Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  As Brazil’s Petrobrás suffered quietly under Washington’s “containment policy” (now extended beyond communism to any national oil entities, which were barred from U.S. aid), American interest focused on other countries in Latin America.

  In the Caribbean basin, Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of Indiana moved into Cuba and Jamaica. Guatemala’s tropical Petén region was opened to Standard Oil of Ohio, Texaco, and Standard Oil of New Jersey.

  In Venezuela, dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez began negotiations for new concessions that would net him another $500 million by 1956. Colombia allowed oil teams to penetrate the last virgin forests around Lake Maracaibo along the border with Venezuela, provoking attacks by Matillone Indians defending their sole refuge.

  But it was the Amazon, particularly the Ecuadorian Amazon, that excited the most concern in Washington. In 1942, all eyes were focused on the Marañon River. The Marañon was more than a river—it was a symbol of Ecuadorian pride turned sour when, under the U.S.-brokered Rio Protocol, portions of its oil reserves were ceded to neighboring Peru. Now, more than a decade later, Texaco’s ships plowed up the Amazon River to deliver drilling rigs to the company’s new concessions along the Marañon. Ecuador reacted sharply. Its president, José María Velasco Ibarra, was an ardent nationalist and deeply resented the loss of the oil region.

  Not every Ecuadorian was upset, however: José Chiriboga, who actually helped negotiate the concession as a member of the Ecuadorian delegation to the Rio Conference, and fellow liberal Galo Plaza, who, as postwar president of Ecuador, had accepted it. Now, as Velasco’s ambassador to the United States, Chiriboga received orders from Quito to protest an alleged Peruvian troop buildup along the border by Peru’s president, Manuel Odría. Velasco reportedly feared that Peruvian troops moving along the border, coupled with the arrival of Texaco’s ships, heralded the seizure of more of Ecuador’s Amazonian lands.

  Ecuador Loses Access to the Amazon—and Potential Oil Lands (1941–1942)

  As a result of Peru’s invasion in 1941 and the U.S.-brokered Rio de Janeiro Protocol of 1942, Ecuador lost about half its territory (shaded area) to Peru, a portion of which Peru then leased to Standard Oil of New Jersey’s International Petroleum Company (IPC), which already controlled the Lobitos oil field and the refinery at Talara, Peru.

  Velasco ordered Chiriboga to demand OAS intervention. He got it. The OAS sent inspection teams. But when the teams denied that any Peruvian buildup was occurring, Velasco became suspicious. He promptly declared Ecuador’s concession to the Canadian-based Peruvian Oil and Minerals Company null and “arbitrary.”22

  Velasco had good cause to worry. Two years before, at Odría’s 1953 auction, the Canadian company had successfully bid for exploration rights to 135,000 acres of Amazonian oil lands just across Ecuador’s border with Peru and had won exploration rights to another 17,000 acres. So had Standard Oil of New Jersey, which would soon replace the Peruvian Oil and Minerals Company. Yet another Canadian player, Ventures Limited, had also joined Jersey Standard in buying oil rights in northern Peru’s Sechura Desert. By September 1955, three out of the four Special Group members who had overseen the CIA’s covert operations in Ecuador and Peru that year had ties to American oil companies23 operating across the border in Peru. The fourth member, Allen Dulles, was director of the same CIA that had overthrown the Iranian government two years before over the nagging question of oil.

  Concern over renewed maneuvering by foreign oil companies in Latin America spread throughout the continent. And watching it all was the CIA, which sent reports to Washington. There, Nelson Rockefeller, as chairman of the Special Group and vice chairman of the larger Operations Coordinating Board, was responsible for monitoring covert operations throughout the Western Hemisphere. He controlled an apparatus that could spot problems—and opportunities—wherever they erupted in Latin America. In 1955, two developments must have seemed portentous. One was the election to the Brazilian presidency of the friend of the International Basic Economy Corporation from Minas Gerais, Governor Juscelino Kubitschek; the other was the fall of Nelson’s most embarrassing client from the Roosevelt era, Juan Perón, as president of Argentina.

