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

by Tim Weiner

  “special interrogation” techniques continued for several years thereafter: Senate investigators confirmed that plans for overseas interrogations were a topic of monthly meetings at the CIA from 1951 to at least 1956, and probably for several years thereafter: “The CIA maintains that the project ended in 1956, but evidence suggests that Office of Security and Office of Medical Services use of ‘special interrogation’ techniques continued for several years thereafter.” Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “Testing and Use of Chemical and Biological Agents by the Intelligence Community,” Appendix I, August 3, 1977.

  a group called the Young Germans: Tom Polgar and McMahon interviews with author.

  the CIA’s Free Jurists: Polgar and Peter Sichel interviews with author, see also David E. Murphy, Sergei A. Kondrashev, and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 113–126.

  “Poland represents”: Smith and Wisner at deputies’ meeting, August 5, 1952 CIA/CREST. For Shackley’s encounter with WIN, see Ted Shackley with Richard A. Finney, Spymaster: My Life in the CIA (Dulles, VA: Potomac, 2005), pp. xvi–20.

  “CIA had clearly thought”: Loomis oral history, FAOH.

  Frank Lindsay…told Dulles and Wisner: Lindsay’s prophetic report was called “A Program for the Development of New Cold War Instruments,” March 3, 1953, declassified in part July 8, 2003, DDEL. Lindsay interview with author. Dulles did his best to suppress the report. The leaders of the CIA never took time to assess the consequences of covert action’s failures, or accept criticism that could cost them their jobs if it ever leaked out. Nor did they heed one of their best spies, Peter Sichel, Helms’s chief of espionage operations for Eastern Europe in the early 1950s, who warned that the only way to fight the enemy was to know the enemy. Sichel said he argued that “the minute you get involved in ideology you are no longer going to have dependable intelligence. You are exposing intelligence agents to danger. You can’t be a political agent without exposing yourself to the system that you are trying to undermine. If you’re trying to undermine a political system that’s autocratic, you’re going to get hurt.”

  “Our insight into the Soviet Union was zero”: McMahon interview with author.

  “We can’t get qualified people”: Smith quoted in CIA Support Functions: Organization and Accomplishments of the DDA-DDS Group, 1953–1956, Vol. 2, Chap. 3, p. 128, Director of Central Intelligence Historical Series, declassified March 6, 2001, CIA/CREST.

  “improperly trained or inferior personnel”: Minutes of meeting, October 27, 1952, CIA/CREST.

  “A word about the future”: Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 102–104.

  PART TWO

  Chapter Eight

  “We have no reliable inside intelligence”: The report, “Intelligence on the Soviet Bloc,” is cited in Gerald Haines and Robert Leggett (eds.), CIA’s Analyses of the Soviet Union, 1947–1991: A Documentary History, CIA History Staff, 2001, CIA/CSI.

  Eisenhower fumed: Emmet J. Hughes, The Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the Eisenhower Years (New York: Atheneum, 1963), p. 101. The president was equally unhappy to learn that the agency had no riposte for the Soviet peace offensive that followed soon after Stalin’s funeral—a crude, cynical, occasionally effective propaganda campaign to convince the world that the Kremlin had copyrighted the concepts of Justice and Freedom.

  “Stalin never did anything to provoke a war with the United States”: Jerrold Schecter and Vyacheslav Luchkov (trans. and ed.), Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), pp. 100–101.

  “any prior warning”: NSC minutes, June 5, 1953, declassified February 12, 2003, DDEL.

  “as though the hour of decision were at hand”: NSC minutes, September 24, 1953, declassified September 29, 1999, DDEL.

  “the Russians could launch an atomic attack”…“We could lick the whole world”: NSC minutes, October 7, 1953, declassified February 28, 2003, DDEL.

