excerpts from the book
Safe For Democracy
The Secret Wars of the CIA
by John Prados
Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 2006, paperback
pxiii
Public opinion polls in many countries today portray the United
States as the greatest threat to world peace on the globe, worse
than terrorism or any other nation. This is an unfamiliar role
for a country that has consciously articulated - and advanced
- over many decades the notion that democratic values are the
solution for many of the world's ills. How strange it is that
Americans, fond of the vision of the nation's exceptionalism ...
should find themselves an object of the world's fears.
pxiv
In the sixty years since the formation of the Central Intelligence
Agency [CIA], presidents have continually harnessed the agency
in service of their foreign policy goals. Three decades ago the
"problem" of the CIA appeared to be the agency's status
as a "rogue elephant"-unsupervised, tearing about the
globe, acting at whim. By now it is evident that the agency and
its cohorts were in fact responding to presidential orders.
... Perhaps the problem is more one of
the "rogue" president than it is about an tout-of-control
Central Intelligence Agency.
pxiv
The Joint Chiefs of Staff define a "covert operation"
as one planned or conducted so as to conceal the identity of the
sponsor or permit a denial of involvement. To that category the
U.S. military adds the "clandestine operation," defined
as one in which emphasis "is placed on concealment of the
operation rather than on concealment of the identity the sponsor."
pxv
American undercover actions have resulted in upheavals and untold
suffering in many nations while contributing little to Washington's
quest for democracy.
p3
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) did not quite kill Cheddi
Jagan but did its best to put him out of business. Jagan, the
prime minister of British Guiana, headed for independence as the
nation of Guyana, had raised hackles in Washington. The CIA had
orders to get rid of him.
p7
U.S. officials used the [1962] Georgetown [Guyana] riots as an
excuse to write off Cheddi Jagan. On February 19, with smoke still
rising from the ruins in Georgetown, [Secretary of State] Dean
Rusk sent a strong demarche to the British foreign secretary [Lord
Alec Home] 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."
p13
The agency [CIA} had longstanding ties to the American Federation
of Labor (AFL), had played a central role in the 1949 creation
of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU),
the Inter-American Regional Labor Organization (Organización
regional interAmericano de trajabadores or ORIT) in 1951, and
the AFL's American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD.
p18
The December elections [in Guyana] did not turn out as advertised.
Cheddi Jagan won 47 percent of the vote, more than either the
Americans or the British expected. Burnham trailed by almost thirteen
thousand votes in spite of overseas ballots overwhelmingly favoring
him. But because Jagan did not obtain an outright majority, a
coalition would have to follow. The British governor simply refused
Jagan the opportunity to put one together. A CIA officer elsewhere
in South America noted in his diary on December 18, "a new
victory for the station in British Guiana ... largely due to CIA
operations over the last five years to strengthen the anti-Jagan
trade unions."
The British turned to Forbes Burnham to
form the government. Bumham went on to rule like a dictator until
he died in office, as racist and imperious as many had feared.
Guyana's export industries of sugar, rice, and bauxite atrophied.
By 1984 the wheel had come full circle and Burnham publicly accused
Washington of trying to undermine his government by encouraging
striking bauxite workers-shades of the CIA in 1963. Guyana did
not have another free election until 1992. When it did, the nation
elected Cheddi Jagan... Ironically Cheddi Jagan would die in Washington,
at Walter Reed Army Hospital in 1997, while still in office. Arthur
Schlesinger said in retrospect, "We misunderstood the whole
struggle down there. He wasn't a Communist. The British thought
we were overreacting and indeed we were. The CIA decided that
this was some great menace, and they got the bit between their
teeth. But even if British Guiana had gone Communist, it's hard
to see how it would be a threat."
p29
Since 1947, American secret wars have been carried out on almost
every continent. These covert operations have involved tens of
thousands of dead and wounded, thousands of native fighters, significant
numbers of American clandestine agents, and even regular U.S.
military forces. U.S. involvement has run the gamut from advice
to arms, from support for invasions of independent nations to
secret bombing in clandestine military operations; to the subsidizing
of political parties, associations, or individuals; to the planting
of misinformation by clandestine means. The techniques for international
coercion are not new, nor were they first developed by the United
States. But American participation in World War II opened many
eyes in Washington to the potential of special operations and
provided a nucleus of personnel well versed in clandestine methods.
The Cold War became the catalyst that brought methods and men
together on missions that have been sometimes spectacular, often
unfortunate, and occasionally surprising.
p99
The Iran problem arose from oil, though it had a Cold War overlay,
specifically from British interest in Iranian oil. The CIA covert
action represented the end result of an Anglo-Iranian oil crisis
that had endured for two bitter years, drawing in the British
government, the Royal Navy, the SIS, and then the United States.
