Safe for democracy, p.5
Safe for Democracy, page 5
President Kennedy’s National Security Council (NSC) assessed the Guyana situation a few weeks after the disastrous CIA failure in the April 1961 Bay of Pigs operation, a covert attempt to invade Cuba. They feared Guyana succumbing to the same dark forces as Fidel Castro. Significantly, the task of figuring out what to do about Guyana rested with the same officials responsible for U.S. policy on Cuba. Guyana began as a British rather than an American problem. Unable to sustain its empire following World War II, Great Britain responded to rising nationalism by granting increasing self-government and then independence to many of its colonies, Guyana among them. Europeans had arrived there about 1620, settling on the coast and leaving indigenous peoples in the interior. The Dutch West India Company held on to the territory until 1796 when it fell to the English during the Napoleonic wars. In 1814 Guyana was ceded to England by treaty. The Dutch, Portuguese, and English brought in African slaves, and in the 1830s the British also introduced indentured workers from India. By the 1950s the “East Indians,” as they were called, had become the dominant population at about 46 percent of the total, with Africans the next largest group at 36 percent. Cheddi Jagan came from East Indian stock.
Sugar and rice were Guyana’s main products. The country had a classic plantation economy, with large British corporations controlling most of the production, and plantation workers poorly paid and restive. Their energy fueled Guyanese politics. Born in 1918, the eldest of eleven children of a cane cutter, then a driver, from a village outside the capital, Georgetown, Cheddi Jagan saw the depredations of Big Sugar through his father’s eyes. Cheddi graduated from Northwestern University in the United States and became a dentist. He used his income to put other family members through college. Attracted even then to progressive causes, Cheddi met Janet Rosenberg at a political event in Chicago. In 1943 they married. Once a member of the Young Communist League, Janet Jagan had, if anything, stronger views than Cheddi’s. When the Jagans returned to Guyana they thought themselves destined to organize the workers. In 1947 Cheddi Jagan won election to a consultative council advising the British governor. Three years later he and Janet were founders of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), the first mass political party in the country and for a time the multiracial exponent of Guyanese nationalism.
Cheddi Jagan campaigned constantly for better working conditions and wage increases from the Sugar Producers Association, representing the corporations that controlled the plantations. The corporations’ efforts to keep Jagan off their plantations only increased his appeal to the workers.
Great Britain, committed to fostering self-government in Guyana, in 1953 permitted an election for an assembly and cabinet. British officials convinced themselves during this early period that Cheddi Jagan was a Communist. When he won, Jagan formed a government; Janet Jagan, also elected, became deputy speaker in the assembly. Cheddi argued that British measures were insufficient and pressed for full autonomy. After barely four months in office, the British dismissed Jagan’s cabinet and in 1954 imprisoned both Cheddi and Janet for half a year. That merely increased their popularity.
British hopes of dampening Guyanese sympathy for Cheddi Jagan hinged on creating alternative political movements. One materialized in 1955 when Forbes Burnham, another founder of the People’s Progressive Party and its former vice chairman, formed a new People’s National Congress (PNC). The PNC drew mostly African Guyanese support and ended the former PPP monopoly. In new elections in 1957, however, Jagan’s party won the most votes and returned him to the cabinet, though not as prime minister. Business interests formed another political party in 1960, the United Front (UF), but this stood primarily for minority Portuguese and had little chance for electoral success.
The next election occurred in August 1961. Washington wanted to employ the CIA to forestall a Jagan victory. By now the British were less convinced that Cheddi Jagan was a political extremist and acquiesced in his participation. In late May, U.S. officials met with the British to agree on a program of action, but London refused either a joint operation or unilateral American action. Kennedy’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, wrote to his British colleague Lord Hume, “We are not inclined to give people like Jagan the same benefit of doubt which was given two or three years ago to Castro.” The British foreign secretary replied that any action would only make things worse, that London had no grounds to resume direct rule as it had done in 1953, and that Jagan had not been so difficult since his return to government in 1957. In the 1961 election the PPP won eighteen of the twenty-four seats in the assembly; there was now no alternative to Cheddi Jagan’s becoming prime minister.
