by Gerard Colby
“Mr. President,” Cam explained, “Le Tourneau is very much in love with his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. He wants to please his Lord. He realizes that his Lord does not need servants, but to serve his Lord he must serve his fellow men. So he wants to serve the people of Peru. He wants to lay up treasure in heaven so that when he goes up there he will have a fortune. Down here he has all he needs. He wants to have his treasure in heaven.”18
Le Tourneau indeed had all he needed on earth. He was a multimillionaire. His name was synonymous with the world’s largest earth-moving machines. Cam, as usual, had not told the whole story. Le Tourneau had just sold most of his company to Westinghouse Air Brake, the giant train brakes and signaling combine controlled by Pittsburgh’s Richard K. Mellon and his son-in-law, Herbert A. May. The Mellons paid Le Tourneau over $26 million for his company, in exchange for his promise to stay out of the earth-moving business for five years.
Le Tourneau’s deal with Odría, worked out in the middle of the jungle with Cam’s translating help, was for a colony in one of the most remote places on earth. It was not likely to draw much attention in the United States. His working through a subsidiary of a tax-free evangelical school he had founded (ingeniously named Le Tourneau College) should also have been helpful. Headlines made by outraged Catholic leaders, however, were not.
A “Protestant nucleus” on the eastern side of the Andes “can have grave repercussions on the unity of the nation,” challenged the group. The controversy became so heated that it made a headline in the New York Times: “CATHOLICS PROTEST TEXAN’S PERU PLANS. Fear Protestant Proselytizing in Jungle Reclamation Project of Le Tourneau.”19
“This is a business deal,” Le Tourneau retorted, but quickly added a qualification: “However, I’m a man that mixes business and religion. The President knows that.”20
Seeing a crack in Odría’s armor, his opponents zeroed in on his whole relationship with the Americans, lambasting Odría’s vast concessions to Standard Oil. As the storm gathered in nationalist circles against growing U.S. influence in the Peruvian Amazon, it threatened to engulf SIL. Cam could not deny the economic implications of “Tournavista,” as Le Tourneau called his planned colony in emulation of his Lord’s humility. Cam had written about the coming economic miracle in the U.S. community’s Lima daily, and, with Oscar Vasquez Benavides, former president of the board of the Inter-American Indian Institute, had surveyed the route of a proposed railway that would link Pucallpa with the rail network that served the American-owned copper mines in the Andes.
Proudly, Cam described how deforestation of the Peruvian Amazon “could be doubled as soon as the [Le Tourneau] highway has been paved, and it could be trebled if Mr. R.G. Le Tourneau put his Diesel-Electric Rubber-Tired Tournatrain to work on the highway, hauling in lumber at half the present cost of transportation.”21 As trees disappeared from the Amazon’s delicate ecosystem, cattle ranches would appear in their place, Cam promised, again by Le Tourneau’s design. Cam reported how impressed Le Tourneau was by his visit to the cattle ranch set up by the food supply service (SCIPA), established by Rockefeller’s CIAA and since funded with Point IV money. Then there was the development of what might prove to be as big an oil field as Venezuela’s, even a pipeline over the Andes to tap the oil fields along the Ecuadorian border, where Cam’s missionaries battled the Prince of Darkness and the mysteries of strange tongues.
Peruvian eyes now focused on the man who had brought Le Tourneau to Peru and acted as his interpreter. Who was this man? How had he achieved such power to act as a broker for Peru’s future? Was SIL really part of an American plot to undermine Peru’s national sovereignty, as the Catholic engineers charged, perhaps to sever the oil-rich Amazon as an independent colony controlled by the United States? Suspicions fanned by Odría’s opponents centered on SIL’s contract with the general to start a bilingual school system for Indians in the Amazon. Cam tried to lessen dissent against SIL’s bilingual schools by offering his Jungle Aviation and Radio Service (JAARS) as a sacrificial goat. JAARS’s four airplanes (eventually six) in Peru would become a subsidiary of General Odría’s Military Air Transport, he pledged, and become a worthy civilian complement to the jet fighters Odría received from the Eisenhower administration. The missionary air fleet would cheerily haul government mail, baggage, and passengers—even Catholic priests and nuns—at commercial rates.
