FOLLOWING THE SCENARIO REFLECTIONS ON FIVE CASE HISTORIES IN THE MODE AND AFTERMATH OF CIA INTERVENTION BY ROGER MORRIS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01315R000200030006-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 31
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 19, 2004
• Sequence Number: 6
• Publication Date: September 13, 1974
• Content Type: PAPER

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FOLLOWING THE SCENARIO
Reflections on Five Case Histories
in the Mode and Aftermath
of CIA Intervention
by Roger Morris
-A paper prepared for the Center for National Security Studies
Conference on the Central Intel1iBence Agency
and Covert Actions
Set tember 12-13, l974 A. Washington, Q.C.
This paper represents strictly the personal views of the author.
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Beyond its most publicized activities, from the Bay of Pigs
to the continuing mercenary war in Southeast Asia, there Is
gathering evidence that over the last two decades the Central
-Intelligence Agency has secretly intervened as well in nearly a-
score of countries around the world. The successes or failures of
such involvement, much less its foreign- policy justification, have
been hidden from public view, buried behind official secrecy in.a-
bureaucracy that rarely examines its conventions, and largely
neglected by both the Congress and press. Yet these relatively
obscure examples of CIA intervention are important precisely for
being widespread, routine, and unaccounted. Far more common than
proxy invhiorrs or strategic overflights, a vast traffic in bribes,
blackmail, and propaganda has become the daily staple of the CIA's
covert intelligence operations. It is that traffic that rational-
izes the existence of an equally vast intelligence bureaucracy, and
poses some of the most disturbing questions about the future role
of the CIA in American foreign policy.
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What follows is a survey of five case histories of such CIA
intervention in the 1960s o in Ecuador, Brazil, Zaire (formerly
the Congo), Somalia and Indonesia. The history of these episodes
is still fragmentary at best. But from interviews with official
sources as well as public documents, the main outline of CIA
involvement seems clear enough. It is a record worth recounting
for what it shows of CIA methods and of the ironies, sometimes
bitter, in the aftermath of the intervention. But.these five
examples are more than an account of intelligence operations
somehow detached from other national actions. They are also a
.somber reflection of how the United States conceives and executes
Its foreign relations.
Nor are these cases merely historical or in any sense
academic. Though they belong to the 1960s, much of the policies,
techniques and mentality they exhibit still shape our foreign
affairs. According to official sources, the CIA now maintains,
with White House' approval, close relations with regimes in four
of the'five countries, including substantial financial retainers
for leaders in at least two of the states.
Moreover, thesd operations, carried out mainly from 1962 to
1967, were authorized by senior political appointees in past
Democratic administrations. They are thus the responsibility of.
men who, if now out of government (and righteously pronouncing-on
the excess of the incumbents), might well hold office in some
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future administration. Finally, just a little has changed within
the Executive since these operations were conducted, there is still
no reliable. constitutional or political restraint on such inter-
vention. A largely quiescent Congress, an often indifferent press
and a distracted, uninformed public continue to surrender their
-responsibilities in the making of a democratic foreign policy.
Ecuador: Pronoti ng CoirmuMsm
"It was tribute to what'a six-man station can 'do," said one
former intelligence official of CIA operations in Ecuador in the
early sixties. "In the end, they owned almost everybody who was
-anybody." Remarkable documentation of that claim -- including the
identity of "everybody" and how much they cost -- is apparently
about to appear in the London-published memoir of Philip B.F. Agee,
a former CIA case officer in Latin America who served in Ecuador
from 1.960-to 1963. But Whatever the accounting details, CIA
efforts in Ecuador during Agee's period there have long been regard-
ed within the government as one of the CIA's most impressive
successes.
The intervention in Ecuador was rooted in the policy of the
Eisenhower and Kenr:edy Administrations to isolate the Castro regime
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in Cuba and, more. broadly, to-prevent the further spread of anti-
US governments in Latin America. In the process, however, the
princiEbi target of covert action was neither Cuba nor the Ecuadorian
Corrnunist Party, but rather the country's non-Communist civilian
political leadership.
With twenty seven presidents between 1925 and 1947, its
history a veritable caricature of Latin American instability,,
Ecuador had. gained by the late 1950s a period of rare governmental
and economic calm. The respite was to be short-lived. Though
traditionally conservative in domestic policies -- President Jose
Velasco Ibarra was'serving his fourth term -- the Ecuadorian
regime maintained friendly relations with Cuba through Castro's
rapid move leftward in 1960. That policy may have been in part
an authentic sympathy for the new Havana government,in part an
act of defiance toward Washington, fueled by US pressure in an
Ecuador-Peruvian border dispute in the fall of 1960. In any
event; the Velasco regime did not follow when the US formally
broke with 'Cu.ba in January 1961, and the stage was set for a
concerted CIA campaign to change Ecuador's policy and, if
necessary, its government.
