The new director of the AEC, Adm. Lewis Strauss, an old antagonist of Oppenheimer’s, was determined to suspend Oppenheimer’s security clearance pending an investigation. From April 12 to May 6, 1954, at the height of the army-McCarthy hearings, the AEC conducted a detailed analysis of Oppenheimer’s personal history, reviewing material and calling witnesses, including Oppenheimer himself, to discuss the evidence. The hearings, unlike the McCarthy circus, were closed. A three-person board, chaired by a former secretary of the army and now president of the University of North Carolina, Gordon Gray, poured over tidbits of information about Oppenheimer’s donations to Spanish loyalist causes in the 1930s, his close friendships with left-wing activists, his cultivation of collectivist ideals, and more. They also delved into his attitudes toward the development of the hydrogen bomb, which he had opposed just at the moment the government deemed this weapon crucial for national security. In a 2–1 decision the board recommended to the AEC that Oppenheimer’s security clearance not be reinstated because, although he was “a loyal citizen,” he also had “fundamental defects in his character” and so could not be trusted. The national security state was now eating its own.
Eisenhower considered this a sterling example of the proper way to purge the government of subversives. He told Hagerty that his “handling of the Oppenheimer case would be such a contrast to McCarthy’s tactics that the American people would immediately see the difference.” But would they? Oppenheimer was now labeled a Red, or at least a fellow-traveling Pink. His reputation was ruined, his career in physics largely over, and his great contributions to science and to victory in World War II now tarnished by allegations of communist sympathies. If the Gray board’s methods had been more scrupulous than McCarthy’s, the results were the same: the personal destruction of a decent patriot whose only crime was a persistent sympathy toward political ideals considered dubious in an age of peril.55
From midsummer 1954 on, the administration carefully ignored McCarthy but embraced his Red-hunting agenda. In early June Eisenhower crowed about his record in this area, citing the conviction of 41 communist leaders, the indictment of 20 more, the targeting of 255 political organizations for their communist sympathies, and the deportation of 352 “alien subversives.” He told the press, “The constant surveillance of Communists in this country is a 24-hour, 7-days-a-week, 52-weeks-a-year job.” By late August the president and Congress had hammered out the Communist Control Act of 1954, which outlawed the Communist Party in America. The CPUSA was not in fact a “party,” Congress asserted, but a criminal conspiracy. Furthermore labor unions that contained any communists would be stripped of their legal standing. The Senate passed the bill 79–0, and the House could find but two nay votes against this assault on the political freedoms of American citizens to organize. Eisenhower embraced the bill and hailed its usefulness “in our fight to destroy communism in this country.”56
CHAPTER 7
* * *
Dark Arts for a Cold War
“The things we did were ‘covert.’ ”
I
ON FEBRUARY 26, 1953, ALLEN Dulles took office as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency; he held the job for the duration of the Eisenhower administration, departing under a cloud in 1961 after the failed invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. Dulles left behind a significant legacy. The CIA was initially designed to analyze intelligence gathered by a variety of government and military entities. With Eisenhower’s active support, Dulles transformed the agency into the operational headquarters of a secret struggle against the Soviet Union and many other nations considered threatening to American interests. Eisenhower’s CIA went way beyond intelligence analysis; it engaged in global propaganda, foreign sabotage, subversion, economic warfare, coups d’état, and political assassination. Not until the mid-1970s, when congressional investigations revealed the scale and scope of these activities, was any real restraint placed upon the agency. In the Age of Eisenhower the CIA became fully integrated into the everyday practice of American statecraft, and it remains so to this day.
In the demonology of the cold war, the first few years of the Eisenhower administration hold an especially prominent place. It was then that two major CIA covert operations—in Iran and Guatemala—were launched, in addition to numerous smaller acts of subversion against communist-leaning countries. But these two covert actions, reprehensible and damaging as they were, tend to obscure our perception of the larger canvas. The CIA was more than just a cabal of putschists. In fact the CIA became an incubator for a much wider and arguably more consequential set of ideas and innovations about how America could use its power—its intellectual, scientific, military, economic, and moral power—to defeat communism everywhere in the world. The coups in Iran and Guatemala were symptoms of a larger pathology, namely, the delegation by the American president and Congress of enormous power and resources to a largely unaccountable and opaque agency to conduct a range of subversive and violent operations against the nation’s enemies. Here, in the story of the growth of the CIA, is the most striking evidence that Eisenhower, who warned later generations about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, did so much to build it.1
The man at the center of the story did not look much like a spymaster. Unlike his older brother, Foster, Allen Dulles was an outgoing, gregarious, and gruffly charming man, a tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking, mustachioed figure, full of hearty Ivy League backslapping and warm guffaws. Where Foster was rigid, ponderous, and boring, Allen was impulsive, intellectually curious, disheveled, and disorganized. Allen was a broad though not necessarily deep thinker. He was the fox to his brother’s hedgehog: Foster’s singular brooding obsession was the communist threat emanating from Moscow, while Allen saw the world as a kaleidoscope of challenges and possibilities. Unlike the lugubrious Foster, Allen charmed everyone he met—a crucial asset in a man whose career depended on people telling him their secrets. Indeed he was a successful seducer not just of secret agents but of women, with whom he had innumerable affairs.
