The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  Foster pushed Eisenhower to consider using the ultimate weapons during one crisis after the next, including the climactic stage of the Korean War in 1953, the final French stand in Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the battle of nerves with China over the islands of Quemoy and Matsu that same year, and the 1958 confrontation with the Soviets over Berlin. At various, hair-raising moments of these crises, Eisenhower seemed poised to take Foster’s advice, and was only dissuaded by the alarmed opposition of allied leaders or the cooler-headed responses of the Chinese and Soviet governments.

  John Foster Dulles was the exemplar of Mills’s “crackpot realism.” He was a “wise man” who, in sober and solemn tones, advocated positions that were the height of madness. “We are at a curious juncture in the history of human insanity,” Mills wrote in The Causes of World War III, his 1958 jeremiad against the growing fever for the final conflict. “In the name of realism, men are quite mad, and precisely what they call utopian is now the condition of human survival.”

  “Utopian action”—by which Mills meant active diplomacy among the superpowers, a ban on nuclear arms testing, a moratorium on the production of “extermination” weapons, scientific and cultural exchanges, and free travel between the West and East—was actually “realistic, sound, common sense,” he wrote. In contrast, “practical actions are now the actions of madmen and idiots. And yet these men decide; these men are honored, each in his closed-up nation, as the wise and responsible leaders of our time who are doing the best they can under trying circumstances.”

  Foster seemed to have a chillingly remote perspective on what it meant to drop a nuclear bomb. When the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu was on the verge of collapse, he offered to give two “A-bombs” to French foreign minister Georges Bidault. The French official was deeply shaken by Foster’s blithe offer. Bidault responded “without having to do much thinking on the subject.” He pointed out to Foster that “if those bombs are dropped near Dien Bien Phu, our side will suffer as much as the enemy.” Likewise, during the Formosa Strait crisis, Foster was surprised to learn that the “precision” nuclear bombing of Chinese targets that he was advocating would kill more than ten million civilians. Still, he was not chastened enough to stop his campaign to “punish” the Chinese.

  Mills noted that, like the Nazis before them, the national security leaders “rationally” planning for a nuclear holocaust were characterized by a “moral insensibility.” Official violence had become so bureaucratized that “in official man there is no more human shock.” Mills believed that humanity would continue to teeter on the brink of the eternal void until Eisenhower’s secretary of state, whom he accused of a “doctrinaire and murderous rigidity,” was replaced by a diplomat who was serious about the prospects for peaceful coexistence.

  The death in March 1953 of Joseph Stalin, the Moloch of Soviet brutality and despair, offered the Eisenhower administration the opportunity to redefine the U.S. relationship with Moscow, as the Kremlin’s new leaders began the process of de-Stalinization. But Foster continued to counsel a hard line against the Soviets, interpreting any signs of a Cold War thawing in Moscow as evidence that the tough U.S. line was working. The secretary of state even sternly cautioned Eisenhower not to smile at Soviet officials or shake hands with them at the July 1955 Geneva Summit. This proved difficult for Ike, observed Stewart Alsop, since “his whole instinct was to smile and be friendly. And then he’d kind of draw back, remembering what Foster had said.”

  Nikita Khrushchev, the canny and down-to-earth political survivor who was emerging from the Kremlin’s scrum as the top Soviet leader, closely observed the personal dynamics between Eisenhower and his secretary of state in Geneva and concluded that Foster was in charge. “I watched Dulles making notes with a pencil, tearing them out of a pad, folding them up, and sliding them under Eisenhower’s hand,” Khrushchev later wrote in his memoir. “Eisenhower would pick up these sheets of paper, unfold them, and read them before making a decision on any matter that came up. He followed this routine conscientiously, like a dutiful schoolboy taking his lead from his teacher. It was difficult to imagine how a chief of state could allow himself to lose face like that in front of delegates from other countries. It certainly appeared that Eisenhower was letting Dulles do his thinking for him.”

