Legacy of Ashes (The History of the C.I.A.)

by Tim Weiner

  They flew into combat at dawn, unleashing a barrage against the same Guatemalan army forces whose loyalties were the linchpin of the plan to topple Arbenz. CIA pilots strafed troop trains carrying soldiers to the front. They dropped bombs, dynamite, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails. They blew up a radio station run by American Christian missionaries and sank a British freighter docked on the Pacific coast.

  On the ground, Castillo Armas failed to gain an inch. Turning back, he radioed the CIA, pleading for more air power. The Voice of Liberation, its signal relayed from a transponder atop the American embassy, broadcast craftily concocted stories that thousands of rebel troops were converging on the capital. Loudspeakers atop the embassy roof blasted the tape-recorded sounds of P-38 fighters soaring into the night. President Arbenz, drinking himself into a stupor, saw through his fog that he was under attack from the United States.

  On the afternoon on June 25, the CIA bombed the parade grounds of the largest military encampment in Guatemala City. That broke the will of the officer corps. Arbenz summoned his cabinet that night and told them that elements of the army were in revolt. It was true: a handful of officers had secretly decided to side with the CIA and overthrow their president.

  Ambassador Peurifoy met with the coup plotters on June 27, victory within his grasp. But then Arbenz ceded power to Colonel Carlos Enrique Diaz, who formed a junta and vowed to fight Castillo Armas. “We have been double-crossed,” Peurifoy cabled. Al Haney sent a message to all CIA stations identifying Diaz as a “Commie agent.” He ordered a silver-tongued CIA officer, Enno Hobbing, Time’s Berlin bureau chief before joining the agency, to have a little talk with Diaz at dawn the next day. Hobbing delivered the message to Diaz: “Colonel, you are not convenient for American foreign policy.”

  The junta vanished instantly, to be replaced in quick succession by four more, each one increasingly pro-American. Ambassador Peurifoy now demanded that the CIA stand down. Wisner cabled all hands on June 30 that it was time for “the surgeons to step back and the nurses to take over the patient.” Peurifoy maneuvered for two more months before Castillo Armas assumed the presidency. He received a twenty-one-gun salute and a state dinner at the White House, where the vice president offered the following toast: “We in the United States have watched the people of Guatemala record an episode in their history deeply significant to all peoples,” Richard Nixon said. “Led by the courageous soldier who is our guest this evening, the Guatemalan people revolted against communist rule, which in collapsing bore graphic witness to its own shallowness, falsity, and corruption.” Guatemala was at the beginning of forty years of military rulers, death squads, and armed repression.

  “INCREDIBLE”

  The leaders of the CIA created a myth about Operation Success, just as they did with the coup in Iran. The company line was that the mission was a masterwork. In truth, “we really didn’t think it was much of a success,” said Jake Esterline, who became the new station chief in Guatemala at summer’s end. The coup had succeeded largely through brute force and blind luck. But the CIA spun another story at a formal White House briefing for the president on July 29, 1954. The night before, Allen Dulles invited Frank Wisner, Tracy Barnes, Dave Phillips, Al Haney, Henry Hecksher, and Rip Robertson to his house in Georgetown for a dress rehearsal. He listened in growing horror as Haney began a rambling discourse with a long preamble about his heroic exploits in Korea.

  “I’ve never heard such crap,” said Dulles, and he ordered Phillips to rewrite the speech.

  In the East Wing of the White House, in a room darkened for a slide show, the CIA sold Eisenhower a dressed-up version of Operation Success. When the lights went on, the president’s first question went to the paramilitary man Rip Robertson.

  “How many men did Castillo Armas lose?” Ike asked.

  Only one, Robertson replied.

  “Incredible,” said the president.

  At least forty-three of Castillo Armas’s men had been killed during the invasion, but no one contradicted Robertson. It was a shameless falsehood.

  This was a turning point in the history of the CIA. The cover stories required for covert action overseas were now part of the agency’s political conduct in Washington. Bissell stated it plainly: “Many of us who joined the CIA did not feel bound in the actions we took as staff members to observe all the ethical rules.” He and his colleagues were prepared to lie to the president to protect the agency’s image. And their lies had lasting consequences.

  11. “AND THEN WE’LL

  HAVE A STORM”

  “Secrecy now beclouds everything about the CIA—its cost, its efficiency, its successes, its failures,” Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana said in March 1954.

  Allen Dulles answered to a very few members of Congress. They protected the CIA from public scrutiny through informal armed services and appropriations subcommittees. He regularly asked his deputies to supply him with “CIA success stories that might be used at the next budget hearing.” He had none up his sleeve. On rare occasions, he was prepared to be candid. Two weeks after Mansfield’s critique, Dulles faced three senators at a closed-door hearing. His briefing notes said the CIA’s rapid expansion of covert operations might have been “risky or even unwise for the long pull of the Cold War.” They conceded that “unplanned, urgent, one-shot operations not only usually failed, but also disrupted and even blew our careful preparations for longer-range activities.”