In writing about not giving the Guyanese leader any benefit of the doubt, Dean Rusk referred subtly to a CIA initiative. In August 1961, within days of the election, the State Department sent President Kennedy a proposal that involved two tracks: open cooperation with the Guyanese in hopes of inducing Prime Minister Jagan to align with the West, but a CIA covert political action against Jagan if he did not. Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles figured prominently in the group who hammered out this strategy. At this early stage, Arthur Schlesinger actually helped keep the CIA out of the act, objecting that the covert initiative could easily get in the way of the overt policy of assistance. President Kennedy sided with Schlesinger.
A second round of talks with the British took place in London in early September. Ambassador David Bruce led the American team, with CIA, technical assistance, and State Department officers to help. Among them sat William C. Burdett, Washington’s point man on Guyana policy. The CIA’s senior officer in London at the time, station chief Frank G. Wisner, the agency’s former director of operations, also participated. Bruce received instructions to minimize the importance of the covert track if necessary, telling the British the project was only a plan, that any specific move would be subject to high-level U.S. consideration—but to get British approval. Secretary Rusk told Bruce, “We should keep in mind [the] possibility Jagan is [a] Communist-controlled ‘sleeper’ who will move to establish Castro or Communist regime upon independence.” The British again rejected a secret operation.
Arthur Schlesinger saw Dean Rusk’s cable to Ambassador Bruce and objected—the term “sleeper” had very specific meaning in the spy business, he told one of Rusk’s top aides, and no one, Schlesinger noted, had suggested that Cheddi Jagan was a disciplined agent or pretending to be someone else.
Prime Minister Jagan, perfectly aware that American officials viewed him with suspicion, knew Guyana needed foreign aid. Jagan sought a meeting with Kennedy to plead his case directly. He traveled to Washington and saw JFK in the Oval Office on October 25, seeking to allay U.S. fears. Cheddi Jagan described himself as a socialist who believed in state planning but political freedom for all Guyanese. Then Jagan made his pitch for aid. Kennedy avoided talk of dollar numbers. The American record notes that Jagan “was evasive on all ideological and doctrinal issues.” In his biography of Kennedy, Schlesinger adds that Jagan made a serious faux pas, saying he admired the Marxist journal Monthly Review, and further raised JFK’s hackles with a television appearance in which he refused to criticize the Soviet Union, leaving “an impression of either wooliness or fellow-travelling.”
In the wake of Cheddi’s visit there would be no new help for his country. The policy of overt cooperation languished until January 1962, when President Kennedy ordered the State Department to send a survey mission to Guyana to prepare an expanded technical assistance effort, an extension of a program begun under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. But Kennedy took no action on another initiative, a road-building project that represented by far the largest element of contemplated U.S. aid.
A month later violent riots erupted in Georgetown. Starved of funds, Jagan’s government had proposed tax increases plus tight spending controls. Protests ensued. A general strike began on February 12, degenerating into vandalism and looting. Four days later, when police fired on rioters, killing two, all hell broke loose. The situation assumed a racial character as rioters aimed at stores owned by East Indians in the center of Georgetown, while the opposition parties and those trade unions that catered to the African population maneuvered to take advantage. Jagan could have mobilized East Indian laborers from the plantations to fight the brawlers but instead asked the British governor for security assistance. London deployed a battalion of troops, some flown from Jamaica, about half direct from the United Kingdom, reinforcing the company normally on duty in Guyana.
From the prime minister’s residence, Red House, a beautiful nineteenth-century structure in the colonial style, Jagan could see the devastation. Whole blocks of downtown Georgetown burned to the ground. Jagan later told a British diplomat, as relayed to the Americans, that he thought leaders of the United force and CIA officers had fomented the riots. Prime Minister Jagan asked for a United Nations inquiry but ultimately settled for an investigation by British Commonwealth officials.
