According to O’Rourke, “The United States supported authoritarian forces in forty-four out of sixty-four covert regime changes, including at least six operations that sought to replace liberal democratic governments with illiberal authoritarian regimes.”[167]  In these six cases – Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (1960), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), and Chile (1973) – the U.S. not only undermined democracy but also aided and abetted repression, torture, and execution of political opponents.

Why did U.S. leaders subvert democracy in other countries?

Simply put, they did not trust the people to choose the “right” leaders.  The “right” leaders were those who protected foreign (U.S.) private investments, suppressed leftist parties, and aligned with the U.S. in international forums.  As this American agenda did not conform to the popular will in other countries, Washington officials conspired with select groups – economic elites, rightist political and military leaders, and police and military establishments – to establish the “right” leadership.  “In most Cold War interventions,” notes O’Rourke, “U.S. leaders believed that an authoritarian regime would be most likely to pursue their interests.”  At a White House meeting on June 27, 1970, in which plots to prevent the election of Socialist Party leader Salvador Allende in Chile were discussed, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger explained, “The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.  I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”[168]

U.S. leaders applied different strategies and combinations thereof to achieve their foreign policy goals.  Diplomatic bargaining and economic incentives were the usual fare of international relations.  Governments that accommodated U.S. demands were typically rewarded with economic and military aid; hence, U.S. taxpayers funded a number of authoritarian governments around the world.  If the ability to compel favorable policies was in doubt, U.S. leaders might covertly manipulate elections to assure that the proper leaders were elected, as was the case of Italy in 1948.  According to New York Times correspondent Tim Weiner, “The C.I.A.’s practice of buying political clout was repeated in every Italian election for the next 24 years, and the agency’s political influence in Rome lasted a generation, declassified records show.”[169]

CIA operatives also manipulated elections in Japan during the 1950s and 1960s, secretly providing cash contributions to the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) so as to diminish the electoral prospects of the Japanese Socialist Party.  U.S. Ambassador to Japan Douglas MacArthur later claimed that “the Socialists in Japan had their own secret funds from Moscow” and that U.S. covert funding for the LDP helped to “project American power.”  The LDP ruled Japan without interruption for 38 years.[170]  In Lebanon, CIA agents doled out funds to pro-Western politicians to sway national elections in 1957.  After managing to “rig the election,” as U.S. Ambassador Richard Parker described it, the Eisenhower administration sent 14,000 U.S. troops to Lebanon to protect the pro-Western government of Camille Chamoun from internal dissent.[171]

If election manipulation was not feasible or did not produce the desired outcome, U.S. leaders might employ more diabolical covert methods, including assassinations, military coups, and insurgencies.  The U.S. organized successful military coups in Iran, Congo, Dominican Republic, Brazil, Indonesia, and Chile, and fomented guerrilla insurgencies in Albania, Guatemala, Laos, Cuba, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua.  U.S. leaders much preferred clandestine operations to overt U.S. military intervention, but they were prepared to use U.S. troops and maintained the capability to do so.  In 1963, the U.S. maintained 275 major bases in 31 nations with 1.25 million military-related personnel stationed abroad.[172]  Apart from wars in Korea and Southeast Asia, U.S. troops were deployed to back a rightist government in the Dominican Republic in 1965, and to overthrow a leftist government in Grenada in 1983.[173]

The operative principle for all U.S. covert actions was and is “plausible deniability,” meaning that U.S. agents covered their tracks and U.S. agencies denied responsibility, attributing results to other parties.  Secrecy was needed not only to achieve the particular objectives of the mission, but also to hide the operations from the American public and to avoid international censure.  The charters of the United Nations and the Organization of American States explicitly prohibit the intervention of one nation in the affairs of another nation.  The exposure of U.S. covert operations would identify the United States as the rogue nation it was, rather than the world leader it claimed to be.  Baring the truth would also make U.S. leaders look hypocritical when they condemned Soviet intervention in Eastern Europe and “communist aggression” elsewhere.  How could the Eisenhower administration, for example, condemn North Vietnamese “aggression” against South Vietnam if the world knew that it was attempting to destabilize governments in Eastern Europe nations and the Soviet Union, overthrow governments in Iran, Guatemala, and Laos, and manipulate elections in Indonesia, Japan, and Lebanon?[174]

Different administrations had their own styles, of course, and the Cold War itself varied in intensity over the course of 45 years.  Yet the administrations reputed to be most inclined toward easing international tensions – the Kennedy, Nixon, and Carter administrations – did so only to a limited degree and hid their more aggressive policies.  During John F. Kennedy’s 34 months in office, he oversaw 163 major CIA covert operations, as compared to 170 during the Eisenhower administration’s eight years.[175]  According to the historian Stephen Rabe, “Kennedy and his advisers used a variety of political, economic, and military tools to undermine constitutional regimes throughout the Western Hemisphere…. Despite its public commitment to democracy and reform, the Kennedy administration frequently demonstrated that it preferred anti-Communist authoritarians over left-leaning leaders who respected constitutional processes.”[176]

President Richard M. Nixon (1969-1974) opened the door to friendly relations with the Soviet Union and China by instituting détente in 1972, yet he and his Machiavellian national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, orchestrated the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973.[177]  President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) extended the idea of détente to Cuba and declared in 1978 that human rights “is the soul of our foreign policy,” but nonetheless kept U.S. aid flowing to the oppressive Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran right up to his overthrow in 1979.[178]  Carter also secretly initiated covert operations against the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan before Soviet troops intervened in December 1979, a policy that had long-lasting blowback effects (see Section V).

Accountability

A byproduct of America’s covert operations was the dilution of democracy at home.  The creation of the CIA under the National Security Act of 1947 provided the president with an army of secret agents and a stash of hidden funds with which to engage in every kind of mischief in other nations.  U.S. administrations offered the American public a smorgasbord of lies and “fake news” to cover up their clandestine activities.  Often, they kept Congress in the dark as well.  It took significant effort just to find out what the U.S. government was doing around the world.

One such effort began in the fall of 1973.  Representative Donald Fraser of Minnesota, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Organizations, began hearings on how U.S. foreign aid affected human rights in eighteen countries.  The subcommittee’s 54-page report, titled “Human Rights and the World Community:  A Call for U.S. Leadership,” criticized “the prevailing attitude [that] has led the United States into embracing governments which practice torture and unabashedly violate almost every human rights guarantee pronounced by the world community.  Through foreign aid and occasional intervention – both overt and covert – the United States supports those governments.”[179]  Congress subsequently banned U.S. military aid to a number of countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, El Salvador, and Guatemala, citing gross human rights violations.

Another effort focused on U.S. covert activities.  In January 1975, a bipartisan, eleven-member Senate committee was created to investigate “the extent, if any, to which illegal, improper or unethical activities were engaged in by any agency or by any persons … on behalf of the federal government.”  Known as the Church committee, after Senator Frank Church of Idaho, the committee met for fifteen months, received testimony from 800 individuals, and issued a series of reports on its findings that totaled 110,000 pages.  The reports revealed that 75% of the CIA’s covert operations had never been approved or reviewed by Congress, and that many of the activities were “highly improper.”  The latter included plots to assassinate foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Fidel Castro of Cuba, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and the Diem brothers of Vietnam.  The committee also unearthed the CIA’s Operation CHAOS, which involved illegally conducting surveillance and collecting information on 7,200 U.S. citizens from 1967 to 1973, and Operation MK-Ultra, in which “the CIA undertook programs for testing chemical and biological agents on unwitting Americans, sometimes with tragic consequences.”[180]

One Church committee report on the overthrow of the Chilean government on September 11, 1973, explained how the CIA moved, step-by-step, from supporting opposition candidates in 1964 to fomenting opposition to the election of Salvador Allende as president in 1970, to plotting the kidnapping of General Schneider (who was murdered), and “finally to advocating and encouraging the overthrow of a democratically elected government.”  CIA agents admitted their involvement in the overthrow, but Kissinger insisted that the U.S. had nothing to do with it.[181]

Two accountability measures came out of the Church committee hearings.  One was an Executive Order issued by President Gerald Ford in 1976 prohibiting “political assassination.”[182]  The second was a Congressional amendment in 1976, introduced by Senator Dick Clark of Iowa, prohibiting U.S. support for paramilitary activities in Angola, which Congress had never approved.  In the 1980s, however, Congress repealed the Clark Amendment and the CIA produced an “assassination manual” for the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan rebels, albeit focused on killing lower-level government officials and employees, including teachers and nurses, rather than top Nicaraguan officials.[183]

According to former CIA agents Philip Agee, John Stockwell, and Ralph McGehee, the Church committee’s revelations were only the tip of an iceberg of CIA subterfuge.  Their exposés of “the company,” with parts redacted by CIA censors, were written in the interest of truth and accountability.[184]  McGehee, a 25-year veteran of the agency who was awarded the CIA career intelligence medal upon his retirement in 1976, wrote in the conclusion of his book, Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA (1983):

 

Ralph McGehee, former CIA agent and author [See 13-minute YouTube interview]

The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency.  It is the covert action arm of the President’s foreign policy advisers.  In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign governments while reporting “intelligence” justifying those activities.  It shapes its intelligence, even in such critical areas as Soviet nuclear weapon capability, to support presidential policy.  Disinformation is a large part of its cover action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target audience of its lies.[185]

Accountability was also the goal of a number of truth commissions created in Latin America following eras of repression and civil war, established in Bolivia (1982), Argentina (1983), Chile (1990), El Salvador (1992), Guatemala (1994), Uruguay (1995), Panama (2001), Peru (2001), Ecuador (2007), and Brazil (2012).  These commissions reinforced the Frasier committee message that the U.S. was supporting repressive regimes in Latin America.  The truth commission in El Salvador determined that U.S.-backed state security forces and associated rightist paramilitary groups were responsible for 85% of assassinations and murders, whereas leftist rebels were responsible for 5%.  The Guatemalan Historical Clarification Commission found that government and allied forces were responsible for 93% of the violence, as compared to 3% for the rebels.  The commission described the operations of the Guatemalan military as “acts of genocide.”[186]

President Bill Clinton, on a visit to Guatemala in 1999, took the unusual step of acknowledging a measure of responsibility.  Speaking at the National Palace of Culture just after the release of the truth commission report, Memory of Silence, he said, “For the United States, it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence units which engage in violent and widespread repression of the kind described in the report was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake.”[187]

There were, of course, many U.S. citizens, organizations, and publications intent on exposing the truth about U.S. military and foreign policies.  This was more difficult in the early years of the Cold War when public trust in the government was greater and McCarthyism was in its heyday.  Notable critics included journalists Helen Mears and I. F. Stone, scientists Albert Einstein and Linus Pauling, public intellectuals W. E. B. Du Bois and Norman Thomas, entertainers Paul Robeson and Woody Guthrie, and peace leaders A. J. Muste and Dorothy Day.  Mears, who wrote two widely read books on Japan in the 1940s, questioned whether Americans could “reform any nation … when they hardly knew or cared about other nations’ cultures, societies, and particular historical experiences.”[188]  Stone, in his four-page I. F. Stone’s Weekly, which ran from 1953 to 1971, was adept at analyzing the plethora of propaganda flowing out of the White House, sorting fact from fiction.  The mainstream U.S. press, in contrast, tended to accept the Washington-centered view of the world, framing international developments in terms of whether American was winning or losing influence.[189]

Both during and after the Cold War many scholars have contributed to public accountability through their reflective critiques, constituting a kind of “fifth estate.”[190]  Some scholars have focused on specific U.S. interventions.[191]  Some have critically assessed particular regions or aspects of U.S. foreign policy.[192]  Some have probed the contours of American empire and its accompanying intellectual architecture.[193]  Among the latter is Noam Chomsky, who writes of American exceptionalism:

The fundamental assumption that lies behind the imperial grand strategy … is the guiding principle of Wilsonian idealism:  We – at least the circles who provide the leadership and advise them – are good, even noble.  Hence our interventions are necessarily righteous in intent, if occasionally clumsy in execution…. By virtue of its unique comprehension and manifestation of history’s purpose, America is entitled, indeed obligated to act as its leaders determine to be the best, for the good of all, whether others understand or not.  And like its noble predecessor and current junior partner, Great Britain, American should not be deterred in realizing history’s transcendent purpose …”[194]

In contrast to the noble sense of mission invoked by U.S. leaders, William Blum, in The Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (2000), argues that “the engine of American foreign policy has been fueled not by a devotion to any kind of morality, nor even simple decency, but rather by the necessity to serve other masters.”  The other masters include “preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model,” enhancing the domestic military-industrial-political complex, and “extending political, economic, and military hegemony over as much of the globe as possible.”[195]

President Eisenhower, in his farewell speech in January 1961, warned against the undue influence of the “military industrial complex” even though he had presided over a considerable expansion of the military budget and “defense” industries during his eight years in office.  He averred that the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.  We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties and democratic processes.”[196]  This was a clarion call to not let special interests determine military priorities through their campaign contributions to politicians.  General Douglas MacArthur, speaking in July 1957, more pointedly warned of the inclination of political and military leaders to imagine monsters abroad in order to justify ever-increasing military budgets at home:

Our swollen budgets constantly have been misrepresented to the public.  Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear – kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor – with the cry of grave national emergency.  Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded.  Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.[197]

Space limitations do not permit a comprehensive account of all U.S. interventions during the Cold War.  The remaining part of this section and the next two sections offer synopses of eleven interventions in different regions of the world:

• Greece, Albania, and the Ukraine (Europe and the Soviet Union);
• Iran, the Congo, Indonesia, and Afghanistan (Mideast, Africa, and Asia); and
• Guatemala, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and British Guiana (Americas).

Essays on the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Central America wars of the 1980s can be found elsewhere on the U.S. Foreign Policy History & Resource Guide website.

Greek tragedy:  British-American intervention, 1944-49

Great Britain had been the dominant foreign influence in Greece since the 19^th century.  During the Second World War, Greece was invaded by Italian forces in October 1940, then by German forces in April 1941.  The Greek government surrendered, but resistance to Axis occupation continued under two guerrilla groups:  the National Popular Liberation Army (ELAS), which was aligned with the Communist Party (KKE) and the National Liberation Front (EAM), and the National Republican Greek League, which was aligned with conservative and rightist parties.  The British Foreign Office supplied both guerrilla groups with small arms and aid in their common effort to defeat the Axis powers.

With German forces in retreat in October 1944, rightist and leftist Greek partisans began to clash.  British troops arrived in Athens on October 13 and soon intervened on behalf of the right, engineering the formation of a new coalition government under Nikolaos Plastiras.  On December 3, Greek police forces fired on peaceful EAM demonstrators in Athens, killing 28.  Over the next two months, British forces bombed, strafed, and shot thousands of ELAS fighters and their supporters.  The U.S. ambassador to Greece, Lincoln MacVeagh, applauded British actions and President Franklin Roosevelt offered no criticism.  Stalin, it should be noted, remained resolutely indifferent to the fate of the Greek communists.  Churchill later wrote that Stalin “adhered strictly and faithfully to our agreement of October.”[198]

In the spring of 1945, the British ousted the Plastiras government and installed a more conservative successor headed by Petros Voulgaris.  A wave of repression followed.  “Throughout the countryside,” writes the historian Lawrence Wittner, “right-wing mobs brutalized or killed leftists, republicans, and their families.  National guardsmen attacked left-wing editors and smashed their printshops…. Still clinging to their fragile legality, the remnants of the EAM protested ineffectually and called for reconciliation; increasingly however, their constituency resorted to violent retaliation, fled to the hills for safety, or dissolved under government persecution.”[199]

Under these repressive conditions, the KKE boycotted national elections held in the spring of 1946.  The elections resulted in an even more ruthless government under Panagis Tsaldaris.  Ambassador MacVeagh wrote to Secretary of State Dean Acheson in August, “Not only thousands of communists … but thousands of centrists and republicans as well … are being equally terrorized by what I called ‘disreputable” royalist elements in effective if not open alliance with the Government.”[200]  The KKE organized a new resistance army, the Democratic Army of Greece, in December 1946, followed by the formation of a “Mountain Government” under the leadership of Markos Vafiadis. As Greece descended into civil war, Acheson instructed MacVeagh on January 21, 1947, that “groups prepared to cooperate with the communists should be regarded as disloyal, contaminated, or politically immature elements,” unworthy of participation in a governing coalition.[201]

The following month, the financially strapped British asked the U.S. for active assistance in managing Greece, which is to say, suppressing the left.  President Truman, in appealing to Congress for aid to Greece on March 12, falsely portrayed the country as a domino ready to fall to the Soviet Union.

