From U.S. Intelligence Foreign Intelligence: The Secret Side
of American History by Charles Ameringer, Lexington Books:
Lexington, Massachusetts, 1990.
In much the same way, the International Organizations Divi-
sion used private international organizations-a number of them
based in the United States-as instruments of covert action in
foreign policy. These organizations, representing such diverse
interests as students and youth, labor unions, community
development, health care, and freedom of the press and human
rights, were rarely aware of CIA sponsorship. In fact, many of
them were part of the non-Communist Left and strongly opposed
certain foreign governments that were considered U.S. allies at
the time. The contradiction between official U.S. foreign policy
and the one being carried out by the IOD caused consternation and
controversy when the American public became aware of it in the
mid-1960s.
The IOD provided funding to organizations that were
outspoken in their criticism of U.S. foreign policy and that
would have been outraged to know that they were receiving CIA
support (although in some cases insiders knew what was going on).
In order to conceal its involvement, the IOD devised the
"pass-through," a means of channeling money through several
conduits before it reached the intended beneficiary. The CIA
would create a phony foundation that was little more than a post
office box; it would contribute funds for a particular purpose to
a legitimate foundation that was known to support certain causes
and to have the necessary connections; the legitimate foundation
finally passed the money to the organizations that the CIA wanted
to favor in the first place.
Since the IOD seemed to be fomenting change in countries
where the United States was officially supporting the status quo,
the purported split between "DDI liberalism" and "DDP/DDO
conservativism" was not really that clean. From 1950 to 1954,
the chief of the IOD was Tom Braden, a former OSS operative and
liberal journalist. (Thirty years later, Braden sat "on the left"
in the Cable News Network program Crossfire.) His successor for
the rest of the 1950s and into the 1960s was Cord Meyer, who had
lost an eye in World War II combat and came out of the war
dedicated to the cause of world federalism. Ray Cline, who
became DDI in 1961, had earlier been station chief in Taiwan.
But there was less doubt about where the Special Operations
Division stood politically.
...
In Albania, Kim Philby betrayed the U.S.-British
infiltration teams even before they left their base in Malta,
resulting in the ambushing and killing of many brave men. Yet if
Philby was a monster of sorts, the CIA's Eastern European
programs themselves had particularly malodorous features. Frank
Wisner, who was in charge of the Office of Policy Coordination
(the forerunner of the DDP), ran the programs with the
collaboration of General Reinhard Gehlen. Gehlen was a German
officer who had been responsible for Soviet intelligence during
the war; he had planned his own capture by American forces in the
closing days of the war and had brought his files with him.
Gehlen aided Wisner in assembling "a cadre of German specialists
on the Soviets [but] without regard for their pasts; some of his
best experts were in fact former Nazis. This and similar Army
connections with Nazis would prove embarrassing for the United
States many years later."
Conducting guerrilla operations behind the iron curtain was
infeasible, and the situation in Western Europe was improving in
any case through conventional diplomacy. So Clandestine Services
shifted its attention to parts of the globe where there was
unrest. Events in China and Korea helped focus attention beyond
Europe and broadened the cold war to the world arena. Some
foreign affairs specialists questioned whether every coup or
insurgency in Asia or Latin America was Moscow-inspired, but the
American president did not have to worry about public debate in
using his new secret weapon. Employing covert action, the CIA
replaced the marines as the instrument of "Yankee
interventionism."
The chart in figure 19-1 lists the places-where the CIA
has intervened since its beginning. It is not exhaustive and has
been compiled exclusively from published sources and public
documents, but it serves to indicate the extent of the "new
interventionism" and to identify the various covert action
tactics used.
In the rich variety and broad extent of its deployment,
covert action produced a new American personality: the
"swashbucklers of secret wars," such as Edward Lansdale, Kermit
"Kim" Roosevelt, John Peurifoy, Cord Meyer, William Colby, and
Oliver North. Though there have been many others, these persons
are
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Baltic states 1948-54
the Ukraine 1948-54
Albania 1949-1954
the Philippines 1949-53
Korea 1950
Vietnam 1954; 1955; 1963
China/Taiwan 1951-54; 1967
Burma 1952-61
Tibet 1959-69
Thailand 1960-73
Laos 1962-71
Indonesia 1958
Iran 1953
Guatemala 1954
Costa Rica 1955; 1959-61
Hungary 1956
Cambodia 1958-59
the Dominican Republic 1960-61
Cuba 1960-65
British Guiana (Guyana) 1963-64
Chile 1962-73
Ecuador 1960-63
Uruguay 1964-66
Mexico 1967-68
Bolivia 1967
the Congo/Zaire 1964
Ghana 1966
Angola 1965/1975
West Germany 1963
the United States 1952-67
Iraq (Kurds) 1972-75
Afghanistan 1979-89
Libya 1981/1984
El Salvador 1980
Nicaragua 1981-87
Figure 19-1. CIA Covert Operations
--------------------------------------------------------------
associated with some of the CIA's most sensational episodes.
