by Gerard Colby
When the Brazilian people gave Vargas’s party a resounding victory in Congress that November, the Eisenhower administration looked for someone to replace C. D. Jackson, someone with his experience in psychological warfare, who could be trusted with the knowledge of secret assets and operations, and someone who, unlike Jackson, had enough prestige—and raw power—in Latin America to restore the luster to the Eisenhower name.
There was really no competition for the job. Only Nelson Rockefeller would do.
IKE’S SECRET TEAM
To the general public, Nelson’s new job as special assistant to the president for Cold War affairs was shadowy. Newsweek editors, when told he was to attend the Cabinet, the National Security Council, the Council on Foreign Economic Policy, and the Operations Coordinating Board, came closest to the truth by describing Nelson as Ike’s “Cold War General.” The president’s press secretary, James Hagerty, would admit only that Nelson’s tasks would be “much broader” than Jackson’s. Nelson would add to that job “consideration of how to coordinate work of all government agencies toward the President’s program for peace.”17
“Dulles,” Berle recalled in his diary, “had asked Nelson to take this new job … because … he is on the defensive everywhere. He … feels something is lacking, and expects Nelson to supply the miraculous element.”18
The Third World, Berle intimated, was becoming dangerously restless, and Dulles felt ill equipped to handle it. Dulles also wanted to eliminate any Soviet doubts about the West’s will to preserve its sphere of influence. But critics suggested that Dulles went too far, expanding that sphere to encompass most of the non-Communist world (and, if Radio Free Europe could be believed, most of the Communist world, too). Dulles was also accused of relying too heavily on nuclear weapons.19 Nor did his plans to include a rearmed West Germany—including many ex-Nazis and SS spies in NATO—ease the misgivings of Africans and Asians about the United States’ anti-communist zeal. No matter how skillfully argued or infused with moral “law,” Dulles’s claims rang hollow on Third World ears. Memories of the shame of colonial insult had never left the developing countries, nor did the bitterness over an average life expectancy of forty years and the world’s highest incidence of untreated curable diseases and malnutrition.
Still, in the face of this reality, Berle and Rockefeller could believe that the problem Dulles was having with the Third World was fundamentally “philosophical.” “Nelson felt and I cordially stimulated that the real trouble here was philosophical and spiritual more than economic, material and political. There is no guide line to any political policy. Another dimension was needed.”20
With Nelson taking on the role of Cold War adviser, a new dimension did develop, but its thrust was decidedly more political than philosophical and spiritual. Its goal was control over all covert operations abroad, with Nelson in the cockpit.
On March 12, the CIA learned that all covert operations had to be approved first by the National Security Council’s Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), on which Nelson was the president’s representative. Under Eisenhower’s instructions, the National Security Council authorized the CIA to “develop underground resistance and facilitate covert and guerrilla operations.”
Specifically, such operations shall include any covert activities related to propaganda, political action, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage … subversion against hostile states and groups including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberations groups, support of indigenous and anti-communist elements … deception plans and operations … all protected by the new doctrine of “plausible” deniability.21
Nelson’s Special Group was to oversee all these activities. If there was a philosophical underpinning to this group, it was Machiavelli.
Nelson’s capacity as chairman of the Special Group allowed him to act as Eisenhower’s “circuit breaker,” informing the president of CIA covert operations while protecting the president’s “plausible deniability” before Congress, since some operations ran afoul of American or international law and even of John Foster Dulles’s much touted moral law.
Of all the CIA’s secret activities, the most sensitive were called the “Family Jewels.” That month, CIA Director Allen Dulles gave Nelson and other OCB members a Family Jewels briefing.
Dulles described all the CIA’s covert operations,22 past and present, including those having the most doubtful legality. By 1955, they included the following:
The CIA’s penetration of the National Student Association.
The CIA’s penetration of the news media as intelligence sources, using reporters as spies, planting spies, and spreading false stories (“black propaganda”) in the foreign media that were “replayed” in domestic news sources.23
The CIA’s penetration of the American book publishing industry.
The CIA’s support for Ramón Magsaysay in the Philippines and George Papadopoulos in Greece.24
The CIA’s instigation of coups in Iran and Guatemala.
The CIA’s interception and reading, at New York’s and San Francisco’s post offices, of the private mail of American citizens sent to and received from the Soviet Union and China.25
The CIA’s financing of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation (subsequently renamed Radio Liberty) broadcasts to, respectively, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.26
The CIA’s establishment of a Domestic Operations Division, whose organization and functions were similar to a field station abroad, to conduct covert operations against U.S. citizens in American cities. This action violated the CIA’s charter, which forbade the agency from spying on American citizens at home.
The CIA’s “Operation Bloodstone,” which protected and used Nazis in Europe and the Americas.27
Three other CIA operations, however, would have the most far-reaching implication for Nelson Rockefeller, American missionaries, and the Indians of Latin America: the CIA’s expansion of its MKULTRA mind-control experiments, the use of Edward Lansdale’s Filipinos to recruit Montagnard tribes in a war against Ho Chi Minh’s Vietminh, and to build a new regime in Saigon to create a Korea-like partition of Vietnam, and its growing covert involvement in aviation.
