by Tim Weiner
“A RAPIDLY DETERIORATING SITUATION”
From his first days in power, Allen Dulles polished the public image of the CIA, cultivating America’s most powerful publishers and broadcasters, charming senators and congressmen, courting newspaper columnists. He found dignified publicity far more suitable than discreet silence.
Dulles kept in close touch with the men who ran The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the nation’s leading weekly magazines. He could pick up the phone and edit a breaking story, make sure an irritating foreign correspondent was yanked from the field, or hire the services of men such as Time’s Berlin bureau chief and Newsweek’s man in Tokyo. It was second nature for Dulles to plant stories in the press. American newsrooms were dominated by veterans of the government’s wartime propaganda branch, the Office of War Information, once part of Wild Bill Donovan’s domain. The men who responded to the CIA’s call included Henry Luce and his editors at Time, Look, and Fortune; popular magazines such as Parade, the Saturday Review, and Reader’s Digest; and the most powerful executives at CBS News. Dulles built a public-relations and propaganda machine that came to include more than fifty news organizations, a dozen publishing houses, and personal pledges of support from men such as Axel Springer, West Germany’s most powerful press baron.
Dulles wanted to be seen as the subtle master of a professional spy service. The press dutifully reflected that image. But the archives of the CIA tell a different story.
The minutes of the daily meetings of Dulles and his deputies depict an agency lurching from international crisis to internal calamities—rampant alcoholism, financial malfeasance, mass resignations. What should be done about a CIA officer who had killed a British colleague and faced trial for manslaughter? Why had the former station chief in Switzerland committed suicide? What could be done about the lack of talent in the clandestine service? The agency’s new inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, became a constant bearer of bad tidings about the caliber of the CIA’s personnel, training, and performance. He warned Dulles that hundreds of the skilled military officers that the CIA had hired during the Korean War were quitting, and “it was most evident that a too-high percentage were leaving with an unfriendly attitude toward the CIA.”
At the end of the war, a group of junior and midlevel CIA officers, appalled at the poor morale at headquarters, demanded and received permission to conduct an internal poll of their peers. They interviewed 115 CIA personnel and wrote a long, detailed report, completed at the end of Dulles’s first year as director. They described “a rapidly deteriorating situation”: widespread frustration, confusion, and purposelessness. Bright and patriotic people had been recruited with promises of exciting overseas service—“a completely false impression”—and then stuck in dead-end posts as typists and messengers. Hundreds of officers returned from foreign assignments to wander through headquarters for months, looking for new assignments without success. “The harm accruing to the Agency from inert personnel practices mounts in geometric, not arithmetic progression,” they reported. “For every capable officer that the Agency loses through discontent or frustration, there may well be two or three more competent men (sharing the same educational, professional or social background) that the Agency will never have the opportunity to employ…. The harm done may be irreparable.”
The CIA’s young officers worked for “too many people in responsible positions who apparently don’t know what they’re doing.” They watched “a shocking amount of money” going to waste on failed missions overseas. One of Frank Wisner’s case officers wrote that the operations he worked on were “largely ineffectual and quite expensive. Some are directed at targets that are hardly logical—let alone legitimate. Thus, to protect jobs and prestige, both here and in the field, Headquarters’ mission is to whitewash operational budget and programming justifications with, to say the least, exaggerated statements.” They concluded that “the Agency is shot through with mediocrity and less.”
These young officers had seen an intelligence service that was lying to itself. They described a CIA in which incompetent people were given great power and capable recruits were stacked like cordwood in the corridors.
Allen Dulles suppressed their report. Nothing changed. Forty-three years later, in 1996, a congressional investigation concluded that the CIA “continues to face a major personnel crisis that it has, thus far, not addressed in any coherent way…. Today the CIA still does not have enough qualified case officers to staff many of its stations around the world.”
“SOMEBODY TO DO THE DIRTY WORK”
Eisenhower wanted to shape the CIA into an efficient instrument of presidential power. He tried to impose a command structure on the agency through Walter Bedell Smith. In the days after Eisenhower’s election, the general had expected to be named chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was devastated by Eisenhower’s decision to make him the undersecretary of state. Bedell Smith did not want to be second-in-command to Foster Dulles, a man he regarded as a pompous blowhard. But Ike wanted him—and needed him—to serve as an honest broker between himself and the Dulles brothers.
