completed by the US Army two years after the war revealed that the POW death toll for the entire war was 2,730 (out of 7,190 held in camps; an unknown number of other prisoners never made it to the camps, being shot in the field because of the inconvenience of dealing with them in the midst of combat, a practice engaged in by both sides).

The study concluded that “there was evidence that the high death rate was not due primarily to Communist maltreatment … it could be accounted for largely by the ignorance or the callousness of the prisoners themselves.”⁴² “Callousness” refers here to the soldiers’ lack of morale and collective spirit. Although not mentioned in the study, the North Koreans, on several occasions, claimed that many American POWs also died in the camps as a result of the heavy US bombing.

The study of course could never begin to catch up with all the scare headlines to which the Western world had been treated for three years. Obscured as well was the fact that several times as many Communist prisoners had died in US/South Korean camps—halfway through the war the official figure stood at 6,600⁴³—though these camps did hold many more prisoners than those in the North.

The American public was also convinced, and probably still is, that the North Koreans and Chinese had “brainwashed” US soldiers. This story arose to explain the fact that as many as 30 percent of American POWs had collaborated with the enemy in one way or another, and “one man in every seven, or more than thirteen per cent, was guilty of serious collaboration—writing disloyal tracts … or agreeing to spy or organize for the Communists after the war.”⁴⁴ Another reason the brainwashing theme was promoted by Washington was to increase the likelihood that statements made by returning prisoners which questioned the official version of the war would be discounted.

In the words of Yale psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton, brainwashing was popularly held to be an “all-powerful, irresistible, unfathomable, and magical method of achieving total control over the human mind.”⁴⁵ Although the CIA experimented, beginning in the 1950s, to develop just such a magic, neither they nor the North Koreans or Chinese ever possessed it. The Agency began its “behavior-control” or “mind-control” experiments on human subjects (probably suspected double agents), using drugs and hypnosis, in Japan in July 1950, shortly after the beginning of the Korean War. In October, they apparently used North Korean prisoners of war as subjects.⁴⁶ In 1975, a US Navy psychologist, Lt. Com. Thomas Narut, revealed that his naval work included establishing how to induce servicemen who may not be naturally inclined to kill, to do so under certain conditions. He referred to these men using the words “hitmen” and “assassin”. Narut added that convicted murderers as well had been released from military prisons to become assassins.⁴⁷

Brainwashing, said the Army study, “has become a catch phrase, used for so many things that it no longer has any precise meaning” and “a precise meaning is necessary in this case”.⁴⁸

The prisoners, as far as Army psychiatrists have been able to discover, were not subjected to anything that could properly be called brainwashing. Indeed, the Communist treatment of prisoners, while it came nowhere near fulfilling the requirements of the Geneva Convention, rarely involved outright cruelty, being instead a highly novel blend of leniency and pressure … The Communists rarely used physical torture … and the Army has not found a single verifiable case in which they used it for the specific purpose of forcing a man to collaborate or to accept their convictions.⁴⁹

According to the study, however, some American airmen, of the 90 or so who were captured, were subjected to physical abuse in an attempt to extract confessions about germ warfare. This could reflect either a greater Communist resentment about the use of such a weapon, or a need to produce some kind of corroboration of a false or questionable claim. American servicemen were also subjected to political indoctrination by their jailers. Here is how the US Army saw it:

In the indoctrination lectures, the Communists frequently displayed global charts dotted with our military bases, the names of which were of course known to many of the captives. “See those bases?” the instructor would say, tapping them on the chart with his pointer. “They are American—full of war materiel. You know they are American. And you can see they are ringing Russia and China. Russia and China do not have one base outside their own territory. From this it’s clear which side is the warmonger. Would America have these bases and spend millions to maintain them were it not preparing to war on Russia and China?” This argument seemed plausible to many of the prisoners. In general they had no idea that these bases showed not the United States’ wish for war, but its wish for peace, that they had been established as part of a series of treaties aimed not at conquest, but at curbing Red aggression.⁵⁰

The Chinese Communists, of course, did not invent this practice. During the American Civil War, prisoners of both the South and the North received indoctrination about the respective merits of the two sides. And in the Second World War, “democratization courses” were held in US and British POW camps for Germans, and reformed Germans were granted privileges. Moreover, the US Army was proud to state that Communist prisoners in American camps during the Korean War were taught “what democracy stands for”.⁵¹

The predicted Chinese aggression manifested itself about four months after the war in Korea began. The Chinese entered the war after American planes had violated their air space on a number of occasions, had bombed and strafed Chinese territory several times (always “in error”), when hydro-electric plants on the Korean side of the border, vital to Chinese industry, stood in great danger, and US or South Korean forces had reached the Chinese border, the Yalu River, or come within a few miles of it in several places.

The question must be asked: How long would the United States refrain from entering a war being waged in Mexico by a Communist power from across the sea, which strafed and bombed Texas border towns, was mobilized along the Rio Grande, and was led by a general who threatened war against the United States itself?

American airpower in Korea was fearsome to behold. As would be the case in Vietnam, its use was celebrated in the wholesale dropping of napalm, the destruction of villages “suspected of aiding the enemy”, bombing cities so as to leave no useful facilities standing, demolishing dams and dikes to cripple the irrigation system, wiping out rice crops … and in those moving expressions like “scorched-earth policy”, “saturation bombing”, and “operation killer”.⁵²

“You can kiss that group of villages good-bye,” exclaimed Captain Everett L. Hundley of Kansas City, Kansas after a bombing raid.⁵³

“I would say that the entire, almost the entire Korean Peninsula is just a terrible mess,” testified Major General Emmett O’Donnell before the Senate when the war was one year old. “Everything is destroyed. There is nothing standing worthy of the name.”⁵⁴

And here, the words of the venerable British military guide, Brassey’s Annual, in its 1951 yearbook:

It is no exaggeration to state that South Korea no longer exists as a country. Its towns have been destroyed, much of its means of livelihood eradicated, and its people reduced to a sullen mass dependent upon charity and exposed to subversive influences. When the war ends no gratitude can be expected from the South Koreans, but it is to be hoped that the lesson will have been learned that it is worse than useless to destroy to liberate. Certainly, western Europe would never accept such a “liberation”.⁵⁵

The worst of the bombing was yet to come. That began in the summer of 1952 and was Washington’s way of putting itself in a better bargaining position in the truce discussions with the Communists, which had been going on for a full year while the battles raged. The extended and bitter negotiations gave rise to another pervasive Western belief—that it was predominantly Communist intransigence, duplicity, and lack of peaceful intentions which frustrated the talks and prolonged the war. This is a lengthy and entangled chapter of the Korean War story, but one does not have to probe too deeply to discover the unremarkable fact that the barriers were erected by the anti-Communist side as well. Syngman Rhee, for example, was so opposed to any outcome short of total victory that both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations drew up plans for overthrowing him;⁵⁶ which is not to suggest that the American negotiators were negotiating in the best of faith. The last thing they wanted to be accused of was having allowed the commies to make suckers of them. Thus it was that in November of 1951 we could read in the New York Times:

The unadorned way that an apparently increasing number of them [American soldiers in Korea] see the situation right now is that the Communists have made important concessions, while the United Nations Command, as they view it, continues to make more and more demands. … The United Nations truce team has created the impression that it switches its stand whenever the Communists indicate that they might go along with it.⁵⁷

At one point during this same period, when the Communists proposed that a ceasefire and a withdrawal of troops from the combat line should take place while negotiations were going on, the United Nations Command reacted almost as if this were a belligerent and devious act. “Today’s stand by the Communists,” said the UNC announcement, “was virtually a renunciation of their previously stated position that hostilities should continue during armistice talks.”⁵⁸

Once upon a time, the United States fought a great civil war in which the North attempted to reunite the divided country through military force. Did Korea or China or any other foreign power send in an army to slaughter Americans, charging Lincoln with aggression?

Why did the United States choose to wage full-scale war in Korea? Only a year earlier, in 1949, in the Arab-Israeli fighting in Palestine and in the India-Pakistani war over Kashmir, the United Nations, with American support, had intervened to mediate an armistice, not to send in an army to take sides and expand the fighting. And both these conflicts were less in the nature of a civil war than was the case in Korea. If the US/UN response had been the same in these earlier cases, Palestine and Kashmir might have wound up as the scorched-earth desert that was Korea’s fate. What saved them, what kept the US armed forces out, was no more than the absence of a communist side to the conflict.

6. Albania 1949-1953

The proper English spy

“To simultaneously plan and sabotage this ill-fated venture must have been a severe test of his energy and ingenuity,” wrote one of Kim Philby’s biographers.¹ The venture was the clandestine attempt, begun in 1949, by the United States and Great Britain to overthrow the pro-Soviet regime of Enver Hoxha through guerrilla-fomented uprisings.

It ended in disaster, in part because the Russians had apparently been alerted by Philby, the proper Englishman who had gone to all the right schools and penetrated the highest ranks of British and American intelligence, though he had been a Soviet spy since the age of 21.

Philby had moved to Washington the year before to act as the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) liaison to the CIA. In that capacity he served as a co-director of the CIA-SIS task force engaged in planning the Albanian operation. The choice had fallen upon Albania because it was regarded as the most vulnerable of the socialist states, the smallest and the weakest, not sharing a border with the Soviet Union, isolated between a US-controlled Greece and a Yugoslavia that was a renegade from the Soviet bloc. Moreover, a recent agreement between the Soviet Union and Albania involved aid for Albania in return for a Soviet right to build a submarine base with direct access to the Mediterranean.² By the rules and logic of the cold-war board game, this was a move the United States was obliged to thwart.

The task force began by recruiting scattered Albanian émigrés who were living in Italy, Greece and elsewhere. They were exposed to basic military training, with a touch of guerrilla warfare thrown in, at sites established on the British island of Malta in the Mediterranean, in the American occupation zone of West Germany, and, to a lesser extent, in England itself.³ “Whenever we want to subvert any place,” confided Frank Wisner, the CIA’s head of covert operations, to Philby, “we find that the British own an island within easy reach.”⁴

Intermittently, for some three-and-a-half years, the émigrés were sent back into their homeland: slipping up into the mountains of Greece and over the border, parachuting in from planes which had taken off from bases in Western Europe, entering by sea from Italy. American planes and balloons dropped propaganda leaflets and goods as well, such items in scarce supply in Albania as flour, halvah, needles, and razor blades, along with a note announcing that they were a gift from the “Albanian National Liberation Front”⁵—another instance of the subtle “marketing” touch that the CIA, born and raised in America, was to bring to so many of its operations.

In outline, the plan, or the hope, was for the guerrillas to make for their old home regions and try to stir up anti-Soviet and anti-Communist sentiments, eventually leading to uprisings. They were to distribute propaganda, obtain political, economic and military information, engage in sabotage, recruit individuals into cells, and supply them with equipment. Later infusions of men and material would expand these cells into “centers of resistance”.⁶

Cold-war conventional wisdom dictated that the masses of Eastern Europe were waiting to be sparked into open rebellion for their freedom. Even if this were the case, the choice of ignition was highly dubious, for the guerrillas included amongst their numbers many who supported a reinstitution of the Albanian monarchy in the person of the reactionary King Zog, then in exile, and others who had collaborated with the Italian fascists or Nazis during their wartime occupations of Albania.

To be sure, there were those of republican and democratic leanings in the various émigré committees as well, but State Department papers, later declassified, reveal that prominent Albanian collaborators played leading roles in the formation of these committees. These were individuals the State Department characterized as having “somewhat checkered” political backgrounds, who “might sooner or later occasion embarrassment to this government”. They were admitted to the United States over the Department’s objections because of “intelligence considerations”. One of the checkered gentlemen was Xhafer Deva, minister of interior during the Italian occupation, who had been responsible for deportations of “Jews, Communists, partisans and suspicious persons” (as a captured Nazi report put it) to extermination camps in Poland.⁷

In the name of the CIA-funded National Committee for a Free Albania, a powerful underground radio station began broadcasting inside the country, calling for the nation’s liberation from the Soviet Union. In early 1951, several reports came out of Albania of open organized resistance and uprisings.⁸ To what extent these happenings were a consequence of the Western infiltration and agitation is impossible to determine. Overall, the campaign had little to show for its efforts. It was hounded throughout by logistical foul-ups, and the grim reality that the masses of Albanians greeted the émigrés as something less than liberators, either from fear of the harsh Hoxha regime, or because they supported the social changes taking place more than they trusted what the émigrés had to offer.

Worst of all, the Albanian authorities usually seemed to know in which area the guerrillas would be arriving, and when. Kim Philby was not the only potential source of disclosure. The Albanian groups were almost certainly infiltrated, and careless talk indulged in by the motley émigrés could have contributed to the fiasco. Philby, referring to the CIA-SIS task force members’ habit of poking fun at Albanians, wrote: “Even in our more serious moments, we Anglo-Saxons never forgot that our agents were just down from the trees.”⁹

So lax was security that New York Times correspondent Cyrus L. Sulzberger filed several dispatches from the Mediterranean area touching upon the intervention which required virtually no reading between the lines.¹⁰ (The articles carried no attention-grabbing headlines, there was no public comment about them from Washington, no reporters asked government officials any embarrassing questions … ergo: a “non-event” for Americans.)

Despite one failure after another, and without good reason to expect anything different in the future, the operation continued until the spring of 1953, resulting in the death or imprisonment of hundreds of men. It was not simply the obsession with chopping off one of Stalin’s fingers. Professional prestige and careers had been invested, a visible success was needed to “recoup past losses” and “justify earlier decisions”.¹¹ And the men who were being lost were, after all, only Albanians, who spoke not a word of the Queen’s English, and did not yet walk upright properly.

There was, however, the danger of the action escalating into conflict with the Soviet Union. The Soviets did in fact send some new fighter planes to Albania, presumably in the hope that they could shoot down the foreign aircraft making drops.¹² The operation could not fail to remind Stalin, Hoxha, and the entire socialist bloc of another Western intervention 30 years earlier in the Soviet Union. It could only serve to make them yet more “paranoid” about Western intentions and convince them to turn the screw of internal security yet tighter. Indeed, every now and again over the ensuing years, Hoxha mentioned the American and British “invasion” and used it to justify his policy of isolation.¹³

In the early 1960s, Hoxha himself did what the CIA and SIS had failed to do: He pulled Albania out of the Soviet orbit. The Albanian leader purged pro-Soviet officials in his government and aligned his country with China. There was no military retaliation on the part of the USSR. In the mid-1970s, Hoxha forsook China as well.

7. Eastern Europe 1948-1956

Operation Splinter Factor

Jozef Swiatlo surfaced at a press conference in Washington on 28 September 1954. Swiatlo was a Pole; he had been a very important one, high up in the Ministry of Public Security, the secret police. The story went that he had defected in West Berlin the previous December while on a shopping trip, and now the State Department was presenting him to the world to clear up the mystery of the Fields, the American citizens who had disappeared in 1949. Swiatlo revealed that Noel Field and his wife Herta had been arrested in Hungary, and that brother Hermann Field had suffered the same fate in Poland at the hands of Swiatlo himself, all in connection with the trial of a leading Hungarian Communist. The State Department had already dispatched strong letters to the governments of Hungary and Poland.¹

There is a more expanded and more sinister version of the Jozef Swiatlo story. This story has Swiatlo seeking to defect to the British in Warsaw back in 1948 at a time when he was already in his high security position. The British, for various reasons, turned his case over to the United States and, at the request of Allen Dulles, Swiatlo was told to remain at his post until further notice.

At this time Dulles was not yet Director of the CIA, but was a close consultant to the Agency, had his own men in key positions, and was waiting only until November for Thomas Dewey to win the presidential election and appoint him to the top position. (Harry Truman’s surprising re-election postponed this for four years, but Dulles did become Deputy Director in 1951.)

Noel Field, formerly a State Department Foreign Service Officer, was a long-time Communist fellow-traveler, if not a party member in the United States or Europe. During the Second World War, his path converged with Dulles’s in intrigue-filled Switzerland. Dulles was an OSS man, Field the representative of the Unitarian Church in Boston helping refugees from Nazi occupation. Field made it a point particularly to help Communist refugees, of which there were many inasmuch as Communists were second only to Jews on the German persecution list. The OSS aided the operation financially; the Communists in turn were an excellent source of information about happenings in Europe of interest to Washington and its allies.

Toward the end of the war, Field induced Dulles to provide American support for a project which placed agents in various European countries to prepare the way for the advancing Allied troops. The men chosen by Field, unsurprisingly, were all Communists and their placement in certain Eastern European countries helped them to get their hands on the reins of power long before non-Communist forces were able to regroup and organize themselves.

It could be concluded from this that Allen Dulles had been duped. Moreover, the OSS, under Dulles’s direction and again with Field involved, had financed the publication of a clandestine newspaper inside Germany; anti-fascist and left-wing, the paper was called Neues Deutschland, and immediately upon liberation became the official newspaper of the East German Communist Party.

After the war these incidents served as jokes which intelligence services of both East and West could and did appreciate. Before long, the joke fell heavily upon Noel Field.

In 1949 when Field visited Poland he was regarded with grave suspicion by Polish authorities. He was seen to have worked during the war in a position which could easily have been a front for Western espionage, a position which brought him into regular contact with senior Communist Party members; and he had, after all, worked closely with Allen Dulles, famous already as a spymaster, and the brother of John Foster Dulles, prominent in Washington official circles and already making his calls for the “liberation” of the Soviet bloc nations.

At the time of Field’s arrival in Poland, Jozef Swiatlo was looking to implicate Jakub Berman, a high party and state official whom Swiatlo was suspicious of and detested. It was his failure to convince the Polish president to act against Berman that reportedly drove Swiatlo to try to defect the year before. When Noel Field wrote to Berman asking his help in obtaining a job in Eastern Europe, Swiatlo learned of the letter and saw his chance to nail Berman.

But first Noel Field had to be established as an American spy. Given the circumstantial evidence pointing in that direction, that would not be too difficult for a man of Swiatlo’s high position and low character. Of course, if Field really was working with US intelligence, Swiatlo couldn’t very well be exposing him since the Polish security officer was now himself an American agent. Accordingly, he sent his first message to the CIA, describing his plan about Berman and Field and the harm it could do to the Communist Party in Poland. He concluded with: “Any objections?”

Allen Dulles had none. His reaction to Swiatlo’s message was one of pleasure and amusement. The time had come to settle accounts with Noel Field. More importantly, Dulles saw that Swiatlo, using Noel Field, “the American spy”, as a bludgeon could knock off countless leading Communist officials in the Soviet bloc. It could put the whole of the bloc into a state of acute paranoia and set off a wave of repression and Stalinist tyranny that could eventually lead to uprisings. Dulles called his plan: Operation Splinter Factor.

Thus it was that Jozef Swiatlo was directed to find spies everywhere in Eastern Europe. He would uncover American plots and British plots, “Trotskyist” conspiracies and “Titoist” conspiracies. He would report to Soviet secret-police chief Lavrenti Beria himself that at the center of the vast network was a man named Noel Haviland Field.

Field was arrested and wound up in a prison in Hungary, as did his wife Herta when she came looking for him. And when his brother Hermann Field sought to track down the two of them, he met the same fate in Poland.

Swiatlo was in a unique position to carry out Operation Splinter Factor. Not only did he have the authority and command, he had the files on countless Communist Party members in the bloc countries. Any connection they had had with Noel Field, anything that Field had done, could be interpreted to show the hand of American intelligence or an act of real or potential subversion of the socialist states. The Soviets, and Stalin himself, were extremely interested in the “Fieldists”. Noel Field had known almost everyone who was anyone in the Soviet bloc.

Just in case the level of paranoia in the infant, insecure governments of Eastern Europe was not high enough, a CIA double agent would “corroborate” a vital piece of information, or introduce the right rumor at the right time; or the Agency’s Radio Free Europe would broadcast certain tantalizing, seemingly-coded messages; or the CIA would direct the writing of letters from “East European expatriates” in the United States to leading Communists in their homelands, containing just the bit of information, or the phrase, carefully designed to lift the eyebrows of a security officer.

Many of the victims of Swiatlo’s purges were people who had spent the war years in the West rather than in the Soviet Union and thus had crossed Field’s path. These were people who tended to be more nationalist Communists, who wanted to put greater distance between their countries and the Soviet Union, as Tito had done in Yugoslavia, and who favored a more liberal regime at home. Dulles brushed aside the argument that these were people to be supported, not eliminated. He felt that they were potentially the more dangerous to the West because if their form of Communism were allowed to gain a foothold in Eastern Europe then Communism might become respectable and accepted; particularly with Italy and France threatening to vote Communists into power, Communism had to be shown at its worst.

There were hundreds of trials all over Eastern Europe—“show trials” and lesser spectacles—in which the name of Noel Field played an important part. What Operation Splinter Factor began soon took on a life of its own: following the arrest of a highly-placed person, others fell under suspicion because they knew him or had been appointed by him; or any other connection to an arrested person might serve to implicate some unlucky soul.

Jozef Swiatlo had his counterpart in Czechoslovakia, a man firmly entrenched in the upper rungs of the Czech security apparatus. The man, whose name is not known, had been recruited by General Reinhard Gehlen, the former Nazi intelligence chief who went to work for the CIA after the war.

Czechoslovakia was the worst case. By 1951 an unbelievable 169,000 card-carrying members of the Czech Communist Party had been arrested—ten percent of the entire membership. There were tens of thousands more in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Bulgaria. Hundreds were put to death, others died in prison or went insane.²

After Swiatlo defected in December 1953, East European intelligence services came to realize that he had been working for the other side all along. Four weeks after Swiatlo held his Washington press conference, the Polish government announced that it was releasing Hermann Field because investigation had revealed that the charges which had been brought against him by “an American agent and provocateur”, Jozef Swiatlo, were “baseless”.³ Field was later paid $50,000 for his imprisonment as well as having his convalescence at a sanitorium paid for.⁴

Three weeks after Hermann Field’s release, Noel and Herta Field were freed in Hungary. The government in Budapest stated that it could not justify the charges against them.⁵ They were also compensated and chose to remain in Hungary.

Once Noel Field had been officially declared innocent, the cases of countless others in East Europe had to be reviewed. First in trickles, then in rushes, the prisoners were released. By 1956 the vast majority stood outside prison walls.

Throughout the decade following the war, the CIA was fanning the flames of discontent in Eastern Europe in many ways other than Operation Splinter Factor. Radio Free Europe (RFE, cf. Soviet Union chapter), broadcasting from West Germany, never missed a (dirty) trick. In January 1952, for example, after RFE learned that Czechoslovakia was planning to devalue its currency, it warned the population, thus stimulating a nation-wide buying panic.⁶ RFE’s commentaries about various European Communists were described by Blanche Wiesen Cook in her study of the period, The Declassified Eisenhower. She wrote that the broadcasts:

involved a wide range of personal criticism, tawdry and slanderous attacks ranging from rumors of brutality and torture, to corruption, and to madness, perversion, and vice. Everything was used that could be imagined in order to make communists, whether in England or in Poland, look silly, undignified, and insignificant.⁷

One of the voices heard frequently over RFE on the subject of Communist obnoxiousness was none other than Jozef Swiatlo, who had earned the nickname of “Butcher” for his proclivity to torture. Needless to say, the born-again humanitarian made no mention of Splinter Factor or his double role, although some of his broadcasts reportedly shook up the Polish security system for the better.⁸

Any way the US could stir up trouble and nuisance … supporting opposition groups in Rumania⁹ … setting up an underground radio station in Bulgaria¹⁰ … dropping propaganda from balloons over Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland (on one day in August 1951 alone, 11,000 balloons carrying 13 million leaflets)¹¹ … dropping people as well: four American airmen, presumably intelligence operatives, landing in Hungary¹² …

In 1955, Eastern Europeans could be found at Fort Bragg, North Carolina training with the Green Berets, learning guerrilla warfare tactics, hopefully to be used in their native lands.¹³

By the following year, hundreds of Hungarians, Rumanians, Poles and others were being trained by CIA paramilitary specialists at a secret installation in West Germany. When, in October 1956, the uprising in Hungary occurred, these men, according to the CIA, were not used because they were not yet ready.¹⁴ But the Agency did send its agents in Budapest into action to join the rebels and help organize them.¹⁵ In the meantime, RFE was exhorting the Hungarian people to continue their resistance, offering tactical advice, and implying that American military assistance was on the way. It never came.

There is no evidence that Operation Splinter Factor contributed to the Hungarian uprising or to the earlier ones in Poland and East Germany. Nonetheless, the CIA could point to all the cold-war, anti-Communist propaganda points it had won because of the witch hunts in the East, the human cost notwithstanding.

[continued on page 471]

8. Germany 1950s

Everything from juvenile delinquency to terrorism

Within a period of 30 years and two world wars with Germany, the Soviet Union suffered more than 40 million dead and wounded, enormous devastation to its land, and its cities razed to the ground. At the close of the Second World War, the Russians were not kindly disposed toward the German people. With their own country to rebuild, they placed the reconstruction of Germany far down on their list of priorities.

The United States emerged from the war with relatively minor casualties and its territory completely unscathed. It was ready, willing and able to devote itself to its main priority in Europe: the building of an anti-Communist bulwark in the West, particularly in the strategic location of Germany.

In 1945, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson has written, official American policy was explicitly “to bring home to the Germans that they could not escape the suffering they had brought upon themselves … [and] to control [the] German economy to … prevent any higher standard of living than in neighboring nations.”¹

“From the outset,” Acheson added, US officials in Germany believed this plan “to be unworkable”.²

Acheson did not explain what lay behind this prognosis, but its correctness soon became apparent for three distinct reasons: (1) influential American business and financial leaders, some of them occupying important government positions, had too great a stake in a highly-industrialized Germany (usually dating back to before the war) to allow the country to sink to the depths that some American policy-makers advocated as punishment; (2) a revitalized West Germany was seen as an indispensable means of combatting Soviet influence in the Eastern sector of the country, if not in all of Eastern Europe. West Germany was to become “the showcase of Western democracy”—dramatic, living proof of the superiority of capitalism over socialism; (3) in American conservative circles, and some liberal ones as well, wherein a Soviet invasion of Western Europe remained perpetually imminent, the idea of tying West Germany’s industrial hands was one which came perilously close to being “soft on communism”, if not worse.³

Dwight Eisenhower echoed this last sentiment when he later wrote:

Had certain officials in the Roosevelt administration had their way, Germany would have been far worse off, for there were those who advocated the flooding of the Ruhr mines, the wrecking of German factories, and the reducing of Germany from an industrial to an agricultural nation. Among others, Harry Dexter White, later named by Attorney General Brownell as one who had been heavily involved in a Soviet espionage ring operating within our government … proposed exactly that.⁴

Thus it was that the de-industrialization of West Germany met the same fate as the demilitarization of the country would in the coming years, as the United States poured in massive economic assistance: $4 billion of Marshall Plan aid and an army of industrial and technical experts.

At the same time, the Soviet Union was pouring massive economic assistance out of East Germany. The Soviets dismantled and moved back home entire factories with large amounts of equipment and machinery, and thousands of miles of railroad track. When added to war reparations, the toll reached into the billions of dollars.

By the early 1950s, though social services, employment, and cultural life in East Germany were on a par or superior to that in West Germany, the Western sector had the edge in those areas of prosperity with the most sex appeal: salaries were higher, the eating was better, consumer goods more available, and the neon lights emblazoned the nights along the Kurfürstendamm.

American cold warriors, however, as if discontent with the game score or with leaving so much to chance, instituted a crude campaign of sabotage and subversion against East Germany designed to throw the economic and administrative machinery out of gear. The CIA and other US intelligence and military services in West Germany (with occasional help from the likes of British intelligence and the West German police) recruited, equipped, trained and financed German activist groups and individuals of West and East. Finding recruits for such a crusade was not difficult, for in post-war Germany, anti-communism lived on as the only respectable vestige of Naziism.

The most active of these groups, which went by the name of Fighting Group Against Inhumanity, admitted that it had received financial support from the Ford Foundation and the West Berlin government.⁵ Subsequently, an East Berlin news magazine published a copy of a letter from the Ford Foundation confirming a grant of $150,000 to the National Committee for a Free Europe “so that it, in turn, could support the humanitarian activities of ‘The Fighting Group Against Inhumanity’.”⁶ The National Committee for a Free Europe, in turn, was a CIA front organization which also ran Radio Free Europe.⁷

The Association of Political Refugees from the East, and the Investigating Committee of Freedom-minded Jurists of the Soviet Zone, were two of the other groups involved in the campaign against East Germany. The actions carried out by these operatives ran the spectrum from juvenile delinquency to terrorism; anything “to make the commies look bad”. It added up to the following remarkable record:⁸

•  through explosives, arson, short circuiting, and other methods they damaged power stations, shipyards, a dam, canals, docks, public buildings, gas stations, shops, a radio station, outdoor stands, public transportation;

•  derailed freight trains, seriously injuring workers; burned 12 cars of a freight train and destroyed air pressure hoses of others;

•  blew up road and railway bridges; placed explosives on a railway bridge of the Berlin-Moscow line but these were discovered in time—hundreds would have been killed;

•  used special acids to damage vital factory machinery; put sand in the turbine of a factory, bringing it to a standstill; set fire to a tile-producing factory; promoted work slow-downs in factories; stole blueprints and samples of new technical developments;

•  killed 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy by poisoning the wax coating of the wire used to bale the cows’ corn fodder;

•  added soap to powdered milk destined for East German schools;

•  raided and wrecked left-wing offices in East and West Berlin, stole membership lists; assaulted and kidnapped leftists and, on occasion, murdered them;

•  set off stink bombs to disrupt political meetings;

•  floated balloons which burst in the air, scattering thousands of propaganda pamphlets down upon East Germans;

•  were in possession, when arrested, of a large quantity of the poison cantharidin with which it was planned to produce poisoned cigarettes to kill leading East Germans;

•  attempted to disrupt the World Youth Festival in East Berlin by sending out forged invitations, false promises of free bed and board, false notices of cancellations; carried out attacks on participants with explosives, firebombs, and tire-puncturing equipment; set fire to a wooden bridge on a main motorway leading to the festival;

•  forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards—for example, for 60,000 pounds of meat—to cause confusion, shortages and resentment;

•  sent out forged tax notices and other government directives and documents to foster disorganization and inefficiency within industry and unions;

•“gave considerable aid and comfort” to East Germans who staged an uprising on 17 June 1953; during and after the uprising, the US radio station in West Berlin, RIAS (Radio In the American Sector), issued inflammatory broadcasts into East Germany appealing to the populace to resist the government; RIAS also broadcast warnings to witnesses in at least one East German criminal case being monitored by the Investigating Committee of Freedom-minded Jurists of the Soviet Zone that they would be added to the committee’s files of “accused persons” if they lied.

Although many hundreds of the American agents were caught and tried by East Germany, the ease with which they could pass back and forth between the two sectors and infiltrate different enterprises without any language barrier provided opportunities for the CIA unmatched anywhere else in Eastern Europe.

Throughout the 1950s, the East Germans and the Soviet Union repeatedly lodged complaints with the Soviets’ erstwhile allies in the West and with the United Nations about specific sabotage and espionage activities and called for the closure of the offices in West Germany they claimed were responsible, and for which they provided names and addresses. Inevitably the East Germans began to tighten up entry into the country from the West.

The West also bedeviled the East with a vigorous campaign of recruiting East German professionals and skilled workers. Eventually, this led to a severe labor and production crisis in the East, and in August 1961, to the building of the infamous Berlin Wall.

While staging their commando attacks upon East Germany, American authorities and their German agents were apparently convinced that the Soviet Union had belligerent designs upon West Germany; perhaps a textbook case of projection. On 8 October 1952, the Minister-President of the West German state of Hesse, Georg August Zinn, disclosed that the United States had created a secret civilian army in his state for the purpose of resisting a Russian invasion.

This force of between 1,000 and 2,000 men belonged to the so-called “Technical Service” of the German Youth Federation, the latter characterized by the New York Times as “a Right-wing youth group frequently charged with extremist activities” (a reference to the terrorist tactics described above). The stalwarts of the Technical Service were hardly youths, however, for almost all appeared to be between 35 and 50 and most, said Zinn, were “former officers of the Luftwaffe, the Wehrmacht and the S.S. [Hitler’s Black-shirts]”. For more than a year they had received American training in infantry weapons and explosives and “political instruction” in small groups at a secluded site in the countryside and at a US military installation.

The intelligence wing of the Technical Service, the state president revealed, had drawn up lists and card indexes of persons who were to be “put out of the way” when the Soviet tanks began to roll. These records, which contained detailed descriptions and intimate biographical information, were of some 200 leading Social Democrats (including Zinn himself), 15 Communists, and various others, all of whom were deemed “politically untrustworthy” and opponents of West German militarization. Apparently, support for peaceful co-existence and detente with the Soviet bloc was sufficient to qualify one for inclusion on the hit-list, for one man was killed at the training site, charged with being an “East-West bridge builder”. It was this murder that led to the exposure of the entire operation.

The United States admitted its role in the creation and training of the guerrilla army, but denied any involvement in the “illegal, internal, and political activities” of the organization. But Zinn reported that the Americans had learned of the plotting in May and had not actually dissolved the group until September, the same month that German authorities arrested a number of the group’s leaders. At some point, the American who directed the training courses, Sterling Garwood, had been “supplied with carbon copies of the card-index entries”. It appears that at no time did US authorities communicate anything of this matter to the West German Government.

As the affair turned out, those who had been arrested were quickly released and the United States thwarted any further investigation in this the American Zone of occupied Germany. Commented Herr Zinn: “The only legal explanation for these releases can be that the people in Karlsruhe [the Federal Court] declared that they acted upon American direction.”⁹

To add to the furor, the national leader of the Social Democrats accused the United States of financing an opposition group to infiltrate and undermine his party. Erich Ollenhauer, whose name had also appeared on the Technical Service’s list, implied that American “clandestine” agencies were behind the plot despite the disapproval of high-ranking US officials.¹⁰

The revelations about the secret army and its hit-list resulted in a storm of ridicule and denunciation falling upon the United States from many quarters in West Germany. In particular, the delicious irony of the Americans working hand-in-glove with “ex”-Nazis did not escape the much-castigated German people.

This operation in Germany, it was revealed many years later, was part of a much wider network—called “Operation Gladio”—created by the CIA and several European intelligence services, with similar secret armies all over Western Europe. (See Western Europe chapter.)

9. Iran 1953

Making it safe for the King of Kings

“So this is how we get rid of that madman Mossadegh,” announced John Foster Dulles to a group of top Washington policy makers one day in June 1953.¹ The Secretary of State held in his hand a plan of operation to overthrow the prime minister of Iran prepared by Kermit (Kim) Roosevelt of the CIA. There was scarcely any discussion amongst the high-powered men in the room, no probing questions, no legal or ethical issues raised.

“This was a grave decision to have made,” Roosevelt later wrote. “It involved tremendous risk. Surely it deserved thorough examination, the closest consideration, somewhere at the very highest level. It had not received such thought at this meeting. In fact, I was morally certain that almost half of those present, if they had felt free or had the courage to speak, would have opposed the undertaking.”²

Roosevelt, the grandson of Theodore and distant cousin of Franklin, was expressing surprise more than disappointment at glimpsing American foreign-policy-making undressed.

The original initiative to oust Mossadegh had come from the British, for the elderly Iranian leader had spearheaded the parliamentary movement to nationalize the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), the sole oil company operating in Iran. In March 1951, the bill for nationalization was passed, and at the end of April Mossadegh was elected prime minister by a large majority of Parliament. On 1 May, nationalization went into effect. The Iranian people, Mossadegh declared, “were opening a hidden treasure upon which lies a dragon”.³

As the prime minister had anticipated, the British did not take the nationalization gracefully, though it was supported unanimously by the Iranian parliament and by the overwhelming majority of the Iranian people for reasons of both economic justice and national pride. The Mossadegh government tried to do all the right things to placate the British: It offered to set aside 25 percent of the net profits of the oil operation as compensation; it guaranteed the safety and the jobs of the British employees; it was willing to sell its oil without disturbance to the tidy control system so dear to the hearts of the international oil giants. But the British would have none of it. What they wanted was their oil company back. And they wanted Mossadegh’s head. A servant does not affront his lord with impunity.

A military show of force by the British navy was followed by a ruthless international economic blockade and boycott, and a freezing of Iranian assets which brought Iran’s oil exports and foreign trade to a virtual standstill, plunged the already impoverished country into near destitution, and made payment of any compensation impossible. Nonetheless, and long after they had moved to oust Mossadegh, the British demanded compensation not only for the physical assets of the AIOC, but for the value of their enterprise in developing the oil fields; a request impossible to meet, and, in the eyes of Iranian nationalists, something which decades of huge British profits had paid for many times over.

The British attempt at economic strangulation of Iran could not have gotten off the ground without the active co-operation and support of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and American oil companies. At the same time, the Truman administration argued with the British that Mossadegh’s collapse could open the door to the proverbial communist takeover.⁴ When the British were later expelled from Iran, however, they had no alternative but to turn to the United States for assistance in toppling Mossadegh. In November 1952, the Churchill government approached Roosevelt, the de facto head of the CIA’s Middle East division, who told the British that he felt that there was “no chance to win approval from the outgoing administration of Truman and Acheson. The new Republicans, however, might be quite different.”⁵

John Foster Dulles was certainly different. The apocalyptic anti-communist saw in Mossadegh the epitome of all that he detested in the Third World: unequivocal neutralism in the cold war, tolerance of Communists, and disrespect for free enterprise, as demonstrated by the oil nationalization. (Ironically, in recent years Great Britain had nationalized several of its own basic industries, and the government was the majority owner of the AIOC.) To the likes of John Foster Dulles, the eccentric Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh was indeed a madman. And when the Secretary of State considered further that Iran was a nation exceedingly rich in the liquid gold, and that it shared a border with the Soviet Union more than 1,000 miles long, he was not unduly plagued by indecision as to whether the Iranian prime minister should finally retire from public life.

As matters turned out, the overthrow of Mossadegh in August 1953 was much more an American operation than a British one. Twenty-six years later, Kermit Roosevelt took the unusual step of writing a book about how he and the CIA carried out the operation. He called his book Countercoup to press home the idea that the CIA coup was staged only to prevent a takeover of power by the Iranian Communist Party (The Tudeh) closely backed by the Soviet Union. Roosevelt was thus arguing that Mossadegh had to be removed to prevent a Communist takeover, whereas the Truman administration had felt that Mossadegh had to be kept in power to prevent one.

It would be incorrect to state that Roosevelt offers little evidence to support his thesis of the Communist danger. It would be more precise to say that he offers no evidence at all. Instead, the reader is subjected to mere assertions of the thesis which are stated over and over, apparently in the belief that enough repetition will convince even the most skeptical. Thus are we treated to variations on the theme such as the following:

“The Soviet threat [was] indeed genuine, dangerous and imminent” … Mossadegh “had formed an alliance” with the Soviet Union to oust the Shah … “the obvious threat of Russian takeover” … “the alliance between [Mossadegh] and the Russian-dominated Tudeh was taking on a threatening shape” … Mossadegh’s “increasing dependence on the Soviet Union” … “the hand of the Tudeh, and behind them the Russians, is showing more openly every day” … “Russian backing of the Tudeh and Tudeh backing of [Mossadegh] became ever more obvious” … the Soviet Union was “ever more active in Iran. Their control over Tudeh leadership was growing stronger all the time. It was exercised often and, to our eyes, with deliberate ostentation” …⁶

But none of this subversive and threatening activity was, apparently, ever open, obvious, or ostentatious enough to provide Roosevelt with a single example he could impart to a curious reader.

In actuality, although the Tudeh Party more or less faithfully followed the fluctuating Moscow line on Iran, the relation of the party to Mossadegh was much more complex than Roosevelt and other cold-war chroniclers have made it out to be. The Tudeh felt very ambiguous about the wealthy, eccentric, land-owning prime minister who, nonetheless, was standing up to imperialism. Dean Acheson, Truman’s Secretary of State, described Mossadegh as “essentially a rich, reactionary, feudal-minded Persian”,⁷ hardly your typical Communist Party fellow-traveler.

On occasion the Tudeh had supported Mossadegh’s policies; more often it had attacked them bitterly, and in one instance, on 15 July 1951, a Tudeh-sponsored demonstration was brutally suppressed by Mossadegh, resulting in some 100 deaths and 500 injured. The Iranian leader, moreover, had campaigned successfully against lingering Soviet occupation of northern Iran after World War II, and in October 1947 had led Parliament in its rejection of a government proposal that a joint Irano-Soviet oil company be set up to exploit the oil of northern Iran.⁸

What, indeed, did Mossadegh have to gain by relinquishing any of his power to the Tudeh and/or the Soviet Union? The idea that the Russians even desired the Tudeh to take power is no more than speculation. There was just as much evidence, or as little, to conclude that the Russians, once again, were more concerned about their relationship with Western governments than with the fate of a local Communist Party in a country outside the socialist bloc of Eastern Europe.

A secret State Department intelligence report, dated 9 January 1953, in the closing days of the Truman administration, stated that Mossadegh had not sought any alliance with the Tudeh, and that “The major opposition to the National Front [Mossadegh’s governing coalition] arises from the vested interests, on the one hand, and the Tudeh Party on the other.”⁹

The Tudeh Party had been declared illegal in 1949 and Mossadegh had not lifted that ban although he allowed the party to operate openly, at least to some extent because of his democratic convictions, and had appointed some Tudeh sympathizers to government posts.

Many of the Tudeh’s objectives paralleled those espoused by the National Front, the State Department report observed, but “An open Tudeh move for power … would probably unite independents and non-Communists of all political leanings and would result … in energetic efforts to destroy Tudeh by force.”¹⁰

The National Front itself was a coalition of highly diverse political and religious elements including right-wing anti-communists, held together by respect for Mossadegh’s personal character and honesty, and by nationalistic sentiments, particularly in regard to the nationalization of oil.

In 1979, when he was asked about this State Department report, Kermit Roosevelt replied: “I don’t know what to make of that … Loy Henderson [US ambassador to Iran in 1953] thought that there was a serious danger that Mossadegh was going to, in effect, place Iran under Soviet domination.”¹¹ Though he was the principal moving force behind the coup, Roosevelt was now passing the buck, and to a man who, as we shall see in the Middle East chapter, was given to alarmist statements about “communist takeovers”.

One can but wonder what Roosevelt, or anyone else, made of a statement by John Foster Dulles before a Senate committee in July 1953, when the operation to oust Mossadegh was already in process. The Secretary of State, the press reported, testified “that there was ‘no substantial evidence’ to indicate that Iran was cooperating with Russia. On the whole, he added, Moslem opposition to communism is predominant, although at times the Iranian Government appears to rely for support on the Tudeh party, which is communistic.”¹²

The young Shah of Iran had been relegated to little more than a passive role by Mossadegh and the Iranian political process. His power had been whittled away to the point where he was “incapable of independent action”, noted the State Department intelligence report. Mossadegh was pressing for control of the armed forces and more say over expenditures of the royal court, and the inexperienced and indecisive Shah—the “King of Kings”—was reluctant to openly oppose the prime minister because of the latter’s popularity.

