by Tim Weiner
“These four mongrels were supposed to be our defense against communism and the extremes of Arab nationalism in the Middle East,” said Harrison Symmes, who worked closely with the CIA as Rountree’s right-hand man and later served as ambassador in Jordan. The only lasting legacy of the “secret task force” was the fulfillment of Frank Wisner’s proposal to put King Hussein of Jordan on the CIA’s payroll. The agency created a Jordanian intelligence service, which lives today as its liaison to much of the Arab world. The king received a secret subsidy for the next twenty years.
If arms could not buy loyalty in the Middle East, the almighty dollar was still the CIA’s secret weapon. Cash for political warfare and power plays was always welcome. If it could help create an American imperium in Arab and Asian lands, Foster was all for it. “Let’s put it this way,” said Ambassador Symmes. “John Foster Dulles had taken the view that anything we can do to bring down these neutralists—anti-imperialists, anti-colonialists, extreme nationalist regimes—should be done.
“He had given a mandate to Allen Dulles to do this…. And, of course, Allen Dulles just unleashed people.” As a result, “we were caught out in attempted coups, ham-handed operations of all kinds.” He and his fellow diplomats tried “to keep track of some of these dirty tricks that were being planned in the Middle East so that if they were just utterly impossible, we’d get them killed before they got any further. And we succeeded in doing that in some cases. But we couldn’t get all of them killed.”
“RIPE FOR A MILITARY COUP D’ETAT”
One such “dirty trick” went on for a decade: the plot to overthrow the government of Syria.
In 1949, the CIA installed a pro-American colonel, Adib Shishakli, as the Syrian leader. He won direct American military assistance along with covert financial aid. The CIA station chief in Damascus, Miles Copeland, called the colonel “a likeable rogue” who “had not, to my certain knowledge, ever bowed down to a graven image. He had, however, committed sacrilege, blasphemy, murder, adultery and theft.” He lasted four years before he was overthrown by Ba’ath Party and communist politicians and military officers. In March 1955, Allen Dulles predicted that the country was “ripe for a military coup d’etat” supported by the agency. In April 1956, the CIA’s Kim Roosevelt and his British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) counterpart Sir George Young tried to mobilize right-wing Syrian army officers; the CIA delivered half a million Syrian pounds to the leaders of the plot. But the Suez fiasco poisoned the political climate in the Middle East, pushed Syria closer to the Soviets, and forced the Americans and the British to postpone their plan at the end of October 1956.
In the spring and summer of April 1957, they revived it. A document discovered in 2003 among the private papers of Duncan Sandys, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s defense secretary, spells out their effort in detail.
Syria had to be “made to appear as the sponsor of plots, sabotage and violence directed against neighbouring governments,” it said. CIA and SIS would manufacture “national conspiracies and various strong-arm activities” in Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan, and blame them on Syria. They would create paramilitary factions and spark revolts among the Muslim Brotherhood in Damascus. The creation of the appearance of instability would destabilize the government; border clashes manufactured by American and British intelligence would serve as a pretext for the pro-Western armies of Iraq and Jordan to invade. The CIA and SIS envisioned that any new regime they installed would likely “rely first upon repressive measures and arbitrary exercise of power” to survive.
Roosevelt identified Abdul Hamid Serraj, the longtime chief of the Syrian intelligence service, as the most powerful man in Damascus. Serraj was to be assassinated, along with the chief of the Syrian general staff and the head of the Communist Party.
The CIA sent Rocky Stone, who had cut his teeth in the Iran operation, to serve as the new chief of station in Damascus. Accredited as a diplomat, a second secretary at the American embassy, he used promises of millions of dollars and unlimited political power to befriend officers in the Syrian army. He represented his recruits in reports to headquarters as a crack corps for an American-backed coup.
Abdul Hamid Serraj saw through Stone in a matter of weeks.
