Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Another team spent the night before the Vietminh takeover at the city bus depot contaminating the oil supply so that the bus engines would gradually be wrecked. The team had to work quickly in an enclosed storage room. Fumes from the contaminant came close to knocking them out. “Dizzy and weak-kneed,” the SMM history records, “they masked their faces with handkerchiefs and completed the job.”36

  Back in Saigon, Lansdale’s efforts were somewhat more positive. He served as an adviser to Diem, supporting the Prime Minister in his decision to crush the Binh Zuyen, a quasi-criminal sect which controlled gambling, the opium trade, and prostitution in Saigon. Lansdale also persuaded Diem to hold a referendum designed to give his regime a popular legitimacy. The ballot allowed the South Vietnamese to choose between Diem and Emperor Bao Dai, who had thoroughly discredited himself as a playboy tool of the French. Diem got 98 percent of the vote on October 23, 1955, and became President of South Vietnam, which became a republic.37

  Lansdale had ambitious plans for the new republic. He proposed to Allen Dulles that the CIA provide the money to support a program he called “Militant Liberty.” He described it as a concept he had used successfully in the Philippines. As Lansdale explained it to Dulles, it sounded like a high school civics exercise: “The heart of any plan to implement ‘Militant Liberty’ is the progressive training of groups of indigenous personnel in an understanding of the meaning of a free society to the individual and the individual’s responsibilities in creating and maintaining such a society.” He wanted to concentrate the program in the South Vietnamese Army because “the induction-training-discharge cycle provides ready access to indigenous personnel who can play an important role in a revitalization of Vietnam both during their period of military service and subsequently after they have returned to civilian life.”38

  Through the second half of the fifties, Lansdale continued to involve himself in the Byzantine politics of Saigon, a city full of plots, filled with intrigue, and jammed with spies. All his activity could not hide the fact that the United States had been unable to prevent the Communist takeover in North Vietnam and that the CIA was incapable of toppling Ho Chi Minh’s government in Hanoi. In the Far East there were to be no cheap victories, as there had been in Iran and Guatemala.

  THE CIA’S FAILURE IN VIETNAM did not deter the agency from trying again to topple an Asian government, this time in 1958 in Indonesia. President Sukarno, a fifty-six-year-old ladies’ man who had had four wives and who was linked by gossip to such movie stars as Gina Lollobrigida and Joan Crawford, was somewhat like Mossadegh, a spellbinder of a speaker but erratic and mercurial as a leader. Like many Third World presidents, Sukarno had drifted toward the left. He had expropriated most of the private holdings of the Dutch (who had held Indonesia as a colony for 350 years), he had turned to the Russians for help in obtaining weapons for his armed forces, and he had brought the Communist Party of Indonesia into his coalition government.

  Since winning its independence in 1949, Indonesia had been a parliamentary democracy. But in February 1957, following a tour of Russia and its satellites, Sukarno declared that democracy did not suit his diverse nation. Indonesia was indeed diverse—its nearly 100 million people lived on 3,000 islands. Sukarno dissolved Parliament and took semidictatorial powers for himself under the euphemism “Guided Democracy.” His chief support came from the one-million-member Communist Party and the Indonesian Army.

  Moderates in Indonesia, headed by political leaders outside of Java, wanted to overthrow Sukarno. The CIA encouraged them to act. On February 15, 1958, the Revolutionary Council in Sumatra proclaimed a new government with a multiparty, coalition cabinet. The rebels had hoped the armed forces would join them, but instead the head of the army, General Abdul Haris Nasution, dishonorably discharged six generals who had sided with them while the air force bombed, strafed, and destroyed two radio stations that had joined the rebels.

  Civil war began. The United States took the high road. “We are pursuing what I trust is a correct course from the point of international law,” John Foster Dulles told Congress in early March. “We are not intervening in the internal affairs of this country.”39

  The next week the rebels asked the United States for arms, and appealed to the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization for recognition. Again, Dulles declared American neutrality: “The U.S. views this trouble in Sumatra as an internal matter. We try to be absolutely correct in our international proceedings and attitude toward it.”