Despite the president’s public assurances that most U.S. aid would be used for civilian purposes, Under Secretary of State Will Clayton told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs that “approximately half” of U.S. funding would go toward arming the Greek military.  To reassure Congress that the money would be spent well, Acheson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the U.S. would place Americans in “the essential key ministries” of the Greek government.  British forces in Greece declined from about 15,000 troops to about 5,000 by the end of July 1947.[202]

So began the transfer of British influence to American control over the Greek government.  U.S. control was exercised by the American Mission for Aid to Greece (AMAG), headed by Dwight Griswold, who took charge in June 1947.  Within a year, AMAG had grown to 1,216 employees, nearly half of whom were Americans and mainly military men.  A New York Times story on October 17, 1947, labeled Griswold the “most powerful man in Greece.”[203]  In November, AMAG official Horace Smith informed the State Department, “we have established practical control … over national budget, taxation, currency issuance, price and wage policies, and state economic planning, as well as over imports and exports, the issuance of foreign exchange and the direction of military reconstruction and relief expenditures.”[204]

Griswold and company attempted to form a center-right ruling coalition in order to put a moderate political face on the American intervention in Greece, but the more pressing objective of suppressing the left led rather to U.S. support for right-wing groups, which had no interest in forming a coalition with centrists if they could avoid it.  In mid-1947, the Greek government outlawed the Greek Communist Party and arrested its leaders.  Tens of thousands of suspected supporters were subsequently arrested and imprisoned.  In September, the Athens government suspended key provisions of the Greek constitution guaranteeing press freedom and civil rights.  Leftist newspapers and radio stations were shut down.  The void was filled by propaganda-laden press releases from Washington.  The Truman administration also pressured U.S. publishers to quash critical articles.  One potential article describing U.S. embassy support for authoritarian political solutions, slated for publication in the New York Times in late 1948, never appeared in print.[205]

Stamping out “communism”

U.S. policies in Greece grew harsher as the civil war continued.  Karl Rankin, the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Athens, wrote to Washington on May 15, 1948, reiterating that the central American goal was “stamping out the Communist revolt and influence in Greece” and that there must “be no leniency toward the confirmed agents of an alien and subversive influence.”  He advised the State Department that there should be no “promise of general elections carried out under a government which would include, if not Communists, at least certain champions of compromise and reconciliation between the East and the West.”  The introduction of moderate politicians, he continued, would provide “a renewed opportunity for the Communist and Communist-front organizations … to carry on open as well as clandestine propaganda and sabotage.”[206]

Rankin and his American colleagues, in other words, preferred a Greek police state under rightist control to fair elections that included communists; and they pushed for continuing the civil war over negotiating a compromise with the communist left, which had been part of the political system in the past.  Rankin’s assumption that communism was an illegitimate and alien influence – rather than, say, Americans in Greece – was typical of American officials and repeated elsewhere, including in Vietnam.

Before the infamous U.S. “pacification” programs in Vietnam were created, America’s allies in Greece were implementing such programs.  By November 1947, Griswold reported, the Greek army had forcibly evacuated 310,000 people to “safe areas.”  The suspected rebel supporters lived behind barbed wire enclosures and were afforded no legal right to appeal their fate.  Those judged by the government to be rebels were executed.  Between December 1944 and September 1949, the Greek government executed 3,136 persons.[207]  Despite concerns raised by a United Nations investigating commission, Ambassador Henry F. Grady, who replaced MacVeagh in July 1948, argued against limiting these political executions.  The U.S. “task,” he wrote on August 21, 1948, was “to see that nothing prevents Greeks from finishing [a] job well started or robs their victory of its effectiveness.”[208]

The rebels held out for over three years (1946-1949), surviving in mountain sanctuaries.  Yugoslavia under Tito provided some military supplies to the rebels – in defiance of Moscow’s wishes – until convinced to do otherwise in 1949 by the promise of U.S. aid under the Marshall Plan.  In November 1948, rebel forces were estimated at 23,000, while the U.S.-supplied Greek National Army, advised by more than 100 U.S. military officers, had expanded to 263,000 troops, not including home guard units.  In August 1949, the rebels were soundly defeated in a lopsided battle in which 50,000 government troops attacked 7,700 rebels at Vitsi and government warplanes and artillery pounded rebel positions.  On October 16, rebel leaders announced a “ceasefire.”  The next month, President Truman reported to Congress that victory had been achieved.[209]

All in all, the Greek civil war took the lives of more than 50,000 combatants – 36,839 insurgents and 14,356 government troops – and displaced more than 500,000 civilians.  At least three U.S. military officers died in battle, contrary to official claims that U.S. advisers were not participants.[210]

Postwar authoritarianism in Greece

The end of the civil war did not mean an end to the political left in Greece, nor to U.S. involvement.  On March 5, 1950, elections for the national legislature resulted in a victory for centrist parties, which won 133 seats, as compared to 61 seats for the rightist Populist Party and 22 seats for the leftist Democratic Front.  “The ascendancy of the center,” notes Wittner, “came under immediate attack.  Powerful forces … plotted feverishly to secure a right-wing alternative.”  U.S. General James Van Fleet viewed with alarm the inclusion of the left in the Greek legislature, warning the State Department that “the Communists and fellow travelers have gradually regained their morale and influence and many are now in important positions.”[211]

The State Department agreed with Van Fleet and lent its support to right-wing politicians.  In March 1952, the U.S. embassy in Athens announced its opposition to proportional representation in Greek elections – a democratic system employed across Europe – and threatened to cut off U.S. aid if it were not changed.  Faced with this ultimatum, the centrist government reluctantly agreed to a district by district plurality system that undermined (leftist) minority representation.  Rightist parties subsequently gained a majority of seats in Parliamentary elections in November 1952 and the U.S. thereafter supported a succession of right-wing governments.[212]

The worst of the rightist governments emerged on April 21, 1967, when Greek military officers seized power.  Their leader, Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos, had been on the CIA’s payroll since 1952.  He announced that the military coup was necessary in order to “save the nation from the precipice of communism.”  The right-wing junta subsequently imposed martial law, closed down parliament, suspended the constitution, banned political parties, silenced the press, and placed unions under government control.  Within a few months, the junta had imprisoned more than 40,000 people, some of whom were tortured.  Through it all, the U.S. backed the Papadopoulos regime. The military junta was ousted in November 1973 and democracy was restored. Papadopoulos and his cohorts were put on trial for high treason and torture. Found guilty, Papadopoulos spent the rest of his life in prison.[213]

President Bill Clinton seemed blissfully ignorant of this history when visited Greece in November 1999, intent on securing a bilateral treaty enabling closer cooperation between the FBI and Greek security forces. He was met in Athens by 10,000 protesters who had not forgotten the U.S. role in supporting dictatorship and terrorism.[214]

Offensive operations in the Soviet bloc, 1949-56

No sooner had the Marshall Plan been initiated to tie Western Europe to the United States than U.S. officials began plotting to undermine Soviet control in Eastern Europe.  Rather than being part of America’s defensive “containment” policy, U.S. covert interventions were part of its offensive roll-back strategy.  Placed in historical context, they may be seen as part of an offensive “domino theory,” in which the U.S. sought to build on its successes in Italy (elections in April 1948) and Greece (civil war victory in October 1949), moving on to undermine communist governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself.[215]

On June 18, 1948, the Truman administration authorized National Security Directive 10/2, establishing the innocuously named Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) to carry out a wide range of sabotage and paramilitary activities behind the “iron curtain.”  Headed by George Kennan, the OPC siphoned off about five percent of Marshall Plan funds for clandestine purposes.[216]  A top-secret 1949 Policy Planning Staff Paper, titled “U.S. Policy Toward the Soviet Satellite States in Eastern Europe,” declared, “Our overall aim with respect to the satellite states should be the gradual reduction and eventual elimination of preponderant Soviet power from Eastern Europe without resort to war.”[217]  The NSC 68 directive of 1950 declared that the U.S. “should take dynamic steps to reduce the power and influence of the Kremlin inside the Soviet Union and other areas under its control.  The objective would be the establishment of friendly regimes not under Kremlin domination.  Such action is essential to engage the Kremlin’s attention, keep it off balance, and force an increased expenditure of Soviet resources in counteraction.”[218]  Congressman Charles Kersten put the matter simply in mid-1951:  “We have the opportunity of taking the offensive in the Cold War.  Let us make some trouble for Joe Stalin in his own backyard!”[219]

Between 1949 and 1956, the OPC and CIA conducted covert operations in six Eastern European nations – Albania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania – and six Soviet Republics – Ukraine, Russia, Byelorussia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.  The OPC merged with the CIA in 1952.

The origins of U.S. covert operations in Eastern Europe go back to May 1945, when General Reinhard Gehlen, a German prisoner of war at the Wörgl POW camp in Austria, approached U.S. officials with an offer.  Gehlen had been the commanding officer for Nazi military intelligence on the Eastern Front and had a wealth of knowledge about anti-Soviet partisans in the region, many of whom had collaborated with the Nazi regime as well as participated in mass killings of Jews.  Gehlen was willing to share his information and contacts in exchange for dropping all charges of war crimes against him and his associates.

The U.S. Army not only agreed to the Gehlen’s offer but also began rebuilding his organization under U.S. auspices.  According to O’Rourke, “Gehlen’s organization grew to include hundreds of ex-Nazis, who provided key intelligence, contacts to right-wing émigré groups throughout Eastern Europe, logistical support, and labor for America’s covert rollback missions.  Over the next decade, the US government spent at least $200 million and employed around 4,000 staff to rebuild Gehlen’s organization.”[220]  The main agents of recruitment were Eastern European émigrés who had left their homelands and were living in Displaced Person camps in Allied-occupied zones in Germany, Austria, and Italy.  There were some 2.3 million displaced persons living in the American-occupied zone of Germany alone.[221]

What U.S. officials did not know was that the Soviet Union had infiltrated virtually all anti-Soviet émigré and nationalist organizations, including the Russian Liberation Movement, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the Latvian Daugavas Vanagi, and the Albanian Balli Kombëtar.  Partly because of this, and partly because U.S.-backed groups were tainted by their Nazi collaboration, all of the U.S. covert missions failed to do more than cause minor disruptions.

Operation BGFIEND in Albania

The first U.S. covert operation in Eastern Europe focused on Albania, a small country wedged between Greece and Yugoslavia that shared no border with the Soviet Union.  The British were already operating there and the U.S. followed their lead.

In early 1946, the British launched a covert destabilization campaign aimed at toppling the Soviet-backed Albanian government of Enver Hoxha and replacing it with a pro-Western, royalist faction.  The operation involved recruiting and organizing émigré units, then transporting them into Albania where they could conduct sabotage, organize resistance, and incite general rebellion.  In June 1949, the U.S. joined the effort in a covert operation codenamed BGFIEND.  An Anglo-American Special Policy Committee was created to oversee the operation,  On July 1, 1949, the CIA Office of Confidential Funds approved $900,000 for BGFIEND.[222]

The two main opposition groups to the Hoxha government were the Legaliteti, led by King Zog (Ahmet Muhtar Zogolli), and the Balli Kombëtar.  The Legaliteti’s sole goal was to restore the monarchy.  The CIA deemed Balli Kombëtar “poorly organized” and “confused by its own concurrent double-dealings with Axis and Ally.”  Both groups had collaborated with the Nazis during the war.  U.S. agents bribed and persuaded the two groups to join forces under a newly formed umbrella group called the National Committee for Free Albania (NFCA).  The NCFA made its public debut at a press conference in Paris on August 26, 1949, presenting to the world the U.S. manufactured line that its goals were to establish “fundamental human rights” and “the restoration of full independence.”[223]  In fact, the leaders of the NCFA were well-known Nazi collaborators, so well-known, in fact, that the U.S. State Department turned down a number of requests for U.S. entry visas.  According to O’Rourke:

Declassified documents from the Nazi War Crimes Act show that the United States conspired with numerous known war criminals as a part of this endeavor.  For instance, they encouraged Hasan Dosti to become head of the NCFA … despite knowing that he “served as a Cabinet Minister under the fascists.”  Likewise, the CIA collaborated with Shaver Deva despite his behavior during WWII as “a German agent and ‘prize quisling’” who had started “a pro-German movement.”[224]

Following the establishment of NCFA, the next step in the U.S. plan was to initiate a propaganda offensive in Albania, the aim being to increase popular disenchantment with the Hoxha regime.  “Toward this end,” writes O’Rourke, “the CIA’s Psychological and Paramilitary Staff funded NCFA publications, launched high-altitude balloon drops of anti-Hoxha leaflets, and created Radio Free Albania.”[225]

The third step was to recruit and train more Albanian émigrés to infiltrate into Albania.  The training took place in British-owned Malta and at a U.S. military base near Heidelberg, Germany.  The agents were infiltrated by land, sea, and air (parachute drops).  Albanian security forces, however, seemed to know the time and place of every arrival.  “Indeed,” notes O’Rourke, “one study found that of forty-nine Albanian agents that had been infiltrated by the United States between November 1950 and October 1951, only two were still alive and in contact with the control center in Athens by the end of 1951.”[226]

Suspicion grew in Washington that there was a spy in the Special Policy Committee.  In July 1951, evidence pointed to Kim Philby, a high-level British intelligence officer serving in Washington.  He was dismissed from his position and returned to England (where he was cleared of charges in 1955 only to admit to spying for Moscow years later).  Yet the clandestine missions continued to fail.  The Hoxha government publicly announced each time agents were captured or killed.  On October 24, 1951, for example, the government radio station reported that “thirteen spies dropped by parachute on Albanian territory by the United States Espionage services” had been killed.  In 1954, the Hoxha government put on trial eight captured agents, publicly revealing the details of American covert operations.[227]

The public exposure of these “covert” missions allowed the world to see that the U.S. was doing exactly what it was accusing the Soviet Union of doing, attempting to subvert other governments.  The credibility of the U.S. was also undermined by its alliance with Nazi collaborators, particularly in Albania where NCFA leader Hasan Dosti was commonly known as a “war criminal” responsible for large-scale massacres and imprisonments during the Second World War.  Having failed to achieve anything but embarrassment, Washington officials canceled the mission in Albania in April 1956.[228]

One odd twist to the story is that in August 1968 Albania broke with the Soviet Union, cutting its ties with the Warsaw Pact.  Thereafter it aligned with China, patched up an old quarrel with neighboring Yugoslavia, and made overtures to the West, asserting its neutrality in the Cold War.[229]  In hindsight, U.S. leaders might have succeeded in drawing Albania out of the Soviet bloc by offering aid and trade opportunities rather than fomenting sabotage.