The Syrians set up a sting. “The officers with whom Stone was dealing took his money and then went on television and announced that they had received this money from the ‘corrupt and sinister Americans’ in an attempt to overthrow the legitimate government of Syria,” said Curtis F. Jones, a State Department officer sent to clean up the mess Stone left behind. Serraj’s forces surrounded the American embassy in Damascus, seized Stone, and interrogated him roughly. He told them everything he knew. The Syrians identified him publicly as an American spy posing as a diplomat, a veteran of the CIA’s coup in Iran, and a conspirator with Syrian army officers and politicians to overthrow the government in exchange for millions of dollars in American aid.
The revelation of this “particularly clumsy CIA plot,” in the words of the U.S. ambassador to Syria, Charles Yost, had consequences that reverberate today. The Syrian government formally declared Rocky Stone persona non grata. That was the first time that an American diplomat of any stripe—be he a spy working undercover or a bona fide State Department officer—had been expelled from an Arab nation. In turn, the United States expelled the Syrian ambassador to Washington, the first expulsion of any foreign diplomat from Washington since World War I. The United States denounced Syria’s “fabrications” and “slanders.” Stone’s Syrian co-conspirators, including the former president, Adib Shishakli, were sentenced to death. A purge of every military officer who had ever been associated with the American embassy followed.
A Syrian-Egyptian alliance grew from this political turmoil: the United Arab Republic. It was the locus of anti-American sentiment in the Middle East. As America’s reputation plummeted in Damascus, Soviet political and military influence grew. After the botched coup, no Americans could win the trust of the increasingly tyrannical Syrian leadership.
One trouble with blown operations such as this was that they “couldn’t possibly be ‘plausibly denied,’” David Bruce’s report to President Eisenhower had warned. The American hand was clear to all. Was there no accounting for “the immediate costs of disappointments (Jordan, Syria, Egypt, et al.)”? asked the report. Who was “calculating the impacts on our international position”? Was the CIA “stirring up the turmoil and raising the doubts about us that exist in many countries of the world today? What of the effects on our present alliances? Where will we be tomorrow?”
“WE CAME TO POWER ON A CIA TRAIN”
On May 14, 1958, Allen Dulles convened his deputies for their regular morning meeting. He lashed out at Wisner, advising him to do “some soul-searching” about the agency’s performance in the Middle East. On top of the botched coup in Syria, anti-American riots had erupted without warning in Beirut and Algiers. Was this all part of a global plot? Dulles and his aides speculated that “the Communists were in fact pulling the strings” in the Mideast and across the world. As the fear of Soviet encroachment escalated, the goal of creating a tier of pro-American nations on the Soviets’ southern flank grew more urgent.
The CIA’s officers in Iraq had orders to work with political leaders, military commanders, security ministers, and power brokers, offering money and guns in exchange for anticommunist alliances. But on July 14, 1958, when a gang of army officers overthrew the pro-American Iraqi monarchy of Nuri Said, the Baghdad station was sound asleep. “We were caught completely by surprise,” said Ambassador Robert C. F. Gordon, then an embassy political officer.
The new regime, led by General Abdel Karim Qasim, dug into the old government’s archives. They held proof that the CIA had been deeply entwined with Iraq’s royalist government, paying off the leaders of the old guard. One American working under contract for the CIA, posing as a writer for an agency front, the American Friends of the Middle East, was arrested in his hotel and disappeared without
a trace. The officers at the CIA station fled.
Allen Dulles began calling Iraq “the most dangerous place in the world.” General Qasim began allowing Soviet political, economic, and cultural delegations into Iraq. “We have no evidence that Qasim is a communist,” the CIA advised the White House, but “unless action is taken to curb Communism, or unless the Communists make a major tactical error, Iraq will probably be transformed into a Communist-controlled state.” The agency’s leaders acknowledged among themselves that they had no idea what to do about that threat: “The only effective and organized force in Iraq capable of countering Communism is the Army. Our basic intelligence on the present situation of the Army is very weak.” The CIA, having lost one battle in Syria, and another in Iraq, agonized over what to do to stop the Middle East from turning red.
After the Iraq debacle, Kim Roosevelt, the CIA’s Near East division chief since 1950, resigned to seek his fortune as a private consultant to American oil companies. He was replaced by James Critchfield, the agency’s longtime liaison with General Reinhard Gehlen in Germany.
