Legacy of Ashes (The History of the C.I.A.)

by Tim Weiner

  In June 1957, barely eight years after shedding his prison uniform, Kishi traveled to the United States for a triumphal visit. He went to Yankee Stadium and threw out the ceremonial first ball. He played a round of golf at an all-white country club with the president of the United States. Vice President Nixon introduced him to the Senate as a great and loyal friend of the American people. Kishi told the new American ambassador to Japan, Douglas MacArthur II, the general’s nephew, that the new security treaty would be passed and a rising left-wing tide could be stemmed if America helped him consolidate his power. Kishi wanted a permanent source of financial support from the CIA rather than a series of surreptitious payments. He convinced the American envoy that “if Japan went Communist it was difficult to see how the rest of Asia would not follow suit,” Ambassador MacArthur remembered. Foster Dulles agreed. He argued that the United States had to place a big bet on Japan, and that Kishi was the best bet the United States had.

  President Eisenhower himself decided that Japanese political support for the security treaty and American financial support for Kishi were one and the same. He authorized a continuing series of CIA payoffs to key members of the LDP. Politicians unwitting of the CIA’s role were told that the money came from the titans of corporate America. The money flowed for at least fifteen years, under four American presidents, and it helped consolidate one-party rule in Japan for the rest of the cold war.

  Others followed in Kishi’s path. Okinori Kaya had been the finance minister in Japan’s wartime cabinet. Convicted as a war criminal, he was sentenced to life in prison. Paroled in 1955 and pardoned in 1957, he became one of Kishi’s closest advisers and a key member of the LDP’s internal security committee.

  Kaya became a recruited agent of the CIA either immediately before or immediately after he was elected to the Diet in 1958. After his recruitment, he wanted to travel to the United States and meet Allen Dulles in person. The CIA, skittish about the appearance of a convicted war criminal meeting with the director of central intelligence, kept the meeting secret for nearly fifty years. But on February 6, 1959, Kaya came to visit Dulles at CIA headquarters and asked the director to enter into a formal agreement to share intelligence with his internal security committee. “Everyone agreed that cooperation between CIA and the Japanese regarding countersubversion was most desirable and that the subject was one of major interest to CIA,” say the minutes of their talk. Dulles regarded Kaya as his agent, and six months later he wrote him to say: “I am most interested in learning your views both in international affairs affecting relations between our countries and on the situation within Japan.”

  Kaya’s on-and-off relationship with the CIA reached a peak in 1968, when he was the leading political adviser to Prime Minister Eisaku Sato. The biggest domestic political issue in Japan that year was the enormous American military base on Okinawa, a crucial staging ground for the bombing of Vietnam and a storehouse of American nuclear weapons. Okinawa was under American control, but regional elections were set for November 10, and opposition politicians threatened to force the United States off the island. Kaya played a key role in the CIA’s covert actions aimed to swing the elections for the LDP, which narrowly failed. Okinawa itself returned to Japanese administration in 1972, but the American military remains there to this day.

  The Japanese came to describe the political system created with the CIA’s support as kozo oshoku—“structural corruption.” The CIA’s payoffs went on into the 1970s. The structural corruption of the political life of Japan continued long thereafter.

  “We ran Japan during the occupation, and we ran it in a different way in these years after the occupation,” said the CIA’s Horace Feldman, who served as station chief in Tokyo. “General MacArthur had his ways. We had ours.”

  13. “WISHFUL BLINDNESS”

  Enthralled by covert action, Allen Dulles ceased to focus on his core mission of providing intelligence to the president.

  He handled most of the CIA’s analysts and much of their work with studied contempt. Dulles would keep them waiting for hours when they came to prep him for the next morning’s meeting at the White House. As afternoon turned to evening, he would burst out his door and blow past them, rushing to keep a dinner date.

  He had fallen into “the habit of assessing briefings by weight,” said Dick Lehman, a senior CIA analyst for three decades and latterly the man who prepared the president’s daily briefing. “He would heft them and decide, without reading them, whether or not to accept them.”