It was a masterly stroke. With the blessings of the powerful U.S. Embassy, Cam was making Odría an offer he could not refuse: a U.S.-backed aviation and radio service stretching across the borderless jungle. Odría, in accepting, also helped resolve JAARS’s growing operating deficit. By 1958, the SIL line would gross as much as $35,000 a year from charters;22 in one case it operated an oil company’s Catalina for several months when the company’s pilots could not handle the hazardous flights over jungles and mountains.23
Peru’s Catholic hierarchy was not mollified. SIL admittedly was staffed by only evangelical Protestants. Worse, at SIL’s recent first teacher training course only Protestant Indians or SIL sympathizers were taught.24
Cam again proved his capacity for the miraculous. He simply denied that SIL was really a Protestant missionary front. “We do not carry out evangelist work because the Institute has a mission of scientific character and not a religious end,” he told the press.25
Peru’s Apostolic Vicar was skeptical and within a week was able to produce a University of Oklahoma bulletin affirming SIL’s ties to the Wycliffe Bible Translators; he also directly accused Cam of plotting with his “millionaire friend and financial backer … to Protestantize our jungle.”26
Cam reeled in retreat. He wrote El Comercio a 4,000-word statement confessing that the Wycliffe Bible Translators “has absolutely no life apart from the Summer Institute of Linguistics.” He still insisted, however, that it was “non-sectarian.” As for Le Tourneau, “we have no other connection than a recent friendship.”27
The friendship included money donated by Le Tourneau’s tax-free foundation,28 which controlled both his business and his college (including its Peruvian “development” subsidiary).
Nor was the friendship so recent.
“GOD’S PARTNER”
Robert Gilman Le Tourneau was a born-again Christian businessman long known in Fundamentalist circles. During the 1920s, while making a small fortune off the public construction boom in California, he came to believe that he was specially blessed by the Lord of his childhood. He contributed regularly to the Christian Missionary Alliance. When the Great Depression hit, he plugged his company into the giant public works projects the Hoover administration had started to relieve unemployment. During the New Deal, he built irrigation systems and roads. Le Tourneau and his wife attributed their success to divine blessing, not Washington’s public works programs, their previous business associations, or even Le Tourneau’s inventive genius for designing bigger and more efficient machines. To thank Jesus, they set up the Le Tourneau Foundation under their control, pledging 50 percent of their company’s profits and 50 percent of their personal income to “The Lord’s Treasury.”
The foundation became the conduit for hefty tax deductions for both the company and the family. This tax shelter also sponsored a technical school in Peoria, Illinois, near the site of the Le Tourneau factory, where workers were proselytized by Le Tourneau’s Fundamentalist magazine, NOW. “God is chairman of my board of directors,” he claimed, with some legal accuracy. The millionaire soon joined the board of John Brown Academy, where Paul Townsend (Cam’s brother) taught, and Cam found his first support for nearby Camp Wycliffe.
By the end of World War II, God and war profits had boosted his company’s sales 400 percent. His company supplied 70 percent of the earth-moving equipment used by the Pentagon. Thousands of mammoth Le Tourneau bulldozers, scrapers, rooters, dump carts, and sheepfoot rollers were used by U.S. forces in North Africa, India, Burma, China, and every major island in the South Pacific.29
In postwar Peru, the Cathol
ic church soon found that it was no match for Le Tourneau or Townsend. Combined, the two men represented American wealth, colonization of the jungle, and the powerful U.S. Embassy, which saw “Tournavista” as an extension of its Point IV program.
In September 1953, Odría approved SIL’s contract. To end public debate, Odría then decorated Cam for “distinguished service to Peru.”
