by Gerard Colby
In the Oval Office, he found Harry Truman serenely disposed to the news. Truman intended to incorporate the Economic Cooperative Administration into the proposed Mutual Security Agency, and, perhaps to deemphasize its military edge, would appoint Averell Harriman its chief. Harriman, after all, was a Democrat. Why don’t you become one, too? he asked Nelson. Nelson refused.
The presidential elections were only a year away, and the Democrats were in trouble. Nelson’s Uncle Winthrop and his father were behind Dwight D. Eisenhower’s preparations to run. The popular general’s election would allow Nelson to return to Washington in proper style and really shake things up—to do what he wanted. He could perhaps even move the ranks of the Republican party into the modern era associated with his family’s endeavors.
It would be his biggest mistake.
FOLLOWING THE GENERAL
The Rockefellers were not prepared to be forced out of the party of their forebears by ultra-rightists. The GOP was still the party of the Eastern Establishment, and the Rockefellers were now that Establishment’s First Family.
Chase National Bank’s pioneering of American banking in postwar Germany and Standard Oil’s control over much of the Middle East’s oil had placed the Rockefellers at the financial and industrial nexus of European reconstruction. Their dominance over trans-Atlantic finance—with all that was implied in an Atlanticist-based foreign policy in Washington—was unassailable. Few financiers would miss the meaning of John J. McCloy’s transfer from Germany as U.S. military governor and high commissioner to New York as chairman of Chase National Bank. And no one doubted that it was a promotion.
This deepening Rockefeller involvement in the fate of Europe, not the Third World, led to Nelson Rockefeller’s return to Washington under Eisenhower. It was Latin America, however, that would return him to power.
By October 1951, all eyes of the Republican Eastern Establishment had settled on Eisenhower as the candidate. Eisenhower’s loyalty to corporate prerogatives on gaining foreign markets and resources was in no doubt, and all hoped that he would take up the banner of internationalism for a wider NATO alliance that would include Turkey and Greece and a rearmed Germany. They saw in the general someone with enough prestige to override Taft’s fiscal conservatism and his constitutionalist apprehensions about presidential usurpation of Congress’s power to declare war.*
The Rockefellers in particular hoped the war hero could arrest the deterioration of the more moderate central faction of the Republican party. They wanted Eisenhower to rescue the party from the extreme nationalism espoused by General Douglas MacArthur and Wisconsin’s junior senator, Joseph R. McCarthy.
By mid-1951, McCarthy’s witch-hunt had consumed the careers of leftists and liberals who were never to Rockefeller’s liking. But now his fires were spreading out of control, lapping at the doors of the very institutions that were the bedrock of the Rockefeller political empire, including the Rockefeller-financed Institute of Pacific Relations and the Rockefeller-funded Walter Hines Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University.
To steady Washington’s keel as the ship of state carried the American people through the McCarthyite storm would take a captain of unimpeachable reputation, yet one who was responsive to higher direction. Nelson’s uncle, Winthrop Aldrich, led the way in recruiting Eisenhower as the Republican candidate.
Nelson, however, was kept in the background during the campaign. His penchant for attracting media attention would have tarnished Eisenhower’s name with conservative Republicans. He displayed self-discipline by confining his help to backstage. He set up a team of economists to work on position papers for the campaign and found Eisenhower’s principal speech writers. To cap it all off, Nelson joined his family in quietly slipping Eisenhower his largest campaign donation: $94,000.8
As the campaign rolled toward its landslide victory, Nelson was preoccupied with the Cold War. He grappled with how best to fight the holy crusade, exploring everything from the details of reorganizing Washington’s bureaucracies, to the broader philosophical questions involved in constructing a popular argument that would link the cause of democracy and freedom with the ideology of capitalism. His ideas were not new, but they would make a deep impact on the lives of millions of people in the United States, as well as in the Third World.
THE COLD WAR’S NEW FRONTIERS
The “Shining Dream” of the Amazon returned. IBEC’s John Camp wrote to Nelson from Venezuela, recommending that the new Republican administration open up South America’s interior.