  An analyst admitted to the inner sanctum in midafternoon to advise Dulles on the crisis of the moment might find the director watching a Washington Senators baseball game on the television in his office. Lounging in a reclining chair, his feet up on an ottoman, Dulles followed the game while the hapless aide faced him from the back of the TV set. As the briefer reached his crucial points, Dulles would analyze the ball game.

  He became inattentive to the life-and-death questions at hand.

  “INDICT THE WHOLE SOVIET SYSTEM”

  Dulles and Wisner together had launched more than two hundred major covert actions overseas over the course of five years, pouring American fortunes into the politics of France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Pakistan, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam. The agency had overthrown nations. It could make or break presidents and prime ministers. But it could not get a handle on the enemy.

  At the end of 1955, President Eisenhower changed the CIA’s marching orders. Recognizing that covert action could not undermine the Kremlin, he revised the rules written at the start of the cold war. The new order, labeled NSC 5412/2 and dated December 28, 1955, remained in effect for fifteen years. The new goals were to “create and exploit troublesome problems for International Communism,” to “counter any threat of a party or individuals directly or indirectly responsive to Communist control,” and to “strengthen the orientation toward the United States of the people of the free world”—great ambitions, but more modest and nuanced than what Dulles and Wisner tried to achieve.

  A few weeks later, the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, created more trouble for international communism than the CIA dreamed possible. In his February 1956 speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he denounced Stalin, dead less than three years, as “a supreme egotist and sadist, capable of sacrificing everything and anybody for the sake of his own power and glory.” The CIA picked up rumors about the speech in March. My kingdom for a copy, Allen Dulles told his men. Could the agency finally obtain some intelligence from inside the Politburo?

  Then as now, the CIA relied heavily on foreign intelligence services, paying for secrets it could not uncover on its own. In April 1956, Israel’s spies delivered the text to James Angleton, who became the CIA’s one-man liaison with the Jewish state. The channel produced much of the agency’s intelligence on the Arab world, but at a cost—a growing American dependence on Israel to explain events in the Middle East. The Israeli perspective colored American perceptions for decades to come.

  In May, after George Kennan and others judged the text as the genuine article, a great debate arose inside the CIA.

  Both Wisner and Angleton wanted to keep it secret from the free world, but leak it selectively abroad, to sow discord among the world’s communist parties. Angleton thought by tweaking the text with propaganda, “he could have used it to such advantage that he would have discombobulated the Russians and their security services and perhaps used some of these émigré groups that we still at that time hoped to activate, and liberate the Ukraine or something,” said Ray Cline, one of Dulles’s most trusted intelligence analysts at that time.

  But above all, they wanted it cut for bait to lure Soviet spies, in order to salvage one of Wisner’s longest-running, least effective operations—Red Cap.

  A worldwide program that began in 1952, taking its name from the railroad porters who helped baggage-laden travelers, Red Cap aimed to induce Soviets to defect from their country and
work for the CIA. Ideally, they would serve as “defectors in place”—remaining in their government posts while spying for America. Failing that, they would flee to the West and reveal their knowledge of the Soviet system. But the number of important Soviet sources developed under Red Cap was zero at the time. The Soviet division of the CIA’s clandestine service was run by a narrow-minded Harvard man named Dana Durand, who held his position through a combination of accident, default, and alliance with Angleton. The division was dysfunctional, according to an inspector general’s report issued in June 1956 and declassified in 2004. The Soviet division could not produce “an authoritative statement of its missions and functions,” much less grasp what was going on inside the Soviet Union. The report contained a list of the CIA’s twenty “controlled agents” in Russia in 1956. One was a low-ranking naval engineering officer. Another was the wife of a guided missile research scientist. The others were listed as laborer, telephone repairman, garage manager, veterinarian, high school teacher, locksmith, restaurant worker, and unemployed. None of them could have had any idea what made the Kremlin tick.

