Ike's Spies

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  SIMULTANEOUSLY WITH THE HUNGARIAN UPRISING came the Suez crisis. Britain and France, acting in conjunction with Israel, invaded Egypt in an attempt to recover control of the Suez Canal from Colonel Gamel Abdel Nasser. Ike was angry at the British and French for acting without consulting him, and furious at Allen Dulles for having failed to warn him in advance. He eventually forced the British and French to give the Canal back to Egypt.

  Still, Ike was no friend of Nasser’s. At one Oval Office conference, he listened to various suggestions on ways the CIA might “topple Nasser.” Finally, according to the minutes of the meeting, “The President said that an action of this kind could not be taken when there is as much active hostility as at present. For a thing like this to be done without inflaming the Arab world, a time free from heated stress holding the world’s attention as at present would have to be chosen.”14

  In that instance, the President himself said no to the CIA. In other cases, it was the 5412 Committee, chaired by Gordon Gray. Gray had been Truman’s Secretary of the Army and then Eisenhower’s Director of the Office of Defense Mobilization. In 1955 he became Ike’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs. He was the liaison between the White House and the State and Defense Departments, as well as Chairman of the 5412 Committee.

  That committee (often referred to as the “Special Group”) consisted of Gray, the Secretaries of Defense and of State, and the Director of Central Intelligence. Created in March of 1955 by the National Security Council, in Paper number 5412/1, it was the most secret committee of the U. S. Government. No covert action could be undertaken without the prior approval of the committee.15

  The major function of the special group, according to Gray, was “to protect the President.” It would scrutinize proposed CIA actions, policies, and programs to make certain they did not get the President or the country into trouble. The committee dealt with issues too sensitive to be discussed before the whole National Security Council, a large group that debated issues but never set policy.16

  Richard Bissell explained how the committee worked. “When an operation was about to be undertaken, it would be written up within the clandestine service, and approved up the line, up to and including Allen, and then Allen himself almost always attended the 5412 and then he would present it.” At that point the State Department, usually represented by Robert Murphy, Foster Dulles’ deputy, would give its approval. When Bissell was asked if an operation, once approved by 5412, would go before the National Security Council, he replied, “No. These were much too sensitive. Remember that under Eisenhower the NSC was a whole big roomful of people.”

  Gordon Gray would bring the 5412 decision privately and informally to the President. Then, a day or two later, Gray would get back to Allen Dulles and say, “Look, my boss has this or that reaction to this operation.” Only then would the CIA spring into action.17

  During the early years of 5412, the CIA had tremendous confidence in itself, and Ike had tremendous confidence in it. It seemed that the agency could manipulate events anywhere in the world to suit the United States. Iran and Guatemala were the proof.

  But Iran and Guatemala, if realistically assessed, would have indicated the unwelcome truth that there were limits on what the United States and the CIA could accomplish. Instead, as Ray Cline noted, “romantic gossip about the coup in Iran spread around Washington like wildfire. Allen Dulles basked in the glory of the exploit wtihout ever confirming or denying the extravagant impression of CIA’S power that it created.”

  The trouble was, as Kim Roosevelt was the first to admit, “the CIA did not have to do very much to topple Mossadegh, who was an eccentric and weak political figure.” Iran did not prove that the CIA could overthrow governments when and where it wished; rather “it was a unique case of supplying just the right bit of marginal assistance in the right way at the right time.”18

  In Guatemala “the legend of CIA’S invincibility was confirmed in the minds of many by a covert action project that inched one step further toward paramilitary intervention.” Again, however, as Cline insists, Guatemala was a unique situation. It required little use of actual force and succeeded mainly because of a shrewd exploitation of favorable local political circumstances. Nevertheless, the “mystique of CIA’S secret power was well established by the tales from Teheran and Guatemala City,” not least in the mind of Allen Dulles himself.19

  The major result was that the CIA became even more of an action-oriented agency, which was certainly in accord with the Donovan-OSS legacy but which was, according to such well-informed critics as Cline and Morton Halperin, detrimental to the conduct of American foreign policy.20 Detrimental because the covert operations backfired, as in Hungary in 1956 and later in Indonesia and Cuba, and because the emphasis on action meant that the CIA, under Dulles, failed to provide the President with the information he needed, when he needed it, as in the Suez crisis of 1956 or in Cuba in 1959.