  That kind of secret could be kept safe on Capitol Hill. But one senator posed a grave and gathering threat to the CIA: the red-baiting Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy and his staff had developed an underground of informants who had quit the agency in anger toward the end of the Korean War. In the months after Eisenhower’s election, McCarthy’s files grew thick with allegations that “the CIA had unwittingly hired a large number of double agents—individuals who, although working for the CIA, were actually Communist agents whose mission was to plant inaccurate data,” as his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, recounted. Unlike many of McCarthy’s charges, this one was true. The agency could not withstand a whit of scrutiny on the issue, and Allen Dulles knew it. If the American people had learned, in the heat of the red scare, that the agency had been duped all over Europe and Asia by the Soviet and Chinese intelligence services, the CIA would be destroyed.

  When McCarthy privately told Dulles face-to-face “that CIA was neither sacrosanct nor immune from investigation,” the director knew its survival was at stake. Foster Dulles had opened his doors to McCarthy’s bloodhounds in a public display of sanctimony that devastated the State Department for a decade. But Allen fought them off. He rebuffed the senator’s attempt to subpoena the CIA’s Bill Bundy, who out of old-school loyalties had contributed $400 to the defense fund of Alger Hiss, the suspected communist spy. Allen refused to let the senator scourge the CIA.

  His public stance was a principled one, but he also ran a down-and-dirty covert operation on McCarthy. The clandestine campaign was outlined in a CIA officer’s secret testimony before McCarthy’s Senate committee and its twenty-eight-year-old minority counsel, Robert F. Kennedy, which was unsealed in 2003. It was detailed in a CIA history declassified in 2004.

  After his private confrontation with McCarthy, Dulles organized a team of CIA officers to penetrate the senator’s office with a spy or a bug, preferably both. The methodology was just like J. Edgar Hoover’s: gather dirt, then spread it. Dulles instructed James Angleton, his counterintelligence czar, to find a way to feed disinformation to McCarthy and his staff as a means of discrediting him. Angleton convinced James McCargar—the officer who had been one of Wisner’s first hires—to plant phony reports on a known member of the McCarthy underground at the CIA. McCargar succeeded: the CIA penetrated the Senate.

  “You’ve saved the Republic,” Allen Dulles told him.

  “THIS FUNDAMENTALLY REPUGNANT PHILOSOPHY”

  But the threat to the CIA grew as McCarthy’s power began fading in 1954. Senator Mansfield and thirty-four of his colleagues
were backing a bill to create an oversight committee and order the agency to keep Congress fully and currently informed about its work. (It would not pass for twenty years.) A congressional task force led by Eisenhower’s trusted colleague General Mark Clark was getting ready to investigate the agency.

  At the end of May 1954, the president of the United States received an extraordinary six-page letter from an air force colonel. It was an impassioned cry by the first whistle-blower from inside the CIA. Eisenhower read it and kept it.

  The author, Jim Kellis, was one of the agency’s founding fathers. An OSS veteran who had fought guerrilla warfare in Greece, he had gone to China and served as the first station chief in Shanghai for the Strategic Services Unit. At the CIA’s birth, he was among its few experienced China hands. He went back to Greece as an investigator for Wild Bill Donovan, who as a private citizen had been asked to investigate the 1948 murder of a CBS reporter. He determined that the killing came at the hands of America’s right-wing allies in Athens, not ordered by the communists, as was commonly believed. His findings were suppressed. He returned to the CIA, and during the Korean War he was in charge of the CIA’s paramilitary operations and resistance forces worldwide. Walter Bedell Smith had sent him on troubleshooting investigations in Asia and Europe. He did not like what he saw. A few months after Allen Dulles took command, Kellis quit in disgust.

  “The Central Intelligence Agency is in a rotten state,” Colonel Kellis warned Eisenhower. “Today CIA has hardly any worthwhile operations behind the Iron Curtain. In their briefings they present a rosy picture to outsiders but the awful truth remains under the TOP SECRET label of the Agency.”

  The truth was that “CIA wittingly or unwittingly delivered one million dollars to a Communist security service.” (This was the WIN operation in Poland; it is unlikely that Dulles told the president about the ugly details of the operation, which blew up three weeks before Eisenhower’s inauguration.) “CIA unwittingly organized an intelligence network for the Communists,” Kellis wrote, referring to the debacle created by the Seoul station during the Korean War. Dulles and his deputies, “fearing any aftereffects on their reputation,” had lied to Congress about the agency’s operations in Korea and China. Kellis had personally investigated the question on a trip to the Far East in 1952. He had determined that “CIA was being duped.”

  Dulles had been planting stories in the press, burnishing his image as “a scholarly affable Christian missionary, the country’s outstanding intelligence expert,” Kellis wrote. “For some of us who have seen the other side of Allen Dulles, we don’t see too many Christian traits. I personally consider him a ruthless, ambitious and utterly incompetent government administrator.” Kellis pleaded with the president to take “the drastic action needed to clean up” the CIA.

