From this watershed meeting, three epochal events ensued: the United States assumed leadership of the West; any hope of avoiding the Cold War was lost; and the initial steamrolling impact of the domino theory—the view that if one nation falls to communism, all those nearby will follow suit—commenced.3
A month later, on March 7, President Harry Truman stood before Congress to request 400 million dollars in aid for Greece and Turkey. The request was overwhelmingly approved, for Truman couched it not in humanitarian terms, but in the terms he had received it: without it, the free world would end. With this, the Truman Doctrine was born and the Cold War became irreversible.
On June 5, after Truman’s request was expedited, Secretary Marshall made a complementary speech at Harvard outlining the administration’s intent to extend massive economic aid to the rest of Europe.4 The expressed reason was to rebuild the shattered continent, to ensure its survival against a Moscow-led communist victory. The real reason was to reconstruct Europe’s ability to buy American exports, so as to avoid either a depression or socialist advances.5 The overall request was for 17 billion dollars. A special session of Congress was called, and funding for the Marshall Plan was approved, despite considerable opposition.6
If the resulting economic isolation did not cause Josef Stalin and the USSR sufficient worry, the forthcoming Brussels Pact, signed by England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, certainly did. It was a military pact formed in the name of thwarting communist aggression. It led to the formation of NATO, which added other nations, particularly the United States.
But the crucial year for us is 1947. In the context of the onrushing Cold War, one telling piece of legislation completed the construction of a national security state: the aptly named National Security Act. Signed on July 26, 1947, this law established the National Security Council to oversee all U.S. intelligence operations, created the Central Intelligence Agency, and gave the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) the leadership of that agency.7
The odd thing was that the least discussed part of the act was potentially the most important: the intelligence functions of the CIA. It was not until the end of the congressional debate that they were even addressed. Congress had been preoccupied with the question of the jurisdiction of the CIA, specifically that it have no domestic purview. The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, emphatically concurred.8
Once these matters were decided and CIA responsibilities were ostensibly restricted to a foreign domain,9 the Agency was delegated five functions: to correlate, evaluate, and distribute intelligence; to advise the President’s National Security Council on national security matters; to recommend ways to coordinate various intelligence departments; to perform “additional services of common concern” for the government-wide intelligence community; and to perform “such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct”10 (emphasis added).
The last clause was the key to Pandora’s Box. Indeed, “other functions” became the linchpin for future covert and paramilitary operations, although the legislative history of the law shows that the phrase was not intended to justify those types of acts. It was meant to cover unforeseen circumstances. Congress never considered secret warfare or international coercion.11
As with every other aspect of the anticommunist national security state, this bill passed with alacrity. And six weeks after Truman signed it, the CIA was founded. The first DCI was Navy Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoeter.
At first, the Agency had neither the skill nor the experience to extend its reach to overseas coercion.12 But it learned quickly from its British cousins, first the SOE and then the SIS.13 After setting up Radio Free Europe in 1950 and Radio Liberty in 1951, it went into partnership with the SIS in the Baltic republics of Lithuania and Estonia, but, due to Soviet counterintelligence and Agency incompetence, these first forays into covert operations failed. But two things happened that expanded the range and success of the fledgling agency: First, there was the Mao Zedong’s (Tse-tung’s) communist victory in China in 1949.14 Second, there was the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. With these two events, the Cold War went to another level, and the power, range, and skill of the CIA were greatly expanded. Bases were opened everywhere, especially in the Far East. Old intelligence officers from World War II were re-recruited. Expenditures were multiplied. Dummy fronts to conceal CIA operations were opened. Resupply operations were enhanced. By 1953 the Agency had over 10,000 employees.15
Dulles, McCloy, and Reinhard Gehlen
But there is more to the story of the birth of the CIA. Out of the ashes of World War II emerges an episode so dark in tone, so epic in scope, so powerful in its connotations that it was a state secret not exposed to any significant extent until the 1970s. And it sheds much light on the genesis and excesses of the Cold War and the national security state.
As World War II drew to a close, many high-ranking Nazis, recognizing that defeat was coming, began to plan their own escapes. One was Reinhard Gehlen. He did not cut an imposing figure when he turned himself in to the victorious U.S. troops in May of 1945; and, over his protestations, he was immediately shunted off to a prison camp.16
Gehlen had been a commander in Hitler’s Foreign Armies East, responsible for German military intelligence throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In addition to intelligence work, he had created a network of fascist paramilitary groups to fight the vaunted communist threat in Eastern Europe. And by 1945 he was a potentially major player in any anti-Soviet agenda.
Gehlen had surrendered, calculating that the best way to save himself was to offer his formidable intelligence organization to U.S. intelligence as a bargaining chip. He was sure that when the right people realized who he was, the fear in the Allied camp of the communist threat would induce the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America’s wartime precursor of the CIA, to consider his offer seriously.