Bedell Smith vented his anger to Vice President Nixon, his neighbor in Washington. From time to time the general would drop in for a visit, Nixon remembered, and “a couple of drinks would loosen his tongue a bit in an uncharacteristic way…. And I remember one night we were sitting having scotch and soda, and Bedell got very emotional, and he said, ‘I want to tell you something about Ike…. I was just Ike’s prat boy…. Ike has to have somebody to do the dirty work that he doesn’t want to do so that he can look like the good guy.’”
Bedell Smith did that work as Ike’s overseer of covert action. He served as the crucial link between the White House and the CIA’s secret operations. As the driving force of the newly created Operations Coordinating Board, he carried out the secret directives from the president and the National Security Council, and he oversaw the CIA’s execution of those orders. His handpicked ambassadors played central roles in carrying out these missions.
During the nineteen months that Bedell Smith served as the president’s proconsul for covert action, the agency carried out the only two victorious coups in its history. The declassified records of those coups show that they succeeded by bribery and coercion and brute force, not secrecy and stealth and cunning. But they created the legend that the CIA was a silver bullet in the arsenal of democracy. They gave the agency the aura that Dulles coveted.
9. “CIA’S GREATEST
SINGLE TRIUMPH”
In January 1953, a few days before Eisenhower’s inauguration, Walter Bedell Smith called Kim Roosevelt in at CIA headquarters and asked: “When is our goddamn operation going to get underway?”
Two months before, in early November 1952, Roosevelt, the CIA’s Near East operations chief, had gone to Tehran to clean up a mess for his friends in British intelligence. Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq, had caught the British trying to topple him. He had expelled everyone in their embassy, including the spies. Roosevelt had arrived to preserve and pay off a network of Iranian agents who had worked for the British but were happy to accept American largesse. On the way home, he stopped in London to report to his British colleagues.
He learned that Prime Minister Winston Churchill wanted the CIA to help overthrow Iran. Iran’s oil had propelled Churchill to power and glory forty years before. Now Sir Winston wanted it back.
On the eve of World War I, Churchill, as first lord of the British Admiralty, had converted the Royal Navy from coal-burning to oil-burning ships. He championed the British purchase of 51 percent of the new Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which had struck the first of Iran’s oil five years before. The British took a lion’s share. Not only did Iranian oil fuel Churchill’s new armada, but the revenues paid for it. The oil became the lifeblood of the British exchequer. While Britannia ruled the waves, British, Russian, and Turkish troops trampled northern Iran, destroying much of the nation’s agriculture and sparking a famine that k
illed perhaps two million people. Out of this chaos arose a Cossack commander, Reza Khan, who seized power with guile and force. In 1925, he was proclaimed the shah of Iran. A nationalist politician named Mohammad Mossadeq was one of the four members of the Iranian parliament, the Majlis, who opposed him.
The Majlis soon discovered that the British oil giant, now the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, systematically cheated their government of billions. Hatred of the British and fear of the Soviets ran so high in Iran in the 1930s that the Nazis made deep inroads there—so deep that Churchill and Stalin invaded Iran in August 1941. They exiled Reza Khan and installed his pliant, dewy-eyed twenty-one-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.
While Soviet and British armies occupied Iran, American forces used its airports and roads to transport roughly $18 billion worth of military aid to Stalin. The only American of consequence in Iran during World War II was General Norman Schwarzkopf, who organized Iran’s Gendarmerie, the rural police (his son and namesake was the commander of the 1991 war on Iraq, Operation Desert Storm). Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin held a war conference in Tehran in December 1943, but the allies left behind a starving nation where oil workers made fifty cents a day and the young shah held power through electoral fraud. After the war, Mossadeq called upon the Majlis to renegotiate the British oil concession. Anglo-Iranian Oil controlled the world’s largest known reserves. Its offshore refinery at Abadan was the biggest on earth. While British oil executives and technicians played in private clubs and swimming pools, Iranian oil workers lived in shanties without running water, electricity, or sewers; the injustice bred support for the communist Tudeh Party of Iran, which claimed about 2,500 members at the time. The British took twice as much income from the oil as the Iranians. Now Iran demanded a fifty-fifty split. The British refused. They tried to sway opinion by paying off politicians, newspaper editors, and the state radio director, among others.