The main instruments of pressure against the Ecuadorian
regime included not only the customary CIA penetration among
influential elements in politics, journalism and the military,
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but also those US-sponsored labor organizations which were later
to play a similar role so often elsewhere in'Latin America --
chiefly the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLO),
publicly founded by the AFL-CIO in 1961 and its companion
organization, the Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers
(GRIT), also established under AFL-CIO auspices. It was for
these labor organizations, ostensibly voluntary and independent
institutions in Latin America, that Philip Agee served as CIA
liaison in Ecuador in 1960-1963 -- channeling covert-financial
support, orchestrating "spontaneous" political activities,
directing the Ecuadorian labor organization's policy toward its
own_ government.
The details on exactly when and how the decision was taken
to mount the CIA campaign in Ecuador must await the publication
of Agee's book. But it seems plausible that at least the initial
decision was made early in 1961. At this point, US-supported
labor groups -- of the kind Agee and the CIA serviced -- were
already waging well organized, highly financed and largely success-
ful campaigns;'to control the Ecuadorian labor movement. By mid-
July, Velasco was under heavy pressure from his own cabinet and
some elements of the military to abandon his Cuban policy.
Diplomatic relations reilained intact, but Velasco broke openly
with his volatile Vice-President, Carlos Julio'Arosemena, when
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the latter returned from a summer 1961 visit to Eastern Europe
urging closer relations with the Soviet bloc.
The split between Velasco and Arosemena deepened into the
autumn and ended in a sequence of crisis and violence from which
Arosemena, with Air Force backing, emerged in November as the new
President. The new President immediately reaffirmed the main-
tenance of relations with Cuba, and within a week of the takeover
of the Arosemena regime, Ecuadorian affiliates o ORIT publicly
opposed diplomatic ties with Soviet bloc states and warned of
"Communist demagoguery" in the new government.
When the Organization of American States voted to exclude
Cuba on January 31, 1962, Ecuador joined Argentina, Bolivia,
Brazil, Chile and Mexico in abstaining. And over the following
months, the internal pressure. gathered.
There was an extraordinary increase in anti-Communist press
attacks and labor demonstrations. Indiscriminate charges of
Communist sympathies were flung at scores of officials, many of
whom were forced to resign. By late.March, Arosemena had put down
an attempted coup by army officers, but his political support
was badly shaken.
On April 3, 1962 Ecuador broke relations with Cuba as well
as Poland and Czechoslovakia, ending all ties with Communist
states. There was a brief resurgence by Arosemena, now drawing
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support from across the political spectrum but principally
from a coalition of liberals, moderate socialists and independ-
ents. At mid-1962, he had forced out rightist Ministers of
Defense and Interior and transferred or ousted several high-
ranking military officers who had brought pressure on the break
with Cuba. But a year later, in July 1963, Arosemena's civil
government was overthrown by a military coup in the wake of
Mounting unrest, with labor in the lead.
"President Arosomena didn't want to break relations [with
Cuba] but we forced him," Agee was to recall in a recent interview
with the Washington Post. "We promoted the Coirmmunist issue and
-especially Communist penetration of the government."
The Ecuadorian case has seemed worth recounting in some
detail because it was to prove almost a prototype of the later
"'spontaneous" overthrow of other Latin American regirnles similarly
at odds with US `'policy. The steady flow of money purchasing
pposi ti on' politicians and strident editorials, the accompanying
opposition -
"vigilence" of US-aflliated labor organizations, the inevitable
40
inspiration of the military to save the nation -- all were to be
-repeated with varying emphasis and intensity. I n Ecuador as
elsewhere, however, the outco.,e of the CII intervention and the
related overthrow of Arosemena was more than a change in the
Country's diplomatic alignment, the ostensible goal of the
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8.
covert action. After its interval of economic stability,. avoid-
ing the inflation and devaluation plaguing other Latin American
countries, Ecuador fell during 1961-63 into a persistent depress-
ion stemming from the political turmoil and a resulting decline
in banana exports, a main cash crop. Ten years later, despite a
recent oil boom, the country remained one of the poorest in Latin
America in terms of income distribution. From 1966 .to 1970, U.S.
development aid to Ecuador was less than $22 million. A former
U.S. official estimates that the. CIA spent at least half that much
bringing down civil government in Ecuador between 1960 and 1963.