Great Britain had total control over the pumping, refining, and
shipping of oil in southern Iran through the Anglo-Iranian Oil
Company (AIOC). Under an agreement to expire in 1993, AIOC paid
Iran rents and taxes plus salaries for Iranian employees. The
money accounted for half of Iran's budget, but in fact AIOC paid
more taxes to the British government than to the nation whose
oil it pumped, and AIOC itself earned ten times what it paid Iran.
Sure of their position, the British offered only cosmetic changes
in a supplement to the agreement when it came up for renegotiation.
Tensions heightened when the United States signed its own agreement
with neighboring Saudi Arabia that recognized Saudi ownership
of the oil and the corporation.
... While the Truman administration remained
in office, official U.S. policy favored an amicable resolution
of the AIOC matter.
... Allen Dulles's era began when he took
an oath of office on February 23, 1953. Another SIS delegation,
this one headed by British intelligence chief Sir John Sinclair,
was in Washington at the time, its mission to plan a joint Iran
operation. Allen Dulles had headed the Near East Division during
his time at the State Department, and Sullivan & Cromwell
represented AIOC's parent firm in the United States. Although
he maintained a casual and noncommittal posture to the British,
Dulles favored the idea of a joint operation [Operation Ajax].
... the CIA station in Teheran had reported
inquiries from a senior Iranian general as to whether the United
States might support a coup d'etat against Prime Minister Mossadegh.
... On April 4 Allen Dulles approved a
$1 million fund that the Teheran station could use to weaken Mossadegh.
... Project Ajax envisioned a "quasi-legal
overthrow" in which the CIA would manipulate public opinion
into opposition and suborn members of the armed forces, the Majlis,
religious figures, and businessmen. To induce the shah to dismiss
Mossadegh, a series of emissaries would proceed to Teheran to
persuade him to issue the appropriate decree, called a firman.
At that point the agency would put crowds into the street to back
up the shah's action and further pressure any wavering members
of the Majlis.
... Compared to the protracted period
of planning approval, Ajax's execution took place quickly. It
was the struggle for control of the armed forces and police, together
amounting to some 250,000 Iranians, that triggered the actual
Iranian coup. In the spring of 1953 Mossadegh assumed the position
of defense minister in his own cabinet and moved to supplant the
shah as commander-in-chief. He appointed his own people to head
the police and as chief of staff of the army. Quite likely these
actions steeled the shah, who had failed to act decisively throughout
the AIOC crisis, in his determination to rid himself of Mossadegh.
In this case the Majlis refused Mossadegh's request for extended
powers, leading the premier to dissolve parliament on July 19.
A few days later major street demonstrations occurred in Teheran.
... Full-scale rioting broke out in Teheran
on August 18 and 19. Several hundred people died in the violence.
A friendly newspaper published the text of the shah's firman appointing
Zahedi. Late on the 18th a CIA headquarters dispatch actually
called off Ajax, and the SIS dispatched a similar instruction.
But the tide had already begun to turn. Roosevelt got the Rashidian
brothers and other agents to mobilize mobs in the streets while
Iranians and CIA officers contacted army units throughout Iran
to rally them to Zahedi. On the second day pro-shah tank units,
informed by reporter Kennett Love of weak guard forces at the
premier's house, attacked Mossadegh's residence. That morning
Chief of Staff Riahi reluctantly informed Mossadegh he no longer
controlled the army, and in fact pro-shah troops began to appear
all over Teheran. Throughout the afternoon the CIA-backed forces
consolidated their hold on the city. The shah returned from Italy
and paraded in triumph through the streets of Teheran.
So ended Project Ajax, the first apparent
U.S. covert victory.
... The big winners were the shah and
his henchmen, who gained absolute power, which they held for twenty-six
years until swept away by a religious conservatism even more potent
than the populism of Mossadegh. The United States, by participating
in the coup, broke with its own tradition-and its declaratory
policy-of unconditional support for democracy around the globe.
Through support of the shah, the United States also committed
itself irrevocably to his regime in a way that blinded Washington
later when it should have recognized rising opposition... The
losers were the Iranian people; Mohammad Mossadegh, who was eventually
captured and placed on trial.
p108
The government in Guatemala, of a social democratic bent, had
been elected Fin November 1950 with more than half the vote in
a free election. President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman thereafter acquired
even greater popularity. Peasants fully supported his ardent efforts
to reform Guatemala's agriculture and economy.