  Eisenhower wanted to counter the threats to the clandestine service and clean up its problems in secret. In July 1954, shortly after the conclusion of Operation Success, the president commissioned General Jimmy Doolittle, who had worked on the Solarium project, and his good friend William Pawley, the millionaire who had provided the fighter-bombers for the Guatemala coup, to assess the CIA’s capabilities for covert action.

  Doolittle had ten weeks to report back. He and Pawley met with Dulles and Wisner, traveled to CIA stations in Germany and London, and interviewed senior military and diplomatic officers who worked in liaison with their CIA counterparts. They also talked to Bedell Smith, who told them that “Dulles was too emotional to be in this critical spot” and that “his emotionalism was far worse than it appeared on the surface.”

  On October 19, 1954, Doolittle went to see the president at the White House. He reported that the agency had “ballooned out into a vast and sprawling organization manned by a large number of people, some of whom were of doubtful competence.” Dulles surrounded himself with people who were unskilled and undisciplined. The sensitive matter of “the family relationship” with Foster Dulles arose. Doolittle thought it would be better for all concerned if the personal connection were not a professional connection: “it leads to protection of one by the other or influence of one by the other.” An independent committee of trusted civilians should oversee the CIA for the president.

  The Doolittle report warned that Wisner’s clandestine service was “filled with people having little or no training for their jobs.” Within its six separate staffs, seven geographic divisions, and more than forty branches, “‘dead wood’ exists at virtually all levels.” The report recommended a “complete reorganization” of Wisner’s empire, which had suffered from its “mushroom expansion” and “tremendous pressures to accept commitments beyond its capacity to perform.” It observed that “in covert operations quality is more important than quantity. A small number of competent people can be more useful than a large number of incompetents.”

  Dulles was well aware that the clandestine service was out of control. The CIA’s officers were running operations behind their commanders’ backs. Two days after Doolittle presented his report, the director told Wisner that he was worried that “sensitive and/or delicate operations are carried out at lower levels without being brought to the attention of the appropriate Deputy, the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence or the Director of Central Intelligence.”

  But Dulles handled the Doolittle report the way he usually dealt with bad news, by burying it. He would not let the highest-ranking officers at the CIA see it—not even Wisner.

  Though the full report remained classified until 2001, its preface was made public a quarter century before. It contained one of the grimmest passages of the cold war:

  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. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.

  The report said the nation needed “an aggressive covert psychological, political and paramilitary organization more effective, more unique, and, if necessary, more ruthless than that employed by the enemy.” For the CIA had never solved “the problem of infiltration by human agents,” it said. “Once across borders—by parachute, or any other means—escape from detection is extremely difficult.” It concluded: “The information we have obtained by this method of acquisition has been negligible and the cost in effort, dollars and human lives prohibitive.”

  It placed the highest priority on espionage to gain intelligence on the Soviets. It stressed that no price was too high to pay for this knowledge.

  “WE DIDN’T RAISE THE RIGHT QUESTIONS”

  Dulles was desperate to place an American spy inside the iron curtain.

  In 1953, the first CIA officer he had dispatched to Moscow was seduced by his Russian housemaid—she was a KGB colonel—photographed in flagrante delicto, blackmailed, and fired by the agency for his indiscretions. In 1954, a second officer was caught in the act of espionage, arrested, and deported shortly after his arrival. Soon thereafter, Dulles called in one of his special assistants, John Maury, who had traveled in Russia before World War II and spent much of the war at the American embassy in Moscow representing the Office of Naval Intelligence. He asked Maury to join the clandestine service and to train for a mission to Moscow.

  None of Wisner’s officers had ever been to Russia, Dulles said: “They know nothing about the target.”

  “I don’t know anything about operations,” Maury responded.

  “I don’t think they do either,” Dulles replied.

  Such men could hardly provide the president with the intelligence he wanted most: strategic warning
against a nuclear attack. When the National Security Council convened to talk about what to do if that attack came, the president turned to Dulles and said: “Let’s not have another Pearl Harbor.” That was the task the president assigned to the second secret intelligence commission he created in 1954.

  Eisenhower told James R. Killian, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to lead a group seeking ways of preventing a Soviet bolt from the blue. He pressed for techniques the Doolittle report strongly recommended: “communications and electronic surveillance” to provide “early warning of impending attack.”

  The CIA redoubled its own efforts to listen in on the enemy. It succeeded, in its own fashion.

  Up in the attic of the Berlin base headquarters, a washed-up baseball player turned lawyer turned spy named Walter O’Brien had been photographing papers purloined from the East Berlin post office. They described the underground routes of the new telecommunications cables used by Soviet and East German officials. This espionage coup turned into the Berlin Tunnel project.

  The tunnel was regarded at the time as the CIA’s greatest public triumph. The idea—and its undoing—came from British intelligence. In 1951, the British had told the CIA that they had been tapping into the Soviets’ telecommunications cables through a network of tunnels in the occupied zones of Vienna since shortly after the end of World War II. They suggested doing the same in Berlin. Thanks to the stolen blueprints, it became a real possibility.