As for Ecuadorian labor, apparently so anxious to`be rid of
Arosemena and diplomatic relations with Cuba, the new military
regime was soon to be a dubious blessing. "The Ecuador military
-regime has launched a systematic and ruthless attack on Ecuador's
trade unions," ah ORIT publication bitterly complained soon after
the 1963 coup. "There is every reason to fear that Ecuador is
heading towards a full military dictatorship..." The country
returned briefly to civilian rule in 1963, albeit under military
supervision, but a new constitution was suspended two years
later and a military junta resumed power in.1972.
US-Ecuadorian relations were comparatively untroubled after
1963, flaring only briefly in a 1971 fisheries dispute. American
firms, including ITT, Standard Fruit, General Tire, and Dow
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Chemical dominate foreign investment with some 60% of foreign
corporate holdings. Trade with the US is not significant by
Latin American standards. In 1974, as in 1960, what authentic
uJS national interest would justify CIA intervention in Ecuador
seemed a fit subject for debate.
As a final irony, the Latin American states are now
scheduled to meet in Quito to consider the re-opening of
relations with Cuba, apparently about to benefit from the
politics of detent. Washington would now quietly abandon its long-standing
fear that diplomatic ties with Havana endangered vital US
interests in the Hemisphere. For the people of Ecuador, however,
there would be no escape from a decade of military dictatorship,
labor repression and unrelieved poverty that began in large part
with one of CIA's "successes" of the early sixties.
Brazil: "It did not just happen..."
As the pressure was mounting on the Arosenena regime in
Ecuador, much of the same sequence was being played out in
Brazil. There, as in Ecuador, the spearhead of anti-government
activity was to be labor organizations spawned by the United
States, and the target was a nationalist, non-communist civilian
regime. Similarly, the result in Brazil was the institution of
a military dictatorship which pursued foreign policies more
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domestic liberties, including the rights of labor.
The development of events in Brazil during 1962-64 is
perhaps more familiar than the parallel operation in Ecuador.
The regime of President Joao Goulart clashed with the United
States early in 1962 over the expropriation of an ITT subsidiary,
the resumption of Brazil's diplomatic relations with the Soviet
Union, and Rio's abstention (along with Ecuador and others) in
the earlier OAS vote to expell Cuba. Agee has reported
that the CIA poured over $20 million into Brazil's 1962
elections in support of opposition candidates for governorships,
senatorial and deputy seats, and even thousands of provincial
and municipal offices. The election, however, in which
Communi sm was the issue, was disappointing to Washington. In a
record turnout, pro-Goulart figures won a number of positions at
national and local levels.
In -the aftermath of the 1962 election, events moved rapidly.
In November 1962, Brazil demanded transfer of a US di pl or,lat for
inter ferene : in domestic politics. By JVffuua}'y 1963 Washington
had decided to withhold $50 million in development aid pledged
two years earlier, ostensibly pending fiscal reforms by Goulart.
resumably with
Coincidentally, the Brazilian branch of AIFLD-'(p
its rCSOurces) began to
a Rio counterpart to Agee husbanding
step u4, anti-government operations. Courses in "labor affairs,"
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in Brazil and in Washington, were given to anti-Goulart Brazilian
labor leaders -- including the head of the vital Telegraph and
Telephone union who, reported an approving Reader's Digest later,
"after every class...quietly warned key workers of coming trouble
and urged them to keep communications going no matter what
happened."
U.S. aid remained frozen through 1963. Ambassador Lincoln
Gordon became sharply critical of "leftist" elements in the
Brazilian government. Charges of communist penetration were,
again as in Ecuador, widely aired in the Brazilian press. On
October 11, 1963 the Goulart regime announced the discovery'of a
cache of US weapons entering the country under Alliance for
Progress packages and reportedly addressed to anti-Goulart
figures.
In January 1964, Goulart signed a potentially far-reaching
bill to curb corporate profits expatriated from Brazil by foreign
investors, a bill affecting mainly the host of US interests in
the t unary valued at nearly a billion dollars. By early March,
Goulart had moved to repair his shifting political position by
forming a popular front with leftist support, and had retained
a coalition majority in parliament. "lle had staying power,"
recalled one US official who watched these events, "and he was
the popularly elecLvd leader of the country."