I would propose a vast land development scheme for a belt of undeveloped area, extending from Venezuela through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina; mostly on the east side of the Andes in the headwaters of the Orinoco, Amazon and Paraguay-Paraná Rivers. This is the largest undeveloped land area available for settlement remaining in the Western World.
Probably the first big need is a principal railroad and highway from Venezuela to Argentina through the heart of this area.9
Camp proposed what ultimately became the Trans-Amazonian Highway.
The death knell for the Amazonian Indian had just tolled.
The development of capitalism in the Third World was not moving rapidly enough to meet popular demands for land reform and industry. The settlement of Amazonia was an intriguing alternative to rupturing alliances with Latin American regimes by insisting that these regimes redistribute land—the very source of their monopoly on economic and political power.
Nowhere was the danger of this latter course more evident than in Guatemala, where a revolution was getting out of hand, and in the Philippines, where one had almost done so.
In Guatemala, the elected government of agrarian reformer President Jacobo Arbenz had embarked on a program of land redistribution that included expropriating uncultivated land. The largest owner of uncultivated land in Guatemala was Boston’s United Fruit Company, a firm with ties to the inner circle of Eisenhower’s campaign. United Fruit’s continued success was vital to a host of Rockefeller’s friends in business and government.10
In October 1952, these forces coalesced in a Council on Foreign Relations study group on “Political Unrest in Latin America.” Several people voiced their opinions, but as usual Adolf Berle had the last word. Let’s characterize the Arbenz government as not merely communist, Berle suggested, but as “a Russian-controlled dictatorship.” It followed—somehow—that an elected government that displeased American corporate interests like United Fruit was actually “a clear-cut intervention by a foreign power, in this case, the Soviet Union.”
That fork taken, Berle raced down a well-trod path: “It seemed to me that there was perfectly good ground for the United States to invoke the Act of Chapultepec and the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro, pledging all hands to defend against domination from without the hemisphere.… Certainly the Council on Foreign Relations the other night agreed generally that the Guatemalan government was communist.”
The next step required no conspiracy. It was as natural as breathing.
“I am arranging to see Nelson Rockefeller. He knows the situation and can work a little with General Eisenhower on it.”11
Shortly after Eisenhower’s election, Berle also brought the machinations in Guatemala to the attention of Deputy CIA Director Allen Dulles and another old friend of Nelson’s, J. C. King.
He was now Colonel King, having won promotion through sensitive intelligence work in Argentina, one of Latin America’s most volatile posts during King’s tenure there as a military attaché. Nazi scientists and Gestapo officers were being recruited by the U.S. Army Command in Germany for work against local communists; many of these men were then allowed to pass through the “rat pipeline” with Vatican passports from Italy and Spain to Argentina, where King, who had gained access to seized records12 on secret German holdings in Argentina and other Latin American countries, was monitoring the corporate investments of the fugitives. At least a dozen of these Nazi fugitives remained
CIA assets in countries like Bolivia and Chile.
The success of King’s operations in Argentina was evident by his meteoric rise to the equivalent rank of a lieutenant general as the CIA’s first Chief of Clandestine Services in the Western Hemisphere. For intelligence gathering, he relied on former FBI agents (J. Edgar Hoover having shared control with Rockefeller of intelligence operations in Latin America during World War II), using as their main sources American businessmen who were overseeing subsidiaries of major American corporations, as well as local police chiefs in Latin American cities.
King owed his rise in the CIA, therefore, to a network of operatives who were severely limited in their capacity to provide accurate and broad political intelligence. Most had little experience in the countryside, where most of Latin America’s population still lived, and certainly not with the Indian miners and peasants.
Other sources of information were needed, people who, if not members of the targeted population themselves, had the trust of those who were: people whose presence in the rural areas would not be threatening or lacking in reason, who were academically trained enough to give insightful analysis into mores, if not political developments.