... United Fruit, the largest landowner
in Guatemala, owned some 550,000 acres plus a controlling share
of the country's only railroad. La frutera, as it was known, trembled
at the Guatemalan government's land redistribution program. Beginning
in February 1953 Arbenz expropriated almost 400,000 acres of land
to parcel out to peasants. The Guatemalans offered compensation
- twenty-five-year bonds at 3 percent guaranteed interest for
the exact book value of the assets la frutera claimed for tax
purposes. United Fruit rejected this settlement out of hand and
... went to its home government for relief.
The lawyer Thomas G. Corcoran had been
a lobbyist for Civil Air Transport and also for United Fruit.
Tommy "The Cork" acted as intermediary now, selling
Ia frutera's scheme to the CIA. He met with Undersecretary Walter
Bedell Smith that summer. Smith already knew of CIA's efforts
and had no difficulty hearing out the lobbyist. A key difference
would be that United Fruit, a principal purveyor of the charge
that Jacobo Arbenz Guzman constituted a Communist threat to the
Americas, and a participant in earlier plots, this time wanted
nothing to do with the action itself.
Allen Dulles became the executive agent
for Project PB/Success. He kept in close touch with the planning
through personal assistants. Jim Hunt was Dulles's man for field
operations, much as Tom Braden had been for international organizations.
By the fall, definite action impended. The plan for Success, embodied
in a September 11 paper, went right to Director Dulles. Based
on the premise that the Guatemalan army, a poorly trained, indifferently
equipped force of few, tin seven thousand troops, functioned as
arbiter of the country's politics. [Project] Success aimed to
inundate Guatemala with propaganda undermining loyalty to President
Arbenz. At the same time the CIA would provide its own alternative,
an ostensibly independent force under a former army officer, Col.
Carlos Castillo-Armas. A CIA air force would bomb as necessary
and drop leaflets while a CIA radio station purporting to be the
voice of the rebels would convey the impression the movement had
mass support. The concept envisioned the army defecting to Castillo-Armas
as his rebel force entered Guatemala. In effect, the DO paper
argued, "the task headed by the CIA calls for a general,
over-all plan of combined overt and covert action of major proportions."
... In the Cold War vision of a two-camp
world, there was little room for indigenous nationalisms. Not
only did the United States act readily against nations like Iran
and Guatemala, those ventures were initiated regardless of the
countries' efforts to maintain friendly relations with the United
States. The CIA operations made a mockery of the oft-reiterated
American principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs
of states.
The Central Intelligence Agency, unleashed
in the name of democracy - democracy as defined by American foreign
policy, which came to mean governments that assumed pro-American
stances-actually encouraged the opposite. No elections occurred
in Iran between the 1953 CIA operation and 1960; thereafter parliament
existed at the pleasure of the shah. In Guatemala after 1954 the
republic was abolished. A new constitution was adopted only in
1965, but that was soon suspended by military rulers. In fact
the excesses of the ruling oligarchy became such that the United
States itself, under the Carter administration, finally halted
virtually all foreign aid to the country. Over the long haul the
covert actions did not produce the results advertised.
In both Iran and Guatemala the United
States received credit from world public opinion for creating
dictatorships, not democracies.
p147
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.
p148
President Eisenhower began his quest for a new system for covert
action during the heady days of 1954 when [Project] Ajax [Iran]
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.
... Eisenhower's commitment to the Cold
War is clearly demonstrated in NSC5412/2. The directive provided
the secret warriors with the broadest possible charter, the breadth
of which is still worth quoting in its entirety:
3. The NSC has determined that such covert
operations shall to the greatest extent practicable, in the light
of U.S. and Soviet capabilities and taking into account the risk
of war, be designed to:
a. Create and exploit troublesome problems
for International Communism, impair relations between the USSR
and Communist China and between them and their satellites, complicate
control within the USSR, Communist China and their satellites,
and retard the growth of the military and economic potential of
the Soviet bloc.
b. Discredit the prestige and ideology
of International Communism, and reduce the strength of its parties
and other elements.
c. Counter any threat of a party or individuals
directly or indirectly responsive to Communist control to achieve
dominant power in a free world country.
d. Reduce International Communist control
over any areas of the world.
e. Strengthen the orientation toward the
United States of the peoples and nations of the free world, accentuate,
wherever possible, the identity of interest between such peoples
and nations and the United States as well as favoring, where appropriate,
those groups genuinely advocating or believing in the advancement
of such mutual interests, and increase the capacity and will of
such peoples and nations to resist International Communism.
f. In accordance with established policies
and to the extent practicable in areas dominated or threatened
by International Communism, develop underground resistance and
facilitate covert and guerrilla operations and ensure availability
of those forces in the event of war, including wherever practicable
provision of a base upon which the military may expand these forces
in time of war within active theaters of operations as well as
provide for stay behind assets and escape and evasion facilities.
p152
The secret warriors [CIA] marched on, led by their president {Eisenhower],
insulated from outside the country, ordered to stir up trouble
for the enemy - a Cold War agency with a mission.