  The rebels’ best weapon was their air force, which carried out a series of raids against the government. On April 30, Sukarno accused the United States of supplying the bombers and the pilots. He warned Washington “not to play with fire in Indonesia.… Let not a lack of understanding by America lead to a third war.”

  “We could easily have asked for volunteers from outside,” Sukarno continued. “We could wink and they would come. We could have thousands of volunteers, but we will meet the rebels with our own strength.”40

  That same day, Ike held a press conference. He was asked about Sukarno’s charges. “Our policy,” the President replied, “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.

  “Now on the other hand,” Ike continued, “every rebellion that I have ever heard of has its soldiers of fortune. You can start even back to reading your Richard Harding Davis. People were going out looking for a good fight and getting into it, sometimes in the hope of pay, and sometimes just for the heck of the thing. That is probably going to happen every time you have a rebellion.”

  Boys will be boys, in short, and no one could expect the President to change human nature. The trouble with Ike’s offhanded explanation was that it was a lie. The Americans flying bombing missions for the rebels were not soldiers of fortune acting on their own, but CIA agents acting at the direction of the Eisenhower administration.41

  When Sukarno made his deal with the Indonesian Communist Party and began receiving arms from the Soviet Union, the CIA decided to do to him what it had done to Mossadegh and Arbenz. Ike checked over the plan, which was almost identical with PBSUCCESS, and approved the operation.

  The pilots and planes came from the Civil Air Transport (CAT), originally formed in China by the CIA to support Chiang Kai-shek, later used by Lansdale in the Philippines and Indochina. Most of the CAT equipment and manpower came out of Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers. Lansdale described CAT in a top-secret memorandum on “unconventional-warfare resources in Southeast Asia,” which he gave to General Maxwell Taylor in 1961 (and which was later published in the Pentagon Papers): “CAT, a CIA proprietary, provides air logistical support under commercial cover to most CIA and other U. S. Government agencies’ requirements … CAT has demonstrated its capabilities on numerous occasions to meet all types of contingency or long-term covert air requirements.… During the past ten years, it has had some notable achievements, including support of the Chinese Nationalist withdrawal from the mainland, air drop support for the Indonesian operation, air lifts of refugees from North Vietnam, more than 200 overflights of Mainland China and Tibet, and extensive air support in Laos during the current crisis.”42

  CAT supplied the Indonesian rebels with a half dozen or so B-26 two-engine bombers. They flew harassing raids intended to frighten Sukarno’s military supporters into deserting him. All was going well until May 18, 1958, when a pilot named Allen Lawrence Pope was shot down during a bombing and strafing run on the Ambon Island airstrip in the Moluccas. The American ambassador to Indonesia, Howard P. Jones, followed Ike’s lead and dismissed Pope as “a private American citizen involved as a paid soldier of fortune,” but that fiction could not survive long. Allen Dulles lost his enthusiasm for the venture; Ike no longer wanted any part of it. The CIA withdrew CAT and the Indonesian rebellion collapsed.

  It was an ignominious failure. As Ray Cline has noted, it made Sukarno increasingly dictatorial and led to much misery for Indonesia. Sukarno�
��s atrocious political and economic mismanagement led to a crisis in the mid-1960s that saw the Communists murder many of the politically conservative leaders in an attempt to seize total control. That attempt resulted in the widespread massacre of thousands of Communists themselves. The University of Indonesia, after an investigation, placed the number killed at 800,000, making this one of the worst bloodbaths of all time.43

  Cline has an excellent summary of the debacle in Indonesia: “The weak point in covert paramilitary action is that a single misfortune that reveals CIA’S connection makes it necessary for the United States either to abandon the cause completely or convert to a policy of overt military intervention. Because such paramilitary operations are generally kept secret for political reasons, when CIA’S cover is blown the usual U.S. response is to withdraw, leaving behind the friendly elements who had entrusted their lives to the U.S. enterprise.”44

