In June 1948 the National Security Council made a compromise decision. It established the innocently named Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), and assigned it to CIA for what the Army traditionally called “rations and quarters.” This meant that Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, then director of Central Intelligence, would house, administer, and pay the OPC staff, but would have no substantive control of OPC policy or activity. OPC would report directly to the National Security Council and to the secretaries of state and defense, and would receive its directives and marching orders from these offices. This lame compromise between establishing yet another secret organization and giving CIA full responsibility for covert action operations seemed to have been most heavily influenced by the reluctance of the State and Defense Departments to give the upstart CIA any more responsibility than it already had. Granted the understanding that many in Washington were convinced that the United States was headed for war with the USSR, it is difficult to see how anyone might have thought this compromise could have worked.
Those of us in the Office of Special Operations were more curious than concerned about these decisions. It was not that we were all so blasé we couldn’t be bothered, but that we were running hard to keep abreast of our daily responsibilities. Moreover, the fact that the outfit was still in a teething mode, and without a sufficiently broad base of experience, left us little time for strategic reflection. The benefit of a few back-to-back months of organizational peace might have aroused more comment and speculation on the advent of OPC. Little did we know.
The National Security Council first listed OPC’s responsibilities in a blunt secret charter that directed it to engage in “propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, antisabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion of hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”
If this were not handful enough, these activities were to be planned and conducted so that if ever exposed, the American government could “plausibly disclaim any responsibility.” It seems impossible to believe that the paramilitary activity authorized in the OPC charter could be carried out in a manner that could plausibly be denied by the President, but I do not recall any serious challenges to this instruction at the time.
In an unclassified document published in 1995, CIA presented a delicately phrased but significantly new definition of covert action: “An operation designed to influence governments, events, organizations, or persons in support of foreign policy in a manner that is not necessarily attributable to the sponsoring power; it may include political, economic, propaganda, or paramilitary activities” (emphasis added).*
In my opinion, a covert action operation that is not necessarily attributable to its sponsor does not qualify as a covert activity.
Before signing on with the State Department, Frank Wisner had worked with Allen Dulles and a handful of private enthusiasts who served as volunteer intelligence lobbyists. Frank had led the agitation for a new secret agency specifically authorized to engage in all forms of secret political, psychological, paramilitary, and economic warfare. In 1948, Frank slipped quietly aside from his State Department assignment and was appointed chief of OPC. Highly intelligent, experienced, energetic, and impeccably well connected, he was uniquely well qualified for the job.
By the time President Truman’s nomination of General Bedell Smith to replace Admiral Hillenkoetter as DCI had been confirmed by the Senate in August 1950, it did not take any marked insight to realize that General Smith was not likely to allow any element of his new command to report to and receive orders directly from the secretary of state or anyone else in Washington. One of the general’s first acts was to tell Wisner that as of the next morning, OPC was part and parcel of CIA, and that it would report to and receive its directives from the director of Central Intelligence. Frank was realist enough to know that the change was bound to come. The fact that it came this quickly did not make it any more welcome.
The most serious remaining problem was an internal one, the merging of OSO and OPC facilities, administration, and personnel. OSO personnel had paid little attention to OPC in its inception. From the moment OPC moved into the OSO quarters alongside the Reflecting Pool and began to undertake field operations, antagonism between the two disciplines developed. Two areas of conflict evolved, one operational, the other administrative.
Operational tradecraft was the fundamental problem. The first person I heard use “tradecraft” to describe the mechanics of secret intelligence was Allen Dulles. I doubt that he coined the expression, but he obviously liked the homespun sound of it. A colleague has pointed out that the Russian term for the arts and practices of espionage is “conspiracy,” and that while American operatives learned tradecraft, their Russian antagonists were boning up on conspiracy. My friend thought that the slightly sinister overtone of the Russian term was more fitting a secret intelligence organization. Each to his own.
The first OPC operatives had not been in the field for long before it became obvious that in the rush to get operations under way, the OPC supervisors had paid too little attention to tradecraft and cover, and were failing to coordinate with the local OSO staff. In the pursuit of the overly ambitious OPC objectives, OSO equities were ignored, and security discipline was often poor.
Administratively, one of the earliest gripes was pay. Wisner had convinced the National Security Council that to make OPC work, he would need the very best personnel possible. From the outset and within the confines of the civil service pay scale, OPC sometimes based a new employee’s pay on his salary in private life. Previous secret intelligence or diplomatic experience, language skills, and area knowledge were treasured, but the pickings were slim, and many recruits were accepted without any of these qualifications. This was exactly opposite of OSO practice. OSO recruits who did not have pertinent intelligence experience, language skills, and area knowledge came aboard at entry-level pay levels adjusted in part to their educational backgrounds and ages. Subsequent promotions were based on experience, languages, area knowledge, and proven operational competence. In practice, many inexperienced OPC officers were at least one pay grade above OSO personnel, with equal responsibility.