  The uprising was crushed: The June 1953 East Berlin uprising is conclusively documented by the CIA’s David Murphy in Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 163–182. The endlessly repeated story—see, among many, John Ranelagh, The Agency (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 258—that the CIA’s Berlin base wanted to distribute weapons to the East German protestors is false. The figure of 370,000 protestors comes from James David Marchio, “Rhetoric and Reality: The Eisenhower Administration and Unrest in Eastern Europe, 1953–1959” (Ph.D. diss., American University, 1990), cited in Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947–1956 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 132–133.

  “train and equip underground organizations”: NSC 158, “United States Objectives and Actions to Exploit the Unrest in the Satellite States,” DDEL. Eisenhower signed the order on June 26, 1953.

  170 new major covert actions: In “Coordination and Policy Approval of Covert Actions,” February 23, 1967, NSC/CIA.

  Dulles polished the public image: A partial list of news organizations that cooperated with the CIA under Allen Dulles includes CBS, NBC, ABC, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Scripps-Howard Newspapers, Hearst Newspapers, Copley News Service, and the Miami Herald. For a comprehensive list of war-propaganda veterans running American newsrooms in 1953, see Edward Barrett, Truth Is Our Weapon (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1953), pp. 31–33. This is a story that remains to be told, although Carl Bernstein had a very good cut at it in “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977. Bernstein got it precisely right in this passage: “Many journalists who covered World War II were close to people in the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor of the CIA; more important, they were all on the same side. When the war ended and many OSS officials went into the CIA, it was only natural that these relationships would continue. Meanwhile, the first postwar generation of journalists entered the profession; they shared the same political and professional values as their mentors. ‘You had a gang of people who worked together during World War II and never got over it,’ said one Agency official. ‘They were genuinely motivated and highly susceptible to intrigue and being on the inside.’”

  The minutes of the daily meetings of Dulles and his deputies: The records were obtained from the CREST system at the National Archives in 2005 and 2006. They reflect a grinding fear that the CIA’s weaknesses would be exposed to public view.

  At the meetings of August 28 and September 23, 1953, CIA inspector general Lyman Kirkpatrick warned that military officers were leaving CIA in droves, and “with an unfriendly attitude.” The agency’s personnel policies were “causing disgruntlement and leaving the door wide open for these individuals to approach members of Congress.”

  On June 13, 1955, Kirkpatrick asked Dulles whether a CIA officer “recently convicted of manslaughter…as a result of a fight with an RAF officer should be terminated or allowed to resign.” On October 5, 1955, Deputy Director of Intelligence Robert Amory noted that “the Army is presently preparing a history of Korea, which if published as presently written will put CIA in a bad light.”

  The station chief in Switzerland who killed himself was James Kronthal, an OSS veteran who had succeeded Allen Dulles in Bern and had served there since 1946. He was a homosexual suspected of succumbing to Soviet blackmail. The case was not proven. He committed suicide in Washington during Dulles’s first days as director in March 1953.

  The 17 percent annual turnover rate—one in six CIA personnel left in 1953—was a finding of the “Final Report on Reasons for Low Morale Among Junior Officers,” November 9, 1953, CIA/CREST. The survey of 115 CIA officers recorded deep unhappiness at corruption, waste, and misdirected missions.

  “a major personnel crisis”: House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, IC21
, “Intelligence Community Management,” p. 21.

  a man he regarded as a pompous blowhard: CIA historians have surmised that Bedell Smith expected Ike to name him chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did not want to serve as undersecretary of state, did not like John Foster Dulles, and was uneasy about Allen Dulles’s appointment as director of central intelligence. John L. Helgerson, “Getting to Know the President: CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates, 1952–1992,” CIA/CSI.

  “a couple of drinks would loosen his tongue”: Transcript of Nixon interview with Frank Gannon, April 8, 1983, Walter J. Brown Media Archives, University of Georgia, available online at http://www.libs.uga.edu/media/ collections/nixon.

