THE CIA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80M01009A000100050015-8
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 48
• Document Creation Date: December 23, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 29, 2013
• Sequence Number: 15
• Publication Date: June 24, 1961
• Content Type: MISC

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NATION
SPECIAL ISSUE JUNE 24, 1961 . . 25c
THE
by
Fred J. Cook
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LETTERS
One Small Act for Peace
Dear Sirs: In a letter in the June 10
issue, re Mary Grooms's article on shel-
ters [May 13], Robert Berkowitz com-
ments: "I am not certain if she re-
gards the United States as the only
warlike agent in the world." Perhaps
Mr. Berkowitz will find it less incon-
ceivable that anyone could so regard
us (or rather, our government) after
he has read Mr. Dreher's eye-opening
article, "Hazards of Civil Defense," in
the same issue in which his letter ap-
peared. But in any case, may I suggest
to him that all that really matters is
whether the United States is one of
the warlike agents in the world. I think
the record clearly shows it is, and that
as such it is one of the parties responsible
for imperiling the very existence of the
human race. I also think that if just
one of the main warlike agents in to-
day's world were to begin acting in
such a way as to further?and not mere-
ly praise?peace, the threat which nu-
clear weapons pose to mankind would
be lessened far out of proportion to the
initial act for peace, because that act
would finally reverse the horrible trend
of the arms race. BLOSSOM D. SEGALOEF
New Haven, Conn.
Familiar Argument?
Dear Sirs: William Gilman, reviewing
The Structure of Science in your June
10 issue, asks: ". . . Can we then ab-
solve the Los Alamos scientists of their
share of responsibility for Hiroshima?"
The answer is Yes, because (a) we were
at war; (b) without Hiroshima, the
war would have continued for two more
years and 2 million more Americans
would have died; (c) far more Japanese
lives, as well as property, would have
been wiped out with a continuation of
the war; (d) a leading Japanese states-
man said if conditions had been reversed,
he would have had no hesitancy in using
the bomb against America.
Chicago, Ill. ROBERT ROSENBLUTH
Regressive Tax?
Dear Sirs: In your May 13 issue,' Peter
Dorner presented the case for a tax on
the advertising of large .companies. Mr.
Dorner assumes that (1) as wealth
grows, the demand for an increasing
number of consumer goods "reaches a
state of extreme inelasticity" and (2)
firms, by product differentiation and
large advertising expenditures, can pass
Summer Schedule
After July 1, and through
August, The Nation will ap-
pear on alternate weeks
only, i.e., on July 15 and
29, am! August 12 and 2_6.
The normal weekly sched-
ule will be resumed with the
Sept. 2 issue.
along cost increases to the consumer.
When demand is in "a state of ex-
treme inelasticity," the firm is in a po-
sition to pass increases in cost along to
the consumer with the result that prices
are higher and the quantity sold is
about the same.
To the firm, a tax on advertising is
an increase in the cost of doing busi-
ness. If the tax can be forced on the
consumer in the form of higher prices,
then its economic impact is identical
to that of a sales tax. A sales tax is a
regressive tax.
If one grants Mr. Dorner his as-
sumptions, one is confronted with a
tax on advertising that is paid by the
consumer under a system of regressive
taxation. Suppose that the volume of
advertising does decrease. What will
disappear? Will there be less Play of
the Week or will there be less Gun-
smoke?
Most of the effects that Mr. Dorner
is seeking could, perhaps, be better
achieved through a system of grading
and labeling of advertised products and
by a closer look at advertising material
by the FTC. This would not raise the
funds needed for public welfare projects.
If these funds are to be raised through
taxation, however, progressive taxation
would seem to commend itself.
Evanston, Ill. MORTON SCHNABEL
From the Bosporus
Dear Sirs: Not for pedantry, but be-
cause I like The Nation, I should like
to point out two inaccuracies in your
editorials of April 22:
/. On page 334: ". . . One of these is
Franz Joseph Strauss, his Minister of
Defense, who insists that the NATO
armies, which are mostly German ar-
mies . . ." 'Taint so. On this side of the
ocean, Turkey has the largest military
under NATO.
2. On page 333: "... It should not be
forgotten that Syngman Rhee and
Adnan Menderes, shortly before they
were ousted from office by their irate
countrymen, had also scored 'smashing'
electoral victories...." One of the rea-
sons Adnan Menderes was -ousted- on
May 27, 1960 (an unforgettable date for
Turkey), was -the discontent of the
intellectuals and students over the delay
by Menderes' Democrat Party in sched-
uling elections. The last election in Tur-
key took place back in 1957. Opposi-
tion leader Ismet Inonu, just before the
May 27 Revolution, all but promised
civil war if elections weren't held by
October 27 of this year, the constitu-
tional limit of four years since the last
elections. (It is pretty much agreed
that in the 1957 elections, however,
manipulation of the electoral results
"well known to dictators" took place.)
Istanbul FERDINAND DRYLE
In This Issue
THE CIA
by FRED I. COOK
529 ? Editors' Introduction
529 ? Part
534 ?
539 ?
543 ?
547 ?
551
I: Secret Hand of the
CIA
II: Allen Dulles:
Beginnings
III: Dulles and the SS
IV: Dulles, Peace and
the CIA
V: With Dulles in Iran
VI: Just a Little Rev-
olution
556 ? VII: The Road to War
561 ? VIII: Fiasco in Cuba
569 ? IX: A Look at the
Future
Crossword Puzzle (opp. 572)
by FRANK W. LEWIS
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George G. Kirstein, Publisher
Carey McWilliams, Editor
Victor Ti. Bernstein, Managing Editor
Robert Hatch, Books and the Arts
Harold Clurnian, Theatre
Maurice Grosser, Art
M. L. Rosenthal. Poetry
Lester Trimble, Music
Alexander Werth, European
Correspondent
Mary Simon, Advertising Manager
The Nation, June 2:4, 1961. Vol. 192, No. 25
The Nation, published weekly (except for omis-
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THE CIA .. by Fred J. Cook
INTRODUCTION: "The only time the people pay
attention to us," Allen Dulles once said of the CIA,
"is when- we fall flat on our face" ? or words to that
effect. But as Mr. Dulles would be the first to concede,
the reason for the default lies not with the people, but
with the CIA itself. The disastrous Bay of Pigs episode
is not the only fiasco that can be laid at the door of the
lavishly financed CIA. But in this latest fiasco more
of the facts came to light than in similar earlier episodes.
Now, therefore,- seemed an excellent time, while t-he
facts of the Cuban fiasco are fresh in mind, to take a
look at an agency which is of vital concern to national
security and the well-being of the people, but about
which the people know less than about any major
agency of government. ? What interested us, as editors,
were not the immediate causes of the particular fiasco;
we- do not propose to join the feverish post-mortem
search for scapegoats: Our concern was with the basic
question: how did this extraordinary agency come into
being? what -is known about its record? how does it
fit into the American constitutional scheme of things?
On the face of it, an inquiry into an agency dedicated,
as is the CIA, to secrecy in its planning, its operations,
its personnel and. its budget, presents a difficult journal-
istic undertaking. But a considerable amount of material
has been published about the agency and its operations,
some of it clearly inspired by the CIA with the approval
of its director. True, most of the ? material is scattered
and disparate, consisting of small items which, taken
alone, have little meaning. But when put together by
an astute craftsman, they form a significant pattern.
The easiest part of our job was to find the craftsman.
Fred J. Cook's special articles for The Nation ? "The
FBI," "The Shame of New York," and "Gambling,
Inc.," have Won him important journalism prizes for the
last three years. In giving him the assignment, we told
Mr. Cook to stick to the public record; we did not want
-him to attempt to seek out undisclosed facts or to probe
into possibly sensitive areas. His assignment was simply
to summarize existing published material which, long
since available to potential "enemies," was still not
readily available to the American public.
Mr. Cook has followed our instructions. There is not
a fact hereafter set forth which has not already been
published. Yet, put together, these facts add up to a
story that ?proved new to us, as we are certain it will
prove new to the reader. And enough of the known
facts are presented to warrant an informed judgment
about the agency. For what Mr. Cook proves is what
Sir Compton Mackenzie demonstrated for Nation
readers in another connection (see "The Spy Circus:
Parasites with Cloaks and Daggers," December 5, 1959);
namely, that intelligence of the cloak-and-dagger variety
is a two-edged sword,-and that the sharper edge is some-
times held toward the throat of the wielder.
And another lesson that Mr. Cook drives home is
this: clearly the CIA must be divested of its "action"
or operational functions and restricted to the sole func-
tion, of gathering information for other agencies operat-
ing under customary constitutional safeguards., ED.
/*CI PART i SECRET HAND of the CIA
SHORTLY BEFORE 6 P.M. on De-
cember 5, 1957, a faceless man drop-
ped a letter into a mail box in New
York City's Grand Central Station
area. It was to the editor of The Na-
tion. The opening sentence read:
"As an American intelligence officer,
I feel duty bound to state my ap-
prehensions as to the future of my
country." What was the basis of these
apprehensions? The threat of a ram-
pant world communism? The menace
of Soviet weaponry? The dangers of
internal subversion? No. The writer,
whose letter bore in almost every line
intrinsic evidence of minute and in-
timate knowledge, was concerned
about just one crucial aspect of the
times ? the mortal damage America
was inflicting upon itself. This was
a damage, he found, that resulted
directly from the careers , and the
power and the misconceptions of two
men: the late John Foster Dulles,
then Secretary of State, and his
younger brother, Allen Welsh Dulles,
then as now head of the vitally im-
portant Central Intelligence Agency,
the official eyes and ears of American
foreign policy, the medium that
gathers and sifts and judges infor-
mation?and so conditions the minds
and predetermines the decisions of
American policy makers on the high-
est levels.
Now, four years later, in the wake
of the Cuban disaster ? and other
less publicized but equally significant
disasters the words of the intel-
ligence agent who unburdened him-
self in that letter read like the most
infallible of prophecies. America was
being pushed along the road to for-
eign policy disasters, he wrote, by
the closed minds of the Dulles broth-
ers -- by their refusal to face facts
as facts and their insistence on tortur-
ing facts into the framework of pre-
determined policy.
This is the way the intelligence of-
ficer phrased it:
The following circumstances are
cause for deep concern:
1. United States foreign policy is
not formulated on the basis of an
objective analysis of facts, particu-
larly those made available by In-
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telligence Service, but is being de-
termined by John Foster Dulles'
personal rash conceptions.
2. The fact that Allen Dulles is
in charge of collection and evalua-
tion of all information makes it pos-
sible for the Secretary of State to
distort the information received as
he sees fit. Facts thus presented
disorientate not only the President
and Congress but also the people of
the United States. (Italics added.)
3. As a consequence, our foreign
policy is not based on the real in-
terests of the United States. It has
suffered one defeat after another
and may eventually draw us into
a nuclear war.
Though John Foster Dulles since
has died, Allen Welsh Dulles still
rules the CIA, and the Cuban de-
bacle that his agency sponsored,
planned and directed has provided
graphic proof that he still retains his
ability to "disorientate not only the
President and Congress but also the
people of the United States."
Cuba: the Lost Lesson
No issue of our times lies closer to
the core of the decision of war or
peace on which the very survival of
mankind depends. For from our
proper understanding of the facts,
our recognition or denial of com-
plicated and even at times trans-
parent truths, must derive the for-
mulation of our policies and the most
fateful of our decisions. Cuba is only
the most recent and most striking
example. When the CIA spurred on
the abortive invasion under the rose-
ate delusion that Cubans were chaf-
ing to revolt against the tyranny of
Fidel Castro, the United States
achieved only the disgrace and op-
probrium of a British-style Suez on
an even more futile scale. Not only
did the invasion fail ignominiously,
but the attempt 'helped, if anything,
to solidify the iron rule of Castro.
It enabled him to pose as the hero
of his people, successfully repelling
a "foreign" invasion. It touched off
a ripple of reaction throughout Latin
America where people, while they
may not want a dictator like Castro,
want no more the gratuitous med-
dling in their internal affairs by the
American giant to the north. It takes
no seer to perceive that all the evil
fruits of the Cuban blunder have not
yet been reaped.
, Shockingly in this context come
indications that the U.S. Govern:-
ment, instead of learning a most
salutary lesson from the Cuban
fiasco, has ? determined to turn its
back even more resolutely upon facts
and truth. In the last week of April,
after officials on every level should
have had time to digest the moral
of Cuba, some 400 newspaper editors
and columnists were called to Wash-
ington for a background briefing on
foreign policy by the State Depart-
ment. As James Higgins, of the
Gazette and Daily (York, Pa.), later
wrote, "There developed at this con-
ference a very evident tendency on
the part of the government to blame
the press, at ?least part of the press,
for spoiling the plans of the Central
Intelligence Agency." The govern-
ment theory plainly was, not that
the whole conception was faulty,
530
but that too much had been print-
ed about the gathering of Cuban in-
vasion forces?and that this had
alerted Castro and ruined an other-
wise promising endeavor. The head-
on collision of this comforting theory
with the most elemental facts about
modern Cuba was ignored with great
determination?with such great de-
termination, indeed, that President
Kennedy, in a speech to a conven-
tion of American newspaper editors,
suggested that the editors, before
they printed a story, ask themselves
not only "Is it news?" but "Is it in
the interest of national security?"
Such a censorship, even if only vol-
untary, would inevitably result in
increasing the blackout of informa-
tion from which the American peo-
ple have suffered since the end of
World War II. As James Higgins
wrote, "The truth of the story . . .
was not to be considered an impor-
tant measure of its rights to see
print. . . . I got the impression in
Washington of a governmental closed
mind."
This is a liability that could be
fatal to all mankind in a world teeter-
ing on the edge of thermonuclear
disaster. What America so obviously
needs is not fewer facts but more,
not deceptive images that fit our
prejudices and preconceptions, but
truth?however unpalatable. What
America needs is the unvarnished
truth about Chiang Kai-shek, about
Quemoy and Matsu, about Laos,
about Latin America?and especial-
ly about Cuba, the island (as the
President so often has reminded us)
that is just ninety miles from our
shores, the island about which our
secret and public minisformation
has been demonstrated to be quite
literally colossal.
The Agency Nobody Knows
In this all-pervasive atmosphere
of the shut mind and the distorted
fact, Central Intelligence is the key,
the vital agency. Yet it is the one
agency of government about which
the American people are permitted
to know almost nothing, the one
agency over which their own elected
representatives are permitted to have
virtually no control. CIA is the only
agency whose budget is never dis-
closed, whose director can sign a
The NATION
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voucher for any amouht Without
checkup or explanation. How many
persons does it employ, bow many
agents does. it have? Even Congress-
men do not know precisely. Its
Washington headquarters staff alone
is estimated to consist of more than
10,000 employees; in total, it is be-
lieved to have more persons on its
payroll than the State Department.
How much money does it have at its
disposal? Again, even most of the
Congressmen who vote the funds do
not know precisely. CIA itself says
this "figure is very tightly held .and
is known to not more than five or
six Members in each House." CIA
allotments are hidden in the budget-
ary requests of various .government
departments; estimates vary from a
low of $500 million annually to the $1
billion mentioned by the conserva-
tive New York Times. A billion, dol-
lars a year concentrated in the hands
of one man about whose activities
the American people are permitted
to know virtually nothing?and
about whose activities it appears to
be, suggested they should know even
less?represents the kind of power
that, in essence, can well determine
the nation's course and remove from
its People the power of decision.
TwoMeaded Monster
This danger that CIA may not
just inform, but also determine pol-
icy, has been enhanced from the
agency's inception by an authorized
split personality. From the start, CIA
has been a two-headed monster. It
is not just a cloak-and-dagger agency
entrusted with the important task
of gathering .information concerning
our potential enemies throughout
the world; it also has the authority
to act on its own information, carry-
ing out in deeds the policies its in-
telligence discoveries help to form.
Though its overt acts are supposed
to be under the direction of the Na-
tional Security Council, the risk in-
herent in such a dual responsibility
is obvious. With an end in view, can
intelligence be impartial?
The hazards implicit in such a
vast, concentrated, double-motive
agency were not. unforeseen. Harry
Howe Ransom, of Harvard, in his
Central Intelligence and National
Security, describes the reaction of
Admiral Ernest j. King in March,
June .24, 196.1
1945, when the Secretary of the Navy
sought his views on the formation of
the proposed centralized intelligence
agency. "King replied," Ransom
writes, "that while such an arrange-
ment was perhaps logical, it had in-
herent dangers. He feared that a cen-
tralized intelligence agency might
acquire power? beyond anything in-
tended, and questioned whether
such an agency might not threaten
our form of government"
British intelligence, for centuries
considered one of the world's most
expert, has long held that the wed-
ding of action to intelligence is a fatal
flaw in CIA. So have others. In 1948,
Professor Sherman Kent, of Yale,
himself an intelligence officer in
World War II, wrote a treatise on
the purposes and the dangers of in-
telligence operations in a book called
Strategic Intelligence for American
World Policy. At the time CIA had
just been formed and its perform-
ance lay entirely in the future, but
Professor Kent struck out vigorously
at what he called "the disadvantage
of getting intelligence too close ? to
policy." He added:
This does not necessarily mean
officially accepted high United States
policy, but something far less exalted.
What I am talking of is often ex-
pressed by the words "slant," "line,"
"position," and "view." Almost any
man or group of men confrOnted
with the duty of getting something
planned or getting something done
will sooner or later hit upon what
they consider a single most desirable
course of action. Usually it is sooner;
sometimes, under duress, it is a snap
judgment off the top of the head. . . .
I cannot escape the belief that
under the circumstances outlined,
intelligence will find itself right in
the middle of policy, and that upon
occasions it will be the unabashed
apologist for a given policy rather
than its impartial and objective an-
alyst.
It takes no particular insight to
find the seeds of the Cuban fantasy
in that perceptive paragraph.
In the aftermath of so monumental
a blunder as Cuba, however, it seems
pertinent to inquire: Just what is
the record of CIA? Are its successes
overbalanced by its failures? And
does it, in its dual role of secret agent
and activist operative, not merely
inform our' foreign policy but, to a
large measure at least, determine it?
Let it be said at once that there
can be no exact score board chalking
up the runs, hits and errors of CIA.
Allen Dulles himself has commented
that the only time his agency makes
the headlines is when it falls flat on
its face in public. Its successes, he
intimates, cannot be publicized for
the obvious reason that to do so
might give away some of the secrets
of his far-flung intelligence network.
This is true, but only partially so.
For CIA, while it refrains from pub-
lic announcements, docs not disdain
the discreet and controlled leak. And
some of ? these leaks have found
their way into such prominence as
Saturday Evening Post exclusives. ?
Where the .CIA Succeeds
Despite the secrecy of CIA, there-
fore, there is on the public record,
in the fourteen years since its cre-
ation in 1947, a partial and, indeed,
highly significant record of its deeds.
And by this record it is possible to
judge it. Let's look first at some of
the achievements.
1[In 1955, a CIA communications
expert, studying a detailed map of
Berlin, discovered that at one point
the main Russian telephone lines ran
only 300 yards from a radar station
in the American sector. The CIA
dug an underground tunnel, tapped
the cables and, for months, before
the Russians got wise, monitored
every telephonic whisper in the So-
viet East Sector.
?In 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev
delivered his famous secret speech
denouncing the crimes of Josef Stalin
before the Twentieth Communist
Party Congress, a CIA agent man-
aged to get the text and smuggle it
out to the Western world. Washing-
ton was able to reveal the explosive
contents before the Soviets them-
selves had edited the speech for pub-
lic consumption. The blow was prob-
ably one of the strongest ever struck
at Communist ideology. Communist
parties in the United States and
other Western countries, long taught
by Communist propaganda to regard
Stalin with reverence, felt that the
bedrock of belief had been cut out
from under them.
liThe U-2 spy plane operation, a
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risky procedure that backfired dis-
astrously in the end, was for years
one of the world's most successful
feats in espionage. From fifteen miles
up, this plane took pictures of such
incredible clarity and detail that it
was possible to distinguish between
a cyclist and a pedestrian; its radio
receivers, which monitored all wave
lengths, recorded literally millions of
words. A single flight across Russia
often furnished enough assorted in-
formation to keep several thousand
CIA employees working for weeks,
and the flights lasted for four years
before, at the beginning of May,
1960, on the very eve of the sched-
uled Summit Conference in Paris,
pilot Francis Powers took off on the
mission on which he was shot down.
The bad judgment implicit in order-
ing the flight at such a delicate time,
the ridiculous CIA "cover story"
that Powers was gathering weather
data, the solemn promulgation of
this fairy tale and the swift subse-
quent exposure of the United States
before the world as an arrant liar?
all of this wrecked the Summit,
forced the United States to abandon
the U-2 aerial espionage program,
and inflicted enormous world-wide
damage on American prestige.
Whether, in the ideological war for
men's minds, the ultimate tarnishing
of the American image outweighs the
positive details garnered by the U-2s
in four years of successful espionage
remains a forever unresolved point
of debate. For one thing, the ideo-
logical war goes on, neither finally
won nor irretrievably lost; for an-
other, no one except on the very
highest and most closely guarded
levels of government can possibly
know just how vitally important
were the details the U-2s gathered.
Though the U-2 program became,
in its catastrophic finale, a fulcrum
of policy, the significant pattern
that emerges from the Berlin wire
tapping, the smuggling of the Khru-
shchev speech, the years-long earlier
successes of U-2, seems fairly ob-
vious. All dealt with intelligence?
and intelligence only. The intent was
to gather the kind of broad and de-
tailed information on which an in-
telligent foreign policy may be based.
These activities did not in them-
selves constitute active meddling in,
532
or formation of, policy. Unfortunate-
ly, not all CIA activities fall into
this legitimate intelligence role; time
and again, CIA has meddled active-
ly in the internal affairs of foreign
governments. And it is in this field
that some of its most vaunted suc-
cesses raise grave questions about
the drift and intent of our foreign
policy.
Where It Fails
Here are some of the high spots
of CIA in international intrigue:
1IIn 1953, with Allen Dulles him-
self playing a leading role, CIA
sparked a coup that ousted Moham-
med Mossadegh as Premier of Iran.
Mossadegh, a wealthy landowner,
rose to political power by capitaliz-
ing on popular hatred of the British
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which
dominated the economy of the na-
tion, exporting Iran's greatest na-
tional resource by payment to the
national treasury of what Mossa-
degh considered a mere pittance.
Mossadegh set out to nationalize the
oil industry in Iran's interest, allied
himself with pro-Communist forces
in Teheran, and virtually usurped
the power of Shah Mohammed Reza
Pahlevi. When he did, a successful
CIA plot bounced Mossadegh out of
office so fast he hardly knew what
had hit him; the Shah was restored
to power; and a four-nation con-
sortium, in partnership with the
Iranian Government, was given con-
trol over the country's liquid gold.
CIA showed a tendency, if not to
brag, at least to chuckle in public
about this wily and triumphant
coup; but the aftermath has furnish-
ed no cause for unalloyed rejoicing.
The United States poured millions
of dollars into Iran to shore up the
government of the anti-Communist
Shah. A Congressional committee
found in 1957 that, in five years, Iran
had received a quarter of a billion
dollars in American aid. Yet the
Iranian people themselves had not
profited. So many American dollars
had stuck to the fingers of corrupt
officials that Iran was running up
constant deficits, though the Con-
gressional committee found that it
should have been fully capable, with
its oil revenues, of financing its own
national development. Despite the
hundreds of millions of dollars in
American aid, Iran remained so prim-
itive that, in some isolated towns, in
this twentieth century, residents had
yet to see their first wheeled vehicle;
a whole family might live for a year
on the produce of a single walnut
tree; and small children labored all
day at the looms of rug factories for
20 cents or less. Small wonder, as
Time reported in 1960, that Mossa-
degh "is still widely revered"; small
wonder either that a new Premier,
appointed by the Shah in early May,
1961, after a riotous outbreak in
Teheran, was described by the Asso-
ciated Press as the Shah's "last hope
of averting bankruptcy and possible
revolution. . . ."
?In 1954, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman
won an election in Guatemala and
achieved supreme power. This demo-
cratic verdict by the Guatemalan
electorate was not pleasing to the
United States. American officials de-
scribed the Arbenz regime as com-
munistic. This has been disputed, but
there is no question that Arbenz was
sufficiently leftist in orientation to
threaten the huge land holdings of
Guatemala's wealthy classes and the
imperial interests of United Fruit
and other large American corpora-
tions. American disenchantment with
Arbenz needed only a spark to be
exploded into action, and the spark
was supplied by Allen Dulles and
CIA. Secret agents abroad spotted
a Polish freighter being loaded with
Czech arms and ammunition; CIA
operatives around the world traced
the peregrinations of the freighter as,
after several mysterious changes of
destination, she finally came to port
and began unloading the munitions
destined for Arbenz. Then CIA, with
the approval of the National Security
Council, struck. Two Globem asters,
loaded with arms and ammunition,
were flown to Honduras and Nica-
ragua. There the weapons were
placed in the hands of followers of
an exiled Guatemalan Army officer,
Col. Carlos Castillo Armas. He in-
vaded Guatemala, and the Arbenz
regime collapsed like a pack of cards.
It is perhaps significant that the
Guatemalan blueprint was practical-
ly identical with the one CIA follow-
ed this April in the attempt to over-
throw Castro. Only Castro was no
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Arbenz. In any event, Guatemala,
like Iran, remains one of the CIA's
most publicly acknowledged coups;
and, like Iran, the sequel raises dis-
turbing doubts about precisely what
was gained. For the promises of the
CIA-backed Castillo forces to insti-
tute social and democratic reforms
have not yet materialized. Half of
the arable land in the nation of four
million persons still remains in the
hands of 1,100 families. The economy
of the country is dominated by three
large American corporations, topped
June 24, 1961
by United Fruit. Workers in the
vineyards of United Fruit staged a
strike in 1955 trying to get their
wages of $1.80 a day raised to $3.
They lost. And Guatemala is still a
distressed country?so deeply dis-
tressed that the Kennedy Adminis-
tration feels it must have several
more bushels of American aid.
11In 1954 and again in 1958, the
United States almost went to war
with Communist China over the
rocky islets of Quemoy and Matsu,
squatting less than three miles off
the Chinese coast. When Red Chi-
nese artillery barrages blanketed the
islands, heavily over-populated with
Chiang Kai-shek troops, American
public opinion was conditioned to
react angrily to these aggressive ac-
tions. What hardly any Americans
realized at the time was that the
Red Chinese had ?been subjected to
considerable provocation. Allen Dul-
les' CIA had established on Formosa
an outfit known as Western Enter-
prises, Inc. This was nothing more
than a blind for CIA; and, as Stewart
Alsop later wrote in the Saturday
Evening Post, CIA agents, operating
from this cover, masterminded "com-
mando-type guerrilla raids on the
mainland . . . in battalion strength."
The title to Alsop's article told all:
"The Story Behind Quemoy: How
We Drifted Close to War."