Marchetti and Marks suggested that Lansdale's work was the
"proto-type" for CIA covert operations during the 1950s: "His
exploits under agency auspices, first in the Philippines and then
in Vietnam, became so well known that he served as the model for
characters in two best-selling novels, The Ugly American by
William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, and The Quiet American by
Graham Greene. In the former, he was a heroic figure; in the
latter, a bumbling fool."
In the list of covert operations, Lansdale figured in the
very first episode outside Europe, which occurred in the
Philippines in 1949. Lansdale, an air force colonel, assisted
Philippine leader Ramon Magsaysay in putting down the rebellion
of the Communist Hukbalahaps, or "Huks." He was one of the
earliest advocates of counterinsurgency warfare, or the use of
guerrilla tactics to defeat guerrillas. Lansdale's mission
enabled Magsaysay to win popular support by providing effective
propaganda and by secretly providing funding for economic and
social reforms. It ended when Magsaysay was elected president in
1953.
Lansdale's success in the Philippines inspired President
Eisenhower to have him try the same tactics in Vietnam. Although
Eisenhower warned against getting involved in a "land war" in
Asia, the CIA's proprietary airline CAT airlifted supplies to the
beleaguered French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. After the French
were defeated and Indochina was divided in compliance with the
Geneva Accords, the Eisenhower administration concentrated on
South Vietnam as the place to stop "the dominoes from falling."
Lansdale gave his support to Ngo Dinh Diem, an anti-Communist
leader who had also opposed the French and Japanese, and
engineered his election to the presidency in 1955. But Diem was
no Magsaysay. He and his brother, Ngo Dihn Nhu, proved to be
corrupt and repressive. This led to Lansdale's departure and
created in time a made-to-order situation for the Communist Viet
Cong and the North. Moreover, the usually astute Lansdale had
intervened in favor of a Roman Catholic in a predominantly
Buddhist nation. On November 1, 1963, as U.S. involvement in
Vietnam was deepening, Diem and his brother were overthrown and
subsequently assassinated. The CIA had put Diem in power and had
now removed him after secretly conspiring with a group of army
generals.
...
The CIA intervention in Guatemala stirred up a great deal
of ill will toward the United States in Latin America. Even
moderate, pro-United States leaders in the region, who had
shunned the Arbenz regime, now complained about a Yankee double
standard that used "free world" rhetoric against communism but
that ignored the transgressions of right-wing tyrants. President
Jose Figueres of Costa Rica, for one, urged the United States to
stop arming dictators and to fight communism by eradicating
poverty and injustice in Latin America. His urgings led to his
becoming involved with the CIA as a target of intervention
himself and, then, as an "agent of influence."
In the mid-1950s, Figueres was one of the Caribbean's few
progressive leaders to hold office. He condemned the region's
dictators and permitted political exiles to engage in
conspiratorial activities on Costa Rican soil. Figueres's policy
riled Nicaragua's Somoza, who, encouraged by the events in
Guatemala, decided it was time to get rid of his annoying
neighbor. Citing evidence that Figueres had abetted an
assassination attempt against him in April 1954, Somoza helped
Figueres's enemies launch an invasion of Costa Rica from
Nicaragua in January 1955. Figueres had played a dangerous game,
but he had also abolished the Costa Rican army, which forced him
to appeal to the Organization of American States to protect his
country from Somoza's aggression. The OAS, with the concurrence
of the U.S. representative, ordered a cease-fire and sent a
delegation to Costa Rica for an on-site investigation.
At that point, Somoza realized that he had to act quickly.