  Ike was painfully aware of these shortcomings. He wanted Dulles to serve him as General Strong had served him during the war, to be in fact as well as in name his chief intelligence officer, the man who would give him an overview, to be sure the President got the information he needed to act, while screening him from petty detail. He did not want Dulles wasting his time on minor clandestine operations. Ike had Gordon Gray talk to Dulles about these points, but it did little good.21

  Dulles continued to spend most of his time on covert operations and remained hesitant to make intelligence summaries or judgments. Rather than come down on one side or the other on whether the French could hold out in Vietnam, for example, or whether Fidel Castro was a Communist, Dulles preferred to present vast amounts of raw intelligence material to the President and let him decide, while he directed his agents in their paramilitary activities. The trouble was twofold: the raw intelligence was usually contradictory, and always terribly bulky. The President simply did not have the time to read it and evaluate it.

  In January 1956, Ike created the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities (PBCFIA), composed of retired senior government officials, to provide the President with advice on intelligence matters in general, and to recommend appropriate changes in the CIA. Omar Bradley, General Doolittle, and David Bruce were among the members. The PBCFIA recommended that Dulles separate himself from the CIA altogether and serve as the President’s intelligence adviser by coordinating intelligence gathered from all sources, including the FBI, the military, and the State Department. In brief, Dulles would be to President Eisenhower what Strong had been to General Eisenhower.

  But Dulles would not change. Despite the PBCFIA, and despite Ike’s own pressure (the Church Committee found that “President Eisenhower himself repeatedly pressed Dulles to exert more initiative” in intelligence gathering and summary), Dulles held to his own concepts and methods. He could not or would not shake the Donovan legacy.22

  A year later, in January of 1957, Ike held a review conference with the NSC. Always seeking new ways to balance the budget, he complained that intelligence was becoming a $1 billion-a-year operation. The minutes noted that “in discussion the President recalled that because of our having been caught by surprise in World War II, we are perhaps tending to go overboard in intelligence effort.” Admiral Arthur Radford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said that the various intelligence-gathering agencies, including the CIA, “are doing quite well in bringing in the material.” But, he added, “we can do better as regards screening and pulling it together.”

  Ike said he agreed with the importance of screening material, but he did not want to go too far in that direction either. The DCI should not hold back important items, he declared, citing the example of Pearl Harbor, where the senior officers on the spot were not given information available in Washington.

  The notes then record that Dulles gave his semiannual report on covert operations. As the meeting ended, the DCI told the President he wanted to get General Lucian Truscott to join the CIA “and take over the coo
rdination duty.” Ike replied that he wanted it the other way around—“that Mr. Dulles must perform the coordination, and that he should get a man who could manage the operations of the CIA.”23

  But when Truscott came to the CIA, he did so as Deputy Director for Community Affairs, with responsibility for coordinating intelligence gathered by the CIA, the military services, and the State Department. This did not work out, for, as the Church Committee noted, “the separate elements of the intelligence community continued to function under the impetus of their own internal drives and mission definitions.”24 As President, Ike never found the replacement for General Strong that he was looking for.

  All of which raises the perplexing question, why didn’t he fire Dulles? The man had violated his direct orders, in both letter and spirit, in the Truscott affair. Part of the answer is the nature of the beast. President Eisenhower could not impose his will on the federal bureaucracy to anything like the extent that General Eisenhower imposed his will on SHAEF. Another part of the answer lies in personality and influence. Ike’s very high regard for John Foster Dulles undoubtedly played a major role in his retention of Allen Dulles.