If In 1960 and again in 1961, the
landlocked Indo-China principality
of Laos threatened the peace of the
world in a tug-of-war between East
and West. Again the American pub-
lic was confronted with glaring head-
lines picturing the menace of an on-
sweeping world communism; it was
given, at the outset at any rate?
and first impressions in international
sensations are almost always the ones
that count?practically no under-
standing of underlying issues. Yet a
Congressional committee in June,
1959, had filed a scathing report on
one of the most disgraceful of Amer-
ican foreign aid operations. The com-
mittee found that, in seven years,
we had poured more than $300 mil-
lion into Laos. This indiscriminate
aid had caused runaway inflation
and wrecked the economy of the
country. At our insistence, a 25,000-
man Army that the Laotians didn't
want or need?and one that wouldn't
fight?had been foisted on the Lao-
tian people. In a completely botched-
up program, American resident gen-
iuses spent some $1.6 million to build
a highway, built no 'highway, and
wound up giving all Southeast Asia
a vivid demonstration of the most
unlovely aspects of the American
system of bribery, graft and corrup-
tion. As if this wasn't bad enough,
little Laos fairly crawled with CIA
agents. These gentry, in late 1960,
in another of their famous coups,
overthrew the neutralist government
of Prince Souvanna Phouma and in-
stalled a militarist regime headed by
Gen. Phoumi Nosavan. The Phoumi
Army clique had just one qualifica-
tion to recommend it, but it was a
qualification dear to the heart of
CIA: it was militantly anti-Commu-
nist. Unfortunately, this attitude did
not recommend the new regime as
heartily to the Laotian people as it
did to the CIA; General Phoumi had
almost no popular support, and when
the Communist Pathet Lao forces
began to gobble up vast chunks of
the nation, there was hardly any re-
sistance. The result was inevitable.
The United States was placed in the
humiliating position of practically
begging to get the very type of neu-
tralist government its CIA had con-
spired to overthrow. A greater loss
of face in face-conscious Asia could
hardly be imagined.
Revolutions for Hire?
These are just a few of the best-
documented examples of CIA's med-
dling in the internal affairs of other
nations. There are others. There is
the case of Burma, on whom CIA
foisted unwanted thousands of
Chiang Kai-shek's so-called freedom
fighters?warriors who found it much
pleasanter to take over practically an
entire Burmese province and grow
opium than to fight the Red Chinese.
There was this spring's Algerian
Army revolt against Gen. Charles de
Gaulle, an event in which an accus-
ing French press contends the CIA
played an encouraging hand. CIA
categorically denies it, but French
officialdom, suspicious as a result of
previous CIA meddling in French
nuclear-arms program legislation, has
refrained from giving the American
agency a full coat of whitewash,
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Such activities obviously range
far beyond the bounds of legitimate
intelligence gathering. No one will
argue today, in the tensions of a
cold war that at almost any moment
might turn hot, against the need for
an expert intelligence-gathering
agency. But does it follow that we
need and must have an agency gear-
ed to the overthrow of governments
in any and all sections of the world?
Have we, who pose (most of us sin-
cerely) as a truly democratic peo-
ple, the right to send our secret
agents to determine for the people
of Iran or Guatemala or Laos what
government shall rule them? We
have never proclaimed this right;
our public officials doubtless would
express pious abhorrence at the
thought. But, in the light of past
events, we can hardly be surprised
if, to the world at large, CIA actions
speak louder than official protesta-
tions.
Nor can we escape the odium of
regimes with which the CIA has sad-
dled us. It follows as inevitably as
day the night that, if CIA conspires
to overthrow a foreign government
on the blind theory that in the war
against communism anything goes,
the American people as a whole are
burdened with responsibility for the
regime that CIA has helped to in-
stall. And the record of such regimes
in many remote corners of the world
is decidedly not pretty. In the light
of the past, it should be obvious that
the future is not to be won by prop-
ping up puppets with sticky fingers.
On this whole issue, perhaps the
most perceptive piece of writing was
produced in the aftermath of Cuba
by Walter Lippmann in a column en-
titled "To Ourselves Be True." Lipp-
-mann, fresh from recent interview' s
with Khrushchev, wrote:
"We have been forced to ask our-
selves recently how a free and open
society can compete with a totali-
tarian state. This is a crucial ques-
tion. Can our Western society sur-
vive and flourish if it remains true
to its own faith and principles? Or
must it abandon them in order to
fight fire with fire?" Lippmann's an-
swer to this last question was a ring-
ing, "No." The Cuban adventure
had failed, he wrote, because for us
it was completely out of character?
as out of character as for a cow to
try to fly or a fish to walk. The
United States, of course, must em-
ploy secret agents for its own infor-
mation. "But the United States can-
not successfully conduct large secret
conspiracies," he wrote. ". . . The
American conscience is a reality. It
will make hesitant and ineffectual,
even if it does not prevent, an un-
American policy. . . . It follows that
in the great struggle with commu-
nism, we must find our strength by
developing and applying our own
principles, not in abandoning them.
7)
Probing more deeply, Lippmann
analyzed Khrushchev's philosophy
and explained the Soviet leader's ab-
solute belief in the ultimate triumph
of communism. The Soviet Premier,
he had found, is sincerely convinced
that capitalism is rigid, static; that it
cannot change, it,, cannot meet the
needs of the people, the needs of the
future. Only communism can, and
communism will succeed capitalism
as capitalism supplanted feudalism.
This, with Khrushchev, is "absolute
dogma." Having . explained this,
Lippmann then wrote:
I venture to argue from this
analysis that the reason we are on
the defensive in so many places is
that for some ten years we have
been doing exactly what Mr. K. ex-
pects us to do. We have used money
and arms in a long, losing attempt
to stabilize native governments which,
in the name of anti-communism, are
opposed to all important social
change. This has been exactly Nvliat
Mr. K's dogma calls for that
communism should be the only al-
ternative to the status quo with its
immemorial poverty and privilege.
We cannot compete with commu-
nism, Lippmann argued, if we con-
tinue to place "the weak countries
in a dilemma where they must stand
still with us and our client rulers,
or start moving with communism."
We must offer them "a third option,
which is economic development and
social improvement without the to-
talitarian .discipline of communism."
Obviously, the philosophy of Wal-
ter Lippmann is several aeons re-
moved from that of the CIA man,
whose record shows be has just one
gauge of merit?the rigid right-wing
inflexibility of the anti-communistic
puppet regimes that CIA has install-
ed and supported. The record sug-
gests that in the CIA lexicon there
is no room for social and economic
reform; such phrases imply a pos-
sibly leftish tendency, and God for-
bid that we should ever back such!
Let's give 'em, instead, a military
dictatorship. This CIA philosophy-
in-action is the very antithesis of the
American spirit Walter Lippmann
was writing about, and to understand
how we came to be encumbered with
it, one must understand the career
and ties and outlook of one man?
Allen Welsh Dulles.
PART II ALLEN DULLES: BEGINNINGS
WHEN ALLEN DULLES was eight
years old, he wrote a thirty-one page
essay on the Boer War, an event
that was then disturbing the con-
science of the world. The last sen-
tence read: "I 'hope the Boers win
this war because the Boers are in
the right and the british in the
534
wrong." Questioned in after life about
that small "b" in "British," Dulles
explained that he wrote it that way
deliberately because he didn't like
the British at the time and hoped
that small "b" would show just what
he thought of them.
Now, sixty years later, Allen Dul-
les is -very much the man foreshad-
owed by the boy author. The interest
in foreign affairs that led him to
write a small book on the Boer War
at the age of eight (it was actually
published by a doting grandfather)
has remained with him throughout
his life. Some would say, too, that
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he retained the strong prejudices, or
the stout convictions (depending on
how you, look at it), that led him at
the age of eight to refuse to dignify
the British with a capital letter.
The future master of the CIA was
steeped in the aura of international
affairs from earliest childhood. He
was born on April 7, 1893, in Water-
town, N.Y., where his father, Allen
Macy Dulles, was a Presbyterian
minister. His mother, the former
Edith Foster, was the daughter of
General John Watson Foster, who
in 1892 had become Secretary of
State in the Republican administra-
tion of Benjamin Harrison. Years
later his mother's brother-in-law,
Robert Lansing, was to serve as Sec-
retary of State in the administration
of Woodrow Wilson.
These family ties were to be in-
fluential both in the career of Allen
Dulles and in that of his brother,
John Foster, five years his senior.
Allen graduated from Princeton with
Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1914 and
promptly went off to teach English
for a year in a missionary school at
Allahabad, India. Returning to
Princeton, he got his Master of Arts
degree, then followed in the foot-
steps of his older brother by joining
the diplomatic service ruled by his
uncle, Secretary of State Robert
Lansing. On May 16, 1916, when he
was twenty-three, he went off to
Vienna as an undersecretary in the
American embassy. Though the
young man 'himself could have had
no inkling at the time, this was where
it was all to begin;- ?here were to be
woven the first permanent strands
into the career of the future boss of
CIA.
Beginnings in Vienna
Vienna was then the capital of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, the part-
ner of Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany in
the bloody warfare of World War I.
America herself was about to become
involved in this most tragic of wars,
from which the world has yet to sal-
vage a formula for peace. In the
striped-trouser set and the top-level
society of Vienna, young Dulles, the
nephew of the American Secretary
of State, quickly made his mark; and
when America joined the Allies, he
along with other members of the
June 24, 1961
American delegation skipped across
the border to Berne in Switzerland.
It was here that Dulles got his first
taste of the secret, :high-level in-
trigue that so often determines the
?fate of empires and of peoples. As
he later told a visitor: "That's when
I learned what a valuable place
Switzerland was for information?
and when I became interested in in-
telligence work."
Dulles' interest doubtless was stim-
ulated by the heady role he played
in the very kind of top-drawer, be-
hind-the-scenes maneuvering that
was to mark the pattern of his later
life. By the beginning of 1918, the
creaky Austro-Hungarian Empire,
exhausted by war, could perceive
plainly before it the hideous specter
of imminent collapse. Naturally, its
Emperor Charles, with a ruler's pri-
mal instinct for self-preservation,
wanted to salvage as much from the
ruins as was possible. His negotiator
in this laudable endeavor was his
former tutor, Dr. Heinrich Lam-
masch. Lammasch had met the tall
and charming Allen Dulles in Vienna;
he was 'perfectly aware that the
young man was the nephew of the
American Secretary of State; and so,
with an eye to establishing rapport
on the highest possible levels, he ap-
proached Dulles and through him
made arrangements for the salvage
talks the Austrians so much desired.
The secret discussions which Allen
Dulles thus played a key role in ar-
ranging began on January 31, 1918,
in a villa in Grummlingen, hear
Berne, belonging to a director of
Krupp's. Professor George D. Her-
ron, who often carried out secret as-
signments for President Wilson,
'headed the American delegation.
Professor Lammasch and industrial-
ist Julius Meinl led the opposing bar-
gain hunters. The Austrians were
ready to promise almost anything
in the hope of preserving the Haps-
burg monarchy, and the Americans,
evidently blind to the already tar-
nished luster of the throne, deluded
themselves into the belief that they
were really being offered a prize?
that the Austrian Emperor might be
propped up as "a useful force."
Finding these nice Americans so
receptive, Lammasch was effusive in
his promises. Austria-Hungary would
be 'positively delighted to follow the
American lead in everything, espe-
cially if (does this sound familiar?)
the generous Americans would ex-
tend financial aid and help to build
"a bridge of gold" between Vienna
and Washington. Dulles' immediate
superior, Hugh Wilson, was intrigued
by the prospect, and all of the Amer-
ican delegation seems to have been
quite enthusiastic. The British, in-
formed of the proposal, were far more
skeptical and warned against trust-
ing too much in the performance of
the Hapsburgs. Events proved the
British so right. The Austrian mon-
archy collapsed, Charles abdicated,
and the net result was a fiasco. Yet
Time in 1959 could write of this
period that Allen Dulles, in the
Switzerland of 1918, "hatched the
first of the grandiose plots which
were to become his trademark."
Introduction to Germany
After Berne came the great peace
conference at Versailles. Secretary of
State Lansing, second only to Wilson
among the American negotiators, saw
to it that his two nephews had re-
served seats at the great event. John
Foster was given the task of study-
ing such financial problems as repa-
rations and war debts; Allen had an
even more fascinating job as assist-
ant head of the Department of Cur-
rent Political and Economic Corre-
spondence, a key organization that
'handled and channeled all communi-
cations to the American delegation.
Allen Dulles' immediate boss was
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Ellis Dressel, a leading American ex-
pert on German affairs and a man
who was convinced that the new
Soviet Union represented a world
menace, one that could be dealt with
effectively (shades of 1945!) only
through a partnership between Amer-
ica and a revived Germany.
This was not the prevailing view
in that simpler world of 1918 in
which hatred of militaristic Germany
was the dominating factor. It is sig-
nificant mainly because, for its day,
it was an extreme view and because
Allen Dulles was quite close to
Dressel and shared many of his be-
liefs. In December, 1918, and again
in early 1919, Allen accompanied his
superior on trips to Germany during
which they conferred with high Ger-
man industrialists. The bent of Dul-
les' own thinking at the time is indi-
cated in a memorandum that he
wrote on December 30, 1918, en-
titled: "Lithuania and Poland, the
Last Barrier between Germany and
the Bolsheviks." It evidently was
based largely on information gath-
ered from Polish and Lithuanian ref-
ugees, and it described the Bolshevik
menace in the strongest terms. Dul-
les even advocated support of Polish-
Lithuanian intervention in Russia,
writing: "The Allies should not be
deterred from a military expedition
because of their fear that it would
require hundreds of thousands of
men."
Peace concluded, Dressel was sent
to Berlin as American charge d'af-
faires in Germany, and Dulles went
with him. Here he was thrown into
contact with a stream of German
politicians, industrialists and Army
officers, many of whom were con-
cerned about the new Communist
menace and talked about the possi-
bility of raising a European army?
spearheaded by German generals, of
course?to fight the radical Bolshe-
viks. Nothing came of these plans,
and Dulles soon was transferred to
Constantinople.
In later years, the stereotyped
portrait of Allen Dulles given the
American people by virtually all of
the large media of information pic-
tures a master spy, a super-sleuth,
who confounded his rivals in inter-
national intrigue from his earliest
days. The image, contrasted with
536
Drawing by Berger
John Foster Dulles
the reality of what came out of Dul-
les' first "grandiose plot" at Berne,
seems considerably overblown, but it
cuffers even greater damage when
one studies the acid pen portrait of
Dulles in action in the Balkans left
by a veteran American intelligence
officer of the period.
Dabbling in Oil
The disenchanted agent was Rob.
ert Dunn, a veteran and hard-bitten
American newspaper man who had
received his initial training in skep-
ticism at the hands of Lincoln Stef-
fens. Dunn later spent nearly twenty
years in Naval Intelligence. He was
a lieutenant in Turkey in those first
years of the 1920s, when Allen Dul-
les appeared upon the scene. Years
later, in his book World Alive, pub-
lished by Crown in 1956, he wrote
as follows:
And now Mr. Secretary of State
Colby's young men were arriving in
the flesh to whistle at the nymphs
on our office ceiling. Among the
cooky-pushers strange to a naval
staff came one beetle-browed Boston
Brahmin, rich as a dog's insides with
copper stock. . . .
One Allen Dulles, freckled, with
toothbrush mustache, was a serious
grad of the Princeton Golf Club,
fresh from Versailles and drawing
the fatal boundaries of Czechoslova-
kia.
Dunn continues by recounting
how a London Times reporter hap-
pened to find in a second-hand book-
stall an ancient volume from which
anti-Semitic propagandists obvious-
ly had filched the ideas for the Pro-
tocols of the Elders of Zion. Neither
the Times reporter nor Dunn was
very much excited by the discovery
because, as Dunn wrote, the Proto-
cols had been well exposed by in-
ternal evidence as forgeries and hard-
ly anyone took them seriously any
more.
But now [Dunn added], while
Stamboul boiled sedition against the
Entente and Kemal chetties threat-
ened siege, Dulles decoded to "Sec-
state" academic analyses of that stale
forgery. No wonder Roosevelt, later,
was to growl at diplomatic myopia
and the braid-on-cutaway tradition.
Such, on Dunn's testimony at least
?and he soon took the first oppor-
tunity to get out of Naval Intelli-
gence because he couldn't stand
working with Dulles?was the well-
coddled young man who, after two
years in the Balkans, was called back
to Washington to head the State De-
partment's Division of Near Eastern
Affairs.
The Near East, then as now, was
a sensitive area, and for much the
same reason?oil. British interests
had had a hammerlock on the rich
preserves of the entire Mediterranean
basin and had tried to freeze out
American rivals; but now such com-
panies as Gulf and Standard Oil were
no longer to be denied. The years
during which Dulles headed the key
Near Eastern Division were, as it so
happened, the very years during
which the Rockefeller interests in
Standard Oil negotiated a toehold
in the Iraq Petroleum Co., and the
very years in which the Mellons of
Gulf were laying the groundwork for
valuable concessions in the Bahrein
Islands. Both of these developments
became public and official in 1927,
the year after Dulles left the State
Department to join the New York
law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell.
His decision was motivated pri-
marily by financial considerations.
The highest salary he had made with
State was some $8,000 a year, and
he was a married man, with a grow-
ing family. Sullivan and Cromwell
(in which older brother John Foster
was already a partner) belonged to
the legal elite of Wall Street?one
of those law firms that have made
themselves the virtual brains of big
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business, supplying indispensable ad-
-vice on almost every financial, indus-
trial and commercial deal. It ad-
vised both the Rockefellers and the
Morgans; it fairly reeked of the kind
of money that solves all a young
married man's most acute financial
problems.
In this plush atmosphere, Allen
Dulles quickly made himself at home.
He had hardly fitted himself into.
his law chair, indeed, before he be-
came involved in the kind of back-
stage masterminding that has come
to seem almost second-nature to him
ever since.
The nation in question was the
South American ?state of Colombia.
By treaty, Colombia had awarded
the Morgan and Mellon interests the
extremely rich Barco Concession, so-
called, in Notre de Santander Prov-
ince. But in 1926, just as Allen Dul-
les was quitting the State Depart-
ment, Dr. Miguel Abadia-Mendez
was elected President of Colombia.
He quickly proved to be a disturb-
ing element in the placid world of
American oil interests. He threatened
to repudiate the Barco Concession;
he aroused great popular support;
and worried American oil barons de-
cided they would ?have to act. They
turned naturally to their legal brains.
One such brain was Francis B.
Loomis, a former State Department
official; another, Allen W. Dulles.
Pressure was immediately applied on
Abadia-Mendez, but he, stubborn
man, wouldn't yield. In August, 1928,
he accused the American companies
of refusing to pay Colombia what
they owed it for the years 1923-26
and reaffirmed his intention of re-
voking the Barco Concession. This
led a secretary in the American Em-
bassy in Bogota to write Washington
that he was convinced "the Presi-
dent will not withdraw his annul-
ment of the agreement until he is
forced to do so under the pressure
of a hard and fast demand."
Colombia the Gem
Force was applied. The State De-
partment sent a sharp note to Bo-
gota. Colombia countered by threat-
ening to nationalize all her oil fields.
The United States served Colombia
with a formal ultimatum. The Mel-
ions threatened an economic boycott.
June 24, 1961
Drawing by Berger
Allen Dulles
Angry anti-American demonstrators
paraded in the streets of Bogota.
The full details of their labors
probably never will be revealed, but
the effects became obvious. In 1930,
Colombia got a new President: Dr.
Enrique Olaya Herrera, a former
Colombian ambassador to the United
States and a well-known friend of
Wall Street bankers. Soon after his
election, he visited New York and
was promised a million-dollar loan,
provided the Barco Concession was
honored. It was.
This adventure in the international
diplomacy of oil, revealing in its way,
was actually little more than a minor
vignette in the ascending careers of
Allen Dulles and his older brother,
John Foster. The interests and out-
look of the two were intertwined al-
most inseparably. They were part-
ners in the firm of Sullivan and
Cromwell; they represented the
same clients and the same interests;
their two careers moved together in
measured cadence, almost like the
steps of trained dancers. Most im-
portant among their varied interests,
and claiming a major share of their
attention, were some of Germany's
greatest- international cartels.
Three of their clients represented
the very top drawer of German in-
dustry. These were the Vereinigte
Stahlwerke (The Thyssen and Flick
trust), IG Farbenindustrie (the
great chemical trust) and the Rob-
ert Bosch concern. The legal wits of
the Dulles brothers aided all three.
At the onset of World War II, the
German masters of American Bosch
Corp. began to fear for the safety of
their holdings, and an elaborate cor-
porate cover up was arranged. The
Wallenberg brothers, Swedish bank-
ers, agreed to take over American
Bosch (with the promise to return
it after the war, of course), but good
American front names were needed
to provide camouflage. Hence it de-
veloped that in August, 1941, just
a few months before Pearl FIarbor,
John Foster Dulles became the sole
voting trustee of the majority shares.
In 1942, the U.S. Government seized
the shares, contending Dulles' trus-
teeship was merely a device to cloak
enemy interests.
Business Before Polities?
Equally close and equally signifi-
cant was the role that Allen Dulles
played in the great Schroeder inter-
national banking house. The parent
firm was German and was headed
by Baron Kurt von Schroeder. A
genuine scar-faced Prussian, the
Baron played a key role in the acces-
sion to power of Adolf Hitler. It was
in his villa at Cologne on January
7, 1933, that Hitler and von Papen
met and worked out their deal for
the Nazi seizure of power. In sub-
sequent years, von Schroeder remain-
ed close to the Nazi hierarchy. He
was made SS Gruppenfuehrer (the
equivalent of general), and he was
chairman of the secret "Frenden-
Kreis S," which collected funds from
Ruhr magnates to finance Heinrich
Himmler. Outside Germany, the
Schroeder financial empire stretched
long and powerful tentacles. In Eng-
land, it had J. H. Schroeder Ltd.; in
the United States, the Schroeder
Trust Company and the J. Henry
Schroeder Corporation. Allen Dulles
sat on the boards of directors of both.
Almost any lawyer would contend,
of course, that there is nothing wrong
with selling his talents where the
money is and that he has a perfect
right to represent any client, no mat-
ter what his pedigree. The Dulles
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brothers, however, did not just hap-
pen to represent an isolated German
client or two; they represented the
elite of German industry, firms close-
ly tied to the Nazi machinery, over
a long period of time, on the closest
terms and even in directoral capaci-
ties. Granted the complete propriety
of the representation, it would be
naive in the extreme to believe that
such multiple, close associations do
not sway political judgments.
In the long-forgotten records of
the times, there are indeed some in-
dications that this was so. In April,
1940, for example, Dr. Gerhart A.
Westrich, one of Germany's leading
lawyers, a man who had handled
some European affairs for Sullivan
and Cromwell, came to America by
way of Siberia, ostensibly as Hitler's
special emissary to consult with
American businessmen. He establish-
ed residence on a swank New York
suburban estate and before long he
was consulting, not just with Ameri-
can oil and industrial tycoons, but
!with a strange assortment of factory
workers and mechanics. The New
York Herald Tribune exposed this
suspicious activity and charged that
Westrich had made misrepresenta-
tions in applying for a driver's li-
cense. John Foster Dulles imme-
diately came to the Nazi agent's de-
fense. "I don't believe he has done
anything wrong," John Foster said.
"I knew him in the old days and I
had a high regard for his integrity."
American agents began an investiga-
tion, however, and in. two weeks Dr.
Westrich was on his way to Japan.
The Westrich affair, inconclusive
in itself, assumes greater significance
when one considers the Anglo-Amer-
ican Fellowship and the America
First Committee.
In Britain, the London branch of
the Schroeder banking firm financed
the Fellowship and concentrated on
selling the Munich brand of appease-
ment to the British people. The Fel-
lowship sought as members promi-
nent names in the Conservative Par-
ty, big businessmen, bankers. These
cminents were given the VIP treat-
ment on conducted tours of Ger-
many; they were entertained by
Hitler and Goering, and von Rib-
bentrop exercised all the wiles of
propaganda to sell them on the vir-
.538
WANTED
Baron Kurt v.SCHRODER
BORN: Aug. 24, 1889.
PARTY NUMBER: 1475 919 SS NUMBER: 276904
Former residences: K 61 n : Hollendla Villa, Rheinallee;
Bonn: Rolandseck.
Any information relative to the above mentioned subject should be forwarded immediately to:
JOINT SPECIAL FINANCIAL DETACHMENT
U. S. GROUP CONTROL COUNCIL
CONTROL COMMISSION FOR GERMANY (BRITISH ELEMENT)
DiASSELDORF.
This "Wanted" poster was distributed by British and U.S. Military
Governments immediately after the war.
tues of the Nazi system. There was
no secret about this activity, no
doubt about its aims and purposes.
And so it is intriguing to find prom-
inently listed as members of the Fel-
lowship not just the banking house
of J. H. Schroeder Ltd. itself, but the
individual names Of H. W. B.
Schroeder and H. F. and F. C.
Tiarks (see Tory M. P. by Simon
Hoxey, published in England by Vic-
tor Gollancz). F. C. Tiarks -actually
served on the Fellowship's council,
or governing body, and H. W. B.
Schroeder and the two Tiarkses sat
with Allen Dulles on the board of
the J. Henry Schroeder Banking
Corp.
On this side of the Atlantic, the
incorporation papers for the America
First Committee, devoted to persuad-
ing American's to keep out of World
War II, were drawn up in John
Foster Dulles' law office. Records of
America First subsequently showed
that John Foster, the more famous
of the two brothers during most of
their lifetimes, supported America
First financially. In February,- 1941,
his wife contributed $250, and in
May, 1941, another $200. On Novem-
ber 5, 1941, just one month before
Pearl Harbor, America First- records
listed a $500 contribution from "John
Foster Dulles." Dulles himself, when
questioned about these ties, protest-
ed: "No one who knows me and
what I have done and stood for con-
sistently over thirty-seven years of
active life could reasonably think
that I could be an isolationist or
'America Firster' in deed or spirit."
Yet the deed and the spirit seem-
ed to be implicit in a series of pub-
79/t4 -NATIO?ft
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lie speeches that John Foster Dulles
made in the months before ,Pearl
Harbor. On at least three occasions,
he ridiculed the notion that America
faced any danger from the Axis pow-
ers. These, he said, were simply "dy-
namic peoples" seeking their rightful
place in the sun. In a speech before
the Economic Club of New York in
March, 1939, he said:
There is no reason to believe that
any totalitarian states, separately or
collectively, would attempt to attack
the United States or could do it
successfully. Certainly it is well with-
in our means to make ourselves im-
mune in this respect. Only hysteria
entertains the idea that Germany,
Italy or Japan contemplates war upon
us.
There is no public record that Al-
len Dulles shared either his brother's
sanguine world outlook or interest
in America First. But equally there
?is no record, public or private, that
he didn't. All one can say is that,
throughout their careers, the two
brothers displayed a marked com-
munity of political views.
Then came Pearl Harbor.
When it did, a whole new career
opened up for Allen Dulles. During
his service in the State Department
years before, he had become friendly
with an Assistant Attorney General
named William J. (Wild Bill) Don-
ovan. When Pearl Harbor plunged
us into World War II, Donovan was
picked to head America's first super-
spy outfit, the Office of Strategic
Services. He promptly contacted Al-
len Dulles and urged him to go to
his old familiar stamping grounds in
Berne, Switzerland. There Allen was
to set up a European . espionage
headquarters. The reason Donovan
picked -him for the task was that he
wanted a man who had high con-
tacts inside Nazi Germany. On this
score, Allen Dulles certainly quali-
fied.
PART III DULLES AND THE $S
THE OFFICIALLY favored version
of Allen Dulles' exploits in Switzer-
land in World War II goes like this:
He was the very last American to
slip legally across the French border
in November, 1942, as German troops
came pouring into Vichy France in
swift reaction to the Allied invasion
of North Africa. His assignment in
Switzerland was to find out who in
Germany might be opposed to the
Hitler regime and whether they were
working actively to overthrow it. In
true master-spy tradition, he put out
his feelers and soon the fish were
6wimming into his net; soon secret
anti-Nazis were coming to him to
funnel him vital information and to
give him the most intimate details
about the plot to do away with
Hitler.