He called in his IOU from the CIA. He had permitted the CIA to
use Las Mercedes Airport, outside Managua, as a base for its
P-47s during the Guatemalan intervention. Now he wanted the
planes that were parked there to help him in his feud with
Figueres. On January 15, three days after the OAS action, a P-47
Thunderbolt violated Costa Rican airspace and bombed and strafed
a number of Costa Rican towns. Figueres, alarmed by this
escalation, pointed out that Costa Rica had no defense against
"modern weapons" of this kind and again appealed to the OAS. The
council of the organization immediately authorized the United
States to sell four F-51 Mustang fighters to Costa Rica for a
dollar apiece. The State Department, responding to pressure from
certain U.S. congressmen and sensing an opportunity to improve
America's image in Latin America after Guatemala, came to the
rescue and preserved the Caribbean's "lone democrat." Its gesture
ended the "invasion," and the State Department scored one over
the CIA.
But the roles were soon reversed. Within the State
Department, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American
Affairs Henry F. Holland considered Figueres a "troublemaker." He
rebuked him for his interventionism and refused to take seriously
his warning of "reform now, or revolution later." Meanwhile, the
CIA acting covertly hedged its bets when Latin American dictators
started to slip toward the end of the 1950s and after the rise of
Fidel Castro. Cord Meyer, chief of the DDP's International
Organizations Division, was already intervening in behalf of the
non-Communist left and extended CIA support to Figueres in the
wake of the so-called Nixon riots in the spring of 1958.
Americans were shocked by that series of hostile
demonstrations during Nixon's "goodwill" tour of Latin America.
They climaxed in May in Caracas, where a mob stoned and spat upon
the vice president's motorcade and threatened his life. At the
invitation of Representative Charles Porter of Oregon, Figueres
(at the time, just out of office) came to Washington to explain
what had caused these events. "People cannot spit on a foreign
policy," Figueres told a House committee, "which is what they
meant to do." Figueres insisted that Latin America supported the
United States in the cold war, but he asked, "If you talk human
dignity to Russia, why do you hesitate so much to talk human
dignity to the Dominican Republic?" He testified that the United
States must change its policy in Latin America and that it could
not sacrifice human rights for "investments."
But the best that Figueres could do was to induce the CIA to
help Latin America's liberals secretly. The CIA gave him money
to publish a political journal, Combate, and to sponsor the
founding meeting of the Institute of Political Education in Costa
Rica in November 1959. The institute was organized as a training
school and a center for political collaboration for political
parties of the democratic left, principally from Costa Rica, Cuba
(in exile), the Dominican Republic (in exile), Guatemala,
Honduras, Nicaragua (in exile), Panama, Peru, and Venezuela. The
CIA concealed its role from most of the participants except
Figueres. Its funds passed first to a shell foundation, then to
the Kaplan Fund of New York, next to the Institute for
International Labor Research (IILR) located in New York, and
finally to San Jose. Socialist leader Norman Thomas headed the
IILR. After the CIA connection was revealed, Thomas maintained
that he had been unaware of it, but the IILR's treasurer, Sacha
Volman, who also became treasurer of the institute in San jos@,
was a CIA agent. The CIA used Volman to monitor the institute,
and Meyer collaborated directly with Figueres.
Meyer came to San Jose sometime in the summer of 1960. He
and Figueres created the Inter-American Democratic Social
Movement (INADESMO), which was nothing more than a front. A
flier describing the idealistic purpose of INADESMO carried the
same post office box as Figueres's personal
letterhead. The INADESMO setup enabled Meyer to
disperse funds more directly, without having to bother with
conduits or the accounting procedures of the institute. For
example, INADESMO contributed $10,000 to help finance the First
Conference of Popular Parties of Latin America in Lima, Peru, in
August 1960.
The following May, Meyer returned to San Jose for a more
urgent purpose. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs failure, he
provided Figueres with INADESMO funds to sponsor a meeting at his
farm (May 12-20) between the leaders of the principal Dominican
exile movements, Juan Bosch and Horacio Ornes. With Figueres as
sponsor, Bosch and Ornes agreed to form a coalition government in
anticipation of the overthrow of dictator Rafael Trujillo. As the
United States moved to rally the hemisphere against Fidel Castro,
Trujillo had become expendable, because the United States needed
to demonstrate that it opposed all dictators, not just those on
the left.