Within a year of its inception, OPC opened five foreign stations and hired more than three hundred employees. Three years later, forty-seven foreign posts had been established,* and the domestic and overseas staff had grown to some three thousand people. Even in the “the-Russians-are-coming” atmosphere prevailing in Washington and the Western European capitals, it was not possible to recruit, security-clear, and train this many officers and clerks in anything as complex as the responsibilities that had so optimistically been loaded upon the Office of Policy Coordination.
At the time, background security checks for staff employees took a minimum of three months. Training for staff officers involved another three months—and might profitably have been expanded to twice that time. Existing training facilities were swamped by the new arrivals. As a result, some employees were sent to the field with little training, and sometimes after only a familiarization period on one of the headquarters desks. Once in the field, fledgling operatives, no matter how well trained, require close guidance by experienced supervisors. In some OPC offices, the supervisors had little more experience than their staff.
In the months following the merger of OPC and OSO in 1952 it sometimes seemed unlikely that we would ever effect the coordination Bedell Smith assumed would follow his decision to form a unified organization. It took some doing, but the merger of the two functions—intelligence and covert action—was achieved. In sketching this period, I was reminded of how much there is to be said for the way some OPC officers achieved so many of their objectives while hammering their service into shape. Some of the most effective and longest-running covert action projects—Radio Free Europe and the Congress for Cultural Freedom—were established in this early period.
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In 1951, Mohammad Mossadegh, the contentious nationalist prime minister of Iran, began systematically to undercut the authority and policy of the youthful Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Mossadegh also nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and effectively resisted British diplomatic pressure and a partial naval blockade meant to force a change in his policy. American interests in Iran were not felt challenged until it became apparent that the prime minister might turn away from the traditional British-Iranian alliance and accept a hefty loan and other accommodations with the USSR. At this point, Secretary of State Dulles agreed to support the British position. A joint British-American plan to remove Mossadegh and restore the Shah’s authority was agreed upon.
CIA’s point man in the operation was Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of Theodore Roosevelt. Kim, as he was known, was an OSS veteran and an early CA enthusiast. He was assisted by a handful of CIA officers. In two months, and at a cost of two hundred thousand dollars, the joint coup d’état tumbled Mossadegh from office and brought the Shah back from a prudent sojourn in Rome to the Iranian throne.
For insiders, the effort was an incredible success. But when the Eisenhower administration’s faith in covert action as a foreign policy panacea soared, Kim Roosevelt was moved to sound a thoughtful warning.
As he describes it in his book,* Kim tried to convince a high-level meeting, chaired by John Foster Dulles, that the coup had succeeded because CIA’s study of the Iranian situation convincingly showed that the Iranian people and most of the military “wanted exactly” the results the Eisenhower administration was seeking. When Kim noticed that Foster Dulles was paying no attention, he added a most significant caveat. “If we [CIA] are ever going to try something like this again, we must be absolutely sure that [the] people and army want what we want. If not, you had better give the job to the Marines!” As Kim noted, “Foster Dulles did not want to hear what I was saying. He was still leaning back in his chair with a catlike grin on his face.”
At the time the covert action enthusiasts were celebrating their success and pondering further ventures, I never heard any discussion of Kim Roosevelt’s advice, or even a reference to it.
A few weeks after Kim briefed Foster Dulles, the Eisenhower administration directed CIA to undertake another operation, code-named PBSUCCESS. Allen Dulles turned to Kim Roosevelt, an obvious candidate to oversee the ousting of the democratically elected government of Guatemala. Kim looked into what we used to call the “facts bearing on the problem” and politely refused the assignment.
The 1950 presidential election in Guatemala was expected to be a slam-bang contest between Francisco Arana, the chief of the Guatemalan armed forces, and Jacobo Arbenz, the minister of defense. Although both served in the administration of President Juan Arévalo, whose effort to effect changes in land management and to introduce social reforms, including the right of workers to organize unions, had infuriated the wealthy oligarchy, Arana had become increasingly conservative. Arbenz remained loyal to Arévalo’s policies and, like his mentor, had sought left-wing support, including support from people who sympathized with the outlawed Communist Party. A few weeks before the election, Arana was lured into an ambush and killed by a posse of gunmen. A contest that would have given the Guatemalan electorate a clear choice between a conservative candidate and a leftist became an easy victory for Jacobo Arbenz.
In 1952 a CIA national estimate showed that Guatemala’s numerically small Communist Party was exercising a political influence far out of proportion to its voter strength. The following year, the State Department recognized the influence of the Communist Party as an increasingly serious problem. Diplomatic efforts to change President Arbenz’s political slant were ineffective. By 1954, Arbenz had expropriated thousands of acres of the United Fruit Company’s plantations, legalized the Guatemalan Communist Party, and invited its participation in the government. President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Foster Dulles had reluctantly, if quietly, accepted the probability that there could be little “rollback of communism” in Eastern Europe, but there was no chance that they would tolerate Arbenz’s apparent level of communist enthusiasm in our national front yard.