In December, Le Tourneau’s contract was also sanctioned. Two months later, the Peruvian Senate ratified the agreement as Le Tourneau watched from the gallery. Within two years, even Nelson Rockefeller would be commenting on Le Tourneau’s venture in the Peruvian Amazon. In October 1955, a “news clip” from the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC) crossed his desk noting that the Peruvian government had accepted a bid by Robert G. Le Tourneau to develop a “large tropical zone” and that Peru was seeking a $15 million loan to finance the development, along with a new highway connecting the Trans-Andes highway with the “Amazonas Valley.” Nelson scribbled in the margins “we ought to take a look” and promptly fired off a memo to IBEC’s Louise Boyer: “I would like to include this area in the discussion of new lands to be studied.…”30
AT BRAZIL’S BORDERS
Cam’s next stop on his Latin American itinerary was Quito. High in the Ecuadorian Andes, Cam hurried through the ancient cobblestone streets of the capital of the Incas and the conquistadores to a crucial meeting with SIL’s Robert Schneider and a young translator from the Peru branch named Rachel Saint.
Schneider had become Cam’s top government relations aide in the South American advance. He had pioneered in Peru and had helped in the unsuccessful attempt to enter Venezuela. Now he had taken on the directorship of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Slowly, SIL was nibbling away at the outer edges of the western Amazon. If the Inter-American Indian Conference in La Paz in August proved fruitful, they would have a toehold in Bolivia, too. The Andean countries were the back door to the Brazilian Amazon. Success was imperative.
In Rachel Saint, Cam had found the ideal visionary to lead the dangerous advance into the unknown Ecuadorian jungle. As a girl in 1932, she had dreamed of a brown tribe surrounded by green jungle. She finally arrived in SIL’s Peru branch in 1949, having spent a dozen years trying to convince New Jersey alcoholics to take the Lord’s cure. The Indians should have proved easier. They didn’t.
Rachel started her vision-quest with the Piro Indians along the Urubamba River, then moved on to the Shapra, in the oil-rich lands above the Marañon River. By 1953, she had settled on yet another tribe even farther north, across the border with Ecuador near the next large river, the Napo.
This tribe, in a fashion common among isolated hunting and gathering groups, called themselves simply “the people,” or Huaorani. The Ecuadorians called them Auca, Quechua for “savage.” Hunted by rubber slavers, the Auca had been reduced to about 400 souls scattered in four mutually warring groups by the time Robert Schneider arrived with the first SIL team in 1952. No one in the party entertained any illusion about conquering the Aucas for Christ. No one volunteered. They all accepted the wisdom of other missionaries that the hundred Auca spearmen who had held up civilization’s advance would have no compunction sending white foreigners quickly to their God of Love.
Rachel accepted the challenge as her fate. The Lord had willed that the Auca were the “brown-skinned tribe” of her vision.
Cam and Schneider took Rachel to meet President José María Velasco Ibarra. Rachel’s extraordinary offer was presented by Cam to the president. Velasco tried to warn her off. The Auca were “very dangerous. I once flew over them and they threw spears at the plane.”31
Rachel would not be deterred. At last, Velasco sighed his assent.
One of those who received the news with some misgivings was her thirty-two-year-old brother, Nate, a pilot for the Missionary Aviation Fellowship (MAF). Nate’s small yellow Piper Cub served Protestant missionaries scattered throughout the jungle. It was through Rachel’s visits with him that she had heard of the Auca. Now he was beginning to wish she never had. Rachel’s ambitions stood in the way.
While all this was happening, a Shell oil airplane was touring Latin America. Its most interesting passenger was General James Doolittle, the famous army pilot who had flown raids over Tokyo. Doolittle’s inspection of the MAF base at Shell Mera delighted Nate.
“How’s our little air force?”32 Doolittle asked with a twinkle in his eye.
Doolittle was now a director of Shell, though this mission, at President Eisenhower’s request, was to conduct a secret investigation of the CIA’s covert operations.