Jagan’s charges that the CIA fomented the 1962 riots have been widely repeated but on balance should be rejected. Over the succeeding weeks assurances were given—by the CIA to President Kennedy, by the State Department to other officials, and by the United States to Great Britain—that the spooks had had nothing to do with this tragedy. It is suggestive that Edward Lansdale, a political action expert monitoring CIA operations simultaneously under way against Cuba, asked agency officers a few months later why they figured they could provoke a general strike in Cuba when the CIA itself admitted its inability to carry off labor actions elsewhere in Latin America. The CIA had some influence over Guyanese trade unions as a result of its early work in this area (about which more in a moment) and had given a little money to anti-Jagan unions, but the covert action project for Guyana had yet to be approved and there is no other indication of U.S. activity at this time.
What is true is that U.S. officials used the Georgetown riots as an excuse to write off Cheddi Jagan. On February 19, with smoke still rising from the ruins in Georgetown, Dean Rusk sent a strong demarche to the British foreign secretary declaring it “mandatory” that “we concert on remedial steps.” Rusk thundered, “I must tell you now that I have reached the conclusion that it is not possible for us to put up with an independent British Guiana under Jagan.” Rusk saw the Guyanese leader as espousing a “Marxist-Leninist policy” paralleling Castro’s. Ominously, Rusk ended, “It seems to me clear that new elections should now be scheduled, and I hope we can agree that Jagan should not be allowed to accede to power again.”
There remained dissenting voices within the Kennedy administration, however. One was Adlai E. Stevenson, Washington’s ambassador to the United Nations. When Stevenson learned of the Rusk letter to Lord Home he wrote the secretary—and sent a copy to JFK—that British stalling on Guyanese independence would simply strengthen Jagan. American involvement would be impossible to conceal over time, Stevenson argued, while disclosure would substantially damage the U.S. position in Latin America and its carefully nurtured reputation for anti-colonialism. What was more, “the damaging effect of such disclosure would be magnified if the U.S. involvement were of the character which might be inferred from the last sentence of your letter.” Stevenson ended by asking to be briefed on CIA plans for Guyana.
Lord Alec Hume was no more persuaded. The foreign secretary’s reply to Rusk declared that Great Britain would not go back upon its course of bringing the colonies to independence, and certainly could not gain from failing to pursue that course in the single case of Guyana. Hume met Rusk’s declaration head on: “You say that it is not possible for you ‘to put up with an independent British Guiana under Jagan’ and that ‘Jagan should not accede to power again.’ How would you suggest that this can be done in a democracy?”
Even within the CIA there were sometimes less hysterical voices. Participants at the CIA director’s morning staff meeting on February 26 listened as officials reported three Cuban merchant vessels en route to Guyana laden with weapons. Within a day CIA analysts were able to prove the report false. No evidence of Cuban arms shipments anywhere in Latin America would emerge for another year.
At the White House, Arthur Schlesinger warned JFK that both the CIA and the State Department had the notion that the president had made a firm decision to get rid of Jagan. On March 8, 1962, President Kennedy signed a directive, a National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM), explicitly stating that no final decision would be taken on Guyana policy until after a British survey mission, conversations with London, and answers to Kennedy’s specific questions. The NSAM was unusual in that the White House addressed it directly to CIA Director John McCone, Rusk, and so on, not as a single document circulated to the entire top level of the U.S. bureaucracy. It was also striking in that where NSAMs typically ordered action, this one mandated inaction. Also, many Kennedy-era NSAMs were signed in his name by national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, but the president signed this one himself.
A week later Secretary Rusk talked with the British in Geneva. In his report Rusk noted that London did not exclude action but was not willing to go down that road until overt possibilities were exhausted. “For [the] present,” Rusk admitted, “I do not believe covert action with or without [the] British is indicated.” Rusk ended by asking the department to use diplomatic channels to ask the CIA’s Frank Wisner to desist for the time being.