  Chapter Nine

  This chapter is based in part on two classified CIA clandestine service histories: “Zindabad Shah!” obtained by the author, dated 2003, with redactions, and “Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran,” written in March 1954 by Donald Wilber, the propaganda chief for Operation Ajax, and published on the Web site of The New York Times in 2000. “Overthrow” is the official authorized American intelligence version of the coup, a digest of what the CIA officers on the scene recorded and reported to their headquarters at the time. But it is not close to the full truth. The officers on the scene, like Kim Roosevelt, all but ceased relaying the news back home in the final days of the coup, because the news was almost all bad. The CIA history ignores the rationales behind the operation and strenuously downplays the central British role in the overthrow of Mossadeq. It explains President Eisenhower’s reflection that “reports from observers on the spot in Tehran during the critical days sounded more like a dime novel than historical fact.” Wilber, the author of “Overthrow,” was also the rewrite man on the script for the coup itself. Every facet of the plot was polished in May 1953 at the British intelligence station in Nicosia, Cyprus, by Wilber, an OSS veteran who had served in Iran during the war and returned to the Tehran station, and his British counterpart Norman Darbyshire. What emerged was a play in which the Iranians were puppets.

  “When is our goddamn operation going to get underway?”: Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup: The Struggle for Control of Iran (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), pp. 78–81, 107–108. The book is much more novel than fact, but the cited quotation has the ring of authenticity. Kim Roosevelt, born to wealth, schooled in muscular Christianity at Groton, cut his teeth on secret intelligence at the OSS station in Cairo. Donovan’s spies claimed a network of five hundred Arab agents by the war’s end, across the Middle East, in every nation except Saudi Arabia. After the war, Roosevelt returned to the Middle East, ostensibly working for the Saturday Evening Post and gathering material for his 1947 book, Arabs, Oil and History. When the call came to join Frank Wisner’s clandestine service, Kim heard it clearly. The legacy of big-stick diplomacy he inherited from his grandfather, the man who seized the Panama Canal and the Philippines, compelled him to become Wisner’s grand vizier of the nations of Islam in 1950. As chief of the Near East division, Kim spent eight years trying to cajole the leaders of Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia into pledges of American allegiance, using guns and money and promises of American support as inducements, and mounting the occasional coup when those means failed. He put young King Hussein of Jordan on the CIA’s payroll, and he dispatched a corps of General Reinhard Gehlen’s former storm troopers to train the secret service of the new Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

  The agency had a little experience in running Middle Eastern operations before Ajax. In the early 1950s. Miles Copeland, an Arabic-speaking smoothie from Alabama and the CIA’s first station chief in Damascus, worked closely with the American military attaché in Syria, Stephen J. Meade, on a plan to back an “army supported dictatorship,” to quote a December 1948 cable by Meade to the Pentagon. Their man was Colonel Husni Za’im, described by Copeland as an officer known for “his will of iron and brain to match.” Copeland encouraged the colonel to overthrow his president, who had blocked an Arabian-American Oil Company pipeline across Syria, and he promised that President Truman would grant him political recognition. Za’im toppled the government on March 30, 1949, pledged complete cooperation with the pipeline project, and, as Meade reported, threw “over 400 Commies” into prison. The iron-brained colonel lasted less than five months before he was overthrown and executed. Back to the drawing board, Copeland cheerfully conceded.

  The CIA’s 1953 coup in Iran could never have started without the British, and it likely would not have succeeded. British intelligence had a deep understanding of the underlying political intrigues of Iran, gleaned from their agents in the government, the bazaar, and the underworld. The British government had an immense economic motive. And their plot to do away with Mossadeq had a powerful political impetus. It was driven forward by Sir Winston Churchill himself.

  “unseat Mossadeq”: The longtime deputy director of intelligence Robert Amory recorded in his official diary for November 26, 1952, a discussion with the director concerning an “effort to unseat Mossadeq” and a subsequent lunch at which the main topic was Iran and the participants included Wisner, Ambassador Loy Henderson, and, though his name is deleted from the declassified record, doubtlessly Monty Woodhouse.