The actual sequence of events instigated by Roosevelt which culminated in the Shah’s ascendancy appears rather simple in hindsight, even naive, and owed not a little to luck. The first step was to reassure the Shah that Eisenhower and Churchill were behind him in his struggle for power with Mossadegh and were willing to provide whatever military and political support he needed. Roosevelt did not actually know what Eisenhower felt, or even knew, about the operation and went so far as to fabricate a message from the president to the Shah expressing his encouragement.¹³

At the same time, the Shah was persuaded to issue royal decrees dismissing Mossadegh as prime minister and replacing him with one Fazlollah Zahedi, a general who had been imprisoned during the war by the British for collaboration with the Nazis.¹⁴ Late in the night of 14/15 August, the Shah’s emissary delivered the royal decree to Mossadegh’s home, which was guarded by troops. Not surprisingly, he was received very coolly and did not get in to see the prime minister. Instead, he was obliged to leave the decree with a servant who signed a receipt for the piece of paper dismissing his master from power. Equally unsurprising, Mossadegh did not abdicate. The prime minister, who maintained that only Parliament could dismiss him, delivered a radio broadcast the following morning in which he stated that the Shah, encouraged by “foreign elements”, had attempted a coup d’état. Mossadegh then declared that he was, therefore, compelled to take full power unto himself. He denounced Zahedi as a traitor and sought to have him arrested, but the general had been hidden by Roosevelt’s team.

The Shah, fearing all was lost, fled with his queen to Rome via Baghdad without so much as packing a suitcase. Undeterred, Roosevelt went ahead and directed the mimeographing of copies of the royal decrees for distribution to the public, and sent two of his Iranian agents to important military commanders to seek their support. It appears that this crucial matter was left to the last minute, almost as an afterthought. Indeed, one of the two Iranians had been recruited for the cause only the same day, and it was only he who succeeded in winning a commitment of military support from an Iranian colonel who had tanks and armored cars under his command.¹⁵

Beginning on 16 August, a mass demonstration arranged by the National Front, supporting Mossadegh and attacking the Shah and the United States, took place in the capital city, Teheran. Roosevelt characterizes the demonstrators simply as “the Tudeh, with strong Russian encouragement”, once again failing to offer any evidence to support his assertion. The New York Times referred to them as “Tudeh partisans and Nationalist extremists”, the latter term being one which could have applied to individuals comprising a wide range of political leanings.¹⁶

Among the demonstrators there were as well a number of individuals working for the CIA. According to Richard Cottam, an American academic and author reportedly in the employ of the Agency in Teheran at this time, these agents were sent “into the streets to act as if they were Tudeh. They were more than just provocateurs, they were shock troops, who acted as if they were Tudeh people throwing rocks at mosques and priests”, the purpose of which was to stamp the Tudeh and, by implication, Mossadegh as being anti-religion.¹⁷

During the demonstrations, the Tudeh raised their familiar demand for the creation of a democratic republic. They appealed to Mossadegh to form a united front and to provide them with arms to defend against the coup, but the prime minister refused.¹⁸ Instead, on 18 August he ordered the police and army to put an end to the Tudeh demonstrations which they did with considerable force. According to the accounts of Roosevelt and Ambassador Henderson, Mossadegh took this step as a result of a meeting with Henderson in which the ambassador complained of the extreme harassment being suffered by US citizens at the hands of the Iranians. It is left unclear by both of the Americans how much of this harassment was real and how much manufactured by them for the occasion. In any event, Henderson told Mossadegh that unless it ceased, he would be obliged to order all Americans to leave Iran at once. Mossadegh, says Henderson, begged him not to do this for an American evacuation would make it appear that his government was unable to control the country, although at the same time the prime minister was accusing the CIA of being behind the issuance of the royal decrees.¹⁹ (The Tudeh newspaper at this time was demanding the expulsion of “interventionist” American diplomats.)²⁰

Whatever Mossadegh’s motivation, his action was again in sharp contradiction to the idea that he was in alliance with the Tudeh or that the party was in a position to grab the reins of power. Indeed, the Tudeh did not take to the streets again.

The following day, 19 August, Roosevelt’s Iranian agents staged a parade through Teheran. With a fund of some one million dollars having been established in a safe in the American embassy, the “extremely competent professional ‘organizers’,” as Roosevelt called them, had no difficulty in buying themselves a mob, probably using but a small fraction of the fund. (The various accounts of the CIA role in Iran have the Agency spending from $10,000 to $19 million to overthrow Mossadegh. The larger amounts are based on reports that the CIA engaged in heavy bribery of members of Parliament and other influential Iranians to enlist their support against the prime minister.)

Soon a line of people could be seen coming out of the ancient bazaar, led by circus and athletic performers to attract the public. The marchers were waving banners, shouting “Long live the Shah!” Along the edges of the procession, men were passing out Iranian currency adorned with a portrait of the Shah. The demonstrators gathered followers as they went, people joining and picking up the chants, undoubtedly for a myriad of political and personal reasons. The balance of psychology had swung against Mossadegh.

Along the way, some marchers broke ranks to attack the offices of pro-Mossadegh newspapers and political parties, Tudeh and government offices. Presently, a voice broke in over the radio in Teheran announcing that “The Shah’s instruction that Mossadegh be dismissed has been carried out. The new Prime Minister, Fazlollah Zahedi, is now in office. And His Imperial Majesty is on his way home!”

This was a lie, or a “pre-truth” as Roosevelt suggested. Only then did he go to fetch Zahedi from his hiding place. On the way, he happened to run into the commander of the air force who was among the marching throng. Roosevelt told the officer to get hold of a tank in which to carry Zahedi to Mossadegh’s house in proper fashion.²¹

Kermit Roosevelt would have the reader believe that at this point it was all over but the shouting and the champagne he was soon to uncork: Mossadegh had fled, Zahedi had assumed power, the Shah had been notified to return—a dramatic, joyful, and peaceful triumph of popular will. Inexplicably, he neglects to mention at all that in the streets of Teheran and in front of Mossadegh’s house that day, a nine-hour battle raged, with soldiers loyal to Mossadegh on one side and those supporting Zahedi and the Shah on the other. Some 300 people were reported killed and hundreds more wounded before Mossadegh’s defenders finally succumbed.²²

Roosevelt also fails to mention any contribution of the British to the whole operation, which considerably irritated the men in MI6, the CIA’s counterpart, who claim that they, as well as AIOC staff, local businessmen and other Iranians, had indeed played a role in the events. But they have been tight-lipped about what that role was precisely.²³

The US Military Mission in Iran also claimed a role in the action, as Major General George C. Stewart later testified before Congress:

Now, when this crisis came on and the thing was about to collapse, we violated our normal criteria and among the other things we did, we provided the army immediately on an emergency basis, blankets, boots, uniforms, electric generators, and medical supplies that permitted and created the atmosphere in which they could support the Shah … The guns that they had in their hands, the trucks that they rode in, the armored cars that they drove through the streets, and the radio communications that permitted their control, were all furnished through the military defense assistance program.²⁴

The latter part of the General’s statement would, presumably, apply to the other side as well.

“It is conceivable that the Tudeh could have turned the fortunes of the day against the royalists,” wrote Kennett Love, a New York Times reporter who was in Teheran during the crucial days of August. “But for some reason they remained completely aloof from the conflict. … My own conjecture is that the Tudeh were restrained by the Soviet Embassy because the Kremlin, in the first post-Stalin year, was not willing to take on such consequences as might have resulted from the establishment of a communist-controlled regime in Teheran.”

Love’s views, contained in a paper he wrote in 1960, may well have been inspired by information received from the CIA. By his own admission, he was in close contact with the Agency in Teheran and even aided them in their operation.²⁵

Earlier in the year, the New York Times had noted that “prevailing opinion among detached observers in Teheran” was that “Mossadegh is the most popular politician in the country”. During a period of more than 40 years in public life, Mossadegh had “acquired a reputation as an honest patriot”.²⁶

In July, the State Department Director of Iranian Affairs had testified that “Mossadegh has such tremendous control over the masses of people that it would be very difficult to throw him out.”²⁷

A few days later, “at least 100,000” people filled the streets of Teheran to express strong anti-US and anti-Shah sentiments. Though sponsored by the Tudeh, the turnout far exceeded any estimate of party adherents.²⁸

But popularity and masses, of the unarmed kind, counted for little, for in the final analysis what Teheran witnessed was a military showdown carried out on both sides by soldiers obediently following the orders of a handful of officers, some of whom were staking their careers and ambitions on choosing the winning side; some had a more ideological commitment. The New York Times characterized the sudden reversal of Mossadegh’s fortunes as “nothing more than a mutiny … against pro-Mossadegh officers” by “the lower ranks” who revered the Shah, had brutally quelled the demonstrations the day before, but refused to do the same on 19 August, and instead turned against their officers.²⁹

What connection Roosevelt and his agents had with any of the pro-Shah officers beforehand is not clear. In an interview given at about the same time that he finished his book, Roosevelt stated that a number of pro-Shah officers were given refuge in the CIA compound adjoining the US Embassy at the time the Shah fled to Rome.³⁰ But inasmuch as Roosevelt mentions not a word of this rather important and interesting development in his book, it must be regarded as yet another of his assertions to be approached with caution.

In any event, it may be that the 19 August demonstration organized by Roosevelt’s team was just the encouragement and spark these officers were waiting for. Yet, if so, it further illustrates how much Roosevelt had left to chance.

In light of all the questionable, contradictory, and devious statements which emanated at times from John Foster Dulles, Kermit Roosevelt, Loy Henderson and other American officials, what conclusions can be drawn about American motivation in the toppling of Mossadegh? The consequences of the coup may offer the best guide.

For the next 25 years, the Shah of Iran stood fast as the United States’ closest ally in the Third World, to a degree that would have shocked the independent and neutral Mossadegh. The Shah literally placed his country at the disposal of US military and intelligence organizations to be used as a cold-war weapon, a window and a door to the Soviet Union—electronic listening and radar posts were set up near the Soviet border; American aircraft used Iran as a base to launch surveillance flights over the Soviet Union; espionage agents were infiltrated across the border; various American military installations dotted the Iranian landscape. Iran was viewed as a vital link in the chain being forged by the United States to “contain” the Soviet Union. In a telegram to the British Acting Foreign Secretary in September, Dulles said: “I think if we can in coordination move quickly and effectively in Iran we would close the most dangerous gap in the line from Europe to South Asia.”³¹ In February 1955, Iran became a member of the Baghdad Pact, set up by the United States, in Dulles’s words, “to create a solid band of resistance against the Soviet Union”.³²

One year after the coup, the Iranian government completed a contract with an international consortium of oil companies. Amongst Iran’s new foreign partners, the British lost the exclusive rights they had enjoyed previously, being reduced now to 40 percent. Another 40 percent now went to American oil firms, the remainder to other countries. The British, however, received an extremely generous compensation for their former property.³³

In 1958, Kermit Roosevelt left the CIA and presently went to work for Gulf Oil Co., one of the American oil firms in the consortium. In this position, Roosevelt was director of Gulf’s relations with the US government and foreign governments, and had occasion to deal with the Shah. In 1960, Gulf appointed him a vice president. Subsequently, Roosevelt formed a consulting firm, Downs and Roosevelt, which, between 1967 and 1970, reportedly received $116,000 a year above expenses for its efforts on behalf of the Iranian government. Another client, the Northrop Corporation, a Los Angeles-based aerospace company, paid Roosevelt $75,000 a year to aid in its sales to Iran, Saudi Arabia and other countries.³⁴ (See the Middle East chapter for Roosevelt’s CIA connection with King Saud of Saudi Arabia.)

Another American member of the new consortium was Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey (now Exxon), a client of Sullivan and Cromwell, the New York law firm of which John Foster Dulles had long been the senior member. Brother Allen, Director of the CIA, had also been a member of the firm.³⁵ Syndicated columnist Jack Anderson reported some years later that the Rockefeller family, who controlled Standard Oil and Chase Manhattan Bank, had “helped arrange the CIA coup that brought down Mossadegh”. Anderson listed a number of ways in which the Shah demonstrated his gratitude to the Rockefellers, including heavy deposits of his personal fortune in Chase Manhattan, and housing developments in Iran built by a Rockefeller family company.³⁶

The standard “textbook” account of what took place in Iran in 1953 is that—whatever else one might say for or against the operation—the United States saved Iran from a Soviet/Communist takeover. Yet, during the two years of American and British subversion of a bordering country, the Soviet Union did nothing that would support such a premise. When the British Navy staged the largest concentration of its forces since World War II in Iranian waters, the Soviets took no belligerent steps; nor when Great Britain instituted draconian international sanctions which left Iran in a deep economic crisis and extremely vulnerable, did the oil fields “fall hostage” to the Bolshevik Menace; this, despite “the whole of the Tudeh Party at its disposal” as agents, as Roosevelt put it.³⁷ Not even in the face of the coup, with its imprint of foreign hands, did Moscow make a threatening move; neither did Mossadegh at any point ask for Russian help.

One year later, however, the New York Times could editorialize that “Moscow … counted its chickens before they were hatched and thought that Iran would be the next ‘People’s Democracy’.” At the same time, the newspaper warned, with surprising arrogance, that “underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical nationalism.”³⁸

A decade later, Allen Dulles solemnly stated that communism had “achieved control of the governmental apparatus” in Iran.³⁹ And a decade after that, Fortune magazine, to cite one of many examples, kept the story alive by writing that Mossadegh “plotted with the Communist party of Iran, the Tudeh, to overthrow Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi and hook up with the Soviet Union.”⁴⁰

And what of the Iranian people? What did being “saved from communism” do for them? For the preponderance of the population, life under the Shah was a grim tableau of grinding poverty, police terror, and torture. Thousands were executed in the name of fighting communism. Dissent was crushed from the outset of the new regime with American assistance. Kennett Love wrote that he believed that CIA officer George Carroll, whom he knew personally, worked with General Farhat Dadsetan, the new military governor of Teheran, “on preparations for the very efficient smothering of a potentially dangerous dissident movement emanating from the bazaar area and the Tudeh in the first two weeks of November, 1953”.⁴¹

The notorious Iranian secret police, SAVAK, created under the guidance of the CIA and Israel,⁴² spread its tentacles all over the world to punish Iranian dissidents. According to a former CIA analyst on Iran, SAVAK was instructed in torture techniques by the Agency.⁴³ Amnesty International summed up the situation in 1976 by noting that Iran had the “highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran.”⁴⁴

When to this is added a level of corruption that “startled even the most hardened observers of Middle Eastern thievery”,⁴⁵ it is understandable that the Shah needed his huge military and police force, maintained by unusually large US aid and training programs,⁴⁶ to keep the lid down for as long as he did. Said Senator Hubert Humphrey, apparently with some surprise:

Do you know what the head of the Iranian Army told one of our people? He said the Army was in good shape, thanks to U.S. aid—it was now capable of coping with the civilian population. That Army isn’t going to fight the Russians. It’s planning to fight the Iranian people.⁴⁷

Where force might fail, the CIA turned to its most trusted weapon—money. To insure support for the Shah, or at least the absence of dissent, the Agency began making payments to Iranian religious leaders, always a capricious bunch. The payments to the ayatollahs and mullahs began in 1953 and continued regularly until 1977 when President Carter abruptly halted them. One “informed intelligence source” estimated that the amount paid reached as much as $400 million a year; others thought that figure too high, which it certainly seems to be. The cut-off of funds to the holy men, it is believed, was one of the elements which precipitated the beginning of the end for the King of Kings.⁴⁸

10. Guatemala 1953-1954

While the world watched

To whom do you turn for help when the police are assaulting you? The old question.

To whom does a poor banana republic turn when a CIA army is advancing upon its territory and CIA planes are overhead bombing the country?

The leaders of Guatemala tried everyone—the United Nations, the Organization of American States, other countries individually, the world press, even the United States itself, in the desperate hope that it was all a big misunderstanding, that in the end, reason would prevail.

Nothing helped. Dwight Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles had decided that the legally-elected government of Jacobo Arbenz was “communist”, therefore must go; and go it did, in June 1954.

In the midst of the American preparation to overthrow the government, the Guatemalan Foreign Minister, Guillermo Toriello, lamented that the United States was categorizing “as ‘communism’ every manifestation of nationalism or economic independence, any desire for social progress, any intellectual curiosity, and any interest in progressive liberal reforms.”¹

Toriello was close to the truth, but Washington officials retained enough contact with reality and world opinion to be aware of the inappropriateness of coming out against nationalism, independence or reform. Thus it was that Secretary of State Dulles asserted that Guatemalans were living under a “Communist type of terrorism”² … President Eisenhower warned about “the Communist dictatorship” establishing “an outpost on this continent to the detriment of all the American nations”³ … the US Ambassador to Guatemala, John Peurifoy, declared that “We cannot permit a Soviet Republic to be established between Texas and the Panama Canal”⁴ … others warned that Guatemala could become a base from which the Soviet Union might actually seize the Canal … Senator Margaret Chase Smith hinted, unmistakably, that the “unjustified increases in the price of coffee” imported from Guatemala were due to communist control of the country, and called for an investigation⁵ … and so it went.

The Soviet Union could be excused if it was somewhat bewildered by all the rhetoric, for the Russians had scant interest in Guatemala, did not provide the country with any kind of military assistance, did not even maintain diplomatic relations with it, thus did not have the normally indispensable embassy from which to conduct such nefarious schemes. (During this period, the height of McCarthyist “logic”, there were undoubtedly those Americans who reasoned: “All the better to deceive us!”)

With the exception of one occasion, the countries of Eastern Europe had as little to do with Guatemala as did the Soviet Union. A month before the coup, that is, long after Washington had begun preparation for it, Czechoslovakia made a single arms sale to Guatemala for cash, something the Czechs would no doubt have done for any other country willing to pay the price. The weapons, it turned out, were, in the words of the New York Times, “worthless military junk”. Time magazine pooh-poohed the newspaper’s report and cited US military men giving a better appraisal of the weapons. It may be that neither Time nor the military men could conceive that one member of the International Communist Conspiracy could do such a thing to another member.⁶

The American propaganda mill made much of this arms transaction. Less publicized was the fact that Guatemala had to seek arms from Czechoslovakia because the United States had refused to sell it any since 1948 due to its reformist governments, and had pressured other countries to do the same despite Arbenz’s repeated pleas to lift the embargo.⁷

Like the Soviets, Arbenz had reason to wonder about the American charges. The Guatemalan president, who took office in March 1951 after being elected by a wide margin, had no special contact or spiritual/ideological ties with the Soviet Union or the rest of the Communist bloc. Although American policymakers and the American press, explicitly and implicitly, often labeled Arbenz a communist, there were those in Washington who knew better, at least during their more dispassionate moments. Under Arbenz’s administration, Guatemala had voted at the United Nations so closely with the United States on issues of “Soviet imperialism” that a State Department group occupied with planning Arbenz’s overthrow concluded that propaganda concerning Guatemala’s UN record “would not be particularly helpful in our case”.⁸ And a State Department analysis paper reported that the Guatemalan president had support “not only from Communist-led labor and the radical fringe of professional and intellectual groups, but also among many anti-Communist nationalists in urban areas”.⁹

Nonetheless, Washington repeatedly and adamantly expressed its displeasure about the presence of communists working in the Guatemalan government and their active participation in the nation’s political life. Arbenz maintained that this was no more than proper in a democracy, while Washington continued to insist that Arbenz was too tolerant of such people—not because of anything they had done which was intrinsically threatening or offensive to the US or Western civilization, but simply because they were of the species communist, well known for its infinite capacity for treachery. Ambassador Peurifoy—a diplomat whose suit might have been pinstriped, but whose soul was a loud check—warned Arbenz that US-Guatemalan relations would remain strained so long as a single communist remained on the public payroll.¹⁰

The centerpiece of Arbenz’s program was land reform. The need for it was clearly expressed in the all-too-familiar underdeveloped-country statistics: In a nation overwhelmingly rural, 2.2 percent of the landowners owned 70 percent of the arable land; the annual per capita income of agricultural workers was $87. Before the revolution of 1944, which overthrew the Ubico dictatorship, “farm laborers had been roped together by the Army for delivery to the low-land farms where they were kept in debt slavery by the landowners.”¹¹

The expropriation of large tracts of uncultivated acreage which was distributed to approximately 100,000 landless peasants, the improvement in union rights for the workers, and other social reforms, were the reasons Arbenz had won the support of Communists and other leftists, which was no more than to be expected. When Arbenz was criticized for accepting Communist support, he challenged his critics to prove their good faith by backing his reforms themselves. They failed to do so, thus revealing where the basis of their criticism lay.¹²

The party formed by the Communists, the Guatemalan Labor Party, held four seats in Congress, the smallest component of Arbenz’s ruling coalition which commanded a total of 51 seats in the 1953-54 legislature.¹³ Communists held several important sub-cabinet posts but none was ever appointed to the cabinet. In addition, there were Communists employed in the bureaucracy, particularly in the administration of land reform.¹⁴

Lacking anything of substance they could accuse the Guatemalan left of, Washington officials were reduced to condemnation by semantics. Thus, communists, unlike normal human beings, did not take jobs in the government—they “infiltrated” the government. Communists did not support a particular program—they “exploited” it. Communists did not back Arbenz—they “used” him. Moreover, communists “controlled” the labor movement and land reform—but what type of person is it who devotes himself in an under-developed country to furthering the welfare of workers and peasants? None other than the type that Washington calls “communist”.

The basic idea behind the employment of such language—which was standard Western fare throughout the cold war—was to deny the idea that communists could be people sincerely concerned about social change. American officials denied it to each other as well as to the world. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a CIA report about Guatemala, prepared in 1952 for the edification of the White House and the intelligence community:

Communist political success derives in general from the ability of individual Communists and fellow travelers to identify themselves with the nationalist and social aspirations of the Revolution of 1944. In this manner, they have been successful in infiltrating the Administration and pro-Administration political parties and have gained control of organized labor … [Arbenz] is essentially an opportunist whose politics are largely a matter of historical accident … The extension of [communist] influence has been facilitated by the applicability of Marxist ‘cliches’ to the anti-colonial and social aims of the Guatemalan Revolution.¹⁵

The first plan to topple Arbenz was a CIA operation approved by President Truman in 1952, but at the eleventh hour, Secretary of State Dean Acheson persuaded Truman to abort it.¹⁶ However, soon after Eisenhower became president in January 1953, the plan was resurrected.

Both administrations were pressured by executives of United Fruit Company, much of whose vast and uncultivated land in Guatemala had been expropriated by the Arbenz government as part of the land reform program. The company wanted nearly $16 million for the land, the government was offering $525,000, United Fruit’s own declared valuation for tax purposes.¹⁷

United Fruit functioned in Guatemala as a state within a state. It owned the country’s telephone and telegraph facilities, administered its only important Atlantic harbor, and monopolized its banana exports. A subsidiary of the company owned nearly every mile of railroad track in the country. The fruit company’s influence amongst Washington’s power elite was equally impressive. On a business and/or personal level, it had close ties to the Dulles brothers, various State Department officials, congressmen, the American Ambassador to the United Nations, and others. Anne Whitman, the wife of the company’s public relations director, was President Eisenhower’s personal secretary. Under-secretary of State (and formerly Director of the CIA) Walter Bedell Smith was seeking an executive position with United Fruit at the same time he was helping to plan the coup. He was later named to the company’s board of directors.¹⁸

Under Arbenz, Guatemala constructed an Atlantic port and a highway to compete with United Fruit’s holdings, and built a hydro-electric plant to offer cheaper energy than the US-controlled electricity monopoly. Arbenz’s strategy was to limit the power of foreign companies through direct competition rather than through nationalization, a policy not feasible of course when it came to a fixed quantity like land. In his inaugural address, Arbenz stated that:

Foreign capital will always be welcome as long as it adjusts to local conditions, remains always subordinate to Guatemalan laws, cooperates with the economic development of the country, and strictly abstains from intervening in the nation’s social and political life.¹⁹

This hardly described United Fruit’s role in Guatemala. Amongst much else, the company had persistently endeavored to frustrate Arbenz’s reform programs, discredit him and his government, and induce his downfall.

Arbenz was, accordingly, wary of multinationals and could not be said to welcome them into his country with open arms. This attitude, his expropriation of United Fruit’s land, and his “tolerance of communists” were more than enough to make him a marked man in Washington. The United States saw these policies as being inter-related: that is, it was communist influence—not any economic or social exigency of Guatemalan life—which was responsible for the government’s treatment of American firms.

In March 1953, the CIA approached disgruntled right-wing officers in the Guatemalan army and arranged to send them arms. United Fruit donated $64,000 in cash. The following month, uprisings broke out in several towns but were quickly put down by loyal troops. The rebels were put on trial and revealed the fruit company’s role in the plot, but not the CIA’s.²⁰

The Eisenhower administration resolved to do the job right the next time around. With cynical glee, almost an entire year was spent in painstaking, step-by-step preparation for the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Of the major CIA undertakings, few have been as well documented as has the coup in Guatemala. With the release of many formerly classified government papers, the following story has emerged.²¹

Headquarters for the operation were established in Opa Locka, Florida, on the outskirts of Miami. The Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza lent/leased his country out as a site for an airstrip and for hundreds of men—Guatemalan exiles and US and Central American mercenaries—to receive training in the use of weapons and radio broadcasting, as well as in the fine arts of sabotage and demolition. Thirty airplanes were assigned for use in the “Liberation”, stationed in Nicaragua, Honduras and the Canal Zone, to be flown by American pilots. The Canal Zone was set aside as a weapons depot from which arms were gradually distributed to the rebels who were to assemble in Honduras under the command of Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas before crossing into Guatemala. Soviet-marked weapons were also gathered for the purpose of planting them inside Guatemala before the invasion to reinforce US charges of Russian intervention. And, as important as arms, it turned out, hidden radio transmitters were placed in and around the perimeter of Guatemala, including one in the US Embassy.

An attempt was made to blow up the trains carrying the Czech weapons from portside to Guatemala City; however, a torrential downpour rendered the detonators useless, whereupon the CIA paramilitary squad opened fire on one train, killing a Guatemalan soldier and wounding three others; but the convoy of trains made it safely to its destination.

After the Czech ship had arrived in Guatemala, Eisenhower ordered the stopping of “suspicious foreign-flag vessels on the high seas off Guatemala to examine cargo”.²² The State Department’s legal adviser wrote a brief which concluded in no uncertain terms that “Such action would constitute a violation of international law.” No matter. At least two foreign vessels were stopped and searched, one French and one Dutch. It was because of such actions by the British that the United States had fought the War of 1812.

The Guatemalan military came in for special attention. The US ostentatiously signed mutual security treaties with Honduras and Nicaragua, both countries hostile to Arbenz, and dispatched large shipments of arms to them in the hope that this would signal a clear enough threat to the Guatemalan military to persuade it to withdraw its support of Arbenz. Additionally, the US Navy dispatched two submarines from Key West, saying only that they were going “south”. Several days later, the Air Force, amid considerable fanfare, sent three B-36 bombers on a “courtesy call” to Nicaragua.

The CIA also made a close study of the records of members of the Guatemalan officer corps and offered bribes to some of them. One of the Agency’s clandestine radio stations broadcast appeals aimed at military men, as well as others, to join the liberation movement. The station reported that Arbenz was secretly planning to disband or disarm the armed forces and replace it with a people’s militia. CIA planes dropped leaflets over Guatemala carrying the same message.

Eventually, at Ambassador Peurifoy’s urging, a group of high-ranking officers called on Arbenz to ask that he dismiss all communists who held posts in his administration. The president assured them that the communists did not represent a danger, that they did not run the government, and that it would be undemocratic to dismiss them. At a second meeting, the officers also demanded that Arbenz reject the creation of the “people’s militia”.

At one point, the CIA offerred Arbenz himself a large sum of money, which was rejected. The money, which was deposited in a Swiss bank, presumably was offered to induce Arbenz to abdicate or to serve as a means of later claiming he was corrupt.

On the economic front, contingency plans were made for such things as cutting off Guatemalan credit abroad, disrupting its oil supplies, and causing a run on its foreign reserves.²³ But it was on the propaganda front that American ingenuity shone at its brightest. Inasmuch as the Guatemalan government was being overthrown because it was communist, the fact of its communism would have to be impressed upon the rest of Latin America. Accordingly, the US Information Agency (USIA) began to place unattributed articles in foreign newspapers labeling particular Guatemalan officials as communist and referring to various actions by the Guatemalan government as “communist-inspired”. In the few weeks prior to Arbenz’s fall alone, more than 200 articles about Guatemala were written and placed in scores of Latin American newspapers.

Employing a method which was to become a standard CIA/USIA feature all over Latin America and elsewhere, as we shall see, articles placed in one country were picked up by newspapers in other countries, either as a result of CIA payment or unwittingly because the story was of interest. Besides the obvious advantage of multiplying the potential audience, the tactic gave the appearance that independent world opinion was taking a certain stand and further obscured the American connection.

The USIA also distributed more than 100,000 copies of a pamphlet entitled “Chronology of Communism in Guatemala” throughout the hemisphere, as well as 27,000 copies of anti-communist cartoons and posters. The American propaganda agency, moreover, produced three films on Guatemala, with predictable content, and newsreels favorable to the United States for showing free in cinemas.

Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, a prelate possessed of anti-communism, a man who feared social change more than he feared God, was visited by the CIA. Would his Reverence arrange CIA contact with Archbishop Mariano Rossell Arellano of Guatemala? The Cardinal would be delighted. Thus it came to pass that on 9 April 1954, a pastoral letter was read in Guatemalan Catholic churches calling to the attention of the congregations the presence in the country of a devil called communism and demanding that the people “rise as a single man against this enemy of God and country”, or at least not rally in Arbenz’s defense. To appreciate the value of this, one must remember that Guatemala’s peasant class was not only highly religious, but that very few of them were able to read, and so could receive the Lord’s Word only in this manner. For those who could read, many thousands of pamphlets carrying the Archbishop’s message were air-dropped around the country.

In May, the CIA covertly sponsored a “Congress Against Soviet Intervention in Latin America” in Mexico City. The same month, Somoza called in the diplomatic corps in Nicaragua and told them, his voice shaking with anger, that his police had discovered a secret Soviet shipment of arms (which had been planted by the CIA) near the Pacific Coast, and suggested that the communists wanted to convert Nicaragua into “a new Korean situation”. A few weeks later, an unmarked plane parachuted arms with Soviet markings onto Guatemala’s coast.

On such fare did the people of Latin America dine for decades. By such tactics were they educated about “communism”.

In late January 1954 the operation appeared to have suffered a serious setback when photostat copies of Liberation documents found their way into Arbenz’s hands. A few days later, Guatemala’s newspapers published copies of correspondence signed by Castillo Armas, Somoza and others under banner headlines. The documents revealed the existence of some of the staging, training and invasion plans, involving, amongst others, the “Government of the North”.²⁴

The State Department labeled the accusations of a US role “ridiculous and untrue” and said it would not comment further because it did not wish to give them a dignity they did not deserve. Said a Department spokesperson: “It is the policy of the United States not to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. This policy has repeatedly been reaffirmed under the present administration.”

Time magazine gave no credence whatsoever to the possibility of American involvement in such a plot, concluding that the whole exposé had been “masterminded in Moscow”.²⁵

The New York Times was not so openly cynical, but its story gave no indication that there might be any truth to the matter. “Latin American observers in New York,” reported the newspaper, “said the ‘plot’ charges savored of communist influence.” This article was followed immediately on the page by one headed “Red Labor Chiefs Meet. Guatemalan Confederation Opens Its Congress”.²⁶

And the CIA continued with its preparations as if nothing had happened.

The offensive began in earnest on 18 June with planes dropping leaflets over Guatemala demanding that Arbenz resign immediately or else various sites would be bombed. CIA radio stations broadcast similar messages. That afternoon, the planes returned to machine-gun houses near military barracks, drop fragmentation bombs and strafe the National Palace.

Over the following week, the air attacks continued daily—strafing or bombing ports, fuel tanks, ammunition dumps, military barracks, the international airport, a school, and several cities; nine persons, including a three-year-old girl, were reported wounded; an unknown number of houses were set afire by incendiary explosives. During one night-time raid, a tape recording of a bomb attack was played over loudspeakers set up on the roof of the US Embassy to heighten the anxiety of the capital’s residents. When Arbenz went on the air to try and calm the public’s fear, the CIA radio team jammed the broadcast.

Meanwhile, the Agency’s army had crossed into Guatemala from Honduras and captured a few towns, but its progress in the face of resistance by the Guatemalan army was unspectacular. On the broadcasts of the CIA’s “Voice of Liberation” the picture was different: The rebels were everywhere and advancing; they were of large numbers and picking up volunteers as they marched; war and upheaval in all corners; fearsome battles and major defeats for the Guatemalan army. Some of these broadcasts were transmitted over regular public and even military channels, serving to convince some of Arbenz’s officers that the reports were genuine. In the same way, the CIA was able to answer real military messages with fake responses. All manner of disinformation was spread and rumors fomented; dummy parachute drops were made in scattered areas to heighten the belief that a major invasion was taking place.

United Fruit Company’s publicity office circulated photographs to journalists of mutilated bodies about to be buried in a mass grave as an example of the atrocities committed by the Arbenz regime. The photos received extensive coverage. Thomas McCann of the company’s publicity office later revealed that he had no idea what the photos represented: “They could just as easily have been the victims of either side—or of an earthquake. The point is, they were widely accepted for what they were purported to be—victims of communism.”²⁷

In a similar vein, Washington officials reported on political arrests and censorship in Guatemala without reference to the fact that the government was under siege (let alone who was behind the siege), that suspected plotters and saboteurs were the bulk of those being arrested, or that, overall, the Arbenz administration had a fine record on civil liberties. The performance of the American press in this regard was little better.

The primary purpose of the bombing and the many forms of disinformation was to make it appear that military defenses were crumbling, that resistance was futile, thus provoking confusion and division in the Guatemalan armed forces and causing some elements to turn against Arbenz. The psychological warfare conducted over the radio was directed by E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame, and David Atlee Phillips, a newcomer to the CIA. When Phillips was first approached about the assignment, he asked his superior, Tracy Barnes, in all innocence, “But Arbenz became President in a free election. What right do we have to help someone topple his government and throw him out of office?”

“For a moment,” wrote Phillips later, “I detected in his face a flicker of concern, a doubt, the reactions of a sensitive man.” But Barnes quickly recovered and repeated the party line about the Soviets establishing “an easily expandable beachhead” in Central America.²⁸

Phillips never looked back. When he retired from the CIA in the mid-1970s, he founded the Association of Retired Intelligence Officers, an organization formed to counteract the flood of unfavorable publicity sweeping over the Agency at the time.

American journalists reporting on the events in Guatemala continued to exhibit neither an investigative inclination nor a healthy conspiracy mentality. But what was obscure to the US press was patently obvious to large numbers of Latin Americans. Heated protests against the United States broke out during this week in June in at least eleven countries and was echoed by the governments of Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile which condemned American “intervention” and “aggression”.

Life magazine noted these protests by observing that “world communism was efficiently using the Guatemalan show to strike a blow at the U.S.” It scoffed at the idea that Washington was behind the revolt.²⁹ Newsweek reported that Washington “officials interpreted” the outcry “as an indication of the depth of Red penetration into the Americas”.³⁰ A State Department memo at the time, however, privately acknowledged that much of the protest emanated from non-communist and even pro-American moderates.³¹

On 21 and 22 June, Guatemalan Foreign Minister Toriello made impassioned appeals to the United Nations for help in resolving the crisis. American UN Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge tried to block the Security Council from discussing a resolution to send an investigating team to Guatemala, characterizing Toriello’s appeals as communist maneuvers. But under heavy pressure from UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, the Council was convened. Before the vote, while Lodge worked on the smaller nations represented on the Council, Eisenhower and Dulles came down hard on France and Great Britain, both of whom favored the resolution. Said the President of the United States to his Secretary of State: “The British expect us to give them a free ride and side with them on Cyprus. And yet they won’t even support us on Guatemala! Let’s give them a lesson.”³²

As matters turned out, the resolution was defeated by five votes to four, with Britain and France abstaining, although their abstentions were not crucial inasmuch as seven votes were required for passage. Hammarskjöld was so upset with the American machinations, which he believed undercut the strength of the United Nations, that he confided that he might be forced “to reconsider my present position in the United Nations”.³³

During this same period, the CIA put into practice a plan to create an “incident”. Agency planes were dispatched to drop several harmless bombs on Honduran territory. The Honduran government then complained to the UN and the Organization of American States, claiming that the country had been attacked by Guatemalan planes.³⁴

Arbenz finally received an ultimatum from certain army officers: Resign or they would come to an agreement with the invaders. The CIA and Ambassador Peurifoy had been offering payments to officers to defect, and one army commander reportedly accepted $60,000 to surrender his troops. With his back to the wall, Arbenz made an attempt to arm civilian supporters to fight for the government, but army officers blocked the disbursement of weapons. The Guatemalan president knew that the end was near.

The Voice of Liberation meanwhile was proclaiming that two large and heavily armed columns of invaders were moving towards Guatemala City. As the hours passed, the further advance of the mythical forces was announced, while Castillo Armas and his small band had actually not progressed very far from the Honduran border. The American disinformation and rumor offensive continued in other ways as well, and Arbenz, with no one he could trust to give him accurate information, could no longer be certain that there wasn’t at least some truth to the radio bulletins.

Nothing would be allowed to threaten the victory so near at hand: A British freighter docked in Guatemala and suspected of having arrived with fuel for Arbenz’s military vehicles, was bombed and sunk by a CIA plane after the crew had been warned to flee. It turned out that the ship had come to Guatemala to pick up a cargo of coffee and cotton.

A desperate Toriello pleaded repeatedly with Ambassador Peurifoy to call off the bombings, offering even to reopen negotiations about United Fruit’s compensation. In a long cable to John Foster Dulles, the foreign minister described the aerial attacks on the civilian population, expressed his country’s defenselessness against the bombings, and appealed to the United States to use its good offices to put an end to them. In what must have been a deeply humiliating task, Toriello stated all of this without a hint that the United States was, or could be, a party to any of it. The pleas were not simply too late. They had always been too late.

The Castillo Armas forces could not have defeated the much larger Guatemalan army, but the air attacks, combined with the belief in the invincibility of the enemy, persuaded Guatemalan military officers to force Arbenz to resign. No Communists, domestic or foreign, came to his aid. He asked the head of the officers, Army Chief of Staff Col. Carlos Díaz, only that he give his word not to negotiate with Castillo Armas, and Díaz, who despised the rebel commander as much as Arbenz did, readily agreed. What Díaz did not realize was that the United States would not be satisfied merely to oust Arbenz. Castillo Armas had been groomed as the new head of government, and that was not negotiable.

A CIA official, Enno Hobbing, who had just arrived in Guatemala to help draft a new constitution (sic) for the incoming regime, told Díaz that he had “made a big mistake” in taking over the government. “Colonel,” said Hobbing, “you’re just not convenient for the requirements of American foreign policy.”

Presently, Peurifoy confronted Díaz with the demand that he deal directly with Castillo Armas. At the same time, the Ambassador showed the Guatemalan colonel a long list of names of some leaders, requiring that Díaz shoot them all within 24 hours.

“But why?” Díaz asked.

“Because they’re communists,” replied Peurifoy.³⁵

Although Díaz was not a communist sympathizer, he refused both requests, and indicated that the struggle against the invaders would continue.³⁶ Peurifoy left, livid with anger. He then sent a simple cable to CIA headquarters in Florida: “We have been doubled-crossed. BOMB!” Within hours, a CIA plane took off from Honduras, bombed a military base and destroyed the government radio station. Col. Castillo Armas, whose anti-communism the United States could trust, was soon the new leader of Guatemala.

The propaganda show was not yet over. At the behest of the CIA, Guatemalan military officers of the new regime took foreign correspondents on a tour of Arbenz’s former residence where they could see for themselves rooms filled with school textbooks published in … yes, the Soviet Union. The New York Times correspondent, Paul Kennedy, considered to be strongly anti-Arbenz, concluded that the “books had been planted” and did not bother to report the story.³⁷ Time made no mention of the books either, but somehow came upon the story that mobs had plundered Arbenz’s home and found “stacks of communist propaganda and four bags of earth, one each from Russia, China, Siberia and Mongolia.”³⁸ Time’s article made it clear enough that it now knew of the American role in Arbenz’s downfall (although certainly not the full story), but the magazine had nothing to say about the propriety of overthrowing a democratically elected government by force.

Castillo Armas celebrated the liberation of Guatemala in various ways. In July alone, thousands were arrested on suspicion of communist activity. Many were tortured or killed. In August a law was passed and a committee set up which could declare anyone a communist, with no right of appeal. Those so declared could be arbitrarily arrested for up to six months, could not own a radio or hold public office. Within four months the committee had registered 72,000 names. A committee official said it was aiming for 200,000.³⁹ Further implementation of the agrarian reform law was stopped and all expropriations of land already carried out were declared invalid.⁴⁰ United Fruit Company not only received all its land back, but the government banned the banana workers’ unions as well. Moreover, seven employees of the company who had been active labor organizers were found mysteriously murdered in Guatemala City.⁴¹

The new regime also disenfranchised three-quarters of Guatemala’s voters by barring illiterates from the electoral rolls and outlawed all political parties, labor confederations and peasant organizations. To this was added the closing down of opposition newspapers (which Arbenz had not done) and the burning of “subversive” books, including Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Dostoyevsky novels, and the works of Guatemala’s Nobel Prize-winning author Miguel Angel Asturias, a biting critic of United Fruit.⁴²

Meanwhile, John Foster Dulles, who was accused by Toriello of seeking to establish a “banana curtain” in Central America,⁴³ was concerned that some “communists” might escape retribution. In cables he exchanged with Ambassador Peurifoy, Dulles insisted that the government arrest those Guatemalans who had taken refuge in foreign embassies and that “criminal charges” be brought against them to prevent them leaving the country, charges such as “having been covert Moscow agents”. The Secretary of State argued that communists should be automatically denied the right of asylum because they were connected with an international conspiracy. The only way they should be allowed to leave, he asserted, was if they agreed to be sent to the Soviet Union. But Castillo Armas refused to accede to Dulles’s wishes on this particular issue, influenced perhaps by the fact that he, as well as some of his colleagues, had been granted political asylum in an embassy at one time or another.⁴⁴

One of those who sought asylum in the Argentine Embassy was a 25-year-old Argentine doctor named Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Guevara, who had been living in Guatemala since sometime in 1953, had tried to spark armed resistance to the invading forces, but without any success. Guevara’s experience in Guatemala had a profound effect upon his political consciousness. His first wife, Hilda Gadea, whom he met there, later wrote:

Up to that point, he used to say, he was merely a sniper, criticizing from a theoretical point of view the political panorama of our America. From here on he was convinced that the struggle against the oligarchic system and the main enemy, Yankee imperialism, must be an armed one, supported by the people.⁴⁵

In the wake of the coup, the United States confiscated a huge amount of documents from the Guatemalan government, undoubtedly in the hope of finally uncovering the hand of The International Communist Conspiracy behind Arbenz. If this is what was indeed discovered, it has not been made public. On 30 June, while the dust was still settling, Dulles summed up the situation in Guatemala in a speech which was a monument to coldwarspeak:

[The events in Guatemala] expose the evil purpose of the Kremlin to destroy the inter-American system … having gained control of what they call the mass organizations, [the communists] moved on to take over the official press and radio of the Guatemalan Government. They dominated the social security organization and ran the agrarian reform program … dictated to the Congress and to the President … Arbenz … was openly manipulated by the leaders of communism … The Guatemalan regime enjoyed the full support of Soviet Russia … [the] situation is being cured by the Guatemalans themselves.⁴⁶

When it came to rewriting history, however, Dulles’s speech had nothing on these lines from a CIA memo written in August 1954 and only for internal consumption no less: “When the communists were forced by outside pressure to attempt to take over Guatemala completely, they forced Arbenz to resign (deleted). They then proceeded to establish a Communist Junta under Col. Carlos Díaz.”⁴⁷ And in October, John Peurifoy sat before a congressional committee and told them:.