Adolf Berle had the answer. Berle had been helpful to Allen Dulles in the CIA’s recent campaign against the Philippine Huks. The Free Asia Committee was formally established in 1952, just as the CIA was grooming Ramón Magsaysay to turn the Philippines into the American showcase for democracy in Asia. The Free Asia Committee, Berle advised Dulles, could engage in “pamphlet and infiltration work. Furthermore, there is a supply of personnel, chiefly men from the mission colleges.”13
* Taft had been critical of Truman’s sending troops into the Korean conflict without Congress’s authorization, although he weakened the constitutional thrust of his argument considerably by backing the war once the troops were engaged in battle.
17
IN THE WAKE OF WAR-AND THE CIA
THE MIRACLE OF M-A-G-S-A-Y-S-A-Y
Lieutenant Colonel Edward Lansdale, Ramón Magsaysay’s closest CIA adviser, had worked for years for this day. Magsaysay had just been nominated for the presidency of the Philippines, the strategic former U.S. colony of 7,000 islands stretching between Indonesia in the south and the Chinese mainland in the north.
Lansdale’s counterinsurgency goals against the Hukbalahap (Huk) rebellion had been frustrated by the current president of the Philippines, Elpido Querino, who had been assuming an increasingly independent posture and distancing himself from the U.S. Embassy and Lansdale’s campaign for limited economic and political reforms. By the summer of 1952, Washington had decided to give Lansdale the green light to make Magsaysay, the defense minister, president.
Lansdale launched the Magsaysay for President Movement as a broad-based coalition, building Magsaysay’s name as a symbol against corruption. Meanwhile, he initiated psychological warfare against rural villagers who were sympathetic to the Huks. Troops dressed in Huk uniforms attacked hamlets. Then regular army units, scaled down to the self-sufficient light-battalion size that was more appropriate for high mobility in guerrilla warfare, descended on the confused villagers with a “program of attraction” directed by Magsaysay’s Civil Affairs Office (CAO). While the soldiers dispensed candy and gum to children and built 4,000 prefabricated schools to show concern for the peasants, CAO-directed psychological warfare (psywar) teams spread rumors and propaganda and offered rewards for informers. Such “civic action” to assist villagers was standard fare, raising the morale of recruits who were often unaware that the propaganda against the Huks was “black,” that is, false.
Religious beliefs were a key part of Lansdale’s psywar operations. Sometimes families who were fingered as Huk sympathizers would wake in the morning to find the “Eye of God”—a painting of a giant eye—facing their front door. It was one of the harmonica-playing Lansdale’s favorite ruses. Another was snatching the last man in a Huk patrol, killing him, puncturing his neck with two holes, and hanging him upside down until his blood drained out. Then his corpse would be put back on the trail to be mistaken as a victim of the asuang, the vampire of Philippine lore.1
Linguistics was also incorporated into the CIA’s operation. Using a small aircraft with a mounted loudspeaker, Lansdale would fly in dense clouds over villagers who were suspected of being Huk sympathizers. Speaking in the Tagalog language, he would broadcast curses drawn from the CIA’s and anthropologists’ studies of local taboos and myths.
On the very day that Magsaysay was nominated as a coalition candidate for the presidency, a new American agency was brought into the pacification program. Headlines announcing his nomination were just hitting the Manila streets when Magsaysay ordered his secretary to drive to the docks. He wanted the secretary to meet a couple of Americans just arriving. Magsaysay considered these Americans so important that he had intended to meet their ship himself; because of the publicity surrounding his nomination, however, he changed his mind. The Philippines was a Catholic country, and he was already too closely identified with the U.S. Embassy to risk being seen greeting American Protestant missionaries as they stepped ashore. But Magsaysay was happy that the missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) had arrived. He needed them.
When Richard Pittman arrived in Manila, he was not aware of Colonel Lansdale or that the CIA had just completed its first investigation of SIL.2 To the missionary, Magsaysay was an “instrument in the hand of God”3 to launch SIL in the Philippines.