Outwardly different, Foster and Allen were nonetheless intimate confidantes. They had grown up together and spent summers basking in the sun and fishing on the shores of Lake Ontario at the family summer home. There the boys whiled away evenings transfixed by the stories of their grandfather, former secretary of state John W. Foster, who had served under President Benjamin Harrison. (Their uncle, Robert Lansing, would occupy that office during World War I under Woodrow Wilson.) Allen and Foster schooled at Princeton, practiced law together at the distinguished New York firm Sullivan and Cromwell, and during their Washington years played tennis, swam, and had drinks together regularly at the McLean, Virginia, home of their brilliant sister, Eleanor—another Dulles standout, who earned a Harvard Ph.D. in economics and worked in the State Department as a German expert.
Allen came into intelligence work by chance. He entered the diplomatic service in 1916, just a few years out of Princeton, and served in posts in Austria and Switzerland. He worked alongside his brother at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and then went to Berlin and Constantinople. Although he practiced law beginning in 1926, he never lost his interest in government work, and in the 1930s he did periodic tours of duty at the League of Nations in Geneva. In 1942 he was approached by another well-connected New York–Ivy League–Wall Street Republican, Col. William Donovan, about serving in a new intelligence organization. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had been created by FDR to gather intelligence on the nation’s enemies, and Donovan wanted a discreet figure he could trust to help run it.
Dulles accepted immediately. Donovan sent him to Bern, Switzerland, in the fall of 1942 to establish a listening post, using an assignment to the American legation as a cover. Over the course of more than two years, Dulles developed a rich list of contacts—European bankers, lawyers, intellectuals, industrialists, bureaucrats, and émigrés—who provided him with useful intelligence about Nazi Germany. He found sources of information through contacts with the French resis
tance, with anti-Nazi Germans, even inside the German Foreign Office. His success at penetrating the Third Reich became legendary. By early 1944 he had even learned and reported to Washington the details of the “Valkyrie” circle of plotters who were aiming to assassinate Hitler.2
The OSS, which had begun as a shoestring operation run by amateurs and oddballs, was by war’s end a global enterprise, active in Europe, the Mediterranean, and China. It had 3,500 civilian employees and over 8,000 military personnel. But all this was dismantled after the war as the nation demobilized. Not until July 1947, under the pressures of the intensifying cold war, did President Truman devote attention to building up the intelligence services. The National Security Act created the National Security Council, chaired by the president, which in turned would supervise the new Central Intelligence Agency, whose director reported to the president. Quite quickly the CIA’s mandate expanded to include not just the collection of intelligence but active covert offensive operations against the nation’s foreign enemies. In June 1948 the NSC created a new division within the CIA. Despite its innocuous name, the Office of Policy Coordination had a breathtaking remit. According to its charter, NSC 10/2, it would be responsible for “propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures, subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.” The only requirement was deniability: these covert operations were to be designed so that “any U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the U.S. government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.” Instead of gathering and analyzing intelligence, the CIA was now going to become an active combatant in the struggle against communism and its allies.3
The man tasked to run the Office of Policy Coordination was Frank Wisner, an energetic, imaginative, intensely driven, and finally tragic figure of the early clandestine service. Born in Mississippi in 1909 and educated at the University of Virginia, he was a first-rate student and athlete. Giving up his promising legal career, he joined the navy at age 32 and eventually found his way to the OSS in 1943. With daring assignments in Cairo, Istanbul, Bucharest, and occupied Germany, Wisner burnished his credentials as one of the most eager underground operatives of the era. As head of the OPC, Wisner presided over the rapid growth of the CIA’s covert projects. His office soon had 2,800 full-time employees in 47 overseas stations and burned through a budget of $80 million a year. Wisner concentrated mainly on targets inside the European communist bloc. He believed that the thousands of Soviet and East European émigrés who had fled west after the war could be used as the spearhead of a secret anticommunist underground. Many of them were brought in to help staff Radio Free Europe, though whenever they were sent back behind the Iron Curtain they were almost immediately arrested. Wisner found it was extremely hard to penetrate the Soviet bloc, despite millions of dollars and many ingenious projects. By 1951 the CIA would look to softer targets where covert operations could notch up a few easier wins.4
As the CIA grew, it was aided enormously by a compliant Congress. Rather than act as a watchdog, Congress ceded control of covert activities to the president. In June 1949 Truman signed into law the Central Intelligence Agency Act, which gave a free pass to the CIA to receive and spend government money off the books: “In the interests of the security of the foreign intelligence activities of the United States,” and so that “the Director of Central Intelligence shall be responsible for protecting intelligence sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure, the Agency shall be exempted from . . . any other laws which require the publication or disclosure of the organization, functions, names, official titles, salaries, or numbers of personnel employed by the Agency.” A legal blanket was thus thrown over the agency’s operations and functions. In addition, money appropriated to the CIA would not need to be accounted for. “The sums made available to the Agency,” the law stated, “may be expended without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of government funds; and for objects of a confidential, extraordinary, or emergency nature, such expenditures to be accounted for solely on the certificate of the Director and every such certificate shall be deemed a sufficient voucher for the amount therein certified.” The new spy agency thus possessed unparalleled freedom in waging the cold war.5
