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

by Tim Weiner

  A document discovered in 2003: The British document describing the joint CIA-SIS plot against Syria was discovered by Matthew Jones and detailed in his monograph “The ‘Preferred Plan’: The Anglo-American Working Group Report on Covert Action in Syria, 1957,” Intelligence and National Security, September 2004.

  “The officers with whom Stone was dealing”: Curtis F. Jones oral history, FAOH. “We were trying to overcome more than the Rocky Stone episode,” Jones said. “For example, we had financed arms purchases by Armenians who buried them in Syria”—until Syrian intelligence dug up the arms caches and broke up the underground battalion.

  “particularly clumsy CIA plot”: Charles Yost, History and Memory: A Statesman’s Perceptions of the Twentieth Century (New York: Norton, 1980), pp. 236–237.

  “some soul-searching” and “pulling the strings”: Deputies’ meeting, May 14, 1958, CIA/CREST.

  “caught completely by surprise”: Gordon oral history, FAOH.

  “the most dangerous place in the world”: NSC minutes, May 13, 1958, DDEL.

  “We have no evidence that Qasim is a communist”: CIA briefing to NSC, January 15, 1959, CIA/CREST.

  “The only effective and organized force in Iraq”: Deputies’ meeting, May 14, 1959, CIA/CREST.

  another failed assassination plot: In 1960, Critchfield proposed the poisoned handkerchief. Helms endorsed it. So did Bissell. Dulles approved. All believed they were carrying out the wishes of the president of the United States.

  “We came to power on a CIA train”: Sa’adi quoted in Said Aburish, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite (New York: St. Martin’s, 2001). Aburish was a committed Ba’athist who broke with Saddam and chronicled the brutality of his regime. He gave an instructive interview to Frontline, published on the Web site of the PBS documentary series(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saddam/interviews/ aburish.html). “The U.S. involvement in the coup against Kassem in Iraqin 1963 was substantial,” he said. “There is evidence that CIA agents were in touch with army officers who were involved in the coup. There is evidence that an electronic command center was set up in Kuwait to guide the forces who were fighting Kassem. There is evidence that they supplied the conspirators with lists of people who had to be eliminated immediately in order to ensure success. The relationship between the Americans and the Ba’ath Party at that moment in time was very close indeed. And that continued for some time after the coup. And there was an exchange of information between the two sides. For example it is one of the first times that the United States was able to get certain models of MiG fighters and certain tanks made in the Soviet Union. That was the bribe. That was what the Ba’ath had to offer the United States in return for their help in eliminating Kassem.” James Critchfield, who orchestrated the operation as the Near East chief of the clandestine service, said to the Associated Press shortly before he died in April 2003: “You have to understand the context of the time and the scope of the threat we were facing. That’s what I say to people who say, ‘You guys in the CIA created Saddam Hussein.’”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “measures by this Government that would cause the fall of the new regime in Indonesia”: NSC minutes, September 9, 1953, DDEL.

  “a tremendous hold on the people; is completely noncommunist”: “Meeting with the Vice President, Friday, 8 January, 1954,” CIA/DDRS.

  “There was planning of such a possibility”: Bissell testimony, President’s Commission on CIA Activities (Rockefeller Commission), April 21, 1975, Top Secret, declassified 1995, GRFL.

  “all feasible covert means”: NSC 5518, declassified 2003, DDEL.

  “a number of political figures”: Bissell oral history, DDEL.

  “God, we had fun”: Ulmer interview with author.

  fire-breathing cables: CIA report summaries, “NSC Briefing: Indonesia,” February 27 and 28, March 5 and March 14, and April 3 and 10, 1957; CIA deputies’ meeting, March 4, 1957; CIA estimate, “The Situation in Indonesia,” March 5, 1957.

  “Sumatrans prepared to fight”: “NSC Briefing: Indonesia,” April 17, 1957; CIA chronology, “Indonesian Operation,” March 15, 1958, declassified January 9, 2002. All CIA/CREST.

  “attempt to find out State Department policy on Indonesia”: Director’s meeting, July 19, 1957, CIA/CREST.