Some of this happened, but it isn't
all that happened. To understand the
significance of developments in
Berne, one needs to recall the back-
ground of the times. In January,
1943, just as Allen Dulles' intelli-
gence-gathering operation began to
get going in full swing, Churchill and
Roosevelt were meeting in Casa-
blanca for the first of those Summit
conferences that were to determine
the conduct of the fighting and, more
important, the conditions for ending
it. It was at Casablanca that the
two great Allied leaders proclaimed
the doctrine of "unconditional sur-
June 24, 1961
render" and vowed to "spare no ef-
fort to bring Germany to her knees."
Their proclamation came at a time
when a witch's brew was already
boiling inside Germany. German
military strategy long had been predi-
cated on avoiding a war on two
fronts. This had been a cardinal prin-
ciple of Hitler himself until the seem-
ingly endless succession of easy vic-
tories unbalanced his judgment and
propelled him into war with the So-
viet Union. The limitless void of Rus-
sia quickly began to engulf the Nazi
war machine, and then, on top of the
Eastern struggle, had come the Jap-
anese stroke at Pearl Harbor, a blow
that had 'surprised Hitler almost as
much as it had the American fleet.
This development had thrown the
tremendous power and resources of
America into the scales against the
Axis powers, and soon both German
generals and the more astute leaders
of the SS saw that ultimate defeat
was inevitable unless some compro-
mise political settlement could be
worked out with the Allies. A num-
ber of top-level conferences were de-
voted to this problem, both in the
camp of the military and the camp
of the SS.
In one of these secret conclaves in
August, 1942, SS-Brigadefuehrer
Walter Schellenberg, one of Heinrich
HimTriler's brightest proteges and
one of the most dangerous of Nazi
secret agents, proposed a bold solu-
tion to his boss. Himmler, the master
of the secret police for whom Kurt
von Schroeder had raised funds in
'the Ruhr, was a cautious man where
his own neck was involved; but he
was extremely ambitious, too?and
so he listened to Schellenberg. Schel-
lenberg argued that the war was lost
unless a "political solution" could be
arranged. Only Himmler, he contend-
ed, could achieve this. Only Himmler
could intrigue to spread dissension
among the Allies, to split them
apart, to achieve the needed separate
settlement with the West. Himmler
hesitated, caution warring with am-
bition. The argument between him
and Schellenberg lasted until 3:30
A.M., but Himmler finally agreed to
try Schellenberg's idea.
The prize at stake was enormous.
If he succeeded, Himmler could make
himself master of all Germany. The
ruthless SS chief was well aware, as
William L. Shirer makes clear in The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,
that 'military cliques were plotting
the assassination of Hitler. On occa-
sion Himmler made a great pretense
of activity and sent some of the more
obvious bunglers before execution
squads, but it seems certain he could
have protected the Fuehrer much
more efficiently than he did. It seems
certain also that he gave the plotting
generals loose rein, anticipating the
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situation that would develop if and
when they succeeded in blowing up
his revered leader. Himmler, with his
iron grip on the machinery of the
secret police, felt fully competent to
deal with the generals; he feared no
other rival in the Nazi party; and if,
in foreign affairs, he could achieve
Schellenberg's "political solution," he
could perpetuate the Nazi system
with himself in Hitler's shoes.
Meet "Mr. Bull"
Such appear to be the compelling
reasons that led Himmler and Schel-
lenberg to send two SS agents to seek
out Allen Dulles in Berne. The SS
agents were a Dr. Schudekopf and
Prince Maximillian Egon Hohenlohe.
The Nazi version of these negotia-
tions was contained in three docu-
ments written at the time, labeled
"Top Secret," and preserved in the
files of Schellenberg's dreaded De-
partment VI of the SS Reich Security
Office. Bob Edwards, a member of
the British Parliament, cites these
documents and quotes them fully in
a pamphlet written this year, A
Study of a Master Spy (Allen Dul-
les). In studying his account, upon
which the following section is based,
it must be borne in mind that the
documents represent an enemy ver-
sion of the talks and must therefore
be read with caution; nor should it
be forgotten that in the shadow
world of the secret agency, duplicity
is a common coin and truth most
difficult to determine.
Edwards, who fought with Loyal-
ist forces in Spain during the civil
war in the 1930s, has been general
secretary of the Chemical Workers
Union since 1947. He is a former
member of the Liverpool City Coun-
cil and has served in Parliament,
elected with Labour and Co-opera-
tive backing, since 1955. He attract-
ed considerable attention when he
began protesting in the House of
Commons about the activities of the
Krupps in Bilbao and the danger of
permitting the Germans to establish
bases in Spain. As a result, "from
absolutely reliable sources in Bonn,"
he says, he received a number of
documents, including the three deal-
ing with Dulles and the SS.
The first of these documents is
a brief covering letter, of which only
one copy was made. It is dated April
540
30, 1943, and is .from SS-Haupt;.
sturmfuehrer Ahrens to Department
VI, dealing with: "DULLES, Roose-
velt's special representative in
Switzerland." The second is a record
of conversations between Dulles, re-
ferred to throughout the report as
"Mr. Bull," and Prince Hohenlohe,
called "Herr Pauls." The conversa-
tions took place in Switzerland in
mid-February, 1943.
"Immediately on arrival," accord-
ing to the memorandum on the Dul-
les-Hohenlohe talks, "Herr Pauls"
received a call from a "Mr. Roberts,"
a Dulles aid and confidant. Roberts
was anxious to arrange an immediate
meeting with his chief, Allen Dulles.
Hohenlohe stalled until he could
check up on Dulles. From Spanish
diplomats, from the Swiss and from
representatives of some of the Nazi
satellite states in the Balkans, Ho-
henlohe learned that Dulles operated
on the very highest level, apparent-
ly with a direct pipeline into the
White House, by-passing the State
Department. This 'convinced the SS
agent. that he should, by all means,
see "Mr. Bull."
He was greeted, he reported, by
"a tall, powerfully built, sporting
type of about forty-five, with a
healthy appearance, good teeth and
a lively, unaffected and gracious
manner. Assuredly a man of civic
courage." The conversation was cor-
dial. Hohenlohe and Dulles quickly
established that they had met be-
fore, in 1916 in Vienna and in the
1920s in New York. With these pre-
liminaries out of the way the SS re-
port of the talk between "Herr
Pauls" and "Mr. Bull" continues:
Mr. Bull said . . . he was fed up
with listening all the time to out-
dated politicians, ?gr?and prej-
udiced Jews. In his view, a peace
had to be made in Europe in the
preservation of which all concerned
would have a real interest. There
must not again be a division into
victor and vanquished, that is, con-
tented and discontented; never again
must nations like Germany be driven
by want and injustice to desperate
experiments and heroism. The Ger-
man state must continue to exist as
a factor of order and progress; there
could be no question of its partition
or the separation of Austria. At the
same time, however, the might of
Prussia in the German state should
be reduced to reasonable proportions,
and the individual regions (Gau)
should be given greater independence
and a uniform measure of influence
within the framework of Greater
Germany. To the Czech question, Mr.
Bull seemed to attach little impor-
tance; at the same time he felt it
necessary to support a cordon sari-
taire against Bolshevism and pan-
Slavism through the eastward en-
largement of Poland and the preser-
vation of Rumania and a strong
Hungary.
German Hegemony
If . this view seems hardly in ac-
cord with the publicly avowed Roose-
velt-Churchill program of "uncondi-
tional surrender" and bringing "Ger-
many to her knees," the rest of the
Dulles philosophy, according to this
SS report, seems to agree even less
with the ideals for which thousands
of Allied soldiers were at that mo-
ment dying. "Herr Pauls" reported
that "Mr. Bull seemed quite to rec-
ognize" Germany's claim to indus-
trial leadership in Europe. "Of Rus-
sia he spoke with scant sympathy.
. . . Herr Pauls had the feeling that
the Americans, including in this case
Mr. Bull, would not hear of Bol-
shevism or Pan-Slavism in Central
Europe, and, unlike the British, on
no account wished to see the Rus-
sians at the Dardenelles or in the oil
areas of Rumania or Asia Minor."
Indeed, as "Herr Pauls" noted later,
The NATION
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"Mr. 'Bull" made no great secret,
though he did not speak in detail,
about "Anglo-American antago-
nisms."
The conversation now took an
abrupt turn. "Herr Pauls" made what
he described as "a very sharp thrust
on the. Jewish question" and said he
"sometimes actually felt the Ameri-
cans were only going on with the
war so as to be able to get rid of
the Jews and send them back again.
To this 'Mr. Bull' replied that in
America things had not quite got
to that point yet and that it was
in general a question whether the
Jews wanted to go back. Herr Pauls
got the impression that America in-
tended rather to send off the Jews
to Africa."
Discussing the reorganization of
postwar Europe, "Mr. Bull" appeared
to reject British ideas "in toto."
Hohenlohe reported:
He agreed more or less to a Europe
organized politically and industrially
on the basis of large territories, and
considered that a Federal Greater
Germany (similar to the United
States), with an associated Danube
Confederation, would be the best
guarantee of order and progress in
Central and Eastern Europe. He does
vot reject National Socialism in its
basic ideas and deeds so much as the
"inwardly. unbalanced, 1:71 feriority-
complex-ridden Prussian militarism."
(Italics added.)
Then Mr. Bull turned to the sub-
ject of National Socialism and the
person of Adolf Hitler and declared
that with all respect to the historical
importance of Adolf Hitler and his
work it was hardly conceivable that
the Anglo-Saxons' worked-up public
opinion Could accept Hitler as un-
challenged master of Greater Ger-
many. People had no confidence in
the durability and dependability of
agreements with him. And re-estab-
lishment of mutual confidence was
the most essential thing after the
war. Nevertheless, Herr Pauls did
not get the impression that it was
to be viewed as a dogma of American
prejudice. . . .
The conversation continued with
Hohenlohe trying to get some inkling
of Allied military intentions and with
Dulles fending off his queries. The
American agent did deliver, however,
a pointed warning. He cited Amer-
ica's "expanding production of air-
craft, which will systematically be
Lune 24, 1961
brought Into action against the Axis
powers." Then:
Mr. Bull is in close touch with the
Vatican. He himself called Herr
Pauls's attention to the importance
of this connection, for the American
Catholics also have a decisive word
to say, and before the conversation
ended he again repeated how greatly
Germany's position in America would
be strengthened if German bishops
were to plead Germany's cause here.
Even the Jews' hatred could not out-
weigh that. It had to be remembered,
after all, that it had been the Ameri-
can Catholics who had forced the
Jewish-American papers to stop their
baiting of Franco Spain.
The third top-secret Nazi docu-
ment deals with another talk be-
tween 'Mr.- Roberts," Dulles' right-
hand man, and another SS agent,
identified only as "Bauer." This took
place in Geneva on Sunday, March
21, 1943. It was a long, rambling,
inconclusive rehash of the war and
its issues, but certain strong strands
emerge in the SS report. "Bauer"
quoted Roberts as saying "he [Rob-
erts] did not like the Jews and it
was distasteful to think that they
were now able to adorn their six-
pointed star with an additional
wreath of martyrdom. . . ." The cool-
ness toward the British, the pro-
German warmth was there. "Bauer"
quoted Roberts:
America had no intention of going
to war, every twenty years and was
now aiming at a prolonged settle-
ment, in the planning of which she
wished to take a decisive part and
did not wish to leave that again to
Britain, bearing in mind the bitter
experience of the past. It would be
nothing else but regrettable if Ger-
many excluded herself from this set-
tlement, for that country deserved
every kind of admiration and meant
a great deal more to him than any
other countries.
How Much Truth?
The impact of these reports, read
eighteen years later, can only be de-
scribed as shocking. The picture that
emerges is of a Dulles perfectly will-
ing to throw the Austrians and the
Czechs (whom the Allies then were
publicly pledged to free) to the
wolves; a Dulles who "does not re-
ject National Socialism in its basic
ideas and deeds," despite the smok-
ing furnaces of the Nazi charnel
houses; a Dulles who, blaming all on
Prussian militarism, was looking
forward to seeing a strong and re-
surgent Germany dominating all of
Central Europe; a Dulles who was
concerned primarily (as the Dulles
of 1918 had been) with using Ger-
many and Poland as buffers against
Russia in the East; a Dulles who was
concerned, as one would expect the
Dulles of the 1920s to be, with keep-
ing Russia out of the oil-rich Near
East; a Dulles who seemed still to
regard the .British with a small "b,"
who looked with equanimity (as the
Dulles who had represented some of
the mightiest German corporations
might be expected to do) upon Ger-
man industrial leadership of Europe
?a Dulles who paid "respect to the
historical importance of Adolf Hitler
and his work," who thought Hitler
would have to go, but who did not
make this seem like "a dogma of
American prejudice."
One finds oneself asking the shock-
ed question: Was this the real Al-
len Dulles?
It is not easy to decide. Always,
in anything that touches upon the
double-dealing shadow world of the
secret agent, one must have more
than normal reservations. This pic-
ture of Dulles is the picture that
emerges from SS reports, but per-
haps SS agents, like a lot of other
secret agents, might have been
tempted to tell headquarters what
they knew headquarters wanted to
hear. Even if the SS reports were
completely accurate, there is no guar-
antee that Dulles actually believed
all that the reports attributed to
him. He was trying to pick the minds
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of his SS callers, as they were trying
to pick his, and in the brain-picking
duel, any agent might be likely to
cloak, to a degree at least, his real
beliefs and intentions and to pretend
to what he did not really feel. Was
this what Dulles was doing? Was he
being extremely cordial and agree-
able to Hohenlohe merely in the hope
of luring information out of him? Or
were at least some of those senti-
ments he expressed really his own?
Whatever the truth, there is no
imputation in these documents that
Allen Dulles was anything but a
patriot seeking to further what he
conceived to be the best interests of
his country. Not his motives, but
his judgments, are called into ques-
tion as one peruses these SS records.
In any case, the SS portrait must
be assessed against some check-
points?Dulles' own known back-
ground and certain future develop-
ments, all of which seem to fall into
a pattern. Dulles certainly played
the master's role in cloak-and-dagger
activities in Europe. He remained
the boss of the Berne nerve center of
intelligence throughout the war, and
he came out of the conflict with an
overpowering reputation as Ameri-
ca's master spy. Under the circum-
stances, it is curious to find that the
pattern of German rapprochement
described in Hohenlohe's report was
repeated again and again in other
secret dealings by American agents.
For a "Soft" Peace
One of these negotiations took
place in October, 1943, when Dr.
Felix Kersten, a Finnish masseur who
had won the confidence of Himmler
himself, went to Sweden to confer
with an unnamed American agent.
They discussed "the danger from the
East" and "a compromise peace."
Tentatively, they agreed on the res-
toration of Germany's 1914 bound-
aries (this would have included
France's Alsace-Lorraine), the end-
ing of the Hitler dictatorship, re-
duction of the German Army, con-
trol over German industry, and an
American pledge to forget about an
enlarged Poland. Still later, in the
spring of 1944, another American
feeler was put out by a secret agent
in Yugoslavia, again for negotiations
that would involve the possibility of
542
uniting the Western Allies with Ger-
many for the "struggle against Bol-
shevism."
These repeated overtures would
make it seem as if someone some-
where had some pretty determined
ideas about a soft German peace
and the building up of a strong post-
war Germany to combat the Soviet
menace. All of this occurred at a
time when Russia ostensibly was our
Ally and was locked in the fiercest
of death grapples with Germany. If
the Russians, who had their own spy
system, were aware of these secret
machinations? as they may well
have been, for, according to the Ger-
mans, Hungarian agents had broken
the code Dulles was using?the seem-
ingly unreasonable Russian distrust
of America would begin to seem less
unreasonable. Such are the penalties
of an intelligence operation that runs
counter to the official policy of the
nation employing it.
Whether Dulles himself had any
responsibility for the persistent pro-
German feelers is not established, but
there is one further strong indication
of his attitude toward Germany in
one of his best-publicized exploits.
Not long after his arrival in Berne,
he received a call from an emissary
connected with the military side of
the crosshatch of plots involving the
destruction of Hitler. His caller was
Hans Bernd Gisevius, German vice
consul in Zurich and a member of
the Abwehr, the secret intelligence.
Gisevius was a huge, 6-foot-4 Ger-
man who had been connected with
anti-Hitler plots in 1938 and 1939,
before the outbreak of the war. He
had close connections with some of
Germany's top military leaders, who
had long been convinced that Hitler
would have to be removed from the
scene. From Dulles, Gisevius and his
fellow plotters wanted just one as-
surance?that, if they killed Hitler,
Washington would support them in
setting up a new and presumably
anti-Nazi government.
The German conspirators did not
just ask for Washington's backing;
they held out a threat. If the West-
ern democracies refused to grant
Germany a decent peace, they warn-
ed, they would be compelled to turn
to Soviet Russia for support. This,
it would seem, was hardly the tone
of men inspired by great ideals. As
Shirer perceptively remarks: "One
marvels at these German resistance
leaders who were so insistent on get-
ting a favorable peace settlement
from the West and so hesitant in
getting rid of Hitler until they got it.
One would have thought that if they
considered Nazism to be such a
monstrous evil . . . they would have
concentrated on trying to overthrow
it regardless of how the West might
treat their new regime." No such re-
flection appears to have occurred to
Dulles. He was inclined to accept
the demands of the plotters and
urged Washington to back the bar-
gain, to promise favorable terms of
peace. In this he failed. Roosevelt in-
sisted on "unconditional surrender."
In the light of what we now know,
the wisdom of the deal proposed by
Dulles appears to be highly dubious.
One thing is certain: Himmler knew
of the plots against Hitler and de-
liberately left enough of the plotters
free to score the near-miss of the
1944 bomb explosion in Hitler's East
Prussian 'headquarters. Himmler cer-
tainly had every intention of domi-
nating the Germany that would have
survived the loss of the Fuekrer, and
there can be little doubt that, if he
had been successful, the Nazi system
would have been ?perpetuated. This,
at least, the doctrine of "uncondi-
tional surrender" avoided. The com-
plete crushing of Germany, the free-
ing of the wraiths in its concentra-
tio.n camps?total victory and its
revelations?made any apologia for
Nazism impossible.
Such an outcome could hardly
have been achieved by the Allen Dul-
les who peeps out at us from the
pages of SS reports or by the Allen
Dulles who was ready, by his own
admission, to deal with the military
plotters.
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PART IV DULLES, PEACE and the CIA
ALLEN DULLES came back from
Berne with such a reputation as a
cloak-and-dagger mastermind that
his exploits are still spoken of with
awe. He was decorated with the
American Medal of Merit, a Presi-
dential Citation, the Medal of Free-
dom, Belgium's Leopold Cross and
France's Legion of Honor. These
medals represented several triumphs
in espionage.
The greatest feats stemmed from
Dulles' contact with an employee in
the German Foreign Office who has
been identified only as "George
Wood." A secret anti-Nazi, "Wood"
risked death many times to make
contact with Dulles in Berne. At each
meeting, he delivered to the Amer-
ican agent copies of ultra-secret Ger-
man documents. The impressive to-
tal of 2,600 documents reportedly
was funneled into Dulles' hands by
"Wood." Some are said to have been
of .such importance that they vitally
affected .the course of the war.
According to the Dulles legend,
documents supplied by "Wood" gave
the first clue to German experiments
with the V-1 and V-2 rockets at the
Peenemunde testing base on the
Baltic. Dulles' information, it is as-
serted, warned the Allies in time, en-
abled them to raid Peenemunde with
their heavy bombers, and set the
rocket program back an all-important
six months.
There is no doubt that the raid on
Peenemunde did just this, but there
is Considerable doubt whether Dulles
can claim sole credit for it. Winston
Churchill, in his history of World
War II, writes that German experi-
ments with rockets at Peenemunde
were known even before the war and
that as early as the autumn of 1939
"references to long-range weapons of
various kinds began to appear in our
Intelligence reports." Edwards, the
British M.P., writes categorically:
Finally, it is a well known fact that
it was not Mr. Dulles who distin-
guished himself by discovering the
V-rockets, but unassuming Miss Con-
stance Babbington Smith, the British
expert on aerial reconnaissance pho-
June 24, 1961
tography, who on June 23, 1943, iden-
tified the launching ramps on an
aerial photograph of Peenemunde.
The British Secret Service had known
about plans for building them ever
since 1939.
Fewer questions have been raised
about some of Dulles' other exploits.
One of these dealt with a mysterious
Nazi spy by the name of "Cicero."
Edwards insists that the full story of
"Cicero" has not yet been told, but
the accepted version goes like this:
From some of the documents given
him by "Wood," Dulles learned that
the British Ambassador in Turkey,
Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, had
a valet who was actually a Nazi spy
and who used the code name of
"Cicero." The tip about "Cicero"
came to Dulles just in time to alter
the route of an American convoy and
Save it from a planned U-boat attack.
Even more important than saving
a convoy was the final achievement
credited to Dulles?the surrender of
the German Army in Italy in 1945.
Dulles arranged this through his con-
tacts in the SS, specifically through
negotiations with SS-Obergruppen-
fuelirer Karl Wolff. As a result, the
German surrender in Italy came
earlier than otherwise might have
been the case, and presumably the
lives of thousands of Allied soldiers
were saved.
The Dulles Ambivalence
With war's end, Dulles returned'
for a time to his law desk at Sullivan
and Cromwell, but with his glamor-
ous (and glamorized) World War II
masterminding behind him, it was
hardly to be expected that world
events would leave him long alone.
Both he and his older brother, John
Foster, now began to emerge on the
national scene in new and ever more
powerful roles. The build-up for both
was, and was to remain, tremendous.
The nation's largest news media
agreed with virtually a single voice
that John Foster Dulles was the in-
fallible wise man of foreign policy;
his ties to top-level German industry
under the Nazis, his links to America
First, his speeches proclaiming we
had nothing to fear from the Axis,
were all forgotten. Only some mav-
erick columnists like Drew Pearson,
I. F. Stone, Dr. Frank Kingdon and
Harold L. Ickes remembered the past.
And who were they to outshout New
York's Governor Thomas E. Dewey,
who discovered and proclaimed
(years before Eisenhower) that John
Foster Dulles was "the greatest
statesman in the world" and "the
only man in the world whom the
Russians fear"?
Then ? and Since
Under the cover of such authorita-
tive proclamations of highly disput-
able fact, the American public as a
whole completely forgot that the
Dulles brothers had been the high
legal priests and the helpful manip-
ulators of some of the greatest Ger-
man trusts; and little significance
seems to have been attached to the
curious coincidence that, in the im-
mediate postwar era, they became
the spokesmen for a compassionate
German policy. With the adaptabil-
ity of lawyers and politicians, they
seethed at times to ride both sides
of the issue, but in the final analysis
their weight appears to have been
thrown on the pro-German side.
Typical of this ambivalence was
the performance of Allen Dulles in
the days right after the guns were
silenced. In an article he wrote in
Collier's in May, 1946, he based his
lead paragraph on the events of
157 B.C., comparing Berlin with
Carthage. "Berlin remains a monu-
ment to Prussian and Nazi philoso-
phy," he wrote. He suggested it
might be a good idea to leave in the
heart of Berlin a completely devas-
tated area as a perpetual reminder
of what the Nazis and Prussian mili-
tarism had wrought. "The central
area, for example, a half mile radius
around Hitler's Chancellory," he ex-
plained, "might be set aside as a
perpetual memorial to the Nazis and
to Prussia." Berlin should no longer
be the capital of Germany; it should
be relegated to an inconsequential
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role as a mere railroad and commer-
cial center because "Berlin has lost
its birthright. . . . It has lost it be-
cause for generations this city has
housed the chief disturbers of world
peace. Hence, as the capital of Ger-
many, Berlin 'clelenda est.'"
Yet, in less than two years' time,
Allen Dulles appeared to be worry-
ing less about the horrors of Nazi
and Prussian militarism and more
about the virtues of a strong Ger-
many. When Congressional commit-
tees began debating the European
Recovery Program, former President
Herbert Hoover, John Foster Dulles
and Allen Dulles were among the
leaders in the drive to rebuild Ger-
man industry?with which the Dul-
leses, at least, had had the strongest
kind of personal and financial ties.
Describing this effort, Helen Fuller
wrote in The New Republic in Feb-
ruary, 1948:
For months, the Herter Committee
on European aid has been passing
for a high-minded, bipartisan group
of Good Samaritans. Actually, the
Herter bill that is being urged as a
substitute for ERP was mainly a
Hoover product. Chairman Christian
A. Herter (R., Mass.), a Hoover
protege, allowed Allen Dulles, inter-
national banker and friend of Hoover,
to do the drafting, called in other
like-minded Wall Streeters to help.
The author went on to describe
the "snail's pace" dismantling of
German industry abroad, the concen-
trated "strong Germany" propa-
ganda drive in the United States.
She quoted John Foster Dulles' tes-
timony, which seemingly straddled
both sides of the issue. John Foster
favored reparations and control; but
he insisted it wouldn't be economical
to duplicate Germany's steel indus-
try in France, and all Western Euro-
pean countries would be positively
"delighted to see Germany restored
and smoke pouring out of the fac-
tories of the Rubr as rapidly as pos-
sible." Acidly, Helen Fuller wrote:
"The Inter-Allied Reparations Agen-
cy could show Dulles fat official rec-
ords to the contrary. France, Bel-
gium, the Netherlands and many
others want German equipment with
which to rebuild their own devas-
tated economies."
This is the background from which
the "strong Germany" policy of to-
544
day was to emerge. Whether the Ger-
mans of today are a completely dif-
ferent race from the Germans of the
past who brought two of history's
most horrible wars upon the world,
whether the "strong Germany" pol-
icy represents the acme of wisdom
or a disastrous gamble in power poli-
tics?these are questions that only
the future can decide. What is im-
portant here is to understand some
of the pressures producing the policy.
When one examines these, one finds
the Dulleses advocating a public
policy that coincided neatly with the
dictates of what had been their long-
time private interests. The Allen
Dulles of 1918, of 1942-45, of 1947-
48, seems the same man, with the
same strong alliances to top-level
Germans regardless of their ideology;
and it is this strong pull of private
ties that becomes so disturbing when
one tries to analyze the public per-
formance of the man who was soon
to become head of CIA.
Birth of the CIA
The agency itself was essentially
the creation of President Harry S.
Truman, and it resulted almost in-
evitably from the painful lessons of
World War II. Pearl Harbor had had
a permanent and understandable ef-
fect upon the thinking of American
leaders. In the post-mortems con-
ducted into that disaster, it had be-
come apparent that ample informa-
tion was available in Washington to
have alerted Army and Navy com-
manders at the Pearl Harbor base
of their danger; but no effective use
had been made of the available in-
telligence, largely because there was
no single agency entrusted with the
accurate and speedy interpretation
of such detail. The emergencies of
war led to the hasty creation of OSS,
but OSS was obviously a stopgap
measure, not a final solution.
On October 1, 1945, immediately
after the cessation of hostilities, Tru-
man abolished OSS. The President
apparently had a personal distaste
for the nasty business of spying, and
he was, in addition, under bureau-
cratic pressures from all sides to de-
capitate OSS as quickly as possible.
The military intelligence services
wanted no such powerful competitor;
the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover long
had felt it should be the sole gather-
er and dispenser of vital information,
both at home and abroad; and the
Department of State and the Bu-
reau of the Budget both ?had the
knives out for OSS. With the disso-
lution of the agency, however, a cha-
otic situation quickly arose. Intel-
ligence reports from all the competing
intelligence-gatherers flowed in be-
wildering profusion across the Pres-
ident's desk. Frequently, no two
agencies agreed on anything; fre-
quently, their analyses and predic-
tions flatly contradicted one another.