My role in Guatemala prior to the revolution was strictly that of a diplomatic observer … The revolution that overthrew the Arbenz government was engineered and instigated by those people in Guatemala who rebelled against the policies and ruthless oppression of the Communist-controlled government.⁴⁸

Later, Dwight Eisenhower was to write about Guatemala in his memoirs. The former president chose not to offer the slightest hint that the United States had anything to do with the planning or instigation of the coup, and indicated that his administration had only the most tangential of connections to its execution.⁴⁹ (When Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs were published in the West, the publisher saw fit to employ a noted Kremlinologist to annotate the work, pointing out errors of omission and commission.)

Thus it was that the educated, urbane men of the State Department, the CIA and the United Fruit Company, the pipe-smoking, comfortable men of Princeton, Harvard and Wall Street, assured each other that the illiterate peasants of Guatemala did not deserve the land which had been given to them, that the workers did not need their unions, that hunger and torture were a small price to pay for being rid of the scourge of communism.

The terror carried out by Castillo Armas was only the beginning. It was, as we shall see, to get much worse in time. It continued without pause for more than 40 years.

In 1955, the New York Times reported from the United Nations that “The United States has begun a drive to scuttle a section of the proposed Covenant of Human Rights that poses a threat to its business interests abroad.” The offending section dealt with the right of peoples to self-determination and to permanent sovereignty over their natural wealth and resources. Said the newspaper: “It declares in effect that any country has the right to nationalize its resources …”⁵⁰

11. Costa Rica mid-1950s

Trying to topple an ally, part I

If ever the CIA maintained a love-hate relationship, it was with José Figueres, three times the head of state of Costa Rica.

On the one hand, Figueres, by his own admission in 1975, worked for the CIA “in 20,000 ways … all over Latin America” for 30 years.¹ “I collaborated with the CIA when we were trying to topple Trujillo,” he divulged, speaking of the Dominican Republic dictator.²

On the other hand, Figueres revealed that the Agency had twice tried to kill him.³ He did not elaborate, although he stated at the same time that he had tried for two years to get the Bay of Pigs invasion called off. This may have precipitated one or both of the assassination attempts.

The CIA also tried to overthrow the Figueres government. In 1964, the first significant exposé of the Agency, The Invisible Government, disclosed that:

in the mid-1950s CIA agents intruded deeply into the political affairs of Costa Rica, the most stable and democratic republic in Latin America. Knowledgeable Costa Ricans were aware of the CIA’s role. The CIA’s purpose was to promote the ouster of José (Pepe) Figueres, the moderate socialist who became President in a fair and open election in 1953.⁴

Figueres remained in office until 1958, in this his first term as president; he had headed a liberal junta in the late 1940s.

The Agency’s “major grievance was that Figueres had scrupulously recognized the right of asylum in Costa Rica—for non-Communists and Communists alike. The large influx of questionable characters complicated the agency’s job of surveillance and forced it to increase its staff.”⁵

The CIA’s problems with Figueres actually went somewhat deeper. Costa Rica was a haven for hundreds of exiles fleeing from various Latin American right-wing dictatorships, such as in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and Figueres was providing groups of them with material and moral support in their plans to overthrow these regimes.⁶ To Figueres, this was entirely in keeping with his anti-totalitarian beliefs, directed against the left as well as the right. The problem was that the dictators targeted for overthrow were all members in good standing of the United States’ anti-Communist, “Free-World” club. (The American attitude toward Trujillo was later modified.) Moreover, Figueres had on occasion expressed criticism of the American policy of supporting such dictatorships while neglecting the economic and social problems of the hemisphere.

These considerations could easily outweigh the fact that Figueres had established his anti-Communist credentials, albeit not of the “ultra” variety, and was no more a “socialist” than US Senator Hubert Humphrey. Although Figueres spoke out strongly at times against foreign investment, as president he was eminently accommodating to Central America’s bêtes noires, the multinational fruit companies.⁷

In addition to providing support to Figueres’s political opponents,⁸ the CIA, reported The Invisible Government, tried:

to stir up embarrassing trouble within the Communist Party in Costa Rica, and to attempt to link Figueres with the Communists. An effort to produce evidence that Figueres had been in contact with leading Communists during a trip to Mexico was unsuccessful. But CIA agents had better luck with the first part of their strategy—stirring up trouble for the Communists. They succeeded in planting a letter in a Communist newspaper. The letter, purportedly from a leading Costa Rican Communist, put him on record in opposition to the Party line on the [1956] Hungarian revolution. Unaware that the letter was a CIA plant, the leading officials in the American Embassy held an urgent meeting to ponder its meaning. The political officer then dispatched a long classified report to Washington, alerting top policy makers to the possibility of a startling turn in Latin American Communist politics.⁹

In 1955 the Agency carried out an action against Figueres that was more immediately threatening. A deep personal and political animosity between Figueres and Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza had escalated into violence: an attempt against Somoza’s life, launched from Costa Rica with Figueres’s support, was countered by an invasion from Nicaragua by land and air. Figueres’s biographer, Charles Ameringer, has related that:

Figueres accused the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency of aiding the Somoza movement against him. He claimed that the CIA felt indebted to Somoza for the help he had given in overthrowing the Arbenz regime. He asserted that the same pilots and planes (the F-47) that had participated in the attack upon Guatemala, “afterwards came from Nicaragua and machine-gunned eleven defenseless towns in our territory.” According to Figueres, at the same time that the U.S. Department of State arranged the sale of fighter planes for Costa Rica’s defense, CIA planes and pilots were flying sorties for the rebels.¹⁰

It is interesting to note that during this period, when virtually nothing had yet been revealed about such blatant CIA covert activities, the fact that the Agency had been caught red-handed tapping Figueres’s telephone was worthy of condemnatory editorial comment by the Washington Post and a like statement by Senator Mike Mansfield on the floor of the Senate.¹¹

José Figueres did not regain the presidency of Costa Rica until 1970, at which time a renewed CIA effort to overthrow him was undertaken, for not very different reasons.

12. Syria 1956-1957

Purchasing a new government

“Neutrality,” proclaimed John Foster Dulles in 1956, “has increasingly become an obsolete conception, and, except under very exceptional circumstances, it is an immoral and shortsighted conception.”¹

The short-sightedness of the neutralist government lay perhaps in its inability to perceive that its neutralism would lead to John Foster Dulles attempting to overthrow it.

Syria was not behaving like Washington thought a Third World government should. For one thing, it was the only state in the area to refuse all US economic or military assistance. Damascus did not much care for the strings which came attached—the acceptance of military aid usually meant the presence of American military advisers and technicians; furthermore, the US Mutual Security Act of 1955 specified that the recipient country agree to make a contribution to “the defensive strength of the free world”, and declared it US policy “to encourage the efforts of other free nations … to foster private initiative and competition [i.e., capitalism].”²

Another difficulty posed by Syria was that, although its governments of recent years had been more or less conservative and had refrained from unpleasant leftist habits like nationalizing American-owned companies, US officials—suffering from what might be called anti-communist paranoia or being victims of their own propaganda—consistently saw the most ominous handwritings on the walls. To appreciate this, one has to read some of the formerly-secret-now-declassified documents of the National Security Council (NSC), based in part on reports received from the American embassy in Damascus during 1955 and 1956 …

“If the popular leftward trend in Syria continues over any considerable period, there is a real danger that Syria will fall completely under left-wing control either by coup or usurpation of authority” … “the fundamental anti-US and anti-West orientation of the Syrians is stimulated by inevitable political histrionics about the Palestine problem” … “Four successive short-lived governments in Syria have permitted continuous and increasing Communist activities” … “the Communists support the leftist cliques [in] the army” … “apathy towards Communism on the part of politicians and army officers” is a threat to security … “the Arab Socialist Resurrectionist Party (ASRP)” and “the Communist Party of Syria are capable of bringing about further deterioration of Syrian internal security” … danger of ASRP “coup d’etat” and “increased Communist penetration of government and army” … “Of all the Arab states Syria is at the present time the most wholeheartedly devoted to a neutralist policy with strong anti-Western overtones” … “If the present trend continues there is a strong possibility that a Communist-dominated Syria will result, threatening the peace and stability of the area and endangering the achievement of our objectives in the Near East” … we “should give priority consideration to developing courses of action in the Near East designed to affect the situation in Syria and to recommending specific steps to combat communist subversion” …³

It would appear that the idea of military men who were leftist and/or apathetic to communists must truly have been an incongruous phenomenon to the American official mind. But nowhere in any of the documents is there mention of the leftists/Communists/ASRP having in fact done anything illegal or wicked, although the language employed is similar to what we saw in the Guatemala chapter: These people don’t join anything, they “infiltrate”, they “penetrate”; they “control”, they’re “opportunistic”. In actuality, the behavior described is like that of other political animals: trying to influence key sectors of the society and win allies. But to the men holding positions of responsibility in the National Security Council and the State Department, the evil intent and danger of such people was so self-evident as not to require articulation.

There is one exception, perhaps expressed to explain away an uncomfortable observation:

In fact, the Communist Party does not appear to have as its immediate objective seizure of power. Rather it seeks to destroy national unity, to strengthen support for Soviet policies and opposition to Western policies and to exacerbate tensions in the Arab world. It has made significant progress toward these objectives.⁴

There is no indication of what the author had in mind by “national unity”.

A leftist-oriented or communist-dominated Syrian government, reasoned the US ambassador to Syria, James Moose, Jr., would clearly threaten American interests in neighboring Turkey, which, in turn, could outflank all the states of the NATO alliance, and so forth and so on.⁵ It was clear that since the Syrian government could not be relied upon to do anything about this major impending disaster, something would have to be done about the Syrian government.

To this we add the usual Middle-Eastern intrigue: in this case, Iraq plotting with the British to topple the governments in both Syria and Nasser’s Egypt; the British pressuring the Americans to join the conspiracy;⁶ and the CIA compromising—leave Nasser alone, at least for the time being, and we’ll do something about Syria.⁷

An implausible scenario, scandalous, but in the time-honored tradition of the Middle East. The British were old hands at it. Dulles and the Americans, still exulting in their king-making in Iran, were looking to further remake the oil region in their own image.

Wilbur Crane Eveland was a staff member of the National Security Council, the high-level inter-agency group in Washington which, in theory, monitors and controls CIA clandestine activities. Because of Eveland’s background and experience in the Middle East, the CIA had asked that he be lent to the Agency for a series of assignments there.

Archibald Roosevelt was, like his cousin Kermit Roosevelt, a highly-placed official of the CIA; both were grandsons of Teddy. Kermit had masterminded the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953. Archie had fond hopes of doing the same in Syria.

Michail Bey Ilyan had once served as Syria’s foreign minister. In 1956 he was the leader of the conservative Populist Party.

At a meeting of these three men in Damascus, Syria on 1 July 1956, as described by Eveland in his memoirs, Roosevelt asked Ilyan “what would be needed to give the Syrian conservatives enough control to purge the communists and their leftist sympathizers. Ilyan responded by ticking off names and places: the radio stations in Damascus and Aleppo; a few key senior officers; and enough money to buy newspapers now in Egyptian and Saudi hands.”

“Roosevelt probed further. Could these things, he asked Ilyan, be done with U.S. money and assets alone, with no other Western or Near Eastern country involved?”

“Without question, Ilyan replied, nodding gravely.”

On 26 July, Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser announced that his government was taking over the operation of the Suez Canal. The reaction of the British and French was swift and inflamed. The United States was less openly hostile, though it was critical and Egyptian government funds in the US were frozen. This unexpected incident put a crimp in the CIA’s plans, for—as Ilyan explained to Eveland in despair—Nasser was now the hero of the Arab world, and collaboration with any Western power to overthrow an Arab government was politically indefensible.

Eventually the coup was scheduled for 25 October. The logistics, as outlined by Ilyan, called for senior colonels in the Syrian army to:

take control of Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, and Hamah. The frontier posts with Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon would also be captured in order to seal Syria’s borders until the radio stations announced that a new government had taken over under Colonel Kabbani, who would place armored units at key positions throughout Damascus. Once control had been established, Ilyan would inform the civilians he’d selected that they were to form a new government, but in order to avoid leaks none of them would be told until just a week before the coup.

For this operation, money would have to change hands. Ilyan asked for and received half a million Syrian pounds (approximately $167,000). The Syrian further stipulated that to guarantee their participation the Syrian plotters would require assurance from the highest level of the American government that the US would both back the coup and immediately grant recognition to the new government. This, Ilyan explained, could be communicated as follows: in April, President Eisenhower had said that the United States would oppose aggression in the Middle East, but not without congressional approval. Could the president repeat this statement, in light of the Suez crisis, he asked, on a specified date when Ilyan’s colleagues would be told to expect it? Eisenhower’s words would provide the guarantees they were seeking.

An affirmative reply to Ilyan’s plan arrived in Damascus from Washington the next day. A proper occasion for the requested statement would have to be found and Secretary Dulles would be the one to use it. The scheme was for Dulles to make public reference to Eisenhower’s statement between 16 and 18 October, thus giving Ilyan the week he needed to assemble his civilian team.

Before long, John Foster Dulles held a press conference. In light of recent Israeli attacks on Jordan, one of the reporters present asked whether the United States might come to Jordan’s aid per “our declaration of April 9”.

Yes, replied the Secretary of State, repeating the reference to the April statement. The date was 16 October.

But following close on the heels of this was a message from Ilyan in Damascus to Eveland in Beirut postponing the date of the coup for five days to 30 October because Colonel Kabbani had told Ilyan that his people weren’t quite ready.

The postponement was crucial. Early in the morning of the 30th, a very distraught Michail Ilyan appeared at Eveland’s door. “Last night,” he cried, “the Israelis invaded Egypt and are right now heading for the Suez Canal! How could you have asked us to overthrow our government at the exact moment when Israel started a war with an Arab state?”⁸

The leftist-trend-in-Syria bell continued to ring in Washington. In January 1957, wrote President Eisenhower later, CIA Director Allen Dulles “submitted reports indicating that the new Syrian Cabinet was oriented to the left”.⁹ Two months later, Dulles prepared a “Situation Report on Syria” in which he wrote of an “increasing trend toward a decidedly leftist, pro-Soviet government”. Dulles was concerned with “organized leftist officers belonging to the Arab Socialist Resurrection Party”.¹⁰ That same month, a State Department internal document stated:

The British are believed to favor active stimulation of a change in the present regime in Syria, in an effort to assure a pro-Western orientation on the part of future Syrian governments. … The United States shares the concern of the British Government over the situation in Syria.¹¹

Then, in June, an internal Department of Defense memorandum spoke of a possible “leftist coup”. This was to be carried out, according to the memo, against “the leftist Syrian Government”.¹²

Thus it was that in Beirut and Damascus, CIA officers were trying their hands again at stage-managing a Syrian coup. On this occasion, Kermit Roosevelt, rather than cousin Archibald, was pulling the strings. He arranged for one Howard (“Rocky”) Stone to be transferred to Damascus from the Sudan to be sure that the “engineering” was done by a “pro”. Stone was, at thirty-two, already a legend in the CIA’s clandestine service as the man who had helped Kim Roosevelt overthrow the Iranian government four years earlier, though what Stone’s precise contribution was has remained obscure.

The proposed beneficiary of this particular plot was to be Adib Shishakly, former right-wing dictator of Syria, living covertly in Lebanon. Shishakly’s former chief of security, Colonel Ibrahim Husseini, now Syrian military attaché in Rome, was secretly slipped into Lebanon under cover of a CIA-fabricated passport. Husseini was then to be smuggled across the Syrian border in the trunk of a US diplomatic car in order to meet with key Syrian CIA agents and provide assurances that Shishakly would come back to rule once Syria’s government had been overthrown.

But the coup was exposed before it ever got off the ground. Syrian army officers who had been assigned major roles in the operation walked into the office of Syria’s head of intelligence, Colonel Sarraj, turned in their bribe money and named the CIA officers who had paid them. Lieut. Col. Robert Molloy, the American army attaché, Francis Jeton, a career CIA officer, officially Vice Consul at the US Embassy, and the legendary Howard Stone, with the title of Second Secretary for Political Affairs, were all declared personae non gratae and expelled from the country in August.

Col. Molloy was determined to leave Syria in style. As his car approached the Lebanese border, he ran his Syrian motorcycle escort off the road and shouted to the fallen rider that “Colonel Sarraj and his commie friends” should be told that Molloy would “beat the shit out of them with one hand tied behind his back if they ever crossed his path again.”

The Syrian government announcement which accompanied the expulsion order stated that Stone had first made contact with the outlawed Social Nationalist Party and then with the army officers. When the officers reported the plot, they were told to continue their contacts with the Americans and later met Shishakly and Husseini at the homes of US Embassy staff members. Husseini reportedly told the officers that the United States was prepared to give a new Syrian government between 300 and 400 million dollars in aid if the government would make peace with Israel.

An amusing aside to the affair occurred when the Syrian Defense Minister and the Syrian Ambassador to Italy disputed the claim that Husseini had anything to do with the plot. The Ambassador pointed out that Husseini had not been in Syria since 20 July and his passport showed no indication that he had been out of Italy since that time.

The State Department categorized the Syrian charge as “complete fabrications” and retaliated by expelling the Syrian ambassador and a Second Secretary and recalling the American ambassador from Syria. It marked the first time since 1915 that the United States had expelled a chief of mission of a foreign country.¹³

In the wake of the controversy, the New York Times reported that:

There are numerous theories about why the Syrians struck at the United States. One is that they acted at the instigation of the Soviet Union. Another is that the Government manufactured an anti-U.S. spy story to distract public attention from the significance of Syria’s negotiations with Moscow.¹⁴

In the same issue, a Times editorial speculated upon other plausible-sounding explanations.¹⁵ Neither in its news report nor in its editorial did the New York Times seem to consider even the possibility that the Syrian accusation might be true.

President Eisenhower, recalling the incident in his memoirs, offered no denial to the accusation. His sole comment on the expulsions was: “The entire action was shrouded in mystery but the suspicion was strong that the Communists had taken control of the government. Moreover, we had fresh reports that arms were being sent into Syria from the Soviet bloc.”¹⁶

Syria’s neutralism/“leftism” continued to obsess the United States. Five years later, when John F. Kennedy was in the White House, he met with British Prime Minister Macmillan and the two leaders agreed, according to a CIA report, on “Penetration and cultivation of disruptive elements in the Syrian armed forces, particularly in the Syrian army, so that Syria can be guided by the West.”¹⁷

Decades later, Washington was still worried, though Syria had still not “gone communist”.

13. The Middle East 1957-1958

The Eisenhower Doctrine claims another backyard for America

On 9 March 1957, the United States Congress approved a presidential resolution which came to be known as the Eisenhower Doctrine. This was a piece of paper, like the Truman Doctrine and the Monroe Doctrine before it, whereby the US government conferred upon the US government the remarkable and enviable right to intervene militarily in other countries. With the stroke of a pen, the Middle East was added to Europe and the Western hemisphere as America’s field of play.

The resolution stated that “the United States regards as vital to the national interest and world peace the preservation of the independence and integrity of the nations of the Middle East.” Yet, during this very period, as we have seen, the CIA initiated its operation to overthrow the government of Syria.

The business part of the resolution was contained in the succinct declaration that the United States “is prepared to use armed forces to assist” any Middle East country “requesting assistance against armed aggression from any country controlled by international communism”. Nothing was set forth about non-communist or anti-communist aggression which might endanger world peace.

Wilbur Crane Eveland, the Middle East specialist working for the CIA at the time, had been present at a meeting in the State Department two months earlier called to discuss the resolution. Eveland read the draft, which stated that “many, if not all” of the Middle East states “are aware of the danger that stems from international communism”. Later he wrote:

I was shocked. Who, I wondered, had reached this determination of what the Arabs considered a danger? Israel’s army had just invaded Egypt and still occupied all of the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. And, had it not been for Russia’s threat to intervene on behalf of the Egyptians, the British, French, and Israeli forces might now be sitting in Cairo, celebrating Nasser’s ignominious fall from power.¹

The simplistic and polarized view of the world implicit in the Eisenhower Doctrine ignored not only anti-Israeli sentiments but currents of nationalism, pan-Arabism, neutralism and socialism prevalent in many influential quarters of the Middle East. The framers of the resolution saw only a cold-war battlefield and, in doing so, succeeded in creating one.

In April, King Hussein of Jordan dismissed his prime minister, Suleiman Nabulsi, amidst rumors, apparently well-founded, of a coup against the King encouraged by Egypt and Syria and Palestinians living in Jordan. It was the turning point in an ongoing conflict between the pro-West policy of Hussein and the neutralist leanings of the Nabulsi regime. Nabulsi had announced that in line with his policy of neutralism, Jordan would develop closer relations with the Soviet Union and accept Soviet aid if offered. At the same time, he rejected American aid because, he said, the United States had informed him that economic aid would be withheld unless Jordan “severs its ties with Egypt” and “consents to settlement of Palestinian refugees in Jordan”, a charge denied by the State Department. Nabulsi added the commentary that “communism is not dangerous to the Arabs”.

Hussein, conversely, accused “international communism and its followers” of direct responsibility for “efforts to destroy my country”. When pressed for the specifics of his accusation, he declined to provide any.

When rioting broke out in several Jordanian cities, and civil war could not be ruled out, Hussein showed himself equal to the threat to his continued rule. He declared martial law, purged the government and military of pro-Nasser and leftist tendencies, and abolished all political opposition. Jordan soon returned to a state of relative calm.

The United States, however, seized upon Hussein’s use of the expression “international communism” to justify rushing units of the Sixth Fleet to the eastern Mediterranean—a super aircraft carrier, two cruisers, and 15 destroyers, followed shortly by a variety of other naval vessels and a battalion of marines which put ashore in Lebanon—to “prepare for possible future intervention in Jordan”.²

Despite the fact that nothing resembling “armed aggression from any country controlled by international communism” had taken place, the State Department openly invited the King to invoke the Eisenhower Doctrine.³ But Hussein, who had not even requested the show of force, refused, knowing that such a move would only add fuel to the fires already raging in Jordanian political life. He survived without it.

Sometime during this year the CIA began making secret annual payments to King Hussein, initially in the millions of dollars per year. The practice was to last for 20 years, with the Agency providing Hussein female companions as well. As justification for the payment, the CIA later claimed that Hussein allowed American intelligence agencies to operate freely in Jordan. Hussein himself provided intelligence to the CIA and distributed part of his payments to other government officials who also furnished information or cooperated with the Agency.⁴

A few months later, it was Syria which occupied the front stage in Washington’s melodrama of “International Communism”. The Syrians had established relations with the Soviet Union via trade, economic aid, and military purchases and training. The United States chose to see something ominous in this although it was a state of affairs engendered in no small measure by John Foster Dulles, as we saw in the previous chapter. American antipathy toward Syria was heightened in August following the Syrian government’s exposure of the CIA-directed plot to overthrow it.

Washington officials and the American media settled easily into the practice of referring to Syria as a “Soviet satellite” or “quasi-satellite”. This was not altogether objective or spontaneous reporting. Kennett Love, a New York Times correspondent in close contact to the CIA (see Iran chapter), later disclosed some of the background:

The US Embassy in Syria connived at false reports issued in Washington and London through diplomatic and press channels to the effect that Russian arms were pouring into the Syrian port of Latakia, that “not more than 123 Migs” had arrived in Syria, and that Lieutenant Colonel Abdel Hameed Serraj, head of Syrian intelligence, had taken over control in a Communist-inspired coup. I travelled all over Syria without hindrance in November and December [1956] and found there were indeed “not more than 123 Migs”. There were none. And no Russian arms had arrived for months. And there had been no coup, although some correspondents in Beirut, just a two-hour drive from Damascus, were dispatching without attribution false reports fed to them by embassy visitors from Damascus and a roving CIA man who worked in the guise of a US Treasury agent. Serraj, who was anti-Communist, had just broken the clumsy British-US-Iraqi-supported plot [to overthrow the Syrian government]. Syria was quiet but worried lest the propaganda presage a new coup d’état or a Western-backed invasion.⁵

As if to further convince any remaining skeptics, Eisenhower dispatched a personal emissary, Loy Henderson, on a tour of the Middle East. Henderson, not surprisingly, returned with the conclusion that “there was a fear in all Middle East countries that the Soviets might be able to topple the regimes in each of their countries through exploiting the crisis in Syria”.⁶ He gave no indication as to whether the Syrians themselves thought they were going through a crisis. As an indication of how artificial were the crises announced by the White House, how arbitrary were the doomsday pronouncements about the Soviet Union, let us consider the following from a Department of Defense internal memorandum of June 1957, about two months before Henderson went to the Middle East:

The USSR has shown no intention of direct intervention in any of the previous Mid-Eastern crises, and we believe it is unlikely that they would intervene, directly, to assure the success of a leftist coup in Syria.⁷

In early September, the day after Henderson returned, the United States announced that the Sixth Fleet was once again being sent to the Mediterranean and that arms and other military equipment were being rushed to Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey. A few days later, Saudi Arabia was added to the list. The Soviet Union replied with arms shipments to Syria, Egypt and Yemen.

The Syrian government accused the US of sending warships close to her coast in an “open challenge” and said that unidentified planes had been flying constantly over the Latakia area day and night for four days, Latakia being the seaport where Soviet ships arrived.

Syria further claimed that the US had “incited” Turkey to concentrate an estimated 50,000 soldiers on Syria’s border. The Syrians ridiculed the explanation that the Turkish troops were only on maneuvers. Eisenhower later wrote that the troops were at the border with “a readiness to act” and that the United States had already assured the leaders of Turkey, Iraq and Jordan that if they “felt it necessary to take actions against aggression by the Syrian government, the United States would undertake to expedite shipments of arms already committed to the Middle Eastern countries and, further, would replace losses as quickly as possible.” The president had no quarrel with the idea that such action might be taken to repel, in his words, the “anticipated aggression” of Syria, for it would thus be “basically defensive in nature” (emphasis added).⁸

The American role here may have been more active than Eisenhower suggests. One of his advisers, Emmet John Hughes, has written of how Under-Secretary of State Christian Herter, later to replace an ailing John Foster Dulles as Secretary, “reviewed in rueful detail … some recent clumsy clandestine American attempts to spur Turkish forces to do some vague kind of battle with Syria”.⁹

Dulles gave the impression in public remarks that the United States was anxious to somehow invoke the Eisenhower Doctrine, presumably as a “justification” for taking further action against Syria. But he could not offer any explanation of how this was possible. Certainly Syria was not going to make the necessary request.

The only solution lay in Syria attacking another Arab country which would then request American assistance. This appears to be one rationale behind the flurry of military and diplomatic activity directed at Syria by the US. A study carried out for the Pentagon some years later concluded that in “the 1957 Syrian crisis … Washington seem[ed] to seek the initial use of force by target”¹⁰ (emphasis added; “target” refers to Syria).

Throughout this period, Washington officials alternated between striving to enlist testimonials from other Arab nations that Syria was indeed a variety of Soviet satellite and a threat to the region, and assuring the world that the United States had received a profusion of just such testimony. But Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia all denied that they felt threatened by Syria. Egypt, Syria’s closest ally, of course concurred. At the height of the “crisis”, King Hussein of Jordan left for a vacation in Europe. The Iraqi premier declared that his country and Syria had arrived at a “complete understanding”. And King Saud of Saudi Arabia, in a message to Eisenhower, said that US concern over Syria was “exaggerated” and asked the president for “renewed assurances that the United States would refrain from any interference in the internal affairs of Arab states”. Saud added that “efforts to overturn the Syrian regime would merely make the Syrians more amenable to Soviet influence”, a view shared by several observers on all sides.

At the same time, the New York Times reported:

From the beginning of the crisis over Syria’s drift to the left, there has been less excitement among her Arab neighbors than in the United States. Foreign diplomats in the area, including many Americans, felt that the stir caused in Washington was out of proportion to the cause.

Eventually, Dulles may have been influenced by this lack of support for the American thesis, for when asked specifically to “characterize what the relation is between Soviet aims in the area and the part that Syria adds to them”, he could only reply that “The situation internally in Syria is not entirely clear and fluctuates somewhat.” Syria, he implied, was not yet in the grip of international Communism.

The next day, Syria, which had no desire to isolate itself from the West, similarly moderated its tone by declaring that the American warships had been 15 miles offshore and had continued “quietly on their way”.¹¹

It appears that during this same restless year of 1957, the United States was also engaged in a plot to overthrow Nasser and his troublesome nationalism, although the details are rather sketchy. In January, when King Saud and Iraqi Crown Prince Abdul Illah were in New York at the United Nations, they were approached by CIA Director Allen Dulles and one of his top aides, Kermit Roosevelt, with offers of CIA covert planning and funding to topple the Egyptian leader whose radical rhetoric, inchoate though it was, was seen by the royal visitors as a threat to the very idea of monarchy. Nasser and other army officers had overthrown King Farouk of Egypt in 1952. Ironically, Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA have traditionally been given credit for somehow engineering this coup. However, it is by no means certain that they actually carried this out.¹²

“Abdul Illah,” wrote Eveland, “insisted on British participation in anything covert, but the Saudis had severed relations with Britain and refused. As a result, the CIA dealt separately with each: agreeing to fund King Saud’s part in a new area scheme to oppose Nasser and eliminate his influence in Syria; and to the same objective, coordinating in Beirut a covert working group composed of representatives of the British, Iraqi, Jordanian, and Lebanese intelligence services.”¹³

The conspiracy is next picked up in mid-spring at the home of Ghosn Zogby in Beirut. Zogby, of Lebanese ancestry, was the chief of the CIA Beirut station. He and Kermit Roosevelt, who was staying with him, hosted several conferences of the clandestine planners. “So obvious,” Eveland continued, “were their ‘covert’ gyrations, with British, Iraqi, Jordanian and Lebanese liaison personnel coming and going nightly, that the Egyptian ambassador in Lebanon was reportedly taking bets on when and where the next U.S. coup would take place.” At one of these meetings, the man from the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) informed the gathering that teams had been fielded to assassinate Nasser.

Shortly afterwards, Eveland learned from a CIA official that John Foster Dulles, as well as his brother Allen, had directed Roosevelt to work with the British to bring down Nasser. Roosevelt now spoke in terms of a “palace revolution” in Egypt.¹⁴

From this point on we’re fishing in murky waters, for the events which followed produced more questions than answers. With the six countries named above, plus Turkey and Israel apparently getting in on the act, and less than complete trust and love existing amongst the various governments, a host of plots, sub-plots and side plots inevitably sprang to life; at times it bordered on low comedy, though some would call it no more than normal Middle East “diplomacy”.

Between July 1957 and October 1958, the Egyptian and Syrian governments and media announced the uncovering of what appear to be at least eight separate conspiracies to overthrow one or the other government, to assassinate Nasser, and/or prevent the expected merger of the two countries. Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the United States were most often named as conspirators, but from the entanglement of intrigue which surfaced it is virtually impossible to unravel the particular threads of the US role.¹⁵

Typical of the farcical goings-on, it seems that at least one of the plots to assassinate Nasser arose from the Dulles brothers taking Eisenhower’s remark that he hoped “the Nasser problem could be eliminated” to be an order for assassination, when the president, so the story goes, was merely referring to improved US-Egyptian relations. Upon realizing the error, Secretary Dulles ordered the operation to cease.¹⁶ (Three years later, Allen Dulles was again to “misinterpret” a remark by Eisenhower as an order to assassinate Patrice Lumumba of the Congo.)

Official American pronouncements during this entire period would have had the world believe that the Soviet Union was the eminence grise behind the strife in Jordan, the “crisis” in Syria, and unrest generally in the Middle East; that the Soviet aim was to dominate the area, while the sole purpose of US policy was to repel this Soviet thrust and maintain the “independence” of the Arab nations. Yet, on three separate occasions during 1957—in February, April and September—the Soviet Union called for a four-power (US, USSR, Great Britain and France) declaration renouncing the use of force and interference in the internal affairs of the Middle Eastern countries. The February appeal had additionally called for a four-power embargo on arms shipments to the region, withdrawal of all foreign troops, liquidation of all foreign bases, and a conference to reach a general Middle East settlement.

The Soviet strategy was clearly to neutralize the Middle East, to remove the threat it had long felt from the potentially hostile control of the oil region by, traditionally, France and Great Britain, and now the United States, which sought to fill the “power vacuum” left by the decline of the two European nations as Middle East powers.

History does not relate what a Middle East free from big-power manipulation would have been like, for neither France, Great Britain, nor the United States was amenable to even calling the Soviet “bluff”, if that was what it was. The New York Times summarized the attitude of the three Western nations to the first two overtures as one that “deprecated the Soviet proposals as efforts to gain recognition of a Soviet right to a direct voice in the affairs of the Middle East. They have told the Russians to take up their complaints through the United Nations.”

Following the September proposal, John Foster Dulles, replying to a question at a press conference, said that “the United States is skeptical of these arrangements with the Soviet Union for ‘hands-off’. What they are apt to mean is our hands off and their hands under the table.” This appears to be the only public comment the US government saw fit to make on the matter.¹⁷

It may be instructive to speculate upon the reaction of the Western nations if the Soviet Union had announced a “Khrushchev Doctrine”, ceding to itself the same scope of action in the Middle East as that stipulated in the Eisenhower Doctrine.

In January 1958, Syria and Egypt announced their plans to unite, forming the new nation of the United Arab Republic (UAR). The initiative for the merger had come from Syria who was motivated in no small part by her fear of further American power plays against her. Ironically, under the merger arrangement, the Communist Party, already outlawed in Egypt, was dissolved in Syria, an objective which a year and a half of CIA covert activity had failed to achieve.

Two weeks after the birth of the UAR, and in direct response to it, Iraq and Jordan formed the Arab Union, with the United States acting as midwife. This union was short lived, for in July a bloody coup in Iraq overthrew the monarchy, the new regime establishing a republic and promptly renouncing the pact. The trumpets of Armageddon could once more be heard distinctly in the Oval Office. “This somber turn of events,” wrote Eisenhower in his memoirs, “could, without vigorous response on our part, result in a complete elimination of Western influence in the Middle East.”¹⁸ Although the president would not be so crass as to mention a concern about oil, his anxiety attack was likely brought on by the fact that one of the greatest oil reserves in the world was now under rule of a government which might well prove to be not as pliable an ally as the previous regime, and too independent of Washington.

The time for a mere show of force was over. The very next day, US miltary forces invaded Lebanon lest the popular impulse from Iraq serve to bring down the Lebanese government.

Of all the Arab states, Lebanon was easily the United States’ closest ally. She alone had supported the Eisenhower Doctrine with any enthusiasm or unequivocally echoed Washington’s panic about Syria. To be more precise, it was the president of Lebanon, Camille Chamoun, and the foreign minister, Charles Malik, a Harvard Ph.D. in philosophy, who had put all their cold-war eggs into the American basket. Chamoun had ample reason to be beholden to the United States. The CIA apparently played a role in his 1952 election,¹⁹ and in 1957 the Agency furnished generous sums of money to Chamoun to use in support of candidates in the Chamber of Deputies (Parliament) June elections who would back him and, presumably, US policies. Funds were also provided to specifically oppose, as punishment, those candidates who had resigned in protest over Chamoun’s adherence to the Eisenhower Doctrine.

As is customary in such operations, the CIA sent an “election specialist” along with the money to Beirut to assist in the planning. American officials in Washington and Lebanon proceeded on the assumption, they told each other, that Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia would also intervene financially in the elections. The American ambassador to Lebanon, Donald Heath, argued as well, apparently without ironic intention, that “With both the president and the new chamber of deputies supporting American principles, we’d also have a demonstration that representative democracy could work” in the Middle East.

To what extent the American funding helped, or even how the money was spent, is not known, but the result was a landslide for pro-government deputies; so much so, that it caused considerable protest within Lebanon, including the charge that Chamoun had stacked the parliament in order to amend the constitution to permit him to seek an otherwise prohibited second six-year term of office the following year.²⁰

By late April 1958, tensions in Lebanon had reached bursting point. The inordinate pro-American orientation of Chamoun’s government and his refusal to dispel rumors that he would seek a second term incensed both Lebanese nationalists and advocates of the Arab nationalism which Nasser was promoting throughout the Middle East. Demands were made that the government return to the strict neutrality provided for in the National Pact of 1943 at the time of Lebanon’s declaration of independence from France.

A rash of militant demonstrations, bombings and clashes with police took place, and when, in early May, the editor of an anti-government newspaper was murdered, armed rebellion broke out in several parts of the country, and US Information Agency libraries in Tripoli and Beirut were sacked. Lebanon contained all the makings of a civil war.

“Behind everything,” wrote Eisenhower, “was our deep-seated conviction that the Communists were principally responsible for the trouble and that President Chamoun was motivated only by a strong feeling of patriotism.”

The president did not clarify who or what he meant by “Communists”. However, in the next paragraph he refers, without explanation, to the Soviet Union as “stirring up trouble” in the Middle East. And on the following page, the old soldier writes that “there was no doubt in our minds” about Chamoun’s charge that “Egypt and Syria had been instigating the revolt and arming the rebels”.²¹

In the midst of the fighting, John Foster Dulles announced that he perceived “international communism” as the source of the conflict and for the third time in a year the Sixth Fleet was dispatched to the eastern Mediterranean; police supplies to help quell rioters, as well as tanks and other heavy equipment, were airlifted to Lebanon.

At a subsequent news conference, Dulles declared that even if international communism were not involved, the Eisenhower Doctrine was still applicable because one of its provisions stated that “the independence of these countries is vital to peace and the national interest of the United States.” “That is certainly a mandate,” he said, “to do something if we think that our peace and vital interests are endangered from any quarter.”²² Thus did one of the authors of the doctrine bestow upon himself a mandate.

Egypt and Syria, from all accounts, supported the rebels’ cause with arms, men and money, in addition to inflammatory radio broadcasts from Cairo, although the extent of the material support is difficult to establish. A UN Observation Group went to Lebanon in June at the request of Foreign Minister Malik and reported that they found no evidence of UAR intervention of any significance. A second UN report in July confirmed this finding. It is open to question, however, what degree of reliance can be placed upon these reports, dealing as they do with so thorny an evaluation and issued by a body in the business of promoting compromise.

In any event, the issue was whether the conflict in Lebanon represented a legitimate, home-grown civil war, or whether it was the doing of the proverbial “outside agitators”. On this point, historian Richard Barnet has observed:

No doubt the Observation Group did minimize the extent of UAR participation. But essentially they were correct. Nasser was trying to exploit the political turmoil in Lebanon, but he did not create it. Lebanon, which had always abounded in clandestine arsenals and arms markets, did not need foreign weapons for its domestic violence. Egyptian intervention was neither the stimulus nor the mainstay of the civil strife. Once again a government that had lost the power to rule effectively was blaming its failure on foreign agents.²³

President Eisenhower—continuing his flip-flop thinking on the issue—wrote that it now seemed that Nasser “would be just as happy to see a temporary end to the struggle … and contacted our government and offered to attempt to use his influence to end the trouble.”²⁴

Camille Chamoun had sacrificed Lebanon’s independence and neutrality on the altar of personal ambition and the extensive American aid that derived from subscribing to the Eisenhower Doctrine. Lebanese Muslims, who comprised most of Chamoun’s opposition, were also galled that the Christian president had once again placed the country outside the mainstream of the Arab world, as he had done in 1956 when he refused to break relations with France and Great Britain following their invasion of Egypt.

Chamoun himself had admitted the significance of his pro-American alignment in a revealing comment to Wilbur Crane Eveland. Eveland writes that in late April,

I’d suggested that he might ease tensions by making a statement renouncing a move for reelection. Chamoun had snorted and suggested that I look at the calendar: March 23 was a month behind us, and no amendment to permit another term could legally be passed after that date. Obviously, as he pointed out, the issue of the presidency was not the real issue; renunciation of the Eisenhower Doctrine was what his opponents wanted.²⁵

Instead of renouncing the doctrine, Chamoun invoked it. Although scattered fighting, at times heavy, was continuing in Lebanon, it was the coup in Iraq on 14 July that tipped the scales in favor of Chamoun making the formal request for military assistance and the United States immediately granting it. A CIA report of a plot against King Hussein of Jordan at about the same time heightened even further Washington’s seemingly unceasing sense of urgency about the Middle East.

Chamoun had, by this time, already announced his intention to step down from office when his term expired in September. He was now concerned about American forces helping him to stay alive until that date, as well as their taking action against the rebels. For the previous two months, fear of assassination had kept him constantly inside the presidential palace, never so much as approaching a window. The murder of the Iraqi king and prime minister during the coup was not designed to make him feel more secure.

The Eisenhower Doctrine was put into motion not only in the face of widespread opposition to it within Lebanon, but in disregard of the fact that, even by the doctrine’s own dubious provisions, the situation in Lebanon did not qualify: It could hardly be claimed that Lebanon had suffered “armed aggression from any country controlled by international communism”. If further evidence of this were needed, it was provided by veteran diplomat Robert Murphy who was sent to Lebanon by Eisenhower a few days after the US troops had landed. Murphy concluded, he later wrote, that “communism was playing no direct or substantial part in the insurrection”.²⁶

Yet, Eisenhower could write that the American Government “was moving in accord with the provisions of the Middle East Resolution [Eisenhower Doctrine], but if the conflict expanded into something that the Resolution did not cover, I would, given time, go to the Congress for additional authorization”.²⁷ Apparently the president did not place too much weight on John Foster Dulles having already determined that the Resolution’s mandate was open-ended.

Thus it was that American military forces were dispatched to Lebanon. Some 70 naval vessels and hundreds of aircraft took part in the operation, many remaining as part of the visible American presence. By 25 July, the US forces on shore totaled at least 10,600. By August 13, their number came to 14,000, more than the entire Lebanese Army and gendarmerie combined.²⁸

“In my [radio-TV] address,” wrote Eisenhower, “I had been careful to use the term ‘stationed in’ Lebanon rather than ‘invading’.”²⁹ This was likely a distinction lost upon many Lebanese, both high and low, supporters of the rebels and supporters of the government, including government tank forces who were prepared to block the entrance into Beirut of US troops; only the last-minute intercession on the spot by the American ambassador may have averted an armed clash.³⁰

At a meeting between Robert Murphy and Lebanese Commander-in-Chief General Faud Chehab—related by Eveland who was briefed by Murphy afterwards—the American diplomat was warned that the Lebanese people were “restless, resentful, and determined that Chamoun should resign and U.S. troops leave at once. Otherwise the general could not be responsible for the consequences. For fifteen years his officers had acted behind his back; now, he feared, they might revolt and attack the American forces.”