Allen Dulles did not disappoint Reinhard Gehlen. Dulles was chief of the Berlin OSS office, under General William Donovan. He had been dreaming of incorporating Gehlen’s operation since 1944.17 Plans for a post-war, allied, anticommunist intelligence organization had been in the works since then. Donovan and Dulles had been against the official policy of prosecuting all Nazi war criminals and had said so to Roosevelt.18 Indeed, Dulles kept the details of his plans secret from Roosevelt and then Truman. Both Donovan and Dulles, it seemed, saw Gehlen’s organization as a prime asset in their scenario for a postwar CIA.
By late summer of 1945, Dulles had finished his negotiations with Gehlen. In September of 1945, Gehlen and six of his aides were flown to Washington by Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith (another future DCI), for high-level meetings. The Gehlen Organization was transferred, and on Gehlen’s terms.19 It remained intact and under his control, “justified” under the rubric of mutual defense against the communist menace.
The United States agreed to finance and support the new network until such time as a new German state would take it over. In 1949, Gehlen signed a contract worth five million dollars a year to work for the CIA.20 And in 1950, High Commissioner of Germany, John McCloy, appointed Gehlen as adviser to the German chancellor on intelligence.21 Ultimately Gehlen would become the chief of intelligence of the Federal Republic of Germany. It was an incredible deal. Gehlen got everything he could have asked for. (In addition, this extraordinary agreement was what allowed men like Klaus Barbie and Josef Mengele, to escape to South America.22) From the ruins of defeat, the virtual head of Hitler’s intelligence became the chief of one of the largest intelligence agencies in the postwar era. A man who should have been imprisoned and prosecuted for war crimes23 became a wealthy and respected official of the new Germany.
By consummating the Gehlen deal, Allen Dulles accomplished two things. First, he signaled that the hallmark of the coming national security state would be anticommunism. Morality, honesty, common sense, these would al
l be sacrificed at the altar of this new god. Second, he guaranteed that the future successor to the OSS, the Central Intelligence Agency, would be compromised in a strange way: it would be viewing the new red threat not through American, but through German—indeed Nazi—eyes, an incredible distortion, since in essence Gehlen was selling Hitler’s view of the Soviet Union and communism. Not coincidentally, this was a view that dovetailed with Dulles’s. Morality fell by the wayside; in Dulles’s words about Gehlen, “He’s on our side and that’s all that matters.”24 Finally, we see that Dulles had no compunctions about overriding orders from above when he felt that his vision of national security was at stake.
This was the line that Dulles sold Truman at the birth of the Agency, the same line Dulles implemented as Eisenhower’s Director of Central Intelligence. It is one of the more glaring ironies in recent history that future CIA Director Allen Dulles was appointed to the panel that investigated the circumstances of President Kennedy’s murder. If there were a plot that involved and exposed any part of the national security apparatus, Dulles would doubtless hide the trail in order to cover up a crime of this superstructure, which he himself had helped construct. This is an important part of our story since, as we shall see, Dulles was the single most active member of the Warren Commission.
The Dulles Brothers and the Cold War
In 1953 General Dwight D. Eisenhower took over the White House. Although his public image was that of an avuncular, charming old man—a university president and citizen-soldier—he was in reality a hard-nosed Cold Warrior, adept on the international stage of power plays and intimidation. Eisenhower had developed a healthy respect for espionage and secret operations through his experience in World War II with the SIS, the French Resistance, and the OSS. He firmly advocated and implemented the full use of this type of agency in a wide variety of roles. In 1952, the Democratic Party’s response to the communist threat, commonly named “containment,” was inadequate, according to the Republican Party. In the presidential campaign, the GOP ridiculed the idea of keeping the Soviet empire confined, of merely parrying future expansion and waiting for the communist world to collapse. Its spokesmen advocated something more radical and dangerous. Sometimes it was termed “liberation.” Sometimes it was called “rollback.” Either way, it meant that the U.S. should go beyond resisting future Soviet advances. It should actively begin to free those people it considered already enslaved by communist doctrine and power.
While Eisenhower never clearly embraced this policy, he came close.25 He had no problem with its endorsement by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles or Vice President Richard M. Nixon. But secretly, Eisenhower agreed with containment. After all, he had been in conference with Truman and Marshall right at its creation in 1947 during the Greek-Turkish crisis. And during the Hungarian crisis of 1956, when Ike was urged by advisers like Nixon and Dulles to intervene directly against Soviet tanks and liberate Hungary, he chose not to.
Although he stopped short of rolling back the communists, Eisenhower was a dedicated practitioner of an active containment policy, at any price, in any place, or at the slightest provocation. His tool was the CIA. And the frequency and the alacrity of its use were greatly aided by the fact that his Secretary of State’s brother, Allen Dulles, became CIA Director in 1953. Although Eisenhower came to his Cold War stewardship through mostly ideological eyes, with the Dulles brothers, the Cold War was more complex, sophisticated, and monetary. Prior to becoming part of the American foreign policy establishment, both brothers had worked at the giant New York corporate law firm Sullivan and Cromwell. John rose to managing partner and Allen became a senior partner. Here they served huge overseas clients like United Fruit and DuPont. In 1932, Allen saved a rich oil and mineral field for the wealthy Mellon family of Pittsburgh when he rigged the Colombian presidential elections by bribing one of the candidates.26 With his prior experience in the State Department, where he had worked before going to Sullivan and Cromwell, Allen became quite proficient at the art of secret operations. When he became part of the OSS in World War II, he honed these skills even further. With these years of experience, when he became CIA Director, he was ready and willing to make huge changes in the philosophy and actions of the Agency. As some have written, it would not be improper to state that Allen Dulles revolutionized the CIA. The two previous Directors, Roscoe Hillenkoeter and Walter Bedell Smith, were military men. They generally believed that intelligence should be used to supplement military action. But Dulles’s broad background in the State Department, the OSS, and at Sullivan and Cromwell gave him a much wider and more daring vision of what the CIA could be and do.