The result was that the President
was almost as badly off from this
plethora of advice as he would have
been if he had had no advice at all,
and he was left largely to follow his
own hunches. ,
This obviously was no way to
chart strategy among the perilous
reefs of the cold war, and various
solutions were proposed. Donovan,
as early as 1944, had suggested to
Roosevelt the creation of a central
intelligence agency so powerful it
would dominate the entire field. Op-
position to such a monolithic struc-
ture was led by the Navy, which took
the position that each of the services,
with its own special requirements and
ends in view, needed its own agents.
Admiral King, in addition, foresaw
in a powerful central intelligence a
possible threat to democracy, and in
Congress there were very real fears
lest, in our hunt for intelligence, we
create a potential Gestapo.
Giant Step Forward
The result was a compromise. Tru-
man, by Executive order on January
22, 1946, set up the Central Intelli-
gence Group, the forerunner of the
present CIA. This was to be, as Ran-
som explains in his authoritative
book, primarily "a holding company
coordinating the work of existing de-
partments." It functioned under an
executive council, the National In-
telligence Authority, composed of the
Secretaries of State, War and Navy,
and the President's personal repre-
sentative. Under this setup, the prac-
tice began which continues today of
having central intelligence provide
for the President's personal eye a
daily, exclusive and unified digest
and summary of all important inter-
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national intelligence. Truman, un-
derstandably, felt that a great step
forward had been taken. "Here, at
last," he writes in his memoirs, "a
coordinated method had been work-
ed out, and a practical way had been
found for keeping the President in-
formed as to what was known and
what was going on."
The Central Intelligence Group,
however, was only a temporary ex-
pedient, as OSS had been before it;
and Congress, in ordering the semi-
unification of the defense establish-
ment in 1947, abolished CIG and
created the present Central Intelli-
gence Agency, functioning under a
National Security Council, compar-
able to the former National Intelli-
gence Agency. Before final action
was taken, the advice of Allen Dulles
was sought. This he gave in a signifi-
cant memorandum dated April 25,
1947.
Dulles made six principal recom-
mendations. CIA, he thought, should
have absolute control over its own
personnel; its chief should not have
men foisted upon him for political or
other reasons, but should have full
say in picking his own assistants. The
agency should have its own budget
and the right to supplement this by
drawing funds from the Departments
of State and National Defense. CIA
should have "exclusive jurisdiction
to carry out secret intelligence op-
erations." It should have "access to
all intelligence information relating
to foreign countries." It should be
the "recognized agency for dealing
with the central intelligence agen-
cies of other countries." And, finally,
it should have "its operations and
personnel protected by 'official se-
crets' legislation which would pro-
vide adequate penalties for breach
of security."
Principle of Separation
In his comments on the proposed
agency, Dulles made several impor-
tant observations. CIA, he felt,
should be predominantly civilian ra-
ther than military in its high com-
mand, and if a military man was ap-
pointed to head it, he should become
a civilian while he held the office. Its
administration, he felt strongly, must
have long-term continuity and pro-
fessional status; its director should
June 24, 1961
For the home of a secret agency, the new Washington headquarters of the
CIA is on the resplendent side.
be assured of long tenure, like Hoover
in the FBI, "to build up public con-
fidence, and esprit de corps in his
organization, and a high prestige."
He opposed the creation of an agency
that would become "merely a coordi-
nating agency for the military intel-
ligence services" and warned that
this "is not enough." Most signifi-
cantly, in view of the future course
of events, he recognized the dangers
inherent in wedding information to
policy.
The State Department . . . [he
wrote] will collect and process its own
information as a basis for the day-
to-day conduct of its work. The Arm-
ed Services intelligence agencies will
do likewise. But for the proper judg-
ing of the situation in any foreign
country it is important that the in-
formation should be processed by an
agency whose duty it is to weigh
facts, and to draw conclusions from
those facts, without having either the
facts or the conclusions warped by
the inevitable and even proper preju-
dices of the men whose duty it is to
determine policy and who, having
once determined policy, are too likely
to be blind to any facts which might
tend to prove the policy to be faulty.
The Central Intelligence Agency
should have nothing to do with pol-
icy. It should try to get at the hard
facts on which others must deter-
mine policy.
The case could not be put better.
With this strong, explicit statement,
virtually every expert on the sub-
ject has always been in complete
agreement. But, unfortunately, this
wasn't the way CIA was to be set
up, and this wasn't the way that in-
creasingly, under Allen Dulles him-
self in later years, it was to run.
Rumors that this cardinal prin-
ciple of intelligence?the separation
of information from the roles of pol-
icy and action?might be flouted
by the new spy outfit were current
even as it was being created. In the
hearings on the National Security
Act of 1947, Congressman Fred
Busbey sounded an anxious note. "I
wonder," he asked, "if there is any
foundation for the rumors that have
come to me to the effect that through
this Central Intelligence Agency,
they are contemplating operational
activities?"
The question wasn't answered at
the time, but the act in its final form
left the door open and "they" walked
through. The Security Act charged
CIA with five specific functions: to
advise the National Security Coun-
cil on intelligence matters related to
national security; to make recom-
mendations to the council for coordi-
nation of intelligence activities of
departments and agencies of the gov-
ernment; to correlate and evaluate
intelligence and provide for its ap-
propriate dissemination within the
government; to perform for the bene-
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fit of existing intelligence agencies
such additional services as the NSC
might determine could be more ef-
ficiently handled centrally; and fi-
nally, most important, "to perform
other functions and duties" relating
to national security intelligence as
the NSC might direct. It is this
"other functions and duties" clause
that gave CIA broad powers to enter,
not just the field of intelligence, but
the field of overt activities.
The Principle Violated
The concentration of power in the
hands of the agency, implicit in its
organization, was increased tre-
mendously by revisions of the CIA
statute made in 1949. Three major
changes placed almost dictatorial
powers in the hands of its director.
Ile was given the right to hire and
fire without regard to Civil Service
or other restraints. CIA was exempt-
ed from the provisions of any laws
that might require publication or dis-
closure of the "organization, func-
tions, names, official titles, salaries
or numbers of personnel employed"
(even the Bureau of the Budget was
directed specifically to make no re-
ports to Congress on any of these
matters; in other words, CIA be-
came a completely closed book). At
the same time, its director was given
full authority to spend any amount
on his personal voucher, without ac-
counting. "This," as Ransom com-
ments, "is truly an extraordinary
power for the head of an Executive
agency with thousands of employees
and annual expenditures in the hun-
dreds of millions of dollars."
To counterbalance these sweep-
ing powers, there were few restraints.
Congress, evidently with that haunt-
ing Gestapo specter in mind, did
specify that CIA should have no ar-
rest or subpoena powers within the
United States. The FBI's files, while
not barred to it, were not exactly
opened either; for, while other agen-
cies were required to report their in-
telligence findings to CIA, the FBI
was not. The CIA may obtain what-
ever specific information the FBI
has if it requests it in writing, but
this is quite a different affair from
being kept informed as a matter of
routine of what the FBI knows. Fi-
nally, a supposed safeguard was set
546
C.
A.
711117 ; .
,94,? F7
It 00 0
up around those all-important "other
functions and duties" the CIA was
empowered to perform. These were
to be embarked upon only at the di-
rection of the National Security
Council, presided over by the Pres-
ident himself. But, as Ransom points
out, the principal intelligence ad-
viser of the NSC is the director of
CIA. The director is "a constant par-
ticipant in NSC deliberations," and
this, to Ransom, seems "to suggest
that the scope of CIA operations is
to a large extent self-determined....
Certainly Congress has no voice as
to how and where CIA is to function,
other than prohibiting it to engage
in domestic security activities."
This is the powerful and secretive
setup?doubly powerful and insidi-
ous in its influence because it is so
secretive, so free of any effective
checkrein?that Congress created to
protect us against the possibility of
an atomic Pearl Harbor. How has it
functioned?
In the beginning, as was perhaps
inevitable with a new agency, its
performance could be described only
as decidedly spotty. Rear Admiral
Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter was the first
director of CIA and guided its des-
tiny through its first three difficult
years. The Korean War came during
this period, and with it came the
first blunders of the new agency
in its primary role, the gathering of
intelligence.
Early Failures
For some of these errors in stra-
tegic foresight, CIA was not alone
at fault; other older and better-
established arms of the intelligence
services, the military and the State
Department, were equally culpable.
The first miscalculation?and one of
the gravest in magnitude, for upon
its accuracy rested the cornerstone
of such deterrent policies as "massive
retaliation"?dealt with the date
Russia might be expected to deto-
nate an atom bomb. All intelligence
services agreed at the end of World
War II that this feat would require
ten years at least, and all were aston-
ished when the Soviets held their
first successful A-bomb test in 1949.
This shock was succeeded by one
even greater, for the Russians in Au-
gust, 1953, actually beat us to the
first workable hydrogen bomb, and
we learned some significant details
of value to ourselves by analyzing
their fallout. With these blasts, just
as important though less obvious and
less publicized than Sputnik, "mas-
sive retaliation" became an unwork-
able two-way street.
The next flub involved Korea, but
again, at the outset at least, CIA
was no more at fault than others.
All our intelligence services thought
it highly improbable that the North
Korean Communists would invade
South Korea and touch off a war?
but they did. This first wrong guess
was followed by others. One of the
great surprises was the appearance
in the Korean skies of the Russian
MIG-15, a war plane faster than any-
thing in our arsenal and one that in-
flicted crushing losses on our B-29
bombers. Yet, even after the MIG-15
appeared, we continued our fatal
underestimation of the Russians. Air
Force Intelligence was of the opin-
ion?and the other intelligence serv-
ices seemed to agree?that the Rus-
sians could turn out no more than
six MIGs a month by hand; actually,
Russian industry built 10,000 MIGs
with great rapidity.
These initial blunders of intelli-
gence in the Korean War were mat-
ters of relatively little moment com-
pared to the final one that, in the
fall of 1950, literally cost the lives
of thousands of American soldiers.
United Nations forces, having recov-
ered from their initial defeats, had
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driven the Red invaders from the
North back across the 38th Parallel,
the dividing line between North and'
South Korea. A decision had to be
made whether to continue the at-
tack across the border, conquering
all of Korea. This course was sub-
ject to one paramount danger. If
U.N. forces pressed on into North
Korea, would the Chinese Commu-
nists, with their hordes of manpower,
cnter the war?
General Douglas MacArthur was
confident that they would not. All of
our intelligence forces agreed in es-
sence on this forecast. In this, as in
the recent Cuba invasion, our vision
appears to have been blinded by our
desires, and the intelligence for
which we pay literally billions of dol-
lars was abysmally wrong, while the
advice of independent observers,
whose minds were not chained by
the demands of policy, was plainly
right. In the Korean War, as in the
case of Cuba, there were many clear
and explicit warnings that a blind
intelligence refused to heed.
One of these was delivered by Su-
preme Court Justice William 0.
Douglas. An astute world traveler,
Justice Douglas had been roaming
through Southeast Asia during the
late summer of 1950. His pulse-tak-
ings convinced him that, if our troops
crossed the 38th Parallel, the Com-
munist Chinese would enter the war
on a massive scale. He personally
warned President Truman of this. A
similar warning was sounded in
Washington by the Indian represent-
atives td the United States. But these
uncommitted minds could not be ex-
pected to be so persuasive as those
who were supposed to know.
Ransom, in his work on the CIA,
describes the sequel in these words:
Despite the continuous barrage of
propaganda warnings and the care-
fully monitored movement of troops
into Manchuria, intelligence analysts
and the policy makers failed to con-
sider seriously such threats and ap-
parently neglected to read history,
or they would have recognized the
traditional Chinese fear of an enemy
north of the narrow Korean waist.
President Truman records in his
memoirs that "On October 20 (1950),
the CIA delivered a memorandum to
me which said that they had reports
that the Chinese Communists would
move in far enough to safeguard the
Suiho electric plant and other instal-
lations along the Yalu River which
provided them with power." Actually
the Chinese had begun crossing the
Yalu four days earlier with the ap-
parent intention of throwing the
United Nations forces out of Korea.
The surprise was complete, and
the massive Chinese onslaught
threatened for a time to cut off and
obliterate the U.N. Army. Even
though MacArthur managed to res-
cue the bulk of his forces, be was
driven back in a military debacle.
Criticism of the CIA may have
had something to do with the de-
cision of Admiral Hillenkoetter to
leave his post as its director and re-
turn to naval duty. He was succeed-
ed by General Walter Bedell Smith,
who had been Eisenhower's Chief of
Staff in Europe. One of Smith's first
moves was to telephone Allen Dulles.
Dulles had served on a committee
that in 1948 had examined the CIA
setup and recommended some fifty
administrative changes. Smith had
read the report, and when he got
Dulles on the phone in his New
York law office, he spoke with char-
acteristic bluntness.
As Dulles later recalled it, Smith
growled: "Now that you've written
this damn report, it's up to you to
put it into effect."
Dulles agreed to serve with Smith.
In November, 1950, he left for Wash-
ington. He has been there ever since.
e____II>011 PART v WITH DULLES IN IRAN
"I CAME DOWN here to stay six
months, and now see what has hap-
pened," Allen Dulles remarked to a
friend some years ago, in a happier
time.
A husky six-footer, weighing 200
pounds, the boss of the CIA, with
his bristling mustache and thinning
gray hair, greatly resembles his late
brother, John Foster Dulles, but in
Washington he was generally the
much better liked of the two. He was
less of a Messiah, more relaxed, more
good-humored. A man who seems to
live with a pipe in his mouth, Allen
Dulles looks more like a kindly,
tweedy, college professor than a
mastermind of secret intelligence, and
he and his wife form one of Wash-
ington's most popular party-going
couples. They frequently, however,
June 24, 1961
do little more than put in an appear-
ance and leave early. But even these
fleeting visits cause some eyebrow
raising, for most comparable com-
manders of secret agents, less gre-
garious than Dulles, shun the cock-
tail circuit with its built-in tempta-
tions to wag the tongue. This is a
risk that Dulles assumes with ap-
parent joyousness, and this much
must be said for him: he has never
yet been accused of dropping the
wrong word into the wrong ear.
As far as personality goes, then,
(and, as everyone knows, it goes
far), Allen Dulles has been and still
is a popular man in Washington. At
sixty-eight, he is still amazingly ac-
tive. He plays a good game of dou-
bles in tennis, still shoots golf at
around ninety when he has a chance
to play. Friends describe him as a
man of "enormous patience," and to
interviewers?he presents the candid
and attractive face of a man who
modestly deprecates his own cloak-
and-dagger roles. "I've never been
shot at," he remarked once, "and I
don't know that anyone ever tried
to kidnap me."
These engaging personal attributes
have helped to carry Allen Dulles far
and probably have helped to blunt
much sharp criticism to which, other-
wise, he might have been subjected.
He became Deputy Director of CIA
under Bedell Smith in August, 1951,
and in January, 1953, with the ad-
vent of the Eisenhower administra-
tion, he was named director even as
his brother became Secretary of
State. Thus, as The New York Times
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noted at the time, the nation in a
most unusual move had placed "in
the hands of two brothers the direc-
tion of open and secrct foreign policy
designed to win the 'cold war' against
communism."
The result became evident almost
at once. Not just intelligence, but
palace coups became the work of
CIA. The intrigue that topples gov-
ernments became increasingly its
trade mark.
Dulles had hardly made himself
comfortable in the CIA director's
chair when a major event abroad
called for prompt and accurate anal-
ysis. In March, 1953, the report of
Joseph Stalin's death flashed over
the wires to a teletype in CIA head-
quarters at 2430 E Street N.W. in
Washington. The dictator's demise
raised immediate and tremendous
questions. Georgi Malenkov appear-
ed to be the No. 2 man in the Krem-
lin. He would probably succeed, for
a time at least, to Stalin's power.
What kind of ruler would he be?
Would Russia be torn by revolution,
by internal power struggles? Would
she be more, or less, warlike?
Upon the answers to these ques-
tions depended America's posture,
America's preparation to meet the
changed world situation. CIA swung
at once into a "crash" program de-
signed to provide the necessary in-
formation. The instant Dulles got
the word of Stalin's death, he began
sending out orders to CIA agents and
undercover men scattered through-
out the world. He demanded from
them information on what to expect,
morale behind the iron curtain, arms
shipments, troop movements, purges.
Before long, detailed reports began
to pour in.
Iran: a Tangled Web
While the foreign network was
supplying overseas data, Dulles and
the experts in his analysis section in
CIA headquarters sifted reports and
studied their voluminous files on
Malenkov and the men most closely
associated with him. From all of
these sources, they compiled a pic-
ture and made an expert guess. A
messenger rushed off to the White
House with this CIA estimate: Rus-
sia was not prepared for war. There
would be no revolution.
548
It was, as events were to show, a
pretty accurate assessment, and it il-
lustrates CIA's functioning at its
best in the intelligence field that
should be its primary business. But
before many months had passed, CIA
was to give another demonstration
of its prowess, this time on a differ-
ent and far more controversial level.
The development involved strate-
gically important, oil-rich Iran. The
Iranian border runs for 1,000 miles
along that of the Soviet Union, and
the natural resources of the country
include an estimated 13 per cent of
the world's oil reserves. This liquid
. treasure, the one great source of true
wealth in Iran, long had been ex-
ploited by British interests. Baron
Reuter, founder of the British news
service that still bears his name, had
received in 1872 a concession that
gave him practically a complete mo-
nopoly over Iranian industry. Inter-
national complications prevented
Reuter from doing much to exercise
the concession for several years, but
ultimately, in the early 1900s, he and
others?including J. Henry Schroe-
der & Co., the international German
banking house with which Allen Dul-
les later was to be connected?form-
ed the Industrial Bank of Persia
(later the Bank of Iran), which in
turn helped to finance the Anglo-
Iranian Oil Co. It seems worthy of
note that Frank C. Tiarks, one of
Allen Dulles' fellow directors in the
Schroeder banking enterprises, served
also as a director of Anglo-Iranian
Oil and that Sullivan and Cromwell,
the New York legal firm in which
the Dulles brothers were such prom-
inent partners, was the long-time
legal counsel of Anglo-Iranian Oil.
These old ties are stressed because
they were lying there among the
stage props in the background when
Allen Dulles, just a few short months
after he became CIA director, pop-
ped upon the international scene in
a new and decidedly spectacular role.
The immediate background was this:
In 1951, a new political force that
threatened old and dominant finan-
cial interests had arisen in Iran. This
force was Mohammed Mossadegh,
himself a wealthy landowner, but a
man driven by a strong anti-British
phobia. Mossadegh rose to power as
Premier during a time of intense na-
tionalism in Iran, and he capitalized
on the sentiment of the hour by ex-
propriating the properties of the
British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.
The company's royalty payments
had provided a major part of Iran's
foreign exchange earnings; but with
the seizure by Mossadegh, there de-
veloped a bitter international dis-
pute. The huge financial interests of
the West virtually boycotted Iranian
oil. Mossadegh tried to make deals
with smaller, independent American
companies to work the Iranian fields,
but the State Department frowned
upon such free enterprise. The inter-
national oil cartel held firm?and
Iran lost all its oil revenues.
Democracy?and Oil
The resulting financial pressures
on the Mossadegh regime were enor-
mous. The United States offset some
of these with foreign aid. In 1951,
$1.6 million was allowed for a tech-
nical rural-improvement program.
The following year, with Iran drain-
ed of all oil revenue, the American
foreign aid grant was raised to $23
million, most of which was used to
make up Iran's foreign exchange
shortages. The Iranian financial
crisis, however, remained desperate,
and on 1VIay 28, 1953, Mossadegh
sent a demand to President Eisen-
hower. Iran, he said, would have to
have more American aid, or he would
have to seek help elsewhere through
the conclusion of an economic agree-
ment and mutual defense pact with
Russia.
Foreign analysts were convinced
that Mossadegh had just one asset
he could pledge to guarantee the
safety of Russian investment?the
rich Iranian oil fields and the re-
finery at Abadan, the world's largest,
which Mossadegh had seized from
Anglo-Iranian. It is clear that Anglo-
Iranian had billion-dollar prop-
erty interests at stake, but this un-
derlying factor has hardly ever been
mentioned in discussing the loftier
picture ? the stake of democracy:
If Russia were to get Iran's oil,
the Western democracies' position
throughout the Middle East would
be weakened, Soviet prestige would
be greatly enhanced. This, naturally,
was unthinkable, and so the Eisen-
hower administration, already great-
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ly under the influence of the Dulles
brothers, decided on a startling new
gamble in international intrigue.
The President stalled Mossadegh
for a month, then turned him down
with an emphatic "No." Immediate-
ly afterwards, things began to hap-
pen. The step-by-step action was de-
tailed by Richard and Gladys
Harkness in a three-part Saturday
Evening Post series, "The Mysterious
Doings of CIA," which appeared in
the late fall of 1954. The series bears
intrinsic evidence on almost every
page of having been written with the
full, if secret, cooperation of CIA,
and so its account of the coup in
Iran is as authoritative as one can
get. Obviously, this was one of those
occasions when Allen Dulles, in tri-
umph, permitted himself an audible
public chuckle?and a discreet leak.
Enter the CIA
This, then, according to the Hark-
nesses, is what happened:
On August 10, 1953, Allen. Dulles
packed his bags and flew to Europe,,
ostensibly to join his wife for a quiet
vacation in the Swiss Alps. His de-
parture coincided almost precisely
with mounting developments in the
Iranian pressure-cooker. Mossadegh
was threatening to run Shah Mo-
hammed Riza Pahlevi right off the
throne and out of the country. The
Premier had allied himself with the
Communist Tudeh Party in Teheran
and had acquired almost dictatorial
powers. He was at this very moment
conferring with a Russian diplomatic-
economic mission. These conferences
were a clear sign that the hour of
supreme decision approached; yet,
strangely enough, Loy Henderson,
the American Ambassador to Iran,
seemed to feel free to leave his vital
post for a short "holiday" in the
company of Allen Dulles in Switzer-
land. Another visitor who seemed to
be drawn as if by a magnet to Dul-
les' picturesque hostelry in the Alps
at precisely this critical juncture was
Princess Ashraf, the attractive and
strong-willed brunette twin sister of
the Shah, who, according to the
Harknesses, "had had a stormy ses-
sion with her brother in his pink-
marble palace, because of his vacil-
lation in facing up to Mossadegh."
The Alpine rendezvous of master
June 24, 1961
secret agent, diplomat and Iranian
princess would seem to indicate that
perhaps wires were being pulled. This
suspicion was reinforced when a
fourth mysterious actor began to
stroll slowly across the international
stage. This was Brig. Gen. H. Nor-
man Schwarzkopf, best known for
the not entirely brilliant conduct of
the Lindbergh kidnaping case in
1932 when he had been head of New
Jersey State Police. Schwarzkopf now
began to move leisurely around the
Middle East, stopping off in Pakis-
tan, Syria, Lebanon?and Iran. He
was an old hand in Iran, having
served there from 1942 through 1948
as high-level adviser in the reorgani-
zation of the Shah's national police
force. He was, he said, just dropping
by "to see old friends again." Mossa-
degh and the Russian propaganda
press distrusted this pat explanation
and began to rail nervously at his
presence; but Schwarzkopf, undeter-
red, visited with the Shah and had
some intimate talks with his former
colleague on the national police force,
Maj. Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi. Almost
at once, like cause and effect, a new
and tougher attitude toward Mossa-
degh became apparent.
Triumph for the West
On Thursday, August 13, the Shah
acted. By royal decree he deposed
Mossadegh as Premier and installed
in his stead General Zahedi. A colonel
of the Imperial Guards was sent to
serve the notice on Mossadegh, but
Mossadegh wasn't ready to quit. He
massed tanks, jeeps and troops
around his residence, and at mid-
night of Saturday, August 15, he
seized the colonel of the Imperial
Guards, clapped him in jail and pro-
claimed that the "revolt" had been
crushed. The Shah and his Queen,
taking Mossadegh at his word,
promptly fled to Rome by way of
Iraq.
Some hardier souls, including
Schwarzkopf, remained upon the
Iranian scene. The manipulations in
which they now engaged never have
been spelled out in detail, but it is
understood that CIA cash flowed in
copious quantities. The amount re-
liably reported is $19 million?and
$19 million can influence a lot of
men. What happened next in Iran
would seem like proof of that
theorem.
On Wednesday, August 19, with
the Army standing close guard around
the uneasy capital [the Harknesses
wrote], a grotesque procession made
its way along the street leading to
the heart of Teheran. There were
tumblers turning handsprings, weight-
lifters twirling iron bars and wrestlers
flexing their biceps. As spectators
grew in number, the bizarre assort-
ment of performers began shouting
pro-Shah slogans in unison. The crowd
took up the chant and there, after
one precarious moment, the balance
of psychology swung against Mossa-
degh.
Upon signal, it seemed, Army forces
on the Shah's side began an attack.
The fighting lasted a bitter nine hours.
By nightfall, following American-style
military strategy and logistics, loyalist
troops drove Mossadegh's elements
into a tight cordon around the Pre-
mier's palace. They surrendered, and
Mossadegh was captured as he lay
weeping in his bed, clad in striped
silk pajamas. In Rome, a bewildered
young Shah prepared to fly home and
install Zahedi as Premier, and to give
Iran a pro-Western regime.
Triumph for our side! In the Hark-
ness account, there is of course no
hint Of the years-long legal tie be-
tween the Dulles brothers and Anglo-.
Iranian Oil, nor is it emphasized that
one of the major accomplishments of
the coup in Iran was to save the bil-
lion-dollar scalp of Anglo-Iranian.
The picture presented, obviously the
CIA's flattering version of itself, was
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that the overthrow of Mossadegli
had been accomplished "by the
Iranians themselves" and that Iran
was the showcase of a new method
by which CIA would develop and
nurture "freedom legions among cap-
tive or threatened people who stand
ready to take personal risks for their
own liberty."
This sounds fine if one doesn't
analyze it too closely, but the hard
sequel of events, unfortunately, has
refused to reflect the lofty image. In
the harsh afterlight, it has become
abundantly apparent that all CIA
accomplished in Iran was an old-
style palace coup, with money in
bountiful quantities and skillful
press agentry pulling emotional
heartstrings at a pivotal moment and
achieving a much-desired end. But
did this represent a great triumph
for Western democracy in the ideo-
logical battle against communism?
True, a new regime, oriented toward
"our side," had been installed. But
was this new regime motivated by
ally loftier concept than the idea that
what was good for Anglo-Iranian
Oil was good for Western democracy?
Events seem to say that it was not.
$5 Million a Month
Much of the sorry story is told in
the 1957 report of the Committee on
Government Operations of the House
of Representatives. The report makes
clear that in August, 1953, immedi-
ately after the overthrow of Mossa-
degh, a delighted United States be-
gan to pour mutual security funds
into Iran at an average rate of $5
million a month and that this went
on for three years "to make up def-
icits in Iran's government budget."
The committee found that, in five
years from 1951 to 1956, the United
States had donated a quarter of a
billion dollars to Iran and that (the
committee did not phrase it in pre-
cisely these terms, of course) all we
had accomplished was to furnish the
entire Middle East with a king-size
example of graft and corruption. The
committee was convinced that Iran,
with some $300 million a year fat-
tening its treasury from restored oil
revenues, should have been fully ca-
pable of financing itself and provid-
ing for its own national development
without any U.S. aid. Yet, despite
550
its heavy oil revenues, despite the
hundreds of millions of dollars in
American aid, Iran's " CIA-installed
government was so corrupt that the
national treasury constantly teeter-
ed on the brink of bankruptcy and
reported ever-mounting deficits.