  A week before Nelson convened Quantico II, the Argentine air force and navy staged a successful revolt against Perón. No longer guided by his wife’s savvy—Eva had died in 1953—Perón had abandoned himself to personal and political excesses. He outraged Eva’s followers by taking a fourteen-year-old girl as his mistress. Then he lost the support of the Roman Catholic Church by ending compulsory Catholic education and paid Catholic holidays for government workers. But what most undermined the morale of Perón’s base of loyalists was his decision to allow Standard Oil of California to take over exploration in a huge portion of Santa Cruz province.

  As Perón faced the likelihood of exile, George E. Allen was winging his way toward the Middle East. It was Allen’s Atlas Corporation that had triggered Perón’s decline by following Milton Eisenhower’s visit two years before with a bid to drill 400 oil wells near the Argentine Andes. Now Allen was on his way to Egypt.

  This mission, urged on a reluctant State Department by Nelson Rockefeller,24 was to offer credit for the Aswan Dam if Nasser would stop talking about Soviet trade and Czech arms. Nelson had no reason to be optimistic. Nasser controlled the Suez choke point of the Persian Gulf oil flow; his Syrian allies controlled the pumping stations of Iraq Petroleum Company’s pipeline. (Indeed, the Syrians would blow up the stations during the Suez Crisis the following year.) On top of that, Nasser promoted the spread of Arab nationalism in the Middle East, making the Pentagon’s and oil companies’ need to identify and secure Latin American oil reserves for future tapping a strategic necessity.

  Nelson knew from experience that in cases of unrest in the Third World, military aid to compliant regimes could stem the tide of rising expectations only so long. As he had with Standard Oil’s board twenty years before, he now argued strenuously that time was running out for American intervention in the developing world’s political process.

  Small wonder that Nelson was disheartened by the administration’s failure to respond to Quantico II’s warnings on Latin America’s strategic importance.

  If this were ever to change, Nelson needed more power, more than what appointed office offered and especially more than four secretaries of state in three administrations had been willing to allow. Even in a top-level White House job, his staff, with funds restricted by the Treasury Department, had never grown beyond twenty people, a far cry from his CIAA empire of thousands.

  He decided to resign.

  Before he left, he sent the recuperating Eisenhower two Christmas presents. One was traditional Americana: a nineteenth-century silk embroidery of a bald eagle. The other was traditional Rockefeller: a parting shot at his enemies. In a two-page memorandum, he argued that the time-honored approach of the secretary of state controlling foreign affairs no longer sufficed at a time when the United States was a global power.

  His recommendation was startling: Centralized efficiency should replace the contending agencies of cabinet rule appropriate to an earlier laissez faire age. “You need an organization which can adequately coordinate the development of strategy, the carrying out of actions, the analysis and evaluation of programs to achieve stated objectives.”

  In other words, an appointed supergovernment, above and outside the departments and agencies known to the press and the people, acting in secrecy out of the White House, responsible to only one man, the president.

  Eisenhower, however, was not ready to enter a dark age of executive power and take the nation on the path that would lead to the Nixon administration’s Houston Plan for a centralized police state, to Watergate, and then to the Reagan administration’s Iran-contra arms deal.

  The president responded to Nelson’s tough letter only with personal regrets about losing daily contact with the Rockefeller heir, “one of the sad developments of an otherwise happy holiday season.”25<
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  Nelson packed up his office.

  “I’m convinced of one thing,” he told one of his aides, while stopping by to say good-bye. “You can’t have a voice in your party unless you’ve proved that you know how to get votes.”26

  Then he turned and left, closing the door behind him.

  20

  MESSENGERS OF THE SUN

  LAUNCHING THE FLEET

  A week before Nelson Rockefeller resigned as presidential assistant for psychological warfare and Cold War strategy, one of the Cold War’s least-known but significant events took place outside a hangar in a Chicago airport. Braving a frigid wind blowing in from Lake Michigan, a group of men and women gathered on December 17, 1955, for what was supposed to be a celebration of American Christian charity toward less developed nations. But the two star celebrities of the occasion gave hint of another, more political purpose.