Murphy had listened patiently, Eveland relates, and then …

escorted the general to a window overlooking the sea. Pointing to the supercarrier Saratoga, swinging at anchor on the horizon, the President’s envoy had quietly explained that just one of its aircraft, armed with nuclear weapons, could obliterate Beirut and its environs from the face of the earth. To this, Murphy quickly added that he’d been sent to be sure that it wouldn’t be necessary for American troops to fire a shot. Shehab [Chehab], he was certain, would ensure that there were no provocations on the Lebanese side. That, Murphy told me, ended the conversation. It now seemed that the general had “regained control” of his troops.³¹

None of the parties seem to have considered what would have been the fate of the thousands of American military personnel in a Beirut obliterated from the face of the earth. Civil warfare in Lebanon increased in intensity in the two weeks following the American intervention. During this period, CIA transmitters in the Middle East were occupied in sending out propaganda broadcasts of disguised origin, a tactic frequently employed by the Agency. In the case of one broadcast which has been reported, the apparent aim was to deflect anti-US feelings onto the Soviet Union and other targets. But the residents of the Middle East were not the only ones who may have been taken in by the spurious broadcast, for it was picked up by the American press and passed on to an unwitting American public; the following appeared in US newspapers:

BEIRUT, July 23 (UPI)—A second mysterious Arab radio station went on the air yesterday calling itself the “Voice of Justice” and claiming to be broadcasting from Syria. Its program heard here consisted of bitter criticism against Soviet Russia and Soviet Premier Khrushchev. Earlier the “Voice of Iraq” went on the air with attacks against the Iraqi revolutionary government. The “Voice of Justice” called Khrushchev the “hangman of Hungary” and warned the people of the Middle East they would suffer the same fate as the Hungarians if the Russians got a foothold in the Middle East.³²

On 31 July, the Chamber of Deputies easily chose General Chehab to succeed Chamoun as president in September, an event that soon put a damper on the fighting in Lebanon and marked the beginning of the end of the conflict which, in the final analysis, appears to have been more a violent protest than a civil war. Tension was further eased by the US announcement shortly afterwards of its intention to withdraw a Marine battalion as a prelude to a general withdrawal.

The last American troops left Lebanon in late October without having fired a shot in anger. What had their presence accomplished?

The authors of the Pentagon study referred to earlier concluded that “A balanced assessment of U.S. behavior in the Lebanon crisis is made difficult by the suspicion that the outcome might have been much the same if the United States had done nothing. Even Eisenhower expressed some doubt on this score.”³³

American intervention against the new Iraqi government was more covert. A secret plan for a joint US-Turkish invasion of the country, code-named Operation CANNON-BONE, was drafted by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the coup in 1958. Reportedly, only Soviet threats to intercede on Iraq’s side forced Washington to hold back. But in 1960, the United States began to fund the Kurdish guerrillas in Iraq who were fighting for a measure of autonomy.³⁴

At the same time, the Iraqis, under Brig. General Abdul Karim Kassem, started to work towards the creation of an international organization to counter the power of the Western oil monopolies. This was to become OPEC, and was not received with joy in certain Western quarters. In February 1960, the Near East Division of the CIA’s clandestine services requested that the Agency find a way to “incapacitate” Kassem for “promoting Soviet bloc political interests in Iraq”. “We do not consciously seek subject’s permanent removal from the scene,” said the Near East Division. “We also do not object should this complication develop.”

As matters turned out, the CIA mailed a monogrammed handkerchief containing an “incapacitating agent” to Kassem from an Asian country. If the Iraqi leader did in fact receive it, it certainly didn’t kill him. That was left to his own countrymen who executed him three years later.³⁵

The significance of the Lebanese intervention, as well as the shows of force employed in regard to Jordan and Syria, extended beyond the immediate outcomes. In the period before and after the intervention, Eisenhower, Dulles and other Washington officials offered numerous different justifications for the American military action in Lebanon: protecting American lives; protecting American property; the Eisenhower Doctrine, with various interpretations; Lebanese sovereignty, integrity, independence, etc.; US national interest; world peace; collective self-defense; justice; international law; law and order; fighting “Nasserism” … the need to “do something” …³⁶

In summing up the affair in his memoirs, president Eisenhower seemed to settle upon one rationale in particular, and this is probably the closest to the truth of the matter. This was to put the world—and specifically the Soviet Union and Nasser—on notice that the United States had virtually unlimited power, that this power could be transported to any corner of the world with great speed, that it could and would be used to deal decisively with any situation with which the United States was dissatisfied, for whatever reason.³⁷

At the same time, it was a message to the British and the French that there was only one Western superpower in the post-war world, and that their days as great powers in the Lands of Oil were over.

14. Indonesia 1957-1958

War and pornography

“I think it’s time we held Sukarno’s feet to the fire,” said Frank Wisner, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans (covert operations), one day in autumn 1956.¹ Wisner was speaking of the man who had led Indonesia since its struggle for independence from the Dutch following the war. A few months earlier, in May, Sukarno had made an impassioned speech before the US Congress asking for more understanding of the problems and needs of developing nations like his own.²

The ensuing American campaign to unseat the flamboyant leader of the fifth most populous nation in the world was to run the gamut from large-scale military maneuvers to seedy sexual intrigue.

The previous year, Sukarno had organized the Bandung Conference as an answer to the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), the US-created political-military alliance of area states to “contain communism”. In the Indonesian city of Bandung, the doctrine of neutralism had been proclaimed as the faith of the underdeveloped world. To the men of the CIA station in Indonesia the conference was heresy, so much so that their thoughts turned toward assassination as a means of sabotaging it.

In 1975, the Senate committee which was investigating the CIA heard testimony that Agency officers stationed in an East Asian country had suggested that an East Asian leader be assassinated “to disrupt an impending Communist [sic] Conference in 1955”.³ (In all likelihood, the leader referred to was either Sukarno or Chou En-lai of China.) But, said the committee, cooler heads prevailed at CIA headquarters in Washington and the suggestion was firmly rejected.

Nevertheless, a plane carrying eight members of the Chinese delegation, a Vietnamese, and two European journalists to the Bandung Conference crashed under mysterious circumstances. The Chinese government claimed that it was an act of sabotage carried out by the US and Taiwan, a misfired effort to murder Chou En-lai. The chartered Air India plane had taken off from Hong Kong on 11 April 1955 and crashed in the South China Sea. Chou En-lai was scheduled to be on another chartered Air India flight a day or two later. The Chinese government, citing what it said were press reports from the Times of India, stated that the crash was caused by two time bombs apparently placed aboard the plane in Hong Kong. A clockwork mechanism was later recovered from the wrecked airliner and the Hong Kong police called it a case of “carefully planned mass murder”. Months later, British police in Hong Kong announced that they were seeking a Chinese Nationalist for conspiracy to cause the crash, but that he had fled to Taiwan.⁴

In 1967 a curious little book appeared in India, entitled I Was a CIA Agent in India, by John Discoe Smith, an American. Published by the Communist Party of India, it was based on articles written by Smith for Literaturnaya Gazeta in Moscow after he had defected to the Soviet Union around 1960. Smith, born in Quincy, Mass. in 1926, wrote that he had been a communications technician and code clerk at the US Embassy in New Delhi in 1955, performing tasks for the CIA as well. One of these tasks was to deliver a package to a Chinese Nationalist which Smith later learned, he claimed, contained the two time bombs used to blow up the Air India plane. The veracity of Smith’s account cannot be determined, although his employment at the US Embassy in New Delhi from 1954 to 1959 is confirmed by the State Department Biographic Register.⁵

Elsewhere the Senate committee reported that it had “received some evidence of CIA involvement in plans to assassinate President Sukarno of Indonesia”, and that the planning had proceeded to the point of identifying an agent whom it was believed might be recruited for the job.⁶ (The committee noted that at one time, those at the CIA who were concerned with possible assassinations and appropriate methods were known internally as the “Health Alteration Committee”.)

To add to the concern of American leaders, Sukarno had made trips to the Soviet Union and China (though to the White House as well), he had purchased arms from Eastern European countries (but only after being turned down by the United States),⁷ he had nationalized many private holdings of the Dutch, and, perhaps most disturbing of all, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) had made impressive gains electorally and in union-organizing, thus earning an important role in the coalition government.

It was a familiar Third World scenario, and the reaction of Washington policy-makers was equally familiar. Once again, they were unable, or unwilling, to distinguish nationalism from pro-communism, neutralism from wickedness. By any definition of the word, Sukarno was no communist. He was an Indonesian nationalist and a “Sukarnoist” who had crushed the PKI forces in 1948 after the independence struggle had been won.⁸ He ran what was largely his own show by granting concessions to both the PKI and the Army, balancing one against the other. As to excluding the PKI, with its more than one million members, from the government, Sukarno declared: “I can’t and won’t ride a three-legged horse.”⁹

To the United States, however, Sukarno’s balancing act was too precarious to be left to the vagaries of the Indonesian political process. It mattered not to Washington that the Communist Party was walking the legal, peaceful road, or that there was no particular “crisis” or “chaos” in Indonesia, so favored as an excuse for intervention. Intervention there would be.

It would not be the first. In 1955, during the national election campaign in Indonesia, the CIA had given a million dollars to the Masjumi party, a centrist coalition of Muslim organizations, in a losing bid to thwart Sukarno’s Nationalist Party as well as the PKI. According to former CIA officer Joseph Burkholder Smith, the project “provided for complete write-off of the funds, that is, no demand for a detailed accounting of how the funds were spent was required. I could find no clue as to what the Masjumi did with the million dollars.”¹⁰

In 1957, the CIA decided that the situation called for more direct action. It was not difficult to find Indonesian colleagues-in-arms for there already existed a clique of army officers and others who, for personal ambitions and because they disliked the influential position of the PKI, wanted Sukarno out, or at least out of their particular islands. (Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelago, consisting of some 3,000 islands.)

The military operation the CIA was opting for was of a scale that necessitated significant assistance from the Pentagon, which could be secured for a political action mission only if approved by the National Security Council’s “Special Group” (the small group of top NSC officials who acted in the president’s name, to protect him and the country by evaluating proposed covert actions and making certain that the CIA did not go off the deep end; known at other times as the 5412 Committee, the 303 Committee, the 40 Committee, or the Operations Advisory Group).

The manner in which the Agency went about obtaining this approval is a textbook example of how the CIA sometimes determines American foreign policy. Joseph Burkholder Smith, who was in charge of the Agency’s Indonesian desk in Washington from mid-1956 to early 1958, has described the process in his memoirs: Instead of first proposing the plan to Washington for approval, where “premature mention … might get it shot down”…

we began to feed the State and Defense departments intelligence that no one could deny was a useful contribution to understanding Indonesia. When they had read enough alarming reports, we planned to spring the suggestion we should support the colonels’ plans to reduce Sukarno’s power. This was a method of operation which became the basis of many of the political action adventures of the 1960s and 1970s. In other words, the statement is false that CIA undertook to intervene in the affairs of countries like Chile only after being ordered to do so by … the Special Group. … In many instances, we made the action programs up ourselves after we had collected enough intelligence to make them appear required by the circumstances. Our activity in Indonesia in 1957-1958 was one such instance.¹¹ (Emphasis in original.)

When the Communist Party did well again in local elections held in July, the CIA viewed it as “a great help to us in convincing Washington authorities how serious the Indonesian situation was. The only person who did not seem terribly alarmed at the PKI victories was Ambassador Allison. This was all we needed to convince John Foster Dulles finally that he had the wrong man in Indonesia. The wheels began to turn to remove this last stumbling block in the way of our operation.”¹² John Allison, wrote Smith, was not a great admirer of the CIA to begin with. And in early 1958, after less than a year in the post, he was replaced as ambassador by Howard Jones, whose selection “pleased” the CIA Indonesia staff.¹³

On 30 November 1957, several hand grenades were tossed at Sukarno as he was leaving a school. He escaped injury, but 10 people were killed and 48 children injured. The CIA in Indonesia had no idea who was responsible, but it quickly put out the story that the PKI was behind it “at the suggestion of their Soviet contacts in order to make it appear that Sukarno’s opponents were wild and desperate men”. As it turned out, the culprits were a Muslim group not associated with the PKI or with the Agency’s military plotters.¹⁴

The issue of Sukarno’s supposed hand-in-glove relationship with Communists was pushed at every opportunity. The CIA decided to make capital of reports that a good-looking blonde stewardess had been aboard Sukarno’s aircraft everywhere he went during his trip in the Soviet Union and that the same woman had come to Indonesia with Soviet President Kliment Voroshilov and had been seen several times in the company of Sukarno. The idea was that Sukarno’s well-known womanizing had trapped him in the spell of a Soviet female agent. He had succumbed to Soviet control, CIA reports implied, as a result of her influence or blackmail, or both.

“This formed the foundation of our flights of fancy,” wrote Smith. “We had as a matter of fact, considerable success with this theme. It appeared in the press around the world, and when Round Table, the serious British quarterly of international affairs, came to analyze the Indonesian revolt in its March 1958 issue, it listed Sukarno’s being blackmailed by a Soviet female spy as one of the reasons that caused the uprising.”

Seemingly, the success of this operation inspired CIA officers in Washington to carry the theme one step further. A substantial effort was made to come up with a pornographic film or at least some still photographs that could pass for Sukarno and his Russian girl friend engaged in “his favorite activity”. When scrutiny of available porno films (supplied by the Chief of Police of Los Angeles) failed to turn up a couple who could pass for Sukarno (dark and bald) and a beautiful blonde Russian woman, the CIA undertook to produce its own films, “the very films with which the Soviets were blackmailing Sukarno”. The Agency developed a full-face mask of the Indonesian leader which was to be sent to Los Angeles where the police were to pay some porno-film actor to wear it during his big scene. This project resulted in at least some photographs, although they apparently were never used.¹⁵

Another outcome of the blackmail effort was a film produced for the CIA by Robert Maheu, former FBI agent and intimate of Howard Hughes. Maheu’s film starred an actor who resembled Sukarno. The ultimate fate of the film, which was entitled “Happy Days”, has not been reported.¹⁶

In other parts of the world, at other times, the CIA has done better in this line of work, having produced sex films of target subjects caught in flagrante delicto who had been lured to Agency safe-houses by female agents.

In 1960, Col. Truman Smith, US Army Ret., writing in Reader’s Digest about the KGB, declared: “It is difficult for most of us to appreciate its menace, as its methods are so debased as to be all but beyond the comprehension of any normal person with a sense of right and wrong.” One of the KGB methods the good colonel found so debased was the making of sex films to be used as blackmail. “People depraved enough to employ such methods,” he wrote, “find nothing distasteful in more violent methods.”¹⁷

Sex could be used at home as well to further the goals of American foreign policy. Under the cover of the US foreign aid program, at that time called the Economic Cooperation Administration, Indonesian policemen were trained and then recruited to provide information on Soviet, Chinese and PKI activities in their country. Some of the men singled out as good prospects for this work were sent to Washington for special training and to be softened up for recruitment. Like Sukarno, reportedly, these police officers invariably had an obsessive desire to sleep with a white woman. Accordingly, during their stay they were taken to Baltimore’s shabby sex district to indulge themselves.¹⁸

The Special Group’s approval of the political action mission was forthcoming in November 1957,¹⁹ and the CIA’s paramilitary machine was put into gear. In this undertaking, as in others, the Agency enjoyed the advantage of the United States’ far-flung military empire. Headquarters for the operation were established in neighboring Singapore, courtesy of the British; training bases set up in the Philippines; airstrips laid out in various parts of the Pacific to prepare for bomber and transport missions; Indonesians, along with Filipinos, Taiwanese, Americans, and other “soldiers of fortune” were assembled in Okinawa and the Philippines along with vast quantities of arms and equipment.

For this, the CIA’s most ambitious military operation to date, tens of thousands of rebels were armed, equipped and trained by the US Army. US Navy submarines, patrolling off the coast of Sumatra, the main island, put over-the-beach parties ashore along with supplies and communications equipment. The US Air Force set up a considerable Air Transport force which air-dropped many thousands of weapons deep into Indonesian territory. And a fleet of 15 B-26 bombers was made available for the conflict after being “sanitized” to ensure that they were “non-attributable” and that all airborne equipment was “deniable”.

In the early months of 1958, rebellion began to break out in one part of the Indonesian island chain, then another. CIA pilots took to the air to carry out bombing and strafing missions in support of the rebels. In Washington, Col. Alex Kawilarung, the Indonesian military attaché, was persuaded by the Agency to “defect”. He soon showed up in Indonesia to take charge of the rebel forces. Yet, as the fighting dragged on into spring, the insurgents proved unable to win decisive victories or take the offensive, although the CIA bombing raids were taking their toll. Sukarno later claimed that on a Sunday morning in April, a plane bombed a ship in the harbor of the island of Ambon—all those aboard losing their lives—as well as hitting a church, which demolished the building and killed everyone inside. He stated that 700 casualties had resulted from this single run.

On 15 May, a CIA plane bombed the Ambon marketplace, killing a large number of civilians on their way to church on Ascension Thursday. The Indonesian government had to act to suppress public demonstrations.

Three days later, during another bombing run over Ambon, a CIA pilot, Allen Lawrence Pope, was shot down and captured. Thirty years old, from Perrine, Florida, Pope had flown 55 night missions over Communist lines in Korea for the Air Force. Later he spent two months flying through Communist flak for the CIA to drop supplies to the French at Dien Bien Phu. Now his luck had run out. He was to spend four years as a prisoner in Indonesia before Sukarno acceded to a request from Robert Kennedy for his release.

Pope was captured carrying a set of incriminating documents, including those which established him as a pilot for the US Air Force and the CIA airline CAT. Like all men flying clandestine missions, Pope had gone through an elaborate procedure before taking off to “sanitize” him, as well as his aircraft. But he had apparently smuggled the papers aboard the plane, for he knew that to be captured as an “anonymous, stateless civilian” meant having virtually no legal rights and running the risk of being shot as a spy in accordance with custom. A captured US military man, however, becomes a commodity of value for his captors while he remains alive.

The Indonesian government derived immediate material concessions from the United States as a result of the incident. Whether the Indonesians thereby agreed to keep silent about Pope is not known, but on 27 May the pilot and his documents were presented to the world at a news conference, thus contradicting several recent statements by high American officials.²⁰ Notable amongst these was President Eisenhower’s declaration on 30 April concerning Indonesia: “Our policy is one of careful neutrality and proper deportment all the way through so as not to be taking sides where it is none of our business.”²¹

And on 9 May, an editorial in the New York Times had stated:

It is unfortunate that high officials of the Indonesian Government have given further circulation to the false report that the United States Government was sanctioning aid to Indonesia’s rebels. The position of the United States Government has been made plain, again and again. Our Secretary of State was emphatic in his declaration that this country would not deviate from a correct neutrality … the United States is not ready … to step in to help overthrow a constituted government. Those are the hard facts. Jakarta does not help its case, here, by ignoring them.

With the exposure of Pope and the lack of rebel success in the field, the CIA decided that the light was no longer worth the candle, and began to curtail its support. By the end of June, Indonesian army troops loyal to Sukarno had effectively crushed the dissident military revolt.

The Indonesian leader continued his adroit balancing act between the Communists and the army until 1965, when the latter, likely with the help of the CIA, finally overthrew his regime.

15. Western Europe 1950s and 1960s

Fronts within fronts within fronts

At the British Labour Party conference in 1960, Michael Foot, the party’s future leader and a member of its left wing, was accused of being a “fellow traveller” by then-leader Hugh Gaitskell. Foot responded with a reference to Gaitskell and others of the party’s right wing: “But who,” he asked, “are they travelling with?”¹

They, it turned out, had been travelling with the CIA for some years. Fellow passengers were Frenchmen, Germans, Dutch, Italians, and a host of other West Europeans; all taking part in a CIA operation to win the hearts and minds of liberals, social democrats, and assorted socialists, to keep them from the clutches of the Russian bear.

It was an undertaking of major proportions. For some 20 years, the Agency used dozens of American foundations, charitable trusts and the like, including a few of its own creation, as conduits for payments to all manner of organizations in the United States and abroad, many of which, in turn, funded other groups. So numerous were the institutions involved, so many were the interconnections and overlaps, that it is unlikely that anyone at the CIA had a grasp of the full picture, let alone exercised broad control over it or proper accounting. (See Appendix I for a partial organizational chart.)

The ultimate beneficiaries of this flow of cash were political parties, magazines, news agencies, journalists’ unions, other unions and labor organizations, student and youth groups, lawyers’ associations, and other enterprises already committed to “The Free World” which could be counted upon to spread the gospel further if provided with sufficient funding.

The principal front organization set up by the CIA in this period was the grandly named Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). In June 1950, prominent literati and scientists of the United States and Europe assembled in the Titiana Palace Theatre, in the American Zone of Berlin, before a large audience to launch the organization whose purpose was to “defend freedom and democracy against the new tyranny sweeping the world”. The CCF was soon reaching out in all directions with seminars, conferences, and a wide program of political and cultural activities in Western Europe as well as India, Australia, Japan, Africa and elsewhere. It had, moreover, more than 30 periodicals under its financial wing, including, in Europe:

Socialist Commentary, Censorship, Science and Freedom, Minerva, Soviet Survey (or Survey), China Quarterly, and Encounter in Great Britain;

Preuves, Censure Contre les Artes et la Pensée, Mundo Nuevo, and Cuadernos in France (the last two in Spanish, aimed at Latin America);

Perspektiv in Denmark, Argumenten in Sweden, Irodalmi Ujsag in Hungary, Der Monat in Germany, Forum in Austria, Tempo Presente in Italy, and Vision in Switzerland.

There were as well CCF links to The New Leader, Africa Report, East Europe and Atlas in New York.²

Generally, the CCF periodicals were well-written political and cultural magazines which, in the words of former CIA executive Ray Cline, “would not have been able to survive financially without CIA funds”.³

Amongst the other media-related organizations subsidized by the CIA in Europe at this time were the West German news agency DENA (later known as DPA),⁴ the international association of writers PEN, located in Paris, certain French newspapers,⁵ the International Federation of Journalists, and Forum World Features, a news feature service in London whose stories were bought by some 140 newspapers around the world, including about 30 in the United States, amongst which were the Washington Post and four other major dailies. The Church committee of the US Senate reported that “major U.S. dailies” which took the service were informed that Forum World Features was “CIA-controlled”. The Guardian and The Sunday Times of Great Britain also used the service, which earlier had been called Forum Service. By 1967, according to one of Forum’s leading writers, the news service had become perhaps “the principal CIA media effort in the world”, no small accomplishment when one considers that the CIA, in its heyday, was devoting a reported 29 percent of its budget to media and propaganda.⁶

Another important recipient of CIA beneficence was Axel Springer, the West German press baron who was secretly funneled about $7 million in the early 1950s to help him build up his vast media empire. Springer, until he died in 1985, was the head of the largest publishing conglomerate in Western Europe, standing as a tower of pro-Western and anti-communist sentiment. The publisher of the influential West German weekly Der Spiegel, Rudolph Augstein, has observed: “No single man in Germany, before or after Hitler, with the possible exception of Bismarck or the two emperors, has had so much power as Springer.” His relationship with the CIA reportedly continued until at least the early 1970s.⁷

The originator of the American program, the head of the CIA’s International Organizations Division, Tom Braden, later wrote that the Agency placed one operative in the CCF and that another became an editor of the CCF’s most important magazine, Encounter.⁸ Presumably there was at least one CIA agent or officer in each of the funded groups. Braden stated that “The agents could … propose anti-Communist programs to the official leaders of the organizations.” He added, however, that it was a policy to “protect the integrity of the organization by not requiring it to support every aspect of official American policy.”⁹

The Cultural Freedom journals appealed to the non-Marxist left (Forum, by contrast, was conservative), generally eschewing the class struggle and excessive nationalization of industry. They subscribed to Daniel Bell’s “the end of ideology” thesis, the raison d’être of which was that since no one could call for dying for capitalism with a straight face, the idea of dying for socialism or any other ideology had to be discredited. At the same time, the journals advocated a reformed capitalism, a capitalism with a human face.

To the cold warriors in Washington who were paying the bills, however, the idea of reforming capitalism was of minimal interest. What was of consequence was the commitment of the magazines to a strong, well-armed, and united Western Europe, allied to the United States, which would stand as a bulwark against the Soviet bloc; support for the Common Market and NATO; critical analysis of what was seen as the intellectual component of international communist subversion; skepticism of the disarmament, pacifism, and neutralism espoused by the likes of the prominent Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in Great Britain. Criticism of US foreign policy took place within the framework of cold-war assumptions; for example, that a particular American intervention was not the most effective way of combatting communism, not that there was anything wrong with intervention per se or that the United States was supporting the wrong side.

“Private” publications such as these could champion views which official US government organs like the Voice of America could not, and still be credible. The same was true of the many other private organizations on the CIA payroll at this time.

In 1960, CND and other elements of the Labour Party’s left wing succeeded in winning over the party’s conference to a policy of complete, unilateral nuclear disarmament and neutrality in the cold war. In addition, two resolutions supporting NATO were voted down. Although the Labour Party was not in power at the time, the actions carried considerable propaganda and psychological value. Washington viewed the turn of events with not a little anxiety, for such sentiments could easily spread to the major parties of other NATO countries.

The right wing of the Labour Party, which had close, not to say intimate, connections to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Encounter, New Leader, and other CIA “assets” and fronts, undertook a campaign to reverse the disarmament resolution. The committee set up for the purpose issued an appeal for funds, and soon could report that many small donations had been received, together with a large sum from a source that wished to remain anonymous. Over the next year, there was sufficient funding for a permanent office, a full-time, paid chairman and paid staff, field workers, traveling expenses, tons of literature sent to a large mailing list within the movement, a regular bulletin sent free, etc.

Their opponents could not come close to matching this propaganda blitz. At the 1961 conference, the unilateralist and neutralist decisions were decisively overturned and the Labour Party returned to the NATO fold.¹⁰

Supporters of the CIA have invariably defended the Agency’s sundry activities in Western Europe on the grounds that the Russians were the first to be so engaged there and had to be countered. Whatever truth there may be in this assertion, the fact remains, as Tom Braden has noted, that the American effort spread to some fields “where they [the Russians] had not even begun to operate”.¹¹ Braden doesn’t specify which fields, but it seems that political parties was one: The CIA had working/financial relationships with leading members of the West German Social Democratic Party, two parties in Austria, the Christian Democrats of Italy, and the Liberal Party, in addition to the Labour Party, in Britain,¹² and probably at least one party in every other Western European country, all of which purported to be independent of either superpower, something the various Communist parties, whether supported by the Soviet Union or not, could never get away with.

The media provides another case in point. Neither Braden, nor anyone else apparently, has cited examples of publications or news agencies in Western Europe—pro-Communist or anti-Nato, etc.—which, ostensibly independent in the cold war, were covertly funded by the Soviet Union.

More importantly, it should be borne in mind that all the different types of enterprises and institutions supported by the CIA in Western Europe were supported by the Agency all over the Third World for decades on a routine basis without a Russian counterpart in sight. The growing strength of the left in post-war Europe was motivation enough for the CIA to develop its covert programs, and this was a circumstance deriving from World War II and the economic facts of life, not from Soviet propaganda and manipulation.

Operation Gladio

The rationale behind it was your standard cold-war paranoia: There’s a good chance the Russians will launch an unprovoked invasion of Western Europe. And if they defeated the Western armies and forced them to flee, certain people had to remain behind to harass the Russians with guerrilla warfare and sabotage, and act as liaisons with those abroad. The “stay-behinds” would be provided with funds, weapons, communication equipment and training exercises. The planning for this covert paramilitary network, code-named “Operation Gladio” (Italian for “sword”), began in 1949, involving initially the British, the Americans and the Belgians. It eventually established units in every non-communist country in Europe—including Greece and Turkey and neutral Sweden and Switzerland—with the apparent exceptions of Ireland and Finland. The question of whether the units were more under the control of national governments or NATO remains purposely unclear, although from an operational point of view, it appears that the CIA and various other intelligence services were calling the shots.

As matters turned out, in the complete absence of any Russian invasions, the operation was used almost exclusively to inflict political damage upon domestic leftist movements.

The Gladio story broke in Italy in the fall of 1990, stemming from a judicial investigation into a 1972 car-bombing which discovered that the explosives had come from one of the 139 secret weapons depots kept for Gladio’s forces in Italy. Subsequently, the head of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the matter revealed that “When Gladio was started, the Americans would often insist … that the organization also had to be used to counter any insurgencies.” Retired Greek Gen. Nikos Kouris told a similar story, declaring that a Greek force was formed with CIA help in 1955 to intervene in case of Communist threat, whether external or internal. “There were ex-military men, specially trained soldiers and also civilians. What held them together was one ideological common denominator: extreme rightism.”

As in Germany (see Germany chapter), the Italian operation was closely tied to terrorists. A former Gladio agent, Roberto Cavallero, went public to charge that there was a direct link between Gladio and Italy’s wave of terrorist bombings in the 1970s and early 1980s which left at least 300 dead. He said that Gladio had trained him and many others “to prepare groups which, in the event of an advance by left wing forces in our country, would fill the streets, creating a situation of such tension as to require military intervention.” Cavallero was of course referring to electoral advances of the Italian Communist Party, not an invasion by the Soviet Union.

The single worst terrorist action was the bombing at the Bologna railway station in August 1980 which claimed 86 lives. The Observer of London later reported:

The Italian railway bombings were blamed on the extreme Left as part of a strategy to convince voters that the country was in a state of tension and that they had no alternative to voting the safe Christian Democrat ticket. All clues point to the fact that they were masterminded from within Gladio.

One of the men sought for questioning in Italy about the Bologna bombing, Roberto Fiore, has lived in London ever since and the British government has refused to extradite him. He is apparently under the protective wing of MI6 (Britain’s CIA) for whom he has provided valuable intelligence.

The kidnapping and murder in 1978 of Aldo Moro, the leader of the Christian Democrats, which was attributed to the Red Brigades, appears now to have also been the work of Gladio agents provocateur who infiltrated the organization. Just prior to his abduction, Moro had announced his intention to enter into a governmental coalition with the Communist Party.

In Belgium, in 1983, to convince the public that a security crisis existed, Gladio operatives as well as police officers staged a series of seemingly random shootings in supermarkets which, whether intended or not, led to several deaths. A year later, a party of US Marines parachuted into Belgium with the intention of attacking a police station. One Belgian citizen was killed and one of the Marines lost an eye in the operation, that was intended to jolt the local Belgian police into a higher state of alert, and to give the impression to the comfortable population at large that the country was on the brink of Red revolution. Guns used in the operation were later planted in a Brussels house used by a Communist splinter group.

As late as 1990, large stockpiles of weapons and explosives for Operation Gladio could still be found in some member countries, and Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti disclosed that more than 600 people still remained on the Gladio payroll in Italy.

[continued on page 471]

16. British Guiana 1953-1964

The CIA’s international labor mafia

For a period of 11 years, two of the oldest democracies in the world, Great Britain and the United States, went to great lengths to prevent a democratically elected leader from occupying his office.

The man was Dr. Cheddi Jagan. The grandson of indentured immigrants from India, Jagan had become a dentist in the United States, then returned to his native Guiana. In 1953, at the age of 35, he and the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) were elected by a large majority to head the government of the British colony. Jagan’s victory was due in part to the fact that Indians comprised about 46 percent of the population; those of African origin made up about 36 percent.

The PPP’s program in office was hardly revolutionary. It encouraged foreign investment in the mining sectors while attempting to institute liberal reforms such as strengthening the rights of unionists and tenant farmers, creating a public school system that would lessen church control of education, and removing a ban on the import of “undesirable” publications, films and records. But the British Conservative government was not disposed to live with such policies advocated by a man who talked suspiciously like a socialist. The government and the British media, as well as the American media, subjected the Jagan administration to a campaign of red-scare accusations and plain lies in the fashion of Senator McCarthy whose -ism was then all the rage in the United States.

Four and a half months after Jagan took office, the government of Winston Churchill flung him out. The British sent naval and army forces, suspended the constitution and removed the entire Guianese government. At the same time, the barristers drew up some papers which the Queen signed, so it was all nice and legal.¹

“Her Majesty’s Government,” said the British Colonial Secretary during a debate in Parliament, “are not prepared to tolerate the setting up of Communist states in the British Commonwealth.”²

The American attitude toward this slap in the face of democracy can be surmised by the refusal of the US government to allow Jagan to pass in transit through the United States when he tried to book a flight to London to attend the parliamentary debate. According to Jagan, Pan Am would not even sell him a ticket. (Pan Am has a long history of collaboration with the CIA, a practice initiated by the airline’s president, Juan Trippe, the son-in-law of Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, Edward R. Stettinius.)³

By this time the CIA had already gotten its foot in the door of the British Guiana labor movement, by means of the marriage of the Agency to the American Federation of Labor in the United States. One of the early offsprings of this union was the Inter-American Regional Labor Organization (ORIT from the Spanish). In the early 1950s, ORIT was instrumental in the conversion of the leading confederation of unions in Guiana, the Trades Union Council, from a militant labor organization to a vehicle of anti-communism. Wrote Serafino Romualdi, at one time the head of AIFLD (see below) and a long-time CIA collaborator: “Since my first visit to British Guiana in 1951, I did everything in my power to strengthen the democratic [i.e., anti-communist] trade union forces opposed to him [Jagan].”⁴

This was to have serious repercussions for Jagan in later years.

In 1957, running on a program similar to that of four years earlier, Jagan won the election again. Following this, the British deemed it wiser to employ more subtle methods for his removal and the CIA was brought into the picture, one of the rare instances in which the Agency has been officially allowed to operate in a British bailiwick. The CIA has done so, unofficially, on numerous occasions, to the displeasure of British authorities.

The CIA set to work to fortify those unions which already tended somewhat toward support of Jagan’s leading political opponent, Forbes Burnham of the People’s National Congress. One of the most important of these was the civil servants’ union, dominated by blacks.

Consequently, the CIA turned to Public Services International (PSI) in London, an international trade union secretariat for government employees, one of the international networks which exist to export the union know-how of advanced industrial countries to less-developed countries.

According to a study undertaken by The Sunday Times of London, by 1958 the PSI’s “finances were low, and its stocks were low with its own parent body, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions [set up by the CIA in 1949 to rival the Soviet-influenced World Federation of Trade Unions]. It needed a success of some kind. The financial crisis was resolved, quite suddenly, by the PSI’s main American affiliate union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).” AFSCME’s boss, Dr Arnold Zander, told the PSI executive that he had “been shopping” and had found a donor.

“The spoils were modest at first—only a couple of thousand pounds in 1958. It was, the kind donor had said, for Latin America. The money went towards a PSI ‘recruiting drive’ in the northern countries of Latin America by one William Doherty, Jr., a man with some previous acquaintance of the CIA.” (Doherty was later to become the Executive Director of the American Institute for Free Labor Development, the CIA’s principal labor organization in Latin America.)

“The donor was presumably pleased, because next year, 1959, Zander was able to tell the PSI that his union was opening a full-time Latin American section in the PSI’s behalf. The PSI was charmed.”

The PSI’s representative, said Zander, would be William Howard McCabe (a CIA labor apprentice). The Times continued:

McCabe, a stocky, bullet-headed American, appeared to have no previous union history, but the PSI liked him. When he came to its meetings, he distributed cigarette lighters and photographs of himself doling out food parcels to the peasants. The lighters and the parcels were both inscribed “with the compliments of the PSI”.⁵

In 1967, in the wake of numerous revelations about CIA covert financing, the new head of AFSCME admitted that the union had been heavily funded by the Agency until 1964 through a foundation conduit (see Appendix I). It was revealed that AFSCME’s International Affairs Department, which had been responsible for the British Guiana operation, had actually been run by two CIA “aides”.⁶

CIA work within Third World unions typically involves a considerable educational effort, the basic premise of which is that all solutions will come to working people under a system of free enterprise, class co-operation and collective bargaining, and by opposing communism in collaboration with management and government, unless, of course, the government, as in this case, is itself “communist”. The most promising students, those perhaps marked as future leaders, are singled out to be sent to CIA schools in the United States for further education.

The CIA, said The Sunday Times, also “appears to have had a good deal of success in encouraging politicians to break away from Jagan’s party and government. Their technique of financing sympathetic figures was to take out heavy insurance policies for them.”⁷

During the 1961 election campaign, the CIA’s ongoing program was augmented by ad hoc operations from other American quarters. The US Information Service took the most unusual step of showing its films, depicting the evils of Castroism and communism, on street corners of British Guiana. And the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade brought its traveling road show down and spent a reported $76,000 on electoral propaganda which lived up to the organization’s name.⁸ One historian has described this as “a questionable activity for a private organization, which the State Department did nothing to discourage”.⁹ On the other hand, the activities of US government agencies in British Guiana were no less questionable.

Despite the orchestrated campaign directed against him, Jagan was re-elected by a comfortable majority of legislative seats, though with only a plurality of the popular vote.

In October, at his request, Jagan was received at the White House in Washington. He had come to talk about assistance for his development program. President Kennedy and his advisers, however, were interested in determining where Jagan stood on the political spectrum before granting any aid. Oddly, the meeting, as described by Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. who was present, seemed to be conducted as if the Kennedy men were totally unaware of American destabilization activities in British Guiana.

To Jagan’s expressed esteem for the politics of British Labour leader Aneurin Bevan, those in the room “all responded agreeably”.

To Jagan’s professed socialism, Kennedy asserted that “We are not engaged in a crusade to force private enterprise on parts of the world where it is not relevant.”

But when Jagan, perhaps naively, mentioned his admiration for the scholarly, leftist journal, Monthly Review, it appears that he crossed an ideological line, which silently and effectively sealed his country’s fate. “Jagan,” wrote Schlesinger later, “was unquestionably some sort of Marxist.”¹⁰

No economic aid was given to British Guiana while Jagan remained in power, and the Kennedy administration pressured the British to delay granting the country its independence, which had been scheduled to occur within the next year or two.¹¹ Not until 1966, when Jagan no longer held office, did British Guiana become the independent nation of Guyana.

In February 1962, the CIA helped to organize and finance anti-Jagan protests which used the newly announced budget as a pretext. The resulting strikes, riots and arson were wholly out of proportion to the alleged instigation. A Commonwealth Commission of Enquiry later concluded (perhaps to the discomfort of the British Colonial Office which had appointed it) that:

There is very little doubt that, despite the loud protestations of the trades union leaders to the contrary, political affinities and aspirations played a large part in shaping their policy and formulating their programme of offering resistance to the budget and making a determined effort to change the government in office.¹²

The CIA arranged, as it has on similar occasions, for North American and Latin American labor organizations, with which it had close ties, to support the strikers with messages of solidarity and food, thus enhancing the appearance of a genuine labor struggle. The agency also contrived for previously unheard-of radio stations to go on the air and for newspapers to print false stories about approaching Cuban warships.¹³

The centerpiece of the CIA’s program in British Guiana was the general strike (so called, although its support was considerably less than total) which began in April 1963. It lasted for 80 days, the longest general strike in history, it is said.¹⁴

This strike, as in 1962, was called by the Trades Union Council (TUC) which, as we have seen, was a member in good standing of the CIA’s international labor mafia. The head of the TUC was one Richard Ishmael who had been trained in the US at the CIA’s American Institute for Free Labor Development along with other Guianese labor officials.

The strike period was marked by repeated acts of violence and provocation, including attacks on Jagan’s wife and some of his ministers. Ishmael himself was later cited in a secret British police report as having been part of a terrorist group which had carried out bombings and arson attacks against government buildings during the strike.¹⁵

No action was taken against Ishmael and others in this group by British authorities who missed no opportunity to exacerbate the explosive situation, hoping that it would culminate in Jagan’s downfall.

Meanwhile, CIA agents were giving “advice to local union leaders on how to organize and sustain” the strike, the New York Times subsequently reported. “They also provided funds and food supplies to keep the strikers going and medical supplies for pro-Burnham workers injured in the turmoil. At one point, one of the agents even served as a member of a bargaining committee from a Guiana dike workers’ union that was negotiating with Dr. Jagan.” This agent was later denounced by Jagan and forbidden to enter the country.¹⁶ This is probably a reference to Gene Meakins, one of the CIA’s main labor operatives, who had been serving as public relations advisor and education officer to the TUC. Meakins edited a weekly paper and broadcast a daily radio program by means of which he was able to generate a great deal of anti-Jagan propaganda.¹⁷

The Sunday Times study concluded that:

Jagan seems to have thought that the unions could hold out a month. But McCabe was providing the bulk of the strike pay, plus money for distress funds, for the strikers’ daily 15 minutes on the radio and their propaganda, and considerable travelling expenses. All over the world, it seemed brother unions were clubbing together.

The mediator sent from London, Robert Willis, the general secretary of the London Typographical Society and a man not noted for his mercy in bargaining with newspaper managements was shocked. “It was rapidly clear to me that the strike was wholly political”, he said. “Jagan was giving in to everything the strikers wanted, but as soon as he did they erected more demands”.¹⁸

Financial support for the strike alone, channeled through the PSI and other labour organizations by the CIA, reached the sum of at least one million dollars.

American oil companies provided a further example of the multitude of resources the US can bring to bear upon a given target. The companies co-operated with the strikers by refusing to provide petroleum, forcing Jagan to appeal to Cuba for oil. During Jagan’s remaining year in office, in the face of a general US economic embargo, he turned increasingly to the Soviet bloc. This practice of course provided ammunition to those critics of Jagan in British Guiana, the United States and Great Britain who insisted that he was a communist and thus fraught with all the dangers that communists are fraught with.

The strike was maintained primarily by black supporters of Forbes Burnham and by employers who locked out many of Jagan’s Indian supporters. This inevitably exacerbated the already existing racial tensions, although The Sunday Times asserted that the “racial split was fairly amicable until the 1963 strike divided the country”. Eventually, the tension broke out into bloodshed leaving hundreds dead and wounded and “a legacy of racial bitterness”.¹⁹

Jagan was certainly aware, to some extent at least, of what was transpiring around him during the general strike. After it was over he charged that:

The United States, in spite of protestations to the contrary by some of its leaders, is not prepared to permit a Socialist government or a government committed to drastic and basic reforms to exist in this hemisphere, even when this government has been freely elected … It is all too clear that the United States will only support a democratic government if it favors a classic private enterprise system.²⁰

In an attempt to surmount the hurdle of US obsession with the Soviet Union and “another Cuba in the Western hemisphere”, Jagan proposed that British Guiana be “neutralized” by an agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union, as the two powers had done in the case of Austria. Officials in Washington had no comment on the suggestion.²¹

Cheddi Jagan’s government managed to survive all the provocations and humiliations. With elections on the agenda for 1964, the British and their American cousins turned once again to the gentlemanly way of the pen.