Doolittle presented his findings to Eisenhower in October 1954. The president now had a reliable report on the CIA and the “assets,” including people, it used. He gave the study to Allen Dulles with instructions to “show it to no one else, but to get back to him about the report’s conclusions and recommendations.”33
Doolittle’s recommendations were in keeping with the CIA’s penchant for avoiding congressional oversight. They encouraged Eisenhower to endorse more covert operations, even, ominously, illegal ones beyond “the acceptable norms of human conduct.”
Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.34
Eisenhower was enthusiastic about Doolittle’s “Anticommunist Manifesto.” Two months later, he appointed a new special assistant on Cold War strategy and psychological warfare. As the president’s personal representative on the National Security Council, this man would oversee the global escalation of CIA covert warfare.
A Planning Coordination Group, which came to be called simply the “Special Group,” was established. In a position of authority over policy second only to the president himself and actually exercising much more power than he did, three men—CIA Director Allen Dulles, Undersecretary of State Herbert Hoover, Jr., and Undersecretary of Defense Roger Kyes—would be in command, chaired by the president’s new special assistant: Nelson Rockefeller.
* Few rural leaders of those jailed after the CIA-backed coup were found to understand, much less support, communist theories. See Stokes Newbold (Richard Adams), “Receptivity to Communist Fomented Agitation in Rural Guatemala,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 5, no. 4 (1957).
*They sat out the coup in a classroom in Oklahoma, and did not return until Arbenz was gone and United Fruits land and order were restored.
IV
PROPHETS OF ARMEGEDDON
Fortunately, Brazil has a great vacant frontier area that offers the prospect of developing a new rural economy.… It should be emphasized that what is contemplated here is a program of opening up this new “west” in Brazil, in the manner our own “west” was opened up under the Homestead law after the Civil War.
—JOHN R. CAMP, Rockefeller AIA employee
Proposal to the federal International
Cooperative Administration,
November 1960
18
IKE’S COLD WAR GENERAL
A PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE
Washington’s fashionable Foxhall Road was dark when Ann Whitman, the president’s personal secretary, left the large house. A single light burned, silent testimony to continued work in the library where she had dined alone that night with Nelson Rockefeller. Nelson might work into the wee hours, the fate of a middle-aged man seeking refuge from a marriage going sour and a career in doubt.
After Ike’s election, Nelson had been made chairman of the President’s Advisory Committee on Government Organization. His job held neither excitement nor prestige, but at least he was back in Washington, where his influence could be felt,
if not feared.
He started off by confronting New Deal Democrats with typical vengeance. His grandfather would have been proud. Someone, after all, had to have enough credibility and gall to shake up Washington’s bureaucracy and refit it to meet its new global opportunities.1
Within six months, with the approval of the president and the Republican-led Congress, Rockefeller had centralized the U.S. government into a modern corporate state. He tightened corporate control over the Defense Department, bringing the whole operation more into conformity with corporate streamlining.
He abolished the Export-Import Bank’s four-man board, centralizing all power in the hands of a managing director. Control over the bank was crucial if American corporations were to penetrate the Third World trade of Western European powers, expand American investment in the Third World, and stave off the twin evils of nationalism and communism.
He abolished the State Department’s International Information Agency, already mortally wounded by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunts, and set up the United States Information Agency (USIA). Virtually independent of the State Department and free of its diplomatic responsibilities, the USIA would prove more amenable to covert operations by the CIA, including disinformation news “feedback” into the United States.
Nelson also destroyed the Mutual Security Agency, merging its operations and those of three other foreign-aid agencies into the Foreign Operations Administration. FOA at last brought to fruition the proposal that Nelson, as chairman of Truman’s International Development Advisory Board, had made for a centralized foreign-aid agency.
He merged the Federal Security Agency (and its $4.6 billion budget, ten operating units, and three federal corporations) into a single new cabinet-level department, Health, Education, and Welfare. (He managed to get himself appointed the first undersecretary of HEW to boot.) This was Nelson’s best hope for salvaging some of the CIAA’s legacy of education, public health, and vocational rehabilitation programs.