  Richard J. Daley, looking the model of the stocky Irish American big-city politician, was a conservative but devout Roman Catholic. The newly elected mayor of Chicago was absolute ruler of arguably the most powerful Democratic machine in the United States. Daley had not risen to power championing the ambition of Fundamentalist Protestants in Catholic countries like Ecuador. Yet here he was, officially welcoming the crowd, including members of the press, to the dedication of an airplane that would bring the Wycliffe Bible Translators into the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Standing beside Daley was Ecuador’s ambassador José Chiriboga, who had earned a reputation for shrewdness as mayor of Quito equal to Daley’s in Chicago. Only twelve years before, he had confounded his countrymen by signing over half of Ecuador’s Amazon to Peru at Washington’s behest. Pearl Harbor had made hemispheric unity essential, Chiriboga had explained, and the war between Ecuador and Peru had to end, even if that meant that Ecuador would lose land rumored to be coveted by Standard Oil’s Peruvian subsidiary, International Petroleum Company. And now here was Chiriboga again, as ambassador of a self-described radical nationalist government, sanctioning the penetration of Ecuador’s remaining Amazonian lands by a well-connected American missionary organization.

  Perhaps the greatest enigma of the day was the thin, balding man who had led the dignitaries out of the hangar to watch the new airplaine in a demonstration flight. William Cameron Townsend was a paradox of naïveté and hard-nosed diplomacy, as innocent in purpose yet deliberately aimed as any “arrow of love” sent to Bibleless tribes by the unseen force he called Jesus. At fifty-nine, he retained his youthful exuberance and grace, smiling easily as he helped assemble the dignitaries and reporters before the plane Larry Montgomery was about to demonstrate. Only those closest to him knew his steely resolve and how it had led him across the United States’ Rubicon of church-state separation to embrace the world of politics unlike any Fundamentalist missionary before him. This day marked the beginning of the Inter-American Friendship Fleet he was promoting in Washington’s corridors and of the Jungle Aviation and Radio Service (JAARS) as an important instrument of the Cold War.

  Pilot Larry Montgomery climbed aboard the small plane and taxied it away for the takeoff. It was an odd-looking craft, with a roaring, large twin-bladed propeller and a giant overhead wing with flaps so wide it seemed to hang over everything else, dwarfing the cabin. Six months before, another unusually long-winged airplane had zoomed into the stratosphere before startled onlookers, but it would be another half year before the CIA’s U-2 would make its secret maiden voyage into Soviet skies. This plane, however, was ready now, and although its design came out of the same aeronautical origins as did the U-2, the Helio Courier was no secret. It could not be, for it was designed to be flown at low altitudes and speeds, not in the heavens beyond sight and sound. Both planes would make history for the CIA. But the U-2’s mission would be exposed to the world within five years; the Helio’s use as a CIA asset would remain virtually unknown for three more decades.1

  At first, the board of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) had an attack of anxiety over the expense of Cam’s vision of an airborne SIL. No one could argue that the Helio Courier was a bush pilot’s dream. Even the name was intriguing: Helio is the Greek word for “sun,” and courier is the Latin word for “messenger.” There was something romantic about evangelical linguists bringing tribes the Light of God’s Word in Helio Couriers, “Messengers of the Sun.” But where would they ever get another $150,000?

  “Uncle Cam has always been a step ahead of us,” Ken Pike had insisted. “He may be again.”2

  He was. Cam used his tested formula for success, St. Paul’s advice to “honor the King.” To attract recognition from U.S. officialdom, Cam called on liberals in the Rockefeller sphere of influence. He contacted a corporate-backed group of Good Neighbors he had been cultivating for years, the same Pan American Council of Chicago that Nelson Rockefeller’s CIAA had supported during the war.3

  Cam arranged for the Pan American Council to participate in the Helio ceremony by hosting a luncheon for Ambassador Chiriboga, to be presided over by Mayor Daley and to include guests from all the city’s Good Neighbor committees that were working for closer ties with Latin America.4

  Now more than ever, SIL’s future was tied to aviation as much as to linguistics. Planes were becoming the most important means for governments involved in “nation-building” in the Third World to secure, penetrate, and colonize frontiers with landless peasants. As JAARS’s dedication of its air fleet to the Peruvian military had demonstrated, through Cam’s negotiated contracts, SIL’s most important assets—airplanes—became their assets. Airplanes were much more versatile than translators, and skilled pilots, maintenance crews, and radios were even rarer in the oil-rich jungles of the Amazon than were airplanes. In just the past year, Cam had been given the green light from two governments that were searching for oil in the jungles east of the Andes: Bolivia and Ecuador.