For over a year, the CIA had been in contact also with
dissidents inside the Dominican Republic who argued that
assassination was the only certain way to remove Trujillo. The
CIA station in Ciudad Trujillo (now Santo Domingo) had encouraged
the dissidents and actually delivered to them three pistols and
three carbines "attendant to their projected efforts to
neutralize Trujillo." Because the Bay of Pigs failure created an
uncertain situation, the United States tried to put the brakes on
this operation and refused to pass along additional weapons to
the dissidents which the Dominican station already had,
specifically M-3 machine guns. The National Security Council,
meeting on May 5, "noted the President's view that the United
States should not initiate the overthrow of Trujillo before
[knowing] what government would succeed him."
On May 30, Trujillo was ambushed and assassinated. The same
"action group" with whom the CIA had been in contact and to whom
it had delivered pistols and carbines carried out the attack.
According to the 1975 report of the Church Committee, there was
"no direct evidence" that CIA weapons had been used in the
assassinations and the effect of the Bosch-Ornes pact upon the
events that transpired remains a matter for speculation.
Nonetheless, the CIA described its role in "changing" the
government of the Dominican Republic "as a 'success' in that it
assisted in moving the Dominican Republic from a totalitarian
dictatorship to a Western-style democracy." Bosch himself was
elected president of the Dominican Republic. Sacha Volman
followed him there, establishing a new "research and publication
center" and taking with him the CIA funding that used to go to
Figueres in Costa Rica. Though one cannot prove that there was a
coordinated link between the external and internal opposition
groups, Meyer was in a position to know what both elements were
doing. In March 1962, Meyer's IOD was merged with the Covert
Action staff, and Meyer became chief of the new and enlarged
unit.
In this review of Meyer's activities in Costa Rica and the
Dominican Republic, there have been repeated references to Fidel
Castro and the Cuban Revolution. In fact, most of the CIA's
clandestine operations in Latin America during the 1960s occurred
in the context of Cuban developments.
Elsewhere in the hemisphere, too, CIA actions had the
objective, "No more Cubas." In British Guiana (which became
independent Guyana in 1966), the CIA worked through its assets in
the international trade union movement to topple the
pro-Communist government of Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan. In the
early 1960s, Jagan had made friendly overtures toward Castro and
had chosen to make the labor unions a factor in his bid for
absolute power. In 1963 and 1964, the American Federation of
Labor (AFL) and its international allies, the Inter-American
Regional Labor Organization (ORIT) and the International
Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), helped stage an
eighty-day general strike that prevented Jagan's takeover of the
unions and led to his eventual political defeat.
Tom Braden later revealed that when he was head of the IOD,
he had passed money to American labor leaders to fight Communist
labor unions in Italy and Germany. Columnist Drew Pearson wrote,
"Jay Lovestone, sometimes called [AFL-CIO president George]
Meany's minister of foreign affairs . . . takes orders
from Cord Meyer [Braden's successor] of the CIA." Lovestone, who
was appointed executive secretary of the AFL Free Trade Union
Committee after World War II and a dedicated cold warrior,
needed little prodding from Braden and Meyer in opposing
Communist influence in the international labor movement. At
about the time that Meyer took charge of expanded operations in
international organizations as chief of the Covert Action staff,
Lovestone helped create the American Institute of Free Labor
Development (AIFLD) for the purpose of training labor leaders in
Latin America in labor organizing techniques and tactics. The
AIFLD was one of several AFL-CIO entities that received covert
funding from the CIA; Philip Agee alleged that its collaboration
with CIA stations abroad was extremely close, amounting to a
"country-team effort."
In the British Guiana case, Jagan accused the AIFLD of
intervening in the general strike and denounced its executive
director, Serafino Romualdi. Romualdi, the AFL's long-time
"roving ambassador" in Latin America, did not deny the charge but
showed only nonchalance: "I simply put at the disposal of the
strike committee the services of six graduates of [AIFLD]. . . .
who were working as interns with various local unions. They
performed so well that one of them, David Persaud, later was
elected President of the BGTUC [British Guiana Trade Union
Congress]."" In reality, the operation had not been simple. The
strike became very violent and had taken a toll of 160 lives and
required huge sums of money to sustain. Jagan insisted that there
were eleven, not six, AIFLD graduates active in the strike, and
one critic claimed there were "more visitors to that tiny country
in the name of 'labor solidarity' in 18 months than in the
previous 18 years." Romualdi charged that Cuba and Russia had
acted as "strikebreakers" by shipping food and fuel to Jagan,
but, in the end, before British Guiana became independent, Jagan
was out as premier.