  “subversion by ballot”: F. M. Dearborn to White House, “Some Notes on Far East Trip,” November 1957, declassified August 10, 2003, DDEL. Dearborn personally reported on his trip in a face-to-face meeting with Eisenhower on November 16, according to the president’s diary. CIA, “Special Report on Indonesia,” September 13, 1957, declassified September 9, 2003, DDEL. “Indonesian Operation,” March 5, 1958, CIA/CREST.

  Al Ulmer believed: Ulmer and Sichel interviews with author. In the summer of 1957, Ulmer sent out a call to clandestine service officers to monitor Sukarno during his annual jaunt on a chartered Pan Am jet to Asia’s most exclusive bordellos. The fruits of his mission were limited to a sample of Sukarno’s stool for medical analysis, obtained by the chief of the Hong Kong station, Peter Sichel, with the help of a patriotic Pan Am crew in the CIA’s pay. In the absence of knowledge, all evidence was germane.

  “beyond the point of no return”: NSC minutes, August 1, 1957, DDEL.

  “utmost gravity”: Deputies’ meeting, August 2, 1957, CIA/CREST.

  “the dismemberment of Indonesia”: Cumming Committee, “Special Report on Indonesia,” September 13, 1957, declassified July 9, 2003, DDEL. At this time, Ambassador Allison accepted a summons to come over to the presidential palace for an informal chat. Sukarno wanted Eisenhower to come to Indonesia, to see the country for himself, to be the very first head of state to visit the lovely new guest house he was building on Bali. When the cold rejection from Washington arrived two weeks later, Allison handed it over with a shudder: “I literally saw Sukarno’s jaw drop as he read President Eisenhower’s letter. He couldn’t believe it.” Allison’s views and quotations cited in this chapter are in John M. Allison, Ambassador from the Prairie, or Allison Wonderland (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), pp. 307–339.

  Eisenhower ordered the agency: The language of the order is printed in the CIA’s chronology, “Indonesian Operation,” March 15, 1958, CIA/CREST.

  Wisner flew to the CIA station in Singapore: CIA records show two trips to the region in the fall of 1957 and the spring of 1958. Wisner sought to make sure that the State Department knew as little as possible about his covert-action plans. The minutes of the director’s meeting on December 26, 1957, say that he had meetings scheduled with State Department officials set for December 30 “concerning the Indonesian situation. Mr. Wisner expressed the hope that these discussions could be fairly well limited to policy matters rather than permitted to slice over into operational matters.”

  The CIA’s Jakarta station: “Indonesian Operation,” March 15, 1958, CIA/CREST. The paramilitary operation is detailed in Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison, Feet to the Fire: CIA Covert Operations in Indonesia, 1957–1958 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999), pp. 50–98. The background of the political-warfare programs is in Audrey R. Kahin and George M. T. Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995).

  “sons of Eisenhower”: Office of U.S. Army attaché, Jakarta, to State, May 25, 1958, cited in Kahin and Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy, p. 178. The CIA asked the Pentagon to help find more English-speaking Indonesian Army officers who wanted to seize power with the CIA’s assistance. Memo to Allen W. Dulles from Major General Robert A. Schow, the army’s intelligence chief, February 5, 1958.

  The responses should have given the Americans some pause. General Nasution, the professional military officer who led the Indonesian Army and stayed loyal to the government, assured the U.S. Army attaché in Jakarta, Major George Benson, that he already was purging every suspected communist from any position of influence. Lieutenant Colonel D. I. Pandjaitan, an Indonesian m
ilitary attaché based in Bonn—and a Christian, his American counterparts noted—proclaimed: “If the U.S. knows of any Communists, let them tell us, and we will have them removed…. We will do anything except shoot Sukarno or attack the Communists without proof of illegal actions on their part. In our country now we cannot arrest Communists just because they are Communists; we will remove them”—and here the colonel stabbed at the air as if holding a knife—“if they step out of line.” Memorandum of conversation with Indonesian army officers, date unclear but probably early 1958, declassified April 4, 2003, CIA/CREST.

  Foster said he was “in favor of doing something”: JFD telephone call transcripts, DDEL.

  “the United States faced very difficult problems”: NSC minutes, February 27, 1958, DDEL.

  “It was a very strange war”: NSC minutes, April 25, 1958, DDEL.