The British Colonial Secretary, Duncan Sandys, who had been a leading party to the British-CIA agreement concerning Jagan, cited the strike and general unrest as proof that Jagan could not run the country or offer the stability that the British government required for British Guiana to be granted its independence. (Sandys was the founder, in 1948, of The European Movement, a CIA-funded cold-war organization.)²²

This was, of course, a contrived position. Syndicated American columnist Drew Pearson, writing about the meeting between President Kennedy and British Prime Minister Macmillan in the summer of 1963, stated that “the main thing they agreed on was that the British would refuse to grant independence to Guiana because of a general strike against pro-Communist Prime Minister, Cheddi Jagan. That strike was secretly inspired by a combination of U.S. Central Intelligence money and British intelligence. It gave London the excuse it wanted.”²³

The excuse was used further to justify an amendment to the British Guiana constitution providing for a system of proportional representation in the election, a system that appeared certain to convert Jagan’s majority of legislative seats into a plurality. Subsequently, the British-appointed Governor of British Guiana announced that he would not be bound to call on the leader of the largest party to form a government if it did not have a majority of seats, a procedure in striking contrast to that followed in Great Britain.

When, in October 1964, the Labour Party succeeded the Conservative Party to power in Great Britain, Jagan had hopes that the conspiracy directed against him would be squashed, for several high-ranking Labour leaders had stated publicly, and to Jagan personally, their opposition to the underhanded and anti-democratic policy of their Conservative Party foes. Within days of taking office, however, the Labour Party dashed these hopes.²⁴

“Bowing to United States wishes,” the New York Times disclosed, the Labour Party “ruled out early independence for British Guiana” and was going ahead with the proportional representation elections. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, it was reported, had left the new British Foreign Secretary, Patrick Gordon-Walker, “in no doubt that the United States would resist a rise of British Guiana as an independent Castro-type state”.²⁵ On a previous occasion, Rusk had urged Gordon-Walker’s Conservative predecessor, Lord Home, to suspend the British Guiana constitution again and “revert to direct colonial government”.²⁶

The intensive American lobbying effort against British Guiana (the actual campaign of subversion aside), led Conservative MP and former Colonial Secretary, Iain Macleod, to observe in the House of Commons: “There is an irony which we all recognize in the fact of America urging us all over the world towards colonial freedom except when it approaches her own doorstep.”²⁷

The day before the election of 7 December, a letter appeared in a British Guiana newspaper—a bogus pro-Communist letter, a tactic the CIA has used successfully the world over. The letter was purportedly written by Jagan’s wife Janet to Communist Party members, in which she stated: “We can take comfort in the thought that the PNC [Burnham’s party] will not be able to stay in power long … our communist comrades abroad will continue to help us win eventual total victory.”

Ms. Jagan quickly retorted that she would not be so stupid as to write a letter like that, but, as in all such cases, the disclaimer trailed weakly and too late behind the accusation.²⁸

As expected, Jagan won only a plurality of the legislative seats, 24 of 53. The governor then called upon Forbes Burnham, who had come in second, to form a new government. Burnham had also been named as a terrorist in the British police report referred to earlier, as had several of his new government ministers.

Jagan refused to resign. British Army troops were put on full alert in the capital city of Georgetown. A week later, Her Majesty’s Government waved its hand over a piece of paper, thereby enacting another amendment to the British Guiana constitution and closing a loophole which was allowing Jagan to stall for time. He finally surrendered to the inevitable.²⁹

In 1990, at a conference in New York City, Arthur Schlesinger publicly apologized to Cheddi Jagan, who was also present. Schlesinger said that it was his recommendation to the British that led to the proportional representation tactic. “I felt badly about my role thirty years ago,” the former Kennedy aide admitted. “I think a great injustice was done to Cheddi Jagan.”³⁰

Four years later, with Jagan again president—having won, in 1992, the country’s first free election since he had been ousted—the Clinton administration prepared to nominate a new ambassador to Guyana: William Doherty, Jr. Jagan was flabbergasted and made his feelings known, such that Doherty was dropped from consideration.³¹

When it was time, in 1994, for the US government to declassify its British Guiana documents under the 30-year rule, the State Department and CIA refused to do so, reported the New York Times, because “it is not worth the embarassment”. The newspaper added:

Still-classified documents depict in unusual detail a direct order from the President to unseat Dr. Jagan, say Government officials familiar with the secret papers. Though many Presidents have ordered the CIA to undermine foreign leaders, they say the Jagan papers are a smoking gun: a clear written record, without veiled words or plausible denials, of a President’s command to depose a Prime Minister.³²

“They made a mistake putting Burnham in,” said Janet Jagan looking back at it all. “The regrettable part is that the country went backwards.” And so it had. One of the better-off countries in the region 30 years ago, Guyana in 1994 was among the poorest. Its principal export was people.³³

17. Soviet Union late 1940s to 1960s

From spy planes to book publishing

Information … hundreds of young Americans and émigré Russians gave their lives so that the United States could amass as much information as possible about the Soviet Union … almost any information at all about the land Churchill had described as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”.

There is no evidence, however, that any of the information collected ever saved any lives, or served any other useful purpose for the world. Today, tons of files stuffed with reports, volumes of computer printouts, tapes, photographs, etc., lie in filing cabinets, gathering dust in warehouses in the United States and West Germany. Probably a good part of the material has already been shredded. Much of it has never been looked at, and never will be.

Beginning in the late 1940s, the US military, the CIA and the National Security Agency regularly sent aircraft along the borders of the Soviet Union to collect visual, photographic and electronic data of a military or industrial nature, particularly to do with Soviet missile and nuclear capability. The increasingly sophisticated planes and equipment, as well as satellites, submarines, and electronic listening posts in Turkey and Iran, produced vast amounts of computer input. At times, the planes would unintentionally drift over Soviet territory. At other times, they would do so intentionally in order to photograph a particular target, or to activate radar installations so as to capture their signals, or to evaluate the reaction of Soviet ground defenses against an attack. It was a dangerous game of aerial “chicken” and on many occasions the planes were met by anti-aircraft fire or Soviet fighter planes.

In both 1950 and 1951, an espionage airplane with a crew of ten was shot down, with no survivors. In 1969, a crew of 31 was lost, this time to North Korean fighters over the Sea of Japan. During the intervening years, there were dozens of air incidents involving American aircraft and Communist firepower, arising from hundreds, if not thousands, of espionage flights. Some of the spy planes made it safely back to base (which might be Turkey, Iran, Greece, Pakistan, Japan or Norway) after being attacked, and even hit; others were downed with loss of life or with crew members captured by the Soviets.¹

There has been considerable confusion concerning the number and the fate of US airmen captured by the Soviets after their planes made forced landings or were shot down during the 1950s and ’60s. Russian president Boris Yeltsin stated in 1992 that nine US planes had been shot down in the early 1950s and twelve American survivors had been held prisoner, their ultimate fate not yet discovered. Five months later, Dmitri Volkogonov, former Soviet general and co-chairman of a Russian-US commission investigating the whole question of missing Americans, told a US Senate committee that 730 airmen had been captured on cold war spy flights, their fate likewise unclear.²

The most notable of these incidents was of course the downing of the U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers on 1 May 1960. The ultra high-flying U-2 had been developed because of the vulnerability to being shot down of planes flying at normal altitudes. The disappearance of Powers and his U-2 somewhere in the Soviet Union ensnared the United States government publicly in an entanglement of a false cover story, denials, and amendments to denials. Finally, when the Russians presented Powers and his plane to the world, President Eisenhower had no alternative but to admit the truth. He pointedly added, however, that flights such as the U-2’s were “distasteful but vital”, given the Russian “fetish of secrecy and concealment”.³ One of Eisenhower’s advisers, Emmet John Hughes, was later to observe that it thus took the administration only six days “to transform an unthinkable falsehood into a sovereign right.”⁴

On several occasions, the United States protested to the Soviet Union about Soviet attacks on American planes which were not actually over Soviet territory, but over the Sea of Japan, for example. Though engaged in espionage, such flights, strictly speaking, appear to be acceptable under international law.

The most serious repercussion of the whole U-2 affair was that it doomed to failure the Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit meeting which took place two weeks later in Paris, and upon which so much hope for peace and detente had been placed by people all over the world.

Was the U-2 affair the unfortunate accident of timing that history has made it out to be? Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, US Air Force, Ret. has suggested otherwise. From 1955 to 1963, Prouty served as the liaison between the CIA and the Pentagon on matters concerning military support of “special operations”. In his book, The Secret Team, Prouty suggests that the CIA and certain of the Agency’s colleagues in the Pentagon sabotaged this particular U-2 flight, the last one scheduled before the summit. They did this, presumably, because they did not relish a lessening of cold-war tensions, their raison d’être.

The method employed, Prouty surmises, was remarkably simple. The U-2’s engine needed infusions of liquid hydrogen to maintain the plane’s incredible altitude, which placed it outside the range of Soviet firepower and interceptor aircraft. If the hydrogen container were only partly filled upon takeoff from Turkey, it would be simply a matter of time—calculable to coincide with the plane being over Soviet territory—before the U-2 was forced to descend to a lower altitude. At this point, whether the plane was shot down or Powers bailed out, allowing it to crash, is not certain. The Soviet Union claimed that it had shot down the U-2 at its normal high altitude with a rocket, but this was probably a falsehood born of four years of frustrating failure to shoot a single U-2 from the sky. In any event, the Russians were able to present to the world a partially intact spy plane along with a fully intact spy pilot, complete with all manner of incriminating papers on him, and an unused suicide needle. The presence of identification papers was no oversight, says Prouty: deliberately, “neither pilot nor plane were sanitized on this flight as was required on other flights”.⁵

Powers, in his book, doesn’t discuss the liquid hydrogen at all. He believed his plane was disabled and forced to descend by the shock waves of a Soviet near-miss. But he recounts technical problems with the plane even before the presumed near-miss.⁶

In light of the furor raised by the shooting down of a South Korean commercial airliner by the Soviet Union in 1983, which the Russians claimed was spying, it is interesting to note that Prouty also makes mention of the United States at one time using “a seemingly clean national commercial airline” of an unspecified foreign country “to do some camera spying or other clandestine project”.⁷

To the Russians, the spy planes were more than simply a violation of their air space, and they rejected the notion put forth by the US that the flights were just another form of espionage—“intelligence collection activities are practiced by all countries”, said Washington.⁸ (At the time there had been no indication of Soviet flights over the United States.)⁹ The Russians viewed the flights as particularly provocative because airplanes are a means of conducting warfare, they can be considered as the beginning of hostilities, and may even be carrying bombs. The Russians could not forget that the Nazis had preceded their invasion of the Soviet Union with frequent reconnaissance overflights. Neither could they forget that in April 1958, US planes carrying nuclear bombs had flown over the Arctic in the direction of the USSR due to a false warning signal on American radar. The planes were called back when only two hours flying time separated them from the Soviet Union.¹⁰

No American plane dropped bombs on the Soviet Union but many of them dropped men assigned to carry out hostile missions. The men who fell from the sky were Russians who had emigrated to the West where they were recruited by the CIA and other Western intelligence organizations.

The leading émigré organization was known as National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, or the National Union of Labor (NTS). It was composed largely of two distinct groups: the sons of the Russians who had gone to the West following the revolution, and those Russians who, through circumstance or choice, had wound up in Western Europe at the close of the Second World War. Members of both groups had collaborated with the Nazis during the war. Although NTS was generally classified in the right wing of the various émigré organizations, their collaboration had been motivated more by anti-Stalinism than by pro-Nazi sentiments.

NTS was based primarily in West Germany where, throughout the 1950s, the CIA was the organization’s chief benefactor, often its sole support. At a CIA school set up in Germany, under the imposing name of the Institute for the Study of the USSR, as well as at schools in Great Britain and the United States, the Agency provided NTS members with extensive training before airdropping them into Soviet territory. The men landed on their native soil elaborately equipped, with everything from weapons to collapsible bicycles, frogmen suits, and rubber mats for crossing electrically-charged barbed-wire fences.

The Russians were returned to their homeland for a variety of reasons: to gather intelligence about military and technological installations; commit assassinations; obtain current samples of identification documents; assist Western agents to escape; engage in sabotage, for which they were well trained (methods of derailing trains and wrecking bridges, actions against arms factories and power plants, etc.); or instigate armed political struggle against Communist rule by linking up with resistance movements—a wholly unrealistic goal given the feeble state of such movements, but one which some NTS fanatics swore by.

It will never be known just how many men the CIA infiltrated into the Soviet Union, not only by air but by border crossings and by boat as well; many hundreds at least. As to their fate … the Soviet Union published a book in 1961 called Caught In the Act (= CIA), in which were listed the names and other details of about two dozen infiltrators the Russians claimed to have captured, often almost immediately upon arrival. Some were executed, others received prison sentences, one allegedly was an individual who had taken part in a mass execution of Jews in German-occupied Soviet territory. The book asserts that there were many more caught who were not listed. This may have been a self-serving statement, but it was a relatively simple matter for the Russians to infiltrate the émigrés’ ranks in Western Europe and learn the entire operation.

The CIA, to be sure, was not naive about this practice. The Agency went so far as to torture suspected defectors in Munich—using such esoteric methods as applying turpentine to a man’s testicles or sealing someone in a room and playing Indonesian music at deafening levels until he cracked.¹¹

The Russians further claimed that some of those smuggled in were furnished with special radio beacons to guide planes where to land other agents, and which could also be used to direct US bombers in the event of war.

Some of the émigrés made it back to Western Europe with their bits and pieces of information, or after attempting to carry out some other assignment. Others, provided with a complete set of necessary documents, were instructed to integrate themselves back into Soviet society and become “agents in place”. Still others, caught up in the emotions of being “home”, turned themselves in—once again, “the human factor”, which no amount of training or indoctrination can necessarily circumvent.¹²

No American operation against the Soviet Union would be complete without its propaganda side: bringing the gospel to the heathen, in a myriad of ways that displayed the creativity of the CIA and its team of émigrés.

Novel mechanisms were developed to enable airplanes and balloons to drop anti-Communist literature over the Soviet Union. When the wind was right, countless leaflets and pamphlets were scattered across the land; or quantities of literature were floated downstream in waterproof packages.

Soviet citizens coming to the West were met at every turn by NTS people handing out their newspapers and magazines in Russian and Ukrainian. To facilitate contact, NTS at times engaged in black market operations and opened small shops which catered to Russians at cheap prices. From North Africa to Scandinavia, the CIA network confronted Soviet seamen, tourists, officials, athletes, even Soviet soldiers in East Germany, to present them with the Truth as seen by the “Free World”, as well as to pry information from them, to induce them to defect, or to recruit them as spies. Hotel rooms were searched, phones tapped, bribes offered, or blackmail threatened in attempts to reach these ends. Actions were also undertaken to entrap or provoke Soviet diplomatic personnel so as to cause their expulsion and/or embarrass the Soviet Union.¹³

The propaganda offensive led the US government into the book publishing business. Under a variety of arrangements with American and foreign publishers, distributors, literary agents and authors, the CIA and the United States Information Agency (USIA) produced, subsidized or sponsored “well over a thousand books” by 1967 which were deemed to serve a propaganda need.¹⁴ Many of the books were sold in the United States as well as abroad. None bore any indication of US government involvement. Of some, said the USIA, “We control the things from the very idea down to the final edited manuscript.”¹⁵

Some books were published, and at times written, only after the USIA or the CIA agreed to purchase a large number of copies. There is no way of determining what effect this financial incentive had upon a publisher or author concerning a book’s tone and direction. In some cases, Washington released classified information to an author to assist him or her in writing the book. In 1967, following revelations about CIA domestic activities, this practice purportedly came to an end in the US although it continued abroad. A Senate committee in 1976 stated that during the preceding few years, the CIA had been connected with the publication of some 250 books, mostly in foreign languages.¹⁶ Some of these were most likely later reprinted in the United States.

The actual identity of most of the books, however, is still classified. Among those which have been revealed are: The Dynamics of Soviet Society by Walt Rostow, The New Class by Milovan Djilas, Concise History of the Communist Party by Robert A. Burton, The Foreign Aid Programs of the Soviet Bloc and Communist China by Kurt Muller, In Pursuit of World Order by Richard N. Gardner, Peking and People’s Wars by Major General Sam Griffith, The Yenan Way by Eudocio Ravines, Life and Death in Soviet Russia by Valentin Gonzalez, The Anthill by Suzanne Labin, The Politics of Struggle: The Communist Front and Political Warfare by James D. Atkinson, From Colonialism to Communism by Hoang Van Chi, Why Vietnam? by Frank Trager, and Terror in Vietnam by Jay Mallin. In addition, the CIA financed and distributed throughout the world the animated cartoon film of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.¹⁷.

The most pervasive propaganda penetration of the socialist bloc was by means of the airwaves: Numerous transmitters, tremendous wattage, and often round-the-clock programming brought Radio Liberty and Radio Free Russia to the Soviet Union, Radio Free Europe and Radio in the American Sector to Eastern Europe, and the Voice of America to all parts of the world. With the exception of the last, the stations were ostensibly private organizations financed by “gifts” from American corporations, nickel-and-dime donations from the American public, and other private sources. In actuality, the CIA covertly funded almost all of the costs until 1971; exposure of the Agency’s role in 1967 (although it had been widely assumed long before then) led to Congress eventually instituting open governmental financing of the stations.

The stations served the purpose of filling in some of the gaps and correcting the falsehoods of the Communist media, but could not escape presenting a picture of the world, both East and West, shot through with their own omissions and distortions. Their mission in life was to emphasize whatever could make the Communist regimes look bad. “To many in the CIA,” wrote Victor Marchetti, former senior official of the Agency, “the primary value of the radios was to sow discontent in Eastern Europe and, in the process, to weaken the communist governments”.¹⁸

Many of the Russians who worked for the various stations, which broadcast at length about freedom, democracy and other humanitarian concerns, were later identified by the US Justice Department as members of Hitler’s notorious Einsatzgruppen, which rounded up and killed numerous Jews in the Soviet Union. One of these worthies was Stanislaw Stankievich, under whose command a mass murder of Jews in Byelorussia was carried out in which babies were buried alive with the dead, presumably to save ammunition. Stankievich wound up working for Radio Liberty. German war criminals as well were employed by the CIA in a variety of anti-Soviet operations.¹⁹

By every account, the sundry programs to collect strategic information about the Soviet Union, particularly via infiltration into the country and encountering Soviet nationals in the West, were a singular flop. The information reported was usually trivial, spotty, garbled, or out-of-date. Worse, it was often embellished, if not out-and-out fabricated. Many post-war émigrés in Western Europe made their living in the information business. It was their most saleable commodity. From a real or fictitious meeting with a Soviet citizen they would prepare a report which was often just ordinary facts with a bit of political color added on. At times, as many as four versions of the report would be produced, differing in style and quantity of “facts”; written by four different people, the reports would then be sold separately to US, British, French and West German intelligence agencies. The CIA’s version contained everything in the other three versions, which were eventually transmitted to the Agency by the other countries without their source being revealed. Analysis of all the reports tended to bring the CIA to the conclusion that the NTS was giving them the fullest picture of all, and that the information all tallied. NTS looked good, and the files grew thick.²⁰

The CIA’s Russian files in Washington, meanwhile, approached mountainous proportions with the data acquired from opening mail between the Soviet Union and the United States, a practice begun in the early 1950s and continued at least into the 1970s.²¹ (Said a Post Office counsel in 1979: “If there was no national security mail cover program, the FBI might be inhibited in finding out if a nation was planning war against us.”)²²

Former CIA officer Harry Rositzke, who was closely involved with anti-Soviet operations after the war, later wrote that the primary task of the émigrés infiltrated into the Soviet Union during the early years—and the same could probably be said of the spy-planes—was to provide “early warning” of a Soviet military offensive against the West, an invasion which, in the minds of cold-warriors in the American government, appeared perpetually “imminent”. This apprehension was reminiscent of the alarms sounded following the Russian Revolution (see Introduction to the Original Edition) and similarly flourished despite the fact of a Russia recently devastated by a major war and hardly in a position to undertake a military operation of any such magnitude. Nevertheless, wrote Rositzke, “It was officially estimated that Soviet forces were capable of reaching the English Channel in a matter of weeks. … It was an axiom in Washington that Stalin was plotting war. When would it come?” He pointed out, however, that “The mere existence of radio-equipped agents on Soviet terrain with no early warnings to report had some cautionary value in tempering the war scare among the military estimators at the height of the Cold War.”²³

A secret report of the National Security Resources Board of January 1951 warned: “As things are now going, by 1953 if not 1952, the Soviet aggressors will assume complete control of the world situation.”²⁴

Rositzke, although a committed anti-Communist, recognized the unreality of such thinking. But, as he explained, his was a minority opinion in official Washington:

The facts available even at the time suggested the far greater likelihood that Moscow’s postwar strategy, including the conversion of Eastern Europe into a western buffer, was basically defensive. I argued this thesis with some of the CIA analysts working on Soviet estimates and with some Pentagon audiences, but it was not a popular view at the time. It is nonetheless a simple fact that no scenario was written then, nor has it been written since, to explain why the Russians would want to conquer Western Europe by force or to bomb the United States. Neither action would have contributed in any tangible way to the Soviet national interest and would have hazarded the destruction of the Soviet state. This basic question was never raised, for the Cold War prism created in the minds of the diplomatic and military strategists a clear-cut world of black and white; there were no grays.²⁵

Several years were to pass, Rositzke pointed out, before it became clear to Washington that there were no warnings, early or otherwise, to report. This, however, had no noticeable effect upon the United States’ military build-up or cold-war propaganda.

18. Italy 1950s to 1970s

Supporting the Cardinal’s orphans and techno-fascism

After the multifarious extravaganza staged by the United States in 1948 to exorcise the spectre of Communism that was haunting Italy, the CIA settled in place for the long haul with a less flamboyant but more insidious operation.

A White House memorandum, prepared after the 1953 election, reported that “Neither the Moscow war stick nor the American economic carrot was being visibly brandished over the voters in this election.”¹ Covert funding was the name of the game. Victor Marchetti, former executive assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA, has revealed that in the 1950s the Agency “spent some $20 to $30 million a year, or maybe more, to finance its programs in Italy.” Expenditures in the 1960s, he added, came to about $10 million annually.²

The CIA itself has admitted that between 1948 and 1968, it paid a total of $65,150,000 to the Christian Democrats and other parties, to labor groups, and to a wide variety of other organizations in Italy.³ It also spent an undisclosed amount in support of magazines and book publishers and other means of news and opinion manipulation, such as planting news items in non-American media around the world which cast unfavorable light upon communism, then arranging for these stories to be reprinted in friendly Italian publications.⁴

It is not known when, if ever, the CIA ended its practice of funding anti-Communist groups in Italy. Internal Agency documents of 1972 reveal contributions of some $10 million to political parties, affiliated organizations, and 21 individual candidates in the parliamentary elections of that year.⁵ At least $6 million was passed to political leaders for the June 1976 elections.⁶ And in the 1980s, CIA Director William Casey arranged for Saudi Arabia to pay $2 million to prevent the Communists from achieving electoral gains in Italy.⁷

Moreover, the largest oil company in the United States, Exxon Corp., admitted that between 1963 and 1972 it had made political contributions to the Christian Democrats and several other Italian political parties totaling $46 million to $49 million. Mobil Oil Corp. also contributed to the Italian electoral process to the tune of an average $500,000 a year from 1970 through 1973. There is no report that these corporate payments derived from persuasion by the CIA or the State Department, but it seems rather unlikely that the firms would engage so extravagantly in this unusual sideline with complete spontaneity.⁸

Much of the money given by the CIA to Italian political parties since World War II, said a former high-level US official, ended up “in villas, in vacation homes and in Swiss bank accounts for the politicians themselves.”⁹

A more direct American intervention into the 1976 elections was in the form of propaganda. Inasmuch as political advertising is not allowed on Italian television, the US Ambassador to Switzerland, Nathaniel Davis, arranged for the purchase of large blocks of time on Monte Carlo TV to present a daily “news” commentary by the editorial staff of the Milan newspaper Il Giornale Nuovo, which was closely associated with the CIA. It was this newspaper that, in May 1981, set in motion that particular piece of international disinformation known as “The KGB Plot to Kill the Pope”.

Another Italian newspaper, the Daily American of Rome, for decades the country’s leading English-language paper, was for a long period in the 1950s to the ’70s partly owned and/or managed by the CIA. “We ‘had’ at least one newspaper in every foreign capital at any given time,” the CIA admitted in 1977, referring to papers owned outright or heavily subsidized, or infiltrated sufficiently to have stories printed which were useful to the Agency or suppress those it found detrimental.¹⁰

Ambassador Davis also arranged for news items which had been placed in various newspapers by the Agency to be read on Monte Carlo TV and Swiss TV, both of which were received in Italy. The programs were produced in Milan by Franklin J. Tonnini of the US Diplomatic Corps, and Michael Ledeen, a reporter with Il Giornale Nuovo.¹¹ (Ledeen, an American, was later a consultant to the Reagan administration and a senior fellow at the conservative think-tank of Georgetown University in Washington, the Center for Strategic and International Studies.)

The relentless fight against the Italian Communist Party took some novel twists. One, in the 1950s, was the brainchild of American Ambassador Clare Booth Luce. The celebrated Ms. Luce (playwright and wife of Time magazine publisher Henry Luce) decided to make it known that no US Department of Defense procurement contracts would be awarded to Italian firms whose employees had voted to be represented by the Communist-controlled labor union. In the case of Fiat, this had dramatic results: The Communist union’s share of the vote promptly fell from 60 to 38 percent.¹²

Then there was the case of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, another beneficiary of CIA largesse. The payments made to him reveal something of the Agency’s mechanistic thinking about why people become radicals. It seems that the good Cardinal was promoting orphanages in Italy during the 1950s and 1960s and, says Victor Marchetti, “The thinking was that if such institutions were adequately supported, many young people would be able to live well there and so would not one day fall into Communist hands.”¹³ The Cardinal, as a Monsignor, had been involved with the Vatican’s operation to smuggle Nazis to freedom after World War II. He had a long history of association with Western governments and their intelligence agencies. In 1963, he became Pope Paul VI.¹⁴

In a 1974 interview, Marchetti also spoke of the training provided by the Agency to the Italian security services:

They are trained, for example, to confront disorders and student demonstrations, to prepare dossiers, to make the best possible use of bank data and tax returns of individual citizens, etc. In other words, to watch over the population of their country with the means offered by technology. This is what I call techno-fascism.¹⁵

William Colby, later Director of the CIA, arrived in Italy in 1953 as station chief and devoted the next five years of his life to financing and advising center/right organizations for the express purpose of inducing the Italian people to turn away from the leftist bloc, particularly the Communist Party, and keep it from taking power in the 1958 elections. In his account of that period he justifies this program on the grounds of supporting “democracy” or “center democracy” and preventing Italy from becoming a Soviet satellite. Colby perceived all virtue and truth to be bunched closely around the center of the political spectrum, and the Italian Communist Party to be an extremist organization committed to abolishing democracy and creating a society modeled after the (worst?) excesses of Stalinist Russia. He offers no evidence to support his conclusion about the Communists, presumably because he regards it as self-evident, as much to the reader as to himself. Neither, for that matter, does he explain what was this thing called “democracy” which he so cherishes and which the Communists were so eager to do away with.¹⁶.

Colby comes across as a technocrat who carried out the orders of his “side” and mouthed the party line without serious examination. When Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist, interviewed him in 1976, she remarked at the close of a frustrating conversation, “Had you been born on the other side of the barricade, you would have been a perfect Stalinist.” To which, Colby replied: “I reject that statement. But … well … it might be. No, no. It might not.”¹⁷

American policy makers dealing with Italy in the decades subsequent to Colby’s time there did not suffer any less than he from hardening of the categories. Colby, after all, took pains to point out his liberal leanings. These were men unable to view the Italian Communist Party in its indigenous political context, but only as a “national security” threat to the United States and NATO. Yet, all those years, the party was proceeding along a path revisionist enough to make Lenin turn in his grave if he were in one. The path was marked by billboards proclaiming the “democratic advance to socialism” and the “national road to socialism”, the abandonment of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” and the denunciation of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The party pushed its “national” role as responsible opposition, participated in “the drive for productivity”, affirmed its support for a multiparty system and for Italy remaining in the Common Market and in NATO, and was second to none in its condemnation of any form of terrorism. On many occasions, it was the principal political force in city governments including Rome, Florence and Venice, without any noticeable return to barbarism, and was a de facto participant in the running of the Italian state. (The Socialist Party, a prime target of the United States in the 1948 elections, was a formal member of the government for much of the 1960s to the 1990s.)

In the files of the State Department and the CIA lie any number of internal reports prepared by anonymous analysts testifying to the reality of the Communist Party’s “historic compromise” and the evolution of its estrangement from the Soviet Union known as “Eurocommunism.”

In the face of this, however—in the face of everything—American policy remained rooted in place, fixed in a time that was no longer, and probably never was; a policy that had nothing to do with democracy (by whatever definition) and everything to do with the conviction that a Communist government in Italy would not have been the supremely pliant cold-war partner that successive Christian Democrat regimes were for decades. It would not have been enough for such a government to be independent of Moscow. The problem with a Communist government was that it would probably have tried to adopt the same position towards Washington.

19. Vietnam 1950-1973

The hearts and minds circus

Contrary to repeated statements by Washington officials during the 1960s that the United States did not intervene in Vietnam until, and only because, “North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam”, the US was deeply and continually involved in that woeful land from the year 1950 onwards.

The initial, fateful step was the decision to make large-scale shipments of military equipment (tanks, transport planes, etc.) to the French in Vietnam in the spring and summer of 1950. In April, Secretary of State Dean Acheson had told French officials that the United States government was set against France negotiating with their Northern-based Vietnamese foes, the Vietminh¹ (also spelled Viet Minh or Viet-Minh: the name was short for League for the Independence of Vietnam, a broadly-based nationalist movement led by Communists). Washington was not particularly sympathetic to France’s endeavor to regain control of its colony of 100 years and had vacillated on the issue, but the rise to power of the Communists in China the previous autumn had tipped the scale in favor of supporting the French. To the Truman administration, the prospect of another Communist government in Asia was intolerable. There was a secondary consideration as well at the time: the need to persuade a reluctant France to support American plans to include Germany in West European defense organizations.

During World War II, the Japanese had displaced the French. Upon the defeat of Japan, the Vietminh took power in the North, while the British occupied the South, but soon turned it back to the French. Said French General Jean Leclerc in September 1945: “I didn’t come back to Indochina to give Indochina back to the Indochinese.”² Subsequently, the French emphasized that they were fighting for the “free world” against communism, a claim made in no small part to persuade the United States to increase its aid to them.

American bombers, military advisers and technicians by the hundreds were to follow the first aid shipments, and over the next few years direct American military aid to the French war effort ran to about a billion dollars a year. By 1954, the authorized aid had reached the sum of $1.4 billion and constituted 78 percent of the French budget for the war.³

The extensive written history of the American role in Indochina produced by the Defense Department, later to be known as “The Pentagon Papers”, concluded that the decision to provide aid to France “directly involved” the United States in Vietnam and “set” the course for future American policy.⁴

There had been another path open. In 1945 and 1946, Vietminh leader Ho Chi Minh had written at least eight letters to President Truman and the State Department asking for America’s help in winning Vietnamese independence from the French. He wrote that world peace was being endangered by French efforts to reconquer Indochina and he requested that the “four powers” (US, USSR, China, and Great Britain) intervene in order to mediate a fair settlement and bring the Indochinese issue before the United Nations.⁵ (This was a remarkable repeat of history. In 1919, following the First World War, Ho Chi Minh had appealed to US Secretary of State Robert Lansing for America’s help in achieving basic civil liberties and an improvement in the living conditions for the colonial subjects of French Indochina. This plea, too, was ignored.)⁶

Despite the fact that Ho Chi Minh and his followers had worked closely with the American OSS (the forerunner of the CIA) during the recently ended world war, while the French authorities in Indochina had collaborated with the Japanese, the United States failed to answer any of the letters, did not reveal that it had received them, and eventually sided with the French. In 1950, part of the publicly stated rationale for the American position was that Ho Chi Minh was not really a “genuine nationalist” but rather a tool of “international communism”, a conclusion that could be reached only by deliberately ignoring the totality of his life’s work. He and the Vietminh had, in fact, been long-time admirers of the United States. Ho trusted the US more than he did the Soviet Union and reportedly had a picture of George Washington and a copy of the American Declaration of Independence on his desk. According to a former OSS officer, Ho sought his advice on framing the Vietminh’s own declaration of independence. The actual declaration of 1945 begins with the familiar “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”⁷

But it was the French who were to receive America’s blessing. Ho Chi Minh was, after all, some kind of communist.

The United States viewed the French struggle in Vietnam and their own concurrent intervention in Korea as two links in the chain aimed at “containing” China. Washington was adamantly opposed to the French negotiating an end to the war which would leave the Vietminh in power, in the northern part of the country, and, at the same time, free the Chinese to concentrate exclusively on their Korean border. In 1952, the US exerted strong pressure upon France not to pursue peace feelers extended by the Vietminh, and a French delegation, scheduled to meet with Vietminh negotiators in Burma, was hastily recalled to Paris.

Bernard Fall, the renowned French scholar on Indochina, believed that the canceled negotiations “could perhaps have brought about a cease-fire on a far more acceptable basis” for the French “than the one obtained two years later in the shadow of crushing military defeat”.⁸

Subsequently, to keep the French from negotiating with the Vietminh, the United States used the threat of a cessation of their substantial economic and military aid.⁹ (This prompted a French newspaper to comment that “the Indochina War has become France’s number one dollar-earning export”.)¹⁰

In November 1953, the omnipresent CIA airline, CAT, helped the French air force airlift 16,000 men into a fortified base the French had established in a valley in the North called Dien Bien Phu. When the garrison was later surrounded and cut off by the Vietminh, CAT pilots, flying US Air Force C-119s, often through anti-aircraft fire, delivered supplies to the beleaguered French forces, in this their Waterloo.¹¹

By 1954, the New York Times could report that “The French Air Force is now almost entirely equipped with American planes.”¹² The United States had also constructed a number of airfields, ports and highways in Indochina to facilitate the war effort, some of which American forces were to make use of in their later wars in that area.

In April 1954, when a French military defeat was apparent and negotiations at Geneva were scheduled, the National Security Council urged President Eisenhower “to inform Paris that French acquiescence in a Communist take-over of Indochina would bear on its status as one of the Big Three” and that “U.S. aid to France would automatically cease”.¹³

A Council paper recommended that “It be U.S. policy to accept nothing short of a military victory in Indo-China” and that the “U.S. actively oppose any negotiated settlements in Indo-China at Geneva”. The Council stated further that, if necessary, the US should consider continuing the war without French participation.¹⁴

The Eisenhower administration had for some time very seriously considered committing American combat troops to Vietnam. Apparently this move was not made only because of uncertainty about congressional approval and the refusal of other countries to send even a token force, as they had done in Korea, to remove the appearance of a purely American operation.¹⁵ “We are confronted by an unfortunate fact,” lamented Secretary of State John Foster Dulles at a 1954 Cabinet meeting. “Most of the countries of the world do not share our view that Communist control of any government anywhere is in itself a danger and a threat.”¹⁶

In May, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Arthur Radford, sent a memorandum to Defense Secretary Charles Wilson on “Studies With Respect to Possible U.S. Actions Regarding Indochina” which stated that “The employment of atomic weapons is contemplated in the event that such course appears militarily advantageous.”¹⁷ (General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s director of intelligence, put it a bit more poetically when he advocated the use of atomic bombs “to create a belt of scorched earth across the avenues of communism to block the Asiatic hordes”.)¹⁸

By this time, two American aircraft carriers equipped with atomic weapons had been ordered into the Gulf of Tonkin, in the North of Vietnam,¹⁹ and Dulles is, in fact, reported to have offered his French counterpart, Georges Bidault, atomic bombs to save Dien Bien Phu. Bidault was obliged to point out to Dulles that the use of atomic bombs in a war of such close armed conflict would destroy the French troops as well as the Vietminh.²⁰

Dulles regularly denounced China, in the ultra-sanctimonious manner he was known for, for assisting the Vietminh, as if the Chinese had no cause or right to be alarmed about an anti-communist military crusade taking place scant miles from their border. As the Geneva conference approached, a CIA propaganda team in Singapore began to disseminate fabricated news items to advance the idea that “the Chinese were giving full armed support to the Viet-Minh” and to “identify” the Viet-Minh “with the world Communist movement”. The CIA believed that such stories would strengthen the non-Communist side at the Geneva talks.²¹

Joseph Burkholder Smith was a CIA officer in Singapore. His “press asset” was one Li Huan Li, an experienced local journalist. It is instructive to note the method employed in the creation and dissemination of one such news report about the Chinese. After Smith and Li had made up their story, Li attended the regular press conference held by the British High Commissioner in Singapore, Malcolm MacDonald. At the conference, Li mentioned the report and asked the Commissioner if he had any comment. As expected, MacDonald had nothing to say about it one way or the other. The result was the following news item:

MORE CHINESE SUPPLIES AND TROOPS SPOTTED EN ROUTE TO HAIPHONG. At the press conference of the British High Commissioner for Southeast Asia today, reports of the sightings of Chinese naval vessels and supply ships in the Tonkin Gulf en route from Hainan to Haiphong were again mentioned.

According to these reports, the most recent of many similar sightings occurred one week ago when a convoy of ten ships were spotted. Among them were two armed Chinese naval vessels indicating that the convoy consisted of troops as well as arms and supplies.

High Commissioner Malcolm MacDonald would not elaborate further about these reports.²²

The story was put onto a wire service in the morning, and by the evening had gone around the world, coming back to Singapore on the European relay to Asia.

The Geneva conference, on 20 July 1954, put a formal end to the war in Vietnam. The United States was alone in refusing to sign the Final Declaration, purely because it was peeved at the negotiated settlement, which precluded any further military effort to defeat the Vietminh. There had been ample indication of American displeasure with the whole process well before the end of the conference. Two weeks earlier, for example, President Eisenhower had declared at a news conference: “I will not be a party to any treaty that makes anybody a slave; now that is all there is to it.”²³ But the US did issue a “unilateral declaration” in which it agreed to “refrain from the threat or the use of force to disturb” the accords.²⁴

The letter and the spirit of the ceasefire agreement and the Final Declaration looked forward to a Vietnam free from any military presence other than Vietnamese or French, and free from any aggressive operations. However, while the conference was still in session in June, the United States began assembling a paramilitary team inside Vietnam. By August, only days after the close of the conference, the team was in place. Under the direction of CIA leading-light Edward Lansdale, fresh from his success in the Philippines, a campaign of military and psychological warfare was carried out against the Vietminh. (Lansdale’s activities in Vietnam were later enshrined in two semi-fictional works, The Ugly American and The Quiet American.) Over the next six months, Lansdale’s clandestine team executed such operations as the following:

•  Encouraged the migration of Vietnamese from the North to the South through “an extremely intensive, well-coordinated, and, in terms of its objective, very successful … psychological warfare operation. Propaganda slogans and leaflets appealed to the devout Catholics with such themes as ‘Christ has gone to the South’ and the ‘Virgin Mary has departed from the North’.”²⁵

•  Distributed other bogus leaflets, supposedly put out by the Vietminh, to instill trepidation in the minds of people in the North about how life would be under Communist rule. The following day, refugee registration to move South tripled. (The exodus of Vietnamese to the South during the “regrouping” period that followed the Geneva Accords was often cited by American officials in the 1960s, as well as earlier, as proof of the fact that the people did not want to live under communism—“They voted with their feet” was the catchphrase.) Still other “Vietminh” leaflets were aimed at discouraging people in the South from returning to the North.

•  Infiltrated paramilitary forces into the North under the guise of individuals choosing to live there.

•  Contaminated the oil supply of the bus company in Hanoi so as to lead to a gradual wreckage of the bus engines.

•  Took “the first actions for delayed sabotage of the railroad (which required teamwork with a CIA special technical team in Japan who performed their part brilliantly).”

•  Instigated a rumor campaign to stir up hatred of the Chinese, with the usual stories of rapes.

•  Created and distributed an almanac of astrological predictions carefully designed to play on Vietnamese fears and superstitions and undermine life in the North while making the future of the South appear more attractive.

•  Published and circulated anti-Communist articles and “news” reports in newspapers and leaflets.

•  Attempted, unsuccessfully, to destroy the largest printing establishment in the North because it intended to remain in Hanoi and do business with the Vietminh.

•  Laid some of the foundation for the future American war in Vietnam by: sending selected Vietnamese to US Pacific bases for guerrilla training; training the armed forces of the South who had fought with the French; creating various military support facilities in the Philippines; smuggling into Vietnam large quantities of arms and military equipment to be stored in hidden locations; developing plans for the “pacification of Vietminh and dissident areas”.²⁶

At the same time, the United States began an economic boycott against the North Vietnamese and threatened to blacklist French firms which were doing business with them.²⁷

Another development during this period that had very profound consequences for the coming tragedy was the cancelation of the elections that would have united North and South Vietnam as one nation.

The Geneva Accords specified that elections under international supervision were to be held in July 1956, with “consultations” to prepare for them to be held “from 20 July 1955 onwards”. The United States, in its unilateral declaration, had reiterated this pledge: “In the case of nations now divided against their will, we shall continue to seek to achieve unity through free elections supervised by the United Nations to insure that they are conducted fairly.”

The elections were never held. On 16 July 1955, four days before the consultations were scheduled to begin, President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam issued a statement that made it clear that he had no intention of engaging in the consultations, much less the elections.²⁸ Three days later, North Vietnam sent Diem a formal note calling for the talks, but Diem remained firm in his position. Efforts by France and Great Britain to persuade Diem to begin the talks were to no avail.

The reason for Diem’s intransigence is well known. He, like President Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, knew that Ho Chi Minh would be a certain winner of any national elections. A CIA National Intelligence Estimate in the autumn concluded that the Diem regime (which Lansdale himself called “fascistic”)²⁹ “almost certainly would not be able to defeat the communists in country-wide elections.”³⁰ Later, Eisenhower was to write in his memoirs: “I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai.”³¹ (The latter was Diem’s predecessor.)

The study of the Pentagon papers cited “State Department cables and National Security Council memorandums indicating that the Eisenhower Administration wished to postpone the elections as long as possible and communicated its feelings to Mr. Diem.”³²

This was support that Diem could not have done without, for, as the Pentagon historians point out: “Without the threat of U.S. intervention, South Vietnam could not have refused to even discuss the elections called for in 1956 under the Geneva settlement without being immediately overrun by the Vietminh armies.”³³

The public statements of Diem and Dulles spoke only of their concern that the elections would not be “free”, which served to obscure the fact that Ho Chi Minh did not need to resort to fraud in order to win, as well as ignoring the announcements of both the United Nations and the International Control Commission (set up in Vietnam by the Geneva Accords) that they were ready to supervise the elections.

In any event, Diem’s commitment to free elections may be surmised from a referendum he held in October 1955 in South Vietnam to invest his regime with a semblance of legality, in which he received 98.2 percent of the vote. Life magazine later reported that Diem’s American advisers had told him that a 60 percent margin would be quite sufficient and would look better, “but Diem insisted on 98 percent”.³⁴

With the elections canceled, the nation still divided, and Diem with his “mandate” free to continue his heavy, tyrannical rule, the turn to violence in South Vietnam became inevitable.