This was not Pittman’s first visit to Manila. In April 1951, stopping en route to California from a Bible-translation seminar in Australia, he found Manila an armed camp. He spent six weeks surveying the islands’ languages and dialects, estimating a number somewhere between 100 and 200. When he reported back to Cam in California, Cam’s eyes lit up. As soon as Cam received copies of his biography of Cárdenas from the publisher, he forwarded one to Pittman to send to Magsaysay.
One day, the phone rang with a call from the Philippines. “Thank you,” a voice said, “book … important for my people.” Then he hung up. Pittman asked the operator the name of the caller.
“It was a Mr. M-A-G-S-A-Y-S-A-Y,”4 she spelled.
Cam ordered SIL to begin preparations for an advance into the Pacific. Pittman was given the royal treatment, meeting with top Magsaysay aides and future cabinet members, college presidents, the current secretary of education, and the director of the Institute of National Languages. Pittman found Magsaysay an awesome figure: Standing six feet tall, Magsaysay looked like a linebacker for the Chicago Bears. He ran an American-style campaign with the help of Lansdale and the CIA, complete with “Magsaysay’s My Guy” buttons.
Philippines
Besides being home to Dole and Del Monte plantations and the Subic Bay U.S. Navy base, the Philippines was the site of mining activities by American-owned companies.
Source: Central Intelligence Agency, 1973.
He won by a landslide. He was now hailed as Washington’s alternative to the more neutral-minded anticolonial leaders of Asia, Nehru of India and Sukarno of Indonesia. Senate Majority Leader William F. Knowland of California invited Magsaysay to organize a military and economic alliance with Chiang Kai-shek and other anticommunist leaders in South Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. This alliance would crystallize in 1956 as the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), a direct offshoot of the regional pact sanctioned at Chapultepec and San Francisco a decade earlier through the efforts of Nelson Rockefeller and Adolf Berle.
Lansdale was already way ahead of Knowland. As early as 1952, he secretly flew his Filipino counterinsurgency operatives into Vietnam to advise Ngo Dinh Diem, the CIA’s heir apparent to the throne of France’s puppet emperor, Bao Dai.5 In 1954, with the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, Lansdale would move his operation into Vietnam. In his wake would come SIL’s Pittman, with a letter of introduction to Diem from Magsaysay.6
Cam greeted Pittman’s contract with Magsaysay with the cry of a Cold W
arrior, relishing the thought of translating the Bible “for scores and scores of tribes almost under the nose of communism; and someday on into tribal areas that exist behind the Iron Curtain.”7
CAM’S MISSIONARY HOMECOMING
At about the same time Pittman wrote Cam for money to do more tribal surveys in the Philippines, Cam received an urgent letter from Guatemala. Donald Burns, his newest protégé, needed help. SIL had entered Guatemala in 1952 to provide translations to American Protestant missionary organizations, including his old friends at the Central American Mission (C.A.M.). The missionaries wanted to extend their work among the smaller Indian tribes. But the Protestants were confronted by a serious rival for the Indians’ loyalty: the new democratically elected government headed by President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. The government’s nationalistic program of improved wages and land reform had threatened one of the wellsprings of conversions for the C.A.M.: the United Fruit Company, the largest landowner in Guatemala.
After assuming office in 1951, Arbenz had initiated his land-distribution plan against foreign-owned United Fruit. C.A.M. missionaries were unhappy to see United Fruit singled out, believing that was the first step toward the expulsion of all American interests, including the C.A.M. The C.A.M. had marked “Red Russia” as the outside agitator responsible for Guatemala’s unrest. It had four intercessors pray daily that “the door of Guatemala and other Central American Republics … remain open in spite of Communist[s] … that Satanic opposition in the form of Communism be broken.”8
Cam caught the first plane out of Lima. He seemed obsessed with gaining a foothold in Guatemala at the height of the crisis. He flew back and forth to the country four times in 1953 to break through each logjam in the negotiations. The U.S. Embassy was now deeply involved in CIA covert operations to undermine the Arbenz government. Ironically, the only point that the embassy and the government seemed to have agreed on that year was the usefulness of SIL, but for different reasons.