BENDING MINDS WITH MKULTRA
Nelson needed little introduction to MKULTRA. The CIA’s use of HEW for mind-control experiments had been initiated during his tenure as undersecretary. The Rockefeller Foundation was also no stranger to this field of research. In 1943, it had set up Allen Memorial Institute at McGill University in Montreal. The institute’s articles attracted the attention of the Pentagon and the CIA, and Pentagon grants for research on brainwashing grew steadily.28
It was not long before Adolf Berle agreed to serve on the board of the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a foundation the CIA created as a cover for MKULTRA. “I am frightened about this one,” Berle wrote in his diary. “If the scientists do what they have laid out for themselves, men will become manageable ants. But I don’t think it will happen.”29
There were eminent physicians and scientists on the board of the society. But lurking behind the sterile formal reports of the researchers was violence. Unaware of their being guinea pigs for the CIA, patients were given a “sleep cocktail” of 100 mg. Thorazine, 100 mg. Nembutal, 100 mg. Seconal, 150 mg. Veronal, and 10 mg. Phenergan and then subjected to 150 volts of electroshock for periods twenty to ninety times longer than normally applied by physicians, two to three times a day for fifteen to thirty days, and sometimes as long as sixty-five days.30 The CIA was interested in creating a blank mind that could be reprogrammed.
The Rockefeller Foundation funded the sensory deprivation research. The technique involved strapping people down in a large box and cutting them off from light, sound, smells, or touching. In March 1955, HEW’s National Institutes of Health began CIA-funded experiments using the standard technique, minus the practice of freeing subjects when they wanted to be freed. Soon mind-control experiments sprea
d throughout the country, nurtured by funding directed by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the head of the Chemical Division of the CIA Technical Services Staff and, according to one former CIA officer, part of the old-boy network in the CIA that included Nelson Rockefeller’s former CIAA associate in Brazil, J. C. King, now CIA chief of clandestine activities in the Western Hemisphere.31
In May 1955, the CIA received a startling proposal to “provide for Agency-Sponsored Research Involving Covert Biological and Chemical Warfare.”32 Dr. Charles Geschickter asked the CIA to contribute $375,000 toward the construction of a special cancer research building at Georgetown University Hospital. He promised a “hospital safehouse” with one-sixth of the building’s beds dedicated to the CIA, complete with cover for three CIA scientists and “human patients and volunteers for experimental use,” including the severely mentally retarded and terminal cancer patients.
Allen Dulles approved, but the CIA money, passed through private channels, would allow Geschickter to get matching funds from HEW for the hospital’s construction. This use of private foundations to pass on government (CIA) money, so HEW’s matching grant requirements could be met, would mean deliberate misleading of at least one other executive department of the U.S. government (HEW), and probably the Treasury Department’s Internal Revenue Service as well. Dulles decided to play it safe and get higher approval. He knew just the man.
Nelson Rockefeller, as chairman of the Special Group, listened attentively as Dulles laid out his case for the MKULTRA hospital. His only question was whether Geschickter could offer “a reasonable expectation” that the CIA scientists would have the space he promised. Given Dulles’s assurance, Nelson gave his approval.33
During Nelson’s chairmanship of the Special Group, the CIA also searched for some means to program assassins. The CIA had discovered that a man “could be surreptitiously drugged through the medium of an alcoholic cocktail at a social party … and the subject induced to perform the act of attempting assassination” of an official in a government in which he was “well established socially and politically.”34 The CIA officer in charge of security for the operation was Sheffield Edwards.35 Edwards later worked under Edward Lansdale in Operation MONGOOSE, the assassination attempts against Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION EMBRACES THE COLD WAR
In 1952, when John Foster Dulles was getting ready to become Eisenhower’s secretary of state, Dulles turned over the chair of the Rockefeller Foundation to the family’s “Mr. Asia,” John 3rd. For the foundation’s presidency, Dulles tapped his friend Dean Rusk.
In the transfer of one of the State Department’s top Far East intelligence operators to the foundation lay the origin of Nelson’s expectation of unreserved cooperation from the foundation in his own intelligence mission. Given the central roles that the Dulles brothers and Nelson now played in Washington, it was not an unreasonable expectation.
Rusk did not let the Rockefellers down. “We have the officers and staff with long experience in underdeveloped areas,” he assured the trustees. “We can recruit for such service somewhat more readily than other types of organizations. We have earned a reputation for political disinterestedness; we are not widely regarded as the tool of any particular foreign policy; we are welcomed in politically sensitive situations.”36
Rusk’s new mission was accompanied by a shake-up in his first line of command. In 1955, the foundation took on new directors for five out of six of its programs: Public Health, Social Sciences, Agricultural Sciences, Medical Sciences, and Natural Sciences. Only Humanities was left untouched.