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The National Intelligence Estimates

  THE MOST IMPORTANT WORK THE CIA DOES takes place in the Washington office of the Deputy Director for Intelligence (DDI). There the CIA carries on the old research and analysis functions of the OSS, tapping America’s prestigious universities for specialized personnel with intimate acquaintance with the languages, history, economics, and social conditions of foreign countries. R & A has none of the glamour of an Operation PBSUCCESS, none of the excitement of an Operation RED SOX/RED CAP, none of the rewards of an Operation AJAX, but it is the heart of the matter, what the CIA is all about. For it is the DDI who provides the information that the President relies upon when he makes a policy judgment.

  Allen Dulles, as noted, was relatively uninterested in acquiring and analyzing intelligence—he left it up to the DDI.

  One of the best men ever to work on the intelligence side of the CIA was Ray S. Cline, an OSS veteran of the R & A branch and ultimately the Deputy Director of the CIA. Cline is a scholar’s scholar. After the war he wrote Washington Command Post: The Operations Division, one of the most widely praised volumes in the highly regarded series The U. S. Army in World War II, and after his retirement he wrote Secrets, Spies and Scholars: Blueprint of the Essential CIA, which was praised in the professional journals as the best book yet on the CIA.

  In the 1950s, Cline worked deep in the labyrinth of the CIA’S intelligence branch. There he had the greatest, and rarest, satisfaction that can come to a bureaucrat—his work actually had an impact on policy. It did so because Cline’s ultimate boss, President Eisenhower, was able to force the bureaucracy to serve him as he wanted it to, rather than as it wanted to do.

  In an NSC meeting early in 1954, Ike complained that there were two things wrong with the intelligence he was getting. First, it failed to make a clear distinction between Russian capability and actual intentions. This is a classic problem because the professional military, who are charged with the defense of the nation, always exaggerate the extent of the threat the nation faces. The military cites the enemy’s capabilities—what the Russians might do in arms production—while ignoring the enemy’s intentions—what the Russians are in fact doing.

  The second complaint Ike had was that not enough was being done to put the Russian threat into a proper perspective. He was bombarded with news that the Russians were building up here, there, everywhere, without weighing the Russian capabilities and intentions against an estimate of America’s capabilities. An overall view was absent because the CIA was responsible for gauging the Russian threat, while the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) were responsible for estimates of the American ability to respond. The two had to be brought together.

  What Ike wanted was a “net” evaluation, or what the military called a “commander’s estimate,” the kind of effort General Kenneth Strong produced throughout World War II. In 1954 the President asked Allen Dulles and Admiral Arthur Radford, Chairman of the JCS, to prepare such a commander’s estimate on the probable outcome of a war between the U.S.S.R. and the United States.1

  Dulles delegated Cline to do the CIA side of the study, while Radford chose Rear Admiral Thomas Robbins, whom Cline characterized as “a brilliant but somewhat lackadaisical” officer. Robbins, in the best military tradition, delegated two staff assistants to represent him. These young officers, Cline wrote, “had not a clue as to what we were supposed to do,” so Cline took over.

  He immediately discovered the tremendous power of the military in the Washington bureaucracy. Cline could invoke Admiral Radford’s name “and have things happen instantaneously.” There was a vast vacuum-tube first-generation computer filling the basement of the Pentagon. He also learned that the only experienced war-gaming staff the services had was outside Washington. Cline mentioned this to Radford on Friday; on Monday, he had full-time use of the computer, and the war-gaming staff was on station in the Pentagon. Cline then prepared to play a computerized war game and, for the first time, make it part of a net estimate.2

  In that second year of the Eisenhower administration, at the height of the Cold War, the Pentagon was full of tension and fear. It was commonly said that communism was bent on “world domination” and that the “time of greatest danger” of attack was two years hence. The Russians would march across the Elbe River into West Germany and on to France, while the Chinese would march across the Yalu River into Korea and launch an amphibious assault against Formosa. The unexamined assumption was that the Communists had both the capability and intention of carrying out such ambitious offensives.