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On March 26, 1964 the first military units came out against
Goulart and by April 1 an army revolt replaced civilian
government with a junta. But the coup was also the result of a
carefully orchestrated effort by labor organizations, and anti-
Goulart middle class groups as well as the army. "Some democrat-
ic labor leaders," boasted an ORIT labor publication, "were
involved in the planning of the popular revolution as far as
-six months ago." "As a matter of fact," AIFLD's William J.
Doherty, Jr. later told a broadcast audience, "some of them
(Brazilian labor leaders) were so active that they became
intimately involved in some of the clandestine operations of the
revolution before it took place on April 1. What happened in
Brazi 1 on Apri 1 1 di d not just happen -- i t was planned --- and
planned months in advance. Many of the trade union leaders --
many of whom were actually trained in our institute were
involved in the revolution, and in the overthrew of the Goulart
regime." In the event, a key role in the coup was played by
telegraphers trained in AIFL.D seminars. One of the first acts
of the military regime was to name several AIFL.D "graduates,"
many trained in the U.S., to purge the labor movements of
"subversives."
Scarcely twenty-four hours after the coup, the Johnson
Administration offered "warmest good wishes" to the junta and
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offered to resume aid. Once more, though, the scenario-managed
in Washington and the field had incongruous results. Within
months, the junta harshly suppressed the labor movement, and
even AIFLD was to break with the regime.- "They're not too favor-
able to any rtover:,2nt that's too democratic," explained one labor
official of junta. policies. A decade after the overthrow of
Goulart, Brazil stands accused before the United Nations of gross
abuses of human rights, including torture of some 15,000
political prisoners and alleged genocide of Ainazonian Indians.
Zaire (The Congo): "An exercise in ration building"
It was to be, promised President Kennedy, "a long twilight
struggle." And nowhere did the struggle seem longer, or the light
so dim, as in the chaotic politics of the Congo following its
independence in l1`GO.
Fourteen years later, the train of Congolese governments, the
exotic. place Ipmes, the endless confusion of personalities and
con'spiracics, even the violence, have a dated, almost comic
quality. Cut in the 1960s, the Unitcd States Government saw it
all as deadly serious business, a test that would determine the
destiny of a continent important and perhaps vital to American
interests. The Congo was not only a wealthy nation strategically
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placed in the heart of African it was also presumed to be a
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or failure 'of one's clients would have repercussions throughout
Africa and the developing world. Briefly then, for the first
and last time, an African problem became a priority. for the
White House and the subject of a US-supported action by the
United Nations.
Bureaucratically, the Congo crisis was supposed to be the
final triumph of anti-colonialism in American foreign policy,
residing in the authority of the State Department's new Bureau
of African Affairs. "We're running this sh.ow," Roger Hi lsman
later remi,ember?ed the boast of one of State's nI--d African experts
But if the thrust of U. S. di pl omia-I-.y at the U11 z,nd elsewhere was
anti-colonial, the decisive American policy in the Congo itself
was soon being executed not only by the State Department, but by
the new CIA stat:~ cil on fl, e scene. From the rail of Patrice
Lumumba in 1960 to the coup installing General Joseph flobutu in
1966, CIA" cash payments to politicians, m rli pul ati on of unions
y and a rising investment in planted
and youth a;' cu r'G 1 groups,
propagantI helped establish increasingly lr oWestern regimes
ending 4111 the military di ctator?shl p that h :s governed the country
for the last nine years.
Perhaps thn most dramatic instance of CI!`. intervention came
in the l a6', St.anl eyv i l l e revolt ti;hen Cuban. Bays of Pigs veterans
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were contracted to fly vintage B-26 bombers and white mercenaries
were recruitcd by the Agency in South Africa and Rhodtdsi a.
("Bringing in ouv ovn animals," as one long-tii;;e CIA operative
described the mercenary recruitment.) The revolt was crushed,
though not before fifty eight European hostages were killed by
the rebels in the wake of the CIA bombings and Lhe Belgian-US
airdrop on Stanleyville.
The mercenary action, however, was ?.-Ytr-aordinary. More
often, the intervention continued quietly in the passage of money
and advice. i"obutu succeeded in a bloodless coup in late 1965,
and has reportedly kept up a close.. liaison with his former
patrons. "Such relationships aren't term-inated," said a former
intelligence official.