But we should add one other ingredient to what Dulles brought to his vision of the Agency. In his service to the upper classes at Sullivan and Cromwell, Dulles and his brother both worshipped at the altar of ruthless corporate Realpolitik. In other words, for these two men, the Cold War was more than about just ideology and the domino theory. It was about American versus Russian dominance in the resource rich Third World. With Allen Dulles, the acronym CIA came to stand for Corporate Interests of America. No method was discarded in his pursuit of their ends. Indeed, during his administration, the CIA perfected the art of the covert, paramilitary operation. As one study stated, “Probably at no time since World War II has violence—especially on a militarized level—in the execution of covert American foreign policy been so widespread as during the Eisenhower administration. Especially was this so with respect to U.S. relations with Third World countries.”27 In 1953, at the service of British and American petroleum interests, Eisenhower authorized Operation AJAX to undermine the nationalist government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran. The Dulles brothers cooperated on a plan for his removal with the British. The Shah, previously a constitutional monarch, fled the country at the time. With Mossadegh’s overthrow, he now returned as a brutal dictator, and decades of Arab resentment in the Middle East ensued. In 1954, at the request of United Fruit Company, Allen Dulles’s Operation SUCCESS caused the overthrow of the progressive Jacobo Arbenz government in Guatemala; again, decades of brutal, military-backed governments followed. It was during this Central American intervention that Allen Dulles gave an opportunity to men like Howard Hunt and David Phillips to cut their teeth in the art of government overthrows. In 1957, an attempt to overthrow Sukarno in Indonesia nearly destroyed his neutralist state and pushed him into forming an alliance for nonaligned countries–that is, those nations who wished not to be tied to either the Russians or the United States in terms of the Cold War. In Vietnam, the Dulles brothers helped construct and maintain the government of Ngo Dinh Diem in the south. They backed Diem’s refusal in 1955 to agree to elections mandated by the Geneva Accords, the pact that ended the first Indochina War in 1954.28 In 1960, Allen Dulles warned against an imminent communist takeover of the Congo and authorized a 100,000 dollars fund to replace the country’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, with a “pro-Western” group. This triggered a chain of events ending in Lumumba’s assassination.29
All of these actions were aimed at controlling these Third World governments so that they would not be able to exercise their own free will in using their own resources for their own public good. This made it easier for American businesses to profit from exploiting friendlier leaders, some of them brutal dictators but backed by the USA nevertheless.
American Imperialism in Cuba 1925–1957
Finally, there was Cuba. Ever since the controversial, and increasingly despotic, rule of President Gerardo Machado in the twenties and thirties, there had been two poles of political power on the island. The first was decidedly leftist, as far left as communism. And this movement appeared to have certain ties to the Soviet Union. The second pole of power was a common one in Latin America after the Spanish were defeated and departed the continent: the upper classes, which allied themselves with the military. Going back as far as Machado’s regime of 1925–33, a major figure in that alliance was then Sergeant Fulgencio Batista. An
d it is important to note here that as early as 1925, “officers from virtually every branch of the Cuban armed forces … had attended various military academies in the United States.”30 The combination of worker unrest, with withdrawal of American support, led to a military coup that ousted Machado; a coup in which Batista was an important figure. The problem was that the State Department did not really like Machado’s successor, Ramon Grau San Martin.31 Grau tried to enact certain programs benefiting the working class, like an eight-hour day and a minimum daily wage for sugar cane cutters. But, understanding what had happened to Machado, he also tried to maintain ties to the military. This turned out to be a difficult balancing act. Grau was overthrown in a military coup in 1934. This coup featured the newly self-promoted Colonel Batista.32
The second military coup in two years shifted the political spectrum in Cuba decidedly to the right. This movement was accented by the “massacres that accompanied the repression of political strikes involving thousands of workers” in 1934 and 1935, and helped wreck “the organs of mass democratic control, devastated workers’ movement, and consolidated military rule in Cuba.”33 For the next twenty-five years, Batista took a powerful role in the Cuban state. He himself served two terms as president: from 1940 to ’44 and from 1952 to ’59. His two terms bookended a second term for Ramon Grau San Martin and a four-year term for Carlos Prio Socarras. But even though those two men were more moderate than Batista, they could only maneuver within the boundaries that Batista himself had already set with the remaining remnants of the left.34
Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, & the Garrison Case Page 2