As if in knowledge of and preparation for this, the United States sent 350 additional military men to Saigon in May 1956, an “example of the U.S. ignoring” the Geneva Accords, stated the Pentagon study.³⁵ Shortly afterwards, Dulles confided to a colleague: “We have a clean base there now, without a taint of colonialism. Dienbienphu was a blessing in disguise.”³⁶

The Later Phase

“If you grab ’em by the balls, the hearts and minds will follow” … “Give us your hearts and minds or we’ll burn down your goddamn village” … the end result of America’s anti-communist policy in Vietnam; also its beginning and its middle.

There was little serious effort to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, even less chance of success, for the price of success was social change, of the kind that Diem was unwilling to accept in Vietnam, the kind the United States was not willing to accept anywhere in the Third World. If Washington had been willing to accept such change—which they have always routinely and disparagingly dismissed as “socialist”—there would have been no need to cancel the elections or to support Diem, no need for intervention in the first place. There was, consequently, no way the United States could avoid being seen by the people of Vietnam as other than the newest imperialist occupiers, following in the footsteps of first the Chinese, then the French, then the Japanese, then the French again.

We will not go into a detailed recounting of all the horrors, all the deceptions, the destruction of a society, the panorama of absurdities and ironies; only a selection, a montage, lest we forget.

To the men who walked the corridors of power in Washington, to the military men in the field, Indochina—nay, southeast Asia—was a single, large battlefield.

Troops of South Vietnam were used in Laos and Cambodia.

Troops of Thailand were used in Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam.

Thailand and the Philippines were used as bases from which to bomb the three countries of Indochina.

Military officers in South Vietnam, Thailand, and Taiwan were trained at American schools in the Philippines.

CIA-supported forces carried out incursions and invasions into China from Laos, Burma and Taiwan.

When there was a (much-publicized) pause in the bombing of North Vietnam, more American planes were thus available to increase the bombing of Laos.

And so it went.

From 1955 to 1959, Michigan State University, under a US government contract, conducted a covert police training program for the South Vietnamese. With the full knowledge of certain MSU officials, five CIA operatives were concealed in the staff of the program and carried on the university’s payroll as its employees. By the terms of a 1957 law, drawn up by the MSU group, every Vietnamese 15 years and older was required to register with the government and carry ID cards. Anyone caught without the proper identification was considered as a National Liberation Front (Vietcong) suspect and subject to imprisonment or worse. At the time of registration, a full set of fingerprints was obtained and information about the person’s political beliefs was recorded.³⁷

When popular resistance to Ngo Dinh Diem reached the level where he was more of a liability than an asset he was sacrificed. On 1 November 1963, some of Diem’s generals overthrew him and then murdered both him and his brother after they had surrendered. The coup, wrote Time magazine, “was planned with the knowledge of Dean Rusk and Averell Harriman at the State Department, Robert S. McNamara and Roswell Gilpatrick at the Defense Department and the late Edward R. Murrow at the U.S Information Agency.”³⁸

Evidently Washington had not planned on assassinations accompanying the coup, but as General Maxwell Taylor, President Kennedy’s principal military adviser, has observed: “The execution of a coup is not like organizing a tea party; it’s a very dangerous business. So I didn’t think we had any right to be surprised … when Diem and his brother were murdered.”³⁹

Donald Duncan was a member of the Green Berets in Vietnam. He has written about his training, part of which was called “countermeasures to hostile interrogation”, ostensibly how Americans captured by Communists could deal with being tortured. Translations of an alleged Soviet interrogation manual were handed out to the class. The manual described in detail such methods as the “Airplane Ride” (hanging by the thumbs), the Cold-Hot Water Treatment, and the lowering of a man’s testicles into a jeweler’s vise, while the instructor, a Sergeant Lacey, explained some variations of these methods. Then a student had a question:

“Sergeant Lacey, the name of this class is ‘Countermeasures to Hostile Interrogation,’ but you have spent most of the period telling us there are no countermeasures. If this is true, then the only reason for teaching them [the torture methods], it seems to me, is so that we’ll know how to use them. Are you suggesting we use these methods?”

The class laughs, and Lacey looks down at the floor creating a dramatic pause. When he raises his head, his face is solemn but his deep set eyes are dancing. “We can’t tell you that, Sergeant Harrison. The Mothers of America wouldn’t approve.” The class bursts into laughter at the sarcastic cynicism. “Furthermore,” a conspiratorial wink, “we will deny that any such thing is taught or intended.”⁴⁰

At the US Navy’s schools in San Diego and Maine during the 1960s and 1970s, the course had a different name. There, the students were supposedly learning about methods of “survival, evasion, resistance and escape” which they could use as prisoners of war. There was in the course something of survival in a desert, where students were forced to eat lizards, but the naval officers and cadets were also subjected to beatings, jarring judo flips, “tiger cages”—hooded and placed in a 16-cubic-foot box for 22 hours with a coffee can for their excrement—and a torture device called the “water board”: the subject strapped to an inclined board, head downward, a towel placed over his face, and cold water poured over the towel; he would choke, gag, retch and gurgle as he experienced the sensation of drowning, just as was done to Vietcong prisoners in Vietnam, along with the tiger cages.

A former student, Navy pilot Lt. Wendell Richard Young, claimed that his back was broken during the course and that students were tortured into spitting, urinating and defecating on the American flag, masturbating before guards, and, on one occasion, engaging in sex with an instructor.⁴¹

Fabrications were required to support the varied State Department claims about the nature of the war and the reasons for the American military actions. A former CIA officer, Philip Liechty, stated in 1982 that in the early 1960s he saw written plans to take large amounts of Communist-bloc arms, load them on a Vietnamese boat, fake a battle in which the boat would be sunk in shallow water, then call in Western reporters to see the captured weapons as proof of outside aid to the Vietcong. This is precisely what occurred in 1965. The State Department’s white paper, “Aggression From the North”, which came out at the end of February 1965, relates that a “suspicious vessel” was “sunk in shallow water” off the coast of South Vietnam on 16 February 1965 after an attack by South Vietnamese forces. The boat was reported to contain at least 100 tons of military supplies “almost all of communist origin, largely from Communist China and Czechoslovakia as well as North Vietnam”. The white paper noted that “Representatives of the free press visited the sunken North Vietnamese ship and viewed its cargo.”

Liechty said that he had also seen documents involving an elaborate operation to print large numbers of postage stamps showing a Vietnamese shooting down a US Army helicopter. The former CIA officer stated that this was a highly professional job and that the very professionalism required to produce the multicolor stamps was meant to indicate that they were produced by the North Vietnamese because the Vietcong would not have had the capabilities. Liechty claimed that letters in Vietnamese were then written and mailed all over the world with the stamp on them “and the CIA made sure journalists would get hold of them”. Life magazine, in its issue of 26 February 1965, did in fact feature a full color blow-up of the stamp on its cover, referring to it as a “North Vietnam stamp”. This was just two days before the State Department’s white paper appeared.

In reporting Liechty’s statements, the Washington Post noted:

Publication of the white paper turned out to be a key event in documenting the support of North Vietnam and other communist countries in the fighting in the South and in preparing American public opinion for what was to follow very soon: the large-scale commitment of U.S. forces to the fighting.⁴²

Perhaps the most significant fabrication was that of the alleged attack in August 1964 on two US destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf off the coast of North Vietnam. President Johnson used the incident to induce a resolution from Congress to take “all necessary steps, including the use of armed forces” to prevent further North Vietnamese aggression. It was a blanket endorsement for escalation heaped upon escalation. Serious enough doubts were raised at the time about the reality of the attack, but over the years other information has come to light which has left the official story in tatters.⁴³

And probably the silliest fabrication: the 1966 US Army training film, “County Fair”, in which the sinister Vietcong are shown in a jungle clearing heating gasoline and soap bars, concocting a vicious communist invention called napalm.⁴⁴

The Johnson administration’s method of minimizing public concern about escalation of the war, as seen by a psychiatrist:

First step: Highly alarming rumors about escalation are “leaked”.

Second step: The President officially and dramatically sets the anxieties to rest by announcing a much more moderate rate of escalation, and accompanies this announcement with assurances of the Government’s peaceful intentions.

Third step: After the general sigh of relief, the originally rumored escalation is gradually put into effect.

The succession of “leaks”, denials of leaks, and denials of denials thoroughly confuses the individual. He is left bewildered, helpless, apathetic.

The end result is that the people find themselves deeply committed to large-scale war, without being able to tell how it came about, when and how it all began.⁴⁵

Senator Stephen Young of Ohio was reported to have said that while he was in Vietnam he was told by the CIA that the Agency disguised people as Vietcong to commit atrocities, including murder and rape, so as to discredit the Communists. After the report caused a flurry in Washington, Young said that he had been misquoted, that the CIA was not the source of the story. Congressman Cornelius Gallagher, who had accompanied Young on the trip, suggested that it “may well be that he [Young] spoke to a Vietcong disguised as a CIA man”.⁴⁶ From a speech by Carl Oglesby, President of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), during the March on Washington, 27 November 1965:

The original commitment in Vietnam was made by President Truman, a mainstream liberal. It was seconded by President Eisenhower, a moderate liberal. It was intensified by the late President Kennedy, a flaming liberal. Think of the men who now engineer that war—those who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President [Johnson] himself. They are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They are all liberals.⁴⁷

The International Communist Conspiracy in action:

During the heat of the fighting in 1966-67, the Soviet Union sold to the United States over $2 million worth of magnesium—a metal vital in military aircraft production—when there was a shortage of it in the United States. This occurred at a time when Washington maintained an embargo on supplying Communist nations with certain alloys of the same metal.⁴⁸ At about the same time, China sold several thousand tons of steel to the United States in South Vietnam for use in the construction of new Air and Army bases when no one else could meet the American military’s urgent need: this, while Washington maintained a boycott on all Chinese products; even wigs imported into the US from Hong Kong had to be accompanied by a certificate of origin stating that they contained no Chinese hair. The sale of steel may have been only the tip of the iceberg of Chinese sales to the United States during the war.⁴⁹

In a visit to China in January 1972, White House envoy Alexander Haig met with Premier Chou En-lai. Years later, Haig wrote: “Though he never stated the case in so many words, I reported to President Nixon that the import of what Zhou [Chou] said to me was: don’t lose in Vietnam; don’t withdraw from Southeast Asia.”⁵⁰

In 1975, a Senate investigating committee began looking into allegations that the CIA had counterfeited American money during the Vietnam war to finance secret operations.⁵¹

“Two Vietcong prisoners were interrogated on an airplane flying toward Saigon. The first refused to answer questions and was thrown out of the airplane at 3,000 feet. The second immediately answered all the questions. But he, too, was thrown out.” Variations of the water torture were also used to loosen tongues or simply to torment. “Other techniques, usually designed to force onlooking prisoners to talk, involve cutting off the fingers, ears, fingernails or sexual organs of another prisoner.”⁵²

It is not clear whether these particular Vietnamese were actual prisoners of war, i.e., captured in combat, or whether they were amongst the many thousands of civilians arrested as part of the infamous Phoenix Program. Phoenix was the inevitable consequence of fighting a native population: You never knew who was friend, who was enemy. Anyone was a potential informer, bomb-thrower, or assassin. Safety demanded that, unless proved otherwise, everyone was to be regarded as the enemy, part of what the CIA called the Vietcong infrastructure (VCI).

In 1971, CIA officer William Colby, the director of Phoenix, was asked by a congressman: “Are you certain that we know a member of the VCI from a loyal member of the South Vietnam citizenry?”

“No, Mr. Congressman,” replied Colby, “I am not.”⁵³

Phoenix was a coordinated effort of the United States and South Vietnam to wipe out this infrastructure. Under the program, Vietnamese citizens were rounded up and jailed, often in tiger cages, often tortured, often killed, either in the process of being arrested or subsequently. By Colby’s records, during the period between early 1968 and May 1971, 20,587 alleged Vietcong cadres met their death as a result of the Phoenix Program.⁵⁴ A similar program, under different names, had existed since 1965 and been run by the United States alone.⁵⁵

Colby claims that more than 85 percent of the 20,587 figure were actually killed in military combat and only identified afterward as members of the VCI.⁵⁶ It strains credulity, however, to think that the tens of thousands of Vietcong killed in combat during this period were picked over, body by body, on the battlefield, for identification and that their connection to the VCI was established.

The South Vietnam government credited Phoenix with 40,994 VCI deaths.⁵⁷ The true figure will probably never be known.

A former US military-intelligence officer in Vietnam, K. Barton Osborn, testified before a House Committee that suspects caught by Phoenix were interrogated in helicopters and sometimes pushed out. He also spoke of the use of electric shock torture and the insertion into the ear of a six-inch dowel which was tapped through the brain until the victim died.⁵⁸

Osborn’s colleague, Michael J. Uhl, testified that most suspects were captured during sweeping tactical raids and that all persons detained were classified as Vietcong. None of those held for questioning, said Osborn, had ever lived through the process.⁵⁹

Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, was the man most responsible for “giving, controlling and managing the war news from Vietnam”. One day in July 1965, Sylvester told American journalists that they had a patriotic duty to disseminate only information that made the United States look good. When one of the newsmen exclaimed: “Surely, Arthur, you don’t expect the American press to be handmaidens of government,” Sylvester replied, “That’s exactly what I expect,” adding: “Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid. Did you hear that?—stupid.” And when a correspondent for a New York paper began a question, he was interrupted by Sylvester who said: “Aw, come on. What does someone in New York care about the war in Vietnam?”⁶⁰

Meanwhile, hundreds of US servicemen in Asia and Europe were being swindled by phoney American auto dealers who turned up to take down-payments on cars which they never delivered. Commented an Illinois congressman: “We cannot expect our servicemen to fight to protect the free enterprise system if the very system which they fight to protect takes advantage of them.”⁶¹

On 27 January 1973, in Paris, the United States signed the “Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam”. Among the principles to which the United States agreed was the one stated in Article 21: “In pursuance of its traditional policy, the United States will contribute to healing the wounds of war and to postwar reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam [North Vietnam] and throughout Indochina.”

Five days later, 1 February, President Nixon sent a message to the Prime Minister of North Vietnam reiterating and expanding upon this pledge. The first two principles put forth in the President’s message were:

(1) The Government of the United States of America will contribute to postwar reconstruction in North Vietnam without any political conditions. (2) Preliminary United States studies indicate that the appropriate programs for the United States contribution to postwar reconstruction will fall in the range of $3.25 billion of grant aid over 5 years. Other forms of aid will be agreed upon between the two parties. This estimate is subject to revision and to detailed discussion between the Government of the United States and the Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.⁶²

For the next two decades, the only aid given to any Vietnamese people by the United States was to those who left Vietnam and those who were infiltrated back in to stir up trouble. At the same time, the US imposed a complete embargo on trade and assistance to the country, which lasted until 1994.

Are the victims of the Vietnam War also to be found in generations yet unborn? Tens of millions of gallons of herbicides were unleashed over the country; included in this were quantities of dioxin, which has been called the most toxic man-made substance known; three ounces of dioxin, it is claimed, in the New York City water supply could wipe out the entire populace. Studies in Vietnam since the war have pointed to abnormally high rates of cancers, particularly of the liver, chromosomal damage, birth defects, long-lasting neurological disorders, etc. in the heavily-sprayed areas. Other victims were Americans. Thousands of Vietnam veterans fought for years to receive disability compensation, claiming irreparable damage from simply handling the toxic herbicides.

After the Second World War, the International Military Tribunal convened at Nuremberg, Germany. Created by the victorious Allies, the Tribunal sentenced to prison or execution numerous Nazis who pleaded that they had been “only following orders”. In an opinion handed down by the Tribunal, it declared that “the very essence of the [Tribunal’s] Charter is that individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience imposed by the individual state.”

During the Vietnam war, a number of young Americans refused military service on the grounds that the United States was committing war crimes in Vietnam and that if they took part in the war they too, under the principles laid down at Nuremberg, would be guilty of war crimes.

One of the most prominent of these cases was that of David Mitchell of Connecticut. At Mitchell’s trial in September 1965, Judge William Timbers dismissed his defense as “tommyrot” and “degenerate subversion”, and found the Nuremberg principles to be “irrelevant” to the case. Mitchell was sentenced to prison. Conservative columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., not celebrated as a champion of draft resistance, noted shortly afterward:

I am glad I didn’t have Judge Timbers’ job. Oh, I could have scolded Mr. Mitchell along with the best of them. But I’d have to cough and wheeze and clear my throat during that passage in my catechism at which I explained to Mr. Mitchell wherein the Nuremberg Doctrine was obviously not at his disposal.⁶³

In 1971, Telford Taylor, the chief United States prosecutor at Nuremberg, suggested rather strongly that General William Westmoreland and high officials of the Johnson administration such as Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk could be found guilty of war crimes under criteria established at Nuremberg.⁶⁴ Yet every American court and judge, when confronted by the Nuremberg defense, dismissed it without according it any serious consideration whatsoever.

The West has never been allowed to forget the Nazi holocaust. For 55 years there has been a continuous outpouring of histories, memoirs, novels, feature films, documentaries, television series … played and replayed in every Western language; there have been museums, memorial sculptures, photo exhibitions, remembrance ceremonies … Never Again! But who hears the voice of the Vietnamese peasant? Who has access to the writings of the Vietnamese intellectual? What was the fate of the Vietnamese Anne Frank? Where, asks the young American, is Vietnam?

20. Cambodia 1955-1973

Prince Sihanouk walks the high-wire of neutralism

John Foster Dulles had called on me in his capacity as Secretary of State, and he had exhausted every argument to persuade me to place Cambodia under the protection of the South-East Asia Treaty Organization. I refused … I considered SEATO an aggressive military alliance directed against neighbors whose ideology I did not share but with whom Cambodia had no quarrel. I had made all this quite clear to John Foster, an acidy, arrogant man, but his brother [CIA Director Allen Dulles] soon turned up with a briefcase full of documents “proving” that Cambodia was about to fall victim to “communist aggression” and that the only way to save the country, the monarchy and myself was to accept the protection of SEATO. The “proofs” did not coincide with my own information, and I replied to Allen Dulles as I had replied to John Foster: Cambodia wanted no part of SEATO. We would look after ourselves as neutrals and Buddhists. There was nothing for the secret service chief to do but pack up his dubious documents and leave.

Prince Norodom Sihanouk, in his memoirs¹

The visits of the Brothers Dulles in 1955 appear to have been the opening salvos in a campaign of extraordinary measures aimed at pressuring the charismatic Cambodian leader into aligning his nation with the West and joining The Holy War Against Communism. The coercion continued intermittently until 1970 when Sihanouk was finally overthrown in an American-backed coup and the United States invaded Cambodia.

In March 1956, after Sihanouk had visited Peking and criticized SEATO, the two countries which sandwich Cambodia—Thailand and South Vietnam, both heavily dependent upon and allied with the United States—suddenly closed their borders. It was a serious move, for the bulk of Cambodia’s traffic with the outside world at that time passed either along the Mekong River through South Vietnam or by railway through Thailand.

The danger to the tiny kingdom was heightened by repeated military provocations. Thai troops invaded Cambodian territory and CIA-financed irregulars began to make commando raids from South Vietnam. Deep intrusions were made into Cambodian air space by planes based in the two countries.

To Sihanouk, these actions “looked more and more like preliminary softening-up probes” for his overthrow. He chose to thrust matters out into the open. At a press conference he scolded the US, defended Cambodia’s policy of neutrality, and announced that the whole question would be on the agenda of his party’s upcoming national congress. There was the implication that Cambodia would turn to the socialist bloc for aid.

The United States appeared to retreat in the face of this unorthodox public diplomacy. The State Department sent a couple of rather conciliatory messages which nullified a threatened cut-off of certain economic aid and included this remarkable piece of altruism: “The only aim of American policy to Cambodia is to help her strengthen and defend her independence.” Two days before the national congress convened, Thailand and South Vietnam opened their frontiers. The local disputes which the two countries had cited as the reasons for the blockade had not been resolved at all.²

The measures taken against Cambodia were counter-productive. Not only did Sihanouk continue to attack SEATO, but he established relations with the Soviet Union and Poland and accepted aid from China. He praised the latter lavishly for treating Cambodia as an equal and for providing aid without all the strings which, he felt, came attached to American aid.³

Such behavior should not obscure the fact that Sihanouk was as genuine a neutralist as one could be in such a highly polarized region of the world in the midst of the cold war. He did not shy away from denouncing China, North Vietnam or communism on a number of occasions when he felt that Cambodia’s security or neutrality was being threatened. “I foresee perfectly well,” he said at one time, “the collapse of an independent and neutral Cambodia after the complete triumph of Communism in Laos and South Vietnam.”⁴

In May 1957, a National Security Council (NSC) paper acknowledged that “the United States has been unable to influence Cambodia in the direction of a stable [i.e., pro-Western] government and non-involvement in the communist bloc.”⁵

The following year, five battalions of Saigon troops, supported by aircraft, crossed the Cambodian border again, penetrated to a depth of almost 10 miles and began putting up new boundary markers. Sihanouk’s impulse was to try and repel the invaders but, to his amazement, he was informed by the American Ambassador to Cambodia, Carl Strom, that US military aid was provided exclusively for the purpose of opposing “communist aggression” and in no case could be used against an American ally. The ambassador cautioned that if a single bullet were fired at the South Vietnamese or a single US-supplied truck used to transport Cambodian troops to a military confrontation with them, this would constitute grounds for canceling aid.⁶

Ambassador Strom was called back to Washington, told that Sihanouk would now have to go and that US aid would be cut off to precipitate his fall. Strom, however, did not think that this was the wisest move to make at that point and was able to convince the State Department to hold off for the time being.⁷

William Shawcross, in his elaborately-researched book, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, notes that “NSC papers of the period cited in the Pentagon papers confirm that Washington saw Thai and Vietnamese pressure across the borders as one of the principal weapons to be used in an effort to move Sihanouk toward a more pro-American position.”⁸

In addition to Thai and South Vietnamese troops, the CIA had at its disposal two other forces, the Khmer Serei and the Khmer Krom, composed largely of ethnic Cambodians opposed to Sihanouk’s rule, who operated out of the two neighboring countries. The Khmer Serei (“Free Cambodians”) were described by Shawcross as the “Cambodian organization with which American officials had had the closest contact”.⁹ Sihanouk once equated them to the “free” Cubans the United States maintained in Florida.¹⁰

These forces—recruited, financed, armed and trained by the CIA and the US Special Forces (Green Berets)¹¹—began to infiltrate into Cambodia in the latter part of 1958 as part of a complex conspiracy which included, amongst others, a disloyal Cambodian general named Dap Chhuon who was plotting an armed uprising inside the country. At its most optimistic, the conspiracy aimed at overthrowing Sihanouk.

Sihanouk discovered the plan, partly through reports from Chinese and French intelligence. The French were not happy about the American intrusion into what had been their domain for close to a century.

By February 1959 the conspirators had been apprehended or had fled, including Victor Masao Matsui, a member of the CIA station in Cambodia’s capital city Phnom Penh, who hurriedly left the country after Sihanouk accused him of being a party to the plot. Matsui, an American of Japanese descent, had been operating under State Department cover as an attaché at the embassy.

The intrigue, according to Sihanouk, began in September 1958 at a SEATO meeting in Thailand and was carried a step further later that month in New York when he visited the United Nations. While Sihanouk was away in Washington for a few days, a member of his delegation, Slat Peou, held several conferences with Americans in his New York hotel room which he did not mention to any of his fellow delegates. Slat Peou, it happened, was a close friend of Victor Matsui and was the brother of General Dap Chhuon. In the aftermath of the aborted conspiracy, Slat Peou was executed for treason.¹² Sihanouk was struck by the bitter irony of the CIA plotting against him in New York while he was in Washington being honored by President Eisenhower with a 21-gun salute.¹³

In a similar vein, several years later President Kennedy assured Sihanouk “on his honour” that the United States had played no role in the affairs of the Khmer Serei. “I considered President Kennedy to be an honourable man,” wrote Sihanouk, “but, in that case, who really represented the American government?”¹⁴

CIA officer (later Director) William Colby, stationed in Vietnam at the time of the Dap Chhuon plot, has written that the Agency was well aware of the plot and had recruited someone on Dap Chhuon’s staff and furnished him with a radio with which to keep the CIA informed. The Agency wanted to be kept informed, Colby asserts, in order to “dissuade the Thai and Vietnamese” from overthrowing Sihanouk. Colby adds:

Unfortunately, in putting down the coup, Sihanouk had captured our agent and his radio. And, not unnaturally, he drew the conclusion that CIA was one of the participants, and that the gold and arms furnished from Bangkok and Saigon to be used against him were only part of the overall plot of which the radio was a key element.¹⁵

The Cambodian leader has attested to several other plots he lays at the doorstep of the CIA. Amongst these was a 1959 effort to murder him which was foiled when the police picked a nervous young man, Rat Vat by name, out of a crowd surrounding Sihanouk. He was found to be carrying a hand grenade and a pistol. Investigation showed, writes Sihanouk, that the would-be assassin was instigated by the CIA and the Khmer Serei. Sihanouk also cites three incidents occurring in 1963: an attempt to blow up a car carrying him and the visiting president of China, Liu Shao Chi; an attempt to smuggle arms into Cambodia in a number of crates addressed to the US Embassy; and a partially successful venture aimed at sabotaging the Cambodian economy and subverting key government personnel through the setting up of a bank in Phnom Penh.¹⁶

On 20 November of the same year, two days before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Cambodian National Congress, at Sihanouk’s initiative, voted to “end all aid granted by the United States in the military, economic, technical and cultural fields”. It was perhaps without precedent that a country receiving American aid voluntarily repudiated it. But Sihanouk held strong feelings on the subject. Over the years he had frequently recited from his register of complaints about American aid to Cambodia: how it subverted and corrupted Cambodian officials and businessmen who wound up “constituting a clientele necessarily obedient to the demands of the lavish bestower of foreign funds”; and how the aid couldn’t be used for state institutions, only private enterprise, nor, as mentioned earlier, used against attacks by US allies.¹⁷

After some American bombings of Cambodian villages near the South Vietnam border in pursuit of North Vietnamese and Vietcong, the Cambodian government, in October 1964, announced that “in case of any new violation of Cambodian territory by US ground, air, or naval forces, Cambodia will immediately sever diplomatic relations with the United States”. The government did just that the following May when American planes bombarded several villages, killing or wounding dozens of peasants.¹⁸

The pattern over the next few years, as the war in Indochina intensified, was one of repeated forays into Cambodian territory by American, Saigon and Khmer Serei forces in search of Communist supply lines and sanctuaries along the Ho Chi Minh Trail; bombing and strafing, napalming, and placing land mines, with varying numbers of Cambodian civilian casualties; angry accusations by the Cambodian government, followed on occasion by an American apology, promise of an investigation, and the taking of “measures to prevent any recurrence of such incidents”.¹⁹

Sihanouk did not at all relish the intrusions into Cambodia by the Vietnamese Communists, nor was he wholly or consistently antagonistic to American pursuit of them, particularly when there was no loss of Cambodian lives. On at least one occasion he disclosed the location of Communist bases which were promptly bombed by the US. However, Sihanouk then went on the radio and proceeded to denounce the bombings.²⁰ Opportunist that he often revealed himself to be, Sihanouk was nonetheless truly caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, and by the late 1960s his predicament had compelled him to resume American aid and re-establish diplomatic relations with the United States.

Despite all the impulsiveness of his personality and policies, Sihanouk’s neutralist high-wire balancing act did successfully shield his country from the worst of the devastation that was sweeping through the land and people of Vietnam and Laos. Cambodia had its own Communist insurgents, the Khmer Rouge, who surely would have unleashed a full-scale civil war if faced with a Cambodian government nestled comfortably in the American camp. This is precisely what later came to pass following the overthrow of Sihanouk and his replacement by Lon Nol who was closely tied to the United States.

In March 1969, the situation began to change dramatically. Under the new American president, Richard Nixon, and National Security Affairs adviser Henry Kissinger, the isolated and limited attacks across the Cambodian border became sustained, large-scale B-52 bombings—“carpet bombings”, in the euphemistic language so dear to the hearts of military men.

Over the next 14 months, no less than 3,630 B-52 bombing raids were flown over Cambodia.²¹ To escape the onslaught, the Vietnamese Communists moved their bases further inside the country. The B-52s of course followed, with a concomitant increase in civilian casualties.

The Nixon administration artfully played down the nature and extent of these bombings, going so far as to falsify military records, and was largely successful in keeping it all a secret from the American public, the press and Congress.²² Not until 1973, in the midst of the Watergate revelations, did a fuller story begin to emerge.

It was frequently argued that the United States had every right to attack Cambodia because of its use as a sanctuary by America’s foes in Vietnam. Apropos of this claim, William Shawcross has pointed out that:

During the Algerian war of independence the United States rejected France’s claimed right to attack a Tunisian town inhabited by Algerian guerrillas, and in 1964 Adlai Stevenson, at the U.N., condemned Britain for assaulting a Yemeni town used as a base by insurgents attacking Aden. Even Israel had frequently been criticized by the United States for attacks on enemy bases outside its territory.²³

On 18 March 1970, Sihanouk, while on a trip abroad, was deposed as Head of State by two of his leading ministers, Lon Nol and Sirik Matak. To what extent, if any, the United States played a direct role in the coup has not been established, but there are circumstances and testimony pointing to American complicity, among which are the following:

•  According to Frank Snepp, the CIA’s principal political analyst in Vietnam at this time, in early 1970 the Agency was cultivating both Lon Nol and Son Ngoc Thanh, leader of the Khmer Serei, as possible replacements for Sihanouk. The CIA believed, he says, that if Lon Nol came to power, “He would welcome the United States with open arms and we would accomplish everything.”²⁴ (This, presumably, meant carte blanche to wipe out Vietnamese Communist forces and sanctuaries in Cambodia, as opposed to Sihanouk’s extremely equivocal position on the matter.) Both men, as matters turned out, served as prime minister in the new government, for which diplomatic recognition was immediately forthcoming from Washington.

•  The United States could seemingly also rely on Sirik Matak, a committed anti-Communist who had been profiled by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency as “a friend of the West and … co-operative with U.S. officials during the 1950s.”²⁵

•  Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in his biographic work on Kissinger, states that Sihanouk’s “immediate overthrow had been for years a high priority of the Green Berets reconnaissance units operating inside Cambodia since the late 1960s. There is also incontrovertible evidence that Lon Nol was approached by agents of American military intelligence in 1969 and asked to overthrow the Sihanouk government. Sihanouk made similar charges in his 1973 memoir, My War With The CIA, but they were not taken seriously then.”²⁶

•  An opponent of Sihanouk, Prom Thos, who became a minister in the new government, has said that whether Lon Nol had specific promises of American help before the coup is unimportant: “We all just knew that the United States would help us; there had been many stories of CIA approaches and offers before then.”²⁷

•  The CIA’s intimate links to the conspiratorial circle are exemplified by an Agency report prepared six days before the coup, entitled “Indications of Possible Coup in Phnom Penh”. It disclosed that anti-Communist demonstrations against the Vietcong and North Vietnamese embassies in the capital the previous day had been planned by Sirik Matak and Lon Nol as part of a showdown policy against Sihanouk and his followers, and that the two men had put the army on alert “to prepare … for a coup against Sihanouk if Sihanouk refused to support” them.²⁸

•  General William Rosson, deputy to General Creighton Abrams, the Commander of US Forces in Vietnam at the time, has declared that American commanders were informed several days beforehand that a coup was being planned and that United States support was solicited.²⁹

•  Roger Morris, who was serving under Henry Kissinger on the National Security Council staff when the coup took place, reported that “It was clear in the White House that the CIA station in Phnom Penh knew the plotters well, probably knew their plans, and did nothing to alert Sihanouk. They informed Washington well in advance of the coup.”³⁰

•  William Shawcross asserts that had Sihanouk “returned quickly and calmly to Phnom Penh [following the anti-communist demonstrations] he would most likely have been able to avert disaster.” That he did not do so may not have been by chance. Frank Snepp has revealed that the CIA persuaded Sihanouk’s mother, the Queen, to send a message to her son abroad reassuring him that the situation was not serious enough to warrant his return.³¹

With Sihanouk and his irritating neutralism no longer an obstacle, American military wheels began to spin. Within hours of the coup, US and South Vietnam forces stationed in border districts were directed to establish communication with Cambodian commanders on the other side and take steps toward military co-operation. The next day, the Cambodian army called in an American spotter plane and South Vietnamese artillery during a sweep of a Vietcong sanctuary by a battalion of Cambodian troops inside Cambodia. The New York Times declared that “The battle appeared to be the most determined Cambodian effort yet to drive the Vietcong out of border areas.”³² The Great Cambodian War had begun. It was to persist for five terrible years.

The enemy confronting the United States and its Saigon and Phnom Penh allies was now not simply the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong. The Cambodian Communists—the Khmer Rouge—under the leadership of Pol Pot, had entered the conflict, as had sundry Cambodian supporters of Prince Sihanouk.

On 30 April 1970, the first full-scale American invasion of the new war was launched. It produced a vast outcry of protest in the United States, rocking university campuses from coast to coast. Perhaps the most extraordinary reaction was the angry resignations of four men from Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council staff, including Roger Morris. (Kissinger labeled the resignations as “the cowardice of the Eastern establishment”.)³³

By the end of May, scores of villages had been reduced to rubble and ashes by US air power; the long train of Cambodian refugees had begun their march.

Three years and more than a hundred thousand tons of bombs later, 27 January 1973 to be precise, an agreement was signed in Paris putting an end to a decade of American warfare in Vietnam. The bombing of Cambodia, however, continued.

Prior to the Paris agreement, the official position of the Nixon administration, repeatedly asserted, was that the sole purpose of bombing Cambodia was to protect American lives in Vietnam. Yet now, the US not only did not cease the bombing, it increased it, in a last desperate attempt to keep the Khmer Rouge from coming to power. During March, April and May, the tonnage of bombs unloosed over Cambodia was more than double that of the entire previous year. The society’s traditional economy had vanished. The old Cambodia was being destroyed forever.

Under increasing pressure from Congress, the Nixon administration finally ended the bombing in August. More than two million Cambodians had been made homeless.

It does appear rather ludicrous, in the light of this application of brute force, that the CIA was at the same time carrying out the most subtle of psychological tactics. To spread dissatisfaction about the exiled Sihanouk amongst the Cambodian peasantry who revered him, a CIA sound engineer, using sophisticated electronics, fashioned an excellent counterfeit of the Prince’s distinctive voice and manner of speaking—breathless, high-pitched, and full of giggles. This voice was beamed from a clandestine radio station in Laos with messages artfully designed to offend any good Cambodian. In one of the broadcasts, “Sihanouk” exhorted young women to aid the cause by sleeping with the valiant Vietcong.³⁴

In a farewell press conference in September 1973, the American Ambassador to Cambodia, Emory Swank, called what had taken place there “Indochina’s most useless war”.³⁵

Later, California Congressman Pete McClosky, following a visit to Cambodia, had harsher words. He was moved to declare that what the United States had “done to the country is greater evil than we have done to any country in the world, and wholly without reason, except for our own benefit to fight against the Vietnamese.”³⁶

On 17 April 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh in victory. Two weeks later, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong. Incredibly, the Khmer Rouge were to inflict even greater misery upon this unhappy land. And to add to the irony—or to multiply it—the United States supported the Khmer Rouge after their subsequent defeat by the Vietnamese, both by defending their right to the United Nations Cambodian seat, and in their military struggle against the Cambodian government and its Vietnamese allies. In November 1980, Ray Cline, former Deputy Director of the CIA, visited a Khmer Rouge enclave in Cambodia in his capacity as senior foreign policy adviser to President-elect Ronald Reagan. A Khmer Rouge press release spoke of the visit in warm terms.³⁷ This was in keeping with the Reagan administration’s subsequent opposition to the Vietnamese-supported Phnom Penh government. A lingering bitter hatred of Vietnam by unreconstructed American cold warriors appears to be the only explanation for this policy.

21. Laos 1957-1973

L’Armée Clandestine

For the past two years the US has carried out one of the most sustained bombing campaigns in history against essentially civilian targets in northeastern Laos…. Operating from Thai bases and from aircraft carriers, American jets have destroyed the great majority of villages and towns in the northeast. Severe casualties have been inflicted upon the inhabitants … Refugees from the Plain of Jars report they were bombed almost daily by American jets last year. They say they spent most of the past two years living in caves or holes.

Far Eastern Economic Review, Hong Kong, 1970¹

[The Laos operation] is something of which we can be proud as Americans. It has involved virtually no American casualties. What we are getting for our money there … is, I think, to use the old phrase, very cost effective.

U. Alexis Johnson, US Under Secretary of State, 1971²

The United States undertook the bombing campaign because its ground war against the Pathet Lao had failed.

The ground war had been carried out because the Pathet Lao were led by people whom the State Department categorized as “communist”, no more, no less.

The Pathet Lao (re)turned to warfare because of their experiences in “working within the system”.

In 1957 the Pathet Lao (“Lao nation”) held two ministerial posts in the coalition “government of national union”. This was during John Foster Dulles’s era, and if there was anything the fanatic Secretary of State hated more than neutralism it was a coalition with communists. This government featured both. There could be little other reason for the development of the major American intervention into this impoverished and primitive land of peasants. The American ambassador to Laos at the time, J. Graham Parsons, was to admit later: “I struggled for sixteen months to prevent a coalition.”³

In addition to its demand for inclusion in the coalition government, the Pathet Lao had called for diplomatic relations with the countries of the Soviet bloc and the acceptance of aid from them, as was already the case with Western nations. “Agreement to these conditions,” said Washington, “would have given the Communists their most significant gains in Southeast Asia since the partition of Indochina.”⁴ Others would say that the Pathet Lao’s conditions were simply what neutralism is all about.

In May 1958, the Pathet Lao and other leftists, running a campaign based on government corruption and indifference, won 13 of 21 contested seats for the National Assembly and wound up controlling more than one-third of the new legislature.⁵ Two months later, however, Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma, a man universally categorized as a neutralist, “resigned” to form a new government which would exclude the Pathet Lao ministers.⁶ (He subsequently claimed that he was forced to resign due to continued American opposition to Laotian neutrality; as it happened, one Phoui Sananikone, backed by the US, became premier in the reorganized government.)⁷ Then, in January 1959, the non-left majority in the National Assembly voted, in effect, to dissolve the Assembly in order “to counteract communist influence and subversion”. The left was now altogether excluded from the government, and the elections scheduled for December were canceled.⁸

If this wasn’t enough to disenchant the Pathet Lao or anyone else with the Laotian political process, there was, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the spectacle of a continuous parade of coups and counter-coups, of men overthrown winding up in the new government, and regimes headed by men who had sided with the French in their war against Indochinese independence, while the Pathet Lao had fought against the colonialists.⁹ There were as well government-rigged elections, with the CIA stuffing ballot boxes;¹⁰ different regimes-cum-warlords governing simultaneously from different “capitals”, their armies fighting each other, switching allies and enemies when it suited them; hundreds of millions of US dollars pouring into a tiny kingdom which was 99 percent agricultural, with an economy based more on barter than money, the result being “unimaginable bribery, graft, currency manipulation and waste”.¹¹

The CIA and the State Department alone could take credit for engineering coups, through force, bribery or other pressures, at least once in each of the years 1958, 1959 and 1960, if not in others.¹² “By merely withholding the monthly payment to the troops,” wrote Roger Hilsman (whose career encompassed both agencies, perhaps covertly simultaneously), “the United States could create the conditions for toppling any Lao government whose policies it opposed. As it turned out, in fact, the United States used this weapon twice—to bring down the government of one Lao leader and to break the will of another.”¹³

The American wheeling and dealing centered around giving power to the CIA’s hand-picked rightist strongman Phoumi Nosavan, ousting Souvanna Phouma and other neutralists, and jailing Pathet Lao leaders, including the movement’s head, Souphanouvong (the half-brother of Souvanna Phouma, both being princes of the royal family). Souphanouvong insisted that neither he nor the Pathet Lao were communist, but were rather “ultra-nationalist”.¹⁴ Crucial to understanding his statements, of course, is the question of exactly what he meant by the term “communist”. This is not clear, but neither is it clear what the State Department meant when it referred to him as such. The Pathet Lao were the only sizable group in the country serious about social change, a characteristic which of course tends to induce Washington officials to apply the communist label.

In August 1960, Kong Le, a military officer with his own troop following, staged a coup and set up a neutralist government under Souvanna Phouma, rejecting Pathet Lao help.¹⁵ But when this government became a casualty of a CIA coup in December, Kong Le allied himself with the Pathet Lao; later he turned to the United States for aid and fought against the Pathet Lao. Such was the way of the Laotian circus.

No study of Laos of this period appears to have had notable success in untangling the muddle of who exactly replaced whom, and when, and how, and why. After returning from Laos, writer Norman Cousins stated in 1961 that “if you want to get a sense of the universe unraveling, come to Laos. Complexity such as this has to be respected.”¹⁶

One thing that came through unambiguously, however, was the determination of the United States to save Laos from communism and neutralism. To this end, the CIA set about creating its now-famous Armée Clandestine, a process begun by the US Army in the mid-1950s when it organized Meo hill tribesmen (the same ethnic group organized in Vietnam). Over the years, other peoples of Laos were added, reaching at least 30,000 in the mid-1960s, half of them more or less full-time soldiers … many thousands more from Thailand … hundreds of other Asians came on board, South Vietnamese, Filipinos, Taiwanese, South Koreans, men who had received expert training from their American mentors in their home countries for other wars, now being recycled … an army, said the New York Times, “armed, equipped, fed, paid, guided, strategically and tactically, and often transported into and out of action by the United States” … trained and augmented by the CIA, and by men of every branch of the US military with their multiple specialties, the many pilots of the CIA’s Air America, altogether some 2,000 Americans in and over Laos, and thousands more in Asia helping with the logistics. A Secret Army, secret, that is, from the American people and Congress—US military personnel were there under various covers, some as civilians in mufti, having “resigned” from the service for the occasion and been hired by a private company created by the CIA; others served as embassy attachés; CIA pilots were officially under contract to the Agency for International Development (AID); Americans who were killed in Laos were reported to have died in Vietnam¹⁷ … all this in addition to the “official” government forces, the Royal Laotian Army, greatly expanded and totally paid for by the United States …¹⁸

Laos was an American plantation, a CIA playground. During the 1960s, the Agency roamed over much of the land at will, building an airstrip, a hangar, or a base here, a warehouse, barracks, or a radar site there;¹⁹ relocating thousands of people, entire villages, whole tribes, to suit strategic military needs; recruiting warriors “through money and/or the threat or use of force and/or promises of independent kingdoms which it had no intention of fulfilling, and then keeping them fighting long beyond the point when they wished to stop;”²⁰ while the “legendary” pilots of Air America roamed far and wide as well, hard drinking, daredevil flying, death defying, great stories to tell the guys back home, if you survived.²¹

Some of the stories had to do with drugs. Flying opium and heroin all over Indochina to serve the personal and entrepreneurial needs of the CIA’s various military and political allies, ultimately turning numerous GIs in Vietnam into addicts. The operation was not a paragon of discretion. Heroin was refined in a laboratory located on the site of CIA headquarters in northern Laos. After a decade of American military intervention, Southeast Asia had become the source of 70 percent of the world’s illicit opium and the major supplier of raw materials for America’s booming heroin market.²²

At the same time, the hearts and minds of the Laotian people, at least of those who could read, were not overlooked. The US Information Agency was there to put out a magazine with a circulation of 43,000; this, in a country where the circulation of the largest newspaper was 3,300; there were as well USIA wall newspapers, films, leaflet drops, and radio programs.²³

In the face of it all, the Pathet Lao more than held their own. The CIA was overextended, and, unlike the motley band of Asians assembled by the Agency, the soldiers of the Pathet Lao had some idea of what they were fighting for. The Soviet Union, aware of what the United States was doing in Laos, even if the American public was not, was alarmed by the establishment of a pro-American government in the country, and acceded to a cold-war knee-reflex by sending military supplies to the Pathet Lao, though nothing remotely on the order of the US commitment.²⁴

Beginning in the early 1960s, the North Vietnamese were aiding them as well. Hanoi’s overriding interest in Laos was not necessarily the creation of a Communist state, but the prevention of a belligerent government on its border. In January 1961, the New York Times reported that “Many Western diplomats in Vientiane [capital of Laos] … feel the Communists would have been content to leave Laos alone provided she remained neutral and outside the United States sphere of influence.”²⁵

Hanoi was concerned not only by the American political and military operations in Laos, but by the actions of US Special Forces teams which were entering North Vietnam to engage in espionage, sabotage, and assassination,²⁶ and by the bombings of the country being carried out by the US Air Force²⁷ at a time when the war in South Vietnam was still but a shadow of what was to come. Later, as the wars in Vietnam and Laos became intertwined, Laos formed part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the principal route by which Hanoi supplied its comrades in South Vietnam, and the North Vietnamese fought to protect it as well as attacking American radar installations in Laos used to aid US bombing of North Vietnam.