By the customary standards of national policy, the Congo,
now renamed Zaire, has been an obvious success story for every-
one. The country is united and pro-Westcrn, its history presumably
an inspiration to uthor American client regimes in fear of
disintegration or sul)verSi on. Diplomatic relations with the US
are outwardly excellent.. Aneri c,n corporate i nvestnr n t, notably
in copper and aluminium, doubled to about $!6 million following
a 1976 visit by V.o!;utu to the US. Investors include Chase
Manhattan, Ford, G11, Gulf, Shell, Union Carui :le and several
other large concern:,. In many respects, Zaire seems
15.
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rni zah,l e from the vol ati 1 e, ungovernable mess of little unrecog
than a decade ago. "It's been a good exercise in nation-
more
building," says a senior Foreign Service Officer in a
But the success story in Zaire can also be seen
nt perspective. After .a decade of authoritarian rule,
different Vast
despite comparatively heavy US and European aid, despite
in
natural wealth, Zaire remains one of the poorest countries
world, its grol?,th rate over the decade 1960-1970 less than
the ~
and its GNP per capita only $90. Its stability has been
2.7.
purchased at the cost of recurrent terror and repression. This
model state of American policy in Africa has yet to conduct a
ational free election, to allow the free functioning of
n Tess.
olitical parties or labor unions, or to condone a free p
P
The Agency's most "successful" client in Africa rules by
h a Mrn tesnue impulsiveness that seems to sh.ock even
his former case officers. One recalled that in 4~Lr~ student
had forcibly,enli~:tcd in the armed forces the en
aniUfl University. "hie was put out. by some student
bqdy of lov
strations," remembered the official. tgobutu .finally
ema~i
d
, but ten of the students were sentenced to life
relented.
imprisonment for crimes of "public insult" to .i;he~ Chief of State
impri
Mobutu been altogether a model for US diplomatic efforts
Nor has ertly himself with south
in Africa. While reportedly dealing
in 4 to secure his southern
resut~:;bly
Africa, Rhodosia and Portugal (P
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frontier if not African solidarity), he has steadily refused
occasional US requests that he intercede to halt genocide in
neighboring Burundi or Uganda. As if to make the point, at
the height of the killings of Africans in Uganda, Mobutu
renamed Lake Edward Lake Idi Amin.
As for the CIA itself, the exercise has also had its
drawbacks. One intelligence source recalls a fervant Mobutu
approach.eventual ly deflected, that either Zaire with CIA ?hel p
or the Agency alone undertake an invasion against "those
bastards across the river" in the Congo Republic (Brazzaville).
He's a "real wild man," said one former official, "and we've
had trouble keeping him under rein."
Somalia: Campaign fi panci jg around the horn of Africa
If the Congo enjoyed its moment of chic in world.politics, and
the covert irwestrent which flowed from it, Somalia by contrast
seems an obscure byckwater of international politics. But the CIA
intervention there in the mid-sixties, as in Ecuador earlier,, is
reportedly another tribute to what a small station can do, however
remote from the national interest.
An impoverished land of less than three million along the
northeastern coast of Africa where the Indian Ocean meets the Gulf
of Aden, Somalia was of concern to Washington for a number of
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reasons. Irredentist claims threatened border warfare with
both Kenya and Ethiopia, the latter a long-time US client state
under Haile Selassie and the site of a major intelligence base.
Somalia was also an early recipient of Soviet aid in Africa, and
its coastline held potentially strategic ports for any future
rivalry in the Persian Gulf or Indian Ocean, an interest shared
by France and Britain. At that, however, the country was
apparently not an urgent concern in US diplomacy. When Somalia
predictably rejected a 1963 American offer of "defensive" arms
conditioned on the exclusion of all other supplies, the State
Department leaked its "displeasure" but seemingly did no more.
Over the next four years, 1963-1967., official US-Somali
relations were distant and US aid next to nothing while Somali
leaders visited the Soviet bloc, Somali newspapers published
anti-American forge'ies planted by Soviet intelligence, and the
country fought a brief but bloody border war with Ethiopia. Then,
suddenly, early in 1967 history took a turn for the better.
President Abdul;ashid Shermarke was elected for a six-year term
as President in June and in July appointed as Premier i'lohanimed
Egal, American-educated and avowedly pro-Western. By fall, US
aid was resumed in amounts twice the previous total since independence,
and Somalia had concluded a border agreement with Ethiopia. In
1968, Egal visited the US following a visit to Somalia by Vice
President Humphrey, and was hailed by President Jolhnson as
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"enormously constructive in a troubled area of Africa." What the
two leaders did not discuss, say official sources, was how
"constructive" the CIA had been for Mr. Egal, whose rise to power
was reportedly facilitated by thousands of dollars in covert
support to Egal and other pro-Western elcrents in the ruling
Somali Youth League Party prior to the 1967 Presidential election.