  But all these opportunities depended, in turn, on making the Inter-American Friendship Fleet a reality. Cam had spent most of this furlough year in the United States in a fruitless effort to convince the oilmen of Tulsa that JAARS was the answer to their prayers, not just his. He needed a publicity coup to win them over and to persuade businessmen in other cities to buy the Helios he had ordered.

  He tried his best in Chicago. So did Ambassador Chiriboga, who helped arrange a wiregram of support from Ecuador’s President Velasco Ibarra, which Don Burns read proudly to Mayor Daley and the other attenders of the “Friendship of Chicago” dedication. But when the ceremony was over and Larry Montgomery had finished his aerial acrobatics with the Helio and gone on his way to Quito for a similar ceremony there with Velasco, Cam knew it was not enough. The Chicago Tribune’s small column in the back pages the next day made that fact painfully clear. He needed something bigger, something inspiring, to encourage the participation of more famous politicians to draw the crowds that donors appreciated and to cheer the donors on to write checks in recognition of JAARS’s unique potential.

  He returned to Arkansas, to Wycliffe’s home at Sulphur Springs, from where he wrote pleas for money to unheeding Fundamentalists. Then, as if from the Hand of God, lightning struck in the glint of spears.

  BEHIND OPERATION AUCA

  Deep in Ecuador’s Amazon jungle, at Shell Oil’s abandoned base camp, a young SIL Bible translator named Betty Elliot sat with four other missionary wives, their eyes riveted on the silent radio receiver, their thoughts seized by dread. Hours had passed since their husbands had radioed from an unchartered beach on the Curaray River even deeper in the jungle. This was the river that lent its name to the famous poison used by Amazonian Indians to paralyze their prey—the same curare that Rockefeller-funded Dr. D. Ewen Cameron would soon be testing for the CIA at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, Canada. Other than airplanes, the Curaray River was also the only means of transportation through an area where Shell’s work crews had once fallen to Indian spears and poisoned darts from blow guns. These were the same Indians that the five American missionaries were trying
to contact for the Lord, and their wives knew the risk was great. Since surviving enslavement and massacres by rubber barons, the elusive Huaorani Indians gained fame by the name given them by the terrified Quichua who lived in the area: the Auca, the Savage.

  Nate Saint, the missionaries’ leader, had told his wife, Marjorie, that he would call at 4:35. But that time was past, and the women were frantic. Marjorie kept calling. The jungle answered with an awful silence.

  Of the five men, the lean thirty-two-year-old Nate was the oldest and most experienced. A pilot with the Missionary Aviation Fellowship (MAF), he had the most knowledge of the region and its people. His bright yellow Piper was a familiar sight throughout the Oriente or “East,” as Ecuador’s Amazon region east of the Andes was called. Nate was a welcome source of diesel fuel for missionary generators, mail from home, and medicine, the greatest weapon against the tribes’ traditional religious leaders. For seven years, Nate had operated out of Shell Mera, the oil company’s old base. There, in 1954, he met Shell director Jimmy Doolittle during the general’s secret fact-finding tour of CIA covert assets for President Eisenhower. In September 1955, the same month that Ambassador Chiriboga announced that the Ecuadorian government no longer recognized the Oriente concessions of a Canadian-owned company, Peruvian Oils and Minerals Company, Nate suddenly launched Operation Auca.

  It did not take much for Nate to convince the Elliots to join Operation Auca. Jim, aged twenty-eight, like many Fundamentalist missionaries who preceded him, had given up on the United States, where Christians “sold their lives to the service of Mammon,” and had come to Romanist and heathen Latin America to save it from itself. He joined two other young recruits of the Plymouth Brethren mission, Ed McCully and Peter Fleming, in trying to bring the Fundamentalist Jesus to the Andes lowlands. After three years of inglorious service under Dr. Wilfrid Tidmarsh, strategically poised at the edge of the forbidding Auca jungle, the men were more than ready for Saint’s adventure. So was a former paratrooper, Roger Youderian, who was on the verge of throwing in his missionary towel. A two-year bout for the Gospel Missionary Union trying to convert head-hunting Shuar Indians to the south had left him desperate for some victory for Christ somewhere, anywhere. Nate Saint offered a way out of defeat. There was no dispute when Nate urged a bond of secrecy, shared only with their wives.