Covert operations in the Ukraine

U.S. covert operations in the Soviet republic of Ukraine were similar in many respects to the operations in Albania.  U.S. agencies recruited and trained émigrés from the Displaced Persons camps and sent them into the country to conduct sabotage, organize rebellion, and pump out anti-government propaganda.  What was different about the Ukraine was that there was long-standing resistance to Soviet authority which the U.S. hoped to tap.

The underground Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was founded in 1929.  Eleven years later, a split occurred and OUN-B was formed under the leadership of Stepan Bandera.  In the months leading up to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Nazi leaders provided Bandera with 2.5 million marks to conduct covert operations against the Soviet Union and to form two Ukrainian battalions to assist the German Army.  “The Ukrainian auxiliaries,” writes O’Rourke, proved to be willing and ready collaborators for the Nazi mass killing program in Eastern Europe.”  At a meeting in July 1941, OUN-B leaders declared that Jews “have to be treated harshly…. we will adopt any methods that lead to their destruction.”  In the months following the German invasion, OUN-B forces killed an estimated 12,000 Jewish civilians.[230]

American intelligence agents with the Strategic Services Unit (SSU was a precursor to the CIA) first met with Ukrainian émigré groups in April 1946, according to a declassified CIA history of the mission written in 1971.  The SSU’s first task was to gather intelligence about the history and motivation of Ukrainian émigré groups, as “American intelligence was woefully ignorant of the different Ukrainian groups and their aims.”  The Gehlen organization helped identify contacts and make connections.  The Americans soon came into contact with Bandera, described by U.S. agents as “the personality of the Ukrainian émigré community.”  Soviet leaders wanted Bandera extradited to the Soviet Union in order to put him on trial for treason and war crimes, but the U.S. would not allow it, as this would undermine émigré confidence in the U.S. mission.[231]  The U.S. was about to take over what Nazi Germany had started.

The SSU recruited other former Nazi collaborators, especially Mykola Lebed, who led a group called the Supreme Ukrainian Liberation Council (UHVR).   In 1943, during the Nazi occupation, Lebed encouraged the ethnic cleansing of Polish civilians.  According to a 1947 U.S. intelligence report, Lebed was a “well-known sadist and collaborator of the Germans.”  The U.S. nonetheless conspired with Lebed and later moved Lebed and his family to Munich to avoid extradition by the Soviet Union.[232]

CIA covert plans for Ukraine were approved in Washington in the summer of 1949.  The plans called for recruiting and training Ukrainian field agents, placing them inside the Soviet Ukraine though air drops and other means, and providing logistical support for the Ukrainian resistance movement.  The U.S. provided sabotage equipment, specialized arms, printing presses, medical supplies, radios, and more.  The CIA mainly worked with Lebed’s UHVR while the British ran complementary missions to support Bandera’s OUN.  The first covert airdrop of agents into Ukraine occurred in September 1949.  “The Soviets quickly eliminated the agents,” according to the CIA history.  Many more agents were subsequently killed.  Nevertheless, in October 1950, CIA analysts saw encouraging signs in the formation of underground cells, a purported Ukrainian Insurgent Army that had raided Communist Party installations, and the distribution of anti-Soviet propaganda.[233]  What the CIA analysts did not seem to recognize was that the great mass of Soviet people, including Ukrainians, would never follow a band of traitors who had fought with the Nazis in the Great Patriotic War.

By 1954, most of the clandestine cells in the Ukraine had been discovered and shut down by Soviet authorities.  One CIA official was quoted in 1957 as saying that “the path of experience” in infiltrating agents in the Ukraine “has been strewn with disaster.”  The official CIA history notes:  “At least 75 percent of the 85 CIA agents dispatched under REDSOX disappeared from sight and failed in their missions.”[234]  According to O’Rourke:

As in Albania, US planners found that the Soviet security forces in Ukraine always seemed to be one step ahead of them.  Indeed, they were.  Archival evidence shows that Soviet intelligence officials knew of the Anglo-American connections to Ukrainian nationalists as early as 1946…. In addition to their agents in Ukraine, the Soviet Union also maintained an extensive spy network in the American displaced persons camps and among the Ukrainian émigré community at large.[235]

In 1956, the U.S. ended its subversive covert operations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, largely because they were practical failures.  By then, Stalin had died and the European situation had stabilized into opposing NATO and Warsaw Pact blocs.  Though both sides militarized the border, there were no attacks and none were expected.  On May 15, 1955, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, United States, and France signed a treaty granting Austria independence and arranging for the withdrawal of all occupation forces.  This was a victory for diplomacy.

U.S. propaganda nevertheless continued through Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (aimed at the Soviet Union).  Whether or not it inspired opposition to Soviet-backed governments, it certainly gave the latter an excuse to suppress reform movements.  When the Socialist Workers Party rose up against the Hungarian government in October 1956, Soviet General Pytor Lashchenko declared the uprising a “counter-revolutionary rebellion that was actively supported by the most reactionary forces of international imperialism,” meaning the U.S.[236]  U.S. propaganda appeared to inspire false hopes among Hungarian reformers, though a direct U.S. intervention was not contemplated in Washington.[237]

In hindsight, it may be seen that U.S. covert operations in the Soviet bloc were inimical to peace and global stability.  They dangerously increased tension between the U.S. and Soviet Union at a time when both nations were racing to develop nuclear weapons.  U.S. aggression, moreover, belied all U.S. propaganda against Soviet subversion and aggression.

In the wake of declining European empires in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, U.S. leaders were keen on maintaining Western influence.  The first CIA report on September 3, 1948, “The Break-Up of the Colonial Empires and its Implications for US Security,” warned that the “shift of the dependent areas from the orbit of the colonial powers not only weakens the probable European allies of the US but deprives the US itself of assured access to vital bases and raw materials in these areas in event of war.  Should the recently liberated and currently emergent states become oriented toward the USSR, US military and economic security would be seriously threatened.”^[238]

According to the historian Michael J. Sullivan, the U.S. goal was to become the “hegemonic successor to earlier imperialist powers.”[239]  Hence, the U.S. followed the British into Iran (and into Greece, Albania, and British Guiana), and the French into Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.  Across the world, Washington officials sought to prevent newly formed nations from choosing leftist leaders, adopting economic nationalist policies, or developing friendly relations with the Soviet Union.

U.S. involvement in Vietnam was the most infamous effort of the U.S. to control developments on the other side of the world.  Leslie Gelb, who headed the team that compiled the Pentagon Papers between 1967 and 1969, was struck not so much by the lies of successive presidents revealed in the Papers, but “that our leaders, from Truman onwards, didn’t know hardly anything about Vietnam and Indochina.  They were ignorant.”[240]  Indeed, they seemed to be intentionally ignorant, having adopted a faulty and simplistic ideological blueprint that divided the world into saints and sinners.  As Arnold Offner writes, “In Washington, ideological predispositions blinded policymakers to the actual political dynamics of East Asia.”[241]

Alongside Vietnam was Laos, where U.S. intervention escalated from election manipulation to massive aerial bombing attacks.  As in Vietnam, U.S. leaders sought to exclude communists from political participation in the Laotian government.  The communist-led Pathet Lao, like the Viet Minh, had led the fight against French colonialism and garnered significant popular support as a result.  In anticipation of National Assembly elections scheduled for April 24, 1958, the Eisenhower administration launched Operation Booster Shot, a covert operation that distributed money and aid to rural communities in an effort to win votes for U.S.-backed candidates.  Despite this foreign interference, the Pathet Lao won nine seats and other leftist parties won four, enough for a majority in the 21-seat assembly.

Having failed to deny communists political power through the ballot box, the Eisenhower administration began organizing a rebellion in an area inhabited by the Hmong ethnic group.  Under the Kennedy administration, the CIA expanded its operations, creating the U.S.-directed Armée Clandestine.  The CIA brought in some 20,000 Thai soldiers and other foreign mercenaries to beef up the 30,000-strong Hmong army.  Although Kennedy signed an international agreement in July 1962 guaranteeing Laotian neutrality, the CIA’s secret war continued.  In 1964, with the Pathet Lao now aided by North Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson began massive bombing attacks, turning the country into a moonscape.  From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped more than two million tons of bombs on Laos, making it the most heavily bombed country per capita in history.[242]  America’s anti-communist mission took an immense toll on the Laotian people who, like the Vietnamese, posed no threat to Americans.

With regard to the Middle East, the U.S. began exerting its influence in the early 1950s.  The U.S. gradually superseded Great Britain as the dominant foreign nation in the region, engaging in a variety of covert and overt actions.  U.S. leaders generally rationalized their actions as a protective response to the threat of “International Communism,” as President Eisenhower described it in January 1957.  According to Thomas Paterson, however, “many Arabs saw neither a direct nor indirect threat from Soviet/Communist aggression; they saw Western meddling and sphere-of-influence building.”[243]  That perception was on target with respect to U.S. and British actions in Iran.

Iran, 1951-53

Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh no doubt believed that his conflict with Great Britain over oil rights in Iran did not threaten the United States.  Yet in 1953, the U.S. joined the British in ousting the democratically elected prime minister of Iran.

Great Britain was the dominant power in the Middle East and fully intended to remain so after the Second World War.  “No other area in the world,” writes Melvyn Leffler, “except for the United Kingdom itself, was considered more important than the Middle East.”

The British had extensive petroleum interests in the Persian Gulf, owned the largest refinery in the world at Abadan [Iran], controlled the oil fields in southern Iran, maintained airfields in Transjordan, Iraq, and Cyprus, stationed troops in Aden, Sudan, Eritrea, and Somalia, and possessed a huge military base complex at Suez…. In 1945 there were more than 200,000 troops at the Cairo-Suez base, and close to 100,000 soldiers would remain during the next few years.[244]

Following the war, Soviet troops lingered in northern Iran, apparently to encourage independence movements by Kurdish and Azerbaijani groups – potential friendly allies.  The U.S. protested the delay and the UN Security Council passed a resolution on January 30, 1946, demanding Soviet withdrawal.  Stalin accommodated and Soviet forces were withdrawn in February.  There was no Soviet threat in Iran thereafter.

Iran had a democratic form of government with a popularly elected parliament, a prime minister chosen by the parliament, and a shah (king) who played a nominal role.  On April 28, 1951, the parliament chose as prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a European-educated lawyer and wealthy landowner in his early seventies.  His main agenda was the nationalization of the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a policy widely supported in his country.  Six weeks earlier, both houses of the Iranian parliament had voted overwhelmingly to support nationalization.

Iran produced about one-third of the Middle East’s total oil output at the time, some 600,000 barrels a day.  Yet Iran received less than 20 percent of the profits and Iranian oil workers were treated poorly, living in shanty towns without running water or electricity, subject to extreme heat and floods.  “With the oil revenues,” explained Mossadegh in a speech at The Hague in June 1951, “we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease, and backwardness among our people…. The nationalization law provides that 25% of the net profits on the oil be set aside to meet all the legitimate claims of the [Anglo-Iranian Oil] company for compensation….”[245]

The British met the challenge with a two-pronged strategy; on the one hand, negotiating with the Mossadegh government to retain British oil rights; on the other hand, employing British intelligence services, MI-6, to lay the groundwork for Mossadegh’s ouster.  The CIA was already conducting a covert campaign, codenamed Operation TPBEDAMN, to undermine the communist-led Tudah Party.  In June 1951, the CIA Office of National Estimates produced a report foreseeing that a “semi-dictatorial” regime led by Shah Reza Pahlavi could reverse the nationalization and allow the British oil company to remain in Iran.[246]

U.S. negotiators, meanwhile, attempted to resolve the conflict, suggesting that Iran and the British oil company split profits 50-50, similar to deals made by the U.S. with the governments of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.  The Iranian government, however, rejected the offer as it would allow Britain to retain the rights to underground resources.  The talks collapsed at the end of August 1951.[247]  The British responded with a punishing oil embargo, blocking the sale of Iranian oil in world markets and causing turmoil in the Iranian economy.  The Iranian government, in turn, sent troops to seize the huge Abadan refinery.  British leaders determined that Mossadegh must go.

The Churchill government in London (Winston Churchill became prime minister again in October 1951) decided that the United States needed to be involved in the overthrow.  British foreign minister Anthony Eden broached the idea with U.S. officials in November 1952.  Outgoing President Truman left the matter for incoming President Dwight Eisenhower, who quickly approved it.  In early February 1953, Eden sent a delegation to Washington to begin the planning.

Washington officials justified the covert intervention in the name of fighting the ubiquitous “communist menace,” as protecting British oil rights was inadequate as a reason for overthrowing of a democratic government.  At a NSC meeting in March, U.S. ambassador to Iran Loy Henderson asserted that the overthrow of Mossadegh was necessary in order to prevent Iran from falling into communist hands.  Though there was no evidence of a communist plot to take over the government, the very possibility of it was enough to compel and justify militant U.S. action.  In a typical statement of exaggeration, Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson warned that “if Iran succumbed to the Communists there was little doubt that in short order the other areas of the Middle East, with some 60% of the world’s oil reserves, would fall into Communist control.”[248]

Between March and August 1953, the CIA and MI-6 worked together to carry out a two-part strategy that involved fostering popular opposition to the Mossadegh government and recruiting military leaders along with the Shah to take over the government.  The plan was codenamed Operation TPAJAX by the CIA and Operation Boot by Britain’s MI-6.  As described by the journalist-turned-historian Stephen Kinzer:

Two secret agents, Donald Wilber of the CIA and Norman Darbyshire of the British Secret Intelligence Service, spent several weeks that spring in Cyprus devising a plan for the coup…. With the cold calculation of the surgeon, these agents plotted to cut Mossadegh away from his people.  Under their plan, the Americans would spend $150,000 to bribe journalists, editors, Islamic preachers, and other opinion leaders to “create, extend and enhance public hostility and distrust and fear of Mossadegh and his government.”  They would hire thugs to carry out “staged attacks” on religious figures and other respected Iranians, making it seem that Mossadegh had ordered them.  Meanwhile, General [Fazlollah] Zahedi would be given a sum of money, later fixed at $135,000, to “win additional friends” and “influence key people.”  The plan budged another $11,000 per week, a great sum at that time, to bribe members of the Iranian parliament.  On “coup day,” thousands of paid demonstrators would converge on parliament to demand that it dismiss Mossadegh.  Parliament would respond with a “quasi-legal” vote to do so.  If Mossadegh resisted, military units loyal to General Zahedi would arrest him.[249]

The coup d’état took place on August 19, 1953, following four days of chaos in the streets.  The Shah, at the behest of the CIA and MI-6, appointed General Zahedi prime minister and had Mossadegh arrested.  There were a number of glitches and the plan nearly failed.  In the end, it succeeded not only in ousting Mossadegh but also in replacing the democratic parliamentary system with an authoritarian system under the Shah.  In the ensuing weeks, the Shah reversed the nationalization policy and granted U.S.-based oil companies the right to 40 percent of Iranian oil – America’s reward for sabotaging democracy.  Initially uncertain about participating in the coup, the Shah quickly became comfortable with tyranny.  In the weeks following the coup, hundreds of political activists and party leaders on the left were arrested though they had committed no crime.  Mosaddegh was imprisoned for three years, after which he was put under house arrest until his death.