  On the first Saturday morning of June 1956, Dulles called Ray Cline into the director’s office. “Wisner says you think we ought to release the secret Khrushchev speech,” Dulles said.

  Cline stated his case: it was a fantastic revelation of “the true feelings of all these guys who had to work under that old bastard Stalin for many years.

  “For God’s sake,” he told Dulles, “let’s get it out.”

  Dulles held his copy in trembling fingers gnarled with arthritis and gout. The old man put his carpet slippers up on the desk, leaned back, pushed his glasses up on his head, and said, “By golly, I think I’ll make a policy decision!” Cline recalled. He buzzed Wisner on his intercom, “and kind of coyly talked Frank into a position where Frank could not disagree with releasing it, and using the same kind of arguments that I had, that it was a great historical chance to, as I think I told him to say, ‘indict the whole Soviet system.’”

  Dulles then picked up the phone and called his brother. The text was leaked through the State Department and ran three days later in The New York Times. The decision set events in motion that the CIA had never imagined.

  “CIA REPRESENTED GREAT POWER”

  For months thereafter, the secret speech was beamed behind the iron curtain by Radio Free Europe, the CIA’s $100 million media machine. More than three thousand émigré broadcasters, writers, and engineers and their American overseers put the radios on the air in eight languages, filling the airwaves up to nineteen hours a day. In theory, they were supposed to play their news and propaganda straight. But Wisner wanted to use words as weapons. His interference created a split signal at Radio Free Europe.

  The on-air émigrés at the radios had been begging their American bosses to give them a clear message to deliver. Here it was: the speech was recited over the air night and day.

  The consequences were immediate. The CIA’s best analysts had concluded a few months before that no popular uprising was likely in Eastern Europe during the 1950s. On June 28, after the speech was broadcast, Polish workers began to rise up against their communist rulers. They rioted against a reduction in wages and destroyed the beacons that jammed Radio Free Europe’s transmissions. But the CIA could do nothing but feed their rage—not when a Soviet field marshal ran Poland’s army and Soviet intelligence officers oversaw the secret police, who killed fifty-three Poles and imprisoned hundreds.

  The Polish struggle led the National Security Council to search for a crack in the architecture of Soviet control. Vice President Nixon argued that it would serve American interests if the Soviets pounded another upstart satellite state, such as Hungary, into submission, providing a source for global anticommunist propaganda. Picking up that theme, Foster Dulles won presidential approval for new efforts to promote “spontaneous manifestations of discontent” in the captive nations. Allen Dulles promised to pump up a Radio Free Europe program that floated balloons east over the iron curtain, carrying leaflets and “Freedom Medals”—aluminum badges bearing slogans and an imprint of the Liberty Bell.

  Then Dulles took off on a fifty-seven-day world tour, circling the earth in a zippered flight suit aboard a specially configured four-engine DC-6. He dropped in on the CIA stations in London and Paris, Frankfurt and Vienna, Rome and Athens, Istanbul and Tehran, Dhahran and Delhi, Bangkok and Singapore, Tokyo and Seoul, Manila and Saigon. The journey was an open secret: Dulles was received as a head of state, and he reveled in the limelight. The trip was “one of the most highly publicized clandestine tours ever made,” said Ray Cline, who accompanied the director. Cloaked yet flamboyant—that was the CIA under Allen Dulles. It was a place where “truly clandestine practices were compromised” while “analysis was clothed in an atmosphere of secrecy that was unnecessary, frequently counterproductive, and in the long run damaging,” Cline thought. Watching foreign leaders fawn over Dulles at state dinners, he learned another lesson: “CIA represented great power. It was a little frightening.”

  “WISHFUL BLINDNESS”

  On October 22, 1956, shortly after Dulles returned to Washington, a deeply weary Frank Wisner flicked out the lights in his office, walked down the corridors of decaying linoleum and peeling walls in Temporary Building L, went home to his elegant house in Georgetown, and packed for his own tour of the CIA’s biggest stations in Europe.