The nature and extent of North Vietnam’s aid to the Pathet Lao before this period is difficult to ascertain from Western sources, because such charges typically emanated from the Laotian government or the State Department. On a number of occasions, their report of a North Vietnamese military operation in Laos turned out to be a fabrication. William Lederer and Eugene Burdick, in A Nation of Sheep, summarized one of these non-events from the summer of 1959:

The people of the United States were led to believe that Laos physically had been invaded by foreign Communist troops from across its northern border. Our Secretary of State called the situation grave; our ambassador to the U.N. called for world action; our press carried scare headlines; our senior naval officer implied armed intervention and was seconded by ranking Congressmen … The entire affair was a fraud. No military invasion of Laos had taken place … There seemed no doubt that a war embracing thousands of troops, tanks, planes, and mass battles, was raging. Regardless of how the accounts were worded, this was the picture given the nation.²⁸

It had all been a ploy to induce Congress not to reduce aid for Laos, something seriously being considered because of the pervasive corruption which had been exposed concerning the aid program.²⁹ The Laotian government and the large American establishment in Laos, each for their own reasons, were not about to let the golden goose slip away that easily.

On the last day of 1960, the Laotian government announced to the world that seven battalions of North Vietnamese troops had invaded the country. By all accounts, and by the utter lack of evidence, this claim as well cannot be taken seriously.³⁰

And in 1962, reported Bernard Fall, the renowned French scholar on Indochina: After a battle between government forces and the Pathet Lao, in spite of the fact that Col. Edwin Elder, the American commander in the area of the battle, immediately stated that there was

“no evidence to show that Chinese or [North] Vietnamese had participated in the attack”, the Laotians—and much of the U.S. press, and official Washington with them—immediately claimed that they were again faced with a large-scale “foreign invasion”.³¹

Shortly after Kennedy became president in January 1961, he made a sustained diplomatic effort to establish a coalition government in Laos, precisely what the Eisenhower administration and the CIA had done their best to sabotage. Although he sometimes fell back on conventional cold-war rhetoric when speaking of Laos, one part of John F. Kennedy realized the absurdity of fighting for the backward country, a land he considered not “worthy of engaging the attention of great powers”.³² Soviet Premier Khrushchev, for his part, was reportedly “bored” with the question of Laos, and irritably asked Kennedy’s emissary why Washington bothered so much about the country.³³

Eventually, in July 1962, a multi-nation conference in Geneva signed an agreement for a coalition government in Laos. But in the mountains and the plains of the country, this was no longer a viable option. The CIA had too much time, effort, material and emotion invested in its Secret Army; it was the best war the Agency had going anywhere; it was great adventure. And the Pathet Lao were much stronger now than a few years earlier. They were not about to buy such shopworn, suspect goods again, although everyone went through the motions.

Both sides regularly accused each other of violating the agreement, and not without justification. The North Vietnamese, for example, did not withdraw all of their troops from Laos, while the US left behind all manner of military personnel, American and Asian, who remained under AID and other civilian cover, but this was nonetheless a violation of the agreement. Moreover, Christopher Robbins, in his study of Air America, has noted that US “Military advisers and CIA personnel moved across the border into Thailand, where they were flown in every day [to Laos] like commuters by Air America, whose entire helicopter operation was based in Udorn [Thailand].”³⁴ Air America, by the early 1970s, had no less than 4,000 employees in Thailand.³⁵

Thus it was that the fighting dragged on, though only sporadically. In April 1964, the coalition government, such as it was, was overthrown by the right wing, with the CIA’s man Phoumi Nosavan emerging as part of a rightist government headed by the perennial survivor Souvanna Phouma to give it a neutralist fig leaf.³⁶ The Pathet Lao were once again left out in the cold. For them it was the very last straw. The fighting greatly intensified, the skirmishes were now war, and the Pathet Lao offensive soon scored significant advances. Then the American bombing began.

Between 1965 and 1973, more than two million tons of bombs rained down upon the people of Laos,³⁷ considerably more than the US had dropped on both Germany and Japan during the Second World War, albeit for a shorter period. For the first few years, the bombing was directed primarily at the provinces controlled by the Pathet Lao. Of the bombing, Fred Branfman, a former American community worker in Laos, wrote: “village after village was leveled, countless people buried alive by high explosives, or burnt alive by napalm and white phosphorous, or riddled by anti-personnel bomb pellets”³⁸ … “The United States has undertaken,” said a Senate report, “… a large-scale air war over Laos to destroy the physical and social infrastructure of Pathet Lao held areas and to interdict North Vietnamese infiltration … throughout all this there has been a policy of subterfuge and secrecy … through such things as saturation bombing and the forced evacuation of population from enemy held or threatened areas—we have helped to create untold agony for hundreds of thousands of villagers.”³⁹

The American military, however, kept proper records. AID could report to Congress that wounds suffered by civilian war casualties were as follows:

1. Type: Soft tissue, 39 percent. Compound fracture, 30 percent. Amputation, 12 percent. Intraabdominal, 10 percent. Intra-thoracic, 3 percent. Intra-cranial, 1 percent.

2. Location: Lower extremities, 60 percent. Upper extremities, 15 percent. Trunk, 18 percent. Head, 7 percent.⁴⁰

There was no happy way out for the Laotian people. In October 1971, one could read in The Guardian of London …

although US officials deny it vehemently, ample evidence exists to confirm charges that the Meo villages that do try to find their own way out of the war—even if it is simply by staying neutral and refusing to send their 13-year-olds to fight in the CIA army—are immediately denied American rice and transport, and ultimately bombed by the US Air Force.⁴¹

The fledgling society that the United States was trying to make extinct—the CIA dropped millions of dollars in forged Pathet Lao currency as well, in an attempt to wreck the economy⁴²—was one which Fred Branfman described thus:

The Pathet Lao rule over the Plain of Jars begun in May 1964 brought its people into a post-colonial era. For the first time they were taught pride in their country and people, instead of admiration for a foreign culture; schooling and massive adult literacy campaigns were conducted in Laotian instead of French; and mild but thorough social revolution—ranging from land reform to greater equality for women—was instituted.⁴³

Following on the heels of events in Vietnam, a ceasefire was arrived at in Laos in 1973, and yet another attempt at coalition government was undertaken. (This one lasted until 1975 when, after renewed fighting, the Pathet Lao took over full control of the country.) Laos had become a land of nomads, without villages, without farms; a generation of refugees; hundreds of thousands dead, many more maimed. When the US Air Force closed down its radio station, it signed off with the message: “Good-by and see you next war.”⁴⁴

Thus it was that the worst of Washington’s fears had come to pass: All of Indochina—Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos—had fallen to the Communists. During the initial period of US involvement in Indochina in the 1950s, John Foster Dulles, Dwight Eisenhower and other American officials regularly issued doomsday pronouncements of the type known as the “Domino Theory”, warning that if Indochina should fall, other nations in Asia would topple over as well. In one instance, President Eisenhower listed no less than Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and Indonesia amongst the anticipated “falling dominos”.⁴⁵

Such warnings were repeated periodically over the next decade by succeeding administrations and other supporters of US policy in Indochina as a key argument in defense of such policy. The fact that these ominous predictions turned out to have no basis in reality did not deter Washington officialdom from promulgating the same dogma up until the 1990s about almost each new world “trouble-spot”, testimony to their unshakable faith in the existence and inter-workings of the International Communist Conspiracy.

22. Haiti 1959-1963

The Marines land, again

“Duvalier has performed an economic miracle,” remarked a Haitian of his country’s dictator. “He has taught us to live without money … to eat without food … to live without life.”¹

And when Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s voodoo magic wore thin, he could always count on the US Marines to continue his people’s education.

During the night of 12-13 August 1959, a boat landed on the northern coast of Haiti with a reported 30 men, Haitians and Cubans and perhaps others aboard. The men had set sail from Cuba some 50 miles away. Their purpose was to overthrow the tyrannical Haitian government, a regime whose secret police, it was said, outnumbered its army.

In short order, the raiding party, equipped with heavy weapons, captured a small army post and began to recruit and arm villagers for the cause.² The government reported that about 200 persons had joined them.³ Haitian exiles in Venezuela, in an apparently coordinated effort, broadcast appeals to their countrymen to aid the invaders. They set at 120 the number of men who had landed in Haiti, although this appears to be an exaggeration.⁴

The initial reaction of the Duvalier government was one of panic, and the police began rounding up opposition sympathizers.⁵ It was at this point that the US military mission, in Haiti to train Duvalier’s forces, stepped in. The Americans instituted an air and sea reconnaissance to locate the rebels. Haitian soldiers, accompanied by US Marines, were airlifted to the area and went into the field to do battle with them.⁶ Two other US Navy planes and a helicopter arrived from Puerto Rico.⁷

According to their commander, Col. Robert Debs Heinl, Jr., the American Marines took part in the fighting, which lasted until 22 August.⁸ The outcome was a complete rout of the rebel forces.

Information about the men who came from Cuba derives almost exclusively from the Haitian government and the American military mission. These sources claim that the raiding party was composed of about 30 men and that, with the exception of one or two Haitians who led them, they were all Cubans. Another report, referred to in the New York Times, stated that there were ten Haitians and two Venezuelans amongst the 30 invaders.⁹ The latter ratio is probably closer to the truth, for there was a considerable number of Haitian exiles living in Cuba, many of whom had gained military experience during the recent Cuban revolution; for obvious reasons of international politics and fighting incentive, such men were the most likely candidates to be part of an invasion of their homeland.

The Castro government readily admitted that the raiding party had come from Cuba but denied that the government had known or approved of it. This claim would seem rather suspect were it not for the fact that the Cuban coast guard had thwarted a similar undertaking in April.¹⁰

The first members of the American military mission had arrived in Haiti in January, largely in response to another invasion attempt the previous July (originating probably in the Dominican Republic). Regardless of all the horror stories about the Haitian regime—such as the one Col. Heinl tells of his 12-year-old son being arrested when he was overheard expressing sympathy for a group of hungry peasants he saw—Duvalier was Washington’s man. After all was said and done, he could be counted upon to keep his Black nation, which was usually accorded the honor of being Latin America’s poorest, from turning Red. Heinl has recounted the instructions he received from a State Department Under Secretary in January:

Colonel, the most important way you can support our objectives in Haiti is to help keep Duvalier in power so he can serve out his full term in office, and maybe a little longer than that if everything works out.¹¹

The Kennedy administration, which came to power in January 1961, had little use for Papa Doc, and supported his overthrow as well as his possible assassination. According to the later testimony of CIA official Walter Elder before a Senate investigating committee, the Agency furnished arms to Haitian dissidents seeking to topple the dictator. Elder added that while the assassination of Duvalier was not contemplated, the arms were provided “to help [the dissidents] take what measures were deemed necessary to replace the government,” and it was realized, he said, that Duvalier might be killed in the course of the overthrow.¹²

But as Cuba increasingly became the United States’ bête noire, the CIA’s great obsession, Washington’s policy changed. Haiti’s cooperation was needed for the success of US efforts to have Cuba expelled from the Organization of American States in 1963. From that point on, Duvalier enjoyed the full diplomatic and economic support of the US. When the Haitian leader died on 12 April 1971, the American Ambassador Clinton Knox was the only diplomat present at the midnight swearing-in of 19-year-old Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier as the new President for Life, who was to receive the same economic, political and military support as had “Papa Doc”, with only the occasional hiccup of a protest from Washington when the level of repression became difficult to ignore.¹³

23. Guatemala 1960

One good coup deserves another

In November 1960, as John F. Kennedy was preparing to succeed Dwight Eisenhower, the obsessive priority of American foreign policy—to invade Cuba—proceeded without pause. On the beaches and in the jungles of Guatemala, Nicaragua and Florida, the Bay of Pigs invasion was being rehearsed.

On the 13th of the month, five days after Kennedy’s victory, Guatemalan military personnel broke out in armed rebellion against the government of General Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, seizing two military bases and the port city of Puerto Barrios. Reports of the number of officers involved in the uprising vary from 45 to 120, the latter figure representing almost half the Guatemalan Army’s officer corps. The officers commanded as many as 3,000 troops, a significant percentage of the armed forces. Their goals, it later developed, were more nationalistic than ideological. The officers were fed up with the corruption in the Ydigoras regime and in the army, and were particularly incensed about the use of their country by a foreign power as a springboard for an invasion of Cuba, some of them being admirers of Fidel Castro for his nationalist policies. One of the dissident officers later characterized the American training base in Guatemala as “a shameful violation of our national sovereignty. And why was it permitted? Because our government is a puppet.”¹

The rebellion was crushed within a matter of days, reportedly by the sole power of the Guatemalan Air Force. Some years later, a different picture was to emerge.

The rebels were a force to be reckoned with. The ease with which they had taken over the two garrisons and the real possibility of their mutiny spreading to other bases set alarms ringing at the CIA base, a large coffee plantation in a remote corner of southwestern Guatemala, where the Agency and the US Air Force were training the army of Cuban exiles who were to launch the attack upon their homeland. The CIA feared, and rightly so, that a new regime would send them, the Cubans, and the whole operation packing.

In Washington, President Eisenhower ordered US naval and air units to patrol the Caribbean coast and “shoot if necessary” to prevent any “communist-led” invasion of Guatemala or Nicaragua.² Eisenhower, like Ydigoras, saw the hand of international communism, particularly Cuba, behind the uprising, although no evidence of this was ever presented.³ It was all most ironic in light of the fact that it was the conspiracy of the two leaders to overthrow Cuba that was one of the reasons for the uprising; and that the US naval fleet ordered into action was deployed from Guantánamo Naval Base in Cuba, an American military installation present in that country against the vociferous objections of the Cuban government.

In Guatemala, meanwhile, the CIA decided upon a solution to the dilemma that was both remarkably simple and close at hand: American and Cuban pilots took off from their training ground and bombed and strafed rebel headquarters outside Guatemala City, and bombed the town and airfield of Puerto Barrios. Caught completely by surprise, and defenseless against this superior force, the rebels’ insurrection collapsed.⁴

Back at the coffee plantation, the CIA resumed the function which had been so rudely interrupted, the preparation for the overthrow of the Cuban government.

No announcement about the bombings was made in Washington, nor did a report appear in the American press.

The CIA actions were probably not widely known about in Guatemala either, but it became public knowledge that President Ydigoras had asked Washington for the naval and air support, and had even instructed the Guatemalan Ambassador in Washington to “Get in touch immediately with [Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs] Thomas Mann to coordinate your action.”⁵ Thus it was that the Guatemalan president, needing afterward to distance himself a little from so much Yanqui protection, was moved to state that countries like Guatemala are at a disadvantage because “Cuba is a satellite of powerful Russia”, but “we are not a satellite of the United States.”⁶

The final irony was that some of the dissident officers who went into hiding became more radicalized by their experience. During their revolt they had spurned offers of support from some of the peasants—though this would necessarily have been very limited in any case—because fighting for social change was not at all what the officers had in mind at the time. But as fugitives, thrown into greater contact with the peasants, they eventually came to be moved by the peasants’ pressing need for land and for a way out of their wretched existence.⁷ In 1962, several of the officers were to emerge as leaders of a guerrilla movement which incorporated “November Thirteen” as part of its name. In their opening statement, the guerrillas declared:

Democracy vanished from our country long ago. No people can live in a country where there is no democracy. That is why the demand for changes is mounting in our country. We can no longer carry on in this way. We must overthrow the Ydigoras government and set up a government which represents human rights, seeks ways and means to save our country from its hardships, and pursues a serious self-respecting foreign policy.⁸

A simple sentiment, stated even simpler, but, as we shall see, a movement fated to come up against the wishes of the United States. For if Washington could casually do away with an elected government in Guatemala, as it had in 1954, it could be moved by a guerrilla army only as rocks by waves or the moon by howling wolves.

24. France/Algeria 1960s

L’état, c’est la CIA

When John F. Kennedy assumed office in January 1961, he was confronted with a CIA at the zenith of its power and credibility. In the Agency’s first 14 years, no formal congressional investigation of it had taken place, nor had any “watchdog” committee been established; four investigations of the CIA by independent task forces during this period had ensured that everything relating to things covert remained just that; with the exception of the U-2 incident the year before, no page-one embarrassments, scandals, or known failures; what had received a measure of publicity—the coups in Guatemala and Iran—were widely regarded as CIA success stories. White House denials and a compliant media had kept the Agency’s misadventure in Indonesia in 1958 from the public scrutiny it deserved.

It is probable that the CIA had more staff officers overseas, under official and unofficial covers, than the State Department, and this in addition to its countless paid agents. Often the CIA Chief of Station had been in a particular country longer than the American ambassador, had more money at his disposal, and exerted more influence. When it suited their purposes, Agency officers would completely bypass the ambassador and normal protocol to deal directly with the country’s head of state and other high officials.

The CIA had its own military capabilities, including its own air force; for all intents and purposes, its own foreign service with, indeed, its own foreign policy, though never at cross-purposes with fundamental US cold-war, anti-communist ideology and goals.

Seemingly without fear of exposure or condemnation, the Agency felt free to carry out sundry Dr. Strangelove experiments involving control of the human mind and all manner of biochemical weapons, including the release of huge amounts of bacteria into the air in the United States which resulted in much illness and a number of deaths.

It was all very heady stuff for the officers of the CIA, playing their men’s games with their boys’ toys. They recognized scarcely any limitation upon their freedom of action. British colonial governors they were, and all the world was India.

Then, in mid-April, came the disaster at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. The international repercussions had barely begun to subside when the Agency was again catapulted into world headlines. On 22 April four French generals in Algeria seized power in an attempt to maintain the country’s union with France. The putsch, which held out but four days, was a direct confrontation with French President Charles de Gaulle, who had dramatically proclaimed a policy leading “not to an Algeria governed from France, but to an Algerian Algeria”.

The next day, the leftist Italian newspaper, Il Paese, stated that “It is not by chance that some people in Paris are accusing the American secret service headed by Allen Dulles of having participated in the plot of the four ‘ultra’ generals.”¹

Whether Il Paese was the original source of this charge remains a mystery. Dulles himself later wrote that the Italian daily was “one of the first to launch it” (emphasis added). He expressed the opinion that “This particular myth was a Communist plant, pure and simple.”²

The New York Times reported that the rumors apparently began circulating by word of mouth on the day of the putsch,³ a report echoed by the Washington Star which added that some of the rumors were launched “by minor officials at the Elysée Palace itself” who gave reporters “to understand that the generals’ plot was backed by strongly anti-communist elements in the United States Government and military services.”⁴

Whatever its origins, the story spread rapidly around the world, and the French Foreign Office refused to refute the allegation. Le Monde asserted in a front-page editorial on 28 April that “the behavior of the United States during the recent crisis was not particularly skillful. It seems established that American agents more or less encouraged Challe [the leader of the putsch] … President Kennedy, of course, knew nothing of all this.”⁵

Reports from all sources were in agreement that if the CIA had indeed been involved in the putsch, it had been so for two reasons: (1) the concern that if Algeria were granted its independence, “communists” would soon come to power, being those in the ranks of the National Liberation Front (NLF) which had been fighting the French Army in Algeria for several years—the legendary Battle of Algiers. It was with the NLF that de Gaulle was expected to negotiate a settlement; (2) the hope that it would precipitate the downfall of de Gaulle, an end desired because the French President was a major stumbling block to US aspirations concerning NATO: among other things, he refused to incorporate French troops into an integrated military command, and he opposed exclusive American control over the alliance’s nuclear weapons.

By all accounts, it appears that the rebel officers had counted on support from important military and civilian quarters in France to extend the rebellion to the home country and overthrow de Gaulle. Fanciful as this may sound, the fact remains that the French government took the possibility seriously—French Premier Michel Debré went on television to warn the nation of an imminent paratroop invasion of the Paris area and to urge mass opposition.⁶

Reaction in the American press to the allegations had an unmistakably motley quality. Washington Post columnist Marquis Childs said that the French were so shocked by the generals’ coup that they had to find a scapegoat. At the same time he quoted “one of the highest officials of the French government” as saying:

Of course, your government, neither your State Department nor your President, had anything to do with this. But when you have so many hundreds of agents in every part of the world, it is not to be wondered at that some of them should have got in touch with the generals in Algiers.⁷

Time magazine discounted the story, saying too that the United States was being made a scapegoat and that the CIA had become a “favorite target in recent weeks”.⁸ James Reston wrote in the New York Times that the CIA:

was involved in an embarrassing liaison with the anti-Gaullist officers who staged last week’s insurrection in Algiers … [the Bay of Pigs and Algerian events have] increased the feeling in the White House that the CIA has gone beyond the bounds of an objective intelligence-gathering agency and has become the advocate of men and policies that have embarrassed the Administration.⁹

However, C.L. Sulzberger, who had been the man at the New York Times closest to the CIA since its founding, stated flatly that “No American in Algeria had to do with any insurrectional leader … No consular employee saw any rebel.” (A few days later, though, Secretary of State Dean Rusk disclosed that an emissary of the rebellious French generals had visited the US Consulate in Algiers to request aid but had been summarily rebuffed.)

The affair, wrote Sulzberger, was “a deliberate effort to poison Franco-American relationships” begun in Moscow but abetted by “anti-American French officials” and “naive persons in Washington … When one checks, one finds all this began in a Moscow Izvestia article April 25.”¹⁰ This last, as we have seen, was incorrect.

Dean of American columnists, Walter Lippmann, who had seen de Gaulle in Paris shortly before the putsch, wrote:

the reason why the French Government has not really exculpated the CIA of encouraging the Algerian rebel generals is that it was already so angry with the CIA for meddling in French internal politics. The French grievance, justified or not, has to do with recent French legislation for the French nuclear weapon, and the alleged effort of CIA agents to interfere with that legislation.¹¹

Newsweek repeated the claim that it was “French officials” who had been “the main sources” of the rumors in the first place. When challenged by the American administration the French denied their authorship and tended to soften the charges. Some French officials eventually declared the matter to be closed, though they still failed to explicitly rule out the allegations about American involvement.¹² In early May 1961, L’Express, the widely-read French liberal weekly, published what was perhaps the first detailed account of the mysterious affair. Their Algerian correspondent, Claude Krief, reported:¹³

Both in Paris and Washington the facts are now known, though they will never be publicly admitted. In private, the highest French personalities make no secret of it. What they say is this: “The CIA played a direct part in the Algiers coup, and certainly weighed heavily on the decision taken by ex-general Challe to start his putsch.”

Not long before, Challe had held the position of NATO Commander-in-Chief, Allied Forces, Central Europe, as a result of which he had been in daily contact with US military officers.¹⁴ Krief wrote that certain American officials in NATO and the Pentagon had encouraged Challe, and that the general had several meetings with CIA officers who told him that “to get rid of de Gaulle would render the Free World a great service”. Krief noted that Challe, despite an overweening ambition, was very cautious and serious-minded: “All the people who know him well, are deeply convinced that he had been encouraged by the CIA to go ahead.”

At a luncheon in Washington the previous year, Jacques Soustelle, the former Governor-General of Algeria who had made public his disagreement with de Gaulle’s Algeria policy, had met with CIA officials, including Richard Bissell, head of covert operations. Soustelle convinced the Agency officials, according to Krief, that Algeria would become, through de Gaulle’s blundering, “a Soviet base”. This luncheon became something of a cause célèbre in the speculation concerning the CIA’s possible role. The New York Times and others reported that it had been given by the Agency for Soustelle.¹⁵ US officials, however, insisted that the luncheon had been arranged by someone at the French Embassy at Soustelle’s request. This French official, they said, had been present throughout the meeting and thus there could have been no dark conspiracy.¹⁶ Why the French Embassy would host a luncheon for a prominent and bitter foe of de Gaulle, a man who only two months earlier had been kicked out of de Gaulle’s cabinet for his “ultra” sympathies, was not explained. Nor, for that matter, why in protocol-minded Washington of all places, the CIA would attend. In any event, it seems somewhat fatuous to imply that this was the only chance Soustelle and the CIA had to talk during his stay in the United States, which lasted more than a week.

A clandestine meeting in Madrid also received wide currency within the controversy. Krief dates it 12 April 1961, and describes it as a meeting of “various foreign agents, including members of the CIA and the Algiers conspirators, who disclosed their plans to the CIA men”. The Americans were reported to have angrily complained that de Gaulle’s policy was “paralyzing NATO and rendering the defense of Europe impossible”, and assured the generals that if they and their followers succeeded, Washington would recognize the new Algerian Government within 48 hours.

It may well be that the French Government did have evidence of the CIA’s complicity. But in the unnatural world of international diplomacy, this would not necessarily lead to an unambiguous public announcement. Such a move could result in an open confrontation between France and the United States, a predicament both sides could be expected to take pains to avoid. Moreover, it might put the French in the position of having to do something about it. And what could they do? Breaking relations with the United States was not a realistic option; neither were the French in any position to retaliate economically or militarily. But French leaders were too angry to simply let the matter pass into obscurity. Thus, to complete the hypothetical scenario, they took the backdoor approach with all its shortcomings.

In a similar vein, the United States knew that the Russians, for at least one year, were intercepting telephone calls in the US of government and congressional officials, but said nothing publicly because it was unable to end the practice for technical reasons.¹⁷ And this concerned an “enemy”, not an ally.

Between 1958 and the middle of the 1960s, there occurred some 30 serious assassination attempts upon the life of Charles de Gaulle, in addition to any number of planned attempts which didn’t advance much beyond the planning stage.¹⁸ A world record for a head of state, it is said. In at least one of the attempts, the CIA may have been a co-conspirator against the French president. By the mid-1960s, differences between de Gaulle and Washington concerning NATO had almost reached the breaking point; in February 1966, he gave NATO and the United States a deadline to either place their military bases in France under French control or dismantle them.

In 1975, the Chicago Tribune featured a front-page story which read in part:

Congressional leaders have been told of Central Intelligence Agency involvement in a plot by French dissidents to assassinate the late French President Charles De Gaulle. Within the last two weeks, a CIA representative disclosed sketchy details of the scheme … Sometime in the mid-1960s—probably in 1965 or 1966—dissidents in the De Gaulle government are said to have made contact with the CIA to seek help in a plot to murder the French leader. Which party instigated the contact was not clear … According to the CIA briefing officer, discussions were held on how best to eliminate De Gaulle, who by then had become a thorn in the side of the Johnson administration because of his ouster of American military bases from French soil and his demands that United States forces be withdrawn from the Indochina War. Thus the following plan is said to have evolved after discussions between CIA personnel and the dissident French. There is, however, no evidence the plot got beyond the talking stage.

A hired assassin, armed with a poison ring, was to be slipped into a crowd of old soldiers of France when General De Gaulle was to be the host at a reception for them. The killer would make his appearance late in the day when it could be presumed De Gaulle’s hand would be weary and perhaps even numb from shaking hundreds of hands. The assassin would clasp the general’s hand in lethal friendship and De Gaulle would fail to detect the tiny pin prick of poison as it penetrated his flesh. The executioner would stroll off to become lost in the crowd as the poison began coursing through De Gaulle’s veins either to his heart or brain, depending on the deadly poison used. How quickly death would come was not divulged, if that was even discussed at the time …

In the outline presented to the congressional leaders, there is no hint of what the CIA’s actual role might have been had the plot reached fruition.¹⁹

The dissidents involved in the alleged plot were embittered French army officers and former Algerian settlers who still bore deep resentment toward de Gaulle for having “sold out French honor” by his retreat from the North African colony. There was no mention in the reported CIA testimony about any involvement of Lyndon Johnson, although it was well known that there was no love lost between Johnson and de Gaulle. The French leader was firmly convinced that the United States was behind the failure of his trip to South America in 1964. He believed that the CIA had used its network of agents in South America to prevent a big turnout of crowds.²⁰ There is some evidence to indicate that the General was not just paranoid. In 1970, Dr Alfred Stepan, a professor of political science at Yale, testified before Congress about his experience in South America in 1964 when he was a journalist for The Economist.

When De Gaulle was going to make his trip through Latin America, many of the Latin Americans interviewed [officers of various embassies] said that they were under very real pressure by various American groups not to be very warm towards De Gaulle, because we considered Latin America within the United States area of influence.²¹

After the appearance of the Chicago Tribune story, CIA Director William Colby confirmed that “foreigners” had approached the Agency with a plot to kill de Gaulle. The Agency rejected the idea, Colby said, but he did not know if the French government had been advised of the plot.²² It is not clear whether the incident referred to by Colby was related to the one discussed in the Tribune.

In the early evening of Monday, 9 November 1970, Charles de Gaulle died peacefully at the age of 80, sitting in his armchair watching a sentimental television serial called “Nanou”.

25. Ecuador 1960-1963

A textbook of dirty tricks

If the Guinness Book of World Records included a category for “cynicism”, one could suggest the CIA’s creation of “leftist” organizations which condemned poverty, disease, illiteracy, capitalism, and the United States in order to attract committed militants and their money away from legitimate leftist organizations.

The tiny nation of Ecuador in the early 1960s was, as it remains today, a classic of banana-republic underdevelopment; virtually at the bottom of the economic heap in South America; a society in which one percent of the population received an income comparable to United States upper-class standards, while two-thirds of the people had an average family income of about ten dollars per month—people simply outside the money economy, with little social integration or participation in the national life; a tale told many times in Latin America.

In September 1960, a new government headed by José María Velasco Ibarra came to power. Velasco had won a decisive electoral victory, running on a vaguely liberal, populist, something-for-everyone platform. He was no Fidel Castro, he was not even a socialist, but he earned the wrath of the US State Department and the CIA by his unyielding opposition to the two stated priorities of American policy in Ecuador: breaking relations with Cuba, and clamping down hard on activists of the Communist Party and those to their left.

Over the next three years, in pursuit of those goals, the CIA left as little as possible to chance. A veritable textbook on covert subversion techniques unfolded. In its pages could be found the following, based upon the experiences of Philip Agee, a CIA officer who spent this period in Ecuador.¹

Almost all political organizations of significance, from the far left to the far right, were infiltrated, often at the highest levels. Amongst other reasons, the left was infiltrated to channel young radicals away from support to Cuba and from anti-Americanism; the right, to instigate and co-ordinate activities along the lines of CIA priorities. If, at a point in time, there was no organization that appeared well-suited to serve a particular need, then one would be created.

Or a new group of “concerned citizens” would appear, fronted with noted personalities, which might place a series of notices in leading newspapers denouncing the penetration of the government by the extreme left and demanding a break with Cuba. Or one of the noted personalities would deliver a speech prepared by the CIA, and then a newspaper editor, or a well-known columnist, would praise it, both gentlemen being on the CIA payroll.

Some of these fronts had an actual existence; for others, even their existence was phoney. On one occasion, the CIA Officer who had created the non-existent “Ecuadorean Anti-Communist Front” was surprised to read in his morning paper that a real organization with that name had been founded. He changed the name of his organization to “Ecuadorean Anti-Communist Action”.

Wooing the working class came in for special emphasis. An alphabet-soup of labor organizations, sometimes hardly more than names on stationery, were created, altered, combined, liquidated, and new ones created again, in an almost frenzied attempt to find the right combination to compete with existing left-oriented unions and take national leadership away from them. Union leaders were invited to attend various classes conducted by the CIA in Ecuador or in the United States, all expenses paid, in order to impart to them the dangers of communism to the union movement and to select potential agents.

This effort was not without its irony either. CIA agents would sometimes jealously vie with each other for the best positions in these CIA-created labor organizations; and at times Ecuadorean organizations would meet in “international conferences” with CIA labor fronts from other countries, with almost all of the participants blissfully unaware of who was who or what was what.

In Ecuador, as throughout most of Latin America, the Agency planted phoney anti-communist news items in co-operating newspapers. These items would then be picked up by other CIA stations in Latin America and disseminated through a CIA-owned news agency, a CIA-owned radio station, or through countless journalists being paid on a piece-work basis, in addition to the item being picked up unwittingly by other media, including those in the United States. Anti-communist propaganda and news distortion (often of the most farfetched variety) written in CIA offices would also appear in Latin American newspapers as unsigned editorials of the papers themselves.

In virtually every department of the Ecuadorean government could be found men occupying positions, high and low, who collaborated with the CIA for money and/or their own particular motivation. At one point, the Agency could count amongst this number the men who were second and third in power in the country.

These government agents would receive the benefits of information obtained by the CIA through electronic eavesdropping or other means, enabling them to gain prestige and promotion, or consolidate their current position in the rough-and-tumble of Ecuadorean politics. A high-ranking minister of leftist tendencies, on the other hand, would be the target of a steady stream of negative propaganda from any or all sources in the CIA arsenal; staged demonstrations against him would further increase the pressure on the president to replace him.

The Postmaster-General, along with other post office employees, all members in good standing of the CIA Payroll Club, regularly sent mail arriving from Cuba and the Soviet bloc to the Agency for its perusal, while customs officials and the Director of Immigration kept the Agency posted on who went to or came from Cuba. When a particularly suitable target returned from Cuba, he would be searched at the airport and documents prepared by the CIA would be “found” on him. These documents, publicized as much as possible, might include instructions on “how to intensify hatred between classes”, or some provocative language designed to cause a split in Communist Party ranks. Generally, the documents “verified” the worst fears of the public about communist plans to take over Ecuador under the masterminding of Cuba or the Soviet Union; at the same time, perhaps, implicating an important Ecuadorean leftist whose head the Agency was after. Similar revelations, staged by CIA stations elsewhere in Latin America, would be publicized in Ecuador as a warning that Ecuador was next.

Agency financing of conservative groups in a quasi-religious campaign against Cuba and “atheistic communism” helped to seriously weaken President Velasco’s power among the poor, primarily Indians, who had voted overwhelmingly for him, but who were even more deeply committed to their religion. If the CIA wished to know how the president was reacting to this campaign it need only turn to his physician, its agent, Dr. Felipe Ovalle, who would report that his patient was feeling considerable strain as a result.

CIA agents would bomb churches or right-wing organizations and make it appear to be the work of leftists. They would march in left-wing parades displaying signs and shouting slogans of a very provocative anti-military nature, designed to antagonize the armed forces and hasten a coup.

The Agency did not always get away clean with its dirty tricks. During the election campaign, on 19 March 1960, two senior colonels who were the CIA’s main liaison agents within the National Police participated in a riot aimed at disrupting a Velasco demonstration. Agency officer Bob Weatherwax was in the forefront directing the police during the riot in which five Velasco supporters were killed and many wounded. When Velasco took office, he had the two colonels arrested and Weatherwax was asked to leave the country.

CIA-supported activities were carried out without the knowledge of the American ambassador. When the Cuban Embassy publicly charged the Agency with involvement in various anti-Cuban activities, the American ambassador issued a statement that “had everyone in the [CIA] station smiling”. Stated the ambassador: “The only agents in Ecuador who are paid by the United States are the technicians invited by the Ecuadorean government to contribute to raising the living standards of the Ecuadorean people.”

Finally, in November 1961, the military acted. Velasco was forced to resign and was replaced by Vice-President Carlos Julio Arosemana. There were at this time two prime candidates for the vice-presidency. One was the vice-president of the Senate, a CIA agent. The other was the rector of Central University, a political moderate. The day that Congress convened to make their choice, a notice appeared in a morning paper announcing support for the rector by the Communist Party and a militant leftist youth organization. The notice had been placed by a columnist for the newspaper who was the principal propaganda agent for the CIA’s Quito station. The rector was compromised rather badly, the denials came too late, and the CIA man won. His Agency salary was increased from $700 to $1,000 a month.

Arosemana soon proved no more acceptable to the CIA than Velasco. All operations continued, particularly the campaign to break relations with Cuba, which Arosemana steadfastly refused to do. The deadlock was broken in March 1962 when a military garrison, led by Col. Aurelio Naranjo, gave Arosemana 72 hours to send the Cubans packing and fire the leftist Minister of Labor. (There is no need to point out here who Naranjo’s financial benefactor was.) Arosemana complied with the ultimatum, booting out the Czech and Polish delegations as well at the behest of the new cabinet which had been forced upon him.

At the CIA station in Quito there was a champagne victory celebration. Elsewhere in Ecuador, people angry about the military’s domination and desperate about their own lives, took to arms. But on this occasion, like others, it amounted to naught … a small band of people, poorly armed and trained, infiltrated by agents, their every move known in advance—confronted by a battalion of paratroopers, superbly armed and trained by the United States. That was in the field. In press reports, the small band grew to hundreds; armed not only to the teeth, but with weapons from “outside the country” (read Cuba), and the whole operation very carefully planned at the Communist Party Congress the month before.

On 11 July 1963 the Presidential Palace in Quito was surrounded by tanks and troops. Arosemana was out, a junta was in. Their first act was to outlaw communism; “communists” and other “extreme” leftists were rounded up and jailed, the arrests campaign being facilitated by data from the CIA’s Subversive Control Watch List. (Standard at many Agency stations, this list would include not only the subject’s name, but the names and addresses of his relatives and friends and the places he frequented—anything to aid in tracking him down when the time came).

Civil liberties were suspended; the 1964 elections canceled; another tale told many times in Latin America.

And during these three years, what were the American people told about this witch’s brew of covert actions carried out, supposedly, in their name? Very little, if anything, if the New York Times is any index. Not once during the entire period, up to and including the coup, was any indication given in any article or editorial on Ecuador that the CIA or any other arm of the US government had played any role whatever in any event which had occurred in that country. This is the way the writings read even if one looks back at them with the advantage of knowledge and hindsight and reads between the lines.

There is a solitary exception. Following the coup, we find a tiny announcement on the very bottom of page 20 that Havana radio had accused the United States of instigating the military takeover.² The Cuban government had been making public charges about American activities in Ecuador regularly, but this was the first one to make the New York Times. The question must be asked: Why were these charges deemed unworthy of reporting or comment, let alone investigation?

26. The Congo 1960-1964

The assassination of Patrice Lumumba

Within days of its independence from Belgium on 30 June 1960, the land long known as the Belgian Congo, and later as Zaire, was engulfed in strife and chaos as multiple individuals, tribes, and political groups struggled for dominance or independence. For the next several years the world press chronicled the train of Congolese governments, the endless confusion of personalities and conspiracies, exotic place names like Stanleyville and Leopoldville, shocking stories of European hostages and white mercenaries, the brutality and the violence from all quarters with its racist overtones.

Into this disorder the Western powers were “naturally” drawn, principally Belgium to protect its vast mineral investments, and the United States, mindful of the fabulous wealth as well, and obsessed, as usual, with fighting “communism”.

Successive American administrations of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, looking through cold-war binoculars perceived an East-West battleground. The CIA station in the Congo cabled Washington in August that “Embassy and station believe Congo experiencing classic communist effort [to] takeover government.” CIA Director Allen Dulles warned of a “communist takeover of the Congo with disastrous consequences … for the interests of the free world”. At the same time, Dulles authorized a crash-program fund of up to $100,000 to replace the existing government of Patrice Lumumba with a “pro-western group”.¹

It’s not known what criteria the CIA applied to determine that Lumumba’s government was going communist, but we do know how the Washington Post arrived at the same conclusion:

Western diplomats see … the part [of the Congo] controlled by volatile Premier Patrice Lumumba sliding slowly but surely into the Communist bloc. … Apart from the fevered activity of Communist bloc nations here, the pattern of events is becoming apparent to students of Communist policy. Premier Lumumba’s startling changes of position, his open challenge of the United Nations and Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, his constant agitation of the largely illiterate Congolese can be explained in no other way, veteran observers say.²

Years later, Under Secretary of State C. Douglas Dillon told a Senate investigating committee (the Church committee) that the National Security Council and President Eisenhower had believed in 1960 that Lumumba was a “very difficult if not impossible person to deal with, and was dangerous to the peace and safety of the world.”³ This statement moved author Jonathan Kwitny to observe:

How far beyond the dreams of a barefoot jungle postal clerk in 1956, that in a few short years he would be dangerous to the peace and safety of the world! The perception seems insane, particularly coming from the National Security Council, which really does have the power to end all human life within hours.⁴

Patrice Lumumba became the Congo’s first prime minister after his party received a plurality of the votes in national elections. He called for the nation’s economic as well as political liberation and did not shy away from contact with socialist countries. At the Independence Day ceremonies he probably managed to alienate all the attending foreign dignitaries with his speech, which read in part:

Our lot was eighty years of colonial rule … We have known tiring labor exacted in exchange for salary which did not allow us to satisfy our hunger … We have known ironies, insults, blows which we had to endure morning, noon, and night because we were “Negroes” … We have known that the law was never the same depending on whether it concerned a white or a Negro … We have known the atrocious sufferings of those banished for political opinions or religious beliefs … We have known that there were magnificent houses for the whites in the cities and tumble-down straw huts for the Negroes.⁵

In 1960, it must be borne in mind, this was indeed radical and inflammatory language in such a setting.

On 11 July, the province of Katanga—home to the bulk of the Congo’s copper, cobalt, uranium, gold, and other mineral wealth—announced that it was seceding. Belgium, the principal owner of this fabulous wealth, never had any intention of giving up real control of the country, and it now supported the move for Katanga’s independence, perceiving the advantage of having its investments housed in their own little country, not accountable to nor paying taxes to the central government in Leopoldville. Katanga, moreover, was led by Moise Tshombe, a man eminently accommodating to, and respectful of, whites and their investments.