The Eisenhower administration was pleased with its handiwork.  Vice President Richard Nixon visited Iran in December 1953 to bestow America’s blessings on the Shah.[250]  The Shah visited the White House three times during the Eisenhower years.  In February 1955, Iran joined Turkey, Iraq, and Pakistan in the U.S.-sponsored Baghdad Pact, a network of U.S. military allies on the Soviet Union’s southern border.  In 1959, Iran and the U.S. signed a bilateral defense pact.  The value of Iran to the U.S. as a military ally, economic partner, oil dispenser, and loyal friend of the United States outstripped any concern in Washington for Iran’s lack of democracy.  At a NSC meeting on June 18, 1959, Eisenhower expressed the view that people in the Middle East “simply cannot understand our ideas of freedom and human dignity.”[251]  It was a remarkable statement.  More likely, Iranians could not understand how the U.S. preached the gospel of freedom and democracy while aiding the forces of authoritarianism and repression.

For 26 years following the August 1953 coup, CIA agents worked closely with the Shah’s security and intelligence units (SAVAK) to suppress all political opposition.  According to the Israeli intelligence analyst Ervand Abrahamian, “By 1977, SAVAK had 5,300 full-time agents and a large number of part-time informers.”  It had the power to “censor the media, screen applicants for government jobs … and use all means necessary, including torture, to hunt down dissidents.”  The U.S. never faltered in its support.  As the Shah began to lose his grip on the country amid rising protests in 1978, President Carter’s special envoy to Tehran, General Robert E. Huyser, urged Iran’s top military leaders to kill as many demonstrators as necessary to keep the Shah in power.[252]

When the Shah was ousted by an Islamic revolution in early 1979 many Americans could not understand why Iranians appeared to hate Americans – television newscasts showed demonstrators in the streets shouting “death to America.”  Few Americans were able to connect the dots between the coup of 1953 and the revolution of 1979.  The U.S. media in the intervening years had painted a positive portrait of the impeccably dressed Shah Pahlavi as one who welcomed Western culture and a modicum of women’s rights.  The 1953 coup and the Shah’s secret police were swept under the rug.  Forty-seven years after the coup, however, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright acknowledged a measure of U.S. responsibility for the deteriorating relationship between Iran and the United States, speaking before the American-Iranian Council on March 17, 2000:

In 1953 the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh.  The Eisenhower Administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons; but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development.  And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.  Moreover, during the next quarter century, the United States and the West gave sustained backing to the Shah’s regime.  Although it did much to develop the country economically, the Shah’s government also brutally repressed political dissent.  As President Clinton has said, the United States must bear its fair share of responsibility for the problems that have arisen in U.S.-Iranian relations.[253]

The Congo, 1960

The decline and exodus of European colonial powers in Asia and Africa in the 1950s and 1960s left the door open for many new experiments in nation building.  For the Belgian Congo, a huge colony containing more than two hundred ethnic groups, independence came on June 30, 1960.  In the lead-up, there were riots and violent clashes with Belgian authorities, but no war of liberation.  Parliamentary elections were held on May 22, 1960, with twenty-eight parties vying for 127 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 84 seats in the Senate.  The Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) won a plurality with 23.4 percent of the vote.  Party leader Patrice Lumumba was selected prime minister despite Belgian attempts to block him.[254]

Lumumba was born in 1925 in a small village in southwestern Congo and educated at a Protestant missionary school.  In 1958, he attended the first all-African People’s Conference in Accra, the capital of Ghana.  He came away convinced that the time had come for Africans to run their own affairs.  On Congolese Independence Day, he spoke of the possibilities of the future:

We are going to institute social justice together and ensure everyone just remuneration for his labor.  We are going to show the world what the black man can do when he works in freedom, and we are going to make the Congo the focal point for the development of all of Africa.  We are going to see to it that the soil of our country really benefits its children.  We are going to review all the old laws and make new ones that will be just and noble.  We are going to put an end to the suppression of free thought and see to it that all citizens enjoy to the fullest all the fundamental freedoms laid down in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.[255]

However noble these ideals, the new nation was beset with severe problems from the outset.  In July 1960, only weeks after Independence Day, the southern province of Katanga, which held more than half the country’s mineral wealth, seceded from the union with the help of a Belgian mining company, Union Minière du Haut-Katanga.  Lumumba appealed to the United Nations to intervene to help put down the rebellion and evict the foreign Belgian forces in the country, but the UN Security Council turned down the request.  Lumumba, in desperation, let it be known that he was thinking of asking the Soviet Union for assistance.  He insisted that “African nationalists reserve the right to be friendly with anybody we like according to the principles of positive neutrality.”

Although, under international law and long-standing precedent, every nation had the right to establish diplomatic and trade relationships with every other nation, Washington officials were of the view that any Third World ties with the Soviet Union constituted a threat to U.S. hegemony, euphemistically described as “security.”  Already by 1960, Third World nations were forming the Non-Aligned Movement, indifferent to U.S. warnings against economic nationalism and friendly diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.  At the end of July, CIA director Allen Dulles told the National Security Council that it was “safe to go on the assumption that Lumumba has been bought by the Communists” and that this “fits with his own orientation.”[256]

The CIA was already involved in the Congo, having provided covert payments to political parties and candidates in order to prevent Lumumba’s election in May 1960.  Having failed to achieve the desired outcome, the Eisenhower administration proceeded to plot Lumumba’s overthrow.  CIA station chief Lawrence Devlin arrived in the capital city, Léopoldville, soon after independence was declared.  According to the historian Stephen R. Weissman, “Within a few weeks he was deeply involved in an effort to overthrow the government and assassinate some of its top officials, the first of a series of covert action and related “intelligence” programs that would continue into the 1970s.”[257]

On August 18, Devlin cabled CIA headquarters:  “Embassy and Station believe Congo experiencing classic Communist takeover Government.”  At a NSC meeting the same day, Undersecretary of State Douglas Dillon remarked that Lumumba “was working to serve the purposes of the Soviets.”[258]  In short, Washington officials convinced themselves that a “communist threat” lurked in the Congo, and thus they could get rid of Lumumba in good conscience.

The CIA developed a two-part plan to assassinate Lumumba and overthrow the government, securing a replacement amenable to the West.  The CIA sent an agent to the Congolese capital with poison to kill Lumumba, but it was not clear if the assassination attempt was made before the overthrow took place on September 14, 1960.  With U.S. and Belgian support, Colonel Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, Chief of Staff of the Congolese National Army, deposed Lumumba in a bloodless coup and installed a new government.  Lumumba took refuge at the United Nations headquarters in Léopoldville.  He survived that day only to be arrested along with two of his associates on December 1.  Mobutu, not wanting to be held responsible for Lumumba’s death, turned Lumumba over to his political enemies in the Katanga province.  He was tortured and executed there on January 17, 1961.[259]  A U.S. correspondent witnessed Lumumba’s arrival at Lubumbashi:

Lumumba, blindfolded with a grimy bandage, his hands tied behind him, and roped to two of his political lieutenants, was directed down the steps of the plane.  Within sight of a large airport billboard proclaiming “Welcome to Free Katanga,” the trembling, stumbling Lumumba and his fellow prisoners fell to the ground in a hail of savage baton, rifle-butt and first blows and kicks from a gauntlet of snarling Katangese.[260]

General Mobutu did America’s bidding and received U.S. support in return.  He ordered Soviet diplomats out of the country, dispensed with economic nationalist plans, and later aided U.S. covert operations in Angola.  Mobutu also amassed a personal fortune in the impoverished country.  President John F. Kennedy, inaugurated in January 1961, continued his predecessor’s support for Mobutu.  When Mobutu visited the Washington in May 1963, Kennedy was full of praise.  “General,” he said, during a walk in the White House rose garden, “if it hadn’t been for you, the whole thing would have collapsed and the Communists would have taken over.”[261]

In November 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson offered military support for Mobutu in response to a rebellion in the Oriental Province.  The CIA organized a mercenary army and provided planes to crush the rebellion.  The intervention was denounced by African leaders Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, and Morocco’s King Hassan II.  U.S. ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson, met their objections with hypocritical denial.  “From the beginning,” he said, “we have been opposed – and remain opposed – to foreign intervention in the internal affairs of the sovereign and independent state of the Congo.”  Mobutu established a military dictatorship in 1965 and remained in power until 1997.[262]

Indonesia, 1955-65

Indonesia is an archipelagic nation located between Australia and Southeast Asia.  It was colonized for over three hundred years by the Netherlands and known as the Dutch East Indies.  In 1942, Japanese forces occupied the island nation and imprisoned Dutch administrators.  Japanese authorities proclaimed Indonesia liberated and mobilized the population in support of the Japanese war effort.  In the process, they nurtured Indonesian nationalist leaders such as future president Sukarno.[263]  Japanese rule grew harsh as the war turned against them.  A United Nations report in 1947 estimated that three million people on the island of Java and one million on other islands died as a result of famine, forced labor, and lack of medical care.[264]

With the defeat of the Japanese in September 1945, the Dutch attempted to reassert their control over Indonesia, aided by the British.  Sukarno led an Indonesian guerrilla movement in the fight for independence.  After four years of war, the Dutch gave up and Indonesia declared its independence on December 27, 1949.  Sukarno became the first president.  His vision of nation-building involved a combination of national unity, socialist economics, and religious tolerance in a Muslim-dominated nation.  In matters of foreign policy, he disdained imperialism and advocated neutralism in the Cold War.

In April 1955, Indonesia hosted the Bandung Conference, the first step in the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement.  In his opening remarks, Sukarno identified the origins of the great “battle against colonialism” in the American War for Independence, “the first successful anti-colonial war in history.”  He warned against the continuing danger of neo-colonialism:

I beg of you do not think of colonialism only in the classic form which we of Indonesia, and our brothers in different parts of Asia and Africa, knew. Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation.  It is a skillful and determined enemy, and it appears in many guises.  It does not give up its loot easily.  Wherever, whenever and however it appears, colonialism is an evil thing, and one which must be eradicated from the earth.[265]

Sukarno’s views did not comport with those of American leaders half a world away.  In November 1953, the Eisenhower administration issued a top-secret national security directive, 171/1, with respect to Indonesia that identified a “pro-Communist inclination” among some Indonesian leaders and a popular communist base of about 10 percent of voters.  Noting that Indonesia “is inhabited by 80,000,000 people, and is a producer of rubber, tin and petroleum,” all needed by the West, the report stated:  “The loss of Indonesia to Communist control would have serious security implications for the United States and the rest of the free world.”  The “courses of action” outlined in the directive began with a warning to “avoid the appearance of interfering in Indonesian internal affairs,” though that is exactly what the U.S. planned to do, and called for “the elimination of Communist influence from the Indonesian Government” by supporting non-communist and anti-communist groups, including “important parts of the armed forces.”[266]

The first U.S. foray into Indonesia was a CIA effort to sway parliamentary elections in 1955 by funding opposition Islamic parties.  Sukarno’s Indonesian National Party (PNI) won a bare plurality with 22.3% of votes.  On the left, the Communist Party received 16.4%, and the Socialist Party (which opposed the Communist Party), 2.0%.  Three Islamic parties collectively garnered 43.3% of the vote, signifying a challenge to the secular-oriented PNI.[267]  Sukarno turned to the Communist Party and other smaller parties to maintain his governing coalition.

Having failed to oust Sukarno by manipulating elections, the CIA began a propaganda offensive to discredit Sukarno, planting false stories in the press.  One such story alleged that Sukarno was having an affair with a female Soviet intelligence agent and that the Soviet government was blackmailing Sukarno.  In 1957, the CIA station began secretly aiding and abetting a rebellion led by regional military commanders on the island of Sumatra.  According to the international relations scholar John Quigley:

The CIA enlisted all three branches of the U.S. military in the venture:  the army training rebel troops, the navy providing offshore backup, and the air force creating and operating a rebel air force.  The CIA hired 350 Americans, Chinese, and Filipinos to service and fly transport aircraft and B-26 bombers for rebel operations…. The CIA airdropped supplies to the rebels.  CIA director Allen Dulles ran the Indonesia operation, and his brother [Secretary of State] John Foster Dulles was the moving force behind it.[268]

Faced with this foreign-supported rebellion, Sukarno declared martial law in March 1957.  In November, an assassination attempt on his life failed but killed six schoolchildren.  In February 1958, dissident commanders on the island of Sumatra linked up with civilian politicians and formally declared their intention to overthrow the Sukarno government in Jakarta.  Civil war broke out in April 1958.  At a news conference on April 30, 1958, President Eisenhower was asked about Sukarno’s charge that American planes were bombing Indonesia.  “When it comes to intrastate difficulty anywhere,” he said, “our policy is one of careful neutrality…. As for any United States pilots, every rebellion that I have ever heard of has its soldiers of fortune.”  When a reporter asked Secretary Dulles about Americans being soldiers of fortune in Indonesia, he said, “We have no legal obligation to control the activities of Americans of this character.”[269]

The U.S., in fact, was running regular bombing raids, one of which mistakenly hit a crowded marketplace, killing a number of people.  On May 18, 1958, the Indonesian military shot down a B-26 bomber and captured the pilot after his parachute got tangled in a coconut tree.  The pilot was identified as an American, Allen Lawrence Pope.  The Eisenhower administration initially denied involvement, but documents on Pope showed that he was based at the U.S. Clark Air Force base in the Philippines.  The Indonesian government charged that he was a CIA operative, which was correct.  The CIA was supplying both planes and pilots to the rebels.  Soon after the incident, with CIA’s cover blown, the Eisenhower administration pulled back from direct U.S. military involvement.[270]

The civil war in Indonesia continued for more than three years, ending with the surrender of the last band of rebels in August 1961.  During those years, Sukarno became more authoritarian; for example, he replaced half the members of parliament with his appointees and banned Islamic parties that had joined the rebel political front.  The U.S., meanwhile, increased its contacts with rightist military leaders.  A U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff memo in 1958 noted that the Indonesian Army was “the only non-Communist force … with the capability of obstructing … PKI [Indonesian Communist Party].”[271]

In 1965, a rebellion within the military establishment became an excuse for General Suharto, a pro-American officer, to launch a coup d’état against the Sukarno government.  According to the political scientist Peter Dale Scott, the September 30^th attack on the military officers was “the first phase of a three-phase right-wing coup,” noting that the generals who were killed in the rebellion were those most loyal to Sukarno and would likely have prevented the coup.  Suharto blamed the attack on the left, thus providing the requisite justification for his army to conduct an all-out massacre of suspected leftists, which took more than 500,000 lives.  Suharto placed Sukarno under his “protection” and prevented the president from resuming control.  In March 1966, Sukarno was forced to sign a Presidential Order assigning Suharto the right to take all measures necessary to preserve national security and stability.  One year later, Sukarno was stripped of his presidency and placed under house arrest.[272]

The U.S. supported Suharto’s genocidal campaign against the left in 1965.  In 1990, U.S. embassy and CIA officials revealed that U.S. Ambassador Marshall Green had given lists of communists and leftists to the Indonesian military even as the mass murder was underway.  Robert J. Martens, a former member of the embassy’s political section, told the Washington Post in May 1990 that the lists were “a big help to the army.  They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad.”[273]  In October 2017, Vincent Bevins, a journalist based in Jakarta, noted that a “trove of newly declassified diplomatic cables reveals a surprising degree of American involvement in a brutal anti-communist purge in Indonesia half-a-century ago”:

In Indonesia in October 1965, Suharto, a powerful Indonesian military leader, accused the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) of organizing a brutal coup attempt, following the kidnapping and murder of six high-ranking army officers.  Over the months that followed, he oversaw the systematic extermination of up to a million Indonesians for affiliation with the party, or simply for being accused of harboring leftist sympathies. He then took power and ruled as dictator, with U.S. support, until 1998….