Diplomatic suasion had failed, and the days of open military intervention in our hemisphere seemed to have passed. An ambitious covert action operation was the obvious answer. This decision was underlined when an intelligence report showed that a Swedish-owned ship had landed in Guatemala bearing some two thousand tons of Czech arms.
President Eisenhower authorized a $20 million budget, and an operations plan was drafted. A Guatemalan exile, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, was the central figure and commander of the rebel forces, the main components of which were an army of several hundred men and a small air force training in Honduras. An extensive propaganda campaign was launched in May 1954, and the Voice of Liberation, a clandestine radio station ostensibly operating from secret bases in Guatemala, began broadcasting news of battles within Guatemala and transmitting “orders” to notional resistance groups. On June 18, 1954, Colonel Armas and his ragtag force crossed the Guatemalan border unopposed. Air raids were faked—the planes dropped improvised bombs that were loud but harmless. The alleged results were widely publicized in exaggerated accounts broadcast by the “rebel” radio. Arbenz and his advisors were confused but held fast, and the Guatemalan military commanders remained quiet.
On June 20, Allen Dulles informed President Eisenhower that the operation had stalled and success was “very much in doubt.” Unless the Guatemalan army moved against Arbenz, there was little probability that the coup would succeed. What was needed, Dulles told the President, was three aircraft to replace the vintage planes lost to ground fire and mechanical failures. Eisenhower agreed, and the “sale” of aircraft by the Air Force was negotiated. The lightly disguised planes were delivered by CIA pilots and momentum was restored to the rebel forces.
At this moment the relentless radio propaganda and deception moved Arbenz to make a final mistake. Convinced that he was facing an all-out attack, Arbenz panicked and ordered weapons be given to the “people’s organizations and political parties.” This was too much for the conservative army commanders. Arbenz was convincingly told that the army would no longer support him and that he should resign. He did so and slipped across the border into exile.
It was a near thing, but another ambitious covert action had succeeded.
PBSUCCESS introduced Richard M. Bissell, Jr., to covert action operations. After a brilliant scholastic record at Groton and Yale and a hitch at the London School of Economics, Bissell had entered government service in World War II as a key figure in directing the most efficient use of vital merchant shipping. After the war he taught economics at MIT and engaged in private consulting work. In 1948, he was summoned to Washington, where he wrote the first draft of the Marshall Plan. In 1952, he joined the Ford Foundation, a job that led to his exploring the ways in which CIA might promote resistance to the Soviets in Eastern Europe and gave him the opportunity to work with various old friends—Frank Wisner, Frank Lindsay, Tracy Barnes, and Max Milliken, then all with CIA. In 1953, Allen Dulles, also a friend, persuaded Bissell to join the Agency. His first brush with operations came as a staff officer involved in the complex political and logistical support of PBSUCCESS, at the time the Agency’s largest CA project.
*A Consumer’s Guide to Intelligence (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office).
*In almost all instances, the OPC operatives shared office premises with the established OSO installations. This was easily done in the still-occupied areas in Germany and Austria. It was more of a problem in other areas.
*Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup: The Struggle for Control of Iran (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979, p. 210).
Chapter 12
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BREAKING THE ICE
As the Agency gained its growth and settled down, the operations command channel remained much as it was initially conceived. In 1953 it went from Allen Dul
les, director of Central Intelligence (DCI), to the deputy director for plans (DDP), Frank Wisner. As DDP, Wisner also shared responsibility with Dulles for the high-level contacts with the White House, Department of State, and Pentagon. In my role as Wisner’s deputy and chief of operations, I supervised all operational activity except the work handled directly by Dulles or Wisner. I was also responsible for headquarters and overseas personnel assignments. Next in the line of command were the chiefs of the various area divisions. As in the Department of State, day-to-day activity was supervised by the country desk officers in each of the area divisions.
The rapid growth of CIA from its inception in 1947 to the mid-1950s and the merger of the covert action and espionage elements in 1953 meant there was more than enough work to keep Wisner and me busy. Although fully informed of all covert action operations, I concentrated—pace Mr. Dulles—on intelligence collection, counterintelligence, and foreign liaison activity. Frank was primarily concerned with covert action and policy matters, but was also abreast of my work, and participated in all the important personnel decisions. At no time was either of us excluded from oversight of the other’s activity. This was particularly important in my case, because when Frank was out of town I took over. We had an easy and, I think, very effective working relationship.
There was always more than could be done in anything resembling a normal workday. I made it a practice to leave the office when I felt I had coped with what had to be done that day. To attempt to deal with everything that reached one’s desk was to encourage a constantly increasing burden, with ever more problems being presented daily. The solution—to take a page from General Smith’s practice—was to effect a sort of inbox triage, and to refuse to consider any problem that could be solved at a lower level. Day in and out I probably averaged a fifty-hour workweek. This sounds tame enough, and rightly so had all the hours been spent at my desk.
A Look Over My Shoulder Page 15