  “CIA makes policy by default”: Deputies’ meeting, August 10, 1953, CIA/ CREST.

  “consequences of Soviet take over”: Dulles briefing notes for NSC meeting, March 4, 1953, CIA/CREST.

  a $100 million loan: NSC meeting minutes, March 4, 1953, DDEL.

  They could not maintain that Mossadeq was a communist: Soviet intelligence reports in 1953 more concisely judged Mossadeq as “a bourgeois nationalist,” and no ally in Moscow’s eyes. Vladislav M. Zubok, “Soviet Intelligence and the Cold War: The ‘Small’ Committee of Information, 1952–53,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 19, Summer 1995, pp. 466–468.

  “rescued by the Americans”: Stutesman oral history, FOAH.

  “to liquidate the Mossadeq government”: “Radio Report on Coup Plotting,” July 7, 1953, National Security Archive, CIA/Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) release.

  Brigadier General Robert A. McClure: General McClure’s central role in the coup has gone unrecognized; the CIA’s official in-house history of the plot all but erases him. The agency deliberately downplayed his work, for the general was no great friend of the CIA. See Alfred H. Paddock, Jr., U.S. Army Special Warfare: Its Origins (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1982). I am grateful to Paddock for sharing the insights he derived from reading McClure’s personal papers. McClure’s “very fine relationships with the Shah” were mentioned in a note from Eisenhower to Army Secretary Robert Ten Broeck Stevens, April 2, 1954, Presidential Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, document 814.

  “The failure of the military coup”: CIA Office of Current Intelligence, “Comment on the Attempted Coup in Iran,” August 17, 1953, declassified November 16, 2006.

  “‘After you, Your Majesty’”: The dialogue is reproduced in the classified CIA history of the coup titled “Zindabad Shah!” (Victory to the Shah!)

  “an almost spontaneous revolution”: Rountree oral history, FAOH.

  One was the Ayatollah: It has been alleged that Ayatollah Kashani was in the pay of the CIA. Mark J. Gasiorowski, “The 1953 Coup D’Etat in Iran,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 19, 1987, pp. 268–269. But Reuel Marc Gerecht, who joined the CIA in 1985 as a member of the Iran desk of the clandestine service, wrote that Kashani was “beholden to no foreigner.” Gerecht read the CIA’s history of Operation Ajax, and he said the lesson in it was this: “One has to be generous to give American operatives in Iran much credit for restoring the Shah. Virtually every detail of their plan went awry. The principal American operatives at our embassy didn’t speak Persian. When Teheran started to boil and it was impossible to make contact with the usual English-and French-speaking Iranian sources, the CIA station went blind. The coup succeeded only because Iranians who were neither on the American or British payrolls nor under foreign c
ontrol seized the initiative to topple Prime Minister Mossadeq.” Reuel Marc Gerecht, “Blundering Through History with the C.I.A.,” The New York Times, April 23, 2000.

  “his old friend Bedell Smith”: Roosevelt’s recounting of this scene appears in chapter 9 of “Overthrow,” the official CIA history.

  “Romantic gossip about the ‘coup’ in Iran”: Ray S. Cline, Secrets, Spies, and Scholars: Blueprint of the Essential CIA (Washington, DC: Acropolis, 1976), p. 132. Note the quotation marks Cline placed around coup.

  “CIA’s greatest single triumph”: Killgore oral history, FAOH.

  Chapter Ten

  This chapter is based on the richest documentation of a CIA covert operation now available. In May 2003, the State Department published a supplemental volume of The Foreign Relations of the United States covering the role of the United States in the overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1954 (available online at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/ike/guat/), along with a chronological, collated collection of 5,120 redacted CIA documents on the covert operation made public that same day (available online at http://www.foia.cia.gov/guatemala.asp). The publication of these documents was the result of a twenty-year struggle, and it represented a high-water mark in CIA historiography.