by Tim Weiner
Unless otherwise noted, the quotations in this chapter are taken verbatim from these primary documents and from the CIA’s own internal history of the coup, written by Nicolas Cullather, published in redacted form as Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
The role of William Pawley at the crucial hour of the coup was revealed by the historian Max Holland in “Private Sources of U.S. Foreign Policy: William Pawley and the 1954 Coup d’État in Guatemala,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2005, pp. 46–73. Holland uncovered Pawley’s unpublished memoirs at the George C. Marshall Library in Lexington, Virginia.
The memoirs of the key players include Dwight Eisenhower, The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953–1956 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963); Richard Bissell, Jr., with Jonathan E. Lewis and Frances T. Pudlo, Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); and David Atlee Phillips, The Night Watch: 25 Years of Peculiar Service (New York: Atheneum, 1977). Phillips gives the players cover names, but the declassified documents make that cover transparent.
The Guatemalan operation began under General Walter Bedell Smith. On January 24, 1952, Allen Dulles told a State Department official overseeing Latin America that the “CIA was giving consideration to the possibility to rendering assistance to a group headed by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas plotting the overthrow of the Government of Guatemala.” Castillo Armas sought the help from Latin America’s most powerful dictators—Nicaragua’s Somoza, the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo, Cuba’s Batista—as his proposal gradually filtered up to the CIA’s chiefs. In the spring and summer of 1952, Bedell Smith and Undersecretary of State David Bruce repeatedly discussed plans for a CIA-backed coup. The operation was code-named Fortune and the job was handed to J. C. King, the chief of the CIA’s newly formed Western Hemisphere Division.
King devised a plan to ship weapons and $225,000 to Castillo Armas and his allies. In October 1952, he packed up 380 pistols, 250 rifles, 64 machine guns, and 4,500 hand grenades, all labeled as farm machinery, and he was set to ship them south from New Orleans. But the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza and his son Tacho had talked freely about the plot. Word filtered back to Washington that its cover was blown, and David Bruce called the whole thing off. But behind the State Department’s back, with Bedell Smith’s approval, King requisitioned an aging navy transport to carry the weapons to Nicaragua and Honduras. On its first trip, the ship was spied by several hundred curious Nicaraguans as it sought to land on a supposedly deserted island; on its second voyage, its engines conked out and the navy had to send a destroyer to rescue the crew and cargo.
A trickle of CIA aid reached Castillo Armas nonetheless, and in March 1953 he and most of his followers, about two hundred strong, tried to seize a remote Guatemalan army garrison. They were crushed, and while Castillo Armas escaped to Honduras, his movement was badly wounded. Operation Fortune had failed.
When it was revived as Operation Success, Bedell Smith played his role as undersecretary of state to the fullest. The American ambassadors in Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua reported to the CIA through Bedell Smith. All shared the sense that “Communism is directed by the Kremlin all over the world, and anybody who thinks differently doesn’t know what he is talking about,” as Ambassador Peurifoy said. But the Kremlin thought little about Latin America in the days before Fidel Castro came to power. It had all but ceded the terrain to the United States, the dominant force in the hemisphere since the nineteenth century. Had the CIA infiltrated Guatemala’s small but influential communist party, it would have known that the Guatemalans were not in touch with the Soviets.
The agency nevertheless saw Guatemala’s President Arbenz as a Red puppet marching to music from Moscow. He had instituted the most ambitious and successful program of land reform in all of Latin America, taking fallow fields from corporations such as United Fruit and deeding them to hundreds of thousands of peasants. United Fruit felt threatened, and the CIA knew it; the company had tremendous political power in Washington and made its anger known at the highest levels of the government. But the CIA was not fighting for bananas. It saw Guatemala as a Soviet beachhead in the West and a direct threat to the United States. It also saw United Fruit and its lobbyists as an irritating impediment; it tried to shove them out of the picture as the operation gained steam.
the classic CIA résumé of the 1950s—Groton, Yale, Harvard Law: Perhaps too much has been made of the influence brought to bear at the CIA by the school of muscular Christianity practiced at Groton. But Operation Ajax in Iran was led by Kermit Roosevelt, class of 1936, with help from his cousin Archie Roosevelt, class of 1934. The planning and execution of Operation Success was led by Tracy Barnes, class of 1932, and Richard Bissell, class of 1931. Bissell, Barnes, and John Bross, the senior prefect of the class of 1932, led the charge at the Bay of Pigs. And the toxins that the CIA aimed to use to kill Fidel Castro were prepared in an agency lab run by Cornelius Roosevelt, class of 1934.
