Safe for democracy, p.28
Safe for Democracy, page 28
Diem consolidated his power in Saigon by neutralizing first the pro-French army, then the powerful sects. Lansdale stood with him every step of the way, privately visiting sect leaders, enlisting them in key coups, carrying Diem’s messages and money, and contriving stumbling blocks to obstruct French maneuvers. Lansdale advised Diem, often daily. But the Saigon leader failed to deliver on promises of political reforms he made to the Americans. Eisenhower’s envoy and friend, General Collins, finally decided to end U.S. support, at which point Lansdale used a CIA back channel to alert his bosses. In Washington, Allen and Foster Dulles conspired to undercut the Collins policy. It was Collins, not Lansdale, who would be replaced. Lansdale also convinced Diem to claim nation status for the southern regroupment zone. In October 1955 Lansdale was awarded the National Security Medal, as Kim Roosevelt had been before him.
The Geneva settlement provided for all-Vietnam elections in July 1956, which Eisenhower feared would reunify the country under North Vietnamese leadership. The administration encouraged South Vietnam to reject the elections. While Diem thus cast the die for a second Indochina war—in which both special warfare and the CIA would play a large part—the United States saw its new Southeast Asian ally in Cold War terms. Thus American planners designed the South Vietnamese army against a conventional military threat. The basic strategy embodied in U.S. 1955 war plans set the CIA to retard an enemy advance through Laos while the U.S. Pacific Fleet made coastal raids with special warfare units to harry a Communist advance down from North Vietnam. But when war returned to Vietnam it took the form of an internal uprising against Ngo Dinh Diem. The Americans prepared themselves and the South Vietnamese for the wrong threat. All this was of a piece with the evolution of the CIA’s secret wars in Asia, which grew far beyond the Korean conflict. True to expectations, Dwight Eisenhower greatly expanded the playing field. Covert operations in East Asia proceeded with exuberance, an exuberance matched elsewhere by the Central Intelligence Agency.
* Since the era of these covert operations, China has changed its written language. The new rendering, called pinyin, is intended to be more phonetic than the traditional. In a historical account such as this, however, the new system can generate confusion. In general this narrative will render place names, with which readers may be familiar, in the modern form while retaining the traditional rendering for historical figures, with the exceptions of the major figures well known to history. Thus Mao Tse-tung will be Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek will be Jiang Jieshi, Peking will be Beijing, and Fukien appears as Fujian—but Li Tsung-jen remains in the traditional form.
8
“Acceptable Norms of Human Conduct Do Not Apply”
AS ONE OF the CIA’s Princeton Group of consultants, Richard Bissell spent his final months before actually joining the agency circulating his latest policy prescription among key players. The true weakness in America’s defenses, he argued, lay not in any inability to face Soviet invasion of Western Europe but in the Third World, where Bissell feared revolutions would ultimately be exploited by Moscow. The CIA’s activities in Indochina and the Philippines had aimed directly at this threat. But to Bissell’s surprise—indeed to that of the CIA itself—the first real crisis of the Eisenhower era erupted in the middle of Europe, Germany specifically, and nowhere else.
One catalyst of events was Stalin’s death in March 1953. While Radio Free Europe, then Radio Liberty, busied itself with saturation broadcasts and the Psychological Strategy Board hurriedly cobbled together an overall response, Russian spy chief Lavrenti Beria briefly held power in Moscow, loosening the reins of Soviet control in Eastern Europe. In East Germany, recently clobbered with production quotas that further increased hopelessness, the liberalization betokened a new right of protest. In mid-June construction workers in East Berlin began work slowdowns that blossomed into demonstrations. Protests reached peak intensity, and workers made plans for a public march on June 17. The news spread throughout East Germany by word of mouth, but also courtesy of Radio in the American Sector (RIAS). Although not an appendage of Wisner’s Wurlitzer, RIAS did the same work for the U.S. high commissioner in Germany, with eight Americans and 650 Germans on its Berlin staff. East Germans made the demonstration a spectacle never before seen behind the Iron Curtain. Documents in Russian and former East German archives released after the Cold War show that East German authorities and Soviet occupiers lost their nerve. Two entire armored divisions entered East Berlin. Strikes and labor protests continued for the next two days.