No Triumph for the People
Here are some of the exact words
of the House committee. The quar-
ter-billion dollars in American aid
was administered in such "a loose,
slipshod, and unbusinesslike manner"
that "it is now impossible?with any
accuracy?to tell what became of
these fu-nds." Amounts requested for
American aid to Iran "seem to have
been picked out of the air." The
American aid mission to Iran was
concerned only with spending as fast
as possible regardless of what the
money was spent for, and members
who objected to this "were either
disciplined or labeled as incompe-
tent." Improkrement projects were so
riddled with graft and corruption
that, after four years, most still were
not finished. A major undertaking
was the construction of a multi-mil-
lion-dollar dam on the Karadj River,
but this project "has resulted in vir-
tually nothing but the relocation, at
a cost to the United States Govern-
ment of nearly $3 million, of a road
around the proposed site." Not only
had no construction been started on
the dam, there wasn't even a con-
tract!
The effect of this type of Ameri-
can aid has been to make a bad situa-
tion worse. It is a hard thing to say,
but true, that the American taxpay-
ers have been milked of hundreds of
millions of dollars only to provide
the Communist system, on a gold-
plated platter, with a priceless propa-
ganda item. Our hundreds of millions
of dollars have done virtually noth-
ing for the people of Iran; they have
enriched only the grafters and widen-
ed the gulf between the very rich
and the abysmally poor. The Con-
gressional committee in 1957 found
literacy so low in Iran that, even in
the cities, some estimates placed it
at not more than 7 per cent. Time,
magazine, certainly not one of the
world's ultra-liberal organs, report-
ed in 1960 that some families were
still living on the produce of a single
walnut tree, that tiny children work-
ed all day at the looms of rug fac-
tories for 20 cents or less. Time, up-
dating its report in May, 1961, found
that Iran, under the pressure of the
flood of American dollars, was suf-
fering from runaway inflation. Prices
were jumping at the rate of 10 per
cent a year; a pound of meat in
Teheran cost $1.15; wages remained
so low that teachers were earning
only $25 a month. The economy of
the country was being strained to
maintain a 200,000-man Army, larger
than the armies of either Western
Germany or Japan. Elections had
been so blatantly rigged that the
Shah had been forced to cancel two
of them and fire three key men in his
immediate entourage. One of these
was the chief of the secret police,
who had built himself an ostenta-
tious mansion near the Shah's own
palace; another was General Ali Kia,
chief of army intelligence, who, said
Time, had "built a block of luxury
apartments that Teheranis had taken
to calling the Where-Did-You-Get-
It-From Building."
This is what we have bought in
Iran with our millions. The result
we reap by such extravaganzas be-
came clear this past May when 5,000
teachers rioted in the streets of Te-
heran in front of the Parliament
building. A police major lost his
head, fired his revolver and killed
one teacher, wounded three others.
Teachers and students then fought
bloody band-to-hand skirmishes with
police, paraded the dead teacher's
coffin through the streets and forced
the resignation of the Premier. The
Shah hastily installed AN Amini, a
wealthy, French-educated landowner
with liberal political views. Amini,
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concededly the last hope of avoiding
revolution, took over a nation so
badly looted that its government
debt, only $10 million in 1955, had
soared to $500 million. He took swift
stock of the situation and reported:
"There is no life left in the economic
and financial agencies of the govern-
ment." To striking teachers, he con-
fessed: "The treasury is empty, and
the nation faces a crisis?I dare not
speak more openly lest I create a
panic."
Yet some persons in Iran still were
not worried. The commanders of its
200,000-man Army and its massive
police force felt fully capable of
handling anything and everything.
Senator Hubert Humphrey (D.,
Minn.) reported with a sense of
shock: "Do you know what the head
of the Iranian Army told one of our
people? He said the Army was in
good shape, thanks to U.S. aid ? it
was now capable of coping with the
civilian population. That Army isn't
going to fight the Russians. It's plan-
ning to fight the Iranian people."
Such, in the final analysis, is what
the CIA and the corrupt Iranian re-
gime that followed in its coup-mak-
ing footsteps have wrought in Iran.
No demonstration of "decadent cap-
italism" could be more apt, more pat
for Khrushchev's propaganda pur-
poses. Here, in most graphic form,
is a demonstration of the manner in
which, as Walter Lippmann found,
we have been doing exactly what
Khrushchev expects us to do; we
have been propping up dictatorial,
corrupt, right-wing regimes?and so
we have been proving his case for
him. It should be obvious that the
American ideal, if it is ever to be
persuasive, if it is ever to have va-
lidity, must find loftier expression
than the gun of the secret police chief
clasped in fingers stained by many a
dirty buck. It must concern itself
with people, not with rulers; it must
help the broad mass of the people;
it must offer both freedom and hope,
not oil profits and graft.
PART VI JUST A LITTLE REVOLUTION
IN MARCH, 1954, Allen Dulles was
interviewed by U.S. News and World
Report on the cloak-and-dagger ac-
tivities of CIA behind the iron cur-
tain. The question-and-answer se-
quence went like this:
Q. It is often reported in the .papers
that you send in provocateurs to stir
up revolution in the satellite coun-
tries. What truth is there in that?
Dulles: I only wish we had ac-
complished all that the Soviets at-
tribute to us. . . .
Q. Is that part of your function?.
to stir up revolution in these coun-
tries?
Dulles: We would be foolish if we
did not cooperate with our friends
abroad to help them do everything
they can to expose and counter this
Communist subversive movement.
Tacitly, then, Dulles acknowledged
that the CIA was fomenting violence
and revolution behind the iron cur-
tain, but he was putting it in the
gentlest possible way and on the most
acceptable possible plane. We were
simply "cooperating" with our
friends; we were simply helping them
"to expose and counter this Com-
munist subversive movement." It all
seemed very mild and very logical
the way Dulles put it, but revolution
is never mild, nor is killing an appeal
to logic. A little reflection about Dul-
les' statement leads inevitably to
serious questions. Is it all really so
June 24, 1961
simple? Just what is involved in
stirring uP a little revolution behind
the iron curtain? Do such brush fires
simply flare and burn themselves out,
causing the Russians some well-de-
served embarrassment, or do they in
a very direct way involve the pres-
tige and policy of the United States?
The answer seems clear and un-
equivocal to anyone who will study
the record. It has been given in a
number of places?in East Germany,
in Poland, in Hungary, in the Mid-
dle East. Behind, many of the erup-
tions that in recent years have
shaken the peace of an uncertain
world, close examination will reveal
the fine, scheming hand of CIA. And
it will reveal, too, that CIA time and
again has stirred up the brush fires
without any regard for the long-
range consequences.
East Germany, 1953
Take, for example, the East Ger-
man uprising of 1953. On June 17,
just two months before Allen Dulles'
startling coup in Iran, a series of
anti-Communist riots broke out in
the Soviet-dominated East Zone. In
America, this was taken as an en-
couraging sign that all was not rosy
in the communistic millennium and
that perhaps the East Germans
might throw off the yoke of tyranny.
Such optimism was quickly dissi-
pated. Though some of the anti-
Communists were well-armed, the
revolt was quickly put ?down; and
though great numbers of refugees
fled across the border into West Ger-
many, not all of the leaders of the
rebellion were so lucky. The Eastern
SSD (State Security Service) began
a reprisal campaign that lasted for
months and resulted in the seizure
of hundreds of Soviet-hating Ger-
mans.
The significance of this counter
drive became apparent on November
17, 1953, when The New York Times
reported that the East German Gov-
ernment had accused scores of its
prisoners with being Nazi provoca-
teurs. The East Germans claimed
(one must always regard these Com-
munist claims with caution, of course,
but then in the secret war of CIA
one has no other information on
which to judge) that these Western
agents ?had been caught with plans
to blast railroad bridges and stations,
burn factories and government build-
ings and assassinate officials. Faked
food stamps and counterfeit bank
drafts designed to upset food ration-
ing and bank credits were found in
some of the prisoners' pockets, the
East Germans asserted.
The Communists in the East Zone
were incensed by these discoveries,
but then presumably New Yorkers
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would be a little annoyed if a squad
of Russian saboteurs should be
caught with plans to blow up the
Croton reservoir. In any event, a
number of the accused agents pro-
vocateurs were brought to trial. Tes-
timony showed, the East Germans
said, that these agents belonged to
a mysterious organization headed by
Reinhold Gehlen, a former Lieuten-
ant General in command of counter-
intelligence on the Eastern front un-
der Hitler. The East German trials
resulted in the execution of four of
these Gehlen agents and life impris-
onment for eleven others, but not
even these harsh sentences stirred
up as much controversy as one other
charge the East Germans made. They
contended that, on some of the
agents, they had found lists of names
of prominent West German anti-
Nazis who had been marked for ulti-
mate liquidation.
Though it would seem extremely
illogical for East German saboteurs
to be carrying such lists around in
their pockets, there can be no ques-
tion that the East Germans, in jab-
bing an accusing finger at the Rein-
hold Gehlen spy organization, touch-
ed a sensitive nerve. Gehlen at the
time was a mystery figure, virtually
unknown to the 48 million citizens
of the Bonn Republic; unknown to
American Congressmen because his
name had never been mentioned on
the floor of Congress. Yet Gehlen
and the private cloak-and-dagger
army he headed were indisputably
real. In fact, Gehlen was America's
No. 1 spy in Europe, he had literal-
ly thousands of agents on his payroll,
and he was being financed to the
tune of between $5 million and $6
million a year with CIA-channeled
funds.
Daniel De Luce, one of the Asso-
ciated Press's veteran foreign corre-
spondents, in an article written some
months after the East German reve-
lations, lifted a corner of the veil of
secrecy that for so long had shrouded
Gehlen. Gehlen's organization, De
Luce said, included the elite of the
old German Army's counterintelli-
gence corps and agents of diverse
nationalities scattered through East-
ern Europe and the Balkans. Gehlen
operated .on the old secret-service
principle of never letting one agent
:552
know what another was doing, of
tying all the threads together at just
one place?the top. His thread-tying
headquarters were located on Ameri-
can-requisitioned property near Mu-
nich in Bavaria, and were sealed
off with barbed wire and guarded
by armed state police like an atomic
in
"On his secret reports which eval-
uate the findings of his costly anti-
Soviet espionage program operating
as far beyond the Iron Curtain as
Siberia, much of American defense
planning admittedly depends today,"
De Luce wrote.
The picture that emerges borders
on the fantastic. American knowl-
edge and security were being made
dependent, to a vital degree, on men
who were our recent enemies?men
who had fought to the last gasp for
a system that we had believed rep-
resented one of history's most mon-
strous evils. It is certainly question-
able enough to have American
foreign policy tugged and hauled all
over the map by the super-secret
activities of CIA cloak-and-dagger
boys, operating free Of any effective
restraint or control; but clearly, in
its relations with Gehlen, CIA had
taken one further gigantic stride in-
to the realm of dubiousness. Without
the knowledge or consent of the
American people or their representa-
tives, it had placed some $6 million
worth of annual reliance in the good
faith of a recent enemy, command-
ing an unofficial army of foreign
agents (many of them apparently
former Nazis at that), and it had
delegated to this weird, recent-enemy
organization major responsibility for
its own thinking, knowledge and
safety. The secret pro-German policy,
which seems to have had many pow-
erful advocates in the highest Amer-
ican circles even during the horrors
of World War II, had indeed brought
us full-circle.
Plots?and More Plots
Yet the American public as a
whole remained almost completely
unaware. Few major newspapers (the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch was an ex-
ception) paid any attention to De
Luce's revealing dispatch from Ger-
many. John Foster Dulles' much-
trumpeted policy that we intended
to liberate the captive peoples ?
advanced, as events were to show,
without giving the most elementary
consideration to how this desirable
end was to be achieved short of all-
out American aid and another world
war?rolled like an avalanche down-
hill to fresh international fiascoes
that served only to increase interna-
tional tensions. Time and again, with
CIA in the middle of the plotting,
aided frequently by its Gehlen pro-
teges, futile revolts and short-sighted
intervention marked the consistently.
reckless course of American foreign
policy.
Here, in capsule form, are some of
the well-remembered highlights of
the disastrous fifties that saw the
whittling away, not just of American
power, but of America's moral pres-
tige:
IT The overthrow of King Farouk
in Egypt in 1952. Communists inside
Egypt reportedly were making im-
mense capital from the antics of the
lascivious regime of the pudgy mon-
arch whose principal interest in life
appeared to be belly dancers. An
Army revolt was organized with
Generals Mohammed Naguib and
Gamal Abdel Nasser in the leading
roles. The Harknesses, in their Sat-
urday Evening Post revelations,
straight from the horse's mouth,
stated flatly: "Skilled American po-
litical operatives were available to
advise leaders of a pro-American
Egyptian military junta when the
time seemed ripe for a palace coup,
and they indicated how such devi-
ous matters were best arranged." It
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was another Signal triumph for "our
side." The coup came off on schedule,
Farouk fled ? and then we got Ga-
mal Abdel Nasser.
The Egyptian strong man whom
we had helped to install apparently
long remained a favorite of CIA ?
such a favorite, indeed, that in Sep-
tember, 1955, a CIA agent took it
upon himself to advise Nasser to
ignore a forthcoming State Depart-
ment note. The note was an attempt
to limit Nasser's purchase of arms
from Communist Czechoslovakia to
a one-shot deal. It was considered
important enough for Washington to
send George Allen, then Assistant
Secretary of State for Middle East
Affairs, on a special trip to Cairo to
deliver the message in person. The
CIA evidently was disturbed by this
attempt to pressure Nasser, and be-
fore Allen arrived, it effectively cut
the ground out from under him by
advising Nasser he could safely ignore
the warning ? a sequence that leads
inevitably to the question: Who was
running foreign policy, the State De-
partment or the CIA?
We Knew All Along
IT The Suez crisis in October, 1956.
This might be described as the final
flowering of our earlier intrigues with
Nasser, and even the most ch'aritable
view must produce a blush or two at
what can only be described as Amer-
ican duplicity. First, of course, we
precipitated the crisis by offering
Nasser heavy financial aid and then
practically slapping his face by re-
neging on the offer. This touched off
a chain reaction whose consequences
would appear not to have been fore-
seen. Nasser seized the 'Suez Canal.
And the British, French and Israelis
undertook the invasion of Egypt.
When this happened, we held up
our hands in righteous horror at the
warlike action of our Allies and pro-
tested that we had been taken com-
pletely by surprise. John Foster Dul-
les testified: "We had no advance in-
formation of any kind [regarding the
Israeli attack on Egypt]. The Brit-
ish-French participation also came
as a complete surprise to us." This
simply was not true. Two years later,
in -1958, the CIA leaked to Don
Whitehead, of the New York Herald
Tribune, a version so detailed that
it leaves little doubt that we knew
lune 24, 1901
? and knew precisely ? just what
was going to happen before it hap-
pened. According to CIA, American
intelligence agents in Israel had noted
and reported the mobilization of the
Israeli Army; agents on Cyprus had
watched and reported British and
French activity in loading combat
craft and marshaling war planes and
paratroopers; they had even reported
that, the French had given combat
briefings to newspaper correspond-
ents attached to their invasion units.
Twenty-four hours before the attack,
the White House had a specific warn-
ing from CIA that the Israelis would
invade Egypt, that the French and
British Would attack Suez.
Bearing all this in mind, let's listen
to the insider's view contained in the
letter written to The Nation by an
intelligence agent in 1957, a HI year
before Whitehead's disclosures:
I know that . . . Intelligence Serv-
ice received information through vari-
ous channels about the planned ac-
tion. This information was duly
transmitted to the State Department.
Mr. [John Foster] Dulles knew the
day and hour of the attack. Under
these circumstances it was quite ob-
vious that we should have dissuaded
our allies from such a rash step. . . .
Those in the know were surprised
by the behavior of our Secretary of
State at the time. Mr. Dulles' reply
to a comment from a State Depart-
ment official was that in our posi-
tion, the best thing to do is to shut
our eyes and see nothing. We shall
win in any case. Both the defeat of
the Arabs as well as the loss of pres-
tige by the United Kingdom and
France will benefit us. The moral
prestige of the West in Arab coun-
tries has suffered untold harm by the
attack on Egypt. The case speaks for
itself.
?The invasion of Lebanon in 1958.
If the CIA was not caught napping
in the Suez crisis but was made to
look bad for devious reasons of policy,
there seems to be no question that
it had not the slightest forewarning
of the military coup by a group of
pro-Nasser Army officers in Iraq on
July 14, 1958. King Faisal and
Premier Nuri es-Said, pro-Western
rulers of Iraq, were slain. Simultane-
ously, riots and insurrection shook
the pro-Western government of
Premier Chamoun in Lebanon. News
of these events reached Allen Dulles
about dawn on July 14. He promptly
went into action. He got his brother,
Secretary of State John Foster, out
of bed, and he summoned the chair-
man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to an
emergency conference. With both
Dulles brothers urging drastic action,
the panic button was pressed loud
and long. The American Sixth Fleet
was ordered to Lebanon; marines
went charging ashore in a full-scale
invasion. For a moment, world peace
seemed to hang in the balance. Yet,
in the calm of retrospect, this "crisis"
action seemed to have almost farci-
cal aspects. Riots, a little gunfire, the
coups that overthrow governments
are no particular novelty to the
Lebanese. They seemed to have had
no iinderstanding, those simple folk,
that the, fate of the entire cold war
depended upon events in Lebanon.
Indeed, they regarded the landing of
the marines more as an amusing and
colorful sideshow; it was an event
that turned an ordinary day into a
fete day, and crowds lined the harbor
front to watch the fun. Needless to
say, a powerful nation does not look
well in the robes of a circus clown,
and it was freely predicted at the
time that the hasty and ill-advised
invasion would boomerang against
American prestige. It did just that.
Afro-Asian countries joined the So-
viet Union in backing a United Na-
tions resolution demanding that
American troops get out of Lebanon;
on October 31, the marines left?and
Chamoun's government, which they
had been sent to prop up, promptly
fell. Chamoun remains bitter at the
Americans, who, he feels, went back
on promises they had made to him
to support his regime at whatever
cost. In the end, at great risk, we had
pleased nobody; we had won our-
selves another loss.
CIA on the Danube
11The Hungarian revolt of 1956.
The CIA's role in promoting and en-
couraging this abortive and tragic
uprising, which we were not prepared
to support after we had instigated it,
remains shrouded in top-level, cloak-
and-dagger secrecy. It seems well
established, however, that arms were
smuggled into both Poland and Hun-
gary, either by the CIA or its Gehlen
collaborators. When the Polish and
Hungarian rebellions broke out in
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October, 1956, both American offi-
cial and public opinion appeared to
be caught off base, and there were
charges that CIA had been sleeping
at the switch again. Not so, the
agency said in self-defense. It had
accurately predicted the outbreaks
in both Poland and Hungary; its only
error, a minor one, had consisted in
estimating that the Polish revolt
would come first. More important
than the unresolved issues of arms-
smuggling and CIA alertness is still
another unresolved matter?the re-
sponsibility of CIA in whipping up
the Hungarian rebels to fanatic self-
sacrifice in a hopeless cause. Al-
though the fact cannot, of course, be
verified, it has been charged that
Radio Free Europe works closely with
CIA. RFE's propaganda broadcasts
during the bloody Hungarian revolt
prolonged the struggle after it was
hopeless and led to needless sacrifice,
according to Leslie Bain, Budapest
correspondent for The Reporter.
"America will not fail you . .. Amer-
ica will not fail you," he quoted the
propaganda radio as repeating over
and over, after it had become appar-
ent to all the rest of the world that
America would. The ruthless sup-
pression of the Hungarian revolt by
Soviet tanks and troops was certain-
ly a grim chapter that served to
strip off before the eyes of the world
the mask of Russian false preten-
sions. But let's not forget that Amer-
ican luster was tarnished, too. We
had been exposed as a nation that
talked big, but that had no plan; we
had been exposed as a nation that
had let those who trusted in our
words go down to death, prison and
disillusionment.
Classic Meddling
Such is the record of some of the
CIA's more classic meddling in the
internal affairs of Europe and the
Middle East. It shows that even the
agency's successes (as in the case of
Farouk) have a tendency to turn
into long-run disasters, and it indi-
cates strongly that America is hard-
ly qualified, by anti-tommunistic en-
thusiasm alone, to run the internal
affairs of other nations all over the
world. The record in these cases, such
as it is, has been written; but there
remains in CIA's behind-the-scenes
masterminding of European affairs
5_5_4
one large item of unfinished business
that may be more important than all
the rest?its long-term, enduring re-
lationship with the Gehlen secret
service and the possible influence of
that relationship in coloring our of-
ficial attitudes toward such vital is-
sues as Berlin and the equipment of
the German Army with nuclear arms.
Clearly these are matters on which
the peace of the world ultimately
may hinge, and so it seems pertinent
to inquire: Just who is this man
Reinhold Gehlen to whom, largely
without the knowledge of the Amer-
ican people or the American Con-
gress, we so swiftly and so Complete-
ly entrusted our safety after the end
of World War II?
Herr Reinhold Gehlen
Gehlen is a product of the German
Rcichswehr, a life-long professional
soldier and, according to official as-
surances at least, no Nazi. A smallish,
thin-faced man, he has a high fore-
head, receding fair hair aud light blue
eyes. The son of a publisher, he is
quiet and scholarly in manner, but
he speaks in the terse, clipped tones
of a man long accustomed to com-
mand. He joined the Reich,sweh,r in
1920; he fought in the invasions of
Poland and France; and when the
Russian war broke out, he was trans-
ferred to the Eastern Front where, in
April, 1942, he was selected to head
the German Army's key new intel-
ligence section.
He quickly became convinced that
the Soviet Union could not be over-
whelmed by military means alone,
and he was, De Luce says, "one of
the lost voices that urged the Nazi
regime . . . to win over the Russian
people by generosity while rooting
out the Communist system." Instead,
some two million Soviet war prison-
ers were reduced to sub-human mis-
ery in Nazi extermination camps.
The official recital of Gehlen's vir-
tues continues by stressing the
pessimistic accuracy with which he
forecast events on the Eastern Front.
His grim view of the war, it is said,
almost earned him execution as a
dangerous defeatist, but recurrent
disasters so consistently fulfilled his
dire predictions that he wound up
being promoted to Lieutenant Gen-
eral at the age of forty-three. .
With the collapse of the Hitler re-
gime, Gehlen saw to it that he got
captured by the Americans. Here
there appears to be a significant gap
in the story. There is no hint of the
nature of the contacts or negotia-
tions that preceded his surrender,
but one is confronted, out of the blue
as it were, with the picture of a pris-
oner of war being treated from the
start almost like a Very Important
Personage. Gehlen, we are told,
brought with him an imposing mass
of secret information on Russia, and
this presumably was a direct pass-
port to American good graces. In
any event, he was employed for
eighteen months combing through
his own voluminous files and putting
them in order for American intelli-
gence. Then he was rewarded with
as juicy an assignment as a war
prisoner ever got; he was given au-
tonomous command of his own army
of private agents, with, as De Luce
wrote, "a personally chosen German
staff to organize cold-war espionage
in the Soviet Zone for the United
States."
De Luce continued: "Gehlen's pri-
mary mission is to identify and locate
at all times the forward Soviet and
satellite armed forces. This is funda-
mental to allied security, including
400,000 American, British and
French troops outposting West Ger.-
many."
The British Are Shocked
Though the American public even
today remains almost totally un-
aware of what we did or of its pos-
sible significance, our relations with
Gehlen long have represented one of
the most controversial aspects of out
secret cold-war policies. Quite ob-
viously, our whole attitude toward
Germany, toward France and Britain,
toward all of Europe, must have been
conditioned by what for long years
we were told?or not told?by the
multi-million-dollar espionage ring of
former German agents whom we had
made our principal eyes and ears in
Europe. This pivotal trust on such
crucial matters has shocked our
closest allies, the British, who do not
play the game of intelligence that
way; and since the past record would
seem to indicate they play it pretty
well, it is perhaps of some signifi-
cance to trace further the career and
the influence of Reinhold Gehlen.
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The Affair of Otto John
It must have been clear from the
start that Gehlen's private army
would have a highly equivocal status
inside West Germany, where official
security matters were in the hands
of Dr. Otto John. All signs indicate
that a fine, throat-cutting duel was
waged between Gehlen and John,
with Gehlen doing his best to get
Chancellor Konrad Adenauer on his
side. He and Adenauer held a num-
ber of secret meetings in a house
across the Rhine River from Bonn,
and Dr. John, who later revealed
these assignations, apparently was
perfectly aware that the ground was
being cut from under him. CIA os-
tensibly was working closely with
John's security forces, but its money
in multi-million-dollar amounts was
riding on Gehlen. The private strug-
gle between the two West German
security chiefs came to a head in
early July, 1954, when Dr. John
visited the United States. He went
to Washington and had lunch with
Allen Dulles. Outwardly, the two
men gave every appearance of cor-
diality, but no one knows what went
on between them, for on this matter
CIA has never peeped a word. Dr.
John returned to Bonn, and then on
July 20, 1954, came an event that
rattled official eyeteeth. Dr. John
deserted to the Communists in East
Germany, presumably taking with
him a privately hoarded store of
valuable state secrets.
This turncoat performance by
West Germany's official intelligence
master was an embarrassing episode,
but it could hardly have broken the
heart of Gehlen. He was left with a
clear field?almost. One other poten-
tial rival, Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz,
who headed the intelligence section
of the Defense Ministry in Bonn, re-
mained in the running, but he quick-
ly proved no match for Gehlen. The
result was reported in The New York
Times on July 20, 1955, in a dispatch
from Bonn. The German Govern-
ment had just announced that it had
decided to take over Gehlen's organi-
zation, then estimated to include
3,000 agents. The Times credited re-
ports that "the main stream of East
European information received by
the United States Central Intelli-
gence Agency originates with the
Gehlen organization." Of Gehlen, it
commented that he was inaccessible
and "something of a legendary fig-
ure." The Times added: "He has
been credited by some with great in-
telligence and denounced by others
as a sinister figure."
Just a few months later, on Sept.
1, 1955, the name of the mysterious
Gehlen figured startlingly, if only
momentarily, in an unusual upheaval
in American intelligence. The Army
announced in Washington that Maj.
Gen. Arthur Gilbert Trudeau, who
had headed the Army's G-2 (Intel-
ligence Corps), was being transferred
to a Far East post. The announce-
ment was made to appear routine,
but John O'Donnell of the New York
Daily News apparently was fed an
earful by irate Pentagon brass. For
O'Donnell disclosed that Trudeau's
scalp had been demanded by Allen
Dulles personally. According to
O'Donnell, Dulles spelled out his case
in a letter to the Secretary of De-
fense, and the feud was carried all
the way to President Eisenhower
himself for final decision.
In Dulles' official letter, O'Donnell
wrote, the CIA head
. . . charged that the Army's top in-
telligence officer, "without consulting
the Central Intelligence Agency," had
talked with West Germany's Chancel-
lor Adenauer here last June in "an
effort" to "undermine" the confidence
of Adenauer in a hush-hush CIA-
bankrolled setup in Germany, headed
by the mysterious Reinhart von [sic]
Gehlen. Furthermore, said Dulles, the
General has expressed doubts about
the reliability- of Gehlen as an in-
dividual and the security safeguar'ds
of the mystery organization.
The Pentagon denied quite vocif-
erously that Trudeau, one of its fa-
vorite generals, the commander who
had spearheaded MacArthur's drive
to tecapture Manila at the end of
World War II, had ever committed
such a breach of protocol as to ques-
tion Gehlen's reliability. All he had
done, said the Pentagon, was to ex-
press some doubts about Gehlen's se-
curity safeguards. Whatever the
truth about the extent of Trudeau's
criticism, the bare bones of the case
boil down, it would seem, quite sig-
nificantly to this: Reinhold Gehlen,
just ten years earlier the master of
Hitler's intelligence on the Eastern
Front, had sufficient influence
through Allen Dulles to cost even
the Army's G-2 chief his post.