  Ike gave his own answer in this statement, quoted by the Church Committee: “I’m not going to be able to change Allen. I have two alternatives, either to get rid of him and appoint someone who will assert more authority or keep him [Allen] with his limitations. I’d rather have Allen as my chief intelligence officer with his limitations than anyone else I know.”25

  So Dulles stayed on, as Ike’s chief spy, for the entire eight years of the Eisenhower administration. His reputation was consistently high. He was on the front lines in the Cold War, the man who could overturn governments with a snap of his fingers, foil the KGB with the back of his hand, uncover secrets no matter where or how deeply hidden. By pretending to avoid publicity, he attracted it. He was certainly the best-known spy in the world, the subject of feature articles in the Saturday Evening Post and U.S. News & World Report,26 as well as a favorite guest of television interviewers. And throughout his tenure as DCI, he kept the emphasis of the CIA on covert operations.

  AS IN VIETNAM. By the time Ike moved into the White House, in January 1953, the United States was already involved in Vietnam to the extent that it was paying for a considerable portion of the French war effort. One of the first foreign-policy decisions of the Eisenhower administration was to step up that support to include equipment as well as money.

  In April 1953, Ike approved “the immediate loan of up to six ‘Flying Boxcars’ (C-119s) to the French for use in Indochina to be flown by civilian pilots.” The President wanted the loan kept secret, so he had Allen Dulles and the CIA handle the arrangements. In May, Ike had Bedell Smith arrange to send a military mission to Vietnam “to explore ways and means through which American assistance can best be fitted into workable plans for aggressive pursuit of hostilities.”27

  The escalation was under way. By January 1954 the United States had sent in fifty heavy bombers (B-26s) to support the French at Dien Bien Phu. At a meeting of the “President’s Special Committee on Indochina.” Allen Dulles “wondered if our preoccupation with helping to win the battle at Dien Bien Phu was so great that we were not going to bargain with the French as we supplied their most urgent needs.”28

  He was expressing a widespread concern in Washington that if we are going to supply the equipment and pay the cost, we must control the strategy. Ike was impatient with the French, whose strategy was almost as badly executed as it was conceived. He once said, “Who could be so dumb as to put a garrison down in a valley and then challenge the other guy, who has artillery on the surrounding hills, to come out and fight?”29

  To exert more American influence, the Pentagon had convinced the French commander, General Navarre, to accept a group of liaison officers. This was obviously a delicate matter—the French fiercely resented any hint that they needed military advice from the Americans, but they needed the American equipment so badly they could not say no.

  Unknown to the French, Dulles had bigger plans. The committee notes state, “Mr. Allen Dulles inquired if an unconventional warfare officer, specifically Colonel Lansdale, could not be added to the group of five liaison officers.… Admiral Radford thought this might be done.”30

  Thus did the redoubtable Colonel Edward Lansdale make his entry into Vietnam, where he made a mark that was later enshrined in two semifictional works, The Ugly American and The Quiet American. Lansdale was a former San Francisco advertising man who believed in “selling” the American way of life when and where he could, and in covert actions when they were necessary. He was a veteran of guerrilla action against the Communist Hukbalahaps in the Philippines.

  Dulles’ instructions to Lansdale were to “enter into Vietnam quietly and assist the Vietnamese, rather than the French, in unconventional warfare.” He was not to irritate the French, if possible, but he was to keep them at arm’s length. In Vietnam, Lansdale was to set up the Saigon Military Mission (SMM) “to undertake paramilitary operations against the enemy and to wage political-psychological warfare.”31

  Lansdale entered Saigon on June 1, 1954. He had a small box of files, a duffle bag of clothes, and a borrowed typewriter. The prospects could not have been gloomier. Dien Bien Phu had just fallen to the Vietminh. At the Geneva Conference, the northern half of Vietnam had been given over to Ho Chi Minh and the Communists. Speaking for the United States, Under Secretary of State Bedell Smith promised that although his government had not signed the Geneva Accords, it would not use force to upset them. That put some limits on how much aid the Eisenhower administration could openly give to the South Vietnamese leader, Ngo Dinh Diem.