“Barnes proved unable”: Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 175–177.
“Dulles’s apprentice”: Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior, pp. 84–91.
“What we wanted to do was to have a terror campaign”: E. Howard Hunt interview for the CNN Cold War series, 1998, National Security Archive transcript available online at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/ interviews/episode-18/hunt1.html.
“we were all at our wit’s end”: Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior, pp. 84–91.
“we really didn’t think it was much of a success”: Esterline oral history in James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh (eds.), Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), p. 40.
Chapter Eleven
“Secrecy now beclouds”: Congressional Record 2811–14 (1954).
“CIA success stories”: Deputies’ meeting, February 29, 1956, CIA/CREST.
“risky or even unwise”: Dulles, “Notes for Briefing of Appropriations Committee: Clandestine Services,” March 11, 1954, CIA/CREST. Such candor before Congress was exceedingly rare. John Warner, one of Allen Dulles’s in-house lawyers at the CIA, recalled a far more typical encounter between Dulles and the House Appropriations Committee chairman, Clarence Cannon of Missouri. Cannon was close to eighty years old at the time: “Cannon greets Dulles; ‘Oh, it’s good to see you again, Mr. Secretary.’ He thinks it’s Foster Dulles…. They swap stories for two hours. And at the end—‘Well, Mr. Secretary, have you got enough money in your budget for this year, the coming year?’—‘Well, I think we are all right, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much.’ That was the budget hearing.”
“the CIA had unwittingly hired”: Roy Cohn, McCarthy (New York: New American Library, 1968), p. 49.
“CIA was neither sacrosanct”: Transcript of telephone conversation between Allen and Foster Dulles, cited in David M. Barrett, The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005), p. 184.
a down-and-dirty covert operation: The declassified CIA history outlining the CIA’s work against McCarthy is Mark Stout, “The Pond: Running Agents for State, War, and the CIA,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 48, No. 3, 2004, CIA/CSI. The congressional testimony came from William J. Morgan, a Yale-trained psychologist and OSS veteran who had been the CIA’s deputy chief of training, in a March 4, 1954, hearing before the McCarthy committee titled “Alleged Threats Against the Chairman.” The transcript was unsealed in January 2003. Morgan, who was detailed to Walter Bedell Smith’s Operations Coordinating Board, testified that his superior, a CIA officer named Horace Craig, suggested that “the best thing to do was penetrate the McCarthy organization.” Failing that, Craig speculated, more severe measures might be taken: No other known evidence corroborates the charge that the CIA was thinking abou
t killing McCarthy. The senator drank himself to death in good time.
Senator Charles E. Potter (R., Ill.): He stated in essence that this man should be liquidated, referring to Senator McCarthy?
Dr. Morgan: It may be necessary.
Senator Potter: And that there are madmen—
Dr. Morgan: For a price willing to do the thing.
A congressional task force led by Eisenhower’s trusted colleague General Mark Clark: Clark’s secret report, declassified in 2005, called the CIA “virtually a law unto itself,” its conduct “unique and in many ways strange to our democratic form of government.” See Michael Warner and J. Kenneth McDonald, “US Intelligence Community Reform Studies Since 1947,” 2005, CIA/CSI.
an extraordinary six-page letter: Kellis to Eisenhower, May 24, 1954, DDEL. 108 Doolittle went to see the president: President’s meeting with Doolittle Committee, October 19, 1954, DDEL. The notes from this meeting, hastily taken, convey the awkwardness of a bearer of bad news.
The Doolittle report: Special Study Group, “Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency,” September 30, 1954, declassified August 20, 2001, CIA/CREST.