  Neither he nor his boss had a clue about the two greatest events going on in the world. War plans were afoot in London and Paris, while a popular revolution was at hand in Hungary. In the course of a crucial fortnight, Dulles would misinterpret or misrepresent every aspect of these crises in his reports to the president.

  Wisner sailed out over the Atlantic in darkness. After his overnight flight to London, his first order of business was a long-scheduled dinner date with Sir Patrick Dean, a senior British intelligence officer. They were to discuss their plans to topple the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had come to power three years earlier in a military coup. The issue had been brewing for months. Sir Patrick had been in Washington a few weeks before, and the two had agreed that one way or another, their objectives required Nasser’s removal from power.

  The CIA had supported Nasser at first, handing him millions, building him a powerful state radio station, and promising him American military and economic aid. Yet the agency was taken by surprise by events in Egypt, despite the fact that CIA officers outnumbered State Department officials by about four to one in the American embassy in Cairo. The biggest surprise was that Nasser did not stay bought: he used part of the $3 million in bribes that the CIA had slipped him to build a minaret in Cairo on an island in front of the Nile Hilton. It was known as el wa’ef rusfel—Roosevelt’s erection. Because Roosevelt and the CIA could not come through on their promises of American military aid, Nasser agreed to sell Egyptian cotton to the Soviet Union in exchange for arms. Then, in July 1956, Nasser challenged the legacies of colonialism by nationalizing the Suez Canal Company, the corporation created by the British and the French to run the Middle East’s man-made maritime trade route. London and Paris roared with outrage.

  The British proposed to assassinate Nasser and contemplated diverting the Nile River to destroy Egypt’s bid for economic self-rule. Eisenhower said it would be “dead wrong” to use lethal force. The CIA favored a long, slow campaign of subversion against Egypt.

  That was the issue that Wisner had to work out with Sir Patrick Dean. He was first perplexed and then furious when Sir Patrick failed to appear at their long-scheduled meeting. The British spy had another engagement: he was in a villa outside Paris, putting the final touches on a coordinated military attack on Egypt by Britain, France, and Israel. They aimed to destroy Nasser’s government and take the Suez back by force. First Israel would attack Egypt, and then Britain and France would strike, posing as peacekeepers while seizing the canal.

  The CIA knew none of this. Dulles assured Eisenhower that reports of a
joint Israeli-UK-French military plan were absurd. He refused to heed the CIA’s chief intelligence analyst and the American military attaché in Tel Aviv, both convinced that Israel was about to go to war against Egypt. Nor did he listen to an old friend, Douglas Dillon, the American ambassador in Paris, who called to warn that France was in on the plot. The director instead chose to listen to Jim Angleton and his Israeli contacts. Having won their undying gratitude for coming up with a copy of Khrushchev’s secret speech, the Israelis dazzled Dulles and Angleton with disinformation, warning that there would be trouble elsewhere in the Middle East. On October 26, the director conveyed their falsehoods to the president at the National Security Council meeting: The king of Jordan has been assassinated! Egypt would soon attack Iraq!

  The president pushed those headlines to the side. He declared that “the compelling news continued to be Hungary.”

  A great crowd had gathered at the Parliament in Budapest two days before, led by student demonstrators rising up against the communist government. The hated state security police confronted a second crowd at the government radio station, where a party functionary was denouncing the protests. Some of the students were armed. A shot rang out from the radio building, the security police opened fire, and the protestors fought the secret police all night. At the Budapest City Park, a third crowd tore a statue of Stalin from its pedestal, dragged it to the front of the National Theater, and smashed it into shards. Red Army troops and tanks entered Budapest the next morning, and the demonstrators persuaded at least a handful of the young Soviet soldiers to join their cause. Rebels rode toward the Parliament on Soviet tanks flying the Hungarian flag. Russian commanders panicked, and in a terrible moment at Kossuth Square a blinding crossfire erupted. At least a hundred people died.