Our German Ally
Against this background, let's turn
once more for an insider's view to
the intelligence officer who wrote The
Nation in 1957. His at least is not the
conventional, official view, and un-
der the circumstances, it may seem
worth serious thought. He wrote:
Our Intelligence Service in West
Germany collected much reliable in-
telligence which should have led the
State Department to reconsider its
point of view on Dr. Adenauer's
policy. Americans serving in Fontaine-
bleau and in West Germany are very
much aware that the Germans under
the guise of "friendship" are only in-
tent on recovering their military
might by using the United States as
a springboard. Contacts with German
military and other officials have con-
vinced me that the Germans hate
and despise Americans. They cannot
forget that the United States was
their enemy in the Second World
War. Adenauer's assertion of friend-
ship serves as a smoke screen which
enables West Germany to mark time.
Eventually Germany will spurn Amer-
ican tutelage and proceed with her
own ambitious plans. These plans,
i.e., annexation of East Germany, res-
toration of eastern borders, etc., can
be achieved only by a world war.
The United States may find that in-
stead of using Germany for its own
purposes it would be bound to a
German policy. . . .
The Germans are indeed playing
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the game their own way, nurturing
plans for the future. This is corrobo-
rated by the fact that Gehlen's In-
telligence Service in West Germany
frequently conceals important intel-
ligence and deliberately issues mis-
leading information, regardless of
our agreement for exchange of infor-
mation. Nevertheless, during this
postwar period, Gehlen has been con-
sidered a most loyal ally and his
Service has been financed with Amer-
ican dollars.
Communist propaganda refers to
Adenauer's West Germany as a pup-
pet of the United States. We prefer
to regard her as our most "reliable"
ally. Both conceptions are wrong.
Germany is our "most dangerous"
ally. Our friendship with her may
have disastrous consequences for the
United States.
Under these circumstances, our
preference of West Germany over our
old and tried allies is unpardonable.
British and French officers have often
expressed themselves in my presence
with an obvious feeling of resentment
and bitterness over the United States
policy of making yesterday's enemies
today's principal partners.
With this attitude, Edwards, the
British Labour M.P. and skeptic of
German intentions, fully agrees. In
his pamphlet on Allen Dulles, he
has written:
It is particularly worrying that Mr.
Dulles and his agency should be
maintaining close contacts with Gen-
eral Reinhold Gehlen's West German
secret service. Though it can be count-
ed as a NATO intelligence organiza-
tion, we think there is great need for
caution in our dealings with it. It is
extremely unlikely that General Geh-
len has any very warm feelings for
us. As for Mr. Dulles, he actually
advertises his friendship with the
General and after a recent visit to
London went straight off to Bonn.
But we have reason to believe that
General Gehlen does not confine his
interests to the East. The German
secret service never has done so. So
much the worse for us. . . . Beware
the Germans, when they come bear-
ing gifts!
An extreme view, possibly, but
valuable for all of that as a caution,
a warning, a reminder that there is
another side to the German question.
We are never told that any more,
but then we have never been told
about Reinhold Gehlen and his or-
ganization either?or about how we
got where we are.
PART VII THE ROAD TO WAR
ONE OF THE most significant in-
formal conferences of the postwar era
was held in Allen Dulles' CIA office
on a cold and dreary morning in
March, 1952. His brother, John Fos-
ter, had just returned from the Far
East, where he had added to his
prestige by helping the Truman ad-
ministration draft the Japanese peace
treaty. John Foster was now about
to become one of the most caustic
critics of the administration that had
employed him. He was full of very
positive ideas about exactly what
should be done to right the situation
in the world.
Participating in this conference
that was to forecast much of the
global strategy of the Eisenhower ad-
ministration before Eisenhower had
even been nominated or elected were
a number of important second-eche-
lon officials?Allen Dulles, then the
No. 2 man in CIA; Charles Bohlen,
State Department Counselor; John
Allison, then Assistant Secretary of
State for the Far East; General Mer-
rill, of Merrill's Marauders fame;
John Ferguson and C. Burton Mar-
shall, of the State Department Plan-
ning Staff.
John Foster Dulles opened the con-
ference by expounding his views?
and quite positive views they were.
He sharply criticized Truman's order
interposing the Seventh Fleet be-
tween Formosa and mainland China.
This, John Foster said, was really
"protecting" the Chinese Commu-
nists, then battling us in Korea, from
counterattack by the Nationalist
forces of Chiang Kai-shek. He had
discussed this "anomalous" situation
with Chiang, he said, and Chiang, as
was hardly surprising, fully agreed
with him. Now, there were "certain
islands" close to the mainland still
held by Chiang's warriors, and
Chiang, if given a "warrant" by the
United States to insure him against
the risks involved, could strengthen
his already considerable forces on the
islands and play merry hob with the
Communists on the mainland. This,
John Foster said positively, is what
we should do: we should in effect,
though he did not use the precise
term, "unleash" Chiang; we should
adopt a bold "forward" policy against
the Chinese aggressors.
According to Stewart Alsop, who
six years later revealed the details of
this meeting in his Saturday Eve-
ning Post article, "The Story Behind
Quemoy: How We Drifted Close to
War," John Foster Dulles' proposal
was received at first with tepid po-
liteness. Allen Dulles asked a couple
of deferential questions. Nobody
seemed to challenge John Foster's
thesis until suddenly C. B. Marshall,
"a big, articulate, irascible man,"
blew his top. The course Dulles pro-
posed, he said flatly, would mean di-
rect American intervention in the
Chinese civil war. Worse, if we gave
Chiang a "warrant" on the offshore
islands, we would by this action "con-
vey to a foreign entity the power to
involve the United States in war."
Marshall denounced Chiang's "men-
dicant and necessitous regime" and
branded any "warrant" that would
permit such a regime to drag the
United States into war "an act of
supreme folly."
John Foster Dulles [Alsop wrote]
looked at Marshall as though he did
not exist?a feat Dulles can perform
brilliantly?and said not a word.
There was an unhappy silence. Then
Bohlen, the able diplomat, took over,
asking Dulles questions which were
politely phrased, but which neverthe-
less pointed up the risks involved in
the course Dulles proposed. The
meeting then broke up, on a strained
and inconclusive note.
The islands under discussion were,
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of course, Quemoy and Matsu, hud-
dling almost on the doorstep of the
Chinese mainland. Small, rocky nub-
bins of land, they were of absolutely
no strategic value, as such eminent
authorities as Dwight D. Eisenhow-
er and Douglas MacArthur agreed;?
yet twice in succeeding years, due to
the "supreme folly" of Dulles' policy,
they almost dragged the United
States into war, almost touched off
the third world conflagration which
everyone so dreads.
Islands of Folly
For John Foster Dulles wasn't to
be deterred from his "bold forward"
plan by the logical objections of men
like Marshall and Bohlen. Almost as
soon as he became Secretary of State,
he loudly proclaimed what the news-
papers dubbed the "unleashing" of
Chiang. He did not go quite so far
as to, give Chiang a public "warrant,"
but the effect was the same. With
our active encouragement, Chiang
poured thousands more troops into
the offshore islands, creating a situa-
tion in which he could claim that he
had committed the very flower of his
Army there and so, when trouble
arose, we were committed to sup-
port him. The situation has over-
tones reminiscent of those in Ger-
many where, as the letter-writing
intelligence agent remarked, we are
so wedded to German policy that, if
the Germans ever determine to re-
unite their country, we almost cer-
tainly will be dragged into war to
help them.
In the Far East, time and again,
a tinder-box situation has been cre-
ated by the fatuity of the American
obsession with Chiang Kai-shek.
Powerful American business inter-
ests, in alliance with many of the
power lords who dominate the larger
media of information, long have per-
sisted in viewing Chiang as one of
the great men of his age, a states-
man of nobility and stature, a leader
who may one day win back China
from the Communists if we only give
him our help. This view has been so
widely sold to the American people
that it is considered virtually an act
of treason in many circles to chal-
lenge it.
Yet challenged it must be. The
record is clear and explicit, and it
June 24, 1961
isn't at all what we have deluded our-
selves into believing. Chiang has
never been anything but a Chinese
warlord with one guiding principle
?the interests of Chiang. In his rise
to power, he played footsie with the
Communists, and not until he had
won and wanted the big apple all for
himself did he really break with
them. 'The corruptness of his re-
gime was one of the least-hushed
World War II scandals. It offered the
people of China nothing; American
Army leaders in China found it al-
most impossible to get Chiang's
"tigers" to fight, and the Japanese
Chiang Kai-sh,ek
almost tore the country apart while
Chiang and his inner circle waxed fat
on the resources of the national
treasury. As William J. Lederer
writes in A Nation of Sheep, the Chi-
nese people became "sick of him and
the Soongs" and "the rotten Chinese
apple was ready to drop of its own
accord." Although Chiang had bil-
lions of dollars' worth of American
military equipment for his 3-million-
man Army, these forces were com-
posed of conscripts who had no love
for Chiang; money for its food and
pay went into the pockets of grafting
officers. And so, when Communists
applied pressure, the troops didn't
fight?they either surrendered or
joined up.
Chiang fled to Formosa, taking the
contents of the national treasurY with
him. For ten years now, Chiang's
Formosan regime has been painted
in the United States in glowing col-
ors as a Western-style democracy.
Actually, nothing could be further
from the truth. As Lederer writes,
Chiang's warriors, when they first
arrived, "pillaged and robbed For-
mosa." They killed thousands of pro-
testing Formosans with machine-gun
fire; and ever since, having taught
the Formosans a democratic lesson
by this process, Chiang's 2 million
Chinese Nationalists have ruled
some 9 million Formosans with an
iron, dictatorial hand. According to
Lederer, some 70 per cent of Chiang's
Army is now composed of Formosan
conscripts, who might fight to pro-
tect their home island but have no
burning compulsion to help Chiang
reconquer China. The Formosans
themselves would like to be rid of
the Nationalist monkey on their
backs; and they have no love for the
United States, which continues to
prop up Chiang's discredited regime
with some three-quarters of a billion
dollars in annual aid.
Yet America's arch right-wing
policy makers and its equally arch
right-wing CIA under Allen Dulles
continue to invest Chiang with a
halo and to push him forward as
our answer to communism in Asia.
It is an infatuation that has brought
us repeatedly into widespread disre-
pute.
Poppy Fields of Burma
Consider the case of Chiang's Bur-
mese opium growers. In 1951, follow-
ing the collapse of Chiang's regime
on the mainland, several thousands
of his followers fled across the Yun-
nan border into Northern Burma.
American policy makers decided to
arm and equip these Nationalist
troops for a reinvasion of Yunnan
Province. From Formosa, CIA al-
legedly masterminded the operation.
Arms, munitions, supplies were air-
lifted into Burma, but despite this
support, there is little evidence that
Chiang's gallant warriors ever wreak-
ed much damage on the Chinese
Reds. Instead, the Nationalists dis-
covered they could achieve the finer
life more easily by growing opium,
and a great number of them settled
down in Northern Burma and pro-
ceeded to do just that.
The Burmese, a most unreasonable
people, were not happy with this
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ideal, CIA-created situation. For
some inexplicable reason, they seem-
ed to resent the presence of this for-
eign army on their soil; and when
Chiang's fighters, showing no regard
for Burmese sovereignty, practically
took over the state of Kengtung and
established their own government,
the Burmese actually filed a vigorous
protest with the United States. As
Charles Edmundson, former Wash-
ington editor of Fortune and a for-
mer foreign service expert, wrote in
The Nation (Nov. 7, 1957), the
American Ambassador in Burma
hadn't been let in on the secret of
what the CIA and the Chinese Na-
tionalists were up to. The Ambassa-
dor, William j. Sebald, therefore
denied in perfect good faith that
America had anything to ,do with
supporting Chiang's guerrillas . in
Burma. I3urmese Prime Minister, U
Nu .knew better and became so in-
censed he suspended all U.S. Point
Four activities and almost broke of
relations . entirely. Eventually, our
own Ambassador resigned his post
in protest against our own program,
and American prestige throughout
Southeast Asia sported a couple of
very unlovely black eyes.
A four-power conference finally
reached an agreement about Chiang's
opium-happy warriors. Some 7,000
were evacuated to Formosa. But even
this didn't solve the entire problem.
Sizable remnants of the Nationalist
force continued to squat in their
poppy fields, and as of this spring
the Burmese Army was still fighting
a guerrilla war in its own country
in an effort to wipe them out. In this
most recent fighting, the Burmese
contended they had seized American
arms and supplies only recently air-
lifted into Burma. Such charges,
skillfully exploited by Communist
propaganda, sparked riots that re-
sulted in the stoning and wrecking
of U.S. Embassy buildings in down-
town Rangoon. When such outbreaks
occur, the widespread impression
given the American people in glaring
headlines is that we have been most
foully attacked again as a result of
Communist machinations; hardly
ever is there any appreciation of the
fact that the Communists might find
it impossible to get the people on
their side without the help of the
558
backfiring plots of our own cloak-
and-dagger boys.
The "Spooks" of the Islands
Destructive as such incidents are
to America's image, they do not men-
ace the peace of the world like the
more grandiose CIA endeavors that
led directly to the crises of Quemoy
and Matsu. In the early 1950s, the
CIA established on Formosa an out-
fit known as Western Enterprises,
Inc. This was a thinly disguised
((cover" for CIA, whose agents, an in-
communicative lot, became known
on the island as "the spooks." These
"spooks" played an active role in the
build-up of Chiang's forces on the off-
shore islands and the raids that were
launched from there. As Stewart
Alsop wrote, the CIA was "respon-
sible for organizing and equipping
the .Nationalist guerrillas who raided
the mainland from the offshore is-
lands." These "commando-type guer-
rilla raids" were "sometimes mounted
in battalion strength," Alsop related.
In addition, the offshore islands were
used for reconnaissance, leaflet drop-
ping, occasional bombing forays, and
for blockading such Chinese ports as
Amoy, on the mainland opposite
Quemoy.
These offensive gestures apparent-
ly nettled the Chinese Reds, a very
unreasonable and touchy folk, and in
the first .week of September, 1954,
they became so incensed that they
blasted Quemoy with heavy artillery
barrages. Two American officers of
the Military Advisory Group station-
ed on the island were killed, and the
American public, in its shock at such
unprovoked aggression, was whipped
up to the point where it might very
easily have plunged into Chiang's
war. In fact, Alsop wrote that "al-
though no more than a tiny handful
of people knew it at the time, the
American government came very
close to responding with a condi-
tional decision to go to war with
Red China."
Alsop cited chapter and verse of
the story. The Joint Chiefs of Staff,
under the leadership of that old
strong-China hand, Admiral Arthur
Radford, voted overwhelmingly for
war. They backed a policy, not just
to launch bombing raids on military
objectives opposite Quemoy, but to
blast, targets, far inland in China. If
the Chinese Reds responded with
an all-out attack on Quemoy, we
would use nuclear weapons. This,
make no mistake about it, would
have been World War III. Only
Matthew Ridgway dissented and
fought with all his power against
such an "unwarranted and tragic
course." Ridgway found an ally in
Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, who had
been moved over from CIA and made
Under Secretary of State when the
Dulleses took charge. Smith shared
Ridgway's horror of the prospect and
telephoned his former chief, Presi-
dent Eisenhower, then vacationing
in Denver. Eisenhower listened and
scotched the reckless plan of the
Joint Chiefs.
The 1954 crisis, given a chance,
finally died down, and the policy
known as the "releashing" of Chiang
began. Until 1954, Alsop wrote, the
offshore islands had been almost the
"exclusive playground" of CIA; but,
by the time of the first Quemoy
crisis, CIA's thin "cover" of Western
Enterprises., Inc. had been pretty
well "blown" and control had been
turned over largely to the Military
Advisory Group. The presence of
these uniformed military advisers on
the islands represented, in effect, the
public "warrant" John Foster Dulles
had originally proposed we give
Chiang; and when, in 1958, the Com-
munist Chinese again shelled the is-
lands, our prestige once more was on
the line, and once more we were al-
most involved in war. Only a broad
promise that we wouldn't permit
Chiang to use the islands for any
worth-while purpose, not even leaflet
dropping, smoothed over the situa-
tion.
And Now Laos
The Burmese crisis that all but
turned friend into foe, the recurrent
crises on Quemoy and Matsu, vividly
illustrate the manner in which the
secret and militant activities of CIA
create for us a foreign policy all their
own. They illustrate the way the CIA
tail wags the American dog and how
such wagging can quite easily plunge
the whole animal?and all his breth-
ren?into the most horrible of his-
tory's wars. But Burma and Quemoy
weren't the only examples in Asia
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of what is wrought by CIA. To these
there must be added another exam-
ple, and one of current crisis signifi-
cance?Laos.
American blunders in Laos go back
a full six years, and they are not by
any means all of CIA's making,
though it was reserved for CIA to
write the final, climactic chapter. To
understand how CIA masterminded
us into the hole in which we now
find ourselves, one has to appreciate
the background. Laos became a na-
tion in 1955 as a result of the Geneva
agreement that split the former
French Indo-China into its compo-
nent parts. Laos was the interior
principality, primitive, landlocked,
with a 1,000-mile border with Red
China. The Geneva agreement pro-
vided it was to have a neutralist gov-
ernment, but the evidence is abun-
dant that we, no more than the Com-
munists, wanted a neutral Laos. We
wanted a Laos committed irrevo-
cably to our side.
This becomes clear if one studies
the findings of the House Commit-
tee on Government Operations which
delved deeply into the Laotian mud-
dle in 1958 and, on June 15, 1959,
filed a scathing report of what it
found. What the committee discov-
ered was that all sound military ad-
vice had been disregarded by the
State Department in, its determina-
tion to build up an anti-Communist
Laos. The committee remarked acidly
that Congress had always been as-
sured that "force objectives"?the
number of foreign troops the United
States will support?are established
on the basis of the military judgment
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In Laos
this simply was not true.
The Joint Chiefs, in fact, consid-
ered Laos militarily, worthless and
repeatedly told the Eisenhower ad-
ministration so. The House commit-
tee wrote: "U.S. support of a 25,000-
man Army, of the entire military
budget, and of segments of the civil-
ian economy is, in fact, based on a
political determination made by the
Department of State contrary to the
recommendations of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff." It pointed out that the
Joint Chiefs, even after they had
been asked to reconsider their views,
had refused to budge. In a memo-
randum, they had said, the House
June 24, 1961
committee wrote, that "mutual se-
curity support of Laotian forces
could not be recommended 'from the
military point of view,' but acqui-
esced in the provision of such sup-
port 'should political considerations
be overriding.'"
This, then, was the beginning. The
House committee's findings make it
clear that, for political considerations
alone, we imposed upon Laos a huge
and militarily unjustified standing
Army. We did this with no regard
for either the characteristics or the
desire's of the Laotian people. The
Laotians are Buddhists; they are,
not in pretense but in actuality, a
deeply peaceful people. As Keyes
Beech wrote in the April 22, 1961,
Saturday Evening Post: "In Laos
not even the fighting cocks are blood-
thirsty. They wear no spurs and do
not fight to kill. As good Buddhists,
Laotian soldiers were no less reluc-
tant. They generally aimed high and
expected the other fellow to return
the favor."
The Cocktail Circuit
In Laos, as in so many other of
the world's trouble spots, the right-
wingers in our own State Depart-
ment and CIA dealt only with their
right-wing counterparts, a small and
wealthy ruling class and this class's
military cohorts. As Newsweek re-
ported last May: "Our allies, the tra-
ditional ruling class, had little in-
terest in reform. The political meth-
ods they used?stuffing ballot boxes
and intimidating neutralist voters?
succeeded only in driving the mod-
erates to the Left. . . . The worst
thing perhaps was that' U.S. policy
makers never came to terms with any
elements in Laos other than those
they considered to be militantly anti-
Communist."
Tied to such interests, with view-
point constricted to the cocktail cir-
cuits of Vientiane, we plunged head-
long into Laos, apparently with no
philosophy except that if we spent
enough money, no matter how, we
could buy ourselves an anti-Com-
munist ally. As the House commit-
tee found, we repeated, on an even
more flagrant scale, all 'the ghastly
mistakes which it had criticized so
strongly years previously in Iran.
Laos is about 99 per cent agricul-
tural. Its economy is primitive. The
Laotian farmer usually grows what
he needs, barters off his surplus to
supply his other wants. Money, in
much of Laos, is virtually nonexist-
ent. Into such an economy, with
evidently no regard for its disrup-
tive effects, the United States in just
six years poured $310 million. The
result was almost inevitable. The
wildest currency speculation took
place; the Laotian economy was all
but wrecked; and the cost of living
doubled between 1953 and 1958.
Cooperative Graft
As in Iran, corruption flourished
like jungle growth in the tropics.
The House committee found clear
evidence that both the Americans
who were channeling the aid dollars
to Laos, and the Laotian government
officials who were dispensing them,
dipped greedy paws into the golden
stream. The committee flatly ac-
cused one American public-works of-
ficer of accepting "bribes totaling at
least $13,000." It recounted the sor-
did story of a former U.S. Operations
Mission Director who extracted a
fantastic price for his decrepit 1947
Cadillac from an official of the Uni-
versal Construction Co., to whom
he was awarding a contract. "Un-
controverted evidence," the commit-
tee wrote, "indicates that the vehicle
was at that time inoperable, and
that shortly thereafter it was cut
up and the pieces dropped down an
abandoned well. In the interim, it
had stood rusting in front of Uni-
versal's main office, where it was the
subject of scornful amusement by
Laotians and Americans alike."
One honest American who tried to
do something about the mess was
"railroaded out of Laos by his su-
periors." The railroading was sanc-
tioned by Ambassador J. Graham
Parsons, who presided over our aid
efforts in Laos at their corrupt worst,
and Parsons was rewarded for his
watchfulness by being called back
to Washington and made Assistant
Secretary of State ?for Far Eastern
Affairs. In all of this time, the bulk
of the American taxpayers' $310 mil-
lion was used mainly to enrich an
inner circle of palace thieves; hardly
any of it was used to help the Lao-
tian people. Not until the elections
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of 1958 were imminent did die-Amer-
icans distributing aid in Laos sud-
denly come up with a crash program
that they labeled "Operation Boost-
er Shot" to try to buy some good
will on the mass level.
In one acid paragraph, the House
committee summed up the operation-
al mess:
The concentration of the benefits
of the aid program to the area around
Vientiane and other centers of popu-
lation, and the enrichment of, and
speculation by, Lao merchants and
public officials which attended the
aid program, tended to lend credence
to the Communist allegation that the
Royal Lao Government was "corrupt"
and "indifferent" to the needs of
the people.
The People's Voice
Even an idiot, it might be pre-
sumed, should have foreseen the in-
evitable consequences, but our CIA
and our State Department remained
blind to them right ? up to the last
moment of inescapable -truth. Ex-
Ambassador Parsons was testifying
before the House committee just as
the Laotian elections were being 'held
in 1958. He insisted that he had re-
liable, "official" information that the
results would be wonderful for our
side. The Communist Pathet Lao, he
predicted, would win only two of
fifteen contested seats, and this
would mean that "the integrity and
independence of Laos in the free
world" would have been preserved
intact.
Then the votes were counted. The
Communists, instead of being crush-
ed, won a crushing victory. The
House committee later reported that
.the Communists had won nine seats,
and their sympathizers an additional
four. The Royal Cabinet, indeed,
had to install the pro-Red leader as
the minister who, in the future,
would control U.S. Foreign Aid
Funds in Laos; it had to agree that,
henceforth, two battalions of pro-
Communist troops actually would be
supported by U.S. funds. This was
victory? This was assuring "the in-
tegrity and independence of Laos in
the free world"?
In obvious disgust, the House com-
mittee wrote:
In summary, the decision to sup-
port a 25,000-man Army?motivated
$69
by a Department of State .desire to
promote political stability?seems to
have been the foundation for a series
of developments which detract from
that stability. . . .
The aid program has not prevented
the spread of communism in Laos.
In fact, the Communist victory in
last year's election, based on the
slogans of "Government corruption"
and "Government indifference" might
lead one to conclude that the U.S.
aid program has contributed to an
'Prince Souvanna Phouma
atmosphere in which the ordinary
people of Laos question the value
of friendship with the United States.
When You Can't Buy?
It might, indeed. But what the
House committee 'found wasn't the
last, or the Worst, of the debacle. The
final 'chapter, an epic in blindness
and futility, was yet to be written.
For the simple 'truth is that, having
failed to buy ourselves an ally in
Laos, we next tried to procure one
through the CIA's favorite device?
the military coup. Allen Dulles'
eager beavers engineered this with
cavalier disregard of any superior
strategy Of the State' Department or
the desires of the new American Am-
bassador on the scene, Horace H.
Smith. Keyes Beech in his Saturday
Evening Post account describes the
conflict between CIA and Smith in
these words:
On the political level, Smith's job
wasn't made any easier by the fact
that during most of his tour in Laos
he was being crossed by Central In-
telligence Agency operatives nesting
in his own embassy. As Smith saw
it, the question 'was: Who was going
to administer American policy in
Laos?CIA or the embassy?
How many CIA agents were
wandering .around Laos during this
period only the CIA could know.
One of the more flamboyant, who
blossomed everywhere, affected- a
copybook cover that included a
manufactured British accent, a luxu-
riant mustache, elaborately casual
but expensive clothes, and a cane
with a secret compartment that held
?not a sword, but brandy. . . .
As Ambassador, Smith favored ? a
conservative coalition government
which offered a little of something
to all factions. CIA activists made
no secret of their preference for a
group of army "Young Turks."
CIA's favorite boy was Gen. Phou-
mi ?Nosavan, ? the ? forty-one-year-old
Minister of Defense, who was later
to emerge as the government ."strong
man." ? . Phourni was strongly anti-
Communist. He was also fervently
pro-Minister, of Defense, because
that's where the money. wis
The first .blowup came in August,
1960, when a paratroop captain
named Kong Le, whose troops hadn't
been paid in . three months because
his superiors were looting the
became fed up with the state .of af-
fairs and led a coup. Successful, he
raced all around Vientiane in a jeep
bearing legends demanding the Amer-
icans go home. The CIA boys and
the brains of the American military
mission on the scene were stunned.
Until Kong Le suddenly went off
the deep end; they had considered
him one of their very own fair-haired
boys, and they couldn't understand
what the -devil had gotten into him.
Nor did they like.or understand any
better what, Kong Le did with his
new-found power. .
Neutralism: a Dirty Word
He called on Prince Souvanna
Phouma- to take over as Premier.
Souvanna was a neutralist. Depend-
ing on how you look at it, he was a
sincere neutralist, hoping to bring
some kind of peace to his unsettled
country,.or he was just a weak-kneed
tool of the Communists. The Amer-
icans, to most of whom neutralism
was a dirty word anyway, took the
second view. Ex-Ambassador Par-
sons, by this time promoted to the
post of supreme authority for Far
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Eastern Affairs, flew to Laos to try
to get some understanding with Sou-
vanna; but he and Souvanna had
never wasted any affection on each
other when Parsons was Ambassador,
and so it was almost inevitable that
they wouldn't achieve any meeting
of minds now. They didn't. The
American chips went down on the
CIA's boy, General 'Phoumi. Given
the green light, Phoumi in Decem-
ber, 1960, actually fought a battle
and captured Vientiane. Souvanna
and Kong Le were chased out, and
having no place else to go, they join-
ed the Communist Pathet Lao. With
him in retreat, Kong Le thought-
fully took 9,000 American rifles with
which he armed the Communist
forces? .