“sensitive and/or delicate operations”: Director’s meeting, October 24, 1954, CIA/CREST. The problem of uncontrolled secret operations persisted in the Dulles years. The director had determined that he could decide whether his superiors needed to know what he was up to. Some of his underlings felt the same way about him and his top aides. A senior CIA officer, John Whitten, gave secret Senate testimony in 1978 stating that “there were a number of operations in the clandestine services that neither the DDO nor the ADDO knew” in the 1950s and early 1960s. The DDO was the deputy director for operations—the chief of the clandestine service—and the ADDO his top assistant. Deposition of John Whitten, Assassination Transcripts of the Church Committee, May 16, 1978, pp. 127–128. Whitten testified under the alias “John Scelso” his true identity was declassified by the CIA in October 2002.
not even Wisner: At a deputies’ meeting on November 8, 1954, Wisner asked Dulles if he would be allowed to read the Doolittle report. Dulles refused the request. He allowed Wisner to see a brief version of the report’s recommendations, but not the devastating critique itself.
Dulles was desperate: John Maury and Edward Ellis Smith interviews, R. Harris Smith papers, Hoover Institute, Stanford University.
“Let’s not have another Pearl Harbor”: NSC minutes, March 3, 1955, DDEL.
A secret CIA history of the Berlin tunnel: “Clandestine Services History: The Berlin Tunnel Operation, 1952–1956,” CIA, August 25, 1967, declassified February 15, 2007.
glimmer of warning that Moscow intended to go to war: The CIA officers who had started out at the Berlin base under Richard Helms still saw the city and the techniques they had learned there as the best windows into Moscow. Helms and his men thought that the big CIA stations in Germany and Austria and Greece should carefully and patiently establish resident agents inside Eastern Europe. These networks of trusted foreigners would recruit other like-minded spies, coming closer and closer to the seats of power, each creating sources of information that, when analyzed and sifted, would become intelligence for the president. That was the way to know your enemy, they believed, and by the mid-1950s they were starting to think that they might be starting to see a picture emerging out of the darkness.
The CIA found its first real Russian spy as the Berlin Tunnel project got under way. The Vienna station was in contact with Major Pyotr Popov, an actual Soviet military intelligence man, the first Russian spy of lasting value that the CIA ever had. He knew a thing or two about tanks and tactical missiles and Russian military doctrine, and over the course of five years he betrayed the identities of some 650 of his fellow officers. Frank Wisner, inevitably, had wanted to turn Popov into the leader of an underground network of resistance fighters. The espionage side of the house fought hard and this time wore Wisner down; the bitterness over this fight lingered for years. Popov was not a perfect spy; he drank like a fish, forgot things, and ran terrible risks. But for five years, he was unique. The CIA would claim with conviction that Popov saved the United States half a billion dollars in military research and development. He cost the CIA about $4,000 a year. The British mole George Blake, betrayer of the Berlin tunnel, exposed Popov too. The major died before a KGB firing squad in 1959.
“Those of us who knew”: Polgar interview with author.
“We obtain little significant information”: Technological Capabilities Panel, “Report to the President,” February 14, 1955, DDEL.
“one of these machines is going to be caught”: James R. Killian, Sputnik, Scientists and Eisenhower: A Memoir of the First Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), pp. 70–71.
“the last refuge of organizational privacy”: Bissell, “Subject: Congressional Watchdog Committee on CIA,” February 9, 1959, declassified January 29, 2003, CIA/CREST.
Bissell saw the U-2: Bissell’s thoughts about the U-2 are in his memoir, Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 92–140. Reber’s observation that “we didn’t raise the right questions” is on p. 105. Helms knew the U-2 was no silver bullet. He once told a meeting of clandestine service officers in the days when Bissell’s star was at its zenith that “a good reporter does not need a magical black box to get useful information…. As long as there has been an airplane, pictures have been taken from it. CIA needs to use every collection device it can…. But in the final analysis, the only way you can get at what a man thinks is to talk to him.”