The British intelligence chief in Tehran, Christopher Montague Woodhouse, warned his compatriots that they were courting disaster. It came in April 1951, when the Majlis voted to nationalize Iran’s oil production. A few days later, Mohammad Mossadeq became Iran’s prime minister. By the end of June, British warships were off the coast of Iran. In July, the American ambassador, Henry Grady, reported that the British, in an act of “utter folly,” were trying to overthrow Mossadeq. In September, the British solidified an international boycott of Iran’s oil, an act of economic warfare intended to destroy Mossadeq. Then Churchill returned to power as prime minister. He was seventy-six; Mossadeq was sixty-nine. Both were stubborn old men who conducted affairs of state in their pajamas. British commanders drew up plans for seventy thousand troops to seize Iran’s oil fields and the Abadan refinery. Mossadeq took his case to the United Nations and the White House, laying on the charm in public while warning Truman in private that a British attack could set off World War III. Truman told Churchill flatly that the United States would never back such an invasion. Churchill countered that the price for British military support in the Korean War was American political support for his position in Iran. They reached an impasse in the summer of 1952.
“CIA MAKES POLICY BY DEFAULT”
The British spy Monty Woodhouse flew to Washington to meet with Walter Bedell Smith and Frank Wisner. On November 26, 1952, they discussed how to “unseat Mossadeq.” Their plot began in the twilight of a presidential transition—as Truman’s power faded, the coup plans grew. As Wisner said when the plot was in full cry, there were times when “CIA makes policy by default.” The stated foreign policy of the United States was to support Mossadeq. But the CIA was setting out to depose him without the imprimatur of the White House.
On February 18, 1953, the newly installed chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service arrived in Washington. Sir John Sinclair, a soft-spoken Scotsman known to the public as “C” and to his friends as “Sinbad,” met with Allen Dulles and proposed Kim Roosevelt as field commander for a coup. The British gave their plan the prosaic title of Operation Boot. Roosevelt had a grander name: Operation Ajax, after the mythical hero of the Trojan War (a strange choice, as legend has it that Ajax went mad, slew a flock of sheep thinking they were warriors, and killed himself in shame after he came to his senses).
Roosevelt ran the show with flair. He had been working for two years on political, propaganda, and paramilitary operations to fight off a feared Soviet invasion in Iran. CIA officers already had enough cash and guns stashed away to support ten thousand tribal warriors for six months. He had the authority to attack the Tudeh, the small, influential, outlawed Communist party of Iran. Now he shifted his target, aiming to undermine support for Mossadeq inside Iran’s mainstream political and religious parties.
Roosevelt started stepping up a campaign of bribery and subversion. The agency’s officers and their Iranian agents rented the allegiances of political hacks, holy men, and thugs. They bought the services of street gangs who broke up Tudeh rallies with their bare knuckles and mullahs who denounced Mossadeq from the mosques. The CIA did not have Britain’s decades of experience in Iran, nor nearly as many recruited Iranian agents. But it had more money to hand out: at least $1 million a year, a great fortune in one of the world’s poorer nations.
The CIA took its cues from the influence-buying network controlled by British intelligence. It was run by the Rashidian brothers, three sons of an Iranian Anglophile who controlled ships, banks, and real estate. The Rashidians had clout with members of the Iranian parliament. They held sway among the leading merchants of the bazaar, the unacknowledged legislators of Tehran. They bribed senators, senior military officers, editors and publishers, goon squads, and at least one member of Mossadeq’s cabinet. They bought information with cookie tins filled with cash. Their circle even included the shah’s chief manservant. It would prove a catalyst in the coup.