Critchfield quickly became interested in the Ba’ath Party of Iraq after its thugs tried to kill Qasim in a bungled gun battle. His officers ran another failed assassination plot, using a poisoned handkerchief, an idea that was endorsed all the way up the CIA’s chain of command. It took five more years, but the agency finally backed a successful coup in Iraq in the name of American influence.
“We came to power on a CIA train,” said Ali Saleh Sa’adi, the Ba’ath Party interior minister in the 1960s. One of the passengers on that train was an up-and-coming assassin named Saddam Hussein.
15. “A VERY STRANGE
WAR”
The American view of the world from the Mediterranean to the Pacific was black and white: a firm American hand was needed in every capital from Damascus to Jakarta to keep the dominoes from falling. But in 1958, the CIA’s effort to overthrow the government of Indonesia backfired so badly that it fueled the rise of the biggest communist party in the world outside of Russia and China. It would take a real war, in which hundreds of thousands died, to defeat that force.
Indonesia had fought for freedom from Dutch colonial rule after World War II and won it at the end of 1949. The United States supported Indonesia’s independence under its new leader, President Sukarno. The nation came into the CIA’s focus after the Korean War, when the agency realized that Indonesia had perhaps twenty billion barrels of untapped oil, a leader unwilling to align himself with the United States, and a rising communist movement.
The agency first raised the alarm over Indonesia in a report delivered to the National Security Council on September 9, 1953. After hearing the CIA’s dire account of the situation, Harold Stassen, then director of the Mutual Security Agency, the military and economic aid organization that succeeded the Marshall Plan, told Vice President Nixon and the Dulles brothers that they “might well give thought to measures by this Government that would cause the fall of the new regime in Indonesia, since it was obviously a pretty bad one. If it is being as heavily infiltrated by Communists as CIA seemed to believe, it would be more sensible to try to get rid of it than to prop it up.” But when Nixon briefed CIA officers in Washington four months later, after meeting Sukarno during a world tour, he reported that the Indonesian leader had “a tremendous hold on the people; is completely noncommunist; and there is no doubt that he is the main ‘card’ of the United States.”
The Dulles brothers strongly doubted Nixon. Sukarno had declared himself a noncombatant in the cold war, and there were no neutrals in their eyes.
The CIA seriously considered killing Sukarno in the spring of 1955. “There was planning of such a possibility,” Richard Bissell recounted. “The planning progressed as far as the identification of an asset”—an assassin—“whom it was felt might be recruited for this purpose. The plan was never reached, was never perfected to the point where it seemed feasible. The difficulty concerned the possibility of creating a situation in which the potential agent would have access to the target.”
“SUBVERSION BY BALLOT”
While the agency weighed his assassination, Sukarno convened an international conference of twenty-nine Asian, African, and Arab chiefs of state in Bandung, Indonesia. They proposed a global movement of nations free to chart their own paths, aligned with neither Moscow nor Washington. Nineteen days after the Bandung conference disbanded, the CIA received a new covert-action order from the White House, numbered NSC 5518 and declassified in 2003.
It authorized the agency to use “all feasible covert means”—including payoffs to buy Indonesian voters and politicians, political warfare to win friends and subvert potential enemies, and paramilitary force—to keep Indonesia from veering to the left.
Under its provisions, the CIA pumped about $1 million into the coffers of Sukarno’s strongest political opponents, the Masjumi Party, in the 1955 national parliamentary elections, the first ever held in postcolonial Indonesia. That operation fell short: Sukarno’s party won, the Masjumi placed second, and the PKI—the Indonesian Communist Party—placed fourth with 16 percent of the votes. Those results alarmed Washington. The CIA continued to finance its chosen political parties and “a number of political figures” in Indonesia, as Bissell recounted in an oral history.
In 1956, the red alert was raised again when Sukarno visited Moscow and Beijing as well as Washington. The White House had listened when Sukarno said he greatly admired the American form of government. It felt betrayed when he did not embrace Western democracy as his model for governing Indonesia, an archipelago stretching more than three thousand miles, encompassing nearly one thousand inhabited islands, with thirteen major ethnic groups among a predominantly Islamic population of more than eighty million people—the world’s fifth-largest nation in the 1950s.