In retrospect, this clandestine ban!,, rolling in Somalia seems
very modest by CIA standards, only a tiny fraction of what the
Agency now spends in a month i n Southeast Asia or even in the
Congo In the early sixties. And its immediate benefits -- in
rising US influence, in the detente with a grateful Ethiopia
no doubt seemed real enough at the time. In any event, several
sources say the subsidies were discontinued in 1968. But the
withdrawal was to be perhaps too late. On October 15, 1969, while
Egal was again visiting the US, President Shermarke was
assassinated.- A r.:eek later th22 array seized power, dissolving the
National Assembly and Constitution and arresting the entire
Cabinet, including Egal. Among the charges against Egal would
be corruption of tie electoral process and coniplicity with foreign
intelligence services. Ironically, the bizarre CIA political
contributions before 1967 may have been a decisive factor in the
eventt!al fall of the Agency's candidate.
Little chan-,icd for the people of Somalia as a result of the
CIA intervention. They are still grindingly poor, with a
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ne ative growth rate in 19E,''-1970 and less than $70 GNP per-capita.
The main beneficiaries of the covert action, Egal and his colleagues,
are mostly in jail or dead. The country has turned again toward
the Soviet bloc in the last five years, with reports of Soviet
naval bases and airfields menacing the Indian Ocean. Perhaps it
is out of some sense of bureaucratic defensiveness, rooted in
memories of the Focal episode, as well as a valid difference of
view that CIA Director Colby is now reported to be less alarmed by
the Soviet presence in Somalia than his Pentagon counterparts.
Indonesia: Thr (;iGrest Qominae
Finally, one of the most familiar CIA"successes" has been the
succession of a pro--Western military regime in Indonesia. Though
there is no clear evidence that the Agency Was instrumental in the
1965 coup that eventually overthrew President Svi:arno, there is
also na douhzt that it was precisely Sukarno `s ouster from the Right that had
been an Agency goal for nearly a decade:. In that sense, Indonesia
seems another telling measure of the possible ro:sults of 'covert action.
CIA intervention against the Su%arno regime probably began as
early as the 1956 Sumatra revolt, and was brought drastically
into the open with the downing in May 1958 of a CIA 8-26 and its
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21.
.. pilot, Allen Pope, who was released during a brief thaw
in US-Indonesian relations in 1962. Diplomatic hostilities soon
resumed in 1963-1964 during Sukarno's confrontation policy to and
Malaysia, and by mid-1905, following violent anti-US demonstrations
in Indonesia, the US Congress adopted a resolution using a total
aid cut-off. Then, in September 1965, in the wake of an abortive
coup by pro-Chinese officers the Indonesian military began the
purge of Indonesian leftists that was not only to displace Sukarno
but also lead, within a year, to the death of as many as 000,000
people -- tens of thousands of them, by the Army's own investiga-
tion, wholly innocent bystanders.
Assuming no direct CIA complicity in these events r e, the
Indonesian coup should be seen in the context of what the Agency
was trying to accomplish by covert action in Indonesia and else-
~.;here. `thus the fear op Convmunist subversion, which erupted to a
frenzy of:kIlling in 1965-66, had been encouraged in the
.11penetration" propaganda of the Agency in Indonesia just as it was
exploited in Ecuador or Brazil. So too the Indonesian' military
must have known that their rep%e;.Re>t of Sukarno and the
obliteration of the Indonesian Communist Pr_r gty would hardly he
opposed by an American government whose own covert intelligence
operations hi ;d long been directed at both. "All I know," said
one former intelligence officer of the Indonesian events, "i s
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that the Agency rolled in some a
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that things broke big and very favorable, as far as we were
concerned."
By 1974, there were some signs that Indonesia might be
moving toward some reia,xation of the harsh military rule applied
since 1) g. But Indonesia, like Brazil, w s cited in the United
Nations for gross abuses of human rights and several sources
estimate as many as 50,000 political prisoners are still being
held without trial.
For all the clear differences in setting and events, these
five cases have much in common. And vie.-red together, they seem
to characterize (if not caricature) some of the main elements of
the CIA's covert action abroad.
First, thei~e are the obvious ironies in both the techniques
of intervention and the outcome of events. In most of the five
cases "success" ?-? however temporary -- came largely at. the
expense of the Agency's own instruments. They trained political
organizers and found political organizations outlawed. They
used a more or less free press to plant propaganda and were left
with more or less rigid censorship. They spent thousands to buy
elections from the Amazon to the Gulf of Adam and were left with
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dissolved. assrrablies and no more troublesome voting. Relying on
labor unions for their purposes, they saw the labor movement
suppressed.