Jagan's defeat paralleled another CIA initiative, at the
other end of South America in Chile. The CIA's intervention in
Chile began in 1962, with a $50,000 covert contribution to the
Christian Democratic party; it lasted through 1970-73, when it
made an $8 million expenditure to oppose the government of
Salvador Allende. Chile, a nation with a
democratic tradition and chronic economic ills, troubled the
United States because its leftist political parties appeared to
be capable of achieving electoral victory. During the period
1962-69, the United States provided Chile with more than a
billion dollars in direct, overt economic assistance to improve
economic and social conditions. During the same period, the CIA
acted covertly to strengthen the Christian Democratic party as
the most viable reformist movement. It expended during a
fifteen-year period of discreet cooperation...was based on a
shared commitment to a common purpose. The NSA leadership wanted
to cooperate with democratic and representative university
student groups abroad and to oppose the attempt of the Communists
to dominate the international student community. The Agency
shared that objective and was prepared to help them achieve what
they had already decided to do. "II The students had been denied
open support by the State Department and Congress because "they
were considered too far to the left in the general climate of
McCarthyism and anti-intellectualism of the 1950s. They had then
turned to the CIA and accepted its secret funding. Under the
arrangement, "CIA funds would support only the international
division of the National Student Association; only the NSA
President and the International Affairs Vice President would be
witting of the CIA connection. Each year, after the election
of new student leaders, the CIA held a secret briefing for the
new officers, and elicited from them a secrecy agreement.""
Despite the seeming "blank check" relationship between the
CIA and the NSA, the Agency in fact made "operational use" of
individual students. Students attending world youth congresses
were asked to report on "Soviet and Third World personalities"
and to observe "Soviet security practices." In 1957, a U.S.
student delegate to the Sixth World Youth Festival in Moscow "was
instructed to report on Soviet counterintelligence measures and
to purchase a piece of Soviet-manufactured equipment. Besides
these actions pertaining to the international sphere, the CIA
intruded upon the functioning of NSA itself by influencing the
selection of officers, spotting sympathetic leaders and promoting
their candidacies. It was this latter aspect that created the
greatest furor.
Immediately after the publication of the Ramparts article
about the NSA, the New York Times and the Washington Post
published lists of private American organizations and foundations
that had received CIA secret funding. The presence of
educational and private voluntary organizations, labor unions,
elements of the media, and religious groups on the list aroused
grave concerns about the effects of CIA operations upon the
"independence and to insist upon human rights compliance and
unload associations with dictators without developing viable
alternatives. However, such policy decisions could be firmly
pursued through open diplomacy (without returning to the days of
Cord Meyer and the covert funding of the non-Communist left, as
much to deceive the Congress and the American people as to
protect secrets). Carter's failure to force Anastasio Somoza to
leave Nicaragua in January 1979 was a policy error and had no
relationship to the status of Clandestine Services.
That Clandestine Services had declined, there was little
doubt. Even the Carter administration tried "to resurrect covert
action" in 1980 '41 after events brought President Carter around
to George Kennan's thinking of thirty years earlier. The idea of
a contingency force was updated, as stated by Stansfield Turner:
"the talent necessary for covert action is available in the CIA
and it must be preserved. Carter extended covert support "to
opponents of the Sandinistas," including "newsprint and funds to
keep the [opposition] newspaper La Prensa alive,"50 and he
responded to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979
with covert arms shipments to Afghan rebels. U.S. intelligence
was not caught unawares by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, as
Carter's critics charged, but Carter, shocked by Soviet
recklessness, resorted to covert action to "punish the Soviets,"
since going to war "wasn't feasible."" The. tragic clandestine
rescue mission that was aborted in the Irani-an desert in April
1980 was a failure, but it was no more a failure than the Bay of
Pigs in the heyday of Allen Dulles.
If Carter's "failures" were also "intelligence failures,"
the problem was in the function of clandestine intelligence
collection (HUMINT). In reforming Clandestine Services, no one
had made clear the distinction between foreign intelligence or
espionage and covert action. When Ranelagh affirmed that the CIA
under Carter and Turner had "lost the quality of being
special,"51 he overlooked the fact that the FI people had lost
out a long time before (to say nothing of the DDI analysts).
Turner's purge of two hundred covert operators did not ruin the
CIA, and Carter's problems in foreign affairs were more complex
than his obvious disdain for covert action.