Sukarno was a spellbinding orator who spoke in public three or four times a week, rallying his people with patriotic rants, trying to unify his nation. The few Americans in Indonesia who could understand his public speeches reported that he would quote Thomas Jefferson one day and spout communist theory the next. The CIA never quite grasped Sukarno. But the agency’s authority under NSC 5518 was so broad that it could justify almost any action against him.
The CIA’s new Far East division chief, Al Ulmer, liked that kind of freedom. It was why he loved the agency. “We went all over the world and we did what we wanted,” he said forty years later. “God, we had fun.”
By his own account, Ulmer had lived high and mighty during his long run as station chief in Athens, with a status somewhere between a Hollywood star and a head of state. He had helped Allen Dulles enjoy a romantic infatuation with Queen Frederika of Greece and the pleasures of yachting with shipping magnates. The Far East division was his reward.
Ulmer said in an interview that he knew next to nothing about Indonesia when he took over the division. But he had the full faith and trust of Allen Dulles. And he remembered vividly a conversation with Frank Wisner at the end of 1956, just before Wisner’s breakdown. He recalled Wisner saying it was time to turn up the heat on Sukarno and hold his feet to the fire.
Ulmer’s station chief in Jakarta told him that Indonesia was ripe for communist subversion. The chief, Val Goodell, was a rubber-industry magnate with a decidedly colonialist attitude. The essence of his fire-breathing cables from Jakarta was conveyed in notes that Allen Dulles carried to his weekly White House meetings in the first four months of 1957: Situation critical…. Sukarno a secret communist…. Send weapons. Rebellious army officers on the island of Sumatra were the key to the nation’s future, Goodell told headquarters. “Sumatrans prepared to fight,” he cabled, “but are short of arms.”
In July 1957, local election returns showed that the PKI stood to become the third most powerful political party in Indonesia, up from the fourth spot. “Sukarno insisting on Commie participation” in Indonesia’s government, Goodell reported, “because of six million Indonesians who voted for Communist party.”
The CIA described this rise as “spectacular gains” giving the communists “enormous prestige.” Would Sukarno now turn toward Moscow and Beijing? No one had the slightest notion.
The station chief strongly disagreed with the outgoing American ambassador in Indonesia, Hugh Cumming, who said Sukarno was still open to American influence. From the start, Goodell fought the new ambassador, John M. Allison, who had served as the American envoy in Japan and the assistant secretary of state for the Far East. The two quickly reached an angry impasse. Would the United States use diplomatic influence or deadly force in Indonesia?
No one seemed to know what the foreign policy of the United States was on this point. On July 19, 1957, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Charles Pearre Cabell “recommended that the Director again attempt to find out State Department policy on Indonesia,” say the minutes of the CIA chiefs’ meeting. “The Director agreed to do this.”
The White House and the CIA sent emissaries to Jakarta to assess the situation. Allen Dulles dispatched Al Ulmer; President Eisenhower sent F. M. Dearborn, Jr., his special assistant for security operations. Dearborn reluctantly advised Eisenhower that almost all of America’s allies in the Far East were shaky. Chiang Kai-shek was leading “a dictatorship” in Taiwan. President Diem was running a “one-man show” in South Vietnam. The leaders of Laos were corrupt. South Korea’s Syngman Rhee was deeply unpopular.
But the problem in Sukarno’s Indonesia was different, the president’s man reported: It was “subversion by ballot”—one of the dangers of participatory democracy.
Al Ulmer believed that he had to find the strongest anticommunist forces in Indonesia and support them with guns and money. He and Goodell argued furiously with Ambassador Allison over “a long and fruitless afternoon” on the veranda of the embassy residence in Jakarta. The CIA men did not accept the fact that almost all the Indonesian army leadership remained professionally loyal to the government, personally anticommunist, and politically pro-American. They believed that CIA support for rebellious army officers could save Indonesia from a communist takeover. With the agency’s support, they could create a breakaway Indonesian government on Sumatra, then seize the capital. Ulmer returned to Washington denouncing Sukarno as “beyond redemption” and Allison as “soft on communism.” He swayed the Dulles brothers on both counts.