... Eisenhower worried about controlling
the secret warriors but pursued his Cold War with gusto. The very
rush of events made it difficult to go back over old ground. The
5412 Group provided semi-annual presentations of the covert program,
but it remained impossible to exercise constant control. Initiative
became crucial to protecting the president's interests. Like many
bureaucracies, however, 5412 reacted to recommendations rather
than exerted positive leadership. The real initiative lay in the
hands of the Central Intelligence Agency, which, in fulfillment
of the 5412/2 objectives, launched more covert ventures around
the world.
p539
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick (Ronald Reagan's U.N. ambassador) [in an]
article in the magazine Commentary in November 1979. In "Dictatorships
and Double Standards", [Jeanne] Kirkpatrick argued that there
was a difference between dictators of the left and the right...
According to Kirkpatrick's reading of history, right-wing dictators
are more respecting of human rights, do not create refugees, merely
tolerate (rather than cause) social inequities, are more amenable
to liberalization, and, of course, are more friendly to the United
States.
p620
The CIA answered to the president. Throughout the Cold War it
had been the president's tool for international manipulation.
This could only continue, due to the fact that Congress, by failing
to pass an intelligence charter during the 1970s, had left existing
ambiguities untouched. At no time since has there been sufficient
unity of view, or a veto-proof majority of any political party,
capable of imposing regimentation on the system.
Nor did every, or even most, legislators
want control of intelligence. Many recognized that Congress had
too many chiefs and lacked ability to sustain attention; it had
not the necessary knowledge of programs, missions, and players.
Its members might trip over important values. Many saw Congress
as a partner with the executive in managing intelligence, with
oversight the tool. None of this mattered. Presidents viewed every
success of the overseers as diluting their authority. Tensions
inherent to the system could be viewed as constitutional checks
and balances except that the playing field, never level, awarded
all advantage to the executive.
p628
America's most valuable resource is the image and texture of its
democracy, its example to the world. The worst aspect of covert
political action is that the tool is a clear contradiction of
democratic values. Manipulation of peoples anywhere runs directly
counter to these professed values.
p637
The Central Intelligence Agency exists to serve the president.
There would be no paramilitary actions except for presidential
desires.
p638
Covert action has never been under complete presidential control,
even as presidents have total authority to order it. The continuing
problem with this authority is that its legal basis rests entirely
upon the "such other functions" clause of the 1947 National
Security Act. But the legislative history of the act shows that
Congress never intended to sanction covert action with that language,
and there are several occasions when the CIA's general counsel
concluded that paramilitary action was not within its scope. If
presidents instead rely on their authority as commander-in-chief
of the armed forces, the problem is that the CIA is not an "armed
force." If it were, the president would then have to comply
with the 1973 War Powers Act for a covert operation. Moreover,
if the CIA is to be considered an unofficial armed force, the
Constitution (Article I, Section 8) expressly reserves to Congress,
not the president, the right to give letters of marque, the eighteenth-century
equivalent of grants of combatant status-in other words, presidential
findings. Legislation that regulates findings cannot supersede
the Constitution.
This legal conundrum would be eliminated
if there were a detailed charter specifying missions and methods
for the intelligence agencies, but initiatives for charter reform
were defeated by the Carter administration in 1978 and 1980. Presidents
as politically diverse as Eisenhower and Carter have consistently
opposed this intelligence reform. The device of issuing executive
orders on intelligence is precisely aimed at avoiding charter
law. Nothing in the last two decades has altered this constitutional
issue. It is time to end the presidential free ride on covert
action.
p641
former CIA director John Deutch
It is one matter to adopt a foreign policy
that encourages democratic values; it is quite another to believe
it just or practical to achieve such results on the ground with
military forces .... But the notion of intervening in foreign
countries to build a society of our preference is not just a Republican
or conservative failing. The corresponding Democratic or liberal
failing is the view that America has a duty to intervene in foreign
countries that egregiously violate human rights and a responsibility
to oppose and, where possible, remove totalitarian heads of state.
p647
The system of congressional oversight of intelligence operations
persists on the surface. But both the president and the CIA continue
to resist full and frank reporting, the very reforms supposedly
initiated in the wake of Iran-Contra.
p648
Americans are doubtful of the propriety or effectiveness of intervention,
and, schooled by the tragedies of Vietnam and Iraq - are suspicious
of motive. Claims to act in support of democracy have cloaked
a host of dubious schemes, and covert action has been a major
avenue for the execution of such intrigues. A conflict remains
between ends and means, with covert action an especially sensitive
technique when employed in the quest for democracy.... What Americans
accepted yesterday they may not today, or tomorrow.
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