  On Lansdale’s first night in Saigon, Vietminh saboteurs blew up large ammunition dumps at the airport, rocking Saigon throughout the night. Lansdale had no desk space, no office, no vehicle, no safe for his files. He did have the use of the regular Saigon CIA station chief’s communications system, but he had no assistants, no team. The SMM consisted of Lansdale alone.

  But he made rapid progress. His reputation from the Philippines had preceded him, and high-ranking South Vietnamese officers made contact. Lansdale organized the Vietnamese Armed Psywar Company. This was in accord with his instructions “to develop homogeneous indigenous units with a native officer corps,” for which purpose he had $124 million to spend.32

  Lansdale trained his Psywar Company, then sent the soldiers, dressed in civilian clothes, to Hanoi. The city was in a state of near chaos as the French pulled out and the Vietminh took over. The Psywar Company’s mission was to spread the story of a Chinese Communist regiment in Tonkin acting in a beastly fashion, emphasizing the supposed mass rapes of Vietnamese girls by Chinese troops. Since Chinese Nationalist troops had behaved in just such a fashion in 1945, and since the Vietnamese had hated and feared the Chinese for centuries, Lansdale was confident that the planted story would confirm Vietnamese fears of Chinese Communist occupation under Vietminh rule.

  Alas, no member of Lansdale’s Psywar Company ever returned from the mission. To a man, they deserted to the Vietminh.33

  Lansdale, meanwhile, had jumped into the middle of the confused, nearly chaotic political situation in Saigon. In mid-1954, the French turned control of the government over to Emperor Bao Dai. His Prime Minister was Ngo Dinh Diem, a pudgy five-foot five-inch aristocrat, fifty-three years old, with a fierce ambition. The Army Chief of Staff was General Hinh, an impatient, disingenuous officer who wanted total control for himself. The struggle for power was between Diem and Hinh, as Bao Dai was enjoying himself in Paris and along the French Riviera.

  Lansdale became involved because he was close to both Diem and Hinh. He had met them in the Philippines earlier, liked them both, and got on famously with their wives. He was also a friend of Hinh’s mistress, who was a pupil in a small English-language class conducted by the CIA mission for the mistresses of various VIPs in Saigon.

  Because of his connections, Lansdale learned of a plot by H
inh and other high-ranking officers to overthrow Diem. He informed Ambassador Donald Heath, who asked him to see what he could do to prevent an armed attack on the Presidential Palace, where Diem had his office. Lansdale went to Hinh and bluntly told him that United States support for South Vietnam would end if the attack took place. Then he went to the Palace to give the presidential guards tactical advice on how to stop a tank attack. The SMM official history records, “The advice, on tank traps and destruction with improvised weapons, must have sounded grim. The following morning, when the attack was to take place, we visited the Palace: not a guard was left on the grounds; Diem was alone upstairs, calmly getting his work done.”34

  The SMM, by mid-August 1954, had ten agents. Eight had been rushed in at the last minute, just before the cease-fire went into effect. The newcomers, rounded up in Korea, Japan, and Okinawa, were old OSS hands, with some experience in paramilitary operations but none at all in psywar. Their zeal made up for their inexperience. They formed clandestine units of anti-Communist Vietnamese, then went north to disrupt the Communist takeover in Hanoi. One team tried to destroy the largest printing plant there, but Vietminh guards frustrated the attempt. They then tried a so-called black psywar strike, printing leaflets, attributed to the Vietminh, that instructed residents on how to behave for the immediate future. They proclaimed a three-day holiday, outlined a phony monetary reform, and so on. Vietminh currency the next day fell 50 percent in value, and most of Hanoi was on the streets celebrating the “holiday.”35

  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