While the newly declassified documents further illustrated the horror of Indonesia’s 1965 mass murder, they also confirmed that U.S. authorities backed Suharto’s purge.  Perhaps even more striking:  As the documents show, U.S. officials knew most of his victims were entirely innocent. U.S. embassy officials even received updates on the executions and offered help to suppress media coverage….

It should not be entirely surprising that Washington would tolerate the deaths of so many civilians to further its Cold War goals. In Vietnam, the U.S. military may have killed up to 2 million civilians.  But Indonesia was different:  the PKI was a legal, unarmed party, operating openly in Indonesia’s political system.  It had gained influence through elections and community outreach, but was nevertheless treated like an insurgency.[274]

Washington officials not only tolerated the massacre, but were also pleased with the political outcome.  State Department staffer Rob Barrett wrote to Charles Mann of the U.S. Agency for International Development in April 1966, “the trend of Indonesian political development has been drastically altered in the direction favorable to the United States interests in the Far East.  The PKI has been eliminated as an effective political force…. The new leaders are trying to integrate the country into the international [capitalist] community.  Investment should be encouraged.”[275]

Suharto ruled Indonesia with full U.S. support until 1998.  He was never held accountable for the 1965 mass murders, nor for another round of atrocities committed in East Timor in 1975.  As East Timor, which shares the island of Timor with Indonesia, emerged from its status as a Portuguese colony, the possibility of a leftist government prompted Suharto to launch a massive invasion of the country.  According to the East Timor government, “During the invasion mass killings and rapes took place:  60,000 Timorese were dead by mid-February.  A puppet Provisional Government of East Timor was installed in mid-December.”

On December 6, 1975, one day before the invasion began, President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with President Suharto in Jakarta.  The U.S. Embassy recorded the conversation.  Suharto:  “We want your understanding if we deem it necessary to take rapid or drastic action.”  Ford:  “We will understand and will not press you on the issue.  We understand the problems you have and the intentions you have.”  Kissinger:  “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly.”  Following the invasion, the U.S. blocked UN Security Council action against Indonesia.  The UN General Assembly nonetheless passed a resolution deploring the invasion, citing “the inalienable right” of the people of East Timor “to self-determination.”[276]

Afghanistan, 1979

By 1978, much had changed in the international arena.  The Soviet Union and China had become rivals, fighting a brief border war in 1969; Cold War tensions between the U.S. and the great communist powers had eased during a period of détente that began in 1972; and the U.S. had lost the war in Vietnam, a 21-year effort to establish a separate, non-communist nation in the southern half of the country.  U.S. policymakers nevertheless remained committed to limiting Soviet influence and to undermining leftist parties and governments around the world.  The U.S. covert intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 was aimed at making trouble for the Soviets in their own backyard as well as asserting greater U.S. influence in the region.

In April 1978, the government of Mohammad Daoud was overthrown by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), a communist party closely linked to the Soviet Union.  Daoud, a Western-educated member of the royal family, was shot and killed along with most of his family.  PDPA leader Nur Muhammad Taraki took the reins of government until he, too, was assassinated in October 1979, leaving the presidency to Hafizullah Amin.[277]  Soviet leaders were critical of Amin, ironically, because he was overzealous in carrying out the communist program.  That program included securing women’s rights, which grated on Islamic fundamentalist beliefs, as well as advancing public education and redistributing lands to peasants, among other modernization reforms; but Amin implemented these reforms in an authoritarian manner, riding roughshod over ethnic, religious, and tribal traditions and local power structures.  The KGB (Soviet intelligence agency) station in Kabul pressed Moscow to remove him from office, warning that Amin’s heavy-handedness was causing the party to lose popular support and could lead to the “consolidation of the opposition” against the government.[278]

In Washington, U.S. officials viewed the volatile political situation in Afghanistan as an opportunity to sow unrest in the Soviet client state, not unlike U.S. covert actions in Eastern Europe during the early Cold War period.  On February 21, 1979, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, the architect of the U.S. intervention, directed National Security Council (NSC) intelligence coordinator Paul Henze to develop a “coherent and systematic plan.”  In early March the CIA presented the NSC with a set of options ranging from anti-government propaganda to “sponsorship of large-scale insurgency to bring about a change in government in power in Kabul” (capital city).   The latter option initially appeared overly ambitious but after an anti-government revolt in the western city of Herat in mid-March, it looked more promising to U.S. policymakers.  The CIA reported on March 23 that insurgencies have “now grown into serious threats to the survival of the Soviet-backed regime,” adding that the situation could deteriorate for the Afghan government to the point that “only massive Soviet military intervention ” could save it.  The latter possibility did not deter Brzezinski.  In a memo to Vice-President Walter Mondale that same day, he wrote that “we can and should … be building a public record to head off possible Soviet intervention or reap the propaganda benefits if it should occur.”[279]

Brzesinski had a larger view of U.S. strategic interests.  The U.S., in his grand design, should couple its hushed-up covert intervention with a loud propaganda campaign that challenged the Soviet Union to hold fast to the non-intervention principle established in international law.  If the Soviet Union refrained from intervention, this could enable the U.S.-backed insurgents to win their battle for regime change, thus transforming a Soviet client state into a likely U.S. ally.  If the Soviets did intervene and suppress the rebellion, then the U.S. would be able to tarnish the Soviet Union as a totalitarian aggressor, confirming U.S. Cold War ideological presumptions, and most importantly, justify a buildup of U.S. military power in the region, ostensibly to defend against further Soviet aggression.  The latter was deemed necessary, not because of events in Afghanistan, but because of the Islamic revolution in Iran that ousted the Shah on February 11, 1979.  The sudden loss of a dependable U.S. client state in the region produced anxiety in Washington, though the new government of Ayatollah Khomeini had no interest in aligning with the Soviet Union.  In preparation for an international summit in Vienna in June, Brzezinski prodded President Carter to “make clear we have a vital interest ” in the Persian Gulf and “will act firmly and expeditiously to protect” the region.  The Persian Gulf stretches the length of Iran’s southern coast but does not touch land-locked Afghanistan.[280]

The covert U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, codenamed Operation Cyclone, gained momentum in the spring of 1979.  The Pakistan and Saudi governments agreed to be intermediaries and the CIA found willing allies among Islamic militants known as Mujahideen, or “Soldiers of God.”  Mujahideen leaders such as Hekmatyar had been fighting “godless communism” for years.  On July 3, Carter signed a presidential “finding” that authorized the CIA to spend just over $500,000 on propaganda and psychological operations, and to provide “unilaterally or through third countries as appropriate support to Afghan insurgents, either in the form of cash or non-military supplies.”[281]  The administration had to be cautious about providing weapons to the rebels because of Congress.  In January 1976, Congress shut down a CIA operation in Angola after learning that the CIA was sponsoring an unauthorized war.  The Carter administration deemed it prudent to provide cash to the Afghan rebels so that they could buy their own weapons.

As with other covert interventions, the administration hid its actions under a smokescreen of rhetoric.  State Department spokesman Hodding Carter told the press on August 4, 1979, “We expect the principle of nonintervention to be respected by all parties in the area, including the Soviet Union.”[282]  U.S. actions, in fact, were exactly opposite this principle.  In early September, CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner requested “funds for the Pakistanis to purchase lethal military equipment for the insurgents.”[283]  The following month, the U.S. covertly provided Pakistani intermediaries with $772,000 in cash and an equivalent amount of military equipment for distribution to the rebels.[284]

The Soviet intervention took place on December 24, 1979.  Some 30,000 Soviet troops entered Afghanistan, took control of the major urban centers and transportation arteries, and established a new government under Babrak Karmal, a Marxist general.  Amin was killed in the presidential palace, though Soviet leaders denied any responsibility for his death.[285]

The Soviet invasion was essentially a client state operation in which the Soviets replaced one communist government with another.  It was not unlike the U.S. invasion of Panama a decade later, when the U.S. replaced one client (Manual Noriega) with another.  To be sure, the Soviet invasion was a major blunder, as it sparked resentment and resistance to the new Soviet-backed government as well as to foreign meddling in general.  In hindsight, U.S. assistance to the Mujahideen was also a blunder, as it stoked radical Islamic militancy and nurtured leaders such as Osama bin Laden who later became America’s number one enemy.

Both Soviet and U.S. leaders feared the spread of Islamic militancy sparked by the Iranian Revolution that erupted in early 1979.  On January 16, after fifteen months of strikes and protests, Reza Shah Pahlavi left Iran, opening the way for Islamic religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini to take control of the government.  Khomeini called the U.S. “the great Satan,” the Soviet Union, “the lesser Satan,” and Israel, “the little Satan.”[286]  On April 1, Iranians voted in a national referendum to become an Islamic republic that combined an elected parliament with a religious Supreme Leader.  To U.S. leaders, the Iranian revolution signified a major geopolitical loss, as Iran under the Shah had been a loyal client state and military ally.  For Soviet leaders, the danger was closer to home.  They worried that the Iranian Revolution would embolden the large Muslim populations in the Soviet Union’s southern republics and in neighboring Afghanistan, undermining Soviet authority and influence.  Soviet leaders also suspected that the U.S. might try to replace its lost influence in Iran by gaining a foothold in Afghanistan.  According to declassified documents, Amin reached out to the American chargé in Kabul, J. Bruce Amstutz, in early October 1979.  “The Afghan president made clear to me,” Amstutz wrote to the State Department, “that he is open to see any designated USG mission chief.”[287]

U.S. support for Islamic guerrillas

On December 26, 1979, two days after the Soviet intervention, Brzezinski wrote a memo to President Carter sketching out a more militant U.S. policy in Afghanistan.  “It is essential that Afghanistan’s resistance continues,” he wrote.  “This means more money as well as arms shipments to the rebels, and some technical advice.  To make the above possible we must both reassure Pakistan and encourage it to help the rebels.”  A week later, Brzezinski wrote to State Department officials, “Our ultimate goal is the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan.  Even if that is not attainable, we should make Soviet involvement as costly as possible.”[288]

In early 1980, Brzezinski personally travelled to the Afghan-Pakistan border near Khyber Pass to meet with Mujahideen leaders.  “We know of their deep belief in God,” he told the men through a translator, “and we are confident that their struggle will succeed.  That land over there [Afghanistan] is yours.  You will go back to it one day because your fight will prevail, and you will have your homes and your mosques back again, because your cause is right and God is on your side.”[289]  Of course, it was the U.S. government that was on their side, in conformity with the realpolitik formula:  the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

In Iran, meanwhile, on November 4, 1979, nationalist radicals in Tehran seized the U.S. embassy and took Americans hostage, demanding the return of Shah Pahlavi from the United States to stand trial for his crimes against the people.  The U.S. refused, especially as the Shah was undergoing cancer treatments.  The Iranians released fourteen hostages for various reasons but kept the remaining 52 Americans in captivity for the next 444 days.  An abortive U.S. rescue attempt failed in a desert storm.  President Jimmy Carter, in his State of the Union address on January 23, 1980, placed Iranian hostage crisis and Soviet intervention in Afghanistan at the top of his rhetorical agenda:  “These two acts – one of international terrorism and one of military aggression – present a serious challenge to the United States of America and indeed to all the nations of the world. Together, we will meet these threats to peace.”[290]

Carter did not mention that Afghanistan already had a communist government which the Soviets replaced with another.  He did not reveal that the U.S. had delivered aid and arms to Afghan Islamic insurgents before the Soviet invasion.  Nor did he offer any hint that the U.S.-backed insurgents were intent on turning Afghanistan into an Islamic state similar to Iran (although Sunni rather than Shia).  Instead, Carter raised fears of Soviet expansion into the Middle East and vowed to protect the oil-rich region “by any means necessary,” a presidential edict that became known as the Carter Doctrine.  The doctrine was aimed at Iran as much as the Soviet Union.  It essentially replaced former U.S. reliance on Iran (under the Shah) to police the Gulf with direct U.S. military power and hegemony.  As U.S. hegemony always had to be masked as defensive for public relations purposes, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan served this purpose.  Carter also declared that the U.S. would “impose stiff economic penalties on the Soviet Union” and boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.[291]

Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev responded by declaring that “the national interests or security of the United States of America and other states are in no way affected by the events in Afghanistan.  All attempts to portray matters otherwise are sheer nonsense.”[292]  Clearly there was a difference between the Soviet understanding of security, which was limited to its sphere of influence, and the American conception of security, which encompassed the entire globe.

The war that the U.S. helped foment in Afghanistan expanded in the 1980s.  Congress approved nearly $3 billion in covert aid for the Mujahideen guerrillas, more than all other CIA covert operations combined that decade.  The Reagan administration provided sophisticated weaponry, including high-quality anti-aircraft missiles that could pierce the heavy armor of Soviet helicopters, enabling the guerrillas to keep Soviet forces bogged down.  In April 1988, with Mikhail Gorbachev at the helm in the Soviet Union, a peace accord was signed followed by the withdrawal of Soviet troops between May 1988 and February 1989.  The decade-long war took a heavy toll on the Afghan people, with military and civilian deaths estimated at 500,000 to 1.2 million.  The Soviets suffered over 14,000 fatalities.  Washington officials deemed their handiwork successful.  Yet they learned few lessons from the Soviet experience, as the U.S. found itself in a similar quagmire after invading the country in November 2001.[293]

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

“Yankee imperialism” is a pejorative term used by Latin Americans to refer to U.S. military interventionism and economic domination in their region.  During the first one-third of the 20^th century, the U.S. operated under the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1904) which declared the right of the U.S. to intervene in other nations in the Western Hemisphere in order to prevent “chronic wrongdoing.”  Protests by Latin Americans eventually led to a shift to the Good Neighbor Policy of 1933, which promised an end to U.S. military interventionism.  The U.S. nonetheless remained committed to supporting strongman governments that protected private U.S. investments.

For a brief period between 1944 and 1946, U.S. policymakers considered extending the Good Neighbor Policy to include support for democratic governance in the region.  In November 1944, the State Department issued Instruction 4616, which informed American diplomats that military dictatorships and unconstitutional governments “are to be deplored”:

While the Department will continue to maintain cordial relations with all established and recognized governments, it is not incompatible with those policies to state unequivocally the self-evident truth that the Government of the United States cannot help but feel a greater affinity and a warmer friendship for those governments which rest upon the … freely expressed consent of the governed.[294]

In February 1946, the State Department took a step further in this direction, advising:  “Economic assistance should be given only where it is clear that it will benefit the people of a country generally and will help in the development of democracy and honest government,” and that “no military equipment or assistance should be given except where such a policy is agreed upon by international action, or where it is clearly necessary for reasons of security to the United States.”[295]

This tentative shift in policy orientation in Washington was in keeping with a budding democratic movement that swept Latin America at the end of the Second World War.  According to the historian Michael Schmidli:

Propelled by the combined effects of the global struggle against fascism, the relative benevolence of Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, and, to varying degrees in each Latin American nation, the rise of an “emerging middle class and urban working class that joined with students, intellectuals, and in some cases a militant peasantry,” the region witnessed unprecedented demands for democratic reforms.  Moreover, the United States actively assisted in the outpouring of Latin American democracy; flush with victory over authoritarian regimes in Europe and Asia, in the heady aftermath of V-J Day [Victory over Japan] a phalanx of hardheaded U.S. diplomats fanned out across the hemisphere, pressure Latin American authoritarians such as Paraguay’s Higinio Moringo and Guatemala’s Jorge Ubico to hand over the reins of power via electoral transitions.  As a result, in 1946, Latin American could boast fifteen democracies out of a total of twenty nations – a startling figure considering there had been only four democracies two years earlier.[296]

The onset of the Cold War prompted a reversal of Washington’s tenuous pro-democracy policy.  According to David Schmitz, the Cold War paradigm in Washington “ushered back in the positive evaluations of authoritarian governments in the worldwide struggle with the Soviet Union…. They would be wedged into the free world, no matter what their record of abuses.”^[297]  Such was the case in Nicaragua.  The Truman administration initially withheld diplomatic recognition of the Nicaraguan government under Anastasio Somoza García after he ousted an elected president in May 1947.  The shunning lasted less than a year, however, as Somoza was deemed a valuable ally in the global war against “communism.”