  Before jumping on the Eisenhower bandwagon in 1952, the Dulles brothers calculated that he would not make a strong president. But Ike’s malleability offered its own advantages, in their eyes. As secretary of state, Foster succeeded in undermining or deflecting every tentative step that the president made toward détente with the Soviet Union. In August 1955, following the Geneva Summit, Foster sent out a long cable to all U.S. diplomatic mission chiefs around the world, warning that the free world must not let down its guard despite the air of goodwill wafting out of the conference. “Geneva has certainly created problems for the free nations,” he wrote. “For eight years they have been held together largely by a cement compounded of fear and a sense of moral superiority. Now the fear is diminished and the moral demarcation is somewhat blurred.” The free world must not “relax its vigilance,” he declared, dismissing the post-Stalin Soviet peace efforts as a “classic Communist maneuver.” Hope was Foster’s enemy, fear his righteous sword.

  By 1958, five years into the process of de-Stalinization, Khrushchev was understandably deeply puzzled and frustrated by Washington’s failure to diplomatically engage with his regime. The main obstacle to peace, he rightly concluded, was John Foster Dulles.

  Foster’s staunch resistance to making peace with the Soviets did not reflect a perverse contrariness or extreme anti-Communism. Nor did it suggest his true assessment of the Soviet threat. His belligerence was strategic. As his revealing cable stated, this militant sense of alert was the “cement” that held together the Western alliance. And as Mills pointed out, the “continual preparation for war” was also the main factor holding together America’s power elite. Or, in the mordant observation of Randolph Bourne as the United States plunged into the epic madness of World War I, “War is the health of the state.” Foster, who always acted in the interests of the American establishment, understood this. It was this permanent war fever that empowered the country’s political and military hierarchies and enriched the increasingly militarized corporate sector. It was the very lifeblood of this ruling group’s existence—even if, in the atomic age, it threatened the existence of humanity.

  The Eisenhower-Dulles foreign policy operated on twin levels of psychic violence and actual violence. While the secretary of state threatened to evaporate entire populations with “tactical” nuclear strikes, the director of central intelligence actually eliminated individuals around the world whenever they were deemed to be a threat to national security. Determined to use the CIA more aggressively than President Truman, who had feared creating an “American Gestapo,” Eisenhower unleashed the agency, giving Allen Dulles a license to kill that the spymaster utilized as he saw fit.

  Years later, in the 1970s, when post-Watergate congressional committees forced the CIA to account for its lethal reign under Dulles, the agency tried to downplay its ruthlessness. CIA witnesses testifying before the Church and Pike Committees insisted that while the agency had targeted foreign leaders such as the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and Fidel Castro, its assassins had proved inept or were beaten to the punch. Assassination, went the CIA line, was simply not the sort of business at which its people excelled. But the agency was being too modest.

  In truth, the CIA became an effective killing machine under Dulles. Allen Dulles was an assassination enthusiast throughout his espionage career, from the days of his involvement in the Operation Valkyrie plot against Hitler onward. Later in his career, any nationalist leader who seemed a problem for U.S. interests was viewed as fair game. During the 1957 Suez crisis, as a group of foreign policy officials and commentators gathered for dinner at the Washington home of Walter Lippmann, th
e conversation turned to Egypt’s defiant leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. One of the guests jested, “Allen, can’t you find an assassin?” To the group’s amazement, Dulles took the comment in dead seriousness. “Well, first you would need a fanatic, a man who’d be willing to kill himself if he were caught,” said the spymaster, puffing thoughtfully on his pipe. “And he couldn’t be an outsider. He’d have to be an Arab. It would be very difficult to find just the right man.”