Premature Celebration
In Vientiane, General Phoumi and
the CIA celebrated their victory.
"The celebration. was premature,"
Keyes Beech writes. "Looked at from
a cold-blooded, cold-war viewpoint,
the bloodshed might have been jus-
tified if, .as the CIA argued, blood-
shed was necessary to 'polarize' Com-
munist and anti-Communist factions.
It might have been justified if strong
and effective leadership had emerged
from the smoke of battle. Unfortu-
nately, neither of these things hap-
pened. 'Polarization' took place only
at the top, between the same tired,
familiar faces."
Souvanna and Kong Le, backed
now by Communist manpower, be-
gan to carve up Laos. Phoumi, hav-
ing distributed the best financial
plums in the government .among his
relatives, seemed to have lost all in-
terest in the dreary business of fight-
ing. Everywhere the, Pathet Lao
forces were victorious. The puppet
government we had installed was too
corrupt and inefficient to oppose
them;" the 25,000-man Army for
which we had been paying for five
years had never wanted to fight in
General Phounti
the .first place and wanted to fight
even less in a corrupt cause; the
Laotian people whom we had not
helped, but had only helped to ruin,
could hardly be expected to feel that
we were worthy of their ultimate sac-
rifice. So there we were, having made
one of history's most colossal botches
of everything.
The new Kennedy Administration
was bequeathed this little sweet-
heart of a problem. There the Com-
munists were, overrunning all of
northern Laos, gobbling up another
country, and we were faced with just
two unlovely choices. We could either
go to war in defense of freedom
against the Communist menace, or
we could humbly sue for the reinsti-
tution of the very kind of neutralist
government (only it would be worse
now because the Communists were
stronger) that we had conspired to
kick out.
Boxed into this dead-end street,
President Kennedy at first talked
tough and acted as if he would like
to fight. But it quickly became ap-
parent that the Congressional lead-
ership of his own party would have
no part of such folly, and the result
was the only result really possible?
long-drawn-out, largely futile nego-
tiations for a cease-fire in Laos and
the return of "neutralism," even if
it meant the return of Souvanna.
No defeat that CIA has ever earn-
ed us has been more complete, more
devastating. In face-conscious South-
east Asia, we had lost all the face
there was to lose, and even Thai-
land, long considered a staunch part-
ner of the West, began to flirt with
neutralist ideas. In such manner had
CIA intriguing come home to roost.
As Marquis Childs wrote from
Geneva, where he was dancing at-
tendance on the Laos peace talks, if
CIA was to be thoroughly investi-
gated in the aftermath of Cuba, "the
role played by that agency in the
mess in Laos is perhaps more relevant
than the share of responsibility
which CIA must bear for the Cuban
fiasco."
PART VIII FIASCO IN CUBA
IN DECEMBER, 1960, U.S. Sena-
tor-elect Claiborne Pell (D., R.I.)
made a quiet visit to Fidel Castro's
Cuba. A former Foreign Service of-
ficer in World War II, Senator Pell
was no novice in pulse-taking, and
when he went among the Cuban
people, he was surprised at what he
found. He later capsuled his dis-
coveries for the New York Herald
Tribune in these words:
The people of Cuba that I saw
lune 24, 1961
and spoke to during three or four
days of quiet observation were not
sullen or unhappy or dissatisfied. I
am afraid that it is only true that
they were still tasting the satisfac-
tion of Castro's land reform, of his
nationalization of United States com-
panies and of the other much-touted
reforms put into effect by Castro.
The dispossessed and disgruntled
were in jail or in exile.
Senator Pell returned to Washing-
ton and explicitly warned high of-
ficials of the Kennedy Administra-
tion that the time for action against
Castro was not yet.
During the same December, two
other visitors to Cuba saw the same
sights, came to the same conclusions,
and wrote an article about them.
These observers were Gen. Hugh B.
Hester, U.S.A. (Ret.), holder of the
Distinguished Service Medal for serv-
ices in the southwest Pacific in
World War II, and Jesse Gordon,
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public-relations consultant. In an ar-
ticle, "A New Look at Cuba?The
Challenge to Kennedy," published by
New World Review, General Hester
and Gordon wrote:
It must be pointed out that a
Princeton poll, taken [in Cuba] last
year, revealed 86 per cent of the
people in support of Castro....
Most observers would agree that
if elections were held tomorrow,
Castro would be overwhelmingly re-
turned to power....
The morale of Cuban workers and
the militia is high....
There is no doubt about the peo-
ple's spirit or their courage, tenacity
and determination to hold onto the
gains under the revolution....
The U. S. military high command
has plans for an invasion of Cuba.
Should the Kennedy Administration
decide to continue along the reckless
path of the previous Administration,
we fear disaster will result.
No prophecy was ever better jus-
tified by the event. No prophecy
was ever less hidden under a bushel.
At the end of March, Gordon per-
sonally mailed reprints of the article
to the White House, the State De-
partment and members of Congress.
But about 1:30 A.M. on Monday,
April 17, some 1,500 Cuban exiles?
trained, financed and masterminded
by the CIA?stormed ashore at the
Bay of Pigs on Cuba's south coast.
The CIA, the agency that is sup-
posed to know all, had insisted that
Cuba was ripe for revolution.
Never perhaps was an intelligence
estimate more disastrously wrong. In
a few hours, it became apparent that
the Cuban invaders had not the
slightest chance. They were over-
whelmed, killed, captured. The CIA-
planned coup, almost a year in the
making, backfired so tragically that
Fidel Castro was presented with an
hour of triumph in which to strut.
Instead of being overthrown, the
power of his regime, thanks to CIA,
was solidified in all of Cuba.
Commenting on the consequences
almost a month later, Richard H.
Rovere wrote:
The passage of time does not re-
duce the magnitude of the folly in
Cuba. The more it is examined, the
worse the whole affair looks. The
immediate consequences are bad
enough: Castro's tightened grip on
Cuba, the growing distrust of Amen-
562
can leadership, the revelations of
Central Intelligence "operating" pro-
cedures and of the bureau's mam-
moth incompetence. What is more
painful, though, is the awareness that
intelligence (as a quality of mind,
not as data), and the best staff a
twentieth-century President has had,
offered so little protection against
enormous error....
As it turned out, the non-profes-
sionals were mostly right, and the
professionals were almost wholly
wrong.
This, needless to say, is not the
result that an annual $1 billion in-
vestment in intelligence is expected
to achieve?especially on an island
just ninety miles from our shores,
an island on which we have a huge
naval base, where there are many
long-time American residents, where
presumably we should have the most
solid contacts. This wasn't Laos,
thousands of miles away in another
and remote corner of the world?
but Cuba, on our doorstep.
Operatives on Parade
How could it happen? How could
our master intelligence agency, CIA,
be so completely wrong? These ques-
tions have been only partly answer-
ed, but even the partial answers
throw the book at CIA. Let's look
at one eyewitness account of the CIA
in action. It was written by Thayer
Waldo in the San Francisco Chroni-
cle.
This reporter [Waldo wrote] spent
the first half of last year in Cuba.
At that time, with the U. S. Embassy
still in operation and fully staffed,
eight of its personnel were CIA
agents, three worked for the FBI,
and each of the Armed Services had
from one to five operatives assigned
to intelligence work.
No special effort was required to
learn these facts or to identify the
individuals so engaged. Within
thirty days of arrival in Havana,
their names and agency affiliations
were made known to me, without
solicitation, by other correspondents
or Embassy employees.
The latter included one CIA man
who volunteered the identities of all
three persons accredited to the FBI;
and a Cuban receptionist, outspoken-
ly pro-Castro, who ticked off the
names of six CIA agents?with en-
tire accuracy, a later check con-
firmed.
In addition to Embassy staffers,
the CIA had a number of operatives
(I knew fourteen, but am satisfied
there were more) among the large
colony of resident U. S. businessmen.
One of these, a roofing and installa-
tion contractor, had lived in Cuba
from the age of six, except for service
with the Army during World War
II?as a master sergeant in G-2, mili-
tary intelligence. Predictably, that
known background made the man a
prime target for observation by
Castro's people when U. S.-Cuban
relations began to deteriorate seri-
ously. He was shadowed day and
night, his every contact reported.
Yet the CIA made him its chief
civilian agent in Havana.
Unintelligent Intelligence
Quite obviously, this wasn't a very
efficient way for a super-intelligence
agency to run a secret intelligence
network. But then, according to
Waldo, Naval Intelligence was no
more efficient. During most of 1960
and into 1961, it ran a major in-
telligence-gathering project at the
Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Some
3,800 Cubans are employed on the
base, but they live outside govern-
ment property, most of them in or
near Guantanamo City, twenty-
seven miles north. It occurred to
Naval Intelligence that here, among
these Cubans going back and forth
every day, was a mass of raw human
material from which could be culled
significant data about the prevailing
mood in Cuba. Naval Intelligence,
as a result, ran about 140 interviews
a day, questioning the Cuban work-
ers about the attitudes of Cuban
civilians toward Castro. Almost to
a man, apparently, the workers as-
sured the Americans that the Cuban
people were very, very unhappy
with Castro.
Waldo points out that naval-base
workers are paid about 60 per cent
more than comparable workers in
private industry, that the suffering
Cuban economy offers few job op-
portunities to any man who might
lose the naval-base plum he had?
that, in a word, it should have been
expected the Cuban workers would
tell Naval Intelligence only what
they knew Naval Intelligence wanted
to hear. Waldo quotes a South
American diplomat making this wry
comment on this strange intelligence
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operation: "If I denounce my neigh-
bor as my mortal enemy and then
ask my servants their opinion, they
are pretty apt to tell me that every-
one else hates him, too?particularly
if they like their jobs."
From such sources and from CIA's
close contacts with ?gr?ubans
(who were convinced, naturally, like
all ?gr? that great numbers of
the Cuban people hated Castro as
fervently as they did), American
opinions appear to have been form-
ed. It is necessary to use such qualify-
ing words as "appear" and "seem,"
for it must be emphasized that any
synthesis of the Cuba misadventure
must be based on incomplete infor-
mation?the kind that has become
available by sweeping out from un-
der official rugs.
Up to this point, the American
people have been given no chance
to find out for themselves what hap-
pened, what went wrong, who was
responsible. Investigations have been
held in secret, as if we were safe-
guarding the formula of some new
miracle weapon; and when the Chair-
man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
testifies behind closed doors, one
Senator shouts that he has been
shocked out of his britches and all
the chiefs should be fired?others
insist blandly that they weren't
shocked, and nobody should be fired.
Such are the baffling cross-currents
in the world of secrecy we have
substituted for the world of infor-
mation. If, therefore, any officials
would quarrel with this account of
the Cuban fiasco, let them first
quarrel with themselves ? behind
closed doors.
Beginning of the Plot
It seems, then, to be well-establish-
ed that in the spring of 1960, prob-
ably in late April or early May, the
Eisenhower administration made a
fateful decision. Castro, it felt, was
moving steadily into the Communist
orbit. CIA had information that some
eighty Cuban fliers had been sent
to Czechoslovakia to train on Rus-
sian jets; there were reports of con-
struction projects inside Cuba that
looked to CIA as if they might be
designed to launch missiles. Castro,
in addition, seemed to be stirring
up trouble in Panama, the Domini-
lime 24, 1961
can Republic, Haiti; he would have
to go.
The strongest initial proponent of
the "Castro must go" line appears
to have been Republican Vice Presi-
dent Richard M. Nixon. He, it is
said, argued strongly that we must
support armed intervention in Cuba
to get rid of Castro, and he finally
won Eisenhower's consent. Once this
basic decision had been made, our
fate was in the hands of CIA, for
CIA was supposed to know precisely
how to run such delicate affairs.
This official misconception of
CIA's omniscience and omnipotence
quite obviously was based upon
CIA's vaunted successes in over-
throwing Mossadegh in Iran and Ar-
benz in Guatemala. Castro, we de-
cided, was to be another Arbenz,
and the Guatemala script that had
worked so well was the one CIA
elected to follow. In some ways, the
situation seemed made to order for
it. Castro's increasingly iron dictator-
ship, his merciless execution of dissi-
dents were sending increasing hordes
of refugees to our shores. The Miami
area was swarming with them. All
that CIA had to do was to train
them, arm them and mold them into
an invasion force.
Gaggle of Factions
Simple as this basic conception
seemed, it required considerable do-
ing. The anti-Castro Cubans were
a gaggle of warring factions, ranging
over all the hues of the political
spectrum. They included brutal ex-
cops who had served Fulgencio Ba-
tista without a qualm, arch conserv-
atives who 'wanted their lands and
money back, left-wing reformers who
wanted to preserve Castro's land
policy and Castro's nationalization
of vital industry, but without Cas-
tro's dictatorship. These groups were
personalized in their leadership. On
the far Right were ex-Batista hench-
men like Rolando Masferrer. Also
far over to the Right, but free of
the Batista taint, was the Movement
for Revolutionary Recovery (MRR),
headed by Captain Manuel Artime,
who had been only briefly associated
with Castro. On the Left?reformers,
but strongly anti-Communist ?
were the followers of the People's
Revolutionary Movement (MRP),
bedded by Manolo Antonio Ray,
Castro's former Minister of Public
Works.
The CIA, with its pronounced
right-wing proclivities which always
seem to orientate it toward ruling
shahs and military dictators, had to
pick "its boys" from this divided
pack; and its choice fell, where its
choices always have seemed to fall,
on the representatives of the Right.
Only in this case its choice was more
unfortunate even than usual, for in
Cuba the forces of the Right were
almost powerless to help it.
The Choice that Wasn't Made
Virtually all sources seem to agree
that there was just one effective
resistance movement inside Cuba:
the MRP headed by Manolo An-
tonio Ray. A quiet, soft-spoken ar-
chitect and civil engineer, Ray had
been ope of Castro's most effective
resistance leaders. For some two
years during the precarious course
of the Castro revolution, he had di-
rected sabotage inside Havana; and
when Castro came to power, Ray
had been rewarded by appointment
as Minister of Public Works. He
served just eight months, then he
broke with Castro. He realized by
that time, he says, that Castro did
not intend to live up to his demo-
cratic promises, that his regime was
becoming increasingly dictatorial, in-
creasingly communistic. So Ray once
more went underground, setting up
his ?own clandestine organization to
fight the new dictatorship.
He managed to evade Castro's
police and to work for eight months
inside Cuba. In that time, he per-
fected an underground network that
spanned the island state. Each
province had its seven-man execu-
tive council, and in each province
similar organizations reached down
into the separate counties. Ray kept
contacts between these underground
groups to a minimum, tying the
threads together only at the top, and
soon the effectiveness of his grow-
ing organization was demonstrated
by increasing incidents of sabotage.
Ray was certainly an effective
leader, not much doubt about that.
But, let's whisper it, be was "left-
wing." The man still had faith in
the original Castro program; he
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thonght that land a.nd 'industrial
reforms were long overdue and es-
sential to Cuba's ultimate prosper-
ity. Those who want Cuba returned
to its pre-Castro state seem to over-
look the vital fact that this state
was so bad it made Castro possible.
Castro clambered to power over the
ruins of a corrupt and brutal system.
He had made great capital (see his
program as he himself explained it
in The Nation, Nov. 30, 1957) out
of the fact that 85 per cent of Cuba's
small-scale farmers did not own their
land; out of the fact that more than
half of the arable land in the nation
was in foreign hands; out of the
fact that more than 200,000 rural
families had not a square foot of
land on which.to support themselves
while almost 10 million acres "of un-
touched arable land remain in the
hands of powerful interests." One of
Castro's first and most popular acts
had been to split up these baronial
holdings. Ray believed that these
objectives had been right, but he
wanted them achieved in a frame-
work of freedom. He explained his
philosophy to the New York Post
in these words:
Our movement doesn't allow poli-
ticians to come in on the backs of
the people just so they can get back
into power and get money for them-
selves. [Ray did not explain how
he would prevent this.] We've had
enough of that. What we want is a
continuation of social reform?not a
government by the rich or the ex-
ploiters. We believe in a mixed
economy of private enterprise?be-
cause it is effective and efficient?
and government ownership of utili-
ties and monopolies?because these
things belong to the whole people.
And there must be freedom. This,
Castro has destroyed.
Such a program could not fail to
be anathema to rigid, right-wing
minds, or to those powerful Amer-
ican interests whose primary con-
cern was the repossession of their
vast, Castro-sequestered holdings in
Cuba. With such a program, CIA
would have no truck. Though Ray's
underground organization was the
only effective one, he had to go it
alone. He got virtually no money,
no supplies, no help of any kind
from CIA. He established his Own
training camps and financed them
564
by selling One-PeSO stamps each
month to sympathizers inside. Cuba.
Indicative of .the support he had in-
side the country we were trying to
liberate was the 'fact that his collec-
tions ultimately reached 60,000 pesos
a month. CIA evidently drew no
conclusions from this. All the time
Ray was struggling to maintain him-
self and his underground organiza-
tion, CIA was pouring a huge flow
of cash (the total finally came to
$45 million) into the promotion of
its. right-wing invasion.
Prying Open the Plot
Over-all direction of the Cuban
endeavor was in the hands of one
of CIA's deputy directors, Richard
Richard M. Bissell, Jr.
M. Bissell, Jr., a former economics
instructor at Yale. Under Bissell was
a large corps of CIA agents and in-
structors, some Spanish-speaking
North Americans, at least one Fili-
pino, and ? surprisingly ? quite a
number of Eastern Europeans who
couldn't communicate with their
Cuban proteges .at all except through
interpreters. This was the staff that
directed the training of the invasion
troops in a number of camps carved
out of the Guatemalan jungle. The
first recruits, thirty-two in number,
were flown to Guatemala in May,
1960. They were put to work hack-
ing out a training base on jungle
acres donated for the purpose by
Robert Alejos, a wealthy Guatemalan
landlord. Later airstrips were built
on wasteland along the fringes of
Alejos' coffee plantation, and Ameri-
can jet pilots, in civilian clothes,
We're ssent to.Guataniala to train the
Cuban fliers.
All of this activity was conducted
for months without anyone in the
United States outside of the highest
official circles having any inkling of
what was afoot. But a large-scale
invasion cannot be kept hidden from
public view forever, and in this case,
in any event, secrecy arrangements
were not of the best. Some of the
Guatemalan airstrips were operated '
in full sight of travelers on the Pan
American highway and the Guate-
malan railroad, and in time the word
began to get around. The Nation
called public attention to what was
going on last November, but the
large wire services and major media
of information continued to play
blind, deaf and dumb for nearly two
months. It was not until early Janu-
ary that Time finally used a short
article on the Guatemalan airstrips,
followed within a few days by a much
more etailed story in The New
York Times. With these news pieces,
the American public at large, for
the first time and still only in a
tentative fashion, began to acquire
information about the plot we were
brewing in the Caribbean.
Picking the Leader
The publication of these first news
stories almost coincided with a de-
velopment of major importance in
the Guatemalan camps. There CIA
had picked its "fair-haired boy":
twenty-nine-year-old Manuel Artime,
regarded by some of Ray's followers
as a Franco Falangist. By January,
1961, Artime was in solid with Frank
Bender, the CIA area chief in Guate-
mala. Drew Pearson asserts that Ar-
time was helped along the path to
rank and glory by Bender's secretary,
Macho Barker, whom Artime had
promised to make sports czar of
liberated Cuba. If true, this report
would seem to indicate that Artime
expected to dominate the govern-
ment of the new Cuba and to pass
out the rewards. There are some
other tenuous indications pointing
in the same direction. The Chat-
tanooga Times Washington corres-
pondent, Charles Bartlett, later was
to reveal the existence of a super-
secret unit, known as Operation 40,
apparently organized to act after the
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invasion, seizing control of the new
government and establishing a dic-
tatorship, possibly under Artime.
With these machinations stirring
in the background, the youthful Ar-
time made his move at the end of
January. With the full backing of
?CIA, he staged a coup in the train-
ing camps. He made fiery speeches
to some 1,500 freedom fighters then
in training. In some instances, he
changed their commanders, installing
his own men, and he appealed to all
to join his banner. Most did, but
some 200 balked.
Those "Democratic" Rebels
Artime didn't stand for any non-
sense from these recalcitrants. Back-
ed up by CIA all the way, he had
the 200 arrested and isolated under
guard. Some managed to escape
through the jungles and make their
way back across Mexico to Miami.
Others were talked into joining up.
But there remained a hard core who
stood by their convictions and re-
fused to support Artime's budding
junta. What happened to these stub-
born ones should be an object lesson
to a nation that has permitted its
cloak-and-dagger boys to run their
own private little dictatorships.
Long weeks later, after the Cuban
invasion had failed, the story was
told to Tire New York Times by Dr.
Rodolfo Nodal Tarafa, a young law-
yer who had been in the training
camp at Trax, Guatemala, when Ar-
time staged his coup. On January
31, Dr. Nodal said, the senior mil-
itary adviser in the Trax camp,
known to the Cubans only as
"Frank," mustered the 300 training
freedom fighters and told them their
two commanding Cuban officers had
been sent away for "playing politics."
They would be commanded hence-
forth, "Frank" said, by Captain San
Roman. This choice was distinctly
unpopular with the Cubans in camp.
Captain San Roman had been an
officer of Fulgencio Batista and was
reported to have fought against
Castro in the Sierra Maestra. In San
Roman, the freedom fighters smell-
ed the stench of the old, brutal
Batista dictatorship; and since this
wasn't the kind of "cause" for which
they were prepared to die, 230 of
the 300 asked to resign.
June 24, 1961
Theirs was supposed to be a free
volunteer army, but of course such
insubordination could not be per-
mitted. Another agent by the name
of "Bernie" was summoned to deal
with the trouble. He charged the
230 recalcitrants. with being Com-
munists. He declared he had author-
ity from the Democratic Revolution-
ary Front to name commanders, and
be had picked Captain San Roman
for them. That was that. But the
Cubans didn't seem to see the logic
in this clear, democratic reasoning.
It seemed to them that they were
the ones who had been elected to do
the fighting and .the dying, and they
should have something to say about
the cause for which they were pre-
pared to make such sacrifices. They
demanded that their case be heard
by the Front within seventy-two
hours. Otherwise, they wanted to be
discharged and returned home.
A committee of five was selected
to present this protest. "Bernie" re-
fused to receive the delegation. He
agreed finally to talk to a single
spokesman, and Dr. Nodal was
chosen. The lawyer explained to
"Bernie" that the freedom fighters
were neither mercenaries nor con-
scripts, and that they could not ac-
cept commanders who represented
the very antithesis of the ideals for
which they were fighting. "Bernie"
suggested that the troops agree to
train for five days more while they
waited for a representative from the
Democratic Revolutionary Front to
arrive. They agreed. But seven days
passed, and nothing happened. The
troops again went on strike.
Iron Beneath Velvet
Now CIA took off the silken
gloves of deceit. Threats and prom-
ises were freely employed. Gradu-
ally, the protesting troops were
browbeaten into submission?all but
twenty. These twenty were obdu-
rate. On February 11, while the rest
of the men were on field exercises,
one of the advisers asked eight of
the twenty to go with him. They
thought, Dr. Nodal says, that there
was to be another conference. Not
until they had been led along a jun-
gle track to a canvas-covered truck
did they discover their error. There
they were suddenly covered by three
men holding Thompson submachine
guns.
The eight were driven to La Suiza,
an estate where there was a Guate-
malan Army camp. There they were
surrounded by eight or ten men with
automatic weapons. Each of the
eight was taken separately from the
truck; each was taken into a small
room, forced to empty his pockets,
forced to strip off all his clothes.
"I felt sure this was it," Dr. Nodal
said. "I was sure we were going to
be murdered."
But not even CIA was quite equal
to that. The men, deprived of "even
our love letters," as Dr. Nodal says,
were permitted to dress again. They
were taken to a shed 15 feet by 30,
with concrete floor and galvanized
iron roof?a furnace by day, an icy
igloo by night. Here they were im-
prisoned. For twelve days, they
were not permitted to bathe or
shave, to have clean clothes or to
eat a really edible meal. Periodical-
ly, they were questioned by another
CIA mystery man, known to them
only as "Pat," the chief security
guard. They were given lie-detector
tests, virtually at gunpoint. The ob-
ject was to make them confess that
they were Communists, for obvi-
ously such stubborn and disagreeable
characters simply had to be Com-
munists. Naturally, they wouldn't
admit it, and strangely enough, as
far as can be learned, the lie-detector
tests didn't show it. In frustration,
the CIA finally flew the stubborn
holdouts, now seventeen in number,
to a jungle prison in remote Peten
Province in northern Guatemala.
Here they were held under armed
guard and warned they would be
shot if they tried to escape. They
were warned, too, that when the
revolution succeeded they would be
turned over to the new Cuban gov-
ernment to face trial and, probably,
execution.
This fate they were spared by
the failure of the invasion for which,
originally, they had trained so ar-
dently. With that unexpected col-
lapse of all its plans, CIA acquired,
if not a change of heart, at least a
twinge of discretion. It released the
seventeen "freedom fighters" it had
held in cruel jungle imprisonment
for eleven weeks, flew them back
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to Miami and dumped them out.
There Dr. Nodal and the others
started their own resistance move-
ment. It has one primary, over-rid-
ing principle: it will have nothing
to do with CIA.
Kennedy's Dilemma
Such is the background against
which the CIA set out to insure
the "liberation" of Cuba from Cas-
tro. No one in Washington, of course,
had any idea of the manner in which
CIA was indoctrinating the prin-
ciples of democracy into its "freedom
fighters" in the Guatemalan jungles.
It has become obvious that no one
on any level of government, not the
Congress, not the President, had any
clear conception of what CIA was
up to or how it was running the
store; yet it was in such a miasma
of misinformation and non-informa-
tion that President Kennedy had
to make a crucial decision.
It is not clear just when he first
learned of the invasion plans set
on foot by Nixon and Eisenhower.
One version has pictured him as
learning about the project for the
first time shortly after the election.
According to this version, the inva-
sion had been scheduled for the late
fall, but Kennedy was so shocked
by the idea that the stroke was
postponed to let him make the de-
cision. Against the background of
what is known, all of this appears
unlikely; for Kennedy himself, in
his television debates with Nixon,
had proposed just such drastic action
as the Eisenhower administration
contemplated?and Nixon, it should
be noted parenthetically, had held
up his hands' in pious horror at the
thought. In any event, in January,
Kennedy began to get detailed re-
ports on the Cuban invasion project
from CIA and from the State and
Defense Departments. He was con-
fronted with an evil dilemma.
The Cuban rebels had spent
months in the training camps; they
were ready to go; they could not
be held in leash forever. Futher-
more, the publicity so belatedly
given about the Guatemalan train-
ing bases had stripped the mask
from our CIA-overrun puppet state;
embarrassed, Guatemalan officials
yielded to public outcry and inform-
566
ed the United States we would soon
have to get out. CIA further intensi-
fied the pressure on the President.
Castro, it reported, was getting So-
viet tanks and MIGs; he was step-
ping up his counterintelligence ac-
tivities throughout the nation. It
was now or never.
Such were the strong pressures
for action?for a decision, as Sher-
man Kent once wrote, "off the top
of the head.". Yet even so, inside
the Kennedy Administration, there
was much soul-searching and a quite
definite tug of war. The President
himself, aware that the contemplated
American-backed invasion Would
violate every provision of the 1948
Pact of Bogota, prohibiting the use
of force against the governments of
American states, frowned on any
direct American participation. Sec-
retary of State Dean Rusk apparent-
ly doubted the wisdom of the entire
venture, but he was not a strong
enough man to fight for his con-
victions. Chester Bowles disliked the
whole idea, leaked his dislike to the
press, but apparently wasn't con-
sulted .in the final decision. Senator
William Fulbright, chairman of the
Foreign Relations Committee, was
the one man with convictions who
fought stoutly for them, but his pro-
tests were ignored. Determinative in
making up the President's mind for
him, it appears, was the information
supplied by CIA, backed up by Navy
Intelligence. This insisted that Cas-
tro's island empire was ripe for revo-
lution. Independent analyses by
amateurs that pointed to a directly
opposite conclusion were ignored. It
was decided 'to strike.