The CIA had recently issued a National Intelligence Estimate specifically to predict the impact of the Beria “peace offensive” on Germany. But looking at Berlin, the analysts concentrated on the possibility of something like the Berlin Blockade, that is, Soviet harassment against the West. No one expected internal unrest. At the CIA’s Berlin Base, led by William K. Harvey, surprised intelligence officers scrambled for any information they could get, and obtained much of it from RIAS broadcasts, as did many in both East and West Berlin. The CIA had lost track of Soviet forces in East Germany, with frantic confusion the result.
Only Harvey’s deputy, Henry Heckscher, himself German-born, understood the demonstrations’ threat to Communist power in the East. Heckscher argued that the CIA should give the strikers weapons from the agency’s stockpile in West Berlin. David Murphy, a subordinate at the Berlin base, denies that the field submitted any request to approve CIA intervention, citing the recollections of Tom Polgar and Gordon Stewart, both senior officers in the overall German program. Murphy notes that General Truscott, to whom Polgar was a deputy, would have fired anyone who suggested such a thing. Other Berlin base officers recall that Bill Harvey, not Heckscher, sent a cable recommending a U.S. show of force, not arms to the East Berliners. Alerting American troops in Germany might have put the Russians on warning.
The cable reached CIA headquarters after Allen Dulles had left for the day. Division chief John Bross bucked it up the line to Wisner. A military alert, beyond the ken of the agency, would have to go through Eisenhower. In this fast-moving situation Washington had little possibility of acting in time. Wisner rejected Bill Harvey’s suggestion. A paper prepared at the Psychological Strategy Board on June 17 noted that John Foster Dulles’s State Department had a similarly cautious attitude.
On June 19 Allen Dulles briefed the NSC on the riots and similar protests in Czechoslovakia. Then C. D. Jackson speculated on exploiting events for propaganda purposes. President Eisenhower interjected that if the United States intervened to fan the flames of discontent, the heads that rolled would be those of America’s friends.
Jackson argued that the riots might be the bell pealing disintegration of the Soviet empire, but the president’s view prevailed. Ike saw supplying arms as inviting the slaughter of the protesters. The United States could not risk major war with the Russians, one that might well go nuclear. Washington’s only official action was to offer food aid.
Soviet secret reports found in the archives decades afterward estimated the number of rioters in East Berlin on June 17 at 66,000, about 10,000 of them actually from West Berlin. Over the following weeks about 10,000 East Germans fled to the West. Almost 3,000 people were arrested and a hundred were killed or wounded in street clashes.
During the summer and fall the Psychological Strategy Board prepared a plan to take advantage of unrest in Eastern Europe. Eisenhower approved an NSC policy paper with both short-term and long-range measures toward this end. Among the long-term actions, CIA had primary responsibility for a program to implement the Volunteer Freedom Corps initiative, training and equipping underground organizations capable of launching large-scale raids or sustained warfare when directed to do so.
The president also ordered an overall strategic review, dubbed the “Solarium” study for the White House indoor garden where the panelists met and presented the final report. Three task forces assembled, each to argue for a particular line of action. The “rollback” approach was subsumed in Solarium’s “Alternative C,” designed “to increase efforts to disturb and weaken the Soviet bloc,” attacking the “Communist apparatus” worldwide and missing no opportunities “to confuse and unbalance our enemy.”
The Task Force C program foresaw preparations for atomic warfare, expediting development in the Volunteer Freedom Corps, and the employment of Chinese Nationalist troops, first against Hainan Island, then the mainland. Planners estimated costs at about $60 billion for the first two years, declining to $45 billion subsequently, with perhaps another $5 billion needed if the program led to new hostilities in Korea.