  The Dulles brothers assured multinational firms that Washington would stop at nothing to protect their overseas investments. In August 1956, during yet another period of upheaval in the Mideast, Foster addressed a private meeting of oil company officials in Washington. The secretary of state assured the oilmen that if any sultan or despot were to be as unwise as Mossadegh and try to nationalize his underground desert treasure, the country would soon find itself the target of an “international intervention.” Fortunately for Eisenhower, who sought to avoid such costly military operations, his administration would only feel compelled to mount one such intervention, sending the Marines into Lebanon in 1958 to ensure that the Beirut government remained in friendly hands. The rest of America’s imperial mission during the Eisenhower years remained firmly in the hands of Allen Dulles.

  Whispers about Dulles’s tactics began making themselves heard in the White House during Eisenhower’s first term. Some of the anxious reports came from those Washington circles that took a permanent interest in the nation’s affairs, no matter which party was in power. Some emanated from within the spy agency itself. In July 1954, Eisenhower asked a trusted military friend, retired Air Force general James H. Doolittle, a World War II hero, to look into the agency and give him a confidential report. After Doolittle finished his investigation in October, the president blocked out an afternoon to hear his briefing. The general told Eisenhower that the CIA was badly managed and that Dulles was overly zealous. Furthermore, the relationship between the Dulleses was “unfortunate”—an alliance based on blood that allowed the brothers to establish their own, largely unaccountable power center within the administration. Eisenhower responded defensively, insisting that he found the Dulles brother act to be “beneficial.” As for Allen, he might have his peculiarities, conceded the president, but the CIA was “one of the most peculiar types of operations any government can have, and it probably takes a strange kind of genius to run it.”

  Ironically, the Doolittle Report gave Dulles even more justification for his remorseless shadow war by concluding, “It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply.” Dulles could not have put it more zealously himself.

  Dulles’s CIA operated with virtually no congressional oversight. In the Senate, Dulles relied on Wall Street friends like Prescott Bush of Connecticut—the father and grandfather of two future presidents—to protect the CIA’s interests. According to CIA veteran Robert Crowley, who rose to become second-in-command of the CIA’s action arm, Bush “was the day-to-day contact man for the CIA. It was very bipartisan and friendly. Dulles felt that he had the Senate just where he wanted them.”

  The CIA director found the House side of Congress to be equally amenable. Each year, Dulles had to go through the formality of making the agency’s budget pitch to the armed services panel of the House Appropriations Committee, which was chaired at that time by Rep. Clarence Cannon of Missouri. On one occasion, the CIA’s congressional liaison Walter Pforzheimer had to track down the elusive Cannon to find out when that year’s CIA budget hearing would be scheduled. Pforzheimer cornered Chairman Cannon in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall, alerting the congressman to the fact that Dulles would be asking for a 10 percent increase in the CIA’s budget. “All right, Walter, you tell Mr. Dulles that he had his hearing and that he got his 10 percent.”

  Eisenhower was perfectly happy to have Congress stay out of the CIA’s business, fearing a repeat of the McCarthy circus if legislators were allowed to probe the agency’s operations. The president—who didn’t know everything about the agency’s dark side, but knew enough —was also keenly aware of the dangers of such exposure. “The things we did were ‘covert,’” the president wrote in a diary entry that was not declassified until 2009. “If knowledge of them became public, we would not only be embarrassed . . . but our chances to do anything of like nature in the future would almost totally disappear.”

  John Eisenhower, who served his father as a White House aide, later blamed the Dulles spy set for manipulating the president. Ike was no match, said the younger Eisenhower, for the slick Ivy League types at the CIA. “Dad could be fooled. He was better when the guy was in uniform and knew him. But all those guys from Princeton and Yale . . .” Yet, throughout most of his presidency, Eisenhower was all too willing to be fooled by the CIA. Ike knew that Dulles’s “strange genius” had its uses.