Paralleling U.S. acceptance of right-wing dictators was a growing distaste for tolerant liberal governments.  Policy planner George Kennan, following his only trip to Latin America, wrote in March 1950 that “it is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists.”  Similarly, a State Department report in December 1952 expressed concern that too many leaders in Latin America were “immature and impractical idealists” who lacked “the disposition to combat extremists within their ranks, including communists.”[298]

In March 1953, President Eisenhower approved NSC 144/1 as the basis for U.S. policy toward Latin America.  The directive called on the U.S. to mobilize the hemisphere to “eliminate the menace of internal Communism.”[299]  In practice, this meant aligning the U.S. with the landed aristocracy and rightist political and military forces that had been crushing leftist and labor reform movements for decades.  Military dictators and repressive governments caught on quickly and appealed to the U.S. for aid on the basis of opposing communism.  In Cuba, at the suggestion of U.S. ambassador Arthur Gardner, Fulgencio Batista established a special office dedicated to repressing “communists” (Buró de Represión a las Actividades Comunistas), which Batista used to suppress his political opponents.  When Vice President Richard Nixon visited Havana in February 1955, he praised Cuba as a “land that shares with us the same ideals of peace, freedom and dignity of men.”  In a toast to Batista, he likened the dictator to Abraham Lincoln.[300]

U.S. leaders pursued their anti-communist mission in large part by cultivating ties with Latin American military and security forces, deemed the most anticommunist of institutions.  The U.S. offered four kinds of support:  funds for military and police forces, U.S. military advisers, the training of Latin American security personnel at U.S. military schools, and the transfer of sophisticated equipment, especially for surveillance purposes.  During the 1950s, the U.S. provided $400 million in military assistance to the region and assigned 800 military personnel to work with Latin American officials in order to improve so-called “internal security.”  Between 1945 and 1959, the U.S. paid for nearly 8,000 Latin American military personnel to attend U.S. military facilities in either the Panama Canal Zone or the U.S.  Equipment included “light weaponry geared toward internal security operations” and “sophisticated intelligence-gathering technology,” notes Schmidli, which repressive governments used in conjunction with “extralegal kidnappings, torture, and disappearances of political opponents.”[301]

U.S. support for repressive regimes did not sit well with many Latin Americans.  When Vice President Richard Nixon visited Caracas, Venezuela, in May 1958, his car was assaulted by demonstrators, in part because of past U.S. support for the authoritarian rule of Marcos Pérez Jiménez.  Venezuelans had ousted Pérez Jiménez in a bloodless military coup five months earlier.  In Cuba, U.S. support for the authoritarian government of Batista backfired when the great majority of Cubans celebrated the overthrow of the Batista government by Fidel Castro’s guerrilla army on January 1, 1959.

After a brief period of indecision, U.S. leaders responded to the Cuban Revolution in three ways:  by organizing covert operations to overthrow the Castro government; by increasing “internal security” aid to other Latin American governments so as to prevent similar revolutions; and in March 1961, by launching the Alliance for Progress program to boost economic development.  “Through the Alliance for Progress economic program,” notes Stephen Rabe, “Kennedy sought to immunize Latin Americans against the appeals of communism by transforming the traditional socioeconomic structure of the region within one decade.”[302]

The Kennedy administration touted the Alliance program as a Marshall Plan for Latin America, but it was rather a paltry imitation of it.  Whereas the Marshall Plan provided outright grants, a large part of Alliance funds consisted of loans that had to be repaid; and the total amount of money was considerably less on a per capita basis.  During the 1960s, the region received about $15 billion of the promised $20 billion from the U.S., or about $4 per person.  The money stimulated some economic development but not enough to offset population growth and systemic trade inequalities.  As Rabe explains, “In order to generate the $80 billion on domestic savings mandated by the Alliance, Latin America needed to sell on the global markets their primary produces – coffee, sugar, bananas, copper, tin, lead, zinc, and oil.  But the prices of these tropical foods and raw materials declined in the 1960s even as the prices of imported industrial machinery and finished goods, the very things needed for economic development, rose.”  Latin American leaders called for fairer terms of trade, but to no avail.[303]

The optimistic goals for the Alliance were also undermined by increased U.S. military and police aid to the region, which had the effect of strengthening reactionary forces violently opposed to economic reform, especially land redistribution programs.  Economic progress as well as democratic governance fell victim to this “internal security” aid.  According to George Herring:

U.S. military aid in some ways subverted the Alliance for Progress…. The Kennedy administration expanded military aid by more than 50 percent to $77 million per year.  In 1962 alone, more than nine thousand Latin American military personnel trained in such educational institutions as the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia…. Between 1961 and 1963, military coups eliminated six elected governments.  The U.S. aid program assisted the growth of military influence, and for the next two decades the military dominated hemispheric politics.[304]

The six military coups took place in Argentina (March 1962), Peru (July 1962), Guatemala (March 1963), Ecuador (July 1963), the Dominican Republic (September 1963), and Honduras (October 1963).[305]  In Peru, to take one example, on July 18, 1962, a U.S.-supplied Sherman tank smashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Lima, and a U.S.-trained Peruvian officer informed the elected president that he was being ousted by a military junta.  The Kennedy administration withheld diplomatic recognition of the Peruvian government for only one month before restoring diplomatic relations and U.S. aid.  According to Schmidli, “during the 1960s, Latin America experienced no fewer than sixteen military takeovers, led by officers who had almost inevitably trained at U.S. facilities.”[306]

In Brazil, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations actively assisted the overthrow of the democratic government of João Goulart, supplying the CIA with about $5 million to destabilize the country.  President Goulart had run afoul of U.S. hegemonic designs by promoting economic reforms such as land redistribution and state controls over foreign capital, and by forging an independent foreign policy that recognized and traded with communist countries, including Castro’s Cuba.  The coup took place on March 31, 1964, after which President Johnson sent his “warmest wishes” to the new military junta and offered “our intensified cooperation.”  There followed a large influx of American advisers and aid that enabled the military junta to more effectively repress dissidents.  In the first month alone, notes Odd Arne Westad, “more than 50,000 people were arrested, in the start of a ‘dirty war’ that would last up to the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1985…. In strategic terms, however, the new Brazilian military dictatorship became a close ally of the United States in intervening elsewhere in Latin America.”[307]

Dom Hélder Câmara, the archbishop of Recife, was declared a nonperson by Brazil’s military leaders – the media could not mention his name.  The popular archbishop famously remarked:  “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint.  When I ask why so many people are poor, they call me a Communist.”[308]

Senator J. William Fulbright, having watched the Alliance for Progress program turn for the worse, commented that “we have made ourselves the prisoners of the Latin American oligarchs who are engaged in a vain attempt to preserve the status quo – reactionaries who habitually use the term ‘communist’ very loosely, in part out of emotional predilection and in part in a calculated effort to scare the United States into supporting their selfish and discredited aims.”[309]

In 1975, the rightist governments of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil formed Operation Condor, a hemisphere-wide association of regimes dedicated to destroying the left.  The central organizer of Operation Condor, Manuel Contreras of Chile, was a paid CIA asset between 1974 and 1977.  According to the historian J. Patrice McSherry:

Condor specialized in targeted abductions, disappearances, interrogations/torture, and transfers of persons across borders.  According to a declassified 1976 FBI report, Condor had several levels.  The first was mutual cooperation among military intelligence services, including coordination of political surveillance and exchange of intelligence information.  The second was organized cross-border operations to detain/disappear dissidents.  The third and most secret, “Phase III,” was the formation of special teams of assassins from member countries to travel anywhere in the world to carry out assassinations of “subversive enemies.”[310]

Human rights groups in Latin America estimated that Condor commandos “disappeared” hundreds of persons in cross-border operations: 132 Uruguayans, 72 Bolivians, 119 Chileans, 51 Paraguayans, 16 Brazilians, 12 Argentines, and at least one American, Ronni Moffitt, who was assassinated along with Orlando Letelier, former Chilean ambassador to the U.S., in Washington, D.C. on September 21, 1976.  “Clearly,” writes McSherry, “Operation Condor was an organized system of state terror with a transnational reach.  It was an anticommunist international that went far beyond targeting ‘communists,’ and it signified an unprecedented level of coordinated repression by right-wing military regimes in Latin America.”[311]

A State Department analysis of Operation Condor on August 2, 1976, noted that the “right-wing regimes” participating in Condor resented human rights criticism aimed at them, some of it coming from Washington.  The regimes suspected that the U.S. had “‘lost its will’ to stand firm against communism because of Viet-Nam, détente, and social decay.”  Although the U.S. had done much to help these rightist authoritarian governments establish themselves, U.S. foreign policy was undergoing a reevaluation at the time, with Congress placing restrictions on foreign aid to countries that egregiously abused human rights.  The analysis, written by Assistant Secretary for Latin America Harry Shlaudeman, stated that the U.S. was a “casual beneficiary” of Operation Condor “for reasons that are too obvious to need elaboration here,” but cautioned that revelations of state-sponsored assassinations could hurt the image of the United States.[312]

With this in mind, on August 23, 1976, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger signed a telegram to U.S. ambassadors indicating that they should express concern to South American officials regarding any activities that “would further exacerbate public world criticism of the governments involved.”  This can be read as a suggestion to not engage in assassinations or a warning to not get caught.  In any case, Kissinger made no requests to the CIA to investigate Condor missions within the United States, though it was known that two Chilean secret police agents were traveling to Washington on false Paraguayan passports.  These were the same men who killed Moffitt and Letelier by planting a car bomb.  Following the assassinations, the CIA and State Department delayed and withheld information from the FBI concerning the murders.  In an later interview, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hewson Ryan admitted:  “We knew fairly early on that the governments of the Southern Cone countries were planning … some assassinations abroad in the summer of 1976.  Whether if we had gone in, we might have prevented this, I don’t know.  But we didn’t.”[313]

Guatemala, 1952-54

In 1944, Juan José Arévalo won the Guatemalan presidency in a free and fair election, ending 13 years of dictatorial rule under Jorge Ubico.  Arévalo initiated a series of progressive reforms designed to institutionalize democratic structures and advance economic and social progress such as minimum wage laws, labor protections, increased educational funding, and expanded suffrage.  Though his reforms were relatively moderate, a number of coups were attempted during his presidency, mostly led by conservative military officers with the backing of large landowners and employers.[314]

In the November 1950 elections, former defense minister Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán won the presidency with 65.44 percent of the vote.  Árbenz extended the reforms begun under Arévalo to include the redistribution of land to poor peasants.  Enacted in June 1952, the Agrarian Reform Law empowered the government to expropriate uncultivated portions of large plantations (greater than 223 acres), to be paid for through 25-year bonds bearing three percent interest.  Arbenz himself, a landowner through his wife, gave up 1,700 acres of land.^[315]  Árbenz explained the need for this reform in a speech in April 1951:

Our task is to work together in order to produce more wealth… but we must distribute these riches so that those who have less – and they are the immense majority – benefit more, while those who have more – and they are so few – also benefit, but to a lesser extent.  How could it be otherwise, given the poverty, the poor health, and the lack of education of our people?[316]

Approximately two percent of the Guatemalan population controlled 72 percent of the arable land, while 88 percent of the population held 14 percent of the land.  Of the privately held land, less than 12 percent was under cultivation.  As the historian Douglas W. Trefzger writes, “In a country where more than two-thirds of the population participated in agriculture, this meant sweeping poverty, malnutrition, and its accompanying health problems.  If ever a country needed an agrarian reform to solve its social ills, Guatemala was that country.”[317]  During the eighteen months of its operation the Agrarian Reform program distributed 1.5 million acres to some 100,000 families.

Among the lands expropriated by the government were 400,000 acres belonging to the U.S.-based United Fruit Company (UFCO).  On the basis of tax declarations, the government offered UFCO $627,572 in bonds in compensation.  The U.S. State Department, acting on behalf of UFCO, demanded 24 times that amount.  The involvement of the U.S. government in this issue was due in part to personal ties to UFCO.  Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA director Allen Dulles, had both worked for a New York law firm with close links to UFCO.  The Dulles brothers joined UFCO publicists in accusing the Árbenz government of being a “stooge” of the Russians.  Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith, who at one time sought a management position at UFCO, wrote to President Eisenhower denouncing Árbenz and his “Communist-administered Agrarian Reform Law.”[318]

In the eyes of U.S. officials, the Árbenz government had committed two sins.  It had allowed communists to participate in the political affairs of the nation, legalizing communist parties in 1952, and it had expropriated land owned by a U.S.-based corporation.  The communist Guatemalan Workers Party (PGT) held only five of 58 seats in the Guatemalan Congress, but Árbenz’s kitchen cabinet included advisors from the PGT, including José Manuel Fortuny who helped write a new labor code.  This was enough for U.S. officials to claim communist “aggression” in Guatemala, though the Soviet Union was not involved.[319]

In truth, democratic elections in Guatemala had produced a government committed to acting in the interest of the impoverished masses, and this is arguably what frightened U.S. leaders.  If the Árbenz government’s reforms were successful in meeting the basic needs of the population, this would establish an attractive left-of-center economic model for other poor countries, an alternative to permanent underdevelopment under “free market” capitalist rules.  Such hegemonic concerns could not be said in public, of course.  Instead, U.S. officials engaged in a barrage of fear-mongering propaganda, linking Árbenz’s egalitarian reforms to an alleged communist takeover of the government and an impending “Soviet beachhead” in Guatemala.