George Kennan, chief of the Task Force A panel, argued eloquently for the alternative of “containment” as offering lower costs and less risk of war with Russia.
Eisenhower took Kennan’s point. The president jumped up and said he wished to summarize. Rollback, Ike said, would strain American alliances and represented “a departure from our traditional concepts of war and peace.” He chose to restrict military spending and avoid greater risk of atomic war. Option B—continuing previous policies—did not interest the president.
Few have noticed that Ike did not select a pure strategy. Containment, Kennan’s option A, he mixed with elements of the Task Force C program, in particular covert action. That this was the decision is clear from the record of the NSC meeting on July 30, 1953, where participants discussing the Solarium results explicitly raised the possibilities for action in Guatemala, Iran, and Albania.
Allen Dulles noted that he had already sent a CIA paper on Albania to the Psychological Strategy Board. Dulles also asked the National Security Council to make new policy decisions, presumably for U.S. action in Guatemala. Only in the case of Albania did President Eisenhower inject a cautionary note, “because of the question of who gets it and who gets hurt.” Both the Guatemala and Iran covert actions were carried out, as already recounted.
Dwight Eisenhower, a general with broad military experience, seemed better equipped than Harry Truman to judge the feasibility of covert action. As president he accepted the Cold War rationale, encouraging covert operations as an integral part of the conflict, even as he managed intelligence better than many presidents before him and since. The record shows President Eisenhower intimately involved in the secret war. The story of how Ike managed to do this while preserving his claim to know nothing demonstrates masterful command of ponderous organizations as well as a tightly drawn doctrine of “plausible deniability.” Ike’s key lay in the use of his staff, a habit he no doubt acquired in the military.
At the strategic nuclear level, Eisenhower did much to resist a stampeding arms race, though his achievement has been tarnished in recent years by revelation of his delegations of authority to use nuclear weapons. But as the man who institutionalized covert operations, Ike does not emerge as the moderate, even liberal, Republican seen in historical reappraisals. It is apparent—and now largely accepted by historians—that Eisenhower relied upon covert operations instead of, and in preference to, conventional military force. He institutionalized covert operations precisely by creating mechanisms to manage them. The president did this even while the Indochina and Guatemala ventures were in progress, and he sustained the effort to control global clandestine operations.
President Eisenhower began his quest for a new system for covert action during the heady days of 1954 when Ajax shone as the CIA’s crowning achievement. Ike wanted to replace Truman’s top-secret NSC order which prescribed the procedure for approval. Truman’s 10/5 panel, the Psychological Strategy Board, had endorsed covert operations informally, but the Truman directive merely gave the group authority to regulate the Office of Policy Coordination. Eisenhower abolished the PSB in the summer of 1953, making the Truman directive obsolete. With the OPC merged into the CIA’s Directorate for Operations, the Iran and Guatemala covert operations were approved in ad hoc fashion. Eisenhower’s new order, signed on March 15, 1954, and numbered NSC-5412, brought the system into sync with the new structure. In his directive, Ike for the first time gave formal powers to his management mechanism for secret wars.
Yet within three short months the CIA, without orders, sank a ship off San Jose, Guatemala, a vessel moreover, belonging to an American ally.
To enhance morale, President Eisenhower openly expressed satisfaction to the CIA’s Guatemala secret warriors, but privately he determined to get an independent review. Staff members approached retired air force Gen. James H. Doolittle, who agreed to lead a study group. Ike’s final instructions in a letter on July 26, 1954, three days before his White House reception for the Project Success team, asked for a comprehensive review of the factors of personnel, security, cost, and efficiency of covert operations, along with an assessment of how to “equate the costs of the overall efforts to the results achieved.” The panel would report to Eisenhower personally on how “to improve the conduct of these operations.”