  But when Cline played his war games on that giant computer, he made some fascinating discoveries, the chief being that “it was a pretty desperate move for the U.S.S.R. to attack us with their substantially inferior long-range air force.” U.S. radar tactical warning systems in Europe and Asia were good enough to preclude the possibility of the Communists achieving surprise. An incidental discovery was that the characteristics of defense radar made it more profitable to attack at low levels, where “ground clutter” confused the radar, than at the high altitudes for which American bombers were designed. This discovery led to a revision of U. S. Air Force bombing tactics, a fortuitous revision as the development over the next few years of Soviet ground-to-air missiles made it imperative for the United States to go to low-level attack.3

  With the results of the war game before him, Cline then wrote the commander’s estimate for 1954. He prepared a briefing on the subject, complete with the usual visual aids and charts. The military insisted on pride of place and Admiral Robbins, not Cline, made the oral presentation at the White House. Ike insisted that all the top officials in the Defense Department attend this special briefing.

  “The encomiums were great,” Cline wrote with justifiable pride. What Ike had suspected all along was confirmed—using such terms as the “ultimate” intention of “world domination” was a poor indicator of specific near-term military action.* The Communists were neither ready nor able to resort to direct military action. The figure of speech that “the time of greatest danger of attack is two years hence” disappeared from JCS papers. Military intelligence officers and civilian analysts became more sophisticated, their language more moderate, their descriptions of the Communist threat more accurate and less scary.

  The commander’s estimate, Cline summarized, along with others in the following years, “succeeded in reducing the Soviet military threat to the United States to reasonable proportions in the minds of war-planning staffs.” This in turn allowed Ike to hold steady to his “New Look” in defense policy, at an immense financial savings to the nation while simultaneously reducing fears and slowing the arms race. The CIA, Cline boasts, “probably never accomplished more of value to the nation than this quiet, little-remarked analytical feat.”4

  Cline’s accomplishment was a victory for analysis. It was matched by the CIA’S greatest triumph of intelligence gathering, the U-2 program, discussed in the following chapter. A third function of the DDI’S side of the CIA was prediction, to anticipate events around the world and report them to the President
before they happened. Even when the President could not do anything one way or another about the event, which was usually the case, he always wanted to know in advance. American Presidents hate to be caught by surprise. It is the CIA’S job to tell the President what is going to happen, and it is an almost impossible assignment.

  IN 1956, ON THE EVE of the Eisenhower vs. Stevenson presidential election, France and Britain joined with Israel to attack Egypt. White House Press Secretary James Hagerty told reporters that the President got his first information on the invasion “through press reports.” The attack “came as a complete surprise to us.” Simultaneously, the Russians sent their tanks into the streets of Budapest; Administration spokesmen told the press that the Russian attack on Hungary was also a complete surprise.

  Such reports made Allen Dulles furious. A month later he leaked stories to the Washington press corps that the CIA had predicted Hungary in detail. He also complained to reporter Andrew Tully, “My brother said the State Department was taken by surprise. That was only technically correct. What he meant was that the British, French and Israeli governments had not informed our ambassadors. But we had the Suez operation perfectly taped. We reported that there would be a three-nation attack on Suez. And on the day before the invasion CIA reported it was imminent.”5

  Dulles’ leaks made Ike, in his turn, furious. The President had a legendary temper, which he struggled—usually successfully—all his life to control. When angry, he could not keep the bright red color out of his face, and the back of his neck would become red as a beet, but he did manage to sit perfectly still. Under his desk, however, he would tear his handkerchief into tiny bits, down to the individual strands of cotton. When he finished, there would be a loose ball of cotton strands at his feet, and no handkerchief.