  “any operations partaking of a military character in Indonesia”: NSC minutes, April 14, 1958, DDEL. John Foster Dulles, memorandum of conversation with the president, April 15, 1958, DDEL.

  “I enjoyed killing Communists”: Pope interview with author.

  “almost too effective”: NSC minutes, May 1, 1958, DDEL.

  “stirred great anger”: NSC minutes, May 4, 1958, DDEL.

  “it could not be conducted as a completely covert operation”: “Indonesian Operation,” March 15, 1958, CIA/CREST. Incredibly, Allen Dulles pleaded poverty as the reason for the failed mission. The CIA needed at least $50 million more in its covert action budget, he told Eisenhower: “We were quite thin in our resources to meet situations such as that in Indonesia.” 152 “They convicted me of murder”: Pope interview with author. Sukarno waited two years before putting Pope on trial. The CIA pilot was held at a summer resort on the slopes of Mount Merapi, where his guards took him hunting and gave him every chance to escape. He calculated this as a plot, a way for the government to turn a strapping blond, blue-eyed American prisoner over to the Communist Party of Indonesia. After four years and two months of captivity, he was set free in July 1962 at the personal request of the attorney general of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy. He went back to flying for the CIA in Vietnam for the rest of the 1960s. In February 2005, at age seventy-six, Al Pope was awarded the Legion of Honor by the government of France for his role in the resupply of besieged French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

  “glaring mix-up”: Director’s meeting, May 19, 1958, CIA/CREST.

  favorable to the United States: “NSC Briefing: Indonesia,” May 21, 1958, declassified January 15, 2004, CIA/CREST.

  “The operation was, of course, a complete failure”: Bissell oral history, DDEL.

  “Dissident B-26 aircraft shot down”: “NSC Briefing: Indonesia,” May 21, 1958, CIA/CREST.

  He came back from the Far East in June 1958 at the edge of his sanity, and at summer’s end he went mad: But Wisner had been demonstrably unsound since late 1956, and so had the clandestine service. Paul Nitze, a good friend who had worked closely with Wisner as Kennan’s successor at the State Department, observed that “the upshot of the strains of that Hungarian episode and the Suez episode were more than Frank could bear and he had a nervous breakdown after that. I think that the difficulties[at the clandestine service] began after Frank had a nervous breakdown…. They began after Frank was no longer competent to run it.” Nitze oral history, HSTL. Wisner suffered through “a very hard time” during his treatment, Dulles wrote to his old deputy director, Bill Jackson, in December 1958. “I hope it will not now be many weeks before he is out of the sanitarium.” Allen Dulles papers, declassified February 13, 2001, CIA. At the time, electroshock was “used for a variety of disorders, frequently in high doses and for long periods…. Many of these efforts proved ineffective, and some even harmful.” See “Report of the National Institute of Mental Health Consensus Development Conference on Electroconvulsive Therapy,” Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 254, 1985, pp. 2103–2108.

  “at a loss”: Director’s meeting, June 23, 1958, CIA/CREST.

  “We had constructed”: Smith cited in Douglas Garthoff, “Analyzing Soviet Politics and Foreign Policy,” in Gerald K. Haines and Robert E. Leggett(eds.), Watching the Bear: Essays on CIA’s Analysis of the Soviet Union CIA/CSI, 2003.

  a report from his intelligence board: “Subject: Third Report of the President by the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities” and memorandum of conference with the president [by the board], December 16, 1958, CIA/DDEL. At this meeting with the president, former defense secretary Robert Lovett “reinforced the views of the Board that the present organization is weak by citing the example of Indonesia,” read the top secret minutes of the meeting. “Mr. Lovett pointed out by way of general summary that we have two basic ways of obtaining reliable information, through gadgets and through individual secret agents. It is in this latter field, the secret agents, that he feels we will obtain our best information…. We are not good in this field and we should get better.”