Then, too, there were the ironies in tactics. Presumably
to avoid "i nsta.bi l i ty" in Latin America, the Agency deliberately
fostered poliL'icl turmoil and division which might easily have
gone beyond its control. No one planned the frenzied slaughter
by Moslem gangs and undisciplined troops in Indonesia, but it
stemmed in part from a climate of fear and suspicion which the
United States worked covertly to fc-rrrent. Or on a more subtle
level, to combat Soviet influence in Somalia, our covert policy
lavishly (by Somali standards) embraced the few politicians who
might have done that, and destroyed their local credibility in
the process.
There is, of course: no record of amends to our clients who
suffered the se untoward results -- no escape engineered for
Egal, no cov&t carrpai gn or case officers to rc~_stabl i sh labor
rights in Ecuador or Brazil, and, we must assume, no sure exit
for Messrs. i-;cbu4u or Suharto or their many peers if it should
come to that.
All this raises the often puzzling question of exactly who
were the clients and %-,hat were the basic inter. is of covert
policies in these cases or others. It is clear enough that the
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Agency's clients were scarcely the institutions or popular
organizations spa,.-,,-nod or exploited. Least of all is there
evidence of a direct interest in the social or economic
-welfare of the mass of people in any of the countries.
Intervention left untouched the substantial human misery
in all five countries, and in varying degrees added the burden
of political repression. But then that was hardly the
Agency's mission or target.
In the end, of course, the CIA's only authentic client was
itself. Regimes, labor leaders, obliging editors, moonlighting
Cabinet Ministers, ambitious colonels all come and go. The
station remains, altering its rolls as necessary and passing
them along from case officer to case officer, with the power
of manipulation the only real criterion of covert, operational
success.
Within the U.S. government., all five of these cases have
been judged asp a nia jor credit to the CIA's bureaucratic stock.
Even, Somal i a can be rationalized as a vindication of covert
action; our men in ilogadi sc'i o fell, after all, when they left
the payroll. Yet even within the burcaucracy there are
apparently doubts about the longevity of our.succ,:?ss. The
covert money cont.-inues to glow in many cases because the
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"stability" of the agreeable successor regin s never seems
secure. Guerrillas in Brazil, leftists or anti-American students
in Ecuador, the psychological aberrations in Zairean politics,
the resurgence of opposition in Indonesia -- a station's.work
is never done.
Beyond the soiretin;es bizarre measures of success, these
five cases also ohvicusly share the common mythology of covert
action. All belong to the cold war anxieties of the sixties.
All reflect the abiding conviction that the, United States should
and could shape the politics and diplomacy of other countries by
clandestine, if necessary ruthless, and altogether extra-legal
means. The prevailing orthodoxy was that our security was at
stake in some measure in virtually every capital of the develop-
ing world as well as in the industrialized states. And security
was surely nowhere inconsistent with repressive regimes. On the
other hand, in none of the five cases -- Ecuador, Brazil, Zaire,
Somalia, Indonesia -- did the CIA or its political superiors
ever make a public case that the national security was so involved.
V
The offending element in all cases -- even, again, in
Somalia, where th^ Agency now tends to discount Soviet influence was an uncontrolled or so?ietinres belligerent na-ti onal i sm. It
was the infectous power of independence that seems to have been
most disturbing to US policy-makers in the pre-detente era.
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.26.
But then none of these cases are relics of the past. The
techniques they illustrate were applied anew, albeit perhaps with
more sophistication, to the Allende regime in Chile, with similar
results. (one wonders how many unionists or students or journalists
who obliged us in deposing Allende are now -- as their Ecuadorian,
Brazilian, Congolese, Somali or Indonesian counterparts before
them -- suffering second thoughts under the less-tender rule of
the Chilean junta.)
But perhaps the central point of these experiences is that
buying
the Agency was not really some autonomous evil machine,
and selling countries by some hidden bureaucratic impulse simply
to manipulate or exist. In these five cases and many more, the
CIA was truly, as Richard Bissell once told the Council of Foreign
of national policy." What we
Relations, "a responsible agency
are talking about in each of these cases is forei ~,,`~. pol i c.y, from
the l owl i est ,desk officer in the State Department -L-.b the junior
staff of the station in she field. The CIA ultimately carried
out the operations in these five countries because it was national,
Presidential policy to have compliant regimes in Latin America, a
"stable," pro-Western rule in the Congo, a reversal of leftward,
Irredentist politics in Somalia and an end to Sukarno's volatile
nationalism. In that sense, the CIA met real needs within the
United States Government. And if it had not existed, bureaucratic
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imperatives and -interests included, in all probability it would
.have been invented.