Shotgun Wedding
Before the actual invasion, there
was a CIA-arranged, , shotgun wed-
ding. CIA, a great togetherness out-
fit, wanted to get all the anti-Castro
groups together pulling in harness
behind Manuel Artime, the field
commander it had already selected
for them. With Bissell wielding the
whip, it was announced on March 22
that a Revolutionary Council had
been formed two days previously
in Miami. The provisional president
of the council was Jose MirO Car-
dona, who had been Castro's first
Premier, but had quickly broken
with the dictator. Manolo Ray was
a member of the council, but its
overwhelming complexion was con-
servative. It was understood that
Cardona would become Provisional
President as soon as the invading
troops had carved out a foothold on
Cuban soil. Later there would be
free elections. Just what trust should
have been placed in these promises
in view of CIA's action in investing
full military power in Artime, in view
of the murky Operation 40, remains
a matter of conjecture.
Political control established, the
next consideration was CIA's inva-
sion plan. Originally, the cloak-and-
dagger agency wanted to hurl all
the available invasion forces ashore
at one point in one all-out assault.
From the first, it appears, Manolo
Ray's MRP doubted the wisdom of
CIA's military conceptions. Ray felt
that the only way to overthrow Cas-
tro was to use Castro's own formula
against him?to infiltrate Cuba with
small guerrilla groups, to build up
the program of sabotage and re-
sistance within the country to the
bursting point. So strongly did Ray
feel about this that it appears he
even contemplated taking his MRP
out of the Revolutionary Front; but,
in the end, he went along because,
as he later said, "we did not want
to give the slightest aid to the Com-
munists."
Dubious Military Tactic
CIA's tactical plan raised other
doubts. The invasion beach it select-
ed was in the swampy, isolated Bay
of Pigs, ninety miles southeast of
Havana. The' idea apparently shock-
ed Colonel Ramon Barquin, an Army
officer who had been imprisoned by
Batista, one of the most respected
military figures among the ?gr?
and the man who almost certainly
would have been Ray's choice to
command the invasion had Ray had
a choice. Colonel Barquin pointed
out that only two narrow, easily de-
fended paths led inland from the
Bay of Pigs. One was a narrow road,
the other a narrow railroad bed. On
either side of these defiles, for a
distance of twenty-four miles inland,
stretched impenetrable, mosquito-
infested swamps. "This swamp of-
fers some advantages?you can't be
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San Francisco Chronicle
4/5qv40--
-ifPPEPoVETZ
.?1: 42019
174A6e121
Times-Mirror Syndicate
"Achilles Heel"
Some U. S. Press Comment
On the Cuban Invasion and the CIA
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
E 600FED IN (UBA
AJc 600fED it4 CAP.
vNE GODFED CIA
E 000FED IN (SA
WE
"Teacher's Pet"
lune 24, 1961
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Oakland Tribune
Oakland Tribune
,);\
icuciagr
"Ps-s-st -- smell something burning?"
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flanked," Colonel Barquin conceded.
"But it makes no difference; you
can be stopped easily enough." All
that Castro would have to do would
be to concentrate tanks and troops
at the mouths of the two funnels
opening onto the central Cuban
plain; his task would be like putting
a cork in the mouth of a bottle.
The ways to disaster had now been
greased by CIA decisions that, it
would seem, had erred at each and
every step along the way; the in-
vasion ship was about to be launch-
ed. On March 29, after making some
changes in plan, President Kennedy
flashed the green light from the
White House. One of the President's
modifications banned U.S. aerial
strikes in support of the invaders;
the Cubans must do it on their own.
Another dealt with the cleaning out
of Batista supporters in the invasion
army. The President himself, it is
said, ordered the arrest of Rolando
Masferrer, the best-known Batista
henchman; but, while this order was
carried out, CIA heeded imperfectly
the President's intent. Other Batista
luminaries like Captain San Romin
sailed from Guatemala in command
of their troops.
The attack began with surprise
raids by B-26s on Castro's airfields.
They wrought some damage, but,
as events were to show, not enough.
This was the first failure, but it
wasn't the most serious. For a stra-
tegic move that reads like something
out of Gilbert and Sullivan, one has
to thank the masterminds of CIA.
On some level?on just what level
and on just whose authority the
American public, presumably, will
never be permitted to know?the
brilliant decision was reached that
the Cuban leaders of the Revolution-
ary Front were not to be permitted
to have anything to say, or to do,
with their own invasion.
Climax to a Nightmare
On April 16, the day before the
actual invasion, Dr. Jose Mir6 Car-
dona and the members of his Revo-
lutionary Council were in New York.
They received word to go to Phila-
delphia. There they were met and
flown to Miami. The instant they
arrived, they were conducted to a
small, isolated house on the out-.
568
skirts. Here they were held virtual
prisoners. They were not permitted
to use the telephone. They were not
permitted to communicate with any-
one. They were allowed only to listen
to radio reports of how their invasion
was being managed for them.
Here, perhaps, is the most fantastic
episode of the entire fantastic night-
mare. The success of the invasion
from the outset clearly depended on
a mass uprising of the Cuban people
in its support. But Ray, the under-
ground commander, the only leader
who could have been effective in
marshaling such support, was muz-
zled. Obviously, he was too left-wing,
too dangerous a man. Obviously,
too, CIA wasn't trusting any of the
other members of the Revolutionary
Council; it was making certain that
they didn't interfere with CIA's
invasion.
Some genius in CIA evidently de-
cided that the Cuban people would
arise en masse if a message was
beamed to them from our Swan Is-
land radio station off the Honduran
coast. And so this message was con-
cocted:
Alert! Alert! Look well at the
rainbow. The first will rise very
soon. Chico is in the house. Visit
him. The sky is blue. Place notice
in the tree. The tree is green and
brown. The letters arrived well. The
letters are white. The fish will not
take much time to rise. The fish is
red. Look well at the rainbow....
This gibberish, as far as can be
learned, was the only notice the
Cuban people ever got. Ray's under-
ground, so assiduously kept in the
dark by CIA, didn't even know an
invasion was coming off?and so did
nothing. The Cuban people apparent-
ly didn't make much sense out of
that fish and rainbow business?and
so did nothing. The invasion troops
stormed ashore and found Castro,
much better informed than the
underground, waiting for them.
The debacle was swift. The in-
vaders stabbed inland along the one
narrow road, the one narrow railroad
bed. They penetrated for twenty
miles, and then they were hit by
tanks, by artillery fire, by strafing
from the air. American papers carried
glaring headlines about Russian
MIGs turning the tide, but less
hysterical reports later showed that
there wasn't a MIG in the air. Cas-
tro had armed some old jet-trainer
planes, and these were enough. An
ammunition ship, carrying practical-
ly all of the reserve supplies for the
expedition, was sunk. The narrow
road and railroad track were smother-
ed by fire. On either side the jungles
hemmed in the invaders. They could
not advance, they could not escape;
they could only surrender.
Post-Mortem Debacle
Now, to compound the Military
disaster, came other disasters, the
full effects of which almost certainly
have not yet been totaled. First,
there was the lying. As in the U-2
disaster, we tried to deny the self-
evident truth. In a world that we
expect to accept America's word as
its bond, we deliberately set out to
demonstrate again that this word
was worthless. Rep. William Fitts
Ryan (D., N.Y.) writes that, after
the invasion had been under way for
twenty-four hours, "an official repre-
sentative of the State Department
stood in the 20th Congressional Dis-
trict Office in Washington and said
that neither the CIA, the State De-
partment nor any other government
agency was involved 'in any way.'"
Worse, far worse, was the spectacle
in the United Nations.
There Adlai Stevenson, our Am-
bassador to the U.N., a man of tre-
mendous personal prestige not only
among Americans but among the
peoples of the world, put his prestige
on the line in a lost and tarnished
?cause. Apparently, he hadn't been
told the truth by his own govern-
ment; and so, replying to charges
of American intervention made by
the Cuban delegate, Stevenson de-
nied categorically that the United
States had had any hand--any hand
at all?in the attempt to overthrow
Castro. Such charges, he said, were
a tissue of lies delivered "in the
jargon of communism." He added:
"If the Castro regime has hostility
to fear, it is the hostility of Cubans,
not of Americans. . . . If the Castro
regime is overthrown, it will be over-
thrown by Cubans, not Americans.
I do not see that it is the obligation
of the United States to protect Dr.
Castro from the consequences of his
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treason to the promises of his revo-
lution."
To turn Stevenson's own phrase
back upon him, what kind of "jar-
gon" is this?
Even though television viewers
who had venerated Stevenson turned
away sick at the sight, American
officials still were not willing to em-
brace truth. A determined effort was
made, with the help of the Madison
Avenue public relations firm that
had been hired to handle pronounce-
ments for the Cubans, to picture
the invasion as no invasion at all?
just a little guerrilla operation in-
volving no, more than 200 or 300
men, many of whom had succeeded
in making contact with rebel forces
in the interior of Cuba. This myth
quickly was exploded by Castro.
He paraded some 1,200 captives
for all the world to see. He even
had them tell their stories on tele-
vision. There, in the full glare of
the klieg lights, some were identified
as former Batista thugs; and all,
almost to a man, pleaded they had
been deceived by the CIA.
Catastrophic as all this was, it
was not the end of the catastrophe.
Castro's police and Army put on a
nation-wide hunt for subversives. It
is estimated that 100,000 suspects
were rounded up. Though many
were finally released, hardly a single
leader in Ray's underground escaped.
Resistance leaders denounced CIA
bitterly. Their organization, they
said, had been wrecked, and some
wondered out loud whether this had
been part of CIA's intention. In a
Cuban prison, Associated Press cor-
respondent Robert Berrellez met a
twenty-two-year-old Cuban who had
been one of Ray's principal lieu-
tenants in the Cuban underground.
This Cuban complained bitterly that,
a month before the invasion, the
CIA radio station on Swan Island
had actually broadcast his name to
Castro's police. "This station paid
tribute to me by name for helping
exiles get out of Cuba clandestinely,"
the resistance leader said. "That
tipped off G-2 and I was finally
trapped."
In the light of such stories, can
one wonder that many Cubans refuse
to trust CIA any more? The extent
of the distrust was clearly indicated
in Miami on May 23, when Ray
finally took his MRP out of the
Cuban Revolutionary Council. The
move, he said bluntly, was in pro-
test against the CIA's continued
domination of the Cuban resistance,
its continued playing of Cuban poli-
tics, its continued refusal to support
MRP and its continued recruitment
of former Batista officials for a new
"national army." This would seem
to indicate that not even a disaster
of the magnitude of Cuba can change
the rigid mentality of CIA, can drag
it?to use an old Stevenson phrase?
"kicking and screaming into the
twentieth century."
Cuba, and CIA's infatuation with
Batista bravos and authoritarians of
the far Right, are merely the final
chapter in a book in which the plots,
whatever else may be said of them,
are all consistent. Iran, Guatemala,
Laos, Cuba: in all of them, the
CIA's fondest affection has been re-
served for militarists with nineteenth-
century social outlooks, for small and
wealthy ruling cliques that have no
sincere interest in the welfare of the
millions whom they govern. The im-
position of such governments merely
stalls the future and gives Khrush-
chev his talking points. As Stuart
Novins wrote in a perceptive final
paragraph in his account of the
Cuban fiasco in The Reporter:
The tragic episode ... raises a
number of obvious questions about
the activities of the Central Intelli-
gence Agency. But beyond that,
there is reason to doubt that even
if the attack had been successful, it
could have produced a viable politi-,
cal resolution for the bloody turmoil
of Cuba's recent history. To liberate
Cuba from the outside, with a gov-
ernment to be imposed from the
outside, is not the most promising
way to promote a stable democracy
in Cuba and to advance the social
and economic welfare of its people.
Not only does Cuba know this, but
far more important, the rest of Latin
America knows it too.
PART IX A LOOK AT THE FUTURE
If it is true that the agency [CIA1
mapped the invasion plan, herded
the Cuban resistance leaders around
like redheaded stepchildren and con-
ducted military operations in their
stead, then we have trusted a Gov-
ernment agency to make all but war
without the consent of Congress.?
Rep. Paid G. Rogers (D., Fla.) in
the House of Representatives, May
1, 1961.
I want my position to be crystal
clear. The Pentagon, the military
services, and the intelligence services
of the nation are to be the servants
of the policymakers. They are not
to be policymakers in themselves....
June 24, 1961
If we have learned anything in
recent months ... it is that the pre-
ponderance of the emphasis ... on
the part of the military, the Central
Intelligence Agency, and the other
intelligence services was overwhelm-
ingly involved in the policymaking
functions of the Government, to the
point where the actions of the mili-
tary and the CIA made policy
through their preemption of the
field.?Senator Hubert D. Humphrey
(D., Minn.) in the Senate, May 3,
1961.
THESE TWO quotes pose an issue
that, in its depth and dimensions,
appears still not to have been fully
realized by the American people. This
is no issue of internal organization.
This is no technical issue, involving
the combination of intelligence and
action functions in one agency, the
CIA, though that is part of it. This
is an issue that goes to the very
guts of the democratic processes. In-
volved here is the question of whether
the "black" arts (sabotage, revolu-
tion, invasion) are to dominate all
American democratic functions and
to determine for our people willy-
nilly, without debate, without knowl-
edge even of what is at stake, the
course their nation is to take in
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the - world. No lesser, issue amounts
to a tinker's damn here.
Congress alone,. under our Con-
stitution, is supposed to have the
right to declare war. This safeguard
was devised by the Founding Fathers
with the wise intent of insuring that
no Executive with a mania for power
could ever determine for the people
whether they were to live in peace,
or to fight and .die. Only the people
through their representatives in Con-
gress were to decide their own fate
on this most crucial of all ? issues.
Today, with intercontinental ballistic
missiles and nuclear warheads cast-
ing a dread shadow over the world,
there is more need than ever before
in history for an intelligent and ? in-
formed electorate to exercise the re-
straints and the powers of decision
guaranteed in the. Constitution. Yet
today we -practice the "black" arts
on such a far-flung, billion-dollar
scale, we throw around them such
a,mantle of -spurious p-atrioticsecrecy,
that neither the people nor their
watchdogs ? in Congress have the
faintest idea what is happening un-
til it has happened?until it is too
late. In essence, CIA, which is , at
the root of the evil, has .become a
Frankenstein monster dominating
the Congress that created it.
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The result is a twofold- tragedy.
Abroad, CIA destroys our prestige
and undermines our influence. At
home we do not even know what
is happening.
Actions Belie Words
Our Presidents?Eisenhower was
notable for this and was motivated,
nearly everyone would agree, by a
deep sincerity?proclaim our peace-
ful intentions, our devotion to the
ideals of democracy and good will
and world peace. The American
people sincerely believe that this is
what we stand for and cannot com-
prehend why the world at large does
not believe in our so obviously good
intentions. Our people do not under-
stand that, even as our Presidents
speak, the actions of CIA frequently
invest their words with every ap-
pearance Of the most arrant hypoc-
risy. The Presidents . speak peace;
but the CIA overthrows regimes,
plots internal sabotage and revolu-
tion, foists opium-growers. on a
friendly, nation, directs military in-
vasions, backs right-wing militarists.
These are not the actions of a demo-
cratic, peace-loving nation devoted
to the high ideals we profess. These
are the actions of the Comintern
in right-wing robes. America, no
more than the USSR, can speak out
of both sides of its mouth and ex-
pect the peoples of the world to
trust in its sincerity.
All of this goes on abroad, but at
home the American public does not
know for long months, if ever, what
CIA has brewed. The power of a
billion-dollar, secret agency operating
as a law unto itself is almost in-
calculable, not just in molding the
image of America in foreign lands,
but in molding at home the image
Americans have of the world around
them. Time and again American
public opinion has been whiplashed
into a warlike frenzy by glaring head-
lines picturing a callous Communist
aggressor when, all the time, the
CIA was the secret provocative
agent. The crisis over Quemoy was
a glaring example. The U-2 .incident,
in which our government lied to
"cover" CIA and pictured to the
public a Russian bear reaching out
with bloody paw to down our in-
nocent little weather plane, was
another. Less 'well 'known, but per-
haps of greater long-range impor-
tance; is the Manner in which our
whole attitude toward Communist
China has been deliberately colored,
as Charles, Edmundson has written,
by "the State Department's repeated
and sometimes incendiary statements
that all Americans held prisoner in
Communist China are held illegally
and in violation of international law.
Every well-informed correspondent
and editor in Washington knows that
many of the prisoners have been
U.S. intelligence agents, whom China
has as 'much right to hold as the
United States has to imprison Ru-
dolph Ivanovich Abel, the Soviet
'master spy.'" By such tactics, Ed-
mundson writes, the American pub-
lic has been bamboozled "to the
point where a rational China policy
has become a political impossibility."
Making Peace Difficult
It may even be that a rational
policy of. any kind has become a
political impossibility. Cyrus Eaton,
the multi-millionaire Cleveland in-
dustrialist who has long championed
a policy of coexistence with China
and the Soviet Union, pointedly
suggests that either CIA or some
of its secretive governmental col-
laborators is indulging, within the
United States, in propaganda activi-
ties designed to make any peaceful
solution impossible. In a letter to
Senator Fulbright, Eaton charges
that federal funds are being funneled
secretly into the promotion of
demonstrations ? designed to inflame
public opinion against visiting iron-
curtain diplomats. Eaton writes:
An interesting question is, who
supplies the funds to hire the pro-
fessionals who surround the embas-
sies and follow foreign visitors with
insulting signs and shouted epithets?
I find it hard to believe, but I am
informed that substantial funds for
such undesirable activities come from
federal appropriations, under a dis-
guised name.
After the Soviet Deputy Premier,
Mr. Mikoyan, visited me in Cleve-
land, I made a point of investigating
the group of Hungarians who en-
deavoured to molest him in Cleve-
land, Detroit and Chicago. It turned
out that the identical people had
gone into all three cities by car and
had obviously been hired and fi-
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nanced by someone with ample funds,
reputedly Uncle -Sam? In Cleveland,
representatives of the State Depart-
ment gave every evidence of con-
niving with the Hungarian hecklers
by putting at their disposal the
routes and locations most advan-
tageous for their hostile demonstra-
tions against the Mikoyan party.
I have also looked carefully into
the background of the so-called Hun-
garian Freedom Fighters. Many of
them turn out to be former officers
of the Nazi Army that invaded Hun-
gary; they were, of course, obliged
to flee the country when Hitler was
defeated. (Italics added.)
This is a truly sensational charge.
Eaton's very name, of course, is
anathema to right-wingers, but Con-
gressional attempts to investigate
him have proved largely futile and
he remains a powerful and influential
man. Whether investigation would,
establish the validity of his charge
remains uncertain; but in consider-
ing it, two facts perhaps should be
borne in mind?the long love af-
fair of CIA with the Gehlen agency,
which included former Nazi officers
and operated in Hungary, and the
Cuban freedom fighters' recollections
of the number of "East European"
CIA agents who, with the aid of in-
terpreters, directed their drills in
Guatemala. If these should ever turn
out to be true straws in the wind,
if Eaton's charge should ever be
substantiated, an entire new field of
secret CIA activity might be ex-
posed?one more pernicious than any
other in its underhanded influence
on American public opinion.
What Kind of Probe?
CIA is, of course, now being in-
vestigated. It is being investigated
now just as it has already been in-
vestigated four times in the past?
in private, in secret. Each investiga-
tion found flaws. Each reported CIA
was working to correct them. Each
succeeding probe found some of the
same flaws and reported that CIA
was working to correct them. And
now, in 1961, we have come to our
present pass.
In 1956, a Congressional Joint
Committee called futilely for the
appointment of a watchdog com-
mission to put a checkrein on CIA.
The committee took some round-
house swings at CIA's most precious
lune 24, 1961
forte, its ironclad secrecy. "Once
secrecy becomes sacrosanct, it in-
vites abuse," the committee wrote.
"Secrecy now beclouds everything
about CIA. . . ." The committee
quoted with approbation the com-
ment of Hanson Baldwin of The
New York Times that CIA "engages
in activities that, unless carefully
balanced and well executed, could
lead to political, psychological, and
even military defeats, and even to
changes in our form of government."
The first part of that prediction has
certainly come to pass. As for the
second, the committee itself wrote:
"Our form of government . . . is
based on a system of checks and
balances. If this system gets serious-
ly out of balance at any point, the
whole system is jeopardized and the
way is open for the growth of
tyranny."
The way is still open. For the
Congress of 1956 did nothing. And
we reaped the whirlwind in Laos
and in Cuba.
The new, Executive-style investi-
gation ordered by President Ken-
nedy can hardly be expected to meet
the full need, the full right, of the
American people to know. Gen.
Maxwell Taylor beads the President's
new investigating board; the Presi-
dent's brother, Attorney General
Robert Kennedy, sits upon it. So
does Allen Dulles, the man being
investigated. It may be noted that
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Declassified and Approved For Release 2013/10/29: CIA-RDP80M01009A000100050015-8
it is rare indeed when the defendant
turns star prosecutor at his own
inquest.
The record of the past few years
seems to say clearly that the colossal
mess CIA has created demands
nothing less than a full-scale Con-
gressional investigation. It is not
enough just to lop off CIA's opera-
tional arm and give its "black arts"
intriguers to some other secret
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agency; we need to examine in detail
just what the "black arts" have
brought us, we need to consider
whether they can ever be reconciled
with the principles, of democracy?
the principles we profess. It is not
enough just to give .Congress finally,
at long last, a watchdog committee
(a move, incidentally, that is still
by no means certain); we need to
examine publicly, in detail, the
qualities of mind and the kind of
hidden interests that have placed
our prestige unreservedly behind
wealthy oligarchies and right-wing
militarists in a world in which the
growing clamor on every side is for
social and economic justice, social
and economic change. We need to
discover how and why, as Walter
Lippmann wrote, we are doing just
what KhrushcheV expects us to do,
why we are doing his propagandizing
for him. Only if we make basic de-
terminations of this kind can we
hope for the future.. And we cannot
make them if we do not first learn
the who and the-how and the why
that have so often placed us on
the wrong and losing side?if we
do not clean out the forces that put
us there. This, only an aroused Con-
gress could hope to accomplish.
At Stake: the World's Faith
Both the faith of foreign nations
in us and our own faith in ourselves
are at stake, for both have been
deeply compromised by the shady
activities and the secrecy surround-
ing the ?shadiness that have become
the twin hallmarks of CIA. When,
hard on the heels of Cuba, the
French generals in Algeria tried to
overthrow Charles de Gaulle, we
were confronted by all-but-official
charges in the French press that CIA
once more had egged on the mili-
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WORLD FELLOWSHIP Conway, New Hampshire
572
tarists. M. Soustehle, at a inncheon
in Washington last- December. 7, is
said to have talked long and earnest-
ly to CIA Deputy Director Richard
Bissell, :Jr., on the proposition that de
Gaulle's program in Algeria could
lead only- to communism. CIA is
said to have been impressed; 'Gen-
eral .Challe, who led the revolt, is
said to have had several meetings
with CIA agents; he is reported to
have been given the impression that
be would have the .support of the
United States.
All of this Mr. Dulles and the CIA
categorically deny. But Walter Lipp-
mann 'reported from Paris that it is
known that CIA agents meddled in
France's internal affairs during the
French debate -on the nuclear-arms
program. And the highest French
officials, pleased by President Ken-
nedy's prompt and whole-hearted
support of de Gaulle, have called
the Algerian incident closed?but
they have not, pointedly they have
not, given a full and clean bill of
health to CIA. It is a sequence that
leaves a foul taste in the mouth. As
Tlie New Republic's Washington cor-
respondent wrote, commenting on
the French -charges and recalling the
background incidents of 1.).-2 and
Cuba: "Preposterous?? Certainly!
And yet . . . and yet. . . . It is
not that we think for a minute that
the French charge is true, but that
now we are suspicious of everything."
So we are. L'Express, with pointed
intent, quotes Allen Dulles: "The
countries which are the most power-
ful to resist Communist subversion
are those where the military are in
power.". We recall this hard. kernel
of Dulles' philosophy acting itself
out in Egypt, in Iran, in Guatemala,
in Laos, in Cuba. Why not in France?
Could it be possible in so large a
power, one of our oldest Allies? Well
?why not? In the secret world of
CIA anything is possible?and no
one knows. We can only wonder and
doubt. And doubt does not inspire
confidence abroad or fervor at home.
It's time to clean .house.
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The NATION
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Declassified and Approved For Release 2013/10/29: CIA-RDP80M01009A000100050015-8
Crossword Puzzle No. 921
By FRANK W. LEWIS
9
10
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MERE IMEMINEM
26
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dRillER 29 11.111111111
ACROSS:
1 Not a very restrained person, con-
sidering one is rather pale, and put-
ting on weight. (6)
5 and 2 down Proper speech to sign,
though they're rather wordy. (12;
10 Drumheads should be things Kit
made. (9)
11 Is to win wrong, when under one's
influence? (2,3)
12 A small animal with a soft heart
to examine in detail. (7)
13 The part of the mollusc our genera-
tion found troublesome. (7)
14 The Village Blacksmith does what-
e'er he can. (5)
16 A sort of eye can let you burn it,
perhaps. (9)
18 Dread arrest, understand! (9)
20 Shelters the outside coverings, ac-
cording to what one hears. (5)
22 The direction of the carriage? (7)
24 A way to the heights? One should
have wings! (7)
26 In Hamlet, they say an old man is
such a child! (5)
27 Send to the office again checks
which get big. (9)
28 A planner is sometimes far along
with this, and digs the difference!
29 In return, the revolutionary scold
one that might fly. (6)
DOWN:
2 See 5 across
3 Those who make lace out of rags?
4 Get a toe-in job, and arrange things
this way. (9)
5 Man takes these occasions to make
laws. (5)
6 The root of psychic or youthful
problems? (7)
7 Its center is cut with a cross. (9)
8 Presently on board, but yet not in
place. (7)
9 Did Cleopatra have to rouse it at
last? We hope so! (6)
15 Making double-talk? (The fabric
needs taking in.) (9)
17 Such words as 22 do, making pre-
cious sense. (9)
18 A trailer in Technicolor? (7)
19 What's happening around the prim-
itive force of the plain? (7)
20 Coins, as changed by one that evi-
dently rolls over and over. (7)
21 Go along with a canonized list. (6)
23 Skirts and matadors might be. (5)
25 When "Mr. William Shakespear"
was a boy he exercised his father's,
according to John Aubrey. (5)
SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 920
ACROSS: 1 and 5 Standing orders; 10
Catch; 11 Seahorses; 12 Earning; 13
Acolyte; 14 Marshy; 15 Husband; 18
Overbid; 21 Starch; 24 Silence; 26 Open
end; 27 Pamphlets; 28 Gayer; 29 Gasp-
ed; 30 Usurpers. DOWN: 1 Sachem; 2
Alternate; 3 Dahlias; 4 Nosegay; 6
Riotous; 7 Essay; 8 Suspends; 9 Cal-
ash; 16 Archetype; 17 Roast pig; 19
Banshee; 20 Deemed; 21 Spouses; 22
Avenger; 23 Adorns; 25 Lambs.
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"The CIA" by Fred J. Cook
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