The CIA did not distinguish itself in its early years, however. It failed to anticipate the rapid development of a Soviet atomic bomb, first tested in August 1949, and notably failed to predict the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. Truman called on Eisenhower’s wartime chief of staff and former ambassador to the Soviet Union, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, to take the reins of the intelligence agency. Smith, a sour, demanding workaholic and masterful administrator who was nearly incapacitated by painful ulcers, took over in October 1950 and called on Allen Dulles, the experienced wartime spymaster, for help. In January 1951 Dulles took the title of deputy director for plans, with a remit to oversee both intelligence collection and the conduct of covert operations; in late August, Smith appointed him deputy director of the agency, and Wisner took over as the head of plans. The Dulles-Wisner team, now in charge of all covert operations, would have a dramatic impact on American foreign relations in the coming years.6
Dulles had long been a believer in the promise of covert activities to frustrate the expansion of communism. He would now get a chance to prove his ideas. Truman approved a policy document in October 1951 called NSC 10/5 that demanded “the intensification of covert operations” in order to “place the maximum strain on the Soviet structure of power.” Truman’s security team wanted more of everything: the cultivation of secret resistance cells in the Soviet bloc, a vigorous psychological warfare campaign, sabotage, espionage, and even direct guerrilla activities inside the communist states. In April 1952 Smith reported to the NSC on their progress. Between 1949 and 1952 the CIA had tripled its number of clandestine operations. “These cold war projects,” he wrote, “are worldwide in scope” and included “psychological warfare as well as paramilitary operations; denial programs with respect to strategic materials; stockpiling on a limited scale in strategic areas to assist the military in the event of war; the organization and planning of sabotage teams to support resistance operations”; and other “stay-behind movements” to be used in the event of war. The CIA that Dulles took over in February 1953 had gone from monitoring and studying the enemy to waging all-out subversive war.7
II
President Eisenhower looked at the CIA and its capabilities through the prism of the Second World War. As supreme commander in Europe, he had relied on secret intelligence, especially the priceless information achieved through the decryption of German signals traffic, known as Ultra. Eisenhower had also valued special operations behind enemy lines, such as the use of secret resistance networks to gather information and conduct sabotage, the creation of underground cells, and the dissemination of propaganda. Transposing this experience onto the cold war, he believed that the Soviet regime, like the Nazi Third Reich, aimed to control the geography and resources of Eurasia, to expand across the world, and to destroy America itself. Missiles and armies might deter a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, but the challenge of the 1950s was to halt the communist infection on the periphery, in the Third World especially. America had to find new means to weaken the ties binding the Soviet imperium. The stakes were extremely high, and if Eisenhower had any qualms about the ethics of using secret and often brutal means to destroy America’s enemies, he never expressed them.
When Eisenhower looked at the world map in early 1953, he saw a landscape dotted with brush fires. What he called “the free world” faced threats from nationalism, anticolonial liberation movements, socialist and communist agitation, and direct military aggression. The arc of danger circled the globe: from the Car
ibbean and Latin America to the eastern Mediterranean and Persian Gulf, across Pakistan and India, through Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and Korea, it seemed as if America and its allies were on the defensive. Eisenhower wanted to project American power and contain Soviet influence while avoiding any direct provocation that might trigger war. Covert operations provided one way of squaring this circle. The first chance to go on the offensive came just six weeks into his presidency, not in Asia or in Europe but in the Middle East, in the oil-rich monarchy of Iran.
On March 1, 1953, Eisenhower received a memo from the CIA about the worsening of the Western position in Iran. In words surely designed to catch the president’s attention, the CIA reported that “a Communist takeover [in Iran] is becoming more and more of a possibility.” This was a dire prognosis indeed. Three days later the National Security Council took up the issue in only its seventh meeting of the new administration. CIA director Dulles summarized the Iranian situation in apocalyptic terms. If Iran should fall to the communists, he told the president, not only would the Soviet Union gain access to Iran’s oil, but “there was little doubt that in short order the other areas of the Middle East, with some 60% of the world’s oil reserves, would fall into Communist control.” His brother, the secretary of state, solemnly agreed. “The Soviets had played their game in Iran very cleverly,” he said. Treasury Secretary George Humphrey declared that he was “shocked” at this news and asked Foster Dulles if he really believed that “Russia would ultimately secure Iran.” Dulles sadly replied “in the affirmative.” Added National Security Adviser Robert Cutler, “With the loss of Iran, we would lose the neighboring countries of the Middle East.”8
The Age of Eisenhower Page 21