One thing President Kennedy demanded as a prerequisite for his decision had been an analysis of the possibilities and limitations of action. On March 15 the State Department completed an extensive policy paper. Its third option specified “a program designed to bring about the removal of Cheddi Jagan.” Analysis in the paper indicates the project clearly envisioned “covert U.S. political action” and that British acquiescence (at a minimum) would be necessary. State recognized negative factors, conceding Adlai Stevenson’s point that the United States must be prepared to pay heavily in world public opinion “if evidence were presented showing any U.S. covert activities.” Even without such evidence, Russia and Cuba could be expected to make the most of allusions to earlier CIA operations in Latin America to diminish U.S. “credibility as a supporter of the principle of nonintervention.”
The Guyana paper framed Anglo-American conversations in Washington, where the British survey mission reported its results. At the March 17 meeting, Deputy Undersecretary of State U. Alexis Johnson took pains to say the United States feared chaos and a Communist government, insisting on the need to work closely to avert catastrophe—code words to convince London to acquiesce in U.S. action if not rise to the occasion themselves. Reprising Dean Rusk’s cautions of a month earlier, Johnson indicated that Washington saw Cheddi Jagan in the same light as Fidel Castro, saying, “We do not intend to be taken in twice.” The British, on the other hand, reported that Guyana’s large sugar corporations were not worried and mentioned that two of the biggest had no wish to become involved politically. One, the Bookers Group, “probably considered Jagan to be the best leader of the lot.”
The State paper and the Washington talks became the basis for the deliberations of a shadowy unit called the Special Group, the highest U.S. government unit dealing with covert operations. When the Special Group met on March 20, Guyana was the third item on its agenda. The Group refined a CIA project proposal next sent to the British.
London’s resistance to covert action weakened over time. When President Kennedy and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan met in May 1962, the British agreed to special arrangements for consultations with Washington on Guyana. At informal secret talks the Americans presented their action program. Macmillan still rejected the most energetic measures but decided he could abide some CIA efforts to manipulate Guyanese politics. By June, Arthur Schlesinger had told President Kennedy that “an independent British Guiana under Burnham (if Burnham will commit himself to a multiracial policy) would cause us many fewer problems than an independent British Guiana under Jagan.”
Schlesinger intended his policy advice to guide Kennedy’s decision on the covert action that Washington spooks advocated. The Central Intelligence Agency carried out many kinds of activities. Ones that aimed to influence the domestic affairs of other states were known as “political action.” The Guyana project would be a political action. A variety of tactics might contribute to this kind of operation. The most obvious was to recruit—usually for pay—persons of influence in the target nation. Such opinion makers could include politicians, businessmen, labor leaders, and journalists—especially the latter two: labor leaders because they could put bodies in the street on demand, journalists because their stories in the print or broadcast media could sway people’s beliefs. Barrages of such press coverage could be targeted to shape opinion, and if intelligence operatives had good enough connections, they could concoct the stories themselves, taking CIA’s carefully crafted lines of argument and drumming them in by repetition. Judicious dollops of CIA money could help form or advance political parties and finance candidates at election time.
When subjects were aware of the role of American intelligence, they could be said to be “witting.” Unwitting persons were those deliberately kept in the dark about the CIA role in what they were being asked to do. American intelligence operatives could pretend to be of other nationalities—a “false-flag” approach. But even if they revealed their true colors they would usually not identify themselves as CIA officers—they would be under “cover.” The CIA command center in any country was called a “station,” located within the U.S. embassy and headed by a station chief. An important station, or one with far-flung activities, would direct “bases” in other places within the country. Stations were typically staffed by officers under “light” cover—people supposed to be diplomats, commercial officials, or military rather than spies. Even deeper cover, undercover, were officers who pretended to have no connection with the U.S. government whatsoever. These persons were under “nonofficial cover.” The Guyana operation would be conducted primarily by officers under nonofficial cover. The persons they recruited, agents or assets, evidently were mostly aware of the CIA origins of the plots they were carrying out. Agents were always left unwitting of CIA purposes, of course, but in a political action like Guyana, over time these became rather transparent.