Jimmy Doolittle was a good choice. Dynamic leader of the airmen who had bombed Japan in 1942, immortalized in the book and movie 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, Doolittle had experienced wartime special operations and understood them. Doolittle knew Ike from Britain in 1944 when he had been a subordinate air commander. He met with Eisenhower in early July 1954, then sat down with William B. Franke, Morris Hadley, and William B. Pawley to perform the review.
Doolittle’s committee held its first meeting at CIA headquarters on July 14. It received extensive briefings from the agency, State, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the armed services, the FBI, and the Bureau of the Budget. By July 29 Doolittle had assembled a staff and had his review in full swing. After seeing both Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner, Doolittle and consultant J. Patrick Coyne inspected CIA installations in Western Europe in mid-September. On September 30 the “Report of the Special Study Group on Covert Activities” went to the president.
The Doolittle Report gave solid support to the rationale for the secret war. Its second paragraph stated quite baldly:
As long as it remains national policy, another important requirement is an aggressive covert psychological, political and paramilitary organization more effective, more unique and, if necessary, more ruthless than that employed by the enemy. No one should be permitted to stand in the way of the prompt, efficient and secure accomplishment of this mission.
So serious was the conflict with communism that “there are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply.” The secret warriors could have asked for no better.
But Doolittle’s report also criticized performance in several areas. It concluded that the agency’s staff of five thousand could be reduced 10 percent without impact. (Only in 1959–1960 did CIA budgets provide for reductions—of about 1 percent.) The “fusion” of the old OPC and OSO Doolittle termed a “shotgun marriage.” The report warned that the “Cold War functions” of the Directorate for Operations overshadowed its espionage role, and the committee recommended the DO be reorganized into a viable “Cold War shop.” Dulles should be given more support on covert action, with staff provided by the National Security Council for better implementation of NSC-5412.
These recommendations were controversial. Eisenhower asked Doolittle to discuss them with Allen Dulles personally. Doolittle did so, then saw Ike on October 19 and told him the study was a constructive critique. He thought Dulles’s basic problem was organizational—the CIA had grown “like topsy,” but neither its director nor Frank Wisner were especially good organizers.
Doolittle remarked that Allen Dulles had taken personal criticism pretty well but fought for his staff people “to the point of becoming emotional.” Doolittle cited their mutual comrade, Walter Bedell Smith, who had once said that Allen was “too emotional to be in this critical spot” and that “his emotionalism was far worse than it appeared on the surface.”
Eisenhower replied, “We must remember that here is one of the most peculiar types of operation any government can have, and it probably takes a strange kind of genius to run it.”
The president also defended his CIA director: he had not seen Allen Dulles “show the slightest disturbance.” Furthermore Allen had important contacts throughout the world.
Doolittle tried one more tack, referring to the relationship between the DCI and the secretary of state. Having brothers in these two posts created problems that “it would be better not to have exist.”
Eisenhower resisted strenuously. He had appointed Allen Dulles in full knowledge of the relationship, Ike said. It did not disturb him because CIA’s work was partly an extension of State’s job, and because a confidential relationship between the two brothers “is a good thing.” “I’m not going to be able to change Allen,” observed the president. “I have two alternatives, either to get rid of him and appoint someone who will assert more authority or keep him with his limitations. I’d rather have Allen as my chief intelligence officer with his limitations than anyone else I know.”
What the president did instead was work hard to implement his system. First he tried to do this through the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), a subgroup under the NSC supposed to focus on implementation, the successor to the Psychological Strategy Board. The presidential directive gave the OCB authority over covert operations. But OCB was not senior enough to be making decisions on projects, and it included more officials than ought to be concerned with secret war. So on March 12, 1955, in a revised NSC-5412/1, Eisenhower created a new Planning Coordination Group to be advised in advance of all major covert operations. It would be “the normal channel for giving policy approval for such programs as well as for securing coordination of support therefor.”