Allen Dulles walked into the March 4, 1953, National Security Council meeting with seven pages of briefing notes focused on the “consequences of Soviet take over” in Iran. The country faced “a maturing revolutionary set-up,” and if it went communist, all the dominoes of the Middle East would fall. Sixty percent of the free world’s oil would be in Moscow’s hands. This disastrous loss would “seriously deplete our reserves for war,” Dulles warned; oil and gasoline would have to be rationed in the United States. The president did not buy a word of it. He thought it might be better to offer Mossadeq a $100 million loan, in order to stabilize his government, rather than to overthrow it.
Monty Woodhouse tactfully suggested to his American counterparts at the CIA that they might take a different approach in presenting the problem to Eisenhower. They could not maintain that Mossadeq was a communist. But they could argue that the longer he remained in power, the greater the danger that the Soviets would invade Iran. Kim Roosevelt fine-tuned this pitch for the president’s ear: If Mossadeq wobbled to the left, Iran would fall to the Soviets. But if he was pushed the right way, the CIA could make sure that the government fell into American control.
Mossadeq played straight into this trap. In a miscalculated bluff, he raised the specter of the Soviet threat with the American embassy in Tehran. He expected to be “rescued by the Americans,” said John H. Stutesman, an American diplomat who knew Mossadeq well and served as the State Department officer in charge of Iranian affairs in 1953. “Mossadeq felt that if he kicked out the British, and threatened the Americans with Russian hegemony, that we’d rush in. He wasn’t that far wrong.”
On March 18, 1953, Frank Wisner informed Roosevelt and Woodhouse that they had an initial go-ahead from Allen Dulles. On April 4, CIA headquarters sent $1 million to the Tehran station. But Eisenhower still had his doubts, as did other key players in the plan to overthrow Iran.
The president made an eloquent speech a few days later called “The Chance for Peace,” in which he declared that “any nation’s right to form a government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable,” and “any nation’s attempt to dictate to other n
ations their form of government is indefensible.” These ideas struck home with the CIA’s station chief in Tehran, Roger Goiran, who asked headquarters why the United States would want to ally itself with the traditions of British colonialism in the Middle East. It was a historic mistake, he argued, a long-term disaster for American interests. Allen Dulles recalled him to Washington and dismissed him as station chief. The U.S. ambassador to Iran, Loy Henderson, who had been in on the plans from the start, strongly opposed the British choice of a dissolute retired major general, Fazlollah Zahedi, as the front man for the coup. Mossadeq had told the ambassador that he knew Zahedi was a British-backed traitor.
Despite that, the British nominated and the CIA seconded Zahedi, the only man openly bidding for power who was thought to be pro-American. In late April, he went into hiding after the kidnapping and murder of Iran’s national police chief—with good reason, for the suspected killers were his own supporters. He did not resurface for eleven weeks.
In May, the plot gained momentum, though it still lacked the president’s approval. It was now in its final draft. Zahedi, armed with $75,000 in CIA cash, would form a military secretariat and choose colonels to mount the coup. A group of religious fanatics called the Warriors of Islam—a “terrorist gang,” says a CIA history of the coup—would threaten the lives of Mossadeq’s political and personal supporters inside and outside the government. They would stage violent attacks on respected religious leaders that would look as if they were the work of the communists. The CIA drew up pamphlets and posters as part of a $150,000 propaganda campaign to control Iran’s press and public, proclaiming that “Mossadeq favors the Tudeh Party and the USSR…. Mossadeq is an enemy of Islam…. Mossadeq is deliberately destroying the morale of the Army…. Mossadeq is deliberately leading the country into economic collapse…. Mossadeq has been corrupted by power.” On D-Day, the coup plotters led by Zahedi’s military secretariat would seize the army’s general staff headquarters, Radio Tehran, Mossadeq’s home, the central bank, police headquarters, and the telephone and telegraph offices. They would arrest Mossadeq and his cabinet. More money, $11,000 a week, immediately went to buy off enough members of the Majlis to ensure that a majority would proclaim Zahedi as the new prime minister. This last detail had the advantage of giving the coup an appearance of legality. Zahedi, in turn, would pledge fealty to the shah and restore his monarchy to power.