The Humanities Division, under ex-CIA officer Chadbourne Gilpatrick, gave $68,000 in 1955 to the University of Philippines’s Institute of Public Administration to train selected students from Southeast Asia in the fine art of running Western-backed governments efficiently without appearing to be colonial appendages. One of the division’s primary missions was to foster “community development,” part of the “leadership training” component of Lansdale’s “nation-building” concept. While the institute trained students from Thailand, Burma, and Indonesia in the complement to the grittier “community development” work in the barrios and hamlets of Southeast Asia, the university’s Agricultural College at Los Baños prepared community organizers under the aegis of the CIA-controlled Office of the Presidential Assistant for Community Development.37
Community development organizers required a grounding in the psychology of group dynamics. They had to be able to “steer the conversation [of villagers] around to the needs of the barrio they thought should be attended,” the CIA’s Joseph Smith explained, “and they would get the barrio folk to discuss the characteristics of their ideal leader. It turned out the man they had in mind for the job fit these characteristics perfectly. The villagers would ‘discover’ that their ideal leader was in fact already in their midst.”38
“Leadership training” required not only identifying and recruiting local leadership talent, but getting the CIA’s chosen leader to be accepted by the people as their own choice.
In Vietnam, the chosen leader was Diem. At Lansdale’s urging, in April 1955, Diem launched a successful military offensive against opium gangs in Saigon that were an obstacle to Diem’s taking power. Secretary of State Dulles reversed his previous misgivings about Diem. From 1950 to 1954, Diem had been safely tucked away in Maryknoll monasteries in New York and New Jersey that were filled with missionaries who were exiled from China. There, he awaited Washington’s call as the independent, nationalist “alternative” to Ho Chi Minh. Senator John F. Kennedy had predicted that such a leader would be needed to forestall the election of the popular Communist leader.39 Now, with Diem’s demonstration of military strength and Dulles’s backing, the way was clear for Diem’s claim to absolute power.
Enter Nelson Rockefeller in August 1955. He reminded the members of the Special Group that it was charged with finding “ways effectively to utilize U.S. and foreign individuals and groups and foreign public and private organizations” in covert operations.40 These organizations included universities, which were used as “manpower reservoirs.” Professors from Michigan State University (MSU) had flown to Saigon in May and they soon were joined by CIA officers. MSU’s inventory request that year included grenade launchers, riot-gun ammunition, tear-gas projectiles, grenades, and mortars.41 American academe was training Diem’s police and Civil Guards in the dark side of Cold War democracy.
As it turned out, Diem was soon to be Washington’s last hope for stemming communism in Southeast Asia. On March 17, 1957, Philippine President Ramón Magsaysay died in a plane crash.
The CIA picked the wrong candidate to succeed Magsaysay and was soon without a power base for its Southeast Asia operations. Nelson saw the crisis in leadership immediately. He contacted John 3rd about immortalizing the memory of Magsaysay throughout the region.
Nelson had an idea for a Rockefeller version of the Nobel Prize, with $25,000 to be awarded each year to someone in the Far East who exemplified Magsaysay’s willingness to “stand up and be counted.” Magsaysay, despite death—or because of it—could serve perpetually as Washington’s “spirit of democracy” in Asia. Lansdale wrote a long memo describing Magsaysay’s leadership qualities. He claimed that Magsaysay had had a profound impact on Diem and through Diem and his “civic action” soldiers, on Burma’s prime minister and even on soldiers in Laos. Those who “found it amusing to tease Americans that he was an ignorant puppet of ours” were a “fringe smart-aleck set” that was “of little importance in Asia, even when quoted by Radio Peking.”42
Cautious bureaucrats were overruled. The Rockefellers were definitely not of the “smart-aleck” set. The Magsaysay Foundation was open for business.
The foundation gave Operation Brotherhood, the CIA’s program to assist Catholic Vietnamese who moved south of the 11th parallel to join Diem’s regime, one of its first awards. “Our propaganda job was to emphasize that … people were rejecting Communist rule in Vietnam,”
the CIA’s Smith later recalled.”… Operation Brotherhood [appeared] like another legitimate effort of humanitarian concern for brother Asians.”43 Catholic missions were not the only ones recruited in the effort to legitimate Diem’s regime. Another Magsaysay Award would go to the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and be accepted by Richard Pittman, the top man in SIL’s advance into the Philippines and the newly created South Vietnam.44
Central to U.S. strategy in the war in Vietnam, both in its initial covert stage and later in its massive overt stage, was aviation. As President Eisenhower’s representative to the Special Group, Nelson Rockefeller had oversight responsibilities for the CIA’s development of its clandestine aviation capacities.
Nelson’s closest contact in the aviation industry was his brother Laurance. During Nelson’s tenure as chairman of the Special Group in 1955, Laurance’s top aide, Harper Woodward, joined the board of the CIA’s Civil Aviation Transport (CAT), the Agency’s major air freight carrier in Southeast Asia.45
Increasing covert operations in the steep forested valleys of Indochina forced the CIA to begin searching for a lightweight STOL (short-take-off-and-landing) plane to supplement CAT’s fleet of larger planes.
A small aircraft firm in the peaceful Boston suburb of Norwood had developed an aeronautical marvel: the Helio Courier. Capable of taking off from a landing strip as short as a tennis court, soaring at speeds well over 100 miles per hour or hovering silently at 30 miles per hour, the Helio Courier could range as far as 842 miles.