  “our problems were getting greater every year”: Dulles, minutes of senior staff meeting, January 12, 1959, CIA/CREST.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Richard Bissell became the chief: Bissell’s ambitions for the CIA were great; the obstacles against them were greater. He told his senior officers that his mandate was to merge the “Hot War plans and Cold War capabilities” of the United States—to make the CIA more sword than shield in the battle against the Soviets. He created a new division, Development Projects, that allowed him to run covert action programs out of his hip pocket. He saw the CIA as an instrument of American power no less potent—and much more useful—than the nuclear arsenal or the 101st Airborne Division. “Mr. Bissell’s Remarks, War Planners Conference,” March 16, 1959, declassified January 7, 2002, CIA/CREST.

  Bissell knew the agency was dangerously short on the talent needed to achieve his goals. His own “sheer brilliance,” said one of his top assistants, Jim Flannery, “could not overcome the fact that the clandestine service is basically people.” Flannery quoted in Peter Wyden, Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), p. 320.

  Bissell immediately ordered his division chiefs to “identify substandard employees and dispose of them.” He wanted an “unrelenting and constant” culling of the herd. “Look beyond the case of inefficiency or wrongdoing,” he instructed his underlings. “Identify and terminate those employees who are not carrying, can not, or will not carry their fair share of the work.” Richard Bissell, “Subject: Program for Greater Efficiency in CIA,” February 2, 1959, declassified February 12, 2002, CIA/CREST.

  A detailed internal survey of the CIA’s clandestine service in November 1959 showed the source of Bissell’s concerns: the recruitment of talented young officers had dwindled while the ranks of the mediocre and middle-aged swelled. “A very considerable percentage” of the CIA’s officers soon would be at least fifty years old; they were the World War II generation, and in three short years they would start retiring en masse after twenty years of military and intelligence service. “There is a strongfeeling of frustration widespread among the best Clandestine Service officers which has its origin in the Agency’s apparent inability to solve the manpower problem,” the internal CIA study showed. That problem remains unsolved today. “Subject: A Manpower Control Problem for the Clandestine Services Career Program,” November 4, 1959, declassified August 1, 2001, CIA/CREST.

  A secret CIA history: Unless otherwise noted, quotations and citations on the CIA and Cuba in this chapter are taken from the CIA’s clandestine history of the planning on the Bay of Pigs operation: Jack Pfeiffer, Evolution of CIA’s Anti-Castro Policies, 1951–January 1961, Vol. 3 of Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation, CIA, NARA (hereinafter cited as Pfeiffer).

  Pfeiffer was named the CIA’s chief historian in 1976; he retired in 1984 and spent a decade thereafter unsuccessfully suing the CIA to release this work. His three-hundred-page history turned up in the National Archives in June 2005, uneart
hed by Professor David Barrett of Villanova University.

  Jim Noel: Noel quoted in Pfeiffer. Ambassador William Attwood, who served as President Kennedy’s personal back channel to Castro in the summer of 1963, remembered: “I was in Cuba, in ’59, and I met CIA people there whose main sources were members of the Havana country club…. They didn’t get out among the people.” Attwood oral history, FAOH.

  Al Cox: Cox quoted in Pfeiffer.

  Robert Reynolds: Reynolds made the remark to the author and several other reporters attending a conference on the Bay of Pigs in Havana in 2001.

  “a new spiritual leader”: Quoted in Pfeiffer.

  “Though our intelligence experts backed and filled”: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Waging Peace: The White House Years: 1956–1961 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), p. 524.

  “the elimination of Fidel Castro”: Authorship of the memo may be credited to J. C. King, then finishing his ninth year as chief of the Western Hemisphere division. The editing by Dulles is in Pfeiffer.

  “anybody with eyes could see”: Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Jake Esterline in this book are from videotaped interviews with Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive or from Esterline’s remarks at transcripts of conferences on the Bay of Pigs conducted at the Musgrove Plantation in Georgia in 1996. The Musgrove conference is in James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh (eds.), Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).

  “The Dripping Cuban”: Helms and the dripping Cuban are in Pfeiffer. “Helms completely divorced himself from this thing. I mean absolutely!” Dick Drain, chief of operations for the Cuba task force, recounted. “The third time that he said, ‘You know I have nothing to do with this project,’ I said, ‘Well, Mr. Helms, I don’t want to be fatuous about this, but I wish to Christ that you did because we could use your expertise.’ He said, ‘Hahaha…yes…well, thank you very much,’ and that was the end of that. He avoided the thing like the plague.”