  In 1956, to appease critics who charged that the CIA was operating with extremely minimal supervision, Eisenhower again ordered a discreet investigation of the agency by national security insiders—this time, diplomat David Bruce and Wall Street banker-statesman Robert Lovett. Eisenhower and Dulles felt there was nothing to fear from this new inspection, since Bruce and Lovett were longtime friends of the spymaster. But the Bruce-Lovett report shocked Dulles, taking strong aim at the CIA’s penchant for creating political mayhem around the globe. There was an airy arrogance to Dulles’s “busy, monied and privileged” agency, with its obvious fondness for overseas “kingmaking,” declared the report. The promiscuous freedom that had been granted to Dulles and his “extremely high-powered machine” to “go barging around into other countries . . . scared the hell out of us,” Lovett later remarked.

  But, once again, Eisenhower ignored the strong criticisms leveled at the spy agency. Dulles’s operation was simply too essential a component of the president’s Cold War strategy for him to rein it in.

  Unmanaged by the White House and unsupervised by Congress, Dulles’s CIA grew to become the most potent agency of the Eisenhower era. Dulles was a master at seeding Washington bureaucracies with agency men, placing his loyalists in top positions in the Pentagon, State Department, and even the White House. The CIA became increasingly intertwined with the armed services, as military officers were assigned to agency missions, and then sent back to their military posts as “ardent disciples of Allen Dulles,” in the words of Air Force colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who served as a liaison officer between the Pentagon and the CIA between 1955 and 1963. Prouty, who observed Dulles at close hand, marveled at his mastery of the Washington power game. “He simply worked like the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon; he eroded all opposition.”

  Late on September 9, 1954, as midnight approached, Jacobo Arbenz, the recently deposed president of Guatemala, was escorted into the Guatemala City airport with a small entourage, including his wife, Maria Vilanova, and two of their children. Arbenz was beloved among his dirt-poor country’s peasants and workers for his land and labor reforms, but he was reviled by Guatemala’s aristocracy. As he prepared to leave his homeland, Arbenz was showered with abuse by a smartly dressed crowd of several hundred ill-wishers. “Assassin! Thief! Piece of shit!” they screamed at him as he hurried into the airport terminal with his family.

  Arbenz was fortunate to make it past the venomous crowd unharmed. Shortly before he and his family were driven to the airport, a decoy car masquerading for security purposes as the vehicle actually transporting the Arbenz family was blown up by his enemies.

  Howard Hunt, one of the principal CIA orchestrators of the Guatemala coup, later acknowledged that he had helped organize the hostile send-off party at the airport for the benefit of the press. But Hunt claimed that he had spread the word among his people to let Arbenz leave the country unscathed. He knew that if the deposed leader were assassinated, “we’d [the CIA and the United States] get blamed for it.” Relatives of Arben
z later said they found Hunt’s professed concern for their family’s security “hard to believe,” considering his role in the Guatemalan president’s violent downfall.

  Before he was allowed to board the chartered DC-4 waiting to take him to Mexico City—the first stop in what would turn out to be a permanent exile—Arbenz was subjected to a final humiliation. Authorities of the new military regime demanded that the ex-president strip to his underwear in full view of a mob of jostling reporters and cameramen, ostensibly so that they could make sure he was not smuggling out cash. After his traumatic overthrow, Arbenz’s nerves were shot. He and his family had spent seventy-three days and nights in miserable asylum at the Mexican embassy in Guatemala City, which had become so packed with political refugees that typhus and other diseases had broken out. At the airport, Arbenz looked pale and drawn in the glare of the camera lights. Every time a flashbulb popped, he visibly flinched. And yet, even as he disrobed in full view of the press pack, he held on to a kind of dignity, his head erect, his eyes looking straight ahead. “It gave the impression that a cold statue was taking off his marble clothes,” remarked one of the ogling reporters.

  “They were trying to break him down psychologically,” said Dr. Erick Arbenz, a New York anesthesiologist and grandson of Jacobo Arbenz, who has led the family’s campaign to reclaim his legacy. “Can you think of another example like this, where the elected leader of a nation was forced to undergo this sort of humiliation—to be publicly undressed in front of news cameras? The CIA was afraid of him—an educated, articulate reformer who had stood up to the local elite and the U.S. government. He was a big threat to these powerful interests.”