The Eisenhower administration supported the Belgian military intervention on behalf of Katanga; indeed, the American embassy had previously requested such intervention. Influencing this policy, in addition to Washington’s ideological aversion to Lumumba, was the fact that a number of prominent administration officials had financial ties to the Katanga wealth.⁶

The Belgian intervention, which was a very violent one, was denounced harshly by the Soviet Union, as well as many countries from the Afro-Asian bloc, leading the UN Security Council on the 14th to authorize the withdrawal of Belgian troops and their replacement by a United Nations military force. This was fine with the United States, for the UN under Dag Hammarskjöld was very closely allied to Washington. The UN officials who led the Congo operation were Americans, in secret collaboration with the State Department, and in exclusion of the Soviet bloc; the latter’s citizens who worked at the UN Secretariat were kept from seeing the Congo cables. Hammarskjöld himself was quite hostile toward Lumumba.⁷

The UN force entered Katanga province and replaced the Belgian troops, but made no effort to end the secession. Unable to put down this uprising on his own, as well as one in another province, Lumumba had appealed to the United Nations as well as the United States to supply him with transport for his troops. When they both refused, he turned to the Soviet Union for aid, and received it,⁸ though military success still eluded him.

The Congo was in turmoil in many places. In the midst of it, on 5 September, President Joseph Kasavubu suddenly dismissed Lumumba as prime minister—a step of very debatable legality, taken with much American encouragement and assistance, as Kasavubu “sat at the feet of the CIA men”.⁹ The action was taken, said the Church committee later, “despite the strong support for Lumumba in the Congolese Parliament.”¹⁰

During the early 1960s, according to a highly-placed CIA executive, the Agency “regularly bought and sold Congolese politicians”.¹¹ US diplomatic sources subsequently confirmed that Kasavubu was amongst the recipients.¹²

Hammarskjöld publicly endorsed the dismissal before the Security Council, and when Lumumba tried to broadcast his case to the Congolese people, UN forces closed the radio station. Instead, he appeared before the legislature, and by dint of his formidable powers of speech, both houses of Parliament voted to reaffirm him as prime minister. But he could taste the fruits of his victory for only a few days, for on the 14th, army strongman Joseph Mobutu took power in a military coup designed by the United States.

Even during this period, with Lumumba not really in power, “CIA and high Administration officials continued to view him as a threat” … his “talents and dynamism appear [to be the] overriding factor in reestablishing his position each time it seems half lost” … “Lumumba was a spellbinding orator with the ability to stir masses of people to action” … “if he … started to talk to a battalion of the Congolese Army he probably would have had them in the palm of his hand in five minutes” …¹³

In late September, the CIA sent one of its scientists, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, to the Congo carrying “lethal biological material” (a virus) specifically intended for use in Lumumba’s assassination. The virus, which was supposed to produce a fatal disease indigenous to the Congo area of Africa, was transported via diplomatic pouch.¹⁴

In 1975, the Church committee went on record with the conclusion that Allen Dulles had ordered Lumumba’s assassination as “an urgent and prime objective” (Dulles’s words).¹⁵ After hearing the testimony of several officials who believed that the order to kill the African leader had emanated originally from President Eisenhower, the committee decided that there was a “reasonable inference” that this was indeed the case.¹⁶

As matters evolved in the Congo, the virus was never used, for the CIA’s Congo station was unable to come up with “a secure enough agent with the right access” to Lumumba before the potency of the biological material was no longer reliable.¹⁷

The Church committee observed, however, that the CIA station in Leopoldville

continued to maintain close contact with Congolese who expressed a desire to assassinate Lumumba. CIA officers encouraged and offered to aid these Congolese in their efforts against Lumumba, although there is no evidence that aid was ever provided for the specific purpose of assassination.¹⁸

Fearing for his life, Lumumba was on the run. For a while he was protected from Mobutu by the United Nations, which, under considerable international pressure, had been forced to put some distance between itself and Washington.¹⁹ But on 1 December, Lumumba was taken into custody by Mobutu’s troops. A 28 November CIA cable indicates that the Agency was involved in tracking down the charismatic Congo leader. The cable spoke of the CIA station working with the Congolese government to get the roads blocked and troops alerted to close a possible escape route of Lumumba’s.²⁰

The United States had also been involved in the takeover of government by Mobutu—whom author and CIA-confidant Andrew Tully described as having been “discovered” by the CIA.²¹ Mobutu detained Lumumba until 17 January 1961 when he transferred his prisoner into the hands of Moise Tshombe of Katanga province, Lumumba’s bitter enemy. Lumumba was assassinated the same day.

In 1978, former CIA Africa specialist John Stockwell related in his book how a ranking Agency officer had told him of driving around with Lumumba’s body in the trunk of his car, “trying to decide what to do with it”.²² What he did do with it has not yet been made public.

During the period of Lumumba’s imprisonment, US diplomats in the Congo were pursuing a policy of “deploring” his beatings and trying to secure “humane treatment” for him, albeit due to “considerations of international opinion and not from tender feelings toward him”.²³ The immediate and the long-term effect of Lumumba’s murder was to make him the martyr and symbol of anti-imperialism all over Africa and elsewhere in the Third World which such American officials had feared. Even Mobutu later felt compelled to build a memorial to his victim.

Without a clearcut “communist” enemy like Lumumba, the Kennedy administration, which came to power on 20 January 1961, was very divided on the Katanga question. Although the United States wound up supporting—in the name of Congolese stability—the UN military operation in the summer to suppress the secession, Tshombe had outspoken support in the US Congress, and sentiment amongst officials at the State Department and the White House mirrored this division. The sundry economic and diplomatic ties of these officials appear to have been more diverse and contradictory than under the Eisenhower administration, and this is reflected in the lack of a unified policy. However, according to Kennedy adviser and biographer, Arthur Schlesinger, opinions on both sides of the issue were expressed in terms of hindering supposed malevolent Soviet/communist designs in the Congo.²⁴

In an even more marked policy division, US Air Force C-130s were flying Congolese troops and supplies against the Katangese rebels, while at the same time the CIA and its covert colleagues in the Pentagon were putting together an air armada of heavy transport aircraft, along with mercenary units, to aid the very same rebels.²⁵ (This marked at least the third instance of the CIA acting in direct military opposition to another arm of the US government.)²⁶

Washington officials were more in unison when dealing with another prominent leftist—Antoine Gizenga, who had been Vice-Prime Minister under Lumumba. Following the latter’s dismissal, according to the Church committee, the CIA station chief in the Congo, Lawrence Devlin, urged “a key Congolese leader” (presumably Mobutu) to “arrest” or undertake a “more permanent disposal of Lumumba, Gizenga, and Mulele.” (Pierre Mulele was another Lumumba lieutenant.)²⁷ Gizenga was in fact arrested shortly after Mobutu took power, but a UN contingent from Ghana, whose leader, Kwame Nkrumah, was Lumumba’s ally, intervened and freed him.²⁸

In the continuous musical-chairs game of Congolese politics, the first of August 1961 found Gizenga as the Vice-Prime Minister under one Cyrille Adoula. By the end of the month, Gizenga was as well, and simultaneously, the leader of a rebel force that had set up a regime in the Stanleyville area which it proclaimed as the legitimate government of the entire Congo. He fancied himself the political and spiritual successor to Lumumba.

The Soviet Union may have believed Gizenga, for apparently they were sending him arms and money, using Sudan, which borders the Congo on the north, as a conduit. When the CIA learned that a Czech ship was bound for Sudan with a cargo of guns disguised as Red Cross packages for refugee relief in the Congo, the Agency turned to its most practiced art, bribery, to persuade a crane operator to let one of the crates drop upon arrival. On that day, the dockside was suddenly covered with new Soviet Kalashnikov rifles. Through an equally clever ploy at the Khartoum (Sudan) airport, the CIA managed to separate a Congolese courier from his suitcase of Soviet money destined for Gizenga.²⁹

The State Department, meanwhile, was, in its own words,

urging Adoula to … dismiss Gizenga and declare him in rebellion against the national government so that police action can now be taken against him. We are also urging the U.N. to take military action to break his rebellion … We are making every effort to keep Gizenga isolated from potential domestic and foreign support … We have taken care to insure that this [US] aid has been channelled through the central government in order to provide the economic incentive to encourage support for that government.³⁰

The CIA was supplying arms and money to Adoula’s supporters, as well as to Mobutu’s.³¹ Adoula, who had a background of close ties to both the American labor movement and the CIA international labor movement (via the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions—see British Guiana chapter), was chosen to be prime minister instead of Gizenga by a parliamentary conference during which the parliamentarians were bribed by the CIA and even by the United Nations. A subsequent CIA memorandum was apparently paying tribute to this when it stated: “The U.N. and the United States, in closely coordinated activities, played essential roles in this significant success over Gizenga.”³²

In January 1962, United Nations forces with strong American backing ousted Gizenga and his followers from Stanleyville, and a year later finally forced Tshombe to end his secession in Katanga. These actions were carried out in the name of “uniting the Congo”, as if this were a matter to be decided by other than Congolese. Never before had the UN engaged in such offensive military operations, and the world organization was criticized in various quarters for having exceeded its charter. In any event, the operations served only to temporarily slow down the dreary procession of changing leaders, attempted coups, autonomous armies, shifting alliances, and rebellions.

Adding an ironic and absurd touch to the American Congo policy, three months after the successful action against Gizenga, Allen Dulles (thanks to the Bay of Pigs, now the former Director of the CIA) informed a television audience that the United States had “overrated the danger” of Soviet involvement … “It looked as though they were going to make a serious attempt at takeover in the Belgian Congo, well it did not work out that way at all.”³³

Nonetheless, by the middle of 1964, when rebellion—by the heirs of Lumumba and Gizenga—was more widespread and furious than ever and the collapse of the central government appeared as a real possibility, the United States was pouring in a prodigious amount of military aid to the Leopoldville regime. In addition to providing arms and planes, Washington dispatched some 100 to 200 military and technical personnel to the Congo to aid government troops, and the CIA was conducting a paramilitary campaign against the insurgents in the eastern part of the country.³⁴

The government was now headed by none other than Moise Tshombe, a man called “Africa’s most unpopular African” for his widely-recognized role in the murder of the popular Lumumba and for his use of white mercenaries, many of them South Africans and Rhodesians, during his secession attempt in Katanga. Tshombe defended the latter action by explaining that his troops would not fight without white officers.³⁵

Tshombe once again called upon his white mercenary army, numbering 400 to 500 men, and the CIA called upon its own mercenaries as well, a band which included Americans, Cuban-exile veterans of the Bay of Pigs, Rhodesians, and South Africans, the latter having been recruited with the help of the South African government. “Bringing in our own animals” was the way one CIA operative described the operation. The Agency’s pilots carried out regular bombing and strafing missions against the insurgents, although some of the Cubans were reported to be troubled at being ordered to make indiscriminate attacks upon civilians.³⁶ Looking back at the affair in 1966, the New York Times credited the CIA with having created “an instant air force” in the Congo.³⁷

When China protested to the United States about the use of American pilots in the Congo, the State Department issued an explicit denial, then publicly reversed itself, but insisted that the Americans were flying “under contract with the Congolese government”. The next day, the Department said that the flights would stop, after having obtained assurances from “other arms of the [U.S] Government”, although it still held to the position that the matter was one between the Congolese government and civilian individuals who were not violating American law.³⁸

The Congolese against whom this array of military might was brought to bear were a coalition of forces. Some of the leading figures had spent time in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union or China and were receiving token amounts of arms and instruction from those countries; but they were never necessarily in the communist camp any more than the countless Third Worlders who have gone to university in the United States and have been courted afterwards are necessarily in the Western/capitalist camp. (This does not hold for professional military officers who, unlike students, tend to be a particularly homogeneous group—conservative, authoritarian, and anti-communist.)

Africa scholar M. Crawford Young has observed that amongst the coalition leadership, “The destruction of the [Leopoldville] regime, a vigorous reassertion of Congolese control over its own destiny, and a vague socialist commitment were recurrent themes. But at bottom it appeared far more a frame of mind and a style of expression, than an interrelated set of ideas.”³⁹ The rebels had no revolutionary program they could, or did, proclaim.

Co-existing with this element within the coalition were currents of various esoteric churches, messianic sects, witch-finding movements, and other occult inspirations as well as plain opportunists. Many believed that the magic of their witch doctors would protect them against bullets. One of their leaders, Pierre Mulele, was a quasi-Catholic who baptized his followers in his own urine to also make them immune to bullets. The insurgents were further divided along tribal lines and were rent by debilitating factionalism. No single group or belief could dominate.⁴⁰

“Rebel success created the image of unified purpose and revolutionary promise,” wrote Young. “Only in its subsequent phase of decay and disintegration” did the coalition’s “dramatic lack of cohesion” and “disparity in purpose and perception” become fully evident.⁴¹

The New York Times addressed the question of the coalition’s ideology as follows:

There is evidence that most supporters of the Stanleyville regime have no ideological commitment but are mainly Congolese who are disillusioned with the corruption and irresponsibility that has characterized the Leopoldville regimes. The rebel leaders have received advice and money from Communists but few if any of the rebels consider themselves Communists. It is probable that few have heard of Karl Marx.⁴²

In the coalition-controlled area of Stanleyville, between 2,000 and 3,000 white foreigners found themselves trapped by the war. One of the rebel leaders, Christopher Gbenye, conditioned their safe release upon various military concessions, principally a cessation of American bombing, but negotiations failed to produce an agreement.⁴³

Instead, on 24 November 1964, the United States and Belgium staged a dramatic rescue mission in which over 500 Belgian paratroopers were dropped at dawn into Stanleyville from American transport planes. Much chaos followed, and the reports are conflicting, but it appears that more than 2,000 hostages were rescued, in the process of which the fleeing rebels massacred about 100 others and dragged several hundred more into the bush.

American and Belgian officials took great pains to emphasize the purely “humanitarian” purpose of the mission. However, the rescuers simultaneously executed a key military maneuver when they “seized the strategic points of the city and coordinated their operation with the advancing columns of Tshombe’s mercenary army that was moving swiftly towards the city.”⁴⁴ Moreover, in the process of the rescue, the rescuers killed dozens of rebels and did nothing to curtail Tshombe’s troops when they reached Stanleyville and began an “orgy of looting and killing”.⁴⁵

Tshombe may have provided a reminder of the larger-than-humanitarian stake at hand in the Congo when, in the flush of the day’s success, he talked openly with a correspondent of The Times of London who reported that Tshombe “was confident that the fall of Stanleyville would give a new impetus to the economy and encourage investors. It would reinforce a big development plan announced this morning in collaboration with the United States, Britain and West Germany.”⁴⁶

The collapse of the rebels’ stronghold in Stanleyville marked the beginning of the end for their cause. By spring 1965 their fortune was in sharp decline, and the arrival of about 100 Cuban revolutionaries, amongst whom was Che Guevara himself, had no known effect upon the course of events. Several months later, Guevara returned to Cuba in disgust at the low level of revolutionary zeal exhibited by the Congolese guerrillas and the local populace.⁴⁷

The concluding tune for the musical chairs was played in November, when Joseph Mobutu overthrew Tshombe and Kasavubu. Mobutu, later to adopt the name Mobutu Sese Seko, has ruled with a heavy dictatorial hand ever since.

In the final analysis, it mattered precious little to the interests of the US government whether the forces it had helped defeat were really “communist” or not, by whatever definition. The working premise was that there was now fixed in power, over a more-or-less unified Congo, a man who would be more co-operative with the CIA in its African adventures and with Western capital, and less accessible to the socialist bloc, than the likes of Lumumba, Gizenga, et al. would have been. The CIA has chalked this one up as a victory.

What the people of the Congo (now Zaire) won is not clear. Under Mobutu, terror and repression became facts of daily life, civil liberties and other human rights were markedly absent. The country remains one of the poorest to be found anywhere despite its vast natural riches. Mobutu, however, is reputed to be one of the richest heads of state in the world. (See Zaire chapter.)

William Atwood, US Ambassador to Kenya in 1964-65, who played a part in the hostage negotiations, also saw the US role in the Congo in a positive light. Bemoaning African suspicions toward American motives there, he wrote: “It was hard to convince people that we had provided the Congo with $420 million in aid since independence just to prevent chaos; they couldn’t believe any country could be that altruistic.”⁴⁸

Atwood’s comment is easier to understand when one realizes that the word “chaos” has long been used by American officials to refer to a situation over which the United States has insufficient control to assure that someone distinctly pro-Western will remain in, or come to, power. When President Eisenhower, for example, decided to send troops into Lebanon in 1958, he saw it as a move, he later wrote, “to stop the trend towards chaos”.⁴⁹

27. Brazil 1961-1964

Introducing the marvelous new world of Death Squads

When the leading members of the US diplomatic mission in Brazil held a meeting one day in March 1964, they arrived at the consensus that President João Goulart’s support of social and economic reforms was a contrived and thinly veiled vehicle to seize dictatorial power.¹

The American ambassador, Lincoln Gordon, informed the State Department that “a desperate lunge [by Goulart] for totalitarian power might be made at any time.”²

The Brazilian army chief of staff, General Humberto de Alencar Castelo (or Castello) Branco, provided the American Embassy with a memorandum in which he stated his fear that Goulart was seeking to close down Congress and initiate a dictatorship.³

Within a week after the expression of these concerns, the Brazilian military, with Castelo Branco at its head, overthrew the constitutional government of President Goulart, the culmination of a conspiratorial process in which the American Embassy had been intimately involved. The military then proceeded to install and maintain for two decades one of the most brutal dictatorships in all of South America.

What are we to make of all this? The idea that men of rank and power lie to the public is commonplace, not worthy of debate. But do they as readily lie to each other? Is their need to rationalize their misdeeds so great that they provide each other a moral shoulder to lean on? “Men use thoughts only to justify their injustices,” wrote Voltaire, “and speech only to conceal their thoughts.”

The actual American motivation in supporting the coup was something rather less heroic than preserving democracy, even mundane as such matters go. American opposition to Goulart, who became president in 1961, rested upon a familiar catalogue of complaints:

US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara questioned Brazil’s neutral stand in foreign policy. The Brazilian ambassador in Washington, Roberto Campos, responded that “neutralism” was an inadequate term and explained that “what was involved was really a deep urge of the Brazilian people to assert their personality in world affairs.”⁴

American officials did not approve of some of the members of Goulart’s cabinet, and said so. Ambassador Campos pointed out to them that it was “quite inappropriate” for the United States “to try to influence the composition of the cabinet.”⁵

Attorney-General Robert Kennedy met with Goulart and expressed his uneasiness about the Brazilian president allowing “communists” to hold positions in government agencies. (Bobby was presumably acting on the old and very deep-seated American belief that once you welcome one or two communists into your parlor, they take over the whole house and sign the deed over to Moscow.) Goulart did not see this as a danger. He replied that he was in full control of the situation, later remarking to Campos that it was as if he had been told that he had no capacity for judging the men around him.⁶

The American Defense Attaché in Brazil, Col. Vernon Walters, reported that Goulart showed favoritism towards “ultra-nationalist” military officers over “pro-U.S.” officers. Goulart saw it as promoting those officers who appeared to be most loyal to his government. He was, as it happens, very concerned about American-encouraged military coups and said so explicitly to President Kennedy.⁷

Goulart considered purchasing helicopters from Poland because Washington was delaying on his request to purchase them from the United States. Ambassador Gordon told him that he “could not expect the United States to like it”.⁸

The Goulart administration, moreover, passed a law limiting the amount of profits multinationals could transmit out of the country, and a subsidiary of ITT was nationalized. Compensation for the takeover was slow in coming because of Brazil’s precarious financial position, but these were the only significant actions taken against US corporate interests.

Inextricably woven into all these complaints, yet at the same time standing apart, was Washington’s dismay with Brazil’s “drift to the left” … the communist/leftist influence in the labor movement … leftist “infiltration” wherever one looked … “anti-Americanism” among students and others (the American Consul General in São Paulo suggested to the State Department that the United States “found competing student organizations”) … the general erosion of “U.S. influence and the power of people and groups friendly to the United States”⁹… one might go so far as to suggest that Washington officials felt unloved, were it not for the fact that the coup, as they well knew from much past experience, could result only in intensified anti-Americanism all over Latin America.

Goulart’s predecessor, Jânio da Silva Quadros, had also irritated Washington. “Why should the United States trade with Russia and her satellites but insist that Brazil trade only with the United States?” he asked, and proceeded to negotiate with the Soviet Union and other Communist countries to (re)establish diplomatic and commercial relations. He was, in a word, independent.¹⁰

Quadros was also more-or-less a conservative who clamped down hard on unions, sent federal troops to the northeast hunger dens to squash protest, and jailed disobedient students.¹¹ But the American ambassador at the time, John Moors Cabot, saw fit to question Brazil’s taking part in a meeting of “uncommitted” (non-aligned) nations. “Brazil has signed various obligations with the United States and American nations,” he said. “I am sure Brazil is not going to forget her obligations … It is committed. It is a fact. Brazil can uncommit itself if it wants.”¹²

In early 1961, shortly after Quadros took office, he was visited by Adolf Berle, Jr., President Kennedy’s adviser on Latin American affairs and formerly ambassador to Brazil. Berle had come as Kennedy’s special envoy to solicit Quadros’s backing for the impending Bay of Pigs invasion. Ambassador Cabot was present and some years later described the meeting to author Peter Bell. Bell has written:

Ambassador Cabot remembers a “stormy conversation” in which Berle stated the United States had $300 million in reserve for Brazil and in effect “offered it as a bribe” for Brazilian cooperation … Quadros became “visibly irritated” after Berle refused to heed his third “no”. No Brazilian official was at the airport the next day to see the envoy off.¹³

Quadros, who had been elected by a record margin, was, like Goulart, accused of seeking to set up a dictatorship because he sought to put teeth into measures unpopular with the oligarchy, the military, and/or the United States, as well as pursuing a “pro-communist” foreign policy. After but seven months in office he suddenly resigned, reportedly under military pressure, if not outright threat. In his letter of resignation, he blamed his predicament on “reactionaries” and “the ambitions of groups of individuals, some of whom are foreigners … the terrible forces that arose against me.”¹⁴

A few months later, Quadros reappeared, to deliver a speech in which he named Berle, Cabot, and US Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon as being among those who had contributed to his downfall. Dillon, he said, sought to mix foreign policy with Brazil’s needs for foreign credits.¹⁵ (Both Berle and Cabot had been advocates of the 1954 overthrow of Guatemalan President Arbenz, whose sins, in Washington’s eyes, were much the same as those Goulart was now guilty of.)¹⁶ At the same time, Quadros announced his intention to lead a “people’s crusade” against the “reactionaries, the corrupt and the Communists”.¹⁷

As Quadros’s vice president, Goulart succeeded to the presidency in August 1961 despite a virtual coup and civil war initiated by segments of the military to block him because he was seen as some sort of dangerous radical. Only the intervention of loyalist military units and other supporters of the constitutional process allowed Goulart to take office.¹⁸ The military opposition to Goulart arose, it should be noted, before he had the opportunity to exhibit his alleged tendencies toward dictatorship. Indeed, as early as 1954, the military had demonstrated its antipathy toward him by forcing President Vargas to fire him from his position as Minister of Labor.¹⁹ The American doubts about Goulart also predated his presidency. In 1960, when Goulart was elected vice president, “concern at the State Department and the Pentagon turned to panic” according to an American official who served in Brazil.²⁰

Goulart tried to continue Quadros’s independent foreign policy. His government went ahead with resumption of relations with socialist countries, and at a meeting of the Organization of American States in December 1961 Brazil abstained on a vote to hold a special session aimed at discussing “the Cuban problem”, and stood strongly opposed to sanctions against the Castro government.²¹ A few months later, speaking before the US Congress, Goulart affirmed Brazil’s right to take its own stand on some of the cold-war issues. He declared that Brazil identified itself “with the democratic principles which unite the peoples of the West”, but was “not part of any politico-military bloc”.²²

Time magazine, in common with most US media, had (has) a difficult time understanding the concept and practice of independence amongst America’s allies. In November 1961, the magazine wrote that Brazil’s domestic politics were “confused” and that the country was “also adrift in foreign affairs. Goulart is trying to play the old Quadros game of international ‘independence’, which means wooing the East while panhandling from the West.” Time was critical of Goulart in that he had sought an invitation to visit Washington and on the same day he received it he “called in Communist Poland’s visiting Foreign Minister, Adam Rapacki, [and] awarded him the Order of the Southern Cross—the same decoration that Quadros hung on Cuba’s Marxist mastermind, Che Guevara”.²³

Former Time editor and Latin America correspondent, John Gerassi, commented that every visiting foreign dignitary received this medal, the Cruzeiro do Sul, as part of protocol. He added:

Apparently Time thinks that any President who wants to visit us must necessarily hate our enemies as a consequence, and is “confused” whenever this does not occur. But, of course, Time magazine is so unused to the word “independent” that an independent foreign policy must be very confusing indeed. In South America, where everyone would like to follow an independent foreign policy but where only Brazil has, at times, the courage, no one was confused.²⁴

Goulart, a millionaire land-owner and a Catholic who wore a medal of the Virgin around his neck, was no more a communist than was Quadros, and he strongly supported the United States during the “Cuban Missile Crisis” of October 1962. He offered Ambassador Gordon a toast “To the Yankee Victory!”,²⁵ perhaps unaware that only three weeks earlier, during federal and state elections in Brazil, CIA money had been liberally expended in support of anti-Goulart candidates. Former CIA officer Philip Agee has stated that the Agency spent between 12 and 20 million dollars on behalf of hundreds of candidates.²⁶ Lincoln Gordon says the funding came to no more than 5 million.²⁷

In addition to the direct campaign contributions, the CIA dipped into its bag of dirty tricks to torment the campaigns of leftist candidates.²⁸ At the same time, the Agency for International Development (AID), at the express request of President Kennedy, was allocating monies to projects aimed at benefiting chosen gubernatorial candidates.²⁹ (While Goulart was president, no new US economic assistance was given to the central government, while regional assistance was provided on a markedly ideological basis. When the military took power, this pattern was sharply altered.)³⁰

Agee adds that the CIA carried out a consistent propaganda campaign against Goulart which dated from at least the 1962 election operation and which included the financing of mass urban demonstrations, “proving the old themes of God, country, family and liberty to be as effective as ever” in undermining a government.³¹

CIA money also found its way to a chain of right-wing newspapers, Diarias Associades, to promote anti-communism; for the distribution of 50 thousand books of similar politics to high school and college students; and for the formation of women’s groups with their special Latin mother’s emphasis on the godlessness of the communist enemy. The women and other CIA operatives also went into the rumor-mongering business, spreading stories about outrages Goulart and his cronies were supposed to be planning, such as altering the constitution so as to extend his term, and gossip about Goulart being a cuckold and a wife-beater.³²

All this to overthrow a man who, in April 1962, had received a ticker-tape parade in New York City, was warmly welcomed at the White House by President Kennedy, and had addressed a joint session of Congress.

The intraservice confrontation which had attended Goulart’s accession to power apparently kept a rein on coup-minded officers until 1963. In March of that year the CIA informed Washington, but not Goulart, of a plot by conservative officers.³³ During the course of the following year, the plots thickened. Brazilian military officers could not abide by Goulart’s attempts at populist social reforms, though his program was timid, his rhetoric generally mild, and his actions seldom matched either. (He himself pointed out that General Douglas MacArthur had carried out a more radical distribution of land in Japan after the Second World War than anything planned by the Brazilian Government.) The military men were particularly incensed at Goulart’s support of a weakening of military discipline and his attempts to build up a following among non-commissioned officers.³⁴ This the president was genuinely serious about because of his “paranoia” about a coup.

Goulart’s wooing of NCOs and his appeals to the population over the heads of a hostile Congress and state governors (something President Reagan later did on several occasions) were the kind of tactics his enemies labeled as dictatorial.

In early 1964, disclosed Fortune magazine after the coup, an emissary was sent by some of the military plotters “to ask U.S. Ambassador Lincoln Gordon what the U.S. position would be if civil war broke out”. The emissary “reported back that Gordon was cautious and diplomatic, but he left the impression that if the [plotters] could hold out for forty-eight hours they would get U.S. recognition and help.”³⁵

The primary American contact with the conspirators was Defense Attaché Vernon Walters who arrived in Brazil after having been apprised that President Kennedy would not be averse to the overthrow of João Goulart.³⁶ Walters, who later became Deputy Director of the CIA, had an intimacy with leading Brazilian military officers, particularly General Castelo Branco, going back to World War II when Walters had served as interpreter for the Brazilian Expeditionary Force then fighting in Italy with the Allies. Brazil was the only Latin American country to send ground combat troops to the war, and it allowed the United States to build huge aircraft staging bases on its territory.³⁷ The relationship between US and Brazilian officers was continued and enhanced after the war by the creation of the Higher War College (Escola Superior de Guerra) in Rio de Janeiro in 1949. Latin America historian Thomas E. Skidmore has observed:

Under the U.S.-Brazilian military agreements of the early 1950s, the U.S. Army received exclusive rights to render assistance in the organization and operation of the college, which had been modeled on the National War College in Washington. In view of the fact that the Brazilian War College became a rallying point for leading military opponents of civilian populist politicians, it would be worth examining the extent to which the strongly anti-Communist ideology—bordering on an anti-political attitude—[of certain officers] was reinforced (or moderated?) by their frequent contacts with United States officers.³⁸

There was, moreover, the ongoing US Military Assistance Program, which Ambassador Gordon described as a “major vehicle for establishing close relationships with personnel of the armed forces” and “a highly important factor in influencing [the Brazilian] military to be pro-US.”³⁹

A week before the coup, Castelo Branco, who emerged as the leader of the conspirators, gave Walters a copy of a paper he had written which was in effect a justification for a military coup, another variation on the theme of upholding the constitution by preventing Goulart from instituting a dictatorship.⁴⁰

To Lincoln Gordon and other American officials, civil war appeared a real possibility as the result of a coup attempt. As the scheduled day approached, contingency plans were set up.

A large quantity of petroleum would be sent to Brazil and made available to the insurgent officers, an especially vital commodity if Goulart supporters in the state oil union were to blow up or control the refineries.⁴¹

A US Navy task force would be dispatched to Brazilian coastal waters, the presence of which would deliver an obvious message to opponents of the coup.⁴²

Arms and ammunition would be sent to Branco’s forces to meet their fighting needs.⁴³

Concerned that the coup attempt might be met by a general strike, Washington discussed with Gordon the possible need “for the U.S. to mount a large material program to assure the success of the takeover.”⁴⁴ The conspirators had already requested economic aid from the United States, in the event of their success, to get the government and economy moving again, and had received a generally favorable response.⁴⁵

At the same time, Gordon sent word to some anti-Goulart state governors emphasizing the necessity, from the American point of view, that the new regime have a claim to legitimacy. The ambassador also met with former president Juscelino Kubitschek to urge him to take a stronger position against Goulart and to use his considerable influence to “swing a large congressional group and thereby influence the legitimacy issue”.⁴⁶

Of the American contingency measures, indications are that it was the naval show of force—which, it turned out, included an aircraft carrier, destroyers, and guided missiles—which most encouraged the Brazilian military plotters or convinced those still wavering in their commitment.⁴⁷

Another actor in the unfolding drama was the American Institute for Free Labor Development. The AIFLD came formally into being in 1961 and was technically under the direction of the American labor movement (AFL-CIO), but was soon being funded almost exclusively by the US government (AID) and serving consistently as a CIA instrument in most countries of Latin America. In May 1963, the AIFLD founded the Instituto Cultural Trabalho in Brazil which, over the next few years, gave courses to more than 7,000 union leaders and members.⁴⁸ Other Brazilians went to the United States for training. When they returned to Brazil, said AIFLD executive William Doherty, Jr., some of them:

became intimately involved in some of the clandestine operations of the revolution before it took place on April 1. What happened in Brazil on April 1 did not just happen—it was planned—and planned months in advance. Many of the trade union leaders—some of whom were actually trained in our institute—were involved in the revolution, and in the overthrow of the Goulart regime.⁴⁹

Doherty did not spell out any details of the AIFLD role in the coup (or revolution as he called it), although Reader’s Digest later reported that one of the AIFLD-trained labor leaders set up courses for communication workers in combatting communism in the labor movement in Brazil, and “After every class he quietly warned key workers of coming trouble and urged them to keep communications going no matter what happened.”⁵⁰ Additionally, Richard Martinez, an unwitting CIA contract employee who was sent to Brazil to work with the Agency’s Post, Telegraph and Telephone Workers International (formerly Doherty’s domain), has revealed that his field workers in Brazil burned down Communist Party headquarters at the time of the coup.⁵¹

The coup began on 31 March 1964 with the advance upon Rio of troops and tanks. Officers obtained the support of some units of enlisted men by telling them they were heading for the city to secure it against Goulart’s enemies. But at the main air force base pro-Goulart enlisted men, hearing of the move toward Rio, seized the base and put their officers under arrest. Indecision and cold feet intervened, however, and what might have reversed the course of events instead came to nought. Other military units loyal to Goulart took actions elsewhere, but these too fizzled out.⁵²

Here and there a scattering of workers went out on strike; several short-lived, impotent demonstrations took place, but there was little else. A number of labor leaders and radicals were rounded up on the orders of certain state governors; those who were opposed to what was happening were not prepared for violent resistance; in one incident a group of students staged a protest—some charged up the stairs of an Army organization, but the guard fired into their midst, killing two of them and forcing the others to fall back.⁵³

Most people counted on loyal armed forces to do their duty, or waited for the word from Goulart. Goulart, however, was unwilling to give the call for a civil war; he did not want to be responsible, he said, for bloodshed amongst Brazilians, and fled to Uruguay.⁵⁴

Lincoln Gordon cabled Washington the good news, suggesting the “avoidance of a jubilant posture”. He described the coup as “a great victory for the free world”, adding, in a remark that might have had difficulty getting past the lips of even John Foster Dulles, that without the coup there could have been a “total loss to the West of all South American Republics”. Following a victory parade in Rio on 2 April by those pleased with the coup—a March of Family with God for Liberty—Gordon informed the State Department that the “only unfortunate note was the obviously limited participation in the march of the lower classes.”⁵⁵

His cable work done, the former Harvard professor turned his attention back to trying to persuade the Brazilian Congress to bestow a seal of “legitimacy” upon the new government.⁵⁶

Two years later, Gordon was to be questioned by a senator during hearings to consider his nomination as Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. “I am particularly concerned,” said the senator, “with the part you may have played, if any, in encouraging, promoting, or causing that overthrow.”

Said Lincoln Gordon: “The answer to that, senator, is very simple. The movement which overthrew President Goulart was a purely, 100 percent—not 99.44—but 100 percent purely Brazilian movement. Neither the American Embassy nor I personally played any part in the process whatsoever.”⁵⁷

Gordon’s boss, Dean Rusk, was not any more forthright. When asked about Cuban charges that the United States was behind the coup, the Secretary of State responded: “Well, there is just not one iota of truth in this. It’s just not so in any way, shape, or form.”⁵⁸ While Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s view of the affair, stated to Gordon, was: “Well, Goulart got what was coming to him. Too bad he didn’t follow the advice we gave him when I was there.”⁵⁹

Gordon artfully combined fast talk with omission of certain key facts about Brazilian politics—his summary of Goulart’s rise and fall made no mention at all of the military’s move to keep him from taking office in 1961—to convince the assembled senators that Goulart was indeed seeking to set up a personal dictatorship.⁶⁰

Depending on the setting, either “saving Brazil from dictatorship” or “saving Brazil from communism” was advanced as the rationale for what took place in 1964. (General Andrew O’Meara, head of the US Southern [Latin America] Command, had it both ways. He told a House committee that “The coming to power of the Castelo Branco government in Brazil last April saved that country from an immediate dictatorship which could only have been followed by Communist domination.”)⁶¹

The rescue-from-communism position was especially difficult to support, the problem being that the communists in Brazil did not, after all, do anything which the United States could point to. Moreover, the Soviet Union was scarcely in the picture. Early in 1964, reported a Brazilian newspaper, Russian leader Khrushchev told the Brazilian Communist Party that the Soviet government did not wish either to give financial aid to the Goulart regime or to tangle with the United States over the country.⁶² In his reminiscences—albeit, as mentioned earlier, not meant to be a serious work of history—Khrushchev does not give an index reference to Brazil.

A year after the coup, trade between Brazil and the USSR was running at $120 million per year and a Brazilian mission was planning to go to Moscow to explore Soviet willingness to provide a major industrial plant.⁶³ The following year, the Russians invited the new Brazilian president-to-be, General Costa e Silva, to visit the Soviet Union.⁶⁴

During the entire life of the military dictatorship, extending into the 1980s, Brazil and the Soviet bloc engaged in extensive trade and economic cooperation, reaching billions of dollars per year and including the building of several large hydroelectric plants in Brazil. A similar economic relationship existed between the Soviet bloc and the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976-83, so much so that in 1982, when Soviet leader Brezhnev died, the Argentine government declared a national day of mourning.⁶⁵

It was only by ignoring facts like these during the cold war that the anti-communist propaganda machine of the United States could preach about the International Communist Conspiracy and claim that the coup in Brazil had saved the country from communism. For a typical example of this propaganda, one must read “The Country That Saved Itself,” which appeared in Reader’s Digest several months after the coup. The innumerable lies about what occurred in Brazil, fed by the magazine to its millions of readers, undoubtedly played a role in preparing the American public for the great anti-communist crusade in Vietnam just picking up steam at the time. The article began:

Seldom has a major nation come closer to the brink of disaster and yet recovered than did Brazil in its recent triumph over Red subversion. The communist drive for domination—marked by propaganda, infiltration, terror—was moving in high gear. Total surrender seemed imminent—and then the people said No!⁶⁶

The type of independence shown by the Brazilian military government in its economic relations with the Soviet Union was something Washington could accept from a conservative government, even the occasional nationalization of American property, when it knew that the government could be relied upon to keep the left suppressed at home and to help in the vital cold-war, anti-communist campaigns abroad. In 1965, Brazil sent 1,100 troops to the Dominican Republic in support of the US invasion, the only country in Latin America to send more than a token force. And in 1971 and 1973, the Brazilian military and intelligence apparatuses contributed to the American efforts in overthrowing the governments of Bolivia and Chile.

The United States did not rest on its laurels. CIA headquarters immediately began to generate hemisphere-wide propaganda, as only the Agency’s far-flung press-asset network could, in support of the new Brazilian government and to discredit Goulart.⁶⁷ Dean Rusk, concerned that Goulart might be received in Uruguay as if he were still Brazil’s president on the grounds that he had not resigned, cabled the American Embassy in Montevideo that “it would be useful if you could quietly bring to the attention of appropriate officials the fact that despite his allegations to the contrary Goulart has abandoned his office.”⁶⁸

At the same time, the CIA station in Uruguay undertook a program of surveillance of Brazilian exiles who had fled from the military takeover, to prevent them from instigating any kind of insurgency movement in their homeland. It was a simple matter for the Agency to ask their (paid) friend, the head of Uruguayan intelligence, to place his officers at the residences of Goulart and other key Brazilians. The officers kept logs of visitors while posing as personal security men for the exiles, although it is unlikely that the exiles swallowed the story.⁶⁹

In the first few days following the coup, “several thousand” Brazilians were arrested, “communist and suspected communist” all.⁷⁰ AIFLD graduates were promptly appointed by the new government to purge the unions.⁷¹ Though Ambassador Gordon had assured the State Department before the coup that the armed forces “would be quick to restore constitutional institutions and return power to civilian hands,”⁷² this was not to be. Within days, General Castelo Branco assumed the presidency and over the next few years his regime instituted all the features of military dictatorship which Latin America has come to know and love: Congress was shut down, political opposition was reduced to virtual extinction, habeas corpus for “political crimes” was suspended, criticism of the president was forbidden by law, labor unions were taken over by government interveners, mounting protests were met by police and military firing into crowds, the use of systematic “disappearance” as a form of repression came upon the stage of Latin America, peasants’ homes were burned down, priests were brutalized … the government had a name for its program: the “moral rehabilitation” of Brazil … then there was the torture and the death squads, both largely undertakings of the police and the military, both underwritten by the United States.⁷³

In the chapters on Guatemala and Uruguay, we shall see how the US Office of Public Safety (OPS), the CIA and AID combined to provide the technical training, the equipment, and the indoctrination which supported the horrors in those countries. It was no less the case in Brazil. Dan Mitrione of the OPS, whom we shall encounter in his full beauty as a torturer in Uruguay, began his career in Brazil in the 1960s. By 1969, OPS had established a national police force for Brazil and had trained over 100,000 policemen in the country, in addition to 523 receiving more advanced instruction in the United States.⁷⁴ About one-third of the students’ time at the police academies was devoted to lectures on the “communist menace” and the need to battle against it.⁷⁵ The “bomb school” and techniques of riot control were other important aspects of their education.

Tortures range from simple but brutal blows from a truncheon to electric shocks. Often the torture is more refined: the end of a reed is placed in the anus of a naked man hanging suspended downwards on the pau de arara [parrot’s perch] and a piece of cotton soaked in petrol is lit at the other end of the reed. Pregnant women have been forced to watch their husbands being tortured. Other wives have been hung naked beside their husbands and given electric shocks on the sexual parts of their body, while subjected to the worst kind of obscenities. Children have been tortured before their parents and vice versa. At least one child, the three month old baby of Virgilio Gomes da Silva was reported to have died under police torture. The length of sessions depends upon the resistance capacity of the victims and have sometimes continued for days at a time.

Amnesty International⁷⁶

Judge Agamemnon Duarte indicated that the CCC [Commandos to Hunt Communists, a death squad armed and aided by the police] and the CIA are implicated in the murder of Father Henrique Neto. He admitted that … the American Secret Service (CIA) was behind the CCC.

Jornal do Brazil⁷⁷ Chief of Staff of the Brazilian Army, General Breno Borges Forte, at the Tenth Conference of American Armies in 1973:

The enemy is undefined … it adapts to any environment and uses every means, both licit and illicit, to achieve its aims. It disguises itself as a priest, a student or a campesino, as a defender of democracy or an advanced intellectual, as a pious soul or as an extremist protestor; it goes into the fields and the schools, the factories and the churches, the universities and the magistracy; if necessary, it will wear a uniform or civil garb; in sum, it will take on any role that it considers appropriate to deceive, to lie, and to take in the good faith of Western peoples.”⁷⁸

In 1970, a US Congress study group visited Brazil. It gave this summary of statements by American military advisers there:

Rather than dwell on the authoritarian aspects of the regime, they emphasize assertions by the Brazilian armed forces that they believe in, and support, representative democracy as an ideal and would return government to civilian control if this could be done without sacrifice to security and development. This withdrawal from the political arena is not seen as occurring in the near future. For that reason they emphasize the continued importance of the military assistance training program as a means of exerting U.S. influence and retaining the current pro-U.S. attitude of the Brazilian armed forces. Possible disadvantages to U.S. interests in being so closely identified with an authoritarian regime are not seen as particularly important.⁷⁹

The CIA never rests. The New York Times reported in 1966:

When the CIA learned last year that a Brazilian youth had been killed in 1963, allegedly in an auto accident, while studying on a scholarship at the Lumumba University in Moscow, it mounted a massive publicity campaign to discourage other South American families from sending their youngsters to the Soviet Union.⁸⁰

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