In September 1952, President Truman approved a CIA covert plan, codenamed PBFORTUNE, aimed at overthrowing the Guatemalan government.  As word of the plan began to seep out, however, Truman put it on hold, lest U.S. machinations be exposed.  Interventionism, after all, contravened both U.S. (Good Neighbor) policy and international law.  President Dwight Eisenhower, upon entering office in January 1953, revived the plan and renamed it PBSUCCESS.  In August, the Eisenhower administration budgeted $2.7 million for a mixture of covert actions involving psychological warfare, subversion, and assassinations.  The assassination of Guatemalan officials was to be carried out “either in conjunction with the operation or in the event of its failure,” according to the historian Nick Cullather, who wrote a history of the covert operation for the CIA.[320]

The subversion part of the plan centered on Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, a dissident military officer who had attended the U.S. Army’s elite school at Fort Leavenworth and had led previous coup attempts.  With financial enticements and virulent propaganda against “godless communism,” Castillo Armas and CIA operatives were able to recruit some 400 to 500 men who were housed, fed, trained, and armed at bases in Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, countries led by rightist dictatorial regimes.  The CIA provided Castillo Armas’s insurgent army with rifles, submachine guns, mortars, bazookas, grenade launchers, ammunition, and rations.  Most importantly, under cover of “arms assistance” to Nicaragua and Honduras, the CIA obtained some thirty planes for the planned invasion, including bombers and transport aircraft.  American pilots would fly the planes.[321]

On December 16, 1953, newly appointed U.S. ambassador to Guatemala John Peurifoy met with Árbenz for six hours, revealing nothing about the CIA plan.  Peurifoy reported to the State Department six days later that he was convinced that “Communists will continue to gain strength here as long as [Árbenz] remains in office.”[322]  His implicit message was to proceed with the covert operation.  Peurifoy came to Guatemala after his first appointment in Greece in 1950, where he was a willing ally of the government’s repression following the civil war.  In Guatemala, he secretly recruited military officers to join the coup d’état, offering bribes, military advancements, and an end to the U.S. arms embargo once Árbenz was removed from office.[323]

In late January 1954, a Panamanian diplomat revealed the CIA plot to Árbenz and provided him with a trove of documents.  Árbenz passed the documents on to the Guatemalan press, which published them on January 29 under banner headlines.  The documents identified training bases in Nicaragua and implicated the “government of the North” in staging a rebel invasion of Guatemala.  The U.S. State Department labeled the charge “ridiculous and untrue,” and restated its vacuous mantra, “It is the policy of the United States not to intervene in the internal affairs of other nations.  This policy has repeatedly been reaffirmed under the present administration.”  The U.S. media reinforced the lies.  Following the administration, Time magazine called the charge “completely fanciful” and countered that the Árbenz government was trying to “divert attention from Guatemala as the Western Hemisphere’s Red problem child.”[324]

While preparations for the invasion continued, Secretary of State Dulles attempted to carve out a legal path for U.S. intervention in Guatemala.  At an OAS meeting in Caracas in March 1954, Dulles pressed Latin American delegates to support a resolution that would outlaw “communism” in the hemisphere, thereby providing an opening for the U.S. to argue that U.S. intervention in Guatemala was necessary in order to oust the “communist” Árbenz government.  The Latin American delegates, however, including those of dictatorial governments, resisted the measure largely because they recognized that the U.S. would be able to unilaterally intervene in any country in the hemisphere simply by labeling it “communist.”  Dulles attempted to buy votes and bribe his way to passage of the measure, promising concessions worth millions of dollars to individual countries.  “Nonetheless,” notes the historian Max Paul Friedman, “amendments pushed through by Latin American diplomats transformed the interventionist American resolution into a strong statement against intervention.”[325]  Latin American delegates voted 17-1 (with two abstentions) to amend the U.S. resolution to require OAS consultation before any action was taken, thus ruling out unilateral U.S. intervention.

Unable to obtain OAS authorization for an overt intervention, the Eisenhower administration proceeded with its covert plans.  Although the CIA has yet to declassify all documents regarding PBSUCCESS, including the names of 58 government officials targeted for assassination, the agency prepared a Memorandum in May 1975 providing an overview of the “CIA’s Role in the Overthrow of Arbenz,” which follows:

In August 1953, the Operations Coordinating Board directed [the] CIA to assume responsibility for operations against the Arbenz regime.  Appropriate authorization was issued to permit close and prompt cooperation with the Departments of Defense, State and other Government agencies in order to support the Agency in this task.  The plan of operations called for cutting off military aid to Guatemala, increasing aid to its neighbors, exerting diplomatic and economic pressure against Arbenz and attempts to subvert and or defect Army and political leaders, broad scale psychological warfare and paramilitary actions.  During the period August through December 1953 a CIA staff was assembled and operational plans were prepared.

Following are the specific operational mechanisms utilized by the Agency in the overall missions against the Arbenz government:

• Paramilitary Operations. Approximately 85 members of the Castillo Armas group received training in Nicaragua.  Thirty were trained in sabotage, six as shock troop leaders and 20 others as support-type personnel.  Eighty-nine tons of equipment were prepared.  The support of this operation was staged inside the borders of Honduras and Nicaragua. [1-1/2 lines of source text not declassified]  There were an estimated 250 men in Honduras and El Salvador for use as shock troops and specialists, outside of the training personnel that had been sent to Nicaragua.
• Air Operations. The planning for providing air operational support was broken down into three phases; i.e. the initial stockpiling of equipment; the delivering of equipment to advance bases by black flight; and the aerial resupply of troops in the field.  Thirty days prior to D-day, a fourth phase, fighter support, was initiated.  There were approximately 80 missions flown during the 14–29 June 1954 period, by various type aircraft such as C–47’s, F–47’s and Cessnas which were used to discharge cargo, distribute propaganda and for strafing and bombing missions.
• Clandestine Communications. A clandestine radio broadcasting station was established in Nicaragua.  The purpose of these broadcasts was to intimidate members of the Communist Party and public officials who were sympathetic to the Communist cause….

One of the propaganda ploys was to fabricate reports of Soviet arms deliveries to Guatemala by submarine, and then arranging to have a CIA planted cache of Soviet arms discovered and publicized.  The mythical arms deliveries were superseded by the real thing when a ship carrying 2,000 tons of Czech weapons and ammunition arrived.  This shipment created an international furor and provided clinching proof of what had been the main CIA propaganda theme, that Guatemala under Arbenz had become a Soviet satellite….

On 17–18 June five shock teams trained by the Agency crossed into Guatemala. The turning point came on 25 June when Castillo’s forces repulsed a counterattack and later bombed a fortress in Guatemala City.  On 27 June Arbenz resigned …[326]

Although Castillo Armas was given credit for the overthrow of the Árbenz government, his role constituted only one of four parts, the others being U.S. air power, radio propaganda, and the defection of key Guatemalan military leaders, including Air Force Colonel Mendoza Azurdia on June 4, 1954.  American pilots flying unmarked planes bombed and strafed the cities of Zacapa, Chiquimula, and Guatemala City.  They also flew low over the capital city firing machine guns into the air to terrify the population.  These raids (acts of war) ultimately proved more potent in demoralizing government forces than the insurgent army’s invasion on the ground, which ventured no further than Chiquimula, about 25 miles from the Guatemalan-Honduran border.  Castillo Armas’s rebel army took control of Chiquimula on June 24 in a clash that took seventeen lives, the costliest battle of the brief war.[327]

The CIA launched a clandestine radio campaign, the “Voice of Liberation,” seven weeks before the invasion.  Operating out of Opa-Locka (Miami), an American actor turned CIA agent, David Atlee Phillips, worked with three Guatemalans to produce material for radio stations.  Transmitters installed in Nicaragua and Honduras were powerful enough to reach across Guatemala and compete with the government’s radio station on the same channels.  Announcers claimed that their radio stations were deep in the Guatemalan jungle, which the U.S. press duly reported.[328]

On the eve of the invasion, the Árbenz government arrested more than one hundred anti-government activists.  Although there was no evidence of torture or murder, Secretary Dulles issued a statement to the international press on June 15 that “a reign of terror” had begun in Guatemala.[329]  The Philadelphia Inquirer, among other U.S. newspapers, followed suit, editorializing, “In recent weeks, the Communists – the real government – have been building up a reign of terror and suppression that sent hundreds fleeing across the borders to safety.  And now they are streaming back into their own country with the avowed purpose of smashing the Russian plot and liberating Guatemala from the most dangerous threat the Western Hemisphere has had to face.”[330]

During the invasion, the “Voice of Liberation” broadcast false battle reports, creating the impression that thousands of insurgents were on the march.  The international press corps was not allowed into rebel areas and thus could not confirm or deny the reports.  The main source of “inside” news for the U.S. press was Ambassador Peurifoy who, as Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer write, “dropped tidbits of information, confided private thoughts to the correspondents and drank with reporters at the American Club downtown in the midst of the aerial bombardment.  All were struck by his courage; none realized that he knew precisely when the raids were coming and where the bombs or bullets were expected to hit.”[331]

On June 20, three days after the rebel invasion began, the CIA sent a memo to the president explaining how black propaganda and disinformation were playing a key role in the coup:

… the entire effort is thus more dependent upon psychological impact rather than actual military strength, although it is upon the ability of Castillo Armas’ effort to create and maintain for a short time the impression of very substantial military strength that the success of this particular effort primarily depends.  The use of a small number of airplanes and the massive use of radio broadcasting are designed to build up and give main support to the impression of Castillo Armas’ strength as well as to spread the impression of the regime’s weakness.[332]

The Eisenhower administration also carried out a disinformation campaign in the U.S.  CIA and UFCO worked hand in hand to manipulate public opinion “through fabrication of evidence of the ‘communist menace’ in Guatemala,” writes the historian Gordon L. Bowen.  “Indeed, Fruit Company-sponsored information constituted a near monopoly of sources used in American press reports about Guatemala in this era.”[333]

The U.S. media followed Washington in judging that the Árbenz government’s importation of arms from Czechoslovakia in mid-May 1954 confirmed that Guatemala was in the Soviet camp.  This was a biased interpretation, to be sure, as the Guatemalan government, like every government, had the right to purchase arms from any other nation, particularly in response to a foreign-supported insurgency.  Moreover, as a June 1954 CIA report noted (declassified in 2003), “An abundance of information from many sources shows that Guatemala has attempted to obtain arms, airplanes, and military equipment in almost every European country and in the United States over the past several years.”  Guatemala’s attempts to purchase arms from the U.S., Canada, Britain, Switzerland, Belgium, and Italy were all blocked by the U.S. before the government turned to Czechoslovakia.[334]

On June 21 and 22, a few days after the invasion began, Guatemalan foreign minister Jorge Toriello appealed to the United Nations to investigate and mediate the crisis, providing documented evidence of foreign air attacks.  The U.S. blocked a proposed investigation in a Security Council vote.  U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge went beyond denial to warn the Russian delegate Semyon K. Tsarapkin, “Stay out of the Western Hemisphere … Don’t try to start your plans and conspiracies here.”[335]

On June 22, Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas introduced a concurrent “sense of the Congress” resolution stating that the U.S. must “prevent interference in Western Hemisphere affairs by the Soviet Communists.”  The fact that the Soviet Union had supported Guatemala’s appeal for mediation at the UN led Johnson to declare that this amounted to “open, flagrant notice that Communists are reserving the power to penetrate the Western Hemisphere by every means – espionage, sabotage, subversion, and ultimately open aggression.”[336]

In the House, Representative Jack Brooks of Texas endorsed the Johnson resolution with flair, declaring that “a Communist-dominated government in Guatemala is only 700 miles from Texas – only 960 miles, or a few hours’ bomber time, from the refiners, the chemical plants, and the homes of my own Second District in Texas.”  The resolution passed unanimously in the House and received only one negative vote in the Senate.  The dissenter, William Langer of North Dakota, argued in part that the U.S. ought to be “committed to the principle that every sovereign nation has a right to determine for itself its own form of government.”[337]

Árbenz gave up the fight on June 27 when his senior staff reported that his military officers had lost confidence in him.  He found refuge in the Mexican Embassy and was later allowed to leave the country along with his top aides.[338]  A fractious military junta that included Castillo Armas took power under Peurifoy’s direction.

The reaction to the overthrow across Latin America was one of anger.  Street protests erupted in Mexico, Honduras, Panama, Cuba, Ecuador, Bolivia, and elsewhere.  In Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, national legislatures enacted resolutions condemning U.S. aggression.  The Uruguayan delegate to the UN General Assembly warned that U.S. “aggression” against Guatemala constituted a “very serious precedent for the American countries.”  Costa Rica’s democratic president José Figueres denounced the U.S. for misreading the Árbenz government and “seeing communists everywhere.”  Ecuador’s president, José María Velaco Ibarra, opened the country’s next session of Congress with a speech warning against letting the ideological nature of a government become grounds for outside intervention, as this would mean the end of national sovereignty.[339]

In the U.S., Life magazine (July 5, 1954) interpreted the protests as a sign that Latin Americans had fallen prey to communist propaganda, editorializing that “world communism was efficiently using the Guatemalan show to strike a blow at the U.S…. in the form of Red-run anti-U.S. demonstrations which loudly supported Guatemala and waved the bloody shirt of Yankee imperialism from Mexico to Santiago.”[340]  Secretary of State Dulles claimed on July 12, 1954, that the “people of Guatemala have now been heard from…. Led by Colonel Castillo Armas, patriots arose in Guatemala to challenge the Communist leadership – and to change it.”  The future, he added, now “lies at the disposal of the Guatemalan people themselves.”[341]  To Dulles and company, Árbenz was a “communist,” communism was an alien ideology forced on the good but ignorant people of Latin America, and the United States had the responsibility and right to remove this alien cancer, no less than defending the hemisphere from a Soviet military attack.

If the “communist threat” in Guatemala was unreal, so was U.S. support for freedom and democracy in the aftermath of the coup.

On July 19, 1954, less than a month after the coup, Castillo Armas announced the formation of a “National Committee of Defense Against Communism,” followed two weeks later by a Preventative Penal Law Against Communism that established the death penalty for alleged crimes that could be construed as “sabotage,” including union activities.  The National Committee of Defense was given the right to place citizens under arrest without charges for up to six months.  The new government also reversed the expropriation of United Fruit lands and cracked down on the banana workers’ union.  A law was passed restricting the right to vote to literate citizens.  The government also ordered the banning and burning of “subversive” books, including Victor Hugo’s famous Les Miserables.[342]

On September 1, the military junta in Guatemala dissolved and Castillo Armas assumed dictatorial power.  To legitimize his authority, a plebiscite was staged on October 10 in which Guatemalans were asked a single question:  “Are you in favor of Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas continuing in the presidency of the republic for a term to be fixed by the constituent assembly?”  The approval rate was an implausible 99.8 percent.  This was proof enough for the Eisenhower administration.  Castillo Armas was invited to the White House in November 1955 and given a hero’s welcome.  At a state dinner, Vice-President Richard Nixon described the Guatemalan leader as a “courageous soldier” who had led the Guatemalan people in revolt “against Communist rule.”[343]

The reality was that the U.S. had orchestrated the overthrow of a democratically elected president and undermined its progressive economic policies, leaving in place a dictatorial regime, political repression, and unrelieved economic oppression.  The latter conditions catalyzed three decades of civil war and brutal state violence beginning in 1966.  Human rights groups estimate that between 1954 and 1990, the succession of repressive military regimes in Guatemala murdered more than 100,000 civilians.[344]

In 2011, more than half a century after the overthrow, Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom apologized for the coup, calling it a “great crime.”  In a ceremony at the National Palace in Guatemala City, Colom turned to Mr. Árbenz’s son, Juan Jacobo, and asked for forgiveness on behalf of the state.  “That day changed Guatemala,” President Colom said, “and we have not recuperated from it yet.  It was a crime to Guatemalan society and it was an act of aggression to a government starting its democratic spring.”[345]

Cuba, 1959-62

Only ninety miles from Key West, Cuba was the most important client state of the United States prior to January 1, 1959.  On that day, Fidel Castro and his guerrilla army marched through Havana amid cheering crowds, having routed the hated dictator, Fulgencio Batista.  Washington officials were wary of Castro at the time, but not unduly alarmed.  A NSC report on “U.S. Policy toward Latin America,” dated February 16, 1959, stated, “None of the Latin American nations faces an immediate threat of overt Communist aggression or takeover.”[346]

Castro himself was an enigma to Washington officials.  Born in 1926, he had grown up in a moderately prosperous family on a sugar plantation in the Oriente Province.  He enrolled at the University of Havana law school in 1945 and became active in politics.  In early 1952, he campaigned for a seat in the Cuban Congress, but elections were never held, as Batista pulled a military coup.  Enraged, Castro organized a group of followers and attacked the Moncada military barracks in the Oriente Province on July 26, 1953.  He was captured, tried, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but released in 1955 in a government amnesty program.  Castro left for Mexico with a few cohorts and began organizing a revolution to topple Batista, named the “26th of July Movement.”  He was joined by Ernesto “Che” Guevara, an Argentinian medical student who had been in Guatemala when the Árbenz government was overthrown.  On December 2, 1956, Castro, Guevara, and eighty other men landed on Cuba’s eastern shores.  Batista’s forces were waiting for them and all but twelve insurgents were killed or captured.  The survivors fled to the Sierra Maestra mountains where they found great support among the people.