A five-volume CIA history: Wayne G. Jackson, Allen Welsh Dulles as Director of Central Intelligence, declassified 1994, Vol. 3, 1973, pp. 71ff., CIA.
“There are some things he doesn’t tell the President”: Eleanor Dulles’s remark is recorded in Ambassador William B. Macomber, Jr., oral history, FAOH. Macomber was assistant secretary of state for congressional relations under Eisenhower.
Chapter Twelve
The relationship between the CIA and the leaders of Japan in the 1950s was detailed in the author’s interviews with Al Ulmer, CIA’s Far East division chief from 1955 to 1958; Clyde McAvoy, Kishi’s CIA case officer in the mid-1950s; Horace Feldman, a former CIA station chief in Tokyo; Roger Hilsman and U. Alexis Johnson, senior State Department officials under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson; Jim Lilley and Don Gregg, formerly CIA station chiefs and U.S. ambassadors in Beijing and Seoul, respectively; and Douglas MacArthur II, the U.S. ambassador in Tokyo under Eisenhower.
The relationship was first limned in the author’s New York Times article, “CIA Supported Japanese Right in ’50s and ’60s,” October 9, 1994. That article had its origins in a struggle then ongoing between the CIA and the State Department over the release of a volume of The Foreign Relations of the United States covering Japan in the 1960s. Twelve years later, in July 2006, the State Department belatedly acknowledged that “the U.S. Government approved four covert programs to try to influence the direction of Japanese political life.” The statement described three of the four programs. It said that the Eisenhower administration authorized the CIA before the May 1958 elections for the Japanese House of Representatives to provide “a few key pro-American and conservative politicians” with money. It said the Eisenhower administration also authorized the CIA “to institute a covert program to try to split off the moderate wing of the leftist opposition in the hope that a more pro-American and ‘responsible’ opposition party would emerge.” In addition, “a broader covert program, divided almost equally between propaganda and social action,” sought to encourage the Japanese people to embrace the ruling party and reject the influence of the left. The deep relationship with the rising politician and future prime minister Kishi was not acknowledged. FRUS, 1964–1968, Vol. XXIX, Part 2.
After Japan fell, the American occupation led by General MacArthur purged and imprisoned right-wing militarists s
uch as Kishi and his allies. But things changed after George Kennan was sent to Japan in 1948 by Secretary of State Marshall to try to persuade MacArthur to change his views. An example of MacArthur’s policies could be seen on the docks of Osaka, where dismantled machinery from Japanese industries was being greased, crated, and shipped at great expense to China as part of a war reparations program. Americans were paying to take Japan apart and support China at the moment it was being overrun by the communists. Kennan argued that the United States should move as fast as possible from the reformation of Japan toward its economic recovery. This about-face required an end to MacArthur’s purges. It meant that accused war criminals such as Kishi and Kodama would be released. It led to their recruitment by the CIA and the eventual restoration of powerful leaders, business cartels, internal security forces, and political parties.
“The U.S. should do what it can to encourage effective conservative leadership in Japan,” said the Operations Coordinating Board, in a report to the White House dated October 28, 1954, and declassified fifty years later. If the conservatives were united, they could work together to control Japan’s political life, the board said, and “to take legal measures against Communists, and to combat the neutralist, anti-American tendencies of many of the individuals in Japan’s educated groups.” This is precisely what the CIA did from 1954 onward.
The CIA provided $2.8 million in financing: Japanese conservatives needed money. The American military needed tungsten. “Somebody had the idea: Let’s kill two birds with one stone,” said John Howley, a New York lawyer and OSS veteran who helped arrange the transaction. The Kodama-CIA operation smuggled tons of tungsten out from Japanese military caches into the United States and sold it to the Pentagon for $10 million. The smugglers included Kay Sugahara, a Japanese American recruited by the OSS from an internment camp in California during World War II. His files, researched by Howard Schonberger, a University of Maine professor writing a book nearly completed at his death in 1991, described the operation in detail. The proceeds were pumped into the campaigns of conservatives during Japan’s first post-occupation elections in 1953. Howley said: “We had learned in O.S.S., to accomplish a purpose, you had to put the right money in the right hands.”