For the sane reason, it is clear what the Agency does not
do covertly, whatever its czpabilities It does not attempt to
relieve the torture or prisoners in Brazil, or to discredit the
police there, or to undermine the savage exploitation of the
Amazonian Indians. It does not mobilize on behalf of higher
wages for the vase Indian population of Ecuador. It does not
pressure Mobutu for free elections in Zaire or for denial of
his o~,n covert support of a genocidal regime in Burundi. It does
not finance legal or journalistic pressure in Indonesia to free
the prisoners held since 10,6.5. One searches in vain for any
evidence that the Agency has intervened anywhere in two decades
on behalf of hvm.n rights, But that is not only a natter of
covert intelligence operations. An argument could certainly be
made on strictly practical grounds by the CIA (as indeed officials say
has been) tha souie support for groups downtrodden by "friendly"
regimes is simply a way to cover all bets. Covert action is most
often no more nor less than the way we do business with the world,
the ruling expediency and inhumanity of diplomacy as apart from
the hypocrisy of rhetoric.
Finally, each of the five cases shares to a large extent the
common process by which covert operati uns -- and foreign policy --
it
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or desk,:hen approved by the highest level of government,
mainly by the predecessor of the current Forty Committee, these
cases proceeded with no visible trace of bureaucratic debate.
There is no record of opposition from the State Department or
White House staff, no resignations on principle, no major leak
to forstall action.
For most Foreign Service Officers, one suspects, these
operations are distasteful, embarrassing and certainly bureau-.
cratically annoying to the degree that their clients are in the
action, but not essentially inconsistent with the accepted
conduct of foreign policy. So too they were accepted by two
Presidents and their men. It seems a banal yet still striking
fact: a large number of people in the United States Government
unquestioningly accepted and supported -- and accept and support
now --- the proposition that It was necessary for this country
secretly to bov.h and bribe in some of the most marginal precincts
of the national interest ,imacinable.
An analysis of covert action by the CIA can only lead
toward a most basic. discussion of United States foreign policy}
and beyond that to the standards and concepts of a democratic
foreign policy that we expect of public officials at all levels.
But then it is not only the sinister Executive Branch that
bears responsibility for these episodes and the m ntality-they
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mirror. Congressman Michael Harrington recently expressed dismay
that his colleagues from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
seemed uninterested in-the revelations of $11 million spent to
unseat Allende in Chile. It is not, of course, so surprising or
merely a reflection of the Congressional at-:e of Secretary
Kissinger. The Congress has largely consistently ignored covert
operations, in comfortable, earnestly cultivated ignorance, for
as long as the Agency has existed. The exceptions, such as
Harrington's letter or Senator Case's exposure of Radio Free
Europe, or the Senate Hearings on AIF(A and ITT are all too rare.
For its part, he press has tended to treat the subject with
the same air of resignation or gingerly neglect. Beyond the
familiar exceptions, journalism has found it just as hard, or
unimportant, to follow the mundane rhythm of covert action abroad.
The CIA, like the reputation o-1: the incumbent Secretary of State,
is a continuing beneficiary of the distaste for investigative
reporting in foreign affairs.
There seems no facile answer to any of this. But a beginning
,could be made by the Congress to control covert action just as it
has dertiarlded control over war powers, and for the same reasons of
Constitutional rosponsibility and sanity.
A Foreign Intervention Control Act might include the
fol1orrin,:
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However unlikely these changes seem in the political realities of
Washington, where the incentive to control the CIA and assume genuine
responsibility for national security remains, as the bureaucrats say,
"thin" in all quarters, there will be no answer to the abuses of
covert action without such reforms.
But the ul timati: reform must co,-.,1e in foreign policy. The most
careful controls on covert action will be unavailing so long as we
see our role in t he world in the way we have seen it for the last
two decades. Our vast national intelligence apparatus, besides protecting
authentic security i ntc:res E:s, could conceivably be di recved to strengthen
the capacity of govcrrunents to resolve the enormous humman problems
now beginning to breal; over them. But that is not a matter of
intelligence technique or success. It could only come from a larger
decision that the United States conduct at last a humane and open
foreign policy.
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