Batista reported that Castro had been killed, but New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews found him very much alive and interviewed him at a mountain hideout in February 1957, providing North Americans with their first glimpse of this bearded revolutionary who some compared to Thomas Jefferson.  Matthews wrote that Castro’s “program is vague and couched in generalities, but it amounts to a new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic, and therefore anti-Communist.  The real core of its strength [speaking of 26^th of July Movement] is that it is fighting against the military dictatorship of President Batista.”[347]  The U.S. State Department verified the latter point in March 1958, estimating that “some 80 percent of the Cuban people” opposed the Batista regime.  Recognizing that their dictator in Havana might not last, Washington officials cut off arms to Batista and searched for a replacement, which proved futile.[348]

Castro was acutely aware of the historical domination of the U.S. over Cuba.  The U.S.-Batista alliance, notes Odd Arne Westad, prevented Cubans from “carrying out the social and economic reform that Castro thought necessary.  The promise of the Cuban revolution was that Cubans – and eventually all Latin Americans – could by themselves overthrow U.S. control and create truly independent states.”  Castro expressed his social welfare orientation in his “History Will Absolve Me” speech on October 16, 1953, at the age of 27, declaring “man’s inalienable right to a decent living,” thus extending the “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” written into the U.S. Declaration of Independence, to the economic realm.[349]

In his victory speech at Santiago de Cuba on January 4, 1959, Castro declared that his revolution “will not be like 1895 when the Americans came and took over, intervening at the last moment, and afterwards did not even allow Calixto Garcia to assume leadership, although he had fought at Santiago de Cuba for 30 years.”  Castro also promised, “Nor will it be like 1933, when the people began to believe that the revolution was going to triumph, and Mr. Batista came in to betray the revolution, take over power, and establish an 11-year-long dictatorship…. The function of the military is not to elect governments, but to guarantee laws and to guarantee the rights of the citizens.”[350]

Castro did not carry out his democratic promise, to the great disappointment of many Cubans, but neither was his revolution a threat to U.S. national security.  In mid-April 1959, Castro visited the U.S. at the invitation of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.  Touring the U.S. for eleven days, he visited the Jefferson Memorial and Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home, likening the freedom fighters of the American Revolution to those of the Cuban Revolution.[351]  President Eisenhower avoided meeting with the 33-year-old guerrilla in clean fatigues, but Vice President Richard Nixon met with him at the Capitol on April 19.  Nixon concluded after the meeting:

Whatever we may think of him he is going to be a great factor in the development of Cuba and very possibly in Latin American affairs generally.  He seems to be sincere.  He is either incredibly naïve about Communism or under Communist discipline – my guess is the former, and as I have already implied, his ideas as to how to run a government or an economy are less developed than those of almost any world figure I have met in fifty countries.[352]

Castro did seem uncertain about his economic program.  On the one hand, he welcomed foreign investment and declared in May, “This is not a Red revolution.”  On the other hand, he initiated a land redistribution program that same month affecting 1.7 million acres owned by U.S. citizens and companies.  At the time of Castro’s triumph, U.S. investors owned 40 percent of Cuba’s sugar production, 50 percent of its railroads, 90 percent of its utilities, and sizable chunks of Cuba’s arable land.  U.S. businesses controlled Cuba’s tourist industry, replete with prostitution and gambling, while the U.S. government controlled the lifeblood of the Cuban economy through quotas on sugar imports.[353]  Castro’s Agrarian Reform Law of 1959 established a maximum limit of 3,311 acres for plantations and ranches, affecting wealthy Cubans as well as foreigners.  The government offered compensation for confiscated lands in the form of 20-year bonds at amounts based on tax values.  One-third of the land was to be distributed to peasants, with the rest managed by state farms and cooperatives.[354]

The American correspondent Herbert Matthews, who continued to visit Cuba in 1959, wrote in July that Castro wanted a social revolution, not a Communist revolution.[355]  Washington officials, however, appeared not to distinguish between the two.  According to a NSC report in January 1960 reviewing U.S.-Cuban relations in the year 1959:

The period from January to March might be characterized as the honeymoon period of the Castro government.  In April a downward trend in U.S. Cuban relations had been evident…. In June we had reached the decision that it was not possible to achieve our objectives with Castro in power…. In July and August, we had been busy drawing up a program to replace Castro.  However some U.S. companies reported to us during this time that they were making some progress in negotiations, a factor that caused us to slow the implementation of our program.  The hope expressed by these companies did not materialize.  October was a period of clarification…. On October 31, in agreement with CIA, the Department [of State] had recommended to the President approval of a program … The approved program authorized us to support elements in Cuba opposed to the Castro government while making Castro’s downfall seem to be the result of his own mistakes.”[356]

Why did Washington officials want to oust Castro?   At that time, Castro was not a communist; the Soviet Union had no bases or missiles in Cuba; and Che Guevara, Castro’s right-hand man, was ensconced in the government bureaucracy rather than agitating for revolution abroad (he would leave Cuba in 1965).  The Eisenhower administration was no doubt apprehensive about future possibilities, but its decision in 1959 to oust Castro was based on Cuba’s economic nationalist policies.  As Secretary of State Christian Herter said in a letter to President Eisenhower on November 5, 1959, Cuba’s economic policies, “if emulated by other Latin American countries, would have serious adverse effects on Free World support of our leadership.”  To allow Castro to proceed would create a situation in which “the United States cannot hope to encourage and support sound economic policies in other Latin American countries and promote necessary private investment.”[357]

Washington’s easiest route to undermining Castro was through economic pressure – making the economy scream.  Warned that the U.S. intended to restrict Cuban sugar imports, Castro signed a trade agreement with the Soviet Union in February 1960 under which the Soviet Union would purchase 425,000 tons of Cuban sugar that year and Cuba would receive Russian oil.  In May, the Cuban government informed the managers of U.S.-owned oil refineries that they would have to process the Russian oil.  The refinery owners refused, acting under U.S. government directives.  In June, the Cuban government seized the refineries.  In July, the Eisenhower administration banned Cuban sugar imports.

The Soviet Union stepped in at that critical moment to purchase an additional 700,000 tons of sugar for the year, saving the Cuban economy.  In October, the Castro government nationalized 382 big businesses, including banks and manufacturers of sugar, liquor, beer, perfume, soap, and textiles.  The U.S., in turn, imposed an embargo on U.S. exports to Cuba except for food and medicine.  In December, Cuba negotiated a multilateral trade agreement with the Soviet Union, Eastern European countries, and Mongolia for the purchase of 4 million tons of sugar in 1961.  China also provided a modest amount of aid to Cuba. [358]  All in all, Cuba found a way to survive economically without U.S. trade and investment.

Undaunted, U.S. officials pursued more aggressive strategies.  Between October 1959 and mid-April 1961, Washington officials planned and implemented various covert operations aimed at sabotaging the economy, overthrowing the government, and assassinating Castro.  To be clear, Cuba posed no military threat to the U.S. or to its neighbors.  Its differences with the U.S. were over Cuban nationalization of private U.S. properties.  The U.S., in undertaking aggressive actions against Cuba, acted illegally under international law, a fact well understood by U.S. officials, as their missions were undertaken in stealth in order to allow for “plausible deniability.”

U.S. sabotage operations began in October 1959 with air raids from bases in Florida against economic targets, which also killed civilians.  In December, with thousands of Cubans making their way to the United States, the CIA began recruiting and organizing the expatriates into anti-Castro units under the aegis of Brigade 2506.  Training for an invasion of Cuba began at sites in Florida and Guatemala in March 1960 and intensified in early 1961.  Heading the invasion operation was Jacob Esterline, the director of the CIA’s Operation PBSUCCESS in Guatemala in 1954.  Another veteran of that operation, E. Howard Hunt, was tasked with forming a government-in-exile to replace the Castro government.  To drum up opposition within Cuba, the CIA initiated a radio propaganda program modeled on the Guatemala operation.  On September 28, 1960, the CIA airdropped its first supply of weapons and supplies to dissidents, except that the drop missed the designated landing area by seven miles and the items were picked up by the Cuban army.  CIA agents also tried to assassinate Castro by poisoning a box of his favorite cigars, the first of at least eight attempts.[359]

Cuba did not respond to U.S. aggression with aggression of its own but rather took the matter to the United Nations, lodging a complaint against the U.S. on July 11, 1960.  The Cuban delegate denounced U.S. support for “counter-revolutionary” elements and terrorist bombings, providing the Security Council with documentation of the effects.  On September 26, 1960, Castro elaborated on these charges in a four-hour speech before the UN General Assembly.  Turning to U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, he said, “May I take this opportunity of telling His Excellency the Representative of the United States that there are many mothers in Cuba still awaiting his telegrams of condolence for their children murdered by the bombs of the United States.”  Lodge categorically dismissed all accusations of U.S. intervention.[360]

The main proponent of the expatriate invasion of Cuba in White House discussions was CIA Deputy Director of Plans Richard Bissell.  Although he had no experience in running covert operations, he was confident that the invasion would succeed.  Should problems arise, he surmised, he could call for backup U.S. airpower to overwhelm Cuban defenses.[361]  The use of U.S. warplanes, however, would expose the hand of the U.S. in the illegal invasion, and President Kennedy was adamantly opposed to this.  Kennedy put his personal credibility on the line at a press conference on April 12, 1961, just days before the invasion, stating:

… there will not be, under any conditions, an intervention in Cuba by United States armed forces, and this government will do everything it possibly can, and I think it can meet its responsibilities, to make sure that there are no Americans involved in any actions inside Cuba…. The basic issue in Cuba is not one between the United States and Cuba; it is between the Cubans themselves.  And I intend to see that we adhere to that principle.  And as I understand it, this Administration’s attitude is so understood and shared by the anti-Castro exiles from Cuba in this country.[362]

The Cuban exiles in Guatemala preparing for the invasion were also confident that their mission would not fail, knowing that the powerful United States was backing them.  Alfredo Durán, an early enlistee in Brigade 2506, recalled that “the brigade had a very high morale, which was surprising, because of the terrible conditions in the camps” which included bad food, constant rain, and “mud all over the place.”[363]  The CIA also placed great expectations on anti-Castro cells within Cuba, counting on them to rouse the Cuban people against Castro when the invasion came.[364]  CIA expectations far exceeded the capabilities of the small dissident groups, as Castro had mobilized impressive defenses and the population was mostly still on his side in early 1961.  The CIA also changed its landing site from Trinidad to Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs) only one month before the operation was set to take place.

Senator J. William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, was one of the few in Congress to learn about the invasion plan.  He met with Kennedy to advise against it.  “He made a powerful case against it, talking about things like treaties and international law,” noted the historian-in-the-White House Arthur Schlesinger in a reflective discussion.  “Needless to say, Fulbright was a lone wolf speaking in that final meeting to decide to go ahead.  He can’t have been too popular with Bissell.”[365]

On the morning of April 15, six Cuban expatriate pilots flying unmarked U.S. B-26 bombers set out to destroy the 30-plane Cuban air force, striking two airfields, three military bases, and the Antonio Maceo Airport.  The Kennedy administration’s pre-arranged cover story for the press was that a defecting Cuban Air Force pilot had done the damage before flying to Miami.  The cover was blown, however, when close-up photos of the plane shown to reporters revealed that it was a different type than those of the Cuban air force.  Fearing further exposure of America’s invisible hand, Kennedy cancelled air strikes planned for the next day.

When the expatriate invaders arrived at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, Cuban air and ground forces were ready for them “and the exiles soon found themselves outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered and outplanned by Castro’s troops,” according to a CIA history of the event.  “The deteriorating operation convinced President Kennedy to authorize six unmarked fighter jets from the aircraft carrier USS Essex to provide combat air patrol for the Brigade’s aircraft for one hour on April 19,” but only for one hour.[366]  Even with additional air support, it is questionable whether the expatriate invaders would have succeeded.  They surrendered on April 19.  The invasion took the lives of 157 Cuban soldiers, 89 Cuban expatriates, and four American pilots; and 1,197 expatriates were taken prisoner.[367]  Durán managed to escaped to the hills for 30 days before being captured and imprisoned.  Under an agreement between the U.S. and Cuba in late 1962, he and other members of the brigade were returned to the U.S.[368]

In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Castro aligned with the Cuban Communist Party and the Soviet Union, and officially hailed socialism.  Though Fidel’s brother Raúl had long been a member of the Communist Party, Fidel’s 26^th of July Movement had kept the Communist Party at arm’s length for more than two years after the revolutionary triumph.  On May 1, 1960, Fidel declared Cuba a socialist nation:

We must talk of a new constitution, yes, a new constitution, but not a bourgeois constitution, not a constitution corresponding to the domination of certain classes by exploiting classes, but a constitution corresponding to a new social system without the exploitation of many by man.  That new social system is called socialism, and this constitution will therefore be a socialist constitution.[369]

 

Fidel’s shift was facilitated by the Soviet bloc’s timely actions to save the sugar-dependent Cuban economy and by the fact that the Communist Party, unlike Fidel, had prepared plans for restructuring the Cuban economy.  Castro was nonetheless reluctant to cede power to the party.  Hence, in March 1962, he purged the party’s leadership and “stressed that Cuban Communism would revolve around his ideas and those of the ‘guerrilla generation,’” in the words of Odd Arne Westad.[370]  Most importantly, Castro wanted the Soviet Union to protect Cuba from future U.S. attacks.  “It was in self-defense that Fidel sought the Soviet embrace,” writes the historian Piero Gleijeses.  “Only strong Soviet support could protect his regime from the United States.  The fate of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala was a bitter reminder of what befell errant presidents in the U.S. sphere of influence.”[371]  The Castro government also went on the offensive and began a training program in Havana for Latin American rebels in 1962.  “The United States will not be able to hurt us,” Castro explained, “if all of Latin America is in flames.”[372]

Notwithstanding the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the Kennedy administration remained intent on bringing down the Castro government.  On April 19, 1961, the very day the invasion collapsed, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the president’s brother, wrote a memo to the president urging a new campaign against Castro.  The following day, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara requested that the Department of Defense “develop a plan for the overthrow of the Castro government,” although not a direct invasion.  In November 1961, Kennedy approved Operation Mongoose, a multi-faceted plan of economic sabotage and assassination plots.  The operation was coordinated by a top-level interagency group headed by Robert Kennedy.  “My idea,” said Robert Kennedy on November 3, “is to stir things up on the island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run and operated by the Cubans themselves with every group but Batistaites and Communists.”  He added that he did “not know if we will be successful but we have nothing to lose in my estimate.”[373]

Operation Mongoose was apparently not enough.  An invasion might be needed as well.  On March 5, 1962, the Kennedy brothers sent a memorandum titled “Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba” to the Joint Chiefs of Staff requesting that an operational plan be drawn up to “provide adequate justification for US military intervention”:

Such a plan would enable a logical build-up of incidents to be combined with other seemingly unrelated events to camouflage the ultimate objective…. Time is an important factor in resolution of the Cuban problem.  Therefore, the plan should be so time-phased that projects would be operable within the next few months.  Inasmuch as the ultimate objective is overt military intervention, it is recommended that primary responsibility for developing military and para-military aspects of the plan for both overt and covert military operations be assigned the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

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